Month: December 2007

Odds ‘n Sods:

SF in Hawaii sent this: World food stocks dwindling rapidly, UN warns. Here I must mention that I have hope that American agriculture can come to the rescue. Since they are still free-market driven, American farmers can react rapidly to changing markets. They see the price of corn soaring, so they plant more corn. I wouldn’t be surprised to see hundreds of thousands of fallowed acres taken out of the CRP and put back to productive use within the next couple of years. In real terms, the price of crops actually fell from 1975 to 2005. Since then, they have …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

"The budget should be balanced; the Treasury should be refilled; the public debt should be reduced; the arrogance of officialdom should be tempered and controlled. Assistance to foreign land should be curtailed lest we become bankrupt. The mob should be forced to work and not depend upon government for subsistence." – Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106 – 43 BC


Note from JWR:

The high bid in the current SurvivalBlog Benefit Auction is now at $200. The auction is for a scarce original 1980s-vintage Heckler und Koch 19mm Emergency Flare Launcher (EFL) aka “Notsignalgerät“ from my personal collection. It comes with three magazines and 28 scarce original German 19mm flares–10 red, 10 white, and 8 green. Together, this package is worth approximately $400. It is not classified as a “firearm” under Federal law. (Consult your state and local laws before bidding.) Sorry, no overseas bids will be accepted for this auction. This auction ends on January 15th. Please e-mail us your bids, in …


Letter Re: Sources for Gasoline and Diesel Fuel in a Grid-Down Collapse

Dear Jim: There have been a lot of posts recently about bug-out vehicles and such on SurvivalBlog. Of course, every car or truck requires fuel, and in a sudden grid-down situation there will be a bunch of fuel in underground tanks at most every gas station, unable to be pumped out due to the lack of electricity. I have observed oil company trucks filling these tanks, and it appears they simply pry up some covers and drop the fuel into the tanks. How deep are these tanks, and can the fuel be pumped out by some kind of lightweight hand-cranked …


Letter Re: LDS Church Offers Food Storage Starter Kit

Jim, I am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints [LDS or comminly called “The Mormons”]. I am also the Emergency Preparedness Coordinator for my ward. As you know the leaders of the church constantly speak of preparedness. In April 2007 a talk was offered by Keith B McMullin in the Saturday evening session of conference titled “Lay Up in Store”. This talk proclaimed again all the benefits of preparation. While not every Latter-day Saint is fully prepared, a percentage somewhere in the mid-teens have done at least a 72-Hour Kit (Bug-out Bag). The Church’s preparation …


Odds ‘n Sods:

With credit to SHTF Daily (one our favorite sites) comes this tale of housing market woe: Bargain houses largely unsold Courthouse-step auctions offer 1,336 properties in foreclosure — 17 are sold    o o o Great Britain bans samurai swords. I suppose that the British citizenry will soon be down to just butter knives, cricket bats, ASBOs, and harsh language for self defense.    o o o SurvivalBlog reader Mary R. forwarded us this odd notice from the US Treasury: Annual Purchase Limit For Savings Bonds Set at $5,000. Could the Treasury have been warned that the Fed plans to …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

"Every nation that has ended in tyranny has come to that end by way of good order. It certainly does not follow from this that peoples should scorn public peace, but neither should they be satisfied with that and nothing more. A nation that asks nothing of government but the maintenance of order is already a slave in the depths of its heart; it is a slave of its well-being, ready for the man who will put it in chains." – Alexis DeTocqueville, Democracy in America


Two Letters Re: Wider Implications of the Credit Crunch

Sir, I read your piece on the credit crunch, and believe it or not, it gets worse. Morgan Stanley not only took a $9.4 billion dollar hit, they shored up their books by getting a $5 billion dollar infusion of capital from the Chinese! They received a 9.9% share of the company in return. The same Chinese fund has also propped up the Blackstone Group, a private equities firm. – Tim R. Mr. Rawles: I don’t understand what all this credit and financial news means to us poor folks who don’t have any investments to lose. I have a tiny …


Letter Re: Thinking Like an Infantrymen or Thinking Like a Frontiersmen

Jim: I read a post about this a while back and it sort of stuck in my head. It did make a lot of sense. What exactly does it mean to plan like a frontiersmen mean versus plan like an infantrymen? The biggest areas that stuck out were resupply, weapons, numbers, static defense, and caches. Infantrymen can almost universally depend on getting resupplied within 12-to-48 hours if they run low on ammo or anything else. Survivalists or frontiersmen do not have this luxury. Which means two things, first stock up on as much ammo as you can afford and use …


Weekly Survival Real Estate Market Update

St. Maries, Idaho and Snow Country Logistics Today we take a quick look at St. Maries, Idaho, located an hour or so south east from Coeur d’Alene and an hour and a half from Spokane, Washington. The first noticeable thing about the town’s geography is that it is on the south east side of Lake Coeur d’Alene which provides a natural barrier from possible refugee paths from Seattle and Spokane. But it is also still in reasonable commute distance to the Coeur d’Alene and Spokane area for work until a SHTF or TEOTWAWKI event. The icing on the cake is …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Several readers sent us this one: Morgan Stanley Issues Full US Recession Alert. I could see why it looks like a recession to them…. Stephen in Iraq sent us this: $9.4 Billion Write-Down at Morgan Stanley–the firm reported the first quarterly loss in its 72-year history. Meanwhile, we read: Bear Stearns Posts 4Q Loss—the first loss in its 84-year history. Wow, they both made it through the Great Depression without posting losses. But now they are in the red. Billions of dollars in the red. We are experiencing times that are unprecedented within living memory.    o o o Thanks …



Note from JWR:

The bald eagles have returned here to the valley. We see a lot of them here each winter. In addition to fish, they enjoy finding road-killed deer. They aren’t picky eaters. In fact, some of our best “up close” eagle viewing is of the ones that are right next to the county road, typically sharing a road kill with a cluster of ravens. The ravens respectfully wait their turn.


Wider Implications of the Credit Crunch

The news on the financial front has gone from bad to worse. Eric S. sent us this: ECB lends $500 Billion to lower rates, and Stephen in Iraq found this article: Fed Loans Banks [Another] $20 Billion. And if that weren’t enough, K.L. in Alaska sent us this: ACA Capital Holdings Inc. was just de-listed by the New York Stock Exchange. K.L.”s comment was blunt: “[ACA Capital Holdings] is essentially bankrupt. It is one of the insurers of the financial instruments such as municipal bonds, hedge funds and CDOs that have been infected by toxic mortgages. These funds are becoming …


Two Letters Re: Ladies’ Supplies for Preparedness

Jim: Just a note to follow up on what a previous poster said about The Diva Cup and The Keeper: I have tried both and I prefer The Diva Cup by far, it seems to be a little more compact and therefore easier to use than The Keeper. I tried the SouthCoast Shopping link that was given a couple of times (and they have had the price of $17.50 for a long time now) but I usually seem to have some sort of problem on the site when I try to check out. Just be cautious. If you use www.mysimon.com …