Year: 2009


Note from JWR:

Please keep The Memsahib in your prayers. Her health is still in peril, but as Christians we have total faith in God, and we look at things on the eternal time scale–that makes this earthly life just a blink of an eye. We never lose sight of the fact that God’s grace is amazing.


Letter Re: Transmission of Odors to Bulk-Packed Storage Foods

Dear Mr. Rawles, I made a food storage mistake that I would like to share with other SurvivalBlog readers. Last summer I purchased a plastic food grade bucket, filled it with pasta, lentils, beans and candy mints, and sealed it up. I opened the bucket last week and discovered that I now have mint-flavored pasta, lentils, and beans. Even though the mints were individually-wrapped and packaged in a plastic bag their odor was so strong that it permeated just about everything. I’m sure the pasta, lentils, and beans are safe to eat, but they’ll just taste a bit strange. Lesson: …


Letter Re: Rethinking Uncommon Rifle Chamberings

Mr. Rawles- I read “Patriots: A Novel Survival in the Coming Collapse” a couple of weeks ago and enjoyed it. Thank you. I wanted to mention: I try to follow conventional wisdom about caliber choices for SHTF weapons. Interestingly, in the current ammo shortage, it’s still somewhat easy to get ammo for oddball calibers. For example, if one needs 7.5×55 Swiss, 7.65x54R Russian or 7.5×54 French, many online dealers have it in stock, while 9mm, 45 ACP, 12 gauge buckshot, 308, 223, 7.62×39 etc., are very hard to come by. For people who don’t have the budget to stockpile a …


Letter Re: A Flat Tire as Learning Experience, by Rock O.

James, My truck and my wife’s van both have extensive “WTSHTF” kits, for use in case of an emergency. The following was a simple, unexpected yet common occurrence that was the real eye opener for me. At 5:30am the other morning. I decided to drive my fairly new diesel VW to a gun show in the area. We only use it for around town drives and it is garage kept. Halfway to the gun show, on a major highway, I had a blowout. ‘No big deal’. I’m thinking. I’ve changed lots of tires in my 64 years. Wrong! Pulling off …


Letter Re: Choosing Antibiotics to Store for Emergencies

Mr Rawles, I have been reading Survivalblog for a couple of years now and want to thank you for providing such a wonderful resource. I also participated in the April 8th Amazon book bomb and just finished reading “Patriots: A Novel Survival in the Coming Collapse” for the first time. I couldn’t put it down and read it in one sitting. That being said, I must point out one potentially harmful error in your mention of tetracycline. I am starting my final year of pharmacy school and have been working in my family’s drugstore for 25 years. Tetracycline is the …


Letter Re: Thanks for SurvivalBlog

James, I’d like to thank you personally for maintaining SurvivalBlog. Until last year, I’d always thought of my survival skills as important to have, but didn’t think I’d ever truly need them. Now that the bottom has fallen out of the economy (in exactly the way you predicted!), I believe everything I value is truly at risk. To see the danger that America is in, just turn on the news for ten seconds. To see the danger that the culture of true service to God is in, do a Google search for “De-baptism” or “Santa Muerte.” The world’s situation has …


Economics and Investing:

News about the results of the Federal Reserve’s “Stress Test” got out, and it sent a shock wave through the financial world. The news was quite disturbing. Although with the caveat that it is not yet confirmed, I recommend reading the summary at Hal Turner’s web site. Reader “NDSS” mentioned this bit of much-needed common sense from Charles Hugh Smith: Why a 50% Drop in Housing is Not the Bottom. JWR’s comment: Anyone that thinks that the US real estate market will soon “recover” is dreaming. The peak in Alt-A and Option ARM mortgage rate resets won’t be until 2011. …


Odds ‘n Sods:

W. in Washington recommended this blog site: Little House in the Suburbs    o o o “Goff” sent an item from a Bangor, Maine newspaper: Firepower Fever; Worried about how gun laws might change, some enthusiasts stock up and local suppliers feel the heat    o o o Fred the Valmetmeister notes: “The market for [reloading] primers is so scary. Take a look at the auctions at GunBroker.com and go to the reloading section. Look at the auctions for primers! For example: [cases of] 5,000 CCI Large Pistol primers for $340! I now see single boxes [of 1,000 primers selling] …



Letter Re: Bicycles as Bug-Out and Utility Vehicles

I read SurvivalBlog almost every day. I see lots of folks talking about bug out vehicles, going to great lengths to describe storing fuel long term, stripping down vehicles and even planning on parking them out of the way when fuel runs out. But I rarely see much mentioned about one of the best long term, low tech tools out there for transportation: The bicycle, the cargo bike and the adult tricycle. Bicycles are inexpensive, ubiquitous and take only a pair of legs and half a brain to use. People in Third World countries haul huge amounts of stuff with …


Letter Re: Pedal Power for Electricity Generation and Water Pumping

Hi Mr. Rawles: Thank you so much for your efforts on this blog as well as Rawles Gets You Ready. I have a question that I haven’t seen addressed. Are there products out there based on pedal power? Meaning, I can’t afford a real alternative energy system or a large storage area for gasoline. What I’d like is a way to keep a few deep cycle batteries charged to power my rechargeable AA-size batteries (do they make rechargeable batteries in any other size?), my cordless power tools and other objects. There must be alternator/bicycle systems to do that but I …


Letter Re: The Mexican Drug Wars Come to the United States

Jim, As the economy gets worse, crime of this sort will only increase. Small towns that have secondary and tertiary highways are not immune. Often these secondary routes parallel the primary highways that have the heaviest enforcement which leads the traffickers to use the secondary routes to evade Law Enforcement. We have had first hand experience with interstate drug traffickers in our Midwestern town of 1,300 people that has a parallel secondary highway running through it. I shudder to think what will happen to our borders, cities, and towns when bankrupt states and cities are forced to confront the stark …


Letter Re: Why Survivalists Should Buy Local Organic Food

Jim ~ We subscribe to an organic grocery delivery service and have the food dehydrator running non-stop around the clock now that local produce is coming in. Our preference is dried over frozen because of smells and off flavors that frozen can pick up. Even through I pay a premium for organic foods, my feeling is that if inflation or hyperinflation is around the corner, the price I’m paying now will at the least even out in the face of inflation, and I’ll still have a superior product. I know that the food we are preserving is top quality, not …


Economics and Investing:

Charley keyed in on a piece in The Atlantic, where Jeffrey Goldberg contemplates survivalism: Why I Fired My Broker. The accompanying video clip, titled “The Con Game” is quite entertaining and has some snippets about his acquaintance Cody Lundin–a survivalist and author.(Cody is the author of When All H*ll Breaks Loose: Stuff You Need To Survive When Disaster Strikes — currently around #300 in the Amazon ranks.) Here is a quote from the print article: “For the record, I don’t think the grid is buckling under the weight of consumer debt or the mistakes of AIG. But we’re in a …