Year: 2011

Notes from JWR:

A Kindle-version of the SurvivalBlog.com Archives 2005-2010 is now available for $9.99, via the Amazon.com store. It is more than 7,000 pages long and text-to-speech enabled. It also has more than 20,000 links to external web pages from your Kindle reader. (Available only if you are connected to the Internet while reading.) Anyone with a Kindle can download a free 700 page (10%) sample of the archive, for a “test drive”. Meanwhile, for folks with laptops, we are nearing release of the 2005-2010 archive of SurvivalBlog on CD-ROM (in both HTML and PDF). Both file formats will have links to …


Affordable Preparedness, by Phil in East Tennessee

I enjoy reading SurvivalBlog each morning as I prepare for my day. I have only been a reader of the blog for six months, and enjoy all the varied insights. So I feel compelled to share some of my experiences. Let me start off by saying I was raised in a Christian preparedness household.  Both my parents suffered through the Great Depression as children and my mother was deeply impacted by the possibility of being hungry and cold again. As a teenager in the mid-1970s I remember we had a basement full of Neo-Life brand long term storage food, thousands …


Letter Re: Funding Your Preparations with the Underground Economy

For many people funding your survival cache/ preparedness stockpile has to come out of your budget. Whether you work for someone every day, draw a pension check or work for yourself you have to find a way to fit your projects into the limits of your paycheck. And with Uncle Sam taking a larger share at every turn it seems to be getting harder to find those extra nickels to put to use. Once most of us pay a house and car payment and then monthly utilities and food there is hardly enough left to worry about buying ammo, additional …


Letter Re: List of Countries by Real Population Density

James, I have been playing with the numbers based on the population figures and wanted to give you this update. I did a study of the total land under cultivation in 2002 (rather than just the potentially arable land, and not including grazing land).  42 of the 50 states exceed the figure of 245 people per square kilometer. [JWR Adds: States with less than 600 people per square kilometer of active-worked farm land might pull through a societal collapse, with plenty of sweat and by God’s grace. But anyone who is planning to survive whilst living in a state with …


Letter Re: Investing in Nickels, in Quantity

Dear Mr. Rawles, Regarding people eventually mailing U.S. nickel [5 cent coins] in bulk, you had asked: “Is there a box manufacturer that makes a sturdy corrugated cardboard box that fits tightly into a Medium size Priority Mail Flat Rate corrugated cardboard box?” At ULINE you can get a box to fit nicely inside the corrugated Medium Flat Rate Box (“FRB1″, with dimensions 11″ x 8-1/2″ x 5-1/2”). It is item #S-4517. It measures 10″x8″x5″. These boxes cost 54 cents each in lots of 25. (OBTW, leave it to the government to make two “medium” flat rate boxes. The longer, …


Letter Re: Legalities of Prescribing Long-Term Antibiotics

A reader wrote to ask: “I have talked to a local doctor who is sympathetic about giving prescriptions for antibiotics but he is concerned about the legalities of supplying anyone with excessive amounts of any drug.  Does anyone out there know the proper process to undertake this acquisition?  I’m not worried about buying stuff outright and am willing to use multiple pharmacies but he is worried about getting in trouble and wants to know the legalities.  Any wisdom you or your readers can share? “ Doctor Koelker Replies: Doctors prescribe long-term antibiotics for many different problems, including conditions as simple as …


Economics and Investing:

The short squeeze in silver that I recently mention seems to be on, in earnest. Check Monday’s spot silver chart. That is a 31-year high. KAF sent us a link to a great piece by Patrice Lewis over at WorldNetDaily: Connecting the dots to anarchy. (SurvivalBlog readers will recognize Patrice Lewis as the editor of the excellent Rural Revolution blog.) Companies Raise Prices as Commodity Costs Jump. (Thanks to Daniel S. for the link.) Anthony S. sent this sign of the times: Pan American Silver Shifts Assets to Canadian Dollars John R. suggested this: Six Charts Which Prove That Central …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Josh M. pointed us to a piece of hydrogen fuel cell technology that has finally made it to the consumer level: Powertrekk.    o o o Egyptian ‘Net Killed By Intimidation, Not a Switch. (A hat tip to Wade B. for the link.)    o o o C.D.V. sent us this dire prediction: Scientists Warn of $2 Trillion Solar ‘Katrina’.    o o o Reader J. H. forwarded: Reports coming out of Christchurch, New Zealand, following a magnitude 6.3 temblor are thusfar a bit confused. Please keep the folks there in your prayers.    o o o Troubling news: Florida …



Notes from JWR:

SurvivalBlog’s traffic continues to grow. We now average more than 260,000 unique visits per week, and we are using almost two terabytes of bandwidth per month. (That is a lot for a blog that is nearly all text!) If we are going to set up an offshore mirror web site (as planned), then it is going to require a fairly capable server. — Today we present another entry for Round 33 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The prizes for this round include: First Prize: A.) A course certificate from onPoint Tactical. This certificate will be for the prize winner’s …


Looking For the Wave: Our Experience with Hawaii’s 2010 Tsunami Alert, by An Oregonian

Here on the Oregon coast we have included precautions for a Tsunami in our emergency preparations.  This last spring while on vacation on the north shore of Oahu we experienced some valuable lessons when the Tsunami alert was raised after the earthquake in Chile.  This experience has helped us and hopefully will provide food for thought for others. We have family living on the north shore of Oahu, in Laie that we were staying with during our trip.  About 4am in the morning as I was sleeping on the porch, a woman knocked on the door to inform the family …


Letter Re: Medical Response in Hostile Environments Class

Hello All,   We have another Medical Response in Hostile Environments Class scheduled. This class will be on June 10, 11, and 12, 2011.  It will be conducted at the historic Lafayette Hotel, 101 Front Street, in Marietta Ohio.  Marietta is on the Ohio River at Exit 1 off of I-77.  (This is a new location, so our web site may not yet reflect all the updates).  The Hotel is offering a special group rate but you must mention Medical Corps to get it.  If your flight brings you into Cleveland you can get a commuter flight to Parkersburg. (Mid-Ohio …


Letter Re: Linux and Computer Security

Dear Mr. Rawles, As always, I thank you for your work and send greetings and blessings to you. I just switched from using Windows Vista to Ubuntu Linux 10.10 on my Laptop. First, I must say I am delighted at the ease of installation and how everything works immediately. Second, I am delighted that my Windows Vista partition of the hard disk continues to work just as it always had. No loss of data nor of function. When I began using Linux, I looked into security and learned that there is no firewall immediately installed. It is easy and free …


Letter Re: Understanding Digital Ham Radio Modes

Dear Editor: Some SurvivalBlog readers are really into ham radio; some are not. I think you’ll all find this YouTube video link very interesting as it concerns various modes of digital radio transmissions that ham radio operators use daily and enjoy. It shows you, and lets you hear, what a digital mode is like if you come across it on your shortwave receivers, or your ham transceivers. There are advantages in recognizing that what you’re hearing is a digital message, and knowing the type of transmission. If you have a shortwave receiver that can discriminate the frequencies you can even …


Three Letters Re: List of Countries by Real Population Density

Jim- Dr. Hugh asked the question about population density in the US States.  Below is the answer. Since I couldn’t finagle Wolfram Alpha to do this in people per square kilometer, I did it in square miles. For reference: If you convert Dr. Hugh’s figure of 245 people per square kilometer to people per square mile and that equates to 634.5 people per square mile Keeping that number in mind, I used this Wolfram Alpha equation, and learned: Rank State Pop. Density 1 New Jersey 1,185 people/mi^2 2 Rhode Island 1,007 people/mi^2 3 Massachusetts 835.2 people/mi^2 4 Connecticut 737.7 people/mi^2 …