Odds ‘n Sods:

Several interesting retreat properties have just been added to our SurvivalRealty.com listings. Three of them are in the Bradshaw Mountains, near the geographically-isolated small town of Crown King, Arizona. This is not far from the towns of Dewey and Humboldt, which were locales in my novel “Survivors”.  Another newly-listed SurvivalRealty property is located in Muddy Pond, Tennessee (on the Cumberland Plateau), which coincidentally was a locale in my novel “Founders”. When I last checked, there were 112 SurvivalRealty.com listings in the United States, and five that are offshore.

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For anyone who normally carries a Glock 20 or 21 but lives in bear country, the .50 GI conversion kit might be a viable option. These have been in full production from Guncrafter Industries since 2009, and they’ve perfected the design. The beauty of this design is that you can switch your pistol back to the pistol’s original chambering in less than a minute. I checked with the company (in Huntsville, Arkansas) and learned that the ammo runs from $23 for a box of 20 on up to $42.25 for a box of 20. (The latter is for their segmented hollow points, which are individually turned on a lathe.) I also asked about their 8-round and 9-round .50 GI Glock magazines. They said that they are a proprietary design and there are no plans to make any with a larger capacity. (Because of the great weight of the .50 cartridges, it might be more than the Glock magazine catch could support.) Also note that because the .50 GI slide is slightly wider that the standard .45 ACP slide, installing an extended slide release is recommended, and holster options are limited. I have read that they will fit in a Model 070 Safariland Glock Duty Holster. (Such as a the 070 SSIII Mid-Ride, Level III Retention.)

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I’ve just come up with a solution to Detroit, Michigan’s bankruptcy woes: Turn much of the city into a 24-hour-coverage ongoing survival-themed reality television show. Do you remember The Truman Show? In it, they they built the world’s largest sound stage, to follow just one child’s life, in a make-believe city? Okay, now imagine The Detroit Show: Whole sections of de-populated Detroit are rigged with cameras. Teams of otherwise unemployed volunteer participants are dropped into Detroit with only what they can carry on their backs. They are allowed to “homestead” abandoned houses and contiguous abandoned properties. They either improvise or barter for farming equipment. They are allowed to establish an autonomous government, with their own laws, their own sheriff(s), and their own courts, as they see fit. They are encouraged to barter with the locals. I would imagine that the show would start out a lot like The Colony. But then, after a couple of years, some of competing teams would graduate to running prosperous large scale farms and then end up running city states, in a situation much more like The Borgias. than The Waltons. I find this captivating, but it would probably require a special act of the Michigan legislature. And it would surely be deemed politically incorrect to show so much of the failed aftermath of deeply entrenched socialist politics in the hollow shell of the once the great city of Detroit.

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A Common Core informational meeting will be held Monday July 22nd from 6:30 pm – 8:30 pm at the Candlelight Christian Fellowship, 5725 N. Pioneer Drive, Coeur d’Alene Idaho (In front of the roller skating rink on Highway 95.)

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Commentator Jon Hall sums up the milieu of “post-apocalyptic” books and movies: The End of the World and Other Entertainments