Preparedness Notes for Wednesday — May 8, 2019

May 8th is the birthday of missionary and U.S. military intelligence officer John Birch. (Born, 1918, died August 25, 1945.) He is considered by many to be the first American casualty of the Cold War. This is also the birthday of Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek. — SurvivalBlog Writing Contest Today we present another entry for Round 82  of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The more than $12,000 worth of prizes for this round include: First Prize: A $3000 gift certificate towards a Sol-Ark Solar Generator from Veteran owned Portable Solar LLC. The only EMP Hardened Solar Generator System available to …




It is Planting Time – Part 2, by L.R.

PART 2 In Part 1, my goal was to share with you the value in raising a home vegetable garden, especially if you consider food resupply in a grid down situation. Hopefully, I encouraged you to seriously think about raising your own food and to get started with learning valuable gardening skills. I also wanted you to be realistic in meeting your gardening goals and not to expect perfection especially with your first gardening efforts. In Part 2, I’d like to share some perspective on what vegetables you may want to plant and consider options on how to preserve your …




JWR’s Recommendations of the Week:

Here are JWR’s Recommendations of the Week for various media and tools of interest to SurvivalBlog readers. This week the focus is on FoodSaver vacuum packing machines. (See the Gear & Grub section.) Books: Recommended by SurvivalBlog reader S.H. in Texas: Letters of a Woman Homesteader, by Elinore Pruitt Stewart. S.H. writes: “The hardships she faced in early 20th Century Wyoming would make many of us lie down and die today (after rifling through a bottle of Prozac!), but through it all, the joy that she experienced from her life is evident. It’s a good, short, read, that reminded me …




Economics & Investing For Preppers

Here are the latest news items and commentary on current economics news, market trends, stocks, investing opportunities, and the precious metals markets. We also cover hedges, derivatives, and obscura. And it bears mention that most of these items are from the “tangibles heavy” contrarian perspective of SurvivalBlog’s Founder and Senior Editor, JWR. Today, we look at investing in discontinued car models. Pictured is a pre-1999 air-cooled Porsche 911 — made before the major engine design change and body style re-vamp (See the Tangibles Investing section near the end of this column.) Precious Metals: From the perspective of chartist Mark Mead …