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32 Comments

    1. QGIS is one free one but it is unwieldy and probably won’t work on the average computer. Google free mapping software and check out the technical specs to see what will best work on your computer and do the job you are looking for. Google earth is useful for viewing or for transferring data to other mapping software but I refuse to work in their software.

  2. Good article, gave me memories of “Guns, Germs, and Steel!” It’s also interesting to note Bismarck’s (arguably the greatest statesman of the late 19th Century) opposition to Germany acquiring overseas colonies, and his reliance on a complex web of diplomatic alliances to work the competition of all-states-against-all-states to Germany’s advantage.

    As a Henry Ford fan, I also have to say that labelling Fordism an enabler of genocide is a very uncharitable take on an idea that contributed much to American prosperity, and without which we may have lost WW2 and the Cold War.

    1. Fordism is a common name given to the systemic approach of a particular process. Depending on how far one reads back on history, Ford was inspired by military processes that date back to the 1300s.

      I am not sure this article is saying that Henry Ford contributed to genocide, but rather his approach to assembly line production, which was inspired by early military history and style of management, is a common name used to characterize a systematic approach.

  3. Six years ago i went back to college and got a degree in geospatial technology. This is the creation of maps to display specific data/statistics. These maps can contain information ranging from utilities, bike paths, trees, political parties/voting info, sales/marketing info and even online/browsing info. One example of intrusive data collection is retail stores. These include membership stores like Costco, stores with discount cards and even Wal-Mart. Yes Wal-Mart, several years ago i went online to walmart.com to order something and when I went to create an account i found a history of grocery items I had bought at my local store. Normally we buy our groceries with cash but on few occasions I have used a debit card when I had no cash. Upon investigation i found that those items in my shopping history were purchased on debit card. The amount of data being collected, mapped and used is astonishing.

  4. Exceptionally well written article!
    For me, history and geography are critically important for personal safety.
    Personal safety and oppressive government is on a lot of Americans’ minds right now, as we see large groups of people moving out of urban areas and into the country. Many trying to get out before the election. People are buying properties sight unseen. Unbelievable, but I get it. History and geography are two topics that remind us of why the 2nd Amendment is so critical to our survival.

  5. Great article, I wish the author were available for answering questions.

    As for learning geography, perhaps some parents reading this could use what my parents used to teach me. There was a game called “Game of the States,” which used a map of the U.S. as the playing board. You had a little truck and you drove around the country buying the main products that each state produced, and had to answer questions before you able to make a purchase such as “What is the state capitol?” The first time we played I still remember scrunching up my face and pronouncing Missouri as “Mrs. Sour Eye.” There was also “I Owe Way” and “Orrygoan”. 🙂

    Game of the States is still around after all these decades:
    https://www.amazon.com/Hasbro-Gaming-42667-Game-States/dp/B000B7T7ZG

    Th best thing they did was to buy me a globe. It had a detachable base so my dad and I would sit on the couch and between TVC commercials, or sometimes just on a slow Saturday afternoon, we’d take turns finding the most obscure country on the globe, say the name, and the other guy would have to find it on the globe. In the process, I even learned where all the big countries were located. In the fifth grade, we had a blank globe with the outlines of all the countries, which could be written on with chalk. The teacher would call on a student to find a certain country and then write it in with chalk. On one day, student after student failed to mark the proper country. On my turn, I marked the first one correctly, than she proceeded to give me country after country, and was duly impressed that I never missed a single one, even the most obscure tiny little ones. All from my dad sitting with me on the couch, tricking me into learning geography by making a game of it. He barely graduated high school but he was not only one of the most educated people I ever knew, but one of the best teachers as well. Thanks Dad!

    1. So, for the updated edition of Game of The States, for the main products that each state produced…

      Is California’s main product “Foolishness”?

      and,

      Is New Jersey’s main product “Misery”?

    2. You had a very cool Dad, St. Funogas!

      So, we home schooled the girls in the Classical Model of Education. The girls studied Geography from day one. They memorized the location of the states and capitals of the USA every third year and then the countries and capitals of Asia, Oceana, Europe, Africa alternating years. In Junior high, they had a full year of Geography, memorizing, tracing and labeling, and then free hand drawing the entire world, while memorizing where each country was located, it’s capital and major features. Their end-of-year Geography project was to create an artistic model of the Earth’s Geography, using any medium: wood burning, glass, metal, paper, ink, clay, paints, Pencils, etc. and presenting all of the countries of the world. Then their exam was to, from memory, to draw the world and label all of the countries their capitals and major features in three hours. It was quite fun and quite an accomplishment. I can safely say that in our family, we all love Geography.

      1. Hey Lily and Fester, now I’m curious what geography curriculum my kids who home school use. Sounds like both the systems you mention are good. Lily, yours sounds exceptionally cool. It would be a fun summer project with my grandkids to spend a few days/weeks making paper-mache globes, then using math to figure out and draw the latitude/longitude lines, then using those lines to help draw in the countries and main features like rivers and mountain ranges, even some underwater features like where the tectonic plates are.

    3. I learned geography through a homeschool curriculum called Mapping the World by Heart. It’s just how it sounds. You have to actually learn what country/nation was within borders on a blank paper, bodies of water included. It really helped my understanding of world conflicts, etc. through the years. I hope to use the same curriculum with my children.

  6. A wonderful article. Thanks for running it. As another comment noted, this article has echoes of Jared Diamond’s work. Also reminds me a bit of The Great Frontier by Walter Prescott Webb.

  7. I have been making my own unique map over the past week. I used Google Maps satellite view and printed out a roughly 20k radius view with our farm in the center. During trips to town, I take different roads that serve as ingress, egress of my location, and note the homes with Biden/Harris 2020 signs. It has provided quite a stunning picture of which avenues may be hazardous to travel in about 45 days.

      2. Glad I could help BWL. The Biden signs are certainly in the minority here as well but it has been quite revealing. Exempting the older ones who still believe they are still voting for the Democrat party of JFK, even here, in rural Virginia there are those who drink deeply from the punchbowl of Marxist Kool-aid. Always a good piece of easy intelligence gathering when they out themselves.

      3. As of Friday September 25th there are no DFL campaign signs on the state, county and township roads I take to go to work. I won’t be shedding any tears if I never see any. They are all Trump signs, but nothing else so far. JWR made a good point about buying real estate now.

  8. 1) Henry Ford really hit the nail on the head when he said “History is bunk”.
    At least when talking about the official histories put out by corrupt universities — telling the Truth about the Rich is not how Harvard got a $40 billion endowment. An endowment created originally on profits from the slave trade.
    You have to examine the EVIDENCE –or lack of it — for official histories to really appreciate the truth of what Ford said.

    2) For example, about 18 years ago a group of US historians — the Yassky Group — mounted an effort to overthrow the Second Amendment by arguing only they knew what really happened in 1776.

    The basis of their attack was Michael Bellesiles “Arming America” — a history that claimed few Americans owned firearms in 1776.

    3) Arming America has the distinction of receiving US History’s highest award — the
    Bancroft Prize — only to have that Prize rescinded when people OUTSIDE the history profession — Clayton Cramer, James Lindgren,etc — pointed out that the evidence Bellesiles had cited did not exist.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arming_America

    4) But Academia’s move to crucify Bellesiles began when I pointed out that Arming America was the basis for an extremely one-sided push by Academia to ban firearms, with no attempt by these taxpayer-supported professors to give an even-sided view.

    http://hnn.us/articles/741.html

    Law Professor Glenn Reynolds noted my article on his conservative blog Instapundit.
    https://pjmedia.com/instapundit/31808/

    Shortly thereafter, the National Endowment for the Humanities rescinded the grant it gave to Bellesiles and a group of historians —allegedly misled by the Evil Bellesiles – began an ongoing academic trial of Bellesiles. With the Inquisition led by a Stanford historian named Jack Rakove.

    5) What is hilarious is not only was Arming America fake history but the history of how the professional historians handled the fraud is fake history. That history, written by Pro-gun control Peter Charles Hoffer of the Yassky Group, depicted the incident as one in which sincere, good-intentioned history professors were misled by the evil Bellesiles and they worked to correct things when informed of the facts.

    6) Claptrap. Utter claptrap. At the back of Arming America, Michael Bellesiles thanked lead prosecutor Jack Rakove for reading and approving every page. When I pointed this out on the historians H-OIEAHC forum, Rakove admitted that he had arranged for Bellesiles to get a grant from Stanford to research and write Arming America.

    7) But what about Academia’s much-proclaimed Peer Review? What has never been noted is that Arming America was waved through peer review with lavish praise by historian Roger Lane. An event with what intel people call “anomalies”.

    One is that Roger Lane was retired – hence, professionally immune from approving claptrap.

    The second is that Roger was a history professor at Haverford College – which is also where Jack Rakove studied history as an undergraduate.

    8) Some other “anomalies” in 2002:

    a) A law firm in Chicago, using the legacy of a dead heiress, runs something called the Joyce Foundation. The major funder of the gun control movement.

    b) Joyce Foundation funds a symposium producing a set of articles in the Chicago Kent Law Review attacking the Second Amendment. The symposium was led by a professor named Carl T Bogus (I’m not making this up ) and included historian Jack Rakove. Much of the Chicago Kent arguments were based on Bellesile’ s “Arming America”.

    c) A major gun-control advocacy group, the Violence Policy Center , praises the scholarship of the Chicago-Kent Symposium — with NO ONE pointing out that VPC is almost 90% funded by the same Joyce Foundation that funded the Chicago Kent symposium VPC is praising.

    d) The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in California rules that the Second Amendment is not an individual right and cites Bellesiles’ Arming America – then hilariously has to later rewrite its ruling to delete the Bellesiles citations after Arming America is discredited.

    e) The Joyce Foundation’s $1 Billion in assets are EXEMPT from taxes because it claims to be a public charity working on “public health” and not engaged in political advocacy.,

    f) At this time (2002) its Board of Directors included an obscure professor of Constitutional Law named Barack Obama.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyce_Foundation

    http://howdypodna.com/thejoycefoundation.html

  9. Great article, thanks for posting! This is by far the most informative blog on the internet, particularly since you added the comments section. It instills a sense of family to the daily reader because of the handful of regular commentators who post so frequently. I feel as though I know you without having ever met you. That’s a special thing in these trying times. God bless you all.

    1. Well said, BD. I, likewise, have a sense of familial connection with my fellow contributors. All of us are smarter than any of us. Our shared quest for insight and liberty nourishes us all.

      Carry on in grace

  10. One of the most interesting classes I took in college was on Political Geography: how politics is influenced by geography and how geography shapes politics. It has proved eminently practical in today’s society

  11. I hope everyone can bear with an old geezer strolling down memory lane for a few moments. I’ve loved geography since as far back as I can remember. My bucket list started when I was five years old looking at my Golden Book Encyclopedias and later, maps. The first item on my bucket list was to go to Alaska some day. Oddly enough the only state I’ve never been to yet is… Alaska. In our house, we referred to “the Rand McNally” and we all knew what it was. On cross-country family trips, my sisters and I would run inside every gas station we stopped at and load up on all the free road maps they had back in those days, then back home we’d spend hours and hours looking at them, dreaming of travels, and laughing at the funny place names like Bill, Wyoming, Truth or Consequences, New Mexico, and Boring (z-z-z-z) Oregon.

    I added dozens of items to my bucket list over the years just from looking at maps. Like going to that tiny little piece of Minnesota (the Northwest Angle) that isn’t even hooked on the the rest of the U.S., standing at the Greenwich meridian, standing on the equator with a foot on each side, in both thenorthern and southen hemispheres (I know, corny!), going to the islands of Guernsey and Jersey just to see where the cows came from (and I nominate the people of Guernsey to be the nicest people on the whole planet). To Komodo Island to see if there really were dragons there. I eventually made it to all those places, and lots more, even played slap the bull with a large Komodo dragon (after letting the guide get around a bend in the trail and out of sight) and lived to tell the tale.

    Okay, going way, WAY out on a limb here… Here’s a poem I wrote in my 12th grade English class about maps. They all thought I was uncreative writing about such a “dumb” topic.

    A map is a wonderous piece of paper
    Covered with lines from a talented maker
    That offers for free to all who will seek
    A mind trip for a day or a week
    Leave all your cares and your problems behind
    And all of your worries that choke you and bind
    Gaze at your map and read of her places
    Dream of the trails that left us few traces
    Float down her rivers and travel her highways
    Hitchhike a back road or stroll down a byway
    Run through the leaves that turn red in Vermont,
    Do what you will and go anywhere you want
    Traveling a map is as free as the air
    With just half an hour you can go anywhere you dare
    So pick up a map the next time you’re bored
    And enjoy yourself right out of your gourd!

    That pretty much ended any hopes of a career in creative writing so I majored in one of the sciences instead. But I’ve never outgrown my love of maps. 🙂

  12. It seems that moving just 36 days before a epic election is short sighted. I know of a couple that is trying to move to Boise, Idaho in the next month or so. They moved just 5 years ago to Washington State-(not West Coast cities- midpoint of State)- and now wanting to buy in Idaho. The move alone will cost in the $35,000 dollar range factoring in moving expenses plus realty fees.
    The main problems I see is the fact they will be outsiders in every sense of the word at a time of great turmoil no matter who wins in Nov.
    The price points are high since they are looking at $600K property that’s already high for wages if the area. The only positive they will not have a mortgage and are debt free.
    So people moving to a new area, no friends in area, new to any church they attend and paying a premium for the property, how is that a good idea? And spending $30,000+ in fees!!!

    1. !. SurvivalBlog has a link on the top of the page under Resources. This article might be helpful. ~Finding Like-Minded People in Your Area~
      ***
      ***
      2. Me (GGHD) … Many people with the ability to choose where they live, in the USA, will move to an area where it’s a >safer place to live. … … Unfortunately, once safe areas in the USA have become havens for criminals. Most people don’t like to sleep with one-eye open and a gun under the pillow.
      (Politicians are included in the large criminal class in many places, now days.)
      … … There are many articles about liberal Celebrities and Rich People moving from Cities and Neighborhoods, that are no longer safe.

      3. Many people now days are asking, “What will happen if the electricity and water system is disrupted for a few weeks?” = “Will my neighbors be helpful or will they try to crawl through the back window and steal my stuff?”

      4. Maps can help people find a safer area, and gain familiarity with an area too. Some websites even allow people to comment about specific areas in a location. Maps with the location of crime incidents are sometimes placed online by the local police.

      5. Generally, the overall opinion on SurvivalBlog says, “The best time to relocate from a potentially dangerous location to a safer place is ~first thing tomorrow morning.” + ‘It might be dangerous for many people in American Cities to venture outside at night!’

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