Day: January 15, 2026

Preparedness Notes for Thursday — January 15, 2026

On January 15, 1907, the first 3-element vacuum tube was patented by American inventor Lee DeForest. — This is the anniversary of the 2009 “Miracle On The Hudson” engines-out emergency water landing. — Today is the birthday of Dr. Edward Teller who co-invented the H-bomb and worked on the Manhattan Project. — SurvivalBlog Writing Contest Today we present another entry for Round 122 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The prizes for this round include: First Prize: A Gunsite Academy Three-Day Course Certificate. This can be used for any of their one, two, or three-day course (a $1,095 value), A Peak …


Preparedness Lessons From Communist Mongolia – Part 1, by G.K.

We lived in Mongolia in the early 1990s, for a few years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, during a time when the system had officially ended but its habits had not yet loosened their grip on daily life. I was in my early thirties, married, with two young daughters, trying to build a life far from anything familiar. We were not passing through, and we were not insulated expatriates. We were attempting to function inside the local economy, under local conditions, with consequences that were immediate and personal. At the time, I did not think of what we …


The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods

SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods. This column is a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from JWR. Our goal is to educate our readers, to help them to recognize emerging threats, and to be better prepared for both disasters and negative societal trends. You can’t mitigate a risk if you haven’t first identified a risk. In today’s column: mutated bird flu viruses. Bird Flu Mutations Cause Concern Reader B.T. sent us this, from The New York Times: Bird Flu Viruses Raise Mounting Concerns Among Scientists. The article …