Stretching Your Dollars, by Elli O.

Inflation is high. In fact, it has reached at least a 40-year high (depending on who you listen to) and shows no sign of slowing down. Mortgage interest rates are at a 20-year high. More households than ever before are struggling to pay for groceries, medical treatment, housing, and gasoline. Since our influence on the problem of inflation is next to non-existent, then we need to focus on some simple but basic solutions to being frugal. Stretching our dollars until the next payday is our goal! My husband says that I am frugal to the point of being miserly! But …


Making Your Own Sauerkraut – Part 2, by E.P.

(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.) My grandmother used open ceramic crocks to make sauerkraut. The problem is that they, like the Gartopf style ceramic crocks, are quite expensive compared to glass jars, so I bought several used crocks to try. It is hard to seal open crocks adequately to provide the anaerobic environment necessary to make sauerkraut without having to regularly skim off the spoilage that forms at the top of the crock. I tried using a piece of lexan sealed to the top of the crock with silicone glue, drilling a hole in the lexan to …


Making Your Own Sauerkraut – Part 1, by E.P.

I have been making sauerkraut for many years. My grandmother (my mother’s mother) was German, and used to make it many years ago. Unfortunately, she never taught me how to do it, so I had to learn how to do it on my own. Fortunately, I found a really excellent book, Making Sauerkraut and Pickled Vegetables at Home, by Klaus Kaufmann and Annelies Schoneck. This book not only explains how to do it, providing many different recipes but also explains the science behind the fermentation process. I highly recommend it for anyone who is interested in making sauerkraut. The basic …


Red States Have To Build Alternative Economies, by Brandon Smith

Economic centralization is the ultimate form of organized conspiratorial power, because it allows a small group of people to dictate the terms of trade for a society and therefore dictate the terms of each person’s individual survival. For example, the Federal Reserve as a banking entity has free rein to assert policy controls that can disrupt the very fabric of the US economy and the buying power of our currency. They can (and do) arbitrarily create trillions of dollars from thin air causing inflation, or arbitrarily raise interest rates and crash stock markets. And according to former Fed chairman Alan …


While Inflation Refuses to Go Away, Gold Refuses to Go Up, by Arkadiusz Sieroń

The recent Consumer Price Index (CPI) report shows that inflation remains high. It implies a hawkish Fed and bearish gold. To paraphrase a famous Pink Floyd song, I wish you weren’t here, inflation! The CPI increased 0.4% in September, after rising 0.1% in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. The move was slightly higher than expected and occurred despite a 2.1% decline in the energy index. What’s really bad, especially for the poorest households, is that food prices continued to rise. The food index rose 0.8% for the month, the same as August, and was up 11.2% from …


Long-Term Storage of Gasoline Fuels – Part 1, by Tunnel Rabbit

In this article, I will discuss Avgas, Mogas, White Gas, Fuel Restoration Tips, Fuel Storage, and some Cold Weather Tips. Introduction When it comes the various internal combustion engines, we must conserve and preserve fuels for as long as it is feasible. In the cold northern climates, keeping a chainsaw running is a serious concern. We can use ‘work around’ solutions, or methods, in other words, expediant techniques to improve and use old fuel stock, as our fuel supply will necessarily be limited in a partial or total collapse situation. We must necessarily reduce the demand and our expectations, and …


My Ten-Day Test-My-Preps Adventure – Part 4, by St. Funogas

(Continued from Part 3. This concludes the article) SOLAR PANELS In this section I’ll cover something I haven’t seen discussed in any of the books and articles I’ve read on solar panels so don’t skip over this next part. I hope by the end of this that some will be convinced they’re a very good idea for now as well as a post-SHTF lifestyle. They’re relatively inexpensive and easy to install with a DIY approach. With solar panels our life can proceed as usual in so many different areas which will make our transition to TEOTWAWKI simpler. Not only will …


My Ten-Day Test-My-Preps Adventure – Part 3, by St. Funogas

(Continued from Part 2.) Day Four It was completely overcast by 06:30. Yes! I can fully test my solar panel output. Freezer temps before the morning solar-panel electricity came on: 24°F. I can deal with that if it never gets any warmer during the test, and it didn’t. This on/off freezer method could potentially work year-round so let the SHTF when it wants. As the days get shorter and less solar power is available, seasonal temperatures also get cooler making it easier for the freezer to keep up in my unheated shop. This will be an interesting comparison test for …


My Ten-Day Test-My-Preps Adventure – Part 2, by St. Funogas

(Continued from Part 1.) I started a to-do list for when the test is over. It started with: Can 12 quarts or more of water. Figure out how much water the plumbing pressure tank holds from 50 psi down to 0 psi Many others, mentioned below. I went to bed that night at 21:30. In the fifteen seconds it took for me to fall asleep, a quick thought passed through my head: How nice it was to have complete darkness, able to see all the stars out of my loft window with no little lights from the television and DVD …


My Ten-Day Test-My-Preps Adventure – Part 1, by St. Funogas

With today’s world events, I’ve moved from “remote possibility” to “high probability” that we’ll soon see some major changes in our country and world that most folks can’t even imagine today. I’m not alone in thinking at some point there is a good possibility today’s events could lead into a major war for the U.S. We’ll be fighting some real armies, not a bunch of boys with old rifles riding ponies, as we did in Afghanistan. How hard would it be for enemy with Special Forces-type teams to take out our national power grid without even dropping any bombs? We …


Volunteering With RAM, by Dan D. in Arizona

A Brief Introduction In 1994 I picked up a copy of Wired magazine and there was a full-page image of Marc Thorpe showing a radio-controlled tank with a chainsaw mounted to the top. It was an advertisement for the first Robot Wars event (which then became the BattleBots television show that you are likely familiar with). I thought “I was made for this!” and then went on to compete and win a number of trophies. Not bad for a software engineer. Last year, I was browsing DVDs at a thrift shop in town and stumbled across a Remote Area Medical …


For the Want of a Horseshoe Nail, by 3AD Scout

There is a very old poem, with many variations about for the want of a nail. Basically, the poem goes like this: “For the want of a nail the shoe was lost For the want of a shoe the horse was lost For the want of the horse the rider was lost For the want of the rider the battle was lost For the want of the battle the kingdom was lost And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.” On occasion, I get to teach disaster logistics and I use this poem to get students to understand the …


Boers, Beans, Bullets, and Bear Soup – Part 2, by Tunnel Rabbit

(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.) A Rifle for the Recoil Sensitive Around here, .30-06 is more common than .308 Win.  The second most popular in my neighborhood is 6.5 Creedmoor (6.5CM), then 6.5×55, and lastly a wildcat for the AR platform, the 6.5 Timberwolf. Ideally, we would be best off to standardized on .308 Winchester. Yet .30-06 is still king in these woods. It is time tested and found to be the best all around cartridge CONUS, good for mouse to moose, and the occasional Griz, because it can shoot the heaviest .308 caliber bullets with a …


Boers, Beans, Bullets, and Bear Soup – Part 1, by Tunnel Rabbit

This morning, as per usual, I am having more black beans and black bear soup for breakfast on a cold mountain in Montana, waiting for all h*ll to break loose. I prefer beef, but presently bear meat is all that I have. The first few months of a collaspe may be the worst as the desperate and raiding gangs will be active. And then comes several years of famine.  And the rest of the Four Horsemen. Today, I must decide on whether to get a range finder, or a box of 1,000 match-grade bullets for the old war horse: a …


Blacksmithing Basics: Working From Next to Nothing, by Richard P.

Iron work is a foundational skill, literally shaping the bones of civilizations for well over a millennium today. As such, the earliest practitioners started out with nothing but ingenuity and raw natural materials. It is possible to do the same in a survival context, but the amount of labor necessary to smelt one’s own wrought iron from ore is prohibitive unless one has no other choice. Much more reasonable in a survival setting would be the repurposing of available metals. In history, this was extremely common. Viking societies would burn longships and sift the ashes to recover nails. We can …