Letter Re: Home Canning Resources

Mr Rawles, I am a 10 Cent Challenge subscriber who has learned so much from your site since my brother, “Mike near Seattle” told me about it. One skill that my husband and I are trying to become proficient at is canning. Both of us came from homes where our mothers canned, but being a kid in the “production line” doesn’t mean you will remember how to can 30 years later as an adult. I found a great web site called CanningUSA.com that has free online videos for beginners to watch so you can learn how to start canning all …


Letter Re: Sources for Gasoline and Diesel Fuel in a Grid-Down Collapse

Mr Rawles: Would a hand-lever pump like this one or this one work for pulling up fuel from a gas station underground tank]? Thanks, – F. JWR Replies: Both of those hand pumps are designed specifically for pumping from drums with standard barrel bung threads. They should work with underground tank is you add an extension hose with a nice tight seal at the union of the hose. However, this type of pump is less flexible than my preferred 12 VDC pump design, since they cannot be used for one step vehicle-to-vehicle fuel transfers. They are also only marginally faster, …


Letter Re: Cashing in on Scrap Copper, Brass, and Aluminum

Dear Jim, I am a daily reader of your blog. With all the discussion about gold and silver value I thought it might be prudent to bring up the value of other metals. I am a Master Plumber and I make a small fortune by recycling old copper pipe, brass fittings, valves, and faucets. Number 1 copper is up to $2.75 a pound. Four years ago it was $1.50. Yellow brass is $1.60 a pound. It was only 60 cents four years ago. An old water heater can get you $5.00. I know people that save aluminum cans and take …


Letter Re: Communications in Times of Crisis

Hi, Jim: As a licensed Ham and (ever since the 1970s) a licensed CBer (those were the days when CB licenses mattered.) I had to go quickly back and check the Communications in Times of Crisis posting one more time, and sure enough I did find a couple of small errors/omissions which need mention. First, the 12 watts output mentioned by the author for CB radios only applies when operating in SSB mode. If in AM mode, you are still limited to 4 watts out. Yes, I know some folks run “foot warmers” (illegal [linear] amplifiers); but, remember that those …


Letter Re: The Novel “The Last Centurion”

Mr. Rawles, I thought you might be interested in an early preview of “The Last Centurion” a novel about the world after an Avian Flu pandemic. The Author is John Ringo – who writes military and sci-fi – and often combines the two. The language is coarse, and it is written in a blog style, but it has some great observations about society, politicians, money supply and what happens in a real disaster. You can find the early release chapters online. It really gets good in chapter 5 and 6 talking about the responses to the outbreak and how some …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Delinquencies are soaring: Unpaid credit cards bedevil Americans. (A hat tip to Craig S. for sending us this.)    o o o An Ambrose Evans-Pritchard article was mentioned the at CometGold Forum (at Contrary Investors Cafe) and by nearly a dozen SurvivalBlog readers: Crisis may make 1929 look a ‘walk in the park’. Here is a key quote: “Liquidity doesn’t do anything in this situation,” says Anna Schwartz, the doyenne of US monetarism and life-time student (with Milton Friedman) of the Great Depression. “It cannot deal with the underlying fear that lots of firms are going bankrupt. The banks and …




During a Disaster Event Should You Stay at Home or Leave?, by Grandpappy

Different types of disasters may require a different response if a family wishes to maximize their chances for long-term survival. Therefore each family should have several different disaster plans that they could successfully implement depending on the circumstances. These plans should include: 1. Staying at your home and being able to survive for a reasonable period of time without any outside assistance, and 2. Quickly and efficiently evacuating your home and traveling to a predetermined destination. Staying at home is probably the best overall strategy for most families in a variety of different disaster type situations. However, there are a …


Letter Re: Hunkering Down in an Urban Apartment in a Worst Case Societal Collapse

Hello, In the event of a disaster (I live in New York City) I intend to shelter in place until all the riotous mobs destroy each other or are starved out. I am preparing for up to six months. I have one liter of water stored for each day (180 liters) and about 50 pounds of rice to eat as well as various canned goods. I have not seen on your site anything about heat sources for urban dwellers who intend to shelter in place. I’m assuming that electricity would go first soon followed by [natural] gas and running water. …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Six readers sent us this article about dispossessed Southern Californians: Tent city in suburbs is cost of home crisis    o o o A Rawles family member sent us a link to a web site has all kinds of information on primitive technology    o o o From our friend Michael Panzner, over at the Financial Armageddon blog, comes a chart that tells a thousand words: A Mind-Boggling Data Series    o o o You’ve all seen what has happened to food prices in the past year.Keep in mind that most food storage vendors (including some of our advertisers) are …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

"If we could condense all the truths of Christmas into only three words, these would be the words: "God with us." We tend to focus our attention at Christmas on the infancy of Christ. The greater truth of the holiday is His deity. More astonishing than a baby in the manger is the truth that this promised baby is the omnipotent Creator of the heavens and the earth!" – John F. MacArthur, Jr.


Letter Re: Retreat Security–Lessons Learned from the Rhodesian Experience

Jim: After giving it some thought [to post-TEOTWAWKI retreat security], I think we need to study many of the homestead/farmstead fortifications used during the [late 1970s] Rhodesian Bush War and to a certain extend in rural South Africa in the present day. Of course, one would need to adjust for legalities so one would not be breaking any laws. – Lame Wolf [JWR Adds: Lame Wolf also sent us a great quote from a letter by “Rhodesian” that was first posted at the Small Wars Journal (SWJ) web site. BTW I recommend the SWJ site–in particular their Reference Library pages–as …


Letter Re: A Twenty-Something EMT with Limited Preps Storage Space

Mr. Rawles, First off I would like to thank you for your profound impact on my life in the last four months. All of my life I grew up with a father and grandfather who were/are minor survivalist men. They believe that the end times are coming and we should prepare for them. They keep about three days of food and water at their homes and plenty of guns and ammo. For the longest time I always thought it was ridiculous and never understood it. Now my thinking has changed to the fact that they are under prepared. When I …


Odds ‘n Sods:

MQC sent us this: Standard & Poor’s Downgrades ACA Capital to Junk Status. MQC notes: “S&P cut ACA’s rating to ‘CCC,’ or eight levels below investment grade, from ‘A,’ the sixth-highest investment-grade rating. It also said it may cut Financial Guaranty Insurance Co’s ‘AAA’ rating.” Here is a sobering snippet: “The entire US economy is $14 trillion or so in contrast to $42.6 trillion in credit default swaps. The entire derivatives trade is now a record $681 trillion.”    o o o Ready Made Resources just added a new photovoltaic (PV) power product to their line. For those of us …