Letter Re: Advice on a 12 VDC Fuel Transfer Pump

Mr. James Wesley; Rawles: I keep a lot of extra gas in five gallon jerry-cans around my new farm/retreat wanna-be, for emergencies. (Stabilized with PRI-G, of course.) Yeah, I know that siphoning–especially if you prime it “by mouth”–is not safe. (Gag!) To make it easier and safer to transfer gasoline into or out of vehicle gas tanks, is there any transfer device that I can use use? Perhaps something that would plug into my pickup truck’s cigarette lighter [12 volt DC power] jack? What can I buy that is cheap off-the-shelf, or cheap to cobble together myself? Oh, and its …


Letter Re: Smoke Damaged Firearms

Greetings, In January, our home burned down. The family made it out safely thanks to our dog waking us up. The fire started outside and once it entered the house it was engulfed in minutes. My question is how to restore books, firearms, et cetera that have been damaged by smoke and fire. Since getting burned out is a possibility in survival times this information could be quite handy. BTW Smoke eats the finish on guns. My Mini-14 got eaten up pretty badly, but the CETME in the rack next to it came out just fine. I guess they used …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Blog reader B.H. sent this snippet: “Last month I was at the NRA headquarters in Virginia. I noticed a sign across the street for condos for sale for $260,000. I made a comment on how expensive that sounded when a NRA headquarters employee said that he sold his condo in the same development for $465,000 just eight months prior. That’s a decline of 44% in one year. Ouch for the guy that bought at the top of the bubble.”   o o o There are just 3 days left in the big “Container load sale” at Survival Enterprises. Looking at …


Jim’s Quote of the Day:

"To ban guns because criminals use them is to tell the innocent and law-abiding that their rights and liberties depend not on their own conduct, but on the conduct of the guilty and the lawless, and that the law will permit them to have only such rights and liberties as the lawless will allow… For society does not control crime, ever, by forcing the law-abiding to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of criminals. Society controls crime by forcing the criminals to accommodate themselves to the expected behavior of the law-abiding." – Jeff Snyder


Notes from JWR:

Our special thanks to the folks at Safecastle (one of our most loyal advertisers) for expanding their advertising on SurvivalBlog. They now have the exclusive “nailed up” top position SurvivalBlog banner ad. Be sure to sign up for their “Safecastle Royal” buyer’s club and give them your patronage. They have a fantastic line of preparedness products! Today we also welcome our newest advertiser, Health Treasures. They provide a great assortment of health and survival products, including water test kits, aerobic oxygen, potassium iodide (KI) anti-radiation (thyroid protection) tablets, health books, and survival books. They also sell nutritional supplements such as …


Three Letters Re: Pondering Some Personal Consequences of Global Climate Change

JWR, Both M.W.A. and Michael Williamson bring some sanity and reason to the subject of climate change. Thanks for publishing their letters. Weather/climate is probably the most complex system on earth. For anyone to say they can tell with any kind of certainty what the climate on earth was like millions of years ago is ridiculous and what is the point. On a very basic level, the one universal truth about the weather/climate is change, unending change. You could even make the case that change is a universal physical law. The writers are correct to question the motives of the …


Odds ‘n Sods:

As reported by The Daily Reckoning: “The Central Bank of Zimbabwe announced this week that henceforth inflation would be illegal. Anyone who raises prices will be arrested.” Do they honestly believe that they can put the brakes on a 1,200% per annum inflation rate, by decree? The Zimbabwean government is beyond corrupt, and beyond incompetent. Comrade Mugabe and his band of fools from the ZANU-PF must go!   o o o RBS mentioned this news story at CNN.com: Vagrant: “We killed for scrap metal, hid bodies in manholes.” Human nature hasn’t changed. When times get really hard, you can expect …




Letter Re: Questions on Multipurpose Home Shelters

Sir: I live in Georgia and we have more than our share of tornados. We usually go to the basement to my office during storms but I’ve decided that even though it’s underground on 3 sides, with only 3/4 plywood and sheet rock between us and the garage doors that it is no longer a viable option. I’ve looked at FEMA plans and I’ve scratched my head and come up with this idea but wanted to kind of say it out loud to someone to see if it sounds too crazy. The back part of the basement is almost completely …


Two Letters Re: Pondering Some Personal Consequences of Global Climate Change

Jim, I have been reluctant to comment on the climate change hysteria, but the recent letter by Hawaiian K was too much. There are several important facts to remember on this topic: 1) We don’t have enough data to determine whether we are in a long-term warming trend, or in a counter-cyclical move in a long term cooling trend. Lot’s of people have ‘data’ but no ‘facts’ have been established. Remember in the 1970’s how the next ice age was right around the corner? 2) Even if we do happen to be in a warming trend at the moment, there …


Odds ‘n Sods:

Flagged by HPF (one of our regular content contributors): Retired CIA Energy Analyst’s Latest Comments on Peak Oil   o o o There are just 6 days left in the big “Container load sale” at Survival Enterprises. Many items have already sold out. Don’t dawdle on this one, folks! All of the storage food items are “first come – first served.” The prices are less than half of retail.    o o o It is nice to see that silver has come out of its doldrums and appears to be back on its long term bull market trajectory. (At the …



Note from JWR:

For those of you that have been waiting, we just received another 10 copies of “The Encyclopedia of Country Living” by the late Carla Emery. This book is a “must” for the bookshelf of every well-prepared family. See my mail order catalog for details.


Letter Re: Firearm Chamber Adapters

Hi Jim, I found an article in the latest issue of “The Backwoodsman” magazine that talked about using chamber adapters to employ different caliber ammunition in single shot, and over-and-under [rifle/shotgun combination gun]s like the Savage 24V. Here’s the [MCA Sports] web site mentioned in the article that sells the adapters: http://www.mcace.com/adapters.htm It seems like a neat idea to have the capability to convert a firearm to shoot different types of ammo that might be scrounge during a long term TEOTWAWKI . Do you think there is any merit in investing in chamber adapters? Or would it be wiser to …