Category: Contest

For those of us that pay attention, the mass media is shouting about a massive locust plague ravaging much of eastern Africa and a wide swath running across to Pakistan. ‘Locust’ is a generalized term for swarms of grasshoppers and similar species that emerge when they reach a high population threshold. Due to more rain than average, the last few years have seen increased vegetation, and thus a peak in the locust population cycle in these areas. While this uptick in locust numbers occurs every 50-to-75 years and has for centuries, the politicians and other “leaders” are debating if “climate …

(Continued from Part 1.) Part 2 – Disaster: Depression, Grief, and PTSD Yesterday in Part 1, I covered types of stress and began to touch on tools and techniques for control. Today in Part 2, I will discuss disaster’s effects including depression, grief, and PTSD, while Part 3 will focus on numerous preventive strategies. While I am a licensed M.D., retired disabled, I am not a psychiatrist and remind our readers that I am neither diagnosing nor prescribing. Please obtain prompt medical care from licensed practitioners as long as they are available. Who Is Susceptible? People who survive disasters may …

Authors Introductory Note: This article describes my experience in obtaining, refining and casting scrap lead for later use in bullet casting. The safety precautions in this article are the actual ones I used in this process, and I believe them to be adequate to protect against contamination to yourself and the environment. However, I am neither a doctor nor a chemist, and if you attempt this yourself you should do your own research. — There are many articles on SurvivalBlog about the utility of bullet casting. This is true, especially for someone who has older cartridge guns and black powder …

In times of high stress nobody “rises to the occasion”.  Instead, we all sink to our training and competency. Everyone has heard this statement in one form or another, but it is worth repeating.  Competency of a skill requires repetition.  I have spent significant range time with individuals in law enforcement.  I do not remember a single encounter when I have, not only been more competent, but also been complemented on my level of skill. I do not say this to brag but to help other individuals with a preparedness mindset because I believe everyone can achieve a high competency …

When TEOTWAWKI happens, none of us know how it’s going to go down. Will it be a natural destructive force or world war? An asteroid or weapons of mass destruction? Massive starvation or biological warfare? Maybe you’ll have to bug out and leave home. Or maybe you’ll have to stand your ground and defend what’s yours. We have no idea what the world will be like, only that it will be different. Regardless of how it happens, after TEOTWAWKI, all aspects of survival need to be considered. Of course, hunting, fishing, and foraging for edibles are necessary. And of course, …

Now I might be just a mild mannered, right-leaning, Christian grandma, but in my former life I was a hardcore, back-to-the-land, Rainbow Family hippie. There’s a bunch of us (once young people) who learned survival and community building skills in the late 1970s and early 1980s, and we suspected that someday we might need to be teaching these skills. The Rainbow Family name came from different native American visions of white people who would adopt Native American styles of life. (This was decades before the LBGTQ+++ crowd appropriated the “rainbow” and half of the English Alphabet.) For example the Hopi …