Category: Emerging Threats

A 21st Century Threat: Battery Fire Cyber Attacks

I will keep this essay brief, and to the point. Readers of my novel Expatriates and Liberators will recall how I fictionally described the use of both time-delayed and remotely-controlled incendiaries and explosives. I have recently been considering the potential threat posed by the inclusion of lithium-ion rechargeable batteries in consumer products that have Internet connections. As the Internet of Things (IoT) proliferates, I believe that the possibility of malicious, remotely-controlled battery fires is a growing threat. It has already been well-documented that thermal runaway battery fires are an increasingly common occurrence. These fires happen often, even in devices that …


SurvivalBlog Graphic of the Week

Today’s graphic:  The silent spread of Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD), caused by prions, among Deer and Elk populations in North America. (Graphic courtesy of Reddit, using USGS data.) The thumbnail below is click-expandable.         — Please send your graphics or graphics links to JWR. (Either via e-mail or via our Contact form.) Any graphics that you send must either be your own creation or uncopyrighted.


Political Machinations: The 2026 Midterms May Be A.I.-Manipulated

The recent Democratic Party mayoral primary election of Zohran Mamdani in New York City does not bode well. It illustrates that the Hard Left Democrats now have a stranglehold on New York City politics. I suspect the same for all of the East and West Coast Blue States, as well as Illinois. I heard it suggested on talk radio that artificial intelligence (A.I.) was used to exert influence on the New York mayoral primary via concerted social media bot traffic. This may have swayed “on the fence” voters toward Mamdani. I’m curious to see if this manipulation can be documented.  …


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, we ponder severe solar storms and impending demographic doom. The Unseen Fury of Solar Storms SurvivalBlog staffer Tom Christianson suggested this recent article: The Unseen Fury Of Solar …


Avoiding Those Jurisdictional Layers

Many of my consulting calls focus on the selection of retreat property locales. I always advise my clients to look first at state, county, and local laws, before they even start to look at individual real estate listings. In this essay,  I will address the issue of jurisdictional layers, when considering retreat locales. In two previous SurvivalBlog articles, I discussed the whole concept of jurisdiction: In 2018: The First Question is Always Jurisdiction. and, in 2024: Fencing In Federal Jurisdiction. But in this essay, I will be going over the application of jurisdiction, and most importantly how it varies, additively, …


Europe’s Anti-American Shift, by Brandon Smith

Nationalism is villainous and globalists are the heroes? It’s a propaganda message that has been building since the end of World War II and the creation of globalist institutions like the UN, the IMF, World Bank, etc. By the 1970s there was a concerted and dangerous agenda to acclimate the western world to interdependency; not just dependency on imports and exports, but dependency of currency trading, treasury purchases and interbank wealth transfer systems like SWIFT. This was the era when corporations began outsourcing western manufacturing to third world countries. This is when the dollar was fully decoupled from gold. When …


How The Woke Postmodern “Faith” Glorifies Evil, by Brandon Smith

It’s not as if it was ever a secret: The very core of the woke movement is fundamentally rooted in evil. The general definition of “evil” being a conscious act of deception and destruction, the deliberate victimization of others for the sake of personal power, pleasure, and gain. When I try to imagine what a religion of evil might look like I consistently come back to the far-left woke movement along with its rabid mantras, agendas, and self-righteous narcissism. The majority of human beings have an inherent sense of good and evil; we often refer to this condition as conscience …


Avoiding the Worst Case Scenario – Part 3, by M.B.

(Continued from Part 2.) There isn’t room here for detailing all the things to look for to see trouble coming, but violence does not usually consist of a bad guy leaping out of the bushes to attack someone. More commonly, the assailant looks for a way to get close to an intended “mark” and to size them up for their suitability as an easy victim. The idea is to gauge your reaction, and to see if it’s safe to victimize you. Marc MacYoung calls this “the interview”. The criminal interview may be as simple as asking for change, or for …


Europe Goes Full Totalitarian and Puts The Entire Western World at Risk, by Brandon Smith

It’s happening again. Europe is once again going totalitarian and this time there’s a decidedly familiar communist stench. The outcome was predictable for many of us in the alternative media and the situation is only going to get worse in the next few years, but what does this mean for the rest of the world? With the European elites casting off their humanist masks and going outright Orwellian, what kind of chaos can we expect to unfold? First and foremost I want to point out a key piece of irony here – For decades in the US we heard the …


Retreat Security: What We Can Learn from Israel – Part 1, by Don Shift

Introduction It’s every prepper’s fantasy: living in (mostly) a self-sufficient secure compound surrounded by liked-minded individuals living off the land just out of reach of the ravaging hordes. For novelists and daydreamers, living on the frontier in a simpler way is an appealing escape from the often-disheartening humdrum of ordinary life. Rather than worry about politics and taxes, you worry about raiders and if this summer’s crop will come in. But in the pages of fiction or the corners of our imagination, the good guy always prevails. Reality is much more stark. Those who lived on Israeli kibbutzim—collective compound-style communities— …


A Little Lexicon of Liberty and Freedom Terms

The following is just a brief summary of some legal terminology.  A serious legal scholar would do a deep dive and end up with a 50,000-word treatise. But that is not my intent here, so I will keep it brief: One book that I’ve often referred to over the years is Black’s Law Dictionary. Mine is a 6th Edition, printed in 1991. I also have an e-book copy of the classic Bouvier’s Law Dictionary from 1856. It is interesting to see how some definitions of terms have morphed, over time. People often use the terms Freedom and Liberty synonymously. However, …


Countering Drones – Part 2, by TacOps

(Continued from Part 1. This concludes the article.) Current Anti-Drone Applications As drones have continued to threaten civilian and government spaces, different groups have taken various approaches to down drones in their airspace. Both Ukraine and Russia have adopted a ballistic solution. Using cheap, Turkish-made shotguns has allowed them to supply mass Infantry units with counter-drone capabilities. They have found that #4 buckshot from a 12-gauge shotgun has had the most effectiveness against small drones – the ones dismounted Soldiers are most likely to encounter. However, 12-gauge shotguns have a maximum effective range of only fifty meters. Shotguns have benefits …


Countering Drones – Part 1, by TacOps

Drones are a hot topic in the news. From drones flying over New Jersey, Coast Guard ships, and other areas, to drone use in Ukraine, these have concerned many people. From the perspective of many in the prepping community, the question is how to prepare for drone attacks in a TEOTWAWKI situation. In this article, I will highlight a brief history of drone use, a background on the overall situation concerning contemporary events with drones, current anti-drone applications, and how to ultimately prepare to counter-drone reconnaissance and/or direct attacks. A Brief History of Drones Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV’s), now commonly …


Preparedness in the New Golden Age or Grimy Age – Part 1, by Single Farmer

Editor’s Introductory Note: This young man is prayerfully seeking a wife. He is offering an after-marriage gift of up to $50,000 to whoever introduces him to his bride with $18,000 after their marriage and another $16,000 to the individual who provided the introduction after the first two births of healthy children born to him and his wife, for a total potential gift of $50,000. For further details, see this link to his article posted on February 24th, 2025: My Quest For a Wife. — We find ourselves in a unique time which will be of great change. We can either …


WW3 Is Still On The Table: Europe Wants Boots On The Ground In Ukraine, by Brandon Smith

In the lead up to the 2024 presidential elections in the US the Biden Administration in collusion with UK, European and Ukrainian partners devised a plan to “Trump Proof” the war in Ukraine. In other words, they openly admitted that they wanted to prevent Trump from taking any actions that might force an end to the war and render a serious peace agreement. Part of that plan included the expanded use of long-range guided missiles supplied by western governments. These missiles require flight data from NATO assets along with NATO personnel to launch – Meaning, any strikes involving these weapons …