Category: Survival Mindset

The recent anti-survivalist post mentioned in SurvivalBlog dismissing survivalists is destructive. He’s entitled to his opinion. Everybody’s got one. I think that those who are brave enough and ethically strong enough to be survivalists have an obligation to their culture, people, and species to survive. It’s a thankless job, and too many survivalists go crazy from the sacrifices they make. Being a survivalist and being sane is tough because it requires many personal sacrifices. You have to balance work and home life, learning skills for independence, and skip buying fancy toys in favor of equipping yourself for a worst case …

In 1976 Ronald Reagan said “The nine most terrifying words in the English language are, “I’m from the government and I’m here to help.”” Why do so many of us agree with these words? Is our innate distrust of an organization that’s takes our hard earned money and uses it to restrict our rights and freedoms because “we need to be protected from ourselves”? Is it that we have seen how government agencies perform in major disasters like hurricane Katrina and we fear that we would receive the same treatment in a SHTF scenario? Or is it that the government …

Hello Jim, My family and I are fortunate enough to live in a sparsely populated area of the Rocky Mountain West. Seems we are always being “discovered” by someone who wants to move here and get away from it all. Some even sell their homes and set up residences here, but more often than not, they last about 2 years and the “for sale” sign is back up again. Seems to me that the old adage is true… a Leopard cannot change its spots. You can’t take a fellow from the suburbs… drop them in the middle of a Prickly …

We all know that to be fully prepared we need a great survival retreat we can bug-out to. We all dream of the perfect retreat, were we will go post-SHTF. If you are like me however, this is simply not reality. I have no remote, armored, fully stocked retreat to go to in a disaster. Like millions of Americans I live not in the country, nor the city, but the area in between, commonly called the suburbs. Though all suburbs are different most of them share similar qualities, small, less than acre lots, single family houses with well maintained front …

I’ve stated much of the following before, but it bears repeating: Don’t make the mistake of slipping into the “Armchair Commando” mindset. It is what my friend Keith in North Idaho calls the”Tommy Tactical” mindset. You know the type: your overweight friend with the big gun collection, but hardly any stored food. He is the same guy that will spend hours debating the finer points of exterior ballistics or starlight scopes, but that hasn’t even taken the time to zero all of his guns. He is too busy collecting guns, talking Schumer, and reading Soldier of Fantasy magazine. Armchair Commandos …

The recent SurvivalBlog letters regarding wolves illustrate something that has interested me for a while. This is a phenomenon that might be called “The Great Disconnect”. “The Great Disconnect” is defined as the increasing number of people who lack the ability to distinguish between reality and their own beliefs. These are people who reject out of hand anything that conflicts with their internal world-view, no matter how out of touch with reality that view may actually be. I have no idea what percentage of the population falls into the ‘disconnected’ category, but judging from what I see on the Internet, …