Category: SurvivalBlog

Letter Re: Thanks for SurvivalBlog

James, I’d like to thank you personally for maintaining SurvivalBlog. Until last year, I’d always thought of my survival skills as important to have, but didn’t think I’d ever truly need them. Now that the bottom has fallen out of the economy (in exactly the way you predicted!), I believe everything I value is truly at risk. To see the danger that America is in, just turn on the news for ten seconds. To see the danger that the culture of true service to God is in, do a Google search for “De-baptism” or “Santa Muerte.” The world’s situation has …


Cold and Dark–An Account of an Ice Storm, by Steve S.

Preparations In January, 2008, the outlook for people in the United States appeared bleak. I told my wife that we needed to stock-up on food because I felt that the supply lines were thin and vulnerable. I began my preparations by Internet search. I found JWR’s SurvivalBlog and I bought a copy of his novel. In the meantime, I started buying cases of canned goods. I bought food that we generally ate. I looked at the expiration dates of every purchase. I tried to buy what would last through 2011. Not much would, so I bought with the idea of …


Letter Re: Getting the Right Training and Preparing Methodically

Dear Mr. Rawles, I wanted to thank you for what you are doing and your work. I think that the reality is that you are saving a lot of people’s lives in addition to helping people to continue to be “in” the world but less and less “of” the world. I have been able, in turn, to pass along to other people a lot of things that I have learned from you and your readers, and I hope help them to focus and remain calm in their preparations. (I have also pointed them all to your web site). Now three …


Letter Re: Documentary Film Producer Seeking Interview Subjects

Dear SurvivalBlog Readers: I can’t thank you all enough for the numerous responses to my earlier posting. It’s a pleasure meeting you all and reading about your different approaches to survival and a preparedness mentality. I have been doing my best to respond to all of your emails, but wanted to let you know if you haven’t heard back from me directly, it is not due to a lack of interest, but more the logistics of responding to the volume! I have read through all of the emails that have come my way and encourage those who haven’t responded but …


Four Letters Re: Firewalls, Anonymity, and SurvivalBlog

Two notes about Some Call Me Tim’s excellent recommendation of JanusVM: 1) Use Decloak.net to verify that you’ve done everything right. It uses a whole host of very strong tests to attempt to locate your computer and will find out if you’ve slipped up somewhere. The place you’ve slipped up is almost always DNS but cookies and other things can give you away too. 2) Be aware that this encrypts the traffic you’re sending and receiving, it doesn’t make it go away. Someone listening in can tell when you’re sending/receiving and how much, they just can’t read it. Timing and …


Two Letters Re: Firewalls, Anonymity, and SurvivalBlog

Dear Mr. Rawles As a network administrator, I spend a fair amount of time making sure my end users cannot access certain web sites from company computers and data lines. I try to make sure we don’t get too draconian in our filtering practices, I do my best to make sure that not streaming audio or video, social networking sites, or other time killers make their way through the network. Recently, a friend of mine told me about a tool called JanusVM, a combination of Internet anonymity tools (TOR, PRIVoxy, Squid, and VPN) that runs in a virtual machine. You …


Letter Re: A Company Layoff Underscores the Need to Be Well Prepared

Jim, What a surprise my wife and I received at work yesterday. My wife and I work for the same manufacturing company and after two banner years and a huge Christmas bonus the company is reducing everyone to 20 hours a week. The company we work for is a total “team oriented” place to work and if one person gets a bonus we all get a bonus and the same is true when it comes to layoffs. While our company sets and exceeds the world standard for what we do many of the companies we are dealing with are unable …


Some SurvivalBlog Advertising Changes

I’m very pleased to report that SurvivalBlog is now indisputably the most popular preparedness blog on the Internet, with an average 117,200 unique visits per week. The phenomenal growth of SurvivalBlog’s circulation (which has more than tripled in the past 16 months), has brought with it some growing pains. As I’m sure you recall, since November of 2005 we used a scrolling script to make all but one of the ads slowly scroll by. This worked fine back when we had just a dozen advertisers. But unfortunately we’ve found that it was a very inefficient solution: We’ve received several complaints …


Letter Re: SurvivalBlog is a Money Saver

Mr Rawles: For some time I was a lurker, reading SurvivalBlog on a more or less regular basis. Eventually I decided I needed to pay for what I was getting. I became a Ten Cent Challenge subscriber. Yesterday, you saved me more than the cost of my subscription with just one tip: I ordered a Foodsaver V2830 and paid just $59.99, postage paid. These originally sold for $169.99. I had wanted one for a long time and put off purchasing it because of the expense. Many thanks! And to the rest of the lurkers out there, it’s time to pay …


Letter Re: Finding Archived SurvivalBlog Topics

Mister Rawles: First off, I want to thank you for running SurvivalBlog. Its an awesome resource–sorta “one stop shopping” for folks like me that are getting prepared. I first read your book three years ago, when I was on my second deployment in Iraq. Your novel [“Patriots“] was in a big pile of books in our unit’s MWR [Morale, Welfare and Recreation] room. They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, but I was following advice from my home-town librarian when I picked your book. She once advised me: “Look for books with ‘broken’ spines and that show …


Two Letters Re: Advice for City Folks on a Budget?

Dear Mr. Rawles, I am writing to ask for your advice and for your charity, and also because I think this subject may be of interest to many of your readers. I discovered your web site a week ago and have found it to be both very informative and also very alarming! It was major wake-up call for me. In my opinion, I am not at all prepared for the upheavals that are already underway and that lie ahead of us. I would very much like to change that situation, but it all (considered as a whole) seems so overwhelming. …


Letter Re: A Suggested Reading List

James: Thank you for all of the work that you put into your web site. I have been reading your site and preparing for the last couple of years. I thought you might be interested in the Bibliography to my [retreat] group’s operations guide. Fiction Adams, John Joseph. Wastelands. San Francisco : Night Shade Books, 2008. Alten, Steve. The Shell Game. Springville , Utah : Sweetwater Books, 2007. Brin, David. The Postman. New York : Bantam Books, 1985. Budrys, Algis. Some Will Not Die. New York : Dell Publishing Co., Inc., 1961. Card, Orson Scott. The Folk of the Fringe. …


Letter Re: An E-Mailed SurvivalBlog Digest?

Sir, I would like to sign up to get your blogs [via e-mail]; but I can’t see where I do that; Could you please help me. Thanks, – Dianne M. JWR Replies: For the privacy of my readers, I don’t have a digest of my blog that is e-mailed. (I don’t like to keep lists. I don’t even keep records of anyone that makes a voluntary subscription donation.) Just direct your web browser whenever you’d like to read SurvivalBlog. It is updated daily (and I haven’t missed a day since the blog was started three years ago), so you might …


Letter Re: The SurvivalBlog Ten Cent Challenge

Sir, This is a note to follow up on the envelope that I mailed you last week, for my first year of 10 Cent Challenge subscription. (I’m the guy that sent you a stack of ’bout $70 worth of Liberty [Bell “Forever” US] postage stamps and the newspaper clipping on the IndyMac bank run. You were right in your prediction about bank runs!) I just want to let you know how much your blog means to me. I read it almost every day. It is amazing how much practical knowledge you have passed on to us readers. I am very …


A July, 2008 Jim Rawles Interview by AlterNet

The following is a transcript of an interview that will soon be run at the popular left-of-center AlterNet web site: AlterNet: Is survivalism a failure of community? A celebration of it? JWR: I’d say that survivalism is indeed a celebration of community. It is the embodiment of America’s traditional “can do” spirit of self-reliance that settled the frontier. AlterNet: Is it engineered by personal issues? Is it a racial, or economic phenomenon, in your opinion? Or both? JWR: Survivalism [is a movement that] crosses all racial and religious lines. It is essentially color blind. For 99% of us, we could …