A useful map for those considering moving: Here’s Where in the Country You’re Most Likely to Become a Victim of Violent Crime. – JBG
o o o
After Nearly Claiming His Life, Ebola Lurked in a Doctor’s Eye. – D.S.
o o o
Tracking kids via microchip ‘can’t be far off,’ says expert. – G.M.
o o o
Bedtime Reading to Kids “Unfairly Disadvantages” Others . – S.D.
o o o
Battle erupts over censorship of 3D-printer gun plans. – H.L.
“If they confess their iniquity and the iniquity of their forefathers, in their unfaithfulness which they committed against Me, and also in their acting with hostility against Me— I also was acting with hostility against them, to bring them into the land of their enemies—or if their uncircumcised heart becomes humbled so that they then make amends for their iniquity, then I will remember My covenant with Jacob, and I will remember also My covenant with Isaac, and My covenant with Abraham as well, and I will remember the land.” Leviticus 26:40-42 (KJV)
May 8th is the birthday of missionary and U.S. military intelligence officer John Birch (born 1918, died August 25, 1945). He is considered by many to be the first American casualty of the Cold War.
o o o
Seed for Security is running a great sale. Their Super Survival Pack is now 20% off. It’s a total of four pounds of survival seeds and two pints of healthful grains, all packaged for long-term storage. Their seed is heirloom, non GMO, and none is hybrid. This offer is for a limited time.
o o o
Today, we present another entry for Round 58 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 58 ends on May 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.
My experience in survival preparedness has spanned roughly a decade now, from my early 20’s into my early 30’s. I have learned a lot along the way and would like to share my experiences, varied as they are, on many subjects. These are only my opinions. Your individual circumstances will vary; you can take from this what you will and ignore the rest.
The number one most important survival consideration is that NOW, while money is worth something, you had better get HOT on MAKING MORE MONEY. Ten years ago, I was absolutely convinced that the financial system was imminently going to implode. Therefore, instead of investing money and time into being able to expand my own financial growth, I poured every spare penny into weapons, ammunition, equipment, et cetera. These are all things that are useful, but in the long run I did more harm than good.
Although we all know that one day the reckoning for this world will come, the game can go on much longer than anyone can imagine. It is their system, and they will keep it going as long as they can keep looting this country and destroying it from within. This could take another 10-20 years. We just don’t know. So always invest in yourself, in new skills, in new businesses, and in your capability to generate money. Have a second job, learn a trade, and just increase your income somehow. Preparedness becomes so much easier when you are making $10,000 a month instead of $3,000. Spend a year or two right now creating that larger income stream for yourself and you will suddenly be able to afford the best weaponry, optics, free dried foods, gear, and more. Skills can always defeat equipment, but when you have enough money to buy the best equipment and also go take excellent training, you are going to be an order of magnitude better off. Money opens up a lot of doors.
Most of the people reading this blog are probably men. Guys, survival is not just about having an arsenal that the terminator would be envious of; it is also about having a life that you love. This means having companionship, a wife, kids, and a legacy. Our individual lives are not that important in the grand scheme of things. This is going to sound like it has nothing to do with survival, but hear me out. Go take dancing lessons. Yes, dancing lessons are imperative to your survival situation. A man who can dance salsa is going to be able to attract a woman ten times easier than a man who can’t dance. Good luck finding a mate by preaching about Austrian economics and derivatives. This can come later, once she knows you are a fun and happy go lucky person who keeps her laughing. (Save the Rambo persona for the cannibal raiders down the road.) Ensuring the survival of our way of life means having children to pass our values and culture on to, and you need a woman to have your children.
So, do yourself a favor and find out where you can learn salsa. Then, go find yourself a mate. Absolutely do not bring up guns, politics, or preparedness until you can ease her gently into it. Women are wired differently than men, and it behooves you to approach these topics very cautiously, as not to upset her idea of what the future might be. Women fall in love with an idea. If her idea of life with you is nothing more than living in an underground storage container and eating beans while repelling cannibals, well guess what, she is going to pass that idea up for another idea.
If you think that working out at the gym a couple of times each week is going to be the same as living off the land and building a community, you are absolutely going to be in for a physical and mental shock. I have personally gone from working a construction job and going to the gym five times a week to working on an oil rig for 28 straight days with 12-hour shifts every day. I thought that I was in shape and strong, but what 95% of the population considers to be hard work is a walk in the park. I realized this when I went to work on the oil rig.
Our ancestors would spend all day long tilling the earth, day after day. They would swing an ax, swing sledge hammers, split wood, haul heavy equipment, and do this from sun up to sun down. Their bodies were conditioned from a young age to work for the entire day. This probably prevented them from a lot of injury, but for all the rest of you who work regular office jobs, your body will be prone to injury when you make this transition. I wanted to tell you about different types of pain, because you are going to become familiar with pain, and it is good to have an idea about what is serious pain and what is not.
You will deal with muscle soreness, naturally, being the most mild pain of them all. After the soreness will come aching joints, from your fingers to your wrists, and especially your knees. Aches can get pretty uncomfortable, but you should never worry about aches, because they will go away with some good food and rest. The harder you work, the more you must eat. You absolutely must follow that rule. The body can withstand a tremendous workload as long as you are fueling it with plenty of calories and nutrition! That cannot be emphasized enough. You will begin to fall apart if you do not heed this advice.
Stabbing pain is something more serious, and it is likely from some kind of injury. I can only assume you will not have a doctor around or access to any real medical care. So you have to be able to function-test your body. This means that you basically check for range of motion, and if something is giving you stabbing pains, then you just need to stop aggravating it or you will run the risk of truly injuring yourself. Restricting movement or supporting it somehow with improvised braces or supports can help.
What you must be in the habit of is the proper and safe way to use common tools. For example, you must be in the habit of properly positioning your body so that when you swing that sledge hammer and it glances off whatever you were trying to hit, it doesn’t clip your knee cap on the way down and cause an actual injury. I cannot tell you how many times I have seen people do exactly that. Just imagine you are on your retreat, where you have been splitting wood for eight hours straight, your hands are aching terribly, your muscles are exhausted, and you are mentally about to quit, and your ax slips out of your hands and cuts your foot wide open. Toughening up for hard labor is not a fun thing to do, but get in the habit of using your tools safely, at a minimum!
With the best intentions I have pretty much tried every method of food storage that you can think of. I have settled on freeze-dried food stoage. The other methods I have found to not work for me for a few reasons:
There are a thousand idiots out there giving advice for every real professional you might find. Do yourself a favor in the beginning and read the book On Combat. This will drive home the importance of reality-based, stress-inducing training. Weapons are secondary to training and tactics, period. As long as you have a reliable weapon that you will be mentally prepared to aggressively use, then you will do better than all the arm chair commandos who only ever shoot at stationary paper targets on a flat range on a nice sunny day. I own a non-standard rifle– the Steyr AUG– and all my friends always tell me that if I get into a SHTF situation I won’t be able to find parts or whatever else. That’s not true. There will be so many corpses with AR15s laying around that if I need another gun, I will pick one up. I have met countless morons with weapons, zero training, and zero combat mindset. The ground will be littered with unfired rifles.
For hand-to-hand fighting, just go right to www.scars.com and subscribe. Practice it with your team. My good friend is an expert in the system, has been in hundreds of real life fights on the street as a cop, and never lost a single fight, period. I am skilled at an intermediate level and still surprise others trained in the more well-known systems, with the simplicity and effectiveness of SCARS. You will find a lot of negative stuff about it online, but that comes from ignorance. It has the fastest learning curve, most scientifically-developed concepts, and trains the mind and not just the body. To give one sentence that sums up why SCARS is the best: There are no defensive moves in SCARS, only offensive movements.
So, to sum it up, make more money, dance yourself into the arms of a good woman, work hard like your ancestors, train for reality, and study combat.
HJL,
It looks like there is a differing view that counters the story you linked to… Facts matter!. – D.S.
HJL Responds: There is always more than one side to any argument; this one is no exception. However, the author of the “Facts matter!” article that you are referencing, while making the accusation that the original author is twisting “the facts” to suit his purpose, does the exact same thing. Given both articles, here are my concerns:
If it’s not obvious here, I’m having trouble with the idea that Sorenson tells its clients that they will hold their client’s data confidential and then releases enough information to law enforcement to suggest that a warrant may be authorized or that they would run the test in the first place without a warrant.
Denmark moves closer to a cashless society. – G.G.
o o o
Why The Student Debt Bubble Is About To Get A Lot Larger
o o o
Items from Mr. Econocobas:
PETER SCHIFF: We’re Not Headed for a Fed Rate Hike — QE4 Instead
Layoffs Hit 3-Year High in April as Energy Cuts Surge
Hold Precious Metals As Banks Try To Criminalize The Use Of Cash
The modern paramilitary police and how we got here: SurvivalBlog reader D.C. blames FLETC for turning our nation’s local level police forces into paramilitary death squads after seeing them first-hand on flights in and out of Roswell, NM heading to and from training in Artesia, and hearing the chatter amongst themselves. “The .gov folks talked amongst themselves at the airport of actively recruiting local agencies to send police officers to receive the training. The trainee officers seem very boosted in morale by the training, and their chatter is confident and not unlike that seen among school team athletes.” – D.C.
o o o
SurvivalBlog reader D.B. sent in the link to this website with many useful online books that look like they are from the early 1900’s on many subjects like “Agriculture for the beginner”, “Practical blacksmithing”, and many others like this. You just have to scroll down past the construction tutorials to get the online books.
o o o
Homeschoolers interrogated on guns, vaccines. – D.S.
o o o
Mapped: One-in-five murder victims in world is Brazilian, Colombian or Venezuelan. – JBG
o o o
War is coming. – P.M.
“But you need to make sure that the last thing you remember about today isn’t that you fell down, it’s that you got back up again. That’s what we do when bad things happen to us.” ? Michael Rowe, Wild Fell
Today, we present another entry for Round 58 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 58 ends on May 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.
We all take our glorious electronic communicators for granted today. Got a problem? Search the web. Driving to work and realize you forgot to mail an important bill? Call home and ask your family to drop it off at the post office for you. Need directions? Just ask your phone.
What if you suddenly lost the use of these wondrous conveniences? Who hasn’t experienced this at some point? Poor signal strength, cell towers under maintenance, power outages, and more can take your connectivity offline. The more we rely on these amazing conveniences daily, the more annoyed we are when they don’t work.
Every part of the USA has its own type of natural disaster. I happen to live where earthquakes are an accepted part of life– northern California. When a strong quake happens, everyone instinctually reaches for their cell phone to call family and friends, but when they do they usually can’t get a connection. There are several possible reasons, including power outage at the cell tower, physical damage to land lines that connect the towers to the phone system, or simply cell system overload due to the massive demand put on the cell towers by so many people trying to make calls all at the same time.
However, there is yet another reason why your cellphone may not function during a natural disaster: the government may limit your access to insure that emergency workers and first responders can successfully use the system. You may have assumed that if you pay your bill you should be able to use the system, but in an emergency federal law says otherwise. If the government decides that other uses of the cellular system are more important than yours, you lose. This article, from Police Chiefs magazine, discusses several of the priority mechanisms that are available to local and regional emergency responders that could result in you not being able to access the cellular system or at least result in you having your use limited.
Now, imagine for a moment that the government wished to prevent people from communicating with each other, for purposes other than responding to a natural disaster: counter terrorism, marshall law, and so on. How would you communicate with family and friends? Shutting off the Internet is already a known tool available to the federal government under Executive Order 12472, so email or chat or any Internet communications are also not things you can count upon. Is this possibility far-fetched? Disabling civilian communications is a commonly used tool in many places in the world today, such as China.
The one communications method that can typically get through when all else fails is two-way radio. There are many different kinds of radios available, some of which are designed for non-licensed consumers. One of these operates on what the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) calls The Family Radio Service, or FRS. Despite any advertising claims for “high power”, all legal FRS radios are limited to 1/2 watt of transmission power. You might get many miles of range with a 1/2 Watt FRS radio if you happen to be on a mountain top and are transmitting to someone below you in a valley with no visible obstructions, but in an urban or suburban environment, where buildings and trees are common, practical range is severely limited to less than a mile. Even if you are able to do so, who will you contact using an FRS radio in a communications blackout? Given its usable range, that’s not too many people and perhaps none.
Another unlicensed radio service available to consumers, but more powerful than FRS walkie talkies, is Citizen’s Band or CB radio. At full legal transmission power of 4 watts, CB radios have an effective range of approximately four miles. This considerably expands the number of people you can reach compared to FRS walkie talkies. CB radio remains somewhat popular with truckers and others.
Perhaps the most effective radio service to consider is the Amateur Radio Service, or Ham radio. First, legal radios with 50+ watts of transmit power are commonly available, making 20 to 30 mile line-of-sight transmission entirely possible. Also, amateur radio has established publicly accessible repeaters in places that help low power hand-held radios communicate much longer distances. Many amateur radio repeaters are solar powered these days, enabling them to operate even if the power grid is down. I live in a dense urban/suburban area and can easily reach a repeater located over 15 miles away using my 5 watt, 2 meter hand-held. That repeater allows me to reach at least another 50 miles, vastly expanding the number of people I can reach.
Another thing to consider is who you are going to reach. If you are talking about FRS or CB radio, you have no idea of the experience of the person you are going to reach or what resources they may be able to connect you with if you need help. Amateur radio operators, on the other hand, have a long history of assisting with communications during disasters and other emergency situations. One of the oldest Ham radio organizations– the American Radio Relay League (ARRL)– was established to help relay messages over long distances during times of communications outages. So who you reach is arguably even more important than what radio technology you use to reach them. But without some kind of radio technology, you aren’t going to reach anybody!
When communications between people are cut off, the only information you are going to get is the “information” the authorities want you to receive. Should you evacuate? Maybe you would if you knew all the facts of a disaster or other situation. Perhaps the best course of action is to stay put, but if all you know is what others wish you to know, you can’t really make an informed decision. You might be able to pick up some critically useful information on FRS or CB, but Ham operators are going to have information from the widest area, simply because they are able to communicate over much longer distances.
A very important thing to consider about selecting a radio is its reliability. If you want to depend on this gear when everything is chaos, you don’t want a cheaply made radio. FRS walkie talkies are good for caravan driving or communicating over short distances while camping or hiking, but they typically are not built to emergency preparedness standards. CB radios are typically built as “mobile radios”, intended to be installed in and run off a car’s 12-volt battery system. In the world of electronics design, this means the designers don’t have to care very much about power consumption, and so they don’t. While there are some handheld CB radios, the established high quality radio makers of amateur and commercial radios do not make them. They make Ham radios instead. So your choices for a high quality hand-held radio capable of reaching any considerable distance and reaching others who are familiar with radio communications, perhaps even in emergency situations, are pretty much limited to Ham radios of some kind, and the most commonly used hand-held Ham radios are 2 meter radios.
There is quite a lot to choose from in selecting a 2 meter hand-held transceiver these days. Some very excellent radios can be had for $150 or less. Higher functioning radios can cost several times that amount, but a $150 2 meter hand-held radio is all you need to be able to connect when the SHTF. As a hand held, it can travel with you in a bug out bag or in your car, if you are able to use that. Most hand-held radios today come equipped with NiMH or even Lion batteries, enabling very long monitoring times. Some have useful, optional battery packs that can accept standard AA battery cells. If rechargeable, these do not require special chargers and can typically be charged off of portable solar-powered chargers. There are even some sub $50 radios made in China that you might consider, though I personally own one, I prefer the build quality of established amateur radio makers.
If you are convinced that having the power to communicate in spite of natural or man-made impediments is definitely for you, why get an amateur radio license? If government has disintegrated into tyranny or chaos, who cares if you have a license? This is a fair question. One good answer is that in order to learn and gain experience with Ham equipment and its operation before any such disruption of communications should occur, you will want to do it with a license. Getting a license and operating your radio helps put you in touch with the radio community in your area, familiarizes you with available repeaters, and will help introduce you to people you can count on when things get weird.
How hard is it to get a Ham license? The answer is that it depends quite a lot on how much operating privilege you wish to have, but relax and know that the entry level Technician’s License is all that you need to get on the air with a 2 meter radio. For many Hams, this is all they’ll ever need or want. Others will wish to learn and do more, like bouncing radio signals off the moon. Really! Since February of 2007, the FCC eliminated the requirement of learning Morse Code in order to obtain a license, so something that used to be a considerable barrier to getting a license has been removed.
There are many resources on the Internet, such as eham.net, that let you take practice exams for free. You can take them over and over until you learn everything you need to know to pass the written FCC exam. Of course, there are many books available for purchase and from your local library to help you prepare for the exam. Written exams are given locally by Ham volunteers and typically cost $15 to take. If you pass, the FCC will mail your license to you in about two weeks. If you study with online exams until you can consistently pass them, there’s no reason to believe you won’t pass your written exam the first time.
Once you do a little study and pass your exam, what can you do with amateur radio?
The only fairly certain mode of communicating during disasters, whether natural or man-made, is radio. You can’t count on cell phones, land lines, or the Internet, any of which can become disabled or even intentionally turned off. To be prepared, you need to obtain and learn how to properly operate a 2-way radio.
There are many online resources for amateur radio because Hams were some of the early adopters of the Internet. Hams have launched satellites (OSCAR), established repeater phone patches in the 1970’s allowing radio to phone system calling, foretelling cellular phones, and adapted radio to the Internet, letting any registered Ham make use of remote repeaters world-wide through the Internet and software (Echolink). Online Ham resources would be too numerous to list here, but the following two web sites are great starting points:
HJL,
I would like to add the sin of abortion to the list in author JP’s article Watchman Fatigue. There have been nearly 56 million abortions in the United States alone since Roe v. Wade. We, as a nation, are accountable for those innocent lives. Numbers 35:33 is very sobering in light of this. I fear we are headed for a very difficult time.
“So ye shall not pollute the land wherein ye are: for blood it defileth the land: and the land cannot be cleansed of the blood that is shed therein, but by the blood of him that shed it.”
Thanks, – E.M.
o o o
It begins: US government issues $700,000 fine against a digital currency. – S.B.
o o o
Inspector General: IRS Allowed $5.6 Billion In Erroneous Education Tax Credits. PLC
o o o
What’s the Cash Value of Your Vegetable Garden?. – D.S.
o o o
Items from Mr. Econocobas:
Blame the next global financial crisis on the U.S. dollar– More like blame it on central banks and central planning
F.L.I.R. is HERE. FBI using wide scan infra-red monitoring aircraft during Baltimore unrest. – T.P.
o o o
Congressman vs. Surveillance-Happy Secret Police. – RBS
o o o
Ancestry.com Is Now Sharing Your DNA With the Police. They promise not to share your DNA with anyone outside of the company, and yet they did it anyway. They didn’t even ask for a warrant. – H.L.
o o o
Never let a crisis go to waste: France passes new surveillance law in wake of Charlie Hebdo attack. – JBG
o o o
An interactive map that tracks botched police raids in the United States. – D.S.
“We all have our personal Andes.” ? Nando Parrado, Miracle in the Andes
May 6th (1906) is the birthday of Tuvia Bielski. You may remember him as the main character in the movie Defiance. This movie was based on the book Defiance: The Bielski Partisans by Nechama Tec.
o o o
Today, we present another entry for Round 58 of the SurvivalBlog non-fiction writing contest. The $12,000+ worth of prizes for this round include:
First Prize:
Second Prize:
Third Prize:
Round 58 ends on May 31st, so get busy writing and e-mail us your entry. Remember that there is a 1,500-word minimum, and that articles on practical “how to” skills for survival have an advantage in the judging.