The Editors’ Preps for the Week

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To be prepared for a crisis, every prepper must establish goals and make long-term and short-term plans. Steadily, we work on meeting our prepping goals. In this column, the SurvivalBlog editors share their planned prep activities for the coming week. These range from healthcare and gear purchases to gardening, property improvements, and food storage. This is something akin to our Retreat Owner Profiles, but written incrementally and in detail, throughout the year. We also welcome you to share your planned activities for increasing personal preparedness in the coming week. (Leave a Comment with your project details.) Let’s keep busy and be ready!  This week’s focus is on songbird migration.

JWR

Dear SurvivalBlog Readers,
This has been another busy week for us here in the American Redoubt. The weather this week has been very sunny and dry with seasonal temperatures in the 80s.

Songbird Migration

Around the third week of July, the height of summer, is rather a sad time for me. Why? Because all of our migrant birds that arrived between March and June who filled our mornings and evenings with their beautiful  chorus of songs, have now finished raising their young and have already departed for southern climes (Hermit, Swainson, and Varied Thrushes, Common Snipe, Red Wing  Blackbirds, Hummingbirds, Bluebirds, Winter Wrens, Warblers, Catbirds, and many more. Our mountains go from lovely singing voices one morning to silence the next morning. It is that profound. I’ve been listening for it during this past week and it has happened.  By Friday morning, I woke up to that profound silence.   It makes me feel very sad, because it tells us that the summer is already waning and fall and winter are coming. I want to put the brakes on it. Time is moving too fast. Hey, slow down the summer!

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The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods:

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SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “HJL”. Be sure to look at the Home School Resources at the bottom of the column today for a couple of real gems that are easy to obtain.

Liter of Light

I’ve seen solar lights made out of old plastic bottles before, but usually, they were just stuck in a wall or the ceiling and channeled the sun. Now the Liter of Light project is teaching people to use them in more ways. A small LED flashlight placed in the neck of the bleach filled bottle gives them new life. They still work in the traditional sunlight refraction method. However, now they can also be used at night. Coupled with a small solar panel, you have a renewable and inexpensive method of light. Thanks to T.J. for the link.

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The Editors’ Quote of the Week

“And Moses spake unto the heads of the tribes concerning the children of Israel, saying, This is the thing which the Lord hath commanded. If a man vow a vow unto the Lord, or swear an oath to bind his soul with a bond; he shall not break his word, he shall do according to all that proceedeth out of his mouth.” Numbers 30:1-2 (KJV)

Preparedness Notes for Friday – July 21, 2017

July 21st is the birthday of Ernest Hemingway. He was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois. He committed suicide in July 2, 1961 in Ketchum, Idaho, after being diagnosed with haemochromatosis, and after electroshock treatments failed to lift him from chronic alcoholic depression. He lived a sad life but was a great writer.

Preparedness Movement History and My Own Preparations- Part 1, by Old Bobbert

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We will take a look at some history, the preparedness movement history and also some of mine. My goal here is to move you to see happiness and enroute stop off to visit anger, sadness, feeling shamed, and then fully satisfied. We will be thrilled with ourselves, and finally recognize “I’m both right and righteous”. I have been reading and contributing to this blog for about 10 years. So far I have about 76 3-ring binders of preparedness data on the book shelves. I like to read. (I’ll share why I read later.)

A Lot of History That Points to Necessary of Preparedness

Being 76 years young with four children, eight grandchildren, and three fabulous great grandchildren, I therein have a wondrous history of failures and successes to my name. Those events, good and not so good, all of them helped me to be me. I love it. In my world, I was among the WW2 babies who grew to adulthood in the sixties, parented four fabulous teens in the seventies, and became sickenly proud grandparents in the eighties. And now, finally, we are thrilled great grandparents in our strange, newer world of the newest century. I am thrilled to see, to know, to believe, to preach to the lower levels of Americans that:

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Freeze Dried Friday

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Welcome to a new column on SurvivalBlog! We’ve been making so many things in the Harvest Right Freeze Drier that we want to share some of them with you. If you have something wonderful you’ve prepared in your freeze dryer that you would like to share with SurvivalBlog readers, take a photo of it and send it in along with a description. We might just feature you here!

A Halting Start

This week with the garden harvest starting to ramp up, the freeze dryers are getting ready for their workout. Freeze Dryer number one is back up and running after having the main seal blown. It only took about an hour to pull the pump apart, replace the seals, and get it fired back up. I’m not sure why I dreaded that job so much because it was easier than I remember the last time.

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Economics & Investing For Preppers

Here are the latest items and commentary on current economics news, market trends, stocks, investing opportunities, and the precious metals markets. We also cover hedges, derivatives, and obscura. And it bears mention that most of these items are from the “tangibles heavy” contrarian perspective of JWR. (SurvivalBlog’s Founder and Senior Editor.) Today’s focus is on contrarian investing. (See the special section, near the end of this column.)

Precious Metals:

Dovish Draghi Comments Drive Gold Prices

Commodities:

Irina Slav: Stability Is Returning To Oil Markets

o o o

Could The Gulf Dispute Actually Help Iran?

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Preparedness Notes for Thursday – July 20, 2017

Today is the 84th birthday of novelist Cormac McCarthy (born, 1933.) He is the author of the survivalist novel The Road, which later became a popular movie with the same title.

On July 20th, 1969, At 10:56 p.m. EDT, American astronaut Neil Armstrong, 240,000 miles from Earth, spoke these words to more than a billion people listening at home: “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” Stepping off the lunar landing module Eagle, Armstrong became the first human to walk on the surface of the moon.

America’s Public Schools are Government Indoctrination Centers

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The following article might strike some of our readers as a bit of a rant. So if you dislike reading rants, then please just skip reading this article.

It Started With a Letter

The impetus for this article was a fairly cogent well-intentioned letter from a SurvivalBlog reader:

Dear Editor:
I am concerned about some of the information linked on your blog. I’m a Christian, an avid prepper, and a daily reader of your blog. I support your effort to make readers aware of the world around us, and the changes that we feel are to come. I do have concerns when it comes to the negative portrayal of public schools. It is easy to stereotype groups of people, but not always an accurate way of looking at them. There are individuals who believe those of us who read your blog are crazy. We are all unshaven, dirty, live in underground bunkers, wear aluminum foil hats, and hold our illegal firearms as we talk to ourselves. Is this accurate? No, it is not.

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Request for Information on Dehydrating Fruit

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Sweetened Dried Fruit

My dehydrator has failed me. Well, not really, but I can’t seem to create what I want so I’m asking for help from the SurvivalBlog readership. I love the sweetened dehydrated fruit that you can buy in stores, but I am unable to recreate this yummy snack. While I can successfully dehydrate fruit for storage, it has a tendency to look like leather rather than the colorful, tasty treat that you see in this picture. If you can tell me how to re-create this, you will make me a hero to my grand-kids! Leave your ideas in the comments section.- HJL

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The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods:

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SurvivalBlog presents another edition of The Survivalist’s Odds ‘n Sods— a collection of news bits and pieces that are relevant to the modern survivalist and prepper from “HJL”. As part of today’s focus on the Public School system, take a look as some of the current headlines under the “Public Schools” header below.

Venezuela

Venezuela’s opposition party called a nationwide strike for today in an attempt to keep Maduro from rewriting the country’s constitution. They are hoping that this will help force Maduro from office through early elections. Of course, the expected response will be stepped up confrontation and violence in the streets. In the meantime, food shortages continue and the people suffer. Yep, that’s socialism for you.

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Guest Post: So Why Would You Do Tactical Training?, by David

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“So why do you do this tactical training stuff?” This is a question I get asked from time to time.  Sadly, the answer does not lend itself to a sentence or two.  Let me lay out my premises and then some conclusions.

(This article comes from David, who is a multi-class MVT alumni. He is the organizer of the Idaho Classes in 2016 and 2017. And MVT says, “We have already scheduled Idaho May 2018.”)

Assumed Role

In our family, I am literally the last man standing of my generation.  Since I am no longer immersed in pursuing “the rat race”, I have time to contemplate the long-term future and security of our children and grandchildren.  Our kids are busy with their careers and families.  Put differently, while I fervently hope bad times will not come knocking, I am the one most inclined to contemplate and plan for those “unlikely but very bad” scenarios.

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