Author Archives: Commander Zero

Link – Prehistoric Preppers: A Look Back at Pre-Y2K Survival Gear and Conventional Wisdom

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Last month I mentioned that this year is the twenty-year anniversary of the Great Y2K Scare. I happen to be bopping around the interwebs and came across this dated-but-still-interesting piece about how things have changed preparedness-wise since then.

As a child in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s. I lived through an odd era of the gun culture. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a lot of survivalists and those preparing for WWIII suddenly had less to worry about…until President Clinton was elected and the threat that Y2K posed became a thing.

Thinking back on such a time, I now laugh at a lot of the ideas and beliefs that ran rampant in certain segments of the population. But exist they did.

I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.

The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.

I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?

I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.

Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.

Costco Powdered Eggs review

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I’ve never heard of anyone in the military who had to eat powdered eggs and had anything positive to say about them. Perhaps the military gets a lower grade of product…or perhaps military food preparation is abysmal.. or all of the above. My experience with powdered eggs has been okay. Theyre not “Ohmigod these are awesome!” but they aren’t “What the hell is this crap?” either. On a few occasions I have fed them to people without telling them what they were and no one said anything. I find them to be acceptable, and certainly a better alternative to no eggs. Anyway….All powdered eggs seem to be extremely distasteful before cooking. You get this orange-colored thing that looks like pancake batter and smells like burnt cheese from a toaster oven. It isnt until you start cooking them that some sort of transformative process begins and they become more appealing. These eggs, branded as “WildRoots” and picked up at CostCo, were exactly like every other powdered egg product I’ve tried. Not bad, not great, but definitely a worthy addition to the food storage. As mentioned a couple posts back, my local CostCo had them on closeout, marked down from $6.97 to $2.97 which is a stupidly good deal.

For those of us who, at the moment, don’t have a backyard full of chickens but want to maintain a semblance of ‘normalcy’ when it comes to breakfast, and have some protein on hand, these would be an excellent choice. Canned bacon, dehydrated eggs, hash browns, biscuit/muffin mix, powdered milk, Tang, canned fruit, pancake mix, honey, and you’ve got a pretty decent breakfast with a shelf life of several years. After a long night of manning the barricades, chasing looters, and guarding the house, a breakfast like that would be rather welcome, I should imagine. In a slightly more realistic vein, these are an excellent choice for hunting cabins and other non-grid locations where store-bought eggs aren’t an option and you’re not around often enough to keep chickens.

They are packaged in a foil-ish paper pouch but I would vacuum seal this stuff up to be extra sure it is protected for long term. If you can’t find these at your local CostCo, here’s the nutritional and company info:

Don’t get annoyed if you can’t find them at your local CostCo. It seems that powdered eggs are powdered eggs are powdered eggs… there doesn’t seem to be much difference between ones I’ve tried. Augason Farms sells #10 cans of powdered eggs and I’d bet they are identical to this stuff. Only major difference is packaging and CostCo’s remarkable discount.

At $2.97, it’s worth buying a box just for the experimental value.

 

Costco eggs closeout

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Remember a few weeks back I discovered that Costco was selling powdered eggs? Well, I was going through Costco and saw this:

The price ending in “7” instead of “9”, as well as the asterisk in the corner of the placard, indicate that this product is being moved out with no plan to restock it. So, if you’re close to the Missoula Costco and want a smoking deal on some powdered eggs…this is your chance. Hell, I have cases of #10 cans of eggs and I still picked up three packages. For three bucks you’dbe crazy not to. How are they….thats a post that’ll be ip in a couple days.

 

No business like snow business like snow business I know

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You know, it was just as I predicted. Here in the valley we got snow that barely stuck to the ground (or as the more uneducated would say, ‘didnt hardly stick’). Basically, it was exactly as I anticipated. “But Helena got nine feet of snow! But Billings got seven feet of snow!…”, etc, etc. May be, but you know what? I don’t live in Billings or Helena, so I’m really pretty unconcerned about that. I said that where I live it was going to barely register as snow and thats pretty much how it played out. I call this one in my favor.

But thats this time. Next time…who knows? Which is why we try to maintain a particular level of readiness for these things.

Winter approaches

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If you live in the ‘Redoubt’ region you are undoubtedly aware that this weekend is supposed to be some sort of early-season snowpocalypse. Honestly, with all the hand-wringing going on you’d think we’d never seen snow before. But, I suppose the news media need something to get all worked up about.

True enough, though….it IS fall. Time to say goodby to summer and get the winter gear out. I had a pretty good experience getting the Watergun coated a few months back and I think I’m going to get that Danish winter camo pattern applied to one of my PTR’s and one of my AR’s as well. As I used to tella buddy of mine, “The revolution is not going to happen on a sunny day.”

Im kinda hoping we do get a huge amount of snow because I’ve got a couple sets of snowshoes I really haven’t had a chance to play with very much. I’d like to give them a bit of a workout.

Also, this is the time where hunting season is nigh. I find it highly doubtful I’ll have time to go this season but I like to think the possibility is there. Stranger things have happened.

In the meantime, I need to fire up he snowblower this weekend to make sure it’s ready for winter. Even a blind hog finds an acorn once in a while, so I suppose its possible the hopeless clowns at the weather bureau might have been right and we get a major dump of snow this weekend. We shall see. I’d be utterly flabbergasted if it dumped anything even close to what they are forecasting. If there’s more than an inch of snow I’ll be quite surprised.

The ultimate survivor, it seems

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I suppose it is sort of fitting that “The Survivalist” series of books has managed to …uhm..survive…after the death of it’s author. I may be a little late to the party on this, but it appears that despite Jerry Ahern dying a few years back his famous pulp series is continuing on…

I am a bit perturbed by this. Ahern’s original series, which is a guilty pleasure, required a certain suspension of disbelief if you wanted to make it through his books. But, despite the outrageous over-the-top invincibility and deus-ex-machina luck of the main character, there was still a bit of a foundation in reality…at least, up until a dozen books in where it became more sci-fi than just -fi. But even that still had a bit of a tenuous basis in reality. This book tells us “Corrupt politicians, Neo-Nazis, Aliens, the returned Atlanteans or those thought to be dead for centuries; who is about to finally bring down the human race?” Aliens? Atlantis? Ah, poor Jerry….they should have thrown the copyrights in the casket with you and let the series die a somewhat dignified death.

This somewhat parallels the old “Guardians” pulp series which met a similar fate – the original author moved on and strings of ghost writers came in and all consistency went out the window as, again, somewhat-based-in-reality gave in to shark-jumping nonsense.

Hands down winner, though, for most dissatisfying way to end a series goes to “J. Johnstone” of the infamous “ashes” series. A series of pulp novels so formulaic I literally believe they used the exact same text from the previous books and simply changed supporting character names and locations. The final chapter to this series was so dissatisfying and limp that it effectively alienated the few fans the series had left.

Post-apocalyptic fiction is a genre that used to be pretty fringe. It’s become far, far more mainstream as the whole ‘zombie’ thing has become a cultural touchstone for such fiction. Early fiction did exist, of course, but they were standalone books…not series. As best i can tell, Ahern’s series was the first modern post-apocalyptic serial. It’s heartening that there is still an audience for it, but it’s a little sad to see it become what it appears to have become. It’s like an old Hollywood starlet, far past her prime, slathering on makeup and old costumes to try and recapture the magic from her heydaynd instead being a pathetic and pitiful caricature of her past.

As much as I liked Ahern’s series, I think I’m going to give the post-mortem installments a pass.

 

Paratus 2019

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Greetings fellow survivalists! A happy Paratus to you all (well, most of you anyway).

Thats right, gang…today is Paratus – the holiday for surivalists.

This year I decided to be a little extravagant and send Paratus cards to a few fellow preparedness bloggers and other people who have interacted with me over the year. How did the cards turn out? Rather slick, if I do say so myself. Some people got just cards, some people got cards and a small gift. If you didn’t get a card but would have liked to…well…interact with me more and perhaps next year you too can get one of these (not) highly-collectible Paratus cards.

So! The traditions of Paratus have a long and noble history datingback to the times of…uhm…ok, it’s actually a fairly recent holiday. BUT….you can read all about it at the world-famous Paratus FAQ. I won’t recap it here because thats what the FAQ is for.

I did receive Paratus greetings (and even a gift or two) from several people and I am grateful. I’ll give the mail another day or two to make sure anything that was sent has arrived and then, if i received a gift from someone to whom I did not send a card/gift…..then I have to discharge my Paratus obligation of making a self-deprecating statement about my lack of reciprocity. (Check the “How does the gift giving work for Paratus?” part of the FAQ for more details on how that works.)

Ihope you’ll take some time today to engage in the traditional Paratus activities…although some of you live your everyday lives in such a state of preparedness that pretty much everyday is Paratus. If thats the case, I salute you! But as for the rest of you… get out there and shoot today, hang out with your LMI buddies and talk about preparedness-stuff, go to WalMart and pick up a case of canning jars, eat some freeze-drieds, or go watch “Threads” or “Red Dawn” while cleaning your AR.

It’s your holiday…make a new Paratus tradition for your household or something equally interesting. But, regardless, have a happy and well-geared Paratus.

Oh..and if you’re curious what the Paratus cards for this year looked like….

Cover

Inside

Back

Slick, no?

The problem with remote locations

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Minding my own business the other day, and I ran into someone at the post office. He’s an LMI, and rather serious about it, but for some reason we interact very, very infrequently. I probably haven’t seen him in about a year. So I ask him how he’s doing and how tings are coming along vis-a-vis the whole preparedness thing.

Sadly, he told me some meth-head broke into his bugout cabin and, with privacy and time on his side, took a hatchet and managed to whittle through some concrete to get to his stash of guns and ammo. Also tore open a couple Stack-On gun safes cabinets. And that he destroyed what he couldn’t take…tossed a buncha guns in the river. Then the useless tweaker dragged himself to his campsite to get his nod on and thats where he was, gorked out of his mind, when the cops and the very annoyed cabin owner found him.

The LMI in question mentioned that the whole thing sorta soured him a little on the idea of preparedness. Makes sense…you invest time and money and some waste of skin sets you back to square one.

Thats yet another one of the Great Survivalists Quandaries – how to have a remote location that is secure enough to be left alone and unattended. The easy answer that I would imagine 90% of the blogosphere would come back with is something involving large waterproof containers and a backhoe. Mind you, I’m not asking what you think the ideal solution is. Already I know the comments are going to be filled with people saying “He should do this….”. My point is that when it comes to stashing goods away at those lovely remote locations you should always expect that it ain’t so remote some piece of trash can’t get into it when youre a hundred miles away.

Its also a pretty good reason to not keep all your eggs in one basket. Sure, it’s entirely possible that when The Day comes and you have to leave now, now, now you may not be able to grab as much gear to throw into your vehicle as youd like. Maybe you’ll be leaving straight from work ,or the supermarket, or the ball game, and have no chance to return home to grab your gun cases and gear. Thats why you pre-position your gear, but you don’t pre-position all of it.

I know folks that keep a storage rack system bolted to the ceiling of their garage. It holds several storage containers full of gear and supplies. In a crisis, their plan is to back the pickup into the garage and just lower those ready-to-go containers into the bed of the truck and be out the door in about five minutes.  But their arrangement of gear is such that if they load the truck and can’t get to their secondary site, the gear will keep them safe…and if they have to leave without their gear, they have enough gear at the site to keep them going. Its when the possibility of having to leave without their gear AND not make it to their secondary location comes up that the problems start.

The fella I mentioned is pretty bummed, and he’s a bit disillusioned, but I have a pretty strong feeling he’ll stick to the program and continue his journey in preparedness. I suspect he will make some very big changes at his cabin in terms of construction, concealment, contents, and countermeasures. It’s unfortunate that it had to happen to him, but it’s incidents like those that remind us that just stacking AR15s in the closet might not be the best idea for long term solutions.

 

Article – The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

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I am in no way a sports guy, so for me to link to an article from ESPN must be an indication that there is something interesting going o. And, indeed, there is…

At 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.

As he’s jogging, it’s easy to mistake him for a soccer player. But he is not. This body he has put together is not an accident. Caruana is, in fact, an American grandmaster in chess, the No. 2 player in the world. His training partner, Chirila? A Romanian grandmaster. And they’re doing it all to prepare for the physical demands of … chess? Yes, chess.

The TL;DR version is this: even though chess is the least apparently physically taxing sport since competitive napping, the studies show that the stress, mental load, and related stresses cause your body to lose weight the same as if you were engaged in heavy sports.

What this means for survivalists is that the people who stress about long-term food being loaded with fat, salt, and calories that you don’t need when all you’re doing is sitting in a fallout shelter waiting for the rads to go down are missing a point. And in a crisis, the severe stress and mental taxation that you will be subject to will take a toll on yourbody even if you’re just sitting around a battery radio in the dark as the city crumbles around you.

Read the article and substitute ‘chess’ for ‘disasters’ and you’ll see how this affects you and I.

Grandmasterssurvivalists in competitiondisasters are subjected to a constant torrent of mental stress. That stress, in turn, causes their heart rates to increase, which, in turn, forces their bodies to produce more energy to, in turn, produce more oxygen. It is, according to Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Philip Cryer, a metabolism expert at the school, a vicious, destructive cycle.

Meanwhile, playerssurvivalists also eat less during tournamentsdisasters , simply because they don’t have the time or the appetite. “The simple explanation is when they’re thinking about chess disasters, they’re not thinking about food,” says Ewan C. McNay, assistant professor of psychology in the behavioral neuroscience program at the University of Albany.

Stress also leads to altered — and disturbed — sleep patterns, which in turn cause more fatigue — and can lead to more weight loss. A brain operating on less sleep, even by just one hour, Kasimdzhanov notes, requires more energy to stay awake during the chess game. Some grandmasterssurvivalists report dreaming about chessdisasters, agonizing over what they could have done differently for hours in their sleep, and waking up exhausted.

Sound familiar?

Continue reading the article and read what these people do to maintain mental acuity under these conditions of heightened stress. Big exam coming up? Strategy session with your department chairs? Making long-range plans for your familys survival? You’ll need your brain in peak performance so you might want to read what these guys do to their diets, exercise patterns, the way they breathe, and even the way they sit in order to maximize brainpower for “the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.”

I’ve noticed that when I need stone-cold clear-headed maximum-brainpower I get best results if I exercise to get the blood flowing and don’t eat for several hours beforehand. The ability to think clearly and efficiently is probably the most useful talent for someone who plans on making their way through the crapstorm that life tends to hurl at us once in a while. Optimizing your body to allow you to ‘think better’ may be one of the better tricks you can have up your sleeve.

15 years after the ban

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It has been brought to my attention that this weekend is the 15 year anniversary of the expiration of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban. Fifteen years. If you remember the ban expiring, and you are, at this moment, scrambling to find ARs and mags “just in case”, then you’re one of those fools who, as the saying go, “…does not remember history is doomed to repeat it.”

If, after the ban expired, you had bought one AR mag a month, and one AR per year, you would have 15 AR’s sitting in the safe and 180 magazines to go with them, for a somewhat-comforatble gun:mag ratio of 1:12. And it would have cost you, by my math, $75 per month.

Not an AR guy? Well, you could  be sitting on around 540 Glock mags for that same $75/month

“But I only came to guns in the last ten years!”, some will say. Or the last five years. So what? That’s still enough time to have put away an AR and a dozen mags every year.

Kids? Job? Car Payment? House payment? Sure, that gets in the way. But you make room in your life and your wallet for that which is important to you. $75 a month is about $2.50 a day… drink one less Starbucks coffee each day, smoke two less packs of cigarettes a week, or just cut back from eating out once a week to once every two weeks.

I guarantee you that 95% of you make more money than me and even then I am still able to squirrel away a few (ahem) guns and ammo. The difference isn’t financial, the difference is intentional. To me, it’s important enough to give up buying a new bicycle, to pass on buying the expensive groceries, to make do with a ratty pair of shoes for another month or two, to ride my bike rather than drive, to eat another plate of rice and chicken rather than go out to dinner….because, to me, I’d rather have the guns in the safe.

No matter what it is you want out of life…money, fame, cars, women, expensive toys, whatever….if you want it bad enough, really bad enough, you will find a way to get it. You just have to want it more than the other things.

This is why I have no sympathy for anyone who, fifteen years after the ban, is suddenly now worried about getting more mags and Evil Black Rifles. You had fifteen years to get ready by doing something that takes most people one year. If you get caught with 10-round magazines and neutered rifles this time around it’s poor planning on your part, buddy. (and, of course, the fault of those idiots in Washington.)