I love the idea of these, but the maintenannce is, no doubt, pretty intensive. On the other hand, you could just buy it and sell ‘subscriptions’ to it like those Vivos schemes. For what you’d pay for one of these, you could build an amazing, smaller place better suited for a small (or large) family.
Just needs the Vault-Tec logo pic.twitter.com/oa0jtFh2Me
— MERICA MEMED (@Mericamemed) January 25, 2026
Plus one point for bunker construction, minus several thousand points for it coming to the attention of the cops. The plate carrier with the “VILLAIN” ID patch is a nice touch.
A few pictures of a cool looking bunker. No pictures of the actual alleged grow op.
The pictures that are available show a pretty interesting setup, complete with concrete floors and ductwork to the outside.
I guess the powers that be will destroy it and fill it in because it doesn’t have a building permit or something. Judging by the size, it looks like they buried a quonset hut. Looks like they did a pretty good job of it too.
Silver topped a hundred bucks an ounce today. I cannot explain why, but on some level this is terrifying me. It’s like watching lines form around the block at an ATM, or seeing canned goods flying off the shelf in a frenzy. Rightly or wrongly, some part of my brain equates a huge and fast run up in metals prices as some sort of harbinger of trouble.
I wonder if the sudden rush by people to sell their silver and take advantage of the record high (because crossing the $100 mark might be a ‘trigger event’ for some people) will temporarily push the price down, leading other people to think “this is the dip!”, buy in, and drive the price even higher.
However, guessing what the market will do has historically never been my strength, but even a broken calendar is right once a year.
Every workday I do a bank deposit for my employer. Conveniently, there’s an Albertson’s grocery near the bank, so after I do my deposit I do a fast run through the meat department at Albertson’s looking for remaindered meat discounts. Today was a good day:
Organic Angus 85/15 ground beef knocked down by 50%. That puts it to $4.99 per pound. And its already in convenient easy-to-stack one-pound vacuum-sealed bricks. Well, I guess I’ll take ’em all. Contacted a friend to see if they wanted me to pick some up for them, so I’ll be spreading the good fortune around a bit. Still gonna have about 30# to tuck away in the freezer.
I got a similar deal many years ago, but back then it was $1.50 per pound. But that was 15 years ago before inflation worked its magic. Because Im a numbers kinda guy, I price compared against CostCo.
CostCo has 88/12 at $5.79…about 13% more than the remaindered stuff from Albertson’s. But its in bulk and needs to be repackaged. So, yeah, worth the effort…IMHO.
Considering inflation and other economic uncertainty, its not a bad idea to take advantage of these sorts of opportunities when they arise.
Its a sad state of affairs where $5 a pound is considered a bargain for regular hamburger meat.
More news that could, by some folks, be interpreted as a sign something is coming….
Another fine reason to try and keep as low a profile as possible. It doesn’t have to be a nuclear war for .gov to come by and seize your lawfully held private property. Sometimes poorly-prepared local governments will pull that stunt: 1, 2, 3
I’ve spent the last half hour trying to find it, but somewhere on the blog I had a post to an article about a sporting goods shop in NY being broken into by first responders who broke into it to take supplies that they felt they needed. Of course, it was perfectly justified by the local .gov.
Moral of the story is that what .gov (local or national) doesn’t know about your stockpile won’t hurt ’em.
The brother of a coworker died last month and would I be interested in some gun stuff?
Thats how I get in trouble. But, I couldn’t say no. I won’t get into too many details about how many guns I got (cough*ten*cough), but the Beta Site now has a dedicated Marlin .45-70 (Pre-Rem) to keep around in case the bears decide that my place on the food chain needs reassessment. Or an elk decides to munch on the vegetable garden. I mean..y’know…once the place actually gets built.
(My usual bear-repellent, in longarms, is the PTR-91 with a mag full of soft-points.)
What exactly is the purpose of the Beta Site? Is it the next step in my life where I eschew living in town and move to an ‘off grid’ lifestyle of careful energy usage, wood chopping, always worrying about well pumps and water…or is it an ‘in case of emergency’ sort of ‘acceptable’ shelter that while not having ‘all the comforts of home’ does provide orders of magnitude of safety over being homeless?
In short, is it a lifestyle or a lifeboat? Well, kinda sorta both…but not at the same time.
At the moment, and for the immediate future, it’s a lifeboat. A secondary location to pick up and run to in case, for whatever reason, living where I live now becomes untenable. As a lifeboat, it doesn’t need to look like something out of ‘Country Living Magazine’. It just needs to keep me warm, fed, safe, and secure. That can look like just a glorified campsite, it can look like a tweaked out garden shed, it can look like a small trailer, that can look like…well…any weatherproof box with a roof and some accommodations.
But the end goal is for it to be more than that. The end goal is for it to be a comfortable, functional, ‘homey’ place where I can snowmobile in on Dec 1, turn on the lights, fire up the woodstove, put on some quiet Spotify Christmas music, put my feet up, and watch the snow fall outside without seeing another human being until Jan 1. Thats the idealized and romanticized version, of course. I’m fully aware that its going to take a good bit of time (and money, unfortunately) to get to that.
So lifeboat vs lifestyle…for the next year, maybe two, its definitely just a place that I can run off to if need be. It’ll have some very(!) basic features but it will still give me more options than if I didn’t have the place at all. And over the next year or two, it’ll morph into something more than just a ‘bare bones’ destination. The final goal is something that is on par, in terms of convenience and appointments, with where I live now…flush toilet, hot water, heat and lighting, etc, etc. all hidden away at the end of a road no one really wants to drive down.
My birthday is in the summer, so Im thinkng that at my next milestone birthday in 2027 I’d like to have the overwhelming majority of things done, if not entirely done. We’ll see how it goes.
Reading the news is like trying to read tea leaves these days. Every nation seems to be ‘gearing up for something’, as the kids say. The news is certainly full of things that could make one feel like its 1939 and something big is about to kick off, but the challenge is figuring out what the likelihood of that is. Civil war? Economic collapse? Nato v. Russia? Us v. China?
Out of curiosity, I looked up the things that were in short supply in the US as a result of the war back in the 1940’s. That was a completely different time and the supply chain was quite different back then. But the question I was curious about was what would be affected in the event of a larger conflict in modern times? Perhaps a NATO vs Russia event. Or the Mideast does one of its periodical explosions into violence. Or the Chinese invade Taiwan.
There are supply chain interconnectivity issues that weren’t even dreamed about 80 years ago. And the threat to the mainland US involved bombers and invasion, nowadays its a cargo-container-nuke, cyberattack, or ‘bad actors’ plowing through a shopping mall. Different times.
And, I swear, this feeling gets more pronounced every year. It seems like every year I say “this year feels like something big is going to happen’, and, for the most part, I’ve been mostly-wrong. But even a broken calendar is right once a year, and, eventually, something will happen. The history of the world is not exactly replete with moments of quiet and calm. To be fair, though, the US has historically been the best place to be when the wheels start to fly off civilization, diplomacy fails, the tanks roll, and markets crash.
I dropped a good chunk of cash and precious metals to acquire the Beta Site, but I was careful to make sure I didn’t spend all my cash and metals. I held back what I thought would be a goodly amount for something unexpected. But still, I feel a lot more secure with money in the bank and a big ‘ol box of silver bars in the safe. Now I have to juggle replenishing the precious metals with using that money to advance things at the Beta Site.
I’ve no idea what World War 3 (or is it 3.5 or 4 these days?) is going to look like but whatever form it takes, its likelihood seems more these days. Of course, when the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail. When you’ve spent 35 years gearing up for the end of the world, every newsflash looks like the kickoff to World War Whatever.
At the moment, my focus is getting the Beta Site up to a point where at least I could relocate there and have a bit of distance and safety from whatever goes on in the world. At this exact second that looks like simply a place to park a tent and some supplies. But I’m going to try to get it to the point that from a year from now its at least graduated into something a bit more civilized with walls, roof, heat, and basic power. And from that point it advances to running water, creature comforts, and everything else needed to go from bolt-hole to small-year-round-capable dwelling.
But in the meantime I feel like I’m racing the clock…between getting older and the feeling of impending crises theres a bit of a sense of urgency. Not sure if its justified or not, just sayin’ it’s there. But I suspect I’m not the only one, hm?
Someone asked me in email about the circumstances under which Id use the more expensive lithium batts as opposed to the less expensive ‘regular’ batts.
The biggest gripe I have against non-lithium batts is their propensity to leak and absolutely destroy whatever device they were in (lookin’ at you, Duracell!). For something like my pocket flashlight it isn’t that big a deal..go on Amazon, spend $25, get another flashlight. But there is some fairly expensive stuff…GPS, trail cams, radios, night vision, thermal vision, weaponlights, optics,etc…that take AA batteries and the last thing I want is to have that expensive gear rendered useless and needing replacement. The financial hit isn’t insignificant.
But, more importantly, if a piece of gear is critical then it is absolutely worth the extra expense to use the lithium batteries. For example, all the spare AA batts in my Bag O’ Tricks are lithium. Why? Because if I’m in a situation where I need to reload my electronic device from the spare batteries I carry in my Bag, then the situation is such that the last thing I need is to a) discover that the batteries that have been in my bag for the last year are dead, and b) have my device, whatever it is, get taken out of service because the batteries puked in it.
Any piece of critical gear needs every advantage it can get in terms of reliability, performance, resilience, and longevity. If I’m out hunting and I break a leg, have to call in search and rescue, and they ask for my location, the last thing I want is a) my phone charger being dead, b) my GPS being dead, c) my emergency locator being dead, and d) me being dead.
Crom forbid I ever have to point a rifle at anything thats got language skills, but if it comes to that I sure don’t want that little red dot or MOA circle to not be there when I bring the rifle up. (Backup iron sights? Of course!) And I also don’t want to replace a $600 Eotech because CostCo Duracells ossified the internals of the battery compartment.
Lithium batts aren’t infallible, I’ve read of occasions where they’ve crapped the bed too. But I’d say I’ve read about that happening once for every hundred stories I’ve read about Duracells and other batteries puking their guts out.
TL,DR: if its a piece of gear that is critical to your survival, painful to replace, or both…feed it the batteries that are least likely to crap out on you in a pinch.Upfront costs will be a little higher but, IMHO, worth it.
One of the things that has been on my ‘need to buy’ list for some time has been lithium batteries. We all know that the Duracell batteries crap the bed more often than not. For critical gear like radios, GPS, etc, I only use lithium batteries. They have less self-discharge, have a long storage life, and are not usually affected by heat or cold.
Years and years ago, CostCo carried Energizer lithium batts. But, I can say with some certainty, that I have not seen them there in years. Like, at least five years, probably more like ten. Until today…
Well, geez….I wasnt planning on picking up a big batch o’ batteries but here we are.
Perhaps your CostCo carries these all the time. Mine doesn’t. So, when something like this becomes available, I feel its worth pointing out the to local LMI. If you’re within range of the Missoula CostCo, they got yer batts.