Author Archives: Commander Zero

Guessing the weather

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There were a couple greenmail well-wishes in the PO box the other day from readers who congratulated me on the blogs twentieth anniversary. Thank you much, guys…it really helps!

Life continues apace. I’ve developed a new game to play online: I go to Yahoo News and, starting at the top, see if I can scroll down an entire page without hitting an article about ‘gun violence’ or ‘assault weapons’. So far…no.

The media is flogging this quite hard these days. To my paranoid way of thinking this is simply the usual tactic of the media, no doubt in cahoots with the lefties, warming us up to the idea that ‘reasonable’ and ‘commonsense’ bans on assault rifles, magazines, permitless CCW, etc, is perfectly normal. After all, once you’ve seen nine months worth of dozens of outlets telling you something ‘needs to be done’, arent you, the generally ambivalent public, going to nod your head and go ‘yeah, I’ve read about that. Something should be done?’

It’s a form of indoctrination, propaganda, and opinion-nudging all rolled into one.

Add to that that somehow, despite what must have been the advice of virtually everybody on both sides of the political spectrum, Dopey Joe is throwing his hat in the ring for a re-election. Part of me says to let him get re-elected so we can stop all this foreplay and just get the darn apocalypse started already, Another part of me thinks that you have to have a Carter administration in order to clear the path for a Reagan administration.

My ability to predict the future is utterly worhtless. For every correct prediction I’ve made, I’ve got at least a dozen bad ones under the belt. That’s something like a 92% wrong average. But…you never know which prediction is going to be correct, so you have to prepare for all of them.

I’ve been hammering away at this blog since 2004 that the assault weapons ban would come back, and without a grandfather clause, eventually. I still believe that and I still take steps to be ready for it. I suggest you do as well.

But, in addition to the looming specter of gun prohibitions, we also have inflation, supply chain issues, and wildly dangerous foreign intrigues going on. Most of which, I think, can be mostly (though not entirely) laid at the feet of crack-smoking Hunter Biden’s dad. (And when it comes to cringe-worth Presidential relatives, Hunter Biden makes Billy Carter look like a choirboy.)

It’s not the end of the world yet. Heck, the orchestra hasn’t even warmed up. But the ticket office is open and the ushers are making sure the seats are prepared. So…..

Radio active

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I’d been wanting an Icom-7200 for a while…so long a while, in fact, that the 7200 has been discontinued. Sure I can find them used but I really hate buying a product that is used unless I am intimately familiar with how it works and how to check it out to make sure it works. This is why, normally, I have no problem with used guns…Im familiar enough with thundertoys that I can tell fairly readily if a used gun is good or if its someones problem child.

The Icom-7200 was supplanted by the Icom-7300. Ok, thats at least 100 better than the 7200, right? Let’s order one up.

It’ll be here later in the week. I already have a power supply and cable for it, but I need to figure out an antennae (a word I can never spell right on the first go) for it. At the moment, I’ve no interest in transmitting…but I have a keen interest in listening.

As was said in Alas Babylon, “But Sam Hazzard’s principal hobby was listening to shortwave radio. He was not a ham operator. He had no transmitter. He listened. He did not chatter. He monitored the military frequencies and the foreign broadcasts and, with his enormous background of military and political knowledge, he kept pace with the world outside Fort Repose. Sometimes, perhaps, he was a bit ahead of everyone.”

My interest is in listening…taking in whats out there, examining it, and using that information as necessary. Maybe down the line I’d have need to send rather than receive, but for now I simply want to listen. And, yes, I need to get the license to transmit but thats a project for later.

If anyone has suggestions (and links) on the subject, I’d be very interested.

It was 20 years ago today…

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Well, today is the twentieth anniversary of me thinking “Hmm, maybe I’ll start a survivalist blog”. And, lo, it came to pass…….

The original incarnation of the blog was on LiveJournal (remember them?), and then I grabbed a copy of PageMaker and made up a website. That lasted for only a few weeks until I decided to go with WordPress. And, since then, that’s what I’ve used.

It’s been a fabulously interesting twenty years as far as blog-related stuff goes.

First and foremost, I like to needle ,Rawles about how my blog predates his by a few years. However, in all fairness, his blog is updated every day whereas mine is usually every three days or so. It’s a good-natured rivalry that is silly because, hands down, he has the more informative and useful blog. But…I was in the space first. ;0

See, my blog was never about telling people how to prepare, or why to prepare, it was simply to tell how and why *I* was preparing. I make mistakes, and sometimes I have brilliant insights….hit-n-miss is pretty much how the posting goes around here.

I’ve met a few people in the preparedness and gunblog world. I’ve also been ’email friends’ with a few people in the industry. I’m very grateful for those experiences and have enjoyed meeting all of them. I try very hard not to name drop in this blog because of privacy, but I’ve met some of the ‘big names’ in blogging. Fine folks, every one of them.

Over twenty years, I’ve seen a lot of blogs come and go. The most fascinating was our good friend Harry over at Self-Sufficient Living. He went dark and deleted his blog a number of years ago and eventually stopped replying in email. Maybe he died, maybe he went to ground. Dunno. But he was a great guy to read and I enjoyed our communications. I’d love to catch up with him sometime.

Over twenty years you can see trends change and fall in and out of favor. This blog is older than the iPhone that many of you are reading this post on. When this blog started we were still in the 1994 Assault Weapons Ban era. Can you imagine? Neutered rifles and 10-rd magazines…the horror!

And, of course, over twenty years we have had all sorts of ‘this is it!’ moments as told to us by the media and people who had their tinfoil on too tightly. Just off the top of my head….SARS, Bird Flu, Avian Flue, Kung Flu, 2012, Fukishima, Ebola, Peak Oil, assorted earthquakes, etc, etc. Yet…..we’re still here.

It doesn’t take twenty years of thought to come up with “Stay safe, live within your means, be ready for a rainy day, plan ahead.” So, why have I been re-hashing the same stuff over and over? Well, its not always the same stuff…technology and toys change over time, new goodies come to market, etc. But, mostly, I’ve come to enjoy the routine and structure of blogging. And most importantly, I like that my interactions with people who read the blog remind me that maybe I’m not some outlier with a weird camo fetish…there are plenty of people out there who think the same way. Its a nice reminder that Im not alone in my beliefs and practices. Don’t underestimate how important that is.

What does the future hold? Beats me. My life is completely different than it was on Day One of the blog. Back then I had lotsa time and no money. Now its the other way around. Back then it was a big deal to spend $20 on batteries or a MagLite. Nowadays I routinely drop several hundred bucks every couple weeks on preparedness acquisitions (and way too many Ruger P95Dc’s). I’ll probably keep blogging until either the apocalypse actually happens or until I finally get my beloved Middle O’ Nowhere heavily fortified house. And even then i might not stop. Just can’t really say.

In the meantime, I’ll use this moment to shamelessly shill for myself – if you’ve enjoyed the last twenty years or twenty minutes of my posting, feel free to head over to Patreon and throw a little something my way. I promise it will go to a cause that would make Schumer and Feinstein fall down with a case of the vapors.

Thanks to everyone who reads the blog and I hope you all continue your work on making yourselves more resilient against what the future holds, no matter what that might be. We’ll see how many more years we can keep cranking out these posts.

The Last Of Us observations

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So with The Walking Dead having sailed into history and devolved into what will, no doubt, be short-lives spinoff series, I need a new post-apocalypse show to immerse myself in. The Last Of Us is the latest installment in that.

The premise? Well, you can go look it up…I don’t really have the willpower to type out a synopsis that you can easily find elsewhere.

So, historically, television and movies have done a wildy disparate job of portraying the dystopian future. One thing that separates TLOU is that while shows like Jericho, The Walking Dead, The Last Ship, etc, all start with an apocalypse, TLOU is actually about whats happening 20 years after the apocalypse. As a result, we don’t see how the world became rubble and ruin, rather, we just start at that point.

So what does the future look like twenty years after the apocalypse? Apparently we get walled cities that are operated by heavy-handed military governments. People work for chits, everything is in short supply, the guards are goons, and there’s always that contingent of people who want to ‘change the system’. Its virtually a trope.

The characters, after only one season, are a bit one-dimensional but you can see that there’s an attempt being made to flesh them out a bit. You can’t really develop a character into a fully-developed person that the audience cares about in only one season. But there’s plenty of foreshadowing about where those character developments will land…tough, hardened kid who just wants the joy of being a child again, gruff survivor secretly needing to love someone and have connection, that sort of thing.

Gunplay? A bit. There’s an interesting scene where a stolen M4 is squirreled away because finding ammo for it is too difficult. Personally, I’d think that in a world full of armed government goons carrying AR’s youd find that .223 is probably the more common round. And, flying in the face of real-world experience, the main hero carries a….Taurus revolver. Hmm. I’m not sure a Taurus has the build quality to last through twenty years of hard use.

One thing I noticed that seems interesting is that outside of the large cities, survivors carry hunting-type rifles (bolt guns) rather than AR’s, whereas inside the walled quarantine zones the government and the rebel faction both use AR’s. Obviously this is because the rebel faction takes the guns from the government faction as they’re killed, but you’d think the M4 would be useful in the rest of the landscape, not just the cities.

My guess is that, 20 years into the apocalypse, ammunition for the M4’s is widely available to .gov forces and those forces are predominantly in the cities…so the M4 prevails there. Outside the cities, in the sparsely populated outside world, all the 5.56 was burned up long ago and people use whatever rifle happens to be chambered for whatever ammunition they find.

Makes me wonder if this is finally the scenario that justifies the Scout rifle concept.

Article – How to survive nuclear war after a bomb is dropped: what to do, how to prepareArticle –

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Some light reading for Saturday:

If Russia launched a weapon from international waters just off the East Coast, people in cities like New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, might have just 10 to 15 minutes to prepare.

“You wouldn’t even have time to go get your kids from school,” Irwin Redlener, a public-health expert at Columbia University who specializes in disaster preparedness, told Insider last year.
Arguably, the American public is not as prepared or educated on what to do in the event of a nuclear attack as Americans were during the Cold War, when fallout shelters, , and air raid sirens were in place across the nation. So here’s a minute-by-minute guide to help.

Llikelihood of the classic Reagan-era all-out nukefest actually happening? Pretty small, I think. But all it takes is one thermonuclear weapon to ruin your whole day and , besides, this information may prove to come in handy some day.

Scabbard

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A dear friend of mine, after reading my post about BBQ guns, sent me a link to a place that has their own BBQ holster/belt package. Indeed, a pretty cool looking rig. However, that really interested me was that they are manufacturing a leather rifle scabbard for AK’s and AR’s.

I have to say, that would be a pretty cool accessory for the person with a hayburner.

They actually used to make scabbards for M1 Garand rifles back in the day. Of course, being a semi auto, there has to be an accommodation for the charging handle and the Garand scabbards have a metal shield over a cutout in the scabbard to make that accommodation.

I suppose a scabbard would be handy on a 4×4 or motorcycle but I’d think most of the time you’d be just as well serviced by having the rifle slung at your side or across your back.

Regardless, its nice to see, in a world full of kydex, that there are still folks working in great-smelling, creaking, looks-better-with-age leather.

Speaking of BBQ guns

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A couple people were curious what I wanted in a barbecue gun. Well, my plan was one of the following:

In a nice extra fancy floral engraved Tom Threepersons holster from El Paso Saddlery.

And, of course, a nice set of showy grips.

Now, I know an engraver here in the valley who does good work ( Mike Gouse ), but I rather prefer factory engraving even if it’s just machine done.

So, there you have it. Attend some big social function and if you see some goober with a gussied up GP-100, well, say hi ’cause its probably me.