I did  a post several years back on solar charging of cell phones, and the technology has changed a tiny but in those intervening years. I have a Goal0 Nomad panel and decided to test it out the other day. I took an old dead iPhone, USB cable, and the Nomad7 and set them out in the yard directly in the sun to charge.

A couple things you have to keep in mind – first, take the device you’re charging and protect it from the sun and heat. If you don’t, they’ll go into thermal shutdown mode. I usually put the phone under the panel but off the conductive ground. Secondly, and this is really important, higher end electronics like cellphones are very fussy about charging irregularities. If the voltage fluctuates, as it might when the sun goes behind a cloud, that change in electrical input may cause your device to go out of charge mode or something. The solution is to use the panel to charge a battery pack and then use the battery pack to charge the phone. Goal0 is now selling a package that does exactly that – GOAL ZERO 42020 Venture 30 Solar Recharging Kit. 

This is pretty much your one-stop solution to this:

Maybe your neighbor will let the neighborhood charge their phones at their generator. Maybe.

No doubt someone will opine that in a blackout condition the cell towers will mostly be dead too, so why worry about your cellphone? If you think that, then you really are too short-sighted to be a survivalist. Turn in your camo and freeze-drieds and take up another hoby..like model railroads or something.

Even in a world with cell towers down, your phone takes pictures, takes video, does math functions, accesses files from local networks, acts as a flashlight, provides entertainment, tracks supplies, etc, etc. In short, it’s a very useful tool even when it’s not being used as a communication device. (And, yes, you can even use them, to a degree, for communication using devices such as Go tenna.)

Anyway, I plugged in the dead iPhone, set it under the panel, and came back a few hours later and…100% charged.

Moral of the story is that although having a generator is nice, it’s a bit overkill for just charging phones in a power-failure situation. So…these panels (with the battery) are excellent alternatives.

I am both amused and entertained by this article.

According to a 2015 simulation at Cornell University, the safest place to be during the apocalypse is the Northern Rockies. That’s exactly where one finds the 37,000-acre Resort at Paws Up. Its nearest metropolis, and airport, is the college town of Missoula, pop. 69,000. Researchers agree zombies will first attack the most densely-populated urban areas. For that reason, Big Sky Country is one of the best places to retreat to. Paws Up allows the well-to-do among us to familiarize themselves with things in nature—like stars, trees, and silence—they may encounter when they flee their penthouse apartments and suburban mansions.

Paws Up is out past Potomac, and is, literally, across the highway from where I hunt. I have heard stories about overzealous Paws Up employees chasing hunters away even though the hunters weren’t trespassing on PU land. I’ve never had that happen, but then again most folks don’t want to annoy someone strolling through the woods with an HK-91 (clone, actually) hanging off them.

Paws Up has a bit of mixed feelings about it amongst the locals. They had a major screaming match with the state over some water quality issues back when they got started, and I was rooting for them in a David v. Goliath kind of way. Then I heard about their folks getting all goon-like and shooing hunters away from the place. Hey, it’s one thing if someone is trespassing but intimidating them and driving them away when they aren’t trespassing? Bad juju.

Interesting article on the Strategic National Stockpile. I wonder if they have one of these somewhere for ammo. (“Yes! And its called ‘my basement’!”)

 

When Greg Burel tells people he’s in charge of some secret government warehouses, he often gets asked if they’re like the one at the end of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where the Ark of the Covenant gets packed away in a crate and hidden forever.

“Well, no, not really,” says Burel, director of a program called the Strategic National Stockpile at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Thousands of lives might someday depend on this stockpile, which holds all kinds of medical supplies that the officials would need in the wake of a terrorist attack with a chemical, biological or nuclear weapon.

The location of these warehouses is secret. How many there are is secret. (Although a former government official recently said at a public meeting that there are six.) And exactly what’s in them is secret.

“If everybody knows exactly what we have, then you know exactly what you can do to us that we can’t fix,” says Burel. “And we just don’t want that to happen.”

What he will reveal is how much the stockpile is worth: “We currently value the inventory at a little over $7 billion.”

Check out 0:23 to 1:20.

“Granddad loved people…but he didn’t trust them very much.”

Funny thing is, people say “Oh, it’s the world we live in today. It wasn’t like this when I was a kid.” or “It wasn’t like this when my grandparents were alive”. You’re right, it wasn’t. It was actually worse. The world has never been a pleasant or safe place. What’s changed is that we’ve gotten so good atinsulating ourselves from it, and keeping it’s ugliness at a distance, that when we really do get a glimpse of what the real world is like, we can’t believe that it’s really been that way all along. It must be a recent thing. Nope, it’s not. It’s the real world…it’s here every day.

There have always been people willing to crack your head open for whats in your pockets, there have always been people starving, there has always been someone who wants to control you, and there have always been people who want what you have and are willing to take it when the opportunity arises. Just because you don’t see it, or even recognize it, doesn’t diminish that this is an objective truth.

So, yes, love your neighbors, be nice to people, help when you can, and try not to be a dick, But…don’t forget that you can only trust your fellow man so far. Trust, but verify.

“The people have spoken…and they must be punished.” – Ed Koch, famous mayor of NYC.

The UK leaving the EU isn’t the end of the world. All it really means, in practice, is that the top guys in Brussels have to order new stationary.

The world got along without the EU twenty years ago, they’ll get along without it now. Not a big deal.

What does surprise me is that the UK voted for the secession. How often do you hear of anyone seceding from anything without a war or revolution?

If I had to bet, I’d say markets are back to normal by next Wednesday as people have an entire weekend to realize that it’s not a big deal. What is a big deal, though, is that the UK might just have been the first rat off the ship and the EU might start getting a  little sticky about who else leaves. Stay tuned.

CUMANÁ, Venezuela — With delivery trucks under constant attack, the nation’s food is now transported under armed guard. Soldiers stand watch over bakeries. The police fire rubber bullets at desperate mobs storming grocery stores, pharmacies and butcher shops. A 4-year-old girl was shot to death as street gangs fought over food.

Venezuela is convulsing from hunger.

Hundreds of people here in the city of Cumaná, home to one of the region’s independence heroes, marched on a supermarket in recent days, screaming for food. They forced open a large metal gate and poured inside. They snatched water, flour, cornmeal, salt, sugar, potatoes, anything they could find, leaving behind only broken freezers and overturned shelves.

And they showed that even in a country with the largest oil reserves in the world, it is possible for people to riot because there is not enough food.

In the last two weeks alone, more than 50 food riots, protests and mass looting have erupted around the country. Scores of businesses have been stripped bare or destroyed. At least five people have been killed.

This is precisely the Venezuela its leaders vowed to prevent.

Yay, socialism. I think you’d have to wait a long time to see such a level of dystopia hit this country. And while I don’t think it will ever be like that, on a national level, here in the US, it is still a fascinating example of what happens when food becomes scarce. That ‘thin venwer of civilization’ that we always hear about gets scratched away and the next thing you know there’s an angry mob prying the bars off the window to your house.

So many tangents to go off of in that story…personal security, hard currency, foraging skills, food storage, armed revolution, etc, etc. Make no doubt about it, folks that don’t care who gets voted into office will suddenly care about politics when their kitchen cabinets are bare. I haven’t found much in the way of news about it, but I’d imagine the rural dwellers in Venezuela are probably faring a little better than their city brethren.

There’s a lot to take away from the article. And the related articles about the crumbling medical infrastructure are illuminating as well. And while I don’t foresee it happening on a national scale here, I can see it happening on a local scale to various degrees as things like weather and natural disasters come and go.

Go read. Then go sit in your pantry an imagine what it would be like.

It’s only a matter of time before the government collapses or is forced out by a crowd with pitchforks and torches. What comes in after that will be anybody’s guess.

Sportsman;s guide has a pretty good deal going on. Twenty bucks for a 400-yard spool of military two-strand commo wire.

This is the stuff you want for things like field phones or any other..ahem..’device’…that you need to run some current to. This stuff usually goes for a lot more per spool, so …get while the getting is good.

ETA: They changed the price on that one SKU. This one appears to still be cheap…

It’s under the “I Don’t Know What I’d Do With It, But I Want Them Anyway” category.

I’m not exactly 100% sure what use smoke grenades (or smoke-generating devices) are in a preparedness situation. Oh, sure…from the ‘lost hiker’ perspective it’s nice to have an enormous cloud of smoke wafting through heavy forest canopy making your location more readily apparent to rescuers. Or if you’re in a boat at sea. Now, drop those two scenarios and ….. ?

The last time I heard of anyone outside of the military using smoke to cover a retreat or advance was this guy..and it did not go well for him. I suppose that in some sort of Mad Max world you’d use them to choke people out of buildings or perhaps provide distractions. But, other than that, I’m not really seeing a lot of practical application. Then again, I relly haven’t sat down and wargamed it through completely either.

Regardless….the subject does have some interesting baggage with it.

In the old days, back when this was a free country, you could buy your classic military pull-ring smoke grenades through the mail and at gun shows. They were fun and, no two ways about it, looked cool mixed in with your gear. Paintballers loved em. And, as usual, some scrotally-challenged wonder at ATFE decided that the fuze assembly and/or igniter system fell under the classification of ‘regulated explosive’ and that was the end of the party. (although they are still available on department letterhead or with an ATFE explo license.)

Nature abhors a vacuum and so does the market. A few outfits have stepped in with their own version of ‘pull ring’ smoke grenades. Most notably, these guys. I ordered a few of them the other week, out of curiosity and they arrived a few days ago. I haven’t tried them yet but the videos of them being used seem rather promising. But…they are nowhere near the durability of the military product. For one thing, it’s hard to shake the feeling that this is a firework that has been dressed up with tactial-looking stickers and graphics. The ‘body’ is a heavy cardboard tube..like most fireworks. The degree of weather-resistance and durability of this product would seem to be….mild. As I said, I have no idea what I would do with these things, but if I did think I had a need for them I’d want them to be as waterproof, crushproof, moistureproof, and durable as possible.

To be fair, though…it looks like they generate a nice amount of smoke in a hurry. And..theyre cheap.

Giving us better durability and water-resistance, but a distinct lack of color, are the distress smoke signals available to boaters. I like these. I can usually find them cheap at gun shows, they aren’t about to raise the eyebrows of anyone, and they seem to generate a decent amount of smoke. I could entirely see someone rolling one or two of these down an office stairwell in Katrinaville to dissuade looters from coming up the stairs.

Naturally, there is always a DIY option for these sorts of things. A quick perusal of YouTube, a trip to WalMart, a side trip to Home Depot, and you an pretty much build some amazing, albeit improvised, smoke generating devices on your own.

…and somewhere at Cheaper Than Dirt headquarters, they are readying the pricing algorithms on the website for $100 Pmags.

Quick! Time to take guns and magazines away from the people who didn’t do anything wrong.

Buckle up, kids…it’s going to be a bumpy ride.

ETA: Nailed it.