Oh merciful Crom, it is *hot* out there…. someone get Putin on the phone and tell him to dial down the weather machine.

Some interesting tidbits from around the interwebs…….
When Dyeing PMAGs, Liquid Or Powdered Dye? – An interesting piece from TFB about dyeing sand-colored pmags to whatever color you happen to need. I generally don’t use plastic mags but color-coding magazines has some appeal to me. I’ve always liked bright orange magazines for range practice and this would be a good way to readily segregate ‘practice’ mags from ‘critical’ mags.

Citizen science takes on Japan’s nuclear establishment -DIY nuclear background monitoring. I’m a fan of empirical data over government supplied data. What’s interesting is that some placesdont want you to own early warning systems because you might misread them and cause panic. And, of course, you might stray from the ‘official’ reports.

The new Microgun – Smaller than an M4, but with a cyclic rate of about $1400 rpm. This really might bring the man-portable Jesse Ventura backpack electric gun into reality… these would make amazing suppressing-fire weapons for light vehicles and temporary facilities. I thought I read somewhere that someone was working on a version that ran off a cordless drill…..

And just for fun…rubber-band MP5 – Because.

Building for sale. Comes with: helicopter deck and 360-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wait, what?

The Chesapeake Light Tower – 14 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach – has both, and it hit the auction block last month.

I wonder if it’s far enough out there to be considered out of the US’ jurisdiction. History has several sea-stead attempts at creating sovereign micronations….I wonder if this would be another one.

You know that things like plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, rubber buckshot, etc. are called “Less-than-lethal”, right? It used to be they were called “non-lethal”, but the problem was that sort of title implied that you couldn’t kill anyone with itg. Sixty seconds on Google will show plenty of episodes of people getting brained with ‘non-lethal’ baton rounds and that sort of thing and winding up dead. So…the moniker “Non-lethal” was changed to less-than-lethal meaning that usually it won’t kill someone if you use it properly. A lot of distinctions there.

Many of the blogs I read advocate ‘self-sufficiency’ as a goal. They propose the dream house that is ‘off the grid’ and independent of the umbilical cords that connect us to the major infrastructure. This is all great if you can do it, but it’s a tall order. It seems that the choices are binary…you are ‘off the grid’ and ‘self-sufficient’ or you’re ‘on the grid’ and screwed. There hasn’t been a term for that in-between stage. I think that term is ‘less-than-dependent’. It implies that you aren’t self-sufficient, but you are more resilient to an infrastructure failure than those who are 100% dependent on that infrastructure. Let me give an example…

X has a house in town that has city water, city sewer, grid electric, natural gas, gets his groceries from the market, and that sort of thing. Z has a farm in the hills with a well, septic field, solar/wind generators and batteries, livestock and a huge garden, and all the other gee-whiz that we dream about. X is dependent and not self-sufficient, and Z is , by pretty much most definitions, independent and self-sufficient. Lethal vs. non-lethal. But is there an unrecognized or unacknowledged ‘in-between’? Take Y, who lives in the burbs or on the edge of town. He has his home set up just like X with it’s tie-in to ‘the grid systems’, and he doesn’t have the dedicated systems like Z….but he has backup generators, a cistern and pool full of water, a pantry loaded with food, a large propane tank to run his emergency heater and stove, etc, etc. He’s not 100% dependent, but he’s not 100% independent either. He is, I think, ‘less-than-dependent’.

I bring it up because sometimes I think we forget that it isn’t a binary choice…you’re either dependent or independent, self sufficient or not self sufficient. I think there’s a grey area in there and that grey area is where most of us are. I’m certainly not self-sufficient, in this context, but I’m far from dependent. I may not last as long as the guy out in the hills with his self-sufficient setup, but I’ll far, far outlast my totally dependent neighbors. We all want to leave the dependent stage, and I think we all want to reach the self-sufficient/independent stage, but we should recognize that less-than-dependent is still a huge step in the right direction. Some people may be okay with less-than-dependent, some people may see it as just a stop on their way to independent/self-sufficient, but…if you cannot get to that independent/self-sufficient stage, at least try to get to the less-than-dependent stage.

This is like finding out the call girl doesn’t *really* love you…..

The first time I bid on a freelance job to ghostwrite a doomsday survival guide, I was only asked one question: Did I have experience writing for middle-aged Republican men? I told the client that I had experience writing for a wide variety of ages and political affiliations, which was noncommittal enough to be true.

 

The client said, “Sounds good, bro.”

 

We were off to the races.

I highly doubt anyone here does this but:

As previously noted, Pokemon Go also requires extensive app permissions to run. And the Pokemon Go privacy policy states the company may share aggregated data with third parties, and identifiable user data with law enforcement agencies and other parties for a range of reasons it deems appropriate.

It isn’t hard to imagine that somewhere, “someone” wanted a way to bring millions of people into a program where they could be tracked, have their phone mined for data, and have who knows what other ‘third party’ stuff slipped into their phone. Disguise it as a game and people will line up to hand over their digital keys.

Or, perhaps it’s just a game.

But, to me, it’s just an unnecessary risk. If someone were to really want to play this game, I’d suggest buying a burner phone and using it instead. Expensive as hell, but you probably shouldnt be wasting your time playing this modified and rebranded version of geocaching anyway.

A guy driving a truck manages to kill (according to current numbers) more people than a guy shooting a rifle in a crowded nightclub. That’s interesting to think about since pretty much any yahoo can head down to U-Haul, load up a panel truck with some inertia-inducing weight, dial it up to 60 mph and plow into a Farmers Market on any given Saturday.

The quick response is “this is yet another reason to always be armed”, which is a tad misleading if you know basic physics. There’s nothing you can shoot that isn’t crew-served that’s going to stop a couple tons of mass clipping along at 40 mph. On the other hand, reports are suggesting that after his episode behind the wheel, the driver came out shooting, at which point..yes…time for a  bullet party.

What probably would have made the biggest difference didn’t sit in a holster, but rather between the ears – situational awareness. Know the risks, know the potential chokepoints, kill zones, bottlenecks, etc….be aware of who is around you….recognize that being in a cluster of poeple might make you more of a target than being alone..know where the nearest exit is. That sort of thing.

Sad state of affairs, but that’s the way the world is today and probably will be that way for the rest of our lives. Folks like you and I, people who are used to thinking this way about personal safety, will probably adapt to it quite easily and quickly. We already operate in Condition Yellow most of the time when we’re out of our homes. For us, it’s second nature. Most every cop I know operates with a heightened Condition Yellow as their default setting. Same for a lot of military guys. Check your factory setting and adjust as necessary.

It’s an ugly world out there, and Bad Things really can come wearing a thousand different faces. You may not be ready for all of them, but you’ll still be miles ahead of the oblivious, normalcy-biased souls who stand around texting “OMG terror attack” when the smart person is beating feet in the opposite direction.

“It’s a real war, kid…it’s here every day.”

When Andrew and Deborah Ku first heard about Hurricane Sandy, they worried that their ground-level bodega—located one block from the beach in Far Rockaway, Queens—would be swamped. They searched for sandbags and found none.

They made an impromptu barrier of faux-sandbags improvised from supplies at hand: cat litter and garbage bags.

The bodega weathered the storm without a drop of floodwater, enabling a reopening as one of the few surviving stores on the hard-hit peninsula.

An article I came across about the impromptu engineering that is spurred by necessity. As Rand said, “Man’s mind is his basic tool of survival.” Everything from Robinson Crusoe to Castaway to The Martian (esp. The Martian, actually) highlights that when you’re caught in a bad situation, it’s the clear-headed, creative, intelligent man who succeeds.

This is why the smart survivalist has a library that covers everything from small unit tactics to emergency medicine to electrical theory and accounting. We’re all familiar with Heinlein’s famous quote: “A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.”  I’m not sure specialization is necessarily a bad thing..when I need a triple bypass I’d very much like the guy working on me to be not only a specialist, but a very well trained one. However, specialization to the exclusion of things is definitely not a good idea.

Back in the old day, the best you could hope for was to slowly acquire the information you wanted by diligent trips to the library, and scouring new and used bookstores. Nowadays, literally the entire collected information of humanity is available to you on a small computer you carry in your pocket. And you don’t even need to actually read about it…you can see videos explaining whatever you want to learn.

While the information is out there, the desire to learn is not. That’s something you have to get from within. I am always stunned when I meet people so dogmatic that they won’t try new products, ideas, or methods, because “this is good enough”. What kind of person intentionally hamstrings themselves simply because they’re too lazy or narrow-minded to investigate and evaluate new ideas? I had a buddy who thought that his 1941 Johnson was the ultimate SHTF rifle…it was quick to reload (with five round stripper clips), fired a powerful .30 caliber bullet, and had a high-capacity (10 round) magazine. Never mind that it cost around $3000. Oh..and it didn’t do anything an AR-10, PTR-91, or even an M1A would do for half the money. But…facts had no bearing on his beliefs and he persisted in building his apocalyptic future around an outdated, obsolete, expensive, logistically-orphaned, and awkward weapons platform.

I suppose my point is, the linked article shows that when the chips are down, what’s between your ears can be more useful than whats in your pockets (or pack). But only if you’re able to think that way and not be hobbled by “this is how we’ve always done it.”