Monthly Archives: April 2023

Roof Korea Birthday – ROK on, boys

Posted on by

‘Tis the anniversary of that unique subset of Americans – the Roof Korean.

For those who don’t recall, or, like me, never get tired of hearing the story, the Roof Korean was the name given to the Korean shopkeepers who grabbed their thundertoys, climbed up on the roof of their business, and persuaded would-be trouble makers to go elsewhere.

It’s a fascinating and inspiring story. The moral of that story is that sometimes things go sideways to the point that an AR, plate carrier, and a half dozen of your best friends with AR’s and plate carriers is exactly what the doctor ordered.

Video – 55-year-old freeze dried soup

Posted on by

We’re all familiar with Campbell’s Soup, right? Red and white can thats been around for a zillion years. You know the brand.

What I did not know was that for a few years, back in the sixties, they sold some of their soups in freeze dried form.

What we have here is a video of a couple guys opening up, reconstituting, and eating 55-year-old freeze dried soup. TL;DR – it was good.

This is unsurprising but still a good reminder that as long as the packaging is in good condition, freeze-drieds will pretty much last your lifetime. Does he nutritional value degrade? Probably. But I doubt it degrades to zero, which means that 55-year-old freeze drieds beats starving to death.

For those of you who missed it the first time, a Friend Of Gun Jesus did his own taste test on some old Mountain House and his results were pretty encouraging.

The point here is that if you include freeze drieds as part of your storage food program, and you protect the packaging from damage, your food should be just fine for pretty much the rest of your life.

Icom musing

Posted on by

So the Icom-7300 arrived the other day. It is, hands down, far more radio than I know what the heck to do with. First thing I noticed, though, was that the manual included with the thing was extremely lacking. Fortunately, the internet is a handy resource.

It appears that the 7300 ships with the ‘Basic’ manual…around 80 pages (https://static.dxengineering.com/global/images/instructions/ico-ic-7300_it.pdf) . What I wanted was the ‘Complete’ manual…which is around 180 pages   (https://www.icomjapan.com/support/manual/2271/).

Does a hundred pages make a difference? Oh yes. Keep in mind, my radio experience is virtually nil…but, like a good survivalist, I need to learn (and retain) the necessary skills to make full use of this tool.

I am, unfortunately, going to have to set up a small desk in a corner of the bunker and make a little listening station for it. This means having to, once again, re-arrange thigs and make some room. Truly, space is the final frontier. At the moment, all I want to do is listen. I am told that, since I am listening and not sending, pretty much any antenna would do the job. It is unfortunate that Ticom doesn’t live nearby since he’d be pretty much the last word on these matters.

Getting a ‘serious’ radio is something I’d been blowing off for, well, way too long. There were a bunch of reasons for this…none of them really good. The biggest was the expense. The bloody thing is not cheap at almost $1200. But I suppose thats the test of your convictions about the future: do you really believe that there are bad times coming that will be bad enough that you’ll need to have your own communications network? If the answer yes then you bite the bullet and spend what needs to be spent. Another excuse is simply that things like shortwave radios are low on my list of Uncertain Goods. To my way of thinking, which may or may not be correct, I foresee the availability of things like AK’s and 30-rd magazines being more threatened than the availability of radio equipment….thus, my priorities in terms of acquisition lean towards the things that I deem as being ‘threatened’ in terms of their availability to me. As a result, a very expensive radio took a backseat. And, finally, I’ve been doing the whole paranoid survivalist thing for over thirty years…but its only recently that my life has hit the point where I can afford (barely) such grand expenditures.

So, I’ll set up a small desk in the corner of the bunker, pick up a few support items, and start getting my brain up to speed on things. Part of me is looking forward to it and part of me really wonders where I’ll find the time. But…as I said…if you really think uberbad times are coming, well, then you make the time, mister.

Guessing the weather

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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…

Posted on by

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

Posted on by

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.