Strange bedfellows

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There’s that old expression about the ‘enemy of my enemy is my friend’. It sounds nice, but in practice the enemy of your enemy is your friend up until your enemy is defeated…then the odds are pretty good that new friend will be your next enemy. (cough*WW2 and the Soviets*cough).

Here’s an article about how the trend towards being a ‘cashless society’ will be racist, classist, and a host of other -ists because poor people and people of color somehow are unable to get a debit card. (“Retailers want to go cashless. But opponents say that’s discriminatory“) So, what these self-appointed guardians of equality are proposing is that it be legislatively mandated that a business must take cash.

Hold that thought a minute, and go read this article. (“New York Times Wants To Have Credit Card Companies Monitor Sales of Guns and Ammo. What Could Ever Go Wrong?“) Here, the NY Times, a bastion of journalistic…uhm…well, something…, feels that consumer credit companies (and I would imagine, by extension, bank debit card holders) flag transactions for ‘the authorities” when a customer purchases certain quantities of guns/ammo.

Many credit card companies already have positions on what sort of transactions they will not partake in. It’s not hard to imagine that with the ‘do it for the children’ crowd leaning on them , that they’d cave and prohibit the use of their services on ‘forbidden’ services/transactions.

So, it isn’t a stretch to imagine the day when many stores are cashless and your only recourse for payment is to use your debit/credit card. Except that when you try to buy a rifle or magazine or ammo….-DECLINED-. And since the vendor is cashless, you’re choices are now pretty severely limited. It’s a tidy end run around that pesky right to bear arms thing. There’s no right to purchase arms…so they’ll simply make the transaction as onerous and difficult as possible: make it so you can only pay with a card, and make the terms of the card such that you can’t buy guns.

Thus, strangely, I’m in the camp of those folks saying that businesses should take cash (although I disagree about forcing them to). Not because I care about some meth tweaker or welfare queen who can’t get a checking account, but because cash gives me a degree of anonymity and privacy that I demand. Politics does indeed make strange bedfellows.

As a businessman, I recognize that cash presents a bunch of challenges…miscounting, theft, attractive nuisance, disease vector, time sink,  etc, etc. And people paying by card are far more likely to spend more money and do it more often than those who use greenbacks. (Which is why Vegas gives you chips to bet with instead of real money.) But as a survivalist and lover of liberty and privacy, cash possesses some very handy qualities that I desire, not the least of which are privacy.

Its interesting how seemingly unrelated ideas or events – ‘going cashless’ and turning credit card companies into watchdogs of the public welfare – can combine to present such hazards to folks like you and I.

 

589 and counting

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It’s hard to believe, but next year is a Presidential election year. It really flew by fast, didn’t it?

Election day is…mm….well, hell, let’s let the internet do the math:



So 589 days until election. What can you do between now and then? Well, if you can promise to pay back $1 a day until the election you could pick up a midrange AR. Or about five dozen Pmags. Or, if you’re a careful shopper, three cases of 9mm. If you’re willing to save $1 a day until then.

But, what if you’re a tad more industrious than that? Maybe you’re willing to give up Starbucks or something. Pay yourself five bucks a day between now and then and you could have five AR’s, or a couple M1A’a, or four or five Glocks, or about 325 shiny new AR mags. Or a really nice set of body armour with room leftover for ammo.

It’s been 15 years since the sunset of the Clinton Assault Weapons Ban…thats four Presidential election cycles where we bit our nails every fourth November. And .22LR is still not anywhere near its old prices, although it is available.

Am I advocating panic buying? Of course not. Panic buying is waiting until a week before election day. I’m advocating that you get off your butt and finally get it done and out of the way so you can move onto other things in your life.

The reality is that every so often, for political expediency, someone gets thrown out of the sled to the wolves. Next week the ‘bump stock’ fiasco takes effect. That was the short-straw that was drawn to appease the clamoring anti-gunners. But…next time…it might be something else, something more important, something more useful. Thats the political reality. And, as Rand said, while you can ignore reality you cannot ignore the consequences of ignoring reality. And for the last 15 years there have been quite a few people ignoring the reality that there is never a ‘safe period’ for your AR and magazines.

Me, I’ve got enough to take care of me and those I care about. At this point I’m just buying extras to sell to the head-in-the-sand ostriches at “Get the Kentucky jelly” prices.

It’s 589 days to the election. Why take chances? If you can keep a promise to yourself to set $1 a day aside until then, you can have at least one AR and/or a buncha mags to set back.

This reminder of the Bad Ol’ Days has been brought to you by this blast from the past:

Article – New Zealand Prime Minister Says Semi-Automatic Weapons Will Be Banned After Mass Shooting

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New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern said Thursday that the country will ban military-style semi-automatic weapons, assault rifles and high-capacity magazines after the shooting massacre that killed 50 last week.

“On 15 March our history changed forever. Now our laws will too. We are announcing action today on behalf of all New Zealanders to strengthen our gun laws and make our country a safer place,” Arden said at a new conference in Wellington, the country’s capital.

“Every semi-automatic weapon used in the terror attack on Friday will be banned,” Ardern promised, adding that the legislation will be “drafted and introduced in urgency.”

Meanwhile, over at Cheaper Than Dirt, someone is tooling up the USB drive that contains their pricing algorithm for hundred-dollar PMAGs.

No one is saying “as goes New Zealand, so goes the world” but now is not a bad time to make sure you have your lifetime supply of [mags/receivers/etc] checked off your list.

‘Pawn Stars’ off grid home

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I was watching ‘Pawn Stars’ the other day and the main character bought himself a fire truck to use on his ‘off grid property’. The show then cut to a tour of the property in question and I was mightily impressed. A water turbine, outbuildings, pond, steel roofing, etc. A really nice looking setup. The best tour of it I could find available is a commercial promo from the battery company that supplied the batteries for the powerhouse.

How cool is that? And I rather like that little aqueduct at 0:48. Its a nice looking piece of property, I’d like to see more of it and get some detail.

I try not to be jealous of other people’s success…after all, they’re not doing anything I couldnt do if I really tried…but, boy, thats a sweet looking setup.

Wise decisions

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I read a mention over at SurvivalBlog that the Wise lawsuit has come to an end and Wise lost. (Some backstory and details) The gist of the lawsuit, as I understand it, is that Wise said their food would provide enough food for X number of people for Y number of days. Someone with a calculator and a knowledge of human dietary needs must have read the labels on the packaging because it was discovers that the whole X-days-for-Y-people thing only works out if those people are getting Bataan Death March portions and nutrition. Succinctly, on Wise’s schedule you would be getting less calories than many concentration camp prisoners.

What’s going to happen to Wise? Beats me. Maybe they’ll survive this, maybe not. What will be much more interesting is the repercussions throughout the industry. I guarantee you that the guys at Thrive and Mountain House are sitting down with their lawyers and nutritionists and double checking their packaging to make sure they are n’t setting themselves up for a similar problem.

Who got burned in this? Most likely the ‘casuals’. The not-really-survivalists who wanted to make one phone call, order one big pallet of food, and then say they were done with the food storage part of their plans. I’m all for turnkey solutions and one-stop-shopping, but having a backup plan for when the grocery store is empty is a serious enough task that perhaps a bit more homework is needed.Who can you trust? No one. So when ABC Food Co. says their package will feed three people for a month you should…do what? Correct answer: read the labels and do the math. Anyone with basic math skills and a modicum of intelligence would have realized that 450 calories a day is significantly less than the ‘2000 calorie per day’ mantra that’s been drummed into our head by government food label laws. Sure, 2000 calories is a one-size-fits-all approach that isn’t necessarily accurate, but it does at least give us something of a baseline.

Sitting in a bunker for three weeks waiting for the fallout levels to go down? Might get away with less calories. Snowshoeing to the lake to get water to haul back to your hidden cabin? A lot more calories, please. Even using the somewhat questionable 2000 calorie yardstick, you could see that some of these prepackaged kits were way, way down on calories.

I’m a huge fan of the long-term foods. I’ve got cases of pork chops, spaghetti, corn, apples, chicken, teriyaki, etc, etc. But those are part of a layered approach. I add up all the short-, mid-, and long-term food and thats the yardstick I use. And I use that 2000 calorie baseline as my minimum standard. I have absolutely no intention on subsisting exclusively on freeze-dried food made twenty years ago. I figure on using some of the expensive and exotic stuff (freeze dried meats) to complement the cheap and boring stuff (bulk packed rice and pasta) with the everyday stuff (canned vegetables, jarred sauces, etc.)

Im sure most of you guys are doing the same thing, right? On the one hand we have nitrogen-sealed #10 cans of Pasta Primavera and on the other we have #10 cans of wheat and dried onions from the LDS cannery.

 Moral of the story: avoiding starvation, and the desperate choices forced upon you by the threat of it, is too serious an issue to hand over to some marketing guys at a long term food company. Read the labels, do the math, make the spreadsheet, check other vendors, review other brands. It would be awesome if we really could make one phone call, write one check, and be done with it but that just ain’t gonna happen. Read the fine print, always.

Not Plan ‘A’

.30-30 upgrade

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Well, it took about twenty years but I finally upgraded the sights on my .30-30 carbine. This thing weighs just a tad under five pounds which malkes it a joy to tote through the woods, it breaks down into two pieces small enough to stuff in a pack, and it shoots a .30 caliber cartridge with a respectable amount of energy. But…the factory sights were lacking.

Those sights are darn near halfway down the barrel. And they’re simple notch/post sights…like an AK. And while I respect the AK, I want better sights if I’m going out looking to load up the larder.

I finally got off my butt and order up a peep sight that I’d been meaning to buy for the last couple decades. When you’re using open sights, the longer the sight radius the better.

And it sits all the way at the back of the barrel like it’s supposed to, giving me a rather lengthy sight radius. And an aperature I can swap out if I so desire.

Sure, I have plenty of .308’s that will kill Bambi just fine. But, none of them weigh less than five pounds. And I enjoy handloading for the single-shot .30-30.

Is it a survival gun? I suppose any gun is a ‘survival gun’ if your situation calls for it. But this is really just a fun lightweight(!) carbine that I can stuff into a backpack, hop on my mountain bike, and be miles ahead of everyone on some closed-off logging road when the sun comes up and hunting hours begin.

What willI  be shooting? Most likely some 180 grain hollowpoint cast bullets. I like playing with cast bullets and the Contender is an ideal platform for such foolery. Since it’s a .30 caliber single shot, I can pretty much load it with any bullet from 90 gr. up to 220 gr. Of course, at .30-30 velocities those heavy ones will just meander out there taking their time…but when they hit…ouch.

Whats the sight? Williams. There are other sights out there but I liked how compact this thing was.

However, speaking of sights…wait’ll you see what I put on the Marlin 336.

 

Fifth columns

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You know, it’s tough enough to be a survivalist when there’s a large demographic that views you as a right-wing, [whoever]-phobe, racist, gun-humping neanderthal. The neighbors with their Subarus and ‘Coexist’ bumper stickers chuckle with their fellow travelers about ‘that guy’ next door who always seems to be up to no good.

Now, it’s starting to trend towards us survivalists living in a world that is, apparently, warming to the consistently failed theory of socialism. Folks, not only am I anti-social, I’m anti-Socialist.

Normally, I don’t care about your religion, who you sleep with (unless, of course, youre doing it outside of your commitments), or what your political bent is – until those beliefs start to manifest themselves as trying to control me and my life. And there are few groups that are about controlling your life more than the starry-eyed morons rallying under the red banner. It’s tragically humourous – the left calls anyone who disagrees with it a Nazi and then embraces socialism and communism. Never mind that when you’re stacking bodies, the Nazis can’t even come close to the stratosphere-challenging mountain that was created under the guise of and guidance of socialism and communism.

I had a survivalist buddy who was a member of The Minutemen back in the day. In those free-wheeling days of the late ’60s and early ’70s, what with groups like The Weathermen and those SLA cats, the notion of some sort of Communist insurgency might have seemed perfectly reasonable. Armed commie takeover of the country seemed more plausible when you had ‘Peoples Army’ of this and the ‘Revolutionary Committee” of that running around shooting cops and robbing banks.

But, as a nation, we’re pretty much fans of bloodless revolution when it comes to our own backyard. The American Revolution and the War of Southern Overconfidence are pretty much the last time we had shooting in the streets over the direction of national government. Thats why we have elections rather than shooting wars. And all you have to do to swing the pendulum from one side to the other is simply convince enough people to march in lockstep to the polls and vote it in someone.

Currently, the contenders for People Most Likely To Ignore Obvious History are Socialist Barbie from NY,  and Bernie Sanders from Vermont. One could be excused for being so divested from reality by reason of stupid youth and the other for age-related dementia. Trouble is, there are legions of stoners, outraged liberal arts majors, and trendy ‘resistance’ types who think socialism is a great idea. And they vote.

What’s this mean for we survivalists? Well, I haven’t seen many socialists who were cool with you owning guns…or, really, much of anything else. As Maggie Thatcher famously opined, ‘the problem with socialism is that you eventually run out of other people’s money.’ And the ‘other people’ are you and me. Yeah, yeah..they always say it’ll come from ‘the rich’ being made to ‘pay their fair share’, but as Slick Willie showed us, you get a lot more money when you redefine downwards who ‘the rich’ are.

Socialists aren’t going to like you owning guns, wealth, any business they think is ‘too big’, and those sorts of things. And as survivalists, we peg the needle on the ol’  “EnemiesOfTheState-O-Meter”.. what with our guns, gold, cash, property, and rather particular ideas about individual liberty.

Normally, I’d think that ‘useful idiots’ like Bernie and Socialist Barbie were outliers..aberrations…the rounding errors of a political equation. But there seems to be a rush to the left these days on the Democrats side. Everyone seems to be trying to outdo each on who can denounce capitalism the loudest and promise the most government gimmes. They think that the next presidential election will be a rush of people who’ll vote for anyone Not Trump… and that means that every left-leaning politician who has dreams of making the big time is going to throw his (or her) hat in the ring and differentiate themselves by being even more lefty than their fellow opportunists.

Practical result? The things you and I care about most are the sort of things that the socialist democrat-types target as being in need of ‘control’. More gold, more cash, more guns, more mags, more property, and above all – more vigilance that idiots like those people are politically stamped out before they get into positions where they can do some real damage.