Sceptre military-style water cans? Best I can find is at Lexington Container but I was hoping for something closer to Montana to save on shipping. Clarification: Scepter..not ‘just like Scepter’ or ‘private labelled but made by Sceptre’ or ‘better than Sceptre’.

After 9/11, my dad filled a duffel bag with some energy bars, a couple gallons of water, some penicillin, and a map. Amid scaremongering headlines about imminent anthrax and “dirty bomb” attacks in the city, he wanted to have some supplies on hand in case we needed to get out of Brooklyn fast. Were he to assemble such a bag today, he’d likely stumble on a number of companies promising a more wholesale brand of disaster preparedness: a box full of shelf-stable freeze-dried meals, to be revived from their dessicated state with the addition of boiled water.

Always interesting when someone does this sort of thing. They seem to miss that the point of this food isn’t to replicate your pre-collapse culinary habits, but rather to keep you alive.

Was up at the local chain outdoors shop and saw, stacked high, bricks of Federal .22 for the first time in what seems like quite a while. $24.99, which, if you do the math, comes out to $0.0476 per round. I just picked up about 50,000 rounds for $0.0410 per round, so, on a brick of ammo, the difference is about $3 a brick. Multiply that by..uhm…100 bricks…and you get a savings of about $300. I can live with that.

I’m the first to admit that I do not get out into the stores as much as I’d like, so perhaps the availability has been high lately and I simply haven’t noticed, but I actually cannot recall the last time I saw bricks of bulk Federal sitting on the shelf with no limits on purchase.

Did I buy some? Yes, actually. One brick just for some recreational shooting. Yes, I just bought 50,000 rounds but thats Deep Sleeper ammo. It’s for that Really Bad Decade..not for busting rocks at the range. (Well…it might also be used for barter purposes with hungry, desperate, short-sighted coeds who were woefully unprepared for the end of the world.)

Even though I have a bunch of .22 ammo sittinghere, there’s still a part of my lizard brain that has been conditioned over the last several years to grab all the bricks whenever I see them. I have to remind myself “It’s cool..it’s cool…you’ve got plenty.”

But..but…bricks!

MADISON, Wis. (AP) — The state Supreme Court says a man who had a loaded handgun in his glove compartment violated Wisconsin’s concealed carry law.

Police in Milwaukee stopped Brian Grandberry in 2014 and found a loaded semi-automatic pistol in the glove compartment. Grandberry didn’t have a concealed weapon permit and prosecutors charged him with violating the state’s concealed carry law.

I cannot imagine how having a gun in your glove compartment counts as being concealed, but I guess thats a job for the appeals court to figure out. I suppose the argument might be that although the gun isnt on the person it is ‘readily accessible’.

I don’t know what I ate last night but, man, it was some weird dreams last night. I dreamt that I lived in a coastal city, surrounded by mountains, and the whole city had been evacuated because of a tsunami warning. I, for some reason, had remained behind and was contentedly wandering through an empty CostCo wondering how long the produce would last before I could get around to eating it all…and wondering if the power would stay on. Next thing you know, I’m on a ridge overlooking the city and I see the Hollywood-style wave slam through the city, obliterating everything and…heading right up the side of the mountains where I’m standing. I make a dash down the opposite slope of the ridge hoping the ridge will channel all the water. Nope. The wave comes up behind me, picks me up and hurls me to certain doom. My final thought before I’m slammed into the ground, and presumably killed, is for my loved one. And then I wake up.

I recall, in the dream, watching the city get washed away and thinking “Man, I shouldn’t have left all my gear down there.” Live and learn, I guess.

Definitely a change from the usual zombie dreams.

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Interesting that I had that dream and then today was pointed to a fascinating article about the likelihood of a massive earthquake (and it’s consequences) in this region.

Soon after that shaking begins, the electrical grid will fail, likely everywhere west of the Cascades and possibly well beyond. If it happens at night, the ensuing catastrophe will unfold in darkness. In theory, those who are at home when it hits should be safest; it is easy and relatively inexpensive to seismically safeguard a private dwelling. But, lulled into nonchalance by their seemingly benign environment, most people in the Pacific Northwest have not done so. That nonchalance will shatter instantly. So will everything made of glass. Anything indoors and unsecured will lurch across the floor or come crashing down: bookshelves, lamps, computers, cannisters of flour in the pantry. Refrigerators will walk out of kitchens, unplugging themselves and toppling over. Water heaters will fall and smash interior gas lines. Houses that are not bolted to their foundations will slide off—or, rather, they will stay put, obeying inertia, while the foundations, together with the rest of the Northwest, jolt westward. Unmoored on the undulating ground, the homes will begin to collapse.

Interesting article. We had a bit of an earthquake here last summer and it underscored that, for the entire time I’ve lived in Montana, I had seriously underestimated the likelihood of seismic-related events. I’ve been thinking about it on and off since then (which is worthless without actually doing any followup) and figure that there are a few things I really need to bump up the priority list…most notably, I need to get the second water heater secured and have flexible couplings installed. I also need to get a couple gas shutoff wrenches and chain one to the gas meter out back. And, of course, reposition a certain amount of gear and supplies someplace where they’ll still be useful and accessible if a house falls on top of them.

ETA: Followup article

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I was going through blog email and discovered a couple email notices that a couple folks very generously sent a few bucks my way. Darn nice of ’em. Next week when the blog has its’ fifteen-year birthday I’ll probably lean on everyone for offerings to the bandwidth gods, but for those who jumped the gun a little early…much thanks.

Well, for one thing, an inordinate amount of people will chortle evilly and go “Sucks to be them. So long, hippies!”

California is the land of beaches, mountains, and all the legal marijuana you can stomach. It’s also, inconveniently, a dangerous minefield riddled with nasty fault lines that rupture without much warning, generating massive earthquakes that can level buildings, pulverize roads, and kill lots of people in the span of seconds.

First rule of surviving a disaster: Dont Be There. But, as we’ve pointed out recentl, some folks, despite wanting to leave for greener (and safer) pastures, are stuck where they are for various reasons. Good luck.

I have a friend whose uncle was a photographer for the railroads in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s. I have a suitcase here filled with ancient pictures of California in the late 1890’s right up to, and shortly after, the big San Francisco earthquake. Its eerie to look at those photos and imagine all those buildings, wharves, and people being destroyed in the following conflagration.

It’s easy to forget that a gigantic California earthquake is not the same as a giant San Francisco earthquake. We think of earthquake we think of tall buildings swaying, broken water mains, etc…but California covers a lot of ground that looks nothing like San Francisco or LA.

All the scientists keep saying that The Big One is ‘overdue’. Will it create Nevada beachfront property? Probably not. (Darn it.) But it will definitely be something pretty much unprecedented in modern American disaster responses. I would think that it would be an ‘all hands on deck’ event with pretty much every resource across the country being shipped westward. The survivor stories would be epic.

Happily, my little chunk of Montana seems relatively stable…last years earthquake notwithstanding. Sure, we have a supervolcano brewing a few hundred miles away, but the likelihood of that thing popping off within the incredibly small amount of time that is my lifespan is like hitting the PowerBall.

Will The Big One happen in my lifetime? I dunno. I figure I’ve got about 25 years left on my meter…thats a pretty small window, from a geological timeline, to have something happen. For the sake of the few decent people in California, I hope it doesn’t happen but theyd be crazy not to be geared up for it.

Apparently, according to my extraordinarily unscientific poll, when it comes to what country we think is going to be a big problem we give the nod to China. Not surprising, although what was mildly surprising was the way it was the top vote-getter.

The Chinese are famous for taking the long view of things. American politics tends to focus on short periods (like, say, four or eight years) when it comes to policy making… the Chinese, on the other hand, are in it for the long haul. I’ll give you an example:

I was reading an article about an airport in Sri Lanka that was built to handle a million passengers a year, but serves only 50,000. Who backed the construction of the airport? China. Why? Well, ostensibly its a development project for Third World countries. Mind you, its a development project that conveniently creates a large airport with runways capable of handling military transport. Interesting, that. And as you read about China’s other endeavours, you see more ‘long game’ maneuvering… long-term leases on huge swathes of African farmland spring to mind. And, again, those infrastructure improvements that look pretty noble and generous but are easily converted to military use.

You guys are all familiar with their recent activities in the South China sea, right? China is building islands in contested waters to give them a military launchpad for regional actions. Forward thinking stuff.

Economically, we hear about how China is the biggest buyer of US debt. A popular end-of-the-world scenario is China dumping that debt and doing tremendous financial damage to the US.

And there’s always that niggling little detail about how dang near everything we buy is Made in China. That includes electronic devices which sometimes mysteriously come with spyware already loaded into it that reports back to……?

Perhaps the Russians aren’t doing anything that China isn’t already doing, they just do it quieter. But, I’m of the opinion that between the two countries, I’d say China is a more viable threat than Russia because China’s focus is on economic warfare and dominance, whereas Russia seems to just go for the military. It’s the difference between being robbed by a shady accountant or by the guy in an alley with a baseball bat.

So, yeah, I’m in that percentage that voted China as the biggest problem.

For some reason, this amazingly stupid sentiment seems to be prevalent among Gyno-Americans whereas I have never encountered it among us Penile-Americans..the slogan: “live every day like its your last” or sometimes phrased as “live today like theres no tomorrow”, or some other similar phrasing.

Dude, I’m a survivalist. My whole existence as a survivalist is predicated on being prepared for tomorrow. Additionally, if people really lived their lives like there was no tomorrow we’d be living in ‘The Purge‘. With an absolute absence of long-term consequence (‘long term’ being no more than 25 hours from when you commit your act of non-tomorrowness) you know what you get? People settling old scores, killing people they dislike, shotgunning their annoying neighbors, looting everything in sight, and generally going completely off the chain. Thats what a world full of people who live like there’s no tomorrow looks like. Oh, sure..there will be some folks who will spend those last 24 hours with love ones, or conversing with their deity of choice, or simply committing suicide (kinda of like quitting before you get fired)… but by and large, you tell a couple billion humans that in 24 hours they will all be extinct you can bet there’s going to be some Olympic-level savagery taking place.

And, really, if you think about it, anyone who says they live like there’s no tomorrow is, most likely, just spouting pithy sayings. If they really believed that they’d have no qualms forking over the keys to their car, quitting their job, or doing any one of a host of things people who really aren’t going to see the sun rise would do.

Heck, think about it even more and you realize that someone who lives like theres no tomorrow is living a life devoid of the notion of consequence. Who wants to share a planet with a socipath like that? Expecially when they dress their insanity in the garb of some sort of noble enlightenment. Sure, maybe the Dali Lama says he lives like theres no tomorrow but I’ll bet you a hundred bucks he buys his toilet paper in a 12-roll pack.

What this world really needs is more people who live like there is a tomorrow. They plan, develop careers, establish long-term relationships with other people, invest, and engage in long-term goals and projects.

I have got to stop looking at the bumper stickers on the cars in front of me in traffic… its a recipe for aggravation.

No doubt you’ve heard the term ‘cashless society’, right? Basically, it means a system where the usage of physical currency has been supplanted by the use of ‘cashless’ forms of payment….debit cards, electronic wallets, etc. They’ve already started experimenting with this sort of thing in parts of Europe (naturally) and this sort of thing is being hailed by the technology fans as a tremendous advancement in society…muggings and robberies will fade as people no longer have cash. Why hold someone up in an alleyway or knock over a MiniMart when there’s no cash there?

Who else lauds this move to the cashless society? Folks who feel they have an interest in keeping tabs on what you do with your money. I’m of the opinion that whether I’m buying a Slim Jim and a copy of Hustler at 3am in 7-11, or buying a duffel bag of AR mags out of the back of a van in the Domino’s parking lot, what I do with my money is no one’s business but mine.

I was in the bank today and saw this lovely sign:

This is what I would call a ‘soft ban’. A hard ban would be the outright prohibition of the use of cash. Knowing that sort of thing might actually not go over well with a large chunk of the voting constituency, the alternative is to make the transactions more and more annoying to the point where the average Joe says “Screw it, it’s easier for me to just move the money to your account using [PayPal/ACH/Debitcard/etc]”. See, they don’t actually ban the cash, they just make it more and more difficult to the point where it may as well be a ban. (Machine guns are a good example…they’re not banned, they just require a tax..and fingerprints..and background checks…and police approval..and nine months of waiting…and…and…and…to the point where they may as well be banned.)

Governments angle, of course, is tax revenue. Oh, they cloak it in ‘war on terrorism’ nonsense…can’t let those guys have a bake sale amd then move the money to Islamabad to buy RPG’s..but a happy side-effect (for the .gov) is that it’s far easier to make sure you’re claiming all the money you make for tax purposes.

Taxes aside, no one needs to be able to look at financial records and determine who bought freezedrieds, ammo, guns, bus tickets, politically-sloganed sportswear, or anything else for that matter.

There will always be that group of people (raises hand) who prefer to do cash transactions for things. When Kroger stops taking cash and only takes EBT and debit cards, or the local Conoco only takes plastic ‘for the safety of our staff’, what choices are left to you? Barter? I suppose that might work but the guy working the island at the Costco gas pumps isn’t in any position to dispense fuel for cash (or cash equivalents). You’re only real recourse will be small businesses and entrepreneurs who will fill that market void…and, reasonably, make a profit. $2.50 a gallon for gas with your debit card at Costco, or $4 a gallon in the back of the WalMart parking lot from a bunch of five-gallon cans in the back of someones pickup.

I used to work in an adult bookstore. Virtually all the transactions were in cash for a very obvious reason – no one wanted their spouse (or whoever) getting the cancelled checks or credit card statements and seeing that someone had rented movie or bought toys. Did the store owner declare all that lovely undeclared cash? Beats me. But the takeaway here is that using cash afforded a level of privacy.

The usual crowd will address these issues by saying  ‘if you’ve got nothing to hide then you shouldn’t have a problem with it’. Thats the same crowd that has schoolkids wearing see-through backpacks and want’s a backdoor to unlock your phone. ‘Reasonable’ and ‘commonsense’ limitations on privacy, of course.

Whats the privacy-minded to do? Well, the obvious answer, to me, is also the shady answer – go create a fake identity and load it up with a debit card or other electronic banking info. But…that would be wrong, You could use some anonymous electronic payment form like a prepaid debit card like you’d find in vending machines or in the gift rack at the supermarket checkout, but those actually have some limitations on how they can be used. I suppose the lowest-impact thing to do would be to vigilantly make sure that your must-be-private transactions are done with cash. And, of course, whenever possible try to be paid in cash.

Cryptocurrency? That’s definitely something that has potential, but it’s still a bit too unstable at the moment. The idea is brilliant and wonderful and, of course, of great concern to .gov who thinks that unmonitored financial transactions are the work of terrorists and bad guys and not simply people who want their privacy.

Gold and silver are about as close a thing as we have to a universal currency. Trouble is, you still can’t really go into WalMart and buy a deli bucket of chicken wings with it. Oh you can convert it into a currency that will let you get your bucket of wings, but if that WalMart doesn’t take cash then what exactly will you convert it to?

I’m not sure what the solution is. I suppose it’s to simply be prepared to pay a premium to do things the ‘off the grid’ way. The more clever and morally flexible of us will, no doubt, come up with some workarounds but that has its own set of problems and issues.

For now, I suppose I’ll just have to keep an eye on how things develop.