Actually, this time I had a fairly legitimate reason. I have decided that I need the oft-ridiculed “bathroom gun” and I needed something that would be largely impervious to the moisture encountered in a bathroom environment.
Prices on these things are getting a little higher (but, hey, the prices of everything are getting a little higher these days. Thanks Brandon!) but I still managed to nick this one for about $200. And, as I’ve said, for $200 you can’t really do much better unless you find some weird mislabelled Glock or SIG on Gunbroker.
Only drawback to this particular boomtoy is that the vendor shipped it with a .40 magazine instead of a 9mm magazine. Fortunately I have an ammo can full of Ruger 9mm mags so it isn’t a hardship.
These things really are unspoken heroes in terms of utility. Theyre a bit chunky, and they won’t impress your friends at the range, but I have yet to even hear of one breaking, they’ve been utterly reliable, and for the price they are basically disposable. As a truck/cabin/cache gun, these things are hard to beat.
I’m actually a fairly open-minded individual. I know that the impression of most survivalists is that we are a bunch of Bible-thumping, gun-humping, right-wing reactionaries who are the enemy of all things ‘non-traditional’. Not so for me. I may not agree with something but…you do you, man.
However…
I absolutely abhor fusion cuisine. Taking one particular genre/species/school of food and combing it with another is… wrong. Example: Taco pizza. Look, either you go eat a taco or you order a pizza. You don’t mix them together. It’s just…..no. Mexican stir-fry? Egg foo omelette? Ranch dressing on pizza? Egg sandwich between two donuts? No, no, no.
But…once in a while…I sin against the culinary gods. Todays affront: the breakfast burrito.
As a survivalist I am all about a couple tings when it comes to food: portability, shelf-life, and quantity. And, as much as I hate to drift into mixing cuisines, the breakfast burrito is handy. It’s a hearty traditional breakfast that requires no tableware, can be rolled up in some aluminum foil and tucked in a pocket, and carries a powerful caloric/carbohydrate punch.
Todays dietary deviance utilized long-term stores just to see what would happen:
We have some dehydrated eggs from CostCo, the survivalist staple of canned bacon, some instant hash browns, some freeze dried cheese blend, and, of course, tortillas. Now, the tortillas were not out of long-term. But, to be fair, I have drums of corn and flour, a grain mill, and some cast iron – so I could make tortillas from scratch using my long-term grain if I had to.
Eggs cooked up just fine, bacon spent some time in a pan to get the fat melted and mixed with the rehydrated hashbrowns. Mix in some cheese and wrap it up in a tortilla:
Probably its most redeeming feature: wrapped in aluminum foil you can shove this in a pocket or mag pouch and eat it later in the day with no muss or fuss.
Results were yummy, but could have benefited probably from a sharper cheese. Some salsa (theres that stupid fusion thing) would also have been nice. And, I do keep salsa on the shelf in storage, but didnt feel like cracking it open. As an aside, given the ingredients in salsa, you can source the individual freeze dried ingredients and make your own instant salsa blend.
Breakfast is the one meal that, after the apocalypse, will be actually better than what i eat now. For some reason, all the things you’d do for breakfast seem to have long-term storage options that lend them quite well to the survivalist pantry. I’ve posted about it before, but a post-apocalyptic breakfast menu would actually better than what I eat now. Go figure.
Man, it’s just a fascinating world that we live in thee days, innit? I mean, we wind up living in/through a pandemic which pretty much no one (well, except the Chinese) saw coming. Then we get inflation that hasn’t been seen in a generation (thanks Brandon!), and now we’re shooting UFO’s out of the sky like it’s a Space Invaders tournament. I have no idea what sort of Black Swan could possibly be next…I mean, who would have thought any of these most recent crises were even plausible?
Remember: while we cannot control the things that are out of our control, we can control our responses to them. I can’t control the idiots in Washington driving the economy into a ditch, but I can control my response to that. And I do. My response is the same as my response to most thing out of my control – set things up so that I can at least exert a little bit of control over the consequences.
Right now my biggest concern is positioning myself to take advantage of the decline in the housing market as rates go up, qualified buyers go down, and the resultant decline in prices. Somewhere out there is a piece of property that is exactly what I’m looking for and it’s previous owner is slashing the price to make a sale. Of course, buying the property is only the beginning of the financial journey – once it’s done, then comes the building and improvements. A chunk of nowhere is nice. A chunk of nowhere with a comfy, cozy, hardened little house on it is better.
Although my biggest concern at the moment is, as I said, getting my ducks in a row to purchase some property, there’s still that little bugaboo of being ready for everything else that could go wrong. For 90% of the problems, the quick fix is cash. Water heaters, transmissions, broken teeth, family emergencies, layoffs, and a host of other personal EOTWAWKI’s are fixed with a generous application of greenbacks. And for what the greenbacks don’t fixe, there’s food, fuel, amo, guns, meds, clothes, and a zillion other things to help take the sting out of whatever crisis is coming down the pike.
Still, you can never know whats gonna happen…(pandemic? Who had that one on their scorecard?) So, I keep doing what I’ve always been doing … stock up, have extra, be ready to shift gears on a moments notice, etc, etc.
Not an inexpensive way to live, unfortunately, but dirt cheap compared to the costs of being unprepared.
Deciding that, while plastic mags seem to be doing okay, it might be nice to have some durable metal magazines for the HK94/MP5 series of firearms I own, I ordered up a six-pack of MKE brand metal MP5 mags.
Results were mixed. The mags functioned fine in two guns, but in the MP5k-style gun the recoil of each shot would displace the magazine in the well and the mag would not be locked in place, thus resulting in failures to feed. Since the mags worked okay in the other guns, and the plastic mags worked fine, I’m suspecting that the mag catch on this particular gun is not ‘pushing inwards’ all the way to securely engage the magazine notch. Not sure if its a part that can be adjusted, as on an AR, or what. I need to experiment a bit.
For the record, the Unity-AC and ETS plastic mags have worked fine across the board..Because these are metal mags, and the area for the magazine catch to engage is pressed into the metal rather than milled out as on the pastic mags, perhaps the recess is not as deep as it could be. But…that didnt seem to matter in the other two guns…so Im guessing its the magazine catch. Fortunately, if thats the case, it could be as simple a fix as replacing the magazine catch. Need to play with it some more.
One of the nice things about having guns that are identical is that when it comes to testing things out, having a sample size of more than one is very handy for eliminating variables.
I’m going to go ahead and say the MKE mags were worth it since they appear to work just fine in my other two guns and its only these mags, in one particular gun, that is giving me a problem. Im pretty confident the problem is the magazine catch and I’ll probably head over to HKParts and order a replacement.
One of the more notable events this week was the Chinese taking an aerial tour of Montana, and our missile fields, with a rather large balloon.
The interesting thing about the Chinese is that they think long-term. In this country, and many Western ones, we make policy and plans that are, perhaps, one or two political terms in the future. For example, we have a four-year term for president, so a lot of plans are on a four or eight year timetable. The Chinese don’t limit themselves like that. They plan for fifty years, or more, out there.
This is most evident in their Belt And Road Initiative to create streamlined lines of travel for commerce (and, no doubt, military equipment) across a good chunk of Asia and into Europe.
Africa is a special case to the Chinese. They’ve been investing heavily in infrastructure projects…building massive airports in tiny countries that never see a 747 but will see plenty of Chinese military transports. Large swaths of land are leased or purchased by China for their ‘food security’ program. It’s only a matter of time before, at some point, they decide to ‘take Africa private’ and simply nudge out the local governments and install their own
Long before that happens, though, China will flex it’s biggest muscle – its economic one. When your economy is dependent on Chinese goods and Chinese debt purchases, you’ve gone from being equals to being beholding to a patron.
Of course, things might be different with the whole Russian situation these days. The Russians and the Chinese had a big dustup about 60 years ago in a case of ‘my Communism is better than your Communism’ and it looked like the two of them might start lobbing canned sunshine at each other.
The Russians kicking of a war in Europe would, no doubt, put a crimp in those Chinese plans for economic domination although I’ve no doubt they have various contingency plans to make such an event work for them.
And, of course, lets not forget these are the same folks that let loose a virus that killed a buncha people and they have yet to have their feet held to the fire about it.
So that ballon episode? Thats just a visible part of China’s plan to get its Peking ducks in a row for when it decides to really start applying the pressure to the international, and American, community.
An interesting question that, I think, will have two very distinct camps of supporters and not a lot of middle ground: does a survivalist need a military-style helmet?
We’ve seen the ‘high speed, low drag operators’ running around in their bump helmets. These helmets are more for protecting your noggin from banging against doorways, window frames, the inside of an MRAP, etc, etc, rather than offering ballistic protection. In fact, as I read it, skateboard helmets were sometimes pressed into duty before the military was fully on board with the bump helmet.
But we’re not talking about that. We’re talking about the modern(ish) PASGT that we see frequently at gun shows and the like. Does a survivalist need one of those? Or is wearing one just a form of LARPing?
Well, to be fair, they’re a great place to mount your flip-down night vision. But, how many of us can afford to have a sweet set of NODs? So if you don’thave a need for a helmet-mounted piece of gear, do you need a helmet?
I think that in most crises your probably going to need a protective helmet to spare you the head injuries from debris, tree limbs, falling glass, etc, etc, more than you will need the ballistic protection from incoming rifle fire. (And I’d put the need for protection from shell fragments at near-zero.)
On the other hand, some folks figure that if youre going to be wearing body armour why wouldn’t you extend that level of protection to your brainpan? If you’re doing the Roof Korean thing, don’t you want as much protection as possible? Good argument there.
I’ll admit that, tucked away in the bunker, there’s a PASGT sitting there that I picked up years ago. I know it fits, but other than that I have never worn it. But, for some reason, I like knowing I have it. If I had to run out the door to stem the horde of zombies would I grab it? I’m really not sure. But I like having that option.
What about you? Does a helmet have a place in your preps? Military helmet or construction/debris helmet?
I have…a few….MP5 clones sitting around here. What I don’t have are genuine HK mags. ANd, thats a little understandable since the bloody things are around $75+ ea. And, for reasons known only to Crom, the fine folks at Magpul don’t make any MP5 sticks. (Although they do get points for making a drum.)
Alternatives? ETS makes ’em. And the former Yugoslavia has the “AC Unity” brand whcih is suddenly everywhere in the wholesale world. Prices are around $20 a mag, which is reasonable, and they seem to work okay although some can be a bit snug.
MKE makes MP5 clones and they sell metal mags. The MKE metal sticks have a seemingly good rep, and although I’ve found the plastic mags to be OK, I’d rather travel the apocalypse with something a bit more hardy. So, I ordered up a half dozen from Atlantic Firearms and will let you know how they perform.
And, dang it, at some point I’m going to have to grit my teeth and buy a half dozen genuine HK mags. But, lordy, thats some expensive happysticks.
Last time I saw Pedro Pascal, he was doing an admirable job at Hollywood Gun Fu in “Kingsman”.
But apparently he’s in the new HBO post-apocalypse series “The Last Of Us”. I’m familiar with the game a bit, and its a storyline I can get into. Now that Walking Dead is history, I need a good post-apocalyptic fantasyworld to climb into.
Any of you guys been watching this series and wanna share your opinion on it? I know it’s only three episodes old, but I’ve been seeing some good reviews on it.
Continuing the cleanup-slash-organizing-slash-evaluation episode I referred to earlier, it’s interesting to see what has and has not aged well over the course of..hmm..twenty years in some cases.
As I mentioned, the older MagLites, while still having some utility, are far inferior to the more modern LED and CR123 flashlights that have twice (or more) the brightness, five times the run time, one third the size, and twice the price. Ignoring the handiness of a 3-cell D-battery MagLite for rearranging someones dental work, they don’t do anything that isn’t done more efficiently and compactly by a modern LED pocket light.
Things like rice and wheat have stored just fine in 15-gallon ‘blue barrels’. The #10 cans from the LDS cannery, which are between 10-15 years old, have held up just fine. Same for the oatmeal that I rotated through a couple years back. Some stuff keeps well, some stuff does not.
Notoriously, Duracell batteries tend to poop the bed after a surprisingly short amount of time. I have learned the hard way to NOT leave them in any device that is going into storage.
So, the cleanup continues….curious to see what sort of “Hey, I forgot about those” turn up.
