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Article – Switzerland is getting rid of its emergency stockpile of coffee

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ZURICH – Switzerland on Wednesday announced plans to abolish the nation’s emergency stockpile of coffee, in place for decades, after declaring the beans not vital for human survival, though opposition to the proposal is brewing.

Nestle, the maker of instant coffee Nescafe and other importers, roasters and retailers are required by Swiss law to store bags of raw coffee. The country stockpiles other staples, too, such as sugar, rice, edible oils and animal feed.

If you’ve spent any time as a survivalist, you know that the Swiss are the closest thing to a country that has institutionalized preparedness (the Israelis probably get runner-up). Their ‘secret’ bunkers that litter the countryside are famous…as was their mandate about new home construction including shelter space. Add into the mix the long-standing (though that may be changing) access to military arms for its citizenry and you have a recipe for nation that could be said to have made preparedness a national platform.

And…apparently….coffee was part of that preparedness plan.

In just about every classic piece of survivalist fiction (“Alas Babylon” springs to mind) there is always a little section about how the lack of coffee is greatly lamented by survivors (with cigarettes and alcohol coming in a close second). The Swiss, apparently, hedged their bets and stockpiled some java to get everyone started when they wake up in the morning.

I don’t drink coffee, but I do keep some freeze dried coffee around. I am told by aficionados that although freeze dried coffee is regarded rather poorly, it is magnitudes of order better than no coffee at all.

My own personal addiction is CocaCola. I can go without if I have to, but I won’t be happy about it. I find that my cravings for the sugar and caffeine can be met with long-term-storage-friendly drink mixes such as powdered ice tea mix. However, for the folks that smoke or have a less-than-healthy relationship with alcohol, well, I don’t envy them.

Part of me is a bit disappointed that the Swiss are slowly dismantling the policies and practices that made them a beacon of preparedness. For a while they were a great example of ‘civil defense’ to point to when discussing national policies on the subject.

But, in the end, the only person responsible for your safety and security is you. It’s nice when governments make it easier with things like tax breaks, flexible building codes, and free ammo, but you always need to operate as if it’s going to be just whatever you can do for yourself… which is often how it actually goes.

Link – Prehistoric Preppers: A Look Back at Pre-Y2K Survival Gear and Conventional Wisdom

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Last month I mentioned that this year is the twenty-year anniversary of the Great Y2K Scare. I happen to be bopping around the interwebs and came across this dated-but-still-interesting piece about how things have changed preparedness-wise since then.

As a child in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s. I lived through an odd era of the gun culture. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a lot of survivalists and those preparing for WWIII suddenly had less to worry about…until President Clinton was elected and the threat that Y2K posed became a thing.

Thinking back on such a time, I now laugh at a lot of the ideas and beliefs that ran rampant in certain segments of the population. But exist they did.

I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.

The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.

I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?

I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.

Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.

Article – The grandmaster diet: How to lose weight while barely moving

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I am in no way a sports guy, so for me to link to an article from ESPN must be an indication that there is something interesting going o. And, indeed, there is…

At 5-foot-6, Caruana has a lean frame, his legs angular and toned. He also has a packed schedule for the day: a 5-mile run, an hour of tennis, half an hour of basketball and at least an hour of swimming.

As he’s jogging, it’s easy to mistake him for a soccer player. But he is not. This body he has put together is not an accident. Caruana is, in fact, an American grandmaster in chess, the No. 2 player in the world. His training partner, Chirila? A Romanian grandmaster. And they’re doing it all to prepare for the physical demands of … chess? Yes, chess.

The TL;DR version is this: even though chess is the least apparently physically taxing sport since competitive napping, the studies show that the stress, mental load, and related stresses cause your body to lose weight the same as if you were engaged in heavy sports.

What this means for survivalists is that the people who stress about long-term food being loaded with fat, salt, and calories that you don’t need when all you’re doing is sitting in a fallout shelter waiting for the rads to go down are missing a point. And in a crisis, the severe stress and mental taxation that you will be subject to will take a toll on yourbody even if you’re just sitting around a battery radio in the dark as the city crumbles around you.

Read the article and substitute ‘chess’ for ‘disasters’ and you’ll see how this affects you and I.

Grandmasterssurvivalists in competitiondisasters are subjected to a constant torrent of mental stress. That stress, in turn, causes their heart rates to increase, which, in turn, forces their bodies to produce more energy to, in turn, produce more oxygen. It is, according to Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at Washington University in St. Louis, and Philip Cryer, a metabolism expert at the school, a vicious, destructive cycle.

Meanwhile, playerssurvivalists also eat less during tournamentsdisasters , simply because they don’t have the time or the appetite. “The simple explanation is when they’re thinking about chess disasters, they’re not thinking about food,” says Ewan C. McNay, assistant professor of psychology in the behavioral neuroscience program at the University of Albany.

Stress also leads to altered — and disturbed — sleep patterns, which in turn cause more fatigue — and can lead to more weight loss. A brain operating on less sleep, even by just one hour, Kasimdzhanov notes, requires more energy to stay awake during the chess game. Some grandmasterssurvivalists report dreaming about chessdisasters, agonizing over what they could have done differently for hours in their sleep, and waking up exhausted.

Sound familiar?

Continue reading the article and read what these people do to maintain mental acuity under these conditions of heightened stress. Big exam coming up? Strategy session with your department chairs? Making long-range plans for your familys survival? You’ll need your brain in peak performance so you might want to read what these guys do to their diets, exercise patterns, the way they breathe, and even the way they sit in order to maximize brainpower for “the ultimate test of cerebral fitness.”

I’ve noticed that when I need stone-cold clear-headed maximum-brainpower I get best results if I exercise to get the blood flowing and don’t eat for several hours beforehand. The ability to think clearly and efficiently is probably the most useful talent for someone who plans on making their way through the crapstorm that life tends to hurl at us once in a while. Optimizing your body to allow you to ‘think better’ may be one of the better tricks you can have up your sleeve.

Link – Study Finds Rise In ‘Doomsday Prepping’ Due To Mainstream American ‘Culture Of Fear’

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CANTERBURY, England — “Doomsday prepping” or stockpiling food, medicine, weapons and other supplies in case of an apocalyptic scenario has long been considered peculiar behavior only exhibited by conspiracy theorists and other extremists in the United States. However, such prepping has actually been steadily on the rise in the U.S. over the past decade. So, what’s causing this surge in stockpiled rice packets and underground bunkers? One group of researchers say it is an ever growing sense of impending doom in American culture.

First of all, England is a nation of cucks who have gone from ruling an empire that was 1/4 of the planet to ruling an island the size of Michigan. Their opinions on anything ‘Murican really don’t matter. But….

I am flummoxed when some self-righteous moron, when told of someone stockpiling food or somesuch, loudly proclaims “I won’t live my life in fear!” Clearly, they don’t realize how stupid that sentence is. Let’s examine it:

  • They have homeowners insurance because they are scared of their house burning down
  • They have auto insurance because they are scared of being in an accident
  • They have health insurance because they are scared of getting sick
  • They have life insurance because they are scared of dying
  • They have retirement plans because they are scared of being old and poor
  • They have pepper spray on their keychain because they are scared of being mugged

So, really, they are already living a life of fear. However, if you point that out to them they will declare “That’s not living in fear! Thats taking reasonable precautions! Thats just commonsense!”

And they will never realize the irony of that statement.

So, you and I, in our food-laden, heavily-armed, well-fueled, economically-prepared homes are always going to be seen as the wierdos…right up until the quake happens, the riots start, the tornadoes hit, or the economy splatters…..then we’re going to be everyone’s brand-new best friend. (And, holy crap, are the unprepared in for a surprise when it turns out that the people they pointed at and made fun of turn out to not be terribly enthused about sharing their food and have the resources to make that “No” stick.)

Preparedness is not a uniquely American thing…to Europeans I’m sure it looks that way because preparedness is about the individual taking responsibility for themselves. And in pretty much every country that sort of individualistic character trait has been stamped out in favor of various forms of IngSoc-style thinking. But the desire to trake care of ones self and ones own is a rather universal trait, it’s just that we Americans aren’t terribly embarrassed about it and don’t really feel the need to apologize for it. At least, I don’t.

 

Article – How To Read A Map

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The next idiot that has to get hauled out of the woods horizontally because he blindly trusted his GPS, or worse, his celphone, will not be the last. Natural selection in action. There’s plenty of good books on the subject, but here’s some basics.

“Once you’re outdoors, you can’t rely on technology anymore,” says Christiaan Adams, developer advocate for Google Earth. Being able to read a good old-fashioned paper map is one of the most fundamental outdoor skills. In case you never learned or need a refresher, here are the basics.

Article – Outlaw Country

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A fascinating article about someone who, admittedly a ‘hard luck case’, moves to ‘survivalist country’ and winds up in the sort of situation that has no good resolution.

The takeaway here, as I see it, is that while we like the idea of a place out in the middle of nowhere, that middle of nowhere also appeals to another subset of people that we may not particularly want to share oxygen with. In short, the ‘wide open spaces’ and ‘lack of oversight’ that make a place appealing to you and I also appeal to some less savory types who might be your neighbors. And, sometimes, it can turn ugly in a big way.

Whatever terms he initially plugged into Google or Facebook or YouTube, he was soon frequenting websites promoting far-right conspiracy theories, watching videos predicting imminent social collapse, and reading how-to guides on survival preparedness. Over a few months in late 2012, the content of Taylor’s Facebook posts shifted from topics like trucks and music to videos from the hacktivist group Anonymous and posts about pandemic disease, the threat of GMO foods, the rise of Islam, and the Obama administration’s purported plans to confiscate everyone’s guns. Taylor devoured TV shows like Doomsday Preppers, Survivor Man, Live Free or Die, and Man, Woman, Wild. The notion of living off the land allowed him to imagine ways he might escape the wage economy and finally make something of himself.

RTWT.

Article – The Next Plague Is Coming. Is America Ready?

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An interesting article about disease-laden Africa and how all the plagues and pestilence in any part of the world is just one Boeing away from becoming our problem.

A 340-mile road, flanked by deep valleys, connects Kikwit to Kinshasa. In 1995, that road was so badly maintained that the journey took more than a week. “You’d have to dig yourself out every couple of minutes,” Mikolo says. Now the road is beautifully paved for most of its length, and can be traversed in just eight hours. Twelve million people live in Kinshasa—three times the combined population of the capitals affected by the 2014 West African outbreak. About eight international flights depart daily from the city’s airport.

If Ebola hit Kikwit today, “it would arrive here easily,” Muyembe tells me in his office at the National Institute for Biomedical Research, in Kinshasa. “Patients will leave Kikwit to seek better treatment, and Kinshasa will be contaminated immediately. And then from here to Belgium? Or the U.S.?” He laughs, morbidly.

Zombie are the new normal in EOTW fiction, but before then the big science fiction threat was some sort of superflu (“The Stand”, anyone?)

We’re kinda seeing it now in NYC with their measles episode. Heck, right here in my college town we’re having an outbreak of whooping cough. Not to get anyone’s tinfoil hat into a twist, but that whole “I don’t need to vaccinate my kid if everyone else is vaccinated” doesn’t seem to be working very well.

It’s tough to avoid people, but I suppose if you live out in the desert where you can go quite a while between human contact you might wind up missing the whole pandemic. Or you might die alone drowning in your own fluid-filled lungs. :::shrug:::

The folks at Fatherland Homeland security used to tell us to keep duct tape and plastic sheeting around for this sort of thing. Remember that? (And remember that awesome color-coded alert system they introduced?)

I suppose the only thing you can really do to mitigate your chances of being a victim of some pandemic is avoid people, be prepared to stay indoors for a length of time, and bleach/sterilize/sanitize the hell out of everything. I know that I could lock the doors and not leave my house for a couple months. Thats no guarantee against catching Captain Trips but it seems that your chances of catching something from someone is greatly reduced when you avoid all contact with those someones.

The article linked above is pretty interesting. It just reinforces that the African continent is well and truly screwed.

Video – Dangerous Things Are Dangerous

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A very interesting video from Ian McCollum (aka ‘Gun Jesus’) detailing the time a trip to the range put a chunk of shrapnel in his chest.

There’s a lot in here about the importance of medical training and equipment when you spend a bunch of time out in the desert shooting hundred year old machine guns. However, whats really interesting is something that is sort of oblique to the main issue – how do you direct help to your location when you’re “in the middle of nowhere”?

The range I shoot at is an established shooting range in the sense that if you called 911 and said “Im at the So-N-So Range” they would know where that is and how to get there. But, what about when you go off the beaten path? At that point, you’re going to have to try and meet folks halfway by getting your bleeding butt to some sort of common rally point that the medics actually can find.

While I try to maintain a pretty decent degree of situational awareness I am surprised to say that when I go hunting I never take a moment to notice what mile marker I’m parking at when I disembark and make my way into the timber. It occurs to me that I need to take note of the sort of information that would come in handy if I had to call for assistance if I got hurt out in the sticks. It would be nice to be able to tell the dispatcher “Yeah, its along Highway 200, just after mile marker 27 theres a logging road heading east. Im parked four miles up that road.”

Of course, I also usually carry a couple signalling devices (flare/smoke) so that “close” becomes “close enough”.

It’s always a good idea to have an exit strategy and to ‘begin with the end in mind’. Which means when heading out into the sticks I need to start thinking about “what if”. Obviously I carry a certain amount of gear in case things go sideways, but I need to start being more cognizant of where I am and how I would direct others to that location. While I know how to use UTM coords, I wonder if the 911 people would have a clue.

Regardless, an interesting video to watch and a reminder that shooting guns can sometimes turn dangerous and therefore it’s always a good idea to have some gear (and training) to stay on top of things in case someone gets a hole punched in them.

Speaking of Gun Jesus, have you guys seen his Kickstarter? The man wrote a book that he hoped might garner $25,000 in sales. He failed to take into account his internet notoriety and he leaped past the $25,000 to almost $270,000…and thats with three weeks still left on the kickstarter.

Video – Should I Buy A Used Ruger P95

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An interesting video:

I’ve made no secret that I rather like the P95, but I like it for one very simple reason: for about $200 it’s the best gun you can buy. Thats not to say its the best gun out there, or that its even a ‘very good’ gun. Rather it means that if you have $200 in your pocket, unless you get extraordinarily lucky, the Ruger P95 will be the best gun you can afford.

But…there’s some other things to think about.

On the police trade-in market these days there are tons of Glock and S&W .40 caliber pistols. For about $250 you can have a S&W M&P or a Glock 22/23. And, honestly, both of those guns are better than the P95.

Why don’t I get a stack of those pistols if theyre better than the P95 and only a few bucks more? Well, first off, I already filled my need for some cheap disposable pistols…I already have a dozen of the P-series so there’s really nothing to be gained by picking up the other ones. Additionally, I’m not a .40 guy. I prefer the 9mm.

However, if you’re looking for something that is ‘affordable’ and far better than a HiPoint, Bersa, or Taurus, head over to Kings and check the used pistols. Or, you can cruise Gunbroker and try your luck at scoring some $200 P95’s. They don’t usually go that cheap, but there’s always plenty to bid on and if you bid often enough you’ll get one at that price.

Guns like these are not really my first choice for carrying around everyday (although you could), but rather they are ‘loaners’ or ‘expendable’ handguns. Guns that you don’t mind loaning or giving to a friend who needs a gun, that you can leave in a truck or cabin and not be heartbroken if it gets stolen, or that you can abuse by getting wet and banged up as you rough-n-tumble your way through some disaster. They are like Bic lighters…they work quite reliably but they are basically disposable and cheap enough that you can have several.

I’ve ordered up a few of the police trade-in M&Ps for a friend and I have to say, I really like the gun. We got a .45 ACP version with three magazines for, I believe, $270 which is a smoking deal for a .45 with spare mags. What amazed me was how narrow and comfortable the grip was for that double stack mag. Very impressive.

Anyway, I was perusing YouTube and saw that video and thought I’d pass it along since I’ve mentioned my penchant for cheap, uber-stout handguns more than a few times.

Article – Air Force veteran worried about EMPs takes us into his doomsday bunker

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On Thursday, President Trump signed an executive order to protect against a electromagnetic pulse (EMP) that “has the potential to disrupt, degrade, and damage technology and critical infrastructure systems.”

The order added that man-made or naturally-occurring EMPs “can affect large geographic areas, disrupting elements critical to the Nation’s security and economic prosperity, and could adversely affect global commerce and stability. The Federal Government must foster sustainable, efficient, and cost-effective approaches to improving the Nation’s resilience to the effects of EMPs.”

TJ Gray, a Vietnam veteran and self-sufficienist, recently told us that EMPs are perhaps what worries him most in terms of a catastrophe that society would not be able to handle.

Interesting article. Not sure of the point of it, but still entertaining.