Tag Archives: theory

Lithium AA batts at CostCo Pt II

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Someone asked me in email about the circumstances under which Id use the more expensive lithium batts as opposed to the less expensive ‘regular’ batts.

The biggest gripe I have against non-lithium batts is their propensity to leak and absolutely destroy whatever device they were in (lookin’ at you, Duracell!). For something like my pocket flashlight it isn’t that big a deal..go on Amazon, spend $25, get another flashlight. But there is some fairly expensive stuff…GPS, trail cams, radios, night vision, thermal vision, weaponlights, optics,etc…that take AA batteries and the last thing I want is to have that expensive gear rendered useless and needing replacement. The financial hit isn’t insignificant.

But, more importantly, if a piece of gear is critical then it is absolutely worth the extra expense to use the lithium batteries. For example, all the spare AA batts in my Bag O’ Tricks are lithium. Why? Because if I’m in a situation where I need to reload my electronic device from the spare batteries I carry in my Bag, then the situation is such that the last thing I need is to a) discover that the batteries that have been in my bag for the last year are dead, and b) have my device, whatever it is, get taken out of service because the batteries puked in it.

Any piece of critical gear needs every advantage it can get in terms of reliability, performance, resilience, and longevity. If I’m out hunting and I break a leg, have to call in search and rescue, and they ask for my location, the last thing I want is a) my phone charger being dead, b) my GPS being dead, c) my emergency locator being dead, and d) me being dead.

Crom forbid I ever have to point a rifle at anything thats got language skills, but if it comes to that I sure don’t want that little red dot or MOA circle to not be there when I bring the rifle up. (Backup iron sights? Of course!) And I also don’t want to replace a $600 Eotech because CostCo Duracells ossified the internals of the battery compartment.

Lithium batts aren’t infallible, I’ve read of occasions where they’ve crapped the bed too. But I’d say I’ve read about that happening once for every hundred stories I’ve read about Duracells and other batteries puking their guts out.

TL,DR: if its a piece of gear that is critical to your survival, painful to replace, or both…feed it the batteries that are least likely to crap out on you in a pinch.Upfront costs will be a little higher but, IMHO, worth it.

The harsh reality of gun logistics

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Remember when the SCAR from FN was gonna be the new standard by which all other ‘battle rifles/carbines’ would be judged? Maybe not so much. And while FN makes excellent stuff and parts breakage may not be as big an issue as with some brands, if youre gonna drop several grand on one rifle youd like to have the expectation its going to be able to live a long life of parts support from the OEM. To be fair, there is some third-party representation out there for the SCAR, but with the discontinuation of the model it seems those third parties are going to have to pivot to other things to take up the revenue loss. In short, if you love your SCAR perhaps it is the time to stockpile parts and mags. Or, trade it in for something a bit more plebian that is well-supported.

As Friend Of The BLog(tm), Tam over at View From The Porch sagely notes about FN: They’re still making ARs.

I ceratinly go off the reservation once in a while when it comes to picking up a less-than-common boomtoy. I have a few Mini-14s here which are notoriously difficult to source spare parts for, for example. But for ‘run out the door’ guns for when things suddenly become PvP, it’s the boring-and-predictable trio of AR, Glock, and 870/500. Guns that are rather ‘unsexy’ but will have logistical support  until youre on life support.

This doesnt mean those are the ‘best’ guns. It just means that theyre the ones likely to have the biggest, broadest, most robust logisitcal support. Just because something is popular or numerous doesnt always equate to ‘best’. Sometimes the not-the-best is the smarter choice simply because the logistics support is stronger. I love  me some HiPower, but I carry a Glock. I shoot better with the HiPower, but finding parts and mags is not nealy as easy as for the Glock. And since I usually buy guns, for preparedness purposes, with the attitude of “what if I can’t get any more of these tomorrow?” I tend to trend towards stuff that is going to have easy logistics.

In reality, if you have a SCAR it is highly likely, almost to the point of certainty, that you will never use it enough to have a parts breakage issue come to the point that the rifle is shut down. But I don’t like to play the odds if I can avoid it. Sure, the likelihood of tomorrow bringing the apocalypse and me spending the next twenty years living, running, hiding, fighting, guarding, and shooting with one rifle is virtually zero. But it isn’t zero. Survivalism is about resilience….min-max’ing things to give yourself every possible percentage point in your favor. And life has a habit of throwing some wild curve balls.

Doesn’t mean the AR is the ‘best’ rifle, it simply means that it is the best supported rifle. And long-term support is a very highly desired quality to have when picking something to run out the door with.

Invariably, someone in comments will chime in with ‘amateurs talk tactics, professionals talk logistics’. I’m not a professional, but I don’t think I’m an amateur either. What I definitely am is a guy who tries to set dogma aside (“Hurrr  hurr…back-to-back World War champions!”) and look at the choices from a particular viewpoint. That viewpoint is the one of “If what I have today is all I can have for the rest of my life, would I be okay?” If tomorrow the pipeline were shut off for the AR…no new guns, no new mags, etc., would I have the logistics in place to keep them going for the long-term? Absolutely. The market has provided unlimited resources that make getting squared away for a scenario like that a piece of cake. Compare against, say, the SCAR…or the G36….or the Mini-14…or the Beretta AR70…or any ’boutique’ or niche carbine.

All this to say that when you’re picking your next boomtoy with an eye towards the apocalypse, it might serve you well to pick something with an already established logistics train. At the moment, the AR platform is probably the most heavily supported platform of anything with a shoulder stock on it in the US. AK, HK, M1A, whatever….all fine bullet thowers but all way down on the ladder when compared to the logistical all-you-can-eat buffet that the AR brings.

I know it sounds like I’m stroking the AR here, but its simply that it is the most relatable and prevalent example of a wildly robustly supported platform. It’s subjective, but here’s my thinking on what platforms have the most robust support:

Rifle/carbine – The AR by miles. After that probably the AK. Everything after those two are more distant on the list. Plenty of support out there for the M1A and the AR10, but not like those first two choices.

Shotgun – Remington and Mossberg. Even with Remington’s reduced role these days there are literally tons and tons of parts, barrels, stocks, etc out there waiting to be had. Same for Mossberg. That Turkish M4 Benelli-clone you bought is cool, but when you need a new recoil spring or shell lifter you might have a problem.

Pistol – Glock wins hands down. One of the few guns you can build from scratch using only aftermarket parts. Maybe tied with 1911 for ubiquity, but as I’ve said, a Glock repair uses, at most, a punch and a hammer. A 1911 repair uses a mill and a lathe. VP9, Beretta 92, Sig 226, Smith M&P, all fine guns but not nearly the same level of support….close though.

.22 Rifle – The 10/22 is the hands-down logistics champ. Nothing else comes close.

Im sure SCAR owners will be fine, and FN says they’ll have parts for years, but that doesn’t change the fact that when you adopt a new platform you are at the mercy of the logistics needed to support it. Something to think about on your next preparedness gun purchase.

 

The War Budget

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Good judgement comes from experience, and experience? That comes from bad judgement.  If you suffer a job loss, catastrophic event, divorce/death of a spouse, major medical episode, or any number of financial EOTWAWKI events, you’re already at a disadvantage because your head is in a bad place and you’re probably in no shape to make short-term tactical financial decisions. Why would you be? Caught in the moment, your major thought is survival..keeping the lights on and not starving.

We wargame and make plans for the end of the world, right? We have maps, escape routes, stashes of gear, emergency communication protocols, etc. But, as I’ve said over and over, you’ll have a bunch of small personal EOTWAWKI events that are resolved with $50 bills long before you have the EOTWAWKI event that is resolved with .50 BMG.

So, it would stand to reason, that if youre going to be so prepared that you have contingency plans for the apocalypse, perhaps it might be a good idea to have plans for those personal apocalypses as well.

I learned the hard way that when youre suddenly in a financial hardship and you don’t know where the next dollar is coming from, thats the worst time to suddenly write a budget or spending plan. Dude, you need to have that duck already in the row so that when you get that big pink slip or your income takes a headshot you simply open up the folder to the plan and you follow it.

For me, thats what I call ‘the war budget’. I try to live on a budget, which I have always recommended you do, and I have created and maintained a separate budget just for a crisis like the one I described. When my personal financial situation suddenly drops into chaos, I can open a folder, pull out the War Budget, and know that a lot of time and thought went into it and that if I follow it I’ll have the best chance of muddling through.

The War Budget is simply my regular budget stripped down to the essentials and with all the fat trimmed out. Retirement contributions on hold, dining out eliminated, investing on hold, services like cable and the like are reduced…the goal is to establish the minimum dollar amount needed to keep me in the fight.

This isn’t something you can just come up with in ten minutes as youre driving home from what used to be your job or business. You just won’t have your head in the game enough at that moment to be making clearheaded decisions…this is why you have to come up with this plan beforehand when you’ve got time to think it through. The first step, of course, is to have a regular budget that youre working with that you can start going through and editing. Food budget? Cut it and dip into your short-term food storage.Fuel budget? Trim it…your driving to job interviews and not  much else. Cable television? It’s outta here. Buying gold? On hold. Roth contribution? On hold. HSA contributions? On hold. Vacation? Forget about it. Its time to regroup, refocus, reorient, and re-engage.

The War Budget works best, unsurprisingly, when you’ve made other preparations for this sort of thing a part of your life when times are good. You have enough food in the cabinets and freezer that cutting back the grocery budget doesnt mean eating any less. You’ve created an emergency fund that can cover your bare minimum expenses for the amount of time you project it’ll take for you to get back on your feet. You’re a survivalist, you should have been preparing all along.

I look at my normal budget and compare it to the War Budget and see that it’s a reduction of about 20-25% in most things, and the outright elimination of others. But that number at the bottom of the column is the one I live and die by. Take the emergency fund, divide it by the amount in the War Budget, and thats how many months you have to get your feet back under you.

Obviously, once we’re back on our feet the plan is to replenish what we used, add to it, and create a state of even more resilience. That’s how this is supposed to work. But here’s the important takeaway from this post: when you are in the midst of the crisis is not the time to plan how youre going to survive it. In the midst of the crisis you’ll have the ‘fog of war’ clouding your judgement…you won’t see the things you need to see. This is why you need to have a plan ready to go that is well thought out, periodically revisited and updated, and … most importantly…trusted. When you stagger home shell-shocked and thinking “Now what am I going to do?”, what you want is to have the confidence and faith that you’ve got something in place that has already done all the thinking for you. Something where if you just ‘follow the plan’ you’ll be fine. Hence…the War Budget.

But remember, guys….the War Budget is a budget of resources..money. And for any budget to work, you have to have those resources that need budgeting to begin with. Without a an emergency fund, the War Budget is almost useless. And without the War Budget, the emergency fund is in danger. When crunch time hits, you can’t just spend indiscriminately…you need to make the most of the resources you have. So…War Budget.

I’ve had a couple episodes in my past where I had no idea where the next dollar was coming from, and I seriously had doubts there’d be electricity in my home in the morning. Those experiences sucked, but they brought about the good judgement I exercise now in regards to being prepared for the personal EOTWAWKIs. If I were to lose my job tomorrow, I could operate for a rather comfortable amount of time on the War Budget and my emergency fund. Having the emergency fund is crucial, but so is having a plan on how best to maximize when that emergency hits.

You do you, of course.

 

Sighting in

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I have a couple 9mm ARs. One is the Angstadt Arms version, which I recommend, and the other is the KE Arms version that uses the polymer lower receiver/stock combo. Both have their advantages…the KE arms is very, very light. The Angstadt has a last-shot hold open.

I had picked up a second Trijicon MRO last week and needed to get it sighted in for the KE Arms gun, so thats what I did today. Once dialed in, it was quite easy to chew the center out of the target dots. It’s a handy little carbine that shares magazines and ammo with my Glocks.

Every single time I post about pistol caliber carbines it invariably leads to “if youre going to carry a carbine why wouldnt you carry it in a carbine caliber” or “pistol caliber carbines are stupid” discussions in comments. Every single time. So, for the sake of my sanity and to save everyone some time, lets hit the search function and just go reread the older arguments and explanations.

Speaking of 9mm. I was flipping around some blogs and came across this picture:

My current carry ammo is the Speer Gold Dot. People I have talked to who would be ‘in the know’ say that it is the pellet of choice for people who have to deal with things that have language skills. I had a disappointing experience with HydraShocks once and, while recognizing it may have just been a fluke, I have been adamant about not using them. I think my nightstand gun still has Black Talons in it, which clearly shows how long its been since I rotated my ammo out of that particular gun. My ‘house gun’, the MP5SD clone, uses Hornady subsonic hollowpoints. I usually prefer 124 gr. in my unsupressed guns. Even FMJ will ‘do the job’ as long as ‘you hit them in the right spot’, but thats a rather stupid argument. A baseball bat will ‘do the job’ if you just ‘hit them in the right spot’, but I can tell you with experience under my belt that in the real world you don’t always get the luxury of setting up your shot to be perfect. Sometimes you gotta be the first with the most and when that happens youre gonna want a little bit of extra for that ‘margin of error’. Could you go elk hunting with a .22 Mag? Absolutely. Is it a good idea? Definitely not. Sure, a perfect shot in the perfect spot with the .22 Mag will drop an elk, but you don’t always get the perfect….and when that happens you want to have extra mass, extra speed, extra power on your side to make up for less-than-perfect placement.

Life isn’t perfect. Buy the hollowpoints.

Should I stay or should I go?

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Better too early than too late, right?

It’s a question that was peripherally raised in some comments a post or two back. In preparedness, one of the eternal questions and conundrums is ‘when do you forfeit everything in your normal world to beat the disaster and be ahead of it?’

There are plenty of people, especially ‘first responder’ types, who at some point have to decide, do I abandon my job to care for my family, or do I ‘stay at my post’ and hope my family can get through this without me? In the non-first-responder trades, there’s still that question…when do I walk away from my job/career, pension, etc. in order to get ahead of the disaster?

The problem is, if you wait too long (“Ahh..its probably not serious. I’ll go to work today”) you wind up way behind the curve, caught in evacuation traffic, empty gas stations, roadblocks, and general disorder. But if you leave too early (“This is it. Time to throw it all away and head to the bunker.”) and it turns out to be nothing….well, I hope your resume is current because you’ve probably lost your job.

If you’re going to walk away from your job, your business, your mortgage, your responsibilities, and all that because you think we are about to drop into Mad Max world….you better be right, because trying to undo that sort of bridge-burning is not going to come easy.

For some people, it isnt that big a problem…maybe they already live at their ideal hideout. Perhaps theyre retired with no job to be beholden to. Maybe they live a kind of lifestyle where ‘transitioning’ to an EOTWAWKI lifestyle is no more complicated than closing and locking the gate at the end of the driveway. I suspect, for most of us, it isn’t that easy.

It’s even more complicated when there’s other people involved. Working spouse? Kids? You have to convince them as well that its time to throw away everything you’ve done up to now…career, relationships, etc…because we need to head to Uncle Dave’s cabin to avoid the zombies. Maybe you think the stock market dropping 50% in a day as aircraft carriers head towards Russia is enough to trigger your flight, whereas your spouse may feel that there has to be actual missiles flying and people dying before they’re convinced. Its tough, man.

And, of course, you need to establish that ‘line in the sand’ and then commit to it. “Yeah, there’s a mushroom cloud on the horizon, but…”, “Yeah, the Chinese have invaded Taiwan and sank our carrier group, but…”, “Yeah, a dirty bomb just went off in San Diego, but…” No, you’ve got to really think it through and decide what is and is not your triggering event.

It’s my opinion, and thats it folks..just an opinion, your mileage may vary…that you should have some ‘lines in the sand’ about when youre bumping up to ‘the next level’.

Complacency…the curse of the prepared

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I’ve mentioned it in the past, but it really is difficult to maintain one’s focus and intensity in preparing for the end of the world when you have electricity, hot water, a freezer full of food, and a job. And we know that graveyards are full of people whose secondary cause of death was complacency. We let our foot off the gas and we don’t notice it until we suddenly realize we’re miles from where we want to be and time is almost gone.

I often joke to people that I do my best, fastest, copious, and efficient work when I have gun pointed at my head. And, if you really think about, there’s always a metaphorical gun pointed at our head – our own mortality. Memento mori….we’re all gonna die. But it’s easy to forget that and we wind up dawdling and wasting time.

It’s just so easy to forget that there are wars going on…military wars, culture wars, economic wars, and personal wars. It’s easy to forget about the unpredictability of groceries when you’re fat and not hungry. It’s easy to forget about the fragility of power systems when the lights are on. It’s easy to forget about the vulnerabilities of supply chains when there’s gas in your truck. You get the idea.

I can only speak for myself, of course, but I’m betting that some of you also slack off a bit in the good times (or the not-bad times). What do you do to regain that focus and intensity? Watch ‘Threads’? Start making lists? Resolve to be more diligent? I know I can’t be the only one who sometimes slows down and starts to lose steam in terms of living a life of improved resilience and decreased threats.

What do I do? I think back about times when I was living pretty close to the edge… no money in the bank, no food in the fridge, no marketable skills, that sort of thing. Days where twenty bucks was all the money in the world. You only have to be hungry a time or two to really appreciate the fundamental things that make life bearable – shelter, food, water, heat, and a way to pay for them.

I bring this up because I was thinking that I have gotten a bit soft lately. I used to have a somewhat intense focus on making sure I had the mechanisms and supplies in place to get me through pretty much anything that might come along and kick me back to those lean days. It seems like the further away I get from those times, the less focus and intensity I have… which is wildly counterproductive because, holy Crom, have you watched the news lately?

So…if you’re like me and think that maybe you havent been running the preparedness wagon on all eight cylinders lately and you need a little more octane in the tank, I suggest you settle into a comfy chair, relax, and think back to the utter and absolute craptacular moments in your past, be pleased that theyre behind you, and then use their memory to fuel your resolve to get back into the mindset that gets things done. Make a list if you have to. Get an accountability partner. Promise yourself an awesome reward if you hit your goals. Whatever it takes, man.

It isnt a certainty, but I’d say the odds are good that someday you, me, and everyone else are gonna get caught up in something thats gonna make us glad we prepared as much as we did and sorry we didnt prepare as much as we should have.

Only you know what works for motivating you, but whatever it is I recommend you start doing it if you havent already. The world is an uncertain place and there’s not a lot of room for complacency.

Guns? Sure. But food…ah, thats another story

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Re-organizing my stuff, especially the long-term food, has me musing about the classic have vs. have-not conflict that we will see when the wheels fly off society…and that, to some degree, we are seeing now.

The apocalypse is going to come in several different flavors…civil war/disturbance, economic depression, huge natural disaster, pandemic, stray nukes…and it will, no doubt, at some point require that you be ready to maintain the safety and security of your loved ones and your home. But you know what happens far more often than the need to point a gun at someone? The need to eat.

I’m an old-school survivalist – being armed is right up there at the top of the list of things to be ready for. But I also have dang near thirtyfive years of being that old school survivalist behind me. In all that time, I have needed to eat far more times than I’ve needed to point a gun at someone. Not saying it wont happen…simply saying that, statistically, youll be more likely to be patting yourself on the back over your food stash than your gun and ammo stash.

In addition to keeping you from, y’know, dying, food has an excellent moral and motivational (Motivatory? Motivary?) effect – as the graphic on the MRE entree says: food is a force multiplier. Well-fed people are going to perform better than starving people. And starving people are desperate people who do desperate things..and doing desperate things is a great way to become someone who doesn’t need food at all…forever. So dont be a starving person who takes crazy risks out of desperation, and don’t be around starving people who are unpredictable and dangerous.

Having that resource of food also makes you a target. Truly desperate people…people who are cold, who are hungry, who are hopeless, who are watching their loved ones miss meals…are dangerous and unpredictable. Don’t be one of them and don’t let them know you’re there.

Right now we live in a world where people will literally kill you because they want your sneakers, think you cut them off in traffic, or simply want your cellphone. And thats in a world with 911, electricity, cops, and a somewhat-functioning society. Now imagine what it’ll be like when the only mechanism to keep the foot on the brake pedal of social chaos is whatever you’ve got in your holster or slung over your shoulder.

In a situation like that the person who can sit at home, safe and secure, and not have to venture out into the chaos looking for food and supplies has a tremendous advantage. Exponentially so if he’s there with his equally well-fed and well-armed family and friends.

It used to be that people first getting into preparedness/survivalism started off with a wild binge of gun and ammo buying, and everything that came after was done with far less rigor and enthusiasm. I have encountered quite a few people who had guns and ammo aplenty but put virtually no thought into food. A bunch of 2-liter pop bottles filled with rice and beans is better than starving…I guess. But you really should aspire for better than that.

And for the love of Crom, stock up on ‘regular’ food….the canned fruits, the jarred sauces and soups, the bags of pasta and rice, etc, etc. Expensive freeze drieds are awesome but when I suffer a small-scale EOTWAWKI like a job loss or 48-hour power failure, I’m going to be really reluctant to break into the $30 can of Mountain House Chicken and Rice and more likely to grab a $2 jar of spaghetti sauce and a $3 bag of pasta off the shelf.

Guns and radios and fuel and all the other sexy stuff is important, no doubt, but water and food are always going to get more use and demand than pretty much anything else you can store. It’s absolutely worth thinking about what youre stocking up on, how much of it you’re putting away, and how youre going to use it. Certainly thats where my mind is these days.

Bag O’ Tricks – Batteries edition

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There’s nothing that says you have to have battery-powered devices to help you get through the unexpected crisis, but they sure do make things easier.

When it comes to electronics, there’s a handful of things I keep in the Bag O’ Tricks ™ at all times…flashlights (plural), radio, USB charger, scanner. All of these devices run on batteries and if a crisis occurs, you are definitely going to want to have a spare reload (or three) for your devices.

You do what works for you, but here’s where I’ve landed after much thought and twenty years of practice.

First step is battery compatibility – its the BoT(tm), not a CostCo. I don’t have the room or the back muscles to carry several different battery types. I have zero interest in carrying around a handful AA batteries, 9v batteries, CR123 batteries, AAA batteries, and a couple coin batteries. Try to get all your gear singing from the same battery songbook. This is where your first value judgement, and possibly compromise, is going to have to take place. Let’s say your radios take AA but your flashlight takes CR123. You’ve got three choices at this point:

  • Swap out the flashlight for one that takes AA
  • Swap out the radio for one that takes CR123
  • Carry two different types of batteries

It is entirely possible that, given three ‘Tier One’ pieces of gear, one of them might have to be swapped out for second tier in order to provide battery compatibility. How much are you willing to ‘step down’ in terms of utility in exchange for those streamlined logistics? Fortunately, almost everything has a functional, reliable, usable, quality alternative. Maybe you’re ‘perfect’ flashlight runs on CR123 but you need one that runs on AA…but you hate giving up all the awesome features of that particular CR123 flashlight. Well, look around, there is almost certainly an equivalent one out there that runs on AA.

And, just to be clear, I’m not advocating one type of battery over another. I’m just saying whatever battery you choose, try to stick with all your devices running off that one.

For my BoT(tm), I try to keep stuff as small as possible. Most small devices run on AA (or AAA) batteries and thats what I’ve decided to standardize on for my Bag O’ Tricks(tm). That doesnt mean my other gear doesn’t use other batteries…it just means that everything in my bag, which may be all I have in terms of resupply for the immediate time being, runs off the same battery – AA.

The battery devices I keep in my bag are pretty straightforward: AM/FM pocket radio with earphones, Icom R6 scanner (uses same headphones as AM/FM radio), a couple flashlights, and a USB charger.

The only exception to the ‘one battery’ rule is that sometimes I’ll have a rechargeable device (cell phone, flashlight) that can be recharged through USB. For those, I have a USB charger in my bag that runs off of…you guessed it…AA batteries.

I carry 16 AA batteries in a pair of Maxpedition battery pouches. There are other battery cases on Amazon and you’ll find no shortage of variations on this theme. I came into the Maxpedition ones years ago and never bothered looking for others. The plastic case is available from plenty of other makers, but the cordura pouch from Maxpedition does a nice job of keeping things handy and muffling any rattle. The most important thing is to get a case or carrier that completely isolates the battery from everything else around it and protects the contacts.

Don’t just think you can wrap your batteries with some tape over the contacts, throw them in your bag, and be fine. Bad juju, man. Same for sticking them in a cigar tube, or a cut length of PVC with duct tape over the ends. Your electronics (radio, light, gps, phone, etc.) are all critical pieces of gear. Don’t half-ass it by throwing your batteries in a bag where theyre going to short circuit against each other and be useless to you when you finally need them…assuming they don’t set your bag on fire first.

As for batteries themselves, we all know that at some point the batteries crap the bed and turn your gear into junk. I go with lithium AA batts. They are way more expensive than regular AA’s but a) they leak far far less than regular AA’s, and b) they don’t weaken over time or in temperature extremes the way regular AA’s do. Yup, theyre more expensive…but when I’m navigating my way out of the basement of a building during a blackout I will absolutely not care that they cost several times what the regular batteries cost…I’ll just be relieved they work and didnt puke in my flashlight.

And, by the way, when it comes to flashlights is there any reason not to have them use LED’s? They sip battery power and are far less delicate than the old krypton bulb lights. All my flashlights, except for legacy stuff, are LED these days. And for situations where you want to use batteries sparingly they are absolutely the better choice.

And although it isnt technically a battery, I always carry a USB plug in and one of those octopus-like multi-adaptor USB charging cables. This way, if there’s electricity, I can charge whatever USB device I or someone with me has. This really shines when traveling and need to charge up my phone at the airport so I can screw around on the internet while awaiting my flight.

I like to think that any crisis I get into where I have to rely on what’s in my BoT(tm) will be a short term one and that I’ll be back at my base of operations shortly. But life has a way of throwing curveballs and if I’m stuck living out of my bag, so to speak, for a couple days I have no doubt there will be at least one or two battery changes for some of my gear…so, I carry two 8-packs of AA lithium batteries.

There you go. A glance into the reasoning about whats in the BoT(tm) and why.

 

Delayed

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I was cruising around the internet and saw a meme that said “You didnt save their life….you just delayed their death.” Technically true. If you save someone’s life it is functionally and literally equivalent to delaying their death.

This got me ruminating about the recent election…Harris’ defeat / Trumps victory didn’t save us from the upcoming bad times, it just delayed them.

It’s all very subjective, but my belief is that no one…Trump or even Teddy Roosevelt…can have 100% of my trust to not do something that I believe is against my best interests. I’m glad Trump won, absolutely…but I see his victory as, at best, a stall giving me more time to get myself squared away against the uncertain future and it’s certain bad times.

While I’m okay with my current level of preparedness, I still have a little ways to go before maxing out. I’d like to think that Trump’s victory buys be a little bit more time to get there. We’ll see.

Resilience against political change

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Self-interest is the dominant trait in humans. It kind of has to be or else we’d have died out generations ago. Intellectually we may think we are putting our self-interest aside when we act ‘for the greater good’ but when it’s time to bail out of the plane and theres only one parachute between you and a total stranger…well…that self-interest thing comes roaring to the surface and the knives come out.

Rightly or wrongly, a lot of people look at political results from an ‘is this good for me’ angle rather than an ‘is this good for the country’ perspective. You could argue that if something is good for you, then it’s good for the country (or vice versa), I suppose. Most people, I think, will vote their own self-interest. Whether I agree with it or not, I can at least understand it.

And while you may think you can ignore politics, I can assure you that politics will not ignore you. Sometimes that looks like an extra bite in your paycheck to pay ‘your fair share’, and sometimes it looks like a Bearcat in your driveway to enforce a ‘reasonable and commonsense’ law.

In preparedness there’s a tendency to, after an election where the ‘right’ candidate wins, get complacent and think that a bullet has been dodged and things will be ‘better’ for the next four years. Personally, I think thats a wildly foolish attitude to take – no matter who wins, there are no guarantees. Likelihoods, the odds, may change, sure…but they are never 100% against.

I suppose the trick, if there is one, is to increase your resilience to the point that a change in government will affect you as little as possible no matter who wins. You can’t be 100% proofed against the .gov but you can certainly increase your level of preparedness to the point where you are impacted far less than Joe Blow is when the political wind changes.

I guess political sea change is one of those things to add to the list of scenarios to be prepared against. What does that look like? I’d imagine it looks alot like being in a situation where you can comfortably keep your head down and your profile low when the powers that be decide to start hammering down the nails that stick up.

But…my point is this: if, when elections roll around, you think “I hope my candidate wins because if they dont this bad thing will happen that will affect me” then perhaps its worth investigating being prepared against that bad thing so you’re not vulnerable to the fickle political winds.