Archive for the 'Survival' Category

Hard skills:

With the introduction of the Homestead Act of 1862, previously unsettled land in the western portions of the United States became an attractive option to thousands of people.

These pioneers were looking for a new way of life, but in order to attain it, they had to have certain skills.

Traveling in covered wagons, grouped together for defense and support, the early pioneers were a mix of nationalities and had a large array of skills.

Only the individuals who could master this huge list of skills were ultimately able to settle this uncharted terrain successfully. Unfortunately, many didn’t make it…

The skills developed by this brave, resourceful group of people are just as relevant in today’s modern homesteads. Only individuals who can master these essential skills can be successful in this challenging, rugged existence.

But are those skills relevant to homesteading as we know it today? Let’s take a look at the long list of skills that those first pioneers had – and determine their importance for the modern homesteader today.

Everything from weather forecasting to making cleaning products to the seasonality of food storage and preparation. Do people still tan hides? Included is a video on how to do it.

Source:

U.S. students in most states and across almost all demographic groups have experienced troubling setbacks in both math and reading, according to an authoritative national exam released on Monday, offering the most definitive indictment yet of the pandemic’s impact on millions of schoolchildren.

In math, the results were especially devastating, representing the steepest declines ever recorded on the National Assessment of Educational Progress, known as the nation’s report card, which tests a broad sampling of fourth and eighth graders and dates to the early 1990s.

In the test’s first results since the pandemic began, math scores for eighth graders fell in nearly every state. A meager 26 percent of eighth graders were proficient, down from 34 percent in 2019.

Fourth graders fared only slightly better, with declines in 41 states. Just 36 percent of fourth graders were proficient in math, down from 41 percent.

Homeschool really is a matter of prepping. Are you preparing your family to support each other and be a team? Educating your children in the Law-word of God and demanding they behave according to right and wrong as defined by God in the Holy Bible is paramount. This is critical not only to you and them but to civilization. Exodus 20:12, Proverbs 22:6.

It’s been a mild autumn so far nationwide. Not sure about Alaska, but they usually know what they’re doing. But for the rest of us, it’s been so mild in all regions that we may be lulled into a false sense of ease about the coming winter. That first blast of cold will be a wakeup call for many. Several links are provided below; most are basics, but for the serious, here is the List of Lists.

Winter Prepping basics and tips, including some things you might not have thought about in a while or ever considered, along with regional considerations. This list is too short. There are many other facets that need consideration.

#2: Honey, get yourself a honey bucket!
Since you may you may not have water or sewer from the municipal water supply in an emergency you’ll need to think about sanitation: grey water and honey buckets.

A Honey Bucket is not a Honey Trap, nor is it a Honey Bunny. See, prepping can be fun! The term Honey Pot is very often misused for Honey Trapping. A Honey Pot is actually a computer network with no real intelligence value in the data. It’s designed to lure in (foreign) powers, so they give away their intrusion capabilities or otherwise open themselves to counterattack. Properly identifying each of these other three potential problems has, at sundry times and in diverse manners, helped me. Prepping isn’t only about dried foods. A Honey Bucket is something else entirely.

#3: Stock up on food and a way to cook indoors
You may well have prepared your long-term emergency food needs with ample supplies of rice and beans, but it’s time to stock up on the foods you’ll need to survive a power outage! Your aim for a power outage is ready to eat, shelf-stable meals, such as protein and energy bars, nut butters and crackers. If you have an alternate way to cook, then stock up on soups and canned foods.

Next, given the recent global environment, there are World War II Civilian Survival Lessons. Regardless of what becomes of America, you’ll spend most of your time doing “civilian stuff” anyway.

How American Civilians helped win World War II (and survive).
History repeats itself they say. Capitalizing on wartime lessons can help you for any disaster, not just war. Below are some civilian survival skills and ideas garnered from the civilians who survived World War II with patriotism, collaboration and a “can do” attitude. Below are survival lessons garnered from civilians during the war…

Next, don’t forget how the bankers and government (but we repeat ourselves) brought us the never-ending communist New Deal. So consider prepper Lessons on The Great Depression. The Green New Deal should be twice as good as the first one! That’s what the TV said, so we believe it. Joking aside, Solutions-based Prepping is an interesting concept.

Learn from the past: prepping for the next Great Depression.
Wondering how can you survive an economic collapse and avoid poverty? Perhaps Robert T. Kiyosaki summed it up best when he wrote: “Poverty is simply having more problems than solutions.” Think about this from a prepper’s perspective: strive to be prepared to have more solutions than problems. To ensure you have more solutions than problems, be creative, be flexible and adapt. Below is how to help survive the next Great Depression.

Further, if you’re new to the notion of viewing how to make it through tough times, here are some basics to start:

10 Steps to Basic Preparedness.

Prepping for Ordinary People.

At the CDC, we learn some rudimentary respects to being prepared for Winter Storms. The fun part about doing what the government says to be prepared is that they tell you to both get ready, and then they call you insulting monikers for taking their advice.

Also, see the basics of preparing for Winter Power Outages. This seems important now, certainly for Europe and California, but elsewhere as well.

37 Foods to Hoard

And finally, in light of the recent “pandemic,” it would be a very good idea to get books and training in basic medical and dental knowledge.

Clausewitz’s most famous saying about war, that it is the continuation of politics (policy) by other means.

Here is the passage in full:

24. WAR IS A MERE CONTINUATION OF POLICY BY OTHER MEANS.

We see, therefore, that War is not merely a political act, but also a real political instrument, a continuation of political commerce, a carrying out of the same by other means. All beyond this which is strictly peculiar to War relates merely to the peculiar nature of the means which it uses. That the tendencies and views of policy shall not be incompatible with these means, the Art of War in general and the Commander in each particular case may demand, and this claim is truly not a trifling one. But however powerfully this may react on political views in particular cases, still it must always be regarded as only a modification of them; for the political view is the object, War is the means, and the means must always include the object in our conception.

At SurvivalBlog, this is an excellent two-part post. A very brief history of the Boer Wars is offered then it’s almost exclusively weapons, ammo, purposes in use, and personal firearms considerations. Great stuff, tons of data, with much to consider and debate.

Part One

Part Two

Excerpt from Part Two:

Around here, .30-06 is more common than .308 Win.  The second most popular in my neighborhood is 6.5 Creedmoor (6.5CM), then 6.5×55, and lastly a wildcat for the AR platform, the 6.5 Timberwolf. Ideally, we would be best off to standardized on .308 Winchester. Yet .30-06 is still king in these woods. It is time tested and found to be the best all around cartridge CONUS, good for mouse to moose, and the occasional Griz, because it can shoot the heaviest .308 caliber bullets with a 1:10 twist rate barrel.

The .30-06 can also punch out a flat shooting 175 grain bullet at 2,800fps with H4831sc, H4350 powder, or other similar powders. It is appreciable flatter shooting than .308 Winchester, and far flatter than .308 Winchester’s military version, 7.62×51 NATO.  Yet we do pay the price in terms of a punishing level of recoil. Therefore, my ideal long range rifle would be the 6.5×55 cartridge in a modern action capable of 60,000psi with 29 inch bull barrel attached, however that rifle is only a dream rifle.

The Rutherford Institute

“It is the function of mass agitation to exploit all the grievances, hopes, aspirations, prejudices, fears, and ideals of all the special groups that make up our society, social, religious, economic, racial, political. Stir them up. Set one against the other. Divide and conquer. That’s the way to soften up a democracy.”― J. Edgar Hoover, Masters of Deceit

The U.S. government has become a master of deceit.

It’s all documented, too.

This is a government that lies, cheats, steals, spies, kills, maims, enslaves, breaks the laws, overreaches its authority, and abuses its power at almost every turn; treats its citizens like faceless statistics and economic units to be bought, sold, bartered, traded, and tracked; and wages wars for profit, jails its own people for profit, and has no qualms about spreading its reign of terror abroad.

Worse, this is a government that has become almost indistinguishable from the evil it claims to be fighting, whether that evil takes the form of terrorism, torture, drug trafficking, sex trafficking, murder, violence, theft, pornography, scientific experimentations or some other diabolical means of inflicting pain, suffering and servitude on humanity.

With every passing day, it becomes painfully clear that this is not a government that can be trusted with your life, your loved ones, your livelihood or your freedoms.

[…]

Just recently, for example, the Pentagon was compelled to order a sweeping review of clandestine U.S. psychological warfare operations (psy ops) conducted through social media platforms. The investigation comes in response to reports suggesting that the U.S. military has been creating bogus personas with AI-generated profile pictures and fictitious media sites on Facebook, Twitter and Instagram in order to manipulate social media users.

Psychological warfare, as the U.S. Army’s 4th Psychological Operations Group explained in a recruiting video released earlier this year, enables the government to pull the strings, turn everything they touch into a weapon, be everywhere, deceive, persuade, change, influence, and inspire.

We’ve argued this before, but about NSA spying on foreign nationals and countries. What the DoD is doing here is legitimate in the national security interest as it stands today. The problems are not this program or the US spying on enemies or potential enemies; there are two problems with this. There is no declared war, and the DoD has been permanently funded to wartime levels for 80 years now under continuing resolutions. It’s silly to argue against this spying while funding the spies like we’re at war. Will all of this be turned against us, surely, and probably already is? But as it stands right now, this is a legitimate use of the funds allocated by Congress for this purpose. We were warned against a standing army, and congress used to have power over that.

It’s a short hop, skip and a jump from a behavioral program that tries to influence how people respond to paperwork to a government program that tries to shape the public’s views about other, more consequential matters. Thus, increasingly, governments around the world—including in the United States—are relying on “nudge units” to steer citizens in the direction the powers-that-be want them to go, while preserving the appearance of free will.

[…]

This Machiavellian scheme has so ensnared the nation that few Americans even realize they are being brainwashed—manipulated—into adopting an “us” against “them” mindset. All the while, those in power—bought and paid for by lobbyists and corporations—move their costly agendas forward.

Read the whole thing.

Outdoor Life.

It’s been a tough year for Chris Landers. The 30-year-old hunter from Strathmore, Alberta underwent four ocular surgeries at the beginning of 2022 to fix a detached retina, the result of a work accident during which some metal shavings flew into his eye. He hunted in 2021 before realizing the retina was an issue and successfully harvested an elk and a black bear. He was hoping to have similar success with his 2022 elk season, but things wouldn’t go as planned.

Landers and his buddies were hunting in the Spirit River valley north of Grand Prairie in the afternoon of Thursday, Sept. 15 when disaster struck. As they followed after a bugling elk, some thick brush knocked an arrow out of Landers’ quiver. Somehow, the arrow stuck into the ground with the broadhead pointing up. Landers didn’t see it in time and stepped right into the razor-sharp blades. The broadhead gouged into his shin, soared up behind his knee, and plunged into the back of his lower thigh.

The blades severed his peroneal nerve and nicked an artery. This not only turned his left leg into a fountain of blood, but also rendered it practically immobile and without any sensory function. Extreme damage to the tissue and cartilage around his knee joint only got worse as he fell to the ground.

“[The arrow] went right beside the bone, almost halfway up my leg,” Landers tells Outdoor Life from a hospital in Calgary. “It went past my knee and snapped off somewhere. We found the bottom half of the arrow and another small chunk where it broke, so about 10 inches of arrow were in my leg.”

His hunting partners Devon Spencer and Jared Manuel immediately sprung (sic) into action. They were miraculously in the only spot of cell phone service they’d seen in the two days they’d been hunting, so they called in emergency services.

“We stopped the bleeding so that it wasn’t crazy bad, and I just tried to calm myself down a little bit,” Landers says. “We had STARS Air Ambulance flying overhead about an hour and a half later. They nosed down and one of the nurses came down and put a tourniquet on. She couldn’t get an I.V. in because I was in shock, so she had to do an [intraosseous infusion] and had to drill a hole in my leg to put meds in through my shinbone.”

Pictures at the link.  They were initially using a belt as a tourniquet.  Even if the IFAK contains nothing more than a tourniquet and Quik Clot, carry one in the bush with you.  Virtually anything can happen.

Many Traditional Americans have bought an AR-15 recently but have used it little or not at all. (Ahem, you know who you are!) The first thing to do is read the whole manual that came with your weapon. The manual should have a parts list diagram. This will be important info providing proper terminology. Most say what to do next is to take it partially apart (field strip), clean it, and reassemble it, even before shooting. You should at least field strip it and wipe down the excess manufacturer’s oil.

There is a lot, and I mean a lot, of information about the AR-15 platform on the web. Most of it is useless. It’s super high-speed operators, the bulk of whom are total jerks, trying to impress and one-up each other, whose language and decorum are despicable, which doesn’t help the average family with their homesteading, church, or team-building needs.

The object should be to train with the AR platform to get beyond your hunting knowledge. Your women folk also need to learn to run the gun.

Get very familiar with the weapon platform, how it performs, its capabilities, and its uses. Training with an AR is different than hunting; the platform is designed primarily for defense. That’s why you bought it, right!?!

Well, you need practice in all phases; handling and manipulation, including loading/unloading/reloading mags, safety, sling, sights, how and when to use the “ping pong paddle” – bolt catch/release lever, safety positions, the six-position buttstock, learning/running drills, shooting static/moving targets, shooting while you’re moving, etc.

You can see how this is definitively not a bolt gun and not like hunting! The time to learn your AR isn’t when your family is in trouble but before.

Some background reading is here: The AR15 as the Rifleman’s Weapon.

This video is pretty good at showing terminology and the basics of manipulation.

Next: how to field strip and clean your AR-15.

John Lovell at Warrior Poet Society is the rare exception. Instead of being a rude, know-it-all tough guy, he’s an experienced action guy with the heart of a teacher. Here’s his How To Shoot an AR-15/M-4 Carbine video, including some step-by-step written instructions.

In this video, we learn a wonderful beginner’s shooting drill. The reason for three shots is, again, defense, not hunting. I like that he teaches to get the hits on target first and, with practice, increase the rapidity with which you can run the drill. When proficient, increase the distance from the target. Later, add mag reload. This is also a fantastic handgun basic training practice. Found at this channel with other good vids.

I’m a proponent of the idea that every adult, 12 years and up, should have at least basic proficiency with every weapon type in your household. A father can determine if children are mature enough to begin serious training, but they should be training in their youth, boys, and girls.

Readers, please weigh in with beginner to helpful intermediate knowledge, books, channels, links and etc. Thanks.

The headline is from this article. A better one would be the Reality of Real Profits v. Marxist Ideology Taking Over Wall Street.

The reality is real profits after expenses are what matters, or a business isn’t a going concern. A company must cover production costs, including salaries, and have some cash left (8 to 10 percent is the average target for an S&P 500 company) to reinvest for growth, new products, or expansion into new markets. You can’t structure a business around theoretical returns in feel-good social engineering.

In recent weeks there have been giant strides in the effort to challenge the legality of the “Environmental, Social and Governance” (ESG) construct that has become a threatening obsession of the titans of Wall Street. Though ESG remains a unfamiliar acronym for most Americans, Main Street investors whose pension dollars are funding ESG investments are beginning to ask questions.

ESG is a social construct. The Left always projects.

While constituting competing frameworks, reporting systems, and scoring systems for environmental and social reporting for companies, the ESG construct lacks any quantifiable or worthwhile measurements. Put plainly, it is an entirely subjective scheme, created and funded by political, activists. Under the pretense of environmental protection and social diversity, these activists recognized that they had allies in the financial services and banking sectors who could be incentivized to do via the capital markets that which the activists knew they could never achieve using traditional market forces or democratic institutions. In short, voters would never agree to ruin their own economies, livelihoods and futures in the name of political ideology. To be successful, it necessarily needed to be stealthy and unchallenged.

And neither would shareholders vote to destroy real profits for green projects that have no chance of recouping investment costs, knowing that these schemes don’t make actual profits in free and open markets. By ‘traditional market forces,’ the article means, earn real money or die!

In recent travels, giant windmills stood throughout certain parts of the US west. Where is the study on ROI (Return on investment) for these hideously ugly and mostly idle steel versions of the Dutch windmills from the Middle Ages? Forget for the moment monetary ROI; the Left doesn’t care about that. Let’s talk about Kilowatt Hours of ROI. What is the breakeven for a windmill in terms of energy used to produce it vs. energy output over its installed productive years?

The things are gigantic, made from metals, with miles of wiring for each one, lubrication, transportation and installation, lifecycle maintenance, etc. At what point, having poured millions of kilowatt hours of carbon energy into its production, does a windmill pay for itself in carbon savings by kilowatt hours of energy output? We all know the answer; they take more to produce and maintain in the total lifecycle than they will ever deliver. We’re willing to be wrong about this; dear communist greenies, show us the math, please?

Therefore, if one doesn’t pay for itself in kilowatt hours of power produced, it can never pay for itself in real money!

That’s just one example under the E for Environmental. This is why the Green Energy New Deal is fake. Remember that to implement their Green New Deal completely, they’ll need you to suffer to the point where you’ll accept whatever they plan to implement if only you have enough food for your children. The S for Social is most assuredly destructive to capital investing. But we’re ranting, back to the article.

Recognizing this reality, attorneys general Jeff Landry and Todd Rokita of Louisiana and Indiana issued a letter earlier this month warning their states’ pension boards that ESG investing is likely a violation of fiduciary duty and potentially opens their investment staff and investment advisers to liability if they continue allocating funds to ESG-promoting asset managers such as BlackRock.

The Landry and Rokita letters follow another letter sent last month from them and seventeen other state AGs to BlackRock CEO Larry Fink. That letter warns the asset management giant that BlackRock’s ESG investment policies appear to involve what they describe as, “rampant violations” of the sole interest rule, a well-established legal principle. The sole interest rule requires investment fiduciaries like BlackRock, to act to maximize financial returns, not to promote social or political objectives.

Yet, it is clear that BlackRock and industry counterparts are doing precisely that. They are attempting to use the ESG pretext of “protecting the environment” to re-orient trillions of dollars of their clients’ capital toward what are unquestionably their own political and social objectives. This effort is borne out in the companies in which they invest and the trends they curate and then fund. As is repeatedly touted in the literature of the most prolific ESG advocates, they believe that because their asset management partners, including BlackRock, manage such a substantial percentage of the total investment market, their ESG world view is above constraint of law, or beyond the reach of the institutions that have traditionally protected investors from dubious investment schemes.

Dubious is the exact right word. One might be able to make a contrarian investment in the E, but the S and G exist enforced by law under the runaway woke interpretations of the 13th amendment and 1964 Civil Rights Act. It’s not just the most prominent corporations that are involved. Every medium or small (publicly traded in stock) corporation has to sign on to the woke S and G or get shut down by government enforcement. Meanwhile, because of the E, nobody can get funding for projects that make much-needed electricity, such as new nuclear power or natural gas plants.

America is famous for wealth extraction and not just overseas. It’s what government and businesses have been doing to West Virginia through coal for decades. The coal leaves on a train to make power for the big cities, and with it goes the profits leaving one of the most mineral-rich states in the union in poverty. Now, much of that coal goes to our self-declared enemy, China. The Left plans this same thing for Texas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, North Dakota, Louisiana, and others by destroying the oil industry.

But don’t worry, they’ll take your tax money and put up a windmill, if perchance a breeze comes along, maybe you can have an hour of electricity. I was struck by the fact that there are no substations on large farms with 50 giant windmills or more. Every coal, hydroelectric, and nuclear plant that I’ve seen has electrical substations to concentrate and route the gathered electricity on high-tension wires to population centers. I’ve even seen a solar farm with a small substation. Maybe the windmills are magic?

Here Kitty Kitty:

Wildlife officers on Wednesday were tracking a mountain lion that attacked a 7-year-old boy and prompted the closure of a sprawling Southern California park, authorities said.

The child and his father were walking up stairs at Pico Canyon Park near Santa Clarita around dusk on Monday when a cougar emerged from brush and bit the boy on the buttocks, said Capt. Patrick Foy with the California Department of Fish and Wildlife.

That’s a classic ambush. Walking up steps takes attention and wind; fleeing is also difficult. Smart kitty. The attack occurred at dusk; cats are crepuscular. Though they may hunt at other times they hunt at dawn and dusk almost daily.

Foy said the father, who was walking behind, heard his son cry out and charged toward the big cat. “The lion let go and retreated back into the brush,” he said.

The boy was taken to a hospital with injuries that were not life-threatening, Foy said.

“It was a pretty traumatic episode for him, but he’s expected to be fine,” he said.

Wildlife officials sampled the bite wound to confirm that a mountain lion was responsible and to obtain a DNA profile of the animal.

The father said the cougar didn’t appear to be wearing a GPS collar from the National Park Service, which tracks and studies big cats in Southern California. The park service said it doesn’t have a collared mountain lion in the area and the park is outside its research zone, according to Foy.

You knew it was coming: “rare.”

Mountain lion attacks on humans are rare. Around 20 confirmed attacks have occurred in California in 110 years of record-keeping, he said.

That number of 20 is a bald-faced lie. That’s the “official” “confirmed” by the “Fish and Wildlife authorities” number, is my guess. Note how it wasn’t ‘confirmed’ to be a lion until the saliva sample was analyzed, as though a 7-year-old and his father don’t know what a cat looks like.

Fish and Wildlife officers surveyed the area and set up baited boxes to try and trap the mountain lion at the park in foothills about 35 miles (56 kilometers) northwest of downtown Los Angeles. The park remained closed Wednesday.

Baited boxes? Wait, weren’t they “tracking” the mountain lion? They have no fool idea where the cat is, and neither does AP, the source of the story, know what words mean.

I still want to see one in the wild.

H/T Instapundit