• That New Car Feeling

    Well, a portion of the inheritance from my parents arrived. I gave myself a small amount and the wife. Money that wasn’t spoken for in other ways.

    The last few times I’ve needed a rental car, I’ve gotten a current version of my Toyota Tacoma. Every time I came away wishing I had a new truck.

    Then a few days after getting back in my truck, I would realize that I didn’t want a new Truck. What I wanted was the new radio/head end.

    So that’s what I got. A serious upgrade, It is an Alpine unit with Android Auto. I will be able to get in the truck and when I turn on the unit, it will hook up and give me navigation, calls, and music. Life is nice.

    And for much less than a month’s payments on a new truck.

    Boy they last a long time

    In 1967, my parents bought a VW Microbus. It had hauling capacity that a standard station wagon did not. It was the equivalent of today’s mom van.

    At the time, most cars were getting an astonishing 5 to 7 MPG. The VW got 20MPG. Given the amount of travel we did, this likely made a difference.

    They gave me that car when I turned 16. I drove it until 1987 when I traded it in.

    At the time I traded it in, it was on its third engine, its second gas tank, it didn’t have a working speedometer. The floor was nearly rusted through. Hell, it was rusted through. The aux. heater hadn’t worked in years. The main heater wouldn’t even defrost the windshields.

    The bumper was a replacement that my brother wielded up out of diamond tread.

    In short, it was at the end of its life. A year after I traded it in, I saw somebody driving it around town.

    My truck is 15 years old. At 15 it is in better condition than that VW was at 10. It is still on its first engine. There is no rust on it. I expect it to keep going for at least another 5 years.

    Lawfare

    We keep moving closer and closer to the administration telling the courts to pound sand until the Supreme Court Rules.

    It is sickening how inferior courts can find their way to always rule against trump.

    A stat I heard was that between 1900 and 1999, there were 22 nationwide injunctions issued. There were 87 issued against Trump in his first term.

    I believe I heard that there have been 30 so far in his second term.

    People Fall For This?

    I had numerous ads pop up because I purchased some computer stuff direct from China. Would you believe that you can buy a 2023 GMC Sierra for only $1,500? Sounds too good to be true.

    Looking at the listing, they only accept payment via Western Union or wire transfers. Yeah, too good to be true.

    And This

    A friend ordered a DVD he had been searching for over the last 5 years. It arrived. New In Box.

    Except it was just the box and book. No DVD. Amazon seller who was long gone by the time my friend received his package.

    Amazon is covering the costs, but still…

    Tariffs

    I spent the last two weeks adding tariff processing to a B2B e-commerce website. The Canadian was just frustrated at the extra work for him and having to finally track tariffs. He had just been eating the cost of tariffs for years, a part of doing business.

    In the meantime, I’ve been told that Trump’s tariffs are going to cost me thousands of dollars per year.

    I’ve watched videos of leaders in other countries say, “We aren’t going to take this from the USA!”

    One article pointed out that Vietnam has tariffs on the $10B they import from the US. Trump has put tariffs on the $150B we import from Vietnam. Isn’t it stupid that he did this to them?

    Question of the Week

    If the United States putting tariffs on imports is so bad, why is it good when other countries put tariffs on our goods.

    What do you think of this entire tariff thing?

            

  • Watching The Supreme Court is always frustrating. There is a tendency for things to take a long time.

    David Snope filed a petition for writ of certiorari on September 23, 2024. This will be the third or fourth time he has requested a writ of certiorari from the Supreme Court.

    It has been granted once, the ruling of the Fourth Circuit court was vacated, and the case was remanded back down to the Fourth for a do-over in light of Bruen.

    In November 2024, we were hoping that this case and Ocean State Tactical would both be granted cert. It did not happen.

    If cert had been granted by January 16th, the case would have had oral arguments in the fall, with the opinion issuing in August.

    As things sit, we might not hear the outcome of this case, if granted cert, until the fall of 2026.

    But there are things afoot here.

    First, the court heard Bondi v. Vanderstok and published their opinion on March 26th. This was not a direct Second Amendment Challenge, it was more of an administrative challenge. We did not win. Both Alito and Thomas dissented.

    Mexico’s lawfare case was heard. We will have an opinion on that before the end of the 2024-2025 term. This is a case where the Supreme Court can slap down the lower courts for abusing the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act.

    Snope is in regard to Maryland’s “assault weapons” ban. It is one of the many cases where the inferior courts have said things of the sort of “well, some arms aren’t arms under the protection of the Second Amendment.”

    Another case, with a docket that looks almost the same, is Ocean State Tactical challenging Rhode Island’s magazine ban. Here, the inferior courts have declared that magazines aren’t really arms under the Second Amendment.

    A third case has shown up on the radar.

    Antonyuk II is a Second Amendment challenge to New York State’s Bruen tantrum response bill.

    The heart of this is New York designating almost every part of the state a sensitive place. Even though Bruen explicitly said that the state couldn’t declare Manhattan a sensitive place, just because there were cops and people there.

    All three of these cases are being discussed by the justices, again, this Friday. If we get lucky, we will hear some movement on Monday.

    At this point, my tea leaves are missing, my crystal ball has clouded up, and the wife won’t let me sacrifice a chicken to read its entrails.

    I haven’t a clue what the justices are going to do. I am holding out hope.

            

  • The art of the emotional appeal, aka “emotional blackmail,” is usually mastered by around age 3. The first time your child’s chubby little hands rise up and they pout, saying, “Pweeeeeze?” you can feel it, that tugging of the heartstrings. As responsible adults, it’s our job to teach our offspring (and local offspring in our vicinity) that you can’t get everything you want, and sometimes the answer is going to be no.

    Saying no isn’t something that comes easily to the current crop of newly minted adults out there. Those who fall between the ages of 25 and 35 seem to have no concept whatsoever of “no” or “FAFO.” They’ve essentially never “found out” about anything, because they so rarely hear the word no.

    While I don’t always put a lot of stock into certain theories of civilization, there’s one going around that seems to have at least some grasp on reality.

    Ingraham, Eli. (2024). Land and Forgiveness: How One Woman’s Dream to Free the Land is Breaking New Ground. Interdisciplinary Journal of Partnership Studies. 11. 2. 10.24926/ijps.v11i1.6140.

    I don’t know if the dates are accurate, but it does seem to be grounded in factual research. Excuse the article I pulled it from; it was the only one with a decent enough graphic explaining it. The article is horrid, poorly written (imo), and not well grounded. But the theory that Ingraham’s study is based upon is real, and not too bad. If you want to really go down the rabbit hole, check out this post by Noema. You don’t have to do that, though. The graphic does a fairly decent job of making it easy to understand.

    The general idea is that society, civilization as a whole, goes through these multi-stage cycles that last somewhere between 180 and 280 years in length. This is borne out by history, which does indeed seem to follow such cycles. They’re not perfect, but they are present, and they can be seen quite clearly. Drop in the history of Greece, and it fits. Rome, it fits. Early China, it fits. And so on.

    The theory, followed through for America, states we’re in the end stages of one complete cycle. This isn’t too difficult to believe, considering we’re 248 years old as a country. Things were bound to break. After all, no one had previously attempted to run a country under a President, an elected official, prior to America. Our Constitution was radical in the most vast understanding of that word. The fact that so many other world leaders are now attempting to use our methods to run their countries is a testament to how well it has worked.

    The thing is, though, I believe our Founders knew it wouldn’t work forever, as given. That’s one reason why they created the Constitution. It was created in such a way as to allow We The People to change and ratify it, as we became better as a People, and as we matured as a country.

    (more…)

            

  • Love it or hate it, project management is a thing. It has to be there. If you don’t think it is there, you are just doing it badly.

    Project Managers are a different kettle of fish. Some need to be boiled alive. Others can just dance on hot rocks. And a very few can sit at the big boys’ table.

    I’m coming off the end of a rush project that was big. I had to take a customized system and add tariffs to it with about 14 days from concept to deployed. More than a little to get done.

    When I started programming, I had a choice of an 8080 with a 24×80 character display, or a 6502 with a 24×40 character display.

    When I was introduced to JOVE, Jonathan’s Own Version of EMACS, I fell in love with it. Multiple views into the same file, the ability to copy and paste from different files or different places in the same file. And auto indentation.

    Powerful stuff for the time.

    My fingers worked will with vi and later vim because I played Nethack and before that, Hack. The programs had a particular key set for moving the cursor based on the key caps of a terminal type used at MIT.

    The author had never seen a terminal without arrows over the J, K, H, and L keys. To give you an idea of how ingrained those are, I had to fire up vim and tell my fingers “down”, “up”, “right”, and “left” to record the keys for this sentence. My fingers know, I don’t.

    Besides jove, I learned emacs. Emacs is my programming editor. It is what I use when I need to write a lot of code or text. With modern computers, it starts just as fast as jove ever did on a 68020 class CPU.

    The problem we had was keeping track of what needed to be done or fixed. This might start off as a document, written with jove in troff. This could be fed to different processors to create PostScript files to be sent to our printers.

    Later, some of us used LaTeX for the same thing. Your “design document” was a separate file that was “fixed” before you started coding. These documents never contained more than brief pseudocode and discussions of algorithms.

    As you were coding, if you discovered something, you created a comment and marked it. The two most common marks were, XXX which meant that the code was broken in some way, but it didn’t need to be fixed now. All XXX marks had to be addressed before the code could be released.

    The other mark was TODO. This was working code but needed some features or extensions added. These did not need to be fixed before release.

    In general, we used grep to find all these markers in a list of files. It wasn’t difficult.

    The small program I’m working with has some 250k lines of code. After 3 or 4 years of supporting this site, I would say I’ve looked at every line of code in the system.

    Finding every marker in 4100 files across 1200 directories is a pain.

    Enter Kanban

    Kanban is a project management tool. The concept is easy enough to do with sticky notes and a white board or notes with push pins on a larger bulletin board.

    Today, the normal Kanban has 4 columns to hold cards. The cards are labeled, “backlog”, “To Do”, “Doing” or “Working”, and “Done”.

    When you create a card it goes into the “backlog” column. These are issues or tasks that have no resources assigned to them.

    Once per week, there is a meeting of the workers and the project manager. In this meeting, the project manager evaluates the cards that are in the “Done” column. If they are truly done, then they are removed from the board and added to the QA project.

    Cards that are in the working column stay in the working column. Cards that are in the working column can be moved into the backlog column if some other card blocks them.

    For example, if you have a card that says, “Put new tire on left front wheel” it cannot be worked on until the card that says, “Purchase a new tire for the front left wheel.” Until the purchase card is completed, you can’t work on the installation card.

    If there are any resources (workers/developers) that think they are going to need more tasks to work on, the project manager will take cards from the backlog column and move them to the To-Do column.

    When a worker requires more work, they move the card from the To-Do column to the working column. When they complete the card, they move it to the Done column.

    I’ve used Kanban in the past. It never really appealed to me as it didn’t feel any different from the old ways of doing things.

    For this latest project, I used my Kanban board.

    Instead of putting markers in the code, I opened a new issue. That issue just went into the “backlog” column. I could tag the issue as a bug or a feature. I could indicate that cards were blocked. It was faster to create the issues/cards than to make entries into the files and then try to locate them later.

    Today, I’ll be looking through anything in the QA column and writing unit or web tests for them. I’ll also be doing a QA across the site, to add to the project board.

    The biggest thing for me was the ability to visual see what still needed to be done.

    Conclusion

    Good tools make the work go faster.

            

  • You may ask yourself, why is Allyson posting up songs from 1967 that weren’t even popular back then? Listen to the song. Sure, it’s a song about Snoopy. No question at all.

    It’s more than that. I’ve been listening to bunches of OLD music (defined as pre-1970s, thank you very much… you know, EARLY 20th century) of late, and this one really struck me. On the surface, it’s just a silly song about Snoopy, our beloved cartoon dog. The lyrics aren’t particularly smart, but they scan nicely and the song is fun to sing.

    But the Red Baron was a real person, and he really did take down 80 aerial combatants in 1917. Of course he wasn’t stopped by Snoopy; his plane was shot down by a combination of RAF pilots and Australian ground gunners. He was killed by a single bullet, and went down near Vaux-sur-Somme, France.

    So why this silly song? Because it harkens to a time when this country actually cared about its position in the world stage. If the actions of Hitler in the 30s and early 40s were to happen today, we would do nothing. Today’s generation isn’t interested in fixing those kinds of wrongs. To misquote Karoline, the people in France would be speaking German. We can see this all around us. There are plenty of places where heinous things are going on, and we’re just not involved anymore.

    I’m not sure we should be, because America managed to get itself listed as the world’s police, and that’s not a good thing. But at one time, when we stood up the enemy nations cowered with fear. Today, they just shrug and go back to messing with little girls and silencing women and killing the innocent.

    There is hope. With Trump currently in office, military enrollment is up, exponentially. We see world bullies quietly standing down and skulking off to the shadows once more. The question is, can we keep it up? There is hope, but it’s going to take more than Trump’s four years in office to make it real.

    I want to live in a world where we can make slightly off color jokes about stuff, and have folks chuckle. Most of the music I’ve listened to in the last five days would NEVER be permitted on the radio today. Too sexist, too racist, too … whatever. But they’re fun, and light, and frankly, no one gets hurt by listening to them.

    So here’s to a world where we can cheer on Snoopy, and be proud of our troops, and stand up for freedom in our country… and then, when we’re in a better place at home, for freedom elsewhere.

            

  • Everyone in my house loves stir fry. I do all kinds of stir fry dishes, too. I make a great coconut Thai curry, and my ginger soy poke bowls aren’t bad either. Recently, I was in a mood for noodles instead of rice, though, and I went looking and found a recipe for using ramen noodles in a stir fry. This is my take on that!

    Ingredients:

    • 3 tbsp regular soy sauce
    • 3 tbsp dark soy sauce
    • 3 tbsp hoisin sauce
    • 1 tbsp oyster sauce
    • 1 tbsp rice wine vinegar
    • 2 tsp sriracha or sweet chili sauce
    • 1/4 tsp white ground pepper
    • 3 packages instant ramen noodles (discard flavor packets)
    • 1 lb skinless, boneless chicken breasts, diced
    • 3 tbsp vegetable oil, divided (see recipe)
    • 1 cup diced red bell pepper
    • 1 cup sliced white button mushrooms
    • 1/2 cup diced sweet yellow onion
    • 1 cup broccoli florets
    • 1 tbsp fresh minced garlic
    • 1 tbsp fresh grated ginger
    • 2 thinly sliced green onion
    • 1/2 tbsp toasted sesame seeds

    In a small mixing bowl, whisk together the soy sauces, hoisin, oyster sauce, rice wine vinegar, sriracha (or chili sauce) and white pepper. Set aside.

    In a large pot or saucepan, bring 6 cups of water to a low boil. Add the noodles to the water and cook for 2 minutes only (you just want to soften them). Drain and rinse the noodles in cold water to stop the cooking process, then set them aside.

    Heat a wok or other nonstick pot to medium high, and add a tablespoon of oil. Add in the diced chicken breast and cook for 4 to 5 minutes, until the chicken is thoroughly cooked. Remove the chicken pieces and set them aside. In the same wok, add the remaining 2 tablespoons of oil and let it heat up. Add in the bell pepper, mushrooms, and onions. Cook until the onions and peppers are tender but still toothsome. Add in the broccoli and continue to cook until it turns a vibrant green. Toss in the minced garlic and grated ginger, and cook for an additional minute.

    Return the chicken to the vegetable mixture and stir to combine. Turn off the heat but keep the wok on the stove. Add in the cooked ramen, and then pour the sauce over everything. Use tongs or two forks to toss everything together. Be sure to get the sauce on everything.

    Garnish your stir fry with the thinly sliced green onion and the sesame seeds. Serve this while it’s still hot.

    Notes:

    We don’t use peppers around here because of allergies. I substituted in some thinly sliced carrots instead. You could really go with any combination of vegetables for this (or any) stir fry, but do keep it simple. The sauce is the star of this show, and too many vegetables will take away from its glory.

            
  • Good points on flintlocks. Then again, making your own primers is definitely possible, including the charge inside. I ran into a reference (online) about making primer charges. You do need some chemical skills, though not a whole lot more than what it takes to make powder for some of the options. I once made mercury fulminate way back in college following the procedure listed in a German textbook I had read (Die Explosivstoffe by H. Brunswig, you can find it online). Not an optimal choice but easy and it would do the job.

    On “technology would return quickly”, maybe so, but I wonder about that. A month or two ago on a list I follow someone posed the question “what is your book list for the books to save if civilization were to collapse?” I tried to make a list of 3, a list of a dozen, and the outline of a list of 100. Even with 100 it’s not so easy.

    Suppose you have to start over with basic hand tools and a stock of metal. Can you make things? It would help to have a lathe. Can you make a lathe? A basic one (wood turning style) is not too hard. What about a screw cutting lathe? Maudsley figured out how to make a lead screw without a screw cutting lathe. How? Chase it? I suppose that must be the answer, but I haven’t seen the procedure documented.

    And this is just one example. You’ll probably want nitric acid. Can you make that?

    Do you want to communicate? Can you find Morse code, or semaphore code? Do you want a radio, and how would you make the parts? Even a first generation radio (spark transmitter, crystal receiver) takes electric power and headphones and other stuff you would have to learn to make.

    — pkoning

    Black powder is a low explosive. It deflagrates instead of explodes.

    Does this mean it is less powerful than a high explosive? I’m not the one to answer that.

    In doing research, I found that in some mining situations in the past, they would create a room to hold the explosives. The room would be filled with high explosives to shatter the rock and black powder to push the rock out. The cartoons of rooms filled with “gunpowder” and “dynamite” were based on real-world things.

    I have not attempted to make any high explosives. I have the knowledge, I have some books on how to do it, I have not done it. Therefore, I do not have the skill(s) — yet.

    One of the interesting aspects of high explosives it that many don’t like to go boom. They need an initiation charge to do so. So you need a small amount of a more sensitive yet still energetic enough explosive to make the high explosive go boom.

    One of my manuals describes how you create a blasting cap from a 5.56 case. Simplified, remove the primer from a spent case. Feed a slow fuse through the primer hole. Place it in the “press” to be filled.

    The press is a wooden dowel that fits in the case mouth. It is attached to a wooden lever, with one end of the lever attached to a firm upright. The dowel is positioned only a couple of inches from the pivot point.

    The lever is a couple of feet long. At the far end is a hole for a rope. The rope leads down to a snatch block (pulley) on the ground.

    To use the press, you put a small amount of the primary explosive in the case. You GENTLY put the wooden dowel in the case mouth. You go a good distance away to the end of your rope, and you gently pull the rope to pull the lever down to press the primary explosive into the case.

    When you have an unexpected explosion of the primary explosive, you are hopefully far enough away and behind cover so you are not harmed.

    Yeah, not for the faint of heart.

    Primers, again something I have knowledge about, I haven’t attempted it. I have been collecting spent primers for a few thousand rounds, just in case.

    As for technology returning rapidly? Yeah, it will. Not because of any one person, but because of the wealth of skills that exist. As my mentor used to say, “If the Internet were to be destroyed tomorrow, it would be back up in a couple of weeks because geeks can’t live without their porn.”

    It isn’t so much that we could rebuild everything, it is that we have so much “scrap” that could be brought back on line.

    My plan for books is to take a few thousand with me. A Kindle device with a low-power draw and a few thousand books sitting in a cage to protect it from EMPs. Hell, multiple such devices. I have small memory devices of 64GB. You can put a hell of alot of data on one of those. And duplicate it.

    Paper books would be a back-up, and we have bookshelves of such books.

    Suppose you have to start over with basic hand tools and a stock of metal. Can you make things?

    I have a foundry. I can make castings. I can make patterns. This is a good first step. Can I pour iron? I have the knowledge and tools to do so. I haven’t poured iron. I’ve only poured aluminum.

    Aluminum isn’t as good as iron for most castings, but it is better than wood. There is plenty of aluminum to be had as scrap.

    I do have a lathe. The lathe I have is belt-driven. That belt is powered by a 3 phase electric motor. I have the skills to make new leather belts for it. In a worse case situation, I can get slow speeds from it with a human-powered system, like a bicycle.

    This is the reason I learned how to make safe steam boilers (knowledge) and steam expansion engines (skill). I have a generator set that I plan to make steam powered, if required, to make electricity for the mill.

    Can I make a wood cutting lathe? Yes. I have the skills to use it.

    Can I make a wooden screw? Yes. I have done so. The thing about making screws is that you only need to make one course and nearly correct screw to be able to create any screw of any quality.

    The magic is in the reduction gears. Assume you want to make a screw that is a precise 8 threads per inch. You start with a hand cut screw of whatever pitch say 1.5x6tpi. This is a tap and die set you can pick up on Amazon. You can get different diameters and pitches.

    Even if this thread is not that precise, you can use it to make a more precise thread. If you feed this at a 4 to 1 ratio, you can get a pitch of 24. If you run it a 4 to 3, you can get your 8 threads per inch. The gearing might be a bit complex, it will take some time to get it right, but it can be done.

    Of more interest is making flat surfaces and right angles. With three right-angle samples, you can create three right angles and with 6 flat faces.

    Start by making a flat surface. This is done by starting with three nearly flat surfaces. Call them A, B, and C. Ink B and use it to find “high spots” on A. Scrape down the high spots on A. Repeat with C on B.

    A and C are now flatter as referenced to B. Ink C and use it to find high spots on A and B. Scrape the high spots. A and B are now flatter as referenced to C. Repeat for switching your inking surface each time. You can get a flat surface within the limits of your ink and the material you are using in short order.

    It took me a couple of weeks to accomplish this with rough aluminum castings. Mostly because I was only working a couple of hours per week on it.

    Once you have your flat surfaces, they become your reference. You can now make one face of each of your right angles flat. This doesn’t take much time because it is relatively easy because you are only scrapping one surface at a time.

    Now that you have those three faces flat, you can use the same method of A, B, and C with the vertical surfaces. If A is your reference surface, and it is out 0.100 over 4 inches, and you use it against B and C. Both B and C will be scraped towards a 0.100 IN over 4 inches.

    If you continued like this, you would end up with angle blocks that are not square.

    But, when you rotate through a different master each time, the angles will move towards vertical.

    A is out 0.100, this causes B and C to be IN by a little. Not the full 0.100. We now test A against B and A will be cut IN a little, making it more correct. B and C will hit lower than the top and will modify there.

    Each round, the surfaces get better and better.

    Can I make nitric acid? I have the instructions someplace. Again, knowledge, not skill.

    I don’t know morse well enough. I have knowledge but not skill. I have references for semaphore. Knowledge, not skill. I have real-world cypher experience. I haven’t built a radio in 50 years, but again, I have the references.

    So the brief answer is keep learning. Have fun learning. And make sure you translate that knowledge into skills.

    There is a shed on my property that my children and I built. I built it as if I were building a house, but in small. I built it to translate knowledge into skills. And we learned. Boy did we learn.

            

  • I grew up a prepper. Most of the people I knew were preppers. The difference was that it was normal.

    My parents were born at the tail of the great depression. They lived through WWII as children and suffered the rationing that took place in the US.

    My grandparents planted and tended a garden every summer. It was just the norm.

    We once lived a good 2 hours from any supermarket. There was a local grocery, but everything there was pricey. It was the sort of place you went if you ran out of eggs.

    Once a month, my mother would drive onto base in DC and shop at the commissary. She would have three or four carts of food. She purchased a month’s worth of milk. When we got home, everything was put away in freezers. We had “fresh” milk for about 3 days per month, thereafter, it was from frozen.

    When we could, mom had a garden. She was never happier than when she had an entire acre of garden.

    People think about “getting started” with prepping.

    I believe this is the wrong mindset. The correct mindset is to start thinking about what knowledge and skills do you need?

    Skills and knowledge are entirely different things. You might know how to wire an electrical outlet, but do you have you done it? Do you know how to use the tools? Do you have the right tools? Can you do it without harming yourself or others?

    Because of my parents, I started with a “being prepared” mindset. There was always enough food in the pantry, freezer, and refrigerator. It was just the way I grew up.

    I remember the first major snowstorm in Maryland after my daughter was born. Wife number one wasn’t satisfied with what we had in the refrigerator. Our child would starve if I didn’t get some milk, right now.

    I put on my calf high moccasins, my wide brimmed hat, my winter coat and walked to the 7/11 to get milk.

    On the way there, I pushed a female cop’s car out of the snow bank three times.

    My wife was in a panic. I was not. I had powdered milk, a supply of gravity feed fresh water, and a camp stove. There was nothing to worry about.

    I was wrong. I had knowledge, but not enough skills.

    I’ve spent the last forty years learning more skills. What skills I didn’t learn for myself, I found people I love and trust to have those skills.

    When I lived in Maryland, it felt like there was a strong chance of a war engulfing the East Coast. Not American vs. American, but of actual foreign soldiers on our soil. I had the money, I spent that money on firearms for battle. I wasn’t thinking of hunting. I wasn’t thinking of food and shelter.

    I was ignorant. But it was a step in the correct direction.

    Today I have more skills, I have a better idea of what I don’t know. I still don’t know what I don’t know, but I can see that I have gaps.

    One of the people making comments suggested that I have a flintlock style firearm. Amazingly enough, that is coming to my home shortly.

    The Fort At #4 represents the time around of the French and Indian war. I am working with some reenactors to find a smoothbore that is period correct and a rifle. I want a Kentucky long rifle. I’ve loved the look of that rifle since watching Daniel Boone on TV.

    I not only know how to make black powder, I’ve done it. I have extensive notes on how I did it. I have the tools to manufacture it, about 2 pounds at a time.

    We are practicing making salt-peter but haven’t succeeded yet. I’ve made proper charcoal. And I have some sulfur. KNO3 is also around here.

    I want to make my own primers, but it is not worth the risk.

    I’ve made my own slow fuse and my own fast fuse. I’ve made fireworks. All cools stuff.

    If I’m talking to somebody knew to prepping, I always start with the rule of threes.

    1. You can live 3 minutes without air
    2. You can live 3 hours without shelter
    3. You can live 3 days without water
    4. You can live 3 weeks without food
    5. You can live 3 months without hope

    Without air is first-aid, hygiene, medical. If you are bleeding out, you aren’t going to make it the 3 hours to die without shelter. If you aren’t breathing, nothing else will matter in a few minutes.

    Without shelter includes fire making, proper clothing, proper shelter from the elements, and the skills to build a home.

    While 3 hours sounds extreme, consider falling into a freezing river in winter. How long will you survive? How long will you survive in the desert without proper protection from the sun?

    For whatever reason, most people put food before water. Water is life.

    Back in the ’80s, the army was looking at the best way to hydrate their soldiers. One method was to only allow the men to drink at rest stops, and only as much as they wanted. Another was to make them drink a certain amount at rest stops. Another was drinking on the move and making sure they drank “enough”.

    The test was simple, take a group of soldiers, make them hike a distance, then test them in a combat situation.

    Method one had the men combat ineffective at the end of the march. They were combat ineffective for a couple of days after.

    Method two had the men combat effective after a few hours of rest at the end of the march. They were combat ineffective for the next few days.

    The third method? The troops arrived and immediately went into combat, they were effective. They were able to repeat the test the next day without issue.

    There is a reason that the military has hydration rules that push water into the men. There is a reason that hydration packs are worn by sailors.

    Three weeks without food is pushing it. People become less capable after only a few days without food.

    Our family added, “Three months without hope.” Hope is having some form of joy with you. Pictures of loved ones. A deck of cards. Anything to help take your mind off what you are going through.

    One of the biggest takeaways I can give you, if you are starting to prep, “Don’t plan on survival, plan on living. Life was strong before our modern society, and life was good.”

    I close with a definition of a zombie. A zombie is that city dweller, from a deep blue city, that hasn’t eaten in a week, is drinking unfiltered water wherever they find it, and they are stripping the countryside clean of all food and goods.

    We saw zombies burning down cities because a criminal died of heart disease while in police custody. When you think of zombies, think of those drones, living in a city with less than 24 hours of food.

            

  • There are five rifles on the wall. Four lever action and “Mrs. Pink”, an AR-15 platform with pink furniture. Don’t ask.

    They are known as “Bear”, “Deer”, “Raccoon”, “Squirrel”, and “Mrs. Pink.”

    Bear is a Henry Big Boy in 45-70. Deer is a Winchester model 94 in 30-30. Squirrel is a Henry Golden Boy in .22LR.

    We do have bear around here, and I know that Bear has enough stopping power, with rapid follow-ups.

    Deer has taken a couple of deer. She does a fine job with iron sights for me out to around 150 yards.

    Squirrel isn’t used for squirrel hunting, but damn he’s fun to shoot.

    That leave’s Raccoon. Raccoon is a Rossi R-95 in .357 Magnum. She eats .38 special just fine. She is a little loose where the stock attaches to the receiver, but she will put rounds on target out to 100 yards with no problem.

    The lever action in .357 is a nice, mid-weight, rifle. I’ve used it for taken fat raccoon and opossums. One shot and they are down.

    She is easy to reload for, and it is easy to police up all the brass. I cast hollow point bullets for her and have some commercial bullets for her as well.

    All in all, she is a great rifle.

    There is a matching wheel gun in .357 magnum. I don’t have enough time with that revolver. It is more than capable of putting rounds on target, I’m not. It doesn’t shoot like my Sig nor my 1911s.

    Would I recommend an R-95 for a first-time gun buyer? No.

    They don’t have a great reputation. The loading gate is nasty sharp, it needs a little care to get it to function easily. I found that finding ammo for it was a bit of a pain. With reloading, it is a joy.

    Mrs. Pink as a red dot on her. She belongs to my wife. We run the manual of arms every so often, but I figure she has 30 rounds before she needs an assist to load the next magazine. But I know that those 30 rounds are going exactly where she wants them to go.

    The iron sights on the four lever guns work fine for me today. I have another 30-30 that has a scope mounted on it. I need to spend a few dollars to replace the scope with something modern and then sight everything in.

    All in all, those rifles make up the “go to” when needed now.

    The other part of this are the LBV that are available for use. Each vest has 6 30 round mags of 5.56, at least 2 spare mags for the pistol that goes with the LBV, and a first aid kit.

    Past Plans

    When I was considering buying my first firearms, I was looking at “what happens if…” My thought process was based on the concept of availability of ammo after the fall.

    That lead me to an AR-15 in 5.56, an AK type rifle in 7.62×39, a 9mm Glock, a bolt action in 7.62×51, a black powder revolver, and a black powder rifle.

    The firearm I have the most fun with, to this day, are the AR’s. They are gentle on the shoulder, the ammo isn’t too expensive, they are easy to carry and are just plain fun.

    Though I will note that they eat ammo rapidly. It isn’t an unusual range day when I won’t send 300+ rounds down range.

    I still have .308 from the original ammo buy. I’ve augmented it with reloads, but I don’t feed much through that rifle.

    Of course, once I started buying firearms, it hasn’t really stopped.

    Regardless, as more than one person has said, when the SHTF, the best firearm is the one you have.

            

  • See those seedlings hardening off in the header image? Those are from a garden I was growing about a decade ago. They’re strong, healthy seedlings. They’re ready to be set into the ground to thrive and grow and make veggies for us.

    And then there’s this specimen:

    See how it’s falling over, and it only has a single set of leaves? Those aren’t even leaves, by the by. Those are called cotyledons, or “seed leaves.” They’re just there to get the plant going. By the time a seedling is as tall as this one is, it should have several sets of leaves. So why is this poor thing falling over and not growing better and stronger?

    The first thing it’s lacking is probably light. Most of the time, when we’re starting seedlings indoors, we’re short on light. There are plenty of ways to fix that, of course. You can put them on a rack with a light right above them, and put a timer on it to give them 12 hours a day. That will fix the light problem, even if they’re cheap light strips. What if you don’t have a rack with light strips, though? Well, you can make do by giving your plants as much light as you can. I have a “daylight lamp” that I use in the winter to help with depression. This time of year, I no longer need it, so I give it to my plants. I move it around, so they all share in the glory of it. Any lamp put close enough to the seedlings will help.

    Your seedlings also may be too cold, or alternatively, too warm. Most seeds like to germinate between 65 and 80° F, so if your home goes below that at night (or, like mine, never gets that high even in the daytime), you  may need to pick up a seed mat. The mats aren’t that expensive, and you just place your seed trays right on top of them. They keep the temperature warm but not hot, and convince your seedlings that it’s time to grow.

    A third option is that you are not watering your plants enough, or that you’re over-watering them. You can tell if your plants have enough water by feeling the soil they’re in. If it’s dry and flaky, you need to water them, stat! If it’s saturated and dripping, it’s probably too wet. You need moist soil that clumps when you take a handful of it, but that isn’t dripping and sopping wet. It’s my strong opinion that the best way to water seedlings is from below. The containers your seedlings are in should have several small holes in the bottom (and if there aren’t, add some), or be made out of porous material like paper egg cartons. The containers should be sitting in a waterproof container, either one designed for the purpose or whatever you have on hand. Pour the water into the bottom of the tray, and let the soil suck it up from below. This encourages strong roots, which is important for your plant. If there’s a tiny bit of water in the tray, you’re fine. If it’s an inch deep, you need to drain it out. I also keep a mist sprayer on hand full of water, and each day I will spritz my seedlings. This helps prepare them for the rigors of a rainfall when they get outside.

    The last option for helping seedlings develop strong stems and avoid them being leggy, is to blow a fan over them. This should be a VERY gentle fan, aimed above but not directly onto the seedlings. This simulates the breeze outside, which is part of what causes a plant to create thick stems and rigorous root systems. The fan, sweeping back and forth, will make your plants signal themselves to create more roots and stronger stems. Another method is to (GENTLY) brush over your seedlings with your hands each morning and evening. This need take only a couple of seconds, and should be done very carefully.  You don’t want to break or damage the plants.

    If you get to the point where you need to thin out seedlings (an unfortunate thing but necessary), don’t pull them up. Pulling plants disturbs the soil and surrounding plants, possibly causing more than intended to die. Instead, cut them off at the soil line. The plant will die off and feed the soil, and you can feed the thinned plants to your chickens or bunnies (so long as they aren’t poisonous).