Tag: SHTF Prep

Black Friday Suggestions

SHTF

A little while back, Larry Correia done a rant, excellent as always, ending with the wonderful payoff line:

But these stupid motherfuckers are not going to quit pushing until a critical mass of Americans just says fuck it and go full on Rwandan machete party.

Unlikely.  The only reason the Rwandans went all slashy was because they had no Second Amendment at their disposal.  We, however…

Anyway, Larry’s point was not about machetes, per se, but predictably the comments that followed were all about machetes, good ones, brand names, where to get them, etc.

Kinda like the tangent my Readers would follow, bless ’em.

Of course, in that SHTF eventuality I wouldn’t depend on a machete (panga, as they’re known in Africa), because of the invention of brass cartridges and their excellent launching platforms as created by John Moses Browning, Mikhail Kalashnikov and other such fine folks.

Anyway, I believe I have the “slash” part of the party quite adequately covered by my Fox 685 “Trekking” blade:

…but believe me, it’s way down the list of tool options for the Great Society Realignment of 202x.

Room With A View

Real Estate, SHTF

For those who want to get away from it all, there’s always this place:

I can just see the listing description:

Adorable cottage with unbeatable Alpine view needs only a little TLC to make a perfect retreat from the bustle of city life.  No-maintenance garden and limitless recreational activities await its next loving owner.  Property adjoins national park, so no neighbors will spoil your view or solitude.  Only the screams of the many falling climbers  soaring eagles disturb the silence, and winter snows turn the area into a picture-postcard life.  Main road  path only steps away.  One of a kind value!

Uh huh.

Handy

SHTF

I’ve mentioned this bad boy in the past as a worthwhile addition to a SHTF bag:

I see it as an axe, a hammer, a nail-puller and, in fact, a fairly decent weapon.  All for under $40.

Walmart has the Estwing version — all-metal, for half a dozen bucks more.

Both are made in the U.S., so that’s all good.  My only word of advice is that you may want to touch up the axe blade of each one a tad, as I did mine (I have two in my SHTF bag) — they’re rigger’s hatchets, not woodsman’s.

Isolated

Resistance

I forget where I got this (sorry), but SOTI I saw this, as the mindset of the Deep Swamp towards us conservatives:

“We don’t like things as they are, and so we’ll make it really, really expensive for certain people to enforce their rights. We’ll make them fight every day for what should be rightly theirs for free. We’ll take away their birthright. We’ll screw with their businesses and screw with their wombs and screw with their assumptions about what the courts have guaranteed them, and some of them will give up, and some of them will make mistakes, and we’ll just make sure they have many bad days, and eventually they’ll get tired of fighting with us and we’ll get a team of brutal lawyers to take them down and put them in their place.”

At American Greatness, Max Martin has this rather withering comment to make:

At this moment [conservatives] are the weaker side in this asymmetric struggle. Right now, we are 80 million couch potatoes and keyboard warriors with rifles in our bedroom closets. This is not a force to be reckoned with.

Read the article to get the argument that leads him to that depressing conclusion.  Not part of his analysis, by the way, is that a large number of the so-called 80 million are a bunch of old bastards like myself, who have neither the health, energy nor will to do all the stuff he suggests we do to avoid being buried by the liberal ruling elite.

So what’s left?  DO we just resign ourselves to the fact that at some point, if we refuse to give in to the feral [sic] government, its rules, regulations and apparatchiks, we should just wait in our homes for the sturmtruppen  and Stasi to come for us, and then surrender meekly to be led off to Room 101?  Or, for those of us who have nothing to lose, resist with violence rather than just resign ourselves to our fate?

Let’s face it:  if the American Revolution was actively pursued and fought (by some estimates) by only 13% of the then-population of the soon-to-be United States, that means that the other 87% were either British loyalists or the 18th-century equivalent of couch potatoes.  That being the case, who is going to form the 13% of conservatives (10 million?  we should be so lucky) who would actively form the resistance against the fucking establishment?

Here’s the late Joseph Sobran on the topic:

“By today’s standards King George III was a very mild tyrant indeed. He taxed his American colonists at a rate of only pennies per annum. His actual impact on their personal lives was trivial. He had arbitrary power over them in law and in principle but in fact it was seldom exercised. If you compare his rule with that of today’s U.S. Government you have to wonder why we celebrate our independence…”

And if I may be so bold:  what’s facing us, as the de facto  survivors and supporters of the principles that formed our republic, is a far more formidable foe than George III.

  • They aren’t thousands of miles away over the ocean, with no communication other than written letters and ship-borne transmission.  They are right here, and their military force, communications and even media support are far, far greater than anything the British king had at his disposal.
  • Whereas George III and the British population may have had a relatively benign attitude towards those pesky columnists, our modern-day opponents actively hate us and think we should be exterminated — whether by shunning (of our voices and our access to communication), or in some extreme examples, killed.  (Lest I’m accused of being overwrought on this issue, let us remind ourselves that nobody dreamed that the oh-so civilized Germans, with their cultural history of Goethe and Schiller, would be capable of mass murder and genocide — except that they were.)
  • The Revolutionary army of 1776 was well armed for the time.  We have a few thousand committed riflemen, to be pitted against a modern army.  We can’t even drink beer when threatened by Meal Team Six, let alone withstand a sustained assault against our lives by a federal army such as FBI SWAT teams, DHS ditto, or even IRS agents.  They can concentrate their forces against us;  we can’t do the same against them.
  • Forget that shit about the U.S. Armed Forces being composed of supportive conservative warriors.  They aren’t any more, at least at the officer level.  If the government decided to use them against us, they will.  They’ve walked all over the Constitution in terms of our freedom of speech and they continue to do so on our right to bear arms;  so if you think a little thing like Posse Comitatus  is going to stand in their way, I have a New York bridge to sell you.
  • Most importantly of all:  we have no leaders.  Even if we did, the modern state can dispose of them with absolute ease and little fear of retribution:  our equivalent of John Hancock, John Adams, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington wouldn’t last a day without being muzzled, arrested and imprisoned under the various anti-terrorism laws.

I wish I had something more upbeat to say about all this, but the reality is that I’m in the grip of a profound sense of gloomy foreboding.

Feel free to add your thoughts in Comments.  And if you’re afraid to be candid because of the possible consequences… then that is precisely what I’m talking about.

Open Letter To TX.gov

Bad News, SHTF

Now that things have returned to normal (ice melted, water restored, power turned back on), we need to look very hard at ourselves and make sure that none of the past month’s nonsense ever happens again in Texas.  In case the Big Brains haven’t figured it out yet, let’s look at the problems and their solutions.  First, the overriding principle:

Texas needs to become completely self-sufficient in power generation.  That includes during times of inclement weather such as we’ve just had.

1.)  Wind power fails in a crisis.  That’s not an assertion, that’s a truism, and it’s not just true in Texas:  it’s true everywhere in the world.  So if we’re going to continue to generate power from wind, that power needs to be sold outside the state to, say, California [irony alert] because they apparently love the stuff.  But not a single part of the Texas energy supply should come from wind power, ever again.

This means that to replace wind power as part of our energy supply system, we have to build more gas-powered and nuclear power stations.  And we need to do it quickly, in the next couple of years.  But before anyone starts blathering on about environmental regulations as excuses for not getting it done, here’s the mandate:  get it done or we’ll elect people who can.

2.)  Texas has its own electricity distribution grid, and it sucks — once again, a statement of fact.  Texans don’t want to hear about pipelines freezing or cables breaking because of extreme cold, ever again.  When it gets cold — and no matter how cold it gets — Texas needs to continue functioning.  Our energy transmission grid needs to be made bullet-proof.

3.)  All of this is going to cost money.  Don’t care.  We also know that a lot of people have a lot of money and political capital invested in the “renewable” power generation business, and we don’t care about them either.  Find the money by cutting pork-barrel expenditure items from the Texas budget — if you need to know where they are, ask Dan Crenshaw for a list, because I bet he has one — or else, lean on the utility companies to get their own house in order, because apparently they’ve been unable to do it for themselves.  And if they do, that can’t come at the expense of higher utility bills.  We pay enough for electricity already, and given the energy resources Texas has at its disposal, we should be paying even less.  (And while you’re there, eliminate this nonsense.)

4.)  Pass legislation that enables all the above.  Generally speaking, we don’t like our state legislature to pass that many laws (see:  biannual legislature sessions, two-year budgets), but this is one time we’ll make an exception.  If you can get everything done under existing legislation, fine.  If not, pass the laws to enable them.

Texans are proud bunch, and when we see statistics like “3 million people have no electricity in the United States;  2.3 million of them live in Texas”, that pisses us off, big time.  Not having heat, water or power in our homes when it’s 15°F outside is not acceptable.  Just to hammer the nail in up to the head:  we’re talking millions of pissed-off voters.

I know that in any financial system there’s a calculus that says you can’t budget for extremes.  It’s the reason why Brownsville, for example, has no supplies of road salt and no trucks to scatter it on icy roads.  I’m not talking about that.  What I’m stating is that electricity is not a luxury, it’s a necessity — and it’s exponentially more necessary in inclement weather.

As a rule, I ignore the disaster weenies who are always forecasting doom because of climate change, wild swings in weather conditions and so on.  While their stupid predictions are not worth thinking about, the inescapable fact is that the Big Freeze of February 2021 has exposed our vulnerability and the fragility of our energy supply grid.  This time it was freakish weather, but that doesn’t mean it will never happen again.  The consequences of failure are too great for us to do nothing, and hope that the law of averages will come to our rescue in the future, because if averages tell us anything, it’s not to rely on them.  A polar freeze which happens every fifty years on average means that you could have one every year for the next ten years and not another one for the next five hundred.  That’s the way to look at averages, and it’s no way to gamble with the well-being of your citizens and the state economy.

Get it done.  And don’t even think of imposing a state income tax to raise the money — I shouldn’t even have to mention it, but some idiot will.

Lessons Learned

SHTF

Now that the waters have receded (from our apartment) and the ice has melted (from the Great Texas Polar Event of 2021), here are a couple of things I’ve learned from the experience.

1.)  You cannot have too many flashlights, lanterns or batteries.  Seriously.  When our power went out, I was three lanterns short, and I kept misplacing my goddamn flashlight — you know, you put it down to carry a bucket of floodwater outside, then can’t find the thing when you come back into a darkened room.

Addendum:  You don’t need trillions of candlepower to get by.  Seriously, again.  In fact, my trusty Surefire was often too bright, its beam blinding me when bouncing off a mirror or white wall.

Next steps:  I’m going to get at least three more battery-operated lanterns like this one:


I already have one of these, and for long life and adequate lighting, it’s the best:  it saw me through the last Plano power outage (5 days) back in 2016.

As for flashlights, I’m going to get a bunch of these Maglite 3C bad boys:


I used to pack one on hunts and camping trips back in South Africa, and over about five years it never broke, flickered or burned out — and those were the days before LED bulbs, even.  (I can’t believe that I don’t own one now, come to think of it. ) There is going to be at least one in every room in the house, and in each car as well.  (Note:  I already own a sufficiency of “tactical” Surefire and Fenix flashlights, and also a couple headlight types as well.)

I’m also going to get a lanyard to hang a smaller Maglite around my neck, just in case.

2.)  My little butane cooking stove was completely inadequate to cook anything outside — the wind kept blowing the flame out, and even in calm conditions, it took over half an hour to boil a single pot of water, because butane sucks under frigid conditions.  Here’s the offending object:

Next steps:  what I’m going to get is a sturdy camp stove, like this one:

…which uses Coleman Fuel, white gas* or in a pinch, even gasoline (which I always have on hand in a spare fuel can).  Or I might just go crazy and get one of these:

I don’t care much about portability because it’s for in-home emergencies like we just endured.

Conclusion:  it doesn’t seem to matter how well prepared you think you are — I certainly wasn’t, even though I thought otherwise.  (I didn’t run out of batteries, which is the only good thing about the whole sorry business.)  Next time will be better, I hope.

*Coleman Fuel and white gas are almost the same, except that white gas, while cheaper, doesn’t have the extra stabilizers and corrosion-preventatives that the branded Coleman Fuel contains.  Even so, either will last up to ten years in an unopened container.