Starvin Larry

This post is meant to serve as a baseline. What this means is that, quite bluntly, it works for me at a minimum. It is meant to be added to, but never detracted from, while patrolling in the traditional sense. There’s a few items not pictured that should go without saying, such as a couple extra undershirts and a few pairs of socks packed in ziploc bags, and the communications equipment I’d carry as an RTO, but for the most part what you see here is basically the same as what was carried by yours truly in Afghanistan on multi-day long range patrols.

I’m a big fan of chest rigs for a couple of reasons- reloading speed and weight carrying efficiency along with the fact that everything centered on the body creates less snagging in thick brush, leaving less spoor for the potential tracker. Although they deserve a post unto…

There seems to be in human civilization a great seesaw like movement between forward movement and a great forgetting, a shedding of the fetters of civilization.

Normally this takes extraordinary measures by the country’s rulers.  China’s history is infuriating to read, because they advanced so far so fast and then got caught in this cycle of civilizational forgetting, of running away from everything they’d known and been.  Honestly the last one, the Cultural Revolution, was less successful than the others because the rest of the world remembered for them.

But when studying a civilization, you shouldn’t have to say “The Emperor who burned all the books?” and be answered, “Which one?”

Those emperors usually also set a death penalty on story tellers and grandmas who told stories were persecuted.

But the mania isn’t only Chinese.  The French Revolution not only tried to install all new things, but it was part…

They cast their silver in the streets, and their gold shall be removed; their silver and their gold shall not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the LORD: they shall not satisfy their souls, neither fill their bowels: because it is the stumbling block of their iniquity.

Ezekiel 7:19

Economics are important. You may or may not have enough ammo or be fit enough for what’s coming, but I can assure the vast majority of you are nowhere near economically ready. We’re not talking about floating monthly credit card debt or paying the mortgage; becoming prepared for a society reverting to barter is a bit harder than what most folks assume.

Silver and Gold

Far and away, the most common meme among Survivalists and Preppers is to invest in Silver and Gold as a hedge. Every conservative talk radio show advertises it, most forum…

RICHMOND, Va. — Rejecting as patently false the Obama administration’s contention that its mass surveillance program has inflicted no harm on American citizens, attorneys for The Rutherford Institute, ACLU, Wikipedia, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers have asked a federal appeals court to reinstate a First and Fourth Amendment lawsuit against the National Security Agency (NSA), the U.S. Department of Justice and their directors.

In advancing their arguments before the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, the broad coalition of educational, legal, human rights and media organizations point out that the NSA’s surveillance program—which is unprecedented in its scope and intrudes on the privacy of Americans’ internet communications and impairs their expressive and associational rights—has chilled lawful First Amendment expression and given rise to self-censorship. The coalition’s arguments are reinforced by a recent study published by the Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly showing that…