Survival Homestead

Source: TheStar.com

What should you do if you’re stranded outside in -15C weather? According to survivalist lore, burrow into the snow.

Weather researchers agree, and they provided the supporting scientific evidence in a recent issue of the Bulletin of the Canadian Meteorological and Oceanographic Society (CMOS).

During most winters, York University buries electronic thermometers at ground level beneath snow at a campus weather station. This past Feb. 29, when the air registered -15C, the temperature at the ground surface was a comparatively balmy 0. Three days later, when the air temperature rose to 12C, the ground surface remained at 0.

This is nature’s thermostat at work. The 10-centimetre-deep snow insulated the ground from the cold air. Also, any heat conducted up from the earth goes mostly into melting snow rather than raising temperatures.

Finally, when melted water freezes, it releases what’s known as “latent heat,” again maintaining the temperature near 0 at the spot where ground and snow meet.

But the survivalist thermostat fails when air temperatures are really frigid, says atmospheric science professor Peter Taylor in the CMOS Bulletin.

York also operated a weather station last winter at Iqaluit, Nunavut. The late February temperatures there were -25 to -30, both in the air and just beneath the snow surface.

“If you are stranded, burrowing under snow is still a good plan to conserve body heat,” writes Taylor, “but do not expect to find a -5C layer after several months of -30C temperatures.”

survivalism

Source: OrlandoSentinel.com

Donna and Joel Brinkle used to own 5 acres in Geneva. That’s where they raised their family. Joel worked as a manager at Florida Power & Light Co. Donna is a former deputy court clerk.

Then, in the 1990s, they stopped paying taxes and declared themselves independent of all government authority. They have been battling government ever since.

Joel, 76, went to jail. The IRS went after their money, and Seminole County sold their home because of unpaid taxes.

Now, they face a new battle: Florida’s attorney general is suing them, accusing them of fraud and harassment for filing a lien naming four Seminole County officials: Sheriff Don Eslinger; State Attorney Norm Wolfinger; Clerk of Courts Maryanne Morse; and Clayton Simmons, chief judge of the 18th judicial circuit.

The couple recorded the lien in April, claiming ownership of every piece of property held by those officials.

The suit asks a judge to throw out the claim and to ban the Brinkles from filing any more liens against public officials, unless it is done by an attorney or with a court order. It also asks a judge to bar the state and the county from accepting any more liens from the couple unless they are done by an attorney or with a court order.

Dozens of liens in 6 years

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sovereign citizen

Source: MyFox Philadelphia

The bomb squad and police conducted an investigation Tuesday in Conshohocken at the Millennium Riverwalk Complex, which was the scene of a major fire last summer.

Police responded to an 11:30 a.m. report of a possible explosive device found in apartment building 4000 and remained at the complex for several hours.

Montgomery County authorities later said they recovered several weapons — all of which are believed to be legally owned — as well as other items from an apartment that was left uninhabitable by the August blaze and the presence of mold.

The items removed from the apartment belonged to a man described as a survivalist who was never allowed to return to the residence. He was said to be cooperating with the police investigation, Fox 29’s Joyce Evans reported from the scene.

Investigators were taking the items — including about 50 containers of rice — to a crime lab to ensure that there was nothing illegal there, and that process was expected to take several days.

After arriving at the scene Tuesday morning, the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department Bomb Disposal Unit first X-rayed a black bag found near the complex entrance. It was found to have nothing inside.

Police then searched inside of the building and said, based on what they found inside, they felt further investigation was warranted.

The apartment complex told residents that a security company noticed a box of ammunition in the building, prompting the call to police.

Source: men.style.com

“Hard-core survivalists say I’m a complete poseur,” says Mike, who estimates he’s spent about $10,000 on his stockpile. “They give me flak for living in the city. True, I’m eight miles from one of the biggest targets in the country—but I’m not going to live in some podunk town. I like to go out to dinner and bars. I like my nice, soft, cushy life.”

According to Jim Rawles of SurvivalBlog.com, survivalism is growing at a rate not seen since the seventies, fueled by such obvious crises as the housing crash, the tanking economy, looming environmental disasters, and the spike in oil prices. All of these things have conspired to validate the preppers’ paranoid worldview, but, more than the supposed Y2K computer bugs or the post-September 11 terrorism panic, the catalyst was Hurricane Katrina. It was an unholy confluence of natural calamity, government failure, and ensuing human suffering, disorder, and anarchy.

“For me, the horrid government response to Katrina really struck home,” says Jason, a 34-year-old who runs SHTFblog.com, a survivalist website. “I don’t think the government is out to get me, but I do think it’ll be inept at delivering help should I and much of the nation need it during a time of disaster. Then there’s SARS, global warming, increased food and fuel costs … Watch the evening news—why wouldn’t you prepare?”

Preppers don’t preach about the Rapture or hold up the end is near signs. They keep their identities under wraps, partly because they don’t want their neighbors and coworkers to think of them as better-dressed versions of Ted Kaczynski. “I don’t talk about it to a lot of people,” Mike says. “They make fun of you.” But preppers are also secretive because they don’t want a crowd at the door—waiting for handouts—when things do fall apart.

Jack Spirko, a 35-year-old media-company owner, lives in a subdivision outside Dallas, in a sprawling house with a home movie theater and two living rooms. He’s taken pains to make sure that none of his neighbors know he’s been vacuum-packing quail meat and stocking up on zucchini from his backyard garden for the past three years. “If you walked up to one of them and said, ‘Do you know Jack? Do you think he has six months of food in the house?’” he says, “they’d say no. We don’t wear camo. We don’t look like survivalists. We look normal.”

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I do have to wonder what the basis is for the cruelty to children charge…hopefully it’s not related to their lack of Gameboys or fashionable clothes…Leave this man and his family alone!

Source: The Augusta Chronicle

Ricky Cantrell had a heart-to-heart talk with Jeremy Long about his family.

It was the early 1990s, and the two men ran a struggling pulpwood business together and lived next door to each other in mobile homes on Georgia Highway 88 in Blythe.

Mr. Long had just had his third child, and he was already having trouble paying bills and taking care of the family to the point that the older children wore tight, raggedy clothes, Mr. Cantrell said. He told Mr. Long he needed to apply for government assistance.

Soon after that, a woman pulled up in the dirt driveway they shared, driving a big sedan that looked like an unmarked government car. Mr. Long got nervous and agitated, according to Mr. Cantrell.

He told his wife to take the children inside, then ordered the woman off his property.

“I think he got scared and shut it down,” Mr. Cantrell said. “That’s really what made us think, what in the world’s the matter with them?”

A lot of people wondered that over the years, and the question lingers in the wake of authorities discovering Mr. Long’s wife and 11 children living in a ramshackle house in Burke County with no running water or electricity.

Before his arrest Aug. 8, Mr. Long spent nearly two decades on the fringes of society. He took pains to keep himself and his family off the grid.

The children — ranging from 10 months to 18 years old — had never been inside a school classroom nor had a single vaccination, Burke County Sheriff Greg Coursey said. The only doctor they had seen was at their births in Augusta emergency rooms. Former neighbors said whenever a stranger passed by or looked their way, they scattered and hid.

Though he could easily have qualified for it, Mr. Long wouldn’t get on welfare or take food stamps. He didn’t have a valid driver’s license, and a prosecutor who handled his bond hearing said he left “no paper trail.” The caretaker of the abandoned house where police found the family said they were there without permission.

Mr. Long, 37, wouldn’t speak to The Augusta Chronicle last week when a reporter visited him at the Burke County jail, where he’s being held on a charge of second-degree cruelty to children. His wife, Christine, 38, didn’t respond to a letter requesting an interview. His attorneys with the Augusta Judicial Circuit public defender’s office also refused to comment.

However, interviews with former co-workers, business partners, neighbors and employers of Mr. Long dating back more than a decade paint a picture of a secretive man who worked hard as a talented jack-of-all-trades and cared about his children, but kept society and its government institutions at arm’s length.

That went for his family back in Louisiana, too.

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