Survival Homestead

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.

It’s interesting that, as time went on, many of the offspring of the people who lived through the depression retained fewer and fewer of the skills and values that would be necessary to successfully cope with difficult economic times.  This is in part due to ignorance, greed, the inability to delay gratification, and most importantly, manipulation by a greedy and corrupt system.

The “System” has developed numerous means by which to separate the individual from their capital.  An excellent treatment of this is an article called “The Gospel of Consumption.”  Understand this!  And do not allow yourself to be milked like some stupid cow.

We will learn these lessons of depression-era living again it seems, but maybe this time, after the dust settles and we count the heads of those remaining, we can retain them and pass them on to future generations so that they will not be so dependent on an increasingly fragile and complex system that is just itching to shear them like sheeple.  Do this for yourself, but more importantly, do it for your children.  Teach it to them, and do so primarily by example….that’s what they will be paying most attention to anyway.

• Avoid debt like the plague it is.
• Make due or do without.  If you cannot afford it then you cannot have it.
• Be happy with what you already have.  It’s called “Thankfulness”
• Be good stewards of the resources you currently possess
• Run your household like a business, because it is a business.

Source: CNN.com

Memories of salvaging and stealing to avoid going hungry are part of the legacy of the Great Depression. Some iReporters say they can’t help but look at the current economy and feel the past holds lessons for the present.

…

Donna LeBlanc of Waxia, Louisiana, says she carries no credit to this day as a result of the frugality and self-reliance instilled in her by her family. Her husband keeps the couple’s credit card and maintains a zero balance.

The Great Depression meant scary times for many households as a period of economic downturn spread throughout the world. Historians trace its start to the “Black Tuesday” stock crash on October 29, 1929, and argue that the resulting global desperation set the stage for World War II.

LeBlanc said her grandparents were fortunate that they didn’t have investments and could grow — or catch — their own food during the Depression years.

Her grandfather Lester was a “Cajun cowboy” often seen wearing a cowboy hat, and her grandmother Ida was a resourceful woman who spent much of the 1930s working as a store clerk. LeBlanc, always told never to keep credit card debt, heard frightful stories from Ida

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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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The tone of the article is funny and it is entertaining to read, and yet very serious contentwise…

Via: The StarPhoenix

People are always asking me, “Chef Tony, if you are attacked in your kitchen by an intruder, what is the best utensil for self-defence?

I always tell them the same thing. I’m not a chef and my name isn’t Tony.

It so happens, however, that I do know something about the use of kitchen utensils for self-defence. When I empty the dishwasher, say, I always ask myself, “Would it be possible to kill someone with this?”

It’s not a question you want to be asking for the first time when a kitchen intruder comes at you. You might choose to defend yourself with something other than the optimal weapon. Bacon tongs, say. These are almost useless as a weapon, unless, of course, someone attacks you with a strip of hot, crispy bacon, in which case you might use the tongs to disarm him. Otherwise, bacon tongs are the second-worst weapon in the kitchen, right after the basting brush.

Of course, the weapon of choice for most experienced chefs is the large, all-purpose chef’s knife. That’s why they call it all-purpose. You can use it for slicing, chopping, hacking or stabbing.

Certainly, a knife is ideal for mincing fresh shallots or for trimming the fat off a rack of spring lamb, but is it the best weapon against one or more determined attackers who might themselves be armed with knives? I’m not so sure. For this kind of heavy-duty work, you’re better off with a meat cleaver, if you have one. What makes the meat cleaver so effective in the event of a home kitchen invasion is that the perpetrators almost always are made out of meat.

A better weapon still is the cast-iron skillet. It’s the kitchen equivalent of a medieval mace. A heavy, iron skillet can also deflect an opponent’s knife or even a small-calibre bullet, so it’s a shield as well as well as a blunt instrument. When you hear the gong-like peal of an iron skillet connecting with an intruder’s cranium, you know the fight is over.

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Source: Wikileaks

US military: Survival, Evasion and Recovery, FM 3-50.3

us-fm-3-50.3-2007.pdf
Download from: Sweden, US, Sweden2, Latvia, Slovakia, UK, Finland, Netherlands, Tonga, SSL, TOR

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