American Survival Blog

Yeah, I know I haven’t been keeping up with the site but I do have a couple of good resources for you to peruse on basic/primitive skills that will help you as society slides into chaos. Enjoy:

Hedgehog Leatherworks has a great short article on primitive jerky making techniques. This will definitely come in handy if something happens to our grid. There’s also a video:

In a similar vein, Rasch Outdoor Chronicles has a post on Brain Tanning that is simple to follow and includes links to more in depth instructions.

Sunflower Ammo has instructions on how to put together a filtration system using those commonly available gravity water filter elements and a couple of buckets:

Pioneer Living Survival Magazine has a great post on making charcoal.

Trail Boss TV has an some thoughts on the single shot break open 12ga. I included it only because it echoes much of my own thinking and I like to see people agree with me.

Americans Networking to Survive have come up with an interesting concept for post-SHTF cooperation. It might be a good place to start networking.

As is the entire “Gold will save you from the apocalypse” movement. I’ve said before that if you believe that America is really going to collapse and chaos will rain then Gold is a Sucker’s Bet for Survival. Making money now and preparing for life in a second world country (at best) is the way to go and something tells me the people who run Cash4Gold (and the hundreds of affiliate marketers who pimp them) are thinking the same way.

Don’t get me wrong, gold is a great investment but it isn’t a preparation for TEOTWAWKI. You can make a lot of money with gold though. But not if you send your jewelry into Cash4Gold which routinely pays people less than a third of the value of their jewelry. This old article from Money Watch explains why this is just another scam:

Let’s say that your beloved bought you a one-ounce 14-carat gold necklace for $1,600. Does that mean Cash4Gold will pay you $1,600? Sorry, buster! It pays only for the gold content, not for the beauty of the jewelry. A 14-carat item is only 58.3% gold. An ounce of it is worth $644. (Gold is weighed in troy ounces, which are smaller than ordinary ounces.) Don’t expect a check for anything near that amount in the mail from C4G, however. Aronson told Florida Trend magazine that he pays only 20% to 80% of the spot price of gold. The more you send him, the greater the percentage you’ll get. Obviously, a one-ounce necklace is not much; so assuming you’d get only 20% of the value, about $128.80. (You can figure the melt-down value of your gold clicking over to www.dendritics.com/scales/metal-calc.asp.) In contrast, pawnshops and jewelry stores in one experiment paid 35 to 70% of the gold’s meltdown value.

The average consumer has no way of knowing any of this, however. At this writing, neither the C4G website nor its advertising or mailing packs disclose how much the company will pay for the gold it receives. Nor does it give any examples like the one I provided. In a FAQ down deep in its website, the company tells people that pawnshops or jewelers may pay them more. But its home page practically screams its promise to pay “25% more.” More than what? Maybe more than Scrooge.

In other words hold onto your gold chains and use them as bartering tools when the chips are down. In fact gold jewelry will perhaps be easier to use as a barter item post-TEOTWAWKI than the one ounce gold coin you purchased which will be worth more than any materials you’re trying to get. If the government starts confiscating gold they won’t be looking for your 14-carat bling so there’s another reason to keep hold of that necklace until you really need to trade it in.

If you want quick cash hit a pawn shop. Don’t fall for online schemes designed to play on your greed. Keep your gold and set up a Cash4gold affiliate website, which is frankly the only way you’ll ever make any money with that company.

Via Survivalblog comes this list of .pdfs that are mainly public domain works covering a variety of topics that will be useful to the survivalist post TEOTWAWKI. Farming, hunting, fishing, trapping, food preservation building heating and refrigeration devices, blacksmithing, gem mining, this forum thread has it all.

As we slip into second world status 19th century skills and technologies will become necessary to keep society running. My advice is to bookmark this thread, download the materials you want and print them out now. After the lights go out it’ll be too late. You also never know when a forum will remove links or disappear.

The Old Knowledge Database links thread.

Survivalism is going mainstream and everyone is looking to cash in, including left leaning “learning” channels like The History Channel which has long abandoned objective and informative programs in favor of communist agi-prop like the completely disgusting Howard Zinn-led call for class warfare The People Speak.

However, I am a fan of Monster Quest so I always check in to see what’s on. This is how I came across The History Channel’s most outrageous program – a show called Apocalypse Man. It is not an exaggeration to say this show is not so much an instructional program on surviving disasters as a plot by The History Channel to murder you.

“Survival expert” Rudy Reyes begins the program by telling people that during a full on TEOTEWAWKI situation they should head into the biggest city they can find, and the show goes down hill from there. I understand that Mr. Reyes is said to be a Marine Force Recon veteran which I have seen some discussion about on the Web as being a bald-faced lie. I won’t play gotcha with someone’s service, but I will say that if Reyes is relaying his military training to audiences then we should start rethinking the training we’re giving our boys.

The key to surviving any situation is being prepared, staying cool, and using common sense. Most of all, the old adage “keep it simple, stupid” should be the motto you live by. Reyes sees things differently, as evidenced by him lighting a campfire with steel wool and a battery. Because I assume there’s no way he could have gotten hold of lighters or matches before TEOTWAWKI.

His preparation for the coming collapse of society, imagined by the producers as some sort of sudden Mad Max scenario (which ignores historical collapses, like Argentina) seems to be a bag of burglary tools, a complete lack of concern for his or any one else’s safety, and the morals of a crack addict. With pry bar in hand and criminality in his heart our “hero” takes viewers on a whirlwind tour through every nerd’s apocalypse spank fantasy where an empty world becomes their kingdom.

As I stated before, his first bit of advice for TEOTWAWKI is to tell people to head into the nearest large city because that, he says with a straight face, is where the supplies are. I guess all the stores that surround me on the outskirts of the very modest city I live by are illusions caused by my lack of “survival expertise” as is my larder of supplies I’ve collected for emergencies. Of course, heading into a city after a disaster is foolish, especially now that a small army of Reyes inspired looters, sorry I meant survivalists, will be rushing there to join the masses of people struggling to survive. The cities are dangerous now, with higher crime rates and worse unemployment/poverty than the rest of the country. After TEOTWAWKI I can only assume that most rational people will be planning on getting out of the city as quickly as possible.

But this is Rudy Reyes we’re talking about! Irrationality is his secret weapon to survive any situation. Like when his path to the shining city (full of supplies which simply can’t be found elsewhere) is blocked by a river he doesn’t want to cross because there could be poop in it. The drawbridge to cross it has been raised by police or military because martial law has been imposed, although none seemed to stick around to keep the crossing secure. What to do? Luckily Reyes has rope in his backpack along with his pry bar (what crime bloggers will immediately recognize as a rape kit) so using the pry bar as a grapnel, he swings across the river. I mean, what could go wrong? It’s not like if you get injured after this apocalypse pulling some stupid stunt it’d be hard to medical attention, right?

Then there’s Reyes’ special survival “foraging” method. Home invasion. Reyes actually tells viewers that to get supplies they should go to the suburbs, look for houses that haven’t been looted and kick in those doors, flashlight at the ready to brain anyone they run into. He never puts forward the idea that A) even in the breakdown of law and order this is wrong or B) the unlooted house is probably unlooted for a reason. The Reyes inspired home invader is going to be shot eventually.

I can only imagine the look on some Apocalypse Man fan’s face as he kicks in my front door to find an angry blogger with the new .327 Ruger Blackhawk I’m hoping to receive as an anniversary present tucked into a garish Halloween orange sash Wild Bill Hickock style. “What would Rudy do?” he’ll ask himself as I shoot him several times before Tweeting “ZOMG! Had 2 shoot looter, he had a Apocalypse man dvd in his pack! ROTFLMAO!”

It’ll be a steep price to pay for canned goods you can get on sale for $.50 a piece at any supermarket prior to TEOTWAWKI.

But that’s not Reyes’ worst advice or most asinine claim. Throughout the one hour episode we’re treated to such ludicrous scenes as Reyes lighting campfires indoors, rappelling down elevator cables (there are access ladders in most elevator shafts), risking life and limb to get fuel for generators because you “need electricity to survive” (explaining why there was no life on earth until the 20th century) and we even watched in horror as Reyes procured drinking water with the same dirty bicycle pump he had used to pump diesel out of a gas station supply tank.

“This is sustainability!” he declares while standing proudly over his three days worth of canned goods. Fuel and power, not food and water, are the things Reyes says we need after TEOTWAWKI. Most laughable is Reyes’ commandeering of a hospital which he claims is worthless except that it has a generator. You know, because one man with a pry bar should be willing to attempt to secure an entire facility alone … so he doesn’t have to sleep in the dark.

In short, Rudy Reyes advocates a survival strategy in which people who’ve spent too much time playing the Fallout games kick in your door, cave in your skull in front of your terrified family and steal whatever is in your house. Then they will retire to the block long hospital complex which they have secured with nothing more than steely determination and a total lack of morality. This is a process they will replicate every couple of days.

That’s not so much a survival strategy as a invitation to get your ticket punched. The Xbox playing pot smokers who take people like Reyes seriously don’t have what it takes to pull off home invasions now, much less when Darwinism ensues and the unlooted homes are filled with the people with the fewest compunctions about blasting some d-bag who spent all his money on drugs and video games prior to TEOTWAWKI. Reyes’ advice to viewers in the event of societal chaos is to do everything they can to make things more chaotic. In Europe that might fly, in a country where more than half the population owns firearms trouble makers are not going to be surviving at higher rates than people who put some food away and mind their business.

If I were a conspiracy theorist I’d be suspicious of The History Channel’s agenda. After all, they’ve been supporting Marxism with Zinn and strong centralized governments benefit from periods of disorder. But it’s more likely they simply want to cash in on the survival boom and looked for someone who was willing to affirm their pre-concieved notions of American immorality.

The real problem is that Reyes is not the purveyor of this sort of anything goes philosophy, but a product of the entrance into survivalism of people who are not preparing for TEOTWAWKI, but hoping for it. There are hundreds of Reyeses out there. People’s who plan on looting Wal-Mart after a disaster rather than shopping there now. People who dream of a time when they can simply smash windows and take what they want from the society and culture they despise for whatever reason. There are people who think the world owes them and they see civil disorder as a time for them to get what’s coming to them.  Reyes is telling them to attempt to take, by force if necessary, what you and I have put away for the bad times. The show is a plot to kill not only those who follow Reyes’ advice, but those of us who get in the way.

It is for this reason that I recommend people view this pilot if they get a chance, so you can see into the mind of a degenerate looter, oh I’m sorry survival expert, first hand.

It seems in an effort to keep the population from panicking the media and government agencies have only sown confusion and spread misinformation. The World Health Organization has mysteriously announced that only seven people have died due to Swine Flu not the 150+ that had been reported. I personally find this chard to believe, especially since Mexico is being economically crippled by the outbreak with European countires cancling flights there. Call me a conspiracy theorist but I think they’re trying to cover up something.

Meanwhile the W.H.O. has raised the pandemic alert level to 5. The scale only goes to six. So according to these people lowballing the numbers a pandemic is pretty much a definite. If it has such a low mortality rate, why do they care?

Probably because the situation in Mexico is much worse than it is being reported. Suburban Guerrilla has various testimonials from doctors in the area which claim people aren’t being told the truth in an effort to insulate Mexico from economic harm and hide the fact that the government an U.N. bodies are basically ineffective money wasters. Here’s one letter I found particularly enlightening:

I work as a resident doctor in one of the biggest hospitals in Mexico City and sadly, the situation is far from “under control”. As a doctor, I realise that the media does not report the truth. Authorities distributed vaccines among all the medical personnel with no results, because two of my partners who worked in this hospital (interns) were killed by this new virus in less than six days even though they were vaccinated as all of us were. The official number of deaths is 20, nevertheless, the true number of victims are more than 200. I understand that we must avoid to panic, but telling the truth it might be better now to prevent and avoid more deaths.

My point isn’t that we’re at the end of civilization, just that the helplessness of government agencies in face of this is something they are both embarrassed of and unwilling to allow the populace to see lest we begin to question their existence at all. I think that this new flu is spreading. It is not as dangerous now as it might be if this flu follows the Spanish Flu pattern of three seasonal waves, it will be in the fall and winter. Even that may mean little to healthy and relatively wealthy Americans who are not the poor and unhealthy victims of the Spanish Flu.

But this flu is going to cause significant damage to our economy and may kill a fair share of people. No matter how much cheer leading the media is doing it’s time to take precautions. The virus can mutate in to a more lethal form at anytime, so as long as the pandemic threat level remains high you need to be aware of the threat.