Gun Blog Variety Podcast #125 - Forbidden Thoughts, Lack of Sleep, and Voicemails

It sounds sinister when we put it like that, but anything can seem threatening if it's written tersely. Example: "The last gun owner on Earth sat alone in a room. There was a knock at the door..."

• Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens have nothing on the Glock 43 and Springfield XD-S for Beth and her husband. What else are their favorite things? Listen to her segment to find out. 
• What kind of idiot robs his neighbor who is sure to recognize him? Sean takes a closer look.
• Barron is on assignment and will return soon.
• In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin get a voicemail from Joshua in Arizona challenging our listeners to set their goals for 2017. What are YOUR goals? Send us your voicemails and we'll play them.
• Tiffany  is on assignment and will return next wee, but in the meantime check out her guest appearance on Ballistic Radio. 
• Fatigued? Erin has some tips for you.... when she wakes up.
• "Loaded Conversations" is back and they've let the hate come out to play. Weer'd is ready with his Patented Weer'd Audio Fisk™.
• And our plug of the week is for the ebook "Forbidden Thoughts". 

Thank you for downloading, listening, and subscribing. You are subscribed, right? We are available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and now on Google Play Music!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here.

Thanks to LuckyGunner and Remington for their sponsorship, and a special thanks to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support.

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:

Fatigue

Like I mentioned at the top of the show, I didn’t get a lot of sleep last night and right now I feel like a member of the Walking Dead. However, in a disaster or emergency situation, you may not be able to sleep well either, and odds are good that you’ll have to be functional the next day. 

These are the tips and tricks I’ve learned regarding how to get to sleep at night in strange or uncomfortable environments, and how to compensate the next day for not being able to sleep the night before. 

In order to get a good night’s sleep, you need to have as few distractions as possible -- but post SHTF you might not have the luxury of a quiet bedroom. Provided it’s safe for you to do so, soft plugs in your ears -- the squishy kind, like you see at shooting ranges -- will mute most noises, and a bandana or shemagh across your eyes will cut out most bright lights. I slept like this in college for many years. 

Eating right before going to bed may be terrible for your weight, but it’s a great way to fall asleep. The sensation of being full is a great tranquilizer, as we can all attest from eating Thanksgiving dinner, and the heat from your body digesting the food also helps to warm your sleeping bag.

If cold weather is keeping you from sleeping, a nalgene or metal bottle filled with hot water and brought into your sleeping bag can also serve to keep you warm at night.

But if you still couldn’t sleep and have to be up and working like a normal human being the next day, there are still preps that will help with this. I of course am a big fan of coffee as my caffeine delivery system of choice, and I talked about this in episode 31. Other people prefer tea, which is actually easier to carry in a bug out bag and easier to make. But if you aren’t able to make a hot, caffeinated drink at breakfast -- you don’t have the time, or it isn’t prudent to make a fire, then caffeine pills are your friend. 

I think most of us flirted with No-Doz in college or the military, but I discovered a similar product  on Amazon called “Jet Alert”. I haven’t tried it -- yet -- but a box of them costs around $6. That’s half the price of No-Doz, and you get a great quantity for your money: a box of 100 mg regular strength pills has a count of 120, and the double strength box has a count of 90, compared to No-Doz’s count of 60 per box. Those are good savings, and the brand has a good reputation on Amazon, so look into getting some for your bug-out bags. 

Also, using checklists -- discussed in episode 65 -- are a great way to get work done even if my brain isn’t fully engaged. Following a list reduces the amount of horrible thinking that I have to do when I’m tired, but it keeps me productive. If you’re in a disaster situation and you expect to be fatigued the next day, before you go to bed write down a list of all the things you’ll need to do in the morning. Just the simple act of making a list can help people sleep better because it’s one less thing to worry about, and then the following day you can just read the instructions to yourself instead of having to go “Now, what was I supposed to do today?”

Finally, it’s been my experience that fatigue from lack of sleep mirrors a hangover in a lot of ways, so I treat it similarly. I drink a lot of water when I wake up, then I force myself to do some mild exercise -- walking, stretches, etc -- in the sunlight. My body hates it and wants to crawl into a dark place and sleep more, but the sunlight helps wake me up and the exercise releases some endorphins that make me feel somewhat better. 

• Jet-Alert 100 MG Each Caffeine Tab 120 Count
• Jet-Alert Double Strength Alertness Aid Caplets, 200mg - 90 Count

Guest Post: Conflict Resolution, or Post-Apocalypse Politics for Survival

by George Groot
George is a member of our Facebook Group and has written for us before.

As a prepper, you have the stuff needed to survive. But however romantic the idea of “doing it yourself”, at some point someone has to crawl out of the fallout shelter and begin the long and tedious task of rebuilding civilization. Part of that unpleasant task of surviving is dealing with other people.

Dirty, nasty, selfish, arrogant, lazy, horrible people. People who can’t even contribute to the survival needs of their group. But no matter how tempting it is, you're not going to cast your kids out every time the going gets rough.

That joke aside, the conflict resolution strategies you have in a Parent/Child relationship are fundamentally the same as when you have an Adult/Adult relationship: one party has power (usually the power to withhold something) and the other has a grievance (the most common grievance, even among adults, is “it’s not fair!”).

Rational People Can Behave Rationally
When the conflict is relatively benign, two people can usually resolve the issue between themselves, generally through a negotiation strategy where the negotiating skill of the participants dictates what they will give up to get what they want out of an outcome. Ideally this is the best way to resolve conflict.

But when one party holds a disproportionate amount of power in the equation, one-on-one negotiating may not be a desired outcome: the powerful party would gain little to nothing, and/or the weak party wouldn’t gain enough. In this situation, the conflict is either going to go unresolved or more people are going to get involved.

When society is operating normally. this resolution can take the form of mediation, arbitration, or even a lawsuit. There are functioning systems in a society that focus almost solely on conflict resolution. After “the big one” (or whatever your end of the world scenario of choice), these sorts of services will be less than robust.

As a prepper, in a survival situation you will have plenty of “power” in the form of skills and resources. Other people will want your resources and services and have very little to offer you in return.

So What Do You Do? 
There are several options, from social to anti-social, passive to active, violent to pacifist. Each has it's place, but it is important not to limit yourself only to the ones that make you feel good about yourself.

Remove One Party From the Equation
This is called “murder” if done by force (this could possibly be called  “Cain and Abel Conflict Resolution Method“), but quite often in a functioning society the corollary is “Charge him with something and get him convicted so that we can confiscate X.” Removing one party to a conflict essentially removes the conflict.

I know, I know: your parents likely told you “Violence doesn’t solve anything”, but killing someone who wants your stuff is a viable conflict resolution strategy for survival.

Become Professional Mediators
Another method is to build a group or tribe that will provide the conflict resolution services that a world without law would otherwise lack. Every group has some sort of leadership and some sort of followership. As many “rugged individualists” may balk at this, the group will need to provide services to members in order to maintain members. The strength of the pack is the wolf, the strength of the wolf is the pack; sometimes having the strength of a group on your side is enough to deter conflict before it starts.

Avoidance
Avoidance is a great strategy because it saves on the cost of valuable bullets, time, and energy that could have been spent doing something more constructive than dealing with dirty, nasty, lying, backstabbing people. Avoidance is a great strategy when you have enough power and resources to do it. But if you don’t, you had best hope that you’ve surrounded yourself with a good group.

Tribe
What should your group look like? Ideally your group shares your values, your ethics, and your goals. People don’t have to line up 100% on everything to form highly effective and resilient groups, but the more culturally aligned you are in terms of group norms, the easier conflict resolution as part of group membership will be. However, sometimes we just have to accept that our party needs a healer, and that a medic, nurse, or doc will get a pass on behavior because of the skills they bring. Your value to the group is a source of conflict resolution power; if you don’t have anything but unskilled labor to offer, odds are you’ll have less in group influence.

I don’t want to get carried away down the rabbit hole of organizational behavior. I just want to get people thinking about how to negotiate their way into better survival outcomes, because after the balloon goes up, we won’t be the only survivors. I guarantee that not only are some of them going to be unpleasant, but that you will also find it necessary to interact with them at some point.

New Year, New Goals

Many people create lists of things that they want to change about themselves with the beginning of a new year. These resolutions generally have a poor track record of success, but the idea has some merit.

I prefer to spend this time reflecting on the past year, and trying to figure out what I have to look forward to so that I can make plans. I don't make resolutions, but I do try to set some goals for the next year based on what happened previously.

Last year I did make some progress:

• I started replacing the incandescent bulbs in my house with LED bulbs. Looking at my power bill, I can see that his one action cut my electricity use by a third over the last 12 months. The prices of LED bulbs are coming down, and the better ones last a lot longer than regular bulbs.
• I picked up more supplies which let me set up better (or more complete, at least) back-up kits for first aid, water treatment, and lighting.
• I was able to help some other preppers with their preps. That's important to me, so this one is a big positive.

Some things are beyond my control. I accept that as a fact of life and not as a personal failure.

• I have no control over the timing of births and deaths, both of which I dealt with last year. Some things are easier to prepare for than others, and those two are not on the "easy" list.
• I have no control over the weather, so I need to prepare for what it can throw at me.
• I have little to no control over what others do, but I can prepare to deal with the consequences of their actions.

The things that I can control fall into two categories: those that I need to work on, and those that I can live with as-is. If I can live with it, I'm not going to stress over it. The things I need to work on are generally personal in nature and I won't go into details, but here are a few of them:

• I need to get off of the nicotine. I've used tobacco off and on for the last 35 years. Cancer doesn't run in my family so my risk factors are lower, but I still need to work on breaking the addiction -- the money savings alone make it a no-brainer.  I have to quit smoking. I'll write more about this if I have any luck with it.
• I need to spend more time at the family farm. Since I stand to inherit it, I should start taking care of it, and there are always fences to mend, trees to be cut down, garden plots that need to be improved, and a house that needs a lot of work.
• I need to start telling work “No, I will not” when they ask too much of me. I enjoy helping people, but there is a point where I draw a line and say,“No more”. I won't bore you with the details, but my efforts this year have not been appreciated beyond my immediate supervisor, so they shouldn't expect the same level of effort from me next year.
• I need to roll my writing schedule back a couple of days to give our editrix plenty of time to go over my posts. Her other endeavors are taking a bite out of her free time,  and I can do my part to relieve some of her stress. (Yes, thank you very much! -- Erin)

With a new year comes new opportunities. I don't expect all of them to be good, but I will do what I can to handle them as they come. Maybe this year one of us will win the lottery and make some dreams come true.

May your year be filled with good preps, and I hope that we never have to use them.

Prudent Prepping: Low Cost First Aid

The dust has settled and the First 72 Hours have passed. Follow along as I build a long term plan via Prudent Prepping.

I'm always looking for a bargain or a low-cost way to add to my preps. Since I'm in a different Home Depot every day, I start where it's easiest: at work!

I have previously found inexpensive flashlights in the Christmas area and also in dump bins scattered around the store. The period after the holidays is prime bargain hunting for close-outs and discontinued items.

My latest find is a Special Buy: a first aid kit brought in for Christmas.

First Aid Essentials kit

Close out item sku #1001 788 644 - $9.99

I saw this and compared it to the standard Home Depot kit from 3M before buying  -- and I took this one home! I looked for assorted band aids, and to get 100 I would spend almost $8. The kit started at $12.99, but just dropped locally to $9.99! There is no way I could pass this up for the lower price.

Just be aware that your local Depot may not keep a large first aid kit on the shelf, and the kit I'm reviewing is a Special Buy, so call to have your local store check stock before going to get one. Alternately, you could combine the kit with another order and have it shipped to the store for free.

• Looking closely at the contents, I can see over 100 assorted band aids, sterile wipes and the other typical items found in a first aid kit. 
• What is not found on all kits are the mounting 'ears' which allow hanging the kit on a wall. 
• The kit has actual hinges instead of a molded continuous hinge that (in my experience) breaks well before the contents are used up. 
• There is no gasket or seal of any kind to the box, so storage in an area likely to bet wet or very humid for extended periods is not a good idea.

The Takeaway 

• Shop for bargains everywhere you go, you might be surprised what you find 
• I can never have enough 1st Aid supplies, especially the small stuff

The Recap

• One 200 piece First Aid kit from Home Depot: $9.99 at Close Out pricing! 

If you plan on buying anything through Amazon, please consider using our referral link. When you do, a portion of the sale comes back here to help keep this site running! 

If you have comments, suggestions or corrections, please post them so we all can learn. And remember, Some Is Always Better Than None!

NOTE: All items tested were purchased by me. No products have been loaned in exchange for a favorable review. Any items sent to me for T&E will be listed as such. Suck it Feds.

The Right Cutting Tool for the Job

As a proper redneck geardo, my supplies include hatchets, axes, and saws. All of these tools have a purpose, but this weekend I was asked how I decided which to use for a particular task. If you can cut down a tree with an ax or a saw, how do you decide which to use?

Each tool has attributes that will tell you what it's good for:

• Saws have precision and clean, straight cuts. 
• Axes have mass and momentum. 
• Hatchets have the same intentions as an axe, but with less mass and a shorter handle giving them a bit more control.

What does that all mean, though? As an answer, we'll look at some real world tasks and the tools to perform them.

Felling
Felling is the act of cutting down a standing tree. Lumberjacks use huge, powerful chainsaws for this, and if you have one of those, you probably know more than me about this topic. For the rest of us, cutting down a tree with a hand saw can be an endeavor: as you cut through, the tree can lean into the cut and bind your blade. On limbs and small trees, this isn't a big problem; just push the tree or branch away to keep the blade free. On standing material larger than about 4", though, this becomes more difficult.

An ax cuts with a different action, and won't suffer from this binding. It requires more practice and more physical effort, but is ultimately safer and easier. A hatchet can work for very small trees, but you`'ll work yourself to death on anything of size.

Trimming
Once the wood is on the ground, saws show their strength because your material is no longer working against you by trying to fall to the ground. With a saw, you can break your wood down to lengths that work for a fire, or to a needed length for building material.  A saw also gives clean, square ends, where an ax does not, which can be useful for building things in a camp. An ax can perform these tasks, but it takes more time and energy.

Notching
Many bushcraft constructs require notching your building material. A skilled axman makes this look effortless, and with skill and practice it can be, but without that skill and practice you'll drive yourself to frustration. The rest of us should use a saw,  which cuts precise notches with very little practice. It is a slower process, but it works. Practice with the ax or hatchet, but know the saw will fill the gap until then.

Splitting
When you're trying to make round logs into not-round logs, the mass and leverage of an ax makes it the only way to fly. While a saw could theortically do the job, that would require so much more time that doing so is beyond impractical. If you want to work with smaller wood, such as kindling, the greater control of a hatchet or tomahawk makes it ideal for the task.


There is no single do-all tool -- but now you can pick the right tool for the task.

Lokidude

Apocabox Unboxing #15 (December 2016)

Not actually Erin.

Picture by KJ Photography

& is used with permission.

Is it possible?

Have I actually managed to record an Apocabox unboxing without video or audio issues?  And I did it without being massively behind behind deadline?

Well... maybe the first part (we shall see, based on audience reaction). The second? Not so much, since I recorded it on the 19th and I'm only just now publishing it.

The only reason it looks like it's on time is because I was able to edit it Sunday instead of today.

Gun Blog Variety Podcast #124 - Happy New Year!

It's pronounced TWENTY SEVENTEEN. Are you really telling me that when it hits 2020 you're going to call it "two thousand and twenty"?

NO, YOU'RE NOT.

• How can piano lessons make you a better shooter? Beth tells us why it's not actually that far-fetched.
• In a crime that strikes close to home, Sean tells us about three suspects arrested in connection with the murder of a clerk in the convenience store closest to his house.
• Barron is on assignment and will return soon.
• In the Main Topic, Sean and Erin discuss Charles C.W. Cooke's article "Phantoms of Gun Control" as published in the NRA's magazine "America's First Freedom".
• Tiffany saw two videos of women using Brazilian Jiu Jitsu to fight off attackers. She wanted a second opinion, so she contacted Craig Douglas of ShivWorks for his thoughts.
• Do you have prepping resolutions? Erin does. What does she plan to do in 2017? She'll tell you.
• The Brady Campaign had a live Facebook Chat talking about their “Runaway Hit” Miss Sloane. Weer’d was listening in...
• And our plug of the week is for the Surefire CombatLight.

Thank you for downloading, listening, and subscribing. You are subscribed, right? We are available on iTunes, Stitcher Radio, and now on Google Play Music!

Listen to the podcast here.

Read the show notes here.

Thanks to LuckyGunner and Remington for their sponsorship, and a special thanks to Firearms Policy Coalition for their support.

Blue Collar Prepping Transcript:

Erin's Prepping Resolutions

By the time you’ve heard this podcast it’s already 2017 -- yes, that’s TWENTY SEVENTEEN, not two thousand and seventeen, ugh! -- and so I thought I’d talk about what resolutions I intend to make prepping-wise.

First, I acknowledge that I am out of shape. I still can’t perform a single pull-up, and that’s something I absolutely need to work on this year. To that end, I have bought an exercise bar from Amazon that installs in any doorframe without screws or other hardware.

Then I’m going to follow the advice of YouTuber Scooby1961 in his video “How to do your first pull-up.”  The entire video is only 11 minutes long, and I encourage everyone to watch it, but the basis of his routine is this:

1. Place a chair between yourself and the pull-up bar. 
2. Climb up onto the chair and grab the bar. 
3. Walk off the chair -- Scooby calls this “Walking the Plank” --
4. -- then lower yourself to the ground as slowly as possible. 
5. Do that 8 times, then rest for a minute, then do it again until you’ve completed 5 sets. 

By doing this, you will gradually build up your strength until you are able to actually start doing pull-ups.

My next resolution is to “Cut the Clutter”. A week ago, my co-blogger Chaplain Tim wrote an article called “Hoarding or Stockpiling?” that talked about the differences between being prepared by having supplies and being a hoarder. It’s a subtle difference, to be sure, it reminded me of a post I wrote in 2014 called The Slippery Slope of Prepping.

If you don’t have the time to read both posts, it really all comes down to this:

• If the preps serve you, then you are a prepper. 
• If you end up serving the preps, then you’re a hoarder. 

There’s a great line from the movie Fight Club, where Brad Pitt’s character says “The things you own end up owning you.” And there’s truth to this, because we so often define ourselves by what we have -- our possessions, our car, our house.

And I’ve come to the conclusion that not only do both of my parents have mild hoarding tendencies -- see the photos in my post of the literal PILES of stuff my dad was keeping in his room -- but that I’m falling victim to it as well.

For me, it’s a combination of not wanting to waste anything -- because if something has value, then throwing it out instead of using it is wasteful -- and also a feeling of “As sure as I throw this away, I’m going to need it.”

However, what I failed to recognize until I read Chaplain Tim’s post is that holding onto these items is still costing me something:

1. First, they take up volume within my room, where space is at a premium. 
2. Second, they cause me emotional distress because I have difficulty finding things, or getting to things, in a cluttered room. 

So what I need to do is find a way to get rid of these things without the associated mental trauma of “being wasteful”. I’m trying to get around this by giving away still-useful items to a good home -- for example, past a certain point I don’t need any more knives, so if I can give them away to a prepper who needs knives, or to someone who collects knives, that’s not “wasting” a “perfectly good thing”.

So if you’re someone I know who ends up with, say, a box full of prepping supplies and you don’t know why -- well, this is why.

My final prepping resolution is to learn more. Too many preppers fall into the “magical talisman” trap that gun owners do by thinking that merely having supplies is enough.

This is of course completely false. It’s not enough to have a gun or survival gear; you have to know how to use it, and that involves training with it so that you know how to use it effectively.

Do a pull-up, learn and train more, and collect less: those are my prepper resolutions for 2017. What are yours?

• Iron Gym Total Upper Body Workout Bar - http://amzn.to/2icOvGm
• How To Do Your First Pullup! (Then 8 more!) - https://youtu.be/mRznU6pzez0
• Hoarding or Stockpiling? - http://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/2016/12/hoarding-or-stockpiling.html
• The Slippery Slope of Prepping - http://bluecollarprepping.blogspot.com/2014/06/the-slippery-slope-of-prepping.html