The Urban Survivalist

Obviously riots are one of the biggests fear that urban survivalists have that rural survivalists don't have to worry about. I saw this on Google. It has a lot of good tips and is worth the read. Check it out and tell me what you think. How to Survive a Riot

I've been busy doing some landscaping. I want to get my garden started by the end of the week. Unfortunately that means tearing up half of my yard and remodeling my dog's pen. Progress has been good. I've still got a lot of work to do, though. I've also got big plans for my truck. Then there are the camping trips that I have planned. Posts will probably be slowing down again. Sorry that I spoiled you with so many regular updates recently. It's pretty obvious that the "rice shortage" is the big headline these days. There might be a shortage outside the US but the only problem that we've got here is panic buying and our JIT (just in time) inventory system showing it's weakness. People see that there are riots in Egypt and Haiti. They hear that other countries are discouraging or even halting their rice exports. So what do they do? They rush to the store and buy a few hundred pounds of rice that they wouldn't have eaten, anyway. The...

It's lightweight. It's tasty. It keeps for a long time. It's a great trail food. It's a good method of storing meat that people have been using for thousands of years. Too bad it's so expensive. It's a lot cheaper when you make it yourself but you have to leave the oven on all night or get a dehydrator, right? Wrong. All you need is a fan and a drying rack. The fan isn't even necessary if you don't have too much humidity and you can keep the bugs away. You don't even need the drying rack if you just hang it up to dry. The fan speeds things up and if you use the drying rack you won't have to listen to your wife, parents, SO, roommates, etc complain about the strips of meat that are hanging up in the kitchen window. First get yourself some meat. Make sure it's as lean as possible. Fat doesn't dry out and it'll turn rancid, spoiling the meat so trim it all off. Then cut the meat into strips. Next you'll want to marina...

You could have five years worth of food at home. You could keep your BOB packed and ready to go at all times. You could keep a "get home bag" in the trunk of your car right next to your rifle. Unfortunately, none of that will do you much good if something happens really fast and you're stuck with what you've got on you. You never know when getting back to your vehicle or even home will be difficult if not impossible. What you can conceivably carry on you can be very limited depending on your job, the season and what you're doing. It could also be all that you have. In my case I'm stuck wearing dressy clothes every day so it's really hard to conceal anything. I also spend a lot of time with customers all over town so I can't just keep a kit in my office desk. Anything bigger than a laptop case is just too bulky. Cash is king. Even if there is no emergency it's good to have a few bucks in your pocket. It's faster than a check. You don...

When I wrote the original review of my cheap grinder I said that it's not capable of making flour that's suitable for bread making. Then when I was brewing a batch of beer the other day I noticed something after I cracked my grain. There was dust everywhere. It's pretty obvious what that dust was.....flour! Obviously I knew that it technically could make flour when I made that statement but I just assumed that it would take way too much time and effort. So I decided to see how much time and effort it would take to make enough flour to bake some bread. It was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would be. Here's how I did it. The grain hopper on my grinder is pretty big. It holds about 3 cups of whole wheat so that's what I started with. As I ran the grain through the handle was fairly easy to turn and didn't take too much effort. I'm not in great shape and, after a full hopper, I was feeling the burn but it didn't tire me out. From what I hear ...

Yellowstone blew up right after an asteroid wiped out most of Asia and the government freaked out and turned the Middle East to glass blaming it all on the terrorists. You and your TEOTWAWKI posse survived it all in your Titan missile silo that you bought for $500 at a government auction that no one else showed up for. With a few years worth of Mountain House, MREs and beans and rice you're set for a while. Unfortunately, the truckload of heirloom seeds that you've got stored away are practically worthless since you probably won't see sunlight for at least a decade thanks to the choking clouds of ash and nuclear winter. Or are they? You might not be able to plant a garden with them for a while but you can still sprout them. Even if it's not TEOTWAWKI sprouts are nutritious, tasty, easy to grow and require little to no sunlight. Most seeds aren't very nutritious because they're hard to digest. When they're sprouted everything in the seed becomes easil...

I keep seeing "there will be riots in the streets!" used as one of the main arguments to leave the city and set up your little homestead in the middle of nowhere. Reading some of these blogs and message boards you might start to believe that riots consist of huge, organized groups of people systematically looting, pillaging and burning everything in their paths for miles. If you prep they know it and they'll be singling you out. If you're lucky they might just let you join them. Otherwise they'll just kill you, rape your wife and children and then use your preps to further their advance. Once you get past the Hollywood and paranoia it's pretty obvious that they don't work like that. First of all they're not very organized. Sometimes it starts out as some type of political rally. Other times something outrageous happens and people just go crazy. Maybe people are starving. Maybe a certain group of people feel like they've been severely mist...

but it's certainly not a free pass to survive the apocalypse like a lot of people like to believe. There have been several instances in history where the collapse or severe strain on the system has resulted in people in the country faring much worse than the people in the cities. Do you think that if things get so bad that the government is confiscating food resources that they're going to go door to door emptying out people's cabinets in the city? That's a huge waste of resources when they can just go to the country and "compensate" farmers for their food stores. Do you think you'll be able to put up a solid defense against the military when they show up and demand you give them your latest crop for a bunch of worthless paper? Do you know all of your neighbors? Maybe you think you do. You never know who's just waiting for a time when they don't have to worry about those pesky authorities. I grew up in the country. My family on my mother...

The Plague - One day every kid on the planet under 9 years old falls into a foamy mouthed coma. Every day at 10 they all go into seizures. For 10 years every kid is born with the condition. It's actually a really cool premise and I had high hopes for the movie. There was another great depression. Eventually everyone stopped caring and was losing all hope for the future. Unfortunately it gets horrible once the movie gets rolling. All at once the children wake up one day and go on a rampage and start killing everyone. They're basically zombies with some degree of intelligence. They're hard to kill and they've got some kind of hive mind thing going on. Overall it was pretty horrible. Pass on it unless you're like me and you absolutely must suffer through every zombie movie on the planet no matter how horrible it is. Deadly Harvest - I took Rangerman's advice and picked this one up. The acting isn't great and it definitely screams "cheesy 70s B ...

A lot of people like to talk about how cities will be death traps after the ball drops. The government will be out to get you. Neighbor will turn on neighbor. Roving gangs of armed thugs will be burning down every house who's occupants don't allow them free reign to rape, steal and pillage. I'm sure that something to that effect will be happening in the bigger cities. You won't want to be in downtown LA when the civilization ending crisis occurs. Most of us are stuck in a city, though, and some of them may not end up being as bad as all that. Trying to get out might just prove to be a lot more dangerous even if you do get a jump on the golden horde. As important as where you're headed is how you're going to get there. The freeways leading out of NOLA were pretty ugly after Katrina. Now imagine if that's what every freeway leading out of every major city looked like. If bugging out is a plan that you seriously mean to implement then you had better k...

Pemmican is a survival food that the Native Americans developed. It's simple. It's easy to make. It stores extremely well (for months or even years). It's lightweight and easy to carry with you. It's very energy rich. You can live off of it for a long time (probably indefinitely). It even tastes pretty good. So what's in it and how do you make it? It's just fat, dried meat and dried berries. I've used raisins before. I used craisins in my last batch. You can also use strawberries, blueberries or whatever other dried berries that you've got lying around. You could probably even use some other dried fruit if you wanted. The meat isn't important, either. Just make sure that it's dried sufficiently. Once again, the type of fat used doesn't matter. Just make sure you use equal parts meat, berries and fat. Mix the dried berries and meat together. Then pour melted fat over them. Mix everything well so that the fat saturates (get ...

Our society has developed to the point where everyone doesn't need to know how to do a little bit of everything, anymore. Some might argue that we're at the point where most people are afraid to do something outside of their expertise because they think it's too hard to learn how to do. After all, someone else spent their entire life learning how to do it so how can it be so easy? Or maybe it's something that professionals normally use a team of people to do so how can one person accomplish the task? Then there are the things that you just don't need to learn how to do because we've got an infrastructure in place that removes the necessity. It might not be all that hard to learn how to do but it's not worth our time. Some things that seem like they may be too hard to do yourself aren't. On the other hand some things that seem like they'd be pretty easy to do turn out to be pretty difficult without experience. It seems to me like when I get th...

Flashlights are an important part of everyone's preps. They come in all different shapes and sizes. There are different bulb types to choose from. They use different types of batteries. They have different housings from aircraft aluminum to cheap plastic. The brightness varies a lot depending on the type of batteries used, the lens, the reflector and the bulb. Throw (how far away it projects it's beam) and spot (how solid and uniform the projected light is) are also important factors to consider. The type of bulb used is probably the most important factor to consider. The most common bulbs are incandescent. These are the bulbs that you find in older flashlights, the cheap little cheesy lights that you get in emergency kits or small mini-mags. They aren't very bright and the color of the light is a distinctive yellow color. The light gradually gets dimmer as the batteries lose power. The spot isn't usually very solid. They're cheap and they have good thro...

I just picked this book up last night. I finished it tonight. It's not often that I finish a book in two days. Part of it was because it was really easy to read and pretty short. It was also very hard to put down. It's very well written with an original, different style of writing. Without giving too much away it's a story set several years after some type of extremely devastating event that's never truly explained. A father and son is trying to get as far south as possible before winter sets in. They've got to deal with the trials and tribulations of the road in a post-apocalyptic world. I highly recommend it if you haven't already read it. You can find it under Survival Fiction if you click on my amazon store.

Don't do it on government land. You might end up like the squirrelman in Seattle. Apparently this dude built a tree house on a vacant lot in Seattle that turned out to be owned by the city. Go check it out here

As you can see I've done a bit of remodeling. I added an Amazon store and a third column so that everything doesn't look quite so cluttered. Take a look at my Amazon store when you get the chance. If you use the search bar or any of the links on the sidebar to navigate to Amazon then I'll get a little piece of it even if you buy something that I'm not advertising and it won't cost you a cent extra. Unless I start posting every day or I feel like what I've got to say is worth anything then this will be the only "buy my stuff" blurb that you'll ever see on this site. Feel free to let me know what you think of the new look.

I've seen this topic come up a lot lately. The idea is to get a cheap, used trailer and some junk land and moving in. What blows me away is how many people actually try to argue that it should be your ultimate goal and that you need to do it as soon as possible. You don't need things like air conditioning or running water. Why bother with a garden when you can just forage wild plants and eat out of buckets? More than a few hundred square feet is a waste of space. I can understand buying some junk land and parking a trailer or building a cabin there. For a few grand you could have a place to call your own even if you lose everything else. Keep it stocked with supplies and you've got a place to go in an emergency. Even if all is well in the world you've got a place to go and just get away from it all. I'm not against buying some land with the intent to move out there eventually. Running a self sufficient homestead is a long term goal of mine. I just want t...

I ripped this off from one of the forums that I frequent and couldn't stop laughing as I read it. Most of you have probably seen it but to those who haven't...enjoy. You might be a survivalist if... - You can’t put your groceries in the trunk of the car because its already jammed full with emergency kits, first aid supplies, and fully-stocked BOBs. - You have emergency rations for your pets, and view your pets as potential emergency rations. - You know the news three days before it hits the mass media. - You have back-up plans for your back-up plans. - You’re convinced you’ve been exposed to so many chem-trails, you consider it a form of birth control. - You’ve ever repressed the urge to bleat “BAAAAAAAAAA” as your neighbor earnestly asks, “What war? Where?” - You’ve ever bought antibiotics for human use through a vet, or grains for human consumption through a feed store. - You’ve got more than one grain mill. - You’ve ever wondered how you might filter the used water from you...

Food, water and shelter are what you need to get by. Being able to protect yourself is also important. Guns are fun but too many people go too far with them. I firmly believe that every American household should have at least one firearm. I don't think that it should be law. I just wish that people would accept the fact that the threat of armed private citizens has helped dissuade several would be attackers throughout our history. If you don't already own a gun but you want to get prepared don't run out and buy a safe full of guns along with thousands of rounds of ammo before you do anything else. Just get a cheap handgun, a milsurp bolt gun or a shotgun in a relatively common caliber and buy a few hundred to a thousand rounds for it. A CZ-52 and a 1200 round sealed case of ammo will set you back less than $300 and it's enough gun to handle just about anything. That's just one option out of several. The key here is to not go crazy with your "arsenal...