Campfire Chat

You need to find a tall Hill for short mountain that you can walk up to the top up and be by yourself, once you get there raise your hands or get down on your knees,however it is you pray to whatever you pray to and thank and praise IT for what some of us have never had…. Clan.

Every. Single. Day.

The Guerrilla Gunfighter is solid work. I have just skimmed the first few chapters and stopped and re-read a few things, but over all I am pretty satisfied at what I am reading and seeing so far… just like I was in your previous offerings… Keep up the good work man…

Thanks dude! I appreciate it.

easy to forget that the reaper does get us all in the end. In my mind I’m still 25, although the calendar says it’s more than twice that.

I deal with that daily. In my mind, I’m still a 20-something gunslinger. I’m also fit enough that I can go long periods of time misleading myself that way. It really sucks when something happens to remind me that I’m not.

I read Tribes the other day, and it’s spot on. I fought in Ar-Ramadi (M240B Gunner with 1-503d Infantry) in 04-05 and I heard alot of myself in Junger’s words.

If you’re a Vet, read it…. It’ll explain some shit.

 

No comment necessary.

 

Where is the link for your new book I am interested in buying a copy

I pulled the purchase link down, until I could get all of the pre-orders shipped. It will be going back up today, since all of them have now been shipped (for those of you who have not received your shipped notification, it is coming. I’ve been pretty tied up, as you will see below…)

It can be purchased at the Warhammer Six Store site, or via Lulu.com.

Can I trouble you to share what belt(s) you like for carrying concealed?

Honestly? Since I can get away with jeans and an untucked shirt 95% of the time, I still typically just use a Wilderness Instructor Belt. If I need to tuck my shirt in, I have an old Gunsite branded leather belt that I got from a buddy.

I’ve used a sand fllter I made from a 5 gallon bucket at a house I lived at for a few years. The well water wasn’t safe to drink. Made safe drinking water.

Mine was super simple. 5 gallon bucket, propped up on 2 x 2×4’s over another 5 gallon bucket. Drilled a few small holes in the bottom of the top bucket. Layered a few layers of cheesecloth, then a layer of charcoal, then a layer of fine grave, then sand, then bigger gravel, then sand on top again.

Filled it up, leaving enough room to pour in almost 2 gallons of water before it would overflow.

It is cheap and sustainable – you can rebuild it using the same materials a number of times. I was able to use the same supplies for 3 years with only pulling off the top layer of sand off, rinsing it out with a couple gallons of clean water after combing through it, left it out in the sun for a few hours, then put it back in the bucket. (helps to put a layer of cheesecloth under the sand to keep it out of the gravel)

Yeah, simple filters are easy to make, and work really well.

 

“LTC Grossman is a fucktard.”

Keep making that spot-on observation. There is no freshness date on it, and it will never expire.

For those who don’t know why Grossman is a fucktard, a brief review:
Telling people that nobody is inherently violent, and stating counterfactually that we have to program people to kill, (and then making a cottage industry out of peddling that line of twaddle) is only belied by all of recorded human history. Evidently that part was not required reading for any of his manifestly worthless degrees. Grossman is the face of junk science. You get the feeling from his books that if you brought up the example of Cain and Abel, he’d go, “Unpossible. Cain clearly watched too many violent TV shows and video games.” Or his head would start smoking, and he’d ask for “Norman: correlate please.”

I don’t go to retired military officers for psychological expertise (even those who got their boutique psychology degrees in their spare time) for the same reason I don’t ask psychologists how to take a hill or organize a parachute jump.

But doing it would be fun to watch, if only to illustrate vividly in laymen’s terms why Grossman is a fucktard. Except, or course, for the guys taking the hill or hitting the LZ.

Grossman is one of those guys who ultimately wasn’t very interested in the actual military arts except as a rent check, but became captivated by the psychobabble of his hobby profession before retirement. Then found a screwball niche, and latched on like a barnacle. Pretty much like most of psychology.

His books are great…if you have a table leg an inch shorter than the others.
Otherwise, put them in the outhouse. Tearing the book jacket off will make it easier to properly utilize the pages in the best way, as needed.

Keep rocking, JM.

 

That was a much more eloquent breakdown of Grossman’s flaws, as opposed to my typical curse-laden rants about the man.

I have a question regarding your water system. You may have answered it in previous postings and I missed it. If so, I apologize. You have mentioned that you use rain catchment and a retention pond for you water needs. You have also mentioned that you filter your water before use. My question is, what filtration do you use? Is it an off the shelf solution or do you have a homemade filtration system? Also, other than boiling, what are your long term solutions to filtration

So, we actually have two separate filters. One is the basic Big Berkey filter, with the metal bottle and the white ceramic filters inside. The second is the “homemade” version of that, out of two 5-gallon food grade buckets, with four of the ceramic filters inside. Each filter is good for some ridiculous amount of water, that, when I did the math, turned out to be like 40+ years of our daily water consumption. I’ve also got a couple sets of extra filters set aside, in case we do need to replace them, or they break (I had that happen once, when the house dropped below freezing for a couple days. The water in the filters froze and cracked them).

I’ve also got the components set aside for 3-4 more of the bucket systems, so I can upsize, when we have more people living on site, if some of them are unable to bring their own.

Beyond that, I would go to the simple biofilter method mentioned above. I’ve done it a lot, and it’s stupid simple, and quick.

I would point out to the cheap seats that things don’t have to be grand scale. I live in an apartment, so I’m not going to have hogs. However, I have practiced making beer/ mead, soap, and cheese. I can stuff when I get a surplus from people like yourself. I started paying attention years ago to what wild edibles are close to me, like hickory and English walnut. I’m nowhere near as prepared as yourself, but I haven’t been sitting still, and that’s infinitely better than the nothing I was doing before.

Absolutely! One of these days, I’m going to do a book on living resilient, and address both homesteading like we do, as well as simply being more resilient in urban environments.

On the topic of ‘classic’ post-apocalptic science fiction, have you read Earth Abides? It’s among my favorites in the genre, and very different from the prepper oriented stuff that I see a lot of today.

I love all of those older “classic” doomsday fiction. Like I mentioned previously, one of my favorite elements is when authors look past “WTSHTF” and immediate catastrophes, and focus on how cultures may evolve out of that in later years. It’s an interesting thought experiment to me, especially when you remember that the values we teach our children who survive will largely be responsible for how those future cultures turn out…

————————————————–

Two days ago, headed to the house with the kids in the truck (my wife wasn’t there, see below), as we drove up the road to our gate, I looked over into the neighbor’s pasture and saw a very large black bear boar running across their pasture, which was full of calves and momma cows. I stopped, and jumped out and called the neighbor to let them know. Then, I called the other neighbor, whose farm he was moving towards. As soon as I notified them, I grabbed my AR out of the truck, with every intention of shooting the bear, despite being out of season, in the interest of protecting the livestock (yeah,….it was all about protecting the livestock….). Unfortunately, I had my 10.5″ with an EoTech on it in the truck. This is not my normal grab-n-go gun, but it was what I had in the truck that day. So, I found a sight picture, and realized that, at the distance the bear was (about 300 yards by that point), there was no way I was going to achieve the level of precision I felt necessary to take a responsible shot on an adult bear). So, he survived.

I know a lot of “prepper” writers talk about “survival arsenals” or “survival batteries,” with dedicated hunting rifles and dedicated defensive rifles. One of the things I discussed in the new rifle book though, is what I would label the idea of general preparedness rifle. For preparedness, you don’t need a different rifle for harvesting meat and for stacking bad guy bodies. You need a rifle you can carry around in hand, in your truck, and lean against the wall, or hang in a safe place in the house. Whether you need to smoke a bad guy coming through the front door, or you need to shoot a bear that is eating your calves, or you need to shoot a raccoon that is stealing your feed corn for your animals, you need a general purpose rifle. If I still lived in the Northern Rockies, I might consider a .308 AR10 for that purpose, or even my M1A (no, probably not). Where I live now though, my 5.56 is adequate for anything I am going to run across, even a 600# bear or big feral boar hogs. If I need my rifle, the most dangerous thing I’m going to need to deal with is a bad guy with a gun. Sure, a feral hog or a bear COULD be dangerous, but a bad guy with a gun IS dangerous. By focusing on that most dangerous threat, and making sure it is dealt with, I can then deal with secondary issues if I need to, as I regularly do, and describe in the book.

———————————–

Last week, I posted Memento Mori, about my mother’s husband passing unexpectedly. Five minutes after I posted that, while I was working on getting the subscription drill posted, I got a phone call from my mother’s neighbor. She had gone to check on my mother, in light of circumstances, and found my mother immobile in her chair.

Dropping everything I was working on where it sat, and driving ridiculously fast to get to her house, I discovered my mother had suffered from what was apparently—and was later confirmed to be—a moderately severe stroke.

She’s not dead. She still has her speech function. She ended up suffering severe degradation of motor control on her right side (arm and leg), and some so-far severe short-term memory issues. As is typically the case (I’ve learned) in stroke patients, the neurologist informed me (actually, I put it into words, and he confirmed my conclusion) that there are four potential outcomes:

1) She’ll remain with the limitations she currently has and live some unknown length of time.

2) She’ll get progressively better, to at least the point she was, and live 5, 10, or even 30 years.

3) She’ll get progressively worse, and either pass, or live in some level of disability, for some unknown length of time.

4) She’ll have another stroke sometime in the indeterminate future, and it will kill her.

His words were, “We won’t have a very good idea for probably three months.”

Since that happened, either my wife or myself has been at her side continuously, in the hospital or at home. She was released for a day, but then ended up coming back to the hospital for an infection that set in when one of her IV sites abscessed overnight.

I have had a number of people ask me about this, pointing out how difficult it is going to be for the two of us to deal with this, while raising three children and a farm…especially if physical therapy doesn’t work. This has been accompanied by advice ranging from “find her a live-in companion care provider,” to “she needs to be in a nursing home!” (My siblings, biological and step- that she raised are either out-of-state, or completely worthless pieces of shit that can’t be relied on to remember to wipe their own ass, let alone provide intelligent care to a partial invalid, so we have both accepted that it is our responsibility. On the other hand, the clan of choice has, again, come through with multiple offers of aid, ranging from sitting with my mother, to providing shifts for nursing care….).

I am actually writing today’s articles while sitting in her hospital room, as she sleeps. As it stands, the plan for the time being is that my wife and I will take turns. One of us will be with her, either here in the hospital, or at her house, when they check her out of here (later today, according to the doctor). The other will be at the farm, with the kids, carrying the load there.

Is it easy? Fuck no. Is it possible? Well, it has been for a week. We’ll see how it does in the short-term. We have discussed giving it a month, both to see how it works, and to see if she progresses with physical therapy. After that, it will be a matter of either we all move in with her, and the farm becomes a bugout location, secondary site sort of thing (she doesn’t have the infrastructure on her place that we have built, and I’m entirely too proud of my house to just give it up), or she will move in with us. Since her house is a “modern” house with grid-power/etc, it would—at least theoretically—make caretaking an invalid simpler, but….

The benefit of this, for readers, is that I will in the near future, be able to speak a little more authoritatively, on long-term palliative care concerns for preparedness medicine. Right?

What this will mean is that, while I intend to get back to, and maintain, the feature article, Campfire Chat, and From the Library articles each week, there will be times when that is not feasible, obviously. Sometimes weeks will simply be skipped. Other times, it may simply mean they are on days other than Tuesdays, as I re-arrange my working schedule to deal with this.

Additionally, I am aware that the subscription drill from last week was not sent. I apologize for that, and I will remedy that. I am going to try and get it done and out today before she is checked out of the hospital, but if that doesn’t happen, I will send two drills next week instead of just one, to help make up for it. I apologize for any inconvenience this causes subscribers, and I thank you for your patience.

———————————

Despite this, I did manage to get the pre-orders of Guerrilla Gunfighter Volume Two packaged and shipped. Not all of you have received your shipped notifications yet, but, with the exception of two dozen that my helper is putting in the mail today, they have all been sent now. I will get the shipped notifications out as soon as possible.

In the meantime, I am putting the book back up on both the Lulu.com page and the Warhammer Six Press store site. I cannot ship to foreign addresses from the Warhammer Six Press site, but Lulu will do that direct. I am mostly keeping the Warhammer Six Press site up because we still get linked to there, and get an occasional sale from old links. If you insist on near next-day shipping, order from Lulu. If you want to do me a solid and help me get the money from it a little sooner, even though it might take me a week or two to get around to actually shipping the books, feel free to order from the Warhammer Six Press store site….

Again, thank you, as always, for reading, and for ordering the books, wherever you choose to order them from.

Advertisement