12 Dangers That Await You When Bugging Out

by Megan

If you’re preparing for an event where you believe you may be forced to leave your home, you need to be prepared to combat the dangers of bugging out. Bugging in is almost always a safer route to take because you are at least somewhat aware of the hazards that exist in your local area.

If the area around you has become unstable enough that you need to bug out, it means there are new and increasing hazards around you that you aren’t familiar with or even aware of. It is these unknown hazards after any SHTF event that can thwart even the best laid bug out plans if you aren’t prepared to deal with them and adapt your bug out plans quickly in response.

#1. Lack of Clean Drinking Water

You know that you need to include water in your bug in stockpile and have several options for getting fresh water to drink when that runs out. Following a SHTF event, public utilities, like the water and wastewater treatment facilities, could quickly become overwhelmed. Running water provided by the city or public utility may become contaminated or even stop altogether. It’s even possible that groundwater will become contaminated and end up contaminating local wells.

If you’re bugging out, it will be essential that your bug out route and alternative routes put you within reach of multiple places to check for clean water. You’ll also need to know with certainty that you can filter and purify any water you drink. It’s entirely possible that your bug out will take longer because you have to detour in order to get to water.

#2. Dehydration

If you’ve been prepping for any amount of time at all, you’ve heard the warnings about dehydration. The human body must have water on a regular basis in order to continue to function normally. During a bug out, you will be on the move, expending energy to try and get to your bug out and to accomplish many of the physically demanding tasks that are required for survival when bugging out. You’ll be losing more fluids due to perspiration that occurs during physical activity. Depending on the climate, you may also be exposing your body to unrelenting heat. You’ll need more water than normal to keep functioning, not less.

If you’ve ever watched Naked and Afraid on TV, you’ve seen how quickly a lack of water can start to impact motivation, drive, energy, and strength. If your body is weakened from dehydration, you put yourself at increased risk for illness, injury, and being unable to successfully defend yourself against looters or others who want to take your remaining supplies.

#3. Impassable Roadways

Most preppers have planned at least one and maybe more than one bug out route they will use to get from work or school to home and from home to their bug out location. But another one of the dangers of bugging out after a widespread disaster or SHTF event is the likelihood that many roadways in the area will be completely impassable.

Even if you do have a vehicle, there will be many, many other vehicles that simply ran out of gas or were abandoned wherever they were when the event happened. Highways, bridges, overpasses, freeway entry and exit ramps, and intersections may very well be completely impassable due to broken down or abandoned vehicles. Even if your car is operating, you may not be able to get through or turn around, forcing you to abandon your vehicle.

You need to prepare to change routes and even change transportation methods or set off on foot to get where you’re going. Keep in mind that what took several hours by car can easily take several days on foot. So, you will need more supplies but will have less capacity to carry them without your car. Therefore many preppers considering using a cache system.

#4. Hypothermia

Make sure your gear and supplies are adequate to keep everyone as dry and as warm as possible if you anticipate any kind of inclement weather. Hypothermia can set in even in weather that is 50 or 60 degrees Fahrenheit if you are wet and can’t get dry. If your bug out route requires you to cross creeks, streams, or other bodies of water or will mean travel through an area that is flooded or may be plagued with rain storms, plan to use waterproof clothing and other ways to stay dry when bugging out.

#5. Looters/Zombies

One of the greatest dangers to you and your family when bugging out will be other people. Looters and “zombies” who are desperate to feed themselves and their families and who didn’t prepare will not hesitate to take your gear and supplies. Some of these people will resort to violence in order to get what you have. Do what you can to avoid other people when possible, but also make sure you are knowledgeable in self-defense and are prepared to defend your family and your supplies during a bug out.

#6. Disappearing Rule of Law

One of the huge dangers of bugging out will be the disappearing rule of law. There are huge numbers of people in our world today whose tendency to violence and criminal activities are reined in by the rule of law. When a widespread disaster strikes, emergency services personnel, especially law enforcement, will be quickly overwhelmed by demand for assistance. The last thing police and other enforcement personnel will be worrying about is that someone stole your car or that you can’t find your teenage daughter.

Law enforcement will have bigger fish to fry and you will essentially be on your own. People normally reigned in due to laws and fear of punishment will quickly realize that they now have reduced risk of being caught for minor offenses such as burglary, assault, theft, even rape or kidnapping. It will be you against them with very little if any chance of anyone coming to your assistance. You must be prepared to take steps to avoid these people at all costs and to defend yourself and your family if confronted.

#7. Separation from Your Group

Being separated from your group during a bug out can be really dangerous. A widespread disaster or event can impact your communication systems and devices, especially if phone systems and other circuits are overwhelmed with demand. This means if you are separated from your group, you may not be able to get in touch with them to rendezvous or let them know if a pre-planned meeting place is now unsafe. To plan for this, make sure you have a visual system in place to get word to your group about your movements or changes in plans.

#8. Injury

Another one of the most dangerous threats during a bug out is an injury. If you aren’t used to using portable or hand tools you will be more susceptible to injury from misuse. In addition, allowing yourself to become exhausted or weak from malnutrition will increase the likelihood of an injury. An injury during a bug out can limit your mobility and if you don’t have an alternative way to get around and can’t get to safety, an injury can even be fatal. Learn as much as you can about how to prevent and treat injuries that can occur during a bug out to help combat this threat.

#9. Illness/Disease

Sanitation and hygiene after a disaster will be poor due simply because systems will get flooded with demand and some won’t be working because of the disaster or event. In addition, the number of deaths will greatly increase, and emergency services won’t be able to keep up with proper removal and burial of the dead. Animals and rodents will quickly overrun the streets and buildings. All of these things mean the risk of illness will increase.

Many of the diseases we thought were eradicated could once again rear their ugly heads. If you aren’t aware of these diseases and properly prepared to deal with a variety of illnesses using stockpiled medications or natural remedies, your bug out will fail. Talk to your physician about writing an extra script or two so you can stockpile prescription medication or look into animal antibiotics or natural alternatives.

#10. Exhaustion

Even if you choose to bug out by vehicle, it’s possible to become exhausted during a bug out or any extended travel. The stress of being constantly on the move and being continually on high alert for hidden dangers will take its toll. Make sure you plan for adequate sleep. If you choose to bug out on foot, by bicycle, or another method that requires you to physically expend energy in order to travel, adequate breaks to rest will be critical to success.

#11. Malnutrition/Starvation

The human body needs adequate fuel in order to be able to continue to expend the energy required for many of the tasks needed during a bug out. Without the right fuel going into your body, you will start to feel the effects pretty quickly. Ensure that you plan to carry enough food and supplies so that each person in your group can consume the needed number of calories, including protein, to keep moving. If the human body doesn’t get adequate fuel to keep it moving, your ability to stay moving will be negatively impacted.

#12. Lack of Accurate Information

As you read through all of these hazards and dangers of bugging out, it should have become clear that another threat to your safety is going to be the lack of information or misinformation. Finding out what’s really happening around your home, neighborhood, and town will be difficult if not impossible.

You will have to get information from multiple sources and piece information together and then make assumptions based on what you do know. Even if you are lucky enough to have some way to communicate with others, information you get could be delayed, inaccurate, or even deliberately misleading. And if you take action and bug out based on misinformation or incorrect assumptions, your bug out could go wrong quickly.

Wrap-up

If you’ve read through all of these dangers of bugging out, it becomes clear the odds are stacked against you. The only way to begin to even out those odds is to gather as much knowledge and experience as you can about each of the bug out obstacles so that you can deal with whatever comes up along the way. Consider these dangers one at a time and make sure you’ve learned all you can and that you incorporate procedures into your bug out plan to combat them as best you can. There will be incidents where you simply can’t stay where you are. But whatever you do, don’t ignore the dangers of bugging out.

Did miss something that you think is an obvious danger of bugging out? Let us know in the comments below.

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Build Your Own Antenna for Outdoor Monitoring with LoRa

LoRa and LPWANs (Low Power Wide Area Networks) are all the range (tee-hee!) in wireless these days. LoRa is a sub 1-GHz wireless technology using sophisticated signal processing and modulation techniques to achieve long-range communications.

With that simplified introduction, [Omkar Joglekar] designed his own LoRa node used for outdoor sensor monitoring based on the HopeRF RFM95 LoRa module. It’s housed in an IP68 weatherproof enclosure and features an antenna that was built from scratch using repurposed copper rods. He wrote up the complete build, materials, and description which makes it possible for others to try their hand at putting together their own complete LoRa node for outdoor monitoring applications.

Once it’s built, you can use this simple method to range test your nodes and if you get really good, you might be setting distance records like this.

via Radio Hacks – Hackaday https://ift.tt/2H13Eon

Simple Decoder Serves as Solo Ham’s Test Buddy

For a hobby that’s ostensibly all about reaching out to touch someone, ham radio can often be a lonely activity. Lots of hams build and experiment with radio gear much more than they’re actually on the air, improving their equipment iteratively. The build-test-tweak-repeat cycle can get a little tedious, though, especially when you’re trying to assess signal strength and range and can’t find anyone to give you a report.

To close the loop on field testing, [WhiskeyTangoHotel] threw together a simple ham radio field confirmation unit that’s pretty slick. It relies on the fact that almost every ham radio designed for field use incorporates a DTMF encoder in the microphone or in the transceiver itself. Hams have used Touch Tones for in-band signaling control of their repeaters for decades, and even as newer digital control methods have been introduced, good old analog DTMF hangs in there. The device consists of a DTMF decoder attached to the headphone jack of a cheap handy talkie. When a DTMF tone is received, a NodeMCU connected to the decoder calls an IFTTT job to echo the key to [WTH]’s phone as an SMS message. That makes it easy to drive around and test whether his mobile rig is getting out. And since the receiver side is so portable, there’s a lot of flexibility in how tests can be arranged.

On the fence about ham as a hobby? We don’t blame you. But fun projects like this are the perfect excuse to go get licensed and start experimenting.

via Radio Hacks – Hackaday https://ift.tt/2pUOXMg

Putting a Poor Man’s Vector Analyzer Through Its Paces

If anything about electronics approaches the level of black magic, it’s antenna theory. Entire books dedicated to the subject often merely scratch the surface, and unless you’re a pro with all the expensive test gear needed to visualize what’s happening, the chances are pretty good that your antenna game is more practical than theoretical. Not that there’s anything wrong with that — hams and other RF enthusiasts have been getting by with antennas that work without really understanding why for generations.

But we’re living in the future, and the tools to properly analyze antenna designs are actually now within the means of almost everyone. [Andreas Spiess] recently reviewed one such instrument, the N1201SA vector impedance analyzer, available from the usual overseas sources for less than $150. [Andreas]’s review does not seem to be sponsored, so it seems like we’re getting his unvarnished opinion; spoiler alert, he loves it. And with good reason; while not a full vector network analyzer (VNA) that will blow a multi-thousand dollar hole in your wallet, this instrument looks like an incredible addition to your test suite. The tested unit works from 137 MHz to 2.4 GHz, so it covers the VHF and UHF ham bands as well as LoRa, WiFi, cell, ISM, and more. But of course, [Andreas] doesn’t just review the unit, he also gives us a healthy dose of theory in his approachable style.

[The guy with the Swiss accent] has been doing a lot of great work these days, covering everything from how not to forget your chores to reverse engineering an IoT Geiger counter. Check out his channel — almost everything he does is worth a watch.

Thanks to [Nita Vesa] for the tip.

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Why You Shouldn’t Wait for the Government To Save You After SHTF

by Tara

“Hello, I’m from the government and I am here to help…”

If these words sum of your survival “plan,” you should go on ahead and start kissing your loved ones good bye right now. The government is NOT prepared, and by the time their underlings start rolling down your street, it will likely be to take and not give, supplies.

The government is not prepared to render aid to all American people immediately after a national disaster strikes, and beyond. The massive stockpile of food, potable water, and medicine you might think the government has to distribute, simply does not exist.

The aftermath of natural disasters in 2017 alone proves that the problems with getting aid to emergency sights is not just a lack of available stockpiles, but also involves budgetary and logistical hurdles as well. Local and state governmental entities will be as overly taxed as federal agencies, and equally hampered by a lack of resources, funds, ability to reach areas in either the immediate or surrounding, disaster area.

In all likelihood, when the government does arrive in your neighborhood, it may be to find more essential resources to keep itself and “top priority” areas going. Your guns could be the first thing to go, especially if martial law has been declared. The redistribution of vital materials, “for the public good” should be something we all are thinking about as we prep….and covertly store our preps.

Disaster Warnings

How much of a warning the government has before disaster strikes will directly impact both the amount of aide that can be distributed and how long it will take to deliver. Having time to coordinate with state, regional, county, and local governmental entities and businesses that sell fuel, food, and water, will increase the possibility that aide could arrive within days or weeks, if the disaster is not a nationwide event.

The chance of having more than a 24 hour warning before disaster strikes is likely only going to happen if the incident is sparked by a weather related event, like a hurricane, tornado, or flooding. The ability to detect solar flares before they happen has only existed for about two decades and is still not perfected.

Do not count on the Emergency Alert System (formerly known as the Emergency Broadcast System) to utter more than a single warning before a SHTF incident – if that. The once simplistic emergency response system went high tech about a decade ago…making it incredibly vulnerable to cyber hackers.

Terrorists who are able to hack into the EAS could potentially send out false information to not only the general public, but to the first responders who would be rushing into ground zero to help in the immediate aftermath of the disaster. Ponder for a moment, how much more devastating the 9/11 attacks or the Boston Marathon bombing could have been had the first responders intentionally been given false information – or instructions designed to lure them to an area for stage two of a terror attack to take place.

If the power grid goes down, as would happen during a solar flare, EMP, nuclear attack, or catastrophic natural disaster near Washington, DC, the ability to enact the Emergency Alert System might not exist.

The change over from the Emergency Broadcast System to the high tech Emergency Alert System permits the President of the United States to tap into a direct link to the EAS to issue an alert. To date, no president has conducted a live test on the new system, so whether or not it works or how hard it would be to hack, is basically unknown. Some security tech experts maintain hacking into the EAS system would not take the skills of a seasoned cyber hacker. If a hacker garners access to the root server of the Emergency Alert System, the ability to thwart or alter warnings messages, has been gained.

Governmental Priorities

The government’s first priority will not be to feed, house, and render medical aid to the American people. Maintaining order will be the number one priority of all levels of government during and after a SHTF disaster. If our freedom must be infringed upon to get the task completed, that is what will be done. One of the most revered presidents in the history of the United States did just that, and we now celebrate his birth with a day off of work every year.

President Abraham Lincoln has long been heralded for saving the union during the Civil War. He may have done that, but the Constitution was trampled upon to achieve the lofty goal. There is a distinct reason many Southerners refer to what happened between 1861 and 1865 as the “War of Northern Aggression,” and they do not have anything to do with cherishing the abhorrent act of owning other human beings.

Contrary to what most public school history textbooks tell you, the Civil War began brewing not over slavery, but after more than a decade of tariffs being levied upon the South alone. Politicians of the 1800s were no different than their modern counterparts when it came to holding onto power and money to spend that was not their own. Prior to taking a vote on secession, President Lincoln had the entire Maryland State Legislature arrested.

To keep America intact and collecting increasingly high export tariffs, the Constitution was violated in the following ways by Lincoln during the Civil War:

1. The Navy was ordered to blockade domestic ports. Such an act must be ordered by Congress, but during the Civil War the president usurped the power of the governing body in an effort to starve the South into submission.

2. President Lincoln ordered the military attack on Fort Sumter without congressional approval and refused to call Congress back into formal session after the attack has taken place. Sumter was not just any fort, it was a primary tariff collection depot.

3. General William Tecumseh Sherman was issued an order by President Lincoln to embark on his march to the sea – burning down whole towns (including hospitals) and “requisitioning” food and other goods from Southern residents, as he saw fit.

4. Lincoln again circumvented Congress when he suspended the writ of habeas corpus. This allowed the arrest of Americans without bothering to file a criminal charge against them – and to hold them without the benefit of a trial indefinitely. When ordered by the United States Supreme Court to immediately restore the writ of habeas corpus. Lincoln not only ignored the mandate without consequence, he ordered the arrest of the justice who dared to issue it. Approximately 20,000 Americans were arrested after the writ was suspended during the Civil War.

5. More than 300 newspapers, the only form of a free press at the time, were either commandeered and then shuttered, by order of President Abraham Lincoln. Some of the publishers and editors of the newspapers who reported negative articles about the handling of the Civil War, were arrested for merely exercising their right to free speech.

The very protections our Founding Fathers wrote into the Constitution to forever prevent a loss of freedom or for tyranny to rear its ugly head in America, were cast aside by a single man and then soundly forgotten by the history books.

If you think such a thing could not happen again, for the sake of keeping order, you would be delusional. The government will once again be acting in the ends justify the means mode during a SHTF scenario.

What Should We Expect The Government To Do In An Effort To Maintain Order?

• Declare martial law
• Impose a curfew
• Restrict movements of Americans – enter the definite possibility of FEMA camps here!
• Requisition all functioning vehicles, or even horses, if the SHTF disaster was caused by an EMP or solar flare.
• Take control of the food supply
• Suspend the writ of habeas corpus…again
• Shut down the free press

The effective mission statement on FEMA’s own website should be viewed as a harbinger of what to expect during a large-scale disaster:

“A secure and resilient nation with the capabilities required across the whole community to prevent, protect against, mitigate, respond to, and recover from the threats and hazards that pose the greatest risk.”

I can just about guarantee you folks that rural areas will not be anywhere near the top priority list for recovery aid during and after a doomsday disaster. When the agents from the Department of Homeland Security and FEMA show up in rural areas where most preppers live, they will be looking for food – because this is where is grown and raised, and for guns, because we have the highest percentage of ownership on a geographic scale.

Who will be the government decision makers after a SHTF disaster? That question has far too many variables to offer even an educated guess. We could be way down the presidential line of succession after a doomsday disaster. The HMIC could be the director of the Department of Transportation or the deputy director of Bureau of Land Management – in essence, an unelected appointee with less experience than a small town mayor, when it comes to managing a population of any size

I am not one prone to conspiracy theories. My description of the typical government response is based upon past precedent, agency priorities, and logic. The government will not think it’s out to get you, but protect you while maintaining order for the “public good.” That, my dear fellow preppers, is the recipe for a freedom-infringing and very dangerous scenario, indeed.

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Lucid Dreaming | Needing some advice to attain lucidity

Hey everyone, Ive been trying to attain lucidity for about a month now with no avail. I’ve mostly been focusing on wild and WBTB with WILD. I’d like to give a few experiences and hopefully someone can give me some advice to help achieve lucidity next time i try. First off, i just woke from a nap in which i attempted WILD. I had headphones in which played binaural beats and a beep would occur around every 20 seconds to keep my mind awake. I was sitting there drifting away and i all of the sudden was in like a scene (not yet a dream i don’t think) and clearly remember what i did but i had no clue i was in a dream and then the beep occurred and i like “snapped out of it.” It’s like i could see what was going on but it wasn’t developed yet and even the undeveloped parts i had no clue i was in a dream. I’m guessing i just drifted off and then the beep woke me up. But anyways i seemed to stay awake for some time and nothing ever becomes paralyzed and rarely ever to i hear faint noises and i never experience imagery, this continues for 10-15 minutes then all of a sudden i look and it’s two hours later! I must’ve fallen asleep but definitely didn’t dream. This happens with my WBTB techniques too, it’s like after I’m up my mind doesn’t dream for the next segment of sleep.

I recently started taking dream lead after a little impatience with the process (i know i know it takes time) and the first two nights the only difference I’ve seen is the first pill knocking me right out, other than that i don’t think i notice anything different.

I am close to being able to call my RCs a true habit but not quite there yet.

I haven’t tried MILD and WBTB or really any other technique yet. I have a super powerful memory when it comes to the real world but obviously I’m not remembering enough of my dreams considering remembering 4 is a good night and most nightha i only remember 1.


I’m going to try just taking the red pill tonight to see if it sparks anything in me since i believe the blue pill is being too sedative.

Any thoughts? Any recommended techniques? Anything you clearly see I’m doing wrong?

via Lucid Dreaming - Dream Views - Attaining Lucidity https://ift.tt/2Gec4HT

These 14 Urban Survival Skills are Critical

by Megan

When SHTF, the most important thing for you to understand is that everything you know about how the world works can change very quickly. Most new preppers do their planning as if they will all be at home when SHTF. But the truth is you and your family members could be anywhere when things go bad. Even if you don’t live in a city or urban area, it’s quite possible you will be in or near an urban area when SHTF. If that happens, these urban skills will help you survive in any city.

#1. Navigation

If you’re caught out away from home when SHTF, one of the key urban skills to help you survive in the city will be your ability to navigate your way through the city to either get home, reach your agreed rendezvous point, or get safely out of the city to your bug out location. The ability to find and make use of detailed maps of the area, alternate routes to/from work or school, and shortcuts will be vital to your survival.

#2. Locating and Purifying Water

It’s impossible for humans to survive without drinking water. This is a critical survival skill whether in an urban or rural situation. But in an urban situation, the large fresh water sources such as lakes and ponds may be less prevalent than in rural situations. This means you need to know where to find water in the city and how to then purify the water you find so it is safe to drink.

#3. Make Something from Nothing

The knowledge and ability to make something from nothing in an urban skill that will help you survive in any city. Most people will look for the obvious things to help them such as lighters.

Flashlights, canned food, bottled water, blankets, etc. A city has so many people that these obvious supplies will be gone very quickly. If you are able to look at the things other people passed up and know that you can make those work for something you need, you’ll be ahead of the game. Examples might be using a magnifying glass or steel wood and battery to start a fire or using a solar powered light next to a sidewalk as a flashlight.

#4. Knot Tying

No matter how well prepared you think you are, something is bound to go awry at some point. Your knot tying skills will help you survive in any city, whether you need to lash extra gear to your bag or vehicle, make your own snare, tie hand and footholds in a rope, or build a ladder for climbing. Even if it’s just to secure a makeshift shelter or tie a hook or sinker on a fishing line, knot tying will come in handy again and again in an urban survival situation.

#5. Climbing Skills

When you’re in an urban environment, climbing skills come in handy so that you can use an alternate rooftop route which will be less exposed or get into or out of a building without being discovered or followed. You may need to climb in order to cross a river to get to your bug out location or meeting area. If the bridge you would normally take across the river is clogged, monitored, or overrun with dangerous people, you need to climb to go around.

#6. Choose Shelter Strategically

One of the most critical skills you can have in an urban survival situation is the ability to strategically choose your shelter. Your shelter needs to be secure from intruders. It needs to be secluded so you don’t attract attention of passersby. It also needs to be a location where you can easily defend yourself and one that has an alternate way out so you can retreat if things get bad.

#7. Fire-Making

Like any survival situation, a key skill is knowing many different ways to make fire, cook food, and stay warm. It’s critical that you know several different ways to make fire so that no matter what resources you have at your disposal, you can stay warm and cook food. One method not many new preppers may know about is joule heating.

This is the ability to create fire by sending electric current through a conductor. A standard toaster uses joule heat. One way to do this in an urban grid down situation is to use an old piece of steel wool and a power source, such as a 9-volt battery.

#8. Evade and Hide

In the cities, one of the biggest threats you will face in a grid down situation will likely be other people. Your ability to evade and stay hidden from those who intend to do you harm or who are desperate and want what you have, can go a long way toward your survival. Map out alternate routes using rooftops and/or underground subway tunnels or sewer systems, so you can travel without being seen. Learn how to hide your fire from view so you can stay warm without revealing your location to others.

#9. Scavenge

Knowing where and what to scavenge is one of the urban skills that will help you survive in any city. When looking for supplies skip the retail stores and go for warehouses, distribution centers, or even supply trucks. Abandoned public buildings such as schools or office buildings and construction sites can be good sources for the following items:

• Food
• Water
• Tools
• Shelter materials
• Diesel Vehicles
• Generators

#10. Foraging

While scavenging is a term used more for the skill of finding materials and other items you might need, foraging usually refers to the skill of collecting or harvesting things that grow wild. For example, many weeds that you pass every day in the city are useful for medicinal purposes or are edible. If you are able to identify these weeds when other people don’t have that skill, you will be able to find food and medicine even when others cannot.

#11. Thinking Outside the Box

The ability to think outside the box is an urban skill that will help you survive in any city. People in cities will be desperate and the obvious places for supplies will be quickly overrun. To increase your odds of finding supplies that haven’t already been grabbed by others, you need to think outside the box.

As an example, look for diesel from underground tanks at gas stations and use something like an old bike pump and hose to make a syringe pump. Seek out working communication equipment or components to piece together from a taxi cab dispatch office or take advantage of small solar panels that normally power road construction signs to charge your batteries.

#12. Self-Defense

Self-defense is one of the urban skills that will help you survive in any city because sooner or later you will need to defend yourself at some point. The more ways to defend yourself you are experienced with, the better your chances of being able to defend yourself against whatever enemy might show up.

It could be criminals who are intent on violence, looters motivated by getting what you have, or desperate families just trying to survive. It doesn’t matter who the enemy is because if you can’t properly defend yourself, they win, and you lose.

#13. Negotiation and Bartering

Another urban skill to help you survive in any city is bartering and negotiation. While experts will recommend you try to avoid other people whenever possible, this won’t always work. There will be times when you need to barter and/or negotiate with others to get the supplies you need. Being prepared to do this and having proper bartering supplies stockpiled will go a long way toward your survival.

#14. First Aid Skills

When things go wrong and in a survival situation it’s almost certain that at some point things will go wrong, you have to be prepared for the worst. In an urban situation, your level of first aid skills and medical knowledge may be the difference between life and death.

Many people may falsely believe that in the city medical help will be more available, but this is far from the case. Most emergency services personnel will be overrun with desperate people very quickly. To survive injury or illness in an urban survival situation, you need to master first aid skills, so you can handle whatever may come up.

Wrap Up

The more of these urban skills you can master, the better your chances of survival in any city. There will always be other skills you can learn which is why prepping is a lifestyle change and not something you can ever be “done” learning. And when it comes to survival, there are no absolute guarantees.

Even the most skilled survivalist can make a mistake when fatigued or distracted. In the same vein, the least skilled among us can luck out and make it through a nearly impossible situation. But these urban skills will help you survive in any city because they can help tip the odds in your favor. And when it comes to a survival scenario, having the odds in your favor is the best position you can be in.

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An Introduction to Storm Detector Modules

Why Taking Guns From The ‘Mentally Ill Should Scare You

by Tara

After the recent school shooting in Parkland, Florida, liberal talking heads immediately launched into yet another attack on our Second Amendment rights. As has also become commonplace after mass shootings, mental health was also infused into the discussion with a flurry of possible bills proposed in the wake of the massacre.

We gun owners are used to the illogical knee-jerk reactions of the anti-gun crowd after mass shootings. We have also grown frustratingly accustomed to the eagerness of liberals to put the blame on the guns, and not squarely where is belongs – on the person who held the weapon and squeezed the trigger.

Blaming the gun used in any mass shooting will not stop future mass shootings. I can stare at our gun safe 24/7, waiting for the moment one of our firearms jumps off its rack and launches into a bloody killing spree. It’s just not going to happen…ever.

Doing something, anything, to stop gun violence can prompt some pretty scary laws – ones that have consequences those who rush to support them, do not take even a few seconds to ponder. If making a law would ensure the prevention, or even logical curtailing or a specific crime, there would no longer be murder, rape, drug dealing, or drunk driving arrests in the United States of America.

If most DUIs occurred by people driving a Dodge Charger, banning the vehicle from ever again being manufactured in America would still not stop drunk driving accidents. No politician would ever propose such a ludicrous idea in the first place.

It has been incredibly easy for liberal politicians and the media to blame the gun and not the actual evil person behind mass shootings. It reinforces their anti-gun agenda, makes it appear like they are taking action to protect the children and the public at large, and pretends to offer a quick fix to an extremely complicated problem.

Taking a long hard look at the American family and admitting that the lack of a father in the home, parents who act like besties and not real parents, disengaged parents of overly scheduled and highly pampered children, would be far too in-depth, complicated, and uncomfortable of a subject to delve into. Banning guns and calling for weapons to be removed from mentally ill or disabled people, is a much easier concept to sell to those folks who think a “gun free zone” sign will protect them.

Discussing the crumbling of our society and culture is cultivating mass shooters would lead to monstrously politically incorrect language and could of course cost liberal politicians some votes. There are more people killed in a month of weekends in Chicago than any single mass shooting that has happened in America. But, they don’t want to talk about that, not really.

The few that are pushed to answer questions about the lack of attention being paid to inner city gun violence in Chicago (and similar cities) blame it on lax gun laws in surrounding areas where they think the street punks in the Illinois city are going to get their guns. The blood in the streets doesn’t at all mean stringent gun laws don’t work, it only means such laws must be mirrored everywhere to have an impact.

Since there are so few real journalists left in the mainstream media, the logical follow up question is never asked. If the lax gun laws in other parts of Cook County are to blame, why aren’t double digit weekend shootings occurring there, as well?

Liberal’s false narrative on urban criminals…

Liberals are also fond of claiming it is not the fault of the youthful urban largely minority criminals that they got caught up in violent gangs – it is the lack of good schools and jobs that provoked them. Once again, they are pushing a false narrative. If living in an impoverished area where jobs are scarce and the schools are poorly funded, why aren’t the sidewalks in most rural areas also dripping with blood each weekend?

Kids growing up in rural areas probably have more access to legally purchased guns than Chicago youth do illegal guns, yet folks around here rarely ever bother to lock their doors at night and have no fear of getting hit by a stray drive by bullet.
If tough gun laws are the answer, why weren’t the mass shootings were have experienced in recent history also occurring during the 1950s, 60s, and 70s when far, far fewer gun laws existed?

Mental health?

The fact even the mainstream media is finally considering the mental health of mass shooters as the motivation behind gun mass shootings and not simply a particular weapon is a good thing, but only to a certain degree. Unless Second Amendment rights supporters keep a close eye on ALL proposed mental health gun laws, we all could one day soon hear a knock at the door by government agents coming to take our firearms.

No sane person would want a mentally ill person to have a firearm – or any other type of weapon. But, do we really want liberals, or the government in general to be in charge of determining mental fitness?

After the Parkland, Florida shooting, the mainstream media, CNN in particular, staunchly lambasted Republican lawmakers who supported overturning Barack Obama’s rule that yanked away Second Amendment rights from the disabled. Low-information voters thought the conservatives were gun-clinging monsters because Americans with disabilities who, according to the then liberal White House, no longer possessed the mental capacity to own a firearm.

There was a strict and lengthy process to determine what Americans with disabilities lost their gun rights, a formal hearing would be held and an avenue for appeal if guns were ordered to be removed. Nope, nothing of the kind was slated to occur under the supposed “common sense” mental health gun law.

Any law-abiding American gun owner who received a disability check and had a representative payee, was subject to it – without legal recourse. The government’s theory was a person surely had to be not only possibly physically, but mentally incapacitated if another adult was designed as the person who cashed their checks and take care of their banking.

If a rural grandma decided to give such authority to an adult child or grandchild so she didn’t have to drive 30 miles to the bank, she would have been forced to give up the shotgun she kept in the house to protect herself.

If a man with vision problems opted to go the same route because he no longer drove, he too would no longer have the right to protect himself from a home invader.

An urban elderly person who uses a walker and lives in a dangerous neighborhood would have had to choose between keeping a handgun they had a permit to carry and allowing a loved on to be their representative payee.

The mystery of the “mentally ill”…

Exactly what type of medication a person was taking or condition they were suffering from that would disqualify them under the mental health gun law, still remains largely shrouded in mystery.

That was then, this is now..and the mental health gun control laws coming down the pike could be even more arbitrary and contain only foggy details about firearms disqualifying conditions.

The mental health gun control laws being bantered about could impact your minor children, as well. One day soon all of the 8,389,034 kids forced to take psychiatric drugs by their doctors and/or parents, will become adults. Any of those children who want to purchase a gun, may likely not be able to due to their past history of treatment for a mental health or behavior issue – or supposed issue.

The number of children, particularly boys, being fed drugs to combat ADD or ADHD now numbers into the millions and has grown every year for the past decade.

• There are approximately 1,080,168 age five and below who are now taking psychiatric drugs.

• About 274,804 age one and younger, are prescribed psychiatric drugs in the United States.

• Around 4,130,340 children are taking the same mental health medications on a daily basis in America.

• Approximately 3,617,593 teenagers between 13 and 17 years old, the average age range of school mass shooters are consuming psychiatric drugs.

• Around 4,404,360 of the American children are taking strong prescription medications because a doctor thinks they have ADHD. Have you ever seen the test for an ADD or ADHD diagnosis? Is is a completely subjective set of questions a doctor, parents, and a teacher answers to determine if their behavior falls within currently accepted norms – that’s it. Around 1,500 of the children on ADHD drugs are still wearing diapers when the medicine is prescribed.

• Approximately 2,165,279 children who are less than one year old to 17, are taking antidepressant medications.

• Another 830,836 or so American toddlers, children, and teenagers are prescribed anti-psychotic medications.

• About 2,132,625 minors are prescribed medications for anxiety issues.

When television and government supposed experts talk about the drug problem and gun violence problems in America, they should first be talking about the impact of long-term psychiatric prescription drug on children who grow up popping a pill every day in this country.

The reasons behind the monumental increase in which psychotropic pharmaceuticals are being prescribed to children, the same type of drugs many mass shooters and terrorists were on when they created mass carnage, remains largely unaddressed – even though it desperately needs to be.

Liberals want to make the NRA and by extension, all Second Amendment supporters the big bad guys.

They go on, and on, and on each night on the news talking about the deep pockets of the NRA and all the power their political contributions bring them.

One of the many actual facts the liberal commentators fail to mention, is how the NRA political contributions pale in comparison to the deep pockets of Big Pharma. Over the course of the last decade, the NRA lobbying budget was $20 million. That is truly a lot of money, but Big Pharma, the makers of all the drugs being forced upon innocent children, had a lobbying budget or $2.5 BILLION.

No, they don’t want to talk about that. Why children are being prescribed some of the most serious drugs on the market even before they are old enough to write their own names – and the impact those drugs and have on their still-forming brains, does not fit their gun-grabbing narrative at all.

Liberals want us to believe the same type of governmental agencies that failed to revoke Nikolas Cruz’s gun rights after being alerted to his dangerous, threatening, and sometimes illegal behavior BEFORE he opened fire inside a school, is diligent and dedicated enough to determine who among us is mentally ill and isn’t fit to own a gun?! I think not.

None, exactly 0% of the suggested gun violence bills currently being debated and passed, would have stopped Cruz from legally getting a gun – not even some of the mental health guidelines that are finite and reasonable, if the law enforcement agents tasked do not share and act upon the information.

I fully respect our local heroes, they risk their lives protecting our communities for very little pay each and every day. But, in the case of the Parkland, Florida school shooting, members of law enforcement agencies where complaints about the shooter were lodged, including the school, did not do their jobs…and children died because of it.

Veterans who have sought treatment for stress, anxiety, PTSD, or similar issues have lost their Second Amendment rights because they went to a doctor for help and in most cases, been prescribed the same type of medications being given to our children.
A VA staffer sitting in an office somewhere can take one quick look at a veteran’s file and deem the man or woman too “mentally defective” to own a gun. Thousands of veterans are still fighting to retain the right to protect themselves at home after protecting us abroad.

We have already seen how badly such a blanket policy controlled by government hands has played out with the “No Fly List.” Liberals love to talk about this list too, when touting their latest “comprehensive” gun control legislation.

The “No Fly List” Analogy

The left loves to say a person can be placed on the No Fly List because they pose a national security threat, but can still buy a gun. While this makes it seem like a new gun law or enhanced background check is necessary, the liberals uttering such dogma have gotten very creative with their carefully selected set of “facts.”

The parameters for the No Fly List were so broad and subjective, some powerful public officials and agency administrators even found their names on the dreaded list. Ted Kennedy was stopped an interrogated to prove he was not the “T. Kennedy” on the No Fly List, Cat Stevens was temporarily refused entry back to the United States after his new last name, “Islam” landed him on the list, two CNN reporters and even a toddler, just to name a few, have found themselves onto the terror watch list.

Getting off the list can often involve a lengthy and expensive legal process. Only about 1,000 or so people on the 80,000 plus person fly list, are even Americans already in our country.

There is a massively huge difference between mental health patients with serious problems and a person taking some type of medication for a small or temporary issue – like anti-stress medication after the loss of a loved one.

I am very afraid all of the recently proposed laws will not only difference, but in the rush to “do something” will deter people from seeking out the help they need.
Liberals are now demanding that doctors be permitted to ask patients if they own a gun or one is present in their home. Such privacy intruding questions are not permitted everywhere.

If a doctor feels a patient if depressed, anxious, or is experiencing other similar emotions, the physician would be entitled (perhaps compelled) to report the gun-owning patient to the local authorities.

I am the first to admit I do not understand the inner-workings of a liberal mind, but what do they even hope to accomplish if every doctor becomes required to ask if a patient owns a gun?

Lying to a police officer can get your arrested, but there is at least currently no law against lying to your doctor. People lie to their doctor all the time: “How often do you consume alcohol, how often do you exercise, how much do you smoke…” probably spark the most frequent lies to doctors.

The fight to safeguard our Second Amendment rights is not one of leaps and bounds, but one of inches. We have to remain vigilant and read every single word in bills proposed both in our own respective states and federally.

Do not let innocuous sounding bills fool you into thinking the new rules they contain will not chip away at our right to keep and bare arms. Let us never allow our the United States of America to become like the former Soviet Union and use “mental illness” designations to garner control over the right to free speech, political dissent, or our Second Amendment rights.

via Modern Survival Online http://ift.tt/2GcsHHk

What to Do Immediately After SHTF

by Megan

One of the most common debates among preppers is what kind of disaster to prepare for in the near future and what to do immediately after SHTF.

Many preppers believe that when SHTF it will be a natural disaster such as a tsunami, a super volcano eruption at Yellowstone, an asteroid or solar flare. Other preppers insist that the SHTF event that is coming will be man-made and will be the result of an economic collapse or nuclear war. Still, others insist that you cannot predict these events and therefore planning for everyday type emergencies, random acts of violence, and anticipated natural disasters common in your area is all you can do.

Regardless of how it happens, it’s critical that you know what to do immediately after SHTF. So, in this article we’ll give you some general steps to follow as an outline of how to prepare for any crisis situation whether large or small.

Stay Calm and Get Away from Immediate Danger

The key thing to do immediately after SHTF is to remain calm and get away from the immediate danger. Whether the danger is a school shooter, a multi-car pileup on an icy highway, a random bomb that exploded in a shopping plaza, or a natural disaster, finding a temporary safe spot is the priority.

Do your research and train yourself to be observant and react using muscle memory to danger. The human instinct to protect itself can be powerful but if you panic, you can override your instincts and put yourself in more danger. The more you know about how dangerous situations play out and what things to do to protect yourself, the easier it will be to react in a way that could save you further injury and even save your life.

Treat Any Injuries

Once the immediate danger of the situation has passed or you are in a temporarily safe place, inspect yourself and others for any injuries. Treat life-threatening injuries first using available first aid supplies. For any injuries that are not immediately life-threatening make sure you treat them to avoid infection and further damage.

Communicate whereabouts with Family if possible

If you are away from home when SHTF or are separated from your family or group members, you’ll want to take steps to communicate your whereabouts to them. If your cell phone is working, send a text message which is more likely to get through and will be easier for the other party to receive than a voicemail message.

If your get home bag includes a handheld radio and your family members have similar radios, you can use that to stay in communication as you make your way home or to your agreed meeting location.

Gather Information

Once you’ve communicated your whereabouts to family members, you’ll want to gather as many details and facts as you can about the situation. Hopefully, your get home bag contains a handheld radio or NOAA radio you can turn on to monitor any additional information.

You can also take a few minutes to observe the area around you and eavesdrop on conversations as you make your way home to try and determine how severe the situation really is.

• How widespread does the danger appear to be?
• What’s the sky/weather look like?
• Do you hear gunfire? Can you still hear sounds of traffic such as engines, horns, sirens, etc.?
• What do you hear?
• Is power out? Does it appear to be widespread or limited to one area?
• Do you see or smell smoke that would indicate a fire or explosion?
• Are other people nearby staying inside or coming outside?

Fill Gas Tank and Get Home or to Agreed Meeting Location

If you determine that the event is a widespread event and could be an actual SHTF event rather than a temporary emergency situation, it’s time to get home as quickly as possible. If you’re at work or school and your vehicle will start, that’s great. Use a route that will be less traveled and appears to take you around the danger.

On your way home, if you pass a gas station still open and without long lines, take a moment to top off your gas tank in case it’s needed. Use your available cash to purchase any supplies you may need if the situation extends into a long term one.

If your car won’t start due to an EMP or some other reason, make sure you grab your survival bag and fill it with any supplies you may need from your car before you set off on foot or via your alternate transportation (bike, etc.).

Review Your Family’s Emergency Plans

If you’ve been a prepper for any length of time when SHTF, your family will have an emergency plan that everyone is familiar with and hopefully one that you have practiced several times. The benefit of having a family emergency plan in place is that family members can begin to implement the plan in phases which in a serious emergency makes use of precious time that others will waste trying to figure out what is happening.

If the situation turns out to be temporary or not as serious, there’s no harm done by implementing your emergency plan. In a serious SHTF situation, your family will be that much farther ahead than your neighbors who are still watching TV or running around trying to figure out what is happening.

Make sure these steps are an early part of your family plan:

• Turn on NOAA or another emergency radio
• Fill collapsible water jugs and other containers with water and put by the door
• Charge cell phones, portable power chargers, and other critical devices
• If power is out or could go out, make sure flashlights and extra batteries are within easy reach
• Confirm all doors and windows are secured and activate any other SHTF defense measures such as closing and locking driveway gates, activating perimeter alarms, etc.

Additional Steps for a Natural Disaster or Widespread Emergency:

Ready Any Storm Protection Supplies

If what you think is coming is a natural disaster such as a tornado, hurricane, or flood, this is the time to make sure any of your storm protection supplies are available and ready to be put up quickly.

• Plywood storm shutters can be set near windows, ready to be hung.
• Move outdoor furniture and recreational items into the garage or shed.
• Fill sandbags and even stack them in place around the perimeter of your property
• Clear brush and other flammable debris and items from around your home.

Bring Pets Inside and Pen Livestock

When an emergency occurs, animals can sense chaos and their behavior can become unpredictable. Even well-behaved animals may run if they are startled by gunshots or other loud noises. If you bring them inside or pen them up when you get the first indication of trouble, it will be easier to feed and care for them as the days progress. If you do need to bug out quickly, you won’t waste precious minutes chasing them down.

Mark Children, Elderly, and Pets with Identifying Information

Even if you don’t plan on being separated from your spouse, parents, children, or other group members, that possibility exists in many SHTF scenarios. We’ve all seen the reports of family members being separated through no fault of their own. Take a moment to clearly mark pets and livestock with identification and contact information. For larger animals you can use a non-toxic paint to write your contact info where it’s clearly visible. For children and the elderly who may be vulnerable to being separated from the group, use a magic marker with clean nail polish to put identifying information on their wrist or arm.

Decide to Bug Out or Bug In

At some point early on following a SHTF incident, you need to commit to bug in or bug out approach. Unless you live in a large city or on the outer edges of an urban area, bugging in is typically the safer option. Bugging out always carries more risk, but if your home is not safe or if you must get to a BOL that is farther out, you have no choice but to bug out.

The decision to bug out or bug in is always a personal decision. Remember you may not be thinking clearly in the midst of a SHTF event and panic will set in. If you intend to bug in and the situation changes and your home becomes too dangerous, you’ll want to be ready to adapt quickly. One good idea is to set some guidelines ahead of any crisis situation that will allow you to determine whether to bug in or bug out when the time comes.

Confirm Your Bug Out Preparations

Even if your family emergency plan leans toward bugging in as your main strategy, there will be some SHTF events that may require you to bug out. In fact, if your intent is to hunker down and bug in but at some point, your home becomes unsafe, not having a bug out plan prepared in advance can mean almost certain death.

So even if you plan is to stay put at home, have a bug out plan in place as backup and take time to double check those preparations so if the situation calls for it, you can be gone within minutes instead of hours.

• Ready BOV supplies and fluids
• Review plan for rally points, alternate routes, and visual signals
• Prepare to load any additional supplies that may be helpful to have

Do an Inventory of All Supplies if Time Allows

Once you are in a safe location and monitoring available channels to determine the extent of the disaster, it’s a good time to do a final check of all available supplies. Make note of anything you don’t have available and figure out alternatives or work arounds.

When things get hectic later, you won’t waste precious time looking for supplies you “thought” you had on hand. Prioritize food consumption so that you are eating fresh food first, followed by refrigerated food, frozen food (which will thaw in 1-3 days), and finally your canned and dry food stockpile.

Prioritize According to Survival Rule of Threes

When SHTF, it will be critical that you prioritize your actions in terms of the Survival Rules of Threes. This rule indicates how long the average human be can survive without critical resources:

• 3 minutes without fresh air to breathe
• 3 hours without warmth and shelter in extreme weather
• 3 days without fresh water to drink
• 3 weeks without food

The rules of threes can come in handy when you need to prioritize your activities due to limited energy and fatigue. It can also help you to prioritize if you are bugging out and don’t have room in your vehicle for everything.

If something happens to your vehicle and you must bug out on foot, it can help you to determine what to carry and what items to leave behind. When you’re in a survival situation with limited time until dark for example, use the survival rule of threes to determine the order of your tasks to ensure your best chance of survival.

There are of course no guarantees when it comes to a SHTF situation. But knowing what to do immediately after SHTF can boost the odds that you and your loved ones will come through it and survive.

via Modern Survival Online http://ift.tt/2FPopC9

Control a Swarm of RC Vehicles with ESP8266

Over at RCgroups, user [Cesco] has shared a very interesting project which uses the ever-popular ESP8266 as both a transmitter and receiver for RC vehicles. Interestingly, this code makes use of the ESP-Now protocol, which allows devices to create a mesh network without the overhead of full-blown WiFi. According to the Espressif documentation, this mode is akin to the low-power 2.4GHz communication used in wireless mice and keyboards, and is designed specifically for persistent, peer-to-peer connectivity.

Switching an ESP8266 between being a transmitter or receiver is as easy as commenting out a line in the source code and reflashing the firmware. One transmitter (referred to as the server in the source code) can command eight receiving ESP8266s simultaneously. [Cesco] specifically uses the example of long-range aircraft flying in formation; only coming out of the mesh network when it’s time to manually land each one.

[Cesco] has done experiments using both land and air vehicles. He shows off a very hefty looking tracked rover, as well as a quickly knocked together quadcopter. He warns the quadcopter flies like “a wet sponge”, but it does indeed fly with the ESP’s handling all the over the air communication.

To be clear, you still need a traditional PPM-compatible RC receiver and transmitter pair to use his code. The ESPs are simply handling the over-the-air communication. They aren’t directly responsible for taking user input or running the speed controls, for example.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen an ESP8266 take the co-pilot’s seat in a quadcopter, but the maniacal excitement we feel when considering the possibility of having our very own swarm of flying robots gives this particular project an interesting twist.

via Radio Hacks – Hackaday http://ift.tt/2HGGzq9

A Review of President Trump’s First Year in Office

by Derrick Krane

I have seen 10 US presidencies in my lifetime, and have never seen an American president subjected to such hatred and vitriol as the current holder of the office. People have made threats, wished death upon President Trump, have wished rape upon his wife, Melania, portrayed him decapitated, and blamed him for all that is wrong, without recognizing any of his accomplishments.

This is mostly due to the liberal media distortions and the gullible, naïve, Kool-Aid guzzling, extreme left lemmings. This is so frightening how so many people have  stopped thinking critically, believe whatever they are told by left leaning news outlets and liberal celebrities and educators, and are so easily led.

During the 2016 Presidential campaign, I kept an eye on both the Republican and Democratic candidates.  I heard the numerous media reports stating that Donald Trump was crazy, he was a clown, he wasn’t serious, he was running as a publicity stunt, and he would never get close to the oval office.

But as he ascended and left other Republican candidates behind, I did something that not enough Americans did during this last election. I listened to what he had to say, instead of what the media reported he was saying, out of context and through the distorted lens of liberalism. I watched some of his rallies. He did not sound like he was crazy, or a clown.

We have numerous pressing domestic and foreign issues that are challenging and threatening our nation. Do the American people need substance or form? We need a strong leader to deal with these issues effectively. He was saying thing that made sense and that resonated with me.

Yes, during his campaign, he said a few things that were a little out there, he was boisterous, crude, and rough around the edges, but so what?  He is a real man; an Alpha-male.

He was not bowing to political correctness, which has permeated and infected western civilization like the disease that it is, or acting like a weakling beta-boy. He spoke decisively, and had sound ideas to dig America out of the pit that ex-president Barrack Hussein Obama had put us in during his presidency, which is what he has been doing his first year in office.

Here I want to focus on what President Trump has accomplished in major foreign and domestic issues in 2017.

1. Immigration and crime

We have a problem in this country with illegal aliens collecting public assistance from programs with limited resources, which are intended for down and out Americans.

Criminal illegal aliens come here and commit heinous crimes. They are deported and return over and over. We no longer need immigrants, rather immigrants need us. The last thing we need are freeloaders and criminals who contribute nothing to society and only take. Under the Trump administration, things are changing. Fewer illegals are trying to enter the US, showing that enabling law enforcement to do their jobs is working.

The number of people caught trying to illegally enter from Mexico is at the lowest level since 1972. U.S. Border Patrol and ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) made 310,531 arrests, down 24 percent from 2016, and the lowest since 1971.

2. Healthcare

An executive order signed within days of President Trump taking office “waived, deferred, or delayed” the punitive fine (Fox News, 2017) that was imposed for those who were unable to afford the ridiculously high monthly payments from the Health Care Exchange, but made too much money to qualify for Medicaid state insurance.

Some people even received a refund for the fines imposed in previous tax years. The effort to get rid of the disastrous Obamacare program is still ongoing, and will hopefully be resolved in 2018.

3. Education

As an educator, I see the end results of inadequate public education in college students who are woefully unprepared for college, and lacking in essential, fundamental academic skills. There are wasteful programs in place at the federal level which do nothing to prepare students.

Trump wants to cut the Department of Education’s budget by $9.2 billion, from $68.3 billion to $59.1 billion. 63% of this reduction is from eliminating programs that are redundant or ineffective.

4. Economy

The US economy is thriving and growing stronger under President Trump. The stock market has been soaring, and unemployment is down, with more jobs being moved to, or kept in the US. Consumer confidence hit a 17-year high, labor costs are decreased, and productivity and retail sales are increased.

The national deficit is also being addressed by curtailing wasteful and redundant government spending. The Trump administration withdrew or delayed 1,500 proposed regulations, resulting in a savings of $8.1 billion in 2018, and will save another $9.8 billion in 2018 (Binion, 2018).

5. Foreign policy

• ISIS’s has been defeated and driven from Iraq; Trump has clearly stated the US is committed to Afghanistan long term to help develop and maintain stability, and prevent the formation of other radical Islamic extremist groups such as the Taliban, Al-Qaeda, or ISIS.
• Trump responded decisively against the use of chemical warfare in Syria by the government of Bashar al-Assad. On April 4, 2017, the Syrian regime used the nerve toxin Sarin against civilians in the town of Khan Sheikhoun, which killed over 80 people. Trump called the attack an “affront to humanity” that “crossed a lot of lines for me. When you kill innocent children, innocent babies … that crosses many, many lines — beyond a red line”. Two days after the Sarin attack, US warships launched 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles at a Syrian military airfield. This sent a clear message that the use of barbaric chemical weapons would not be tolerated.
• North Korea is being contained. While many have been critical of President Trump’s provocative words toward Kim Jong-Un, (Vital and Allen, 2017), another clear message is being sent: we do not fear North Korea, and any attack on the US or its possessions would be a suicidal move by Jong-Un.
• President Trump has a warm relationship with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, and had renewed out commitment to our most important middle eastern ally, with whom we also share many cultural links. In December 2017, Trump announced that the US officially recognizes Jerusalem as Israel’s capital. There was abundant international criticism, and the UN condemned the measure. Nikki Haley, our ambassador to the UN noted which countries voted for their condemnation, and in keeping with the America First policy of the Trump administration, foreign aid to these nations is being considered for cutting or elimination.

6. National defense

It is human nature for the strong to dominate the weak. Go to any correctional facility or middle school to see this theory in action. Better still, look at the history of the world. Whether an individual or a nation, those who are weak are at the mercy of their enemies.

Only the threat of retaliation and a position of resolute strength, and the ability to enforce it stays the hand of our enemies. To this end, President Donald Trump has assigned The Fiscal 2018 National Defense Authorization Act, which authorized $700 billion for the Defense Department (Bushatz, 2018). The Trump administration is also supporting the ongoing development of a ballistic missile interceptor system (The White House, 2018).

7. The Second Amendment.

This has become an area of contention recently. Initially President Trump showed strong support of the Second Amendment and gun owners. It appears he has bent to pressure from the gun control crowd following the latest school shooting by a deranged individual.

However, if the media distortions are sifted through, this is about better enforcement existing laws for background checks and the purchase of firearms, and a ban on bump stocks, which in effect make a semi-automatic rifle fire in fully automatic mode. Even the NRA supports regulation of bump stocks.

More controversial are Presidents Trump’s asking an increase in the age to purchase firearms from 18 to 21, and Trump’s statements regarding what he referred to as excessive “checks and balances” that limit what can be done to keep guns out of the hands of those that are psychologically unfit to handle them responsibly. T

ake the firearms first, and then go to court,” Trump said “You could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.” (Gearan, DeBonis, and  Min Kim, 2018).  Circumventing due process for any reason is alarming.

Conclusion

Donald Trump’s presence in the White house is making America stronger than it has been in the past eight years.  Our economy is growing, our military is stronger, damaged relationships with our allies are being repaired,  our enemies are receiving unequivocal messages that they need to choose their actions with care, illegal immigration is being dealt with, economic burdens are being eased, and conservatives are becoming bolder at being able to speak out against the toxic insanity of political correctness.

He is a flawed human being, as are all of us.  I do not blindly follow, or agree with his every word and policy.  The very right to engage in informed criticism of our leaders is an essential part of the system of checks and balances, which make a free society. Only in the worst of totalitarian dictatorships does the populace march in lockstep, not daring to question or challenge their leaders. But the hate coming from the supposedly tolerant left is difficult for me to understand.

I realize most of my readers will be conservatives. I hope that some from other parts of the political spectrum have also exposed themselves to some alternatives to the liberal echo chamber, and will think critically, rather than accepting what they are fed without question.

via Modern Survival Online http://ift.tt/2FUVrE0

Review: LimeSDR Mini Software Defined Radio Transceiver

An Autonomous Drone For Working Rare Squares

Amateur radio is an extremely broad church when it comes to the numerous different activities that it covers. Most of the stories featuring radio amateurs that we cover here have involved home-made radios, but that represents a surprisingly small subset of licence holders.

One activity that captivates many operators is grid square collecting. The map is divided into grid squares, can you make contact with all of them? Land-based squares in Europe and North America are easy, those in some more sparsely populated regions a little less so, and some squares out in the ocean are nigh-on impossible. As an attempt to solve this problem, the Jupiter Research Foundation Amateur Radio Club have put an HF transceiver and associated electronics in a WaveGlider autonomous seagoing vehicle. The idea is that it will traverse the ocean, and you can work it, thus getting the contact you require to add those rarest of grid squares to your list.

The transceiver in question is a commercial portable one, an Elecraft KX3, and the brain of the payload is a Raspberry PI. It’s operating the FT8 mode, and will respond to a call on 14074 kHz in an automated fashion (Or it would, were its status page not telling us that it is offline due to power issues). It’s currently somewhere in the Pacific ocean, having been at sea now for a couple of months.

We spotted this through a spirited online discussion as to whether working an automated station is really a proper contact at all, with one amateur commenting that it might be a way for him to keep on going post mortem. But the ethics of the contact aside, it’s an extremely interesting project and one we hope eventually will come back online.

Thanks Sotabeams, via [AE5X].

via Radio Hacks – Hackaday http://ift.tt/2FFKPZz

Is Australia’s Gun Grab About to Happen in the United States?

by Isabella

In the wake of the Parkland, FL shooting, the gun control debate is once again raging in our country. People who know next-to-nothing about guns or gun laws are demanding vague “gun control” measures be taken to prevent another shooting while ignoring the many laws that were in place that should have stopped the Parkland shooting.

Whenever gun control discussions rear their ugly head in our national conversation, gun-grabbing zealots on the left bring up Australia as an example.

In 2015, following the shooting at a community college in Oregon, Obama remarked publicly that he looked to countries like the UK and Australia for their laws that supposedly eliminated mass shootings:

“We know that other countries, in response to one mass shooting, have been able to craft laws that almost eliminate mass shootings,” he said. “Friends of ours, allies of ours — Great Britain, Australia, countries like ours. So we know there are ways to prevent it.”

Over the last week, the mainstream media, who has been pushing the gun control narrative since before the bodies were even cleared from Marjory Stoneman High School in Parkland, Florida, has been praising Australia for another mass round-up of civilian-owned firearms and not-so-subtly suggesting that the United States should consider the same measure.

Although liberals have been looking to Australia’s restrictive gun laws as a beacon of hope in the war against gun violence, gun-rights activists in the US and even the UK and Australia say that not only would mirroring Australia’s gun laws be a poor choice for the US, they haven’t even worked to reduce murder in Australia to begin with.

Now more than ever, it is important to debunk the notion that Australia’s gun laws have been anything but ineffective towards deterring crime and were the US to imitate their policy, it would be disastrous.

To start with, it is important to consider what President Obama was implying by the suggestion that the US might model Australia’s gun laws. In Australia, the government didn’t simply tighten restriction on purchasing and owning firearms, they actually rounded up and confiscated weapons.

While it is most commonly understood that, in 1998, Australia implemented several new gun control measures including a highly successful gun buyback program, what most mainstream media outlets won’t tell you is that this included widespread gun confiscation.

“The crucial fact they omit is that the buyback program was mandatory. Australia’s vaunted gun buyback program was in fact a sweeping program of gun confiscation,” says Varad Mehta of the Federalist, noting the lack of mention to this simple fact in mainstream media outlets calling for similar gun control measures in the United States.

Mehta notes that while many politicians call for Australian-style gun control, what it would take to actually implement this kind of confiscation in the United States would be incredibly dramatic: “New York and Connecticut authorities so far have shown no inclination to enforce their laws by going door to door to round up unregistered guns and arrest their owners.

But that’s what would be necessary to enforce the law. A federal law, therefore, would require sweeping, national police action involving thousands of lawmen and affecting tens of millions of people. If proponents of gun control are serious about getting guns out of Americans’ hands, someone will have to take those guns out of Americans’ hands.”

To think that gun confiscation would work in the United States is both highly ignorant and also borderline psychotic. Is the American government really going to pry hundreds of millions of firearms out of hundreds of millions of cold, dead hands?

Unlikely.

In a country like ours where the right to bear arms is not only deeply embedded in our national zeitgeist, it is a cornerstone in the foundation of our unique American liberties. We also happen to have hundreds of million gun owners.

Gun-control fanatics like to suggest, as you’re hearing constantly from the media right now as the character and morality of every gun owner in this nation is being questioned by a sickeningly biased media, is that we all know deep down we can stop gun violence but Americans simply love their guns too much. They also love to attribute the moral high ground in this regard to countries like Australia and the UK.

The problem is, as National Review contributor Charles Cooke pointed out following Obama’s 2015 comments, assuming that national gun confiscation would look anything like it did in Australia in 1998 would be an idiotic and fatal mistake:

“Contrary to the president’s implications, Britain and Australia are not “countries like ours” when it comes to the right to keep and bear arms; they are completely, utterly, extraordinarily different,” Cooke wrote. “When the British government banned handguns in 1997, there were fewer than half a million in circulation. Because there was almost no opposition, they were quickly collected up without fuss. Likewise, after the Australian government pushed through its ban in 1998, federal officials easily confiscated around 650,000 guns — between one third and one quarter of the total.”

Cooke continues: “At present, there are around 350 million guns in circulation in the United States — more than one for every person living here — and the American people enjoy constitutional protection of their right to keep and bear them. If the American government did what Australia did in 1998, they would bring in about 100 million guns but leave between 200 to 250 million on the streets (about as many as there were in total in 1994). This, obviously would be rather pointless. More important, perhaps, such a move would lead to massive unrest, widespread civil disobedience, and possibly even a war.”

This is truer still today, as the nation’s hundreds of millions of gun owners have no interest in turning in their guns and large swathes of Middle America are tight knit communities that are armed to the teeth, while the people who want to take all the guns typically have none (other than the government, of course.)

Gun-control zealots who know nothing about firearms have absolutely no idea how much more gun violence there would be were you try to take weapons from millions of people who know darn well they have a God-given, natural right to bear them.

In a recent op-ed for the New York Times, Australian writer A. Odysseus Patrick explained that what made such extreme gun measures possible in Australia is they simply don’t have the deeply embedded cultural regard for the importance of bearing firearms. “We Australians have a profoundly different relationship with weapons,” he says. “Americans love guns. We’re scared of them.”

He continues to explain that Australians have no concept of firearms as an important part of their national identity, and I will note that they also clearly have no concept of firearms as an important part of national liberty, either.

Mehta shares Patrick’s views, noting “The crucial point is the final one: Australia does not have a bill of rights, and that, ultimately, is the reason it was able to confiscate guns. Australians have no constitutional right to bear arms, so seizing their weapons did not violate their constitutional rights. Gun confiscation in the United States would require violating not only the Second Amendment, but the fourth and fifth as well, and possibly even the first. Progressives generally have no compunction about breaching the Second Amendment, but one wonders how many others they would be eager to violate in their quest to nullify the second. Civil war and a tattered Constitution: such are the consequences of invoking “Australia.” It is not a model; it is a mirage.”

This explains why so many Australians adapt an attitude of scorn towards America’s love-affair with guns; they simply never had to fight for their own independence they way America did. Americans fought, bleed, and died, using firearms, for our liberty from the crown; Aussies still have Her Majesty on their money. We understand how important it is to maintain freedom from tyranny to have an armed populace; Australians are perfectly comfortable giving their security over to the government.

This just stands to further underscore how important the Second Amendment is to securing our  liberty. Without a national identity of self-reliance and self-defense, Australians gladly gave up their rights to self-defense without much of a fight. If you were to try to take this right from Americans, it would get bloody.

Regardless of this grim prospect, even if Americans were happily willing to part with their Second Amendment rights and lawfully turned in their weapons the way Australians did, there is the glaring problem with Australian gun control that it didn’t actually work.

As the Daily Wire points out, multiple studies have indicated the gun control measures taken in Australia made an insignificant impact on crime:

A 2007 British Journal of Criminology study and a 2008 University of Melbourne study concluded that Australia’s temporary gun ban had no effect on the gun homicide rate. Crime Research Prevention Center president John Lott had similar findings.

“Prior to 1996, there was already a clear downward [trend] in firearm homicides, and this pattern continued after the buyback,” wrote Lott. “It is hence difficult to link the decline to the buyback.”

“Again, as with suicides, both non-firearm and firearm homicides fell by similar amounts,” Lott continued. “In fact, the trend in non-firearms homicides shows a much larger decline between the pre- and post-buyback periods. This suggests that crime has been falling for other reasons. Note that the change in homicides doesn’t follow the change in gun ownership – there is no increase in homicides as gun ownership gradually increased.”

The 2007 study found the same trend, as National Review’s Mark Antonio Wright notes:

The Australian gun-homicide rate had already been quite low and had been steadily falling in the 15 years prior to the Port Arthur massacre. And while the mandatory buyback program did appear to reduce the rate of accidental firearm deaths, Baker and McPhedran found that “the gun buy-back and restrictive legislative changes had no influence on firearm homicide in Australia.”

This pattern is also mirrored in suicide rates, which is significant because in the United States currently, suicide accounts for the most gun deaths annually. “While [studies] show a steady decline in gun-related suicides, the reduction occurred at the same time as an overall reduction in the Australian suicide rate. What’s more, firearm-related suicides had been declining in Australia for nearly ten years before the 1996 restrictions on gun ownership,” Wright points out.

“Moreover, a look at other developed countries with very strict gun-control laws (such as Japan and South Korea) shows that the lack of guns does not lead to a reduced suicide rate. Unfortunately, people who want to kill themselves often find a way to do so — guns or no guns,” he adds.

Not only is the suggestion that the United States emulate the 1998 gun grabbing measures of Australia insanely stupid, it’s just plain insane. Not only would such measures be bloody and violent, they fundamentally undermine everything it means to be an American.

Liberals love the unique liberties and the founding philosophy of our country, but they have lost sight of the spirit that secured it for them in 1776. Our country was founded on the principle that no one but God need recognize the natural rights we have to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

If we fail to acknowledge that the right to life includes the right to defend our lives would strike at the very core of our American liberty.

We shouldn’t try to be like Australia in any way because we are not Australia. We are the United States, the greatest and most unique country in existence. The right to bear arms is one of the most important pillars this vision of liberty stands on.

Let Australia worry about their own guns–in America, we will defend our right to bear our guns if it kills us.

Does America really want to go down that path?

via Modern Survival Online http://ift.tt/2trUMVD

How to Make Homemade Ketchup

by Isabella

There is nothing easier than grabbing a bottle of ketchup at the supermarket, but there was a time when people made it themselves!

It’s actually quite easy to make homemade ketchup, and it’s a great skill to have for times you might not be able to rely on the supermarket for your favorite condiments.

The great thing about this ketchup is it is lacto-fermented, which means not only is it delicious and far superior in taste and quality to store bought ketchup, it is also full of added nutritional benefits and naturally-occurring probiotics.

Let’s get started!

Here’s what you’ll need:

• 21 oz of tomato paste
• 1/3 cup honey, preferably raw
• 3 Tbs apple cider vinegar
• 3 cloves garlic
• 6 Tb liquid whey
• 3 tsp salt
• pinch cayenne pepper

A note on whey: this is not the powdered fitness supplement you’ll find at GNC–that definitely won’t work! Whey is the liquid by-product of cheese or yogurt making.

The easiest way to get it is to take a carton of organic, whole-milk yogurt, and place it in a strainer lined with a napkin or cheesecloth. Place the strainer over a bowl, cover, and wait a few hours. The whey will collect beneath, and you’ll have the added bonus of some deliciously thick Greek-style yogurt!

Homemade Ketchup Steps

1. Combine the liquid ingredients together in a bowl and stir well to combine.
2. Mince your garlic and add, along with the seasonings to the liquid ingredients.
3. Using a rubber spatula, pour into a canning jar. Spread flat on the top.
4. Using a clean paper towel or napkin, clean the top of the jar above the ketchup.
5. Cover loosely with a lid, and leave on your counter for three days. Then, transfer to the fridge and enjoy!

It really is that simple! Spread on a burger or hot dog, slather over some chili fries, or use as the base for sloppy joes or bbq sauce.

Enjoy!

via Modern Survival Online http://ift.tt/2F8txAZ

Finding Noise with an Antenna

[K5ACL], aka [SignalSearch], recently brought his active receive loop antenna in off the roof to give it a checkup and perform any necessary maintenance. While it was in the shack, he took the opportunity to discuss how well it would perform indoors. The verdict? Not ideal. He’d mount it 50 feet away from the house if the HOA would let him.

Houses, and subsequently most ham shacks, are filled with noise sources that interfere badly with HF. So after spending a minute or so listening on an SDR, [K5ACL] demonstrates another use for this type of tightly-tuned antenna—as a noise detector.

The main culprit in [K5ACL]’s house is the ceiling light that’s right there in the shack. You can see the noise striping the waterfall as he turns it on and off. But the noise from the light is small potatoes compared to some other common household items, like those power line adapters that turn house wiring into networking cable. Those produce so much noise that even an active loop is really no match. Stay tuned after the break to watch [K5ACL] work the bands through the noise.

Active receive antennas are great if you’re stuck in an apartment building or a congested city. They’re easy enough to make, whether you want a portable loop or a permanent installation.

Via [RTL-SDR]

via Radio Hacks – Hackaday http://ift.tt/2FdN8CZ