Setting Up a Carbine for Self-Defense

by Contributing Author

Rifles, specifically carbines, are excellent choices for a defensive long gun, especially when chambering an intermediate cartridge. Their combination of desirable characteristics such as light weight, compact size, mild recoil and superior projectile performance make them ideal for any setting save the most confined quarters. The choice is obvious: if a carbine is a viable option for defense, you are almost always better off choosing it than a handgun.

But any carbine is incomplete without some additional equipment to enable the shooter to use its full potential in the context of self-defense. Some of these accessories are to help the shooter manage the gun; others help the shooter process a possible threat. All of them add capabilities to the carbine that are so vital they are nearly mandatory enhancements.

In the list below, I will rank them in what I consider to be descending order of importance, that is with the most important items first. Before we get to the list, we will establish a basic premise of what a defensive carbine is in the context of this article.

What a Defensive Carbine Is and What it Isn’t

For our discussion, it will be beneficial to constrain our idea of a defensive carbine into a few coarse parameters. Of course, the literally-minded and pithy readers will immediately proclaim that any rifle or carbine that you happen to be using to defend against a present threat is a defensive carbine. This is true in spirit, and perhaps a credit to their mindset that training and will to prevail are more important than the weapon, but one could also show, logically, that a tool designed for the task makes light of the work, where one intended for another purpose is clumsy at best or dangerous liability at worst.

Any gun will do if you can do, but if you have a choice it is best to pick the one, right tool: by way of example, all hammers are hammers, but a carpenter’s hammer and a tack hammer are similar only in their basest attributes, and neither is suited to the other’s purpose. Sure, you may be able to use one for the other in a pinch, but the work will be harder, and may suffer for it. The same largely applies to guns.

First, our carbine is not a long or ungainly rifle designed for hunting, sniping or other long range shooting. Such long or heavy rifles are too slow and awkward to maneuver to be of much use inside a dwelling. A carbine, after all is a shorter, typically lighter breed of rifle, and is our modern ideal for self-defense.

Second, our defensive carbine should be of intermediate caliber, with the current paradigm being 5.56mm NATO or its civil counterpart the .223 Remington, and the 5.45mm Russian. Cartridges in this class offer the best combination of terminal effectiveness, capacity and mild recoil.

One may choose a slightly larger cartridge, like 6.8mm SPC, 7.62mmx39mm or 7.62mm NATO, but with these cartridges you incur significant penalties in both handling and recoil for their increased power. That power may be wasted in the context of self-defense at closer ranges, and their increased penetration presents significant liability concerns. Tiny rounds like the .22LR, .22 Magnum or 5.7x28mm should be chosen only when a gun with very light weight and negligible recoil must be sought.

Pistol caliber carbines, or PCCs in common parlance, are seeing resurgence in popularity but a pistol round fired from a long gun is still a pistol round, and aside from better hit probability you will not see any significant gain in performance from increased velocity. Do not let the neat perk of sharing ammunition with your handgun sway you from a proper rifle cartridge; if you are committing to the weight and bulk of a long gun, it is best to get the commensurate level of performance from it.

Third, the carbine should be capable of rapid follow-up shots and possess adequate ammunition capacity. Exactly how much capacity equals “adequate” is a subject of constant debate. If you adhere to the school of statistical averages, a gun with a capacity of 5 rounds is adequate, with the majority of defensive shootings being resolved in 3 rounds or less. Proponents of greater capacity will note that if you trust to those averages you can trust the averages that you won’t need a gun at all, so why bother.

Again, the ideal here is a semi-auto, detachable magazine-fed design. For some, a lever, bolt or pump-action design is either all that is available to them or permissible. My preference would lean strongly toward the pump or lever action, then the bolt gun. The first two are easier to run faster with less practice.

If you are stuck with one of the above manually operated actions, such is life, but do not forget that rifles of that nature have been getting it done for well over a century all around the world. Do your best to optimize your shooting performance with what you have, and seek solutions to mounting the requisite items.

The Upgrade List

Next we’ll examine the accessories and equipment that will upgrade our capabilities and complete the carbine. Remember, these are presented in descending order of importance, so if you have very limited funds and can only equip your gun with one or two, start here at the top and work your way down.

Weapon Mounted Light

If you only decide to buy one item because of this article, make it this one. When using a pistol, one has the option to mount a WML or utilize a handheld light. No such luck with a long gun, as anyone who has ever tried to use a handheld in conjunction with a rifle or shotgun will tell you that operation is fraught with mishap and frustration. A WML is the only way to go.

A white light is necessary on a defensive gun for a few reasons, principally it allows you to positively identify a potential threat in any condition of no or low light: who are they, what are they doing, and are they armed? This is absolutely essential for any use-of-force scenario, as positive ID of the target is a prerequisite to using force, especially lethal force. There are plenty of sad tales of citizens shooting at family members or innocents in the dark due to not having all of the information necessary to make a shoot/no-shoot decision. The light would have provided that.

Also, if you cannot articulate to authorities precisely why you needed to shoot when you did, you are going to have a rough go of things in the trial that ensues. Rest assured if the shooting takes place in a time or area of low light, you will be asked how you knew that the shootee needed shooting. You had better be able to answer honestly that you saw that the threat was imminent and lethal before you decided to fire.

Another advantage of a high-output WML is the ability to overwhelm an adversary’s vision with directed white light. While not “blinding” as commonly described, a powerful white light directed at an adversary will drastically impair his vision. Sight is the primary sense of humans, and reducing or degrading it is a useful strategy to help control someone or win a fight.

If using iron sights, a WML allows for easier perception of the sights in the dark, as the brilliant beam will backlight your irons sharply, making them stand out in crisp, well defined black against the now lit background. In the absence of an optic, this will allow precisely aimed fire in low light conditions.

WMLs are simple to install today thanks to a variety of mostly standardized interfaces and can be mounted on virtually any long gun, including older, manually operated designs so long as it has an appropriate rail (or you are willing to install one). While easy to install, proper use of the light is a skill in itself, and will require training and practice to get the most out of it while minimizing the chances of illuminating yourself.

The switching setup is another issue, and will take the form of a remote pressure pad, tailcap button or rocker-type switch. Other positive attributes you should seek in selecting a light are high output of 500 lumens or more, a reputation for ruggedness and reliability and a small form factor. Good WMLs that can handle the stress and shock of firing are not cheap, especially when factoring in the cost of necessary mounts and furniture, but you get what you pay for. Expect decent models from Streamlight to start around $150.00 and go up. Surefire’s WMLs start around $300.00.

If you are on a budget and your firearm has a 1913-STD “Picatinny”rail or can accept one, a less expensive solution is to use a decent quality hand-held and install it on the long gun using a simple ring mount for the purpose. So long as the activation switch is reachable without taking your support hand off the forend, most will work just fine.

Sling

This is nearly tied in importance with a light for must-have equipment on a long gun. A sling is to a carbine what a holster is to a pistol; you must have a place to put the gun if you don’t want to set it down when you need to go hands-free. Slings also aid with weapon retention, and can be used to improve your shooting position for longer range shots (admittedly not a concern for the average self-defense engagement, but an advantage nonetheless).

Often neglected on a dedicated defensive gun, a proper sling will allow you to go let go of the carbine for any purpose while still keeping it ready for instant use, if necessary. It is not hard to imagine a situation where you may need both hands free, be it administering aid, opening doors, carrying something or someone, or similar.

In a longer term crisis scenario or disaster, where one may need to have their carbine slung and ready for extended periods of time, a sling will let you carry it out of the way and walk, climb or work more conveniently, as the rifle can be stowed and still produced quickly in the event it is needed.

Having a long gun attached to your body via a sling also makes it significantly more difficult to for an attacker to turn it around and shoot you with it should he lay hands on it. This is no free lunch, as one who gets control over the gun will also, ergo, have some control over the person tethered to the gun. Still, this advantage outweighs the disadvantage.

Slings run the design gamut from simple straps to complicated, multi-adjustable crazes of buckles and nylon. The most common varieties are single point, or one point, and two point slings. Three point slings exist, and are still made today but are largely going extinct. Single point slings hook up to the gun at a single point on the receiver, hence the name, and are a popular make. They allow great mobility and freedom of movement for easily switching shoulders, but do little to support the carbine out of the way when it hangs, and are best used on very short barreled guns.

Three point slings hook up to the gun at two places on the gun, fore and aft, sometimes on the receiver and sometimes on the stock and forend, with a third point of contact running between the two standing ends of the sling. Back in the day they were seen as the go-to method for managing a rifle or shotgun when going hands free, but are somewhat complicated and prone to snagging owing to the excess material used in their construction.

Two point slings, of which the modern quick-adjust variety is best all around, are my preferred option for a defensive carbine. These slings connect either to the receiver or stock and forend of a rifle and give a great degree of flexibility, holding the gun out of the way when hanging in front of the body and all the while still keeping it close at hand. They are simple, easy to adjust quickly to cinch or slacken the gun, and perfect for most shooters applications. They require some experimentation and fidgeting to setup perfectly for your stature and gun, but this is easily accomplished and rarely will any special hardware solution be required for mounting.

Good slings are not too expensive, and the two most popular, effective quick-adjust two pointers on the market are the Viking Tactics VTAC sling and the Blue Force Gear VCAS sling, both selling for under $100.

Red Dot Sight

For sheer speed and precision at close ranges, the modern red dot sight, or RDS, is unrivaled. Until the advent of the firearm, humans always focused on the threat when wielding a weapon. After the firearm matured somewhat and introduced both front and rear sights it was discovered that the best way to achieve accuracy using one was by focusing on the front sight, not the target. Humans, constrained by our biology, can only focus at one distance, or plane, at a time, and so our target appears fuzzy and indistinct as we hard focus on our sight.

While we have become very, very proficient at using iron sights to shoot well and quickly, an RDS allows us to once again focus on our target and still perceive our sighting reference, in this case the dot, triangle or whatever shape the reticle happens to be. This method, once a shooter acclimatizes to it, results in a huge increase in speed and accuracy, especially for engaging a moving target. An RDS also allows one to see their sight, the reticle, perfectly well even in conditions of total darkness. The situation that one might make use of this perk without identifying the target first through application of white light is probably very rare, however.

This both-eyes-open, fast and efficient sighting system is the single best efficiency upgrade for a defensive carbine, and can be mounted to just about any make or model. RDS’s are more rugged than ever, often outmatching its host firearm in sheer durability, and high quality models by Aimpoint, Trijicon, Leupold and others have battery life expectancy measured in months or years; you literally do not have to turn some models off, so long as you remember to change the battery every once in a while. For shooters suffering from aging or ailing eyes that make using iron sights slow or practically impossible, an RDS will often make shooting accurately much easier.

Quality comes at a price: good ones are expensive, with the most dependable models, made by Aimpoint, starting at about $350.00 and going up precipitously from there. Do not get suckered into buying a cheap, hobby-grade sight that retails for a $100 or less; they will not survive long on a hard-use gun, and their electronic components are nowhere near as reliable or rugged as the better makes. On the plus side, most guns will feature a rail already included or built into the gun, and so you’ll only need an appropriate mount or adapter for the sight itself, and often not even then.

Enhanced Controls and Furniture

Far from being just a decorative or aesthetic element, enhanced controls, chosen wisely, will improve the shooter’s manipulation of the carbine’s functions. While not mandatory, upgrading the furniture can improve the shooters control over the gun itself before and during firing, and it may include rails or mounting points to allow mounting of previously discussed accessories like slings or lights.

Together, these upgrades improve the shooter’s interface with his carbine, increasing performance. This may be seen as a marginal upgrade by some, and on some guns whose factory furniture, trigger, safety and the like all fit the shooter adequately and perform well enough this is a fair point. But for the shooter who is struggling with a stock that is too long, a handguard too short or a tiny, hard to actuate safety, these upgrades can translate into big gains in efficiency.

Pay careful attention to upgrading the trigger of your carbine. A light, crisp trigger is a boon for accuracy, but be wary of going too light. Also ensure that you give due diligence to ensuring any aftermarket trigger is 100% reliable. Depending on your specific gun, an upgraded trigger may be very simple or complex to install. If in doubt, leave it to the ministrations of a competent gunsmith.

Extended or enhanced controls like safeties, bolt catches and magazine releases may provide easier, more certain manipulation and can be installed at your preference so long as they do not protrude so much they are at risk of inadvertent actuation, which is especially problematic for safeties and mag releases.

Certain guns, like AK family rifles benefit greatly from enhanced controls, in the case of the AK an extended safety lever that allows the safety to be swiped down with the shooting hand trigger finger; far preferable to the stock component that forces one to break the firing grip to accomplish the same (unless you have obscenely long fingers).

Conclusion

While there are more opportunities to tune, tweak and customize your carbine than ever before, only a few selections make sense on a defensive gun. Slings, lights, RDS’s and enhanced controls all offer improved efficiency and effectiveness to the user who is willing to acquire and practice with them. If you can afford to upgrade your carbine, give careful consideration to installing them.

What is your go-to carbine for defense? Is yours box-stock, modestly enhanced or fully customized? Let’s hear it in the comments!

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Lucid Dreaming | [Meditation Practice]Introductory//Inducing trance states

Hey everybody!

I promised this for a handful of people, and I’m glad to say HERE IT IS :D I will be going over the many ways I induce trance states.

**Beware, this gets pretty deep**



I’ll be breaking it up into these categories:
Introductory
Advanced
WOKE

Introductory - Just that, an introduction to inducing a trance-state and what it is in my own experience, and explaining it at a beginner level.

Advanced - Building off of the introductions, using those techniques to make complex techniques, by combining/finding out more past the basic level of meditation

WOKE - The deeper more profound/interesting things you can do with such states. (it’s kinda funny I named it “WOKE”, it should just be like “Mastery” or something :P)




Introductory:

First… What is a trance-state?
It’s really simple, yet it’s hard to put into the correct wording that will give it justice. Trance states are deeper feelings of disconnect from waking, conscious reality, you are at the bridge between waking and sleeping, but more on the side of deep slumber. Here is where your subconscious is readily accessible and is very simple to give it commands without the conscious mind overthinking. In a trance state, there are REALLY, no thoughts, you would have to consciously/slightly forcibly induce a thought. It’s clear, it’s crystal clear. The trance state is more than just mindfulness, it is slight/full dissolution of the separations made by the mind for a time, you are going into the subconscious mind DIRECTLY, within a trance state.


To access this trance state, is simple as well, but it takes practice. So read carefully.
It’s down to meditation, concentrated focus on oneness. When I say “Oneness”, It doesn’t have to mean that spiritual mumbo jumbo, i just mean seeing a different perspective. Your body, is one body, sure it may have arms and legs, but keep diving deep and putting it back to the bigger perspective.

Your fingers are made of bones, fingernails, flesh, blood, and what makes the bones are other smaller bones, and what makes the smaller bones, is based on the minerals and vitamins, and the minerals and vitamins are made of atoms, and so on…. BUT you can’t deny it’s one purpose. The purpose, is simply to be, and live. Through this, all of your body parts work towards oneness, and IS one, since it is ONE body, working for ONE purpose, there is no separation, because even in separation, there is more and more simplicity and it leads back to the one purpose.

Now seeing that perspective, apply it to meditation. Don’t see you as “disconnecting from the mind” see yourself BECOMING the mind, you BECOME your body, YOU BECOME YOU. See and feel yourself as one essence, one consciousness that makes many thoughts and does many things, but it still retreats to one consciousness.

As you slowly realize and realize this as you let go of the separation and become the mind, you will start to tend towards this. You are not your past, you are not your future, you are YOU determining the future, therefore you are determining this moment, what you think of, and what you ARE.

This is the key, as it’s a feeling of straight being. As you become yourself again, there isn’t any thoughts bothering you, as you being you, YOU DEFINE EVERYTHING. Once again, therefore knowing this, you can simply let go, relax, and let the moment be the moment, and then simply, INTEND.

Intend this.
Intend your focus to be on deep relaxation, and deep feelings. By deep i mean finding the most relaxed possible point of consciousness you can obtain before fully going to sleep (You might go to sleep with this, as really, you induce a trance like state right before you go to sleep anyways!)

In this deep state, you move very slowly, and you are able to see your subconscious and work as ONE.

Something like placing your intention behind a similar feeling to these words:
“I only focus on focusing”,
“I am deeply relaxed and come back to my pure state of being”,
“I AM my subconscious mind acting as ONE relaxed consciousness”


You’ll know you’re in a trance state, if you find it a bit hard to get out of it! Haha. Trust me it’s easy, you won’t get “stuck” there or anything. It’s just like waking up in the morning. Nine times out of ten, it will take you a fewwwww seconds to gain full waking consciousness. That’s the major difference with regular mindfulness meditation and trance states. With a meditation, it’s simple and really you can literally walk up out of it and be back to doing whatever, granted you have more mental clarity, it’s not like, purposefully waking up and feeling yourself back in your body as you do with waking and making a conscious effort to re associate with coming back from this deeper level.

Practice, practice, practice. First enter the mindfulness meditation, then actively try to ascend past that, by being mindful OF your mindfulness. Since really, this is concentrated focus.

One thing you can do is imagine warm water flowing all around your body, cleansing you and giving you mental clarity and stability.

Or you can imagine that there is a light coming from your mind that illuminates your entire body as one light, imagining you feeling as ONE light without any absence of it near you.

Doing the mindfulness meditation can be as simple as follows.
Really, all you have to do is kick start the movement, as your subconscious will take care of the rest.
*”An object in motion, tends to stay in motion, an object at rest tends to stay at rest”* type thing applies here. The more you move towards something, the more it stays there.

Notice your focus on things… “I notice myself focusing on my typing.”
Just saying that applied to whatever you are doing, has a profound effect! As this will get you quickly into that mindfulness, and then you can use it to get into the trance state.

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Antennas That You Install With A Spray-Can

With the explosion in cell phones, WiFi, Bluetooth, and other radio technologies, the demand for antennas is increasing. Everything is getting smaller and even wearable, so traditional antennas are less practical than ever. You’ve probably seen PCB antennas on things like ESP8266s, but Drexel University researchers are now studying using titanium carbide — known as MXene — to build thin, light, and even transparent antennas that outperform copper antennas. Bucking the trend for 3D printing, these antennas are sprayed like ink or paint onto a surface.

A traditional antenna that uses metal carries most of the current at the skin (something we’ve discussed before). For example, at WiFi frequencies, a copper antenna’s skin depth is about 1.33 micrometers. That means that antennas have to be at least thick enough to carry current at that depth from all surfaces –practically 5 micrometers is about the thinnest you can reasonably go. That doesn’t sound like a lot, but when you are trying to make something thin and flexible, it is pretty thick. Using MXene, the researchers made antennas as thin as 100 nanometers thick — that’s 10% of a micrometer and only 2% of a conventional antenna.

There are other materials that wind up in thin antennas, but they all have challenges either because they are not very conductive or are difficult to fabricate. MXene is a fairly new family of materials developed at Drexel University. To produce it you start with MAX which is a combination of titanium, aluminum, and carbon. The aluminum is removed in a process that requires acid and stirring for 24 hours, lithium chloride, and a centrifuge. The hydrofluoric acid is nasty to work with, but not beyond the reach of a careful home lab. You can see a Drexel video about making MXene, below. The researchers sprayed the antennas on a thin plastic substrate.

The only thing that looked tricky to us, was that thin flakes of the specific MXene used degrade in the air due to oxidation. That means production needs argon gas and the final product has to be laminated with something to protect it from the air, so that’s going to add thickness in a practical device.

Of course, PCB antennas are nothing new. But if you read the paper, you’ll see these antennas can readily outperform conventional thin antennas.

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Buy A Baofeng While You Still Can? FCC Scowls at Unauthorized Frequency Transmitters

There was a time when a handheld radio transceiver was an object of wonder, and a significant item for any radio amateur to own. A few hundred dollars secured you an FM walkie-talkie through which you could chat on your local repeater, and mobile radio was a big draw for new hams. Thirty years later FM mobile operation may be a bit less popular, but thanks to Chinese manufacturing the barrier to entry is lower than it has ever been. With extremely basic handheld radios starting at around ten dollars and a capable dual-bander being yours for somewhere over twice that, most licencees will now own a Baofeng UV5 or similar radio.

The FCC though are not entirely happy with these radios, and QRZ Now are reporting that the FCC has issued an advisory prohibiting the import or sale of devices that do not comply with their rules. In particular they are talking about devices that can transmit on unauthorised frequencies, and ones that are capable of transmission bandwidths greater than 12.5 kHz.

We’ve reported before on the shortcomings of some of these radios, but strangely this news doesn’t concern itself with their spurious emissions. We’re guessing that radio amateurs are not the problem here, and the availability of cheap transceivers has meant that the general public are using them for personal communication without a full appreciation of what frequencies they may be using. It’s traditional and normal for radio amateurs to use devices capable of transmitting out-of-band, but with a licence to lose should they do that they are also a lot more careful about their RF emissions.

Read the FCC statement and you’ll learn they are not trying to restrict the sale of ham gear. However, they are insisting that imported radios that can transmit on other frequencies must be certified. Apparently, opponents of these radios claim about 1 million units a year show up in the US, so this is a big business. The Bureau warns that fines can be as high as $19,639 per day for continued marketing and up to $147,290 — we have no idea how they arrive at those odd numbers.

So if you’re an American who hasn’t already got a Baofeng or similar, you might be well advised to pick one up while you still can.

UV5-R image via PE1RQM

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Submarine to Plane: Can You Hear Me Now? The Hydrophone Radar Connection

How does a submarine talk to an airplane? It sounds like a bad joke but it’s actually a difficult engineering challenge.

Traditionally the submarine must surface or get shallow enough to deploy a communication buoy. That communication buoy uses the same type of radio technology as planes. But submarines often rely on acoustic transmissions via hydrophones which is fancy-talk for putting speakers and microphones in the water as transmitters and receivers. This is because water is no friend to radio signals, especially high frequencies. MIT is developing a system which bridges this watery gap and it relies on acoustic transmissions pointed at the water’s surface (PDF warning) and an airplane with high-precision radar which detects the oscillations of the water.

The complexity of the described setup is mind-boggling. Right now the proof of concept is over short distances and was tested in a water tank and a swimming pool but not in open water. The first thing that comes to mind is the interference caused by waves and by aerosols from wind/wave interactions. Those challenges are already in the minds of the research team. The system has been tested to work with waves of 8 cm (16 cm measured peak to trough) caused by swimmers in the pool. That may not sound like much, but it’s about 100,000 times the surface variations being measured by the millimeter wave radar in order to detect the hydrophone transmissions. Add to that the effects of Doppler shift from the movement of the plane and the sub and you have a signal processing challenge just waiting to be solved.

This setup is very interesting when pitched as a tool for researching aquatic life. The video below envisions that transmitters on the backs of sea turtles could send communications to aircraft overhead. We love seeing these kinds of forward-thinking ocean research projects, like our 2017 Hackaday prize winner which is an open source underwater glider. Oceanic studies over long distances have been very difficult but we’re beginning to see a lot of projects chipping away at that inaccessibility.

[Via IEEE Spectrum]

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SHTF Apothecary- 15 Plants to Grow for All Natural Healing

by Megan

For anyone with chronic illnesses, it doesn’t take long for prescription costs to become overwhelming, especially with recent changes in the healthcare system in the United States. In addition to rising costs for medication, most preppers realize that prescription medications will quickly become unavailable when SHTF.

Even those without chronic health problems will have a need for medication to treat illnesses and injuries in a post SHTF world. For this reason, many people are turning to natural remedies for present and future health issues.  If you’re considering natural remedies to help with your health issues now or in a grid down situation, we’ve put together a variety of plants to grow for all natural healing for your SHTF Apothecary.

As always, every person’s health history is unique and what works for one may not work for all. Please consult your own individual physician or holistic practitioner about how natural remedies will work for your specific chronic illnesses.

It’s also critical that you learn to properly identify the plant you are going to use for an herbal remedy. You should research the herbs in your apothecary and know which part or parts of the plant are best used for medicinal purposes and which to avoid. Some plants can be toxic if prepared incorrectly or used the wrong way.

Please keep in mind this article is for information purposes only, and is no substitute for medical advice. Neither the author nor modernsurvivalonline.com shall be held liable for any injuries or side-effects as a direct or indirect result of the application of the advice given in this article.

How to Use Plants for All Natural Healing

Herbal remedies are most often used as a tea or infusion by combining parts of the plant with boiling water and allowing the mixture to steep for a period of time. The standard for teas and infusions is one-half to one ounce of herb to one pint of liquid and steep for 10-15 minutes.

Some herbs do require different ratios or steeping time so always double check the recipe for your specific herb and ailment. Extracting volatile elements from roots or bark of a plant is typically done through a decoction, which means cutting or chopping the pieces and boiling in water for 3-5 minutes and then straining.

Tinctures generally involve steeping the herb in a mixture of water and alcohol for about 14 days, shaking occasionally, and then straining off the liquid to store for later use. A poultice remedy calls for the herb to be crushed or ground into a paste and then applied topically to the injured area. It’s important to know how to prepare each herbal remedy to ensure maximum effectiveness.

Commonly Used Medicinal Plants and Herbs

If you’ve done any gardening at all you’ve probably heard about the medicinal uses and health benefits of commonly used plants and herbs such as:

• Garlic
• Dill
• Rosemary
• Lavender
• Sage
• Ginger
• Chamomile
• Basil
• Mint and Peppermint
• Thyme
• Oregano
• John’s Wort
• Echinacea
• Clove

But did you know that there are literally thousands of other herbs, flowers, and even weeds that you can grow for all natural healing purposes? Many preppers start growing medicinal plants for their SHTF Apothecary but soon discover that with proper physician supervision, it’s a great way to save money right now on your pharmacy bill and prescription medications.

Plants to Grow for All Natural Healing

 

Aloe Vera is a hardy plant that can be grown indoors in colder climates or do very well outdoors in hotter climates. The gel from the aloe vera plant is soothing for burns and minor skin irritations and aloe vera juice has become a popular dietary supplement to help with a wide variety of ailments. Does well in full sun, needs little maintenance and grows well in any well-draining type of soil.

 

Angelica (Angelica archangelica) can be used to refresh skin or as an eyewash. Also effective against the symptoms of bronchitis and chest congestion. It can reduce pain in joints caused by rheumatism and gout. Plant in a shady area of your garden or homestead.

Anise (Pimpinella anisum) is an herb used to relieve stomach upset and enhance digestion as well as other digestive issues including colic, cramps, and flatulence. Use the seeds as a breath freshener or combine in warm milk to reduce insomnia.

 

Bee Balm (Monarda didyma) prefers the sunny areas of your SHTF apothecary garden and it will help keep mosquitoes away. Keep it on hand to relieve the pain of a sore throat and ease cold symptoms such as stomach upset, diarrhea, fever, and even vomiting.

 

Black Cohosh (Actaea Racemosa) grows wild in the southern and central areas of North America and parts of Canada. It’s a flowering plant that grows tall but Black Cohosh roots are valuable for medicinal purposes.

Although scientific evidence is not confirmed, many medical practitioners, especially midwives swear by the benefits of black cohosh for many different things. It can mimic estrogen which makes it useful for a variety of women’s health issues. It also has antispasmodic, anti-inflammatory, sedative, and analgesic properties.

Black Cohosh is effective for treating symptoms of menstrual cramps, hot flashes and mood swings caused by menopause. It can also be effective in treating arthritis pain, high blood pressure, congestion, and even blood clots and cardiac stress. Women who are pregnant or could be pregnant should use cautiously as it’s commonly used to induce contractions. Some people may be allergic to black cohosh and it can impact the liver when used over a long period of time.

 

Catnip (Nepeta cataria) is typically thought of as something cats enjoy but it can be planted in your SHTF apothecary and made into a tea to help with stomach upset, colic, bronchitis, as well as anxiety, diarrhea, and flatulence.

 

Comfrey (Symphytum officinale) also commonly called “Knitbone” is great as a poultice when applied to bruises, wounds, and insect bites. The leaves and roots of the comfrey plant contain allantoin, which works to promote wound healing. Comfrey tea has been used to reduce pain and symptoms of bleeding gums, rheumatism, asthma, throat inflammation, and ulcers. Comfrey flourishes in shady areas.

Lady’s Mantle (Alchemilla vulgaris) can be used as an anti-diarrheal medicine and also works as a coagulant to slow internal bleeding. It can also be effective as a poultice or paste and applied topically. This plant likes a shady area.

 

Marshmallow (Althaea officinalis) is a part of the Malvaceae herb family. Its leaves are velvety soft with serrated edges. It has mucilaginous, antibacterial, and antitussive properties which make it helpful for treating swollen mucous membranes when taken orally.

It’s also been commonly used to treat digestive disorders to coat membranes and relieve irritation and swelling. Used topically it can relieve swelling caused by skin diseases such as contact dermatitis and eczema. Use roots or leaves to make a tincture, tea, capsules, or ointment as needed.

 

Mullein (Verbascum thapsus) known by many names including hare’s beard, candlewick and Indian tobacco, is used medicinally since ancient times. Technically classified as a weed, its light-grey leaves are hairy with a velvety feel and its flowers are small and yellow.

It enjoys sunshine and flowers from November to March. The leaves, oil, and flowers are used in various ways to treat lung and chest disease, as a cough medicine and for respiratory issues such as asthma, pleurisy, bronchitis, whooping cough, and pneumonia. It has astringent, emollient, analgesic, and antibacterial properties which make it effective against a wide range of illnesses. Study its components as each part has different properties that make it effective in different ways.

Parsley (Petroselinum crispum) is well known as a garnish for dishes but did you know that it’s actually a nutrition powerhouse? Use to alleviate bad breath, to treat bruising, eye infections, and soothe coughing. Does well in sunny areas of the garden.

 

Primrose (Primula vulgaris) is a beautiful flowering plant. Its roots can be decocted to ease symptoms of bronchitis, cough, and congestion in the lungs. AS a tea it can be used to relieve headaches, anxiety, and insomnia. Plant in a shady area.

St. John’s Wort (Hypericum perforatum) should be planted in sunnier areas of the garden. It’s a well-known plant used for soothing the itching and other effects of poison ivy.  In ancient times, St. John’s Wort was used to relieve nervousness, and to aid the urinary system. Used topically for scrapes, burns, and wounds. The flowers of the St. John’s Wort can be made into a tea to relieve insomnia and treat jaundice and anemia.

 

Valerian (Valeriana officinalis) also known as cut-finger, garden valerian, Phu, and garden heliotrope, has a strong odor that is not entirely pleasant and smells more like body odor. Plant away from your home or barn as the odor of Valerian may attract rodents and cats.

But don’t let the odor keep you from considering Valerian fas a plant to grow for all natural healing. It’s a perennial and does best in partial shade or sunny areas and can be used in a variety of ways. Let valerian grow for at least two years before harvesting its roots and rhizomes for medicinal use.

It’s most commonly used as a sleep aid due to its sedative properties, but it also can be used as an expectorant, and antispasmodic to treat coughs, epilepsy, convulsions, stress, intestinal cramping, nervous exhaustion and more than a hundred other things. Do not use continually for more than three weeks and do not use with young children. For elderly, use in very small amounts and monitor reactions closely.

 

Wild Ginger (Asarum canadense) is a great plant to add along a shady area of your SHTF garden. A root decoction was once used by Native Americans to prevent pregnancy. The roots can also be used in a tea to soothe colic, stomach upset, and reduce flatulence.

Have you started your SHTF Apothecary? What are your favorite plants to grow for all natural healing? If you haven’t started your garden yet, which of the above plants will you consider? Let us know in the comments below.

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Lucid Dreaming | Focusing on the breath

Iv been meditating on and off for 3 years now for 10mins a day.To incorporate more meditation time iv decided on something new.
I spend between 1 and 4 hours a day on my Xbox.People say that gamers tend to be better at lucid dreaming but I disagree because as I turn my Xbox on I'm in my living room and then when I'm in a game in literally in the game and have forgotten about where I actually am.
My goal is to play my Xbox as usual but practising on keeping some of my attention on my breath? But having some attention on my breath whilst having alot on the game...is that meditating....my understanding is that meditation is kind of like single pointed attention? Maybe it's not meditating but maybe just more awareness? Any tips or info would be appreciated thanks =D

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Lucid Dreaming | [Subconscious reprogramming] How to effectively reprogram your mind for lucidity.

Hello everybody! I will be sharing with you guys how to use your mind to achieve whatever you want with lucidity.


There are first somethings that you have to realize.
You have to realize that everything is in the mind. There isn’t things that are affected that are outside of you awareness/thoughts. Your dreaming reality is affected by your mind, and your mind only. Nothing else. This includes waking reality as it influences your dreaming reality as well.

You also have to realize that you are not your thoughts, you are your consciousness, which produces thoughts. You can control your consciousness and therefore as a result the thoughts will become how you’d like them to be.


This can help with any technique, but first you need to be confident in what technique you want to do. Which technique is the easiest to understand, go to that first and start small.

Let’s say you want to do DEILD, and the biggest issue with it you’ve found is “not waking up after each dream”. You would then make a phrase that you want to pass on to your subconscious. Something like “I naturally wake after each dream” or “Each time I wake up, I stay still.” Much like MILD, you wouldn’t use “I will” or “I am going to” or “I might”, things like that. You have to be confident in it.

If you have found a mantra that you liked, but you aren’t feeling confident in it. You might have to do some shadow work based on that mantra.

Shadow work is bringing repressed doubts, fears and thoughts up to the surface of your awareness to be healed.

One simple way to do this is as follows.

When you have found your mantra, really feel how it feels to accept it. If you feel like “OKAY YEAH THIS IS TRUE” then you don’t need to do shadow work for it, if it feels like “eehhh, wellll… i think??” then do this:

Write down your mantra on a piece of paper, in big font.
Then look at it, stare at it, think on it, look at it. Then naturally think and reflect on how this mantra makes you feel.

Then write down all your feelings under that mantra in a smaller font. Everything you can find until it feels like you have found the bottom of it. Then really look at those thoughts and feelings and come to terms with them by logically approaching them and realizing that they are mostly not true. You probably won’t find a valid doubt with shadow work. It either comes down to habbit, or “I haven’t seen proof of it yet”


Now that you have your mantra, and you’re good to go, next thing to do is affirm it.

You do this with meditation. Which is very simple.

Relax and get into a trance-like state (i'll be making a tutorial on how to get into trance-states easier), you'll know when you're in a trance like state when you're very relaxed, disassociated from most of your environment. Focus is clear, no other thoughts, and you'd have to make an active attempt to get out of it.


Then you repeat the mantras. When you say it, make sure you are confident in it and you have no doubts in it. Also intend that each time you say it. The mind realizes it more and more and more.

FOCUS ON THE MANTRA AND AUTOMATICALLY ASSUME IT IS ALREADY TRUE.
That is important

Your subconscious already knows what to do, you just need to command it, and lead it to the different mental pathway.

Eventually you will start thinking in ways that revolve around this mantra, and then you will start building habits, then you will start manifesting things that revolve around it, and it will consume your life to rewire your mind. Use it well, use it to your benefit.

Do this a few days in a row, and you're good. You should start seeing results soon.


Thanks for reading! Cya around!!

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Lucid Dreaming | An easier way to access your subconscious?

Okay someone either thought of this already or its plain stupid. I'm curious either way. If reality checks like the finger through the palm were done by someone you know like a friend or such, that is if the palm is one person's and the finger is another's in the rc, would it be possible for a person or that particular person to represent your subconcious in the dream and therefore giving a form to your subconscious a little more easily?

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Lucid Dreaming | Was I almost in a DEILD

Hey, I’ve been trying to DEILD for like 3 nights in a row and I just got back into lucid dreaming about a week ago. I’ve started to remember about 3-4 dreams a night again in decent detail. For some reason I wake up after everyone so its the perfect opportunity to DEILD. After one of the 3 dreams I remember last I was able to stay absolutely still after I woke up. I tried imagining the dream I woke up from but I think where I went wrong is when my mind started racing too much about SP and my other dreams in the night rather than just focusing on one dream. Both my hands felt really heavy and I was able to picture some of my dream but then I lost it and woke up fully, how close was i?

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Is Urban Survival Even Possible?

by Tara

Urban survival is basically an oxymoron. If you have extensive survival or military training, it is possible – but the chances of making it through a SHTF disaster for even an above average person in a city environment, is exceedingly slim.

There are plenty of reports on the internet attempting to teach you how to survive in an urban environment, and a plethora of others urging you to “bug out to the woods” – following the instructions and advice in many of those types of pieces will likely get you and those you love, killed.

If you are looking for a report that is simply going to reinforce your plans to ride out the apocalypse in a city or to get potentially life-saving advice on how to do it, this article is not going to do that. Nope, it is going to give you the cold hard truth and hopefully, the type of brutally honest guidance you need to begin making a feasible plan to survive a long-term disaster.

Top 8 Reasons Why Urban Survival Isn’t Possible

Reason #1:Water

Once the power goes out or the grid fails, as it ultimately will in any type of disaster, you will have no way to get water to drink, to wash, or for use in food preparation other than rainwater collection. Does it rain every day? No, yet you need to consumer water every day.

Going without water for three days is long enough to cause severe dehydration or even death. You will not be the only city dweller desperate to set up bowls and buckets on the apartment building rooftop to collect rainwater. Do not think another panicked human being with an equally dire need for water would not kill you over a bucket containing only a few ounces of water.

Your only other options for water (because all available bottled water will disappear from store shelves just a few hours after a disaster, at best) is using a LifeStraw or similar device to suck water out of any puddle you find. Decorative water features and fountains will contain dirty and likely chemically treated water that a LifeStraw could filter enough to make it safe to drink, but you have to beat hundreds to thousands of other people to the water source first.

Reason #2: Food

Urban gardening and homesteading is a positive and growing trend, but that food would have to be protected by armed individuals for it to not disappear just about as quickly as water when a disaster hits. Unless you live right next to an urban community garden, the chances of you reaching it before the food is gone, or even reaching it safely once the growing plots have been raided, are just about zero.

Growing food inside your apartment or townhouse, or other type of urban dwelling that could even have a tiny backyard, would be your saving grace for a brief amount of time. If others in your neighborhood, even folks you think of as friends or nice acquaintances, beat you home from work, your food source could disappear before you get to harvest what can be pulled and take it inside the home.

Do not underestimate the desire to stay alive and protect the family that everyone will be feeling, folks who never thought of stealing anything before in their lives could be reduced to it in an instant. You could always forage, even in the city wild edibles are growing.

But, there are several downsides to foraging in an urban environment during a SHTF situation. The first thing to consider is safety, any time you are out in the open you are a target for attack and the theft of whatever you risked your life to find. Second, the weeds and other wild edibles you could find to eat are most likely contaminated with chemical pesticides municipal employees have sprayed to eliminate them from sidewalks and parking lots.

You could go to the part to potentially find a greater abundance of wild edibles in one space, but those plants and weeds have also been sprayed with chemical pesticides and the competition for them will increase the danger you will face while bending over to pick them and then tote them home.

Reason #3: Food Preparation

Let’s say you were an avid indoor and outdoor vertical gardener who has a crop ready to harvest and was able to scurry it inside before it was taken. Now what are you going to do with it? Sure, you can eat fruits and veggies raw, but they should be washed first and you have no or precious little, water.

Did you grow protein-rich crops to help keep you strong and healthy during a disaster? If not, you better have plenty of long-term storage food tucked away inside your limited storage space. Unlike rural or even suburban preppers who understand the value of a survival homestead, you cannot keep even small livestock at your home or have access to hunting and fishing areas to supplement your stockpiled food.

Most varieties of long-term storage food require the addition of hot water. You do not have a heat source and again have no or only a tiny and unsustainable amount of water. If you insist upon living in an urban environment and want to prep, your best chance of staving off starvation is to use every single inch of space that you can to stockpile long-term storage food and water.

If you live in a small apartment, use floor to ceiling wall shelves in each room to store your preps. Will this look very unappealing, especially when non-prepping guests come over. Yep, but do you want to attempt to survive in the city, or not? This is the type of stockpiling that will be required to get your through a short term disaster, and to provide you with the food and water you need to flee via vehicle immediately after it strikes.

The feasibility of fleeing the city either by vehicle or by foot and where to go if you get out, is a topic that will be covered in greater detail below. In order to be able to prepare food and boil water, purchase a camping stove and an ample supply of the propane tanks necessary for it to operate.

Remember, the prepping motto, “One is none and two is one” and buy two camping stoves and spare parts. Are you cringing right now thinking about where you are going to put 10 long-term food storage buckets, 36 cases of water, and the camping stove you need to attempt survive even a short-term disaster? Good. That’s means you are an intelligent person determined to learn how to develop a survival plan that will actually work.

Reason #4: Energy

As noted above, expect the power to go out if not immediately, within days after an apocalyptic event. The vast majority of metropolitan areas would not permit a resident to live off grid. When the power goes out, how will you heat your home, boil water to make it safe to drink, light the home, and prepare food?

The camping stove will be a viable option as long as the propane tanks don’t run dry. Unlike rural and suburban preppers, you cannot purchase a multi-fuel generator and have it hard-wired to power the essentials inside the home – nor can you have a wall-mounted propane heater or wood burning stove to keep your warm or boil water and prepare food upon. If you are lucky, you have an apartment or townhouse with at least a fireplace.

A fireplace is not efficient enough to properly heat a home, especially during the winter. If you close off all the rooms except the one the fireplace is in and have stockpiled wood (you still have storage space, right?) you will not freeze. You could burn your furniture, but it will release toxic fumes because it is treated wood and would require the opening of a window, at the very least – which would let the cold in.

What could you do for light and heat if you live in an urban environment during a disaster? Purchase a small portable and lightweight solar generator and place it on your balcony or fire escape (you better guard it 24/7 or it will probably be stolen) so you can run an electric space heater and a few lamps – as long as the solar generator is getting enough sun.

Reason #5: Freedom of Movement

If you live in an apartment building, as most city dwellers do, the elevator will not work after the power goes out. Your only means of exiting and entering the property will be via the stairs or fire escape. Not only will this be a time-consuming and labor intensive process, it will also be a highly dangerous proposition.

Any thug desperate for, well, anything to help them survive or steal to use for barter, will be waiting in the stairway or on the fire escape.Common street thugs will be willing, heck some may be eager, to physically attack you, rape your, and claim your apartment as their own. We have all seen the looting and violence that takes place during riots on the news – those scenes will seem mild compared to the civil unrest that will occur during a disaster situation.

Reason #6: Medical Emergencies

You will not be able to call 911 for help during a long-term disaster. Stockpiling over-the-counter and prescription medications, as well as common first aid items, will be essential to your very survival. You still have enough storage space left for all the medical preps you will need to treat anything from small injuries up to a gunshot wound, right?

Reason #7: Weapons

Hopefully you already have your concealed carry weapons (CCW) permit. If you do not, get it ASAP. You must store enough weapons, handguns, rifles, shotguns, ammunition, knives, and even bows and arrows, to protect what is yours, yourself when you leave your dwelling, and to get out of the city when you finally have to admit survival in an urban environment is not possible.

Do you know how to use all of these types of weapons? If not, learn. Do you have space to store them? Ammunition, the amount you will need in order to survive, takes up a lot more space than you might think. You will also need to stockpile spare parts for your guns, learn how to fix problems on your own, and ideally, purchase reloading equipment and learn how to use that as well.

Unlike in rural areas, and even many suburban areas, you will probably be surrounded by more bad guys with guns than good guys and gals with legal guns. Let this fact sink in for a little bit, and then start contemplating how you could relocate for your work or work from home in either the same career or a new one so you could move somewhere safer, with an abundance of natural resources, and be surrounded by like-minded and prepared individuals.

Reason #8: Bugging Out

Hesitation will kill your quicker than a lack of food, sleeping cold, or even a lack of water. If you think you must live in a city for work and access to quality medical care (which does not have to be true) then you must have an exit strategy, one that has been practiced excessively, allowed for obstacles, and includes a backup contingency plan.

If you wait, hoping that help is on the way, that local heroes in blue will be able to get things under control, or simply because the situation in front of you has frightened you into a state of immobility, you will die. When a disaster strikes there will be a brief moment of collective shock, this is when you need to go if you are going.

Once the shock wears off and the thousands or tens of thousands of your neighbors fully grasp the catastrophe that has occurred, it will not be safe to be out on the street and the roads will be clogged worse than any traffic jam you have ever experienced. Fleeing when the rule of law no longer exists in society will make you and your family not only a target if trying to leave the city on foot with only what you can carry, but when you are stopped on the road in jammed traffic.

What do you think the odds are of you either not running out of gas when stuck in stagnant traffic or finding a gas station that is either still functional or with pumps that are not already dry? You can stockpile fuel in your trunk, but when a bad guy or bad girl decides to attack you while you are stuck in traffic and take it, you will be on foot in an environment that is just as dangerous as the one you left a few miles back in the city.

Let’s say you do get out, you leave quickly and beat hundreds of other panicked drivers trying to escape the city – where will you go? Please, please, I am begging you, do not simply, “bug out to the woods” or “bug out to the country.” Only those with expert survival skills would make it living in the woods, and even such learned preppers or veterans would still be facing possibly insurmountable obstacles.

Every state park or national park in the country will become filled with frightened (temporary) survivors who left their homes with nowhere to go. Instead of a threat being present around every street light, it will now be lurking around every tree. If you know how to hunt and are lucky enough to bag a deer before the population is overly taxed and disappears, that guy behind the tree could be willing to kill you for it, or at least hurt you to get it.

Simply because the water in a stream or pond in the woods, state park, or national park is clear, that does not mean it is safe to drink. You will have to pack both enough survival gear and knowledge to garner clean water, food, wild edibles, to build a shelter (the cabins and tents at the park will disappear quickly and you might have to fight to the death to keep it) build a fire, etc.

So many novices trying to shoot game and build fires will likely lead to copious amounts of accidental deaths and even destroy the very woods you counted on to keep you alive. As for the “bugging out to the country” faux survival plan, that can get you killed as well.

Do not think for a single moment all of the millions of country folks like myself will not be standing armed on the country line to prevent the marauding hordes – good people or not, from the city AND the suburbs, from coming into our area. We will protect our natural resources fiercely because the lives of those we love depend on it.

For the sake of argument, let’s assume you were lucky enough to get to a state park in time to set up a camp or score a cabin to stay in. How long will the food you carried in on your back keep you alive? Would it last long enough to kill enough wild game and find enough wild edibles that no one could take from you, and preserve it until you could plant crops with the seeds you carried in and tend to them without getting them stolen?

What if the SHTF event occurred during the winter? Now, that changes things a bit doesn’t it. Although there are fewer of them, wild edibles do grow in the winter. Not all game hibernates, so you could still hunt. But the readily available food sources you were counting on to supplement what you carried in and planned on growing, will be significantly diminished.

I recently read an article about urban survival that tried really hard to find some pros to add to a long list of cons. I think I laughed out loud several times when the write made some urban to rural prepping environment comparisons.

First, the preparedness writer claimed it would be a lot easier to scavenge needed materials like scrap metal, fencing, and batteries in the city. This guy really must have not spent much time away outside of the city if he does not think most country folks keep ample of this type of scrap around in their backyards, pole barns, or at one of the many junk and scrap yards that dot the rural landscape like chain-stores do in metropolitan areas.

The second survival-related chuckle I was unable to stifle was when the writer claimed urban buildings will be better at stopping bullets because they are made out of concrete. Urban buildings sure are taller and yes, some boast incredibly thick concrete that will provide protection from incoming fire, but a lot of country folks build their homes out of poured concrete walls because of both cost and to keep the interior of the home cool in the summer.

There are also many brick homes and log homes that were built with either a concrete wall covered by thin timber or incredibly thick hardwood. One of the major differences between urban dwellings and suburban and rural ones is that we can walk out onto our acre or into spacious backyards without the threat posed by a dense population that has struggled with a high crime rate by taking only a few steps, not thousands of steps down a pitch black stairwell into the dangerous unknown.

The goal of this article is not to lambaste your plans to try to survive in an urban environment, but to educate you about what it will take, so you can devise a better plan and join the rest of the prepared Americans who already know living in a city is a recipe for death during a SHTF event. We want you to join us in the survivor’s club, so you have some major life decisions to begin making…right now.

If you absolutely cannot move (and really, I think that you could if you made some lifestyle choices that would likely greatly benefit your overall health and quality of living in the end), consider buying rural land and creating a real bugout retreat or leasing space from a rural resident who is willing to let you park a camper on the land year round.

You need somewhere to go and store the survival items you need and a space to learn and hone the survival skills you and your family will need to make it through the doomsday event and beyond.

Build up a relationship with the community where you buy or the person you are leasing from, get your face seen around town and always carry proof that your own or lease in the area so you can make it across a security guard after the SHTF.

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No Signal For Your Radio-Controlled Watch? Just Make Your Own Transmitter

You can win any argument about the time when you have a radio controlled watch. Or, at least, you can if there’s any signal. [Henner Zeller] lives in a place where there is no reception of the DCF77 signal that his European wristwatch expects to receive. Consequently, he decided to make his own tiny transmitter, which emulates the DCF77 signal and allows the watch to synchronise.

A Raspberry Pi Zero W is the heart of the transmitter, and [Henner] manages to coax it into generating 77500.003Hz on a GPIO pin – close enough to the 77.5kHz carrier that DCF77 uses. The signal is AM, and transmits one bit/s, repeating every minute. A second GPIO performs the required attenuation, and a few loops of wire are sufficient for an antenna which only needs to work over a few inches. The Raspberry Pi syncs with NTP Stratum 1 servers, which gives the system time an accuracy of about ±50ms. The whole thing sits in a slick 3D printed case, which provides a stand for the watch to rest on at night; this means that every morning it’s synchronised and ready to go.

[Henner] also kindly took the time to implement the protocols for WWVB (US), MSF (UK) and JJY (Japan). This might be just as well, given that we recently wrote about the possibility of WWVB being switched off. Be sure to check the rules in your area before giving this a try.

We’ve seen WWVB emulators before, like this ATtiny45 build, but we love that this solution is an easy command line tool which supports many geographical locations.

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

A No-Fuss Rack of Ham

With any hobby, it’s easy for things to get out of hand. Equipment can get scattered around the house, chargers lost in the car while cables languish in the shed… but it doesn’t have to be this way. With a go-bag or go-box, everything required is kept together in a ready-to-go condition. Heading out for a day of filming? Grab the go-bag and you’re all set. [oliverkrystal] wanted to apply this to a ham radio setup, and built this ham shack-in-a-box.

Wanting to use proven components and keep things rugged and usable, the build starts with a 6U-sized plastic rack mount case. This saves weight over plywood versions and is nice and tough. A combination of off-the-shelf rack mount parts and 3D printed pieces are brought together to make it all happen. [oliverkrystal]’s printed cable organisers are a particular treat, and something we think could help a lot of builds out there.

It all comes together as an impressive self-contained unit with two radios, an antenna tuner, in-built illumination and other useful features. No longer does one have to scramble around preparing gear for the weekend’s hamventures – grab the box and you’re ready to go!

Perhaps you don’t have a lot of ham gear, though? Try this setup to get going for less than $100.

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

Direction Finding And Passive Radar With RTL-SDR

To say that the RTL-SDR project revolutionized hacker’s capabilities in the RF spectrum would be something of an understatement. It used to be that the bar, in terms of both knowledge and hardware, was so high that only those truly dedicated were able to explore the radio spectrum. But today anyone with $20 can pick up an RTL-SDR device, combine it with a wide array of open source software, and gain access to a previously invisible world.

That being said, RTL-SDR is usually considered an “Economy Ticket” to the world of RF. It gets your foot in the door, but experienced RF hackers are quick to point out you’ll need higher-end hardware if you want to start doing more complex experiments. But the KerberosSDR may soon change the perception of RTL-SDR derived hardware. Combining four R820T2 SDRs on a custom designed board, it allows for low-cost access to high concept technologies such as radio direction finding, passive radar, and beam forming. If you get bored with that, you can always just use it as you would four separate RTL-SDR dongles, perfect for applications that require monitoring multiple frequencies such as receiving trunked radio.

KerberosSDR (which was previously known as HydraSDR) is a collaborative effort between the Othernet engineering team and the folks over at RTL-SDR.com, who earlier in the year put out a call for an experienced developer to come onboard specifically for this project. Tamás Peto, a PhD student at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, answered the call and has put together a system which the team plans on releasing as open source so the whole community can benefit from it. In the videos after the break, you can see demonstrations of the direction finding and passive radar capabilities using an in-development version of KerberosSDR.

As for the hardware, it’s a combination of the RTL-SDR radios with an onboard GPIO-controlled wide band noise source for calibration, as well as an integrated USB hub so it only takes up one port. Everything is wrapped up in a shielded metal enclosure, and the team is currently experimenting with a header on the KerberosSDR PCB that would let you plug it directly into a Raspberry Pi or Tinkerboard.

The team hopes to start final hardware production within the next few months, and in the meantime has set up a mailing list so interested parties can stay in the loop and be informed when preorders start.

If you can’t wait until then, we’ve got a detailed write-up on DIY experiments with passive radar using RTL-SDR hardware, and you can always use your browser if you want to get your radio direction finding fix.

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11 Places WW3 Could Start and How

The Historical March towards WWI and WWII

Glimpsed through the backwards lens of history, major conflicts seem to unfold in a natural and predictable sequence of events.  From the perspective of the future, the events of the past are made certain.  It is generally understood that things could’ve happened no other way.

But in the hectic pull of the moment the outcome is not always so certain.  Competing interests and rivalries struggle for control amidst shifting and uncertain political currents.  Old institutions, that seemed beyond reproach, crumble in an instant and are replaced by structures and forces that no one could’ve imagined.  Fortunes and dynasties are washed away like pebbles in a tide and new elements are deposited on the shores of history.  From what depths did they surface?

The massive technical shift of industrialization would lay the groundwork for a challenge to the feudal aristocracy that dominated Europe and the planet before WWI.  The old masters of empire, tied to the land and sea by generations of conquest might’ve assumed they would rule forever.  And rightly so.

But the bold advances of technology coupled with the shifting tumults of power and ambition effectively overthrew the old orders.  Old Europe was laid to waste on the battlefields of WWI.  Trust and hope in the old ways bled out in the trenches beside the millions of corpses of sacrificial young.  The monarchs shrugged and retreated inside their castles.  They sensed they would be replaced.

New allegiances and power struggles rushed to fill the vacuum.  The outcome of WWII would determine who would lead the modern world after the old world had been bombed into decay.

But even WWII, taken as a given by many present historians, was not inevitable.

After WWI there were peace treaties a plenty and the sentiment of the time was one of exhaustion and trepidation.  The treaties would surely last, no one would dare to plunge the world into another series of deadly and exhausting atrocities.  The people had lost too much and now they deserved peace and rest.

But pride and ambition and the longing for victory are eternal states of human nature.  The second world war was even larger than the first.  By some estimates 80 million people died in total during this massive conflict.

America benefited both from its territorial distance from Europe and its technological triumph in winning the arm’s race.  The first and only country to build and detonate a nuclear bomb over an enemy population, America set the stage for a lasting peace.

Having glimpsed the horrors of nuclear war, the leading powers set down to negotiate not only a temporal peace, but a method for avoiding massive conflicts in the future.  International organizations such as NATO and the UN came into existence.  These transnational structures of governance offered the solution of peace, cooperation and lasting prosperity.  Optimism prevailed as America led the world in rebuilding.

The Present Day Global Landscape

A new generation of entitled elites lost the trust of the populace they promised to serve.  Self serving supranational corporations, beholden to no single nations laws, swept up the governments of the world in wealth and corruption.  The populations of America and Europe were sold a false premise under the guise of globalization.

As developing nations have been offered a taste of modernization in exchange for providing an inexhaustible supply of cheap labor, the standard of living of most Americans and Europeans has declined.  The media, governments, and leading economic experts use inflation, fuzzy statistics, and number massaging to fluff up their phony indicators.  But for decades the people have felt it slowly slipping away.

The election of Trump, which according to the elites, ‘no one’ saw coming, now seems like the first of perhaps many responses demonstrating the people’s displeasure with the present day power structure.  Populist and nationalist uprisings are currently spreading across the political spectrum throughout Europe.  To those outside of the echo chambers of self interested power, many of these changes seemed not only possible, but plausible and predictable.

Still, there remains a sentiment, strongly felt amongst the survivalist community, that the entire system is shoddy and decrepit and may crumble under it’s own weight before things sort themselves out for good.  Some welcome this collapse and cheer for it openly.  Others live as if the day of reckoning will never come.  One thing is certain, preparedness is key.

Some of the conditions for WWIII to break out at any moment are already present.  Restlessness and dissatisfaction with the present order, a challenge to the old assumptions and institutions, a degree of instability.  The feeling permeates that unbreakable bonds and treaties could be easily broken and cast aside any day now.

Perhaps WWIII has already started.  It’s just that, in our present state, wrapped up in our daily obligations and chasing after fleeting distractions we are temporarily blinded to it’s onset.  But if some major pronouncement came tomorrow – that America declares war on such and such nation, or that some other nations declare war on each other – we might not be so surprised.  As the overlapping forces of treaties, economic interests, and competing loyalties plunged the world into outright disarray, hostility and war, some might not even bat an eyelid.

But many would descend into panic and confusion.  While no one possesses the crystal ball that can foretell the future, it is possible to examine current trends and situations and hypothesize about the likelihood of WWIII commencing.

Here is a list of eleven places and ways that WWIII could possibly break out in our present day landscape.  We’ll start by examining probabilities amongst nations but end by looking at the possibility of competing factions within nations, of nationalists vs. globalists, duking it out on the world stage.  The virtual territory of cyberspace and the contested frontier of space are also potential arenas for worldwide conflict.

#1. The United States of America

The potential for civil war looms presently over the landscape.  The liberal elites have lead a bloodless coup in academia and the media in recent decades that has purged most conservatives from the ranks.  Conservatives feel wary of expressing their views in public for fear of suffering social, financial and professional repercussions.  The constitutional guarantee of freedom of speech seems to be eroding.

Trump’s administration is challenged by the ‘Deep State’-led Mueller investigation which takes on the appearance of a slow moving coup.  Trump, in his ongoing efforts to ‘drain the swamp’ is seen by many as making war on the entrenched establishment.

A bloodless civil war may have already commenced in the United States.  Any sudden, drastic actions by either side – Trump firing Mueller and his associates, or Mueller and his allies in Congress attempting to indict or impeach the president – would lead to further hostilities.  A forceful removal or attempted assassination of the President could potentially ignite the entire country into outright war.

Compared to the prior standoff between North and South, an American Civil War 2.0 might be more ideological with Conservatives facing off against liberals.  Practically speaking this might play out as a rural vs. urban conflict.  With race relations at a multi-generational low, there is the potential for race based conflicts as well.

Were the United States to plunge into infighting and chaos, a hostile foreign force, possibly Russia or China or any other opportunistic and powerful nation could attempt an incursion.  There is also the possibility that a supra-national body such as the UN could send in ‘peacekeepers’ to quell the violence and restore order.  Any of these scenarios would likely trigger a global conflict of epic proportions.

#2. Syria

Hardly a day goes by without the international press reporting on a new development in the ongoing conflict in Syria.  This has the potential to ignite WWIII because so many forces are already involved.  On one side, Israel, the United States, and by proxy the major European powers are lined up against Assad.  In a muddled alliance, various remnants of Isis, Al Qaeda, the Free Syrian Army, and other assorted local insurgents (some of whom posed for photo ops with the recently deceased Senator McCain) are aligned against Assad.

However, Russia has drawn a firm line in the sand when it comes to supporting the Assad regime.  Russia and Syria’s relationship extends back several generations and Russia seems intent on protecting and preserving its ally at all costs.  Alongside Russia in supporting Syria’s current government is Iran.

This conflict is currently playing out in some regards as a proxy war between arch rivals Israel and Iran.  The broader conflict between the United States and its NATO allies and Russia is present as well.  This became especially apparent when Turkey shot down a Russian Mig it accused of violating it’s airspace in 2015.  Despite Turkish reparations and frenzied diplomacy, relations between Turkey and Russia remain strained.

The accidental downing of a U.S. jet by Russians or vice versa could easily escalate this conflict into a global scale.  America’s clandestine investment in some of Assad’s adversaries and their direct contact with Russia on the battlefield has the potential for further complications.

#3. East China Sea

The East China Sea is a hotly contested area between Japan and China.  The Koreas border the East China Sea to the north and the Philippines to the South.  Japan and China routinely clash over the accepted territorial demarcations of the area.  It serves as an access port to Japan and a massive international shipping lane for oil.

A skirmish between Japanese and Chinese fisherman, navigators or military vessels could draw the U.S. into a regional conflict.  With N. Korea and Russia aligned against U.S. allies Japan, Vietnam and the Philippines this could easily escalate.

#4. North Korea

North Korea has a young and inexperienced ruler who is seen as erratic, ambitious, and desperate to prove himself by asserting his dominance in the region.  North Korea functions as a proxy of China while South Korea remains a U.S. protectorate.  With nuclear weapons at play, and massive civilian populations within shooting distance, the potential for massive destruction bleeding into worldwide conflict is ample.

#5. Turkey

Turkey is a wild card.  Relations between Turkey and the U.S. are embittered at the moment.  Turkey accuses the U.S. of harboring a religious figure that they blame for leading a coup against Erdogan.  Turkey, in turn, refuses to release American pastors charged with espionage.  The U.S. has retaliated by taking steps to devalue Turkey’s currency and plunge the country into economic chaos.

Turkey is complicated because it is the only Muslim member of NATO.  Erdogan is no fan of Israel and is currently bashing the U.S.  One imagines that he harbors pride and longing for the Ottoman Empire – when Turkish kings ruled the Mediterranean and by proxy much of the world.

If Erdogan and Turkey switched allegiance from NATO to Iran, Russia and China, Europe would have it’s hands full when it came to defending itself.  Of course the U.S. would be treaty bound to step in and voila, WWII.

#6. India vs Pakistan

Before the British left India, they helped segregate the Muslims into an eastern region and Pakistan was created.  With India, a Hindu majority country, bordering Pakistan, a Muslim majority country, the potential for conflict is rife.

The source of much of the tension is the contested Kashmir region.  The majority of the region is controlled by India with the rest divided between Pakistan and China.  Pakistan clearly longs to assert its dominance over this region.  The Kashmir locals would prefer to rule themselves.

There have been four wars between India and Pakistan in the past 70 years along with many territorial skirmishes and disputes.  Both sides have nuclear weapons and are bordered by China.  India has a major ally in the U.S.  It’s easy to imagine how a war between these two nations could broaden into a U.S. vs. China global conflict.

#7. Nationalist Europe and Russia vs the EU

Since the Cold War and the establishment of NATO, Western Europe has been viewed as a unified whole with Eastern Europe and Russia as the antagonist.  However it’s worth remembering that Italy was allied with Russia against Britain and France in WWII.

Strong nationalist sentiments in Italy and Russia have recently unified the two countries in informal opposition to the northern globalists who pledge allegiance to the EU in Brussels.  With nationalist parties leading Hungary and Poland, it’s not difficult to imagine an alliance of Italy, Russia, Hungary, Poland and Austria versus Germany, France, Belgium and Britain.

If Italy were to refuse to accept a single additional immigrant or were to expel its immigrant population into France this would lead to major pushback.  A conflict between Italy and France, could fuel the nationalist/EU divide. This type of setup could explode into a classic, European theater, WWIII scenario.

#8. Nationalist vs. Globalists (Worldwide)

With Brexit, Trump, Salvini in Italy and Sweden set to elect a nationalistic government, it’s becoming obvious that people worldwide are in open revolt against globalism.  The globalists however, control the institutions and the purse strings. 

It’s not far-fetched to imagine a global civil war scenario where nationalists face off against globalists in countries throughout Europe and America.  This could lead to doomsday scenarios of U.N. led invasions that Preppers and Survivalists have historically considered.

Such a scenario might be more accurately referred to as an international secession event rather a World War.  Surely it would be just as devastating.

#9. Christian vs Muslim Holy War

The Crusades are still fresh in the memory of global rulers.  Many in the Arab world view Israel’s presence in the Middle East as a present day continuation of the crusades.  These military conquests often centered around control of Jerusalem.

The influx of Arabic refugees amidst the settled Christian populations of Europe is leading to a clash of civilizations.  Tensions are high.  If a German nationalist insurrection occurred and resulted in the slaughter of hundreds of Arabic immigrants would Turkey or a Middle Eastern nation be tempted to intervene?

If a leading Muslim country called for worldwide Jihad in the streets would bloodshed in the capitals of Europe lead to police and eventually military involvement?  Could WWIII be triggered by unrest on the ground between Muslim and Christian populations?

The experiment of importing millions of middle easterners into European countries seems to be exacerbating hostility and tension.  How this historical shift settles out is anybody’s guess.  Massive, apocalyptic, civilian involved conflicts that triggers war between nations remains a possibility.

#10. CyberWar

The digital realm is the subset for the power grid, the banking grid, and the flow of information and communication. Both state-sponsored and rogue hackers are able to inflict exponential damage to societal systems by utilizing nothing more than keystrokes and ingenue.

It is likely that current ‘virtual’ wars are presently underway in Cyberspace with worldwide units of the military and intelligence agencies busily seeking to intercept and dismantle competing systems.  One such example of this was Israel’s alleged introduction of the StuxNet virus into Iran’s nuclear operating systems.

A hostile power shutting down a country’s electrical grid or other operating mechanisms would have massive repercussions and could trigger a cataclysmic and overt military response.

#11. Space War

The recent Pentagon report of a mysterious Russian satellite with unknown purpose and unrecognized structural components points to the unfolding militarization of space.  This announcement comes on the heels of Trump initiating a U.S. Space Force.

Satellite technology, long used to spy on foreign territory and intercept communications, is evolving towards further known and unknown uses.  Arming satellites to shoot down or disable competing satellites is a possible step.  Using microwave or frequency technology to achieve similar results is another.

The Russian’s recently announced that damage to the International Space Station may have been intentional.  This raises the possibility of intrigue and subterfuge in outer space.

As competing nations assert their control over space and Earth’s surrounding orbit, the possibility of wild, unbridled battle remains.  Unlike the terra firm of earth, where borders are drawn and largely agreed upon, Space remains a wide open frontier with contested areas of dominance that will surely breed continued conflict.

The Longing for War amidst the Slow Drudgery of Bureaucracy

War feeds a romantic impulse in men.  War upends the present order.  It allows for heroism, daring, and sacrifice.  The heightened intensity of war creates valor, honor, and romantic scenarios between men and women that might not arise in everyday life.  Of course the atrocities are well known.

What if WWIII never happens?  What if Civil War never breaks out?  What if life just drags on and we transport ourselves between our somewhat tolerable jobs and our somewhat tolerable home life and never distinguish ourselves or escape from the doldrums?

What if the slow grind of bureaucracy muddles on and people increasingly medicate themselves until they are quietly pensioned off into retirement communities?  Is that the goal of Peace?

War and peace alternate throughout history.  War brings both heroism and horror and peace brings stability and prosperity but risks dragging on into boredom.  It’s worth looking into the role that boredom and frustration play in instigating conflicts and how much of a role those conditions may end up contributing to a possible breakout of WWIII.

via Modern Survival Online https://ift.tt/2CAv4Df