08:05 – When we got up this morning, Barbara announced that she’d gotten angry at me in a dream because I’d bought fifty boxes of Wheaties cereal. I told her that I understood her anger, since I don’t eat cereal and she eats Wheaties only occasionally.
Not that buying fifty boxes of cereal would be outrageous for many preppers. That brownish plastic-y material they use to wrap cereal, crackers, and similar items is actually pretty effective at preserving them. I assume it’s some form of thick BO-PET, which provides a good oxygen/moisture barrier. The last time we bought crackers at Costco, I noticed that the best-by date was 2.5 years out. In reality, that means they should be just fine for at least 5 to 10 years, unless rodents get to them. The same is probably true for packaged breakfast cereals. And if you repackage them in 7-mil foil laminate bags with oxygen absorbers, their true shelf life is probably 100+ years.
Other than for fresh meat, eggs, dairy products, baked goods, and similar items, the whole concept of “best-by” dates is imaginary anyway. Up until about 1970, canned goods and other preserved foods weren’t dated at all, because the (correct) assumption was that they remained good essentially forever. The same is true today, but best-by dates are used by manufacturers to encourage turnover. And, as a result, Americans throw out literally billions of dollars worth of perfectly good food every year, simply because it’s passed those imaginary best-by dates.
Best by dates for soft drink aren’t imaginary. I put some in the back of a cupboard and left them for about five years – they were almost undrinkable so I had to ditch them.
Miles, were the soft drinks in plastic bottles? The chemicals in the soda degrade the plastic after awhile. I am sure RBT and others have a more scholarly explanation. Also, if they use any chemically created sweetener, that will break down, again due to the chemicals in the soda.
An observation, I have noticed a disturbing trend with canned products containing tomatoes, apparently undamaged cans are prematurely swelling and leaking. This is occurring in multiple brands.
Cold dreary rainy day, fitting my mood.
Depends on the soft drink. PET isn’t completely impervious to carbon dioxide, especially under pressure, so carbonated soft drinks do eventually go flat. Non-carbonated ones should remain safe and retain most or all of their taste for many years if stored in PET, longer in glass.
Clark: “Oh the Crunch enhancer? Yeah it’s a non-nutritive cereal varnish. It’s semi-permiable. It’s not osmotic. What it does is it coats and seals the flake, prevents the milk from penetrating it.”
I see 8 people were killed in a stabbing in Australia.
[sarcasm]This sort of thing wouldn’t happen if all knives were registered and anyone purchasing a knife had to go through a thorough background check and a 7-day waiting period. In fact, why do private citizens need to own knives at all? At the very least, knives with blades over 2″ long should be illegal as should knife sets containing more than 4 knives.[/sarcasm]
I do find it interesting that right-leaning Fox News makes it very clear it was a stabbing, but left-leaning CNN buries the fact that it was a stabbing way down in their article. If it was a shooting then that fact would have been in the first sentence of the CNN article. CNN’s anti-gun agenda is clear.
It might even have been one of those fully-automatic electric reciprocating carving knives, which I understand are freely available in Australia. What would a civilian need a fully-automatic knife for?
I lol’d. Works well on saucer sleds too. 🙂
Entire wars were fought and countless murders committed on this planet for many centuries before the invention of firearms, and before gunpowder, even.
It occurs to me yet again that we’re dealing with a mindset and cultural zeitgeist that is virtually impossible to penetrate, on this, and many other issues; we just can’t do it. Half the country has been sucked into this way of thinking, if one can even call it thinking. So many things are simply Conventional Wisdom now, to the point that they’ve become articles of faith, and we all know what they are, though our lists may differ a bit from person to person.
My short list:
Democracy, Diversity, Affirmative Action, guns are bad and should only be for cops and soldiers and gee, maybe we can disarm the cops, Jesus either didn’t exist or He is your “friend,” all kids should attend the publik skool system and then go on to college, housing and three squares a day are Human Rights as is free medical care, all people are equal, global warming is real and deniers should be executed, all our borders should be wide open and all the world’s immigrants welcomed here because ‘they do it out of love,’ etc., etc., etc.
Express dissent, opposition, questions, about any of this, and you’re a hater, and Beyond the Pale.
Yeah DC, diet soft drink in PET bottles. I now try to drink them within three months of purchace.
Beer goes bad in glass bottles. Some things DO have an expiry date, though I agree with Bob that the vast majority of them are merely to get you to buy more. Same with “lather, rinse and repeat” and “plop, plop, fizz, fizz”. Those two simple phrases doubled the sales for their respective products.
“Oh what a relief it is…”
Thanks. Now I’ll have that jingle in my head the rest of the day.
I can’t believe I ate the whole thing…
That’s a spicy meatball …
As to beer and soft drinks, I’m not too concerned with them. I’m talking about shelf-stable foods for long-term storage, and I suspect not a lot of preppers will be squirreling away beer and soft drinks. Or maybe they will.
“That’s a summa spicy meatball!”
“A little dab’ll do ya.”
“…I suspect not a lot of preppers will be squirreling away beer and soft drinks.”
Rather than that, I’d recommend they learn how to brew beer, and for the time being, squirrel away the hard stuff, which will be primo barter goods, like ciggies. Until they learn how to distill it themselves, neither case being rocket science.
RBT – Speaking of beer, a primer on brewing survival beer might be good for your prepper book.
“I suspect not a lot of preppers will be squirreling away beer and soft drinks. Or maybe they will.”
I could give up beer in a flash, and did for eight months a few years ago specifically to see if I could do it. But I’d rather gnaw off an arm than give up soft drink (as my exercise physiologist wants me to do.)
In reality, that means they should be just fine for at least 5 to 10 years, unless rodents get to them.
I have killed three roof rats in the house since July. They are very sneaky little monsters and rampage through your perishables, leaving little turds all over the place.
Entire wars were fought and countless murders committed on this planet for many centuries before the invention of firearms, and before gunpowder, even.
I have been reading about pike brigades lately. Three foot double edged blades on a twelve foot pole. “shudder”
Even Obama says Sony is wrong for canceling the release of that movie.
I’m not sure I have any desire to survive TEOTWAWKI without copious amounts of alcohol (and porn too).
Well, I did brew a batch of beer one time many eons ago, just to prove I could do it. It turned out to be a beer-like material that indeed had alcohol in it, although I can’t claim it was very good beer.
“But I’d rather gnaw off an arm than give up soft drink (as my exercise physiologist wants me to do.)”
If your physiologist is concerned about weight loss, chewing off your arm will achieve the same goal without giving up your soft drink habit.
“… chewing off your arm will achieve the same goal without giving up your soft drink habit.”
And much more entertaining.
Re brewing beer once: Me too, although I made wine. Just because my wife gave me a kit, and a neighbor gave me some fruit. Wasn’t bad, but the commercial stuff costs less if you have to buy the grapes.
I would be embarrassed to admit how much wine I have squirreled away. Facing TEOTWAKI sober would be bad. It keeps well, but distilled stuff keeps practically forever, and I have some of that, too (for medicinal purposes, of course.)
I may consider squirreling away a bunch of hard stuff at some point; even the smell of it now makes me sick so I’m probably pretty safe having it buried around here somewhere; again, for possible medicinal purposes and barter. But it’s way down the list of prep priorities at this point. I’d rather stock up on veterinary medicine and start a medicinal herb garden plot here.
The holiday/vehicle/travel dance up here continues, with multiple phone calls and probable hassles, like, say, Princess not being ready for pickup this afternoon, per usual, and thus delaying her mom and any plans her mom and grandma might have today, but that’s of zero concern, per usual. Or some other monkey wrench somewhere; so far I’m mainly out of it, thank goodness gracious!
Does Princess *ever* get disciplined?
The time for that was seventeen years ago or more and it wasn’t done then for various reasons, one being that her dad had been killed and there was no father in the house until I came along, and of course I was the evil stepfather who tried but was routinely sabotaged by mom and grandma while we also tried to raise the 11-year-old boy at the time. It’s only recently her mom has learned to say “no,” and that’s been a hard struggle all along. And now she’s 22 and has been all over the world; discipline is over, other than whatever self-discipline she’s acquired for admittedly a very rigorous course of study.
A whole different world and culture from what I and my siblings grew up with, an evil and oppressive patriarchy, at home and in the skools. If we looked at grown-ups cross-eyed we were in deep kimchi immediately, let alone talk back or argue with them about everything under the sun. And let alone physically assault them, as was done here. That would have got us killed and buried in the back yard. After a RUTHLESS beating down.
My married brothers and I never hit our kids and tried to reach a happy medium but were routinely and continuously sandbagged and sabotaged by the fem brigades.
And there you have it.
Lynn:
Since your notice a couple of days ago about “bricks” of .22 LR ammo, I have been checking my local Academy (in the NW Austin area). I went by a little while ago without checking first, and all they had on the counter was a 300-rd. CCI brick for $25, much less of a deal than your 500-rd for $30.
The man helping me then happened to mention that he had an unopened ammo shipment in the back that he could check for bricks, if I was willing to wait. So, of course, I did. About one half hour later, he brought me a 1,000-rd brick of Winchester M*22 target and plinking black copper-plated round-nose for $50. It was the only brick in the package. Wow! I jumped on it.
Robert
Re: The shelf life of bottled beers. Dark glass or clear? Stored in the dark or not?
And as for including brewing instructions in a prepping book. The shelf life of unpasteurized beer is very very short, and there would have to be a better use of one’s spare grains. Distillation would be somewhat more useful, but in either case making booze would be way way down the list of important survival skills. A few cases of stored hard liquors could well have some trade value, but again booze simply isn’t a vital life supply.
Finally, [snip] a beer-like material that indeed had alcohol in it, although I can’t claim it was very good beer. [snip] Hey, Anheuser–Busch has made a fortune with that recipe. 🙂
The problem with brewing beer after a collapse is getting hops. They grow in the Pacific NW, not sure about other areas. There are other bittering compounds, but hops are the best.
Now, a still would probably be useful if you have a grain surplus…..
I’m not particularly worried about TEOTWAWKI, but I have stocked up on pure nicotine in anticipation of FDA restrictions and/or taxes up the wazoo. I switched to e-cigs a year or two ago and couldn’t be happier.
About one half hour later, he brought me a 1,000-rd brick of Winchester M*22 target and plinking black copper-plated round-nose for $50. It was the only brick in the package. Wow! I jumped on it.
You got a deal!
It is very weird how the 22 LR is starting to flow in. All the other ammo is plentiful, at least at Academy.
I am waiting for Obola to assign a new per bullet tax to ammo. I guess his writing hand got too tired to do so before 2015.
Yo, fellow haters, I be checkin’ out the local gun shops this weekend for .22LR and .22WMR, while also doing a recon of the other calibers. Will post, if I remember, my northern VT results accordingly.
Obola/Obummer, aka Barry Soetero, aka Dear Leader, is prolly busy planning how to Scrooge up the Xmas for us all somehow, give him a little credit. And our own gov here in the Great Green Mountain State just chit-canned single-payer; all the lefties and libtards and progturds are horrified and demonstrating, so he musta done the right thang; he also gets the usual VT triple-A rating from the NRA, ’cause anything less than that here and your election chances are null and void. A lotta peeps across this great nay-shun don’t know about this and think VT is just a pot-smoking buncha hippie turds and gay rights nutjobs but that’s only in the big burgs and college towns, a belt that runs from Burlap/Chittenden County down through Montpeculiar and to Middlebury and Bennington. Outside of that, they’s a lotta right-wing gun nuts and cranks. And the usual handful of die-hard libertarians who still think anyone cares about their arcane economic theories and obscure political hobby-horses.
The system has to be busted down and then re-assembled in its entirety, no other way, unless somehow, miraculously, a lot more people wake the hell up and fast.
Geez. It’s hard to believe this story:
http://www.abc.net.au/news/2014-12-20/cairns-mother-of-children-arrested-for-murder/5980826
A 37 year old woman murders eight kids, seven of them her own… 🙁
You forgot the “piss be upon him” part. Or something like that.
Hey, I’m doing my best. The problem is, every time I come up with a new plan for widespread destruction or otherwise shattering the status quo, people just laugh at me. It’s disheartening, but at least it fuels my misanthropy.
As all empires have fallen into ashes and dust, so shall this one, in time. Could be decades, could be another century, but I don’t give it more than that, considerably less, actually. It cannot be sustained.
Mine own misanthropy thrives likewise but I find little bits of hope and light here and there among individuals. You are one, as is most everyone on this board, not least our host and his wife, who labor for their own business enterprise but simultaneously improve peoples’ lives beyond measure and yea unto future generations. That probably isn’t said enough here. Those STEM kits will prove to be, if he’ll forgive the expression, a Godsend to countless children and their children and the country as a whole. All while making a living at it, can’t get much better than that.
Gee, what’s wrong with me tonight? Must be those Xmas carols I just listened to…time to put on some death metal or sumthin…I know! Hip-hop! That’d crush anyone’s Xmas spirit…or them singin’ dawgs…”Grandma Got Run Over By a Reindeer”…
…maybe my little collection of Lovecraftian parodies…
Reader Poll: Do you think that there will be a third world war within the next 10 years?
http://www.thesurvivalistblog.net/world-war-10-years/
73% of 397 said yes. Wow, that poll is on a prepper site and hardly scientific but the results are astounding.
Where do I get a Civil Defense Radiological Kit ?
Define “third world war.” In my view we’ve already done that gig. It was known as the “Cold War.” And it was worldwide between multiple hostile powers, including the two superpowers of the time, along with multiple proxies, as in the previous two world wars.
Also in my view and that of others, the so-called Vietnam War can be broken down into two separate but related wars: the First and Second Indochina Wars; the first was mainly in South Vietnam with air strikes in the North and side trips to other countries. I did that gig. Followed by the second, mainly involving Cambodia, Laos and Thailand; I did that gig, too. But the first part of my active duty was spent in the tail end of the Cold War, at NORAD bases and sites across north CONUS. Technically I’m a vet of three different wars.
I believe we are currently in the beginning stages of what is now a low-level World War IV, involving non-state entities along with the usual state powers, and more given to fourth-generation warfare, which our armed forces are not up to snuff on; we’re still living in the second-generation past of blitzkreig and air war bombing campaigns. If only Jimmy Stewart was still around to fly a Liberator over the Norks or sumthin. Then we could send in Patton and MacArthur to mop up.
The germane question is whether or not we’ll have World War V, and that’s a real possibility if the chit blows up in Kashmir, the Taiwan Strait, or again in the Sandbox/Suck region. In any of these areas, the use of nukes is a real possibility and then we’re mos def in entirely new historical territory.
Thanks for the kind words.
As far as all-out nuclear war, I have my doubts, mainly because I think a lot of warheads won’t make it to their targets because of launch, boost, and re-entry failures, and a lot of those that do make it to the targets are likely to be duds. I would expect a high percentage of US warheads to detonate on target, and probably a high percentage of Israeli warheads and British warheads. As to the others, not so much. I suspect the Chinese would have the highest success rate of the also-rans, with Russia far, far behind. They simply don’t maintain their missiles and warheads very well. As to India, Pakistan, and particularly NK, I wouldn’t expect any successes at all. Testing a static device and delivering it are two entirely different things.
Besides which, it’s by no means certain that many of the warheads would be targeted at the US. The Chinese and Russians hate and mistrust each other, and NK hates everyone.
I don’t envision an all-out nuke war; possibly a limited exchange between India and Pakistan or a half-baked attempt by the Norks. Outside possibility of the Israelis, in “desperation,” launching against their Arab/hadji enemies over there as a “last resort.” After they pressure us for our green light, of course.
Since the end of the Cold War a nuclear exchange between Russia and the US makes absolutely no sense. With the reduction in MIRVs there’s less temptation and rationale to strike first.
My money would be on Pakistan vs. India. The former know they would be annihilated, but the Indians know they’d likely take a lot of damage too – perhaps from Pakistani bombers.
As to missile and warhead reliability, I think I wouldn’t bet against the Frogs.