Month: March 2015

Wednesday, 11 March 2015

08:18 – I see that Apple has introduced a watch that costs up to $17,000 and runs for as little as 3 hours on a charge before it needs to be removed and connected to its charger for a 2.5 hour charging session. This battery issue seems to be a recurring problem with Apple products. I think the reason is that Apple “designs” new products and only after the design is finalized do they figure out how to cram a battery into it. They need to get engineers involved from the beginning, but I doubt Apple has many actual engineers.

There was an article in the paper yesterday and a follow-up article this morning about a 21-year-old woman who ran off the street and struck and killed a 10-year-old boy with her car. She then continued across the grass, ran into a tree and fence, abandoned her car, and fled. The article yesterday said that she’d been charged with felony hit-and-run. I said to Barbara yesterday that I thought that was a bit harsh, given that she’d left her vehicle at the scene. It sounded to me as though she’d panicked after the accident and wasn’t really trying to avoid responsibility for what she’d done.

The article this morning added more details. When he was struck, the boy was standing in front of his home, talking to his older brother and mother, who watched it happen. The driver lives on the same street as the victim, although the street changes names at the curve where the incident occurred. The street is only a few blocks long, so there’s no way she wouldn’t be identified. There’s a good chance that the victim’s family knew her or at least recognized her 2014 Toyota RAV4. Barbara speculates that she was texting when she lost control of her car and killed a child. So she’ll have that to live with for the rest of her life, and will probably be facing some serious jail time.


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Tuesday, 10 March 2015

08:13 – Someone sent me a cartoon about Y2K prepping, so I just went back and re-read my journal entries for late December of 1999. It was as I remembered. I wasn’t really expecting any major problems, and we did nothing special other than updating our software, filling the fuel tanks in our vehicles, filling the bathtub with water, and digging the oil lamps out of storage. What I’d forgotten is that few people around here seemed very concerned. The stores were full of unsold stuff that they’d ordered in expecting a Y2K rush that never materialized.

Barbara is meeting her sister for dinner tonight for her sister’s birthday, so Colin and I are on our own for dinner. Barbara went to the gym last night, so I took the opportunity to watch Mutant World with Amber Marshall. IMDB gives it 3.6/10, which is about 3.6 too high. This is a really bad movie. Good cast, but truly dismal writing. I watched the first half hour or so, which was time enough to watch Amber go rock-and-roll with her assault rifle on a zombie. I turned it off after that, because I was afraid Amber would get eaten by a zombie.


11:55 – Which reminds me that I need to think about stocking up on zombie repellent, or at least the supplies to make it up as needed. Apparently there are many effective zombie repellents available, but one of the best is good olde napalm.

The napalm itself requires only gasoline and a gelling agent. Many different materials work as gelling agents, but the best is still polystyrene, AKA Styrofoam. So the napalm itself won’t be a problem, but I need to think about igniters.

I suppose I could go with one of the two old favorites: (a) a flaming rag stuffed in the mouth of a glass bottle that’s been scored with a diamond ring or glass cutter, or (b) a half inch of concentrated sulfuric acid in the bottom of the bottle that causes a paper soaked in potassium chlorate, dried, and wrapped around the bottle to burst into flame when the acid contacts the chlorate.

But both of those methods have problems. The obvious problem with the first method is that you have to stand up holding a bottle stuffed with a flaming rag, which tends to draw unwanted attention from every zombie nearby. Both methods have the problem that a glass bottle, even if it’s been scored with a diamond beforehand, often doesn’t actually break even when it hits concrete, let alone soil or other soft materials. And even if the napalm ignites, it usually doesn’t scatter very well.

So I think I’m going to go with 1- or 2-liter soft drink bottles, using a bursting charge with a pull igniter and a 3-second fuse. The bursting charge will include magnesium granules, which should ensure that every bit of the napalm will be ignited, contacting anything in a radius of 5 or 10 meters.

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Monday, 9 March 2015

10:41 – I need to spend this week mostly doing science kit stuff. We’re in reasonably good shape on chemistry kits, but I just shipped the last forensic kit this morning and we’re down to half a dozen biology kits. I’ll be making up and bottling chemicals, building subassemblies, and building kits most of this week.

I’ve been putting a lot of effort into the prepping book and I need a break from it. Thinking and writing constantly about disasters gets depressing, particularly the types of disasters that are essentially impossible to prepare for. As I’ve said many times, unlike some of my readers I don’t really expect an apocalyptic end of all things. What I expect is a gradual slide into dystopia, with increasing poverty, social unrest, and government intrusion into our lives. That’s why I want to get away from the city, and that’s why I’m storing foods, guns, and other supplies and developing more useful skills. But in a true catastrophe like a long-term grid-down situation or a nightmare pandemic, there’s no real way for anyone to be prepared. The simple fact is that we have too many people who are entirely dependent on a complex, interlocking network. If something catastrophic enough to break even part of that network occurs, there will be a mass die-off in the US and there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop it. The most that Barbara and I can do is relocate to thinly-populated farming country, stock up, and hope that when the crunch comes we’re prepared to ride out the worst of it with our family and friends.




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Sunday, 8 March 2015

10:08 – Once again, I tried to convince Barbara to leave our clocks on EST rather than switching to Obama Daylight Time. Once again, she refused. I wish that North Carolina and the other “red” states would simply refuse to change the clocks twice a year. Particularly those of us who are far enough south that day lengths don’t differ that much between winter and summer. Ben Franklin suggested daylight saving time, sure, but he was JOKING. Unfortunately, morons didn’t get the joke.

I’m still working on the prepping book. Some of this stuff is really depressing, particularly for bend-over-and-kiss-your-ass-goodbye situations like a catastrophic EMP/CME event. Hey, I just invented a new prepping acronym: BOAKYAG, bow-ack-ee-ag. (Rats! I just checked the Urban Dictionary and found that it had already been coined, back in 2011.)

I cringe every time I read a news report about another young black man being shot and killed by police, as happened in Wisconsin the other day. It happens frequently, and every time it happens I wonder if this will be the trigger event that sets off widespread rioting and looting in cities and towns across America. The pressure continues to build, and these sporadic breakdowns in civil order put me in mind of the small tremors that precede major earthquakes. One day, those major earthquakes will occur. It may be a month from now or ten years from now, but it’s now a question of when, not if.


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Saturday, 7 March 2015

08:24 – We’re seeing the first signs of spring around here. Colin and I spotted a robin yesterday. He stalked and tried to pounce it. Our highs over the coming few days are to be in the middle 50’s to low 60’s (~ 13C to 17C), with lows well above freezing.

I burned Mutant World to disc yesterday, but I’m not sure I’ll watch it. I jumped to the very end of the video, which had a bunch of the humans standing around, but Amber Marshall wasn’t among them. I’m afraid that means she got eaten, and I really don’t want to watch her be killed and eaten. Or eaten and killed.

I’m still working on the prepping book. Right now, I’m jumping around the chapters on security and defense, EMP, and nuclear emergencies, adding material here and there.


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Friday, 6 March 2015

08:01 – Speaking of the adorable Amber Marshall, I just noticed yesterday that she’d been in a movie that was released last November, so I grabbed a copy with BitTorrent. When Barbara got home yesterday, I told her about it and she said we could watch it this weekend.

What I didn’t tell her was the name of the movie. It’s called Mutant World, and it has a 3.6 rating on IMDB. It’s about a bunch of Doomsday Preppers that go into a bunker and come out 10 years after an asteroid impact to find the world populated by mutant zombies. When I brought up the file to make sure it was readable, I clicked at various random locations on the timeline. One of those was a scene with Amber using her assault rifle to fire on a mob. I’m in love all over again. I just hope she doesn’t get eaten.

During my dad’s final illness in 1990, he was suffering from congestive heart failure. I remember a discussion I had at the hospital with a dietitian or nutritionist or whatever they call the people who pretend to understand the effects of diet on human health. They had my dad on what amounted to a no-salt diet, and she was going on and on about the evils of salt in general and the sodium ion in particular. I asked her what evidence she had for her assertions, and told her that I suspected that the sodium ion was good for you and that most people consumed too little salt rather than too much. She looked at me as if I were from Mars. So, fast-forward 25 years. I was reading a study yesterday that finds pretty definitively that low-salt diets are killers.

As I’ve been saying for at least 40 years, “nutritionists” and “dietitians” know nothing. They have no data upon which to base their recommendations. Fortunately, a couple million years of evolution has provided us with a pretty good way of determining which foods are good for us. It it tastes good, it’s probably good for you; if it doesn’t, it’s probably not. That’s why these low-sugar, low-fat, low-salt “healthy” foods are very bad for you. They taste like crap, which tells me they are crap.


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Thursday, 5 March 2015

08:08 – My favorite TV series, actually the only one I’ll bother to watch, has been renewed for a ninth season. Last October it became the longest-running Canadian one-hour drama series when its 125th episode was broadcast. With the season 8 finale that runs the end of this month, it’ll be up to 139, 140, or 141 episodes, depending on whether and how you count the double-length episode s04e9.5 that was run as a TV movie. And now I have 18 more episodes of Amber Marshall to look forward to.

I knew that Amber was very special by the time I finished watching the first episode. She’s one of those few people who make me happy just knowing that she’s in the world.


13:33 – Holy Cow! This is my kind of conservative politician: Insanely Hot Conservative Danish Politician Gains International Fame

I’d never heard of Nikita Klæstrup until just now, but I suspect she has a big future in Danish politics. If not, she has something else to fall back on. Additional NSFW images here.

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Wednesday, 4 March 2015

08:21 – Barbara is going out to dinner with friends tonight, so Colin and I are on our own. I told him that if he’d catch something I’d cook it. I hope he comes back with a squirrel or a rabbit, but he’s just as likely to bring back a good stick.

It’s currently foggy with a cold drizzle, but we’re supposed to get up to 72F (22C) today. Depending on which forecast you believe, we may have freezing rain and sleet tomorrow, with a low of 23F (-5C).

I see that congressman Trent Franks (R-AZ) has reintroduced a bill to address the vulnerability of this country’s infrastructure to EMP, both artificial and natural. My own take is that an EMP attack is extremely unlikely, but the threat of a natural “EMP” event resulting from a coronal mass ejection (CME) is very real and very likely. The planet came very close to being nailed by a massive CME in July 2012, and NASA estimated the likelihood of such an event hitting the planet as 12% between 2012 and 2022. Depending on the severity of the CME, such a strike could cause anything up to and including the electrical grid being down for months to years, which would wipe out not just electric power, but communications, transportation (including food), and even water purification.

It seems that such massive events occur on average about once per century. The last one was the 1859 Carrington Event, which was also the first one that humans really noticed. Before that, we had no electricity, no electronics, and nothing else that would be affected by a massive CME. Humans just took no notice of earlier events because the only evidence of them would have been magnificent aurorae. But one thing is for sure: we’ll notice the next one. One credible study suggested that a Carrington-class event occurring today would result in the die-off of 65% to 70% of the US population within 12 months, most by starvation.


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Tuesday, 3 March 2015

08:45 – I’m still working on the section I (first month) chapter on security and defense. I just finished the section on protecting your home and started the section on organizing and protecting your neighborhood from looters, which are the primary threat during a short-to-medium term emergency. Just ask the folks in areas near the Ferguson riots, or indeed in any of the many other areas that have recently faced threats from civil unrest. I have a final, short section on firearms to write, recommending a shotgun and/or a .22 rifle for each adult or teenager, and then the first draft of that chapter will be complete.

As always, I’m trying to keep things as simple and inexpensive as possible. Some preppers can afford to spend $100,000+ on a rural retreat and another $100,000+ on supplies, but not many can afford that. So I’m trying to keep things as practical as possible for my expected average audience. That means many people will take issue with my recommendations, which is fine. If you can afford more and think it’s justified, spend the extra money. But many people will be pressed to buy even basic preparation supplies, and it’s them I have in mind.


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Monday, 2 March 2015

08:01 – I finally “borrowed” my first book under Amazon Prime yesterday. I’d given up on trying with Barbara’s and my monochrome Kindles because every time I tried it would lock up the Kindle, requiring a complete reset. Something in the firmware of those older Kindles doesn’t get along with our D-Link wireless router. I figured out the problem one time. It has something to do with the B/G/N mode setting on the router, but it’s not worth the hassle so we just keep our mono Kindles in airplane mode. Fortunately, the WAP works fine with Barbara’s Kindle Fire HDX, so that’s what I used to borrow the book.

Once I’d downloaded the book to Barbara’s Kindle Fire, I used the Amazon website to download the book to my hard drive, dropped it into Calibre to strip the DRM, and transferred it to my mono Kindle. We do all our reading on our mono Kindles, so formerly I’d download every title twice, once into a directory of books for my Kindle and then a second time into a directory for Barbara’s Kindle. That was getting old, so now I routinely download the book once, drop in into Calibre to strip the DRM, and then we can transfer it to either Kindle without worrying about which copy works on which Kindle.

The book I borrowed is Alpha Farm by Annie Berdel, which several websites had recommended. If I were going to waste time writing a review, the heading would be “Stop her before she writes again”. Like most prepper books I’ve seen, fiction and non-fiction, this one is complete garbage. Even elementary school spelling, grammar, and punctuation escapes this woman. The book is full of misused and misspelled words, run-on and fragment sentences, and odd constructs that leave the reader with no clue what the author intended to convey. She apparently doesn’t even realize that she’s supposed to use periods to end sentences. The narrative switches back and forth from first- to third-person, and even characters switch back and forth between names. The author has apparently never met a woo-woo conspiracy theory she doesn’t like: HAARP, chemtrails, government causing severe weather and earthquakes, vaccines causing autism, and on and on. Fortunately, I’m a very fast reader. I got through this piece of crap in half an hour or so, but that certainly was a wasted half hour.


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