A Quick Run Around the Web--August 27, 2015

More on Bikes

Given my recent post on using bicycles during hard economic times or post-SHTF, I decided to see if I could find some additional articles on the topic. Voila!

• "Why Bicycles Are A Smart Choice When SHTF"--Survival Hax
• "Post-Peak Oil, Bicycles will be YOUR Source of Transportation"--SHTF Blog.
• "10 Survival Items to Scavenge from Abandoned Bicycles"--Preparing for SHTF.
• "The value of a bicycle after SHTF"--Prepper Resources.
• "post-SHTF Transportation: bicycles"--Prep Blog.
• "Affordable Transportation In Times of Hardship"--Come and Make It (I mentioned this the other day, but wanted to include it here for completeness). 

Survival and Self-Defense Related

• "Guns for Beginners: Three Steps to Drawing Your Concealed Carry Pistol"--The Truth About Guns. Move, draw your gun, and shoot (or not).
• "Recipes for the Post-Apocalypse: How and why to eat rat meat"--io9.
• "Buy-One-Get-One Prepping"--Practical Prepping Blog.
• "How To Begin Prepping: A True Story"--Perky Prepping Gramma.
• "How To Acquire Food Storage Even If You Are Poor…"--Modern Survival Blog.
• "The Drinkable Book"--Blue Collar Prepping. A book (from a start-up company) designed for each page to act as a filter (to a certain extent) and treated to kill bacteria.
• "Operational Security for Safety"--Apartment Prepper Blog. Basic stuff like not advertising your interests and activities on Facebook or through bumper stickers, not leaving your garage door open or front window curtains/blinds open so everyone can see if you are home and what you own, and so on.
• "Taking Care of Number One - Knife Safety and Emergency Wound Care"--Long Range Hunting Magazine. Some tips on avoiding getting cut, and what to do if you are. Note: this article is three pages.
• "Do Preppers Really Need to Know Wilderness Survival Skills?"--Master Woodsman.
• "Five Day Lightweight Backpacking Meal Plan"--Erik the Black's Backpacking Blog. This would also be applicable to a 72-hour kit or BOB.
• "How Long Do You REALLY Have to Boil Water Before It’s Safe to Drink?"--Equip 2 Survive. Although the ultimate purpose of this article is to get you to buy a product (the Water Pasteurization Indicator (WAPI)), it does point out that bringing your water to a rolling boil is unnecessary and uses a substantially greater amount of fuel than needed (this is due to the heat of vaporization--essentially the energy you need to put into the water to cause the water molecules to break their bonds to one another and turn the water from liquid to steam. You may remember from high school or college chemistry classes bringing water to a boil, and once you hit the boiling point, the temperature would hold steady at the boiling point although you were putting a bunch more heat into the system--this heat represented the additional energy to break those bonds).
• "The 44 Magnum Rifle Round Part 1" and "Part 2"--Real Guns. Handloading the .44 Magnum as a rifle round, including the need to slightly shorten the cases to maintain the COL for certain bullets.

News and Misc.

• "Off the grid: North Korean sub fleet's mystery mission"--Fox News. During the recent tensions, North Korea put 70% of its submarine fleet (50 vessels) to sea. They are still gone. 
• "Fifty refugees found dead in the back of an air-tight truck on the side of an Austrian motorway as police hunt people smuggling gang"--The Daily Mail.
• "Europe's immigration drama has nothing to do with Donald Trump: Glenn Reynolds"--USA Today. A brief overview of the immigration problem confronted by Europe.
• "How to Destroy a City in Five Minutes"--World Affairs. Michael Totten reports on how the terrorist attack against tourists in Sousse, Tunisia, has left the town a ghost town: the tourists haven't returned, employers are laying off workers, and it has even depressed food prices because of the decline in demand from hotels and restaurants.
• "China Said to Consider Policy Shift to Put Population Growth Before Economy"--Bloomberg. "Facing a demographic time bomb that threatens China’s economic rise, President Xi Jinping is considering shifting his priority to population growth, according to a person familiar with the discussions." The article then goes on to describe the demographic problems confronting China.
• "Gigantic Antarctic Instrument, IceCube, Finds Mysterious Cosmic Neutrinos"--IEEE Spectrum.
• "The Case for Complex Dark Matter"--Quanta Magazine.
• "The 30-Million-Year Mass Extinction Cycle --'A Coincidence, or a Dark-Matter Event?'"--The Daily Galaxy.