December 11, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Ever thought about this? Fire Tricks"--Dave Canterbury at Wilderness Outfitters

Prepping:

• "SHTF Survivalist Radio Frequency Lists"--Radio Master Reports.
• "The 12 Essentials of Any Bug-out Bag"--Stealth Survival. The author states that these are: water, food, first aid, zip ties, personal hygiene items, self-defense, alternative power supply, fire-starter items, light source, cloths, shelter, and a survival manual.
• "The ‘Two is one and one is none’ fallacy"--Graywolf Survival. I think I've posted to this article before, but is a good one to read and take to heart if you are preparing BOBs for a group of people. Essentially, the author is advocating that you carry redundant capability, not redundant gear. 
• "First Aid: Super Gluing Cuts, Imodium for Emergencies, & More"--More Than Just Surviving. The author is planning on posting more articles on first aid, but wanted to also get people up to speed with what he has already done. That is the purpose of this article: to provide an overview of various first aid articles the author has already published and provide links to those articles.
• "What Will You Do When Strangers or Friends Beg You for Supplies in TSHTF?"--All Outdoors. This is one of the great moral dilemmas in prepping. The simple answer is the one provided by Aesop in his famous fable of the ants and the grasshopper: the ants left the grasshopper to his fate. However, this may be too simplistic. First of all, it assumes that you are able to keep you and your stores safe from angry and desperate neighbors. And, believe me, your ability to hide the fact that you are well supplied will be hard to conceal in any extended grid-down event. Lights, smoke from fires, and even the smell of food cooking, will give you away.  I can walk down my street during any evening in warm weather, and smell the aroma of the various meals being cooked in many of the houses I pass. And I think I have previously related my story of a lengthy power outage during my college days when it was easy to tell the apartments where the LDS students lived: they were the only ones that had lit windows from the camp lanterns and oil lamps. However, even if your light and scent security was excellent, over time, the relative better health of you and yours will advertise that you have food and supplies.

Second, turning away strangers, or even neighbors and bare acquaintances, is one thing; turning away friends or family is quite another. Post SHTF will probably be very tribal, and there is rarely a tribe that will have stronger bonds than your close friends and family. As some of the comments to the cited article suggest, the better course of action may be to provide assistance to those willing to trade either items, labor, or both. 

Other Stuff:

• The religion of peace strikes again: "Bomb blast kills dozens at Cairo Coptic church"--Yahoo News. The article reports: "A bombing at Cairo’s largest Coptic cathedral killed at least 25 people and wounded 49, many of them women and children attending Sunday mass, in the deadliest attack on Egypt’s Christian minority in years."
• "Germany migrants: Freiburg murder arrest fuels tensions"--BBC News. According to the article, "Germans have been sickened by revelations that a teenage Afghan asylum seeker may have been responsible for the rape and drowning of the young medical student, who volunteered for a charity that helped refugees." Why do they do this? Because it is their nature.
• Austria learns what it is like to shelter the serpent in their bosom: "'There are big problems' Outrage as migrant rapes soar by 133% – in just ONE YEAR"--The Express. Still not as much a problem as rape in Sweden.
• Speaking of Sweden: "Sweden CHAOS boils over: Cars go up in flames as violent thugs attack police officers"--The Express. (Warning: video plays automatically). Of course, this violence from Muslim migrants is not something new. "In 2016 alone, hundreds of cars have been destroyed as police struggle to combat the increasing violence and criminal activity which more than 50 areas being labelled as 'no-go' zones."
• "Palmyra falls to ISIS once more: Islamists reclaim ancient city after gathering 4,000 militants to lay siege and overthrow Assad's men"--Daily Mail. As Solomon at the SNAFU blog notes, this is a big deal because the ISIS forces are almost equal in size to a Marine Expeditionary Battalion.
• "Turkey Set To Trigger Global War Through Migrant Boatlift To Greece"--The Anonymous Conservative. The inspiration for this post was news reports that, in response to the EU suspending talks over admitting Turkey into the Union, Turkey is gathering a flotilla of boats to ship 3,000 refugees from Turkey to Greece every day, while closing down refugee camps to encourage the refugees to move along. As the Anonymous Conservative points out, "[t]hat is 1.1 million migrants in a year, and Turkey has 3.5 million right now to send, with more on the way. All of that, and Greece is presently sinking financially with only 60,000 migrants in their country." I've maintained that Europe made a mistake early on by rescuing boats filled with migrants rather than turning them back or sinking them with all aboard. Now the precedent and expectation has been set, and any action to repel the invaders will lead to a wave of violence in Europe from the so-called refugees already there, and sinking of vessels crewed by Turks may spark a war.

• Related: "Italy blasted over migrant intake as experts claim 80 per cent have NO RIGHT to asylum"--The Express.

• "Russia Is Knocking Down The Rabbits"--Anonymous Conservative. This post is motivated by a news report stating that not only has Russia attempted to influence the American election in favor of Donald Trump (still not established), but that Russia is providing assistance to right-wing parties in Europe. The Anonymous Conservative writes:

     If [the article is true], it is ominous. Russia will not benefit in her competition with Germany by installing a nationalistic K-strategist in office. If Putin’s primary concern were direct competition with Germany, he would surely boost the rabbits like Merkel. Incompetence in an opponent is highly desirable.

     But Putin is following the opposite path. I can only see one reason why he would do that. Putin sees a bigger threat down the road, and he wants Europe and the USA strong, because he is hoping to see them on his side in the battle, as allies.

     To me, if this is true, it means Putin sees a global war down the road, almost certainly with Islam, and he is trying to prevent the Muslims from gaining control over Europe’s military technology and machinery – including her nukes. By installing fellow K-strategists in Europe, he maximizes the likelihood they will in-group against the Muslims, expel them, and then perhaps one day side with Russia, should radical Islam become a bigger problem globally, in a Global-war/Apocalypse scenario.

• "Talk about opening a can of worms!"--Bayou Renaissance Man. Peter Grant cites to a news report of a lawyer that has suggested that blacks should use jury nullification to block convictions of black thugs that have killed cops or whites. Grant warns that if blacks were to follow this strategy, it would severely damage the concept of rule of law, and "[i]f non-black Americans become convinced that the criminal justice system will not, in fact, deliver justice to black criminals, then they will take the law into their own hands.  You'll find that more and more black criminals are found dead at the scene of their crimes."
• "Immigration Can Kill the Democrat Party"--Sultan Knish. Daniel Greenfield postulates that the identity politics is killing the Democratic party. He believes that "[t]he Democrats are losing the Rust Belt, just like they lost the South, because they have become an urban political machine. Identity politics is just urban organizing with a lot of left-wing lipstick on top." Thus, while identity politics may have helped Hillary beat Bernie Sanders in the primary elections, it may be what doomed her campaign in the general election because she alienated rural and rust belt voters. He further reasons:

     Democrats went into this election convinced that the tide of demographic change was on their side. That tide depends heavily on immigration. If Trump secures the border, deports illegal aliens and revamps immigration to serve national interests, then the Democrats lose their demographic future. 

     And they realize it. They’ve gambled their political future on immigration. If immigration can’t deliver the demographic changes that the left touted, then they will become a minority party. 

• "The Neo-Reactionary Ben Op"--Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. One of Dreher's readers wrote to him complaining how "conservative" politicians have singularly failed at conserving anything:

... the truth of the matter is that Conservatism, Inc. not only (perhaps even deliberately) failed to conserve the natural family or religious liberty or the sanctity of human life or pretty much anything else; it did so precisely because it was ideologically aligned with global capital on one side and the cultural commissars of the sexual revolution on the other. This was not an accident, it was baked into the Buckley/Kristol cake.

Dreher responded by observing:

I had not really thought of the Benedict Option as a neoreactionary project, mostly because I know little about neoreaction. What I do know — and this is something I speak to in the book — is that the logic of the Enlightenment has deposited us on this far shore. Liberal democracy is a fruit of the Enlightenment, but we are discovering that it cannot produce within people the sentiments it needs to sustain itself. This, I believe, is what Adams meant when he wrote that the US Constitution is fit only for a “moral and religious” people. Without religion, the passions of men will tear through the Constitution like a whale through a net, he wrote.