Exploring practical methods for preparing for the end times, including analysis of end time scripture and prophecy, current events, prepping and self-defense.
To me, this video speaks more about the design of the Federal Punch than anything else. And the host--Sam--does speak highly of his confidence in Federal hollow points whether it be the HST or the Punch. What surprised me is that the velocity of the .44 Special was under 800 fps and it still had good expansion, even through the cloth barrier and fiber board. In any event, the comparison between the two resulted in the .44 Special having a final expanded diameter larger than the 9mm, but the 9mm had more penetration.
Yeah, its basically an advertisement for the Kenai chest holster, but it raises good points about why a chest holster is a good choice for carrying while mountain biking.
This week is another post nuclear war RPG originally from the 1980s called Twilight: 2000. The photo above is a rather battered 1st edition box set that I picked up somewhere.
Published by Game Designers Workshop (GDW) in 1984, the characters take the roles of military personnel in the chaos and ruins of late-WWIII Poland. The game postulates a war breaking out in 1995 between NATO and the Warsaw Pact after an attempt to reunify East and West Germany. The war involved conventional troops, some NBC warfare, but not a full exchange of nuclear weapons. Five years after the war started, troops are still fighting, but the logistical and command chains have broken down. In game terms, this means that the characters--which are military troops--are in undersized and under supplied units that have to scavenge, trade for, or buy supplies, fuel, and ammunition.
Although the boxed set presumed Poland as a setting, there were supplements that expanded the game beyond Poland, including one I remember that took place in the Caribbean with the characters potentially being able to man a sailing vessel that was a reproduction of the U.S.S. Constitution originally intended to be used in a motion picture.
Now I have to say that, as best as I can remember, I have never played this game. A high school friend of mine had picked it up as well as some supplements but never got around to running it with our gaming group. However, some years ago, I acquired a boxed set of the first edition rule set. But since I haven't played any version of the game, I have included a couple video reviews below. The first covers the first edition of the rules. The second video gives an overview of the different editions of the game, explains why post-apocalypse games were so popular for kids growing up in the 1980s and then reviews the most recent edition of the game.
The first edition box set came with two rule books--a "Play Manual" and a "Referee's Manual"--a set of charts to assist with creating a character, a set of charts commonly used in play, an equipment list (actually a booklet), a price list of common gear, a beginning adventure ("Escape from Kalisz") and player handout, an "Intelligence Briefing" giving background for the military unit the characters begin in, a map of Poland, record sheets, and a set of four six-sided dice and a single 10-sided die. The Play Manual has a general background and explanation of terms and abbreviations, character creation rules, the general rules for tasks, skills, time and travel, etc., as well as the first part of the combat rules. The Referee's Manual has additional rules on using skills, combat, encounters, radiation and disease, repairing equipment, trade and commerce, etc.
The boxed set I have, being a used set, was missing the dice, but had stuffed into it a couple supplements detailing Soviet vehicles and U.S. Army vehicles, respectively, and a setting guide entitled The Free City Of Krakow.
When creating a character, the player roles 4d6 for each physical or mental attribute (e.g., intelligence or fitness) and subtracts 4 from the result giving a result of 0-20 (but re-rolling a 0 result). From there, you can boost an attribute you want to increase, but at the cost of reducing another attribute. And there are other characteristics that must be rolled (e.g., your radiation exposure) or selected (e.g., your nationality). Characters also will have skills depending on which branch of service and specialty they have.
The basic rule mechanic is that you take an "asset" (a character attribute or skill level), multiply it by 5 to get a target number, and then roll a percentile die (1-100 created by rolling the 10-sided dice once for multiples of 10 and a second time for the single digits with 0, 0 considered as 100) and try to get under the target number. If you roll under the target number, you succeed. If something is easier than normal, the asset X 5 result may be doubled to get a higher target number, and then the percentage die rolled. If harder, the result would be halved to get a smaller target number. Of course, other dice may be rolled for particular rules.
Because of the setting, there are, of course, rules on radiation, disease, foraging, hunting and fishing, and so on, but nowhere near the detail of the Aftermath! game covered last week. However, since the characters are all members of a military unit, there are fairly extensive rules on combat.
The game has gone through several revisions. A second edition released in 1990 had to deal with the fall of the Berlin Wall and so created a different backstory to explain the outbreak of the war. In 1993, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the game was updated again with an alternate timeline where the KGB launched a successful coup against Boris Yeltsin to maintain communist rule and then the war broke out.
In 2006, a third edition was released by a company called 93 Games Studio and renamed Twilight 2013, which moved away from the Cold War setting of the original game. However, this version wasn't very popular and the company went out of business two years later.
From the Daily Mail: "Shocking moment nun is pushed over and repeatedly kicked in Jerusalem, amid claims of a rise in attacks targeting Christians." She was just walking and minding her business when the man ran quite a distance up to her pushing her hard so that fell over onto some raised stones. He started to walk away, thought better of it, and returned to her and starting kicking her while she lay on the ground. The nun is a researcher at Jerusalem's French School of Biblical and Archaeological Research. The article indicates that the attacker was wearing tzitzit, a fringed undergarment worn by some observant Jewish men, and had been reported as being Jewish by the Times of Israel. The attacker was arrested, but, citing multiple sources, the article points out that this is an example of a growing number of insults, spitting, and attacks against Christians, particularly those dressed in religious garb.
Wadie Abunassar, the coordinator of the Holy Land Christian Forum, called attacks targetting Christians a growing phenomenon. He attributed the quick response to the attack on the nun to the fact that it was caught on video.
He said he felt 'great anger on the system and great sadness because I feel that this will not end anytime soon'. One of the problems, he said, was the deterrence against such violence.
'Many times in such cases there are no arrests and if there are arrests, sometimes after one or two days, (suspects) are released,' he added.
'In some cases, the police do not recommend the prosecution to file charges or to indict them. And in some cases, when there is indictment, the indictment is mild.'
A couple short videos on the Kenai chest holster from Gunfighters Inc. If you don't know, the Kenai is a Kydex chest holster intended for outdoors use: fishing, hunting, hiking, etc. The idea with a chest holster system is that because it is over the chest, your firearm's weight is distributed evenly, it is out of the way of backpack straps or a rifle sling but is still easily accessible. It is also high enough that you can use it with waders if you are fishing.
The full holster system comes with a harness and the holster. The holster clips into the harness and you can buy the holster shells separately, so once you have the harness you can purchase additional holsters for different firearms at a substantial savings over buying a new holster and harness together--a $70 savings at the time of this writing. They have a large number of ready to ship holsters, but if you can't find what you are looking for, they have an option for "design a custom" chest holster that has many other models of firearms.
The USA currently faces its largest measles outbreak in decades, with 2280 confirmed cases in 2025 and 910 additional cases reported in just the first 6 weeks of 2026. This re-emergence threatens one of the country's major public health achievements: the elimination of measles in 2000, a feat reached after several years of extensive nationwide vaccination efforts, including a change to a two-dose measles, mumps, and rubella vaccination schedule. The current epidemic started in January, 2025, in Texas, USA, with two imported cases, and has since spread to 45 US states. According to the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), measles elimination status requires the sustained absence of endemic transmission—defined as any continuous transmission chain—persisting for at least 1 year. Canada lost its elimination status on Nov 10, 2025, prompting the Pan American Health Organization (PAHO) to declare that the Region of the Americas—which had been the first region worldwide to eliminate measles twice—had lost its measles-free status. This development reflects a broader global resurgence of measles: on Jan 26, 2026, six European countries, including the UK and Spain, also lost their elimination status. Concerns are growing that the USA might soon face a similar outcome, with a decision from the PAHO Measles and Rubella Elimination Regional Monitoring and Re-Verification Commission forthcoming in November, 2026. ...
May 1 is an important holiday to communists who refer to it as International Workers' Day or similar. So what are communists doing this year? NPR reports:
The "May Day Strong" protest events in various cities, ranging geographically from Boston to San Francisco, are meant to mark International Labor Day. They follow anti-Trump protests under the "No Kings" banner that organizers say have drawn millions of people nationwide.
[snip]
The National Education Association — the nation's largest labor union, with 3 million members — is a key organizer of Friday's protests. NEA President Becky Pringle told NPR that the message this year is that the country should be "focusing on workers over billionaires."
"We know there are bus drivers in New York and teachers in Idaho and nurses in Louisiana who are feeling the impact of a system that has decided … to put billionaires ahead of everyone else," she said, while "cutting services like public education that this country has made to our kids and impact our future."
Organizers say more than 500 labor unions, student groups, community organizations and other groups will participate. One of those student groups, Sunrise Movement, which bills itself as "young people fighting fascism to win a Green New Deal," said that more than 100,000 students were expected to miss school, in what it called a "strike."
In North Carolina, where the NEA says per-pupil spending and teacher salaries rank near the bottom nationwide, some 20 public school districts will be closed due to planned staff absences. The NEA says educators and school workers, such as bus drivers, cafeteria workers and maintenance staff, are planning to rally in the capital, Raleigh, to pressure the state legislature for more education funding.
It goes on to list other school districts around the country that are shutting down of the communist holiday. But it is not just teachers' unions. The Guardian reports:
Thousands are expected to join an economic blackout for International Workers’ Day , as part of 3,500 “May Day Strong” events across the country today. Organizers are calling for “no school, no work, no shopping” with walkouts, marches, block parties and other gatherings planned into the evening.
On the east coast, protests were already under way by the early morning. In Manhattan, a group of Amazon workers, Teamsters and local politicians marched from the New York public library’s main branch to Amazon’s nearby corporate offices to demand the corporation cut its contracts with ICE and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). In the nation’s capital, protesters with the organization Free DC shut down intersections across the city, holding handmade banners reading “Workers over billionaires” and “Healthcare not warfare”.
By midday, six protesters with youth-led Sunrise Movement were arrested for blocking a bridge in Minneapolis, Minnesota. In Portland, Oregon, Sunrise protesters occupied a Hilton hotel lobby where DHS officials are allegedly staying.
May Day has long been an annual day of protest for the labor movement, and this year, many active movements are converging to demand no ICE, no war, and taxing the rich. The May Day Strong coalition includes labor unions, immigrants rights groups, political organizations such as the Democratic Socialists of America, and the organizers behind the No Kings protests. Friday’s economic disruption builds on a similar coordinated effort out of Minnesota in January, when tens of thousands of Twin Cities residents took off from school and work to flood the streets in protest of federal immigration agents storming the city.
So what are they protesting for? Meaning, what would they do if they got control of the country?
There is a heuristic being bandied about that says: "The purpose of a system is what it does." So today is a good day to remember what communism does. From "100 Years of Communism—and 100 Million Dead" by David Satter.
In a 1920 speech to the Komsomol, Lenin said that communists subordinate morality to the class struggle. Good was anything that destroyed “the old exploiting society” and helped to build a “new communist society.”
This approach separated guilt from responsibility. Martyn Latsis, an official of the Cheka, Lenin’s secret police, in a 1918 instruction to interrogators, wrote: “We are not waging war against individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. . . . Do not look for evidence that the accused acted in word or deed against Soviet power. The first question should be to what class does he belong. . . . It is this that should determine his fate.”
Such convictions set the stage for decades of murder on an industrial scale. In total, no fewer than 20 million Soviet citizens were put to death by the regime or died as a direct result of its repressive policies. This does not include the millions who died in the wars, epidemics and famines that were predictable consequences of Bolshevik policies, if not directly caused by them.
The victims include 200,000 killed during the Red Terror (1918-22); 11 million dead from famine and dekulakization; 700,000 executed during the Great Terror (1937-38); 400,000 more executed between 1929 and 1953; 1.6 million dead during forced population transfers; and a minimum 2.7 million dead in the Gulag, labor colonies and special settlements.
To this list should be added nearly a million Gulag prisoners released during World War II into Red Army penal battalions, where they faced almost certain death; the partisans and civilians killed in the postwar revolts against Soviet rule in Ukraine and the Baltics; and dying Gulag inmates freed so that their deaths would not count in official statistics.
If we add to this list the deaths caused by communist regimes that the Soviet Union created and supported—including those in Eastern Europe, China, Cuba, North Korea, Vietnam and Cambodia—the total number of victims is closer to 100 million. That makes communism the greatest catastrophe in human history.
The only real flaw with Satter's analysis is that he relegates communism to the past, whereas communism and its bastard offspring, Critical Theory, live on in groups such as Antifa, BLM, the Democratic Socialists of America, practically any group that employs "community organizers" and, evidently, the NEA. They may say they stand or support policies or practices that sound good, list some lofty goals, but that isn't what communist history shows. As noted, "the purpose of an organization is what it does"; or, as Christ phrased it, "Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them." And so far, their fruits in the United States have been multiple political assassinations and assassination attempts, blocking roads and highways, beating up innocent people, defending criminals, urging that violent criminals be turned loose to prey on the public, rioting, looting, undermining and cheating at elections, subverting the intelligence community to make up lies whole cloth to remove a president they don't like, conspiring to allow the invasion of the country by the third world, and otherwise being agents of chaos. If they were to achieve the political power they desire, death camps and gulags would not be far behind.
“Through multiple interviews, detectives learned that two brothers orchestrated the event in an effort to generate attention on social media and in the news,” the police wrote in a press release. “Both individuals fully admitted to their involvement and provided conclusive evidence confirming that they, and they alone, were responsible for the incident, which ultimately drew nationwide media attention.”
The two denied any ties to hate groups, but there is no word on whether they had financial or other ties with the SPLC.
From Bearing Arms: "Anti-Gun Activist Convicted of Murder in Colorado Shooting." Per the article, Lumumba Sayers Sr. belonged to an anti-violence group called Heavy Hands, Heavy Hearts that teaches kids and adults how to break the cycle of street and gang violence. On August 10, 2024, Sayers left an anti-violence event and drove to a park where Malcolm Watson was celebrating his son's birthday with family and friends and shot Watson dead. Sayers believed that Watson was responsible for the shooting death of Sayer's son and was there to get revenge. When Sayers confronted Watson, he was armed with an unregistered handgun which, he told jurors, he
carried in his pocket for protection despite not having a concealed
carry permit. Prosecutors argued that he also had another handgun
described by prosecutors as a "ghost" gun which he used to shoot and
kill Watson and then, as shown in surveillance video, was passed off to an unidentified associate who took it from the scene.
Greg has a couple articles for those of us that conceal carry but have to wear something other than jeans and a loose T-shirt. The first is from Lucky Gunner on how not to dress like a "tactical hobo" and the other from A Tailored Suit that has advice on carrying a concealed handgun while wearing a suit coat or blazer, including tips for your tailor if you can afford a tailored suit or jacket.
A link to the latest Range Master news letter, which itself has some articles and drills. One I recommend is on the shift in understanding of Jeff Cooper's color code from a measure of how ready were you to respond to violence to simply a measure of awareness. For example:
The core question moved from “Am I willing to act?” to “Am I paying attention?” Those are not the same question. One prepares a person to move decisively under stress. The other prepares them to observe events as they unfold.
Today, the Color Code appears in workplace safety briefings, active shooter presentations, and corporate training slides. In many versions, lethal force is never mentioned at all. The result is a framework stripped of its original purpose.
An article on pepper spray because sometimes you need something between a harsh word and using a lethal weapon. An excerpt that seemed particularly important:
But the thing is, the LE use case for pepper spray is not the civilian use case at all. Craig Douglas refers to pepper spray as “an eye gouge in a can,” which I like quite a lot. If you’ve ever been poked in the eye just in general it’s distracting and disorienting, and if it happens in a fight it’s even worse. The civilian use case for pepper spray is to create time and space for you, the civilian, to escape. We are not pepper spraying people so we can go hands on with them, we’re pepper spraying them so we can run the f[--]k away.
I have pepper sprayed several people in a civilian context, and it’s an incredibly low bar of force, it’s easy to articulate, and the entire point is for you to get away from the attacker. It could also be to access a more effective tool than pepper spray given the situation, but we have to understand that our key use case for spray is to spray and sprint.
Massad Ayoob's 5-point checklist of things to say to police after an armed encounter. Greg comments: "Despite some attorneys in disagreement, I firmly believe that Massad Ayoob created the definitive list of statements that you should make to the police after a defensive shooting."
Some history: An article about Frank Hamer, the Texas Ranger that hunted down Bonnie and Clyde, and the Remington Model 8 semi-auto rifle he used.
The article is at the anti-gun site, The Trace; but if you can ignore the wailing and gnashing of teeth, the article outlines some major changes in rules planned or being made by the ATF which should benefit gun owners and gun dealers.
An article on "What Criminals Know That You Don't" which delves into some aspects of how criminals select victims or targets of opportunity, but also discusses some other aspects of crime statistics including the following bit (bold added):
The numbers on armed resistance are worth knowing. Complying completely in an armed robbery still leaves a 25 percent chance of injury, and the robbery succeeds 90 percent of the time. Resistance with a firearm drops injury odds to 17 percent and rarely allows the crime to complete. Resistance before injury drops that to around 6 percent. For rape specifically, armed resistance is the most effective deterrent to completion and does not increase physical harm to the victim. Research also shows defensive gun uses frequently occur without a shot fired. The presence of a firearm alone can stop a crime in progress.
A gun is not the first solution. It is the last. But as Hearne noted, “Most of the time, you don’t need a parachute, but when you do, nothing else will substitute.”
In a recent "Gun & Prepping News" I had linked to an article on using super-glue for first-aid. Greg also links to that article, but provides some addition tips on using super-glue to close wounds. He also comments: "Vet Bond is the chemical equivalent of Derma-Bond at 1/3 the cost. The primary difference between that and standard super glue is that the Vet Bond won’t sting as much and it lasts about one day longer than super glue."
Finally, Greg links to an article on how humanity is about to "fork" in different directions, the first of which are how people use AI tools:
AI has handed every human being on the planet an extraordinary set of tools: the ability to build software, design products, generate content, start companies, and pursue ambitions that previously required teams of specialists and millions in capital.
Some people will pick those tools up and build. They’ll become creators, entrepreneurs, and innovators. They’ll use AI to amplify their vision and bring it into the world. They will be the architects of the next economy.
Others will watch. They’ll consume: watch Netflix, play video games, scroll social media… be passively entertainment. The tools will be available to them. They simply won’t pick them up.
Although the Constitution of 1787 mentioned citizens, it did not define citizenship. It was not until 1868, with the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, that a definition of citizenship entered the Constitution. Here is the familiar language: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.” Thus there are two components to American citizenship: birth or naturalization in the U.S. and being subject to the jurisdiction of the U.S.
We have somehow come today to believe that anyone born within the geographical limits of the U.S. is automatically subject to its jurisdiction. But this renders the jurisdiction clause utterly superfluous and without force. If this had been the intention of the framers of the Fourteenth Amendment, they would simply have said that all persons born or naturalized in the U.S. are thereby citizens. Furthermore, the principal supporters of the Fourteenth Amendment were explicit about the meaning of “subject to the jurisdiction”: it meant owing exclusive allegiance to the U.S. and none to any other country.
The article is a deep dive on this subject including the history, predecessor laws that informed the citizenship clause, and comments and debate from the Congressmen that wrote and debated the clause. The author also closes with some comments about how duel citizenship undermines the idea of citizenship and the nation-state.
