Quote of the Day
-JWR over at Survival Blog
Survival Blog Down
This weekend, our server in Sweden was put under a “ping flood” Denial of Service (DOS) attack that resulted in 65% packet loss for a few hours.
This attack was most likely orchestrated by the man in Texas who last week anonymously sent me a racist rant and threats against both my blog site and my books. (His e-mail began: “You ni**er lover you have five days to take all links and any [sic] metion for [sic] links below off your site. If you [sic] dont [sic] do it I will post [sic] everyone [sic] of [sic] you [sic] cr***y books on [sic] prirate [sic] sites and kiss your ni**er loving income from them good [sic] by [sic] .”)
The attack was timed for a three-day holiday weekend, because the miscreants expected that the staff at our ISP would be unavailable to help up reconfigure.
OBTW, the attack did not initially include our dotted quad backup address: 95.143.193.148 (Which is explained here.)
At least this provided a good test for our Continuity of Web Services (COWS) defenses. Obviously, we are now going to need multiple mirror sites as well as an adaptive cloud server that can handle any future DOS onslaught.
The other lesson this teaches is the importance of having a backup. We provide an offline archive of the past six years of SurvivalBlog posts, available for a modest price.
~Jim Rawles~
Editor, www.SurvivalBlog.com
TOR here: I tried to go to the site this morning and couldn’t get there. I figured it was just one of those internet things that just happen. You know the kind where a little something is off on one side or another and you just can’t get to a site, happens all the time. Apparantly it wasn’t. Obviously this is lame. Hopefully it will get figured out sooner instead of later.
I guess this is a good lesson about relying on online information or resources. Between Survival Blog, stuff I have in the cloud and various sites I go to for this or that I am guilty of this. In the immediate future I will look to pull some stuff off the web. In particular I will be ordering the Survival Blog archive and copying stuff out from other places.
Survivalblog Article: A Practical Utilitarian’s Take on Firearms and Calibers
Worth looking at and thinking about.
I respectfully disagree on the overall assessment of M16/M4/AR-15 platform. They do need to be cleaned now and again but nothing crazy. They don’t need to be spotless, just have the inside free of junk (chunks of carbon usually being the culprit) and some lube in there. If you are unwilling to do that then buy an AK. As to durability. I haven’t seen the Buttstock/ buffer tube of an AR series rifle break during the course of military operations. Like any precise mechanical object they can be broken; I confident it would be easy to destroy any of the old WWII bolt action warhorses, a Remington 870, AK, Glock or whatever in 60 seconds flat by slamming it repeatedly into a rock or a curb. (The exception to this is the old M2 .50 cal because it is too heavy to swing well and has really thick metal components, I would have to take off the barrel and mess up the threads or take pliers to the trigger mechanism which would kind of be cheating).
In my opinion the M16/M4/AR-15 platforms ergonomics and commonality/ availability of parts/ accessories/ ammunition as well as the unparraleled modularity outweigh it’s modest negatives.
Cookies on Survivalblog
Read this immediately!!
Today I was reading Survival Blog and interestingly Jim Rawles said it was time to back off of purchasing Gold and Silver. To put it into perspective The Godfather loves PM’s more than about everything except his kids, 1911 pistols and long term shef stable food. I personally made my last purchase a few months ago when silver was $28 or so. To be honest I don’t plan to consider making more purchases until it retreats back to that area. I am not a professional advisor or anything and if you follow my ideas you are truly on your own. Consider yourself disclaimed. Personally I will not be doing any selling because we are not yet at what I would consider our desired “core holding”. However if I had more than that I would seriously consider selling. I am just telling this to you guys to counter all the hysteria out there in our circles. I also have to note that the people promoting said hysteria almost always directly or indirectly profit from it.
The smart money is not buying into PM’s at these prices.
Does Preparing For TEOTWAWKI Cover All Other Scenarios?
I have heard it said that if you truly prepare for a genuine full on mad max scenario all the other scenarios are covered by default. I used to say that wasn’t quite true. Now I would clarify by saying that it covers you for a lot (versus all) other scenarios.
Obviously if you are prepared for a genuine end of the world event then a power outage or even a Katrina like mid length regional disaster is just a practice drill. Having serious depth in food you normally eat will let you wait till sales to resupply and thus get more food for less money. If you have 15+ mags per gun, cases and cases of ammo as well as plenty of spare parts you are well positioned for any sort of gun ban.
However it is also worth noting what the TEOTWAWKI plan doesn’t cover.
It completely ignores all sorts of highly likely financial/ unemployment/ slow slide issues. That Cold War mentality where the only option is that everything will go just fine until the world ends misses this one. You need to be concerned about your overall debt as well as savings for a rainy day. Can you afford your super spiffy retreat if you lose that high paying job? Even if your ‘retreat’ is paid off it is only yours so long as you can pay the property taxes.
Also I have a concern that this sort of planning can lead one not to worry about the progressively more violent world we are living in because you’ll just carry a rifle everywhere if TEOTWAWKI happens. That sort of mentality isn’t realistic. My real concern with this bionary approach is that it heavily weights things like owning rifles and stashing sand bags n barbed wire against more practical concerns like concealed carrying a pistol whenever possible and other more realistic home/ personal defense stuff. You need to be worried a lot more about 2-3 armed criminals who are probably on drugs breaking into your place tonight a lot more than EU/ Russian/ Mexican soldiers enforcing world government upon you.
I think that if you keep a solid financial footing and put plenty of effort/ energy into preparing to defend yourself today then there is nothing wrong with the majority of your energy going toward the kind of worst case scenario deserving of a fiction novel.
Jim’s Quote of the Day
I know some of you, for whatever reason do not read Survivalblog so now and again I try to hilight things from there which pop out at me. Jims Quote of the Day is one of them so read it.
quote of the day
“No investment will pay returns as high as paying down debt.” – Nolan Lickey, Business, Seventh Edition, by Pride, et.al., Houghton Mifflin Publishers, 2002
Stolen from Survivalblog
Total Survivalist Blog 