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Take it from me. You never know when your house could go up in flames. I like this advice for prepping from Rex Nanorum at The Loadout Room:
If you’ve been prepping for a little while, you’ve probably got the basics covered. You have a bug-out bag, a decent stash of MRE’s or #10 cans of freeze-dried food and a plan to keep it all secure once you’re hunkered down. What’s next? Besides piling up more supplies, what else can you do to further prepare yourself for a disaster? Here are 5 ideas you may find useful in going from beginner to intermediate prepper.
1. Bug out picnic/range day/camping
This is a great way to include the family. If we’re having a slow weekend day and want to have a little adventure I’ll yell “bug out picnic!” and give a time limit for when we’re driving away. This helps with organization, prioritization and delegation of tasks. These little adventures are also a good way to cycle out older supplies and shake down your gear for deficiencies.
2. Skill-of-the month
Reading through accounts of people who have survived through terrible circumstances, you will rarely (if ever) find someone who says “I didn’t know crap but I sure spent a lot on supplies”. It is a widely held opinion that the most important tool is between your ears. So, try your hand at a new skill once a month. I’m not saying go out and buy a full reloading setup to get familiarized; I’m saying once a month you should take a crack at a new skill that you may find useful to add to your mental arsenal. Don’t just stop at an instructional video or book, get hands-on experience to drive home the lesson. Some ideas are: lock-picking, primitive fire starting, small game trapping, food preservation techniques, first-aid instruction or celestial navigation.
3. Spice up your food preps
Look around for new and tasty additions to your foodstores. Living off a 50 lb bag of rice will get old quick and it doesn’t take much to change up the menu a bit. Search for foods with a long shelf life that are different than what you’ve got a lot of. Smoked wild Alaskan salmon with a shelf life of up to 10 years? Count me in. Honey, bouillon and salt are all essential and have extreme shelf lives. Some Johnny’s seasoning salt and Tang drink powder are cheap and easy products to literally spice up your meals. Not to mention sustainability years after the apocalypse- throw some seed packets in your cache to offer fresh foods if possible to the end times.
Read more here.
Top 10 Survival Tips
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Are you going to the polls on 8 November with one hand on the lever and the other holding your nose? With six weeks to go and inane droning on the presidential election intensifying, you might want to tune out the talking heads and tune into Netflix’s latest release, The Crown. At $130 million, the biggest budget for a TV series of all time, the series (begins 4 November) focuses on the 25-year-old Queen Elizabeth, newly married and preparing to ascend the throne. BBC drama lovers, according to the Federalist’s Gracy Olmstead, will see lots of familiar faces in the starring lineup.
The heart of the drama is Queen Elizabeth’s relationship with the two important men in her life—Prince Philip and Winston Churchill. Also explored are the political rivalries and personal intrigues during a decade of the Queen’s reign, highlighting the sensitive juggling she must coordinate between her private world and her public life.
Claire Foy plays the young Queen Elizabeth II.
Matt Smith plays Prince Phillip.
John Lithgow plays Sir Winston Churchill.
The Crown | Official Trailer [HD] | Netflix
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The Wall Street Journal does a pretty good job of laying out a serious list of national security issues that the FBI, to date, has beat around the bush on. Don’t Americans deserve the truth for a change? Lester Holt appeared to have no interest in any of a series of issues of deep concern regarding Clinton’s integrity and honesty. Donald Trump played Mr. Nice Guy in the first debate. Americans do not believe that Hillary Clinton is trustworthy. It is time the trustworthiness door is swung wide open so Americans can see the real Hillary Clinton
The WSJ writes: “FBI Director James Comey: His probe of the former Secretary of State’s private email server is looking more like a kid-glove exercise with each new revelation.”
House Oversight Chairman Jason Chaffetz on Friday disclosed that the FBI granted immunity to Mrs. Clinton’s top aides as part of its probe into whether Mrs. Clinton mishandled classified information. According to Mr. Chaffetz, this “limited” immunity was extended to former chief of staff Cheryl Mills and senior adviser Heather Samuelson, in order to get them to surrender their laptops, which they’d used to sort through Mrs. Clinton’s work-versus-personal emails.
The FBI also offered immunity to John Bentel, who directed the State Department’s Office of Information Resources Management; to Bryan Pagliano, Mrs. Clinton’s IT guru; and to an employee of Platte River Networks (PRN), which housed the Clinton server.
Meantime, the FBI waited until late Friday to dump another 189 pages of documents from its investigation, including notes from interviews with Ms. Mills and Ms. Samuelson, Mr. Pagliano, Clinton confidante Huma Abedin, and Platte River Network employees. They raise even more questions.
James Comey’s Clinton Immunity
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The majority of the gun control rhetoric you hear worming its way around Washington is progressive, fact-free, folly. My friend, Bob Levy, Cato Institute Chairman and one of a handful of thoroughly objective gun control scholars in America, delivers the reality of the gun control issue. In short:
Millions of so-called assault weapons are now used for hunting, self- defense, target shooting, and even Olympic competition. Any attempt to buy them back would almost certainly backfire: Lawbreakers, who rely on their weapons, would retain them, as would mentally deranged persons who aren’t motivated by financial incentives.
There are hundreds of millions of magazines in circulation with a capacity of 10 rounds or more. Realistically, they cannot be confiscated. Homemade magazines are easy to assemble. Experienced users can replace an empty magazine in a couple of seconds.
Surveys indicate that less than 2 percent of guns used by criminals are bought at gun shows… Violence-prone buyers who fail those checks can purchase weapons illegally, or steal them.
It’s doubtful that new gun controls- imposed mostly on persons who are not part of the problem will be effective.
The Heller Ruling, Five Years On (Robert Levy)
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Many developed market politicians are talking up infrastructure spending as a way to generate an economic stimulus, but here in The Wall Street Journal, Phil Gramm pokes some holes in the idea that building highways-to-nowhere will get economies out of their rut. In fact, he likens the push to the same policies that led the world into global recession in 2007-08.
More government spending, particularly for infrastructure projects, is the mantra in Washington and other capitals. But two factors stand in the way. First, the governments of most developed economies are broke. According to their own government figures for 2015, the total public debt of European Union members as a share of GDP is 85%, U.S. debt is 101% and Japanese debt is 229%. Second, the rates of return on infrastructure investments are generally low. As European Central Bank President Mario Draghi said in an interview last October, “There aren’t many public investments with a high rate of return.”
With infrastructure spending so popular and government coffers so empty, the appeal of subverting private wealth to serve government objectives has become even more attractive. The latest scheme to do so is the European Union’s attempt to “incentivize” more insurance investment in public infrastructure as part of its “Solvency II” regulatory regime. In January the EU lowered capital standards for infrastructure investments by as much as 40% but cited no major errors in the old risk model or any new empirical evidence to justify the change. Instead, the EU repeatedly emphasized its need for “€2 trillion in [infrastructure] investment” by 2020.
The U.S. seems set to follow Europe’s lead. The Treasury Department’s new Federal Insurance Office released a report last year encouraging “state insurance regulators to assess the current [risk-based capital] approach and explore appropriate ways to increase incentives for infrastructure investments by insurers.”
Haven’t we seen this movie before? Didn’t lowering capital standards in the mortgage industry have a bad ending? Remember the subprime-mortgage meltdown and the 2007-08 financial crisis?
Private vs Public: Infrastructure Spending
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Express.co.uk is right on the money, as Debbie and I see here on the ground in Paris. The French are fed up. Donald Trump resonates with the French, as does Marine Le Pen.
The French presidential race has been rocked after an opinion poll showed leader of the National Front party, Marine Le Pen, is by far the most popular political figure among right-wing supporters, and also gaining ground among left-wing circles.
Only 53 per cent of right-wing supporters claimed to feel the same way about France’s former head of state Nicolas Sarkozy, and 67 per cent for Alain Juppé, who is currently favoured to win the spring 2017 presidential election.
The poll made another shocking revelation: two thirds of the French – 63 per cent – think that left-wing politicians could be wiped off the French political scene following next year’s elections.
France: Far-right Le Pen vows to end EU dominance
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I had a few reactions to Gary Johnson’s televised admission that he didn’t know what Aleppo was. The first was “how refreshing to see someone on television admit that he doesn’t know something!” It’s an open secret in the think tank/pundit-sphere that the first rule of talking about politics on TV is to proceed as though you know everything about everything. “If you’re on TV talking about it, you’re an expert on it,” as one Media Professional put it.
Teaching this way of thinking is helpful to the rare aspiring pundit who worries about what he doesn’t know, or who lives in fear that he might wind up on a split screen with the former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq on the subject. (Spoiler: Former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Christopher Hill, who took time out of his day to do an interview trashing Johnson, does smarm better than he does Syrian politics or geography . If anybody should be embarrassed from this whole thing, it’s Chris Hill.)
My second reaction, though, was to think what a sad reflection the interview was on the extent to which the Libertarian (and libertarian) infrastructure had underinvested in foreign policy. Hundreds of millions of dollars each year pump through the conservative and liberal foreign policy complexes to train foot soldiers, educate future policymakers, and generally condition the battlefield in a way amenable to the prerogatives of neoconservatism and liberal imperialism, respectively. There is nothing similar from the viewpoint of non-interventionism or restraint in Washington.
Foreign policy is an elite sport in the United States, and the media and pundit world quickly piled on Johnson in a way many voters wouldn’t have. But particularly with a Libertarian candidate, elites play a role in legitimizing or delegitimizing a candidate, and this was all they needed to pile on. Never mind that I doubt Mike Pence could point to Aleppo on a map–he could have shot a winsome smile and mumbled something about American exceptionalism that would have sufficed. Johnson was unprepared because there’s little constituency for preparing him.
But as I stewed about how Johnson lacked a foreign policy team–and how my former colleagues at Cato had to fight long shot, lopsided battles day in and day out in Washington–the third thought occurred to me. If you think the United States is terrifically secure–so secure that Americans are far removed from the consequences of unsound foreign policy making–then where is the pressure for more restrained policy supposed to come from? From voters, who are almost totally untouched by the negative consequences of extravagant foreign policies? From elites, who are totally untouched?
The sad coda to this line of thinking was that perhaps Gary Johnson was paying exactly the right amount of attention to foreign policy, given the incentive structure he faces. I recalled a meeting at the office of a prominent libertarian magazine where I was invited to discuss foreign policy with him before his 2012 presidential campaign. The convener had invited a neoconservative journalist and me to brief the candidate. As NJ and I dutifully attacked each other on the Iraq War, blowback, and U.S.-Iran relations, the candidate seemed attentive but uninterested. Not unlike the average American–or even the average American politician–in the absence of talking points carefully drawn up and hammered home by staff.
It’s a certain sort of wistful whimsy that holds if we just #LetGaryDebate, the Libertarian candidate could break through. That seems exceedingly unlikely, given his press appearances in the 2016 campaign thus far. But if libertarians, or Libertarians, are going to play a more prominent role in national politics, dramatically expanding the libertarian foreign policy infrastructure seems like an important prerequisite.
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 Unlike poor ol’ Kim K., the guy who forced his way into our room was not masked, did not tie us up in the bathroom, and didn’t take anything. Our intruder only wanted to help. Especially making coffee.
I was startled on our 5th floor balcony when something furry seemed to be bumping into my leg. Sans cafe at this point, it took a couple of bumps to realize that it was something more aggressive than my cotton-terry robe brushing my leg. Oui, c’etait Richard, a very serious, beautiful Chow (a.k.a. Puffy Lion Dog, appropriate for the Shangri La).
He apparently isn’t as big as he looks, as he had squeezed himself through the narrow iron fencing between our balcony and his owners’.
Bonne journée.
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The #1 visitor destination in Paris is the magnificent Eiffel Tower. We are in Paris for two lengthy visits per year and are often at or near the Eiffel Tower, as many of our favorite restaurants are on Rue St. Dominique. As such, we have an excellent feel as to what to expect in terms of visitors. We know what the parked bus lineups look like, the hordes of tourists filling near every square meter under and around the ET, the long lines of impatient visitors snaking around the entrance booths to the ET, and the dozens of hawkers from Senegal waving mini Eiffel Towers.
And this visit? In a poof, it’s gone. The ET is now surrounded by a security fence. No more crowds milling underneath. The waiting lines? Reduced to a mere trickle, approaching zero. The Senegalese hawkers? Prohibited from the zone. The long lineup of tourist-filled buses and crowds of waiting riders? Almost completely gone. It’s shocking and sad and hard to see conditions changing soon. Could there any better measure of French tourist activity than the Eiffel Tower?
The word that sums up the prevailing situation is crisis. European voters know what is going on, and what to do about the crisis. In Austria, the coalition government that has ruled the country since WWII didn’t even make it out of the first round of voting. The UK—shockingly to many—has voted to exit the EU altogether. In Germany, Angela Merkel is on the ropes. In Hungary, the hard right is prevailing. In Poland, the mood is the same. And here in Paris, the mere mention of François Hollande draws snickers of disdain.
Europe is reacting strongly against the radical Muslim horde that has been sweeping over the region. And the political worm has turned. In the U.S. as well. Donald Trump has made it clear that he understands voters’ fears. At Trump’s country-wide rallies, he draws record-setting crowds, while competitor Clinton draws an ET-like trickle. The American media and the deeply entrenched Washington political elite would have voters believe otherwise. Who will be the wiser this November remains to be seen.
Paris tourism hit by militant attacks, strikes and floods
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