New American Truth

This morning (as I type this) I’ve seen multiple news stories about how no one won the PowerBall Lottery leaving the lottery management folks to estimate the new jackpot at $350 Million (annuity totals) or a cash value of $222.8 Million – which, for the sake of this article, I’m going to round up to $223M.  My question was this: If you’re a survivalist/prepper and you win the lottery, what the heck do you do? Read the full story

This morning’s facebook and twitter world seem to be full of posts about The Walking Dead, zombies and preppers.  It made me think about how much of what we do (seriously) to be prepared versus what we’d do if we were preparing for a zombie apocalypse.  The decision I came to?  It wouldn’t be all that different.  Let’s think about it for a few minutes… Read the full story

First let me say this:  We at New American Truth are horrified and distraught at the loss of life in Newtown, Connecticut.  The history of violence in or against our schools in the United States predates our country’s founding.  It should shame us all that we act so aggressively to prevent accidental deaths by fire or physical injury but we so completely neglect the prevention of violence in any realistic manner.  Instead of arming willing and capable teachers and training our students to never accept being a victim, the educational leadership mouths meaningless platitudes about “zero tolerance” and “teaching individual responsibility.”  The only way to survive a violent attack and emerge victorious against evil is to train for it and respond to it with greater justified and completely moral violence.  Until that reality becomes accepted and spread through our schools, violence will continue; the loss of innocent lives will continue; and politicians will continue to use such horrific events, leveraging them for their own power-grabbing agendas. Read the full story

As I read various articles and blogs about survival preparation, planning, preparedness, etc. it occurs to me that each writer, including myself, holds a greater expertise in certain areas of preparedness and survival than in others. I know… “Duh!” right? What would I expect? Everyone has that which they have mastered to a greater extent and those skills that they still need to practice. It is human nature, I believe, to prefer to practice that which we are already good at and to neglect, to some extent, the things we aren’t as good at. Why? Because we naturally don’t like failure and when we practice the things we’re not as particularly skilled at, we don’t do them as well… leaving us feeling a greater sense of failure than when we efficiently and neatly accomplish another skill set we’re far better at. Read the full story

Everyone has a different idea of what a “tool kit” is and you can find a plethora of articles on “every day carry.”  My wonderment, as brought up by a conversation I had yesterday, is what preppers or survivalists carry each day that they consider essential for their survival.  The bigger question, for me, is what they think they should be carrying but don’t due to legal restrictions (weapons), convenience (bulkiness) or perception (how would people look at them). Read the full story

In my book, “Personal Disaster Planning Handbook,” I describe a layered and redundant system of preparation that includes both a backpack/bug out bag and a load bearing vest.  In the book I’m very clear that you have to make the choice whether you load your vest to support survival, defense (combat) or both.  Recently I had a friend of mine point out to me that combat is entirely about survival so if you load your vest to support defense/combat then, in his opinion, you ARE loading it for survival.  This gave me pause and forced me to consider a few things. Read the full story

The creativity level of people who are trying to sell something never ceases to amaze me.  Manufacturers, vendors, bloggers, etc… they all seem capable of coming up with a new spin on why you need something they’ve got.  I’m as guilty as the next guy: I try to sell my books and certainly this website makes a few dollars from advertising (enough to keep us up and running anyway).  For all that, I still believe that basic preparedness and survival starts, first and foremost, with YOU and your knowledge.  I also firmly believe that survival and preparedness are two different things. Read the full story

Isn’t it a shame that we can’t get people as excited about preparedness as one author did about a man’s variations in his sexual interests?  I mean… yeah, I understand that almost anything to do with sex is more interesting that preparedness, planning and survival, but if you die for lack of preparedness you’re not going to be around to enjoy sex anyway, right?  That said, the whole “fifty shades” thing got me to thinking that there are probably that many different kind of preppers (if not more) and quite often we’re all lumped together in the same basket in spite of our differences. Read the full story

Way “back in the day” I picked up my first Spyderco knife – an Endura.  Through my years wearing a uniform on the street I carried many a different lockblade folding knife and the assortment included other variations on that basic Endura design.  Spydero knives all have that trademark thumbhole and most of the ones I’ve owned have the plastic/synthetic grips I’ve grown accustomed to.  The early variants had a molded plastic pocket clip but that has changed to steel across the years.  Recently I received Spyderco’s Manix 2 to field test and I’ve come away quite pleased. Read the full story

I had to wait a few days to calm down before writing this. It seems a friend of mine, who has never said anything directly to me about my prepper ways, decided to put up a couple of posts on facebook. The posts were not insulting per se, but were full of implied criticism of ANYONE who prepares in any way. To make things worse, to me, this person lives about as far from a nuclear power plant as I do and has even less chance of escaping the area should something go wrong. So rather than do anything proactive to be ready (you know… prepare?) this individual has decided it would be great sport to make fun of preppers. Read the full story