Articles by Paul Helinski

No matter how much food you store, it will never be enough. At some point you will have to either grow your own food, or provide a valuable product or service that you can swap for food, or for the “coin of the realm” (whatever money turns out to still work after the collapse), that you can swap for food. But in most parts of the world, food doesn’t grow year round regardless. Grains will store with little outside intervention. Beans will certainly store in most environments, and potatoes, winter squashes, and some fruits will last the winter if you provide for them a root cellar of some sort that will keep them fresh. Other than that, if you want to eat vegetables and fruits year round, you will have to learn how to can your food. It isn’t hard, but you have to do it now, because as you’ll see, canning is fraught with pitfalls if you don’t do it right.

This video is from Luke Rudkowski from We Are Change (the guy who made the 911 Loose Change video). He is in Baltimore documenting the Martial Law that is going on there. We have said for some time that it won’t be called Martial Law when the time comes. They know that is a hot button word. But what else is this? Clearly from the video there are no “protestors” or looters in the vicinity, and there are even other LE officers in battle gear. Are you prepared to face the line of shields in your neighborhood? Are you an LE officer or military serviceman who takes your oath seriously? Please, comment below as to your thoughts. Luke is a documented journalist and has been admitted to the halls of the US Congress to interview legislators. This is no joke.

This is one of the few articles in this series where I haven’t yet reviewed the product, but I plan to follow it up with a review in the future because I bought one. My intention in posting this today is to give the regular readers of this column a official heads up on a heavily discounted and apparently high quality product that may be a priority for you in your prepping supplies. For many years I have been looking at wood cook stoves. If you have never seen one (and I actually haven’t in person), these are not regular woodstoves. Wood cookstoves were popular in the US between the 1880s and 1930s. They look like a regular stove, with an oven and burners, but they run on wood and have no electric or gas components.

I find it shocking that the least popular articles in this series are always about the threat of nuclear war. Because from a purely survival standpoint, nuclear war is the only scenario that will most likely result in the actual post apocalyptic society for which we are all preparing, a society in which survival will truly be of the fittest, and of the most prepared. Nuclear war is also the most likely scenario of where our current international disaster is headed, and I’m not saying this to be alarmist. If you look around the world right now, clashes are ramping out of control in nearly ever corner of the globe. World currencies are competing for who can devalue themselves the quickest, because of un-repayable debt, and America is being shut out of world trade deals, because everyone but Americans now understand that our reign is over. If you were an American power broker, wouldn’t you say it’s about time to pop a nuke or two and get the world back in line with American values?

The title of this week’s column was named intentionally to mean more than just specifically what we will be talking about. Nowhere in this series will you find, “go do this and you will survive!” There is no such thing. But building skills that you don’t currently have, and backing up those skills with some usable resources, is at this point prudent. All I can do is sow some seeds of knowledge and hope that in your own best interest, you will follow up and build a library of survival knowledge, and a pile of survival assets. If you have followed us from the start, you will remember a year ago when I wrote the first article on seeds, and my focus then was “don’t screw it up” (because you will, and it is better to get the screws ups under your belt). Here we are now a year later, and for most of the country, this is a great time to start some seeds. Danger of a last freeze is quickly passing, and it is time for new things to grow.

People get really emotional about Hi-Point guns. You could say that folks “either love them or hate them,” but I think there is a better explanation than that. Quality control and customer service are always an issue with small and fast growing companies. Hi-Point has had its ups and downs, so some people got good guns, and some people got very bad guns. Everyone I know who has purchased a Hi-Point in the last few years has been delighted with it, and my local gun dealer said that he sells a ton of them and none of them ever come back as having problems. To me that says that the word on the street is that Hi-Point guns are now generally reliable, and they have always been very inexpensive for what you get…when it works.

am not one who upgrades guns all that much. But since getting my first set of tritium night sights stock on a Springfield EMP, I decided that this is the one thing that for my carry guns I must insist on adding, if I didn’t procrastinate it forever. My main carry gun, and pretty much only carry gun these days, is another Springfield gun, the XD-S in .45ACP. It is a single stack, two finger grip that shoots like a 3 finger grip, or better. And until now, I had indeed procrastinated putting the night sights on it. When I read about the new TFX tritium sights from Truglo, I had to try them. Everything I have purchased Truglo in the past has exceeded expectations for the money, and these sights were no different.

A friend the other day asked me if I knew anything about setting up a charitable trust to purchase a silencer. He specifically asked because he’d like one for survival, to be able to get in and get out quietly hunting game on public and private land. My answer is what the heck do you want one of those for when you can get a killer crossbow for about the same price?

Can you believe it has been over a year since I started this column? If you are a new subscriber, you may have missed some of the seminal early stuff, so I would go into the archives and read some if you have the time. There is more information here than you’d find in years of subscriptions to print mags, and hundreds of hours of surfing survival blogs, which are both mostly full of fluff geared towards advertisers. From the start this column has taken a hard look at actual survival without the benefit of modern society, but we began with the question, why should we do this?