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I’ve recently learned something new that I think I should share with you. It is survival computing. In general I am not a big fan of power inverters, and I think you should run as much off of 12 volts as possible, but there are a lot of benefits to having a laptop available, and phones and tablets are priceless if you have kids. I’m also going to cover a $25 low voltage/low amperage computer solution that is currently being used to build perimeter security systems, remote listening posts, and even balloon lifted radio relay antennas. This is pretty cool stuff.

The most difficult part of writing this column has been to condense down everything I have learned into small, bite sized chunks, but when it comes to radiation, I think I have failed. Everyone wants to talk about nuclear bombs and EMP strikes, but getting someone to pay attention to what happens next is nearly impossible. Radiation, whether it be fallout from those initial nuclear strikes that may or may not happen, or from the nuclear plants that will melt down shortly after **whatever** burns down our current reality, will be a part of survival. If you are unprepared for it, you are going to die. I don’t see how I can make it more simple.

We will be taking a break from the normal schedule here at GunsAmerica until the week before SHOT Show in January, so I thought it would be nice to share with you some of the subjects and products that I am working on for the coming year. If you haven’t read this column all along [...]

Thermoelectric generators are not a new technology. “TEG” power was discovered in 1821, but I have to admit, it is new to me. I recently discovered three consumer products that create electricity from direct heat, and all three of them have survival applications. One of them is the best bugout or camp stove I have ever encountered, and I would take it one step further and say that it is the best bugout cooking solution I have ever encountered, period. A second is made for generating electricity while you cook your dinner, and I had marginal success with it. The third is made for a high level of direct heat electricity production, and you can drive it from your rocket stove, a camp stove, and they have models from 10 watts up to 100 watts that use waste heat from your wood stove.

I have avoided the subject of “bugging out” in this series until now, and it was intentional. Most bugout articles are absolute garbage. I even saw one in a large format news stand magazine that compared **children’s backpacks** because in the same issue were several advertising spreads from Columbia. Bugging out is a great topic if you want clicks and magazine purchases, but few people address what it means to actually bug out, and the different scenarios that may force you to leave a secure location. Think about it. Are the roads jammed? Am I going to be on foot at some point? I can’t hide that I am carrying resources, and at some point I may have to deal with “the authorities” who are going to make sure that I am unarmed. How do I maximize the money that I can spend right now, to perhaps survive at some point out on the road to somewhere.

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?

This 33 second video from Febuary 8th never made the national news, not even Drudge, despite that fact that it has over 3,000,000 plays on Youtube. Alex Jones (aka Bill Hicks) even played information gatekeeper on it by changing the story from the original “breaking” story of a nuke, to later explaining that it was a chemical plant. What do you think it was? But the bigger question is, why wasn’t it injected into the 24 hour news cycle for the talking heads to speculate on for at least a day? Could it be that the powers that be decided it wasn’t the time for the next nuclear fear porn? Why would they do that? Is it because that the real “black swan” event scheduled to trigger WWIII is set to be nukes?

From what I can tell, nobody is going to send me a Facebook notification 24 hours before Russia, China, “terrorists” (ie. our own shadow government), or the US under official license launches a nuke. Radiation is silent once you are outside the blast radius of a nuclear bomb, so unless news of the blast makes it onto Drudge, how would you even know that a blast has occurred? Up until now we have focused our attention on Geiger tube radiation meters, but I recently found out that those meters tend to BLANK OUT at radiation levels that aren’t even on the level of a CT scan. For this article I consulted with Shane Connor, owner of the famous radiation site KI4U.com. I bought potassium iodide from him and had him calibrate my Civil Defense meter back in the 90s. He is still doing it today, and he calibrated four meters for us for this article.