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Category Archives: Survival

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The OODA Loop may Save Your Life

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by: Brent Smith at the Common Constitutionalist

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The following is a departure from my normal politically oriented articles, but I think with all the violence popping up everywhere in America, it’s more important than ever to understand and develop situational awareness. It can, quite literally, save your life and the lives of loved ones.

In the video below, Navy SEAL Commander Mark Divine of SEALFIT explains the OODA Loop – Observation – Orientation – Decision – Action, and incorporates it into the Cooper Color System.

The OODA loop is a practiced mindset of constant situational awareness, and the ability to take swift and decisive action from the information collected from that awareness.

This is different from mere paranoia. Situational awareness is more like tactical observation. It’s more than just noticing that there are a bunch of people gathered across the street waiting to cross, or a blue van driving by. It’s more like “Where’s Waldo,” or “one of these things is not like the others.”

Practicing situational awareness can keep you or your loved ones from simply walking out into traffic or prevent you from entering a potentially dangerous or deadly situation or encounter, by merely avoiding it all together.

With practice, one will be able to pick out Waldo fairly quickly – like the guy wearing a trench coat in the middle of summer. And with practice, you’ll find there is almost never a Waldo to find – that everything is the way it’s supposed to be. read more

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An Inspiring Real-Life Lord of the Flies Story

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from the Guardian:

The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months

A still from the 1963 film of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies.

A still from the 1963 film of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. Photograph: Ronald Grant

 

When a group of schoolboys were marooned on an island in 1965, it turned out very differently from William Golding’s bestseller, writes Rutger Bregman.

For centuries western culture has been permeated by the idea that humans are selfish creatures. That cynical image of humanity has been proclaimed in films and novels, history books and scientific research. But in the last 20 years, something extraordinary has happened. Scientists from all over the world have switched to a more hopeful view of mankind. This development is still so young that researchers in different fields often don’t even know about each other. read more

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Video Podcast – Ammo Background Checks Halted – Breaking Down My Survival Roll

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by: Brent Smith

Federal Judge Blocks California’s ‘Onerous and Convoluted’ Ammunition Restrictions

A federal judge on Thursday blocked a California law requiring background checks for people buying ammunition, issuing a sharply worded rebuke of “onerous and convoluted” regulations that violate the constitutional right to bear arms.

I use a day pack when hiking on the weekends. With my pack, I attach an additional canvas roll filled with what I consider additional essentials.

I break it down to show what I carry. read more

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New Ember Camp Stove

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Ember is designed to work with solid fuel rather than gas
Ember is designed to work with solid fuel rather than gas

There’s a lot of high-tech gear you could haul into the outdoors these days, but there’s also plenty to be said for solutions that take a simpler approach. The Singapore-based designers behind the Ember Stove aren’t ones to complicate things, taking to Kickstarter with a compact two-piece cooking solution designed to fit in your pocket and fire up with just a handful of twigs. read more

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What Makes One a Mass-Shooting Survivor?

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by: Brent Smith at the Common Constitutionalist

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Say I’m walking down the street. There’s a bank being robbed about 500 ft up the road. The robbery goes bad and the crooks start opening up on the patrons inside the bank. 20 people are shot and killed. By now I’m only about 200 ft from the bank, but that’s as close as I get. That places me less than a football field away.

When it’s over, I head up to the bank steps, where I see reporters descending on the bank. One of them sees me and asks if I’m one of the mass-shooting survivors. I said I heard gunshots, but can I consider myself a survivor of the bank mass-shooting? No – of course not. That’s ridiculous.

But if not, why not?

I ask this because it seems that every student on the campus of the Florida high school is somehow considered a mass-shooting survivor. This may seem crass, but I’m just asking a reasonable question. read more

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Water Purification Pen

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I gots to get me one of these!
Roving Blue's new O-Pen brings ozone purification anywhere you go
Roving Blue’s new O-Pen brings ozone purification anywhere you go(Credit: C.C. Weiss/New Atlas)

The highlight of Overland Expo East was the large motor vehicles and trailers, but the show also had some interesting tech in smaller packages. Perhaps the smallest of all, the Roving Blue O-Pen supports off-roaders and world travelers by keeping drinking water clean and fresh. read more

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Words May Wound but Islamists Will Kill

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by: the Common Constitutionalist

On his June 16th radio show, Mark Levin said, “I made a suggestion to the gay community. I said you better exercise your second amendment rights while you still can. What did I mean by that,” asked Levin. “What I meant was that you need to acquire weapons to defend yourselves, because you’re being targeted by the Islamo-nazis.”

That’s a good piece of advice, as Levin is known to give. However, his advice runs up against the perceived reality of a lot of today’s youth. This reality is that for today’s youth, from 20-somethings (maybe older), all the way down to elementary school children, the fight instinct has been beaten out of them (figuratively speaking) with the bat of political correctness – leaving only the flight instinct.

Along the same vein as Levin’s advice, I wrote a piece  the other day calling for more Americans, particularly millennials, to fight back, become sheepdogs and stop acting like sheep, so when the wolves come calling, as one did in Orlando, you can and will stand up and protect the innocent.

Sadly, far too many young men and women (and other) have been conditioned to hide or flee, rather than fight. Obviously the parents bear some of the blame, but our education system, such that it is, also bears a great deal. read more

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We Need More Sheepdogs and Less Virtue Signaling Sheep

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by: the Common Constitutionalist

No LGBT community – love will not conquer hate – not this time. No rainbow flags in the shape of hearts or cuddly teddy bears will protect you from gunfire or a suicide bomb when radical Islamists come-a-callin.

Oh, it’s a great liberal sentiment – just as it was after the Bataclan nightclub massacre in Paris in November.

In March, Michelle Malkin wrote a piece entitled, “Post-Jihad Gesture Theater: Je Suis Sick of It.” As is usual, she knocked it out of the park as she wrote: “While homicidal, suicidal and genocidal jihadists are busy plotting the next soft-target terror attacks on the West, docile Westerners are busy shedding cartoon tears and doodling broken hearts on social media.”

Now we’ve had another planned massacre, this time on an American “soft target,” on the heels of our last “soft target” attack in San Bernardino by Islamic radicals. And the response of the Je Suis crowd is the same as it was after the Charlie Hebdo, the Paris and Brussels attacks – candlelight – chalk drawings and “solidarity.”

After the San Bernardino attacks, thousands gathered at San Manuel Stadium to mourn in solidarity. “It could’ve been any of us, so I’ve had a really hard time with it and I just wanted to be around other people who felt the same,” Martha Rendon, a San Bernardino County employee said while holding back tears. “County, city and clergy leaders told the crowd to pray for the victims’ loved ones and to stand united as a community in what will be a long healing process.” read more

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This Raft Will Save Lives

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The Sea Kettle concept life raft not only aims to provide shelter from the elements but ...
The Sea Kettle concept life raft not only aims to provide shelter from the elements but also drinking water from the sea.

The thought of folks suffering from extreme dehydration whilst stranded in a life raft at sea got industrial designer Kim Hoffman thinking of a way to turn all that sea water into safe, drinkable, life-saving refreshment. She took inspiration from portable desalination tools and created the Sea Kettle concept, a colorful life raft that uses heat from the sun to evaporate salty water and collect condensed run off in containers within the raft’s structure. read more

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Turn Plastic Bottles Into String

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This simple product is amazing and utterly practical. Talk about recycling.

You may think you’re doing the world some good by recycling plastic bottles – but a French pair of environmentalists has gone one better.

Pavel and Ian, a pair of inventors from Versailles, have created a simple gadget that lets you ‘upcycle’ any plastic bottle into rope.

The team claim that one bottle is enough to create rope strong enough to pull a car out of a ditch. read more