Author: Pat Henry

If the world really goes to hell in a hand basket like so many are predicting, what do you think you will miss most? It could depend on what your life is like after the SHTF that dictates just about everything for you. It could also depend on how you are viewing the word “miss”. If you have ever listened to country music at all, you can see a trend in some of the more popular songs out there. They take a concept or phrase and spin it on its head to make a point you might not have expected.…

A lot of people plan to bug out if the SHTF with all of their survival gear stowed in their vehicle or pulled in a trailer. What if you have to turn around quickly? Do you know how to swing that trailer around so that you don’t get stuck? Can you execute a turn on a blocked road so that you aren’t trapped in an ambush? This is what I was thinking as I watched my neighbor this weekend. I was mowing our yard which is my favorite twice weekly activity this time of year (not) and my neighbor was…

I received an email the other day asking for advice on how to get a loved one on board with prepping.  This is a subject I have wanted to write about for a while because I have had these same thoughts and struggles with various loved ones in my own life as each of you. I won’t try to convince you that I am an expert and there is no book forthcoming, but I do have personal experience of my own challenges of trying to convince someone about prepping and wanted to share this and my perspectives with you. I…

Editors Note: As we begin construction on our own chicken coop this week, I came across this article on the Ready Store Blog and wanted to share. This has some great and practical tips for making your chickens happy and stress free, which leads to more eggs. If you start to raise chickens to be more self-sufficient, you want them to be as productive as possible. But what if they aren’t laying as many eggs as you’d hoped? The most common reasons that chickens aren’t laying eggs is because they are too young, too old, the hours of daylight…

From the dawn of time, man has tried to implement home security that would keep him and his family safe. From caves to small huts to castles with moats and now underground bunkers we humans have continued to strive for safety. Safety from what? It depends on the time, the situation and location. The threats could be from burglars, rioters, or ruthless gangs. They could be psycho ex-boyfriends or girlfriends or just some nut that made eye contact with you at the wrong moment and decided to ruin your day. It could be someone you know or a complete stranger.…

As a child I grew up in a house named The Orchard and although the land had long since been sold off several large apple trees remained which gave us a reasonable harvest each year. I have fond memories of the delicious fruit pies and crumbles my mother used to prepare. Growing fruit is one of the most efficient forms of gardening – once the trees are established you can expect an abundant supply for decades with only a little pruning and mulching to keep them happy. Without a doubt, the cheapest way to start a mini-orchard is to buy…

I have not been following the news of the Boston Marathon bombing tragedy hyper closely because I didn’t want to get bogged down in the details. That may sound foolish or naïve, but I had a feeling as this was unraveling that something seemed very odd about the events portrayed in the news and TV. I continue to feel that way after the two suspects have now died or been captured. Time or circumstances has made me a little more skeptical to believe everything I see on TV at first blush. I don’t know whether or not this is a…

Every weekend, I drive with one of my children to run errands and my route takes me past the same house (not the house in the picture above). I know it is coming before I get there and try as I might, I can’t stop myself from glancing out my window, over my daughters head to the yard of this house. The house is a nice enough house in a nice enough neighborhood, so what I see each week surprises me. On their roof, lying pitiful and sorry-looking is one of those inflatable Santa’s complete with the sleigh and reindeer.…

Recently we had a new sponsor join the Prepper Journal and I have only now been able to get around to announcing them properly.  Mother Earth Products contacted us a few weeks ago about advertising on our site. I wanted to try their products first and see the quality for myself before I recommended them to our readers. Mother Earth Products quickly sent some samples that I requested and they were really good so we added them to our site. What I really wanted to do was a larger test with a broader spectrum of products. Our idea was to…

Many of you reading this now have at least a vague concept of Situational Awareness. For those who don’t, Situational Awareness means slightly different things based on who you ask, but the general concepts are the same. Situational Awareness is an understanding of your environment and any potential threats to your safety or the safety of others in your group. Even more simply put, it’s making sure you know what is going on around you at all times. I think even more simplistic, SA is just an escalating awareness of what is going on around you. With that increased awareness…

If an EMP attack happened and you were on the other side of the country, what would you do? From time to time, my work required me to have to go out of town on business just like millions of other people each year. The distance and locations all vary with the need, but in a lot of cases, I am unable to be as equipped as I would normally be around my home town. In some cases, I travel internationally, but that is rare. Sometimes I only travel an hour or two by car so I opt to drive.…

Could there be a way to practice combat without risking death? Today I will discuss how you can up your end-of-the-world game and have fun at the same time. There are two sides to most of the more opinionated comments and occasionally articles I read out in the prepper blogging world with respect to any hypothetical grid-down scenario. The first side (let’s call them the “Experts”) goes usually something like “if you don’t have any real-world experience, you will die if the SHTF”. The second is more optimistic, to put it mildly, and goes something like “When it goes down…

Each day it seems we are greeted by another plan for government surveillance, under the guise of national security of course, in order to access our private information. Government, we are told must be able to see everything at any time on anyone and nothing seems to be off-limits anymore. It got me thinking; could we be faced with a potential future where the meaning of the word “privacy” will be understood as differently as the word “Gay” used to be? In its original context, Gay used to mean happy, merry, in good spirits and lively. Actually it still does,…

A couple of weeks back I was contacted by SafeGuard ARMOR asking me if I would like to review one of their bulletproof vests. Not being one to turn down an opportunity to test some equipment that could be of use to Preppers I jumped at the chance. A few short days later, the FedEx man dropped a nice black bag on my door. Inside was SafeGuard’s Stealth vest. The Stealth is designed to be concealable and worn under clothes. This would be great for undercover police, bodyguards or you. That’s right, the average every day prepper could have a use…

I recently watched the History Channel’s Hatfields & McCoys and was fascinated, like so many others to watch this interpretation of an American Legend. Part of the reason why I wanted to watch this mini-series was for historical significance. Another reason for this post is the many lessons I was able to glean from watching the Hatfields and McCoys that I want to share today. For those of you who don’t know, it is the story of an infamous and bloody feud between two families living on the border of Kentucky and what is now West Virginia following the American…

If you have ever thought about protecting your home from rising floodwaters or creating barricades that can resist a hail of bullets, you should know how to use sandbags. Sandbags have been used for a long time to keep us safe in dangerous situations. Safe from rising flood-waters and from incoming rounds in combat. I started thinking about sandbags in terms of home security and the dual purpose they fill struck me. In some places, the threats of floods from winter’s ice thawing is a real and present threat to everything someone may own. Knowing how to build a proper…

Having a plan in place for survival communication in a disaster or survival situation is important to your preparations. This may be a plan for communicating with your family if you are away. It could entail group communications at a retreat or neighborhood watch scenario or it could be as simple as letting family members know where you are if you are forced to separate? Taking the time to plan your survival communications now can save someone’s life and make any other plans you have to function more smoothly. Survival communications also encompass staying aware of news and information. If…

Justin O’ConnellActivist Post As a general rule, if anything is covered en masse by the mainstream media, then I tend to believe that which I am watching is actually one long promotional spot. The same could potentially be said for Bitcoin as over the past months its popularity has grown so much that “anarcho-capitalist…Libertarian…Freedom Fighter against mankind’s two biggest enemies, the State and Central Banks,” Dollar Vigilante Chief Editor, Jeff Berwick, has been on CNBC, CNN, Fox News, and BBC, and other mainstream outlets. What brought on this sudden attention? No, not our anarcho-capitalism, but our announcement of the world’s…

For some preppers, a common motivation to become prepared is the risk of a biological outbreak of some disease with a high mortality rate and aggressive transmission vector. They fear, and with good reason, that if a disease gets out into the open, society will quickly fall and the grid will collapse under the weight of so much death and suffering. This fear certainly seems plausible with events over the past decade of aggressive strains of virus’s but so far we have been relatively protected from any major outbreak. This could be due to the hard work of scientists and…

Spring is in the air and with it comes yard work. For some of us, we have already started planting our gardens, others are tending to their chickens and most of us preppers have to start cutting the grass again. I know you may hear the Home Depot song playing in your mind as you think of mulching and planting and sprucing up after winter’s snooze but I have already been cutting my grass and it is due again for another visit with the lawnmower. As I started to think about getting out there and cutting the grass, I wondered…

Bartering is the key. This will be the solution to all our problems when the grid goes down and society devolves back to somewhere around the early 1900’s,  or at least that is what everyone in the prepping community would have you believe. Everyone that is except for the 10% who are anxiously awaiting the collapse so they can finally live out their lawless fantasies to their fullest. Bartering, in theory, makes perfect sense. It is at its core, trading services or goods for other services or goods. An agreement between two people to exchange one thing for another. The…

Yesterday I read about hundreds of armed vigilantes in a small Mexico town . This was preceded earlier by reports of townspeople capturing and murdering several men, displaying their bodies propped up in lawn chairs for the world to see. Their captors had written signs on some of the dead men as a warning to those who came to loot and kill. On the surface, with so much violence associated with the drug wars in Mexico, this seemed like a positive development purely from the aspect of people taking justice back into their own hands. Their corrupt officials not caring…

Our world is becoming ever more electronic and digitized with each passing day. Every time we turn around, something that we used to have on paper has been turned into an “App”. We don’t even get the big phone books anymore at our house. The big ones doubled as booster seats for a lot of kids growing up. Strong men would rip them in half to prove how awesome they were. Now, it seems the old phone books have turned into smaller and smaller versions as the years pass and I don’t believe the companies that produce them can be…

When we talk about survival, there are certain items that immediately come to mind. We start with the discussion of beans, bullets, and band-aids. This logically flows to having at least a 30 day supply of food, firearms and ammo to defend your home or retreat and medical instruments and supplies to take care of a variety of injuries in an emergency. This gets you the basics and then we talk about extending those provisions to last longer time periods, support more extreme scenarios, or to include additional bodies. On top of the basics, we have allowances for backup power,…

By now you have heard of the Department of Homeland Security’s program of counter-terrorism called “If You See Something, Say Something”. The premise of this program is for all citizens to pay attention to suspicious characters or circumstances and if they witness something that seems odd, they should notify an authority immediately. This message has been rolled out to WalMarts, sporting events and radio announcements. It may already be on the covers of milk cartons too for all I know. What is wrong with that? Don’t we all need to be mindful of our surroundings? Isn’t it important to maintain…

I would rather have my trusty shotgun as opposed to a baseball bat and harsh language if there were a bunch of people trying to knock down my door any day. So, with that in mind, below are my list of the top 5 firearms you need to get your hands on now.

The military Code of Conduct is a guide to all members of the armed forces. It’s purpose is to illustrate how you are supposed to act if you are captured by an enemy in a time of war. It is an ethical guide, not necessarily a practical handbook. This code is taught to everyone who goes into service in the military and its history goes back to 1955 when President Dwight D. Eisenhower issued his Executive Order 10631. The Code has been relatively unchanged since then except to remove any reference to gender (thank you PC police) and a minor…

Why would anyone possibly need to consider how best to hide your money? Unless you have been on vacation the past few days or out of touch with the never-ending news media we live in you have seen or heard about the events in Cyprus. For those who haven’t heard, the short story is that the IMF has pushed for a “wealth tax” in Cyprus which would involve taking money directly out of the bank accounts of the people. That’s right, stealing in broad daylight with no apologies whatsoever. The IMF is saying that the people of Cyprus need to…

In thinking about preparing your family for survival after a disaster or emergency situation you can’t forget to consider their health. Your family’s health is affected by so much more than having adequate stores of food. Having the best gun for self-defense is great and important, but what if someone in your group comes down with an illness that could have been easily prevented with a proper survival sanitation plan?  What if the killer that attacks you is a sinister little microorganism you never saw coming? Of course, the health impacts vary with the event that caused the disaster. Flooding…

This is a pretty interesting video. It shows Marine Special Operations Team 8222 exchanging fire with Taliban fighters in the village below. Toward the end of the video you can hear incoming rounds snapping overhead as the guys settle down to eat what looks like lunch from MRE’s. This is part of Funker530′s ongoing documentary of the War in Afghanistan. If you want to know more about these Marines check out Level Zero Heros, which has information about their upcoming book and a special episode of National Geographic. Source: Max Slowik at Guns.com