Monday, May 24, 2010

Surviving: A Compulsion to Prepare for the Worst





"People are waking up to the fact that they cannot always rely on outside sources for their personal safety and survival," Tom Martin, CEO of the American Preppers Network, tells Asylum.

"A 'sh** hit the fan' scenario happens to just about everyone sometime in their life," he says. "Preparing and having a 'prepper' mindset will lessen the impact of whatever disaster it may be that you might experience in your life."

...there is a posse of self-sufficient men and women out there who make it their goal to be prepared when disaster strikes. They call themselves "preppers."

From natural catastrophes to economic meltdowns to nuclear blowouts, the preppers' collective goal is quite simple: to carry on as usual, even when catastrophe strikes.

Over recent years, a huge community of preppers has developed. Perform a simple Google search and you'll turn up plenty of prepper-related stuff, including the Web television portalPrepper TVsurvival blogs, podcasts (such as DoctorPrepper and PrepperPodcast), andforums that cover everything from a woman's perspective to recycling to how to handle dead bodies.

There's even a rash of YouTube videos offering tutorials on such topics as how to 
construct your own nuclear bomb shelter, what firearms you should own, and how to earthquake-proof your stored food.

_Asylum


h/t SurvivalBlog

The idea is to have the tools, supplies, and skills to make it to the other side of whatever crisis is likely to pop up.  If you last longer than everyone else in your part of town, and you are running out of supplies, it will be okay to scavenge a bit in your local neighborhood.  But be careful of other scavengers who may be of the "shoot first and ask questions later" variety.

Ironically, while it is largely leftists who frequent the dieoff.org sites and who pine for the killing off of 90% of the human population of the planet, it is more likely to be the more independent and apolitical persons who will be in the best position to see the far side of catastrophe.  Most leftists -- typically incompetent pseudo-intellectuals -- will not have what it takes to make it.

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Sunday, May 16, 2010

750,000 Concrete Mushroom Bunkers from Commie Paranoia Days


Concrete Mushrooms Preview - Albania's 750,000 inherited bunkers. from Concrete Mushrooms on Vimeo.
Back in the commie paranoia days of Albania's Enver Hoxha, the fear of invasion from imperialist capitalist outsiders was topmost in the mind of leadership. To better defend Albania from the hordes of capitalists who were massing at the gates, Hoxha built hundreds of thousands of concrete mushroom bunkers. Many years later, now, and the invasion never came. So what does the dirt-poor country of Albania do with almost a million concrete mushroom bunkers?
Some people are creating hotels and resorts from the lumps of concrete. Others turn the monstrosities into wineries or restaurants. Let your imagination run wild. The mushrooms are there. You may as well think of a use for them.
H/T and photo credit: ImpactLab

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Tuesday, May 11, 2010

Imagine the Possibilities

H/T Recyclart Das Park

This simple sewer pipe-to-dwelling conversion suggests many possibilities. Sewer pipe is strong, water-proof, and meant to be buried underground. With the proper end-caps, sealants, insulation, and entry-ways, an underground survival shelter or bunker made of large diameter sewer pipe could be made relatively sustainable for long periods of time -- given a certain ingenuity and resourcefulness.

H/T ImpactLab

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Sunday, May 09, 2010

Pitcher-Style Home Water Purification System


H/T ImpactLab
The Homedics water purification utilises both filtration and light-wave germicidal action to kill 99.9999% of bacteria, 99.99% of viruses and 99.95% of microbial cysts in your drinking water (and costs $99.99 as well). It is like a Brita activated charcoal filter plus germicidal ultraviolet, so it removes more of the potentially harmful products that sometimes find their way into a drinking water supply.
Homedics website
UVC light, with wavelengths between 100 and 280 nm, is commonly referred to as “germicidal light” due to its effectiveness in destroying microorganisms. UVC light acts as a natural outdoor air purification system by deactivating the DNA of microorganisms and destroying their ability to multiply.

UVC light has been used to effectively disinfect and sanitize in water treatment plants, hospitals and laboratories, and food and drug facilities for years. In addition, this technology has been used in a number of consumer products.

Utilizing the germ-killing benefits of UVC light, HoMedics, the leader in health and wellness products, developed Restore®, a complete water purification system in an easy to use pitcher. Restore combines UV Clean technology to remove bacteria, viruses and microbial cysts with a filtration system to reduce heavy metals, chlorine (taste and odor), and some industrial and agricultural pollutants.

Restore includes an internal filtration system with an activated carbon and ion exchange resin. Once water has passed through the filter, the water is purified by the built-in UV lamp by activating a 60-second germ-killing cycle. _Homedics PDF

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Thursday, May 06, 2010

Police Searching for Missing, Productive, Obedient Woman


Police Still Searching For Missing Productive, Obedient Woman
Worth watching just for the Sasquatch ads.

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Monday, May 03, 2010

War of the Sexes: Not Politically Correct



In the paper, Nyborg looks at many other studies to try to determine whether sex differences in IQ exist and, if so, which sex does better on which subtests and by how much. He comes to the conclusion that women do slightly better in verbal tests, men better on spatial, and in sum, men have an IQ advantage over women of between 3 and 8 points, his best number being around 7 points. Men also have a wider dispersion of IQs than women....The result, as the graph shows, is that at an IQ of 145, which could reasonably be deemed an elite level, men outnumber women by a factor of 8. _Mangans

Mangans

Dennis Mangan looks at a 5 year old study comparing gender differences in intelligence. The study was by Helmuth Nyborg at a Danish university, U. of Aarhus. Nyborg received no end of grief from pseudo-intellectuals, and was even reprimanded by his own university for daring to cross the line of political correctness. But lines of political correctness must be crossed if humans are to get at the truth -- and learn to live with the truth while doing whatever they feel is necessary to change the underlying reality.
Experts have long disagreed about the existence of a sex difference in overall intelligence. Some (e.g. Lynn, 1994, 1997, 1999; Lynn, Irwing, & Cammock, 2002) find that males outscore females by about 3.8 IQ points, but most find no sex difference (e.g. Brody, 1992; Halpern & LaMay, 2000; Jensen, 1998).

This disagreement is confusing for theoretical reasons. First, males dominate all higher ranks of education, research, occupation, and political power structures that call for capacity to deal with complexity, which is just another way of defining general  intelligence g. Second, males have, on average, larger brains than females, and brain size correlates positively with intelligence. Yet, the empirical evidence for a male g advantage is equivocal.

The present study addresses these paradoxes by testing four hypotheses: (1) Ambiguous definitions and methods explain the current disagreement among the experts, (2) The proper analytic approach will identify a male lead in general intelligence g, (3) The larger male brain
partly explains the average male g lead, and, (4) Classical Distribution Theory illustrates how a small male mean SD g score advantage and a wider male SD dispersion score translate into an exponentially increased male–female ratio at the high end of the g distribution. This unequal ratio of high g males to females explains in part why males (always, according to Goldberg, 1977) dominate the intellectually most demanding top occupational and political strata.

...The study made it understandable how an exponentially growing male/female ratio at the high end of the g distribution—with the exact numerical ratio being a function of the size of the average sex difference in mean g and of the dispersion of g—provides part of an explanation of the male dominance in high society.

The present results derive from a more careful sampling of the two independent sub-samples than any before, but the small Ns call for caution in interpretation, even if it is harder to obtain a statistically significant difference in a small than in a large sample.

The general conclusion: Proper methodology identifies a male advantage in g that increases exponentially at higher levels, relates to brain size, and explains, at least in part, the universal male dominance in society. _PDF_Nyborg_PDF

Later research using fMRI and other brain scanning methods have looked at specific differences in connections between brain centers (white matter) and differences in specific brain centers themselves (grey matter), finding much greater significance in those subtle differences than in gross brain size and weight differentials.

That is to be expected, since it is the actual performance of the brains, rather than the size of the hat, that is at issue.

Males dominate the top levels of most professions for many reasons. A significant part of the reason is hormonal -- testosterone providing a certain assertiveness that often lends toward hard work and achievement. At the upper levels of cognitive performance, males are undeniably dominant. Part of that difference is also likely due to testosterone's effects on the developing brain -- primarily in adolescence, but also in early life.

Modern political correctness is counter-productive and self defeating for society as a whole, since it leads to wholesale waste of many of the finest male brains on the planet -- and for too many other reasons to mention here.

In the final reckoning, there will be no final reckoning. But there will certainly be repercussions that Susan Faludi never dreamed of. ;-)

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