Human proofing Part 2

                                                Human proofing Part 2

  So we talked a lot about why we need to be in groups in my last post. I just want to take a little time to tell you why we did that. The simple fact is you can't do everything  yourself. The bottom line is you stand a high chance of getting hurt, over run, sick or just plain worn out. You can hunt, cook, eat, and sleep all by yourself but you would be hard pressed to guard yourself all night. You would be lucky yo get over a major illness and you can't fight off 4 or 5 other people by yourself in most cases. So yeah if you are alone it will be hard. That is not to say you're out of options but in the end game it's so much easier to survive with a good team. I mean could you imagine trying to go out and get food with a 100 degree fever by yourself?
 We need help. We need people to help get food while others gather wood and watch to make sure no one gets lost or attacked while all that is going on. Now that's not to say that you can't survive by yourself. You can, it's just way easier if you have good people to help you.
 You will hear a lot about how your mind is what gets you when you are in a survival situation. The isolation takes a toll on you. Just having other people around will help ease that. If you are on your own in a situation remember that it is all calculated risk; if it is more likely that you will get hurt, captured, or impaired then you don't do it! This is going to be a hard decision some times. You think it won't but it will. What do you do if a bear has your kid? Or your wife is captured by roaming bandits? You have to be smart. Can you get her back... sure. Is storming in like a mad man going to work? Most likely not. We all have to work out what the risk verses reward is and make a decision based on what is best in that situation.
 A word of caution: You will notice I use the wording good team. I do this because in bad times there will be people that have no skills and no ability to survive. When this happens people can become very dangerous. They may try in various ways to get all they can from you. These people have no ability to provide for themselves. They may act friendly to gain trust before trying to kill you in your sleep or just steal everything you have and leave you. There will also be good people without the proper skills to survive in this kind of environment.  These people will be a strain on resources as you will have to teach them how to survive.  For these reasons I say good team, meaning a group that you already know and trust. That in the best case scenario you have trained with or you have already faced some kind of critical and highly stressful  situation with. These individuals you can count on and you have a good idea of what their reaction to highly stressful situations will be. As well as a good knowledge of their skill sets.
  Keep in mind that in all situations you should be planning for the worst case scenario and hoping for the best.

We are the hope

  Hello and welcome my friends. It is a pleasure and a privilege to be here with you all again.  In my last article I spoke of where we might go or more to it where we are most likely headed. I want to say that the path we go down will be as dark as we choose to make it. For that reason I call this talk Hope. We as individuals can be ready for this coming time. We can prep now. There is still time. Like in the bible we know not when he will come just that he will. We know that this cycle is ending we just don't know when. That is part of the idea of this blog, to get people ready for the hard times everyone feels coming but also to teach us the skills needed to do the one thing no one wants us to do... Be self sufficient. So that no matter what is going on in the world you will be able to make a living, provide for your family, and most importantly to be able to help others. As it stands I have mostly talked about survival as it applies to living off the land. This is just the beginning of the learning we still need to understand our communities, agriculture, finances, war, politics, and corporate structures. This will be my life's work.

  Life is like water ever changing and so we too must be ever changing. We must be like water shapeless and yet all shapes. We must always be in a state of becoming. Always learning and changing with the times and the environment. Always ready for the next thing. We live in times where there is little certainty. Where our grandfathers spent their whole careers at one company and retired. We are fired months or days before that retirement. Our life of loyal work brushed away simply to save a few dollars. We are forced to buy things we do not want from health care to insurance. The prices of these services now mandatory skyrocket while the quality of the service diminishes to the point where it becomes just another tax that we pay 10 full what we receive. We are corralled in to big cites and little houses, paid so little that both parents have to work to put food on the table and medicated so that we do not think of this as slavery. We look on as our rights are striped away one after another and wish for change while we sit by and do nothing. We are told that if you discipline your child he or she will be taken from you and we now are seeing that ramifications of this socialist ideology.
  Now you ask what can I do to change this? It starts with education. knowledge is power. We stop looking at the funny cat videos and start talking to our next door neighbors, reading books, working out and meditating. Surround yourself with like minded people. Get to know your neighbors well. Divided we fall. History has shown us this time and time again. Dividing people has been the weapon of dictators and tyrants since the beginning of time. Black vs. white, rich vs. poor, left vs. right, America vs. Russia. All a distraction from the real issues. Think about it, how many of the people around you do you know? If something happened do you know what type of people are around you? The answer is no in most cases. So do you care what happens to them? Most likely the answer to this is again NO. This is good for anyone that wants to be able to control people. No one knows anything so if needed the tyrant can just make something up and no one knows so it can't be disproved.
There was a time when you knew your neighbors. You might not have liked them but if you were in trouble you knew you could call on them. We really need to return to that. Second  you can start to look for ways to supplement your income. It is a well know fact you will never get rich working for someone else and you shouldn't. They took all the risk they should get the reward. Most companies especially now pay the least amount possible for the most they can get. That will leave 90% of us working ourselves to death just to live pay check to pay check. By a lot of sacrifice and  living under our means you can use some of your income to start growing your own food, to get out of the apartment you spend so much of the little money you have on, and get your own place  away from the city if you can so that you can hunt, fish and grow crops and raise animals. Then all you have to do is sell them when you need money. Wow that's a concept... trade something for something by producing your own stuff. My mom tells me when she was little that they only went to town once a month for the things they could not grow. Can you imagine that?!  My friends dad to this day hoards toilet paper! Toilet paper!  Because when he was growing up they didn't have it. I'm not saying go off the grid or anything. Just think if you were growing your own food and caning it you have it cost almost nothing and you know whats in it. I don't make this too long so I will end with this
   

 The monks say that life is suffering and that only through compassion and the elimination of ego can we overcome this suffering. I believe this to be true.

 Wealth and power as most people see it is every where. Just siting there waiting to be grabbed up and yet most people do not even recognize it. They walk around blind to the world around them in a self imposed isolation. If you truly wish to be free, to be happy you must engage with other people.  You must live life as it was meant to be lived. Help others to reach their goals and in doing this you too will reach your own goals. This is a fundamental truth most people spend their whole life trying to figure out. A book I read once told me this but it was not until my second time through the book that I understood what it was saying. I will post a link to the where you can get the book at the end of this article. If you read this book once I suggest that you read it again and then read many other books on the subject. You will see the same thing repeated over and over. Life is not about the biggest bank account it is about the best quality of life. Having everything you need and enough to help out your friends.
 
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Link to book

We stand on the brink

Hello and welcome. It is great to have you all here with us again. We have some great stuff for you today. If you are like us you feel the way we do and you see what we see. You want to be prepared. Not just for yourself but so that you can help others. When I was a child I was gifted or cursed with the intuition that the world was not right and while it would be so easy to fix it  that would not happen.  I was too young to understand the why of this though. To have a world where there is little suffering is so easy and yet so unachievable. Why?

 Well it seems to be the basic set up of life. It happens over and over again in a very normal and predictable pattern. Something is created, it either survives and grows or it does not. That is the biggest part. Not all things actually survive! We see this with everything in nature. It is survival and a fight to survive. But we will talk about this another time because that could be a whole talk in and of itself. If the thing does make it past the initial struggle for existence it starts to grow and becomes stronger and stronger, the same as everything else in existence. But then after a time or really from its creation it starts it's decent. In humans and animals the cells stop reproducing correctly, bones weaken, we lose strength. then diseases and parasites begin to over take our systems. It is the same with government. It begins with a fight. Out of that something forms but as time goes on it is infected with disease and  corruption. This leads to its destruction...Armageddon,  The Apocalypse, the end of the one thing. But as we all can see in nature from the end of one thing there is the beginning of another. But what will it be ???? How many failures will it take for the next thing to survive?? How long will it take for the old thing to die?? These are the questions that matter. These are the questions that will shape your life and my life. These are the times we live in and the moments life was created for. We live in a comfortable death. but life was not meant to be so. It was for living, relationships and love; for learning and sharing of knowledge. If there was no selfishness in the world and everyone was compassionate, free from expectation  and self then suffering could be minimized and living maximized. I long for the day this is a reality.  If you believe as we do that life is for living we hope you continue to follow us.

The Art of Human Proofing

                                       


This is one of my favorite things to talk about. Even as a kid I was absolutely fascinated with combat and science. From weight lifting & nutrition to room clearing tactics, I love everything about the human experience as it relates to combat and survival. As I have grown up I find this knowledge to be foundational as it seems to affect every aspect of our lives. Understanding these concepts could very well be the difference between making a man or a monster.  As a man I believe that it is part of our responsibility to be a protector, provider, teacher and pastor to our families and those close to us so that the next generation is better than the previous. Especially now since we live in a world that promotes weakness, segregation & isolation as well as teaching victim mentality along with entitlement. This combination is rapidly leading us toward moral and ethical decline and when that happens people will inevitably become selfish and intolerant little whinny monsters. If you look around you can see this happening now my friends.  As much as we would like to turn a blind eye to it we most not. We must teach our children how to interact with others, how to deal with others, and even when to fight. Teach them to protect what we have from tyrants that would rob us of everything. This may sound long winded and harsh but it is just the cold raw truth which is something I think at times we have shied away from. Now knowing why we have to learn this most basic of skill, really the one thing that holds us all together, we can with the correct ideas delve in to this multi-part study.
 We can start to look at this most fascinating of topics with the beginning of humanity. In a landscape covered with danger and life threatening hazards around every corner men were forced to become problem solvers. While not the strongest animal in the world, we are the most cunning and vicious. With the exception of a few lone wolf types we learned that there is safety in numbers and we formed tribes and began to hunt in packs. This formation of groups led to what we see now in the world as clicks. This formed tight knit social groups which in turn leads us to a kind of pack mindedness. This, in my humble opinion, was a two edged sword. As science has shown us, when we are in groups we act very differently than we would on our own. We have come to call this mob mentality or group thinking and it can and will override your fundamental thought processes if you do not guard against it. The brutality of mob mentality has been shown many times. Just look at the paper, Every riot you see is mob mentality brought to the headlines. But, is it always bad?
Well lets look at it from the stand point of cave men. Imagine you were in a tribe and out hunting a bear. As you come upon your pray adrenaline floods your system and your thoughts race until you no longer have a conscious thought. You just act! No time for thought as your actions flow almost instinctively on a primal level. Like so many times before the rest of the hunting party are in the same state, you are one with your pack, and every one syncs a great skill. Or maybe you are on a battle field and bullets are flying by you but you are in what me and some of my group call the zone, you are acting not reacting. You are in sync with your team and you just go which is not all bad and is useful for survival. Just remember you don't want to be in this kind of mode in a shoe sale or on black Friday because it just leads to problems. From there of course man started to learn to defend what he claimed as his. We started to build weapons and traps instead of just throwing rocks, we started to make structures to keep our things safe while we were out, and we started to make it to what we now believe ourselves to be...top of the food chain. And this is where we turned on ourselves and people started trying to control other people. We started to raid other tribes for their food and land and the need for the art of defense became a must for every one. Every man was tough and knew the basics of combat and survival, a practice that at the time was needed just to live but that has diminished in recent years. This is a shame and could be intentional as weakening the bounds of family and community is a requirement for the enslavement of the people. Our freedom of speech along with our right to own guns and property is always on the front line being fought against. Laws are created to keep people from being able to defend themselves and these laws have zero tolerance and a zero effectiveness unless you count the fear factor that they create. So it would just make sense to not want strong intelligent people with friends, families & the backing of their communities behind them. That is a very scary thought to anyone trying to control you. The thought that you would have people willing to stand up and say no you can not do that to my family or friend with force changes the whole game. Think about it my friends.
 Now some of this might seem a little off topic as I go into some of my thoughts but it all falls back to the defense of
  *You
  *Your family
  *Your stuff
  *Your friends and their stuff
   *Everything else so no other group can come and take it from us.
 This is what we need to know...the how and why of where we came from and the thought process behind our inner dependence on others so we know how best to deal with the people that interact with us and our groups and how to interact with others and their groups. Now I have only just begun to scratch the surface of this topic and have not even begun to talk about actual defense. From this post I hope that you can take away the sense of why this is important and why you must learn and understand this subject so that you have the best chance for you and your family and friends to survive in a very rapidly changing world where the illusion of stability and order could be shattered at any moment. The need to be prepared is higher now than it has been in a long time. Don't get caught in the illusion! Be ready because it is always best to have and not need than need and not have.

As always thank you so much for your time and your attention. If you would like more information or have any comments on any of the topics we have covered please contact us at jraxes@gmail.com or check us out at Facebook and FIA. please like and share us with your friends. Until next time remember life is what you make it so make it the most amazing thing you can imagine.

Primitive tool making flint kipping or stone craft

                                     Primitive tool making flint kipping or stone craft 

  We have now moved to the area of tools where we will be working with stone. We lived in the stone age for about 3.4 million years so you can imagine how important stone was and still is to us now. We have had a lot practice in developing our ability to work with stone and we now use it to store information instead of making knives, arrow heads or axes.  Amazing how we took it from a hand tool to an information storage tool. In the beginning stone was used for axes, knives, arrow heads, armor, pots, bowls and traded for any number of things. You needed to know how to work this abundant natural resource if you wanted to get any work done back in the early days of man. The way people worked stone varied  from grinding to chipping and their ability to produce varied dependent on the tools they had to work the stone with. We will look a little into both chipping and grinding to help make you better capable of surviving in the wild should you find yourself stranded without your knife or ax.  
The 1st way we can shape stone is by grinding. You can grind a stone on other stones by placing sand and water on a larger flat stone and rubbing the two stones against each other. This works best if the stone you are using to shape the stone you want as a tool is much larger than the other and flat. Rub water and sand onto the larger stone to add an abrasive surface then rub the stone you are shaping against the larger stone. Once the large stone is muddy rinse and repeat. This over time will start to shape the stone to the desired shape which could be a knife, ax or even a plate. The 2nd method is chipping and there are a couple ways I have seen this done. The 1st is a crude smash method where you find a large rock firmly embedded in the ground and as flat as you can find so as to avoid any deflective or glancing blows. Once you have found this rock you will look for a large smooth rock to use as your crushing rock as mentioned before if this rock is flat it helps keep from having glancing blows. You then place a smaller rock on the rock embedded in the ground and smash it with the large flat rock to create shards that can then be used as cutting tools or arrow heads. It should go with out saying but be careful. Smashing rocks with rocks is a little dangerous. Watch that you are not going to smash your fingers or that a shard does not fly into your eye. Stone can be up to 400X sharper than surgical steel. Once again please be careful!  
 From here we will find a more pointed rock to use to chip the fine shape of the item. Simply use the more pointed rock like a wood pecker hammering at the rock taking down unwanted areas and notching the sides for binding notches. This is time consuming so if you are at camp fighting off boredom this is a good way to do that. 
 The 2nd type of chipping is on flint which breaks in a very interesting way and I will link a video I found of a park ranger doing this that is very cool. With this you start with a large stone and hit the out side to start a fracture and you will then start to flake off pieces hitting the edge of the flint until you flack it to the desired item. Flint is great to make tools out of and has its own style and rules for working the stone.  Here are a few things to keep in mind on how stone breaks. 

      1.) To detach a flake strike the stone at an angle close to but not 90 degrees 
      2.) Every stone has an imaginary center line
      3.) Flakes love to travel over convex surfaces
      4.) Flakes love to follow mass they will travel over the ridges and lumps

Guys there is a ton more information on this topic and I will for sure be coming back here in later post because I know I have just scratched the surface of this subject but for now as I go out and practice and learn more you will just have to go to some of our friends for more info on this amazing topic as always thank you for your time and your attention. We hope that this has been useful to you. Please follow us on facebook or on the blog here at fiablognews
And as promised here is a link to the flintknipping   

The Art of Primitive Tool Making Cordage

The Art of Primitive Tool Making

Cordage

There may come a time in your life where you are in a situation in which you are out in a hostile environment with nothing.  Survival might seem like an impossible task. In other articles we have addressed finding shelter, making fire, and finding and purifying water. Now we will cover the topic of making tools. With tools your survival will be made much more enjoyable and what at first might have seemed a daunting task will become an enjoyable camp out.  Most people will never understand how the simple things they use every day were once made on the spot by the people that used them. In the old days one only went to town for things you could not make yourself. Simply you just need to know how.

Let’s start with cordage. If you know how to make your own cord you can make traps, bags, rope, hammocks and fishing line. You can do so much with cord. It is just a very amazing item to have and be able to make. So let’s start with what we make cordage from. We will either make cordage from plant fiber or from animal fibers. There are a few good spots to get cord off of animals like the spine and the leg tendons. For plants you want dry fibers. Look for your weed like plants they will have good fibers. Here is a small list of plants good for fibers: milkweed, hemp, cattail, cedar, maple & douglas iris just to name a few. These each have different ways you have to extract and prepare the fibers in later articles we will go into more detail about how to do this. 

There are a few different ways to make your cordage. For this article we are just going to go with the simple reverse wrap method. What you want to do is take your fiber then fold it in half leaving one side longer than the other. Next pinch it together and twist the top strand away from you then you want to bring that piece toward you and down. Now hold that section as you twist the new top piece away from you. And that’s all there is to it. Wash, rinse, and repeat. To reiterate, the top piece twists away from you. Once it is tight you bring the top piece toward you and down. That brings the bottom piece up then twist the new top piece away from you until it tightens then bring that toward you and down. Now that we have the process for making the cord let’s talk about adding more fibers to make the cord longer. Once you have progressed to where you have about 2 inches of top fiber left you want to get a new fiber and place it with the 2 inch section then twist that away from you then pull the twisted piece toward you and down. You have just integrated a new piece of fiber. Very simple right?That’s what I thought until I tried it the first time. It takes a little getting used to but once you get the hang of it you’ll be knocking out a lot of fiber really quickly. 

As always thanks you for your time and attention. I hope the information in this article was helpful. If you have any questions or there is a specific area of survival you would like us to cover please feel free to contact us and we will look into it.  Don’t forget to subscribe and follow us on facebook.

Research for this article pulled from our friends at Black ScoutSurvival, Primitive ways and the book Extreme Survival

  

The well of life: Water finding & purifying

The well of life: Water finding & purifying

The need for water is one of the few things that can’t be over looked as water accounts for about 75% of our body weight. Without water we soon wither and die. Now let us enter into the study of where to obtain and how to purify this most precious of substances. Why do we need water? Water is needed for a number of reasons in the body from circulation to respiration and converting food to energy. At rest on average we need 2 liters of water per day to survive. When working out or performing a strenuous task we need up to 2 additional liters per hour. Without water our bodies quickly slow down. A lack of water causes dehydration which my result in lethargy, headaches, dizziness & confusion. We can only survive without water for 3 days. This is a very short amount of time making water one of the 1^st three things we most have to survive. Let’s look at the (Rule of 3s) we can survive

3 minutes without air

3 hours without shelter (In extreme temps/ environments)

3 days without water

3 weeks without food

It should be noted that thirst is no indication of how much water you need whereas dark urine is. You should drink small amounts as often as your water supply allows. If you do not have a good supply of water all movement should be limited to cool times of day or to night. Also you should stay in the shade as much as possible to reduce water loss. It is recommended that you not eat if you do not have water to drink with your food as it will deplete your body’s water stores more quickly. Also do not remove your clothes even in the hot sun as layers help to keep moisture close to the body. Lastly the beast place for you to carry water is in you if you can drink do you need the water more than your cantina does. When you do get purified water drink! Fill your containers before starting off again or build a shelter nearby the water supply and wait for rescue.

Now on to finding water> I have been looking at a lot of other wilderness pro’s pages to help me understand the best way to go about finding water and it seems they all agree on about the same thing: dig for it, collect it from the dew in the morning or use a solar still if a water source is not available. The solar still seems to be the least effective of all the ways to create water so use it only if the others are not working. To start with look for water sources that are close to you and visible from the surrounding land scape lakes, rivers or streams. If none of these are available you will be looking for low spots in the surrounding that have dark, heavy foliage areas and or dry river beds. These areas will have a good chance of having underground water supplies that you can tap into for survival. Another good way to get water is to gather it from the early morning dew. Also check depressions or the nooks in trees. Soak up the water from catches with a piece of cloth or some dried grasses wring it into a container, then filter and boil the fluid. If you do see and can identify foliage as non-poisonous you can place these plants in a plastic bag and by a process called transpiration the plant will shed water into the bag.

And now for the purification issue. It is pretty common knowledge that if you drink water that is from a stagnant pool or water that was to close too defecation you will have a good chance of getting sick. Some of these sicknesses can take up to 2 weeks or more to set in. We could go into great detail about the different harmful; stuff but we will for this article focus on how to keep from getting sick. Our 1^st way is the most used and known about: boiling and it is just like it sounds. Create a fire use an object to hold the water over the fire until it is boiling, then let the water cool and drink. There are a few different ideas on how long to boil for but the general consensus is that it should be brought to a boil for at least a few minutes. The 2^nd way to purify is filtering. This method can be done with a store bough filtering system or with one you create using multiple layers of sand, rock and charcoal allowing the water to filter though the different layers. The 3^rd and last method is chemicals you may add things like tincture of iodine 2%, chlorine or alcohol to your water as a way to kill harmful bacteria’s and pathogens. Also they make several water purification tablets for hikers now. The down side to this is that if you use too much you could harm yourself so please do the research on the recommended amounts before you use these.

With proper planning and a little foresight and some luck you should not need to use the methods described here. But in the event you find yourself in a life or death situation we hope that the information provided here can help to get you out safely.

As always thank you for your time and attention. You can follow us on facebook or our blog page. If you would like more information on the subject of wilderness survival check out our friends and pro survival groups at primitive ways, Indefinitely wild.   research for this article was obtained from primitive ways, Indefinitely wild and  the book Extreme Survival .