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