On channeling Glenn

Back in the warehouse at work, I keep my desktop radio tuned to a local all-talk station. I'm no one's disciple, mind you, nor have I changed my opinion that conservative talk radio is an intellectual desert. Still, since I'm armed with independent critical thought, what I hear often serves as a useful starting point.

Glenn Beck -- still crazy after all these years -- fills the 9am-to-noon slot each day. And while he's more apocalyptic and decidedly Goddier than I am, the truth is that we share many of the same views.

The difference, simply put, is that I get there without melodrama, precious metals, right-wing social ideology or reliance on prophecy.

One morning last month, Beck devoted an hour of his radio show to personal and family preparedness, recapping a webcast he'd done the night before. I present his stream-of consciousness notes here, unabridged -- I'll come back with my observations on the other side.

BUY FARMLAND
Grow your own food.
Live near people & Begin to make alliances-of-skill. (barter)
Live near farmland.

ELECTRONICS-FREE
Paper copies of important documents.
Know where your deeds are. Take them in an emergency.
Russian gangs in trouble.

COLLEGE/SCHOOL
Apprenticeships are the future.
Discuss the value of school for what you can earn.
Do not look for labels -- they will become meaningless. (Yale)
Find other forms of school. (online)
Teach young children now that college is not a given.
Demand merit for school & student or pull your time/$.
Educate yourself at all times. Always read.
Have a hardcopy of all important books/documents.
Learn old and/or lost practices.
Mending/canning/farming.
Learn to fix an engine.
Re-learn reading a map.
Know the news. Life can change quickly.
Be able to defend your positions by knowing the other side.

TRADITIONS
Preserve what is important. Shed all others.
Conserve & preserve. Reclaim & restore.

MONEY
Gold, food, cigarettes, liquor, sugar, ammunition, guns, seeds, skills. (barter)
Knowledge.
Have 30 days' cash-on-hand.
Buy a house.
Stop all excess spending. Buy quality only. Forget fashion-only.
Measure twice, cut once. Do not waste.
Consider a fuel-efficient SUV/truck.
Consider something prior to 1979. Fix yourself.

LOCATION
Live near like-minded people. Texas, mountains or where God still plays a role in real life.
If you cannot move (no place will be untouched), create network.

BUSINESS/WORK
Be the best you can be. Be the one employee no one can fire.
Small biz -- be the product or service no one can cancel.
Conserve & preserve.
Learn from the Depression.
Advertise when no one else is: Chevrolet.
Stay in business, but downsize & preserve. (arch)
Honesty, integrity & charity.

BE GEORGE BAILEY
Spit yourself out of the system. Turn upside-down now.
Put your money where your heart is.
Do business in symbiotic ways -- we need each other.
Do not try to put others out of business -- let them do it.
Gimbles & Macy's.
Never be the smartest man in the room.
Take care of your employees the best you can.
Take less & give more.
Read Franklin & Washington.

LIFE
Do not plan your life & then move. Plan, listen & obey.
Practice at least Franklin's American religion.
Serve.
Honor all of your obligations.
Preserve -- food, time, money, energy.
Teach your children the basics. Values/principles.

Do with less now. Less of a shock if it comes later.
Serve/share.
Join a 9.12 group. Link online. Phone & locations.
Have a meeting place established for family.
Read the Bible.
Have a gun & know how to shoot it.
Resolve those issues that are holding you back.
Stop all behavior that does not expand you or others into good.
Make amends for what you have done.
Find peace & get to work.
Teach children work ethic.
Tolerate nothing that you feel is wrong by remaining silent.
Let your children see you stand.
Be honorable in all of your dealings.
Understand that anger is a part of life but never feed it.
The first look is not a problem. It is the second look.
Never be the best man/woman in the room.
Be happy & optimistic. Life will go on. Make plans for the future. Get married. Have children.

Does any of that (minus the obvious) sound the least bit familiar?

Flip back through KintlaLake Blog, especially my posts on urban resources and preparedness, gardening and canning, frugality and keepers and more. Notice the striking similarity between Beck's mindset and my own.

I'll admit that appearing to channel a talk-radio klaxon bugs me a bit. The point, though, is that Glenn Beck and I are, at least in this regard, on the same preparedness page -- and that's a good thing.

Canning continuity, Part II

(As I type this, the outdoor temperature here in our village is 95°F. Coupled with 64% relative humidity and a dew point of 81°F, the "feels like" temp -- that new-fangled "heat index" popular with TV meteorologists -- is a brain-broiling 117°F, and we haven't yet seen the hottest part of the day. Time to focus on something cooler.)

In last Saturday's post, I waxed righteous about re-using a vintage Ball canning jar. I've put up three more quarts of pickles since then, each in a jar left behind by our home's previous owner. I've also done a bit of sleuthing about their pedigrees.


That clear Kerr Self-Sealing Wide Mouth jar (above) arguably is the least interesting of the four. It offers no clues as to its age but, judging by the other jars we found, it probably was made in the 1960s in Sand Springs, Oklahoma.


The quaint-looking Mom's Mason jar was made in nearby Columbus by Home Products. a division of Ohio Container, in the mid-1970s.


This blue Atlas Strong Shoulder Mason was made in Wheeling, West Virginia by Hazel-Atlas, which ceased production in 1964. I suspect that this jar may date to the 1940s or 1950s -- but that wouldn't make it the oldest jar rescued from our basement shelf.


Nope, that distinction (so far) belongs to the blue Ball Perfect Mason mentioned on Saturday. Its markings testify that it was made between 1923 and 1933.

These vintage canning jars aren't just worth keeping -- they're damned well worth using.

Canning continuity

When we moved into these digs last year, our discoveries included a basement shelf lined with empty glass jars -- three dozen vintage Ball, Kerr and Atlas canning jars, hinting that the previous occupant was typical of her generation.

This afternoon I put up the season's first refrigerator pickles. And although I have plenty of my own jars, I went down to the basement and cast my eyes over the old ones, ultimately choosing a quart-size Ball "Perfect Mason" in blue glass.

It seemed fitting.

We're carrying on a tradition of preserving food grown on this modest patch of land, using a vessel first employed perhaps four decades ago.

If I have to explain why that feels just right, you wouldn't understand.

Picking up threads

It feels like a good time to re-visit some topics covered on KintlaLake Blog in recent weeks and months. In no particular order, then...

Scouting arms
I posted a pointed commentary last month about the disappearance of marksmanship from the list of essential Scouting skills. And while it may be endangered Scoutcraft, it's not yet gone.

Two long-gun merit badges remain -- Rifle Shooting and Shotgun Shooting. Earning each requires a Scout to demonstrate knowledge and proper mindset as well as skill with firearms.

Rifle Shooting gives a candidate the option of firing a .22 rifle, an air rifle or a muzzle-loader. The marksmanship standards might sound simple -- putting five three-shot groups inside an inch at 50 feet, for example -- but I'll wager that many of us gray-haired shooters can't do that reliably with open sights. Shotgun Shooting is similarly challenging.

It's also worth noting that Shooting Sports is an elective Ranger Award in the Venturing program, which succeeded Exploring in the 1990s.

There's no telling how long it'll be before runaway political correctness relegates those awards to Scouting's trash heap, but I wanted to temper my previous pessimism with some (encouraging) facts.

Urban Resources: Ranger Bands
Seldom does the sun set without another use for "Ranger Bands" popping into my head. It's a curse.

One sub-zero February evening I pulled a Mini Maglite from my TrailBlazer's console, and after just a few minutes the ice-cold aluminum had my hands aching. The next morning I cut a length of road-bike tube and slipped it over the housing -- problem solved.

I also found a neat idea (above) in a 1919 issue of Popular Science. Soon I believe I'll cannibalize a motorcycle tube and use that "cobbled" sheath on my Vaughan Sub-Zero Axe. Pictures (mine) to follow.

Sharps: Pocket sheaths
Looking at my "pocket sheath for the woods" the other day, it occurred to me to dose the hide with Montana Pitch-Blend Leather Dressing -- beeswax would help repel water, protecting the knife and (especially) the tinder in the fire kit.

The sweet-smelling paste darkened the leather slightly and gave it a nice sheen. Tested afterward, the surface beaded and shed moisture well. I treated my smaller pocket sheath, too, but with the Leather Oil -- less water-repellent than Leather Dressing (owing to the lack of beeswax), but just fine for the application.

Waste management
I hate to see food go to waste -- any food, for any reason. It's safe to say that it's one of my pet peeves. And although composting is a perfectly responsible way for us to turn truly disposable matter into fertilizer, I've been thinking about better ways to save fresh fruits and vegetables that risk spoiling before we're able to eat them.

At a local odd-lots store the other night I spied a brand-new five-tray food dehydrator. It was a convection-only model (no fan), so it wasn't ideal -- but it was "marked down" from $40 to $25. Besides, it came with a jerky kit.

So we brought it home. We'll do some drying, some vacuum-sealing and some canning and see how it goes over the next year or so. As for making jerky, I'll use the nifty convection oven that was in the kitchen when we moved into our house.

Winchester Model 67

I uncovered a relatively recent article about my old single-shot .22 -- "Winchester Model 67: A Product of Another Era," written by Gil Sengel and published in the January-February 2009 issue of Rifle Magazine. It covers the M67's history, development and variants, and I found it a fascinating read.

I'm unable to offer a hot-link to the piece, however -- it's vanished from Google Books. Go figure.

Scout at 16 weeks
The last time I wrote about our new puppy, she could sleep in a teacup with room to spare. Now she's four months old (give or take) and weighs about 25 pounds. She looks more Lab-ish every day -- otter's tail and all.

I agree with our vet that she'll top-out between 50 and 60 pounds before she's done growing. I hope she doesn't grow out of her disposition, though -- she has the most amazing personality.

Smart? You betcha. She was obeying "sit" and "stay" a long time ago. And she doesn't just "shake hands" -- last week she mastered "gimme five," "high five" and "all ten, up high."

She's definitely Daddy's Girl -- and Daddy is incurably smitten.

Poster eyes

When I illustrated yesterday's entry with a half-dozen World War II-era posters, I could almost hear the reaction from some quarters -- a combination of nostalgia for a nation united and revulsion at government propaganda.

It was a different time, a different country. Most Americans alive today can't grasp the concepts of self-sufficiency, conservation and recycling even for their own sake, much less actually sacrifice in service of a greater good.

Take something as fundamental as food. During World War II, citizens were encouraged to plant "Victory Gardens" (called "War Gardens" during World War I), ostensibly so that more farm-grown produce could be channeled to our fighting forces around the world.

It's estimated that by 1944 a stunning 40 percent of all vegetables consumed in the U.S. came from 20 million Victory Gardens.

The feds also urged Americans to "Can All You Can" -- to "put up" surplus home-grown produce for use between growing seasons. (Now you know why your grandma had all those Ball jars on her basement shelves.) Not only did gardening and canning help stretch families' budgets, they also made precious ration points go farther.

Sometimes we forget that The Greatest Generation endured wartime rationing of -- ready? -- tires, cars, typewriters, sugar, gasoline, bicycles, shoes, silk, nylon, fuel oil, coffee, stoves, meat, lard, shortening, vegetable oils, cheese, butter, margarine, processed foods, dried fruits, canned milk, firewood, coal and more. The national speed limit was 35mph.

I have a lasting memory of how my father ate green onions -- base, leaves and all. He was the only person at our family table who did that. At the time I thought it strange. Now I get it.

He wasted nothing. As a child of The Great Depression, he never knew for sure when his next square meal would come. And as a young man during World War II, he understood that food was, in truth as well as by the government's definition, a weapon of that war.

He always cleaned his plate. So now do I and, coincidentally or not, I'm the only one at our family table who can be counted on to do that -- every single time.

Grow your own food. Make it last. Clean your plate. Sound advice -- but can you imagine the dustup today if those suggestions came from the federal government?

Big Brother! Groupthink! Socialism! Hell, these days the First Lady can't plant a garden or push breastfeeding without getting criticized by Caribou Barbie or the Mindless Minnesotan. Nanny state!

There's no law against propaganda campaigns containing good stuff, and yet we've become embarrassingly adept at saluting or dismissing ideas based solely on the source. That's what sustains all anarchists and anti-government cynics. But as I said a couple of years ago,

"Blind rejection, blind acceptance -- both are manifestations of ignorance. Not everything that our government does is sinister, any more than everything it does is wonderful. Skepticism (not paranoia) instructs us to differentiate between the two, and then critical thought (not ignorance) allows us to see facts."

The same goes for political campaigns, of course.

Americans pulled together, albeit briefly, after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. We couldn't sustain our unity, however, choosing instead to withdraw to safe cover behind walls of ideology.

I don't believe that we have it in us to do what The Greatest Generation did. Our "more perfect Union" is divided beyond the capacity of today's Americans to repair.

What individual citizens can do, within our homes and communities, is to begin reclaiming our American legacy of respect, hard work, frugality and selfless service. We won't see this nation's strength restored in our lifetime, but the work must start now.

How does your garden grow?