An Emergency Chemical Light That Lasts Forever – With No Chemical

Interesting little gizmo... I've always wondered if there was a way to make glow-sticks reusable. May have to add a few of these to my bug-out bag. My mother recently joined the prepper crowd and refuses to call hers a bug-out bag, preferring the G.O.O.D. vibes instead. (Get Out Of Dodge). I have to admit it's a bit more upbeat.





Here's what Wikipedia has to say about Bug-Out Bags:

A bug-out bag^[1][2] is a portable kit that contains the items one would require to survive for seventy-two hours^[3][4] when evacuating from a disaster. It is also known as a 72-hour kit,^[5] a grab bag,^[6] a battle box, and other popular names include "Personal Emergency Relocation Kits" (PERKs) GO Bag and GOOD (Get Out Of Dodge)^[7] bag. The focus is on evacuation, rather than long-term survival, distinguishing the bug-out bag from a survival kit, a boating or aviation emergency kit, or a fixed-site disaster supplies kit. The kits are also popular in the survivalism subculture.^[8]

The term "bug-out bag" is related to, and possibly derived from, the "bail-out bag" emergency kit many military aviators carry. The concept passed into wide usage among other military and law enforcement personnel, though the "bail-out bag" is as likely to include emergency gear for going into an emergency situation as for escaping an emergency.^[9]

Poon Lim or Lim Poon BEM (March 8, 1918 – January 4, 1991) was a Chinese sailor who survived 133 days alone in the South Atlantic.

From Wikipedia:

Poon Lim or Lim Poon BEM (March 8, 1918 – January 4, 1991) was a Chinese sailor who survived 133 days alone in the South Atlantic.

Lim was born in Hainan, China. In 1942, during World War II, he was working as second steward on the British merchant ship SS Ben Lomond, which was on its way from Cape Town to Dutch Guiana. The ship was armed but slow moving and was sailing alone instead of being in a convoy.

On November 23, the German U-boat U-172 intercepted and torpedoed the ship in position 00.30°N 38.45°W, some 750 miles east of theAmazon. As the ship was sinking, Poon Lim took a life jacket and jumped overboard before the ship's boilers exploded.^[3] Although accounts differ, out of the crew of 55, a total of 11 other sailors may have eventually been rescued.

After approximately two hours in the water, he found an 8' square wooden raft and climbed into it. The raft had several tins of biscuits, a forty litre jug of water, some chocolate, a bag of sugar lumps, some flares, two smoke pots and an electric torch.

Poon Lim initially kept himself alive by drinking the water and eating the food on the raft, but later resorted to catching rainwater in a canvas life jacket covering and fishing. He could not swim very well and often tied a rope from the boat to his wrist, in case he fell into the ocean. He took a wire from the electric torch and made it into a fishhook, and used hemp rope as a fishing line. He also dug a nail out of the boards on the wooden raft and bent it into a hook for larger fish. When he captured a fish, he would cut it open with a knife he fashioned out of abiscuit tin and dry it on a hemp line over the raft. Once, a large storm hit and spoiled his fish and fouled his water. Poon, barely alive, caught a bird and drank its blood to survive.

When he saw sharks, he did not swim. Instead he set out to catch one. He used the remnants of the next bird he caught as bait. The first shark to pick up the taste was only a few feet long. He gulped the bait and hit the line with full force, but in preparation Poon Lim had braided the line so it would have double thickness. He also had wrapped his hands in canvas to enable him to make the catch. But the shark attacked him after he brought it aboard the raft. He used the water jug half-filled with seawater as a weapon. After his victory, Poon Lim cut open the shark and sucked its blood from its liver. Since it hadn't rained, he was out of water and this quenched his thirst. He sliced the fins end let them dry in the sun, a Hainan delicacy.

On two occasions other vessels passed nearby: first a freighter, then a squad of United States Navy patrol planes. Poon contended that the freighter saw him but did not pick him up because he was Chinese. The Navy planes did see him, and one dropped a marker buoy in the water. Unfortunately for Poon, a large storm hit the area at the same time and he was lost again. He was also once spotted by a German U-boat, which had been doing gunnery drills by targeting seagulls.

At first, he counted the days by tying knots in a rope, but later decided that there was no point in counting the days and simply began counting full moons.

[edit]Land

On April 5, 1943, after 133 days in the life raft, Poon Lim neared land and a river inlet. A few days earlier, he had known that he was close to the land because the colour of the water had changed; it was no longer the oceanic deep blue. Three Brazilian fishermen rescued him and took him to Belém three days later.

During his ordeal, Poon Lim had lost 9 kg, but was able to walk unaided upon being rescued. He spent four weeks in a Brazilian hospital and the British Consul arranged for him to return to Britain via Miami and New York.

When told no one had ever survived longer on a raft at sea, Poon Lim replied, "I hope no one will ever have to break that record."^[4] People have lived longer lost at sea, the current record being 10 months for 3 Mexican sailors in a disabled fishing boat.^[5] However, as of 2011, no one has broken Poon Lim's record on a life raft.

[edit]Aftermath

King George VI bestowed a British Empire Medal (BEM) on him, and the Royal Navy incorporated his tale into manuals of survival techniques. After the war, Poon Lim decided to emigrate to the United States, but the quota for Chinese immigrants had been reached. However, because of his fame and the aid of Senator Warren Magnuson, he received a special dispensation and eventually gained citizenship.^[6]

[edit]Death

Poon Lim died in Brooklyn on January 4, 1991.^[7]

[edit]Cultural References

The science fiction novel The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester was inspired by a newspaper report about Poon Lim.

Prepping Heads for the Mainstream, Not Just for Closet Paranoids Anymore, or, This Ain't Your Mama's Collapse.

By Jim Forsyth

Sat Jan 21, 2012 11:44am EST

(Reuters) - When Patty Tegeler looks out the window of her home overlooking the Appalachian Mountains in southwestern Virginia, she sees trouble on the horizon.

"In an instant, anything can happen," she told Reuters. "And I firmly believe that you have to be prepared."

Tegeler is among a growing subculture of Americans who refer to themselves informally as "preppers." Some are driven by a fear of imminent societal collapse, others are worried about terrorism, and many have a vague concern that an escalating series of natural disasters is leading to some type of environmental cataclysm.

They are following in the footsteps of hippies in the 1960s who set up communes to separate themselves from what they saw as a materialistic society, and the survivalists in the 1990s who were hoping to escape the dictates of what they perceived as an increasingly secular and oppressive government.

Preppers, though are, worried about no government.

Tegeler, 57, has turned her home in rural Virginia into a "survival center," complete with a large generator, portable heaters, water tanks, and a two-year supply of freeze-dried food that her sister recently gave her as a birthday present. She says that in case of emergency, she could survive indefinitely in her home. And she thinks that emergency could come soon.

"I think this economy is about to fall apart," she said.

A wide range of vendors market products to preppers, mainly online. They sell everything from water tanks to guns to survival skills.

Conservative talk radio host Glenn Beck seems to preach preppers' message when he tells listeners: "It's never too late to prepare for the end of the world as we know it."

"Unfortunately, given the increasing complexity and fragility of our modern technological society, the chances of a societal collapse are increasing year after year," said author James Wesley Rawles, whose Survival Blog is considered the guiding light of the prepper movement.

A former Army intelligence officer, Rawles has written fiction and non-fiction books on end-of-civilization topics, including "How to Survive the End of the World as We Know It," which is also known as the preppers' Bible.

"We could see a cascade of higher interest rates, margin calls, stock market collapses, bank runs, currency revaluations, mass street protests, and riots," he told Reuters. "The worst-case end result would be a Third World War, mass inflation, currency collapses, and long term power grid failures."

A sense of "suffering and being afraid" is usually at the root of this kind of thinking, according to Cathy Gutierrez, an expert on end-times beliefs at Sweet Briar College in Virginia. Such feelings are not unnatural in a time of economic recession and concerns about a growing national debt, she said.

"With our current dependence on things from the electric grid to the Internet, things that people have absolutely no control over, there is a feeling that a collapse scenario can easily emerge, with a belief that the end is coming, and it is all out of the individual's control," she told Reuters.

She compared the major technological developments of the past decade to the Industrial Revolution of the 1830s and 1840s, which led to the growth of the Millerites, the 19th-Century equivalent of the preppers. Followers of charismatic preacher Joseph Miller, many sold everything and gathered in 1844 for what they believed would be the second coming of Jesus Christ.

Many of today's preppers receive inspiration from the Internet, devouring information posted on websites like that run by attorney Michael T. Snider, who writes The Economic Collapse blog out of his home in northern Idaho.

"Modern preppers are much different from the survivalists of the old days," he said. "You could be living next door to a prepper and never even know it. Many suburbanites are turning spare rooms into food pantries and are going for survival training on the weekends."

Like other preppers, Snider is worried about the end of a functioning U.S. economy. He points out that tens of millions of Americans are on food stamps and that many U.S. children are living in poverty.

"Most people have a gut feeling that something has gone terribly wrong, but that doesn't mean that they understand what is happening," he said. "A lot of Americans sense that a massive economic storm is coming and they want to be prepared for it."

So, assuming there is no collapse of society -- which the preppers call "uncivilization" -- what is the future of the preppers?

Gutierrez said that unlike the Millerites -- or followers of radio preacher Harold Camping, who predicted the world would end last year -- preppers are not setting a date for the coming destruction. The Mayan Calendar predicts doom this December.

"The minute you set a date, you are courting disconfirmation," she said.

Tegeler, who recalls being hit by tornadoes and floods in her southwestern Virginia home, said that none of her "survival center" products will go to waste.

"I think it's silly not to be prepared," she said. "After all, anything can happen."

(Reporting by Jim Forsyth in San Antonio; Editing by Corrie MacLaggan and Greg McCune)

Gay Pride, Gun Pride

by Robert W. Hunnicutt • January 24, 2012

There was rumor going around the SHOT Show this year that the Pink Pistols, a gay 2nd Amendment group, would have a stand. That proved not to be the case, so far as I could tell, but it did raise a question.

What do gay rights and gun rights have in common? More than you might think, I would say.

Gay activists and gun activists have, in a similar time frame, both piled up a long list of notable legal and political victories.

We won the Heller v. D.C. (2008) case before the Supreme Court, striking down the District of Columbia handgun ban. Similarly, the high court struck down laws against consensual sodomy in Lawrence v. Texas (2003).

Every state but Illinois now has some level of legal concealed carry, and concealed carry rights are continually being expanded. The list of states that recognize gay marriage or civil unions continues to grow, and no realist can deny that ultimately, the whole country will have them. Homosexuals can now serve openly in the armed services, and in most places can adopt children.

Whether all that’s good or bad you can argue deep into the night, but you can’t fail to notice that gun rights and gay rights have burgeoned at the same time. And that’s not an accident, though I am confident it has been a big surprise to many.

To use a pompous academic term, homosexuality and gun ownership were both until recently “transgressive” personal choices that challenged established social norms. Being gay may have been more transgressive in Yazoo City, Miss. and owning a gun more so in Cambridge, Mass., but both were on the fringes 50 years ago.

Social norms, whether about race, marriage, sexuality, childrearing, dress, language or workplace relations, have been demolished since those days, and that demolition has been regarded as a great thing by those of progressive mindset.

What they failed to appreciate was that social norms are of a piece, and if you demolish them in the area of personal sexuality, you’re tearing them down just as much when it comes to personal defense. You can’t let some people off the chain and keep others chained.

If you say that gays have the right to seek personal fulfillment, you can’t then say that gun owners have no such right. Personal possibilities can’t be expanded in just one direction; they spread out unpredictably, like paint surging out of a spilled can.

Somewhere along the line, gun owners decided to get loud and proud. I can promise you, having worked there for 20 years, that idea didn’t come from the NRA. It also didn’t come from the gun industry, which until very recently, didn’t really want black guns at the SHOT Show.

Gun owners got loud and proud quite on their own, one bumper sticker or T-shirt or viral video at a time, and they may have learned how, at least in part, from guys cavorting on parade floats, dressed like the Village People.

Just as there are flamboyant gay icons like Elton John or the ice skater Johnny Weir, we have our own outrageous figures like Ted Nugent or Toby Keith. A society that tolerates the one has to tolerate the other. We worry a lot about political correctness, but the truth of the matter is that popular culture has probably never been more wide-open, at both extremes of the political spectrum.

TV fare like Modern Family features homosexual characters, portrayed in a positive light, while cable TV is full of gun-related shows like Sons of Guns or Top Shot. Were either of them imaginable in the 1960s, or even the 1980s?

So I would argue that the general expansion of personal possibilities has expanded possibilities for us, too. And that’s a good, thing, no matter how you may feel about Liza Minelli. It may not be easy to see or accept, but there’s a straight line connecting the guy in the assless chaps to you in your “Infidel” T-shirt. Both of you drive some people nuts, and both of you are freer to be who you want to be than ever before.

How to Get Emergency 120 Volt AC Power Anywhere

Instructions

1. • 1
     If you want some standard house power (120 volt 60Hz AC power) out in the woods or something, you'll need to do this whole process ahead of time before you leave. Otherwise you can actually wait for a storm to hit or whatever and then do it but it's a good idea to do it ahead of time anyway because one of the steps is to go to your local car battery selling location and buy a battery or two. If they're out of power, they're probably not open for business so you should probably pick up the gear ahead of time.
   • 2
     Before you go battery shopping though, first you need to know what type and how many to buy. So first, make a list of what you'll need to power. Keep it limited to what you absolutely need. If you can get behind your refrigerator to the plug, then that's probably a good one but I'll warn you right now, it probably will need more power than you can supply using this method.
   • 3
     Once you have your list, find the power requirements of the devices on your list. Most devices will list the watts or amps on a black plate where the power cord enters the device. You need the watts so if is say 0.8A that's 0.8 amps which means you need to multiply it by 120 volts to get the wattage. So that would be a 96 watt device. Now add up all the values. Let's say you have a 100 watt lamp and 800 watt mini-air conditioner, and 60 watt laptop you want to run. That would be 960 watts total. Keep that number in mind for shopping.
   • 4
     Now the question is, do you need one or ten batteries? Well, it depends how many watts you'll be using and for how long. Batteries are rated in amp hours and you have watts. But that's no problem. Batteries run at 12 volts so divide your total watts from before by 12. My example of the 960 watt total would mean I need 80 amps. One single car battery can usually output over 700 amps so the actual current isn't an issue. How long the batteries will last before running out is the real problem. Most car batteries are around 100 amp hours which means it can last 1 hour if something is pulling 100 amps and then it would be empty. Or it can run something at 1 amp for 100 hours or 25 amps for 4 hours. So as you calculate, add batteries in groups of 100 amp hours just as a rough estimate.
   • 5
     I could power my 960 watt example for just over an hour. Well I want to use it all day so I'd either need to buy A LOT of car batteries or switch out the air conditioner for a 200 watt fan instead. Also take into account usage. If you're only going to use your fan for half the day or keep it at half speed, count it as half the watts or amps. So if you need to just run 200 watts, it will be drawing 17 amps so one car battery could run it for (100AH divided by 17 amps equals) 5.8 hours before the battery runs out.
   • 6
     Before you set the amps estimate in stone though, remember that most devices, especially electronics, pull less than they say they do. So you can cut a little bit off that estimate. You'll also turn everything off if you have to leave for a short time so it will last longer that way too. With a final estimate of 10 amps total needed over two days for example, I'd probably only buy 2 car batteries even though 10 amps for 12 hours a day times two days is 240AH and 3 batteries would be 300AH. If you hate math and numbers and estimating, you can just buy one or two batteries and run them until they're empty too. That or go get one out of your car when the others run out but that will reset your clock and radio settings and possibly even stored settings like air/fuel mixes and automatic shifting settings. It won't break anything in your car though to leave it without a battery so if it comes to that, do it.
   • 7
     As for which battery to buy, it really doesn't matter so go cheap. It's not worth it to get some high end batteries from a good brand name. The only fancy feature you should look for are deep cycle batteries (commonly used in marine/boating systems) because they maintain 12 volts for longer instead of slowly fading. If you can't find any, a normal battery will work fine though. At Walmart they have very cheap batteries. In fact, last I saw they have a riding lawn mower battery for just $20! It's at least half the capacity of a car battery but you might be able to find a car battery for $40 so you might as well go for the full sized one. You can also get generic ones from hardware stores for cheap. So according to your estimate or according to your budget, buy as many batteries as you need.
   • 8
     Here's the rest of the shopping list while you're there. If you don't have a set or two of jumper cables, you'll need one pair for every extra battery you buy in order to connect them to each other. So if you buy 3 batteries, you'll need one pair of cables. If you buy 5, you'll need 4. Now that you have the power, you need the device that will turn it from 12 volt DC to 120 volts AC. If you know electronics, you already know that that's called an inverter. Walmart and some hardware stores, won't have a good enough equipment. They rarely if ever have an inverter that can supply more than 400 watts. According to your estimation in step 3, that may be enough but more than likely, you'll need 800 watts or even 1600 watts. Be aware that running 750 watts on an 800 watt inverter will often set off the alarm and/or shut it off so don't cut it too close. An 800 watt inverter usually won't be able to run any household heater or any hairdryer so you may want to go bigger. Luckily, most auto part stores have 800 and 1600 watt inverters in stock at all times. Advance Auto Parts for sure has them and most other chains do too. Occasionally I see some at hardware stores too so do look around.
   • 9
     So you've got the batteries, the jumper cables to link them together, and a properly capable inverter. Now just make sure you have a power strip if necessary and that's about all you need. To hook it all together, plug the power strip into the inverter and keep it switched off. There should be jumper cable clamps on cables attached to rings that screw into terminals on the inverter so attach those. Clamp them onto the battery terminals with the black cable to negative and red to positive, or as marked if they're not color coded. The connect any other batteries, positive to positive and negative to negative, with the jumper cables for any other batteries. If you accidentally cross them to opposite terminals, you'll melt the jumper cables. The order should be battery, jumper cables, battery, jumper cables, etc, then battery, inverter hookup cables, and inverter, all linked together with all the negatives together and all the positives together.
   • 10
     Now just flip the inverter on and it should be supplying power. If it sounds like it's on, plug something inexpensive and simple into the power strip like a lamp, not a computer. If the lamp turns on, then everything is working and you can add the rest of your appliances as needed. Just remember the capacity and time limit. If you hear an alarm-like noise or everything shuts off, you overloaded the inverter by pulling too much power at one time or the batteries are close to running out. Most inverters will work down to an extremely low 10.4 volts though and car batteries don't get that low until they're extremely depleted.
   • 11
     Now enjoy being the only one on the block with lights and TV and video games and computers and whatever else. Your TV will turn on but cable TV probably won't work. Satellite TV probably will if you can also power your dish if necessary. Broadcast TV through an antenna might work if the power isn't out at the transmission tower. DSL internet has a small chance of working because of the way the phone infrastructure was set up but cable probably won't. Either way, modems barely take up any power so you might as well try. Just remember to use the power sparingly and be very careful not to short out the terminals or disconnect them from the inverter. And finally, get your hands on a car battery recharger when the power comes back on and recharge all the batteries.

Read more: How to get emergency 120 volt AC power anywhere | eHow.com http://www.ehow.com/how_4519611_emergency-volt-ac-power-anywhere.html#ixzz1k8hSdMHq