How to Cook on Your Car Engine, and Other Vehicle Survival Tips

Harvested from http://survival.outdoorlife.com/blogs/survivalist

December 27, 2012 - 2

by Tim MacWelch

During a winter storm is the worst time to get stranded in your vehicle. It’s also the most likely time you could be stuck in your car for a few days.

The ice storms, deep frozen slush, and thick snow that would bog down a perfectly functional vehicle can create some dangerous survival conditions inside the vehicle, and deadly conditions outside if you were to try to walk for help without the right gear and clothing.

Unless your ride is on fire or about to slide off a cliff, you should always stay with the car or truck in a stranded winter survival situation. The vehicle provides shelter and a bigger target for searchers to find. So how do you get by for a day or two or more until help arrives?

Here are some important things to consider before and during a stranded vehicle scenario.

Don’t Drive Around Empty Handed
Your vehicle should be stocked up for emergencies, especially in the winter. Shelter items, spare clothes, first aid, food and water should be plentiful in your vehicle, along with jumper cables, road flares, starter fluid, and some quality hand tools.

Don’t Use Up Your Gas All At Once
As long as your exhaust pipe is clear, you can run the engine periodically to run the heater for warmth. But even with a full tank, you’ll only have a few precious hours to idle the engine for heat. Run the vehicle for no more than 20 minutes at a time, with the heat running as high as you can get it. Try to hold off as many hours as you can between periods of running the engine.

Be Obnoxious With Your Signaling While The Engine Runs
The battery alone will only honk the horn and flash the lights so many times before it runs out of juice. But while the vehicle is idling, you can honk the horn and flash the lights as much as you like. The engine is providing the power, not the battery.

Insulate
Insulation is the key to keeping warm in any situation. All of the metal in a vehicle will make it hard to keep it heated in cold weather. So rather than trying to heat the whole cab with your body heat, insulate your body with any material you have. Ideally, you would have a good sleeping bag for each seat in the vehicle, or at least a few blankets. Failing that, try wrapping up in clothes, outerwear, or even the carpeting ripped from the vehicle.

Car Cooking And Heating?
If you have food that you would like to warm up, pop the hood and place the food securely by the exhaust manifold. I’ve heard of a guy who had enough engine compartment space that he was able to weld a small Dutch oven to his engine block. He’d clamp down the lid to keep the food secure and away he’d go. A two-hour drive would cook a pot roast to perfection. Building on the concept of portable heat, you can turn rocks and bricks into space heaters that could be brought into the vehicle. First, you need to set up a heat-proof platform in the vehicle’s cab. Try tearing out the floor carpet to get down to the metal. A platform of bricks or rocks in the floor board will work, too. Then, get some rocks from a dry location, or maybe a few bricks if you have some in the vehicle. Next, you can build a fire outside of the vehicle, and throw the rocks or bricks in the fire to heat them up. Heat them for about 30 minutes in the fire and then scoop them out with a shovel or any other tool you have. Dust all the coals and sparks off of the bricks or rocks, and carefully set them on your fire-proof, heat-proof platform. Repeat as needed every few hours.

The normalcy bias, or normality bias, refers to a mental state people enter when facing a disaster.

Is it a crime to be an 'alarmist' when there is actually cause for alarm? How many will we persecute for crying fire before we realize the theatre is actually ablaze?

 It causes people to underestimate both the possibility of a disaster occurring and its possible effects. This often results in situations where people fail to adequately prepare for a disaster, and on a larger scale, the failure of governments to include the populace in its disaster preparations. The assumption that is made in the case of the normalcy bias is that since a disaster never has occurred then it never will occur. It also results in the inability of people to cope with a disaster once it occurs. People with a normalcy bias have difficulties reacting to something they have not experienced before. People also tend to interpret warnings in the most optimistic way possible, seizing on any ambiguities to infer a less serious situation.

Full Wikipedia Entry

More Absurdities of Our Modern Age: Electric candle that runs on the heat from a real candle

I love you Cory Doctorow. Read 'Makers' this summer. Quite possibly the most amazing contemporary science fiction-y book I have read in my lifetime. - Sky Cosby

Original post on Boing Boing.

Cory Doctorow at 11:23 am Wed, Nov 28 on Boing Boing

Instructables user Randofo has created a tutorial for his ingeniously perverse candle-powered electric candle. As the name implies, it's an electric candle whose power comes from the heat given off by a real candle.

I have been thinking a lot lately about being more prepared, and what supplies we should have on hand for when the 'big one' hits. After prioritizing the three most obvious things to have in a severe emergency - water, food, and a fair-sized crowbar - it came down to figuring out what else one needs to survive. It did not take me very long to conclude this item was electric lighting. I use that all the time. How can I live without that?

After assessing the problem, it became apparent to me that after a few days of constant lighting, all of my batteries will be dead. This means that either I need rechargeable batteries, or a way to generate electricity without them. Not needing batteries to begin with seemed most sensible to me. I explored different options and finally figured out a low-cost, long-term, and portable, method to keep my electric candles lit. I am going to use heat generated by tea lights. The nice thing about this solution is that they are dirt cheap, small, and will last forever. You can buy about 1,000,000 tea lights at Ikea for $1.99. With a fair-sized stock of small candles, I can keep my electric candle lit indefinitely. Thanks to my candle-powered electric candle, I know that I will never be left in the dark.

Candle-Powered Electric Candle (via Neatorama)

Toilet paper is the opiate of the asses

Avast, ye wretches! Ye sheeple! Know ye not the ways and means by which thou hast been cuckolded? Fooled? Corralled? Knick-bottomed?

Like you, I was raised to believe in my own wasteful incapacity; or rather, my own incapacity to handle my own waste.

Yes, I too was a slave of the porcelain throne. A pedant to that prettified-pooper, that quiet commander of tile floors and shuddering thighs. I, too, worshiped at that alter of gastro-intestinal exflux. I bowed my bowels to the bowl. I hunched, and strained, and prayed for desperate release to the gods of civilized shitting. I was not a man, but a supplicant.

They say that religion is the opiate of the masses: that it steals of man his sacred self, and sells it back to him at inflated price. Well, I have had my bodily processes stolen and resold by the CAPITALIST KYRIARCHY and I say: shitting is religion.

What is a water-closet but the temple of the secular world? A separate place, of enforced quiet and private meditation. Observe the similarity of the toilet stall to the Catholic confession box. Notice the juxtaposition of hushed silence and exaggerated echo; these are the sounds of a holy place, a sanctified realm. The scrawled, illicit messages on doors, mirrors, and towel dispensers: are these not prayers of a kind, bottled-messages flung blindly out toward god or man? The unspoken ritual of the line, the urinal, the line, the sink, the towel:

I once was lost, but now am found; Was blind but now I see.

I once held filth that's now released; Was pained, but now am cleaned.

Is the closing ritual of handwashing not a secular re-configuration of baptism? Ancient Israelites washed themselves of sin and evil; modern humans wash themselves of germs and shit, the scientificized articulation of that same sin and evil. Like our forebears, we must 'get clean.'

We do this. We hock our bodies, our selves, the very process which sustains us, into an anonymous white water-bowl, to be flushed away and forgotten. The public toilet is the modern guillotine: a public resource for separating the social chaff from the social wheat, a ruthless "cleansing" mechanism. Rather than surrender our heads, we surrender our excrement; but in that great calculus of power/knowledge, it is all one and the same. Control my shit, and you control my life; for if I cannot shit, how can I live? Does not the absolute authority of the toilet (that is, its authority over my bowels, and the complete absence of any socially-accepted alternative method of relief) coupled with its relative scarcity (ever tried to take a dump in downtown Seattle? If you're shopping, it's easy; if you're poor, it's damned-near impossible) make for a most insidious form of social control? THINK ABOUT IT, man!

The New New World Order

Is the world about to end? Think about it: in just three days, a presidential election of epicker proportions than Joseph Smith's snow-white lapels will come rambling to a halt, and we will know-- nay, we shall feel the powers-that-be shake, volcano-like, in their subterranean lairs.

What's at stake in this election? Well, besides the obvious question of "Whose supporters will peel their candidate's electoral bumper-sticker from the rear of their (i.e. the supporters') cars in shame?," there are the so-called 'issues.'

'Issues' like "marriage rights for the Gays," "getting the so-called 'economy' running again," and "whether or not to pre-emp a nuclear holocaust upon Iran or some other convenient villain" are all the pundits talk about, sure. And of you want to believe the mainstream so-called 'news' media, with your head in the sand and your ass in the air, like a cruising ostrich, then you go right ahead. It's not my business to enlighten you from the bonds of your brainwashed ignorance, now is it?

BUT! Those of us who know the TRUTH know that this election is about one thing: The New New World Order.

You see, the US presidential election of 2012 has its roots in the Council of Nicea, convened by the Emperor Constantine in 325 AD ostensibly to hammer out the theological particularities of the growing Christian religion. However, recent archaeological findings have revealed that the council's actual purpose was to create and sustain a league of banker-assassins, whose sole mission through the ages was to cultivate centralized political power through centralized currency manipulation. They accomplished this through targeted plague ships, mind-suggestive control, and bestseller-topping novels such as Harry Potter, the collected works of Dan Brown, and the Bible.

The Council's name has changed since then, but its mission has not. From inducing the first World-War (by strangling the Archduke Ferdinand and then framing his death as a gun-assassination) to faking the Korean War (on the same set, by the way, as the moon landing), to electing the Reagan-triplets to the US presidency in the 1980s (the first successful application of clone-technology), the Council's reach has been deep and penetrating. The successful encroachment of DEA jurisdiction into Iron-Curtain countries after the fall of Hitler (and his unsuccessful attempt to lead the knights of the Templar back into power) set the stage for a coup de tat by the so-called American economy against the Soviet Cold-War machine in 1988 (though video footage of the fall of the Berlin Wall was successfully covered-up until the following year). All that was left to be done, from the perspective of double-agent Ross Perot and his neo-moderate supporters, was a little mopping-up action vis-a-vis Brazil and Walmart.

But, in the late nineties, a new player entered the field: Willard Mitt Romney. Born of a Kangolese goatherd and the monarch-in-exile of New Amsterdam, Romney (then called "Obuntu") quickly took steps to mask his outsider identity by infiltrating the Romney estate at age three and switching places with the real Will Mitt Romney. The latter's fate is murky, but 'Romney' went on to attend the private school known as Hogwarts Eton Cranbrook, where he received his introduction in the grey arts. Bluffing his way through Harvard and Bring 'Em Young! Bringham Young U., Romney quietly established contacts with a variety of the rearguard-vanguard, who intro-docrinated him to counter GHW Bush's New World Order with their own, new New World Order.

So now you see what hangs in the balance of this election: on the side of Obama, more of the same. On the side of firebrand Mitt Romney, on the other hand, new more of the same.

The choice is yours.

Weapons of Mass Construction

Last Earth Distro will soon be carrying this 2 DVD series, stay tuned. Ain't nothin' like improvised weaponry to tickle my fancy.



and here's the teaser for Volume II:

Reposted: An Extended Metaphor on Reading and Bowels

(Reposted from www.earthlightbooks.blogspot.com)

Weird observation: on the one hand, books are the object of solitude par excellance. When you read, you read alone. Chuck Palahniuk has a whole essay about how to escape the lonesome writer's shack and how being a successful author is composed of a cyclical flight from, and then return to, being alone. Jonathan Franzen's essay anthology How to Be Alone is titled after the reader's solitude as a kind of political/spiritual attitude: the question of preserving one's integrity amid mass-culture is the same as the question of how to be alone. Neil Postman writes of the breakdown of individual, critical thinking under the force of mass media. We've all had the experience of trying to read Dickens or Tolstoy or Wallace in the library or a cafe and found ourselves utterly incapacitated by the jabbering gossip spewing from some guy on his cell phone, one table over. Everyone's read the same sentence twelve times without it registering, as we try in vain to tune out lady behind us on the bus as she narrates, to no one in particular and everyone in general, the minutia of her day. We've all flown, like substance-starved refugees, from the toiling, yowling masses into the blessed silence of churches, single-stall toilets, locked cars, and after-hours offices. To read. In peace.

But then over on the left hand is the fact that reading cum books cum writing cum bibliophilia is a fundamentally communal thingy. Let's skirt past how books are basically conversations (okay, monologues; but still, it takes two people) on prostheses. Let's ignore the publishing industry, libraries, book clubs, lit. classes, the canon(s), and the new, infinite psuedo-book, the Internet. Forget all that. I want to concentrate on one particular aspect of how books are social objects.