"Popular Mechanics Essential Survival Guide"
It's awesome quality, good presentation and pretty funny sometimes the way a good guide should be.
I really prize some of the books I have found the past three years. They are all pretty good and handpicked for their quality. Unfortunately, they sometime suffer in execution when they are difficult to read or poorly laid out.
This all-purpose general survival manual is one of the best we have published so far. It’s full of cutting-edge relevant hands-on advice like you would expect from Popular Mechanics.
It covers all the traditional disasters and then begins to incorporate information on long-term endurance in extended situations. Finally it gets to the real bonafide apocalypse and you will find some very useful and off-beat counsel on how to keep on truckin’ after the world has ended.
Highest recommendation. 297 pages including color illustrations with extremely useful lists and step-by-step guides.
EXCERPT FROM INTRODUCTION
Survival means different things to different people in different situations. Throughout its existence, which spans 115 years and counting, Popular Mechanics has regularly published stories about all kinds of survival: in the woods alone; stuck in a mountain crag with no water; marooned on an iceberg as polar bears approach; trapped in a car by a fallen tree. Survival can mean simple self-sufficiency—living off the land, relying on only oneself for food, shelter, and water. It can mean digging a bunker in the backyard and stocking it with candles and Spam. Or there’s my friend Eliot. The other day he found himself locked in his own bathroom in his apartment in New York City with no phone.
After twenty minutes he was able to dismantle the entire door knob and lock using only a nail clipper.
Survival.
For this book, we’ve compiled our very best survival tactics, secrets, stories, firsthand advice, and gear recommendations in one place. The information in these pages was as relevant a century ago as it is now, when everything from climate conditions to global politics is rife with uncertainty. Keep it on the shelf in the basement next to your go bag, in the garage with your flares, or in the bunker out back. Study it. It contains not just knowledge about the most reliable waterproof fabrics but also wisdom on how to approach any situation in which survival is a question. Even if you’re not the doomsday type, we all have in the back of our minds those three words that make a book like this indispensable: You never know.
Good luck out there.
POPULAR MECHANICS ESSENTIAL SURVIVAL GUIDE
(Added to the Memex)
Regards, Tex
Thanks a lot for this book Tex.
>> The world will be inherited by the meek and they will all be really good mechanics apparently.
You know this is an unseen but very important aspect about Jesus Christ is that he speaks in technical terms. As a man he must have been of outlier intelligence, his primary training was being a craftsman (Tekton) ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tekt%C5%8Dn ) but then he studied the Scripture and mastered it.
When he said
"Give not that which is holy unto the dogs, neither cast ye your pearls before swine, lest they trample them under their feet, and turn again and rend you."
this is something very common to people of outlier intelligence, in that there are so few of them that they communicate with people of common intelligence, who either don't get it (the swines) or it is understood wrongly, or worse still, some people don't get it although they are supposed to (the dogs), and this often generates resentment and hostility.
The New Testament is full of technical analogies and metaphors, which is also a common thing among craftsmen and people who deal with physical reality in the first place. When you deal with reality then either you managed to build something that lasts, or you couldn't or the thing is just some shaky mess (the "house built on sand").
It's all fair game when you're dealing with building things, but when you get into morals and law, doing so exposes the bullshitters at the top, who will get you killed, if you ever worked in a company or an administration you will know this.
A very interesting evolution is that of AI, because AI is the ultimate bullshitter, it pretend to know because it can read millions of books, yet is unable to understand any of it. The bullshit quarterly reports, the empty doctorate thesis, the misleading press article, nobody reads those, but AI does, and he gives it all his faith.
This is why, although AI is useful in getting bits of information here and there, one has always to verify all of it, because if one piece is not genuine then it will compromise the entire assembly.
In a way, AI is the ultimate bullshitter, as such it will be mankind's ultimate test.
In the end reality (that is, God) always wins, and when it does it is a reveal, as the Greeks would call it, an apocalypse.
PS - A decent written recitation on The American Political Party of Violence https://torrancestephensphd.substack.com/p/the-american-political-party-of-violence
Enjoy