Saturday, October 28, 2017

"Something is Rotten in Denmark."

Tom's Journal. http://tomschuckmanjournal.blogspot.com/

Friends,
   The phrase,  "Something is Rotten in Denmark"  is just an American EXPRESSION used to convey the simple idea that 'something is wrong,'  or unusual.   It is NOT meant in any way to rub or insult  our Danish cousins and friends the wrong way !   I certainly HOPE that no one in the great, smart country of Denmark wasn't offended in any way, shape or color.

Hugs,
Tom  Schuckman
Email:   tschuckman@aol.com  



tschuckman@aol.com


   
James Lewis
October 27 at 9:00am
 
What Will Be Valuable in an Economic Collapse
http://homesteadingandprepping.com/index.php/2017/10/25/what-will-be-valuable-in-an-economic-collapse/
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Foreword in Danish:


God dag!
I hvert fald var det en god dag for mig, at sove i en varm seng lidt sidste dag, lykkeligt gift med en varm og kærlig kvinde, som også har lavet min morgenmad her til morgen, lørdag og lidt af kulden udenfor. I går aftes sendte jeg for noget varmt skiundertøj til at holde mine lange ben varm til vinter. Jeg vil hellere betale lidt mere, hvis det tøj blev fremstillet i USA eller Danmark, eller Skotland.
Faktisk er jeg for få år siden forskede i min forgangne generationer/ forfædre helt tilbage til 1400-tallet i Tyskland ! Og jeg tog også et "spit" at samle nogle spyt fra munden, DNA, og fandt ud af at omkring 32% af mine forfædre kommer fra Storbritannien, og derefter yderligere 31% fra Skandinavien og resten af mine proportioner fra Vesteuropa --Tyskland.
Men hvis vi studerer bibelen, bibelen - for man ved jo, at "Gud kan ikke lyve." - Paulus' Brev til Titus 1: 2. Og vi alle kom fra Adam og Eva, fra "civilisations vugge-- Edens Have." 2 af de 4 floder der går igennem den originale "Garden of Eden", der er udarbejdet for vore første forældre er stadig gældende: "Eufrat og Tigris !!" - vore dages Irak ! Wow !
I den korte tid, som vi lever på planeten Jorden, jeg ydmygt at tro, at vi alle bør kende disse grundforudsætninger --- så lidt studiet selv..
Jeg er så glad i dag med gode udsigter til at blive passet af min kære hustru, Lori, også en dygtig kok. Jeg ved, at vi i USA - Amerika er så velhavende, i dag, Oktober 28th, 2017, men mange stormagter/ nationer har nået deres "guldalder" og derefter erstattet af andre stormagter i vores verdenshistorie. Som virkelig meget mere usa vil vare. Fader Gud ved ! Tiden er hurtigt kommer når alle nationer under solen bliver bedømt af sønnen.
Venlig hilsen
Thomas G. Schuckman
Tschuckman@aol.com Email:
"Jesus er Herre".




Hello Friends,
     I always figured to try hard to be 'Ahead of the 8 ball, and prepared.'   Don't we all hate to look foolish and caught off guard ?   I think that my Dad gave me some good advice--- with what he had to work with.   Also,  I think it's a generational thing --- "One building on the shoulders of the past generation, ever learning."
        However,  for all the so-called smarts and wisdom I have acquired all these 68 years,  I sure paid my dues, and made so many mistakes.   It seems like half of my life I spent getting out of the hole that I myself dug !  --LOL.   Yes,  you can do that stuff when you are younger  --- but you don't have the time/ years when you get older, so you need to spend more prudently and wisely,  dear friends, and escaping 'False Religion.'

Although I started a serious study of the Bible shortly after I got home from Vietnam, in 1970.....  I really didn't "Find the Lord Jesus Christ, and accept Him into my Heart until about May of 1995 !   And then I still picked a few women to settle down with that WERE NOT TRUE CHRISTIANS....   a foolish mistake on my part.   So, can we really expect God's blessings when we 'marry outside of God's camp ?? ??'    The book of Romans, Chapter 3, verse 10, says,  "As it is written,  there is none righteous, no, not one."     Friends,  if we just read the 2 books of Matthew and Romans, we could all be so well educated and SMART,  ready to take the world and Satan both and kick them out into space.....sort of.   But you all get the point, I am sure.   If we call upon Father God and the Holy Spirit --- beg for power and endurance and strength to just reserve some special time to sit down with out disturbance and READ THE KJV Bible,  please !
And that would finally give all of us the HUMILITY to re-start our life on the proper, godly, level, and then grow rapidly in Grace.  

IMHO [In My Humble Opinion], reading some exciting parts of the KJV Bible, can be powerful and addictive,  and yes,  you can actually 'get high' reading God's Word !   My opinion,  again.   Or is that the "Holy Spirit,"  working ......     But God's people are Happy people,  although many of us are poor -- for various reasons.   Yet the Bible states that none of God's children will ever have to beg for bread.   That too, is Scripture.

Warm Regards,
Tom  Schuckman
Email:   tschuckman@aol.com 








Radio Silence – Communication Without Electronics





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I love modern technology, particularly the electronics that allow me to communicate so quickly and easily. Even so, the loss of that capability – for whatever reason it’s lost – doesn’t have to be entirely devastating. We communicate not only without our electronics, but without noise all the time.
I tap my wrist, hold up my hand with my fingers splayed. Across a room, instantly, I’ve told someone they have five minutes, or that I need/want five minutes. I tap beside my eyes, point in a general direction, and then point lower or higher in an aisle of a store. It tells somebody at the other end that I found what we’re looking for, or that I want them to look at something, and then where more specifically that something is.
We do it nearly instinctively, some of us more than others. While hand gestures especially change meaning culture to culture, the ability to communicate without speaking is inherent to our species. It has been since before the first cave painting.
Recently the topic of communication without radios came up. The possible reasons for a non-radio life are pretty varied – a generator or solar panels with significant damage, low winter light, extended-time crisis when even rechargeable batteries are exhausted, seasons and locations when it’s hard to get messages through, EMPs and solar storms, neighbors who have the skills to survive but don’t have the same EMP-proof stockpiles we do, newer homesteaders and preppers who can survive but haven’t moved into serious “thrive” supplies yet.
There are also times we want to communicate, but don’t necessarily want to be heard. Hunting and tactical reasons are two of those.
History and modern technology have given us a lot of options to work around those possibilities and needs. Here are a few.

Morse

Morse code can be applied to a lot of communication options. While it’s primarily associated with radios, it was once a common ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore communication method using light instead.
Navy signalman using Morse –

It wasn’t until I started looking for an image online that I realized how dependent people are on the blinker-clicker features of their flashlights for light-transmitted Morse. If you have a milspec light that can take that abuse, great.
If not, cover and uncover your flashlight with your hand.  It’s still fast and easy.
For some of us with broken and aging fingers, and for people who are turning their lights on and off to get the same effect, it’s not only actually easier, sometimes faster, it’s also going to save your light a lot of wear and tear.
You can use a laser pointer for it as well, or cover and uncover a battery-candle-oil lantern with a box (or an oatmeal tub, coffee can, small ones with your hand).

Containing Light

Light stands out like it’s cool at night. Even a little green-red-blue laser light. It travels a long way when it’s dark-dark.
If you’re only trying to not stand out to everybody with one of those insane fifty-yard beams and you’re working from a set, expected position, you can signal by flashing the laser light or a flashlight into your palm or onto your chest, onto a tree or certain wall that’s visible from another location but not most of the property.

If you anticipate the need to really not be seen by anybody but your LOS partner, carry a flattened toilet paper roll wrapped around your small flashlight. (Flattened but tube, not sliced.)
When you’re ready to send a message back to the house, to the other side of a building, along the length of a wall, or down a roadway, cup the tube in one hand so you’re blocking the back, and stick the front of the light just inside it. Or, hold a laser sight/pointer just outside it.
The roll contains the light, so only somebody facing you sees it. If you want, add a mirror or a white disk to the palm to make it a little easier for that person to see.
I pretty much prefer those two general methods, regardless, because you stand a really good chance of blinding the person you’re trying to signal, or at least giving them dots in the eyes, especially with a pointer.

Ship Flags

The sea services have been using specific flags to communicate since some of the earliest days, from pirates warning about trying to run from them, warning others that illnesses are aboard, to requesting assistance. This site has a list of international signal flags, their phonetic name, and the navy/maritime meanings.
The phonetic name becomes valuable, because some of the meanings at sea translate directly or with minor modification to things we face on land, too. The Morse, semaphore, or ASL of the phonetic name can be flashed or signed to convey a whole thought or message, just as a flag would.
The flags can be made – painted on boards or drawn on cards to use in windows or to be flashed, or drawn in chalk on a wall or sidewalk as needed. It doesn’t have  to be fabric, or flying in the air.
Any flag, banner, or windsock at all can be part of group and neighbor communication.
If we all normally fly the local team’s colors, but somebody puts it at half-mast or upside down, they could be saying they need help – or they’re ready for harvest/planting assistance. One person with a weather station might say rain, so a blue banner goes up. A black cross on yellow might mean a woman went into labor and the local sheep keeper would be welcome as a midwife. A black dot might mean there’s sickness – don’t come calling.
A flag might also just mean all’s well here, and a quick snip to drop it on the way past alerts all the rest that the gunfire wasn’t practice, it’s real, or that there’s a fire-fire, not burning waste or smoking out bees.
We can get as creative or simple as we want.

Semaphore Flagging

Another powerful tool in the box for sending messages visually, with the same alpha-numeric capabilities of Morse, is semaphore signaling – that signalman out there with the two bright flags or cone lights. Semaphore flag signaling was also once done using a single flag in just four positions (you can find it called wigwag signaling as well).

With two flags, there are fewer combinations to remember, but you also have to have two flags – and hands – available. For both, a larger line-of-sight space is required so the flags can be seen.

Established Shorthand Codes

Radio Q codes  and 10 codes have a lot of value for quickly sending messages.
Various established codes provide shorthand communication for “Suspicious vehicle” (10-37), “your keying is hosed and hit every branch of the ugly tree on its way down” (QSD), “Report to [location]” (10-25), “stand by” (QRX), and “Be super-duper quiet” (“Do not use siren or flashers”) (10-40).
Those are all phrases we might use, from communicating across a yard or across a farm, as a simple survivor with a neighbor or family, or as a group with defensive and patrol forces. 10-codes especially have a lot of preexisting elements that are of use in many situations.

They can be transmitted with clicks, whistles, a pipe smacked with a hammer, marker on a dry erase board, flashed/blinker lights, or using semaphore flag(s) and hand signals.
We can also easily modify or truncate existing codes.
“QRO” (are you troubled by static noise) can become “do you hear anything”.
10-81 (breathalyzer report) becomes “just a drunk”.
10-90 (bank alarm) can become a prefacing code for an audio or visual alarm, with the location following it.
As with cop and amateur radio codes, there are hospital codes that can apply or be readily modified to fit life without radio communication. Heavy equipment operators and divers also have signals we can steal and modify. Knowing the common motorcyclist signals can be applied to daily life as well as serious disasters.

Military Hand Signals

Whether we’re ever planning to clear a house or a yard with another person or not, military and police hand signals also have applications for many situations. The numbers alone are useful. There are also action-information signals that are pretty handy.
The difference between “stop” and “freeze” gets used with my dumb dog 20 and 200 feet from our house with some regularity. I prefer to just go extract her or the ball from my pots and planters, but sometimes I just want her to stay generally where she is while a car passes. “Go back” translates to “out/away” in our world – I want her to back away from me, usually while I’m playing with sharp things or might squish her.
I originally thought it was just my quirky father telling dogs, the rest of the family, and hunting buddies that we were going to the vehicle with his “steering wheel” gesture. For a while I though the military had stolen the “down” signal from hunters with dogs.
Turned out, not so much. He just modified them from his military days.
Even without need for silence, it’s just really easy to whistle or clap a hand once, tap a window, ring a triangle, and then make a quick gesture, as opposed to shouting fifteen times or hiking out to somebody.
The gestures themselves are rooted in military hand signals we each learned (decades apart). In most of my lifetime’s applications of them, they’ve had no military bearing at all. But like the ability to say “I love you” a last time from a window, or immediately flag a distress signal in a boating-savvy community, they entered into our world and stayed in use.

ASL

American sign language has some of the same benefits as the everyday-everyone useful military signals. There are a world’s worth of truncated single-gesture shorthand signs, for everything from “man” or “female child” to “taking lunch”.  Deaf-mute people are able to hold the same sophisticated conversation as speaking and hearing folks. The addition of spelling and broader concepts to military hand signals allows ASL signers to be more specific across even distance, silently.
It’s also just a handy skill to have and might increase your employability when you stick it on a resume.

Written Word

As with flags and hand signals, we can take cues from history and modern eras with leaving drawn symbols – or flashing cards and posters – as well.

Here’s a fairly comprehensive listing of WWII symbols. It wouldn’t be completely crazy talk to go with another nation’s symbols, such as German or Russian, if you want to keep the information a little more segmented, although there tends to be a lot of commonality.

The old hobo symbols can be a little tricky. I can think of three or four for “safe water” alone. It also means adjusting from “black spot of death” and “X marks the spot” to slashes and X’s are bad, and dots are good.
However, from “dangerous man” and “vicious dogs” to “rickety bridge” or “avoid this in rain”, there are many apply, whether we’re planning on a community, thinking “Kilroy” situations, or just making notes for family or a core group.
The symbols also allow us to quickly and easily annotate our own maps for areas of concern or resources.

Limitations

The limitation to all of these is line of sight. But in some to many cases, being able to communicate even from a driveway to the house, the length of a hall, or stacked in a ditch, without making noise or taking a lot of time, makes them worth considering. There’s a good reason many of them have never faded from use, even with today’s technology.
If you want to communicate at range in the dark, you’ll need flashlights or pointers, (or oil-candle lanterns if your non-radio needs are expected due to long-duration interruptions in shipping). For us, that’s balanced, because we have lights on us, almost always, but not always a cell signal and not always a radio. That might not hold true for everyone.
Hand and flag signals are limited in range, while light carries longer distance. However, blinker-light comms is only really reliable at night. I may be able to use red boards, car windshield heat reflectors, or white flags to increase range in the daytime.
The number-one piece of gear for longer-distance communication without electronics is going to be binoculars or a scope.

Day or night, if I can’t see what you’re sending, clearly, we have delays or miscommunication. They’re inexpensive enough and should be part of most preparedness closets anyway.
If you’re mostly in brush country and are only talking about distances of double-digit yards, don’t break the bank there – there are more important things. If you’re looking at using blinker lights and somebody climbing a windmill or water tower daily or weekly to do a neighborhood-town flag check, a simple scope should work.

It’s also a lot to learn.
Instead of planning to use all of them, maybe take notes, print guides, but cherry pick. The very basic hand signals (heard, saw, numbers, armed or unarmed, child, adult, animal, danger, recover/relax, say again) and basic Morse code would take priority. 10 and Q codes can be added on. A few flags or graphics to represent ideas or situations follow.

Radio Silence Backups

The point is not to discourage anyone with fifty-five million more things to learn or buy. It’s that we have lots of options even if electronics-driven communication becomes unavailable. With any luck, there are some ideas here that can add some resiliency and redundancy to existing plans.
And, since a lot of it is learning based, not resource based, non-radio comms can be a way to improve preparedness with free-inexpensive skill building while saving up for purchases.

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FBI Releases New Info on Sandy Hook Shooting, Guess Who Visited before the Shooting?

On Tuesday, the Federal Bureau of Investigation released 1,500 pages of documents related to their investigation and subsequent findings regarding the December 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut.
The document dump was publicized by the FBI via their records vault Twitter account.
If you are interested, you can view the documents at the three links below:
While there are lots of unanswered questions surrounding Sandy Hook and lots of things in the official story, as well as the behavior of many people involved, the issue always needs to be transparency, and while some of the documentation answers some questions, there are entire redacted pages in the document dump which raise more questions.
“In general, the FBI does not comment on the content of the files released through [Freedom of Information Act], and lets the information contained in the files speak for itself,” said Charles Grady, a community outreach specialist for the FBI based in New Haven. “This is a routine FOIA release nothing more, nothing less.”
A routine FOIA release?  Why can’t we get the State Department to do that with Hillary Clinton’s documents?  Why is even the Trump administration dragging their feet on those FOIA requests?  But I digress.
Alleged shooter Adam Lanza weighed only 85 pounds, according to the documents.  This then begs the question of how he was toting all the arms and ammunition that he was said to have been carrying.  Not only that, but how was he able to be so accurate, especially since we are told these weapons were his mothers?
Lanza was said to have been in possession of a Bushmaster XM15 .223 caliber rifle, a Glock 10mm handgun and a 9mm Sig Sauer P226 handgun.
He fired 154 round and also had more ammunition for the weapons he had on his person as well as three 30-round magazines for the Bushmaster.
However, the real bombshell in the documents was that the FBI visited him sometime before the shooting and told his mother that he might have a job with the FBI one day.
What’s even more telling is why he was commended for a job with the FBI.  He allegedly had hacked into a government computer.
So, instead of arresting him and charging him with a federal crime, our government decided, “nope, we’re not gonna charge him with a crime…. we’re gonna say he could have a job with us someday!
Is this not disturbing in and of itself?  You might say, well he’s a minor, but that really is beside the point here.
Does anyone else think we can trust the FBI anymore?
“The authorities told her that if her son was that smart, he could have a job with them someday,” according to one of the heavily-redacted reports.
Stop and think about this one moment.  The FBI knew about a lot of things in our history and yet, they failed to act properly on the information they had.  Take 9/11 for example.  Take the beheading plot against Pamela Geller for another example.  Fortunately, at least that murderous attempt was foiled.
That’s not all, Pamela Geller, who recounts her own experience with the FBI and death threats she has faced in her book FATWA: Hunted in America, has pointed out other incidents where the FBI has dropped the ball or been complicit in attacks on Americans.
Matt Agorist at The Free Thought Project reports:
As the News reports, Lanza, at that point in the ninth grade, landed on investigator’s radar after hacking his way into an unidentified agency’s computer. The teen made it through two levels of security before his efforts were thwarted, the documents showed.
“Nancy had to convince the authorities that her son was just very intelligent and was challenging himself to see if he could hack (his way in),” the report said of Lanza’s mother.
This revelation about Lanza being visited by federal agents several years before the shooting, leads to so many more questions and opens the floodgates for more conspiracy theories.
Another question on the minds of Americans is why this 20-year-old kid, with no history of violent behavior, would ever do such a thing. Investigators even noted in their reports that Lanza was never violent, but often required special tools to avoid hurting himself by accident.
Clearly, there a lot of questions that need to be answered, but this information does make you wonder just what was going on here.  It’s not everyday the FBI shows up at your house to investigate why your son is hacking government computers and then years later engages in one of the largest mass shootings in US history.
I still say something is rotten in Denmark.

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