them. Are you losing precious sleep on these long hot summer nights? Are you paying outrageous energy bills trying to stay cool while you're sleeping? If so, have I got great news for you. The bed fan is an amazing device that installs at the foot of your bed and circulates cool air between your sheets. Your average body temperature is over 98 degrees and your air conditioner simply can't penetrate your blanket or your body heat is being trapped. The Bedfan's revolutionary design directs cool air between the sheets where it's really needed. No more tossing and turning to keep you up all night. The Bedfan's thin streamline design is simple to install and fits between your bed and foot board. And did I mention how much money you're going to save by turning down your air conditioner overnight? Please don't let another sleepless night go by. Get your Bedfan by going to bedfan.com or calling area code 210-632-8280. I had a dream the other night that, well, I didn't understand. A figure walked in through the mist with a flintlock in his hand. His clothes were torn and dirty as he stood there by my bed. He took off his three-cornered hat, and speaking low to me, he said, we've fought a revolution to secure our liberty. We wrote the Constitution as a shield from tyranny. For future generations, this legacy we gave. In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. The freedoms we secured for you, we hoped you'd always keep. But tyrants labored endlessly while your parents were asleep. Your freedom's gone, your courage lost, you're no more than a slave. In this, the land of the free and home of the brave. You buy permits to travel and permits to own a gun. Permits to start a business or to build a place for one. On land that you believe you own, you pay a yearly rent. Although you have no voice in saying how the money's spent, your children must attend a school that doesn't educate, and your Christian values can't be taught according to the state. You read about the current news in a regulated press, and you pay a tax you do not owe to please the IRS. Your money is no longer made of silver nor of gold. You trade your wealth for paper so your life can be controlled. You pay for crimes that make our nation turn from God and shame. You've taken Satan's number and you've traded in your name. You've given government control to those who do you harm so they could burn down churches and seize the family farm and keep our country deep in debt. Put men of God in jail. Harash your fellow countrymen while corrupted courts prevail. Your public servants don't uphold the solemn oaths they've sworn. And your daughters visit doctors so their children won't be born. Your leaders send artillery and guns to foreign shores and send your sons to slaughter fighting other people's wars. Can you regain the freedoms for which we fought and died? Or don't you have the courage or the faith to stand with pride? And are there no more values for which you'll fight to save? Or do you wish your children to live in fear and be a slave? O sons of the Republic, arise, take a stand, defend the Constitution, the Supreme Law of the land, preserve our great Republic and each God given right, and pray to God to keep the torch of freedom burning bright. As I awoke, he vanished in the mist for whence he came. His words were true, we are not free, but we have ourselves to blame. For even now as tyrants trampled each God given right we only watch in tremble too afraid to stand and fight If he stood by your bedside in a dream while you were asleep and wondered what remains of the freedoms he'd fought to keep What would be your answer if he called out from the grave? Is this still the land of the free and home? That's why your killer body armor. Okay, here we go guys and North and Southeast. east and west of the Mississippi along with southern and central Alaska. You will also find us on the Hallmark Network, eight colonial states to include expansions into the core of the country. In other words, we're having a lot of fun. The guys are doing a great job along with the gals. And we will have the Golden Spike Program somewhere in southern Ohio or southeastern Ohio. We'll see what happens there. The O Network will be Hallmark. and the alternate coming together to cover the whole of the country in a few places we still have to fill in. It will be paint by numbers there. And we will have the program up and online to replace the internet as the bad guys shut it off. Faster, sooner and better because they are headed towards trying to screw around with the country guys. We've got to be ready to counter it when the time comes. Butter Knife, today's date is? It is 29 March 2009. It is the last hour of the day and the week and that makes it Quartermaster Corner. And Quartermaster guys, remember if it weren't for Quartermaster, the rest of the system simply doesn't function because supply and support. You've got to have a supply train. It may be by the time it's done, a little South American llama with two 150 pound packs or a little less maybe, but it'll carry between 150 and 300. leaping over fallen logs and of course moving with that little train of llamas as they work their way across the ridge lines of Kentucky. Parachute cord you need to improvise there. We'll probably provide that if we can, but there's a lot of other things out there that we need to make sure are covered. The 510 program that we have implemented is going well. Everybody is incorporating that. Even Mark does that every day. There are things that I'm just putting off to the side. They're going into the 510 program and everything top to bottom to outfit a person. Clothing, underpants, t-shirts, field jackets, body armor, boots, helmets, you name it, all the web gear, backpack, it's there. And the idea behind that is... that you grab one package out of the series of packages that are deployed or one barrel and so many people or a person is outfitted depending on the size of the container top to bottom just throw it at them check the size cross reference the size on the box or the should say the size on the plastic barrel or sealed container it's got to be sealed so it's protected from the elements and then you just hand it on down the line and it's their job to sort it out you just got the basics there that's what Quartermaster does Anyway, it is a beautiful Friday. We had blue skies when we started the day. Quasi storm fronts roll through we've had little spitterings of rain nothing major, but gray during the day now here We are ending the day with the blue sky also so remember It's the end of the workday you guys and a lot of cases are headed home Don't think about what you got to do when you get there Think about what's beyond the hood of your car because we want to be able to talk to you next week at this same time and Fridays are the most dangerous because people are always thinking about what they're going to do Friday night or what they're going to do over the weekend Hey, that's going to get there, but to do it you have to get home. May 30th at Rochester. However, it's no longer at the county fairgrounds and it's a one-day event, not a three-day event. This is the 75th Annual Rochester Hamfest and it costs $5 to get in at the gate. That includes even a ticket for the raffle. Children accompanied by adults who pay the $5. They are free and it's up to 16 years of age. You can get in for free with an adult. The kitties can come along and there's a dinner at night if you want to stay for dinner. It's 15 bucks for the dinner. If you want to camp out there overnight, it's $5 at night for camping. There are no hookups though. The location of the ham fest is going to be at Bernard Carnival Grounds, B-A-R-N-A-R-D grounds and that is located in Greece, New York, which is just west of Rochester and the physical address is 380 Maiden, M-A-I-D-E-N Lane, Greece, New York. Gates open at 8am and set up if you're going to do a tailgating or set up booths they start at 6am. Apparently tailgating is free. Booths you'll have to contact them for pricing on that. Grand prize, door prize that goes with the tickets on the drawing is an ICOMC. IC718HF transceiver, ICOMS is one of the finest radios you can possibly ever have. Well worth picking up. Operating number for calling into the ham fest is 146.8. That's 146.8. That is your 2 meter handband and if you want automated navigation to directions to bring you right there, you call in at 146.79 tomorrow morning, 146.79. I'll get you right there but I know if you can get up into the onto the beltway of 390 or 490 or any of that stuff going westbound, not to take you into Greece or if you're coming from the west, Highway 104 will take you into Greece. I think what, Highway 19 from the south will bring you on up into Greece as well. If you're coming out of the south or southwest into Greece. Call in numbers is 585-671-2424. There is an email address. at www.rochester.rr.com. That's tomorrow at the Barnard Carnival Grounds in Greece. That's all I have, Mark. I think that will do. Very good. Thank you, Dave. You can listen in. That's where you can go to get supplies, right? For the quartermaster. Signal communications. He needs all sorts of good supplies. That's right. Signal communications are the key, guys. That's the whole idea. Radio communications of all types. Take advantage of it now, take advantage of it while you can. Get all the ICOM 2 meter radios you can find at Hamfest. The old ones, they're the best. They work real well for using for militia uses because a little clip of the wire and a solder here, they can go from 142 megacycles all the way to 158 megacycles. just with a little jumper wire. Yes, it's a symptom of an over-regulated system in which sometimes the older equipment is valued above the newer equipment because more rules and more restrictions and more crippling has occurred over time. Quite a number of scanners are that way, a lot of other two ways are that way. Modifications are easier on the older ones that are built into the firmware and some of the newer ones, that sort of thing. Too bad it's just a sign of the general degradation of things. The nice thing too with the ICOM and your two meters, they're programmable and scrammable and they run duplex. It's real fun if you've got a buddy. And you set up duplex between two radios. Instead of going through a repeater, you do duplex from radio to radio. I talk on one frequency, my buddy talks on another frequency. And anybody doing a scanner? Well, they only get half the conversation. Lots of fun. Presumably it's a little bit smoother as well if you're stopping and starting. OK. Thank you, gentlemen. Hold on for just a second, Butterknife. I know you're scored away, but we've got Spike sitting in the wings here with an announcement, too. So I'll tell you what we'll do. We'll grab him real quick also. How's that sound? OK, good. Spike, jump in there. Actually, I didn't have an announcement. I just called in to help Ed out with the hour last hour and decided to stick around because Butterknife was having problems. But I will reinforce some of the stuff said before. Big rocks, however. I'll take off with the rest. Thank you, Spike. Appreciate that. And again, keep us up to speed. Oh, by the way, Spike. Real quick, we've got a bunch of people in your AO you'll be expecting to contact. A little south of you, but we're afraid to know who they are. Ask you, because whenever I go to the still walk down the railroad cars, you got a lot of feedback from... Actually, Indiana and Southern Illinois are very, very busy. To the point where I think people are looking at your Gouverneur the same way we look at our Gouverneur. Very interesting. Oh yeah. The response is quite fascinating too. But there are a number of people and there are across the length of the state, but just expect the mail to be a little thicker in the next day or two. The mail you sent me, I did receive it. Very good. And you know how to deal with that, right? Okay. Put it to good use then too. There's more on the way by the way. Just keep an eye on the mail. Cool. I got a pile that's about 35 envelopes right here on top of the very thin monitor balanced on the very tall pile of telephone books behind it. He's waiting for the kiddie. Oh no, they are all sleeping. They played themselves to death. So my clerk typist is asleep right now, thank goodness. I have one. This is one thing, as we know, the four-pod assistants are usually unique on a keyboard, but we have one that she is absolutely attentive. She understands and relates to the mouse and the screen. Not that she wouldn't like the mouse for other reasons, they are a nice chew toy. The same with playing with the keyboard. She has figured out that if you watch the screen and you touch the keys, something happens. I've been watching her as she, you know, the cat brain is smaller than a dog brain, but it's amazing how much storage is in this one. Obviously this is an upgrade. I mean an upgrade. Yeah. I mean an upgrade. I mean, oh, wait a minute. That's right. If you tap her, you can hear the titanium scallering. You know. Sometimes if you hit a key, you'll get totally non-linear response from the mark, and that's very entertaining, I'm sure. Yep. Oh, she's like, it's fascinating to watch. Like I said, she's... She's doing all kinds of fun stuff. Right now she's doing the best thing of all. She's sleeping all over her ears. Now I'm talking about her, she'll probably start moving in this direction. Oh, I'm not doing my job. Anyway, we have fun too. Thank you Spike, appreciate that. No problem. Y'all breath. You guys have a good one. Good talking to you, better enough. and butter knife you've got more information for us and everything's up and online again i assume so go ahead oh yeah we've got punches uh... first thing i'd like to slide in there one of our friends and sponsors i believe for this hour you know other hours is wolverine m o dot com dot do not go to the website right now why uh... do do we ask uh... should we not go to that website uh... don't we like them anymore yes we like them despite but Their website has a little problem with the virus right now. So anybody who cares about the health of their computer wants to stay away from that website for the time being until they get everything sorted out. For your convenience, fire up the pencil here. Their voice number is 734-340-7285. That is 734-340-7285. We've been warning people in chat to not go to their website, but we don't want you to not deal with them. Just use the telephone for the time being until they can get everything sorted out. For your convenience, so you're not tempted to go to the website for the moment, one last time. The simplest theory is to assume that somebody at their ISP or elsewhere got careless and this website got infected. We always are great fans of alternate theories of these things, but however that happened, that website is temporarily hazardous. For the time being, just pick up the phone and talk with them and do things the old-fashioned way. One last time, 734. Just so they don't think that we're trying to drive people away. I will provide you the alternative. Hopefully in the next day or three they'll be able to get somebody's backside in gear and fix that little problem. Absolutely. And again, I just talked to them about that today and warned them specifically in person. Hopefully they'll be passing the word on from that end too and finding out what's going on with the support system there. We'll have more information as we develop over the weekend. We know there are other things they have to take care of right now. One of the things we have, they have a funeral in the family, in the close relation slash family down there, so they're taking care of that right now, but that's not... to say that the store is offline, just reverse, there's always somebody there and taking care of business right now so they will be open tomorrow too. And real quick, but before going any farther, we are a quartermaster and I mentioned this earlier. Guys, talk to the suppliers today. The M9 copies, the finished gas masks, are gone. Where? We bought them all. From the ultimate site you mean? From the ultimate site. The supply end is exhausted. I will tell you that right now. If you have any more masks that you want, as far as we know, on the horizon, there are none left. And I know because I have, like I said, I've touched every one of your gas masks in a way because I've been to the warehouse where they all come in. They've all come from one source. Well, you think a better knife has the last 8,000 in existence? Oh, wait, I've been required on that. It might be. That's true. Well, you see, that's the whole point. We've got everybody trying to buy multiples. Now, that doesn't mean that, for instance, main military should still have masks, but I can't guarantee that because, as was confirmed, as we know, once the flying pig disease was mentioned, gas masks went off or just flying out of the inventory. That was part of the issue and I warned everybody about this months and months ago. I don't disagree that they aren't going to try and throw these things at us as far as the propaganda arm and in reality it's stuff with toxins they've created. We've never argued against that. Just to reverse, the reason I told everybody to get your gas mask earlier is so that you wouldn't be paying, number one, you could get the size you needed and what you wanted. And number two, you're not going to pay five times what they were going for. And you all know because we've told you and pointed you to the prices on these things. So everybody that got theirs, congratulations. Everybody who is just now coming in, don't panic, but you're going to have to shop around for other systems beyond the types that we've talked about. If you've listened to the archives, you know we've talked about the finished nines. They are good and very well made. Finland does not do anything cheap. They do everything very well. They have a militia slash national force that is very excellent. Their training is phenomenal. They train live fire constantly. They are rifle marksmen in that country. They are experts in all of the other arms that they use and they take their business very seriously. Same is true with all their support equipment for their army. Very high quality, very well made. So these M9 masks, these M9 copies, we'll call them an M9 because they're just a direct knockoff of the M9 gas mask. Whatever is out there in the retail or semi-retail end is what's left. Now I'm going to confirm a few other numbers on some of the other masks and I do know that they had a wave of the Russian masks come in. I've talked about that before. Again, they are 40 millimeter filters. They're not bad masks. It's just that while you can get the higher tech combat mask, you do it. I carry either an M10 or a carrying M10 depending on what kit I have, I can grab four kits. But I have mostly the M9 or I have the M10 type slash M17 type masks simply because of availability and lots of spare parts. That is how it works. I have every other mask you can imagine. I have masks you have never seen and never will again that are in the inventory because we have researched all this stuff. The other masks that are available, I carry a spare Russian mask. Is it for myself? Well, if need be, yes. But I have a tendency to carry spares because somebody else may need a backup or may need another one. Okay, in other words, something happens to their equipment. Remember, if you're a team leader or you're a supervisor, that's just policy. You carry extras of everything because you're supposed to be looking out for the troops. It doesn't mean you're caring for their benefit, period. In other words, well, they don't have to carry anything because they can wait for Mark to do it. That's not how it works. When you're in any kind of operation, the idea is to ensure that your people are not hurt and that they continue to operate at a particular level of performance. To do that you might have to carry some spares and again you're also usually one of the people that's a first responder. Again, you never know what you run to in the field. I like lots of extras and everything simply because assume the worst and we won't be disappointed. The Russian masks are a floppy skull, I like to call them the possum mask because that's what they look like. You pull the whole thing over your head. It's got this long snooty nose. They typically do not have a voice mitter. but some do because the officers and NCOs did talk. The enlisted men don't. They're not supposed to. Enlisted men didn't get a voice meter. You're supposed to listen and you're supposed to just pay attention, not be heard. So the supply system is being eaten up and there are whole categories that have just been consumed. And it's not a surprise. It's what we expected. In fact, to be quite honest, although I was hoping it would stretch out a little bit longer, What this means is that about 3-4 months earlier than the bad guys probably wanted to, they've depleted or altered the inventory for supply in that area. I don't have a problem with that because those masks are out there someplace. Some people are not going to be smart enough to keep them. We'll get them without anybody having any way of knowing where they went. It's just like when all the generators were bought years ago. Guys, we absorbed them all. Just keep that in mind. Somebody else doesn't want to keep theirs or they decide they think they need a quick buck. Guess what? We're going to turn right around and resupply from another direction and there's no accountability. Anyway, just want to get that in there. Butterknife, jump in there, please. Go right ahead. Okay. As far as you know, have the retailers emptied out on the M9s or is it just the back end? Just the import jobbers. Okay. Then let's quickly run through the retailers that we know of and recommend for the remaining stock. There is COPESdistributing.net. They have the, you want to search on finish, F-I-N-N-I-S-H. They're offering the kit with one filter for $12. There is Centerfiresystems.com. that is CenterFireSystems.com. They originally offered these things three for twenty dollars. They are offering them now or most recently that I saw at three for twenty five dollars. And the one that I like best is E-GunParts.com. That is E-GunParts.com, the old Numbrich Arms Corporation. They hit their quantity three price and then are continuous from there. So you get the same price for each if you order three or four or five or what have you. You don't have to get them in multiples of three and they're about the same price on the mask plus filter but they are by far the best source I have found so far on the filters alone. So if you buy the mask sets and then want additional supply of the filters, three or more filters, the filters are at $2.40 a piece. By far the best price that I have heard. So I would recommend e-gunparts.com as our first place to visit. For those who are on that site you want to search on M61, that's mic 61. That's the nomenclature they're using for those masks and filters. They have other things but the M9 is the one that I really like. And they call it the M61 because The US version, we called it M9, the Fins called it M61. Did we ever determine whether those are the exact same molds, whether we sent the molds over and they continue to use them? That's what I always suspected because the M9 went out of service here and then appeared in two variants, actually three or four variants. The closest one is actually the finished model, but I have not been able to get an answer on that. I got into that discussion with somebody actually about four or five days ago because we were also talking about some other equipment, web gear and such. As the stuff disappeared out of our inventories as far as manufacturing during the Cold War, all of a sudden they cropped up in other countries including those behind the iron curtain where they started cranking out the same system but in East Germany's hands or Romania's. The same is true with that design with regard to Finland adopting it. So I would think if they may have maybe sold a percentage of the molds, they could have done that. sold a percentage of the molds to Finland and then they just proceeded to make them in their neck of the woods. Entirely possible. It's not at all unusual for factories to sell off entire dye sets or mold sets or whatnot and to just dump that very expensively developed tooling in a kit to some other country and the other country just fires up and turns right around and continues to produce the material at hand. Did we hear a beep? Do we have a caller? Okay, sounds like we have a listener. That's right. We have a very patient listener on our hands. Go ahead though. Okay, I've missed a couple of the programs over the last week, so just to check with you, have you discussed the topic of seed balls on air recently? No, please do that again. In fact, good point. I actually got into that discussion off the air, and we need to talk about that on the air again, so go ahead and jump in on that, please. Okay, this is a really neat little technique and technology for low labor input gardening. And everybody ought to know about this one. It may be a little bit late in the season for some people in some areas, but it's never too late to learn a new thing and may not be too late to execute, depending on the circumstances. As far as I can tell, this came from a Japanese guy who is one of these sort of semi back to the nature type fellows back in the late 80's I think it was. He showed it to a bunch of the mother of news type people and they thought it was way cool and started talking about it and the word has spread. What this is based on, this is a technique for growing edible food with very little labor input on marginal land. Not all land is laid out in nice great big rectangular splotches with midwestern flood, silt, soil, and all of those traditional things that we think of as farming. An awful lot of the earth is covered in much more irregular patches and glops and bits and pieces and scraps of land. But vegetation still grows there anyway. This is based on the principle that In all of these marginal areas, as you move over terrain and elevation fluctuates and trees and rocks and high points and low points occur, within 10 or 50 feet of each other you can have wildly different microclimates. You can have dry spots and wet spots, high and low pH. You can have sunny and you can have shady You can have all sorts of combinations of conditions in little spots and patches here and there. Very close to each other and very hard for a human to identify. It's very hard to say, oh well, this spot would be perfect for carrots and 10 feet over here this would be better for some other crop. So the technique that this guy came up with is to let nature make the decision. What he does is he says, okay, gather up all the different sorts of seeds of things you are interested in. Take seeds from radish and from carrots and from tomatoes and leaf lettuce and romaine lettuce and beans and all of these different things that you might have any interest in and mix them all together. Dump them all in a bucket and mix them all together. and throw in a little bit of clay and moisten it just enough so that it will become clumpy. And you homogenize this. and add a little bit of moisture so that it gets clumpy. And then you do the kindergarten trick of rolling it out into ropes and pinching it off and rolling it around in your hands and making little balls out of it. Grape size or smaller balls of this clay and spread them out on cookie sheets or tarps or whatever it is you have in the sun so that they dry. And when you're done you have all these little marbles of clay, dirt, and assorted mixed together seeds in ball bearing or grape sized form. Then you gather them all back into your bucket and you go around the edges of fields or the edges of creeks or any of these places that are not intensively garden, presumably not far from places you might want to camp or where you live or what have you. And you simply broadcast these. You grab handfuls of them and you just fling them all over the place and let them scatter all over. And what you are doing is you are spreading little bundles of seeds everywhere through all of these little pieces of the terrain and letting them fall where they may. And as soon as the first rain comes along, of course, the clay will dissolve. The seeds will fall into that soil. And each of them will encounter different soil conditions. And in this spot, the radishes will say, hmm, I like this. And the beans will turn up their little noses in croak. And in some other spot, 10 feet away, it'll be the other way around. Some other plant will say, oh, I like this spot. The pH suits me just fine. And somewhere else, everything will sprout. And some plants will think, oh, there's not enough sun here. And 10 feet over, the other plants will say, there's too much sun for me. I'm quitting. And whatever likes a particular spot of soil with all of those conditions will grow in that spot. By doing this, you give all of these different varieties opportunities to find little spots that they like and to grow more or less wild. Later on, you just come back. You will have to be able to identify your plants because they're not going to be a neat little rose with a seed packet at the end saying, this one is lettuce and this one is something else. But it will cause great profusion of known edible plants to be growing in a particular area. And you can go back later and simply pick these almost wild plants as your as your little truck garden with basically zero labor input. You just give those plants the opportunity to grow in different niches and spots wherever they find suitable, and then you come back later and harvest them based on whatever happened to grow in a particular spot. Mark? One of the advantages is this is part of the wild propagation process we've talked about. It's an interesting idea, and it's not a bad one. Remember, if you especially have a lot of waterways, a lot of secondary streams, swamps, corners of fields, just like he's talking about, like the gentleman who thought this idea up, we have a lot of waterways and we have a lot of back corners and spots here and there. Now you're going to figure you're going to get some wild animal consumption, that's expected. And even if you got a percentage that was fairly high, The benefit is an insurance policy that allows for secondary production that gives you some food source. Right, if the critters get even most of it but you've grown a vast amount, then so what? You've still got some. It took very little work and besides, if the critters are hanging around a lot, you may get some of the critters too. Exactly. The second benefit is remember, let them go ahead and eat the nummies. They taste better when they've been fed better. You know what I mean? So, gee, that bunny has got a little better calorie consumption with a little nicer flavoring to him. And you just adjust accordingly when the time comes after you've harvested them. So there are a number of different options here, but this is part of, again, the deployment in the rural areas especially, or even in some of the urban areas. You could do this in a lot of places where you're on the periphery of a town or a village. And you're hopefully trying to get things to take off. You will find out, just like you said, by having a combination, in some places certain plants will grow better than others. It depends upon, as we were talking about earlier in this week with Larry, pH and consistency of the soil. You're going to find out real quick without working what it is that will work because it will grow. The other thing is, like I said, streams and watersheds, where you have a lot of streams, a lot of places up and down, the waterway where you can drop these. They're going to get sufficient water through the early season. You can point out the high water mark. Typically, if you're getting the growth in the earlier part of the season anyway, the high water mark is already there. You plant it just at the edge or above the high water mark only by a short distance. When the water recedes, you still have a good combination of moisture. You have moist air. You've got sunshine. That's exactly what you need for those seeds to take off. And again, the dominant plants that work best in each of the conditions will survive and thrive accordingly. So if ideally, better still, is not only do they thrive and survive, but they are producing seed pods. If you don't harvest, and if you're really lucky, as has been the case with some of the stuff we've planted over the years, you get regeneration season after season. And so you don't have to do anything. Example is dill. If you can get dill going, dill is a weed. Whatever you don't harvest is going to drop back into the area where you produced it progressively. You're going to have beds. and little packs of little patches of the plant that you want. We can do this also with many of the herbs or like mints. Anything like that, even onions and garlic will grow the same way. When you drop them in, remember those bulbs are supposed to drop back down and look at the stem. Look at what they're doing. The stem is so long, the plant breaks at the halfway marker farther. As it falls over, it drops away from the mother plant. See what it's doing? It's actually creating a colony. That colony drops in place. It has so many buds. Hopefully when it drops, they actually separate a little bit. It's going by numbers so that some may not survive. But amazingly enough, what I've seen with garlic, onions, and all these others that are bulbs like that is typically, unless you picked a really bad spot, you're going to see almost 100% survival rating on these things, short of those that have not developed completely. So here's another source for any of the food products that actually helped to change the flavor and the mineral content of the diet, which is why it's nice to have the different types of dills. Sage, there's one you can grow anywhere. Sage is a weed. Sage is a weed that originally is like, wow, the Indians are using it. Let's try this out. It doesn't mean it wasn't in other parts of the planet in different forms, but as we see it here, with all the different cooking that's done, the wild herbs became a standard. But they may not necessarily be growing effective in the area, so you want to develop them. That's one of the things we're recommending. The examples that I used were, and the main idea that I had in mind is as edibles and caloric supplements and so on. Bear in mind that all of the herbs are also going to have to fill in in medicinal roles as well. I believe the current plan is that December 31, the Codex Elementarius becomes effective. Now, of course, there is a big question how tightly the vampires will be in charge of things at that point. But that is basically a big elaborate scheme to make vitamins and minerals all heavily restricted and under control of pharmaceutical companies to make sure that our food supply is degraded as thoroughly as possible so that people get sick. And it is generally just a very bad thing. And they do plan to go ahead with it at the end of this year. So we are going to have to use available gardening resources as much as possible to make up the difference in available pharmaceuticals. Not that what's currently available is necessarily all that good for us, but the supplies are going to be deliberately monkey wrenched. So herbs and whatever spices can grow in your area are also a priority. And this is a way to generate supplies of those. So we exhausted that topic I guess. And we still have 18 minutes so jump in there. Go right ahead. Okay, now we've got another one. This is a little along the lines of fun stuff. But, we have several different methods of making fire. Probably our favorite is the disposable butane lighter and of course there are the strike anywhere matches which are becoming an endangered species and box matches and so on and so on and so on down the list. One of the traditional ones is the good old American Zippo lighter. I went looking just for grins to find out what was going on with the Zippo lighter and was shocked to find that standard list price on a Zippo or even a clone of that sort of lighter nowadays is $15 a pop. And that irks me a little bit because there are people who still have and use that style of lighter that they carried in World War II. or Korea or what have you and the things just run forever. You have to replace supplies. You have to keep topping them up with fluid. You have to change the flints. But that is one of the classic designs. You almost can't think of an improvement on that design. There are some caveats just like anything else. They don't work terribly well in cold weather. You need to keep them in an inside pocket if that's the case. You do have to keep topping them up, but they are also very, very wind resistant compared to the butane disposables. And it seems to me that this is a useful item to include in the mix. But at $15 a pop, I'm thinking, what the heck is going on here? You can be sure that even the name brand is made in China, perhaps with a little bit more oversight by the by the marketing firm, but still China Sport material at this point. Why does this cost so much? So I went out and went hunting. And what I discovered is that the generic term for these in marketing circles is the oil lighter, the phrase is oil lighter. And I found a vendor which has some of these at extremely comfortable prices. This is dealextreme.com. That is deal extreme. Now this is an incredibly cluttered site and they have a bazillion things on there. but you can search for SKU numbers or you can search for the phrase oil lighter. And I have found some of them, if you don't mind a little bit of hokey artwork on them, as cheaply as $2.73 for a single unit with free shipping by three or more and they will offer them to you for slightly over $2 a piece. The cheapest one they have listed has artwork on the side of a pot leaf, so that may not appeal to everybody. But there are other variants as well. That SKU number is 5.2. 5274 if a search will turn that up. That's 5274. But you can certainly just go looking around and see what else you find. Remember the key phrase is oil lighter. And that cheapest one is called Hawk Vintage Metal Oil Lighter. Now I would expect this to be cheaply manufactured, and therefore you want to buy five or ten of these things, not one. I expect some of them to break. Even though they do seem to have user reviews and many positive things said about them, be advised that on any vendor site those could be shells. But they don't seem repetitive and mechanistic. So that may be the perfectly legitimate. Another variation is one called American Spirit Metal Oil. It has a little Statue of Liberty and some other nonsense on there. That one is SKU 8384. That one they will sell for about $2.50 a piece, quantity three. The single quantity price is $3.23. Still vastly better than the $15. you will pay for the Zippo branded lighter. This site also has some other variations. There are refillable butane models for about $2.50 a piece, $2.00 a piece in quantity. Quantity again is $3.00 or more. Naturally, we should be aware that some of these refillables with the jet or torch style outputs were of course designed for the crack head market. That's what, not to put too fine a point on it, that's exactly what they had in mind. They are not designed to run for minutes and minutes on hand. But with that in mind, if you only run them for five or ten seconds at a time, these things can also double up as terrific fire starters because they will give a heck of a blast to any sort of damp tinder you're working on. You can use them for very light soldering if you've got a couple of wires that you need to solder someplace, especially if you've got some low melt solder. They will serve as a torch, just don't run them very long at a stretch. If you don't have a buddy each have one of these things, maybe you can take turns blasting the spot if you really need to spend a little bit more time to warm up a piece of small pipe or something along those lines. They have some of these refillable jet style butane types for $2.50 a piece or $2.00 a piece in quantity. So wander around on the site and take a look. But you will find, and the one thing that I was really looking for was the Zippo styles. And for 2 to 2.25 a piece, you can get 5 or 10 of these guys and equip your butter knife crowd with an other and additional option for fire starting. Now these guys use consumables, specifically they use flints and they use fluid. So, butternut got busy on that one as well. I ran down to my local Walgreens and took a look at the wall behind the checkout counter. to find out what flints cost. And I was horrified to discover that a little plastic cart of nine flints retailed for $2.50. And well, you don't have to change them every five minutes. So I guess that's not too awful. But it sure does seem like yet another example of a horrendous markup in the retail market. So I went hunting. I found a store called USA-less. That's u-s-a-l-e-s-s dot stores dot yahoo dot net. and if you search on Ronson, R-O-N-S-O-N, that is R-O-N-S-O-N, they will sell you an entire retail card of these flint packs. So you get a cardboard sheet that's got 24 of these packs, and each of these packs has nine flints on it, and they will sell you that entire sheet for $13.20, which drops the price down by about a factor of five. So you're paying about 50 cents more or less for one of these little yellow plastic cards of nine flints instead of $2.50. I like 50 cents much better than $2.50 and I think most people probably do. And if you can scrape up the princely sum of $13.20 to buy this many all at once or even a multiple of that. that drops your cost on the flints by about 80% from retail. And last but not least, what's the major material that you have to squirt into these things? It's lighter fluid. And what's lighter fluid? That is naphtha. So I went hunting for naphtha and I also checked the retail prices. At the drug store, at the grocery store, you'll pay $2 to $5 for a bottle of that stuff and it will contain anywhere from 5 to 8 to perhaps 12 ounces of fluid. Now a bottle of that lasts quite a while, but it also strikes me as yet another example of the retail markups that we tend to pay for things. So, I went hunting and I found that there is an outfit called www.woodfinishersdepo.com. That is www.woodfinishersdepo.com. And if you search that site for the keyword naphtha, N-A-P-T-H-A, that's what lighter fluid is. NAPTHA, NAPTA, that is a petroleum distal that has been used for 100 years or more for various things, and that is lighter fluid. You will find that you can buy a 5 gallon pail of this stuff for $60, plus shipping and hazmat fees and all that kind of good stuff. If you buy a second one, they'll sell you two of them for $33 a piece. The price of this stuff drops practically in half. They'll almost give you the second one in exchange for the fact that you're going to have to have another hazmat fee. You can also purchase single gallons from this source. If I recall, they're about $12 a piece. That particular page won't refresh on my browser tonight. So I think they were about $12 a piece, and I think they dropped to about $7 a piece if you bought two or more. These are gallons. And they can put as many as four of those into a box under a single hazmat. So if you and a buddy wanted to really equip your depots with what might to improve almost a lifetime supply of lighter fluid. You could buy one or two gallons of this stuff, split up the hazmat, so you order four and each get two, or order two and each get one. And you discover what this Ronson brand of Shell Oil Company product has known for decades, and that is that the markup is just absolutely insane. So among these three vendors you can pick up the so called oil lighters for $2.00 to $2.00 and $1.00 a piece. You can buy flints at one fifth of the price of retail and you can purchase the fluid that's NAFTA at prices on the order of $7.00 to $9.00 per gallon rather than $5.00 for a half a pint or something along those lines. Now, bear in mind when you're handling any fluid like this, the usual precautions outside, nobody smoking nearby, all of that sort of stuff apply. But how do we want to handle this stuff without slopping it all over the ground? The chemists will use the word pipette. But housewives will use a simpler word, turkey baster. Have a container that you want to fill. ready and you poke the turkey baster in there and you give it a slurp and you move over to the container you want to fill and you give it a spit and there you go and there is no slop, no mess. If you have some of these retail lighter fluid cans or jars or what not you just give them a squeeze, poke them into the glass that you just filled up and slurp it up and refill and away you go. So, that's a slightly odd one, but a knife did a little bit of shopping and you can save 80 or 90% on that category of equipment if you are ingenious and hunt out these alternate approaches to the retail system. Excellent. And again, one of the things to remember is fire is your friend in many different ways issue can possibly store to produce fire that is a plus plus uh... when you look at our kids You will find conventional paper pack matches, you will find stick matches, you will find lifeboat matches, you will find Zippo lighters, you will find butane lighters, you will find even some of the jetlighters depending on what they are. And every single one of them has a different strength and a weakness, different failure modes, so it's good to have several. That's right, and you have them placed all over your system in your combat pack, your house load, on your person and they should be designed to be stored so that they are waterproof, they are sealed inside. A lot of times we get the seal, here's an example, get the sealamilo packs. Take some of the matches, put them in the sealamilo packs, and then take and put that sealamilo pack in another one. And that goes in your deepest storage point and also goes in one of your popcorn pockets on your pants and trades out its equipment you always carry. Ziploc bags with extra glove liners and extra socks. Go in your popcorn pockets, on your pants and in your coat or in your battle blouse. Either way, the idea behind this is that even if you were stripped of your gear, you're carrying a certain amount of survival equipment with you constantly. And there's a whole battery of little trinket things that you can have. It's not the fastest way to do something, but it gives you the ability to do something as opposed to being stuck bare butt naked out there in the wind. There's nothing quite like not freezing to death to make your day. There's nothing I like better than not freezing to death. Waking up the next morning and still breathing is a plus plus situation. Or even if you have to stay up all night sitting around a little fire, if you're not frozen then the next day may be better. That's right. So again, all of these tools are useful. There is one butter knife I don't know from our main supplier, the one, the importer. They had a German What was it called? The German Zippo. It wasn't a Zippo design at all. It was a very different lighter. Very popular. I used to get these on cards of 12. They come either in the silver or they come with a color for the body of the thing. They're still sheet metal stamping. They've been around since World War I by what I understand. They're very reasonably priced if they have any left. I'll have to find out if there's any of those still coming in. It was another solution in that category. You may have reminded me of it because we haven't had any. I've got one or two hanging around that are in kits. Is that an oil lighter or a wick? With an oil wick lighter. Same as the Zippos. But it's a different design altogether. It's not flat. It's actually like a lipstick tube. I describe it like this. So collect the blintz they come in awfully handy and they're not worn out they're not dead just because they're in that old pick lighter they threw away for a dollar. Right they have a slightly different texture but they still work. That's right and you'll make them again we can always find them and use them for other applicants too. We have to have the tools to do that. We are the Music Butter Knights this hour went by super fast. They all do. And again, thank you for being here. We are going to surrender the programming back ahead. God bless Republic. and assault address stamp envelope 2, Raider Company, HHC, P.O. Box 194, Dexter, Michigan, 48130. That address again is Raider Company, HHC, P.O. Box 194, Dexter, Michigan, 48130. Colonial Marines in all 50 states, serving America in America, today and into the future.