Jackknife Lockpick Review

Buy at Amazon

While I don’t often need lock-picks, I do find the ability to pick locks fascinating.  There are groups and conventions dedicated to the mechanical skill needed to bypass locking mechanisms.

It take a keen mechanical mind to develop lock picking techniques.

This Jackknife Lockpick is a really neat way to keep lock-picks readily available for use.

Beware, some states have laws making it illegal to carry a lockpick set.  They are considered in some places to be “Burglar Tools”

Personally, I like the little shot of dopamine when I make the lock click open.

Lockpicking is a pretty neat skill to have, and I should probably do a video on it one day.  I like this Jackknife Lockpick because it is easy to carry around and is pretty handy.

Even if you don’t ever plan on picking locks to get them open, knowing what locks are easy to pick has uses in designing security systems around your home.  For one, after learning to pick locks, I found out how extremely easy a master lock is to pick open.  You would think they would be hard based upon their branding as being strong.

At one time I thought about opening a locksmith service, but it was right at the time the Dept of Commerce decided to protect the people that had services already by making it almost impossible to start your own without permission of the existing services. (apprentice program)

The Complete Soapmaker

Making soap is an essential homesteading skill of our forefathers.  Imagine how life would be if you did not have soap.  Not only for hygiene, but for disease prevention.

For years I avoided making soap for fear it was too complicated and dangerous.  However, The Complete Soapmaker and books like it made me realize it was not that hard to make soap.I found an easy soap method that took little effort and made my first batch of soap.  I still have some in the kitchen and I am pretty proud of the result.

I even added the how to in my Food Preservation book.

The problem is, once you start making soap you tend to keep wantingto experiment.  I had to put a stop to it before I started making blueberry lavender touchy feely soap.

I have a reputation to uphold and I can’t make too many feminine products.  Beeswax Nipple balm is about a girly as I can go.  Fragrant soap is over the limit.

Seriously thought, The Complete Soapmaker is a valuable book to have in your prepper/homesteader library.  Making soap is not hard, its not that expensive, and it is a valuable skill for times of need.

The Government Can

 

The Government Can
Buy at Amazon

I find Tim Hawkins to be a talented and funny man. I enjoy his music, especially this video “the government can”.  It reminds me that a government that can give you anything to you can take everything from you.

Personally I would rather have a limited government with a strong sens that their role is simply to punish theft and violent crime, protect us from foreign intrusion, and mange patents and copyrights and take care of everything else myself or through contracting in a free market.

What scares me is that there are people that think that the government can and should do everything for everybody – this scares me because the government cannot produce anything.  It exists from the power to take.

The government can tax, and I have no problem paying my share, and I do not want children or the disabled to go hungry, but I bristle at the idea that because I work – it is fair to take money from my household to pay those who choose not to work.

I eat chicken thighs and cheap hamburger while my taxes pay for foodstamps so that the “less fortunate” can afford to eat steak, good whiskey, cigarettes, and drugs.

Just because the government can, doesn’t mean it should.

Thinking, Fast and Slow

Thinking, Fast and Slow
Buy at Amazon

This Nobel prize winning economist writes about the two basic types of thinking and how to use them to achieve success.  I find Thinking, Fast and Slow to be useful when teaching students how to make decisions under stress.I am currently in a graduate certificate program in executive leadership, and in my class on decision making the Professor also highly recommended this book.  The author in THinking Fast and Slow taks about the two types of thinking Type 1 and Type 2.  Type 1 is the instinctual constant low level thinking we all do.  How to walk, tie our shoes, the gut feeling of I like this person, or I don’t like this situation.  Most of your decisions are type 1 thinking.

Type 2 always follows Type one, it is the monitoring level of deeper thinking.  When you first started driving and had to think about steering and braking, and the mechanics oif it all you were in type 2 thinking.

The neat thing is that you can train yourself in a subject until it becomes type 1.  That is mastery.

I discussed the OODA loop and the color code system with the the pHD teaching the course but she had no frame of reference.  Luckily the Grad Student assisting her used to teach firearm training at the Federal Law Enforcement Academy, so that lead to some great discussions about how those defensive tactics concepts worked within the academic framework.

If you want to get a little deeper understanding of how your brain works under stress – or especially if you teach how to work under stress then Thinking, Fast and Slow is a book you should consider reading.