The Partisan's First-Aid Kit

This article was originally published on American Partisan.

Whether you consider yourself to be a prepper, patriot or partisan, there is no argument to made against having a robust emergency medical kit and the training and knowledge to put it to use. I'm going to show you my own medical kit that I keep nearby at all times. Before I proceed, first I want to make sure that you understand how important it is to acquire some level of medical training. Getting trained in the latest standards and techniques for Basic Life Support for adults, children and infants is easy and valuable. The American Heart Association is the gold standard for this training in the US, and can be completed in one day. Opportunities for additional medical skills training are available all over your local community as well. I recommend that anyone with a little spare time and money enroll in the EMT course at your local community college. Most EMT courses can be completed in one semester. I don't necessarily expect everyone to go and get employed as a full-time EMT or paramedic, but going through the EMT course and occasionally practicing those skills may end up saving the life of someone in your family or in your survival group. I'm going to assume that I'm talking to an audience that has some medical knowledge or intends to acquire some at a later time.


To start off, let me first say that you need to be able to take a full set of vital signs on someone. You need to be able to assess blood pressure, heart rate (and assess for perfusion to the extremities), respiration rate, temperature and oxygen saturation. Here is a pretty good video instructing on the basic technique for manually checking blood pressure.

Next, you're going to need to be able to respond to an immediate emergency involving the ABC (The AHA has rearranged these letters, but my kit still applies). Airway, breathing and circulation. Here, you see a nasopharyngeal airway, a CPR mask with valve and a trauma tourniquet. These things address ABC. Also in the photo, you see an emergency blanket, some scissors and other tools, and a seat belt cutter. If you've got additional space in your bag, fill it with something that you can use in a situation you don't have another tool for. That's where my seat belt cutter came to find a place in the bag.

You need to ensure that you've got some ability to protect yourself and the person you're treating from infection. Iodine and alcohol are used to clean wounds and skin. Saline can be used as a rinse for wounds and eyes. Hydrogen peroxide should not really be used anymore as a straight antiseptic if you can avoid it, because it has the tendency to destroy healthy tissue as well as infectious organisms. With that said, it can be used as a stand-in chemical debridement tool if you've get the assessment skills and training to create such a wound dressing as necessary. If possible, don gloves before responding to an emergency. Stash several pairs in your kit so anyone who is assisting you can wear them. Size large is good enough for most people in a pinch.

If you've got the training, the assessment skills and are not able to move the patient to a professional medical facility, they may require IV fluids. In the photo you see a bag of 0.9% normal saline and a bag of lactated ringer's IV fluids. These are isotonic crystalloids and can be used as volume expanders when a patient's blood pressure is too low or for re-hydrating a dehydrated patient. Again, I want to stress that you need to have the requisite training and assessment skills before administering IV fluids to a patient. However, looking around at the website you're reading this on, can you imagine that you may be in a situation where giving someone these fluids may save their life? Imagine having these supplies in war-torn Africa, Sarajevo 1996 or even Venezuela today.

Being in such a situation would undoubtedly require you to tend to wounds. Some of the supplies for wound treatment can be seen here. Keep various sizes of gauze and "cling" wraps. The Bulkee gauze is great for wrapping and giving a protective cushion over wounded areas. ABD pads are absorbent and great for covering open wounds to protect them from the environment. Those Tegaderms in the top left corner of the photo below are great for making a pressure dressing. Take one or two of those 4x4 gauze pads and fold them into a wad, place onto a small bleeding wound and place the Tegaderm tightly over it.

It's important to have a few eye pads and a bottle of saline eye wash. Also below you'll see a few things that I managed to find additional space for. Non-adhesive pads can be placed on a wound site that you don't want to cause further trauma to when removing the bandages.

Xeroform petroleum dressing is made to placed over wounds that need to maintain a degree of moisture for healing. Maintaining a moist environment has been shown to increase the movement of new skin cells to the surface. This is especially helpful in burns. The bottle contains Iodoform dressing strips which are meant to pack inside small wounds. The strips help prevent infection and assist healing from the inside out.

Below I have some methods to stop bleeding and seal cuts. You've all probably seen war movies where the medic dumps a pack of powder onto a wound? Yeah, we still use that stuff. Pack it into bleeding cuts, don't just pour it all over the place. The Skinaffix is basically skin glue.

In a post-SHTF event, I expect to need a lot of bandages, so I've made sure to include several different types of bandages. The triangular bandage is great for making a sling for an injury to someone's arm.

If you've got the skills and need, you may have to stitch up a wound on a buddy or on yourself. It's very important to have the tools to do it right and the supplies to ensure the wound stays clean and doesn't get infected. If you can get some 2% lidocaine, a syringe and small gauge needle, you can greatly reduce the pain associated with the suturing procedure, which means less movement while you're doing the work. You'll also need a pair of short nosed clamps, sometimes called a "needle driver"to grip the needle without slipping.

Post-SHTF, there is likely going to be a great lack of hygiene and cleanliness. This can result in abscesses and other types of wounds that may require lancing and draining. The theme once again is possessing the training and assessment skills to conduct such a procedure and do it using aseptic techniques. Syringes, needles and sometimes a sharp blade is needed for this, and it's better to have something like a scalpel (below you see a #10 blade) than your everyday carry pocketknife for this job. Lidocaine is handy for this as well, if you've got it.

Don't overlook the importance of medication. Tylenol is great for reducing fevers (but NOT for use in reducing high temps resulting from heat related injuries), ibuprofen for injuries and aches (can also reduce fevers), benadryl for allergic reactions, loperamide for diarrhea, which can cause rapid dehydration (in case of suspected food poisoning, allow for permissive diarrhea so the body can rid itself of the toxins). Odansetron, aka Zofran, is great for treating nausea and vomiting (reread the point above on food poisoning and apply it to temporary vomiting). Also make every effort to obtain children's versions of these medications if you feel you're going to be possibly treating children. Aspirin should never be given to children under 12 years old.

Tongue depressors and long-stem Q-tips are handy if you've got the space.

A wealth of knowledge can be found on the shelves of your local bookstore. Even those with extensive training prefer to keep reference material at arm's length.

Here is what my finished product looks like. Everything pictured above fits inside this 20'' medical bag, even with some of the supplies doubled up. Your kit is likely to look different and I encourage you to take stock of your own abilities and needs. This is by no means and final solution to all medical situations, but is always a work-in-progress. I try to tell anyone who will listen that one of my top eight priorities as a prepper/survivalist is MEDICAL capabilities (the other seven being shelter, water, food security, commo, intelligence and transport). Your group needs someone (or multiple someones) with training, assessment skills and supplies. I urge you to fill this important gap in your preparations before the big test. There will be no do-overs.

Eulogy for the US; Migration a human right?

Sobering.

Read it all. What are we supposed to do? I, in my town, can not defend the entire country. Neither can you. What about your state? Mine is too large.

What I can do is defend my house. Then build a group to defend the neighborhood. Then branch out into our town. Arm up and stack ammo. Chokepoints, roadblocks, patrols. Partner with other groups and work your county.

The government, your local cops, the state agents, officials, politicians, Feds, none are going to help you. They're helping the "migrants" instead, because they say migration is a human right, and what they say is what goes. Talk to your sheriff and see what he says. Mine says nothing.

And it's not women and children. It's military age males coming here from South America, Africa and the Middle East, and they're not coming for work and jobs, unless your fair-skinned daughter and wife are named "Work" and "Jobs".

Either take up arms, or prepare to be culturally enriched. Hard.

Word from the Tijuana migrant caravan.

Claire Wolfe has a source inside Tijuana, Mexico who is sharing information on what he's seeing on the ground.

As I suspected, over 90% of the migrants are military age males, rather than women and children.

There's an agenda afoot, and someone is behind it.

In favor of the squad-sized survival group, or even smaller.

In the American Partisan article titled "Some Principles for Group Recruiting", Kit Perez mentions that "A group with 3 guys in it is not going to have the same issues as a group of 7. If you’re above 7 (or, depending on your function and goals, 10 at the absolute max), you have too many people."

Her reasons in that particular article are based mostly on recruiting difficulties and openings for infiltration of your group. The larger groups are much easier for what we in the intelligence community referred to as "ADVINT", or adversarial intelligence, to infiltrate.

Her statement on group size got me thinking about another major factor that puts me firmly in the same mindset when it comes to group size, that is that the ideal group size is between three and ten gunslingers. Here is the "major factor": With those three to ten gunslingers, come their families.

Let me tell you about my own loosely affiliated group. I say "loosely affiliated" because we haven't yet hammered out the details of how our group would operate, but I'll use it as an example of how this can become a big logistical burden.

Let's say you've got me, my dad and two brothers in-law. So that's four shooters with appropriate rifles, pistols, shooting capabilities, diverse experiences that give me a pretty nice little fireteam for a small AO in whatever environment we are working in. When the manure contacts the rotational air mover, I suspect that my rural location with acreage will be our rally point, for the sake of this article. So the call will go out using our primary, secondary or emergency commo channels, and everyone will drop in to our little HQ to get ready to fight off the Russians or Cubans, or whoever is playing the villain in our movie. But that's not going to be the whole group. I've got my wife and children, of course. My dad obviously has my mom with him. My two brothers in-law would be bringing their wives of course, my sisters. They would all need to bring their children.

Then my wife has her parents, and there is no way I can deny my wife's parents a safe haven, nor can I deny her siblings. That's out of the question. One of my brothers in-law has another kid that I wouldn't think of ever turning away. My grandparents are elderly and sick and live in the next town over. Do I tell them that they're on their own at 80+ years old? My in-law has a parent who lives alone too. Are they the odd one out? I could lose one of my gunslingers (who is a former corpsman) if I decide that this person is just out of luck.

These are the kinds of decisions that will have to be made in these situations, and you're going to have to make potentially dozens and dozens of these difficult decisions if you've got an entire platoon of 30 gunslingers in your group.

The example above is loosely based on reality, and could have me trying to manage upwards of 30 people at our location, with some elderly, some infants, some toddlers and some sick. All of those people require food, water, shelter, sanitation, etc., and you've got to keep them in a cooperative mood. This is assuming that our group has to maintain at a single location. Being able to continue maintaining safely in multiple locations makes managing a group easier in some ways and harder in others, but once you are forced to activate your group, these people still have to be taken into full account wherever they are. That group has swelled to over 30 people for just a four-man fireteam...

I understand that there are going to be a lot of people who will say "you're just going to have to make the hard decisions and turn people away...", and I do hear you, and you're correct. But we will all have a short list of people who we will never turn away, and when you're putting a group together and you've decided that a particular person is too much of an asset not to have with you, you will have to take on their short list of essential people as well, or they will not join your group.

This was a mental exercise on my part to try to get you thinking of a survival group differently. Many of us once thought about this concept and imagined our group of rifle carriers meeting together to hash out tactics and training exercises and barbecues, and the group we imagined was neatly split into three or four squads of eight or ten people, all forming a nice tight platoon of 30-40 dudes with uniforms and ranks and matching kit. It's time to consider that a better option for a lot of people is going to look a lot more like a scout team of three or four guys, or a squad of eight or ten split into twin fireteams. From this soldier's perspective, that may be the most practical size logistically, and also for the previously mentioned counter-infiltration purposes.

Why the political left stigmatizes preppers

black pilled explain the reason for media and political demonization of preppers and gun owners.

Happy Veteran's Day

Forming a community survival group.

Here is my original article, posted at American Partisan.

In the events that are coming, being part of a solid group of people is going to be your best bet to get through. Studying the work of Selco (Yugoslavia), Fernando "FerFal Aguirre (Argentina) and others who have actually been through a modern societal collapse is invaluable because it shows us an example of what a modern societal collapse may actually look like here. Studying those events, it becomes clear that people who are part of a group survive the best, and the groups with some semblance of a plan will fare even better. It's true that no good plan ever survived the first enemy contact, but having a solid plan for your group fosters confidence in that group, allowing the members to keep their head in the game when the going gets tough, and drive toward the objective.

When building your survival/partisan/neighborhood security group, you've got to tailor your group to your objective, situation and capability. What are you building a group to do? What size group is practical for your situation and location? How many people can you actually find to join? I am currently located in the rural Deep South, a few miles outside of a town of about 300 people. Am I going to build a battalion-sized survival group that will save the U.S. from the Communist threat?

Don't hold your breath, mate. That's not realistic.

Now, how about a group that is purpose built for securing a neighborhood after a Category 5 hurricane? In 2004, the area where I lived experienced Hurricane Ivan. The destruction was significant, and there were reports of looting (as always) in areas of NW Florida. Based on the social "atmospherics" and potential threats where I lived, my neighborhood could have been adequately secured around the clock by just a squad-sized element working in three, maybe even four shifts per 24 hour period. Thank God we got through and didn't need it during our month-long, near total interruption of basic services. There was not going to be any police or government response if we had needed help.

There are a lot of experts out there who have some really great ideas and advice on building groups and how to plan. I'll tell you how I've tried to envision my group and plan, but don't think I'm trying to tell you that there is only one way to get this right. You'll have to take a step back and judge your own situation for yourself.

I try to break my ideas for a survival group into two sections. Those are your AREA OF OPERATIONS and your OBJECTIVES. I break the activation of the security group into two environments, those being a PASSIVE environment and an AGGRESSIVE environment. You can alter these terms however you see fit, but here I'll tell you what I'm referencing.

Your AO is obviously going to be your location, and it's where your objectives are going to take place. Initially, you'll need to start at the lowest level. So your first AO is your house and property and the people who live there. As you build a group and achieve your objectives in that AO, you'll expand as necessary and however you're able. Expanding your AO out to the neighborhood, community, town, city and outward will bring new necessary objectives such as patrols, commo check-ins, recon outings, supply runs, visits to friends and family members, meetings with local officials (depending on environment), etc.

The OBJECTIVES themselves will include whatever your group can do to secure the AO from potential threats, whether those threats are coming from a tyrannical government, a band of marauders, the effects of a coronal mass ejection, or more likely, some downturn of the economy that leads to a failure of civility, adverse weather or a house fire at a neighbor's home. Even the unexpected loss of a job for the primary breadwinner of a home is something a solid group of people can support each other against.

The PASSIVE environment is what most of us currently live in right now. Unless you live in a place like inner city Chicago or St. Louis, you are more likely to activate your group for an adverse weather event or house fire than you are for a suspension of services or widespread criminal activity. You most likely don't have difficulty driving down to the supermarket to pick up food or supplies in this environment.

In an AGGRESSIVE environment, this is not the case. You're most likely activating your group in order to facilitate armed security in your AO and conduct other missions to get through a serious interruption of routine services or lack of local government support.

Now, before you can get down to business with establishing the AO and examining the environment, you've got to look at the third major factor, which is your group size. You'll have to determine what your group can do at that size and try not to overreach. I feel the minimum group size needs to be at least three or four people, because it will be hard to get some things done in an aggressive environment and large AO with only two people. Four people gives you a full fireteam. A fireteam allows you to have a team leader, a lead scout, a medic, a commo guy, or whatever other jobs your group requires, without anyone being burdened with too many responsibilities. Going larger to six or eight people gives you a whole squad, and your team can start splitting up and running recon missions or doing guard duty shifts in an aggressive environment, or doing neighborhood checks throughout town after a storm in a passive environment. Going bigger than that can be difficult, because now you've got a whole lot of personalities to manage, a whole lot of mouths to keep quiet, a whole lot of families to satisfy and take care of and a whole lot of extra chances to pick up a new member that might not be in it to advance your ideas and efforts.

The authors at American Partisan have done a great service in pushing the conversation on building and maintaining groups for survival and community security. This is just one former soldier's ideas on a starting template for doing that. In the events that lay ahead of us, I firmly believe that the people who belong to a group of like-minded people who are focused on driving toward a common goal of survival and mutual well being will survive the best and have the best outcome. This has been demonstrated throughout history during times of war, natural disasters and societal collapses. It would behoove you to find your people, rally them and get them ready.

Florida recounts and other big news.

Looks like three Florida races are heading for recounts. The governor's race is narrowing, with Andrew Gillum gaining votes, the Senate race is narrowing with Bill Nelson gaining votes, and now the Agriculture Commissioner race has flipped to the Democrats.

Democrats always gain votes in recounts. They will never let an election go, they will always question the legitimacy and send in a million lawyers to make sure they take whatever they can get.

My prediction: Gillum and Nelson will gain thousands of votes in a recount, and the Democrat candidate for Agriculture Commissioner, Nikki Fried, will build an even bigger lead. Recounts don't ever go in the other direction. The Broward County election system is the most corrupt in the country, and has been investigated and successfully sued for election fraud. Hopefully Rick Scott and Trump and will jump into that fight. We'll see.

Meanwhile, Stacy Abrams still refuses to concede the Georgia gubernatorial race. Another example of a party unwilling to stop scrapping and clawing for every inch of ground they can take. Would be nice if "our side" had a party like that, but they're too busy being "better than that", and "not stooping to their level".

Next up, we have a bunch of votes being "discovered" in Arizona, and now the Democrats seem to be about to flip that Senate seat. I'm sure the ghost of John McCain is smiling on that, and Jeff Flake must be very proud.

And in other news, Ruth Bader Ginsburg broke some ribs and was hospitalized after she took a flying leap, probably when she found out the Republicans still (probably) hold the body of Congress that is responsible for replacing her corpse with a real, living and breathing judge. Please say the correct prayers for the situation. The CORRECT ones.

But wait! There's more!

A mass shooting that I can be blamed for took place in Kalifornia. Why can I be blamed? Well I'm a white male, so start there. I automatically shoulder 25% of the blame for literally everything on it's face, once it's confirmed that an event took place at all. Then we find the shooter was also white, and a male. Blame game bumps to 75%. Shooter was a veteran (former Marine), so that pretty much pushes above 95%.

But we're still waiting on the blame recount. I predict it'll hit 100% by Saturday. Either way, I absolutely MUST have my firearms confiscated from me, and the same goes for you too.

Here's how that'll go down, assuming you're not willing to turn over your entire collection to your local Kommissar in exchange for a $50 gift card.

The day after.

And here we are, with the Democrats holding the House of Representatives with a majority of about 30 or so seats, and the Republicans holding the senate majority with 54 or so. The Republicans still hold the White House, of course, and the SCOTUS leans to the right. The Republicans are also now down several governors. Seven at my last count.

And you'll hear plenty of Republican voters clamoring about how "it could be worse" and "we still hold most of the power" and "every president loses some seats in the first round of mid-terms" and other such nonsense.

They're correct, but it's still nonsense. Why? Because it didn't have to happen like that this time. It shouldn't have. It really didn't even have to be close. The Republicans lost "bigly", because they lost more than just the House and some governors.

When Trump won his election, he won because he was saying the things people all had on their minds all the time. He was talking basic common sense and he was using their terminology and tone. Why should anyone be allowed here illegally when it's ILLEGAL? Why should we blame guns, inanimate objects that they are, for murders when it's PEOPLE that are committing them? Tax breaks put more money in people's pockets, which then gets spent, which drives the economy! Government messes up everything it touches, so we should get government out of our healthcare! Entitlements are a heavy burden on our economy, so we should get those people working instead!

All of these things are what he said in order to get elected, and once he was, he actually got started right away on some of them. All he needed was some support from his party.

The party that controlled both the House and the Senate. Oh, and even the SCOTUS was going to be leaning to the right since he had a vacancy to fill. With their support, there was nothing stopping the train.

But unfortunately. He didn't get that support. The Republican Party, the spineless fools, just didn't have the heart or the guts to go on the offensive. His tweets were too provocative, his speeches were too raucous, his jabs (which were usually, actually just counter-punches) were too "unpresidential". The party wanted to slow-walk the agenda (they were never on board with it) and look for compromises with the decimated, demoralized Democrats. Because of this soft approach, they failed to repeal 0bamacare, forcing Trump to scratch away at it with Executive Orders. They kvetched over tax reform and made Trump pull teeth to get it done. They totally ignored the opportunity to discuss gun rights and pass a single bill on it. They repeatedly failed to provide any significant funding or action  for real border security, which was the lynchpin of the movement that put Trump in office and Hillary into what many hope is permanent retirement.

The Republican Party held ALL of the power that We the People could have given them, and then some, for two years straight. They've had the White House for two years. They had the Senate. They had the House. They've had the SCOTUS firmly since Gorsuch was confirmed. Nothing was standing in their way.

Unless you count themselves.

Paul Ryan was one of the worst. He snidely commented negatively on almost everything Trump tried to do and worked in the backrooms to undermine his efforts to get something, anything done. He earned his nickname, Quisling. Mitch McConnell wasn't any better, and resorted to his typical uselessness.

The Republicans could have GAINED seats in the House and Senate and CRUSHED the Democrats for a decade if they had gone on the offensive and stopped the flow at the border, strengthened gun rights nationally, totally wiped 0bamacare from the books, reduced taxes (they sort of did this), reformed the entitlement system... They'd have been kings.

But instead they stayed on the defensive. Even as the crippled minority party in every aspect, the Democrats aggressively controlled the pace and narrative, and had the Republicans on their heels. If not for the utterly psychotic antics of the Democrats at the Kavanaugh hearings (I believe that behavior pulled a lot of disgruntled conservatives back into the fray out of pure spite), the Republicans may very well be looking at losses double that of which they have now. Possibly even a lost Senate, and even more lost governors.

The Democrats in the House now have the ability to subpoena and investigate everyone and everything, for anything, until 2020 and maybe beyond. They have the ability to punish those they deem deserving. We thought Kavanaugh was treated badly...

Looking at the current situation, it's easy to say that now we won't have any positive legislation passing to Trump's desk. No pro-gun bills. No border security. No healthcare fixes.

But then again, the Republicans didn't send anything like that to him anyway. Not once in two years.

And that's why they lost the House.

Liberal propaganda proving nationalist points

I have been seeing leftists and multiculturalists make arguments for mass immigration into the USA with memes and cartoons like the one posted below.
Showing a photograph or illustration of native american with lines like " stop mass immigration? good point lets start with you"
Asserting that white european christians moving into the americas was detrimental to the native populations that were here prior.
Well they are right mass immigration was harmful to the culture and lives of the tribes that were residing here.
The left is right but are they too damn thick to see that they are proving that nationalists concerns are valid?
When a nation is overwhelmed by another nation then their health, safety and cultural future is at risk.
Thank you for agreeing with nationalists and driving the point home!
By the way the native americans they post in these photos did not sit idly by as these mass migrations came trucking in.
They fought with fury and mass bloodshed.
Do they not see they are only encouraging nationalists and disproving their multiculturalist drivel of " cultural enrichment"
What they think they are doing is guilting us but yet again they fail.