U.S./MEXICO BORDER—The migrant caravan headed for the U.S. has been the center of much controversy, but the problem seems to have solved itself, as the entire caravan has mysteriously disappeared.
In other, unrelated, good news, there's now a really cool-looking giant wooden horse sitting right at the U.S. border, fresh for the taking.
The wooden horse is massive in size - big enough to fit thousands of people inside if it were hollow (though judging by its weight, the horse is already filled with something). It could make a neat tourist attraction, and President Trump was quick to call dibs on it. "That's my horse; I saw it first!" Trump said in a public statement. "It's the biggest and best horse ever, so obviously it's meant for me. Bring it across the border immediately before someone else takes it!"
Workers are already busy moving the horse, which is conveniently on four giant wooden wheels. "Remember Troy!" called out one of the workers as they began moving it. It's unclear what Troy, a character from the NBC sitcom Community played by famous actor/musician Donald Glover, has to do with a large, wooden horse, but remembering his antics did put a smile on everyone's faces as they began the hard work of moving the massive horse across the U.S. border.
*.*
U.S.—In a recent report by the federal government released Friday, the increasingly divided nation was found to have only one thing left in common: enjoying videos in which people fall off things, get hit with a ball or errant baseball bat, or attempt dangerous stunts that end in injury.
While Americans continue to argue about nearly every possible subject, people on the left and the right are still able to join together in laughing at people doing dumb things that result in bodily harm.
"Democrats and Republicans are coming together for only one remaining activity: watching people fall off bicycles, slip on treacherously icy paths, and attempt dangerous stunts while drunk," said a government representative. "The unifying power of people doing stupid stuff and suffering the consequences can't be overstated."
The nation used to at least come together over religion, baseball, and common holidays. But this report found that even those things are less unifying in this tense political atmosphere, with people breaking down into arguments over literally everything—except the pure joy that comes with watching as a kid throws a ball at his dad's crotch.
The science is settled: if you want to unite with family members and friends who disagree with you, invite them over to your house and fire up some compilations of people falling down on YouTube.
*.*
HELMAND, Afghanistan — A smart bomb has been used to destroy something that costs more than a smart bomb for the first time since the introduction of precision-guided munitions in 1968, sources confirmed today.
U.S. forces employed Hellfire laser-guided missiles to destroy five Taliban gun trucks as they prepared to attack Musa Qala, a district center in Helmand Province, Afghanistan.
“We assess the value of these trucks that we destroyed as being about $200,000 a pop,” Gen. Austin S. Miller, commander of NATO forces in Afghanistan, told reporters. “A Hellfire missile only costs $115,000. This was the most efficient strike we’ve seen in this war yet.
The White House said the strike is proof the administration’s strategy in Afghanistan is working.
“This is what winning looks like. It’s proof that we’re putting the Taliban in a place where they be forced to negotiate,” said a senior administration official, who was not authorized to speak publicly. “They can’t afford this.”
Some Pentagon officials have pushed back on this assessment.
“The armored Humvees that the Taliban had stolen from the Afghan National Army originally cost $220,000, and we paid the Afghan interior ministry $8,300 in bribes to get them into the country,” John Sopko, the special inspector general for Afghanistan reconstruction, told reporters. “Also, the Taliban were using these as substitutes for trucks that they buy for $800 in Peshawar. So the general’s assessment of the replacement cost of these vehicles is not accurate.”
Foreign policy experts have raised concerns the White House could be overstating the long-term effects of the strike.
“This will not have a significant impact on the outcome of the conflict,” noted John Gentle, a foreign policy expert at RAND Corporation. “The U.S. spends $167 million a day in Afghanistan, and the American people don’t even know we’re still there. I don’t think they really expect our forces there to be efficient at this point. What is an efficient war, anyway?”
*.*
ALBANY, N.Y. – While most elderly people plan for relaxation and travel during their retirement years, one federal employee at the Department of Veterans Affairs is settling in for the long haul, sources confirmed today.
Gertrude Smith, well into her nineties, will not retire anytime soon despite doing absolutely no work for the past 6 or 7 years, according to her co-workers.
“She literally stopped moving years ago, contributes nothing to our office and yet remains employed here,” front desk receptionist Angie Brooks said. “It’s frustrating. We’ve been trying to convince her to retire, but she never really answers us. She just sits there staring at her computer.”
Smith never really moves or even speaks, her manager said. She also reportedly doesn’t go home at night. She instead sits in her office staring into the distance.
Smith, who was around 30 years old when Kennedy was shot, attends daily meetings but hasn’t said a word or asked a question since the Challenger explosion.
“We carry her weight literally.” said Duke Krenz, another coworker. “Someone always has to wheel her into the boardroom for meetings.”
Co-workers have urged Smith to retire, but she smiles and shakes her head no.
“Look, I appreciate that some people have health issues, but her blood has pooled in her feet and she just smells god-awful. Can she not smell herself?” said Laura Anderson, a nurse at the VA clinic. “Come on, have some courtesy for the rest of us.”
“I mean, our hands were tied,” said Smith’s previous supervisor Jake Torrance. “To remove a non-performer from the federal government, jeez, it takes years to navigate the process. We gave Smith a bunch of warnings, but the VA’s Performance Improvement Plan requires us to give an employee at least five years to improve. Even then, she has many appeal rights to counter management’s efforts.”
Records show that Smith was fired from the VA in 2015. However, an attorney filed an equal opportunity appeal on her behalf and she was reinstated. She was also awarded a large settlement, but the check was apparently never cashed.
The impact of Smith’s inactivity is not only impacting the morale of her coworkers, but it’s also affecting the government’s efforts to recruit new talent into its aging workforce.
“This is concerning to me for a variety of reasons,” said Stacy Novak, the current human resources manager. “This is going to set a precedent and all ‘aged’ employees are going to stick around forever. I have to worry about bringing in fresh talent so the federal government can get out of the 1950s’ mindset.”
“But I can’t hire anyone until Gertrude stops taking up desk space,” she continued. “Doesn’t look like it’s going to happen anytime soon, unfortunately.”
*.*
WASHINGTON, D.C.—In a special report Thursday, CNN's Jim Acosta took President Trump to task for failing to take any responsibility for causing World War II.
The president was criticized for not acknowledging that his rhetoric may have contributed to the conflict that spilled out across the globe in the late 1930s. While some historians acknowledge that there may have been other factors—like the Treaty of Versailles, the expansionist Japanese Empire, and a certain German fascist—a large swathe of liberal scholarship has now pinned the war squarely on Donald Trump.
"The president is quick to talk about the Germans' part in instigating the war, yet he still refuses to take any responsibility for inciting the violence that led to World War II," said Acosta. "It is obvious to everyone who watches our channel 24/7 that President Trump is the cause of every woe mankind has ever suffered, from famine and disease to war and death. And yet he stubbornly refuses to acknowledge this."
Acosta then excused himself for his customary afternoon practice of speaking encouraging words to himself in the mirror.
At publishing time, both Snopes and Politifact had rated CNN's claim that President Trump was the main cause behind the conflict that killed tens of millions 100% true.
Quote of the Times;
“With good humor and pessimism it is not possible to be either wrong or bored.” - Davila
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/
Issue of the Times;
13 Shocking Facts About Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller
Talking heads act like Special Prosecutor Robert Mueller is fair, impartial and unbiased.
But the facts are a wee bit different ...
Failure to Aggressively Prosecute the BCCI Scandal
The BBC noted:
[Mueller] is also known for leading the probe into the 1991 collapse of the Luxembourg-registered Bank of Credit and Commerce International (BCCI).
Williams Safire wrote in the New York Times:
The B.C.C.I. scandal involves the laundering of drug money, the illicit financing of terrorism and of arms to Iraq, the easy purchase of respectability and the corruption of the world banking system.
For more than a decade, the biggest banking swindle in history worked beautifully. Between $5 billion and $15 billion was bilked from governments and individual depositors to be put to the most evil of purposes - while lawmen and regulators slept.
Now the fight among investigators is coming out into the open. Manhattan District Attorney Robert Morgenthau, who gave impetus to long-contained probes, told a Senate subcommittee headed by Senator John Kerry that he is getting no cooperation from the Thornburgh Justice Department.
Justice's Criminal Division chief, Robert Mueller, tells me he will have a hatchet-burying session with the independent-minded D.A. next week, and vehemently denies having told British intelligence to stop cooperating with the Manhattan grand jury.
Mueller's handling of the BCCI scandal as the point man for the Justice Department was widely criticized. As noted by a Senate report written by Senators Kerry and Brown:
Over the past two years, the Justice Department's handling of BCCI has been criticized in numerous editorials in major newspapers, including the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, reflecting similar criticism on the part of several Congressmen, including the chairman of the Subcommittee, Senator Kerry; the chief Customs undercover officer who handled the BCCI drug-money laundering sting, Robert Mazur; his superior at Customs, Commissioner William von Raab; New York District Attorney Robert Morgenthau; former Senate investigator Jack Blum, and, within the Justice Department itself, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida, Dexter Lehtinen.
Typical editorials criticized Justice's prosecution of BCCI as "sluggish," "conspicuously slow," "inattentive," and "lethargic." Several editorials noted that there had been "poor cooperation" by Justice with other agencies. One stated that "the Justice Department seems to have been holding up information that should have been passed on" to regulators and others. Another that "the Justice Department's secretive conduct in dealing with BCCI requires a better explanation than any so far offered.
***
Under Assistant Attorney General Mueller, the Department assigned nearly three dozen attorneys to the case. During 1992, the Department brought several indictments, which remained narrower, less detailed and, at times, seemingly in response to the efforts of District Attorney Robert Morgenthau of New York, the Federal Reserve, or both
***
Suddenly, on August 22, Dennis Saylor, chief assistant to Assistant Attorney General Mueller, called Lehtinen and, according to the US Attorney, "indicated to me that I was directed not to return the indictment."
The Senate Report also noted:
While the Justice Department's handling of BCCI has received substantial criticism, the office of Robert Morgenthau, District Attorney of New York, has generally received credit for breaking open the BCCI investigation.
***
In going after BCCI, Morgenthau's office quickly found that in addition to fighting off the bank, it would receive resistance from almost every other institution or entity connected to BCCI, including at various times, BCCI's multitude of prominent and politically well-connected lawyers, BCCI's accountants, BCCI's shareholders, the Bank of England, the British Serious Fraud Office, and the U.S. Department of Justice.
Squashing Warning Signs that May Have Stopped 9/11
Larry Klayman writes:
Robert Mueller first hit my radar ... just months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the World Trade Center.
***
I came to meet and later represent FBI Special Agents Robert Wright and John Vincent, of the agency’s Chicago Counter-Terrorism Field Office. During our meeting, both Special Agents Wright and Vincent revealed to me that they had been conducting a counterterrorism investigation of Saudi money laundering into and in the United States, and they both believed that a massive terrorist attack was imminent.
In the course of this investigation, both special agents had asked a fellow FBI agent who was undercover, one of Muslim descent, to be wired to turn up further evidence of this terrorist operation. The Muslim agent refused, indignantly telling both Wright and Vincent that Muslims don’t spy and rat on other Muslims. In shock, my soon-to-be clients reported this to their supervisors at the FBI, but no action was taken. To make matters worse, Wright’s and Vincent’s FBI supervisors quashed their investigation. They both believed that the order to kill the investigation came from the highest reaches of the FBI, and, upset if not outraged by this cover-up, Wright then decided to write a book detailing this breach of FBI honor.
The only way I could explain this cover-up was that then-FBI Director Robert Mueller was sensitive to the ties between the family of President George W. Bush and the Saudi royal family.
***
Director Mueller, along with his “yes men” supervisors at the agency, not only quashed my clients’ investigation and ignored the disloyalty of the Muslim undercover agent, but then missed the warning signs leading up to September 11 – the biggest intelligence failure in American history, even surpassing Pearl Harbor.
But shamelessly, despite this historic intelligence failure and the World Trade Center terrorist attacks that ensued, Mueller later led an effort to drum both Special Agents Wright and Vincent out of the FBI, in part by attempting to remove their security clearances, as a “reward” for their candor.
FBI special agent – and a 2002 Time Person of the Year – Colleen Rowley points out:
The FBI and all the other officials claimed that there were no clues, that they had no warning [about 9/11] etc., and that was not the case. There had been all kinds of memos and intelligence coming in.
But overwhelming evidence shows that 9/11 was foreseeable. Indeed, Al Qaeda crashing planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was itself foreseeable. Even the chair of the 9/11 Commission said that the attack was preventable.
Mueller was one of the people who dropped the ball and let 9/11 happen.
Allowing Escape of Saudi Persons Connected to Bin Laden
Right after 9/11, American airspace was closed down. Yet Mueller was one of the people who allowed relatives of Bin Laden and other persons of interest fly back to Saudi Arabia.
Entrapping Innocent People for P.R. Purposes
After dropping the ball, Mueller then went on to entrap innocent people for P.R. purposes.
And Rowley notes:
In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Mueller directed the “post 9/11 round-up” of about 1,000 immigrants who mostly happened to be in the wrong place (the New York City area) at the wrong time. FBI Headquarters encouraged more and more detentions for what seemed to be essentially P.R. purposes. Field offices were required to report daily the number of detentions in order to supply grist for FBI press releases about FBI “progress” in fighting terrorism. Consequently, some of the detainees were brutalized and jailed for up to a year despite the fact that none turned out to be terrorists.
9/11 Cover Up
Rowley says:
TIME Magazine would probably have not called my own disclosures a “bombshell memo” to the Joint Intelligence Committee Inquiry in May 2002 if it had not been for Mueller’s having so misled everyone after 9/11.
In addition, Rowley says that the FBI sent Soviet-style "minders" to her interviews with the Joint Intelligence Committee investigation of 9/11, to make sure that she didn't say anything the FBI didn't like. The chairs of both the 9/11 Commission and the Official Congressional Inquiry into 9/11 confirmed that government “minders” obstructed the investigation into 9/11 by intimidating witnesses (and see this).
Mueller's FBI also obstructed the 9/11 investigation in many other ways. For example, an FBI informant hosted and rented a room to two hijackers in 2000. Specifically, investigators for the Congressional Joint Inquiry discovered that an FBI informant had hosted and even rented a room to two hijackers in 2000 and that, when the Inquiry sought to interview the informant, the FBI refused outright, and then hid him in an unknown location. See this and this.
Harper’s notes:
Bob Graham, the former chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, told me recently that Robert Mueller, then the FBI director (and now the special counsel investigating connections between Russia and the Trump campaign) made “the strongest objections” to Jacobson and his colleagues visiting San Diego.
Graham and his team defied Mueller’s efforts, and Jacobson flew west. There he discovered that his hunch was correct. The FBI files in California were replete with extraordinary and damning details …
***
Nevertheless, Mueller adamantly refused their demands to interview him, even when backed by a congressional subpoena, and removed Shaikh to an undisclosed location ‘for his own safety.’
Graham also wrote that the FBI also “insisted that we could not, even in the most sanitized manner, tell the American people that an FBI informant had a relationship with two of the hijackers.”
And Kristen Breitweiser - one of the four 9/11 widows instrumental in forcing the government to form the 9/11 Commission to investigate the 2001 attacks - points out:
Mueller and other FBI officials had purposely tried to keep any incriminating information specifically surrounding the Saudis out of the Inquiry’s investigative hands. To repeat, there was a concerted effort by the FBI and the Bush Administration to keep incriminating Saudi evidence out of the Inquiry’s investigation. And for the exception of the 29 full pages, they succeeded in their effort.
Iraq War
Rowley notes:
When you had the lead-up to the Iraq War … Mueller and, of course, the CIA and all the other directors, saluted smartly and went along with what Bush wanted, which was to gin up the intelligence to make a pretext for the Iraq War. For instance, in the case of the FBI, they actually had a receipt, and other documentary proof, that one of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, had not been in Prague, as Dick Cheney was alleging. And yet those directors more or less kept quiet. That included … CIA, FBI, Mueller, and it included also the deputy attorney general at the time, James Comey.
Torture
Rowley also points out:
Mueller was even okay with the CIA conducting torture programs after his own agents warned against participation. Agents were simply instructed not to document such torture, and any “war crimes files” were made to disappear. Not only did “collect it all” surveillance and torture programs continue, but Mueller’s (and then Comey’s) FBI later worked to prosecute NSA and CIA whistleblowers who revealed these illegalities.
Anthrax Frame-Up
Mueller also presided over the incredibly flawed anthrax investigation.
The U.S. Government Accountability Office says the FBI's investigation was "flawed and inaccurate". The investigation was so bogus that a senator called for an "independent review and assessment of how the FBI handled its investigation in the anthrax case."
The head of the FBI's anthrax investigation says the whole thing was a sham. He says that the FBI higher-ups "greatly obstructed and impeded the investigation", that there were "politically motivated communication embargoes from FBI Headquarters".
The FBI's anthrax investigation head said that the FBI framed scientist Bruce Ivins. On July 6, 2006, he filed a whistleblower report of mismanagement to the FBI’s Deputy Director pursuant to Title 5, United States Code, Section 2303, which noted:
(j) the FBI’s fingering of Bruce Ivins as the anthrax mailer; and, (k) the FBI’s subsequent efforts to railroad the prosecution of Ivins in the face of daunting exculpatory evidence.
Following the announcement of its circumstantial case against Ivins, Defendants DOJ and FBI crafted an elaborate perception management campaign to bolster their assertion of Ivins’ guilt. These efforts included press conferences and highly selective evidentiary presentations which were replete with material omissions.
In other words, Mueller presided over the attempt to frame an innocent man (and see this).
Unsure If Government Can Assassinate U.S. Citizens Living On U.S. Soil
Rather than saying "of course not!", Mueller said that he wasn't sure whether Obama had the right to assassinate Americans living on American soil.
Constitutional expert Jonathan Turley commented at the time:
One would hope that the FBI Director would have a handle on a few details guiding his responsibilities, including whether he can kill citizens without a charge or court order.
***
He appeared unclear whether he had the power under the Obama Kill Doctrine or, in the very least, was unwilling to discuss that power. For civil libertarians, the answer should be easy: “Of course, I do not have that power under the Constitution.”
Crippled Investigations of Financial Fraud ... Helping to Allow the Great Recession
In a 2013 piece entitled "Mueller: I Crippled FBI Effort v. White-Collar Crime", the country’s top white collar crime expert, William Black – who put over 1,000 top S&L executives in jail for fraud, and is a professor of law and economics at the University of Missouri - wrote:
The FBI never developed “an intelligence operation” “to analyze threats” of even epidemic fraud.
***
White-collar crime investigations and prosecutions are massive money makers that reduce the deficit, but Mueller, Holder, and Obama refuse to make these points and refuse to prosecute the elite bank fraudsters. On substantive and political grounds their actions are either inexplicable or all too explicable and support my readers’ belief that the FBI leadership no longer wants to investigate and prosecute the elite bank frauds.
This is important because:
• Fraud CAUSED the Great Depression and the 2008 financial crisis
• Numerous Nobel prize winning economists say that we need to prosecute fraud, or else the economy will never truly stabilize
• After the Great Depression, the government cracked down on Wall Street fraud. But Mueller and other Bush and Obama administration officials let it slide
(There are a lot of people more responsible for the Great Recession - and for lack of reform afterwards - than Mueller. For example, Mueller's boss (the FBI is a part of the Department of Justice) made it more or less official policy not to prosecute financial fraud. But this is another example of Mueller dropping the ball.
Spying on Americans
Mueller participated in one of the greatest expansions of mass surveillance in human history.
As we noted in 2013:
NBC News reports:
NBC News has learned that under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, the government has been collecting records on every phone call made in the U.S.
On March 2011, FBI Director Robert Mueller told the Senate Judiciary Committee:
We have put in place technological improvements relating to the capabilities of a database to pull together past emails and future ones as they come in so that it does not require an individualized search.
Remember, the FBI - unlike the CIA - deals with internal matters within the borders of the United States.
On May 1st of this year, former FBI agent Tim Clemente told CNN's Erin Burnett that all present and past phone calls were recorded:
BURNETT: Tim, is there any way, obviously, there is a voice mail they can try to get the phone companies to give that up at this point. It’s not a voice mail. It’s just a conversation. There’s no way they actually can find out what happened, right, unless she tells them?
CLEMENTE: “No, there is a way. We certainly have ways in national security investigations to find out exactly what was said in that conversation. It’s not necessarily something that the FBI is going to want to present in court, but it may help lead the investigation and/or lead to questioning of her. We certainly can find that out.
BURNETT: “So they can actually get that? People are saying, look, that is incredible.
CLEMENTE: “No, welcome to America. All of that stuff is being captured as we speak whether we know it or like it or not.”
The next day, Clemente again appeared on CNN, this time with host Carol Costello, and she asked him about those remarks. He reiterated what he said the night before but added expressly that “all digital communications in the past” are recorded and stored:
NSA whistleblowers say that this means that the NSA collects "word for word" all of our communications.
Colleen Rowley writes:
Mueller’s FBI was also severely criticized by Department of Justice Inspector Generals finding the FBI overstepped the law improperly serving hundreds of thousands of “national security letters” to obtain private (and irrelevant) metadata on citizens, and for infiltrating nonviolent anti-war groups under the guise of investigating “terrorism.”
Covering Up for Turkish Terrorists
Sibel Edmonds, a former FBI translator who has been deemed credible by the Department of Justice’s Inspector General, several senators(free subscription required), and a coalition of prominent conservative and liberal groups, who the ACLU described as "The most gagged person in the history of the United States of America", and who famed Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg says possesses information “far more explosive than the Pentagon Papers”, says that Mueller covered up a Turkish terror network.
Gagging Whistleblowers
Edmonds also said that Mueller gagged her and other whistleblowers.
Conclusion
Rather than being "above the fray", Mueller is an authoritarian and water-carrier for the status quo and the powers-that-be.
As Coleen Rowley puts it:
Mueller was chosen as Special Counsel not because he has integrity but because he will do what the powerful want him to do.
Mueller didn’t speak the truth about a war he knew to be unjustified. He didn’t speak out against torture. He didn’t speak out against unconstitutional surveillance. And he didn’t tell the truth about 9/11. He is just “their man.”
And:
It’s sad that political partisanship is so blinding and that so few people remember the actual sordid history.
Shocking?
Answer?
The poor country pastor was livid when he confronted his wife with the receipt for a $250 dress she had bought. "How could you do this!" he demanded.
"I don't know," she wailed, "I was standing in the store looking at the dress. Then I found myself trying it on. It was like the Devil was whispering to me, 'Gee, you look great in that dress. You should buy it.'"
"Well," the pastor persisted, "You know how to deal with him! Just tell him, "Get behind me, Satan!"
"I did," replied his wife. "He said 'You look great from here too.'"
*.*
The two old coots were both only a year short of retirement from the assembly line, but one Monday morning that didn't keep Joe from boasting to Manny about his sexual endurance.
"Three times," gasped Manny admiringly.
"How'd you do it?"
"It was easy." Joe looked down modestly. "I made love to my wife, and then I rolled over and took a ten- minute nap. When I woke up again, I made love to her again and took another ten-minute nap. And then I put it to her again. Can you believe it! I woke up this morning feeling like a bull, I'll tell you."
"I gotta try it," said Manny.
So that night he made love to his wife, took a ten- minute nap, made love to her again, took another nap, woke up and made love to her a third time, then rolled over and fell sound asleep. He woke up feeling like a million bucks, pulled on his clothes, and ran to the factory, where he found his boss waiting outside for him.
"What's up, Boss?" he asked. "I've been working for you for twenty years and never been late once. You aren't going to hold these twenty minutes against me now, are you?"
"Twenty minutes!" growled the boss. "Where the hell were you on Tuesday and Wednesday?
*.*
U.S.—In yet another disaster caused by President Trump’s winning just far too much, whole caravans of people are trying to enter the US so they too can experience the presidenting of Donald Trump.
“We don’t know what to do,” said ICE official Brett Kelley. “Trump is just too successful as president. Everyone from all over has heard how great he is, and we can’t stop them from trying to get here.”
The Democrats have begun condemning Trump for being far too good at everything. “Trump needs to reduce the quality of his presidenting,” demanded Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “The only way to end this crisis is for him to stop being the greatest president of all time.”
Trump has stubbornly refused, though. “I can’t be anything less than the greatest ever,” Trump announced. “It’s impossible. I know you’re getting tired of hearing everyone everywhere talk about what a tremendous job I’m doing, but there’s nothing I can do to stop that. The only thing I can fail at is failure.”
*.*
What’s the difference between a feminist and a suicide vest?
A suicide vest actually accomplishes something when triggered.
*.*
As we stood in formation at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, our Flight Instructor said, "All right! All you damn dummies fall out."
As the rest of the squad wandered away, I remained at attention.
The Instructor walked over until he was eye-to-eye with me, and then just raised a single eyebrow. I smiled and said, "Sure was a lot of 'em, huh sir?"
Quote of the Times;
“This is the best advice I can give is to always solve a problem.”
Link of the Times;
https://ammo.com/articles/venezuela-economy-collapse-socialism-oil-envy-demagogues
Issue of the Times;
5 Questions About Transgenderism That No Leftist Can Answer by Matt Walsh
Twitter has stepped up its war on reality.
Last week, it permanently banned a feminist who committed the unconscionable sin of repeatedly insisting that men aren't women. This past weekend the company clarified its stance on the issue. According to the new rules, you are not allowed to engage in any "slurs" or "tropes" that might offend transgender individuals. These "slurs" and "tropes" include "misgendering" and "deadnaming" a transgender person. Of course, "misgender" means referring to a person by their biological (read: actual) sex. "Deadnaming" sounds like a codeword the CIA might use, but apparently it means calling a "transgender woman" by his original male name, or a "transgender man" by her original female name. Any of these offenses might earn you a permanent ban from the platform.
Some conservatives seem surprised by the increased attempts to silence those who acknowledge and affirm biological realities. I am only surprised by their surprise. This was always inevitable, and it will only get worse from here. After all, what other choice does the Left have? They literally cannot engage with the other side of this debate because there is no debate. "Transgenderism" is an article of faith. It has no referent in physical reality. It cannot be defended logically or scientifically. If they are going to maintain their radical theory of gender, they can only do it through intimidation and force.
The leftist position on this topic is so divorced from reason, so utterly indefensible, that they cannot even explain their own view, let alone defend it against an intellectual challenge. They can only issue assertions and then shout ad hominems at anyone who refuses to immediately believe and adopt their philosophy wholesale. To demonstrate this fact, here are five very basic questions that any proponent of "transgenderism" and gender fluidity should be able to answer easily, but cannot:
1) How precisely does a biological male come to the conclusion that he is really a woman?
2) If he arrives at this conclusion based on the fact that he "feels like" a woman, how does he know what it feels like to be a woman?
3) What exactly is a female feeling?
4) Even if it made sense to speak of female feelings and female thoughts, and even if it were possible for a man to know for certain that he is experiencing those feelings and thoughts, in what objective sense do those feelings and thoughts make him a woman rather than simply a feminine man?
5) The Left tells us that gender is a social construct. They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling or thought or taste or preference. If gender is indeed an artificial construct and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as "man" or "woman," then what in the hell is a woman? A woman, in that case, is not defined by her feelings, thoughts, ideas, preferences, or her body, reproductive organs, chromosomes, DNA, etc. So what is she defined by? If she isn't defined by anything, then how does it make sense to call yourself a woman? Isn't that like calling yourself a whooziwhatsit or a thingamadoodle? Isn't "woman" now a term empty of all objective meaning?
I have never heard any leftist offer a satisfactory answer to these questions. Rarely have I seen anyone even attempt an answer. That's because there is no answer. They are proposing square circles. They are insisting on something that is not only scientifically but logically impossible. All they can do with such an insistence is insist it. Only logical propositions can be explained and defended. So, they don't bother. And why should they? If they can make their ideas mandatory, it doesn't matter that the ideas are absurd.
"I don't know," she wailed, "I was standing in the store looking at the dress. Then I found myself trying it on. It was like the Devil was whispering to me, 'Gee, you look great in that dress. You should buy it.'"
"Well," the pastor persisted, "You know how to deal with him! Just tell him, "Get behind me, Satan!"
"I did," replied his wife. "He said 'You look great from here too.'"
*.*
The two old coots were both only a year short of retirement from the assembly line, but one Monday morning that didn't keep Joe from boasting to Manny about his sexual endurance.
"Three times," gasped Manny admiringly.
"How'd you do it?"
"It was easy." Joe looked down modestly. "I made love to my wife, and then I rolled over and took a ten- minute nap. When I woke up again, I made love to her again and took another ten-minute nap. And then I put it to her again. Can you believe it! I woke up this morning feeling like a bull, I'll tell you."
"I gotta try it," said Manny.
So that night he made love to his wife, took a ten- minute nap, made love to her again, took another nap, woke up and made love to her a third time, then rolled over and fell sound asleep. He woke up feeling like a million bucks, pulled on his clothes, and ran to the factory, where he found his boss waiting outside for him.
"What's up, Boss?" he asked. "I've been working for you for twenty years and never been late once. You aren't going to hold these twenty minutes against me now, are you?"
"Twenty minutes!" growled the boss. "Where the hell were you on Tuesday and Wednesday?
*.*
U.S.—In yet another disaster caused by President Trump’s winning just far too much, whole caravans of people are trying to enter the US so they too can experience the presidenting of Donald Trump.
“We don’t know what to do,” said ICE official Brett Kelley. “Trump is just too successful as president. Everyone from all over has heard how great he is, and we can’t stop them from trying to get here.”
The Democrats have begun condemning Trump for being far too good at everything. “Trump needs to reduce the quality of his presidenting,” demanded Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer. “The only way to end this crisis is for him to stop being the greatest president of all time.”
Trump has stubbornly refused, though. “I can’t be anything less than the greatest ever,” Trump announced. “It’s impossible. I know you’re getting tired of hearing everyone everywhere talk about what a tremendous job I’m doing, but there’s nothing I can do to stop that. The only thing I can fail at is failure.”
*.*
What’s the difference between a feminist and a suicide vest?
A suicide vest actually accomplishes something when triggered.
*.*
As we stood in formation at the Pensacola Naval Air Station, our Flight Instructor said, "All right! All you damn dummies fall out."
As the rest of the squad wandered away, I remained at attention.
The Instructor walked over until he was eye-to-eye with me, and then just raised a single eyebrow. I smiled and said, "Sure was a lot of 'em, huh sir?"
Quote of the Times;
“This is the best advice I can give is to always solve a problem.”
Link of the Times;
https://ammo.com/articles/venezuela-economy-collapse-socialism-oil-envy-demagogues
Issue of the Times;
5 Questions About Transgenderism That No Leftist Can Answer by Matt Walsh
Twitter has stepped up its war on reality.
Last week, it permanently banned a feminist who committed the unconscionable sin of repeatedly insisting that men aren't women. This past weekend the company clarified its stance on the issue. According to the new rules, you are not allowed to engage in any "slurs" or "tropes" that might offend transgender individuals. These "slurs" and "tropes" include "misgendering" and "deadnaming" a transgender person. Of course, "misgender" means referring to a person by their biological (read: actual) sex. "Deadnaming" sounds like a codeword the CIA might use, but apparently it means calling a "transgender woman" by his original male name, or a "transgender man" by her original female name. Any of these offenses might earn you a permanent ban from the platform.
Some conservatives seem surprised by the increased attempts to silence those who acknowledge and affirm biological realities. I am only surprised by their surprise. This was always inevitable, and it will only get worse from here. After all, what other choice does the Left have? They literally cannot engage with the other side of this debate because there is no debate. "Transgenderism" is an article of faith. It has no referent in physical reality. It cannot be defended logically or scientifically. If they are going to maintain their radical theory of gender, they can only do it through intimidation and force.
The leftist position on this topic is so divorced from reason, so utterly indefensible, that they cannot even explain their own view, let alone defend it against an intellectual challenge. They can only issue assertions and then shout ad hominems at anyone who refuses to immediately believe and adopt their philosophy wholesale. To demonstrate this fact, here are five very basic questions that any proponent of "transgenderism" and gender fluidity should be able to answer easily, but cannot:
1) How precisely does a biological male come to the conclusion that he is really a woman?
2) If he arrives at this conclusion based on the fact that he "feels like" a woman, how does he know what it feels like to be a woman?
3) What exactly is a female feeling?
4) Even if it made sense to speak of female feelings and female thoughts, and even if it were possible for a man to know for certain that he is experiencing those feelings and thoughts, in what objective sense do those feelings and thoughts make him a woman rather than simply a feminine man?
5) The Left tells us that gender is a social construct. They reject the idea that women must necessarily have any particular feeling or thought or taste or preference. If gender is indeed an artificial construct and our physical features have no bearing on our identity as "man" or "woman," then what in the hell is a woman? A woman, in that case, is not defined by her feelings, thoughts, ideas, preferences, or her body, reproductive organs, chromosomes, DNA, etc. So what is she defined by? If she isn't defined by anything, then how does it make sense to call yourself a woman? Isn't that like calling yourself a whooziwhatsit or a thingamadoodle? Isn't "woman" now a term empty of all objective meaning?
I have never heard any leftist offer a satisfactory answer to these questions. Rarely have I seen anyone even attempt an answer. That's because there is no answer. They are proposing square circles. They are insisting on something that is not only scientifically but logically impossible. All they can do with such an insistence is insist it. Only logical propositions can be explained and defended. So, they don't bother. And why should they? If they can make their ideas mandatory, it doesn't matter that the ideas are absurd.
Honest?
Two old Irishmen were sitting at the local pub drinking a few beers.
So, Thomas O'Ryan said to Liam Halloren, "Liam, me buddy, me ol' pal. When I die would you please pour a couple of beers o'er me grave?"
Liam said, "Why certainly, but could I pour it through me bladder first?"
*.*
A study says stress may lead to loss of memory and brain shrinkage. Great, another shrinkage to worry about.
In a small town in France, there is a serial rabbit killer, who has killed a half-dozen pet rabbits. My theory is that its someone very protective of their Trix cereal.
A study says Louisiana is one of the fattest states in the nation. So much that 50% of the people make up 75% of the population.
A Dutch man has gone to court to legally change his age from 69 to 49. Of course, the big question: If he’s allowed to do that, would it stop all the junk mail from AARP for an entire year?
Las Vegas oddsmakers listed the 2-7 Buffalo Bills NFL team as a 28.5 favorite over college team Alabama. For what purpose, no one knows.
A company in Wisconsin decided that, instead of giving a bonus for Christmas this year, each employee is going to receive their own hand gun. I would make extra sure in the coming year not to take the last cup of coffee without starting a new pot.
Utah will start testing beers to make sure they contain less than 4% alcohol. There's a job my high school career counselor never bothered bringing up.
*.*
Army Replacing Enlistment Bonuses With Welfare Checks
WASHINGTON — After barely making their 2018 recruiting goal, The United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is eliminating enlistment bonuses in their 2019 recruiting plan in order to heavily target a nearly unending source of manpower: Americans on government assistance.
According to USAToday, it was that demographic — unemployed adults around 35 – 40, with multiple kids, no healthcare, and the need to earn below 185% of the poverty line to maintain their welfare — who miraculously pushed the US Army over their goal earlier this September. Highlighting insanely low enlisted soldiers’ pay and free healthcare, according to government manpower experts, is the next logical step.
Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) director Teresa A. McKay weighed in on the campaign’s success, explaining how DFAS works cross-functionally with all of the armed forces to ensure that soldiers make “just enough” in case money becomes tight.
“Like any good business we always create ‘back-doors’ and ‘levers’ that we can pull in case funds become strained or unavailable,” said McKay. “By purposely keeping lower enlisted pay rates below U.S. poverty guidelines, we can direct them to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) or state run programs in order to redirect monies to more important programs like the ‘lightning gun,’ next-generation cold weather gear no one is allowed to wear, and the F-35.”
Col. Patrick R. Michaelis, Commander of the Army’s 2nd Recruiting Brigade, championed the “welfare initiative” after learning food stamp usage was on the rise in the military. He says that the strategy is the perfect solution to Millenials who want to send troops overseas but don’t want to do any of the actual fighting.
“The tried-and-true demographic of adults 17 – 24 has been exhausted, literally,” said Michaelis. “From what, I have no idea, but we’re finding Gen X’ers who now take care of their Baby Boomer parents and are more than happy and financially destitute enough to join the military.”
*.*
I stopped at a florist shop after work to pick up roses for my wife. As the clerk was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet, a young man burst through the door, breathlessly requesting a dozen red roses.
"I'm sorry," the clerk said. "This man just ordered our last bunch." The desperate customer turned to me and begged, "May I please have those roses?"
"What happened?" I asked. "Did you forget your wedding anniversary?"
"It's even worse than that," he confided. "I broke my wife's iPhone!"
*.*
Say what you want, however depression does have its benefits.
For instance, I used to have a fear of flying.
Now when I get on a plane, I really don't give a crap if it reaches its destination.
Issue of the Times;
The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants to Nuke Omaha by Larry Correia
Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback—which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it—and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
But this post isn’t about that particular line from one foolish congressman. It’s about all of the silly left wing memes that have popped up since, trying to justify the congressman’s basic premise that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete for resisting tyranny, and the government would obliterate anyone who failed to comply.
I’ve seen a slew of these over the last few days. Nukes kicked it off, but I’ve seen it before with drones, or tanks, or cruise missiles. Basically they all boil down to the same fundamental premise. The federal government has access to advanced weapon systems, and thus anyone who resisted gun confiscation would be effortlessly destroyed by these advanced weapon systems, ergo gun control has already won, forgone conclusion, and they declare victory.
Like most political memes, they’re taking an extremely complex situation, and providing a cartoonish, simplistic answer, which makes them look like complete dipshits to anybody with a clue, but scores them lots of Virtue Signal Points to their likewise ignorant but posturing friends. To my people, this is really goofy stuff. I mean, if you have even a basic knowledge of this topic these memes are about as clever as the ones from the vaccines cause autism morons and the flat earth society.
We are so divided it’s like we are speaking two different languages. Hell, on this topic we are on two different planets. And it is usually framed with a sanctimonious left versus right, enlightened being versus racist hillbilly, unfailing arrow of history versus the knuckle dragging past sort of vibe.
But basically it boils down to one side making the argument: The idea of the 2nd Amendment resisting a tyrannical government is obsolete, because the federal government is too overwhelmingly powerful, and has too many advanced technologies.
So today I’m writing this for my left leaning friends and readers, in the hopes that I can break down the flaws in this argument. I’m going to try not to be too insulting. Accent on try… But I’ll probably fail because this is a really stupid argument.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a novelist now, but I retired from the Evil Military Industrial Complex, where I helped maintain those various advanced weapon systems you expect to bomb me with. Before that I was a gun dealer and firearms instructor. So basically I sold guns to the people you expect the people I trained to take them from.
On that note, I don’t think you fully comprehend the nature of the individuals you expect to do your dirty work, but I’ll come back around to that later.
First, let’s talk about the basic premise that an irregular force primarily armed with rifles would be helpless against a powerful army that has things like drones and attack helicopters.
This is a deeply ironic argument to make, considering that the most technologically advanced military coalition in history has spent the better part of the last two decades fighting goat herders with AKs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seriously, it’s like you guys only pay attention to American casualties when there’s a republican in office and an election coming up.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama launched over five hundred drone strikes during his eight years in office. We’ve used Apaches, smart bombs, tanks, I don’t know how many thousands of raids on houses and compounds, all the stuff that the lefty memes say they’re willing to do to crush the gun nut right, and we’ve spent something like 6 trillion dollars on the global war on terror so far.
And yet they’re still fighting.
So yes, groups of irregular locals can be a real pain in the ass to a technologically superior military force. That’s pretty obvious.
Now here is the interesting part. Best estimates are that any given time in Iraq we’ve been fighting about 20,000 insurgents at most. Keep that number in mind, because now we’re going to talk about the scope of this hypothetical fight over gun control.
Nobody really knows how many people in America own guns, or how many guns are here. The estimates range wildly. I’ve noticed a trend over recent years of the news media trying to minimize that number, to make it seem like it’s actually a very low percentage of Americans who own firearms, a fading cultural anomaly if you will, and to explain the one to two million new backgrounds checks done every month for new purchases, a handful of us just own a few hundred guns each.
Uh huh…. Sure.
While trying to make gun ownership seem like an oddball thing, I’ve seen the media come up with some truly silly estimates about the total number of guns in this country. The one that was going around earlier this year was really easy to debunk, because they used the number of NICS checks… Problem is, it didn’t take into account the millions guns sold before that (and they never really wear out), the fact that one NICS check can be used to buy multiples at a time, and that many US states (including the gun nuttiest) use their own state background check system, and don’t report to that federal number. Oh yeah, with advances in cheap machining, making your own guns at home has become increasingly popular.
When pollsters call to ask us if and how many guns we own—we think about things like a congressmen talking about nuking us—and immediately lie our asses off. The biggest recurring joke in the gun community is that I don’t own any guns, because I lost them all in a freak canoe accident.
So nobody really knows how many guns there are here, or how many of us own them. But the answer is A LOT.
Recently the WaPo ran an article called Americans Vastly Overestimate the Number of Gun Owners. As with most WaPo articles, it was about 90% bullshit, but they are claiming that only 20 to 30 percent of Americans own guns. That may sound plausible if you live in Manhattan, but out here in flyover country, that’s downright laughable, but anyways, to make the idea of mass gun confiscation as plausible as possible, let’s run with that rosy figure. We’ll even take the lower one of 20%. (snort)
Too bad America has over a third of a billion people, because even the unrealistic figure of 20% of 325 million is still a whopping 65 MILLION people. That’s about the same as the entire population of France. That’s about the same as the population of Great Britain, only with 500 times the firepower. Good thing we didn’t go with that 30%, because now the number is way bigger than the population of Germany (and you know what a pain beating them last time was!). Or ironically, about three times the population of Iraq.
It’s kind of funny, when it comes to us adopting social or economic programs, the left is always comparing the US to Denmark, which has the population of LA county, and that’s totally not apples and oranges, but declaring war on a percentage of the American population bigger than most nation states? That’s no biggie.
But I digress…
Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else. And even though the government has become tyrannical enough to send SWAT teams door to door and threaten citizens with drones and attack helicopters, rather than half the states saying fuck you, this means Civil War 2, instead we’ll stick to the rosiest of all possible outcomes, and say that most gun owners comply.
In fact, let’s be super kind. Rather than a realistic number, like half or a third of those people getting really, really pissed off and hoisting the black flag, let’s say that 99% of them decide to totally put all their faith into the government, and that the all-powerful entity which just threatened to kill their entire family will never ever turn tyrannical from now on, pinky swear, so what do they have to lose? And a whopping 90% of gun owners go along peacefully.
That means you are only dealing with six and a half MILLION insurgents. The entire active US military is about 1.3 million, with about 800,000 reserve. Which is also assuming that those two Venn diagrams don’t overlap, which is just plain idiotic, but I’ll get to that too.
Let’s be super generous. I’m talking absurdly generous, and say that a full 99% of US gun owners say won’t somebody think of the children and all hold hands and sing kumbaya, so that then you are only dealing with the angriest, listless malcontents who hate progress… These are those crazy, knuckle dragging bastards who you will have to put in the ground.
And there are 650,000 of them.
To put that into perspective, we were fighting 22,000 insurgents in Iraq, a country which would fit comfortably inside Texas with plenty of room to spare. This would be almost 30 times as many fighters, spread across 22 times the area.
And that estimated number is pathetically, laughably low.
In one of the bluest states in America, the New York SAFE Act only has like a 4% compliance rate. And that’s mostly just people choosing to ignore an onerous law. Because the further you get away from the major cities, the more people just don’t give a crap about your utopian foolishness. Its benign neglect, and most Americans are happy to ignore you until you mess with them. You start dropping Hellfire missiles on Indiana? Fuck you, its game on. And that 1% is going to turn into 50% damn quick.
So just by the numbers, it’s an insurmountable problem, but we’re just getting started with how stupid this idea is.
Let’s talk about the logistical challenges of this holy crusade to free the country of icky guns and murder everybody who thinks differently than you do.
In Iraq, our troops operated out of a few secure bases. Those were the big areas where we could do things like store supplies, airlift things in or out, repair vehicles, have field hospitals, a Burger King, etc. And then there were Forward Operating Bases. These are the little camps troops could stage out of to operate in a given area. The hard part was keeping those places supplied, and I believe most of America’s causalities came from convoys getting hit while trying to supply things like ammo, food, and fuel, because when you’re moving around, you’re a big target. All of these places were secured, and if you got too close, or they thought you were going to try and drive a car bomb through the gate, they’d light you up.
Now, imagine trying to conduct operations in a place with twenty times the bad guys, and there are no “safe zones”. Most of our military bases aren’t out in the desert by themselves. They’ve had a town grow up around them, and the only thing separating the jets from the people you expect them to be bombing is a chain link fence.
The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.
In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.
You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns? But I don’t think unrelenting total war against everyone who has ever disagreed with you on Facebook is going to be quite as clean as you expect.
There will be no secure delivery of ammo, food, and fuel, because the guys who build that, grow that, and ship that, well, you just dropped a Hellfire on his cousin Bill because he wouldn’t turn over his SKS. Fuck you. Starve. And that’s assuming they don’t still make the delivery but the gas is tainted and food is poisoned.
Oh wait… Poison? That would be unsportsmanlike! Really? Because your guy just brought up nuclear weapons. What? You think that you’re going to declare war on half of America, with rules of engagement that would make Genghis Khan blush, and my side would keep using Marquis of Queensbury rules?
Oh hell no.
A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.
Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts? While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?
The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was five Special Forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other (and gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?).
Similar dinner conversation once, with a bunch of SWAT cops from a major American city, talking about how incredibly easy it would be to entirely shut down and utterly ruin their city, with only a small crew of dedicated individuals and about forty eight hours of mayhem and fuckery. (And guess what their political leanings were? Hint, most of them were eager to retire because they’d been treated like shit by their liberal mayors, and take their pension to someplace like Arkansas)
So yeah, let’s talk about those people you think are going to be unfeeling automatons who will have no problem killing their friends and neighbors on your behalf…
They are us.
Above I mentioned a Venn diagram of obstinate gun owners and the military, but you can change that to cops and it’s going to be pretty similar. Those diagrams overlap a lot, and depending on the particular department or unit, they make one big happy circle.
Back when I owned a gun store, we were located one block from Utah Army National Guard Headquarters. Every drill weekend my building was a sea of ACU (and the fact that very few of my liberal readers know what that abbreviation means just shows goes to show how incredibly out of touch they are, but I mean that ugly sage grey digital camouflage). It was just a bunch of guys hanging out, talking shit, and BUYING GUNS.
Lots and lots of guns. And I know most of my left wing readers can’t tell them apart, but they were specifically buying the scary ones that you want to ban the most. Thousands of them. And cops… Holy moly I sold a lot of guns to cops. Not department guns, though we supplied a few of those, but personal guns.
Having worked with a lot of police departments, guess what? The guys who actually know how to shoot? The ones who run the training programs? Usually they’re my people too. The gun nuts gravitate toward that position because A. more taxpayer funded ammo, and B. they actually give a shit about the subject, so they learn on their own, and then try to pass those skills onto their coworkers to better keep them alive.
Whenever I see one of these dipshit memes produced by some Gender Studies Major, it just demonstrates how incredibly sheltered and out of touch they are. They don’t know fuck all about these people. Usually if they’re talking about soldiers, it’s about how they’re evil baby killers, or time bombs of PTSD rage, or poor deluded fools who joined the military because they couldn’t get a real job…. And cops, it’s about how they’re just a bunch of trigger happy racists just itching for an excuse to execute everybody who looks different than they do.
But don’t worry, despite all those years of abuse, when you ask them to go door to door in their hometown to systematically attack people they’ve known their whole lives, friends and family who’ve done nothing wrong, and maybe get shot or blown up, and when it’s over then turn in their own personal guns, all because some moron in a big city a thousand miles away said so, I’m sure they’ll hop right to it.
See, one of the things you guys on the left don’t realize is that there’s that whole “Othering” thing. You do it all the time without thinking about it. Where you just ascribe increasingly terrible things to people, like all gun owners are murderous, racist, kill crazy, redneck, dumb ass peckerwoods who want children to die, to the point that to you, we’re this unimaginable, evil, Other, so it’s okay to threaten to murder us, and feel good about yourself. Because we’re bad, and you’re the good guy, and thus totally justified in all you do.
Yet you assume that the people who gravitate toward the career fields you’ll need to wage war on us will feel the same way you do. When in reality most of them think you’re posturing, elitist, ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about guns, crime, violence, or America.
Now this is where I’ll part ways with most of my libertarian brethren, because they are quick to point out that there are plenty of places where cops enforce existing gun or drug laws. The part they’re missing is that most people are complicated, and they’ve got lines they won’t cross.
In this case, the target isn’t some Other, it’s not just their people, it’s them. And an active shooting war between the government and half the population? That’s a pretty big fucking line. And we’re not talking about people they are already inclined not to like, but rather they’re supposed to go shoot their doctor and their mechanic for doing something that up until a few days ago was legal and they were doing themselves. A small percentage will be happy to put on the jack boots and start loading people into cattle cars. But a larger percentage will say nope, I’m calling in sick, don’t feel like getting blown up today.
And another big chunk will actively help the insurgents, because they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?
Now this will vary wildly depending on jurisdiction. Some places, no problem. People will comply. Others because of the culture, they won’t. Yet, in the places where they are the least likely to comply, those are the places where you are the most likely to have the local authorities be actively on the side of the insurgents. (this is kind of a no brainer to anybody who has ever looked at any guerilla war ever in history). Which means that the occupiers then have to import outsiders to do the deed, but then the presence of outsiders piss off the rest of the local fence sitters, and now everybody is getting blown up.
The problem with all those advanced weapons systems you don’t understand, but keep sticking onto memes, is guess who builds them, maintains them, and drives them? When I first saw this idiotic Apache meme my comment was that sadly Freedom Eagle’s day job was as a contractor doing helicopter engine maintenance.
Those drones you guys like to go on about, and barely understand? One of the contracts I worked on was maintaining the servers for them. Guess which way most military contractors vote? Duh. Though honestly, if I was still in my Evil Military Industrial Complex job when this went down, I’d just quietly embezzle and funnel millions of DOD dollars to the rebels. Because fuck you is why.
So you’ve got an insurmountable challenge, that’s logistically impossible, and a big chunk of the people you expect to fight on your behalf being actively against you. Your side would need an incredible amount of will, especially after they turned off your electricity and water, and there’s no more food on the shelves.
This is why smart progressives prefer to boil the frog slowly.
To pull off confiscation now you’d have to be willing to kill millions of people. The congressman’s suggestion was incredibly stupid, but it was nice to see one of you guys being honest about it for once. In order to maybe, hypothetically save thousands, you’d be willing to slaughter millions. Either you really suck at math, or the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line. And if that’s the case, you’re a sick bastard, and a great example of why the rest of us aren’t ever going to give up our guns.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
http://www.cutesypooh.com/
So, Thomas O'Ryan said to Liam Halloren, "Liam, me buddy, me ol' pal. When I die would you please pour a couple of beers o'er me grave?"
Liam said, "Why certainly, but could I pour it through me bladder first?"
*.*
A study says stress may lead to loss of memory and brain shrinkage. Great, another shrinkage to worry about.
In a small town in France, there is a serial rabbit killer, who has killed a half-dozen pet rabbits. My theory is that its someone very protective of their Trix cereal.
A study says Louisiana is one of the fattest states in the nation. So much that 50% of the people make up 75% of the population.
A Dutch man has gone to court to legally change his age from 69 to 49. Of course, the big question: If he’s allowed to do that, would it stop all the junk mail from AARP for an entire year?
Las Vegas oddsmakers listed the 2-7 Buffalo Bills NFL team as a 28.5 favorite over college team Alabama. For what purpose, no one knows.
A company in Wisconsin decided that, instead of giving a bonus for Christmas this year, each employee is going to receive their own hand gun. I would make extra sure in the coming year not to take the last cup of coffee without starting a new pot.
Utah will start testing beers to make sure they contain less than 4% alcohol. There's a job my high school career counselor never bothered bringing up.
*.*
Army Replacing Enlistment Bonuses With Welfare Checks
WASHINGTON — After barely making their 2018 recruiting goal, The United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is eliminating enlistment bonuses in their 2019 recruiting plan in order to heavily target a nearly unending source of manpower: Americans on government assistance.
According to USAToday, it was that demographic — unemployed adults around 35 – 40, with multiple kids, no healthcare, and the need to earn below 185% of the poverty line to maintain their welfare — who miraculously pushed the US Army over their goal earlier this September. Highlighting insanely low enlisted soldiers’ pay and free healthcare, according to government manpower experts, is the next logical step.
Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) director Teresa A. McKay weighed in on the campaign’s success, explaining how DFAS works cross-functionally with all of the armed forces to ensure that soldiers make “just enough” in case money becomes tight.
“Like any good business we always create ‘back-doors’ and ‘levers’ that we can pull in case funds become strained or unavailable,” said McKay. “By purposely keeping lower enlisted pay rates below U.S. poverty guidelines, we can direct them to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) or state run programs in order to redirect monies to more important programs like the ‘lightning gun,’ next-generation cold weather gear no one is allowed to wear, and the F-35.”
Col. Patrick R. Michaelis, Commander of the Army’s 2nd Recruiting Brigade, championed the “welfare initiative” after learning food stamp usage was on the rise in the military. He says that the strategy is the perfect solution to Millenials who want to send troops overseas but don’t want to do any of the actual fighting.
“The tried-and-true demographic of adults 17 – 24 has been exhausted, literally,” said Michaelis. “From what, I have no idea, but we’re finding Gen X’ers who now take care of their Baby Boomer parents and are more than happy and financially destitute enough to join the military.”
*.*
I stopped at a florist shop after work to pick up roses for my wife. As the clerk was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet, a young man burst through the door, breathlessly requesting a dozen red roses.
"I'm sorry," the clerk said. "This man just ordered our last bunch." The desperate customer turned to me and begged, "May I please have those roses?"
"What happened?" I asked. "Did you forget your wedding anniversary?"
"It's even worse than that," he confided. "I broke my wife's iPhone!"
*.*
Say what you want, however depression does have its benefits.
For instance, I used to have a fear of flying.
Now when I get on a plane, I really don't give a crap if it reaches its destination.
Issue of the Times;
The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants to Nuke Omaha by Larry Correia
Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback—which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it—and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
But this post isn’t about that particular line from one foolish congressman. It’s about all of the silly left wing memes that have popped up since, trying to justify the congressman’s basic premise that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete for resisting tyranny, and the government would obliterate anyone who failed to comply.
I’ve seen a slew of these over the last few days. Nukes kicked it off, but I’ve seen it before with drones, or tanks, or cruise missiles. Basically they all boil down to the same fundamental premise. The federal government has access to advanced weapon systems, and thus anyone who resisted gun confiscation would be effortlessly destroyed by these advanced weapon systems, ergo gun control has already won, forgone conclusion, and they declare victory.
Like most political memes, they’re taking an extremely complex situation, and providing a cartoonish, simplistic answer, which makes them look like complete dipshits to anybody with a clue, but scores them lots of Virtue Signal Points to their likewise ignorant but posturing friends. To my people, this is really goofy stuff. I mean, if you have even a basic knowledge of this topic these memes are about as clever as the ones from the vaccines cause autism morons and the flat earth society.
We are so divided it’s like we are speaking two different languages. Hell, on this topic we are on two different planets. And it is usually framed with a sanctimonious left versus right, enlightened being versus racist hillbilly, unfailing arrow of history versus the knuckle dragging past sort of vibe.
But basically it boils down to one side making the argument: The idea of the 2nd Amendment resisting a tyrannical government is obsolete, because the federal government is too overwhelmingly powerful, and has too many advanced technologies.
So today I’m writing this for my left leaning friends and readers, in the hopes that I can break down the flaws in this argument. I’m going to try not to be too insulting. Accent on try… But I’ll probably fail because this is a really stupid argument.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a novelist now, but I retired from the Evil Military Industrial Complex, where I helped maintain those various advanced weapon systems you expect to bomb me with. Before that I was a gun dealer and firearms instructor. So basically I sold guns to the people you expect the people I trained to take them from.
On that note, I don’t think you fully comprehend the nature of the individuals you expect to do your dirty work, but I’ll come back around to that later.
First, let’s talk about the basic premise that an irregular force primarily armed with rifles would be helpless against a powerful army that has things like drones and attack helicopters.
This is a deeply ironic argument to make, considering that the most technologically advanced military coalition in history has spent the better part of the last two decades fighting goat herders with AKs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seriously, it’s like you guys only pay attention to American casualties when there’s a republican in office and an election coming up.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama launched over five hundred drone strikes during his eight years in office. We’ve used Apaches, smart bombs, tanks, I don’t know how many thousands of raids on houses and compounds, all the stuff that the lefty memes say they’re willing to do to crush the gun nut right, and we’ve spent something like 6 trillion dollars on the global war on terror so far.
And yet they’re still fighting.
So yes, groups of irregular locals can be a real pain in the ass to a technologically superior military force. That’s pretty obvious.
Now here is the interesting part. Best estimates are that any given time in Iraq we’ve been fighting about 20,000 insurgents at most. Keep that number in mind, because now we’re going to talk about the scope of this hypothetical fight over gun control.
Nobody really knows how many people in America own guns, or how many guns are here. The estimates range wildly. I’ve noticed a trend over recent years of the news media trying to minimize that number, to make it seem like it’s actually a very low percentage of Americans who own firearms, a fading cultural anomaly if you will, and to explain the one to two million new backgrounds checks done every month for new purchases, a handful of us just own a few hundred guns each.
Uh huh…. Sure.
While trying to make gun ownership seem like an oddball thing, I’ve seen the media come up with some truly silly estimates about the total number of guns in this country. The one that was going around earlier this year was really easy to debunk, because they used the number of NICS checks… Problem is, it didn’t take into account the millions guns sold before that (and they never really wear out), the fact that one NICS check can be used to buy multiples at a time, and that many US states (including the gun nuttiest) use their own state background check system, and don’t report to that federal number. Oh yeah, with advances in cheap machining, making your own guns at home has become increasingly popular.
When pollsters call to ask us if and how many guns we own—we think about things like a congressmen talking about nuking us—and immediately lie our asses off. The biggest recurring joke in the gun community is that I don’t own any guns, because I lost them all in a freak canoe accident.
So nobody really knows how many guns there are here, or how many of us own them. But the answer is A LOT.
Recently the WaPo ran an article called Americans Vastly Overestimate the Number of Gun Owners. As with most WaPo articles, it was about 90% bullshit, but they are claiming that only 20 to 30 percent of Americans own guns. That may sound plausible if you live in Manhattan, but out here in flyover country, that’s downright laughable, but anyways, to make the idea of mass gun confiscation as plausible as possible, let’s run with that rosy figure. We’ll even take the lower one of 20%. (snort)
Too bad America has over a third of a billion people, because even the unrealistic figure of 20% of 325 million is still a whopping 65 MILLION people. That’s about the same as the entire population of France. That’s about the same as the population of Great Britain, only with 500 times the firepower. Good thing we didn’t go with that 30%, because now the number is way bigger than the population of Germany (and you know what a pain beating them last time was!). Or ironically, about three times the population of Iraq.
It’s kind of funny, when it comes to us adopting social or economic programs, the left is always comparing the US to Denmark, which has the population of LA county, and that’s totally not apples and oranges, but declaring war on a percentage of the American population bigger than most nation states? That’s no biggie.
But I digress…
Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else. And even though the government has become tyrannical enough to send SWAT teams door to door and threaten citizens with drones and attack helicopters, rather than half the states saying fuck you, this means Civil War 2, instead we’ll stick to the rosiest of all possible outcomes, and say that most gun owners comply.
In fact, let’s be super kind. Rather than a realistic number, like half or a third of those people getting really, really pissed off and hoisting the black flag, let’s say that 99% of them decide to totally put all their faith into the government, and that the all-powerful entity which just threatened to kill their entire family will never ever turn tyrannical from now on, pinky swear, so what do they have to lose? And a whopping 90% of gun owners go along peacefully.
That means you are only dealing with six and a half MILLION insurgents. The entire active US military is about 1.3 million, with about 800,000 reserve. Which is also assuming that those two Venn diagrams don’t overlap, which is just plain idiotic, but I’ll get to that too.
Let’s be super generous. I’m talking absurdly generous, and say that a full 99% of US gun owners say won’t somebody think of the children and all hold hands and sing kumbaya, so that then you are only dealing with the angriest, listless malcontents who hate progress… These are those crazy, knuckle dragging bastards who you will have to put in the ground.
And there are 650,000 of them.
To put that into perspective, we were fighting 22,000 insurgents in Iraq, a country which would fit comfortably inside Texas with plenty of room to spare. This would be almost 30 times as many fighters, spread across 22 times the area.
And that estimated number is pathetically, laughably low.
In one of the bluest states in America, the New York SAFE Act only has like a 4% compliance rate. And that’s mostly just people choosing to ignore an onerous law. Because the further you get away from the major cities, the more people just don’t give a crap about your utopian foolishness. Its benign neglect, and most Americans are happy to ignore you until you mess with them. You start dropping Hellfire missiles on Indiana? Fuck you, its game on. And that 1% is going to turn into 50% damn quick.
So just by the numbers, it’s an insurmountable problem, but we’re just getting started with how stupid this idea is.
Let’s talk about the logistical challenges of this holy crusade to free the country of icky guns and murder everybody who thinks differently than you do.
In Iraq, our troops operated out of a few secure bases. Those were the big areas where we could do things like store supplies, airlift things in or out, repair vehicles, have field hospitals, a Burger King, etc. And then there were Forward Operating Bases. These are the little camps troops could stage out of to operate in a given area. The hard part was keeping those places supplied, and I believe most of America’s causalities came from convoys getting hit while trying to supply things like ammo, food, and fuel, because when you’re moving around, you’re a big target. All of these places were secured, and if you got too close, or they thought you were going to try and drive a car bomb through the gate, they’d light you up.
Now, imagine trying to conduct operations in a place with twenty times the bad guys, and there are no “safe zones”. Most of our military bases aren’t out in the desert by themselves. They’ve had a town grow up around them, and the only thing separating the jets from the people you expect them to be bombing is a chain link fence.
The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.
In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.
You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns? But I don’t think unrelenting total war against everyone who has ever disagreed with you on Facebook is going to be quite as clean as you expect.
There will be no secure delivery of ammo, food, and fuel, because the guys who build that, grow that, and ship that, well, you just dropped a Hellfire on his cousin Bill because he wouldn’t turn over his SKS. Fuck you. Starve. And that’s assuming they don’t still make the delivery but the gas is tainted and food is poisoned.
Oh wait… Poison? That would be unsportsmanlike! Really? Because your guy just brought up nuclear weapons. What? You think that you’re going to declare war on half of America, with rules of engagement that would make Genghis Khan blush, and my side would keep using Marquis of Queensbury rules?
Oh hell no.
A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.
Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts? While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?
The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was five Special Forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other (and gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?).
Similar dinner conversation once, with a bunch of SWAT cops from a major American city, talking about how incredibly easy it would be to entirely shut down and utterly ruin their city, with only a small crew of dedicated individuals and about forty eight hours of mayhem and fuckery. (And guess what their political leanings were? Hint, most of them were eager to retire because they’d been treated like shit by their liberal mayors, and take their pension to someplace like Arkansas)
So yeah, let’s talk about those people you think are going to be unfeeling automatons who will have no problem killing their friends and neighbors on your behalf…
They are us.
Above I mentioned a Venn diagram of obstinate gun owners and the military, but you can change that to cops and it’s going to be pretty similar. Those diagrams overlap a lot, and depending on the particular department or unit, they make one big happy circle.
Back when I owned a gun store, we were located one block from Utah Army National Guard Headquarters. Every drill weekend my building was a sea of ACU (and the fact that very few of my liberal readers know what that abbreviation means just shows goes to show how incredibly out of touch they are, but I mean that ugly sage grey digital camouflage). It was just a bunch of guys hanging out, talking shit, and BUYING GUNS.
Lots and lots of guns. And I know most of my left wing readers can’t tell them apart, but they were specifically buying the scary ones that you want to ban the most. Thousands of them. And cops… Holy moly I sold a lot of guns to cops. Not department guns, though we supplied a few of those, but personal guns.
Having worked with a lot of police departments, guess what? The guys who actually know how to shoot? The ones who run the training programs? Usually they’re my people too. The gun nuts gravitate toward that position because A. more taxpayer funded ammo, and B. they actually give a shit about the subject, so they learn on their own, and then try to pass those skills onto their coworkers to better keep them alive.
Whenever I see one of these dipshit memes produced by some Gender Studies Major, it just demonstrates how incredibly sheltered and out of touch they are. They don’t know fuck all about these people. Usually if they’re talking about soldiers, it’s about how they’re evil baby killers, or time bombs of PTSD rage, or poor deluded fools who joined the military because they couldn’t get a real job…. And cops, it’s about how they’re just a bunch of trigger happy racists just itching for an excuse to execute everybody who looks different than they do.
But don’t worry, despite all those years of abuse, when you ask them to go door to door in their hometown to systematically attack people they’ve known their whole lives, friends and family who’ve done nothing wrong, and maybe get shot or blown up, and when it’s over then turn in their own personal guns, all because some moron in a big city a thousand miles away said so, I’m sure they’ll hop right to it.
See, one of the things you guys on the left don’t realize is that there’s that whole “Othering” thing. You do it all the time without thinking about it. Where you just ascribe increasingly terrible things to people, like all gun owners are murderous, racist, kill crazy, redneck, dumb ass peckerwoods who want children to die, to the point that to you, we’re this unimaginable, evil, Other, so it’s okay to threaten to murder us, and feel good about yourself. Because we’re bad, and you’re the good guy, and thus totally justified in all you do.
Yet you assume that the people who gravitate toward the career fields you’ll need to wage war on us will feel the same way you do. When in reality most of them think you’re posturing, elitist, ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about guns, crime, violence, or America.
Now this is where I’ll part ways with most of my libertarian brethren, because they are quick to point out that there are plenty of places where cops enforce existing gun or drug laws. The part they’re missing is that most people are complicated, and they’ve got lines they won’t cross.
In this case, the target isn’t some Other, it’s not just their people, it’s them. And an active shooting war between the government and half the population? That’s a pretty big fucking line. And we’re not talking about people they are already inclined not to like, but rather they’re supposed to go shoot their doctor and their mechanic for doing something that up until a few days ago was legal and they were doing themselves. A small percentage will be happy to put on the jack boots and start loading people into cattle cars. But a larger percentage will say nope, I’m calling in sick, don’t feel like getting blown up today.
And another big chunk will actively help the insurgents, because they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?
Now this will vary wildly depending on jurisdiction. Some places, no problem. People will comply. Others because of the culture, they won’t. Yet, in the places where they are the least likely to comply, those are the places where you are the most likely to have the local authorities be actively on the side of the insurgents. (this is kind of a no brainer to anybody who has ever looked at any guerilla war ever in history). Which means that the occupiers then have to import outsiders to do the deed, but then the presence of outsiders piss off the rest of the local fence sitters, and now everybody is getting blown up.
The problem with all those advanced weapons systems you don’t understand, but keep sticking onto memes, is guess who builds them, maintains them, and drives them? When I first saw this idiotic Apache meme my comment was that sadly Freedom Eagle’s day job was as a contractor doing helicopter engine maintenance.
Those drones you guys like to go on about, and barely understand? One of the contracts I worked on was maintaining the servers for them. Guess which way most military contractors vote? Duh. Though honestly, if I was still in my Evil Military Industrial Complex job when this went down, I’d just quietly embezzle and funnel millions of DOD dollars to the rebels. Because fuck you is why.
So you’ve got an insurmountable challenge, that’s logistically impossible, and a big chunk of the people you expect to fight on your behalf being actively against you. Your side would need an incredible amount of will, especially after they turned off your electricity and water, and there’s no more food on the shelves.
This is why smart progressives prefer to boil the frog slowly.
To pull off confiscation now you’d have to be willing to kill millions of people. The congressman’s suggestion was incredibly stupid, but it was nice to see one of you guys being honest about it for once. In order to maybe, hypothetically save thousands, you’d be willing to slaughter millions. Either you really suck at math, or the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line. And if that’s the case, you’re a sick bastard, and a great example of why the rest of us aren’t ever going to give up our guns.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
http://www.cutesypooh.com/
When?
My wife told me; "Sex on vacation is so much better than at home."
Not the postcard I was expecting.
*.*
There was a dance teacher who talked of a very old dance called the Politician.
"All you have to do" she told her class "is take three steps forward, two steps backward, then side-step side-step and turn around."
*.*
Saudi Crown Prince Begins 100 Hours Of Court-Ordered Community Service For Murdering Jamal Khashoggi
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Working with cleaning crews alongside the Riyadh-Dammam Highway, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman began serving his 100 hours of court-ordered community service Thursday for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Well, I’ll admit it—I got mixed up with the wrong people and I did some bad stuff, so this is what I get,” said the crown prince, who had reportedly been picking up trash since 5 a.m. that morning after a Saudi prosecutor found him guilty of ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. “Is 100 hours of work in the sweltering heat a lot of time? Yes. Is it perhaps too much? Of course! But in Saudi Arabia, we have to show our citizens that no one should be able to get away with murdering members of the media. Not even me.”
At press time, the crown prince had reportedly left the premises after convincing his parole officer to let him serve the rest of his time stoning women and beheading prisoners.
*.*
A stealth B-2 bomber was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado.
It caused all kinds of problems when it landed near a senior center because someone cried out, "B-2!"
Another person yelled out, "Bingo!"
Then a brawl erupted.
*.*
Kristen Bell says she’s not sure about the message that “Snow White” is giving her daughters about a prince kissing a woman without their permission.
I have a feeling that a fairy tale where the princess was left in the forest in a glass coffin for eternity would have been a big hit.
Issue of the Times;
SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF, interviewed by Daisy Luther
Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.
If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.
How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?
It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.
To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.
Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.
I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.
Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.
We were living a normal life, and then suddenly we were thrown in a way of living where if you could not “negotiate” something with someone, you solve the problem by launching a rocket from an RPG through the window of his living room.
Hate stripped down the layers of humanity and suddenly it was “normal” to level an apartment building with people inside with shells from a tank or form private prisons with imprisoned civilians for slave work or sex slaves.
Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent.
Again, the thing that is important for readers is that we were a modern society one day, and then in few weeks it turned into carnage.
Do not make the mistake of saying “it cannot happen here” because I made that mistake too.
Do not underestimate power of propaganda, fear, hate, and the lowest human instincts, no matter how modern and good your society is right now and how deeply you believe that “it can not happen here”.
You’ve mentioned warlords and gangs in several of your articles. Were they responsible for the majority of the violence or was it hungry families?
Fighting of the armies through the whole period of war brings violence in terms of constant shelling from a distance from different kind of weapons.
For example a few multiple rocket launchers (VBR) could bring in 30 seconds the destruction in an area of 3-4 apartment buildings, and being there in that moment and surviving it gives you a completely new view on life.
Snipers were a constant threat and over time you simply grow a way of living that you constant scan area in front of you where your next steps gonna be. Are you gonna be visible and from where? Etc.
Most brutal violence was actually lawlessness and complete lack of order between different factions and militias, so in some periods there were militias or gangs who simply ruled the cities or part of the city where they were absolutely masters of everything in terms of deciding of taking someone’s life.
In lawlessness, you as one person could be really small and not interesting, or join some bigger group of people to be stronger, some family or militia or gang.
An example of a gang would be group of people of some 300 or 500 people who “officially” were a unit or militia and operate for some faction, but in reality they operate mostly for themselves.
That included owning part of the black market, having prison (for forced labor or ransom), attacking people and houses for resources, smuggling people from dangerous areas.
Violence from those kinds of group was the most immediate violence, the most visible in terms of SHTF talking.
If those people came on your door you could obey, fight, or negotiate, but mostly you could not not ask for help from any kind of authority, because there was no real authority.
In any society, no matter where you are living, there are a great number of people who are waiting for the SHTF to go out and do violent things. Small time criminals or simply violent persons who are not openly violent because system is there to punish them for that. It is like that.
Some gang leaders that I knew were actually completely sick people with a strange type of charisma that makes people follow them, weird situations that can happen only in a real collapse.
They are people who just waited for their time to rise.
Those kinds of people together with criminal organization that are already there in any city in the world will be the backbone of SHTF gangs.
Who were the most likely victims?
A very simple answer would be that the most likely victims were people who had interesting things without enough defense.
But it was not always that simple.
For example one of the first houses that got raided in my neighborhood, right at the beginning of collapse while there was still some kind of order, was a rich family’s home.
They had a nice house with bars on the windows, a pretty good setup for defense, and they had enough people inside so they could give pretty good resistance to the mob.
But they got raided simply because they were known that they are rich, so they were attacked with enough force to be overwhelmed.
It was not only about how much manpower you had and how well-organized defense of your home was, it was also about how juicy a target you were.
If you are faced with 150 angry people attacking your home because they are sure you have good stuff inside your chances are low, no matter how good and tough you are.
People who were alone were a pretty easy target and old people without support of family or friends.
It was not always about killing someone or violence. For example, if you were alone and without resources but you had something else valuable like some kind of skill or knowledge you could easily be “recruited” for some faction or group, not by your will of course.
What were some ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of violence? How do you recommend that people prepare themselves for the possibility of violence?
It can be done in steps, or in layers.
Do not be interesting (or attract attention) when the SHTF.
This means a lot of things, for this article I can give a few examples with shortened explanations because it is a huge topic:
• Do not look like a prepper (before or after SHTF). There is no sense in announcing that you are prepping for EMP, civil collapse, apocalypse, or whatever. With that you are risking the probability that when the SHTF, people will remember that you have interesting things in your home
• Your home should look ordinary. For example, if you are living in the city on a street where all houses look similar, there is not much sense in making your home look like a fortress. You’ll just attract attention.
• Your defense should be based on more subtle means. Some examples are having means to reinforce doors and windows quickly when you need it, or to reinforce them from inside. Make changes in your yard to funnel possible attackers where you want them to be (trees, fence, bush…). You can make your home look abandoned or already looted.
Think about what survival is!
Survival is about staying alive, it is not about being comfortable at the expense of losing your life.
I have seen many times people lose their lives simply because they were too attached to their belongings (house, car, land, goods…) so they simply did not want to leave something and run in a particular moment.
Everything can be earned and bought again except life.
Forget about statements like “I will defend it with my life” or “over my dead body” or similar because the real SHTF is usually not heroic or noble. It is hard and brutal. When you are gone you are gone and there might be nobody to take care of your family just because you have been stubborn or trusted in movies when it came to violence.
To rephrase it: Be ready to leave your home in a split second if that means you and your family will survive, no matter how many good things you have stored there.
Be mentally ready for violence
In a way, it is impossible to be ready for violence, especially widespread violence when the SHTF, but you can minimize shock when that happens with some things.
If you are not familiar with what violence is, you can try to get yourself close” to it today (in normal times). It can be done, for example, by doing some voluntary work for example in a local hospital, ER or similar… or simply by working with homeless people.
Sounds maybe strange but activities like this can get you a bit of a feeling of what it is all about, not to mention that you can learn some practical and useful skills for SHTF.
Have means and skills (physically) to defend – or to do violence
No matter how old or young you are, your gender or religion I assure you that you are capable of doing violence. It is only a matter of the situation and how far you are going to be pushed.
It is not just “some people are capable of violence.” Everybody is capable. Not everybody enjoys doing it or is willing to do it so easily.
In today (normal times) you can learn some violence skills and you should do it, again no matter if you are a woman or old or young.
You should own a weapon and know how to use it. You should practice with it, or have at least some basic knowledge about hand-to-hand combat.
The worst case scenario is to have a weapon that you try for the first time when SHTF.
Be familiar with your means for defense, let your family members know what they need to do in case of attack of your home, have plan, and go through it.
Only through practice will you minimize chances for mistakes.
Use common sense
I know lot of survivalists almost dream about how they are going to use weapons against bad guys when SHTF, and that they will be something like super heroes from movies, saving innocents and killing villains.
Truth is that in a real collapse, a lot of things are kind of blurred and you are not sure who the bad guys are. Good guys turn out to be lunatic gang members who want to bring food to their kids.
There are no super heroes when SHTF, and if some of them show up they end up dead quickly.
There is only you and your skills and mindset and what you prepared.
Use violence as a last resort because of the simple fact that by using violence you are risking of getting killed or hurt. Remember when SHTF there is maybe no doctor or hospital to take care of your wound.
It is a time when even a small cut can eventually kill you through infection and lack of proper care.
I’m a single mom with a household full of girls. In an SHTF situation, what would our best strategies be to remain safe?
Just like I have mentioned before, strategy is always same for any part of survival, and shooting from the rifle is pretty similar no matter are you man or woman.
Being single mom with household full of girls on first look make you as a ideal target in some situations, but we are talking here in prepper terms so there is no reason not to be perfectly well prepared as a single mom with girls.
But yes I admit it is not perfect situation, even if you are prepared well, some things are sure, you need to connect with other people even more.
House with couple of girls will always look like easy prey for some people.
It is like that.
Were people in the city safer than people in the country? Can you tell us more about rural living during this time?
In my case definitely no.
In the essence it always come to the resources and people.
City meant more people less resources, country (rural) meant less people more resources, and because that level of violence simply was lower. That was most important reason.
There are few more reasons why it was much better in the country.
People in the country (rural settings) were much more “connected to ground” they were more tough if you like, they grew their own food, had cattle, lived more simple life prior SHTF and when everything collapsed they had less problems getting use to it.
Yes they also did not have electricity and phones, running water or connection to other places but they adapted easier to the new life because they had more useful skills then people in the city.
Life was harder for them too than prior to the collapse, but they had means to get resources: land, woods, river…
Another thing is that people in small rural communities “in the country” were more connected to each other, people knew their neighborhood and some things were easier to organize, like community security watch, help in case of diseases and similar.
What types of weapons did people have for self-defense?
It was different political system prior the collapse where it was not so usual to own a weapon legally. And to own one illegally could mean a lot of troubles.
Right prior to SHTF, it became possible to buy different weapons on the black market but still, a majority of people did not own weapons.
When it all collapsed, it was possible to get a weapon through trade.
Because of the military doctrine here prior to the collapse, we used “East Bloc” weapons. A favorite was AK-47 in all different kind of editions, or older weapons like M-48 rifle, SKS rifle, 22 and similar.
People used what they had, so in one period you would be lucky if you had any kind of pistol and knife.
Later through the different channels weapon become more available so people had them more. A lot of that was actually junk that some warlords somehow “imported”.
Weapons 50-60 years old without proper ammunition, or not in operating condition. A lot of people simply did not have a clue how to use any kind of weapon so a lot of accidental deaths happened.
I remember people storming abandoned army barracks that was mostly looted, but they found in one building a lot of RPGs while other part of the same building was burning.
Two guys were trying to figure out a single-use RPG, and while they were messing with it clearly not knowing how that thing worked, they accidentally armed it and launched a rocket that flew through the crowd, not hurting anyone and exploding in wall 100 meters from where they stood.
They were smiling, clearly happy because they thought they figured out how that thing worked.
What weapons do you suggest to have for SHTF?
It is a never-ending discussion and a favorite prepper topic, and I must say that whole discussion is overrated.
I have used them in a real situation, and tried and tested lot of different kind of weapons and what works for me may simply not work for you.
For example, here for me good choice is AK-47 rifle, maybe for you wherever you are it is very bad choice.
Good advice is : you need to have a weapon that most people have around you because of multiple reasons: spare parts, repairing, ammunition availability, possibility that you can pick that rifle from other people and you know how to use it.
What caliber and similar is a matter of discussion again. I am talking from the point of owning a rifle.
Another thing is that you need to know how that weapon works. Luckily, most of my readers live in an area where gun laws are great comparing to region where I am.
You have much more choices when it comes to owning a weapon and practicing with it. Use that.
And do not forget that using weapon in a real life situation is not like shooting at beer bottles with your friends after a barbecue.
In real life you might be in a situation to use a weapon while you are tired, dirty, and hungry and while someone is screaming next to you.
It is going to be maybe when you are not ready to do that, maybe in pitch dark, maybe after you have been awake for 48 hours.
At least think about that.
When should you use violence?
Contrary to some popular beliefs in the prepper community, the point is to use violence only as a last solution.
The reason is as I mentioned already, the risk that you can be hurt or killed too, but also once you do violence you change your own rules, or push it more forward, and it is easy to get lost in violence.
There are consequences to that, and you are not going to be the same person ever again.
Violence is a tool, not a toy. You need to know how to use it as best as possible, but also to avoid using it when it is not necessary.
It is a good idea to set up a clear set of rules (mentally too) when you are gonna use violence and to try to stick to it.
For example you will use weapon if someone tries to break your home and attack you, and you need to be ready to do that without hesitation.
What else should we know about post-collapse violence?
Think with your head and research.
One thing that is absolutely important when it comes to understanding how violent it is going to be and what can you expect in your own case of SHTF, is to understand how much media can influence people in making their decisions about violence.
In my case, the media built up situation where people feared so much from other people that they actually hated them. They hated them so much that they actually strip them down from humanity.
In a real-life example, it works in a way that people killed other people, including kids and women, because they hated them so much because media told them.
It may look ridiculous and not possible to you, and you might again think “that can not happen here” but please trust your own resources, look for independent information, not mainstream media, in order to get the right information about what is really happening in the beginning of collapse.
Do not be pulled into “popular opinion” just because the “man from TV” (whoever he might be) told you so.
It is easier today. Because of the internet, you have much more choices for correct information than in my time. But still be careful, you might find yourself rioting together with 500 people just because you trusted some media.
Real survival is not romantic or idealistic. It is brutal, hard and unfair. Let Selco take you into that world.
Read more of Selco’s articles here: https://shtfschool.com
Quote of the Times;
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.” - Maugham
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38491/watch-ocasio-cortez-has-no-idea-what-3-branches-ryan-saavedra?fbclid=IwAR09Uxnsud7Udak1yROciAAH1qB2Jz9vuHH3z3K6bwG8Ik4QrHrH3QiY16U
Not the postcard I was expecting.
*.*
There was a dance teacher who talked of a very old dance called the Politician.
"All you have to do" she told her class "is take three steps forward, two steps backward, then side-step side-step and turn around."
*.*
Saudi Crown Prince Begins 100 Hours Of Court-Ordered Community Service For Murdering Jamal Khashoggi
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Working with cleaning crews alongside the Riyadh-Dammam Highway, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman began serving his 100 hours of court-ordered community service Thursday for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Well, I’ll admit it—I got mixed up with the wrong people and I did some bad stuff, so this is what I get,” said the crown prince, who had reportedly been picking up trash since 5 a.m. that morning after a Saudi prosecutor found him guilty of ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. “Is 100 hours of work in the sweltering heat a lot of time? Yes. Is it perhaps too much? Of course! But in Saudi Arabia, we have to show our citizens that no one should be able to get away with murdering members of the media. Not even me.”
At press time, the crown prince had reportedly left the premises after convincing his parole officer to let him serve the rest of his time stoning women and beheading prisoners.
*.*
A stealth B-2 bomber was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado.
It caused all kinds of problems when it landed near a senior center because someone cried out, "B-2!"
Another person yelled out, "Bingo!"
Then a brawl erupted.
*.*
Kristen Bell says she’s not sure about the message that “Snow White” is giving her daughters about a prince kissing a woman without their permission.
I have a feeling that a fairy tale where the princess was left in the forest in a glass coffin for eternity would have been a big hit.
Issue of the Times;
SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF, interviewed by Daisy Luther
Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.
If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.
How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?
It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.
To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.
Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.
I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.
Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.
We were living a normal life, and then suddenly we were thrown in a way of living where if you could not “negotiate” something with someone, you solve the problem by launching a rocket from an RPG through the window of his living room.
Hate stripped down the layers of humanity and suddenly it was “normal” to level an apartment building with people inside with shells from a tank or form private prisons with imprisoned civilians for slave work or sex slaves.
Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent.
Again, the thing that is important for readers is that we were a modern society one day, and then in few weeks it turned into carnage.
Do not make the mistake of saying “it cannot happen here” because I made that mistake too.
Do not underestimate power of propaganda, fear, hate, and the lowest human instincts, no matter how modern and good your society is right now and how deeply you believe that “it can not happen here”.
You’ve mentioned warlords and gangs in several of your articles. Were they responsible for the majority of the violence or was it hungry families?
Fighting of the armies through the whole period of war brings violence in terms of constant shelling from a distance from different kind of weapons.
For example a few multiple rocket launchers (VBR) could bring in 30 seconds the destruction in an area of 3-4 apartment buildings, and being there in that moment and surviving it gives you a completely new view on life.
Snipers were a constant threat and over time you simply grow a way of living that you constant scan area in front of you where your next steps gonna be. Are you gonna be visible and from where? Etc.
Most brutal violence was actually lawlessness and complete lack of order between different factions and militias, so in some periods there were militias or gangs who simply ruled the cities or part of the city where they were absolutely masters of everything in terms of deciding of taking someone’s life.
In lawlessness, you as one person could be really small and not interesting, or join some bigger group of people to be stronger, some family or militia or gang.
An example of a gang would be group of people of some 300 or 500 people who “officially” were a unit or militia and operate for some faction, but in reality they operate mostly for themselves.
That included owning part of the black market, having prison (for forced labor or ransom), attacking people and houses for resources, smuggling people from dangerous areas.
Violence from those kinds of group was the most immediate violence, the most visible in terms of SHTF talking.
If those people came on your door you could obey, fight, or negotiate, but mostly you could not not ask for help from any kind of authority, because there was no real authority.
In any society, no matter where you are living, there are a great number of people who are waiting for the SHTF to go out and do violent things. Small time criminals or simply violent persons who are not openly violent because system is there to punish them for that. It is like that.
Some gang leaders that I knew were actually completely sick people with a strange type of charisma that makes people follow them, weird situations that can happen only in a real collapse.
They are people who just waited for their time to rise.
Those kinds of people together with criminal organization that are already there in any city in the world will be the backbone of SHTF gangs.
Who were the most likely victims?
A very simple answer would be that the most likely victims were people who had interesting things without enough defense.
But it was not always that simple.
For example one of the first houses that got raided in my neighborhood, right at the beginning of collapse while there was still some kind of order, was a rich family’s home.
They had a nice house with bars on the windows, a pretty good setup for defense, and they had enough people inside so they could give pretty good resistance to the mob.
But they got raided simply because they were known that they are rich, so they were attacked with enough force to be overwhelmed.
It was not only about how much manpower you had and how well-organized defense of your home was, it was also about how juicy a target you were.
If you are faced with 150 angry people attacking your home because they are sure you have good stuff inside your chances are low, no matter how good and tough you are.
People who were alone were a pretty easy target and old people without support of family or friends.
It was not always about killing someone or violence. For example, if you were alone and without resources but you had something else valuable like some kind of skill or knowledge you could easily be “recruited” for some faction or group, not by your will of course.
What were some ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of violence? How do you recommend that people prepare themselves for the possibility of violence?
It can be done in steps, or in layers.
Do not be interesting (or attract attention) when the SHTF.
This means a lot of things, for this article I can give a few examples with shortened explanations because it is a huge topic:
• Do not look like a prepper (before or after SHTF). There is no sense in announcing that you are prepping for EMP, civil collapse, apocalypse, or whatever. With that you are risking the probability that when the SHTF, people will remember that you have interesting things in your home
• Your home should look ordinary. For example, if you are living in the city on a street where all houses look similar, there is not much sense in making your home look like a fortress. You’ll just attract attention.
• Your defense should be based on more subtle means. Some examples are having means to reinforce doors and windows quickly when you need it, or to reinforce them from inside. Make changes in your yard to funnel possible attackers where you want them to be (trees, fence, bush…). You can make your home look abandoned or already looted.
Think about what survival is!
Survival is about staying alive, it is not about being comfortable at the expense of losing your life.
I have seen many times people lose their lives simply because they were too attached to their belongings (house, car, land, goods…) so they simply did not want to leave something and run in a particular moment.
Everything can be earned and bought again except life.
Forget about statements like “I will defend it with my life” or “over my dead body” or similar because the real SHTF is usually not heroic or noble. It is hard and brutal. When you are gone you are gone and there might be nobody to take care of your family just because you have been stubborn or trusted in movies when it came to violence.
To rephrase it: Be ready to leave your home in a split second if that means you and your family will survive, no matter how many good things you have stored there.
Be mentally ready for violence
In a way, it is impossible to be ready for violence, especially widespread violence when the SHTF, but you can minimize shock when that happens with some things.
If you are not familiar with what violence is, you can try to get yourself close” to it today (in normal times). It can be done, for example, by doing some voluntary work for example in a local hospital, ER or similar… or simply by working with homeless people.
Sounds maybe strange but activities like this can get you a bit of a feeling of what it is all about, not to mention that you can learn some practical and useful skills for SHTF.
Have means and skills (physically) to defend – or to do violence
No matter how old or young you are, your gender or religion I assure you that you are capable of doing violence. It is only a matter of the situation and how far you are going to be pushed.
It is not just “some people are capable of violence.” Everybody is capable. Not everybody enjoys doing it or is willing to do it so easily.
In today (normal times) you can learn some violence skills and you should do it, again no matter if you are a woman or old or young.
You should own a weapon and know how to use it. You should practice with it, or have at least some basic knowledge about hand-to-hand combat.
The worst case scenario is to have a weapon that you try for the first time when SHTF.
Be familiar with your means for defense, let your family members know what they need to do in case of attack of your home, have plan, and go through it.
Only through practice will you minimize chances for mistakes.
Use common sense
I know lot of survivalists almost dream about how they are going to use weapons against bad guys when SHTF, and that they will be something like super heroes from movies, saving innocents and killing villains.
Truth is that in a real collapse, a lot of things are kind of blurred and you are not sure who the bad guys are. Good guys turn out to be lunatic gang members who want to bring food to their kids.
There are no super heroes when SHTF, and if some of them show up they end up dead quickly.
There is only you and your skills and mindset and what you prepared.
Use violence as a last resort because of the simple fact that by using violence you are risking of getting killed or hurt. Remember when SHTF there is maybe no doctor or hospital to take care of your wound.
It is a time when even a small cut can eventually kill you through infection and lack of proper care.
I’m a single mom with a household full of girls. In an SHTF situation, what would our best strategies be to remain safe?
Just like I have mentioned before, strategy is always same for any part of survival, and shooting from the rifle is pretty similar no matter are you man or woman.
Being single mom with household full of girls on first look make you as a ideal target in some situations, but we are talking here in prepper terms so there is no reason not to be perfectly well prepared as a single mom with girls.
But yes I admit it is not perfect situation, even if you are prepared well, some things are sure, you need to connect with other people even more.
House with couple of girls will always look like easy prey for some people.
It is like that.
Were people in the city safer than people in the country? Can you tell us more about rural living during this time?
In my case definitely no.
In the essence it always come to the resources and people.
City meant more people less resources, country (rural) meant less people more resources, and because that level of violence simply was lower. That was most important reason.
There are few more reasons why it was much better in the country.
People in the country (rural settings) were much more “connected to ground” they were more tough if you like, they grew their own food, had cattle, lived more simple life prior SHTF and when everything collapsed they had less problems getting use to it.
Yes they also did not have electricity and phones, running water or connection to other places but they adapted easier to the new life because they had more useful skills then people in the city.
Life was harder for them too than prior to the collapse, but they had means to get resources: land, woods, river…
Another thing is that people in small rural communities “in the country” were more connected to each other, people knew their neighborhood and some things were easier to organize, like community security watch, help in case of diseases and similar.
What types of weapons did people have for self-defense?
It was different political system prior the collapse where it was not so usual to own a weapon legally. And to own one illegally could mean a lot of troubles.
Right prior to SHTF, it became possible to buy different weapons on the black market but still, a majority of people did not own weapons.
When it all collapsed, it was possible to get a weapon through trade.
Because of the military doctrine here prior to the collapse, we used “East Bloc” weapons. A favorite was AK-47 in all different kind of editions, or older weapons like M-48 rifle, SKS rifle, 22 and similar.
People used what they had, so in one period you would be lucky if you had any kind of pistol and knife.
Later through the different channels weapon become more available so people had them more. A lot of that was actually junk that some warlords somehow “imported”.
Weapons 50-60 years old without proper ammunition, or not in operating condition. A lot of people simply did not have a clue how to use any kind of weapon so a lot of accidental deaths happened.
I remember people storming abandoned army barracks that was mostly looted, but they found in one building a lot of RPGs while other part of the same building was burning.
Two guys were trying to figure out a single-use RPG, and while they were messing with it clearly not knowing how that thing worked, they accidentally armed it and launched a rocket that flew through the crowd, not hurting anyone and exploding in wall 100 meters from where they stood.
They were smiling, clearly happy because they thought they figured out how that thing worked.
What weapons do you suggest to have for SHTF?
It is a never-ending discussion and a favorite prepper topic, and I must say that whole discussion is overrated.
I have used them in a real situation, and tried and tested lot of different kind of weapons and what works for me may simply not work for you.
For example, here for me good choice is AK-47 rifle, maybe for you wherever you are it is very bad choice.
Good advice is : you need to have a weapon that most people have around you because of multiple reasons: spare parts, repairing, ammunition availability, possibility that you can pick that rifle from other people and you know how to use it.
What caliber and similar is a matter of discussion again. I am talking from the point of owning a rifle.
Another thing is that you need to know how that weapon works. Luckily, most of my readers live in an area where gun laws are great comparing to region where I am.
You have much more choices when it comes to owning a weapon and practicing with it. Use that.
And do not forget that using weapon in a real life situation is not like shooting at beer bottles with your friends after a barbecue.
In real life you might be in a situation to use a weapon while you are tired, dirty, and hungry and while someone is screaming next to you.
It is going to be maybe when you are not ready to do that, maybe in pitch dark, maybe after you have been awake for 48 hours.
At least think about that.
When should you use violence?
Contrary to some popular beliefs in the prepper community, the point is to use violence only as a last solution.
The reason is as I mentioned already, the risk that you can be hurt or killed too, but also once you do violence you change your own rules, or push it more forward, and it is easy to get lost in violence.
There are consequences to that, and you are not going to be the same person ever again.
Violence is a tool, not a toy. You need to know how to use it as best as possible, but also to avoid using it when it is not necessary.
It is a good idea to set up a clear set of rules (mentally too) when you are gonna use violence and to try to stick to it.
For example you will use weapon if someone tries to break your home and attack you, and you need to be ready to do that without hesitation.
What else should we know about post-collapse violence?
Think with your head and research.
One thing that is absolutely important when it comes to understanding how violent it is going to be and what can you expect in your own case of SHTF, is to understand how much media can influence people in making their decisions about violence.
In my case, the media built up situation where people feared so much from other people that they actually hated them. They hated them so much that they actually strip them down from humanity.
In a real-life example, it works in a way that people killed other people, including kids and women, because they hated them so much because media told them.
It may look ridiculous and not possible to you, and you might again think “that can not happen here” but please trust your own resources, look for independent information, not mainstream media, in order to get the right information about what is really happening in the beginning of collapse.
Do not be pulled into “popular opinion” just because the “man from TV” (whoever he might be) told you so.
It is easier today. Because of the internet, you have much more choices for correct information than in my time. But still be careful, you might find yourself rioting together with 500 people just because you trusted some media.
Real survival is not romantic or idealistic. It is brutal, hard and unfair. Let Selco take you into that world.
Read more of Selco’s articles here: https://shtfschool.com
Quote of the Times;
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.” - Maugham
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38491/watch-ocasio-cortez-has-no-idea-what-3-branches-ryan-saavedra?fbclid=IwAR09Uxnsud7Udak1yROciAAH1qB2Jz9vuHH3z3K6bwG8Ik4QrHrH3QiY16U
Electric?
Q: What did one German say to the other German?
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@gmail.com
to complement The Field!
Or
If you like what you see,
Witness the Archives;
www.SimpleDisorder.com
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
AOD 318
}; - >
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@gmail.com
to complement The Field!
Or
If you like what you see,
Witness the Archives;
www.SimpleDisorder.com
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
AOD 318
}; - >
Several animals were savagely beaten in the making of this page, including but not limited to; kittens, rabbits, zebu, skunks, puppies, and platypus. Also several monkeys where force fed crack to improve their typing skills.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.
And someone shot a duck.
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.