Rumblings Of A Distant Thunder...

So after the all the build-up, President Trump's going to have his cake and eat it too:
Apparently he'll sign the Porculus Omnibus bill, flaws and all, and turn around and declare an emergency, and tap Pentagon spending for national security to build the Great Big Beautiful Wall, gambling that at the end of the day, the courts rule in his favor, and he builds the wall.

And no, this isn't "Unprecedeted!", for the @$$holes at ABCNNBCBS.

h/t Daily Timewaster

Pelosi and Schumer can't very well repudiate their own bill, nor can anyone in Congress whine, after two different congresses had multiple chances to do the right thing, that they weren't consulted, and  serially couldn't get things done on both the wall and immigration reform, and never failed to fail.

The odds are good Trump's case will prevail in court, and he'll build the wall. Whether that'll be enough, and soon enough, to save him in 2020 is an open question.

If he doesn't start shoveling illegals back over it, the template for election-stealing has already been field-tested, and a wall alone will be too little too late. The poison pills in the border security bill may still lose enough of his base to flip an election outright, or the wall may make enough short-term difference to flip the Congress again, and get him one more amenable than Quisling Ryan's bunch of do-nothing GOP Chamber of Commerce illegal alien lovers did to turn things around for awhile.

Time will tell.

If he loses in court, or fails to win re-election, or it's all been for nothing (anyone of which is an open question going forward), this was the high-water mark of a potential lame duck presidency.

The number of people who've gone belly-up underestimating this president since 2015 is legion, so I wouldn't bet against him, but I'd cover my bets.

The Democrats are beyond argument the anti-white and anti-America party, (like there was ever any doubt), and there's no limit to their madness, as recent days have demonstrated times beyond counting.
The GOP half of the Uniparty is mainly just for the same thing, but slower, with less gusto and a wee bit more subtlety.

We're not Eurostan - yet - but that's the destination intent, and things here aren't going to fizzle, they're going to fester, short of miracles.
I would not base any planning on the expectation of miracles.

Either way, win or lose in 2020, your respite is going to end. You have either until 1/21/2021, or 1/21/2025, to have your situation well enough in hand for what's still coming. The Under on that is just over 700 days. Make. Them. Count.

At any point, international pandemic, global recession, or black swan events may create unlooked for chaos. And absent a sea change turn-around, the demographic tsunami headed your way as the Turd World continues to stream here and ruin two hundred years of the greatest standard of liberty and economic opportunity on earth is still headed for you, whether it's moving in first gear, or fifth.

You should be getting your What-If plans in order, getting yourself in shape, physically and mentally to cope with chaos, and ready to act, not talk, if life hands you a triple-decker sh*tburger. Like it probably will. A small local disaster is every bit the problem for some people a global disaster is for everyone. Being prepared and resilient is never wasted effort.

The Eighties and Nineties are over: things are not going to stay nifty for anyone, for long.
And what comes next may topple a civilization, or just push it into a long, slow descent into a profound decline, the likes of which, if you knew them ahead, would have you frantically doing everything you could to avert the consequences on a personal level.

Avoid crowds.
Be Somewhere Else when bad things happen.
Save For Rainy Days.
Live Within Your Means.
Strong People Are Harder To Kill, And Generally More Useful.
No One Else Will Be Coming To Save You.

Feb 2019 Ebola Update: Cheery Thoughts

Six months in, the second-worst Ebola outbreak in history trails only the 2014 West African Pandemic Games Ebola world record (Level 15-17, depending on whose numbers you believe.)
You are officially at a Level 10 on the 34-Step Pandemic Panic-Meter©.
FYI, every ten steps or so takes the number of cases up by 10³.
I.e., Level 1 is 1 case (Patient Zero).
Level 10 is 1,000 cases (Now, 6 months into the outbreak).
Level 20 is 1,000,000 cases (At current course and speed, perhaps as soon as this coming August, six months from now. And that's with a near-flawless experimental vaccine in use. Alternatively, maybe only 8,000 cases in August; still bad, but not that much worse than now.)
{And yes, the Black Death and smallpox are still the all-time record holders. So far.}
Level 30 is 1,000,000,000.
Level 34 is everyone. (Minus the infectious but survived-the-initial-infection 20%).

Good News: The vaccinations have made this a slow ramp-up to 1000 cases.
Bad News: No slowing in sight, and at a certain point, things begin instead to accelerate, like rolling a boulder down a steep hill.

FWIW, West Africa topped out somewhere around 90,000 cases and 30K-40K deaths (using the conservative estimate that reported numbers were "only" 1/3 of reality numbers. And Word To Your Mother, with actual mortality numbers, if they had 90K cases - and they did - they had >70K deaths. Even with the 30K number of cases, deaths would have to be around 24K. So you can tell they were lying, because their lips were moving.)

And they admitted two months ago this outbreak would go on at least another six months. Things now are worse than two months ago there, not better. Ponder that before you think this will "burn itself out" ever, let alone anywhere south of 1,000,000 cases.

And yes, the official tally right now is "only" 959, not an actual 1000, but due to the fact that they haven't been able to vaccinate, trace contacts, or even operate health teams in the highest-affected areas for days and weeks at a stretch, the reality is that they probably blew past 1000 cases some weeks ago. I'm going with calling that one now, instead of waiting for next week's WHO report.

And once again, the fatality rate is right on at 80%. Not the happy-gas 60%.
(Go to Wikitardia's page: Take the deaths today. Divide that number by the confirmed  Ebola cases 21 days earlier. Nota bene that result is consistently within a point of 80%, going back to the first weeks of the outbreaks. Math: Still a thing, Wikipedia.)

And in case you weren't aware, Ebola "care" in DRC, and all of Africa, at Ebola Treatment Centers, is always "palliative", i.e. "make their symptoms and inevitable death less uncomfortable", for the 80% who'll expire.The "lucky" 20% who survive will now carry the disease effectively for life (every time they check survivors, they find live virus reservoirs) and can look forward to not only re-infecting friends and family (which may be one hitherto unsuspected source of new outbreaks going back to the 1970s), but eventually going blind, and multiple other lifelong consequences. Good times. Oh, and that's exactly the future for the survivors treated here in the US in 2014-2015. Their lives are functionally over, and they're dead men/women walking.

Bonus point for this outbreak:

 "the World Health Organization indicated that half of confirmed cases were not showing any fever symptom, thus making diagnosis more difficult.^"

How do they screen out potential Ebola infectees at the airports and border crossings (when they bother to try)?
Fever.

Pleasant dreams.

TL;DR: You don't have enough sand bags, concertina wire, and ammunition for what's coming once it escapes the lab. Again.

Video reference: World War Z.

Forecast: When this becomes as blisteringly obvious to TPTB as it is now, here, any actual and factual reporting on it will be squelched. Just like in 2014.
Watch and see if I'm right. I'd love not to be.

Life Lesson: For You Who Live Sheltered Lives

For the Perpetually Offended:
This is not a black man, nor a Caucasian in "black face".
It's a man with "homeless tan", i.e. what happens when lack of primary hygiene
 tattoos 60 years of dirt into your skin. This is also what the typical homeless
person of +/- 35 y.o. looks like. Drugs, alcohol, and crazy are not your friends.

Riffing off Mosby's recent repost of his 2014 thoughts on field sanitation and hygiene, I offer the following experience, far too recent.

I have elsewhere documented a previous encounter with a member of the Street Diversity.
Suffice it so, I recently had occasion to deal with several more, including Mr. Brown. (Go read the linked story, above. Not right before nor after a meal.) Mr. Brown was worse than Mrs. Brown. Same basic premise (living in car for months to years). Twenty pounds of actual sh*t in his shorts. Except with septic shock, and a literal coral reef of fungus on both legs, inches thick, which didn't spontaneously generate over days nor even weeks. He was outted when the vehicle he was driving struck a parked car in a lot, and PD found him.

Another, probably a cousin of the Brown family tree, was living similarly, with holes in his skin such that I could do anatomy lessons from the exposed musculature visible through his windows, a pair of sodden feet (due to recent rains) inside boots that were a classroom lecture and lab on immersion foot, and a probable case of necrotizing fasciitis, i.e. flesh-eating bacteria.

Both of them with extra riders, i.e. parasitic infestations.

Those guys usually die within a day or two, BTW. We may save one or both, but only just barely.

Who cares, you're not doing my job, right?

Okay, well-played. Except not so much.

And suppose Mr. Brown had hit your car?
Or what if Cousin Brown washed up on your doorstep, or at the end of your lane, in anything from just bad luck to major disaster, let alone SHTF?

If these sorts of Zombie Hordes walk around every day in first-world conditions now (and I'm here to assure you that they do), what are the odds you run across them come a local disaster, let alone civil disruption, or full-on Sportiness when bad things happen to everyone?

My SWAG: about 100%.

What's your plan to deal with that?
(For the smart @$$/dumb @$$ who kneejerk replies "Rule 308", fair enough and all; so, waddarya gonna do with the leftovers afterwards?)

How prepared are you to deal with the unhygienic unwashed stinking pestilential shambling masses anywhere between city hall and the front porch, dead or alive?

Sanitary disposal and Level-A Hazmat decon better be on your radar, long before it's on your front porch.

And you'd better be pretty up-to-date on your vaccinations, as well as being able to deal with every one of 100 medieval pestilential plagues after anything as simple as bad weather.
And game it for when you cannot call 911, and have the county coroner's van show up to dispose of the detritus that was deposited nearby.

No one is coming to save you.

Now see if you can figure why I think being familiar with Ebola, and the field-expedient protection for it, might be a bit more germane than some of the witless wonders think it is.

There's a typhus outbreak, right effing now, in Los Angeles' City Hall. Today.
From sewer rats, who gain access to the buildings via thoughtfully constructed rain gutters that provide a highway from curb rain gutters all the way to the roof, and then into the building through ventilation ducting and such.

What's your contingency plan for typhoid, dysentery, plague, and dozens of other civilization-long killers of man, going back to the deep B.C. era.?

PTA, baby:

Prevention
Treatment
Abatement

Vector control, pest eradication, and public health are suddenly on your plate too, as lord of your own domain, in any sort of disruption, large or small, short-term or generational.
Washing your hands is good, but there's more than that to sanitation.

Fail to plan: Plan to fail.

Fail = slow, lingering death for you and yours, shriveled, crapping your guts out, amidst an uncaring universe.

You will see this material again.
Next time, the pop quiz may be with your life and your tribes' as the ante.

Choose wisely.

Intelligence - Emergency Planning: BESTMAPS

Sam Culper at Forward Observer has launched FOTV.
The first video is under 10 minutes of introduction to an acronym tool for what you should be looking at to understand your own area, for any sort of contingency planning, from mild to wild.

Go. Watch. Learn.

Give 'em a thumbs up, or a subscribe, and if you need it, tag along for future installments.
You're getting pearls here, for free, minus the time and the cost of streaming electrons.

Leaving fruit like this unharvested is like leaving money on the table in Vegas: simply not done.

Hard At Work

 

Local, Local, Local.

Here's A Better SOTU

h/t Daily Timewaster

A picture worth 1000 words, and impossible to rebut.

All you NeverTrumpers out there, give us a holler when you get tired of winning.

Saturday VLOG List

I have a wall of great movies, some classic TV, and no connection to broadcast cable nor TV, for going on 20 years now, nor any intention of changing that. I miss broadcast entertainment like I miss going for a walk amidst the radioactive wastelands around Chernobyl.

I've lost nothing but endless inane commercials, and increasingly mediocre programming, plus movies I already own, except cut to ribbons into maddeningly short ADHD segments.

And I don't pay $50-100/month to companies that hate me, my principles, my beliefs, and my entire way of life, and spend the profits from their horrible service to browbeat me every chance they get.

Instead, I cherry pick a random assortment of regular YouTube channels, for programming that is entirely satisfying, relatively commercial-free, or nearly so, and which I can watch as and when I feel like it, pause and restart, or binge watch for hours of internet wormholing.

If you are in any way inclined to any of that, I offer the following gem-worthy finds, for your entertainment pleasure.

This ranking is deliberate, and in my personal order of entertainment value:

1) my little homestead

A family of six (and a new in-law since last summer) building their earthbag empire somewhere in Paradise Valley AZ. Find their earliest forays, and start there. Or watch the consolidated hour-plus marathons of an entire project stitched together. They post weekly updates most Fridays at 6PM PST, and their content goes back 10 years. If there were YouTube Emmys, they should win one annually.

2) Life Uncontained

A couple who sold out of their FL home, moved to the grandparents' ranch somewhere in east-central TX, and are building their dream home, one bite at a time, for just about a year. They expected 2000 subscribers to their adventure. They're now at about 100,000. There's a reason for that.

3) My Self Reliance

Ontario, Canada building contractor Shawn James has been vlogging on breathtaking Canadian travels for three years, and working on his cabin from scratch in the wilds of the Great White North for going on two, since March of 2017. He does it laconically, and then with a what-did-we-learn-today homily at the end. And with food. You will gain weight watching his series. If you can't sit through episodes of This Old House and New Yankee Workshop, and then transition into watching this guy craft a log cabin on dirt from scratch using all hand tools, I don't want to know you.

4) Living Big In A Tiny House

Bryce Langston is a Kiwi travelling the world finding people making small homes fantastic, and documenting it better than the dreck on pay cable. Whether you're thinking of downsizing your life, just starting out, curious for ideas that work in bigger spaces too, or just killing 10-15 minutes at a time, there isn't a single video going back 5 years he's posted that isn't worth the time to watch it. Two personal favorites: Caboose House bed & breakfast cottage in Portland, and the farmer's NZ Hobbit-style Eco Cave house. When I'm building Camp Snoopy (starting this fall, I hope) see if I don't steal some of both ideas before I die.

I visit several prepper channels, most well-known to folks, but no one preps 24/7/365/forever, self-evidently, so their content is spottier.

But sooner or later, everyone builds a house. Or wishes they could.
Man is a house-building animal.
These channels scratch that itch until you can get to it yourself, give you ideas, and something to watch on the days you're too beat to work at it yourself.
We all need some down time.

These are unhesitatingly recommended for your leisure moments, in whatever chunks of time you might devote to them.

Democrat Show And Tell : This Is Who We Are

CTH: You're Doing It Wrong

Mike at Cold Fury posted excerpts of some codswallop from Conservative Treehouse today:

Republican Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell announces he is “especially proud” of passage for his amendments requiring the U.S. military to continue operations in Afghanistan and Syria:

Which I took at face value, nearly ruining a perfectly good keyboard with the beverage I was consuming:

Srsly?

“The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and the Navy of the United States…” – U.S. Constitution, Art II, Sec. 2 

It’s prima facie an unconstitutional amendment, and wouldn’t pass the smell test in the first 5 seconds in federal court. The judge would throw it out before counsel even took their seats. 

As a moot law, it’s completely unenforceable, and Trump could tell the entire Congress to f**k themselves and bring every troop home tomorrow, and there’s jack and squat that Bitch McConjob and Queen Alzheimers can do about it except piss their Depends. 

That’s why the Constitution cleverly didn’t make Congress the executive branch. 

The military will leave Syria and/or A-stan the minute the CG says “GTFO!”, and anyone from private to CJCS who half-steps will have a long time in military correctional custody to rethink insubordination, sedition, and treason. 

Congress’ sole say in military affairs is writing the laws under which they operate, and funding them (or not). That’s it. They can starve a war, but they have no more say over where and whether the military deploys than they have over when the tide comes in.
If POTUS decides they’ll all be deployed to Alaska tomorrow, they’ll be packing long underwear and Mickey Mouse boots by sunset. 

If the idiot who wrote this and the layers of editors at Conservative Treehouse are too stupid to figure all this out without being told, they’re not tall enough for the internet.
I promise you President Trump, the entire White House executive staff, and the entire DoD down to a recruit just stepping into the yellow footprints tonight knows it without anyone telling them. 

I missed the SOTU because of work, but I’m pretty sure neither Bitch McConjob nor any other swinging Richard sh*tweasel in the Congress was granted emergency authority to suspend the US Constitution while I was sleeping. 

This is either fakenews for idiots who flunked civics, or what happens when certain websites whose name rhymes with “Funservative Peehouse” let window-licking retards write their content. Take your pick.

Then I dug deeper. It seems Bitch has passed no such "requirement".
So the correct answer is both "A" and "B".

Wait, color me shocked:
The Amendment “requires” no such thing, and the @$$tard monkey who wrote the article overstepped reality by about a country mile, conflating “reaffirming the importance” into “requiring the U.S. military to continue operations”. 

That’s like turning someone hearing “Nice job!” and turning it into “made me CEO of his company”.  

You’ve been had by a jackass, Mike.
If that’s the best CTH can do, they’re farking retards.
They’re obviously not a reliable source.

If anyone has CTH on speed dial, tell them to change their underpants, and check their basement, because clearly their batshit crazy retarded cousin has chewed through the straps, made his way to the keyboard, and gotten hold of the password to post content on their site.

I'm second to no one in my dislike of Bitch McC, but if CTH can't get basic facts straight, maybe poker's not your game, Ike.

And if you're going to rival ABCNNBCBS for "Worst FakeNews Story Of The Week", take "Conservative" out of the name, and change the website address to HuffPo or something.
Or get a job with Alex Jones.

I feel sorry for Mike for repeating this twaddle, but CTH is the one with merde all over their face.

Nice going, buttheads.

From The Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare...

A blast from the past, because some things never go out of style.

The 1st Sergeant reminds you that you'll see this material on the final exam.

And the S-2 informs us that at last look, the 9th Marquess of Queensbury is still dead.
Fight dirty.

My Thoughts On Loading Into Box Cars...