GMTA

You saw the reference pdfs I posted earlier today.

So, over on Forward Observer, Sam Culper linked to a solid TM from the 1950s on Civil Defense, as a tool for doing Urban (or Area) Assessments. Worth the download as well, esp. given that you won't find many 65-year-old civil defense resources still floating around IRL.

And then Brushbeater gives you a free and easy 5-minute hip pocket lesson than anyone could follow, on using brevity codes for communicating information via radio with a respectable amount of security. (Or wire, written message, or anything else you'd care to try.)

You have an embarrassment of riches out there, and it borders on the criminal to squander it.

Basic References -

 

 

T-1, Hour Zero.
Happy Monday. Welcome to the Knowledge Issue Point.
 
I don't care if you can stand at the position of attention, walk in a straight line, shine your boots, or salute. (It's nice, in some settings, moderately helpful with gaggles of dazed newbs for getting them from Point A to Point B without getting run over by traffic, and it does teach maggots discipline and attention to detail, but intrinsically, it's window dressing. If you can't pay attention without someone screaming in your ear, wear clean clothes, feed yourself, and wash your nasty @$$ without someone making you do it, nothing I write here will help you. Ever.)

Neither do I, at this moment, care to impart one single whit of martial history, customs of the service, military ranks, or other arcana. Nor cover a host of PC SJW happy horseshit we currently drop around our current services' recruits' necks, like a boat anchor to a drowning man.

Because the best discipline, the kind that matters, is self-discipline.

If you can master that, grab a bucket, or a thumb drive, proceed to the Issue Point, and draw your Knowledge ration for the next phase of training.

Books are our friends. I know this because someone told me that when I was about three years old, and it's stuck like glue to me to good effect ever since. The books below will get you through tough times, and may very well save your life, and not by stopping a bullet when you carry one of them in your shirt pocket. Until you manage to move The Knowledge below from your computer to your brain housing group, and then become able to muster it to your feet and fingertips like a frickin' Jedi master, it's just random electrons.

It's up to you to make it transition from thumb drive to brains to fingers.

These will not teach you everything (though it may feel like it sometimes), and in many cases they'll give you tons more than you need to know, including about a lot of stuff you don't need to know, strictly speaking.
But they contain most of what you do need, and give you room to grow, should you choose (or be forced to by necessity), beyond the bare basics.

Additional references, from a variety of sources, will follow as necessary, but this basic ration contains 99% of everything to be covered in the notional two-week period I outlined yesterday, and in fact contains about the same percentage (and much more beyond that) of what every recruit gets in the Army or Marine Corps in several weeks to months of Basic training.

People who get to some level of Jedi mastery of it are what the military calls sergeants, chief petty officers, and officers, which is not anything to ever be ashamed of.

Using these below, I'll point to specific chapters, sections, pages, etc. as I break it down into bite-sized chunks.
All of these links are active as of today, and since they only cost electrons, you'd be a fool not to download them, and put them on flash drives, at a minimum. Some/most of them can be purchased in dead-tree format from the GPO, many have been bootlegged as-is and sold by other companies over the counter at brick-and-mortar bookstores, and on Amazon, and you can also take your flash drive stick to Fed-Ex/Kinko's to burn your own copies, and it's completely legal. Hell, you paid for this stuff with your taxes.
But for one example, the current survival manual below is over 600 pages. That's $24 or more at the copy center, by itself. (But if I could take just one book into the wilderness with me in a gallon-sized ziplok baggie...)
If you find current copies of any of these at gun shows and swap meets, and for a reasonable price, I'd grab them.
Older versions, anything from about 1980 onwards, are generally worth the trouble as well.

But with this link list, you can get your hands on them for mouseclicks, plus the bandwidth and time.

And you should.

Someone forward-thinking might want to put the lot of them on flash drives, to have them handy to hand out to like-minded individuals, if they thought they might need others to have them in hand on some future day.

And yet again, getting the book, or even memorizing it, won't make you an expert. You need real-world application. But this is where you get the knowledge to apply in the first place.



FM 21-20 Physical Fitness Training (1998)

You can also use the following for the most current manual, but the download was horrendously slow:
FM 7-22 Army Physical Readiness Training (October 2012)

FM 21-18 Foot Marches (April 2017)

FM 4-25.11 First Aid (December 2002)

Tactical Combat Casualty Care (December 2017)

DD Form 1380 - TCCC casualty card (June 2014)

FM 23-9 Rifle Marksmanship M-16A1/2/3/4/M4 (April 2003)
MCRP 3-01A USMC Rifle Marksmanship (October 2012) - thanks Badger!

MCRP 8-10.3 Pistol Marksmanship M9 (January 2016)

FM 3-25.26 Map Reading and Land Navigation (January 2005)

FM 21-75 Soldier Combat Skills (January 2008)

FM 21-76 Survival (May 2002)

Soldier's Manual of Common Tasks Level 1 (June 2009)
Every single task for every soldier Army-wide, broken down to the individual steps.

FM 24-19 Radio Operators Handbook (May 1991)

FM 7-8 Infantry Platoon and Squad (April 2016)

Two additional recommendations that are always worth the getting are
1) The Guidebook For Marines, which is privately published, not available anywhere as a pdf, and distills yards of Army field manuals down to the quick-and-dirty essentials.

2) TC 3-21.76 Ranger Handbook (April 2017) which, being an official DA pub, is available at the link as a free pdf, and does a great distillation of things for the Army's best infantry experts.




Note that recently the Army, in its institutional wisdom, elected to change the field manual (FM) numbering system that had sufficed from about 1920-2010 or so, just to make things more complicated. I've used the older version for most of the above, but as the references are all recent, most if not all of them have the current numbering system on the first page. I also provided dates, because that's how they change editions.

For instance, I have multiple copies of FM 5-15, Field Fortification, dating from roughly 1920, 1940, 1955, 1968, and 1980. Why? Because, for instance, the 1920 edition was chock full of detailed drawings on how to construct a chemical-war-proof subterranean field battalion HQ and hospital capable of sustaining prolonged shelling from anything up to the size shell of German railroad artillery, using nothing more complex than sandbags and timbers up to 8"x8". Like they built along 400 miles of WWI trenches.

But after nuclear weapons became a thing, and trench warfare went away, that wasn't seen as quite as important, so it's not in the 1968 or 1980 editions.

So what? Well, imagine you're in Bosnia next year, and the Serbs don't have nukes, but they damned sure might want to shell the shit out of your town or village all day long with conventional artillery, and suddenly, those 90-year-old underground casualty station/field hospital drawings might come in pretty damned handy.

By the same token, you aren't likely to ever need to field-strip an M2 Browning MG, and you aren't likely to use a grenade launcher or Claymore mine. But you damned sure may be faced by someone who has them, and it would be a good idea to be able to recognize them, and know how far they're effective, and how much of what building material you'd need to build something of in order to be safe from the effects of one. That's the kind of extra info in many of the above references on which it would be a good idea to have a nodding familiarity, at some point.

Real-life cases in point: The Mexican military deploys the G3 rifle; the near world-standard FN MAG GPMG (that's the M240 to us), and the same M2 .50 BMG we've used since WWI. So, when one of them falls into your hands someday, or one is mounted atop an HMMWV or cartel "technical" at the border (by which I mean anywhere between, say, two miles south of the dotted line of the actual border all the way north to US I-8, which could actually be 50-100 miles north of the dotted line), it's a little late to wonder whether you're in range, what you need to hide behind to be safe from it/them, or how to utilize (or disable) one that...somehow...comes into your possession, and crack the book open and freshen up on the details on the spot. (Ask me how I know this.)

Any knowledge is better than no knowledge, but there will always be another thing to learn.
And what's in your library may someday be all the reference collection you're ever going to have, for either short- or long-term.

Plan. Ahead.

Course Syllabus

Having been through three different organizational versions of military training, and a number of later schools for same, if I needed to get the barest basics across to someone in a hurry, I 'd do it thusly:

Two full, seven-day weeks of basic training.

I would assume a 12-hour training day, notionally from about 6A-6P.
I'd expect 2 hours for morning PT, every day.
I'd spend the other 10 or so hours for all other training.

Two days of solid first aid. Call it twenty hours.
Five days of marksmanship.
Mornings for the rifle for five days, afternoons for pistol for four, and an afternoon to cover shotgun basics.
That's Week One.
Then four full days of fieldcraft, taught in the field, followed by three full days of survival training.
That's Week Two.

Would you know everything after just two weeks?
Hell, no.
But you'd have the basic building blocks to function effectively.
I could get those fundamentals across in that time frame, and more than a few people
like some over there ----->
have been making a living doing that, and more, for some good time.

And you'd need those basics, because you'd have to continue on from there, on your own, or in a local neighborhood/tribe protection group. Which works for disaster relief, or anything sportier, god forbid you should ever need either one. (But sooner or later, you likely will.)

Then I assumed a follow-up schedule of one (and a half) weekends per month, for a year, plus two weeks' summer field training, almost exactly like the Notional Guard (I kid, guys) does it since time out of mind. Where and when people who'd actually Been There, and Done That, would help you along to gaining basic competency in a lot of useful things.
Because skills training is a system, and an ongoing process, not a one-time pill for life.

That gets you just about eight solid weeks of training within a year's time, minus a lot of the chickenshit and PC-b.s., (and none of the hurry-up-and-wait it's famous for) the actual military has to endure, which is just about the same way they do basic training in most of the services.

You'd be getting a lot of hands-on after the initial two weeks, with most of the second day of each monthly training, and all the summer period, spent in the field for the entire day, doing the basics.

So what?
I'm giving you the outline, because you're going to have to teach yourself, at least the generalities, unless and until you go visit someone (again, list of same on the right column at the top of the blog) for some serious hands-on time, including critique.
And because you may be the trainer for someone else, at some point.

If you don't know or learn this stuff, it's only going to come back and bite you, not me.

And anyone with the time and inclination can bootstrap their way through a lot of the stuff faster, or even non-stop, because tomorrow, I'll post links to pdfs that detail the entire subject matter, and the basic skills, broken down in detail, all paid for with your tax dollars, and written at a sixth-grade level of understanding, so anyone who wants to can grasp it.

Avengers: Infinity War

Avengers: Infinity War landed on movie screens this weekend. Guess my response.

Spoiler Alert:





















No, really, I'm not kidding. Spoilers.























Marvel, which stumbled (though making out financially like bandits) with Black Panther, marking the end of unbroken successes since the Avengers' prequels started over a decade and change ago, is now fully in the grip of the Disney @$$holes who killed the Star Wars franchise with the last (wait, two...no, three) utterly franchise-killing atrocious movies.

This Avengers' outing, in a script that must have been vetted by Paul Ehrlich himself, is the World Series where a bomb goes off in the eighth inning of Game One, and wipes out half the favored team.
Good luck selling tickets for the next game.
It's the Rocky sequel where Sylvester Stallone gets into the ring, gets a head shot, and dies of a brain aneurysm in the second round, kicking and twitching on the canvas, right in the middle of the movie.

If Mel Gibson had done Braveheart like this, he would have opened with the final scene, then just shown Longshanks raping the Scots for two hours, like Marvel did to the audience in this two-and-half-hour set-up to getting cornholed by Marvel like Tim Roth did to Jessica Lange in Rob Roy (which was R-rated for a reason):

Audiences haven't been butt-f**ked this hard just to blatantly milk a sequel cash cow till it bleeds since the ending of The Empire Strikes Back.

Actually, this is worse than that.

Punish the sonsofbitches who foisted this horseshit on an audience, and
STAY HOME.

Some of you, like the yuuuuuuuuuuuuuge audiences for this thing this weekend, won't listen to that. Seeing this evil craptastic sequel-bait p.o.s. for yourself will be its own reward, and its own punishment.

What do I mean?
The Avengers lose damned near every fight in the movie.
Then, they lose at the end.

Half of them are wiped out, dead.

The list of those who get whacked in this flick is prodigious.
Loki.
Everybody fleeing Asgaard.
Gamora.
Vision.
Dr. Strange.
Groot.
Star Lord.
Mantis.
Drax.
Spiderman.
Bucky Barnes.
Red Witch.
Falcon.
T'Challa.
Black Panther.
Nick Fury.
Agent Hill.

All deader than canned tuna.

Oh, and half the population of the universe.

Sam Jackson's absolute last line in the whole movie, "Motherfu..." summed up audience response pretty perfectly.

Oh, and Hulk has projectile dysfunction after getting his ass beat in the opening scene, and never gets it together for the rest of the movie. Only with the help of a Tony Stark workaround does he finally manage to pull off a half-assed Pedro Serrano "F**k you, Jobu, I do it myself!" lame semi-comeback, before they all choke hard, and get soundly thrashed by the villain in the ultimate battle.

Fury and Hill eat it in the lone easter egg, at the very last second after the credits.
With some cryptic pager logo as the only tease as to how they'll pull some recockulous deus ex machina solution out of their asses in the next movie or three.

(Too late, you've already pulled me out of the movie, and the entire franchise, jackholes.)

Or else, they're going to save one helluva lot on payroll, after killing off half the talent list forever.

The last time we saw an ending this shitty for one side, the loser was Walter Mondale.

The packed midnight show on the second night of the weekend was phenomenal, considering the thing was playing on 15 of 25 screens, sold out through 11PM shows when I bought tickets for it at 8PM, and the parking lot was jam packed like I haven't seen for a movie since May of 1977, for some George Lucas sci-fi flick about some lost robots on a desert planet.

That same audience sat in stunned silence to the entire end of the credits, in an atmosphere best described as funereal.
The last time I saw an audience this thoroughly depressed at the end was the fans rooting for the Russian hockey team at the 1980 Olympics. Or maybe for the Bobby Kennedy victory party in 1968 at the Ambassador Hotel, I can't say which.

After this execreble offering, Disney shares should plummet, and I hope movie-goers with torches and pitchforks storm the studio gates Monday, and demand heads. Tar-and-feathering, at a minimum. (And I'm talking hot tar on bare skin, none of that room-temperature sticky roof patch b.s.)

This sort of betrayal was utter bullshit, and I hope their Marvel sequels all do as well as The Lone Ranger from here on out.
As it is, they'll make metric buttloads of cash this weekend, but I can hope against hope word-of-mouth about this enormous dung-ball kills it off in a couple of weeks.
They thoroughly deserve that, until they apologize for this shitastic stunt.

From now on, they could put strippers and live executions in the opening credits, and the whole franchise is still dead to me.


You've been warned.

And after the trailers, I was looking forward to Ant-Man and The Wasp.
The only way I'm seeing it now is when they send me a free copy in the mail, by way of apologizing for this weekend's monstrous fuck-up.

Like that'll ever happen.
Adios, Marvel.
It was fun while it lasted.

My rating:
Flush twice, this is a monster load, and will overwhelm a low-flush toilet.

Ground Rules

"We are the Pilgrims, Master. We shall go always a little further:
it may be beyond the last blue mountain barred with snow,
across that angry or that glimmering sea..."

For those who don't know, the image above is at Stirling Lines, at the SAS regimental barracks in Hereford. Those who die in battle with that regiment have their names inscribed upon the base; those who manage to avoid that honor have "beaten the clock".

If that's a something they can aspire to do, so should you. So pull up a chair.

Before beginning, there's some things to cover.

1. I don't know everything.
2. Neither do you.
3. Neither does the internet.

What I'm passing on isn't original, from me, or anything like. It's written down, and been handed down. Some of it dates back before you or I were born. Some of it dates back to before the U.S. of A. was born. Some of it dates back to Sun Tzu, Caesar's legions, Moses and Joshua, or for all we know, pre-history hominids doing hand-to-hand combat at the monolith in 2001. Whether it was penned yesterday, or 6000 years ago, I'll try to make it as up-to-date as possible, but you should also bear in mind that lessons that last 6000 years probably do so for good reason.
 
You may have heard something the way I did, or slightly different. My original military training was generic for both the Army in the early-to-late 1980s, and the Marines at the same time. (Which, being the Marines, probably means the same way they've taught it from 1775-present, on general principle. I'm pretty sure they still have cartons of Revolutionary War bayonets and Spanish-American War mess kits in boxes at Albany GA and Barstow CA, just in case the stuff might come in handy again someday. I was carrying an M-16A1, eating C-rats, and wearing an issue flak vest, all of absolute certain 'Nam-era vintage, well into the 1980s. Before they issued me a howitzer that was brand new before WWII. Yes, really.)

I had to validate the lessons as a civilian much later in life for five-plus years doing armed border security on the Mexican border. You've probably seen videos I shot or helped to shoot. It's not all military information, though most of it can be found there, as well as other places. The medical information is everything I can glean and distill from over 25 years of doing everything from basic first-aider, to EMT, to RN, in a riot, an earthquake, hundreds of everyday events from World Cup to Rose Parade/Bowl, 100 feature films and twice that number of TV shows, and two decades in over a dozen ERs, including the busiest one on the planet. The fieldcraft and survival information has taken me from 12K' peaks in the Yosemite to the Mojave and Sonoran deserts, on and through Pacific Islands both jungle and desert, through the hills and woods of Kentucky, Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia, to brief visits to jungles in Honduras, and along the Korean DMZ from hot-as-hell to cold-as-hell.

They may do things different at OSUTs, MCRD, Ranger/SF/BUD/S, the Royal Army or Marines, now, and/or in the other forces of ours and 25 other nation's militaries, let alone in civilian life, than exactly what I pass along here. Mostly not, and I stay fairly current.

So just to be clear:
I don't give a shit.

It won't hurt my feelings, it doesn't threaten my dignity, amend what I know, or cancel any of it out.
I'll pass on what I know works, and explain why it works, if necessary. I'll give you hard-copy references whenever I can. Look them up, try things out, and see for yourself if necessary.
(If you don't check things out for yourself, you're quite possibly an idiot.) Due diligence is always your responsibility.
That doesn't make it the only right way, then, now, or ever. It doesn't mean there's not another way - or ten to twenty more - to skin that cat, or even a better way to do it.
But I won't walk you off a cliff or into a swamp. I'll check it as well as I can, and I won't deliberately mislead or misinform you about anything.

I was a big fan of the MagPul videos and the guys who made them a few years back, because their approach was simple, and transparently common-sense:
"We don't know everything. But here's what works for us, and why we do it the way we do.
Try it for yourself, and see if it works for you. But if you've got a better way for you, do what works best."

That doesn't mean there aren't any wrong ways to do something.
Quite the contrary is true.
Read a few historical accounts of battles and campaigns, or go to the Darwin Awards website.
There are, I can assure you, wrong ways to do everything. With suitably unhappy consequences to them all.

They cull the ignorant, the deliberately stupid, and the unlucky with equal indifference.
In war, in survival, and even in everyday life, everything you do - including nothing - may still get you killed.

Some days, that's just where the lightning strikes.
And other days, you were just an unlucky dumbass.
But remember, no one gets out of this life alive.

Your goal is to leverage things so that to the greatest extent possible, you're most likely to die quietly in your bed from the natural causes of old age, and not with a surprised dumbass look on your face from terminal stupid, or screaming in terror like the passengers in your back seat, when that day comes.

4. This ain't the movies. And you ain't John Wayne.

I've worked in movies, big-shit real-deal ones, for over twenty years. Prime-time TV shows by the dozens too. And even more low-budget dreck. I'm also a huge fan of the quintessential American art form. They teach vividly - by design - some great and enduring lessons.
They also pass on a whole lot of stupid, in a "doing-this-$#!^-will-get-you-killed" way, just as vividly.
Your job is to always know and/or remember which is which.
This is why cops and prosecutors (and probably crooks) laugh at police shows, doctors and nurses laugh at medical shows, and veterans laugh at military and war movies. And not at the parts that you laugh at.
But if I make reference to something in one, it isn't because they're reality; it's generally because they're a readily accessible common reference point of reality to a disparate crowd. You may not have read Steve Callahan's Adrift, nor be able to recite Jack London's To Build A Fire from memory, but you've probably seen Tom Hanks' Castaway or Liam Neeson in The Grey, well enough for them to be useful to make a point.
(And I can poach clips off the latter two from YouTube, and will, you can betcher@$$.)
Just remember, in real life, there's no one to yell "Cut", there are no do-overs or re-shoots, and dead is final, real, and frequently painful on the way out. You won't be doing the PR tour to promote the movie if you buy the farm in Scene 4.

5. Human Stupidity + Intractable Forces Of Nature = Melodrama.
6. Little problems are a certainty. Big problems may show up too.

Some genius replying on another blog just said once that he'd "move were there were no problems".
Problems solved, QED.

Let's think that over:
No blizzards.
No hurricanes.
No tornadoes.
No earthquakes.
No floods.
No wildfires.
No riots.
No violent crime, nor criminals to perpetrate it.
No wild animals or rabid predators (on any number of legs).
No wars.
No famines.
No droughts.
No plagues or pestilence.
No plundering hordes or rapacious government.
No human evil or insanity, nor any indifferent natural fury whatsoever.
Sh'yeah, right.
Great plan.
Soopergenius level unlocked.

And then you looked at a map, and realized that describes no place on Planet Earth, in recorded history, going back to at least since getting our collective asses kicked out of Eden, or learning to walk upright and eat meat (take your pick).

In short, never, and nowhere.

So, for all places in the actual world, functionally forever:

7. Shit happens.

Have a plan for that.
With options.
And options to your options.
P-A-C-E.
Primary.
Alternate.
Contingency.
Emergency.
(As the Gunny/Master Chief told some of you:
"Write that down. You will see this material again.")

8. Think systems, not items.
9. Stuff is good. Stuff + knowledge is better. Stuff + knowledge + experience is golden.

You can't buy your way to excellence.
You can't read your way to mastery.
But if you get high quality gear, read and retain the best information, and master it with practical hands-on application, until it becomes part of you, you can do just about anything.
More importantly, if you understand the theory, and can put theory into practice, you can make second-rate, half-assed, or even primitive cobbled-together caveman gear do things that get you largely to the same place as gold-plated gear would, most of the time, and you'll be miles ahead of someone with only the gold-plated gear, or only book-learning.

And miles could be the difference between comfort and pain, or even between life and death.

Don't get down on dumbasses with great toys or good books, though.
Some of them can be taught. The books can be passed around.
And worst case, the dumbasses become a re-supply point when they screw up, die, and the survivors split their gear.
Which brings us to this:

10. Life isn't fair.
11. Nothing is free.
12. Nothing worth having is easy.
13. Nature is an indifferent bitch.
14. Murphy was an optimist.
15. Luck happens when preparedness meets opportunity.
16. The cavalry isn't coming.
17. You're 9-1-1.
18. If you're expecting to get "raptured" out of trouble, because the Almighty is your personal genie, bear well in mind that God, by all available accounts, has a habit of walking you through the Red Sea, or using the belly of a whale, to get you where you're supposed to be. Not teleporting you to safety because you're delicate. And laggards tend to end up as a pillar of salt. Learn a lesson or two right there.

That's why, whether for just yourself, or for any others, you need to do things - generally hard things - if you want to succeed.

Old guys know stuff. Pay attention.

And why, circa 500 B.C., Sun Tzu could tell everyone afterwards:
"Duty is heavy as a mountain; death is light as a feather."

I aim to move mountains. Or go over, around, or through them.
If that's too hard for anyone, nobody signed a contract. You can puss out any time.

And remember, death is light as a feather.
Sometimes, it even flies in on one.

Your choice.

Needful Things

In a recent meatspace convo, I mentioned that I've done the training legwork to train and equip anything up to a battalion of folks.
What's lacking, for anyone between the two great oceans, is the folks in question.

That fact noted, I have, in fact, ginned up a list of the sorts of topics you'd need to cover, for folks who'd had zero training nor prior military service. And have largely laid out the syllabus for same.

Most of it you can find other places. Some of it by people with more expertise.
No where, that I am aware of, so concise, nor centrally located.
(Well, unless you're between 17-39 years old, and you want to give up 4-8 years of your life, with a good shot at winning a Purple Heart, perhaps posthumously.)

For all of it, I highly recommend, as many times previously, that you seek out bona fide Subject Matter Experts, for real-time hands-on training and practice in the subjects in question. In these things as in, e.g., skydiving or scuba diving or flying small aircraft, you aren't going to learn how to do it, for real, on the day, from reading a book. Let alone a blogpost or ten.

But at some point, you've got to make the first step, which is always going to be looking at the material, and learning certain things in your head, so that you can eventually progress to doing them with your hands.

So in shameless tease of that point, starting next week, I'll start putting up the building blocks. For some people, it will be cursory review. Good for you. For some others, it will be all new Things You've Never Heard. With my compliments.

I will also put up pdf links to material you'll need, should you lack the hard copy references in question.

For both, diligent practice, with people who can answer your questions in person, and supervise your execution of same, correcting errors as necessary, in real life and real time, is the ultimate goal of the exercise. Because book learning isn't street smart.

We're not talking about taking over the world. We're talking about keeping you and those you value and/or love alive, in anything from a local emergency to a major disaster, or worse. The smaller of which are inevitable, and the larger end of which remains an open question. (Trump will not be president forever, for just one obvious thing. And like rust, the enemies of this country in general, and your individual liberty in particular, never sleep. No small number of them are paid for with your tax dollars, and have been every day since before you were born.)

The skillsets for any of the above are frighteningly but conveniently very similar.
(This is why the Notional Guard is the go-to group for riots and natural disasters, capice?)

And on your own, you should already have or get CERT training, a basic EMT class/card, basic firearms instruction on rifle, pistol, and shotgun (and in that order), orienteering/land nav/geocaching skills, and radio training to any level of HAM licensure that you can get to.

You should have your medical and dental ducks in a row, and be in shape (round is not a shape) and doing some level of regular cardio exercise and fitness, whether it's power walking, hiking, bicycle riding, swimming, or jogging. (Cross-country skiing or snowshoeing also counts for those of you north of the snow line, either latitudinally or by dint of ground elevation.) You don't need to be able to do BUD/S or SFAS PT (although it's something to definitely aspire to), because most of us aren't 18 years old any more, but if you can't do 15-20 minutes of cardio at your target heart rate for age, you're pretty much going to be baggage for anything constructive - and you can lie to others, but you can't fool yourself, try though you might.

And if - and only if - actual inescapable physical disability prevents the latter, you should double down on the other tasks, because you're the immobile target zebra in the herd, and predators don't give handicap scores. They will be grading the Final Exams; I nor you will not.

For anyone interested, the bus unloads Monday, at the footprints.

The Fall of Civilizations

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

Peter comments:

Our modern civilization can fall, too, and in a surprisingly short time.  It's happened right before our eyes multiple times over the past half-century.  Think of the Soviet Union in the late 1980's, or Venezuela over the past five years.  It could happen even to the USA or Western Europe, if enough of the storm clouds gathering over either economy were to let loose.  (Think of what would happen if the US government, due to economic circumstances, were to stop providing Social Security and/or Medicaid to its citizens:  or, alternatively, if we did not act to stop illegal alien infiltration, and they did to the whole of the US economy what they've already done to California.  What would either and/or both of those events do to a very large part of our population?  And what would that imply for our society as a whole?)

Food for thought.

Maybe a light snack.

Unlike Rome, the means of decisive intervention hereabouts is not solely vested in the government's minions.

Hordes of illegals doing to the US economy what they've done to CA would simply initiate a bloodbath reckoning, and expulsion via the local cemetery, and in haste.

Stopping Social Security or Medicaid would be equally harsh, but the old and infirm aren't liable to kick up much of a fuss as they died from starvation or lack of medical care in the same numbers as the prior scenario.

(And, I suspect, local charity would pick up much of the slack for the deserving poor, and the hopelessly addicted would die in droves or be re-institutionalized en masse, simultaneously ridding us of society's wandering gypsy refuse and central government's power, both salutary consummations devoutly to be wished.)

In many ways, society is both more fragile and more robust than it was in 400 A.D.

Wholesale breakdown is less likely, though certainly not impossible.
You've just chosen the two scenarios least likely to do more than inconvenience society for more than a season or three, for those other than the target demographic.

Neither A Day Without A Mexican nor A Day Without Grandpa would affect most of society except to lessen the traffic load on the interstates, and shorten the waiting time at the local ER, ultimately.

Bring down the financial system or the power grid rapidly and in total, and you've got quite a different matter on your hands.

Weather Report

Fire The Sonofabitch, For Cause - Dereliction of Duty

h/t Gateway Pundit

Fire this dopey-looking AWOL SOB.

(Gateway Pundit) President Donald Trump asked AWOL AG Jeff Sessions and FBI Chief Christopher Wray why corrupt Hillary-supporting lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page were still employed at the Bureau after being caught secretly exchanging texts and plotted to take Trump down.
This information was leaked to far left Vox.com.
Sessions declined to fire the corrupt FBI hacks.

If Sessions can't or won't do his job, start letting people at DoJ go, starting with  him, moving to Rosenswine, and work down until you find someone both honest and motivated to start doing the work of pursuing crime and administering justice in the republic.

If that happens to leave dozens to thousands of former DoJ lawyers unemployed and under a well-deserved cloud of suspicion for attempting a soft coup, that's just tough shit.

If they have to build more federal prison space and get a rush shipment of orange jumpsuits to accommodate the former lawyers and FBI agents suddenly in need of same, that would be the first thing to turn this shit-show around, and get things back on track.

And then prosecute the serial felon herself, Felonia von Pantsuit, and shut the Clinton Foundation down for RICO violations, seize all their financial assets, revoke the owners' passports, and if that creates a financial hardship for Fat Bill, offer to lend him a cell and orange jumpsuit too.

The AG's job is to be a pitbull against crime, not a nancyboy, or a lost little lamb.
Sessions is naught but an incompetent puss, and it's clearly what he intended to be since before the election.

You Win The Internet For The Day

Tam FTW yesterday

Yes, that would solve everything.

Maybe make murder and manslaughter illegal while they're at it, too.

I guess everyone in Canuckistan just thought a sidewalk was automagically a Van-Free Zone, or something.

First World Problems

It's hard to post words and pictures when your default choice for pics can't get their collective shit together for over two days.

And it's free, so I'm getting exactly what I paid for.

It doesn't seem to have any effect on the links to (eight months and 26 pages worth) my already-posted content, it's just that any attempt to access my own album, or create new content, gets me the spinning white wheels of death.

So Imgur, right now you suck.

She's Gone

Effective today, after a run of 50+ years, the iconic Redhead, above, wanted by pirate mobs on the far shore since 1968, if not since 1568, is being refurbished right out of existence at the original Magic Kingdom. Because they can.

The latest victim of f**king with Disneyland to quell the unquenchable mobs of PC asstardianism will be removed, and then replaced by some Melissa McCarthy-looking redheaded pirate chick, toting a musket and giving lip, if the prior change at Disneyworld, and the other assorted DisneySpinoff lands is any guideline. The more malignant militant dyke warriors are clamoring for putting in Anne Bonny and Mary Read in full-revisionist lesbian glory, but even LGBTAtoZEIEIO-friendly Disney Corp. isn't quite ready to go that far. Yet.

Apparently, the thought of showing a fairly lighthearted version of "human trafficking" >gasp! clutch pearls!< was a cultural Rubicon beyond which the PC Minions of Fucktardia could not proceed without a case of the vapors, though they have, as yet, expressed no problems with those same animatronic pirates shelling an innocent town, waterboarding the mayor, shooting at his wife, ransacking and looting the inhabitants, and then burning the whole town down in a drunken arsonist's gleeful orgy. Pretty much like every Saturday night currently in Detroit, or Chicongo. (Hey, let's make THAT ride, and call it Pirates of the Democratic Cities! What, too spot-on? Sue me.)

Bidding for women, the one basically non-violent activity amongst the whole ride, was just too much, apparently.

No word on how the PC 'tards are dealing with that whole arranged-marriage thing in one third of the current world, especially amongst the beloved hordes currenty invading Europe, and a lot less gently than their Disney counterparts, but thank heavens visitors to New Orleans Square at the Anaheim branch of Mauschwitz are now safe from such real-world realities. It's for the children. And maybe they can put bride auctions in at Aladdin's Oasis instead.

I visited the park yesterday, knowing this end was coming, and accidentally blundering yet again into the bi-annual delight that is Dapper Day without realizing it had come again, and enjoying the spectacle of men wearing coats, ties, and hats, and ladies in dresses and heels, just because they can. I documented the original Bride Auction tableau on video multiple times yesterday, with a view to a future YouTubing of the prior version for as long as I can before the Google Taliban deems it offensive, and it was time well-spent.

This was the last ride that Walt Disney himself supervised and approved, but clearly the idiots in charge of the corporation won't rest until they beat all traces of his vision from the multi-billion$$ Fortune 100 corporation he left behind, and finally strangle the golden-egg-laying goose he bequeathed to subsequent generations once and for all. Perhaps they can even find a way to power the park by harnessing him spinning in his grave, and make the whole cultural fornication process green, as well as PC.

Move Back To Wakanda

McThag brings the math spankdown.

Since you bring up reparations, OK, let's have them.
You and your kind owe 360,222 lives to us white people.
Using the national average of $37,050,000.00 for a wrongful death settlement times the number of lives sacrificed we get $13,346,225,100,000.00.

Yes, Mr Shabazz, that's more than thirteen trillion US dollars.  Got that on you?

I will even be FAIR about it and not even apply 153 years of compound interest to the equation.

But unlike McThag, I will relent on such blistering common sense, for but one option:

Anyone applying for reparations should be given absolutely free, courtesy of the US taxpayers, one business-class one-way ticket to the African sh*thole country of their choice (that would be, with no exceptions, all of them), and the transport of up to 1000 pounds of their personal goods and chattels by common ocean carrier - with the ironclad proviso that the receiver must surrender their US passport and renounce in perpetuity their US citizenship, with a mandatory 20-year time period before they would be allowed to return and re-enter the US as legal immigrants on a green card, should they subsequently change their minds, and apply to come here as foreign immigrants. (And if we happen to close our doors to all such at some point until further notice, oh well.)

The IQ of both continents would improve markedly.

People Who Live In Glass Houses, etc.

h/t Kenny

(BANKSTER BUTTINSKIS, MONEYGRUBBERVILLE) The American people lent $45 billion to Bank of America during the bailout. That bailout came with a hefty $100 billion guarantee against losses on toxic assets.
That money came from American taxpayers. It came from gun owners and non-gun owners.
But Bank of America has warned that it will refuse to lend money to manufacturers of “assault-style guns”. It had previously announced it was edging away from the coal business to fight global warming.

Be a real bitch if some folks started to shove slices of frozen cheese the same size as credit cards into BofA's ATM card slots, or caulk those suckers over, and epoxy or hard acrylic the keypads. Or just paint over the screens with black paint.

Be tough to figure out who did it at 3AM if they wore V for Vendetta or Obama masks too, huh?

Even harder if they sprayed over the ATMs' cameras too.

I bet someone with enterprise could hit 10 or 20 a night, and never get caught.

But I bet after 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 ATM out of service calls, they'd see their way right the f*** out of the whole political arena, and go back to just being a bank, or shareholders would probably find a board who could figure out what business they were in.

Of course, that would be both naughty and illegal, so of course you wouldn't want to do that.
Especially if anyone was looking. Because you'd get caught.

Just saying...

"Dear B of A: In a sluggish economy, never, EVER fuck with another man's livelihood. Now if you're smart, like I think you are, you're not gonna make me come back here."

It'd also be a real bitch if Congress were pressured by constituents - in an election year with primaries just weeks away, mind you - to remove FDIC deposit guarantees from any bank infringing on citizens' Constitutional rights, since government oversees those banks like a proctologist's tailpipe scope.

And if BofA has spare time for this kind of silly horseshit, it's clearly also time for the Treasury Dept. to call in the notes on those 2008 bailout loans. Tomorrow. In full.

And also, cancel any government business with those banks, and bar any future transactions with them by any government entity.

They could even forbid all direct deposits to them from any government payees, as a matter of government policy. And there's not a damned thing BofA could do about that, except go under.

In case anyone would rather call their Congressweasel, rather than stock up on frozen cheese, caulk, and epoxy.

But if you're a belt-and-suspenders kind of guy, ROWYBS.

That's What I'm Talking About

h/t WRSA

This is just the sort of thing to do. Funny, painful, and untraceable.

Full points and extra credit to the folks who started the viral campaign to distribute fake Starbuck's burnt coffee to The Diversity, for slavery reparations, inviting the homeless into their stores, etc.

When jackwagons sued to force Christian bakers to make wedding cakes for lesbians, and Antifa decided to go from verbal protest to outright gratuitous destruction for its own sake, they called down the flaming lava from the heavens, and now it's landing full weight on the Lefty supporters at Starbuck's.

How do you Commie bitchez like it when the PC pitbull is sicced on you?

Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of hipster assclowns, given all the crap on the Lunatic Left to which they've donated.

You raise a pack of baboons, turn them loose on the neighbors, and they come back and tear up your house, and all I'm going to do is laugh.

This sort of own-goal self immolation and chaos is exactly the kind of thing that needs to happen a few thousand more times. When the Leftards find out that playing with matches gets you burned, after a good long cry, and some skin grafts, they'll have two deformed paddle hands left to stop doing that shit to other people.

And if they don't learn the lesson, it's equally funny watching them running around on fire, screaming their little lungs out for the few moments of life they have remaining.

Here's to you Mr. Fake Starbucks Coupons For Black People; you're a Real American Hero.

By the way: Cinco De Mayo is coming up.
It would be a shame to deny illegal aliens free coffee too.
Get busy.
If you were to include coupons for free illegal alien workers in the local Home Depot sale fliers at the front door, and offer them 50% off new iPhones, that's on you too.



Send a wire to the main office, and tell them I said "Ow!"

Open Season, No Bag Limits, Until They Learn

h/t Kenny

 

Tam noted yesterday:

Well, Patriot's Day passed without anybody doing anything to add a further anniversary to 4/19, for good or ill.

Natzsofast, Guido.

(ROME, NY) -- John Collins was standing outside the milk house at his dairy farm this morning when he heard yelling coming from inside. He ran in, he says, and saw his worker, Marcial de Leon Aguilar, pinned up against the window by armed men.
The men did not identify themselves and were screaming at Aguilar, Collins said.
"I run and say, 'What the hell is going on in here?'" Collins said.
Then the men told Collins they were officers with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. He asked them for a warrant or some paperwork to explain what they were doing. They had none, he said, so he ordered them to get off his property and leave Aguilar alone.
As this happened, Collins said, Aguilar's children watched. They were waiting nearby for the school bus to come. Collins said the officers put Aguilar in handcuffs and took him across the rural road to their vehicles. At least seven officers had come onto the small farm, Collins said.

Collins said he followed the officers cross the street and asked them why they were taking Aguilar, but he didn't get a straight answer. He also continued to ask for paperwork, but was not offered any by the ICE officers.  

Collins followed the ICE officers across as they took Aguilar, in handcuffs, to their three waiting vehicles.
"I told them you can't come in here without a warrant," Collins said. "They can't take someone and throw them up against the wall because of the color of their skin."
Collins attempted to take photos and video with his phone. When he did that, he said, one of the ICE officers grabbed his phone and threw it into the road. Then they handcuffed him and threatened to arrest him for hindering a federal investigation, he said.
But then the officers uncuffed him and left with Aguilar in the backseat of a dark Dodge Caravan.

Twenty-five years since Waco, and federal fucktards still can't figure out why most folks think they should be shot on sight when they pull this kind of douchebadge Gestapo shit.

But they've STILL got it coming, 99% of the time, and it's probably the only way to weed the worst of them out.

"Seven unidentified federal agents were killed by local farmer when they were caught trespassing, attempting a kidnapping, and committing multiple other federal felonies on his dairy farm in upstate NY yesterday. Buzzards and other scavengers ate the remains before they could be removed."

Kind of has a nice ring to it.

If, after only 240 years of precedent, some feds still can't manage to color inside the lines, enough with them. Let them take the same chances as home invaders and other criminals, and they'll knock that horseshit off, or die for their sins, and no one will miss them. And if they do miss them, their aim will improve with practice.

I don't care if the guy they're after was convicted of serial murder of children and eating their beating hearts after confessing in open court; if a federal agent and his crew of thugs can't be bothered to obtain a lawful arrest warrant, announce and identify themselves according to policy, and produce the scrupulously correct legal paperwork on demand, instantly, they deserve the next mass shooting that arrives in their asses, and anybody doing that shooting deserves not only no prosecution, but a presidential medal for public service to the nation.

Every one of those assholes should be fired and face federal prosecution, then sued civilly until upon parole they have to live in cardboard boxes and eat dumpster scraps.

With great power comes great responsibility.
This is the kind of fail that should end in orange jumpsuits.

Time To Get Down To The Rat Killin'

h/t Bayou Renaissance Man

When you ignore reality, there are consequences.
This is how this problem gets solved.

Peter has a good and interesting post on murder in the US considered with respect to population density:

Back in the 1950's and 1960's, ethologist John C. Calhoun experimented with rats to find out how their behavior changed when their population density (i.e the number of rats in a confined space) was increased.  He described their behavior in two papers that have become seminal in their field:

• Population Density and Social Pathology
• Death Squared:  The Explosive Growth and Demise of a Mouse Population

He called their reactions the "Behavioral Sink", observing that normal interactions became pathologically warped under the stress of overcrowding, resulting in violence, cannibalism, and the breakdown of normal social interaction.  The term (and his experiments) have been used as a metaphor for human interaction under the stress of increasing density of urban population.

You should go over and RTWT.

Studies of rats are valid.

For rats.

The reason Los Angeles and Cook counties (L.A. and Chicongo) have 51% of the murders in the entire country is that they are concentrated deposits of human refuse, with Democrat city governments, and shoddy, corrupt under-policing of those same protected (mostly) Diversity candidates, in most cases with the same 1-3% of the population committing 99% of the crime.

The population density is the same in nearby rich suburbs as it is in Watts, East L.A., or the South Side of Chicongo, and yet the (non-existent) murder rates there are infinitesimally small, unless visited by the exact wastes of skin and oxygen from those same urban
$#!^holes.

Prove this for yourself.
Look at the population density at baseball and football games during the game, and tell me the murder rate extrapolated to a 365-day year.

Some rats need some rat killin'.
It's no more complicated than that.

If we simply executed the violent incorrigibles, the murder rates in South Central or South Chicago would drop to the levels found in Monaco and Luxembourg, and recidivism would drop to 0%.