Damnable Libel

Seriously though, I had nothing to do with any recent fires.
But paraphrasing Mark Twain, I have sent a letter stating
 that I heartily approved of them.

I Told Ya So

Democrat voter turnout in Charcoal Hills, formerly known as Pacific Palisades,
 expected to decrease by 98.4% for next decade. Pisser, huh?

Homeless cause 14,000 Fires per year in L.A. County

Insurance companies dropped coverage because Califrutopia is a massive clusterfuck

authorities drained reservoirs in fire areas for a year despite two record wet seasons, which was why hydrants had no water

Billion$$ unspent: Gov. Moonbeam and Gabbin' Nuisance haven't built a new reservoir in CA in 50 years, as population doubled, and billions of gallons of rain and snowmelt flow out to sea year after year

And all this nonsense was voted in and funded lavishly by the millionaire Leftard lunatics in West L.A., which runs about as Democrat as NYFC not counting Staten Island.

I repeat for emphasis:

Stop dropping water on those neighborhoods. Swap it out for napalm and aviation gasoline, and solve this problem for a century or more. Make Stupid Painful Again.

Sunday Music: A Few Hot Tracks

A few apropos cuts that sprung to mind lately. Something for everyone here. Talking Heads, Ohio Players, J.D. Souther, the Pointer Sisters, and Blue Oyster Cult. Riffs on a theme.

Say When

 h/t Divemedic

By all means, read DM's OP, but we've covered this ground times beyond counting, so we're cutting to the chase, and defer to visual aids.

Demographics Is Destiny. Which Works Both Ways.

 h/t WRSA

The bottom half is my helpful addendum to a pic CA posted today. Feel free to fact check my addition, but like Shit Trump Says™, even if it's off by a hair here and there, my addition is likelier far more accurate than most of you want to admit is the case.

Like the pooches in most situations, 49 other states and 85 other countries have f**ked Califrutopia so hard for so long it'll never walk straight again. Remember your own state's or country's role in that multi-decade bestiality caper the next time you want to gloat about how the pooch is getting on currently.

Bonus giggle for me: There were an estimated 500,000 anchor babies born in the U.S. to illegal aliens last year. The largest-growing group was in the 49 states not called "California".

And California is broke, so the welfare gravy train is coming to a slamming halt, which is going to drive both carpetbaggers and whackjobs back home like an electromagnet. So your turns are coming like a freight train. Lube optional. Bummer, man. BOHICA, baby.

Brushfires: It Isn't Just The Government, Stupid

 h/t Peter

If this is global warming, all I ask is a bag of marshmallows and a stout roasting spike.

As Bayou Renaissance Man noted, some other bloggers have offered explanations for the current fire situation hereabouts. Without questioning their bona fides on the topic, we have lived in the exact area in question our entire life (save for a few transitory changes of address required by Uncle Sam), and from time before Reagan was governor, let alone president. In our youth, we and some friends sat on our house roof and watched the hillsides gloriously aflame in all four cardinal directions at the same time, and watched 150' tall flames overtop those same hillsides. This is not a novel phenomenon, and we possess a wee bit more precise and firsthand handle on the situation, and a great deal more historical context than most.

While decades of flagrantly incompetent Democommunist government (but we repeat ourself) hereabouts has an undeniable share of the blame in the raging wildfires hereabouts, trying to portray the current fiasco solely, or even majorly, as government's fault is like trying to blame baseball bats for causing home runs.

Government's role in this is mainly as a symptom, not a root cause.

As we pointed out in comments to an earlier post on BRM, insurance companies abandoning coverage in Califrutopia was a net plus, not a terrible thing, because they were otherwise being forced to subsidize (on the backs of ordinary policyholders) rich, entitled idiots building mansions inches away from literal tons of fireload, in brush-choked wind-tunnel canyons that burn regularly for not years, not decades, not centuries, but for millennia, since Hammurabi himself was in diapers. 

Having seen this phenomenon first-hand for half a century myself, my argument was simple:

Let the insurance companies allow the entitled idiots' homes to burn, with no coverage possible.

Then we'll have fewer entitled jackholes (you guess the missing word there), overwhelmingly - but not entirely - the exact same dancing monkeys in music, film, and television, on either side of the cameras and microphones whose serial idiocy you all rightfully loudly decry and castigate on these same blogs 24/7/265, buying or building homes in those same brush-clogged wind-tunnel canyons, which burn every 5-10 years with the predictability of the seasons, who like having brush and oak trees inches from their multi-million-dollar estates "because it looks pretty", who won't let cities use eminent domain to widen the narrow streets enough to permit emergency vehicles to access those streets even during minor emergencies, let alone brush fires the size of some cities, who elect more government idiots to oppose brush-clearing and controlled burns, simultaneously funding dope-smoking tree-hugging eco-lunatard hippies who oppose brush clearing and controlled burns because they think humans are the parasites who must be eliminated, nor ever vote for any politicians or measures that would fund sufficient infrastructure to make sure there's even water flowing out of the hydrants at the top of those canyons, like for example fixing the 10,000 water main breaks in L.A. unrepaired since the Northridge Earthquake thirty years ago - which is why random sinkholes keep cropping up all over Los Angeles - to use when you need it (like for the semi-annual brushfires that have happened here since Fr. Junipero Serra and Spanish conquistadors first arrived on the scene, and found out the local Indian name for the current San Fernando Valley was "The Valley that Smokes" because of perennial lightning-caused brushfires since time out of mind, thousands of years before Columbus' arrival on Hispaniola). Newsflash, Common-Core grads: there was smog over the Greater L.A. Basin and the adjoining valleys 200 years before the first car or gas station arrived here. You could look it up. History: still a thing.

These are the same entitled Leftard idiots who won't broom out the homeless, who camp in those same canyons smoking meth, and which drug-addicted losers are too tweaked out to notice that 50MPH gust during the regular Santa Ana winds just blew their hillside campfire into a raging inferno, causing five out of every ten fires, going back decades.

Hear me, God! Let those fires rage out of control and burn unrestricted, and weed out the surplus of morons (mostly deported or imported here from 49 other states and 85 other countries), and if possible, ship more morons into the fire zones while the flames rage out of control, to preclude having to deal with them after it's all over, with their upturned palms looking for government relief largely shaken down from the peons in this state and 49 others whom they moved to those canyon mansion to escape.

If we were governor for a day, the aerial tankers would be dropping napalm and aviation gasoline by the ton around the clock for the entire day, until the problem self-corrected, and the hillsides looked like Hiroshima on August 7th, 1945.

Oh, and the inevitable survivors of this disaster? No points for guessing who'll be back grifting next spring, when the scrubbed-bare hillsides turn into raging mudslides and flooding, crying to anyone who'll listen about how terrible is their lot in life, rather than having to attend mandatory public struggle sessions to own up to their stupid life choices and cranio-rectal impaction issues.

Never have so many delusional entitled morons so richly deserved to have been crapped upon from a great height by the Flying Fickle Finger Of Fate.

Even if you could wave a magic wand and instantly make the entirety of government in Califrutopia go away, you wouldn't fix the problem. For the same reason you could kill all the horses in the world, and years later you'd still have hundreds of millions of horses' asses.

You want to fix California? Bite the bullet: this is going to hurt.

Leave the government alone.

Because as always, politics is downstream from culture.

Just take back all your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk who weren't born here but have come in and f**ked the state up royally for the last 40 years, and deport the 15M illegal aliens your congressweasels and senators have not only ignored, but even encouraged (Lindsay Grahamnesty, Marco ScrewYoubio, call your offices), until they started being bussed into your towns and cities, and the government hereabouts will take care of itself. Just like it did without any further input from you for 130 years. The rest of the country has used this state as a giant demographic and economic tampon to catch all the outflow from the other 49 for nearly 50 years, and now you're all aghast about the toxic shock.

Own your own goddam mess. Admitting that is the first step to solving the problem.

If you'd stop sh*tting and pissing in our gene pool hereabouts, you'd be amazed how fast it would resemble a swimming pool instead of the nation's septic tank. Oh, and those carpetbaggers you bitch about? They weren't Californians when they moved here, and they still aren't now that they've moved on to piss and sh*t in your pool. Best wishes dealing with your own states purpling up because of them. Tag, you're it.

And in the short-term, please, let the entitled @$$holes' mansions burn to the ground. Ideally with them locked inside. And not a penny of relief funds for those grifters that survive. Tough love, we beseech you.

At best, it'll build some character, and at worst, it might kill metric fucktons of them. Or at least, induce them to move back home where they came from, and where they belong.

Win-win.

Random Bushcraft Tip

h/t Commander Zero

The item in the header pic might look to you like a $2.99 roll of 18 gauge floral wire, available at any Hobby Lobby, with cousins for sale at Home Depot, WallyWorld, Michael's Crafts, etc.

It is, and it isn't.

What it really is, is twenty 5-foot long pieces* of snare wire suitable for all sorts of small game, helpfully all connected on one handy spool, with a nifty wire-cutting gadget on the bottom of the package.

If you're ever stuck and trying to survive, putting out a snare, i.e. ONE, is a joke, well-known to hundreds of SERE School instructors over the years who've seen or heard earnest students announce they put out their survival snare. Singular. Usually with absolutely nothing to show for the effort.

Putting out twenty snares on a trapline, or 3-5 squirrel poles in a target-rich woodland,

OTOH, is a much higher-percentage shot at getting something to go in the stew pot for supper.

Use the handy cutter on that package, once the need is urgent, to chop your entire 100' roll into handy 5' segments.

With each segment,

1. Pull a few inches around a small pencil-sized stick, twice around, creating a double loop, leaving about an inch or so beyond the loops created.

2. Slide that double loop off the stick carefully, keeping it open, and twisting an inch or so of the wire beyond the double loop tightly around the end before the loop.

3. Take the unfinished end, and pull it through the double loop, keeping the double loop open, until you've created a loop the appropriate size of the game you're trying to catch.

Repeat 1-3 another 19* times.

4. Find appropriate places on game runs, burrow holes, etc., to place your snares, and anchor them to driven or buried stakes or rocks, as appropriate, to secure anything you catch. Don't pull on the double loops, and minimize handling the snares. If you have anything to cover your scent, or to bait the set/run, do it after it's placed.

If you've done this right, anything passing through your snare will pull the noose tighter, causing the metal double loop to cinch down, preventing it from releasing anything you catch, and getting tighter the harder they pull against it.

Check all your snares at least once a day. Checking at dawn and dusk isn't a bad plan. Otherwise you're just feeding any local predators, instead of yourself.

There are myriad ways to set out snares like these for birds and small game, and all those approaches are beyond the scope of this post. Further study and real-world practice is highly recommended. Do it now, when your survival isn't at stake if you fail.

But now you have the knowledge of how to create the individual snares necessary. Sizing the wire you use and the noose size and height up or down gives you the opportunity to capture anything of almost any size, if you build the right noose with the right wire. (Snares for cougar, wolf, bear, and moose are not recommended. But you do you. Deer- or feral hog-sized snares, by contrast, could yield quite a bounty.)

Bear well in mind that whatever you catch may not be dead when you find it, and may not like being snared. Be prepared to turn it from a problem into a menu item by dispatching it without getting clawed or bitten in the process.

Boilerplate b.s.: Obey all game and hunting regs if you practice with these. Don't trap the neighbor's pets (or children) in testing these out. But remember that in a personal life-and-death survival situation, there are no game regs, and screw the bag limit.

You can buy purpose-made snares from several trapping suppliers, but generally for a lot more money. Unless you're trapping professionally, don't bother. But throwing a few spools of floral wire in your kit for survival purposes gives you snare options that might come in handy, with wire that won't rust, and is already a color found in nature.

*(Or thirty-three 3' pieces. Or fifty 2' pieces. And so on.)

Sunday Music: The Waiting

Seldom is a classic Tom Petty tune so able to capture the zeitgeist of the country forty years later. Top Twenty (#19) in 1981, and still as timeless now as then.

NEWSFLASH! COLD!!!

TDS Is Real. And They Really Are That Bat-Sh*t Crazy.

Also: I have a bridge for sale. Cash only.

Thought For The Day

This Is My Shocked Face

 

With more than 20M criminals deliberately imported into the U.S. since 2021 under the regime of Mr. Fraudulent, I'm not surprised the jihadi terror attacks have kicked off here.

I'm only surprised there was only one. So far.

But with the CIA and FBI on the case (the same geniuses who told us Hunter Biden's laptop was a fraud, and that grandmothers at J6 were our biggest terrorism threat) I'm sure we'll find out who was ultimately behind this. About the time O.J. finds the real killer, and Jimmy Hoffa's body turns up.

I still recommend that we quietly inform the Saudis that  if this keeps happening, all of Mecca and Medina will be bombed into rubble in immediate retaliation, and AC-130s will mop up stragglers. Make jihad Islam's problem, and see how long they want to play cowboys and fucktards.