Fish Food

1) Rest assured, the bodies will be recovered. You'll see them next season as cod fillets, in seafood restaurants and Gorton's packages everywhere.

2) The takeaway lessons will be simple:

    a) Don't ride in experimental diversity-built rides.

    b) Hire engineers and workmen for competence, not diversity.

3) Yoda's Axiom applies:

Because Mother Nature doesn't grade on a curve at 370 Atmospheres of pressure. (2½ tons PSI, or 800,000 pounds/ft², for Common Core grads, at the depth where sits RMS Titanic. Imagine 14 fully loaded cargo containers, balanced on your lap. Painless and quick.)

Or anywhere else.

And now, an appropriate air:

Pop Quiz

 

POP!

>LOW TIRE PRESSURE WARNING!<

A front-wheel blowout at 70 MPH, in the fast lane, is a great time to do physics calculations in your head on how smoothly and quickly you can get over to the right hand pull-over lane without

a) becoming a one-person Dukes Of Hazzard stunt demonstration team (BTDTGTTS)

b) getting creamed by an 18-wheeler

c) driving off the rapidly deflating rubber, and using your rims for ad hoc fireworks sparklers in rush hour traffic, thus ensuring the purchase of a new wheel as well as a new tire.

AAR Takeaways

1) As Commander Zero has mentioned on multiple occasions, you'll use wads of fifty bucks a lot more frequently than belts of .50BMG for most personal emergencies. This would be one of those cases.

2) Off the accelerator, hit the hazards and the turn signal, and make smooth but rapid lane changes without drastic alterations in direction, to keep the rim on the rubber. (Greased that.)

3) For a driver's side tire change, there is no such thing as too far off the road. Including completely off the highway, down the off-ramp, and into a nice quiet parking lot, if you can make it that far. (I couldn't do that. Far beyond best-glide distance.)

4) Angle the car so your @$$ has more between it and oncoming traffic than just good looks and God's best wishes. Even if you have to move again after you've stopped. Trust me on this.

5) A daylight tire change is interesting. (Mine was.) One at night can be life-changing. Not in a good way. A hands-free headlamp isn't a luxury. Neither are eyes in the back of your head. Not everyone in the right-hand lane is fully awake, sober, or a very good driver.

6) Know your area. Sometimes traffic is less of a hazard than the 'hood (and the hood rats) at the end of the off-ramp. The lesser of two evils is always the right choice.

7) A low-speed spare is better than nothing. But not by much. A wheel with a real spare is vastly superior. 

{And should be as mandatory as seat belts on all new cars, or at the very least, an option at purchase. "Yes, I'd like to save $18 off the $30K purchase price and get that P.O.S. pot-metal wannabe tire instead of a real spare, because I'll never need it" said no one ever. And if anyone did, that's quite simply a fucktard. Or a jackassical auto exec who should be flogged with electrical cord, and then staked out butt-naked and supine in the breakdown lane of a major highway for 24 hours, every time they suggest it at a board meeting. It shouldn't require a separate after-market expensive choice either; it's how it oughta be, period. /rant}

8) A small thick steel plate or short piece of oak 1"x8" or pine 2"x8" is often the difference between jacking your car up, and jacking your jack down into soft ground. Only one of these moves lets you remove a bad tire.

9) The flares were nice, but you don't always want to start a fire or attract attention. Sometimes, letting traffic pay no notice and cruise on past is better than creating a lookie-loo hazard, and eating 3000 pounds of dumbshit sandwich when some gawking @$$clown stops to see if there's a headless torso sprawled across your hood, and turns a flat tire into a twelve-car pile-up.

10) The LED flares are absolutely splendid, but "10-year" shelf life (as if) batteries don't last two years in hot/cold car trunks. Annual checks are in order, and spares still in the original package are even better.

11) Folding triangles never run out of battery power, don't start fires, work day or night, and alert to a hazard without creating a bigger one. I'll be adding those to the trunk box ASAP.

12) We haven't changed a flat tire in 30 years, so we're not an Indy pit crew, but taking 30 minutes to git 'er done was a wee bit embarrassing. A ground tarp right next to the jack was handy, but a gardener's foam mat would have been a boon to knees that aren't 18 any more.

13) Consider 12V power tools for jack raising and lug nut removal/replacement. Every minute you're not next to traffic, is another minute you're not next to traffic. Pedestrians never win auto vs. pedestrian contests, especially at highway speeds. Ask me how I know.

14) Fix-A-Flat is helpful, unless it's not. Some holes just aren't salvageable.

The Good

Cars with Tire Pressure Sensor systems provide life-saving information and change reactions to life-saving moves. If your car doesn't have this, consider it the next time you buy.

Getting to Main Trauma 1/2 hour late is always better than getting there 1/2 hour early, as the main attraction.

A tire is always cheaper than a car wreck, ambulance ride, or hospital bill.

A cash cushion always solves a lot of problems with minimal hassle.

The Bad

Dead batteries suck. Especially if they're a single-point-of-failure for anything. P and A were good, but having the C and E in PACE would have been far better.

Put the crappy OEM spare in the garage, and get a real spare tire for the trunk. If this had been a trip to Vegas problem 50 miles from BFEgypt, rather than 3 miles from work at rush hour, this could have gone from annoying to a really sh*tty deal very rapidly.

The Ugly

The time to perfectly and logically organize the trunk supplies is yesterday. And it's either done right, or it's not.

I literally last week drastically upgraded the FAK in the vehicles. Should have done all the emergency equipment at the same time. So, this week, instead of last week. Got off lucky this  time.

Leave guns and ammo alone. But slap a $10 excise fee on every case of screws sold to contractors as a road hazard mitigation fee, and use it to make road hazard protection free on every set of new tires, to punish the fucktards who drop their gorram deck and drywall hardware hither and yon like the Johnny Appleseeds Of Mayhem fucktards they are. I've never been shot, but I've lost more tires over the years to screws that didn't fall out of cars, but rather off of work trucks, than I can recollect.

So Let's Talk Turkey

In this case, the 800-lb. turkey in the room.
As various levels of lockdowns, quarantines, safer-at-home, and other restrictions are lifted, some more wisely than others, it's time for a serious come-to-Jesus talk.

Some of you were ready, mostly.
Most of you were found to have your pants around your ankles.
A goodly number of the latter also were found to have heads inserted, to various degrees, up their own @$$#$.

And everyone knows what excuses are like.

The ones that were ready, mostly, will have a hard time ahead, because they're going to have to think, really hard, about where they might have failed, or would have come up short, for any number of "what if"s that didn't happen. Most of them will survive that trial handily, since they're pretty good at "what if"ing. But no plan of action survives first contact with the enemy, and it will still require diligent and careful consideration to be prepared for the next Problem.

And there will be a Next Problem, most assuredly.
(No small part of which is the follow-up to what has transpired this year, to date.)

That concludes their after-action memorandum, and being the ones who did OK this time, they're probably already working on doing even better next time. No one ever glides and coasts across the finish line in first place, and they already know that.

So the bulk of this little chat will concern the bulk of people for the past few months.

Bare Survival

You're here reading this? Congrats. You survived. So far. This always beats the alternative.

Details

1) You thought to yourself, "Self: The Government will Never do X, Y, or Z."
I warned people waaaaaay back, because the CDC outright told you, they planned to do exactly the shutdowns that happened. I got told, online, and in person, "That will never happen, because reasons."
Well, sucks to be you, doesn't it?
They called out the National Guard. They shut everything down. Schools. Businesses. Courts. Government offices. Congress. SCOTUS. Every-damned-thing.
If you thought, to any degree, there was something they'd never do, you just got a metric fuck-ton of evidence that your head was one of those shoved in a dark, quiet place.
Welcome to Reality, Bucko!
Don't be That Guy ever again, please.

EVERYTHING is on the table, always, every time. Get that through your heads.
That foolish and short-sighted take cost some people their lives, others their livelihoods, and the reckoning on the final tally of damage will take a decade to properly assess, and there's no guarantee today that you'll be there for that final announcement.

 

YOU WILL SEE THIS MATERIAL AGAIN

2) Despite being told, any number of times, the sage advice of Ol' Remus, to

"AVOID CROWDS"

most of you couldn't, or wouldn't. Not "Run to the hills" necessarily. Most of you lost your complete shit at being told to simply stay home, and mind your own business. As if you'd been told to fly to Mars in a balloon. No plan. No resources. Little to no forethought whatsoever to that eventuality, judging purely by the pissing, moaning, and caterwauling, both here and a hundred other sites, leads me to believe you'd do even worse if it was anything worse than just going home, and effing off.

Resistance? Insurrection?? Civil war??? Pfft. You'd have been roadkill on Day Two.
Some number are anyways, right now. And you thought you were going to kick ass?

Sh'yeah. That stinging in the back of your head? That was Reality slapping you.
If this was news to you, I'm sorry to have delivered it.

3) Despite any number of times you might have heard it from me, The Other Ryan at the former Total Survivalist Libertarian Rantfest, or in Commander Zero's Notes From the Bunker, or from Selco, or Ferfal, you didn't - and DON'T - have a multi-month cash float of funds to see you through a crisis even as mild as the one we've just gone through.
"Oh, but, But, BUT...!"
Reality doesn't give a sh*t, Snowflake.
If you aren't homeless, in a box, eating from dumpsters, literally living hand-to-mouth 24/7/365, you had disposable income, and you foolishly and short-sightededly got a house mortgage, car payment, credit card balance, or any number of toys, geegaws, and other miscellaneous sh*t that you suddenly found burdensome, because you did not pay yourself FIRST and use those funds to establish a cash reserve sufficient for your normal expenses for three, six, or twelve months with no other means of support.

This has been commonsense advice from sites like Kiplinger, Motley Foole, Dave Ramsay, and about 1000 others for effing YEARS, man.

Isn't the back of your head really red and sore yet??

"BUT BUT BUTT I CAN'T DO THAT!!!

Okay. So you're now an American't, instead of an American. Enjoy the welfare dime, suckle up to government's cold, hard teat, and may your chains rest lightly upon you.

If, however, you "coulda, shoulda, woulda", but didn't, then just own up to that error, and correct it, FIRST CHANCE YOU GET. Not next year, next month, or next week, but next paycheck. And every bit you can, FIRST, until you've got money you can lay hands on, even if the house burns down, even if the bank is closed, even if the power grid goes down and there's no ATM, no Internet, and no financial system, so that next time, you're not That Guy.
If you have nothing, work on a week's pay. When you get a week, work on having a full month. When you get a month, work on three. When you get to three, work on six. When you get to six, work on a year. At least 90% of all problems that aren't global zombie apocalypse can be readily solved with a passport, a credit card with a high limit, and/or a fat envelope of cash. If you want to get to more than a year, good for you. If you want to diversify from fiatbux greenbacks into other currencies, as well as gold and silver PMs, great for you.

And nota bene if you run a business (RUN, not "work for") the same should be true of your business emergency contingency fund. If you can't do that, you're a failed business, and skating along the edge just ensures you'll be the first one over the cliff at the first sign of trouble. Some of you have already discovered that.

Your parents and grandparents, who went through the Great Depression (which was anything but Great) knew this in their bones. Now you do too. The Gods Of The Copybook Headings just called to say "Hi!"

4) Three days food (and other necessities of life) is a joke. One told by FEMA and the Red Cross, mainly to people for whom 1 day's extra anything is something their tiny minds never thought of. Three days' stored food just means that on Day Four, you're in a FEMA camp, as a refugee.

No sh*t. All it takes is the barest planning ahead. I had a month on hand, for two, in a one-bedroom apartment, when the Northridge Earthquake hit. We did fine. I upped it to six months since then. In this non-event, I've yet to crack a single can of that. But I'm working on making it a year before the next annoying little PITA comes along.

5) And my TP "hoarding" consisted of buying exactly one extra package, before it became a thing, because I already had months of that laying around stored too. Ditto for damned near everything else. I'm working on the same for meds and other supplies. You? Probably not so much, right?

6) Not living on land I own, water is only ("only") a couple of months, plus about nine ways to purify all I can gather and store. By year's end, I'll be at six months. 

7) Power/heat is something to work on, but I can cook for several months ("Several", because I need to see how long a fraction of what I've got stored works, and then see how long everything I've got stored extrapolates to.) Heat here is only a problem a few months a year, worst case, and mostly solvable with warmer clothes. Handled. But adding a small capability for renewable power for a fridge/freezer, and brief use of a couple of appliances, was on this year's list anyways. It has moved higher since January.

8) Any problem that lasts more than a year has gotten beyond mere survival, and become an extinction event. Aim to be able to handle that, too, eventually. But more guns, and more ammo, aren't going to feed you, because anybody worth robbing has probably already gotten there ahead of you, along with a lot of people who think they'll be doing the robbing. Even during the height of the German Occupation, the French Resistance, small and humble as it was in reality, never seemed to lack for enough guns and bullets. Neither will you, because at some point, the people who have them become a supply point for everyone who doesn't. You only need a knife, or a rock, or a few feet of stout wire, to start leveling up.
Stop focusing on weapons, and start looking at tactics, strategy, and logistics. Starving people never won a war in recorded history, and even modern society, fat as it is, hasn't managed to eat itself quite to death yet. Calories are more important than gun racks, in the grand scheme, though you'll always need enough of everything.

9) Communications, with PACE, were a minimal concern in this Lilliputian problem. Next time, they may feature more heavily. You might want to get on that.
Just saying.

10) Medical?

"What's a virus?"
"What's PPE?
"What's handwashing?"
"What masks work, at all? Good? Better? Best?"

And on and on and on and on, ad infinitum.

GET TRAINED.
GET SUPPLIES.
GET ENOUGH SUPPLIES.
Lather. Rinse. Repeat.

My Porcelain Thinking Room catalog library shows N95 masks, which don't expire, were going for $1.49@ from Major Surplus as recently as 2018, in 10-mask boxes. IOW, for $150, you could have put on a new one every day from the beginning of the lockdown to now, and still had masks left over. That'd be good for decades if you never used them. But more than a few people bought a ninth handgun for three times that price, that they never used this time around. If you have a gun collecting itch, fine. I do. I could arm enough people to take over most countries south of Mexico without breaking a sweat. But let's call your fetish a fetish, and not confuse it with anything but a nice inheritance for your heirs when you die of old age. I'm closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and I've used the medicine cabinet far more than the gun cabinet, to date. Both are good, and even fun, but one has a wee bit more utility in the long haul, and should be accorded a higher precedence if you're using your big head to work your way though a problem, instead of the little one. Get smarter about that, get trained, and get the supplies that can support your training, and vice versa. If you can deliver babies, birth cattle, and safely remove an appendix, with what's on-hand at home, you're the exception that proves the rule.

Almost none of you are there, nor anywhere close, and very few really want to be, until it's far too late to fix. I've made a tidy sum over the years on those people. Ask me how I know.

We could go on, but won't.
I hope you all enjoyed your free trial of communism, and I hope you all manage to bounce back and thrive coming out the other side, whenever this current sh*tshow all ends finally.
But you shouldn't have been setting your hair on fire nor sh*tting your pants about anything that happened. And you wouldn't have been, IF you'd been more than half-assed totally unprepared for it.

You just got the world's most annoying fire drill. You're not on fire, as it turns out. So go forth, and learn the goddam lessons you should have already learned, instead of going back to sportsball, mall therapy, and general obliviousness, so that the next one doesn't kick your ass like the last one did.

And please, by all that's good and true, remember this nonsense the next time some government-paid tool tells you "Don't worry. This will never happen. It will happen, but not here. But if it happens here, we'll crush it. We're ready for this. We've got this. We'll do fine."

Instead, worry a little bit.
It will happen.
Here.
We won't crush it.
We're not ready.
They don't "got this".
You won't do fine.

Remember that, and nothing else they say will concern you much, as much as make you laugh at them. And hopefully, inspire you to take a wee bit more personal responsibility for your own safety and security, to the extent possible, rather than bitch at the government for telling you lies, or bitch at other people for telling you the truth. You come off looking poorly in either case, and none of the BMWing helps with your ultimate problem.

The harder this little note made you cry and want to hissyfit and tantrum, the more it applies to you. Best wishes in your future endeavors, but Denial isn't just a river in Africa, and Hope still ain't a plan.

Why You're Getting Rolled, Lesson #2,087:

For baseball players, it's "Keep your eye on the ball."

For fighter pilots, it's "Lose sight, lose the fight."

Different ways of saying the same thing:
History's gut pile is assembled from the body parts of the witless and clueless.

At its root, the Parkland shooting, except for the dozen-and-a-half unfortunate victims, was nothing surprising or newly dreadful, and nothing functionally different than any of the other mass shootings enabled by the concentrated stupidity of Gun Free Victim Zones. It's what happens when you ring the dinner bell, chum the water, and push tourists into the pool with predators created by the Left, sharing the same amoral outlook as hungry carnivorous sharks.

FFS, that's been the entire point of the exercise, indeed the very raison d'etre for the Evil Party to enact it: precisely to keep up a steady supply of outrageous acts, to feed their Political Hate Machine with a never-ending supply of still-warm victim's blood, for their faithful party hacks to always be dancing in, until they achieve their goal:

the total disarmament of anyone who would oppose their totalitarian control of the population.

They already have full Astroturfed fill-in-the-blanks scam campaigns ready to go when each Next One happens, like they did this time.  Just shake and bake, add in some useful idiots to be the face of Stupidity du jour, and Presto! Instant Pudding!

They aren't even shy about this now.
They say it right out in public, outright, openly, explicitly, unashamedly, with pride, and malice aforethought.

Let's review, kids, with their own Playbook 
("Rommel, you magnificent bastard, I read your book!")

"#8.: Keep the pressure on."

This is why they never stop.
This isn't football, or baseball. It's Rollerball, final game.
No timeouts, no penalties, no substitutions, and no time limit.

You're either Jonathan E., or you're roadkill in this game, on the way to the final goal.
There isn't any other option, and you can't get out of the game.

The other side either gets beaten to insensibility, or you do. Winner take all.

So what happened with Parkland?

You. Got. Rolled.
Look at that opening photo.
That's where the phrase comes from.

The douchebadge deputies dropped the ball there thirty-nine times.
The shitbags at the Federal Bureau of Incompetence dropped the ball another half-dozen times.
The assigned School Resource Officer was a gutless coward, more worried about preserving his own fat ass and pension, than about protecting the lives of teenagers. (That fat assbag should be hounded and catcalled every waking moment from sunup to sunset every day of his miserable life, including by people with bullhorns outside his house from 7AM to 10PM daily, until the day he eats his gun.)



At your service, you chickenshit bastard.

The cowardly Broward Sheriff's deputies violated every rule of Active Shooters, and listened and watched while a 19-year-old weakling massacred other people's kids, because they lack the requisite moral character to put their lives on the line when it matters, and give him a new problem to work on, flying at his head at 1100FPS, times the number of rounds in all those magazines they tote around on their donut-fattened hips.

Those multiple failures should also be the narrative 24/7/365, from every person on the internet to every talking point in every bit of media, until Hell freezes over.

But you don't have the patience, perseverance, or stomach for that kind of fight.
So you lose.

The Florida legislature turned back gun control catcalls initially, and ignored them, as should be the default response every time they start, but their worthless Senate, including twelve fat bastards given obviously-bogus A-ratings by the perpetually worthless NRA, stabbed you in the back. Like they will.

This is what always happens when you hire some lazy rent-seeking @$$holes to do a job you should be doing yourselves, because it's too hard, too icky, or you're too lazy. And being demonstrably lazy, no one will recall those backstabbers, nor boot the ones not already termed out, so there are no consequences for such perfidy.

Michael Corleone was willing to whack his own brother for taking sides against the family, and you won't even dump out of office a legislator who sets the Constitution on fire in front of your face, and then spits in yours.

So what would've been the usual three-day ejaculation of nonsense was given new life, and seeing the faltering cardboard-cutout "army" in their path, the Soros-bux flowed in, then more from the Usual Suspects and Useful Idiots in Hollyweird, and you got the Florida gun bill.

Dear Supposed Right Wing: LEARN A F**KING LESSON FROM THAT DEBACLE.

And now, the FakeNews narrative of shrieking harpies running a new Children's Crusade.
This should be getting beaten like a rented mule. It should be getting clubbed, 24/7 like baby Harp Seals, non-stop, until their blood is caked up to your armpits, and then repeated for effect.

Because
"#5.: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon."
and
"#6.: A good tactic is one your people enjoy."

Hence the memes I've cheerfully contributed on the subject.
Shills like Hogg, Gonzalez, and their army of middle-aged Leftard harpies, and their Astroturf funding sources should be the stuff of ridicule every waking moment until they become the poster children for National Joke, and the default punchline of every comment on the subject of gun control, for decades to come.

But you don't have the patience, perseverance, or stomach for that kind of fight.
So you lose.

The same is true on the Omnibus Spending Bill.
The president's job isn't to propose a budget.

If that fact is news to you, you're simply a retard.
If you take that in, learn a lesson, and stop falling for that nonsense, at least you're an educable retard.

The Congress - you know, the 435 shitweasels you have the most concrete, firsthand, undeniable control in sending to, or recalling from, Mordor on the Potomac, and their 100 money-guzzling House of Lords betters in the Senate - made this year's Frankenstein Monster budget-busting porkfest. Because they can.

Did your elected douchcanoe(s) vote for it?
Will you give them rivers of lava at every townhall meeting you can about that?
Will you give your time, money, and invective every waking moment to turning their fat, stupid asses out this year for that sin?

No, of course you won't.

You don't have the patience, perseverance, or stomach for that kind of fight.
So you lose.

That's why TINVOWOOT: There Is No Voting Our Way Out Of This.

60% of you, at minimum, don't even show up when all it would cost you is a buck's worth of gas, and 15 minutes of your time. That's why cheating helps the other side, and elections are such near-run things. Would that America on any Election Day had one voter in ten who sleeps through it actually show up. So you sure as hell won't do it just because the future of the country hangs in the balance every two years.

So, being too fucking lazy, going back decades, to pull a lever when that's all it would cost you, you'll get another actual revolution/civil war/zombie apocalypse, because somehow, waiting until it's actually that horrible appeals to you more than regular maintenance, and throwing the bastards out of office decades hence did.

Best wishes with that plan.

Because you don't have enough ammo.
And you don't have enough of anything else, including allies, to think that plan is going to work out the way you'd hoped.

Maybe society and civilization will survive your laziness and stupidity long enough to write a history or two of how everything went to shit because you lacked the intelligence, character, or endurance to preserve civilization, and sustain it when it was your turn.

So you can fix that.

Or, not.

Fuck up in haste, repent at leisure.