Urban Defense EDC: The Drop Wallet

 h/t Zero

While this is probably an EDC item in NYFC, a Drop Wallet, AKA "Mugger Wallet", is a handy piece of gear to carry in urban areas, while travelling, or any time you feel the need, and per recent discussions over at Commander Zero's's blog, something not everyone has heard of.

The idea is to have a plausible wallet you can fork over, ideally by dropping or tossing, when getting stuck up for your wallet and other items on your person.

1) Get a decent wallet.

2) Load it up. Some people advocate a few real bills, . Personally, the amount of real money I'm prepared to hand over is $0, but you do you.

You can obtain, for $10 + shipping, a dozen cinematic US bills, totalling $372, 2@ of $1, $5, $10, $20, $50, and $100, all used in motion pictures (and clearly marked as such), from BezosMart. I'd rather do that, and salt it with enough to be convincing.

Looks real. Totally fake. Look closer.

Fake cash only gets you part of the way home though.

3) Lard the card slots up. How?

Grab a mittful of gift cards the next time you pass a rack of same at the store.

Cost: $0. Actual value: $0. Decoy value: Priceless. Make especially sure to get a couple with the VISA and Mastercard logos, and place them prominently up front.

A few higher-end merchant gift cards won't go amiss to pad the section.

4) Some people will tell you to put old picture IDs or driver's licenses in there too.

BAD idea. a) Why give someone a handle on your real identity? b) And BTW, if they have an old address on you, they can cyber-stalk you to your true address now for a little payback, for a few dollars. Why make that easy for them?

Instead, work a little harder. Get any number of fake I.D.s, again from online sellers (I'm talking the ones you can buy and have without doing 5 years in the pen, not teenager fake IDs, which if you buy online, you'll send the money, and never see the money nor the ID ever again.)

Try these instead.

Find a state that works for you. Then rework them with a fake name and address, change the details, and put in an old photo of yourself. Copy that in color and laminate it (FedEx/Kinko's is your friend here). In fact, make 5-10 copies, so you don't have to do all this again after you toss the first wallet. You want to be Fred Flintstone, Kelly Green, or Bob Sledder? Knock yourself out.

5) Throw in some random business cards and miscellaneous crap. 

Need family pictures? They sell those too. Go to any store with photo frames, and find some shots of "your" kids, wife, husband, girl/boy friend, etc. Photocopy to size, cut to fit, and now Bob is literally your uncle.

Carry the fake wallet for a while to break it in, wear and tear it, etc.

When it comes to every day carry, obviously, put it in a different pocket than your actual wallet.

Maybe put the fake in your hip pocket, and hide the real one somewhere else.

When need presents itself, hand it over, drop it, or even toss it, to create distraction, giving you the chance to beat feet, create a little more space between you and Mr. Robber, or misdirect them long enough for more active measures.

Dealer's choice there.

Bonus points:

A) Leave another one in your house, 24/7, especially when you're away/out of town. Ideally, right in front of that hidden 4K color nightvision camera, so you and the cops get a great look at the burglar who lifts it.

B) Put one of the new small GPS tags in it. Not so much to find the bad guy (though if they oblige by taking it all the way home, so much the better), but to give the detectives a great trace of the route the thief took, hopefully past some other people's surveillance cameras (Ring, traffic cams, etc.) on the way to wherever they dump it.

If you want to put OC powder, UV dye, or itching powder on the bills and such, we won't tell.

C) Given the price of cell phones, carrying an old dead one (or better yet, a really cheap crappy burner phone that was never activated, traceable to no one) to fork over, and keeping your actual one more concealed isn't a horrible idea either.

At any rate, you now have options that don't include getting robbed of anything beyond an old wallet, some movie props, and a junk flip phone, and giving any would-be stick-up folks a reason to split with the goods rather than hang around and screw with you, without giving them anything that would lead them back to you, and might lead the po-po to them.

Win-win.

Do what seems best to you.

Stating The Obvious

 h/t WRSA: Food For Thought

Somebody's saying the quiet part out loud. (FAIK, has been saying it for some good time, and is only now getting traction). Whatever the reason something like this is turning up, it's a good thing. RTWT.

The American colonies were largely self-governing. Happy to have Daddy's help when the French and Indians came calling in the mid-18th century, they weren't so happy about getting to pay a disproportionate share of the costs. But they already had their own governments, and knew how to run what needed to be run. Colonial legislatures were already in existence, the only thing they had no input on was the persons made royal governor by the King.  These offices proved easy to dispense with; the rest was co-opted.

As the author of the OP notes, all successful revolutions, and in fact, our own Unconventional Warfare doctrine, repeatedly points out the need to mirror TPTB with an underground government structure. Which unplugs the tyrannical government from the people, and the people from the tyrannical government, delegitimizing TPTB on the spot.

If you're some large "L" Libertardian, who thinks anarchy is something that has ever worked, you've got another think coming. You won't get the Wild West, either, you'll get the South Side of Chicago in the Roaring 20s, Beirut in the 1980s, and/or Bosnia and Serbia in the 1990s. Nature abhors a vacuum, and if you can't or won't run things, warlords will step up in your stead, and you'll just have traded one dictatorship 1000 miles away, for 1000 dictatorships 1 mile away.

By all means, figure out a minimal government, but you're going to have to have police, fire/EMS, trash collection, water, power, communications, etc., or you and your tribe will be cooking rabbits and living in leather tipis for a long, long time, until some bigger badass tribe rolls over you. Ask the Cherokee and Sioux how that plan works out for the second-place contestant.

A lot of government rent-seekers will be wholly suitable to roll into the new lash-up, and a lot won't. Some, in fact, should be actively barred from any such positions for life, lest you recreate the nanny state with all its drawbacks, and none of the benefits of modern society. For example, your fire and EMS folks are probably able to roll over without a hitch. Your police not quite so much. Your unionized civil servants, diversity awareness officers, and petty bureaucrats not at all.

So you'd better have a plan for that, and them.

Not by tomorrow (though that isn't a bad idea), but the sooner you start working on the shopping list, and deciding on the components of the layers, the easier it is to bake the cake when you need it. Local and county/parish level is good enough for openers. Levels above that will shake out as necessary on the day.

Take a hard look at what your city and county do, and start pondering (and discussing with LMIs) what on that list needs to stay, and what needs to go. Even as a pure thought exercise, it starts getting your head in the game for what will eventually become necessary.

Water, shelter, and food are necessities. But you're not going to make it as Batman In The Boondocks, and if you can't wrap your head around that before you're in the middle of it, you're going to have hard sledding come the moment.

Once you figure out what you need, you can sub-divide it down into what those needs will require in order to work. Ideally, by subverting or siphoning off support for the current PTB, and ultimately by having the various parts of it thoroughly penetrated, infiltrated, and subverted. And the parts that have to go already metaphorically marked with red tape for culling, as appropriate, when the time arises.

You either climb this mountain, or it falls on you.

Barbarism is easy. Civilization is hard. But the payoff of the latter over the former is tremendous.