No Quit In Them

 h/t Davydov

You can't beat people who won't roll over and quit.

Things are going to get hard here too. Two more years of Mr. Fraudulent, Emperor Stumblefuck Poopypants I. So you're going to have to deal with your own tough times. Tough times weed out the pussies. Don't be one.

Celebrating Diversity

Commander Zero reminded us yesterday that this is Rooftop Korean Anniversary time.

His linked story, however, is large amounts of ahistoric twaddle.

Whoever wrote that tripe has no idea what went down, and clearly wasn’t alive nor living in L.A. at the time. I was.

During the interim between the Rodney King incident, and the Rodney King Verdict, a female Korean liquor store clerk in South Central was getting walloped for stopping a teenage black girl from shoplifting, so as the black girl (the 1991 exemplar of Trayvon Martin Syndrome: "Play Stupid games: Win Stupid Prizes") left the store with (or without) a stolen orange juice bottle, the store owner capped her with her gat – in the back. Deader than canned tuna, right there.
And then got a pass from the L.A. County court (probation, fine, community service. No prison time). C'est la guerre.

Koreans had taken over many of the markets in South Central L.A. over decades, after the previous owners (generally Jewish) had been burned out of the ‘hood in the Watts Riots of ’65. The lack of any supermarkets in that aftermath, for those long decades, made South Central (exactly as today) a “food desert”, where absent a long drive to less diverse regions of the city, only corner liquor stores had the handy necessities of life, like milk, eggs, bread, etc., and being the Diversity, the locals, either lacking the wherewithal and desire to run their own markets, or more likely, knowing that they’d be robbed and shoplifted blind by their own co-Diversity beans, resented the outsiders. Plus ça change...

The shooting above didn’t add anything to their fund of ill will.

So come the Rodney King Free Shoes and Televisions Festival, old scores got settled. Not least of which with Korean shopkeepers in the ‘hood.

In one memorable bit of local color, the Koreans, many former military veterans of South Korea’s National Service rules, took to the roofs of their stores.

LAPD, all aflutter, bypassed rioting Diversity beans of all colors in their haste to disarm the Koreans doing what LAPD would not do. (And no, LAPD wasn’t “stretched too thin”, they were deployed to the central bus yards, and there waited and watched the riots for three days, because Chief Knucklehead Wannabe Gates and Mayor Egging The Riots On Bradley weren’t on speaking terms. The rank and file was largely furious, but management’s plan was to do absolutely nothing, mainly to punish the citizenry at large for daring to indict police officers for beating the hell out of anyone they felt deserved it. Anybody above the rank of Sgt. in LAPD from then on was and is now, a complete gutless douchebadge.)

So when confronted by LAPD on the point, the Koreans handed over their rifles, and LAPD did what they did best in the riots: they beat feet and hid again.

Whereupon the Koreans, being no dummies, waited until the black-and-whites drove off leaving skidmarks, went to their trunks, pulled out their second set of arms, returned to their rooftops, and prevented many a mob from doing to their stores what happened to thousands of others.

On seeing one approaching group seeking cheap goods, the rooftop Koreans present scattered a number of rounds into the pavement ahead of the melee, and the crowd quickly decided to go loot and burn on another street, while still several hundred yards short of their objective.

That’s how it works in a riot: people tend not to go all in just for the fun of looting and arson, if it’s going to become a life-and-death proposition.

There were no complaints, and no arrests, AFAIK, of any rooftop Koreans for the duration. IDK whether they ever got the original set of confiscated rifles back, but knowing the LAPD and D.A., it’s doubtful.

And the whole kerfluffle could have been nipped in the bud, when videographer George Halliday showed up at the Foothill Division station with his homeshot video of the original incident the next day, suggesting that the LAPD might want to pass it along to their Internal Affairs folks for further investigation. Whereupon the desk sergeant in L.A.'s Finest "suggested" to Halliday that he ought to get the hell out of the station rapidly, before he got himself arrested, so he took it over to KTLA-TV  instead. The rest is history.

The moral of the story:

Why Those Of You Who Think You Know Everything Annoy Those Who Do

Revisiting a Commander Zero thread from a couple of days ago kick-started the muse today.

Watching people try to do in 15 minutes what some of us have been doing for 15 years and far more, is a snark-inducing moment.

It’s akin to watching someone who thinks they could perform at Carnegie Hall tomorrow, if only they had a grand piano and a tux. Yes, that’s it, clearly the only thing you lack is the tux and the instrument, then everything will be fine.

For that level of facepalm, the best therapy involves bushel baskets of rotten fruit, to take to the concert.

Perpetual blog Q.: “Hi, I’m totally clueless, but I’m in a bind, because reality. How do I suddenly become a doctor/lawyer/HAM radio extra-class operator/farmer/nurse/civil engineer/Tier I JSOC ninja gunslinger/Karate black belt/master mechanic/home contractor/nuclear physicist/electrical engineer? And by somewhere between noon and 3PM today, EST? Any help would be appreciated.”

My stock A.: Have you got a hat? One that lights up and says “Lion tamer”?

After that, you hold their hand, and walk them back to the small end, and suggest actually learning something from the beginning. You know...like you learn everything.

“Q.: How do I get rich?”
A.: Pay attention in school twenty years ago, and start working towards your goal consistently and relentlessly.
“Q.: But that’s no help…I need the money nooooooow!”
A.: Yeah. Sux to be you, huh?

Sigh. Shakes head. Goes back to stacking cans and sandbags, and cleaning weapons.

There's nothing wrong with being clueless. We all are, on any given topic. Some people know a lot about a lot of things, but nobody knows everything about everything.

But the height of arrogance is to think: "Oh, you're not very bright. Distill the essence of your wisdom to me in 15 minutes, and also your lifelong experience from 10/20/30/40/more years doing what you do, because I think I could learn it during commercial breaks from the Idiot Tube."

Yeah, no.

So, look. You can learn to do one thing from YouTube in half an hour.
Disassemble a rifle and clean it, dig a well, make a dovetail miter joint, whatever.
It won't make you an expert, but you can become an expert in that, after you do it 10 or 50 or 1000 times. That's how Ranger/SF guys get good at what they do. They don't learn how to do special secret squirrel stuff, so much as they learn how to do the basics flawlessly, every time. It isn't the 100 pitches that made that Perfect Game happen; it's the 100,000 pitches that were thrown leading up to it. I've told the story of a friend who was a multi-time Olympic skating competitor, who blew my late adolescent mind when he casually dropped that learning a simple jump was falling on your ass 500 times. And getting back up to do it again. And again. And again. It's really that basic.

The corollary is true, too. If you're too old to fall on your ass, you're never going to learn that jump. And even if you can, you aren't going to learn it today. This year? Maybe. But only if you
a) Start. And
b) Keep getting back up when you fall.

Can I set up a HAM shack right now?
No.
But I know how to use a radio, the difference between HF/VHF/UHF, how to talk on a radio, the phonetic alphabet, etc. So I could get a basic ticket, if I study and practice. The books, and the radio, only work if you use them both, and just buying a $5K rig isn't going to make me an antenna whiz Extra-class genius by lunchtime.
Any more than just buying a $5K golf club set is going to make you Tiger Woods, or buying an ivory and ebony-inlaid 2-pc. custom pool cue is going to make you Minnesota Fats.

If you want to know stuff, you have to put in the time.
Time is the only thing you can't bank. You spend it whether you want to, or not, and you have no idea how much you have at any point in this life.

So stop frittering it away, and invest it.
Wisely would be ideal.

And realize that, just like figure skating, you're probably going to have to fall on your ass 500 times to get something down right. Plan for that, too. Case in point.

So probably better to do that work long before you need to know it.
Let alone use it.

A few years back, between jobs, I decided to learn to play drums for real, instead of just air-drumming my life away. Yes, the drum kit helped, but the six months of practice, every day, sometimes twice a day, 2-3 hours, until my arms hurt, because I could, and because it took my mind off a situation I couldn't change in the short-term, are what did it. And I'm still not Neal Peart, or Mick Fleetwood. Yet. But years later, I could cover a crapton of songs from the Who, the Stones, Pat Benatar, Tom Petty, the Cars, or even tour with AC/DC now (really, as long as drinking and drugs weren't a requirement), because I've beaten whole catalogs of those songs for real into muscle memory. I've got the broken sticks and thicker arms to prove it. And it's been a blast. And no, it ain't rocket surgery. But it was a skill set I didn't have then and do now, and is time invested.

Still on my list: HAM radio. Welding. Piano and guitar. Tai Chi. About nineteen more languages, on top of the two I have now. A pilot's license. I'll certainly die before I get through everything I'd like to learn, but I won't die wishing I'd learned things but just sat around never trying.

A lot of you just now have probably got a lot of unexpected free time on your hands.
I mean a lot. Stop frittering it away.
Make a list of what you want to learn, and a time and study schedule, and stick to it.
Invest the time. Then practice. Teach yourself to learn.
(Bonus: Focusing on something you can do for real is a great way to tune out the drumbeat - see what I did there - of panic about the 1001 things you can't affect, with everything that's going on right now. Ask me how I know.)
That's the only way you're ever going to learn to be the expert you aren't.

We're going to get through this.
We just are.
If you're not, well...it sux to be you, doesn't it?

But if you can do a thing or ten when it's over that you couldn't do when it started, it won't all be wasted downtime and old movie fests, will it?

Some Things We Should Be Able To Agree On

Nota bene, "Should" is not "Will". Take a breath, and work with me for a minute or three here.

1) The Bill of Rights ought to be inviolable. Not "is", but damned skippy "ought" to be.
If you can't get there on your own, I don't know you, and I don't want to. The rest of that paragraph ends "...and the horse you rode to town on, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw."

2) Evil SOBs would - and have, and will continue - to try and dismantle it, brick by brick, and letter by letter, until there's nothing left of it.

3) There is no compromising between the people who believe in Point 1 and the people described in Point 2. None whatsoever. One may argue, change, or abandon tactics, and be a general. But one who changes or abandons principles is a soulless saboteur. "...and the horse he rode to town on, sideways, with a rusty chainsaw."

4) That means that at some point (and ideally, at every opportunity), the people in Point 1 are going to have to oppose the people of Point 2, and that when all else has failed, that will come down to force of arms and bloodshed, because some people don't take "No!" for an answer until you shoot them in the face.

5) In the entire recorded history of the world, the number of wars that have been won, let alone avoided, by peaceful non-violent protests, can be counted on one's thumbs. (and even those just postponed the violence until a wee bit later. E.g., ask India how things are going with Pakistan. QED) In fact, violent warfare has been the cast-iron rule, not the rare exception.

6) So, with even a grade-school diploma, and knowing 1-5, now that you've had your public gun love-in in VA, and the Democrats in the legislature have declared publicly that they're not impressed, what will you do next? (To spare the feelings of some, we won't talk - for the moment - about previous efforts.) What have you done for yourselves lately?

7) Some few of you like to try taking cheap shots at us here in California, which is now Califrutopia. So you should know a few things, unpleasant as they may be to face, for you.

A large part of our problems here now are due to four things:

a) Your toothless banjo-playing kinfolk, who came here for decades because they weren't welcome in your little patch, and the carpetbagging opportunist pols they voted for. For the 95th time, google the origins of such upstanding examples as Nancy (Alzheimers) Pelosi, Barbara (Stupidest Senator Ever Until Kamala Kneepads Harris) Boxer, and Gray (Impeach Me!) Davis, let alone Ahnuld Schwarzenegger, and DiFi's husband. I'll own Gov. Moonbeam, and Jane Fonda, if you own the tide of Okies and Commies that preceded them.

b) The senators and representatives from 49 other states, who couldn't see a problem with making California the Wetback State (and don't get me wrong, I'm equal opportunity with that appellation, whether they swam the Rio Grande, or shipped themselves here from Asia, Africa, Sh*tholia, or Trashcanistan) until it was too late to fix. Some 10M+ illegals here, and 40M in the U.S., and folks elsewhere have just started to think it may be a problem, in relative terms.

c) The illegal aliens in question, who in California alone outnumber the population of any one of 42 U.S. states.

d) The people here who decided that when the going gets tough, the tough beat feet to happier places.  You took care of you, no doubt. You f**ked everyone you left behind too, without a second thought. Spare me your excuses if that's you. it's too late for that. Own it.
 
When you returned to your native states, or made new homes in new lands, you were either reviled as "Californians" (which most of you never were) every time things got more liberal, even if you voted anything but; or once in a blue moon hailed as one of the few "good Californians" if you were more conservative about your most recent home turf than the locals were. So you were pretty much damned if you stayed, and damned if you left. The lyrics and chorus to Bob Dylan's Like A Rolling Stone come to mind in your cases.

The combination of people that weren't from around here, and an overwhelming horde of transplants, legal and illegal, suddenly electing communist douchebags conspired to flip the state from solid (R) to puerile (D) in less than a generation. If you live in VA, stop me if you've heard this one. If you live in NH, FL, or TX, let me know when the penny drops for you too.

As I told four fine people, several of whom you've read in comments here and elsewhere, over dinner last week IRL, you'll get California from my cold dead hands, and not without one helluva fight. My line in the sand is still here, and so am I. If you run from the fight, you'll never fight the fight, and you'll never win.
My plan for California is like Poland's: when the state goes bankrupt (and it's headed there like a freight train), the wheels come off that wagon, and the statues of Marx come down. It's going to have to be that drastic, here. But communists always run out of other people's money. They can't help it.
You should also bear well in mind that there are more 2A supporters in CA than in any other state, even now, and more gun owners here than there are people in any state in 80% of the rest of the country. So maybe think about walking back the lazy snark that would diss an army 10 times the size of what the U.S. can currently field. And that goes for 2A supporters in NFY, MA, NJ, or anywhere else you don't like. If "just showing up" really counted for anything serious, we'd have had this knocked here thirty years ago. But the truth is it gets you nothing but a big target, unless you have more of a plan than getting together. We'll come back to that point in a bit.

Those of you who left, best wishes when the same thing happens again there. Where will you run next? And then? And then?

My gentle suggestion is to stop running and start digging in, if you have any self respect.

Forgive me if thinking that perhaps Virginians, and Southerners in general, might have a better understanding of those sentiments than those who've never experienced living in occupied territory, but clearly some people's memories are shorter than their wedding tackle. But there it is. And it's coming to your state too. Look around if you doubt me.

8) So having said that, you might show just a dash more understanding when I tell you that playing in the street is pointless. It changes no votes, it delivers no votes, and it sways no votes. And even when voting works (or used to), a federal judge will simply overturn the vote. This is how Pres. Jimmy Peanut gave California back to Mexico, long after he was out of a job himself, and turned it into the Califrutopia you, and I, know and loathe. One judge, one vote, one state.

It happened long before this became just about guns, here or anywhere, and between people coming in and people going out, it was over before it started for us. We didn't lose our state in November, and face a fight over guns the next month. It was a long, slow slide into where we are now. The so-called Republican Party in this state was gutless and spineless long prior, and rolled over on assault weapons over one incident, and the "Republican" governor lacked the guts to veto the bill. And within a couple of years after the floodgates were opened to illegals, there weren't any Republicans anywhere who could stop anything, even if we could have found one or put one in office with a functional spine.

And holding public rallies would have accomplished nothing.

So put a sock in that noise, swallow some braggadocio, and learn a hard lesson:

9) There's what you can do, and what you can't do.
So if you're going to do something, DO IT.
Stop yakking about it. Stop marching for it. Stop wishing for it.
Think as long and hard as it takes.
MAKE A PLAN, NOT A WISH LIST.

DO IT.

Cheerleader b.s. pep rallies aren't going to get it done.
I'm sure your high school won every pep rally they held, because nothing was on the line.
What mattered was the score on the field, and whether your team moved the ball.
So please, for the love of all that matters, stop playing with your balls, and move the ball.

10)
a) That means stop grandstanding for the cameras, which will never love you, never help you, never tell the truth about you, and never help you win.
The revolution will not be televised.
And get cracking on firing up your neighbors and friends, who will do all of those things, but only if you can get together with them on doing things that matter, things that count, things that WORK.

You are not going to stupid your way to victory.
You are not going to rally your way to victory.
You are not going to talk your way to victory.
You are not going to wish your way to victory.

You're going to have to recruit hard-hearted, like-minded, tough-headed people to plan your way to victory, organize your way to victory, and work  your way to victory, if you want to win a victory.

And dollars to donuts, the only marching that's going to work is going to be done with a pack, not a placard. PR may set the table, but bullhorns don't win battles.

You are not  going to be the first army in history to fly to victory on unicorns spewing strawberry-scented farts and pooping rose petals and happy gas to conquer the people in Point 2.

b) Propaganda, however, is a tool, and a weapon, if you would wield it as such, in the dimming twilight before the night of any actual war. So if you're going to get 20,000 people together, don't do just that.

But you would have needed the wit to have someone on the podium announce 

"Governor Northam, TEAR DOWN THIS WALL!"

Right before you did it yourselves, on cue, just like Berliners did.

If those 20,000 in Richmond had dismantled that fence, rolled it up, stacked it in neat pieces, announced that free speech means everywhere, peaceful assembly means everywhere, and keeping and bearing arms means everywhere, and then peacefully walked away, you would have been more effective than if you'd pulled Gov. Babykiller onto the stage live, peeled his underwear off, and paddled his behind.
Your cell phone video of that would have gone worldwide viral.

So FFS, if you do what you did again, and TPTB put up a fence again, Flip The Friggin' Script, Will Ya?

If you'd all shown up with no masks, but all in blackface, you would have made the rally about shaming him, instead of shaming yourselves by providing photo ops for the EneMedia at ABCNNBCBS.

If you'd all been in coats and ties, instead of camo, you would have looked like the Sunday School teachers whose manners you displayed on Monday, and not like the bitter gun-toting clingers of liberal fever-dreams.
Unless and until things go hot

OPTICS ARE TACTICS.

Write that on your hands in laundry marker.

But it's only a weapon if you wield it like one, deliberately, with more of a plan than "Hey, wouldn't it be cool if we all showed up?" and no actual control over your own people beyond best wishes. Hope ain't a plan.

None of this after-game quarterbacking. It just demonstrates that there was no leadership at the goatrope with actual no sh*t contingency plans ready for
* How we co-ordinate this thing from bottom to top
* What we do if 50 people show up
* What we do if 500 people show up
* What we do if 5000 people show up
* What we do if a whole Army shows up, and we outnumber the cops 20:1.
No one thought about any of that, because no one thought about much beyond showing up.

Let alone
* What we do if someone (or a lot of someones) get(s) arrested
* What we do if someone gets injured
* What we do if someone gets shot
* What we do if shooting breaks out all over, and it goes pear-shaped

Failure to plan is planning to fail.
That's why Monday was a fail before it ever happened.

And you have to have another plan (or five) for what happens when it switches from a war of words to an actual war (like it will), because you won't propaganda your way to victory either, by itself. And you need to tell that truth to every Swinging Richard who shows up, until they can repeat it from memory. At some point, you'd better be ready to pick a fight.

11) You're going to have to get to the point where they either flee before your actual hardass forces, or get to where you shoot m*****f*****s in the face, and string the survivors up to lampposts in droves.

(Option Three is, you're getting loaded into boxcars. I would counsel avoiding that.)

Which leads to everything you need to know from here on out:

12) Anything that doesn't clearly and directly help you do #11 is a waste of time, energy, resources, and everything else you need to win. And you have none of them in such abundance that you can afford to squander them, for even a moment.


That's the topic.
Flame away on it. If you can.

Want MOAR! good ideas?
Go here. Read this.

Just Another Day On The Job: Reality Edition

h/t Daily Timewaster

If this picture isn't in the front hall of the Aviation Boatswain's Mate "A" School HQ, it's criminal.

That right there is some righteous deck rigging.

You may be good, but are you chaining-a-squadron-of-fighters-down-to-withstand-40°-rolls-in-a-typhoon good?



(To be fair to today's Absolutely Fabulous Rainbow Navy, this was back when not running into everything else afloat was seen as par for the Bridge Officer's & Watchstander's course 24/7/365, rather than something to earn you an efficiency "E" on the superstructure. And they didn't have any 85# female ABs. So don't feel bad about yourselves. You've been hobbled by institutional stupidity. But get out before there's a shooting war, I beseech you.)

Brother, Can You Spare A Dime?

h/t WRSA

Gerard VanderLuen, on no few occasions, has kindly picked up and repeated my scribblings here on his own blog over the past few years, for which kindness I am grateful.

He is now currently a refugee in his 104-year-old mother's apartment, having lost house, home, and all his worldly goods and chattels in one of the CA wildfires near Chico, about 600 miles closer to Oregon than we are here. He got out with his car, a cat, and the clothes on his back, and that's about it.

He is one of the good guys, and in his current situation, I imagine anything you could send to his tip jar would be far more of a boon to him now that whatever it costs you.

Consider what you might be able to do, and help a brother out.

h/t Daily Timewaster
Video of people in Paradise evacuating with no notice:

Just So You Know How High The Bar Is

h/t Free North Carolina

Old guys who rate: Mad props.

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.

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.

Agitate

 

In a nation where everything you do that is wise, intelligent, and sensible runs contrary to the dominant suicidal moron culture, your job is to agitate. If they push, you push back, twice as hard. And then maybe polish them off with a throat punch and a kick to the groin, just to leave them a little something extra to remember you by until next time.

Like puppies making puddles and a rolled up paper, it's the simplest and most effective means of instructing them to stop doing that.

A grain of sand is what irritates an oyster for years into making a pearl. If you want a pearl-laden society - instead of the current sh*t sandwich on the menu for lunch, every day, endlessly - you're going to have to be the pain in the ...oyster, irritating the hell out of them every waking hour, and forcing them to do something that produces something valuable, rather than them just sliding around the bowl and into the septic system, which costs them nothing, and is their default product left to their own devices.

Because, exactly like every spree shooter for going back decades and centuries, and damned near every assassin, the Leftard Tantrum Machine produces broken people with no impulse control, and the minute they get the merest sliver of power, whether it's a seat in office, a civil service job with a clipboard, or a loaded weapon, just can't help themselves from crapping in the punchbowl, trying to micromanage your life, or going out and shooting a prince, a pope, or a president, or if nothing better presents itself, a schoolyard full of kids.

That's what they do, because they are, at root, defective people, who never learned to think because it's too hard, never learned to not throw a tantrum because they never got the ass-whipping that breaks that cycle, and now are reaching the tipping point, where they're nearly half of society, all lovingly raised by molly-coddling mommies and no fathers, untutored, unspanked, and who spent their entire lifetime accumulating participation trophies for showing up, and having their dirty diapers lovingly hung on the refrigerator as if they were masterpieces by Rembrandt.

Every time you see something in society that's five-star stupid, unworkable, and headed over the brink of disaster, this is the fundament from which it has sprung, without fail. Every sociopathology in modern Western society traces back to nothing more complicated than this, run amok without hindrance, for years into decades, and straining to make it to centuries, before the whole thing melts down, and we as a race of humans start from near scratch. Again.

The Flood, the Tower of Babel, the Fall of the Roman Empire, and now the current situation, and they and every smaller collapse, noted by historians like the Durants, all revisit the same rise-growth-collapse cycle, for shorter or longer periods, with lesser or greater consequences, and for longer and shorter periods.

Throwing up every barricade, and monkey-wrenching that ceaseless stupidity from society's left side of the bell curve is what those of us over on the brighter side have to do. No one person built the pyramids, and you won't either. But you can, and must, do everything in your power to stop the forces of Stupid at every opportunity, small and large.

Being the most magnificent PITA contrary to Stupid is your birthright. If you're an American reading this, it's in your DNA. There is no higher calling that you can be about 24/7/365, short of the point at which the sides start to exchange actual gunfire. And there's nothing magical in the water here that's going to prevent things getting to that point; if you're very fortunate, you may stave it off for another generation here, and pass the torch to the next generation. If not, every day you're not in a pitched battle is, as another blogger has noted, "another day you get to sharpen your tomahawk".

Teach your children. Harder still, be an example to them. Reason with those who may be reached, and will listen. Educate the foolish, the stupid, the ones too lazy and late to the party. It's a zero-sum: every person you bring to our side is one less body you might have to oppose more forcefully if things go to hell. Thwart the terminally suicidally stupid at every opportunity. And don't be shy about throwing every elbow, punching every nose, and gouging every eye you have to, in the process. Bullies only learn when they see their own blood, and feel the pain of their own punched nose.

The Cluebat Of Wisdom will educate you.

You are the rugby player at the bottom of the scrum. There is no referee able to see, and no Marquis of Queensbury rules in a pig pile.

All that matters is who has the ball when the pile is untangled.

Sharpen your elbows, and get busy.
The cavalry isn't coming.
It's you.
You are Breitbart.
You are Sabo.

TINVOWOOT.
Trump is not our savior, nor was he elected as such.
He was elected to be our weapon.

John has a long moustache.
Give 'em hell.

Dividends

Don't just "spend" your time this weekend.
Invest it.

Work some recreation in, by all means.
But "prepare" is a verb.

Do what's needed to ensure that you're better at something worthwhile come Monday morning than you were on Friday afternoon.

The time to improve your skills and capabilities is not the moment when you wish you'd already done it long ago. And disasters large and small don't make appointments.

Since ever.

But...WHY Is The Rum Gone?

The last post got some wide notice (my thanks for the link-love), and one private query:
Why focus on soft tactics?

Let me explain it thusly:
According to the specialists employed with your tax dollars in how to defend or subvert a given political system, there are some 17 levels of preparation involved before you get to "sporty".
Slitting throats and blowing shit up are at Level 16.

You, and anyone you've ever heard of, are no farther developed than Level 3.
Cogitate on that.

And bear in mind that unlike anthropogenic globull warming, Dunning-Kruger is a real thing.

See below:

Building A Resistance Movement. (This embiggens).

This wisdom is excerpted cheerfully from a little book on doctrinal subversion that many of you have heard of, and some of you have studied, in a hands-on sort of way.
It's known colloquially as The Bible, and officially as FM 3-05.201 Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Operations, April 2003.

You should look it up.
In fact, you should probably download that pdf, print it out, and spend some goodly time dedicated to absorbing the wisdom therein, both for the intellectual exercise, and because there may be a practical exam at some point.

But despite any interest in leveling up, you're not ready for that, I'm not ready for that, nobody you know of is ready for that, and the proof is right there above, before your lying eyes. The fourteen layers of foundation missing between now and then are what everyone who imagines otherwise is missing.

That lack is the sort of thing that gets you nonsense like Bunker Hill, Harper's Ferry, and the First Battle Of Bull Run.

It gets your ass handed to you, wastes a lot of scarce manpower and material (not to mention goodwill), while gaining you ridicule, doubt, and disdain from exactly the people you'll need at Level 5. Recall, please, for the historically impaired, that without France, we'd be celebrating the Queen's Birthday, and not the Fourth Of July, and that without Britain and France's support, the South would be just another Lost Cause. (Oops, too late.)

This is the same reason Maduro and socialismo are still kicking Venezuela's ass; until they get their opposition sh*t in one bag, no one is going to send them the help they need to send the commies packing, in a hanging-from-streetlamps sort of way. Mind you, it should happen, and probably will, but they're going to have to get to that point before anyone will risk the shrieking condemnation for helping them help themselves. Or, they'll just wait until everyone's too weak from lack of food, and eventually people will die, and something better may spring up indigenously - in a generation or two. Or, not. (cf: Norkistan.)

So, a propaganda war is what you're in for (and what you've been in since at least 1929, whether you knew it or not).

Hence the call to finally wake up and smell the coffee. And the covfefe, for that matter.
The beauty is, there's some miniscule chance to affect things, even yet. Not by purely voting at the bastards, certainly,

but every thumb you can put on the scale - and in the Left's eyes, both figuratively and literally, when opportunity presents itself - before things degrade to open conflict is to your advantage. Undermine the hell out of anything you can on the Leftard side, especially while it's easy and cheap, let alone not something that'll get your head in a noose, right? It's helpful, it's a zero-sum (every one of them you convert, or simply demoralize, is one less you have to fight), and hell, it's FUN.

Learn lessons from history: starve the beast. The US Cavalry was purely ancillary with our Indian problem in securing the frontier. The business-end was the hunting out of the buffalo. You could look it up. So if you find the Leftards' buffalo herds, and turn them into rugs and burgers, you'll have a much more harmonious outcome.

By the by, there may never be any Great Cataclysm. Or, it may not happen in your entire lifetime. But how long and how gradual the slide into oblivion is may very well depend on how vigorously you kick them in the teeth as the trolls of collectivism and anarchy try to climb over the walls.

Life thus far hasn't been about shooting anyone in this country, by and large for nearly two centuries. But there have always been one helluva lot of hippies out there. And heaven knows, they aren't going to punch themselves.

Hence the exhortation to get busy.
Be happy in your work.

This, This, THIS:

1:20:20ff

From Bill Whittle's The Stratosphere Lounge this past week:

We conservatives always thought that tyranny was going to come to us through the government, and therefore we're heavily armed with weapons. And that's not where it's coming from; these people are afraid of paring knives.
They're not coming after us with guns, they're not coming after us with tanks, and they're not coming after us by taking over the government. The defenses that we've established on those lines are overwhelming. They're unassailable defenses; the first amendment essentially still is unassailable, and so is the right to keep and bear arms, and so on.
But in any event, we prepared ourselves so well against invasion from that quarter that they simply decided it was pointless to attack there, so they attacked someplace else. And the censorship that they want is not being enforced by the government, and it's not being backed up by tanks or soldiers with guns; the government's not censoring anything we do.
The censorship that they're looking for, and the control of people's thoughts and minds is accomplished by social opprobrium. It's accomplished by shaming people, and not just shaming them, by ruining their lives in the many ways that they know how to. The way they ruined the lives of the person who decided he didn't want to deliver a cake to a gay wedding: that is not allowed, and so he must be destroyed.
... 

So, if the Left doesn't have guns - and they don't; and if they don't have direct government suppression - and they don't; then how have they achieved everything they've achieved, how have they kept us so silenced?
The only power that the Left has - and it's enormous power - the only power that the Left has is the power that you give them yourself: it's the power of social proof.
Social proof and peer pressure is the most powerful motivator in human psychology. Every single one of us out there has things we know to be true - such as certain countries in the world being complete shitholes - and we won't say them, and we won't say them because we know that what will happen to us will be so damning that we just don't want to go through with it.
We also know it doesn't mean physical danger, at least in most cases. ...It's not that we fear physical repercussions, we fear the moral repercussions of what the Left can marshal. But when you get right down to it, really where the rubber meets the road, we do what the Left wants to us to do, because we allow them the power of telling other people who we are.
We think that's more important than what we believe. That's why we don't say what we want to say, that's why we don't speak our minds, why no one is allowed to speak the truth anymore.

A truism is that generals and warriors are always gearing up for the last war.
That's why the constant drumbeat of a coming Revolution, or Civil War, or October Revolution, ad infinitum, ad nauseum, is so much childish magical thinking.
Yes, sh*t may hit the fan; some ways are more likely than others.
But it isn't going to unroll exactly, nor even mostly, like it did back when(ever), and you aren't going to zip over the next Alamo with an AC-130 and mow down the hordes with your air-assault miniguns and change the tides of history.
Put down the bong.

Look, I likes me some guns - I do - and the fact that I have a personal armory that could overthrow some banana republics for real is proof of that. I don't spend a lot of time talking about guns, not because I don't like them, or I think they're not important, because I do, and they are, and it's not because it don't know a helluva lot more than the average person about them, because I do. I've sold them retail and wholesale, carried them professionally and casually, and competed with them frequently, as well as do regular practice. There are also plenty of people who geek out about them to the extreme, and know a helluva lot more than me, and that's their patch. I'm fine with that. I stack up at about the bottom of the top third, versus the whole population, which means two chances out of three I'm smarter than you about something, and one chance out of three your knowledge would bury me. Out of 300M people hereabouts. And the people in the top of the top third, who eat, sleep, live and breathe guns are the go-to guys who you should be reading and listening to, not me, most times, on that subject. This is absolutely a pro-2A site, but it's not about that.

Because as Whittle noted, guns aren't where things are at, nor where it's been, and probably not where it's going to be. (Not absolutely won't be ever, which is why prudent people prepare for that contingency, yet without focusing on it exclusively.)

The point of the lesson, and the excerpted transcript from the above video, is that the Right has overwhelmingly focused on re-fighting the Civil War/Revolution/Zomb-pocalypse to the utter exclusion of virtually everything else in culture, and you've had your asses kicked in every other way for 70 years because of that.

Don't believe me? How many tacticool gun training gurus are there, vs. how many people are out there teaching you how to use Photoshop, Imgur, etc. as weaponized subversion of the Leftard Evil Empire? Would that be roughly 5000 to 0?? The prosecution rests.

(YUUUUUGE Hint To The Right and Alt-Right: Stop doing solely conservative speech- and love-fest Woodstocks, and start getting the meme-makers, artists, speakers, writers, etc. to start teaching people weaponized art and media Right-wing subversion. That's the point where you stop being the History Channel, and become the actual Green Berets. The History Channel never won a war. Get a fucking cluebat upside the head, geniuses.)

You decided government was a lost cause, and surrendered them fifty years from FDR to Reagan. And then walked away for nearly another thirty years after that.
You decided Hollyweird was subversive, so you ignored movies.
You decided television was idiocy, so you unplugged it.
You decided universities were ridiculous, so you ignored academia.
You decided society was irredeemable, so you've gone - or plan to - off into the hills. 
And on, and on, and on, until you've completely disconnected from the culture, to the point that you can't relate to half the country, and are teetering on the brink of losing the entire cultural enterprise, forever, and precipitating either a conflagration of biblical proportions, or else aping Eurostan's interminable slide into suicidal oblivion and subsummation. Somehow, you think you're going to be the special elephant that the onslaught of carnivorous ants won't strip to the bone. 

Well-played; how has that worked out for you?

The second point is that the enormous war you're gearing up for, while it may still happen, is unlikely because the Left is still getting what it wants without firing a shot because by the time you're going to be ready to return fire, you'll already be surrounded, cut off, and irrelevant, like Japanese soldiers on by-passed islands, running around a jungle in solitary pursuit of winning a war that was over decades before you found out about it.

Great jumping Jehoshaphat, that was comedy parody gold by 1965 on Gilligan's Island, and you want to adopt it as a strategy manual.

What I'd humbly suggest, is that just for the helluvit, you fight back right effing NOW.

You won't need your gun safe, but - and this will be hard for a lot of people - you'll need to use your brains.

Push. Back.
More. Bigger. Faster.
AND TWICE AS HARD.

Twice as hard.

We don't need nor want the Judean People's Front Crack Suicide Squad to make a desperate futile gesture, we don't need people blowing shit up or slitting throats. (Yet.) All that does is precipitate the war that wipes you out, after turning the squishy middle firmly against you, just like every time in history.

In this battle, people like Sabo, the Earl of Taint, the People's Cube, Stilton Jarlsberger, Chris Muir and Dianny are worth a full division apiece. The weapons are withering sarcasm, ridicule, opprobrium, disdain, and gut-quivering laughter. Photoshop, Imgur, Mememaker, manga, even stick figures will cut it.

"Man is the only animal that blushes. Or needs to." - Mark Twain

You don't have to be good, as much as productive; keep churning and throwing it on the wall until something sticks.
Perhaps even literally.

And not on friendly businesses and undecideds' property. Try putting it on the walls of a decidedly opposition target. Make them spend their own money to hire security guards, repaint walls, and so on. It's not so funny when the shoe's on the other foot.

Or pay to have a mural painted in their faces, right across the street.

 

How about this one across from the NYTimes, or CNN?

If that's too big, go small. Like wall art and bumperstickers. Post an essay on a bulletin board. Slap a picture up inside the stall doors of the porcelain thinking room. At a liberal bastion. Bonus points for making Chuck Schumer/Nancy Pelosi/George Soros/Anderson Cooper urinal targets, and scattering them around town. Getting the idea yet?

When the dominant culture is antithetical to liberty, your job is to be subversive, and flip the culture.

Write, draw, cut and paste, caption. Whatever it takes, whatever you've got.
If you can't make it, learn how. (I did.)
If you're not witty enough, disseminate it. Those sites are legion. Every link helps.
If you're too lazy for that, support it. Throw 'em a buck, or more.
(And if you're too lazy and cheap for even that, go fuck yourself. Sideways, with a rusty chainsaw.)
And every time you see a film, a TV show, read a book, or see some art that supports your values and worldview, return the favor: support the hell out of it. Doubly so if the profits accrue directly to our side, instead of subsidizing the next ten Leftard forays to undermine society.

"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain." - John Adams

The reason Trump - a weapon, not a cure - scares the living sh*t out of the other side is because he doesn't give a rusty fuck what the other side thinks of him, rabbit punches the sh*t out of them on their own media, and he's immune to their disdain and catcalling. He's grabbing them by the p*ssy, and they let him. According to the prophecy.

Give the Left the finger, every day, in your own head, and then slip them the wiener of pushback where it hurts, and without any lube. Embarrass them in public, and rub their noses in it, until they're bloody with your efforts. It's the only way a bully is broken and defanged.

THAT is your mission, every day, forever. Beat 'em like a rented mule.
Not pussing out. Not running and hiding. Not yet.
Start bailing out the boat, instead of stocking the liferaft and jumping inside, waiting for the ship to sink. (And you @$$holes drilling holes in the bottom can guess what's coming to you, sooner or later.)

"If you will not fight for right when you can easily win without blood shed; if you will not fight when your victory is sure and not too costly; you may come to the moment when you will have to fight with all the odds against you and only a precarious chance of survival. There may even be a worse case. You may have to fight when there is no hope of victory, because it is better to perish than to live as slaves.” - Winston Churchill

You have the Second Amendment to protect the First. The more you unload with the First Amendment, the less likely it is you'll need recourse to do so with the Second.
(Funny how that works, i'n'it?)

Then you can enjoy your guns by taking them out for practice, and teaching your friends and neighbors how to shoot, instead of just hording them up for the Rise of the Terminators. When the Left has to brave a shitstorm of ridicule every time they open their fetid yawps, you're getting it right.

The Left lost the election. Then they've thrown everything they could at Trump the past year, and he's crushed them. And laughs and mocks at their pathetic attempts.
Whether we're talking Vince Lombardi or George Patton, the strategy is the same:
you use attacks from the air to create opportunities on the ground.
President Trump has done the air strikes.
So now, get yourselves in gear. Stop spectating and get in the game.
Bring them the pain. Run up the score.