Nearly everybody of note (and any number of un-notables) seem to want to bat around the concept of "leaderless resistance" and its pros and cons like a cat at Christmas with a wad of wrapping paper.
Well, spiffy, blogfodder for me, yay, and no muscle strain involved.
Problems?
1) There ain't no leader.
2) There ain't no army.
3) There ain't no Rebel Alliance with an air force and a secret base squirreled away anywhere, or most of us would have run away to join that circus long since.
None of this should come as a surprise to anyone reasonably well-informed.
But the deal-breaker is
4) There ain't no Resistance.
Because, there isn't.
There's a trail of people ranging from the mildly amused to the frothingly malcontented who are all opposed to what passes for governance in these here United States. The vast majority can't and won't be gathered into anything larger than what would constitute a big rush at Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon.
Most of the few who'd actually show up couldn't pass muster at the recruiter's office, even were they inclined, and many of those because they already did so, and so long ago as to be time out of mind.
And what that leaves is nothing but a mob and a rabble, which is as far from a resistance as amoeba are from apes, even if we assume Darwin got it mostly right.
So, long before we get to a Rebel Alliance trying to reinstate the Old Republic, it would probably be helpful to have some actual rebels.
We aren't going to have those anytime soon, and here's why:
Americans are not "joiners", until push comes to shove comes to somebody starts shooting at somebody else, and then some.
Historical precedents?
The Declaration of Independence languished in Congress for more than a year after Lexington and Concord.
John Brown and his abolitionist fanatics were jeered by the bulk of the nation, not just even, but especially in the north, as a bunch of bomb-throwing lunatics. He was hung in short order without so much as a burp or hiccup from society. Fort Sumter was another matter.
It took Wilson the better part of three years of chivvying and multiple U-boat attacks, and Roosevelt two years, to get the US into separate World Wars, and even FDR had to wait until the Japanese helpfully sneak-attacked us. But the next day, the lines at the recruiters' offices were a mile long.
QED.
So we have a long and strong tradition, and not entirely unreasonable, to wait until someone starts shooting at us before anybody is inclined to reach for the rifles. This separates us from most of Europe, and all of Africa and Central and South America, and it's not really a bad thing.
So forget a leaderless resistance, or a led resistance, until you've first gotten Darth and his Evil Empire to square off against, unless you want to look like the 21st century equivalent of John Brown and his hapless bunch of nutballs. (Of which, even a casual tour of the interwebz will attest, there is currently no shortage. And most of them truthfully are people you wouldn't even speak to in person, and if you had the unfortunate luck to greet, would induce you to bathe afterwards, after securely bolting your doors.)
What does that leave?
Well, 21st century life has left us severely short of stevedores and farm and ranch hands of sturdy build and long hours of physical labor since youth. Which, once again, anyone who's ever run a platoon of recruits would confirm.
So the most important thing anyone can actually do, and which ups the stakes from internet bravado to actual get-off-your-ass commitment, is undertake the same regimen beloved of drill instructors since time immemorial:
> Go do PT.
Not pilates, or yoga, or tofu wrestling and coffee swizzling at the Bean and Bonehead Cafe.
Get off your ass, work on pull-ups, push-ups, and sit-ups, until you approach and/or exceed military-grade levels of performance (available any number of places online).
Then do at least a Daily Seven (look it up if you're unfamiliar!) of calisthenics as a warm up, and proceed to run, increasing distance and endurance, until you meet or exceed the same levels as the military ground forces expect.
> Get at least a decent rifle (first!) and a decent pistol, and learn to shoot both proficiently.
And not just at paper targets while you stand stock-still at rock-throwing range.
> Start hiking, and up the distance and weight carried, until you can carry say 60# for 20 miles in a day.
Boot camp takes sedentary videogamers and turns them into hardcore military animals by instilling physical fitness, rapid obedience to orders, and practical marksmanship into them, at which point they are barely qualified to begin to learn how to be part of an army, or the equivalent.
If any or all of that is beyond your means, will, or ability, then you've already self-selected yourself out of the pointy end of any resistance anywhere anytime.
Even if you do accomplish it, you may only end up more physically fit, and able to defend yourself from the dregs of society, which is no mean improvement in your status. But it isn't a green beret either. You undertake the preparation in the knowledge that events may transpire such that your further services are never required. O happy day.
And failing to do that means you also flunk the "rapid obedience to orders" component, in this case the order of common sense in making basic preparations, and which skill no one can inspire on the internet unless Jedi mind tricks would also work on you.
Those who attempt this, and have the will but not the ability, have thus selected themselves down from the pointy end, to a lower level of the pyramid, into the ranks of what John Mosby calls on his mountainguerrilla blog, the support or Auxilliary levels.
But if you aren't motivated to do something beyond banging on your keyboards, you're just part of the "chattering class", of which there is no shortage, and frequently little utility once things get sporty.
Less than one person in one hundred (or, probably, a thousand) will make or is making any attempt to achieve even such a basic level of personal preparation as basic physical and martial prowess coupled with the ability to take a hike.
Hence the title of this post, and the observation that the first ingredient for a salad is the unstated necessity to begin by planting a garden.
Go plant that particular Liberty Garden, or shaddup already.
Saturday, September 14, 2013
Thursday, September 12, 2013
9/12 Thoughts
I'm not a day late on this. I don't have any 9/11 thoughts. 9/11/01 was twelve years ago. The victims and perpetrators, like Generalissimo Francisco Franco, are still dead. The man who planned and orchestrated the attack is dead. (Huzzah, Navy SeALs!) So are several successive generations of Al Queda's second tier, and countless thousands of jihadi wannabes, courtesy of the finest men and women serving in any military at any time in history. Because after watching mere office workers step off the 90th floor into Oblivion, how could anyone sane or intelligent (which eliminates jihadis on both counts) not know with utter certainty that we were going to deliver a smackdown of biblical proportions, because America?!?
But that's the past.
My thoughts turn to 9/12, and dealing with right here, right now. This whole thing went all pear-shaped the moment we started restricting our civil liberties here, instead of blowing the imaginary civil liberties of terrorists there to Mars on a cloud of shrapnel and nitrocellulose.
In no particular order:
Dear President Assclown: Just stop. Go sit down. Dubbya, love him or hate him, spent months building a coalition, and making the case worldwide for more months before committing a single troop to harm's way. Of course, unlike you, he actually served, so golfing and doing reefers before this bong-hit decision making wasn't the option it apparently is in the White House today. When you finish the box of cupcakes and three bags of potato chips, c'mon back to Earth, and sit your ass down. And hang up the phone. 87% of your own "supporters" know you've fallen on your head on this thing. Step away from the red phone, before you get a blister from thinking too hard. If you hadn't mostly sacked everyone above brigadier who'd tell you that your crack-smoking fantasies about how we go to war won't work here, they'd all stand up and tell you the same thing, and a good bit more tactfully, but as you've shown no sign of intelligence thus far, let alone listening to criticism, in your entire life, I feel I'm on pretty safe territory here, as the odds of you reading this are only slightly lower than the odds of you being able to comprehend it in the first place. But just to cover the bases, I say it again: step away from the military option. Guns are for grown-ups, and you're hopelessly under qualified on that score.
Abandon forever the asstardian idea from Colon Powell (that's not a typo, he must've been talking out his back end) of "You break it, you bought it". That's fine for antique shops, but retarded foolishness in international affairs. Which folly has been amply demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to date.
It's time to return to our traditional response: "If we break it, you damned sure had it coming, and we're going to keep on breaking it until you jackholes stay in your little effing swamp and leave us the hell alone. And if high explosives don't make the point, we can start dealing cards measured in kilotons and megatons. Ask Japan how that works with fanatics who don't understand the concept of unconditional surrender. Tell 'em Harry Truman sent you."
Let's just call that the Aesop Get Off My Lawn Doctrine of American Geopolitics.
And we let Iran know their clock runs out in 24 hours, then we send the bombers every day until they surrender.
If terrorists shoot an American, we should bomb their village into powder. If they hijack a plane, we should erase their home country's airport, and forbid its reconstruction indefinitely. If they attack a ship, we seize their fleet of oil tankers. They get hissy and kill people over cartoons of their prophet, we level Mecca. That is how you break bad habits from childish thugs with access to adult toys. When the countries who harbor them and give them aid live in mortal fear that anyone remotely connected to them is going to bring the entire USAF down around their heads in the morning, to the point that they bring us a platter of heads of the guilty if an American tourist gets so much as a stubbed toe or an undercooked steak, we can focus on more important things. I'm betting they run out of villages and airports and oil tankers long before we need to go to three shifts a day at the Amalgamated Ordnance Factory, but either way, I'm willing to risk it to send that message. You've reached our saturation point, so either straighten up and mind your own business, or else we're dusting off plans for your country after we eradicate you from it and re-introduce endangered species to graze over your bones and rubble. Simple, clear, and unambiguous.
Disband the TSA, and break up DHS into its constituent pieces, minus DHS.
We don't need the reichssicherheitshauptamt here, and never did. Those fat bozos couldn't find their asses with both hands, a map, and a rear-view mirror, and all they've done is molest millions, irradiate millions more, and never do anything but terrorize law-abiding citizens, rape the Constitution, loot luggage, sleep on the job, and generally fuck things up seven ways to Sunday. We don't need them; we have the IRS and the US Postal Service for that, and we can't afford the pensions, even if all the president's cronies and illegal alien relatives are currently qualified for the TSA accelerated management program.
It's time for Church-style hearings on the NSA.
Frank Church gutted and crippled the CIA in the mid-70s, just in time to handicap us from seeing the tsunami shift coming in Iran, and totally miss the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
The NSA, nominally about keeping us safe from foreign threats, has instead turned their energies on the much easier target of ass-raping the Bill of Rights, and creating 1984 on steroids among harmless Americans. Just because Hopey Dopey is the incompetent jacktard of all-time as an Affirmative Action President, doesn't mean one of the next few screwballs won't be Stalin or Napoleon. So if ever an agency needed to be gut-shot, filleted, and fenestrated from a twelfth-floor window, it's the mostly secret leviathan at Fort Meade.
And the first senator who calls for these hearings, and offers blanket amnesty to Snowden, is the front-runner in 2016.
When the NSA puts their energy into spying solely on foreign enemies once again, and none into their current Orwellian nightmare program of hometeam civilian snooping, maybe they can be safely turned loose, provided they have actual adult supervision.
Reagan, the consummate D.C. outsider, knew this 35 years ago: government isn't the solution to anything (except unbridled freedom and prosperity, both of which it consumes like a grizzly on crack), government is the problem.
We need to kill Obamacare, wean down Social Security and Medicare, and gut entitlements before they suck the last drop of life out of this economy. If we don't, it's already past too late, and the only question will be the severity of the Depression we embark upon when the music stops, and there aren't any chairs for anyone in this rigged Ponzi scheme of an economy.
Our Founders recognized that political and economic freedom go hand in hand, so it's no wonder Obama and his burrowing socialist would-be overlords have done everything both incompetence and malice could achieve in order to undercut, undermine, and hamstring our economic health.
Including throw open the floodgates to tens of millions of illegals. Slamming that door once and for all, on both security and economic grounds, and taking a pause on legal immigration, except for those with actual English-speaking ability, documented higher education sufficient to establish a weekly income, and a burning desire for life as a free American, for about the next 50 years. That'll give the hordes of faux-indigenous peasantry time to either return home to their former Third World paradises, or assimilate to the dominant American culture and let their children take a crack at learning English and making a successful life, rather than jacking it at the point of either their knives or Uncle Sam's gun from those who've figured out how to earn a decent living following the rules.
If we hack away the nonsense that's strangling this country, the rebirth of freedom would be like a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. If we don't, it's going to be like the launch of the shuttle Challenger, and we're all inside the cockpit.
And on that note, a free people are a restless people, and a questing people. When I was but a small boy, we not only conquered space, we kicked its ass, early, and under-budget. And we haven't equalled that feat in 44 years, nor even come close, which has been more than a peripheral reason for the malaise that socialism inflicts every time it's tried.
So it's time to stop resting on the laurels earned by men now nearly all dead, and earn some of our own by people not even yet selected for the next missions. It's time we got the bureaucrats out of space exploration, and brought back the engineer-dreamers, and started exploring the rest of our solar system and the rest of the universe, just because we can.
And anyone who can't understand that about America needs to move to a hut in the Third World rainforest, weave some flip flops out of palm fronds, and live on a diet of grubs and tofu cakes.
Our people are too great to be contained by a stagnant prosperity, little dreams, and big government, they need the freedom that comes from small government, booming prosperity, and huge dreams. We aren't built for anything less, and we demand nothing more.
But that's the past.
My thoughts turn to 9/12, and dealing with right here, right now. This whole thing went all pear-shaped the moment we started restricting our civil liberties here, instead of blowing the imaginary civil liberties of terrorists there to Mars on a cloud of shrapnel and nitrocellulose.
In no particular order:
Dear President Assclown: Just stop. Go sit down. Dubbya, love him or hate him, spent months building a coalition, and making the case worldwide for more months before committing a single troop to harm's way. Of course, unlike you, he actually served, so golfing and doing reefers before this bong-hit decision making wasn't the option it apparently is in the White House today. When you finish the box of cupcakes and three bags of potato chips, c'mon back to Earth, and sit your ass down. And hang up the phone. 87% of your own "supporters" know you've fallen on your head on this thing. Step away from the red phone, before you get a blister from thinking too hard. If you hadn't mostly sacked everyone above brigadier who'd tell you that your crack-smoking fantasies about how we go to war won't work here, they'd all stand up and tell you the same thing, and a good bit more tactfully, but as you've shown no sign of intelligence thus far, let alone listening to criticism, in your entire life, I feel I'm on pretty safe territory here, as the odds of you reading this are only slightly lower than the odds of you being able to comprehend it in the first place. But just to cover the bases, I say it again: step away from the military option. Guns are for grown-ups, and you're hopelessly under qualified on that score.
Abandon forever the asstardian idea from Colon Powell (that's not a typo, he must've been talking out his back end) of "You break it, you bought it". That's fine for antique shops, but retarded foolishness in international affairs. Which folly has been amply demonstrated in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya, to date.
It's time to return to our traditional response: "If we break it, you damned sure had it coming, and we're going to keep on breaking it until you jackholes stay in your little effing swamp and leave us the hell alone. And if high explosives don't make the point, we can start dealing cards measured in kilotons and megatons. Ask Japan how that works with fanatics who don't understand the concept of unconditional surrender. Tell 'em Harry Truman sent you."
Let's just call that the Aesop Get Off My Lawn Doctrine of American Geopolitics.
And we let Iran know their clock runs out in 24 hours, then we send the bombers every day until they surrender.
If terrorists shoot an American, we should bomb their village into powder. If they hijack a plane, we should erase their home country's airport, and forbid its reconstruction indefinitely. If they attack a ship, we seize their fleet of oil tankers. They get hissy and kill people over cartoons of their prophet, we level Mecca. That is how you break bad habits from childish thugs with access to adult toys. When the countries who harbor them and give them aid live in mortal fear that anyone remotely connected to them is going to bring the entire USAF down around their heads in the morning, to the point that they bring us a platter of heads of the guilty if an American tourist gets so much as a stubbed toe or an undercooked steak, we can focus on more important things. I'm betting they run out of villages and airports and oil tankers long before we need to go to three shifts a day at the Amalgamated Ordnance Factory, but either way, I'm willing to risk it to send that message. You've reached our saturation point, so either straighten up and mind your own business, or else we're dusting off plans for your country after we eradicate you from it and re-introduce endangered species to graze over your bones and rubble. Simple, clear, and unambiguous.
Disband the TSA, and break up DHS into its constituent pieces, minus DHS.
We don't need the reichssicherheitshauptamt here, and never did. Those fat bozos couldn't find their asses with both hands, a map, and a rear-view mirror, and all they've done is molest millions, irradiate millions more, and never do anything but terrorize law-abiding citizens, rape the Constitution, loot luggage, sleep on the job, and generally fuck things up seven ways to Sunday. We don't need them; we have the IRS and the US Postal Service for that, and we can't afford the pensions, even if all the president's cronies and illegal alien relatives are currently qualified for the TSA accelerated management program.
It's time for Church-style hearings on the NSA.
Frank Church gutted and crippled the CIA in the mid-70s, just in time to handicap us from seeing the tsunami shift coming in Iran, and totally miss the collapse of the former Soviet Union.
The NSA, nominally about keeping us safe from foreign threats, has instead turned their energies on the much easier target of ass-raping the Bill of Rights, and creating 1984 on steroids among harmless Americans. Just because Hopey Dopey is the incompetent jacktard of all-time as an Affirmative Action President, doesn't mean one of the next few screwballs won't be Stalin or Napoleon. So if ever an agency needed to be gut-shot, filleted, and fenestrated from a twelfth-floor window, it's the mostly secret leviathan at Fort Meade.
And the first senator who calls for these hearings, and offers blanket amnesty to Snowden, is the front-runner in 2016.
When the NSA puts their energy into spying solely on foreign enemies once again, and none into their current Orwellian nightmare program of hometeam civilian snooping, maybe they can be safely turned loose, provided they have actual adult supervision.
Reagan, the consummate D.C. outsider, knew this 35 years ago: government isn't the solution to anything (except unbridled freedom and prosperity, both of which it consumes like a grizzly on crack), government is the problem.
We need to kill Obamacare, wean down Social Security and Medicare, and gut entitlements before they suck the last drop of life out of this economy. If we don't, it's already past too late, and the only question will be the severity of the Depression we embark upon when the music stops, and there aren't any chairs for anyone in this rigged Ponzi scheme of an economy.
Our Founders recognized that political and economic freedom go hand in hand, so it's no wonder Obama and his burrowing socialist would-be overlords have done everything both incompetence and malice could achieve in order to undercut, undermine, and hamstring our economic health.
Including throw open the floodgates to tens of millions of illegals. Slamming that door once and for all, on both security and economic grounds, and taking a pause on legal immigration, except for those with actual English-speaking ability, documented higher education sufficient to establish a weekly income, and a burning desire for life as a free American, for about the next 50 years. That'll give the hordes of faux-indigenous peasantry time to either return home to their former Third World paradises, or assimilate to the dominant American culture and let their children take a crack at learning English and making a successful life, rather than jacking it at the point of either their knives or Uncle Sam's gun from those who've figured out how to earn a decent living following the rules.
If we hack away the nonsense that's strangling this country, the rebirth of freedom would be like a rocket launch from Cape Kennedy. If we don't, it's going to be like the launch of the shuttle Challenger, and we're all inside the cockpit.
And on that note, a free people are a restless people, and a questing people. When I was but a small boy, we not only conquered space, we kicked its ass, early, and under-budget. And we haven't equalled that feat in 44 years, nor even come close, which has been more than a peripheral reason for the malaise that socialism inflicts every time it's tried.
So it's time to stop resting on the laurels earned by men now nearly all dead, and earn some of our own by people not even yet selected for the next missions. It's time we got the bureaucrats out of space exploration, and brought back the engineer-dreamers, and started exploring the rest of our solar system and the rest of the universe, just because we can.
And anyone who can't understand that about America needs to move to a hut in the Third World rainforest, weave some flip flops out of palm fronds, and live on a diet of grubs and tofu cakes.
Our people are too great to be contained by a stagnant prosperity, little dreams, and big government, they need the freedom that comes from small government, booming prosperity, and huge dreams. We aren't built for anything less, and we demand nothing more.
Monday, September 9, 2013
Of Shortages: Ammunition and Brains
Some of you, doubtless, have noted a dearth of .22LR ammunition.
It isn't just your imagination.
For dissemination far and wide:
The genius jacktards of the Greater Gun Conglomerate Community have independently and individually decided, some months back into the Great Ammo Debacle Part II, to simply cease outright and for unspecified future notice, all production of .22 rimfire ammunition.
Some observations, by the numbers:
1) Yes, it's their ball, and their game, but it was still asinine, stupid, shortsighted, and every other Dictionary of Synonyms reference for having their heads firmly clenched somewhere north of their diaphragm from an entry point south of the pelvic girdle.
2) It allowed them to focus on fulfilling with much greater rapidity the demand for centerfire ammunition of all types, where their own mark-ups are suitably higher per pound of product.
3) It totally overlooks the marketplace which, rightly or wrongly, uses the availability/dearth of .22LR as a keynote species of scarcity, concluding that if bread/milk/eggs/unleaded gas/.22LR is in short supply, even if 9mm is available by case lots, the zombies must nevertheless be right up the road shuffling hereward as we speak.
4) The predictable result of 1, 2, and 3 above being people with a 20-year supply of .22LR flinging themselves on any sighting of .22LR sufficient to achieve their goal of a 30-year supply of same, with all the alacrity of a DSC/Navy Cross candidate hurling himself on a hand grenade to save his buddies, or any past or current mayor of Washington D.C. hurling himself on a bag of crack rocks.
5) The utter yet predictable oblivion of The Powers That Be in the Greater Gun Conglomerate Community to the market forces resulting from 1, 2, 3, and 4 being that .22LR will continue in short supply until the manufacturers either catch up with demand on everything else (with currently only 3 years' backorders instead of the recently reported 10 years' worth), or decide that they are, in fact, creating and exacerbating this problem themselves, which epiphany will be notable by the sounds of a loud series of THWUNK-like sounds from somewhere behind the production panjandrums of the folks who run Federal, Remington, Winchester, CCI/Speer, etc., et al, and a notable pinkening of their complexions from increased oxygenation to their cranial spaces.
As such a remarkable confluence of them pulling their collective heads out simultaneously has never been observed before in the wild, I wouldn't expect to sight such Black Swan-like events anytime in the foreseeable future.
YMMV.
It isn't just your imagination.
For dissemination far and wide:
The genius jacktards of the Greater Gun Conglomerate Community have independently and individually decided, some months back into the Great Ammo Debacle Part II, to simply cease outright and for unspecified future notice, all production of .22 rimfire ammunition.
Some observations, by the numbers:
1) Yes, it's their ball, and their game, but it was still asinine, stupid, shortsighted, and every other Dictionary of Synonyms reference for having their heads firmly clenched somewhere north of their diaphragm from an entry point south of the pelvic girdle.
2) It allowed them to focus on fulfilling with much greater rapidity the demand for centerfire ammunition of all types, where their own mark-ups are suitably higher per pound of product.
3) It totally overlooks the marketplace which, rightly or wrongly, uses the availability/dearth of .22LR as a keynote species of scarcity, concluding that if bread/milk/eggs/unleaded gas/.22LR is in short supply, even if 9mm is available by case lots, the zombies must nevertheless be right up the road shuffling hereward as we speak.
4) The predictable result of 1, 2, and 3 above being people with a 20-year supply of .22LR flinging themselves on any sighting of .22LR sufficient to achieve their goal of a 30-year supply of same, with all the alacrity of a DSC/Navy Cross candidate hurling himself on a hand grenade to save his buddies, or any past or current mayor of Washington D.C. hurling himself on a bag of crack rocks.
5) The utter yet predictable oblivion of The Powers That Be in the Greater Gun Conglomerate Community to the market forces resulting from 1, 2, 3, and 4 being that .22LR will continue in short supply until the manufacturers either catch up with demand on everything else (with currently only 3 years' backorders instead of the recently reported 10 years' worth), or decide that they are, in fact, creating and exacerbating this problem themselves, which epiphany will be notable by the sounds of a loud series of THWUNK-like sounds from somewhere behind the production panjandrums of the folks who run Federal, Remington, Winchester, CCI/Speer, etc., et al, and a notable pinkening of their complexions from increased oxygenation to their cranial spaces.
As such a remarkable confluence of them pulling their collective heads out simultaneously has never been observed before in the wild, I wouldn't expect to sight such Black Swan-like events anytime in the foreseeable future.
YMMV.
Saturday, September 7, 2013
Good Judgement vs. The Other Kind
Recently both a friend's experience and a recent local news story have highlighted once again the dangers of driving while tired.
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. Lest I appear to be holier than thou, I offer the following cautionary tale.
After having finished approximately six weeks of desert maneuvers in the garden paradise that is Marine Corps Base 29 Palms, we returned to Camp Pendleton, and germane to this story, on a Thursday. The plan was to return to work on Friday, clean up everything, and then enjoy a long Memorial Day weekend. Like my charges, I was to clean up, get a good night's rest, and awake refreshed and ready to confront the one-day blitz of work before a well-earned 72-hour liberty.
I, however, was invincible and immortal, and had a fiancee only a short hour and a half north in the greater Los Angeles area, not to mention friends and family in my home of record therein. The fact that I'd been awake 22 hours a day for most of that six weeks meant nothing but that I could surely make the easy drive home, enjoy home cooking and a real bed, and return early and refreshed to supervise the de-crudding of trucks, howitzers, men, and personal gear, thus having my cake and eating it too.
Thus it was that I set out, attired in PT gear and flip-flops, for a journey in sunny SoCal pre-summer broad daylight, for a trip much shorter than the S.S. Minnow's "three-hour tour", and which, in realty, was to be about as eventful.
I headed northwards along a relatively lightly-trafficked stretch of I-5. My trusty steed, a vintage Ford Escort, hummed along doing 80 in the fast lane along the center divider, and just about at the halfway point, nearly adjacent to the I-5/I-405 split, nature took its course.
I was on a straightaway, trying to stay between the inevitable clots of traffic, in the empty stretch in between two herds of cars. And then, the Nap Monster tapped my sleep-deprived tender head from wide awake to out like a light.
Probably for only a split to at most a full second, whereupon I awoke, drifting gently but inexorably towards the only other vehicle anywhere around me, the old green pickup truck in lane #2. Being as young and stupid as any 25-year-old, my brain immediately commanded a full-on goggle-eyed spaz attack, and a panic stab of the brake before I hit the truck a few feet further along.
And now, Physics made an appearance, as the rear of the car made the decision to try and pass the front end, where the engine and drive train was located, the weight therein making it slow down more firmly that the lighter rear wheels.
Fully awake now and stone-cold brilliant, I deftly did exactly what one should do, having made at least two other mistakes already: I got off the brakes, and gently steered the wheel to the right, into the skid the rear end was attempting. And by cracky, it worked! Steve McQueen couldn't have done as well as I did in arresting the skid before it became catastrophic. But being less experienced than Steve, I had mildly overcompensated, and in short order, the rear end now tried to pass me on the left.
It was less urgent this time, and I steered into that skid as well. And once again, it was working. Car still doing 75, and brains doing 190, things were looking pretty good at this point. I worked a couple of smaller corrections in, and things were settling down, but Physics wasn't quite done with me for the day.
Because all this correcting had used up the last thing I didn't quite have enough of, which was space. In this case, between my car, and the adjacent, brand new, concrete barrier rail in the center divider.
Which is when, for an incredible moment time stood still, or at least moved with glacial slowness.
The left front tire kissed the edge of the barrier. Now, a steel barrier would have simply meant grinding metal, slowing, and an annoying slow-motion crunch. But CalTrans had cleverly decided that concrete barriers don't need replacing from accidents as often and expensively as metal barrier rail. And the new concrete barrier was wider at the bottom than the top, with an ever so graceful curvature to its profile.
The result, as wheel kissed concrete, was that I become the newest stuntman on the Dukes Of Hazzard Ride on the I-5. The concrete, instead of slowing me down, merely became the fulcrum to redirect that 75MPH of forward energy, and turn me into the most amazing Flying Corkscrew one could ever witness or experience first hand.
I am now airborne, still headed forward, and starting to spin clockwise.
At this point, the most glaring deficiency lighted the final caution light on my brain's Master Warning Display: seat belt not fastened. Well, FML.
No gibbering moron, I knew what that meant. Impending projectile status, followed by pain and agony, and probably a mangled end to a brief life. Because, pursuant to driving on several military posts, I'd dutifully attended and watched all the mandatory Blood On The Pavement-esque matinee training films thrown at me, and knew with exquisite clarity my chances outside the vehicle at the speed it and I were currently travelling. Realizing at the last the magnitude of this error, I made a hasty bargain with God: He could, indeed, kill me at His pleasure, but I assured Him that were it so, t'would only be thus if the steering wheel were found at the scene firmly clenched in my lifeless hands, snapped off at the bolts from the steering column from which my trajectory had wrenched it. And so I spun onwards towards Eternity holding the only thing that mattered in a literally death-defying grip.
I'd like to say I saw everything, or that I clenched my eyes and saw nothing, but the truth is somewhere mixed between those options. But I absolutely heard every sound. And it went like this: metal-metal-metal-rubber-metal-metal-metal-rubber, as the car slid on the side, the roof, the other side, the wheels, and continued thusly, all the while as I sat, crouched over, seatbeltless, on the passenger seat, in a washing machine of broken glass and all the other items inside the car, until, after somewhere between 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 twists, we - I, the glass fragments, the debris, my belongings, and my trusty Escort, all came to a simultaneous stop.
And, Sweet Jesus, I was alive and unharmed!
Guardian Angels 1, Senseless Mangled Demise 0!!!
And the crowd went wild!
I braced, in sudden unnatural silence, for what I was sure would be the counter climactic impact with a semi truck hitting me and shattering me into a thousand pieces.
I counted to ten silently.
Then, realizing the ride had come to a full and complete stop, I exited. Upside down, I disentangled my bare feet from amongst the pedals, removed my hands from the steering wheel where, I was certain, one could find my fingerprints pressed into the very plastic to this day. And I crawled out through a much smaller than normal passenger side window to face the day. I emerged, facing upstream in traffic, to a phenomenal sight.
From left to right, there were five lanes of traffic, completely dead-stopped, about 40 feet away from my car, now resting all the way over on the right hand side. And behind each wheel of every car as far as I could fleetingly note, every driver, white knuckles on the steering wheels of their cars, and three huge black "O"s on their face: two huge eyes, and one gaping black mouth, all like giant donuts.
I should have done a quick circus bow, having survived my stunt with such aplomb. Instead, I looked down, saw the handy white line to my left, and stepped approximately three feet over, to now stand off the actual driving lanes of the freeway. I'd crossed 5 lanes in about as many seconds, and ended up upside down and sideways. Driving between packs of cars had evidently given the following traffic time to stop and watch the show without joining in.
My military duffle bag, with six weeks of nasty clothes, had been sitting in the back seat. The ruckus had strewn it across 5 lanes of I-5 for 300 yards. Out of nowhere, a pickup truck with a couple pulled up on the right. They got out, handed me a full duffle bag, and said, "We saw your stuff go flying, so we got out in the stopped traffic, and put it all back in the bag." Which they plopped next to me. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Thanks!" I said.
"Our pleasure!" they replied, jumped into their truck, and were gone, that fast.
{Wherever and whoever you are, God Bless you.}
Traffic now picking it's way around my car, after suitable gawking, I decided getting my other items was in order, so I got down, reached inside, and retrieved my wallet, keys, flip flops and Timex watch from among the glass shards now resting on the roof of the car. Everything important had stayed with the car! The Timex, which 3 years of Marine Corps service on three continents had not broken, now had a shattered crystal, finally killed in a way military service couldn't accomplish. Then I started brushing and picking glass from my hair, eyebrows, and clothing.
Less than 30 seconds post exiting, the unheard off: CHP officer pulls up, looks at me, looks at the car, and asks, "Any survivors?"
"That'd be me."
"You were driving?"
"Yup."
"Didja have your seat belt on?"
"Oh, yes, officer, that's the law!"
He looked inside to assure himself there was no other headless blood-dripping corpse inside, then returned to his car to radio for a tow truck.
Less than a minute later, the local fire truck and ambulance are there. (Nota bene this is a good ten years pre-cellphone era.)
They look at the car, look at me, and ask "Any survivors?"
"Me."
The paramedics see to me, make sure I haven't suffered some hidden calamitous injury.
Learning I'm an off-duty Marine (the high-and-tight haircut, and red and gold PT gear with obvious EGA emblem sort of let that cat out of the bag) "Are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital? The base is right there." And they point to MCAS El Toro over yonder, from which the occasional jet is taking off and landing nearly overhead.
{Why yes, off course, sir. Please take me to the El Toro Base Naval Hospital, thus insuring that I'm in trouble there, and with my CO once he's informed at the speed of telephone that I elected to drive home, crashed my car, and was in all probability going to drive about 20 miles beyond the overnight liberty limits for my post, because I'm not only a lousy driver, but stupid, and I'd like a court martial to go along with my wrecked car, and soon to be jacked insurance rates. Because hey, since I can't drive anywhere, I might as well get a bust in rank and a pay cut plus a gratuitous kick in the junk to go with my misfortune, right?}
"Uh, no thanks sir, I'll be fine once I get the car towed away."
He looked really disappointed not to be able to help me, then his eyes lit up. "Hey, you're bleeding."
I had, in fact, acquired about a 1cm scratch through my t-shirt onto my right shoulder, barely skin deep, as I crawled out of the shattered glass passenger window. Still refusing the hospital ride, he wordlessly rummaged in his jump bag, handed me a band-aid, and an alcohol swab, and the fire department departed.
Now I was left to consider my car. All four wheels folded in flat against the undercarriage, it was, clearly, deader than canned tuna. And in looking at it, I was the one-in-a-million guy: if I had been wearing my seat belt, I'd have been belted upright in a car where the roof was now smashed down to about my collarbone level, and I too would be as dead as the car, and still happily strapped right behind the wheel, with my head helpfully folded out of the way down to the shoulder blades. Kids, don't try this at home!
The tow truck was in reality one of those flat-bed things, that lowered the bed, winched the dead car carcass onto it, strapped it down like an upended turtle, and proceeded to the nearest wreckatorium.
The drive over surface streets was what really drove home my great fortune in being alive, as pedestrians would stop and do a triple take, then stare at us as we made our unescorted procession to the car cemetery.
I finally got to a phone. My fiancee was relieved, because she'd heard there was a terrible accident on the I-5, and she knew how much I hated being stuck in traffic.
Breaking things to her gently, I told her I had good news and bad news. She elected for good news first, so I asked her, "You know that new car purchase we've been thinking about after the wedding...?"
In total, there were anywhere from 3-7 different highly improbable circumstances involved, which having been the recipient of, I have no shyness about calling miracles.
I should have been dead, then and there, several ways.
Instead of laughing about it at home a couple of hours late, as I did my laundry, ate pizza, and arranged to borrow a car to drive back in the morning.
So please, learn from my then-stupidity: If you're tired, pull off the highway and take a nap, or do whatever you need to do to be more awake. Don't drive tired, because it leads to dead with incredible rapidity, and it's just pointless. I don't ever risk it now, because I figure I've used up my share of miracles for one lifetime.
Good judgement comes from experience. Experience comes from bad judgement. Lest I appear to be holier than thou, I offer the following cautionary tale.
After having finished approximately six weeks of desert maneuvers in the garden paradise that is Marine Corps Base 29 Palms, we returned to Camp Pendleton, and germane to this story, on a Thursday. The plan was to return to work on Friday, clean up everything, and then enjoy a long Memorial Day weekend. Like my charges, I was to clean up, get a good night's rest, and awake refreshed and ready to confront the one-day blitz of work before a well-earned 72-hour liberty.
I, however, was invincible and immortal, and had a fiancee only a short hour and a half north in the greater Los Angeles area, not to mention friends and family in my home of record therein. The fact that I'd been awake 22 hours a day for most of that six weeks meant nothing but that I could surely make the easy drive home, enjoy home cooking and a real bed, and return early and refreshed to supervise the de-crudding of trucks, howitzers, men, and personal gear, thus having my cake and eating it too.
Thus it was that I set out, attired in PT gear and flip-flops, for a journey in sunny SoCal pre-summer broad daylight, for a trip much shorter than the S.S. Minnow's "three-hour tour", and which, in realty, was to be about as eventful.
I headed northwards along a relatively lightly-trafficked stretch of I-5. My trusty steed, a vintage Ford Escort, hummed along doing 80 in the fast lane along the center divider, and just about at the halfway point, nearly adjacent to the I-5/I-405 split, nature took its course.
I was on a straightaway, trying to stay between the inevitable clots of traffic, in the empty stretch in between two herds of cars. And then, the Nap Monster tapped my sleep-deprived tender head from wide awake to out like a light.
Probably for only a split to at most a full second, whereupon I awoke, drifting gently but inexorably towards the only other vehicle anywhere around me, the old green pickup truck in lane #2. Being as young and stupid as any 25-year-old, my brain immediately commanded a full-on goggle-eyed spaz attack, and a panic stab of the brake before I hit the truck a few feet further along.
And now, Physics made an appearance, as the rear of the car made the decision to try and pass the front end, where the engine and drive train was located, the weight therein making it slow down more firmly that the lighter rear wheels.
Fully awake now and stone-cold brilliant, I deftly did exactly what one should do, having made at least two other mistakes already: I got off the brakes, and gently steered the wheel to the right, into the skid the rear end was attempting. And by cracky, it worked! Steve McQueen couldn't have done as well as I did in arresting the skid before it became catastrophic. But being less experienced than Steve, I had mildly overcompensated, and in short order, the rear end now tried to pass me on the left.
It was less urgent this time, and I steered into that skid as well. And once again, it was working. Car still doing 75, and brains doing 190, things were looking pretty good at this point. I worked a couple of smaller corrections in, and things were settling down, but Physics wasn't quite done with me for the day.
Because all this correcting had used up the last thing I didn't quite have enough of, which was space. In this case, between my car, and the adjacent, brand new, concrete barrier rail in the center divider.
Which is when, for an incredible moment time stood still, or at least moved with glacial slowness.
The left front tire kissed the edge of the barrier. Now, a steel barrier would have simply meant grinding metal, slowing, and an annoying slow-motion crunch. But CalTrans had cleverly decided that concrete barriers don't need replacing from accidents as often and expensively as metal barrier rail. And the new concrete barrier was wider at the bottom than the top, with an ever so graceful curvature to its profile.
The result, as wheel kissed concrete, was that I become the newest stuntman on the Dukes Of Hazzard Ride on the I-5. The concrete, instead of slowing me down, merely became the fulcrum to redirect that 75MPH of forward energy, and turn me into the most amazing Flying Corkscrew one could ever witness or experience first hand.
I am now airborne, still headed forward, and starting to spin clockwise.
At this point, the most glaring deficiency lighted the final caution light on my brain's Master Warning Display: seat belt not fastened. Well, FML.
No gibbering moron, I knew what that meant. Impending projectile status, followed by pain and agony, and probably a mangled end to a brief life. Because, pursuant to driving on several military posts, I'd dutifully attended and watched all the mandatory Blood On The Pavement-esque matinee training films thrown at me, and knew with exquisite clarity my chances outside the vehicle at the speed it and I were currently travelling. Realizing at the last the magnitude of this error, I made a hasty bargain with God: He could, indeed, kill me at His pleasure, but I assured Him that were it so, t'would only be thus if the steering wheel were found at the scene firmly clenched in my lifeless hands, snapped off at the bolts from the steering column from which my trajectory had wrenched it. And so I spun onwards towards Eternity holding the only thing that mattered in a literally death-defying grip.
I'd like to say I saw everything, or that I clenched my eyes and saw nothing, but the truth is somewhere mixed between those options. But I absolutely heard every sound. And it went like this: metal-metal-metal-rubber-metal-metal-metal-rubber, as the car slid on the side, the roof, the other side, the wheels, and continued thusly, all the while as I sat, crouched over, seatbeltless, on the passenger seat, in a washing machine of broken glass and all the other items inside the car, until, after somewhere between 2 1/2 and 4 1/2 twists, we - I, the glass fragments, the debris, my belongings, and my trusty Escort, all came to a simultaneous stop.
And, Sweet Jesus, I was alive and unharmed!
Guardian Angels 1, Senseless Mangled Demise 0!!!
And the crowd went wild!
I braced, in sudden unnatural silence, for what I was sure would be the counter climactic impact with a semi truck hitting me and shattering me into a thousand pieces.
I counted to ten silently.
Then, realizing the ride had come to a full and complete stop, I exited. Upside down, I disentangled my bare feet from amongst the pedals, removed my hands from the steering wheel where, I was certain, one could find my fingerprints pressed into the very plastic to this day. And I crawled out through a much smaller than normal passenger side window to face the day. I emerged, facing upstream in traffic, to a phenomenal sight.
From left to right, there were five lanes of traffic, completely dead-stopped, about 40 feet away from my car, now resting all the way over on the right hand side. And behind each wheel of every car as far as I could fleetingly note, every driver, white knuckles on the steering wheels of their cars, and three huge black "O"s on their face: two huge eyes, and one gaping black mouth, all like giant donuts.
I should have done a quick circus bow, having survived my stunt with such aplomb. Instead, I looked down, saw the handy white line to my left, and stepped approximately three feet over, to now stand off the actual driving lanes of the freeway. I'd crossed 5 lanes in about as many seconds, and ended up upside down and sideways. Driving between packs of cars had evidently given the following traffic time to stop and watch the show without joining in.
My military duffle bag, with six weeks of nasty clothes, had been sitting in the back seat. The ruckus had strewn it across 5 lanes of I-5 for 300 yards. Out of nowhere, a pickup truck with a couple pulled up on the right. They got out, handed me a full duffle bag, and said, "We saw your stuff go flying, so we got out in the stopped traffic, and put it all back in the bag." Which they plopped next to me. "You okay?"
"Yeah. Thanks!" I said.
"Our pleasure!" they replied, jumped into their truck, and were gone, that fast.
{Wherever and whoever you are, God Bless you.}
Traffic now picking it's way around my car, after suitable gawking, I decided getting my other items was in order, so I got down, reached inside, and retrieved my wallet, keys, flip flops and Timex watch from among the glass shards now resting on the roof of the car. Everything important had stayed with the car! The Timex, which 3 years of Marine Corps service on three continents had not broken, now had a shattered crystal, finally killed in a way military service couldn't accomplish. Then I started brushing and picking glass from my hair, eyebrows, and clothing.
Less than 30 seconds post exiting, the unheard off: CHP officer pulls up, looks at me, looks at the car, and asks, "Any survivors?"
"That'd be me."
"You were driving?"
"Yup."
"Didja have your seat belt on?"
"Oh, yes, officer, that's the law!"
He looked inside to assure himself there was no other headless blood-dripping corpse inside, then returned to his car to radio for a tow truck.
Less than a minute later, the local fire truck and ambulance are there. (Nota bene this is a good ten years pre-cellphone era.)
They look at the car, look at me, and ask "Any survivors?"
"Me."
The paramedics see to me, make sure I haven't suffered some hidden calamitous injury.
Learning I'm an off-duty Marine (the high-and-tight haircut, and red and gold PT gear with obvious EGA emblem sort of let that cat out of the bag) "Are you sure you don't want to go to the hospital? The base is right there." And they point to MCAS El Toro over yonder, from which the occasional jet is taking off and landing nearly overhead.
{Why yes, off course, sir. Please take me to the El Toro Base Naval Hospital, thus insuring that I'm in trouble there, and with my CO once he's informed at the speed of telephone that I elected to drive home, crashed my car, and was in all probability going to drive about 20 miles beyond the overnight liberty limits for my post, because I'm not only a lousy driver, but stupid, and I'd like a court martial to go along with my wrecked car, and soon to be jacked insurance rates. Because hey, since I can't drive anywhere, I might as well get a bust in rank and a pay cut plus a gratuitous kick in the junk to go with my misfortune, right?}
"Uh, no thanks sir, I'll be fine once I get the car towed away."
He looked really disappointed not to be able to help me, then his eyes lit up. "Hey, you're bleeding."
I had, in fact, acquired about a 1cm scratch through my t-shirt onto my right shoulder, barely skin deep, as I crawled out of the shattered glass passenger window. Still refusing the hospital ride, he wordlessly rummaged in his jump bag, handed me a band-aid, and an alcohol swab, and the fire department departed.
Now I was left to consider my car. All four wheels folded in flat against the undercarriage, it was, clearly, deader than canned tuna. And in looking at it, I was the one-in-a-million guy: if I had been wearing my seat belt, I'd have been belted upright in a car where the roof was now smashed down to about my collarbone level, and I too would be as dead as the car, and still happily strapped right behind the wheel, with my head helpfully folded out of the way down to the shoulder blades. Kids, don't try this at home!
The tow truck was in reality one of those flat-bed things, that lowered the bed, winched the dead car carcass onto it, strapped it down like an upended turtle, and proceeded to the nearest wreckatorium.
The drive over surface streets was what really drove home my great fortune in being alive, as pedestrians would stop and do a triple take, then stare at us as we made our unescorted procession to the car cemetery.
I finally got to a phone. My fiancee was relieved, because she'd heard there was a terrible accident on the I-5, and she knew how much I hated being stuck in traffic.
Breaking things to her gently, I told her I had good news and bad news. She elected for good news first, so I asked her, "You know that new car purchase we've been thinking about after the wedding...?"
In total, there were anywhere from 3-7 different highly improbable circumstances involved, which having been the recipient of, I have no shyness about calling miracles.
I should have been dead, then and there, several ways.
Instead of laughing about it at home a couple of hours late, as I did my laundry, ate pizza, and arranged to borrow a car to drive back in the morning.
So please, learn from my then-stupidity: If you're tired, pull off the highway and take a nap, or do whatever you need to do to be more awake. Don't drive tired, because it leads to dead with incredible rapidity, and it's just pointless. I don't ever risk it now, because I figure I've used up my share of miracles for one lifetime.
Thursday, September 5, 2013
A Plaintive Plea From the Peanut Gallery
I read, watch, listen to, and otherwise digest a lot of media content, particularly survival, preparedness, and related content. I appreciate those who've learned a thing or two sharing it, usually gratis, with the rest of us. And the last thing I ever want to do is complain about free ice cream, but...
I know, let's just consider this my free advice about your free advice.
1) EDIT is your friend.
I don't care whether it's a dissertation, a blog post, or a YouTube spot. You aren't showing your street cred when you leave in all the ummms, burps, hiccups, and perambulations across the pages of the English language with nary a visit to Dictionary Drive.
Instead, you're showing your @$$.
Computers have spell-check. Learn to use it. I confess to fingers which don't obey my personal rather anally-inclined spelling and punctuation, but that has more to do with the limitations of a laptop or smartphone keyboard than to poor grades in English or latent (or not-so-latent) retardation. I read over what I type, even in answer to someone else's blog, and catch as many mistakes as I can. I run these posts through spell-check when it's available as an option, multiple times. When there aren't any tell-tale yellow screw-ups highlighted, I shed a little tear of joy. There may be a few variances from the Oxford English Dictionary, but they're purposeful, or non-standard words, for the most part. When I find mistakes from posts I imported from earlier iterations and never spell-checked, I fix them, and they still piss me off. More so because I know there's always another one out there. So if whatever you're posting is worth your time, or mine, show a little consideration for your craft, if not your mother tongue, and don't sound like a refugee from the 4th grade.
If you did a video, get ANY non-linear editing program out there, and learn how to compose a better video. Cut out the oopsies, the hemming and hawing and umming, and all the other stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with your topic. They practically give away video editor programs with any laptop or PC, so use one, any one at all, and cut out the crap. Give me back the two minutes of my life when you had the camera pointed at the sun, your dog, or shoved in your armpit.
2) COMPOSITION is key.
Somewhere back in the mystic chords of memory, at least one of your English teachers probably made some vain attempt to convey to you that sentences and paragraphs have structure, and that when they follow this structure, you can communicate an entire paper, blog post, or video coherently to other people who speak the same language.
The same is true for pictorial efforts as well: Don't stare at the camera and talk us to death; in a video, point the camera AT what you want to convey, even a crayon drawing by your five year-old son, while you talk over what you're showing. Don't tell me, e.g., how to bait a hook, SHOW IT while you tell it, and you double the chances of getting the point you intended across.
A perspicacious person might note that having this stuff WRITTEN DOWN beforehand, in a logical order, would be a great help in this respect. Industry professionals refer to this modern marvel as a SCRIPT.
Compose one for the talking part, and a SHOT LIST for the camera work, and you'll be already almost as bright as some big-time Hollywood directors. Give it a shot before you make your next YouTube masterpiece.
3) Silent film died in the 1920s.
And if you can't grasp this, you should have done so too.
You can shoot video that's absolute @$$, with a crappy handycam, pointed out your back end. But if the audio is flawless, people will watch it until the end most times. On the other hand, you could rent a Panavision or RED digital camera that resolves freckles at 50 yards, in crystal focus, with Oscar-worthy cinematography, but if the audio sounds like you tied the microphone to your spastic chihuahua on crack, and had him wander into a rotating room fan in between helicopter flyovers, most people will click "Screw That" in about 1.5 seconds. Think about how long you'll tolerate a crappy connection on a cell phone call, and realize this is how everyone feels when you screw the audio on your video.
So, for instance, when you're shooting outside, put a windscreen on the microphone.
Put the microphone somewhere close to who or what is making the noise you want to hear.
Turn everything else we don't want to hear off. Your fans, air conditioners, wind chimes on the patio, your toddler, or barking dog. Make them quiet, or make them gone. I'm begging you.
Amazingly, just like your would-be masterpieces, all these and many more tips are available from video and audio professionals, for absolutely no cost whatever, except the investment of time and brain power you could make to learn from them. Dozens of them are right next to your videos on YouTube, for frick's sake! Consult them, learn from them, and live them, and bring us your A game.
The only thing worse than being the only expert to post a video on YouTube on some arcane subject, is that you did so with the sense of a bull in a china shop, crashing around trying to get somewhere, and mainly making would-be fans of your work, like yours truly, instead want to either kill you outright, or perhaps just duct-tape you to a chair, and force you to watch your own videos for a few days until you confess to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.
I really appreciate the time, and in many cases, unique expertise you bring to any given subject. Show a little respect for yourself and your audience, by presenting what you know at least as professionally as how well you know it. You'll sound as smart as you are, and your view counts will climb.
Thank you.
I know, let's just consider this my free advice about your free advice.
1) EDIT is your friend.
I don't care whether it's a dissertation, a blog post, or a YouTube spot. You aren't showing your street cred when you leave in all the ummms, burps, hiccups, and perambulations across the pages of the English language with nary a visit to Dictionary Drive.
Instead, you're showing your @$$.
Computers have spell-check. Learn to use it. I confess to fingers which don't obey my personal rather anally-inclined spelling and punctuation, but that has more to do with the limitations of a laptop or smartphone keyboard than to poor grades in English or latent (or not-so-latent) retardation. I read over what I type, even in answer to someone else's blog, and catch as many mistakes as I can. I run these posts through spell-check when it's available as an option, multiple times. When there aren't any tell-tale yellow screw-ups highlighted, I shed a little tear of joy. There may be a few variances from the Oxford English Dictionary, but they're purposeful, or non-standard words, for the most part. When I find mistakes from posts I imported from earlier iterations and never spell-checked, I fix them, and they still piss me off. More so because I know there's always another one out there. So if whatever you're posting is worth your time, or mine, show a little consideration for your craft, if not your mother tongue, and don't sound like a refugee from the 4th grade.
If you did a video, get ANY non-linear editing program out there, and learn how to compose a better video. Cut out the oopsies, the hemming and hawing and umming, and all the other stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with your topic. They practically give away video editor programs with any laptop or PC, so use one, any one at all, and cut out the crap. Give me back the two minutes of my life when you had the camera pointed at the sun, your dog, or shoved in your armpit.
2) COMPOSITION is key.
Somewhere back in the mystic chords of memory, at least one of your English teachers probably made some vain attempt to convey to you that sentences and paragraphs have structure, and that when they follow this structure, you can communicate an entire paper, blog post, or video coherently to other people who speak the same language.
The same is true for pictorial efforts as well: Don't stare at the camera and talk us to death; in a video, point the camera AT what you want to convey, even a crayon drawing by your five year-old son, while you talk over what you're showing. Don't tell me, e.g., how to bait a hook, SHOW IT while you tell it, and you double the chances of getting the point you intended across.
A perspicacious person might note that having this stuff WRITTEN DOWN beforehand, in a logical order, would be a great help in this respect. Industry professionals refer to this modern marvel as a SCRIPT.
Compose one for the talking part, and a SHOT LIST for the camera work, and you'll be already almost as bright as some big-time Hollywood directors. Give it a shot before you make your next YouTube masterpiece.
3) Silent film died in the 1920s.
And if you can't grasp this, you should have done so too.
You can shoot video that's absolute @$$, with a crappy handycam, pointed out your back end. But if the audio is flawless, people will watch it until the end most times. On the other hand, you could rent a Panavision or RED digital camera that resolves freckles at 50 yards, in crystal focus, with Oscar-worthy cinematography, but if the audio sounds like you tied the microphone to your spastic chihuahua on crack, and had him wander into a rotating room fan in between helicopter flyovers, most people will click "Screw That" in about 1.5 seconds. Think about how long you'll tolerate a crappy connection on a cell phone call, and realize this is how everyone feels when you screw the audio on your video.
So, for instance, when you're shooting outside, put a windscreen on the microphone.
Put the microphone somewhere close to who or what is making the noise you want to hear.
Turn everything else we don't want to hear off. Your fans, air conditioners, wind chimes on the patio, your toddler, or barking dog. Make them quiet, or make them gone. I'm begging you.
Amazingly, just like your would-be masterpieces, all these and many more tips are available from video and audio professionals, for absolutely no cost whatever, except the investment of time and brain power you could make to learn from them. Dozens of them are right next to your videos on YouTube, for frick's sake! Consult them, learn from them, and live them, and bring us your A game.
The only thing worse than being the only expert to post a video on YouTube on some arcane subject, is that you did so with the sense of a bull in a china shop, crashing around trying to get somewhere, and mainly making would-be fans of your work, like yours truly, instead want to either kill you outright, or perhaps just duct-tape you to a chair, and force you to watch your own videos for a few days until you confess to being the gunman on the grassy knoll.
I really appreciate the time, and in many cases, unique expertise you bring to any given subject. Show a little respect for yourself and your audience, by presenting what you know at least as professionally as how well you know it. You'll sound as smart as you are, and your view counts will climb.
Thank you.
Friday, August 23, 2013
Blogcation Is Over: Back To The Cultural Wars
Of Carnivores and Cavalrymen, by Chris Hernandez
{Note: I had the great privilege to meet Chris Hernandez when a Fourth of July trip put him in proximity. Surprising me not a bit, he is every bit the gentleman and scholar one would expect, if they'd been reading his blog, visible under his name to the right. This response to his article is also a large part of what we discussed over dinner with his family. You should read his stuff, and when afforded the opportunity because he's finished some more, buy his stuff. You should also know I give out praise the way I hand out $100 bills.}
The publishing industry, as part of the cultural media like TV, the movies, academia, etc., doesn't just publish stories to make a profit, they publish the stories that they WANT to make a profit. Pro-military conservative gun-owning white male neanderthals need not apply.
If Naval Institute Press, which had never published fiction before, hadn't taken a lucky chance on an unbelievable submarine story by a total rookie, Tom Clancy would be a retired insurance agent from Eastern MD. His success got you Stephen Coonts, Harold Coyle, Dale Brown, Ed Ruggero, (all former military) and probably a dozen lesser lights, none of whom would've seen the light of day if NY publishing firms had any say.
If you write a novel about how all vets are PTSD-timebomb homophobic wife-beaters who eat babies, go postal on a kindergarten, and then cap themselves, you'll be the darling of the book signing circuit, with a movie option in the wings. Witness the baker's dozen anti-war movies about Iraq and A-stan, some from novels, made and released to horrible box office while troops (including you, {Chris}) were actually engaged in combat at the time, despite how much money the one before it lost.
And let's don't overlook the possibility that Dillrod got his fantasies {in Carnivore} published because the publishers knew, or strongly suspected, that he was completely FOS, and wanted to exploit the image of him as a wanton killer turned loose by Chimpy McBushitler, the Emperor Sithlord Cheney, and Darth Rumsfeld on the sweet, peace-loving children of Southwest Asia.
Publishing that kind of narrative would be seen as pro bono charity work for The Cause.
Look how much ink they've spilled trying to tell you that there's no way a war-hero president who faced down Kruschev and humiliated the Soviets was killed by a frothing rabid, citizenship-renouncing avowed communist, because there's no way a trained Marine with a scoped rifle could have put two bullets out of three into a slow-moving target from under 100 yards.
It's not a conspiracy amongst themselves, either. They just all went to the same schools, vote the same, think the same, hang out with themselves, and can't, for the life of them, imagine how anyone else could sanely disagree with their point of view unless it's someone who eats lead paint chips and drinks moonshine in a trailerpark in flyover country. And I'm probably soft-selling what they actually say to each other when they think no one's listening.
The beauty of things now is the traditional gate-keepers are losing sway as technology democratizes culture. You can self-publish, I can make movies, someone else can do a YouTube weekly TV show, and none of us need spend more than about a month's rent in Hollywood or New York to completely skip the Old Guard system.
{Chris,} Keep writing.
We'll beat down the gates, pee on their corpses, and YouTube the video.
21st century rockstars, I tell ya.
{Note: I had the great privilege to meet Chris Hernandez when a Fourth of July trip put him in proximity. Surprising me not a bit, he is every bit the gentleman and scholar one would expect, if they'd been reading his blog, visible under his name to the right. This response to his article is also a large part of what we discussed over dinner with his family. You should read his stuff, and when afforded the opportunity because he's finished some more, buy his stuff. You should also know I give out praise the way I hand out $100 bills.}
The publishing industry, as part of the cultural media like TV, the movies, academia, etc., doesn't just publish stories to make a profit, they publish the stories that they WANT to make a profit. Pro-military conservative gun-owning white male neanderthals need not apply.
If Naval Institute Press, which had never published fiction before, hadn't taken a lucky chance on an unbelievable submarine story by a total rookie, Tom Clancy would be a retired insurance agent from Eastern MD. His success got you Stephen Coonts, Harold Coyle, Dale Brown, Ed Ruggero, (all former military) and probably a dozen lesser lights, none of whom would've seen the light of day if NY publishing firms had any say.
If you write a novel about how all vets are PTSD-timebomb homophobic wife-beaters who eat babies, go postal on a kindergarten, and then cap themselves, you'll be the darling of the book signing circuit, with a movie option in the wings. Witness the baker's dozen anti-war movies about Iraq and A-stan, some from novels, made and released to horrible box office while troops (including you, {Chris}) were actually engaged in combat at the time, despite how much money the one before it lost.
And let's don't overlook the possibility that Dillrod got his fantasies {in Carnivore} published because the publishers knew, or strongly suspected, that he was completely FOS, and wanted to exploit the image of him as a wanton killer turned loose by Chimpy McBushitler, the Emperor Sithlord Cheney, and Darth Rumsfeld on the sweet, peace-loving children of Southwest Asia.
Publishing that kind of narrative would be seen as pro bono charity work for The Cause.
Look how much ink they've spilled trying to tell you that there's no way a war-hero president who faced down Kruschev and humiliated the Soviets was killed by a frothing rabid, citizenship-renouncing avowed communist, because there's no way a trained Marine with a scoped rifle could have put two bullets out of three into a slow-moving target from under 100 yards.
It's not a conspiracy amongst themselves, either. They just all went to the same schools, vote the same, think the same, hang out with themselves, and can't, for the life of them, imagine how anyone else could sanely disagree with their point of view unless it's someone who eats lead paint chips and drinks moonshine in a trailerpark in flyover country. And I'm probably soft-selling what they actually say to each other when they think no one's listening.
The beauty of things now is the traditional gate-keepers are losing sway as technology democratizes culture. You can self-publish, I can make movies, someone else can do a YouTube weekly TV show, and none of us need spend more than about a month's rent in Hollywood or New York to completely skip the Old Guard system.
{Chris,} Keep writing.
We'll beat down the gates, pee on their corpses, and YouTube the video.
21st century rockstars, I tell ya.
Tuesday, July 16, 2013
Perspective
Recently on a forum, a number of folks including moi were discussing the recent abominable broad-daylight rape (survived) by an oblivious 22-year old airhead in Chicago, and a conversation point came up.
In the AAR discussion of fail that contributed to the event, and in the course of pointing out any number of better choices by the lady involved, a serving troop opined that we of the forum were wrongly blaming the victim.
Firstly, no. As a rule, no one, including the twentysomething oblivious twit, deserves to be raped. The only deserving person in this tale is the rapist, who deserves a long stretch in prison, ideally after a suitable thumping via PR-24 until he looks like Rodney King's "after" pictures. But short of not helpfully tying herself up and wearing a hood, there was little the victim did right, starting with traipsing through Chicago oblivious, and wholly dependent on sunlight and the kindness of strangers for her protection. The flaws in that plan, somewhat tardily, are now apparent to her, having survived the horrendous ordeal.
So in the course of discussing the particulars, a conversation point came up.
I asked Mr. Currently Deployed, "How many grunt patrols in A-stan deploy with troops wearing their ear buds and listening to their music on 10?" (As had Our Victim.)
To which the retort from our man in Kandahar was "If being in an American city is like a combat tour in Afghanistan, we have much bigger problems."
So, apparently it's still news somewhere that the United States murder tally of approx. 16,000+ (go ahead, check the FBI stats) in any average year going back a generation makes the United States over 80 times more dangerous than Afghanistan in any year of the ten-year ongoing war there.
If you hadn't noticed that the body count in any number of American metropolii is higher than the military in the whole of Afghanistan on its worst day, you need to get out more, or read more widely. Chicago is orders of magnitude worse than Afghanistan.
In the last 10+ years since 2002, we've suffered 2100+ military deaths in Afghanistan. Chicago does that number of homicides in 4-5 years without breaking a sweat. Chicago, for it's size (1/1000th) and population (1/10th) relative to Afghanistan, is 20-50 times more unsafe than Afghanistan.
In fact, the stories of troops from everywhere surviving one or multiple tours in the sandbox, only to subsequently get whacked stateside, are legion.
So anyone wandering the streets of Chicago similarly cluelessly can expect similar or worse results than the victim in this sad tale.
Homicides, 2002-present, cities only, not counting surrounding environs:
NYFC = 6,005
Chicago = 5,426
L.A. = 4,761
Detroit = 4,061
Philadelphia = 3,867
Washington D.C. = 1,958
Those six cities alone are twelve Afghanistan wars.
So no offense to anyone with a tour or three there, but comparatively, Afghanistan is an effing church picnic, because the victims here don't routinely have Level IV body armor, an M-4 assault rifle and 300 rounds, a squad of guys backing them up, MRAPS to ride in with a crew-served weapon manned in the turret, and handy air strikes on call.
Which also points out that if the Taliban ever showed up in Bed-Stuy, the Southside of Chicago, or S. Central or East L.A., they'd likely get their asses handed to them. Even our street thugs are tougher than they are. The Taliban don't amount to MS-13 or the Crips on the world food chain of thuggery.
So in either group's turf, it behooves one to try using their eyes, ears, and brains simultaneously to avoid trouble, rather than trusting to the Force or Magic Fairy Dust to protect you.
Thus endeth the lesson.
In the AAR discussion of fail that contributed to the event, and in the course of pointing out any number of better choices by the lady involved, a serving troop opined that we of the forum were wrongly blaming the victim.
Firstly, no. As a rule, no one, including the twentysomething oblivious twit, deserves to be raped. The only deserving person in this tale is the rapist, who deserves a long stretch in prison, ideally after a suitable thumping via PR-24 until he looks like Rodney King's "after" pictures. But short of not helpfully tying herself up and wearing a hood, there was little the victim did right, starting with traipsing through Chicago oblivious, and wholly dependent on sunlight and the kindness of strangers for her protection. The flaws in that plan, somewhat tardily, are now apparent to her, having survived the horrendous ordeal.
So in the course of discussing the particulars, a conversation point came up.
I asked Mr. Currently Deployed, "How many grunt patrols in A-stan deploy with troops wearing their ear buds and listening to their music on 10?" (As had Our Victim.)
To which the retort from our man in Kandahar was "If being in an American city is like a combat tour in Afghanistan, we have much bigger problems."
So, apparently it's still news somewhere that the United States murder tally of approx. 16,000+ (go ahead, check the FBI stats) in any average year going back a generation makes the United States over 80 times more dangerous than Afghanistan in any year of the ten-year ongoing war there.
If you hadn't noticed that the body count in any number of American metropolii is higher than the military in the whole of Afghanistan on its worst day, you need to get out more, or read more widely. Chicago is orders of magnitude worse than Afghanistan.
In the last 10+ years since 2002, we've suffered 2100+ military deaths in Afghanistan. Chicago does that number of homicides in 4-5 years without breaking a sweat. Chicago, for it's size (1/1000th) and population (1/10th) relative to Afghanistan, is 20-50 times more unsafe than Afghanistan.
In fact, the stories of troops from everywhere surviving one or multiple tours in the sandbox, only to subsequently get whacked stateside, are legion.
So anyone wandering the streets of Chicago similarly cluelessly can expect similar or worse results than the victim in this sad tale.
Homicides, 2002-present, cities only, not counting surrounding environs:
NYFC = 6,005
Chicago = 5,426
L.A. = 4,761
Detroit = 4,061
Philadelphia = 3,867
Washington D.C. = 1,958
Those six cities alone are twelve Afghanistan wars.
So no offense to anyone with a tour or three there, but comparatively, Afghanistan is an effing church picnic, because the victims here don't routinely have Level IV body armor, an M-4 assault rifle and 300 rounds, a squad of guys backing them up, MRAPS to ride in with a crew-served weapon manned in the turret, and handy air strikes on call.
Which also points out that if the Taliban ever showed up in Bed-Stuy, the Southside of Chicago, or S. Central or East L.A., they'd likely get their asses handed to them. Even our street thugs are tougher than they are. The Taliban don't amount to MS-13 or the Crips on the world food chain of thuggery.
So in either group's turf, it behooves one to try using their eyes, ears, and brains simultaneously to avoid trouble, rather than trusting to the Force or Magic Fairy Dust to protect you.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Sunday, July 7, 2013
Resource Update
Under the heading of Medical Reference, there's a book you should add to your list, and your library:
The Survival Medicine Handbook: A guide for when help is NOT on the way
Written by the Altons, AKA Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy of the Doom and Bloom blog and podcast fame, this book is 588 pages of medical gold, for times when 9-1-1 is a fantasy, or a distant hope, and now it's all on you.
This book is a huge expansion and improvement on the 1st Ed., largely due to numerous questions, and some serious dedication to upgrade and improvement by the authors.
You are well advised to get this book, consult it, and get your medical preparations for any major disaster you foresee up to the point where you could take advantage of the information provided. You can store food and water, but there's no Start Trek medical hologram you're going to boot up, on the day.
This book, in your head and on your bookshelf, backed up by a careful and thoughtful acquisition of important medical supplies is the next best thing.
$35 and change on Amazon, and a steal at twice the price.
Really.
The Survival Medicine Handbook: A guide for when help is NOT on the way
Written by the Altons, AKA Dr. Bones and Nurse Amy of the Doom and Bloom blog and podcast fame, this book is 588 pages of medical gold, for times when 9-1-1 is a fantasy, or a distant hope, and now it's all on you.
This book is a huge expansion and improvement on the 1st Ed., largely due to numerous questions, and some serious dedication to upgrade and improvement by the authors.
You are well advised to get this book, consult it, and get your medical preparations for any major disaster you foresee up to the point where you could take advantage of the information provided. You can store food and water, but there's no Start Trek medical hologram you're going to boot up, on the day.
This book, in your head and on your bookshelf, backed up by a careful and thoughtful acquisition of important medical supplies is the next best thing.
$35 and change on Amazon, and a steal at twice the price.
Really.
Thursday, July 4, 2013
Birth Certificate
When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to
dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to
assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which
the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the
opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel
them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.--That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, --That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.--Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.
He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.
He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.
He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.
He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.
He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.
He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected; whereby the Legislative powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.
He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.
He has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary powers.
He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone, for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.
He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harrass our people, and eat out their substance.
He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.
He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil power.
He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:
For Quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:
For protecting them, by a mock Trial, from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:
For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:
For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:
For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of Trial by Jury:
For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences
For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies:
For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws, and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:
For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.
He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.
He has plundered our seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.
He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.
He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.
He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.
In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.
Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our Brittish brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.
We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.
Tuesday, July 2, 2013
Pole-Vaulting The Shark
There are any number of "tacticool" courses out there.
It's a free country, some are run by consummate professionals, and some by shameless hucksters looking to prove P.T. Barnum correct (and succeeding beyond the dreams of mere avarice).
Caveat emptor.
But when someone purporting to teach a tactical contractor medical course issues a "round count" requirement, and then piles on by suggesting that 2250 rounds is probably 1000 rounds too low, but they're caving to the ammo shortage, grab your wallet with both hands.
But then, I was blissfully unaware of all this, preferring the sharks to go about their way of getting fed, while I pursue my own daily crust in my own manner. Live and let live.
Then, someone on a forum noted that he was ponying up $1650 for a 5-day class.
So I took a look at the syllabus.
And my head exploded, as seen below:
Boys and girls, if the market is charging $1650 for less than half the content of the most basic EMT course available, save your dough and stay home.
That market is broken, crazy, or both.
It's a free country, some are run by consummate professionals, and some by shameless hucksters looking to prove P.T. Barnum correct (and succeeding beyond the dreams of mere avarice).
Caveat emptor.
But when someone purporting to teach a tactical contractor medical course issues a "round count" requirement, and then piles on by suggesting that 2250 rounds is probably 1000 rounds too low, but they're caving to the ammo shortage, grab your wallet with both hands.
But then, I was blissfully unaware of all this, preferring the sharks to go about their way of getting fed, while I pursue my own daily crust in my own manner. Live and let live.
Then, someone on a forum noted that he was ponying up $1650 for a 5-day class.
So I took a look at the syllabus.
And my head exploded, as seen below:
Best Regards,
Boys and girls, if the market is charging $1650 for less than half the content of the most basic EMT course available, save your dough and stay home.
That market is broken, crazy, or both.
The American Academy of Orthopedics publishes Emergency Care And Transportation Of The Sick And Injured, 10th ed., every several years. It's the bible of emergency medical care, and it's available on Amazon for $62.76.
The PowerPoint notes for Tactical Combat Casualty Care are available free online in multiple places. (And I've already covered the Average Citizen highlights on this blog.)
So are any number of videos demonstrating and explaining all the concepts and specific techniques in both of the above, on YouTube.
This is one of the few places where the Internet is truly wonderful.
If, out of sheer gratitude, you'd like to split the difference, and send me half of the $1487.26 I just saved you, I'll be happy to tell you where to send a check for my $743.63.
And when someone shoots at you, duck and cover, then shoot back.
Now I've just saved you 2250 rounds of ammunition better allocated for other purposes.
So by internet standards, I'm also a tactical shooting school guru.
Genuflect as you leave the Presence.
Sunday, June 30, 2013
Prudence v. Chicken Little
So, apparently, I am "over the top".
On any number of things, certainly, but not least of which on the suggestion that the decision in the Zimmerman trial may not comport with the sensibilities of a goodly number of indigent, unemployed, and overly entitled urban yutes, who have a rather elastic concept of the definition of personal property and one's civic propriety responsibilities.
Quick, get me my smelling salts.
I watched helmeted OD-clad National Guardsmen riding city buses each morning to go downtown to the riots in Watts as a child.
I loaded bandoleers and was prepared to hand out weapons to neighbors who'd asked for the loan after the verdict in the trial of multiple LAPD officers last seen beating Rodney King to a pulp in the course and scope of their employment.
I watched the fires first-hand, and saw the miasma of smoke columns from thousands of fires, while snipers shot at firemen, and the police cowered helplessly for three days while the city burned.
I have watched on TV as any number of miscreants celebrated the Lakers' championship(s) by burning local cars and businesses and stealing their wares.
So I beg some indulgence for having the temerity and unmitigated gall to suggest that it's a fatal confluence to have:
- the most race baiting president of the US, ever
- said president lacking any wits whatsoever, or the internal filters to censor the ramblings of his un-American rants and musings to the public
- record minority unemployment, by any standard but the Great Depression
- an unseasonably hot summer, and everyone out of school
- the most speciously expressed case for a hate crime in recent history
- a criminal murder case so thin you could read through it, likely if not certain to produce an acquittal on all charges for the man who is guilty only of being innocent, and having had the foresight to bring a handgun to a fistfight, with a side bonus of saving the Florida taxpayers from a lifetime's worth of room and board costs for future thug Trayvon Martin.
So I therefore suggest that the result, when it comes to pass, highly favors the formation of an excuse mob, not outraged over racial injustice, but rather, enamored of the opportunity to pick up two free armfuls of the most expensive Nike tennis shoes, and unburdened by any sense that it being illegal somehow makes the looting of such merchandise actually wrong, in any practical application sense.
Personally, I plan to have suitable weaponry and contingency plans to repel boarders, both in transit, and at home. Given recent history, that doesn't seem the height of insanity.
If exactly nothing happens, I will happily go on about my business undismayed, let alone feel in any way disappointed.
But it seems to me that doing nothing to prepare, and trusting to the innate law-abiding nature and bon homme of the race-baiters and their minions, as one's best defense, is liable to get one killed, or at least risk a severe jacking -up.
Your mileage may vary.
But if your response to my prudence is, like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, to hold your palm up, and advise me to "Remain calm! All is in order!", be advised I'm trampling you, just on general principles. And if an actual riot occurs, I'm picking your pockets, and doing a flamenco on your junk before I move along. Over the top - of you.
On any number of things, certainly, but not least of which on the suggestion that the decision in the Zimmerman trial may not comport with the sensibilities of a goodly number of indigent, unemployed, and overly entitled urban yutes, who have a rather elastic concept of the definition of personal property and one's civic propriety responsibilities.
Quick, get me my smelling salts.
I watched helmeted OD-clad National Guardsmen riding city buses each morning to go downtown to the riots in Watts as a child.
I loaded bandoleers and was prepared to hand out weapons to neighbors who'd asked for the loan after the verdict in the trial of multiple LAPD officers last seen beating Rodney King to a pulp in the course and scope of their employment.
I watched the fires first-hand, and saw the miasma of smoke columns from thousands of fires, while snipers shot at firemen, and the police cowered helplessly for three days while the city burned.
I have watched on TV as any number of miscreants celebrated the Lakers' championship(s) by burning local cars and businesses and stealing their wares.
So I beg some indulgence for having the temerity and unmitigated gall to suggest that it's a fatal confluence to have:
- the most race baiting president of the US, ever
- said president lacking any wits whatsoever, or the internal filters to censor the ramblings of his un-American rants and musings to the public
- record minority unemployment, by any standard but the Great Depression
- an unseasonably hot summer, and everyone out of school
- the most speciously expressed case for a hate crime in recent history
- a criminal murder case so thin you could read through it, likely if not certain to produce an acquittal on all charges for the man who is guilty only of being innocent, and having had the foresight to bring a handgun to a fistfight, with a side bonus of saving the Florida taxpayers from a lifetime's worth of room and board costs for future thug Trayvon Martin.
So I therefore suggest that the result, when it comes to pass, highly favors the formation of an excuse mob, not outraged over racial injustice, but rather, enamored of the opportunity to pick up two free armfuls of the most expensive Nike tennis shoes, and unburdened by any sense that it being illegal somehow makes the looting of such merchandise actually wrong, in any practical application sense.
Personally, I plan to have suitable weaponry and contingency plans to repel boarders, both in transit, and at home. Given recent history, that doesn't seem the height of insanity.
If exactly nothing happens, I will happily go on about my business undismayed, let alone feel in any way disappointed.
But it seems to me that doing nothing to prepare, and trusting to the innate law-abiding nature and bon homme of the race-baiters and their minions, as one's best defense, is liable to get one killed, or at least risk a severe jacking -up.
Your mileage may vary.
But if your response to my prudence is, like Kevin Bacon in Animal House, to hold your palm up, and advise me to "Remain calm! All is in order!", be advised I'm trampling you, just on general principles. And if an actual riot occurs, I'm picking your pockets, and doing a flamenco on your junk before I move along. Over the top - of you.
Friday, June 14, 2013
This Week's Got-My-Goat Moment
First of all, my it's-all-about-me disclaimer.
I'm a (mostly) grown-up class clown and practical joker, and I generally go through my days in an emotional range from calm and even-tempered to laughing. If nothing else, because it makes my food digest easier. I am not Glum from the cartoon Gulliver's Travels ("We're doomed!").
But any number of passing items, and most especially from The Powers That Be, look to me, and always will, like the antics of kids standing in a wading pool of gasoline and trying to light a road flare: hilarious on YouTube, but not so funny when they're set up on my front porch.
So this week's moment was while trying to glean any nuggets of wisdom from someone talking about their foreign relief trip to uplift the world's downtrodden. Specifically, when, having stayed once at a Holiday Inn Express once, they opined about when antibiotics were appropriate, or not.
And proceeded to name as bacterial infections two things which are anything but, and for which the proper antibiotic is frequently best delivered from a bar of Lifebouy, followed by a warm shower and a clean bath towel, followed by topical application of OTC medications.
Folks, doctors spend around 6-8 years, after college, learning the best ways and times to use antibiotics. And bear in mind, they miss diagnoses (a nice way of saying "Screw up royally") too, despite it being their job, and proceeding from the best intentions and scrupulous attention to the best information available.
So please, for the love of facts, medicine, common sense, and the Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you don't know what you're talking about with regard to antibiotics (or aerodynamics, or thermodynamics, or any other deeply technical subject), either learn enough to speak about what you do know with a modicum of actual knowledge, that you got the hard way - by learning it - rather than winging it, or else simply and succinctly adopt Will Roger's advice, to "never pass up a good opportunity to shut up".
What we don't need, when discussing home medical care, or survival situations, or expertise on anything else, at the counter, the coffee table, the street corner, or the intarwebz, is another conga line of the blind leading the blind. Unless someone knows how I can send them all tour bus tickets to the nearest cliff. (I promise to upload that video to YouTube.)
I'm a (mostly) grown-up class clown and practical joker, and I generally go through my days in an emotional range from calm and even-tempered to laughing. If nothing else, because it makes my food digest easier. I am not Glum from the cartoon Gulliver's Travels ("We're doomed!").
But any number of passing items, and most especially from The Powers That Be, look to me, and always will, like the antics of kids standing in a wading pool of gasoline and trying to light a road flare: hilarious on YouTube, but not so funny when they're set up on my front porch.
So this week's moment was while trying to glean any nuggets of wisdom from someone talking about their foreign relief trip to uplift the world's downtrodden. Specifically, when, having stayed once at a Holiday Inn Express once, they opined about when antibiotics were appropriate, or not.
And proceeded to name as bacterial infections two things which are anything but, and for which the proper antibiotic is frequently best delivered from a bar of Lifebouy, followed by a warm shower and a clean bath towel, followed by topical application of OTC medications.
Folks, doctors spend around 6-8 years, after college, learning the best ways and times to use antibiotics. And bear in mind, they miss diagnoses (a nice way of saying "Screw up royally") too, despite it being their job, and proceeding from the best intentions and scrupulous attention to the best information available.
So please, for the love of facts, medicine, common sense, and the Holy Flying Spaghetti Monster, if you don't know what you're talking about with regard to antibiotics (or aerodynamics, or thermodynamics, or any other deeply technical subject), either learn enough to speak about what you do know with a modicum of actual knowledge, that you got the hard way - by learning it - rather than winging it, or else simply and succinctly adopt Will Roger's advice, to "never pass up a good opportunity to shut up".
What we don't need, when discussing home medical care, or survival situations, or expertise on anything else, at the counter, the coffee table, the street corner, or the intarwebz, is another conga line of the blind leading the blind. Unless someone knows how I can send them all tour bus tickets to the nearest cliff. (I promise to upload that video to YouTube.)
Thursday, June 6, 2013
Things Not To Do
Okay, I admit, I could give you easy ones.
Things like:
Don't buttrape the Bill of Rights.
But we've hadtwo probably at least fourteen presidents who say otherwise, so I'm taking a different tack.
Sailing across the wind, rather than into it, is exactly what tacking is, after all.
Let's note, for the record, that the NSA isn't collecting telephone cell records under a court order.
They're collecting them under a large farm of antennae in Maryland, connected to enough raw computing power to crush diamonds, and use Chinese calculus as your log on password. Which they've done since pretty much the day after Marconi invented their stuff.
So rather than get all unpatriotically down on their activities, or throw some hysterical histrionic fit, I'd rather make a few carefully chosen observations.
I note, purely for informational purposes, that you can log on to Google Translate, type in any words, for instance, either a meaningless string of terrorism "alert" words or actual fully-formed sentences laden with those little DHS/NSA sphincter-puckering Easter Eggs. You can also use Translate's player to read the results back to you out loud, record the Siri-like voice(s) as an mp3 that wouldn't match your own voiceprint, get a couple of "burner" phones bought and maintained with cash, and send the resulting canned conversations back and forth at will from, say, Phone A live to Phone B voicemail, and vice versa.
If you're an even sneakier little $#!^, you can use the power of Google translate to convert your English (or whatever) words into Arabic, Pashto, and any number of other high-interest dialects, play those live conversations around, and for nothing invested beyond boredom and keystrokes, invent an entire fictional terror cell, complete with dialog.
Of course, purely for research into your unpublished Clancy-esque novel.
You'd want to take the batteries out of the phones except when you were actually sending yourself a message, and drive somewhere far away from your house or office when you send. *I* can't help it if you drove over to the cell tower nearest the local federal building, or international airport, and I'm certainly not responsible if you sent such a conversation to, for example, a US Embassy where the odds it's being tape-recorded in real time are about 100%.
But I will remind you that making discernible terrorist threats is a crime, and that security cameras record facial features and license plates, which a halloween wig and sunglasses, public transportation, and half an hour reading spy-biz tradecraft from a Barnes and Noble book generally thwarts.
And don't, under any circumstances, send Arabic conversations containing key phrases to voicemail accounts at places like the Southern Poverty Propaganda Center, See B.S. Nudes, Handgun Disarmament International, or the American Criminal Liberties Union, on the weekends, or at 3AM, when no one's going to be there to answer their phones in person. Because sending the dung beetles to investigate terror cells among those groups would be...baaaaaaaad.
Don't do it! Never ever ever.
And while we're on the subject, don't Google half a dozen truly awesome German Enigma emulation websites, translate similar alert-word laden conversations from English into actual Enigma alphanumeric cipher groups in spy-approved blocks of 5 letters/numbers, and then text those coded messages back and forth between the burner phones either. Because you wouldn't want the NSA and DHS goons to waste their precious time cracking obsolete WWII-era encryption, and find a bunch of coded tweets revealing a massive imaginary conspiracy to do nothing but waste their time. So please, I'm begging you, don't do that.
The Reichsicherheitshauptamt told me, if I see something, say something.
But they didn't tell me what to say, so this is what I chose.
April Fools is too precious to only celebrate once a year. So don't do that.
Chaos, panic, disorder. Don't do that either. My work here is done.
They can't stop the signal. So let's absolutely not do that.
Things like:
Don't buttrape the Bill of Rights.
But we've had
Sailing across the wind, rather than into it, is exactly what tacking is, after all.
Let's note, for the record, that the NSA isn't collecting telephone cell records under a court order.
They're collecting them under a large farm of antennae in Maryland, connected to enough raw computing power to crush diamonds, and use Chinese calculus as your log on password. Which they've done since pretty much the day after Marconi invented their stuff.
So rather than get all unpatriotically down on their activities, or throw some hysterical histrionic fit, I'd rather make a few carefully chosen observations.
I note, purely for informational purposes, that you can log on to Google Translate, type in any words, for instance, either a meaningless string of terrorism "alert" words or actual fully-formed sentences laden with those little DHS/NSA sphincter-puckering Easter Eggs. You can also use Translate's player to read the results back to you out loud, record the Siri-like voice(s) as an mp3 that wouldn't match your own voiceprint, get a couple of "burner" phones bought and maintained with cash, and send the resulting canned conversations back and forth at will from, say, Phone A live to Phone B voicemail, and vice versa.
If you're an even sneakier little $#!^, you can use the power of Google translate to convert your English (or whatever) words into Arabic, Pashto, and any number of other high-interest dialects, play those live conversations around, and for nothing invested beyond boredom and keystrokes, invent an entire fictional terror cell, complete with dialog.
Of course, purely for research into your unpublished Clancy-esque novel.
You'd want to take the batteries out of the phones except when you were actually sending yourself a message, and drive somewhere far away from your house or office when you send. *I* can't help it if you drove over to the cell tower nearest the local federal building, or international airport, and I'm certainly not responsible if you sent such a conversation to, for example, a US Embassy where the odds it's being tape-recorded in real time are about 100%.
But I will remind you that making discernible terrorist threats is a crime, and that security cameras record facial features and license plates, which a halloween wig and sunglasses, public transportation, and half an hour reading spy-biz tradecraft from a Barnes and Noble book generally thwarts.
And don't, under any circumstances, send Arabic conversations containing key phrases to voicemail accounts at places like the Southern Poverty Propaganda Center, See B.S. Nudes, Handgun Disarmament International, or the American Criminal Liberties Union, on the weekends, or at 3AM, when no one's going to be there to answer their phones in person. Because sending the dung beetles to investigate terror cells among those groups would be...baaaaaaaad.
Don't do it! Never ever ever.
And while we're on the subject, don't Google half a dozen truly awesome German Enigma emulation websites, translate similar alert-word laden conversations from English into actual Enigma alphanumeric cipher groups in spy-approved blocks of 5 letters/numbers, and then text those coded messages back and forth between the burner phones either. Because you wouldn't want the NSA and DHS goons to waste their precious time cracking obsolete WWII-era encryption, and find a bunch of coded tweets revealing a massive imaginary conspiracy to do nothing but waste their time. So please, I'm begging you, don't do that.
The Reichsicherheitshauptamt told me, if I see something, say something.
But they didn't tell me what to say, so this is what I chose.
April Fools is too precious to only celebrate once a year. So don't do that.
Chaos, panic, disorder. Don't do that either. My work here is done.
They can't stop the signal. So let's absolutely not do that.
Monday, June 3, 2013
Capabilities & Intentions
Whether I'm talking about delivering medical care to you or the whole nation, sizing up a policy initiative for a city council member, talking to a detective or the U.S. Attorney about a criminal conspiracy, or the CIA or the DoD planning a strategic geopolitical campaign, it all comes down to those two words: capabilities and intentions. Mine, and the opposition's.
What do I want to do?
What can I do?
What does my opponent want?
What can he/they do about that?
(What you don't or can't know is the area covered by the Fog Of War.)
The way to success starts and ends there. Or failure, if it's ignored.
You have to know yourself, know what you want to do, and what you're capable of.
And either influence what someone else wants, or what they do, along a range from gentle persuasion to global thermonuclear war.
Like tic-tac-toe, the results never vary, but unlike that game, there aren't any draws.
You either succeed, or you fail.
All efforts on your part should thus be geared towards improving what you can do, which improves the range of capabilities you possess; or of bringing others' intentions or capabilities into line with your goals, or thwarting them when that can't be accomplished.
If you're a young single guy, you want to persuade the hot chick to perceive you as desirable, and display the capabilities she thinks are important, whether that's supplying a lobster dinner, dancing, and tickets to the hot rock band, or graduating medical school and buying a mansion on the cliffs by the shore, and sending your offspring to college. (It helps if you actually have all that going on, and share a lot of perceptions in common, but lacking everything isn't an absolute handicap to ultimate success, as any visit to the tabloids or the mall will attest. No wedding in history has failed to provide at least one dubious father in law, one shocked mother in law, or at least one astonished onlooker.)
If you're trying to reach a deal, you want to gather as much support as possible, until you've won your position, and/or convince the other side that you're the side to come to, or prevent them from getting their way until you can either convince them, or steamroll them.
A chief of police, ideally, doesn't want to catch all the crooks. First of all, he wants as many people as possible not to become crooks in the first place. So he sets out to make his side look formidable, and the penalties for crossing the law certain, swift, and unappealing. He knows there will always be those who'll either be too stupid to listen, or determined enough to cross him. Those are the ones who get more specialized attention. But he knows resources aren't limitless, because he knows his own capabilities, and does what he can. This is why city-wide riots succeed, but crime families don't.
On a much larger level, people who play the game undid communism. They knew that the intention was total subjugation of everyone to the organs of the state (and I mean that any way you care to understand "organs"; what the state planned to do to people is little different than what rapists want, practically.) But people who paid attention to what is, instead of what they wished, knew that the communists weren't capable of running everything and everyone, and that they didn't know what they didn't know. Wanting to rule the world isn't a matter of ambition, or even force of arms, but the reality that none of us is able to outsmart all of us. And so, the jacktards failed, despite desperately struggling against reality for most of two generations, and great was the fall thereof.
You can even take this to the realm of forces of nature, because for "intentions", you can substitute the laws of nature and physical tendencies. Tornadoes, for instance, can happen anywhere, and do; but they're lot more likely to move from southwest to northeast in Tornado Alley. Hurricanes are far more likely on the east coast from June through November than any likelihood that a Cat V will come storming across Lake Superior in February and lay waste to Green Bay.
But you have to know what you know, what you want, and what you can do about it, and you have to know what the other side wants, knows how to do, and can actually accomplish.
And then you have to improve your position, and persuade, undermine, or thwart theirs, and you win.
It doesn't matter if you're trying to grow carrots and keep the rabbits out, or grow a civilization by stopping the Mongolian hordes from invading China by building the Great Wall. Capabilities and Intentions is the blueprint for success. Learn it, love it, and live it.
What do I want to do?
What can I do?
What does my opponent want?
What can he/they do about that?
(What you don't or can't know is the area covered by the Fog Of War.)
The way to success starts and ends there. Or failure, if it's ignored.
You have to know yourself, know what you want to do, and what you're capable of.
And either influence what someone else wants, or what they do, along a range from gentle persuasion to global thermonuclear war.
Like tic-tac-toe, the results never vary, but unlike that game, there aren't any draws.
You either succeed, or you fail.
All efforts on your part should thus be geared towards improving what you can do, which improves the range of capabilities you possess; or of bringing others' intentions or capabilities into line with your goals, or thwarting them when that can't be accomplished.
If you're a young single guy, you want to persuade the hot chick to perceive you as desirable, and display the capabilities she thinks are important, whether that's supplying a lobster dinner, dancing, and tickets to the hot rock band, or graduating medical school and buying a mansion on the cliffs by the shore, and sending your offspring to college. (It helps if you actually have all that going on, and share a lot of perceptions in common, but lacking everything isn't an absolute handicap to ultimate success, as any visit to the tabloids or the mall will attest. No wedding in history has failed to provide at least one dubious father in law, one shocked mother in law, or at least one astonished onlooker.)
If you're trying to reach a deal, you want to gather as much support as possible, until you've won your position, and/or convince the other side that you're the side to come to, or prevent them from getting their way until you can either convince them, or steamroll them.
A chief of police, ideally, doesn't want to catch all the crooks. First of all, he wants as many people as possible not to become crooks in the first place. So he sets out to make his side look formidable, and the penalties for crossing the law certain, swift, and unappealing. He knows there will always be those who'll either be too stupid to listen, or determined enough to cross him. Those are the ones who get more specialized attention. But he knows resources aren't limitless, because he knows his own capabilities, and does what he can. This is why city-wide riots succeed, but crime families don't.
On a much larger level, people who play the game undid communism. They knew that the intention was total subjugation of everyone to the organs of the state (and I mean that any way you care to understand "organs"; what the state planned to do to people is little different than what rapists want, practically.) But people who paid attention to what is, instead of what they wished, knew that the communists weren't capable of running everything and everyone, and that they didn't know what they didn't know. Wanting to rule the world isn't a matter of ambition, or even force of arms, but the reality that none of us is able to outsmart all of us. And so, the jacktards failed, despite desperately struggling against reality for most of two generations, and great was the fall thereof.
You can even take this to the realm of forces of nature, because for "intentions", you can substitute the laws of nature and physical tendencies. Tornadoes, for instance, can happen anywhere, and do; but they're lot more likely to move from southwest to northeast in Tornado Alley. Hurricanes are far more likely on the east coast from June through November than any likelihood that a Cat V will come storming across Lake Superior in February and lay waste to Green Bay.
But you have to know what you know, what you want, and what you can do about it, and you have to know what the other side wants, knows how to do, and can actually accomplish.
And then you have to improve your position, and persuade, undermine, or thwart theirs, and you win.
It doesn't matter if you're trying to grow carrots and keep the rabbits out, or grow a civilization by stopping the Mongolian hordes from invading China by building the Great Wall. Capabilities and Intentions is the blueprint for success. Learn it, love it, and live it.
Saturday, June 1, 2013
PPPPPPP
It's inevitable in humans, and especially among tech-savvy Westerners, to want a piece of Magic Gear that will solve the catastrophe du jour, and folds down to wallet-size. (There was one of those once, but it was made of Unobtanium, and it sank with Atlantis.)
Everybody who knows what they're talking about, and anybody who's heard the questions or seen the results, let alone seen the elephant, gives the following advice more times than probably any other:
Resist that urge.
There is, in fact cool gear. In a given situation, for a specific task, there is always one particular piece of gear that is the most superior, the most excellent; and there are, doubtless, any number of alternatives that would serve admirably, and some aficionado who can even demonstrate how they could/would/should survive with their particular piece of kit. Most of them are like child-proof caps: when you have one, there's never a convenient 8-year old there to get it open for you.
But the only way gear solves problems - pay attention, this is the important fact - is by you getting into a problem in the first place. Yes, a parachute is a great substitute for a flyable airplane. But it would've been far simpler to do proper maintenance and service in the first place, and maybe not trying to fly through that weather over those mountains. A liferaft beats drowning, but it's not a substitute for paying attention to the chart, and not sailing into the rocks, or skipping any of the other ten things you coulda/shoulda/woulda done that got you to where you need to get into the raft just now. Some as simple as keeping a mallet and a supply of wooden pegs in various sizes.
Accidents do happen, and unicorns appear that make the things go sideways. That's what parachutes, liferafts, and survival kits are for. Life isn't certain.
But asking about the best stuff to sock away in a bugout bag for every catastrophe is as dumb as asking for the best gun to use to shoot burglars.
In the latter, the best question to ask was "How do I make it highly unlikely to ever need to shoot burglars?" Like putting up a fence, getting a dog, trimming away brush that allows concealed access, planting thorny species, beefing up your glass, locks, windows, and doors, installing bright lights, household timers, and maybe an alarm system, should all come ahead of which gun to buy, which question comes ahead of only the decision of whether or not to install barbed wire, a walled palisade, and a moat with drawbridge. Do the first things first.
I've been in and through a fair number of disasters, emergencies, and crises. In 99% of them, the Number One gear solution was
"Go home and lock your door. Stay there until situation resolves."
That was it. Problem solved.
The Number Two gear solution was
"Get in car. Drive away. Far, far, away. Stay there until situation resolves."
Which solution necessitated only three things: a reliable car, a current AAA road map, and a handy envelope of ready and abundant cash. Once again, Problem solved.
(Note the above modifiers: "reliable", "current", and "ready" and "abundant". They aren't accidental. Plastic isn't cash. An ATM isn't cash. In some situations far from unlikely, a bag of $20s or $100s may not be cash either. Plan ahead, and plan appropriately.)
Knowing which one to revert to, and when to use each, is the result of rather unsophisticated planning. I will share with you that Top Secret decision algorithm:
"Is _________ liable to affect me inside my house?
No: Stay Yes: Next question
"Is _________ liable to prevent me from departing in my car?
No: Go Yes: Stay
That's the magic. Either you're safe somewhere near, safer far away, or not safe anywhere. In which last case, do whatever you want. If it helps, sing the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go".
What you'll need in any case are the basic necessities for providing yourself (and anyone you're responsible for) with shelter, water, food, medical care, and personal protection.
By all means, make those provisions, both in situ and in transit.
But there's no gear that's going to save you infallibly, every time, from everything, that fits inside your pocket, or bugout bag, or car trunk, or closet. You'd have to tow the Home Depot, and bury the local Mall under your house, and unless you're Donald Trump, that ain't happening.
But what you can do is to evaluate where you live, from your skin to the house structure itself, to the neighborhood, to the locale, to the region, to the nation, and make a serious study of the most likely problems and events, the most serious problems and events, and make a list of fixes and workarounds for each, to include when it's time to stay, time to go, and what you'll need for each.
A parachute/liferaft/bugout bag/survival retreat/Blofeld's secret underground lair is okay per se, but not as a substitute for a functioning brain, time spent using it planning for emergencies, and staying aware daily of where you are along a continuum between "everything's roses" to "I was already screwed yesterday before I got out of bed".
And ready emergency funds, whether an envelope or a small sack.
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
Everybody who knows what they're talking about, and anybody who's heard the questions or seen the results, let alone seen the elephant, gives the following advice more times than probably any other:
Resist that urge.
There is, in fact cool gear. In a given situation, for a specific task, there is always one particular piece of gear that is the most superior, the most excellent; and there are, doubtless, any number of alternatives that would serve admirably, and some aficionado who can even demonstrate how they could/would/should survive with their particular piece of kit. Most of them are like child-proof caps: when you have one, there's never a convenient 8-year old there to get it open for you.
But the only way gear solves problems - pay attention, this is the important fact - is by you getting into a problem in the first place. Yes, a parachute is a great substitute for a flyable airplane. But it would've been far simpler to do proper maintenance and service in the first place, and maybe not trying to fly through that weather over those mountains. A liferaft beats drowning, but it's not a substitute for paying attention to the chart, and not sailing into the rocks, or skipping any of the other ten things you coulda/shoulda/woulda done that got you to where you need to get into the raft just now. Some as simple as keeping a mallet and a supply of wooden pegs in various sizes.
Accidents do happen, and unicorns appear that make the things go sideways. That's what parachutes, liferafts, and survival kits are for. Life isn't certain.
But asking about the best stuff to sock away in a bugout bag for every catastrophe is as dumb as asking for the best gun to use to shoot burglars.
In the latter, the best question to ask was "How do I make it highly unlikely to ever need to shoot burglars?" Like putting up a fence, getting a dog, trimming away brush that allows concealed access, planting thorny species, beefing up your glass, locks, windows, and doors, installing bright lights, household timers, and maybe an alarm system, should all come ahead of which gun to buy, which question comes ahead of only the decision of whether or not to install barbed wire, a walled palisade, and a moat with drawbridge. Do the first things first.
I've been in and through a fair number of disasters, emergencies, and crises. In 99% of them, the Number One gear solution was
"Go home and lock your door. Stay there until situation resolves."
That was it. Problem solved.
The Number Two gear solution was
"Get in car. Drive away. Far, far, away. Stay there until situation resolves."
Which solution necessitated only three things: a reliable car, a current AAA road map, and a handy envelope of ready and abundant cash. Once again, Problem solved.
(Note the above modifiers: "reliable", "current", and "ready" and "abundant". They aren't accidental. Plastic isn't cash. An ATM isn't cash. In some situations far from unlikely, a bag of $20s or $100s may not be cash either. Plan ahead, and plan appropriately.)
Knowing which one to revert to, and when to use each, is the result of rather unsophisticated planning. I will share with you that Top Secret decision algorithm:
"Is _________ liable to affect me inside my house?
No: Stay Yes: Next question
"Is _________ liable to prevent me from departing in my car?
No: Go Yes: Stay
That's the magic. Either you're safe somewhere near, safer far away, or not safe anywhere. In which last case, do whatever you want. If it helps, sing the Clash's "Should I Stay Or Should I Go".
What you'll need in any case are the basic necessities for providing yourself (and anyone you're responsible for) with shelter, water, food, medical care, and personal protection.
By all means, make those provisions, both in situ and in transit.
But there's no gear that's going to save you infallibly, every time, from everything, that fits inside your pocket, or bugout bag, or car trunk, or closet. You'd have to tow the Home Depot, and bury the local Mall under your house, and unless you're Donald Trump, that ain't happening.
But what you can do is to evaluate where you live, from your skin to the house structure itself, to the neighborhood, to the locale, to the region, to the nation, and make a serious study of the most likely problems and events, the most serious problems and events, and make a list of fixes and workarounds for each, to include when it's time to stay, time to go, and what you'll need for each.
A parachute/liferaft/bugout bag/survival retreat/Blofeld's secret underground lair is okay per se, but not as a substitute for a functioning brain, time spent using it planning for emergencies, and staying aware daily of where you are along a continuum between "everything's roses" to "I was already screwed yesterday before I got out of bed".
And ready emergency funds, whether an envelope or a small sack.
Proper Prior Planning Prevents Piss Poor Performance
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