A Light In The Darkness

304 thoughts on “A Light In The Darkness”

1. Have they processed the fact the terrorists who hurt us so badly on 9/11 were *not* ignorant religious fanatics but upper-middle-class, college-educated religious fanatics? Young men who, by their standards, “had everything to live for?”

   Bet not.

   1. Bah. Religious fanatics are religious fanatics. /s

   2. As far as I can tell, no.

   3. No and they never will. The 20 hijackers were not stupid people. You don’t need a PhD to fly a jetliner, but these were not illiterate Afghani goatherders. They were middle-class, some college-educated, some madrassah-educated. They were literate, they knew their Quran (or their insane interpretation) and they could have become any number of different gainful professions. Instead, they decided to kill three thousand people in the name of Allah.

      Being book-smart does not mean you’re not gullible.

      1. Being book smart means you could possibly do more damage.

         Hence using airliners as guided missles instead of running around stabbing a few random people in crowd.

      2. Now, now, they didn’t intend to kill 3,000 people.

         No, they intended to murder upwards of 100,000 innocent people. They committed their atrocity at a time when the buildings weren’t at peak occupancy, probably because they failed to take such factors into account. They also didn’t know how long the buildings would stand, giving people time to evacuate.

   4. See, that’s the thing. They don’t know how to do anything, including think things through. They think we’re too stupid to even consider as humans. All they’d have to do is ask us how we feel and we’d tell them.

      But no, they just know how to break shite.

      And I think those camps are still a potential idea on their side, another idea that will fail.

      1. The camps have been mentioned a number of times in the last few years. They keep trotting it out (rather like after-birth abortion) and then pulling back and saying they didn’t mean it.

         1. Commies gotta have their Gulags to punish those Eeevul Kulaks.

         2. Yeah, a few years ago in WA state we caught them paying the American Indians to set up big lodge houses and big barbed wire encampments, that were strangely empty.

            The evil regime pretended they were not for camps, just people with the Coof who were to be quarantined.

            1. Is that a distinction without a difference?

               1. we put it a bit differently at the time but yep, exactly.

         3. The Reader thinks this particular dystopia we inhabit already has reeducation camps. We call them HR departments.

            1. And public schools.

   5. They use it to practice their doublethink. Those who think at all, that is.

2. Last night the wife and I woke up with the damn smoke detectors all going off intermittently. Couldn’t find anything wrong in the house, and they stayed silent for the next 12 hours. Ran around replacing all the batteries, but the old ones still seem to have quite a bit of charge left.

   1. How old? They have about a 10 year life if they are the ionizing type. They can get squirrelly when over-old.

      I used to have one that seemed triggered by high pollen levels.

      The malfuntioning monoxide detector was fun.

      1. I replaced them all just last year. I really dislike doing overhead wiring work.

3. They trust their authors, but we have The Author looking out for us.

   1. THIS. He’s looking out for me in the best way. Crazy.

      1. Me too.

         1. I’m glad. The feeling of being well cared for really helps everything else.

4. Larry Correia has been, “playing with his food,” tolling low-class, low-follower types on X. One part of it has been trying to explain to them how much damage the overweight, baseball cap-wearing, middle-aged “rednecks,” one of them was mocking could do if they set their minds to it.

   This type just keeps preening about how “stupid,” conservatives are, and how quickly any “civil war,” will be put down by troops with tanks, jets and bombs. The words, “Viet Cong,” or “Taliban,” are not included in their downloads.

   1. I saw an exchange on anti-social media. Picture of 5 guys, beer guts and dirty from work, and the soy-boy was saying how easy they’d be to roll over.
      The first response was to comment that any one of those guys could get an anvil from the bed of a pickup–alone. Then go back to having a beer.
      The second was noting that there were probably 12 knives and 8 or so handguns carried on those dudes.

      With respect to jets and bombs; they seem to forget that the planes have to land, be fueled and armed. The people doing those things ain’t living in some bunker surrounded by armed guards, and in the airbase I sort of know, the activities do do that stuff are within range of a good deer hunter. They might also have not noticed that Ukraine is pretty good at using low cost drones against similar facilities. Nice fuel dump you have there…

      1. Many of these people can’t even grasp where food and electricity ACTUALLY come from, let alone anything more complicated like supply lines.

         1. Well, food comes from grocery stores (produced by machines in the back, of course), and electricity comes from a thingie on the wall, right? They know these simple facts of life, so don’t try to fool them. 😜😜😜

            1. And water comes out of the faucet, and goes down the drain when you flush. That is simply The Natural Order Of Things!

         2. >Many of these people can’t even grasp where food and electricity ACTUALLY come >from, let alone anything more complicated like supply lines.

            On that note, I will tell a story from many years ago, when I first started scuba diving. There was a pet store near me that had a NEW! FASCINATING! salt water aquarium corner, so I went to take a look. I saw that they had some of the fish I was familiar with, having just gotten REEF certified in fish ID. So I went, “yeah, seen that one, seen that one, seen that one,” mostly to myself. The clerk was following me (I guess I looked suspicious? Maybe he liked older women?) and he asked where I had seen them since they were the only salt water distribution place for 70 miles.

            I said I had seen them in the wild, diving in the Florida Keys.

            And he said,”These are wild fish? From the ocean and everything?”

            and I asked where he thought they came from. He replied “We get ours from the warehouse.”

            And I laughed and laughed until I was asked to leave.

            1. Sometime back in prehistory (1970, maybe?) I remember a PETA spokescritter saying that no one needed to kill animals, because meat could be bought in the grocery store; the boggle was epic. These supposedly-educated adults actually believe the garbage they spout, and have essentially zero conception of reality. 😒

               1. I remember walking past a PETA equivalent protest in the 80’s. They objected to the selling of furs in a particular store. No readon to kill!

                  Many wore leather shoes and belts.

                  1. Q: Why does PETA protest fur, but not leather?

                     A: Harassing little old ladies is a lot safer than hassling bikers. 😛

                  2. Yep. If it weren’t for cognitive disconnect they’d have no cognition at all.

            2. “We get ours from the warehouse.”

               ………….

               To be fair. Most aquarium fish are not taken from wild stock, anymore. These days they are captivity bred. Probably not in the warehouses in question. (What? I watch “Tanked”, reruns.)

               1. I live very close to an aquarium/fish store, that also grows coral. (I think at one point they were trying to just grow coral, but they had to diversify. Also I think it kept them from going squirrelly.)

                  There’s actually another guy with a coral farm in his basement, who lives on the other side of town.

                  Two saltwater coral farms, in one smallish Ohio town. Hundreds of miles from any wild coral reef, unless you count fossils.

                  1. People are so gloriously weird.

                  2. I think at one point they were trying to just grow coral, but they had to diversify. Also I think it kept them from going squirrelly.

                     The coral, or the shopkeepers? 😀

      2. I saw that one. It was attempt to flip the script on an older meme showing a bunch of noodle-armed soi-bois with danger hair, and the same caption.

         Their best memes are plagiarized.

      3. none of these middle class twits have ever been hit by a strong man who wanted to hurt them. They have no idea, no idea at all. it’s all just larping.

         as for them having the armored cars and tanks and guns, who do they think is crewing them? Will the sergeants obey their officers and shoot their own people or will they shoot their officers? Especially as the sergeants, and the officers too, live in these communities and people would know how to find them. The ghosts of Ceausescu and Ghadafi could tell them how well that works out.

         Morons.

         1. Machines have to be designed, built, operated, and maintained.

            The people really good at these tasks are not necessarily automatically in complete agreement who think that machines spring out of nothing in the middle of the void.

            A wise person who cares about military outcomes, and thinks machines are the end all of war would at least study machinery.

            (Folks who have properly studied the big picture may also see that there is no real evidence that Infantry has yet been dethroned as queen.)

            It is deeply unwise to publicly speculate about winning a civil war, or terrorizing political opposition, by deploying a nuclear weapon domestically very close to a major depot for servicing delivery vehicles for nuclear weapons.

            We recruit people to operate weapons, all over the country. We move them around all over, and they marry, all over. They live in lots of places, and work side by side lots of people.

            Research, design, manufacturing, supply chain? All over the place.

            The cool exciting toys may also mostly be complicated, and expensive.

            If you could set things up to arm and equip fanatics from a curated set of politically reliable lunatics, then you could potentially cause some widespread damage to parts of the US. The problem is that this would take time, and space, and you would either need to do it through established US defense contracting organizations, or learn how to do it in a new organization. There does not seem to be any of the necessary contracts, so it is probably not possible to, say, sustain fighter or bomber operations against even half a dozen small US cities.

            Now, in theory you could do this without involving US persons potentially tied to any arbitrary domestic target if you could just use foreign funding, parts, and people. If, if, if. That would also have other challenges.

            Maybe one day American will gleefully mass murder American, but right now the necessary propaganda does not appear to be a complete success yet.

         2. As effed up as the Red Leftroids have made the US Armed Forces, do not expect a bastion of conservatism, like say 1988.

            They have been prepping the corruption for 20 years, especially the last 16. Anyone of “flag rank” (General/Admiral) is likely Red Leftroid or at least a “go along” squishy, else no career.

            (spit)

            The good news is that the expected “discussions” over what are obey-able orders amoung all lesser ranks will likely leave them relatively unavailable for a while.

            But expect eventual compliance with ass-hattery, as they purge “reactionaries” and provide fig-leaf court opinions from thrall judges. There is a tradition of obedience to civilian authority, and that will be exploited.

            And know that even the Red Leftroid faction will be world-class. They wont pull punches, and will see opposition as traitors to be mopped. Literally.

            Don’t expect much “Queensbury” conduct. Not from any faction, on any side. Not once things get spicy.

            Thus we maximize efforts to win by civil means.

            1. The most likely outcome would be the military brass trying to take control themselves. I can’t see them obeying a bunch of soy boys for long. As you say, not a good thing and not what any sane person wants to happen.

            2. Some of the rank and file know what is going on…and are working over under and around. One person I know who got out in thr last year described how all the tough nits deliberately got the CO, a DEI lesbian who hated men, blackmailed female troops into ‘favors’….or rewarded them that were eaager, to assign them to maximum field duty and training as punishment. This meant weeks to months i harsh environments learning teaching the less knowlesgable and using a surprising number of work arounds to stay aware.

               Also sadly the CO accidently asent some inappropriate videos of her and select subordinates being bad to the wrong people. She was relieved in thr field snd after an investigation given a general discharge. I was toldthe alternative presented to her involved a lot of co finement to camp while everythi g was investigated….

               So not a walk over either way but hope

               1. Good for them. Back during my time in (mid-late ’60s) it would probably have been “solved” by fragging; this is better, since fragging erodes discipline. Turn the handle in the direction it’s designed to go, but far further than they imagined. 😉

                  A BCD would have been better, but a General (I assume “under other than honorable conditions”) is also pretty good.

                  1. probably have been “solved” by fragging; this is better, since fragging erodes discipline.

                     ……………..

                     Should certain orders occur, may happen yet.

            3. I don’t think you would have seen something like this without that corruption.

               https://www.bizpacreview.com/2024/06/07/secret-weapon-donny-deutsch-calls-for-military-to-take-public-stand-against-trump-1464272

               “MSNBC analyst Donny Deutsch on Friday urged the military to release an ad campaign against former President Donald Trump ahead of the upcoming presidential election.”

         3. And some folks will pull their punches a bit, and avoid the head, so the beating can go on longer.

            Not the wisest move, but some folks want to inflict -pain-.

      4. They’re carrying more weight than is wise, because you can’t count on vehicles. You may need march, and every ounce counts.

         OTOH, marching would do a good job of fixing it.

   2. Carnival folks say “Never wise up the chumps.”

      Its good advice. You can’t correct their thinking, mostly, not the hardcores and true-believers. Dont give them useful things to add to it. Hopefully the penny never drops, but if it does, one heck of a pile of Red Leftroids are going to die of stupid.

      When I was cane-dependant, several folks thought I was “easy”. Heh.

      “Never wise up the chumps.”

      1. Apparently “Hey, let’s beat up the guy with the big stick!” doesn’t prompt any actual thought on their part. Yeah, Sparky, kick the wolverine in the nuts; that’ll go well.😆

      2. Honest, officer, the purse snatcher tripped over my cane. And when he fell, he took e down with him. I can’t get up without help.

         Me, at the bus transfer plaza, when I was dependent upon buses.

   3. What’s ironic and amusing is that the OP of that “fat redneck” meme would apparently defeat his imagined enemy by voguing at them, from what I saw of the OP’s feed.

      1. Why, they will cut down their foes with their rapier wit!

         Sharp as a cantaloupe.

5. I’m pretty sure they’re disappointed that we didn’t start rioting after the verdict.
   And before then, when I first heard that they were trying to keep Trump stuck in the NY area with court cases during the campaign season, I burst out laughing at their idiocy.
   Like locking MacGyver in the supply closet.

   1. Right?

      1. Oh, they’re still trying to have Merchan keep the gag order in place until sentencing. Wonder if they’ll try to keep travel restrictions on too?

         1. I’ve sent you two messages with Kathy’s addresses.

            1. Got them, thanks.

            2. We’re hooked up, so to speak, thanks Sarah. I really appreciate it.

               1. Fastest answer to a prayer, I’ve ever had. You are truly deserving.

                  One more miracle like that and I can be canonized a saint,🤣😂🤣

                  oh wait…. I need to be dead first.

                  Nevermind. 😔

                  1. Apparently not if you are Orthodox, depending on which branch of Orthodox. Although that might not apply anymore. Sources differ. Kitty shrug

                  2. ROFL. Yeah, let’s wait a bit on that whole Saint thing.

                     Plenty of time. 🧐

   2. It did seem to me that the weekend after the announcement of the verdict was unusually quiet. Oh well.

      1. Everone was checking their scuba gear and updating their lists.

         So many lists nowadays! Lists of supplies, lists of locations, lists of people, lists of crimes, lists of prayers, etc…

         1. “I have a little list.

            They never will be missed.” 😁

   3. “Why you no Boog?” Fibbie asked.
      “We don’t have all your addresses yet, Fibbie” Redneck replied.

      They are our neighbors, everyday they drive by us, on their street, in their schools, in their businesses. They have to worry which one of us will be the one that takes them down, not vice versa. It would be more helpful if they locked themselves into camps for their own protection, then trying to round us all up. I think they are starting to get that. But then if you have to live in a prison to be safe, is that really living? Now can you trust the maid, the butler, the gardener? It never ends.

      1. In “A Tramp Abroad” Heinlein related a joke current in South Africa in about 1960.

         A housewife, nervous about the rumors of uprising and the promise to kill all the whites asks her houseman, Ha’penny, you wouldnt kill us would you? You been with us all your life.

         He looks at her and smile gently. Why no Mrs. Smith. I helped raise you. I could never hurt you.

         Relieved she says Thank you.

         Oh no he continues, I talked with Mrs Jones Ha’penny about this he feels the same way. So we agreed he would kill all you and I would kill all his.

         So it is not thier neighbors they need fear….

6. I’ve been saying for several years now.That if he gets close to the oval office again they’ll have them killed, Hell even the late night talk show host have been joking about it.

   Since Clinton was last in office they have been desperate for us to get violent. At this point any excuse will do, As far as I can tell they would rather permanently postpone the next election over any event than have to show their hands in stealing yet another election.

   1. As I believe Larry pointed out once upon a time, for the left violence is a dial, to be turned up and down at their convenience. For the right, it’s a switch, and it is VERY VERY HARD to flip, because once it IS flipped…it gets very bad.

      Most of us on the right are still sane, and don’t want the switch flipped, for all that the lefties keep bringing prybars and block and tackle to try and flip it for us. Also, I think most of us are still entertained by just how *well* pointing and mocking and laughing at them works. They just can’t handle it.

      1. Its why they hate Meme’s so much, or the fact that even the idiots among us( Raises hand ) can Meme better than they can, we can even turn their own Meme’s against them.

         1. Because they have no sense of (good) humor, they are unable to produce a humorous meme. Their attempts are Very Serious Things Meant to Warn Us.

            1. Don’t forget the ‘nasty insult at acceptable target, why aren’t you laughing? I said they’re bad people!!!’ option.

            2. To state a truth in a pithy and memorable way, requires an acquaintance with that truth.

               Leftists are postmodernists who deny the very existence of truth.

               1. Bingo.

      2. More like multiple switches with a switch guard over them. The switches get pressed, alarms start to sound, and then the explosive bolts go off.

         1. “…You now have approximately five months to reach minimum safe distance…”

7. c4c

8. Since Clinton was last in office they have been desperate for us to get violent. At this point any excuse will do, As far as I can tell they would rather permanently postpone the next election over any event than have to show their hands in stealing yet another election.

   Look for deliberate pokes and false flags to try to set the spark. With a backup plan of a nuclear WWIII.

   I told someone today we already bailed Europe out twice/thrice last century. Not going to waste resources freeing them from Islam or Bears. Their elites are their own problems, we have our own set of nilistic satanists to deal with.

   1. Merrick Garland all but announced a false flag event coming before the election.

      https://www.theepochtimes.com/us/garland-warns-terror-threat-on-us-soil-has-gone-up-enormously-since-oct-7-post-5663197

      1. Thing is, I wouldn’t be surprised if the terror threat really *has* gone up enormously recently. But the reason for that sudden increase has nothing to do with the “far right, white supremacist, Christian” claims that the current administration usually identifies. It has to do with all of the people slipping through the southern border who were only in Central America long enough to sneak into the US.

         1. The objective threat? Sure. But that’s not what they follow or measure. They want to blame everything on white rage. So they do. And invent all the bullshit required to support it.

         2. THIS

            1. “What’s the matter, McFly? Chicken?”

               The Sinisters can’t comprehend that people on the Right don’t have the moral development of a picked-on teenager. In order to stay on the Right, one must continually maintain and develop one’s morality.

               Becoming part of the Sinister Set means you surrender your moral compass to the mob, with predictably degrading results.

         3. And since they cannot think of people other than as “class members”, and since obviously all BIPOC are a single class, they will cooperate fully with TPTB and with each other against the “white class”. A study of history and cultures, which could inform them of their rather serious mistake, are foreign terms to them.

9. C4C

10. If they started running now, they *might* get to someplace we couldn’t find them and mock them within an inch of their pride…

    Instead, they’ll be like that ship of Vulcans in that Original Star Trek whose last thought were of astonishment.

    1. The Immunity Syndrome, season 2, episode 19 for the younger types
       https://memory-alpha.fandom.com/wiki/The_Immunity_Syndrome_(episode)

       “Shut up, Spock! We’re rescuing you!“
       “Why, thank you… Captain McCoy.“

       1. Yep – the Intrepid got eaten. Vulcan had never been defeated. They were astonished, at the end, to be lunch.

11. Violins?

    Isn’t that the background music playing when somebody goes full Vlad Tepes up and down Pennsylvania Avenue?

    Unlikely to happen, but even bad boys dream. Am I a bad boy?

    And I want a teeshirt which says: ‘Unconvicted Felon’.

    Enough of this. I have holes to dig. For foundation braces people! Not for bodies!!

    1. Ah, but you know how to dig.

       1. (Infantry grin)

    2. there are already “all my role models went to prison” shirts, although most of the ones I’ve seen are religious and may not be your thing.

       1. Someone is gonna do a, “I’m voting for the felon, not the guy who’s incapable of standing trial,” shirt.

          1. I’ve already seen the “I’m voting for the one who has been declared mentally competent to stand for trial.”

          2. “Vote for the felon, it’s important.”

             “Vote for the felon, not the crook.”

             Either could work.

             1. There is the meme of

                “Vote for the ‘felon'”
                “Not the fascist”

          3. 

       2. “I follow a convicted felon” with a picture of the crucifixion would be funny, but then they would say we think Trump is Christ.

          1. And this is different from present HOW? Yeah, let’s mock their delusions left, “right” and center, but let’s not give them MORE reasons to drink their own ink seriously.

          2. Multiple pictures of convicted felon’s throughout history, Jesus, Ghandi, Mandella, Trump, etc..

    3. I dunno, maybe for this particular application the Dukes of Hazzard theme song would work.

       Them revenuers have always been one step behind those good ol’ boys.

    4. Once you’ve got a post set in the ground, it can be put to all sorts of uses. 😛

    5. Looks like #teamkatepaulk has another proponent. Personally, I’m leaning more and more these days toward #teambluejinn.

12. The prep doesn’t surprise me, really. I think the 2009 recession woke a lot of folks up to the idea that having food storage, etc to see you through tough FINANCIAL times was a pretty good idea. Then add in the hugeness of this country, and the fact that it trends to somewhat harsher weather than many places in the western world (watch a Swedish youtuber’s reaction to tornado documentaries sometime, it’s hilarious), and that whole Thor Tools crap, and many of us have encountered–at least once in our lives–a case of “grocery store is almost empty bc blizzard/tornado/something/stupid protesters shut the interstate down and our just-in-time supply trucks haven’t been able to get through. It’s a matter of course in my part of the country, because the idiot feds built the main interstate (I-80) through our state in the EXACT location all the locals told them was a bad idea, because our *lovely* Wyoming winds would mean that even in relatively light-snow winters, the interstate would have to be shut down. Lo and behold…

    And then the left just kept pushing harder. And harder. And more and more people are eyeing the weather vane and going “Hmmm. Increasing our emergency supplies might not be a bad idea…” Not to mention the fact that–Americans Americaning–depending on cottage industry laws in your region, you might even be able to run a nice little side-business selling, oh, freeze-dried fruits or candies as treats (and charge the earth for them, and people love ’em. Srsly, though, freeze dried apples are like…apple marshmallows. They’re amazing. Yes, my father decided to get a freeze-dryer last year, and has been assiduously experimenting with it since. It makes those nasty canned peaches you get in big metal cans taste awesome, too–and you can store a LOT of freeze dried food without much weight or space being occupied. And I can say from experience that reconstituting freeze dried veggies in a soup results in near-fresh-veggie textures, unlike dehydrated veggies, which usually stay kind of tough and leathery.)

    If I hadn’t realized my mailing address (rather than my street address) on my driver’s license would be a problem, I would already be in possession of a nice freedom seed dispenser. As it is, it will have to wait until I am next in Cheyenne and can take my water bill with me.

    1. Oh, G*d, the HUGENESS of this country! The Daughter Unit and I just came back from a road trip to California and back — from central Texas. There is a LOT of empty space. And a LOT of places where … as my daughter remarked, “The people who live and work here … they’re probably plenty tough!”

       Agricultural land … yeah, we drove by miles and miles of it. Hay-fields, pastures. Cows. Timberlands. Oil fields, with working donkey-jacks, pumping out that sweet, sweet fresh crude oil…

       We saw a gas station in California where it was a penny off from $6.00 a gallon. We were so glad to get back to Texas, where gas prices per gallon were in the range of sanity.

       1. The price differential for Costco gas is big enough to warrant a membership on its own, even for folk who don’t have food storage to speak of. It can be up to 60¢ per gallon in my neck of California.

          1. Same thing goes for Sam’s here in DFW.

          2. Not sure what the Costco/std station differential is in Southern Oregon. Costco prices (west of the Cascades) are generally close to what I see at home (east of ’em). I suspect the westside proximity to I-5 and being the first logical place for northbound traffic to fuel up in Oregon might have a lot to do with east/west differences.

             1. Costco to not-Costco runs a few cents less to 15 cents less. Comparison I use is to the Division Fred Meyers, which and be 6 to 15 cents more depending on whether costs/gallon are going up or down. Not easy to judge then either. Sometimes Costco is slower to increase prices than Freds, sometimes faster to drop prices than Freds. OTOH Freds has a program that allows up to a $1/gallon off. Pay for it with credit that rewards 4% on fuel and you are getting more than Costco’s fuel discount.

                Comes down to “it depends”.

                1. If the Fred Meyers fuel rewards program is like that of Fry’s (the Arizona member of the Kroger family of stores), it offers at least 2x fuel points when one buys gift cards. Fry’s often has digital coupons for 4x fuel points on gift cards.

                   1. Yes. Fred Myers (Kroger). Don’t do the gift cards. But do take full advantage of 4x Fridays. Today 210 x4 ($150 net, might have also taken advantage of “buy 2 get 2” on 12 pack Pepsi for hubby and son, plus a few other heavy discounts). May was only 1540 points. But April and March were 3000+ points. Latter is 3x fills at $1/gallon discount. That is up to $18/tank savings (generally $17).

                      I take advantage of sales and coupons. What I don’t do is run all over town to use. My run is Costco, Petsmart (which are together), Mini Pet Mart, then Freds (Kroger), might hit the other Mini Pet Mart that is on the way home. An 8 mile round trip. Could also shop Winco (same block as Costco and Petsmart) and Albertsons (across the street from Freds), but don’t.

                      1. When I have Projects and Home Desperate is the winner, I’ll get gift cards to cover the materials. If I’m really lucky, it’s a 4X coupon. Had at least one occasion in the past year where I had $2.00 available for gas discounts.

                         $SPOUSE used to use gift cards for Joanns, but their financial situation went flaky, and we didn’t want to be an unsecured creditor, so no more gift cards.

                      2. For some bizarre reason, in my town, the local Walmart has for the last several months been consistently 10-20 cents cheaper than the local Kroger equivalent (not to mention everyone else in town). Which means that there’s pretty much only reason to fill up at Kroger once every other month–if that. I’m not sure who is smoking what, but either the local Walmart is being extra clever, or Kroger (City Market) is actively trying to kill their gas business…

                         1. We have 3 stations, essentially same intersection. Two, both Mobile, run within a cent of each other. Who is higher or lower depends on who changes which direction, first. The third? $0.15+, or more, higher; AM/PM. Near I can figure is they are conceding they don’t make money on fuel. But given the franchise, required to have it. So priced to make something off fuel, even if don’t sell much.

       2. Heck, there’s places here in the East where, if an EMP hit at night and you were driving, you would have to walk or to the nearest town/city. Sure, you can spot those fields full of cows driving during the day and mark them at night, but do you want to try hunting through all of those by starlight and maybe with a flashlight in a emergency, perhaps disturbing someone’s sleep and possibly receiving a lethal response for you knock on the door? Oh, and we have packs of coyotes around the state, too. And bears, and bobcats, and of course the rumors of Cannot Exist Here cougars, not to mention feral dogs that crossbreed with the coyotes….

          That was something I was thinking about driving home one night, just gaming it out in an effort to test a story idea. If that’s a concern for storybuilding, when you apply it to real life, even the East isn’t exactly a place in which you want to get lost without supplies and definitely not without a map. GPS may not work and can get blocked, but how many people carry paper maps these days?

          1. The Reader keeps a current large atlas in each car. And he’s so old he can read maps (assuming the presence of reading glasses).

          2. The good news is that there was a test of the effects of an EMP attack on a city a while back (I think Obama was in office at the time). The results suggested that even civilian cars – with all of their electronics – would be surprisingly resilient to an EMP. They might suffer some effects. But they should still be able to act as “cars”, and not “roadblocks”.

          3. (Infantry grin)

          4. Indeed even in New England which is pretty densely populated (345/sq mile compared toUS average of 97/sq mi and England at 729/sq mi). The Northeast outside the cities and suburbs has a whole lot of nothing. Some states are only nothing, VT’s largest city Burlington tops out at ~45K, The capital Montpelier has like a 9K population. ME is dead empty but for Portland down to coastal NH. RI and Coastal CT are dense but very quickly in CT the population drops as you go inland. Inland MA is mostly empty west of 495 but for Worcester, and Springfield and a bit near Pittsfield. NY state but for NYC (and suburbs), Albany Troy, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo is mostly farm. PA outside of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh is low population (Harrisburg is like 50K max). Even NJ probably the densest Northeast state thins out quickly west of the Parkway.

             The brahmandarins live in these enclaves and rarely travel in the US outside the “civilized” areas other than to National parks. They also like to travel to Europe (see England density and much of Europe averages more). Thus their interaction with “average folks” / country folksis limited and they like to think everything outside of the enclaves is the West Virginia from Deliverance. Honestly, they’re not totally wrong eff around with the locals too much and they take a dim view of your behavior and things may start to happen.

          5. Note that if you belong to the AAA, maps are freebies at the offices. Not sure about mailorder/online.

             I found an AAA office across the street* from my retina specialist. Since I was a frequent flyer for that and other eye procedures, I had lots of chances to build my paper map supply. Each of our vehicles has at least state and local county maps.

             For road trips, I like a Rand McNally road atlas. Last one dates to 2014, the last time I did a major trip. If pigs fly and I need to do another long one, I’ll update the atlas.

             ((*)) They closed the Flyover County office several years ago.

             1. Used to get maps of locations headed to through mom & dad, who have AAA. Still could through mom. We have boxes of maps.

    2. Is that the Snow Chi Minh trail? We went over that last October with the 5th wheel. The road stayed open, but we drove very carefully.

       1. A better name for an interstate has yet to be invented.

       2. Ah yes, I recall following a semi just east of the Utah/Wyoming border in a blizzard. He could see the road (I think), but I couldn’t see enough to try to pull over to a safe shoulder. Could see the trailer, so we carried on for a while. The joys of late April weather. (I get nervous when I see interstates with railroad type gates for frequent closures, and I grew up in (lower elevation) snow country.)

          1. Not just blizzards in high desert/mountains prairie cause caution notifications to go up. Not just for semis, but RV’s, tall vans, etc. The joke of a VW Bug changing lanes without the steering wheel changing is no joke when it is a truck towing a trailer, or a big motorhome. Watching the back end of a towed trailer swaying back and forth from one lane over the line isn’t either. Watching either slowly tip over (it seems slow until it isn’t) We’ve seen the prior two first hand, the last the after effects after emergency crews already on site. Never experienced any. Leveling jacks and sway bars towed by a vehicle that more than exceeded the trailer specs, and slowing down, for the win. Worse we’ve seen is watching attached extension towing side mirrors get ripped off and go sailing off into the fields or river. Only difference between being in a snow blizzard and other clear weather, is that at least visibility allows pulling over far enough and still be seen.

             Worse we’ve seen through Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, and Nevada. But the Columbia Gorge through to Portland/Vancouver can be a joy too. One of the reasons we cut through Oregon from Ontario, Oregon through Burns. Love them blocking mountains.

             1. We started running out of propane before we got out of Wyoming. We did find some in NE. But it was out first trip through mountains with serious snow.

             2. On my way home down I-15 in either Idaho or Utah, I crossed a bridge and saw a pickup truck jammed against the right side, hitched to a trailer drawbar draped over the wall, with the trailer presumably dangling somewhere below.

                “Now that’s something ya don’t see every day.”

                1. saw a pickup truck jammed against the right side, hitched to a trailer drawbar draped over the wall, with the trailer presumably dangling somewhere below.

                   ………….

                   I think we’ve seen that picture somewhere.

                   When we went to Canada, Fall 2019, coming back we went west toward Vancouver before crossing the border south. Sunday, traffic slowed to a crawl, for hours. Finally got to the “problem”. Long box crew cab with canopy with 40’+ trailer on it’s side in the shrubbery. We cringed. While we didn’t have our setup that trip, we hadn’t decided to give it up, yet. This was a our “test trip” to see if we wanted to give up traveling with an RV. In theory, I’d be driving more (🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂😂). Oh, right you all never have met my hubby. Did (finally) drive a bit last stretch home, Seattle to Longview. Next trips? Haven’t driven a mile. Not that I don’t want to. Just someone has to be driving during the day, and we are rarely on the road anymore at night. Maybe on the marathon home. But then we are (usually) driving cross Oregon, and I rarely pass semis (drives someone nuts), or anything, unless passing lanes. Hwy 20/22/126 between Ontario and Bend have very few passing lanes. Let alone drive it at 70 MPH. I am not a bad driver. I am not an aggressive driver.

                2. “Hanging Chad”

             3. Mumble years ago, I did that trick in a VW bug. New to me, and I was going south on a two-lane highway with drifting snow from the west. The first couple times by rear end broke loose (dead flat road, mercifully no oncoming traffic) was more terrifying interesting than I liked, but then I twigged. Hit a snowy patch, let up on the gas pedal and the Bug would track straight.

                Never had to drive the car in snow on mountain roads; by the time the opportunity came up, I had a different car with much better snow manners–so long as I did my part. (Recalls a couple of ice incidents…)

                Now, I’m used to it. I know where the icy patches are between here and town, and when the wind is getting frisky. That and studded snow tires on 2 of the three vehicles we have. I can be quite selective as to when I use the third in winter.

13. Well, you have some friends who don’t have chickens. But we do get eggs from an “egg neighbor” once removed. And I could start growing potatoes in the back yard today (and possibly should).

    1. I should also, but given all the travel this summer, I’m just going to grow zuchini and cucumber and I have some tomatoes looking good.

       1. Tomatoes went in the greenhouse and the zucchini in the raised beds (most of it; bought plants and reseeded after the Miracle-Grow fiasco–It’s a miracle that any zucchini grew with this year’s batch) yesterday. We’re getting 90 degree weather, so watering a few times a day until the soil moisture hits sort-of equilibrium.

          We’re grinding dried zucchini as really tasty filler for salmon cakes. Got enough left from last year’s crop to get by until harvest. I hope. Ahead of the game with dried tomatoes, so we’ll have some nice veggies when they’re ready.

       2. Just planted in the last 3 weeks 50+ tomatoes and even more peppers, corn (sweet & popcorn), beans (green & dry), winter & summer squash, and everything else one might grow in an annual garden, and probably a few things you haven’t thought of (I like to experiment). Still working on planting a few things, but I’ve got more than enough fresh produce growing to feed my family for a year, and to share.

          I like food security. I like to know where my food comes from, and how it was made. And I love delicious fresh veg. So I grow my own.

    2. Saw one of those U-Tube bloobs, about how to grow potatoes in used tires. Stack two tires together and when you want to harvest you pull the tires apart and walla potatoes.

       1. You can make a potato box out of shipping pallets, too. Probably about the same yield, without the tire smell. 🙂

          1. You can fill a cardboard box fill of leaves and grow potatoes in that too.

             They can grow about any old where. Which is why the Irish didn’t starve to death in spite of how hard the British (spit) tried.

             1. I have read that one reason for the Irish reliance on potatoes pre-Blight was that they were underground. It’s easy for Brit troops to burn a field of grain, or even a storehouse of it. Potatoes don’t burn easily, and troops aren’t in this for heavy digging.

                1. Um… The Irish were growing grain, veggies, and so forth for their English landlords, in the landlords’ fields. The Redcoats weren’t burning Lord XY’s fields, unless his politics were very very wrong.

                   The potatoes would fit in their increasingly tinier tenant cottage plots of land, and feed a family all year; so the Irish increasingly grew potatoes for themselves.

    3. Grow bags. Straw. So many ways to grow spuds.

       I highly recommend a book, “Gardening When It Counts”, by Steve Solomon

       I have about 800 sq feet of garden – Spuds are in (gonna start hilling this weekend I think), beans are in, peas are flowering, peppers are starting to grow, just put in a saucing tomato, and the zucch and pickles are about to take off, I reckon. Gotta get some more lettuce and spinach in the ground for the missus so there’s some ready when the first batch decides it wants to bolt. Apple trees ain’t died yet, and I know folks with chickens (and there’s a few stands in the area sellin’ farm fresh).

       1. One must keep in mind that I am Black Thumb, Shatterer of Vegetation.

    4. Potatoes are remarkably easy to grow. It’s been tricky for me to get consistently larger potatoes, but I always get something by basically just getting the bit-with-a-sprout in dirt, even in containers.

14. I can’t vouch for the food storage because I live in the city on the barbaric coast of the Broken (formerly Golden) State. I can’t even bring myself to watch that movie about a modern Civil War because the premise of Texas and California seceding and allying with each other is just too stupid.

    What I can say is that all the folks on one side think they have the tanks and the jets, but what’s the last big city you’ve seen with a big military base? It’s a long drive to Edwards AFB from anywhere.

    Even if they can mobilize the military whose ranks come from rural non-college propagandized class, they have a logistics problem. What do they think they’re going to eat? Food doesn’t grow in cities, and they should have learned a lesson from the Canadian trucker’s strike, but they don’t even know how that really ended up because they’re news sources didn’t report on how the government blustered and then backed down. How hard is it to just not send your crops to the cities? Good luck with all you Ivy Leaguers driving your stupid no hauling power electric trucks, not to mention running those eeeevil factories that slaughter chickens and other actual food stuff. Hell, those folks would be lucky to recognize a carrot plant and be able to dig it up. Yes Poindexter, carrots grow under the ground. They neglected to teach you that in college, didn’t they? Country folks might not have coffee, but the city folk won’t have bread, or vegetables, or meat.

    1. Malicious compliance. “Sorry, sir, but the paperwork’s holding up the delivery trucks. The Highway Patrol is doing random weight and permit checks, and it’s got the highway tied up. No, safety, sir. Didn’t you hear about the terrible accident with the overweight semi that had brake failure? I thought everyone knew, sir. We’ll get things moving as soon as we can.

       “No sir, the daily fuel use cap is a problem for trucks on that other route. And we don’t want to lose our permits; someone might think we were intentionally trying to avoid safety checkpoints.”

    2. You don’t even have to invade a city, you just get rid of a few bridges, interstate type, and the city can’t get any food in, or not enough. All cities are near a good water source or it doesn’t exist. Water source usually mean a river, that is another bridge. I won’t say how easy it is to down an interstate bridge, but it don’t require fertilizer and diesel fuel, nor explosives. And that’s not even going into how flimsy their power grids are. All those things are in red counties, not blue cities, they exist at our sufferance, not the other way around.

       1. Power transformers are a bitch to replace, because All The Smart People decided to have “just enough” on hand, and not worry about potential accidents or disasters. And it takes a year to manufacture one.

          1. Yup lead time on substation hardware can be upwards of months. Every once and a while we lose one around here (to lightning mainly) and the power company goes ape trying to fix it. Damage a bunch of them and all hell would break lose. Gas lines are similarly vulnerable (vis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merrimack_Valley_gas_explosions) and fixing that can take upwards of a year (I think there were still folks that were not back in their homes when wuflu hit in 2020).

       2. We had an illustration of bringing down a bridge a few months ago.

          1. One in Charleston almost bought it a day or so ago. Ship’s controls locked on, “maximum speed.” Fortunately, it missed.

             1. I’ll borrow Sundance’s Suspicious Cat’s look.

          2. Homeless guys took out Atlanta’s freeway on accident.

             1. Only after some idiots allowed some other idiots to store thousands of pallets under it. ‘Twere an act of collective stupidity.

             2. I remember that one: about eight years ago (unless they did it AGAIN!) some stoner burned a whole couch right up against the foot of one of the bridge piers of the I-85 Spaghetti Junction onto I-285 (of which I’ve opined here before) one night. The heat penetrated the concrete–probably expanded and de-tempered the 2″+ rebar nearest the fire, which did much damage to the concrete itself–and almost as soon as morning traffic picked up, the bridge came down.

                I was drilling with an Army Reserve unit in the ATL area then, so the event sticks in memory.

    3. You might be surprised how dependant the US Armed Forces are on civilian trucking and train transport for CONUS operations. Fuel and food, for example. Sure, bases have epic stockpiles. For the troops. But the families are not part of that planning. The on-base stores such as post commisary and post exchange are not all that different from civilian grocery stores and shops. Trucks and trains.

       No one that matters is stupid enough to kick off a real ACW2.0/BoogalooTwo. But there are plenty of amateur idiots who “have a cunning plan”…

       1. There are GHU knows how many tiny railroad bridges there are going over back country roads.

    4. As others have noted, it would be no contest. I won’t elaborate here on specifics of how easy it would be because–internet. Ask me at LibertyCon in a couple of weeks, but it’s clear it only takes 5 minutes for everybody else here to plan a campaign.

    5. “It’s a long drive to Edwards AFB from anywhere.”

       I will note that Camp Pendleton is the only thing preventing the existence of one massive urban area that stretches along the west coast from the Mexican border all the way up to Ventura and Santa Barbara.

       But for the most part, that observation is correct.

       1. Very true, and San Diego is probably the least left wing big city in the country. Yes, it’s left wing now. Being gay/queer/lesbian/homosexual is practically the minimum qualification for local office these days.

          Still, the Navy & Marines haven’t been driven out, unlike from San Francisco and Los Angeles. I laugh at the concept of the TV series NCIS Los Angeles. Even Riverside has lost March AFB, and San Bernardino has lost Norton AFB. The closest actual NCIS office is at Pendleton. Good luck for the real NCIS finding anything to do in LA. I doubt you could round up even a hundred retired Navy vets in LA.

          1. There are still conservative communities scattered around the Los Angeles area, especially once you get into the surrounding counties that are included in the Greater LA Metropolitan Area. Riverside County – which is one of those counties – just had its Sheriff publicly endorse Trump for President.

    6. A few years back, I literally showed a young woman who had moved from NYC how to pull a carrot out of the ground. She’d only seen them bagged in the grocery store before. Mind. Blown. It was absolutely wild to see the absolute awe on her face as she held a carrot she’d dug herself. A different young woman had never had garden fresh peas. I got the honor of watching her reaction as she learned how to pop pea pods and taste her first handful of fresh garden peas.

       Real food, as one of my favorite YouTubers says, comes dirty.

       I’m lucky enough to live close to rural areas (though we’re getting built up because developers discovered our valley and are building for the fleeing Californians), and yeah, we’re lucky because we have a certain amount of food manufacturing close by. Dairy, in particular, and dry farming. Unless they keep building subdivisions on prime farmland, we’ll be okay.

       My feelings on the developers who keep encroaching are unprintable and inexpressibly furious.

       1. Californians really need to remember that they are refugees and not missionaries.

    7. Texas and the rest of the Gulf Coast states seceding together I could see.

15. I suspect making the Guard pay for their housing, then bunking some of them in a parking garage at least temporarily, didn’t win a lot of friends for the Powers That Be.

    1. Weird. It’s like they don’t know their place as inferiors born to serve the ruling class or something.

    2. Trump putting some of them up in his hotel gratis will have done interesting things to their heads to.

    3. Indeed I had the same thought. That was cluelessness of a totally new order. I think the brahmandarins forget (or don;t care) where the enlisted types (especially National Guard/Reserve) come from. Also the paying off of student loans when a lot of these folks are doing service to earn education benefits is not going to make them popular.

    4. My representative was bringing pizzas to our state’s units stuck in the parking garage.

16. On the medical side of things, hypoxia can cause anxiety/panic. And wake you up at night. If you haven’t been, using a little finger meter to keep an eye on things isn’t a bad idea, I have one that records entire night and can be reviewed on a phone or pewter for less 100 bucks, though your med insurance might pay for one.

    1. even a smart watch can give an indication

       1. well first off the best one I know for continuous or overnight is about 179 now. I got mine a year or more ago for about 120. Wellue O2 ring. The watch O2 sensors are fair, but they’re pretty expensive, and while you can set alarms, the vibration alarm on the ring is good. I trust the ring more for accuracy.

    2. I’m using a CPAP. So, probably not.

       1. especially using Cpap regular monitoring SaO2 key and is reimbursable expense most insurance; The Wellue Ring stays on and can give you a report you generate on your phone and share with your docs

       2. I don’t have an O2 monitor, but use OSCAR to track my CPAP results. (Open source/free software, can be found via https://www.sleepfiles.com/OSCAR/ for Windows. I built my copy for Linux. (Use and a lot of tips can be found at www dot apneaboard dot com.)

          The program can point out oddities. (I seem to be very prone to Chenye-Stokes* breathing, where I’ll cycle between normal breathing, then drop to nothing, then restarting, all on a cycle of one minute. My cardiologist says it doesn’t worry him, though I wonder if it’s related to my bad AFIB. Haven’t bought a recording oximeter, which OSCAR can merge with independent CPAP data.)

          ((*)) Can be overridden by a servo CPAP-adjacent machine that would force normal breathing. The last I looked (before Biden “fixed” the economy #rollseyes), such machines were $2000**, and since the problem doesn’t appear when I’m sleeping in a hotel*** (suspect the same in a sleep lab), it’d be a challenge to really figure out.

          ((**)) Covered by Medicare now, but that implies much more doctoral supervision. Naah.

          ((***)) though one site says it could be from higher altitude. Or else I’m dying, though since I’ve known I’ve had it since 2016, I’m a bit skeptical of that…

       3. Just got an admail, using code COM you can get a decent continuous oximeter 1 cent less $70.00. https://getwellue.com/products/oxylink%E2%84%A2-maxring-oxygen-monitor?variant=40868639309866
          My insomnia kicked in Friday and still an issue with impending doom vibes. Well, gotta go l have a doc appointment …

          1. doom vibes are just sanity right now.

             1. Since I was about ten, my doom vibes have been associated with doom events but NEVER the doom events I was anticipating. They are accurate in timing but never in anticipated events. Maybe I’m about to get a flat tire instead of end of the world.

17. but, but, doomy doom doomed

    the people off somewhere with the leadership magic are perfect

    hitler did not screw up his own imperial ambitions being a destructive idiot

    obama did not screw up his own legitimacy by being a race war nutter who was confident that whites had never voted for him

    my inability to understand cause and effect has nothing to do we me personally being a loser, those leaders off in the distance are totally doing stuff impossible for mere mortals to replicate

18. well yup,

    “where they win and everyone falls in line scared of their brutality, and they confiscate all the food, stop food production, starve the parts of the country that disagree with them, etc. etc. etc. … it will never work.”

    you can bet they will try this BS again, just listen to the chatter,

    me thinks there may end up sand in their gear box.

    1. “Operation Monkeywrench” is a thing.

       (queues up Beastie Boys – “Sabotage”…)

19. Mocking evil is essential:

    Square Joe ShitsPants

    .

    You are welcome.

    1. 💗💗💗

    2. sponge bob smear pants

    3. 

    4. Joe “Boom-Boom” Biden 😀

       “No boom-boom today. Boom-boom tomorrow. There’s always a boom-boom tomorrow.”

    5. Hey, I posted a reply here and WPDE ‘lost’ it.

20. I’ve long since decided that the noise making and saber-rattling are displays and maneuvers made in an effort to get the other side to fold without having to fight. That’s both the “We have guns; we’ll stack the bodies” boasts by our side and the “You can’t possibly win against the GOVERNMENT!” propaganda by the enemy side.

    Because winning without having to fight a boog is the best victory, and the Left realizes this too, at least on some level.

    1. It does three things.

       1.) As you said, it is an attempt to cow the opposition.

       2.) It is also an attempt to build up the morale of those on the same side.

       3.) It’s an attempt to get those who will follow the perceived strong man to join up with the “obvious winner” before anything actually starts.

21. signs and portents. Limited overs (20) cricket USA 159 for 3. Pakistan 159 for 8. In extra overs. USA 18 for 1. Pakistan 13 for 1. USA wins. This is very likely the biggest upset in cricket history and among the biggest in sporting history. Our sub-continentals — with one windie — were better than their sub-continentals. Truly this is the greatest country.

    Limited overs cricket is its own thing and odd things can happen,but this is unbelievable. The world is truly mad.

    1. Well, in 2016 the Cubs won the World Series. Maybe this is an omen?

       1. The bloody Red Sox won in 2004 and it’s been downhill ever since.

          1. *AND* they came from behind with an 0-3 game deficit when they did it!

             1. Yes, it showed that God was displeased with the United States of America.

                1. America? It was just the New York Yankees! Who cares about them!?

                   1. me.

             2. Greatest days of my life, only behind Wedding, birth of children, and just ahead of Bin Laden eating a couple rounds.

       2. … in 2016 the Cubs won the World Series.

          A myth and a hoax.

       3. Short story I’ve been saving for the recommendations post but there’s never been a prompt word that seemed to fit:

          Michael McDavis woke up to the sound of beeping and a pounding headache. He quickly found the source of the beeping: an IV stand next to his… hospital bed, apparently… was beeping and flashing an “empty bag, replenish” message. Soon a woman in green scrubs walked in, saw him struggling to sit up, and pushed a button on the intercom. “Doctor? He’s awake,” she said, before coming over and starting to change the IV bag. “How do you feel? Do you know where you are?” she asked.

          “A hospital, clearly, but where? Am I still in Chicago?” he said.

          “Yes, you’re at Northwestern Memorial. Do you know what day it is?” she said.

          “November 2nd,” he said.

          “No, sorry. You’ve been in a coma for a week. It’s November 9th.”

          “A week? You’re joking, right? Tell me you’re joking.”

          She handed him a newspaper. It was dated November 9th, 2016, and the headline read, “President-Elect Trump Congratulates Cubs on World Series Win.”

          Michael said nothing, but a scene from the Captain America movie from five years ago flashed into his head. The one where Cap wakes up in a hospital carefully designed to make him think he’s still in the 1940s. But… no, that couldn’t be it. If this were an elaborate hoax, surely they would have chosen a plausible headline.

          No, this couldn’t be a hoax. Which left only one possible explanation. Somehow, while he slept, he had been transported to a parallel Earth in an alternate dimension. One where the Chicago Cubs could win the World Series in the same week that Donald Trump — of all people! — could be elected President of the United States. Something that was clearly impossible in the real world, so the parallel-Earth theory was the only one that made sense.

       4. The Red Sox won the World Series.

          The White Sox won the World Series.

          The Cubs won the World Series.

          It would have been a little more portentous if the Cubs had shifted forward to win it right after the White Sox.

          Still. . . .

22. The left: “No one needs weapons of war! Ban the (fill in the blank)

    Also thr left: “Ha, ha, you and your stupid AR-15 will never stand up to our tanks! And jets!”

    1. wait till the Russians arm us like our blob gov is doing to ukraine

       1. The Russians don’t have weapons. And they wouldn’t arm us. Putin himself said, the Democrats are closest to his vision.

          1. We don’t need to be armed, we currently have enough to do the job that our founders intended. It’s just a matter of timing of when to plant the freedom seeds.

             The Democrats are doing a better job of ruining the US as a superpower by destroying the economy and armed forces.

             That’s why Putin likes them.

             “Never interrupt your enemies when they are making mistakes.”

             The fact that the neocons have pushed NATO to the Russian borders and fscked around with Ukraine for decades has solidified his power.

             But these are the same group of idiots that have pushed for the last two decades of war that have killed millions and promoted the coup in the USA. AngloAmerican Bolsheviks.

             1. The neocons did NOT push NATO to Russia’s borders. That was Putin’s excuse. He’ll always have an excuse.

                1. If anyone “pushed NATO” up to the Russian doorstep, it was the fellow Putin shaves in the mornings, IMNSHO. We were not, that I’m tracking, actively soliciting even the Balkan trio to join (maybe we did, but it might not matter if we did or not). What happened seems to be more that, between the Kremlin and the western schmucks riding on the leather of US/UK “Everlast” gloves, it became increasingly clear that One Must Choose Sides, so they signed with the “schmucks.” They’d already been on Team Kremlin for half a century and more, and didn’t care to return to Putin’s dugout.

                   There’s also an element of that in the Ukraine war, both current noise and the appropriation of Crimea a few years ago: Putin took Crimea partly (I believe) to remind Kyev Who’s In Charge In This Neighborhood. The prior Ukrainian government was cowed and brought to heel sufficiently to pause the attack, but this new comedian (Zelenskyy) is too uppity for Kremlin tastes, and far too cosy with Washington. The “oppression” of ethnic Russians in the eastern counties may or may not have happened, but I think the real issue was that Mr. Z. was stepping too far westward.

                   Putin had to make sure the Ukraine didn’t choose The Wrong Side.

                   1. Looks like Vlad has done slapped dat Tar Baby good, eh?

                      1. Yep.

             2. …. you mean the stuff where Ukraine got annoyed by Russia going in and doing stuff like poisoning the opposition to the “we should obey Russia” guys?

                I suppose “not continuing the tradition of going sure, Russia, want us to pay for you to invade other countries” could be called some kind of a “neocon push”….

          2. I assume, of course, this is all world building fie writing. (LoL)

             Should Russia choose to do so, they could ship crates of rifles to anyone, anywhere.

             Easily, several million Nagant pattern bolt-action rifles, several million SKS type carbines, and several million Kalshnikov pattern assault rifles. All with sealed tins of ammo.

             They sold us quite a pile in the 1990s. (As did China.) It wasn’t even a large fraction of the Russian pile of smallarms dating back to WW1.

             China has a different smallarms mix, but possibly a larger pile.

             And those firearms will -work-, once Bubba gets the crates open and the Cosmoline (preservative) off them.

             And then there would be more serious stuff like RPGs and hand grenades to spice up the party-favor mix.

             Of course, there might not be anyone left who doesn’t already have a suitable boomstick, who would use one. But Bubba will definitely trade up.

             Of course, once the festivities bollox up a harvest season (or three), the shipments to favored factions are likely to be food, not guns.

             Because you can count on the Armed Forces to already have plans to ensure the available chow goes to the faction running (and feeding) the Armed Forces. Guaranteed.

             And the propaganda will be -savage-. 24×7, the media will be telling the sheeple that the reason their kids are going hungry is “those rebel kooks”, and please dial 1-999-4RATOUT if you suspect treason.

             Pro tip: if, during a notional “boog”, you and your family are not losing weight same as your neighbors, you will be presumed to be “hoarding”. Expect a visit from the Stasi. Yes, hungry folks will pick your trash looking for edibles and thus seeing any curious wrappers/cans/clues.

             be discreet

             be ruthless

             For those books folks are writing, of course…

             1. No. They’re having trouble producing serious weapons at this point.

                1. Firearms are easy and cheap. Russia has scads of capacity, and piles of leftovers in crates ready to ship. Its one of the few things they did fairly well, Soviet or not. it has been their chief small-but-steady moneymaker until Zero and Square Joe Squishpants decided to see how high they could drive oil prices.

                   You can make the receiver of a Kalashnikov “AKM” pattern rifle (stamped receiver, not milled) out of a decent shovel blade and garage gunsmith tools.

                   Trust me on this one. (grin)

                   The humor value is that we now make civvy-legal AK knockoffs, of various types, here in the USA, in several brands, at far, far better quality than even the old East German or Czechoslovakian AKs. The only things the Russians can really offer us, presuming boog, is “cheap” and “brrrrt” and “boom”.

                2. dont kid yourself Sarah, what western propaganda wants you to believe and what boots on the ground relay is a totally different picture.

                   1. Oh, gads, not the sooper seekret literally-reprinting-Russian-claims stuff, which somehow can’t be overturned by stuff like actual Americans who are on the ground, or even local Russians who don’t have a “liberator” shelling their house.

                      1. well, ok, guess it depends where the peeps you talk to are from, the guys i spoke with were from the east and left because they were getting shelled by the west, didnt want to die for some reason, IMHO these guys are legit and so Ill go with what they said, especially since i worked almost side by side with them for about 6 months.
                         nuff said, going to let it go

                         1. And I should believe you, over everyone else, including the folks I actually know, in spite of you repeating known debunked Russian claims, because…. um… you’ve shown up being vaguely black-pill-y once?

             2. 11-B

                exactly what was going through my mind, just like that article i read was saying that they would arm western governments adversaries, same BS the west is doing just about everywhere stirring up sheit,

                hey, one good turn deserves another.

                a crate o rifles and mags and ammo here a can o plastic explosives there a couple crates o RPGs for bubba and his buds to play with

                why not, its ok for DC to do that

                1. Will Vlad isn’t Could Vlad. It is one very big different thing to ship illicit arms into the USA, versus gifting/selling them to Taliban or VietCong or the annoying foreign idiots dejure.

                   Now, since we are arming Ukies for spicing up his personal Tar Baby, he is almost certainly providing shopping opportunities to the cartels of Mexico, or at least strongly considering it. And we cant exactly bitch about it much if its just man-portable stuff, versus say tanks and Artillery rounds. Well, we can under Monroe Doctrine. (Grin)

                   Vlad stuck his (HONK!) in a hornets nest. The Ukies do not seem willing to quit, which means he either crushes them, which he has repeatedly failed to do over two years, or gets very, very embarrassed by settling for some face saving lesser chunk. He was smart to say “just Crimea” back in 2014. He went for broke in 2022, tried for decapitation/regime-change and missed. And for humiliating Russia, the Ukies are going to make a saint out of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. They do not -care- if he is a crook. He nut-kicked the Russian bear and got away with it. (So far, at least. I wouldn’t want to carry his life insurance.)

                   And at the rate Russia is “winning”, China is going to get Siberia with a platoon of CommuKids with sticks. There won’t be any effective Russian troops left to oppose them.

                2. More directly, if Vlad gets caught directly arming lunatics inside the USA, we get to play that game right back. And the Russians have far, far more deadly lunatics in Russia than we have here in the USA. And far more organized. And far more likely to massacre. And that would be a risk to the Motherland that would be likely a bit too much.

                   And of course, any such excitement just guarantees Trump wins in the biggest landslide in US history. Then we pump enough oil to bankrupt the Saudis, and Russia thusly folds.

                   Sure we can. And Trump would make his prior drilling binge seem like a shortage. And they know it. World War Oil. Heh.

                   1. They think getting us in a war means Biden wins. “Americans don’t change presidents in war.” Yeah. THis one is different.

    2. Also the left: “Only law enforcement and our bodyguards need guns.”

23. You know, I don’t know why it feels like this fits, but to me it feels like it does.

    Optimus Prime, the cartoon truck every young boy of the 80’s wanted to grow up to be like, turns out, his personality was based on a US Marine Captain.

    I don’t why but that makes me feel good.

    1. “Strong enough to be gentle” — that’s a perfect summary of the meaning of “meek”. As in, when Jesus said “the meek shall inherit the earth,” that’s what he was talking about. People often misunderstand meekness as weakness, but it’s not. The original Greek word (Jesus was most likely speaking Aramaic when he gave the Sermon on the Mount, but the people who wrote it down for us wrote in Greek) that is translated “meek” is πραεῖς (praus). https://biblehub.com/greek/4239.htm explains it as follows (all italics are unmodified from original):

       This difficult-to-translate root (pra-) means more than “meek.” Biblical meekness is not weakness but rather refers to exercising God’s strength under His control – i.e. demonstrating power without undue harshness.

       [The English term “meek” often lacks this blend – i.e. of gentleness (reserve) and strength.]

       Thank you for sharing that video. From now on, whenever I need to try to explain the word “meek”, I’m going to use Optimus Prime as an example.

       1. It’s like John W. Campbell’s comment the gentleness of a lioness carrying her cub.

24. …each middle class American having enough of an arsenal to obliterate a third world nation.

    I think that’s a base libel. I know many who have an arsenals adequate to handle an Old World nation.

    IF I were the type of person that owned guns, I would take that as a personal affront and a challenge to build up to at least be able to handle at least Luxembourg for instance. If I were that type of person of course.

    1. The Reader believes that all Americans should be able to arm a force to conquer the Duchy of Grand Fenwick.

       1. You have fun with that. I’m not going to get into it with those tough little buggers.

25. My ideal for of “roughing it” is to go to South Korea and stay at the Shilla Hotel in Seoul. Because it’s so horribly easy to walk for miles and miles through a wide variety of exotic markets, enjoy time with our friends, and find healthy food.

    ACW2.0 does not tickle my fancy. Maybe we can culturally appropriate something like the Maori Haka?

    1. Don’t mess with the Maouris. Just a word of advice.

       ^^;;

       1. Could be worse… they could be shouting Ayo Ghurkali!!!

          1. Worse? I’d call that “equally bad”…

             1. Hard call. I don’t envy anyone that has to face Ghurka or Maori.

                1. Pretty much what I was thinking; neither tends to deal “gently and peacefully” with opponents. And I don’t know about the Maori, but from what I’ve heard and read if you’re a noncombatant you’re safe from the Ghurka; they consider it dishonorable to attack noncombatants.

                   1. A Ghurka tends to look unassuming… until the fighting starts. Then you realize that the guy you wouldn’t have looked twice at while passing him on the street is fully capable of single-handedly stopping a terrorist attack on a passenger bus out in the middle of nowhere.

                      Maoris have genetics that make even the women look imposing if they’re so inclined. When they’re not so inclined, they’re supposed to be pretty awesome people to hang out with.

26. Your writing about the pandemic and how it was used to steal the 2020 election reminded me of something. I’ve been seeing some people — NOT you, Sarah — calling it a “plandemic” and implying that the entire thing was planned, all the way back to when it was released (the idea, as far as I understand the argument, was that China was collaborating with the Dems to get rid of Trump). However, in order to believe that, you have to forget the first few months of 2020. The months when Trump was trying to order flights from China to the US suspended, and the Democrats were calling him racist for doing so, and insisting that there was nothing to worry about.

    Then, of course, they pivoted on a dime, started pushing the “two weeks to flatten the curve” lie (they never intended it to be only two weeks, that was just to get the lockdown camel’s nose under the tent), and all the rest. That’s because someone realized how they could use this to push mail-in voting, because they knew (this time) just how many MORE fraudulent ballots they would need than they did in 2016, and they knew that mail-in voting was the only feasible way to get them. At that point, it did become the “plandemic”, but the only thing planned was the hysteria; the virus was just something they responded to opportunistically. If the release had been planned from the start, they would have been yelling for lockdowns much earlier, and they would have looked like they were Doing Something™ about the problem. Instead, they delayed the lockdowns until after it was already clear (to those paying attention to the Diamond Princess and other evidence) that the lockdowns were unnecessary. So the political nature of the lockdowns was already clear at that point (and became even clearer when they said “Oh, the Summer of Burning Love riots are okay, we’ll only punish churches that gather in large groups, not riots”).

    1. It’s been discussed in the comments here more than once.

       I’m a proponent of “it was an accidental leak that they took advantage of” theory. But I know that there are at least a few here who believe that even the initial release was planned.

       Having said that, I heard something the other day mentioning that Daszack (sp?) – the head of Eco-Health – seems to have picked the Wuhan lab in part because it had lesser protections against an outbreak (only rated as a level 2 facility instead of a level 3, I think was what was said; but I’m not completely sure). Which suggests that while the timing might not have been planned, he might have been anticipating that there would eventually be a leak of some sort.

       1. Actually, I suspect they picked that lab because it was cheap and available. The fact that it was part of the communist Chinese bio-weapons program was just a bonus. I accept that the virus’s escape sometime between July and October 2019 was an accident caused by carelessness and incompetence, but the Chinese shutting down travel from Wuhan to other parts of China while shipping planeloads of virus carriers to dozens of other countries was the most egregious act of biological warfare (or bio-terrorism, in the absence of any declaration of war) in world history.

          That is why the Nuremberg court for crimes against humanity needs to be reconstituted, along with the gallows. They can all be buried next to Josef Mengele.

    2. Doesn’t have quite the same ring, but “scamdemic” is a lot closer to the truth.

       1. tbf denying it initially would make sense, if they wanted to make sure it propagated. Did they? I don’t know.

    3. “scamdemic”

       The foreseeable but unpredictable ChiCom EffUp was effectively “happenstance”. The bastards then improvised the scam.

       1. Foreseeable but unpredictable — good way of putting it. You know they’re going to screw up sometime, but you can’t know exactly when or how so you can’t plan ahead for it. Not in any kind of specifics, at least.

       2. Occam sez the least complicated is the most likely, so because whatever the Mandarin is for “Hey, Zhao, is this a hole in my biosuit?” is simpler than “I now convene the grand conspiratorial planning meeting of the Wuhan Virus Release project…” that’s the way I’m leaning.

          That said, leading up to said hole-in-suit there was obviously lots of twiddling that made it a very easy-to-catch bug, and after the lab techs started dropping there were some very suss decisions, almost as if there was already a plan in place in case SARS-3 came along to make it a whole-world problem.

       3. Oh, the scam wasn’t improvised. The Davos crowd and their hired bureaucrats (if it isn’t the other way round) had plans for locking down the populace and all the rest of it, to be implemented when a suitable emergency arose.

          When Covid came along, and people in nursing homes (average life expectancy: six months from admission) started very predictably catching it and dying, they decided there was no point waiting for a real emergency, and put the plans into action.

          It was a classic case of ‘Never let a crisis go to waste.’

          1. They were throwing (HONK!) at the wall and hyping whatever stuck.

             It was a pick-up game, and it was obvious then and moreso now. Too many missteps, missed opportunities, and ham-handed improvisations.

             The fact that we are not arguing this point in a gulag, nor existing only as smog, for examples.

             We didn’t “defeat the conspiracy”. Their half-assed BS fell apart because “half assed” (quarter assed?) with no proper follow up.

27. Put your shoulder to the monster,
    Never mind the teeth.
    Pay no heed to his bluster
    Just heave for all your worth!

    Put your shoulder to the monster,
    Who will not even think.
    Ignore the rage of the imposter,
    And dump him in the drink!

    Put your shoulder to the monster
    And push for all you’re worth.
    Get the friends you want to foster
    And we’ll push him off the berth!

    Put your shoulder to the monster,
    He’ll not stop us where we sail.
    Put your shoulder to the monster
    And send him off the rail!

    1. “So stand as one defiant,

       Yes, and let your voices swell!

       Stare that Beastie in the face,

       And really give him Hell!

       https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a1IGpIVKEBI

28. Yes, WyrdBard, the littlest Billy Goat Gruff had it right.

    Push that troll off the bridge. Don’t take any of his bullying!

29. Not precisely on-topic for the OP itself, but very much on-topic for its title:

    Early this morning, Space X’s Starship launched on its fourth test flight. And, both booster and orbiter ended up making soft ‘practice’ water landings in the Gulf of Mexico and Indian Ocean respectively. The ‘Starship’ orbiter had rock-solid attitude control in orbit and (despite a few parts getting a little ‘toasty’ on the way down) re-entered, fell down through the air in ‘belly-flop’ attitude, and then flipped at the last minute to ‘land’ in a powered vertical hover just above the water.

    The weirdest thing about it (and quite new) is, 4 on-board Starlink terminals gave live video almost all the way through re-entry — when just about everything else loses even radio contact (the “ionization blackout” from the Apollo and Shuttle eras) for 10-15 minutes or so. (See spacex dot com for that.)

    Yes, it was still only a test flight, and many more will be needed.

    But good, amazing things are still happening, here in America, where (as Sarah says they say in her first homeland) ‘the future comes from’. No matter how much folly and madness abounds elsewhere.

    As one of my characters likes to say/quote (in her own Hungarian):

    “The light shines in the darkness; and the darkness does not overcome it.”

    1. Meanwhile, the hapless Starliner program finally had its first manned launch the day before… and has been leaking lots of helium ever since.

       1. Apparently they were having thruster issues (related to the helium leaks). What are the odds NASA/Boeing have to beg SpaceX to send a Dragon crew to rescue them 🙂 .

          1. I pray that they’re willing to do that, instead of telling the crew to return in the Starliner and “trust us, it’ll go fine.”

             1. I’m very much hoping they don’t come back as a meteor.

                Almost as soon as my husband told me about the helium leaks, I made a comment about SpaceX rescuing them.

                I would like to see at least one other company competing with SpaceX — but they’ve got to be competitive, and to do that, they’ve got to get out of the Apollo mindset.

                1. NASA has belatedly got some religion on Boeing skepticism and gave Sierra Space a second shot with the Dream Chaser that finished third in the crew competition. If Boeing hadn’t got all the competition scoring credits for “mature processes” and “track record” in that crew competition that Crew Dragon won then we would already have two that work – and since they do lifting body reentry Dream Chaser would not have had any parachute problems during dev that hit both SpaceX and Boeing.

                   Note I’d like to see some competition on boosters too, but Blue Bezos, err, I mean Blue Origin has just been a joke.

                   1. Yeah. Blue Origin’s schtick so far has been high profile passenger trips into sub-orbit. It gets their name into the news, but looking closely suggests that they can’t actually do anything practical yet, and will be left in the dust the moment Musk decides it’s time to launch the version of Starship with the staterooms. That’s particularly a problem since they’ve got some contracts with NASA for work in the next few years, and all indications are that they’re not near ready.

                      Glenn Reynolds likes a small company called Rocket Labs, and they’ve had some successful launches that put satellites up into orbit, and have launched at least one mission for NASA. They’re not ready for passengers yet, though..

                      1. The Blue Origin BE-4 engine is WAY late. Both New Glenn and Vulcan are dependent on it as the Russian engines are off limits for now and honestly we getting REALLY crappy quality. The Methane/LOX cycle is hard. SpaceX chose RP1 (kerosene) LOX for the Merlin engines on Falcon/Falcon 9. They’re using Methane/LOX on the Raptors on Super Heavy/Starship but those have been undergoing test since the start of the hops with Starship but that’s almost 4 years of practice with the Methane/Lox Cycle. In January Blue Origin sent two BE-4 up on a Vulcan and that worked admirably, but they really seem to have issues building enough of them. SpaceX cranks out raptors like mad. A Super Heavy/Starship pair uses 39 Raptor engines, 33 on the Super Heavy, 6 (3 atmosphere 3 vacuum design) on starship. They’ve launched 4 and expended 156 Raptors so far. The SpaceX iterative design really has some advantages over the design it right to fly perfect the first time model which Blue Origin seems to have inherited with the various engineers it cajoled to work for it.

                         Rocket Labs is interesting and is doing things similar to early SpaceX with Falcon 1. Unlike Blue Origins or SpaceX they seem to have no “sugar daddy” so they are slowly but surely getting themselves a commercial base in the space where buying a Falcon 9 flight is too expensive. They have a short window of viability because if SpaceX gets Starship right it will knock at least another order of magnitude off the cost/lb to LEO.

                         Dream Chaser is an interesting idea it has a bunch of issues. First it has no related launch vehicle. So it can ride Atlas V (limited supply most reserved by Boeing for Starliner), Vulcan (only 1 flight so far, not man rated, competing for BE-4 engines), New Glenn (paper rocket first flight late 2024 maybe ), Falcon 9 (It MIGHT need Falcon heavy thats not currently man rated). Second aerodynamic aircraft style reentry is tricky. Its different tricky than parachutes and has been done. Shuttle (though there was Columbia), Buran (once), X-37 (maybe 4 times?) and the PLA Space forces X37 alike. Maybe it could grab the COTS spot from the Starliner, but even that only gets you 2-3 flights a year out to early 2030’s as ISS is coming down then (and given issues with the older Russian Soviet modules, I bet sooner). It really has limited cargo capacity in the non man rated version and Dragon cargo and Cygnus carry more stuff. As cool as it is its a niche product with no ecological niche to fill without some major changes.

                         I don’t doubt that at some point SpaceX will stumble or grow complacent/conservative. However, for now SpaceX and Elon Musk get the D.D. Harriman prize and will do so for quite a while.

                         1. The Reader upvotes this as an excellent summary for the non space nerd here. The only correction he’d add is that the two X37s has flown a total of 7 times including the one launched last December and still up there. A great deal has been learned from those missions about long duration exposure to space (don’t ask the Reader how he knows).

    2. Re “blackout”, way back in the early shuttle program test flights they were surprised that they got telemetry way past where they expected on reentry via TDRS given the experience with prior capsule reentries.

       The analysis they ran decided the plasma still frelled the RF signal down and to the sides, but up was much less of a problem. There was still a blackout for comms and data at the most intense part, and recall shuttle did big honking S-turns to give it crossrange capability which turned teh antennas all this way and that, so all of that still messed up the “datalink pointing back up the plasma stream” to the few TDRS sats for a short time.

       So it appears that Starship’s non-maneuvering reentry, basically slowing to terminal velocity way up high and then falling down in skydiver-mode, combined with the distributed Starlink system, with lots of sats in low orbits that are so much closer to the reentering Starship than the geosynchronous TDRS sats were to shuttle, combined with multiple self-tracking terminals on the upper hull, and the fact that it’s all data, all together yields a more stable uplink pathway to at least one Starlink sat back through the less-intense part of the plasma flow field than shuttle ever managed.

       1. I gues the question is if shuttle was still flying, would it manage good data link all eth way through reentry using Starlink terminals.

          They should get a few on the cargo Dream Chaser and see what they can get on it’s reentry.

       2. Challenges dot gov recently/has up a thing about hypersonics technical challenges.

          Something like three out of seven, IIRC, implied challenges of communicating/sensing/positioning through the plasma shell.

          We’ve had opportunity to learn a lot about transmission through plasma over the past sixty or seventy years. Do we know everything important yet? I would guess not.

          Key details of the com link to whereever for craft on reentry include the antenna on the vehicle, the plasma field, antenna on the other side, and the pointing/relative motion stuff.

          In theory, Musk’s bunch could have selected frequency ranges, and codesigned starlink and starship antennas to work pretty well.

          In practice, I would be skeptical of assuming successful co-design, even for Musk’s people, without actual supporting evidence for this speculation.

          Very exciting stuff. Of course, there are more problems to check in the future.

          Like the organizational fights, etc., ad actual technical challenges with managing many space flights.

          Star factory /can/ be expanded to one star ship per day does not mean will be operated at that rate for an extended period of time.

          We shall see.

          1. That rate would be supporting a lot of in-transit ships in deep space and sitting on the moon or Mars or hopefully asteroids being convenient large volume objects, so the number actively poking through the atmosphere one way or another on any given day would be a subset.

             Now if they manage the point-to-point suborbital stuff all bets are off.

             Of course I have no doubt Starship will be found to offend the dirt goddess, because all the space rocks doing more-plasma-y reentries over all the millennia, especially in prior eras with more space rocks, are natural atmospheric plasma events, but SpaceX reentries are artificial ones…

30. 80 years since the beginning of the end of the “Thousand Year Reich”. There’s a lesson there…

31. Re guns – I think I saw an add-em-up that US civil ownership now totals more guns than most of the world’s militaries by major multiples, but the thing that gets me on most of the attempts to disarm the rubes is an absolute lack of any brain space in their arguments for the widespread availability and ease of use of home-scale CNC machining and 3d printing, and the impossibility of controlling designs and detailed production files.

    Joe and the Hoe’s administration has been trying to put “Ghost Gun” regulations into place that echo the panicked CA law on home made firearms, but that cat got out of the bag, jumped on the horse and rode it out the left-open barn door a long time ago. And there’s ongoing active development going on across the intertubes to come up with more and better designs optimized for the capabilities and limitations of 3D printing.

    It’s like chasing around mandating buggy whip control after the Model T has already hit the market.

    So yeah, no way they could even start to do anything effective.

    1. I’m fair to sure the US civilian gun ownership totals more than a number of the world’s largest militaries put together, if not all of them.

       1. Hognose (RIP) on the Weaponsman site, made effort to estimate the pile. I recall 700 million was a likely ballpark number by his method. Some other sources put available ammo over a trillion rounds.

          Those lovely cap-n-ball guns are cash-n-carry most places, no paperwork. And folks in Freeland usually don’t check for Oppressdom ID or vehicle tags in Freedomland.

          A decent flintlock single-shot pistol makes a capable “liberator”.

          Folks, those .50 pistols are a hoot to shoot! The flinters seldom like anything but real blackpowder. The caplock guns work quite well with BP substitutes. One of each….

       2. D. Jason Fleming is correct. I have a longer comment with cites from this morning which is I think stuck in mod because I forgot the two-links-exclusionary-rule, but the hoplophobes themselves published a study using 2017 data that has the U.S. civilian vs worldwide military small arms ratio on the order of 400 million US civilian to 130 million worldwide military, and NICS checks since 2018 add another couple hundred million at least to the US total, so the 700 million number 11B references is right in the ballpark.

          1. Thanks. I could not remember the sources to cite.

             1. Article is https://americanmilitarynews.com/2018/06/us-civilians-own-400-million-guns-compared-to-militarys-4-5-million-survey-shows/

                1. …which points at hoplophobe org https://www.smallarmssurvey.org

                   1. How unrepresented was that survey? I mean, really? Who here is answering a survey of “how many guns are in your household?” I don’t even answer the one on the annual medical form with a “yes, we have firearms in our household”. Nope. It gets a “No.” Not even a “nothing to see here, move along.”

                      1. Thing is, when I read that the 2017 average was 1.2 firearms per person over the entire population, my thought was:

                         

                         1. To be fair, only God has enough firepower.

                      2. The surveys were of manufacturing. The government requires -meticulous- record keeping of anything that has to be sold via a license, and/or imported with an arms permit.

                         The real question is where folks are managing to store it all. Because the size of the known pile is “epic”.

                         I envision couch or chair shaped piles of ammo boxes and cans, covered with blankets and some throw pillows, and rifle crate “box springs” in bedrooms.

                         LOL

                         1. The Reader once lost an entire large closet in a tragic boating accident. Or was it transported to Narnia through the bureau. He can’t remember.

                            1. Bags of holding?

                               Portable hole?

       3. I ran the numbers once. The number of gun owners in the US outnumber all the military and government para-military organizations in the world combined by three to one.

          1. On opening day of Deer season in Pennsylvania, there are about the same number of armed folks afield as there are total active folks in the US Army.

    2. Bwa-ha! My youngest brother’s got two 3d printers and a machine shop, and he knows how to use them! Currently he uses his powers for good, but imagine if he and his fellow engineers and explosives enthusiasts got riled up about something . . .

       He also has experience building siege engines (the local pumpkin toss w/ trebuchets) and has been working on refining his Greek fire recipe. His stated goal for finishing his education was that he wants to have taken all the necessary classes to make his own Iron Man suit, and he’s almost there. I want to be on HIS side in the event of an invasion.

       1. Case going through the courts now, and so far winning, asserts that files for 3d printing or machining firearms are still documents, and thus making and distributing such are protected under the First as freedom of speech and the press.

          Can’t stop the signal.

32. Because the right isn’t collective and the individualists fail to organize.

    Come, everyone… Join
    The United Anarchist’s Society!!

    😀

33. “Of course you’ll eat the bugz. We won’t leave you anything else.”

    https://abc7amarillo.com/news/local/texas-cattle-numbers-hit-lowest-since-1961-amid-ongoing-drought-and-rising-costs-united-states-department-of-agriculture-usda-beef-cattle-matt-garner-range-ben-weinheimer-texas-cattle-feeders-association-mike-ollinger-ranchers

    “In Texas, the cattle numbers are the lowest they’ve been since 1961,” says Matt Garner, executive director of the RANGE. “In the U.S. they’re the lowest they’ve been since 1951.”

    1. What they should worry about is the folks who’d eat the rich before they eat any bugz

       1. Well, they do claim that trans fat is good for you… 😉

    2. The drought has been a real [booger] for the Texas cattle industry, as well as others. You have to reduce your herd in order not to exceed the carrying capacity of the land, the winter-wheat fodder isn’t there, or is scant, dryland hay and corn for feed go up, and if the cattle are stressed enough by the heat, they don’t gain weight and do poorly.

       We’ve been getting rain up here, but that doesn’t balance the losses from the fires (both grass and animals). The range will recover, but it takes time.

    3. Florida is -much- better for cattle, beef and dairy. The lush grasslands are primo for grazing. -Epic- yield.

34. We-uns-all need to keep this song ready to mind to hum at parlous times.
    https://youtu.be/rGxbZ9fXgfI?si=6CdzSF68nSofxDmb

35. they work in fields/live in places where they’re not exposed to people who aren’t like them

    I moved to an area that is more like me, but I’m still occasionally surprised. I tripped over this, today: https://www.blackhillslacrosse.com/

    Scroll down just a bit. A gun raffle for a lacrosse league?!?! I don’t object, but it seems weird to me. What’s even weirder, imho, is limiting the number of tickets!

36.  “rednecks” a group of will commit terrible acts in protest”

    I had to read that in Yoda’s voice.

    I watch a number of people in YouTube including Louise Rossman who is all about technology and I am noticing a strong trend. First, windows 11 will Screencast and track and report EVERYTHING you do. The new version of photoshop will do the same, and shut down if they don’t like what you do with it. Google docs has already been locking people out for sharing documents they don’t like.

    THEY really do want to controll speech and thought itself.

    1. Yet More Reasons to use Linux, GIMP, LibreOffice, SeaMonkey, VLC and other open source software whenever possible.

       I never trusted MicroShaft at all. They started out evil in the 80’s and have gotten steadily more evil ever since.

       An 8 GB Raspberry Pi 5 does everything most people need for $80. It’s so cheap you can keep a whole spare computer on hand in case something goes wrong.

       1. And just repurposing old hardware will work, there are a number of distributions that specialize in making old computers usable, including DyneBolic, WattOS, and the soon-to-be-resurrected DamnSmallLinux.

          1. If it wasn’t frelling brain surgery to get at the battery I have an old MacBook that would be perfectly happy with one of the new distributions. There’s online step by step, but it’s along the lines of “now remove the 3 micron connector with the antigravity tweezers, while holding the main board upside down underwater…”

             1. You forgot the part where you have to do all this whilst balancing your full weight on your left ear.

                I’m an Apple guy from way back, partly because unlike Microsoft, they have an ingrained habit of valuing their users’ privacy and telling Big Brother to go to hell, and partly because unlike Microsoft, there are no separate hardware and OS vendors to pass the buck to each other.

                But lordy, Apple gear is damn near repair-proof. I’m just glad it so seldom needs repairing. (The MacBook I’m using right now is nine years old and still doing well as my main work machine.)

                1. My writing Mac is 11 years old. I sort of need to replace it (can’t upgrade the OS and a lot of websites don’t like that), but the new ones don’t have the features I want. As long as the beast keeps working, I’ll keep using it.

             2. Apple wants to control its users, and hates users having control.

          2. Most mainstream medium to highend laptops/workstations built in the last 10 years will work fine with almost any Linux distro. Plus you can get good used hardware cheap.

             You might want to have a decent amount of DRAM (8GB) and a SSD/NVMe drive. And you can change out some of the more problematic wireless hardware or research ahead of purchase, plenty of information out there.

       2. You can get great cheap laptops and workstations for Linux/BSD by tapping into the surplus off-lease market. Much better system than a Pi and many times can be cheaper overall considering you have to add the accessories to the Pi.

    2. I went open source over twenty years ago, and I’m not going back. And if the tyrants take over Linux, I’ll move to BSD.

       1. BSD requires careful attention to hardwaredrivers. Biggest issue is wireless network.

          The attitude in the BSD world is very much RTFM before complaining. It’s more an pro/sysadmin operating system than a users. So doesn’t attract as many woke, since it’s harder and less popular.*

          Of the BSDs, FreeBSD is probably the most flexible, but OpenBSD is the least woke.

          If you want to try it without committing dedicated hardware, you can always load a virtual machine up with an image. Or if you like CLI, you can get a free shell acount from a few places.

37. Clue less in Omaha , beach that is
    https://i.imgflip.com/8t5vzu.jpg

38. Was at the grocery store today. All of the Foster Farms frozen chicken products had been removed and replaced with Tyson.

    Told the cashier I would never buy anything from Tyson, and why. I want to see Tyson go bankrupt and all of their executroids begging in the street.

    That’s the one use I can think of for homeless camps — places where corrupt former politicians and executroids can eke out their miserable existences in squalor and shame.

    1. ???

       I probably shouldn’t ask, but what’s the issue with Tyson?

       1. Tyson is closing their meat packing plant in Perry, Iowa this month, sacking 1,300 American workers, and will then replace them by hiring illegal aliens let across the border by the Biden* Regime.

       2. I suspect they’re closing that plant because it’s hard to hire illegal aliens in Iowa.

          1. OK. I wasn’t aware of the closure.

39. He just can’t help himself.

    Given the opportunity of coming up with an original speech, or making yourself look feeble and ineffective by fumbling through a blatantly plagiarized rendition of one of the most famous D-Day commemoration speeches of all time, rendered by a politician who is universally recognized as one of the greatest communicators in the modern era, which would you pick?

    We know which one Joe Biden picked!

    https://x.com/ClayTravis/status/1799127244667080763

    Once a plagiarist, always a plagiarist.

    1. Based on what I’ve seen with college and high school students, I’d be very curious if his speech-writers know what plagiarism is, and how easy it is to catch now.

       It’s theft, not recycling, theft, kids.

       1. That’s the moral and ethical aspect. Which, given that he had to call off his original presidential run in 1988 due to plagiarism, is an extra bad thing for him to be doing. There’s also the presentation aspect. By plagiarizing Reagan’s speech, it’s inviting comparisons between Reagan’s ability as a speaker with Biden’s ability as a speaker. Even at the height of Biden’s health, that was a bad comparison for him. Now it also accentuates how old and frail he’s becoming.

40. Here are a couple of old article, both still very relevant. Sarah, I believe you know Larry.

    The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants To Nuke Omaha | Monster Hunter Nation

    Shock the system « Bob Owens

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