07:59 – The final chemical we need for the biology kits is to arrive Monday, which means we’ll be ready to ship kits by 22 March, right on our projected schedule. I still haven’t costed out the kits or shot images of the final kit, but once I’ve done that we’ll be ready to start selling them.
Friday, 16 March 2012
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And so it begins in Greece:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/blog/2012/mar/15/greece-breadline-hiv-malaria
Yep. People thought I was kidding about Greece becoming a third-world country, but I meant it literally. The really awful thing is that it’s just starting. Anyone who thinks things are bad in Greece now ain’t seen nuthin’ yet.
Nor is there any realistic prospect of things getting any better for decades. Greece is losing the people it needs to improve its situation. Professionals, particularly younger ones, are fleeing the country in droves, and unlikely ever to return.
What’s really horrible are the masses of citizens (US or other) that are sitting back fat, dumb and happy thinking “this can’t happen to us.” In the mean time, I’m sure our world leader Obama will gladly send more billions to Greece for humanitarian relief. Which the Greek government officials will gladly line their Swiss bank accounts before they bail out. Just like any other third world sham government.
I am reminded of Belloc:
Whatever happens, we have got
The Maxim gun, and they have not.
With probably a billion+ firearms in civilian hands, the US government has to be a bit more careful than most governments about just how far it tries to push.
Not just firearms. Every other kind of weapon you can think of.
Happy St Paddy’s! 😀
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y07at1bU89Q
But… doesn’t the government have weapons, and people willing to shoot them, too?
Four dead in Ohio wasn’t that long ago. And that was just a war protest, not a declaration of revolt.
And I’m not all that happy! 😀
“With probably a billion+ firearms in civilian hands…”
R U exaggerating for effect here or do you have this as an actual number? Last I knew, even the anti-gun zealot imbeciles had it at 250-million or so.
It will indeed be quite interesting should it ever come to the Almighty State having to enforce its will nationwide, and as historical examples show, once the troops and the cops refuse to fire on their families, neighbors, friends, etc., Game Over. (this is assuming, of course, the otherwise near-apocalyptic collapse of the economy and public order, etc. and what remains of the State apparatus attempting to stay large and in charge…)
And I fear MrAtoz is correct; our lords temporal will, when the footage gets nasty enough, send more billions of our tax dollars in humanitarian aid over there, and then again in the PIIGS, and the rotters in charge will simply loot it and there will be no recourse, no accountability, etc., per usual. Meanwhile I see the banksters and Wall Street types continue to loot the country more or less at will and the rest of us, I guess, continue to eat shit.
But once the store shelves go empty here and we have major and lengthy power outages, and people start actually going hungry, we will see what we will see. There is a lot of pent-up anger out there already, plus all the aforementioned weapons.
No, I was entirely serious. That’s only about three firearms for each person in the US.
I don’t know how many weapons I own. I’d actually have to go and look for them and count them, because I sure couldn’t list them from memory. Among people I know (which admittedly skews the sample), it’s not unusual to find a dozen or more per person.
One guy I know owns literally hundreds. Some of them are actual collectors’ pieces, but a lot of them he bought just to have on hand. I was with him one time when a store was having a sale on (IIRC) Marlin lever-action .357 rifles. He bought a dozen and we loaded them into his truck. When I asked him why he needed a dozen of those, he said he just wanted to keep them on hand come the day when they’d be useful for arming his friends. Another guy, back when WalMart was selling SKS carbines and had them on sale for like $50 each, bought out their entire stock of three or four dozen rifles and something like 30,000 rounds of 7.25×39.
There are a *lot* of firearms out there.
That’s a common fallacy. The government doesn’t actually have any weapons at all. The police and military have weapons, but they’re not the government. And if/when things get bad enough that the government expects the police and military to routinely fire on US civilians, they’ll find that most of those police and military will cross over and join their relatives, friends, and neighbors on the other side of the lines.
Ah, like they did during the Civil War…
It is difficult, at best, to extrapolate from the War of Northern Aggression the idea that things would work out the same way now. I would guess that a majority of the armed forces are FROM the southern states nowadays, for starters. And maybe active-duty troops would have some initial successes, on a regional basis, and Lord knows they have the firepower superiority in jets, choppers, tanks, battleships, etc. But troops have to operate those machines, and I reckon after a few massacres of civilians that end up on YouTube and cell phones all over the place, a lot of troops are not gonna have the stomach for that.
If Robert is correct about the number of firearms out there, we’re talking about a big country of 320 million people and a large number of them are armed to the teeth. This ain’t like the poor barefoot southern boys with shitty muskets and it sure ain’t Russia or Germany or any other country that I can think of now, where most of the people have long since been disarmed and effectively pantsed. O Kanada comes to mind…for one…along with our cousins in Perfidious Albion and Oz.
A lot of people out here have better handguns and rifles than the armed forces and cops have, and we haven’t even touched upon the huge number of veterans, many of them combat-trained and experienced, especially in the last few years, when hordes of them were sent to the Sandbox for multiple tours, including Guard and Reserve troops.
I daresay this government may be biting off more than it can possibly chew should they decide to roll out the artillery, the drones, and the tanks.
That’s why governments always bring in the Cossaks (or whatever). If you’re going to use military forces against civilians, you have to make sure those forces do not identify with the civilians. Even in massacres like My Lai, a large percentage of the troops simply won’t fire on civilians who aren’t threatening them. And in that case, the civilians were only “gooks”. If an officer orders soldiers to fire on people just like them, that officer probably has a short life expectancy. It’s one thing to shoot down civilians in another country when those civilians don’t even speak your language; it’s another thing entirely if that group of civilians might include your mom’s best friend, your cousin’s kid, and your daughter’s schoolmates.
Remember, US forces are integrated now. We no longer have the 5th Alabama or the 17th New York. Any unit is likely to have more than a few soldiers who are from around there, wherever there is. As to Kent State, that was an aberration. Bad officers, untrained troops, and an inflamed situation. I’m sure that everyone one of those boys who fired his weapon has regretted doing so every day since that day.
Well, they won’t have to do any of that stuff, anyway. The TSA has proven that we will all line up in droves.
And Davy, where did you get the ridiculous notion that Canadians don’t have weapons? Only the city slickers disarmed themselves and not all of those. Half of Canada lives outside the major cities. Of the twelve houses on my street, I know at least eight of them have firearms. As a matter of fact, our conservative gov’t has finally delivered on an decades old promise of abolishing the Long Gun Registry. We no longer legally have to declare our ownership of such firearms, only handguns.
Of course, we don’t have access to the automatic weaponry, but one bullet = one man works for the guerrilla fighting a revolution would require.
[snip] Of course, we don’t have access to the automatic weaponry, but one bullet = one man works for the guerrilla fighting a revolution would require. [snip]
I’m assuming that many folks in the US & Canukistan understand that in order to stop a column of tanks, one has to shoot the guys driving the fuel trucks.
RBT wrote:
Didn’t you once tell the story of one of your pals emerging from the shower with a pistol in a waterproof holster? That guy was serious.
RBT wrote:
“It’s one thing to shoot down civilians in another country when those civilians don’t even speak your language; it’s another thing entirely if that group of civilians might include your mom’s best friend, your cousin’s kid, and your daughter’s schoolmates.”
What about Kent State?
Forget it, I read the rest of your post. But I’m not as optimistic about good human nature as you are.
Mr. Grigg, yes, I am aware that the western provinces and rural areas up North and West did not necessarily fall to their knees and give up their guns to the dictators in Ottawa. However that still leaves the majority of the population, mostly urban and suburban, and mostly along our shared border.
And pcb_duffer is correct; faced with a column of armored vehicles, take good cover, and hit the guys driving the fuel trucks, and even better, blow up the fuel dumps, depots, i.e., sources. Also, aim for officers and noncoms, and aim for lower body mass. New tactics will be called for, however, in the face of drones of all sizes, speeds and capabilities, cameras, and cyber warfare ops. For the latter considerations it would be our geeks versus their geeks.
Cardholder Services is also targeting us up in Kanukistan.
The Long Gun Registry was only popular among the Chatterati in Montreal, and the police of course. The police especially. Metro’s Finest recently shot and killed a man who threatening to cause mayhem and panic with…a pair of scissors. They seem to puzzled that the populace is upset by this. No wonder they want to know where all our guns are. And nobody actually had to give up their guns, they just had to pay the correct registration fee.
I have heard it stated, but I have no idea if it is true, that on a per capita basis, Canadians own more guns than Americans. If true, it wouldn’t surprise me.
But here is a question. For the most part Canadians are not armed, certainly not anything like Americans are (or would like to be.) Why then is our murder rate only a third of that of the US and our property crime rate is about the same? If firearm possession really did reduce crime, I would expect the US crime rates to be lower than the Canadian rates. Note that the murder capital of Canada is (or was recently) Regina, Saskatchewan.
If I had been asked twenty or thirty years ago if I would own a firearm, I would have categorically said no, never. I live in uptown, downtown Toronto and I still have no interest or need to own a gun. However, if I lived in a rural area, rural not suburban, I would own a shotgun. Somethings do change.
I suppose I should wait to introduce Something Completely Different, but I’ll probably forget.
I have handle on a couple mercury pool rectifiers for a defunct drive-in theater. I’d hate to see them end up in the hands of the EPA, so let me know if there’s any interest. Beautiful things.
Rolf Grunsky wrote:
“Note that the murder capital of Canada is (or was recently) Regina, Saskatchewan.”
Hey! I had a pen pal there in the Seventies. Or was it Moosomin? Too far back now, but she was really cute.
Jim,
I think you just committed a crime for saying mercury. The EPA is watching.
Back when I was about 15, a friend’s mother (who was an anesthesia nurse) gave me a pint (473 mL) bottle of liquid mercury that had been discarded when the hospital refurbished one of the machines used in anesthesia. I wonder where it’s gotten to.
Jim, just be aware that you can’t ship the stuff without going through all kinds of hassles and expense. A few years ago, some guy that was reclaiming liquid mercury from thermometers and thermostats shipped a bottle of the stuff Priority Mail. Of course, the bottle broke, the mercury leaked out, and the plane ended up being scrapped. (Mercury eats through aluminum very quickly, and apparently ate through the floor of the cargo compartment and then a spar or spars.) The guy ended up liable for millions in damages, and that didn’t count the fines for breaking the law.
Is mercury expensive? And can you just go out and buy a litre or two without having to fill out 100 forms and be vetted by men in black?