09:33 – Barbara is doing very well, better than last time. As usual, the problem is to keep her from over-doing.
I took Latin starting in 8th grade. In 9th grade, we read Vegetius, and his most familiar phrase has always stayed with me: Igitur qui desiderat pacem, praeparet bellum, usually translated as “If you want peace, prepare for war”. Vegetius was a prepper. I thought about that as I was reading an article that was linked to in the comments yesterday: Bracken: When The Music Stops – How America’s Cities May Explode In Violence
It’s a longish article, but worth taking the time to read. I don’t expect things to get this bad any time soon, but it’s certainly a possibility. History tells us that when law and order breaks down, things get very bad very quickly. And right now we’re watching law and order break down.
Pretty well-written article; I can’t really fault any of his potential scenarios, except to add that EBT card failures are one thing; what if all our ATM debit and credit cards also stop working? And throw in, through accident, natural disaster, or sabotage, the Grid or large portions of it, going down, maybe for just a week or two, maybe for months. If gas stations can’t pump gas, there will be a mad business in finding and buying and selling it, and I dunno how many pickup/sniper teams are gonna be able to take the field, so to speak.
My guess remains the same; the inner cities and immediate suburbs will become semi-isolated hell-holes, to be avoided at all costs. If one has not already moved away from these areas or does not have plans to do so in the very near future, one is whistling past the graveyard.
I note also that my point is echoed here in that we have tens of millions of Murkans armed to the teeth out here, and among them millions of trained veterans and a few hundred-thousand experienced combat vets. And those hundreds of millions of firearms.
Meanwhile my observations tend to show that the State has already tried out a few exercises in various parts of the country to gauge what their responses should be in the event of mass civil unrest and violence. I suspect that our “law enforcement” organizations will be quickly overwhelmed, as they were in those urban riots of years gone by and the military will be called upon to step in very forcefully and fairly early.
Overcast today here and we got barely a dusting of snow overnight and tonight we’ll be heading back into the single digits and subzero wind chill. My goal here is get this place self-sufficient enough to get through six months of cold snowy weather with no power, and potential home invasion/looters on the prowl.
Go Barbara! My former USMC son says that pain is just weakness leaving the body. I say that is crazy.
Now Obama wants to outlaw encryption in the intertubes: “Obama: Tech That Prevents Us From Stopping an Attack Is a ‘Problem'”
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2475343,00.asp
Yeah, I saw that – shortly after Cameron in the UK said much the same thing. These things don’t happen at random. For the tech community (in which I include entire companies like Google), this is an utterly stupid thing to say, not least because the NSA is still wiping egg off its face for trying to weaken encryption standards.
In the wake of Snowdon, in light of the atmosphere in the tech community, in the decades after the ridiculous export restrictions on encryption were dropped – in light of all these factors and more, this is a truly foolish statement. His advisors know this, and he said it anyway.
So, while we’re looking so intently at the magician’s left hand…just what is his right hand up to?
It is obvious that only fewer restrictions on government surveillance can keep us safe.
To paraphrase OFD, how do all the actions by the federal government differ from a generally benign organization that believes it’s inevitable that the lid is going to come off and is preparing to do their best to minimize the damage when it does?
What I see has been mostly actions that I might take myself if I were concerned about controlling massive civil unrest or even a full-blown civil war. Things like buying billions of rounds of ammunition, distributing AFVs to local police departments, and many other actions that seem to me to be preparing to declare widespread martial law.
Exactly.
If I was running ops at the highest Fed and state levels in this area, I’d be doing pretty much those same things, plus I’d be staging SWAT and spec ops units in the relevant areas outside the mass unrest probabilities. My guess is that at first they’ll use the minimum force necessary to “achieve the objective” but people panic and mistakes get made and sooner or later something is gonna blow up somewhere. If it goes to a full-scale civil war, all bets are off, because we will then be on a pretty much new historical level, just through numbers and demographics alone, and factoring in the preponderance of available weapons and experienced and trained personnel. It could eventually get at least as ugly as that writer outlined.
Stuff could start happening and then accelerating this year, or maybe not for another several years or ten years, but it doesn’t look good right now, and all that’s needed are a couple fuses to be lit, which is already the case, and some kind of trigger event/s.
In the meantime authorities are arresting teachers for fulfilling every high school boy’s dream, even if they’re eighteen.(of course there is the alcohol).
http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-teachers-sex-students-beach-20150119-story.html#navtype=outfit
Best of all despite this heinous behavior they are on paid leave.
The patriarchy destroys everything.
Those boys must have been desperate.
Good thing there was no tee-vee on the wimmenz island, it woulda been tuned to HGTV and Lifetime and they’d be glued to it; internet access? They’d be shopping online and busy on FaceCrack and Snapchat.
I took a required grad course down at Rutgers over 20 years ago in “Critical Theory” and it was the usual mishmash of claptrap taught by two feminazi agitprop specialists, but they admitted that they’d be nowhere, and knew it every time they flew in an airplane somewhere, without male engineers and technicians and scientists and the guys who built/build everything. I almost fell of my chair. But then they went ahead with their nonsense about “French feminism” and “new historicism” and other such crap, all derived from Marx and Freud originally. So some of the clever beotches know full well what reality is, but they make good livings at selling snake oil and bullshit to college kidz whose parents pay for it all. I got out of that racket that same year; there would have been no place for a mature, Caucasian married Catholic Christian male war veteran and ex-cop as a medievalist anywhere in North Murka.
The teachers are probably a lot prettier when not having mugshots taken. Having sex with a current student should be a firing offense, but I really don’t get why it’s criminal when the student is 18.
Look at the charges: “unlawful sex with a minor” and “contributing to the delinquency of a minor”. Um, 18 is not a minor. The rest of the charges (conspiracy, etc.) only make sense if the first two are proven. Surely any half-competent lawyer could get these charges thrown out?
@SteveF: That’s a great link, and shows exactly the psychological differences between (most) men and (most) women. Guys want to get it done. Gals are social animals. There are exceptions on both sides, but that seems to be the way most of us are programmed.
I’ve never watched one of these survivor programs, but I imagine it must be even more pronounced when the two sexes are together. Males want to do stuff for women, in order to be rewarded with sex. That, after all, is how the next generation gets created.
Yes, I don’t think anyone who has actually thought about it could deny that men have our biologically-programmed roles, as do women. And women’s roles are as important to civilization as men’s are. What makes a man attractive to women, by and large, is how well they perceive him as meeting those biological requirements. And the converse is true as well.
So does this mean that HILLARY!, Bella, Gloria, Dianne, Donna, Valerie, Angela, Golda, and Nancy were and are pretty much outta the running?
They were all probably *in* the running 40-50 years ago.
IMHO, none of them were EVER in the running. Beasts, all. By comparison, pick any half-dozen “conservative” wimmenz over that same period.
Hillary was in the running of the bull dykes 50 years ago. Oh, wait, was that all kinds of incorrect? Dang. Guess I’ll have to check my privilege.
White Privilege!
Fred on females in the military.
And as Fred himself concludes in the earlier piece:
“The military is perfectly aware of all of this. Their own magazine has told them. They see it every day. But protecting careers, and rears, is more important than protecting the country.”
They knew sending guys across No-Man’s Land would get most if not all of them killed or grievously wounded, too. They knew attacking Hamburger Hill multiple times would get the same result. And they know full well that women simply can’t do the routine physical stuff that men do from the time they’re kids. Yet they keep hammering away at this, and God forbid any dissent on the matter or rude comments. That will get your “Do Not Promote” card stamped in a hurry.
Same deal with the cop and firefighter jobs back here in my experience; the women will try to stand around and look cute while we’re engaging in biker bar brawls or hauling a 300-pound fat slob out of the third story stairwell. And do not allow yerself to be alone with them in a squad car or office, either.