08:04 – Today is Barbara’s last day of work at the law firm. As of tomorrow, she’s working for our own company.
Instead of rooting my Fire HD7 and installing Android, I decided to contact Amazon about a warranty replacement. Even after wiping it to defaults and using nothing but the standard configuration to check web pages and email, it locks up several times an evening to the point where it requires a hard reboot. The usual symptom is that the screen either goes completely black or the left 2/3 remains lit up although unresponsive and the right 1/3 is black. I’ve had it for only five months, so it should still be under warranty. I’ll contact Amazon today.
Science kit sales are fine. For 8/15, we did only 74% the revenue of 8/14, but for 9/15 we’ve done 153% the revenue of 9/14. Total revenue for 8+9/15 is at 99.8% of total revenue for 8+9/14. One more order today would take us over 100%.
We are getting low stock on biology and forensic kits, so I’ll spend some time today making up chemical solutions and filling bottles.
Email from Jen. She and her husband decided to order that Renogy 400W solar starter kit, a decent inverter, and some heavy cabling for a battery bank. They picked up several golf cart batteries locally. They’re going to charge up the battery bank with an AC charger, connect the inverter, and then run a known load to see what kind of life they get from a full charge. They’ll then connect up the four 100W panels and see what kind of charging performance they get from them. After that, they’ll stick the fully charged batteries on the shelf in the garage and store the panels and associated gear in a Faraday cage they’ll build from copper screening.
How many active shooter incidents do you think we’ve had in the US in the last 15 years? See below.
From my class last night, civilian active shooter response:
http://www.avoiddenydefend.org/
Watch the movie. This is current doctrine in Texas, and spreading. There are a couple of ways shown to secure a door that I hadn’t thought of.
Also doctrine on medical response is evolving. Previously, it was that EMS would not be allowed onscene until the scene was secure. That’s hours, while kids are bleeding to death. They are moving toward EMS entering with cops providing security. That’s still later than I’d like, but historically it’s after all the shooting is over anyway.
In TX anyway they are VERY aware, and train, that there will be plain clothes people on site with guns when the cops arrive, ie. officers responding from whereever they happened to be, plainclothes officers, and CHL holders (and possible good guys carrying illegally.) There is still risk of getting shot though, as in training, cops sometimes shoot cops IN UNIFORM.
We watched video and heard victim testimony, and the stunning thing is how many people just sit there, waiting to be killed. Decide ahead of time that you will DO SOMETHING. They want you to RUN, HIDE, FIGHT (FBI) or AVOID, DENY, DEFEND (TX) or some other variation, but ACT.
nick
110 incidents between 2000 and 2012, with all the recent ones after that. Bet you didn’t think it was that high. 40% in businesses, 30% schools, 20% outdoors, 10% other (rounded.) 45% of attackers have NO connection to the attack site or victims.
Heh. Reminds me of the shoot/no-shoot trip through the funhouse at GunSite. They had pop-up/pop-around targets, some of which were bad guys and some of which were ordinary civilians, but the latter were often deceptive (like a plumber carrying a pipe on his shoulder, which looked a whole lot like a weapon).
So, the trainees would go through one-by-one. There’d be long pauses interspaced with double bangs. Every trainee, without exception, either shot at least one good guy or failed to shoot at least one bad guy. But the one people still talk about was the nun(!) who went through the funhouse, shooting constantly. It was just a constant series of double bangs. She blew away women carrying grocery bags, kids with sporting gear, anything that popped up got shot, even a priest(!). When she walked out the other end end, Cooper just commented, “She must be from a really tough parish.” To this day, I still have no idea what a nun was doing in gunfighting school.
Our trainer emphasized that if you are onsite when the cops roll up, follow orders, stay still, and show the PALMS of your empty hands. What he didn’t say was to look as much as possible as the splayed hands ‘no shoot’ targets.
nick
One thing Barbara and I do that might help remind street cops that all civilians aren’t their enemies is buy dinner for them whenever we see them in a diner that we’re eating at. I think I’ll start asking the waitress when she adds their dinners to our tab to write a note on their check that their dinner is paid for and “Blue Lives Matter”.
“Blue Lives Matter”
Maybe too much of a good thing. As long as they know who paid for the dinner, that would seem sufficient. Being a cop can be, I’ll grant, a high-stress job. But it isn’t actually particularly dangerous; iirc it doesn’t even make the top ten.
Yeah, but there are different kinds of danger. Most dangerous occupations involve risk of accidental injury. Other than military, cops are the only occupation I can think of where there are a lot of people out there who will intentionally try to kill you.
If you’re a farmer or a construction worker or a tree trimmer, you know that you can get hurt or killed if you’re not careful. But it’s not like someone is actively plotting to hurt you. If you’re a cop, it has to be incredibly stressful to know that anyone you encounter may try to harm you.
Oh, BTW, they don’t know who paid for dinner. We always tell the waitress not to tell them who paid.
Trees don’t go hunting off duty tree trimmers. Power lines don’t go hunting for off duty linemen. Fires don’t go looking for off duty firemen. Thugs do hunt police officers sitting in their cars or pumping gas.
Exactly.
Points taken. BTW, making it anonymous is a nice touch 🙂
Texas A&M Study Calls Obama 5th Best President in America. Good research work by a fine institution!
OBAMA RATED 5th BEST PRESIDENT IN OUR HISTORY.
From a total of 44 US Presidents: Obama is rated as the fifth best.
The A&M’s Public Relations Office released this statement “After almost six years in office, Americans have rated President Obama the fifth best President ever.”
These are the details according to Texas A&M:
1. Reagan & Lincoln tied for first,
2. Twenty three presidents tied for second,
3. Seventeen other presidents tied for third,
4. Jimmy Carter came in fourth, and
5. Obama came in fifth.
“Polarled gas pipeline now in place”
http://www.pennenergy.com/articles/pennenergy/2015/09/polarled-gas-pipeline-now-in-place.html
“Polarled is the first gas pipeline on the Norwegian continental shelf that crosses the Arctic Circle and opens up a brand new highway for gas from the Norwegian Sea to Europe.”
“The gas pipeline, which has a diameter of 36 inches, extends from Nyhamna in Møre og Romsdal to the Aasta Hansteen field in the Norwegian Sea and was laid by the world’s largest pipelaying vessel: “Solitaire” from Allseas.”
“The pipelaying work commenced in March this year and the pipeline consists of more than 40,000 pipes, each of which is 12 metres in length. Polarled is the deepest pipeline on the Norwegian continental shelf. At the Aasta Hansteen field, the pipeline reaches a depth of 1,260 metres.”
“It is the first time ever that a pipe that is 36 inches in diameter has been laid at such a depth. The pipeline’s capacity will be up to 70 million standard cubic metres of gas per day.”
Wow! The pictures are ok, not great.
“Good research work by a fine institution!”
I’m just gonna go ahead here and assume this was sarcasm. Hopefully.
The recent OFD Foundation Study identified Grover Cleveland as our finest President, though. With Grover Cleveland also in second place.
It seems the BBB is rather useless (at least in the way that most Americans assume it is supposed to work):
http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/30/news/better-business-bureau/index.html
I’ve always found the BBB rather laughable myself. Almost no one checks a company’s BBB rating before doing business with that company. Consequently, the BBB rating of a company is useless. Whether your company has an A+ or an F has little impact on anything. However, if a customer is pissed at a company over some issue they’ll pull “I’ll report this to the BBB!” out of their threat grab bag. Many of the very same customers not checking the BBB before doing business with a company are the first to threaten a company with a BBB complaint. It’s just silly.
Hell, Yelp carries more clout these days than the BBB.
The triple-B is old-skool; much easier and better now to trash a biz on the net, as with Yelp or whatever. Ditto for when cops or skool admins/teachers mess you over. Put their stuff all over the net, local blogs, community boards, whatever, while being careful of possible libel/slander. Simply state the troot as U see it with backup data. Easy as pie to do nowadays.
And if you wanna kick it up (or down) a notch, check out the relevant texts available for decades at Paladin Press.
I’ve been doing some thinking about prepping, and have concluded it’s mostly a waste of effort and money. Instead of trusting to your mountains of supplies to see you through, you should trust in yourselves and your abilities. Of course, this would be better if you had more abilities. More powers. Superpowers.
I suggest that instead of laying in batteries (cells, rather) and generators, you should develop lightning power and charge up your stuff by zapping it as needed. Instead of worrying about flashlights and other light sources, be able to make your hand shine brightly. No need to acquire guns and bullets and spend endless time practicing when you can destroy your enemies with psychic blasts.
I’m going to get some old medical and scientific equipment, the kind that puts out lots of excess radiation, as well as old lab animals. I figure that some combination of X-rays, gamma rays, and artificially mutated animal saliva or venom will let me develop superpowers in no time. Any of you are welcome to use my stuff after I’ve developed my powers.
Hmmmm….starting to worry now…Mr. SteveF posted the same thing on consecutive days here…
Uh oh. Mr. SteveF has become a bot. Maybe this is our eventual downfall in that we will not become zombies but we will become bots.
Did someone mention FLASHLIGHTS?
Just couldn’t resist, with the days getting shorter.
Hmm. Sorry about the double-post. I put it on the wrong day, copied the text and put it into the correct day, then deleted the first one. Except that it didn’t delete. I blame global warming. Curse that global warming! Is there no mischief it cannot perpetrate?
If global warming is so smart, where’s my monkey butler? Hmm?
nick
Monkey butter? Sounds like a marital aid.
Monkey butler
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=26M8jVaszQ4
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xAhpDtLkJC4
not monkey butter which is something else entirely
http://www.food.com/recipe/monkey-butter-monkey-jam-505180
But could be used as a marital aid….
nick
Then there’s the funky butlers who serve funky butter.
Obuttwadd is calling for drastic gun control and must be a top priority. Attacking the Constitution as not making sense.
Cankles sez the Second Amendment interpretation by the SCOTUS is incorrect and promises to clamp down harder once she’s in the WH.
The usual suspects are waving the bloody shirt again after today’s incident, and now they don’t even wait until bodies are cold or the correct counts are in.
So their usual solution is, in their ideal world, to take away my guns, and those of all law abiding citizens, of course. This will stop such incidents from occurring anymore and also stop gun suicides and gun accidents, etc., etc. Like it has in the U.K. and Oz.
As always, the blindness: a criminal doesn’t care about breaking the law. That’s pretty much the definition of a criminal. Breaking one more law to obtain a gun is not going to matter to someone planning on shooting up a school, anymore than they care about bringing a gun into a “gun free” (read: target rich) area.