08:16 – It was 60.8F (6C) and partly cloudy when I took Colin out at 0645.
Barbara left about 1515 yesterday to head down to Winston. She had dinner with a friend yesterday evening, stayed with Frances and Al, and is running various errands today and Sunday morning before heading back. Colin and I are bereft. Barbara’s gone, and neither of us has been able to locate any wild women.
I see some religious nutcase says the world is ending, starting today. He formerly said it was ending today, period, but recently modified his prediction to say that today was the beginning of the end. Which is kind of like predicting that the sun will rise in the morning, but followers of idiots like this never seem to notice.
I remember the last time the world ended, back in 2011. We’d planned to have dinner with Paul and Mary at our house. We decided that it’d be safe for Mary, Barbara, and me to have dinner indoors, but we were going to make Paul eat out on the deck. All four of us are atheists, so we figured everything would be okay, but because Paul had been “saved” as a small child meant that he might be transported to heaven, we decided to take no chance of ending up with a hole in our roof
As I was packing up science kits last night and affixing postage labels, it occurred to me how strongly our customer base skews rural/small-town. Sure, we sell a lot of kits into the Clinton Archipelago, but a large percentage go to red states or red areas of blue states. Our customer base is much more likely than average to live in small towns in exurban/rural areas in all 50 states. Now, every time we get an order with a ship-to town I don’t recognize the name of, I look it up on Wikipedia. More often than not, it has a population of 1,237 or 4,158 or something like that, and is located in a rural/agricultural county with a population of 30,000 or fewer.
There’s been a lot of speculation by commenters here about what might happen if things really go to hell. The consensus seems to be that the progs from the blue areas would be in deep shit because (a) they can’t do anything important for themselves, (b) we Deplorables own most of the firearms, and (c) on average, we’re much, much better shots. And I think all of that is true. But it may not be the most important differentiator.
Home-schooled students are far, far ahead of public school students. On average, they’re probably two to three grade levels ahead. Even more important, they actually learn to think, which is a rarity among public-school students. Even disregarding demographic differences, which substantially favor the rural kids, those kids are smarter, better-educated, and harder working than urban kids in public schools. And the rural kids also tend to learn hands-on skills, much more than urban kids do.
So if push ever really comes to shove, the rural population has every advantage over the urban population. If the latter decides to come to take what we have, they’re going to run into a buzzsaw. Or perhaps more accurately, a meat grinder.