Two old Irishmen were sitting at the local pub drinking a few beers.
So, Thomas O'Ryan said to Liam Halloren, "Liam, me buddy, me ol' pal. When I die would you please pour a couple of beers o'er me grave?"
Liam said, "Why certainly, but could I pour it through me bladder first?"
*.*
A study says stress may lead to loss of memory and brain shrinkage. Great, another shrinkage to worry about.
In a small town in France, there is a serial rabbit killer, who has killed a half-dozen pet rabbits. My theory is that its someone very protective of their Trix cereal.
A study says Louisiana is one of the fattest states in the nation. So much that 50% of the people make up 75% of the population.
A Dutch man has gone to court to legally change his age from 69 to 49. Of course, the big question: If he’s allowed to do that, would it stop all the junk mail from AARP for an entire year?
Las Vegas oddsmakers listed the 2-7 Buffalo Bills NFL team as a 28.5 favorite over college team Alabama. For what purpose, no one knows.
A company in Wisconsin decided that, instead of giving a bonus for Christmas this year, each employee is going to receive their own hand gun. I would make extra sure in the coming year not to take the last cup of coffee without starting a new pot.
Utah will start testing beers to make sure they contain less than 4% alcohol. There's a job my high school career counselor never bothered bringing up.
*.*
Army Replacing Enlistment Bonuses With Welfare Checks
WASHINGTON — After barely making their 2018 recruiting goal, The United States Army Recruiting Command (USAREC) is eliminating enlistment bonuses in their 2019 recruiting plan in order to heavily target a nearly unending source of manpower: Americans on government assistance.
According to USAToday, it was that demographic — unemployed adults around 35 – 40, with multiple kids, no healthcare, and the need to earn below 185% of the poverty line to maintain their welfare — who miraculously pushed the US Army over their goal earlier this September. Highlighting insanely low enlisted soldiers’ pay and free healthcare, according to government manpower experts, is the next logical step.
Defense Finance and Accounting Services (DFAS) director Teresa A. McKay weighed in on the campaign’s success, explaining how DFAS works cross-functionally with all of the armed forces to ensure that soldiers make “just enough” in case money becomes tight.
“Like any good business we always create ‘back-doors’ and ‘levers’ that we can pull in case funds become strained or unavailable,” said McKay. “By purposely keeping lower enlisted pay rates below U.S. poverty guidelines, we can direct them to US Department of Agriculture (USDA) or state run programs in order to redirect monies to more important programs like the ‘lightning gun,’ next-generation cold weather gear no one is allowed to wear, and the F-35.”
Col. Patrick R. Michaelis, Commander of the Army’s 2nd Recruiting Brigade, championed the “welfare initiative” after learning food stamp usage was on the rise in the military. He says that the strategy is the perfect solution to Millenials who want to send troops overseas but don’t want to do any of the actual fighting.
“The tried-and-true demographic of adults 17 – 24 has been exhausted, literally,” said Michaelis. “From what, I have no idea, but we’re finding Gen X’ers who now take care of their Baby Boomer parents and are more than happy and financially destitute enough to join the military.”
*.*
I stopped at a florist shop after work to pick up roses for my wife. As the clerk was putting the finishing touches on the bouquet, a young man burst through the door, breathlessly requesting a dozen red roses.
"I'm sorry," the clerk said. "This man just ordered our last bunch." The desperate customer turned to me and begged, "May I please have those roses?"
"What happened?" I asked. "Did you forget your wedding anniversary?"
"It's even worse than that," he confided. "I broke my wife's iPhone!"
*.*
Say what you want, however depression does have its benefits.
For instance, I used to have a fear of flying.
Now when I get on a plane, I really don't give a crap if it reaches its destination.
Issue of the Times;
The 2nd Amendment is Obsolete, Says Congressman Who Wants to Nuke Omaha by Larry Correia
Last week a congressman embarrassed himself on Twitter. He got into a debate about gun control, suggested a mandatory buyback—which is basically confiscation with a happy face sticker on it—and when someone told him that they would resist, he said resistance was futile because the government has nukes.
And everybody was like, wait, what?
Of course the congressman is now saying that using nuclear weapons on American gun owners was an exaggeration, he just wanted to rhetorically demonstrate that the all-powerful government could crush us peasants like bugs, they hold our pathetic lives in their iron hand, and he’d never ever advocate for the use of nuclear weapons on American soil (that would be bad for the environment!), and instead he merely wants to send a SWAT team to your house to shoot you in the face if you don’t comply.
See? That’s way better.
But this post isn’t about that particular line from one foolish congressman. It’s about all of the silly left wing memes that have popped up since, trying to justify the congressman’s basic premise that the 2nd Amendment is obsolete for resisting tyranny, and the government would obliterate anyone who failed to comply.
I’ve seen a slew of these over the last few days. Nukes kicked it off, but I’ve seen it before with drones, or tanks, or cruise missiles. Basically they all boil down to the same fundamental premise. The federal government has access to advanced weapon systems, and thus anyone who resisted gun confiscation would be effortlessly destroyed by these advanced weapon systems, ergo gun control has already won, forgone conclusion, and they declare victory.
Like most political memes, they’re taking an extremely complex situation, and providing a cartoonish, simplistic answer, which makes them look like complete dipshits to anybody with a clue, but scores them lots of Virtue Signal Points to their likewise ignorant but posturing friends. To my people, this is really goofy stuff. I mean, if you have even a basic knowledge of this topic these memes are about as clever as the ones from the vaccines cause autism morons and the flat earth society.
We are so divided it’s like we are speaking two different languages. Hell, on this topic we are on two different planets. And it is usually framed with a sanctimonious left versus right, enlightened being versus racist hillbilly, unfailing arrow of history versus the knuckle dragging past sort of vibe.
But basically it boils down to one side making the argument: The idea of the 2nd Amendment resisting a tyrannical government is obsolete, because the federal government is too overwhelmingly powerful, and has too many advanced technologies.
So today I’m writing this for my left leaning friends and readers, in the hopes that I can break down the flaws in this argument. I’m going to try not to be too insulting. Accent on try… But I’ll probably fail because this is a really stupid argument.
For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a novelist now, but I retired from the Evil Military Industrial Complex, where I helped maintain those various advanced weapon systems you expect to bomb me with. Before that I was a gun dealer and firearms instructor. So basically I sold guns to the people you expect the people I trained to take them from.
On that note, I don’t think you fully comprehend the nature of the individuals you expect to do your dirty work, but I’ll come back around to that later.
First, let’s talk about the basic premise that an irregular force primarily armed with rifles would be helpless against a powerful army that has things like drones and attack helicopters.
This is a deeply ironic argument to make, considering that the most technologically advanced military coalition in history has spent the better part of the last two decades fighting goat herders with AKs in Afghanistan and Iraq. Seriously, it’s like you guys only pay attention to American casualties when there’s a republican in office and an election coming up.
Nobel Peace Prize Winner Barack Obama launched over five hundred drone strikes during his eight years in office. We’ve used Apaches, smart bombs, tanks, I don’t know how many thousands of raids on houses and compounds, all the stuff that the lefty memes say they’re willing to do to crush the gun nut right, and we’ve spent something like 6 trillion dollars on the global war on terror so far.
And yet they’re still fighting.
So yes, groups of irregular locals can be a real pain in the ass to a technologically superior military force. That’s pretty obvious.
Now here is the interesting part. Best estimates are that any given time in Iraq we’ve been fighting about 20,000 insurgents at most. Keep that number in mind, because now we’re going to talk about the scope of this hypothetical fight over gun control.
Nobody really knows how many people in America own guns, or how many guns are here. The estimates range wildly. I’ve noticed a trend over recent years of the news media trying to minimize that number, to make it seem like it’s actually a very low percentage of Americans who own firearms, a fading cultural anomaly if you will, and to explain the one to two million new backgrounds checks done every month for new purchases, a handful of us just own a few hundred guns each.
Uh huh…. Sure.
While trying to make gun ownership seem like an oddball thing, I’ve seen the media come up with some truly silly estimates about the total number of guns in this country. The one that was going around earlier this year was really easy to debunk, because they used the number of NICS checks… Problem is, it didn’t take into account the millions guns sold before that (and they never really wear out), the fact that one NICS check can be used to buy multiples at a time, and that many US states (including the gun nuttiest) use their own state background check system, and don’t report to that federal number. Oh yeah, with advances in cheap machining, making your own guns at home has become increasingly popular.
When pollsters call to ask us if and how many guns we own—we think about things like a congressmen talking about nuking us—and immediately lie our asses off. The biggest recurring joke in the gun community is that I don’t own any guns, because I lost them all in a freak canoe accident.
So nobody really knows how many guns there are here, or how many of us own them. But the answer is A LOT.
Recently the WaPo ran an article called Americans Vastly Overestimate the Number of Gun Owners. As with most WaPo articles, it was about 90% bullshit, but they are claiming that only 20 to 30 percent of Americans own guns. That may sound plausible if you live in Manhattan, but out here in flyover country, that’s downright laughable, but anyways, to make the idea of mass gun confiscation as plausible as possible, let’s run with that rosy figure. We’ll even take the lower one of 20%. (snort)
Too bad America has over a third of a billion people, because even the unrealistic figure of 20% of 325 million is still a whopping 65 MILLION people. That’s about the same as the entire population of France. That’s about the same as the population of Great Britain, only with 500 times the firepower. Good thing we didn’t go with that 30%, because now the number is way bigger than the population of Germany (and you know what a pain beating them last time was!). Or ironically, about three times the population of Iraq.
It’s kind of funny, when it comes to us adopting social or economic programs, the left is always comparing the US to Denmark, which has the population of LA county, and that’s totally not apples and oranges, but declaring war on a percentage of the American population bigger than most nation states? That’s no biggie.
But I digress…
Okay, so let’s say Congressman Swalwell gets his wish, and the government says turn them in or else. And even though the government has become tyrannical enough to send SWAT teams door to door and threaten citizens with drones and attack helicopters, rather than half the states saying fuck you, this means Civil War 2, instead we’ll stick to the rosiest of all possible outcomes, and say that most gun owners comply.
In fact, let’s be super kind. Rather than a realistic number, like half or a third of those people getting really, really pissed off and hoisting the black flag, let’s say that 99% of them decide to totally put all their faith into the government, and that the all-powerful entity which just threatened to kill their entire family will never ever turn tyrannical from now on, pinky swear, so what do they have to lose? And a whopping 90% of gun owners go along peacefully.
That means you are only dealing with six and a half MILLION insurgents. The entire active US military is about 1.3 million, with about 800,000 reserve. Which is also assuming that those two Venn diagrams don’t overlap, which is just plain idiotic, but I’ll get to that too.
Let’s be super generous. I’m talking absurdly generous, and say that a full 99% of US gun owners say won’t somebody think of the children and all hold hands and sing kumbaya, so that then you are only dealing with the angriest, listless malcontents who hate progress… These are those crazy, knuckle dragging bastards who you will have to put in the ground.
And there are 650,000 of them.
To put that into perspective, we were fighting 22,000 insurgents in Iraq, a country which would fit comfortably inside Texas with plenty of room to spare. This would be almost 30 times as many fighters, spread across 22 times the area.
And that estimated number is pathetically, laughably low.
In one of the bluest states in America, the New York SAFE Act only has like a 4% compliance rate. And that’s mostly just people choosing to ignore an onerous law. Because the further you get away from the major cities, the more people just don’t give a crap about your utopian foolishness. Its benign neglect, and most Americans are happy to ignore you until you mess with them. You start dropping Hellfire missiles on Indiana? Fuck you, its game on. And that 1% is going to turn into 50% damn quick.
So just by the numbers, it’s an insurmountable problem, but we’re just getting started with how stupid this idea is.
Let’s talk about the logistical challenges of this holy crusade to free the country of icky guns and murder everybody who thinks differently than you do.
In Iraq, our troops operated out of a few secure bases. Those were the big areas where we could do things like store supplies, airlift things in or out, repair vehicles, have field hospitals, a Burger King, etc. And then there were Forward Operating Bases. These are the little camps troops could stage out of to operate in a given area. The hard part was keeping those places supplied, and I believe most of America’s causalities came from convoys getting hit while trying to supply things like ammo, food, and fuel, because when you’re moving around, you’re a big target. All of these places were secured, and if you got too close, or they thought you were going to try and drive a car bomb through the gate, they’d light you up.
Now, imagine trying to conduct operations in a place with twenty times the bad guys, and there are no “safe zones”. Most of our military bases aren’t out in the desert by themselves. They’ve had a town grow up around them, and the only thing separating the jets from the people you expect them to be bombing is a chain link fence.
The confiscators don’t live on base. They live in apartment complexes and houses in the suburbs next door to the people you expect them to murder. Every time they go out to kick in some redneck’s door, their convoy is moving through an area with lots of angry people who shoot small animals from far away for fun, and the only thing they remember about chemistry is the formula for Tannerite.
In something that I find profoundly troubling, when I’ve had this discussion before, I’ve had a Caring Liberal tell me that the example of Iraq doesn’t apply, because “we kept the gloves on”, whereas fighting America’s gun nuts would be a righteous total war with nothing held back… Holy shit, I’ve got to wonder about the mentality of people who demand rigorous ROEs to prevent civilian casualties in a foreign country, are blood thirsty enough to carpet bomb Texas.
You really hate us, and then act confused why we want to keep our guns? But I don’t think unrelenting total war against everyone who has ever disagreed with you on Facebook is going to be quite as clean as you expect.
There will be no secure delivery of ammo, food, and fuel, because the guys who build that, grow that, and ship that, well, you just dropped a Hellfire on his cousin Bill because he wouldn’t turn over his SKS. Fuck you. Starve. And that’s assuming they don’t still make the delivery but the gas is tainted and food is poisoned.
Oh wait… Poison? That would be unsportsmanlike! Really? Because your guy just brought up nuclear weapons. What? You think that you’re going to declare war on half of America, with rules of engagement that would make Genghis Khan blush, and my side would keep using Marquis of Queensbury rules?
Oh hell no.
A friend of mine who is a political activist said something interesting the other day, and that was for most people on the left political violence is a knob, and they can turn the heat up and down, with things like protests, and riots, all the way up to destruction of property, and sometimes murder… But for the vast majority of folks on the right, it’s an off and on switch. And the settings are Vote or Shoot Fucking Everybody. And believe me, you really don’t want that switch to get flipped, because Civil War 2.0 would make Bosnia look like a trip to Disneyworld.
Speaking of ugly, do you really honestly think that you’re going to be able to kill people because they disagree with you, and they won’t hit you back where it hurts? While you’re drone striking Omaha Nebraska you really think that the people who live where all the food is grown, the electricity is generated, and all the freeways and rail lines run through, that some of them aren’t going to take it personal? And that they’re not going to use their location and access to make life extremely uncomfortable for you?
The scariest single conversation I’ve ever heard in my life was five Special Forces guys having a fun thought exercise about how they would bring a major American city to its knees. They picked Chicago, because it was a place they’d all been. It was fascinating, and utterly terrifying. And I’ll never ever put any of it in a book, because I don’t want to give crazy people any ideas. Give it about a week and people would be eating each other (and gee whiz, take one wild guess what the political leanings of most Green Berets are?).
Similar dinner conversation once, with a bunch of SWAT cops from a major American city, talking about how incredibly easy it would be to entirely shut down and utterly ruin their city, with only a small crew of dedicated individuals and about forty eight hours of mayhem and fuckery. (And guess what their political leanings were? Hint, most of them were eager to retire because they’d been treated like shit by their liberal mayors, and take their pension to someplace like Arkansas)
So yeah, let’s talk about those people you think are going to be unfeeling automatons who will have no problem killing their friends and neighbors on your behalf…
They are us.
Above I mentioned a Venn diagram of obstinate gun owners and the military, but you can change that to cops and it’s going to be pretty similar. Those diagrams overlap a lot, and depending on the particular department or unit, they make one big happy circle.
Back when I owned a gun store, we were located one block from Utah Army National Guard Headquarters. Every drill weekend my building was a sea of ACU (and the fact that very few of my liberal readers know what that abbreviation means just shows goes to show how incredibly out of touch they are, but I mean that ugly sage grey digital camouflage). It was just a bunch of guys hanging out, talking shit, and BUYING GUNS.
Lots and lots of guns. And I know most of my left wing readers can’t tell them apart, but they were specifically buying the scary ones that you want to ban the most. Thousands of them. And cops… Holy moly I sold a lot of guns to cops. Not department guns, though we supplied a few of those, but personal guns.
Having worked with a lot of police departments, guess what? The guys who actually know how to shoot? The ones who run the training programs? Usually they’re my people too. The gun nuts gravitate toward that position because A. more taxpayer funded ammo, and B. they actually give a shit about the subject, so they learn on their own, and then try to pass those skills onto their coworkers to better keep them alive.
Whenever I see one of these dipshit memes produced by some Gender Studies Major, it just demonstrates how incredibly sheltered and out of touch they are. They don’t know fuck all about these people. Usually if they’re talking about soldiers, it’s about how they’re evil baby killers, or time bombs of PTSD rage, or poor deluded fools who joined the military because they couldn’t get a real job…. And cops, it’s about how they’re just a bunch of trigger happy racists just itching for an excuse to execute everybody who looks different than they do.
But don’t worry, despite all those years of abuse, when you ask them to go door to door in their hometown to systematically attack people they’ve known their whole lives, friends and family who’ve done nothing wrong, and maybe get shot or blown up, and when it’s over then turn in their own personal guns, all because some moron in a big city a thousand miles away said so, I’m sure they’ll hop right to it.
See, one of the things you guys on the left don’t realize is that there’s that whole “Othering” thing. You do it all the time without thinking about it. Where you just ascribe increasingly terrible things to people, like all gun owners are murderous, racist, kill crazy, redneck, dumb ass peckerwoods who want children to die, to the point that to you, we’re this unimaginable, evil, Other, so it’s okay to threaten to murder us, and feel good about yourself. Because we’re bad, and you’re the good guy, and thus totally justified in all you do.
Yet you assume that the people who gravitate toward the career fields you’ll need to wage war on us will feel the same way you do. When in reality most of them think you’re posturing, elitist, ignoramuses who don’t know the first thing about guns, crime, violence, or America.
Now this is where I’ll part ways with most of my libertarian brethren, because they are quick to point out that there are plenty of places where cops enforce existing gun or drug laws. The part they’re missing is that most people are complicated, and they’ve got lines they won’t cross.
In this case, the target isn’t some Other, it’s not just their people, it’s them. And an active shooting war between the government and half the population? That’s a pretty big fucking line. And we’re not talking about people they are already inclined not to like, but rather they’re supposed to go shoot their doctor and their mechanic for doing something that up until a few days ago was legal and they were doing themselves. A small percentage will be happy to put on the jack boots and start loading people into cattle cars. But a larger percentage will say nope, I’m calling in sick, don’t feel like getting blown up today.
And another big chunk will actively help the insurgents, because they fucking hate you and everything you stand for. Like seriously, out of touch liberals, how many small town sheriff’s deputies do you think would describe themselves as “progressive”?
Now this will vary wildly depending on jurisdiction. Some places, no problem. People will comply. Others because of the culture, they won’t. Yet, in the places where they are the least likely to comply, those are the places where you are the most likely to have the local authorities be actively on the side of the insurgents. (this is kind of a no brainer to anybody who has ever looked at any guerilla war ever in history). Which means that the occupiers then have to import outsiders to do the deed, but then the presence of outsiders piss off the rest of the local fence sitters, and now everybody is getting blown up.
The problem with all those advanced weapons systems you don’t understand, but keep sticking onto memes, is guess who builds them, maintains them, and drives them? When I first saw this idiotic Apache meme my comment was that sadly Freedom Eagle’s day job was as a contractor doing helicopter engine maintenance.
Those drones you guys like to go on about, and barely understand? One of the contracts I worked on was maintaining the servers for them. Guess which way most military contractors vote? Duh. Though honestly, if I was still in my Evil Military Industrial Complex job when this went down, I’d just quietly embezzle and funnel millions of DOD dollars to the rebels. Because fuck you is why.
So you’ve got an insurmountable challenge, that’s logistically impossible, and a big chunk of the people you expect to fight on your behalf being actively against you. Your side would need an incredible amount of will, especially after they turned off your electricity and water, and there’s no more food on the shelves.
This is why smart progressives prefer to boil the frog slowly.
To pull off confiscation now you’d have to be willing to kill millions of people. The congressman’s suggestion was incredibly stupid, but it was nice to see one of you guys being honest about it for once. In order to maybe, hypothetically save thousands, you’d be willing to slaughter millions. Either you really suck at math, or the ugly truth is that you just hate the other side so much that you think killing millions of people is worth it to make them fall in line. And if that’s the case, you’re a sick bastard, and a great example of why the rest of us aren’t ever going to give up our guns.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
http://www.cutesypooh.com/
Honest?
When?
My wife told me; "Sex on vacation is so much better than at home."
Not the postcard I was expecting.
*.*
There was a dance teacher who talked of a very old dance called the Politician.
"All you have to do" she told her class "is take three steps forward, two steps backward, then side-step side-step and turn around."
*.*
Saudi Crown Prince Begins 100 Hours Of Court-Ordered Community Service For Murdering Jamal Khashoggi
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Working with cleaning crews alongside the Riyadh-Dammam Highway, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman began serving his 100 hours of court-ordered community service Thursday for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Well, I’ll admit it—I got mixed up with the wrong people and I did some bad stuff, so this is what I get,” said the crown prince, who had reportedly been picking up trash since 5 a.m. that morning after a Saudi prosecutor found him guilty of ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. “Is 100 hours of work in the sweltering heat a lot of time? Yes. Is it perhaps too much? Of course! But in Saudi Arabia, we have to show our citizens that no one should be able to get away with murdering members of the media. Not even me.”
At press time, the crown prince had reportedly left the premises after convincing his parole officer to let him serve the rest of his time stoning women and beheading prisoners.
*.*
A stealth B-2 bomber was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado.
It caused all kinds of problems when it landed near a senior center because someone cried out, "B-2!"
Another person yelled out, "Bingo!"
Then a brawl erupted.
*.*
Kristen Bell says she’s not sure about the message that “Snow White” is giving her daughters about a prince kissing a woman without their permission.
I have a feeling that a fairy tale where the princess was left in the forest in a glass coffin for eternity would have been a big hit.
Issue of the Times;
SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF, interviewed by Daisy Luther
Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.
If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.
How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?
It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.
To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.
Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.
I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.
Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.
We were living a normal life, and then suddenly we were thrown in a way of living where if you could not “negotiate” something with someone, you solve the problem by launching a rocket from an RPG through the window of his living room.
Hate stripped down the layers of humanity and suddenly it was “normal” to level an apartment building with people inside with shells from a tank or form private prisons with imprisoned civilians for slave work or sex slaves.
Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent.
Again, the thing that is important for readers is that we were a modern society one day, and then in few weeks it turned into carnage.
Do not make the mistake of saying “it cannot happen here” because I made that mistake too.
Do not underestimate power of propaganda, fear, hate, and the lowest human instincts, no matter how modern and good your society is right now and how deeply you believe that “it can not happen here”.
You’ve mentioned warlords and gangs in several of your articles. Were they responsible for the majority of the violence or was it hungry families?
Fighting of the armies through the whole period of war brings violence in terms of constant shelling from a distance from different kind of weapons.
For example a few multiple rocket launchers (VBR) could bring in 30 seconds the destruction in an area of 3-4 apartment buildings, and being there in that moment and surviving it gives you a completely new view on life.
Snipers were a constant threat and over time you simply grow a way of living that you constant scan area in front of you where your next steps gonna be. Are you gonna be visible and from where? Etc.
Most brutal violence was actually lawlessness and complete lack of order between different factions and militias, so in some periods there were militias or gangs who simply ruled the cities or part of the city where they were absolutely masters of everything in terms of deciding of taking someone’s life.
In lawlessness, you as one person could be really small and not interesting, or join some bigger group of people to be stronger, some family or militia or gang.
An example of a gang would be group of people of some 300 or 500 people who “officially” were a unit or militia and operate for some faction, but in reality they operate mostly for themselves.
That included owning part of the black market, having prison (for forced labor or ransom), attacking people and houses for resources, smuggling people from dangerous areas.
Violence from those kinds of group was the most immediate violence, the most visible in terms of SHTF talking.
If those people came on your door you could obey, fight, or negotiate, but mostly you could not not ask for help from any kind of authority, because there was no real authority.
In any society, no matter where you are living, there are a great number of people who are waiting for the SHTF to go out and do violent things. Small time criminals or simply violent persons who are not openly violent because system is there to punish them for that. It is like that.
Some gang leaders that I knew were actually completely sick people with a strange type of charisma that makes people follow them, weird situations that can happen only in a real collapse.
They are people who just waited for their time to rise.
Those kinds of people together with criminal organization that are already there in any city in the world will be the backbone of SHTF gangs.
Who were the most likely victims?
A very simple answer would be that the most likely victims were people who had interesting things without enough defense.
But it was not always that simple.
For example one of the first houses that got raided in my neighborhood, right at the beginning of collapse while there was still some kind of order, was a rich family’s home.
They had a nice house with bars on the windows, a pretty good setup for defense, and they had enough people inside so they could give pretty good resistance to the mob.
But they got raided simply because they were known that they are rich, so they were attacked with enough force to be overwhelmed.
It was not only about how much manpower you had and how well-organized defense of your home was, it was also about how juicy a target you were.
If you are faced with 150 angry people attacking your home because they are sure you have good stuff inside your chances are low, no matter how good and tough you are.
People who were alone were a pretty easy target and old people without support of family or friends.
It was not always about killing someone or violence. For example, if you were alone and without resources but you had something else valuable like some kind of skill or knowledge you could easily be “recruited” for some faction or group, not by your will of course.
What were some ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of violence? How do you recommend that people prepare themselves for the possibility of violence?
It can be done in steps, or in layers.
Do not be interesting (or attract attention) when the SHTF.
This means a lot of things, for this article I can give a few examples with shortened explanations because it is a huge topic:
• Do not look like a prepper (before or after SHTF). There is no sense in announcing that you are prepping for EMP, civil collapse, apocalypse, or whatever. With that you are risking the probability that when the SHTF, people will remember that you have interesting things in your home
• Your home should look ordinary. For example, if you are living in the city on a street where all houses look similar, there is not much sense in making your home look like a fortress. You’ll just attract attention.
• Your defense should be based on more subtle means. Some examples are having means to reinforce doors and windows quickly when you need it, or to reinforce them from inside. Make changes in your yard to funnel possible attackers where you want them to be (trees, fence, bush…). You can make your home look abandoned or already looted.
Think about what survival is!
Survival is about staying alive, it is not about being comfortable at the expense of losing your life.
I have seen many times people lose their lives simply because they were too attached to their belongings (house, car, land, goods…) so they simply did not want to leave something and run in a particular moment.
Everything can be earned and bought again except life.
Forget about statements like “I will defend it with my life” or “over my dead body” or similar because the real SHTF is usually not heroic or noble. It is hard and brutal. When you are gone you are gone and there might be nobody to take care of your family just because you have been stubborn or trusted in movies when it came to violence.
To rephrase it: Be ready to leave your home in a split second if that means you and your family will survive, no matter how many good things you have stored there.
Be mentally ready for violence
In a way, it is impossible to be ready for violence, especially widespread violence when the SHTF, but you can minimize shock when that happens with some things.
If you are not familiar with what violence is, you can try to get yourself close” to it today (in normal times). It can be done, for example, by doing some voluntary work for example in a local hospital, ER or similar… or simply by working with homeless people.
Sounds maybe strange but activities like this can get you a bit of a feeling of what it is all about, not to mention that you can learn some practical and useful skills for SHTF.
Have means and skills (physically) to defend – or to do violence
No matter how old or young you are, your gender or religion I assure you that you are capable of doing violence. It is only a matter of the situation and how far you are going to be pushed.
It is not just “some people are capable of violence.” Everybody is capable. Not everybody enjoys doing it or is willing to do it so easily.
In today (normal times) you can learn some violence skills and you should do it, again no matter if you are a woman or old or young.
You should own a weapon and know how to use it. You should practice with it, or have at least some basic knowledge about hand-to-hand combat.
The worst case scenario is to have a weapon that you try for the first time when SHTF.
Be familiar with your means for defense, let your family members know what they need to do in case of attack of your home, have plan, and go through it.
Only through practice will you minimize chances for mistakes.
Use common sense
I know lot of survivalists almost dream about how they are going to use weapons against bad guys when SHTF, and that they will be something like super heroes from movies, saving innocents and killing villains.
Truth is that in a real collapse, a lot of things are kind of blurred and you are not sure who the bad guys are. Good guys turn out to be lunatic gang members who want to bring food to their kids.
There are no super heroes when SHTF, and if some of them show up they end up dead quickly.
There is only you and your skills and mindset and what you prepared.
Use violence as a last resort because of the simple fact that by using violence you are risking of getting killed or hurt. Remember when SHTF there is maybe no doctor or hospital to take care of your wound.
It is a time when even a small cut can eventually kill you through infection and lack of proper care.
I’m a single mom with a household full of girls. In an SHTF situation, what would our best strategies be to remain safe?
Just like I have mentioned before, strategy is always same for any part of survival, and shooting from the rifle is pretty similar no matter are you man or woman.
Being single mom with household full of girls on first look make you as a ideal target in some situations, but we are talking here in prepper terms so there is no reason not to be perfectly well prepared as a single mom with girls.
But yes I admit it is not perfect situation, even if you are prepared well, some things are sure, you need to connect with other people even more.
House with couple of girls will always look like easy prey for some people.
It is like that.
Were people in the city safer than people in the country? Can you tell us more about rural living during this time?
In my case definitely no.
In the essence it always come to the resources and people.
City meant more people less resources, country (rural) meant less people more resources, and because that level of violence simply was lower. That was most important reason.
There are few more reasons why it was much better in the country.
People in the country (rural settings) were much more “connected to ground” they were more tough if you like, they grew their own food, had cattle, lived more simple life prior SHTF and when everything collapsed they had less problems getting use to it.
Yes they also did not have electricity and phones, running water or connection to other places but they adapted easier to the new life because they had more useful skills then people in the city.
Life was harder for them too than prior to the collapse, but they had means to get resources: land, woods, river…
Another thing is that people in small rural communities “in the country” were more connected to each other, people knew their neighborhood and some things were easier to organize, like community security watch, help in case of diseases and similar.
What types of weapons did people have for self-defense?
It was different political system prior the collapse where it was not so usual to own a weapon legally. And to own one illegally could mean a lot of troubles.
Right prior to SHTF, it became possible to buy different weapons on the black market but still, a majority of people did not own weapons.
When it all collapsed, it was possible to get a weapon through trade.
Because of the military doctrine here prior to the collapse, we used “East Bloc” weapons. A favorite was AK-47 in all different kind of editions, or older weapons like M-48 rifle, SKS rifle, 22 and similar.
People used what they had, so in one period you would be lucky if you had any kind of pistol and knife.
Later through the different channels weapon become more available so people had them more. A lot of that was actually junk that some warlords somehow “imported”.
Weapons 50-60 years old without proper ammunition, or not in operating condition. A lot of people simply did not have a clue how to use any kind of weapon so a lot of accidental deaths happened.
I remember people storming abandoned army barracks that was mostly looted, but they found in one building a lot of RPGs while other part of the same building was burning.
Two guys were trying to figure out a single-use RPG, and while they were messing with it clearly not knowing how that thing worked, they accidentally armed it and launched a rocket that flew through the crowd, not hurting anyone and exploding in wall 100 meters from where they stood.
They were smiling, clearly happy because they thought they figured out how that thing worked.
What weapons do you suggest to have for SHTF?
It is a never-ending discussion and a favorite prepper topic, and I must say that whole discussion is overrated.
I have used them in a real situation, and tried and tested lot of different kind of weapons and what works for me may simply not work for you.
For example, here for me good choice is AK-47 rifle, maybe for you wherever you are it is very bad choice.
Good advice is : you need to have a weapon that most people have around you because of multiple reasons: spare parts, repairing, ammunition availability, possibility that you can pick that rifle from other people and you know how to use it.
What caliber and similar is a matter of discussion again. I am talking from the point of owning a rifle.
Another thing is that you need to know how that weapon works. Luckily, most of my readers live in an area where gun laws are great comparing to region where I am.
You have much more choices when it comes to owning a weapon and practicing with it. Use that.
And do not forget that using weapon in a real life situation is not like shooting at beer bottles with your friends after a barbecue.
In real life you might be in a situation to use a weapon while you are tired, dirty, and hungry and while someone is screaming next to you.
It is going to be maybe when you are not ready to do that, maybe in pitch dark, maybe after you have been awake for 48 hours.
At least think about that.
When should you use violence?
Contrary to some popular beliefs in the prepper community, the point is to use violence only as a last solution.
The reason is as I mentioned already, the risk that you can be hurt or killed too, but also once you do violence you change your own rules, or push it more forward, and it is easy to get lost in violence.
There are consequences to that, and you are not going to be the same person ever again.
Violence is a tool, not a toy. You need to know how to use it as best as possible, but also to avoid using it when it is not necessary.
It is a good idea to set up a clear set of rules (mentally too) when you are gonna use violence and to try to stick to it.
For example you will use weapon if someone tries to break your home and attack you, and you need to be ready to do that without hesitation.
What else should we know about post-collapse violence?
Think with your head and research.
One thing that is absolutely important when it comes to understanding how violent it is going to be and what can you expect in your own case of SHTF, is to understand how much media can influence people in making their decisions about violence.
In my case, the media built up situation where people feared so much from other people that they actually hated them. They hated them so much that they actually strip them down from humanity.
In a real-life example, it works in a way that people killed other people, including kids and women, because they hated them so much because media told them.
It may look ridiculous and not possible to you, and you might again think “that can not happen here” but please trust your own resources, look for independent information, not mainstream media, in order to get the right information about what is really happening in the beginning of collapse.
Do not be pulled into “popular opinion” just because the “man from TV” (whoever he might be) told you so.
It is easier today. Because of the internet, you have much more choices for correct information than in my time. But still be careful, you might find yourself rioting together with 500 people just because you trusted some media.
Real survival is not romantic or idealistic. It is brutal, hard and unfair. Let Selco take you into that world.
Read more of Selco’s articles here: https://shtfschool.com
Quote of the Times;
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.” - Maugham
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38491/watch-ocasio-cortez-has-no-idea-what-3-branches-ryan-saavedra?fbclid=IwAR09Uxnsud7Udak1yROciAAH1qB2Jz9vuHH3z3K6bwG8Ik4QrHrH3QiY16U
Not the postcard I was expecting.
*.*
There was a dance teacher who talked of a very old dance called the Politician.
"All you have to do" she told her class "is take three steps forward, two steps backward, then side-step side-step and turn around."
*.*
Saudi Crown Prince Begins 100 Hours Of Court-Ordered Community Service For Murdering Jamal Khashoggi
RIYADH, SAUDI ARABIA—Working with cleaning crews alongside the Riyadh-Dammam Highway, Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman began serving his 100 hours of court-ordered community service Thursday for murdering journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
“Well, I’ll admit it—I got mixed up with the wrong people and I did some bad stuff, so this is what I get,” said the crown prince, who had reportedly been picking up trash since 5 a.m. that morning after a Saudi prosecutor found him guilty of ordering the assassination of Khashoggi. “Is 100 hours of work in the sweltering heat a lot of time? Yes. Is it perhaps too much? Of course! But in Saudi Arabia, we have to show our citizens that no one should be able to get away with murdering members of the media. Not even me.”
At press time, the crown prince had reportedly left the premises after convincing his parole officer to let him serve the rest of his time stoning women and beheading prisoners.
*.*
A stealth B-2 bomber was forced to make an emergency landing in Colorado.
It caused all kinds of problems when it landed near a senior center because someone cried out, "B-2!"
Another person yelled out, "Bingo!"
Then a brawl erupted.
*.*
Kristen Bell says she’s not sure about the message that “Snow White” is giving her daughters about a prince kissing a woman without their permission.
I have a feeling that a fairy tale where the princess was left in the forest in a glass coffin for eternity would have been a big hit.
Issue of the Times;
SELCO: The Brutal Truth About Violence When the SHTF, interviewed by Daisy Luther
Are you prepared for the extreme violence that is likely to come your way if the SHTF? No matter what your plan is, it’s entirely probable that at some point, you’ll be the victim of violence or have to perpetrate violence to survive. As always, Selco is our go-to guy on SHTF reality checks and this thought-provoking interview will shake you to your core.
If you don’t know Selco, he’s from Bosnia and he lived through a year in a city that was blockaded with no utilities, no deliveries of supplies, and no services. In his interviews, he shares what the scenarios the rest of us theorize about were REALLY like. He mentioned to me recently that most folks aren’t prepared for the violence that is part and parcel of a collapse, which brings us to today’s interview.
How prevalent was violence when the SHTF in Bosnia?
It was wartime and chaos, from all conflicts in those years in the Balkan region Bosnian conflict was most brutal because of multiple reasons, historical, political and other.
To simplify the explanation why violence was common and very brutal, you need to picture a situation where you are “bombarded” with huge amount of information (propaganda) which instills in you very strong feelings of fear and hate.
Out of fear and hate, violence grows easy and fast, and over the very short period of time you see how people around you (including you) do things that you could not imagine before.
I can say that violence was almost an everyday thing in the whole spectrum of different activities because it was a fight for survival.
Again, whenever (and wherever) you put people in a region without enough resources, you can expect violence.
We were living a normal life, and then suddenly we were thrown in a way of living where if you could not “negotiate” something with someone, you solve the problem by launching a rocket from an RPG through the window of his living room.
Hate stripped down the layers of humanity and suddenly it was “normal” to level an apartment building with people inside with shells from a tank or form private prisons with imprisoned civilians for slave work or sex slaves.
Nothing that I saw or read before could have prepared me for the level of violence and blindness to it, for the lives of kids, elders, civilians, and the innocent.
Again, the thing that is important for readers is that we were a modern society one day, and then in few weeks it turned into carnage.
Do not make the mistake of saying “it cannot happen here” because I made that mistake too.
Do not underestimate power of propaganda, fear, hate, and the lowest human instincts, no matter how modern and good your society is right now and how deeply you believe that “it can not happen here”.
You’ve mentioned warlords and gangs in several of your articles. Were they responsible for the majority of the violence or was it hungry families?
Fighting of the armies through the whole period of war brings violence in terms of constant shelling from a distance from different kind of weapons.
For example a few multiple rocket launchers (VBR) could bring in 30 seconds the destruction in an area of 3-4 apartment buildings, and being there in that moment and surviving it gives you a completely new view on life.
Snipers were a constant threat and over time you simply grow a way of living that you constant scan area in front of you where your next steps gonna be. Are you gonna be visible and from where? Etc.
Most brutal violence was actually lawlessness and complete lack of order between different factions and militias, so in some periods there were militias or gangs who simply ruled the cities or part of the city where they were absolutely masters of everything in terms of deciding of taking someone’s life.
In lawlessness, you as one person could be really small and not interesting, or join some bigger group of people to be stronger, some family or militia or gang.
An example of a gang would be group of people of some 300 or 500 people who “officially” were a unit or militia and operate for some faction, but in reality they operate mostly for themselves.
That included owning part of the black market, having prison (for forced labor or ransom), attacking people and houses for resources, smuggling people from dangerous areas.
Violence from those kinds of group was the most immediate violence, the most visible in terms of SHTF talking.
If those people came on your door you could obey, fight, or negotiate, but mostly you could not not ask for help from any kind of authority, because there was no real authority.
In any society, no matter where you are living, there are a great number of people who are waiting for the SHTF to go out and do violent things. Small time criminals or simply violent persons who are not openly violent because system is there to punish them for that. It is like that.
Some gang leaders that I knew were actually completely sick people with a strange type of charisma that makes people follow them, weird situations that can happen only in a real collapse.
They are people who just waited for their time to rise.
Those kinds of people together with criminal organization that are already there in any city in the world will be the backbone of SHTF gangs.
Who were the most likely victims?
A very simple answer would be that the most likely victims were people who had interesting things without enough defense.
But it was not always that simple.
For example one of the first houses that got raided in my neighborhood, right at the beginning of collapse while there was still some kind of order, was a rich family’s home.
They had a nice house with bars on the windows, a pretty good setup for defense, and they had enough people inside so they could give pretty good resistance to the mob.
But they got raided simply because they were known that they are rich, so they were attacked with enough force to be overwhelmed.
It was not only about how much manpower you had and how well-organized defense of your home was, it was also about how juicy a target you were.
If you are faced with 150 angry people attacking your home because they are sure you have good stuff inside your chances are low, no matter how good and tough you are.
People who were alone were a pretty easy target and old people without support of family or friends.
It was not always about killing someone or violence. For example, if you were alone and without resources but you had something else valuable like some kind of skill or knowledge you could easily be “recruited” for some faction or group, not by your will of course.
What were some ways to prevent yourself from becoming a victim of violence? How do you recommend that people prepare themselves for the possibility of violence?
It can be done in steps, or in layers.
Do not be interesting (or attract attention) when the SHTF.
This means a lot of things, for this article I can give a few examples with shortened explanations because it is a huge topic:
• Do not look like a prepper (before or after SHTF). There is no sense in announcing that you are prepping for EMP, civil collapse, apocalypse, or whatever. With that you are risking the probability that when the SHTF, people will remember that you have interesting things in your home
• Your home should look ordinary. For example, if you are living in the city on a street where all houses look similar, there is not much sense in making your home look like a fortress. You’ll just attract attention.
• Your defense should be based on more subtle means. Some examples are having means to reinforce doors and windows quickly when you need it, or to reinforce them from inside. Make changes in your yard to funnel possible attackers where you want them to be (trees, fence, bush…). You can make your home look abandoned or already looted.
Think about what survival is!
Survival is about staying alive, it is not about being comfortable at the expense of losing your life.
I have seen many times people lose their lives simply because they were too attached to their belongings (house, car, land, goods…) so they simply did not want to leave something and run in a particular moment.
Everything can be earned and bought again except life.
Forget about statements like “I will defend it with my life” or “over my dead body” or similar because the real SHTF is usually not heroic or noble. It is hard and brutal. When you are gone you are gone and there might be nobody to take care of your family just because you have been stubborn or trusted in movies when it came to violence.
To rephrase it: Be ready to leave your home in a split second if that means you and your family will survive, no matter how many good things you have stored there.
Be mentally ready for violence
In a way, it is impossible to be ready for violence, especially widespread violence when the SHTF, but you can minimize shock when that happens with some things.
If you are not familiar with what violence is, you can try to get yourself close” to it today (in normal times). It can be done, for example, by doing some voluntary work for example in a local hospital, ER or similar… or simply by working with homeless people.
Sounds maybe strange but activities like this can get you a bit of a feeling of what it is all about, not to mention that you can learn some practical and useful skills for SHTF.
Have means and skills (physically) to defend – or to do violence
No matter how old or young you are, your gender or religion I assure you that you are capable of doing violence. It is only a matter of the situation and how far you are going to be pushed.
It is not just “some people are capable of violence.” Everybody is capable. Not everybody enjoys doing it or is willing to do it so easily.
In today (normal times) you can learn some violence skills and you should do it, again no matter if you are a woman or old or young.
You should own a weapon and know how to use it. You should practice with it, or have at least some basic knowledge about hand-to-hand combat.
The worst case scenario is to have a weapon that you try for the first time when SHTF.
Be familiar with your means for defense, let your family members know what they need to do in case of attack of your home, have plan, and go through it.
Only through practice will you minimize chances for mistakes.
Use common sense
I know lot of survivalists almost dream about how they are going to use weapons against bad guys when SHTF, and that they will be something like super heroes from movies, saving innocents and killing villains.
Truth is that in a real collapse, a lot of things are kind of blurred and you are not sure who the bad guys are. Good guys turn out to be lunatic gang members who want to bring food to their kids.
There are no super heroes when SHTF, and if some of them show up they end up dead quickly.
There is only you and your skills and mindset and what you prepared.
Use violence as a last resort because of the simple fact that by using violence you are risking of getting killed or hurt. Remember when SHTF there is maybe no doctor or hospital to take care of your wound.
It is a time when even a small cut can eventually kill you through infection and lack of proper care.
I’m a single mom with a household full of girls. In an SHTF situation, what would our best strategies be to remain safe?
Just like I have mentioned before, strategy is always same for any part of survival, and shooting from the rifle is pretty similar no matter are you man or woman.
Being single mom with household full of girls on first look make you as a ideal target in some situations, but we are talking here in prepper terms so there is no reason not to be perfectly well prepared as a single mom with girls.
But yes I admit it is not perfect situation, even if you are prepared well, some things are sure, you need to connect with other people even more.
House with couple of girls will always look like easy prey for some people.
It is like that.
Were people in the city safer than people in the country? Can you tell us more about rural living during this time?
In my case definitely no.
In the essence it always come to the resources and people.
City meant more people less resources, country (rural) meant less people more resources, and because that level of violence simply was lower. That was most important reason.
There are few more reasons why it was much better in the country.
People in the country (rural settings) were much more “connected to ground” they were more tough if you like, they grew their own food, had cattle, lived more simple life prior SHTF and when everything collapsed they had less problems getting use to it.
Yes they also did not have electricity and phones, running water or connection to other places but they adapted easier to the new life because they had more useful skills then people in the city.
Life was harder for them too than prior to the collapse, but they had means to get resources: land, woods, river…
Another thing is that people in small rural communities “in the country” were more connected to each other, people knew their neighborhood and some things were easier to organize, like community security watch, help in case of diseases and similar.
What types of weapons did people have for self-defense?
It was different political system prior the collapse where it was not so usual to own a weapon legally. And to own one illegally could mean a lot of troubles.
Right prior to SHTF, it became possible to buy different weapons on the black market but still, a majority of people did not own weapons.
When it all collapsed, it was possible to get a weapon through trade.
Because of the military doctrine here prior to the collapse, we used “East Bloc” weapons. A favorite was AK-47 in all different kind of editions, or older weapons like M-48 rifle, SKS rifle, 22 and similar.
People used what they had, so in one period you would be lucky if you had any kind of pistol and knife.
Later through the different channels weapon become more available so people had them more. A lot of that was actually junk that some warlords somehow “imported”.
Weapons 50-60 years old without proper ammunition, or not in operating condition. A lot of people simply did not have a clue how to use any kind of weapon so a lot of accidental deaths happened.
I remember people storming abandoned army barracks that was mostly looted, but they found in one building a lot of RPGs while other part of the same building was burning.
Two guys were trying to figure out a single-use RPG, and while they were messing with it clearly not knowing how that thing worked, they accidentally armed it and launched a rocket that flew through the crowd, not hurting anyone and exploding in wall 100 meters from where they stood.
They were smiling, clearly happy because they thought they figured out how that thing worked.
What weapons do you suggest to have for SHTF?
It is a never-ending discussion and a favorite prepper topic, and I must say that whole discussion is overrated.
I have used them in a real situation, and tried and tested lot of different kind of weapons and what works for me may simply not work for you.
For example, here for me good choice is AK-47 rifle, maybe for you wherever you are it is very bad choice.
Good advice is : you need to have a weapon that most people have around you because of multiple reasons: spare parts, repairing, ammunition availability, possibility that you can pick that rifle from other people and you know how to use it.
What caliber and similar is a matter of discussion again. I am talking from the point of owning a rifle.
Another thing is that you need to know how that weapon works. Luckily, most of my readers live in an area where gun laws are great comparing to region where I am.
You have much more choices when it comes to owning a weapon and practicing with it. Use that.
And do not forget that using weapon in a real life situation is not like shooting at beer bottles with your friends after a barbecue.
In real life you might be in a situation to use a weapon while you are tired, dirty, and hungry and while someone is screaming next to you.
It is going to be maybe when you are not ready to do that, maybe in pitch dark, maybe after you have been awake for 48 hours.
At least think about that.
When should you use violence?
Contrary to some popular beliefs in the prepper community, the point is to use violence only as a last solution.
The reason is as I mentioned already, the risk that you can be hurt or killed too, but also once you do violence you change your own rules, or push it more forward, and it is easy to get lost in violence.
There are consequences to that, and you are not going to be the same person ever again.
Violence is a tool, not a toy. You need to know how to use it as best as possible, but also to avoid using it when it is not necessary.
It is a good idea to set up a clear set of rules (mentally too) when you are gonna use violence and to try to stick to it.
For example you will use weapon if someone tries to break your home and attack you, and you need to be ready to do that without hesitation.
What else should we know about post-collapse violence?
Think with your head and research.
One thing that is absolutely important when it comes to understanding how violent it is going to be and what can you expect in your own case of SHTF, is to understand how much media can influence people in making their decisions about violence.
In my case, the media built up situation where people feared so much from other people that they actually hated them. They hated them so much that they actually strip them down from humanity.
In a real-life example, it works in a way that people killed other people, including kids and women, because they hated them so much because media told them.
It may look ridiculous and not possible to you, and you might again think “that can not happen here” but please trust your own resources, look for independent information, not mainstream media, in order to get the right information about what is really happening in the beginning of collapse.
Do not be pulled into “popular opinion” just because the “man from TV” (whoever he might be) told you so.
It is easier today. Because of the internet, you have much more choices for correct information than in my time. But still be careful, you might find yourself rioting together with 500 people just because you trusted some media.
Real survival is not romantic or idealistic. It is brutal, hard and unfair. Let Selco take you into that world.
Read more of Selco’s articles here: https://shtfschool.com
Quote of the Times;
“You tend to close your eyes to truth, beauty and goodness because they give no scope to your sense of the ridiculous.” - Maugham
Link of the Times;
https://www.dailywire.com/news/38491/watch-ocasio-cortez-has-no-idea-what-3-branches-ryan-saavedra?fbclid=IwAR09Uxnsud7Udak1yROciAAH1qB2Jz9vuHH3z3K6bwG8Ik4QrHrH3QiY16U
Electric?
Q: What did one German say to the other German?
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@gmail.com
to complement The Field!
Or
If you like what you see,
Witness the Archives;
www.SimpleDisorder.com
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
AOD 318
}; - >
A: I have no idea, I don't speak German.
*.*
Once there was a boy named Odd. He was the butt of jokes his whole life, because of his name. Eventually he grew up to be a very successful fisherman and owner of three fish processing plants.
When Odd was about to die, he said, "People have been teasing me my whole life and I don't want them doing that after I'm dead, so don't put my name on my gravestone."
After Odd died, people saw his blank tomb-stone and said . . .
"That's Odd ".
*.*
Three Facts That You Won’t Be Able To Unlearn
When you get scurvy, your scars start coming undone. Your body is constantly repairing old wounds, and without vitamin c, it can’t make collagen, so the seams start coming apart.
That “The Clap”, Gonorrhea, got its name from the treatment during medieval times known as “clapping” the penis or slamming the penis between both hands (or a hard surface) to get rid of the discharge and thus the infection.
That coughing noise the raptors make in Jurassic Park is the sound of turtles fucking. Steven Spielberg went to a zoo to get sounds for the roars and a zookeeper jokingly mentioned that it was mating season for the tortoises.
*.*
“Lemon Pickers Needed” read the ad in the newspaper.
Ms. Sally Mulligan of Coral Springs, Florida, read it, and decided to
apply for one of the jobs that most Americans are not willing to do.
She submitted her application for a job in a Florida lemon grove, but
seemed far too qualified for the job.
She has a liberal arts degree from the University of Michigan, and a
master’s degree from Michigan State University.
For a number of years, she had worked as a social worker, and also as
a school teacher.
The foreman studied her application, frowned, and said, "I see that
you are well educated, and have an impressive resume.
“However, I have to ask you, have you had any actual experience in
picking lemons?”
"Well, as a matter of fact, I have," she said
"I've been divorced three times, owned two Chryslers, voted twice for
Obama, and once for Hillary.”
She started work yesterday!
*.*
The teacher gave her fifth grade class an assignment:
Get their parents to tell them a story with a moral at the end of it.
The next day, the kids came back and, one by one, began to tell their stories.
There were all the regular type stuff: spilled milk and pennies saved , etc.
But then the teacher realized, she had missed Janie.
Janie, do you have a story to share?'
''Yes ma'am. My daddy told me a story about my Mommy.
She was a Marine pilot in Desert Storm, and her plane got hit.
She had to bail out over enemy territory, and all she had was a flask of whiskey, a pistol, and a survival knife.
She drank the whiskey on the way down so the bottle wouldn't break, and then her parachute landed her right in the middle of 20 Iraqi troops.
She shot 15 of them with the pistol, until she ran out of bullets, killed four more with the knife, till the blade broke, and then she killed the last Iraqi with her bare hands.
''Good Lord!” said the horrified teacher.
“… What did your Daddy tell you was the moral to this horrible story?”
"Best to stay away from Mommy when she's been drinkin’.”
Issue of the Times;
Child miners aged four living a hell on Earth so YOU can drive an electric car: Awful human cost in squalid Congo cobalt mine that Michael Gove didn’t consider in his ‘clean’ energy crusade by Barbara Jones
His name is Dorsen and he is one of an army of children, some just four years old, working in the vast polluted mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo, where toxic red dust burns their eyes, and they run the risk of skin disease and a deadly lung condition. Here, for a wage of just 8p a day, the children are made to check the rocks for the tell-tale chocolate-brown streaks of cobalt – the prized ingredient essential for the batteries that power electric cars.
And it’s feared that thousands more children could be about to be dragged into this hellish daily existence – after the historic pledge made by Britain to ban the sale of petrol and diesel cars from 2040 and switch to electric vehicles.
It heralds a future of clean energy, free from pollution but – though there can be no doubting the good intentions behind Environment Secretary Michael Gove’s announcement last month – such ideals mean nothing for the children condemned to a life of hellish misery in the race to achieve his target.
Dorsen, just eight, is one of 40,000 children working daily in the mines of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). The terrible price they will pay for our clean air is ruined health and a likely early death.
Almost every big motor manufacturer striving to produce millions of electric vehicles buys its cobalt from the impoverished central African state. It is the world’s biggest producer, with 60 per cent of the planet’s reserves.
The cobalt is mined by unregulated labour and transported to Asia where battery manufacturers use it to make their products lighter, longer-lasting and rechargeable.
The planned switch to clean energy vehicles has led to an extraordinary surge in demand. While a smartphone battery uses no more than 10 grams of refined cobalt, an electric car needs 15kg (33lb).
Goldman Sachs, the merchant bank, calls cobalt ‘the new gasoline’ but there are no signs of new wealth in the DRC, where the children haul the rocks brought up from tunnels dug by hand.
Adult miners dig up to 600ft below the surface using basic tools, without protective clothing or modern machinery. Sometimes the children are sent down into the narrow makeshift chambers where there is constant danger of collapse.
Cobalt is such a health hazard that it has a respiratory disease named after it – cobalt lung, a form of pneumonia which causes coughing and leads to permanent incapacity and even death.
Even simply eating vegetables grown in local soil can cause vomiting and diarrhoea, thyroid damage and fatal lung diseases, while birds and fish cannot survive in the area.
No one knows quite how many children have died mining cobalt in the Katanga region in the south-east of the country. The UN estimates 80 a year, but many more deaths go unregistered, with the bodies buried in the rubble of collapsed tunnels. Others survive but with chronic diseases which destroy their young lives. Girls as young as ten in the mines are subjected to sexual attacks and many become pregnant.
When Sky News investigated the Katanga mines it found Dorsen, working near a little girl called Monica, who was four, on a day of relentless rainfall.
Dorsen was hauling heavy sacks of rocks from the mine surface to a growing stack 60ft away. A full sack was lifted on to Dorsen’s head and he staggered across to the stack. A brutish overseer stood over him, shouting and raising his hand to threaten a beating if he spilt any.
With his mother dead, Dorsen lives with his father in the bush and the two have to work daily in the cobalt mine to earn money for food.
Dorsen’s friend Richard, 11, said that at the end of a working day ‘everything hurts’.
In a country devastated by civil wars in which millions have died, there is no other way for families to survive. Britain’s Department for International Development (DFID) is donating £10.5million between June 2007 and June 2018 towards strengthening revenue transparency and encouraging responsible activity in large and small scale artisanal mining, ‘to benefit the poor of DRC’.
There is little to show for these efforts so far. There is a DRC law forbidding the enslavement of under-age children, but nobody enforces it.
The UN’s International Labour Organisation has described cobalt mining in DRC as ‘one of the worst forms of child labour’ due to the health risks.
Soil samples taken from the mining area by doctors at the University of Lubumbashi, the nearest city, show the region to be among the ten most polluted in the world. Residents near mines in southern DRC had urinary concentrates of cobalt 43 higher than normal. Lead levels were five times higher, cadmium and uranium four times higher.
The worldwide rush to bring millions of electric vehicles on to our roads has handed a big advantage to those giant car-makers which saw this bonanza coming and invested in developing battery-powered vehicles, among them General Motors, Renault-Nissan, Tesla, BMW and Fiat-Chrysler.
Chinese middle-men working for the Congo Dongfang Mining Company have the stranglehold in DRC, buying the raw cobalt brought to them in sacks carried on bicycles and dilapidated old cars daily from the Katanga mines. They sit in shacks on a dusty road near the Zambian border, offering measly sums scrawled on blackboards outside – £40 for a ton of cobalt-rich rocks – that will be sent by cargo ship to minerals giant Zhejiang Huayou Cobalt in China and sold on to a complex supply chain feeding giant multinationals.
Challenged by the Washington Post about the appalling conditions in the mines, Huayou Cobalt said ‘it would be irresponsible’ to stop using child labour, claiming: ‘It could aggravate poverty in the cobalt mining regions and worsen the livelihood of local miners.’
Human rights charity Amnesty International also investigated cobalt mining in the DRC and says that none of the 16 electric vehicle manufacturers they identified have conducted due diligence to the standard defined by the Responsible Cobalt Initiative.
Encouragingly, Apple, which uses the mineral in its devices, has committed itself to treat cobalt like conflict minerals – those which have in the past funded child soldiers in the country’s civil war – and the company claims it is going to require all refiners to have supply chain audits and risk assessments. But Amnesty International is not satisfied. ‘This promise is not worth the paper it is written on when the companies are not investigating their suppliers,’ said Amnesty’s Mark Dummett. ‘Big brands have the power to change this.’
After DRC, Australia is the next biggest source of cobalt, with reserves of 1million tons, followed by Cuba, China, Russia, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
Car maker Tesla – the market leader in electric vehicles – plans to produce 500,000 cars per year starting in 2018, and will need 7,800 tons of cobalt to achieve this. Sales are expected to hit 4.4 million by 2021. It means the price of cobalt will soar as the world gears itself up for the electric car revolution, and there is evidence some corporations are cancelling their contracts with regulated mines using industrial technology, and turning increasingly to the cheaper mines using human labour.
After the terrible plight of Dorsen and Richard was broadcast in a report on Sky News, an emotive response from viewers funded a rescue by children’s charity Kimbilio. They are now living in a church-supported children’s home, sleeping on mattresses for the first time in their lives and going to school.
But there is no such happy ending for the tens of thousands of children left in the hell on earth that is the cobalt mines of the Congo.
Quote of the Times;
“One looks at maps, and does not truly apprehend the extent and variety of the world.” - Williams
Link of the Times;
https://www.boredpanda.com/new-wildlife-photography-robert-irwin/
Subscribe or Submit to the Internet's elite source;
Send E-mail to efreem2@gmail.com
to complement The Field!
Or
If you like what you see,
Witness the Archives;
www.SimpleDisorder.com
An Images & Ideas, Inc. Service.
AOD 318
}; - >
Lived?
What do you call an obese psychic?
A four-chin teller.
*.*
Oneliners
The real goal is to be rich the moment after you die.
Marriage is like a tourniquet; it stops your circulation.
Everything on land is within walking distance.
The road to success is marked with many tempting parking places
God speaks to us in hunches.
You'll notice that a turtle only makes progress when it sticks out its neck
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
The tongue must be heavy indeed, because so few people can't hold it.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
*.*
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. They loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they were caught in a terrible blizzard. They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained, "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. We'll be happy to sleep in the barn. And if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light."
The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night. In the morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way. They enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
About nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up North?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Yes," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned red and he said, "Yeah, sorry, buddy. I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask..?"
"She just died and left me everything.!"
*.*
ISIS Claims Responsibility For 'Baby Shark'
NORTHERN IRAQ—Driven back into hiding, ISIS no longer holds the sway it once did in the Middle East. But the terror group recently claimed responsibility for its most vicious attack yet: the "Baby Shark" series of videos that targeted unsuspecting parents of toddlers on YouTube.
In a video uploaded to Twitter, ISIS claimed to have created the Baby Shark meme and set it loose in the West in order to drive parents up a wall for years to come.
"This attack was brutal, even for ISIS," said one political analyst. "We've come to expect the usual array of terror tactics from the group—but this—this is beyond the pale. To subject American families to the extremely catchy, extremely irritating Baby Shark videos represents the worst war crime the world has seen in decades."
"Baby shark do do do do do do," he muttered. "Dang it, there I go again!”
Not everyone is convinced ISIS is behind the attack. Several prominent Democrat think tanks released statements suggesting the attack has all the hallmarks of Russian interference, designed to destabilize and divide the populace. And Christian pastors across the country are pointing toward Satan as the obvious culprit.
Emboldened by the extreme success of its video assault, the terrorist group also teased an upcoming mashup between the incredibly annoying "Baby Shark" and "Let It Go" from Frozen.
*.*
What’s the real definition of a male chauvinist pig?
A man who hates every bone in a woman’s body.
Except his.
Issue of the Times;
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about by Arthur Chrenkoff
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,
To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,
To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President (that’s you Rosie O’Donnell, Sarah Silverman, Congressman Steve Cohen and others),
To the celebrities and commentators, from Michael Moore to former security officials like John Brennan, who think the United States is on the brink of dictatorship,
To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler,
(And a special mention of those who really should know better – professional historians of the German and the Russian totalitarianism, like Timothy “Bloodlands” Snyder and Charles “Ordinary Men” Browning, who have been only too happy to – without quite comparing Trump to Hitler – talk about illiberal democracy, authoritarian leadership, and draw parallels between the 1930s Europe and the 2010s America),
you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like:
There is no democracy. There is only political party (actually there were two minor and irrelevant fig leaves, which were wholly controlled by the Party and would never act in any way contrary to the Party). All other parties and political activities are banned. Elections such as they are consists of a chance to vote for the Party candidate. It doesn’t matter if you vote against them as results will be falsified to show universal support and approval. The Party controls the government, so the two terms are interchangeable; in fact the Party pretty much controls everything. There is no way for an ordinary citizen to have a political impact, except by joining the Party, and even then the range of options is completely circumscribed by the guiding ideology.
There are no freedoms and civil liberties as they are commonly understood. There is no freedom of speech. Saying anything against the Party, even a joke, can lead to an arrest if you’re overheard and/or reported to the authorities. Unless you’re particularly lucky you can end up in jail. If you’re working, you can lose your job and be forced to take a menial one if you can actually get one. If you’re studying, you can be blacklisted from further education. Or your parents can lose their job over your joke, or your children might be denied a chance to go to university. There are no legal sources of information but the ones run by the Party. Creation, possession and distribution of alternative sources of news and opinion is a criminal offence. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts is illegal. Every news or cultural or scientific product is subject to government censorship. Nothing that the Party does not like for whatever reason can get published or broadcasted. Those who have shown themselves as ideologically unreliable are blacklisted and their careers put on ice. There are approved versions of everything, from history to entertainment. Everything beyond them is illegal.
There is no freedom of assembly. Unless the Party initiates and organises it it’s illegal. It does not matter whether you are peaceful or not, you will likely get beaten up by the police, arrested and charged, with similar consequences as mentioned above. There is no such thing as independent civil society; the Party decides what organisations, clubs and associations can exist. Those that are given permission to operate need to adhere to the Party rules and support the Party each in its own way, whether you’re in the Scouts or a philatelist group. The Party and its symbols are of course ubiquitous, from public monuments to the portraits of the current leader and political slogans. Your social and professional advancement is largely determined by your cooperation with the Party. There is a ceiling on how far you can go in life without at the very least becoming a member.
There is no rule of law and no justice as we understand these concepts. The laws are those of the Party and citizens have no role in shaping them or changing them. If you are accused of any of the large number of wrongdoings and offences against the state/government/Party, the system is stacked against you at every stage of the process. The fact that you have come into contact with the “justice system” is a de facto indication that you have done something wrong, because the system makes no mistakes. Neither the law enforcement nor the judiciary are in any way independent of the Party; they are its instruments; their actions and decisions are political. It’s just you against the system.
Needless to say, there is no general prosperity and huge inequalities of wealth exist. This is because economic opportunities are largely absent for an average person. The state is virtually the only employer, certainly on the large scale. The only routes of material advancement are through the Party and the official (but unheralded) privileges it provides as well as the opportunities for graft and corruption, or through black market and other criminal activity. The system is meant to provide everyone with at least the barest of minimum living standards but very often it cannot do even that. People manage to keep their heads above water through their wits and more often than not by breaking at least some laws. Because the options are so limited, people tend not to change jobs or move around too much. Certainly, the overseas travel is rare and completely at the government’s discretion, hence most of it tends to be either official or to other non-democracies. The government regulates every aspect of life. What’s not expressly provided for is assumed to be forbidden.
All this is a relatively mild, late form of communism, not the earlier version where you could end up in a gulag because the local secret police had a quota to fill or because you once corresponded with a pen pal in another country or wore glasses indicating your intellectual status or didn’t cry sincerely enough after another Dear Leader passed on. Also, this was Poland, which was one of the most liberal of the communist countries, with a relatively independent (but much circumscribed) Catholic Church and a strong tradition of independence and rebellion. The situation was much worse in other countries, and much worse in the past.
I feel almost silly for writing all this because to me I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but clearly it’s not obvious at all for far too many people today. Think of any activity you undertake during your average day and then realise that every little thing is different, more difficult, more involved about it under a dictatorship.
Now tell me how your life today in the United States or Australia or Great Britain is at all similar to life under the state oppression. Please. Anything that even remotely compares to what I have described.
If anything, all the recent attempts to police speech and dictate the correct ways of thinking, whether on the initiative of the state or by private businesses and non-government groups, are inspired by the left, i.e. pretty much the same section of the politically-aware society which is complaining about the descending fascism. This is why I get so agitated about issues like freedom of speech; it’s not just theoretical to me – it reminds me too much of my childhood. When my family escaped to the West it was precisely to leave these things behind not to discover them under a different guise amidst the supposed liberal democracy.
So, dear Resistance, excuse me while my lived experience under the actual dictatorship leaves me cold when listening to and looking at your hysterics and public exhibitions of ignorance and ideological blindness. Your generally white, coddled, middle class progressive privilege it’s showing, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/11/florida-midterm-election-drama-the-sun-is-finally-shining-on-deep-state-darkness/
A four-chin teller.
*.*
Oneliners
The real goal is to be rich the moment after you die.
Marriage is like a tourniquet; it stops your circulation.
Everything on land is within walking distance.
The road to success is marked with many tempting parking places
God speaks to us in hunches.
You'll notice that a turtle only makes progress when it sticks out its neck
No matter how bad it gets, I'm rich at the dollar store.
The tongue must be heavy indeed, because so few people can't hold it.
Change is inevitable, except from vending machines.
*.*
Jack decided to go skiing with his buddy, Bob. They loaded up Jack's minivan and headed north. After driving for a few hours, they were caught in a terrible blizzard. They pulled into a nearby farm and asked the attractive lady who answered the door if they could spend the night.
"I realize it's terrible weather out there and I have this huge house all to myself, but I'm recently widowed," she explained, "I'm afraid the neighbors will talk if I let you stay in my house."
"Don't worry," Jack said. We'll be happy to sleep in the barn. And if the weather breaks, we'll be gone at first light."
The lady agreed, and the two men found their way to the barn and settled in for the night. In the morning, the weather had cleared, and they got on their way. They enjoyed a great weekend of skiing.
About nine months later, Jack got an unexpected letter from an attorney. It took him a few minutes to figure it out, but he finally determined that it was from the attorney of that attractive widow he had met on the ski weekend. He dropped in on his friend Bob and asked, "Bob, do you remember that good-looking widow from the farm we stayed at on our ski holiday up North?"
"Yes, I do." said Bob
"Did you happen to get up in the middle of the night, go up to the house and pay her a visit?"
"Yes," Bob said, a little embarrassed about being found out, "I have to admit that I did."
"And did you happen to use my name instead of telling her your name?"
Bob's face turned red and he said, "Yeah, sorry, buddy. I'm afraid I did. Why do you ask..?"
"She just died and left me everything.!"
*.*
ISIS Claims Responsibility For 'Baby Shark'
NORTHERN IRAQ—Driven back into hiding, ISIS no longer holds the sway it once did in the Middle East. But the terror group recently claimed responsibility for its most vicious attack yet: the "Baby Shark" series of videos that targeted unsuspecting parents of toddlers on YouTube.
In a video uploaded to Twitter, ISIS claimed to have created the Baby Shark meme and set it loose in the West in order to drive parents up a wall for years to come.
"This attack was brutal, even for ISIS," said one political analyst. "We've come to expect the usual array of terror tactics from the group—but this—this is beyond the pale. To subject American families to the extremely catchy, extremely irritating Baby Shark videos represents the worst war crime the world has seen in decades."
"Baby shark do do do do do do," he muttered. "Dang it, there I go again!”
Not everyone is convinced ISIS is behind the attack. Several prominent Democrat think tanks released statements suggesting the attack has all the hallmarks of Russian interference, designed to destabilize and divide the populace. And Christian pastors across the country are pointing toward Satan as the obvious culprit.
Emboldened by the extreme success of its video assault, the terrorist group also teased an upcoming mashup between the incredibly annoying "Baby Shark" and "Let It Go" from Frozen.
*.*
What’s the real definition of a male chauvinist pig?
A man who hates every bone in a woman’s body.
Except his.
Issue of the Times;
Dear Resistance, listen to my lived totalitarian experience – you have no effing idea what you’re talking about by Arthur Chrenkoff
In a world that the identity politics has wrought, lived experience is a trump (apologies for the use of a triggering word) card: your viewpoint or opinion on an issue is automatically deemed invalid or at least less valid and valuable if you’re not a member of a group whose plight is being discussed. Men can’t really know what it’s like to be women, white people can’t really know what it’s like to be people of colour, the straight ones can’t really know what it’s like to have other sexual orientations. Your identity is your argument; “You wouldn’t know what it’s like; you can’t tell me what I should think or feel”. You’re only allowed to walk in somebody else’s shoes to the extent you can feel the same callouses, otherwise give me my shoes back. This sort of epistemological approach rears its head nowadays in everything from most political debates to the calls that fiction authors should not write through characters of different gender, race or sexuality. Just like cultural appropriation, identity appropriation is a grave sin against minorities (or, in case of women, majorities).
As a straight, white, Christian, right-wing, middle class male of European extraction I get told to shut up a lot. As you can imagine, this does not at all stop me from speaking out. The white privilege clearly makes me both uncontrollable and insufferable.
But if lived experience is indeed the be-all-end-all that the identarian left considers it to be, there is one area where my lived experience without a doubt shit all over the lived experience of the woke folk. Unlike all those among them who have been born and/or raised in the West and have zero or almost zero experience of living under anything other than a liberal democratic government (which is 99 per cent of them at least), I have lived the first 15 years of my life under the Soviet block-style communism, or “real socialism” as the Party used to call it. I’m not going to pretend that the 1970s and the 80s in Poland were as bloody and traumatic as the Stalinist Russia, Mao’s China or Pol Pot’s Cambodia (as P J O’Rourke who visited Warsaw at that time noted, the communism for most part doesn’t kill you any more, it just bores you to death) but I do know a difference or twenty-two between a totalitarian or authoritarian society and a Western democracy.
So to all the women dressing up in costumes from “Handmaid’s Tale” who think they’re on the brink of living in a misogynist theocracy,
To all those calling themselves “The Resistance”, as if they were the French Maquis or the Polish Home Army shooting collaborators and derailing trains after their country has been brutally occupied by a totalitarian foreign power,
To those who think that America is currently in a grip of fascism and are calling on the military to stage a coup to remove the President (that’s you Rosie O’Donnell, Sarah Silverman, Congressman Steve Cohen and others),
To the celebrities and commentators, from Michael Moore to former security officials like John Brennan, who think the United States is on the brink of dictatorship,
To all those who have compared Trump to Hitler,
(And a special mention of those who really should know better – professional historians of the German and the Russian totalitarianism, like Timothy “Bloodlands” Snyder and Charles “Ordinary Men” Browning, who have been only too happy to – without quite comparing Trump to Hitler – talk about illiberal democracy, authoritarian leadership, and draw parallels between the 1930s Europe and the 2010s America),
you really have no idea, and I mean it with the greatest possible respect. Actually, I don’t. Most of you are supposedly mature, rational adults but you seem to have at best the most superficial knowledge of history and a complete lack of self-awareness, any sense of perspective, and an ability to contextualise. Having spent your lives relatively free of hardship, deprivation and persecution on any remotely comparable scale to people in other, less fortunate corners of the world, you probably get some frisson from believing yourself to be big actors at a critical time in history, the last line of separating civilisation from the descent into new dark ages. You’re free to engage in whatever ideological cosplay you want, but don’t expect others to take you seriously.
You can pick up any of the thousands of books written about life under a dictatorship and read all about it, or you can watch a doco or listen to a podcast, but clearly you couldn’t be bothered to do so thus far in your life, so I’m going to give you potted version of how a real tyranny (it does not particularly matter whether communist or fascist as they are quite similar in practice, which is of course another thing you don’t want to hear, but that’s tough – they certainly have far more in common with each other than with a free society) works and what the world in which I was growing up looked like:
There is no democracy. There is only political party (actually there were two minor and irrelevant fig leaves, which were wholly controlled by the Party and would never act in any way contrary to the Party). All other parties and political activities are banned. Elections such as they are consists of a chance to vote for the Party candidate. It doesn’t matter if you vote against them as results will be falsified to show universal support and approval. The Party controls the government, so the two terms are interchangeable; in fact the Party pretty much controls everything. There is no way for an ordinary citizen to have a political impact, except by joining the Party, and even then the range of options is completely circumscribed by the guiding ideology.
There are no freedoms and civil liberties as they are commonly understood. There is no freedom of speech. Saying anything against the Party, even a joke, can lead to an arrest if you’re overheard and/or reported to the authorities. Unless you’re particularly lucky you can end up in jail. If you’re working, you can lose your job and be forced to take a menial one if you can actually get one. If you’re studying, you can be blacklisted from further education. Or your parents can lose their job over your joke, or your children might be denied a chance to go to university. There are no legal sources of information but the ones run by the Party. Creation, possession and distribution of alternative sources of news and opinion is a criminal offence. Listening to foreign radio broadcasts is illegal. Every news or cultural or scientific product is subject to government censorship. Nothing that the Party does not like for whatever reason can get published or broadcasted. Those who have shown themselves as ideologically unreliable are blacklisted and their careers put on ice. There are approved versions of everything, from history to entertainment. Everything beyond them is illegal.
There is no freedom of assembly. Unless the Party initiates and organises it it’s illegal. It does not matter whether you are peaceful or not, you will likely get beaten up by the police, arrested and charged, with similar consequences as mentioned above. There is no such thing as independent civil society; the Party decides what organisations, clubs and associations can exist. Those that are given permission to operate need to adhere to the Party rules and support the Party each in its own way, whether you’re in the Scouts or a philatelist group. The Party and its symbols are of course ubiquitous, from public monuments to the portraits of the current leader and political slogans. Your social and professional advancement is largely determined by your cooperation with the Party. There is a ceiling on how far you can go in life without at the very least becoming a member.
There is no rule of law and no justice as we understand these concepts. The laws are those of the Party and citizens have no role in shaping them or changing them. If you are accused of any of the large number of wrongdoings and offences against the state/government/Party, the system is stacked against you at every stage of the process. The fact that you have come into contact with the “justice system” is a de facto indication that you have done something wrong, because the system makes no mistakes. Neither the law enforcement nor the judiciary are in any way independent of the Party; they are its instruments; their actions and decisions are political. It’s just you against the system.
Needless to say, there is no general prosperity and huge inequalities of wealth exist. This is because economic opportunities are largely absent for an average person. The state is virtually the only employer, certainly on the large scale. The only routes of material advancement are through the Party and the official (but unheralded) privileges it provides as well as the opportunities for graft and corruption, or through black market and other criminal activity. The system is meant to provide everyone with at least the barest of minimum living standards but very often it cannot do even that. People manage to keep their heads above water through their wits and more often than not by breaking at least some laws. Because the options are so limited, people tend not to change jobs or move around too much. Certainly, the overseas travel is rare and completely at the government’s discretion, hence most of it tends to be either official or to other non-democracies. The government regulates every aspect of life. What’s not expressly provided for is assumed to be forbidden.
All this is a relatively mild, late form of communism, not the earlier version where you could end up in a gulag because the local secret police had a quota to fill or because you once corresponded with a pen pal in another country or wore glasses indicating your intellectual status or didn’t cry sincerely enough after another Dear Leader passed on. Also, this was Poland, which was one of the most liberal of the communist countries, with a relatively independent (but much circumscribed) Catholic Church and a strong tradition of independence and rebellion. The situation was much worse in other countries, and much worse in the past.
I feel almost silly for writing all this because to me I’m stating the blindingly obvious, but clearly it’s not obvious at all for far too many people today. Think of any activity you undertake during your average day and then realise that every little thing is different, more difficult, more involved about it under a dictatorship.
Now tell me how your life today in the United States or Australia or Great Britain is at all similar to life under the state oppression. Please. Anything that even remotely compares to what I have described.
If anything, all the recent attempts to police speech and dictate the correct ways of thinking, whether on the initiative of the state or by private businesses and non-government groups, are inspired by the left, i.e. pretty much the same section of the politically-aware society which is complaining about the descending fascism. This is why I get so agitated about issues like freedom of speech; it’s not just theoretical to me – it reminds me too much of my childhood. When my family escaped to the West it was precisely to leave these things behind not to discover them under a different guise amidst the supposed liberal democracy.
So, dear Resistance, excuse me while my lived experience under the actual dictatorship leaves me cold when listening to and looking at your hysterics and public exhibitions of ignorance and ideological blindness. Your generally white, coddled, middle class progressive privilege it’s showing, and it’s not a pretty sight.
Quote of the Times;
“The hallmark of a decision in line with one’s character is ease and contentment, and an ample, even provision of natural energy.” - Truitt
Link of the Times;
https://www.collective-evolution.com/2018/11/11/florida-midterm-election-drama-the-sun-is-finally-shining-on-deep-state-darkness/
Policy?
The difference between America and England?
Americans think 100 years is a long time.
The English think 100 miles is a long ways away.
*.*
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all standing watching a street performer do some excellent juggling. The juggler notices that the four gentleman have a very poor view, so he stands up on a large wooden box and calls out, “Can you all see me now?”
“Yes.”
“Oui.”
“Si.”
“Ja.”
*.*
101 Great Quotes on Computers
Computers
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
(Pablo Picasso)
"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork."
(Sam Ewing)
"They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction."
(Janet Reno)
"That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer."
(Paul Leary)
"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."
(Robert X. Cringely)
Computer Intelligence
"Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)"
(Dave Barry)
"I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS."
(Larry DeLuca)
"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
"It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute."
(Marvin Minsky)
Trust
"The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!"
(C3PO)
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
(Steve Wozniak)
Hardware
"Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked."
(Jeff Pesis)
Software
"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
(Alan Kay)
"I've finally learned what 'upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes."
(Dennie van Tassel)
Operating Systems
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
(Jeremy S. Anderson)
"19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM"
(End of the word according to Unix-2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970)
"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck."
(Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003)
"Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' "
(Dave Barry)
Internet
"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"
(Homer Simpson)
"The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit."
(Nytwind)
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."
(Blair Houghton)
Software Industry
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
(Henry Petroski)
"True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it."
(Timm Martin)
"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets."
(Alan Cooper)
"It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins."
(Lou Gerstner)
"We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated."
(Bumper sticker)
Software Demos
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
(Mark Gibbs)
Software Patents
"The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid.
It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them."
(Linus Torvalds)
Complexity
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
(Brian Kernigan)
"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
(Ray Ozzie)
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
(C.A.R. Hoare)
"The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."
(Grady Booch)
Ease of Use
"Just remember: you're not a 'dummy,' no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who-though technically expert-couldn 't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it."
(Walter Mossberg)
"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'. Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover."
(Bill Gates)
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
Users
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
(Ted Nelson)
"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'."
(Edward Tufte)
Programmers
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
(Rich Cook)
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
(Larry Wall)
"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."
(Seymour Cray)
"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
(Larry Niven)
"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match."
(Bill Bryson)
"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."
(Eric Raymond)
"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place."
(IEEE Grid newsmagazine)
"A hacker on a roll may be able to produce-in a period of a few months-something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more."
(Peter Seebach)
"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."
(Randall E. Stross)
"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."
(Bill Gates)
Programming
"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."
(Mosher's Law of Software Engineering)
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
(Bill Gates)
"Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing."
(Gerald Weinberg)
"First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
(George Carrette)
"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
(John Johnson)
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
(Kent Beck)
"To iterate is human, to recurse divine."
(L. Peter Deutsch)
"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."
(Anonymous)
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
(Stan Kelly-Bootle)
Programming Languages
"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."
(Jon Ribbens)
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
(E.W. Dijkstra)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)
"I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn't show up in a Unix directory listing."
(Oktal)
"There is no programming language-no matter how structured-that will prevent programmers from making bad programs."
(Larry Flon)
"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."
(Larry Wall)
C/C++
"Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?"
(Richard A. O'Keefe)
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
(Bob Gray)
"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"C++ : Where friends have access to your private members."
(Gavin Russell Baker)
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that-lacking zero-they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
(Robert Firth)
Java
"Java is, in many ways, C++-."
(Michael Feldman)
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
(Alanna)
"Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN'
T be like."
(pixadel)
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
(Robert Sewell)
Open Source
"Software is like sex: It's better when it's free."
(Linus Torvalds)
"The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less."
(David Emery)
Code
"Good code is its own best documentation."
(Steve McConnell)
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."
(Eagleson's Law)
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
(Tom Cargill)
Software Development
"Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case."
(Francis Glassborow)
"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is."
(Jeff Atwood)
"Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline."
(Bill Clinton)
"You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families."
(Jim McCarthy)
Debugging
"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
(Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are-by definition-not smart enough to debug it."
(Brian Kernighan)
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Quality
"I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"
(Vidiu Platon)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime."
(Michael Sinz)
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
(Alan J. Perlis)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
(Bertrand Meyer)
"If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, 'We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.' "
(Mark Minasi)
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
(Martin Golding)
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
(Paul Ehrlich)
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
(Mitch Radcliffe)
Predictions
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
(Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."
(Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948)
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
(John Von Neumann, circa 1949)
"But what is it good for?"
(Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968)
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
(Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
(Bill Gates, 1981)
"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need."
(Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992)
"We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0."
(Andy Pierson)
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
*.*
My uncle represented this guy getting a divorce from his wife of 15 years. Super toxic breakup and they split everything 50/50, even the land that the house they lived in sat upon. Well she decides to build a house right behind the other house, mind you this was a lot of land probably 200 yards separating both home sites, so that the back of the houses faced each other. The house gets built and my uncle gets a call from his client asking about the legality of a situation he had gotten himself into. Apparently his ex wife would spend a lot of time in her backyard, so he saw her all the time. What he did was buy a female dog and name it the same name as his ex-wife. Anytime he would let his dog back in from letting her out he would yell “Susan you bitch! Get in here!” He would also yell if she was peeing on the flowers,”Susan you bitch! Quit pissing on the flowers!” or “Susan you bitch! Quit digging in the dirt!” The ex-wife called the cops on him a couple of times, but there was nothing they could do because the dog was registered under the name of Susan, and it was in fact a bitch so there you go.
*.*
As I slipped my finger slowly inside her hole, I could immediately feel it getting wetter and wetter.
I took my finger back out and within seconds she was going down on me.
I thought to myself; "I really need a new fucking boat."
Issue of the Times;
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Coming into Focus by Conrad Black
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the outline of a coherent Trump foreign policy is emerging and succeeding. The elements were to withdraw from the role as the default war-maker in the Middle East without creating a vacuum, render Russia less adversarial without facing it down into the arms of the Chinese, and revitalize the Western Alliance to a plausible notion of multilateral contributions and not just an American military guarantee for everyone, ex gratia and pro bono.
At the same time, there would be unrestricted war on terrorist organizations, a revival of nuclear non-proliferation by direct and overbearing threats to North Korea and Iran, and the reconstruction of America’s status as the world’s preeminent economy by tax reductions, deregulation, renegotiation of trade treaties, and encouragement of energy self-sufficiency.
There have been some unfortunate moments from a presentational standpoint, but it is a good plan and it is working.
Changing the Game in the Mideast
Turkey had attempted to masquerade as the patron of the Arabs and was sent packing in remembrance of the Arabs’ 500 years of involuntary enjoyment of Turkish occupation, and after a regional musical chairs game with ancient rivals Iran and Russia, all pretending a common cause in Syria. Turkey was left standing when the music stopped and largely has reconciled with the United States. The two countries will operate joint patrols to keep the Kurds from aggravating Kurdish discontent within Anatolia (Turkish Asia Minor).
Turkish President Erdogan is a distasteful and inconstant ally, but more manageable than the Russian leader Putin, and a Lincolnian statesman compared to the Iranian ayatollahs. The Trump Administration is not prepared to accept permanent involvement of U.S. ground forces in the Middle East. But neither will it accept the creation of vacuums there which foment terrorism, as after Obama’s petulant and abrupt departure from Iraq. This led to the swift rise of ISIS, the disintegration of Shiite Iraq, and thrust 60 percent of the country’s population into dependency on Iran. The entire American effort there: two invasions under the Bushes and Obama’s wind-down, handed Iran the greatest accretion of its influence since the height of the Parthian Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.
Now, making a partial virtue of the failings of the previous two administrations, the crumbling of Iraq and Syria, formerly two of Israel’s most fanatical enemies, strengthens Israeli security, and the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient enemies and oppressors, the Turks and Iranians, bring Egypt and Saudi Arabia into quasi-alliance with Israel. ISIS and al-Qaeda effectively have been smashed, the United States doesn’t care if Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean (since Russia could not challenge the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean without bankrupting itself). The Russians protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite faction, and the Turks and Americans protect the secular adversaries of Assad and keep the Kurds out of Turkey, protecting Kurdistan from the Turks.
Obviously, the war in Yemen has to end without an Iranian victory and the pressure on Iran must be maintained until this dismal theocracy in Teheran either repents of its ambition for an arc of influence, or collapses from internal anger at its comprehensive corruption and failure.
The Arab powers have greater concerns than continuing to try to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment inflicted on them with the red herring of Israel, and no one cares a jot about the Palestinians, as the inexcusably delayed movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem demonstrated. The bedraggled and discredited PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, should soon make a deal which implicitly includes the Egyptians uprooting Hamas in Gaza with America’s and the world’s blessing. Palestine will have to accept a narrower West Bank and a deeper Gaza strip in compensation, with a secure road between them. It will settle down as another dusty, but industrious little country, and the last piece of the puzzle will be Hezbollah—one peep from it and all the neighboring forces will be pleased to dispatch it.
Given the importance of the factors in play, the Trump Administration cannot allow the fracas over purported “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to derail progress in the Middle East. His murder is one of the stupidest and most barbarous acts in the unenlightened history of the House of Saud, and has been hyped to the rafters by the Democrats and their media ciphers, but will be talked out effectively by Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo. It was a disgusting crime, but these are frequent in the Middle East and no significant part of the world’s future can be mortgaged to the victim.
Khashoggi was no great friend of America, despite the mournful caterwauling of the increasingly desperate Democrats, and some well-meaning Republican dupes (like Senator Lindsey Graham, who padded around the Middle East 15 years ago with John McCain demanding fair treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood).
Upending Popular Wisdom on Russia and China
The fixation of the Democrats, and of some gullible Republicans such as Marco Rubio, on the Russians, and the unutterable but now scarcely audible nonsense about collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016, has caused many Americans to forget the strategic correlation of forces in the world. But the president and his close advisors have realized that Russia could only be dangerous if it were so coldly rebuffed before the whole world that it were driven into the arms of China.
Despite the passing hubbub about his comments in Helsinki (which essentially meant that Trump had more confidence in the assertions of Russian intelligence than in the partisan fabrications of former U.S. intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, with some reason), the president has succeeded in shifting America’s attention to the fact that China is its only rival for strategic preeminence in the world.
Trump has struck up and retained a cordial personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but has steadily moved to break down China’s trade surplus with the United States, encouraged China’s neighbors to join hands in resisting Chinese hegemony in the Far East, and used the preeminence of the United States Navy to assure that the Chinese effort to convert the South China Sea into Chinese territorial waters does not succeed.
The fretful assertions that China would surpass the United States as a power, economically and otherwise, in the next 20 years, have died away, as did the claims that Japan would surpass America as an economic power and the USSR as a military power. Now, it is even acknowledged by popular wisdom, Trump-haters, and the somewhat broader and more international category of anti-Americans, (though many of them are Americans), that prejudging the outcome of that contest is unwise.
As he opened relations with China and triangulated the super power rivalry with the Soviet Union in 1972, Richard Nixon said that the world’s five great centers of strategic strength (in terms of population, industry and technology) were the United States, USSR, Western Europe, Japan, and China. Now the Russians are itinerant international troublemakers, inelegantly and inconsistently trying to replicate the feat of Charles de Gaulle in reminding the world of the importance of France, but they are a crumbling custodian of vast geopolitical possibilities, awaiting the development of mature and efficient political institutions. Europe is a cocoon for the containment of Germany, paying Danegeld, for notorious historical reasons, to the working and agrarian classes, but only the British and French retain the remotest concept of how Great Powers conduct themselves. Japan is almost as reticent, but stirred to greater activity than the Europeans by their proximity to China.
Trump and Xi understand that they are the rivals, and there is no real military issue; it is economic predominance and the prestige of the nations. The Americans retain the advantage-the world’s greatest democracy and promoter of democracy. China has no institutions of any public trust except, up to a point, the armed forces. The United States, as in the times of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, is unchallenged in its hemisphere. Western Europe is slumbering quiescently and is, to an adequate extent, an American ally, and palsied Russia is waiting to begin the primordial task of trying to devise political institutions that will serve its legitimate aspirations. Japan seeks American assistance as a bulwark against resurgent China. This is a constellation that President Trump is steadily strengthening, and it is one that, with continued management, cannot fail to win, and will not try to bar China from being the first of the world’s great nations to regenerate itself. In this process, though not in some of its more jingoistic manifestations, China should not be discouraged.
No one would call Donald Trump a sophisticated geopolitician, (including Donald Trump). But in practice, he is. He is not a historian, but he is a realistic analyst of the present and is building a fine future for his country. Americans sense this, and will respond to it.
Quote of the Times;
“Only a few prefer liberty; the majority seek nothing more than fair masters." – Sallust
Link of the Times;
https://fleporeblog.wordpress.com/
Americans think 100 years is a long time.
The English think 100 miles is a long ways away.
*.*
An Englishman, a Frenchman, a Spaniard and a German are all standing watching a street performer do some excellent juggling. The juggler notices that the four gentleman have a very poor view, so he stands up on a large wooden box and calls out, “Can you all see me now?”
“Yes.”
“Oui.”
“Si.”
“Ja.”
*.*
101 Great Quotes on Computers
Computers
"Computers are useless. They can only give you answers."
(Pablo Picasso)
"Computers are like bikinis. They save people a lot of guesswork."
(Sam Ewing)
"They have computers, and they may have other weapons of mass destruction."
(Janet Reno)
"That's what's cool about working with computers. They don't argue, they remember everything, and they don't drink all your beer."
(Paul Leary)
"If the automobile had followed the same development cycle as the computer, a Rolls-Royce would today cost $100, get a million miles per gallon, and explode once a year, killing everyone inside."
(Robert X. Cringely)
Computer Intelligence
"Computers are getting smarter all the time. Scientists tell us that soon they will be able to talk to us. (And by 'they', I mean 'computers'. I doubt scientists will ever be able to talk to us.)"
(Dave Barry)
"I've noticed lately that the paranoid fear of computers becoming intelligent and taking over the world has almost entirely disappeared from the common culture. Near as I can tell, this coincides with the release of MS-DOS."
(Larry DeLuca)
"The question of whether computers can think is like the question of whether submarines can swim."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
"It's ridiculous to live 100 years and only be able to remember 30 million bytes. You know, less than a compact disc. The human condition is really becoming more obsolete every minute."
(Marvin Minsky)
Trust
"The city's central computer told you? R2D2, you know better than to trust a strange computer!"
(C3PO)
"Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window."
(Steve Wozniak)
Hardware
"Hardware: The parts of a computer system that can be kicked."
(Jeff Pesis)
Software
"Most software today is very much like an Egyptian pyramid with millions of bricks piled on top of each other, with no structural integrity, but just done by brute force and thousands of slaves."
(Alan Kay)
"I've finally learned what 'upward compatible' means. It means we get to keep all our old mistakes."
(Dennie van Tassel)
Operating Systems
"There are two major products that come out of Berkeley: LSD and UNIX. We don't believe this to be a coincidence."
(Jeremy S. Anderson)
"19 Jan 2038 at 3:14:07 AM"
(End of the word according to Unix-2^32 seconds after January 1, 1970)
"Every operating system out there is about equal. We all suck."
(Microsoft senior vice president Brian Valentine describing the state of the art in OS security, 2003)
"Microsoft has a new version out, Windows XP, which according to everybody is the 'most reliable Windows ever.' To me, this is like saying that asparagus is 'the most articulate vegetable ever.' "
(Dave Barry)
Internet
"The Internet? Is that thing still around?"
(Homer Simpson)
"The Web is like a dominatrix. Everywhere I turn, I see little buttons ordering me to Submit."
(Nytwind)
"Come to think of it, there are already a million monkeys on a million typewriters, and Usenet is nothing like Shakespeare."
(Blair Houghton)
Software Industry
"The most amazing achievement of the computer software industry is its continuing cancellation of the steady and staggering gains made by the computer hardware industry."
(Henry Petroski)
"True innovation often comes from the small startup who is lean enough to launch a market but lacks the heft to own it."
(Timm Martin)
"It has been said that the great scientific disciplines are examples of giants standing on the shoulders of other giants. It has also been said that the software industry is an example of midgets standing on the toes of other midgets."
(Alan Cooper)
"It is not about bits, bytes and protocols, but profits, losses and margins."
(Lou Gerstner)
"We are Microsoft. Resistance Is Futile. You Will Be Assimilated."
(Bumper sticker)
Software Demos
"No matter how slick the demo is in rehearsal, when you do it in front of a live audience, the probability of a flawless presentation is inversely proportional to the number of people watching, raised to the power of the amount of money involved."
(Mark Gibbs)
Software Patents
"The bulk of all patents are crap. Spending time reading them is stupid.
It's up to the patent owner to do so, and to enforce them."
(Linus Torvalds)
Complexity
"Controlling complexity is the essence of computer programming."
(Brian Kernigan)
"Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges, and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."
(Ray Ozzie)
"There are two ways of constructing a software design. One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies. And the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies."
(C.A.R. Hoare)
"The function of good software is to make the complex appear to be simple."
(Grady Booch)
Ease of Use
"Just remember: you're not a 'dummy,' no matter what those computer books claim. The real dummies are the people who-though technically expert-couldn 't design hardware and software that's usable by normal consumers if their lives depended upon it."
(Walter Mossberg)
"Software suppliers are trying to make their software packages more 'user-friendly'. Their best approach so far has been to take all the old brochures and stamp the words 'user-friendly' on the cover."
(Bill Gates)
"There's an old story about the person who wished his computer were as easy to use as his telephone. That wish has come true, since I no longer know how to use my telephone."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
Users
"Any fool can use a computer. Many do."
(Ted Nelson)
"There are only two industries that refer to their customers as 'users'."
(Edward Tufte)
Programmers
"Programmers are in a race with the Universe to create bigger and better idiot-proof programs, while the Universe is trying to create bigger and better idiots. So far the Universe is winning."
(Rich Cook)
"Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris."
(Larry Wall)
"The trouble with programmers is that you can never tell what a programmer is doing until it's too late."
(Seymour Cray)
"That's the thing about people who think they hate computers. What they really hate is lousy programmers."
(Larry Niven)
"For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless. And then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match."
(Bill Bryson)
"Computer science education cannot make anybody an expert programmer any more than studying brushes and pigment can make somebody an expert painter."
(Eric Raymond)
"A programmer is a person who passes as an exacting expert on the basis of being able to turn out, after innumerable punching, an infinite series of incomprehensive answers calculated with micrometric precisions from vague assumptions based on debatable figures taken from inconclusive documents and carried out on instruments of problematical accuracy by persons of dubious reliability and questionable mentality for the avowed purpose of annoying and confounding a hopelessly defenseless department that was unfortunate enough to ask for the information in the first place."
(IEEE Grid newsmagazine)
"A hacker on a roll may be able to produce-in a period of a few months-something that a small development group (say, 7-8 people) would have a hard time getting together over a year. IBM used to report that certain programmers might be as much as 100 times as productive as other workers, or more."
(Peter Seebach)
"The best programmers are not marginally better than merely good ones. They are an order-of-magnitude better, measured by whatever standard: conceptual creativity, speed, ingenuity of design, or problem-solving ability."
(Randall E. Stross)
"A great lathe operator commands several times the wage of an average lathe operator, but a great writer of software code is worth 10,000 times the price of an average software writer."
(Bill Gates)
Programming
"Don't worry if it doesn't work right. If everything did, you'd be out of a job."
(Mosher's Law of Software Engineering)
"Measuring programming progress by lines of code is like measuring aircraft building progress by weight."
(Bill Gates)
"Writing code has a place in the human hierarchy worth somewhere above grave robbing and beneath managing."
(Gerald Weinberg)
"First learn computer science and all the theory. Next develop a programming style. Then forget all that and just hack."
(George Carrette)
"First, solve the problem. Then, write the code."
(John Johnson)
"Optimism is an occupational hazard of programming; feedback is the treatment."
(Kent Beck)
"To iterate is human, to recurse divine."
(L. Peter Deutsch)
"The best thing about a boolean is even if you are wrong, you are only off by a bit."
(Anonymous)
"Should array indices start at 0 or 1? My compromise of 0.5 was rejected without, I thought, proper consideration."
(Stan Kelly-Bootle)
Programming Languages
"There are only two kinds of programming languages: those people always bitch about and those nobody uses."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"PHP is a minor evil perpetrated and created by incompetent amateurs, whereas Perl is a great and insidious evil perpetrated by skilled but perverted professionals."
(Jon Ribbens)
"The use of COBOL cripples the mind; its teaching should therefore be regarded as a criminal offense."
(E.W. Dijkstra)
"It is practically impossible to teach good programming style to students that have had prior exposure to BASIC. As potential programmers, they are mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration."
(E. W. Dijkstra)
"I think Microsoft named .Net so it wouldn't show up in a Unix directory listing."
(Oktal)
"There is no programming language-no matter how structured-that will prevent programmers from making bad programs."
(Larry Flon)
"Computer language design is just like a stroll in the park. Jurassic Park, that is."
(Larry Wall)
C/C++
"Fifty years of programming language research, and we end up with C++?"
(Richard A. O'Keefe)
"Writing in C or C++ is like running a chain saw with all the safety guards removed."
(Bob Gray)
"In C++ it's harder to shoot yourself in the foot, but when you do, you blow off your whole leg."
(Bjarne Stroustrup)
"C++ : Where friends have access to your private members."
(Gavin Russell Baker)
"One of the main causes of the fall of the Roman Empire was that-lacking zero-they had no way to indicate successful termination of their C programs."
(Robert Firth)
Java
"Java is, in many ways, C++-."
(Michael Feldman)
"Saying that Java is nice because it works on all OSes is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders."
(Alanna)
"Fine, Java MIGHT be a good example of what a programming language should be like. But Java applications are good examples of what applications SHOULDN'
T be like."
(pixadel)
"If Java had true garbage collection, most programs would delete themselves upon execution."
(Robert Sewell)
Open Source
"Software is like sex: It's better when it's free."
(Linus Torvalds)
"The only people who have anything to fear from free software are those whose products are worth even less."
(David Emery)
Code
"Good code is its own best documentation."
(Steve McConnell)
"Any code of your own that you haven't looked at for six or more months might as well have been written by someone else."
(Eagleson's Law)
"The first 90% of the code accounts for the first 90% of the development time. The remaining 10% of the code accounts for the other 90% of the development time."
(Tom Cargill)
Software Development
"Good programmers use their brains, but good guidelines save us having to think out every case."
(Francis Glassborow)
"In software, we rarely have meaningful requirements. Even if we do, the only measure of success that matters is whether our solution solves the customer's shifting idea of what their problem is."
(Jeff Atwood)
"Considering the current sad state of our computer programs, software development is clearly still a black art, and cannot yet be called an engineering discipline."
(Bill Clinton)
"You can't have great software without a great team, and most software teams behave like dysfunctional families."
(Jim McCarthy)
Debugging
"As soon as we started programming, we found to our surprise that it wasn't as easy to get programs right as we had thought. Debugging had to be discovered. I can remember the exact instant when I realized that a large part of my life from then on was going to be spent in finding mistakes in my own programs."
(Maurice Wilkes discovers debugging, 1949)
"Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place.
Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are-by definition-not smart enough to debug it."
(Brian Kernighan)
"If debugging is the process of removing bugs, then programming must be the process of putting them in."
(Edsger W. Dijkstra)
Quality
"I don't care if it works on your machine! We are not shipping your machine!"
(Vidiu Platon)
"Programming is like sex: one mistake and you're providing support for a lifetime."
(Michael Sinz)
"There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works."
(Alan J. Perlis)
"You can either have software quality or you can have pointer arithmetic, but you cannot have both at the same time."
(Bertrand Meyer)
"If McDonalds were run like a software company, one out of every hundred Big Macs would give you food poisoning, and the response would be, 'We're sorry, here's a coupon for two more.' "
(Mark Minasi)
"Always code as if the guy who ends up maintaining your code will be a violent psychopath who knows where you live."
(Martin Golding)
"To err is human, but to really foul things up you need a computer."
(Paul Ehrlich)
"A computer lets you make more mistakes faster than any invention in human history-with the possible exceptions of handguns and tequila."
(Mitch Radcliffe)
Predictions
"Everything that can be invented has been invented."
(Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899)
"I think there's a world market for about 5 computers."
(Thomas J. Watson, Chairman of the Board, IBM, circa 1948)
"It would appear that we have reached the limits of what it is possible to achieve with computer technology, although one should be careful with such statements, as they tend to sound pretty silly in 5 years."
(John Von Neumann, circa 1949)
"But what is it good for?"
(Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, commenting on the microchip, 1968)
"There is no reason for any individual to have a computer in his home."
(Ken Olson, President, Digital Equipment Corporation, 1977)
"640K ought to be enough for anybody."
(Bill Gates, 1981)
"Windows NT addresses 2 Gigabytes of RAM, which is more than any application will ever need."
(Microsoft, on the development of Windows NT, 1992)
"We will never become a truly paper-less society until the Palm Pilot folks come out with WipeMe 1.0."
(Andy Pierson)
"If it keeps up, man will atrophy all his limbs but the push-button finger."
(Frank Lloyd Wright)
*.*
My uncle represented this guy getting a divorce from his wife of 15 years. Super toxic breakup and they split everything 50/50, even the land that the house they lived in sat upon. Well she decides to build a house right behind the other house, mind you this was a lot of land probably 200 yards separating both home sites, so that the back of the houses faced each other. The house gets built and my uncle gets a call from his client asking about the legality of a situation he had gotten himself into. Apparently his ex wife would spend a lot of time in her backyard, so he saw her all the time. What he did was buy a female dog and name it the same name as his ex-wife. Anytime he would let his dog back in from letting her out he would yell “Susan you bitch! Get in here!” He would also yell if she was peeing on the flowers,”Susan you bitch! Quit pissing on the flowers!” or “Susan you bitch! Quit digging in the dirt!” The ex-wife called the cops on him a couple of times, but there was nothing they could do because the dog was registered under the name of Susan, and it was in fact a bitch so there you go.
*.*
As I slipped my finger slowly inside her hole, I could immediately feel it getting wetter and wetter.
I took my finger back out and within seconds she was going down on me.
I thought to myself; "I really need a new fucking boat."
Issue of the Times;
Trump’s Foreign Policy Is Coming into Focus by Conrad Black
Gradually, almost imperceptibly, the outline of a coherent Trump foreign policy is emerging and succeeding. The elements were to withdraw from the role as the default war-maker in the Middle East without creating a vacuum, render Russia less adversarial without facing it down into the arms of the Chinese, and revitalize the Western Alliance to a plausible notion of multilateral contributions and not just an American military guarantee for everyone, ex gratia and pro bono.
At the same time, there would be unrestricted war on terrorist organizations, a revival of nuclear non-proliferation by direct and overbearing threats to North Korea and Iran, and the reconstruction of America’s status as the world’s preeminent economy by tax reductions, deregulation, renegotiation of trade treaties, and encouragement of energy self-sufficiency.
There have been some unfortunate moments from a presentational standpoint, but it is a good plan and it is working.
Changing the Game in the Mideast
Turkey had attempted to masquerade as the patron of the Arabs and was sent packing in remembrance of the Arabs’ 500 years of involuntary enjoyment of Turkish occupation, and after a regional musical chairs game with ancient rivals Iran and Russia, all pretending a common cause in Syria. Turkey was left standing when the music stopped and largely has reconciled with the United States. The two countries will operate joint patrols to keep the Kurds from aggravating Kurdish discontent within Anatolia (Turkish Asia Minor).
Turkish President Erdogan is a distasteful and inconstant ally, but more manageable than the Russian leader Putin, and a Lincolnian statesman compared to the Iranian ayatollahs. The Trump Administration is not prepared to accept permanent involvement of U.S. ground forces in the Middle East. But neither will it accept the creation of vacuums there which foment terrorism, as after Obama’s petulant and abrupt departure from Iraq. This led to the swift rise of ISIS, the disintegration of Shiite Iraq, and thrust 60 percent of the country’s population into dependency on Iran. The entire American effort there: two invasions under the Bushes and Obama’s wind-down, handed Iran the greatest accretion of its influence since the height of the Parthian Empire nearly 2,000 years ago.
Now, making a partial virtue of the failings of the previous two administrations, the crumbling of Iraq and Syria, formerly two of Israel’s most fanatical enemies, strengthens Israeli security, and the encroachments of the Arabs’ ancient enemies and oppressors, the Turks and Iranians, bring Egypt and Saudi Arabia into quasi-alliance with Israel. ISIS and al-Qaeda effectively have been smashed, the United States doesn’t care if Russia has a naval base on the Mediterranean (since Russia could not challenge the U.S. Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean without bankrupting itself). The Russians protect Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and his Alawite faction, and the Turks and Americans protect the secular adversaries of Assad and keep the Kurds out of Turkey, protecting Kurdistan from the Turks.
Obviously, the war in Yemen has to end without an Iranian victory and the pressure on Iran must be maintained until this dismal theocracy in Teheran either repents of its ambition for an arc of influence, or collapses from internal anger at its comprehensive corruption and failure.
The Arab powers have greater concerns than continuing to try to distract the Arab masses from the misgovernment inflicted on them with the red herring of Israel, and no one cares a jot about the Palestinians, as the inexcusably delayed movement of the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem demonstrated. The bedraggled and discredited PLO leader, Mahmoud Abbas, should soon make a deal which implicitly includes the Egyptians uprooting Hamas in Gaza with America’s and the world’s blessing. Palestine will have to accept a narrower West Bank and a deeper Gaza strip in compensation, with a secure road between them. It will settle down as another dusty, but industrious little country, and the last piece of the puzzle will be Hezbollah—one peep from it and all the neighboring forces will be pleased to dispatch it.
Given the importance of the factors in play, the Trump Administration cannot allow the fracas over purported “journalist” Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi citizen and member of the Muslim Brotherhood, to derail progress in the Middle East. His murder is one of the stupidest and most barbarous acts in the unenlightened history of the House of Saud, and has been hyped to the rafters by the Democrats and their media ciphers, but will be talked out effectively by Trump and Secretary of State Pompeo. It was a disgusting crime, but these are frequent in the Middle East and no significant part of the world’s future can be mortgaged to the victim.
Khashoggi was no great friend of America, despite the mournful caterwauling of the increasingly desperate Democrats, and some well-meaning Republican dupes (like Senator Lindsey Graham, who padded around the Middle East 15 years ago with John McCain demanding fair treatment of the Muslim Brotherhood).
Upending Popular Wisdom on Russia and China
The fixation of the Democrats, and of some gullible Republicans such as Marco Rubio, on the Russians, and the unutterable but now scarcely audible nonsense about collusion between the Russian government and the Trump campaign in 2016, has caused many Americans to forget the strategic correlation of forces in the world. But the president and his close advisors have realized that Russia could only be dangerous if it were so coldly rebuffed before the whole world that it were driven into the arms of China.
Despite the passing hubbub about his comments in Helsinki (which essentially meant that Trump had more confidence in the assertions of Russian intelligence than in the partisan fabrications of former U.S. intelligence chiefs John Brennan and James Clapper, with some reason), the president has succeeded in shifting America’s attention to the fact that China is its only rival for strategic preeminence in the world.
Trump has struck up and retained a cordial personal relationship with Chinese President Xi Jinping, but has steadily moved to break down China’s trade surplus with the United States, encouraged China’s neighbors to join hands in resisting Chinese hegemony in the Far East, and used the preeminence of the United States Navy to assure that the Chinese effort to convert the South China Sea into Chinese territorial waters does not succeed.
The fretful assertions that China would surpass the United States as a power, economically and otherwise, in the next 20 years, have died away, as did the claims that Japan would surpass America as an economic power and the USSR as a military power. Now, it is even acknowledged by popular wisdom, Trump-haters, and the somewhat broader and more international category of anti-Americans, (though many of them are Americans), that prejudging the outcome of that contest is unwise.
As he opened relations with China and triangulated the super power rivalry with the Soviet Union in 1972, Richard Nixon said that the world’s five great centers of strategic strength (in terms of population, industry and technology) were the United States, USSR, Western Europe, Japan, and China. Now the Russians are itinerant international troublemakers, inelegantly and inconsistently trying to replicate the feat of Charles de Gaulle in reminding the world of the importance of France, but they are a crumbling custodian of vast geopolitical possibilities, awaiting the development of mature and efficient political institutions. Europe is a cocoon for the containment of Germany, paying Danegeld, for notorious historical reasons, to the working and agrarian classes, but only the British and French retain the remotest concept of how Great Powers conduct themselves. Japan is almost as reticent, but stirred to greater activity than the Europeans by their proximity to China.
Trump and Xi understand that they are the rivals, and there is no real military issue; it is economic predominance and the prestige of the nations. The Americans retain the advantage-the world’s greatest democracy and promoter of democracy. China has no institutions of any public trust except, up to a point, the armed forces. The United States, as in the times of James Monroe and John Quincy Adams, is unchallenged in its hemisphere. Western Europe is slumbering quiescently and is, to an adequate extent, an American ally, and palsied Russia is waiting to begin the primordial task of trying to devise political institutions that will serve its legitimate aspirations. Japan seeks American assistance as a bulwark against resurgent China. This is a constellation that President Trump is steadily strengthening, and it is one that, with continued management, cannot fail to win, and will not try to bar China from being the first of the world’s great nations to regenerate itself. In this process, though not in some of its more jingoistic manifestations, China should not be discouraged.
No one would call Donald Trump a sophisticated geopolitician, (including Donald Trump). But in practice, he is. He is not a historian, but he is a realistic analyst of the present and is building a fine future for his country. Americans sense this, and will respond to it.
Quote of the Times;
“Only a few prefer liberty; the majority seek nothing more than fair masters." – Sallust
Link of the Times;
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And someone shot a duck.
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No Vegans were harmed in the making of this site. We're looking for a new provider.