Softcore or Hardcore?

Posted on May 24, 2008 by Alaska

I’ve always thought of myself as, in Massad Ayoob’s phrase, a “softcore” survivalist — not preparing for TEOTWAWKI, but rather for a temporary disruption of social services for several weeks or a couple months at most — or for somewhat longer-term economic disruption and food scarcities.

Still….

How Long Could You Survive Trapped In Your Own Home?

The only box I couldn’t check was the one for a generator and fuel. And we’ve got about 1000 pounds of canned, dried or dry food. For my wife and I and two dogs. Some is for relatives who might hole up with us, and for charity for our elderly neighbors, but still… that’s a lot. I’ve even recently been thinking of moving the stored food boxes out of the garage and into their own shed. (Yes I have lots of stored water too, and plenty of bleach and filters — and, this being California, two neighbors with large swimming pools.)
Question is, have I crossed over into hardcore territory?

Posted in Armageddon, By Ourselves, For Ourselves | 4 Comments

Woman In Leather

Posted on May 24, 2008 by Alaska

Click to embiggen.frank_frazetta_catgirl-1.jpg

One of the finest Christmas gifts we’ve ever received; our daughter picked the above up in Peru from a little old man who handcrafted amazing sculptures from scraps of leather. This now resides on our family-room wall, but for this pic I liked the effect of placing it on the kitchen table.

My wife and I have a fondness for female nudes, so our daughter picked well. It hangs close to our Frazetta painting “Catgirl,” personally inscribed to my wife by Frank Frazetta himself.

See the resemblance?

Posted in Kewel! | Leave a comment

Guns In the Mail

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Alaska

pix3251426828.jpg pix3251426984.jpg

I’ve seen these little Richardson Boot Pistol replicas floating around on the Internets — fully functional black powder guns, 5 1/2″ barrel, firing .36 roundball using regular ol’ BP or Pyrodex and #11 percussion caps.  And cheeeep at $50 or less, depending where you look. So I bought two. Purely a case of “want” as nobody really needs one of these things.

Should be fun, fun, fun tho.
pix3251426906.jpg

Posted in Have Gun, Will Travel | 2 Comments

Why I cannot be a government employee

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Phil Kadath

Because I scored 95% on this Civic Literacy quiz.

There are 60 questions so take your time. There a few you can deduce/reduce and a few you can learn from as you do so. And I must say that it was one of the hardest internet based quizzes I’ve taken in my five years in the sphere.

FYI: I missed questions #19, #23 and 58.

Also, liberals will absolutely hate questions # 54, #55 and & 60.

I’ll be working until noon on Saturday, so obviously there’ll be no posting from me. David however, is working on some more Boomershoot pics for y’all.

Have a good weekend.

Posted in Kewel! | Leave a comment

So let me get this straight

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Phil Kadath

If my brother and I ever go knock down/drag out over his acting like an idiot, I can never own a firearm again.

But these guys are going to be issued automatic weapons?

D.C. Police Chief Cathy L. Lanier has rehired 17 officers who were fired for misconduct, saying she was forced to bring most of them back because the department missed critical deadlines for taking action.

The officers were dismissed for problems such as lying about when they were on the clock, falsifying documents and looking the other way when another off-duty officer got into fistfights, according to D.C. court and arbitration records. One officer accessed personal information about a City Paper reporter and posted it on the Internet with a suggestion that other police “target the individual for law enforcement,” the records show.

The department has struggled for decades to meet disciplinary deadlines and promised the public and D.C. Council years ago that improvements would be made. But in the most recent cases, police officials once again violated timetables in internal affairs cases. As a result, the firings were overruled by judges in D.C. Superior Court or by arbitrators ruling for the D.C. Public Employee Relations Board.

Talk about your privileged classes.

Found at Some Poor Schmuck

Posted in Order of the imperial upraised middle finger. | Leave a comment

Welcome Home

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Phil Kadath

See that big rock over there? We need turned into little rocks.

Canada is set to deport in June the first of possibly hundreds of American soldiers who sought asylum to avoid military duty in Iraq, a group backing the US deserters said Wednesday.

Corey Glass, 25, came to Canada in August 2006 after serving in Iraq as a military intelligence sergeant.

Authorities told him on Wednesday that his application to stay in Canada was rejected and he would be deported in early June, a spokeswoman for the War Resisters Support Campaign told AFP.

According to the group, several hundred Iraq War resisters are currently in Canada, many of them living underground. Glass would be the first of them to be deported, it said.

“This goes against Canada’s tradition of welcoming Americans who disagree with policies like slavery and the Vietnam War,” said Lee Zaslofsky, a War Resisters Support Campaign coordinator.

Here’s a hammer. Hop to it.

Sadly, like his seeming mentor, Jimmeh Cahtah, if Obama wins the executive office, he will most likely pardon each one of these deserters.

And then invite them over to the White House so that he can appoint them to an ambassadorship.

Posted in Freaks, Mutants, and Morons | 2 Comments

I almost couldn’t believe it

Posted on May 23, 2008 by Phil Kadath

But then I remembered who was writing what I was reading.

Last night on the front page of the uber-leftist FireDogLake blog, was a post about Congresswoman Laura Richardson, the Representative who has been denying that she abandoned a property she owned and let it slide into foreclosure and stopped paying the utilities and property taxes on it.

Unlike that last link to Mrs. Malkin’s site, the loonies at FDL were martyring Richardson

Hello, Congress? The people, you know — the ones you were elected to represent — are hurting out here. A lot of people have lost their houses already. Many, many more are on the edge.

If *this* is what it takes to get your attention, so be it.

I’ve been reading FDL for a while now. Long enough to discover the truly sick part of their scheme to “fix the mortgage crisis”: Having the government buy up loans with our tax dollars.

So here’s what a liberal government does. It provides real market clearing to the market by offering to buy mortgages, only in blocks, at a discount. Not to lend, as the Fed has been, but buy. It sets the price at approximately what the land would have been worth in 2001. It converts each and every mortgage it buys into a simple fixed rate mortgage with a nominal value for the property equal to what it bought the mortgage for plus ten percent and it lets the property owner choose a 10, 20, 30 or 50 year term for the mortgage as long as the monthly payments are no more than 1/3 of the owner’s income. If you can’t afford the payment on 1/3rd of your household income the duration of your mortgage gets kicked up until you can. No other loans can be taken against the house until the mortgage is paid off and no lump payments are allowed so that finance companies can’t come in later and offer to pay of mortgages so folks can do foolish things.

Not the worst idea I’ve heard, except for the fact that nowhere in the Constitution does it authorize the government to be a direct mortgaging house.

By the way, there are no provisions in this plan for if the borrower defaults. Would a government stupid enough to become a mortgage lender let the person/people live there free of charge, or would it send in the ninjas in the most dramatic eviction in modern times?

No one knows. Least of all the numbnuts who thought this plan up, since liberals like to believe that once government steps in to a problem that everything becomes puppy smiles and daisies.

Posted in Too Stupid to Live | Leave a comment

Is it cheating that my brother’s a dermatologist

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Alaska

…and I played a LOT of AD&D? Solo, I might add. Pathetic, I know, but then I got 94% !!! Neener!

h/t: it comes in Pints?

Posted in Academia and Other Nonsense | 3 Comments

The Soundboard – David Undecides

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Phil Kadath

When you stick a guy with too much of a good thing, it is difficult to decide which to choose. And since I’m all about freedom of choice, we’ll just play both.

From the excellent Pendulum album Hold Your Color

Prelude+Slam

I’ve posted this one up previously, but it is so very good that twice won’t hurt it a bit.

And dude’s even got the Deathklok bug

For those this far out of the loop, you are not worthy. But you can buy it here.

David pointed this video as well of Brendan Small at the MAMM as well

\m/ \m/

Posted in Kewel! | 1 Comment

This should be front page news

Posted on May 22, 2008 by Phil Kadath

But I’ll have contracted Simian-Rectal Syndrome before that’ll happen

The MSM wouldn’t want to ruin the election year panderfest, after all

This is an excerpt from a letter written by the CBO to Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI)

“Under current law, rising costs for health care and the aging of the population will cause federal spending on Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security to rise substantially as a share of the economy. If tax revenues as a share of gross domestic product (GDP) remain at current levels, that additional spending will eventually cause future budget deficits to become unsustainable. To prevent those deficits from growing to levels that could impose substantial costs on the economy, the choices are limited: Revenues must rise as a share of GDP, projected spending must fall, or both.”

…..

“With no economic feedbacks taken into account and under an assumption that raising marginal tax rates was the only mechanism used to balance the budget, tax rates would have to more than double. The tax rate for the lowest tax bracket would have to be increased from 10 percent to 25 percent; the tax rate on incomes in the current 25 percent bracket would have to be increased to 63 percent; and the tax rate of the highest bracket would have to be raised from 35 percent to 88 percent. The top corporate income tax rate would also increase from 35 percent to 88 percent.

This is just to meet our current entitlement obligations.

Enjoy the entire twenty-one page pdf file of joy over the weekend and contemplate just how tasty dog food can be, since after losing an extra 38% of your paycheck, that’ll be all you’ll be able to afford.

And Obama was bitching about the price of arugula.

Posted in The Left is Never Right | 3 Comments