What was that?
An avalanche but it’s controlled.
Is it safe?
Sure. They know what they are doing . . . 

[SPEED TESTING] [continue reading…]

IF WE just brought back the punch in the nose as an argument-settling tool we wouldn’t have to worry about bullshit lawsuits, would we?

Very few will ever know the truth, we will know what THEY want us to know. — Dirk

Breaching with a 223/556 is what a retard would do. Breaching is done with a shotgun shooting Avon rounds, a ceramic round designed to shear the bolting mech. I’ve got some experience shooting a breaching shotgun into doors.

The most practical is to breach at the hinges, not the doorknob. A shotgun with a two-inch stand-off device attached to the barrel’s end, with slots so debris doesn’t foul the barrel.

While I’m admittedly not an expert I have done perhaps two dozen doors over my 27 years. The breaching shotgun is a secondary weapon, that is usually not used after the breach, and entry weapons are used after the doors are blown.

Commands used to be, “Breacher up,” from stick leader. Breacher announces “Breeching” then two shots, one top hinge, and one lower hinge. If three hinges are present the third round from command to execution is mere seconds. Breachers will then fall in at the back of the stick, for making entry.

A hooligan tool is always present to pry the hinged side if required. In fact, the breeching device on the end of the shotgun is very similar to a “ Duckbill”, but it’s not a duck bill. A duckbill is crimped on the end to spread shot, not capable of shooting slugs or avons.

I’m told new rounds are being used. A softer metal that won’t cause shrapnel from entering the room being breached.

It is critical to understand that military breaching is in many ways different from a police breach. Objectives are the same, the stated goals are different. Police want zero sprawl entering the hostages’ area.

Hope this helps you to understand

Dirk — June 12, 2022, 6:10 AM

* * * * * * * * * * * *

[continue reading…]

What do they call the Big Mac in Moscow?

I don’t know. I didn’t go to McDonalds.

Through a circle that ever returneth in
To the self-same spot,
And much of Madness, and more of Sin,
And Horror the soul of the plot.
       — Poe, The Conqueror Worm

At the Seattle houseboat where I write, it’s either spider mating season or a spider building boom. Unlike the rest of the builders in this burg, there’s no slump in the spider building boom. Here no bubble has burst. All about this floating world on the lake, spiders big and small are weaving elaborate webs in all the angles a host of houseboats offer.

In fact, so many spiders are getting so busy that it behooves you to begin the day waving a straw broom across your doorways and walkways lest you end up wearing a web. Getting your face slapped and your mouth filled with web is no way to start the day. I know. So sweeping the air with a broom like some latter-day sorcerer’s apprentice is required. That’s my current ritual and it works, most of the time. But webs, I’ve found, come in all sorts of shapes and diameters, and not all are easily seen and swept. Miss one and you get a face full of web and the spider gets, I imagine, very ticked off seeing his long night’s labor wiped out in a split second. If you both get very unlucky, you get a mouth full of the web with a crunchy spider filling. Not my idea of a crisp morning’s memorable moment.  Certainly not the spider’s.

At the same time, you don’t want to be too enthusiastic about web wipeouts. I know how beneficial it is to have spiders at work in a wet environment like a houseboat community. Where spiders weave mosquito populations are severely reduced, flies too. If you want insect life kept down to a dull buzz, you don’t want to destroy any webs that aren’t directly in your way. Besides, after a fog or light rain at dawn, or in the slanting late afternoon light, you are can see dozens of gleaming diadem-dappled webs moving ever so gently in the light breeze off Lake Union. Regardless of how you feel about spiders, their work and their webs are both beneficial and beautiful.

Webs, as we know, are not so wonderful for flies. For flies, a spider’s web is, in the full meaning of the phrase, a dead end. Touch even one silken strand and you can’t shake it off.

The nature of the spider’s web is that once touched by a single strand, your struggles to shake it off enmesh you ever more securely in others until escape is hopeless. In the end, you are held not just by the single strand you started with, but by all the others that lie just to this side or the other. The spider will be along soon enough to wrap things up. The only safe way to escape the spider’s web is not to touch it in the first place.

At least that’s what I told the small fly that landed under the web next to my foot this morning as I stood outside on the railing with my coffee.

[continue reading…]

When my mother moved into her small apartment in Chico forty years ago she chose well. Most of the apartments in the complex overlooked only asphalt parking lots. A few were built so that the apartments faced each other from across a swath of lawn and trees. My mother took one of these on the ground floor.

Just beyond her patio, the builders had left a dawn redwood standing. Thus, for forty years that redwood grew beside her as she lived her life of friends, family, tennis. She lived her life very, very well; teaching all who knew her how to live and how to age and how to die. The redwood grew and witnessed all the moments of all her years. Today, through a quirk of fate — call it destiny — the same redwood grows beside and shelters my terrace across the way. The sun sets behind it every day silhouetting it against the oranges and pinks of the western sky. Absent the wrecking hand of man, the redwood will survive the apartments and the town and the nation itself. Like mother’s memory, it stands indifferent to time and fire. It abides.

This is Water by David Foster Wallace

“Greetings parents and congratulations to Kenyon’s graduating class of 2005. There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

This is a standard requirement of US commencement speeches, the deployment of didactic little parable-ish stories. The story thing turns out to be one of the better, less bullshitty conventions of the genre, but if you’re worried that I plan to present myself here as the wise, older fish explaining what water is to you younger fish, please don’t be. I am not the wise old fish. The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about. Stated as an English sentence, of course, this is just a banal platitude, but the fact is that in the day to day trenches of adult existence, banal platitudes can have a life or death importance, or so I wish to suggest to you on this dry and lovely morning. [continue reading…]

“Everybody knows” that the cowardly Uvalde cops sat in the hall for over an hour while children were being shot and school police chief Arredondo gave the order to stand down, although of course the officers could have gotten the key or breached the doors or shot through the doors without hurting any children.

Except that we don’t know those things, although there certainly have been reports in the MSM stating them as facts or as obvious conclusions – much or all of the specific information coming from anonymous sources.

I would say that probably the vast majority of people who’ve followed this story believe a lot of things that haven’t been proven and that originate with unnamed sources talking to the MSM, or “experts” or pundits not paying attention to what we actually know and what we don’t. Haven’t we learned from previous experience not to trust those initial reports, especially anonymous ones, and to suspend harsh judgment until a lot more is known? And doesn’t that take time?

I’ve been asking a lot of questions as I try to sort it out. One of the things I’ve been waiting for is to hear from school police chief Arredondo. Well, now wait no more. You are free to think he’s lying through his teeth in his description of the ordeal, of course. But I think he just might be telling the truth. [continue reading…]

VIA A Large Regular: Remember to Be Real

Get right over to the new and improved () U.S. Ministry of Truth @ YouTube and subscribe and share to make this new channel the conduit of TROOTH!

Extraterrestrial Highway Rachel, Nevada [continue reading…]

From Brielle Dior [A great American. You’ll see.]

6.45K subscribers
[continue reading…]

BECAUSE now more than ever.

(Just where are all those iconic anti-war demonstrations from, well, just about everywhere over the last 60 years? Nowhere. Nowhere at all. They were all just a smile, a giggle, and then to be memory-holed by the enemies among us.)

Speaking just for myself my off-line notebook says:

(May 2, 2002) I see the dead, the “destroyed,” on both sides, the young soldiers on both sides with all their unlived years stolen by atomizing weapons sent by ghost fingers from armed and targeting robots lurking in the sky.

I find I don’t care at all anymore who “started it”…. Or why it started …. Or this provocation or that insult …. Or whether war by patriot or war by proxy or war by sending in endless ammunition and beta-tested weapons systems to see how well they kill in the mud, in the blood, in the red mist,  in the red rains ….  All of it …. ALL OF IT — ALL OF THEM … I hate and despise all of the Golems in Kyiv, in DC, in London, in China, in Moscow…  All of them, all the masters of war. I don’t know about others but I ain’t marching anymore.

I was conceived in war and born in peace. In my life, there has been the war during which I was conceived and that took the young man I am named after. Then there was the Korean War in which my uncle fought. Then there was the Vietnam war that came for me and which I dodged to my lasting shame. Then what? Falklands? Grenada? Others that have slipped away into the smoke of the war world? Then the wars of 911 and their endless debacle. And now what is presented to me as my choice? PUTIN OR PUTZ? That? That’s my CHOICE? My hope?

I decline the gambit.

I find can’t take “sides” anymore; no, not ever. No more lining up in my “Team USA Jersey” to root for or against some system whose bitter fruits are young men made into a red mist and shredded gobbets of flesh,  done by air or sniper,  by artillery, or by drone,  or with drone or under drone or done in ….  Done in by a drone; some sexless bee weapon wielded by some unseen queen? 

I see now that I at last, at long, long last,  stand outside all these trumped-up causes, these deadly and eternal failures. Today I stand to see and be repulsed but still made so ripe with despair that I have been (through the unremittingly rained bullshit of causes) made ready, primed  –once more once more — to “choose sides” ….

And so the whole cycle begins again and again and again… The snake that consumes its own tail. There. Out there where I can almost see it. Out there where Oruorborus circles the place where some demon will take control of some man and make him hatch the sun on the surface of the Earth. And what then? What then?

I find my thoughts, like thoughts of youth,  grow long.

Leaving Chicago after a full night of sleep, I tell Mack I might write only about the journey’s first half. “The rest will just be the same,” I predict, as thunder claps ominously overhead.

“Don’t say that!” she says. “We’re at the mercy of this goddamn spaceship.” She still hasn’t mastered the lie-flat door handles after three days.

As intense wind and rain whip around us, the car cautions, “Conditions have not been met” for its cruise-control system. Soon the battery starts bleeding life. What began as a 100-mile cushion between Chicago and our planned first stop in Effingham, Ill., has fallen to 30.

“If it gets down to 10, we’re stopping at a Level 2,” Mack says as she frantically searches PlugShare.
We feel defeated pulling into a Nissan Mazda dealership in Mattoon, Ill. “How long could it possibly take to charge the 30 miles we need to make it to the next fast station?” I wonder.
Three hours. It takes 3 hours.

I begin to lose my mind as I set out in search of gas-station doughnuts, the wind driving sheets of rain into my face.

Seated atop a pyramid of Smirnoff Ice 12-packs, Little Debbie powdered sugar sprinkled down the pajama shirt I haven’t removed in three days, I phone Mack. “What if we just risk it?” I say. “Maybe we’ll make it there on electrical fumes.”

“That’s a terrible idea!” she says, before asking me to bring back a bag of nuts.

‘Charge, Urgently!’

Back on the road, we can’t even make it 200 miles on a full charge en route to Miner, Mo. Clearly, tornado warnings and electric cars don’t mix. The car’s highway range actually seems worse than its range in cities.

Indeed, highway driving doesn’t benefit as much from the car’s regenerative-braking technology—which uses energy generated in slowing down to help a car recharge its battery—Kia spokesman James Bell tells me later. He suspects our car is the less-expensive EV6 model with a range not of 310 miles, as listed on Turo, but 250. He says he can’t be sure what model we were driving without physically inspecting the car.

“As we have all learned over many years of experience with internal combustion engine vehicles, factors such as average highway speed, altitude changes, and total cargo weight can all impact range, whether derived from a tank of gasoline or a fully charged battery,” he says.

To save power, we turn off the car’s cooling system and the radio, unplug our phones and lower the windshield wipers to the lowest possible setting while still being able to see. Three miles away from the station, we have one mile of estimated range.

“Charge, Urgently!” the dashboard urges. “We know!” we respond.

At zero miles, we fly screeching into a gas-station parking lot. A trash can goes flying and lands with a clatter to greet us. Dinner is beef jerky, our plans to dine at a kitschy beauty shop-turned-restaurant in Memphis long gone.

Then we start to argue. . .

RTWT AT: I Rented an Electric Car for a Four-Day Road Trip. I Spent More Time Charging It Than I Did Sleeping. – WSJ