Years ago, I used to have a friend who was a somewhat well-known character in computing circles. One day, in his home that he had wired and re-wired many times to accommodate his expanding home-technology fetish, a couple wires started smoking and started a small fire within the wall of the house. My friend punched a small hole in the wall, ran a garden hose in, and put out the fire. I asked why he didnt simply call the fire department. He replied that if the fire department arrived they would have torn apart the entire wall, despite his protests, and basically destroyed the place to get to the fire. He figured his small hole in the wall would give him enough access and patch up pretty easily.

New York has quite the diamond/jewelry district. When a burglar alarm goes off, the cops respond but aren’t permitted entry to the store (by previous agreement). The reason is because if a handful of cops run into an unattended jewelry store in the middle of the night looking for someone, the odds are fairly high their pockets will be bulging on the way out.

So, what do these two stories have in common? In both cases, someone determined that the value provided by having ‘official’ response to an emergency was not worth the suspected risk.

I was thinking about that as the plumber was installing a new shutoff valve in my house today. I was thinking about having a line run off the house water line to a small hose bib tucked under the stairs or under the kitchen sink. Purpose? Indoor firefighting. I keep a goodly supply of fairly substantial fire extinguishers around…but if my kerosene heater ignites something in a major way, a flat hose coiled under the sink might come in handy. I’m certainly in no hurry to have civil authorities in my house for any reason. Last thing I want is the fire department responding to a grease fire that got away from me and them passing a note to the feds about an unusually large amount of ammo in some guys basement.

Not sure of the merits, though. I mean, it sounds like a good idea on its face. A compact coil of hose in an out-of-the-way spot ready to go at a moments notice. But I suppose I could get the same effect if I just ran into the yard and threaded the garden hose through the window. Not sure. Whaddya think? Brilliant? Good Idea? Meh? Stupid? Idiotic?
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Never gets old.

Once in a while I get an email stating that someone donated to the Bunker Equipage Fund. I believe the default setting is for a buck. Some folks throw in more than that, but usually its a buck or five. Once in a very, very rare while someone actually sets up a repeating donation…again usually a buck, but one or two people kick in five bucks a month.

Lately, there has been a small spike in one-time one dollar donations. I figured I should make a post and say thanks for contributing to the delinquency of a(n emotional) minor.

Where’s it all go? Well, mostly to hosting fees and domain renewal. The amount contributed annually is usually right around enough that any difference out of my pocket is pretty small. I’d say that over the course of a year, maybe 10-15 donations show up in my mailbox. And I am grateful for every one of them.

If you ever decide that I’m just too darn [funny/pathetic/insightful/woke/clever/virile] to not have some sort of reward bestowed upon me…well, there’s an app for that:

So, thank you, again, to the kind folks that have ponied up a few greenbacks to help a somewhat-deserving survivalist continue to abuse the blogosphere.

Brazil’s conservative president Michel Temer has ordered the army and federal police to clear highways blockaded by striking truck drivers after a protest over soaring fuel prices entered its fifth day.

The blockades have paralysed much of the country’s economy and prompted São Paulo, the biggest city in South America, to declare a state of emergency over fuel shortages.

…..

In São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, supermarkets and restaurants are running low on supplies. Some factories have shut down, bus services been reduced and even the Refugees World Cup, scheduled to take place in São Paulo on Saturday, has been cancelled.

“Truckers strike” is one of those things that pops up in old school survivalist books (Tappan, for example) on a list of ‘things that will cause nationwide chaos.”

It’s awesome that we live in a world where Amazon can get us a 50# bag of Purina Coed Chow and case of duct tape to our doorstep the next day, but without the mechanisms in place to actually deliver those products….it kinda falls apart.

Take supermarkets for example…when I was a kid, supermarkets had huge cavernous basements where they stored, literally, tons of product to replensih their shelves. Nowadays they rely on the ‘Just In Time’ delivery method to reduce overhead and inventory costs….at the expense of being caught short if something disrupts that supply chain.

I suppose the best way to deal with an anticipated disruption of the delivery network is to get as much material (and materiel) from as close-to-home sources as possible. But I suppose if there’s a critical item that you have to order in from across the nation, that might be an item you want to ‘go heavy’ on or find an alternative to.

I can’t recall of a US truckers strike that paralyzed commerce, but I haven’t really looked too hard either. But it doesn’t have to be a truckers strike…some sort of major in the fuel supply could probably produce a similar result.

Preparedness is all about contingency planning. Disruptions to the supply chain are just one of those potential failure points that needs to be examined…its just that in this country we virtually never have nationwide labor disputes that bring things to a screeching halt. (Closest thing I can recall is the PATCO strike that was ended rather forcefully by Reagan.)

Smaller countries, of course, don’t need much to tip things into the danger zone. The US would seem an unlikely place to suffer a similar level of chaos…we’re so big, and you’d have to get a lot of people on the same page to make a big impact.

Anyway, an interesting story to point out a possible failure point that may not have been previously examined.

A P89 leaves, a P95DC enters. Equilibrium is maintained.

Speaking of Equilibrium, if you like over-the-top gunplay, these two scenes from Equilibrium are some my favorite Hollywood gun fu:

Of course it’s unrealistic and you have to suspend disbelief…thats what makes it fun. Trivia: there’s only a certain amount of decapitations and bullets-through-the-head that you can do in a movie without risking an R or X movie rating for violence. But…if the head in question does not look like a face….if it’s in a helmet, for example…you can bloodily destroy as many as you want. So when you see a lot of bad guys wearing full-face helmets, you can be assured theres going to be a lot of violent head trauma coming up.
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The last post about money was interesting in that the comments had more than one person saying they try to be ‘ahead’ on their repeating monthly bills to allow themselves a cushion. You know, I actually do that too. One month I accidentally paid all my bills twice. Th next month, I figured I’d keep paying as I normally do and I’d have that credit laying there in case I needed to concentrate my resources elsewhere. So, I came to it by accident but it has come in handy. However, I do see the point that it is more limiting than just having that same amount available in cash stuffed in the bottom of the gun safe.

Oh..and payday was yesterday, so the emergency fund is back to normal and I can get back to my current financial goals.
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Three-day weekend. I’m going to try and get to the range, but we’ll see how that works out. I have a ton of stuff to catch up on and a three day weekend would be ideal for doing it. Among other things, I need to take an ammo inventory and possibly spend a few hours in front of the Dillon RL1050 cranking out 9mm.

And there’s also the usual sundry crap….laundry, housecleaning, etc, etc. I tell ya, after the apocalypse there’s going to be a platoon of desperate coeds in French maids outfits handling this sorta thing for me.

Oh…and I might take a few hours to stat watching the new season of Fear The Walking Dead. I’ve got it all on the video recorder…I just haven’t gotten around to watching it. Maybe I’ll do that to get my motivation up to run the Dillon.

Everytime I thaw a pork tenderloin and lay it out in the baking tray, all I can think is how much they look like chestbursters from Aliens. Trivia: In the movie Alien, the cast was not told that the alien was going to burst forth from the other actors chest. They had no idea what was happening when the chestburster exploded out of the other actor. Those surprised looks? Not acting. #dammitridleyscottthatwasmylastcleanpairofunderwear
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So we all figure that after the apocalypse we’ll be using silver and .22 ammo to buy our lapdances and Twinkies, right? Well, Uncle Sam had other ideas..four billion of them, in fact. In cash.

New York and DC are piles of ash, but at least your checks are clearing. That was the idea behind the Culpeper Switch, a sprawling bunker built by the Federal Reserve to keep the banks running after nuclear apocalypse. But even some Cold War-era politicians thought it was silly.

The compound was built just outside the small town of Culpeper, Virginia, near Mount Pony, in 1969. The 135,000 square foot facility was officially called the Federal Reserve System’s Communications and Records Center, and it housed about $4 billion of American currency during the 1970s — currency sitting in what was reportedly the world’s largest single-floor vault at the time.

Edgar Quisneberry would have been quite pleased.

If someone has been scrambling fissionables to the point that the fed has to crack open their Scrooge McDuck-ian vault, then things have hit the point where those greenbacks only utility is as kindling. When I finally climb out of my basement after a couple weeks of watching the dosimeters, I’m going to be inclined to trade a package of crackers-n-cheese for anything other than greenbacks.