Well, that was a bit underwhelming. Forst of, it was, believe it or not, twelve bucks to walk in the door. Twelve! Thats, like, groceries for two days!

There were, maybe, about 30 vendors…there was the usual assortment of nylon gear and books. Also, beekeeping stuff, a couple realotors, some medical stuff, pocket stoves, essential oils, and a few other staples of these kinds of shows. But…all in all, not worth the drive and definitely not worth the price of admission.

On the other hand, I did try to salvage the trip by hitting a few gun stores and came across a place that had a a few 2nd Gen Glocks for sale for $300 ea.. so, not a total loss.

To be fair, this was the first time this sort of thing was held there and perhaps that accounts for the less than impressive showing of vendors, but if it isn’t significantly larger next year I’ll save my money and stay here in little ol’ Montana.

Off to Spokane tomorrow morning with a friend to attend a preparedness expo there. I’ve never been to one of these, so I’m quite curious how it’ll go. I expect lots of vendors of starge food, LifeStraws, firestarting, medical gear, and a lot of tinfoil headgear. Matter of fact, I’m going to keep my open for The Most Bizarre Vendor And Gear. Should be interesting.

I’m not really looking for anything myself. Although, you never know what you might come across. I’ll play it safe and try not to bring too much cash with me. I can resist anything except temptation.

Yeah, theres a distinct lack of posting lately. Real world stuff, Im afraid.

Oddly, you would think with all the tumult going on in the world there would be  no shortage of things to post about…zika, Trump vs. Tramp, wildfires, earthquakes, economic matters, etc, etc. Face it…it’s an interesting world out there.

I’ve been out doing some travel lately, hence the radio silence. It’s a big world and while parts of it are pretty and have some value, they are only a small fraction of the rest of the country. Yeah, Venice is pretty but as a whole Italy is pretty messed up. And the Acropolis looks awesome, but Greece is a Third World hole. So..yeah…the US has it’s issues but it’s better than most of the options.

So…Cruz has bowed out, much to my surprise. I was dead certain he’d be the party candidate (and I really still haven’t ruled it out completely). The only real question now is if the GOP will rally around the frontrunner or leave him to swing in the wind as a lesson to those who would deign to buck the party power players.

Regardless, I think we’re doomed…again. Im thinking it’s going to be President Hillary…but I am virtually certain it will be a one-term affair. Someone pointed out to me that as polarizing as both players are, even in their own party, there’s an excellent chance of gridlock. Dude, I’m pro-gridlock. Government that governs best, governs least.

And to try and stay somewhat on topic, while cleaning out a few things I managed to find a time capsule to the mid-90’s. Behold:

A box of the ol’ Black Talon ammo. Remember all that hand-wringing? How it would fly through a body like a buzzsaw…never mind that with most conventional rifling twists the bullet wouldnt even make a full revolution before exiting the body. Still, once the bad press hit the media Winchester folded it’s tent, took off the black coating, tinkered a bit, and relaunched it as Ranger SXT …where it sits in a lot of badged holsters. So…twenty year old ammo. Sure, it’ll work just fine but, really, who needs the headache of some zealous mouthbreather telling a jury how horrible you are for using ammo that is so evil it was pulled off the market.

Ah, the 90’s….the first half of that decade really was a fun one for guns.

I don’t know what I ate last night that prompted it, but I had some majorly weird dreams.

The biggest catalyst was that I watched a couple DVR’d episodes of “Fear The Walking Dead”.  I swear, the mom on that show is making me root for the zombies. In fact, in my head I refer to her as ‘Andrea 2’, after the loathed character from TWD. My biggest complaint is that her and her family are living comfortably on the boat of the mysterious Mr. Strand, and he really has no duty or obligation to her or her family at this point, and yet she feels she can order him to ‘stop the damn boat’ every time she wants to pick up squalling refugees…risking her family, his boat, and everything else to satisfy her imagined moral superiority.

For the love of Crom, can we please kill this woman off? Please??

But keep this guy..he’s, like, a dozen shades of cool. (Trivia: this man has a Harvard law degree)

Which, naturally, messed with my subconscious and I had a weird dream. I dreamt it was after some great disaster and I helped my neighbor. He was worried he and his family were going to starve and I gave him some food. When he remarked that he didnt want to put me at a disadvantage I said not to worry..I had plenty. And then he just magically assumed that he could have whatever he wanted…and started helping himself to my stores. For whatever reason, I didnt have a gun on me and after he helped himself to some food, a couple bicycles, and some other stuff, he left and I started worrying about if he was going to come back demanding more because, as he said, I ‘have so much’ and he had ‘ so little’. And I worried he was going to tell other people and I’d be overrun with demands for supplies. And then I thought “Well, if he comes back demanding more I’m just going to have to shoot him.” (Which is ungood because i really have no desire to shoot anybody..but I also have no desire to be stripped bare by locusts and left to starve. Grasshoppers are on their own.)

Definitely makes a case for ‘anonymous giving’,  but also makes an even stronger case for keeping your dang mouth shut. And a really strong case for having a secondary location set up. And, finally, it’s a good starting point for deep thinking about just how charitable (or uncharitable) you feel comfortable being.

Really, it’s hitting the point where I’d almost say there’s an industry-wide ‘gentlemans agreement’ going on to get as many AR’s out there as possible before November.

This article was interesting to read. It posits that it isn’t enough for science to learn to predict catastrophic events, science also has to learn how to get that information to people in such a way that they actually do something about it.

This is a fair example of a term that we see pop up from time to time but no one ever really explains – normalcy bias. Wikipedia, naturally, defines it but the short version is this: you’re used to planes NOT hitting skyscrapers, you’re used to people NOT running into a bar and shooting the place up with AKs, you’re used to the earth NOT suddenly shaking and toppling buildings…and when an event like that does finally happen, many people’s brains, not being used to thinking about such things, kinda freeze up. That’s normalcy bias. That’s also why we wargame stuff…fire drills, for example.

Another buzzword that became popular and still pops up is ‘Black Swan’, as in “a Black Swan event”. Again, wikipedia helps us out. A Black Swan event is something that is so statistically rare and infrequently occurring that you can’t really predict it’s occurrence. It is important to note that a Black Swan event is NOT always negative…the development of the internet, for example. One of the criteria for something being a Black Swan event, as stated by the guy who brought the term into popular use, is that it is a complete surprise, it has a huge impact, and it is Monday Morning Quarterbacked afterwards. It is also subjective…whats a Black Swan to you may not be a Black Swan to someone else. An excellent example is this idiot. A power outage occurs, they suffer, and then they rationalize it…and add a dose of normalcy bias to justify their failure.

I was watching a really bad disaster show on SyFy last night. Typical midwestern farm town, huge black clouds ominously roll across the sky and the townspeople…walk out of their shops and stand in the middle of the street to watch. And they continue to stand there as it approaches, hurling debris and automobiles in their general direction. Why? Because they’re slack-jawed at never having seen such things before. You’d think someone would have the brains to turn around, run back in the building, get on the phone, warn their family, and then hustle to the basement. Normalcy bias.

While the Black Swan event is, by definition, unpredictable we can still prepare for consequences even if we can’t predict the event. We don’t know if it’s going to be a flood, tornado, earthquake, the return of Xenu, planet X, or Red Dawn….but we can be pretty sure of what the consequences will be – electrical failure, infrastructure issues, communication issues, etc, etc. And we can prepare for those. I think for most of us, we’re a bit past normalcy bias because we tend to think a good deal about ‘what if’ situations.

Preparing for the ‘Black Swan’ type of event reminds me of the ‘Tenth Man‘ response. In fact, go watch the video…the Mossad guy gives some very good examples of normalcy bias.

Anyway, ‘normalcy bias’ and ‘Black Swan’ are two buzzwords that seem to appear more and more in various articles on the subject of preparedness and I thought it might be a good idea to explore them.

When they get to $400, I’m going all in.