A fascinating story about WalMart and how it seems to be a hotbed for crime. The article, from Bloomberg, mind you, makes the implication that it’s WalMarts fault for all the crime and this it is somehow taking advantage of overworked police departments.

It’s not unusual for the department to send a van to transport all the criminals Ross arrests at this Walmart. The call log on the store stretches 126 pages, documenting more than 5,000 trips over the past five years. Last year police were called to the store and three other Tulsa Walmarts just under 2,000 times. By comparison, they were called to the city’s single Target store 44 times. Most of the calls to the northeast Supercenter were for shoplifting, but there’s no shortage of more serious crimes, including five armed robberies so far this year, a murder suspect who killed himself with a gunshot to the head in the parking lot last year, and, in 2014, a group of men who got into a parking lot shootout that killed one and seriously injured two others.

I shop at WalMart for groceries. There is no doubt in my mind that WalMart id a good place to save a few bucks on things like groceries and housewares. However, because of those ‘everyday low prices’ it is also a magnet for the very low income. Now, not all very low income people are criminals or troublemakers….but many of those VLI people are VLI people because they’re scum. In other words, because they’re tweakers, drug users, criminals, gnagsters, and morons, thats the reason they’re very low income…not the other way around. A person can still be dirt poor and still be a good person…if they already started as one.

Anyway, this is the reason I never, ever go to WallyWorld without a pistol and a healthy dose of situational awareness. And a huge bottle of hand sanitizer in the vehicle.

The article goes on to say that the Target stores don’t have the same issue. Interestingly, in this town, Target has a rep for being *very* pro-active on the shoplifters. They take that stuff quite seriously and their loss-prevention guys sometimes wind up getting into law enforcement. Back in the day, Rudy Giuliani had the ‘broken window’ approach to crime fighting…previous administrations had let the little crimes (fare jumping, drinking in public, littering, etc) go ignored in the name of concentrating on the big crimes. Giuliani figured if you come down on the little crimes, you stop people from graduating to bigger crimes, improve quality of life, and reduce crime. To a degree, it worked. (There were some..uh..civil liberties…issues raised, but thats another story.)

As I used to tell someone, when there finally is a mass shooting event of some type in this town it’s gonna be at the Super WalMart. Sometimes its a freak show out there. Especially in the South.

At this moment, $15 a spool which is a crack-smokin’ price for commo wire for your TA-312 or anything else that needs some two-strand. Pricing will probably change as sales go up, so be early.

An article about folks moving into the neighborhood. And a nod to Friend Of The Blog ,Rawles.

ASKED by an out-of-stater where the nearest shooting range is, Patrick Leavitt, an affable gunsmith at Riverman Gun Works in Coeur d’Alene, says: “This is Idaho—you can shoot pretty much anywhere away from buildings.” That is one reason why the sparsely populated state is attracting a growing number of “political refugees” keen to slip free from bureaucrats in America’s liberal states, says James Wesley, Rawles (yes, with a comma), an author of bestselling survivalist novels. In a widely read manifesto posted in 2011 on his survivalblog.com, Mr Rawles, a former army intelligence officer, urged libertarian-leaning Christians and Jews to move to Idaho, Montana, Wyoming and a strip of eastern Oregon and Washington states, a haven he called the “American Redoubt”.

A report of a car full of men in body armor with semi-automatic weapons brought Lexington police to the Walmart on Richmond Road on Saturday night. Officers found two men, one in body armor, a 20-year-old woman and a six-month old baby.

Lt. Jackie Newman said that when Lexington police officers got the three people out of the car about 11:15 p.m., they said they were preparing for doomsday and needed supplies. A 26-year-old man and a 20-year-old woman were in the car with their 6-month-old baby and a 19-year-old man, police spokeswoman Brenna Angel said Monday.

Oh merciful Crom, it is *hot* out there…. someone get Putin on the phone and tell him to dial down the weather machine.

Some interesting tidbits from around the interwebs…….
When Dyeing PMAGs, Liquid Or Powdered Dye? – An interesting piece from TFB about dyeing sand-colored pmags to whatever color you happen to need. I generally don’t use plastic mags but color-coding magazines has some appeal to me. I’ve always liked bright orange magazines for range practice and this would be a good way to readily segregate ‘practice’ mags from ‘critical’ mags.

Citizen science takes on Japan’s nuclear establishment -DIY nuclear background monitoring. I’m a fan of empirical data over government supplied data. What’s interesting is that some placesdont want you to own early warning systems because you might misread them and cause panic. And, of course, you might stray from the ‘official’ reports.

The new Microgun – Smaller than an M4, but with a cyclic rate of about $1400 rpm. This really might bring the man-portable Jesse Ventura backpack electric gun into reality… these would make amazing suppressing-fire weapons for light vehicles and temporary facilities. I thought I read somewhere that someone was working on a version that ran off a cordless drill…..

And just for fun…rubber-band MP5 – Because.

Building for sale. Comes with: helicopter deck and 360-degree view of the Atlantic Ocean.

Wait, what?

The Chesapeake Light Tower – 14 miles off the coast of Virginia Beach – has both, and it hit the auction block last month.

I wonder if it’s far enough out there to be considered out of the US’ jurisdiction. History has several sea-stead attempts at creating sovereign micronations….I wonder if this would be another one.

You know that things like plastic bullets, beanbag rounds, rubber buckshot, etc. are called “Less-than-lethal”, right? It used to be they were called “non-lethal”, but the problem was that sort of title implied that you couldn’t kill anyone with itg. Sixty seconds on Google will show plenty of episodes of people getting brained with ‘non-lethal’ baton rounds and that sort of thing and winding up dead. So…the moniker “Non-lethal” was changed to less-than-lethal meaning that usually it won’t kill someone if you use it properly. A lot of distinctions there.

Many of the blogs I read advocate ‘self-sufficiency’ as a goal. They propose the dream house that is ‘off the grid’ and independent of the umbilical cords that connect us to the major infrastructure. This is all great if you can do it, but it’s a tall order. It seems that the choices are binary…you are ‘off the grid’ and ‘self-sufficient’ or you’re ‘on the grid’ and screwed. There hasn’t been a term for that in-between stage. I think that term is ‘less-than-dependent’. It implies that you aren’t self-sufficient, but you are more resilient to an infrastructure failure than those who are 100% dependent on that infrastructure. Let me give an example…

X has a house in town that has city water, city sewer, grid electric, natural gas, gets his groceries from the market, and that sort of thing. Z has a farm in the hills with a well, septic field, solar/wind generators and batteries, livestock and a huge garden, and all the other gee-whiz that we dream about. X is dependent and not self-sufficient, and Z is , by pretty much most definitions, independent and self-sufficient. Lethal vs. non-lethal. But is there an unrecognized or unacknowledged ‘in-between’? Take Y, who lives in the burbs or on the edge of town. He has his home set up just like X with it’s tie-in to ‘the grid systems’, and he doesn’t have the dedicated systems like Z….but he has backup generators, a cistern and pool full of water, a pantry loaded with food, a large propane tank to run his emergency heater and stove, etc, etc. He’s not 100% dependent, but he’s not 100% independent either. He is, I think, ‘less-than-dependent’.

I bring it up because sometimes I think we forget that it isn’t a binary choice…you’re either dependent or independent, self sufficient or not self sufficient. I think there’s a grey area in there and that grey area is where most of us are. I’m certainly not self-sufficient, in this context, but I’m far from dependent. I may not last as long as the guy out in the hills with his self-sufficient setup, but I’ll far, far outlast my totally dependent neighbors. We all want to leave the dependent stage, and I think we all want to reach the self-sufficient/independent stage, but we should recognize that less-than-dependent is still a huge step in the right direction. Some people may be okay with less-than-dependent, some people may see it as just a stop on their way to independent/self-sufficient, but…if you cannot get to that independent/self-sufficient stage, at least try to get to the less-than-dependent stage.

This is like finding out the call girl doesn’t *really* love you…..

The first time I bid on a freelance job to ghostwrite a doomsday survival guide, I was only asked one question: Did I have experience writing for middle-aged Republican men? I told the client that I had experience writing for a wide variety of ages and political affiliations, which was noncommittal enough to be true.

 

The client said, “Sounds good, bro.”

 

We were off to the races.

I highly doubt anyone here does this but:

As previously noted, Pokemon Go also requires extensive app permissions to run. And the Pokemon Go privacy policy states the company may share aggregated data with third parties, and identifiable user data with law enforcement agencies and other parties for a range of reasons it deems appropriate.

It isn’t hard to imagine that somewhere, “someone” wanted a way to bring millions of people into a program where they could be tracked, have their phone mined for data, and have who knows what other ‘third party’ stuff slipped into their phone. Disguise it as a game and people will line up to hand over their digital keys.

Or, perhaps it’s just a game.

But, to me, it’s just an unnecessary risk. If someone were to really want to play this game, I’d suggest buying a burner phone and using it instead. Expensive as hell, but you probably shouldnt be wasting your time playing this modified and rebranded version of geocaching anyway.