Tag Archives: history

Mary Mallon

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All this talk about asymptomatic people carrying a virus without knowing it and infecting others brings to mind the story of … Mary Mallon.

No doubt the more astute medical types will recognize the name, but for the rest of us she was better known as Typhoid Mary.

TL,DR version: In the early 20th century a functionally illiterate Irish woman wound up being a carrier for typhoid fever. Mind you, she seemed pretty healthy and had no reason to think she was sick..but wherever she went and worked as a cook…people got sick and died.

Eventually, in some pioneering medical investigatory process, the NYC health people figured out that Mar was making other people sick. The record is a little unclear if they tried to explain it to her but it isn’t hard to imagine that someone with her lack of education might not grasp the idea of being a carrier. All she knew was that the one marketable skill she had was being taken away from her. So, she nodded her head, said she’d stop cooking, and went right on cooking for more families who mysteriously got sick.

Eventually the health department locked her up, quite against Mary’s will, and she wound up spending the rest of her life on North Brother Island.

If you’d like to read the more detailed version, and follow some of the legal wranglings that locked her up, try this and this.

In a time where many people chafe at the notion of .gov forcing restrictions upon them in the name of the ‘public health’ it’s interesting to see how far some municipalities went.

Cue the music………

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Well, first thing you gotta do is set the mood. So….theme music.

And now, the backstory.

You youngun’s might not remember, but back in the day when you wanted a .223 ‘assault rifle’ you pretty much had two choices – a genuine Colt AR-15 or, if you were on a budget, a Ruger Mini-14. Now, back then you could get your Mini-14 in a couple special flavors. Most notably, the ‘GB’ model. The GB, it is said, stood for ‘government bayonet’ in that it was the ‘government’ (military/police) model and featured a bayonet mount.

Mini-14 GB model.

There was also a model of GB that featured a rather interesting folding stock. You can see it in pretty much any episode of the A-Team.

The movie was actually pretty good.

Unlike the TV show, where they dumped a couple mags every episode and never hit anybody.

The folding stock was…interesting. Like all folding stocks it was , at best, merely adequate as a stock but the cool factor was off the charts.

When the ‘Assault Weapons’ ban of 1994 rolled around, Bill Ruger, the guy in charge at Ruger, famously opined that no honest man needs more than ten rounds in his gun.

In addition to not being willing to sell mags holding more than 10 rounds to anyone except Only Ones, Billy Ruger also pulled the folding stock Mini-14 from ‘civilian’ sales. Fortunately, Bill Ruger died before the Assault Weapons ban sunsetted in 2004 and at that point the company was now making smart decisions that didn’t alienate its core customer base. Thus, not only were magazines flowing freely again, Ruger even introduced guns that would have probably never come out if Bill Ruger was still breathing.

But…the folding stock fo the Mini-14 was absent.

To the best of my knowledge, Ruger never reintroduced the folding stock for the Mini-14. I suppose they might have done some for contract sales to an agency somewhere but these days the odds of some agency saying “No, no…lets skip the AR-pattern guns and instead buy a more expensive gun with 1940’s ergonomics, a proprietary magazine, and a history of questionable accuracy” seem mighty slim.

But nature, and the free market, abhor a vacuum. And so some enterprising outfit not only is bringing back the folder, but Ruger, according to the article, even gave them their moulds to do it. Read about it here.

I picked up a couple Mini-14’s last year, including a GB model. And while the Mini-14 is, basically, a range toy for me I still desperately want one of these stocks to slap on it for no real practical reason except…dammit…it’s cool.

So, the folks who are supposed to be developing it still don’t have it on their website but SHOT show is this month and I expect it to be introduced there and then available for pre-order. But…I will get one, yes.

And, of course, everyone who thinks that they are being clever will post some sort of comment about ‘a plan comes together’ or ‘pity the fool’. Yeah..not actually clever.

 

Article – The Deadliest Marksman’s Cold, Brave Stand

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The war was nearly over on March 6, 1940. The enemy, propagandized as an unstoppable fighting machine, was indeed overwhelming the army of the country they’d invaded. Six days later, the aggressors would finally force an armistice, and soon grab control of much of the land they’d coveted. It had taken longer than the two weeks they’d anticipated, but conditions were harsh, the defenders far more resolute than expected. For more than three months, battlefields roared with motoring tanks, gunfire and artillery explosions, obliterating the natural beauty of the countryside. Through it all, one warrior emerged as perhaps the finest killer in military history, on a mission to serve his besieged nation by picking off foreign attackers — many, many of them — one by one with a sniper rifle.

I sincerely doubt there is anyone here reading this blog who doesn’t know the story of the Finnish version of Hathcock. But, it’s a good article, since many are written from the perspective of gun boffins and military buffs…this one, it seems, is written more objectively.

For those of you out there with Mosin’s sitting in the closet, there’s a few sentences about a drill where 16 shots at 500 feet on a target in one minute is mentioned. Possible? Not possible? Grassy-knoll level of expertise required? You decide.

Good article, worth the read.

Article – ‘Here We Go. The Chaos Is Starting’: An Oral History of Y2K

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Twenty years ago, we were all pretty sure the world was going to end on January 1, 2000—or, if not the world, then at least civilization.

It had something to do with how most computer programs used the last two digits to represent a four-digit year, and when the clock rolled over at the end of 1999, every computer would think it was 1900. When that happened, ATMs would stop working, the electrical grid would shut down, planes would fall out of the skies, and newborn babies would get hundred-year-old birth certificates.

Ah, the nostalgia. There really were people who drained their 401k’s and bought cinder block houses in the middle of the desert to ride it all out. If you were a journalist of any stripe back then, you were finding the most freaked out people you could find and putting them on camera to talk about the ‘extremes’ that they were going through to prepare.

Good times, good times. That was twenty years ago this Tuesday. My how time flies. The most interesting thing to come out of it all? John Titor. Well, that and some really interesting garage sales for the next few years. That Y2k legacy of garage sales still rears its head once in a while.

Pearl Harbor Day

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A quiet Sunday morning…you’re listening to the radio, maybe getting ready for church, and you woke up in a world where your biggest worry was the oil leak in your car. And by the end of that same day the nation is marching to war and no one’s lives are untouched. Imagine what that must have been like…you woke up to orange juice and eggs and went to bed with a global war. The lesson there is that your whole life can change in just a moment. So..we prepare.

Link – Prehistoric Preppers: A Look Back at Pre-Y2K Survival Gear and Conventional Wisdom

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Last month I mentioned that this year is the twenty-year anniversary of the Great Y2K Scare. I happen to be bopping around the interwebs and came across this dated-but-still-interesting piece about how things have changed preparedness-wise since then.

As a child in the 1980s who came of age in the 1990s. I lived through an odd era of the gun culture. With the collapse of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War, a lot of survivalists and those preparing for WWIII suddenly had less to worry about…until President Clinton was elected and the threat that Y2K posed became a thing.

Thinking back on such a time, I now laugh at a lot of the ideas and beliefs that ran rampant in certain segments of the population. But exist they did.

I like how “…will get you killed.” is the punchline to every disagreed upon evaluation of a piece of gear…”that [AK/Baofong/Sleeping bag/knife/gas can] will get you killed”. That’s pretty much darn near becoming a trope.

The bit about the lack of AR ubiquity has a bit of truth to it. Back then it was pretty much an AR or AK world with the occasional Mini-14 or HK thrown in just to keep the diversity thing going. But if you had an AR it wasn’t nearly the exercise in ballistic Lego that it is now. Maybe you changed the sling around and found a carry-handle-mounted scope. Other than that, it was a stock A2 or CAR. So, yeah, that changed.

I wonder sometimes whatever happened to those people I saw on the news with the desert scrubland retreats that they bought and cavernous basements of 5-gallon buckets. Did they follow through and keep the lifestyle? Or did they pack it all up, ship it to Goodwill, and move on to a different cause célèbre?

I will say, my thinking has shifted a tiny bit since then. While it’s strongly about being prepared, there is a larger note of resiliency. I’ve come to realize, maybe a bit late, that the small End Of The Worlds will happen far more frequently and often than the big End Of The Worlds. Those small EOTW’s look like job layoffs, house fires, illnesses, car problems, etc, etc. And while five-gallon buckets of wheat will come in handy in Mad Max-ville, they aren’t going to do much to get a transmission repaired next week. So…smart spending, smart saving, smart lifestyle….and underneath all of that, the constant and steady incremental activity of getting things more prepared, more resilient, and more resistant to ‘problems’.

Anyway, its an interesting little article and, for those of us old enough to remember, a fun little poke at an interesting time in our shared collective survivalist past.

The upcoming 20th anniversary of……..

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I realized something today as I was trolling around through my library of various survival books. Do you guys know what this December is? Think about it a moment….what happened 20 years ago this December? Correct! It will be the 20th anniversary of The Great Y2K Scare!

An interesting book at the time, it’s downright amusing to read now. Technology, especially on alternative energy systems, has changed so much in price and performance that the recommendations in this book are like reading Tappan’s “Survival Guns” and being amused at the anachronistic recommendations. HOWEVER, what worked twenty years ago would work now, just not as efficiently or economically…so there is still some merit here.

Ah, remember that? We were going to have to face the apocalypse with 10-rd magazines and nothing to fix our bayonets to because the Assault Weapons Ban was still in effect. I remember seeing news articles about True Believers selling the condo in California’s wine country and buying scrub land in Arizona to build a bunker, fence it in, and ride out the massive civil disturbance that would happen as we all suddenly found ourselves in a Stirling/Kunstler/Forstchen novel. Everyone laughed and pointed fingers at people who were concerned over it while secretly doing a little extra shopping and stockpiling.

With hindsight being 20/20 and all, we know now that Y2K turned out to be prety much a bust. The following summer there were some fascinating garage sales as people sheepishly sold off their new-in-box generators and whatnot. But, just as people started laughing at the foolishness of the preparedness crowd we had the Septenber 11th terrorist attacks and suddenly having a few goodies tucked away didnt seem so unreasonable.

Its a toss up as to which thing made preparedness more mainstream…Y2k or 9/11. Either one, on its face, wouldn’t have been enough but the two events (or non-event, I suppose) together within a short timeframe….thats a different story. But, that was almost twenty years ago and many people who jumped on the bandwagon after those events have probably slacked off a good bit. However, those of us who were of that mind before those events took it as validation of our beliefs and continued apace with the conviction of the vindicated.

9/11 also sent a whole generation of people into the military and overseas where a good chunk of them, now in their 30’s and 40’s, got exposed to what the rest of the workd is like when you’re away from the relative civility of the First World and it’s people. I’ve met plenty of Afghanistan/Iraq vets who were not into preparedness, but I’ve never met one who thought it was stupid. They have a perspective that people who have never been to Third World violence-fests simply don’t have.

I do recall sitting around at midnight on New Years Eve 1999 with an AR across my lap waiting to see what happened. As it turned out….virtually nothing. Certainly nothing catastrophic to my world. Oh, maybe there were some isolated incidents here and there of time locks not functioning, extremely localized grid failures, that sort of thing….but a Purge-like, blood-in-the-streets, we’re-on-our-own sort of situation? Nope.

It was about ten years before I finally used up all the rice I had laid back, and I’m fairly confident theres still a few ammo cans of .38 and .308 ammo sitting in storage from that era. A lot of the consumables (toilet paper, batteries, canned goods, etc.) were used and replaced as time went on, so no real waste there. I would guess that the only real ‘wasted effort’ was that instead of finding a New Years Eve party to attend for the big event I chose to hole up in my house with a very attentive eye and ear on the news.

But, of course, the world is a somewhat different place now. Terrorism was something that happened overseas, digital infrastructure attacks were a theory, people with too many vowels in their name limited themselves to blowing up cars in distant lands, and no one got strip searched for trying to bring more than 3 oz. of shampoo on an airplane. I would guess that the reasons to be prepared are even more pressing than they were then. :::shrug::: Makes no difference to me. Even if the world suddenly turned into a quiet, peaceful place tomorrow I’d still keep a secret room in the house….just in case.

 

 

Wayback Machine: Ruger/Smith ad flamewar

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I was talking to someone about Ruger revolvers today and it reminded me of one of the more direct in-your-face advertising tit-for-tats that Ruger and Smith and Wesson have back in the late 80’s/early90’s. Ruger had some print ads out stating that their guns were more stout that the Smiths and you could tell this immediately because the Rugers were thicker, beefier guns.

S&W didn’t take this laying down and came up with an awesome drop-the-mic without using Ruger by name, but those grips left no doubt who the ad was pointed at.

Smith goes on to call out the ‘bulkier’ competitor revolvers and their porous castings. Honestly, I hadn’t seen a flamewar between two bigtime gunmakers like this since then.

And, you can really tell how old this ad is by the fact that it’s two big name manufacturers defending revolvers.

Ah, those were the days.

Blasts from the past

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Here’s why my Roth is underfunded:

But, with most .223 running around $0.32/@ it seemed like a nice way to get some blasting ammo. For you young bucks who are too young to remember, back before Slick Willy was flavoring his cigars with brunettes we could buy cheap Chinese guns and ammo. How cheap? You could get an SKS and a case of 7.62×39 for about $125-150. Seriously. My UPS guy hated me. Quality-wise it was…interesting. At one point even Chinese gunpowder (hey, they invented the stuff, right?) was on the market very briefly until it turned out that it was basically fireworks powder..it had a burn rate measured in Planck time. Their ammo was a mixed bag…always dirty, often underpowered, but always cheap. Kinda made Wolf look like Federal. All those SKS rifles you see these days were purchased because ammo was nine cents per round.

But, if you were just going to the range to break rocks and make noise…well, it was a pretty good deal. I know a lot of people who salted away cases and cases of this stuff. Not my first choice for Der Tag, but some ammo is (usually) better than no ammo.

This stuff? I’ll probably just use it for playing around with the Mini-14’s.Box says brass case but believe it when I see it. As Uncle Duke says…