ol remus and the woodpile report

Make sure you're reading the

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Warning: Remus is a non-PhD blogger, therefore the Federal Reserve has awarded Woodpile Report the status of Uninformed.

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Regime-speak

You're about to be lied to by the regime when they say ...

growing support for
mounting opposition to
the reality is
the larger question is
the more important question is
the bigger issue is
broader implications
our nation's children
fully funded
linked to
touched by
raising awareness
on some level
demand action
a new study shows
in denial
marginalized
the American People
sends a message
reaching out
inappropriate
off our streets
history shows
the failed ...
arguably
greater diversity
disenfranchised
people of color
insensitivity
social justice
cycle of poverty
most vulnerable
disproportionately
economically disadvantaged
disparate impact
oppressed minorities
the struggle for
solidarity with
outreach
stakeholders
shared values
root cause
working families
underserved populations
diverse backgrounds
vibrant community
too many
too often
a hand up
cycle of poverty
cycle of violence
give back
a positive step
positive outcome
best practices
non-partisan, non-profit
speaking truth to power
making a difference
statistics show
emerging consensus
a poll by the highly respected
reaffirm our commitment to
voicing concern
are speaking out
redouble our efforts
giving voice to
empower
enhance
making bad choices
have issues
divisive
inclusive environment
commonsense solutions

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Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals
Tactics of the Left

Rule 1: Power is not only what you have, but what the enemy thinks you have

Rule 2: Never go outside the experience of your people.

Rule 3: Whenever possible, go outside the experience of the enemy.

Rule 4: Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.

Rule 5: Ridicule is man's most potent weapon

Rule 6: A good tactic is one your people enjoy.

Rule 7: A tactic that drags on for too long becomes a drag.

Rule 8: Use different tactics and actions and use all events of the period.

Rule 9: The threat is more terrifying than the thing itself.

Rule 10: Maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.

Rule 11: If you push a negative hard and deep enough, it will break through into its counterside.

Rule 12: The price of a successful attack is a constructive alternative.

Rule 13: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, polarize it.

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1939

1939-california-tulelake-migrant-potato-pickers
Migrant potato picker's camp, Tulelake California, 1939

A migrant potato worker's camp in Tulelake, on the northern border of California, near Medford Oregon. Migrant families picked, processed and boxed potatoes, then moved on to other seasonal work. Tulelake is still a potato producing area.

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Bugout bags

Is a bugout bag ever done? Well, there will come a day when it is, perforce, but until then they're a work in progress. When Remus says bugout bag, he doesn't mean those bags (plural) you throw into your vehicle when the Big Evil happens, stuff that will sustain you and yours for an extended stay away from home. Those are provisions for an involuntary camping trip in a moderately sketchy environment. It has scented wet wipes for mi'lady, compact little games for the kids and zero degree sleeping bags all 'round. Provisions are carefully chosen for variety and eye appeal, the first aid kit is heavy on bug bite lotions and the tent gets rave reviews for comfort and style.

Then there is the more interesting bugout bag. The real bugout bag. The one you have for bugging out the back door when one Mau Mau or another are crashing through the front door. This bugout bag exists within a universe of stories familiar to all who nurse an internal doomsday dialogue, you know, the one with the I told you so motif wrapped around a Robinson Crusoe adventure, except with deciduous trees and centerfire cartridges. The story where Rule One applies: this game is no game. Background music by Wagner and special effects by FEMA.

This is the bag we lavish our attention on. It's a guy thing, a behind enemy lines thing, a new moon and Marine crawl thing. Everything's camouflaged or stainless steel or mindful of infrared. The FFI would have killed for our kit, the CIA would rewrite their manuals if they only knew. That's the bugout bag we're talking about here. Even the straps have straps. The carabiners are in matte no-glare, maybe even Woodland. Somewhere we have a picture of it with the contents laid out, inventory style. The picture is a month old and mostly out of date. Late at night we wonder if there's room for a thermos-size cold fusion generator. If we had a thermos-size cold fusion generator. That bag.

One of Remus's go-to sources is ol' Commander Tom. Like everybody else he has his Doomsday defined in a cause-and-effect theory worthy of its own quantum mechanics subset, and a nicely developed grudge against those who got us into this mess, also in granular detail, and a fine and unrelenting eye for worthy upgrades to his kit, and therefore to Remus's kit. This column citing a little bivvy pack for instance, nice for those of us with backs deficient as-issued.

As long as we're citing blogs, there's Mayberry, Remus's go-to guy for a good slap up 'side the head when he strays from ground level reality. And as it happens, ol' Remus misspent part of his youth at Caribbean venues so he shares a certain resonance with the good Master of the Ocean Seas. Mayberry's main rant is Keep It Simple Survival. And look for his stories in the left hand column, under My Fiction.

And there's ol' James Dakin. The unfortunate thing for us is that James missed coming of age as a trust fund kid in the '50s, if he had, English 101 would consist mainly of book reports and commentary about his stuff. As it is, ol' Jim treats his impecunious circumstances with a Thoreau-like accounting of effective frugality. When he's in High Dakin Dudgeon it matters not which miscreants he's whipping into a blood-bespeckled froth, the read's the thing. He's at Bison Survival Blog. Why bison? Remus doesn't know. If he were choosing a symbol for survival, bison wouldn't be it.

Back to bugout bags. The ideal bugout bag would weigh exactly nothing, less if it could be managed. Therefore, actual bugout bags are a compromise, but a quantifiable compromise. They should weigh about one tenth your body weight, half again that if you're really fit. Y'gotta be honest with yourself. And so it is we favor vacuum-packed freeze-dried food in mylar packaging that serves as its own rehydration container. In fact, combination everythings are favored. For instance, a machete with a sawback serves as knife, ax and wood saw, the downside being that it's an unhandy knife, a third-rate ax and a barely adequate woodsaw. Sort of like the flying cars thing. Yet we imagine our acute embarrassment at being caught without, say, just the right tool for those quirky vending machine fasteners—people might think we didn't know.

We agonize over each item. How to start a fire, for instance. It had better work in the rain natch, but can we use it with one benumbed hand if we've just pulled ourself out from under the ice, does it have a shelf-life, and on and on. How much is another thing. Is thirty feet of paracord enough? A hundred? How about if we wrap every handle with paracord and use braided paracord as keepers? Each cubic inch of one thing is that much less for something else. Then there's first aid. Do we put up a kit suitable for routine cuts and punctures, maybe also a square of moleskin and some naproxin sodium, or do we outfit ourselves with a mini-EMT kit and teach ourselves heart bypass surgery.

Then there's the bag itself. One marketing maxim says you'll never go broke selling Americans things to get organized. It's as if we were constantly training for submarine duty. Nowhere else in the world will you find customers for shoe compartments that slip under the bed. So we see bags with a maze of internal dividers and zippered pockets, but those weigh up all by themselves, especially if (inexplicably) lined for waterproofing. And worse, compartments pre-allocate the space available for individual components. If they were offered on a bespoke basis this would make sense, otherwise no.

Premium bags marketed to serious hikers are, unfortunately, offered in color schemes that make circus advertising look restrained, as if they should be topped off with a rotating light and a kazoo. And they assume the user will install personal hydration plumbing just short of intravenous, so valuable real estate is devoted to that, um, need. For the record, Remus favors rollups and ziplocks in a bag finished with one of the mossy oak patterns. He adores simplicity so his hydration system is a canteen. That's it. No schematic required, no bite-valves included. Just fill and take a gravity-assisted pull as needed. Tested and approved by generations of Boy Scouts and GIs.

Bugout bags can't help but express the druthers of their owners, their assumptions about the prevailing environment, their expected obstacles and threats. Some will emphasize shelter, others arms or food or tools. Some will have considerable communications gear, others won't have so much as a transister radio. It's a form of poverty, of studied minimalism, of knowing where to be more self-reliant than elsewhere, of providing means and equipment at the expense of deep resources, a balance of durables and consumables based on anticipated prospects for resupply, and of our weaknesses and our strengths and our fears.

A bugout bag infers its purpose, namely: to safely make it to a better location, perhaps to pre-positioned supplies, maybe somewhere that also offers resources for long term habitability, or perhaps to an established enclave or a prearranged meeting place. Bugout bags are for the interim, that debatable space and time between where you are and where you're going. In anticipation it's the stuff of adventure, man on the run, outsmarting or evading danger where it can't be overcome. In fact it would probably be a rerun of the refugee experience throughout time, one of deprivation and anxiety and insecurity, easily becoming one of terror and desperation and agony. So it is we calculate our real bugout bag with care and cheerful optimism. It's our edge, our ace in the hole, our hand up to ourselves.

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Now it begins. In England. The government is helping itself to bank accounts it defines as dormant. We predict a run on mattresses and cans suitable for burial in the back yard.
(h/t Drudge)

Mac Slavo at SHTFPlan has an unsettling story of National Guard deployments in the Gulf states, including roadblock exercises. Includes audio (10m 49s)

Starting January 2012, purchases and sales of silver or gold coins amounting to $600 or more must be reported to the Internal Revenue Service.

Mish says the financial reform bill is a stunning success, that it accomplishes what it was meant to accomplish with astonishing efficiency. You gotta read this one.

The ability to use the genes of extinct hominins is going to force the field of paleoanthropology into some unfamiliar ethical territory. There are still technical obstacles, but soon it could be possible to use that long-extinct genome to safely create a healthy, living Neanderthal clone.

A massive extinction like the one that claimed the dinosaurs has hit the Earth like clockwork every 27 million years, a new fossil analysis confirms. But the study claims to rule out one controversial explanation: a dark stellar companion called Nemesis.

Speaking of extinction, moribund NBC is hosting an awards dinner for self-proclaimed Marxist and former Obama staffer Anthony “Van” Jones. Birds of a feather.

Where's the doom? Some of the more fantastic stories (click this link for a typical doomsday story) about the runaway BP oil well seem not have a counterpart in reality. They said the gusher could never be successfully capped for one. Oops. On the other hand, it's not over yet and all may not be as it appears.

The federal government has taken down its first blog platform. In anticipation of further repression, Osiris is making an "open source" serverless portal available.
(h/t survivalblog)

Don't count on citizens building resilient communities to see them through hard times. Government raids are increasing on farms and food-supply clubs.

Now it gets bad. The NAACP has been assigned to deal the racism card to the Tea Party. This time it's getting dealt right back. A line has been crossed. No going back.

NASA has been transformed into just another politically correct, risk-averse beauracracy. Routine shuttle flights to a steampunk space station hardly qualifies as space exploration. "The space program died because the spirit that articulated it, a spirit open to reality and eager to know it, predeceased it," says Thomas Bertonneau in his article The Challenge Of The Spaceship: Spaceflight As It Should Have Been And As It Was in The Brussels Journal. Caution: long read.

A Moslem mother in Canada strangled her daughter and got three years probation. If the court says it's a fitting punishment, who are we to argue.

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Going viral

Your really long read for this week is Angelo Codevilla's article America's Ruling Class - and the Perils of Revolution, from the American Spectator. Caution: once you start you won't be able to put it down. This article is getting attention in a lot of places.
Thanks to Tom of the North for the heads up.

Breaking Eyewitness Opinion

frankenstein-chains

Overheard

"The regulatory activity now underway is so overwhelming and beyond anything we have ever seen, that we risk moving this country away from a government of the people to a government of regulators."
Thomas Donahue, US Chamber of Commerce via The Daily Caller

"The tax structure for business in California is so patently anti-capitalist that business is fleeing or refusing to expand or start up in the community. These are the true penalties and illustrations of what a “Municide” looks like."
John Galt, johngaltfla.com/blog3

"In October 2009, firearms and ammunition excise tax collection climbed 45 percent from the previous fiscal year, the greatest annual increase in the firearms tax revenue in the agency's history, the report said. By comparison, the average annual increase for fiscal years 1993 to 2008 was 6 percent."
Leslie Gevirtz, Reuters

"96 banks closed/reorg'ed this year. Same period last year? 57. So on an institutional basis, we're running 68.5% ahead of last year."
George Ure, Peoplenomics

"We continue to pile up more and more evidence of what I and a handful of others have been talking about since last spring (2009) - the claim of "recovery" and "economic prosperity" is nonsense; all we've done is tried to play "pull forward demand" once again, this time with government debt issuance, and now that's wearing off."
Karl Denninger, Market Ticker

"My wife, who is very concerned about these things, moved all her personal cash to Australia and Canada. She wants to have a place to go if things blow up here. We have a retreat that's right on the Quebec border. We own 18 miles on the border, so we can cross. Anytime we want to we can get away."
John Malone, CEO Liberty Media, in Wall Street Journal interview

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It's just the way it was

Migrant packing house workers, Canal Point Florida, 1939

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