Concealed Weapons Permits

While I was home on leave Wifey and I went and got concealed weapons permits, a renewal for me and an initial for her. While we were in the county seat doing the paperwork the lady noted that we “were the last two people from Redacted to get a pistol license.” This really didn’t surprise me much because rural and small town folks tend to be armed at a pretty high rate. This isn’t surprising given the 45 minute response time to get a sheriff out there.

Having a pistol license/ CCW is a good thing. It means you can legally carry a concealed handgun which is a very good thing. The necessity of one varies by state. Some places have open carry, or allow you to have a loaded gun in the car, or carry one without a permit in rural areas/ while hunting or fishing or such. A few states have “constitution carry” where if you aren’t a crook (or a couple other narrow well defined things) you can carry legally without the need for a permit. This is really the gold standard.

Other places have very little “wiggle room” and unless you have a permit you are on the wrong side of the law. In some of these places it just means you need to get a permit. Permits vary between a mild administrative annoyance (fill out some forms, show up at a government building during working hours, etc) and a modest fee and almost impossible to get. In places like California unless you are somehow affiliated with law enforcement or are otherwise deemed by the totalitarian administrators to be special (which typically means .gov or .state) it isn’t going to happen. One could argue that there is at least an anecdotal relationship between how hard it is to get a pistol license (aka CCW) and how much the state sucks.

I think that it is important to have a concealed weapons permit, even if you have no intention to carry a handgun. Things may change in your life or region and with a license you can pack heat and still be on the right side of the law. There is nothing like a string of violent crimes in your area, a personal threat, a natural disaster or a riot to make you want to take a handgun on a trip to the gas station or corner store. Sure if nuclear bombs drop or zombies rise from the dead a permit doesn’t matter but in other situations it may very well matter.

Also in states with a waiting period for firearms purchases you can skip it. I always thought waiting periods were stupid anyway, especially so for people who already own guns. Personally I can’t see somebody who already has a decent collection like many of us, deciding they just have to go out and get a new pistol to shoot somebody and then being discouraged by needing to wait a few days to get it. “Well I was going to murder that no good SOB but I didn’t want to use any of the guns I already have and I can’t get a new one for a few days due to the waiting period so I will just forget the whole thing.” Stupid.
If you can get a concealed weapons permit then do so, you never know when it may come in handy.

Building Food Storage in Small Spaces

My long time friend Maggy dropped me a line the other day. She has been on hiatus from our sister blog for awhile as she has been busy having a kid. Anyway she has relocated to a very small apartment (she said the size of a postage stamp) and is looking to rebuild some food storage that got eaten up. She asked my advice on small spaces noting that under the bed was full of baby stuff and thoughts on stocking up beyond ‘if you need one buy two’ plan. Here is my sanitized and slightly edited reply to her:
First of all it has been awhile so I want to congratulate you on the kid and all that stuff. I am happy for you guys. Next there are two separate issues: space and stocking up.

For space: I am really not a huge fan of under the bed. Been there and done that, it just didn't work great. The issue with it is that stuff under there tends to stay under there and not get used, because it is a pain to get to under the bed. Not an issue for a water filter, a case of rifle ammo and some MRE's but for food you want to rotate regularly it is problematic. In my experience if accessing and thus rotating stored food is hard folks won’t do it. If you don’t somewhat regularly rotate food the whole storage thing doesn’t work so well.

I would say first to be more organized in the kitchen (example instead of having 3 drawers of tupperware and other crap have 1 or 2 organized ones) to get the most of the space you do have. Throw away any junk and organize the rest. This should free up some space. Next I would say to look at other shelving/ storage areas in your place. Wifey and I did this with success in the RV. Having a cupboard full of food in a different place isn't ideal but we have to work with what we have available.

Another idea to free up some space is to use small quart or whatever sized containers for staples, rice, beans, flour, etc and keep those in the kitchen. The big bags could then live in a closet or someplace a bit less accessible as you don't need to access them daily, just to refill the jars/ tupperware things.
Really it comes down to prioritization. Thinks we decide are important tend to happen and those we prioritize lower often stall out when they meet any resistance. If you start from the perspective of “I am going to fit X amount of food in my residence, where is it going to go” instead of “How much food can I conveniently fit in the kitchen as it is organized now, without adjusting anything?” there answer is going to be very different.

So in review; first organize the kitchen and then consider using other available cupboards and such outside the kitchen. If it is important, and food is important, then you can find a way.

Restocking on food: The buy 2 cans/ boxes/ packages when you really only need one plan is good. It lets you stock things you are actually eating in better varieties than say buying a case of chili and a case of stew.

The thing is that nobody, except maybe Redacted (her significant other and my longtime friend who doesn’t have a name on here, or I can’t remember it) and he probably did it because he is lazy, wants to eat chili for a month in a row. Far better to have 6 cans of chili, 3 cans of stew, 3 cans of clam chowder and 6 meals worth of pasta with both red and white sauce, etc.

One good way to give your food storage a sort of jump start without getting sucked into too much of any one thing is to get a good baseline of staples. A 20 pound bag of flour, 20 pounds of rice, 10 pounds of corn meal, 10 pounds of beans, a big bag of pancake mix with a large jug of syrup, some peanut butter, jelly, oil and spices and you can eat for a pretty long time, especially since you can cook. That stuff just about doesn't go bad (you can't store a ton of it just in bags but if you cook at all a big bag will get used up well before it would go bad). It doesn't cost a lot and in a pinch you could eat off it for awhile. Maybe do that to get the ball rolling and keep up with the need one buy two and pretty quickly you will accumulate a lot of food you will actually eat.

FWIW the one shelf stable food we probably can't stock enough of in my house is pasta. It is cheap and easy and can be used a lot of ways. Cook a package of pasta, maybe do up some meat and veggies (or not) and toss it in some sauce and you have an easy dinner. In my observation one of the biggest ways for a plan of staple cooking to break down is getting busy. If you get busy and don’t have some reasonable options to get dinner on the table in 15-20 minutes with minimal hassle it is going to be convenience foods or pizza. Pasta is great for this.
Also we eat a lot of rice and I have cereal for breakfast most mornings so we usually have a dozen or so boxes of whatever has been on sale recently.
I hope this gives you some ideas. Feel free to hit me up with any questions it may bring.
-Ryan
If you have anything to add please do so in the comments section.

Book Review Shatter by TC Sherry

This is book two of the deep winter series. To recap the last book began in the winter with a massive earthquake and ended with some other problems. This book sort of skims over the tail end of winter and covers the spring and summer. During this book bad turns into worse. It becomes apparent that the Spokane region and the PNW in general are not going to receive help from the outside and things are not going to return to any sort of old normal.

The Good: This book, as well as the previous book, lays out a compelling vision for a very bad future.
To me it is sort of a “and then what” kind of book. So things went to heck in a hand basket, you get stuff set up initially and after a couple months most of the looters have been naturally selected AND THEN WHAT. Folks start figuring out how to feed themselves in the long term, trade, reorganize society and move forward. That is what this book is about.

MILD SPOILER ALERT FOR THE NEXT COUPLE LINES.
Basically in the first book after the earthquake things internationally then nationally go to hell in a hand basket. The dollar collapses and there is war.  In this book things get even worse, and then worse again, like dealing with all that had happened in the first one wouldn’t be enough.
END SPOILER ALERT

The book brought up some interesting stuff when it comes to property rights, scavenging and ethics. What has been bothering me in a couple books I have read recently, and to some degree the first book in this series is hypocrisy. In this book the main characters actions on the whole were IMO were pretty close to what they expected from others. I won’t say that I agreed with every thing that happened but on the whole it wasn’t offensive and was very thought provoking so that was good.

I think this issue gets complicated if there is a significant die off or long term population shift. There are definitely more questions than easy answers as far as I am concerned. If folks are dead or gone and heirs are not able to be located who does the property belong to? If your neighbor was visiting his cousin in Maine and the balloon goes up at what point do you decide he isn’t coming back? What happens to his stuff?
I think it is pretty clear that stuff which belongs to people who are present or realistically may be present is theirs. However if things get nuts enough that big companies fall apart and such who do their buildings, stores and equipment belong to? Some level of nationalization albeit at a city or county level is likely, at least with this sort of stuff and is probably fairly ethical.

I liked that government didn’t magically go away. It is really a pipe dream to think that some sort of government won’t exist, especially at the local level of city and county. It will hopefully change and help set the conditions for people to take care of their selves, or at least not cause any real problems in a new world though it could get nasty and totalitarian.

In this book there was a sort of barter network that morphed into a sort of general store. For somebody with a knack for that sort of thing, access to a suitable space and some stuff to sort of seed the effort it might not be a bad idea to take some notes about that part. That people were more interactive vs just staying at their homes alone was good I think. People have a tendency to be social animals and it is difficult if not impossible to produce everything you could need or want. It definitely reinforced the desirability of being able to produce, above and beyond your own needs, something which people want.

Personally I do not stock things specifically for barter. However that is at least in part because I am not quite there yet. If one was so inclined they could probably do pretty well with a few hundred dollars of the right stuff. Stuff like kerosene, lamps, .22 LR and small game shotgun loads, sewing stuff, matches, booze, etc.
This book is a good reminder that in many ways local government is more important than at a higher level. To paraphrase Ragnar Benson the county zoning or agricultural commission is far more likely to cause problems in your life than men dressed in black carrying MP-5’s from an alphabet soup agency. This is probably far truer in a long term serious situation as they will have a lot more freedom to maneuver. Bad local governments could turn into little fiefdom’s or Stalinist collective experiments very easily.  It was also illustrated in the book that if people don’t stand up to these things as a group they will inevitably get dealt with piece mill and picked off accordingly.

The Bad:
There was a distinct flavor of population and resource control. Think checkpoints and fuel usage restrictions, curfews, etc. I think these would likely be reality in this sort of situation but it isn’t something I particularly like.
Checkpoints I think would be a fine idea, probably a necessity so long as they didn’t hamper the free movement of individuals in the area and allowed some sort of through passage through for those who need to get someplace. It kind of rubbed me the wrong way that there were passes for people who were deemed special which of course included the main characters. Personally in that situation I would be awful curious about who the heck decided which people were special and what the heck they thought gave them the right to say they could move around freely but I could not. They really didn’t go into detail on exactly what these restrictions were or how they affected people who, unlike the main characters, were not deemed to be special, so I can’t say if I really have an issue parse.

Fuel restrictions I have a hard time with. Now if the local government has fuel and is distributing it then some prioritization to EMS, food production, etc makes sense. However telling someone what they can do with fuel they have is another thing. If someone has a 300 gallon fuel tank in the barn and a 74 stingray and wants to go drag racing down their driveway it really isn’t anybodies business but theirs and their neighbors.
A few things happened that were just a little bit too convenient. The main characters stumbled into some stuff in a way that was awful darn lucky. Not so much as to really mess up the book but enough not to show the benefits of having some things squared away beforehand or the downsides of not having them squared away.
The author talks badly about politicians and government officials who are anything other than perfect public servants and folks who said public positions carry privilege. However the main character definitely uses his position to his advantage a few times getting favoritism or special treatment that Joe down the block wouldn’t. It was government choosing winners and losers at a small local scale. Nothing nasty parse, more like good old boy stuff.

The Ugly:
Not really anything ugly about the book in the usual sense that something is worse than the bad. However the book did expose (which is a good thing and thus doesn’t really belong in the bad part) a couple of ugly and very real possibilities. The first is that a default on our debt would cause all sorts of international problems. It is the kind of thing that starts wars. Even if our country fell apart we have a huge and awesome military. Somebody who thought we were weakened and that they could take advantage or attack our allies might be making a very serious mistake. Even if we were pretty tired and confused we could wipe the floor with most countries.

The next is that some places would try to continue suckling from the teat of government. Big, blue rustbelt and New England cities come to mind.

Lastly the balance of government would go all out of whack. Everyone more or less marches to the same drum in normal times and any pull from individual organizations or departments is canceled out by checks and balances or equaled out by pull from other organizations. However as people and agencies had competing visions, conflict over resources and such things might get crazy. The usually boring game of whose budget and staffing will go up by 3%, whose will stay the same and who might (though it rarely happens) face cuts could turn into serious infighting, like 3rd world stuff. Also in a die off scenario the whole line of succession thing could fall apart pretty easily leaving the US without a clear leader.

The vision of massive cascade failures laid out in this series is compelling, disturbing and seemingly plausible. I was familiar with that concept but had never heard the phrase before.

In closing I enjoyed this book and recommend it to readers. It is definitely worth paying $5 for the electronic edition.

Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better

Let us start out with a question. When (in a defensive situation) would I prefer a shotgun to a rifle?

I have been thinking about it for a couple days and haven't come up with a situation yet. If I am going to have to fight somebody I would like an AR or an AK. Both have a viable defensive round, especially considering I would be using modern defensive ammunition. They hold a lot of bullets and are self loading.

This got me thinking about the role of shotguns in home defense. They are sort of a weird beast anyway. Everybody pretty much agrees you should have one, myself included, but they are fraught with disinformation and misunderstanding. When we strip away the myths it is easier to talk about them.

First of all we have to deal with "stopping power" and penetration. The prevailing myth is that shotguns will utterly destroy all flesh and bone but won't go through wallpaper, let alone the whole wall. I would say that is half right. At close range buckshot does really nasty things. However in a sort of funny way projectiles that will devastate one type of stuff will do the same to another. Buckshot will go through walls no problem. Interestingly the performance is not that differently from .223 or 7.62x39.

Next comes accuracy and shot spread. Shotguns are not a land mine or a magical death ray. You have to have the thing pointed at someone for them to work. Shot spread varies by load, choke and weapon but at "in house" ranges it is going to be closer to fist than dinner plate or trash can sized. I have heard the rule that buckshot spreads at about an inch a yard but you really need to pattern a gun with the barrel/ choke to be sure. [A smart guy I knew took his new shotgun to the range with a 5 pack of 2 or 3 different types of buckshot to see which worked best. That might be an idea worth putting in your kit bag.]

The next is that shotguns are super easy to use. I won't say that is entirely wrong but using them in a realistic combat situation takes some practice. The real issue is that these folks are using two very different standards. The standard for using a shotgun is that they can load it, chamber a round and shoot a target or a cardboard box 15 feet away. The rifle standard is that you have to be able to field strip it while hanging blindfolded from money bars and engage man sized targets out to 300 meters with iron sights in driving rain and wind. See an issue here? If we narrow the rifle standards to CQB at ranges of 50 meters or less (which greatly decreases the marksmanship factor) it is a whole different discussion.

To be honest I would give the rifle an advantage because it is easier to make fast follow up shots with due to the lower felt recoil and being self loading. If, after a short orientation you handed a dozen random people a shotgun and had them put one shot per target into a few targets at realistic defensive ranges and did the exact same thing with an AR or a Mini 14 or an AK I would bet an 18 year old bottle of Scotch the rifle would win out.

Let us look at it another way. What would you think of a rifle which must be manually reloaded and has a capacity of 5-8 rounds? Why should a shotgun somehow be different?

Now onto rifles. I will talk in generalities about AR and AK pattern rifles and most of it would apply to a Mini 14 or whatever you run. I would call stopping power even as both are quite sufficient. You can't exactly kill people twice or anything. Rifles win hands down in capacity with 3-4 times as much ammo as a standard pump shotgun, also they penetrate soft body armor. While home invasions are relatively rare they are getting more common. This scenario is definitely an ugly one, but an ugly one where rifles shine. Also rifles are useful at much longer ranges. An AK or AR which could defend your living room could hit a man sized target a couple football fields (or much further, I’ve seen 800 meter hits with an M4 and an ACOG) away. Past 50ish meters or maybe a bit more with slugs and iron sights, cursing is more effective than a shotgun.

That does not say shotguns don't have some real strengths.

Cost is a huge plus. New pump shotguns cost somewhere around $300. You can buy gently used Mossberg 500's and Remington 870's for around $200-220 all day long. Seriously shotguns are great because everybody can afford one. If you can't afford a basic pump shotgun with a little bit of planning then I recommend you reexamine your life and finances.

The next biggest plus is versatility. With one weapon you could shoot a turkey in the morning, pheasants at mid day, a deer just before nightfall and have something very comforting in your tent or cabin at night. With a long choked barrel and a short open cylinder you are good to go for a lot. Toss in a rifled one to shoot slugs and that is even more versatility. There isn't (not including oddballs like those single barrel rifle/ shotgun things) another weapon out there that can do that.

Also pump shotguns are good because they have evaded pretty much every anti gun law out there. You can’t have an AK in Cali or Washington DC but you can have a shotgun. Lastly you can't get much more common than 12 gauge. If they sell bullets they have shotgun shells. Also if I had to come into a place and need to mooch ammo a shotgun would be a good gun to have.

Now before somebody bites my head off just because something else is better doesn't mean shotguns aren't an acceptable tool. To the question are shotguns, in a standard over the counter configuration sufficient for home defense I would say yes. To be honest if you can’t handle a problem in the house with a tube full of buckshot you probably can’t handle it anyway. That however doesn’t mean I don’t like to put the odds in my favor as much as I can.

I own both and you probably should too.

Merry Christmas

I hope everyone has a good Christmas (or whatever else you celebrate).

Spend time with family and relax and generally give doom a week or so off. Like work, it will be there whenever you get back to it. Eat lots of good food and drink plenty. Spend time with friends and family. Give and receive gifts.

Things over here are about as good as they can be. Holidays should be spent with family and friends, anything else is really sub optimal.We are doing just about enough to keep the walls guarded, the lights on and people fed. This means a decent amount of time to relax or watch movies or think or whatever else folks do. 

Personally I am just kinda hanging out. Eating some good food and relaxing. Lots of time to think about life and other stuff. Really it is probably more like a lazy Sunday than the holidays but it is what it is. Next year I have a high confidence I will be with family so that is something to look forward to. 

Anyway before I go I just want to remind you not to get too stressed or succumb to the petty inevitable junk that comes up. Life is too short, just take a deep breath, have a couple sugar cookies and focus on the good stuff.

Merry Christmas!!!

Picture of the Day

Quote of the day

“In matters of style, swim with the current; in matters of principle, stand like a rock”
-Thomas Jefferson

Quote of the day

“How about I stay out of your whoring and you stay out of my thieving”
-CPT Reynolds to Leonara
Firefly

Gay Marriage

I believe marriage is between a man and a woman. Western culture and traditions as well as the bible make that pretty clear to me. I also believe in Glock handguns, single malt whisky, cheap light domestic beer, bacon, salt and vinegar potato chips and catsup. I do not believe in car loans, Smith and Wesson (though the new M and P series shows some real promise) or Ruger semi automatic pistols, gin, miller genuine draft, BBQ potato chips or pickles. That is just fine. The reason it is fine that nobody really cares what I think. The great thing about America is that you can (or could/ should) be able to do whatever it is that makes you happy as long as it doesn’t hurt anybody else.

Doesn’t anybody have anything more important to worry about? Between terrorism, fuel prices, the destruction of the middle class, economic collapse, the creep of socialism into our lives and numerous other issues can’t we apply our time, energy and resources into more useful areas?

To me if consenting adults individual happiness and freedom comes in conflict with other people’s conceptual displeasure and desire to impose control on others that is always a non decision. So somebody doesn’t like the idea of gays being “married”, why the heck should they get to tell other people what to do? Lots of holy rollers (mostly the annoying Church of the Holy Visa TV types) will be up in arms but so what. They don’t get to tell people what to do. This isn’t Pakistan or Saudi Arabia, it is America and one of the many reasons our country is great is that we have freedom of religion.

If I choose to be a part of their church and consider them important/ wise/ whatever I will listen but otherwise I will ignore them. As far as I am concerned some other Church of the Holy Visa type has about as much right to tell me what to do as an Iranian Mullah. If you haven’t picked up on it they have no right to tell me, or anyone else in America what to do. If they really want to make me do something they can come to my house and give it a try.

The really dumb thing about this is that gay people exist and preventing them from getting married doesn’t change that. Gay people aren’t being strait now because they can’t get married. Unlike prohibition two or prostitution or gambling not even the most deluded totalitarians or religious zealots can pretend this affects the gay population of the US in any way. It is not like dudes who like dudes are living strait lives now because they can’t legally marry or strait people will become gay because it is legal to get married to somebody of the same sex.

For anybody that wants to go down the sanctity of marriage road I have three things to say: Kim Kardashian, internet ministerial services and Reality Television.

Next someone will inevitably mention the good of society or decaying morality or something like that. Those are what people say when they want to control other people’s behavior and can’t come up with a good argument for it. Preventing people in long term stable relationships from getting married in the eyes of the law is sure doing a bang up job of keeping up the sacred institution that is marriage; reference previous exhibits A-C: Kim Kardashian, internet ministerial services and Reality Television. Rubbish is what I say to that argument.

I do not see why the state is involved in marriage anyway. My marriage is between myself, Wifey, our families, whatever church we choose and God. The states only involvement is that I had to pay them for permission. (On a side note it amuses me in a sad way that it is harder to get a drivers license than a marriage license.) If someone else’s partner, family and church say two dudes can get hitched why should I care? What grounds do I have for it being any of my business anyway? Unless one of them is a kid or being coerced I say none at all. Seriously if people think something will make them happy, maybe for the rest of their lives I wish them the best.

If I were the dictator in chief with sweeping powers to solve these sorts of things my solution would be as follows. The government would no longer be involved with marriage. Aside from minimal record keeping I am not sure why it is at all now. It would from now on only certify civil unions. Any consenting adult can get a civil union with any other consenting adult or adults they wish. In a legal sense civil unions have the same powers and protections as marriages have currently. Now if you want to get married and a church or person with access to the internet and $20 wants to marry you then go for it. (Why somebody needs a license to marry people anyway? Especially since you can get one over the darn internet, that however is a whole nother rant.)
Personally I wouldn’t recognize Bob, Jill and Tom’s marriage at the church of the holy threesome but that is my right. They could in turn feel free to think my marriage is a crock and disregard it. This is after all a free country. Just leave people alone to live their lives.
Flame On!

Crossfit

I did crossfit exclusively as my workout plan for about 5 months during this deployment. Over the past 3 I have gone away from that which we will revisit later. During this time I lost some weight (which is more that I had been drinking more and eating a lot of junk right before deployment than anything else) and improved on some skills. I definitely hit a plateau and got stuck in multiple ways.

Crossfit is designed to make you fit across a variety of areas (they break it into ten functional areas: strength, muscular endurance, flexibility, speed, etc) but not really great at any. Also it is admittedly not a strength program. I started on a dedicated strength program and was doing some other stuff like pushups and sit-ups for our PT test. The daily WOD was just getting in the way at this point. Now in fairness to crossfit the more I learned about it the more I learned how flexible it really is. It is much more than just the main site WOD. It is a philosophy that can be used to meet a variety of goals. One particular crossfit formula I like a lot is doing a big lift (CF emphasizes squat, deadlift and presses but it could be jerks or bench or whatever), then body weight exercises followed by conditioning. I have tried doing my own crossfit programming and it just didn’t work over the long term.

I am not going to bash crossfit. It does a lot of good things. In particular I love that it emphasizes having a broad range of skills instead of just hammering at one thing. Being a hulking weightlifter who can’t walk up 2 flights of stairs without getting winded is not a good way to be functional. A 6’ 145 pound tri athlete probably can’t do 5 decent pull-ups and a high school freshman who plays JV football can probably whip him in a fight. If your goals are functional you have to be at least decent at everything.

If your goals are about general fitness and health you can do a lot worse than crossfit. For those without too may specific goals it is a great option. It has gotten weight lifters running and doing cardio and runners lifting weights and everybody doing pull-ups. This is a good thing.

What I found with crossfit is that at some point I was only getting better at crossfit’s specific flavor of workouts which combine body control, light to moderate weights and or running together in various, sometimes random combinations. So my time at a given crossfit workout was going down but I wasn’t able to do more pull-ups or squat more or whatever. It was like teaching to the test if you will.

I think a person has to figure out what their fitness goals are and choose a program based around those goals. A kid who wants to bulk up for football shouldn’t be doing yoga, he should be lifting heavy weights, sprinting, getting plenty of sleep, eating a lot of healthy food and drinking a gallon of milk a day. Conversely an overweight 40 year doesn’t want to put on 25 pounds of anything so they need plenty of longer duration cardio and a reasonable diet. As time goes by you can evaluate the program’s effectiveness based on the measures of effectiveness which are nested with the goals.

 The reason I eased away from crossfit is that it wasn’t meeting my goals. I don’t care how fast I can do 20 wall ball shots or how long it takes me to do 65 65 pound sumo high pull dead lifts. The “waiter walk” is pretty much just ridiculous. These do not really translate into anything I care at all about.  Part of the problem I have with some crossfit programming is that it confuses something being hard with it improving a capability or making you a better athlete in some way. Doing 300 pushups or 200 burpies is hard but what does it do for me. Unless a workout translates into improvement in some measure of effectiveness it is either wasted training time or counterproductive.

Personally I want to be strong, crush body weight stuff and able to run, both fast over short distances and decently over longer distances and do decent on the Army Physical Fitness Test. Unless an exercise or workout helps with those things it is a waste of my time.

In any case I decided to do something different.  It is called 5/3/1 and was designed by a fellow named Jim Wendler. It is quick and there are no complications of what workout or reps or sets I am going to do. In any case we can talk more about this later. I will however say one thing. Jim Wendler believes there should be a specific reason for doing a specific exercise. Not that you should only do certain exercises or whatever but TO HAVE A SPECIFIC REASON FOR WHAT YOU ARE DOING.
Crossfit is certainly not a bad way to go but it isn’t the way for me.

Budgeting for Christmas and the Holiday Season

It is pretty early yet but we are approaching the holiday season so it is time to start thinking about how to not let it ruin our finances. I am going to come out and say I don’t think this one is really that hard. Seriously it is checkers, not chess.

Total Expenditures:
I am not going to tell you how much or how little to spend. Provided that you are not going into debt and are continuing your other financial plans (bills, investments, savings, and such) on schedule then spend as much as you want to.

Events and Gatherings
Most people with normal lives have jobs, family, friends, a couple clubs or associations and who knows what else. This means a slew of parties and activities and such. Many of these things are cheap but some cost money, potentially a lot of it. Being choosy about what you really want to be involved in is a darn good start. Do you really need to go to the annual hockey game and bar night with 3 guys you barely liked back when you worked with them a decade ago? If you do in fact like the guys but don’t want the expense suggest a cheaper activity, possibly at an alternate time. You might just find they could cut out the expensive evening also.

Gifts:
This is where I could say something about the spirit of Christmas and family and all that but I am not going to. Gifts are a big one that gets a lot of people. I think that in general it is a lot easier to be reasonable in a family where other people are reasonable. Both Wifey and I are part of solidly reasonable families. We don’t buy gifts for random uncles and cousins or anything but with both of our families and some close friends the list gets long in a hurry even when we are pretty strict about it. Here are some strategies I have found work to keep everybody happy and costs in line.

With pretty much everybody we exchange gifts with there is an (approximate) agreed upon value. Often it is unspoken and other times it is spoken. In my family over the last few years we have had kids born and people get married and various income changes. We have had discussions about how these various events affect gift giving.  At times when things are particularly tight for an individual we have found that giving people a heads up that for whatever reason gift giving is going to be a bit lighter than normal works really well. Here is a hint, they know it already and don’t care. I don’t know anybody who wants somebody close to them to hurt their self financially to give gifts. The emphasis is on making sure nobody gets unpleasantly surprised, has an awkward moment or hurt feelings.

Budgeting for Gifts:
You certainly want to plan for this one and might want to save a bit of money out of every paycheck for a couple months if money is tight. I and then we did this for a long time. In the last couple years our income has gone up and our expenses have gone down which gives us more disposable income. That coupled with our relatively modest gift giving means we don’t need to save up this year.

My advice is that you (or you and your spouse) figure the total amount you have to spend on gifts, give it a 10% haircut and then decide how to divide it up figuring about how much you want to spend on each person. My experience has been that if you plan to spend 25 bucks a person some gifts will be 21 and others 28 so it sort of averages out and with the 10% set aside you have a small cushion. We have used both cards and cash for gift shopping but typically use cards. If you don’t have the discipline to do that then take an envelope of cash to the store.

Tipping: I hear about this on the TV every year and to be honest I don’t get it at all. Is this some sort of an east coast thing? Is it a big city thing? The list of people they talk about tipping and the amounts are staggering to me. I know folks typically make more money over there (on paper at least as it is largely eaten up by much higher cost of everything) but it seems nuts to me. My folks used to give our paperboy a card with a few bucks if he had done a good job and I think MIL gives a bigger than normal type to her hair dresser around the holidays but both of those are for one person and are a small amount (20 or less I think). Maybe the news is totally out of reality but it seems like some folks are sending giant wads of cash to all kinds of people. Maybe it is a cultural difference but it seems ridiculous to me. We don’t tip anybody just because of Christmas.

Giving:  Times are really hard for a lot of folks right now so consider that in your financial planning. If you can afford it and want to then good for you, if not that is fine also. We do gift giving for a few kids via those tree things. In general we are cheap and I am heartless (Wifey has a big heart but is also cheap so that keeps it reasonable) but little kids shouldn’t have a bad Christmas because their parents are having a hard time or just plain suck at life.  If memory serves me correctly we have also done some food bank donations in the past. Both are causes we will continue to support in the future.

Book Review Deep Winter By Thomas Shelly

I have been reading a lot of fiction lately. Almost all preparedness/ survival type stuff. Usually I would allocate far less time and money toward such a thing but right now it is an enjoyable combination of entertainment and escapism. Probably a waste of money butt is about the only healthy way I can treat myself a little bit right now.

I have been working pretty rapidly through the available titles. Amazon pointed me toward Deep Winter. I looked at the reviews and 2/3rds of them were 4 and 5 (out of 5 possible) and 1/3rd were ones. I remembered a buddy had read the series and while he didn’t rant and rave about how great they are he also didn’t say they sucked. I took a chance, the Kindle edition was only 5 bucks so worst case I wasn’t out much. I am very glad I took the chance.

The broad plot is that a massive earthquake devastates the Pacific Northwest in January. The main characters are a family living in Spokane, Washington. This event proceeds or maybe causes larger national and international events to play out. The book follows the main characters, their friends, family and neighbors as well as a variety of regional and international events through the first month or so of the event. I will go into a bit more detail below and will try to keep spoilers to a minimum.

[It has previously occurred to me that it would be bitterly ironic, given all of the survivalist planning and thought about ideal locations, if the inland Pacific Northwest was hammered a massive disaster.  I am sure it would be big fun in forums and comment sections of blogs. Some folks would never hear the end of it.]

The Good:
Lots of good, too much to remember or list. Overall this is probably the most realistic preparedness book I have read in a long time. Probably one of the most realistic ones I have ever read. The plot was certainly plausible and that is always a good start. To a certain degree it doesn’t matter what the event is (Lucifer’s Hammer, the Road, Zombie anything, etc) as it is people dealing with after affects that is the interesting part but starting realistic is a plus.

The main characters were prepared but not increadably so. Some characters had valuable skills but well within the normal range for people, especially in that area. The ridiculous almost cliché Navy Seal sniper/ diesel mechanic/ organic farmer/ trauma surgeon did not make an appearance. While I enjoy The Survivalist as much as the next guy this was a breath of fresh air.

I appreciated that there was enough violence to show some lessons (hint- post armed guards in discrete locations) and spice things up now and then but not so much that it read like a first person shooter video game. This also let the book put more energy into other areas like primitive cooking, improvisation to do without modern conveniences and equipment. These are areas which are so often minimized or entirely neglected in other books.

The benefits of forging relationships with local cops and power brokers were mentioned. There wasn’t blatant cronyism or bribery or anything like that, just basic human relationship stuff. It goes without saying that a conversation with a cop that starts with “Hi Bob, how is the family?” and “Everyone is good, sorry we missed you at the lodge last weekend” tends to end on an equally positive note.

I found the characterization of how the military would respond in this sort of a situation to be pretty plausible. They didn’t take peoples guns away or force them en mass into “shelters” or anything like that. They were a definite force for order, if a little heavy handed at times.  While I will keep my thoughts on this to myself I do have one observation. Folks who think local cops and soldiers are going to do all this crazy stuff probably don’t know a lot of cops or soldiers.  Sorry I got sidetracked, I will get back to the topic at hand.
I found the way that the situation in terms of security and supply availability deteriorated was very plausible. While you never know exactly what will happen the way it went seemed realistic. It didn’t turn into mad max overnight but they didn’t keep going to stores, which were getting resupplied, for weeks either.
Also the author would randomly use parentheses to mention something loosely related to what was being discussed or whatever popped into his head. I appreciate that because it is something I do.

The Bad:
First I want to address the criticisms I was in the Amazon reviews section. Some folks criticized the main characters for being some sort of religious whacko’s, the father for dominating the family and some other such things. They even threw the phrase “Christian Identity” around which is as far as I can tell, the Aryan Nations better spoken cousin. (That part was totally unfounded in anything I got out of the book.) Also editing errors or poor editing quality was mentioned.

The main characters are part of the “reborn” Christian community which seems to need to mention that they are Christian and discuss their faith out of context and to random people at a far higher ratio than most other folks. They prayed occasionally and mentioned the bible now and then and talked about some religious stuff occasionally. Sure the main character jumped onto his religious soap box now and then but it wasn’t too bad, I just skipped a paragraph or two. It was sort of like being at a banquet or party and talking to a random guy who has to mention that he is born again as a Christian, etc, etc even if the current topic of conversation is BBQing or college football. In my opinion it did not detract from the book. As to the family being too paternally dominated or something I would say there is a range of normal family decision making patterns and theirs doesn’t fall outside of it. Preparedness was sort of more the dad’s thing and thus he probably took the lead a bit more.

 I didn’t find poor editing to be an issue. Sometimes you see self published books in this arena that have text which repeats like it was copied and pasted but never deleted or systemic punctuation issues, poor grammar, etc. I didn’t see any of that lack of quality proof reading in this book. Could the book have benefited from the kind of very skilled editor that a large publisher would have, of course. It would have tightened things up a bit and cut out some fluff. However it did not detract from the overall quality of the book.

Onto my observations:
I found the action to be quite unrealistic. While I truly appreciated that the main characters weren’t some sort of super commando’s that didn’t save it. The book seemed to give them the standard ‘main character’ advantage but did so by making the bad guys universally idiotic and unlucky. Like the kind of idiots who couldn’t rob a 711 successfully if you handed them a pistol and a ski mask then gave them a ride to the 711.
Also I found the action to be overly simplistic. I will make up a similar scene to illustrate this point. “I heard a gunshot and grabbed my rifle. I walked around the house to see what was going on. I saw a guy with a gun in the bushes and shot him.”   First of all in real gunfights people miss. Professionals who do this for a living miss shots regularly. They miss them because they are moving and the other person is probably moving also. They miss because they are in sub optimal firing positions as they take cover. They miss because they can’t clearly see the target or because it is dark. Without reading it again just to look I would say the main characters didn’t seem to miss a shot. Also nobody got wounded or escaped/ broke contact. The bad guys were either killed or captured. While it wasn’t a big overall piece of the book I found it to be way too neat, simple and lopsidedly positive for the main characters. This didn’t really detract significantly from the overall book because that stuff wasn’t a significant part of it.

Their security was sloppy pretty consistently. That is not the authors background (I don’t think) which is cool but they could have done things more consistently. Having guards some nights and not others is a stupid plan. Sort of like carrying a concealed weapon but only on odd numbered days. The real lucky theme of the fights they had was definitely repeated in that they suffered no consequences for their significant security gaps.
The topic of how the main characters expect other people to treat private property vs. how they treat it came up briefly a couple times. It wasn’t blatantly hypocritical so that was good. This has come up in a couple books recently and I am starting to think the central issue may be in my head. I have some thinking to do on that one and will likely write about it later.

Two other things kind of annoyed me. First the main characters really liked using FRS radios. They had the push to talk ones with ear buds and were all on them, constantly, throughout the entire book. Also for reasons I am completely not clear on they said “affirm”. Not affirmative or acknowledged or WILCO but affirm. It was sort of like somebody without an insight to the military was trying to use military language to sound cool. Also in my experience they slightly exaggerated the capabilities and utility of those radios.

Secondly they talked about food a lot. Not food storage or food production or those issues but they were always talking in detail about something that was being cooked or eaten. The book could be slightly changed and called “Eating your way through the Apocalypse”. The format was kind of a recollection/ journal by day thing which worked well throughout except the ratio of the book which was made up of a detailed account of breakfast, then snack and beverages, then lunch, then dinner, then desert could have been a bit smaller. I really don’t care what they are eating for every single meal. It didn’t teach any lessons or provoke any thought or add to the story line.

The Ugly:
Nothing comes to mind. To be honest I was reaching pretty hard for the bad.

Overall Assessment: I really enjoyed this book and think you would also. It also provoked some ideas and thought on a couple subjects. The kindle edition was only five bucks and totally worth it for a long, well written book. I definitely got a lot for my entertainment dollars and that was just on the first read. The paperback was pretty expensive at almost 40 bucks on Amazon, likely because it is one of those very short run type books. I am planning to read the second book in the series next week and am really looking forward to it.

Picture of the Day

Modern marriage, family, life and poverty

Occasionally I go out on a limb from my usual topics and today is going to be one of those days. It has been building in my head for awhile and I want to talk about marriage. I am going to try to do this in the most reasonable way possible without excessive criticism (a little funning is fair game) of anybodies position. So whatever your stance or lifestyle choices are please do not read into my words and get all offended. More likely than not what you read into this will have far more to do with you (and your feelings about your life) than it has to do with me.

I am going to start out by saying that marriage is a weird thing. It is weird because more so than government or money or anything like that it is an idea. What makes it so weird is that unlike government (which is what it is) or money it means very different things to different people. Unlike say a hundred dollar bill which, though of course it is relatively more valuable to an unemployed laborer than Bill Gates, we pretty much agree as the same value, the value peoples values of marriage vary widely. These views are affected by race/ ethnicity, culture, location, socioeconomic status and of course religion. Even the environment you grew up in can make a person who grew up 1 block away from another otherwise similar (on paper) person have vastly different viewpoints.

Some folks take marriage very seriously and others use it as something to get their 15 minutes of fame on who wants to marry a reasonably attractive nobody/ doctor/ midget stripper/ has been E list celebrity. Some people give it serious consideration and reject potential candidates who are close to, but not quite desirable and others seemingly put more energy into their choice of cars or haircuts. The bottom line is that a given marriage is worth precisely as much as the two people in it think it is worth.

Of far more significance (since say post WWII) a couple of big things have happened that really shook marriage. First the requisite education levels (I say education not schooling intentionally) required to support oneself, let alone a family have gone up drastically. An average 18 or 20 year old can’t support a spouse and a kid on the skill sets they have been able to acquire. This is quite a recent change as not so long ago getting married in their mid to late teens was quite common. This leads to even more prolonging of the awkward period called adolescence where our economic system incentivizes (and our social system reinforces) postponing coupling and the raising of children until which time you can acquire the skills to support them. This period just keeps getting longer as an internship/ apprenticeship, putting in substantial sweat equity starting at the bottom and learning or higher education is mandatory for having any shot at a decent economic future. I would wager this has in part lead to a corresponding increase in the average age people get married at.
Also since women have relatively recently entered the workforce their need to get married for economic survival has plummeted and with it the stigma of not getting married very early.

Folks are often socially active and dating for years before getting married these days. This means that lots of people are sexually active before getting married. (I see no point in getting bogged down on this though we will revisit it as it pertains to children and economics later).

Also women are now capable of physically having children far later and far more routinely than in the past. This is leading to some career women in their 30’s postponing marriage. That old biological clock has been slowed down.

I have personally found that men in their mid to late 20’s are in no hurry to get married even if they are in a stable relationship with a woman they plan to be with (and might even cohabitate with). Part of this could be that they are trying to get economically established and are not in a hurry to have kids. Maybe they want some time to pursue other goals. I currently have a theory that a lot of the reason these men are in no hurry is that they are not getting a wife in the most traditional stay at home sense. Since folks are getting married later girlfriends have jobs, etc which they typically do not, for numerous reasons, plan to leave any time soon. Since these women typically make less money than men going halfsies with no immediate plans for children might not look that appealing. Conversely for a lot of women then economics plus stability and womanly social pressures incentivize pushing marriage. However, Wifey points out that the social pressures and situations in larger urban areas are very different. She says in big cities often it is women who are holding off on getting hitched. I don’t know about that (she knows lots of these things) because I try not to talk to people from big cities.

Now we get to children and economics. The heritage foundation did a study on child poverty. Basically it says that if both parents have graduated high school and are married the odds a child will grow up in poverty are about nil. My initial thought was “turns out that if you graduate highschool, get married and then have children your odds of poverty are almost nonexistent. Go $&%(#ing figure”.

I took the time to read the study and it was interesting. They noted that most single mothers are not teenagers but in their mid to early 20’s and that typically they are in a relationship with the father. They do not “plan” to have a child but do stop using birth control which is essentially a plan to have a child as they are having sex. A friend of mine said “No girl over 20 gets pregnant by accident” and while I am sure once in a blue moon it does happen more likely it is intentional. Often the mother and the father are even living together.
The one thing that bothers me is that the way they get these statistics is IMO seriously misleading and designed to product shocking gotcha statistics. They only count the fathers income if he is married to the mother. Two parents living together raising a child will not have both of their incomes counted by this method of tabulation unless they are legally married, even if they are stable, the father contributes significantly to the household and has for years. Since the women in this group tend to have few marketable skills they don’t make a ton of money. The shocking statistics which come from this article are IMO seriously flawed and arguably intentionally misleading. They do note (I am sure accurately) that these relationships often break up and whatever informal support the father was giving may taper off. Despite my issue with the statistics this article is interesting, brings a lot of ideas and is well worth the read.

To me saying marriage is the magical solution to all of the problems of child poverty is seriously flawed. Why would we think the same couple in the same situation would act any differently if one Tuesday they got off work early and went to the courthouse to get married? Folks who barely know each other, jump into a relationship and then have a child, quite possibly without the father being on board beforehand, having given little consideration for how it will affect their future and if they really plan to be together forever are almost doomed from the start.

What we need to stabilize childrens lives is GOOD MARRIAGES and good stable long term relationships that act like good marriages. Parents, who sew some wild oats, party hard, hike the Appalachian train, try to make it on Broadway or whatever they need to do, then get their stuff together in terms of a career path, get to know each other, decide they plan to stay together forever AND THEN HAVE CHILDREN. What shocking, revolutionary ideas! When folks do these things out of order the results are almost always less than optimal. Sort of like baking a cake you have to do these things in the right order under the right conditions or the result is a big mess.

Values and good decision making are the answers. How to cultivate these is something I am far less than certain about. I think on an individual level it comes from parents and families. On a larger scale getting rid of disincentives (often women will qualify for welfare but not if the fathers income is counted) is a good start though that only works in certain socioeconomic groups.

Magazines

It is about time to talk this subject again in my rotating semi repetitive foundational posts. Magazines are important because well magazine fed firearms suck without them. Seriously for want of a magazine a quality defensive firearm becomes a slow to reload single shot weapon.

Quality- I strongly recommend that you buy only factory original magazines for practical defensive use. Buying junk aftermarket magazines is penny smart and dollar foolish, I can’t think of many other ways to invite more grief into your shooting life. If you really want to have “range mags” that are junk then I guess that is fine but keep them separate. Personally I don’t see the point in this as I train with what I would fight with and even if that was not the case I still hate bad mags, even at the range.

The one exception to this is for military pattern weapons. Surplus/ government magazines are typically comparable to factory originals. Also for these military pattern weapons sometimes a magazine is so ambiguous that many companies have quality offerings, this is the case with the AR and 1911 and maybe to a lesser degree the AK given the new US Palm offerings.

Cost- When most reasonable people buy a car they consider the cost to insure and repair it. Sometimes you might be looking at two similar cars and one may (usually because it is foreign or rare) have much higher costs. I recommend you do the same with guns in terms of spare parts, ammo (both separate topics) and magazines. I’m not saying to absolutely avoid guns like Sig’s and HK’s with high magazine costs in favor of ones with much lower cost magazines like Glocks or 1911’s or the Browning HP or whatever. My point is to consider the costs and make sure you can afford them.

Spending all the money to have a defensive pistol or rifle and having less than a handful of mags because of their cost is flat out stupid. I read something on line about a guy who used a rare and from all I have heard very nice Valumet .308 as his rifle. He had one twenty round mag, which a friend lost but that brings us to a whole different topic, for the thing. Seriously he could swap it for a good G3 clone and have a combat load of magazines for the price of lunch at a casual dining restaurant.

Quantity- This is certainly a subject for debate. Personally my happy levels are 10 for a pistol and 20 for a rifle. My standard load would be 3 pistol magazines and about 7 rifle magazines, though of course it depends on the situation. This gives me a full load of magazines, a spare set (maybe at another location) and a few for replacement/trade/friends. Note that this is PER GUN. So if you have three pistols it would be 30 magazines, for two AR’s would be 40 magazines, etc. Also this is for core type defensive weapons. For .22’s, a .380 pocket pistol, etc I keep somewhere around 5. Admittedly my appreciation of nice round numbers could be a factor.

Some folks might be comfortable with less and that is probably reasonable. Two full loads of magazines is probably a good bottom point. For a pretty conventional setup would be about 6 per pistol and more than a dozen per rifle. This is enough that if a magazine is lost or damaged and you can’t replace it immediately it will not be a critical loss.

Some folks like more magazines and that is just fine too. Our friend Commander Zero brings up the point that magazines are the easiest and most likely piece of gun stuff to be targeted by a ban, heck we had one for a miserable decade. It is entirely possible that almost overnight % or that what you have could be ALL YOU WILL EVER GET.  I came of gun buying age during that ban and it sucked. When I started making decent money and had taken care of a few more pressing matters I put some money into magazines. If what I have now is all I am ever going to get that wouldn’t be ideal but I would not be completely hosed either. Think about that for awhile and skipping a couple dinners out (make your spouse dinner or do something else nice instead) to have a few magazines put away just in case might not seem like a bad idea.

Replacement-Magazines are a disposable item that have a finite lifespan and require periodic replacement. In this regard they are sort of like a Timex digital watch. They last a long time but they do inevitable break or get worn out and the easiest course of action is to replace them when that happens.

 If there was a list of things that cause shooters unnecessary problems using magazines that are worn out, damaged or otherwise unserviceable; comes  after buying bad mags in the first place, and would be followed by using cheap ammo in a gun that can’t handle it.

Why go through the hassle. Seriously it isn’t that big of an expense to buy quality magazines and periodically replace them. If springs are worn out replace the spring. If the magazine body is worn out then toss it.
Maintenance-Inspect magazines to make sure they are free of rust and that the inside is not all gummed up with crud. Oiling magazines in not recommended as it attracts gunk which causes issues. Just take them apart and wipe them down now and then.

Rotating- This is a hotly debated topic to which I am not sure there is a right answer. Springs can get ‘set’ and that causes the magazine to jam and have feeding issues or completely lock up or in some cases just puke out bullets. This is bad for obvious reasons. My observation is that functional magazines can stay loaded for months at a time with no noticeable issues. I don’t know what the right answer is. One clear benefit of rotating magazines is that it CONFIRMS that the magazine is still functional and that it will work. Best case it gives you an opportunity to confirm the mags are good and do a quick cleaning. Worst case it could show you that a magazine may need some TLC or new springs. The best time to find out you need to do this is when you are maintaining/ rotating magazines, not when you need the darn gun to work.

Invisible Friends

My Mother In Law is pretty active in an online community, which one doesn’t matter. She calls the people she knows there “Invisible friends”. I like the term. Invisible friends are a big part of the fun of being involved in an online community. Invisible friends are people who have a lot in common with you if in a narrow sense that can give advice and encouragement.

I have found that in places where people gather to discuss a specific range of interests (could be firearms, survivalism, fitness, a hobby or whatever) people are on the whole quite honest. I take folks at face value and their word until given a reason to do otherwise. Every once in awhile there is a troll or somebody who wants to push things in the direction of their alternate agenda. Only one time that I can recall have I stumbled into a total liar.

That being said I do take some precautions. I quite intentionally don’t go into detail about parts of my life, show pictures, etc. Giving anybody you hardly know actionable intelligence to rob or harm you is just not smart. Somebody I have been talking to for regularly for months could, given an iron trap memory or good data management, probably have pieced together a whole lot about me but I don’t worry about that too much. It is one of the risks of getting to know people and has been more than worth the payoff of some interesting and rewarding friendships.

There is one thing I am particularly careful about. I try very hard not to say anything on the computer (blog, email, etc) which I would not want read back to me in a court room. I am even more careful about what I say to folks I don’t know well. 

In the Sopranos there is a young female FBI Agent who was tasked with going under cover to get close to the delightful Adrianna Laserva. This gal changed her appearance and her voice and happened to bump into Ade. They liked the exact same things and had the same hobbies and interests and totally clicked. Over time through idle conversations and observation the agent got some dirt on young Adriana. You get where this is going and it wasn’t pretty.

Now I am not saying this has happened or will happen to anybody like boring old you or me. First this is probably tin foil hat stuff. Secondly I seriously hope our government can manage its time and resources better. Third I don’t really do anything interesting.

That being said if an invisible friend ever once talked about committing a felony, especially if it involved illegal firearms or explosives I would run, not walk away. (I am excluding morbid but obvious jokes like, “and that makes me want to start burning down liquor stores.”) There is a saying that if you are at a group/ political type meeting and 3 people are advocating criminal behavior or violence they are all probably undercover agents for somebody or another has some truth to it. Some folks have different concepts of ‘conspiracy’ and ‘entrapment’ and I do not feel like having my life ruined. The best case is that my invisible friend has a couple of screws loose and is planning something bad. That is still really not a situation where I want to be involved.
Aside from a little bit of caution for the sake of OPSEC and being careful about what sort of conversations you get involved in there is no reason not to interact with and enjoy invisible friends.

Beside, you aren’t going to make any real friends sitting at your computer all day wearing a with a tin foil hat so you might as well make some invisible friends.

Picture of the Day