Category Archives: Uncategorized

Mitigation

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Nothing really changes until January 20 so think of it like getting three months warning that a meteor is going to hit the planet, or that a Category 12 hurricane is going to hit. You’ve got three months to try and get whatever it is that you think you won’t be able to get later down the line.

The nice thing about being a pessimist is that, worst case, things go exactly as you planned for. Thus, for me, I really don’t need to do anything…I’m just gilding the lily at this point.

As Kosh said, once the avalanche has started it is too late for the pebbles to vote. Or, to carry it in a different direction, you can’t change the fact that the meteor is going to hit in three months…what you can do is prepare for the consequences of that hit. In other words, stop bellyaching about the election and refocus on mitigating the results of it. While you’re frantically and self-righteously pounding your keyboard about election fraud, watermarked ballots, and more-votes-than-voters, the people who have moved past that are scooping up the things that you should be buying while you still can.

Predictions? Same as I’ve been saying since pretty much I turned on the lights and flipped the OPEN sign on this blog: mags, ARs, mags, ammo, mags, armour, mags, cryptogrpahy, mags, radio gear, mags, paperless guns, mags. I’ve also predicted that the markets are going to tumble on a Biden win…we’ll see how Monday goes.

Honestly, you should already have been at a point of resiliency in your life where the victor in this contest would have been irrelevant to you. Money in the bank, metals in the safe, guns on the wall, food in the basement, no debt in sight, ammo on the shelf, fuel in the tank, meds in the cabinet… you get all that squared away and it really won’t matter who wins the election.

Basement goals

G3 upgrade

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I have a handful of G3-style rifles. I got them because I wanted a proven .308 platform and because, at the time, magazines were less than $1.00 each. However, the G3 platform is a mixed bag. It has two tremendous advantages in its favor: brute ruggedness and no gas system to screw with. After that it has a couple disadvantages…one of the biggest is that the design of the gun makes mounting an optic very difficult. The problem isn’t as easy as simply slapping some pic rail on top of the receiver. No, see the problem is that the stock that is used has a length of pull that is a bit longer than it needs to be, and there’s a bit of a dogleg drop to the stock to bring your eyes into line with the iron sights atop the rifle. If you mount an optic, you have to literally give up your cheek weld to get your face high enough to see through the scope.

Gun Jesus, a long time hater of the G3 platform, made a video about a ‘modernization’ project he did to a G3-clone. Among other things, he made it left-handed-friendly, added an extended safety, changed the cocking handle out, got a trigger job, and most importantly swapped the stock for one made by the Swede firm of Spuhr.


I’d been wanting to add an optic to my pet PTR-GI rifle but did not want to have to go through the awkwardness of a bizarre cheek riser kludge. Gun Jesus’ experiments, and successful experiences, with modifying his gun prompted me to go ahead and drop a rather healthy chunk of change on what is essentially an M4 stock for the G3.

I ordered the stock from Mile High Shooting and, yes, it really did cost that much. Got the stock in about a week. It would have been nice to have an instructional video on the stock changeout, but the one-page printed instructions were adequate. There is virtually no way you are going to use iron sights on the rifle with this thing in place…you simply cannot get your face low enough to get a sight picture. But….your face sits perfectly where it needs to be to look through a LPVO or dot optic. Since I had a couple extra Leupold Patrol scopes and mounts sitting here, thats what I went with.

Loaded up some 150 gr. softpoints and went to the range. Recoil mitigation? Oh yes….the recoil is nowhere near what it normally is with the issue stock. The stock puts my face in the perfect position to acquire the scope quickly. First round off the magazine tended to print about an inch away from the others, but if you discount that it was turning in 1.5″ groups at 100 yards. Getting a trigger job probably would make a big difference. However, for going out and dropping the hammer on Bambi this thing should be just fine.

If you have a G3 pattern rifle, and you want to make it a bit more native to optics, this stock (if you can stomach the expense) is everything youre looking for. And since TPIWWP, here you go:

By the by, if I had to do it all over again I probably would just go with an AR-10 for the superior ergonomics. Magazines would have been several orders of magnitude more expensive, but I think that might have been a worthwhile tradeoff. One of the reasons I didn’t go with the AR-10 originally is because, at that time, there was no ‘standardized’ magazine…some outfits used modified FAL mags, some used modified M14 mags, some used proprietary mags, etc, etc. Nowadays it looks like thats all shaken out.

It approaches

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Regardless of the election results, you’ve got until January 20 until the current Presidential term expires. You’ve got a little over two months… ready, set, go! Here’s a reminder of what you might (or might not) be facing:

Guys, panic buying comes in four waves:

  1. Right before the election – “This idiot might win”
  2. Right after the election – “Crap, he won. I better get busy and buy…”
  3. Right before the inauguration – “That idiot takes office next week. I better buy…”
  4. Right after the inauguration – “Frak, he’s President now. I better buy while I can..”

This happens every four years. All this has happened before, and all this will happen again.

 

Equanimity

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If you ignore the election results (whenever they finally get around to finalizing them), there’s still plenty of other things to worry about. Don’t spend all day obsessively refreshing your browser to see what happened. There’s still a superflu, economic uncertainty, race-related disturbances, and the usual nonsense out there to prepare against.

As Frank Castle says…the battle may be over but the war goes on.

Just In Time

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These arrived today:

Thats a lot of 9mm Glock happysticks

Fifty of them will go into the Deep Sleep, a few will get stuffed in the bag with my PC Charger, a few will get cycled into the Bag O’ Tricks, and the rest will be sold at sphincter-numbing prices to panic-driven people who really should have seen the handwriting on the wall a long time ago and need to be reminded that there are consequences to waiting until the last minute.

Vote early, vote often

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No in-person voting here in my neck of he woods. I do not like that. I like ritual and routine, I like the standing in line, signing the forms, the little rickety privacy cubicle, etc. I cannot shake the feeling that vote-by-mail or absentee ballot is ripe for chicanery of the most vile kind. Yes, you could argue that the in-person voting methods are just as susceptible to fraud but it doesn’t feel like that to me nearly as much as this other method does.

This time next week

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I am utterly fascinated and anxious all at the same time to see what the world (and markets) look like at this time next week. Its like a cross between watching them draw the Powerball numbers and waiting for a grenade to explode.

Battery-in-a-box buffoonery

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I was up at CostCo the other day and saw this:

The semantic part of me recoils at the advertising calling this a ‘gasless generator’. A generator…generates…electricity. This thing stores electricity, it doesn’t make it. Calling it a ‘gasless generator’ is at best a stupid mistake and, more likely, at worst, misleading. Its like calling a 55-gallon drum of water a ‘portable well’.

What is it? Basically its a big lead acid battery with a built in inverter and some bells and whistles. What does it do? Absolutely nothing, as far as I can tell, that you can’t do for a fraction of the price with some wires, a couple AGM batteries, and a battery charger.

It’s 55Ah, which is, really, kinda puny. What it does have is a built in ‘solar controller’, the ability to be used as a UPS, visual metrics, and a few bells and whistles. But, really, it’s just this with a nicer casing:

If you zoom in on the packaging you can see it boasts that it’ll run an LED lamp for 48 hours. Color me unimpressed. I ran one for almost 4x that long with the battery jump box and it cost 1/5 the price.

While I like the turnkey plug-n-play approach this thing represents, the frugal part of me is aghast thinking what I could (easily) put together for $500 that would perform the same basic functions (albeit without the bells and whistles of automatic low-discharge shutdown and solar controller) at an exponential increase in capacity/runtime.

Article – The American Government’s Secret Plan for Surviving the End of the World

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This led to a key recommendation: five 50-person “interagency cadres” that would be pre-positioned or pre-deployed during emergencies to support would-be presidential successors. These “presidential successor support teams,” codenamed TREETOP cadres by the Pentagon, would deploy randomly to any one of “several hundred sites, perhaps 2-3 thousand, that would be pre-selected,” allowing for a relocation of institutional knowledge that was “highly flexible and adaptive.”

A fascinating little piece about a government-continuity program that came out from, of all things, the Carter administration. Presidential successor support teams? Secret hideouts spread across the land? Agencies tasked with teams to transport and protect possible Presidential successors? For those of you who remember your apocalypse fiction, this seems mildly reminiscent to the old ‘Guardians’ pulp novels from back in the day.

Make no mistake, there’s probably some sort of “Crystal Peak”-type facility out there that we don’t know about (as opposed to the ones we do know about, like the Greenbrier.) Are there special ‘cadres’ of .gov out there whose sole purpose is to navigate political VIPs through the imagined chaos to concrete-reinforced safety? Maybe. It’s certainly an interesting thing to think about. I want to say I recall reading somewhere that there were elite military units that were trained and tasked with just that sort of duty but I can’t recall where.

A quick search on Google for “Treetop” and “Continuity of government” turned up a few more results, but this one was interesting.: It mentions “… supplemented by more than 100 other bunkers, sprinkled around the country, as well as numerous mobile units, that have included two ships”

Interestingly, there was a recent article I read about how during World War Two the Brits had a special plan, team, and real estate specifically for hauling the monarchy to safety in the event of German invasion. And, buildingo n that, a Cold War evacuation plan as well.

Interesting article, though, and it raises interesting questions. To me, that  made it worth the short read and inclusion here. Who knows what sort of poured concrete palaces hide ‘neath the deserts and prairies?