Evidence of the Decline, Part 20768

A twice divorced politician is accused by his ex-wife of coming to her after an eight year affair and asking for an open marriage. He’s asked the question at a debate, and has the chutzpah to slam the moderator as being the immoral/out of line one. Not only does he get away with it, but this is the man who will likely get the “conservative evangelical” vote.

[As an aside, if you can ignore the moral failings it's an excellent example of an alpha reframe. No wonder he can keep finding new wives.]

In a related note, a “conservative evangelical” leader actually has the courage to call out Callista Gingrich for her own moral failing of being a married man’s mistress for eight years, and the reaction of other “conservative evangelicals” is stunned awkwardness – not at the woman’s behavior, but that this religious leader would dare to point out that she bears her own element of culpability. Of course, she has only been married once, so it’s irrelevant that she was banging a married man for eight years.

This is the state of our supposed “moral majority,” folks.

Manly Fathers Day Gifts – Savage Mark IIF .22LR Rifle

 

My Phony Greeting Card Holiday Fathers Day gift this year is a Mark IIF rifle from Savage Arms in .22LR caliber. This weapon is, in fact, the first firearm I’ve ever owned. I’m pretty excited, and it joins a tradition of pretty darn cool Fathers Day gifts from my wife and her mother.

Why this rifle as my first firearm?

• It’s cheap to own. MSRP is $214.00. Purchase price at our local gun store was $195.71. That’s a pretty darn inexpensive rifle.
• It’s cheap to shoot. .22LR ammunition is everywhere and it’s dirt cheap. You can buy a box of 50 rounds for less than $5, and if you buy it in bulk you can get it for less than half that.
• This rifle is one of the most inexpensive bolt action rifles around. Although modern semi-automatics are much more accurate than they used to be, they’re still typically not quite as accurate as an equivalent bolt action.
• The new Savage “Accutrigger” is highly regarded (at least as far a stock triggers go).
• The Mark II family of rifles has a reputation as some of the most accurate “out of the box” cheap rifles you can get.
• A good .22 rifle is an excellent “small game” rifle. Rabbits and squirrel are extremely plentiful in this part of the country, and bag limits are very high during hunting season.
• I’m still somewhere between “novice” and “intermediate” as a shooter, and the .22 rifle is a good platform for inexpensively practicing the fundamentals.
• The lack of recoil and noise makes this a great weapon for my wife to practice on as well. In the future, it will also be a good platform for introducing kids to shooting.

Quite a lot going for it, given the price.

Unfortunately, I don’t have it in my hands just yet. Our local dealer is out of stock (they had a run of folks buying it for Fathers Day), but we should have it soon.

 

 

Tornado Aftermath

Last Wednesday afternoon a series of massive thunderstorms came through the southeastern United States. The storms spawned literally scores of tornadoes. I can’t find exact numbers right now; all the coverage has been replaced by coverage of Osama bin Laden’s death. I’ve heard numbers ranging from 120-150 individual tornadoes, some of them as large as a half mile, a mile and one even a mile and a half wide. The death toll across the south is in the neighborhood of 300 people, with nearly 2,000 injured and hundreds more without homes.

We were fortunate. Our area was one of the lightest hit. No actual tornadoes touched down in our immediate vicinity and we didn’t even have all that much storm damage. However, like most of the surrounding area we ultimately get our power from the Tennessee Valley Authority. They generate most of it and provide it to local utility companies that distribute it. As it happens, the major damage areas went right through a tremendous number of their main high voltage transmission lines. The net result was that we joined more than 750,000 TVA customers who lost power for several days.

Again I should emphasize that we got off easy. All we had to do was suffer without power for a few days. The water was on, although they’re still asking us to conserve water at the moment (some of the pumps are still operating on generator power). Most of the major roads were passable. Outside of the actual tornado paths, damage was minimal. The main problem was simply that there was no power feeding the grid.

Also, the timing was purely dumb luck for my family, as we’d just started accumulating our emergency kit. We weren’t as prepared as we could have been but we were better prepared than many.

Our disaster kit had two major shortcomings, both of which we managed to work around. First, I hadn’t yet gotten to buying a camping stove. As a result we had plenty of food (including a freezer full of frozen food) that we didn’t at first have a way to cook. Second, we hadn’t gotten a generator of any sort. This was more of an inconvenience than anything. We solved the cooking problem by picking up some firewood from my parents and cooking in our fireplace. 10 years in the Boy Scouts turned out to have a pretty nice payoff this weekend as we actually ate fairly decently.

What Worked Well

Cooking in the fireplace worked pretty well, but if the weather had been any hotter it would’ve been a much bigger problem. We were lucky – with highs in the high 70s and low 80s the weather was very mild for early May in the south. Still, we did pretty well off of it.

Getting to know our neighbors paid off as well. It turns out that our next door neighbor is the general manager at a barbecue restaurant. He had plenty of charcoal available for his grill when nobody else could get any. Our first hot meal (Thursday night) came from sharing his grill. We also dropped by my boss’s house to take some hot showers on Saturday (he had a generator running).

Living in a place with a good culture helped tremendously. There was almost no looting and the community as a whole responded in a very organized and civilized manner.

Where We Messed Up

We should’ve had more flashlights and batteries around. We only had one flashlight and one set of batteries for it. That turned out to be enough. The flashlight is an LED variety that lasts forever on a single set of batteries. But having more flashlights would’ve been very convenient. When things calm down I’m going to pick up some for the emergency kit.

We definitely should’ve had some kind of camp stove in our kit. When things calm down again I’m going to pick up a good Coleman double burner to keep in the storage closet.

We should’ve had some gasoline on hand as Athol suggested. We ended up having enough in our cars that it wasn’t a problem, but it was nearly impossible to get gas until Saturday. The gas stations had plenty of gas and the trucks could easily get through to deliver it but only a handful of stations with generators running had electricity to pump it. I’m definitely going to store a bit in the future, and when we move out of the apartment and into a house I’m going to store a pretty sizable amount (at least 10 gallons, maybe 20).

It wasn’t essential but it sure would’ve been nice to have had a generator. The local hardware stores kept getting large shipments in (several hundred a day) and they’d sell out within minutes. We didn’t even try. On the plus side: we’re going to keep an eye on Craigslist over the next few weeks and see if we can get one for half price as people decide they don’t need them anymore and maybe they really shouldn’t have spent that much money on an impulse buy for convenience.

We should have had some cash stashed away somewhere in the apartment. This turned out not to be a real problem for us, but it could’ve been.

Big box grocery stores and retailers, particularly Publix, Kroger and Target were fantastic. They got generators out very quickly and were up and running to provide essentials. Several Publixes in the area were up and running as early as Wednesday night, no joke. I was actually quite surprised at how long it took Wal-Mart to get up and running. I would’ve expected them to break their backs to be able to take people’s money at a time like this.

Several local restaurants got up and running under generator power and were offering free food during the outage. Kudos to them, and a couple are going to definitely see some of my business for it when things get back to normal.

Unexpected Standouts

Our cell phone service is through Verizon, and it was almost completely uninterrupted during the entire event. On Wednesday night and parts of Thursday the data usage on our smart phones was pretty slow, but otherwise we just didn’t have any problems. Whatever ya’ll did, well done Verizon.

The two week battery life on my Kindle turned out to be fantastic. So much so, in fact, that we bought a second one at Target for my wife on Saturday (and charged it at my boss’s place while we were taking the aforementioned hot showers). The down side: wireless delivery for the Kindle is through AT&T, which had no service from Wednesday night until Friday. Also, we need to keep a couple of battery powered book lights around for nights with no power. Still, it worked out really well at a time when our biggest problem was boredom. Bookstores were closed but the Kindle store stayed open the whole time. Two huge thumbs up here.

Unexpected Fail

Wal-Mart. And I’m talking epic fail here. I expected them to be among the first to get up and going again. This is freaking Wal-Mart we’re talking about. The one thing they do really, really well is get setup to take other people’s money. Nope. They weren’t even open on Thursday, only came up for a bit on Friday, finally seemed to open up on Saturday. And this morning, despite having full power on for at least 24 hours, they didn’t have fuck all in stock. Compare that to the Kroger across town that was open – with generators, but under full power – days ago and was almost fully stocked over the weekend. Even the Starbucks inside was open. This one surprised me, big time.

Social Commentary

Facebook was mostly annoying. I witnessed an awful lot of people (mostly women, but not all) who didn’t have anything worse than a power outage going into total whine mode. There are people around us who lost everything, folks. I gave some cash to a couple at Wal-Mart earlier today who are literally living out of their truck right now. Your life is not over just because your power is out for a few days. There were some standouts who took it all in good humor, though.

Wilson moved in with his in-laws for the duration, despite them not having power either. Very beta. Chewie offered us a place to stay for a few days (they’re one state over and still have power). We politely declined because we figured if we were going to be bored (and we would’ve been) we might as well be bored at home. Hermione’s aunt offered us a place as well, but we basically declined for the same reason. Besides, other than no hot showers we were doing pretty well anyway.

There were also a fair number of people who just panicked and did rather stupid things. Like sitting in line at the few gas stations that were open for upwards of three hours in order to get gas. We never had a gas shortage, folks. Just a shortage of electricity to pump it. For those of us who sat tight and waited a few days, there was plenty.

Update: Looks like the official tally is 226 tornadoes in a 24 hour period, setting a new national record.

Disaster Preparedness

As I’ve noted before, I believe that our society is in a state of decline. I don’t believe that it will be the end of the world (the world kept going after the Roman Empire collapsed, after the British Empire collapsed and even after the Soviet Union collapsed), but I do believe that within the next decade, two at the outside, we’re going to see some pretty serious upheaval. I’m also very firmly of the opinion that even if you don’t believe any of that, it’s worthwhile to do some basic disaster preparedness. Nobody knew Katrina was coming. Nobody knew the earthquake in Japan was coming. In my neck of the woods its mostly tornadoes that we have to worry about but you don’t get much warning with them, either. So it’s good to be prepared.

I’ve believed this for a long time yet failed to do anything about it. Until now. In the past couple of weeks my wife and I have put together the beginnings of a disaster preparedness kit.

What we’ve got so far:

• 4 gallons of water
• About two days worth of canned meat
• 3-5 days worth of canned vegetables
• A couple of cans of oranges
• 4 pounds of pasta and a few cans of tomato sauce
• A pretty decent start at an emergency first aid kit (on order, should be here in a few days)

This is survival rations, not gourmet stuff. It’s mostly tailored toward the kinds of things we eat anyway. We trend paleo in our diet so we don’t usually eat pasta, but in a pinch that four pounds of pasta will keep us fed for days. It does, of course, need to be kept sealed against the weather (all our supplies are in a sealed plastic bin, and the pasta is further sealed in ziplock bags).

The food and water portion of the kit cost $40 total. There’s probably enough food for most of a week if we’re frugal. I kept the costs down by sticking to what was on sale. I also tried to stick to stuff with very long expiration dates – most of the food is good until 2013. I don’t want to have to replace it often.

This is only a start. We plan to expand it. Most important is the water supply. That’s only enough for a couple of days. Rather than stock up on gallons of water, however, I’m going to invest this summer in a good backpacking ready (ie lightweight) water filter and a bottle of iodine tablets. We’ve got a pretty sizable lake that we like to take the dogs and the baby on a walk around, and if we’ve got a good water filter handy we’ll have water for months. If it can serve double duty for backpacking trips, so much the better. The iodine tablets make a good backup because they’re cheap, although I’ve used them enough on camping trips to know that I’d prefer the filtered water.

We plan to expand the food portion of it over the next few months by picking up a can or four every week as part of our normal grocery shopping, continuing to look for whatever’s on sale at the time. I’d like to get up to about two to three weeks worth of food. For anything short of a worldwide nuclear holocaust that’s enough time for things to return to normal, for relief agencies to start getting food in, or for us to figure out that it’s time to get out of here. And if the nuclear holocaust happens then we’re kind of fucked no matter what we do.

There are still a few major things we need to add. We need something to cook with. I’m thinking a cheap Sterno type stove and a couple of cans of food. We need some good flashlights with some spare batteries. And as many other shave noted we need a couple of firearms and some ammunition around so that we can hold on to what we’ve got if law and order goes out the window like it did in New Orleans. Other than the firearms I think we can fill out the entire set for around $300 total. That’s cheap enough that if it never gets used it’s not a major loss – but if it ever does get used, it would be cheap at ten times the price. A good used pistol could be had for around that much more (for firearms I’d rather go old than cheap; there are some darn good guns available that people would turn their noses up at just because they’ve been fired before). I plan to spend a bit more on that. Shooting is becoming a new hobby for me and I’m also planning to take up hunting this year. They’re good alpha sports and hunting also a useful skill in the case of a true disaster. And I started to do the math on how much meat we could get off of one good deer and I think that even at only 1-2 per season it would pay for the firearms plus a deep freezer pretty easily over the course of a few years. But if all you’re interested in is something for the emergency kit you really wouldn’t need to spend much at all.

Again, I think that every family should have a minimal emergency kit around just on general principal. You don’t have to spend a lot of money to do it, but if a disaster strikes and you don’t have one you’ll wish you did.