Segregate and Win

We were talking to a few people about how the media is showing the "Violent Blacks", "White Collar Fat Cats", "Blue Collar Dummies", " Good Christian Men/Woman", ETC... And I got to thinking this is very much like what we were taught in the Army about handling detainees. You first divide men from woman, then find some way to divide them out further (like height, weight, color of clothes, etc...) keep doing this till you have very manageable groups. now poke your groups to get them to 'rat out' the people in the other groups.

Now lets apply this to labels that groups of people may give themselves or group give to other groups. Then lets say you have the metaphorical sheep dogs (preachers, politicians, or other group leaders) keep their little herd nice and tight and telling them the other herds are wolfs that will eat them. After awhile the sheep don't know who are wolfs and who are the sheep, so they get scared of each other and only listen the the sheep dogs. As new sheep dogs come and go and not knowing what a wolf looks or smells like a wolf may get on as a sheep dog. The wolf can now march the small or even tiny group off and no one cares or even notices.

Cycles

As I am prepping for this trip (some may call it an Adventure) I was thinking about how life moves in a very circular like pattern. Some people by a combination of luck and skill move more like the Golden Spiral, and other people move more like a Lemniscate. 

The Lemniscate is like a figure eight. This could be like a person that always comes back to a group of others (Family, Club, Gang, Religion, Job, Drugs, or/and etc...). A person may have more the one of these going on so that could be stacked in or on each other.

The Golden Spiral is what I feel lots of people aim for but never fully understand how to get there. The people that get this to work are: try something whether it passes of fails they learn from it then apply that knowledge to the next thing and they keep expanding in this. Always expanding out.

Stop being perfect

So we don't post as much as I would like sense I got rid of the Internet connection a few weeks ago. This means I will write a post on my phone save then at work clean up the post and publish them. I do this to do things like drops links in for refrancing and let people easily look up things I may be talking about. I feel this is bottle necking my postings. I am going to try and post more often than. Even if they are short blurbs.

Is this backwards?

As a member of the Satanic Temple, EV-250 and myself listen to a handful of atheist podcast. Now most of the podcasters on these podcast make fun of these different preppers, mostly from TV shows and ones that post to different religious websites, blogs, and forums. But is this backwards?

The theist has a god (mostly talking about God) and the atheist doesn't have a god. But a lot of the most out spoken preppers seem to be theist screaming "God, Guns, and Ammo". While a lot of the atheist seem to be very happy with "The government will save the day". The more I think about it the more this seem a little backwards. The theist should be saying "Don't worry God has it", while the atheist should be more like "We need to hold out till help arrives, no matter how long".  

Something that I have not heard a lot of preppers talk about is setting ground work in your community for during and after a disaster. I may come back to this topic later, but for now if anyone has ideas on why these views seen reversed please post a comment love to hear some ideas.

Living An US Army Commune

So I was working on the van last night, since I couldn't sleep, and was thinking of somethings that happened in the Army. One thing that stuck with me and was bouncing around the beat up skull that night/morning was this time when I help to organize a libertarian (closer to being anarchist) commune in the tent that about 10 of us shared, and one person lived with us.

Most of the time everyone, but 1 or 2 people in our tent, would go on patrol that could last from 12 to 20 hours or even longer. At the beginning we were sleeping on the green army cots, better then the ground but far from a mattress. One day we got a 20 ft. conex filled with these cheap wooden bunk beds and mattresses. We all stacked up the bunk bed kits in the corners of every tent and each of us through 2 mattresses each of our cots, that night was a lot better sleep.

The bunk bed kits set in the corner of our tent for about a week or two. Then on a day that I and one other person didn't go on patrol we decided to helped each other put together our buck beds. After realizing we built the 2nd bunk faster then the 1st bunk, we thought maybe we could get a third one done faster. By the end of the day we had all the bunks in our tent built and help the one or two people from the other tents build their bunks (we would have made old Eli Whitney and Henry Ford proud with our assembly line ability). In our tent we set a buck next to a cot and through the mattresses on to he bunks. We also set most of the buck so one long side was against a wall of the tent, creating a large center area.

While this action by itself did not admittedly lead to the brief "tent commune" it did get the ball started. But things like when we cleaned up 2 coaches, acquired a large empty wire spool, and got a good size hookah. Which lead to our 'smoke and talks' before bed, this lead to people reaching out and helping each other with things like laundry, or make sure that a plate of food was grabbed from the mess tent (while the food would be cold by the time any one eat it).

This then lead to the thing that may have sealed the deal on our common bond in the tent. We paid a contractor who was leaving $10 for a microwave oven. Then later lead us to plan and run night time operations on the food storage buildings and conexs. We should have wrote up debriefs for every night we conducted one of these. Cause how many acquisitors do you know set up sand-tables, assign a team to scout out then look out and if need be make a distraction, use military grade night vision, and at the end celebrate over acquiring a 25 lb box of chicken nuggets.

But sadly when I went on R&R and came back the crappy tent was gone and we where all consolidated down to a tent that had been insulated with foam and a uniformed plywood sleeping cubes were built and no one was talking everyone was hiding out in their cube with headphones on.

The New Sexest Scale.

So EV-250 and I were talking about a conversation that I had with someone, when I went to Ohio Linux Fest, and it went something like this:

Me: Yeah, there was this girl that was the bartender at the bar we went to when I was in Korea. And she was a solid 10.
The Dude: Don't they use a different system of scales?
Me: Like what, Hexadecimal?
The Dude: I don't know.
Me: OK, she was a #F.
The Dude: Would that not be #FFFFFF.

This then lead to a long argument about HTML and Hexadecimal, that I will spare you. But I still stick with #0 to #F not #000000 to #FFFFFF for the above argument. We both agreed that if you walked up to a girl and said, "you are a total F," then you will most likely get slapped.

EV-250 thought both sides failed and at the same time was on to something. If you take the HTML format of #000000 but apply each placement as it's own value by following this break-down:

1. Hair, #0 to #F
2. Face, #0 to #F 
3. Upper Body, #0 to #F
4. Lower Body, #0 to #F
5. Personality, #0 to #F, This can be left blank with #.
6. Intelligence,#0 to #F, This can be left blank with #.

EV-250 feels this would be better brake down of a person using mostly visual, with 2 optional none visual values. So we decided to use this system on some silver screen victims.



Actress: Claudia Black
Character: Aeryn Sun
Score: #FAFF9C

Scorer: Joshua Marquis

Actress (voice): Ellen McLain

Character: GlaDOS

Score: #.FFFFE

Scorer: EV-250

Leaf Springs and fall showers

EV-250 and I took the van to get the leaf springs worked on (someone was thinking the van was bottoming out going over speed bumps). After talking with a guy at Gordons Spring Svc. Inc.  he said, the springs were in good shape, and he was even surprised that the springs were in as good of shape as they were. He did say, that adding 1 or 2 springs could help sense one side had 5 inches and the other side had about 4 inches of travel before bottoming out. 

But the gentleman at the shop was more interested in the 2 large solar panels on the roof rack and when I showed him the large 300+ lbs orange battery box, he then realized why there was difference in clearance. After EV-250 and I talked about it we will probably bring the van back to get the leafs added. 

I thought I could get some other work done on the van, but after I got thing ready to get work done the sky turned dark (this does not help charge my batteries), and my phone rang. After talking to my father for 10 minutes or so on the phone, the first drop of rain hit me. As I finished quickly putting everything away the air turned into a pool. In less then a minute it was raining left, right, down, and even up. 

Needles to say nothing got done today.

A note and start

This is a blog that will be written from the perspective of a fictional character call EV-250 and myself. Will try and update the adventures of EV-250 every week or as thing happen.