All of the elements are here at the Kennywood Phantom Fall Fest. Large crowds of people just hoping to have some fun. Bands of marauding teens looking for trouble. Fight that results in gunfire. Rinse. Repeat.
Police said the shooting escalated from an "altercation" between two groups of teenagers in front of one of the rides inside the park.
During the course of the altercation, at least one drew a firearm and fired two shots.
The suspected shooter was described as a Black [sic] teenage male wearing a black hoodie and a COVID mask.
The most recent census data on Wikipedia is from 2000 and back then West Mifflin, Pennsylvania was close to 90% White. I am sure that has dropped in the meantime. It doesn't matter because events like the Phantom Fall Fest are magnets for groups of "youths" to travel to and generally cause mayhem. What was the squabble that led to the fight and then the shooting? No one seems to know but it is safe to assume it wasn't anything worth shooting someone about.
We are at a point where people are going to stop going to public places where crowds gather and "teens" are drawn: malls, movie theaters, amusement parks, any kind of fun gatherings. Who wants to load up your kids to go to some crowded event where anything might set off one of the young fellas and cause them to start blasting?
It isn't right that we can't have nice gatherings but that is how it is regardless. Follow the sage advice of Ol' Remus and avoid crowds.
There is so much that was better about life in the 1980s. It was mostly still a high trust society where kids played until it got too dark to see, where being outdoors was more entertaining than being indoors where we didn't have the internet. The girls were hotter, the guys were more masculine. Entertainment was beginning to be subversive but still was amazing.
One thing that I don't miss? The looming threat of global thermonuclear war.
The sword of Damocles hanging over us throughout my school-days was that the Cold War would turn hot, someone would do something dumb and we would have to stop our lessons, crawl under our desks and wait to be incinerated. There were plenty of movies about nuclear war in the 80s, from The Terminator where machines use our nukes to trigger a war with Russia to of course Wargames, based on the idea of a new automated system to prevent human's from failing to "turn the key" that almost launches a global thermonuclear war as a game.
The most vivid part of that movie to me is in the very beginning where the one officer takes his hand off the launch key and the other officer pulls his revolver, cocks it and tells him "Turn your key sir". Not great cinema but it shook me up as a kid.
When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, the threat of nuclear war evaporated overnight. Russia was our friend now, experiencing all of the joys of unfettered globalist capitalism. Hooray! My children never lived under the low key terror of everything ending. To them nuclear war was something that made for an interesting universe for video games like the Fallout series, but it wasn't anything they really expected to worry about. While we have had manufatcured scares like bogus WMDs in Iraq, a nuclear program in Iran and Rocket Man in North Korea shooting rockets into the Pacific, it wasn't the life-ending calamity of a full scale exchange between the Russkies and the U.S.
31 years after the dissolution of the Soviet Union and here we are again and worse, it is more real than at any point in my lifetime. Not since the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 has the world been this close to the edge, the edge of nuclear war. All because of a regional conflict that has taken on a life of it's own.
Most Americans don't really think about our nuclear arsenal. It is out of sight, out of mind for almost everyone. You don't see the Ohio-class nuclear submarines prowling below the waves. Few of us live near the strategic air bases where B-52 Stratofortress and B-2 stealth bombers are stationed. Most of our land-based ICBMs are understandably located in thinly populated places like the Great Plains. My first job out of college was in Cheyenne, Wyoming which is home to the F.E. Warren Air Force base, one of the main hubs for our ICBM forces and the base for the 90th Missile Wing operating Minuteman III ICBMs. I had some young enlisted Air Force mechanics working for me part-time, one of their major duties was to be on-call when trucks were moving ICBMs around in case one broke down. Even still, most Americans have at the back of their mind the security of knowing that the nuclear arsenal is out there and still acting as a deterrent. I believe that absent the nuclear deterrent, there would have been a third World War in Europe last century that would have devastated Europe beyond repair.
While the world's nuclear arsenal is greatly diminished, it is still enormous.
The entire ICBM fleet runs on less computational power than what’s now found inside the smartphone in your pocket....
....The order would appear on Moffett’s glitching trichromatic monitor via a computer program that still relies on floppy disks, initiating a series of steps to launch the missiles. A terminal countdown sequence would begin after a machine translated the digital signal from the command hub into an analog signal that the 50-year-old receiver inside a missile silo could recognize.
The pictures look a lot like what we saw in WarGames, and it certainly seems like most of the ICBMs anyway are operating on equipment older than me. Even still I assume that if the word came down, most of the birds would fly on both sides. What might that look like? Princeton did a simulation a few years back and the big exchange is pretty grim.
You can watch the whole thing here:
As a "prepper" of sorts, much as I dislike that term, a global thermonuclear war is the grand-daddy of them all. We all have a kind of spectrum in our heads from localized civil unrest all the way to nuclear war. Like the rest of my brethren who anticipate and are planning for TEOTWAWKI, my main goal is to survive along with my family so we can hopefully rebuild. But in the event of a nuclear war of that scale? Princeton estimates initial casualties to be pretty high, all in Europe, Russia and the U.S....
While we are not in a strategically valuable area, the scenario above includes "the countervalue plan" coming after the initial strategic strikes would target the 30 most populated areas and economic centers to "inhibit" recovery. Being in the industrial heartland is bad news and of the 30 largest U.S. cities, Indianapolis (15th) is two hours away (SW). Columbus, Ohio (14th) is about three hours away to the southeast. Chicago (3rd) is 3 1/2 hours away, slightly NW. Detroit (27th) and Louisville (28th) to the northeast and south respectively are three hours from us. In other words we are neatly bracketed by likely strikes.
So even though I ordered some potassium iodide tablets this morning, I am pretty sure that we won't survive for long if there is a full-fledged nuclear war. Nor do I really want to. My wife and I talked about this last night, is there much of a point to "surviving" a nuclear war in order to be "not dead" until the cancer or radioactive zombies finally get you? What children are born will be at enormous risk of birth defects and cancer.
This is not the future we were promised. The end of the Cold War was supposed to mean an endless era of peace and prosperity. Instead we got a "global war on terror" abroad and an utter degradation of our culture domestically, accompanied by a cataclysmic slow moving genocide of Whites in Europe and America. To top it off we are careening toward the brink of a nuclear war.
We get all of the bad stuff from the 1980s and none of the good. That isn't the kind of nostalgia I was hoping for.
The po-leece in Tarrant County, Texas foiled a mass shooting set to occur at a Homecoming game. When I saw the story on my email alert using the key words "mass shooting" and saw the names, I figured this would be huge news: Brandon Gipson and Isaac Cooper. Sounded like a couple of White guys and the media would be all over it.
Then I saw the mugshots. Not as frat boy as I thought.
You can feel your IQ drop just looking at those pictures, especially Isaac on the right. Wow.
They had an "AR style pistol" and as usual with the brothers...
Did no one tell these fellas about that whole stabilizing brace thing, or just a regular stock since these two 18 year olds almost certainly obtained this pistol illegally? I haven't shot an AR pistol with just the buffer tube but I expect it loses a lot of accuracy. Not to mention that there are not even iron sights on that pistol so these geniuses were going with the "spray the crowd" tactic. I am admittedly not a certified "shooter" but without sights or some sort of brace I doubt I could hit much with any accuracy very far away.
Some elements are in place: shooting at a school even averted, AR pistol recovered but alas for the FBI they were a couple of colored kids so no one is making a big deal about it.
Meanwhile the Texas Tribune published a story bitching about a judge in Tarrant County, Alex Kim, because he sends too many "youths" to prison instead of to some alternate sentencing bullshit.
Many blame the judge but apparently no one blames the crappy parents and the asshole kids committing the crime. The story calls them "children" more than 25 times or "boys and girls" like they are preschoolers rather than teenaged dangerous criminals. "Boys and girls", GTFOH. Based on those two geniuses above, Tarrant County needs to send more "yoofs" to the slammer where they can't hurt anyone else.
Shoigu also stressed that Russia possesses an immense mobilization capability and could summon almost 25 million people with some military experience. “So one could say that this partial mobilization is just 1%, or a bit more” of the total number of people that could be mobilized, he added.
The conflict in Ukraine could have and should have ended months ago but the U.S. and our "allies" keep propping up the corrupt regime of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky.
To Western ears, the idea of calling up 25 million reservists is crazy. Most American normies watch the news and consume the narrative, believing what they are told to believe. This is just a limited conflict by evil Vodka Man Bad and the noble Ukrainians will drive the heathen from their lands and go back to being a poor, corrupt country in no time!
That is not how the Russians see it.
While I am not an expert on Russia, you don't have to be to understand that they see this as part of an existential struggle against a hostile West that in large measure seems to be still fighting the Cold War. It is not just an amusing proxy war but a direct conflict. The average American doesn't see this but the people who keep arming Ukraine and providing indirect (and likely direct) military assistance against Russia certainly understand it. Vladimir Putin declared that the West is trying to destroy Russia.
Putin also accused the west of using "nuclear blackmail" against Russia noting that "if its territorial integrity is threatened Russia will definitely use all the means at its disposal." to defend Russian territory. "This is not a bluff."
Are you willing to see American cities turned into radioactive rubble so the American military-industrial complex can have a better profit margin? Putin would sooner see the world destroyed than see Russia subjugated by the West and forced into degeneracy.
Adding 300,000 reservists into Ukraine is a huge escalation and it might also mean that the restraint Russia has shown so far is coming to an end. What will this mean for us, how will the West respond? If recent times have taught us anything it is that the people pulling the strings are reckless and sociopathic. Also keep an eye on Taiwan and the recent escalation of tensions in the Pacific. It wouldn't take much to set that off and then all bets are off. Add in rising domestic turmoil and we have the makings of a perfect storm of chaos. At least we can't say we weren't warned.
Put climate change conversations on hold until next year when it warms back up. Looking at a stormy 86 today and then the temps dropping like Biden's popularity.
I am not quite ready for temps only a few degrees above freezing but ready or not, here they come. It will be interesting to watch what happens in Europe as they start needing to heat their homes with skyrocketing energy prices.
We have raised hogs for a number of years since moving to our little farm but most breeds of hog are a lot to handle and butchering weights are more than we are equipped to deal with. We really like Tamworth hogs, they are slower growing than commercial breeds but the bacon is amazing and the ham is a deep red color with a much richer flavor than that pale, watery commercial ham you buy in the store. The problem is that while killing them isn't a problem, handling the carcass certainly is.
So we decided to get some smaller hogs that would do well on forage and poor quality feed. We settled on the somewhat rare American Guinea hog and bought a few gilts (unbred females). They only get around 200-300 lbs when full grown and hanging weight is usually well under 200 lbs, we plan on butchering for meat when the hanging weight will be under 150 lbs. The Guinea Hog females are technically sexually mature very young but it is recommended they not be bred until they are at least a year old. We didn't get a boar so we selected a different breed, a Kunekune, for the male. When the time was right we put on some Barry White, provided some champaign and they commenced to makin' bacon.
Hogs usually have around a 114 day gestation or about 3 1/2 months. Early summer humping leads to late summer babies, we got 9 piglets out of this sow but lost a couple. Tonight we let the 7 little squealers out of the confined area they had been living in and out onto grass for the first time.
They are super cute right now and are already nibbling at grass as expected from two breeds that are noted for being good at foraging.
We are trying to focus on livestock that doesn't require a commercial feed to thrive, assuming that at some point large scale commercial agriculture will break down and you won't be able to buy pig food at the local feed mill or Tractor Supply.
Cute now but when they are older and it is time to butcher them, the smaller carcass size will be a lot easier for us to handle. They are small and easy to handle, surviving on grass if need be. I'll let you know how they taste when we get around to butchering them and cooking them up.
