Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum (To maintain Peace, Prepare For War)
This is a phrase I use a lot. Yes, the Latin, although I have a fondness for my own "Practice Peace, Train Chaos" simply because it is mine.
I was thinking about it again today and wondering how many (or perhaps, how few) of us actually understand it.

As I sit here at my desk, somewhere in an old ranch house in the High Desert, it is a quiet and cold night. Very few things are stirring inside or out, the rythmic tap-tap-tap of my fingers doing their own peculiar dance (I never learned to type and can still do about 100 WPM my way) and the slight hum of the aging CPU about all I can hear.
Immediately ahead of my fingers on the key-board, to the left of the monitor, are knives, yawara sticks and several issues of SWAT and Soldier of Fortune magazines. To my right and slightly behind is a small stainless-steel rolling shelf on which are more of the same magazines, more knives and several books on knives, firearms and hand-to-hand combat. I have knives in my pockets, and a few strides away are long-guns and handguns, loaded of course.
Am I an anti-government white supremecist militia wacko? Far from it, were any of the three-letter agencies to send a Lesbian, Jewish, Black woman to offer me a job this evening I would jump at it and shake her hand with a big grin.
Am I paranoid? Not really. I dont fear black helicopters, aliens, or any such thing. Dont feel I have enemies. Looking at my life I can honestly, and happily, say I have no real enemies who would kill me.
Those who read my blog know I believe strongly in self reliance and self preservation. I can, and will, take care of myself and my loved ones - better living through not getting killed by hunger, cold, or predators. And that is it in a nutshell.
Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum/Practice Peace, Train Chaos - what this means is that while you are peaceful, others are not. While you are restful, others are not. While you are happy, others are not. Those who are not resting, not happy and most of all not peaceful, will try and take yourpeace, rest and happiness away from you. Whether they try to rape you (its never about sex, its about control - taking your freedom, your peace), steal from you (invading your home, your person, taking your comfort, your peace) or kill you or your family (taking your life, taking your everything), those are are not peaceful, do not rest and are not happy, are predators upon everyone else.
Predators, of any kind, do not respond to cries for mercy. Have you ever set on the earth, on some cold moonlit night, and listened to the wails of a rabbit floating over the sage brush and cedar trees, as it was being killed by a coyote? I have. I have heard the cries for help as they filtered across trash cans, filthy streets and dissapeared into the uncaring night of the city. Predators are predators, and none of them understand mercy, it is not their way.
Preparing for war is preparing for predators. Training chaos is making ready to protect your peace.
Man is as man is... the human animal is bestial as the next, brutal as the lions of Tsavo, and quicker to prey on its own kind than any other. This will not change, as long as there are people in the world who want what others have and will use force to take it, this will not change - and for as long as there has been man, there have been those who would take by force. To expect man to change, to expect that our predators can be convinced to be peaceful, to be reasoned with to do good works and earn their way (brutality is so much easier), is a fallicy and a grave mistake.
This is preparing for war - not to invade countries, but to keep back the savagery, the bestiality, the evil and violence of predatory man.
6+ billion people on the planet... so much room for predators to be born and to grow. You cannot expect to not be touched by them. They are as prevalent as any other social disease. We all use condoms. We like clean needles, for our flu shots and our junkies. This is preparing for another kind of fight, against sickness of the body.
Why do so few understand preparing, and if need be carrying out, the fight against the greater sickness of predatory violence?
Why are there so many fools who fail to understand these simple principles of life?

Be Trained, or Be Chained... the choice is yours. I have made mine.
Si vis Pacem, Para Bellum!

Stolen Fetus Murder
Looking these things straight in the face is a challenge, even for people who regularly study death dealings and killing (I am not a "serial killer fan", but read a lot about them in a better effort to try and see inside them, my interests in psychology and combatives drive this).
My first instinct is to say that this (and the three similar previous cases which I am aware of) are the work of demons. Far out thought for some, especially someone like me who prefer hard-reality over comfortable fantasy, but I do believe in forces beyond our knowledge - no way to prove it, I choose to believe because my life experiances will not let me deny it.
But I must rethink my willingness to dismiss these acts as "beyond human scope", because they are not and we have to realize that.
These are not monsters, in any sense of the word. The people who do these things are human, purely human, acting with human instincts and desires (not stable ones, but very human ones).
These are people we share the world with. Share the supermarket with. Live our lives around, next to and in-between.
Human.
Why dont we use that word with its full meaning, its full power. It is a ten-times more terrible word than "Monster".

Another link I feel like posting this afternoon -
Cunningham Custom Leather
Of course, if you dearest reader are actually reading, you should suspect that "Leather" refers to gun leather. If you suspect that you would be quite right, it does refer to gun-leather (not just holsters, belts, ammo carriers too).
The interesting thing here is, they are made by a woman, for women.

I think this is wonderful. Too many times I see women who want to carry a handgun (and what woman shouldnt! I know plenty dont, of course, but firmly believe if all women were armed and ready to use it, rape would be a historical footnote within a few months) end up completely unsatisfied by commonly available holsters, which are generally great for the male frame/physique, and uncomfortable, unconcealable and simply a pain in the ass for the female.
This ends up with women chosing far less practical (and possibly dangerous) methods of carry such as purse holsters. Purse holsters are, on the outside, a decent idea, but when you actually consider the nature of the carry its not hard to see why they are, simply, awful. The purse is one of those things that is either immediately grabbed or dropped in a sudden violent attack (and what attackers announces from across the street "Bitch, better get out yo pistol, I'm gonna come over there and rape yo fine ass!" - not a single one. It will be a sudden violent surprise attack). The purse provides a drag handle to jerk you around with, and is very easy to grab and tug on. This will either break the strap, giving the purse to the attacker, or force you to choose between being a puppet on a string or letting it go to maintain solid footing and upright position. Either way, you just lost your gun. Maybe it gets dropped and the attack continues, maybe it was a purse snatcher and he runs off with it, maybe he rifles the purse, finds the gun and lays smoke on you with it. Lose fucking lose any way you cut it.
Guns should be carried on body - like knives, like mace, like any weapon. Specialty carries have their place, for specialty situations, but day in and day out, guns, knives, your first line primary/secondary weapons should be carried ON BODY.
Holsters for a woman, by a woman, should be understanding of womens needs for carry better than anything else. We all know that us men dont understand women, why should women go to men to get holsters? Exactly.

Reading around the site I also see a great deal of wisdom - for example the comment that the most important part of the holster is the belt.
Without a quality belt, which will hold firm and comfortably, without shifting or breaking in-fight or during the draw, the best holster in the world is, maybe not useless, but seriously detrimented.
Reliable tool-access depends on the tool (gun, knife, whatever) being where you expect it to be, when you need it to be. It needs to be in the same place on the range, in the same place when you practice your draw-stroke in the mirror, in the same place when you put a blue-gun in your holster and go roll around on padded mats training In-Fight weapon access, and it needs to be in that exact same place when you shove your thumb in an attackers eye, post him hard against a wall and then reach for your weapon. A good holster is half of this equation... but without a belt (the other half) it isnt half enough!

Check out the site - www.womensholsters.com - its worth it.

Global Guerrillas: An open notebook on the epochal war of the 21st Century.
Excellent blog on the War on Terror, one of the most insightful things I've read to date.

In the next couple of days I'll be adding links to my "Daily Blog Stops" on the sidebar, this will be on there.
I feel, in this day and age more than ever, it is important to understand these things, terrorism, its faces the efforts (and failures) against it, even as common men and women in the street.
It is our world that is rent and broken, it is our lives that are shocked and destroyed by these things - why shouldnt we know? Why shouldnt we keep track?
When did society become a heard of pedestrian, uninterested, animals wandering around and waiting for their "herders" to tell them what the color of the day is, what is happening.
Open your eyes, open your mind, pay attention! If you dont... well, dont blame anyone but yourself when the wolf sneaks right up and takes a bite out of your ass.

We were warned these things would happen. We were warned by members of our highest courts, writers, street-corner pundits. We were warned by the rest of the world, through their actions, reactions and proclamations. We didn’t listen.

Penny McClurg came to the United States from South Africa in 1986 when she was 15 years old. In 1991 she received Permanent Resident status in the United States. She is now the mother of two children, aged 10 and 11, and engaged to a handsome U.S. Navy veteran. She is also prisoner #040062787 in Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center in Miami. Her crime? Illegal entry to the United States. In 2003 Penny took a cruise, and left then re-entered the United States within a four-day period. Because of this she was put on Deferred Inspection status, during which her Resident Alien card was supposed to be taken and replaced with a temporary card. This was not done, and she was allowed to exit and re-enter the US again in September 2003 and May 2004.
Come June 2004 Penny received a letter from the Department of Homeland Security requesting her to report to Tampa International Airport Airside F on the 30th of the month. Upon doing this she found no one there to meet her and after waiting several minutes called the number provided in the letter, telling the answering person where she was and why. The assured her someone would come for her. Half an hour later she called again, and was told they had no record of her having an appointment. Eventually a Department of Homeland Security officer arrived and escorted her into the secure area of Airside F and asked her to be seated in an office waiting area.
Another Homeland Security officer, one Mr.Guthier, greeted her and told her he would be with her shortly. Two hours later she was summoned into his office, briefly asked about a 1997 Felony conviction, which she confirmed and stated she had completed her sentence and probation for, and then sent back out to the waiting area. Three hours passed before Mr. Guthier returned. This time he told her she was being officially "detained".
She asked what that meant and was told it was essentially being arrested. She asked where she was going and Mr. Guthier said he did not know, someone else would have to tell her.
Her incarceration began on July 1st 2004. At the time she did not know why she was being held, no one would tell her.
She was taken to Turner Guilford Knight Correctional Center and placed in a holding cell that was covered in filth, with feces smeared on the walls. She was then transferred to a regular cell, and again subjected to the same appalling conditions of filth and human waste.
Being Six-Weeks pregnant when placed in the "correctional center" a nurse at the facility wanted to take her blood, but Penny refused to grant her permission for the blood draw due to the unsanitary conditions of the environment.
On the 12th of July Penny asked to see the facility psychiatrist, to discuss her concerns about the way she was being treated, the resulting stress and the effect this would have on her pregnancy. Her request was ignored and on July 15th she miscarried.
She was taken to Jackson Memorial Hospital under guard and, wearing an orange prison jumpsuit, handcuffs and leg-shackles, was seated in the waiting room. She waited there for three hours, ignored by hospital staff, until she began to visibly hemorrhage. When finally seen the doctor informed her she was miscarrying and performed a D&C was performed without the use of anesthetic.
Although it was required Penny refused a follow-up visit, unwilling to subject herself to the same humiliation and violations again.
As well as endangering her health and well-being the detention center provides insufficient meals, including spoiled, rotten and moldy items, and although the commissary provides packaged foods the prison denies inmates the ability to cook or otherwise prepare these items, which require such measures to be edible.
Beyond the unhealthy and dangerous conditions and treatment she has been subjected to, Penny has been denied receipt of legal materials, having several law books she ordered stopped at the prison mail center and returned to the publisher.
Penny has never been told by prison officials, immigration officials, or any Government official why she is being detained. She had to learn from her lawyers what her supposed crime was.
Penny was never given a chance to arrange for care of her children (both American Citizens) before being detained. It was simply luck that had the children staying with her father, and her fiancé available to care for them.
Penny McClurg is behind held in Immigration Holding, officially denied "entry" into the United States she has called home since she was a child, being denied information and legal resources by her captors (for jailers is an inadequate term for this situation), being denied reasonable and safe medical attention, and being denied the simple hygienic and dietary considerations that are afforded to event he worst criminals in America. Her crime? None. Her supposed crime a mistake by the INS, a brutally clear fuck-up.
This is a story that has slowly spread around a few 'blogs, a few alt-news sites, and remains relatively unheard of. Go to www.news.google.com and search for Penny McClurg - you will find nothing. The major media has not, and more than likely will not, carry this story. Essentially no one will ever know who she is, what has happened to her, or what will finally happen to her.
Penny McClurg is going to join the ranks of the disappeared. A grand tradition that began in South America, with the governments arresting/kidnapping people and literally disappearing them, taking groups and sometimes entire villages of people who spoke out against the government or its ties to exploitive international companies such as United Fruit and making them never heard from again. This has now come home to America, and is a far more random seeming process, lacking the overt political and financial motivations of earlier actions around the globe. Homeland Security will not sleep, they will not rest, they will persecute everyone, for every infraction no matter how small and no matter who's fault, and their victims are not subject to the same rights and privileges of common criminals, and are practically powerless to fight it.

Does this sound wrong to you? Does this sound like a perversion of the America you believe in?
Click HERE to sign the Penny McClurg Petition and to learn more about her case.

The way for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing. If you do not click, if you do not sign, you are well within your rights. You can believe that the government is right, that they would detain no one without good reason. You can believe that the President and his advisors, associates and cabinet have America's best interests at heart. You can believe that the Patriot Act is just another weapon against terrorism and that the Dept. of Homeland Security is not hunting and imprisoning every-day Americans.
You will be wrong, and you will be at fault the day they handcuff your children, your neighbors and you, and take you off to a shit-smeared prison, leave you to nearly die from a medical emergency, deny you decent food, legal materials, and the right to know why you are imprisoned.
Don’t tell me it wont happen, couldn’t happen, because it did happen. It happened to Penny McClurg, and its happened to more people. It will keep happening.

America is a dark and haunted place now. We are a shell of myth, with a core of darkness and tyranny that has overwhelmed our golden standards of freedom and justice. We are still the best, we are still the only nation that can even begin to claim to offer true freedom, but we are losing our grasp on that... it is being stolen from us with deceit and deception, a smiling face for freedoms theft, but it is still a theft. What is left behind will be beyond our wildest dreams, beyond our darkest nightmares. If this oncoming tide cannot be reversed, we will look back on these days of a few "disappeared", a few injustices and a mild police state, and we will shed a tear for how good it was.
This is just the beginning.

The Blessing Day

As I lay down to sleep last-night I threw up a call to the great spirit to kend strength to me and to my guardian spirits, to offer me a clearer view of the wisdom and guidance that flows through all things if we but look.
It came in a form not expected. Instead of gifting me with the strength to know what I needed to know, despite lack of study, and to perform the tasks required despite growing "rusty" on them, I received another kind of strength. The strength to admit when I was not ready, when I was forced to turn back.
I was nearly in tears as I left the campus where the EMT-Basic liscensing testing was being held - the first time I blew one practical exam, and this time I came un-prepared and left before I made a fool of myself. It didnt feel like strength, not then. It felt very weak, and I felt very much like I had let down myself and also those I had gone through Basic training with, my comrades who I stood beside then, but could not keep pace with.
But, as I climbed the truck higher into the mountains, running just a little bit, exploring new places and spaces, getting higher into the crisp cold air, clearer in sight, I came to see the strength and wisdom of my decision. Instead of putting myself back to square one by blowing an exam a second time, I stepped back and had the strength not to give up but still admit I was not ready. I've never done that before, not really. I have run, in fear and then in shame, from things, but never made a decision to step back and then return more readied, more powerful in my ability to conduct myself with skill, honor and discipline.
Gifts like that are not always recognized for the gifts they are, but they are all around us and come to us when we need them. We dont always know what is best for us, but when we call out to the great spirit, the spirits of sky and of earth, our guardian spirits, to lend us strength and to guide us, they work that for us, they gift us that in ways that truly come to the best. For the first time ever I may be seeing that truly clearly.

I spent the rest of the day journeying through the old small (very small, only a few hundred people in each) communities in the northern mountains, where some of the old world still exists. Very closed in and with a very powerful feel of tradition and the wide open freedom of being, of vision, that can only come from the mountains and from being truly at home in them.
I saw artworks, weavings and silver work, that are some of the finest in not just the West, but in the world, and I saw homes that were hundreds of years old, with fat lazy dogs out front and fat horses in the snowy pastures beside. I watched the tracks of horses in the snow, as it glittered under a pure sun in a clear sky, and I could have stayed there forever lost in those tracks, making a study of them, a religion, an entire creation.
I bought sage to make smudge, and I left tobacco offerings to the spirits on high as I picked up two powerful quartz stones, which later seemed right to be thrown into a small stream, to carry their magick, their guardian spirits, to other people in other places.
I am at home in the mountains, in the small communities and sacred places, I have clarity of thought and of vision there, and all things begin to show their significance, their power and import. It was a good day in the mountains, a good day traveling with the spirits.

As I came down to the lower places, I even visited one of the oldest Catholic churches in the state, and felt the power of that place as well. It was a different power than the sacred power of the crisp clean mountains under the blue sky and bright sun in cold air. It was cloaking and clustering, almost smothering, an oppressive sort of sacred power. It too has its place and its import, and I too have my feelings and connections to that power, but with my vision still clear it was easy to see why I am at home in the mountains and not in any church, why I am at home with the cold crisp spirits of the air, not the candle smoke, holy water, book-bound spirits of the churches. Different ways to worship the same, different paths to the spirit, each has their place, within the world and within me, but my calling is to the wild and the free, the open spaces, the high places, cold air and sparking snow, cliffs and grass shifting softly in the wind, the scent of pinon-pine sap and cedar drifting across the high hills and high-lows as well.

A very powerful day today, an important day. My vision is clearer today than it has been in a long time, my connection to the great spirit, the guardians, all the spirits. For our world is as much a spirit world as the next, call them God or angels, demons or devil, they are all the same, and are all part of the great whole which surrounds us and reaches beyond what we can see, beyond even what we can dream or sense beyond our senses. I have been losing touch with that, losing sight, vision... I have let the clutter of my daily affairs become the clutter of my mind, the clutter of my home the clutter of my soul, and it drags me down and closes my pathways to the spirit, and today was a re-awakening of those connections, that ability to see, to know, the vision and the sense.
Today was a blessing.

Childrearing? Child-terrorizing?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/this_world/4058833.stm

This is dangerous.
The cruelty, psychologically especially (if not physically as well) and the essential basis of breaking the psyche to make it fit a mold, is completely beyond the scope of acceptable teaching or counseling methods.
The people responsible for this should be brought to account for it and fast.

Debra LaFave

Happened across another news article about Debra LaFave tonight. She is the 23 year old teacher who is accused of raping a 14 year-old male student, and is facing up to 15 years in prison if convicted.
I saw a picture of her, just a small one, in this one news article and decided to do a little "investigating" for myself. All true investigation must first look within I think, and I remember being 14... which at times is like living with blue-balls for brains. Next I consider the photographic "evidence" of Ms. LaFave's appearance. She did, some years ago (around 18 Y/O) pose for some non-nude bikini-shots, and has looked no-less than delicious at her public (read: court and press-conference) appearances. With this in mind I think the photos become essential to these considerations.

Beer and Shots Gallery: The Best Debra LaFave Pics Yet

I ask you, would she have to rape a 14 year old boy? She certainly wouldn't have had to rape me then, nor would she now. Even with this admittedly poor judgment on her record, she would have a hard time raping me... I'm afraid I'd want it too much.

For your own further considerations, here are some more related news, blog and similar bits, pieces and pix.
Fox 41 News Article on Debra LaFave

Fire Coast News Article
The Smoking Gun: Debra LaFave Files

Snaps Blog: One of Several Debra LaFave Pages

Just Another LaFave Gallery

The Owners Manual: Report, Commentary, Few Pics

I do not honestly think this is a rape case... very poor judgement on her part I cannot deny, but rape? I call bullshit on that (even if they just say Statutory Rape... there is nothing rape about it.)
That is one gorgeous woman, and I would forgive her a lot of bad judgment if given the opportunity. Hey, I'm still younger than she is, but old enough not to get her in trouble... anybody got her number?

Feel good materialistic lust of the day

This gives me the warm fuzzies...


http://www.aimsurplus.com/acatalog/AK_WASR_RIFLE_w__Folding_Stock__Bayonet_Lug__Break.html

Good price on a nice little carbine, just about everything a boy could want in a budget battle rifle.
I still have to let myself grin, a great big shit eating grin, whenever I see the evidence of the 1994 Crime Bill (better known as the "Assualt Weapons Ban") sunsetting and taking its ignorance fueled stupidity away from us.
Also makes me wish I had an extra $350 to play with, I'd be all over that. *sigh*