For a very long time, I have believed that the full and complete answer to the rape problem is to arm every woman, or at least every woman we can convince to be armed and properly trained. Will a few men get shot? Yes. They will get shot, and they will die. Not all of them will be guilty of sexual assault, but regardless, the message would get out.

See, rapists are not smart, usually. They are opportunistic. They’re not motivated by sex, either. They’re motivated by power. Rape is not a sexual assault, it’s a mental one. A ridiculously large number of them are actually cowed by women, hence the need to overpower them and do bad things to them.

The concern about being shot and killed by women would stop those types of rapists.

It wouldn’t stop the crafty ones, nor the kiddy diddlers, but there isn’t much we can do in advance about those.

But yes, for the “normal” rapists, the “everyday” rapists, the rape whistle shown above would be just fine, along with smaller versions.

What it would not help with are the ones who are in it for other reasons than power. It wouldn’t help at all with the few but real number of women who cry rape when it isn’t. And boy, do I have a problem with those women.

I am afraid that this current “Jane Doe” is one of those women. I’m afraid she’s like Mattress Girl.

When I went to evaluate the coverage of the Cornell case, I asked Grok to get me JUST the facts. No news outlets, no media reports. I just wanted the various documents available to the public, that state the facts as presented. And frankly, there really aren’t all that many.

What we do know:

She went to a frat party, was already drunk and likely high when she arrived. This is by her own admission, as well as the observation of many witnesses on record. She then proceeded to agree to a threesome with two men, take ketamine in a large dose, and have sexual relations with those two men for an undetermined amount of time. After that, the original two men left, and other men came in.

At least some of the men in the frat put up an “advert” of sorts, telling their frat brothers that there was a willing woman upstairs. These other men were ones who read the “advert” and joined in what they thought was the fun. Per their statements, they found a woman who was lucid enough to ask them to stop a couple of times while she went and did things, and a couple of times when other men in the room were so drunk they were sick and she was checking on them. They stopped when she asked them to stop. Her own statement to the police, the original one, included this information.

Now, the District Attorney went over all the information in the case, and came to the conclusion that there was no way to win a case where the woman states that for the majority (and maybe all) of the time, she consented to what was going on. That’s just not rape, in anyone’s books.

I am strongly of the opinion that every woman deserves to have at least one person who stands by her, steadfastly believing everything she says. No, I take that back. Every person who says they are a rape victim deserves it, not just women. Even when the facts seem wrong. Even when it sounds like she might be lying or blowing things up. It’s hard enough to report this kind of thing. Having one person who’s your designated *believer* really does help. Even if it ends up that the person wasn’t telling the truth, the other people around them known that should they end up in a bad place, THEY would have someone to believe them.

I am often that person, for a variety of reasons. I’m okay with that. I will hold hands, encourage proper reporting, stand with a woman while she has a rape kit done (and let me tell you, that’s a whole other level of degradation, even if it’s entirely necessary). Someone has to be with her (or him), and I am happy to be that person.

But none of that means that I give up my ability to have independent thoughts. I have stood beside someone who I personally thought was lying. Turns out I was wrong; I was very glad I kept that thought inside my head. Regardless, she needed someone standing by her, and I gave her that. Had she gone to court and lost, had he not confessed when pressed by the police and shown all the evidence as it piled up, I would have asked her eventually if she was sure. It’s a shit question to ask someone, but sometimes it has to be asked. I don’t mind being that person, either.

I think someone needs to take Jane Doe aside, hold her hand, and ask her quietly if this really happened. Because her early statements don’t match her later ones. If there’s a reason for that (and there is ONE thing… she reported rape, and it was not written into her report that way, so that was a wrong-doing on the part of the police), then let me know. Let us know. I’m all for supporting rape victims… but I do so with the understanding that they will work toward being survivors, not victims perpetually. I am entirely wary of women who seem to want to stay the victim.

If Jane Doe had been carrying, I suspect we’d know if she’d been raped. If she had been, one or more of the perpetrators would be dead. Maybe not the first two guys, who she absolutely consented to be with (and later thanked for the fun, though requested not to invite the whole frat next time, which implies a lot). It takes a lot to just out and shoot someone who isn’t sexually assaulting you. Most women who want attention from this kind of thing would never shoot their target, because they wouldn’t get the sympathy and love that they’re aiming for. It’s not a perfect answer, but at least it’s an answer… right?

Sigh…

Someone posted this on the internet. Because someone posted this on the internet, someone else got upset. Why, you may ask, did someone get upset over having the above pointed out?

Well, one person pointed out that they were upset they were alive, that they were homeless, didn’t have a bed, and were hungry. Being told to be grateful for things they didn’t have was wrong.

Another person said that the act of stating, “Be grateful,” is an order, and that in so ordering someone to be grateful, you may as well add “or else” to the end. It’s not a statement of joy, but a threat.

Another said it’s a performance piece designed to anger people so they lash out.

I can’t make this shit up. I can’t EVEN.

If you are reading this, you are alive. Even if you feel like total shit (and if you do, PLEASE reach out, because I’d rather spend hours listening to you talk about your bad day than minutes reading a eulogy at your funeral), you’re alive. You may not have a home, but I’m guessing if you’re reading this then you do. There aren’t a lot of people hanging out in political discussion groups on Facebook or the internet in general who are homeless. But even then… a tent, a car, a van, even a box can be a home if you want or need it to be. I’ve lived in a lot of odd places, and almost all of them were “home” even if only for a short while.

If you’re sleeping, you have a bed. It might not be a good bed, but you have one. Your bed might be made of a park bench, the backseat of a car, or a sleeping bag on the ground, but it’s still a bed. I’d hazard to guess pretty much no one reading this is living hard on the streets, though. That means you have a mattress, with sheets and probably a box spring, pillows, maybe a heating blanket, definitely warm blankets. You have a bed.

You have food. And I’m going to be blunt on this – if you don’t have food, that’s on you. There are so many food banks, church dinners, community soup kitchens, and people just outright offering to feed folks that if you’re going without, it’s your own fault. There, I said it. I’m sure that makes me a horrible person, but I’m only speaking the truth. I think what most people mean when they say they have no food, is that they have no food THEY LIKE, and that is not the same thing. At all. You have food.

Me, I am alive. I’m in a better place (physically, emotionally, mentally) than I have ever been before. I relish being alive, even in stressful moments. I’m alive, and I’m bloody grateful that I am.

I have a home. I actually have several homes, because I’m that blessed. I have my home with my family. I have my home with my boyfriend. I have homes with friends, who’ve made it clear I can show up at any moment, any time of day or night, and there will be all of the other things I need. I am so damn grateful to have a home, and not just a house. My heart lives in my home.

I have a bed. I love my bed. I even got to pick the mattress for this bed, which was awesome. I have a cot, too, my “bed while camping,” and I love it as well. I love all my warm blankies, my heating blanket, my pillows that squish just right. I’m so grateful to have a bed that allows me to get amazing rest and wonderful cuddles. And other stuff. Heh…

I have food. I may not have filet mignon, but I have chicken and ground beef. Heck, in a time of need, I know how to get squirrel and deer and turkey. I have a pantry full of rice, beans, canned meats, pasta. I know how to make bread and have both flour and grains to make flour. I have FOOD, so much food. I’ve spent a lot of time saving up that food. I prepare for times when we don’t have a lot, because that always happens. When it does, it doesn’t slow me down. It just changes some of my recipes. And that’s okay. I’m grateful for the ability to think ahead and plan in advance, and I’m grateful for the food I feed my family.

I am grateful. I have all of the above, plus friends, extended family, neighbors… Things might not go exactly as I want them to, but that doesn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I am a blessed person, grateful for all that I have.

This was written by Chris on Oct. 28, 2012.

Starting A Fire

A Story

Quick story. The other day I wanted to test my shelter skills. It was dark and raining. It had been raining all day long so everything outside was soaked. My goal was to make a fire from my EDC (everyday carry). The tools I actually decided to use were:

• Fire steel
• pocket knife
• Poncho
• Flashlight

I put on my poncho, grabbed my flashlight and headed out. My original intention was to find a standing tree to take tinder from but the fact that my night vision had not recovered made me change my plans. I walked in to the woods near our house and made my way in about 30 yards. There I spotted a fallen birch limb about 8 inches in diameter. Most of the bark was missing but some was still attached.

I tested to see if the attached part was still firmly attached and once I found it was, this is where I started. I knelt down with the front of the poncho under my knee and stripped some of the bark off the log. As soon as a piece was stripped it went under the poncho out of the rain and sat on the poncho in front of my knee keeping it dry.

Once I had a fair bit of the bark, I collected it all by feel and stood up. I walked to the nearest pine tree and broke off some dead wood from the tree, again collecting it under the poncho. By this time I had my hands full so I found a place where I wanted to make the actual fire. If I had intended for the fire to last I would have created a bit more shelter but this was a test of starting a
fire more than keeping it going.

Once I had cleared a small area I knelt down over it and pulled my head into the poncho. I was now inside a shelter. One piece of bark went down onto the ground with the dry inside up and the wetter outside against the ground. This gave me a dry location to build my tinder bed. Another piece of bark was placed dry side up to take the rest of my bark.

Splitting the bark gave me access to the very dry interior of the bark. This paper thin layer was broken up into slivers that were placed into a small pile on the base plate. Once I had a small pile I sorted out my twigs and other pieces from smallest to largest,
including the extra bark.

Once everything was in place I got out my fire steel and got my knife back out. A half dozen attempts and finally a spark caught. The bark pile got a good clean flame. I slowly fed it some more until it was established. At this point I added my twigs. It was
getting a bit warm under the poncho but I wasn’t ready to let the rain fall.

A few moments later I had a good flame with the starter twigs catching. At this point I just stood up using my arms to hold the
poncho out to provide shelter for my fire. If need be I could have built the fire larger. If the fire had been sheltered it would have
kept right on going as it was fed. As it was, I considered it a successful test and carefully put out the fire. Putting my head back in the hood I watched for another five minutes to make sure there were no embers still live and headed on home.

This is one of those things that too many people aren’t “getting” lately.

I do a lot of reenactment. I run into people who will happily tell me that the only “approved fabric” for dresses and waistcoats of colonial New England are (insert fabric choices here). They’ll explain there are 3 acceptable patterns, and no variations may ever be made because it’s not historically correct.

This is absolute poppycock. It’s bullshit with extra fiber. At no point in history have women EVER been content with five fabric choices and 3 acceptable dress patterns. Never. Leaving aside the absurdity of even saying that, it points to a much greater problem… that the people saying it actually believe it.

There is this pervasive outlook among the new “historians” (I use the term quite loosely) today that if you don’t have an extant piece showing the exact (whatever), then it didn’t exist. You can’t prove it, so you can’t say it existed.

That is not how history works. I file that under the scientists and archaeologists who tell me that the little stone carved fat ladies were all goddesses. I’m sure some might have been, but I’m equally sure that some of it was porn, because men are about porn the way women are about dress fabrics.

As a member of a few historical societies, I’ve run into people doing experiential archaeology. This means they are taking the items that were available at the time, and using them in the way we either know they were used or posit they were used, to see if the end result matches what we think we know. The end result of many of these experiments is that we change our views. At one time, we thought dinosaurs were lizards, and now we know they were often bird-like. At one time, we thought medieval clothing was all muddy colored and dark, mostly blacks and browns. Now we know that’s so wrong as to be comical, and that medieval clothing was riotously colorful, loud, and often clashing. It took people DOING in order to figure out how we got to the end point… or to figure out that the end point we thought was there, was not.

I am an amateur historian. I do experiential historical cooking. This means that I play with recipes from various time periods (medieval, Viking, colonial American, etc), and I try to figure out what they were doing. It isn’t always obvious. Redacting a recipe (taking it from “Hew ye thee bef into gobbettes” to “dice your beef into even sized pieces about a half inch in size) includes some science, some art, and a lot of translation. You not only have to know about recipes and cooking in general, you have to know about THAT recipe IN CONTEXT. If a medieval recipe asks for an exotic ingredient, it may mean a number of things, and you have to figure out which one is correct (is it a new ingredient brought by an adventurer? did it arrive on the spice trail? is it a modern recipe wrongly identified as medieval? etc). Nothing about it is easy, and not one part of it can be done without engaging in the actual DOING.

There are a couple of recipes I’ve done that really surprised me. The first is “cucumber mandrang,” which is basically a sort of dilly relish that was eaten as a salad or side during the early part of the 18th century. It contains some fun ingredients, including cayenne pepper, which surprised me. It must have just arrived, because we have no earlier mentions of it as far north as New England. How exciting! The second is “chicken pudding,” which is a left-over chicken quiche, for all intents and purposes. It’s tasty and odd, and a great way to use up leftovers and extra eggs in the spring.

The mandrang surprised me because of the spicing. It’s made with port or sherry, “chayne” (their word for cayenne), and a few other spices, mixed in with finely diced cucumber. It’s refreshing and tasty, and one of the few raw recipes I’ve run across from that early. It’s unusual and delicious, and it has a strong resemblance to crock pickles or refrigerator pickles.

The chicken pudding got me because it looks so odd, has a different name, and yet comes out looking so familiar. It tastes great, though slightly different than you think it will when you see it.

I could never have learned any of the stuff I did without actually trying to make these things. Going by books alone, neither of the recipes I’ve mentioned were all that odd. It was the doing that brought out how amazing they are. I learned so much more by actively doing!

We need to encourage kids in school to begin doing. There are too many who just regurgitate information, because that’s what they’re taught. Spit out test answers on demand, and never learn a thing, and never DO. We need them doing… experiencing… experimenting… and growing.

We need that, too. We need to stop repeating our mistakes.

I have long believed as Heinlein says above, through Lazarus Long. If I had managed to get my life together, I would currently be living off grid where no one could find me. I do not like a society that inspects me when it isn’t required.

And there’s the rub. Voting requires ID to ensure it’s the folks who should be voting who are doing so. And while I *personally* do not have an issue with people coming to the States for a better life, if they assimilate, there are issues with open borders admitting people who have no interest at all in assimilating. We’ve reached a point where the number of people coming in is going to overwhelm our systems, and that means we need to close the doors.

Me personally? I think we should just close the doors. Period. If you’re in, you’re in. If you’re a violent criminal, we’ll find you, prosecute you, and lock you up according to our laws (or give you the choice to self-deport, while informing authorities at the other end of your choice). If your only crime is being here, well, we’ll deal. If you’ve stayed under the radar because you’re living AS an American, I honestly, truly don’t care. You’re not the problem.

America is currently experiencing a downtrend in birth rates. We are losing more people to death than we are replacing them with. There are a number of folks who are upset about that, but I am not one of them. While I’ve no interest in depopulating the country entirely, having a few less million would mean we could feed, house, clothe, and educate the ones who ARE here.

Are there issues with that? Yep. Lots of them, especially with the government in the state it currently is.

This is elder abuse. I called the misuse of Biden as elder abuse. How in the world am I supposed to not say that about Mitch? He’s a frickin’ zombie, guys. And he isn’t the only one.

We have Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa): 92, Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.): 84, Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.): 82, Jim Risch (R-Idaho): 81, Angus King (I-Maine): 82 in Congress. We have (R-Ky.): 88 (also the dean of the House), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.): 86, Steny Hoyer (D-Md.): 85, James Clyburn (D-S.C.): 84, and Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.): 84 in the House. And those are just “the oldest.” There are dozens more who are almost as old.

Why are we pushing the nanny state with all the flock cameras and other devices for watching the citizenry? We’re saying it’s because of illegal aliens, but that’s not what’s being used to catch them. Instead, we’re getting the majority of our illegal aliens out via local law enforcement (fingerprinting at jails goes back to AFIS and other systems, which in turn feed to the Feds, who come pick them up safely at lockup), traffic stops, and other passive means. It’s not through mass surveillance. That’s for you and me, guys.

As people get older, they become aware of their mortality. The more fragile they feel, the more they want to be protected. Hence the cameras. Just in case ol’ Mitch wanders off. Or Maxine takes a cab somewhere and forgets her phone number.

We need to scale back and/or get rid of surveillance, because it affects lawful citizens as much OR MORE than criminals, and lawful citizens don’t need watching, thank you very much. That whole 4th amendment thing. We need to enact term limits and let some younger people in our government. Right now, the Boomers and older are in control and frankly they aren’t functional enough to do the job well. Gen X might be the right age, but we’re just fucking done with everyone’s shit and want you off our lawn. So fine, stick some younger ones in. While not impossible, I doubt they’d cock it up any worse than it currently is.