• Bread is often called the “staff of life,” and that’s because a man can survive on bread and water. We think of this, in today’s world of Wonderbread and fake food, as a cruel punishment. In medieval times, bread and water was fairly standard fare for a person. In the 1750s, bread was 60% of the average colonist’s daily food intake. Today, that would be considered outrageous and possibly dangerous. Then, the wheat was whole, and even when finely ground (very doable along the many rivers in water-powered mills), it contained all of the natural protein and fat of the kernel.

    This recipe is one that I’ve developed on my own. It’s a blend of several recipes that I’ve worked on over the years. It combines a pain de mie recipe, a no-knead recipe that I love, and the “beginner’s loaf”  from a book of Chris’s, Bread Alone. It’s the culmination of about 20 years of practice, learning, failures, successes, and surprises as I learned enough about bread baking to casually consider teaching myself to use a wood fired beehive oven at the Fort.

    This is not an easy recipe. It is a simple recipe, however. The beginner bread recipe I mention above is the best place to go for instructions on how to bake bread. If you do what the authors tell you, you will eventually make amazing loaves of bread, every time. It will take a few years of practice, though, and you will probably make up new swear words as you go along. This recipe here, is not as difficult as the beginner loaf, but will not teach you as much about baking as you make it. I heartily encourage you to make it entirely by hand at least a half dozen to a dozen times before indulging in the use of a MixMaster or other bread making machine. Getting your hands onto fresh dough is good for you mentally, and the resulting bread will feed you physically and spiritually. There’s definitely something “more than human” about creating a loaf of bread.

    Bread from 2016
    Bread that Allyson baked in 2016.

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  • The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people are averse to inconsistencies within their own minds. It offers one explanation for why people sometimes make an effort to adjust their thinking when their own thoughts, words, or behaviors seem to clash with each other.
    —Cognitive Dissonance | Psychology Today, (last visited Jul. 21, 2024)

    Ok, but what does that mean? More importantly, what does it mean to us?

    To get an example of cognitive dissonance in “practice”, dig up “I Mudd” from Star Trek. At the end, the crew destroys the androids by setting up cognitive dissonance in their “logical” brains.

    One such method was Spock saying to one android “I love you”, and to another, identical android “But I hate you.” When the androids point out that they are identical, Spock replies, “Exactly.”

    The left has been trained to exist in a state of cognitive dissonance.

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  • Brandon debunks some idiot’s claims of “fake”. 1 MOA red dot on a 2 MOA rifle at 130 to 150 Yards gives you a 4 inch grouping.

            

  • One of the most interesting things I’m currently discovering, is how to move back in time. What happens when there is no electricity? What can we do, how can we do it?

    One path is to learn how to live off-grid. This is part of where I am. This is why I spent the time learning how to make a steam expansion engine, learning how to run it, and then learned how to build a 2 HP boiler.

    That steam engine is intended to run a generator or a lathe, depending. Yes, I have some generators, but water and wood will be easier, in some situations, to get than other fuel.

    But there is another entire type of skill set, that of taking a step back in time.

    Let me discuss just one part of this, I want to make some items, such as a table-top. That’s easy, just drive to the lumberyard and buy the lumber, do the glue-up, feed it through the plainer, sand it and a bit more. Easy stuff.

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  • I posted about prepping a bit back on GFZ. I think it’s a topic that needs to be covered on a regular basis, and even if you have been doing it for a dog’s age, the reminders help get you in the right head space. Now, I don’t do the whole “deep state bunker prep” thing. First, I don’t believe the world will go into that much chaos, that quickly. It’s going to be a slow decline (and in my very strong opinion, the pandemic proved that). Second, and more importantly, bunker prep isn’t sustainable.

    I don’t know if any of you have watched Love, Death, and Robots (it’s on Netflix if you haven’t, and it’s well worth the watch), but there’s a couple of fairly amazing shorts that cover prepping topics. The one I’m personally thinking of is in season 2, when the three robot friends are touring America after the death of all the humans. They walk around an area where a bunch of people lived in bunkers. They’re all dead, too. Another show, can’t remember the name of it, shows a couple who stays two years in their bunker, and when they open the door they find out that the entire Earth has been destroyed and they’re just floating around on a chunk of ground. These both illustrate the problem with bunker prep.

    If you set up a bunker for short term emergencies, that’s fine. It is not, however, a solution for surviving TEOTWAWKI. Eventually, you run out of food, water, or air. And then you die. Bunkers, pre-pack food (like MREs or emergency buckets), and hoarding ammo and firearms are basically just a way to die painfully and slowly.

    Real prepping (yes, I said what I said) is learning enough skills to survive after TEOTWAWKI. Real preppers don’t waste time figuring out ways to try and survive a planet buster bomb or other doomsday scenarios, because there’s no point. If the planet is destroyed, you’re just going to die. If a plague comes through and you catch it, you’re possibly going to die. If someone bombs your city, you may die. These are not things to prep FOR.

    Prepping is what you do after you survive. Yes, have a bunch of food stores set up, because that’s important. There might not be a grocery store to go visit, or it might be empty, or being run by a despot (who isn’t the current government). You may need to shelter to avoid a firestorm or waves of nuclear fallout or insurgents or invaders. That’s short term stuff.

    After the firestorm or fallout or aliens move on, you’ll come out of your hidey hole, and then the real work begins. Surviving is easy. Living is a lot more complex and difficult.

    I’ve talked about it before, saving seeds, learning skills, putting food up that’s shelf stable, making short, medium, and long term plans for emergencies. But how to you go about it all? There’s no one answer for how to prep for surviving and thriving. You have to come up with your own plan, that fits your family and your part of the world. The emergencies that I plan for likely aren’t the ones that should be planned for in a big city like Boston or NYC, for instance. I live in the boonies, and there are other issues I’ll have to deal with. City people will have to deal with zombies (the name for those who wander about robbing and pillaging during emergencies) and rationing and figuring out how and when to escape. People near the equator will have to plan for hot weather, and people farther north will have to plan for cold winters, possibly without electricity or dinosaur squeezings.

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  • The big news of the week is, of course, that somebody got close enough to Trump to make a real attempt to kill him.

    This has opened up a floodgate of horrible responses from people on the rightleft. Listening to Allyson drop people from her friends list on social media has been almost terrifying in its intensity.

    Libs Of TikTok has made it a personal mission to expose many of the people who are calling for the assassination of Trump.

    I think the most vile thing I’ve seen are “Hopes and Prayers for the shooter and his family.”

    Allyson is dealing with a massive shift in politics. I’ve described it as she was standing in the ocean near the shore. Suddenly, the waters just swept out, leaving her standing on shore with all the rest of the right.

    It is frightening to her. I’m not so sure of how much she has changed, though she has, but how much the left has just lost it.

    I’m trying to figure out this X thing. I want to have each post automaticity go to X but the autopost isn’t working for scheduled posts and when it does post, it is a pretty sad-looking post.

    Thank you to every one of you that is here reading our ramblings.

    If you would like to contribute to the blog, please send your article to me, and I’ll see if it fits and can be published.

    I’m attempting to tone back my case analysis postings to be more readable to humans. Please let me know if the tone is about right for you.

    Finally, we will be opening a web store soon. We will be selling Allyson’s books, signed. If anybody is interested in the wooden bowls, I’ll put some of those up for sale as well.

    Anybody who is in the NH, MA, VT area that wants to meet at the Fort at #4, reach out to me, and we’ll make it happen.

    Have a wonderful weekend.

            

  • headshot of Allyson
    Allyson, sans glasses, in a silly hat

    Allyson walks to the podium at the head of the crowded room and looks at everyone. She straightens her tank top unnecessarily, shuffles her feet a bit, and then leans against the podium and adjusts the microphone. 

    Hi. My name is Allyson, and I’m a new Conservative.

    Hi, Allyson!

    The past few days have really changed my mind on a number of subjects. I’m still not a huge Trump fan, but after watching what happened on Saturday, many of my previous concerns have waned. I’ve been reading and educating myself, listening to others, and generally trying to get a better grip on the whole political situation going on. I’ve taken another step to the Right, and while I still consider myself a “small L libertarian,” I think that by society’s standards, I’m now a Conservative.

    This is going to be a real ramble of a blog entry, so bear with me. Please.

    That puts me in a weird place. I feel like I can’t tell my friends. I haven’t been able to talk politics with them in ages, but it’s been a relatively comfortable silence on both parts. But this? I can’t tell them I’m “on the Trump train.” I’d be ostracized. And yes, I know how that sounds, and yes, that’s part of why I took the step to the Right.

    I’m going to say this now, because I have to. I have watched the videos of the assassination attempt a good 40 or 50 times. I’ve looked at different angles, read experts’ opinions, and done my best to do due diligence. The timing and way this played out FEELS too convenient and too well done, and I am absolutely terrified that this was a fake out by Trump and/or his team. My thinking brain tells me that no one, not even the most brash person ever, would have a live bullet come that close to their head on purpose. But my lizard brain is still concerned that somehow, this was just a fake out.

    A lot of people have changed their mind about Trump because of Saturday’s attempt on his life. I desperately hope that everything I saw was real (not that I wanted an attempt on his life, but just that the situation as presented is real). If it turns out to be some kind of fake out, I suspect I’ll just walk away entirely and stop dealing with politics. I don’t think I’ll be able to handle it.

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  • I grew up in an innocent age of TV and movies. The heroes were the guys in the blue uniforms and the white hats. The lawyers were evil men working for evil criminals, or they were good men doing good deeds. The press was there to expose the truth, to give us the facts.

    The whole truth and nothing but the truth.

    What I learned about the court system was that everything happened in the courtroom. It was where all the excitement was. Paying attention because some lawyer was going to expose the truth at the last minute to make their case.

    Even modern legal dramas suffer from the same tropes.

    As I have been reading and listening, I’ve found that most of the hard work comes long before the jury is sworn in. The excitement is buried in hundreds of words and page after page of motions.

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  • I’m not sure I can really report “from behind enemy lines” anymore. I will continue to give a more Left perspective on things (because many of my friends are Left), but personally I’ve made another step to the Right.

    I want to talk about what I’m hearing from my friends online today, after the attempt to kill Trump. They seem to fall into two rather neat categories, quite honestly, with very little middle ground. My friends, the people I personally know, have met and hung out with face to face, and who I would invite over for dinner, are appalled that anyone would try to kill Trump. They are distraught, apologetic, sending thoughts and prayers (in a very not sarcastic way). They are honest. Some of them are feeling a bit raw right now, because they seem to firmly believe that someone from “their side” did this, and it’s making them look at themselves.

    The ones who are merely acquaintances, the people who met me once at an author gig, or who know me from reenacting and friended me on FB because of it, those people who are highly unlikely to get dinner invitations, are making the most vile commentary. “Too bad he missed,” seems to be the general theme. I’ve also heard, “Oh, it was faked,” and “This was planned by Trump,” and “It’s payback from the Project 2025 people!” I didn’t bother to try and reason with the people who said these things; I deleted them as friends, removed their name and number from my phone. Those people are not people I will interact with, other than as required at work.

    I’m rather horrified at the number of people making the horrid comments. I knew they’d come on public spaces like TikTok, but among those I’d admitted (however little) into my own personal space? I did not expect that. What I also didn’t expect was the civil, polite, and at least seemingly heartfelt words from Left leaders around the country. I’m confused over those few who seemed to think that someone sniping at Trump would equal the Right demanding gun laws be enacted. Oy.

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  • Alec Baldwin’s case was dismissed with prejudice.

    What does this mean, IANAL view point

    Alec Baldwin was charged with involuntary manslaughter after he shot and killed his cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins.

    The relevant facts: Alec Baldwin was holding a real gun. Alec Baldwin pointed the gun at a person. Alec Baldwin cocked the gun (pulled the hammer back and set it on the sear). Alec Baldwin then pressed the trigger, causing the gun to fire, killing Halyna Hutchins.

    Irrelevant facts: Somebody told Alec Baldwin that the gun was unloaded (Treat every gun as if it is loaded). Somebody said they loaded dummy rounds into the gun (Treat every gun as if it is loaded). He says he did not pull the trigger, (Never point your gun at something you are not willing to destroy/kill.). In addition, he injured the director(?) (Be sure of your target and what is beyond it).

    Other irrelevant facts: Baldwin is just a trained monkey. He can’t be expected to know the safety rules. Baldwin is so stupid that he should never have been handed a real gun. It was somebody else’s responsibility to make sure that the gun was “safe”.

    Things went wrong on that set. Some of it appears to be Baldwin’s responsibility. Including rushing the safety crew, disregarding safety “suggestions” and overall shitty safety.

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