So I occasionally watch YouTube videos, and sometimes Facebook reels. I like TikTok. I don’t spend a LOT of time watching them, but once in a while it’s nice to just watch some short clips and call it a night. TikTok in particular has become highly amusing to me, since I managed to FINALLY get it to send me conservative humor (see my post from Feb. 5).

See, my feed is blue. It’s REALLY blue. Some of this is because I still read/listen to/watch Left leaning stuff because I report on it to you guys. Frankly, most of it is because I’m poly, pagan, kinky, and pansexual. There’s this assumption that if you’re any ONE of those, you must be Liberal. To be all four? The algorithm thinks I’m so deep Left it’s impossible to think. So it sends me Leftist crap constantly.

It’s not just one place. I get it in my news, because I actively seek out Left news for education’s sake. I get it in my Facebook because I get it in my news, and because some of my friends and acquaintances are Left. I get it in YouTube because it’s a Leftist hell hole. I get it in TikTok because that seems to be the initial basic setting, and you have to work to get out of it.

The main problem I have is that it isn’t just that “they” think I should be Left; it’s that certain facts about my person, physical things, seem to doom me to be “mistaken” for Left when I am not. As an example, we’ve all mentioned septum ring theory: the idea that if a person has a septum ring, they’re almost invariably likely to be Leftist. The same thing with blue hair. If you have both, you’re definitely a Leftist.

I don’t understand how hair color dictates politics. I’m offended by it. I have very far Right friends with septum rings and green hair. No one on our side cares. Any time someone with wildly colored hair or big tattoos or facial piercings “comes out” as Republican or Right leaning, the Left goes into complete melt down mode. I cannot even begin to tell you the number of times I was told that I couldn’t possibly exist on the Right because y’all would hate me and kick me out for being pan, poly, pagan, or kinky. Instead, I found there’s a vibrant LGB community here on the Right. A lot of poly people are conservative. Pagans are all over the damn place. Kinky is… yeah, well anyhow. LOL… You get what I’m saying. The Right doesn’t care.

The Left wraps up their politics in their entire belief system, their personality, and their reality. Therein lies the biggest problem, really. It’s why you can’t talk logic with a lot of leftists. If you start to dig into any aspect of what they believe, they immediately take it as a personal attack. They believe, 110%, that you are attacking them, the person. They cannot comprehend the concept that one can attack the ideal or the fact (or lack thereof) and not be the least bit upset about the person behind it.

The amount of time it takes to dismantle even one small part of the leftist’s worldview enough to show them that it’s faulty causes them to break. I don’t mean that figuratively, for most of them, either. It may seem stupid to you, but I want you to think about how you’d feel if you found incontrovertible truth, actual facts and photographs, proving Trump diddled little girls. You’d be shocked to your core, because the man you’ve known and loved doesn’t seem anything like that. It would mess with your world view and rock your core, because we’ve just KNOWN he’s not the bad person the Left paints him as. That’s how they feel, that depth of despair, every single time you pick at a bit of the Left’s beliefs. If you do manage to break it down into small enough pieces that they can understand it, and they accept it, it doesn’t break down the other parts of their worldview, because to do so would cause them irreparable harm.

When I watch videos of people on the Left being questioned by good speakers (Charlie, for instance, but also many others who are new journalist types), I see the answers get more and more vague as they go along. If you push too hard, they will actually change the conversation entirely, sometimes attacking in a random direction, just to make the questioning stop.

I don’t believe most of them do this out of spite. I believe it’s the response to the trauma they’re living. Having known people who’ve survived serious trauma, it’s a mental tactic most victims don’t even realize they’re doing. I see people on the Left acting much like the victims of domestic abuse and sexual abuse that I’ve known. They’ve been lied to for so long, and it’s just… it’s a lot more comfortable and less painful if you just acquiesce. Standing your ground hurts. And frankly, the human brain is not meant to endure long-standing pain. We’re built to avoid it.

Yes, there are agitators out there. We all know it. Sometimes we can pick them out, and other times, we have to wait for law enforcement to do it at a later date using videos and written statements from witnesses. There only need to be a tiny number of agitators, though. Two or three seeded through a large crowd can turn it into that mob in seconds. They create a flashpoint.

But “most people” are just that… they’re average, they’re the bulk of the people out there. When you press them, they cannot articulate why they’re protesting, or give you different methods to fix the problem. They just chant their slogans. It’s easier than losing their friends, family, and community. Or jobs. I know; I’ve been there. The big difference is, I’m an abuse survivor, and so I recognized (eventually) what was happening to me and how I was responding. I saw it was unhealthy, and I got out. Most people don’t have that experience (nor would I wish it on them). This is just “normal” to them. And since “everyone” is saying the same thing, it must be true.

And that takes me back to that statement I’ve made several times: Not every news station can be lying to me, all at the same time. From a logical standpoint, that is simply absurd. Except we know it isn’t. We know that they ARE lying to us, all of them. It’s tough.

I don’t have the answers. I wish I did. The only way to fix this stuff is to have people on the Left have an epiphany. That only comes when they’re challenged, and they’re avoiding those challenges because it’s hard. So they have no reason and no impetus to change.

The very first thing you need to do when choosing a printer is know what you want to print.

I can’t stress this enough. Sure you can go buy a $2000 11×17 color laser printer. But are you going to print 11×17? Do you need full photographic quality prints?

If what you are doing is printing your tax forms, then a simple $200-$300 black & white printer will do just fine.

The same is true for 3D printers. What do you want to print?

For me there was the “true” driving want, which wasn’t enough to justify a printer. I wanted to be able to print foundry patterns.

With enough research I found that organizational capabilities was high on my list of to-dos that has never gotten done.

To that end I picked MultiBoard as the ultimate pegboard and Gridfinity as my “flat surface” organizer.

Given these three drivers, I could start to list what I required in a printer.

I have tried printing foundry patterns in the past. It didn’t work. Today it should work better.

Most, if not all, of the MultiBoard and Gridfinity can be printed in the cheapest, easiest filament, PLA.

PLA requires a build plate that will support 55°C and a nozzle that supports 220°C. This is every printer out there.

If you need something a bit stronger, PETG is the go-to today. It requires a 70°C build plate and a 230 °C nozzle. Still well within the reach of most 3D printers.

Everything else requires more series printers. ABS, ASA, PA, and PC all require an enclosure. Without an enclosure, your prints will fail. The print will warp, and you will have issues with bed adhesion.

If you need to print something that will be exposed to the elements or that needs to be stronger, you need to go with one of the stronger plastics.

Which leads to the next class of filaments, those with additives. Carbon fiber and glass fiber are two of the common additives.

These fibers will eat your equipment. It will wear your PTFE tubes, but worse, it will eat your extruder and nozzle. You need hardened steel extruder driver gears and nozzle. You just have to plan on replacing the PTFE tubes as they wear. This should already be on your to-do list.

Some new printers come with multiple hotends so you can switch filaments while printing, quickly and easily.

For me, all of this took me to an 3D printer in an enclosure with a series build volume. The build volume I was looking for was 250x250x250 mm.

Because I knew I was going to be printing some CF or GF filament, I knew I wanted to upgrade my hotend to hardened steel.

Finally, I wanted to be able to change the nozzle without messing with cables, wires, or complex procedures.

After doing some back-of-the-envelope research, I started looking for a low cost printer that met my needs.

The printer names that popped up were Elegoo, Flashforge, Creality, and Bambu Lab.

I had never heard of Elegoo or Flashforge, but I had heard of both Creality and Bambu Lab.

The printer I was looking into was a Creality printer, but the Bambu Lab kept showing up with positive reviews. Their P1S met my needs except for the hardened nozzle, but that was an “easy” upgrade. The thing that was blocking me from pulling the trigger was that replacing the nozzle required changing out electronics. Something I did not want.

And then I stumbled on Bambu Lab P2S. This was released in late 2025. The reviews were all positive, but more than that, the reviewers were surprised at the types of improvements.

The P2S came with a hardened extruder and a hardened nozzle. They had also ditched the old hotend and gone with the hotend from one of their higher-end printers. They went with the H2D hotend.

This hotend has a quick replace system for the nozzle. You no longer need to replace electronics or mess with cables; you remove a silicon boot from the nozzle, release two spring clips with your fingers, remove the old nozzle, put the new nozzle in, close the clips, put the boot back on, tell the printer what nozzle you have installed.

I’ve done this twice. The first time took about 5 minutes, the second time about 30 seconds.

This left the ecosystem.

Bambu Lab is a closed ecosystem. They recently updated all their printers. With this update, 3rd party software tools lost the ability to control the printer. You could still move files to and from the printer, but you couldn’t initiate a print.

I had also read that Bambu Lab was using AI to evaluate the things being printed and would refuse to print some models from the cloud.

You could move the files by USB drive, but that gets painful.

They did have a LAN-only mode. That is what I am currently using. In LAN only mode you get full control of your printer. Your printer no longer talks to the Cloud. Your printer is yours.

It also turns out that the OrcaSlicer, which is a fork of the Bambu Studio slicer just works in LAN-only mode.

In addition, the price for the printer and the Automatic Material System (AMS) was less that the Creality printer I was looking for.

Conclusions

Am I happy with my purchase? Yes.

Is there anything I regret? Yes, I didn’t get enough filament out of the gate. I’ve gone through about 10 pounds of filament so far, and I’m not slowing down.

I don’t like finding out that I need a seperate dryer. And the amount of effort it takes to get dry filament.

I don’t like that I can’t directly move files from the Bambu Cloud to my printer; I have to move it through OrcaSlicer.

Would I do it again? Yes. Would I get a different printer? No.

My printer has been printing nearly non-stop since I got it. There were a couple of days when it was busy drying filament and not printing.

They offer the A1 combo at $399. That is the A1 and the AMS light. The AMS light handles four spools and you can have upto four AMS connected to your printer.

They also have the A1-Mini which comes in at $219 but only has a 180x180x180 build volume.

Please remember that I’m a Unix/Linux geek with to much experience in too many fields. What works for me might not work for you. Do your own research, but remember the first rule, have a reason you are going to spend some money. If you aren’t sure, look for a used A1 or A1-Mini or the most popular 3D printer, the Creality Ender 3.

I went with a Bambu Lab P2S printer. It is an enclosed printer; it has excellent support and ecosystem. And it has strong vertical integration.

In order to 3D print something, you need the printer, a build plate, filament, a model, and a slicer.

The build plate is a surface that the filament will adhere to when you want it to and release your printed part when you want it to release.

Filament is a thermoset plastic. I.e., a plastic that melts when heated and can be reshaped and then will hold that new shape after it cools.

The model is a digital 3D solid. It is normally generated with a CAD package.

The slicer take the 3D solid and slices it into layers, then creates a sequence of g-code instructions to recreate that solid in plastic.

The First Print

To start with, I purchased filament from Bambu Lab to use on my printer. Their filament spools come with RFID tags. When you put the spool in the AMS, it will read the RFID, which tells the AMS what type of filament it is and what color. It also says it is Bambu Lab filament, but nobody else has permission (cryptographic) to create RFID tags that the printer/AMS will read.

I selected a useful “print” from the prints that are preloaded in the printer. Then I pressed “go”.
It printed exactly what I wanted, and it has been in use ever since.

The Second Print

It is nice to have models preloaded to print, but that would get boring rapidly. The next step was to use their phone app to print something.

This consisted of starting their app, pointing my phone camera at a QR code on a box. That QR took me to a model in the Bambu Lab cloud. I clicked the print button and a short time later I had a 3D version of that print.

There were more things I printed this way, but it was time to move up.

The slicer

The approved software is Bambu Studio. Which is an Apple or Windows program, no Linux version. I choose to go with OrcaSlicer because it is well respected and integrates nicely with Bambu Lab printers.

Using the slicer, I was able to download models from other sites, outside of the Bambu Lab cloud, slice them, and then send them to the printer. I could then use the Bambu App to start the print, or print directly from the printer control panel.

Over time, I’ve moved away from the Bambu Lab Cloud. I’m doing everything locally now. I still use their cloud to find models ready to print, but that is only because it is easy. I can use their phone app, search for a model, tag it, then download and print it later.

ReMix

My first major print was a riser for the AMS. This was printed in four large parts and a set of TPU gaskets. Yes, I can print custom gaskets.

The riser holds two drawers. I printed those drawers with a Gridfinity base.

All is good so far. I then print a deburring tool Gridfinity bin. It should fit perfectly. It does, except it is too tall. I can’t close the drawer.

This lead to me doing my first remix. I pulled the STL into FreeCAD, then created a sold cube the right size. Intersected the two solids and ended up with a shortened version.

This worked. My deburring tool now fits perfectly in my Gridfinity drawer.

This type of remix is simple. More complex remixes take more time. I’m not good at it yet because it requires me to create a solid from an STL or STEP file.

My First Model

I wanted a Gridfinity box to hold my ultra-precision torque screwdriver. I did all the right things, except I did a shit job of my B-splines. I also took a bad picture. I was too close, so lines that should have been straight were not.

Regardless, I printed it. What came out fit the Gridfinity base. The bin was short enough that the drawer would close.

The issue? The finger holes to lift the tool out were way too small. I’ve learned that I need between 20 mm and 30 mm to bake it easy to grip.

I have a second attempt ready to go, but I haven’t printed it yet. It was cool to see. It is a disappointment for it to not work.

My Latest Model

To control the path of filament, 3D printers use lots of PTFE tubing. This is 4 mm OD and about 2 mm ID pneumatic tubing. These fit into PTFE couplers. One of the coupler/connectors I’m using is a PC4-M10. This has a push connector on one side and is threaded M10 on the other.

I’m using a printed replacement cap for a cereal container. A 4L cereal container will hold a 1 KG spool on rollers with space for a hygrometer and desiccant. With a hole in the container, you can feed your filament out and directly to your printer without ever exposing your filament to the moisture in the air.

One method is to drill a 10 mm hole in the side of the container and use a PC4-M10 screwed into the side. A better method is to put a M10 flanged nut on the backside.

I would rather not drill holes, so I went with the replacement cap with a socket for the PC4-M10.

The model prints the cap, a sealing plug, a threaded and knurled screw-on cap. The cap proper has an inset threaded boss for the knurled cap to screw onto to seal the container.

That boss holds a PC4-M10. The model also contains a printed nut for the PC5-M10. Now here is my issue: the person that printed this seems to have found PC4-M10 with M10x1.5 threads. The PC4-M10 I have is measured with M10x1.0 threads.

I went into FreeCAD, I created a solid with a flange, 17mm hex nut, and a proper M10x1.0 threaded hole.

And it worked. Those nuts are now in use.

I am that much closer to being able to print my patterns for castings.

It has been a learning week for me. I’ve actually gotten to the point where I’m printing things for me rather than for the printer and the printing process.

Every part of the process is so much better than it was the last time I was attempting 3D prints. I have one confirmed model that is a failure. I’ll work with the least failed print to get the tool I need.

The two biggest issues in 3D printing today are bed adhesion and bad filament. Now bad filament isn’t always bad, sometimes it is just that it has absorbed too much water from the air.

There is a relatively simple fix for that: dry your filament.

My printer came with an AMS (automatic material system). It consists of a chamber that holds four spools of filament; each spool has its extruder/feeder. The printer controls the AMS. When the printer wants a particular filament, it unloads the current filament, then it tells the feed motor to push the filament down a sequence of PTFE tubes and Y connectors until the filament is at the extruder proper.

The printer then pushes out the old plastic from the hot end with the new filament, leaving the nozzle loaded with the new filament. It is cool to watch.

The AMS is designed for four small packages of silica desiccant. One of the first things I printed was a set of boxes to hold more desiccant. The AMS now has about between 10 and 20 times as much desiccant as it started with.

The AMS is sealed, has circulating fans and a heater. This means it can be used to dry filament as well as feed it.

There is one small issue: you can’t print while it is drying. You have to have a separate power supply for the AMS to dry while printing.

Which takes me to my “quick” fix, a SunLu S1 Plus filament dryer. This holds one spool of filament, it can run at up to 55°C, and it does a good job of PLA, PETG, and one or two other filaments.

Using it I have been able to rescue some 10 year old PLA that was stored open. It has all just printed, after it was dryed.

Now the fix to this temperature issue is to use a “blast oven”. A blast oven means an oven that can maintain a constant temperature for an extended period of time while air is forced around the filament.

I don’t have a blast oven. What I do have is a printer that can maintain a constant temperature but doesn’t have a fan.

The manufacturer recommends printing a cover in Polycarbonate (PC). But PC is extremely hygroscopic. Straight from the package, it has to be dried at 90°C. Which my SunLU can’t do.

If I had a PC drying cover, I could dry the PC in the printer. All I need is some dry PC but what I have is wet PC.

And this issue exists for every filament I have. So I’m doing a bootstrap.

I did a printer bed drying of some ASA. This took around 12 hours. I used a cardboard box, as recommended. To make a fake cover.

With the ASA dry enough to print, I’m printing a blast oven. This is a two part filament dryer that uses the printer bed for the heat source and a carefully designed drying chamber with forced air.

Now all I have to do is hope that part two prints successfully tonight.

One of my FB prepper groups posted this a week or so ago, and I’ve been watching what people talk about. Lots of stuff about toilet paper. Medications. Food, of course. Pretty much everything mentioned was STUFF, though. And I don’t think that the top 3 “unobvious” things are … well, things.

My first thing that I think people haven’t bothered to think about is garbage. By garbage, I mean both waste from our homes (food packages, moldy leftovers, clothing beyond repair, etc.) and waste from we humans. I don’t think most people give a second thought to garbage. Either they’re like me, and they’re used to taking their garbage to the dump, or they’re like my neighbor, and the magic truck just arrives once a week and takes it all away. In a real SHTF scenario, neither of those things are going to happen.

If the SHTF, you won’t get me within a mile of the public dump. Either everything there will be hella unsanitary (because public dumps require attendants to keep them clean and tidy, and a lot of the recyclables and such are removed each day, as is much of the actual garbage. If the social contract dissolves, there will be no attendants, and nowhere for the garbage to go. It’ll become rat infested, and frankly, human infested.

Human waste is an issue I don’t think the average citizen thinks over long about. I think about it all the time. What do you do with your piss and shit? I like that I flush and it goes away. That’s nice. But I also spend quite a bit of time every summer in places where that’s not the case, and I have to be careful. Port-a-potties are okay, but they fill up (quickly, more quickly than you think they will), and are not a long term solution. Trust me when I say, if the SHTF you want to turn off your toilet and block your access to the street once you’ve assured yourself it’s truly SHTF. You do not want that stuff backing up into your bathroom. Toilets can continue to be used until sewage overflows its bounds at whatever downhill facility it’s going to, at which point it’ll start coming up the tube to meet you.

What DO we do with human waste then? I’m a firm proponent of the “lovey loo” as one company decided to call it. The composting toilet, which need not be expensive or complex if building codes are no longer an issue, is the perfect answer to human waste. If you have even an acre of land, you can put it to use. There’s an fantastic book called The Humanure Handbook that explains the whole process, what to do with waste, and what not to do.

Basically, #1 should go into a bucket with a tight sealing lid, and when full, disposed of either in a hole that goes deeper than 10 inches, or poured out over an area that is not near any running water. Digging a hole is the best way to deal with it, and if you’re ONLY using it for urine, you can dig it and leave it dug, with just a cover over it to avoid anyone falling in. The urine will work its way through the soil and return to the water table safely. Remember that, for the most part, pee is sterile. You want to keep it separate from solid waste.

#2 can be collected in a homer bucket (lined with a garbage bag if you’re squeamish) with a layer of fresh wood shavings over each (ahem) movement. If you’re diligent about keeping urine separate and using your wood shavings, there usually isn’t any smell. You keep using the bucket until it’s full, and then you add in a handful of worm casings and bang the lid on tightly. Carefully label the exterior of the bucket ALL OVER, and set it neatly in the brush at the back of your property. After one year, it’s probably soil that’s fine to use. After two years, even the most delicate of scientists will tell you that all that’s left is dirt. Go use it in your garden. It’s compost, and it’ll be very rich. You work it right and you’ll have enough compost to keep your garden going basically forever.

Please note, all of the above is very short-handed. Go read the book. They explain everything in great detail. I have only given you the highlights here.

The second thing that I don’t think people are the least bit prepared for is the general idea that, if you have a disease or health issue, you’re going to die a lot faster than everyone else. If the SHTF, even if you have stored medication, it’s limited. When it runs out, your risk of dying skyrockets. Now if you’re lucky and the problem is Type II Diabetes, you might manage to work yourself into a safe zone and survive. Working your ass off will do that. But if the problem is cancer or Type I Diabetes, or PCOS or any number of other diseases, you have to be prepared to die. I hate to say it, and it’s uncomfortable to think about, but it’s the truth. It’s important to come to terms with the idea that you or others could die of stuff that was “easy to fix/control” just months earlier.

I deal with this stuff all the time, because I talk to people at historical events. They always ask, “Well, what would have happened to my dad in the 15th century, what with his diabetes?” Well, hon, he’d die. People with gluten intolerance or dairy intolerance? Dead. Allergic to bees? Dead (though not quite as easily as some other deaths). Allergic to a food that’s needed for survival (bread, peanut butter, cheese)? Dead. Have asthma? Dead. It’s a shitty reality that people need to be aware of long before the SHTF. It’s important to ask yourself NOW… am I more help to my family if I stockpile meds and try to make it through the worst days of the SHTF, or would my death be more useful (in which case, don’t store meds and accept what’s coming much more quickly)?

And number three, simply the amount of work people will need to do in order to survive. I do not for a minute believe that most people in our country today will survive the process of making soap to clean their clothes, or the sheer amount of work it takes to make a hot bath, or clearing a driveway without a snow blower. I’ve got a SMALL taste of it, when I spend my 7 to 10 days up at the fort. I only have to cart my water a few yards instead of up from the river, and I have modern soap to clean my clothing with, but I do my best to live like they did. It’s a lot of work. I don’t have time to look at my phone, or read a book. If I have time during daylight hours, I use it to mend clothing or do something else that requires light. On an average stay at the Fort, I walk between 11 and 17 miles a day, and that’s just when I’m staying IN the fort and not going for walks or wandering down to the river. That’s 15 or so miles walking from table to hearth to wood pile, in a big circle, a bazillion times. And that’s me acting as a woman, with a lot of work but a lot LESS walking than my menfolk will be doing.

What are three things you think people are unprepared for? Not the obvious stuff. No toilet paper. What situations or things or thoughts have you contemplated, that you don’t believe others have put thought into?

What is the stupidest thing you’ve heard somebody say in the last two weeks?

When I make a statement, I know that I am correct. The proper temperature for the bed of my 3D printer for PLA is 55°C. As far as I know, this is correct.

If someone were to question that statement, I would consider that I am wrong. Being wrong is part of being human.

Assuming that I am wrong, I will go verify the statement. And what I would find is that there are more pieces that go into that statement, for example, the build plate I’m using.

Having an open, learning mind allows me to self-correct when I am wrong. I actually do this so fast, in real time, that people don’t even notice that I had something wrong. Somebody says I’m wrong because of a particular reason. I evaluate and change my position, taking in the new information.

People remember the outcome, where I’m usually correct; they don’t remember the incorrect starting point. It is a process to get to the correct answer.

I’ve done this here. I’ve made a statement; one of you has corrected me or added more information. I verify, then move forward with the new information.

Unfortunately, we are surrounded by people that are incapable of doing this.

These people cannot conceive that they might be wrong. They argue by expert.

My second wife used argument by expert constantly in our interactions. Since she wasn’t able to support her opinions, she turned to an expert and would tell me I was wrong because this expert was saying what she was saying.

This would require me to locate experts who she would accept, which she never did.

The problem with this style of argument is that you are not looking at the subject. You are not investigating the subject. Instead, you are vetting a third party. You have lost the point of the discussion.

I don’t need an expert to tell me that dropping hot glass into cold water is a good way to end up with shards of glass.

The need for people that are so stupid they require an “expert” to tell them what they should think drives me bonkers.

An example. NH has no income tax. Most of the tax revenue comes from property taxes. You are taxed a certain amount per $1000 of value your property has.

For one area of the state, the tax rate is $34.37/$1000. With an average home/property assessed at $215,000, giving an annual tax of $7389.55.

Now consider a small farm with 40 acres at $5,000/acre. That puts the value at $200,000. The assessed value at around $120,000 with an annual tax of $4124.40.

Now NH wants to protect farmers from heavy taxes so they have an option for your land to be put into “current use.” This covers undeveloped land (hunting, fishing areas) and farmland. If your land is in current use, you only pay taxes on 10% of your assessed value. So the farmer won’t be paying $4124; instead, he’ll be paying $412.40. A significant savings.

This is all well documented in the state’s laws. There are people who do nothing but defend current use cases. The gist is that if you have at least 10 acres in current use, you get this tax break.

A person I knew worked for a town. The town was having a shortfall. They were attempting to raise revenue by getting more land pulled out of current use. This person was concerned about their land, 125 acres, 123 of which were in current use. They asked the town lawyer about their concerns about putting up a small 10×20 hunting cabin in the woods.

The city lawyer told her that the hunting cabin would cause all 123 acres to come out of current use.

Even when I showed her the statutes, even when she was presented with the literature from the current use defenders, she took the word of her “expert” over what the plain text of the law said.

Nothing I said would convince her that she was wrong. She didn’t need to consider that she was wrong because it wasn’t her opinion; it was her “experts” opinion.

She was stupid.

On the other hand, she wanted to post the land as no hunting. That would have taken the acres out of current use.

Because she never learned to read the law for herself, nor did she hire a lawyer to advise her, she didn’t know that posting the land could have taken it out of current use.

The left is full of stupid people. People that can’t think, but they can certainly regurgitate what they have been told.

COVID-19 is so deadly that healthy children must be vaccinated against COVID-19. And you should wear your mask when in your car alone or out on a surfboard or in a boat in the middle of a lake.

They could never apply logic to their position because they never evaluated how they got there.

The other day I heard from a teacher friend that they had observed ICE removing a student from the middle school. Except it turned out that she hadn’t observed it. Two of her fellow teachers had observed it.

I was concerned. Was this the mythical unicorn ICE action? ICE agents storming schools to grab kids, throw them into handcuffs, and drag them out?

Well, no. It turns out that the kid was an illegal alien. His parents have removal orders against them. They had been picked up while the kid was in school.

ICE came to the school, told the admin that they needed to pick up the kid. The admin walked the agents to the classroom; the ICE agents and the kid walked out together. No muss, no fuss.

They were making sure the kid didn’t come home to an empty home.

Still no unicorns.

These people do not know how to think for themselves. They are too stupid to hold an opinion, so they borrow other people’s opinions.

They think they know the law because they had a one-hour seminar taught by radical activists.

A deportation enforcement officer will have between 100 and 200 HOURS of training in the law, focusing on immigration law. ICE agents are required to be college graduates. Their training is provided by actual experts in the law, and they are tested to confirm their knowledge.

You can’t fix stupid.

I hit up TikTok in the evenings for ten minutes, mostly for the comedy, but sometimes from “news on the ground.” Last night was comedy. So good, I need to share it!

@drewdunncomedy it would be funny… ON TOUR: 1/29-31 GRAND RAPIDS, MI 2/6-7 DENVER, CO 2/25 OONTARIO, CA 2/26 OXNARD, CA 2/27 LOS ANGELES, CA 2/29 IRVINE, CA 3/13-14 TYLER, TX 3/26-28 SAN DIEGO, CA 3/30-4/5 LAS VEGAS 4/9-11 MOHEGAN SUN, CT 4/30-5/2 LAWRENCE, KS More dates coming! #standup #jokes #trump #impression ♬ original sound – Drew Dunn

@zxcbbm696 #comedy #comedian #standup #standupcomedy #standupcomedian ♬ original sound – zxcbbm696

There are too many stupid things going on in this country right now. Finding one of them to write about is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel. Way too easy, if you ask me. And it’s a shame.

The one that’s sticking out in my mind right now is the person who decided to pick up a flash-bang that was thrown at them, known right now as Luna von Woke. According to a few sources, the video is fake, but it certainly passed my muster. Others have said the video is real, but the GoFundMe for help to get prosthetics is fake (MEAWW). Regardless, it isn’t the first time someone on the Left has picked up a flash bang, so I’m going to assume this is real.

Now, picking it up at all was stupid, and I could leave it at that. If someone tosses a flash-bang my way, I’m going THATAWAY… any way that’s away from where it is, quick as I can. While they don’t explode in the same way a grenade explodes, they do go boom.

This woman, in the video, looks at the flash bang, then goes running with it in her hand. She doesn’t throw it back. She doesn’t drop it. She doesn’t toss it in a safe direction. She just holds it in her hand until it goes bang. At that point, she hits the deck, writhing and screaming as one would assume would happen when one’s fingers went in two different directions at high speed. Frankly, the fact that it WAS a flash bang might have saved the rest of her hand, as the intense heat of the magnesium probably cauterized the wounds. Still, I’m sure it hurt.

I’m finding it difficult to scavenge up any real sympathy for Ms von Woke. Her ability to think critically isn’t likely to get better, so while I feel bad when anyone gets hurt, that’s about the extent of it. The ouch she’s feeling isn’t likely to teach her not to do it again.

This is literally what happens when we don’t let our children play outside, burn themselves in controlled ways on “warm but not terminally hot” stoves, and use knives early in life. They don’t learn that actions have consequences. It’s just… well, stupid.

And as the title suggests, you can’t cure this kind of stupid. Anyone who actually has the power to think this stuff through is already in the process of doing so. They’re already not going to pick up an exploding thing and run with it, anymore than they’re going to run with scissors or not pay their mortgage. They know there are consequences.

The scary part is, there are more and more people every year who simply do not “get” why bad things happen to them. They don’t know why they get sick (after not washing dishes appropriately), don’t know why people don’t want to be around them (after not showering for days on end and/or not washing their clothing effectively), don’t understand why they aren’t getting hired for jobs (when they show up with facial tattoos and piercings, or show up late and act in a disrespectful manner). They truly seem to expect things to just be handed to them on a silver platter. When you try to help them understand, they get barely into it and give up. They just don’t care. They KNOW that if they just keep doing what they’re doing, someone will take care of them. They know that because it’s what has always happened. And they’re right.

When I was on the dole, it was embarrassing.  I was ashamed, and I hated it, but I did it because I needed to feed my kid and that was more important than my pride. No one “made me” feel that way… it was a natural reaction to being on welfare and having to get food at the food bank. Today, we seem to be expected to worry about how a parent is going to feel while getting food for their kid at a food bank or from SNAP. Frankly, I don’t really care. I don’t want them insulted, of course, because there’s no reason to do so and it’s just morally wrong. But I see no reason to go out of my way to make it less embarrassing. Why? Because that feeling of shame was highly motivating. I wanted to get a job (or at one point, a BETTER job) so that I didn’t have to do the embarrassing thing anymore. And I did.

I wasn’t harmed by being ashamed. My child and I had food. We had shelter. We had heat, and water. Our needs were adequately met, and then some. After I got off the dole, a number of years later, I went back and helped out. Even today, some 30 years past that horrible time, I still do volunteer work every year. Why? Because people helped me, and so I help others. Even in the face of the disgraceful unrepentant asses that come thru the door today. There might be one “me” in the mix, and that’s enough to motivate me to keep helping.

But I’m not interested in making it easier. Easier leads to unemployed people taking to the street to protest FOR fascism, rapists, and criminals. I don’t want it to be easier. I want it to be a slap in the face, to wake people up and get them moving.

If we can end the various waste caused by the people who are terminally stupid (be those people in the citizenry or the government), maybe we can start some programs that actually help people who are truly needy to get into a better place. When I read Hillbilly Elegy, I felt inspired. If our VP can lift himself up through hard work and determination, then so can anyone else. It ain’t easy. If it’s easy, you’re doing it wrong.

Mobs are an organism. They act like a living creature. They might be made of people, but they react in known and predictable ways.

Mobs move in the path of least resistance towards their goal. If one person chooses a different path, others in the mob will follow, not a lot. But more people will follow those, and pretty soon there is a significant part of the mob moving in that new direction.

This is why breaking contact with the mob can be difficult. You need to fade out of the mob, not attract attention that causes parts to follow.

When there is a junction, the mob will flow down multiple paths from that junction unless guided. This is how multiple blocks can become involved with the mob: they move in the same general direction, but they fill all available space.

Mobs avoid hard points. They will flow around those hard points, but hard points cause a pain-like response, and the mob recoils from contact.

Riots are a type of mob behavior. My mentor told the story of how he and his Johns Hopkins buddies rushed to the rowhouse of one of the buddy’s moms. There they set up in the front window with long guns.

As the story was recounted to me, every rowhouse on that block suffered serious damage except for three. The rowhouse they were in and the two rowhouses directly across the street from them.

The mob avoided that hardpoint. It wasn’t worth the pain, and the organism retreated.

Mobs are dangerous. People get caught up in them and don’t know how to extract themselves. People that would never dream of being violent or vandalizing property will do it without even a thought. They follow anybody who acts like a leader.

During student protests that turned into riots at my University in the 60s, before I got there, there was no vandalism until one person threw a brick through the plate glass window of an upscale store. The student newspaper ran a picture of the man throwing that brick through the window to go with the story of the police vowing to track down the student who did it.

Oh, the man throwing the brick? He was dressed as a police officer.

The REST of the windows, those were broken by students who followed suit. Once one act of violence happened, the rest of the mob followed suit.

During the January 6th march to the Capitol, instigators changed the protest into a mob. That mob did not turn into a riot; they just did things that, as individuals, they would not normally do.

The reason that it didn’t turn into a riot was because there was no drive among the people to be violent.

We compare that to the BLM riots.

In Kenosha, we saw protests turn to mobs turn to riots. One of the interesting things that was caught on camera was people in all-black clothing, carrying umbrellas, throwing those first bricks. Starting the process of turning the mob into a riot.

The people in the streets were already angry. The media had been stirring up hate and anger for days and weeks. It took very little to drive the protests into mobs and the mobs into riots.

But there are things that mobs don’t do. They don’t have Command and Control structures. They don’t have security details. They don’t have assigned tasks for different units. They don’t have units.

One of the interesting, but not surprising, features of the “mobs” in MN is just how well organized they are.

All of which leads me to believe that they are not organic. There are parts that are useful fools/tools. But there are other parts that are most definitely acting to destabilize societal norms in the area. To foment a revolution.