There have been several videos posed online by people who generally have been on the Right that show Ukrainian soldiers torturing and executing Russian POWs.

There has been a subset of the Right that has reflexively decided to come out against Ukraine simply because the Left has gone ball to the wall in support of Ukraine.

These videos are not going to make me feel bad for the Russians.

Here is the thing, and I need to make this perfectly crystal fucking clear:

I do not give a single solitary, tiniest iota of a fuck what Ukrainian soldiers do to Russian soldiers. 

Go read your history of the Holodomor,  and the Russian Revolution, and the Decembrist Revolution, and the Crimean War before that.

Go read about the Gulags and Highway of Bones.

Go read about how German women were raped en masse by the Red Army as they defeated the Nazis on the eastern front.

The Russians have always engaged in inhumane tactics and atrocities.

The Russian army is currently shooting women and children.

The idea of law abiding gentlemanly combat is really something that only exists in the modern Anglosphere.

So the Ukrainians are committing atrocities against the Russians who committed atrocities against them since Stalin invaded in 1919 all the way through 1991 and the collapse of the Soviet Union.

Okay, so there are no good guys in this war.  Neither side is as pure and clean as the driven snow.

That’s still not a justification for Russia to invade Ukraine or for Ukrainians not to want to repel invaders.

So what that a Ukrainian soldier kneecaps a Russian POW with an AK.  That Russian was probably the great grandson of the Russian soldier that shot the Ukrainian soldier’s great grandmother’s siblings and raped her because they were picking kernels of wheat off the dirt after the Red Army took their entire crop yield.

This is me not giving a fuck.

This is why I say I don’t want to put boots on the ground there.

When armies that commit war crimes have war crimes committed against them, I’m just going to sit back with some popcorn and watch from a safe distance.

Bill Gates: Rich nations should move to "100 percent synthetic beef" https://t.co/zDe9ewiBFU pic.twitter.com/i92qJWGLPb

— The Hill (@thehill) March 27, 2022

From the article linked in the Tweet:

Bill Gates recently said that he believes rich nations would help the global fight against climate change by consuming only plant-based meat products instead of beef.

In a recent interview with Technology Review, Gates discussed his new book, “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster,” and emphasized the benefits rich nations could produce by moving to “100% synthetic beef.”

“You can get used to the taste difference, and the claim is they’re going to make it taste even better over time.”

No, I am not going to get used to the taste. I’m not going to eat that shit at all.

I can’t fathom what goes on in the heads if these sociopathic, megalomaniac billionaires that they make money and decide they are God-emperors who have the ability to tell the rest of how to live and what to eat.

Cattle have been domesticated and used as a foodsource for over 10,000 years, and this guy makes a bunch of money and decides single handedly to change the entire course of human food consumption.

Bill Gates can get fucked with a howitzer.

I will not live in a pod and I will not eat the fake meat.

I approve.

You want to see me pissed off while you bleed profusely? Mess with my wife in any way, shape or form.

And how desperate were the Oscar organizers who actually used Dollar Store Spike Lee in its broadcast? Chris Rock peaked as actor in New Jack City as the crack addict and has gone downhill ever since.

UPDATE: I just saw this.

The other day I was having a chat with some folks and we ended up talking about gym work. One of them made the comment dispelased about “people that do not disinfect after themselves. Don’t you just hate that?”

My answer was a big fat no.

The person was shocked and ranted about the possibility of transmitting X, Y, or Z diseases including the evil COVID. Why on earth would I not give a care about people cleaning the equipment? My answer was simply “because I will clean the damned things before using them.”

Why do people assume their safety is part and parcel of somebody else’s life? Take control of your safety strategy and do not let other people dictate either by action or inaction.

I am noticing that some business are being less dutifully about the cleaning offerings at the entrances and I believe they will eventually be abandoned. I particularly like having quick access to bleach pads or alcohol-based lotions as I come in, but if they do without them, I will add a small bottle of hand cleaner to my EDC because I have yet to catch the Chink Flu, but I believe I caught E Coli or some other stomach bug twice in the last 2 years. One already rests in the center console of my vehicle.

A quick introduction: I’ve been part of the prepping community since before I was born.  My parents lived through the shortages of WWII and their parents lived through the shortages of the great depression.

I remember mom putting away a few hundred jars of garden vegetables every year she had a garden.  She would buy 20 gallons of milk and freeze 18  gallons when we got home from the store.  Our house always had multiple refrigerators and/or freezers.

As I prepared to leave home, mom and dad helped outfit my car.  It wasn’t the car that was important to them, it was making sure that I had everything I needed, just in case.

Over the years, I’ve followed that.  When I met my mentor we talked about “end of the world.”  He use to joke that if I could get him to the “we have wire” stage, he could take us the rest of the way to modern computers.  So I did the research into how to get from nothing to everything.

Some years later, I joined some local groups that were interested in preparing.  Once there, I found that I and my ladies were doing the teaching. We still educated ourselves, but we were much more likely than others to be skilled in a very wide variety of things.

What do I do first?

This is the most common question asked of people getting into preparing.  And it is a good question.  If you ask on this forum or that forum they will happily tell you how to spend thousands of dollars in order to “get started”.  And all of that is nice, but it doesn’t teach the most basic structure first: How do I prioritize my preparations.

The Rule of Three’s

You can survive:

• Three minutes without air
• Three hours without shelter
• Three days without water
• Three weeks without food
• Three months without hope

There are always going to be people that want to argue about whether “it is really three weeks?”  “What if…?” The bottom line is, it doesn’t matter.

This is a structure to help you get started in preparing and to make good decisions on where to put your priorities.

So what does it mean?

Three minutes without air

If you aren’t breathing, you are not going to survive.  Seems simple, but the first rule is to make sure you keep breathing.  This translates into first aid and stop the bleed.

Make sure you have first aid gear and know how to use it.  Make sure you have “stop the bleed” or “blow out” kits.  These will keep you alive long enough to worry about shelter.

Longer term, this is personal hygiene equipment and products, so you keep healthy. Think about basic items: soap, toothpaste and toothbrush, bandaids or bandages, crutches, inflatable casts, etc.

Three hours without shelter

Once you are sure you are going to continue to breath, you need shelter.  This isn’t just tents and huts and houses, this is everything that shelters you from the elements.  It is hats and coats, clothing, rain coats, tarps, sleeping bags, socks, boots, and of course tents, huts and houses.

You should consider just how long you would survive in 40F rain without some sort of water proof gear.  You would quickly start to get hypothermia. Your body is losing heat faster than it can produce it.  You will die.  And hypothermia sets in at when the core temperature reaches 95F (35C).  

At the other extreme, hot days can lead to over heating, dehydration, nasty sun burns and a host of other issues which will kill you.

Three days without water

Water is of higher priority than food.  The number of people that have a 6 month supply of food and have no idea what to do if the taps stop flowing is mind boggling.  You need water.

Water is both short term (what you carry with you), medium term (how you get more to carry with you), and long term (how are you going to get the 4 to 6 liters of water per day to live comfortably).

Remember, water is used for more than just drinking.  It is used for cleaning and cooking.

And all of the water you use needs to be clean enough for the use you put it to.

Three weeks without food

This people seem to have in spades.  Unfortunately, most people don’t consider what it takes to prepare their stored foods.  Nor how long they will be eating it, nor just how little they actually have.

A comment that has been made many times is something like: Have you tried to eat just 72 hour bars for 72 hours?

Three months without hope

If you are using your preparations, the odds are high that bad things are happening to you, or to the world around you. You need something to keep your spirits up.  That is hope.

Hope includes games to play, radios to listen to, books to read.  A little bit of chocolate candy or hard candy hidden away to make everybody a little happier.  It can be a favorite stuffed animal or a picture of loved ones.  

Hope is a requirement for living (as opposed to surviving), and for long term survival.

Next: How long will this go on?

Sent by angry cybernetic gnomes 

It is an inconvenient characteristic of the universe that the planets with the most valuable near-surface natural resources are also the planets most inhospitable to human life.  The processes of planetary formation that bring useful minerals close enough to the surface of a planet to be mined, e.g., volcanic activity or meteor impact, also create conditions that are hostile to human existence, e.g., toxic atmospheres, temperature extremes, etc.  As such, the most valuable resource finds are frequently on planets and in systems that cannot be sustainably colonized.

These conditions generally make working on these planets extremely hazardous.  As the hazard level of the environment increases so does the cost of safety for the workforce.  Worker shelters, exposure suits, and artificial atmospheric systems become more expensive the more dangerous the environment becomes.  With most of these planets being in uncolonized systems, when factoring in the cost of transportation of equipment from a Union hub to a frontier planet, the costs are driven up to the point where the cost of providing a safe working environment makes resource extraction unreasonably or prohibitively expensive.  AI systems, as advanced as they may be, are still woefully insufficient for complex problem solving such as those encountered in exploratory mining and resource extraction.

Still, despite the risks and challenges, the mineral wealth of these planets is enticing.

This, the potential for extreme wealth existing outside the regular reach of Union laws and regulations has resulted in a new and terrifying form of quasi-slavery: corporeal debt bondage.

During the 18th and 19th Centuries, when resources such as coal, silver, or gold were discovered in the Appalachian Mountains, North American West, Africa, or Indian sub-continent far from civilization, an economic system known as Company Town would often develop.  A company would invest in the development of a small homestead in an isolated location rich in some valuable resource.  Workers would be attracted to the homestead by company men with the promise of work and good wages.  When the workers arrived, they would be charged for the cost of the transportation to the site, equipment, food, and whatever else they needed, that would be extracted from their wages and they would find themselves virtually enslaved by debt to their new employer.  Often, any personal belongings they brought with them would be confiscated, and the lack of supplies and remoteness of the company town prevented these workers from escaping to freedom.  This is the essence of debt bondage.

It is said that there is nothing new under the sun.  This aphorism has proven to be true under the alien suns of distant systems.

This system as it exists on frontier planets is compounded in its horrors.  As the amount of money to be made increases, so in some people does their capacity to be cruel to their fellow man to obtain that money.

Workers are still attracted with the promises of work, good wages, and safe working conditions.  Because these contracts are technically enforceable under Union laws, they are in the strictest sense, true.

The devil, however, is in the details.

The workers are put into induced hibernation for the long haul to the distant company colony, which is standard for deep space transport.  During induced hibernation, the worker’s brain is surgically removed and placed into a robotic body.   The technology for total body prosthetics has existed for some time, however, the near-universal consensus among Union medical practitioners and ethicists is that total body prosthetics strip away so much of a person’s humanity that no reputable surgeon would perform such surgery and consequently patients having had such surgeries are not found in Union societies.

The worker’s body is then shot up with preservatives and placed in a simple cryo storage system, not unlike those used for the transport of consumable meat (or corpses).  Without concern for brain death, long-term preservation of the body is much simpler and cheaper.  Furthermore, since the only life support system needed is for the worker’s brain, the total investment in life support is much lower.  The company does not need to build living facilities with artificial atmospheres for or provide exposure suits to workers.  Food, water, and breathable air costs are minimized.  A simple oxygen and nutrient drip to sustain the brain and power for the robot body are all that are necessary.

The workers labor in their robotic total body prosthesis, for their term of service until their debt bondage is paid off, usually measured in tons of refined product generated, then for as long as they can stand the horror of being separated from their body.  At which point the worker’s body is removed from cryo-storage, the brain is re-implanted, and the worker revived.  There is little to no physical harm to the worker.  The psychological and emotional trauma is significant.

The prosthesis is then sterilized and prepared for the next worker.

The experience for the worker is not painful.  Ironically, what is considered to be the most horrific aspect of a total body prosthesis is the lack of pain as well as the lack of almost all sensations.  The brain is subconsciously aware of the body all the time.  It is a biological phenomenon known as proprioception.  When the brain is removed from the body, that awareness is broken.  The only sensory input the brain receives is from sensors from the prosthetic, generally visual input, audio input, and pressure feedback sensors in the prosthetic hands for the use of tools.  Artificial sensors are limited.  For the worker colors are muted, sound is monotone, and almost all physical sensation is non-existent.  One typically does not think about the importance of all the sensations a person regularly experiences until they are gone, the sound of music, the satisfaction of tasting good food, the feeling of being full after a meal, the simple joy of scratching an itch.  Not to mention the rapture of a massage or physical intimacy.  All gone and replaced by nothingness.

One might wonder why such workers are even given a term of service and why pay them when their job is complete.  Once the brain has been put into the prosthetic and is maintained by life support, why not have the worker labor indefinitely until the brain dies.

The answer comes to us from antiquity and the story of Pandora’s box: hope.

Hope that the term of service will end and the worker is made whole and sent on their way with their wages is what keeps the mind rooted and functioning.  If hope is lost, the mind in the prosthesis will, as they used to say, go mad.  The worker’s brain will suffer a psychological break and the worker will become utterly useless.

This becomes the ultimate motivation for the worker to labor, the need to end the waking nightmare and be reunited with their body.

Companies that use this system advertise good pay and safe working conditions, and exploit loopholes in Union laws and take advantage of distance from Union authorities to get away with abominations of human cruelty.  The reality of corporal debt bondage is that it is an emotionally damaging horror show, the long-term negative effects of which far outweigh the value of the wages earned.

It is in the Charter of the Union of Worlds to “spread humanity among the stars and to all celestial bodies that can support life.”  In our desire for natural resources and wealth, some have spread inhumanity among the stars.

It is the recommendation of this report that this system of labor be expressly and explicitly banned within the Union, resources extracted using this method be embargoed from Union import, and efforts made to subsidize the development of resource extraction on hazardous and inhospitable planets using humane and ethical labor practices.

Sic itur ad astra