Here’s my New Year’s gift to you — if you’re on Facebook, you should join a group called “Homemade attachments.” I stumbled across it the other day, and I don’t recall exactly how, but it’s been an endless source of entertainment since the very first click.
I can summarize the group’s content in two words: redneck engineering.
What you’ll get in your news feed are examples of backyard ingenuity, some professional but most amateur. “Homemade attachments” sees over a hundred illustrated posts a day, from log splitters to robotic cranes, tractor ballasts to trebuchets.
(No, OSHA is not a member.)
Truth is, I have no practical use for most of what I see, not personally. I don’t plow snow or groom my driveway. I don’t own a tractor. I don’t weld.
As long as my neighbors behave themselves, I won’t need a trebuchet.
No, I’m in it only for the fun — to admire the creativity of people who know how, and to marvel at the bald courage of people who should know better.
Maybe you’ll enjoy it, too.
I ran the woodstove hard this morning. It was more experiment than necessity, given a wake-up (6:30am) temp of 30°F. I wanted to see how quickly I could take the still-uninsulated cabin from chill to comfort if I got the burn really crankin’.
This fire took easily, bringing the flue to an indicated 180°F quickly. There it stalled, inexplicably, so (making sure that the stove door was closed and latched) I walked away from it.
When I came back five minutes later, the gauge read 350°F. It climbed steadily from that point, topping-out at 550°F — that’s about as hot as I’d want to run this woodstove. I backed off on fuel, watched the needle drop a hundred degrees, and maintained that level for a couple of hours.
Coziness was achieved. Insulating the place will make a big difference, of course. That’ll happen fairly soon, walls first.
As promised, Deb made us her famous New Year’s meal.
I took this photo on The Mountain this afternoon:
The image below was snapped in March of 2021, at Anchor Down in Tennessee:
Different fires. Same socks.
. . . . .
Whenever I talk about PERSEC and mention that Deb and I are inclined to avoid high-profile events and large crowds, I can almost hear the eyes rolling. And I get it — nobody wants the threat of bad acts to dictate how we, as Americans, live our lives.
In this household, we recognize that making security a top priority means making choices. Sometimes it’s more sensible to avoid a potential threat rather than confronting it.
You wouldn’t find us at a large public gathering on New Year’s Eve — Times Square, for example. It’s a target, and a damned soft one.
Ditto the French Quarter in New Orleans, where in the wee hours of this New Year’s Day, we saw what can happen.
An apparent jihadi in a pickup ran down 45 revelers, killing at least 15. He exited the truck and shot at responding officers, who returned fire and neutralized him permanently.
Investigators say that they found more firearms and more ammunition inside the truck, along with multiple improvised explosive devices (set to be triggered remotely), and that an undisclosed number of additional IEDs were found elsewhere in The Quarter.
If you have a lick of sense, you know that this sort of thing was bound to happen. And you wouldn’t’ve been there.
Beyond that, I won’t tread into discussing means, method or motive. I do want to call your attention to a few things that have come out during the early coverage.
First, notice how quickly details were confirmed publicly, by official sources. So fast. So tidy. That makes me suspicious.
The FBI has said that it doesn’t believe that the guy acted alone, which begs more questions than it answers. Do we need to have the “sleeper cells” conversation again?
An admission by the chief of NOPD, while answering a question at the 1pm press conference, is telling: “We had a plan, and the terrorist defeated it.” Take a lesson from that, please.
I was struck by a question posed by a reporter to the sheriff of Orleans Parish: “What do you say to people who are tired of being resilient?” That, my friends, speaks volumes about our shamefully squishy culture.
Finally, I want to know more about the explosion of an EV at the Trump International Hotel in Las Vegas, just a few hours after the New Orleans attack. I suspect we’ll learn that it was neither accident nor coincidence.
I encourage you to live your best American Life. Make smart choices. And understand — or at the very least, consider — that what happened this morning at Bourbon and Iberville may be the beginning of a campaign of terror.
Take care of yourselves, Patriots. Stay calm. Stay sharp. Stay free.
#WiseUp #LibertyOrDeath #Ungovernable
#LetsGoBrandon #FJB