Coffee Withdrawal: Day Three

Submitted by Bill St. Clair on Mon, 08 Nov 2004 13:00:00 GMT
# Today is day three of coffee withdrawal. Two or three times a year, when it stops working and I'm always tired, I stop drinking the stuff for a month or two. It takes seven days to get off of coffee, and the first three or four are pretty miserable. But I've been through this tunnel enough times to know that the light at the end is worth the pain now. I really should give up coffee altogether, but I won't, because I like it.

Had a strange malfunction at the range yesterday with my AR-15. Loaded a round, pulled the trigger, nothing. Tried to eject it by pulling on the charging handle. It wouldn't budge. Took the lower off, and messed with it a while, then cocked the hammer, reassembled, and pulled the trigger again. Bang! Looking inside, I discovered that I had neglected to clean it after the last firing. Lots of Wolf gunk in the barrel, a little corrosion on the bolt face. Cleaned it up, reassembled, ah...

I took a friend of mine to the range so that he could fire his new 30-30 for the second time. He did that, and then was eager to try the AR. He fired the first shot through it and turned to me with a confused look on his face wondering at the complete lack of recoil. Hehe. Then he proceeded to fill the center of a 50-yard target with 19 more rounds.

# I just put together yesterday that the Manchester Firing Line Range, which I visited the weekend before last, and where the Boston contingent of the Pink Pistols goes to shoot, is on Gay Street. Hehe.

Pink Pistols: Pick on someone your own caliber.SM

# Steve Johnson and Andrew Balls at The Financial Times - Dollar expected to fall amid China's rumoured selling - the U.S. economy may be in big trouble. Check out x-rates.com for graphs of currency exchange rates. Note that the dollar has been falling fast for the last month against the other major currencies. If this keeps up for long, the Canadian dollar will be worth more than American. [smith2004]

# Ben Irvin and Robert Hawes at The Mental Militia - Come Home, Libertarians! - an invitation to Libertarians to join the Free West Alliance and move to Montana. Twelve good reasons to do so. [lrtdiscuss]

# Debra at ClaireWolfe.com - Gulchers, take note! - a review of the AlphaRubicon, a web site for practical survivalists. If I were really interested in survival, I'd drop $36 for Matt Furey's Bare Bones Combat Conditioning Package, and work at losing about 50 pounds. As long as I'm carrying around this anchor, I won't survive very well without western civilization's support. But then, I'm not entirely sure I want to survive without western civilization's support. [claire]

The site consists of two sections: the public side, and the member-only side (called the "Rubicon"). The public side contains a nice variety of basic survival articles, but that's merely the tip of the iceberg. To get the full value of the site, you want to become a member of the Rubicon.

The motto of the Rubicon and its members is, "Facta non verba". That is, "Deeds, not words." They don't write articles or post messages containing theories or "supposed to work". Rather, everything has to be first-hand experience. If there's an article about building a fallout shelter, they show you the pictures and give you the step-by-step play, which often is at odds with what is commonly accepted on most survival boards. Think of them as the "MythBusters" of the survivalist community.

In addition to the thousands of files available (updated very frequently), there are forums (primitive in style, but effective for their purpose, and fast-loading), custom Rubicon instant chat software, wireless alerts, group activities (campouts, meetups, etc), a barter board, group-finder boards, email accounts, group purchases (bulk buys of a product usually get nice discounts) and lots more. Many of the members are professionals (paramedics, law enforcement, lawyers, doctors, and so on), so the advice or intel they give is - again - "facta non verba".

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