• One might ask why the FBI had these training materials in the first place, and whether they plan to throw out the attitudes (yeah, riiiiiight) or just the paperwork.
• You probably already know Tess Pennington’s online series 52 Weeks to Preparedenss. But it’s always worth a link. And soon? A book!
• Bovard: “First wheat, now health care.”
• Drone Studies. A new college major. That is &^%$# repulsive.
• Security: a crypto-nerd’s imagination vs what would actually happen. S, who sent this, noted that these days they’d probably dispense with the drugs.
• RelaxShacks.com. Extremely cool tips for getting the most out of your tiny living spaces.
• RFID chips move aside. The RFID tattoo is here. (SO much more stylish, don’t you agree?)
• I have no idea whether John Wayne actually came up with these five rules to remember in life. But if he didn’t, he should have.
• Carlos Miller notes, “Police can shoot people, tase people, pepper spray people, harass people, steal from people, lie to people and arrest people on unlawful charges and they still get to keep their jobs.” But there are limits, you know.

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Now they’ve moved all those storage foods to their own spot in the grocery aisles. Added a couple more items, too.

I’m standing there choosing this week’s purchases and making notes on what to get on future trips. While I’m scribbling, the section turns, once again, into Walmart’s own little social center. I’m not doing any talking this time. But so many people are standing there chatting with each other about freeze-dried and dehydrated foods as they load up their carts that I’m thinking Walmart should install a Starbucks right there to take advantage of all the friendly idling.

This time it begins with a husband and wife judiciously discussing and choosing items. Another woman carts up the aisle and soon the three of them are chatting about favorite ways of using their storage foods. While they’re going on about best tips for serving cheese powder and broccoli florets, another man does the “pardon me, pardon me” routine through the crowd, and he, too, pops a couple #10 cans into his cart and pauses for a few words before moving on. Me, I’m speechless.

This evening one of my friends will probably be making her storage-food Walmart run.

Hm. I get the impression this idea is working out pretty well. These foods might be appearing at a Walmart near you — even if your Walmart is farther from Mormon country than mine is.

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• Here’s an aspect of the dreadful FATCA that hasn’t gotten much coverage.
• From jed in comments: homeless by choice (and on principle).
• “How to Be Creative.” I don’t buy the claim that there’s no such thing as “creative types” (OMG, there are indeed creative types). But the rest is surely true. Creativity isn’t just for artists, writers, and inventors.
• Neat idea: an urban food forest. Not quite sure, though, how “free” it can be.
• A U.S. government soldier decides to freelance. (ADDED: The story that it was one “lone nut” “going rogue” probably isn’t going to hold up.)
• “Gaining Respect for End-Times Prophet Harold Camping.” Really.
• A whole site for people who believe stuff they saw on The Onion.
• What you surrender when you sign an organ-donor card. Kinda scary.
• What if everybody charged with a crime demanded a jury trial?
• No, Mr, Mueller. You don’t need to check anything. Just arrest Obama and Holder. Among others. (H/T BW.)

Now that’s my idea of a lap dog:

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Loud parties all over the neighborhood yesterday. Well, it’s Carnival. One loud week a year, no problem. A Fourth of July that goes on for two weeks, no problem.

But the neighborhood of my new-old house is beginning to get me down. Badly.

You buy in a poor neighborhood, you expect some stuff. And hey, I’m the person who once told a real estate agent I’d rather live next to tar-paper shacks than the McMansions he insisted on showing me.

But on top of the Notorious Neighbor from Hell, the quality of living here has deteriorated in the last year (and in the last 10, other neighbors say). There’s been some disturbing sh*t going on. Like kids throwing stuff into my backyard — including things that could hurt the dogs. Like kids climbing the rickety fence into my backyard to retrieve soccer balls from their games in the empty lot behind my place (I’m always glad to get their arrant soccer balls for them, but it embarrasses them to knock on my door to ask.) Like more litter than a landfill. Litter I pick up all the time but can’t keep up with.

This is the house directly across the street:

That’s its permanent condition, too, not just some temporary post-party rubble.

No, I don’t think litter police should intervene (though if I were the landlord of the horde of young men who live there I’d be on their ass right now for treating my property that way).

But I am beginning to wonder why I’m spending so much time and money fixing up my own place if this is what the neighborhood is becoming. And worse, I’m beginning to feel like some officious old crank, fretting about what my neighbors are up to instead of minding my own business.

I’ve been looking at real estate listings and have sighed over a couple that have crappy houses but a couple of acres of land. But it’s not likely I can move any time soon unless I luck into a deal like I got on this place — rock bottom price with seller financing. Or get a lease-to-own deal, since any FRNs I have are tied up in this place. (Don’t even say the word “rent”; not with three dogs and a cat; besides, rentals are way higher than my payments here.) Even then, there’s a lot of fixing I still have to do before this house can go up for sale. And in this market, properties are sitting for a loooooong time.

I suppose an alternative might be to organize some sort of neighborhood pride movement. But that is so not me. And although there are plenty of neighbors who keep nice little homes, I wonder how much success anybody would have persuading boozy young renters to clean up their act.

Maybe I didn’t really make a mistake buying here. This house was my opportunity to get back to the NorthWET, after all. And I love the house itself. I love what it’s becoming.

But the trash and noise and rowdy behaviors are getting me down.

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There’s something to be learned about freedom from all that. But what, exactly?

1. Individual action and adrenaline go together.

-S pointed this out in the comments. If we’re ever going to get past the completely ineffectual “call the police or call the landlady” stage with the Neighbor from Hell, we’re going to have to put ourselves on the line in some way large or small. The same is true if we intend to halt the police state. It can’t be done nicely or “within the system.”

Most people don’t like putting themselves on the line.

So as -S says, the best action is one that’s fun for the perpetrators (or makes them feel good about themselves), gets cheers from even those neihbors who want nothing to do with it, and produces such amusing results that even the cops are likely to laugh.

And what applies on a neighborhood scale, applies on a larger scale.

Just this morning, the amazing activist Adam Kokesh tweeted, “When will we have the courage of the 1st Am revolutionaries? Never mind shooting redcoats, when do we start ACTUALLY throwing tea?”

With all respect to Adam — who virtually defines the bold Outlaw Agitator — the first thing that came to my mind was, “Who needs tea-tossers when we already have folks who take down the CIA’s website?”

Because the police state is growing larger, we sometimes think the whole world is full of “sheeple” (hate that word) who either do nothing or make only weak gestures. But it ain’t so. Are there millions who are either inert or actually approve what’s being done to us? Sure. But majorities have always been that way.

We actually live in a world where adrenaline junkies take lots and lots of direct action for freedom. How many American colonists participated in Samuel Adams’ little costume party? A tiny minority — bold enough to act, but cautious enough to disguise themselves. Same today.

This is why I celebrate Freedom Outlaws.

Because once you know you can’t work within the system — whether it be the local law or something much bigger — you might as well be bold and have fun.

2. Nobody has a “system” that works. Never will.

We live in a world designed for, if not by, Hobbes. People are such savages, so the theory goes, that vast & complicated systems have to be built to cage us. Those systems are the only thing that can protect the innocent against the guilty, the peaceable from the unruly, etc. so on.

Except that they don’t, of course. Then the systems themselves, born as agents of coercion, become ruthless, self-preserving, and more of a problem than the things they pretend to protect us from. Or at best (as in the present Neighbor from Hell case) simply a waste of tax money.

Ah, but how would things be in Libertopia? That question has been on my mind ever since the NfH problem began.

The glib answer is that, in Libertopia, everybody in a given area would voluntarily agree to be bound by certain covenants, no doubt forbidding all manner of ordinary nuisances like excess noise and providing real remedies for violations. Never mind that anybody who’s ever lived in a covenanted community can tell you that the enforcers are nannies to the max, who are as likely to come down on you as on your pesky neighbor. Or barring voluntary covenants, we’d all be taught from childhood to honor the golden rule. And barring that, we’d … well, have our ways of dealing with miscreants.

And indeed, in the NfH mess, dependence on government systems has kept people from taking action for months, whereas if they knew they had to solve their own problems, more would have acted — and probably acted quite responsibly — a long time ago.

We might have had a neighborhood organization in place to deal with situations like NfH. Or somebody would have gone over there and, very politely, with sidearm properly holstered, reminded NfH that, really, nobody has to put up with him.

In either case — Hobbesville or Libertopia — as one purist commentor suggested, the rest of us could simply pick up and move if we didn’t like one neighbor’s bad acts. Never mind that that also solves nothing, penalizes the innocent, and lets the bad guy win.

And if you’re talking on a larger scale … sure you can leave your city or your state or even your country when it hinders your freedom too intolerably. Plenty have, plenty will. Can’t knock it. But in a recent comment section, nearly everybody viewed leaving an increasingly unfree country as a sort of surrender — and again, a win for those who most ought to be stopped.

Bottom line: Nobody who claims to have a workable, wide-scale answer actually does. The only answers are the ones we find for ourselves in this messy, complicated old world — hopefully guided by solid principles, but definitely not limited by abstract theories — theories that are inevitably too simplistic to cover everything that arises in Real Life.

—–

One more part of this screed to come shortly.

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When I wrote yesterday about my Neighbor from Hell, I didn’t intend to start a discussion about how to deal with the nuisance.

I should have realized comments would go that way, though. And I’m glad they did because as always you guys came up with ideas that are interesting, helpful, and delightfully devious (sometimes all three at once!).

In the long run, I’m pretty sure the neighbors will have to deal with Mr. Karaoke on their own, non-violently but decisively. Some of your techniques will surely be put to good use.

As it happens, though, this week we caught an unexpected break. And yes it did involve “people in charge.”

After the week’s third party, I begged Mr. K’s landlady to give him an ultimatum: stop the noise or be evicted. This she would not do. But she talked with him, then called me back with a story that, at first, didn’t make much sense. Mr. K was quite indignant because he claimed that he now had the city government’s approval for all this racket!

He had gone to the chief of police and the city council and gotten specific permission to hold musical events (by invitation) around the city in honor of what landlady called “Mexican Mardi Gras” — Carnival, the extended pre-Lenten festivities celebrated down south.

Nobody is going to be so churlish as to begrudge a neighbor an occasional loud holiday celebration.

But Mr. K. — who frankly shows more signs of arrogant cluelessness than malice — decided that the city had given him carte blanche — for parties, for rehearsals, for pretty much anything. The government approved of him. He had Followed Procedures. So how could the neighbors possibly have any legitimate objection?

I went to city hall and explained our dilemma to the mayor. He gave me a fair hearing, talked with the police chief, and by the end of the day the chief had sent a sergeant out to Mr. K’s place with the message that the city had not endorsed anything beyond by-request holiday performances during Carnival.

With luck, this will keep Mr. K. quiet until seriously nice weather sets in. Then we’ll see. I’ll be very, very surprised if this buys us long-term peace.

Am I happy that I went to “officials”? Nope. But this time, in all innocence, those very officials had triggered the problem and they decently took responsibility.

And as I wrote yesterday, when you’re facing a dilemma that increasingly looks as if it can’t be solved politely, it’s easier to live with yourself if you can say, “I tried everything else before I resorted to guerrilla warfare.”

I’d say we’ve now tried everything else.

Do me a favor, if you would. Go back to yesterday’s post and take another look at the second part — the part about mindset and hesitancy to act. Because I really do think that the way everybody’s handled (or failed to handle) this mini-mess bears on our current situation as lovers of freedom in an unfree world.

That’s what I’d like to talk about in part III.

—-

But first … you want a LOL? I wrote the above Thursday afternoon and scheduled it for later posting. As it turns out, I’d rather not post it at all, except that I promised part II. I’m adding this coda at 6:30 Thursday evening — while listening to the sounds of Mr. K’s latest “performance.”

The best I can say is that he is keeping the volume down this time.

But yes, we’ll have to solve this problem ourselves.

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Since last July neighbors and I have been forced to deal with an intractable problem. A man who lives just across the intersection acquired a professional-grade karaoke system and has held approximately 35 blindingly loud parties in a doorless garage. His music can often be heard five blocks away; this close it’s like a jackhammer to the brain.

When asked to turn the music down, the man smiles, nods — and goes right on doing exactly what he wants to do. Sometimes he responds by turning the volume up. The police come out. They make him lower the noise to something more tolerable (but still plainly audible inside our houses). He keeps it low for an hour or two. But his next party goes on at full blast.

I’ve never called the cops on him. Not my style. Others have done the calling. But I talked to him three times and when that failed, I got his landlady to chat with him. That — and winter weather — gave peace-loving neighbors a small break. For a few months we had to put up with “only” two parties a month, not the two a week we endured last summer.

Then suddenly this week we had springlike weather — and he threw three parties-from-hell in four days. The first brought two calls to the police. The next two featured lower volumes of music — but a crowd of people dancing and shouting in the street.

This emphatic return of jackhammer music and unneighborly behavior triggered a community crisis — and an awakening.

And the whole process feels like something freedomistas, or could-be-freedomistas, are going through in the wider world.

—–

People in this neighborhood pretty much keep to themselves. I’ve learned just this week that all last summer people were thinking pretty much what I was: “This is godawful. But surely it’ll be only temporary.”

Then we moved on to, “I can’t stand this one more minute. But nobody else seems to mind. Maybe I’m just some grouchy old weirdo.”

We would jam in our earplugs or crank up our own music and spend his party evenings gritting our teeth and fantasizing about clever, bold, devious — and entirely unrealistic — ways we’d get that bastard. We felt impotent. Our lack of ability to change the situation enraged us perhaps more than the actual noise did.

The first sign I saw that others were suffering came when one of the tenants in Mr. Karaoke’s building heard one of my requests for quiet, came to my house a few days later, and begged me to call the police. He said he didn’t have a phone, but also that he was too scared to call on a nearby pay-phone — that he feared Mr. K and his friends would punish him. (This despite the fact that Mr. K has never threatened violence to anybody.) Too scared.

He’s the one who told me the police had already been out several times. So others are upset. But who are they? Where are they?

Realizing I was no longer just speaking for myself finally gave me more gumption, more motivation. That’s when I got the landlady to buy us that (unfortunately temporary) reprieve.

Then came false hope. When a week would go by without a party, we’d all breathe a sigh of relief and think, “Thank God. Maybe it’s over now.”

Because we were in this state of hopeful denial, this week’s three noise-fests just devastated us. We finally had to face the fact that absolutely nothing had been solved and that as we looked with anticipation toward the coming months of better weather we’d also have to cringe with dread, knowing that every pleasant day might be turned hellish by this one man.

I know this thought process was common because this week’s return of chaos finally got neighbors talking with each other. Our angry, frustrated thoughts poured out. We belatedly realized that we were well-and-truly stuck with this situation and neither the police nor the landlady, despite all their visits to and talks with the culprit, were going to save us. We would have to come up with our own plan. We would have to stomp our own snakes.

But even after being smacked in the face with reality and making the first tentative beginnings of an organization, we weren’t quite ready to believe that we had exhausted all the possibilities of the “people in charge.”

And as it turned out, “people in charge” really did have one more part to play — even though I’m pretty sure it will end up being the part that goes: “Well, we really couldn’t have lived with ourselves if we hadn’t tried every, single last means of working within the system. Now we really know we’ll have to take care of it, ourselves alone.”

This whole thought/action process sounds ridiculously — and sadly — familiar doesn’t it?

—–

More tomorrow.

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I turn the blog over this morning to two commentors at Earthineer:

Oilman2, who says that small farmers (and by extension many more of us) should opt out.

And Earthineer founder Dan Adams who answers that we should opt in.

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