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The White Settlement Church Shooting

12/31/2019

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A transient ex-con walks into a church. Normally unremarkable, come for the company/heat/AC/music, stay for the redemption happens all the time. This guy, on the other hand, had a shotgun and an urge to use it as long as possible.
Unlike a lot of shootings, this one had live video going from beginning to end and unusually clear. The church was livestreaming their services. The camera was placed on the far back corner from the pulpit's left, and was positioned to show both pulpit and congregation. Which meant we had clear view of the shooting, which happened at the far back corner from the pulpit's right.
The shooter, wearing a hood and a jacket, approached a man holding what looks like a collection plate. I'm told by the news the man with the plate was a Mr. Anton Wallace.
After an unheard conversation with Wallace, the shooter pulled a shotgun from under his jacket. A man sitting in the back pew (who news sources ID as a Mr. Richard White) stands and reaches for the small of his back.
Three things happen in rapid succession.
One, The shooter doesn't immediately fire. He does, however, shoot and kill White before White manages to draw his own weapon.
Two, He then turns and shoots Wallace, killing him.
Three, the shooter is shot and killed almost immediately afterwards by a man named Jack Wilson. Wilson had been sitting further away from White in a back pew.
At this point, five more parishioners draw their weapons. One advances along the back wall. One, satisfied the shooter is dead, temple indexes their weapon and starts escorting kids out of the pews. One reholsters after being satisfied the shooter is down. Two head down the main aisle between the pews, flagging some of their fellow parishioners before likewise reholstering.
* * *
That's the shooting. The reactions have been typical.
Pro-gun groups have all but built a statue to the good man with a gun who graced us with his earthly presence. NRA immediately tweeted such, and is being called out by CNN for "apparently it's cool to talk about it when the bodies are still warm if you're proven right."
The tacticlowns are mocking the late Mr. White for everything from being fat to carrying at the small of the back. Those who aren't drooling at Wilson making a headshot from 15 years, that is.
The few gun grabbers who are opening their mouths are sneering at the deaths of Wallace and White as examples of Good Guy with a Gun not working, and otherwise are clutching their pearls and sailing down denial.
I mean, an overweight cishet white boomer christian trump supporter being a GOOD guy? *GASP*
Wilson, for his part, ain't helping. Turns out he's a local politician running for county commissioner, and wasted no time giving his side of the shooting story.
* * *
As for me? I'm getting too old for this shit.
Look, Good Person with a Gun and the Will to use it is still the first, last, and only effective response to mass shootings we have, period. Deal with it or die mad about it.
The fact that Wilson's an ex-cop meant shit. The man used to own a range. He went through more training ammo in a week than most cops do in a year. For further comparison, there's a UPS truck from a few weeks back that probably still looks like a fucking colander.
White died trying. End of story. Larry Correia once said that armed citizens don't have to be Navy SEALS, they just have to be speedbumps. White died a speedbump, and there's honor in that. He died defending his fellow parishioners, even if he never got off a shot. There's a term for mocking the man after all of this: victim blaming.
You want to talk shit about him for it?
Then from one fat man with a beard and a keyboard to another: go fuck yourself.
Seven parishioners were visibly armed that day. One died trying to draw. One killed the shooter. Three others kept their muzzle discipline. Two flagged fellow congregants.
With the usual caveats that I'm a cishet dude here, to me? Being flagged is like being catcalled: it's annoying as fuck and a huge red flag as to the offender's threat to my personal safety, but if the blood has already started flowing, it's the least of my problems. Not bad for a half-dozen people that look like Backyard Bettys.
Wilson's taking a huge risk talking about his part to the press. Even in as clear-cut a shoot as this, It's still a risk that a relative of the shooter can try to sue Wilson for wrongful death. Wilson presumably has a lawyer on retainer. Not every Good Person with a Gun can say that.
(In other words, if the worst happens and you have to pull the trigger, stay the fuck off Facebook for a while. You'll get called a lot of vile shit. But I assure you, discretion becomes the better part of valor here.)
TL;DR - If you can't be a Good Person with a Gun, be a Good Person. Train. Watch out for what happens next.
See you next year.
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Thrifting, recycling, and changes

12/18/2019

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For about a year between high school and college, I worked as a furniture and electronics guy for a regional chain thrift store. I was both the youngest person working there, and the only non-manager without a criminal record. While my experiences are a bit far in the rearview mirror at this point, much about the business hasn't changed. So here's a look at how a thrift store operates.

My store, like many, was in the empty hull of a medium-to-big box retailer. Sales floor and management office in the front, dressing rooms on the side, warehouse, break room and bathrooms in the back.


There are two major ways of gaining inventory: dropoff and pickup. Dropoff consisted of anyone with stuff to unload coming around to the loading dock in the back. The obviously soiled or damaged is rejected out of hand, along with some specialty products (like CRT monitors and TV's, for example). Everything else goes on a cart and gets taken to the warehouse. Pickup is a call-to-arrange service that covers the region. A fleet of small box trucks picks up what they can and delivers to the nearest store location. Both versions are typically run by some form of regional or national charity, which provides receipts for tax purposes.

Inside the warehouse, everything gets sorted. Clothes, typically arriving in hefty bags for ease of movement, are loaded onto steel frame carts about six feet tall and built around a sheet of half-inch plywood used as a deck. Those are divided by a team of three or four people. Normally, there's a base price by type with a sliding scale based on how good a condition any given piece it is.
Toys, media, housewares, electronics, and furniture all go to their own sections to be inspected and tagged. No real cleaning at all. If it's too grody for the sales floor, it's probably already in a compactor by now.
Pricing is more of an art than a science. After a few weeks, everyone working there has a good idea of what anything in particular will go for. Some things (books are typical) have a set price.
Price tags are color coded. Each week, a different color is used. Each week, a different color is half-off. There are about a half-dozen colors. Anything that hasn't sold by the time it's color has been half-off for a week gets trashed. The week after, that color gets used again.
Clothing is the exception. Clothes that haven't been sold are baled in an industrial machine and shipped off, either to ragmakers or overseas.
Anything that looks particularly valuable, unusual, or honestly antique (100 yrs old as opposed to 20) gets researched, priced accordingly, and put up for sale in glass cases or simply online.
If you've tried flipping items from thrift stores and noticed the pickings have been kinda slim the last few years? Well, they know about ebay too. Smaller or more rural holes in the wall might not bother, but bigger shops closer to big cities have at least one tech-savvy staff member who arranges to make a buck off what comes up without relying on foot traffic.
In fact, that's the biggest thing to affect thrift stores in the last 20 years is the same thing that's affected every other secondary market: e-commerce. At every step in the chain, a few seconds online will give a ballpark figure of what it sells for. (or at least, what someone is trying to sell it for. The number of people who don't pay attention to that little detail is staggering). The days of finding secondhand treasures at trash prices is well and truly over. All that's left is people being dicks about how it's not that way anymore. You thought boomer fudds at gun shows were bad? Try thrift store ladies on half-price day. Yikes.
Current trends of "good but cheap stuff" in thrift stores right now is centered on furniture and dinnerware. Long story short, the boomers are starting to die off and their kids don't want their stuff. Secondary markets are currently glutted with it all, but I think in the next decade prices are going to drop big and they'll go back to being competitive options.
The big future questions have to do with environmentalism and recycling. Right now, recycling has gone completely to shit, what with China having stopped buying ours, which has made recycling centers nationwide in America suddenly in financial trouble. Unfortunately, America still has a shitload of space for landfill use, which makes it ultimately cheaper for disposal of a lot of things, including stuff that's fairly easily recyclable.
If I had to get a wish list going?
- Paper recycling dropoffs at every secondhand market. The problem with paper is that it's so cheap, most of it isn't economical to recycle on a consumer scale. Most paper people discard has too many contaminants (food, spills) to make it worth recycling. Not so at the thrift store level. Media is the second biggest single inventory after clothing, and most of that is in books. By targeting the secondary markets, expenses like transport go down.
- Right to repair. The longer something can be used, the longer it will be. Fixing individual components of them is a big part of that. 3D printing is making that more possible every day, it just needs to be made easier.
- More easily recyclable plastics.
Everything from packaging to electronics housings. Make it easier to reuse instead of burn (A major hazard in electronics recycling, where casings are burned off to reach the valuable metals in the circuitry, making a shit ton of toxic smoke). Some sort of solvent that can destroy contaminants and reduce the plastic to a more workable form? Something.
- More container-deposit laws.
They work great in states that have them, and make for a great secondary resource stream. Seriously, if you can legally get cash for a duffle full of cans easier than it is to steal an A/C unit for the copper, two birds one stone.
- Some way of making it easier and more economical to actually recycle at the consumer level.
As a country, we're finding that our biggest resource is time. If we can do the right thing by tossing our food wrapper in a bin that's right there, we will. If not, we won't. Even little things like concert venues switching from plastic drink bottles to glass bottles and aluminum cans mixed with container-deposit bins listed above makes a huge difference.
I haven't even gotten into the fuckery involved with online returns. Ever heard of bracketing? It's the practice of not knowing what the fuck your size is, so you order the same thing in a 3 or 4 size spread, then return the ones that don't fit you. It's cheaper for the vendor to trash the returns than hire a human being to check to see if they can be resold, repackage, and restock it.
Whatever we do, they need to be
One, more affordable than the dumpster.
Two, easier to use than the dumpster.
Three, faster to use than the dumpster.
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The Afghanistan papers

12/10/2019

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Yesterday, the Washington Post opened up a huge investigative piece derisively referred to as the Afghanistan Papers. The bulk of the investigation reveals that the U.S. effectively had no clue what the fuck it was doing for the bulk of the 18-year war.

I was asked what I thought about it.


Uff da...


OK, just to establish my bona fides for the latecomers.


About 775K American service members have deployed to Afghanistan.


I was one of them.


Over 2K died there.


I have the names of seven of them tattooed on my leg.


Children born the day the towers fell are now adults.


Some of which are training to deploy there as I write.


Over 8K and change are there as I write this.


Whenever someone asks me how the war in Afghanistan was like, I answer the question with another question. Namely, "What did you think we were there to accomplish? There's so many goals to choose from?"


I mean, the initial goal was somewhere along the lines of "fuck up Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and Bin Laden, in no particular order, and prevent another 9/11."


Welp, that mission was accomplished by Christmas of 2001.


What happened after that boils down to a two-word phrase: Mission creep.


"Fundamental disagreements went unresolved. Some U.S. officials wanted to use the war to turn Afghanistan into a democracy. Others wanted to transform Afghan culture and elevate women’s rights. Still others wanted to reshape the regional balance of power among Pakistan, India, Iran and Russia.


'With the AfPak strategy there was a present under the Christmas tree for everyone,' an unidentified U.S. official told government interviewers in 2015. 'By the time you were finished you had so many priorities and aspirations it was like no strategy at all.'”


It wasn't the first time the US had meddled there (Charlie Wilson's War should be required reading in High School.) But it was exacerbated with the typical arrogance of people convinced that what's made them prosperous and happy will work for someone else.


Afghanistan is the size of Texas, speaks three times as many languages, the people are just as diverse and even more belligerent. There are two cities deserving of the name, both of which have repeatedly tried to be modern since WWI only for some fundamentalist asshole to want things the old-fashioned way. Outside of the cities? The fucking Iron Age. They're good ranchers, but have barely any concept of literacy, let alone history. I'm talking "Mohammad himself was wandering around during Great Grandpa's day." I had friends who were mistaken for Russians by older folks who remembered the 80's.


The quick, smart response would have been to say, "don't do that shit again. Just do what you do until the next warlord that decides to rule here shows up." and fucking leave.


But Dubya had visions of widespread freedom and plug-n-play New-England style representative republics. And the Dems had visions of taking these poor little brown brothers and sisters and showing them the light of nanny states and third-wave feminism.


So a token force was left in Afghanistan and State Department hangers-on hung around Kabul (guarded by the dirty, dirty, but so hawt-looking in polos and plate carriers Blackwater bubbas).


“Our policy was to create a strong central government which was idiotic because Afghanistan does not have a history of a strong central government,” an unidentified former State Department official told government interviewers in 2015. “The timeframe for creating a strong central government is 100 years, which we didn’t have.”


By 2007ish, Iraq had been invaded, Saddam had been found, tried, and executed, and their own shitshow was well underway. But while Iraq wound down to a lull in anticipation of Obama's exit (which was about as stupidly done as Dubya's entrance), Afghanistan kicked up.


The central problem was that America wanted Afghanistan to transform itself into a strong practitioner of a representative republic and poster child of human rights reform. But America wasn't going to annex or claim the country. That would be worldbuilding, and we don't do that.


And unfortunately the kind of gun-toting dickhead warlords that are GOOD at ruling a rural, spread-out, tribally cultured country aren't fans of human rights, representative republics, or all of that modern mess.

"Was al-Qaeda the enemy, or the Taliban? Was Pakistan a friend or an adversary? What about the Islamic State and the bewildering array of foreign jihadists, let alone the warlords on the CIA’s payroll?

According to the documents, the U.S. government never settled on an answer.


As a result, in the field, U.S. troops often couldn’t tell friend from foe."


Which dickhead with a gun do YOU want in charge? The one openly slapping around his burqua-wrapped wives? The one taking your money with a smile but screaming jihad the second your back is turned? How about the one spending his nights raping the dancing boy that serves his tea?


I'll even be generous and make sure that they're not all the same person.


(And no, I'm not exaggerating. Look up the background of the Martland Act.)


Add in the fact that Afghanis are pretty awesome as ranchers and farmers, but there's no infrastructure to let them exploit their own mineral resources. Which means their biggest cash crop is opium. Gee, it's not like we've been fighting a War on Drugs since I was a gleam in my dad's nutsack or anything. Don't see how that could be a fucking problem.


Sorry, got a little sarcasm on your screen there.


"At first, Afghan poppy farmers were paid by the British to destroy their crops — which only encouraged them to grow more the next season. Later, the U.S. government eradicated poppy fields without compensation — which only infuriated farmers and encouraged them to side with the Taliban."


So, there we were. Given a bullshit mission and no real manner of accomplishing it. But surely there were regular checks? Progress reports?


Not really.


"Upon arrival in Afghanistan, U.S. Army brigade and battalion commanders were given the same basic mission: to protect the population and defeat the enemy, according to Flynn, who served multiple tours in Afghanistan as an intelligence officer.


'So they all went in for whatever their rotation was, nine months or six months, and were given that mission, accepted that mission and executed that mission,' said Flynn, who later briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser, lost his job in a scandal and was convicted of lying to the FBI. 'Then they all said, when they left, they accomplished that mission. Every single commander. Not one commander is going to leave Afghanistan . . . and say, ‘You know what, we didn’t accomplish our mission.’


He added: 'So the next guy that shows up finds it [their area] screwed up . . . and then they come back and go, ‘Man this is really bad.’ ”


Odin bless the Pterodactyl, wherever he is. My old CO wasn't Scipio Africanus or anything, but he knew bullshit when it was handed to him. And taking over a FOB in the middle of a fucking ghost town with a village four miles south and another seven miles Northwest with the mission of "deny the enemy freedom of movement" was a pretty big pile of bullshit.


Hell, we had a secondary mission to train the Afghan police. For a few months there we had two guys from Dynacorp there to train local police officers. But with no local people, there was nobody to train. You'd think Dynacorp would have put them somewhere else. But nope. They showed up to morning command & staff meetings and chow, spending the rest of their time lifting weights and masturbating. Probably getting paid a decimal place more a month than I was at the time, too.


If the CO had been a glory seeker, he might have done some stupid shit like try to clear and hold the ghost town. Probably would've gotten him a silver star. Of course, 20 or 30 of us would've gone home on our shields instead of seven, but the AAR's would have been amazing.


But to his credit, he fulfilled the mission to the letter without selling our blood for the peanuts he knew he'd get. We kept watch on the area, cleared the main roads as best we could, and made the FOB more functional during our time in there.


And thus were careers of those who didn't make waves saved.


I was a trigger puller in my 20's who spent most of my time in Afghanistan in the same three-mile radius. But I kept my ears open and put pieces together. So if you're reading the Afghanistan Papers, know that I've yet to come across anything about them I consider untrue.


If, in the fullness of time, I am chosen to go to Valhalla, and those I struck down fill my cup, I can look them in the eyes and say, "you were armed, you were wide awake, and you were facing me. My honor is satisfied."


But that's about all I'll be able to say to them.

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Unsolicited film industry advice 2019

12/9/2019

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Be on time and have your shit together. It's not everything, but you'd be amazed how far ahead of the pack that gets you.

By "have your shit together" I mean have your materials on point and ready to go. Headshot, resume, reel if you have it. Actors Access and Casting Networks updated.


If you're not in production or rehearsal, you should be in training.


Theater and film are like lions and tigers.

They can and do cross-breed, but they have wildly differing territories, practices, and cultures. Don't get butthurt when your genius at one doesn't translate to acclaim in the other.

Agents part one:

Agents only get paid on commission, period. While an agent can and will demand you have your shit together (see above), legit ones will not demand specific vendors be used. (Actor's Access and Casting Networks being the sole exceptions).

Agents part two:

Agents don't get paid for their (considerable) hard work until their clients do. Until you are at a level where you are, no bullshit, no Dunning-Kreuger, no Imposter Syndrome, consistently doing work worthy of being booked at the current going rates, don't waste an agent's time or yours.

Have a website.

Simple can do. Contact info, headshots, reel, work samples, press mentions. Platforms like Wix or Weebley can let you make a good one in minutes. Let all your social media roads lead back to that site. Other platforms come and go, but sites are still going strong after 25 years.

Have a social media presence, but don't worry about it.

If nothing else, placeholding your name so some jerk doesn't take it for a parody account is cheap hassle insurance. (and useful for the rare occasion you're asked to livetweet during an episode broadcast or come on reddit for an AmA.) One pic and your website address isn't much to put up. My insta is 90% my cats.

Make your Sm presence authentic.

Post as you (or at least the public face of you). Try not to be an asshole (unless that's the public face of you). Delicately balance the need to self-promote with the knowledge that nobody likes commercials.

Don't worry about your metrics. They're fake anyway.

There was probably a year or two where number of followers/friends/whatever influenced casting directors. Those years are gone now. In the aftermath of the 2016 election, it's become more and more clear how followers and likes can be bought by the gross lots. They don't represent actual people following you, so fewer decision makers are giving a shit. Just keep being you, and don't look to this as a shortcut.

Have a life.

Family. Friends. Make time for them now. Care about the people in your life, and spend time with them. The entertainment world builds amazing all the time, but it's all built out of glitter and bullshit. I'm no engineer, but those don't sound like sturdy building materials. Work within it, have passions for it, by all means. But make sure your life has substance in it too.

Know the difference between a contact, a colleague, a fan, and a friend.

There's nothing wrong with being one instead of another. But in an industry awash in misled intimacy, it does you good to be sure of who you open your heart to, and how wide you open it.

Merry Yule,

J.
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Door closing

12/3/2019

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Just an FYI, I've effectively gotten out of the fight business entirely. Sold off the rental stock, stopped choreographing, shut down the website and fb page, the whole shebang.
Barbarian Labs 1.0 is effectively closed.
I'm still teaching basic film combat and the occasional pistol workshop at Actorsbreakthrough, but that's pretty much it.
I'm happy being an Upsize actor with a variety of cool ways to move on my resume, so that's what I'm focusing on for the known future.
(Along with these books I've been having fun writing).
Carry on, go forth, and do cool stuff.
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    Jay Peterson

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