patrick.net

There have been some horror stories here about keeping guns in the home. You should always keep the ammunition separate from the gun and the gun is easy to lock in a number of ways including a trigger lock. A shotgun is the safest and most effective gun you can get for self protection in the home IMO.

rktbrkr saysA shotgun is the safest and most effective gun you can get for self protection in the home IMO.

That reminded me of something funny that happened when I was only about four years old. My father had a double-barrel shotgun that he kept on top of the chest of drawers in their bedroom--you could just see part of the butt of the gun sticking up over the top. One day we were in the front yard and my father had the gun which I had seen him fire before. He held it down just in front of me so I could see it more clearly--I simply reached over and pinched the trigger and the thing fired! The shell went across the street and struck one of the three metal buildings that had been built by the CCC in the late 30's and was then part of the vocational education campus of the high school--it made a loud bang and I'm sure the gouge is still there because the buildings are. What was even worse a lady was walking from the bus stop down at the end of the street not far from there. The term "freak-out" didn't exist then, but that's what my father did. I thought he was going to have a heart attack. He yelled at me that you're never supposed to press the trigger of a gun when you don't know if it's loaded or not, but it was his fault for putting it in my range knowing I had no more knowledge of such a weapon. Needless to say the shotgun wasn't brought out in my presense any longer and a few years later it was stolen--so much for protection.

Nomograph says

Troy says

wtf’s going on with the flood of new account whackos?

Three-day weekend.

If you purported "regulars" need to swim only in your own elitist inbred opinions, then why not start your own Yahoo Group for free and have at it? Your tolerance for any new or different ideas on these forums is quite low. So low that you need to regularly demean anyone who does not share the same ideas as your little inbred clique.

So please, go somewhere else and revel in your inbred ideas. Expose yourselves to nothing different. If that's Heaven for you, and what you struggle so hard to maintain here -- why not put two and two together for a change, get off your ass, and get it done?

Here's the link to get you started -
http://groups.yahoo.com/

Otherwise, please STFU already. Your mindless emotional and personal attacks are boring, if you haven't figured that out already. You're like a freakin' robot.

Apparently Outsideparty thinks that a couple observations of the kookiness factor of vandervert and a couple other recent new accounts makes the observers "elitist." He's right. We should try to minimize that kind of predictable robot like "personal attack."
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MSN: The secret world of doomsday shelters

Looks like we'll have to start stockpiling fuel sooner than expected.

People can't get water or batteries in Tokyo which is hundreds of miles from the epicenter of the earthquake, this is an extraordinary natural calamity but earthquakes happen here too, plan ahead

People will be fine there, it will take a few days but they will get things back to normal for those people who are mobile. They will have issues for a few days, but things will clear up pretty quickly. For those trapped and/or hurt, it could take awhile for them to get help.

The unique thing about Japan is the population densities. It would be like having an earthquake up and down both sides of the US, with tsunami's hitting on both coasts to basically have the same kind of effected population.

^ actually the recent quake is pretty identical to a big one going off in Monterey Bay (if such subduction faults existed there)

You could imagine the 101 corridor from Salinas to San Jose (same population as Sendai) losing power and all the coastal communities from Santa Cruz to Pacific Grove getting washed into the sea. Throw in some valley farmland and it's a closer match.

Only 4 deaths in Tokyo so far is a pretty damn good survival, given this quake was almost as bad in Tokyo as our 1989 quake.

But it's going to take a lot of time and investment to replace the hundreds of billions of dollars of economic loss to the Tohoku seaboard. Maybe a hundred thousand people have lost everything in this world, and they're going to be need to be recapitalized to get back into the primary sector of the economy, and meanwhile the secondary sector that served the ag and fishery industry is going to get similarly wiped out.

And this is not getting into the issues with the crippled nuke plant spewing radioactivity right now. Tohoku may only be a small part of the Japanese economy but this 2% or so just got kicked in the nuts.

@Troy

Where did you get the 2%? Not saying you are wrong, just curious.

I have enough stocked (especially water for now).

It's now been a few days, I wouldn't say things are back to normal.

People will be fine there, it will take a few days but they will get things back to normal for those people who are mobile. They will have issues for a few days, but things will clear up pretty quickly.

The situation at the power plants is a ticking bomb

The danger of nuclear power plants is all hyped up. We have a serious group in our county attempting to create an energy park including nuclear power. That would be awesome and an economic boon.

So are potatoes more or less likely than other foodstuffs to accumulate radionuclides?

American in Japan says

Where did you get the 2%? Not saying you are wrong, just curious.

Tohoku has 7% of GDP, so the coastal fishing industry is one fourth of that?

Plus Sendai serves as a regional center supporting the Tohoku coast, too, so lost GDP from fishing will bleed back to Tohoku.

Then again, if Japan can't get its energy situation sorted out by summer, it will be losing more than 2% of GDP just from the blackouts. Imagine trying to run a conbini when a third of your goods go bad every day. Plus all the transit mayhem.