Stand and be Counted

A call to muster has been sounded.  Will you meet your fellow Patriots on the Green?  The choice is yours and yours alone.

Lurk & Sneak or Stand up and be counted?

Stand and be counted

Counting Coup Challenge

I have decided to take up Kerodin's Challenge.


From Kerodin:
Counting Coup is the act of physically putting your hand on a mortal enemy and then withdrawing, without getting yourself killed.

It is a Warrior's practice.

I offer you this challenge: Consider your AO and give serious thought to ways you can Count Coup as a training exercise. What can you do to cross the threshold from training to low-risk action that will begin to close the gap between the theory and practice of Resistance. 

Think about it for a while, plan for it as you would an Op that has life and death potential. Start small and low-risk. Don't start by bitch-slapping a LEO as he eats a donut. Consider something along the lines of a III/Resist sticker on the car or office of a Democrat running for office.

Let your imagination work.

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I'll be keeping my Patriot's Coup Stick on the right sidebar, adding feathers as I earn them.

Will you take up the challenge?

Theo Spark: Fight For Your Right

Reposted
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Theo Spark: Fight for ......

I am a dinosaur, but not yet a fossil.
- I remember when people actually fought to be FREE.

Now, they fight to get FREE STUFF and shackle themselves willingly as slaves on the Government's plantation.
- In their spare time they fight over coveted sneakers at the mall.

The more things stay the same...

Plato's 'Cave Allegory' from his "Republic" is germane here, but the unions in the government-run schools don't teach it because it was written by (sniff) a 'dead white male' thousands of years ago, and it runs counter to the "progressive" agenda that is anti-freedom and anti-human.
- Now, people only know Orwell's prophetic "slavery is freedom" but do not seem to comprehend the awful meaning of it, nor the import.

Fight CommUNism

This is worth re-posting
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From Kerodin:
One of the most important tasks I have assigned myself is to help people understand the nature of the Enemy. Too many people fixate on Jews, or Fascists, or the Rich, or the FSA, or the Democrats, the Liberals, the RINO's, or blacks, or whites. Too many people allow Sparklies to capture their attention, robbing them of valuable time and energy to prepare to fight the real fight. Too many people target the nuances and the straw-men, never sighting on the true Evil driving them all.

Too many allow themselves to settle on solutions that will never work, such as secession. True Evil, as we face, will never leave you alone.

There is only one solution: Kill the Evil, kill every proponent of the Evil, and rid it from the mortal plane of humanity.

Enemies of Liberty come in many flavors and operate under many banners. I will continue to use the label "Enemies of Liberty" because it is such a large group, indeed many groups operating for the same goal, and all that matters is that they work for the demise of Liberty. They are all Enemies.

I will not try to be a Professor and educate. We do not have the time. Once the world goes hot Liberty will be relying upon every Patriot fighting the true Enemy and trying to reach the same goal: Liberty as defined by Jefferson.

But the man behind the curtain of all the ills facing Liberty today is singular: Communism.

I will point out a few simple facts and people. You can go read for yourself, or accept my conclusion, or dismiss it.

The most important factor in understanding what is happening is to understand Anatoly Golitsyn. He defected from the USSR and told James Angleton that there was a grand plan in the Kremlin, one that was generational in scope, that would include a faked public "rift" between USSR & Red China that would be mended in The Final Phase, and he added that at some point the USSR would be seen to fall, sweeping Communism from the public view.

Remember Golitsyn, always.

Marx wrote of these goals in 1848: (Please remember that Lincoln did not come on the scene and launch the Second American Revolution for another 13 years, and Marx himself wrote Lincoln to congratulate him.)

1. Abolition of property in land and application of all rents of land to public purposes.

2. A heavy progressive or graduated income tax.

3. Abolition of all rights of inheritance.

4. Confiscation of the property of all emigrants and rebels.

5. Centralization of credit in the hands of the state, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.

6. Centralization of the means of communication and transport in the hands of the State.

7. Extension of factories and instruments of production owned by the State; the bringing into cultivation of waste-lands, and the improvement of the soil generally in accordance with a common plan.

8. Equal liability of all to work. Establishment of industrial armies, especially for agriculture.

9. Combination of agriculture with manufacturing industries; gradual abolition of all the distinction between town and country by a more equable distribution of the populace over the country.

10. Free education for all children in public schools.

How many of those ten fundamental planks of Marx can you see in America and the broader world today?

8th Grade Constitution Test - 1954

 Could you pass this test?

Original Link

Ron Paul Video Game

Looks like someone is making a Ron Paul video game.  Hopefully this will help the younger crowd to be exposed to Paul's ideas.

Making Liberty Sexy

Thank you, John

There are more eloquent wordsmiths in this world than I. I refer you to quite a talented one.

Arctic Patriot:

Captain Parker,

I know you’re long since in the grave. Nevertheless, I want to thank you for that crazy, defiant, insane act of pointless resistance you committed all those years ago. I want to thank you for standing in defiance of the most powerful military force known to man alone with so few of your townsmen. That act alone, that resistance, likely was enough in itself to see you arrested, your life destroyed. You had to know you didn’t stand a chance against British bayonets and musketry, and you couldn’t have possibly known what would soon transpire because of the pure steel you displayed that day. You stood, sick with the illness that would bring you to death, staring down the British Empire, and you and your men did not falter. How fast and hard your heart must have beat. How sweaty your palms, how dry your mouth as you showed a defiant and brave front to the enemy and to your men.

And could you have known? You and your men stood, knowing the steel that was in front of you was poised to crush you. Could you have known what would happen after your stand? Would you be crushed and abandoned by your countrymen after your stand? Would it be in vain? Would your former friends and militiamen scurry to be distanced from your memory? Would your wives hate you for standing and dying for this one thing, this concept, this freedom? Could you have known? You couldn’t have. Some things just have to be done, even if you just don’t know.

Did you know that day how many would come to your aid? Did you know that you would send the British, your own countrymen, into a rout, bloodied and dying? Did you ever dream in the years before that it would come to this? Did you hold out hope, until that last second, that things would change?

What made you stand?

Read the rest here

Follow up: Serve a Warrant - Get Served

There were a lot of unanswered questions when last I read about the Odgen Utah Police raid gone bad over at Kerodin's site, leaving 5 LEO wounded and 1 LEO killed by their target Matthew Stewart on January 4th 2012.  Stewart was wounded in the exchange as well.

The police were serving a warrant for marijuana cultivation.  They have also claimed child porn, bomb making, and anti-government documents were found after they searched the house.  Link


One Story of events from Jan. 13th:
After the officers entered the home and cleared the basement and the main floor, they continued to announce their presence with no response as they went through the house. Stewart surprised the group and allegedly started shooting.  Grogan was struck in the face and fell to the floor.  "Matthew David Stewart fired repeatedly at those agents, striking agent Kasey Burrell at least twice and mortally wounding agent Jared Francom who was struck six times," the affidavit states.  Weber County Sheriff's Sgt. Nate Hutchinson was shot "several times" as he tried to help his fallen fellow officers. Jason VanderWarf was also shot in the hip, court records state.  Stewart then "advanced on the officers as they were trying to evacuate the residence and continued firing at the officers as they moved away from the house toward Jackson Avenue," according to the affidavit.  Ogden police officer Michael Rounkles was shot twice after he arrived as backup and entered the house to help the wounded officers.  Even after the officers had left the house, Stewart went to the door and continued firing "into the street and front yard at the already wounded agents and fellow agents who were trying to evacuate them," prosecutors said.  Stewart ran to a shed in his backyard and continued to fire at officers before giving up and surrendering after he had been shot, according to police sources.

Non-Lethal Weapons

Do you wonder what non-lethal weapon systems are out there?  In what situations they will be used?  What their effective ranges are?  What countermeasures you can apply to mitigate their effects?

Then follow this link to Public Intelligence and download the PDF.

Inexpensive Energy? Can't Have That

Thursday 4/12 I read this article at ZeroHedge about how Natural Gas is so much cheaper right now than other forms of gas.

Friday 4/13 this Executive Order on "Supporting Safe and Reasonable Development of Unconventional Domestic Natural Gas Resources" gets issued.

Why the rush?  Did this really need to bypass Congress?


What happens when we have a source of relatively inexpensive energy?  Regulate it.
What do we do if an industry creates jobs - REGULATE IT.

How do they expect the economy to improve when they throw red tape across job creating industries?

Dark Arts for Good Guys: The Right to Knife

I read these posts a while back about the use of a knife from Straight Forward in a Crooked World.  You guys may be interested.

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To what extent are you willing...and capable of saving your life? If no gun were available could you ...would you...are readily capable of doing so with a knife.

Would you slit an attacker's throat?

Could you use a knife to filet three inches of forearm off of a rapist, a serial killer?

Can you descend to that primal place of fight at bad breath distance and prevail? In a very real world people are attacked inside of elevators and the ability to escape may not occur until the word “Lobby” is back-lit. Mothers are forced to the floor boards of vehicles and raped in front of the children, adventure seeking teenagers are found beaten and tortured to death with their heads found in creek beds. Grown men are jumped and beaten by teenagers on subway platforms left mangled and crippled for life.

And this happens every-single-day.

Whether you are in the back streets of Kuala Lumpur, NYC ,a remote camp site in New Mexico or in the cubicle at your office park as a gunman walks around shooting people. A knife beats bare hands and, while a big knife is better the reality is when it goes down you're most likely going to have a folder or small fixed blade to work with.

Isn't a gun better?What brand makes the best tac-folder? I heard knives are illegal to use in defensive situations? Don't worry about it. This isn't an argument about which is better, or knife-nerding about why knives are cool.

The situation is this, you are about to lose your life. Save it. Because what you need more than anything is the willingness to engage..to step INTO the fight.

Read the rest here:

Part I

Part II

And if you are looking for a nice new knife, check these Cold Steel knives out courtesy of Kerodin.

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Edit:  Looks like a couple other guys have linked to this already.  Here's the Links
Dorkfish
Knuckledraggin

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part X)

This is Part X of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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The final installment on this man's experience with the '92 LA Riots.

Via Texas Arcane:
Hollywood burned. Including Madonna's bra collection.

They found four dead people a block away from us. One man had been shot to death in his garage.

They stopped the riot just a couple dozen meters from the Chinese theater. Lots of Hollywood landmarks were reduced to blackened ashes.

You had a sense when the sun went down that night, that whatever the affliction was, it had lost its vital force. The rioting had spent itself.

The National Guard finally arrived, way too late to make any difference. Curfew was maintained for weeks, martial law and tanks on street corners. The real purpose of the military presence was to force whites and blacks to go back to pretending to like each other, that multiculturalism actually worked and that there was not a race war of apocalyptic proportions brewing everywhere and anywhere in the near future. It was all about maintaining appearances.

All kinds of repercussions followed and accusations were hurled as the authority figures meekly emerged from their bunkers and viewed the sheer scale of the destruction that had taken place. Shame over abandonment of their posts was nowhere to be seen. Nor did any prosecution for failure to perform duties take place.

The air was filled with the smell of smoke for months afterwards but eventually all the embers were extinguished.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part IX)

This is Part IX of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Due to some good points brought up by reader Dan, I will have to assume this account is not 100% factual.  How much is truth and how much is fiction is unknown.  Just keep this in mind.

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Via Texas Arcane:
After checking on my wife and making her a glass of tea, I went out the back of my house and crawled up the access ladder to the roof with the .203 slung over my shoulder.

I used a length of rope to pull a broken party umbrella onto the roof and dropped it in the corner as a kind of makeshift tent right in front of the weephole I had scouted beforehand as a good sniper position. I put the .203 underneath the party umbrella. From the air it would look like a typical Mexican house in L.A. with some rubbish left over from a rooftop party piled on it. I didn't want the constantly circling police helicopters to see me on the roof with a rifle.

Before I crawled under the umbrella I took a good look in all four compass directions. Great billowing fires and pillars of smoke reaching up to the sky surrounded the house, it looked like a vantage point in hell. There were flames raging out of control nearly everywhere you looked, occasionally adorned by water spouts from fire trucks trying to douse them.

Right to Resist

Well I wasn't planning on posting this weekend... but with Babylon's piece today on defending against a home invasion I had to pitch in.

Recently the Indiana Governor signed a Right to Resist law which allows an individual to protect their own home against unlawful intrusion by another individual or a public servant.  A lot of people have a problem with this law, saying it will be open season on LEO.  I don't see how this could be the case.  All I see this law in accomplishing is allowing an individual to protect themselves from a home invasion type scenario (by criminals or criminal LEO).  What's wrong with that?  If someone enters your home UNLAWFULLY, Resist!  It doesn't matter if they are wearing a badge and a uniform or not.

On a related note, a member of a local city SWAT team told me he would not be on SWAT one more day if he thought people were going to shoot at him.  So a little resistance/deterrence should go a long way in keeping these guys worrying about whether or not they will make it home that night.

Link to Indiana Law - Senate Enrolled Act 1

Link to Babylon's piece

Link to III Percent's take on it

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part VIII)

This is Part VIII of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
I just want to say - I have been writing it down as accurately as I can, with as little embellishment as possible. I have not tried to make myself ten feet tall or Rambo, because I wasn't. I was scared to death, ill prepared, rather foolish and largely incapable of knowing what was the best course of action to take during the riots. Nowadays, I would have evacuated Los Angeles within an hour of them breaking out or else taken refuge somewhere. Your basic dumb security guard at $14.00 an hour.

I awoke from my long nap with my wife prodding me in a frightened voice on the edge of hysteria, saying "Sweetie, I think you need to get up, you should see this."

As soon as I opened my eyes I realized my throat was raw from breathing in smoke. I had slept on the arm of the couch for about 4 hours. I rose up suddenly and grabbed my wife by the arm. "What is it? What's happening?" I said. I had been dreaming that "Benny" was looking for me and was on the verge of finding me.

"The news said it is in our neighborhood now - right down the street. They are moving towards Hollywood Boulevard," she said with a worried expression.

"Honey, Why did you let me sleep?!? You should have woken me up!" I said, leaping to my feet and reaching for the Desert Eagle underneath a couch cushion.

"I thought you said I should let you sleep when you were tired!" she blurted out.

I glanced at the television. They were panning our neighborhood from the sky and everything was on fire. Hundreds, thousands of people were running everywhere.

"Yes, honey, that's normally a good rule of thumb, except during the collapse of civilization or else when our house is in the middle of a firestorm!!! I yelled, really angry she had not awakened me. "Go to the back of the house and sit in the bathroom near the water cooler. Take the television back there with you and something to eat. Lock the door and stay in there until I come to get you. Run the bathroom ventilator, it will pull air through the house and filter some of the smoke out as it comes under the bathroom door." She knew I was not going to argue with her in a situation like this so she did as I said.

I checked the blinds, took a glance outside the house. Chaos. It was insane. People were running everywhere. Fire engine horns, sirens, helicopter blades whishing over the roof again and again. I took a deep breath, stuck the Desert Eagle under my belt beneath my shirt and ran outside.

A dark haired woman was screaming for help at my front gate. Her mascara was running and she looked either crazy or terrified. She didn't appear to have any marks on her, I helped her to her feet, asked her to stop screaming, what did she need help with. She backed away and ran towards the other end of the block as though she were trying to catch up to someone. Everybody was running down from Sunset past me, mostly all black people, as though something was coming from the east. Some teenage kids went flying past with arms full of cell phones, I thought they were laughing at first but then I realized they were crying hysterically.

I went down to the junction of Sunset and Martin, less than twenty meters from my front door ... people bumping against me in blind terror, some of them staring at me like I was somebody they knew. I had no idea what the hell was going on. The air was thick with smoke and the sheer volume of noise was deafening. Beneath all the emergency horns and sirens, there was another noise, a kind of rushing sound like you might hear come from a seashell if you put it to your ear.

I recognized it. I had heard it at sporting events. It was the sound of thousands of people cheering, yelling, hollering all at once.

I peered around the corner of the drycleaning store to the east, towards La Cienega. The street I had run down in the morning to get to the Quik Mart which had been deserted at the time.

Holy Kee-rist, I thought. This can't be happening.

I am not good at estimating numbers in a crowd. I would guess that I was looking at a mob of somewhere between 20,000 to 50,000 people about four blocks away. It was a liquid dynamic mass of human beings which flowed like a single living organism. They were so obscured by smoke at that distance that sometimes they seem to ripple like a mirage in a spaghetti western.

The entire mob was waiting patiently out in front of the gigantic Walmart super store as two large 18 wheel trucks backed up slowly to the security gates. I could hear the roaring of the engines idling in reverse, slowly backing up. Men jumped off the rear gates and attached chains from the bumpers of the truck to the security gates. Then the crowd drew back in a large circle to give the trucks some room.

There was an ear-shattering roar of approval as the trucks pulled forward and tore the security gates from the front of Walmart, clattering behind in pieces. I saw some of the rioters jump on the gates and ride them like surfboards as they were pulled away.

Then the colossal human mob rushed into the Walmart like air filling a vaccuum. They kept coming and coming, I didn't see how so many people could fit in there all at once.

I had been staring in open mouthed shock as the entire vignette took place, then realized that now looters would be making good their escape once they had their fill of stolen goods. This way, possibly.

I turned and ran back to the house. An alleyway I had passed less than three minutes ago, to the immediate left of the front our house, had been empty. There were now three black guys standing right outside our chain link fence, one of them trying to light the wick on a beer bottle while another held a bottle of kerosene. It so took me by surprise I almost fell trying to come to a halt.

I reached for the Desert Eagle, hands shaking, and pulled the gun out. I had never pointed a gun at another human being in my life. "HEY!!!!!" I yelled, "WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING?!?! DROP THAT BOTTLE!! GET YOUR HANDS UP IN THE AIR!!!"

The three black guys were hard, crusty looking types, all of them dressed in filthy clothing and matted down with dirt. One of them with a big set of dreadlocks spoke before anybody else. "White boy, you must be tripping. Don't even think about pointing that gun at me." The other two nodded at their friend, apparently the leader, but they had frozen irregardless.

"THIS IS A CITIZENS ARREST! GET YOUR HANDS UP!" I yelled, chambered a round in the gun and pointed it at the guy with dreadlocks. "DROP EVERYTHING AND PUT YOUR HANDS UP!" I screamed in the scariest voice I could come up with. I sounded sort of hoarse from all the smoke in the air.

"Sissy bitch, whatchoo think you are? We ain't dun nuttin, not a damn thing! You can't arrest nobody, you punk arse little white boy!" the dreadlocks guy said, but they all dropped everything on the ground. The beer bottle broke and I caught the odor of kerosene immediately from the contents that poured out.

I stared at the liquid as it ran across the floor of the alleyway. I could not believe it. These guys were getting ready to burn us. Of course, we were a corner house with a blind alleyway running alongside us. Our house was the perfect candidate to burn, just like all the other corner houses we had seen on television. Nothing personal, you understand, these guys were getting ready to torch our house because it was conveniently located for just that purpose.

I felt weird all of a sudden. Really weird. The gun wavered. "Okay, nobody ... nobody move," I said, feeling my gorge rising. The three black guys were watching me like a hawk.

With complete astonishment, I vomited a huge mouthful of foul smelling water up into the air, soaking my shirt sleeve. One of the black guys chuckled in amusement. I was trying to keep the gun trained on them and suddenly I was vomiting profusely, gouts of greasy dark water into the air. Nothing like that had ever, ever happened to me before. I think the sheer amount of black tea, coca-cola and coffee I had drunk to stay awake had rubbed my stomach lining raw.

"Don't you f**king move, asshole! I will put a bullet in your ass, I promise you," I said, but I was bent over and fell to my knees as soon as I finished the sentence, dry heaves racking me. I was trying to keep the gun pointed at them and vomit at the same time ... they were already backing away down towards the alley from where they had come. They were all giggling and uttering little expressions of awe at their good luck. I tried to keep the gun on them but they knew I wasn't going to shoot them, they hopped backwards until they were well down the alley and then took off running while guffawing at the spectacle of me dry retching with the Desert Eagle in my hand.

It took me about a minute to clear my stomach where the heaves would stop. I definitely felt a little better, but they were long gone. I stood up slowly, still coughing weakly. All three of them had vanished in the blink of an eye. They could run like the wind, they were probably three blocks away by now.

I suddenly realized how the arsonists had created the illusion of fires breaking out spontaneously and why the newscasters kept claiming they were "organized."

The truth is, nearly all the arsonists were on foot, traveled light and made their escapes simply by running away. Chances are they found bottles for containers as they ran. In a dense urban area like Los Angeles, you could torch a building with a single bottle filled with accelerant and be many blocks away before the smoke attracted a police or news helicopter. It was so simple a child could do it and if you were a fast runner your chances of being captured were nil.

It also would not take many arsonists if they were torching and running on an hourly basis.

That's when I began to comprehend what had happened. The arsonists had destroyed an entire city and brought it to it's knees with empty beer bottles and a few dollars worth of lamp oil available anywhere. Probably less than thirty human beings had ravaged the city of Los Angeles worse than a nuclear weapon might have for less money than what most people spend on lunch. They simply ran away in the time it took for police to respond.

If this were the case, it meant the entire facade of civilization was a complete sham, a brittle fake painted monolith made out of candy glass. If any city could be destroyed by thirty guys on foot with ten dollars worth of kerosene, everything I'd ever been induced to believe in my life about civilization was hollow, false, a lie. We were never more than fifteen minutes away from absolute anarchy in any large metropolitan city.

I tucked the gun back under my shirt and walked back to my house to check on my wife, people running all around me with stolen goods and looted valuables. A helicopter buzzed overhead saying something over a loudspeaker but I couldn't make out what it was ... it was just a weak little warbling noise against a sea of madness all around me.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part VII)

This is Part VII of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
The clerk, who I found out was named Peter, told me to stock up and grab anything I wanted. I was snatching stuff randomly off the shelves when my nose started to really gush. My security guard uniform was ruined, I had blood all down the front of it. I was feeling dizzy and weak, I think from a combination of three days no sleep, getting clocked on the nose and coming down off all the caffeine I was drinking.

Peter tore open a packet of handiwipes and wet it under the sink and believe it or not managed to find time to come on to me while he was trying to help soak up blood from my nose. I managed to let drop I was married and I could see him wince a bit but he kept dabbing with the handiwipe at my nose for me. Gay or not, he was a relatively good person.

"Do you think those guys are coming back?" he asked me, dabbing away.

"Nah, you seen the last of them, guarantee you. Mexicans could not organize a bowel movement. They will go get drunk and forget about it," I said, sniffling to try to make a clot form in there so I could get on with it.

Peter nodded and gave me the cloth, I leaned back against the counter and tilted my head up to try to make the bleeding stop. Peter got a diet coke out of the fridge and accidentally broke another one on the floor. "Who cares," he said,"I ain't coming back here. I could pick up these jobs ten times a week if I wanted 'em. My boss was trying to get me to open the store today, no way, you can feel today is going to be bad, everybody knows it. I'm going home to Burbank and I'm going to drink Jack Daniel's and curl up with a good book. The National Guard will get here eventually."

My nose was starting to clot, I flipped the handiwipe over and was dabbing with the clean side, seemed like it was drying up. I caught motion out of the corner of my eye at the front windows. Peter gasped.

The two dwarves were back. Standing between them was the shortest, ugliest Mexican I have ever seen. That's saying a lot, believe me. I did not have to be Sherlock Holmes to guess this was "Benny." So they were serious. They went and got somebody.

This guy "Benny" was staring at me dead on. One of the dwarves pointed through the glass at me with a crooked finger. Benny had a dead fish stare that I had seen enough in security work to know when you are dealing with the real thing. His two friends might have been wannabes, this guy looked to be the hardest of the hardcore gangbangers. Little trimmed moustache. Dark brown features cut from rock. Although the guy stood about 4'8, he was as thick as a corded tree knot and he exuded bloodcurdling menace. Probably shot a couple of people a week and got away with it, too.

Without taking his eyes off me, he tapped on the window with the butt of a Glock pistol and said something, probably an insult, lips barely moving. Never stopped looking at me. The guy could blister paint off a wall with his eyes.

I almost pissed myself. My wife wanted me to leave the Desert Eagle. Damn, I was going to die because I let her cuckold me again. Ironic. Peter had already ducked down in the dark at the back behind a cheese roll display and gestured for me to "get down." I crouched and slid beside him, tossing aside the groceries I was toting as an encumbrance.

"Peter," I said, "My wife is expecting me back in five minutes from the Quik Mart. I hope you're going to tell me there is another way out of here. I'm not ready to die over a loaf of bread and some milk."

Tapping on the glass with the Glock again. Not hard mind you. Really easy. Scary, scary dude. To this day, I can't be sure or not if these Mexicans really expected me to come to the front of the store and unlock the door so they could shoot me between the eyes.

Peter turned out to be a resourceful guy under pressure. He said "I always imagined this, if a psycho came in and started shooting up the place, how would I get out. Follow me, I know a good way." He didn't have to tell me to stay down, we both crawled to the back.

Air flap doors, through the back into their little stock room. Very dark except for an emergency fire exit sign. "Not that way," Peter said, "stay behind me."

A gunshot behind us, heard glass breaking. Was just about ready to piss down my own leg. Heard what sounded like a lot more than three people rushing into the store, yelling and cursing. Another gunshot. I almost bit off my tongue.

I followed Peter into what looked like a trolley corridor that ran behind the storefronts, all cool concrete cinderblocks. The flourescents were on back here. We had both stood up and were running now. Peter motioned me to turn right and go up a flight of stairs.

We ran through a lobby, everything deserted, Peter seemed to magically know a side door that was unlocked - it led into the foyer of a place called La Cienega Realty. He locked the door behind us as soon as I came inside.

I was shaking and in a cold sweat. I stunk from fear, blood all over my shirt, probably looked like hell. We both stood for a long time listening to see if any noises of pursuers following was audible. We didn't talk, didn't say anything, I was holding my breath for a while and when I let it go I was still concentrating on keeping it as narrow and silent as possible.

Peter said "If you go out the side door of the realty, you'll be right around the corner from Sunset. That's on the other side of the Quik Mart a block away."

I didn't move or say anything. I went over and sat down at a realtor's desk. It looked like it had been abandoned in a hurry, a yellow stick-it on the monitor said "EVERYBODY HOME BY 2:30, RIOTS!" I was scared to even turn on the desk light and just sat in the weak light of the sun coming through the front office windows.

Peter sat down and didn't say anything. We sat their very quietly. I closed my eyes and nearly fell asleep, scared witless in spite of it. About 30 minutes went by.

"Pete, I gotta go, buddy, much appreciated," I said and I got up. "I'm going to break for it down Sunset, hoping Benny is not around."

"I'm calling my sister, she owns a cab company. She'll send a cab out here for me to take me to Burbank," said Peter.

I gave him a smile that came out more like a sick grimace, waved so long, went for the door crouching.

Peered out into the street cracking the door. Fresh air came in from the outside, cool morning air with woodsmoke. No sign of anybody. Jeez, I thought, it's only 9:15 am in the morning. I thought it was night time after all that.

I ran across to Sunset, no traffic. Quiet enough in the streets you could hear nothing but birds chirping. As soon as I made the end of the alley that led behind the houses to Martin Way I took off running all out, kept expecting Benny to put a bullet in my head at some point.

I got home, my wife was shrieking at the sight of the blood. I locked all the doors, closed all drapes, took a shower and fell asleep on the couch after three days with nothing but catnaps.

I remember drifting off with my wife asking me, "What about the milk?" and I replied "Put a few drops of vanilla into the powdered full cream milk and chill it for a couple of minutes, it's delicious. Can't talk. Too tired. Love you, hon. I should have taken that gun, don't give me any more advice, okay? From now on I'm running the show here. After the riots end you can henpeck me all you want."

It's good I got a nap in because that afternoon was going to be biblical, no kidding. Apocalypse on a grand scale. You never saw CGI special effects in a movie that could hold a candle to what I saw when I woke up.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part VI)

This is Part VI of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
It was dark inside the Quik Mart, except for refrigerator lights in the glass display cabinets way in the back. For a second I thought I heard shuffling to the right in the dark over by the magazines, but just then somebody waved at the cash counter on the far left.

"Ho!" said this guy, about in his late teens, very skinny and looking quite nervous. "Come on back," he waved me on. I walked back to the counter through the aisles, stepping over some smashed glass and bags of powder on the floor. The clerk was dressed in casual clothes and he tried to give me a friendly smile, but he was making me anxious because I could see something had him really scared badly.

"Listen, I'm not supposed to be open," he whispered, folding paperwork on the counter, "I just came in because my boss told me to pick up something in the office and then lock everything up." He glanced over at the right side of the store, where my eyes had adjusted to the darkness enough to see there were four people standing reading magazines. "These guys came in behind me and they won't leave. Listen, what do you need?" he asked.

I said, "I just wanted to get some milk, bread and butter, maybe something sweet, is that okay?" I said, keeping my voice low.

"Can you help me get these guys out? You're a big guy, are you in security?" It suddenly hit me. I had not changed clothes since I went off duty at Rodeo Drive three days beforehand. "I don't give a rat's ass about the store, you can take whatever you want and I'll lock it up. But first I have to get these guys to leave." I nodded, "Okay, I'll try to help. Are they armed?" I asked, feeling pretty apprehensive.

"Frig, man, I dunno. I'm scared to even speak to them again," he murmured.

I looked over at the four guys mulling around. "I'll get them to leave," I said, speaking with more confidence than I actually had.

As I walked over to the magazine stand I started to gear up my security guard voice and bearing, long honed from dealing with trouble at Park La Brea and Rodeo Drive over the past year and a half. Any of you work security will know exactly what I am talking about.

As I approached them, I could now see them a lot better. All mexicans, two guys so short bordering on dwarfism but obvious gang members. Another guy older who was rheumy eyed like he was drunk or high, slim boned. The toughest looking guy was an ornery looking dude about 200 lbs, muscular build, hateful looking bastard about 5'10 or bigger. So I had weight and height on the big wolf, but I'm not going to lie to you and tell you I was confident. Truth is my heart was pounding and I was frightened really badly. For all I know all these guys could draw guns and blow me away in the next ten seconds. Of course I was thinking I could not believe I let my wife talk me into leaving the Desert Eagle at home.

The two dwarves reached for their crotches and start swaying like bad-asses as soon as I got close, smacking their lips and looking pretty loco. These short guys might be the first ones to pull the trigger if they were trying to prove something. I kept my face a blank, innocuous mask, absolutely emotionless. Remember that nothing at all is frequently way scarier for the other guy than a tough expression, angry stance. Complete blankness, a dead focused stare is always the way to go. Telegraph nothing at all, not even hostility. The more emotional the other guy gets, the more completely empty your own expression, it tends to break the nerve of almost anybody.

The thin boned drunken guy piped up first. His three companions were flexing their muscles and swaying like monkeys. "What up?" I heard a lack of certainty in his voice that gave me a boost. Go straight in, don't mince words.

"This fellow at the counter says he is closed. Why are you guys still here?" I asked, staring at the big guy instead of the thinner one.

"f**k you," said the big guy, "this is a f**king dem-ock-krass-see. We have a right to be wherevah the f**k we want to." Strangely enough, there wasn't enough bass in these guys voices. They were putting on a good show, but I could tell they were going to fade.

The little mexican dwarf had a bandanna around his head. "White boy, you probably going to get a cap busted in yo ass you talk like dat." The second the guy said it, I knew instantly these guys had no guns. They were probably gang wannabes and second stringers who mowed lawns for a living but regularly scared white folks with their loco act.

I grabbed the little guy by the hair and arm, immediately started to use him as a shield to shove the others towards the front of the store. As I was pushing, I grabbed something off a store shelf and put it in my pocket. "You guys have been asked to leave. It's time to go. Nobody wants to hear your long winded story. Let's go, you're done."

The biggest guy was yelling and cursing me, bandeho, mericon muthafugga and all that, but he was being carried towards the door like everyone else as I leaned into the dwarf and shoved him into his friends. The thin drunk was looking furious and homicidal but oddly enough now that I knew they did not have guns I was not as scared of any of them.

I opened the front door and packed them all out, cursing, bitching, whining.

As I tried to close the door and lock it, the big one decided then he was going to do something, as he was pushed outside. He stuck his arm in the doorframe and reached for my throat. He started to try to choke me and was cursing me as his friends behind him cheered him on. "Gringo pussy, I will strangle you f**kin' bitch!" He couldn't get a grip on my neck, I bent his fingers back until he screeched and released that hand ... then used the other one to clock a hard right hand on the side of my face. It hurt. His friends were yelling, "Kill his stupid ass, poppy! Kill him!" He went to punch me again and because I was still trying to close the door he hit me in the nose, which really hurt. I started bleeding. The other three were laughing and cursing me, "Haw! Faggit white boy, break his face!"

Once my nose was bleeding, I decided just trying to shove the door shut was not the way to resolve it. So I shoved the big guy back into the street and came out the door myself. His friends were cheering, "Yeah, poppy will kick his arse, man, you a dead white boy!"

You probably think this is the part where I tell you about this big street fight we had where I used an incredible array of amazing kung-fu moves to defeat him.

Well, this will probably be disappointing. The fight lasted approximately one second.

As "Poppy" took a step off the sidewalk, he did something that hispanics often do when they are showing off. He lifted his hands in the air, fingers spread wide, shrugged his shoulders and spun around, as if to show the whole world he wasn't afraid of me, saying, "What the f**k you goin' to do, beyotch?!? Whatch yoo goin' to do?!?"

As he turned around to face me, I hit him on the bridge of his nose with a 60 oz glass bottle of Gerber Baby Food Turkey Mash which I had grabbed off the shelf as we were exiting. I threw it as hard as I could and released it about two inches from his forehead just as he was turning around.

It is hard to describe what happened unless you were there to see it. It was like somebody detonated a thermobaric fuel bomb on the end of his nose with a Turkey Mash payload. I actually had to flinch away and shield my face with my arm to protect myself from the flying glass shrapnel. I reckon the 60 oz bottle when it hit him must have been going well over 100 mph or faster. There was a colossal explosion of baby food, pulverised glass shards and pieces of label up to about ten meters away.

There was this microsecond everybody was frozen. He just stood there, face a blasted bloody mess, eyes welling up with blood, then cupped his hands over his ruined mug and fell backwards with a terrible scream. The other three were so stunned they remained half crouched about five seconds before they could even realize what had happened.

"OH JEESUS CHRIST, HE SHOT ME, f**k ME HE SHOT ME I'M DYING," he screamed, his hands covering his face with blood coming out through his fingers.

The thin guy ran over to him, started sobbing and trying to hold his head for him, "He didn't shoot you, Poppy, I think he hit you with something, oh sheeit man you are fugged up!"

"OH SWEET JEEZUS, MY EYES MAN I CAN'T OPEN MY EYES, I'M DYIN' MAN!" the big guy yelled, blood was gushing out of his nose, his eyes, between his fingers. There was a huge pool of it around where he was sitting. "I GOT TO GET TO HOSPITAL, MAN, I'M DYIN HERE!"

One of the dwarves started hopping about angrily, doing a bizarre little dance. "Oh, yoo is dead white boy! Paco, let's get Benny, man Benny will shoot this psycho f**kin' gringo dead! You see what he did to poppy, man that is sum wicked sheeit!"

The two of them ran off screeching about how they were "going to get Benny."

The thin drunk helped his friend to his feet and was yelling at me, "Sick white muthaf**ka, we just came down here to get beer and you have to do sumthin like that! You sick muthaf**ka, you goin' to pay when Benny gets here, watch and see!" They hobbled off together down the sidewalk, the big guy wailing and clutching his face.

I went inside the store, locked the door behind me. The clerk was shaking with fear and putting all this paperwork into a folder. I started grabbing groceries off the shelf and putting them into a plastic tote bag.

They weren't kidding. They went and got Benny. Then things got interesting.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part V)

This is Part V of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
I got so sick of drinking coffee all night long watching buildings burn on the televitz that I started drinking Coca-Cola about 3 am in the morning to stay awake. After I finished off a litre bottle, I cut the end off it and tried fitting the mouth over the end of the flash suppressor on the .203 - it was a perfect fit. I leaned the rifle over in the corner and thought that might make a good way to muffle the noise if I had to go up on the roof and snipe from the positions I had picked out the previous evening.

The news was best summarized as saying the gates of hell had opened in Los Angeles. The Koreans were engaged in firefights with looters from the roofs of their stores, in lieu of a police response. The National Guard was on the way, or so the reporters told us. Darryl Gates was getting asked complicated questions like why the police had been holed up inside the station for three days during the worst riots in United States history. He just gave'em dumb looks and shrugged. The looters were getting more sophisticated and organized, confident in the realization they could operate in an unhindered environment by any law and order. The coming day had a quality about it of climax - everybody had a buzz this was the threshold we were going to step over and see what was on the other side of the world we had known previously.

The fires had gone from local regions to widespread, now bursting into flame nearly everywhere and with no warning. The arsonists were using powerful accelerants and were effectively turning entire buildings into ashes in less than a half an hour in some cases. The live feeds were just and endless series of buildings one after another, starting to be addresses recognizable to me as only a few blocks south.

This is what the news told us, aside from martial law and curfew, when I rose from the couch that morning with the smell of woodsmoke in my lungs filling the air and my wife told me she needed fresh milk for breakfast and real bread. She brushed off my suggestion we use the powdered milk and cook the bread flour I had purchased. She didn't like the way it tasted. She pointed out how quiet it was outside this morning and said the rioters were probably sleeping it off indoors ... she said this was the perfect time to make a run to the Quick Mart for some staples. For some reason this made sense at that time. I soon discovered it wasn't so.

When I started to leave with the Desert Eagle in my hand, she screamed and said the police would shoot me if they saw me with it or arrest me on the spot. She said it was only two blocks and that I should just jog over, grab the groceries and jog back. So I left the Desert Eagle at home, thinking she was right and it wasn't worth getting shot by the cops over some milk and bread.

I didn't jog, I walked quietly and calmly down the alleyway with the sun still rising. I could hear birds chirping and some fire engines far away but otherwise the streets seemed empty.

When I turned the corner and could physically see the Quick Mart, a drunken looking black man, about in his fifties, came shuffling along. "You stretched us too far, white motherf**ker!!! See what you got! This is what you got when you stretch a man! How you like it, pink ass porky pecker!"

I turned around as he walked by and grabbed my crotch, facing him as I continued walking away. "Stretch this for me homeboy, I need another six inches on this thing. Do me a solid, homes, give this a good tug for me, okay?" We kept backing away from each other with ugly looks, he finally snorted and kept shuffling off.

I did not see another living soul until I made the front of the Quick Mart, which I could have sworn was closed and locked up like everything else with the lights out inside and one lone car parked out front. I tried the door just as a formality and it swung open. I stepped inside and said "Hello? Anybody in here? The door was open."

This was how the great battle of the Quick Mart began.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part IV)

This is Part IV of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
That afternoon, I began hosing down the roof with water to make it difficult for passing rioters to throw a molotov up there and set the house afire if they came by the alleyway. Some of my neighbours were doing same.

The rabid leftist across the street, a guy with a little goatee like Trotsky and an earring, came over and offered me a blank check if I would loan him my .22 pistol for the duration of the riots. He said his girlfriend was so scared she had been unable to sleep and he wanted it to give her a feeling of security. About two weeks beforehand, this guy had given me a long smug lecture about the evils of guns in private hands. I gave him the cold shoulder and told him to go up the street to the gunshop if he needed a gun. He said, "They've got a ninety day waiting period! I already tried!" I told him "You're s**t out of luck, then, I guess. Can you even appreciate the irony? That is called being hoisted by your own petard." It was true. The guy didn't appreciate the irony. He was a creature of emotion and now felt fear, maybe for the first time in his pathetic life. Ah, the utter blindness to self-knowledge of the liberal mind.

I had a roll of rusty barbed wire I ran completely around the property over the little chainlink fence. It was the only thing I could think of to give some measure of safety to our little dollhouse. I actually wired broken glass bottles to the tops of the gates and locked the latches shut from the inside with big thick padlocks. My wife came out with sandwiches while I was working and as usual had a good laugh at me. Not in a mean way, just amused a bit at how grimly I was going about the task. The previous tenant had left the barbed wire, a half dozen animal traps and some buckets of nails. Only the week beforehand I was complaining to the landlord about the big fat coil of rusty barbwire in the outdoor garage. I set the animal traps in the weeds on the other sides of the gates, because they were the most likely spots for a rioter to try to get a handhold to leap over the fence and land on the other side. Then I set my wife to making caltrops out of the nails using some ten penny wire. In about two hours we had made a couple dozen and I spread these all over the front lawn hidden by blades of grass. Since I had never made a caltrop before in my life I had a weird sense of accomplishment at this.

The sun was going down again and everybody on the block was vanishing into their homes on cue. I was starting to feel like Richard Matheson's character in "I AM LEGEND," trying to get back into my shelter with my preps before the sun went down before the vampires woke up. The police helicopters were flying overhead so often it looked like Robert Duvall's attack on the beach in APOCALYPSE NOW.

That night, it was like deja vu of the previous night except ten times worse. They now had burned most of South Central to the ground and were working their way steadily north towards Sunset Boulevard. I had this sense of some epic confrontation approaching when they left the ghetto and started to hit the white neighborhoods the following day.

I went up on the roof to try resting my .203 in various gutter brackets and aiming at different parts of the street to see if I had a clear field of fire if it came to that. A police helicopter passed directly overhead and must have seen me with the rifle, but when he made a second pass after turning around I had dropped it into the gutter with my ammo and thrown some leaves over it, then pretended to be sweeping up on the roof so he might think he had seen a broomstick instead of a rifle. The thing about all this is that it was so out of character for me and yet it all seemed to be so instinctual. I was starting to feel like I had another person inside of me for 27 years and it took the riots to bring my true nature out. I was discovering that I was a survivalist. That was the real person inside of me, it was my real nature coming to the fore under stress.

When the sun went down and the long night began, I crawled down inside the house and set up my vigil in front of the television with a pot of strong black coffee. I had not slept more than two hours in the past two days and I didn't feel tired so much as weary from anxiousness.

1992 L.A. Riots - A First Hand Account (Part III)

This is Part III of a X part series.  Part I, Part II, Part III, Part IV, Part V, Part VI, Part VII, Part VIII, Part IX, Part X

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Via Texas Arcane:
That morning everyone on the news was desperately trying to convince everyone of the existence of some sanity in the world and that things would shortly be back under control, but it never was very persuasive because they kept cutting to the cops barricaded inside the station house eating donuts and watching the news and clicking their tongues saying it's terrible, somebody oughtta do somethin' about that.

Lots of pundits and talking heads were telling us the previous night was the worst part and it was over. I climbed to the roof of my house and looked towards the south - I had this sick feeling that this was the beginning, not the end. That feeling was absolutely accurate. That was just the tip of the iceberg of what was coming.

I gave my wife a gun, locked the front doors and drove to the supermarket as soon as it was open and found myself fighting dozens and dozens of people at the doors to get inside and raid the place for as much as we could cart away. I got it right this time and bought what I thought would be serious provisions ... powdered milk, dry staples like beans and corn, canned meats, 30 liter springwater jugs. There was a serious dearth of cashiers and I heard the manager say that lots of people would not be coming in at all. There was a kind of electricity in the air like before a storm. Everyone wanted to get home with stocks and cocoon themselves. Some guy was trying to argue with me over a big pack of "D" cell batteries that I found behind the empty display case, I kept staring at him until he shut up and went away. One really old codger had a radio with an earpiece and he was muttering something about the "looting" starting in earnest while he was waiting in line with me. I didn't know what he was talking about at the time.

I waited at the gun shop for thirty minutes trying to buy a few boxes of ammo but the atmosphere there was very violent and utterly strange. There were lots of guys trying to buy guns off people waiting in line because the gunshop owner had reminded them of the thirty day waiting periods they had voted for in referendum and told them they could apply for a permit but would not be taking a gun out of the shop. These guys were begging for guns to protect their families in these pathetic reedy voices it broke your heart to listen to. Just about then a station wagon filled with black youths drove by playing some bass ugly rap music, everyone in the line was ultra tense thinking they were going to do a drive-by on all the white gun owners waiting in line. The wagon pulled off down the street and finally vanished. I gave up waiting and headed back to the house, luckily I had bought a little ammo the week before the riots.

When I got home, I immediately drilled holes for security crossbars on the front and back door and mounted a two-by-four on each to hold the door if somebody was trying to force it.

Then I turned on the TV again. The illusion that the dawn would bring sanity was completely dispelled. There were crowds bigger than Bible epics filling the parking lots of the all mega stores on La Cienega and they were stealing everything that was not tied down. Anybody watching the news could see the majority of all of them were the new mexican enrichers, not "poor downtrodden disaffected blacks." These guys who were operating leaf blowers for the wealthy the day before were taking advantage of the chaos to show their true colors and were running rampant as animals once they knew the law was not going to show up. They were systematically stripping every single retailer to the west shoreline of anything bigger than a thumbtack - and they were doing it brazenly right in front of television cameras hovering overhead off helicopters.

It was mesmerizing to just watch them swarming into the shopping centers and emerging like little ants loaded down with boxes. Before I knew it the time had slipped by and it was almost noon.