Been deadlining this week and it doesn’t stop. Thinking of you all, though.
- Big Second-Amendment guy, Alan Korwin, is making news with a big First-Amendment case.
- You can always count on the FBI … to be just 61% accurate in its mass-homicide stats. Heck, they could save taxpayers’ money by using random chance. Oh. Maybe they did.
- “By threatening their lives as well as their budgets, Obama has created a huge class of losers, who statistically overrun the small class of winners and outweigh them in savvy…”
- Millennials. Fed up with Obama, Obamacare and government. Nice trend.
- But some of them are still selling Obamacare door-to-door. In a strictly “non-partisan” way, of course.
- Twelve survival schools that USA Today thinks could save your life. YMMV.
- “Rolling Jubilee.” Do-gooding done well.
- They see you when you’re sleeping. They know when you’re awake. They They know just where your cellphone is. So …
BTW. Still working on the candle-heater experiment. First trial was a spectacular bust and deadlines have prevented me from getting back to it. Hoping to try again this weekend.
That article about selling Obomneycare door-to-door was pretty funny. It’s hard not to smile when the system falls on its face. And the gals were so earnest, too. Har har…
That “Rolling Jubilee” is a great idea. Hey, Occupy folks doing good without involving govt. What’s not to like? Well, Ayn Rand did have some reservations about charity, it’s true.
Charity is kinda-sorta illegal in some places-there are cities where I can’t give a stranger 50 cents (in the form of two quarters in a parking meter)..
When I saw the article was in USA Today, I figured they would give Tom Brown good press. Some years ago, I did go to his school. He states he learned his skills in the NJ Pine Barrens from a South Lipan – an extremely obscure tribe – Apache he calls “grandfather.” The man’s grandson, Rick, Brown states was his good friend. Grandfather is dead and so is Rick, who Brown states died in Europe (I’m doing this from memory, so some of the details may not be completely correct. I definitely don’t consider it worth my time to look it up). To my knowledge, no one has ever verified the existence of either of these people.
On occasion, he has been called to track lost persons. He has noted that in some of the cases he puts on a loincloth before tracking. The book Incident at Big Sky describes how a well known tracker from the East was called in by the family of the man killed in a manhunt (according to the book, the man was from New York and used a .380 to threaten an experienced mountain man armed with a rifle). Both the deceased and the family, in my mind, made a very bad choice. After an unimpressive show to anyone who understood tracking at all, the tracker stated he could have solved it if he had been called in sooner and that Sheriff Johnny France should not have called off a tracking search at dark with many inexperienced people running around. When Sheriff France finally was able to solve the case through great persistence, the family never even thanked him. My opinion also is that both the deceased and his family had very bad judgment and no understanding of the situation. They never comprehended that being New York residents didn’t prepare them to fathom events or their consequences in Montana.
In Brown’s school, he recommends making a sand box of certain dimensions and using it to test different conditions. This makes sense, even more so when I heard him make the offhand remark, “[T]hat’s how I learned it.” He remarked, without explanation, that one could tell the difference between a full bowel and a full bladder. I wish I had asked him about that one. His practical examples were showing us animal tracks in the dirt on a nearby walking path. At the end of the course, he held an Indian sweat lodge ceremony. I heard him admit to another attendee that he could not speak the Apache language. While I could not understand anything he uttered, I must honestly admit the volume of the caterwauling was quite impressive.
Shel — That was interesting. I know Brown is a controversial figure. I have no experience with or informed opinion about him. I did read one of his books and large swaths of it struck me as being the most blatant, obvious BS (and yes, most of those concerned the mysterious “grandfather” and things that occurred between Tom and his quite possibly imaginary friend Rick).
But I know at least one other member of the Commentariat went to his school and came away with a different opinion than yours. Thus the YMMV comment on that item.
Clair – Thanks for the response. Sometimes I wonder if the stuff I type just vanishes in the ether, especially if I wait two days to do it.
I believe the chances that Brown learned what he learned the way he claimed are slim and none. One of the other students told me Brown had been a student in another survival school. It’s been so long I can’t remember the specifics. There was a good deal of useful information in his course; I have numerous pages with very detailed notes (somewhere). He did have some good instructors. The one who explained construction of a sweat lodge said with a smile that he would not be discussing the spiritual aspects of it. The maker of the knives Brown designed showed up and the two of them made a big show of seeing each other, complete with happy hugs. I was thinking, “[H]e just makes the f…ing knives; they didn’t share some horrible ordeal with each other.” At that time, I believe Brown had been divorced. His current girl friend, much younger than he, at one point was sitting on the stage in front of the class with what looked to me for all the world like a “[W]hat a bunch of suckers” look on her face. Brown emphatically announced that the laces on his boots were loose not because of style, but because it helped the circulation in the feet. At the time it did happen to be the style.
I believe it was he who was referenced in the Incident at Big Sky book. I become angry just thinking about it (I probably need to work on that). By what seems to have been deceitful and dishonest behavior, the reputation of a thoroughly decent man was permanently damaged, at least in the eyes of the ignorant from the East. There was even a movie about the story; it was a total hack job. The actor who played France had a superficial facial resemblance, but was obviously physically unfit. France in the past had ridden in the rodeo and had done so despite at least one broken bone. The movie was a clear result of the erroneous impression given to the family. How many people believed it is anybody’s guess.
More… I know this is very late, but it’ll bother me if I feel like I sent an incomplete explanation.
When I was at Brown’s school in the early ’90’s, the rumor going around was that NPR (I think) wanted to do a story on his life. Nothing appears to have come of it; the only explanation I can think of is that they failed to find any corroborating evidence of his story. He also had plans, it was said, to open a bigger school in the west, possibly Montana. If he’s still in NJ, not a lot came of that either. My thought is that once he left his protected environment, he wouldn’t be able to demonstrate any special talents.
I did hear him remark, in the protected environment of his school, that a particular group of professional trackers (possibly the Border Patrol) didn’t know anything. That kind of remark speaks for itself.
When people are disoriented, they tend to walk in large circles, because the step with the dominant leg is naturally slightly longer than the step with the non-dominant leg. Once he was called in to find a child who had wandered off into nearly impenetrable brush. He gloated that he looked at that and wasn’t about to go in there, so he estimated the size of the circle and waited by the road. She came out about ten feet from where he was sitting. While he gets credit for doing it the smart way, it doesn’t demonstrate any great tracking ability. When talking to an experienced and very astute LE friend in the central U.S., I was told that on a different case where Brown was also successful, my friend believed that Brown had other information that allowed him to complete his task.
At the time I took the course, Brown didn’t advertise and relied on word of mouth. If one had something to hide, then this would be an excellent way to do it, for new students would already be primed by others with the “wow” factor and thereby wouldn’t look at things terribly critically. I’m remembering now that when the other student and I were expressing our concerns to each other, we found ourselves talking in hushed near-conspiratorial tones so as not to attract the attention of the [groupies(??) sycophants(??)] er, other students.
There. I’ll stop now. Finally.