A Quick Run Around the Web--November 13, 2015

The video above is entitled "Throwing a Tomahawk No-Spin."

Self-Defense/Survival:

• "Whip Yourself Into Self Reliant Shape! (Part 1)"--Prairie Patriot. This is the first of a two part article discussing fitness. As many experts have noted, physical fitness is of critical important as to both survival and self-defense. This article discusses the issue of weight, calories, and lists points necessary for a healthy diet and good eating habits.
• "Whip Yourself Into Self Reliant Shape! (Part 2)"--Prairie Patriot. Ideas on beginning an exercise regimen. 
• "Fire and The Modern Woodsman"--Wood Trekker. Discussing changes to the tools and technology needed for cooking and heating.
• "Three Books from Hock Hochheim"--Active Response Training. A review of :(i) Knife/Counter Knife Combatives; (ii) Impact Weapons Combatives; and (iii) Don’t Even Think About It. The first two titles are self-explanatory, while the third is more of a memoir. 
• "One man's incredible will to survive: Adrift in the Pacific for 14 months, fisherman caught seabirds with his bare hands, chewed driftwood - and ate his fingernails"--Daily Mail. A review or summary of the book, 438 Days, setting out the experiences of Salvador Alvarenga, and his journey adrift in a small fishing boat from off the coast of Mexico, across the Pacific, to the Marshall Islands.
• "Dark Arts for Good Guys Series: Fight & Flight Flight & Fight Part 1" and "Dark Arts for Good Guys Series: Fight & Flight pt II"--Straight Forward in a Crooked World. What to do if you are overseas and a significant riot or coup breaks out.
• "The 4 Layers of Cold Weather Clothing Everyone Should Know"--Common Sense Homesteading.
• "Building Tribe: Understanding Tribal Politics"--The Lizard Farmer.
• And last, but not least, it is Friday--check out the Weekend Knowledge Dump at Active Response Training.

Other Stuff:

• "Recording the Police- The Unintended Consequences"--Greg Ellifritz discusses how people over-recording the police (i.e., making recordings with the hope or expectation that they will catch misconduct) will discourage cops from performing day to day service and assistance. (In Ellifritz's example, he had stopped to provide assistance to a black tradesman who needed to borrow a telephone). 
• "EXCLUSIVE: Autistic boy, six, was 'murdered' by police after cop and his father were in 'months-long' love-triangle with meth-user mom-of-two who had 26 criminal filings"--Daily Mail. As I see it, police have a public image problem arising from two factors: too many people either automatically vilify law enforcement, or go to the opposite extreme of treating them all like heroes. Police are people: there are good ones, bad ones, and those in the middle. Some are enthusiastic about their jobs, and some try and get by doing the least possible. And, just like everyone else, it may change from day-to-day. 
• "Obama Has a Strategy in the Middle East, and It’s Working"--The Washington Free Beacon. "...the primary goal of the president is not a certain outcome on the ground, but rather the reset of the American posture in the region from that of a dominant power to that of one nation among many partners collaborating where possible, and, when conflict can’t be avoided, erring on the side of minimalist interventions."
• "Hong Kong bookstore disappearances shock publishing industry"--BBC. Life under socialism: four men working for a dissident bookstore went missing two weeks ago.
• "Asian Student Says in ‘Safe Space’ People Shouldn’t Be Judged by Race, Gets This Stunning Reaction"--The Blaze. The photograph/video accompanying the story shows a black protester (who has misappropriated Western clothing, technology and language) holding a sign reading: "It is too late to say sorry." 
• "Pic Of The Day: Black Lives Matter Radicals Raise Black Liberation Flag While Stomping On The American Flag…"--Weasel Zippers. Disrespecting America.
• "The regulators’ yoke"--Charles Murray. In writing about how the Federal government evolved from a government of "us" to one of "them," the author notes:

Momentous as these decisions were, they were arguably not as crucial to the evolution of the federal government from “us” to “them” as the decisions that led to the regulatory state. Until the 1930s, a body of jurisprudence known as the “nondele gation doctrine” had put strict limits on how much power Congress could delegate to the executive branch. ... [We] now live in a world in which Congress passes laws with grandiose goals, loosely defined, and delegates responsibility for interpreting those goals exclusively to regulatory agencies that have no accountability to the citizenry and only limited accountability to the president of the United States.

This was no accident. It was part of the Progressive goals of a government operated in a "scientific" manner by "experts" and "professionals." 

• "Does George Soros Want Revolution in Europe?"--The American Conservative.
• "Apocalypse Greece"--Anonymous Conservative. The author observes that the current anti-austerity protests are largely directionless, but that these protests could easily focus the anger and frustration on an "outside" group such as a certain ethnic population or emigrants. 
• "Beirut bomb: 'At least 43 dead' in twin Isis suicide blast in Lebanese capital"--Independent. What we are seeing in the Near- and Middle-East is a successful application of Mao's theory of revolutionary warfare. 
• "Cold sun rising"--The Nation.

Around 2000, the PDO Index started to blow cold again, possibly causing global warming to "pause", as the mainstream scientists describe it. IPCC-affiliated scientists as well as Nasa and the NOAA attribute the pause to other factors. This is when the plot thickens.

Solar cycle 24 - two cycles prior the cycle that's expected to bottom out into a Maunder Minimum - was weak. In 2013-14 it reached its maximum far below average. Meanwhile extreme cold-weather anomalies have occurred around the world. Last year "polar vortices" slammed into the central US and Siberia as a third hovered over the Atlantic. All 50 US states, including Hawaii, had temperatures below freezing for the first time in recorded history. Snowfall records were broken in cities in the US, Canada, Italy, New Zealand, Australia, Japan and elsewhere. Southern American states and central Mexico, where snow is rare, got heavy snow, as did the Middle East.

This past summer the cold didn't let up, with more temperature records across the US and rare summer snows seen in Canada, the US and China. Birds have migrated early in the last two years. Antarctic sea ice set a new record in 2013 and it was broken again in 2014.

Not even Thailand was immune. In 2014 Bangkok hit its coldest low in 30 years, while 63 lives were lost in the North.

Scientists at the Climate and Environmental Physics and Oeschger Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of Berne in Switzerland have recently backed up theories that support the sun's importance in determining the climate on Earth. A paper published last year by the American Meteorological Society contradicts claims by IPCC scientists that the sun couldn't be responsible for major shifts in climate. Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, rejected IPCC assertions that solar variations don't matter. Among the many studies and authorities she cited was the National Research Council's recent report "The Effects of Solar Variability on Earth's Climate".

Other researchers and organisations are also predicting global cooling - the Russian Academy of Science, the Astronomical Institute of the Slovak Academy of Scientists, the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism Russia, Victor Manuel Velesco Herrera at the National University of Mexico, the Bulgarian Institute of Astronomy, Dr Tim Patterson at Carleton University in Canada, Drs Lin Zhen at Nanjing University in China, just to name a few.

• "Astronomers spot most distant object in solar system"--Phys.org. Discovery of a new dwarf planet--V774104--at 103 AU from the Sun.
• "The Invisible Library"--The New Yorker. Scientists struggle to figure out a way to read the Herculaneum scrolls--approximately 800 scrolls, possibly containing many lost works of antiquity--without destroying them. "In trying to read the scrolls, scholars and curators have invariably damaged or destroyed them. The Herculaneum papyri survived only because all the moisture was seared out of them—uncharred papyrus scrolls in non-desert climates have long since rotted away. In each scroll, the tightly wrapped layers of the fibrous pith of the papyrus plant are welded together, like a burrito left in the back seat of a car for two thousand years. But, because the sheets are so dry, when they are unfurled they risk crumbling into dust."