A Quick Run Around the Web -- December 22, 2015 (Updated)

Source: "A Historical Perspective on Homicide"--Powerline Blog.

• "Australia’s 1996 Gun Confiscation Didn’t Work – And it Wouldn’t Work in America"--National Review. Noting that there is statistical correlation between the Australian ban and a reduction in gun suicides (suicides had already been dropping) or homicides (the homicide rates were already low and had been dropping for the prior 15 years). The article also notes the sheer impossibility of seizing hundreds of millions of weapons.
• "Horrifying moment cop shot dead mom-of-three when he slipped and missed while trying to shoot the family's 'growling' pet dog"--Daily Mail. Only professionals should carry guns (sarc.).
• "IRS gains power to revoke tax scofflaws' passports"--USA Today. A new law allows the IRS to suspend the passports of people who owe $50,000 or more in outstanding tax delinquencies. It also authorizes the State Department not to issue passports to such persons. The law further permits the IRS to turn over delinquent accounts to private collection agencies. On the surface, this may seem rather benign (at least to those of us which pay our taxes), but it was reported just a few months ago that four states have driver's licenses that don't comply with the Federal Real ID requirements; citizens of those states may need to use passports to board domestic flights. Those states are: Louisiana, Minnesota, New Hampshire and New York. Does this mean that the IRS could prohibit these people from traveling within the United States by commercial aircraft?
• "Texas Formation’s Shale Gas Estimates Doubled"--American Interest. Also a lot more oil that is now accessible via fracking. 
• "Moody’s lowers Chicago Public Schools’ dismal credit rating"--Washington Times. Another victim of liberal economics.
• "Top business story in 2015: China's sharp economic slowdown"--Associated Press. There are a lot of factors at play including increasing wages in China, and the fact that China's primary customers have never recovered from the 2008 financial crash.
• "One Million Migrants Entered Europe This Year"--Breitbart. Somewhere, Soros is cackling.

• Meanwhile, in Sweden: "Migrants ‘slaughter gay man, dress him in women’s clothes and wrap snake round his neck'"--Express.

• "Study: NOAA Overestimated US Warming by 50%"--Breitbart. Just another story about Watts' recent study on how the NOAA adjusts the temperature data upward to support its global warming hypothesis. But there are some great take downs of "warmists"in the comments.
• "Elon Musk makes space travel history: Billionaire says his SpaceX rocket landing on Earth makes it 'possible' to build a city on Mars"--Daily Mail. These advances in space propulsion are a big deal, with the potential to rival or transcend the impact of Europe's discovery of the New World.
• "Obama Warns Campus Protesters Not To ‘Shut Up’ Opposition, Like Conservatives Do"--The Daily Caller. "In an interview released Monday by NPR, President Barack Obama praised recent student protests that have rocked campuses in recent months as a “good thing,” but urged them not to “shut people up” in the process." The key point to understand is that the protesters know that the latter message--not to shut people up--is not intended for them, but to mollify the American public.
• "US power grid has been 'attacked at least 12 times by foreign hackers stealing plans so detailed they could knock out electricity to millions of American homes'"--Daily Mail.

Security researcher Brian Wallace was on the trail of hackers who had snatched a California university's housing files when he stumbled into a larger nightmare: Cyberattackers had opened a pathway into the networks running the United States power grid.

Digital clues pointed to Iranian hackers. And Wallace found that they had already taken passwords, as well as engineering drawings of dozens of power plants, at least one with the title 'Mission Critical.' The drawings were so detailed that experts say skilled attackers could have used them, along with other tools and malicious code, to knock out electricity flowing to millions of homes.

Wallace was astonished. But this breach, The Associated Press has found, was not unique.

•  Update: "What Is The Hegelian Dialectic?"--Return of the Kings. From the article:

... the Hegelian Dialectic is a mechanism to arrive at a final truth or conclusion. Right now you probably use the Aristotelian method for arriving at truth, which is to observe all the facts of the situation and then make the most logical conclusion based from those observations. Hegel explained a process where truth is instead arrived through the friction and conflict between one force (the thesis) and its opposite (the antithesis). The final result from that clash, the synthesis, is the best conclusion.

In all likelihood, the synthesis is not the final and absolute truth. It becomes the new thesis where a new antithesis forms to oppose it. The conflict between them leads to a second synthesis. This process repeats until the final synthesis is revealed, which theoretically is absolute truth.

* * *

Hegel proposed his dialectic as a natural way of arriving at the truth, but had in mind that the nation itself was the vehicle to create new syntheses. Like most Enlightenment thinkers, he threw god away and made the nation-state god instead. The modern elite has taken this a step further by pre-determining a synthesis (a specific agenda) and then developing events that arrive at that synthesis through artificial means.

If the elite has a result they would like to have, whether it be increased authoritarian rule or a war that solidifies their power, all they have to do is devise an anti-thesis that will lead to the outcome they want. This is commonly done through false flag attacks, where the government of a nation attacks itself so that it can respond in the way that it had wanted to all along, because it’s only through that attack would citizens agree to the planned synthesis. False flag attacks are in fact a common way for governments to fulfill their goals.

• Update: "Movement With A Pistol, Movement With A Carbine"--The Captain's Journal. A couple videos to compare and contrast the methods of tactical movement with each weapon.
• Update: "Hybrid warfare on steroids. Rebels fire ballistic missile at Saudis...successfully intercepted."--SNAFU. The author writes:

What must also be considered is the fact that terrorist groups are displaying the same capabilities as conventional forces.  ....

The problem is this. Special Operations Forces are good. They even have their own mafia and fan club on the internet.  But everyone forgets the truth. You don't send Special Ops against a decently trained conventional force. Special Ops are vulnerable to conventional forces....and now terrorists groups are starting to show the signs of morphing into conventional forces! The Special Ops raid of the past might be fading right before our eyes. We've already seen a growth in unit size from platoon equivalent to now Ranger type battalion sized ops.  

• Update: "Germans Arming Up In Response To Migrant Crime"--Anonymous Conservative. After noting various articles indicating that Germans are buying more weapons because of the exploding crime rates from the immigrants invading the country, the author goes on to predict:

Next the stories will be about why they are arming themselves, and all the awful things that the refugees are doing. That will comes as the nature of the people’s cognition changes, and the media adapts to meet it. As this stress wears on the Germans, day to day, their amygdalae are growing stronger, and more practiced at applying the pain of aversive stimulus to the brain. As they grow more practiced, the stimulus grows stronger, and less able to be ignored. As the stimulus is less able to be ignored, it will become more bothersome, be focused on more, and be exercised even more, in a constant feedback loop of increased sensation —>increased awareness —>increased sensation —>increased awareness. Eventually, the least irritation will provoke an uncontrollable urge to eradicate the source, be it an imperfection in a work product, or a leftist demanding that they import violent foreigners.

Read the whole thing.