October 2, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

Video: "Six Immutable Prepper Laws"--City Prepping. The six basic areas in which you need to prepare.

• "The Combat Handgun Grip"--Handguns. The finer points of holding your semi-auto handgun.
• "WWIII by proxy"--Vox Popoli. Vox Day quotes an article as stating: "Syrian Social Nationalist Party representative Tarek Ahmad says that the war in Syria has reached a dead end, with the intervention of foreign powers turning the situation into a chaotic mess." He goes on to provide his own thoughts and commentary on the war there, as well as the situation in Ukraine. However, I think that he might have one point wrong: that the Left and the Neo-cons want Hillary to win so they can send in a lot more troops to defeat the Russians. However, I'm reminded of Friedman's proposition in his book, The Next 100 Years, that "[t]he United States doesn't need to win wars. It needs to simply disrupt things so the other side can't build up sufficient strength to challenge it." (Id., p. 5).
• The Migration Crises: 

• Fights Erupt Between Germans and Migrants, from the AP: "Police say several people have been injured after fights between locals and migrants in three towns in eastern Germany."

• "‘They Keep Finding Bodies’: Gang Violence in Long Island Town Fuels Immigration Debate"--New York Times. From the article:

Brentwood, a hardscrabble town of nearly 60,000 on Long Island, 40 miles east of Manhattan, has reached another crisis point. For nearly two decades, MS-13, a gang with roots in Los Angeles and El Salvador, has been terrorizing the town, the authorities say, especially its young people. Since 2009, its members have been accused of at least 14 murders, court and police records show.

That toll includes the discovery of the bodies of 4 dead teenagers in a recent two week period, including two girls. The article also observes:

Tensions simmer here because some residents say they believe an increase in Central American migrants to town has led to the increase in gang violence. According to 2014 census figures compiled by Queens College, Brentwood’s population is 68 percent Latino or Hispanic, with more than 17,000 residents claiming to be from El Salvador.

• "Part of Lopez Aguilar immigration history released"--Des Moines Register. An 18-year old Mexican national that ran a stop sign, striking and killing a 12-year old girl, was one of Obama's "dreamers" who had violated the terms of his residency and, therefore, was in the U.S. illegally.

• "German Mayor Beaten Unconscious After Announcing Plan To Accept Refugees"--Zero Hedge. According to the article, "[t]he Mayor of Oersdorf, Joachim Kebschull (61), was recently [struck] unconscious outside of the city's Town Hall where the construction committee was meeting to discuss a new housing development for migrants." Reportedly, just hours before the meeting, Kebschull had received a note stating: "He who will not listen will have to feel."

• The Wages of Sin Socialism:

• "Hungry Venezuelans stop a livestock truck and steal crates of chickens after country's food shortage spirals out of control"--Daily Mail. 

• "At a Loss for Meds, Venezuela’s Mentally Ill Spiral Downward"--New York Times. The Times reports:

[T]housands of mental health patients — many of whom had been living relatively normal lives under medication — are drifting into despair and psychosis because the country has run out of the vast majority of psychiatric medicines, leaving families and doctors powerless to help them, medical experts say. 

Mental institutions have released thousands of patients because they can no longer treat them, according to physicians. The patients still being cared for now suffer in crumbling wards that can barely even feed them. Doctors and nurses fear violent attacks and say they have little choice but to tie their patients to chairs, lock them up or strip them of their clothes to prevent suicides.

If an economic collapse or other severe disruption hits where ever you live, you may also face people that are mentally ill and acting irrationally. 

• Coming soon to Chicago: "Sons of 'El Chapo' likely behind deadly ambush in Mexico that saw 60 gunmen attack a military convoy transporting a drug suspect"--Daily Mail. From the article:

Sons of jailed drug kingpin Joaquin 'El Chapo' Guzman were likely behind an armed attack on a military convoy on Friday, which left five soldiers dead and 10 wounded, a senior security official said.

The attack took place in the early morning on the edge of the city of Culiacan in northern Sinaloa state, along Mexico's Pacific coast, the home base of the Sinaloa Cartel, whose former leader Guzman was recaptured in January.

The convoy was transporting a detainee, Julio Ortiz, when it was ambushed by armed men hurling grenades which caused two of the convoy's vehicles to burst into flames, said General Alfonso Duarte, the regional defense ministry commander in charge of Sinaloa.

* * * 

Ortiz was taken alive by the attackers, but it was unclear whether he was an ally or enemy of the armed men.

To borrow a quote from the movie Predator, "That's pretty sophisticated for a bunch of half-assed mountain boys."

• "Warren Buffet Is Pulling Out To Cash"--Anonymous Conservative. AC cites an article which reports that Buffett, who normally tells investors to keep most of their wealth in investments, has pulled a lot of his wealth out of the market and put it into cash. AC also provides some thoughts on what this may foretell. 
• "China Housing Bubble Re-Inflates - 'Even We Didn't Expect The Prices To Go Up This Much'."--Zero Hedge. This is going to be much worse than Japan in 1989.
• The worst kept secret ever: "Shimon Peres’ final secret from beyond the grave: I DID create Israeli atom bomb"--Daily Mail.
• A warning to the rest of us: "Mike Cernovich’s Bank Accounts Frozen"--Anonymous Conservative. Hillary hasn't even been elected, yet she is still able to subvert our government intelligence and law enforcement apparatus to strike out at her Alt-Right political opposition. Although we think of keeping cash on hand as a disaster "prep" for ATM's going down, or banks being closed, it is also a good idea for those that might find themselves the object of the ire of the Left.
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Physicists have figured out how to create matter and antimatter using light"--Science Alert. From the article:

A team of researchers from the Institute of Applied Physics of the Russian Academy of Sciences (IAP RAS) has just announced that they managed to calculate how to create matter and antimatter using lasers.

This means that, by focusing high-powered laser pulses, we might soon be able to create matter and antimatter using light.

To break this down a bit, light is made of high-energy photons. When high-energy photons go through strong electric fields, they lose enough radiation that they become gamma rays and create electron-positron pairs, thus creating a new state of matter.

"A strong electric field can, generally speaking, 'boil the vacuum,' which is full of 'virtual particles,' such as electron-positron pairs. The field can convert these types of particles from a virtual state, in which the particles aren't directly observable, to a real one," says Igor Kostyukov of IAP RAS, who references their calculations on the concept of quantum electrodynamics (QED).