November 29, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

Video: "Kidnapped! Lock Picking Crash Course (Urban Survival)"--Survival Lilly

Firearms and Prepping:

• "Henry’s New Magnum Rifles"--The Firearms Blog. Henry Arms will be releasing lever action carbines in .327 Federal Magnum caliber. The company will also be expanding its offerings in .41 Magnum.
• "Guest Post: Never Pass Up a Decent .30-30"--George Groot at Blue Collar Prepping. While it is not the combat rifle you would want in a Mad-Max apocalypse, the author points out that it is a practical round and weapon for purposes of survival. His take-away: ",30-30 lever rifles are light, handy, won’t wear you down after a days worth of carry, and are a very utilitarian tool. Even normal carbon steel lever action rifles have been going strong for a century plus now with a simple routine of cleaning and oiling. For a “carry a lot, shoot a little” rifle, there is a lot going for the humble .30-30."
• "Gun Sales Hit Record High on Black Friday 2016"--PJ Media.
• "What Would a Long Range Sharpshooter Infantry Paradigm Look Like? Part 2: Accounting and Training"--Nathaniel F. at The Firearms Blog. This is the second part of a series looking at the concept of fielding whole units dedicated to engaging targets at medium to long range. This part focuses on the costs of the equipment and training. Bottom line: it will be much more expensive to field these units than traditional infantry units.
• "Century International Arms RAS47 AK Rifle Review"--Ammo Land. A bare-bones U.S. made rifle.
• "Two for Flinching: How to Stop Anticipating When You Shoot"--Imminent Threat Solutions. The primary factor, according to the author, is to use dry fire practice to build neural pathways that do not involve a flinch. 
• "High Com Secuirty Plates & Carrier"--Loose Rounds. The reviewer gives it high marks. One feature he particularly liked was the separate pockets for plates and soft armor.
• "What if it happened again? What we need to do to prepare for a nuclear event"--The Conversation. This article is focused more on the policy level, but does include information on the health effects from a nuclear attack.
• "Report: Nuclear material said stolen from Iran could yield 'dirty bomb'"--Jerusalem Post. Per the article, "[t]he missing material, Iridium-192, was reported to the International Atomic Energy Agency by Iran’s nuclear regulatory body earlier this month, warning neighboring Gulf states of its possible nefarious use." The article indicates that the identity of the thieves is unknown. Apparently, a truck transporting the material was hi-jacked, and the truck was later found abandoned.
• Lock picking PDFs--a selection of several popular guides found on-line.
• Paging Al Gore: "Saudi Arabia snowfall turns desert sands powdery white"--RT. Normal temperatures are in the upper 60s. 
• An inconvenient truth: "Stunning new data indicates El Nino drove record highs in global temperatures suggesting rise may not be down to man-made emissions"--Daily Mail. From the article:

Global average temperatures over land have plummeted by more than 1C since the middle of this year – their biggest and steepest fall on record.

The news comes amid mounting evidence that the recent run of world record high temperatures is about to end.

The fall, revealed by Nasa satellite measurements of the lower atmosphere, has been caused by the end of El Nino – the warming of surface waters in a vast area of the Pacific west of Central America.

Keep in mind that the record highs were also exaggerated or even falsified by those scientists whose funding depends on their being man-made global warming. What we are seeing is the lead up to a new Maunder Minimum in another decade or so.

• "'It's the apocalypse': Thousands forced to flee resort Tennessee towns as massive wildfire destroys homes and hotels and threatens Dollywood"--Daily Mail. A large forest fire in the Tennessee Smokey Mountains. The article reports that "about 14,000 residents and visitors were evacuated from Gatlinburg alone, and portions of Dollywood have been evacuated as wind speeds top 70 miles per hour in some parts of Tennessee, which has been hit by the worst drought in nearly a decade."

Other Stuff:

• The religion of peace strikes again: "Ohio State attack: Suspect with butcher's knife, reportedly student and refugee, killed as eleven victims injured"--The Telegraph. The perp was a balding "18 year old" Somali refugee. According to the article, the suspect intentionally drove onto a sidewalk, striking multiple pedestrians, before emerging with a knife and stabbing several people. A good guy with a gun--a police officer--put the attacker down, permanently. The perp allegedly "ranted about how he was 'sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers being killed and tortured' on social media" just hours before his attack. The attack is currently being investigated as a terrorist incident.
• Dreamers! "Cartels Flood Remote Border Sector with Migrants, Overwhelm U.S. Agents"--Breitbart. From the article:

Border Patrol agents in the remote Texas Big Bend Sector are sounding the alarm as Mexican cartels overwhelm them with illegal immigrants ahead of President-elect Trump’s inauguration. The sector has very few agents assigned and has remained one of the most open and unsecured regions along the U.S.-Mexico border.

• Diversity! "African Migrants Riot Against ‘Racist’ Italians: ‘Allah Will Guide Us in Revenge’"--Breitbart. A reminder for those that believe helping others will be reciprocated with kindness:

Locals were terrified as African migrants rioted, throwing projectiles and screaming threats at passers-by in a protest against “racist” Italians on Wednesday and Thursday in Turin.

The Bataclan massacre was a “revenge of the excluded”, warned one of the hundreds of migrants, most of them illegal, who took to the streets to protest against not being given a “decent life” by Italian taxpayers.

“We have nothing in this city”, a man from Cameroon said, angry that people in Italy “do not understand that we are also boys and would like a decent life”.

The rioters are among 1,500 Africans illegally squatting in Turin’s abandoned Olympic village. Most of the men are in their twenties and while there are some who work on the black market, many complain about having nothing to do.

“You Italians — tell your children that we are not dogs. Keep them quiet because our patience will end sooner or later,” one warned. Another cheered the Bataclan massacre in which 89 people were murdered, many of whom were reportedly tortured, hailing it as a “revenge of the excluded”. “One dead of ours [Africans], one death of yours,” he cried.

The trouble started on Wednesday evening when around 300 residents of the former Olympics site took to the streets. They blocked traffic, uprooted signposts, overturned garbage bins, and hurled stones and bottles while screaming “racist” and “bastards” at passers-by. “The Italians are racist and the police control us,” the migrants railed.

• Related: "Italian Interior Ministry: You Must Take in Migrants — Or Else"--Gates of Vienna. The government is going to force the owners of underutilized properties to allow immigrants take up residence in those properties; without compensation, of course.

• We are not all alike: "Skin Deep"--West Hunter. The author writes:

There are a couple of new papers out in Cell about demonstrated immunological differences between Africans and Europeans. We already knew that the course of various infectious diseases can be quite different in people from those two different races, while autoimmune risks are also different (lupus for example is considerably more common in blacks). Researchers found that inflammatory responses were considerably stronger in Africans than Europeans. African macrophages zapped bacteria three times faster than European macrophages.

I wonder if this increased inflammatory tendency is behind the increased risk for sarcoidosis in blacks (12-fold higher death rate). If so, maybe you could help the clinical course by damping down inflammation.

The African pattern almost certainly worked better in Africa (chock-full o’ of pathogens, including many adapted to man or close relatives), while the European pattern worked better outside of Africa – on the whole cooler and less of a microbial playpen.

He adds:

Some of the milder-inflammation alleles in Europeans originated in Neanderthals. Logical, since they too had adapted to the lower pathogen load in ice-age Europe and Central Asia. This probably meant that Neanderthals couldn’t have returned to Africa.

• "Blacks And Minorities Go K – And In-group Against Out-groups"--Anonymous Conservative. Noting an article about a black woman buying a handgun in the wake of Trump's election, the Anonymous Conservative theorizes that this is a sign of increasing K strategy among blacks. However, he also goes on to note a recent report (to which I had also cited) about black male teens that harassed a group of white school girls on a city bus. The black teens then called some female accomplices that boarded the bus, beat up the girls, and robbed them. The Anonymous Conservative notes about this incident:

This was very rabbity. The boys called in girls to do the fighting, and only jumped in to rob the white girls once their own girls had initiated the beatdown. There was a reason K-strategist parents paired up and were very protective of their offspring. K-selection is dangerous.

Many blacks who head toward K will in-group aggressively with blacks against out-groups composed of other races, due to amygdala agitation. I believe racial in-grouping is instinctual in the face of K-stimuli. The black K’s may not be such a problem, but the black r’s will feel emboldened if they think the black K’s have their backs.

This would indicate that the racial hostility we are seeing from the r-parts of the black communities in the inner cities will get considerably worse. And many of those hostile individuals may very well be armed up.

It will be a huge problem for the white rabbits of the cities, not that I am complaining.

However, it is mistake to associate violence, and the willingness to engage in violence, as only a K-select behavior. In fact, it is often the opposite. In The Oxford Handbook of Evolutionary Perspectives on Violence, Homicide, and War by Todd K. Shackelford, Viviana A. Weekes-Shackelford, it notes that:

The trade-offs most relevant to understanding individual differences in violence are those between current and future reproduction, and between quantity of off-spring and investment in offspring. When organisms opt to produce a large quantity of offspring with little investment in each, they are also prone to engage in riskier behavior, including violence, in order to successfully compete with intrasexual rivals and secure mating opportunities. Not surprisingly, the males of of most species are more likely to engage in this "r-selected," or fast, life history strategy than females, who generally provide greater obligatory investment in offspring and thus engage in a "K-selected," or slow, life history strategy by default.

(p. 16).