June 6, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Practice Clearing Your Hands For Better Shooting!"--Active Self Protection Extra (8 min.)

The producer of this video explains that if you have stuff in your hands--particularly in your non-shooting hand--you will unconsciously tend to hold onto it when presented by a threat (I guess something similar to a monkey trap). He suggests that you actually make dropping something out of your off-hand as part of your dry fire practice.

• Grant Cunningham's Hump Day Reading List for this week.
• Some sage advice: "EMOTIONS - DO NOT FEED THE BABOON"--Gabe Suarez. He writes:

       A brute has no emotional control and at any provocation jumps about like a baboon whose banana was taken away.  America is becoming a nation of uncontrolled, immature, brutes who have no self-control, and driven by fear that their banana will be taken.  Don't be a brute. ... 

       Instead, decide today that you are not that brute, but rather a gentleman...albeit a deadly and dangerous one, but a gentleman nevertheless. ...

• "5 car Stickers that Criminals use Against You!"--Modern Survivalist. FerFal warns about the inadvertent information you can give criminals by displaying stickers or decals about your family or place you work such as parking passes/decals, stickers advertising your child's school, firearms related stickers (e.g., NRA stickers or product stickers), and those cutsie stickers showing the number of members in your family (generally showing interests as well).
• "Savage MKII FV-SR"--Fr. Frog's Pad. The MKII is a popular rim-fire rifle produced by Savage, and the FV-SR was a particular model featuring a threaded barrel for accepting a silencer and a Weaver accessory rail for mounting a scope. This article gives a good overview of the weapon and accessories available for it. One of the particular problems with this rifle is that the MKII stock has a drop comb to use iron sights, so it is not possible to get a good cheek rest with the FV-SR model which uses optics. Boyd's offers replacement stocks that are popular, but a cheek riser/pad can also work.
• "Burglar Entry Through 1st Floor Window Air Conditioner"--Modern Survival Blog. If you use an in-window air conditioner on your ground floor, be warned that it is easy for a burglar to push it in and then crawl through the now open space into your home. The author gives some tips on how to better secure your air conditioner and/or window.
• "Powdered Oral Rehydration Mix Recipe"--Baugo Blades. Offers a recipe on making your own, as well as some tips/advice.
• "Incredible images show devastating lava flows from Hawaii's Kilauea volcano which wiped out 'hundreds' of houses in just ONE night - including Big Island mayor's home"--Daily Mail. The property values just plummeted. 
• Some other volcano news: "Almost 200 missing and at least 75 are dead as thousands flee Guatemala's Volcano of Fire in fresh evacuation before new 'curtain of ash' blankets villages"--Daily Mail. Most everyone caught in the pyroclastic flow is dead.

• Related: "'Nobody Is Left': Guatemala Volcano Ravaged Entire Families"--AP. An excerpt:

       On Sunday, when the volcano exploded in a massive cloud of ash and molten rock, Hernandez said her brother and sister ran to check on their 70-year-old grandmother on the family's plot of land in the village of San Miguel Los Lotes.

       "She said that it was God's will, she was not going to flee," Hernandez said. "She was unable to walk. It was hard for her to get around."

       Her brother and sister made it to safety, but their grandmother has not been seen again.

       Hernandez and her husband, Francisco Ortiz, survived because they moved out of Los Lotes just two months ago to begin a new life on a small plot of land.

       The couple has been staying at a Mormon church in the nearby city of Escuintla and going to a morgue there to await news. So far only the body of one relative, her 28-year-old cousin, Cesar Gudiel Escalante, has been recovered and identified.

       "The people ended up buried in nearly 3 meters of lava," Ortiz said. "Nobody is left there."

• A couple on the decline and fall of the Boy Scouts of America:

• "The Marxist-Progressive War on the Boy Scouts"--American Spectator. The author writes:

        The left has succeeded in driving a final nail in the coffin of the Boy Scouts as it once was. The organization is now a shell of its self. It capitulated first on “gay” scout leaders, then on “transgender” scouts, and now on girls joining the Boy Scouts.

         Progressives bask in their triumph, dancing on the grave of an organization they never wanted to build up; it was an organization they wanted to take down. For the left, this is less about giving something to girls than taking something from boys. It’s another scalp on the cultural-ideological wall.

        Lest anyone think this isn’t a take-down, or a fundamental transformation, well, consider that the Boy Scouts of America, founded in 1910, will now be called simply “Scouts BSA” for those ages 11 to 18 (a change openly celebrated with puffy propaganda pieces by PC-stylists at the BSA website). This is a coerced inclusion of gender-neutral “Cub Scouts.”

         The Boy Scouts have been emasculated, neutered. The organization that prided itself on courage stands impotent, fearful in the face of feminists and LGBTQ militants. They’ve cowered to the forces of “diversity” and “tolerance.”

         And for cultural revolutionaries, the defeat of the Boy Scouts is the end of a long march through yet another institution. This march began literally a century ago not with the New York Times or Democrats but with socialists and communists.

• "Destroying the Boy Scouts"--City Journal. From this article:

Losing members while trying to address the complaints of non-members, the clumsily renamed Scouts BSA will shed another huge chunk of its membership when the Church of Latter Day Saints ends its century-long affiliation with the organization in 2020. About 425,000 Mormons will leave the Boy Scouts, representing about 20 percent of the group’s membership. Carefully worded new policies allow individual troops and regional organizations some leeway in establishing co-ed or sex-segregated groups, but the Mormons apparently disagree with the tacit acknowledgement that the traditional BSA’s focus on making boys into better, more responsible men was somehow unfair to girls. The LDS is forming a new organization for boys and young men, oriented around the Gospels and Christian ideals. Nationally, 73 percent of Scout units are sponsored by churches; presumably, they will all be brought into line or else be forced to leave due to their supposed intolerance.

• From a few days ago: "Nicaragua police end church siege after day of terror in Masaya"--BBC. In a warning to us all, the article notes: "The unrest in Nicaragua was triggered by cuts to pensions and social security." Imagine what would happen if there were large welfare cuts in certain urban centers here?
• "Violent crime and poverty place Detroit, Flint, St. Louis and Las Vegas as the WORST cities in America to live in... and it's not good news for LeBron's Cleveland"--Daily Mail. According to the article, "[e]ach city was given a rating based on nine categories: crime, demography, economy, education, environment, health, housing, infrastructure, and leisure," and "[o]ther factors included property prices, poverty and unemployment rates, availability of public transportation and air quality." Crime and poverty seem to be the most significant factors for cities on the list. The article only lists the top 50, and Boise, of course, is not among them. However, I see that Salt Lake City is right at number 50.
• "OMG ET, we’re coming to kill you"--Cosmos Magazine. One possible solution to the Fermi paradox is that the first intelligent species to gain intersteller travel will wipe out all potential competitors. Necessarily, then, because humans haven't been wiped out, we may be the first intelligent species to arise in the galaxy.