November 23, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around The Web

"HOW TO—Store Water" (4 min.)

Must see T.V. for all preppers.

• "AGAINST ALL ODDS: Long-Range Throwsticks"--SWAT Magazine. If your preps assume a period where you may have to hunt to supplement food storage, a related issue is whether you can harvest game without attracting unwanted attention. There are various methods that you can use--trapping, air-guns, sound suppressors--and this article offers up yet another method that should be legal in most jurisdictions and good for smaller game. 
• "Stashes - burial containers, what to put in them, where and how to hide them"--The Survival Summit. This article mostly focuses on things to put in a stash with some tips on where to bury an item, such as (1) staying away from buried utility lines (obviously, maintenance of these lines could reveal your stash); (2) avoid flood zones; and (3) use lasting landmarks--don't relay on GPS, and don't rely on trees which may be knocked down in a storm or flood. I've watched several videos on YouTube of people that have tested buried caches and noted two primary issues: first, damage to canned goods because it wasn't buried deep enough and froze in the winter; and, two, containers that were not actually sealed to keep out moisture or failed.
• So the other day I posted a video which outlined a problem with not seeing additional threats after stopping the initial or primary aggressor. A long-time reader suggested this article on the topic: "Monday Morning Gomez – the Wyatt Protocol"--Recoil Magazine. No, not named after Wyatt Earp, but Lyle Wyatt who developed the protocol as part of his training of military and law enforcement. The Wyatt Protocol is also known as FAST, standing for: Fight, Assess, Scan, Top off the gun (i.e., tactical reload). It has been expanded to include additional T's for Take cover, Talk to whomever needs talking to and a Top down check to Treat for injuries. Taking cover and talking can be done when ever needed, but I think the important point is to make sure to do a self-assessment for injuries. When you are on an adrenaline high, it is easy to overlook even serious, life-threatening injuries.
• This is why Africa-carry was developed: "Slung Rifle too Slow to Stop Grizzly Attack in Montana"--Ammo Land. An elk hunter was attacked by a bear, but was unable to get his rifle unslung in time to use it to defend himself. Although badly mauled, he survived the attack. Professional hunters that hunt dangerous game in Africa rarely carry a rifle slung, but balance it on the shoulder so they can quickly access it. However, there is a method, called Africa- or Rhodesian-carry, which uses a sling over the left (off-hand) shoulder, with the muzzle down. The advantage is that you can quickly grab the weapon the weapon by its forward hand guard with your off-hand, twist and bring up to your opposite shoulder and shoot in one smooth movement. Protruding magazines or a pistol grip can slow this method down, but it is very smooth and quick with a shotgun or rifle with a traditional style of stock.
• On a related note to the foregoing story, Ammo Land reports that in the recent, lethal "Wyoming Bear Attack Glock had No Round in Chamber, Magazine & Pistol Separated." The article also clears up some incorrect information that has previously been reported. From the article:

       The pistol was not in a pack. Mark Uptain was wearing the Glock in a chest holster. He deliberately took off the pistol, took off his shirt, and placed both the pistol and his shirt near the two packs. Processing big game tends to be a bit messy. 

* * *

      It seems unlikely that Chubon received any training about the Glock 20. When Uptain was attacked, Chubon was able to reach the Glock while the bear was engaged with Uptain.  He was able to extract the pistol from the holster. He had time to shoot. He could not make the pistol fire.

Also: "The Glock pistol and the magazine were found in different places. It may be that Chubon activated the magazine release in an attempt to get the pistol to work."

"Younger Dryas Ejecta Curtain"--Antonio Zamora (9 min.)

There is a theory that the cause of the Younger Dryas and some of the extinctions of mega-fauna at the time was due to a large meteor strike from an asteroid or comet over the northern ice sheet. This article discusses evidence of such a strike.

• God--He's a really smart guy: "Drinking tea or coffee during pregnancy REDUCES baby size even if you consume less than the 'safe' amount"--Daily Mail. Research shows that even moderate amounts of caffeine can restrict blood flow to the placenta, resulting in smaller babies. For non-LDS readers, I'm thinking of what is generally referred to as "The Word of Wisdom." 
• "Everything You Thought You Knew About Western Civilization Is Wrong"--The Unz Review. This article is a review of Michael Hudson’s book And Forgive Them Their Debts: Lending, Foreclosure, and Redemption from Bronze Age Finance to the Jubilee Year. The author summarizes Hudson's thesis as follows:

In ancient Mesopotamian societies it was understood that freedom was preserved by protecting debtors. In what we call Western Civilization, that is, in the plethora of societies that have followed the flowering of the Greek poleis beginning in the eighth century B.C., just the opposite, with only one major exception (Hudson describes the tenth-century A.D. Byzantine Empire of Romanos Lecapenus), has been the case: For us freedom has been understood to sanction the ability of creditors to demand payment from debtors without restraint or oversight. This is the freedom to cannibalize society. This is the freedom to enslave. This is, in the end, the freedom proclaimed by the Chicago School and the mainstream of American economists. And so Hudson emphasizes that our Western notion of freedom has been, for some twenty-eight centuries now, Orwellian in the most literal sense of the word: War is Peace • Freedom is Slavery • Ignorance is Strength. He writes: “A constant dynamic of history has been the drive by financial elites to centralize control in their own hands and manage the economy in predatory, extractive ways. Their ostensible freedom is at the expense of the governing authority and the economy at large. As such, it is the opposite of liberty as conceived in Sumerian times” (p. 266).

This is actually a somewhat timely article for me, as my wife and I were discussing this very issue recently--what would happen to financial debts after the Second Coming. Since the Second Coming is to, in part, mark a Jubilee, it was my conclusion that financial debts would be erased. This is what Hudson's book and this article also suggest.

• Nothing to see here ... move along: "Company That Holds The Keys to The Internet…Announces SALE to China."
• "Heroes Hidden in Plain Sight: The Browning Automatic Rifle"--Guns America. The author offers up memories from the life of a neighbor: a man that had served in WWII as a BAR gunner. From the article:

It turned out that Mr. Roberson was my neighbor down the road, and he ultimately shared a lot of stories. A literal lifetime before this unassuming Mississippi farmer carried a Browning Automatic Rifle as a member of the 5th Ranger Battalion in World War 2. On June 6th, 1944, he landed in the first wave on Omaha Beach fighting alongside the 116th Infantry Regiment. We’ve all seen Saving Private Ryan. That was his unit. That was this man.

Read the whole thing.

• I've posted before about the reproducibility crises in the social sciences--that researchers are unable to replicate many (most) of the findings from key studies and experiments in the field. The issue is getting worse, as The Atlantic reports in "Psychology’s Replication Crisis Is Running Out of Excuses." An excerpt:

       Over the past few years, an international team of almost 200 psychologists has been trying to repeat a set of previously published experiments from its field, to see if it can get the same results. Despite its best efforts, the project, called Many Labs 2, has only succeeded in 14 out of 28 cases. Six years ago, that might have been shocking. Now it comes as expected (if still somewhat disturbing) news.

      In recent years, it has become painfully clear that psychology is facing a “reproducibility crisis,” in which even famous, long-established phenomena—the stuff of textbooks and ted Talks—might not be real. There’s social priming, where subliminal exposures can influence our behavior. And ego depletion, the idea that we have a limited supply of willpower that can be exhausted. And the facial-feedback hypothesis, which simply says that smiling makes us feel happier.

      One by one, researchers have tried to repeat the classic experiments behind these well-known effects—and failed. And whenever psychologists undertake large projects, like Many Labs 2, in which they replicate past experiments en masse, they typically succeed, on average, half of the time.

The author ironically notes that the only sure thing in psychological research is that only half of its great experiments can be replicated.

• "Abortion fanatics are sending female pro-life activists rape porn…to scare them into silence"--Life Site. Key point: "It is an irony that some of the men claiming to be supportive of 'women’s rights' respond to the suggestion by pro-life women that killing pre-born children is wrong by sending them degrading, violent sexual imagery in order to suggest that they should be attacked and demeaned for their stance." It should not be surprising: we are in a battle against pure evil. (H/t Anonymous Conservative).
• "Six Strange Facts about our First Interstellar Guest, `Oumuamua" (PDF) by Abraham Loeb. Besides its unusual shape, what sticks out to me is the extremely high reflectivity and that it accelerated (albeit, very slightly) more than can be accounted for by gravity when it rounded the sun. The author notes that there was no outgassing to account for this acceleration, the rotation of the object did not change, and the object did not appear to break up.