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Wednesday, January 16, 2019

January 16, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Earth Catastrophe Cycle | Pole Shift"--Suspicious Observers (12 min.)

        HR8 prohibits young adults from acquiring handguns, but does so with a clever subterfuge.
          HR8 requires almost all firearms sales and loans to be conducted by a federally-licensed dealer. Because federal law prohibits licensed dealers from transferring handguns to persons under 21 years, HR8 prevents young adults from acquiring handguns. This is a clever way to enact a handgun ban indirectly.
    • "2019 Assault Weapons Ban"--The Weapon Blog. An outline of key provisions of Dianne Feinstein's bill to enact a new assault weapons ban. 
    • Another firearm's law workaround: "Dagny Dagger Ammo Allows Legal Access To Armor-Penetrating Bullet"--Ammo Land. In 1986, Congress essentially outlawed the sale to civilians of new production armor piercing style ammunition. But it did so by restricting the use of certain specific types of metals. According to this article, Atlas Arms has figured out some other non-restricted materials to use (although the actual materials are apparently still hush-hush). Or, as the article indicates, "the Dagny Dagger escapes these criteria by use of obscure alloys and careful geometry." Moreover, they are eventually planning on putting the information in the public domain so private individuals can manufacture it at home.
            You need only look at the moot court research of my friend Glenn Meyer, a now-retired psychology professor who found that, given a situation of a homeowner shooting a burglar, the mock juries were harsher on those who used an “assault rifle” than those who used a typical “sporting gun.”
            With that in mind, should I trade in all my AR-15s and similar rifles for the double-barreled shotguns of Elmer Fudd and Joe Biden, and advise you to do the same? Oh, hell no! Instead, I will advise you to be able to explain your choice of firearm in such a way that even 12 people expressly selected by your accusers for their lack of knowledge of firearms and self-defense can understand.
      • You probably heard about the 51 year old man, David Steven Bell, who is being demonized for defending himself against a pack of feral black girls (see this New York Post article and this article from The Citizen Times). The basic story is that these girls--apparently a mixture of teens and tweens--were harassing someone in a store and this guy intervened to tell them to knock it off. However, when he left the store, the girls decided to confront him and harass him. He pushed a couple of girls away, but one of them--the 11 year old girl that is the subject of the articles--rushed back at him, and he punched her. 
               Frankly I think that guy was within his rights to defend himself. But the media was quick to disparage the man as a "brute" and note the apparent disparity of force, since the man was 6' 5" tall and weighed 250 lbs. The man is being charged with multiple counts of assaults on a minor. 
               There are several trends and social mores that come together to make things dicey for Mr. Bell. First of all, there is the traditional Western more that men simply are not supposed to hit women, period. While this historically didn't include slapping or spanking, it now includes any form of physically striking a woman. While this is an anachronism in an age of equal rights, we all know that feminism has been all about women accruing the rights of men without giving up any of their privileges. 
               The second fact against Mr. Bell is that the disparity of force, which has been particularly emphasized in the media: that is, Mr. Bell's size versus the girl. Even though the girl was clearly physically attacking Bell, there are those that are going to say, "well, it was just a little girl." Does this mean that Bell should have just taken whatever physical abuse that was being directed his way, and suffer an injury? I don't believe so, but society, as a whole, would probably say "yes." 
               The third problem Bell has is that he is a white male and the aggressor was a black female. An automatic strike against him in the current environment of hyper identity politics. 
              Fourth, female empowerment now encourages girls and women to be physically aggressive. 
                So, what should Bell have done? It's easy to say that he probably shouldn't have involved himself in the first place by intervening inside the store. I've warned before about the dangers of "white knighting." It is no-win situation, where you are damned if you intervene, but you simply encourage this outrageous behavior by doing nothing. It's also an unsatisfying answer in this case because it doesn't address the larger issue of what to do if you are accosted by a pack of feral children.  
               With young teens and tweens, you might be able to just shove your way through, just like working your way through a pack of yapping chihuahuas. In this age of universal surveillance and cameras, if you feel like you have to defend yourself, make your defense appear to be as passive as possible, and, especially, minimize the use of your hands. You don't want to use closed hand strikes. Keep your hands open and in front of you in a defensive posture, where it might act to calm the child down, but also allows you to block or strike or grab the attacker. If the attacker rushes you, like in this case, let the attacker hurt herself by running into a shoulder or elbow, or tripping her. If you feel you have to strike, turn your hands slightly inward (palms facing each other) and make a quick, sharp, strike with the edges of your hand--not a push but a short strike, no more than a few inches of movement, against your opponent's chest. Remember that the goal isn't to subdue the teen(s) but to get them to simply leave you alone.
               Anyway, those are my thoughts. Please feel free to chime in with your own suggestions or criticisms.
                 Since late October, Frisco residents have reported a number of attacks by coyotes — unusual behavior by the canine predators, which rarely interact with humans.
                  Twice, passing drivers stopped a coyote from stalking joggers along Eldorado Parkway. Then, aggressive coyotes bit a woman on the neck and scratched a 9-year-old child. In December, two other women were attacked while jogging and a coyote bit a dog walking through its neighborhood.
              Herschel Smith has written about the increased number of encounters with coyotes at The Captain's Journal (see, e.g., this article regarding a North Carolina incident).
                         No antibiotic is effective against every type of microbe. Certain ones will kill aerobic bacteria, others are used for anaerobic bacteria, still others are effective against resistant strains, and certain people are allergic to or intolerant of various antibiotics.
                         Instead of buying 10 types of antibiotics (many having similar substances) you should consider 4-5 with totally different actions, so if the bacteria is resistant to one of them, you have 4 totally different “solutions” to try.
                    The four recommended by the author are: Amoxicillin, Clarithromycin, Ciprofloxacin, and Metronidazole. He goes on to discuss each of these, and gives tips on storing antibiotics, so be sure to read the whole thing.
                    • With Shot Show coming up, a lot of new products are being announced:

                      "Gillette: The Best an Incel Can Get"--Paul Joseph Watson's take down of Gillette's new man-hating commercial (8 min.). Feminists, of course, welcome the advertisement and view any objection to it as being the result of the "fragile male ego."
                      Globalization has had some downsides, for instance by depressing middle-class wages in developed countries with advanced economies.
                      Ya think?
                      They [the Democrats and Never-Trumpers] believed it because not only did they want to believe it, they had to believe in order for their carefully constructed world-view to survive. History is supposed to arc toward justice, not boomerang back and hit the cultural Marxists in the tush. A boor like Donald J. Trump not only should not have been elected president, it was impossible that he actually was elected president. Therefore, some nefarious forces must have been at play -- and once they are rooted out, down goes Trump, and progressive order and sanity are restored.
                      He also states that "Andy [McCarthy] makes a convincing case that the entire FBI/Mueller charade was a way to cover their own malfeasance in -- at the Obama administration's behest and with Hillary Clinton's willing collusion -- surveilling the Republican candidate and trying to torpedo his campaign under the guise of 'national security.'" Then he reminds us of the time that Teddy Kennedy sought Soviet assistance to make sure that Ronald Reagan lost his reelection bid, as revealed by Soviet records released after the fall of the Soviet Union.
                                It was a May 14, 1983 letter from the head of the KGB, Viktor Chebrikov, to the head of the USSR, the odious Yuri Andropov, with the highest level of classification. Chebrikov relayed to Andropov an offer from Senator Ted Kennedy, presented by Kennedy’s old friend and law-school buddy, John Tunney, a former Democratic senator from California, to reach out to the Soviet leadership at the height of a very hot time in the Cold War. According to Chebrikov, Kennedy was deeply troubled by the deteriorating relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union, which he believed was bringing us perilously close to nuclear confrontation. Kennedy, according to Chebrikov, blamed this situation not on the Soviet leadership but on the American president---Ronald Reagan. Not only was the USSR not to blame, but, said Chebrikov, Kennedy was, quite the contrary, “very impressed” with Andropov.
                                  The thrust of the letter is that Reagan had to be stopped, meaning his alleged aggressive defense policies, which then ranged from the Pershing IIs to the MX to SDI, and even his re-election bid, needed to be stopped. It was Ronald Reagan who was the hindrance to peace. That view of Reagan is consistent with things that Kennedy said and wrote at the time, including articles in sources like Rolling Stone (March 1984) and in a speeches like his March 24, 1983 remarks on the Senate floor the day after Reagan’s SDI speech, which he lambasted as “misleading Red-Scare tactics and reckless Star Wars schemes.”
                            Also:
                                      Even more interesting than Kennedy’s diagnosis was the prescription: According to Chebrikov, Kennedy suggested a number of PR moves to help the Soviets in terms of their public image with the American public. He reportedly believed that the Soviet problem was a communication problem, resulting from an inability to counter Reagan’s (not the USSR’s) “propaganda.” If only Americans could get through Reagan’s smokescreen and hear the Soviets’ peaceful intentions.
                                      So, there was a plan, or at least a suggested plan, to hook up Andropov and other senior apparatchiks with the American media, where they could better present their message and make their case. Specifically, the names of Walter Cronkite and Barbara Walters are mentioned in the document. Also, Kennedy himself would travel to Moscow to meet with the dictator.
                                           Meanwhile, the inspector general's investigation looking into the deep state's surveillance abuse before the election continues apace, and a secret grand jury has been investigating former FBI Deputy Director Andrew McCabe for months. The OIG revealed last month that it was unable to recover a number of vital Strzok/Page text messages from the special counsel's office because Mueller's records officer had scrubbed them. That almost looked like a warning shot from the OIG to the special counsel.
                                           Then there's U.S. Attorney John Huber, the sheriff who never quite rode into town. He's supposedly investigating the Clinton Foundation and Uranium One, but so far he doesn't seem to have accomplished much.
                                             The reason for that could be that Huber is waiting for DOJ Inspector General Horowitz to finish his lines of inquiry to avoid overlap.
                                               The president himself may be holding the ace in the hole. He can order that the remaining damning FISA documents be unredacted and released so the public can see the FBI's surveillance abuse for themselves. Trump over the weekend suggested that he is waiting until just the right moment to drop the FISA bomb and hinted that some of the miscreants involved in the SpyGate scandal are going down.
                                                 "People are being exposed by this that are totally corrupt," he told Judge Jeanine Pirro on Saturday. "A lot of the people that don’t get mentioned even in that article today, the phony article in The New York Times, there’s a lot of corruption, and we’re exposing it. And I’m going to put that down someday as one of my greatest achievements."
                                          • It is interesting that Bloomberg thinks that global warming is going to kill everyone. It shows that he is either a mendacious lier or doesn't have a clue as to what he is talking about. However, it does remind me of some of the news I've seen over the last week:
                                            Of course, we see headlines like this, intended to scare us into delivering ourselves up to the technocrats that would save us from the great demon Global Warming: "Antarctica Is Now Rapidly Melting All Over, Including Parts We Thought Were Safe." It's not the whole story, since much of the melting is over volcanic zones. But, more damning, it ignores the other half of the equation, which is ice accumulation. That is, "NASA Study: Mass Gains of Antarctic Ice Sheet Greater than Losses."
                                                      When a police truck carrying men in uniform pulled into an impoverished neighborhood in the Haitian capital, residents thought it was an official operation.
                                                      Maybe police were finally trying to head off a war between the gangs that run protection rackets in the market next to the sprawling collection of cinderblock shacks and low-rise public housing.
                                                        Then the men opened fire. Joined by local gang members clad in black, they went house to house with long guns and machetes, pulling unarmed people into the narrow alleys and killing them with single shots or machete blows, witnesses told The Associated Press.
                                                    As to motive:
                                                      Some residents and local rights groups say the killers were gang members working with corrupt police to seize territory in the La Saline gang war. But others accuse Haitian government officials of orchestrating the massacre to head off anti-corruption protests that often start in the neighborhood, an opposition stronghold.
                                                        Fun fact: "Haiti is the world's oldest black republic and one of the oldest republics in the Western Hemisphere."
                                                        By at

                                                        2 comments:

                                                        1. John WilderJanuary 16, 2019 at 9:25 PM

                                                          Love the gold story. Neal Stephenson had that as part of Cryptonomicon (which you've probably read).

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                                                          Replies
                                                          1. DocentJanuary 17, 2019 at 10:14 AM

                                                            I haven't read it, actually. I'll have to add it to my list.

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                                                        Weekend Reading -- A New Weekend Knowledge Dump

                                                        Greg Ellifritz has posted a new Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog . Before I discuss some of his links, I want to ...