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Monday, June 27, 2022

The Docent's Memo (6/27/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Three Robberies Show Various Response Strategies"--Active Self Protection (8 min.)
Greg Ellifritz had recommended, in this past weekend's Weekend Knowledge Dump, that his readers watch this video to get an understanding how fast a robbery can go down. Basically, if you aren't paying attention to your surroundings, you could easily be completely surprised; and, even if spot the robbers before they strike, as happened to the guy getting out of his car in his driveway, you might not have time to draw a concealed handgun.

Firearms & Self-Defense:

    Many readers are under the impression that U.S. special operations forces have returned to using .45 caliber pistols since the adoption of the M9 9mm in 1985.

    This has some truth to it, but in most cases SOF units use 9mm, experts maintain.

    The Army’s Delta Force adopted .40 caliber, but the elite unit is having the same problems as the FBI – the heavier caliber is causing excessive wear problems in guns that were originally designed to be 9mm. Delta is now using 9mm Glock 17s, 19s and 34s.

    The 75th Ranger Regiment and Special Forces units use M9A1s and Glock 19s.

    SEAL Teams mostly use the Sig Sauer 226.

    DEVGRU, or SEAL Team 6, does use Heckler & Koch .45 for special occasions when they need a suppressed capability.

    Now about two years ago, Marine Corps Special Operations Command awarded a $22.5 million contract to Colt Defense LLC for new .45-caliber Close Quarter Battle Pistols for the service's elite special operations troops.The Colt 1911-style pistol replaced the fleet of worn-out Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, M45 pistols.

    The Corps began issuing custom 1911 .45 pistols to its elite Force Reconnaissance units in the 1990s. Gunsmiths at the Quantico Weapons Training Battalion Precision Weapons Section hand built them from old 1911s that had been replaced by the M9 in the mid-1980s.

    The creation of the first MARSOC units in 2006 caused the requirement to grow from 400 pistols to 4,000 pistols. Finding enough surplus 1911s for the Precision Weapons Section's custom rebuilds became impractical, Marine officials maintain.

    Most MARSOC operators, however, are not carrying their nifty new .45s because units are having a problem getting .45-caliber ammo in theater for some reason, sources maintain.

A December 2021 article at We Are The Mighty, titled "How Army Special Forces pulled a sneaky to get Glock pistols," isn't just about how much Special Forces units like 9mm Glocks, but also about how Special Operations Command was able to formally adopt the Glock 19 as a sidearm. But it notes that in the early 2000s "[t]he elite Delta Force adopted the Glock 22 [which is .40S&W caliber] which further increased the demand for Glocks in Special Forces."

    Many of us are oblivious to what’s going on around us, especially when it comes to spotting crime. But if you pay attention, you should be able to identify the telltale signs someone is casing your house before the burglary takes place. Here’s how you can tell if a burglar is watching your house:

  • The same unfamiliar vehicle hanging around over the course of several days, either frequently driving by your place, or parked nearby.
  • Unfamiliar individuals walking back and forth on your street or back alley [ed.: or, as Ahmaud Arbery was doing, jogging through the neighborhood].
  • Anyone taking photos of your home or property. You might not necessarily catch them in the act but if you see a stranger with a camera on your street, that is a cause for concern.
  • Loose light bulbs on exterior lights. Burglars will often unscrew them a day or two prior to a break-in attempt.
  • Strangers at your door. Burglars will frequently walk up and knock on the front door to see if someone is home, giving an excuse – asking for directions, have you seen my dog?, oops wrong house – whenever someone answers it.
  • Mild vandalism like a rock through a side window. This is done so that burglars can get an idea of what happens if a window is broken? Is there an alarm system on the windows they need to be aware of?
  • Someone lets your dog out of your yard. Or someone shows a fond interest in your dog. Getting rid of your dog makes their lives a lot easier.
  • Telephone calls that hang up as soon as you answer. Burglars often do this to find out who, if anyone, is home right now.
  • Clear tape over the keyhole to your front door. This is done so when you enter your keys, they know that you’re home. This could provide them with an idea of your schedule and help them plan better.
  • Trash rummaging. Many times, burglars might go through your trash to try to find important documents that reveal important details about you. This is done to find out about you, the more they know, the easier target you are. Always remember to shred your documents before discarding them.  

The article also mentions that in North America and Europe, strange signs--which reminded me of the hobo codes--have been left somewhere on the outside of the house. "According to the authorities, these are often left by criminals as either reminders to themselves or messages to their accomplices." The author adds: "If you find odd chalk markings on your property, it’s a good idea to inform the proper authorities. These marks may have been made by the kids down the street, or they could be from a burglar. House robbery markings aren’t always obvious and their meaning usually isn’t clear, but the police may have information on what (if anything) they mean."

    Another article, "Common Burglary Tactics (and How to Stop Them!)" at a site called Dengarden is mostly about methods to discourage burglars or make it more difficult for burglars to break into your house, but it discusses a few signs that burglars might be interested in your home. One of these is leaving trash in front of your house:

    Criminals will leave things outside your house like cans, litter, bags, and so on – these mean something. Whatever you do, do not ignore them. This is why you should always pick up litter outside your house because they may well be signs put there by scouts for criminals targeting a house or neighborhood.

    They can denote how many people are in a house, how many of them are male or female (houses with female occupants only are more likely to be targeted). They may also indicate if there are any dogs – the list goes on. Always take a photo first if it looks to be constructed in some fashion, and then bag it and put it in the bin. Wear gloves when you do, because you never know if they may have put substances on it. More on this later.

In a similar vein, the article warns about taking business cards from strangers and to be careful with your mail because they might be dosed with chloroform or another substance meant to incapacitate you. The article also mentions the tactic described above about calling the house to see if anyone is home, but also points out that if they know your email address, they might send an email to see if there is a ping-back message saying you are out of town.

  • Another article that I came across, "The strange expertise of burglars," discusses that there is a learning curve to becoming a successful burglar--seizing opportunities, patterns in how to search a home, and knowing what items to steal to maximize your take. An excerpt:

    [British researcher Claire] Nee might have known that they would instantly home in on the cash. Throughout her experiments, she has shown that most burglars are operating on a skilled “automatic pilot” that allows them to quickly exploit an opportunity.

    It begins long before the day of the crime. When he (or she) starts to need money, the burglar will begin noting potential targets during their day-to-day activities – walking the dog, say. They are surprisingly flexible, however, and may quickly change their mind on the day, if they see another house that is easier to access – thanks to an open window or door, or if the owners are away.

    Once inside, the automatic pilot proves to be essential to stop the criminal losing their head, as I find out myself in my own botched burglary. ...

    I had, however, been sceptical of Nee’s claims that much skill is required. “How hard can it be?” I asked myself as I entered the virtual house. But although I know to focus on the small, portable, high-value items – somehow my eyes glide right over them. My mind is racing, but I can’t find anything – and so I go for the big, cumbersome items instead. Rather than being a smooth criminal, I am like a hyperactive kid on an Easter egg hunt. (If you don’t believe me, I would suggest you take a look at the video below, to see how many items you would have spotted during this staged crime.)

    My confusion is a stark contrast to burglars’ behaviour in Nee’s simulations, which she developed with Martin White at the University of Sussex. Experienced burglars almost all followed the same route through a house, heading first to the upstairs bedrooms, and then to the living rooms downstairs. Along the way, they easily spot the coat pockets for wallets and credit cards, as well as the designer clothes, jewellery and other small valuables – while neglecting the electronic equipment that will quickly age. With an average of just four minutes in the house, the professionals accumulated around £1000 ($1560) more booty than Nee’s control group of law-abiding students.

    Strikingly, most of the thought processes involved in this search seem to take place below consciousness, giving the burglar greater mental space to deal with the risk of being rumbled. “I could have done it with my eyes shut,” one told Nee during her prison interviews. “The search becomes a natural instinct, like a military operation,” is how another described it. “It becomes routine to concentrate on what’s going on around you and where to find things. Most concentration is on the risk of someone coming back – the search is natural.”

    Given this rapid, systematic, non-conscious behaviour, Nee compares burglary to other, more functional forms of skilled expertise – from music to chess to tennis – where top performers claim to enter a similar kind of “flow state” in which most of the most crucial decisions rumble away below awareness.

    And as with those other kinds of experts, she thinks burglary relies on intricate “psychological schemas”. “They are bunches of recipes for how to do things. And as you get more expert, it’s not that you get more of the schemas, but they get more dense and interrelated,” she says. “So you can pluck a solution instantaneously out of your memory, just by seeing a cue.”

    For a chess player, it’s the detailed strategies that can be called to mind in an instance; for a burglar, it’s an encyclopaedic understanding of house layouts and the likely locations of the most valuable objects, as well as planned routes for the getaway. Having experienced many different scenarios, they already have a plan that suits the crime in hand, meaning they don’t have to work through all the possibilities. A novice, by contrast “will be processing everything at once,” Nee says. As I found, doing that leaves you paralysed with indecision.

VIDEO: "4 Psychological Tricks To Command Respect Immediately"--Charisma on Command (8 min.)

Prepping & Survival:

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the bullet’s magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, [1859] the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

Also:

    The Carrington Event, as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

    When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

But, Docent, you say, we already know all of this. And you would be right. But these coronal mass ejections typically occur when there is a lot of sunspot activity; and that, the article goes on to explain, has a lot to do with the Sun's magnetic field. For instance, during a solar cycle, sunspot activity increases until the Sun's magnetic field flips. And that takes the article to the research by Scott McIntosh, an astrophysicist who serves as deputy director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

    His grand unified theory, developed over a decade, goes something like this: Every 11 years, when the sun’s polarity flips, a magnetic band forms near each pole, wrapped around the circumference of the star. These bands exist for a couple of decades, slowly migrating toward the equator, where they meet in mutual destruction. At any given time, there are usually two oppositely charged bands in each hemisphere. They counteract each other, which promotes relative calm at the surface. But magnetic bands don’t all live to be the same age. Some reach what McIntosh calls “the terminator” with unusual speed. When this happens, the younger bands are left alone for a few years, without the moderating influence of the older bands, and they have a chance to raise hell.

    McIntosh and his colleague Mausumi Dikpati believe that terminator timing is the key to forecasting sunspots—and, by extension, coronal mass ejections. The faster one set of bands dies out, the more dramatic the next cycle will be.

    The most recent terminator, their data suggests, happened on December 13, 2021. In the days that followed, magnetic activity near the sun’s equator dissipated (signaling the death of one set of bands) while the number of sunspots at midlatitude rapidly doubled (signaling the solo reign of the remaining bands). Because this terminator arrived slightly sooner than expected, McIntosh predicts above-average activity for the current solar cycle, peaking at around 190 sunspots.

The article also discusses what we could expect if something like the Carrington Event were to happen again:

     The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate.

    Through a weird and nonintuitive property of electromagnetism, the electricity coursing through the atmosphere will begin to induce currents at Earth’s surface. As those currents race through the crust, they will seek the path of least resistance. In regions with resistive rock (in the US, especially the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern Seaboard), the most convenient route is upward, through the electrical grid.

    The weakest points in the grid are its intermediaries—machines called transformers, which take low-voltage current from a power plant, convert it to a higher voltage for cheap and efficient transport, and convert it back down again so that it can be piped safely to your wall outlets. The largest transformers, numbering around 2,000 in the United States, are firmly anchored into the ground, using Earth’s crust as a sink for excess voltage. But during a geomagnetic storm, that sink becomes a source. Most transformers are only built to handle alternating current, so storm-induced direct current can cause them to overheat, melt, and even ignite. As one might expect, old transformers are at higher risk of failure. The average American transformer is 40 years old, pushed beyond its intended lifespan.

    Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

You might think that I've reproduced most the article, but I haven't and I encourage you to read the whole thing including how easily and relatively inexpensively the grid could be hardened to prevent outages in the event of a solar storm.  

Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.

This isn't a major problem, but it does mean that a satellite has to burn additional fuel to maintain altitude and, therefore, shortens the life of the satellite. I would expect, however, that a coronal mass ejection could actually punch satellites down must faster.  

  • "It’s All Coming Down…"--Modern Survival Blog. The author lays out a TEOTWAWKI scenario based on runaway inflation causing supply chain collapses as diesel fuel, oil, and diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) becomes too expensive for truck operators. An interesting look at how possible cascading effects could cause a widespread economic collapse and lawlessness.
    • Related: "Could the Railroad Industry Go Completely Off the Track?"--PJ Media. According to this article, we could see a national railway strike over issues of pay (the proposed pay hike is much less than inflation) and overwork (the latter so bad, that railroads have actually had to resort to advertising for jobs; jobs that used to be so coveted that you had to know someone to even be considered). The parties have been negotiation, according to the article. But...
The current negotiations are nearing an impasse, according to employees. The National Mediation Board (NMB) convened in January and required the parties to come to Washington, D.C. to meet, which is unusual. On June 17, 2022, the NMB released the parties from statutorily mandated mediation. The National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC) and the 12 unions remain without a contract for the members to vote on. The required 30-day cooling-off period started on June 18, 2022. At the end of the cooling-off period, the union members will vote to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike.

 The article continues:

    The parties anticipate that President Biden will establish a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) in the next 30 days. The PEB is a last-ditch attempt to prevent a strike. The unions declined binding arbitration in order to settle the contract disputes, and it will be up to the PEB to hand the 115,000 employees a contract to vote on. The board has 30 days to develop the offering, and employees would vote on it in the 30 days that follow.

    This situation is unlike the air traffic controllers in 1981 or the railroads when there was a strike in 1992. There is no way for the government to force an agreement by threatening to fire striking employees. Open railroad jobs no longer have a line of willing applicants. Employees say that management cannot pick up the slack as they have in the smaller strike in Canada.

    If the employees vote down the PEB’s contract, management may try to impose their offering unilaterally. At this point, the union can strike if the members authorize their representatives. This situation would put Democrats in a precarious position. The only way the rail workers can be compelled to return to work is through an act of Congress or an order to return from President Biden.

    That would require a Democratic majority in Congress or the Democrat president to overrule the will of union members. ...

    The radical Christians are found in the rural areas. Their towns are defenseless, they have almost no cops and their firemen are volunteers. They have to borrow cops and firemen from neighboring jurisdictions miles away in order to handle anything big. And they think they're safe out there. Forget burning cities, cities are on our sides. It's time for rural areas to feel the heat.

    You show up 100 deep in every rural town in a 50 mile radius intent on revolution, you'll crash their system and make them pay.

    And if you all think I'm kidding, I'm dead serious. This was caused by backward ass rural conservatives operating out of a Christianized worldview (even if theyre not Christian, they're heavily influenced by it), they were the ones who voted for Trump in '16; those disillusioned redneck/white trash/blue collar (to quote a country song) types who flipped massively for the GOP. Punish them. Punish their towns. They say "BLM burned the cities to the ground, " I say "let them see firsthand what it's like when a community is truly burned to the ground. They want a civil war? They should have been careful what they asked and voted for."

    I'm not the organizing type. But maybe someone who is can organize that. Start in a certain state in the Midwest often called "the south's middle finger to America." It's literally what the south would've looked like if it wasn't reconstructed.

The author of the Not The Bee post took a mocking tone, convinced that the rural inhabitants would easily handle the situation. I don't have as much confidence because such "peaceful protests" are probably not going to be advertised before hand so they will have the element of surprise; and of the people in such a town only a handful, at best, have the ruthlessness to actually take action, especially since they will be facing state and federal charges--we saw this with the BLM/Antifa riots and there is no reason to believe that it would not occur under a Democrat president. And, so, 100 determined leftist attackers might be more than even a well armed community could handle. By way of example, I would direct my readers' attention to the Haun's Mill Massacre where a sudden attack--even though the people there were aware of the potential danger--left no time for any sort of organized defense. Even Poncho Villas' attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, where approximately 350 troops were stationed and able to quickly mount a defense, resulted in 18 killed on the American side (10 of which were civilians) and several houses and commercial buildings being looted and destroyed.

    That said, and as I discuss below, we are not seeing anywhere near the size and violence of protests following the death of George Floyd, which suggests to me that these protests are not going to have the staying power. Besides, with Democrats facing a pummeling at the polls this fall, I'm sure that the DNC and powerful Democrats are not providing the support that undoubtedly flowed to BLM and Antifa in the runup to the 2020 presidential election. 

VIDEO: "Hoes Mad"--Paul Joseph Watson (7 min.)
Warning: Since he includes video segments of leftists being leftists, this is NSFW.

News & Headlines:

  • And the crazies come out. Umair Haque, writing at Eudaimonia and Co (part of Medium) claims that "The End of Roe Is a Bullet to the Heart of American Democracy," even though the decision expressly overturned a decision made by 9 white guys and returned it to the states where it will actually be decided by democratic methods. Hack writes:
    Today is one of the darkest days in American history. The end of Roe v Wade, which is the decision that legalized women’s reproductive healthcare rights in America, aka “abortion.”

    A Supreme Court made up of fanatics and lunatics, whose vision is a fascist theocracy, has, in one fell swoop, eviscerated American democracy. Five people have taken the most basic of rights away from 330 million. 70%, by some counts, 80%, of Americans don’t want this. This is how a democracy ends.

    Let me put in context just how incredibly dark this day really is. It’s one of the darkest in modern history, period. I can’t think of another example, certainly not in the developed world, where such fundamental rights, and so many of them, have been lost, for so many, in one fell swoop.

He goes on to suggest that because of this ruling, a complete stranger sitting the next table over in a bar, could arrest a woman if he (no she, apparently, would do it) overheard the woman discussing having an abortion. He also asserts that some states will surveille women to make sure they can't leave that state to get an abortion, suggesting that these state could even set up checkpoints at border crossings. 

This is the end of abortion. It’s also the end of democracy. How so? Well, think about the examples above. They are about to become true. But what is really happening in them? Basic rights no longer exist. Privacy. Expression. Association. Movement. The most basic rights of all — poof, gone. Not just for women. For everyone, because, well, anyone can “aid and abet” a woman.

But that isn't all. He continues:

Next to fall? All the cases alongside Roe, which guaranteed rights for anyone in any way outside theocratic-fascist lines. Gay rights, rights to gay marriage, equality, representation. Rights to contraception. And then, of course, “interracial” rights — the return of segregation. 

I am surprised that he didn't add something about fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, human sacrifice, and dogs and cats living together. As if that isn't enough, the editor appended some additional comments expressing her thoughts as a woman:

    I don’t think men understand how it feels. To know that the government is inside your body. To know that your body is a political battleground, that is no longer your own. It is a violation. It is violent. And that is the point. To punish women for the “sin” of being sexually active. To put women in their place, to remind us that our bodies aren’t ours. They belong to men. To externalise costs to women, because that is what patriarchy is built on. So to me, I see the inaction that came after Roe, the way both left and right use us as pawns in a political game, as proof of just how much patriarchy hates women. And that’s how I really feel. I feel hated right now.

    And I am furious. I am white hot with rage. I am furious at the far right, who dehumanise us and hate us. I am furious at the Dems, who did not care enough about us to codify Roe when they had the chance. I am furious at the inaction. To me it says: women weren’t worth the fight. I am furious that I have to explain to people that they won’t stop at abortion, that contraception is next, that America is going to become a country, save for a few liberal havens, where women are forced to become pregnant and give birth. Like chattel. That’s what we are now. Again.

Men don't know what it is like to have the government control their bodies? Yeah, right. Selective service. Covid masking and vaccinations. TSA searches. And chattel? I thought the whole purpose of family law courts was to make men chattel. Men are forced to work to support their ex-wife with it being very difficult to reduce support payments even if the man loses a job or otherwise sees his gross income decline.

    But it isn't just that author, of course. Just The News reports that "[i]ndividuals have been calling on social media for the assassination of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after he issued a separate concurring opinion on Friday in a ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade." It adds that "[a]bortion activists have also published his home address, and others have called to burn down the Supreme Court." The Blaze reports on a "Socialist Reddit group posts home addresses of Supreme Court justices, discusses hunting them down at their churches. TikTok user hint at using pipe bombs in retaliation to Roe v. Wade reversal." The Life Choices Christian crisis center for pregnant women in Longmont, Colorado, was torched by one or more pro-abortion terrorists. 

    Notwithstanding all of this, we haven't seen the types of protests and riots that followed after George Floyd died of a drug overdose while in police custody. The unlimited access to abortion that the left wants has never been all that popular in the United States (although a total ban on abortion hasn't either) and I suspect that most people have no problem with this being decided on a state-by-state basis. I thought we would see much more in the way of protests--especially given how long the pro-abortion crowd had to prepare between the leak of the draft opinion and the final opinion that was released. That we haven't is probably a strong hint on how unpopular are the left's current demands for abortion (for instance, California allows it up to birth and, actually, right after birth).

    A secondary school dropout with a long history of mental health issues, Matapour was sentenced to ten months in prison as a teen after he was tied to a stabbing at a school prom.

    He was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, according to court documents reviewed by Norwegian outlet NettaVisen. 

    Matapour's involvement in serious crime did not end there, with the Oslo terror suspect charged with attempted murder and possession of a firearm in 2019.

    He was again released after a court appeal.

Authorities are treating the attack as an act of Islamic terrorism. Per the BBC, "Two weapons were retrieved at the crime scene by police, one of them a fully automatic gun." Strange how gun control laws didn't stop this. However, a few governments are beginning to catch on to the fact that arming law-abiding citizens can be a benefit: "Nigeria's Zamfara state will start issuing licences to individuals to carry guns to defend themselves against armed gangs of kidnappers causing havoc in the country's northwest, the state's commissioner for information said on Sunday," reports U.S. News. Its a small step with only 500 licenses being authorized, but it is a start.

    The state also banned the use of motorcyles and selling of petrol in three districts and one emirate, in areas which are the most affected by banditry, Dosara said. The state is divided into emirates and the emirates into districts.

    "Anybody found riding motorbike within the areas is considered as bandits and security agencies are thereby directed to shoot such persons at sight," said Dosara.

    The way the company works is it purchases single family rental homes and then allows investors to view the homes on their website. If the investor wants, they can invest in the home by purchasing a share of it, with a minimum investment of $100.

    The company handles property management, and the investors receive their share of the rental income, as well as wait for the property’s value to appreciate over time.

    After five to seven years, the property will be sold, and the equity and profits from the sale are divided up among the shareholders.

    Investors have been showing increasing interest in single family homes as home prices have skyrocketed, and rents rose an average of 16.4% in the last 12 months, and as much as 32% in cities like Miami over 12 months.

    Now with higher interest rates entering the mix, home ownership is even more unaffordable, forcing even more people to rent, and further increasing the cost of rentals.

    The Brits were the first to industrialize, and since they were literally inventing industrialization as they went, the process took seven generations. The Germans came after, but they learned from the Brits, and so completed the process in four. The Koreans, who didn’t begin until 1953, did it in two. The later the start, the more paved the road to industrialization, the faster and easier the journey. China, not beginning until after one Richard M. Nixon traveled to Beijing to visit one Mao Zedong, has done it in one. 

    There is more to industrialization than “merely” steel and rail and electricity and oil and mass transport options. There are also cities. Industrialization means farmers become more productive, pushing people into the cities, while simultaneously there are rafts of infrastructure and industrial plants to construct and operate, which pull people in. On the farms, kids are free labor. In town, children are expensive conversation pieces. Adults aren’t stupid, so urban dwellers have fewer kids. It happened to Britain and to Germany and to Korea and to…China. 

    The key to understanding China’s success in these past few decades as well as its fall in the next few is this intersection of industrialization and urbanization. Cramming two centuries of development into 40 years means China crammed two centuries of growth into that same 40 years. Of course China’s growth has been shockingly fast—but that can only be done once. Similarly, advancing from preindustrial farms to postindustrial condos pours all a society’s energy into industrial development. Great for growth, but it leaves exactly zero space (or time) for children.

    It isn’t that other factors play no role. That’d be a silly position to take. Cultural unity, a work ethic that makes Protestants seem lazy in comparison, a government that is, shall we say, involved with managing the minutiae of people’s lives. It factors in. It all factors in. But I don’t care how unified and hardworking or coordinated a population is if the country in question has…

    …no…

    …people.

    A replacement birthrate is 2.1 children per woman. China slipped below that in the 1990s. Birthrates in Beijing and Shanghai are now the lowest in the world. China’s labor force and overall population peaked in the 2010s, heralding the fastest increases in labor costs in the world. Ever. The average Chinese citizen aged past the average American citizen sometime around 2018. Recent analysis by the South China Morning Post of data from the Chinese census authority suggests China’s population will be half the size in 2050 compared to today. 

    It’s (far) worse than it sounds. Nearly all of China’s 600 million-strong population growth since 1970 isn’t from more births, but from longer lifespans and fewer deaths. Any disruptions in the flows of foods and fuels that enable modernity will earn the Chinese another “world’s best” title; Not only is China the fastest-aging population in human history, soon it will also be the fastest-collapsing.

    Even that assumes nothing else goes even a little bit wrong. 
  • This week's long read: "A New Theory of Western Civilization" by Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic. This is a review of the book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Henrich is known due to research by him and fellow researchers that showed an incredible bias in psychological and sociology research:

In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.

But beyond that, he also discovered that WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) peoples are actually psychological and sociological outliers. And that led him to wonder if there are cultural traits that would explain why WEIRD cultures suddenly shot past all other cultures in terms of technological and economic advancements ... and wealth. As the article points out, "Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance." That is, he had to make his case without relying on hereditary or racial differences. Consequently, while Jerod Diamond focused on "guns, germs, and steel" to explain Western success, Henrich focuses instead on cultural traits. Out of his analysis came the idea that perhaps what made WEIRDs so different was rooted in Catholic family policies that banned polygamy and consanguineous marriage, and shifted the Western cultural focus from the extended family or tribe as is the case among other peoples.

Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.

But this is not all: 

Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP [Marriage and Family Program] was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.

It's a long article but an interesting read.

  • Another long read: "Europe’s Death Rattle: Part I" by John Waters (h/t WRSA). This is a long look at demographics in Europe and Africa and the disfunction of Western aid to Africa. Or, as Waters sums up this piece, "In the culmination of a longtime plan, a global calamity of food scarcity, due to Covid measures and 'sanctions', will soon cause record numbers of mainly African migrants to enter Europe seeking food." An excerpt:

    Much of our attempting to deal with the effects of global poverty takes the form of a kind of guilt-displacement, whereby the objective often looks less like the alleviation of the suffering of the poor than the dispersing of guilt in those apparently seeking a solution. The FUGAP approach may be well-suited to emergency situations, but is not a panacea for Africa’s more workaday ills.

    The latest manifestation of these syndromes takes a new and more immediate form: the insistence from European goverments and the European Union that migrants fleeing from Africa to their continent must be welcomed and accommodated, often without the consent of the peoples among whom they are destined to arrive  — indeed, even at the expense of those people and their own needs. In a variant on the FUGAP method, the people of Europe are told we must open our borders and shut our mouths. Clerics exhort us that ‘Jesus was a refugee,’ and speak piously about ‘embracing the Other,’ as though there was no difference between a single ‘other’ and a hundred or a million. The idea that the world operates at different moral speeds, but that these differentials can be disposed of with the odd handful of coins, has mutated and metamorphosed, nowadays taking the form of a non-negotiable requirement for Europeans to surrender their homelands at the behest of their own debased elites, who themselves appear to imagine they can remain insulated from the consequences of their ‘compassion.’

    The government of my own country, Ireland, has for two decades been stealthily importing significant numbers of migrants (increasingly from Africa) to comply with UN and EU directives that nobody was given an opportunity to discuss and which the media and churches appear to have been enlisted and incentivised to support by, firstly, a policy of evasions and public silencing, and latterly providing covering fire that targets anyone who dares question what’s happening as ‘racist.’ At roughly one-fifth, the (officially admitted) proportion of non-natives living in Ireland now is, after twenty years of a largely stealthily organised influx, more or less equivalent to the proportion of immigrants who have settled in the UK in sixty years of the same approach. 

    Christians, who stand to be swamped within a couple of generations by incoming Muslims, are told — usually by atheists— that it is ‘unChristian’ to be concerned about such a question. Is there anything especially urgent or vital, we hear fellow Europeans ask, about European survival, or the survival of its ‘white’ population?  It need hardly be noted that these questions are usually asked by people with conspicuously pale faces but little understanding of how the culture they take for granted actually works. 

The author contends that it didn't have to be this way--that Africans could do well if they were given a proper boost up--but that aid is mismanaged and focuses around, to borrow a phrase, giving Africans a fish today rather than teaching them how to fish. This, the author suggests, is by design as it provides a ready supply of cheap labor for Europe while making Africa easily exploitable for its natural resources. 

In part 2 of his article, Waters continues his analysis including how charges of racism is being used to tamp down dissent:

    Of course, the obvious risks and dangers of this are fudged and camouflaged by a narrative that reduces things to a simplistic and malevolent racial hypothesis, using the culturally immobilising weapons of prejudicial ideological categories: ‘black’ Africans versus ‘white’ Europeans. The idea is put about that the sole factor prompting the escalating alarm at these drifts on the part of whole sections of every European population is an antagonism towards people of a different skin colour and/or ethnicity. Those who seek to point out that, self-evidently, the indigenous population of Europe is being ‘replaced’ from the ‘developing world’ (for which read ‘the undeveloping world’) are accused of ‘racism’, a charge that resonates jarringly with both the residual ‘compassion’ of Western cultures and the guilt that underlies it. In reality, of course, the issue of race is but a superficial manifestation of a process that has a far deeper and more ominous meaning: the cultural supplanting of the greatest civilisation the world has known, more or less randomly, from the population of an undeveloping culture, whence people cross into Europe imagining that they can immediately acquire, as though by magic, the inheritance, personalities and auras of Western civilisation. This, of course, is a fallacy of quite an extreme kind, for the integration of such outsiders into the Old Continent can be beneficial only up to an indeterminate point, which will be attained by osmosis without any indication that this has occurred, and after which the culture of Europe will descend into an abyss, in which it will become not a second Africa, or a second Pakistan — and still less a ‘New Europe’ — but a nothing culture comprising nihilism, degeneracy and anomie. Those who say, ‘If you import the Third World, you get the Third World’ are wrong: If you import the Third World you destroy both the Third World countries — from which you will have sucked the human energy and cultural memory — and eventually also the cultures of ‘host’ countries into which these vast tranches of humanity are being channelled. The continent of what was previously ‘Europe’ will remain, and that name may be preserved over the door, but the fabric of European civilisation will have corroded and dissolved, to be replaced by something else that we are unable to imagine in advance of its manifestation. Although unlikely, it is theoretically possible that this culture or civilisation might in time prove to be an improvement on that which, debased and intimidated, now prevails on the Old Continent. This is so because Europe has indisputably undergone some radical degeneration in the past half-century or thereabouts, though it is ominously interesting that those most to blame for this degeneration are more or less conterminous with those who advocate mass inward migration, who now add the risk of imposed undevelopment to their crimes against Europe. But whatever it may be, what will emerge will not be Europe in any sense referential to the Europe of Erasmus, Joyce, Proust, Yeats and Havel, but something new, or perhaps, as already noted, a ‘new nothing’.

    And here is the core point: This will have occurred without any consultation or conversation having occurred between those promoting this agenda of replacement and the vast majorities of the indigenous peoples of the Old Continent — the home of democracy, liberty and human rights. 

    The chief instrument of this ruse is the use of the spell-word ‘racism’ to intimidate the indigenous populations of Europe into silence in the face of their own obliteration. In this process, the word is used as a cultural cattle-prod to humiliate and punish those who dissent or protest, isolating them from their fellows as examples of nefarious defenders of past injustice and wrongdoing, and purported continuing harmful discrimination. It is an objectively astonishing thing that the fear of being sanctioned with this word is sufficient to outweigh even the inevitable consequences, which include the loss of just about everything Europe has achieved, promised and stood for, as well as the personal cost, which amounts to the existential and metaphysical homelessness of the successors of each European currently answering to that categorisation. 

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