Weekend Reading #64

•  First up is an article by Greg Ellifritz entitled "What an Escaped Mental Patient Taught Me." It is a look back to a different time. It was the 1980s and Greg was in high school, working a part-time job at a K-Mart department store when an escaped mental patient showed up and started doing crazy things. Ellifritz and some of the other young men working there were tasked to try and keep the crazy contained until police arrived. Anyway, a look back to the 1980s and an important life lesson for Ellifritz that has nothing to do with combat or self-defense.
• And another from Greg Ellifritz--this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump.  Some of the links that caught my attention in particular:

• Massad Ayoob's discussion on whether to engage or stand-down, which looks as some cases involving the initial aggressor rule and when a threat ceases to be a threat.  
• Mark Luell shares some of his experiences teaching a self-defense class; and, if you go to the bottom of the article, a link to where you can download a copy of the course curriculum.
• Massad Ayood discusses lethal force against a mob. Most of the article is about the trials of the soldiers involved in the Boston Massacre, but with some thoughts about the BLM riots of 2021 (when the article was written) thrown in.  But the article should really be taken as a lesson in how the law has shifted in the past 250 years from one where a mob included everyone in the group to now where a "mostly peaceful" protest group is comprised of  "homicidal aggressors being sharks swimming in the protective sea of peaceful protesters" against whom you cannot use lethal force. It is this shift that allows the "homicidal aggressors" to hide behind a wall of "peaceful protestors" as they deal their violence, or suddenly rush out to mete out their violence. 
• Another historical piece that looks at women's concealed carry on the American frontier. 
• And another historical piece--"I use State of the Art Technology"--that looks at the history of night sights, weapon mounted lights, and lasers.
• Matthew Donovan writes about "mouse guns" and the defensive niche they fill. If you scoff at the idea of ever carrying such tiny handguns, you might not be familiar with the first rule of a gun fight, which is to have a gun.
• An article discussing the overall decline in quality of Smith & Wesson revolvers, but also noting that Ruger is also experiencing declining quality in its revolver lines. 
• And an interesting piece from Matt Larsen on how drone warfare is actually increasing the odds of having to resort to hand-to-hand combat as troops are driven into bunkers and trenches. 

• This article was actually part of Greg's Weekend Knowledge Dump, but I decided to give it a different treatment because it is not related to self-defense or firearms: "Mate Selection for Modernity" from Quillette.  This is an article about hypergamy (which I've discussed many times before in this blog as well as when I was doing podcasts with John Wilder) and how it has changed the modern dating marketplace. An excerpt:

Dating and the process of mate selection have changed. The rise of hook-up culture, proliferation of dating apps, and ever-increasing age of first marriage are evidence of this. This current situation can be summarized along four parameters:

1. Increasing female achievement.
2. Growing variability in male status and competence.
3. An evolutionary desire among females to marry up.
4. The globalization of the sexual marketplace and resultant collapse of local status hierarchies.

Together, these conditions have created pronounced imbalances in the modern sexual marketplace. Put plainly, an increasing cohort of successful women are chasing a shrinking number of high-value, commitment-averse men.

Hypergamy works well for women in a male-dominated society. But not so much now:

    Successful women face a shortage of demographically superior men to marry. Indeed, the nascent decline in marriage has been attributed to a putative shortage of economically attractive partners for unmarried women. Applying data imputation methods to national survey data, researchers found that unmarried women face an overall shortage of partners with either a bachelor’s degree or yearly income exceeding $40,000.

    This asymmetry in the sexual marketplace has been well documented in Jon Birger’s book Date-onomics as well as an article penned by myself and Rob Henderson.

    Premised on sex ratios, a surplus of women in education and economic groups caters to men’s desire for multiple partners. The relative rarity of men within these groups means that women, in competition with other females, are more likely to conform to the sexual strategy of males. In these environments, hookup culture is more prevalent. In contrast, environments in which men are numerous see more long-term relationships.

Of course, women are to be pitied for being shallow, where if men refused to date or marry because of a shortage of attractive women, it would be considered evidence of misogyny. And on the subject of dating and meeting people, Greg also linked to this article: "How To Read People: 5 Secrets Backed By Research." But I've known women who understood what this article teaches and were quite skilled on using their body language to manipulate men. 

• We are finally on the cusp of really entering the space age. Robert Zubrin had once written that we would not see significant space exploration and development until launch costs fell below $1,000/kg. In "Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That’s finally changing," Stephen Clark discusses the impact of SpaceX's Starship, with more than 100 metric tons cargo capacity, noting:

    A new report from the Aerospace Corporation helps elucidate why satellite companies are optimizing for Starship. It’s big and reusable, and once operational, it could cut the cost of launching a kilogram of payload into orbit by an order of magnitude from the Falcon 9. This means costs could come down from a few thousand dollars per kilogram to a few hundred.

    Karen Jones, a space economist and lead author of the paper, said her research supports some of those optimistic cost projections. She outlines three scenarios, two of which assume an initial launch cost of $100 million for each fully reusable Starship and Super Heavy booster, with marginal costs of 20 or 35 percent. This is in line with the marginal costs of the smaller, partially reusable Falcon 9, which SpaceX can launch for as little as $15 million per flight on a dedicated Starlink mission.

    This would bring the per-kilogram launch cost for a fully loaded Starship down to $133 to $233 after 10 reuse cycles. A more optimistic scenario with a $50 million initial launch cost and 20 percent marginal cost would reduce payload costs to $67 per kilogram for a Starship/Super Heavy launch at full capacity after nine use cycles. That’s less than it costs to fill the gas tanks of most SUVs. If SpaceX can make these more optimistic ambitions a reality, it would validate a claim made by Elon Musk in 2022 that a Starship flight could eventually cost as little as $10 million.  

The future is bright provided we can survive The Great Filter: liberal women, mass immigration, and socialism.  

• There may be a way to finally give satellites infinite "fuel" for their thrusters: "'Acceleration without fuel:' Revolutionary superconducting thruster harnesses Earth's magnetic field in 1st orbital test"--Space.com. The article explains: "Superconducting magnets can convert solar energy directly into momentum in space and provide a source of acceleration that needs no fuel, but until recently, the technology was too large and complex to fit on a satellite. That's no longer the case." 
• And last, but certainly not least: "Here We Stand"--Wilder Wealth & Wise.  The principles that made the West great.