Gun & Prepping News #107

Some links that may be of interest: 

• "Should I Appendix Carry?"--Ammo Land.  The author discusses several advantages to appendix carry: that your hands naturally fall to the front of the belt line where you would carry a firearm in appendix carry; that it is easier to reach and draw the handgun when seated; and there is a shorter distance (and, thus, time) from the draw to presentation when compared to a standard 3 or 4 o-clock hip carry position. The author concludes and sums up:

 Remember, your finger does not touch the trigger until you are ready to fire. As I mentioned, I like the economy of movement in the appendix draw. Support hand pulls up the shirt tail, shooting hand grips and withdraws the pistol, and then you can use a one-hand grip to make close shot or two-hand grip for a more distant shot. Works for me.

• "Diamondback SDR-A Black: CADRE NEWS"--Safariland.  The article notes that "Diamondback Firearms expands its lightweight SDR-A revolver lineup with the SDR-A Black, a six-shot .38 Special +P revolver featuring a black anodized frame, a black nitride stainless-steel cylinder, and a black PX5-finished stainless-steel barrel shroud." Only 15.6 ounces. 
• "Springfield M1A Standard Issue: The M14 Still Hits Hard"--Guns America. Before reviewing the Springfield offering, the article provides some background on the M14 and why it failed as a standard issue rifle, stating:

    The honest answer for why the M14 failed as a standard-issue rifle is that it was built for a war that never happened, and when the next war did happen, which was in Vietnam, it performed poorly. The M14 was designed in the era of wood and steel just after WWII and the onset of the Cold War. U.S. military strategists were convinced the next world war would be in Europe. And why wouldn’t they? Both World War I and World War II took place in Europe where long rifle shots decided the outcome of a battle. The U.S. Army brass loved the M1 Garand and wanted an updated version of the M1. After all, the M1 Garand performed well in WWII and in the Korean War. It just needed some updates like a detachable box magazine and maybe a less powerful caliber, and make the new rifle lighter, too.

[snip]

    The M14 was adopted in 1959 and deep-sixed in 1964; quickly replaced with the M16. The next war wasn’t in Europe but in a country few Americans knew about or could even pronounce. The place was Vietnam. The M14 proved to be heavy and long for combat in dense jungle vegetation. The wood stock would swell in the humidity, decreasing its effectiveness. In full-auto mode, the rifle was difficult if not impossible, to control. ... 

• "How the 1911 Evolved Into the 2011, and Took Over the Handgun Market"--Ammo Land.  After going over the design and development of the 1911, the article continues:

    During the 1980s, not everyone was convinced that the newest high-capacity 9mm pistols represented the pinnacle of handgun design. Gunsmith Virgil Tripp believed that competitive shooters in disciplines such as IPSC and USPSA shouldn’t have to sacrifice the superb trigger, ergonomics, and accuracy of the 1911 in exchange for increased magazine capacity.

    Combining the defining characteristics of Browning’s legendary design with a double-stack magazine and modern cartridges such as the 9mm seemed like a winning formula.

    In 1992, Tripp recruited engineer Sandy Strayer to help bring that vision to life. Together, the pair developed the first iteration of what would become known as the 2011, which debuted in 1994.

    The pistol featured a patented modular three-piece design consisting of a steel frame and a polymer grip module that accepted double-stack magazines. This modular design became one of the defining characteristics of the platform, allowing shooters to benefit from reduced weight, improved ergonomics, and increased magazine capacity while maintaining the proven operating system of the 1911.

    The combination proved successful. The platform quickly established itself as an exceptionally accurate and competitive handgun.

    The two founded Strayer Tripp International (STI) to manufacture the new platform, though the partnership proved to be short-lived as Strayer eventually departed to form his own company. STI continued refining the design and, over time, became the leading name in the 2011 market before eventually rebranding as Staccato. 

 Then, after key patents expired in 2016, other manufacturers were able to enter the 2011 market. 

•  "Stock Storage On Steroids: The New Magpul DT-S Carbine Stock"--The Truth About Guns. From the lede: "If the battery in your red dot has ever gone flat halfway through a range session while the spare CR123 was at home in a junk drawer, Magpul’s newest stock is aimed at you. The DT-S Carbine Stock takes the company’s Dual Tension design and adds two waterproof storage tubes. It’s available now with an MSRP of $94.95, and being the fan of Magpul that I am, I have one on the way already."
• Speaking of stocks: "Gear Review: Layerform Precision LP 3D Printed Chassis for Crickett Youth Rifles"--Shooting News Weekly. Crickett rifles, for those of you who don't know, are small single shot .22 rifles intended for children to shoot. The stocks and sights are cheap, however. Layerform produces a 3-D printed chassis, stock, and Picatinny rail, that can transform the rifle into a mini-sized version of a precision rifle. The article cites a price of $59.95. This is misleading on two fronts: first, the price listed at the manufacturer's site is actually $90 give or take a penny. But this is only for the chassis. The stock will run another $100 and the Picatinny rail is yet another purchase.
• Guns are supposed to be fun: "FarrowTech’s FT-M Kit: The Halo Magnum at Home"--Gat Daily.  Key point: "Their FT-M conversion kit transforms KelTec’s P17 into something that most gamers will recognize as the M6 Magnum from the Halo universe. It’s not an exact replica, and it isn’t meant to be. But it does capture the overall look and feel while remaining an affordable, practical upgrade to KelTec’s inexpensive .22 LR pistol."
• "6 Best Shooting Gloves in 2026: Our Picks, Field-Tested"--Gun University.  The author considered four general categories: Best Tactical Gloves; Best Gloves for Dexterity; Best Abrasion-Resistant Gloves; and Best Basic All-Around Gloves. The one that they rated highest overall was the Oakley Factory Pilot Gloves. 
• More: "The 6 Best Shooting Gloves We've Tested"--ShellShock Protection.  Their number one choice was the Magpul Patrol Glove 2.0. 
• "Firearms Action Shooting Trials: The 2-Gun Event You Need to Do"--Recoil Magazine. An excerpt:

    FAST stages are dynamic, difficult, and exciting. Over eight stages, we fired more than 550 rifle rounds and 400 pistol rounds. Over 100-round stages (with misses) are the norm for FAST. From a rooftop to down in a trench, sprinting uphill and back downhill to find targets in the sand, or choosing your fate between quickly engaging targets at 300 to 500 yards, or going for the big-time bonuses at 720 yards.

    One standout stage at FAST-Idaho included starting seated in a dune buggy and riding around while the driver did a quick donut in the bay to kick up a ton of dust before letting you loose — as soon as the buggy stopped, the timer started. Engage pistol steel targets at 50 yards for 20 hits, sprint to a brokendown bus in another bay then engage five rifle targets at 50 to 150 yards. Get out of the bus, move into the bay, and shoot more targets from the door of a broken-down truck. Sprint forward to a van and do it again from the hood, then shoot through the van’s broken windows. Crawl through the van with all your gear, then sprint to another SUV, and do it one more time from the hood and through more broken windows. Whew! 

• I doubt anything has changed. "Active Shooter Response: What Changed Post-Uvalde"--The Firearm Blog. The author begins:

For almost twenty years, the message to patrol was simple: if there is an active shooter, you go in. You do not wait for a team. You do not wait for a plan. Single officer, two officers, whatever you have, you move to the threat, and you stop the killing. That doctrine did not come from nowhere. It came from Columbine, where officers set a perimeter and waited while people died inside. The lesson everyone took from Columbine was that waiting kills. Uvalde showed that the lesson did not stick, or more accurately, that writing a doctrine and building the capability to execute it are two very different things.

He also notes:

Here is the uncomfortable part. The doctrine was already correct before Uvalde. Immediate action against an active shooter has been the national standard since the mid 2000s. ALERRT, the training center at Texas State that writes much of the country's active shooter curriculum, had taught the single-officer entry concept for years. Uvalde's policy was not wrong. The execution collapsed anyway.

     The Texas House investigative report documented that 376 law enforcement officers massed at Robb Elementary. The gunman was in the classrooms for approximately 77 minutes—from about 11:33 a.m. until officers fatally shot him at 12:50 p.m.; officers entered at about 12:49 p.m. through a door that was likely unlocked. Think about those two numbers together. Three hundred seventy-six officers. Seventy-seven minutes. That is not a personnel shortage. That is not a shortage of guns. It is a failure of command, communication, and the assumption that doctrine written in a binder would translate into action under live fire from a rifle.

    The failure was structural, not a matter of individual nerve. When 376 officers from different agencies arrive at one scene with no established incident command, no radio interoperability, and no shared understanding of who is in charge, you do not get 376 responders. You get a crowd. Officers deferred to a supervisor they believed was running the scene. The Uvalde police response was shaped by a mistaken belief that the gunman was barricaded or contained rather than an active shooter, which changes everything, because a barricade justifies waiting and an active shooter never does. The misclassification cascaded. Everyone downstream acted on a label that was wrong from the start.

    The lesson patrol should take is not "those officers failed." The lesson is that a correct doctrine sitting on top of a broken command and communication structure produces a broken response. The operational consequence is direct: if your agency has an active shooter policy but has never tested it against a multi-agency, no-command, radios-not-talking scenario, you have a document, not a capability.

 There is a lot more, so be sure to read the whole thing. 

• Spooky: "An Accursed and Desolate Land- America’s Haunted Southern Border"--Everyman Commentary. Citing to the book Out on Foot – Nightly Patrols and Ghostly Tales of a U.S. Border Patrol Agent by Rocky Elmore, the author of the article relates:

     Although large portions of the land along our southern border are isolated, this does not necessarily mean it is uninhabited. Elmore has stated that hunting shacks and people living off the grid who can be found out there. Unfortunately, he also encountered other more ominous signs such as “rape trees,” evidence of fires littered with charred bones, in one case a life-sized mannequin tied to a tree, and what he referred to as a witch’s camp (which he concluded based on the items he saw there). Then he shares some of the supernatural encounters that Elmore and other agents experienced.

    The first account he describes is the sighting of the ghost of a young girl wearing what appeared to be a white night gown which usually appears around three AM in the morning. One agent reported seeing the ghost walking along a ridge at night, which at first he thought was a real girl, but then realized the figure that he was looking at had a strange “white glow.” When he went to go investigate, the figure disappeared. Another agent reported seeing the ghost of a girl floating facedown in a river and ran back to his truck to radio for help. But when he looked over at the river again, the girl was gone. Before he had time to process what had happened he saw the girl standing next to him—she was glowing, but had no face- before disappearing. Then there was the story of a gate which belonged to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) that they patrolled and occasionally had to pass through. More than a few agents reported seeing the ghost of a girl while driving at night (and strangely also around 3 AM). The ghostly figure appeared and disappeared, and never said or did anything, but simply stared (without a face) at the agents.

There's more, so read the whole thing.

RPG Saturday: "The Scott Brown Incident"

The primary purpose of TTRPGs is entertainment, but it isn't like playing a card game, a game of chess, or other board games. In a TTRPG you engage in an adventure vicariously through a character. An imaginary adventure, to be sure, but the results can sometimes be truly memorable. In the video below, Seth Skorkowsky recounts one such game session--one of his most popular "war stories" videos.

 VIDEO: "RPG War Stories - The Scott Brown Incident"
Seth Skorkowsky (11 min.) 

VIDEO: An Explanation of Peter Turchin's "End Times"

I have frequently written or mentioned Peter Turchin's book, End Times, in this blog, including this review from 2023 and this 2024 post on what Turchin calls the wealth pump. The video, below, presents his ideas as well, focusing on the two key drivers of revolution: popular immiseration and elite overproduction. If you want a quick overview of Turchin's ideas and research, this is a good source.  

 VIDEO: "This Book Explains Why Our Elites Are Cheering on The Collapse"
RuminationNationOfficial (21 min.)

 And while we are on this subject, you might want to watch the video from Tucker Carlson, below, that discusses topics that are or soon will be exacerbating popular immiseration, elite overproduction, and the wealth pump: AI will soon be putting millions of white collar workers our of work; and the continued importation of foreign labor at the same time as jobs disappear. In the first video, above, the host described the issue with elite overproduction being too many elites for too many positions. He used the example of musical chairs except that the number of chairs remains the same, but the number of players keeps increasing. What the combination of AI and immigration will do is start removing chairs as the same time the number of players increase--this is a perfect storm for fomenting the unrest necessary for civil war. Worse, as Tucker points out, there are many things that could be done to encourage immigrants to leave the country but no one (i.e., Congress) is doing anything about it. (As an aside, I think that Tucker is too critical of Trump on this point--most of the ideas that Tucker suggests cannot be carried out by the President but would require Congress to change the law).   

VIDEO: "It’s a Recipe for Revolution, Chaos, and Collapse…"
Tucker Carlson Network (11 min.)

Not A Headline You See Everyday

New York Post: "Man dies after eating bomb disguised as sweet dessert: ‘It exploded in his mouth’."

    An Indian man died Tuesday after eating an explosive that was disguised as a sweet dessert dumpling.

    The 35-year-old victim, Rajendra Barautiya, had finished eating dinner with his family and was sitting by a bonfire outside his home when a neighbor handed him what appeared to be a rasgulla — a popular sweet made from cottage cheese, according to India Today.

    The supposed traditional treat was actually a ball of cheese dough filled with gunpowder, which is a trick used by villagers in Madhya Pradesh’s Dindori district to kill wild boars.

Gunpowder doesn't just explode like that. I wonder what was really in it. One theory is that it had Armstrong's mixture, "a highly sensitive primary explosive invented by Sir William Armstrong prior to 1872. It is composed primarily of potassium chlorate and red phosphorus, making it extremely reactive to slight friction, heat, shock, or static electricity."

Weekend Reading #80

Some longer or more involved reading:

• First up is this weekend's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Greg Ellifritz. Some of the links that I thought more notable:
• "Feels like old times again here in the future" from Bendigo Strange notes that a foreign adversary no longer needs an EMP to take down infrastructure, but can do it via hacking (something that has only become easier with the help of AI). And I found this point to be interesting:

... The United States has a GDP (gross national product of nearly $33 trillion dollars. The next nearest is China at $21 trillion and that is optimistic at best. China has long been suspected of being deceitful about their population being 1.4 billon with some open source intelligence numbers claiming their population being as low as 500 million. Despite what Beijing claims nearly every economic intelligence analyst agrees China’s economy is no longer merely slowing it is actively collapsing.  

• An article warning of phishing attacks using texts about packages not being able to be delivered and requesting a whole bunch of personal information.
• An article where the author describes the 5 things he has learned shooting shotguns. Pay particular attention to the sections on accessories and batteries. Shotguns beat things up.
• A look at the advantages of a revolver over a semiauto for deep concealment.
• A link to a video from Gun Sam Revolver Ballistics testing Federal Train & Protect in .380 ACP. This is something I watched earlier this week, and the results from the ammunition from both a short barrelled pocket pistol and larger firearm were both excellent for .380 providing both good penetration and good expansion. I'm going to try this out. I have been getting the HST, but it is expensive. This looks like it works just as well and is probably a lot less expensive.
• Eleven people describe what it was like getting shot. 
• Greg links to a website allowing you to compare the performance of various weapon mounted lights or tactical flashlights from various manufacturers. I have several Olight products, so I was glad to see that the Olight brand was included.
• An article entitled "Burn Casualty Resuscitation: When IV Fluids Run Out" which goes over the research on using oral hydration methods to treat burn casualty victims. The primary advantage, noted in the article, is not necessarily to replace IV fluids when they run out, but conserve IV fluid for those suffering the most severe burns who really need it. 
• Finally, Greg links to a piece listing the "50 Best Books for Boys and Young Men." I've read most of the books on the list and would generally concur with the list. The author recommends the Hardy Boys series, but only the ones published between 1927 and 1959 before they publisher started reworking the stories into the blue spine versions, which I wholeheartedly agree with. If you can't find print editions, I recently linked to a site that has many of these original ones that can be downloaded in epub format or PDFs to read on an electronic device. 

However, there are a few books on the list that I would suggest be avoided. First is The Lord Of The Flies. There is nothing redeeming about this book (the author's primary motivation for writing it was because he hated the other kids at his boarding school) and it is completely backwards of what actually happened when a bunch of boys were marooned on an desert island (see my post "The Real 'Lord of the Flies'").  If surviving being marooned on an island is of interest, then substitute in Robinson Crusoe or The Swiss Family Robinson. 

 

The author also includes Neil Gaiman’s The Graveyard Book. While I haven't read this particular book, given the scandals that have arisen over Neil Gaiman, I would advise against letting your kids read anything by Gaiman. The author of this article suggested Gaiman's book as a substitute for Kipling's The Jungle Book. But why? Just let them read Kipling's work. 

 

The author also lists The Red Badge Of Courage, a favorite of English teachers everywhere (which is in itself a warning) but not of mine. The article does not include Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain, which I thought was strange. I would substitute Huckleberry Finn for The Red Badge Of Courage, mostly because Huckleberry Finn teaches about actual courage.

 

I was disappointed that other than a comic-book version of the Odyssey, there were no classics included in the list. 

 

And a final thought: don't forget short stories and novella. "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow" is a classic for a reason, and some of the works of Poe should interest boys (e.g., his story "The Gold Bug" is a straight up treasure hunt/mystery). And there are many more from other authors. 

• "Historians Say They’ve Solved the Mystery of a Curious 100-Year-Old Contraption Discovered in Storage"--Smithsonian Magazine (Nov. 2024). From the article:

    The saga began late last month, when the Dorchester County Historical Society posted photos of the machine on its Facebook page. In the post, the society asked followers if they had any idea what the device was or what industry it was used for.

    The device sits on a ceramic countertop and features two elongated metal cylinders that sit parallel to one another. The bottom cylinder is smooth, like a rolling pin, while the top cylinder is dotted with protruding hexagonal nubs.

    The gadget has a relatively modern motor, but all of the other pieces are around 100 years old. It’s been sitting in storage since the 1990s. Records suggest that another historical society in Delaware donated a similar machine, but they do not offer any other insights about the donation.

And what was it? "The strange artifact is a mechanical 'beaten biscuit' maker, used to make a type of dense baked good that was historically popular in the American South."

• "Ha Long Bay, an ancient cradle of mankind"--Saigon News (2018). An excerpt:

    Until five or six thousand years ago, the Red River flowed through Ha Long Bay, which was then dry land, and down through a vast fertile plain that ended near the tip of what is now Hainan Island. Most of this plain is now buried under the waters of the Gulf of Tonkin.
In those ancient times, the river flowed into a sea that was about 120 metres below its present level, like most seas and oceans around the world.

    However, as the earth began warming 27,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age, seas around the world began rising gradually until they reached their present levels about 5,000 years ago.

    The inundation, part of a world event referred to in ancient Mesopotamian texts and the Bible, swamped a vast area of coastline around the world, particularly in South-east Asia and Australia to the South. This gave birth to oral histories still repeated by native people in Australia and New Guinea – and by all ethnic groups throughout Vietnam. An article on the subject by the late ethnologist Dang Nghiem Van, The Flood Myth and Origin of Ethnic Groups in South-east Asia, was published in 1993.

    Vạn, director of the Center for Study of Religion and former vice-director of the Institute of Ethnology in Hà Nội, collected 300 stories of an ancient flood in his travels throughout Vietnam. They were published by the American Folklore Society in its journal. Vạn, Vietnam’s prominent historian and ethnologist, died in 2016.

    Geologists today refer to the two pre-flood land masses as Sundaland (Southeast Asia) and Sahul (Australia, Tasmania and New Guinea).

    Southeast Asia was then basically one large land mass stretching like a giant udder from what is now Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and Vietnam to embrace Malaysia, Sumatra and most of the islands as far as Java.

    It was a vast, fertile region fed by silt from rivers flowing for millenia from the slowly rising Himalayas – including the Red River and the Mekong. The rich plains, including what is today the Gulf of Tonkin, now home to Ha Long Bay, are believed to have held a large population of Austronesian speaking people, including the small, dark Negritos who still remain in pockets throughout former Sundaland – and once even as far as the rainforests of northern Australia and Tasmania. 

• "Why haven't we found intelligent alien civilizations? There may be a 'universal limit to technological development’"--Space.com. Rather than a great filter which weeds out or kills off technologically advanced civilizations, the theory discussed in this article suggests that there may be limits to technology that limit the ability of an intelligent species to expand throughout the galaxy. An excerpt:

    Nobel prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman once said, "What I cannot create, I do not understand." The most straightforward interpretation of this is that our technology — what we can create — is constrained by our knowledge. 

    There are, of course, natural limits to human technology. We can't travel in a straight line faster than the speed of light, for example. There may also be natural barriers to human knowledge — facts about the universe that are forever inaccessible to us due to the configuration of our biology. Sure, we have created technology that scaffolds our senses and cognition: Microscopes let us peer into the world of the small, telescopes provide a window into the world of the big, and computers crunch numbers and data that our individual minds are incapable of processing. 

    However, the technologies and experiments that allow us to expand our knowledge are coming at an ever-increasing price. Projects like the Large Hadron Collider at CERN ($4.75 billion to construct and $286 million annually), the International Space Station ($3 billion per year), and the international effort to achieve nuclear fusion at ITER (an estimated $18 billion to $20 billion for construction) show that human efforts to probe our scientific horizons require increasing energy and resources. 

    "If we are candid about it, the fact is that the last major fundamental advances in the science of the universe (macro- and micro-realms, cosmology and quantum mechanics) are almost a hundred years old," Gelis-Filho said. 

• "The Two Empires We Must Defeat" by Daniel Greenfield (2014). Greenfield begins:

    There is a thread that connects many of our conflicts, whether it's the one against terrorism or the one between the Republican establishment and its conservative insurgency. To win a war, we have to understand the nature of the conflict and how we got there. And that's often the missing piece.

    The left blames imperialism for our conflict with terrorists. And it's right. Just not in the way that it thinks.

    Empires may be expansionist, but they're also tolerant and multicultural. They have to be, since out of their initial phase they have to enlist the cooperation and services of subjects from a variety of cultures and religions. An empire may initially be fueled by the talents and skills of a core nation, but as it reaches its next phase, it begins sacrificing their interests to the larger structure of empire.

    The argument between the establishments of the right and the left is over two different kinds of empires. The Republican establishment in America and its various center-right counterparts abroad have attached themselves to the liberal vision of a transnational empire of international law so much that they have forgotten that this vision came from the left, rather than from the right.

    This Empire of International Law proved to have some uses for global trade and security, particularly during the Cold War. These practical arrangements however are overshadowed by the fact that it, like every empire, sacrifices the interests of its peoples to its own structure. This is true of the structure at every level, from the EU to the Federal structure of the United States. The system has displaced the people. And the system runs on principles that require cheap labor leading to policies like amnesty.

    The Empire of International Law needs Muslim immigrants even if its people don't, because it envisions integrating them and their countries into this arrangement and rejects national interests as narrow-minded and nativist.

    This formerly liberal vision now embraced largely by centrists is the left's vision, which includes today's liberals, is of a completely transnational ideological empire in which there are no borders, but there are countless activists, in which everything and everyone are controlled by the state.

    Like the more conventional imperial vision, the left's red Empire of Ideology depends on enlisting Muslims and Muslim countries into its ranks. This is the basis of the Red-Green alliance.

    These two types of imperialists are incapable of representing native workers or communities because they are transnationalists. Their vision is cosmopolitan, rather than representative. They are entranced with a byzantine international arrangement and uninterested in the lives of the people they are ruining.

    This Imperial blindness is why the West is falling so swiftly to Islam. It's why the pockets of resistance are coming from nations outside the imperial sphere. 

How To Take Notes To Help You Learn

 From Psyche magazine: "How to take notes that actually help you learn." A summary of the main points:

1.     Taking notes to learn is different from taking them to record. Sometimes you need to take down as much as possible. But if you hope to internalise the information, you’ll want to process it as you take notes.
2.     Use paper if possible. Since it slows you down, you have to decide what the most important pieces of information are before putting them on paper, which supports learning.
3.     Experiment with ways of processing. Organise the information in your own way – try making summaries, bulleted lists, drawings or charts – and note links between what you’re learning and other things you know.
4.     Try a structured approach. In the Cornell notetaking system, you complement your main notes with a summary at the bottom and cues to practise recalling the information later.
5.     Adopt a better review strategy. Don’t just reread or copy your notes – reorganise them in some way. Then test your memory and understanding and check your notes to see what you’re missing.
6.     Use AI tools selectively. They can be helpful for creating detailed records, but don’t rely only on AI notes if you’re trying to learn.

Signs Of Late Empire: How Texas Dems Could Ground Space X

This article from Texas Monthly, "How Texas’s New Leaders Could Ground SpaceX," explains that Texas has a state constitutional provision giving Texans a right to access public beaches, which includes Boca Chica Beach. 

    But in 2013, the Texas Legislature passed a statute enabling the General Land Office to allow closures for spaceflight activity. This was done as the state was enticing SpaceX to build a spaceport in Cameron County. Without this exemption, Boca Chica Beach couldn’t be shut down on SpaceX’s behalf, meaning its rockets couldn’t fly from Starbase. 

    Now incoming land commissioner Benjamin Flores, once he’s sworn in on January 19, plans to “request an opinion from the Attorney General on the constitutionality of the beach closure statute,” Flores’s chief of staff, Alex Martinez, told Texas Monthly.

    The AG’s job is to serve as general counsel for the governor, the Legislature, and state agencies. If Attorney General–elect Nathan Johnson were to determine that the exemption for spaceflight activities is unconstitutional, that opinion would provide legal guidance for the GLO and other state agencies. Flores would keep Boca Chica open. SpaceX’s federal permitting does not allow for launches in that case.      

The article points out that SpaceX would probably sue, but, in Texas, these guidances from the AG's office are apparently given a great deal of deference by the courts. Failing a lawsuit, however, the article points out:

Musk will soon have other places to launch rockets, if Blue Texas proves inhospitable. One of two new Starship launchpads in Florida is already complete, with an inaugural launch expected before year’s end. SpaceX this year also announced the formation of Starbase Louisiana, a much larger version of the manufacturing and launch facilities now in Cameron County. The new spaceport may have as many as ten launchpads, compared with Starbase Texas’s two.  

There are other ways that the new Democrat leaders of Texas will be able to hurt SpaceX:

    A moratorium and subsequent regulation of data centers could kneecap Musk’s plans for one at Starbase. State approval for a natural gas power plant there, with a pipeline, also could be slower and more particular than the company is used to. The governor-appointed Public Utility Commission of Texas could become a crucial gatekeeper. SpaceX may want these projects to scale up its operations, but they aren’t strictly needed to host the launches it needs to develop Starship for NASA. 

    Musk’s plan for the city of Starbase was to create a self-sustaining town, complete with its own private school, accredited police force, and employees-only bar. But each piece of infrastructure that’s denied increases Starbase’s reliance on the rest of Texas, and the planet. “Data centers in space looking pretty appealing right now,” Musk posted on X just after Hinojosa’s win was announced. 

Robert Heinlein's 1966 novel, The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress, hypothesized a lunar colony declaring independence from Earth's governments, but perhaps it will come sooner and at low earth orbit. 

    What we see unfolding against Musk is common in the late stages of Empire. Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged, is premised on this behavior, although in her book it was a railroad tycoon that was targeted rather than the man leading the charge into space. But it recurs over and over in dying empires as the video below describes. As the video explains, this is part of a great inversion: "Every dying institution reaches a terminal threshold where the men who build the foundation are treated as criminals and the men who loot the treasury are elevated as guardians." The video alternates between applying this to polities and businesses. 

VIDEO: "Why Dying Societies Punish Builders and Reward Parasites — Spengler & Machiavelli"
The Machiavelli Mind (25 min.)

Continuity of Goverment: A Review of "Raven Rock"

Last year, Homestead Rebel published a review of the 2017 book Raven Rock: The Story of the U.S. Government's Secret Plan to Save Itself - While the Rest of Us Die. The book served as the basis for the VICE TV six-part documentary series Why the Rest of Us Die: Secrets of America's Shadow Government. The reviewer notes:

Since Eisenhower, the federal government has built, staffed, maintained, continuously upgraded, and operated innumerable facilities nationwide (mostly in the Appalachian mountains), including “bunkers” like Raven Rock in Pennsylvania, and Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado. Preppers get a bad name, but for a few government elites in particular, the taxpayers have been funding preparations for generations. Of course it goes way, way beyond the bunkers, to include necessary evacuation (by plane, train, automobile, water craft, helicopter and more) of the select few, the feeding and care of the select few, the physical security of the select few, etcetera, etcetera, ad infinitum. It’s impossible to say with certainty because everything is of course “classified,” meaning the loyal subjects don’t need to know, but I’d guess we’ve spent at least a trillion dollars since WW II on CoG. That’s just a guess, and probably well shy of the actual total.

The problem is that none of these preparations are for us. Sure, there was a civil defense program for a while, but that was killed off by President Carter leaving us with FEMA, whose primary job is to help state and local emergency services coordinate, apply for federal funds, and provide some limited material support.  Or, as the author of the review puts it: "FEMA is a product of CoG planning, and for its part couldn’t even handle a regional extreme weather event, like hurricane Katrina. FEMA didn’t even bother with North Carolina; probably thinking of the citizenry as 'dissidents' unworthy of support."

    And if there was a nuclear exchange or some other event requiring the full Continuity of Government program to kick into place? The reviewer asserts:

... The Constitution would be torn up and thrown overboard, martial law would be instituted. That is the plan, I’m not making it up. The government would take your home, your land, any working vehicles, and food you might have stored, for its own purposes, or for redistribution, as the government, and only the government, sees fit. Property rights…gone. Individual liberty…gone. Free speech…gone (censorship is part of the plan). Foreign “aliens” would be rounded up, together with citizen-dissidents (it is planned); what happens to them is anyone’s guess, but no doubt the government would not have access to the resources necessary to incarcerate millions of people that they suspect might present a threat to the government. 

It's not clear to me if this is from the book or the reviewer's own opinions. It is my understanding that the Continuity of Government plans do not specifically authorize the declaration of martial law. But the federal government as well as state and local government often have emergency powers and authority that probably could replicate most aspects of martial law if fully implemented. And there is a big difference between what happens on the ground versus what is--eventually--determined to be unlawful. Just look at the response to Hurricane Katrina, with with door-to-door search and seizure of firearms, armed troops patrolling the streets, local governments that blocked bridges preventing evacuations through their communities, and more.  

    NPR ran a short piece about the book back in 2017 and have an interesting bit where the author of the book relates the impetus to researching and writing the book:

    Several years ago, when Garrett Graff was working at Washingtonian magazine, a coworker brought him a lost ID badge that he'd found on the floor of a parking garage.

    "It was a government ID for someone from the intelligence community, and he gave it to me since I write about that subject, and he's like, "I figure you can get this back to this guy,' " Graff recalls.

    There were driving directions on the back of the ID, so Graff looked it up on Google Maps, and it led him to West Virginia. "The road dead ends into the side of a mountain," he says, "And you can see very clearly these big concrete bunker doors — this little guard shack, chain-link fence, and then this set of concrete bunker doors beyond."

    Graff had stumbled onto one of the government bunkers designed to protect U.S. leaders in the event of a nuclear, chemical or biological weapon attack — most of which were built at the outset of the atomic age and throughout the Cold War.

    "It was a facility that I had never heard of, that wasn't on any map ..." Graff says. "It just made me so curious to go back and understand what the history of these plans were, and what they are in modern times as well."

More:

• "Is the State of Emergency Superseding the US Constitution? Continuity of Government Planning, War and American Society"--Asia Pacific Journal (2010). You can download a PDF of the article at the link. 

•  "United States federal government continuity of operations"--Wikipedia. 

Indy Neidell Drops First Video In Roman Empire Series

This relatively short video is intended to give you a preview of what the series will look like when it starts in February. It introduces us to Julius Caeser's dilemma as he contemplate crossing the Rubicon. The official Kickstarter has also launched: link here.  

 VIDEO: "Render Unto Caesar | The Roman Empire With Indy Neidell - Official Project Launch!"
The Roman Empire With Indy Neidell (9 min.)

Outdoor Life: A Tale Of Sled Dogs And Polar Bears

This is an entertaining read: "My Best Sled Dog Tangled with Polar Bears, Hunted Birds, and Saved My Life More Times Than I Can Count" by Frank Dufresne from the March 1950 issue of Outdoor Life. An excerpt:

    ... When the blizzard smote us in the dusk of early afternoon I’d been mushing my string of fifteen Siberian huskies across a neck of land well known among the Eskimos as a crossing p lace for polar bears. I was pushing hard to reach a deserted sod igloo a few miles down the coast. The screaming, wailing snowfall had stopped all that. There was but one thing left to do: turn the loaded sled on its side, drive the iron brakes deep into the hard-packed drifts, and start to build a snow-block ice house. It wasn’t an easy job. I was dangerously stupefied by cold before I had finished the hollow half-sphere of porous snow. But there were still chores to be done before I could crawl into its shelter.

    To each dog I tossed a nightly ration of dried salmon and blubber, and they came shaking themselves out of their snow burrows to seize the food before the wind ripped it away. From the sled I took sleeping bag, grub box, and primus stove, and dragged the load through an opening in the snow house. Then, followed by Jack Frost-the white leader who always shared such hardy comforts as the winter trail afforded — I crawled inside and plugged the opening behind me with a snow block saved for the purpose. I got the primus stove going, and in a few moments the constricted chamber became fairly comfortable. It started out to be just another night on the tundra — and then came the tense warning of the white leader. 

    Now he growled again, then barked savagely. Outside, I heard the other huskies take up the outcry. And as they did I became aware of a faint rumbling, a sound that grew from a mere vibration to the swelling rumble of drums. I knew then the terror that was descending upon us — a stampede of a great reindeer herd!

    By now, my whole team had joined with the screeching storm to produce a hysterical, blood-chilling chorus. Against it grew the thunderous roar of hoof beats, coming closer and closer. For one breathless moment the vibrating snow house seemed about to collapse. Then, all at once, it was over. The vibrations faded, and there was only the wind thudding and shoving against the snow house.

    Death had brushed by, with only yards to spare. Once again, my white leader’s uncanny alertness and intelligence had roused the other dogs. The stampeding reindeer-terrified perhaps by marauding wolves-had been turned almost at the last moment by the wild clamor of my team. Splendid Alaska Hunting It was all over now. Yet there was to be no sleep for me the rest of that long night. Half in the sleeping bag, shoulders protected by my sik-sik-puk parka, I lifted the primus stove out of its wooden case and touched it off. When the flame turned blue-green, I scooped a pot of snow off the ceiling and made a cup of coffee. Jack Frost crept close and shoved a cold nose into my hand to remind me that whenever I ate, he also got his share. I looked down on this remarkable dog who had saved my life on more than one occasion (and was to do it again). As I fed him a pilot biscuit my mind raced back to the day when I had lifted him from his mother’s breast and cuddled his white, woolly body in the palms of my two hands. That meeting had been a fateful one for both of us. Out of it had grown thousands of adventurous miles over the silent white spaces of northern Alaska. Out of it had come thrills and dangers, and an understanding between dog and man that I never would have believed possible if it had not happened to me.