Weekend Reading #62

Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

• Active Response Training's Weekend Knowledge Dump for this week. A few of the links that caught my attention in particular:
• The Spectator Australia has a piece on crime in Australia, including this bit: "When we compare these broader estimates, Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates."
• Gat Daily has some tips on body language that will communicate that you are not a soft target to a criminal, such as "You should attempt to walk confidently, at a purposeful pace. Your arms should swing naturally and utilize full-body movement."
• Jerking the Trigger has a simple knife hack: using a static cord to hold the knife, allowing it to be completely carried completely concealed rather than wearing it on a belt.
• Gun Digest has some information on the legality of brandishing or displaying a firearm.
• For those that shoot revolvers in competition, Caleb Giddings has an article on determining if your .38 Special loads meet the necessary power factor.
• Urban Combatives has a video on using a water bottle in a sling bag as an improvised weapon.
• Tactical Wisdom discusses what it terms the three blade rule: that you should always have available to you a pocket folding-knife, a fixed-blade knife, and a multi-tool. The author contends that these three knives will allow you to solve most problems requiring blades and other tools. Greg, commenting on this article, also discusses why he does not carry a dedicated self-defense knife.
• Finally, an article on the dangers of bullet setback, which is often due to the constant unloading and loading of your duty or concealed carry weapon with the same bullet always being the one chambered. Each time you do that, the bullet is getting force applied and pushed slightly into the case. I also commonly see it with misfeeds, which can push a bullet quite far back into the case. The danger is that as the bullet is seated deeper, the gas pressure upon firing increases: "It’s estimated that 0.10 inch of bullet setback in the .40 Smith & Wesson can cause pressures to double."

• "CIA Drug Pilot Claims to Have Flown JFK Assassins Into Dallas"--Covert Action Magazine.  The article begins by noting:

    In a February 1985 episode of the hit NBC television series Miami Vice, Eagles singer Glenn Frey played a swashbuckling CIA pilot, Jimmy Cole, who flies ace detective Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Rafael Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) to Colombia to conduct a drug deal.

    Crockett and Tubbs had been recruited by the DEA to work undercover as drug smugglers to help bust cartel operatives. 

    Frey’s character was loosely modeled after Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, a CIA pilot whose exploits over a 40-year career are detailed in a new memoir, Deep Cover, Shallow Graves, with Ralph Pezzullo.

    Contrary to the depiction on Miami Vice, Plumlee’s memoir shows that the CIA often worked hand-in-glove with organized crime and was the one at times smuggling drugs into the U.S.

    Plumlee claims that, on the morning John F. Kennedy was killed, he flew Johnny Roselli, a CIA-Mafia liaison, and other members of the assassination team into Dallas.     

The article traces Plumlee's history from 1957, when he was helping run guns to Fidel Castro, to the 1980s when he was flying guns to the Contra rebels and bringing back drugs. The article also notes:

    Declassified FBI and CIA files from the 1990s, and as recently as 2023, confirm Plumlee’s role as a pilot with ties to several federal agencies, sometimes under the pseudonym of William H. “Buck” Pearson. Plumlee also testified multiple times under oath before congressional committees, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1990-1991).

    This testimony, Russell says, much of it originally classified as top secret, reveals not only Plumlee’s proximity to the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami in the early 1960s but his involvement in clandestine aviation activities during the 1980s “drug war.”

    Released documents in 2023 and 2025 provide further strong evidence supporting Plumlee’s having operated as a deep cover “asset,” challenging the FBI’s characterization of him as an “unreliable chronic complainant” who “gave confusing, illogical” accounts concerning the abort mission in Dallas. Senator Hart stated publicly that Plumlee’s information about the Kennedy assassination and CIA-mob connections was significant enough that he sought to follow up on it, only to be stymied by the powers that be. 

• "'Kill Your Parents' at the Obama Presidential Center"--Daniel Greenfield. At the recent opening of Obama's Presidential Library, the peasants "were forced to squat in camp chairs on the dying grass of what remained of a once beloved neighborhood park, burning in the hot sun, while their betters, politicians and celebrities, watched the spectacle up close."

    Media reporting spent a good deal of time spotting celebrities in the VIP section. There was a sprightly Tom Hanks in sunglasses, there was Oprah, on her fortieth diet, and girlfriend Gayle King, and LA Mayor Karen Bass who had to return home after Los Angeles burned again which seems to happen every time she leaves town.

    And then again there were the people who actually mattered, who had made Obama and the era of radicalism he brought into national politics, happen.

    “Dig it!” the old woman in the third row of the Obama Presidential Center, had once gloated over the brutal murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

    “Kill all the rich people,” the old man wearing the Communist ‘red star’ had defined his radical movement. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

    Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases.

• "Postmodern Marriage" by C. Bradley Thompson. An excerpt:

    We live in a postmodern age that seeks to change or destroy the core principles and institutions that are at the foundation not just of the West but of all civilizations. Under the long shadow cast by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse, we live in a time of nihilistic totalitarianism (nihilism is the means and totalitarianism is the end) that has as its direct goal the dismantling of those ways of living grounded in metaphysical reality.

    Let’s begin by putting our concerns in a broader context. Those who seek to destroy marriage, do so in the name of an ideological passion.

    When early twentieth-century Marxists realized that there would never be a proletarian revolution of oppressed workers because the working class was the greatest conservator of the bourgeois way of life, they recalibrated their strategy and decided that the values most important to the working class would have to be destroyed first and foremost. This led the twentieth-century Left on its “long march through the institutions” to extinguish those moral values and institutions that were suppressing and holding back the Marxist-Leninist revolution foretold by the laws of dialectical materialism. That’s when the Left discovered Nietzsche and Freud and began to wheedle away at the soul of Western man.

    After the Left captured and transformed the universities, schools, media, Hollywood, and various professional associations, etc., they went for civilization’s jugular. The single greatest scalp won by the Left in the last twenty years has been their corruption and transformation of the institution of marriage. The postmodern Left is now giggling as their minions have stripped marriage of its necessary component parts and left it corpse dangling for all to see and mock. (Apologies for mixing my metaphors!)

He goes on to describe post-modern marriage, which is defined more by what it is not than what it is. And because it is nothing concrete, it can therefore be anything. Or as the author puts it:

Ultimately, the postmodern definition of marriage is open-ended and therefore unintelligible. It has no objective referents other than whims and feelings; in fact, it represents an attempt to rewrite reality. But a concept that means everything means nothing. Ultimately, the argument for same-sex marriage is a case of ideological wish-fulfillment. 

Read the whole thing.

"Citizen Vigilante" Available On X For Free ... For Now

    The Realist has informed me that Elon Musk has posted the full movie of Citizen Vigilante on his X-account. I don't know if this is just for a limited time or not, so you might want to hurry if you want to watch it in that format. I'm sure that his reason for doing so is primarily to get around the European censors who want to ban the movie. 

    I'm planning on watching it this weekend and so will probably rent it from Amazon. 

    John Wilder has watched it and has some thoughts about it at Wilder, Wealthy and Wise. But for those that felt let down by some of the older vigilante movies, such as Death Wish, with its statistically improbable cast of criminals, John writes: "However, I’m going to make a bold statement:  this film is more red-pilled than Death Wish.  It is garlic to Hollywood’s© vampire." 

Some Interesting Animations Of The Messinian Salinity Crisis

We tend to think that the Earth is largely unchanging, only slowly reshaped over unimaginably long times. But of course the Earth, including its climate, constantly changes and fluctuates. For instance, we are currently in an interglacial period and the relative warmth we enjoy will eventually fade into another ice age. 

    Most of the time the changes are slow or minor, but occasionally something truly transformative occurs. One of these is the Messinian salinity crisis when the entrance to the Mediterranean Sea from the Atlantic Ocean was blocked, resulting in the Mediterranean Sea mostly drying out. From the Wikipedia article on the topic (footnotes omitted):

    The Messinian salinity crisis (also referred to as the Messinian event, and in its latest stage as the Lago Mare event) was an event in which the Mediterranean Sea went into a cycle of partial or nearly complete desiccation (drying-up) throughout the latter part of the Messinian age of the Miocene epoch, from 5.96 to 5.33 Ma (million years ago). It ended with the Zanclean flood, when the Atlantic reclaimed the basin.

    Sediment samples from below the deep seafloor of the Mediterranean Sea, which include evaporite minerals, soils, and fossil plants, show that the precursor of the Strait of Gibraltar closed about 5.96 million years ago, sealing the Mediterranean off from the Atlantic. This resulted in a period of partial desiccation of the Mediterranean Sea, the first of several such periods during the late Miocene. After the strait closed for the last time around 5.6 Ma, the region's generally dry climate at the time dried the Mediterranean basin out nearly completely within a thousand years. This massive desiccation left a deep dry basin, reaching 3 to 5 km (1.9 to 3.1 mi) deep below normal sea level, with a few hypersaline pockets similar to today's Dead Sea. Then, around 5.5 Ma, wetter climatic conditions resulted in the basin receiving more fresh water from rivers, progressively filling and diluting the hypersaline lakes into larger pockets of brackish water (much like today's Caspian Sea). The Messinian salinity crisis ended with the Strait of Gibraltar finally reopening 5.33 Ma, when the Atlantic rapidly filled up the Mediterranean basin in what is known as the Zanclean flood.

I found a few videos that have animated this drying and flooding event which I have placed below. The first video is primarily an animation; the second video goes into more detail on the conditions in the Mediterranean basin while it was dry; and the third is a more detailed presentation of the event.

VIDEO: "Full Mediterranean desiccation-and-reflooding video"
Daniel García-Castellanos (2 min.)

 

 

 VIDEO: "The Deadliest Desert on Earth Was Hidden Under the Mediterranean Sea"
The Sunken Map (3 min.)

  

 VIDEO: "The Mediterranean Sea Once Completely Dried Up"
Relict World (16 min.)

Looks Like The Supreme Court Had A Busy Morning

• "Supreme Court rules Trump can turn back asylum seekers at US border in major immigration win"--New York Post. Liberals argued that the invaders should be deemed to have "arrived" in the U.S. for purposes of asylum laws when they reached the border, but SCOTUS held that the common meaning of "arrived" applies, not almost here. Justice Sonia Sotomayor once again showed why she should not be on the Court complaining that the decision "extinguishes the light of the torch of the Statue of Liberty.” 
• "Supreme Court rules Trump can remove deportation protection from Haitians, Syrians"--New York Post.  It opens the door to more than 6,000 Syrians and 350,000 Haitians being deported. Most significant part, I think, was that SCOTUS is that when the applicable statute said there was no judicial review of decisions terminating Temporary Protected Status, it meant it--no more lower court meddling. 
• "Supreme Court strikes down Hawaii law requiring permission to carry guns in stores and hotels"--New York Post. The law that was struck down was of the type called a "Vampire rule" requiring the gun owner ask permission before entering an establishment. "The high court’s 6-3 decision means people can carry guns onto privately owned property like shopping malls and gas stations, unless the owners specifically say guns are banned at their establishments."

How Many .50 BMG To Penetrate A Concrete Highway Barrier?

The concrete barrier shrugged off the pistol velocity rounds (i.e., handguns and a subsonic .300 BLK), while rifle rounds made divots. But using what was described as .50 BMG silver tip bullets (presumably the armor-piercing incendiary rounds) it only took 3 rounds placed fairly close together to pierce through the barrier. Because these are steel reinforced, the concrete did not completely break apart as we see with tests against concrete blocks,albeit there was also significant cracking and loss of material on the front face. 

 

 VIDEO: "Can a Concrete Highway Barrier Stop a 50 Cal Sniper Rifle?"
Yee Yee Life (18 min.)

Matt Bracken On A Second Civil War

•  "The CW2 Cube: Mapping the Meta-Terrain of Civil War Two"--Matthew's Substack. This is a model that Bracken had developed to get an idea of the overall characteristics of opposing groups in any coming civil war. He explains:

 Before we move on to the cube, let’s begin with the CW2 Square. The cube is best tackled in another step. Draw the square and label one axis Poorer to Richer. Label the other axis Darker to Lighter. Darker, for brevity, includes African-Americans, Hispanics and so on. Lighter refers to those of European ancestry. The two opposed meta-groups are the poorer and darker versus the richer and lighter, or whiter if you wish to be blunt. The richer/whiter have the power of their wealth, but counterbalancing that advantage is the fact that the poorer/darker have succeeded in wresting control of much of government power. This is so, even if most of their elected leaders are anything but poor or dark.

Thus, "[f]illing one corner of the CW2 Square will be the poorer and darker, who primarily are liberal and progressive Democrats who believe in a malleable 'living Constitution.' And in the other corner will be the richer and whiter, who mainly are conservative or libertarian Republicans who believe in the original intent of the written Constitution." Of course there will be exceptions to these general classifications, but Bracken warns against being pedantic and focusing on the exceptions: we are looking for the general groupings.

Now, let’s add the third dimension and shoot another axis out from the square to form the CW2 Cube. Label the third axis Urban versus Rural, or City versus Country if you prefer. This axis gives a geographical dimension to the meta-terrain, but there will be no convenient dividing line between the opposed sides as there was during the first civil war. It has frequently been observed that today’s red-blue political map is better understood at the county than at the state level. Even blue states like Illinois, California and New York are rural-red outside of their blue urban cores. Obviously, these urban cores are heavily populated but geographically small, with all that means to the electoral process today and to a possible civil war later.

Reviewing the model, then, "[m]ost of us live in the mushy, mongrel middle, far from the tips of the two opposite corners. But the centers of gravity of Civil War Two shall be as I have described: the relatively richer, whiter and more rural against the poorer, darker and more urban."

    Applying Turchin's theories, more correctly we would see two groups of elites, no matter their skin color, drawing their support--their troops, if you will--from the two opposite corners.  

    In any event, Bracken includes diagrams and more discussion about using the conceptual framework the CW2 Cube offers, so be sure to check out the full article. 

    However, Bracken makes a point that we should pay attention to:  

The second aggravating factor is the unstable triangle of the three-sided civil war. The Bosnian Serbs, Croats and Muslims pro-vide a classic example. Each side of the unstable triangle will backstab yesterday’s ally at the moment they perceive themselves to be at a local disadvantage, or when they see an opportunity to wipe out an historic enemy with a new Final Solution. The unstable ethnic triangle in the United States will in many places be composed of black, white and Hispanic sides. By comparison, the old black and white social dichotomy was inherently stable, even when it might have been rife with injustice. 

But this can also depend on where you live. Other groups may make up the third (or fourth or fifth) sides in such an ethnic conflict.

• "Matt Bracken on the Coming 'Dirty Civil War'"--Prepping 2.0. This is a podcast from February 2020. I have not yet had an opportunity to listen to it, but came across it when looking for the CW2 Cube article, and it seemed that it would be interesting.   

Venezula Earthquake

As you probably already know, Venezula was struck by two devastating earthquakes yesterday: "A magnitude-7.2 quake struck roughly 100 miles west of Caracas, followed just 39 seconds later by an even bigger 7.5-magnitude temblor, according to the US Geological Survey." The USGS has a model to give rough ranges of the number of fatalities, and that model gives the highest percentage to the death toll being between 10,000 and 100,000. Grimly, though, the model gives higher odds to the fatalities exceeding 100,000 than to their being below 10,000. Photographs and video I have seen show many heavily damaged multi-story structures as well as some buildings that completely collapsed. 

    The video below has some of the more dramatic video and an overview of how events rolled out. Stefan Burns, who I believe is geophysicist, had a 1.5 hour live stream last night immediately after news of the quake came out that you might find interesting as well. 

    President Trump has already promised assistance and I'm sure that other countries will also be offering help. And I'm sure that many churches and faith-based NGOs will also be providing assistance. And even if we cannot provide physical assistance, we can pray for the survivors and the souls of those that lost their lives.  

VIDEO: "HORROR in Venezuela ! Double M7.5 Earthquake causes STATE OF EMERGENCY - Caracas in RUINS" - On the Pulse with Silki (18 min.)

Was Israel Plotting To Assassinate Pakistan Peace Delegation?

Anonymous Conservative's daily news brief included a post from X on this topic, but I found an article which has a bit more detail: "'Wipe You Off The Map': Pakistan Thwarted Israel's Plot To Kill Asim Munir In Switzerland, Analyst Claims"--NDTV. The claim came from Pepe Escobar in an interview with Mario Nawfal, a Lebanese-Australian podcaster. 

    Pepe, while taking about the friction between Israel and Pakistan and the former claiming to wipe Pakistan off the map, claimed it was the other way around.

    "No, it was the opposite Mario. Basically the short story is Pakistani military intel intercepted ultra-credible information that the Mossad was preparing, under orders by Netanyahu, an assasination [sic] attempt against Asim Munir and maybe the rest of the Pakistani delegation going to Switzerland. So the Pakistanis sent a direct message via their usual intermediaries—I would bet it would be Oman in this case—directly to Israelis saying that 'if you touch our delegation, we're going to wipe you off the map', period. I am quoting, this is what our source informed," Pepe said.   

And on a related note: "Israel furious with Trump for being left out of the US-Iran peace talks: ‘It’s a huge mess’"--New York Post. 

VIDEO: Warning Signs Of Civil War

A couple points raised in the video. First, civil wars are not solely the result of extreme inequality, poverty, or ethnic diversity. And they are less likely to arise in either a functioning free society or in a functioning dictatorship, but--and this is the second point--in the ground in-between: "Researchers call this condition anocracy, a state where the old rules are losing legitimacy, but no new rules have fully replaced them. And again and again, it appeared before societies descended into violence." That is: "A place where there are elections but the rules no longer feel fair. Where there is a government, but fewer and fewer people believe it is legitimate." Thus: 

The hatred [between groups] is rarely the trigger. The trigger is usually a breakdown in the systems that allow people with differences to live together peacefully. Once those systems weaken, old divisions can suddenly become dangerous.  

He later expands on this:

And in a place like that, disagreement stops being normal politics and becomes a question of survival. If you no longer believe the system will deliver a fair result, then losing an election isn't a setback. It's a threat. Every contest becomes existential. But this almost never arrives as a dramatic collapse. It arrives as the slow erosion of one quiet, invisible thing: the belief that the system, whatever its flaws, is basically legitimate. 

In other words, once people in a country cease to believe that disagreements can be settled peacefully, the next step is to settle differences violently. 

    But in reviewing the Wikipedia article, it notes that it is not necessarily being an anocracy that creates the political instability and violence, but the transition from democracy or dictatorship to an anocracy where the danger arises; particularly the transition from democracies to anocracies and the magnitude of the change. In other words, the water in which the frog sits being slowly brought to a boil is less likely to result in civil war than where the water is quickly brought to a boil. 

VIDEO: "Scientists Found A Warning Sign Before Civil Wars"
Michael Button | Patterns of History (15 min.)

This Is What The Wealth Pump Looks Like In Action

 

The wealth pump is that difference between real median earnings and real GDP per capita. You will see that the real wages tracked the growth of real GDP--meaning that workers and employees shared in that increased GDP--until about 1970. Part of the reason that employers were able to break earnings loose from GDP was because of what is shown in the chart below:

 You will notice that the inflection point in this graph was also about 1970. This is why a man could support his family on a single income in the 1950s and '60s, but two income households struggle today.