Tuesday, August 18, 2026

VIDEO: What Pulling A Weapon Can Reveal

From the description: "A weapon can mean very different things depending on the person carrying it. For some, it provides confidence they don't have without it. For others, it's about protection, control or intimidation. And in the most dangerous situations, the weapon isn't shown at all—because it isn't there to threaten you. It's there to be used." Hopefully, you are carrying a weapon because it provides you a tactical advantage and not to bolster your confidence or ego. 

 VIDEO: "When MEN Pull a Weapon… It Reveals EVERYTHING"
Fight SCIENCE (8 min.)

Texas Defying Minnesota Request For Extradition?

 According to CBS News, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison has his panties in a wad because Texas has not processed his request for extradition of an ICE agent--Christian Castro--accused of shooting Julio Cesar Sosa-Celis, a Venezuelan national, in the leg in Minneapolis in January. Castro was arrested by Texas Rangers on May 29, but Texas law only allows extradition holds for up to 90 days, so he potentially could soon be released by Texas authorities. 

    Moriarty and Ellison repeatedly stressed that extradition requests are intended to be administrative, and an apparent refusal like Abbott's is extremely rare, if not unprecedented.

    "We have never heard of anything taking this long because it is an administrative process," Moriarty said. "It is not supposed to be controversial." 
  

But neither, under principles of federalism, are the individual states supposed to merely be different administrative districts.  

Some Things Never Change

An article from JSTOR, "Ancient Rome: A City of Immigrants," discusses an immigrant community adjacent to Rome called Transtiberim ("beyond the Tiber") and includes this bit:

To elites, who provide almost all the written documentation except for funerary inscriptions, Transtiberim was dangerous, déclassé, and working class (to use later jargon). Strange gods were worshipped there—worship of the Syrian goddess Atargatis by “cross-dressing eunuch priests” who practiced ritual castration was banned more than once. The neighborhood was mocked in satires and condemned for its “panhandlers, prostitutes and desperate people with nowhere else to go.” 

Warning: Sharing This Meme Could Get You Arrested In The UK

 

From the Daily Mail: "Former Police Officer Convicted of Sharing ‘Grossly Offensive’ Meme About Islam in Britain." Per the article:

    Retired police officer Stephen Gray, 65, has been found guilty by the Newton Aycliffe magistrates’ court of breaching Section 127(1)(a) of the Communications Act 2003 over a post he reshared on Facebook, which was deemed to be “grossly offensive”.

    According to The Telegraph, Gray was reported to the Durham Constabulary for two Facebook memes by a non-Muslim neighbour of his, whom Gray had previously been in a separate dispute with.

Gray avoided conviction for the first meme because "as it concerned a political issue that had been debated in Parliament." But he was not so lucky with the second:

    The second meme depicted a picture of a man wearing a turban next to some bacon with the caption: “Fun facts about Bacon! People who eat bacon have a lower chance of marrying a 9-year-old!”

    As the post was not considered to be a political message, but rather critical of a religion, it was found to be “grossly offensive” by the court. For this, Gray was found guilty of violating the Communications Act and was ordered to pay £1,000 in fines and court costs. 

Related: "Afghan man, 45, 'marries girl aged SIX before Taliban intervene... and say he must wait until she is NINE'"--Daily Mail.  

Another (!) Autozone Store Looted In L.A.

The New York Post relates that "Another LA AutoZone looted — days after cops plastered faces of brazen crew across the internet." From the lede:

    Another Los Angeles AutoZone has been hit by looters — just a week after an East LA store was ransacked twice in a single day.

    A group targeted the locaiton at 10013 S. Central Ave. in South Los Angeles around 5:30 a.m. Monday following an alleged street takeover, according to Fox 11.

    The LAPD said several vehicles blocked an intersection during the takeover, while two people were taken into custody. The number of looters involved in the latest burglary remains unclear as cops investigate. 

Photographs of the suspects appear to show Hispanics. How would you deal with a group like this targeting your house or neighborhood after a SHTF event?  

VIDEO: Finding The Perfect Barrel Length For .308

The producers of the embedded video started with a 72-inch barrel and cut it down at regular increments until they reached 19 inches to find the best barrel length for .308. I believe they expected that at the longer lengths they would see the velocity fall off (something that occurred in another video testing barrel lengths for .22 LR). Instead, what they found was a fairly consistent velocity from 72-inches down to about 45 inches of between 2,750 and 2,800 FPS, and then the velocity started to decline as they went shorter. 

 VIDEO: "Cutting The World's Longest Rifle To Find The Perfect Barrel Length"
MDT Sporting Goods (8 min.)

Richard Dawkins: Speaking From Ignorance

In the video short below, we see Richard Dawkins (an evolutionary biologist) claim to have read a portion of The Book of Mormon, and assert that it was a fake because it was written (translated) in the 19th Century but used 16th Century English and overuses the term "it came to pass". Dawkins doesn't know what he is talking about. 

    First, as the video explains, the Hebrew phrase translated in the Bible as "it came to pass" is actually used at a high frequency in the Hebrew text. 

“And it came to pass” occurs frequently in the Old Testament.[1] The actual Hebrew Bible has some 1,200 occurrences of the phrase, so the King James translators probably found it to be redundant and cumbersome. As a result, they often translated it as “and it became,” “and it was,” or “and.” On a number of occasions they simply ignored the expression altogether. By the time they finished their work on the King James Version, some 727 instances of the phrase remained in the text.   

Thus, since the people in The Book Of Mormon came Jerusalem circa 600 B.C., it would be expected that their writing would similarly have a high occurrence of "and it came to pass".  

    Second, Dawkins claims about 19th Century English differing greatly from 16th Century English is not universal--I only recently linked to a video discussing how British English rapidly changed in the 19th Century--and there were areas of England that spoke essentially what was 16th Century English up through at least World War II. In Quartered Safe Out Here by George MacDonald Fraser, he recounts his service in the Burma Campaign alongside troops from Cumbria--a region of Northwest England bordering on Scotland. And their English is very much a King James Bible type of English full of "ye," "thee," and "thou". So much so, that I obtained my copy of Fraser's book from a friend who couldn't decipher it and gave it to me, whereas it was not difficult for me because I regularly read from scripture. 

    As for the United States, Alexis de Tocqueville, the French intellectual who traveled through America in 1831 noted the prevalence of the Bible and commented that he  saw “hardly a pioneer’s hut which does not contain a few odd volumes of Shakespeare.” Thus, not only would have Americans on the frontier in the early 19th Century have been familiar and comfortable with 16th Century English, it may have been the only English they regularly read.

 VIDEO: "Richard Dawkins: 'The Book Of Mormon Is An Obvious Fake'."

Monday, August 17, 2026

Wilder: "Know Your Enemy"

    The latest migrant outrage from the UK is that the government is planning on moving 1,200 single adult male asylum seekers into Linton-on-Ouse, a rural village with only 600 inhabitants. It's not the only place getting this treatment: the village of Piddington, with a population of approximately 350, will be receiving 1,250 single adult male asylum seekers. But the UK leadership doesn't care:

    Residents held a symbolic independence referendum in which 96 percent voted to leave the United Kingdom in protest. Children wrote letters pleading with the Prime Minister not to destroy the only home they have ever known. Parish council chairman Tim McNally has repeatedly warned that the scale is neither fair, safe nor responsible.

    Prime Minister Andy Burnham has responded by doubling down. He insists that “all parts of the country need to play their part” and that middle-class and leafy areas can no longer be shielded while poorer communities carry the load.

    Borders minister Anna Turley has defended the approach as creating a “more fair and equitable system,” even while acknowledging that concentrating arrivals in deprived areas previously fuelled “civil unrest.” 

    All of this brings to mind how  Anonymous Conservative begins his daily news briefs with the following, which I have rephrased as a question: "have [you] wondered how we got flooded with migrants we did not want, how our money is sent to causes overseas we do not care about, why our leaders, who should want to curry the favor of the citizens in order to get elected, do not care a whit about what we want or the well-being of our nations, or why our nations perpetually teeter at the brink of civil wars[?]" 

    Because our ruling class want it. Rod Dreher recently reposted an X-post featuring a video of one of the leaders of the largest far left political parties in France. Key point:

    Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the biggest far-left party in France, explains why the alliance between progressives and Muslims is necessary.

    “If you’re counting on white Christian workers to bring about socialism in France, it won’t happen. But our Muslim brothers and sisters will.”

    This is the same playbook being used by the left in all Western countries. 

 And its true. But it doesn't have to only be Muslims. For instance, the Left in the United States supports mass immigration from Latin America for the same reasons as European and British Leftists support mass Muslim migration: because those populations are already primed to vote for socialism. The only difference is that we know that the Muslims will eventually turn on their putative masters. 

    John Wilder's latest, "Know Your Enemy," discusses those who hate and wish to destroy all that is good and beautiful: those he (and many others) term the GloboLeft and the GloboLeftElite. Their excuses for this invasion varies. Jean-Luc Melenchon, as noted above, wants the flood of migrants to advance socialism; as John makes note in his piece, the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops wants them because it is worth nearly $200 million to flood our country with them and Utah Senator John Curtis ostensibly wants them here to undercut American wages. 

    The point, though, is that none of the forgoing elites represent or even care about the common man and woman of their respective countries. As John writes:

    The GloboLeft and the GloboLeftElite are not tied to the countries they live in.

    Instead, they are tied to their class.  A professor from Boulder can glide into a conference in London or Paris or D.C. and feel exactly the same:  the same polite applause, the same correct opinions, the same network of people who went to the same schools, read the same journals, and never once had to fix a carburetor.

    The nice hotel room, the brandy, and the bacon-wrapped shrimp taste identical whether the view is of the Flatirons, the Thames, or Islamabad on the Seine.  These people deal almost exclusively with other members of their class.

 And "class" is the correct word to describe them. As Angelo M. Codevilla explained in his seminal article, "America’s Ruling Class—And the Perils of Revolution," explaining why the elites on both sides of the political aisle held such disdain for the "Tea Party" (bold added):

    Never has there been so little diversity within America’s upper crust. Always, in America as elsewhere, some people have been wealthier and more powerful than others. But until our own time America’s upper crust was a mixture of people who had gained prominence in a variety of ways, who drew their money and status from different sources and were not predictably of one mind on any given matter. The Boston Brahmins, the New York financiers, the land barons of California, Texas, and Florida, the industrialists of Pittsburgh, the Southern aristocracy, and the hardscrabble politicians who made it big in Chicago or Memphis had little contact with one another. Few had much contact with government, and “bureaucrat” was a dirty word for all. So was “social engineering.” Nor had the schools and universities that formed yesterday’s upper crust imposed a single orthodoxy about the origins of man, about American history, and about how America should be governed. All that has changed.

    Today’s ruling class, from Boston to San Diego, was formed by an educational system that exposed them to the same ideas and gave them remarkably uniform guidance, as well as tastes and habits. These amount to a social canon of judgments about good and evil, complete with secular sacred history, sins (against minorities and the environment), and saints. Using the right words and avoiding the wrong ones when referring to such matters — speaking the “in” language — serves as a badge of identity. Regardless of what business or profession they are in, their road up included government channels and government money because, as government has grown, its boundary with the rest of American life has become indistinct. Many began their careers in government and leveraged their way into the private sector. Some, e.g., Secretary of the Treasury Timothy Geithner, never held a non-government job. Hence whether formally in government, out of it, or halfway, America’s ruling class speaks the language and has the tastes, habits, and tools of bureaucrats. It rules uneasily over the majority of Americans not oriented to government.

    The two classes have less in common culturally, dislike each other more, and embody ways of life more different from one another than did the 19th century’s Northerners and Southerners — nearly all of whom, as Lincoln reminded them, “prayed to the same God.” By contrast, while most Americans pray to the God “who created and doth sustain us,” our ruling class prays to itself as “saviors of the planet” and improvers of humanity. Our classes’ clash is over “whose country” America is, over what way of life will prevail, over who is to defer to whom about what. The gravity of such divisions points us, as it did Lincoln, to Mark’s Gospel: “if a house be divided against itself, that house cannot stand.”

But rest assured that they do not represent or care about the common people. In the article, "Inequality All The Way Down"--a discussion of Peter Turchin’s book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites, and the Path of Political Disintegration--the author relates (bold added):

... If you have money, you can easily influence the public opinion, by pushing your narratives in the media. Also, you can invest in lobbying and buy your access to politicians directly. There is an extensive piece of research about this by the political scientist Martin Gillens. He gathered thousands of policy issues between 1981 and 2002. For each of those issues he checked what was ultimately decided and how public opinion was thinking about the issue. He found the political outcomes in the United States only aligned with the interests and wishes of the richest 10 % and their interest groups. Everybody else’s preferences were simply not reflected in national policy decisions. ...

And, as John explains in his post, the elites don't want their preferences challenged:

The GloboLeftElite need the middle class to comply, and they need the anarchy from below to justify their own continued existence as managers of the chaos.  The violent and the non-productive are their power base and their enforcers while the middle class represent the last pool of money they haven’t sucked up.  After they’ve done that, they’re desperate to replace you. 

Read the whole thing.

A Couple Tutorials On Cleaning A Revolver

The first video is just a generic cleaning video with typical cleaning products. The second is from Otis and features some of their specific patches and using a cable rather than a cleaning rod.

 VIDEO: "Basic Revolver Cleaning"
Guns of the West (13 min.)

 

 VIDEO: "Gun Cleaning 101: Colt Python"
Otis Technology (3 min.)

VIDEO: Update On Situation In Africa

The U.S. is getting more involved militarily and, possibly, through mercenary companies, in Africa as it appears we are entering a period of resource competition with China. Time to dig out my old copy of the novel, The Dogs of War.  

VIDEO: "The Africa Situation is Getting Crazy"
Cappy Army (30 min.)

VIDEO: What Pulling A Weapon Can Reveal

From the description: "A weapon can mean very different things depending on the person carrying it. For some, it provides confidence th...