Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:
- Greg Ellifritz has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump posted at his Active Response Training blog. There are always a great selection of links to article and videos, but some of those that I particularly liked or found interesting this week included:
- An article on the weapons used by the Texas Rangers from 1820 through roughly 1900.
- An article entitled "Trust No One" which basically says that you cannot trust any firearms manufacturer to provide you with a dependable firearm out of the box. I'm old enough to remember when you had to put 100 to 200 rounds through a handgun before it operated reliably, and I don't think we are quite back to that stage. But I have also seen complaints of poor quality control go up over the past 10 years even as to major manufacturers (just read comments about S&W's revolvers). But the article is interesting as it describes the problems, which often seem to come down to (i) cost cutting and (ii) constantly tweaking parts and suppliers.
- An article called the "First Shot Problem" which reminds us that the goal isn't to be the first to get off a shot but the first to get off a shot that strikes the target.
- There are a few articles on best and worst practices when carrying concealed or just plain bad self-defense advice. Read these to see how you rate?
- A drill called the Event Horizon drill which, consistent with its name, involves shooting at a solid black circle on a target.
- I know that this might not sound exciting to some of you, but I really appreciated the article entitled "Making Targets Work For You" which has some tips for stapling targets so they aren't as easily torn off by the wind, maintaining your stapler, a product that might make your targets more resistant to rain, and emergency/DIY target supplies.
- "I Spent a Decade Chasing the Deadliest Livestock Killer in Utah’s History" by Frank Miniter, Outdoor Life. The hunt for a willy mountain lion. The article begins:
On July 26, 1992, Billie Worthen watched the western sky fade to stars before unloading her rifle and leaving a herd of 876 sheep grazing in Spring Canyon, 8,000 feet above sea level in Utah’s Fish Lake National Forest. The guard dogs had the night shift.
When the sun came back around the other side, Worthen left her sheep house and rode her mare up to the herd. She was within a few hundred yards of the sheep when her horse began to spook. She soon discovered what was making her horse edgy — the smell of blood.
Hours later federal hunters with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Wildlife Services had to place rocks on the carcasses as they counted the bodies, to be sure they didn’t count the same animal twice. It was the worst single stock-killing incident in Utah state history — 102 sheep dead.
Bending down to look at a track of the culprit, Kelly Joe Wright, a predator specialist, saw that the animal responsible for the carnage was a single mountain lion. He didn’t know then that this was the beginning of the reign of a new king on the Old Woman Plateau.
By 2016, it was clear to Grant that the status quo wouldn’t hold. He was losing as many as 20 percent of his lambs and kid goats to predators, and he knew things could get worse: On the Edwards Plateau, 50 percent and even 90 percent losses were not unheard of. Coyotes were driving some stockmen out of business, others to the brink of collapse, and generally threatening a way of life that is integral to Texan identity. “It’s like having an ever-increasing-size hole in your canoe, and you’re trying to bail out water,” Grant said. In desperation, he decided to go see a fellow rancher about a decade younger than his father who was reputed to have cultivated an ancient knowledge, largely neglected in the United States, that had allowed him to prosper while his neighbors flailed. His name was Bob Buchholz. He was a man who knew about dogs.
Other than hunting, protecting livestock may have been the first work assigned to domestic dogs. They probably got the job more than 5,000 years ago. The ancestors of modern livestock protection breeds, of which the white and downy Great Pyrenees is perhaps the best-known in America, are thought to have arrived in Europe in the sixth century B.C., accompanying shepherds from the Caucasus. Roman Farm Management: The Treatises of Cato and Varro, which compiles agricultural knowledge from the first and second centuries B.C., describes dogs as “of the greatest importance to us who feed the woolly flock, for the dog is the guardian of such [livestock] as lack the means to defend themselves, chiefly sheep and goats. For the wolf is wont to lie in wait for them, and we oppose our dogs to him as defenders.”
The article goes on to describe the breeds and use of dogs as the ranchers and sheep herders learned to use them to protect their livestock. The article ends:
It’s an oddity of livestock guardian dogs that their owners almost never observe them interact with a predator. Their art is practiced mostly unseen, in the low light of dusk and dawn, when their enemies are most active. The proof of their value is the simple absence of death. Misty, whom all the dogs like best, disembarked and poured some kibble. After a few cautious bites, George fled, running across the trail and into the trees. His sheep, Misty said, were getting too far away for his liking. Reba lingered a little while longer over her food. Then she, too, was gone.
Most posts aren’t connected, outside of they’re all written by me. However, the last few have been following a theme that’s pretty old: mistaking The Game for reality, even Plato wrote about it. There are times we all get stuck in it. It’s pretty seductive. We mistake The Game for reality, often to our own detriment.
What’s The Game?
The Game is where life moves away from reality. ...
And the game includes fiat currency and interest. And the purpose of the game is to eliminate your rights and destroy your values.
I told you they were guilty.
House Republicans have spent months digging into ActBlue, the premier Democrat fundraising machine that has raised over $16 billion for Democrat candidates and causes. What they’ve found is every bit as bad as I’ve told you. And ActBlue’s leaders felt the need to invoke their Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination an incredible 146 times.
The just-released interim staff report from the House Administration, Oversight, and Judiciary Committees lays out vast illegal foreign donations and money laundering — “election interference” — and illegal “straw donor” schemes, followed by a massive cover-up to prevent Congress and the DOJ from catching on.
