A Quick Run Around the Web -- February 22, 2016

Survival/Self-Defense/Firearms

• "Tires after an Economic Collapse‏"--FerFal at Modern Survivalist. Mechanics will leave nails on the roads to puncture tires and increase business; roads will fall into terrible disrepair; and thieves and hijackers will also spike roads.
• "Project Mjølner. Part 1 of 2"--Neo Survivalist. Making weapons (clubs/hammers) out of plumbing.
• "Community Security: How Will You Provide Stability?"--Forward Observer.
• "You Need to Fail"--Functional Self-Defense. "You need to fail. If you’re not failing in your practice, then you are not realistically training and you are not maximizing your ability to learn. If you’re not failing, then you’re not pushing to your limit. If you’re not pushing to your limit, then you don’t know where your limit is, or where the borders of your skills are."
• "Review: Armageddon Gear Precision Rifle Sling"--Jerking the Trigger.
• "Choosing a Fighting Variable Part 1: Reticle Design and Illumination"--The New Rifleman.
• "Other Uses For Vinegar, Baking Soda, WD40, Coca Cola, Fabric Softener Sheets And Paper Towels"--The Survivalist Blog.
• "Mother shares heartbreaking video of her daughter, 23, struggling to open her eyes after she was 'beaten and knifed into a coma by roommate who she found on Craiglsist' [sic]"--Daily Mail. The roommate was a 35 year old black male. The victim was a 23 year old white female. The man had only been living with the victim for a week when the attack occurred, but the article indicates that police had found evidence that the two had become involved in a relationship. Just another example that being a victim of a violent crime is generally a matter of doing stupid things with stupid people in stupid places. More than any weapon or self-defense training, your best bet to protect yourself from violent crime is to not be stupid.

Other Stuff:

• "It’s Like Snapchat, But For Terrorists"--Forward Observer Magazine. On the difficulty of figuring out how terrorists and cells communicate.
• "Boris Johnson exclusive: There is only one way to get the change we want – vote to leave the EU"--The Telegraph. The mayor of the City of London writes: 

... According to the House of Commons library, anything between 15 and 50 per cent of UK legislation now comes from the EU; and remember that this type of legislation is very special.

It is unstoppable, and it is irreversible – since it can only be repealed by the EU itself. Ask how much EU legislation the Commission has actually taken back under its various programmes for streamlining bureaucracy. The answer is none. That is why EU law is likened to a ratchet, clicking only forwards. We are seeing a slow and invisible process of legal colonisation, as the EU infiltrates just about every area of public policy. Then – and this is the key point – the EU acquires supremacy in any field that it touches; because it is one of the planks of Britain’s membership, agreed in 1972, that any question involving the EU must go to Luxembourg, to be adjudicated by the European Court of Justice.

He could have been writing about the U.S. federal government and its relationship with the States (remembering that when the United States was formed, the individual states viewed themselves as nation states, not provinces or prefectures).

• Resistance to the occupation forces continues to grow: "Anti-migrant mobs cheer and try to stop firefighters getting to planned refugee shelter as it goes up in flames in Germany"--Daily Mail. 

• Related: "Two migrant men who lied that they were 15 'raped boy, 12, at a Swedish youth asylum centre and filmed the assault'"--Daily Mail.

• "Weimar America"--Victor Davis Hansen at PJ Media. A nice review of the decline of the United States over the last decade. Among other things, he points out:

Since Obama’s reelection, the southern border has been wide open, in naked efforts to recalibrate American electoral demography. The U.S. has taken in more immigrants, legal and illegal, than has any other country.... The U.S. last year allowed nearly $80 billion to be sent in annual remittances to Mexico and Latin America, mostly from those here illegally. ...

• Related: "The Obama Administration Wants to Make Sure Non-Citizens Vote in the Upcoming Election"--National Review.

• Related: This is what we are importing: "Children snatched from their beds, dealers peddling heroin in front of cops and a murder every night: The deadly Mexican state run by 'narcos' who laugh at desperate families forced to pay their ransom demands"--Daily Mail. One of the most useful books for understanding violence is Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature (which I reviewed here). Pinker describes 6 trends that have resulted in steadily lower rates of violent death in Western/Northern Europe, Australia, Canada, and United States. What needs to be kept in mind when considering immigration or refugee issues is that only the first trend--the development of nations states--has been experienced world wide. Or, in other words, most nations and cultures in the world have only experienced one (or, at best, a few) of the trends. That means that these cultures are inherently (and independent of any genetic predisposition) going to be more violent than those cultures with Western or Northern European roots. Also, there is nothing predestined or inevitable about the trends that Pinker describes: they can go into reverse or disappear, along with their influence. 

• Related: "Almost 90,000 dangerous illegal immigrants go free"--Washington Examiner.

• "Shale fightback seen lifting U.S. oil output to record high by 2021"--Reuters. Short take, the Middle-Eastern oil cartel overplayed its hand with record high oil prices, and is finally paying a price.