- "It's The End Of Civilization As We Know It!! Oh, Wait... It's A Squirrel."--Planet Analog (h/t The Silicon Graybeard). A nice article discussing EMP and solar storms and their threats to the power grid. "Luckily, day-to-day threats to the electric grid tend to be more prosaic. Damage from terrestrial storms or trees are the two leading culprits, but the bronze medal position goes to squirrels, which cause around 12% of all electricity outages by shorting out equipment as they use poles and wires to go about their daily business foraging for nuts." The author links to several papers on the subject of EMP and solar storms, so be sure to follow the links if this is a topic that interests you.
- "The Collapse of Obama’s Syria Policy"--Chicago Boyz. The take-away from this article is not so much Dear Leader's ineptitude, but that the U.S. has been taken off-guard by the performance of the Russian military and its hardware.
- "Northrop Grumman teases sixth generation supersonic ‘superfighter’ with laser weapons and stealth bomber set to replace the B-2 in Superbowl ad"--Daily Mail.
- "How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love Cheap Carry Guns"--The Zelman Partisans. (H/t Woodpile Report). "This post is not for the person who has an unlimited budget. It’s also not intended for the person who has a perhaps normal, decent, comfortable income. It’s meant for the rest of us. Living in the real world. The world where you can’t spend money frivolously for the latest and greatest guns and doodads." The author goes on to discuss certain inexpensive firearms that he has owned and used.
- "Is U.S. Gun Ownership Approaching Its Limit?"--The Truth About Guns. With only 1.25 guns per man, woman and child in the United States, the author sees a lot more potential for gun sales since we each need at least 6 different types of firearms:
As you know, firearms have many different, sometime overlapping categories of utility. In times of normal ammunition availability, a .22 rifle and pistol are ideal for practice and training. A centerfire handgun is the favored tool for personal carry. Hunters prefer centerfire rifles. Some rifles are well-suited to home defense and neighborhood security during times of unrest. Shotguns also work well for hunting and home defense.
- "Henry’s New All-Weather Lever Action Rifles"--The Firearms Blog. "All metal parts – save the springs and sights – have been hard chrome plated. ... For these guns, Henry chose a stained hardwood stock that has an industrial grade coating to resist moisture and minimize the day-to-day nicks, scratches and wear that a well used tool will pick up." Available in .45-70 and .30-30.
- On a related note to the video immediately above: "Glenn Reynolds: Washington's culture of corruption rots on"--USA Today.
As Investor’s Business Daily editorialized, this sets an ugly precedent. Under the Obama administration, officials are above the law — at least so long as they’re targeting Obama’s political opponents. Accountability? Rule of Law? That’s just for the little people.
And that’s the worst outcome of all. It’s not just that evidence overwhelmingly points to the IRS having been weaponized in an effort to neutralize Obama’s Tea Party opposition. It’s that ordinary Americans can look at this and conclude that there’s no reason to follow the law if they can get away with breaking it since the people in charge of enforcing the law clearly regard it with contempt.
- Related: "FBI Makes It Official: Hillary Rodham Clinton Is Under Investigation"--PJ Media.
- (Update) Related: "An Abandoned White Middle Class"--First Things.
... Today’s leadership class often thinks of white middle class voters as being in the middle . . . of our national problems. For some on the Left, this cohort is “angry” and “xenophobic,” sowing division in our society. For some on the Right, they’re “takers” who are lazy and incapable of competing in the new global economy. At best, they’re “left behind” by changing economic conditions.
... Today the top end of society is deeply invested in globalization. Some take different positions in public, but one is very hard pressed to find any establishment leader who will say, in private, that we can retreat from economic globalization, much less that we should.One can make an argument that over the long haul economic globalization will be good for all Americans. Perhaps, but in the meantime the gap grows. The top end of society is thoroughly committed. This leads to the following problem for politicians: The Democratic establishment must lie about its economic commitments, while promising to take care of the middle class, and Republicans can be frank about their free-market commitments, while having very little to offer middle class voters.
This gap isn’t just economic; it’s cultural as well. Our establishment is moving toward a post-national vision of the common good, while middle America seems eager for gestures and rhetoric that promises renewed national solidarity.
To a great extent, multiculturalism and other forms of “global consciousness” serve as companions to economic globalization. They promise to teach us how to navigate cultural differences in ways that defuse conflict, promote cooperation, and thus ease the way toward a global marketplace overseen by well-trained, benevolent technocrats from the Kennedy School of Government.
This approach need not be overtly ideological. It’s enough for us to downplay our local loyalties and to adopt a spirit of detachment from our histories. This can be done with plain vanilla relativism. The point is to strip away potentially divisive commitments, allowing us to focus on universal interests we share in common—the universal human desire to get richer, be healthier, and to satisfy individual preferences. This has led to a leadership class that is technocratic in its outlook but has trouble speaking about patriotic loyalties that unify us all.
Thus our volatile political moment. To a greater and greater degree, our establishment has economic interests and cultural commitments that are different—sometimes quite different—from those of many ordinary citizens. For some, that’s not new. But for the white middle class, it’s coming as a shock. They’re not used to being abandoned. Which is why they’re driving the populist rebellion.
- "Pro-rape blogger cancels worldwide meetings — including San Diego"--Fox 5 News. This is just an example of the vitriol aimed at Roosh V., who attempted to organize "meet and greet" meetings for members of the "manosphere." He has been falsely labeled a "rapist" because of an article he wrote that questioned why drunk men and drunk women are held to different standards of responsibility for sex. The thesis of his article is that by focusing solely on the message that men should not rape, while defining down the meaning of the very term, "what we have actually done is teach women not to care about being raped, not to protect themselves from easily preventable acts, and not to take responsibility for their actions."
- Related: "The Left Has Two Huge Advantages, and I Have No Idea How we Overcome Them"--Flopping Aces. "The two words you will never, under any circumstances, hear from a leftist is 'I’m responsible.'"
- Related: Meanwhile, the main stream media studiously ignores an actual rape culture: "Good News: Female Muslim Prof. Says Muslims Can Rape, Rob Infidel Women Only in Some Circumstances"--PJ Media.
- "St. Louis usurps Detroit to become most violent city in the US: Gateway City is worst for rape, robbery aggravated assault and murder according to FBI data"--Daily Mail.
- Last, but not least, check out this week's Woodpile Report.
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