December 29, 2016 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"How Safe Are Your Preps from the Unprepared? OPSEC"--City Prepping.

Prepping/Firearms/Self-Defense:

• Interesting: "So the Ford Police Package INCLUDES ballistic protection?"--SNAFU. A video from Ford describing the armor on its police vehicles, consisting of a ceramic plate backed with a ballistic fabric to catch fragments. According to the video, it is equivalent to a III+ rating, meaning it can stop most small and medium caliber rifle rounds. 

Solomon writes that "I always thought the idea of hiding behind the doors of police cars by LEO's to be one of the most batshit crazy things I've seen." It wasn't necessarily crazy at one time, even before the addition of armor. I have a video tape of some ballistic tests against vehicles that was made in the early 1980s, but the two vehicles primarily used were from the mid- to late-1970s. The thick steel used for the body panels coupled with the steel framework and window mechanism on those older cars was enough to stop most handgun rounds as tested in the video (including .357 Magnum), and certainly would have stopped the soft lead bullets from revolvers as would have been common for the time. However, rifle rounds and shotgun slugs just went through it (and generally through the opposite door as well).

• "Meet SEAL Team 6's Bladesmith"--Maxim. Don't worry--I don't read Maxim. I came across this 2015 article while doing some research on knives. Anyway, it is an interview of Daniel Winkler.
• "So you wanna be a Guerrilla RTO" (Part 1 and Part 2)--Brushbeater. Sending covert, one-way transmissions.
• "Chronicles of the Urban Farm"--Le Survivaliste. The author lists and discusses various elements or factors that must be present for a successful urban farm, and the objectives that must be met: economic, water, food, and energy.
• "Understanding the Gun Control Debate" (Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3)--Massad Ayoob at Backwoods Home Magazine.
• "Guerrilla Gardening: Our Successes and Failures"--Security and Self-Reliance. I like articles where someone tries out something that seems a great idea in theory to see if the theory works. In this case, the theory is about concealing your location by growing gardens hidden in various locations and intended to blend in with surrounding vegetation. The author tried it out and, as they report, it was mostly a failure: seeds wouldn't sprout, plants were lost to insects and animals, and so on. Read the whole thing.

Other Stuff:

• Poking the bear: "Obama's Cold War: President kicks out 35 Russian 'spies' and accuses Putin of ordering hacking of Clinton's secrets in run-up to presidential election - as Kremlin promises revenge and mocks 'lame duck' leader"--Daily Mail. More proof that the idiot-in-chief is set on destroying the West, this time by needlessly antagonizing a potential ally against Islam and China. And, even if the Russians were behind the hacking (which, remember, has been disputed by Wikileaks) for what is Russia being blamed? For revealing the truth about our ruling class. I suspect that there is more behind this, including being outmaneuvered in Syria.
• "Social Media Implicated In Mall Violence"--Anonymous Conservative. The author cites an article noting how social media facilitated the "meet ups" that led to the violence, and then applies it to what could occur in an economic collapse:

     Right now, food is everywhere and the savages do this for fun.

     Imagine if there was no food. Imagine if welfare disappeared. Imagine if the economic system collapsed and currency became essentially worthless, so you could not exchange value easily.

     Everybody is starving, when word goes out to these savages on social media that the Kwikimart on Main Street just got a shipment of food. Imagine if these savages weren’t doing this on a lark, but were doing this as a mission. Imagine if instead of showing up to fight with their fists, they were showing up with guns to kill. Imagine if that fate awaited every store that got a shipment of food. How many would stay in business?

     Imagine being a white person, in that store, shopping with some form of value in your pockets, when the mobs came swarming in like locusts, and saw you with what you were going to use to purchase food. Imagine enemy gangs, like the Bloods and the Crips showing up at the same time, and deciding to fight it out right there. Most such stores prevent exfiltration through back exits, for fear shoplifters would escape with stolen merchandise. If the gangs swarm in, the only way out passes directly through the mob.

     You can see how racial in-grouping will start quickly, and communities will segregate. When confronted with such a threat, people will do anything that holds even the slightest promise of alleviating the threat. As each race in-groups against the other, resentments will build, and that will produce even greater in-grouping.

     We have never seen real K-selection. In truth, we have never seen an economic collapse combined with violent organized street gangs and copious weapons availability, all in close proximity to peaceful communities of responsible people.

     That will be an Apocalypse.

• Psychologists would call this "projection": "The legacy of the Crusades in contemporary Muslim world"--Aljazeera. From the article:

The Crusades were ... an official, divinely argued attempt to eradicate a religion and a civilisation due to religious bigotry - and also for economic reasons that were disguised behind religious rhetoric.

• Speaking of which....: "Inside the minds of jihadis"--The Week. The primary point of this article (and the book on which it draws) is that ISIS' beliefs are a valid interpretation (albeit, not the only one) of Islam. The author writes:

... the Islamic State might be picking the wrong options in the Islamic menu, but they're still picking from the Islamic menu. This is not a semantic point. It has real-world consequences. People who are drawn to the Islamic State are devout Muslims, and it is self-defeating to try to keep them out of radicalization by pompously lecturing them about how the Islamic State's ideology has no basis in Islam, when it is obvious that it does.

• Related: 

• "Virginia Man Arrested for Attempting to Provide Support to ISIS"--Washington Times.

• "Disguised as refugees and able to cross borders without being identified: ISIS general who blew up a hostage with a rocket and decapitated another prisoner is 'back in Europe with 400 soldiers' after fleeing Syria"--Daily Mail. 

     Ex-NATO soldier Lavdrim Muhaxheri and his men are among thousands who have fled after ISIS suffered devastating losses in war-torn Syria, according to sources in the Italian intelligence services.  

     Many of the fighters are feared to have disguised themselves as refugees in order to cross borders to get into Europe without being identified, according to information leaked from the spying agency.

• "Seven people arrested on suspicion of planning ISIS attacks on New Year's Eve revellers in Moscow"--Daily Mail.

• "Saudi Arabia Is the Main Culprit of Jihadism: 2,000 Saudis Joined Terrorist Groups Abroad"--PJ Media.

• More projection; this time from Emperor Palpatine George Soros, who writes: "Democracy is now in crisis. Even the US, the world’s leading democracy, elected a con artist and would-be dictator as its president." Yes, but he leaves office in less than a month.
• "When ‘Paranoia’ Is Justified: Sometimes the monsters are real."--American Conservative. The author relates his research into investigations carried out by law enforcement during World War I to catch Germans that posed a threat to the United States, and then compares it to the current threat from Islam:

     I mentioned the comparison between “paranoia” in the Great War and modern Islamophobia. Actually, that Islamic parallel is closer than we might think. Then as now, some people spread worthless slanders about foreigners and aliens, but also, then as now, some of the nightmare stories were actually true. Among the mass of harmless ordinary migrants devoted to working to improve themselves and their families, there really were, and are, people out to destroy America and Americans. Despite all the horror stories we hear about idiots in 1917 striking at the Kaiser by kicking a dachshund in the street, German spies and terrorists really existed, and they posed a lethal threat.

     I mention this context now because you are not going to hear much about it in the coming year, when we will once again be lamenting the American Paranoid Style.

• Related: "Terrorist cell is alive in Minneapolis, U.S. judge in ISIL case says"--Star Tribune (h/t Bayou Renaissance Man). From the article:

     In sentencing nine young Somali-Minnesotans on terror conspiracy charges this week, U.S. District Judge Michael Davis closed a chapter in the federal government’s long, extraordinary investigation of ISIL recruitment in Minnesota.

     But the full story is far from over.

     In nine hearings over three days before a courtroom packed with the families of the young men who sought to give their lives to ISIL, Davis repeatedly underlined a clear message: There is a terrorist cell in Minneapolis and it is still alive today.

• "Drexler Professor Calls White Genocide A 'Figment Of The Racist Imagination'"--Yahoo News. Drexler University Professor, George Ciccariello-Maher, who tweeted a Christmas wish for white genocide, and later clarified that "when the whites were massacred during the Haitian Revolution, that was a good thing indeed," is now attempting to defend himself by claiming that he was trying to make a point that (notwithstanding his example) "white genocide" was not real. Without any irony, he also wrote that "[i]n that fight [against white supremacy], universities will need to choose whether they are on the side of free expression and academic debate, or on the side of the racist mob." By "free express and academic debate," I expect that he meant providing safe spaces and punishing bad-think.
• "How James Madison Saved The Constitution This Month By Writing The Bill Of Rights"--The Federalist.
• "China claims orbital test of EM drive! Confirm"--Chaos Manor. Jerry Pournelle makes a valid point: "The question becomes, given the magnitude of this, why is it a surprise? We have 21 expensive intelligence agencies; not one of them knew the Chinese orbited an EM Drive?" There is more discussion in a subsequent post, including why the Chinese would make such an announcement, and more discussion from physicists about why the EM drive can't work (which reminds me of a line from Ringworld Engineers in which one of the members of Engineers' species questions FTL travel because their theories say its impossible, to which Louis Wu replies something to the effect: "We use different theories").
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Pacemakers CAN be hacked: US government issues cybersecurity warning over hackers programming bugs in medical devices"--Daily Mail.