February 17, 2017--A Quick Run Around the Web

"Brazil's desperate battle for water: Parched children live among cow carcasses and cracked-earth after vital reservoir dries out leaving an entire CITY facing evacuation"--Daily Mail

Firearms/Self-Defense:

• TGIF: The Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. Lot's of links to good articles, but a couple that jumped out me: 

• "FK BRNO 7.5 Review, My Exclusive First Look: Part I"--Personal Defense Network. "We shot through a Czech Military Issue IIIA Vest, in the carrier, on a 25+ kilogram gelatin torso replica with a simulated bone plate 3″ inside the front edge. The round went through front of the carrier and armor, through the body torso and was trapped inside the back armor panel… from 100 Meters out of a 6″ barrel."

• "Three lethal 12-gauge slug offerings from DDupleks-USA"--The Gun Writer. In his summary, Greg Ellifritz has this to say about the company: "I saw video of some classified ballistic testing done by a certain three-letter government agency a few years ago.  The DDupleks Steelhead slug performed better than anything else against vehicle bodies.  That slug routinely out performed both 7.62 x 39mm and .308 rounds against car bodies and engine blocks.  It was very impressive."

• "Cognitive Dissonance and Denial"--Chiron. Rory Miller discusses the fact that machismo is often vocalized, but cowardice is silent; and someone has been very vocal about something, but when faced with it remains silent, the resulting cognitive dissonance results in denial. The example he gives is someone asserting that if someone molested their child, they would kill the molester. Then when a relative does so, and they don't follow through with their past threats, they end up denying that the relative could have done such a heinous act. Read the whole thing.
• "What Cops Need to Know About Autism"--Breach Bang Clear. The author discusses a shooting of the caretaker of an autistic man, then provides some examples of his dealings (as a police officer) with autistic individuals, before summing up:

Autistic people can display a lot of odd behaviors. Talking to themselves, spinning, suddenly sprinting away, tapping on things repeatedly (like hundreds of times a day), rocking, humming, chewing strange objects, wearing clothes backwards, spitting, all kinds of things. They can be aggressive. They can also overreact to things that don’t bother typical people and ignore things the rest of us would freak about; for example, my son screams like he’s being tortured when we cut his toenails, but barely cried when he broke his arm. Their actions can mimic dangerous, drug-induced behaviors. So we cops need to not jump to conclusions when we see someone acting in ways that look criminal.

• "The Secrets of Countersurveillance"--Forward Observer. Discussion of how to spot whether you are under surveillance.
• "10 Things You Probably Don't Know About Your AR"--Modern Self Protection. Some tips on operating and maintaining the AR.
• "Shout Out To Eric…And Why Some Things, Like Sights And Your Choice In Undergarments Are Highly Individual, And Personal!"--Revolver Science. Besides the miscellaneous points, the author describes shooting the “Hackathorn Standards”: 

String One: 10 Shots In 15 Seconds, At 15 Yards

String Two: 10 Shots In 10 Seconds, At 10 Yards

String Three: 10 Shots In 5 Seconds At 5 Yards

300 Points Possible, Scored On A B8 Bullseye Target

Other Stuff:

• "Strongest storm in years taking aim at Southern California"--Los Angeles Times. "The storm is expected to dump up to 6 inches of rain on Los Angeles County beaches and valleys and 5 to 10 inches on south-facing foothills and coastal mountain slopes, according to the National Weather Service."
• You will be assimilated: "Mark Zuckerberg's plan to save the world: Facebook founder reveals his vision to 'bring us together in a global community' in 5,500 word manifesto"--Daily Mail. Outlining his vision for building a global community, he ominously adds that "it's 'not enough if it's good for some people but it's doesn't work for other people. We really have to bring everyone along.' "
• "Photos of the people of 'El Guano' and Los 'Chapitos' and The 'war', unleashed by them ..."--Blog del Narco. The article suggests that the Sinaloa cartel is about to undergo a civil war. Also, lots of photos of cartel members arming up. (See also "Report: Photos appear to show cartel members readying for war in post-'El Chapo' power struggle").
• Christian Heterosexual White Men need not apply: "HP Pressures Law Firms to Engage in Discrimination"--Power Line. This is one tactic that liberals use to make sure that they can move "their people" into positions of power and authority.
• "Equality is not 'the rights of Englishmen'"--Vox Day. Quoting Alexander Hamilton's opposition to Jefferson's push to allow more immigration: "The influx of foreigners must, therefore, tend to produce a heterogeneous compound; to change and corrupt the national spirit; to complicate and confound public opinion; to introduce foreign propensities. In the composition of society, the harmony of the ingredients is all-important, and whatever tends to a discordant intermixture must have an injurious tendency." 
• "Media's Flynn-Russia Narrative Quickly Collapsing as FBI Reportedly Clears Former National Security Adviser"--PJ Media.

• Related? "Is Michael Flynn Now On A Secret Mission For Team Trump?"--Anonymous Conservative. Speculation that Flynn may now be tasked to uncovering the CIA's links to drug trafficking. 

• Trump knows that he is surrounded by men with long knives: "Trump's pick to replace Flynn turns down offer"--USA Today. Vice Admiral Robert Harward turned down the National Security Adviser position for personal reasons, but sources saying that he "also turned down the White House's role over concerns that he would not have full say over the composition of his staff." Very wise of Trump to reserve the right to fully vet those around him.
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Woolly mammoth on verge of resurrection, scientists reveal"--The Guardian. It will be a mammoth-Asian elephant hybrid (they plan on splicing mammoth genes into the Asian elephant DNA), but still....
• "1,000 Years Ago, Corn Made This Society Big. Then, A Changing Climate Destroyed It"--NPR. From the article:

       According to these lake sediments, the Central Mississippi Valley started getting more rain in the 900s. And that's when corn started thriving. A few decades later, skeletons from several Mississippian cities start showing a distinct carbon isotope signature from corn that suggests people were not only eating corn but eating lots of it. "That comes at right around 950 and that's around the time the population at Cahokia explodes," Bird says.

       This is around the same time that the city's great earthwork pyramids started rising. Beside the massive, 10-story Monk's Mound is a grand plaza that was used for religious ceremonies and for playing the American Indian sport chunkey, involving distinctive stone discs later unearthed by archaeologists. "[Corn production] produces food surpluses," says Bird. And that allowed the Mississippians to build a society with complex recreation and religious practices, he says.

       Cahokia became so notable at this time that other Mississippian chiefdoms may have begun forking off or springing up from its success, says Pauketat. Those other cultural centers were probably copying Cahokia, he says.

       But the good times didn't last. Just a couple of centuries after the Mississippian cultures reached their prime, the medieval warming trend started to reverse, in part because of increased volcanic activity on the planet. Around A.D. 1200, weather patterns across North America shifted, and a transcontinental jet stream that once pulled life-giving rains from the Gulf of Mexico began funneling cold air from the bone-dry Arctic. "We switch to profound drought at A.D. 1350," Bird says. It was the start of the Little Ice Age. The dry spell wouldn't break for up to 500 more years, according to the Lake Martin calcite sediments.

       The weather became poor for growing corn. On top of that, previous work from other researchers suggests that as the midcontinent and regions east of the Mississippi River became drier, lands west of the river became much wetter. Rains inundating its western headwaters might have caused massive flooding at Cahokia, stressing the already faltering farms. "This area hadn't been flooded like that for 600 years," says Samuel Munoz, a paleoclimatologist at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute who did this research but wasn't part of Bird's study.

       As food resources dwindled in the face of an unforgiving, centuries-long drought, Bird thinks the Mississippians' political atmosphere began destabilizing. "The signs of conflict don't really start in earnest until resources become scarcer after A.D. 1250," he says. "Not just more palisades and burned villages but actual skeletal injuries, decapitations, raids and things like that." With mounting bloodshed and increasing food scarcity that must have followed the dramatic change in climate, Bird thinks the Mississippians abandoned their cities and migrated to places farther south and east like present-day Georgia, where conditions were less extreme. Before the end of the 14th century, the archaeological record suggests Cahokia and the other city-states were completely abandoned.