August 7, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Coconut Oil Kills - Ultra Spiritual Life episode 66"--Awaken With JP (5 min.)

The author of this YouTube channel pokes fun at a variety of new age virtual signaling, and his videos are a lot of fun to watch. In this episode, however, he turns his attention on one of the most infamous sources of misinformation concerning healthy foods--the American Heart Association--and, in particular, the AHA's recommendation to avoid coconut oil.

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

• And now we are back to it being unsafe to drop a Sig 320: "BREAKING: Omaha Outdoors Halts Sales of SIG SAUER P320 Pistols Following Failed Drop Testing"--The Truth About Guns. From the article:

       Omaha found that when the pistols were dropped at a very specific angle — muzzle up, striking the back of the slide — the guns would discharge a significant percentage of the time.

        As you can see in Andrew Touhy’s explanation of their findings above, one of the four guns they tested would not fire when dropped. Omaha Outdoors attributes the problem to trigger shoes of a particular weight installed in some models of the gun. According to Tuohy, lighter trigger shoes reduce or eliminate the problem.

• "US Palm Shuts Down"--The Firearms Blog. The reason cited are market conditions. The company is oriented toward the tactical rifle market, so declining demand in that niche combined with increasing competition from the likes of MagPul was probably the direct cause. (Update: Solomon at the SNAFU! blog adds his thoughts on the demise of US Palm, and warns that we will probably see this with a lot of other boutique manufacturers, so if you want something "tacticool," you should probably order it sooner than later).
• "CBS Accidently Stumbles On Harsh Truth About Gun Laws"--Bearing Arms. CBS accidentally included in an interview "[a]dmitted felons saying they have no real problems getting their hands on guns." 
• "Reloading: To Crimp or Not to Crimp, That is the Question"--Guns America Blog. Part of a series on how to reload, this article, as evidenced by the title, discussing different types of crimp and when to use them. He explains:

       We know that a bullet has to be firmly seated in a cartridge. If a bullet is too loose, it can move during recoil or in extreme cases, fall out of the cartridge altogether. If a bullet in a magazine or cylinder moves partially out of the cartridge case during recoil, it can jam up the works. In a revolver, that may prevent the cylinder from turning. In a semi-automatic, that cartridge might cause a feeding jam. On the other hand, if a bullet gets pushed farther into the case, it can increase pressures to catastrophic levels. As the bullet gets pushed in, there is less internal case volume, and when you touch off that round, less volume means higher pressure. How much higher depends on the specific load and amount of bullet setback.

       As a result, it’s important to make sure that projectiles are seated firmly and properly in the cartridge case. The gotcha is that crimping is not the way to do this, with a few partial exceptions that we’ll discuss in a bit. The short explanation is that crimping is not what keeps a projectile firmly seated, case neck tension is, and those two things are not the same. Likewise, crimping doesn’t create or even restore case neck tension. Let’s explore the whole case neck tension thing a bit more.

       The exception to this is "roll crimping," "the process of pushing (rolling) the cartridge case mouth edge into a groove called a cannelure that’s cut into the bullet." This is probably what most of us think of when we think of crimping a bullet. Roll crimping does not obviate the need to have good neck tension, but is added insurance that the bullet won't move during recoil. Although the author discusses this in relation to machine gun ammo, where a typical shooter will see this are magnum cartridges, such as the .357 Magnum or .44 Magnum, or the rifle magnums.

       One thing that the author does not mention about crimping is that it sometimes aids with reliable feeding. And, in particular, I'm thinking about loading rounds into the cylinder of a revolver. I've had issues with the edge of the case catching on the edge of the cylinder hole with uncrimped ammo, but if it is crimped, it just makes it smoother and easier to load.

• A series of articles from Kommando Store on how to care for leather foot ware, contemplating leather boots: 

• "Step 1: Cleaning" discussing the use of brushes (the photograph shows an old tooth brush), but the author also notes that there are specialty brushes, and saddle soap.

• "Step 2: Repair" of cuts, divots, and scratches using rubber cement.

• "Step 3: Lotion & Waterproofing" by applying wax to the leather and stitching, making sure to use the heat from your fingers or a blow dryer to get the wax to melt and penetrate. The author recommends buffing the boot after letting it sit for a few minutes to get rid of excess wax. Repeat if necessary depending on your tastes or the condition of the boot.

• "Step 4: Polish" using a wax or cream type product.

• "Poolside"--The Kakistocracy. A warning that it is not just the water you need to avoid in Mexico, but there have been incidents of tourists--even in the exclusive resorts--being given tainted or drugged alcohol. The author had his own experience with this years ago, with the end result that his wife and he were robbed of some jewelry. There is a website that collects stories of these incidents called Mexico Vacation Awareness. 
• I've noted several times that it doesn't matter how many tactical classes you take, you will never be considered the equal of even a cook in the military. In this article from Western Rifle Shooters Association entitled "SPC Slick And You," the author says as much. The article references a soldier with whom the author served--SPC Slick--who was lazy and not very good at his MOS, but willing to undertake some of the most distasteful jobs in exchange for additional free time. But, and key point: 

       If you’re not prior military, don’t try to do all of the fancy military stuff [post SHTF]. Even if you are a former 11B with lots of experience, keep in mind that you won’t have the resources or the recent training that you used to have. Oh, and in case anyone is thinking that they’ve taken a tactical class at tacticool school and can beat Slick, think again. Even though Slick was combat service support, Slick went through 8 weeks of basic training and Slick’s more recent successors have gone through 10 weeks. In those 8 weeks, Slick learned to handle the M16A1, the M60, the M203, and the M2, as well as familiarization with the M72 LAW. He learned to patrol, set up a defensive perimeter, and learned to do fire and maneuver. He did this for approximately 14 hours a day (in some cases more) 6½ days per week, with a few hours off Sunday mornings for church. If you take into account a few days for admin, he had approximately 7 weeks, with the new recruits having 9 weeks, of this regimen. That’s 637 hours of training in Basic alone.

        Now some of you will rightfully point out that a lot of that time is learning drill, customs, wearing a uniform, etc., and you would be correct. AND WRONG. All of those items teach discipline, the following of orders, and unit cohesion – concepts just as important to winning as any tactic that you may or may not learn in a class. None of this counts any additional tactical training time that he got in AIT, with the unit prior to mobilization, or the refresher training that we got during mobilization. Add to that the fact that Slick could pass an Army PT test (how many people can actually do that for real, not just behind a key board?) and could do 15 mile road march with a fully loaded pack in 3-4 hours. Yup. Slick could.

       Could Slick or any of the rest of us in the unit do infantry? No, at least not well, and I was combat arms. My point? Tacticool school doesn’t even qualify you to take on Slick, much less 10th Mountain....

However, the author maintains that this is not necessary, because you can do a lot of other mundane tasks that don't involve fire and maneuver, including static defense or, I suppose like Slick, maintaining the latrine.

• Conversely, at Zero Gov, the author of "Village Praxis: Soldiers Load Indeed, Some Training Considerations by Bill Buppert" takes a contrarian opinion. He writes:

        There is a stream of consciousness modality currently coursing through the prepper and III% community that if you aren’t infantry, you can’t take the fight to the enemy no matter how competent you may be as men of the gun or whatever background you hail from.

        Infantry training. Sure, it gives insight into suck management and a habituated training environment to American SUT but successful insurgencies aren’t confined to graduates of Western military training courses in combat arms. History is littered with the last gasps and corpse-piles of competent soldiery rotting on the field in a foreign land bested by indigenous soldiers, professional and amateur alike.

Although current practice is to call in an air-strike rather than engage in fire and maneuver, the author notes that the tactics of fire and maneuver since at least World War II has centered around the squad machine gun as a support weapon. How to defeat that?

History shows legions of examples from the “melting” tactics in Afghanistan to the stand-off precision riflery of the Boers or Schutztruppe at the turn of the twentieth century. Irish tactics employed maneuver around the positions of British guns and MGs to flank and envelop.

And, of course, that the soft underbelly of the beast is logistics.

• "'Wrong turn' kills doctor in Grand Canyon hike with girls"--BBC News. This article from last Friday reports that searchers have found the body of an ER doctor and mother that went missing when she went for help and water on a hike into the Grand Canyon. Basic story, is that the doctor and her two daughters were hiking down into the Canyon, and ran out of water. She left the girls at a safe location and went ahead to get water and help and, apparently, took a wrong turn on the trail. "Park rangers suspect the emergency room physician became lost and died from heat exhaustion on the Arizona trail." 

Other Stuff:

• A new poll shows that 62% of Americans support deploying troops if North Korea were to attack South Korea.
• "Black, American, and Armed"--American Prospect. What starts off as a pretty good article on why blacks relied on firearms for self-protection in the past, morphs into a diatribe against the NRA, even though the NRA has tried for decades to get blacks to take an interest in supporting the Second Amendment.
• "China, India struggle to put a lid on their border row involving Bhutan"--Deutsche Welle. The article reports that "For the past several weeks, Chinese and Indian troops have faced off close to a valley controlled by China that separates India from Bhutan - a close Indian ally - and gives China access to the so-called Chicken's Neck, a thin strip of land that connects India to its remote northeastern regions." It goes on to detail some of what is going on, but the primary problem is that China won't recognize India's right to even be involved in border disputes between China and Bhutan, while leaders of both nations are being pressured to not give in to the other because of strong nationalist sentiment. 
• "Get ready for the fall...in temperature! Unseasonably chilly August ahead for the eastern two-thirds of the US with 60F lows lasting up to TWO WEEKS"--Daily Mail.
• This is what we are importing: "Latin America Again Ranks as World's Least Secure Region: Report"--Insight Crime. From the article:

        Gallup's 2017 "Global Law and Order Report" ranks 135 countries from which a total of 136,000 individuals were asked during 2016 to respond to four questions about perceptions of insecurity. These four questions concerned the level of confidence in law enforcement and the feeling of safety when out alone at night, as well as whether the respondents had been victim of robbery or physical aggression in the past year.

        As is often the case with global security-themed studies, Latin America and the Caribbean ranked at the bottom of the list, with a "law and order index" score of 64 out of 100 -- the eighth year in a row the region ranked as the worst in the world. The United States and Canada were ranked at the top with a score of 86 out of 100.

        At the national level, Venezuela was ranked last globally in the law and order index, with a score of 42 out of 100. Only 12 percent of Venezuelans felt safe out alone at night, and barely 14 percent said they trusted law enforcement. Both of those scores are the lowest ever recorded by the Gallup poll since surveyers began asking those questions.

         Of the 11 countries with the worst overall law and order index scores, nearly half are located in Latin America and the Caribbean: Venezuela, El Salvador, Bolivia, the Dominican Republic and Argentina.

• Tijuana about to set a new record in violence between drug gangs and cartels: "To this date, 1071 executions have been reported in Baja California." 
• "This Mysterious Military Spy Plane Has Been Flying Circles Over Seattle For Days"--The Drive. According to the article, "[t]he aircraft, which goes by the callsign 'SPUD21' and wears a nondescript flat gray paint job with the only visible markings being a USAF serial on its tail, is a CASA CN-235-300 transport aircraft that has been extensively modified for the surveillance mission." In addition to an array of electronic and radio surveillance gear, the aircraft also has a door for visual surveillance using various telescopic cameras and imagers. On the low end, this is probably a mixture of standard optics and thermal imaging. 

On the higher end of the capability spectrum, the aperture could be filled with a wide area aerial surveillance (WAAS) camera system that can view a large area—the size of a town—continuously at one time. This technology, which allows for tagging of vehicles and other moving objects, and can even be used retroactively to trace someone's movements over time, is among the biggest surveillance game-changers of our time.

The authors goes on to deduce and explain:

        Some WAAS sensors require the aircraft to fly tight overhead orbits, while others work at a slant angle in relation to the ground. Considering the mounting location and aperture size on the CN-235 in question, this kind of "slant" setup would likely be the case. Also, the counterclockwise orbits the aircraft flies, between roughly six and twelve miles across, at altitudes from 17,000 to 22,000 feet, also indicate such a setup.  

* * *

        Above all else, these types of surveillance systems are especially good at capturing and monitoring so called "patterns of life" over and around a target area. This is an especially useful tool when collecting intelligence on an enemy target or group of targets over time and can open up new possibilities when it comes to the  process of finding, fixing and finishing the enemy. 

        Simply put, instead of recording a snapshot in time such as what a satellite can furnish, persistent airborne surveillance sensors capture massive amounts of exploitable information over hours and days. So if a picture is akin to a thousand words, this persistent type of wide area aerial surveillance is equivalent to an entire novel or even a series of novels.  

            When paired with communications intelligence gathering, such as intercepting radio communications and mobile and satellite phone chatter, a high fidelity "picture" of a targeted area and how specific targets in that area operate can be compiled in a relatively short period of time, all using a single relatively economical asset. Also, the aircraft’s extensive communications suite can take this information, including streaming video, and send it to a command center around the world or relay it to regional ground stations. As such, it can likely provide high-fidelity overwatch of ongoing special operations mission, and relay that video and/or audio to commanders in real time.  

The article contains some maps showing some of the routes taken by the aircraft, and from what field it is operating. Of course, everyone (FAA, Air Force) denies any knowledge of who is operating the aircraft.

• "Chinese chatbots apparently re-educated after political faux pas"--Reuters. You may remember a relatively news of problems with AI chatbots used by Microsoft and Twitter and Facebook which, in one case, had to be shut down because it became racist, and in the other case, two of the bots made up their own language. Well, a similar experiment in China resulted in two chat bots being shut down because they started posting comments critical of the Chinese government. For instance, in one example cited in the article, a user posted "long live the Communist Party!" to which the bot responded: "Do you think such a corrupt and useless political system can live long?"
• Devaluing education: Campus Reform reports that "[a] University of Georgia professor has adopted a 'stress reduction policy' that will allow students to select their own grades if they 'feel unduly stressed' by the ones they earned." I would be very reluctant to hire anyone graduating from the University of Georgia if this is what the administration allows.
• The Kakistocracy observes that the Federal government is on track to spend $4 trillion this year. The top seven items are (amounts in billions of dollars):

1. Social Security: $934
2. Medicare: $646
3. War: $629
4. Medicaid: $545
5. Welfare: $298
6. Federal pensions: $267
7. Interest on the debt: $264

        Items 1, 2, 4 and 5 fall wholly outside the mandate of the Constitution. And the Federal pensions and interest on the debt largely the result of uncontrolled spending on the first five items. And the fact that Congress was unable to even do something as simple as repeal Obamacare suggests that the complexity has metastasized to the point that there is no means to roll back the complexity short of a crash. It is only our wealth and advances in computers that have allowed us to reach the heights of complexity of our current society, so when the collapse comes, it will be utter and complete.

         The point of the author's article isn't so much to discuss the such spending is generally unsustainable, but that it won't be sustainable in light of changing racial demographics and ascension of identity politics. Basically, as the author notes: "Social security and Medicare total $1,580 billion per year, or one and a half trillion. That’s money taken directly out of the pockets of mostly whites and then transferred to mostly whites. And that injustice is not long going to be tolerated." However, welfare primarily for minorities is only half of that. The left will surely push to change this ... and perhaps that is the real reason for Obamacare.

• As in the days of Noah and Sodom: 

• "Inside the $400-a-week San Francisco transgender day camp where children as young as four all use the same bathrooms and choose to be male, female or neither when they check-in every day"--Daily Mail.

• "The sickness in Hollywood"--Vox Popoli. Leaked transcripts from a story conference between George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and Larry Kasdan concerning the script for Raiders of the Lost Ark show that the three intended that the Indiana Jones character be a pedophile in his relationship with Marion--her character was supposed to have been between 12 and 15 at the time of their tryst. 

• "Anthropology’s Obsession with African Origins"--Unz Report. There have been some anthropological discoveries over the past several years that have cast doubt on the "Out of Africa" theory--that modern humans evolved in Africa and spread to other parts of the world. Evidence now shows that other intelligent hominids evolved in Europe and Asia, which interbred with modern humans, and that even within humans, that a great deal of evolutionary development (particularly intellectually and behaviorally) was outside of Africa. The cited article, originally published in 2014, suggests that the "Out of Africa" theory is derivative of Cultural Marxism and the Frankfurt School, which insists "that once we evolved into modern humans, somehow our brains have miraculously been unaffected by any subsequent evolution and that all human achievements after were built with the same brain."
• "The Ghostly Radio Station That No One Claims To Run"--BBC. Occasionally I see articles about Cold War era radio stations that transmit gibberish or weird items, and which are believed to signals to spies but no one really knows. This particular article is about a signal that comes from two stations, located in Russia near St. Petersburg and Moscow, respectively, and can be found transmitting at 4625 kHz. The signal has been broadcast since 1982. According to the article:

       Twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, for the last three-and-a-half decades, it’s been broadcasting a dull, monotonous tone. Every few seconds it’s joined by a second sound, like some ghostly ship sounding its foghorn. Then the drone continues.

        Once or twice a week, a man or woman will read out some words in Russian, such as “dinghy” or “farming specialist”. And that’s it. 

The article discusses a few theories, none of which adequately explain the broadcast. But one of the theories is that the signal acts as deadman's switch for a Russian doomsday program: that is, if the signal goes dead, Russian missile silos will automatically launch their ICBMs. This is not too far fetched of an idea. In September 2009, Wired published an article concerning such a doomsday mechanism called "Perimeter." The system detailed in that article went online in 1985. According to one of the engineers that worked on that project:

The point of the system ... was to guarantee an automatic Soviet response to an American nuclear strike. Even if the US crippled the USSR with a surprise attack, the Soviets could still hit back. It wouldn't matter if the US blew up the Kremlin, took out the defense ministry, severed the communications network, and killed everyone with stars on their shoulders. Ground-based sensors would detect that a devastating blow had been struck and a counterattack would be launched.

 The article continues:

        Perimeter ensures the ability to strike back, but it's no hair-trigger device. It was designed to lie semi-dormant until switched on by a high official in a crisis. Then it would begin monitoring a network of seismic, radiation, and air pressure sensors for signs of nuclear explosions. Before launching any retaliatory strike, the system had to check off four if/then propositions: If it was turned on, then it would try to determine that a nuclear weapon had hit Soviet soil. If it seemed that one had, the system would check to see if any communication links to the war room of the Soviet General Staff remained. If they did, and if some amount of time—likely ranging from 15 minutes to an hour—passed without further indications of attack, the machine would assume officials were still living who could order the counterattack and shut down. But if the line to the General Staff went dead, then Perimeter would infer that apocalypse had arrived. It would immediately transfer launch authority to whoever was manning the system at that moment deep inside a protected bunker—bypassing layers and layers of normal command authority. At that point, the ability to destroy the world would fall to whoever was on duty: maybe a high minister sent in during the crisis, maybe a 25-year-old junior officer fresh out of military academy. And if that person decided to press the button … If/then. If/then. If/then. If/then.

       Once initiated, the counterattack would be controlled by so-called command missiles. Hidden in hardened silos designed to withstand the massive blast and electromagnetic pulses of a nuclear explosion, these missiles would launch first and then radio down coded orders to whatever Soviet weapons had survived the first strike. At that point, the machines will have taken over the war. Soaring over the smoldering, radioactive ruins of the motherland, and with all ground communications destroyed, the command missiles would lead the destruction of the US.

The article mentions that the push for the system began in 1981 and 1982 after statements and positions taken by the Reagan Administration made the Soviets think that the United States might actually be willing to attempt a first strike against the USSR. Interestingly, though, the system was kept secret from the U.S. The reasoning, apparently, was that the system was not intended to dissuade America but, rather, to reassure Soviet leaders that if they delayed authorizing a retaliatory strike, the Soviet Union would still be able to retaliate against the United States; in other words, it gave them the confidence not to rush a decision to launch a nuclear strike against the United States if they believed one had been launched against the USSR.

Update: corrected typo