August 2, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around The Web

"ATM Robbery In Florida Shows Need For Empty-Handed Skills"--Active Self Protection (6 min.)

John Correia refers to ATMs as "accessories to muggings" because they are such prime spots for bad guys to hang out. We took a look at the surveillance video of this incident some time back, but now we have Correia's input on it. If you remember, this was a guy that was mugged just after getting money from an ATM. He threw the money on the ground and then attempt to overpower his assailant when the assailant bent to pick up the money. For his troubles, the victim was shot in the chest and later died. Correia discusses the considerations for a successful disarm, and notes that you need to be spiritually prepared (i.e. right with your loved ones and with Jesus) in the event you are killed in an incident.

• If you haven't read through it yet, check out the Woodpile Report for this week. One point that Ol' Remus mentions that deserves special consideration: 

There will be war. War is inevitable, and it will probably take place on a global scale. There has never been any movement of people of human history even one-tenth as large as the post-1965 invasion of the United States that has not either a) led to war, or b) been imposed by lethal force as the result of war. I believe the die is already cast, as do more than a few military historians of my acquaintance.

• And don't forget Grant Cunningham's Hump Day Reading List for this week.
• How sad. Tiger McKee writes: "I’ve mentioned here that I’m not a big fan of plinkin’ or shooting for fun.  If I have to shoot it’s because lives depend on it." Shooting is a lot of fun, and to ignore that is just to make your life less rich.
• You might want to print this one or save it as a PDF: "CACHING YOUR GUNS FOR A CIVIL WAR PARTS I-IV"--Loose Rounds. Lots of good information. First, there is this point:

First, if you live in a state with licensing and registration, you’re screwed. Even if they don’t have all your weapons in their files, they know you have weapons. They can come and shake down your home and curtilage at their leisure. Registration and Licensing doesn’t solve crimes, and it certainly doesn’t prevent them. It is one thing only: a cheat sheet for confiscation.  For that, it’s the cat’s pajamas.

If you buy a firearm having filled out a form 4473, you are screwed as well, or if you have a CCL. Nevertheless, if you want to proceed with caching, he notes that "[t]he enemies of your cached weapons, dear insurgent, are many. They are rust, and its valkyries water and air; construction and development; discovery; documentation; human frailty; and obsolescence."

         Several weeks ago I was watching some videos on the results of people's caches, and water intrusion and rust were the biggest problem. Also, because some of the people were burying food, another problem that came up was freeze/thaw cycles causing containers to burst--bury your cache below the frost line.

        Anyway, read the whole thing.

• Nice: "A Bradenton cop didn’t rush to a shooting call. She said it didn’t meet her standards"--Bradenton Herald. This woman was made a sergeant earlier this year. From the article:

      Schwartz, had been assigned as the primary officer to the call by dispatch but never activated her lights or sirens nor did she speed to the scene, according to the internal affairs report.

      Instead, Schwartz drove below the speed limit at times, stopped multiple times for traffic lights and stop signs and even pulled over as her own sergeant passed her by with his lights and sirens, according to the internal affairs report.

     When confronted by her sergeant at the crime scene, Schwartz said she never responds in emergency mode unless another officer is down or asks for help, according to the report.

She was suspended. Looking at her and her record, she was obviously an affirmative action hire.

• "Non-Visual Target Indicators"--Deft Systems. It is easy to spend a small fortune on camouflaged clothing and cerakoting firearms and other equipment to reduce our vision "target indicators," but there are other considerations such as smell and sound. This article discusses these latter topics.
• "Spritz Spritz, Bang Bang"--Hell In A Handbasket. A look at non-lethal weapons:

       Batons concentrate the force of a blow, they don’t multiply force.  If one can only muster the energy of a landing butterfly for a punch, then it doesn’t matter if the butterfly is made of steel.

     The same goes for defensive sprays.

      They are extremely useful in that they will make it more difficult for an attacker to carry out their attacks, but there is no guarantee that it will make them stop.  They cause pain, makes it more difficult to breath, and fogs the vision if spray gets in the eyes.  And that is pretty much it.  If the person struck by defensive spray decides to keep on fighting, there is no reason why they can’t continue to do so.

      I have always said that defensive sprays are best used to help running away.  If an attacker is sprayed with mace or pepper spray before the victim takes off, then the ability for the aggressor to chase after them is very curtailed.  If you can’t run due to advanced age, infirmity, or deteriorated physical condition then it isn’t going to do much more than make the aggressor very, very angry.

Besides which, most people don't know how to correctly use a baton. Much of its employment is to jab, and the targets are vulnerable areas of the body, not the strongest, most protected parts of the body.

• Related: "Why Gun Beats Pepper Spray Every Time"--Bearing Arms. The author relates a story of a smash and grab where the criminals sprayed the store owner with so much pepper spray, responding police had to wear protective suits, but the store owner was still able to get to her firearm and shoot at the criminals.

"MP5 magdump ambush on a guy who shot at Utah County Deputies"--Donut Operator (4 min).

• "Whites in Servitude in Early America and Industrial Britain"--Unz Report. They weren't merely "indentured servants," but outright slaves for life, with their children also being subjected to slavery. From the article:

       Up to one-half of all the arrivals in the American colonies were Whites slaves and they were America’s first slaves. These Whites were slaves for life, long before Blacks ever were. This slavery was even hereditary. White children born to White slaves were enslaved too.

      Whites were auctioned on the block with children sold and separated from their parents and wives sold and separated from their husbands. Free Black property owners strutted the streets of northern and southern American cities while White slaves were worked to death in the sugar mills of Barbados and Jamaica and the plantations of Virginia.

• "Not a Country; Not Even a Team"--American Renaissance. Recent immigrants to the U.S. from Latin America and Asia are not assimilating. An excerpt:

        Many other “Americans” feel the same way. In 1999, the American women’s soccer team played the Chinese team in Los Angeles for the finals of the Women’s World Cup. Los Angeles has long had large Chinese communities from Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland that were frosty towards each other, but they set aside their differences to root for the Chinese team. “There are political differences, but because the team is Chinese, that’s all we think about,” explained Louis Wong, who was from Hong Kong.

       Hostile Chinese organizations called a truce and bought seats in the same area so thousands of Chinese-Americans could sit together and make a tremendous din for the Beijing team. The idea of coming together to root for their new homeland appears not to have occurred to them. “I’m a U.S. citizen, but I’m Chinese,” explained businessman Edward Chang.[i]

      Mr. Chang and Mr. Tristan call themselves “American,” but what does that mean? “American” no longer has a racial connotation. It no longer has a linguistic connotation; a declaration by lawyer Aaron Schlossberg that Americans should speak English made him a media target. Outlets such as Time tell us that illegal immigrants calling themselves “Dreamers” are “new Americans,” so you can be an American without even being a citizen.

      The United States may be the “sole superpower” but American identity means nothing more than participation in an economy. Today, appeals to America identity, such as “that’s not who we are” or “those aren’t our values” are usually used to tell us we are not morally allowed to act in our own interests. Reporters and watchdogs look down their noses at even the bloodless civic nationalism represented by American symbols. Millions of “Americans” show no respect for the national flag and don’t support the national team.

• Pyramid power: "The Great Pyramid of Giza Might Focus Electromagnetic Energy in Its Chambers"--Science Alert. From the article:

        "We had to use some assumptions," says Andrey Evlyukhin, senior researcher from ITMO University in Russia.

         "For example, we assumed that there are no unknown cavities inside, and the building material with the properties of an ordinary limestone is evenly distributed in and out of the pyramid."

        Then they made a model of the pyramid and its electromagnetic response. By calculating something called the extinction cross section, the team were able to estimate how the wave energy is scattered or absorbed by the pyramid.

       Using a special type of analysis called a multipole analysis the researchers found that the scattered fields were concentrating in the pyramid's internal chambers as well as under its base.

• "Blowing Smoke"--West Hunt. An article on the inheritability of intelligence. An excerpt:

After a long and difficult pregnancy, Nature Genetics  finally gave birth to a big paper about genetic influences  on educational achievement. Now we know more of the genes that result in high heritability of phenotypes like educational attainment – including something about the metabolic paths involved. These results don’t explain all the heritability we see – in particular the part due to rare deleterious variants – but they  explain some.  Now, from a gene sample, knowing nothing else, we can say something about some kid’s likelihood of completing college. People in the bottom quintile of the polygenic score had a 10% chance of graduating, those in the top quintile had a 55% chance. Obviously if we knew his grades, test scores,  permanent record and genotype, we could make an even better prediction: still, this is interesting.