August 27, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Bully Uses A Chokehold To Rob Victim"--Active Self Protection (5 min.)

This is an interesting video. Not because the victim was completely clueless as to his surroundings--we see that enough in these videos. No, it is because of the care taken by the mugger to not seriously injure the victim. Initially, the mugger uses a pistol to threaten to the victim, but when the victim resists, the mugger ditches the pistol and instead puts the victim in a choke hold and chokes him out. Do you know how to get out of a choke hold? Do you have a backup option, such as a knife or other weapon you could access?

• If you haven't seen this already, check out last week's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Greg Ellifritz. Lots of good articles, but one in particular that he links to has valuable information for anyone that carries a concealed handgun: what to do with your pistol when using a public restroom. I shared some ideas about this awhile back, but the author of the article cited by Ellifritz has a couple of ideas I hadn't considered. Check it out.
• While you are at Active Response Training, take a look at Ellifritz's article on "Using the .22 for Self Defense." In it, he explains why the .22 is not a very good choice for a self-defense handgun despite his research showing that it generally took fewer shots from a .22 to get an attacker to stop his or her attack. Part of the problem is that .22 will not reliably penetrate to vitals and doesn't make large enough holes to lead to extensive blood loss. As Ellifritz notes in his article: "I had a doctor in my class last weekend who told me about a patient he treated who had eight .22 bullets under his scalp and none had penetrated into his brain!  The patient was conscious, alert, and asking for a beer!"

        Let me note that with handguns, shot placement is of key importance because of the relative lack of power compared to rifle bullets (although even rifle shooters rely on shot placement for clean kills). To focus on shot placement to the exclusion of other attributes is a mistake, however. Penetration is important, and penetration is generally a function of momentum (yes, bullet shape, materials, etc., also affect penetration, but I'm just speaking generally). Momentum = mass * velocity. So, all other things being equal, a heavier bullet will penetrate further than a lightweight bullet; or a high velocity bullet will penetrate better than a slower moving bullet. The .22 has neither of these in its favor. So if you can handle more recoil or carry something larger than a .22, than do so. If a .22 is all you have, it can be made to work, but it is not optimal.

• Grrl Power: "Violence By Women"--MacYoung's Musings. Marc MacYoung makes some observations of women increasingly initiating physical violence. Some questions that he raises as to violence perpetrated by women:

        There are two important considerations here. One is we must ask ourselves how many women are using this ‘you can’t hit me back’ idea as a free pass to physically attack and verbally/ emotionally abuse men? In fact, we can ask if they are aggressing while relying on men not hitting. This especially in light of, if the woman loses at the physical, how often will she run to the authorities to get the man punished for hitting back? 

        Two is we must ask if this inherently unjust double standard is prompting men –especially young men– to just say, “Fuggit” and treat women just like they would another man? If you hit him, he’ll hit you right back, just as hard as he would another man. If that last is the case, it becomes a matter of ‘when?’ Will he hit you that hard after the first strike? Or will take multiple hits –and the pain they cause– before he either loses patience or realizes you’re trying to throw him a beating and defends himself? 

       Or are men ‘supposed to’ submit and just take the beating? This is where the rise in the numbers of women attacking strangers becomes an issue. In a domestic relationship, men typically put up with such violence. Often because it’s limited to one or two strikes (incidentally this includes when he thought he was ‘being funny’). It’s when unchecked anger goes into beating mode that men will typically hit back. Having said that, this forbearance does not mean women’s attacks are not legally prosecutable ‘assaults’ or that they do not cause pain to the man. (Incidentally I’m not talking about male abusers. They only make up a small percentage of ‘domestic violence’ as do female abusers. Mostly I’m talking about couples fighting. Which, contrary to the narrative makes up the supermajority of ‘domestic violence.’ But you don’t run national campaigns or get funding on the low numbers of actual abusers. 

One of the comments asked for some studies or statistics to back up MacYoung's observations, to which I replied, although the links are mostly concerned with domestic violence. Some additional resources:

• "Can Women be as Violent as Men?"--Psychology Today. Key point: "Women are more likely to pick fights with their husbands, they are quicker to escalate verbal aggression, and are as likely to use physical aggression as men."

• "Women are more violent, says study"--The Independent. 

• "Why Girls Are Getting More Violent"--ABC News. 

• "Are U.S. Girls Becoming More Violent?"--PRB. This article notes: "The FBI’s Uniform Crime Reports note the female percentage of total juvenile assault arrests jumped from 21 percent to 32 percent between 1990 and 2003. And the U.S. female juvenile assault rate rose from about 200 for every 100,000 girls to 750 between 1980 and 2003." (Footnote omitted).

• "Extensive Research: Women Initiate Domestic Violence More than Men, Men Under-report It."--Ali Shahrestani. Summarizing some research.

The question is why the rise in statistics. One researcher, cited in the PRB article, contends that the increase is largely illusory, and only the result of more incidents being reported or prosecuted. But others refer to surveys that seem to indicate growing levels of violence. I suspect that MacYoung is correct: that women are becoming more public with their violence and abuse, including increasing violence toward strangers. 

• "Various Thoughts on Preparedness"--Total Survivalist Blog. Applying the law of diminishing marginal utility to prepping: 

       Lets say a person sees some risks and decides to get prepared. They get a couple weeks of shelf stable ready to eat (crackers, peanut butter, canned soup, poptarts, etc), a couple water jugs and a filter, a few boxes of batteries for their flashlights and some extra ammo for whatever guns they have. They take $1,000 cash out of savings and keep it at home. This person is now prepared for the vast majority, say 80% of events. 

      Say they take it a bit further, push the food to 2 months. Buy a military pattern rifle and a case of ammo. A generator for when the power goes out. Put a bit of money into silver. Get some bug out stuff together. Now they are ready for like 90% of events. Rough math says we are at a few thousand dollars here. 

      Getting ready for the other 10% of events is going to be a lot more expensive. It is also going to have significantly more impact on your normal life. The really funny part is that for the other 10% of events the preparations people are making are generally for the wrong thing. 

      When war/ pestilence, etc come to your area GO SOMEWHERE ELSE! You don't need to be buying pallets of surplus razor wire, you need to make sure that your passports are current. 

• "Lott: 7.14% of Americans Have Carry Licenses, Up 273% Since 2007"--The Truth About Guns.
• "ATF Data Undercuts Claim Gun-Controlled Cities Get Guns from Surrounding States"--Breitbart. The article reports that "the ATF was asked to trace the origin of 8,600 guns from [Baltimore] crime scenes last year. The federal agency was able 'to determine where nearly 5,900 of the firearms were sold,' and nearly half of those firearms were purchased in Maryland." The article also notes that "the firearms were bought an average of 12 years before the crime or reason for the trace." 

"Paris is a Sh*thole"--Paul Joseph Watson (13 min.) 

Parisians no longer have to travel to Africa to experience the smells, garbage, and human excrement of an African town. 

• Diversity is strength: "Nearly One in Three Crimes In Italy Committed By Foreigners"--Breitbart.
• Like most of you, I find the current crises striking the Catholic Church to be horrifying. However, it is important to remember that this crises is not just a pedophile scandal, but also involves abuse or rape of seminarians by homosexual priests. By sheltering practicing homosexuals within their ranks, without requiring or even expecting repentance, the Catholic leadership set the stage for the growth of a tumor resulting in all that is happening. Some articles for more reading:

• "It's a Gay Scandal Too"--Andrew Klavan at PJ Media. Klavan observes: "But — as with the open secret abuse scandal that lurks just beneath the surface in Hollywood — most of the victims in the church are not children but under-age adolescent males. That is not pedophilia. That is homosexual rape."

• And right on cue: "US priest speaks up for Church's gay 'parish pariahs'"--Daily Mail. From the article:

        Gay people in the Catholic Church are sometimes "treated like dirt", according to a priest invited by the Vatican to address a conference on families in Dublin on Thursday ahead of a visit by Pope Francis.

        US Jesuit priest James Martin preaches openness towards gay Roman Catholics -- in the face of some traditionalists who have tried to shut him down.

• "Vatican Bombshell: McCarrick Conspiracy Uncovered!"--American Conservative. Rod Dreher writes:

       Archbishop Carlo Maria Vigano, who served at the papal nuncio (that is, Vatican ambassador) to the United States from 2011-2016, has dropped an atomic bomb on Francis’s papacy, charging that “corruption has reached the very top of the Church’s hierarchy.”

       In a lengthy statement, Vigano says that Francis has known for years about Cardinal Theodore McCarrick’s sexual abuse, but brought him into the pontifical inner circle anyway, and sent him around the world on papal missions.

       In fact, says Vigano, the Roman curia has known about McCarrick since the year 2000, but McCarrick was protected by gay supporters honeycombed throughout the Vatican. Pope Benedict XVI ordered McCarrick out of public ministry in 2009 or 2010, but McCarrick, abetted by powerful gay allies in the Curia, defied Benedict.

• "Pope To US Church: You’re On Your Own"--American Conservative. Pope Francis signals that he has no intention of removing any bishops.
• "Why Don’t the Priests Blow the Whistle?"--Fr. Palka at Epiphany of Our Lord Catholic Church. He writes, in part:

 One question that was asked after last week’s homily was, “Why don’t ‘good’ priests and ‘good’ bishops blow the whistle on the abusive priests and bishops?” Many people still don’t (I believe most priests still don’t) understand just how evil the active homosexual or homosexual activist (AH/HA from here on out) priests and bishops are. Not understanding the extent of their depravity and wrongly thinking that they are simply “normal” men who just struggle with their sexual desires and sometimes might fail to remain chaste but are really, truly repentant when it happens and strive to “confess my sins, do penance and amend my life, amen”, they cannot possibly grasp the hellish depths to which the AH/HA clergy will go to persecute, lambaste, punish, humiliate and blackmail anyone who stands in their way or threatens their way of life. Let me be clear. The AH/HA priests and bishops treat their sexual mortal sin as if it is a “good” and a God-given good at that (if they even believe in God, something of which I am very doubtful, at least in the Catholic understanding of Who God is). Nay, more than “a” good, they are convinced that it is “the” good. They will go to any, repeat, any length to force others to engage in it, to accept it, or to, at the very least, ignore it and pretend that it doesn’t exist or that it is not harmful enough to mention or try to eradicate. They do not struggle with their disordered sexual desires as so many others do but rather revel in them. 

The author goes on to discuss how "the Lavender Mafia" gets its information to blackmail priests.

• Speaking of scandals and secret combinations: "Despite Comey Assurances, Vast Bulk of Weiner Laptop Emails Were Never Examined"--Real Clear Investigations. You'll see many familiar names in this cover-up by senior FBI and DoJ officials to protect Hillary Clinton: McCabe, Comey, Strzok, Page. And the end result was that hundreds of thousands of emails were never examined; no one questioned how Weiner's laptop came to contain classified materials. And:

       A final mystery remains: Where is the Weiner laptop today?

       The whistleblower agent in New York said that he was “instructed” by superiors to delete the image of the laptop hard drive he had copied onto his work station, and to “wipe” all of the Clinton-related emails clean from his computer.

       But he said he believes the FBI “retained" possession of the actual machine, and that the evidence on the device was preserved.

       The last reported whereabouts of the laptop was the Quantico lab. However, the unusually restrictive search warrant Strzok and his team drafted appeared to remand the laptop back into the custody of Abedin and Weiner upon the closing of the case.

       “If the government determines that the subject laptop is no longer necessary to retrieve and preserve the data on the device,” the document states on its final page, “the government will return the subject laptop."

       Wherever its location, somewhere out there is a treasure trove of evidence involving potentially serious federal crimes -- including espionage, foreign influence-peddling and obstruction of justice -- that has never been properly or fully examined by law enforcement authorities.

• "South Africa’s Julius Malema: Trump’s Right, We’re Coming for White Farmers"--Breitbart. From the article:

“Through land expropriation, we are forcing white people to share the land which was gained through a crime against the humanity of black and African people,” Malema said in a press conference, referring to the racist land policies of colonialism and apartheid.

Of course, Malema wants to seize the land for the benefit of the Bantu majority, and has no intention of turning it over to people that inhabited the land when the first Afrikaners arrived: the Khoi-Khoi and San. 

• Related: "The 4 black lies about land in South Africa. Bantu (black Africans) DO NOT have default right to land."--SA-News. 

• Related: "How the Bantu people surged across two-thirds of Africa"--Ars Technica. From the article:

There are over a billion people in Africa, and nearly a quarter of them speak languages from the Bantu family. Bantu speakers occupy regions from the rainforests of central Africa to the savannah of East Africa and dry climates of the south. And they occupied all of that territory in less than 4,000 years despite the fact that Africa had been teeming with humans for tens of thousands of years.

• "Archaeologists explore a rural field in Kansas, and a lost city emerges"--Los Angeles Times. The ruins were found in Arkansas City, Kansas. From the article:

       Using freshly translated documents written by the Spanish conquistadors more than 400 years ago and an array of high-tech equipment, Blakeslee located what he believes to be the lost city of Etzanoa, home to perhaps 20,000 people between 1450 and 1700.

       They lived in thatched, beehive-shaped houses that ran for at least five miles along the bluffs and banks of the Walnut and Arkansas rivers. Blakeslee says the site is the second-largest ancient settlement in the country after Cahokia in Illinois.

• "Excavation Of Ancient Chinese City Reveals Pyramid And Human Sacrifices That Could Rewrite History"--IFL Science. The article reports:

       Once mistaken for the Great Wall of China, archeologists have unearthed an ancient city complete with a 70-meter (230-foot) pyramid, decapitated heads, and a bounty of precious gems.

       The 4,300-year-old stone city is now named Shimao, although its ancient name is unknown. At 400 hectares, the city was not only the largest walled settlement of its time, it was also among the largest urban settlement in the world – and its discovery challenges commonly held beliefs about how Chinese civilization emerged.

      Shimao is found in a region often been described in Chinese histories as a home to "barbarians". While little is known about the ancient city, its grandeur and intricacy suggest it was once politically and economically important in the region. The buildings were quarried from nearby sandstone whose extraction, transportation, and use were labor-intensive and sophisticated.

      Take the pyramid palace built in the center of the town, for starters. Built around 2300 BC, the 11-story structure was reinforced with stone buttresses and defensive walls. Found in the walls of the pyramid and in nearly every stone structure are jade insets, tools, and other decorations.

      Walk outside and you’ll find yourself in a large, open plaza that was probably used for ritual or political purposes. The pyramid is visible from everywhere within the settlement, from the smaller homes to the storage and garbage deposits. The palace likely served as a symbol of power for the city’s elites, as well as a space for artisanal or industrial craft production.