October 4, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"The Basics"--Sage Dynamics (15 min.)

This video is not a video about the fundamentals of shooting, but is more theoretical, discussing nomenclature--"basics" versus "fundamentals"--and how it applies to individual shooters. For instance, a shooter working to speed his reload time is not going to benefit from going back to learn the fundamentals of marksmanship because it is unrelated to his issue.

• I'm going to keep this short today because Jonathan Low at Defensive Pistolcraft has published his monthly list of articles and commentary which this month exceeds even his normal excellence. It should keep even the most voracious of readers busy for a day or two.

"Bartitsu: The Gentleman's Martial Art | Best of British"--Jess Markwood (3-1/2 min.)

This video gives you just a brief background on Bartitsu and demonstrates three techniques. This is the combat style that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle adopted for use by his character, Sherlock Holmes, and so this video should be of interest to both the history buff and Sherlock Holmes fans.

• Come see the violence inherent in the system! "Georgetown Professor Says White Men Should Be Castrated, Fed To Swine"--The Daily Caller. Specifically, she wrote: "Look at thus chorus of entitled white men justifying a serial rapist’s arrogated entitlement. All of them deserve miserable deaths while feminists laugh as they take their last gasps. Bonus: we castrate their corpses and feed them to swine? Yes." The woman--the thing--is C. Christine Fair, an associate professor at Georgetown in the School of Foreign Service. Meaning, she is teaching our future diplomats and State Department officers.
• Wheels within wheels: Christine Blasey-Ford testified under oath that she knew nothing about polygraph tests or how they worked, which is odd considering that she is a psychologist. A former boyfriend of her has, however, stated that Ford in fact had helped coach a friend on how to pass a polygraph test. That friend, Monica L McLean, apparently passed the polygraph, because she went on to become a lawyer for the Department of Justice and FBI. Moreover, it appears that McLean assisted Ford in drafting her letter that was later used by Feinstein to begin the witch-trial against Kavanaugh. 
• This is what you get when a potential enemy controls your manufacturing base: "The Big Hack: How China Used a Tiny Chip to Infiltrate U.S. Companies"--Bloomberg. An excerpt:

       In 2015, Amazon.com Inc. began quietly evaluating a startup called Elemental Technologies, a potential acquisition to help with a major expansion of its streaming video service, known today as Amazon Prime Video. Based in Portland, Ore., Elemental made software for compressing massive video files and formatting them for different devices. Its technology had helped stream the Olympic Games online, communicate with the International Space Station, and funnel drone footage to the Central Intelligence Agency. Elemental’s national security contracts weren’t the main reason for the proposed acquisition, but they fit nicely with Amazon’s government businesses, such as the highly secure cloud that Amazon Web Services (AWS) was building for the CIA.

       To help with due diligence, AWS, which was overseeing the prospective acquisition, hired a third-party company to scrutinize Elemental’s security, according to one person familiar with the process. The first pass uncovered troubling issues, prompting AWS to take a closer look at Elemental’s main product: the expensive servers that customers installed in their networks to handle the video compression. These servers were assembled for Elemental by Super Micro Computer Inc., a San Jose-based company (commonly known as Supermicro) that’s also one of the world’s biggest suppliers of server motherboards, the fiberglass-mounted clusters of chips and capacitors that act as the neurons of data centers large and small. In late spring of 2015, Elemental’s staff boxed up several servers and sent them to Ontario, Canada, for the third-party security company to test, the person says.

       Nested on the servers’ motherboards, the testers found a tiny microchip, not much bigger than a grain of rice, that wasn’t part of the boards’ original design. Amazon reported the discovery to U.S. authorities, sending a shudder through the intelligence community. Elemental’s servers could be found in Department of Defense data centers, the CIA’s drone operations, and the onboard networks of Navy warships. And Elemental was just one of hundreds of Supermicro customers.

• There is no negotiating with the anti-gun crowd: "Sen. Mark Warner Vows ‘Assault Weapons’ Ban, More Gun Control"--Breitbart. He specifically is calling for bans on bump stocks and binary triggers. He also says that an assault weapon ban would be just the beginning.
• "CivNat vs Nationalist"--Vox Day. A classical liberal/libertarian claims that we cannot revert to "tribalism" while the Nationalist responds by pointing to facts. This, I believe, is the true difference in the coming political chasm: ideology based politics versus evidence based politics.
• A bit of bad luck, that: "Alarm as Red Cross workers attacked in Congo Ebola efforts"--Yahoo News. The workers were seriously injured, according to the article, when they were attacked while trying to carry out safe Ebola burials. Per the article, "[i]t was the most violent attack on Red Cross workers in this outbreak, the organization said in a statement."