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Saturday, March 16, 2019

March 16, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Are WE on the Wrong Side of History??"--Warrior Poet Society (4 min.)
John Lovell predicts that future generations will look back on our culture's widespread practice of abortion much like we look back on the Holocaust. 
  • Remember to go check out this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Greg Ellifritz. First off, I would like to say thank you to Mr. Ellifritz for his shout-out about my humble blog. Mr. Ellifritz always has a good selection of articles and videos which he cites and comments about, but there are a few that I want to especially point out. First, he links to an article entitled "Hard Lessons: Urban Survival," which is a great article for anyone planning on bugging-in in an urban environment. It will, however, crush many of your preconceptions of surviving in an urban environment, at least if the collapse resembles what has already happened to the ghettos of the United States. He also cites to a couple article that puncture myths about what are the most important skills for the concealed carrier ("CCW Training: Are We Practicing the Wrong Skills?" and "Meta : Critical Skills and Goals for Personal Protection." The latter is particularly good. Finally, just because I'm a revolver aficionado, check out "Rediscovering the Wheel: Revolver Drills To Improve Shooting." Many of the drills will help out those of you that use a semi-auto, as well.
  • I was saddened to hear that the Baugo Blades website will be closing down on April 12. They have long been a supporter of this blog, and I really appreciate it. Baugo Blades not only had articles on wilderness survival and prepping, but they sold elderberry starts and a survival knife called the Forager's camp knife, designed for use for the forager and camper as a heavy duty blade for tasks such as cutting and batoning, prying apart things, and digging up roots or edibles. They are having a closeout sale with significant drops in prices, so be sure the check them out.
  • Sparks31 has moved to a new blog/site called "Outland Tek Musings."
  • "The Golden Age of Tactical Shotguns"--Shooting Illustrated. In 1999, Timothy J. Mullin published his book, "The Fighting Submachine Gun, Machine Pistol, and Shotgun: A Hands-on Evaluation" (Amazon link). Unfortunately, the book is out of print, and even used copies can be pricey. Most of the book is devoted to the SMG, but Mullin does discuss the use of shotguns for a military role, lamenting the lack of development and that most "military" shotguns are simply gussied up civilian hunting shotguns. This article, however, notes that the last several years have seen some significant developments in shotguns intended for tactical roles. Of course, the article mentions the Kel-Tek KSG and UTAS UTS-15 bullpup shotguns released in 2011 and 2012, respectively. Kel-Tek has continued to improve its design, and now offers several models of the KSG with different features, barrel and magazine tube lengths and, most recently, a model featuring a single magazine tube. In 2016, we saw Mossberg and Remington releasing their Shockwave and Tac-14 "firearms" that featured 14-inch barrels and a pistol grip. Although many decried these designs as a solution in search of a problem, they can fill certain tactical roles--especially if fitted with a laser sight. Mossberg and Remington have also released versions of their pump-shotguns and Shockwave/Tac-14 firearms that take detachable box magazines, allowing for quick reloading of the weapons. More recently, Remington has released their Tac-13, which is a semi-auto short barrel "not-a-shotgun". And, while unmentioned in the article, there are a number of other box-magazine fed semi-auto shotguns that have hit the market. 
  • "Concealed Carry Corner: Concealed Carry At Home"--The Firearm Blog. A discussion of why you should carry at home, including some videos and news stories about violent criminal attacks on people at their homes.
  • Another reason to use revolvers: "A NEW METHOD OF DNA TESTING COULD SOLVE MORE SHOOTINGS"--Wired. An excerpt:
              Previously, to get DNA off of shell casings, the lab would moisten a cotton swab and rub it over the metal. But their success rate was less than 1 percent. This was proving to be a problem for many cities across the country struggling to solve shootings and homicides. Police often find that shell casings they collect from a crime scene are their most valuable evidence. Ballistic testing can offer clues about what kind of gun was used and, sometimes, whether that same gun was used in another crime. But the casings seldom yielded fruitful DNA results, and the San Diego Police Department, like many others, had stopped doing that kind of test.
               Until 2014. That’s when DNA scientist Shawn Monpetit of the San Diego Police began researching the subject and found a 2011 Netherlands study in which scientists recovered DNA from about a quarter of the casings they tested using a new method. This new technique required scientists to soak the casings for about half an hour in tubes filled with a cocktail of chemicals that break open cells and release DNA so it can then be isolated and tested. “Think of it like soaking your dishes,” said Kristin Beyers, one of the lab’s supervising criminalists.
                 In a rare move, the San Diego Police Department agreed to fund its own study in 2014. Ten cops and lab workers were enlisted to use ammunition the way a criminal might: They carried some around in their pockets and took some straight out of a package before loading it into a gun and firing. When the scientists ultimately tested the roughly 800 casings they collected, swabbing half using the traditional method and soaking the other half, the lab got “interpretable” DNA samples off about 34 percent of the soaked samples. They published their study in a peer-reviewed academic journal, Forensic Science International, and the San Diego Police Department began using it in 2014—around the same time they tested the evidence in the Gregory Benton murder case.
        • "Storage Options in a Small House: Doors as a Storage Space?"--hook racks that slip over the top of doors. Also consider other space savers that fit over doors: my wife, for instances, hangs from the inside of our bedroom door a storage system in which she stores supplies that she uses for sewing. I've also seen back-of-the-door systems for storing shoes or other items.
        Roughly 100 miles off the West Coast, running from Mendocino, California, to Canada’s Vancouver Island, lurks the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where the Juan de Fuca Plate is sliding beneath the North American Plate, creating the conditions for a megathrust quake 30 times stronger than the worst-case scenario along the notorious San Andreas, and 1,000 times stronger than the earthquake that killed 100,000 Haitians in 2010. Shockwaves will unleash more destructive force against the United States and Canada than anything short of nuclear war, a giant asteroid strike, or a civilization-threatening super-volcano.
        Also:
        When it happens, the earth will slip by roughly 60 feet along a rupture zone more than 600 miles long, unzipping the sea floor at roughly two miles per second and convulsing the West Coast for as long as five minutes. Bridges will fall. Wet soil will liquefy. Brick and masonry buildings will shatter. Skyscrapers built before modern earthquake codes may topple. City centers in Portland, Seattle, and Vancouver will be buried beneath glass shards and rubble. Everything underground—water mains, natural gas pipes—will be crushed. Land that has bulged upward from tectonic pressure for the past 300 or so years will collapse to baseline, permanently altering the topography and plunging low-lying coastal areas into the ocean. The inland Cascade Mountains will knock the knees out from under the earthquake, but numerous landslides will occur, especially on roads built with a “cut and fill” method, where flat slabs get cut out of rock walls and smoothed over with soft fill. Just a few minutes after the quake finally stops, the second hammer blow will strike. Tsunami waves up to 50 feet high will rip the face of the coastal region clean off the map, pulverizing everything and killing everyone in their path.
                  Other evidence, which, Kennett noted, is consistent with previous and ongoing documentation of the region by Chilean scientists, pointed to a “very large environmental disruption at about 40 degrees south.” These included a large biomass burning event evidenced by, among other things, micro-charcoal and signs of burning in pollen samples collected at the impact layer. “It’s by far the biggest burn event in this region we see in the record that spans thousands of years,” Kennett said. Furthermore, he went on, the burning coincides with the timing of major YDB-related burning events in North America and western Europe.
                   The sedimentary layers at Pilauco contain a valuable record of pollen and seeds that show change in character of regional vegetation — evidence of a shifting climate. However, in contrast to the Northern Hemisphere, where conditions became colder and wetter at the onset of the Younger Dryas, the opposite occurred in the Southern Hemisphere.
                     “The plant assemblages indicate that there was an abrupt and major shift in the vegetation from wet, cold conditions at Pilauco to warm, dry conditions,” Kennett said. According to him, the atmospheric zonal climatic belts shifted “like a seesaw,” with a synergistic mechanism, bringing warming to the Southern Hemisphere even as the Northern Hemisphere experienced cooling and expanding sea ice. The rapidity — within a few years —  with which the climate shifted is best attributed to impact-related shifts in atmospheric systems, rather than to the slower oceanic processes, Kennett said.
                      Meanwhile, the impact with its associated major environmental effects, including burning, is thought to have contributed to the extinction of local South American Pleistocene megafauna — including giant ground sloths, sabretooth cats, mammoths and elephant-like gomphotheres — as well as the termination of the culture similar to the Clovis culture in the north, he added. The amount of bones, artifacts and megafauna-associated fungi that were relatively abundant in the soil at the Pilauco site declined precipitously at the impact layer, indicating a major local disruption.

                "True Facts: The Bolas Spider"--ZeFrank1 (4 min.)
                Some humor to lighten your day.
                • Gun control in action: While the media (including the NY Times article above) make is seem as though New Zealand had little restrictions in the way of gun control, Wikipedia indicates that: 
                Gun licenses are issued at the discretion of the police in New Zealand provided the police consider the person to be of good standing and without criminal, psychiatric or drug issues as well as meeting other conditions such as having suitable storage facilities. Several different categories of licenses are permitted, with the lowest one permitting access to restricted semi-automatic rifles and shotguns, with limited capacity, while the higher levels which permit fully automatic weaponry and pistols are rarely issued to civilians. 
                (Underline added). Tarrant apparently used two AR-15 style rifles (bizarrely painted with messages) and two pump-action shotguns which he legally obtained under a license issued to him. This both indicates the failure of gun control laws to be able to stop mass killings, but also indicates a failure of psychology as a means of detecting mass killers before the fact. What this means for the success of "red-flag" laws should be obvious. The New Zealand prime-minister has promised to double down on stupid by passing even more restrictive gun laws.
                • When seconds count, the police are minutes away: In this case, 36 minutes. The commander of the local police force maintains that this was “an incredibly fast response time,” and "I am very happy with the response of our staff.”
                • Diversity + Proximity = War: The best treatment I have seen of this in the media is Rod Dreher's article, "Radicalization & Degeneration" which discusses some of the main points from Tarrant's manifesto. Per the manifesto, Tarrant became radicalized after traveling to Europe and seeing the impact of the depopulation and replacement of Europeans by Muslims, and, in particular, the April 7, 2017, terrorist attack in Stockholm in which a little girl, Ebba Akerlund dead. Dreher observed, at this points:
                Here’s the chilling part: Everything Tarrant identifies as qualities of a disintegrating Western civilization is true. You may think that declining numbers of ethnic Europeans is a good thing, or something that has no particular moral meaning. But it really is happening. So are all the rest.
                       Tarrant's goals for his shooting was not only revenge against Muslims for the crimes inflicted on Europe and Europeans, but to also help propel the degenerate West into its collapse. For instance, he specifically noted that he hoped that his attack would influence politicians in the United States into confiscating firearms and spark a civil war. Another article explains:
                        A secondary goal was to goad individuals on the Left into pushing for gun control. He says he chose to use guns in order to push precisely that agenda in order to “create conflict between the two ideologies within the United States.” He believes if the Left can be pushed into trying to weaken Second Amendment rights this will splinter the country, resulting in “a civil war that will eventually balkanize the US along political, cultural and, most importantly, racial lines.”
                          He wants Americans divided and wanted to use his armed attack as a way of doing this. By pitting the nation against itself he claimed the result would be “racial separation of the people within the United States ensuring the future of the White race on the North American continent, but also ensuring the death of the ‘melting pot’ pipe dream.”
                           In his manifesto he said he had various choices of weapons but chose guns because anti-Second Amendment activists would assure his crime got extra media attention. He hoped to pressure them to “seek to abolish the second amendment” in order to rip the country apart. In a part where he asks himself question he asked: “Won’t your attack result in calls for the removal of gun rights from Whites in the United States?” His answer: “Yes, that is the plan all along…”
                            Getting back to Dreher, he warns that there will be more like Tarrant, writing that "what Tarrant did, and what the Islamist terrorists do, intersect insofar as they are responses to the profound displacement of peoples and traditions in the modern world." Also:
                    It seems clear to me that it in no way requires one to endorse Tarrant’s vile crimes to recognize that like splitting the atom, the unwinding of Western civilization is going to release some extreme energies. It already is. It is simply bizarre to think that all Europeans are going to acquiesce gently in the overwhelming of their nations by immigrants in this century. Most will, I think, but it is reasonable to expect that more and more violent fanatics like Tarrant and his hero Anders Breivik will arise. I believe we should take Tarrant seriously when he says that what radicalized him most of all was traveling to Europe and seeing with his own eyes the withering away of the continent’s ancient peoples. His way of responding to it is demonic — but what he is responding to is real. 
                    Read the whole thing.
                    • "White men are evil" and Trump Derangement Syndrome: The main stream media is taking their typical shallow approach to this issue. First, without any analysis, they conclude that Tarrant was a "white supremacist," and suggesting that "white supremacists" are the greatest terrorist threats facing the West. Just keep ignoring 9/11! More strange, in my view are the completely unwarranted attacks on Trump, including his statement that there are only a small number of "white supremacist" terrorists and accusations that his hard stance on immigration somehow caused the attack.
                    • Suppression of Speech: I have no doubt that this incident, as well as Tarrant's motivations, will be used to demonize and suppress speech critical of immigration or Islamification of the West. This will confirm Tarrant's thesis in the minds of many.
                    • Speaking of corruption: "Bill Clinton, Loretta Lynch Tarmac Meeting Reemerges After Lisa Page Bombshell"--Neon Nettle. With the leak of Lisa Page's testimony that the Department of Justice instructed the FBI to not pursue charges against Hillary for her mishandling of classified information, it raises once again the issue of what was discussed between Loretta Lynch and Bill Clinton at the infamous Arizona meeting on an airport tarmac. It also raises the prospect that Lynch may not have been telling the truth when she said that she would accept the FBI's recommendations as to whether to charge Hillary Clinton.
                              Infectious diseases—some that ravaged populations in the Middle Ages—are resurging in California and around the country, and are hitting homeless populations especially hard.
                              Los Angeles recently experienced an outbreak of typhus—a disease spread by infected fleas on rats and other animals—in downtown streets. Officials briefly closed part of City Hall after reporting that rodents had invaded the building.
                                 People in Washington State have been infected with Shigella bacteria, which is spread through feces and causes the diarrheal disease shigellosis, as well as Bartonella quintana, or trench fever, which spreads through body lice.*
                                   Hepatitis A, also spread primarily through feces, infected more than 1,000 people in Southern California in the past two years. The disease also has erupted in New Mexico, Ohio, and Kentucky, primarily among people who are homeless or use drugs.
                                    Public-health officials and politicians are using terms like disaster and public-health crisis to describe the outbreaks, and they are warning that these diseases can easily jump beyond the homeless population.
                                      In all but one of the last seven presidential elections, Republicans lost the popular vote. George W. Bush and Donald Trump won only by capturing narrow majorities in the Electoral College.
                                       Hence the grand strategy of the left: to enlarge and alter the U.S. electorate so as to put victory as far out of reach for national Republicans as it is today for California Republicans, and to convert the GOP into America’s permanent minority party.
                                  • Related: "National Data | Legal Immigration—The Bigger Problem"--VDare Magazine. The author notes that the 1990 immigration law "capped" legal immigration at 700,000 persons a year, but, in reality, with all the exemptions built into the system allowing immigrants to bring in their families, excepting refugees from the limit, and the anchor baby phenomena, the true number is much higher. For instance, the article notes that 1,266,264 people were granted legal permanent resident status in 2006. And who knows how many illegal immigrants enter the country each year. One 2006 study believed that 500,000 illegals enter the U.S. each year.
                                  • Related: "Exclusive–Mo Brooks: ‘Masters of the Universe’ Want More Immigration to ‘Decrease Incomes of Americans’"--Breitbart. According to the article, Rep. Mo Brooks (R-AL) said in an interview that "recent demands to increase the number of foreign workers coming to the U.S. to compete against American citizens for jobs is merely an effort by corporations to deplete the earnings of Americans," and that "Democrats support for mass legal immigration is centered on the premise that increasing the number of foreign workers in the U.S. will decrease Americans’ wages, thus forcing many into poverty and becoming welfare recipients. This, Brooks said, is how Democrats create a permanent dependent class of Democrat voters."
                                  • Then and now ... 
                                             [China's] flagship telecommunications firm Huawei spends $20 billion a year on R&D and now leads the world in fifth generation (5G) broadband. With download speeds perhaps 2,500 times as fast as 4G LTE broadband, 5G makes possible an entire range of new technologies: robotic controls that communicate with each other, highly-coordinated drone swarms, driverless cars, augmented reality, big data processing, and many others.
                                            No American company offers 5G systems. Two Scandinavian companies, Nokia and Ericsson, offer a costlier and inferior alternative, by all accounts (Huawei's R&D spending is double their combined budget). The Trump administration has demanded that our allies keep Huawei out of 5G rollout, without success. Germany's Economics Minister Peter Altmaier has warned that excluding Huawei would delay 5G rollout by years and add billions to the cost. The dust hasn't settled, but the likely outcome seems to be a lot of egg on our face and a lot of sales by Huawei.
                                                 Dubbed "Spoiler," the technique is able to determine how virtual and physical memory is related to each other, by measuring the timing of speculative load and store operations performed by the processor, reports The Register. By spotting discrepancies in the timing, it is possible for an attacker to determine the memory layout, and in turn know areas to attack. 
                                                  "The root cause of the issue is that the memory operations execute speculatively and the processor resolves the dependency when the full physical address bits are available," researcher Daniel Moghimi advised to the report. "Physical address bits are security sensitive information and if they are available to user space, it elevates the user to perform other micro architectural attacks." 
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                                          2 comments:

                                          1. John WilderMarch 20, 2019 at 9:28 PM

                                            Dangit. I clicked on a Huffpo. Haven't done that since 2012.

                                            ReplyDelete
                                            Replies
                                            1. DocentMarch 21, 2019 at 11:12 PM

                                              But where else are you going to get the latest news on UFOs, Bigfoot, Russia-Trump collusion, and other crackpot theories?

                                              Delete