September 4, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Why I'm Using A Quilt vs. A Sleeping Bag From Now On"--Homemade Wanderlust (13 min.)

• “I’m in Fear for My Life!”--Active Response Training. Greg Ellifritz has noted a recent trend to advise people to say "I'm in fear of my life" when confronted by an attacker or home invader. Presumably the reasoning is to warn the attacker that the legal requirements for use of deadly force have been met. Ellifritz questions the value of making such a statement and suggests that saying something like that could actually be turned against you because it doesn't come across as something that you would legitimately say if you really were in fear for your life. Also:

Beyond the legal considerations, consider the impact that such a statement will have on the criminal.  We know that criminals choose victims who are scared and unable or unwilling to fight back.  What message are you sending when you tell your attacker “I’m in fear for my life?”  Do you think it will scare him away or do you think it will embolden him to more violent action?  My bet is on the latter…

• "Last-Minute Emergency Supplies: What to Buy When the Shelves Are Almost Empty"--Organic Prepper. Some tips:

There are lots of other options if the water aisle looks like this [i.e., empty]. They may not be as healthy but they’ll keep you from dying of dehydration.

• Sports drinks (like Gatorade)
• Flavored or sparkling water
• Juice boxes or individual bottles
• Soda pop (not too much though because that can be dehydrating instead of replenishing)
• Vegetable juice
• Premade iced tea

A good trick here is to go to the aisle where people get individually packaged stuff for their kids’ lunches. You’ll find all sorts of beverage pouches and plastic bottles of drinks here.

Options the author mentions for bread substitutes:

• Hamburger or hot dog buns

• Pitas

• Tortillas

• Bagels

• Muffins

• Crackers

The author also noted canned or box items that you might still find, plus some ideas as to alternate light sources.

• It's all in the yaw: "What Eugene Stoner Had To Say About The 5.56mm"--The Captain's Journal. An excerpt:

     “There is the advantage that a small or light bullet has over a heavy one when it comes to wound ballistics, even for the same velocity. But, of course, the velocity helps,” Stoner replied.

     “What it amounts to is the fact that bullets are stabilized to fly through the air and not through water or a body which is approximately the same density as water,” Stoner continued. “And they are stable as long as they are in the air. When they hit something they immediately go unstable. In other words, your spin rates are determined in air, and not in fluid.”

     A .30-caliber M-14 bullet might stay stable through the human body, Stoner said, “while a little bullet, being as it has a low mass, it senses an instability situation faster and reacts much faster. So, therefore, this is what makes a little bullet pay off so much in wound ballistics. As soon as it gets into an unstable portion, it tends to tumble faster, because its mass is lower.”

• "Can Airsoft Skills Translate To Shooting Firearms?"--The Firearm Blog. A Japanese air-soft enthusiast seems to show that it does. On a more general note, the author explains:

Often we see a sort of firearm elitism in the firearm community when airsoft is mentioned. Many people look down on airsoft as a silly kid’s toy. However, there are some who are more open-minded and use airsoft as a legitimate training aid. Airsoft is great for force on force training. While it does not give you quite the feedback as simunition training, airsoft has its uses. The same can be said for using competition, like USPSA, as a sort of training tool. What matters is how the end user treats these training tools and puts them into perspective.

• "Tested: CCI Snake Loads for Handguns"--American Hunter. If you don't know what these are, they are handgun cartridges that have been loaded with a wad and plastic cap containing a small amount of bird shot. I've had a package of the 9 mm for years, but never actually opened it, let alone tried it out. Probably because Idaho is not home to very many poisonous animals or insects. Even the rattle snakes in this area have less powerful venom than in hotter climes. In any event, the author of this piece started carrying a snake load after an encounter with a rattle snake in Oklahoma where he missed three shots at it with his pistol using standard self-defense loads:

Now, I make a point to always carry a snake load second from the top of my handgun’s magazine while walking in the woods. One rack of the slide ejects a hollow point and chambers the snake load if I need it.

• "Concealed Carry Corner: Helping Your Non-gun Friends to Choose a First Concealed Carry Handgun"--The Firearm Blog. The author describes his attempts to help a friend pick a first concealed carry gun ... and his disgust when his friend picked out a 1911 variant:

Don’t get me wrong, I love 1911s. But 1911 is an expert weapon, you need to know how to maintain it. It is heavy, which is a factor for someone buying a first concealed carry handgun. You need to carry it “cocked and locked”, know how to use the safety and have enough training so you won’t fumble with it in a stressful situation. 45 ACP has substantial recoil, especially in a compact gun, which is definitely a negative factor for a shooter with little to no training. And we all know that compact 1911s don’t have the best reputation when it comes to reliability.

I know that the 1911 doesn't have as simple of a manual of arms as a revolver, but I don't see it as being exclusively an expert's weapon, either. Cock and lock is pretty simple: bring the weapon up to aim and swipe the safety down with your thumb. And it is probably a lot safer than other firearms when it comes to stowing it away because you can click the safety back on with your thumb after you finish shooting. Ditto if you shoot and then have to move to a different location or change positions. If a person is worried about carrying locked and cock, the traditional way of dealing with it was to get a holster with a thumb break snap with the strap between the back of the slide and the hammer. That way, even if something were to happen, the hammer would fall on the strap and not impinge the firing pin.

• Related: "Cocked & Locked: The Best Way to Carry a 1911"--Shooting Illustrated.

• "A Good Gun Belt Will Make Concealed Carry Easier And More Comfortable"--The Truth About Guns. As I've noted before, the gun belt is the foundation to your concealed carry system (or open carry, for that matter), so get a good belt.
• "Real-Life Disparity of Force Case"--Active Response Training. A man was being threatened and chased around by someone larger and more dangerous, until the man displayed his weapon causing the would-be attacker to leave. Ellifritz was the responding officer, and provides detailed analysis of the what the guy did right, what he could have done better, and some other pointers. Needless to say, the man was not charged. But one of the reasons was that he was able to provide a statement demonstrating the reasonableness of what he did.
• "A Prepper’s Guide to Tires"--The Survival Blog. Great article covering the different types of tires and how to choose one for your bug-out vehicle (or the vehicle you use to go camping or hunting). It also covers what to do if your tire goes flat, discussing the pros and cons of using fix-a-flat versus changing over to a spare tire; and has information on tires for other vehicles: motorcycles and ATVs, bicycles, and even wheel chairs.
• Brass doorknobs are good for more than decoration."Don’t Just Police Your Brass – Clean it: The Antimicrobial Properties of Brass"--Organic Prepper. Bare copper and copper alloys have surface antimicrobial properties. For instance, the article relates:

Like silver and copper, brass is antimicrobial. According to Professor Bill Keevil, head of the microbiology group at Southampton University, “Until relatively recently brass was a relatively commonly used surface. On stainless steel surfaces these bacteria can survive for weeks, but on copper surfaces they die within minutes. Part of the process DNA from bacteria is also destroyed just as rapidly on the copper, so you cannot get gene transfer on the surface.”

• "MOUNTAIN HOUSE: MEALS ANYTIME, ANYWHERE!"--Survive Today, Prepare for Tomorrow. An extensive review of Mountain House meals, including taste, texture and appearance, ease of preparation, and so on.
• "Here’s What Happened When I Tried CBD Oil"--Apartment Prepper. The author discusses what is CBD oil ("CBD stands for Cannabidiol. It is derived from the hemp plant, cannabis sativa.  CBD is extracted from the flowers, leaves, and stalks of the hemp plant, while hemp oil comes from the seeds"), and how to find reputable sellers ("The U.S. Hemp Authority is the industry’s independent organization for establishing and enforcing safety and quality standards.  At this time, they have certified 22 companies as leaders in processing and manufacturing quality CBD and hemp products."). The author then discusses her and her husband's experiences with using it to relieve pain, reduce anxiety and help with insomnia. For them, it worked very well. 
• "Storage Options in a Small House: Pulling Double Duty"--Surviving the Suburbs. Some ideas for making use of furniture that can also double as extra storage. Examples include an ottoman on which the cover pulls off allowing storage of extra blankets; a fish tank stand that was repurposed into an end table; and elevating a bed to allow more storage underneath.
• Have a light? "XM42 Lite Flamethrower, Handheld & Civilian Legal – Review"--Ammo Land. This particular model uses a .3 gallon fuel tank and has a burn time of about 24 seconds with a range of 25 to 30 feet. Good for a fun show, quickly clearing snow and ice from a drive way, doing weed burns, etc.. The author also mentions that there is a larger XM42-M (modular) that has the option of using a 3-gallon backpack. However, the range is apparently about the same. This would be more interesting if it had a longer range. 
• "Personal Defense Weapons for Apartment Dwellers"--Apartment Prepper. This article mostly looks at a variety of non-lethal or less-lethal weapons, examining both pros and cons. This might be useful for someone considering something for self-defense where they are unable to obtain a firearm. It also has a short section discussing firearms. I can't say that I agree with all their recommendations, but it is another perspective to consider. My thoughts are that if you are relying on non-firearm options, it might behoove you to look at what people in non-firearm or pre-firearm cultures used.  
• "Reloading Shotshells Start to Finish"--Range 365. I've never reloaded shotgun shells, so I've nothing to add.
• "Bowen Rough Country Revolver Sights"--Revolver Guy. A beefier upgrade to the more fragile adjustable factory sights that come with most revolvers. Having said that, I've never had an issue with an adjustable sight on a revolver, but I also don't ride horseback or on an ATV where I could take a good tumble onto a revolver and its sight.
• It's really only an issue for people who reload ammunition: "7.62 NATO vs. .308 Win."--Shooting Sports USA. The author explains:

The difference in these two isn’t the throat, it’s the headspace. NATO is ridiculously longer. Although there are different pressure-testing standards used by NATO and SAAMI, .308 Win. commercial ammo is normally loaded to a higher-pressure maximum than mil-spec NATO. It’s safe to shoot NATO rounds in a .308 Win. chamber, and .308 commercial ammo in a NATO chamber. The difference is in what comes back out. The case (either case) will have been stressed, a whopping lot. A softer or thinner commercial case might be hopelessly contorted.

• Interesting. "Where does the term ‘operator’ come from?"--Loadout Room. The term "operator" is generally associated with members of special operations forces such as, in the United States, one of the Joint Special Operations Command’s (JSOC) Special Mission Units (SMU). It's origin, however, appears to be a Green Beret document issued on April 2, 1959, entitled “The Code For the Special Forces Operator.” 
• "This Marine Corps Sniper Put A Bullet In A Target Nearly 8,000 Feet Away — Here's How He Took One Of The Toughest Shots Of His Life"--Business Insider (via AT&T). Interesting account and discussion on all the variables and calculations needed to make a long range shot. From the article:

       US military snipers typically operate at ranges of 600 to 1,200 meters. At extreme ranges, the Marine is pushing their weapon past its limits. The M107 semiautomatic long-range sniper rifles used by the Marine Corps can fire accurately out to only about 2,000 meters.

      "Shooting on the ground can be easy, especially when you are shooting 600 meters in or 1,000 meters in. That's almost second nature," Bernius said. "But when you are extending it to the extremes, beyond the capability of the weapon system, you have all kinds of different things to consider."

     At those longer ranges, a sniper has to rely a lot more on "hard math" than just shooter instinct.

      Bernius, a Texas native who has deployed to Iraq and other locations across the Middle East, made his most technically difficult shot as a student in the advanced sniper course, a training program for Marine Corps sharpshooters who have already completed basic sniper training.

      "When I came through as a student at the course I am running now, my partner and I were shooting at a target at approximately 2,300 meters," Bernius said. "We did in fact hit it, but it took approximately 20 to 25 minutes of planning, thinking of everything we needed to do with calculations, with the readings."

• "Milano Wants To Know Why Self-Defense Is God-Given Right. Cruz Educates Her."--Daily Wire.

"The Electric Thruster That Could Send Humans to Mars"--SciShow Space (6 min.)

• CNN reports that "West Texas shooter bought gun in private sale" where he wasn't required to undergo a background check. This was after the shooter had failed a background check at a firearms dealer. Anonymous Conservative comments:

We literally had the only shooting ever with a silencer, right before the Supreme Court was to decide whether to take up a case on whether silencers were included under the Second Amendment. And now right before the left wants to expand background checks to private sales, we have a guy who was denied a gun due to a failed background check, and he bought it through a private sale without the background check. As Q says, how many coincidences does it take?

• Related: "Odessa gunman called the FBI and cops 15 MINUTES before killing seven in a rampage and just after he had been fired from his job"--Daily Mail. 

• "51% OF MASS SHOOTERS IN 2019 WERE BLACK: ONLY 29% WERE WHITE"--Front Page Magazine (h/t The Unz Report). From the article:

       The perception that mass shootings are a “white man’s problem” lingers around the country because white mass shooters tend to get more publicity. And, the twisted young male who goes on a public shooting spree fits a certain kind of media narrative. But when we actually study the mass shootings that took place in 2019, it’s clear that Patrick Crusius and Connor Betts are not the norm, but aberrations.

      Mass shooters have no particular ideology. Crusius and Betts were opposites ideologically. (Though both cared deeply about the environment.) Nor are mass shooters a white problem or a black problem. Over the same bloody weekend, William Patrick Williams, who is African-American, appeared in court after being arrested by the FBI for planning to shoot up a Texas hotel with an AK-47 rifle.

      Looking at the data from the Mass Shooting Tracker, widely utilized by the media, as of this writing, of the 72 mass shooters, perpetrators in shootings that killed or wounded 4 or more people, whose race is known, 21 were white, 37 were black, 8 were Latino, and 6 were members of other groups.

     51% of mass shooters in 2019 were black, 29% were white, and 11% were Latino.

     Three mass shooters were Asian, two were American Indian and one was Arab.

    These numbers are if anything vastly understated. As many as half of the mass shootings that took place in 2019 thus far remain unsolved, but they often took place in black areas and claimed black victims.

• "CCRKBA: China School Attack Shows Madmen Will Kill Without Guns"--The Truth About Guns. Apparently, on Monday, a crazy man in China went on a rampage with a meat cleaver at an elementary school leaving at least 8 children dead.
• "Mass Murder without Guns"--Clayton Cramer at National Review. 

      Even today, there are a lot of non-firearm mass murders in America: In USA Today’s collection of mass murders for the period 2006 to 2017, nearly a quarter were done without guns. And most of them you have probably not heard about because they do not advance the Left’s cause of disarming the peasants.

      There’s the 1973 mass murder at a gay bar in New Orleans that killed 32: An ejected customer went down the street and bought a can of cigarette-lighter fluid. And the 87 murdered in New York City in 1990: A guy upset with his ex-girlfriend bought $1 worth of gasoline. In 1986 in San Juan, Puerto Rico, union officers put pressure on an employer by using camp-stove gas to murder 97. On July 5 of this year, a guy in Port Angeles, Wash., burned his trailer, killing his wife and three children. Did you see that on CNN?

     Nations with strict gun-control laws still have mass murders. One man stabbed to death five people with a kitchen knife at a Calgary party. After the 1996 Port Arthur mass murder, Australia banned most semiautomatic rifles, but they still have mass murders: eight siblings killed in a mass stabbing in Queensland; five bludgeoned to death in Sydney in 2009. Mass murders by arson are also a problem in such countries. Palace Backpackers Hostel in Childers, Queensland, was intentionally burned in 2000, killing 15. The 2011 Quakers Hill Nursing Home fire killed eleven, set by a nurse after police questioned him about drug abuse.

    Japan has mass murders. In 1995, a sarin poison-gas attack killed 13 and injured many more. In 2016, a former employee of a nursing home stabbed to death 19 of the patients. Eight students were stabbed to death at an Osaka school in 2001. A combination vehicle/stabbing incident killed seven in Tokyo in 2008. A father burned his wife and five children to death in Tokyo in 2017. Last month, 35 died when a man set fire to an anime studio.

    China, another society with very strict gun laws, also has mass murders. A 2014 terrorist knife attack in Kunming left 33 dead and 143 injured. A series of school attacks in the early 2010s killed at least 25 in total; while not all of these school attacks were mass murders (five or more killed in one attack), some meet the criteria: eight schoolchildren murdered with a knife in Nanping in March 2010; nine murdered in Hanzhong with a meat cleaver in May 2010.

    Explosive mass murders have also been common: 22 with explosives in Manchester, England, in 2017. Two terrorists killed 33 people at an airport and subway station in Brussels with bombs.

    There have also been motor-vehicle mass murders in Europe and Australia: 84 murdered with a truck in Nice, France; 12 in Berlin, Germany; five in Stockholm; 13 in Barcelona, Spain; eight by truck and knives in London. While these were terrorist mass murders, others have been mental-health-related, such as an attack in Melbourne, Australia, that killed six.

     In the U.S., the core problem underlying most mass murders is people with severe mental illness, who in 1960 would have hospitalized before chalk marks had to be drawn around bodies. If we solve the mental-illness issue, the guns do not matter. And focusing on the guns directs the severely mentally ill to other weapons.

Cramer has another article on this subject here.

• Cry havoc.... "Declaring a war that is already lost"--Vox Popoli. Responding to calls from conservatives warning against identity politics, Vox Day observes:

       Let conservatives reject identity politics if they like. Who cares what conservatives do, say, or think anymore? They didn't conserve America. They didn't conserve the ladies room. They couldn't even conserve the two human sexes! And they won't be able to conserve indoor plumbing either. As for declaring war on identity politics, in 2019 that is like declaring war on gravity, or more to the point, declaring war on Alexander the Great on behalf of King Darius III of the Achaemenid Empire.

      That war is already over. That war is already lost.

      Counseling American Christians to return to principles that literally none of their rival identity groups accept is not merely idiotic, it is completely irrelevant. The literally satanic ideology of the individual is now as dead as the Whig Party and the Yangtze River dolphin, and no one is going to be able to revive it in a time when material identity has replaced abstract ideology.

      Conservatives: I will not risk open identity politics.

       Nationalists: Identity politics is upon you whether you would risk it or not.

       Conservatives had better come to terms with accepting the reality of identity politics very, very soon, because what comes next is what Clausewitz would have called identity politics by other means.

• "Get Ready For Apocalypse Ruth"--Kurt Schlichter at Town Hall.  Ruth Bader Ginsberg looks like death warmed over, and it quite possible that she may pass away in the next year giving Trump the opportunity to appoint another Supreme Court justice. And, Schlichter warns, if that happens, it might drive the Left over the edge.
• "Alternative America"--Taki's Magazine. Steve Sailor explains why slavery was not actually all that important to the United State's economic growth in the 18th and 19th Centuries.

• Related: "Slavery Did Not Make America Rich"--Reason. "Growing cotton, further, unlike sugar or rice, never required slavery. By 1870, freedmen and whites produced as much cotton as the South produced in the slave time of 1860. Cotton was not a slave crop in India or in southwest China, where it was grown in bulk anciently. And many whites in the South grew it, too, before the war and after. That slaves produced cotton does not imply that they were essential or causal in the production."

• "Rep. Paul Gosar: Get a STEM Degree, Watch Foreigners Take Your Job"--Breitbart. Gosar explains:

      While Big Tech pushes the NASDAQ to historic highs, Silicon Valley wages for the majority of employees continue to stagnate. Somehow the numbers are not adding up for highly-skilled American workers. One factor increasingly recognized as being part of the problem is the OPT program.

     OPT fast tracks F-1 student visa holders while their U.S. classmates are sidelined. American middle-class parents are feeling the sting when their children struggle to get job interviews and their children’s foreign friends and former collegemates are graduating with offers in hand.

     In 2017, more than a quarter million foreign students in the U.S. on F-1 visas were given the option to remain in the U.S. and work under the OPT program. Thanks to an executive action initiated by President Obama’s administration, every F-1 OPT STEM graduate is allowed to remain in the U.S. for up to 3 years with each degree earned.

     With no limits, restrictions, or merit-based qualifications, these F-1 OPT workers are employed in every industry sector across our great nation, and America’s swing voters and their children are being disadvantaged.

    Each F-1 OPT worker represents a loss to U.S. taxpayers. Not only are American college graduates missing out on great jobs as a result of the OPT program, but neither the OPT worker nor their employer are required to pay FICA taxes. This represents a 15.3 percent tax break to OPT hires and their employers. In other words, American taxpayers are subsidizing foreigners to take away jobs from American taxpayers.

• Related: "Exclusive–Hilarie Gamm: Amazon, Google Reap 15 Percent Discount to Hire Foreigners over American Graduates"--Breitbart. 

• "The American working class dilemma"--Orange Country Register. An excerpt:

      But in recent decades, America’s working class has had precious little celebrate. In contrast to the conditions that prevailed in the aftermath of the Second World War, when the incomes of lower quintiles surged by roughly 40%, five times faster than the top echelon, during the past four decades, those in the bottom 80% have enjoyed no consistent gains. Meanwhile union membership — the key to working class political power — has plunged from 28% in 1954 to 11% today.

      The devastation extends beyond economics. A detailed 2017 study, “When work disappears:  manufacturing decline and the falling marriage-market value of men,” shows that when towns and counties lose manufacturing jobs, fertility and marriage rates decline while unmarried births and the share of children living in single-parent homes rise. More of the working class, both white and minority, are also experiencing elevated rates of obesity, and rising incidents of what the Princeton economists Anne Case and Angus Deaton call “deaths of despair.”

• "Nuclear Nations at Total War with Each Other - but Don't Use Nukes?"--CDR Salamander. The author notes that in World War II, none of the combatants resorted to poison gas even when losing. He suggests that the same result might occur with nuclear weapons, and discusses this in regard to tensions between Pakistan and India.
• Que the spooky music: "China's Lunar Rover Has Found Something Weird on the Far Side of the Moon"--Space.com. 

So far, mission scientists haven't offered any indication as to the nature of the colored substance and have said only that it is "gel-like" and has an "unusual color." One possible explanation, outside researchers suggested, is that the substance is melt glass created from meteorites striking the surface of the moon.

• You can run, but you'll only die tired: "Millionaire model agency boss thought to have key information into the Jeffrey Epstein scandal 'has disappeared like a ghost without a trace'"--Daily Mail. The millionaire modeling agency owner, Jean-Luc Brunel, is alleged to have helped provide fresh meat to Espstein and his pals. 
• "The Kerfuffle Over Interest Rates is Telling Us Something"--Silicon Graybeard. He makes a good point: "In a country that allegedly promotes free markets, why is banking run like the Communist Party of China?" To answer that, you just need to look at who owns the Federal Reserve Bank. The ostensible purpose of the Federal Reserve System was to prevent bank collapses and bank runs by acting as a lender of last resort. That is, since banks loan out the majority of their money, if there were concerns of bank health that might prompt a run by depositors to withdraw funds, rather than collapsing when it ran out of funds on hand, it could go to the Fed to borrow funds. It didn't really work that way in the Great Depression. Or, as Milton Friedman put it:

“The Fed was largely responsible for converting what might have been a garden-variety recession, although perhaps a fairly severe one, into a major catastrophe. Instead of using its powers to offset the depression, it presided over a decline in the quantity of money by one-third from 1929 to 1933 … Far from the depression being a failure of the free-enterprise system, it was a tragic failure of government.”

As a result, the Fed now has more authority to regulate its member banks and set national monetary policy. But it was conceived under the assumption that what is good for the large banks is good for America, which is questionable. 

• Heh. "REPORT: Ilhan Omar’s Current Husband Spills"--Legal Insurrection. The husband (still legally married, but divorced under Islamic law), Ahmed Hirsi, is not willing to go to jail for Omar. One of the tidbits: Hirsi is saying "that while Omar did indeed marry her brother (Ahmed Elmi) for fraudulent purposes, Hirsi did not know at the time that she had married Elmi."
• The science is settled: "Climate Alarmists Foiled: No U.S. Warming Since 2005"--Real Clear Energy.

      In January 2005, NOAA began recording temperatures at its newly built U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN). USCRN includes 114 pristinely maintained temperature stations spaced relatively uniformly across the lower 48 states. NOAA selected locations that were far away from urban and land-development impacts that might artificially taint temperature readings.

      Prior to the USCRN going online, alarmists and skeptics sparred over the accuracy of reported temperature data. With most preexisting temperature stations located in or near urban settings that are subject to false temperature signals and create their own microclimates that change over time, government officials performed many often-controversial adjustments to the raw temperature data. Skeptics of an asserted climate crisis pointed out that most of the reported warming in the United States was non-existent in the raw temperature data, but was added to the record by government officials. 

     The USCRN has eliminated the need to rely on, and adjust the data from, outdated temperature stations. Strikingly, as shown in the graph below, USCRN temperature stations show no warming since 2005 when the network went online. If anything, U.S. temperatures are now slightly cooler than they were 14 years ago.

• A reminder we live in the 21st Century: "China’s Space Dream is America’s Nightmare"--Brandon J. Weichert at the New English Review. Key part:

        The Chinese view space quite differently from their American rivals. China’s space vision is a cold, clear-eyed, nationalist mission for space exploration and, inevitably, exploitation. As I’ve written recently, the Chinese leadership cares “little for the betterment of humanity.” They do not go into space possessed of the same airy, globalist notions that so many American policymakers have been imbued with. What’s more, the Chinese have a far more realistic—even cynical—view of space than most American leaders do. Theirs is a belief that nationalism will empower China’s rise in the strategic domain of space. And, once ensconced as the dominant force in the strategic high ground of space, the Chinese will be able to have control over the other terrestrial strategic domains of space (land, sea, air, and cyberspace).

       The Chinese leadership fundamentally believes that space is an unpossessed resource waiting to be conquered by the nation (or group of nations) that have the gumption to take it before other states can. The cynicism of Chinese leaders when it comes to space is in their belief that China must do everything it can—including weaponizing space—to prevent China’s rivals (read, the United States) from denying space to them.