A Quick Run Around the Web (12/24/2019)

"DISASTER CYCLE | Signs in the Sky Now"--Suspicious Observers (8 min.)

• A useful resource: MTU's "Earth's Active Volcanoes"--data about currently active volcanoes listed by region of the world. 
• Another useful resource: Urban Survival's library of e-books (mostly PDFs) on survival/prepping topics.
• And another: "Northeast Hazards: Hazard Information for the Northeast." Although with a specific focus on the Northeast United States, it has good general information on various natural disasters and hazards, including earthquakes, floods, ice jams, winter storms and terrorism.
• "Teens attack off-duty California cop defending woman in Black Friday brawl, video shows"--Sacramento Bee. Multiple lessons here, but the one's that stick out to me are the dangers of involving yourself into a dispute with a third party and the problems of letting someone get behind you. Also, learn some techniques to get out of a naked rear choke. 
• On the other hand, being a man sometimes means getting involved: "The Men Who Walked Away"--Mark Steyn. He begins:

Friday December 6th marks the thirtieth anniversary of the "Montreal Massacre" - a grim day in 1989 when fourteen female students at the École Polytechnique were murdered by a man known to posterity as "Marc Lépine" [i.e., Gamil Gharbi, son of an Algerian Muslim]. Much followed from that terrible slaughter, including various useless "gun control" measures - and the formal annual commemorations that, three decades on, are attended by as many eminences as Remembrance Day or Dominion Day. ...

He describes the incident:

     ... when might a fish need a bicycle? The women of Montreal's École Polytechnique could have used one when Marc Lépine walked in with a gun and told all the men to leave the room. They meekly did as ordered. He then shot all the women.

* * *

     ... Yet the defining image of contemporary Canadian maleness is not M Lépine/Gharbi but the professors and the men in that classroom, who, ordered to leave by the lone gunman, obediently did so, and abandoned their female classmates to their fate -- an act of abdication that would have been unthinkable in almost any other culture throughout human history. The "men" stood outside in the corridor and, even as they heard the first shots, they did nothing. And, when it was over and Gharbi walked out of the room and past them, they still did nothing. Whatever its other defects, Canadian manhood does not suffer from an excess of testosterone.

Although to be fair to feminists and their enablers, the women were just as brave as the men. 

• Contrasting views of the Springfield XD series of handguns:

• "Reasons To Retire Your Glock?"--Mason Dixon Tactical. The author explains why he left Glock for the XD platform, and what he believes to be the advantages. Basically it comes down to what the author considers to be superior ergonomics, an ambidextrous set up, various safety features, and that the XD with a threaded barrel already comes with suppressor height sights.

• "The Springfield XD- A Polemic"--Active Response Training. Greg Elifritz explains why he recommends against using the XD pistols. Basically it comes down to the fact that he doesn't like the grip safety, which works against you if you are physically exhausted, and that these handguns seem to break more often than Glocks or S&W's M&P line of handguns, and they are harder to maintain or repair.

• "Eyes on Virginia 2020 – Here’s what to expect"--Forward Observer. Samuel Culper does not believe that Virginia will be any different than other states that have gone hard and heavy on gun control recently; that is, the laws will pass, including registration laws, and they will mostly be ignored. He does not anticipate that there will be massive gun confiscation, use of the National Guard, shutting down internet or cellular phone services. As he notes, "Mass confiscation can only come after firearms manufacturers are out of business, by the way. The number of AR-15s, spare parts, magazines, and other accoutrements flooding into the state would be massive."

      If he is correct, this is an opportunity then for setting up the necessary organizations for resistance: parallel but separate organizations with discrete functions such as lobbying, providing legal or financial assistance to people arrested under the new laws, organizing groups that can assist in event of disasters and attend rallies, and groups ("clubs") to provide security for events. These can be set up as non-profits, trusts, foundations, or what have you. Just so long as they are separate legal entities. Even local versions can be separate organizations. Think of the numerous related foundations, think tanks, charities, and so forth, under Soros or the Clintons. Or start talking to farmers about their interlocking corporations, trusts, LLCs, partnerships, etc.

• I've long thought that the media and anti-gun groups had been down-playing the number of firearms in circulation: "AMERICANS OWN AT LEAST 423 MILLION FIREARMS, INDUSTRY REPORT SHOWS"--Newsweek. This only includes firearms produced or imported for civilian ownership in the United States from 1986 to 2018. It doesn't include firearms manufactured and in circulation prior to 1986. So probably add another 100 to 150 million.
• "Time’s Up! New Zealand’s Gun ‘Buyback’ Amnesty Ends…Poorly"--The Truth About Guns. The government collected 46,750 firearms out of an estimated 240,000.
• "Bury a gun and ammo for 15 years"--Charles Wood at Backwoods Home Magazine. This author explained how he successfully did so. The author wrote this article in 2009 and buried his rifle in the early 1990's. I've watched many YouTube videos about people that have experimented with caches, and they have all had problems even if the test only last several months. The single biggest problem is finding the cache later, and it was no different in this case even though the author knew the exact tree it was buried under:

I had been keeping an eye on it, so when it finally fell I marked a nearby tree so I could find it again after the loggers left. Even careful logging causes quite an upheaval in the forest and it can be difficult to locate a specific spot after all the landmarks have been changed. After the logging crew had left it took me several days with a shovel and a rake to locate the rifle. In hindsight, I should have had some additional way of locating it. Since the top of the pipe was about three feet below ground level, my old metal detector wasn’t much help.

As for the actual cache, not only did the author includes the weapon, but the necessary de-greasing and cleaning supplies, ammunition, reloading dies, and a manual for the weapon. He used a PVC tube, and describes how he prepared it:

I bought a piece of 6-inch diameter schedule 40 PVC pipe, end caps, and PVC solvent from a hardware store in another town where I had never done business before. Being in a rural area where everyone knows everyone I didn’t want to arouse any suspicions about what I was up to. I then disassembled the rifle and completely coated every metal part with a rust preventative oil intended for storing unused machinery in damp locations. This oil dries to form a waxy coating. I was extra careful that the bore was completely coated. I wanted to vacuum-pack the rifle as extra insurance against rust. As it turned out my employer had just taken delivery of a mainframe computer that happened to be wrapped in a large aluminized mylar bag for shipping. This proved to be the perfect material for my purpose. I discovered that with a warm iron I could fuse the edges of this material into a custom-fitted airtight bag for the rifle. I placed each individual component of the partially disassembled rifle in its own custom-made mylar bag with a small bag of silica gel desiccant to absorb any moisture present. Using my shop vac and an iron I managed to produce a professional-looking vacuum-packing job. The barreled action, stock, trigger assembly, hand guard, magazines, scope, and mounts all went into individual bags.

He also discusses how he retrieved it without having to dig to the bottom of the hole. So read the whole thing.

• "Modern Drone Warfare, Cops and Virginia"--Wilder, Wealthy and Wise. Wilder notes that the military is betting huge on drones even though they would surely be unusable against a near pear adversary in a modern electronic warfare battlefield. His guess is that this drone technology will make its way into the hands of law enforcement to be used against the populace.

• Related: "These Aren't The Droids You're Looking For"--Raconteur Report. This is Aesop's response to Wilder's article, and discusses how drones would be of very limited use in hilly, forested terrain and some ways of disabling drones. However, a significant portion of the United States is not heavily forested, and surely these drones will be using sensors that can peer through tree canopies. But I do agree--and I've said this before--that the problem with fighting a wide-spread insurgency in the United States would be protecting the logistics tail and administrative headquarters. 

• While we are on the subject of drones, criminals in China have been making use of drones to further spread the African swine flu to pig herds that had previously avoided infection. The reason? To buy the meat at a steep discount and then sell it for food at high prices. But this has caused pig farmers to adopt defenses. And that is where this article comes in: "China flight systems jammed by pig farm’s African swine fever defences"--South China Morning Post. From the article:

      A Chinese pig farm’s attempt to ward off drones – said to be spreading African swine fever – jammed the navigation systems of a number of planes flying overhead.

      The farm, in northeastern China, was ordered last month to turn in an unauthorised anti-drone device installed to prevent criminal gangs dropping items infected with the disease, according to online news portal Thepaper.cn.

      The device came to light after a series of flights to and from Harbin airport complained about losing GPS signals while flying over Zhaozhou county in Heilongjiang in late October. In some cases, the ADS-B tracking technology  – which determines an aircraft’s position via satellite navigation – failed.

One of the problems with using GPS jammers. 

• "5 Things To Consider Before Buying A New Rifle Scope"--The Truth About Guns. Similar to firearms, calibers, and bullets, the use to which you will put a scope determines what you need. The author discusses magnification, reticle types, mounting, features, and price.
• "Hill People Gear Pocket Frame Sheet"--Jerking the Trigger. These HDPE frame sheets  are designed to fit pockets in certain of their products to make the bags more rigid and keep you from getting poked in the back. 
• "Tragedy as victim of the White Island volcano disaster dies in hospital bringing the official death toll to 17"--Daily Mail. 
• Got your flu shot yet? "CDC warns flu season is hitting the country harder this year with 3.7million cases already reported and 1,800 DEATHS"--Daily Mail. 
• "THE MSR POCKET ROCKET | YOUR LITTLE CAMP DRAGON"--SOFREP. The author writes: "MSR boasts’ that the Pocket Rocket can boil 1 liter of water in 3.3 minutes, and they’re not wrong."
• "The View From Olympus: Spreading Disorder and 4GW"--William S. Lind at Traditional Right.

      What we are seeing in spreading disorder is not Fourth Generation war itself.  But it is a failure of the state. As Martin van Creveld argues in The Rise and Decline of the State, the state arose for only one purpose: to establish and maintain order and safety of persons and property.  States that cannot do that lose their legitimacy.

     Here is where we see an answer to our first question, what is going on?  In more and more places, states are failing to maintain order but remain as vehicles of the New Class, the Establishment.  The Establishment runs the state, not to provide security of persons and property for all, but for its own benefit. It uses its control of the state to give itself careers, money (lots of it), power, prestige, etc.  It then employs these to exempt itself from the consequences of state failure, i.e., it lives in gated communities, its kids go to private schools and its jobs don’t get shipped overseas.

     One of the interesting characteristics of the new world disorder is that it is coming primarily from the middle class.  The yellow vests are a striking example. But the young people filling the streets of Baghdad and Hong Kong are also often of middle class background.  They are college students or recent college graduates. They are taking to the streets because around the world, the middle class is under ever growing pressure.  College degrees no longer bring good jobs. Pensions and paychecks no longer last to the end of the month. Maintaining even a vestige of a middle class standard of living requires going even deeper into debt.  The state arose to provide security, but it now yields growing insecurity for the middle class.

      So far, the disorder appears to be directed against the Establishment that runs the state, not the state itself.  That is why it is not Fourth Generation war. If it proves possible to boot the Establishment out and replace it with governors who serve the middle class instead of themselves, the state is likely to remain.  However, if the Establishment is able to hold on to power despite its failure in governance, then at some point people are likely to start giving up on the state itself. At that point we will be looking at 4GW, and lots of it.

"Red Beard’s Ghost Returns - German Invasion Plans - WW2 - 069 - December 21 1940"--World War Two (12 min.)

• That we know of: "The FBI’s Darkest Hour"--by Adam Mill at American Greatness. An excerpt:

     The Constitution provides, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.” We know that the FBI violated its oath or affirmation in securing the Carter Page warrants. That’s what each of those 17 “mistakes” noted by the Horowitz report is: a deception to gain a warrant. A warrant is only as valid as the truth of the information relied upon by the judge issuing it. 

     Adding to the injury of Mueller’s probe is the parallel public relations operation it apparently coordinated against the president using false and misleading information sourced to “officials familiar with the investigation.” Leak after leak after leak smeared the president and the people around him. It was lawless and un-American. 

     It’s the greatest scandal in U.S. legal history. Most chilling of all is that the current FBI chief, Christopher Wray, recently shrugged-off FBI agents lying to the FISA court. He said of the damning Horowitz report that, in his mind, what was “important that the inspector general found that, in this particular instance, the investigation was opened with appropriate predication and authorization.” 

• Related: "The DOJ IG Report and Senate Hearing"--Diplomad. He writes:

Read it; you don't need me to tell you what the report states about how the FBI engaged in a massive criminal conspiracy (yes, conspiracy) to take down candidate and later President Trump. Forget all that media spin about the report exonerating Director Comey, and the finding that the investigation into Trump and Russia was legal and proper. Rubbish. The report is a wrecking ball; the Dems and their buddies don't know what to do about it except spin, spin, spin and shout "Impeachment!" The report, and Horowitz at the hearing, clearly stated that the FBI lied to the FISA court in order to obtain warrants on Carter Page and sent contacts, at times wired, to talk to Trump campaign personnel--obviously in hopes of entrapping them. The FBI did all sorts of inept and even criminal actions to nail Trump. It's in the report.

• "Secrets, Not Constitutional Authority, Are Now the Coin of Power in Politics"--Richard Fernandez at PJ Media. He argues that "[s]tability will never return to liberal democracies until excess secrecy is sanitized by sunlight and the great bureaucracies can no longer bludgeon each other and the public with weaponized information."
• "The secret federal Stasi"--Vox Popoli. Lots of background, and then he concludes:

     This is bigger than Watergate + 9/11 + the Bay of Pigs + almost every other conspiracy theory you can name combined. It is also why you're seeing definite signs of panic and desperation everywhere from the House of Representatives to the mainstream media to the boardrooms of the Fortune 500. This reaches from the heart of the Swamp in Washington DC to Silicon Valley and Seattle, Washington. In East Germany, it came out after the Wall fell that one-fifth of the population was involved in the surveillance of the other four-fifths of the population; now keep in mind that due to the mathematical reach of the FISA warrants, the 825 million surveillance orders issued actually exceeds the 320 million population of the USA.

     Now we know how and why Google and Amazon and Facebook got so big, so fast. They were the corporate arm of the surveillance state. No wonder their top executives are retiring and running and applying for citizenship in non-extradition treaty countries like New Zealand.

• Related? "Hundreds Of Billions In Gold And Cash Are Quietly Disappearing"--Zero Hedge. 

• Flashback to 2012: "U.S. government is secretly spying on EVERYONE using civilian security cameras, say Wikileaks"--Daily Mail. 
• "Ominous and Invasive Surveillance Powers Exposed in Horowitz Report"--Rachel Bovard at American Greatness. "If senators can’t even trust the FBI not to abuse its powers of surveillance for political purposes, how should the rest of us feel?"
• "Boom: Admiral Mike Rogers is Cooperating With Barr and Durham"--DB Daily Update. Rogers is a former director of the National Security Agency.

• Background: "NSA Director Rogers Disclosed FISA Abuse Days After Page Warrant Was Issued"--Epoch Times. 

• "We Tested Ring’s Security. It’s Awful"--Vice. "... Amazon-owned home security company Ring is not doing enough to stop hackers breaking into customer accounts, and in turn, their cameras, according to multiple cybersecurity experts, people who write tools to break into accounts, and Motherboard's own analysis with a Ring camera it bought to test the company's security protections." 
• "How Your Phone Betrays Democracy"--New York Times. An excerpt:

     Within minutes, with no special training and a little bit of Google searching, Times Opinion was able to single out and identify individuals at public demonstrations large and small from coast to coast.

      By tracking specific devices, we followed demonstrators from the 2017 Women’s March back to their homes. We were able to identify individuals at the 2017 Inauguration Day Black Bloc protests. It was easy to follow them to their workplaces. In some instances — for example, a February clash between antifascists and far-right supporters of Milo Yiannopolous in Berkeley, Calif. — it took little effort to identify the homes of protesters and then their family members.

• They've been lying to you: "Study Finds Only 1.3% of Overdose Victims Had Opioid Prescription"--Pain News Network. 
• "Islam and the Psychology of Satan: The Tragicomedy of Hell on Earth"--The Hesperado. The author explains his hypothesis before moving on to his argument:

That hypothesis is, simply put, that Islam is not only “Satanic” in a loosely poetic or rhetorical sense—an adjective likely to be interpreted even among many in the still inchoate anti-Islamic movement as hyperbolic—and not only even a Satanist cult (albeit the largest, longest-lasting and most successful such cult in history), but positively and directly a creation of Satan himself.

• Satan has many tools: "For The LGBT Mob, Lesbian Ads On The Hallmark Channel Are Just The Beginning"--The Federalist. The author explains:

     In a theological sense, the Hallmark Channel is not a Christian broadcasting network. ...

     But, culturally speaking, Hallmark Christmas movies are noticeably Christian. The characters don’t take off their clothes, murder anyone, or use profanity. The hero loves children and defends the poor. The heroine who begins the story loving her self-involved life in the city chooses family and a life of self-sacrifice in her hometown by the end of the tale.

     If you’re a pious Christian mom who wants to escape into a universe where all the cynicism and immorality of modern life aren’t allowed, or if you want to snuggle up with your eight-year-old daughter and watch a silly movie without having to explain inappropriate content you weren’t expecting, the Hallmark Channel is about the only place left that will let you do it.

      So when an ad featuring a lesbian couple airs during a commercial break on the Hallmark Channel, it doesn’t upset you because your fragile little Christian heart can’t handle the image of two women in wedding dresses. It upsets you because the ad indicates that the secular left, led by the LGBT mafia, have discovered your last remaining hideout, planted their flag in the ground, and claimed it as their own.

• "Whistling Past the Graveyard"--John Derbyshire's 2006 review of Mark Steyn's book, America Alone: The End Of The World As We Know It. Derbyshire begins:

      Is the world of today a better or a worse place than the world of 100 years ago? On all the ordinary indices of human felicity — health, longevity, security, hygiene, comfort, prosperity, equality, dentistry — the answer is of course that we live much better lives than our grandfathers did.

      That is not the whole story, though. There has, for example, been much loss of liberty in those nations where individual liberty is (I first, very significantly in this context, wrote "was") most prized. As A.J.P. Taylor noted in English History 1914-45: "Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman." The America of 100 years ago was even freer, and our freedoms persisted for longer. A fiftysomething American friend of mine remembers being a 13-year-old, strolling down his suburban New York street carrying a rifle under his arm, on the way to some shooting practice.

      Taking the world at large, I think you can make a case that, net-net, and even allowing for the amenity improvements listed in my second sentence above, civilization has in some other respects slipped backwards. Take "diversity," for example. For all our fantasies about having vanquished "racism,"  "discrimination," and the rest, we are in many places less tolerant of each other than we were a hundred years ago. There has been a slow separating-out of ethnicities everywhere these past few decades.

      In British India, as Kipling's stories illustrate, Hindus, Moslems, Sikhs, Buddhists, Parsees, and half a dozen lesser sects jostled together without any very dramatic friction. When the British left, it was suddenly found necessary to place Hindus and Moslems in two (then, a quarter-century later, three) different nations, which to this day have not been able to settle their differences. The astonishing salad that was the Austro-Hungarian Empire did not survive World War One (which, admittedly, its internal strains had helped to start), and squabbles over which bits of its remnants belonged to whom helped to ignite World War Two. The Sunnis, Shias, and Kurds of Mesopotamia seem to have coexisted reasonably well under Ottoman rule; in today's Iraq they prefer to massacre each other. Even the streets of Belfast were more heterogeneous in 1906 than they are today, when thirty years of sectarian violence has chased even middle-class Protestants and Catholics off into different neighborhoods.

      Education, too, the great panacea of the twentieth century ("Human history becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe" — H.G. Wells in The Outline of History, 1919), delivers less than it once did in many places. No doubt the average Chinese peasant knows more about the world now than his revered ancestors did; but as Mark Steyn notes in his new book America Alone, an intelligent young Pakistani lad of 1906 would have become acquainted with Shakespeare, the Magna Carta, and Sir Isaac Newton, while his present-day counterpart will more likely spend his schooldays memorizing the Koran — trading in his grandfather's twentieth-century mentality for a seventh-century one.

• Another Derbyshire classic: "The Talk: Nonblack Version." This article was in response to numerous articles published by black parents about having to give "The Talk": "the painful discussion that many, if not most, black parents eventually have with their kids" "about how to deal with police when they are stopped for no good reason." Derbyshire's "talk" went the other direction, presenting real world instruction on how to deal with Black criminality and the negative consequences of affirmative action. Because, whether you believe that high crime rates among blacks are due to inheritable traits (such as intelligence or "the warrior gene") or cultural, the difference doesn't mean much when you are walking down the street. In any event, while nothing happened to the authors of the "the talk" for Blacks, Derbyshire was fired from his position with The National Review.

• Related: "A Censored Race War"--a 2012 article from Thomas Sowell at the National Review on the topic of how the media ignore racially motivated black-on-white crime. He writes:

      What the authorities and the media seem determined to suppress is that the hoodlum elements in many ghettoes launch coordinated attacks on whites in public places. If there is anything worse than a one-sided race war, it is a two-sided race war, especially when one of the races outnumbers the other several times over.

       It may be understandable that some people want to head off such a catastrophe, either by not reporting the attacks in this race war, or by not identifying the race of those attacking, or by insisting that the attacks were not racially motivated — even when the attackers themselves voice anti-white invective as they laugh at their bleeding victims.

        Trying to keep the lid on is understandable. But a lot of pressure can build up under that lid. If and when that pressure leads to an explosion of white backlash, things could be a lot worse than if the truth had come out earlier, and steps taken by both black and white leaders to deal with the hoodlums and with those who inflame them.

• "Sweden: The Wages of Self-Loathing Is Civil War"--American Thinker. From the article:

     The population of Sweden is now 10.1 million, of which 8% are of the Islamist persuasion.  The first question is, who owns the guns, and how many are there?

     This site says civilians in Sweden are estimated to hold 2,296,000 guns, legally and illegally, of which about half are rifles.  There is a big hunting tradition in Sweden.  As of the year 2011, licenced firearms per 100 head of population was 6.5, and registered guns per 100 people was 18.9.  So the average gun-owner has three of them.

     The Swedish government is thinking along the same lines.  They are currently trying to restrict weapons use by hunters.  Magazines and ammunition are to be registered with the police and be kept apart from the weapons.

• "Violent male convicts claiming to be ‘trans’ are terrorizing women in all-female Canadian jails"--Life Site. The article reports: "Correctional Services Canada (CSC) has been quietly transferring some of the country’s most notorious and violent male criminals to women’s prisons because they are claiming to be 'female.'" The criminals are doing this so they have access to female prisoners for sex. Fortunately, the prisons are well stocked with "morning after" pills. An American federal court would probably uphold something similar under the 8th Amendment: they already require prisons to pay for sex transitions.
• "IBM Reveals “Staggering” New Battery Tech, Withholds Technical Details"--IEEE Spectrum. The battery is touted as being made from common materials, non-flammable, able to recharge 80 percent of its capacity in five minutes, and capable of hundreds of thousands of recharge cycles with only 20% degradation of its charging capacity. One of the companies that assisted with this development was a Japanese glass company, which suggests that it is a battery using a glass electrolyte.

• Related: "A Glass Battery That Keeps Getting Better?"--IEEE Spectrum. 

• A reminder we live in the 21st Century: "CHINA IS ABOUT TO FIRE UP ITS 'ARTIFICIAL SUN' IN QUEST FOR FUSION ENERGY"--Newsweek. "The device, called HL-2M Tokamak, is part of the nation's Experimental Advanced Superconducting Tokamak project, which has been running since 2006. In March, an official from the China National Nuclear Corporation announced it would complete building HL-2M by the end of the year." Its a Tokamak design, so it probably won't work. But China has said that the device will be operational in 2020, meaning that it will be ready to test. France is also leading a consortium building a commercial fusion power plant that will be first fired up in 2025.