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Thursday, May 14, 2020

A Quick Run Around the Web (5/14/2020)

"Did Judo Skills STOP THREAT?.. When is ENOUGH for Self Defence"--Fight Science (5 min.)
Don't know the background to this, but for some reason the punk in the black shirt decided to try and start a fight with the guy in the blue shirt.

  • "Your Tactical Training Scenario- Surprise Attack"--Active Response Training. An analysis of an attack where the victim's first hint was getting bashed over the head with a hammer. It doesn't have to be a hammer, though; there are plenty of videos of surprise attacks involving sucker punches, especially to the "off button" behind the jaw. An excerpt:
          When we imagine what might happen during robberies or attacks, we often assume that there will be some type of warning or verbal precursor.  Not always.
           The issue is what my friend Craig Douglas calls “unequal initiative.”  In real life attacks, criminals get to go first.  Oftentimes, their first move happens before you even recognize you are playing the game.  That reality isn’t reflected in most folks’ practice programs.
             Have you ever practiced overcoming a deficit in initiative?  Have you ever started your practice session lying on your back, with a person sitting on your chest striking you hard in the face while wearing boxing gloves?
               When you are in this spot, your five second “El Presidente” isn’t gonna happen.  But that’s what occurs in real life.  The criminals aren’t looking for a fair fight.  They want to make it as easy as possible…working from ambush and stealing your stuff before you have a clue you have even been attacked.
            Read the whole thing.
            • "M1 Garand Reloading With Modern Components & Tools"--American Rifleman. The author's best results was from Berger Hybrid Target 168-gr. bullets over 45.0 grains of VihtaVuori N150 powder. The author was using new Starline brass and CCI BR2 benchrest primers. The author was very pleased with the Starline brass and its consistency. My experience with Starline brass has been very good.
            • "Pistol Shooting Tests"--DeFoor Performance Shooting. A pistol qualification test to test your skill. It uses an NRA B-8 target.
            • "The Bug-Out Chest Rig"--Blue Collar Prepping. The author explains:
                    Earlier this year I mentioned that one of my resolutions was to reduce the weight of my Get Home Bag. While I am still in the process of doing that, one of the things which I have done (and is sort of a cheat, but as Lokidude says, "If you aren't cheating you aren't trying hard enough") is to move some of that gear off my back and onto my chest with a chest rig.
                      While this does not reduce the actual amount of carried weight, it does serve to reduce the amount that my aching back has to carry while simultaneously placing gear in a position where I can access it quickly. I consider this a double win.
                The rig she is using is the NYCTO Tactical Chest Rig from Creek Stewart. This is advertised as being modeled on South African Defense Force (SADF) Pattern 83 Chest Rig. This rig has a large central pocket, a 30-round mag pouch on either side, and grenade pouches further on the sides, as well as Molle attachments on the front. I would note, however, that for a little less, you can get the Hill People Gear Heavy Recon Kit Bag that has laser cut PALS attachments on the front and bottom, a pocket into which you can fit a duty-sized handgun, and a main compartment (also with PALS attachments points). Another option is the Hill People Gear original kit bag that, while lacking the front-outside PALS, has three internal compartments (including one for a handgun), an internal pocket with PALS and PALS on the outside-underside. 
                Fencing pliers have more capability than the typical set of pliers. They can be used as a medium sized hammer, they have a robust claw on the back end for pulling fence staples or whatever else might need pried upon, and they can cut through whatever can fit between their cutting jaws. They are a heavy set of pliers for doing work on whatever might need held while being repaired. Finally, they have multi-sized crimp jaws if you are actually doing fencing or electrical work.
                         On another operation, my patrol was called up for an emergency extraction because we were needed badly somewhere else. When we arrived at the only potential landing zone within many miles of thick jungle, we found a tropical hardwood tree located in such a way that a helicopter could not land. After barely chipping the bark off the tree with a machete, it was obvious that something else would have to be done to get rid of it. As I considered using several of our precious claymore mines to take the tree out, one of my more experienced troops came up with his M14 and offered to shoot the tree down.
                           After making sure we had no troops downrange, with a good bit of skepticism, I gave him the go ahead. He walked over to the tree, held his rifle fairly level to the ground and began shooting through the tree left to right with shots spaced about an inch or two apart. Before he got through his second magazine the tree fell over as nice as you could please. I later worked with 1st Cavalry Division snipers using XM21s to take out the enemy by shooting them through the trees they were behind. During small-unit engagements, one sniper named Staff Sergeant Crow liked to use a technique called "precision traversing fire."
                             After identifying the likely location of an enemy soldier behind a tree, he would aim maybe a foot or two off the ground at the edge of the tree and, in a cadence not unlike rapid fire in a match, move each subsequent shot across the tree a few inches apart. Often before he traversed to the opposite side of the tree, an enemy soldier would fall away from the tree, hit by a combination of bullets and wood fragments. In one particular engagement, he accounted for nine of the enemy using that technique.
                      It would be interesting to see that in practice. I'm not discounting the account, but I've watched numerous tests of shooting bullets into trees, and essentially those have shown that if a tree is big enough to hide you, even powerful rounds like the various magnums or even .50 BMG aren't going to hit you. But those tests were conducted by only firing one or two shots per tree.
                      [Sgt. Brian "Sir Robin"] Miller was the first supervisor on the scene of the shooting, arriving in time to hear three or four shots, records show. A state commission assembled to investigate the shooting found that Miller took his time putting on a bulletproof vest and hid behind his car.
                      The reason he is getting reinstated is because the Sheriff's Department did not provide sufficient due process to Miller when it fired him, although it is not reported how his due process rights were violated. Of course, for most of my readers, you have no due process rights protecting you from being fired. You can be fired for virtually any reason or no reason at all. But, thanks to a long ago Supreme Court ruling, public employees are deemed to have a property interest in their job requiring due process (e.g., notice, opportunity to be heard, etc.) prior to being terminated, on top of which most public sector unions have added other requirements. The result is that it is often easier to just put up with a lousy employee rather than terminate their employment. 
                            The back pay should be substantial as he was pulling in $138,410.25 in 2017. Yeah, and you thought cops were underpaid.
                      • Live by the sword, die by the sword: "Teen Accused of Attacking 15-Year-Old Girl Shot Dead"--Breitbart. Tyquan Howard, 16, had been accused of being part of a group that had attacked and severely beaten a young girl in Crown Heights back on March 5, and stealing the shoes off her feet. The article indicates that Tyquan was "shot around 1 p.m. in front of a building on St. John’s Place in Brooklyn and died hours later at a local hospital." No arrests have been made.
                      • I finished reading Marcus Wynn's latest novel, Ariel. Good stuff. Check it out. This is a sequel to his earlier book, Salt. I don't think you need to read Salt first, but it would probably help since it provides background on the characters.

                      "I Took A Really Cool Shotgun Class With Matt Haught (Part 3): Zones of Employment"--Active Self Protection Extra (7 min.). A good example of why you need to pattern your self-defense shotgun loads in your particular shotgun.

                      On January 26, 2020, over a month before the first coronavirus cases were confirmed in the New York City area in the COVID-19 pandemic in New York City, Barbot said at a press conference: "We are encouraging New Yorkers to go about their everyday lives and suggest practicing everyday precautions that we do through the flu season".[11] On February 2, with the city's first coronavirus case under investigation, Barbot stated: "The risk to New Yorkers from coronavirus is low and ... our preparedness as a city is very high. There is no reason not to take the subway, not to take the bus, not to go out to your favorite restaurant, and certainly not to miss the [Chinatown Lunar New Year Parade and Festival] parade next Sunday [Feb. 9]."
                      • "Fauci's Song and Dance"--American Thinker. Key point: "Many would argue, and I count myself among them, that Fauci’s consistently wrong advice using consistently wrong computer models has led to needless suffering and death."
                               ... we have a veritable litany of failure, much of it deadly. Cuomo began by downplaying the seriousness of the virus and boasting that New York, being ‘fully coordinated’ and ‘fully mobilized’, was going to handle it much better than many places. That was on March 2. Fast forward two months and New York leads the country in coronavirus deaths, accounting for a third or more of the nationwide total. At some point the governor began to panic, shouting that New York would need 140,000 beds (it needed 18,500 at the peak) and 30,000 ventilators. Soon I expect to see them littering antique stores repurposed as planters.
                                What made Cuomo’s handling of the situation so bad? Critics point to a host of policies. Waiting until just a couple of weeks ago to pay serious attention to cleaning the subway system was one failure. But the real doozy was forcing nursing homes to take patients infected with the virus. What part of the population is by far the most vulnerable to the virus? The elderly. Who occupies nursing homes? The elderly. Cuomo might as well have sent in a SWAT squad and ordered it to start firing. Not only did he require nursing homes to take infected patients, he made it against the law even to ask if new patients were infected. Thousands died.
                          • Related: "‘A pressure cooker’: Pa. governor aims to contain GOP revolt"--AP. Per the article: "The Democrat [Gov. Tom Wolf] at the helm in one of the premier battlegrounds in November’s presidential election is struggling to fight a Republican revolt over his stay-at-home orders and business shutdowns. Egged on by state GOP lawmakers, counties have threatened to defy his orders while at least a few business owners have reopened despite his warnings."
                                   The US Congress moved with remarkable speed to approve rescue measures for small businesses, large industries and workers, amounting to nearly $3 trillion.
                                    But that infusion simply "bought time... it postponed" bankruptcies, David Kotok, cofounder of Cumberland Advisors, said of the massive federal push to support the economy.
                                      Kotok -- who thinks it will take around five years for the US economy to fully recover -- expects casualties in other sectors, including travel, leisure, real estate, energy and "more that haven't surfaced yet," he told AFP this week.
                                        Federal Reserve Chief Jay Powell warned Wednesday of a potential "wave of bankruptcies" that could cause lasting harm to the world's largest economy, and said more fiscal support may be needed to prevent the devastation, despite the massive cost.
                                          Powell, who has launched a host of key programs to support credit markets and provide funds directly to companies, said there are limits to how far the Fed can go.
                                           "We can make loans to solvent businesses," Powell said, but cautioned that "The passage of time is all that is needed for a liquidity problem to turn into a solvency problem."
                                              This week, former President Obama re-emerged from hibernation to lecture Americans about the threat to rule of law posed by the Trump administration. After Attorney General Bill Barr announced that the Department of Justice would be dropping its case against President Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn, who had pled guilty to one count of lying to the FBI, Obama told his former aides, “our basic understanding of rule of law is at risk.” He explained, “There is no precedent that anybody can find for someone who has been charged with perjury just getting off scot-free. … And when you start moving in those directions, it can accelerate pretty quickly as we’ve seen in other places.”
                                                In reality, of course, Flynn was never charged with perjury. He was charged with lying to the FBI in the course of an investigation, a separate and far lesser offense, particularly given the fact that his alleged lie was immaterial to any underlying crime. In fact, as America found out over the past two weeks, Flynn wasn’t supposed to be the subject of any investigation at all: The FBI had decided to close an investigation into Flynn in January 2017, even after supposedly nefarious calls between Flynn and Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. Disgraced former FBI agent Peter Strzok — the same man who pledged to lover and former FBI attorney Lisa Page that Donald Trump would never be president and suggested an “insurance policy” against that possibility — then intervened to keep the investigation open.
                                                 The next day, during an Oval Office meeting, President Obama himself asked then-FBI Director James Comey about the Flynn-Kislyak communications. Next, Comey upped the ante: He avoided following normal FBI-White House protocols in order to interview Flynn, and Comey’s deputy director, Andrew McCabe, avoided informing Flynn of his rights. Nonetheless, the FBI agents who conducted the interview suggested that they did not think Flynn was lying during that interview. As it turns out, notes between top FBI officials at the time said, “What’s our goal? Truth/Admission or to get him to lie, so we can prosecute him or get him fired?” Flynn would later plead guilty to one count of lying to the FBI — at least in part because the FBI was threatening his son with prosecution.
                                                    This should be a massive scandal. It should be a massive scandal because, at the very least, it demonstrates the nation’s chief law enforcement agencies, prompted by political actors at the very top of the government, racing to bend the rules in order to pursue a case they were convinced they would make: the case that the Trump campaign had conspired with the Russian government. From the purposefully botched Carter Page Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act warrant to the absurdly conjured prosecution of Flynn, the most powerful institutions in American life violated the protocols meant to restrict abuse, firmly secure in their own feelings of moral rectitude.
                                              • "Obamagate Is Not a Conspiracy Theory"--National Review. David Harsanyi writes: "There’s no reason to ignore the mounting evidence that Obama administration officials were corrupt in their handling of the Trump–Russia investigation."
                                              • "‘Obamagate’ Isn’t A Conspiracy Theory, It’s The Biggest Political Scandal Of Our Time"--The Federalist. John Daniel Davidson points out: "A string of recently released documents have confirmed that the entire Russia-Trump investigation, which eventually entrapped Flynn and forced then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions to recuse himself, was an unprecedented abuse of power that amounted to organized effort by the Obama administration to nullify the results of the 2016 presidential election. It was in effect an attempted coup."
                                                      Now in the wake of the Justice Department's decision to drop charges against former Trump National Security Adviser General Michael Flynn, Nunes is turning his attention to the conduct of the special counsel, who was appointed after President Donald Trump fired FBI Director James Comey.
                                                       "We're doing a large criminal referral on the Mueller dossier team that put together a fraudulent report -- that knew there was no collusion the day that Mueller walked in the door," said Nunes. "They set an obstruction of justice trap. There's no doubt in my mind that we will make a conspiracy referral there."
                                                          In April of 2019, Barr released a redacted version of Mueller's final report showing that the investigation did not establish that members of the Trump campaign conspired or coordinated with the Russian government, though Mueller declined to conclude whether or not the president committed obstruction of justice.
                                                           Nunes added that he is also interested in determining whether or not members of the senior leadership of the DOJ and FBI were involved in the Mueller team's conduct.
                                                               The media lies all the time. We have seen it on Russian collusion, Covington Catholic, the coronavirus, and a host of other subjects. When they are not lying, they engage in a kind of willful distortion of the facts, focusing on unrepresentative stories of the “man bites dog” variety without providing useful context. This is especially common when a racially charged crime happens.
                                                                It is not a coincidence that the national media recently latched onto the Ahmaud Arbery story from Brunswick, Georgia. Video has emerged of the event itself, and the story doesn’t sound good: a good boy out for a run gets profiled and murdered by two crazy white racists.
                                                                 Is this story even plausible? Video, after all, can be misleading, as it doesn’t show what happened before the camera started rolling. And while the white suspects have been reviled as “dumb rednecks,” one of the allegedly crazed maniacs is a former cop turned investigator. He and his son, according to their account, were in hot pursuit of a neighborhood burglar. At least one other 911 caller told police Arbery was trespassing in a home under construction.
                                                                    There are other reasons to be skeptical of the media narrative. First, the initial prosecutor on the case, before the national media outcry, offered a detailed justification for his decision not to prosecute.
                                                                      Second, giving credence to the robbery theory, Arbery has a felony criminal record—for bringing a gun to a high school football game and a later probation violation for shoplifting. He was said to have been seen by one of the suspects days earlier casing the neighborhood.
                                                                        Third, Arbery may have been confined involuntarily for mental health reasons, as the D.A.’s letter mentions. “Arbery’s mental health records & prior convictions help explain his apparent aggressive nature and his possible thought pattern to attack an armed man,” the prosecutor wrote. The video shows him, without hesitation, attacking one of the men who were blocking his way. No media reports have followed up on this interesting tidbit.
                                                                          Finally, while Arbery is indeed running on the video, was he actually just a jogger out in the neighborhood? He was wearing what appear to be long jean shorts and high-top basketball shoes—not exactly jogging attire.

                                                                      * * *

                                                                              It is funny how these stories seem to emerge and get national coverage so regularly during election years. We’ve seen this movie before: Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and the trigger-happy maniac Sean Reed in Indianapolis. In every case, the facts and background of the victim, as well as the perpetrators, were distorted to fit a narrative.
                                                                             A brochure for the tool, which was obtained by Vice, says it works on a range of iOS and Android devices and would give police remote access to a person's text messages, emails, contact lists, GPS data, and social media apps.
                                                                                The tool could also be used to turn on the phone's microphone without the user knowing, covertly take pictures through its camera app, and even intercept calls - all while leaving 'no trace whatsoever on the device.'
                                                                            Even if the San Diego P.D. eventually decided against the purchase, how many other P.D.s are using it?
                                                                            • Hmm. "$1.6T in century-old Chinese bonds offer Trump unique leverage against Beijing"--Fox Business. "The Lewisburg, Tennessee-based American Bondholder Foundation holds $1.6 trillion of century-old Chinese debt, including interest, dating to before the founding of the communist People’s Republic of China, that it wants the administration's help in redeeming. There is an estimated $6 trillion or more of the debt outstanding worldwide." The article continues:
                                                                                     The bonds were issued by the Republic of China -- which ousted the imperial government in a coup -- as far back as 1912 and backed by gold; they were defaulted on in 1938. The ROC government fled to Taiwan, where it remains the official ruling body, after Mao Zedong’s communist party took over following the 1949 end of the revolution.
                                                                                      Beijing maintains Taiwan is part of China, and under international law, successor governments are responsible for the debts of their predecessors.
                                                                                        President Trump is a “'promises made, promises kept' president, and he said to my face that he was going to do this transaction, do this deal, and hold China accountable,” Jonna Bianco, president and chairwoman of the American Bondholder Foundation, told FOX Business.
                                                                                          Bianco, who has power of attorney for 95 percent of the thousands of U.S. bondholders, said making China repay its debt would “not be punishment,” but rather a basic fundamental of international finance.
                                                                                            Alcubierre’s warp drive theory works not by pushing anything faster than light. Instead, his warp drive creates a bubble that literally warps space: compressing it in front and stretching it out behind. If you were in a spaceship traveling inside such a bubble, you’d still be moving under the speed of light, but you’d essentially be traveling through distances that have been squeezed shorter, as if you were riding the crest of a wave through space-time.
                                                                                              “A propulsion mechanism based on such a local distortion of spacetime just begs to be given the familiar name of the ‘warp drive’ of science fiction,” Alcubierre wrote in his original paper. Naturally, among both physicists and the general public, the name caught on.
                                                                                                 “A rotating detonation engine takes a different approach to how it combusts propellant. It’s made of concentric cylinders. Propellant flows in the gap between the cylinders, and, after ignition, the rapid heat release forms a shock wave, a strong pulse of gas with significantly higher pressure and temperature that is moving faster than the speed of sound.
                                                                                                  This sets the RDE apart from conventional engines, which require a lot of machinery to direct and control the combustion reaction so that it can be turned into acceleration. But in an RDE, the shock wave generated by the ignitions creates thrust naturally and without the need for additional engine parts.
                                                                                                    However, as Koch indicates, the rotating detonation engine field is still in its infancy and engineers are still not certain what they are capable of. ...
                                                                                                    A type of rocket engine once thought impossible has just been fired up in the lab. Engineers have built and successfully tested what is known as a rotating detonation engine, which generates thrust via a self-sustaining wave of detonations that travel around a circular channel.

                                                                                                    As this engine requires far less fuel than the combustion engines currently used to power rockets, it could eventually mean a more efficient and much lighter means of getting our ships into space.

                                                                                                   "The study presents, for the first time, experimental evidence of a safe and functioning hydrogen and oxygen propellant detonation in a rotating detonation rocket engine," said aerospace engineer Kareem Ahmed of the University of Central Florida.
                                                                                                               The idea of the rotating detonation engine goes back to the 1950s. It consists of a ring-shaped - annular - thrust chamber created by two cylinders of different diameters stacked inside one another, creating a gap in between.
                                                                                                                Gas fuel and oxidiser are then injected into this chamber through small holes and ignited. This creates the first detonation, which produces a supersonic shockwave that bounces around the chamber. That shockwave ignites the next detonation, which ignites the next, and so forth, producing an ongoing supersonic shockwave to generate thrust.
                                                                                                                  This should produce more energy for less fuel compared to combustion, which is why the US Military is investigating and funding it; this new research was funded by the US Air Force, and it's not the only such project the military are looking into.
                                                                                                            • "Reversing age: dual species measurement of epigenetic age with a single clock"--BioRxIv. The study found that "[t]he treatment [with young blood plasma] more than halved the epigenetic ages of blood, heart, and liver tissue. A less pronounced, but statistically significant, rejuvenation effect could be observed in the hypothalamus. The treatment was accompanied by progressive improvement in the function of these organs as ascertained through numerous biochemical/physiological biomarkers and behavioral responses to assess cognitive functions."
                                                                                                                    Military networks have so many thousands of users and devices that just figuring out what is connected at any given time is a challenge, he said, let alone sifting through the vast amounts of network traffic to spot an ongoing intrusion. For all its faults, AI is much better than humans at quickly sorting through such masses of data.
                                                                                                                      AI can also quickly potential lines of sight between different points of the battlefield. That’s why the AI Task Force is working on a “fields of fire” AI that uses the new IVAS targeting goggles to determine what area each soldier can cover with their weapons. The software would compile that data for the whole squad, platoon, company, or even battalion, giving commanders a map of exactly what approaches were defended and where any potential blind spots lie. (Another potential application of this same technology would be to analyze potential fields of fire from suspected or confirmed enemy positions to identify the safest routes past them).
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                                                                                                                Weekend Reading

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