A Quick Run Around the Web (6/9/2020)

"How to Shoot a Pistol in 10 Minutes"--T.Rex Arms (12 min.)

A very short introduction, but it may even have some tips for experienced shooters.

• A new Woodpile Report.
• "What Color Front Sight is Best?"--Shooting Illustrated. Although discussing fiber optic sights specifically, it probably holds true for painted sights. From the article:

      At dawn and dusk Gale suggests green, with red “…the preferred option for most competitive target shooters.”

     Young said green/yellow is the spectrum human eyes detect best in most conditions and for that reason it’s the company’s most popular option. Orange takes the next place in number of customer demands and red comes in last because, “… red is a more difficult color for the eye to pick up across multiple lighting conditions.”

• "Holsters Past and Present"--Shooting Illustrated. Excerpt:

No one can really say when the first shoulder holster became popular, but you can bet that it was during this frontier era, if not earlier. The first shootist of note who preferred the shoulder rig was Texas sociopath John Wesley Hardin. By the time he got to El Paso, after his little vacation in the Texas prison, Hardin was known to have carried a pair of Colt double-action revolvers in some sort of shoulder rig. One source suggests that Hardin may have had a special vest built that included holsters for his two guns. Regardless, it was still the shoulder-holster concept.

• "The $100 Homestead Grain Winnower" (Part 1) (Part 2) -- Survival Blog. The author writes:

      One of the pillars of homestead food production is growing small grains such as wheat, barley, oats, etc. The classic text for homestead grain production is Small-Scale Grain Raising, by Gene Logsdon (1977). His focus is on using small-scale or appropriate technology, usually human powered. For example, harvesting small grains would entail the use of a scythe for cutting the grain, a flail for threshing the grain followed by tossing the grain into the air to winnow or separate the grain from the chaff.

      I was raised on a traditional farm in the 1960s and 1970s where we used farm-scale equipment and I understand the process of raising small grains. However, the scale of homestead grain raising doesn’t justify the purchase or operation of the traditional farm equipment used for grain production. If only a few acres or less is dedicated to wheat for personal use on a homestead, buying an expensive combine which is only used once a year is not a prudent use of financial resources.

      Logsdon recommends the purchase of small threshers which were usually sold to seed companies as a substitute for large combines. A check of the internet shows that small threshers are still available but cost hundreds of dollars and are built in China or India. With the current pandemic and the decrease in imports from those Asian countries this equipment may not be available in the near future.

      For those who want to raise their own homestead grains and process them at home, one part of that process – winnowing – can be made easier by building and using a homestead-scale grain winnower. I recently built and modified a grain winnower from plans available on the internet. These plans, “Small Electric Winnower“, were designed by Allen Dong and Roger Edberg and are in the public domain. The plans are a bit dated (circa 1998) and somewhat rudimentary. But I found that the basic unit could be easily assembled from commonly available materials using hand/power tools, hacksaw, jig saw, etc. for about $100. (Not including the Black and Decker Workmate stand, where I mounted it.) This was a pleasant project to work on and required me to improvise and make adaptations to the original plans in order to complete the final construction.

• I think I came across this via Greg Ellifritz or Jon Low, but I don't remember now. In any event, another handgun drill: "Hateful Eight | Pistol Power Drills"--Primer Peak. The drill uses a standard B8 target, which you can download here.
• "Your Dry Practice Plan: Movement, Handheld Light, & 911"--Swift Silent Deadly. Some suggestions on adding some elements to your dry fire practice: movement (i.e., moving while drawing, reloading, etc.), accessing and using a light with a firearm in hand, and accessing and using your cell phone to call police with a firearm in hand. On the latter point:

       First, how do you carry your phone? Is it in a pocket that you can access with your gun in your hand? Mine is tough, so it’s rearrange my whole pocket system or learn to reach across with my left hand (seems to work).

      Let’s look at one more little brain teaser that I came up with while dry practicing: if you have to use both your gun, and a handheld light, which one do you relinquish control of to call 911? Just a thought.

• "Gun Review: Smith & Wesson Model 69 .44 Magnum Revolver"--The Truth About Guns. The 69 is a 5-shot .44 Magnum based on S&W's L-frame. That makes it light-weight for carry, but with high felt-recoil when shooting. The author relates:

      For the model 69, Smith & Wesson made a few noteworthy changes from the traditional S&W revolver. First, to fit the potent .44 Magnum into the L-frame (which had originally been designed for the .357 Magnum cartridge), S&W dropped one round from the norm and manufactured the 69 with a 5-shot cylinder.

      To my knowledge, the only other .44 magnum revolver manufactured with a smaller, five-shot cylinder is the Taurus Tracker. The Tracker was also marketed to the outdoorsman as a lighter, svelter .44 magnum package, but I personally had a bad experience shooting a friend’s brand new .44 magnum Taurus Tracker with factory ammo. Let’s just say that if I owned a Taurus Tracker in .44 magnum (I don’t and never will), I would only shoot .44 Special loads through it.

     The good news is that Smith & Wesson appears to have gotten a 5-shot .44 magnum right. This change resulted in the bolt stop notches on the outside of the cylinder no longer being machined directly over each chamber, in the thinnest steel on the cylinder. On the 69, the bolt stop notches are machined between each chamber, in the thickest steel. I don’t have to be a metallurgist to understand that this eliminated a weak spot in the traditional S&W six-shot .44 magnum cylinder.

      I didn’t stress test the 69 to see how heavy a load it would take before blowing up, and have no desire to do so. I did fire a few heavy loads through the 69 just to see what would happen, and aside from some hellacious recoil and a sore hand, all was good.

     Another engineering change: the S&W model 69 got rid of the traditional S&W front “lock” on the ejector rod, which had been used by S&W since the venerable “triple lock.”

     To make up for this removal of one action locking point, Smith added a ball-and-detent locking point on the crane of the model 69. This is a feature that had largely been a custom gunsmith nicety, but apparently Smith & Wesson’s engineers finally got the memo.

Ruger uses a locking point on the crane in their Redhawk revolvers.

• "The Modern Minuteman Rifle Concept: An Ar15 That Can Do It All"--The New Rifleman. His idea is an AR that can be used effectively by the shooter out to 300 to 400 yards. Thus, he envisions using some type of optic on it. The lighter weight is mostly accomplished by using a different profile barrel:

The Hanson profile barrel is my go-to barrel from Ballistic Advantage and this is why. I have the lightweight Hanson profile barrel. I don’t have dimension measurements on it, but it starts as a regular barrel width and tapers down to a pencil barrel. Doing this makes a very lightweight barrel but it’s heavy where you need it, near the chamber. The regular Hanson barrel starts as a heavier barrel at the chamber and tapers down to a thinner barrel at the muzzle as well. Again, it puts the meat where it needs to be and keeps the weight down on the front of the rifle. These barrels are Sub MOA guarantee with match grade ammo. They also come with a gas block with 2 set screws and a pre-drilled hole to pin your gas block in place. The barrel has a corresponding hole drilled as well, all you have to do is line the gas block up, tap in the roll pin, and that gas block is not going to move. 

• "6mm ARC Round, Too Little Too Late?"--Ammo Land. The author questions what advantages it presents over 6.5 Grendel and 6.8 rounds. I tend to agree. I've looked at numerous articles and even a few videos about this round and the ballistics are looking suspiciously like a slightly weaker version of the 6.5 Grendel. The primary advantage would be that it can use a far greater range of bullet weights, as low as 55 grains according to some sources. Maybe that could boost its velocity to something interesting.
• "How to Harvest and Use Nature’s Aspirin"--The Art of Manliness. 

      The bark of willow trees contains a naturally occurring chemical compound called salicin. When consumed, your body turns salicin into salicylic acid, which acts as an anti-inflammatory to relieve ailments like minor aches and pains, headaches, arthritis, and muscle soreness. In addition to salicin, willow bark contains plant compounds called flavonoids, which also act to combat inflammation.

     A medicinal record of using willow bark for pain relief exists in almost every archival text that discusses medicine and herbal remedies. Even Hippocrates wrote of it. It was also commonly used among Native Americans and many other indigenous cultures all over the world.

     In fact, willow bark was so effective for pain relief that early pioneers of modern medicine sought to create a synthesized version in a laboratory. The result, called acetylsalicylic acid, was discovered by chemist Charles Frederic Gerhardt in 1853. In 1899, the German pharmaceutical company BAYER named it aspirin.

Also:

      While the white willow (Salix alba) and black willow (Salix nigra) seem to be the most common species used for the commercial production of willow bark medicine, I have used the bark from countless other species of willow, while in the field, with equal effect. The one I’ve used most often is weeping willow, which is a cultivar of white willow, and readily available in my area.

     A willow tree has three layers to recognize:

• Exterior Bark: This is the bark that you see on the outside of the tree. It is very thin and smooth on small saplings and new growth shoots and is somewhat thick and furrowed on older trees. You want to only harvest bark from the young shoots or branches that are no more than 2 years old (about the diameter of your thumb or less). Any older and the exterior bark is too thick and cumbersome to deal with.

• Inner Bark: White or cream to slightly green in color, the inner bark is the layer of fibers that lay just under the exterior bark. It is very thin, just about 1/8 of an inch or less in thickness. This is where the medicine is.

• Heartwood: The bulk of the branch or tree is just beneath the inner bark layer. This is the wood layer and it can be discarded or used for other crafting projects, such as basketry.

      You can harvest willow bark during any time of year, but it’s ideal to do it in the spring, for two reasons. The first is that in springtime, the inner bark is flush with sap and fluids, making the bark easy to peel from the branch or small tree. In central Indiana where I live, willow bark can be stripped with ease from April to early July.

      Secondly, research indicates that the concentration of salicin in willow bark is highest in spring; rising to as much as 12.5% as compared to .08% in the fall.

"Sean Gordon Murphy Bends the Knee... Again"--Just Some Guy (15 min.)

The black community is angry with rioters and looters.

• The Left is calling for defunding the police. Los Angeles' mayor has already announced that he will be cutting the LAPD's budget by $150 million. Some Democrats claim that this is merely hyperbole and that what is meant is police reform or redirecting funds into other rehabilitative programs. But that isn't what we are hearing from those actually calling for defunding. For instance, it has been reported that "a veto-proof majority of Minneapolis City Council members announced their commitment to disbanding the city’s embattled police department[.]" "Ocasio-Cortez said she’s 'actively engaged in advocacy' for a 'reduction of our NYPD budget and defunding a $6 billion NYPD budget that costs us books in the hands of our children and costs us very badly needed investment in NYCHA [New York City Housing Authority] and public housing.'" According to Breitbart, "Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN) on Friday called for the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) to be disbanded and for the city to 'reimagine' public safety[.]."

      So how is that going to turn out? Well, in 2016, Baltimore entered into a consent decree with the DoJ to reform its police department to reduce racial discrimination and excessive force:

But in the years that followed, Baltimore, by most standards, became a worse place. In 2017, it recorded 342 murders — its highest per-capita rate ever, more than double Chicago’s, far higher than any other city of 500,000 or more residents and, astonishingly, a larger absolute number of killings than in New York, a city 14 times as populous. Other elected officials, from the governor to the mayor to the state’s attorney, struggled to respond to the rise in disorder, leaving residents with the unsettling feeling that there was no one in charge. With every passing year, it was getting harder to see what gains, exactly, were delivered by the uprising.

But that is the best-case scenario. Worst case? Antifa and BLM enforcers become the de facto police, and speed cameras and red-light cameras will be on every street corner.

• More: "Anoka Co. Sheriff has 'no appetite' to help Minneapolis if it abolishes police department"--Fox 9.

• More: "EXCLUSIVE: 'We prepare to stop these murders by any means necessary.' Black Lives Matter leader declares war on police and group is 'training our people to defend our communities' in Black Panther style armed 'patrols'"--Daily Mail.

• More: "BLM leader says group developing highly trained 'military' arm for 'war on police'"--Disrn.

• Related: "LA Mayor Garcetti Calls His Cops 'Killers.' The 'Killers' Just Sent a Reply to the 'Unstable' Mayor"--PJ Media. 

• Related: "Latin gangs attack Black Chicago protesters in effort to assist police"--The Grio. 

• Related: "George Floyd’s Family Petitions United Nations to Help Disarm Police in the United States"--Breitbart.

• Media style notes: White people arming up and organizing to protect their community from rioting and looting are "vigilantes", but black people doing so are merely "citizen patrols."

• Related: "Mayor Lori Lightfoot denounces vigilantism in Chicago after white men patrol neighborhood streets with bats"--MSN.

• Related: "Vigilante residents wield their rifles as they block their street to guard against looters"--Daily Mail. 

• A Daily Mail editor displays doublethink in action: "NYPD finds concrete hidden in ice cream cartons at George Floyd protests - as peaceful demonstrations continue nationwide for a 14th consecutive night"--Daily Mail.
• A tacit admission that Minneapolis crime is mostly committed by blacks? "Minneapolis City Council President: If You Call the Cops When Your Garage is Broken Into, You're a White Supremacist"--Front Page Magazine.
• Points to ponder:

      "Minneapolis, Minn. has been under Democratic control since 1978. Chicago has been under Democratic control for 89 years; its present mayor is a black woman. Philadelphia has had Democratic mayors for 68 years; three of its last five mayors have been black men. Six of the last seven Atlanta, Ga., mayoral administrations were led by black Democratic mayors, and the present mayor is a black woman.

     "A city runs its police department and other services; therefore, if there is so much 'systemic racism' in these organizations, why hasn't it been corrected over so many years under Democratic leaders?

     "Why aren't these cities garden spots of racial tolerance, understanding, and virtue?"

Because the Left, even blacks on the Left, don't actually care about black people, but merely see them as props and cannon-fodder for imposing a socialist/communist regime.

• Related: Just another weekend in Chicago: "85 Shot – 24 Dead in Chicago as City Sees Deadliest Day in 60 Years — As Democrats Continue to Call to Defund the Police"--Gateway Pundit. 

• Christ taught us to wash the feet of others; Black "faith leaders" teach otherwise: "White Cops, Leftists Engage in 'Ceremony' of Washing the Feet of Black 'Faith Leaders'."--Legal Insurrection. "As a part of the event there was a ‘Washing of the Feet’ ceremony where at least three white law enforcement officers and three other white attendees washed the feet of pastors Faith and Soboma Wokoma."

• Related: "Watch: Police Officer Refuses to Kneel, Says ‘I Only Take a Knee Before God’ as Protestors [sic] Scream at Him"--Red State. A black police officer.

• I hope that my liberal relatives take this to heart: "NY Times Op-Ed: White People Should Stop Talking To Relatives Until They Support BLM"--Hot Air.
• "Leftist/Jihadist Common Goal: 'This S--t Won’t Ever Stop Unless We F--kin’ Take It All Down'"--PJ Media.

      Urooj Rahman is a housing attorney for Bronx Legal Services who is currently in legal trouble for tossing a Molotov cocktail at a NYPD cruiser during the recent riots in New York City. She is also a committed activist for the Palestinian jihad, having published agitprop spreading false claims of Palestinian victimhood. Despite the hot water she is in now, however, she has a bright future as an ideological leader of both the Left and the Islamic jihad. In an interview before her attack, she enunciated the common goal of both movements: “This s–t won’t ever stop unless we f–kin’ take it all down.”

     In both the interview and during her attack, Rahman kept a Palestinian keffiyeh close to her face. Her sartorial choice was not incidental. With her attempted torching of the police cruiser (her Molotov cocktail didn’t light), she brought Palestinian jihad tactics to the riots in the U.S. She also revealed the congruence between the ideology of the Left in America today and that of jihadists, not just the Palestinians, but all over the world.

I wrote a paper in college on the psychology of terrorist recruitment and training, and while researching the topic, I discovered that Leftist/communist terrorist groups (which at that time included most Middle-Eastern terror groups, including the PLO--this is before Israel weaponized jihadists to fight the communist terrorists) tended to have lawyers or doctors as their leaders. The right-wing groups generally drew from the working class.

• "Police urging caution in assigning motive to man who stabbed a police officer while yelling ‘Allahu Akbar’"--Twitchy. About an incident in New York City.
• "A book published nearly 25 years ago predicted America would hit a great crisis climaxing in 2020 — and that up next is a millennial vs. boomer standoff that will usher in a new world order"--Business Insider. Applying Neil Howe and William Strauss' The Fourth Turning to the current unrest. An excerpt:

      In the book, Neil and Strauss ... argue that history moves in 80-year cycles that stretch back thousands of years to the ancient Greeks. Why 80 years? Because each cycle roughly corresponds to the length of one long human life, what the Etruscans ritualized and the Romans called a "saeculum" (from which the French got the word "siecle," for "century," and we get the word "secular"). 

      Howe and Strauss argued that each 80-year saeculum is divided into 20-year cycles, defined by each generation as it comes into adulthood. Each of the four generations that makes up a saeculum gets assigned an archetype or Tarot-like identity: prophets, nomads, heroes, and artists.

     Howe and Strauss insist that these cycles have persisted through all of human history. They argue that they lie behind things like the monomyth championed by Joseph Campbell that hedge fund billionaire Ray Dalio swears by.

     All mythology, folklore, even pop culture is essentially an expression of the secular cycle, they claim, as is the great psychologist Carl Jung's theory of the four archetypes underlying the "collective unconscious" and personality type indicators such as Myers-Briggs.

* * *

     The end of the saeculum is the 20-year period that represents the "winter" stage of the cycle. Howe and Strauss called this "the fourth turning," when the hero generation, entering young adulthood, faces off against the prophet generation that is entering elderhood.

     In 1997, they predicted the millennial "heroes" would face off against the baby boomer "prophets" during a crisis-era and, well, it wouldn't be pretty.

      Howe and Strauss saw the climax coming around 2020 and the resolution, including a "Great Devaluation" as the economy is entirely restructured for a new set of circumstances, around 2026.

• "Affirmative Action: The Systemic Racism No One Wants to Talk About"--PJ Media.

      What “affirmative action” and “diversity and inclusion” mean in practice is that in university admissions, hiring, promotions, funding, and organizational activities (living arrangements, social gathering, eating, and ceremonial activities), in government and business hiring, funding, and promoting, certain races and genders are given preference while others are low priority or excluded totally.

      In a perfect example of the bigotry of low expectations, African American and Hispanic applicants with poor academic records are given university places, while whites and Asians with much stronger academic records are refused places. It is well established that in the sciences female hires are preferred, which of course means that male candidates are excluded. White male applicants and candidates, whatever their merits, are at the bottom of everyone’s list. For every “inclusion” based upon race and gender, there is an exclusion based upon race and gender. This seems a pretty clear case of official, systemic racism and sexism. 

• In earlier years, we have seen police deploy and use Long Range Acoustic Devices (LRADs) to break up protests, most notably being used in Pittsburgh in 2009 against protesters of the G20 Summit. As one article explains:

LRADs can project messages up to 600 meters away and officers primarily use them to direct crowds and shriek commands over long distances. However, these devices also come equipped with a “deterrent” function that blasts a series of high-pitched tones that can reach more than 150 decibels on some models (basically the equivalent of a gunshot or firecracker going off). 

However, the devices seem to be mostly missing in action this past week. In looking into it, there probably are two main reasons for this. First, protesters subject to the device in the past have filed lawsuits to prohibit its use, including a successful suit against the NYPD. Second, at least in the case of Portland, the mayor has directed police to not use the devices, at least in the deterrent mode. (See also this article from the Miami Herald). I'd be interested in any accounts of it being used elsewhere to quell the current riots.

• "NSA's phone-tracking program is FAR more extensive than anyone knew, says investigative journalist who exposed classified documents from whistleblower Edward Snowden"--The Daily Mail. 

      Barton Gellman was one of three journalists with whom former NSA contractor Edward Snowden shared thousands of classified documents about US surveillance programs in 2013. 

      One of those documents revealed that the NSA was tracking phone calls made by Americans inside the US. 

     In an excerpt from his new book, Dark Mirror, Gellman lays out how the tool at the heart of the program works in unprecedented detail.   

      That tool, dubbed Mainway, secretly scoured billions of phone records a day for years, cultivating a database that was 'preconfigured to map anyone's life at the touch of a button', Gellman writes.  

     The program was scaled back significantly in the wake of the Snowden leak, but a more restrained version is still in effect today.   

     Though the NSA insists that the database is only used to investigate terrorists, Gellman raises concerns about how easily it could be abused.  

Nah, it would never be abused: "Obama Used National Security to Spy on Americans Opposed to Islamic Terrorists"--Front Page Magazine.

      We know when Obamagate ended, but we don’t know when the policy of spying on Americans began. The tangled roots of the domestic surveillance of political opponents by the NSA predate the alarmism about Russia. Tracing them back into the fetid swamp takes us not toward Moscow, but to Tehran.

      The first public revelation that the White House was spying on high level members of the political opposition came in 2015. Members of Congress had been eavesdropped on as part of an operation to sabotage Prime Minister Netanyahu’s campaign against the Iran Deal. The Israeli leader and his entire country had earlier been targeted by a massive spy campaign to stop Israel from taking out Iran’s nukes.

     But the new wave of surveillance was no longer just against a potential Israeli attack on Iran, but was part of a political campaign to win the domestic argument to aid Iran and legalize its nuclear program.

     The Wall Street Journal reported that by 2013, surveillance of Netanyahu was focused on protecting the Iran nuclear negotiations. Netanyahu’s invitation to address Congress caught the White House by surprise and the surveillance was not only directed at Israelis or even pro-Israel Americans, but members of Congress who were skeptical that the Islamic terror regime would ever scuttle its nukes.

     The Iran Deal ushered in a surveillance shift from monitoring the former allies that Obama wanted to toss overboard, to monitoring Americans who were friendly to those governments, and then leading members of the political opposition, and finally members of an incoming administration. Obama and his associates had redefined national security as the pursuit of his dangerous foreign policy, and the new national security threats were administration critics who were surveilled in order to entrap them.

• We didn't start the fire: "How Fast The World Ends"--Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. He writes:

     This isn’t in Eksteins’ book, but it is in my upcoming book. It’s a toast that Serge Diaghilev, the impresario behind the Ballets Russe (and the 1913 Rite of Spring ballet), gave at a banquet in the Hotel Metropol in 1905:

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, with fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.

Eksteins writes about how this mentality was everywhere in pre-war Europe — this idea that the old world was past its prime, and that a new world — a world of speed, of sensuality, of passion, of the machine — was going to clear away the rottenness in the system, and replace it with something fresher and more vital. War, especially in Germany, was seen as a source of life and renewal. So too was sexual permissiveness. Eksteins writes that the artists and intellectuals of the era believed that Christian sexual morality was anti-life. Prostitutes, homosexuals, and others that bourgeois society regarded as outlaws became heroes. Eksteins writes:

       Despite a fascination among the avant-garde with the lower classes, with social outcasts, prostitutes, criminals, and the insane, the interest usually did not stem from a practical concern with social welfare or with a restructuring of society, but from a desire simply to eliminate restrictions on the human personality. The interest in the lower orders was thus more symbolic than practical. The search was for a “morality without sanctions and obligations.”

       The ballet [Rite of Spring] contains and illustrates many of the essential features of the modern revolt: the overt hostility to inherited form; the fascination with primitivism and indeed with anything that contradicts the notion of civilization; the emphasis on vitalism as opposed to rationalism; the perception of existence as continuous flux and a series of relations, not as constants and absolutes; the psychological introspection accompanying the rebellion against social convention.

Germany was the epicenter of the sexual revolt among artistic and intellectual elites:

     None of this is meant to suggest that Germans welcomed or were prepared collectively to tolerate homosexuality publicly — they were not — but the relative openness of the movement in Germany does indicate a measure of tolerance not known elsewhere. Moreover, homosexuality and tolerance of it are, as many have suggested, central to the disintegration of constants, to the emancipation of instinct, to the breakdown of “public man,” and indeed to the whole modern aesthetic.

      Sexual liberation in fin-de-siècle Germany was not limited to homosexuals. There was a new emphasis in general on Leibeskultur, or body culture, on an appreciation of the human body devoid of social taboos and restrictions; on the liberation of the body from corsets, belts, and brassieres. The youth movement, which flourished after the turn of the century, reveled in a “return to nature” and celebrated a hardly licentious but certainly freer sexuality, which constituted part of its rebellion against an older generation thought to be caught up in repression and hypocrisy.

      In the 1890s Freikörperkultur, or free body culture — a euphemism for nudism — became part of a health-fad movement that promoted macrobiotic diets, home-grown vegetables, and nature cures. In the arts the rebellion against middle-class mores was even more dramatic: from Frank Wedekind’s Lulu plays, which celebrated the prostitute because she was a rebel, through Strauss’s Salome, who beheaded John the Baptist because he refused to satisfy her lust, to the repressed but obvious sexual undercurrent in Thomas Mann’s early stories, artists used sex to express their disillusionment with contemporary values and priorities and, even more, their belief in a vital and irrepressible energy.

Again: Eksteins writes that prior to the Great War, the fascination with war as a source of renewal was widespread. In the summer of 1914, as Europe lurched toward the abyss, the German public in particular was ecstatic. Finally! They weren’t the only ones, either. Interestingly, Eksteins says it’s not fair to blame the war on German aristocrats. It was above all the middle class that wanted the war, and wanted it to be “total war.”

• Related: "The riot at the Rite: the premiere of The Rite of Spring"--British Library.

• (With apologies to Joseph Conrad) The whore! The whore! "Hollywood will tackle sex scenes by 'using CGI' to avoid COVID-19 transmission as filming resumes from June 12 (and some raunchy moments will have to totally scrapped!)"--Daily Mail.
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Smart devices could turn 'dumb' within a few years, Which? warns"--Yahoo.

     Home appliances such as fridges, dishwashers and doorbells that are equipped with smart capabilities, enable owners to control certain features remotely or send alerts to engineers when a fault is detected.

     However Which?, has expressed concern surrounding the lack of clarity from manufacturers on the length of time that smart features will be supported with software updates, warning that some smart products could turn "dumb" within a few years.

     The consumer group has highlighted that a lack of updates on the devices could leave users unable to access some smart functionalities, as well as data abandoned on their home network, a situation that could result in expensive machines that still function being replaced before their time and even ending up in landfill.

     When approached by Which? for comment, the majority of manufacturers said that they would offer updates for what they termed "the life of the product", but could not give a definitive answer.

• Another reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Scientists Just Created Artificial Red Blood Cells That May Be Even Better Than The Real Thing"--Science Alert. 

      By combining biological material with lab-grown polymers, an international team of bioengineers has developed what could be thought of as a Terminator red cell - one more than capable of matching the talents of what's already in our veins.

     Not only can this microscopic cyborg squeeze through the nooks and crannies of a vascular system with its usual haemoglobin, it can be modified to deliver tumour-killing medications, carry biosensors, and even be studded with tiny magnets for the ultimate in remote guidance.