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Thursday, August 6, 2020

A Quick Run Around The Web (8/6/2020)

"Choosing Pepper Spray for Everyday Carry"--Lucky Gunner Ammo (26 min.)
One thing I want to comment on with regard to this video is a throw-away statement about pepper-spray having fewer consequences than using a firearm. The statement seem to imply that you would not face jail time or serious legal consequences. That is not true, of course. Like anytime you use force, you have to demonstrate that the elements of self-defense and what you did was reasonable. You would have to check state laws on whether pepper spray is considered a deadly weapon in your jurisdiction, but even if it were not, you could still be arrested for simple assault and battery, and face a civil suit for damages if the use of the pepper spray was not justified. The advantage is that a civil suit would involve far less damages than a wrongful death suit, and on the criminal side, you might get off with a misdemeanor. 

        The fundamentals of responding to a threat are: Move, Communicate, using Cover, Shooting - if or as needed, and Thinking. Moving -- your immediate response -- should be done in conjunction with drawing your pistol. Now, think about your last practice session. Did it include these fundamentals? Or, was it a shooting session? If your practice isn’t based on the use of these fundamental skills you have to ask yourself, “Am I really preparing to use this weapon in a defensive situation?”

        Practicing to move while drawing the pistol isn’t difficult -- even if you don’t have a live fire range that allows you to practice this. Keep in mind, the vast majority of your practice should be “dry.” With dummy firearms it’s easy to work on the basics without needing or having to go to the range. And, like I always preach, the return for your time and effort is much greater during dry work than live fire practice.

        Moving in response to danger isn't natural; it goes against every natural instinct we have. So, it’s going to require plenty of practice to override the instinctual desire to root to the ground. Movement and drawing your weapon should occur together. Ideally, you want to get to the point where it feels awkward to stand still while drawing your weapon.

       “But,” you ask, “what if the situation I face is an exception, and I don’t need to move?” When you get to the point where you’ve actually learned a skill – you can apply it on demand under any conditions – it’s actually easy to choose not to include that action in your response. But, it’s extremely difficult -- if not impossible -- to remember to do something that you haven’t learned.
Though today’s KISS principle in firearms training (“keep it simple, stupid”) de-emphasizes auto pistols with manual safeties, those so equipped have saved countless cops and armed citizens when a bad guy got hold of their gun, tried to shoot the good guy, and couldn’t because they were unable to find the “turn-on switch.” A semi-auto with a manual safety is also one more layer of protection if something gets caught in the triggerguard when holstering a loaded handgun.
  • "Beretta PX4 Storm Compact 9mm Pistol – Review"--Ammo Land. The article also references and includes photos from the 50,000 round test performed by Ernest Langdon (of Langdon Tactical Technology).
  • "Viridian Introduces World’s First Hand Stop Laser"--The Firearm Blog. This is a good idea. I much prefer a laser that is offset directly below the bore from one that is to one side or other, or, more commonly, both vertically and horizontally offset.
  • "Rule Breaker: The 21-Foot Standard Is Misunderstood" by Tom Grieve at USCCA. This is an important article. Grieve reminds us that the "21-foot rule" is not a rule, but a deadline: it is the distance at which, on average, a police officer no longer has time to draw his gun and get off a shot before a person charging with a knife will be able to strike the officer. It doesn't mean that a criminal within 21 feet is automatically deemed to be an imminent deadly threat; and it doesn't mean that a criminal beyond 21 feet does not present an imminent deadly threat. 
  • "Less-Lethal Crowd Defense: A New Reality" by Scott W. Wagner at USCCA. Since most companies won't actually sell riot control OC sprays, the author suggests looking at bear spray; specifically, the Frontiersman Bear Attack OC Spray in the 7.9-ounce Fog Blast Canister manufactured by Sabre. "Frontiersman’s fog blast delivery system," he writes, "can instantly diffuse through a large outdoor area, distracting multiple threats simultaneously. Stream, gel and foam OC delivery systems do not have the ability to keep their OC airborne long enough for a distraction effect."
  • For those wondering how to stop a large vehicle: "SWAT Sniper Takes Out Semi-Truck Engine To Stop 3 Hour Pursuit"--Law Officer. A .50 BMG rifle, of course. The driver was then disabled by police using a Taser and a Foam Baton.
  • "Where Does Mexico Really Get Its Guns?"--Crime Prevention Research Center. Guatemala, Nicaragua, China, and other foreign countries for the most part.
  • "All The Gear I Pack on A Day Hike: Everything You Need"--Range to Reel. A discussion of the sizes of day packs and what might best serve you, as well as equipment for different lengths of hikes. For instance:
      You should always carry a water filter on any hike. It doesn’t matter if you’re going on a short 1 hour hike, you never know when you might need it.

      You never know when you’ll run into an emergency and need to filter water. For the price of a Sawyer Squeeze water filter it’s stupid not to carry one in your pack. Instead of a water bottle you might want to use the disposable Sawyer squeeze packs that fold up when not in use.
  • "Red Cross Apps Guide Survivalists through Natural Disasters"--Ready 4 It All. It has been a long time since the report from the Haiti earthquake of one survivor patching up a serious injury with the help of an iPhone application. This article looks at some of the mobile phone applications that are available to warn about disasters and what to do.

"Anonymous police officer sends emotional letter detailing what it's like to be a cop today"--Glenn Beck (9 min.)
  • "Tear gas and pepper spray: What protesters need to know"--Craig Bettenhausen at Chemical & Engineering News. A nice article, courtesy of the American Chemical Society, describing various chemical irritants used for crowd control and how they work. And, in case you are exposed to such agents:
            So what should you do if you’re exposed to tear gas or pepper spray?

           Get away from the area, and wash with copious amounts of water—especially your hands and face, Blum says. Kaszeta also recommends “flapping your arms like a chicken” to shake off loose particles and help evaporate volatile components. Water accelerates the breakdown of CS via hydrolysis to malononitrile and o-chlorobenzaldehyde. Alkaline water (pH 9) substantially accelerates that reaction, though JK cautions against using high-pH water on your eyes. Hong Kong protesters have used water saturated with baking soda, which creates a basic solution, to treat exposure to tear gas.

           OC, on the other hand, doesn’t undergo hydrolysis. Still, water can soothe its effects, and soap can help wash the irritating compound away. Some protesters use milk or milk of magnesia to neutralize the riot-control agents on the scene, but little to no data supports those treatments as effective.

           Kaszeta says that most of the effect of riot-control agents is psychological: “If you get a good lungful of CS, you feel like you can’t breathe, but you actually can.”
     
              • "How Cops Can Secretly Track Your Phone"--The Intercept. A look at StingRay and DRT Boxes ("dirt boxes") devices and how they can be used to intercept and obtain metadata concerning your cell phone or other cellular devices. The primary method the devices are used, according to the article, is to capture the IMSI number (International Mobile Subscriber Identity) associated with the SIM card in the phone. Matched up with data from your cellular provider, they can use this number to learn who owns the cell phone and, thus, who might have been in a particular location (such as at a protest). Law enforcement (or intelligence) can also use this number to get information from all the cell towers that have been pinged by the phone during a prior period and get a good idea at the owner's general movements. But that is not all:
              If law enforcement already knows the IMSI number of a specific phone and person they are trying to locate, they can program that IMSI number into the stingray and it will tell them if that phone is nearby. Law enforcement can also home in on the location of a specific phone and its user by moving the stingray around a geographical area and measuring the phone’s signal strength as it connects to the stingray. The Harris StingRay can be operated from a patrol vehicle as it drives around a neighborhood to narrow a suspect’s location to a specific cluster of homes or a building, at which point law enforcement can switch to the hand-held KingFish, which offers even more precision. For example, once law enforcement has narrowed the location of a phone and suspect to an office or apartment complex using the StingRay, they can walk through the complex and hallways using the KingFish to find the specific office or apartment where a mobile phone and its user are located.

              All this is just using the devices "passively." The article indicates that the devices may be capable of more:
               
                     Stingrays and dirtboxes can be configured for use in either active or passive mode. In active mode, these technologies broadcast to devices and communicate with them. Passive mode involves grabbing whatever data and communication is occurring in real time across cellular networks without requiring the phone to communicate directly with the interception device. The data captured can include the IMSI number as well as text messages, email, and voice calls. 

                     If that data or communication is encrypted, then it would be useless to anyone intercepting it if they don’t also have a way to  decrypt it. Phones that are using 4G employ strong encryption. But stingrays can force phones to downgrade to 2G, a less secure protocol, and tell the phone to use either no encryption or use a weak encryption that can be cracked. They can do this because even though most people use 4G these days, there are some areas of the world where 2G networks are still common, and therefore all phones have to have the ability to communicate on those networks.

                     The versions of stingrays used by the military can intercept the contents of mobile communications — text messages, email, and voice calls — and decrypt some types of this mobile communication. The military also uses a jamming or denial-of-service feature that prevents adversaries from detonating bombs with a mobile phone. 

                     In addition to collecting the IMSI number of a device and intercepting communications, military-grade IMSI catchers can also spoof text messages to a phone, according to David Burgess, a telecommunications engineer who used to work with U.S. defense contractors supporting overseas military operations. Burgess says that if the military knows the phone number and IMSI number of a target, it can use an IMSI catcher to send messages to other phones as if they are coming from the target’s phone. They can also use the IMSI catcher for a so-called man in the middle attack so that calls from one target pass through the IMSI catcher to the target phone. In this way, they can record the call in real time and potentially listen to the conversation if it is unencrypted, or if they are able to decrypt it. The military systems can also send a silent SMS message to a phone to alter its settings so that the phone will send text messages through a server the military controls instead of the mobile carrier’s server.
               
              Also:

              Versions of the devices used by the military and intelligence agencies can potentially inject malware into targeted phones, depending on how secure the phone is. They can do this in two ways: They can either redirect the phone’s browser to a malicious web site where malware can be downloaded to the phone if the browser has a software vulnerability the attackers can exploit; or they can inject malware from the stingray directly into the baseband of the phone if the baseband software has a vulnerability. Malware injected into the baseband of a phone is harder to detect. Such malware can be used to turn the phone into a listening device to spy on conversations. Recently, Amnesty International reported on the cases of two Moroccan activists whose phones may have been targeted through such network injection attacks to install spyware made by an Israeli company. 
              • Hmm. "Images in Eye Reflections"--Schneier on Security. From the post: "In Japan, a cyberstalker located his victim by enhancing the reflections in her eye, and using that information to establish a location."

              A reader sends: "The Next End of the World | Q & A"--Suspicious Observers (11 min.)

                     And battle lines are surely being drawn: left versus right, black and brown versus white, blue states versus red, both coasts versus Middle America, and the American past versus the socialist future that our country’s domestic enemies have planned for us.

                     The death of Americans’ pride in their country, in its cultural, political, and scientific achievements, and in its moral goodness, has been based on a deliberate, malignant Marxist lie that has been uncoiling here for a century, beginning with the penetration of the America media and parts of the government up through World War II, the transplantation of the Frankfurt School communists such as Herbert Marcuse and their doctrine of “critical theory” to American academe in the postwar period, continuing through the Soviet destabilization of the civil rights movement in the 1960s—and culminating in the socialists’ seizure of the Democratic Party.

                      And now, here we are, just a few hundred yards from our own Rubicon. Will the winner of the 2020 election be the savior of the Republic, or its destroyer?

                    Washington, like ancient Rome, nervously awaits.
               
              Walsh can only hope that such a conflict would be limited to being between the states. The reality will be much worse:
               
              I saw men hunting the lives of their own sons, and brother murdering brother, women killing their own daughters, and daughters seeking the lives of their mothers. I saw armies arrayed against armies. I saw blood, desolation, fires. The Son of Man has said that the mother shall be against the daughter, and the daughter against the mother. These things are at our doors. They will follow the Saints of God from city to city. Satan will rage, and the spirit of the devil is now enraged. I know not how soon these things will take place; but with a view of them, shall I cry peace? No; I will lift up my voice and testify of them. How long you will have good crops, and the famine be kept off, I do not know; when the fig tree leaves, know then that the summer is nigh at hand.
               
              ("War in the United States"--LDS Last Days (quoting from The Scriptural Teachings of the Prophet Joseph Smith, p. 160)).
               
                    In any event, if you countenance Spengler's historical studies, we are (and have been) at the stage when a strong man--a Caesar--should take control of Western Civilization. After the world wars, Europe was left too weak, and the torch of civilization passed to the United States, so it makes sense that such an event might occur here. It is my belief that only the number of arms in the hands of American citizens have prevented strong man rule up to now. But decades of war in the Middle-East has taught the government how to deal with recalcitrant populations. Wide-spread civil disturbance, or a civil war, would be just the opportunity for someone like Caesar or Napoleon to seize control.
               
                     I do not believe that Trump would be such person. I do not believe that Biden is capable of being that person--he is just a puppet and, should he win the election, would be soon replaced by whomever he selects as his running mate. Besides, unlikely as it might currently appear, such a person might actually arise in Europe were the United States to lose its current preeminent position.
              • The Conservative Treehouse contends that military and intelligence contractors (and, by extension, the intelligence agencies) have been using NSA data for purposes of inside trading on the stock markets. The author even suggests that powerful members of government may have been doing the same. I guess the intelligence agencies have stepped up from the tawdry drug trading they relied upon on in the past.
              • "The Choice Before Us: This time, we’ve traveled to the very edge of the abyss."--Roger Kimball at American Greatness. An excerpt, related to the burning of Bibles by protesters in Portland, Oregon:
                     The clips of the savages burning Bibles put me in mind of Heinrich Heine’s solemn observation that Dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen: “Wherever people burn books, they also end up burning men.” 

                     It may seem melodramatic, but here is the awful choice we face: the choice between the spirit of mayhem, burning pigs’ heads, and burning Bibles, on the one side, and the traditional American spirit that cherishes the rule of law, free expression, and fructifying engines of prosperity, on the other.  
              • "Defund the Government"--Daniel Greenfield at Frontpage Magazine. He has what I believe to be a reasonable position: if local or state governments aren't going to be providing basic services like police protection, have locked down businesses, and are not going to teach children, then citizens shouldn't have to pay taxes.
              • The usual suspects: "Tides Is the Tip of the Anti-Police Spear"--Capital Research Center. From the article:
                     But BLM and its “defund the police” slogan is far from the only campaign Tides has launched against American law enforcement. The Tides Center’s 501(c)(4) lobbying “sister,” Tides Advocacy, runs the Fund for Fair and Just Policing—a leading group in the campaign to overturn the “stop and frisk” policy enacted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) in the early 2000s.

                    Like all Tides-sponsored groups, the Fund for Fair and Just Policing is a product of the professional Left’s nonprofit netherworld. It was ginned up in 2011 with funding from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Atlantic Philanthropies, a Bermuda-based foundation that also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. to push Obamacare through Congress and transform our immigration system—the latter via yet another Tides Advocacy project.

                     Unsurprisingly, Atlantic Philanthropies bestowed the Fund for Fair and Just Policing with $2.2 million “to reform the stop and frisk practices of the New York Police Department.” The fund in turn passed along $8 million to Communities United for Police Reform, a far-left “defund the police” group whose membership includes Black Lives Matter NYC, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Color of Change, and the local SEIU branch.

                     Another Tides project, Fair and Just Prosecution, bills itself as a moderate reform organization. In reality, it employs lawyers from the activist Left and Obama administration aiming to fundamentally transform the criminal justice system by demanding removal of police officers from schools, decriminalizing drugs, expanding the “definition of profiling” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” and forcing police and prosecutors to “acknowledge and apologize for decades of racially disparate policing and criminal justice practices.”
               
              Also: "Fair and Just Prosecution made headlines this week when it was revealed that the group paid for unreported trips by St. Louis circuit attorney Kim Gardner ... who brought charges against local homeowners Mark and Patricia McCloskey...."
                      In the mid-1990s, I worked around a Scoop Jackson-esque “true believer” Democrat. Good guy, retired veteran, DA civilian. Active in the Democratic party, working his way up the hierarchy from precinct worker to bigger things in the Washington State Democratic Party. He was always proselytizing the Party, which I found annoying, but he was a good guy. He could not see any blemish on the Democrats, in any way–They were his heroes, and the Republicans were all the caricature “baddies” to hear him talk. He was always the “cheerful warrior” for the Democrats, a decent man and fairly good-natured about everything political. You could discuss things with him, and he’d be open to it, none of this “cancel culture” BS we have today.

                     Sometime around the middle of the Clinton Administration, he got picked up to go back east for some party function–A two-week or so seminar of some kind for people identified as up-and-comers in the party structure. I don’t know what the hell went on there, but when he came back, he was a changed, far more somber man. He quit saying anything even remotely positive about the Democrats, and he gradually withdrew from working for the party until he was pretty much just your normal politically inactive guy. He was actually embarrassed to admit being a Democrat, there at the end of the time I was around him. I never could get him to comment about whatever it was that he witnessed or participated in during that training/indoctrination seminar, but something there changed his life.

                     Only thing I ever got out of him about the whole thing was a distressed statement to the effect that “…they’ll be hunting Democrats through the streets with dogs, one of these days… And, they’ll be right to do it…”.

                    I’m really not so sure I want to know what he saw, to tell the truth.
              The global economy has plunged into its deepest recession since the Great Depression of the late 1920s. As many as 200 million people worldwide are threatened by unemployment according to estimates from the International Labor Organization. More than 6 million Germans are currently furloughed from work as part of the federal government’s heavily subsidized "Kurzarbeit” program. Many are likely to be laid off in the coming months. "Let's not fool ourselves, work furlough will unfortunately end in unemployment for many," says Clemens Fuest, the head of Munich’s Ifo Institute, a respected economic think tank. "Germany is getting poorer."
               
              The article also indicates that Germany's gross domestic product (GDP) is expected to shrink by 6.8 percent this year. "But the actual effect that the crisis triggered by the coronavirus will have is much higher, because in the absence of the pandemic, the economy probably would have grown rather than stagnated." The author also points out: "The statistics are packed with socio-political dynamite. If the wealthy ultimately become uncoupled from the rest of the population during the crisis and if the middle class shrinks and poverty in old age becomes the norm, the conditions on which social harmony is based will crumble." Read the whole thing.
                     For those who have rejected Christ and the salvation it promises, the reasoning is actual quite simple. They can claim science or philosophy or other intellectual arguments all they want but ultimately it comes down to accountability. People do not want to be held accountable for their sin and don’t like being reminded of how sinful they all are.  Those who have accepted Christ as their savior are not claiming any “holier than thou” status; the Apostle Paul In his letter to the Romans 3:23, it specifically states that “For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God…”

                    Within the last century there have been sects of Christianity who began to ask a particular question; “did God REALLY mean that?”  These groups began to argue that the ancient biblical teachings were no longer relevant according to today’s standard and started to “re-word” scripture to fit into the particular current time.  That of course is still going on today.  They want to “spin” – like a modern-day journalist – what the scripture “REALLY meant” according to a human perspective.  God’s Word was apparently too harsh for the modern ways of life, so it had to be re-interpreted in order to make people feel better about the sin under which they were living.
               
              He goes on to use the story of Eve being deceived into taking the fruit of knowledge of good and evil, and Cain's decision to not offer up a sacrifice of a lamb as examples where Satan convinced someone that God did not really mean what He said.
              • "This Is The First Photo Ever Of A Stealthy Black Hawk Helicopter"--The Drive. An older model, but interesting to see and read a description of what was done to make the helicopter more stealthy. Nothing about reducing the sound emitted from the helicopter, however.
              • "How to build a nuclear warning for 10,000 years’ time"--BBC Future. The issue is how to communicate to people in the distant future that they shouldn't be digging around in a nuclear waste dump. The assumption is that future generations may not understand what the radiation symbol means. An additional assumption is that civilization will have collapsed and so you have to deal with primitives or a people with lower technology than we have today. From the article:
                      “This place is not a place of honor,” reads the text. “No highly esteemed dead is commemorated here… nothing valued is here. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”

                      It sounds like the kind of curse that you half-expect to find at the entrance to an ancient burial mound. But this message is intended to help mark the site of the Waste Isolation Pilot Project (WIPP) that has been built over 2,000 feet (610m) down through stable rocks beneath the desert of New Mexico. The huge complex of tunnels and caverns is designed to contain the US military’s most dangerous nuclear waste.

                     This waste will remain lethal longer than the 300,000 years Homo sapiens has walked across the surface of the planet. WIPP is currently the only licensed deep geological disposal repository in operation in the world. A similar facility should also open in Finland in the mid-2020s.

                     When the facility is full sometime in the next 10 to 20 years, the caverns will be collapsed and sealed with concrete and soil. The sprawling complex of buildings that currently mark the site will be erased. In its place will be “our society’s largest conscious attempt to communicate across the abyss of deep time”.

                     The plan calls for huge 25ft (7.6m) tall granite columns marking the four-sq-mile (10 sq km) outer boundary of the entire site. Inside this perimeter, there is an earth berm 33ft (10m) tall and 100ft (30m) wide marking the repository’s actual footprint. Then inside the berm will be another square of granite columns.

                     At the centre of this monumental “Do Not Enter” sign will be a room containing information about the site. In case the information becomes unreadable, there will be another buried 20ft below, and another buried in the earth barrier itself. Detailed information about the WIPP will be stored in many archives around the world on special paper stamped with the instruction that it must be kept for 10,000 years, the rather arbitrary length of the site’s license.

              I think it is a rather pointless exercise to come up with something other than the radiation symbol. The radiation symbol is internationally recognized and will probably continue in use as long as there is a technological civilization. A primitive culture will not be able to decipher our writing, and as long as they see that a consistent symbol (e.g., the radiation symbol) leads to a consistent outcome (radiation sickness or poisoning) they will quickly learn to avoid anything associated with that symbol.
              at

              2 comments:

              1. John WilderAugust 6, 2020 at 10:09 PM

                Me? I think voting should be hard. Difficult. Time consuming. I'd add in a test to see if people could identify, oh, the vice president and two members of the SCOTUS.

                ReplyDelete
                Replies
                1. DocentAugust 7, 2020 at 8:38 AM

                  The Voting Rights Act of 1965 was passed, in part, to prevent the administration of such tests (generally referred to as literacy tests). Louisiana actually used a simple IQ style test which the Left particularly despised. (See https://allthatsinteresting.com/voting-literacy-test which has an example of the La. test).

                  Delete