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Sunday, October 18, 2020

A Quick Run Around the Web (October 18, 2020)

 

VIDEO: ".357 Magnum vs .44 Magnum Lever Actions"--Lucky Gunner (21 min.)
Outside of the .30-30, the most popular lever actions are probably those in pistol calibers, typically .357 or .44 Magnum. This video compares the ballistics of various loads of .357 and .44 against each other and shooting them from out of a handgun, including gel tests.

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

  • Another "Weekend Knowledge Dump" from Active Response Training. First, a thanks to Mr. Ellifritz for the shout-out. Second, although there are lots of great articles covering numerous topics, I want to focus on the medical and health articles that Ellifritz has included this week which include: treating tonsillitis in austere settings, treating mammalian bite wounds, using super glue to close wounds, using inefficiency (i.e., changing up exercises) to lose fat, and a video showing how to make an improvised tourniquet that works. And, finally, check out the Paul Martin article on the potential for political violence. 

    Last night I came across the article "Are we looking in the right places for voter enthusiasm?" at the Bookworm Room blog. The author makes an important point. While he acknowledges that Biden generates little enthusiasm at his rallies and events, he suggests that the better metric for measuring enthusiasm is to compare Trump rallies and such against the support for BLM rallies and Antifa because it is not so much Biden versus Trump, but Never-Trump/Anti-American versus Trump. Doing so indicates that the election may be much closer than many conservatives believe. 

    And however the election turns out, the political violence will likely increase. If Trump wins, the Left will go even more ballistic than they have already. If Trump loses, the Left will see it as giving them carte blanche to move ahead with their revolution.

  • "Slings In The Wild: Practical Use Of The Shooting Sling In Real World Environments"--Art of the Rifle. The author offers free for download his book, Slings In The Wild. The chapters are:
    • Why Consider Using a Shooting Sling?
    • How does the Shooting Sling Actually Work?
    • The Shooting Sling to Arm Connection
    • Placement of the Sling at the Support Hand
    • The Half-Twist
    • Establishing Effective Sling Tension
    • Putting it All Together
    • Loop Sling Use with Side-Mounted Slings
    • How Does Sling Design Affect Precision on Target?
    • How Does Sling Design Affect Ease of Use?
    • Measuring the Effectiveness of the Sling: Prone, Sitting, Kneeling, Standing
    • Cross-Body Carry and Stabilization
    • Implementing Cross-Body Support
    • Perspective
The author also makes and sells slings. I've purchased two of his slings, and like them.
  • "10 Non-Verbals All Officers Should Be Able to Recognize & Interpret" and "More on Pre-Assault Indicators" from Calibre Press. The first article actually lists 9 types of non-verbal cues and a tenth "catch-all" category. Basically: (1) Watching for strange behavior in or around vehicles; (2) micro-expressions--quick, fleeting expressions that show underlying feelings; (3) grooming movements like brushing off imaginary lint, hair straightening, and clothing adjustments that come at inappropriate times; (4) stretching (remember Han Solo just before he shot Greedo!); (5) the target glance--preoccupation with a particular area of an officer’s body or with a particular weapon the officer is carrying; (6) clenching of jaw muscles, making a fist, contracting the muscles on the neck and back as they prepare for an assault; (7) taking the “Fighting Stance”; (8) rapid eye blinking; (9) with multiple suspects, one or more taking a flanking position; and (10) miscellaneous signs such as dilated pupils, hidden hands, dipping to the strong side as though grabbing something, mouth breathing/panting, hands defiantly on hips, contemptuous spitting, pacing, etc. 
    The second article looks at what should be more obvious indicators: (1) verbal threats (like them saying "I'm going to kick your a**"); (2) failure to comply with instructions or commands; and (3) "verbal hiccups"--"Our theory is that while they’re planning what to do or evaluating their chances of defeating you, they’re mentally preoccupied, which often causes glitches in their responses and their sentence structure."
    When you decide to illuminate the unknown, you must do so so you can positively identify friend from foe. Your technique should illuminate the unknown with enough light to see what you need to see to choose whether or not to employ lethal force.

    Start big. Light up their center mass, so you can get a general picture of who’s ahead; where they’re going, how fast they’re moving, how they’re dressed, whether or not they’re alone, and their body posture. Then aim your beam at their hands, scanning for a weapon. If the unknown person turns out to be harmless, finish with an apology for temporarily blinding them. No harm, no foul.

    If the situation becomes a worst case scenario, transition to your draw stroke…while maintaining the tactical advantage provided by a blinding, high intensity light. Your one-hand clearance method better be legit.

    The question then becomes, do you keep the light trained on the bad guy or extinguish it?

    There’s no one “right” answer. That decision depends on what you saw in the first few moments that convinced you to draw your handgun. Factors like distance, action and whether you can move and move to a better location help determine the right course of action. The bottom line: the situation will dictate.

Also:

    As for searching, I prefer to use a two-handed technique. It allows me to direct the light to any location to identify threats or exploit a tactical advantage (by blinding the attacker). I can employ the full capability of the projected light, angling the beam to splash light into hard-to-reach areas.

    If you locate an unknown and identify it to be a foe deploying lethal force, shooting should be a seamless transition. Using a technique that stabilizes the light while allowing you to engage with effective fire is key.

    Holding the light at “high index” is the best method I’ve found to enable an efficient draw. I position the light near my jawline (see above) to illuminate both the target area and my sight system. While you will may be called to employ lethal force using your strong hand only, you can make that choice because of a superior search technique.

    Note: this scenario highlights the mission-critical importance of mastering an efficient one-handed draw and one-handed shooting. 

In action, what’s immediately apparent with the Stabilizer Kit is that the extra point-of-contact really does make a difference. At 10 and 25 yards, groups were easily half the size using the Stabilizer either strapped to the forearm or with a cheekweld. It takes a little practice to bring up to target, especially with the red dot, but with just a few presentations you get the general idea. The Stabilizer Kit helped turn a 3-inch offhand group at 10 yards into a ragged hole in the same amount of time — you start to understand the appeal of these PDWs.
  • "Remington is Dead, and that’s Okay" by Travis Pike, Gat Daily. During the best years for gun sales, Freedom Group managed to drive Remington into bankruptcy. But Pike views this as a good thing because Remington had let its quality diminish--and at least Ruger now has Marlin. 
  • "Sig Sauer is Expanding"--Gat Daily. Sig is moving its New Hampshire operations into larger facilities in Rochester, New Hampshire.
  • "Can a Wood Gasifier Really Be a Reliable Energy Source?"--Ready4ItAll.org. The short answer is "no." The author explains that it just takes too much wood to make wood gas, it is more dangerous to use and store, and it gums up engines leading to engine failure relatively quickly. Read the whole thing for the details.
  • "Doomsday Food: All The Things That Preppers Should Hunker And Bunker Down With"--The Travel.  A look at different types of nonperishable foods.
  • "Best Activated Charcoal Brands" by Diane Vuković, Primal Survival. Brands listed include Charcoal House Health Activated Charcoal Powder, Coal-Conut Activated Charcoal, MultiVita Hardwood Activated Charcoal Powder, as well as some other brands, including some that are sold in a capsule form.
  • "How to Process and Use Animal Sinew" by Tim MacWelch, Outdoor Life. The author explains that "the highest strength in animal fibers will come from the creature’s very sinews and tendons. Few animal fibers are as strong as these and none can be turned into bowstrings and other cordage products with such high strength. So what is this magic fiber? The anatomical term sinew is a little vague since it includes both tendons (the fibrous tissue that connects muscle to bone) and ligaments (the tissue that connects bone to bone). You can think of it as the 'rope' that holds animals together." The article continues by describing where you can find it, how to collect and process it to make fibers, using it to bind arrowheads and fletching, and ways to protect it from moisture (which can rob it of its strength).
  • "Installing a steel roof"--Backwoods Home Magazine. This 2010 article gives some tips and guidelines for installing a steel roof, but also discusses some of the advantages of steel roofs, including longevity:
The life of steel roofing has greatly increased in just the past five years due to a technologically advanced paint process that no longer fades. We’ve all seen the steel siding on barns and other buildings that gets chalky and faded after just a few years. No more. The same baked-on enamel coating used in the automobile industry is now used for metal roofing, and it barely fades at all. This has been noted in the warranties which have changed from a vague 10-year guarantee against rusting to, in many cases, a 40-year guarantee against even fading.

On the other hand, even new shingle roofs can, depending on the quality of shingle you buy, be 40 year roofs as well. 

    The moment I arrive where I can hunt, I get after it.

    I scout as quickly as I can and I’m pretty aggressive about it. I typically only plant to hunt areas that I feel have limited human intrusion and hunting pressure, so I can pay more attention to obvious sign. I note signs of travel (trails, tracks, terrain features) but I place the most value on active scrapes, particularly scrapes located near heavy cover. If I find an area of active scrapes—especially if they’re near a big rub or two—I’ll hunt that location. Simple as that.

    To find these areas, I move fast. If using an e-bike is legal on the property I’m hunting, that’s my preferred method and I’ll have a treestand and climbing sticks on the bike’s rack, ready to go.

    If I’m on a foot-traffic-only area, then I’ll have a pack frame on my back loaded up with a stand and sticks, especially if my virtual scouting has me feeling the area is likely to deliver the type of sign I’m looking for.

    If I’m exploring an entirely new area and am unsure about its potential, I’ll leave the stand setup behind so that I can move more quickly. If I find a place for a stand, I’ll hustle back and grab what I need.

    I’ve made plenty of mistakes during in-season scouting efforts over the years but the most common, by far, was spending too much time trying to find the “perfect” location rather than understanding the situation I’m hunting.

    I no longer waste time looking for that “perfect” location, because a perfect location seldom exists and I’m not going to be dead-set on hunting as far from a parking area as possible. If hunting pressure is light, and the sign is hot, there is no logical reason to press deeper.

He continues:

    Once I arrive at the area I plan to hunt, I move fast. I don’t worry about walking on deer trails, because I’m not trying to avoid spooking deer. I’m simply trying to cover ground as quickly as I can and let the sign tell me where the deer are. Trying not to spook deer while scouting is seldom effective. Deer will hear me. They will see me. They will smell me. No matter how careful I am, it will happen. This was a tough lesson to learn but the fact is, going slow did only one thing: It wasted time.

    So rather than trying to sneak around, I just hustle along and get the job done. If I’m going to jump a big buck, I want to do so in a manner that seems the least threatening to that deer. Sneaking along like a predator seems, in my mind, to be more threatening than walking along with purpose and giving deer ahead of me plenty of time to depart. Maybe I’m wrong but, to me, it makes sense. It’s also proven to be effective.

    Obviously, while I’m not overly worried about wind direction when scouting or bumping deer, I’m not just crashing around and wearing diesel-soaked boots. I try to disturb as little as possible and leave as little ground scent as I can. If it’s possible to approach an interesting area with the wind in my favor, I’ll do so, but it’s not a requirement. The primary goal is to cover ground fast and find hot sign. There’s a fine line between aggressive and reckless, and I try to stand on it.

He has some other tips and tricks, so read the whole thing.
  • "I Am Not a Housewife. I’m a Prepper." by Mira Ptacin, New York Times. Ptacin begins by relating how she had been preparing a book on preppers prior to the pandemic, and many of the preppers she met seemed to match the stereotypes she had about preppers:
    Then I met Lisa Bedford, a woman known in the prepper community (and on her website) as Survival Mom. She told me that the head-for-the-hills scenario bears little relation to what people actually experience in disasters or other disruptions — and because of that she focuses on another type of prepping: ultimate homemaking and community resilience. “We moms have always and quietly thought in terms of what if,” Ms. Bedford said. “Instead of thinking, ‘What if my kids get too cold outside?,’ we’re thinking, ‘What if this snowstorm keeps us in the house for a couple of weeks and the roads are closed?’” The most basic rule of prepping, she told me, isn’t having a lot of guns and ammunition to fight marauders. It’s the Rule of Redundancy: Have a backup, and then have a backup for your backup.

    She talked about the importance of storing water and how to purify whatever is available. She explained the ins and outs of sanitation when one doesn’t have a working toilet and how to make an “emergency john.” How to start a fire. How to make your own sanitizer. How to dehydrate food. How to administer first aid. How to stay cool when it’s hot out. How to outlast a power blackout. How to reuse, reuse and use again. Or, in a word, how to be resilient.

Covid forced her into the stay-at-home role, and while she resented it at first, she decided to embrace the role with the mindset of a prepper: 
 
    We live on a small island off the coast of Maine and are connected to the mainland by a ferry service that offers a tenuous lifeline to Portland. An extended power outage or hurricane or, heaven forbid, a continuing pandemic would really test our resilience. And so we are using this time with our children not for standardized test prep but to hone more practical skills — cooking, cleaning, how to start a campfire. We offer homemade chicken soup to sick neighbors. We talk about migrating birds and resourceful chipmunks as natural lessons in resilience. We got walkie-talkies that our older son uses when he goes off to hunt for tadpoles. He may not realize it, but he is learning to navigate on his own and practice radio communications discipline — skills we would like him to have in case of emergency.

    I’m learning how to fix things rather than purchase them. I’m keeping a stockpile of food that our family has in case of emergency and can share with other people who know how to fix things. We are learning basic first aid. Andy rescued a couple of broken chain saws and now has them running — we will always have firewood if we need it. We have a garden, which I call our Freedom Garden. Next spring, if the dogs allow, we will have chickens, then perhaps bees.

    I view all this as a form of activism and preparedness. It’s activism because I’m avoiding the consumerist treadmill and building my matriarchal clout. As I realized that my ideas of homemaking were evolving, I also realized that prepping, for me, meant feeling more connected to my neighbors, not less connected. I know that in case of emergency, there are a dozen other moms (whose ages range across many decades) I can call who will gladly help out. And I would do the same for them.
  • "Prepping your home for rough weather"--Seattle Times. Basic stuff like inspecting your furnace and cleaning your gutters to avoid water damage. One of the primary causes of water intrusion in this area seems to be from ice damming--ice buildup on or near the edges of the roof that traps water and allows it to penetrate into the house, often by seeping up under shingles or other gaps. If your gutters get filled and don't drain away water, that water can freeze and lead to ice damming.
  • "Preparing your house for the cold weather"--WTOL-11. From the article:
    Tom Wojciechowski , the owner of Wojo's Heating and Cooling said there are a few things you can do right now to add better protection.

    "Probably 80 percent of failures furnaces is because a lack of maintenance, dirty air filter, dirty blower wheels flame sensor they haven't been serviced. All of that contributes to it failing and then when it gets really cold in these furnaces are laboring and running continuously that is when you're gonna really notice it and I can't keep up," said Wojciechowski.

    Another thing to think about when prepping up your home before Old Man Winter comes, is to make sure you disconnect your hose from your water spicket. 

    "So when you leave a hose on it there's still water inside the hose so when people have  it turned on and leave the nozzle on the end and they don't realize it so the hose freezes so does the line going inside and it ends up splitting, come spring time it thaws and you got a disaster you got water spraying everywhere," added Wojciechowski.

    That's one mistake people seem to make this time a year. 

    Another mistake professionals say-not to fully cover your AC unit that sits outside. 
    So here is the long awaited gist of this article: the C.B. is a cost effective means to communicate over distances that are farther then typical when a little theory is applied to their configuration. I conservatively can hear/talk to almost anyone in my county which correlates to a 30 mile radius centered on my truck, and I live in a complex of mountains and valleys where the valley floor is around 1500 feet elevation and the immediate hill tops are at 4000 feet. Granted I don’t receive equally well in all directions due to the terrain, but it is remarkably better than one would expect. In flat terrain I imagine far better range.

    C.B.’s don’t require licensing like Ham radios, are relatively inexpensive, and with a little theory can be installed to have a increased effective range. They run off a 12 volt DC battery, and can go just about anywhere your vehicle can go, the best part being it’s a way to talk while traveling. While not a reliable atmospheric condition, when the D-layer is active (see the “Rebirth of HF” article on this site) I get Superbowl traffic (the free-for-all channel 6) from Louisiana, here in the Pacific North West. No wonder the deserts of North Africa were no match for the active D-layer and the proto-c.b. radio!
    André Schmitt, a former member of Germany’s special forces command, and five former members of his network have been issued with penal orders over a civilian combat training session in the southern town of Mosbach in the summer of 2018.

    The Guardian and the German broadcaster ARD published exclusive drone footage of the illegal exercise at a former German army barracks in December.

    Internal documents suggested the exercises were part of “Kommando Pipeline” training designed to produce in its last phase “combat-ready” fighters trained in handling rifles and handguns, as well as close combat and urban warfare.

Schmitt had connections with a possible right wing terrorist, but as far as I can tell, none of the charges are terrorism charges.
  • "You Can’t Find What You’re Not Looking For – DHS Releases Misleading Report On Domestic Violent Extremist Threats" by Charles "Sam" Faddis, AND Magazine. After a summer of violent protests by BLM and Antifa, you might wonder why the Department of Homeland Security just recently released a report stating that "right wing" extremist posed the greatest terrorist threat to the United States. Part of the reason is that the DHS was only using data up through 2019. Hidden in their report is the admission that "[w]e are still evaluating data for incidents occurring in 2020." The real issue is why release the report with the obviously wrong information. Faddis surmises that it has to do with it being an election year. He writes:
That does not happen by accident. Everyone responsible for pushing out this report at DHS knew that it was going to be taken, not as a historical document, but as an assessment of where we are now and what we have to fear. They did in any way, and they did it deliberately to feed a narrative that there is nothing to fear from left-wing violence and that only right-wing, white supremacist groups pose a threat to the republic. They knew that three weeks prior to the most contentious Presidential election in modern American history this report would be used for partisan political purposes, and they were happy to serve that purpose.
    A mysterious fog plunged Europe, the Middle East, and parts of Asia into darkness, day and night—for 18 months. "For the sun gave forth its light without brightness, like the moon, during the whole year," wrote Byzantine historian Procopius. Temperatures in the summer of 536 fell 1.5°C to 2.5°C, initiating the coldest decade in the past 2300 years. Snow fell that summer in China; crops failed; people starved. The Irish chronicles record "a failure of bread from the years 536–539." Then, in 541, bubonic plague struck the Roman port of Pelusium, in Egypt. What came to be called the Plague of Justinian spread rapidly, wiping out one-third to one-half of the population of the eastern Roman Empire and hastening its collapse, McCormick says.

    Historians have long known that the middle of the sixth century was a dark hour in what used to be called the Dark Ages, but the source of the mysterious clouds has long been a puzzle. Now, an ultraprecise analysis of ice from a Swiss glacier by a team led by McCormick and glaciologist Paul Mayewski at the Climate Change Institute of The University of Maine (UM) in Orono has fingered a culprit. At a workshop at Harvard this week, the team reported that a cataclysmic volcanic eruption in Iceland spewed ash across the Northern Hemisphere early in 536. Two other massive eruptions followed, in 540 and 547. The repeated blows, followed by plague, plunged Europe into economic stagnation that lasted until 640, when another signal in the ice—a spike in airborne lead—marks a resurgence of silver mining, as the team reports in Antiquity this week.

Other researchers had argued that the cooling period was caused by a cometary impact. This latter article notes: 
 
    There have been two theories put forward to account for this cataclysmic climatic event. One idea is that a giant “super-volcano” erupted in 536, causing the effects described above (Stothers 1984, Keys 1999). The alternative scenario invokes an impact by an asteroid or comet (Clube and Napier 1984).

    The super-volcano theory has several problems. Firstly, no terrestrial volcano can be satisfactorily identified with this event. Secondly, a super-volcano would be expected to produce significant acidity in the atmosphere. This acidity would be recorded in the polar ice caps. Numerous ice-core studies have been carried out in both Greenland and Antarctica (see, for example, Clausen et al. 1997, Hammer et al. 1997). None of these has found evidence for a significant acid layer around 536 of the sort that would be caused by the eruption of a super-volcano.
    Several hundred years later, in 530 CE, Halley’s comet made its periodic return to history, and it was one of the closest approaches Halley's Comet has ever made to the Earth.

    The tail of the comet would have stretched over a large part of the sky and Romans of this period weren't too keen on comets. Everyone waited for a calamity, but it didn't seem to come.

    Justinian the Great, Emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire, was trying to retake Italy, Spain and other former Roman provinces and reincorporate them into the Empire.

    It had been almost 60 years since the collapse of the Western Empire and Justinian felt he had a mandate from God to reunite the whole of the Roman Empire under one ruler.

    Then, the summer didn’t come during the years 536-540 and the winters were very harsh. Crops failed and Europe was gripped by famine sapping the strength of the citizens and the army of the Roman Empire.

    Just as the seasons began to recover in 541-2, however, a boat arrived from Egypt with the news that a terrible plague had begun.

    They didn't have to wait to find out more because almost immediately the weakened Romans began to succumb to the bacterium Yersinia Pestis, otherwise known as the Plague, and the first emergence of the Black Death that would terrorize Europe for centuries began.


VIDEO: "Stabilize Your Firing Grip with the Wedge Hold - Massad Ayoob on Master Class Ep. 19"--Wilson Combat (8 min.)

Our Current Unrest:
  • "On Sparks Before the Prairie Fire"--The Scholar's Stage. The author refutes the notion that the decent into lawlessness is foreordained, citing to numerous occasions that the United States has survived widespread civil strife because the benefits of cooperation and coexistent generally outweigh that provided by a brutal Hobbesian world. Rather, he contends, "Men and women must believe that the rules have changed. Something must happen to show a divided people that ballots have given way to bullets. Some moment must teach that henceforth those who strike first live longest." His concern is that we Americans have had domestic peace for so long, that people will not know how to stay calm in the face of political violence and terrorism.
    • Related: "‘Well, We Just Have to Win Then’"--The Other McCain. He notes that "Democrats are not embarrassed about seeking power, and make no apologies about wielding power." He explains:
    Politics is not about debate. Politics isn’t about compromise. It is not about “image.” Ultimately, politics is about power.

    This is something Republicans have a habit of forgetting. Because the Republican Party represents the respectable middle class, its leaders tend to be concerned with bourgeois respectability, an encumbrance which does not inhibit Democrats. Having assembled a coalition of the aggrieved and impoverished — including criminals, drug addicts, perverts and decadent intellectuals — Democrats unapologetically advocate the selfish interests of their constituent groups, whereas Republicans seem almost embarrassed by their own middle-class supporters.
For us to win, Harvard, Yale, and the Judiciary will have to be cancelled, deplatformed, and demonetized. The prosecutorial system will have to be depoliticized, which will require removing most existing prosecutors to the gulag. It has to become as dangerous to be too far left, as it is to be too far right.

    On Monday, the Michigan Supreme Court ruled that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-Mich.) could not effectively resurrect her lockdown restrictions to fight the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic for 21 days. Early this month, the court had struck down Whitmer’s decision to extend the lockdown past April 30. Whitmer had argued that the Court’s ruling could not go into effect for 21 days, but the court rejected that claim on Monday.

    Whitmer had claimed that the Emergency Management Act of 1976 and the Emergency Powers of the Governor Act of 1945 enabled her to extend lockdowns past April 30, but the court struck down the 1945 law as an “unlawful delegation of legislative power to the executive branch in violation of the Michigan Constitution. Accordingly, the executive orders issued by the Governor in response to the Covid-19 pandemic now lack any basis under the Constitution.”

    In a statement after the ruling on October 2, Whitmer claimed, “It is important to note that this ruling does not take effect for at least 21 days, and until then, my emergency declaration and orders retain the force of law.” She called the ruling “deeply disappointing.” The governor’s attorneys later asked for 28 days to give the administration time to negotiate with lawmakers and put new restrictions in place.

    Yet on Monday, the court ruled that the 21-day rule does not apply in this case because the ruling came in response to questions from a federal judge who sought clarity on the legality of the governor’s actions, Crain’s Detroit Business reported. Chief Justice Bridget Mary McCormack wrote, “I do not believe the court has the authority to grant the remedy the governor requests. … Our court rules do not provide a way for any party to the lawsuit in the (federal) district court to challenge our answer in this court.”

In a more civilized time, she would have been tarred and feathered long before this.

    In addition to causing “maskne” and skin infections on the face and around the mouth, persistent coughing, “mask mouth,” and respiratory illnesses including lung infections, it turns out that most everyone infected with COVID-19 “always” wore masks, according to a newly published study by the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

    The study found 74.2% reported wearing masks “always” while 14.5% wore masks “often,” or 85% almost always woremasks.

    It is difficult not to conclude that wearing non-surgical cloth face masks or face coverings does little to prevent contracting the coronavirus.

VIDEO: "The Philistines in History (who they were and where they came from)"--History With Cy (11 min.)

 Miscellany:

    Recent revelations, including the declassification of key documents, have effectively ended any speculation about what really transpired in 2016 and 2017 in regard to Donald Trump and spurious allegations of Russian collusion. The story was a fabrication. None of it was ever true. There really was a conspiracy, and we really did witness the first attempted coup in American history.

    Information uncovered within the last few days by AND Magazine adds significantly to our understanding of the scope of the conspiracy and suggests strongly that subsequent to the election of Donald Trump there was serious consideration given to simply not transferring power to the President-Elect.

“Hunter Biden paid nonresident women who were nationals of Russia or other Eastern European countries and who appear to be linked to an ‘Eastern European prostitution or human trafficking ring,’” read the report from the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs and Finance Committees.

Hunter is quickly becoming a liability for those in power, and may find himself facing the same end as Epstein. 

    An expose of Hunter Biden’s emails published by The Post on Wednesday showed the oft-troubled son leveraging access to his then-vice president father and introducing him to an executive of a Ukrainian gas company that was under scrutiny at the time.

    The family’s dealings in Ukraine are the subject of several congressional probes and even led to the impeachment of President Trump who was eventually cleared in the Senate of the charge that he pressured Ukraine’s leader to dig up dirt on Joe Biden.

    Hunter Biden’s dealings in China, however, have earned a lot less scrutiny — including over a $1 billion windfall for his business venture just days after visiting Beijing with his influential father.
    The New York Post reported Wednesday on the discovery of a string of emails between Hunter Biden, Democratic Presidential Nominee Joe Biden’s son, and international holdings company Burisma board adviser Vadym Pozharskyi discussing Hunter’s foreign dealings and political influence.

    The emails were discovered after a water-damaged MacBook Pro laptop with a “Beau Biden Foundation” sticker was turned into a repair shop but was mysteriously “never paid for…or retrieved” despite repeated contact from the owner.

    In addition to the incriminating emails, other material extracted from the computer included “a raunchy, 12-minute video that appears to show Hunter, who’s admitted struggling with addiction problems, smoking crack while engaged in a sex act with an unidentified woman, as well as numerous other sexually explicit images” and some family photos depicting Joe, Hunter, and children.

    While a Delaware federal subpoena shows that the FBI obtained both the computer and the hard drive in December as part of an investigation, the shop owner also says that he made his own copy and delivered it to Robert Costello, Mayor Rudy Giuliani’s former lawyer.

    The Post, which obtained the hard drive copy from Giuliani, also reports that former adviser to President Trump Steve Bannon alerted them of the hard drive’s existence in September.
    Jesus spills money all over the temple floor, throws the furniture around, a whip in his hand. Quite a dramatic action for the Prince of Peace! Did you know the temple of Jerusalem in his day was the most magnificent building complex east of Rome? I didn’t ... The high court sat there, the main bank and money exchange. You could say Jesus took on a combination of Washington DC, Wall St., the Vatican, and the military base in Qatar.

    At the top of this edifice was a tight-knit coalition of the wealthy and powerful — in today’s parlance, the billionaires. And it was at that moment, according to all four gospels, that this cabal “started looking for a way to kill him.” That is, the billionaires murdered Jesus. Not the “Jews” — who were, in fact, his own community. Interestingly, it couldn’t be done just then, because he was surrounded by a cross-cutting coalition of that community. You might call it the broad-based egalitarian coalition.

    There is a lot to learn here: Billionaires in charge of a community’s most sacred values, and the public trust, will ruin their society. The only chance of curbing them is to join together in a broad-based coalition, crisscrossing all identity divides – what Jesus was getting at with “love thy neighbor” — and to relentlessly keep the focus trained on the corruption of that ruling clique. We can’t get distracted by manipulative efforts to divide us.
They didn’t just squash the story. They squashed the story and then bragged about it in public. They declared the story to be “harmful” (as in harmful to the election prospects of their chosen candidate). And they cited some bullshit reasons about why they couldn’t share this story, even though they were happy to ignore all those same rules repeatedly whenever it was a breaking story that hurt Trump.

And:

    That would be bad enough, but then it got extra stupid! So while these evil media empires are pretending that they are unbiased and merely trying to “curate the truth”, they banned the White House Press Secretary! They stopped sitting US senators from sharing news articles. Then they banned the president’s reelection campaign nineteen days before an election!

    If social media had banned Obama’s press secretary, and then stopped Diane Feinstein and Chuck Schumer from sharing articles from the New York Times, and then shut down the Obama campaign page nineteen days before his election against Mitt Romney, everyone would have lost their fucking minds. And rightfully so! Because that kind of blatant manipulation of information is evil.
  • "Europe Preparing for the Worst in Washington"--Der Spiegal. The article describes the fear among many Eurocrats that Trump may win the election, or not give up the White House if the results are close and plunging the U.S. into a constitutional crises. But it is clear how the E.U. would go if there was a contested election. According to the article, "[t]he majority of the bloc's 27 member states is hoping for a victory for Democrat Joe Biden, who they hope will steer the U.S. back to its traditional multilateral approach as a reliable alliance partner." How badly do they want a Biden win? Martin Schirdewan, floor leader for the Left Party parliamentary group, wants the E.U. to send election observers to the United States. Diplomatic efforts on some projects are going by the wayside lest it provide assistance to Trump re-election efforts. For instance, the article indicates that the trans-Atlantic dialogue on China is on hold because "[m]any EU member states, including Germany, are opposed to launching a project with the Trump administration so close to Election Day, particularly given the danger that it could provide Trump with last-minute ammunition to declare himself a multilateralist who is valued as a partner across the globe." Another example was the World Trade Organization's recent decision to allow the E.U. to impose punitive trade tariffs against the United States. Says the article:

But some EU member states, particularly Germany, are urging patience. They are concerned that Trump could take advantage of such punitive tariffs in the final days of the campaign. Diplomats say they want to avoid giving Trump such a gift at all costs.

    IMB’s latest global piracy report details 132 attacks since the start of 2020, up from 119 incidents in the same period last year. Of the 85 seafarers kidnapped from their vessels and held for ransom, 80 were taken in the Gulf of Guinea – in 14 attacks reported off Nigeria, Benin, Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and Ghana. 

    In the first nine months of 2020, seafarers reported 134 cases of assault, injury and threats, including 85 crewmembers being kidnapped and 31 held hostage onboard their ships. A total of 112 vessels were boarded and six were fired upon, while 12 reported attempted attacks. Two fishing vessels were hijacked, both in the Gulf of Guinea.

    With approximately 95% of global kidnappings reported from within Gulf of Guinea waters, IMB warns that pirate gangs in the area are “well organized and targeting all vessel types over a wide range”. 
I share with the majority of American Jews’ disgust toward Trump and Trumpism, which has normalized bigotry and cruelty in ways that have crippled American society. That truth doesn’t detract from another: There is another danger, this one from the left. And unlike Trump, this one has attained cultural dominance, capturing America's elites and our most powerful institutions. In the event of a Biden victory, it is hard to imagine it meeting resistance. So let me make my purpose perfectly clear: I am here to ring the alarm. I’m here to say: Do not be shocked anymore. Stop saying, can you believe. It’s time to accept reality, if we want to have any hope of fixing it.

Weiss says that this new ideology does not yet have a name, although he plainly associates it with the "woke" "Social Justice" leaders and crowd. "At some point, it will have a formal name, one that properly describes its mixture of postmodernism, postcolonialism, identity politics, neo-Marxism, critical race theory, intersectionality, and the therapeutic mentality." (Maybe something like "Cultural Marxism"?) But, he notes:

The new creed’s premise goes something like this: We are in a war in which the forces of justice and progress are arrayed against the forces of backwardness and oppression. And in a war, the normal rules of the game—due process; political compromise; the presumption of innocence; free speech; even reason itself—must be suspended. Indeed, those rules themselves were corrupt to begin with—designed, as they were, by dead white males in order to uphold their own power.

Weiss then discusses the "anti-racist" hallmarks of this movement, and how it, inevitably, must be anti-Jewish:

    It should go without saying that, for Jews, an ideology that contends that there are no meaningful differences between cultures is not simply ridiculous—we have an obviously distinct history, tradition and religion that has been the source of both enormous tragedy as well as boundless gifts—but is also, as history has shown, lethal.

    By simply existing as ourselves, Jews undermine the vision of a world without difference. And so the things about us that make us different must be demonized, so that they can be erased or destroyed: Zionism is refashioned as colonialism; government officials justify the murder of innocent Jews in Jersey City; Jewish businesses can be looted because Jews “are the face of capital.” Jews are flattened into “white people,” our living history obliterated, so that someone with a straight face can suggest that the Holocaust was merely “white on white crime.”

    This is no longer a fringe view. As the philosopher Peter Boghossian has noted: “This ideology is the dominant moral orthodoxy in our universities, and has seeped out and spread to every facet of American life— publishing houses, tech, arts, theater, newspapers, media,” and, increasingly, corporations. It has not grabbed power by dictates from above, but by seizing the means of sense-making from below.

    Over the past few decades and with increasing velocity over the last several years, a determined young cohort has captured nearly all of the institutions that produce American cultural and intellectual life. Rather than the institutions shaping them, they have reshaped the institutions. You don’t need the majority inside an institution to espouse these views. You only need them to remain silent, cowed by a fearless and zealous minority who can smear them as racists if they dare disagree.

    It is why California attempted to pass an ethnic studies curriculum whose only mention of Jews was to explain how they, along with Irish immigrants, were invited into whiteness.

    It is why those who claim to care about diversity and inclusion don’t seem to care about the deep-seated racism against Asian Americans at schools like Harvard.

    It is why a young Jewish woman named Rose Ritch was recently run out of the USC student government. Ms. Ritch stood accused of complicity in racism because, following the Soviet lie, to be a Zionist is to be nothing less than a racist. Her fellow students waged a campaign to hound her out of her position: “Impeach her Zionist ass,” they insisted.

    It is why the Democratic Socialists of America, the emerging power center of the Democratic Party in New York, sent a questionnaire to New York City Council candidates that included a pledge not to travel to Israel.

    It is why Tamika Mallory, an outspoken fan of Louis Farrakhan, gets the glamour treatment in a photoshoot for Vogue.

    And this is why AOC, the standard bearer of America’s new left, didn’t think Yitzhak Rabin was worth the political capital, but goes out of her way, a few days later, to praise the Black Panthers. She is the harbinger of a political reality in which Jews will have little power.

As Proverbs 16:18 teaches, "Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall."
Reparations for slavery, you say? Well, we tried that experiment, in the $20-plus trillion spent on welfare, Medicaid, housing, and food stamps for the mostly minority poor since Lyndon Johnson declared his War on Poverty in 1964. As Amity Shlaes shows in her cautionary Great Society: A New History, those trillions only made matters worse. As the clamor swells to compound LBJ’s mistake, Shlaes provides a sobering postmortem, dissecting how and why, when government presumes to reshape society, the result is likely to be gory.

So, instead of a vibrant economy and an expanding space program, we got dysfunctional black communities, massive spikes in crime, and an economic mill stone around the neck of America.
  • "The Inverted Monarchy: Why Democracy is Only a Means to an End"--American Greatness. The title comes from the author's explanation that the goal of most models of government is good governance, and that Democracy (or, more accurately, a Republic) is just one method. The bulk of the article, however, discusses how our Constitution was crafted to get the benefits of Democracy while reducing or minimizing the downsides:
    ... A pure democracy obviously would not do; it would immediately become, in a quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin, “two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for lunch.” This problem affected not only numerical minorities in the population, but also the states themselves: small states would quickly be overwhelmed by big ones. Monarchy wouldn’t do: a key specification for the new government was that sovereignty must rest, somehow, with the people. The new federal government needed to have enough power to carry out its mandates, and to present the new, stitched-together Union to the rest of the world as a coherent whole that other nations could do business with in confidence, while reserving for the individual states all powers that were not clearly required for managing the common interests of the collective. 

    The constitution that emerged at Philadelphia made a careful and complex balance of all of these competing requirements. Knowing that sovereignty is a zero-sum affair, the framers divided powers into what were intended to be non-overlapping parts, with all powers reserved to the states other than those they had explicitly delegated to the new republic. Because the new arrangement was both a compact between the states and an establishment of the people themselves, both were to be represented in separate and distinct ways. 

    Because raw democracy was dangerously volatile, and a poor guarantor of natural rights, it had to be leashed and brought to heel. Of the three branches of government, only one half of a single branch—the House of Representatives—was to be directly appointed by popular vote. Because the more populous states could easily overwhelm the smaller ones, the states themselves were to be represented as coequal individuals in the Senate. The president, too, in order to execute the nation’s laws in such a way as to protect the interests of all the members of this new compact, had to be above the fray. So the Electoral College ensured that the individual states, and not just the great clusters of the population, would have their say in his election.

    The Constitution itself, meanwhile, needed to be defended from the changing passions of the masses. If it were subject to casual revision by popular whim, it could be of no enduring value. The amendment process, therefore, was made so difficult that any change would have to represent the overwhelming majority of the popular sentiment. The framers made certain here, too, that not just the federal legislature, but a large majority of the states themselves, would have to approve any changes.
    • Related: "Last Exit From Autocracy--America survived one Trump term. It wouldn’t survive a second." by David Frum, The Atlantic. His primary complaint is that the Electoral College allows the election of a president even if he or she falls short on obtaining the popular vote. What bothers me is the complete lack of intellectual honesty in the article. Frum complaints of Trump using the pardon power to pardon political supporters, without any reference to the Clinton's abuse of the pardon to reward big money contributors. He complains that Trump is directing government money to his own businesses (i.e., his hotel), even though it is normal for presidents and vice-presidents to charge government for housing security at their private homes and residences. He has the gall to condemn Trump for accepting the Republican nomination on White House grounds, calling it an abuse of government resources for personal gain, at the same time more evidence has emerged of Biden using his position as Vice President to bring in millions and ignoring the money dredged in by the Clintons. And he actually goes so far as to claim that Trump is inciting political violence while saying nothing of the Obama's administration's open support of BLM rioters after Ferguson. 
  • "The way through to the other side of the left singularity"--Jim's Blog. Key point: "The enemy pretends to have decentralized and dispersed power, but its power is in fact highly centralized and concentrated, and thus highly vulnerable to a small amount of precisely targeted violence."
  • Another green fail: "The water-saving device wasting billions of litres every week"--BBC. The UK apparently started requiring duel-flush toilets to save on water. But the type of valve used in those systems are prone to leaking. The result is that "Because we've got so many [loos] that continuously flow all through the day, collectively that water loss is now exceeding the amount of water they should be saving nationally," says Andrew Tucker, water efficiency manager at Thames Water, the UK's largest water and sewerage company.
  • Ditto: "Washington State blows away wind fantasies" by Charles Rotter, Watts Up With That.
    The Northwest has spoken loudly as the Benton Public Utility District (BPUD) has documented their actual battleground experiences with intermittent electricity from wind farms that should be a wake-up call to our policy makers. Their message is “no more wind”.

    The Washington state utility 16-page report titled “Wind Power and Clean Energy Policy Perspectives” of July 14, 2020 provides a devastating counter attack to the wind lobbyists that they question the efficacy of wind farms for power generation and resulted in the utility’s commissioners saying they “do not support further wind power development in the Northwest.”
  • Gog and Magog alert: "Turkey: Erdogan Fueling Hostility Against the West" by Uzay Bulut, Gatestone Institute. The author argues that "[t]he current problem is greater than the Turkish government's violations against territorial waters and airspace of Greece, its continued occupation of northern Cyprus, or its threatening Europe with mass Muslim immigration or Islamist terrorists, among other hostile actions," but "includes Erdogan's fueling of hatred and hostility within society against Europe and the rest of the West." Part of the article:
    While Turkish survey vessels and drilling ships are in the territorial waters of Greece and Cyprus, prospecting for gas, France has deployed its navy to back Greece. On September 10, in Corsica, Macron hosted the leaders of six European Union countries that border the Mediterranean Sea to discuss the recent developments.

    "Turkey is no longer a partner in this region," the Associated Press quoted Macron as telling reporters ahead of the summit. Europeans must be "clear and firm with, not Turkey as a nation and people, but with the government of President Erdoğan, which has taken unacceptable actions."
The Religion of Peace strikes again (Source)
    An 18-year-old Russian refugee of Chechen origin has been identified as the suspect in Friday's beheading of a schoolteacher in a suburb of Paris, French authorities said Saturday.

    The alleged attacker, Abdoullakh Abouyezidovitch A., was shot dead by police on Friday afternoon in Éragny, the same area where the body of Samuel Paty, a 47-year-old history and geography teacher at College du Bois d'Aulne, was found.

CNN omits any mention that the killer was Muslim, nor does the story report that he shouted "Allahu Akbar" when confronted by police.
    The man who beheaded a teacher in a street in France waited outside the school and asked pupils to identify his target, anti-terrorism officials say.

    The man then posted images on social media of dead victim Samuel Paty, 47, who had shown controversial cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad to his students.

    The attacker later fired at police with an airgun before being shot dead.

    The number arrested rose to 10 on Saturday, with police investigating possible links to Islamic extremism.

The article notes that the killer came to France with refugee status as a child.
    Migrant mafia gangs are terrorising Sweden's streets with a surge of bombings and murders, forcing police chiefs in one of Europe's most liberal countries to admit they are losing their grip on law and order.

    Just five years after the country welcomed refugees with open arms, criminal clans from the Middle East, north Africa and the Balkans are behind soaring crime rates in their once peaceful cities, police say, with 257 bombings and more than 300 shootings last year.

    In one extraordinary incident in August, Gothenburg's most notorious crime family, the Ali Khan gang, set up roadblocks in the northeast of the city, shining torches into cars to hunt for members of a rival mob.

    For the second time in six weeks, crew members on a commercial airliner flying near Los Angeles International Airport on Wednesday found that they were sharing the skies with a person soaring solo over Southern California in a jetpack.

    The latest encounter was reported to have occurred at an altitude of 6,000 feet — nearly six times the height of the Wilshire Grand Tower, the tallest building not only in Los Angeles but west of the Mississippi.

    A China Airlines crew spotted the person about 1:45 p.m. Wednesday roughly seven miles northwest of the airport, the Federal Aviation Administration said. The agency is investigating the report.

“We stored the light by putting it in a suitcase so to speak, only that in our case the suitcase was made of a cloud of cold atoms. We moved this suitcase over a short distance and then took the light out again. This is very interesting not only for physics in general, but also for quantum communication, because light is not very easy to ‘capture’, and if you want to transport it elsewhere in a controlled manner, it usually ends up being lost,” said Professor Patrick Windpassinger, explaining the complicated process.

By at

1 comment:

  1. JohnOctober 18, 2020 at 9:36 PM

    Too much to comment on . . . great stuff.

    1. Masks - I went into a local franchise of a national fast food restaurant. About half the workers were wearing the company-mandated masks. I noticed that EVERY ONE of the employees who were wearing masks, touched their mask during the four or five minutes we were there.

    2. LHC finding new dimensions - if we are in a multiverse, my theory remains that "dark matter" is really just gravity leaking in from the other universes that are near ours.

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