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Monday, October 5, 2020

A Quick Run Around The Web (October 5, 2020)

 

VIDEO: "Green Tips Worth It???"--WHO_TEE_WHO (7 min.)
The author shoots a Level III ceramic plate with both 55 grain FMJ and 62 grain "green tip" ammunition. The plate stopped the 55 grain cold, but the 62 grain "green tip" punched right through.

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:
  • First up, Jon Low at Defensive Pistolcraft has a new roundup of articles, videos and commentary. His main message this month: "Urge your friends to get training before some tragic event induces them to get training.  Explain to them that the training prevents the tragic incident.  Because training changes their personality, their body language, and their choices in life." Some other commentary concerns the need to say "I will" rather than "I'll try". And this:
    I've been to a lot of "meetings" where there was a good chance that the guys across the table would shoot me.  People who say they're going to commit suicide are asking for help.  They are not telling you that they will commit suicide.  People who commit suicide usually don't say anything to anyone.  Similarly for people who threaten to kill you.  (But, you can use their words to articulate why you shot them.)

    Shooting in your air conditioned carpeted range is not the same as running a mile up the hill in rough terrain and then shooting.

    Learn by failing.  Fail often.  Fall forward.

    As John Farnam says during training, we are here to fail magnificently, so that in combat we will win.  

Another tip: 
 
     My aiming protocol --
    1.  When wearing bifocals - Align fuzzy sights as best I can.  Tilt head back to get sharp image of front sight.  Tilt head forward to get a clear image of what's going on down range.  
    2.  When wearing contact lenses - Stretch out to hold the pistol as far away from my eyes as possible.  I use the shape of the slide to aim the pistol.  
    3.  Without glasses - Pull pistol in close to get a fuzzy, but visible front sight.  
    4.  With degraded vision - I use the shape of the pistol to aim.  
     Of course, another solution would be to use a red dot sight.  Make sure
to turn up the brightness, so you can easily find the dot in a chaotic
environment.  And you have to practice, because if you're looking for that
bright red dot, but your sight has a dim green dot, your OODA loop may be disturbed.

Jon also relates a useful story about assisting an elderly woman select a firearm for self-defense, aiming issues (including why using both eyes open for sighting is wrong for iron sights), practice, and more. Frankly, the advice and points he covers are good for anyone new to shooting to consider. Be sure to read the whole thing and check out the linked articles on self-defense, the importance of physical fitness for self-defense, the benefits of tactical training for civilians, home-security concerns for the elderly, first-aid/using a tourniquet, learning and transferable skills, and more.
  • Next, be sure to check out Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump, if for no other reason than the first article he mentions has some ideas for tracking down some ammunition during the current shortage. Other articles include why you shouldn't rechamber the same round twice in an AR, knife laws in the various states, examining your vulnerabilities through the point-of-view of a criminal, how to survive a bullet wound, what refugees pack in their bags, and a lot more.
    Just a comment about the article on rechambering the same round in an AR. The issue is bullet set-back: that is, the bullet being pushed back into a case causing excessive--even dangerous--pressure levels. This is not something limited to ARs but can occur with any semi-automatic firearm or firearm that uses the operation of a bolt to feed a round into the chamber. I've seen over the last few months a few articles on this subject, and it is generally raised in relation to the repeated chambering of the same round of defensive ammo as the weapon is loaded and unloaded. But where I've seen set back most often is actually with misfeeds. If everything goes well in the loading cycle, the forces exerted against the bullet will generally be along the sides of the bullet as it slides along a feed ramp or top of the chamber. In a misfeed, the cartridge is typically entering at a poor angle resulting in the bullet impacting the feed ramp and locking up, or impacting the top of the chamber and locking up; and the consequence is the force is directed against the front (or near enough) of the bullet and can push it in. If that a happens, rather than try to get the round to feed, you are better off simply ejecting the round completely, and move on to the next round. And, please, don't do what I've seen on occasions at ranges where someone has a bullet pushed back into the case, then uses his fingers to pull the bullet out to the presumed correct seating depth and rechamber!
    Mongolia’s National Center for Zoonotic Diseases (NCZD) reported a suspected case of bubonic plague in western Mongolia’s Khovd province has been confirmed by lab test results Sunday.

    The patient is a 25-year-old female who was found to have eaten marmot meat last week. While hunting marmots is illegal in Mongolia, many Mongolians regard the rodent as a delicacy and ignore the law.

    According to the NCZD, As of September 2020, 21 suspected cases of marmot plague were registered in Mongolia, 5 cases were confirmed and 60% of them died.

I probably wouldn't have come across this information if not for KA9OFF. As an aside, what we are currently seeing is an increased number of these cases being reported in China and, now, Mongolia. Not that there is necessarily more cases than normal, but there is better reporting. As long as it is bubonic plague, I wouldn't be worried. What I would watch for are reports of pneumonic plague because it involves airborne transmission.
 
    Unfortunately, given our medical system's inability to fully function in the face of COVID-19, I expect that the medical system will completely collapse in the face of a serious pandemic, such as something like the Spanish flu; and doctors and nurses would probably have to be forced to work at gun point in the event of something like the Black Plague. I say this having just attended the funeral of an in-law who died of kidney failure. I don't know if earlier treatment would have saved his life, but I do know that he didn't receive earlier treatment because the hospitals and clinics in the area pretty much cancelled all treatment for several months for fear of COVID-19. Not all areas are the same. I have an acquaintance that when her cancer surgery was cancelled for being "non-essential" in this area, was able to have the surgery in Utah.
    In his recently-published book ‘End Times: A Brief Guide to the End of the World,’ he wrote: "First would come a swarm of increasingly intense earthquakes, a sign that magma was rushing toward the surface.

    “The pressure would build until, like champagne in a bottle given a vigorous shake, the magma would burst through the ground in a titanic eruption that would discharge the toxic innards of the Earth to the air.

    “It would continue for days, burying Yellowstone in lava within a forty-mile radius of the eruption."

    But, Mr Walsh warned the devastation would not be restricted to the local area.

All I can say is that I'm glad I have the Rocky Mountains between me and Yellowstone. And the jet stream should carry the ash plume away from where I live (at least until it circles back around the globe).
  • "Old Hand Sends: Prep Your Apartment Or Suburban Home For Riots And Civil Unrest: How To Get Ready Fast"--American Partisan. Instructions, tips, and tricks for quickly hardening your home to prevent a mob from attacking and getting in. Just a couple comments about the author's section on booby traps. As always, I'm not your attorney and this isn't legal advice. First, the Geneva Convention has nothing to do with the legality of you, a citizen, defending your home against a mob. Second, although the author categorically says that booby-traps are illegal, that may not be strictly true for your jurisdiction--check your state and local laws. The general rule regarding booby traps is that you can't do anything with a booby trap that you can't do in person. For instance, it would be illegal to set a booby-trap to kill or maim someone that doesn't pose an imminent threat of grave bodily harm to you or another person, which is why it is always a mistake (from a legal perspective) to booby-trap a shed, barn or other outbuilding (well, that and the fact that you have a duty not to set traps for mere trespassers). On the other hand, an armed intruder breaking down the door into your "safe room" where you have hunkered down may be fair game for such a deadly device. Given this limitation, which severely restricts the use and utility of a booby-trap, it probably makes more sense to either use a weapon yourself against such an intruder or manually trigger a device. 
  • "Scottsdale-based ammunition company Ammo Incorporated is facing an $80.1 million order backlog amid record demand for ammunition."
  • "You Can Do It: How to Clean Your AR-15 Rifle"--The Truth About Guns. A primer on cleaning the AR-15 as well as recommendations as to products. 
  • "First Look: American Tactical FXH-45M Moxie Handgun"--Shooting Illustrated. A polymer framed 1911 style pistol.
  • Dropping from the .45 ACP to the another John Browning cartridge, the .380: "The .380 ACP Made Better: Federal Hydra-Shok Deep & Punch Handgun Ammo"--Shooting Illustrated. From the article:
I tested the new Hydra-Shok Deep .380 ACP load out of a Diamondback DB380 and it delivered an average muzzle velocity of 839 fps. More importantly, with impact velocities ranging from 800 to 848 fps, the bullet consistently penetrated to 12.5 inches and deformed with an average frontal diameter of 0.510 inch. Better yet, the bullet seemed to be barrier blind, at least with regard to several layers of denim. This might be the best expanding bullet now offered for self-defense use for the .380 ACP. A box of 20 has a suggested retail price of $26.99.

The "Punch" ammo is less expensive, but it also only penetrated 10-inches in the author's tests. While the author tries to minimize this, it suggests that the bullet would lack adequate penetration to reach vital organs under some circumstances.
  • "Ruger P89 Review: Like a 9mm Mullet"--Recoil Magazine. "Like Ruger’s classic double-action revolvers, the P-series autos never use 1 ounce of metal where 2 ounces will do the job just as well." I used to have one of these. The article talks about how large the grip was, but, funny enough, I purchased it because its grip was smaller than a Taurus PT92 I was replacing. Although it was reliable, I've never regretted selling my P89. 
  • "Rifleman Review: Remington R51"--American Rifleman (Sept. 30, 2020). A look at how the pistol, and its floating breach block, works.
  • "Defensive weapon for the infirm."--Volkstudio Blog. He recommends taking a look at the Keltec P17 (a .22 LR weapon) with a Viridian C5L light/laser.
  • "Why Don't Cops Shoot Well?"--Art of the Rifle. The author's experience is that "about a third of cops shoot well, another third are okay, and only a third are borderline incompetent, or completely so". Reasons include lack of training and practice and complacency, but the bigger issue is that firearm competency is such a small part of the job.
  • "2020 Wanderings"--Revolver Guy. The author notes that in the current buying panic of firearms, about 40% of the firearms have been sold to first-time buyers. But, the author contends, not only do most of these new buyers probably have no experience with firearms, probably don't know a "gun guy" to show them the ropes, and probably can't find enough ammunition to practice. Under these circumstances, the author suggests that these types of gun owners might be better served by a revolver over a semi-auto pistol.
  • "How To Develop Pistol Trigger Control"--Shooting Sports USA.
How do we develop trigger control? We develop it through a lot of practice, a lot of shooting and a lot of dry firing. Dry firing is very important. Practice is very important. That's how you develop trigger control. You delegate the trigger to your subconscious mind and shoot it with your subconscious mind. Whenever you see the sight alignment you want, you should just go off.
    The barrel length is no shorter than federal regulations (16″) and no longer than 20″, with 18-1/2″ a better maximum length. Just as with the PPP [Perfect Packing Pistol] it has to be in a chambering which could handle anything that might arise in one’s personal wanderings. My choice is .357 Magnum for several reasons. It is extremely versatile, able to handle .357 Magnum loads from fast-stepping 125 JHPs up to 200-gr. hard-cast loads for hunting, as well as a long list of .38 Special loads.

    In a carbine it is quite accurate with mild felt recoil in most loads and the Model 92 platform is probably the slickest handling of all lever-action rifles. If used for self-defense, the shorter barrel makes it more difficult for an assailant to grab the end of the rifle. For home use, I load the first two cartridges with .38 Specials — less recoil and muzzle blast.
  • "The Benefits of LARPing In Your Home"--The Firearm Blog. For those unfamiliar with the term, "LARP" stands for Live Action Role Playing (in contrast with a table-top role-playing game (RPG) or a videogame RPG); it has become somewhat of a derogatory term among the tactical or shooting community for anyone that dresses up in camo and other gear to pretend to be a shooter or operator. The author of this article makes the argument that LARPing can serve a useful purpose by allowing you to become familiar with and practice using your gear. The author notes, for instance:
Oftentimes, I will do a few dry fire sessions with whatever new piece of gear I get. I only wear that and do 15-20 minutes of dry fire practice to see what needs to be adjusted or moved after moving around either in the house or at the range. In the past, there have been items I have returned immediately because it didn’t work in a dry fire session with my other gear and saved me some time rather than wasting time at the range trying to figure out something a 10-minute dry fire session would tell me.
  • "The Utility of the Bastard Sword"--Men of the West. The author recounts that he had, at one time, purchased a battle-ready bastard sword and put it next to his door. (For explanation, during the early Renaissance, popular swords included two-handed long swords, single-handed arming swords intended to be used with a shield, and the bastard sword that had a grip and pommel long enough it could be used with two-hands but still short enough that it could be wielded with a single hand--funny enough, though, is that these three types of swords generally used the same length of blade). He also mentions an occasion he had to use the sword to hack apart a snake when using a firearm would have been dangerous and injurious to his home. I put together a spear after a similar incident where a couple raccoons had attacked my wife and our dog in our backyard, but one of the raccoons decided to hole up on our back porch rather than flee.
    For those wanting a sword-like weapon, but also wanting something smaller than a 30+-inch bladed weapon, I would suggest something like the Kershaw 1074 18-inch bladed camp knife (detailed review here; and you can purchase it here--Amazon is currently out of stock) or Schrade's Priscilla Brush Sword which has a 16-inch blade. I have the Brush Sword, and it is light and handy enough to use as a small cut and thrust weapon, but tough enough to use as a machete. I would have preferred a bit more length and, if I had been aware of it at the time, probably would have gone with the Kershaw camp knife. The Gerber Bear Grylls Parang is the best machete-like tool I have used, but it's design does not lend itself to being used as a thrusting weapon and it's shorter than I would like for a chopping weapon. 
  • "A Failure of the Victim-selection Process" by Zendo Deb, 357 Magnum. Citing a news story from Florida of an armed robber that chose to rob a gas station employing an armed clerk. After the clerk perforated the robber several times, the robber stumbled away and died.
  • "The Polygraph & Polygraph Countermeasures" by Kevin Goodman, Pursuit Magazine. The basic problem with the polygraph as a means of detecting dishonest behavior:
    The problem with polygraph theory is that it presumes that stress will indicate guilt when it exceeds baseline measures. Naturally, there will be some level of stress in just taking the test, which is what baseline measures are suppose to rule out.

    However, what the test doesn’t control for is that specific questions can induce stress for reasons other than guilt or deception: A person may be anxious because he thinks he’s a suspect, because something from his past induces a strong response to a particular question (a past trauma, say), or because he possesses a certain emotional disposition towards the topic, among other reasons. And the result, in each case, is a false positive for deception.

And: 
    Countermeasures are methods designed to subvert the polygraph by manipulating the results.

    Just as the National Research Council concluded that the evidence for the polygraph is inconclusive, it also concluded that evidence for the efficacy of polygraph countermeasures is also inconclusive. There’s simply not enough research on countermeasures right now to make a firm statement about their effectiveness. But from a theoretical perspective, we can imagine that the test might be manipulated.

Consider the following questions, again (the parentheses describe countermeasures):
  
Have you ever stolen anything? ~ (Hold breath momentarily before responding)

What day of the week is it? ~ (No special response)

Have you ever taken office supplies for personal use? ~ (Try to relax)

Have you ever broken the law? ~ (Contract sphincter muscle)

Have you ever tried marijuana? ~ (Contract sphincter muscle)

Is your first name David? ~(No special response)

Have you used any illicit drugs or substances in the last 12 months? ~ (Try to relax)

    In theory, the test can be defeated by purposely creating exaggerated readings on the control questions. An example of how this might be achieved would be to alter one’s breathing pattern on the control questions.

    Examples of methods that have been suggested to induce physiological stress on control questions include momentarily holding one’s breath, doing mental math, squeezing the sphincter muscle, or biting one’s tongue before responding. In contrast, one might try to relax more on the relevant questions.

    The greatest countermeasure might simply be embracing the belief that the polygraph is ineffective. In theory, incriminating questions would induce less stress if the test taker failed to believe in efficacy of the machine. One way to think of the polygraph is that it’s intended to create a certain placebo response—arousal based on belief.

    Still, the polygraph is registering something. Simply not believing in the polygraph isn’t an option for the informed person who might be more concerned about a false positive than a true positive. Perhaps the informed person is better off sticking with the KGB’s advice to their former mole in the CIA, Aldrich Ames: “Get a good night’s sleep before the test,” they told him.

    In other words: Relax—it’s no big deal!

    These shops were the places at which military history met military collecting; where equipment from anytime after World War II to Vietnam that had been used in the field, as well as much that was never issued, was offered for sale. Whenever the U.S. government would “order” too many uniforms or find it didn’t really need an extra million or so canteens, this type of stuff was offered cheap via specialty retailers who sold it to an eager public.

    Today, there are still so-called “Army/Navy” shops around, but anyone visiting them is more likely to find knockoff camouflage for playing airsoft or overpriced camping gear rather than the good-quality “vintage stuff.” The sad fact is that the heyday of the military surplus store has passed, and with it, the way for preppers to get their hands on the quality military-grade gear deals they seek. Instead, with few exceptions, there are now online catalogs that offer “surplus” mixed in, but it simply isn’t the same.
How did it get so bad? In a word: globalization. Speedier travel and the rapid expansion of trade, including the movement of billions of plants for the horticulture industry, have proved disastrous. “The scale of global trade is overwhelming attempts to control accidental imports of pests and pathogens,” Buggs says. In the U.S., for instance, data from the Department of Transportation on 63 American ports show a doubling of the number of arriving shipping containers between 2000 and 2017.
  • "The Knowledge: Quick Reference"--The Knowledge. This website is run by the author of the book, The Knowledge, which provides a road map for the rebuilding of civilization after a disaster. In this particular article, the author links to some sources of quick reference guides on various topics (some for purchase, but with one site offering free "cheat sheets"), and suggests making up quick reference guides for other, survival or rebuilding topics. The main point of these guides is that they are typically laminated (i.e., protected from harm) and have punched holes to allow them to be placed in a binder, and provide a quick overview or reference commonly needed information for a particular topic.
  • "Build an evaporative refrigerator - no moving parts, no electricity"--Rebuilding Civilization.
  • "Waterproofing Cotton"--Blue Collar Prepping. Instructions on using waterproofing wax (and a brand recommendation) to waterproof cotton.
  • "How Long Does Gasoline Typically Last?"--Modern Survival Blog. It depends on various factors, but your typical gasoline with ethanol will only be reliable for about 3 to 6 months absent the use of stabilizers. 
  • "Women and Prepping - Special Considerations"--Primer Peak. A discussion of methods of birth control, hair care, and feminine hygiene in a post-SHTF world.
  • "Feral Food?"--Blue Collar Prepping. In many states, hunting feral hogs may be a better option for meat post-SHTF than deer or other large game. The author lists some points and tips about why hogs should be hunted, going about hunting them, and processing and eating them.
    There are about 9 million feral hogs in the nation currently, and the beasts, which cause an estimated $2.5 billion worth of damage each year, are multiplying quickly, The Atlantic recently reported.

    “I’ve heard it referred to as a feral swine bomb,” Dale Nolte, manager of the National Feral Swine Damage Management Program at the US Department of Agriculture told the magazine.

    “They multiply so rapidly. To go from a thousand to two thousand, it’s not a big deal. But if you’ve got a million, it doesn’t take long to get to 4 [million], then 8 million.”

    Over the last three decades, the wild hog population expanded from about 17 states to at least 39 — and they’re set to occupy 386,000 square miles across the country by the end of 2020, according to Ryan Brook, a University of Saskatchewan biologist who researches the animals.

    “Pig populations are completely out of control,” Brook said.
    So where in the military sphere would an enhanced cognitive process that determines who is who and what their relation is to you be particularly important?  Maybe in counter-terror or counter-narcotics undercover operations?

    A successful undercover operator must BE or BECOME one of those in the target group. He or she must not only be accepted within the targeted group, they must be TRUSTED by all the key members of the group.

    How does one APPEAR to be that which they are not?

    How does one SUSTAIN that appearance (demeanor, visible motivation, action, all elements of behavior) while under constant scrutiny, stress and the risk of prolonged painful death?

    After reading the research I took these factors and presuppositions into consideration for a theoretical training:

    a) There is a part of the brain dedicated to the function of recognizing and relating to humans.
    b) That function involves a process.
    c) That process begins at a pre-conscious level, where perceptual data assembles into fragments of patterns and then larger patterns based on individual genetics, life experience and specialized training.
    d) Those patterns interact with the part of the brain that creates narrative: “This pattern is my mothers face.” “This pattern is LIKE my mother’s face.” “This pattern is LIKE the face of a boy who bullied me.”
    e) These narratives elicit an emotional response in the part of the brain that use emotions as a marker to signify relative importance.
    f) Those emotional responses give rise to physical sensations we call somatic markers.
    g) Superior undercover operators, human predators, sales people, con men, master teachers and superior therapists all share an ability to RECOGNIZE somatic markers in others, interpret them in real time so as to SHAPE their continuing presentation which in turn SHAPES THE EMERGING INNER NARRATIVE of the person they need to convince, influence, or teach.

VIDEO: "The Expandable Baton is Not a Self Defense Tool"--Hard2Hurt (8 min.)
The author and host of this video argues that the overlap between effectiveness of the baton and the legality of its use is so narrow as to make it useless as a self-defense tool for police or a citizen.

The Current Unrest:
    In the survey, 61% said that the United States is nearing a second civil war, including a shocking 41% who “strongly agree” with that assessment.

    And 52% are so convinced that it is just around the corner, or after Election Day, that they are putting away food and other essentials, an historic expansion of the prepper movement that has been brewing for years, now driven by fear and coronavirus-induced shortages. 
    People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

    This was a point wiser heads made about the Covid panic. The American economy is a wildly complex nonlinear system. The people in charge of it, the Federal Reserve, have mastered just one small set of inputs. This is why they are so cautious about tinkering with the money supply. They understand that beyond small changes in interest rates, they really don’t know what will happen. Through necessity they have figured out how to buy up distressed assets to keep the asset bubble inflated.

    Otherwise, no one understands what is happening in the American economy, outside of their very narrow focus. It’s why the lock downs were an insane idea. What local governments have done is not dissimilar to what the Bolsheviks did to the Russian economy after they gained power. This massive reorganization will not fully play-out for years, maybe decades. Even at this point, no one seems to know how many people are out of work or how many businesses survived.

    Something similar may be happening with the culture. Up until this year, the sports entertainment complex was the great distraction. Every type of sporting event enjoyed wide following on television and on-line. It’s always hard to know, given how our ruling class lies about everything, but television ratings for the professional sports leagues were strong enough to keep raising ad rates. The revenues of the sports leagues kept growing, despite decades of growth.

    That brings us to now, when the ratings for sports entertainment have suddenly collapsed, even for the marquee events. The NBA, which is the blackest of black sports, cannot draw flies. Keep in mind that the television industry routinely inflates their ratings in their press releases used by the media. The endless celebration of all things black for the last five months seems to not have had the effect they expected. All of the other sports have also seen their ratings collapse.

    Hogg wrote in his original Tweet, “We must not fall for the slander espoused by those in power that says violence will solve our problems, they only say that so they can have an excuse to grow their authoritarianism.”

    Touching on his experience at the Florida high school, Hogg added, “I have seen how violence and hate destroys lives and communities- it is not the answer.”

But Hogg was reminded of the narrative and quickly changed his tune, indicating that he was only referring to violence from "young white people,"  and clarifying that "what I am NOT trying to do is tell BIPOC people how they should react to violence directed at them by the state."

How organized are things on the inside?

    There are different types of bloc organization styles. The building block of antifa is what's called an affinity group, people you live and work with and trust and know in real life. All the planning is done within that closed bloc, and they don't let everyone know [what they're going to do]. I didn't know that they were going to burn the Portland Police Association when I joined. What they did was put a call out that said, "Anyone show up in black that night at this place, and you can join the action."

    That's called a semi-open bloc. The planning is done within the closed group, but anyone who's dressed in black can come join the action. If you know what you're looking for, you can spot affinity groups that are working together. One thing they'll do sometimes is have written agreements with other protest organizations that aren't in black bloc. I know of one from Berkeley that illustrates this: "We agree that to not take pictures of anyone in antifa." It will say that literally in writing, so everyone's working together. It's like a combined arms type thing, almost like the military. They work together and are mutually reinforcing.

So your first night with them, you burned the Portland Police Association…

    We get to the Portland Police Association and immediately, they blockade both ends of the street. They built the shield wall and they're hammering the door open. I went over and I'm standing in the bloc as they're breaking the door down. It took them a little while longer than what I thought. They could have found better ways to breach the building, but they had hammers and pry bars and they pry it open and pry the plywood back and they pour fuel and light it on fire and start burning stuff.

    Strategically what they're doing is, they're forcing a dilemma action. A dilemma action is when you put your opponent in a no-win situation. Your enemy has to react. If they don't react, they look weak; if they do react, they have to react in a certain way where it looks like it's an overreaction.

    When the feds were in Portland, they were presented as overreacting, a presentation helped by innumerable people with PRESS written across their clothing flooding the internet with images that presented protesters wholly as victims of an authoritarian regime.

    That's their [antifa's] objective. It's not a tactical thing. That's why all the "press" is there, the sympathetic press. They're trying to create propaganda. They know how the police are going to react, so they carefully calibrate what they do to try to provoke the police into reacting and then filming it. They want to try to push public opinion in favor of removing the police. The police aren't perfect, but what a police force is, it's putting force under an objective third party, under government control. Antifa wants to separate the police from the populace.

    This is basically guerilla warfare. They're trying to undermine legitimacy of the state. The police right now, I think some of them are catching up. There's a playbook for how police respond to riots and they're not actually doing it; it's not an actual riot. I mean, it is a riot, but at the same time, it's a specific type of riot that's trying to make the police respond in a certain way.

Meaning, they're able to provoke the police into taking the bait.

    Yeah. Basically they're baiting the police into overreacting.
  • Without rule of law: "St. Louis prosecutors will NOT pursue nine people who were charged with trespassing at the home of gun-wielding couple who pointed weapons at them"--Daily Mail. This has to do with the mob that broke into the private neighborhood where Mark and Patricia McCloskey lived.
  • "Put An End To Police Raids"--The Captain's Journal. "On the assumption that anyone who yells 'Police' is actually police, you can lay on the floor out of fear of being sent to prison for the rest of your life, or on the other hand, on the assumption that it’s home invaders intent on killing your family, you can defend your home." Before the drug war, daytime service of warrants was the norm, while night time service was rare; and no-knock warrants are primarily a creature of the drug war.
  • I hope the Left remembers this after Trump is re-elected: "Judiciary Reform Is Not Revenge: Expanding the Supreme Court makes sense for both practical and constitutional reasons." by Lawrence Goldstone, The Atlantic. Goldstone notes that until the late 1800s, the number of justices had varied, but was generally equal to the number of federal circuits so that one justice also would be responsible for one circuit. He suggests that the size and number of circuits should be related to population, and that Congress match the size of the Supreme Court to the number of circuits. (For instance, under that scheme, we would have 13 justices on the Court--one each for the 11 numbered circuits, one for the federal circuit, and one for the D.C. circuit). The author is transparent on presenting such a reformation as merely something to be done by Congress, expecting, as he does, for the Democrats to take the White House and the Senate. However, adding (or replacing) justices has become as contentious as the addition of states prior to the Civil War. The only way to do so peacefully would be for Republicans and Democrats to get to appoint an equal number of justices. So, if the size of the Court were to be increased by 4 justices, 2 of the justices would have to be selected by the party that is out of power or it would spark a national crises.

  • Because liberals believe conservatives are evil: "How To Cope When A Family Member Says They’re Voting For Trump" by Christine Organ, Scary Mommy (via Yahoo). Although the author is liberal and all for encouraging her readers to "other" conservatives (a hundred years ago she would have been repeating KKK talking points, but that is no longer a valid means of virtue signaling, so she has to find another group to demonize), she actually raises a couple good points. I recently noted that the problem we face as a country is that the morals and values of half the country is impossible to reconcile with the other half. Or, as Organ puts it: 
To all those people who say, “I would never let politics ruin relationships” or “you should respect others’ opinions,” well… this isn’t “just politics” and these aren’t differences of opinions, they are differences in values. It isn’t about Democrat vs. Republican or liberal versus conservative. It is about life and death. It is about democracy versus fascism. It is about hate versus kindness. 

And she is correct, although not in the way that she thinks. We are a nation largely divided between the Godly and the ungodly, those that value life and those that embrace death and nihilism, between those that value the family and those that would support most any perversion under the sun. Reconciliation and compromise is largely impossible. And, as Organ's article makes clear, the left can no longer exhibit tolerance or comity toward the right.

The so-called Virginia Values Act (S.B. 868), which Gov. Ralph Northam (D-Va.) signed on Holy Saturday (the day before Easter Sunday) in the middle of a pandemic, compels churches, religious schools, and Christian ministries to hire employees who do not share their stated beliefs on marriage, sexuality, and gender identity. A companion law (H.B. 1429) requires ministries and others like them to pay for transgender surgery in employee health care plans, a procedure that violates these ministries’ convictions.
Admittedly, there's a risk in any course we follow other than this, but every lesson in history tells us that the greater risk lies in appeasement, and this is the specter our well-meaning liberal friends refuse to face -- that their policy of accommodation is appeasement, and it gives no choice between peace and war, only between fight or surrender. If we continue to accommodate, continue to back and retreat, eventually we have to face the final demand -- the final ultimatum. And what then?
    Susan "Balloonhead" Shaw, an Oregon State University professor of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (shocker lol), places the blame for the wildfires currently ravaging the West Coast squarely on the shoulders of "white Christians."

    The esteemed pRoFfEsSoR stated that "the intensity and scope of these fires are a result of climate change" and then blames white Christians in particular by saying, "many Christians, especially white Christians, have embraced denial of climate science" and "the West is burning while most white Christians turn away from the root causes of the devastation" and "the white church is mostly complicit with the intersecting systems of racism and global capitalism that underlie climate change."
  • Liberal projection: "America Is About to Enter Its Years of Lead" by Alex Yablon, Foreign Policy. Ignoring the violence committed over the past 6 years or more by Antifa and BLM, the author suggests that Trump supporters are a paramilitary force that will bully the public into voting for Trump. I guess this is yet another narrative being spun to explain a potential Trump victory and justify any post-election violence by the Left.
    10 years ago, if you told someone they’d be watching children depicted pornographically on a mainstream media service, they’d tell you to get lost and stop your fear-mongering. Fast forward today, and we have "Cuties" on Netflix. What happened?

    The Frankfurt School of Critical Theory is what happened. 

    Recently, the White House issued an executive order to stop funding the instruction of Critical Race Theory at the federal level. Why is this a controversy? In order to answer that question, we’ll have to understand the Frankfurt School’s influence on American institutions.
1. Children and young adults are at an extremely low risk for serious illness or death from COVID-19.
2. Lockdowns are extremely harmful.
3. Children do not frequently spread this virus to adults.
4. Immunity to this virus is not just because of detected antibodies [i.e., the percent of people who are immune is larger than the percent of people testing positive for antibodies].
5. The safest, strongest strategy for our nation is to diligently protect the vulnerable and open society to end the lockdown.
    There is no crisis, and hasn’t been for months.

    The Godmother is not the most brilliant ruler, but his intelligence is sufficient to understand that plot, which surely must have been brought to his attention. He therefore knowingly pretends there is a crisis when there is not, for purely political reasons.

    This should be the real crime. It won’t be. He’ll get away with it.

    The crisis is now purely driven by government testing, as described in detail below. After you read that, come back here and gaze at this, the number of daily tests in New York.

He goes on to explain how false-positives are grossly inflating the number of "new cases."  

    • Related: "Stats Hold a Surprise: Lockdowns May Have Had Little Effect on COVID-19 Spread"--National Review.  Looking at the inflection point on the graphs of the daily confirmed cases over time for 13 U.S. states, the data shows that the inflection point when the curve began to flatten was not temporally related to when lockdowns were imposed, and, further, appears to be unrelated to even if the particular state had a lockdown. My hope is that one of the consequences of this lockdown will be many governors (including the governor of my state) losing reelection for their unwarranted crying "wolf". 


VIDEO: "Massad Ayoob 'Judicious Use Of Deadly Force'" (1 hr. 50 min.)

Miscellany:
Since 1977, U.S. states have passed laws steadily raising the age for which a child must ride in a car safety seat. These laws significantly raise the cost of having a third child, as many regular-sized cars cannot fit three child seats in the back. Using census data and state-year variation in laws, we estimate that when women have two children of ages requiring mandated car seats, they have a lower annual probability of giving birth by 0.73 percentage points. Consistent with a causal channel, this effect is limited to third child births, is concentrated in households with access to a car, and is larger when a male is present (when both front seats are likely to be occupied). We estimate that these laws prevented only 57 car crash fatalities of children nationwide in 2017. Simultaneously, they led to a permanent reduction of approximately 8,000 births in the same year, and 145,000 fewer births since 1980, with 90% of this decline being since 2000.

I've long felt the same way. For instance, way back in 2011, I wrote concerning the declining birth rates in the United States:

The interesting aspect of the Forbes' article, however, is that it attempts to address, albeit briefly, government laws and regulations that have discouraged larger families. One not mentioned, but which I suspect has a real impact, are child car seat laws. Because of the size of the seats, and the attachment points, you can only fit two seats per row of seating. Because children must remain in seats for at least 8 years in most states, the typical couple will have all of there [sic] children in car seats for a substantial period of time. Realistically, unless a family uses a minivan or a Suburban style SUV with multiple rows of seating, child car seat laws restrict families to no more than 2 children. Less than the size needed to maintain a population. In this light, car seat laws seem less child-friendly, than childless-friendly.
  • Heh. "Serbia and Kosovo Agree to Name Disputed Lake After Donald Trump"--Daily Time Waster. As you know, the Trump administration was able to get Serbia and Kosovo to come to a peace agreement. One of the many disputes between the two was the name of a border lake known to Kosovars as the “Ujman” and to Serbians as the “Gazivoda”. The two countries resolved the dispute by agreeing to rename the lake after President Trump.
  • Are you going to take the COVID-19 vaccine when it appears? "A little TOO close to the truth"--Vox Popoli. Discussing the plot of a soon to be released Amazon production, Utopia, which is apparently a remake of a Channel 4 series of the same name from 2013. The basic plot is that "[a] group of comic book fans discover an unpublished manuscript for a graphic novel that they believe holds clues about the future, shadowy forces are also looking for the same manuscript, and eventually the comic book fans uncover a global conspiracy" seeking to save the world from over-population. However, what makes it interesting is the conspiracy is to manufacture a deadly virus pandemic in order to panic the world's population into getting a vaccine. But:
Surprise! The vaccine is designed to permanently sterilize all or all but a certain percentage of the people who take it. Sit back and relax as the global population drops from 7.8 billion to about 500 million in a single generation, ushering in a new era of plenty.
  • "A Double-Dose of Spengler" by Herbert E. Meyer, American Thinker. Not Oswald Spengler, but David P. Goldman writing under the moniker "Spengler." Specifically, the article gives a brief overview of Goldman's books, How Civilizations Die (And Why Islam is Dying, Too) and It's Not the End of the World (It's Just the End of You). The first of the two books is about the demographic decline of almost every region of the world, and the geopolitical consequences that might arise.
    • Related: "Spengler's Universal Laws"--Thoughts and Ideas. A compilation of Goldman's "universal laws" concerning civilization and/or the collapse thereof.
  • "How civilizations fall" by Kenneth Minogue, The New Criterion. From the article:
    In modern Europe, we don’t quite have Bedouin storming in from the desert (merely millions of depressed migrants trying to slip through the gates), but the tendency towards barbarism is an active force all around us. Hence the formula for overthrowing a Western society must be not “storm the walls” but “organize your own barbarians” within the walls. Those who hate European civilization know that it cannot be taken by direct assault. It must thus be captured from within. This was the plan adopted by many revolutionaries, most notably, of course, by Marx who constructed a new and hostile tribe within the West called “the proletariat.” They could be made into a revolutionary tribe by equipping suitable people (industrial workers for example) with a unified consciousness, so that in every transaction they understood themselves as a collective. They were being victimized by the oppressive bourgeois. Like the guardians in Plato’s Republic, these revolutionary insurgents had to be taught to be docile within the movement while snarling at those without.

    Marx provided the model for all subsequent movements aiming to take power. His “make your own tribe” kit was found useful by nationalists, anarchists, and many brands of socialist. Hitler made the most creative use of it by playing down victimization and representing every Aryan as a superior type of person. It took the world in arms to get rid of him. But before long, revolutionaries discovered that a revolution based on the proletarian tribe only really worked if you were dealing with pretty unsophisticated peoples—preferably non-Europeans who lacked all experience of freedom and genuine political life. In socially mobile European states, the workers mostly found better things to do with their time than waste it on revolutionary committees and the baby talk of political demonstrations. Something new was needed.

    It was provided by such socialists as Mussolini and Lenin who adopted the principle of the Praetorian Guard: a tightly knit vanguard party, which could use the masses as ventriloquial dummies and seek power on its own terms. This development was part of a wider tendency towards the emergence of oligarchies ruling through democratic slogans.

The author goes on to discuss the rise of radical feminism and other forms of identity politics, and how they form the barbarian tribes. But note this:

My argument is, then, that European civilization has been attacked and conquered from within, without anyone quite realizing what has happened. We may laugh at political correctness—some people even deny that it exists—but it is a manacle around our hands. It binds us quite tightly, though some freedom must be left, because without the contribution of subjugated males, things would very rapidly decline. What political correctness amounts to in reality is a treaty of accommodation reached between the conquerors and the conquered. Women have forced their way into money and status, sometimes beyond their merits, but they have also lost a freedom (Professor Schaub calls it “leisure”) that might have saved them from being formularized in terms of contemporary Western styles of work. Had this not happened, we might well have been saved from some of the discontents that currently afflict us. To be “socially included,” as women have been in the workforce, has many practical advantages, but it involves a spiritual loss. So far the conquerors have not destroyed the geese that lay the golden eggs, so the surface of our civilization does not reveal how profound the change has been. But underneath that surface, there are currents which no one understands.

Read the whole thing. 

An MS-13 leader in El Salvador—Armando Eliú Melgar Díaz (a.k.a. “Blue” or “Clipper”)—has been indicted on terrorism charges for his role as the Corredor (Leader) of the gang’s United States East Coast Program. The indictment, by the United States Department of Justice (US DOJ), represents the first ever charging of an MS-13 member for ‘material support to terrorists’ along with other terrorism related offenses in addition to the more traditional racketeering (RICO) and narcotics trafficking charges.
  • Finish the wall: "Mexico’s President Suggests New Migrant Caravan Timed to Influence U.S. Presidential Election"--Breitbart. From the lede: "Mexico’s President said the newly formed Central American migrant caravan appears to be a politically motivated development shortly before the U.S. presidential election. The bombshell allegation comes as Mexico prepares to face thousands of migrants at its southern border with likely intentions to reach the U.S." Vox Day and others have noted a connection between the every 2 year surges of illegal aliens, the U.S. election cycle, and the spread of Acute Flaccid Myelitis (carried by the newly arrived illegal aliens). However, he has also noted that we haven't seen reports of AFM this year, probably because of the crack-down on illegal aliens crossing the border.
  • Long read: "How Long Was the First Millenium?"--Unz Review. The author considers evidence that the chronology of the First Millennium is seriously flawed because of concurrent events being made out to be consecutive, forgeries in Medieval documents creating a false past to support certain narratives in the Medieval period, and a cataclysmic event in the Third Century that nearly destroyed all European civilization (and which same event is credited with destruction in the 6th and 10th Centuries). He asserts that the First Millennium is 700 years longer than it should be based on the archaeological evidence, although some of the sources he cites look at shorter periods of around 500 or 300 phantom years (see also here). If the author is believed, that would mean that rather than it being the 21st Century, we are actually in the early 14th Century after the birth of Christ. I think a shorter period is more reasonable. For instance, in the latter citation, the author notes that when the Gregorian Reformation to the calendar was implemented to correct for errors in the Julian Calendar, "[t]he ten days that were skipped in October 1582 corrected the mistake that had accumulated in the Julian Calendar over the previous 1,282 years. However, if you deduct these 1,282 years from 1582, you don't arrive in the year of Caesar's calendar reform, 45 BC, but in the year AD 300!" More specifically, the Gregorian reforms only corrected to the First Council of Nicaea, in 325 A.D. I find a 325 year discrepancy more palatable than a 700 year difference.
Of course, you would be remiss if you didn't question why such a large discrepancy wouldn't have shown up in Carbon-14 dating methods. But radiocarbon dating suffers from its own problems, not the least of which is that the amount of Carbon-14 in the atmosphere (and thus absorbed by living tissue) can vary considerably. Put bluntly, it is not as accurate as it is often represented to the general public. A few articles on that topic:
    • "Inaccuracies in radiocarbon dating"--Science News. 
    • "Radiocarbon Dating: A Closer Look At Its Main Flaws"--Great Discoveries in Archaeology. Noting, among other things, "it is only accurate from about 62,000 years ago to 1,200 A.D.", and "[t]he answer to the problem of fluctuating amounts of this important isotope is calibration. While an uncalibrated reading may be off by a factor of 10%-20%, calibration severely reduces that value."
    • "Errors Are Feared in Carbon Dating"--New York Times (May 31, 1990). "Scientists at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Laboratory of Columbia University at Palisades, N.Y., reported today in the British journal Nature that some estimates of age based on carbon analyses were wrong by as much as 3,500 years." This was when scientists started to first recognize how variable Carbon-14 in the atmosphere could be.
    • "Carbon Dating Gets a Reset"--Scientific American. More significantly, as this article points out, the dating method "was initially calibrated by dating objects of known age such as Egyptian mummies and bread from Pompeii". In other words, Carbon-14 was calibrated using the accepted chronology, so if there was an error in that chronology, it would be carried over to the calibration for radiocarbon dating.
    • And most damning: "How Accurate is Carbon Dating?"--Lab Mate. An excerpt:
    Unfortunately, the believed amount of carbon present at the time of expiration is exactly that: a belief, an assumption, an estimate. It is very difficult for scientists to know how much carbon would have originally been present; one of the ways in which they have tried to overcome this difficulty was through using carbon equilibrium.

    Equilibrium is the name given to the point when the rate of carbon production and carbon decay are equal. By measuring the rate of production and of decay (both eminently quantifiable), scientists were able to estimate that carbon in the atmosphere would go from zero to equilibrium in 30,000 – 50,000 years. Since the universe is estimated to be millions of years old, it was assumed that this equilibrium had already been reached.

    However, in the 1960s, the growth rate was found to be significantly higher than the decay rate; almost a third in fact. This indicated that equilibrium had not in fact been reached, throwing off scientists’ assumptions about carbon dating. They attempted to account for this by setting 1950 as a standard year for the ratio of C-12 to C-14 [ed: after the atomic bomb tests had already altered the levels of Carbon-14], and measuring subsequent findings against that.

    Has it Worked?

    In short, the answer is… sometimes. Sometimes carbon dating will agree with other evolutionary methods of age estimation, which is great. Other times, the findings will differ slightly, at which point scientists apply so-called ‘correction tables’ to amend the results and eliminate discrepancies.

    Most concerning, though, is when the carbon dating directly opposes or contradicts other estimates. At this point, the carbon dating data is simply disregarded. It has been summed up most succinctly in the words of American neuroscience Professor Bruce Brew:

    “If a C-14 date supports our theories, we put it in the main text. If it does not entirely contradict them, we put it in a footnote. And if it is completely out of date, we just drop it.”

As you might expect, there is severe disagreement over other commonly accepted chronologies, including the chronology used by Egyptologists largely based on the Kings List. And, as this video, "Were the Pyramids Built Before the Flood? (Masoretic Text vs. Original Hebrew)" points out, the Masoretic text (the version of the Torah used for the Old Testament in most translations of the Bible) dropped nearly 500 years from the genealogies of the patriarchs which throws off most every Bible chronology. You have to go back to other, older sources, such as the Septuagint, to get the correct number of years. (BTW, the author believes this was deliberately done by Jewish rabbis to undermine the Christian position that Christ was the new High Priest). 
  • Diversity: "9,900-year-old Mexican female skeleton distinct from other early American settlers"--Phys.org. Key part: "Though limited by the relative lack of archeological evidence for early settlers across the Americas, the authors suggest that these cranial patterns suggest the presence of at least two morphologically different human groups living separately in Mexico during this shift from the Pleistocene to the Holocene (our current epoch)."
  • "The consequences of the choice"--Vox Popoli. He quotes from an essay by C.S. Lewis about how the Devil, so-to-speak, will sidle up to us to tempt us. An excerpt:
    To nine out of ten of you the choice which could lead to scoundrelism will come, when it does come, in no very dramatic colours. Obviously bad men, obviously threatening or bribing, will almost certainly not appear. Over a drink, or a cup of coffee, disguised as triviality and sandwiched between two jokes, from the lips of a man, or woman, whom you have recently been getting to know rather better and whom you hope to know better still—just at the moment when you are most anxious not to appear crude, or naïf or a prig—the hint will come. It will be the hint of something which the public, the ignorant, romantic public, would never understand: something which even the outsiders in your own profession are apt to make a fuss about: but something, says your new friend, which “we”—and at the word “we” you try not to blush for mere pleasure—something “we always do.”

    And you will be drawn in, if you are drawn in, not by desire for gain or ease, but simply because at that moment, when the cup was so near your lips, you cannot bear to be thrust back again into the cold outer world. It would be so terrible to see the other man’s face—that genial, confidential, delightfully sophisticated face—turn suddenly cold and contemptuous, to know that you had been tried for the Inner Ring and rejected. And then, if you are drawn in, next week it will be something a little further from the rules, and next year something further still, but all in the jolliest, friendliest spirit. It may end in a crash, a scandal, and penal servitude; it may end in millions, a peerage and giving the prizes at your old school. But you will be a scoundrel.
    ... physicists from the Technical University of Munich (TUM) have found evidence of a supernova that exploded near the Earth around 2.5 million years ago.

    The life of stars with a mass more than ten times that of our sun ends in a supernova, a colossal stellar explosion. This explosion leads to the formation of iron, manganese and other heavy elements.

    In layers of a manganese crust that are around two and a half million years old a research team led by physicists from the Technical University of Munich has now confirmed the existence of both iron-60 and manganese-53.

    "The increased concentrations of manganese-53 can be taken as the "smoking gun"—the ultimate proof that this supernova really did take place," says first author Dr. Gunther Korschinek.

    While a very close supernova could inflict massive harm to life on Earth, this one was far enough away. It only caused a boost in cosmic rays over several thousand years. "However, this can lead to increased cloud formation," says co-author Dr. Thomas Faestermann. "Perhaps there is a link to the Pleistocene epoch, the period of the Ice Ages, which began 2.6 million years ago."

    The HyImpulse-developed hybrid rocket motor is powered by a paraffin-based fuel and liquid oxygen. The motor is designed to make use of simpler hardware than a liquid-fueled system while offering greater safety than strictly solid-fueled motors.

    HyImpulse said that the Sept. 15 hot-fire test, its first, confirmed that the paraffin/LOX hybrid rocket engine performed on par with liquid hydrocarbon-based fuels. This performance was achieved utilizing a simpler propulsion system than liquid-fueled rocket engines — which lends itself to reliability — at a fraction of the cost.

  • "Heaven, Atheists, and Happiness"--Wilder, Wealthy & Wise. Key point: "Over time, hard work really does pay dividends.  But the downside of that fairy tale is that you’re going to have far more fun when you’re thirty than when you’re ninety.  I’m not saying I don’t want to live as long as possible, but understanding that if all you do is work until you’re used up, you never did learn to have fun." Similarly, he explains, you don't have to wait until you die to have a life blessed by faith in God.

    But even if you have faith that there’s an afterlife, you can have the benefits that most people think about being tied to Heaven, now.

  • Peace
  • Love
  • Calmness
  • Virtue
  • Certainty
  • Hope

It was my own (very bad) If-Then thinking that said to suffer now for bliss later.

    Nope.  Now, you still have to be as good as you can.  You can’t actually get the benefits listed on the label if you’re not good.  For instance, if you know you’re doing something wrong, say juggling kittens, you’ll never be at peace.  Likewise, if your primary focus is pursuing, um, “physical affection,” you’ll never know actual love until you start looking for actual love.

Read the whole thing.

    As I've noted many times, God is a really smart guy: He has good reasons for His commandments,  even if we do not currently understand those reasons; and it is to our benefit here and now, physically and emotionally, to follow them. That is why Christ said that His "yoke is easy, and my burden is light." (Matt. 11:30). And while we read that "[t]he sacrifices of God are a broken spirit: a broken and a contrite heart," (Psalm 51:17), this is not an admonition that we dwell on our guilt, but a call to give up our sins. That is, the acceptable sacrifice is to repent, and then face forward, not looking back, and move down the better path, knowing that God will remember our sins no more. (Heb. 8:12). "For behold," says God, "this is my work and my glory—to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of man." (Moses 1:39). And that's how God has fun. Every parent and teacher should understand.

By at

4 comments:

  1. KA9OFFOctober 6, 2020 at 6:46 PM

    Thanks for using and mentioning our site! Your "run around the web" posts are the best thing on the internet... keep up the awesome work!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentOctober 7, 2020 at 7:47 PM

      My pleasure. You provide an important service and resource and I want to make sure my readers are aware of it.

      Delete
  2. John WilderOctober 6, 2020 at 8:55 PM

    Okay, everyone, we're ready to start. Welcome to MWLMBAS Anonymous.

    "Hi, I'm John."

    "Hi, John."

    "My wife let me buy a sword."

    It's a real one. Sharp. Spring steel so strong it would take Excalibur itself to break. Do I need it?

    Oh, my, no. But it's in my bedroom.

    On my post? That one was, um, Inspired.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentOctober 7, 2020 at 8:01 PM

      Not much that could survive having a couple feet of steel shoved through it.

      Delete

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