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Monday, November 23, 2020

A Quick Run Around The Web (11/23/2020)

 

VIDEO: "How to USE a CETME/G3 Rifle in Less than 3 Minutes"--FerFal (3 min.)

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

The mine component itself consists of a plastic case that is concave and rectangular in shape. Along the "active" side of the case are the embossed words "Front Toward Enemy" while the rear is embossed with "Back" to help keep the operator from making a lethal mistake during setup. The plastic component contains a composition of C3 explosive. The concave nature of the mine's design allows for a forward blast area that produces a fan-shaped pattern of steel balls across a horizontal arc of approximately 60-degrees. The steel balls packed within the mine are then projected out from just above ground level by the resulting explosion to a height of about 2 meters with a maximum kill radius of 100 meters and an effective kill range of 50 meters. Wounding has been noted as far away as 270 yards from the blast zone though a range of 55 yards is deemed optimal. As can be expected, extreme professional care should be taken during the set up of Claymores. This is not only do to the mine's inherent explosive nature but the fact that up to 20% of the internal steel ball projectiles can blow back towards a friendly line upon detonation. As such, common practice for M18 setup includes the use of natural earth mounds or hills positioned behind the Claymore to help eliminate or reduce such friendly-fire incidents.

    Although modern smokeless powders contain stabilizers and are basically free from deterioration under proper storage conditions, safe practices require a recognition of the signs of deterioration and its possible effects.

    Deteriorating smokeless powders produce and acidic odor and may produce a reddish brown fume. (Don't confuse this with common solvent odors such as alcohol, ether and acetone.)Powder deterioration can be checked by opening the cap on the container and smelling the contents. Powder undergoing deterioration has an irritating acidic odor.
  • "Why You Should Buy Your Ammo in Bulk" by Richard Mann, Shooting Illustrated. Mann notes that he is surprised that there is an ammo shortage now inasmuch as we had barely recovered from a similar shortage that began in 2016. He states that, ideally, you should have enough ammo on hand for 10 years of your normal shooting, but then states that, at a minimum, we should have 200 rounds of rifle and shotgun, and about 500 rounds of pistol ammunition on hand at all times--replacing it as we use it. That seems low, to me, if you are talking about something you shoot frequently. For instance, I went through nearly 100 rounds of 9 mm just this past weekend.
  • "The Recover 20/20 Glock Kit: Perfect PDW or Camel Compromise?"--The Firearm Blog. This video review is critical of the kit. It works well as an arm brace, but is too difficult to use for shouldering, according to the review.
  • "NAA Earl: 1860 Hogleg Is the Biggest Pistol in North America Arms’ Lineup"--Graham Baates, Ballistic Magazine. You probably all know about NAA's mini-revolvers for concealed carry. This version, however, comes with a 6-inch barrel. What's the point? Well, this would make a good little "kit gun". Baates explains:

Weighing less than 10 ounces and measuring less than 1-inch wide, the Earl carries comfortably just about anywhere the 9.75-inch overall length fits. That is where the curiosity of energy on target began. A handgun this portable gives little excuse to not bring a gun at times when a conventional pistol might be uncomfortable or logistically challenging, such as hiking in anti-gun areas or during ranch work. Both occasions coincidentally also offer instances where a firearm would be handy to dispatch small pests or hostile wildlife.

  • "Silent Guns of the US Office of Strategic Services"--The Truth About Guns. A look at some of the exotic weapons dreamed up by the OSS during World War II.
  • Words I never thought I would be writing: Army selects a new submachine gun. The article is "Own The Sub Compact Weapon Chosen By The United States Army" from Loose Rounds. The article reports that "the United States Army selected the APC9K as its Sub Compact Weapon (SCW) to support global personal protective missions." These are 9 mm submachine guns intended for security details. A limited run of semi-auto only versions of the package being delivered to the military will also be offered to the public.
  • "Ultimate Bugout Showdown: Ruger Pc 9 Vs Kel Tec Sub 2000"--Gun Mag Warehouse. A comparison between these two weapons. The barrel lengths are about the same and the author reported comparable accuracy and reliability. The Ruger is about 4-inches longer and significantly heavier: "The Kel Tec tips the scales at 4.25 lbs, whereas Ruger’s carbine is substantially heavier at 6.8 lbs."
  • "Is the M14 Rifle Obsolete?"--Gat Daily. Short answer is "yes."
    The M14/M1A was a heavy, wooden stocked, iron sighted, stripper clip fed, .30 caliber rifle that was made in an era where we knew it was suboptimal now. Even keeping iron sights and .308 we, the Americans, designed yesterday’s rifle and churned out what was a high maintenance piece of mediocrity compared to its peers.

    The accuracy standard was 5.5 MOA and it was (is) a needy and expensive platform. That is the long and short of the story. Not that the rifle didn’t work but that there were already better ways to go about making the service rifle that the armed forces needed instead of the nostalgia piece they cobbled together with some lies about being able to make it on M1 tooling.

    The services made it work because it was what they had. It did alright because it was built on sound past principles. It didn’t last because it was obsolescent the day it rolled of the line.
  • "Gear Review: Athlon Midas TSP3 Prism Scope"--The Truth About Guns. This $325 MSRP scope is 3 power and rather than the standard BDC reticle uses a large circle with 5 MOA hashmarks below it. The problem with prism scopes is that they typically have small eye-boxes, which means that you have to bring them up closer to your face than other optics. The author does not discuss the eye-box for this scope, but merely lists the specifications for the optic which claims 3.2 inches of eye relief.
  • "The Nine Worst Holsters"--Redhawk Firearm Training. The author lists 8 characteristics or features that make a holster a poor holster. And specifically lists the Blackhawk SERPA to get us to 9.
  • "Craft Holsters Vertical Roto-Shoulder Holster" by Scott W. Wagner, USCCA. I reviewed this holster recently for use with a Glock 34. Wagner got one to go with his 6-inch 2020 Colt Python .357 Magnum revolver. He writes:
    Craft Holsters is a European supplier of fine leather holsters, magazine and speedloader pouches, gun belts, and bags. Its product line is diverse and of excellent quality. The Craft Holsters Vertical Roto-Shoulder Holster interested me most — so named because of its ability to allow the weapon to rotate downward for a horizontal draw rather than a vertical one. This holster was specifically produced by Falco Holsters for Craft Holsters.

    The shoulder holster for semi-autos and revolvers is an all-leather construction — except for the off-side nylon belt-attachment strap. It is important to note that the holster’s vertical carry rig requires the person to wear a solid belt to attach both the holster side and the off-side to it. Make sure to use the same solidly constructed belt that you would use with an OWB holster. This keeps the gun from shifting around.
    One of our readers found an interesting medical article, but it was written in nearly-incomprehensible jargon and another reader asked for a translation. We do take requests, so I'll take a shot at translating it into common English.

    The article was about a field-expedient method of determining if a bone was broken when there wasn't an X-ray machine handy, or if it was necessary to reduce the number and costs of X-rays. A study was done to see if using a tuning fork and a stethoscope can find fractures in bones by going to a clinic where people with suspected broken bones would show up, and checking them with the tuning fork/stethoscope before they got an X-ray. The results were good.

     The tuning fork method breaks down like this:

  1. Identify the possible break. Talking to the patient is the easiest way to do this.
  2. Check the similar bone on the other side of the body for normal sound conduction. This will give you a reference point for the volume of sound in an unbroken bone.
  3. Check the possibly broken bone. If there is a break, the sound will be diminished or absent since sound waves travel through solid bone much better than through soft tissue. A break in the bone will interrupt the conduction of the sound waves.

The study used a 128 Hz tuning fork. 

In 1980, sixteen Danish fishermen were forced to jump into the North Sea after their fishing boat floundered. After about 1.5 hours in the water another boat approached and lowered a cargo net which they used to climb on board. They thanked their rescuers and they walked across the deck and went below to the galley where they were supposed to have hot drinks and warm up. Instead, all sixteen of them dropped dead.

The article goes on to discuss different types of hypothermia and treatment. This is a good article it print up and keep handy.

  • "The Best Home Remedies For Stomach Flu Treatment"--Common Sense Home. Main points are: (1) stay properly hydrated (i.e., keeping up with your electrolytes); (2) eat or drink probiotics; (3) try some chia seeds; and (4) comfort yourself (e.g., taking a warm shower or bath). Myself, I drink Coke (not any cola, but the original Coca Cola specifically).
  • "2020 Spring/Summer Garden Review"--Growing Up Guns. The author tried growing produce in 5-gallon buckets, tried straw bale gardening, what he describes as the instant garden/lasagna garden, raised bed gardening, felt bag "container" gardening, hydroponics, and check log terrace gardening and reports on the results including pros and cons of each. 
  • "Bivy Hunting: Worth the Hype?"--Gunpowder Magazine.
    The last few years you read everywhere about bivy hunting. But what is bivy hunting? It’s basically throwing everything you’ll need to hunt for the week in your backpack and camping out on top of a mountain. Why would you want to do that? I’ll tell you why:

    Because it gets old hiking three hours up to the top of a mountain every morning to get into elk. And if you hunt until dark, then you’ll be stumbling down a mountain in the dark. So if you leave three hours before daylight to get up high, hunt until dark, and then hike down, get to camp, and have to whip up a dinner, that makes for a longggg day. And besides that, by the third day you can barely walk even if you’re in good shape. Or what if you kill something at dusk and have to track it and then gut it? Now it is really late, and you’ll be sleeping with your elk on the side of a wind-blown mountain.

    Why not just hike up to the top, set up a camp, and then the next morning you can just roll out of your bedroll at daylight and start hunting. Basically, getting to sleep three hours later. Then at dusk, when the hunting gets good again, you can hunt right until dark, and then take a short hike over to your camp, whip out a fast dinner, and go to bed. That sounds a lot better, doesn’t it?
  • "Infantry Speaking"--Men of the West. The article reproduced Chapter 21 of Children of Yesterday by Jan Valtin (published in 1946). The book appears to be out of print, but a PDF is available here. An excerpt:
Private Ralph Cole of Mount Pleasant, Michigan: Night attack. The Japs came in like a laughing pack of hyenas, bayonets in front and tossing grenades. Everything was in an uproar, shrapnel flying, bullets whizzing, tracers zipping like lightning through the jungle. And suddenly a Jap jumped into my fox hole. My machete was sticking in the ground nearby. I grabbed it and hacked away at the Jap. I hacked his arm off with one good swipe. He backed away and I shot him a couple of times. Still he kept coming. He was the hardest dying character I’ve ever met. Later when I tried to get some sleep he woke me up with his moaning. So I put him out of his misery with two more shots. I noticed then that I was bleeding, too. Shrapnel.
    Lindley Johnson is NASA's planetary defense officer. He says we now have the technology to detect things like asteroids far in advance.

    "We believe we have already found all of the near-Earth asteroids that are of that size that can cause the same kind of catastrophe that occurred to the dinosaurs but there are still a few large ones to find out there," Johnson told CBN News.

    Johnson and other planetary defenders have a plan to redirect and asteroid potentially heading for earth. Next summer, NASA will test that capability for the first time by crashing a probe into an asteroid's moon, knocking it off orbit, and off-course.

VIDEO: "A Simple Trick Everyone Who Carries a Hatchet Should Know! Axe, Survival, Bushcraft, Woodworking"--Coalcracker Buchcraft (6 min.). A method for splitting wood using a hatchet or small ax. Basically, you use the hatchet to make wooden wedges to then use in splitting the wood.

The Current Unrest:

    Donald Trump took a massive step towards admitting defeat in the election Monday night by saying he was allowing the transition to Joe Biden to begin - but immediately claimed he can still overturn his defeat at the hands of voters. 

    General Services Administration Chief Emily Murphy told President-elect Biden in a letter that he can start accessing federal resources to begin the presidential transition process early Monday evening.

    Murphy released a letter to Biden announcing the move, but dedicated a considerable portion to defending her own reputation and claiming she had been threatened and harassed.

But two-thirds of Republican voters want Trump to run again in 2024 - and 79% believe that the 2020 election was stolen through fraud.
    The other main position [regarding the election outcome]—and let me hasten to acknowledge that it is mine—is that this election was riddled with voter fraud. Nor was it the usual taken-for-granted and (between us sophisticated men of the world) acceptable margin of fraud but a planned and systematic assault on the integrity of our election that overturned a convincing victory for Donald Trump.

    I believe this partly because of the stunning statistical anomalies in the election—I have written about this several times (here, for example, and here).

    But I believe the election was fraudulent for other reasons as well. Perhaps the chief reason has to do with the allegations put forward by Sidney Powell, a prominent attorney who is part of President Trump’s legal team. [UPDATE: make that “was.” Late Sunday afternoon, Jenna Ellis tweeted an announcement that Powell was “not a member of the Trump legal team.”] She has laid out her case many times in the last couple of weeks, including at an “opening statement” press conference on November 19 at which she, Rudy Giuliani, Jenna Ellis, and other members of Trump’s legal team offered a précis of their case.

    Their presentation was widely, if not quite universally, condemned by the media. “Where is the evidence?” was one cry, but another, less articulate though more insistent was “Evidence be damned, just shut up and get Trump out of office!”

Adam Housley, formerly of Fox News, now just using his sources to do twitter for fun, says “One of the claims by Powell I have looked into…the claim a location was raided in Germany with servers. I have 3 sources on this…all as solid as they come. Here is what I have found: 1.There is/was a clandestine location in Frankfurt run by CIA used to monitor/manipulate elections around globe. 2.That location did have servers & a front company as cover. 3.I cannot confirm the location was tied to U.S. elections. 4. One source says raided, 2 don’t know.” 

  • "To Restore Election Integrity, End Mail-In Vote Fraud"-- Bert Peterson, American Thinker. The author explains why mail-in voting is so susceptible to fraud, and outlines an argument for using the 14th Amendment to strike down state laws that open voting procedures to fraud. The relevant portion of the 14th Amendment reads: "no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States." Since voting is a right, the author argues, "[i]n passing voter laws that, through their vulnerabilities to fraud, needlessly risk the diminishment of votes that are legally cast, states 'abridge the privileges of citizens of the United States' under their own purview."
    Williams College Professor Steven Miller, a Yale and Princeton trained math expert, said he analyzed Pennsylvania ballot data collected by former Trump campaign data chief Matt Braynard as well as 2,684 voter interviews conducted by a phone bank and found two concerning patterns. One involved possible votes that were not counted, the other ballots that appeared to be requested by someone other than a registered voter.

    "I estimate that the number of ballots that were either requested by someone other than the registered Republican or requested and returned but not counted range from 89,397 to 98,801," Miller said in the sworn statement provided to Just the News. 

    According to Pennsylvania state data for early and absentee ballot requests, there are roughly 165,000 ballots requested in the names of registered GOP voters that had not been counted as of Nov. 16.
  • Stasi, American style: "Oregon Gov. Kate Brown urges residents to call cops on shutdown violators"--Washington Times. 
    • Related: "Buffalo Business Owners Revolt Against Health Department and Sheriffs: 'GET OUT! WE WILL NOT COMPLY'"--PJ Media. The embedded video shows a couple members of the local health department accompanied by a couple Sheriff's deputies trying to break up a meeting of business owners who were meeting to strategize how to survive the latest New York state shutdown of non-essential businesses. Eventually they leave when the property owner told them they were trespassing and needed a warrant. The health department official initially denied needing a warrant, but it has long been established that a business owner can demand a warrant before allowing an inspection official to enter a portion of business property not open to the public. Marshall v. Barlow's, Inc., 436 U.S. 307, 98 S. Ct. 1816, 56 L. Ed. 2d 305 (1978).
  • "What is the Great Reset?"--Eric Worrall, Watts Up With That. Worrall presents a nice summary of what is the Great Reset. He begins, though, by noting what would be the end result of such plan:
According to the World Economic Forum website, the Great Reset is an initiative to build a fairer, more sustainable world, through international cooperation. An attempt to reassert the authority of governments over capitalism, to close remaining tax loopholes, and to ensure fairer outcomes for everyone. There’s just one problem. If the WEF Great Reset initiative succeeds, civilisation could end.

Capital Research Center’s (CRC) Robert Stilson pulls back the curtains on BankFWD, a new effort among rich donors on the Left “to pressure major banks to commit to phasing out financing for (and investment in) oil and gas companies unless those companies have a ‘credible strategy to transition in line with limiting global warming to 1.5° [Celsius].'”

  • "The Great Reset"--The Decline and Fall of the United States of America. Short take:
    Remember that the globalist position is that national borders are obsolete, and that national sovereignty is an impediment to world peace. Despite all their talk about diversity in the abstract, globalists see different people and different cultures as entirely interchangeable cogs in a great big GDP machine. All the postwar international organizations such as the UN, the European Union, the World Health Organization, the World Back, the International Monetary Fund, etc. were built with the aim of ensuring greater peace and cooperation between nations, but in nearly every case they result in the erosion of national sovereignty and the rule by fiat of unelected technocrats.

    These globalist technocratic elites have long been seeding their ideas into popular culture. Look through any fashion magazine over the past five years and see stories about happy Millennials living in tiny pods, eating bugs, and living entirely atomized lives. Just like the WEF’s predictions, these articles present a future where you will not own a car that you can drive anywhere you want, but instead use ride-sharing or mass transit to go where you need in your city. Instead of owning a house, you rent a bed in a co-living space, sort of like a sailor’s bunk on a battleship. Instead of settling down and building a traditional nuclear family of father, mother, and children, you will live with friends and colleagues. Hookups will have entirely replaced marriage and even dating. Any children born into this environment will be communal property. Mainstream media has been publishing articles glamorizing polyamory over the past few years, each one showing effete beta males sharing an overweight woman, trying to normalize this perverse arrangement.

    This all sounds like a dystopian horror to you and me, but to the technocrats, it is the ideal society in their new world order. We will eat bugs and like it, while the elites continue to eat steak at the World Economic Forum headquarters in Davos, Switzerland.
  • "Trump at the Rubicon: How the Insurrection Act and Militia Act Empower Trump to Cast the Die" by Alexander Macris. Politicians and pundits on the Left are promising or calling for investigations into Trump and his family post election, possible criminal investigations, and, at a minimum, making sure that none of them ever find work again. The consequence of these threats is that it may make Trump take drastic steps to make sure that he is selected as the winner of the 2020 election. Macris explains that one of the most recent changes to the Insurrection Act was the addition of 10 USC § 253 which provides:
The President, by using the militia or the armed forces, or both, or by any other means, shall take such measures as he considers necessary to suppress, in a State, any insurrection, domestic violence, unlawful combination, or conspiracy, if it-
  1. so hinders the execution of the laws of that State, and of the United States within the State, that any part or class of its people is deprived of a right, privilege, immunity, or protection named in the Constitution and secured by law, and the constituted authorities of that State are unable, fail, or refuse to protect that right, privilege, or immunity, or to give that protection; or
  2. opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.
Macris argues that Trump could declare that the rampant fraud in this election has deprived some 70 million people of their right to fair elections and use that as an excuse to invoke the Insurrection Act and call up the militia.

        David Atkins, a newly elected California member of the Democratic National Committee, declared recently that Democrats and liberals should "start thinking in terms of post-WWII Germany or Japan" in order to "deprogram 75 million people."

        The 75 million people he referred to are presumably Trump supporters.
     
  • "Dispatch 46: Revolution, Insurgency, and Civil War – we are there"--Michael Yon. He warns:

The big step into war comes when average, intelligent people see the government as illegitimate. We are there. Huge numbers of Americans are not just disgruntled with the government but see the government as actively hostile to their own families, beliefs, and wellbeing.

Also:

    I am no virologist, or epidemiologist, but I have paid attention to pandemic for many years. Those who watched my 2019 livestreams from Hong Kong will remember my talking about ongoing pandemic such as swine flu. I’ve read more than forty books on pandemic and endless articles over the years in large part because there is a Devil’s Triangle between War, Pandemic, Famine. If you get one of these legs in considerable magnitude, the other two legs will follow. Every time. It’s even in the Bible.

    This is old knowledge that our ancestors knew well, and I pay very close attention to old people and ancestral knowledge. And with this Devil’s Triangle always comes mass human migrations. Watch. I’ve been saying it a long time because our ancestors wrote it down and I read their warnings. The second wave of this pandemic also was a solid bet.

    Here is the trick on why I read so much on war, pandemic, famine: you don’t need to be an army general to understand war at a high level. You need that training and expertise to effectively wage war, but not to understand the general patterns. Likewise with pandemic. There is much more to pandemic than the bug. The human reaction – often global – can have relatively little to do with the panic and human reaction. The medical side is only part of the larger picture.

    In other words, we do not need to be experts in fire-physics to understand the human reaction. We need some basis in the physics of fires but there are diminishing returns on investing time in studying thermal radiation and chemical reactions when we are trying to predict what people will do and how we should prepare and react. And to this end, I say with high confidence that someone like Dr. Fauci with medical experience is no more qualified to talk about the economic, political, and other dimensions than other educated people, and likely is far less capable of understanding those dimensions as are many others.

    The China virus is only one of many dimensions. If our economy collapses, we will take a lot more countries with us, and the chance an severity of internal civil war within the United States and other countries will skyrocket, not to mention greatly increased probabilities of nation on nation wars. The virus is important but trivial on the scale of other possibilities and probabilities.

    Everything we are going through now – our ancestors went through a thousand times and a thousand times more. There is little difference now other than we have smartphones made in the same China that the virus and fentanyl came from. The human reactions and tendencies are well-described in old holy books, other books, and the U.S. Constitution. You don’t need any new books to understand what is happening. 

    It might be terrifying to admit, but American democracy depends on authorities who have lost the public trust: unbiased state and city officials to ensure procedural fairness, unbiased election workers to ensure vote integrity, unbiased judges to enforce that integrity, and unbiased media to inform the American people about the other three. Who will audit the auditors? To examine one test case, the Georgia GOP has already raised alarms that the promised audit in their state does not meet crucial evidentiary criteria. Will something be done?

    This election represents the ultimate test of our system and its resilience in a partisan age. If partisans can seize levers of power that impact election results, and they’ve shown they’ll stop at nothing in their revanchism, why engage in elections at all? 

    And what other recourse, short of revolution, can right the situation? 
    While a large number of people throughout the world are celebrating what they believe is the end of the Trump phenomenon, the fact is this president, who has been so widely reviled as freakish, corrupt, accidental, illegitimate, and a virtually total failure, has received nearly 72 million votes to remain as president, even though he fell short of Joe Biden’s total.

    Whatever happens, Mr. Trump has reoriented the Republican Party from country-club altruists, to which it reverted after the Reagan era, to a political organization soundly based in the lower-middle and working classes and among the principal minorities.

    It is a considerable achievement that Mr. Trump has reduced poverty and generated sharp gains in the income of the lowest 20% of income-earners while reinforcing the capitalist credentials of the Republicans. The notion that the changes he has wrought in his party and his policies have been rejected is rubbish; they were effectively ratified in the congressional and state elections and in the huge increase that he gained in the Republican presidential vote.

    If Mr. Trump has really lost, it has been to a vast and fervent coalition that included virtually the entire national press, the administrative state, the financial establishment, Big Tech acting as media censors, Hollywood in all its garish and opinionated fatuity, China’s self-interested American friends, and a near unanimity of academic and ostensibly intellectual opinion, and that does not erase or even significantly diminish his achievement.

    If he wishes, Mr. Trump could spend the next four years as Andrew Jackson did between 1825 and 1828, claiming with some plausibility that he has been robbed of the presidency, while smoothing some of the gratuitously abrasive aspects of his public personality.

    President Biden will take office at the head of a profoundly divided party trying to bridge anti-white urban guerrillas and vandals masquerading as civil-rights crusaders across the traditional liberal-Democratic heartland to the powerful and entrenched interests that united against the alarmingly populist Mr. Trump.

    If the Republicans win at least one of the senatorial runoffs in Georgia, Mr. Biden will do this as only the fourth president elected without his party controlling the Senate (after Taylor, Cleveland, Nixon and the senior Bush).

    A nonpartisan poll, while reflecting a distinct advantage for Mr. Biden over Mr. Trump, disclosed that 13% of Alabama voters who thought leadership was most important regarded Mr. Biden as a strong leader, compared to 86%, whether they liked him or not, for Mr. Trump. Mr. Biden has spent nearly half a century in legislative work, revels in personal contact with other politicians, and is personally well liked, so he may achieve a reduction in the intensity of political discussion and may even succeed in putting together a governing majority for certain issues.

    But he is very unexciting, unoriginal, and apparently enervated. He is unlikely to seek re-election or to be able to pass on to the next Democratic nominee an administration laden with prestige and popularity. Donald Trump, or more likely someone carefully endorsed by him, could carry the banner of Republican populism to victory and resume the assault, though with relative civility, on the entrenched bipartisan establishment that may have succeeded in easing out the great orange ogre. What his enemies like to think of as the end of Mr. Trump is just as likely the beginning.

 

VIDEO: "200 $ Chinese Micro Bow MAXED OUT EXTREME (Tutorial)"--JoergSprave (20 min.)
A tutorial on how to make one of his "Instant Legolas" bows.

Miscellany:

    According to a report on One America News, DuckDuckGo is not much of a safe alternative for Internet users.

    OAN spoke to Rich Granville, CEO of search engine site Yippy.com , and Granville pointed out that contrary to what DuckDuckGo claims, its code source contains customer tracking devices called “cookies.”

    A cookie is a line of code that allows the website to track its visitors. Cookies are used by Google to target users for specific ads. If a user has visited a lot of sports sites, Google will see that and tailor ads that might appeal to a sports fan. If that user has bought a lot of books online, the ads may pop up for books sellers. And on and on.

    DuckDuckGo, though, claims it is a “private” search engine and that it never tracks users. However, according to Granville, a look at the search site’s source code shows that DuckDuckGo does include several cookies.

    U.S. News reported that marriage rates reached a historic low in 2018, with only 6.5 people out of 1,000 getting married — the lowest level in 118 years. 

    Philip Cohen, a sociology professor at the University of Maryland, says, "Women's independence and gender equality is a huge factor in the long-term decline in marriage."

    There has also been a rise in men's rights groups such as Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) and the Manosphere, where men in droves complain about men's unfair treatment in relationships and family courts. They're tired of being brow-beaten by women and the gender bias laws against men. For this reason, millions of men are opting out of marriage altogether.

The bulk of the article is about the fact that men have the most to lose in the event of a divorce (80% of which are initiated by women) due to how skewed family law and the courts are in favor of women receiving alimony and getting custody of the children (together with the child support). Not mentioned is the role that hypergamy and vainglory plays in all of this. 
  • I recently started watching the television series, Prodigal Son, which is about a profiler working for the NYPD whose father is an infamous serial killer, so I found this article interesting: "A Guide to Black Mass Murderers"--American Renaissance. As the author notes, Hollywood and the news media give the impression that the majority of serial killers are white males. However, just as blacks are the majority of murderers in the United States, so too they are the majority of serial killers. In fact the most prolific serial killer in the United States, Samuel Little, is a black man. This piece is not so much an article but a collection of articles about the prevalence of black serial killers.
    The typical "profile" in a movie or television show is "white male in his 30's or 40's and a loner." I suspect that it is true in real life as well: I'm old enough to remember that this was the basic profile made public as police tried to track down a serial killer terrorizing Atlanta, Georgia, in the early 1980s almost up to the point that they announced the arrest of a black man, Wayne Williams. 

    Last year saw the arrest of Billy Chemirmir who was charged with 14 counts of murder, but is suspected of being involved in 1,000 unexplained deaths. 

    Scientists have inserted a human gene in the brains of monkeys to make them larger and more wrinkled in disconcerting lab experiments. 

    Experts found the insertion of the gene, called ARHGAP11B, resulted in a larger neocortex in the foetus of a common marmoset. 
    
    The neocortex is the deeply grooved outer layer of the brain that is involved with reasoning, language, conscious thought and other important functions. 
    The iconic 18-acre radar telescope at Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico cannot be salvaged after it was damaged by broken cables and will be demolished, the National Science Foundation announced Thursday.

    The damage from cable breaks in August and early November has left the radar dish and surrounding structures unsafe and subject to further collapse at any time, foundation officials said.

In one respect, I see this as a sign of national decline because the money isn't available to repair it. But the ability to link telescopes so that widely dispersed telescopes essentially act as one large radio telescope probably makes it unnecessary to repair Arecibo. 
    A new study from Tel Aviv University (TAU) and the Shamir Medical Center in Israel indicates that hyperbaric oxygen treatments (HBOT) in healthy aging adults can stop the aging of blood cells and reverse the aging process. In the biological sense, the adults' blood cells actually grow younger as the treatments progress.

    The researchers found that a unique protocol of treatments with high-pressure oxygen in a pressure chamber can reverse two major processes associated with aging and its illnesses: the shortening of telomeres (protective regions located at both ends of every chromosome) and the accumulation of old and malfunctioning cells in the body. Focusing on immune cells containing DNA obtained from the participants' blood, the study discovered a lengthening of up to 38% of the telomeres, as well as a decrease of up to 37% in the presence of senescent cells.

    The first drug was approved Friday for a rare genetic disorder that stunts growth and causes rapid aging in children, after studies showed it can extend their lives.

    Kids with the genetic disorder progeria typically die in their early teens, usually from heart disease. But in testing, children taking the drug Zokinvy lived 2 1/2 years longer on average.

    The U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the capsules for progeria and a related condition.

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2 comments:

  1. John WilderNovember 24, 2020 at 10:56 PM

    Government policy absolutely determines marriage and fertility rates. And marriage rates determine virtue. And fertility? Determines destiny.

    Funny that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentNovember 25, 2020 at 8:06 PM

      While it shouldn’t be surprising, fecundity in modern countries is directly related to religiousity. The future belongs to conservative Christians.

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