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Tuesday, December 1, 2020

A Quick Run Around The Web (12/1/2020)

VIDEO: "Two-Man Fire Team Tactics"--UF Pro (2 min.)
This illustrates how a 2-man team might react to an ambush, showing firing and maneuver with a 2-man element, and another reason why you want a larger capacity magazine--suppressive fire. 

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

    If in your world view, you can say anything to anybody without repercussions, then good for you. It’s naive and perhaps even suicidal, but it is your right to think that way. Here’s the thing though: being verbally aggressive is often the precursor to violent behavior. Just because you don’t punch somebody, doesn’t mean you are not acting aggressively when you called him a “Goddamned fucking idiot!!!!” You might feel justified, you might feel righteous in saying so, but you are still aggressive, even if you have no intention of turning that aggression into physical violence.

    Guess what: some people will take you seriously anyway and assume you’ll go to the violence stage in the next couple of seconds. So they don’t wait for your punch to come and hit you first. They don’t know you, they don’t know if you’ll lash out or not. They’ll just assume you will eventually strike, given your aggressive verbal tirade. What’s more, legally speaking, they will be able to present a strong case in their defense because if you are the only one screaming obscenities, you are the aggressor, not they…

Christ taught that we should love our neighbors, but even more basic is that we shouldn't be a**holes.

  •  "The Best Coat Pocket Defensive Pistols"--Active Response Training. Greg Ellifritz explains in this article that winter carry brings its own complications, including that it is more difficult to get to a firearm you may be carrying on your waste. The historical remedy to this is to carry a small gun in a coat pocket that you can quickly access (perhaps even shooting through the pocket material) giving you time to access your primary handgun if need be. But, as Ellifritz also explains, the handguns need to be light or they will print or pull your coat off kilter. Another concern is muzzle-flash, if you are shooting through the pocket material, because too much flash/blast could set your clothing on fire! Thus, Ellifritz narrows down the choice to alloy framed snubnosed hammerless (or shrouded) revolvers in .38 Special or, if recoil is an issue, .22 LR.
  • "Canadian Army Looks To Replace Ageing Hi-Powers"--The Firearm Blog. "We don’t yet know what sort of pistol and what sort of characteristics the Canadian Army will be looking for yet, but the pistol is very likely going to be modular, ambidextrous and chambered in the ubiquitous 9x19mm round." The UK changed from the Browning to the Glock 17 Gen4 in 2013 (although they also have older Sig P226s).  Australia appears to still be using the Browning. New Zealand uses the Glock 17. My guess is that Canada will probably either opt for the Glock or the Sig P320.
  • "Ball And Dummy"--Art of the Rifle. The author explains: "To sum ball and dummy up, it involves interspersing dummy rounds and live rounds during a string of fire.  The shooter should not know beforehand whether there’s a dummy or a live round in the chamber.  Ideally, to start out with, give a live round to induce the flinch.  A rimfire may not induce a flinch, so this is probably more applicable with centerfire cartridges.  After the first live round, go heavier on the dummies until the flinching and blinking goes away.  Then reintroduce live rounds.  If a flinch reappears, go back to dummies."
  • "US Army Considering Squad Size Change"--Overt Defense. From the lede:
With the Next Generation Squad Weapon (NGSW) program underway, the US army is considering changes in squad size. Working with the basic assumption that introducing new weapons might mean a change in optimal squad organization, the Army’s Maneuver Battle Lab recently revealed that they have commenced a study tackling the issue. While it is uncertain if any change will result from the study, the army had already indicated that the size of the squad will not fall below 9 men.

The article discusses some of the history of the squad and notes that the Marines are experimenting with 15 man squads. The two factors driving the changes are (1) the wider adoption of automatic rifles capable of suppressive fire so, in effect, every member can be an automatic rifleman, and (2) that the squads are too small for effective fire and maneuver using only the elements within the squad. Another factor which will probably require at least one new member to the squad is that small drones are pushing intelligence gathering down to the squad level, but you will need someone that can carry and deploy small surveillance drones. Thus, at a minimum, I would expect the squad to increase to 10 men, with an "assistant squad leader" in charge of communications and drones, but I suspect that they will add a third fire team.
  • "Winning In The Jungle: B-720 Tips Of The Trade"--American Partisan. This is an update to the B-52 tips that American Partisan had published earlier. These are lengthy, detailed lists of tips and tricks, and will probably overwhelm most people trying to take it all in at once. I believe that the person that will get the most out of this list will be the person with some background in reconnaissance patrols and/or actively practicing such techniques. That is, practice, read through the list and pick up a few additional tips, incorporate that into your techniques, practice and repeat.
  • "Wartime Networks" by Sam Culper, Guerrilla America. From the article:
    I’m re-reading Networks of Rebellion for the umpteenth time. Really, for the third time but it feels like more.

    It’s a dense, data rich, academic view of insurgency. Not for the weak of mind or those who get bored easily, but the payoff is the knowledge of what makes and breaks insurgent networks.

    The greatest take away so far is that peacetime networks form the basis of wartime insurgent networks.

    In other words, you go to irregular war with the friends you have, not necessarily the friends you want.

    And it reminded me of one of David Kilcullen’s books called The Accidental Guerrilla. Kilcullen explains Usama bin Laden’s strategy of marrying into the family of Mullah Omar (or maybe Omar married into UBL’s), which is how UBL became ingratiated into Afghan Pashtun culture.

    And under the code of Pashtunwali, the Pashtuns were obligated to protect UBL. The Taliban couldn’t give up UBL based on this honor code, which virtually assured a ground war in Afghanistan to defeat the Taliban and vanquish al-Qaeda.
    If you are new to the notion of reloading your own ammunition, before you even think of spending any money on equipment or components, get a good reloading manual. Get several manuals, such as from Speer, Hornady, Sierra, Nosler, as well as the powder manufacturers. Hodgdon and Alliant are the two major powder suppliers in the U.S. VihtaVouri is an excellent powder from Finland, and is most definitely worth consideration. All suppliers publish load data for their powders for more cartridges than one can imagine.

    Study each one of these manuals, as well as the online loading data provided by the powder manufacturers, and see how variations of components and powders might affect your decisions. ...

You will also note that the manuals may differ quite a bit on certain loads. For instance, I've noticed that Hornady is generally much more conservative in their recommendations--I had one bullet and powder combination where the maximum load in the Hornady manual was the starting load in a different manual. On another point, the author recommends sticking to a basic balance beam scale for measuring powder weights. No. Electronic scales are not that expensive if you are just going with a basic scale, and they are much easier to work with.

  • "Reloading 7.62x39mm" by Norman Gray for Starline Brass. Some warnings to separate and sort your brass because you won't be able to reload steel casings or casings that are Berden primed, and while most manufacturers use large rifle primers, a few use small rifle primers. Another thing to keep in mind is that some American made rifles in 7.62x39mm had a .308 bore as opposed to the .311 bore typical of the Eastern bloc or Chinese rifles. (The author notes that Ruger switched to a .311 bore barrel for the Mini-30 in 1992, but earlier versions used a .308 barrel). The author offers some other tips for the budding reloader and a few of his own recipes. 
  • "The Guns of Thanksgiving" by Philip Schreier, American Rifleman. A look at the firearms that the Pilgrims would have carried. Contrary to popular art, it was not the blunderbuss (which hadn't even been invented) nor the matchlock used by Spanish explorers a century earlier, but snaphaunce muskets. 

The snaphaunce was developed in the late 16th century in Scandinavia and the Low Countries (Holland, Belgium and Flanders). It was the first lock to feature a piece of flint held in a vice-like hammer (referred to as a cock). When fired, the flint would fall on a frizzen, causing a shower of sparks to then drop into the pan, igniting the priming charge. While not as susceptible [as the matchlock] to the sudden changes in weather, the snaphaunce was a marked improvement over trying to keep a lit ember going while also trying not to spill any loose charging powder that might set off an unfortunate chain of events.

  • Some more firearm history: "'V' Is For Victory: The Smith & Wesson Victory Model Revolver" by Bruce N. Canfield, American Rifleman. "While all of the .38 [Military & Police model] revolvers made by Smith & Wesson during World War II were dubbed 'Victory Model,' the term as generally used today refers to the .38 Spl. 4"-barreled revolvers as made under U.S. Navy and U.S. Ordnance Dept. contracts."
  • "One Shot Timer Rules Them All"--Redhawk Firearm Training. A review of the RangeTech Shot Timer. The author writes:
    For those of you that instruct, this is an absolute game-changer!  I can use the sturdy clip to attach the timer itself to the belt, hat, or even shirt collar of one of my students in the center of the line.  This allows me the freedom to move freely behind the firing line, while keeping the sound of the timer where I want it to be!  From my phone, I can change every possible setting of the timer from par times to sensitivity.

    On my other shot timers that I have used, the display is harder to read in shadowed or low-light environments, but because all of the feedback is on my phone, I can not only see it well, but I can save it as well. 

    Here’s my single biggest gain when using the RangeTech - EFFICIENCY.  On other models of shot timers, I have to remember a certain combination of manual buttons in order to scroll through a setting menu, and then hit that manual button a whole bunch of times to get to what I’m needing.  Now, it’s as simple as looking at the entire setting menu for the timer on one screen with my phone, and selecting what I want rapidly.

    This saves precious time when I’ve got students on the line, but personally, it’s an excellent resource to have when dry-firing for my own proficiency.  I have saved precious minutes between reps by having the ability to change every setting on this timer from my phone instead of a click-and-scroll manual button menu.

And at about $75, it is a lot less than other shot timers. My shot timer is the Competition Electronics Pocket Pro 2. It's not pretty and it uses up 9 volt batteries like there is no tomorrow even if the timer has been turned off, but it works. 

    On November 15, 1884, [Oscar] Thomas made a beeline to the store of Witzleben & Key on Main and Sixth streets in Caldwell, Kansas. He had an ongoing beef with the store because it would not sell him goods on credit. Thomas was armed to the hilt with a dirk knife and a sixshooter. Apparently, he had once told his compadres that he would carry his gun to town if he so desired, and no man or officer of the law would take it from him.

    With a snoot full of who-hit-john, Thomas accosted store clerk Mack Killibraw. Killibraw took up an axe handle and would have used it on Thomas had Mr. Witzleben not taken it from him. Anyway, during the fracas, the town marshals were summoned, and they arrived in time to catch Thomas going for his gun.

    As Marshal Phillips entered the store from the front, Killibraw grabbed Thomas’s hand to keep him from drawing his revolver. Phillips, with his own revolver drawn, ordered Thomas to, “Throw up your hands.”

    Thomas turned, faced Phillips, and calmly made a move to draw his gun. Phillips fired, whereupon Thomas dropped down partially behind the store counter. Phillips again told him to put his hands up. He refused again.

    By then Assistant Marshal Wood had entered the store from a side door, and after Thomas refused to throw out his guns, Phillips commanded Wood to shoot. Wood did as he was ordered, hitting Thomas clean in the head with a shot from his revolver. Thomas died from his wounds the next morning. An autopsy showed Phillips’s bullet had hit Thomas in the left breast, passed through, and came out to the right of his spine. Wood’s bullet entered Thomas’s skull to the left of the junction of the parietal bones and the occipital bone, passed through the brain, lacerating it, and exited through the middle of the forehead.

  • "Digging Your Own Well the Right Way" by Tom Marlowe, The Survivalist Blog. A detailed look at wells and the different methods of digging wells. One thing to be aware of, particular in the western United States, is that you may be required to apply for a water right or license from the state in order to draw water because in those states you may not have a property right in the water that flows or collects over, or under, your property. 
  • "Bug Out Batteries"--Blue Collar Prepping. This is a follow up to the author's recent article on alkaline versus rechargeable batteries. In this article, she looks at different methods of recharging, including the Brunton Explorer solar recharger, a newer Panergy Solar Charger & Battery Bank, and the Eton FRX2 handcranked generator/radio/charger. If you are wanting to charge AA or AAA sized batteries, she recommends the Guide 10 Plus recharger from Goal Zero with a mini-USB input.
  • This might be a fun project: "Building a radio receiver - how the first receivers worked"--Rebuilding Civilization. He explains:
    The first receivers made use of something called a “coherer”. It’s really just a pile of metal filings that are loosely placed between two electrodes.

    It has a remarkable behavior that allows us to detect radio waves.  When no radio waves are present, the resistance between the electrodes is quite high. However, when a radio frequency is present, the metal filings microscopically "weld" together and the resistance drops dramatically. This behavior can be used in an electrical circuit to alert us to the presence of radio waves and it will be covered in detail below. The coherer must then be reset, which involves shaking up the filings to cause the coherer to go back to its non-conductive state, in order to detect the next signal.

The receivers using coherers were only good for pulsed signals (e.g., Morse code) and needed a strong signal to work. The article describes the circuit needed and how tuning was based on the length of the antenna.  

    Beginning in 2000, the Dallas P.D. equipped its patrol cars with GPS locators, which provide data on the vehicle’s coordinates every half-minute. Weisburd analyzed police location data from 2009 against 911 calls in each “beat,” the roughly two-square-mile area that DPD officers patrol. The resulting dataset provides a minute-by-minute measure of police presence and crime levels across Dallas.

    There’s a classic problem associated with similar studies of police effect on crime. If an increase in crime causes police to flood a particular area, then a comparative analysis may suggest that an increase in the number of police correlated with an increase in the crime level. This phenomenon—called simultaneity—caused early researchers to conclude, erroneously, that more police increased crime.

    To address this problem, Weisburd takes advantage of the Dallas PD’s “rapid response” mandate, which calls on officers to respond to emergency calls within minutes. Because this mandate often requires officers to leave their beats, one can examine how a call for help in another area of the city affects crime rates in the area that the departed cop was meant to be patrolling. Weisburd focuses on non-crime out-of-beat calls, ensuring that the out-of-beat event is not of the same sort as the crimes in-beat she subsequently tracks.

    The effect is pronounced. Weisburd finds that a 10 percent decrease in time spent in a beat results in a 7.4 percent increase in crime, as measured by 911 calls. Conversely, a 10 percent increase in time on beat reduces public disturbances by 6 percent to 7 percent, and burglaries by 5 percent. In other words, the presence of cops has a major effect on the crime rate.

    But by what mechanism do police alter the crime rate? Weisburd proposes two possibilities: that the mere presence of an officer deters crime, or that the presence of an officer increases the chance that an offender will be arrested before he commits multiple crimes, thus lowering the overall offense rate.

Of course, not all law enforcement is equal. We are well aware of the many failures of the Broward County Sheriff's Department, but here is a new one: a "squad" of eighteen (18) deputies watched a young black man attempting to break into a house without confronting the attempted burglar or doing anything to stop him. While the crippled homeowner faced the door on his own, crutches and a firearm in hand, telling the 911 dispatcher how scared he was, the deputies stood down the street for 15 minutes and did nothing until the burglar gave up and voluntarily surrendered. The justification for this dereliction of duty? The deputies were supposedly trying to set up a perimeter to make sure no one else was hurt by the lone, unarmed perp. My opinion is that what they were actually waiting for was for the resident to shoot the perp, and then rush in and arrest the resident.


VIDEO: "Review and refresher"--30 Second Tactics (4 min.)
A roundup of some key tips for safe use and operation of a patrol rifle and pistol light.

The Current Unrest:

This move means that should Joe Biden emerge as the victor in the 2020 election, that Durham can continue his investigation and cannot be easily fired by the Biden administration. The Associated Press notes that “a special counsel can be fired only by the attorney general and for specific reasons, such as misconduct, dereliction of duty, conflict of interest of other violations of Justice Department policies,” and that an attorney general must “document those reasons in writing.”
    ... that peaceful and trustworthy elections are likely no longer possible in America means Americans no longer have any peaceful options should the ruling powers do things that the public doesn’t like. Eventually, the response will be violence, and bloodshed, and brutality.

    I am not calling for it. I am simply predicting that it will happen, all because the Democrats refused to accept the legality of the 2016 election and then used any means to steal the 2020 elections, and the Republicans stood by and let them do it.
    During the weeks following November 3, innumerable election experts and statistical analysts have pored over the voting data upon which former Vice President Joe Biden’s purported campaign victory ostensibly stands. A growing body of evidence ranging from straightforward ballot audits to complex quantitative analyses suggests that the tabulation of the votes was characterized by enough chicanery to alter the outcome of the election. Consequently, a consensus has gradually developed among the auditors of publicly available information released by the states, and it contradicts the narrative promulgated by the Democrats and the media. The more data experts see, the less convinced they are that Biden won.

    Among the analysts who question the legitimacy of Biden’s victory is Dr. Navid Keshavarz-Nia, a cybersecurity expert whose technical expertise was touted by the New York Times last September and who has been described as a hero in the Washington Monthly. It’s unlikely that either publication will be singing his praises for his work pursuant to the recent election. His damning analysis of the electronic manipulation of votes that occurred in the early hours of November 4 appears in a sworn affidavit included with C.J. Pearson v. Kemp, a lawsuit filed by Attorney Sidney Powell in the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Georgia. His nine-page affidavit (Exhibit 26) describes how it is possible to manipulate votes, where this occurred, and sums up his findings as follows:

I conclude with high confidence that the election 2020 data were altered in all battleground states resulting in hundreds of thousands of votes that were cast for President Trump to be transferred to Vice President Biden. These alterations were the result of systemic and widespread exploitable vulnerabilities in DVS, Scytl/SOE Software and Smartmatic systems that enabled operators to achieve the desired results. In my view, the evidence is overwhelming and incontrovertible.

    Dr. Keshavarz-Nia is by no means the only expert to reach the conclusion that widespread vote-tampering occurred. This examination of the election results, for example, uses quantitative analysis to identify some very odd anomalies in the 2020 vote patterns. But it isn’t necessary to be a sophisticated statistician or cybersecurity expert possessed of arcane knowledge of how voting machines operate to see that enough ballot fraud occurred to change the election results in several states. That Keshavarz-Nia provides his findings in a sworn affidavit, under penalty of perjury, renders him highly credible. Still, his conclusions are rather opaque to anyone without an enormous amount of training and experience in his field. This requires many of us to take what he says on faith.

    Giuliani’s first witness at the was officer retired U.S. Army Colonel Phil Waldron, a cybersecurity expert who spent half of his 30-year military career as a cavalry officer, conducting armed reconnaissance, and the last half of his career in information warfare.

    Waldron stated that the common software in most of the automated systems operating in the United States today come from Smartmatic Voting Systems and are vulnerable to hackers or on-site manipulation.

    Waldon said that his “white hat hackers” had witnessed Dominion communicating with overseas servers, directly contradicting fired Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) Director Chris Krebs, who said the 2020 election was “the most secure in American history” and that “there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised.”

    He said his team used a reconnaissance tool to look at the Dominion voting network on November 3, confirming that the it was connected to the internet, and that “there were plenty of vulnerabilities” allowing hackers to “penetrate the system.”

    Waldon said his team observed “packet traffic” that went from the U.S. to Frankfurt, Germany, but wasn’t sure if the traffic was coming from Dominion, or another automated voting system.

    He explained that “packet traffic” are “bits of information that are sent over the internet protocol from one point to another.” An automated voting system company called Scytl is located in Germany.

    The four updates in question (coming early on November 4, 2020) are: a 6:31 a.m. Eastern update in Michigan with 141,258 Joe Biden votes and 5,968 Donald Trump votes; a 3:42 a.m. Central update in Wisconsin with 143,379 Biden votes and 25,163 Trump votes; a 1:34 a.m. Eastern update in Georgia with 136,155 Biden votes and 29,115 Trump votes; and a 3:50 a.m. Eastern update in Michigan with 54,497 Biden votes and 4,718 Trump votes.

    Without these updates, Biden would have lost the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Georgia, giving him 42 fewer votes in the Electoral College and costing him the presidency.

    Citing state records, the lawsuit claims that Benson’s office sent out 355,392 unsolicited ballots. Northon explained that Michigan law requires two signatures for absentee voting: a signature on an application form and a signature on the security sleeve for the ballot. In this election, officials mailed out more than 300,000 ballots that no one had requested.

    * * *

    ... almost 30,000 voters said they had sent in absentee ballots but Michigan’s voting records show those ballots were not counted. The lawyer explained that Matthew Brainard conducted a survey and found “29,682 people said they requested a ballot, said they voted, and their ballot wasn’t counted. The state’s records show it wasn’t counted.”

    Why did their ballots not make it to the final tally? Northon said the Amistad Project has “more than three dozen affidavits” testifying that officials threw out ballots when they did not like the result. ...

    Michigan officials counted another 35,109 ballots that were not associated with any address. ... According to Northon, voters “were sent an absentee ballot, but there’s no address on file. They voted. That violates the law.”

    Michigan officials also counted 13,248 ballots cast by individuals who were registered to vote in another state. They also counted 317 ballots from people who voted more than once and 259 ballots from voters who listed only an email address instead of a physical address. Finally, election officials mailed out at least 74,000 absentee ballots that voters requested online.

    “The statute requires a signature, all they’re doing is checking a box,” Northon explained.

    These illegal tabulations and omissions add up to more than three times the margin of victory in the State of Michigan. ...


"The Lost 10 Tribes (LDS Last Days) When will they return?"--Gospel Lessons (16 min.)

Miscellany:

Contrary to popular belief, globalization has functioned as a substitute for innovation and growth. With globalization on the march, the western ruling class could continue to indulge in its most preferred activities, regulation and taxation, in an environment where both of these political addictions appeared sustainable. Non-western elites could perpetuate their authoritarian regimes, garnering growth and legitimacy, from the access to the western markets. Their copy-and-paste method of “innovation” from western firms would fit well with an indigenous business class composed of mostly insiders and ex-regime apparatchiks.

2020 is not the great reckoning predicted in the book of Revelation, despite the fires, the plagues, and the wailing on Twitter. It is the resignation and determination of Exodus, of a dogged people packing up U-Hauls and fleeing this frontier state to seek an even newer, more eternal world.
 
The author is a venture capitalist and part of the locust horde.
    Elaine, a front-line health care worker in Minneapolis, was putting groceries in the trunk of her car recently, in a crowded parking lot at the Uptown Kowalski’s Market, giving her high-alert system a break, as most of us do when some benign activity consumes our attention. It was 5:15 p.m.

    A moment later, a car blaring loud music pulled up behind hers, trapping her at her own car’s trunk. Someone got out of the car and punched Elaine to the ground. An accomplice wrested her handbag from her arm. In the next instant, the car and assailants were gone. It was again a regular evening, just after dark, in a busy parking lot in Uptown.

    The robbery had happened so fast that no one had even noticed. Elaine, my colleague’s mom, a 60-plus year-old woman, beaten and robbed, her eye already swelling shut, had to pull herself up from the ground and stumble into the store for help.

    The store security chief, Scott Nelson, experienced with this kind of crime, immediately began reviewing film from monitoring cameras at nearby businesses.

    Committed to pursuing justice for Elaine, Nelson laments that we “need police service and we need more of it. South Minneapolis is worse than I’ve ever seen it.” He describes the surge of 20-plus attacks a day that are now striking people just going about their daily business, people like Elaine.

    Usually in a stolen car, perpetrators Nelson describes as “young teens, 12-to-14 years old” cruise from lot to lot in neighborhood business districts, waiting for a victim, “like a deer hunter sits in a tree.”

    When they are apprehended, Nelson says consequences are negligible. “I arrest the same people over and over. Nothing happens to them.”
Social Architects (26) is a black identitarian organization headquartered in Washington, D.C. Headed by former Department of Homeland Security employee Ayo Kimathi, “SA-26” fosters pan-Africanism, opposes homosexuality, and resists the deep state. Chris Roberts interviewed SA-26 by email earlier this month. 
    The story of Cynthia Ann and her son, Chief Quanah Parker, is told in S.C. Gwynne's book, Empire of the Summer Moon. Gwynne traces the rise and fall of the Comanche Nation against the backdrop of the fight for control of the American Midwest.

    Gwynne tells Fresh Air's Terry Gross that he became interested in telling the Comanche story because of their integral role in preventing — and then opening up — the American West to white settlers.

    "If you go back through Comanche history, you see that they were the ones who stopped the Spanish from coming North," he explains. "Why did the French stop coming west from Louisiana? Comanches. ... Here was why the West Coast and the East Coast settled before the middle of the country. Here was why there was basically a 40-year wait before you could develop the state of Texas or before other Plain states could be developed."
    Item: Did you know a TV remote can become a spying device by hijacking the infrared it uses to communicate with a set-top box?

    Item: But who needs a remote when you can just yell at your TV? The FBI says that’s not safe either: Hackers can control a smart TV‘s camera and microphone to remotely record video and audio of whoever’s in the room, or use the unsecured TV to get into your router and then your PC.

    Item: Even a humble coffee maker can be hijacked and turned into a ransom-demanding machine. So can other unsecured IoT devices.
    'Together with the dispersed timing of key evolutionary transitions and plausible priors, one can conclude that the expected transition times likely exceed the lifetime of Earth, perhaps by many orders of magnitude. 

    'In turn, this suggests that intelligent life is likely to be exceptionally rare.'

Space manifolds act as the boundaries of dynamical channels enabling fast transportation into the inner- and outermost reaches of the Solar System. Besides being an important element in spacecraft navigation and mission design, these manifolds can also explain the apparent erratic nature of comets and their eventual demise. Here, we reveal a notable and hitherto undetected ornamental structure of manifolds, connected in a series of arches that spread from the asteroid belt to Uranus and beyond. The strongest manifolds are found to be linked to Jupiter and have a profound control on small bodies over a wide and previously unconsidered range of three-body energies. Orbits on these manifolds encounter Jupiter on rapid time scales, where they can be transformed into collisional or escaping trajectories, reaching Neptune’s distance in a mere decade. All planets generate similar manifolds that permeate the Solar System, allowing fast transport throughout, a true celestial autobahn.

Bigger question: can the same process work with planets? We know the Jupiter and Saturn had to form much nearer the Sun than their current orbits, so how long did they take to migrate from the inner solar system, and have they moved back and forth? 

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3 comments:

  1. John WilderDecember 1, 2020 at 11:27 PM

    Great set of articles - I saw the Canadian Armed Forces pistol article, which made me curious, what exactly is it that they do?

    Well, I did find an article that a major project of the CAF is $550,000 that they're spending creating a (I'm not making this up) Stealth Snowmobile.

    So, they do that.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentDecember 2, 2020 at 9:32 AM

      In World War I and II, they acted as shock troops for the British Army. They've also acted as a bulwark against the Soviets trying a northerly invasion into North America.

      Delete
    2. John WilderDecember 3, 2020 at 8:18 PM

      100% agree on those missions - their contributions on D-Day were legendary (for instance).

      But today?

      Delete