The Docent's Memo (March 19, 2020)

 

VIDEO: "REVEALED! Why Israeli Soldiers wear 'Chef Hats'"--Agilite (2 min.)

An interesting piece of gear to break up the outline of the head.

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

• TGIF: A new Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. Lots of good stuff (and a thank you to Greg for the shout out), but these articles struck my interest in particular: (i) "Why the AK?"; (ii) "Home Defense Methods And Strategies"; (iii) "A Burglar’s Universal Search Pattern – How a Burglar Robs Your Home in 8 Minutes"; and (iv) "Defending Yourself Against Dog Attacks: Man Bites Dogs."
• A bear does what in the woods!?! "How to Handle Nature’s Call in the Woods" by Jo Deering, NRA Women. Some good advice on how to go no. 1 or no. 2 in the woods without getting it all over your clothes or feet. Discusses whether or when you might have to pack it out; digging the hole; squatting for no. 1 and no. 2; other methods of going no. 2; products that might make it easier for a gal to pee in the woods or off a treestand; and some discussion of what to do when having a period. The article describes the basic squat for peeing (or pooping):

    While peeing in the woods isn’t as easy for women as it is for men, it’s still a relatively simple deal—just squat and let it go. A couple pieces of advice:

    Drop your pants just below your knees, not all the way to your ankles. This lets you squat below the level of your pants so there’s no chance of peeing on them.

    Minimize splash by getting as low as you can. Peeing on soft ground produces less splash than peeing on a rock or hard ground, if you’ve got the option.

Some good advice there for men for squatting. Also, pee downhill so the liquid runs away from you. There is also a book on the subject, in its 3rd Edition, called "How To Sh** In The Woods."

• "Injured in the Wilderness: Doctor's Rx" by George Dvorchak, M.D., NRA Family. A brief look at what to do if you are in the field and suffer bruising, sprains and fractures, or head trauma such as a concussion or fractured skull.
• "Planning to Escape the Civil War"--REDONKULAS.COM. Having a plan and a backup.
• "Are You REALLY Prepared to Bug Out on Foot? Heed This Cautionary Tale of a Deadly Desert Crossing"--The Organic Prepper. A story of refugees fleeing Venezuela through a desert in northern Chile and how they very nearly died because they did not have even the basic preparations for crossing a desert: no map or compass, inappropriate footware, inadequate water and food, lacked basic knowledge of traveling in a desert, and on and on.
• Uh, no. "5.7×28: The Ultimate Survival Caliber?"--Guns America. I recognize the advantage to having a pistol and carbine that use the same caliber, and 5.7x28 can be an effective caliber for short ranges, but it is not the "ultimate" caliber. 
• "Home Fortification Tips That Can Save Your Life"--The Prepper Journal. The author begins by discussing the downside of residential construction in the United States, which is wood framed buildings made with lumber or vinyl siding, large windows, and generally weak doors that are made more for aesthetics than keeping people out. (But the construction features that make U.S. homes vulnerable to crime--the mostly wood framing and siding--also make them resilient to earthquakes). In any event, the rest of the article is not about hardening your home to take incoming fire, however, but ways to stop or dissuade criminals from breaking into your home. This is good information--and the article is definitely one of the better ones on the topic of hardening your home against criminals and is worth your time to read--but it is not about post-SHTF fortification.
• "USMC Fielding Squad Common Optic"--The Firearm Blog. The Marines have adopted a 1-8x LPVO made by Trijicon as a Squad Common Optic (SCO). It weighs 31.5 ounces and is 10.5 inches in length.
• "KE Arms Introduces KP-15 Trap Door Buttplate for Polymer Lowers"--The Firearm Blog. I've been thinking of doing a lightweight AR build using a polymer lower. This buttplate makes it even more enticing because it gives you a place to store necessary items.
• "Mysteries And Misconceptions Of The All-Important Primer"--Shooting Times. Great article. I found this interesting: "The first bit of useful trivia is that even though Small Rifle and Small Pistol primer pockets share the same depth specification, Large Rifle and Large Pistol primers do not. The standard pocket for a Large Pistol primer is somewhat shallower than its Large Rifle counterpart, specifically, 0.008 to 0.009 inch less." Also, pistol primers use thinner metal making them easier to detonate when struck by the firing pin.
• Good idea: The Daily Mail shared a tip from a food blogger on how to keep lettuce fresh and crisp for up to a month. Basically, put it in a jar or other container that can be sealed, submerge it in water and seal the container, and change the water every 2 to 3 days.
• If you think she looks bad, you should see the guy that attacked her: "'She wanted more of the guy. The police were holding her back': Asian woman, 76, beats attacker, 39, with a stick and sends him to hospital after he punched her in the face in San Francisco"--Daily Mail. Against the odds, it was a white guy that initiated the attack. I'm guessing that when he volunteered to perpetrate the narrative that whites are attacking Asians, he did not expect his victim to fight back.
• "National Concealed Carry Reciprocity Stops Crime, Background Checks Do Not" by Kevin Michalowski, USCCA. Money quote: "Criminals, by definition, do not follow laws. So the requirement for a background check on the sale of a firearm will not stop any criminal." Also:

In order for a background check to really stop crime, police would have to check the status and location of every gun in the country daily to be completely certain no gun has been illegally transferred to someone who might commit a crime. Background checks do not stop crime. They lead to a police state … and nobody wants that.

VIDEO: "Fighting Men - Kill Or Be Killed (1943)"--Nuclear Vault (9 min.)

This rather brutal WWII training film explains that Marquess of Queensberry Rules are not for the battlefield, and will only get you killed.

The Coming Civil War:

• "The 2020 Election and the State’s Crisis of Legitimacy" by William S. Lind, Traditional Right. Key part: "Because the Electoral College, not the voters, elects the President, there is no question that Joe Biden now holds that office.  But his legitimacy depends on whether the popular vote count was accurate.  Was it?  No one knows, and no one can know."
• "The Road To Revolution" by Stanley G. Payne, First Things. A look at how revolutions arise, using the events leading up to the Spanish Civil War as an example. An excerpt (bold added):

This process had no equivalent elsewhere in Western Europe, not even in Germany’s Weimar Republic. It is the only example of a parliamentary constitutional system, under radical control, providing cover for social and political breakdown. Though the Azaña government occasionally took measures to restrain the anarcho-syndicalists, who did not form part of the Popular Front voting bloc, it scarcely ever took action against the socialists and communists, without whose support in parliament the Azaña administration could not remain in power. Moreover, security personnel and state officials who supported the revolutionaries often directly aided the revolution through judicial, administrative, or police action. Moderate and conservative voices protested, to no avail. With the state apparatus entirely under leftist control, the choices were submission or a desperate revolt with most uncertain consequences. In later years, after the left lost the civil war that had ensued from its actions, its spokesmen charged conservatives with irresponsible impatience, insisting that the divided revolutionaries had reached their limit and somehow everything would soon have settled down—though this is hardly convincing.

• "How the Media Led the Great Racial Awakening: Years before Trump’s election the media dramatically increased coverage of racism and embraced new theories of racial consciousness that set the stage for the latest unrest" by Zach Goldberg, Tablet. This August 2020 article looks at the frequency of the words "racism" and "racist" over the last few decades and observes the use of these terms have increased over 700% and just under 1,000% at the New York Times and Washington Post, respectively, from 2011. Goldberg argues that the media is not reporting on racism, but driving a narrative and shaping public perception so that sections of society believes that there is systemic racism and white privilege even though it is unprovable. Moreover, this started during the Obama Administration. Read the whole thing.
• Taking things up a notch or two: "Revenge Of The Gods: California’s proposed ethnic studies curriculum urges students to chant to the Aztec deity of human sacrifice" by Christopher F. Rufo. An excerpt (bold added):

    In theoretical terms, the new ethnic studies curriculum is based on the “pedagogy of the oppressed,” developed by Marxist theoretician Paolo Freire, who argued that students must be educated about their oppression in order to attain “critical consciousness” and, consequently, develop the capacity to overthrow their oppressors. Following this dialectic, the model curriculum instructs teachers to help students “challenge racist, bigoted, discriminatory, imperialist/colonial beliefs” and critique “white supremacy, racism and other forms of power and oppression.” This approach, in turn, enables teachers to inspire their pupils to participate in “social movements that struggle for social justice” and “build new possibilities for a post-racist, post-systemic racism society.”

    R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

    The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

    This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

That is a chthonian cult, not education. And guess who they will be training these kids to sacrifice? 

• "Damon Young: To Stop White Supremacy, Eliminate Whites" by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. As Dreher documents, Young (who is a writer for The Root, which is owned by Univision) blames the sex parlor shootings in Atlanta to white supremacy and then suggests:

White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

Dreher takes this as a call for genocide of whites, looking back at how the Nazis dehumanized Jews and Russians, which made it easier for the atrocities that followed. Dreher warns: "Damon Young and The Root are preparing their readers to commit racist atrocities by dehumanizing those they will victimize."

• "Death By Government: The Primary Fact of the 20th Century" a review by Bradley J. Birzer at Intellectual Takeout. Money quote: "state-sponsored murder is and was the primary fact of the twentieth century. Not the rise of democracy or the liberation of peoples as I was taught in high school, college, and graduate school, but the devastating horrors of the gulag, the holocaust, and the killing fields." Birzer also points out that "Four times the number of persons were murdered by their governments than killed in warfare between 1914 and 1991." Estimates vary, but one estimate I found put the number of homicides, worldwide, during the 20th Century at 8.5 million. During that same time frame, the same source estimated the number killed by war, democide (all government sanctioned mass killing of its own people), and famine at 203 million. Another source put the number of people killed due to democide (i.e., not including war) at 169,202,000 for the whole of the 20th Century. In rough terms, you are 20 times as likely to be murdered by your own government than to die at the hands of the common criminal. Something to think about when deciding whether you really need an AR or AK and thousands of rounds of ammo.

VIDEO: "Voddie Baucham - 3 Examples of Jesus Addressing Homosexuality"--Plead for Grace (9 min.)

Miscellany:

• "American Special Ops Forces Are Everywhere: They’ve become a major military player—and maybe a substitute for strategic thinking" by Mark Bowden, The Atlantic (h/t Marcus Wynne). From the article:

    Using conventional forces is like wielding a sledgehammer. Special Ops forces are more like a Swiss Army knife. Over the years, the U.S. has found out just how versatile that knife can be; the flexibility and competence of Special Ops have proved invaluable. At the same time, the insularity and elitism of these units have bred a culture with elements that some of their own leaders, to their credit, have described as troubling, and that have, in certain instances, evidenced contempt for the traditional values of America’s armed forces. Much of SOCOM’s action takes place in secret. Most Americans are unaware that it has been active in a country until the announcement that its forces are being withdrawn. Or until something goes wrong—as in Niger in 2017, when four Special Ops soldiers were killed in an ambush.

    Notably, its continued growth has been spurred by both success and failure. And perhaps because Special Ops is such a flexible tool, that growth has enabled the U.S. to multiply the way it uses force abroad without much consideration of overarching strategy. The advent of nuclear weapons, in the 1940s, presented leaders with urgent ethical and strategic imperatives. Defining the purpose of such weapons automatically demanded fresh thinking about the bedrock values of a democracy, the nature of multilateral alliances, the morality of warfare, and the scope of U.S. ambitions in the world. Because of its sub-rosa nature, Special Ops has not compelled the same kind of reckoning—and, in fact, may foster the illusion that a strategic framework is not necessary. It’s good to have a Swiss Army knife. And yet even a versatile knife can do only so much.

Also, be sure to follow the link to Wynne's blog and check out his comments and some recommendations he has to reading about where we may be headed as to special operations soldiers. 

• One of my favorite topics: Demographics. "Report: Americans’ Obsession With Careers Is Contributing To Our Dangerous Lack Of Babies"--The Federalist. I've noted before on this subject that the number predictor of declining fecundity is the educational level of the mother and lack of religious faith, whereas larger family sizes are associated with religious conservatives irrespective of the mother's education. In essence, educating women is population control. This article relates some recent research that delves a little deeper into the equation, and perhaps shed some light on the dichotomy between the irreligious and religious on family size even in developed countries. Per the article, a new study demonstrates "that the more career-oriented individuals and wealthy societies become, the more their fertility declines." 

    “Highly work-focused values and social attitudes among both men and women are strongly associated with lower birth rates in wealthy countries,” authors Laurie DeRose and Lyman Stone write in the Institute for Family Studies paper. Later, they observe, “placing a high degree of value on work can dampen fertility desires and make them less likely to be realized.”

    This all suggests, the authors say, that specific societal and individual values strongly influence birth rates in wealthy countries, not necessarily income or welfare availability.

    Many demographers have argued that societal values that flatten the differences between the sexes would help boost fertility — for example, if husbands did more childcare and household chores and women had more earning power. Yet this study finds that people with so-called “egalitarian” values are less fertile than those who embrace differences between men and women.

    The differences were especially pronounced among those who both expressed feminist values and prioritized work over family. Beliefs about sex roles affected fertility the least among those for whom family was their highest priority.

    “Men and women who place a high value on work and expect a high degree of gender equality have the lowest fertility, whereas gender equality expectations are less predictive of fertility among men and women who see work as a less important element of life,” the authors find.

This adds some insight into the religiosity divide as most religions emphasize the importance of family over other pursuits. As one LDS authority, David O. McKay put it, "no other success can compensate for failure in the home.” Or, to state it in a more Biblical fashion, those that favor mammon over God have lower overall fertility.

• In a more civilized society, such people would be tarred and feathered: "Oregon Health Officials Propose Making Mask Mandates Permanent"--The Federalist. The rule has to do with workers in the workplace and their health. The instigation for a permanent rule is that the temporary rule requiring workers to use masks and distance is about to expire. But the officious officials promise that they will strike the permanent rule once the Covid emergency is over. Cross their hearts, fingers crossed behind their back.
• Coming to a border state near you: "Cartel gunmen kill 13 police officers in series of daytime ambushes in central Mexico as state security minister promises to 'respond with all force'"--Daily Mail. The daytime ambushes were carried out by alleged members of the La Familia Michoacana cartel near the cities of Coatepec Harinas and Zacualpan in the Mexican state of Mexico. According to the article, the cartel was "officially broken up in 2011 with the arrest of its leader, José de Jesús Mendez, according to United States authorities," but continues to operate in the states of Guerrero and State of Mexico along with Mexico City, the nation's capital, as well as forming an alliance with the Jalisco New Generation Cartel.
• Biden's a master of foreign policy: "Russia Erupts in Fury Over Biden’s Calling Putin a Killer"--New York Times (via MSN) (h/t Anonymous Conservative). From the lede: "Russia recalled its ambassador to the United States and unleashed a storm of derision aimed at President Biden after he said in a television interview that he thought President Vladimir V. Putin was a killer." Putin's response was that Biden was simply projecting, which is a problem endemic among the Left.
• According to the Blue-Anon people, you're crazy if you think there is a pedophile elite active in government and the media: Brett Blomme, a Milwaukee County children’s court judge, has been arrested on tentative charges of possession of child pornography. Prior to becoming a judge, he served as an assistant city attorney for the city of Madison and as an attorney in the Wisconsin Public Defender’s office. Blomme was also the president and CEO of the Cream City Foundation, a Milwaukee-based LGBTQ advocacy nonprofit organization, from July 2017 until August 2020. 
• "The Other Deficit" by Eamonn Fingleton, The American Conservative. A look at U.S. trade deficits and the peculiar lack of interest in this topic from the elites and the media. An excerpt:

    Why do the media ignore such shocking numbers? The question is all the more pertinent for the fact that the trade disaster’s human consequences have been painfully obvious for so long in the shuttered factories and ruined lives of the once-great industrial cities of the Midwest. 

    The press’s silence seems to stem in large measure from an inability of reporters and editors to think for themselves. They have long considered economics a mystical discipline beyond the comprehension of ordinary mortals. The task of reading the tea leaves has been left more and more to a special priesthood. Whereas in the Nixon era, the priesthood generally espoused the commonsense view that maintaining a nation’s jobs base was an important policy consideration, increasingly in the 1980s a cynical new breed took the lead in shaping media coverage of the economy. These talking heads travel under the rubric of analysts or economists, although in many cases their only real work seems to be to chat to the press. Certainly they seem to be available 24/7 to talk up the supposed wonderful benefits of globalism.

    The mantra became “trade deficits don’t matter.” This served the interests of such mercantilist nations as Japan, Germany, and China, which have continued avidly to build ever more advanced manufacturing industries and thus have generally gained mightily from the offshoring of American jobs. Because the major mercantilist nations are now by far the world’s most prolific sources of investment capital, Wall Street panders to their every need. Almost no one in the American press has questioned this, since the “sophisticated” view among media professionals has become that the United States is leading the world into a new post-industrial era of unprecedented prosperity. In the meantime, supposedly, the faster U.S. factories are shuttered, the better.



Also:



    When a nation imports more than it exports, someone, somewhere, has to finance the gap. In the case of the United States in recent decades, the main sources of such finance have been Japan, Germany, and China—the same nations that, by buying U.S. Treasury bonds by the truckload, have long sustained Wall Street and by extension its talking heads.In deciding to fund America’s trade deficits, these nations have determined that, on balance and in the long run, they stand to gain handsomely. In particular, they know that by developing ever more advanced manufacturing industries, they can create a torrent of high-paying, productive, secure jobs for workers of average or even below-average ability.

    These foreigners hardly regard U.S. Treasuries as a particularly great investment. Rather, they choose to eat U.S. government debt mainly because otherwise the U.S. dollar’s foreign exchange value would implode. It is axiomatic that the higher the foreigners can drive the dollar, the easier it is for foreign exporters to penetrate the American market. By the same token, a high dollar hastens the demise of any remaining American producers trying to hang on.

 

• "Lockdowns as class warfare of the rich and the professional class against the working class" by Thomas Lifson, American Thinker. As we note the passage of one year since we were told "15 days to flatten the curve," the author considers who benefits by the lockdowns. 

The answer is, as an individual, Jeff Bezos.  His stock in Amazon, the single biggest beneficiary of lockdowns, is worth billions of dollars more than before the lockdown.  As a group: educated professionals, able to work from home via Zoom and other internet-based services and able to afford home delivery.  The Ace of Spades pungently summarizes:




    The general lockdowns weren't general lockdowns. As a friend said, we didn't have a lockdown, we had poor people delivering s--- to rich people.

    Instead of protecting the people really at risk, the Ruling Class — the "Zoom class," the people who can work completely remotely — protected itself, and killed half a million people.

Read the whole thing. 

• Proving that the TSA is security theater: "The real-life Con Air: Demure US pensioner Marilyn Hartman, 69, has been able to sneak onto 30 flights without a ticket or passport and now faces jail... so how DID she do it?"--Daily Mail. That's not 30 flights total, but 30 in the last 19 years since security increased after the 9/11 attacks.

    Of course, Hartman — female and in her seventh decade — isn’t an obvious candidate to set alarm bells ringing. And her ability to just drift ghost-like past airport security, airline check-in staff and flight attendants without attracting their notice is key to her success.

    Not for her the desperate measures of Third World stowaways who hide in the wheel-wells of aircraft. She says she always walks on with the other passengers and finds a seat.

    If stopped, she is extremely polite, coherent and plays the total innocent — ‘I don’t really want to get anyone in trouble,’ she once sweetly told a police officer who asked how she had got past airport security and onto a plane.

• "Next Level Lockdown: French Group Goes Underground In Cave For 6 Weeks"--NDTV (h/t Marcus Wynne). 

    A year after France entered uncharted territory with its first coronavirus lockdown, a small group of volunteers has embarked on a more extreme confinement: nearly six weeks underground, with no notion of time, to study the effects of acute isolation.

    Since Sunday night, 15 men and women are living in the vast Lombrives cave in the Pyrenees mountains south of Toulouse for an experiment dubbed "Deep Time," led by the French-Swiss explorer Christian Clot.

    For 40 days their home is a cavernous complex below the Earth's surface, deprived of phones, watches or natural light. But they do have their own tents for a minimum of privacy.

    "Three separate living spaces have been set up: one for sleeping, one for living, and one for carrying out topography studies, in particular for fauna and flora," Clot told journalists a few hours before entering the cave.

    The main subject of study, however, will be the seven men and seven women, aged 27 to 50, as well as Clot, who must adapt to a constant temperature of 12 degrees Celsius (54 Fahrenheit) and 95 percent humidity.

    They have been fitted out with sensors to allow monitoring by around a dozen scientists hoping to learn how humans respond without the usual spatio-temporal frames of reference.