The Docent's Memo (6/4/2021)

 

VIDEO: "Shooting Mistake to Avoid - Do & Don't by ShotKam Camera" (1 min).

A demonstration why you need to lead a moving target.

Firearms/Self-Defense:

• New "Weekend Knowledge Dump" from Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training. Some of the articles that caught my attention: one from Massad Ayood on certain carry gun mods that could get you in trouble (the main one being too light of a trigger); another called "Repetitions" that warns women that when they have someone persistent about "chasing" them, those women need to get a backbone and clearly and plainly tell the guy to leave them alone; an article on handheld and weapon mounted lights and some techniques to make using them more effective; the 4-round speed strip reload for the snubby revolver; advice from Marcus Wynne on how to avoid attacks when driving or entering or egressing your car; and the five worst guns for self-defense. 
• "Skill Set: Sudden Violence"--Tiger McKee, Tactical Wire. The author observes that if and when we are attacked by a violent criminal the attack will be sudden and the violence (and pain and maybe blood) will probably be much more than we have experienced before.

    Once the attack starts, you’ll only have a few seconds to defeat the threat(s). Remember, they already have a plan; you have to respond without delay. When forced to fight, the amount of violence you use must be enough to stop the attack. There’s no time to apply plan A, then wait to see if that works before going to plan B, C or D. Using violence against another person is a hard concept for people to think about, much less actually performing it on someone.

    Surprises come in two formats, good and bad. To avoid the shock of an actual attack you’ve got to become familiar with reality. Pay attention to your surroundings and the people around you. At the first hint of trouble – don’t second guess your initial “warning” – you avoid, escape or prepare to defend. When forced to fight, expect to get hit, cut or maybe shot. Yet, regardless of what happens, you must remain focused on defeating the threat(s), and in a timely fashion. Your training and practice must reflect reality, focusing on the skills needed to defeat a sudden, aggressive attack.

• "Places to Avoid this Summer"--Active Response Training. Ellifritz had found that urban teen violence is increasing around the nation, and the violence increasingly is leading to shootings. He describes several events, including this one in his home state of Ohio:

    The second event was a large fight at King’s Island, one of our state’s biggest amusement parks.  The fight between violent teens bused to the park resulted in numerous injuries, responding cops being attacked, and the park being closed early.  Five people (aged 14-18) were arrested.

 

    This event worries me a bit more.  I can easily avoid an impromptu gathering of teens for a rowdy rap concert in a public park.  If for some reason avoidance wasn’t an option, I’d be armed and able to defend myself if attacked by one or more of the participants.

    At an amusement park with “security,” I’m unlikely to be armed unless I employ some devious tactics to circumvent metal detectors and pat downs.  I may be able to smuggle in a ceramic or polymer blade, but that’s not the best weapon against a group of 20 rampaging teen boys. 

    It’s a problematic scenario.  A uniformed cop was swarmed and attacked here.  The crowd pepper sprayed him, knocked him to the ground, and stole equipment off his belt. 

    If a fully equipped on-duty cop can’t stop these rampaging gangs of teens, why do you think you’ll be safe because you smuggled a small knife or pepper spray through the security checkpoint?

Ellifritz notes that all the incidents he found took place in crowded public places in urban areas. Most of them were parties or concerts involving suspects and victims in the teens and twenties. All started with a verbal altercation, culminating with multiple shooters.  

• "I’d pick slugs every time" by Officer Lindsey Bertomen, Officer.com. Key point:

    Most of us will train shooters in using buckshot within 25 yards, where the nominal spread of shot will land most pellets within 18 to 22 inches, which is around the width of the human torso. Theoretically, a defensive shotgun user—striking center mass—will keep all of the pellets from going beyond the intended target. There are two problems with this. First, if the shooter does not have a completely concentric, centered mass shot, the likelihood of pellets going beyond the target is very high. Second, most shot pattern tests can easily demonstrate that an 18-inch barrel shotgun will usually have patterns past 20 inches around at 15, not 25 yards. This will preclude buckshot use in most high-risk traffic stops. In fact, most uses beyond employment as an entry gun could be questionable, as long as there are non-targets in the periphery. For the record, buckshot is one of the best uses for the officer performing or covering the breaching.

    Shotgun slugs are a completely different story. They usually send an ounce of lead payload at about the same velocities. What most forget is that a shotgun using stabilized slugs is usually as accurate or more accurate than a handgun at 25 yards. Most assume that it takes a rifled slug barrel to make a slug accurate enough for duty use. In fact, almost all law enforcement slugs are designed for smoothbore short barrels. There are slugs for rifled barrels, but the propensity toward leading with some products suggest smoothbore slugs are a better application.

That author notes that while slugs nominally have a range of 50 to 60 yards, he regularly practices at 100 to 150 yards. 

• "How To Breach A Door Using A Shotgun"--SOFREP. From the article:

Orienting the shotguns muzzle correctly is a big factor to a successful breach. In this scenario we are speaking about a door that opens inwards (hinges are internal) and the door operates via a single door knob/locking mechanism. The muzzle of the shotgun should be pressed into the gap between the door knob and hinge. From there the gun should be tilted up at a 45-degree angle while simultaneously angled 45 degrees outward, this will ensure that the risk of collateral damage will be minimized should round over penetration (it most likely will) occur. This directional placement of the shot will also cause the back side of the door frame to blow out in that location giving the door an even better chance of swinging free. If the hinges are visible (the door swings outward) it way be better to directly attack the hinges; if not a hooligan tool may be desired in conjunction to the shotgun or preferred to be used exclusively to pry the door open.

• Related: "Ballistic Breaching With A Shotgun" by Eugene Nielsen, American Cop. 

    ... Although law enforcement teams often make the initial breach with a ram, there are advantages to ballistic breaching with a shotgun.

    When it is properly employed, a shotgun can provide teams with safer and faster door breaching than other methods of breaching. It is not limited to just doors. Shotgun breach can also be employed to breach iron-barred windows, and take out sliding glass doors and defeat padlocks.

    Utilizing a shotgun for breaching offers tactical teams several advantages. It is quicker than manual breaching, jamb spreading or ramming and is safer and requires less training than thermal and explosive entry.

 

    The author recommends the use of a shotgun with just a pistol grip or something similar to the Mossberg Shockwave or Remington Tac-14 firearms because of the tight spaces that such a shotgun will generally be employed. He also warns that the shotgun cannot be directly place against the door, and recommends the use of a standoff device. "The standoff provides increased speed and placement by allowing the shotgun to be fired with the standoff in direct contact with the jamb or door. They permit safe contact by venting muzzle gasses. The better standoffs also reduce recoil and eliminate muzzle jump and deflect debris."

    He also goes on to discuss the different type of frangible breaching rounds and discusses how to properly breach a door. There are different types of rounds depending on what material you will be breaching. However, if you don't have the budget for a whole bunch of different types of rounds, he recommends TESCR#3 made by Royal Arms. Read the whole thing. 

• Related: "The Box O’ Truth #25 – Breaching Rounds." The author tested military breaching rounds. His conclusion:

1. Breaching rounds work great against locks or door locks. Just as expected.
2. These rounds tend to act like a “solid” until they hit something. That means that they penetrate a lot of drywall before coming apart. They are certainly not “safe” to shoot indoors if wall penetration is a concern.
3. They penetrated about 12 inches of water, which would mean approximately 6 inches of flesh, at 15 feet. They are not designed as an anti-personnel round, but I sure wouldn’t want to get shot with one. As Tman noted, “That looks like 400 grains of death.”

• Related: "ROYAL ARMS DOOR BREACHING STAND OFF DEVICE BREACHER." This is the breaching device most often recommended.
• "KE Arms Introduces the Civil Defense Rifle – A More Budget Friendly WWSD"--The Firearm Blog. Ian at Forgotten Weapons has been working on a project called "what would Stoner do", which was an attempt to make use of our experience over the past 60 years, modern manufacturing techniques and modern materials to make an updated and lighter weight AR-15 style rifle. The rifle made use of the KP-15 Polymer Lower Receiver for AR-15 rifles from KE Arms as well as match grade triggers, a carbon fiber hand guard, and other items to produce a lightweight, ergonomic rifle--the WWSD 2020. However, the parts have been hard to source and the price is a bit steep, so they developed a slightly heavier, but lower cost version they are calling the Civil Defense Rifle.
• "In Praise of the Glock 26"--Reflex Handgun. The author muses about the new slew of micro-9 handguns with 10+ round capacities and whether it is the end of the Glock 26. He says no because the Glock 26 offers an advantage over the micro-9s in that the Glock 26 is shrunken full size fighting pistol and can accept the magazines of its larger brethren, the Glocks 17 and 19.

... which would you rather go into a fight against multiple assailants with right now, a Sig P365 with 11 rounds in the gun and a spare 14 round magazine (admittedly, awesome for such a small gun) or a G26 with 12 rounds in it and a spare 21 round magazine?  Which gun can you reach out farther with?  Which provides more controllable recoil and faster follow-up shots?  And reliability?  I realize that some of the new micro 9s are proving very reliable, but the G26 is the same gun as the most proven service handguns on earth, just reduced in height and length.

VIDEO: "Top 100 Preps to Buy at THE HOME DEPOT"--The Urban Prepper (22 min.)

The author has prepared a PDF list of the items discussed in the video. Mostly good ideas, but if you think that you will need sand bags for flooding or defense, you are going to need a lot more than a dozen or two. Also, a lot of items are mostly useful for standard natural disasters or incidents.

Prepping/Survival: 

• On the heals of revelations that the U.S. has a high-ranking Chinese defector with information about China and the Coronavirus, infra, "Chinese State Media Urges Preparing for Nuclear War With US"--NewsMax.
• "An Emergency Dental Kit – You Will Be Glad You’ve Got One If You Need It!"--Modern Survival Blog. The author recommends getting a copy of Where There Is No Dentist, as well as stocking up on toothache relief kits and a dental kit for emergency use. He goes over the contents of those kits as well as recommendations for a couple kits. 

    Another resource I've heard about but never used is the Dentist In A Box originally designed for soldiers on long deployments. The company, located in Australia, sells both a basic kit with temporary filling materials, as well as a tooth trauma kit that comes with what is in the basic kit, plus tooth splinting materials, and tooth storage solution and container for storing a tooth that has been knocked out.

    For the more ambitious, Doom and Bloom sells a Survival Deluxe DENTAL Kit "Grab N Go" for $200 which comes with a basic set of dental instruments as well as other supplies and a copy of Where There Is No Dentist.

• "New Nuclear Power?"--Blue Collar Prepping. The authors compares the traditional pressurized water reactors and the liquid sodium reactor being planned for Wyoming which promises to be less expensive and safer. 

Having grown up in the shadow of a nuclear power plant, we dealt with a lot of emergency planning and notification information coming from the operator of the plant, FEMA, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). A network of warning sirens was placed about 15 miles in every direction around the plant. Testing every month became just another part of life, kind of like the Emergency Alert System tests on the radio. Our house was far enough away that we were not in any of the emergency zones, but we still got an annual map of evacuation routes. Growing up during the Cold War, a lot of what we now call prepping was just everyday life back then.

• "How to Pack a Backpack for Camping" by Logan Scott, All Outdoors. Good article and bonus video demonstrating the concepts.
• "How To Enjoy Hiking In The Rain"--Survival Common Sense. Some of the author's tips:
• No cotton, because it soaks up water. 
• Go with synthetic insulation because down loses its insulative properties when it gets wet. 
• Invest in quality rainwear, not some cheap product that will fail on you. 
• Pack a rain cap. The author recommends a broad-rimmed hat to keep water going down your neck or collecting on glasses. I've found that a baseball cap with a hood pulled over it works well, though.
• Appropriate footwear. He actually recommends against waterproof boots and shoes unless in colder environments because they don't breath very well. "Mesh footwear works well in warmer environments, as mesh drains and dries more quickly if you land in a puddle or have to wade a creek. Any wet weather boots need deep lug soles to provide traction and help you deal with mud and slippery rocks and logs."
• Take gaiters to keep rain from running into your shoes or boots.
• Pack dry clothes. 
• Protect your gear by packing them in plastic trash bags or zip lock bags.

There is a lot more, so be sure to check it out if this topic interests you.

• "A White Laser? New Odin Turbo LEP Weapon Light from Olight Full Review"--Guns America Digest. Well, sort of a laser. LEP stands for Laser Excited Phosphor and the flashlight uses a blue laser to excite the phosphor to emit a very tight beam of light that because of how tight it is actually extends much farther than you would expect based on the light output. The author states that he was easily able to illuminate a tree at 300 yards, and was able to illuminate objects out to 600 yards. From the review:

    Turning on the Odin Turbo for the first time had me giddy. I immediately noticed the lack of spill and was amazed at how concentrated the beam pattern was. At 30 feet, the beam diameter is no more than just a couple feet and that is all you see. It does not illuminate the room like a traditional LED flashlight. The color also appears to be more of a yellowish white than a true white. If you prefer a true white or neutral white, this might be disappointing.

    For only being 330 lumens, the LEP produces such a bright hotspot that the reflecting light can be blinding. Olight claims this LEP light is considered “eye-safe.” When the laser passes through the fluorescent phosphor, the wavelength is reduced to a safe level that’s not supposed to damage the eyes like a traditional laser. I certainly wouldn’t want to be on the receiving end of the Odin Turbo.

VIDEO: "Tucker: Fauci deserves to be under 'criminal investigation'" (12 min.)

VIDEO: "Tucker: Why did they lie to us for so long"--Fox News (12 min.)

Covid News And The Coming Civil War: 

• "A Dangerous State of Affairs" by Kevin D. Williamson, National Review. Commentary on the current firearm and ammo panic: 

    We sometimes talk about “American gun culture,” but another way of saying “American gun culture” is “American culture.”




    As a matter of civil liberty, the Second Amendment is every bit as important as the First or the Fourth or the Sixth, and it is no accident that the semiautomatic rifle has taken the place of the cannon on the Texas revolutionary flag, emblazoned over the slogan that has over the centuries made its way from Thermopylae to Fort Morris to Gonzalez to the bumper of a whole lot of F-150s: “Come and Take It.” At least one of the shoppers looking for ammo over the weekend had the version Plutarch attributed to Leonidas — μολὼν λαβέ — tattooed on his forearm. It’s a popular bumper-sticker, too.




    And that “Don’t Tread on Me” spirit matters to a people whose two great formative episodes were the Revolution and the frontier experience. That attitude is an important part of what has kept America free. But it also is bound up in some of the worst aspects of our national character: paranoia, our unarticulated antinomianism, our taste for political and religious extremism, and our horrifying addiction to violence. Americans are a murder-happy people — not only with firearms but with knives and clubs and hammers, with bombs, automobiles, and standing water. There are lots of countries where people have guns. Switzerland is a gunned-up country, and there are millions of privately owned firearms in France, Austria, and Italy — walk around Tuscany at the right time of year and you can hear the shotguns of the pheasant hunters, a blast in the distance every few minutes.




    I hear shotgun blasts where I live, too — but this is an American city, and they aren’t shooting at pheasants.




    But this isn’t really about the guns. It’s about a society that is, palpably, wobbling on the brink of something awful, with failing institutions, incompetent government, reciprocal distrust among rival social groups, and widespread simmering rage.




    On Memorial Day, we remember those who took up arms because they thought their civilization represented something good and worth preserving. But we increasingly take up arms for the opposite reason: because we believe this society to be corrupt, failing, doomed. We half dread the possibility of breakdown and bloodshed — and are made half-giddy by it, too.




    And that is a dangerous state of affairs. Americans don’t have a well-regulated militia — we don’t have a well-regulated anything.

 

• Secret Combinations: "It is an ‘accursed sect’: Archbishop Viganò strongly denounces the promoters of the ‘Great Reset’"--The BL (h/t Vox Popoli). An excerpt:

    Archbishop Carlo Maria Viganò, the former Apostolic Nuncio to the U.S., unmasked once again, at the Venice Summit, the plan of a group of billionaires to impose a world tyranny, in his speech “Great Reset: the last great lie.”

    Viganò relates the Great Reset to the so-called New World Order and explains its action: “to spread the infernal chaos, in which everything that civilization has laboriously built over the millennia, under the inspiration of [Divine] Grace, will be overturned and perverted, corrupted and erased,” he said on May 30. 

    He further explains that this is the continuation of ancient combat led by “a few tyrants,” and the Great Reset is the last stage. 

    He adds, “And to achieve this end, the last step is the establishment of a synarchy in which a few faceless tyrants, thirsty for power, dedicated to the cult of death and sin, to the hatred of life, of virtue and of beauty, rule.”

    He also specifies the names of some powerful family members who for centuries have secretly hatched the destructive plan, now also availing themselves of the controversial worldwide vaccination plan.  

    “The members of this cursed sect are not only Bill Gates, George Soros or Klaus Schwab, but those who have been plotting in the shadows for centuries to overthrow the Kingdom of Christ: the Rothschilds, the Rockefellers, the Warburgs …”.

    “… and those who have come to ally today with the leaders of the Church, using the moral authority of the Pope and the Bishops to convince the faithful to get vaccinated.”

    The Great Reset is promoted by the founder of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, collaborating with many of the most powerful corporations worldwide. Its long-term plan is to manipulate human beings under the slogan. “You will own nothing, but you will be happy.”

• A contrary view by Martin Gurri writing at City Journal: "The Establishment Strikes Back—For Now."

    The people in charge of our great institutions fear and loathe the public. The election of Trump convinced them that ordinary citizens couldn’t be trusted with the vote. The rise of social media has persuaded them that limits must be imposed on what can be said. Aware that they lack personal and institutional authority, they will gladly settle for political power. They aim to tame the beast.

    Let’s be clear: there’s no elite conspiracy, no secret gatherings in smoke-filled rooms, only a herd-like huddling of conformist minds. There’s no elite ideology in any coherent sense, only a blind impulse to control that gravitates instinctively to certain positions on certain issues. The script is always the restoration of order in a broken world.

• There is something coming which they believe will cause the public to revolt: "The New Domestic War on Terror Has Already Begun -- Even Without the New Laws Biden Wants"--Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald looks back on the increased surveillance and security state apparatus enacted after 9/11, and notes that the same thing is happening right now as to so-called "domestic terrorist" threats posed, not by AntiFa or BLM, by theoretical "white supremacists."  That characterization if preferred in order to quash debate on whether such expanded powers against citizens should be allowed. Greenwald observes:

Fear is crucial for state authority. When the population is filled with it, they will acquiesce to virtually any power the government seeks to acquire in the name of keeping them safe. But when fear is lacking, citizens will crave liberty more than control, and that is when they question official claims and actions. When that starts to happen, when the public feels too secure, institutions of authority will reflexively find new ways to ensure they stay engulfed by fear and thus quiescent.

And this time, the bogeyman will be conservative white Americans:

    The search for a new enemy around which the Biden administration could coalesce and in whose name they could keep fear levels high was quickly settled. Cast in that role would be right-wing domestic extremists. In January, The Wall Street Journal reported that “Biden has said he plans to make a priority of passing a law against domestic terrorism, and he has been urged to create a White House post overseeing the fight against ideologically inspired violent extremists and increasing funding to combat them.”

    Pending Domestic War on Terror legislation favored by the White House — sponsored by Rep. Adam Schiff (D-CA) — would simply amend the old War on Terror laws, which permitted a wide range of powers to fight foreign terrorist organizations, so as to now allow the U.S. government to also use those powers against groups designated as domestic terror organizations. Just as was true of the first War on Terror, this second one would thus vest the government with new, wide-ranging powers of surveillance, detention, prosecution and imprisonment, though this time for use against U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

    Even while that legislation is pending, the U.S. government is already waging an aggressive new domestic war on terror that has largely flown under the radar. Grave warnings from DHS are now just as common, vague and unreliable — but also fear-inducing — as they were in the days of Tom Ridge. Domestic surveillance is also on the rise. Last month, CNN reported that “the Biden administration is considering using outside firms to track extremist chatter by Americans online, an effort that would expand the government's ability to gather intelligence but could draw criticism over surveillance of US citizens."

Read the whole thing. 

• Instapundit dredged up this July 2020 article by Angelo Codevilla, "How a fraudulent ruling class plundered our most precious inheritance." He begins by observing that over the past 50 years, "[s]ocial inequality, even more than economic, has increased as personal safety and freedom have plummeted. People are subject to arbitrary power as never before." Our constitutional republic is now a thing of the past, he argues, because the elites have transformed our society into an oligarchy of grifters.

    Our ruling class transformed America’s regime by instituting a succession of scams, each of which transferred power and wealth to themselves. These scams’ blending into one another compel us to recognize them, individually and jointly, as the kind of governance that Augustine called “magnum latrocinium,” thievery writ large. Thievery of power even more than of money—colloquially, scamocracy.

    Neither Aristotle nor anybody else ever counted scamocracy in their category of regimes because rule by fraud exists naturally only as regimes reach the terminal stages of their corruption.

He continues:

    What do all these preoccupations that have dominated American life the last half century have in common? All—the long-running race and poverty scam, the education scam, the environmentalist scam, the sex scam, the security scam, and now the pandemic scam—have been ginned up by the same people, America’s bipartisan ruling class. All have been based on propositions touted as scientific truth by the most highly credentialed persons in America—experts certified by the U.S government, enshrined by academia as science’s spokesmen, and fawned upon by the media working in concert to forbid any disagreement on the matter whatsoever. Yet virtually all their propositions have turned out to be false, and indeed have produced effects opposite to those claimed.

    Not incidentally, somehow, all these scams ended up putting more power and money into the very same hands—their hands—while diminishing the rest of Americans’ freedoms and prospects. Accident, comrade? No. Taking valuable things under false pretenses for the falsifiers’ benefit is the very definition of fraud, of scam. The scams that have flowed from society’s commanding heights are products of our ruling class’s ever-growing internal solidarity, of confidence in its own superiority and entitlement to rule. They are the other side of its intellectual/moral isolation, and of its co-option of ever-less competent members—hence of its corruption. Whenever you hear someone claiming to speak on behalf of the scamocracy, you may be sure that person is a fraud. 

Read the whole thing. 

• Speaking of scammers: "From masks to the origins of COVID, Anthony Fauci is a liar and a fraud" by Robert Zimmerman, Behind The Black. An excerpt:

    In the past few days a slew of 2020 emails by Dr. Anthony Fauci have revealed his dishonest, incompetent, corrupt, and political agenda during the entire COVID-19 epidemic.

    The emails have revealed he lied about his connections with the Chinese Wuhan lab. They reveal that he knew all along that the virus was almost certainly leaked from that lab. They also reveal that he immediately worked to prevent these facts from being revealed publicly, lying if necessary to do it and successfully forcing publications to withdraw news stories based on his lies.

    Of all these revelations, however, the one email that best illustrates Fauci’s dishonesty and venality was the one in February 2020 — before the epidemic had taken hold and before any shutdowns had been imposed — where he bluntly admitted what has been known for more than a century, that the general widespread use of masks by people who are not sick is pointless and will accomplish nothing.

• More: "#FauciEmails Reveal A Career Bureaucrat Who Followed Political, Not Medical, Science"--Legal Insurrection.

    This has been a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad week for the propagandists in the leftstream activist media and the truth-deniers in Big Tech.  First, we learn that, yes, the coronavirus did likely emerge, bio-engineered, from a Chinese lab. Now we are learning what Anthony Fauci knew and when he knew it.

    The Washington Post and BuzzFeed obtained via FOIA thousands of emails to and from Fauci regarding the WuFlu pandemic.

    While the propagandist media is busy fawning over Fauci as some sort of superhuman godlet who was single-handedly battling WuFlu in some kind of one-man cage match against President Trump and the Wuhan coronavirus, these emails reveal a startling truth. They tell the story not just of Fauci’s blatant, politically-motivated lies to the public but also the great lengths the legacy media and Big Tech went to shut down any discussion of the virus’s origins or mask use efficacy. It was not about stopping the spread of “misinformation” but was a calculated political ploy to shut down the truth.  But we knew that.  And now we have proof.

• More: "REVEALED: Dr. Fauci Plotted with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to Push COVID-19 Fear Porn Before 2020 Election"--Big League Politics (h/t Anonymous Conservative).
• More: Citizen Free Press reports that on Feb. 25, 2020, Dr. Ezekial Emanuel told Fauci that Covid seemed ‘less harmful’ than the Flu.
• More: "COVID “Looks Engineered,” Govt-Funded Immunologist Told Fauci In January 2020."--The National Pulse (h/t Anonymous Conservative). Per the article, which examined the cache of emails referred to above, Kristian Andersen – the head of the Andersen Lab at Scripps Research Institute in California – told Dr. Fauci in late January 2020 that "[o]n a phylogenetic tree the virus looks totally normal and the close clustering with bats suggest that bats serve as the reservoir. The unusual features of the virus make up a really small part of the genome (<0.1%) so one has to look really closely at all the sequences to see that some of the features (potentially) look engineered."
• More: "'Looks Engineered,' Govt-Funded Immunologist Told Fauci In January 2020"--The National Pulse.
• More: "Fauci Sent Panicked Gain-Of-Function E-Mails To Staff In Early COVID Days"--The National Pulse. "E-mails obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request have revealed some critical moments in the early days of the pandemic when Dr. Anthony Fauci began demanding information related to gain of function experiments from underlings."
• More: "Fauci’s Gain-of-Function Smoking Gun Email Proves He Lied to Senator Paul and America"--The Liberty Daily. Last month Fauci testified: "Senator Paul, with all due respect, you are entirely and completely incorrect that the NIH has not ever and does not now fund gain of function research in the Wuhan institute." But in February 2020, Fauci sent an urgent email to Hugh Auchincloss, the NIAID Principal Deputy Director, referencing a paper by a researcher funded by the NIH and a Chinese researcher about gain-in-function work that had been done at the Wuhan institute. 

This is the smoking gun that demonstrates at the very least Fauci was aware of the NIH and NIAID involvement with gain-of-function research in China and the potential that it was connected to Covid-19. At worst, this could indicate they’ve known all along the coronavirus was developed by the Chinese Communist Party and are busy trying to cover up their complicity in its creation and spread.

• More: "Fauci emails all the more reason for US to get to bottom of COVID origins"--New York Post Editorial Board.

    For a year, we’ve been told to “trust the science” — but Fauci, our leading scientist, made declarations that certain theories were “debunked” when they weren’t. Why did he back up Daszak’s self-serving dismissal of the lab theory with no real evidence — when, in fact, he was getting e-mail evidence to the contrary? 

    These revelations don’t ease the growing concern that US taxpayer cash might have helped unleash this plague. 

• Breitbart reports that "White House Actively Looking to Dump Anthony Fauci Amid Revealed Emails and Flip-Flopping."
• Secret combinations at work: "How Amateur Sleuths Broke the Wuhan Lab Story and Embarrassed the Media"--Newsweek (h/t Vox Popoli). From the article:

    Chief among these scientists [claiming that the virus was natural] was a biologist named Peter Daszak, president of EcoHealth Alliance, a non-profit research group that ran a large international program to survey natural pathogens with the potential to cause a pandemic. Daszak had been collaborating for years with Shi Zhengli, the director of the Wuhan Institute of Virology and a renowned bat virologist. Daszak co-authored nearly a dozen papers with Shi and funneled at least $600,000 of U.S. government grants her way.

    When the pandemic happened to break out on the doorstep of the lab with the largest collection of coronaviruses in the world, fueling speculation that the WIV might be involved, Daszak and 26 other scientists signed a letter that appeared in The Lancet on February 19, 2020. "We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin," it stated.

    We now know, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request, that Daszak orchestrated the letter to squelch talk of a lab leak. He drafted it, reached out to fellow scientists to sign it, and worked behind the scenes to make it seem that the letter represented the views of a broad range of scientists. "This statement will not have the EcoHealth Alliance logo on it and will not be identifiable as coming from any one organization or person," he wrote in his pitch to the co-signatories. Scientists whose work had overlapped with the WIV agreed not to sign it so they could "put it out in a way that doesn't link it back to our collaboration."

    At the time, however, there was no hint of Daszak's organizing role. The letter helped make Daszak a ubiquitous presence in the media, where he called a lab-leak "preposterous," "baseless," and "pure baloney." He also attacked scientists who published evidence pointing to the lab. Part of the reason the lab theory made no sense, he argued, was because the Wuhan lab wasn't culturing any viruses remotely similar to SARS-CoV-2. (Daszak has not responded to Newsweek's request for comment.)

    For a long time, Daszak was astonishingly influential. Few in the media questioned him or pointed out that his career and organization would be deeply damaged if it turned out his work had indirectly played a role in the pandemic. ...

• Long read but well worth it: "The Lab-Leak Theory: Inside the Fight to Uncover COVID-19’s Origins"--Vanity Fair. An excerpt:

    On February 19, 2020, The Lancet, among the most respected and influential medical journals in the world, published a statement [ed: the letter authored by Daszak] that roundly rejected the lab-leak hypothesis, effectively casting it as a xenophobic cousin to climate change denialism and anti-vaxxism. Signed by 27 scientists, the statement expressed “solidarity with all scientists and health professionals in China” and asserted: “We stand together to strongly condemn conspiracy theories suggesting that COVID-19 does not have a natural origin.”

 

    The Lancet statement effectively ended the debate over COVID-19’s origins before it began. To Gilles Demaneuf, following along from the sidelines, it was as if it had been “nailed to the church doors,” establishing the natural origin theory as orthodoxy. “Everyone had to follow it. Everyone was intimidated. That set the tone.”

 

    The statement struck Demaneuf as “totally nonscientific.” To him, it seemed to contain no evidence or information. And so he decided to begin his own inquiry in a “proper” way, with no idea of what he would find.

Demaneuf would go on to document numerous escapes of pathogens from Chinese laboratories. Meanwhile, investigators within our own government were warned off from investigating the lab leak hypothesis.

A months long Vanity Fair investigation, interviews with more than 40 people, and a review of hundreds of pages of U.S. government documents, including internal memos, meeting minutes, and email correspondence, found that conflicts of interest, stemming in part from large government grants supporting controversial virology research, hampered the U.S. investigation into COVID-19’s origin at every step. In one State Department meeting, officials seeking to demand transparency from the Chinese government say they were explicitly told by colleagues not to explore the Wuhan Institute of Virology’s gain-of-function research, because it would bring unwelcome attention to U.S. government funding of it.

Also:

    Dr. Richard Ebright, board of governors professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University, said that from the very first reports of a novel bat-related coronavirus outbreak in Wuhan, it took him “a nanosecond or a picosecond” to consider a link to the Wuhan Institute of Virology. Only two other labs in the world, in Galveston, Texas, and Chapel Hill, North Carolina, were doing similar research. “It’s not a dozen cities,” he said. “It’s three places.”

    Then came the revelation that the Lancet statement was not only signed but organized by a zoologist named Peter Daszak, who has repackaged U.S. government grants and allocated them to facilities conducting gain-of-function research—among them the WIV itself. David Asher, now a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, ran the State Department’s day-to-day COVID-19 origins inquiry. He said it soon became clear that “there is a huge gain-of-function bureaucracy” inside the federal government.

 

    As months go by without a host animal that proves the natural theory, the questions from credible doubters have gained in urgency. To one former federal health official, the situation boiled down to this: An institute “funded by American dollars is trying to teach a bat virus to infect human cells, then there is a virus” in the same city as that lab. It is “not being intellectually honest not to consider the hypothesis” of a lab escape.

    And given how aggressively China blocked efforts at a transparent investigation, and in light of its government’s own history of lying, obfuscating, and crushing dissent, it’s fair to ask if Shi Zhengli, the Wuhan Institute’s lead coronavirus researcher, would be at liberty to report a leak from her lab even if she’d wanted to.

It is also interesting to note in both this and the Newsweek article, above, the accusations that Trump's support of the lab origin theory held back investigation. The articles' authors try to paint this as a failing of Trump, but what it really shows is that the media and government bureaucrats so hated Trump that they would undermine anything Trump supported. I will add this: Trump is not a scientist or medical expert, but he is expert in judging people, and he probably could detect the B.S. leaking from Fauci and others a mile away.

• Strange how Covid-19 and/or its vaccine seem to target reproductive organs: "Can Covid-19 Coronavirus Cause Long-Term Erectile Dysfunction? Here Are 2 More Studies"--Forbes.

    A new publication in The World Journal of Men's Health described what happened to two men following bouts with Covid-19 coronavirus infections. Six to eight months afterwards, they still had virus particles in their penises. Not only that. They had developed severe erectile dysfunction (ED) even though they hadn’t had ED prior to having Covid-19.

    In fact, the two men had ED so severe that they underwent penile implant surgery.

• Probably the real reason all this has come to the fore and China may be preparing for war: "High-Ranking Chinese Defector Has 'Direct Knowledge' of Several Chinese Special Weapons Programs"--Red State. Per the article, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) has had a high-level Chinese defector for 3 months who has provided information concerning Chinese weapon programs including their bio-weapons program. "Sources say the level of confidence in the defector’s information is what has led to a sudden crisis of confidence in Dr. Anthony Fauci," states the article, "adding that U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) personnel detailed to DIA have corroborated very technical details of information provided by the defector." 

    But also explosive news on how converged and compromised our intelligence services have become (underline added):

 

    FBI Director Christopher Wray was “ambushed” with the information, [Red State's sources] say, and Langley was also unaware. Sources say DIA leadership kept the defector within their Clandestine Services network to prevent Langley and the State Department from accessing the person, whose existence was kept from other agencies because DIA leadership believes there are Chinese spies or sources inside the FBI, CIA, and several other federal agencies.

 In a separate article concerning the defector at PJ Media, it relates:

... the defector has information on the origins of the Wuhan virus: “China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that coronavirus originally came from a lab.” [Adam Housley] later clarified: “US intelligence has a Chinese defector with Wuhan info. AND China is trying to produce variants that suggest it came from bats to cover up that coronavirus originally came from a lab.”

VIEW: "The Niagara Falls Ice Bridge Disaster"--Fascinating Horror (10 min.)

Miscellany:  

• Trump brought us low gas prices and energy independence. Biden is bringing us a repeat of the 1970s: "Biden To Cancel Oil And Gas Leases In Alaskan Arctic National Wildlife Refuge"--The Federalist. 
• "Is there a 'massive pattern of fraud in the USA'?"--Bayou Renaissance Man. Quoting from a post at the Free Republic:

    This is my personal observation of a pattern of suspicious activities and behaviors going on in the government of a certain West Coast Democrat-operated state that will remain nameless (but it's just south of Oregon).

    Approximately ten years ago I observed a massive increase in turnover in the accounting departments and HR departments of state agencies responsible for making grants of state and Federal money to the public. This phenomenon did not seem to impact any agencies that do not issue payments to the public.

    In prior years the pattern within state government was that accounting staff would frequently spend an entire 30-40 year career with one agency. This meant they had significant experience and understanding of the financial operations of the agency and this led to efficiency. The same applied to Personnel/HR staff.

    Then starting around ten years ago the pattern abruptly flipped. New managers were hired into most accounting and HR offices and they ruthlessly purged or isolated older, experienced staff. These people were replaced with younger, less experienced people who were typically recent college graduates.

    The typical tenure of more than half of these new accounting and HR staff at a particular agency is less than one year. For whatever reason they frequently fail probation and are then removed from their jobs. Some of them face inexplicable acts of retaliation by their managers and numerous lawsuits have resulted as affected individuals have fought back.

    This phenomenon impacting accounting and HR staff did not exist prior to 2010.

    The advent of this staffing issue coincides with the rise in a specific indicator of fraud: Multiple recipients of fraudulent payments listed at the same real or fictional addresses.

. . .

    Because of the persistent instances of high turnover and retaliatory acts by a broad spectrum of managers after 2010 it is not a small logical leap to assume that this phenomenon is tacitly sanctioned by the people who own and operate state government.

    Based on my own informal observations I've concluded that the fraudulent acts of likely embezzlement includes a database of approximately 600,000 to as many as 900,000 fictional persons. The purpose of the fraud is quite possibly to move Federal funds from certain accounts transferring them to non-Federal accounts. This amounts to likely tens if not hundreds of billions of dollars being siphoned off from Federal programs over an eleven year period.

    Some of these funds are likely being redirected to state government accounts.

    A recent case in point: the over $31 billion dollars in fraudulent unemployment claims issued by California's Employment Development Department (EDD). A relative handful of criminals have been arrested for this fraud and that accounts for less than .5% of the total amount of the estimated fraud. Note that some estimates of the fraud are as high as $80 billion.

    No one at EDD has been arrested, demoted, prosecuted, reprimanded, or kicked out of the office coffee club over this fraud. Why? Because I don't think any of the front line staff for EDD were involved. These hard working folks are backlogged trying to clear a massive number of legitimate unemployment claims.

    I believe the fraud was automated and that a very few individuals were directly involved in the actual crime. I believe the fraud was automated for the very simple reason that legitimate claims are still backlogged. The fraud was quickly processed because there was no actual review of the claim involved.

    Okay, now this goes to the next step.

    Someone created a database of up to 900,000 fictional persons. Some of those fictional persons are listed as living at the same real or sometimes fictional addresses.

    And starting in 2016 someone got the bright idea to use this list of fictional persons to commit vote fraud. I believe this fraud recurred in 2020.

• "Pentagon may allow LGBTQ pride flags to be flown on military bases, reversing Trump-era ‘no non-gov’t flags’ rule: Report"--American Military News. You wouldn't be allowed to fly the flag of any other religion on a military base, so why this? (h/t Anonymous Conservative).
• Related: "Gay Reparations Are Past Due" by Omar G. Encarnación, Foreign Policy. The author argues that we, as a society, need to beg for forgiveness from homosexuals, put up monuments to commemorate them, and, in some cases, pay them money.
• Speaking of state sanctioned religions: "PHOTOS: U.S. Embassies, Consulates Worldwide Fly ‘Black Lives Matter’ Flag"--Breitbart. 
• Covid is supposed to be a distraction: "The Racially Charged Bogeyman of Critical Race Theory" by Jabari Simama, Governing (h/t KA9OFF). The author, who supports CRT, explains that we and our elected representatives are just too dumb to understand CRT in all its glory. Besides, he reasons:

Beyond its complexities and formative history, focusing on CRT at this time creates a huge distraction that diverts attention of public officials away from tackling what the public really needs: a return to some semblance of normalcy after a devastating pandemic. 

In other words, don't pay attention to what we are doing behind the curtain. But here is the scary part:

I live in a household of teachers, and they tell me that many students today accept the reality that racism is both implicit and explicit, personal and structural. They say further that students are coming around to accepting and understanding the meaning of privilege — the unearned advantages some families pass down to their children.

• "New Poll Finds All Those People Moving To Texas Aren’t Going To Be Voting For Democrats"--The Federalist.

    Movers from other states were about 1 percent more likely to have voted for Trump than were natives, while movers from overseas favored Biden by 9 percent over natives.




    Among domestic migrants to Texas, Trump was most heavily favored by arrivals from the Mountain West, where Trump enjoyed a plus 13-point margin over the support of native Texans followed by the four-state region of Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee with a plus-8 advantage. Counterintuitively — at least among Texans with an opinion — the area with the third-highest support for Trump among movers was California, where movers were 5 percent more likely to have supported Trump than were natives.




    The region that sent the greatest share of Biden supporters was the South Atlantic Seaboard region, where movers favored Biden over Trump by 9 points more than did natives — the same margin as Biden was favored among voters who were born in another country.




    While naturalized Texans preferred Biden in 2020 compared to domestic movers, they were almost as conservative (42 percent to 44 percent), less liberal (14 percent to 18 percent), and far more moderate (45 percent to 37 percent), signaling that overseas immigrants to Texas are up for grabs politically and are likely taking a dim view of the modern left’s full-embrace of all things woke.

• "Meteor Falls From Sky And Crashes Into Indonesian Volcano, Watch Spectacular Video"--RepublicWorld.com. The photograph makes it appear that the meteor went into the open mouth of the volcano, but a video from a different direction makes it clear that the meteor struck the upper portion of the mountain.
• The future of sunglasses: "Smart sunglasses change tint with the click of a button and can even take phone calls"--Daily Mail. "The sunglasses from Ampere are made with electrochromic lenses, which darkens in response to an electronic signal," which can be controlled by a button on the glasses or a phone app.
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Portable microwave weapons capable of causing Havana Syndrome in US diplomats and spies have been developed by several countries, expert says - as officials probe whether Russia or China are behind over 130 'sonic attacks'"--Daily Mail.