POTD: Ruins of an Elementary School in Georgia

Source: "Haunting photos show abandoned buildings left to lie in ruins across Georgia including an old Olympic stadium, decaying swimming pool and a ghostly manor"--Daily Mail.

 

VIDEO: "The Disaster Cycle Is Marching On"

 

VIDEO: "The Disaster Cycle Is Marching On"--Suspicious Observers (13 min.)

It's only been about 6 months since Suspicious Observes began shipping Ben Davidson's book on the disaster cycle. Yet even in that short time period, a considerable number of papers have been published that support his theory and continue to show that the cycle is progressing. He goes over the new research confirming his theory.

The Docent's Memo (7/28/2021)

VIDEO: "Manurhin MR73 - Double action secrets and a funky 9mm cylinder"--Bloke On The Range (24 min.). A look at some of the mechanical features that make this one of the best revolvers ever.

Firearms/Self-Defense:

• "Mastering Grip: 5 Ways You’re Holding Your Gun Wrong"--U.S. Law Shield. The author of this article approached 5 well known firearm instructors to ask them what was the #1 problem they saw among their students when it came to gripping a firearm. Kippi Leatham's response was shooter's picking up the weapon a different way every time. As we all know, consistency is key to mastering a firearms. Leatham explains how to do it:

    My advice is to get the proper shooting grip immediately (if possible), whether picking the gun up off of a bench, drawing from a holster, taking it off of a display rack, etc. Every time I handle one of my pistols, whether I’m loading a mag, unloading the gun, drawing from a holster, just admiring it, etc., I use my strong-hand shooting grip —

    Trigger finger rests on the frame (below the slide), visibly above/outside of the trigger guard.

    Three remaining fingers are closed and touching under the trigger guard.

    Thumb webbing is centered on the back strap of the gun and positioned under the tang as high as possible.

    Thumb on the left side of the gun is touching the side of the frame.

• "6 Tips to Getting A Better Grip On Your Gun"--The Indoor Shooting Range. This is just a brief information sheet probably intended for the Range's customers. The 6 tips are (followed by my commentary):

1. Get a firm grip. I think it was Massad Ayoob that said that you need to get a tight enough grip that your hand starts to shake slightly, and then back off just a bit. The main point to this is to make sure that the firearm is not going to shift in position as you fire it, and to force yourself into a consistent grip.
2. Lock your wrist. Again, this helps with consistency, as well as preventing a failure to feed or extract due to "limp wrist".
3. Position the gun in your hand so you can reach the trigger. Ideally you want a handgun that fits your hand, but if you are shooting a handgun slightly too big or too little, you may need to position it differently. The point is to be able to be able to at least touch the trigger with the first crease of the first joint of the trigger finger.
4. Two hands are better than one. Two hands equals better stability--if you are using your second hand correctly. A tea-cup grip--where the off-hand essentially acts as a saucer for the gripping hand--is pretty much next to useless. Gripping the wrist of the primary hand is also not really beneficial. Ideally, you want the four fingers of the off hand to lie over the spaces where the three fingers of primary hand are gripping the handgun. Thus, the first finger of the off-hand is pushing up slightly into the trigger guard. I like the thumbs forward grip on a semi-auto pistol, and I like to keep a bit of pressure on the side of the gun with my off-hand thumb--it seems to steady it a bit.
5. Keep the pressure on while pulling the trigger. This point is a warning not to increase or loosen your grip on the firearm as you pull the trigger, otherwise the whole purpose of Point #1 is defeated.
6. Practice holding on tight. This serves two purposes. The most basic is to build your strength. The second is for you to learn an appropriate amount of grip: as noted above, just a hair below where your hand begins to shake.

• "What Are the Effects of a Contact Shot for Personal Defense?" by George Harris, Shooting Illustrated. A reminder that if you are in an extreme close quarter (ECQ) and try to make a contact shot against an assailant, a semi-auto pistol may fail to fire if the muzzle is touching or shoved into the side of the target and pushed out of battery. He also discusses the effects on the person being shot at contact distance:

Without going into great detail, the gases from the propellant powering the projectile down the barrel require a degree of consideration in conjunction with the bullet’s penetration into the target. When the muzzle is in contact with the target as the gun fires, the bullet makes the initial penetration followed by a significant amount of high-pressure gases that create additional tissue damage. In some cases, depending on the cartridge fired in a contact wound, the gas-pressure damage to the target equals or exceeds that which was caused by the projectile itself. This is beneficial in stopping the unwanted action of the opponent in a gunfight.

• "Common Issues When Swapping AR-15 Upper Receivers" by Steve Adelmann, Shooting Illustrated. The "small frame" AR-15 receivers generally fit together without issue, but the author discusses what to do if you happen to have an older Colt model with the larger front pivot pin, if there is too much play between the upper and lower receivers, and a warning that some trigger groups will not work well with PCC uppers. The AR-10 receivers are a different story because there is greater variance in designs--there is no mil-spec for the larger receivers. However, the author discusses the three main types out there and offers pointers for certain issues.

• "Rifle Recoil--Is Anybody Honest About It?" by Dave Anderson, Guns Magazine. A discussion on how excessive recoil is a detriment to learning accurate rifle shooting, but too many shooters and hunters are under the misconception that they need more power! 

VIDEO: "5 Year Survival Food Supply: $7,000 and 2.5 MILLION Calories"--Canadian Prepper (20 min.)

Prepping/Survival:

• "Food Storage List For 1 Year"--Modern Survival Blog. The list is a modified one from the LDS Preparedness Manual, and represents a 1 year, bare minimum food storage for one adult male.
• "Survival Vitamins and Supplements"--Modern Survival Blog. The reality is that it will be hard enough to create a long term storage plan that provides the calories you need, let alone one that will include all of the vitamins. This article discusses the vitamins you should include in your food storage program, starting, of course, with a good multi-vitamin from "well recognized brands, tailored separately towards men and women. And, the 'over 50' crowd…" (Ellipses in original). He also includes Vitamins C and D as additional necessary supplements. Finally, he discusses some other supplements you might want to consider.
•  "What to do during a shelter-in-place order"--KHOU 11 (h/t KA9OFF). This article focuses on a shelter-in-place order issued after a chemical release or incident. The article relates:

When local leaders make that call [to issue an order], here’s what they want you to do:

• Go inside
• Shut and lock all doors and windows
• Turn off your air conditioner or heater, as well as any fans
• Close the fireplace damper

(Basically, you’re trying to keep that possibly dangerous air from coming in your house.)

    While you’re sheltering in place, don’t drink tap water. Keep an eye out for updates about the situation so you know when it’s safe to go outside or if things have escalated and you need to evacuate.

• "Tips For Surviving Deadly Dust Storms" by Bob Rodgers, Preppers Will.  As the author discusses, dust storms primarily are dangerous to drivers because they can quickly and completely obscure vision. There is also the risk of respiratory issues or eye damage if you are caught outside during such an event--the author suggests that if you are in area prone to dust storms that you keep dust masks and goggles in your emergency kit. Back to the driving issue, the author discusses 6 tips for surviving a dust storm while driving, particularly on a highway. The tips are:

1. Be aware of weather by listening to weather reports so you know if there is a possibility of a dust storm.
2. Look for signs of an approaching dust storm and know what are those signs.
3. Run to safety--i.e., try to outrun the storm by taking a different route.
4. Slow down if you are overtaken by a dust storm since most accidents are due to vehicles driving too fast for the reduced visibility.
5. Get off the road.
6. Wait it out.

This advice is also good advice for white outs--like dust storms but with blowing snow.

• "How Breakdown Cascades Into Collapse" by Charles Hugh Smith, SHTF Plan. From the article:

    The misconception that collapse is an all or nothing phenomenon is common: Either the system rights itself with a bit of money-printing and rah-rah or it collapses into post-industrial ruin and gangs are battling over the last stash of canned beans.

    Neither scenario considers the fragility and resilience of the socio-economic system as a whole. It is both far more fragile than the believers in the permanence of the waste is growth model grasp and more resilient than the complete collapse prognosticators grasp.

    The recent relatively mild logjams in global supply chains of essentials are mere glimpses of precariously fragile delivery-supply systems. These can be understood as bottlenecks that only insiders see, or as unstable nodes through which all the economy’s connections run. Put another way, the economy’s as a network appears decentralized and robust, but this illusion vanishes when we consider how the entire economy rests on a few unstable nodes.

• "Mailvox: tribalism wins"--Vox Popoli. A reader describes an incident while staying at a motel with a group of Mennonites. He went down to get his "all you can eat" breakfast and watched in amazement as the Mennonites deftly came in and took over the eating area, physically blocking access to food and tables, and monopolizing the waffle makers, leaving nary a crumb after they were done.
• Two from Raconteur Report on caching and how to do it:

• "For A Rainy Day" 
• "Weapons Caching"

The latter article also contains links to a couple books on weapons caching.

VIDEO: "The War Over Critical Race Theory"--America Uncovered (16 min.)

The Collapse of Complex Societies:

• A few reminders on how important it is to get vaccinated against Covid-19: 
• "Vaccinated people make up 75% of recent COVID-19 cases in Singapore, but few fall ill"--Reuters.
• "Sen. Ron Johnson: Data from Israel Shows 84% of New COVID Cases are with Vaccinated Individuals (VIDEO)"--Gateway Pundit.
• "5,522 People have Died within 28 days of having a Covid-19 Vaccine in Scotland according to Public Health Scotland"--Global Research.
• "Public Health England have released the 19th technical briefing on Covid-19 variants of concern and it shows that people who’ve received at least one dose of a Covid-19 vaccine make up over 65% of all alleged Covid-19 deaths from February 1st 2021 through to July 19th 2021."
• "‘Vast majority’ of Covid-19 cluster in Cape Cod were vaccinated"--Free West Media.
• "Antibody-Dependent Enhancement and the Coronavirus Vaccines" by Derek Lowe, Science Translational Medicine. Antibody-Dependent Enhancement (ADE) is where the anti-bodies that result from a vaccine turn out to facilitate a subsequent infection from the same disease or a variant. Basically, Lowe wants to convince the reader that ADE wouldn't happen in Covid-19 vaccines because scientists learned from studying other similar corona viruses that  "it was the vaccines that targeted the N (nucleoprotein) antigen of the coronavirus that had ADE problems, while the ones that targeted the S (Spike) protein did not." Simple enough, except Lowe had to issue a correction after his opinion piece was published. Now he informs us that he wasn't accurate. "There was trouble after immunization with a nucleoprotein-directed vaccine, but ADE could also be seen with some of the Spike-directed vaccine candidates as well – see reviews here, here, and here."
• "Cascade Of Consequences"--The Burning Platform. A good look at data showing that masks, lockdowns, and even the vaccinations, haven't worked to prevent the spread of Covid. 

    ... The data from Israel, the most vaxxed country on the planet, is proving these “vaccines” to be virtually worthless.

    Over 80% of new cases are among the vaxxed and the effectiveness of the vaccines are clocking in at 39%, just a smidge lower than the 95% from the doctored trials. ...

• "The coming collapse of the developing world"--Spiked. This is a long read, but the gist is that developing countries were not in the best shape economically before the pandemic, and for various reasons are going to be hit hardest economically because of shut downs and travel restrictions. Also, their health systems are terrible and they won't be able to vaccinate enough people to stop the pandemic.
• "Pack animals: NYPD hunt for these three 'Fight Night' teens who attacked firefighter with a bottle before punching and kicking him as he walked his dog in Queens"--Daily Mail. I wonder if the editor would have felt comfortable using this headline if the suspects had been a group of black kids.
• Creepy Joe: "Did Joe Biden Really Pinch 8-Year Old Maria Piacesi’s Nipple In 2015? She Says 'Yes'"--Right Journalism.
• "Why Sexual Morality May be Far More Important than You Ever Thought"--Quest. An excerpt: "Increased sexual constraints, either pre or post-nuptial, always led to increased flourishing of a culture. Conversely, increased sexual freedom always led to the collapse of a culture three generations later."
• The CIA's involvement in the drug trade is probably one of the worst kept secrets in the world. I'm not talking about the specifics--who is involved and where the money is going--because that has been kept secret. Rather, just the larger aspect of the CIA (and probably other intelligence agencies) using drug trafficking to augment their budgets (and probably line pockets), stretching back at least to Air America and smuggling out of the Golden Triangle during the Vietnam Era and all the way forward to at least the 1990s in Afghanistan. Anyway, a good article on the topic: "The CIA, Contras, Gangs, and Crack"--Institute for Policy Studies. This 1996 article begins:

    In August 1996, the San Jose Mercury News initiated an extended series of articles linking the CIA’s “contra” army to the crack cocaine epidemic in Los Angeles. Based on a year-long investigation, reporter Gary Webb wrote that during the 1980s the CIA helped finance its covert war against Nicaragua’s leftist government through sales of cut-rate cocaine to South Central L.A. drug dealer, Ricky Ross. The series unleashed a storm of protest, spearheaded by black radio stations and the congressional Black Caucus, with demands for official inquiries. The Mercury News‘ Web page, with supporting documents and updates, received hundreds of thousands of “hits” a day.

    While much of the CIA-contra-drug story had been revealed years ago in the press and in congressional hearings, the Mercury News series added a crucial missing link: It followed the cocaine trail to Ross and black L.A. gangs who became street-level distributors of crack, a cheap and powerful form of cocaine. The CIA’s drug network, wrote Webb, “opened the first pipeline between Colombia’s cocaine cartels and the black neighborhoods of Los Angeles, a city now known as the ‘crack’ capital of the world.” Black gangs used their profits to buy automatic weapons, sometimes from one of the CIA-linked drug dealers.

    CIA Director John Deutch declared that he found “no connection whatsoever” between the CIA and cocaine traffickers. And major media–the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post–have run long pieces refuting the Mercury News series. They deny that Bay Area-based Nicaraguan drug dealers, Juan Norwin Meneses and Oscar Danilo Blandon, worked for the CIA or contributed “millions in drug profits” to the contras, as Webb contended. They also note that neither Ross nor the gangs were the first or sole distributors of crack in L.A. Webb, however, did not claim this. He wrote that the huge influx of cocaine happened to come at just the time that street-level drug dealers were figuring out how to make cocaine affordable by changing it into crack.

    Many in the media have also postulated that any drug-trafficking contras involved were “rogue” elements, not supported by the CIA. But these denials overlook much of the Mercury News‘ evidence of CIA complicity. For example:

• CIA-supplied contra planes and pilots carried cocaine from Central America to U.S. airports and military bases. In 1985, Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) agent Celerino Castillo reported to his superiors that cocaine was being stored at the CIA’s contra-supply warehouse at Ilopango Air Force Base in El Salvador for shipment to the U.S. The DEA did nothing, and Castillo was gradually forced out of the agency.
• When Danilo Blandón was finally arrested in 1986, he admitted to drug crimes that would have sent others away for life. The Justice Department, however, freed Blandón after only 28 months behind bars and then hired him as a full-time DEA informant, paying him more than $166,000. When Blandón testified in a 1996 trial against Ricky Ross, the Justice Department blocked any inquiry about Blandón’s connection to the CIA.
• Although Norwin Meneses is listed in DEA computers as a major international drug smuggler implicated in 45 separate federal investigations since 1974, he lived conspicuously in California until 1989 and was never arrested in the U.S.
• Senate investigators and agents from four organizations all complained that their contra-drug investigations “were hampered,” Webb wrote, “by the CIA or unnamed ‘national security’ interests.” In the 1984 “Frogman Case,” for instance, the U.S. Attorney in San Francisco returned $36,800 seized from a Nicaraguan drug dealer after two contra leaders sent letters to the court arguing that the cash was intended for the contras. Federal prosecutors ordered the letter and other case evidence sealed for “national security” reasons. When Senate investigators later asked the Justice Department to explain this unusual turn of events, they ran into a wall of secrecy.

The article then turns to a more general history of CIA drug trafficking up to and including its ties to drug trafficking out of Afghanistan in the 1980's and early 1990's. On the latter point, the article relates:

CIA-supported Moujahedeen rebels engaged heavily in drug trafficking while fighting the Soviet-supported government, which had plans to reform Afghan society. The Agency’s principal client was Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, one of the leading drug lords and the biggest heroin refiner, who was also the largest recipient of CIA military support. 

 But I found the following quote the most revealing of all: 

“In my 30­year history in the Drug Enforcement Administration and related agencies, the major targets of my investigations almost invariably turned out to be working for the CIA.” — Dennis Dayle, former chief of an elite DEA enforcement unit.

• More: "The Contras, Cocaine, and Covert Operations: National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 2." Description:

This electronic briefing book is compiled from declassified documents obtained by the National Security Archive, including the notebooks kept by NSC aide and Iran-contra figure Oliver North, electronic mail messages written by high-ranking Reagan administration officials, memos detailing the contra war effort, and FBI and DEA reports. The documents demonstrate official knowledge of drug operations, and collaboration with and protection of known drug traffickers. Court and hearing transcripts are also included.

• Contra: "Cocaine, Conspiracy Theories and the CIA in Central America" by Craig Delaval, Frontline. Even though Delaval concludes that there was no official involvement in the crack cocaine trade by the CIA, it nevertheless relates:

    "You're always going to be having drug traffickers, gun runners, people who are alien smugglers ... as some of the kinds of people that you're going to be relying on to carry out a covert war," Winer observes. "And that's true of any government anywhere--whether you're talking Afghanistan, Colombia, Southeast Asia, Burma. Your operatives tend to be people who are involved in other illicit activities. These things tend to go together."

    If you put aside conspiracy theories of crack peddling, that still leaves the question of why the Agency has repeatedly found itself associated with drug traffickers.

• "Abolish FISA, Reform FBI, & Break Up CIA" by Angelo Codevilla, The American Mind. He begins:

    America’s Intelligence agencies are the deep state’s deepest part, and the most immediate threat to representative government. They are also not very good at what they are supposed to be doing. Protecting the Republic from them requires refocusing them on their proper jobs.

    Intelligence officials abuse their positions to discredit opposition to the Democratic Party, of which they are part. Complicit with the media, they leverage the public’s mistaken faith in their superior knowledge, competence, and patriotism to vilify their domestic enemies from behind secrecy’s shield.

    Pretenses of superior knowledge have always tempted the Administrative State’s officials to manipulate or override voters. Hence, as Justice Robert H. Jackson (who served as chief prosecutor of the Nuremberg trials) warned, they often turn their powers against whomever they dislike politically, socially, or personally and try to minimize the public’s access to the bases upon which they act.

    But only the Intelligence agencies have the power to do that while claiming that scrutiny of their pretenses endangers national security. They have succeeded in restricting information about their misdeeds by “classifying” them under the Espionage Act of 1921. Thus covered, they misrepresent their opinions as knowledge and their preferences as logic. Thus acting as irresponsible arbiters of truth at the highest levels of American public life, they are the foremost jaws of the ruling class vise that is squeezing self-rule out of America.

 

VIDEO: "The BEST SWORD ever? British 1788 pattern heavy cavalry sword"--scholagladiatoria (12 min.)

Miscellany:

• "The Feminist Left Thinks The Best Thing It Can Do For Women Is Send Them To War" by Elle Reynolds, The Federalist. Reynolds' primary argument is this: "I’m sure, if you asked the women of America for a list of things that could make their lives better, being forced to sign up to go to war would not be high on the list." Well, I'm pretty sure that being forced to sign up to go to war isn't high on men's lists either, and yet men (myself included) have been required to register for selective service.

    I'll probably earn a lot of hate for this, but in my opinion, if women expect to exercise all the rights of men in a polity, they should also have to bear the same responsibilities, including the threat of military service. Yes, I'm well aware that the vast majority of young women are physically and emotionally unsuited for combat roles, but I don't believe the solution is to continue to let women be free-riders when it comes to national defense.

 

    I'm also aware that having women serve in the military violates historical moral tenets and biological imperatives that women be protected because of their roles as mothers and perpetuating the race. But women have largely rejected the role of motherhood, so the biological and moral argument for exempting them from service is increasingly moot.

• A canary in the coal mine? "An Elegy for the Boy Scouts" by Mark Pulliam, Law & Liberty. The author notes that from 2019 to 2020 membership in the Boy Scouts of America (BSA) fell from 1.97 million Cub Scouts and Boy Scouts to 1.12 million and, "[t]o make matters worse, the Associated Press reports that BSA membership has fallen even further since 2020—to about 762,000." This is from a high of 6.5 million in 1972 (and, even in 1998, there were 4.8 million scouts). The BSA's biggest supporters were always religions, so it is no surprise that the decline began after former Defense Secretary Robert Gates, while serving as head of the BSA, opened enrollment to homosexual members, and was hurried to its doom when the BSA decided to allow homosexual leaders. Now the Scouts (as they call themselves now) are admitting girls in order to stem the hemorrhage. 

    Pulliam wonders if the decline is because scouting is passé, or because scouting became woke. He notes, in this regard, that Scouting had started to decline in popularity as far back as the early 1960s. The BSA's attempts to keep up with the times didn't seem to have ever worked. The wokeness seems to have simply been the final straw that broke the camel's back.  

    I think that the Scouts simply became irrelevant to most of its perspective audience. The heart of scouting was traditionally rural, so increased urbanization probably didn't help. As Pulliam notes, increased immigration and diversity probably caused the Scouts to fall victim to the "bowling alone" problem associated with reduced social capital. I suspect that stagnating wages beginning in the 1970s probably played a role; for instance, I dropped out over concerns of how much it was costing my parents for membership dues, paying for the awards, uniforms, costs to attend camps, etc. Increased competition for both the boys' and the leaders' time also made a difference.  And the obsession with achieving Eagle Scout by 14 or 15 also took its toll--scouting ceased to be about a bunch of boys getting together for a good time and increasingly was just another box to be checked off in puffing up a college application.

• "Jeff Bezos offers Nasa $2bn in exchange for moon mission contract"--The Guardian. As you know, NASA had awarded its moon rocket contract to Space X. This made Bezos butt-hurt, even though at that time his company hadn't even gotten any sort of capsule into space while Space X had started to regularly do so. So, after making a frivolous complaint to force NASA to reconsider its decision--which could still go to Space X--Bezos is attempting to sweeten the deal "by waiving all payments in the current and next two government fiscal years up to $2bn to get the program back on track," as well as pay for an orbital mission to vet its technology. In other words, Bezos is offering to not charge NASA for the costs it would incur for Bezos's company, Blue Origin, to catch up to where Space X is now. How considerate of him.
• A little crime history: "The ballad of the Chowchilla bus kidnapping"--Vox. From the article header: "In 1976, a school bus carrying 26 children and their driver disappeared from a small California town, capturing the world’s attention. Forty-five years later, we revisit the story." You might think that you recognize this plot from a Dirty Harry movie and you would be correct--that's what inspired the kidnappers.
• "Critical Witchcraft Theory"--American Greatness. The author compares Critical Race Theory to the Salem Witch Trials and similar witch hysterias. An excerpt:

    Systemic racism, by contrast, serves perfectly well as a realistic description of some societies, such as the antebellum states in which slavery was permitted. But today’s theorists of antiracism are faced with the difficulty that real systemic racism has disappeared from America. Individual racists can be spotted, i.e. people who loathe or at least dislike other people on the basis of race and behave towards those people with prejudice. But “systemic racism,” involving the complicity of law, the approval of society, the power of economics, and the reinforcement of culture is just gone. It was officially undone generations ago and we have since vigorously cleaned out its vestiges.

    That leaves the proponents of systemic racism chasing after spectral evidence. They may not be able to see systemic racism with ordinary human eyes, but they “know” it is there and they have special magical eyes to see through its myriad disguises to the ugly truth beneath. William Stoughton and Cotton Mather would be proud of them. 

Concealed Carry For The Rest Of Us

(Source)

       Most of you are probably familiar with the famous quote from Clint Smith: "Carrying a gun is not supposed to be comfortable; it’s supposed to be comforting." I generally have seen it quoted out of context, because Smith also added: "The gun that’s with you is better than the one that’s home in the safe."

      But there are a number of trainers, writers, and pundits that hold to the doctrine that no matter how uncomfortable or inconvenient, you should carry at least a mid-sized service handgun or something as close to it as possible (i.e., the Glock 19 or similar). "Dress around the gun," is also a common phrase to rebut those whose daily wardrobe doesn't include a jacket or untucked t-shirt. But this ignores Smith's other statement about having a gun with you.

     Ideally, everyone wishing to carry a concealed weapon would be able to carry a larger capacity handgun. (Heck, ideally, we could all carry a rifle). But that is not how the real world works. The fact of the matter is most people are not going to carry a weapon if it is uncomfortable and inconvenient because the perceived or actual risk is not that high. This is not to say that concealed carry license holders will not give up some comfort and convenience, but that it is unrealistic to expect the majority to readjust their lives around carrying a handgun. Especially those who do not live or work in high risk jobs or environments.

       Stephen A. Camp does a good job explaining this point in his article "Making the J-Frame .38 Snub Work." He writes:

Clint Smith is reputed to have said something to the effect, “Handguns are meant to be comforting, not comfortable”. I tend to agree if one is pretty sure of treading a hazardous path, leads a high-risk life-style, or works in a dangerous profession. Before retiring as a full-time peace officer, I seldom carried less than a 9mm or .45 automatic off duty. Were I in the jewelry business in Los Angeles or a bodyguard or something similar, I would not rely solely on a snub. More than likely I’ve served my last arrest or search warrant. I’ll not kick in any more doors or be sworn to confronting and arresting wanted felons known to be dangerous on sight. These days I’m around the house feeding ducks or goldfish, writing a bit, at the range, or hunting lease and that’s about it. ... [F]or most of my time I’m in a very, very low risk environment. True warriors will opine that one could be under deadly attack at any time and that is true, but we all play the odds to a degree. 

It is true that, in the United States, there are pockets of high crime; but for most of the country, violent crime rates are very low. The majority of us, like Camp, live in a "very, very low risk environment."

       The result is that most concealed gun carriers will necessarily gravitate toward carrying a firearm that the professionals would considered a "back-up gun" (BUG). In other words, notwithstanding the nomenclature, BUGs are probably the primary concealed carry firearm of most people who carry, not the compact semi-autos like the Glock 19 or 3-inch, steel framed .357 revolvers. And this is reflected in the market. It is why S&W's light-weight snub-nose revolvers are still one of their best sellers; it is why even Glock eventually surrendered and, kicking and screaming, came out with the Glock 42 and 43; and it is why other manufacturers have introduced a bevy of "micro-9's". 

       In other words, rather than carrying the biggest and the baddest handgun, focus on what you would realistically carry on a regular basis and be able to effectively operate.

     In a prior post, "Concealed Carry--No Elegant Solution," I described my journey as to selecting a concealed carry weapon, method of carry, and holster. I went through and tried a variety of firearms, including a variety of full-sized semi-autos, a 3-inch .357 Magnum, a .22 semi-auto "mouse gun," and a compact .380, before finally settling on a .38 snub-nose revolver. Since then, I've moved back to a .380 semi-auto, but I still often find myself slipping the .38 snubby into my pocket.

     While I wouldn't completely rule out heavier weapons, I suspect that for the majority of concealed carriers, an unloaded weight of 20 ounces, give or take an ounce or two, would represent the heaviest firearm they would tolerate for daily carry, and the majority would want a firearm with an unloaded weight of 16 ounces or less. For those wanting to carry in a pocket, whether trousers or an inside breast pocket, a weapon of 12 ounces or less (unloaded) would be best. 

    In this regard, the Glock 43 (9x19mm or 9 mm Parabellum) comes in at 16.2 ounces. The Glock 42 (.380 ACP or 9 mm Short) is 12.2 ounces, and would be more carry friendly for most people. Some other popular concealed carry handguns:

• Beretta offers several concealed carry handguns, including the Pico (.380 ACP) at 11.5 ounces and the Nano (9x19 mm) at 19.8 ounces. 
• Beretta also makes a small .22 LR semi auto (the 21A Bobcat) and a .32 Auto (the 3032 Tomcat) which weigh in at 11.8 and 14.5 ounces, respectively.
• Bersa makes their popular Thunder series of handguns in .22 LR and .380 ACP, weighing 18.9 and 20 ounces, respectively.
• The Glock 26 used to be considered the "baby Glock"--it is 19.4 ounces without magazine.
• H&K's subcompact offering is the P30SK (9mm) which weighs in at 24 ounces.
• Kel Tec's P-3AT (.380 ACP) is popular for those who need something small and lightweight--it is only 8.3 ounces.
• Kel Tec's single stack 9 mm is the PF-9 which comes in at 12.7 ounces.
• At the other end of the spectrum is Kel Tec's P-32 (.32 ACP) which is only 6.6 ounces.
• North American Arms sells a broad range of small revolvers in .22 LR and .22 Magnum. Typical of the former is the NAA-22LR (.22 LR) which weighs only 4.6 ounces; and, of the latter is the NAA-22M (.22 Magnum) at 6.5 ounces.
• The Ruger LCP II (.380 ACP) is 10.6 ounces. 
• The Ruger LCP Max (.380 ACP) is also listed at 10.6 ounces unloaded.
• The Ruger EC 9 (9x19 mm) is 17.2 ounces.
• Ruger's snub-nosed revolver is the LCR which comes in various calibers, from .22 LR to .357 Magnum. The .38 Special model is 13.5 ounces.
• The Sig P238, a 1911-style .380, weighs in at 15.2 ounces.
• The Sig P365 (9x19 mm) comes in at 17.8 ounces.
• The Sig P398, a 1911-style micro 9 mm, weights in at 17 ounces. 
• The S&W Model 642 hammerless .38 Special revolver is the quintessential back-up gun, and probably the measure against which all other small handguns are compared as to size and weight. It's weight (unloaded) is 14.4 ounces. 
• The S&W M&P Bodyguard (.380 ACP) is 12.0 ounces.
• The S&W Shield 2.0 in 9 mm is 18.3 ounces. 
• The S&W Shield Plus (9 mm) is 20.2 ounces.
• The S&W M&P 45 Shield (.45 ACP) is 20.5 ounces.
• The Springfield XD-S in 9 mm is 23 ounces, and in .45 ACP it is 21.5 ounces.
• Springfield also offers a small .380, the Model 911, which is 12.6 ounces.
• Walther offers both a .380 (PK380 at 18 ounces) and a 9mm (PPQ M2 at 24.5 ounces).

This is not intended to be an exhaustive list, but gives you an idea of what is out there from the better known brands.

Inconvenient Truths

IQ by Nation (Source)

A different compilation of National IQ's (Source)

The cultural war is currently focused on what is termed critical race theory (CRT). There is quite a bit of obfuscation of what is CRT and whether it is being taught in K-12. The basic premise of critical race theory, according to the magazine EdWeek, "race is a social construct, and that racism is not merely the product of individual bias or prejudice, but also something embedded in legal systems and policies." According to the article:

A good example is when, in the 1930s, government officials literally drew lines around areas deemed poor financial risks, often explicitly due to the racial composition of inhabitants. Banks subsequently refused to offer mortgages to Black people in those areas.

Of course, such practices have long been illegal. The Fair Housing Act (FHA), as well as a plethora of other anti-discrimination laws, regulations, and whole federal and state bureaucracies exist to prevent such practices. In fact, there is a whole industry of not-for-profit organizations that make their money by constantly trying to find businesses that violate anti-discrimination laws--even tricking them into technical violations--and sue them. Discrimination has become the exception, not the rule.

    But that is where CRT interjects itself. It is not enough, per CRT, to stop acts of discrimination. Rather, the EdWeek article explains, "CRT puts an emphasis on outcomes, not merely on individuals’ own beliefs, and it calls on these outcomes to be examined and rectified." The article also helpfully observes that "Critical race theory emerged out of postmodernist thought, which tends to be skeptical of the idea of universal values, objective knowledge, individual merit, Enlightenment rationalism, and liberalism—tenets that conservatives tend to hold dear." 

    The confusion over whether it is being taught in schools, the article continues, is that critics confuse CRT with "culturally relevant teaching." 

Critical race theory is not a synonym for culturally relevant teaching, which emerged in the 1990s. This teaching approach seeks to affirm students’ ethnic and racial backgrounds and is intellectually rigorous. But it’s related in that one of its aims is to help students identify and critique the causes of social inequality in their own lives.

And by inequality, they mean an unequal outcome (see the discussion on CRT above).  And, per CRT, if there is an unequal outcome, why is that? Because of invisible biases that exist in the system, or in the people. Thus the reason we hear from many intellectuals that whites are inherently racist, inherently oppressors, and blacks are the victims, and that it is not enough to simply not be racist, but that we must be anti-racist: tearing down the supposedly racist systems, beliefs, organizations, etc., that supposedly hold back blacks. 

    The public face of antiracism is Ibram X. Kendi. In a recent NPR piece about Kendi, it related Kendi's dismay on the push back against CRT or culturally relevant teaching, or whatever you want to call it.

"It's been tragic for me to watch," Kendi says. "Because we unfortunately live in a society where there's racial inequity, and our kids are trying to figure out why. They see, you know, let's say darker people who are more likely to be homeless or incarcerated or impoverished, and they're trying to figure out why is that the case? And if we're not actively teaching them it's because of racism, then what are they going to conclude?"

Well, they might conclude that there are other factors at play. Factors which can't be changed by throwing more money at "anti-racist" programs and institutions (and enriching people like Kendi). 

    And it certainly won't help to continue with lies. And that is what Kendi and others are doing--lying. That is the real reason that CRT rejects reason, objective knowledge, and universal truths. And there is a lot of information on why, to quote Kendi, "darker people ... are more likely to be homeless or incarcerated or impoverished."

    Let's start with intelligence. IQ Research has compiled IQ scores from around the world, and even a cursory look at those statistics shows that average or mean IQ's in Sub-Saharan Africa (and certain of the black Caribbean nations) are significantly lower than many other areas of the world, especially Europe and North-East Asia. (Of course, the "mean" or "average" is just that, and doesn't necessarily describe the individual with whom you may be dealing or interacting--in fact, it is dangerous and a mistake to assume that an individual matches the "average" or "mean" for the aggregate as, by definition, 1/2 of the group will be above that number, and 1/2 below).

     What we see are that almost all Sub-Saharan nations have populations where the mean IQ is 70, and a considerable number have mean IQs that 65 or lower. James Thompson discussed last year a comprehensive study into IQ in Nigeria that showed a mean IQ of 70. Turning to an individual country, the United States of America, we see a similar divide, although not quite as dramatic. "When IQ is scaled so that the white mean is 100 and the [standard deviation] is 15, the black mean is about 85 and the black SD slightly less than 15." [1] "Currently, the 1.1 standard deviation difference in average IQ between Blacks and Whites in the United States is not in itself a matter of empirical dispute." [2]

      Under a normal distribution curve, 68% of the population will fall within 1 SD above or below the mean--that is, 34.1% fall within the first SD below the mean. In addition, 13.6% of the population will fall within the second SD below the mean. For American blacks, that means that 34.1% will have an IQ between just over 70 to 85. 13.6% will have an IQ of about 55 to 70.

"So what does it mean to have a score 70 or below? In the past, an IQ score below 70 was considered a benchmark for mental retardation, an intellectual disability characterized by significant cognitive impairments.

Even today, according to the same source, an IQ of 70-79 represents borderline mental disability, while an IQ 55-69 is considered a mild mental disability.

      A common refrain is that IQ is somehow driven by environment. Unfortunately, its appearance seems to be due to "nature" rather than "nurture." For instance, IQ Research claims that the differences in IQ are because of wealth: that is, greater wealth results in a higher IQ. However, the gap in intelligence has persisted for a long time. "This difference was first observed among Army recruits during World War I, and has remained fairly constant." [3] And while I don't want to be diverted into a side discussion on this issue, Michael Levin, in his book cited below, and the paper cited below by Rushton and Jensen, establish that not only do IQ and similar aptitude tests accurately measure cognitive ability, but research shows that IQ differences are inheritable rather than a product of the environment. Steven Pinker has also noted this in his book, The Better Angels of Our Nature. [4] In fact, the failure of many, many government programs, including Head Start, demonstrate that environment is of minimal and only temporary effect.

       Research also shows that low IQ corresponds to several negative social traits. There is a direct correlation between high IQ and altruism and honesty. [5] Intelligent is also positively correlated to self-control (high IQ people generally have greater self-control) [6], crime (low IQ people have a higher propensity to commit crimes) [7], and openness to new ideas [8]. Rushton and Jensen note that blacks exhibit more aggressiveness, impulsivity, and higher self-concept (pride) than whites or east Asians. [9]. They also that blacks report higher rates of sexual intercourse, and more permissive attitudes towards sex, than whites or east Asians. [10] This results in higher rates of sexually transmitted diseases, lower marital stability and lower law abidingness. [11].

      In Richard J. Herrnstein's and Charles Murray's book, The Bell Curve, the authors noted that low IQ correlated with poverty; dropping out of school; unemployment, idleness and injury; higher rates of divorce, lower marriage rates, and increased out-of-wedlock births; increased welfare dependency; low birth rates and poor parenting; less civility or interest in voting; and a higher risk of crime.

     In fact, it is a truism that blacks are involved in violent crime at rates far above that of whites or Asians. In April 2016, I cited to the then recently released "Color of Crime" report by Edwin S. Rubenstein which analyzed crime statistics in the United States based on race. Rubenstein offered a summary of his analysis which included the following points:

• There are dramatic race differences in crime rates. Asians have the lowest rates, followed by whites, and then Hispanics. Blacks have notably high crime rates. This pattern holds true for virtually all crime categories and for virtually all age groups.
• In 2013, a black was six times more likely than a non-black to commit murder, and 12 times more likely to murder someone of another race than to be murdered by someone of another race.
• In 2013, of the approximately 660,000 crimes of interracial violence that involved blacks and whites, blacks were the perpetrators 85 percent of the time. This meant a black person was 27 times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa. A Hispanic was eight times more likely to attack a white person than vice versa.
• In 2014 in New York City, a black was 31 times more likely than a white to be arrested for murder, and a Hispanic was 12.4 times more likely. For the crime of “shooting” — defined as firing a bullet that hits someone — a black was 98.4 times more likely than a white to be arrested, and a Hispanic was 23.6 times more likely.
• If New York City were all white, the murder rate would drop by 91 percent, the robbery rate by 81 percent, and the shootings rate by 97 percent.
• In an all-white Chicago, murder would decline 90 percent, rape by 81 percent, and robbery by 90 percent.

Paul Kersey also took a look at crime in America's largest cities and found the same dichotomy between black violence and that of other races. For instance, he notes in relation to New York City:

Despite being only about 22 percent of the city’s population, the report found blacks comprised a majority—52.4 percent—of murder and non-negligent manslaughter arrests. Hispanics also exceeded their population share, accounting for 35.9 percent of arrests for these crimes. Despite being almost a third of the city’s population, white suspects accounted for less than seven percent of the share. The report noted the arrest population for these offenses “is similarly distributed.”

Similarly, looking at 2015 report from Philadelphia that included information on the race of offenders on "cleared" murder cases for that year, Kersey noted:

From the 133 cases so designated, 105 offenders are identified in the report. Eighty-six (81.9 percent of the total) were black, 18 (17.1 percent) were white, and one (one percent) was Asian. Of this group of 105, ten were of “Hispanic ethnicity.” Given a choice between “black” and “white,” Hispanics are almost always classified as “white,” so possibly all ten of the Hispanic murderers were included in the “white” figure. If that’s the case, whites may comprise only 7.6 percent of identified homicide offenders. 

     Other proxies seem to also track. For instance, "The National Center for Health Statistics said that in 2015, 77.3 percent of non-immigrant black births were illegitimate." The incidence of sexually transmitted diseases is generally much higher among blacks than whites. The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) reports, for instance, that although African Americans only make up 14% of the population in the United States, they account for 45% of the total HIV/AIDS cases (62% of infected women), 55.4% of cases of gonorrhea that were reported, the rate of chlamydia among black women was 5.7 times that of white women, the rate of chlamydia among black men was 7.3 times that of white men, the rate of syphilis for blacks, overall, was 5.4 times that of whites, and the rates of congenital syphilis (i.e., passed from the mother to her child in vitro) was 10.3 times higher than whites.

     Astute observers will note the similarity of many of these traits to that of an r-select population as described in biology and evolutionary psychology. And, in fact, Levin notes in his book:

        Speculation has long focused on the different pressures exerted by the African and Eurasian climates. Survival in the colder climates of Europe and Northern Asia requires technologies unnecessary in Africa: clothing has to be fabricated, fires sustained, food hunted and stored. These constraints favored the ability to plan, in turn entailing ingenuity and low time preferences. Planning is less adaptive in warmer climates where food is easier to get and spoils when stored. (Lynn 1987 speculates that tracking game in snow selected for spatial ability, at which Mongoloids excel.) Hunting also selects more strongly for cooperativeness and reciprocity than does individual gathering and harvesting. 

        Rushton (1988a, 1991d, 1995b) conjecturally organizes this differentiation around two reproductive strategies. Reproductive-rate, or “r,” strategists such as fish produce numerous offspring, few of whom survive. Across species, the r strategy associates with lower intelligence, greater investment in reproduction than in postnatal care, short gestation periods, an accelerated life history,opportunistic feeding, little interindividual cooperation, lax social structure, and boom or bust population cycles. Carrying-capacity, or “K,” strategists, typically large mammals, produce a few offspring in widely spaced litters and care for them long after birth. The K strategy associates with higher intelligence, regular feeding habits, pair-bonding, cooperation, complex social structure, and longevity. Rushton argues that the greater adaptiveness of the r-strategy in Africa made Negroids more r, which would explain the lower mean black levels of intelligence, self-restraint and social organization (as evidenced by failure to form stable political units beyond the tribe, or, in the United States, the gang), and a stronger black reproductive drive as measured by illegitimacy, age of menarche, age of first intercourse, age of first pregnancy, frequency of intercourse, and marital instability. An intriguing phenomenon resistant to environmental explanation emphasized by Rushton is the race difference in litter size: there are 4 pairs of dizygotic twins per 1000 births for Mongoloids, 8 per 1000 for Caucasoids, 16 per 1000 for Negroids. Black infant mortality remains twice that of whites even when social factors are controlled for (Schoendorf et al. 1992).56 An accelerated life cycle is suggested by the greater maturity of black babies when gestation period is controlled for, their greater developmental precocity, and the constancy of the race difference in life expectancy during the twentieth century. [12]

      Even factors that you might think are cultural may very well not be. I would note that a data analysis by OK Cupid of its user data "showed that most men on the site rated black women as less attractive than women of other races and ethnicities." Women also downgraded men that were black or Asian. And an AI algorithm also generally judged white women to be more attractive than darker skinned women. But it is not just a "white thing." Africans find lighter skin to be more attractive. And who can forget the kerfuffle in 2011 when Satoshi Kanazawa (who is Japanese) published an article claiming objective proof that black women are less attractive than white or Asian women with a lower score assigned to women that had more masculine features.

    This is not meant as a catalog of reasons to hate or persecute blacks, but to refute the notion that institutional racism is the reason for disparate outcomes for blacks versus whites (or other races).

Notes:
   
[1] Michael Levin, Why Race Matters, p. 34.

[2]  J. Philippe Rushton and Arthur R. Jensen, "Thirty Years of Research on Race Differences in Cognitive Ability, Psychology, Public Policy, and Law 2005, Vol. 11, No. 2, 235–294, at 236 (PDF available here). See also this summary.

[3]  Levin,  p. 34.

[4]  Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, p. 652 ("General intelligence, moreover, is highly heritable, and mostly unaffected by the family environment (though it may be affected by the cultural environment). [Foot note omitted] We know this because measures of g in adults are strongly correlated in identical twins separated at birth and are not at all correlated in adopted siblings who have been raised in the same family.").

[5]  Levin, p. 54

[6]  Pinker, pp. 598 and 601.

[7]  Pinker, p. 601.

[8]  Pinker, p. 643.

[9]  Rushton, p. 265.

[10]  Id.

[11]  Id.

[12]  Levin, p. 135.

Secret Combinations: South Africa Edition

As you may know, South African President Cyril Ramaphosa has referred to the riots that broke out in South Africa as a failed insurrection, and vowed to track down and punish the instigators. The riots and looting were apparently started by supporters of former President Zuma, who is currently awaiting trial on corruption charges. But is that all there is to it? According to Benjamin Fogel in his article "The insurrection in South Africa is about more than freeing Zuma" there is a lot more behind what is going on.

    He begins by observing some of the big clues that this was not simply a popular uprising. For instance:

• The unrest began on Friday, July 9, when a heavily armed and masked gang hijacked trucks near the Mooi River Toll Plaza and used them to block the road before torching 25 vehicles. The toll gate is a key part of the country’s economy as it links the port of Durban, the largest in sub-Saharan Africa, to the country’s economic heartland of Gauteng. Following this attack, other groups used burning tyres and logs to block roads. In the days that followed, large numbers of people looted shopping centres across KwaZulu-Natal and Gauteng, before turning on other businesses.
• At the same time as the mass looting was taking place, a well-organised and planned campaign of economic sabotage targeted the entire supply chain of KwaZulu-Natal along with key communications infrastructure, water facilities and other vital parts of the province’s economy. Medical clinics, mosques, schools and pharmacies were also targeted and, as a result of the unrest, the entire COVID-19 vaccination drive in Durban, a city of around four million, was suspended amid a devastating third wave.
• According to reports from various municipalities in KwaZulu-Natal, police in the province largely disappeared from the streets during the riots. Intelligence reports about possible attacks on malls or logistics centres were ignored. There are also credible accusations that senior KwaZulu-Natal ANC officials and public office holders were involved in planning and executing these attacks.

Fogel further explains:

This unrest has been unleashed by forces calling for the release of Zuma from prison. These forces are known as the Radical Economic Transformation (RET) faction of the ruling African National Congress (ANC). The RET includes Zuma’s unruly children who have been calling for violence and agitating via social media; political entrepreneurs who sell their services and media profile; mafias, who see defending Zuma as a way of protecting themselves from prosecution; military veterans loyal to Zuma, a senior commander of the ANC armed wing during the anti-apartheid struggle; elements of the charismatic churches, which have been vocal in defending Zuma for years and have benefitted from his patronage networks; and Zulu nationalists, as Zuma was the first Zulu president and has mobilised support through ethno-nationalist appeals to the country’s Zulu population. Since 2008, this faction has threatened to make the country burn if Zuma is prosecuted for one of the many corruption charges that still hang over his head. In the run-up to his imprisonment, these forces rallied at his infamous Nkandla compound – the site of the defining scandal of his presidency after it was revealed taxpayers forked out some $20m for “security upgrades” there – and armed men threatened violence and civil war if Zuma was imprisoned.

And what I consider to be a key point:

The ANC government has admitted that this faction also includes rogue elements from the state intelligence services, which absconded with billions of rand and untold numbers of firearms during Zuma’s presidency.

 

    It is interesting to me how prominently intelligence services seem to pop up over and over again in the scandals revealed in the last 10 years. Remember Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer's comments in January 2017 that Pres. Trump was "really dumb" to take on the intelligence agencies, adding: "Let me tell you, you take on the intelligence community, they have six ways from Sunday at getting back at you.” I suspect the intelligence services are playing king maker in more countries than just the United States.

    Fogel goes on to note that the RET (Radical Economic Transformation) faction are "those who wish to radically transform South Africa’s economy in favour of the Black majority." 

The irony is that the term “Radical Economic Transformation” was itself cooked up in the wake of the Nkandla scandal by the hired guns of British PR firm Bell Pottinger, founded by a Tory peer known as Margaret Thatcher’s favourite spin doctor. Bell Pottinger was employed by one of Zuma’s sons with Gupta money to clean up his father’s image. The firm, whose luminous clients included Augusto Pinochet, might be no more, but its campaign proved successful and RET is now an essential part of South Africa’s political lexicon.

The author describes the Gupta family as "a second-rate business clan from India who relocated to South Africa after the end of apartheid in pursuit of easier pickings."

With the help of Zuma and the sacks of cash handed out from “the Saxonwold Shebeen” – as the Guptas’ compound in Johannesburg is known – ministers were chosen, contracts were awarded, and economic policies decided based on what was best for the Guptas. According to some estimates, state capture cost the South African economy 60 billion pounds ($82.6bn).

He then explains how this qualifies as what I would term a Secret Combination:

    The RET faction is best understood as a network of loosely aligned groups ranging from factions of the ANC, opposition parties – including at times the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) – criminal networks, media groups and influencers rather than a coherent movement. These groups coalesce to defend shared interests, in particular access to rents, securing illegal markets, like the illegal tobacco trade and the country’s booming extortion industry, and protection from criminal prosecution. They share a set of enemies from prying investigative journalists, the tax revenue collection service, prosecutors and the Ramaphosa faction of the ANC, as well as a rhetorical commitment to the articulation of a nation or social order based on Black majority control, particularly related to state-owned enterprises. Despite its alleged “radical” mask, RET essentially amounts to rhetoric to disguise a parasitic form of looting from state-owned enterprises and the call for more of the economy to be transferred into the hands of these criminal networks.

    In this case, the imprisonment of Zuma might be the hill this faction is willing to die on, as they know that his imprisonment opens the door to future prosecutions. It is their shared opposition to accountability and the need to hold elements of political power in order to maintain their rackets that unites these forces under the banner of “free Zuma”. They are likely attempting to extract concessions from the government that protects them from prosecution or being removed from public office.

 Also:

The closest analogy to the continuing unrest in South Africa can be found in the reaction of powerful, entrenched organised crime groups that are threatened by legal prosecution and a loss of political protection. The actors involved in instigating unrest are linked to organised crime and have used public office to build powerful patronage machines; factional politics in the ANC is a battle over resources and rackets rather than ideology in this sense, even if unlike the mafia RET still needs some popular support.

     Fogel believes that the attempt will backfire on the RET faction and its supporters, citing for example the backlash in Italy against the Cosa Nostra when it unleashed a targeted wave of car bombings and assassinations in the 1980s and 1990s to attempt the closure of prosecutions against leaders that had been arrested. Similarly, he notes the failure of Pablo Escobar and the Medellin Cartel in Columbia during the same time period who had pursued terrorism as a means of stopping his extradition to the United States.

There are some early signs that the RET overplayed its hand. The insurrection was geographically limited and has already sparked public fury; now the images on television screens are of communities repairing the damage, cleaning up the cities and rebuilding rather than fire, mass looting, and destruction. It is also possible that the unrest has in fact placed Ramaphosa in a stronger position to deal with his enemies, as he likely enjoys widespread public backing to crack down on those responsible. Furthermore, if he introduces the Basic Income Grant, which he has been hinting at over the last few days, this might go down as the defining moment of his presidency and secure him a second term.

     As I hinted above, we very well may face such a Secret Combination of similarly loosely aligned groups, including intelligence services, major wealthy families, Silicon Valley oligarchs, and probably certain large criminal enterprises. Right now they probably think they are safe having gotten Biden elected and sworn in as President. But there are election audits, as well as proposed audits and investigations being called for in several states. If this grows to be sufficient to threaten the replacement of Biden with Trump, this Combination may well again resort to riots and looting, or worse.

    Long ago, in the 1990s, I played a game called Primal Rage. The game was set in a post-apocalyptical Earth ("Urth") and the players controlled a giant dinosaur or some other huge monster that would battle head-to-head in different parts of Urth, including the ruins of an old human city. As an added touch, the game designers had tiny human figures that would sometimes dart out around the feet of the monsters. Right now, it seems to me that normal people are catching glimpses of titanic struggles between organizations that are much larger and more powerful than we can imagine. We are the tiny people dancing around the feet of monsters. It doesn't seem there is much we can do other than to avoid being stepped on.

The Docent's Memo (7/21/2021)

VIDEO: "WHAT GETTING MADE COST ME: What You Risk When You Carry A Gun In Places You Shouldn't"--The Suited Shootist (20 min.). While we sometimes are dismissive in the gun community about carrying into a non-permissive environment, the Suited Shootists discusses how someone at his workplace overheard him say something about firearms, turned him into HR, and a search of his work area found his firearm, resulting in his being escorted off the property and fired, and it took nearly a year for him to find suitable replacement employment.  Something to consider. 

Firearms/Shooting/Self-Defense:

• "Armed Self-Defense: Reality vs. Fantasy" by Sheriff Jim Wilson, NRA Family.

Too often, even those people who develop defensive plans tend to imagine criminal attacks as a scenario where the good guy always wins and thing work out in the end. It is really a good idea to give serious consideration to worst-case-scenarios, those times when everything goes wrong. Instead of thinking about home invasions where you run the bad guys off, consider dealing with a home invasion where you wake from sleep to find the invaders already in your house and on their way to your kids’ bedrooms. Have you made plans for dealing with that sort of situation?

• "Selecting Personal Defense Weaponry: Handgun"--Gun Carrier. The article covers the following topics:

1. Many Choices of Handguns
2. Switching to a Revolver
3. The Best Handguns for Beginners
4. Stick to the Basics
5. Choosing the Best Handguns for Sale
6. The Popularity of the Glock Handguns
7. Double-/Single-Action Semi-Auto Handgun
8. Should You Buy a Sig?
9. When It Means Life and Death
10. The Simplicity of the Sig

As you can probably tell, the author is a big Sig DA/SA fan, mostly as a consequence of carrying and using a Sig P220 for many years in law enforcement. But he doesn't argue that the Sig SA/DA pistols are the only viable choice. Rather, he believes that you should get the best pistol you can, and that "once you decided on a pistol you intend to bet your life and your loved ones’ lives on, you need to train with it until it becomes second nature to you."

• "Heavy 9mm Luger Bullets: Everything You Need To Know" by Brad Miller, Ph.D., Shooting Sports USA. The primary advantages to using the heavy bullets (e.g., 147, 158 or 165 grains) include lower velocity for suppressed shooting, better ability to knock over steel plates in those types of competition, and deeper penetration against barriers or 4-legged predators.
• "S&W 351PD AirLite .22 Magnum Revolver: Zero Recoil Seven-Shot Defender" by Scott Wagner, US Concealed Carry. An alternative to .38 Special +P or .357 in a lightweight snubby.
• Or, another alternative: "The Perfect J-Frame: Two Years In Review"--Revolver Guy. The steel framed S&W 640 Pro Series which is heavy enough to dampen the recoil of .357 Magnum loads. It also sports better sights than the typical J-frame.
• "When Does A .380 Beat A 9mm?" by Grant Cunningham, Personal Defense Network. Essentially, it comes down to a size and recoil issue. Cunningham denies he is saying that the .380 is always a better choice.

    ... But in some very specific cases, it may be. The shooting world should stop and think about the end use of the gun, not how much raw power it produces.

    Back when I was of the “More power!” persuasion, I met a lady who carries a Browning BDA. The BDA is a double-stack .380 ACP pistol holding 13 rounds. It is, as you might expect, fairly large and heavy for a .380. At the time the micro-9mm fad hadn’t yet started, but even then there were a number of 9mm pistols available that were the size of the BDA and lighter to boot. I actually tried to steer her away from her BDA and to one of the 9mm guns, but she wouldn’t hear of it. She’d tried them and, due to some weakness in her hands, simply couldn’t control them (even with my expert instruction).

    For her, being able to deliver all 13 rounds on target in a very short time frame (which she could do) was a significant advantage over delivering only a few 9mm rounds. My mistake was not recognizing that. Thankfully, I failed to get her to change. She knew her needs better than I did, and if we were to have that discussion today, I would simply help her become as competent with her gun as I possibly could. I understand the issues better and have reined in my macho opinions.

• "Armed Defense from Your Vehicle" by Sheriff Jim Wilson, Shooting Illustrated. Some points that the Sheriff raises is that in most cases, as between your car and your handgun, the car will be the deadlier weapon. Run over or strike people with the car if you have to in order to drive away. It you cannot move the vehicle, then you want better cover and mobility which means evacuating the car and seeking cover (e.g., the engine block) or escaping on foot.
• "Home Defense Plan: How to make one" by Bill White, Survivopedia. While most preppers have probably thought about how to defend their homes in the face of looters or a violent mob, "There’s a little too much 'High Noon' and not enough infantry tactics in our thoughts about home defense," writes the author. In that regard, the author wants the reader to consider "something detailed, something thought out ahead of time, detailing what every member of the family or survival team will do, including how that plan might change if someone is absent." And, he adds:

Let me make one thing clear, right here. If your plan is to stand between your family and the gang attacking your family while your family cowers in a “safe space” behind you, you’ve got a foolish plan. All that plan will do is ensure that you’re dead before your home is robbed. As a man, I can understand taking a stand like that; but as a former military officer, I recognize that one person can’t hold their ground against more than possibly two others, at the most, and expect to survive.

He then goes on to discuss some basic legalities of armed defense, passive and active defenses, and things to include in the defense plan (including an escape plan).

•  And while we are on the topic of home defense plans: "What common or household objects will stop bullets?"--The Prepared. The author relates:

    Thankfully, the internet is full of firearm enthusiasts who have filmed themselves shooting pretty much every imaginable object. So it’s not hard to find out what works for cover and what doesn’t. This guide curates all of that testing onto one page.

 

    The bad news is that there isn’t much in your house that will reliably stop a random bullet. There are plenty of ways to conceal yourself, but not many ways to cover yourself.

The list and discussion of various objects seem to pretty much match what I've observed from videos: brick, even a single layer, will defeat most bullets ... on the first shot, and then quickly degrade. Cinder block is the same, unless it has been filled with concrete. Tightly packed books on bookcases seem to work pretty well. Most other items in your house won't: not refrigerators, washing machines, dryers, nor couches or beds.

• "When it’s Time for Vigilantes" by Bill White, Survivopedia.  I consider this to be a follow up on White's article on having a home defense plan. He observes:

    One of the assumptions I see a lot in the prepping and survival community is that a TEOTWAWKI event will cause a breakdown of society; more accurately, a breakdown of law and order. There’s a general assumption that government will collapse when a severe enough disaster strikes, including law enforcement and the judicial system. We’ll have to protect ourselves because those tasked with that job won’t be there to do it.

    I’m not trying to say that there won’t be a breakdown of law and order. That’s happened before, and it can just as well happen to us. But I don’t think we see clearly what a world without law and order will look like. We think we’ll be on our own, with everyone else trying to get what we have. While that may happen, that’s not the biggest risk.

White warns, however, that a dog-eat-dog, WROL situation will not last long citing the aphorism that "nature abhors a vacuum." That is, one or more warlords will attempt to establish power, White believes, citing such disparate examples as the U.S.'s first attempt to withdraw from Iraq, and the CHAZ zone in Seattle during the Anti-fa and BLM riots. 

We’re not going to face a world of anarchy for long. Instead, some warlord is going to rise to take over. There will be law and order, but it will be the law and order that the warlord wants, not what anyone else wants. In that, your “rights,” as guaranteed by the Constitution, won’t matter at all.

White continues:

    What do you think that means for your family or survival team? What will it mean for the stockpile of supplies you have stashed away in your home? These people aren’t the type who will let you stay in your home, eating your food; they’re the type who will come and “confiscate” it in the name of the “greater good.” That greater good is feeding themselves, not those who are hungry.

    If you think you can take on these people, defending your home from attack, realize that you’re not dealing with just a gang of hungry people who have gathered together to get what they can. These will be professional criminals, unrestrained by the law and willing to use force to get what they want. By the time they attack your home, you can be sure that they will have had other battles behind them, and they’ll have a pretty good idea of what to do to take you out, so they can take what you have. They’ll be well-armed and ready to rumble.

He goes on to discuss different groups that can form the nucleus of a militia to defend against such warlords and methods for getting them to agree to cooperate. One of the important things will be to stabilize access to food so they can focus on more than just finding enough for their families to eat.

• "Banning America's Rifle: An Assault on the Second Amendment?" by Stephen P. Halbrook, The Federalist Society (h/t Massad Ayoob). A look at the why banning the AR-style rifles would be in violation of the Second Amendment; the deliberate use of the term "assault weapon" by the powers-that-be to obfuscate the truth and, thereby, influence the political and legal debate; and how the five circuits that have upheld such bans have been wrong. This is a long read at 32 pages, so I would recommend taking advantage of the PDF Download link at the top of the article and print it out for later consumption.
• "1,900 U.S. Military Firearms Were Lost Or Stolen In The 2010s"--Statista. This June 16, 2021, article begins:

The Associated Press has carried out an investigation which found that 1,900 U.S. military firearms were lost or stolen over the last 10 years, some of which resurfaced in violent crimes. The AP's data covers the Army, Marine Corps, Navy and Air Force, though it is likely an undercount given that all four services have suppressed the release of information about missing weapons. Assault rifles, machine guns, shotguns and pistols are all among the list of items that vanished from armories, supply warehouses, warships and firing ranges over the last decade.

In other words, even the 1,900 figure is probably a serious undercount.

• For the engineers and math geeks out there: "Shock Wave Theory – Rifle Internal Ballistics, Longitudinal Shock Waves, and Shot Dispersion." A paper looking at the optimal barrel time; that is, the optimal time for the barrel to leave the barrel to maximize accuracy.

VIDEO: "SOLAR KILLSHOT | The Sun Sent a Wake-Up Call"--Suspicious Observers (3 min.)

The Sun had a couple coronal mass ejections that, had they been aimed at Earth, would have caused serious problems.

Prepping/Survival:

• "Map and list of fires currently burning in Idaho, Oregon"--KTVB.
• “The claim that bear spray works better than a firearm to protect you from bears is junk science” by Dean Weingarten, The Truth About Guns. He looks at some specific studies to address the problems with the studies suggesting that bear spray is better than firearms. The common factor seems to be a bias because the firearm statistics included only aggressive bears, while the bear spray data included all uses of bear spray, even against non-aggressive bears (i.e., curious bears or bears that just wandered too close). 
• "The essential guide to building your ultimate bug out bag" by Brian Smyth, Task & Purpose. This is more than an article listing things to carry. The author expects you to take the time to collect and write down information and plan the contents of your bag before even buying the bag! His first step is to learn about your environment. He has a list, but it includes things like terrain, local shelter, water sources, edible plants, nearest hospital or source of medical supplies, etc. 

    Second, he wants you to consider what skills you have.

    Third, figure out the places (plural) that you could go, and routes (plural) to each location.

     Finally, consider the size of your party.

    Now you are ready to buy the supplies to go into your bug out bag. As the author notes, "everyone’s environment, skill set, and strategy will dictate what their bug out bag should contain." As you do so, you need to keep a list of each item and its weight, as well as a running total of the combined weight, keeping in mind that you shouldn't go above 25% of your body weight and should actually shoot for 15 to 20%. The author includes lists of certain tools or items for different categories of needs, e.g., food, water, heat, etc.

    With all that done, then it is time to consider what you need in a bag/backpack. The author provides guidance on selecting a bag as well. One thing I liked is that the author did not automatically suggest a tactical bag:

In a bug out situation, you will encounter desperate people, and desperate people do desperate things. As such, make sure your bug out bag will be of little interest to those you run across. In Boston or New York, 5.11 Tactical’s Rush 72 could turn you into Target Number One, but the same pack could work nicely in San Antonio and the surrounding region. A Kelty Redwing 50 may be a smooth move in Portland, Oregon, but it might stand out a bit too much in Chicago or Los Angeles.

Finally, the author provides tips on packing your backpack and suggests some different tests to see if you and your equipment are up to what you believe you will need.

• And on the topic of bug-out-bags and bugging out: "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Cache"--Wilder, Wealthy & Wise. Whether bugging in or bugging out, it seems that one of the points raised is resupply. Bugging out, caches serve to resupply you on your route to the your retreat. If you are bugging in, the cache mostly serves the purpose of hiding things that you don't want someone finding in your house. In this article, John goes over his thoughts concerning what items are actually useful to cache. But he also discusses something to never cache: food. He explains:

    ... Many, many people in America have been hungry, as in “I skipped breakfast” but few people living in 2021 America have really been hungry.  I remember reading that T.E. Lawrence (“Lawrence of Arabia” not D.H. Lawrence who was “Lawrence of Chlamydia”) was always showing how tough he was.  Why, one day, he went a whole day without having any food.

    Most people in the United States could go weeks without any chow.  It always amuses me when I read an article about some programmer from San Jose who followed the Apple® Maps™ direction and ended up snowbound for three days is found.  Almost always, the news story ends up with some insanely stupid comment, “And Brandon survived for six days on nothing but Taco Bell® Fire Sauce™ packets.”

    No.  Brandon was [ ] going to be fine.  The 86 calories he got from the hot sauce packets didn’t cover that thin margin between life and death, and he didn’t really need to eat the two people with him.

    When it comes to bug-out bags (or get home bags) the last thing I’d want is to add food.  And that goes for your cache, too.  Food is bulky, and, over time, will spoil.  Food is a difficult thing to conceal for long periods.  I mean, have you ever left a ham sandwich with mayo on the counter for a week or two?  Ugh.

    Freeze dried food or MREs will last quite a long time if kept dry, but how many MREs would you have to bury to survive for a reasonable period?

    A lot.  I could do the math.  And I certainly do suggest that you have a ludicrous amount of food on hand – as much as you can afford and store.  But to go out and bury it?  Unless you have enough land and enough money to build and bury a bunker, creating a food cache would be just as silly as creating a water cache.

    I'm not a big fan of caches because I've watched too many YouTube videos of people finding it impossible to locate their cache a month, 6 months, or a year later. But food makes it even worse. Mostly because the people burying the cache don't figure out how deep they need the hole to be to get below the frost line, and the food then freezes, ruptures its container or packaging, and rots (and ruins other stuff in the bargain). Also, it seems that they always expend more calories retrieving the cache than they could have stored in it, unless they just filled it with lard.

    There is also the issue of people whose hobby is going out onto public lands to search for caches. Yes, such people exist. If you are lucky, they will turn in their find to the local Sheriff and wait the statutory period, whatever it is, for someone to claim the lost property before taking possession of it. It would at least give you the opportunity to notice the cache was gone and try to get your property back. Otherwise, they will just take it and none be the wiser.  

• "Prepping Doesn’t Require Camo: South Sound Urban Prepper" by Steve Dunkelberger, SouthSoundTalk. Some background on the guy that runs and hosts the Urban Prepper channel on YouTube and how he got interested in prepping.
• "Were the Doomsday Preppers Right?" by Adam Fetterman Ph.D., Psychology Today. The author of this April 2021 article concludes that people with prepping interests tended to be better prepared for the pandemic. He gives some background on why he was interested in this topic, which began with earlier research on prepper mentalities. His research found:

[Preppers have] a variety of personality traits (e.g., low agreeableness and high neuroticism) and beliefs (e.g., political ideology and conspiracy beliefs). We also found that major political events led to increases in people’s beliefs that they needed to engage in prepping behaviors. However, the general point is that those scoring high on these beliefs have a rather cynical view of human nature, the availability of resources, and our ability, as a society, to handle catastrophes.

    I don't know think it is necessarily cynical. I would call it realistic. After all, look at what lemmings do when faced with a high population and low resources. The lesson being that r-select creatures can act in bizarre ways when faced with scarcity. And that is what prepping is about: preparing for a time of sudden onset of scarcity.

    Anyway, the pandemic and other events let the author see whether prepper beliefs and attitudes were justified. He concluded:

    ... Since we published our work in 2019 we have seen a global pandemic, mass protests for racial justice, a record-setting hurricane season, the storming of the US capitol, and a record-setting freeze in Texas that left millions without electricity or water for days, to name a few. The point is, we have had a number of opportunities to see whether cynical post-apocalyptic and doomsday prepping beliefs are warranted.

    As for concerns about human nature, it does not appear that high levels of cynicism are warranted. While there were some cases of questionable human behavior, people were fairly cooperative in most events. For example, during the Texas freeze, many of the people who did not lose their electricity invited those who did into their homes, even as the threat of the pandemic raged on.

    Concerns over the availability of resources is another story. At the beginning of the pandemic, many stores ran out of essential supplies. Further, during the Texas freeze, supply chains broke down such that many grocery store shelves were empty by the end of the week. Therefore, while concerns about human nature are probably overly cynical, concerns about the availability of resources in post-apocalyptic scenarios may be warranted.

    What about believing in the need to prep? While prepping needs may not be to the level of building bunkers, having elaborate bug-out plans, or stockpiling assault rifles, it does seem fairly legitimate to have enough food and supplies to last at least two weeks. This reality has particularly dawned on me living in the hurricane vulnerable city of Houston, Texas. For example, when we were threatened with a particularly strong storm in 2020, I realized just how unprepared we were in terms of food and supplies.

 Heh.

• "After deadly riots in South Africa, army of volunteers leads defense, cleanup efforts"--NBC News. If this had happened in the United States, NBC would be calling those volunteers "vigilantes".  From the lede:

    Noxious smoke from days of riots and widespread looting hovered over parts of this lush seaside city over the weekend as residents came onto the streets to defend their homes and businesses from further violence.

    “We need to stand (our) ground,” Margaret Westerhof, 42, told NBC News at a volunteer-erected traffic checkpoint on the edge of the suburb of Ballito. Normally an interior designer, Westerhof offered to serve as a media liaison for the community organization that sprung up in response to the unrest.

    “It's our duty to continue to support the local authorities … to patrol our areas, keep our businesses safe,” she added.

• Seems like we've been seeing a lot of these types of articles over the past 10 years: "Doomsday Prepping Goes Mainstream"--NPR. This actually links to a 35-minute recording of a broadcast, to which I haven't listened. But they do have a short summary which begins:

    Doomsday prepping is no longer a fringe obsession. The survivalist movement, which was long stereotyped as made up of gun-wielding, right-wing older white men, is evolving.

    According to John Ramey, the founder of a popular how-to prepping website called The Prepared, young, urban-dwelling women are his fastest-growing audience. The site experienced a 25-fold boost in traffic the week COVID shut down parts of the U.S.

VIDEO: "Central Asia on the verge of a water war"--Caspian Report (15 min.)

The Collapse of Complex Societies:

• Speaking of impending water wars: "Ethiopia says second filling of Renaissance Dam complete"--Al Jazeera. The article relates:

    [T]he project has caused concern over water shortages and safety in Egypt and Sudan, which also depend on the Nile’s waters.

    Both countries have called for a binding legal arrangement before dam operations begin, but attempts at mediation have failed, raising concerns that tensions could rise following the most recent announcement.

    “The second filling of the Renaissance dam has been completed and the water is overflowing,” Seleshi Bekele, Ethiopia’s minister for water, irrigation and energy said on Monday.

    “It means we have now the needed volume of the water to run the two turbines,” he said on Twitter.

• "Jefferson Davis: Slavery and the Death of States' Rights" by Sam Jacobs, Ammo.com. An interesting look at Davis's background, including military and political career prior to the Civil War, as well as a discussion of the political conflicts that led to the Civil War and the consequences of the war. Of the consequences, the most powerful was the elevation of the Federal Government over the individual states:

    Before the Civil War, the United States was seen much more as a collective of sovereignties. After the war, it was clear that there was but one – the Federal government. The question remains, was the Civil War the end of States’ Rights?

    It was, albeit briefly. The Reconstruction Era meant the end of states’ rights, but they came back with a vengeance after the end of this period and largely remained unchanged until the Civil Rights Era, when the federal government passed sweeping laws aimed at Jim Crow, voting rights, and other areas.

    State governments are again under renewed attacks by the left in America who are increasingly frustrated that San Francisco, New York, and Los Angeles cannot tell the rest of the country how to live. The Democratic regime of Joe Biden is, much like the Reconstruction government that preceded it, looking for ways to centralize power in the hands of the Federal government. This would require a radical attack on states’ rights in its most powerful form – the Electoral College.

    While states’ rights aren’t what they used to be, they still exercise a great deal of power in the United States. For example nullification, generally thought of as a quirky relic of a bygone era of the pre-Civil War days is alive and well today. Additionally, many states have legalized recreational use of marijuana despite federal laws to the contrary, while others have declared that they will not enforce federal immigration laws.

    The only question of states’ rights that the Civil War settled was which body was supreme – the states or the feds. Thus, states’ rights were weakened considerably and the ultimate seat of sovereignty became, indisputably, the federal government. States’ rights are still alive (at least for now) and kicking – they are a lot more powerful than most people think.

• More South African News:
• "POLICE are caught looting goods as South Africa's descent into lawlessness continues with more shops ransacked and huge queues for food amid 'massive humanitarian crisis' sparked by Jacob Zuma's jailing"--Daily Mail. 
• "Cyril Ramaphosa says South Africa unrest was ‘instigated’"--Al Jazeera. From the article:

    The deadly violence and looting that have rocked South Africa for the past week were planned, President Cyril Ramaphosa has alleged, during his first visit to areas affected by the worst unrest in the country’s post-apartheid era.

    “It is quite clear that all these incidents of unrest and looting were instigated, there were people who planned it and coordinated it,” he said on Friday.

• "‘The insurrection has failed’: Ramaphosa vows to hunt down instigators"--The South African.

“These actions are intended to cripple the economy, cause social instability and severely weaken – or even dislodge – the democratic state. Using the pretext of a political grievance, those behind these acts have sought to provoke a popular insurrection,” said Ramaphosa.

• "Riots: The good, bad and ugly from Ramaphosa’s speech"--The South African. A key point: "According to preliminary reports compiled by NatJoints, extensive damage has been caused to 161 malls & shopping centres, 11 warehouses, 8 factories & 161 liquor outlets, and distributors. This doesn’t include damage caused to roads and other infrastructure."
• "SA riots: Probe launched after ‘1.5 million rounds of ammunition’ looted"--The South African. 

    “It’s understood that a container with more than 1.5 million rounds of ammunition was looted at the Mobeni industrial area near Durban. This took place on Wednesday evening and that sources have stated that the ammo, imported from Brazil, would have ordinarily been shipped to Cape Town. It is unclear why the weaponry had been shipped to Durban.”

    “These allegations coincide with a report in the Mail & Guardian this morning claiming that the violent riots, looting, and burning of businesses and malls were simply the first stage of a larger concerted strategy to destabilise the country.”

• Inflation is coming: "Popeyes has been stockpiling chicken for SIX MONTHS ahead of launch of new nuggets line to get ahead of rising costs sparked by inflation"--Daily Mail.
• "'Do NOT come to the US': Biden's DHS Secretary warns Cubans and Haitians they won't be allowed in if they flee upheaval and deploys Coast Guard jets to watch for migrants crossing the sea"--Daily Mail.  Amazing that the feds will take this stance in regard to Cubans (who may very well vote Republican) but not toward those from Central America (who would be Democrat voters).
• "US to evacuate 2,500 Afghans to US military base in Virginia"--Al Jazeera. The 2500 represent 700 families that are being evacuated pending approval of their visas. In all, it is anticipated that 20,000 Afghans will be evacuated to the United States, and more may be evacuated to other countries and military bases. Per the article, "Interpreters, drivers, clerks and other workers and their families who risk potential retaliation for their work are eligible for the relocation under a State Department Special Immigrant Visa programme." While I don't normally agree with refugee and resettlement programs, this one seems to me to be a point of honor for the United States.
• Speaking of Afghanistan: "The Afghanistan Fiasco Is A Symptom Of A Greater Elite Problem"--The Federalist. The author notes that Biden's view of Afghanistan and our role there pretty much matches that of Trump's, the difference being that Biden doesn't have military brass undermining his every efforts. The problem, however, is neatly summed up in three questions:

In his latest essay, Stephen Walt raises a few fundamental questions. Why did the United States (and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization) imagine they could turn Afghanistan into a modern, Western-style democracy? Why did the Taliban consistently out-fight the Afghan National Security Forces? Finally, why did the war continue for so long?

The author then attempts to answer these questions, writing:

    The answers to the last two questions are, as I mentioned above, that Afghanistan never had a single identity, so naturally the multi-ethnic Afghan forces kept losing to the primarily Pashtun Taliban; Secondly, the war continued for so long because the American ideological brass was thoroughly detached from their own countrymen. The first question needs to be studied more, as that is the ultimate lesson from this 20-year fiasco.

    Afghanistan (and Iraq, Libya, and Syria) are not isolated debacles, and it would be foolish to consider them so. Fiascos like these will keep happening for as long as we harbor the delusion that all problems in the world are the United States’s concern, and deserve our blood and treasure.

    They are a symptom of a far more entrenched modern and elite worldview, which is essentially radical in nature, believes in a historical arc of progress, and is fundamentally opposed to the guidance of American betters ranging from George Washington to John Quincy Adams. They warned America against foreign overextension and exhaustion, which results in internal social incoherence and collapse.

I believe in a follow-the-money approach, which suggest that the reason we were in the war were to enrich the contractors that made hundreds of billions off the war, and those shadowy figures that made money from the expansion of opium production. 

• "The problem with complexity" by Richard Fernandez, PJ Media. This 2017 article has a very prescient example of how our leaders and elites are not very good at managing complexity:

    The dangers of technological complexity were highlighted after authorities in the Philippines suspended the administration of the dengue fever vaccine Dengvaxia when manufacturer Sanofi announced that while it would help those who once had the disease it might produce an even more severe attack in those who were infected for the first time.  The company said:

Based on up to six years of clinical data, the new analysis …  confirmed that Dengvaxia provides persistent protective benefit against dengue fever in those who had prior infection. For those not previously infected by dengue virus, however, the analysis found that in the longer term, more cases of severe disease could occur following  vaccination upon a subsequent dengue infection.

“These findings highlight the complex nature of dengue infection. We are working with health authorities to ensure that prescribers, vaccinators and patients are fully  informed of the new findings, with the goal of enhancing the impact of Dengvaxia in dengue- endemic countries.” said Dr. Su-Peing Ng, Global Medical Head, Sanofi Pasteur.

    Unfortunately the warning came too late.  Health authorities had already vaccinated 733,000 children with Dengvaxia before the warning. Philippine authorities had eagerly jumped at a “landmark” program to become “the first country to start using it on a mass scale” after it had been clinically trialed in 10 countries — 5 in Asia and 5 in Latin America — with apparent success. Now all the chastened bureaucrats could belatedly do was glumly announce preparations for a “worst-case scenario” should a spike in the disease occur.

    The bureaucrats had understandably relied on rational ignorance, in this case the prestige of the WHO and French pharmaceuticals, to reach a decision about the safety of a technology.  But what rational ignorance hides is complexity.  Behind the scenes there was dissent over the mechanism by which vaccine worked of which the bureaucrats were unaware.  Even as Dengvaxia passed its trials some researchers feared the vaccine could trigger antibodies in a “naïve subject” that would weaken them against a second exposure, a process called ADE. “Protective antibodies can turn double agent, teaming up with the dengue virus to make an infection more severe, even life-threatening.” Those fears might have proved correct.

    What the vaccine might actually have done was kick in the door for those who have never had dengue before. ...

• Moving on: "MILLIONS Are Seriously Injured Or Dead From Covid Vaccines – EU Database" by Ethan Huff, Conservative Playbook. Huff reports:

    The latest data from EudraVigilance, a European Union database similar to VAERS (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), shows that nearly 20,000 people have died from Wuhan coronavirus (Covid-19) “vaccines” in the areas of Europe it assesses, along with nearly two million people who have been seriously injured by the injections.

    EudraVigilance covers 27 of Europe’s 50 countries, which suggests that the true figures across the continent could be as high as 40,000 deaths and four million serious injuries. This is substantial, considering far fewer people are getting sick or dying from the Chinese Virus itself.

    “Seriousness provides information on the suspected undesirable effect; it can be classified as ‘serious’ if it corresponds to a medical occurrence that results in death, is life-threatening, requires inpatient hospitalisation, results in another medically important condition, or prolongation of existing hospitalisation, results in persistent or significant disability or incapacity, or is a congenital anomaly / birth defect,” the database explains about how injuries are measured.

    The latest figures are much higher than earlier ones we reported on back in May, which reported about 10,000 deaths and 400,000 injuries.

• "US Military Confirms Heart Inflammation After COVID Vaccine" by Dr. Joseph Mercola. The main points summarized in the article:

• Reports of an increased risk of myocarditis (heart inflammation) after the COVID vaccine were recently confirmed by a study of U.S. military personnel, finding the rate of diagnosis was much higher than would be expected in the same population without a vaccine
• The new reports also include stories of children dying after the vaccine, including a 13-year-old boy who died days after his second dose of the Pfizer vaccine and a 16-year-old boy who had a heart attack while exercising after his vaccination
• Evidence demonstrates the spike protein used in the vaccine is dangerous and is responsible for many of the reported vaccine adverse events, including endothelial damage leading to blood clots, inflammation and heart attack
• Reports to the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System (VAERS) have been growing each week, recently showing an increase of 849 deaths, 1,451 hospitalizations, 286 diagnosis of myocarditis and 55 miscarriages over seven days
• And the reason for higher death rates among black Americans: "Nearly 40% of all US COVID deaths were people with diabetes, expert suggests"--Daily Mail.

VIDEO: "South Africa Descends into Chaos - What is Really Happening?"--Lauren Southern (19 min.)

Miscellany: 

• Juxtaposition this:
• "Ex-FDA chief Scott Gottlieb warns that most unvaccinated people WILL get Indian Covid Delta variant and it could be the most 'serious virus of their lifetimes'"--Daily Mail.
• "Fully-vaccinated US gymnast Kara Eaker, 18, tests POSITIVE for COVID-19 while training for the Olympics in Tokyo, days before opening ceremony - as rising number of cases sparks fresh fears over safety of the Games"--Daily Mail.
• "How your driving might reveal early signs of Alzheimer's" by Chris Baraniuk, BBC News. I was going to summarize the key points, but I forgot what they were. Oh, here they are: "those with preclinical Alzheimer's tended to drive more slowly, make abrupt changes, travel less at night, and logged fewer miles overall, for example. They also visited a smaller variety of destinations when driving, sticking to slightly more confined routes."
• "8,000 Years Ago, 17 Women Reproduced For Every One Man"--Pacific Standard. Conversely, "In more recent history, as a global average, about four or five women reproduced for every one man." The leading theory is that the introduction of agriculture allowed a smaller number of men to accumulate wealth and, therefore, have readier access to women. Or, perhaps, "when men began to multiply on the face of the earth, and daughters were born unto them, That the sons of God saw the daughters of men that they were fair; and they took them wives of all which they chose."
• "Dinosaur-killing asteroid generated a giant TSUNAMI nearly one mile high when it struck Earth 66 million years ago, fossilised 'megaripples' buried in sediment confirm"--Daily Mail. "As well as the giant tsunami that sent tidal waves thousands of miles from the impact site, there were wildfires for 1,000 miles, and world-encircling dust plumes." Also:

    The tsunami would have been so intense its waves reached a mile high and triggered Earth quakes when they hit the ground more than 11 on the Richter scale. 

    It would have devastated the surrounding regions, sending sea life onto land, land life onto the sea and killing millions of creatures in the process. 

    Study authors say the tsunami would have continued for days, reflecting back from the impact multiple times within the Gulf of Mexico, diminishing each time. 

    The ripples seen in the sediment were the forces of massive walls of water hitting the shallow shelf near the shores and going back towards the source of the tsunami - the asteroid impact. 

• "How a Machine That Can Make Anything Would Change Everything" by Thomas Hornigold, Singularity Hub. The article begins with a quote from James Burke: “Something is going to happen in the next forty years that will change things, probably more than anything else since we left the caves.” That something is a nanofabricator. 

Powered by flexible photovoltaic panels that coat your house, it will tear apart the molecules of the raw materials, manipulating them on the atomic level to create…anything you like. Food. A new laptop. A copy of Kate Bush’s debut album, The Kick Inside. Anything, providing you can give it both the raw materials and the blueprint for creation.

He explains:

    What the internet did for information—allowing it to be shared, transmitted, and replicated with ease, instantaneously—the nanofabricator would do for physical objects. Energy will be in plentiful supply from the sun; your Santa Clause machine will be able to create new solar panels and batteries to harness and store this energy whenever it needs to.

    Suddenly only three commodities have any value: the raw materials for the nanofabricator (many of which, depending on what you want to make, will be plentiful just from the world around you); the nanofabricators themselves (unless, of course, they can self-replicate, in which case they become just a simple ‘conversion’ away from raw materials); and, finally, the blueprints for the things you want to make.

This is when the true singularity begins. Even science-fiction writers have a hard time imagining a world where there is no scarcity and no death because you can simply grow or print whatever you want with nanobots small enough to fit in your cells and repair everything, or change it to whatever you need. It could be a heaven ...

• ... or a hell. "What Do the Oligarchs Have in Mind for Us?" by Joel Kotkin, Quillette. 

Almost 40 years ago, in his book The Third Wave, the futurist Alvin Toffler described technology as “the dawn of a new civilization” with vast opportunities for societal and human growth. But instead we are lurching towards what Taichi Sakaiya has called “a high-tech middle ages.” In his landmark 1973 work, The Coming of Post-Industrial Society, Daniel Bell predicted that, by handing ultimate economic and cultural power to a small number of technologists and financiers the opportunity to monetize every aspect of human behavior and emotion, we would be handing them the chance to fulfill “a social alchemist’s dream: the dream of ordering mass society.”

Kotkin elucidates:

 

    The oligarchs are creating a “a scientific caste system,” not dissimilar to that outlined in Aldous Huxley’s dystopian 1932 novel, Brave New World. Unlike the former masters of the industrial age, they have little use for the labor of  middle- and working-class people—they need only their data. Virtually all their human resource emphasis relies on cultivating and retaining a relative handful of tech-savvy operators. “Software,” Bill Gates told Forbes in 2005, “is an IQ business. Microsoft must win the IQ war, or we won’t have a future.”

    Perhaps the best insight into the mentality of the tech oligarchy comes from an admirer, researcher Greg Ferenstein, who interviewed 147 digital company founders. The emerging tech world has little place for upward mobility, he found, except for those in the charmed circle at the top of the tech infrastructure; the middle and working classes become, as in feudal times, increasingly marginal.

    This reflects their perception of how society will evolve. Ferenstein notes that most oligarchs believe “an increasingly greater share of economic wealth will be generated by a smaller slice of very talented or original people. Everyone else will increasingly subsist on some combination of part-time entrepreneurial ‘gig work’ and government aid.” Such part-time work has been growing rapidly, accounting for roughly 20 percent of the workforce in the US and Europe, and is expected to grow substantially, adds McKinsey.

    Of course, the oligarchs have no more intention of surrendering their power and wealth to the proletariat than the Commissars did after the 1917 revolution in Russia. Instead, they favor providing what Marx once described as a “proletarian alms bag” to subsidize worker housing, and provide welfare benefits to their ever expanding cadre of “gig” economy serfs. The former head of Uber, Travis Kalanick, was a strong supporter of Obamacare, and many top tech executives—including Mark Zuckerberg, Y combinator founder Sam Altman, and Elon Musk—favor a guaranteed annual wage to help, in part, allay fears about the “disruption” on a potentially exposed workforce.

    Their social vision amounts to what could be called oligarchal socialism, or what the Corbynite Left calls “fully automated luxury communism.” Like the original bolshevist model, technology and science, as suggested by billionaire tech investor Naval Ravikant, would occasion “the breakdown of family structure and religion” while creating the hegemony of a left-wing identity-centered individualism.