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Wednesday, July 28, 2021

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.

    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.
    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:

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:
    ... 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. ...

    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.

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.

    "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.

    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. 
By at

2 comments:

  1. John WilderJuly 29, 2021 at 10:03 PM

    Caught on tape pinching a little girl in a "private" area. Nothing abnormal about that, right?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentJuly 30, 2021 at 4:56 PM

      Not as long as you have a (D) after your name, apparently.

      Delete

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Weekend Reading--A Knowledge Dump and More

 Greg Elifritz has posted a new Weekend Knowledge Dump   with links to articles and a podcast on a variety of self-defense and prepping topi...