Exploring practical methods for preparing for the end times, including analysis of end time scripture and prophecy, current events, prepping and self-defense.
I've learned that author, trainer, member of the "been there, done that" club, and friend, Marcus Wynne, passed away last week. Although I never had the opportunity to meet Marcus in person, he somehow came across my blog and reached out to me via email in early 2018 and we've been corresponding since.
Only knowing Marcus for such a short time, and only communicating through email, I can't say that I knew Marcus as well as did many others in the shooting community. But there were several things I learned of the man that came through in his comments and emails.
First, he was a deeply spiritual man. He had an intense interest in religious and spiritual beliefs of various sects and peoples, which often showed up in his writing. He had an intense faith in God and was eager to understand His word.
Second, he really cared about people. His life seemed to have been one concentrated on protecting the good from the evil. Although I don't know much of his life as a trainer, I know that he helped train anti-terrorist police and military units in such diverse places as South Africa, Israel, and Northern Europe, as well as in the United States. In his emails to me, he had a great deal of concern on where society was going and the consequences it could have on people. On an individual level, he helped train people in self-defense techniques and did other work to help people win the good fight against the evil in this world.
On a personal note, he and I shared an interest in the Suspicious Observers You Tube channel and the information provided there. He also went out of his way to help me with my blog. He would include me in emails he sent out with interesting news stories, articles or videos related to self-defense, and terrorist warnings that had been issued, many of which I passed on to you, the readers of this blog. He helped my blog in other ways such as putting me in touch with people that could provide gear for me to review, as well as answering questions I had as to certain topics or volunteering information about topics I had raised in my blog. For instance, after I posted a recent video about "woobies" he wrote to me:
Woobies are great albeit expensive; poncho liners go back to my era in the 70s (I had a chance to handle a special prototype made as casualty blankets for the Son Tay raiders who made off with all of them when the raid came up dry). The USMC liner is well made and cheap, Skumberjak and others make good ones, but hands down FAVORITE is the Hill People Gear Mountain Serape. Brilliant design fits inside of a standard
Poncho but with carefully placed zippers turns into a great coat essentially a sleeping bag you can walk and shoot in, and also converts to a lightweight sleeping bag. Used with additional warm layers it’s entirely fine for overnights into fall and would serve in an emergency in winter if augmented by other layers and a fire. ...
Although he did not share this with me, I suspect that he directed many others to my blog.
"12 Gauge Paper Cartridges for the Diablo NO FFL Shotgun Pistol"--Guns America. If you don't know, the Diablo 12-gauge pistol is a double barrel muzzleloading firearm available in barrel lengths of 6 or 8 inches. As a muzzleloader, it does not constitute a short barreled shotgun under the NFA. As a muzzleloader, it is slow to reload. Back when muzzleloaders were the primary military weapons, soldiers made use of a paper cartridge that contained a pre-measured amount of powder and the bullet to make reloading faster. I've read that the typical soldier was expected to be able to load and fire in no more than 15 seconds.
Some Shot Show 2022 high-lights: Just a list of new firearms and products that I thought was interesting:
Probably the most interesting new firearm in my mind was the updated Hi-Power released by Fabrique Nationale. While the outward styling of the gun is similar to the Browning Hi-Power, the design has been updated including larger controls, a modern barrel lockup, an improved trigger design, and a new 17-round magazine. See also here. What I would be interested to know is whether this design was on the drawing board when FN dropped the Browning HP from its lineup, or if it was a response to the renewed interest in the Browning HP including products from Springfield and a couple Turkish manufacturers.
"New .375 Bishop Short Magnum Cartridge"--The Firearm Blog. Back in 2019, Bishop Ammunition and Firearms released a cartridge called the .475 Bishop Short Magnum intended as a dangerous game cartridge for use in the AR 10 platform. It was designed to shoot a 390 grain bullet at 2,500 fps. This year, they necked down the cartridge to shoot a 235-grain .375-caliber bullets at a muzzle velocity of 2950 fps generating 4542 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. By comparison, "[t]he .308 Win. can nudge a 200-grain bullet [about as heavy as you could expect to use] to about 2,400 fps and generate muzzle energy of about 2,550 ft lbs." A more valid comparison might be the .338 Winchester Magnum, which will fire a 225 gr bullet at 2,800 ft/s to produce 3,918 ft-lbs of muzzle energy. This new cartridge is also comparable to lighter bullet loads in the .375 H&H Magnum. Thus, it would be usable for anything you might encounter in North America as well as most African big game, although the bullet is too light for the thick skinned game animals. The issue is going to be cost: no price is listed as to the .375 Bishop, but the .475 Bishop was retailing at about $9 per round when it was first released.
"An AR-15 Rifles For The Kiddos From WEE1 Tactical"--The Truth About Guns. This is a scaled down .22 LR version of the AR rifle for introducing kids to shooting. Per the article, "The JR-15 weighs under 2.5 lbs, has a unique safety that gives parents some extra control over the rifle, and has magazines available in 1-, 5-, and 10-round capacities." That is light enough for a pack gun.
"New CETME L Options From MarColMar"--The Firearm Blog. As a bit of a background, the Spanish CETME C was the first successful standard issue military rifle employing a roller-delayed blowback action. It's design was licensed to HK and begat a long line of various roller-delayed actions including the G-3 and the MP-5. The CETME C was in .308, however, and so when Spain transitioned to 5.56 NATO, it developed a new design which was the CETME L. MarColMar uses CETME L parts kits to produce semi-auto CETME L rifles for sale in the U.S. There new offerings include short barrel versions as well as versions shooting .300 BLK.
"The 44 Auto Mag Makes an Appearance at Range Day"--The Firearm Blog. This is probably a firearm that I will never get but I like the looks of it. The manufacturer, Auto Mag, has spent 6 years working out the bugs and refining the design to make it reliable, and it should be going on sale later this year. No word on price.
Holosun showed off their flush mounted pistol red-dot sights. They are "flush" because they don't need the adapter plate, but the base sits down into where the adapter plate normally fits. Holosun will be making them for more than just Glock pistols (the article lists some of the other models available). One of the benefits to sitting lower is that you don't need to purchase taller iron sights. But, as the article notes:
In order to perform this small bit of magic, Holosun had to make certain compromises. The first was to eliminate a removable battery entirely. The SCS has an onboard rechargeable battery that is charged by the solar panel. According to Holosun the SCS will have a 20k hour battery life. If the battery needs to be replaced you can send it back to Holosun.
"The Retro Roundup"--The Firearm Blog. Some more M16A1 clones are being released, as well as other retro rifle designs.
Last week our power went down without warning. I was working at home as usual when the radio went off and security alarms around the neighbourhood started shrieking. After the WiFi dropped I finally took notice.
Power cuts happen infrequently where I live, the power usually comes back on within an hour and life resumes. But last week was different. The previous day I’d started listening to the audiobook ‘Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared, Surviving the Aftermath’ by former ABC news anchor, Ted Koppel, and the outage found me in a twitchy mood.
For a few moments my imagination ran away with me. I wondered if it was down to something innocuous (as usual) or whether instead there’d been a catastrophic cyber attack on our nation’s power grid.
Within three hours the electricity came back on. It had been due to the failing of a high-voltage line which had taken out power to 3,000 homes in the area.
But it could have been hackers. Really it could.
After some justification for why we are all preppers (at least those of us that try and plan for the future), the author continues:
I’ve come to believe that preparing for the unforeseen isn’t just a choice, but a responsibility. It’s one that I’ll be taking more seriously in future.
Having lived through the global pandemic that dominated 2020, is it really possible, sensible or defensible to rely on life proceeding as it always has done?
I couldn’t have foreseen a world where I’d routinely wear a face mask into a supermarket or where I’d have doubted being able to pick up basic groceries and toilet paper when I got there. 2020 showed that such things can quickly become the norm without warning.
Those living in parts of the USA that experienced gasoline shortages after the Colonial Pipeline hack would have been unlikely to have foreseen such an event — but it happened nonetheless.
Is it really such a leap to contemplate that large-scale cyber attacks or other acts of terrorism, insurrection or war could threaten and disrupt supply chains and national infrastructure? It’s happened before — frequently.
Read the whole thing.
"How to prepare for the end of world"--KCRW. This is the transcript of a May 2021 interview of Mark O’Connell, author of Notes from an Apocalypse, a Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back. O'Connell is Irish and comes at the topic of prepping from the leftist-European point of view. An excerpt:
... I started at the book really looking at the whole scene of doomsday preppers, of people who are digging bunkers and stockpiling tinned goods, and talking about the imminence of the End Times. And it's an international movement, there are a lot of preppers in Ireland and in Britain and across Europe, but really, the most kind of fervent and intense stuff tends to come, unsurprisingly, out of the U.S. And there's a couple of reasons for that.
One of which is that America seems, to me, to be a country with a particularly kind of intense relationship historically and culturally with the apocalypse. The United States, as a colonial enterprise, was born out of a moment of apocalyptic fervor in Europe, with the Pilgrims, and so on. And there's something about the prepper movement that sort of recapitulates that sense of fervor of the first European colonizers of America and the Pilgrims, and so on.
When preppers talk about the collapse of civilization, they're often talking about a situation where there's no more government, where you can't rely on ‘society,’ you can't rely on your fellow people. And it's just you, the kind of rugged individual, pitting yourself against the wilderness or other people, savage people, and so on. And there's a sense of a return to some of the darker mythologies at the heart of that moment in American history with the prepper movement, I think.”
I would counter that when you live in a country of over 300 million people, with a land area almost as big as Europe, it is easy to realize that it is impossible for the government to do anything for you in the event of a national (or larger) emergency. Besides, unlike much of Europe, several large regions of the United States are at risk from earthquakes, others are at risk of hurricanes, and the United States has more tornadoes than the rest of the planet.
Deadly pandemics, fuel shortages and the breakdown of vital supply chains were once the stuff of disaster movies.
But, while we’re getting used to panic-buying toilet rolls and petrol after Covid and Brexit, some savvy Brits were ready years before.
Preppers – those who “prepare” for natural disasters and other emergencies by learning survival skills and stocking up on food and equipment – have long been dismissed as paranoid extremists.
For most, it conjures up images of isolated, heavily armed groups such as the Fortitude Ranch, deep in the woods of West Virginia, US, ready to retreat to their bunker and fend off all those who come near.
But the movement – in a much more modest form – has been quietly growing in the UK too.
Survival psychologist Dr Sarita Robinson, 46, began prepping after moving from Lancashire to California’s San Andreas fault earthquake zone in the early 2000s to work on her PhD.
She says: “I was writing about earthquake survivors and preppers. What became clear was that those who prepped were better at surviving.
“I realised I was living in quite a hazardous area and maybe I should have a quake survival kit.”
Not so "crazy" when the state and local governments are advising you to have food, water, and other supplies stashed away.
To begin preparing for a disaster, Ramey urges any prospective preppers to "ignore the extreme stuff like nuclear bunkers" and start small, focusing on what their biggest risks are, which for most people, he says, is personal health and finances.
"Once those bases are covered, such as an emergency fund with three months worth of expenses, you must look to ensure you're able to survive in your home without any outside utilities or help for at least two weeks."
From there, Ramey suggests building a "bug-out bag" - a bag packed with survival supplies such as food, water, medications, radios, and flashlights - in the event of an emergency that requires rapid evacuation.
Ramey says all responsible members of society should begin prepping in some capacity, likening preparing for an emergency to buying homeowner's insurance or car insurance.
Even if your personal health and finances are not in order, you can set aside a three (or four) day supply of food and water that can be stored without refrigeration and can be eaten with no or minimal preparation in the event of a disaster. I would note that the idea of a bug-out-bag (BOB) is rooted in the concept of a "go bag" and a 72-hour kit. 72-hour kits can be purchased ready made, of course, but there are plenty of government, NGO, and private sources on how to assemble a 72-hour kit or checklists for what to include. See, e.g., the suggestions from Ready.gov, Be Ready Utah, Healdsburg CA, University of Houston-Victoria, the Maryland Municipal League, and NationalTerrorAlert.com.
The Modern Survival Blog offers information and instructions on how to can bacon. Seems pretty straightforward: you lay out the bacon on a sheet of parchment paper, cover with another piece, fold it half (so it will fit in the mason jar) and then roll it up and put it in a wide-mouth jar and process it (information on that is in the article).
Hunga Tonga-Hunga Ha'apai, an underwater volcano in the South Pacific, spewed debris as high as 25 miles into the atmosphere when it erupted on January 15.
It triggered a 7.4 magnitude earthquake, sending tsunami waves crashing into the island, leaving it covered in ash and cut off from outside help.
Some other news stories related to the eruption, earthquake and/or tsunami that struck Tonga:
Both are also charged for a booklet Rasanen wrote and Pohjola published in 2004. Pohjola told The Federalist in an exclusive in-person interview in November 2021 that he asked Rasanen to write the booklet because she was qualified, as a medical doctor and the wife of a pastor. That booklet affirms the classic understanding of sex as reserved solely for marriage, and marriage as comprising one man committed to one woman for life.
In spring 2019, the two were suddenly served with criminal charges for writing and publishing this booklet decades ago, well before Finland passed its hate crimes laws on behalf of powerful special interests who dispute the differences between the sexes and their role in procreation. Rasanen and Pohjola have been summoned several times by Finnish police to be interrogated separately for hours about intricate details of their theology.
In their interrogations, the police demanded that Rasanen and Pohjola recant their beliefs. Both refused. Both have also noted the contrast between their country’s claim to be a free and modern democracy that allows for full and open debate and the way they have been treated, as thought criminals.
What all of this suggests, especially in the complete absence of any confirmed evidence of a “mass grave” or a coverup, is that the whole story is a giant fiction. Its purpose was to provoke a moral panic, demonize the Catholic Church, and make global headlines by peddling historical grievances. And it worked exactly as planned.
But understand this: seven months on from this manufactured moral panic, there will be no backtracking from the media, no following up about the hundreds of corpses “discovered” in a “mass grave.” There will be no questions asked, and no demands for evidence.
Ian Austen of The New York Times, for example, who back in May wrote about the nonexistent “evidence” of a “mass grave containing the remains of 215 children,” has not followed up on his reporting. The closest he came was in October, when he wrote a story about Pope Francis expressing a willingness to visit Canada for “indigenous reconciliation,” and repeated his earlier claim that, “the remains of hundreds of Indigenous children were found on the site of the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in British Columbia.”
No, they weren’t. Nothing has been found there, because no one has looked. Probably no one ever will.
Chinese mothers gave birth to 10.62 million babies last year, an 11.5 per cent drop from 12 million in 2020, the NBS confirmed. The national birth rate fell to a record low of 7.52 births for every 1,000 people in 2021, from 8.52 in 2020.
The national death rate was 7.18 per thousand last year, putting the national growth rate at 0.34 per thousand.
For years, significant and continuing losses have undermined every effort aimed at lasting economic and social development. The neighboring Balkans risk becoming a "desert" due to unemployment and, above all, emigration, especially of the young. This scenario emerges from different pieces of a complex puzzle being put together in recent weeks. These pieces include the fundamental one posed by the census in Bulgaria, which has certified an 11% drop in population over the last ten years. Another census, the one in neighboring North Macedonia, the first to be conducted in the country since 2002, confirmed that the problem is widespread, with provisional results that have worried the authorities in Skopje. According to the first data processed by the National Statistical Office, Macedonia would now have about 1.8 m inhabitants, about 10% less than twenty years ago, with 600,000 Macedonians now living abroad. Perhaps even lower than the real ones, these numbers speak of a demographic catastrophe. Those who leave the country are predominantly young people, whereas the cradles remain empty at home, and the number of older people is growing. And Macedonia is far from being an exception. Even in neighboring Romania, which is already a member of the EU, the consequences due to migration to more prosperous countries now appear uncontrollable.
Short take is that this coming autumn, Xi Jinping will attempt to be selected for a third time to head up the Chinese Communist Party, but he may face stiff opposition; and if he feels that he needs a boost to consolidate his power, an invasion of Taiwan might just do the trick.
The research in Sullivan’s book is impressive and convincing. But the subtitle of the book, “A Cold Case Investigation,” is misleading, for the case may never have been that cold.
Early on, the book makes apparent that some people knew the identity of the person who betrayed Frank’s family to the Nazis. There is a strong possibility that Frank’s own father, Otto, the only family member to have survived the Holocaust, knew.
One is even given a rough chronology as to when he gained this knowledge. As shown by Sullivan and the research team, Otto went from feverish cooperation with the official police investigation in 1948 to indifference by the time the next official investigation in 1963 was conducted.
Otto may have supplied the reason when he told journalist Friso Endt that the family’s betrayer was Jewish. One could gather from this that either Otto was trying to protect a fellow Jew and keep what happened to his family focused on the Nazis or that he knew and forgave the betrayer because the latter faced the monstrous decision of protecting his own family by giving up others.
The most remarkable piece of evidence unearthed for the first time by the researchers was their discovery of an anonymous typed copy of a note sent to Frank’s father identifying the betrayer as a Jewish notary named Arnold van den Bergh. Miep Gies, who helped get the Frank family into the secret room in 1942, may have known about Van den Bergh as well when she hinted during a 1994 lecture that the betrayer was Jewish.
"A Woman’s Place Is in the Rat Race" by Sasha White, Tablet Magazine. A critical look at how feminism has shortchanged women. An excerpt:
One of the most miserable groups of American workers is women, who face a “burnout crisis” and report the highest levels of workplace exhaustion and dissatisfaction. A 2021 study by McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.Org (ironic) found that 42% of women say they feel burned out often or almost always. According to the same study, 1 in 3 women says they have considered downshifting their careers or leaving the workforce this year.
Paradoxically, women in this country were promised that we would finally be fulfilled and empowered if we entered the workforce. Unlike my mother and grandmother’s generation, who were raised to become mothers and wives, my entire generation was taught that our careers will give us deep meaning and allow us to make a difference in the world. That promise rings hollow for several reasons. On a personal level, it creates a mentality in which the loss of one’s career can lead to a devastating emotional void, and on a societal level, it has been manipulated for all sorts of damaging corporatist ends. So why is it still orthodoxy in most feminist circles that going to work equals liberation?
The Feminist Movement was comprised of two main doctrines: sex without consequences and forcing women into the work force. We could be forgiven if you thought that the latter was intended to flood the workforce with new workers in order to stagnate wages. In any event, the author concludes her piece:
To put it in layman’s terms, modern feminist culture has polished the turd that is wage slavery and presented it to us as liberation. We should always resist the temptation to look to an ideological movement for our salvation, but especially when that movement peddles mindless hustler culture as a certain panacea for complex personal ills. When someone advertises “work makes free,” you might wish to remain skeptical. Even if it’s written in pink letters.
Webb represents a technological marvel designed for unforgiving requirements to operate hundreds of components without error. This monumental engineering accomplishment combines a photon collector and an equipment assembly under contract to Northrop Grumman.
Solar panels provide two kilowatts of power, about half that used by a lawnmower. A primary mirror gathers photons that then reflect through a secondary mirror for directing to infrared detectors.
Supported by a carbon-fiber truss, the primary mirror comprises 18 gold-plated hexagonal tiles designed to flex and tilt via motors. These tiles are composed of beryllium (recall the power control sphere from “Galaxy Quest”), which is both lightweight and stiff. Their total starlight collection area is 48 square feet—five times that of the Hubble Space Telescope (at launch in 1990), despite Webb weighing only 60 percent as much.
To ensure adequate infrared sensitivity, an ingenious sun shield passively cools Webb’s mirror tiles to –388 degrees Fahrenheit. With the area of a tennis court, the sun shield faces earth and sun, deflecting and reradiating the sun’s energy away from the primary mirror.
Behind the sun shield, a carbon-fiber container called the “spacecraft bus” stores communication and instrumentation equipment. After arriving at L2, control systems on board will align and calibrate the tiles to ensure proper focus.
Designing and fabricating the sun shield itself presented enormous difficulties. The sun shield comprises five sheets of Kapton polyimide plastic from DuPont coated with aluminum. The two outermost layers include an additional thin layer of silicon to reflect solar energy away from the mirrors.
Seams reinforce the sheets to inhibit lengthy rips when struck by micrometeorites. These sheets were folded origami-style into a 15-foot diameter cylinder to fit within the Ariane fairing. While boosted along Webb’s trajectory towards L2, the sun shield had to then carefully unfurl via multiple cables and pulleys tugged by motors.
Although the sun shield protects the mirrors from solar radiation, the mid-IR detection instrument behind the primary mirror must be further cooled to –448 degrees Fahrenheit. An acoustic resonance chamber specifically configured for the Webb mission accomplishes this energy transfer. This cryocooler buffets helium atoms to thermally separate them and uses heat exchangers to radiate away the excess energy.
Researchers studying the causes and process of developing age-related health issues developed a vaccine to eliminate cells in the human body that are believed to trigger arterial sclerosis and other diseases.
The team led by a professor from Juntendo University in Tokyo said the effects of the vaccine were confirmed through experiments using mice.
One of my readers with experience in tracking recommended the following book: Tracking Humans: A Fundamental Approach to Finding Missing Persons, Insurgents, Guerrillas, and Fugitives from the Law by David Diaz & V. L. McCann. I was lucky enough to find a copy on Amazon, but shortly thereafter happened across an epub version available from no cost at PDF Drive. Here is the link.
Jon Low at Defensive Pistolcraft published a new post this past Sunday. Jon has a lot of good information, comments, and links, so I advise you check out the whole thing. But one item that caught my attention in particular was a discussion on focusing on the front sight and closing (briefly) your non-shooting eye.
I don't know how much the issue is actually debated, but I know there are different schools of thought on each topic. For instance, back when pistol sights were generally small and dark and hard to see, the dominant school of thought was "instinctive" shooting, which was not instinctive but required a great deal of practice and relied heavily on placement of the feet and alignment of the body. This was taught to a high degree to FBI and Secret Service agents who, I've read, could make some pretty impressive shots while shooting from the hip. Some of you may even be familiar with Rex Applegate's method of point shooting which, while not shooting from the hip, still uses body and arm alignment to make quick snap shots without using the sights of a pistol. (See the video below).
There apparently is also a school of thought that claims that you should focus on the target not the front sight blade. But, as Jon points out in his comments, " If you don't focus on the front sight, it will wander off on you, and you will never notice it, because you won't see it, because you're not focused on it."
The increased field of vision is arguably the most important and notable benefit from shooting with both eyes open. Hunters scanning the sky or horizon appreciate being able to spot not just the mallard that’s currently in their scope, but also the one 50 feet away from it for the next shot.
Shooting with both eyes open greatly increases repeatability. This means having both eyes open allows you to move on to the next target quickly without possibly disorienting yourself from making rapid switches between one eye being open and both.
When a hectic situation arises, and you need to draw your weapon, you’re going to experience physical and physiological changes.
Most noticeably, the gun operator’s adrenaline will kick up, prompting the “fight or flight” response.
During this response, the body’s sympathetic nervous system releases norepinephrine and adrenaline from the adrenal glands, which are located right above your kidneys, as shown in the picture to the right.
Once these naturally produced chemicals surge through your bloodstream, your heart rate increases and your eyes dilate and widen.
These physical changes occur because the human brain is screaming to collect as much information as possible.
When these events take place, it becomes much more challenging for the shooter to keep their non-dominant eye closed.
Thoughtfully attempting to keep that non-dominant eye shut can potentially derail the shooter’s concentration, which can result in a missed opportunity for a righteous kill shot.
Jon disagrees with keeping both eyes open--at least at the time of the shot--explaining:
Why the shooter has to close the non-aiming eye for the fraction of a second required to release the shot --
Aiming with both eyes open causes the shooter to see a "double image". You can prove this to yourself by sticking your thumb up at arm's length, place it over a distant target, focus on the target and you will see two thumbs, focus on your thumb and you will see two targets.
So, if you are focused on the target and using the wrong front sight image, you will miss the target. If you are focused on the front sight and use the wrong target image, you will miss the target. Murphy's Law guarantees that the shooter will be using the wrong image. [Murphy's Law - Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong, at the worst possible time.]
The shooter won't automatically use the image from the dominant eye, because eye dominance is perceptual, not physiological. So, it can and does change with stress and attention. Eye dominance is not necessarily left or right. It can be 50% - 50%. Or, anything in-between. Everyone is different. Any time a person aims with both eyes open, he will get a double image.
Assuming a hard focus on the front sight, a person using his right eye to aim, who uses the wrong target image will be shooting way off to the left (damaging property, injuring innocent bystanders, maybe killing them). A person using his left eye to aim, who uses the wrong target image will be shooting way off to the right. This is why it is essential to eliminate the double image by closing the non-aiming eye. Murphy's Law says that anything that can go wrong will go wrong, at the worst possible time. So, the person shooting with both eyes open will be shooting at the wrong image, and hitting unintended objects. No such thing as a miss, only unintended hits.
"Anything that can go wrong, will go wrong." So, we must eliminate anything that can go wrong from our weapon system. So, the non-aiming eye must be closed.
I've periodically tried shooting with both eyes open and have to agree with Jon. You can and probably will see a double image of the front sight blade and, at least for me, I have to concentrate in order to mentally shift to focusing one the correct image to use for shooting. I suppose you can train yourself to automatically can do so, but it is not as natural or as easy as simply closing your non-shooting eye when you take the shot.
Besides, when I switch to shooting with my left hand, as I might if my right arm was injured or tied up, I can simply close my right eye and use my left eye to align the sights when I take the shot. I suspect that if you had trained yourself to ignore the non-shooting eye image, it would be difficult to suddenly shift to try and align the sights.
Now, with the addition of micro red dot sights to handguns, this issue may become moot just as it has when shooting a rifle equipped with a red dot.
This episode is an homage to Art Bell's Coast to Coast, with our sharing a personal paranormal experience and sharing some stories or articles from others.
You can't stop the signal: "Ghost Gunner Can Make Zero Percent Receiver!"--The Firearm Blog. With an increasing number of states looking at banning 80% receivers, Ghost Gunner has now released updates that would allow their machines to start out with a simple block of aluminum and machine the receiver.
"Shotgun Hack Job: Budget DIY Home Defense" by Chris Baker, Lucky Gunner Lounge. With the record demand for guns, common self-defense shotguns may be hard to come by. Baker suggests looking at older shotguns and then takes the reader through the process of turning an old 28-inch Winchester Ranger Model 120 into a proper defensive shotgun by shortening the barrel and stock, and making some other repairs.
"From the Hip: Heckler & Koch P30 9mm Luger" by Brian Pearce, Handloader Magazine. A detailed test and review of this interesting handgun, one of the few fully ambidextrous handguns on the market--meaning ambidextrous safety, slide release lever, and magazine release (without having to swap the magazine release from one side to another)--and certainly one of the few ambidextrous DSAs. The author notes:
... The P30 has undergone extensive torture and function testing, which it passed with a remarkable record. Some independent tests, which included nearly 100,000 rounds, indicate that there was only one failure per 7,000 rounds. Also, many countries and law enforcement agencies have adopted the P30, including Finland, Germany (army, navy, police, customs), Hungary, Malaysia, Norway, Portugal, Singapore, Spain, Switzerland and select U.S. police forces, including the Border Patrol Tactical Unit.
Defense-style 9mm Luger factory loads from Black Hills Ammunition, Federal Cartridge, Hornady Manufacturing and Speer were checked for function and accuracy. There were no failures of any type. All cartridges fed, fired and cases ejected perfectly. With the aid of a rest, all loads grouped into 2.45 inches or less at 25 yards. Hornady’s 124-grain Critical Duty FlexLock +P produced the tightest group at 1.90 inches. Incidentally, two of the four loads tested produced greater velocity than their listed velocities.
The latter is probably due to the pistol's use of polygonal rifling.
"The Ruger Mini-14 – An Unlikely Service Rifle"--The Firearm Blog. Some more about the Mini-14's serving as the standard military rifle for the Royal Bermuda Regiment after the Regiment dumped the FAL.
The Mini-14 GB semi-automatic rifle, not the select-fire AC-556, was purchased from Ruger. The Mini-14 GB had a thicker profile barrel with a flash hider and mounting lug for the US M7 bayonet. The Royal Bermuda Regiment issued the Mini-14s with 20 round magazines. They were initially shipped with standard wooden stocks but in the early 1990s black polymer stocks with pistol grips were procured from Choate. Another unique attribute of the Regiment’s Mini-14s is the regimental crest stamped on the left side of the receiver. Less than a thousand rifles were produced for the Royal Bermuda Regiment.
While on the topic of the Mini-14, check out "Mini 14 Review | Mini 30 Review" by Joe Roberts, at the Gunner's Den. He describes what made the Mini 14 a favorite among preppers in the 1980s:
My Mini 14 is one of the most reliable rifles I have ever owned, it runs on any ammunition that I have on hand. I have run 55gr Lake City surplus, 62gr green tip, 55gr Wolf Steel case, and some .223 handloads that a buddy of mine gave me.
I have owned the rifle for about 6 years now and other than punching the bore once in a while and occasionally some lubrication I have done nothing to it. It is as it came from the factory other than the flash hider that a previous owner added.
Richard Mann, one of those most adamantly against considering an AR style rifle as being eligible as a Scout Rifle because it cannot be used for hunting in all jurisdiction, nevertheless has his own thoughts as to a good general purpose rifle laid out in his article, "General-Purpose Rifle: Arming The One-Gun Man" published last July in Gun Digest. Unlike Cooper, however, Mann has no problem with the modern sporting rifle as a general purpose arm. His criteria are:
Compactness: I wanted a rifle that was easy to transport in a vehicle or use from inside a blind or hide, with a maximum length of less than 36 inches.
Lightness: Rifles are carried more than shot. I wanted a rifle weighing 6.5 pounds or less before accessories.
Power and Reach: I needed a rifle with sufficient power to deal with human adversaries, black bear and deer out to around 300 yards.
Accuracy: I planned to use the rifle to for a wide range of tasks and desired 1 MOA or better precision.
Volume Fire: To fill my predator calling, sport shooting and self-defense needs, I wanted a semi-automatic.
Modularity: I wanted a rifle very adaptable to specialized tasks.
Self-Support: The rifle needed to be chambered for a cartridge for which I could create my own ammunition. I’m not a doomsday kind of guy, but ammo shortages are real.
And the rifle that fills these criteria--at least for where he lives? An AR style Wilson Combat Protector Series Carbine ($1,999.95) with a 16-inch barrel in .300 Hamr, a 1-4 LPVO, and various other doodads such as backup sights and a weapon light. Mann concludes by damning Cooper's Scout Rifle concept with faint praise:
I’ll not be so bold as to claim Cooper’s Scout Rifle concept as something without merit. I have several Scout Rifles I routinely use and will always have one close. What I’ll say and stand behind is that while a true Scout Rifle might be of wondrous worldwide appeal and reasonableness, it’s something that for most people wouldn’t be the most practical one-rifle answer. A general-purpose rifle that doesn’t ideally address your general-purpose needs is, as far as you’re concerned, not a general-purpose rifle at all.
"All About The .38 Special +P and .38 Special +P+"--Revolver Guy. A look at the history and development of the +P and +P+ loads, as well as the eventual concession by the major gun manufacturers to produce .38 Special firearms rated for +P. The obvious difference between standard and +P or +P+ is the pressure when the firearm is discharged: the author notes that the Maximum Average Pressure (MAP) for the standard .38 Special is 17,000 Copper Units of Pressure, while the +P is 29,500 CUP (20,000 psi) and the .357 Magnum is 45,000 CUP. The higher pressure +P loads may lead to increased wear and tear, so, for instance, S&W warns that their firearms may require more frequent service. The author also recommends against using it in older firearms for which parts are no longer manufactured because of the possibility of rendering your antique unworkable and with no repair possible because of a lack of parts. No firearm manufacture produces a revolver that is officially rated for +P+ (which essentially match the .38 Special proof loads), so the author recommends only shooting such loads through a .357 Magnum revolver.
"AR-15 Lower Receiver Aluminum Vs Polymer" by Aaron Spuler, Weapon Blog. After discussing how polymer is generally being used for more and more firearm parts, including frames and even receivers on quite a few newer rifle designs, the author turns to the question of "why use polymer?" He explains:
In contemporary firearms design, especially in military small arms, the quest for the last 70 years has been for lightness. Taken from the lessons of WWII, many designers realized that contemporary infantry combat meant being mobile and putting down an overwhelming amount of firepower. This requires having a light weapon and the ability to carry a lot of ammunition.
The AR was an initial answer to that question: it was lighter than the rifle it replaced and fired a lighter bullet that was still effective during the majority of engagements. That’s what made it the fighting rifle of choice for so many countries for the last half-century.
Combat has not changed radically since World War II and has, I argue, become even more mobile. Now, urban combat dominates not only military action but also law enforcement and self-defense.
The same things that made the AR awesome in 1960 can be improved. The only parts of an AR that have to stand up to the heat and pressure of firing a bullet are the bolt, chamber, and barrel. This means that the upper receiver is likely to stay metal for the foreseeable future.
But, for the rest of the AR, as long as parts stay rigid, why not make them as light as possible. It would be silly, for example, to have a solid titanium foregrip. Sure it would be durable, but it would also add a pound to the weight of the gun. The same logic applies, I think, to the lower.
I could see getting something like this: "Smith Tactics SIDE-KICK Co-CHARGER AR-15 Charging Handle"--The Firearm Blog. It offers an extension that falls along the left side of the gun that acts as a left side charging handle, but still allows you to charge the AR normally, from the rear with a T-shaped handle.
"Cast Bullets and Battle Rifles: Handloading for the U.S. 30s" by Mike Venturino, Handloader Magazine. An interesting article for those into bullet casting and also wanting to shoot some old military rifles. I don't cast my own bullets (at least, not yet), but I inherited a few boxes of .30-06 loaded with lightweight cast bullets. They are not loaded very hot--the recoil was very soft out of an old bolt-action--and very accurate out to 100 yards (which was as far as I shot them). They would have been good rounds for hunting game such as jack rabbit or coyotes.
Many people ask me if they need to get involved in situations where they could be helping someone. My question to them is, “Are you in fear of immediate great grave/or bodily harm for yourself or a loved one” in this scenario, or are you looking just to stop a “bad guy?”
Be honest in answering this question, because if it is the latter, you could easily be stepping into the proverbial minefield. As the author points out, if you do get involved, you had better know for damn sure who is the "good guy" and who is the "bad guy": for instance, that fight in front of you where one man pulls a gun could be an undercover cop trying to make an arrest. You also need to evaluate that someone responding to the scene or event, such as police officers or another person with a concealed carry handgun, my not realize that you are a "good guy" and shoot you.
... the AmmoPal acts like an independent magazine for your tube-fed shotgun. It’s a polymer constructed rectangle, complete with a spring and follower to push rounds to the top. Although, the AmmoPal doesn’t get inserted into any firearm. It simply feeds you one round at a time to keep your shotgun topped off and well-fed.
The AmmoPal gives shooters the capability to carry ten 2.75-inch shells in that big polymer rectangle. That polymer is built to last and made from a UV, oil, and flame resistant polymer. It feels thin and light, but it’s pretty tough. I’ve dropped it numerous times in sand and dirt, on concrete floors, and more. Over the last five years, it has yet to crack, break, or bend in any way.
Also sounds like a good way to store shotgun ammo so it is ready for use.
"WWII Kar98k Sniper Rifle with 4x Scope at 1,100 Yards"--Locked Back. Links to a video from Practical Accuracy to see if they can emulate the exploits of Matthäus Hetzenauer, an Austrian sniper fighting for Nazi Germany during World War II who is credited with making a kill at 1,100 meters (1,202 yards).
"120 Useful Books For Your EOTW Library"--Survival Spot. The links are to Amazon where you can buy the books, but I'm sure the e-book libraries I've mentioned on my e-book page will probably be able to supply many of them.
"The Bear Facts" (Part 1) (Part 2) by Anthony Acerrano, Sports Afield. While we tend to concentrate on brown bears and grizzly bears, the reality is that the majority of us are more likely to encounter the black bear (or, if in foreign parts, something of approximately the same size). Acerrano notes that increased population of both bears and humans make human/black bear interactions more likely. Consequently:
But by most definitions, and speaking generally, violent black bear encounters with humans are on the rise, and the variety of scenarios is rather astonishing: Bears biting people through tent walls; ripping tents open and dragging someone out; breaking into hard-sided, occupied campers; bursting through cabin or home doors; smashing through a glass or screen window to attack a person on the other side; grabbing a man off of his front porch; attacking someone’s dog and then turning on the human who tries to interfere, and so on. Some biologists and bear defenders want to downplay or even deny these realities, and some people in the press or elsewhere want to exaggerate or sensationalize them out of proportion. I am pro-bear, but I believe in finding the truth, which lies somewhere in the middle of these two extremes.
Statistics are hard to come by, but one study found at least 63 people were killed in 59 incidents by non-captive black bears in North America between 1900 and 2009; and, of these, 86%of these fatal attacks happened between 1960 and 2009. Acerrano has documented an additional 13 deaths due to black bears attacks since then. This suggests to me that as bear populations recovered and expanded, and started bumping up against humans, the number of attacks increased. Interestingly, 88% of fatal black bears attacks were predatory in nature (but predatory attacks are less than 10% of the total bear attacks). But:
An important new, not-yet-published study by Janel Marie Scharhag at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point is the first to focus solely on non-fatal black bear attacks, and reveals some fresh and illuminating information. Scharhag examined 210 agency-confirmed attacks that occurred in the 48 conterminous United States from 2000 to 2017. She defined “attack” as intentional/purposeful contact initiated by a bear on one or more humans, resulting in human injury. She did not include violent encounters that weren’t started by the bear, such as if a hunter wounded an animal which then mauled the hunter, or if someone kicked a bear that was fighting with his dog, or if a person got foolishly close while taking a photo.
Of the 210 attacks, 52 percent were defensive. (A defensive attack is one in which the bear reacts to feeling threatened in some way.) Eighty-five percent of defensive attacks were by female bears, 91 percent of them sows with cubs. Further, only 15 percent of all black bear attacks were predatory (and 95% of those were by male bears).
The foregoing is from Part 1 of his article. In Part 2, he discusses ways to avoid bear attacks and how to defend yourself. For instance:
Defensive black bears, feeling threatened, tend to do one of two things: run away (or scoot up a nearby tree, which is another form of escaping), or put on an aggressive show. If you unintentionally startle a sow with cubs, the bear might react by huffing, grunting, growling, clacking its teeth, ground-swatting, or even making one or more false charges, swerving away well before contact. But–and this is key–with a defensive bear of any species, the last thing you want is to increase the sense of threat by doing what is usually advised: yell, get large, wave your arms, and throw rocks or sticks. The bear is already disturbed and is responding aggressively; there’s no sense in possibly escalating that aggression into a full-blown attack.
“I’m a firm believer in the ‘stand your ground’ approach,” says Hechtel. “The simplest and best thing to do in most encounters is to do very little.” This precludes shouting, arm-waving, or trying to run away or climb a tree. If you can slow down the interaction, that’s all to the good; it tends to make the bear less sure of itself.
“Above all,” he says, “don’t overreact [by running, screaming, etc.]; don’t make things worse.” Even if a bruin is charging or running at you, the longer you stand still (preferably with bear spray or other weapon ready to deploy), the better the chances it will stop short or veer off without making contact.
But what if it keeps coming and actually knocks you down? The most common advice is to fight back as hard as you can and “never play dead with a black bear,” but Hechtel disagrees. Once again, with a defensive attack, the idea is to remove the sense of threat; fighting back does the opposite. Sharhag’s findings support this. In a large number of defensive-attack incidents when the person fought back, the injury-outcomes were significantly more severe than when the person did not fight back. Sharhag concludes that when a black bear is “acting defensively, playing dead is more effective at stopping an attack and results in less severe injuries.”
Just don't play dead too early: wait until the bear has struck you and knocked you down, then lie face down on your stomach, legs partly spread for stability, with your hands interlaced behind your neck and lower skull. As for deterrents, the author prefers bear spray for when a bear is acting defensively, but would "prefer to have an appropriate handgun available for dealing with an animal that breaks into a tent, camper, or dwelling, and for aggressive night-bears in general."
Most TV shows focus on wilderness survival. These shows range from participants with plenty of supplies task to reach an extraction point in a defined time period, to those naked with only one survival tool on a mission to survive a predetermined amount of time.
In most cases, these competitions clearly illustrate the outstanding skills, pit falls, and difficulties of the participants in their respective survival environments. I must admit, most do an exceptional job of surviving their ordeal.
In reality, these shows represent an aspect of survival that most of you will never encounter. Thus, as much as you may learn from watching these programs, the skills seen on the show will be of very little value in your most common environment, an urban setting.
Wilderness survival skills such a primitive fire starting, hunting, building a shelter, and water purification techniques are all valuable skills to know but are virtually useless in the urban survival environment.
Situational awareness, personal protection, planning, and preparation are far more important aspects of preventing and surviving an untoward urban event. Urban survival know-how is divided into two very different scenarios of the urban environment. One is the individual, small scale or personal adverse events, such as robbery, mugging, carjacking, or home invasion. The other is the large-scale urban survival events such as natural disasters, civil unrest, and economic collapse.
The likelihood you could find yourself in any one of these urban survival situations is very real and, in most cases, it will happen to each of you more than once in your lifetime. Thus, it is essential to be prepared to prevent yourself from being a victim of circumstance.
He then goes on to discuss six topics relevant to urban survival--Planning, Preparation, Training, Protection, Communication and Safe Haven--as well as some other more particular subjects such as having bug-out and bug-in plans, special considerations for an urban survival bag, etc.
"Prepping Medical Supplies: Best Medical Supplies for Preppers"--Survival Junkies. A pretty good list of basic medical supplies with a bit of discussion of each section. The main suggestion I would make would be to had hemostatic gauze in addition to compressed gauze and compressions bandages. I need to get a SAM splint for our larger kit.
Tinder is smaller and starts a fire; kindling is larger and sustains a fire. Tinder is composed of small, fast-igniting materials such as newspaper, dried foliage, or bark. Kindling is composed of larger materials that burn more slowly, such as sticks, logs, and other large, flammable debris.
The best sustaining strategy for your fire considers a variety of materials – tinder, kindling, and fuel – and how to gather, store, and implement those materials. To start a fire, it’s important to know the difference between tinder and kindling.
The rest of the article goes into how to use each to get going a self-sustaining fire.
Useful skill for those living in areas with decent sized squirrels, like the Eastern United States and the South. "How to Clean a Squirrel The Easy Way"--Skilled Survivor. First you trap them in a live trap. Then you get out your water hose .... No, this is cleaning the carcass to remove the viscera and such. Link goes to an embedded video.
On a related note: "Backcountry Meat Care" by Arom von Benedikt, Sports Afield. An excerpt:
The number one threat to your meat is heat, both external (weather) and internal (body heat). Bacteria only thrive in warm surroundings. Hence, it is imperative to chill your meat as rapidly as possible after harvest.
Your first task after harvesting a backcountry animal and completing your photography session should be to skin and quarter the animal. This will enable body heat to escape rapidly. I prefer the gutless method, as it renders a quicker job and cleaner meat. Use 550 paracord to hang the quarters in a shady spot till the meat cools, and develops a nice crust. Drape the backstraps and other trim meat over clean shaded branches or rocks to cool. Then bag it all in meat sacks to keep bugs and dirt away from the meat. If bugs are bad (particularly flies), you’ll need to bag the meat the minute it comes off the animal. It’ll cool fine inside the meat sacks, it just won’t develop as good a crust. During the quartering and cooling process, take extra measures to protect the meat from dirt and debris. The cleaner your meat, the longer it will keep and the better it will taste.
If the weather is cool enough, say low 40s at night and daytime highs in the 60s, your meat will keep fine for several days as long as it stays in the shade. Cooler temps are even better, and will keep the meat longer.
If temps are hot, say in the 80s during the daytime and 50s or 60s at night, you’ll need a way to chill your meat. The best and only way I’ve found to chill meat in the backcountry is to bag it in contractor-grade trash bags and submerge it in a cold spring or creek. The meat will chill rapidly, and will stay good for a long time.
A lot more there, so read the whole thing.
"Manual Kitchen Tools For Off Grid Living"--Modern Survival Blog. Grid down means all those fancy kitchen gadgets won't work. The author looks at some manual alternatives as to preparing coffee, opening cans, grinding wheat or meat, sifter, mortar and pestle, the mandoline slicer, the rotary egg beater, mechanical kitchen timer, an analog kitchen scale, manual pasta maker, camp stove and oven or a solar oven, and a Berkey countertop filter. Good ideas here.
A crisis engulfing China’s property sector is affecting its biggest developer, with Country Garden Holdings Co’s (碧桂園) shares and bonds hammered amid fears that a reportedly failed fundraising effort might be a harbinger of waning confidence.
Country Garden is one of the few remaining large, better-quality private developers that had been largely unscathed by the liquidity crunch, even as peers, such as Shimao Group Holdings Ltd (世茂集團), saw dramatic reversals in their credit ratings.
The firm is viewed as a bellwether for contagion risk, as unprecedented levels of stress in the offshore credit market threaten to drag good credits down alongside bad ones.
Since taking the top spot from China Evergrande Group (恆大集團) in 2017, Country Garden has remained China’s largest developer by contracted sales. It employs more than 200,000 people.
Headquartered in the southern city of Foshan, the firm — like Evergrande — has in the past few year focused on building housing developments in lower-tier cities.
It has relied heavily on access to funding in the offshore credit market, like many peers that binged on debt to fuel growth.
It has the largest pool of outstanding dollar bonds among China’s biggest property firms, excluding defaulters, with about US$11.7 billion outstanding, Bloomberg-compiled data showed.
The latest nuclear shutdown in France was announced by state energy giant EDF today. They said cracks were found near welds on a safety cooling system for two reactors at the Civaux plant in central France during routine safety checks. And EDF decided to shut down another two reactors at its Chooz plant in the eastern Ardennes region as a precaution because they are built to the same design.
Karine Herviou, deputy chief executive of the French nuclear safety regulator IRSN, said: “The defects that were identified on the last-generation reactors have been found on another reactor.
“We don’t know if there are problems elsewhere. EDF is in the process of checking all of its data.”
Now, 10 nuclear reactors out of France’s 56-strong fleet are currently out of service.
This accounts for about 20 percent of the country’s nuclear capacity – which makes up around 70 percent of the country's power
A judge in the state of Wisconsin ruled on Thursday that the use of ballot boxes in the 2020 election was, in fact, illegal. Joe Biden was declared the winner over Donald Trump in the state by 20,682 votes.
Waukesha County Circuit Court Judge Michael Bohren issued the decision in a lawsuit that had been filed on behalf of two voters by the Wisconsin Institute of Law & Liberty (WILL). WILL argued that the Wisconsin Elections Commission (WEC) had unilaterally issued guidance to election clerks, authorizing the use of ballot collection boxes, in contradiction of state law.
“The guidance from the Wisconsin Elections Commission on absentee ballot drop boxes was unlawful. There are just two legal methods to cast an absentee ballot in Wisconsin: through the mail or in-person at a clerk’s office. And voters must return their own ballots,” commented WILL Deputy Counsel Luke Berg. “We are pleased the court made this clear, providing Wisconsin voters with certainty for forthcoming elections.”
In a memo issued to state election officials months before the 2020 general election, the WEC gave its blessing to install an unlimited number of drop boxes of numerous descriptions: indoors or outdoors, staffed or unstaffed, in a box or with a fox. Officials could even use COVID-19 as an excuse to repurpose existing local “infrastructure” for ballot collection, such as mail slots set up for taxes, mail and public utilities, book and media drop slots at the local library, even “businesses or locations that have already implemented social distancing practices, such as grocery stores and banks.”
In other words, Biden probably didn't win Wisconsin.
Equity means that black drivers should be able to speed and blow through stop lights with impunity: "Chicago’s 'Race-Neutral' Traffic Cameras Ticket Black and Latino Drivers the Most"--ProPublica. The article acknowledges that "[b]oth red-light and speed cameras are distributed roughly evenly among the city’s Black, Latino and white neighborhoods." But "[a] ProPublica analysis of millions of citations found that households in majority Black and Hispanic ZIP codes received tickets at around twice the rate of those in white areas between 2015 and 2019." Worse, "[i]n 2020, ProPublica found, the ticketing rate for households in majority-Black ZIP codes jumped to more than three times that of households in majority-white areas. For households in majority-Hispanic ZIP codes, there was an increase, but it was much smaller." So, it can't be anything that the black and Hispanic drivers are doing; rather, the answer must be that the cameras are racist. The article ends:
Sutton, who has long studied the impact of “race neutral” policies on communities of color, said Chicago’s experience should be a cautionary tale for cities considering camera programs.
“It’s the same cycle, right, in terms of their interaction with the state and with the justice system,” Sutton said. “But the way you enter that is not through a police officer, but through this supposedly unbiased technology. … I don’t think there’s a technological fix to an unjust system.”
Winston Glynn, 30, is accused of murdering 19-year-old Burger King employee Kristal Bayron-Nieves during a robbery in the early hours of Sunday morning.
As officers led Glynn out of the police station into a police vehicle, video captured Glynn shouting social justice slogans at an angry crowd who gathered outside the station.
“Where’s our reparations for four hundred years of f***ing slavery,” Glynn shouted.
Joe Biden! Tear down that wall! News is leaking out that a concrete wall is being erected around the Whitehouse grounds (see here and here). Biden must fear a peasant uprising.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell called high inflation a “severe threat” to a full economic recovery and said Tuesday the central bank was preparing to raise interest rates because the economy no longer needed emergency support.
Mr. Powell said he was optimistic that supply-chain bottlenecks would ease this year to help bring down inflation as the Fed takes its foot off the gas pedal. But he told lawmakers at his Senate confirmation hearing that if inflation stayed elevated, the Fed would be ready to step on the brakes. “If we have to raise interest rates more over time, we will,” he said.
He said nothing to push back against expectations that have firmed in interest-rate futures markets over the past week that the central bank would begin a cycle of interest-rate increases in March.
It continues:
While he offered few specifics, Mr. Powell said the central bank could begin to shrink its $8.8 trillion portfolio of bonds and other assets later this year, which would be another tool for tightening financial conditions.
Compared with a prior experience shrinking the portfolio last decade, the process now could run “sooner and faster, that much is clear,” he said. “We’re going to have to be both humble and a bit nimble.”
The Fed cut short-term interest rates to near zero and started buying bonds to lower long-term rates in 2020 as the coronavirus pandemic hit the U.S. economy, triggering financial-market volatility and a deep, short recession.
“It is really time for us to begin to move away from those emergency pandemic settings to a more normal level,” Mr. Powell said. “It’s a long road to normal from where we are.”
Fed officials who lead regional banks in Cleveland, Atlanta and Richmond, Va., said in interviews or speeches on Monday and Tuesday that they would favor raising rates as soon as March.
And, in probably the understatement of the year:
The coming transition—in which the Fed uses both interest rates and its asset portfolio to dial back stimulus—”could be a bumpy one,” warned Kansas City Fed President Esther George in a speech Tuesday.
Hopefully the coming recession will not be as bad as the one in the early 1980s when the Fed tried to get the inflation that began in the 1970's under control.
This is an example of a conspiracy: "Education Secretary Miguel Cardona under fire for soliciting parents-as-terrorists letter"--Washington Examiner. You may remember the kerfuffle last September when the National School Board Association (NSBA) sent a letter to the White House calling those parents that didn't like what school boards were doing vis-à-vis Covid lockdowns and/or curriculum "domestic terrorists" and demanding that the government do something. It resulted in the FBI investigating parents, and, we have learned, the DoJ is forming a special team to look into prosecuting those that are "anti-authoritarian". Well, it has turned out that Education Secretary Cardona asked the NSBA to send such a letter to the White House in order to justify the federal government's crackdown on parents who didn't like CRT curricula or their kids being forced to vax to return to school.
Law enforcement in Sweden has pointed to criminal migrant clans as driving the growth in shootings.
“These clans have come to Sweden solely to organize crime. They work to create power, they have a great capacity for violence, and they want to make money. And they do that through drug crimes, violent crimes, and extortion,” said Deputy National Police Chief Mats Löfving, who made the remarks in 2020, which garnered national headlines.
He warned that there are 40 migrant gang clans operating in Sweden, and they are dynasties built on crime, and for that reason, it is hard for law enforcement to penetrate the inner circle of these clans.
Gustav Kasselstrand, president of the right-wing Alternative for Sweden (AfS), told Hungarian daily news outlet Magyar Hirlap in 2020 that Sweden’s government and much of its media appear unwilling to make the connection with Sweden’s growing crime problem and its migrant community.
“The government seldom speaks of the criminality that is the result of its botched migration policy and even if it does, they won’t admit the connection between gang wars and immigration,” Kasselstrand said, adding that unless gang members are deported to their lands of origin, gang violence will keep rising.
Gothenburg’s police commissioner, Erik Nord, also said in 2020 that the rise in fatal shootings experienced by Sweden is directly tied to mass immigration. Once known as one of the safest countries in the world, Sweden now has one of the highest deadly shooting rates in Europe. During the early 2000s, the country’s crime and shooting rate were unremarkable, but with the increase in mass migration, the country has spiraled into a cycle of violence.
So far, the government’s efforts to fight recidivism have produced a little effect, as 76 percent of those involved in shootings had already been convicted of committing a crime.
In October of 2020, Linda Staaf, head of the intelligence unit of the National Operational Department (NOA) of the Swedish police force, noted that second-generation migrants had created a new form of gang culture in some no-go areas.
“Overall, we have three types of criminal structures: criminal organisations, such as criminal motorcycle gangs; family-based criminal networks in clan structures; and a new type of culture and network – that is, loose networks that are mainly gang criminals in vulnerable areas,” Staaf noted.
“The loosely composed networks often consist of second-generation immigrants. Parts of the clan structure are brought with them like honour and blood vengeance,” she said.
The man was spotted on the streets of the commune in the afternoon by witnesses who called the police after the man, who was driving a vehicle at the time along the Quai des Mines, was heard shouting “Allahu Akbar!” and “Allah is here, you will die!”
When police arrived on the scene they were able to quickly identify the driver who got out of his car and immediately assaulted the three officers with his car keys, hitting the officers in the face with them, Actu17 reports.
Police were able to subdue and arrest the 36-year-old but all three officers, two female police and a male officer, were taken to the hospital to deal with the injuries they had sustained in the attack.
Related: "Criminal Migrants Wreaking Havoc in French Coastal Town"--InfoWars. The illegal aliens from Algeria lied about their age, claiming to minors, and national origin and denied any involvement in stealing a scooter and damaging multiple other vehicles. They were sentenced to 1 year, suspended, and ordered to return to Algeria.
The FBI has finally admitted the Texas synagogue siege was an anti-Semitic terror attack after initially claiming it was not directly targeting Jews.
Malik Faisal Akram, from Blackburn in the UK, held four people hostage, including a rabbi, for ten hours at the Congregation Beth Israel synagogue in Colleyville, Texas, Saturday night.
Speaking Saturday after the attack, which ended with the death of Akram in a hail of bullets, FBI Special Agent Matt DeSarno said: 'We do believe from our engaging with this subject that he was singularly focused on one issue, and it was not specifically related to the Jewish community. But we're continuing to work to find motive.'
The comments caused a huge backlash, with Republican Lindsey Graham firing back at the 'disturbing' remarks from investigators and demanding further explanation.
In a statement late Sunday night, the FBI backtracked and admitted the attack was 'a terrorism-related matter, in which the Jewish community was targeted'.
The article further explains:
Akram allegedly flew to the US two weeks ago, lived in homeless shelters and bought a gun on the street.
He was calling for the release of terrorist Aafia Siddiqqui from a prison in nearby Fort Worth in Texas.
Rabbi Charlie Cytron-Walker was leading the Sabbath service and was among Akram's four hostages.
The FBI also initially said there was 'no indication' that anyone else was involved in the siege, but two teenagers were arrested over the incident by anti-terror officers in Manchester, England, last night.
The pair, both believed to be under 18, cannot be identified for legal reasons and are still in custody.
Maj. Gen. Igor Kirillov, the head of the Russian military’s radiation, chemical, and biological protection troops, alleged at a briefing that the lab in Georgia was part of a network of US labs near the borders of Russia and China.
The allegations were based largely on materials about the US-funded Richard G. Lugar Center for Public Health Research in Tbilisi, Georgia. Kirillov claimed the documents released by former Georgian State Security Minister Igor Giorgadze showed the facility was funded entirely by the US and the Georgian ownership it has on paper was a cover.
Pentagon spokesman Eric Pahon strongly rejected Kirillov’s claims, calling them “an invention of the imaginative and false Russian disinformation campaign against the West” and “obvious attempts to divert attention from Russia’s bad behavior on many fronts.”
The US-Kazakh partnership in this field dates back to 2003. Kazakhstan has been an interesting “hotspot” for infectious disease occurrence and surveillance in part because of its history, geography and its diversity of host species. Kazakhstan has maintained infrastructure and a tiered network for infectious disease surveillance since the time of the czars.
The US-funded research projects centered on studies involving select agents including zoonoses: anthrax, plague, tularemia, highly pathogenic avian influenza, brucellosis, etc. These projects funded researchers in Kazakhstan, while project collaborators in the US and UK mentored and guided these researchers to develop and test their hypotheses.
The unassumingly named Central Reference Laboratory (CRL) in Almaty figuring in the Tass report was originally planned in 2013, with the US investing US$102 million in a biosecurity lab to study some of the most deadly pathogens that could potentially be used in bioterrorism attacks.
Rather than locating the new facility in some obscure tract of land in Nevada, the Pentagon deliberately chose a site near Almaty to store securely and study the highest-risk diseases such as plague, anthrax and cholera.
The rationale was that the lab would provide gainful employment to talented Kazakh researchers and get them off the streets, so to speak – that is, discourage them from selling their scientific expertise and services to terrorist groups who may have use for biological weapons.
But the CRL, now operational, is anchored on institutional cooperation between the Kazakh government and the US Defense Threat Reduction Agency under the Pentagon, which is tasked with protecting “US national security interests in a rapidly evolving, globalized threat environment to enable a greater understanding of our adversaries and provide solutions to WMD [weapons of mass destruction] threats in an era of great-power competition.”
... the pandemic may soon be over or at least tolerable. While this development is good news, it will raise questions over whether many of the powers assumed in the name of scientific authority were inflated in retrospect. Its one undoubted legacy has been to damage the reputation of the ruling class. As Daniel Henninger writes in the WSJ, “Omicron has killed certitude. People no longer care what government or ‘science’ tells them about Covid-19.” The public has concluded that officials have overreached, and this has — at least temporarily — ruined their credibility.
Inside every leftist is a tyrant screaming to get out: "Editorial Board of Salt Lake Tribune Calls for Governor to Use National Guard Against Unvaccinated"--Town Hall. The Salt Lake Tribune used to be a daily newspaper of some respect. However, they went so woke and broke that they had to sell off their printing plant and are now only a weekly. In any event, its editorial board recently wrote in an op-ed:
Were Utah a truly civilized place, the governor’s next move would be to find a way to mandate the kind of mass vaccination campaign we should have launched a year ago, going as far as to deploy the National Guard to ensure that people without proof of vaccination would not be allowed, well, anywhere.
... A new study reveals older patients contracting COVID have more signs of brain damage than people who develop the neurodegenerative disease.
Specifically, a team from NYU Grossman School of Medicine found significantly higher levels of certain blood proteins which typically rise when someone suffers neurological damage among COVID patients. Researchers say, over the short-term course of their infections, seven markers of brain damage were noticeably higher among COVID patients than non-COVID patients with Alzheimer’s. One of these markers was more than twice as high among coronavirus patients.
“Our findings suggest that patients hospitalized for COVID-19, and especially in those experiencing neurological symptoms during their acute infection, may have levels of brain injury markers that are as high as, or higher than, those seen in people who have Alzheimer’s disease,” says lead author Jennifer Frontera, MD, a professor in the Department of Neurology, in a university release.
More here. I'm seeing this first hand as one of my in-laws, who was fully vaccinated against COVID, recently came down with Covid and has many symptoms consistent with dementia.
One of the problems of living in a largely peaceful community, such as Boise, Idaho, is that there is so little of the "if it bleeds, it leads" headlines that the local media tends to blow small things all out of proportion. As an example, this recent story from The Idaho Statesman newspaper: "Extremist experts say antisemitic groups are ‘emboldened.’ How can Boise fight back?" With that type of headline, you would think that a local synagogue had been burned down. Rather, the article reports that "[i]n November and December, Boise police reported two instances of antisemitic graffiti, as well as antisemitic flyers spread through one neighborhood." The graffiti was near--not on--the local Anne Frank Memorial. Although the story tries to make it sound worse than it was by focusing that it occurred in a two-month period, these are probably the only such events the whole of last year ... or, probably, the year before that. I can guarantee you that there is a much higher incidence of the spread of anti-Mormon literature and vandalism of LDS churches and temples.
I found myself wondering, what is the left so afraid of?
They control virtually everything: The presidency, Congress, Higher Education, lower education, professional schools and organizations, Hollywood and the entertainment industry, Big Tech and every substantial social media platform, all the large mainstream broadcast, digital, and print media with the exception of News Corp. entities, the HR department of almost every major corporation and many of the boardrooms, the permanent federal bureaucracy, the Joint Chiefs and senior military leadership, the FBI and DOJ, and I could go on and on.
It’s hard to think of any major national institution the left doesn’t control, except maybe the U.S. Supreme Court depending on which side of the bed Roberts and Kavanaugh wake up that morning. Which is why they want to symbolically blow it up through court packing, if they could.
It’s hard to imagine it ending. I’ve written many times about the dread of living with the loss of institutions. It’s something only people in the center or right-of-center have to think about. So many of us don’t see a way out.
What is the left so afraid of at their moment of near total control? Do they know something we don’t?
For one, there are cracks in the armor. They don’t control all the states, and that is a warning to them. The Free State of Florida is thriving, people are fleeing blue states for red states. People yearning to be free scares them. The parents movement scares them, because it’s a multi-racial, multi-ethnic, cross-party movement to reclaim the children. Internet platforms not under their control scare them. People who disagree with them and refuse to be silenced scare them. At some point, it can’t be contained.
Like the animals that sense a tsunami coming long before it’s visible and run to higher ground, they feel it coming. It’s not a guarantee, but just the thought of it is creating panic.
Related: "NYT Warns of ‘Right-Wing Threat’ to Democracy, Calls to ‘War-Game’ Insurgency, Secession, Civil War"--Breitbart. According to the article, the authors of the New York Times' piece urge reviving the 2020 bipartisan Transition Integrity Project (TIP) which only accomplishment seems to have been the issuance of a report that, among other things, concluded that "even a 'clear Trump win' was deemed possible only through 'foreign interference and voter suppression' and would not be regarded as legitimate."
If you think it sounds scary, you’re not alone. According to the WEF, it’s “perceived as a critical threat to the world across all time spans—short, medium, and long term—and is seen as among the most potentially damaging for the next 10 years.” Social cohesion worsens upon rising divisions and polarization in society—as income inequalities are exacerbated by the pandemic’s lopsided recovery, for example, with 51 million people projected to live in extreme poverty by 2030 while billionaires grow richer than ever. Erosion also lurks in the fissures created by opposing viewpoints vaccines and on face-mask mandates, and in the rallying cries for long-awaited racial justice in historically oppressed communities.
Put simply, it’s the crumbling of civil society, fractured by divergent forces from within. Consider the attack on the U.S. Capitol led by Donald Trump supporters a year ago; that’s “one manifestation of the instability that political polarization risks creating,” the report says. In the pessimistic scenario, it’s just a harbinger of what’s to come. And voters seem to feel it looming: In a recent poll, they named “division in the country” as their greatest worry, and said they expected it to increase in 2022.
It’s not just domestic, either. Social fraying endangers global populations, as a sense of disenfranchisement grows in large swaths of the world, especially amid a lack of collaboration among powerful governments, which have largely failed to help developing nations crawl out of the pandemic, resolve humanitarian crises, or fight natural disasters wrought by climate change. Environmental neglect, extreme weather, and biodiversity loss were also cited among the top risks we face today.
A gloomy flowchart in the WEF’s report lists the possible offspring of social cohesion erosion, including:
youth disillusionment
social security collapse
livelihood crises
Pair that with “mental health deterioration,” another side effect of the pandemic, and it gets even scarier. All of that could come as a slow burn, with fallout covering the next decade.
I would point out that the number one and two concerns of Americans is actually the economy and inflation. And, if you look at Robert Putnam's work, the loss of social cohesion is largely due to multiculturalism and immigration, two causes heavily pushed by elites.
"The Managerial Elite's funeral pyre"--Bore Patch. The author quotes heavily from a piece by Peter Greer (who used to blog as the Arch Druid) about why the managerial elite (our philosopher kings, so to speak) are so oblivious to their own incompetence. He writes: "Peter thinks that they are trying to crash the airplane into a mountain - create enough starvation and impoverishment that a desperate population turns to them to fix the crisis they created. I could see them try this; I don't think that the reaction will be what they think it will be." Namely, the author sees the elite as having lost so much respect that no one will trust them to fix things. Also:
This so-called "elite" knows nothing of history. Basically every revolution in history was started by a starving underclass. While I think that Peter is right that they could very well pitch this country into that sinkhole, they do not seem to realize that each of these revolutions was against the Powers That Be who were running things. Just how they will harness all this underclass rage against The Man when they're him is beyond me.
They're desperate, and they're out of gas, and it sure doesn't look like their scheme to start revolution in the streets can do anything other than build their own funeral pyre ....
Our national elite is united enough to have the vices of a ruling class, but not the virtues. In particular, they are cohesive enough to be perceived as oppressive by much of the populace, but they are rarely gracious and conciliatory when needed. They know how to make enemies, but not friends.
Culturally and ideologically, America’s elites have consolidated into a regime, with Big Tech, the legacy media, academia, Big Business, the entertainment industry, and, of course, the leaders of the Democratic Party, all singing from the same hymnal, even if they sometimes squabble over the key. But many citizens refuse to join in.
The American ruling class thus faces an ancient problem: how do political, cultural, and economic winners convince everyone else to accept the system; how do elites secure the consent of non-elites? Members of our ruling class cannot appeal to religion or immemorial custom to justify their place. Indeed, they cannot appeal to much of anything beyond their own supposed merits, both personal (they earned their place) and as a class (they believe themselves to be wise and leading us well).
But the superlative merits of our ruling class are less obvious to the rest of us. Thus, hardly a day goes by without The New York Times, Washington Post, and other legacy media outlets warning that some villain or other — Donald Trump, Fox News, Facebook misinformation, the Senate, the Supreme Court, even local leaders and parents — is a Threat to Our Democracy! By democracy, they mostly mean the wishes of the ruling class.
Anyone paying attention knows the American government is broken. Whether we understand the Constitution or not, we know intuitively that something isn’t right. We may grouse generally—“Government spends too much money,” or “Government should be doing X”—but it’s hard even to begin explaining why the system isn’t working.
There are several major trends that explain a great deal. The first has its origins in the founding of the Second American Party System in the late 1820s and the growth of the patronage or “spoils” system; the second has been the growing irrelevance of the House of Representatives in recent decades; and the third is the much more recent cowardice (or ignorance) of our state legislators. These developments have placed the American system of government in triple jeopardy. Thus, it is imperative to understand how we got here, and why these changes in the electoral and legislative systems will not permit any real change short of revolutionary change.
Schweikart argues that the death of the spoils system, where office holders rewarded their supporters with jobs has, since the enacting of civil service reform, instead produced a system that, "rather than promising a few dozen jobs to supporters, politicians now [have] to escalate their disbursements to large so-called 'interest groups.' Farmers, teachers, autoworkers, and retirees all started to lobby for government goodies in the form of subsidies, government-permitted price controls, minimum-wage laws, or other acts of the government. The result was the same, except that groups instead of individuals were now on the receiving end of the patronage behemoth." Thus, there is no incentive for politicians to control government spending or bloat.
Schweikart then states: "Two more developments, compounding our governmental disfunctionality, have emerged in the last three decades—developments which would have made the Founders’ heads spin." The first of these is that by being unable to make and pass budgets, the House of Representatives has frittered away it most valuable leverage, the control over the budget.
This has amounted to a profound devolution of the House’s legislative power from what the Founders intended. The Senate is now the important chamber, a shocking reversal of the English system, wherein the “upper” house (The House of Lords) became irrelevant, while supreme power shifted into the hands of the lower house (The House of Commons). Under Pelosi, the final transfer of power from the House of Representatives to the Senate—which now controls the only truly important job, that of confirming appointees and judges—was finalized. Starting with Obama and then continued by Trump and Biden, real “legislation” now emanates from the president’s executive orders, with passive approval from the Senate, while the House looks on.
And the final development:
But the death blow to federalism and the separation of powers involved another, more recent shift: that of state legislatures willingly ceding their power to governors. During the COVID-19 lockdowns, state legislatures meekly retreated as governors turned into autocrats, driving businesses into bankruptcy, trampling civil rights, and imposing mask mandates willy-nilly. Only months later did the state legislatures of Ohio and Michigan dare to even mention gubernatorial impeachment as the lockdowns wore on, destroying state economies across the country.
To this date, not a single state governor who imposed draconian lockdown measures has been called to task, impeached, or even seen his or her power abridged, save for a couple of state supreme court rulings. Moreover, in the fraudulent 2020 presidential election, when it was clearly the right and duty of state legislatures to demand full accounting of the votes, to withhold certification of the election, and to otherwise stand up to the fraud, not one did so.
This was not just cowardice: In many cases this titanic failure represented decades of dumbing down of constitutional duties at every level. Most of these legislators did not even know they had the constitutional power to decline to certify a fraudulent vote. Republican-in-name-only governors such as Mike DeWine in Ohio and Brian Kemp in Georgia certainly weren’t about to tell them. In short, between the lockdowns and the fraudulent 2020 vote certifications, the role of the state legislatures has been just as emasculated as that of the U.S. House as a whole.
These failures constitute an abandonment of the instruments of government the Founders expected would be the backbone of the American Republic. It has been the willful self-destruction of legislative bodies at all levels that enabled the despotism of executives.
As a counter to the January 6 "insurrection" fairytale, Legal Insurrection reminds us that Democrats have never condemned "the multi-day May, 2020 assault on the White House that left at least 60 Secret Service agents wounded and forced President Trump to be whisked away to a bunker for his personal safety."
"Democrats admit they want to change voting laws because if they don’t, they’ll lose elections"--Neo. Democrats are hiding behind the rubric of "voter rights" to justify this unwarranted federal intrusion. One of the commenters to the article writes: "They mean the ‘voting rights’ of aliens, of people stripped of their political rights due to felony convictions, of people who moved away seven years ago, of people who died last year, and of people who couldn’t be bothered so they gave you the harvester that ballot sent to them in the mail unbidden."
Curious: "FAA's Statement On Mysterious Air Traffic Halt Leaves More Questions Than Answers"--The Drive. On January 10, 2022, the FAA issued an order grounding all air traffic in Hawaii and along the West Coast. This was about the time that North Korea had tested a new missile. However, NORAD had quickly determined that the course of the missile would not come anywhere near the United States, and denies having issues a warning to the FAA. The FAA's statement about the order simply states:
As a matter of precaution, the FAA temporarily paused departures at some airports along the West Coast on Monday night. Full operations resumed in less than 15 minutes. The FAA regularly takes precautionary measures. We are reviewing the process around this ground stop as we do after all such events.
The author of the article writes about the foregoing statement:
This statement is immediately curious for a number of reasons. For one, publicly available recordings of air traffic controllers on the ground talking with pilots at the time show that this pause was not limited to the West Coast of the continental United States. For instance, pilots in Honolulu, Hawaii were given similar instructions.
A desolating scourge? If you have been following my Docent's Memo posts the last several weeks, you know that China has been locking down cities to prevent the spread of Covid even with very few cases of Covid being reported. Strangely, however, the first of these cities to be locked down was Xi’an which was locked down not just because of Covid but because of an outbreak of rodent-borne hemorrhagic fever. But the European Conservative wonders if the continued shutdowns are due to a spread of hemorrhagic fever or, even worse, a mutated virus that combines Covid and the hemorrhagic fever. Writing in his article, "Has a New 'Xi’an City' COVID Variant with Ebola-like Symptoms Escaped China?" the author acknowledges that the shutdowns could be the result of China wanting to not embarrass itself by allowing Covid to spread to the athletes and visitors attending the upcoming Winter Olympics.
Addressing the issue why Xi'an was locked down, the author observes:
CCP officials explicitly stated that it was the Delta variant. They went out of their way to say that it was not the more contagious Omicron variant. Were they telling the truth? The presence of a new variant is unlikely to be openly confessed by the CCP. The problem is that this is the same CCP that has successfully obstructed every independent investigation into the origins of COVID itself, knowing that the facts lead inexorably back to the Wuhan Institute of Virology, so uncovering the truth of the situation in Xi’an will be a near-impossible task.
But what would you do, if you were a pitiless illegitimate dictator, sitting on an undeclared new variant, six weeks before you were to host the Winter Olympics? I know what I would do. I would hit Xi’an with the most furious lockdown it had ever seen and at the same time pretend that any differing symptoms presented by the new variant were due to a totally different virus that just happened to be coincidentally circulating at the same time.
But things may not be as they seem:
The brutality of the Xi’an lockdown is unlike anything we have seen since the CCP first tried desperately—and unsuccessfully—to suppress COVID-19 in Wuhan at the beginning of the outbreak in late 2019.
No one is allowed out of their homes, not even for essential shopping supplies; residential tower blocks have been welded shut from the outside. Deserted streets are sprayed with disinfectant. The fact that Xi’an City is literally starving has provoked the even world’s normally lethargic mainstream media to report on the situation.
Despite the severity of these controls, however, the COVID outbreak is spreading from Xi’an in a broadly easterly direction, forcing full and partial lockdowns all the way to Ningbo, China’s largest port, on the east coast. All the while, the CCP is calculatingly vague about what is actually going on.
The author continues:
The official symptoms in Xi’an are both similar and different from all other recognised variants. In addition to all the expected respiratory tract symptoms, there is also recorded haemorrhaging including from the eyes, ears, and nose.
How did the CCP explain this? Officially, the CCP—the same authority that claims less than 5,000 people have died of COVID-19 in China since the beginning of the outbreak—closed down Xi’an City because of the above-cited six Delta cases. But the CCP—the same authority that reassured the WHO at the crucial early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak that the virus was not passed via person to person transmission—also highlighted as justification for the Xi’an lockdown an outbreak of an unspecified “seasonal haemorrhagic fever.”
The official Party press release, dutifully picked up by the Global Times, has the typical move-along-folks-there’s-nothing-to-see-here quality about it. So let’s do what the “gutless, lazy, and dumb Mainstream Media” has so far refused to do, and actually dig a little deeper. (That phrase, by the way, courtesy of the one and only Stephen K Bannon, who demonstrates yet again how well he has the MSM’s number).
According to the Global Times/CCP press release, this “seasonal haemorrhagic fever” is not person-to-person contagious. But if this really were the case, if the unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever were indeed not person to person contagious, why close Xi’an citing it?
Considering that the official CCP explanation is that the ‘seasonal haemorrhagic fever’ is spread by rodents infecting humans, I suppose we ought to be grateful at least that Xi didn’t blame the Chinese themselves, by accusing them of feasting on rats at a wet market.
It is of course possible that specific patients have been unfortunate enough to acquire both the COVID virus and the unspecified seasonal haemorrhagic fever at the same time. It is also possible that such apparent haemorrhagic symptoms are ‘merely’ side-effects from (or perhaps over-dosing on) one of the vaccines. A possibility that is either comforting or alarming depending on your point of view.
The author speculates that the hemorrhagic fever reported by the Chinese might be some variant of Marburg Virus Disease (MVD), which itself originated in bats. Because of the common zoonotic roots in bats, the author suggests that it would be easier for Covid to virally recombine with the MVD to produce a hybrid. Since the omicron variant is believed to be a viral recombination between Covid and the common cold, this is not impossible. The worrying thing is such a recombinant variant may have already escaped China:
Last week, news emerged that ticked all the boxes of a potential new variant that is a hybrid between COVID and MVD. Six people have been reported to have died since December in Brazil. An article in Outbreak News Today speaks of “a wave of death for patients who manifested respiratory syndromes and haemorrhages in recent weeks […] after experiencing shortness of breath, coughing, fever, chest pain and haematemesis (vomiting blood).” This could be the viral recombination which I’m calling the Xi’an Variant, though obviously much further testing would be needed to know for sure. Testing by internationally respected, independent experts not in the pay of the CCP.
"The Seabed Solution - After 150 years, is the time finally right for deep-ocean mining?"--IEEE Spectrum. Many areas of seabed are contain nodules rich in manganese, nickel, iron, and other materials needed for the coming era of battery powered electric vehicles. For instance, "[t]he Metals Company claims that the metals content of the nodules in just its area of exploration in the Clarion Zone could supply 250 million EVs." Those who hate humanity Conservationists are already preparing to oppose such mining.
... Even today, where humans live alongside predators, both children and adults get eaten. Harry Greene, a herpetologist at Cornell University and one of a handful of my colleagues more likely to be eaten by a wild animal than to die of old age, and Thomas Headland, an anthropologist, recently conducted a study of Agta hunter-gatherers in the Philippines. Harry was excited to find that the Agta lived among a high density of pythons. The Agta tend to be not quite so excited; Greene and Headland found that one in four Agta men had been attacked by a reticulated python. Of the 120 men whose stories were considered for the study, six had been killed by a python. That’s a death-by-python rate of 1 in 20. Those are lousy odds, but most of us have escaped such risks by living in houses and cities and living where our ancestors killed off the most dangerous predators, be they tigers, cave bears, or giant, carnivorous kangaroos. We should be grateful for having escaped—and yet we haven’t really escaped, because our bodies are burdened by our long history of trying to get away.
When our hamburger-size ancestors lived in trees, it was extraordinarily valuable to be able to respond immediately to the potential presence of a predator. Many primate species have alarm calls that are specific for different predators. The first primate nouns were almost certainly those embedded in calls that meant, “Oh shit, big cat!” “Oh shit, giant eagle!” or “For the love of god, did you see the size of that snake?” In this way, predators may have had a positive impact on who we are now, having given us the precursors of language, or at the very least, cussing.
In addition to inventing words for these predators, we also responded in other ways. When we saw or heard a sign of danger—a movement in the grass, a strange shadow—hormonal reactions screamed out inside our bodies. These fight-or-flight responses sped up the heart, increased blood flow to muscles, caused hyperventilation (to get more oxygen for quick reaction), and made us more likely to respond quickly to a predator by searching for it, hiding, running away, or for the truly brave, throwing a stick and then running away.
These fight-or-flight signals and associated jumpiness and anxiety are part of the problem in modern urban life, part of our discontent. They are triggered by all sorts of ordinary activities. Thinking of taxes causes our hearts to beat fast. So does being late for a meeting, forgetting your homework, or contemplating how to pay for a home improvement. In none of these cases does our fight-or-flight response serve a purpose. It gets us agitated. It makes our heart beat faster. It prepares us to run, but to where? To what end?
Right now there are anxious people all around you, ready to run from predators that aren’t there. Our misplaced anxiety can seem silly (the other day I just about melted down while trying to find my keys so that I could drive to the gym, where I was planning to run in place). But it is still a serious problem that can cost money and can cost lives. We have resolved this plague in part by medicating. Xanax, Valium. and other drugs help. “There are no more leopards,” the little pills say, and we rest more easily.
An interesting article, so be sure to read the whole thing.
"How 'super donkeys' were the original war horses: Asses were interbred to be stronger and faster so they could haul a chariot into battle centuries before horses, DNA analysis of 4,500 year-old skeletons reveals"--Daily Mail. The article relates that "[r]esearchers in Paris have studied genomes from equid skeletons found at a 4,500-year-old burial site at Umm el-Marra in northern Syria," and discovered that "the skeletons once belonged to a domesticated hybrid animal called a 'kunga' – a cross between female donkeys and male Syrian wild asses – and therefore provide the earliest known evidence of hybrid animal breeding." "The size and speed of kungas made these hybrid animals a better option than asses for the towing of four-wheeled war wagons." Per the article, this was all done about 500 years before domesticated horses were introduced into the region.
... the Clovis people’s status as adept killers of tusked beasts weighing up to about 9 metric tons has come under fire. New experimental and archaeological studies suggest an entirely different scenario, says archaeologist Metin Eren of Kent State University in Ohio. Clovis points had many uses, like a Swiss Army knife, Eren contends. Spear-throwing hunters might have occasionally killed a mammoth, especially one separated from its group or slowed due to injury. More often, these tools served as knives to cut meat off carcasses of already dead mammoths or as dart tips hurled to scare away other scavenging animals drawn to mammoth remains, Eren and his colleagues conclude in the October Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports.
The main thrust of the study (pardon the pun) was that Clovis point spears simply could not penetrate deeply enough into a mammoth to have mortally wounded it, and they have the terminal ballistic tests to prove it (although I would note that they used clay rather than ballistic gelatin).
Anti-human leftists have long proposed that North American megafauna died out due to over-hunting by Clovis hunters, a lesson on how dreadful humans are to the environment, rather than other causes such as climate change or the more recent theory of a large impactor at about 10,000 B.C. that struck Greenland. So less evidence of the over hunting theory would tend to support some other cause such as the meteor strike. On the other hand, Native Americans are believed to have wiped out whole species of bison by overhunting by the expedient of using fire drives to drive herds over cliffs or into ravines (an incredibly wasteful method of hunting). In other words, there are other ways to hunt than sticking an animal full of spears.
When government becomes the problem: "Don't Try This at Home"--Wired. The government has cracked down on chemical supply companies sale of chemicals and supplies that can be used to manufacture fireworks and explosives. Unfortunately, many of these same chemicals are used for chemical experiments. This has had a chilling effect on companies selling these products to the home experimenter and home schoolers trying to teach chemistry.
In the past several years, the CPSC [Consumer Product Safety Commission] has gone after a variety of online vendors, demanding the companies require customers to prove they have a license to manufacture explosives before they can purchase any chemical associated with making them. Many of these compounds, however, are also highly useful for conducting science experiments. Sulfur, for example, is an ingredient in hydrogen sulfide, an important tool for chemical analysis. Potassium perchlorate and potassium nitrate are widely used in labs as oxidizers.
The CPSC’s war on illegal fireworks is one of several forces producing a chilling effect on amateur research in chemistry. National security issues and laws aimed at thwarting the production of crystal meth are threatening to put an end to home laboratories. In schools, rising liability concerns are making teachers wary of allowing students to perform their own experiments. Some educators even speculate that a lack of chem lab experience is contributing to the declining interest in science careers among young people.
Every young star and star-forming region around the Sun within 500 light years of Earth sits on the surface of a "Local Bubble," according to a new study.
The bubble consists of a cavity of low-density, high-temperature plasma surrounded by a shell of cold, neutral gas and dust, according to the study, published Wednesday in the journal in the journal Nature.
Researchers based at the Center for Astrophysics and the Space Telescope Science Institute said that Earth is at the center of the bubble, which was created by supernovas and expanded by at least 15 powerful star explosions.
