Bombs & Bants Podcast (streamed 3/30/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bombs and Bants Live! Ep 29" (37 min.)

I was not able to attend due to illness; but it was probably for the better since no one wants to listen to a sick guy wander in and out of lucidity. Unless you are a Biden fan, that is. 

New Defensive Pistolcraft Post

Jon Low has a new Defensive Pistolcraft post. Well, not exactly new because it came out last week, but I hadn't referenced it before. He always offers up a lot of wisdom and I really enjoy going through his compilation of articles, videos, quotes, and commentary. I generally try to pick out a few things to whet readers' appetites, and this time is no different. So without further ado: 

• Jon suggests to trainers: 

     Practice backward chaining in your teaching.  Start with the final position that you want to achieve.  Then move backwards through the process, one step at a time.  

     Difficult for you to design and execute.  But, much better for the student's retention and understanding.  Hat tip to Lee Weems.  

He provides an example of this using a simple draw and fire exercise. 

• Jon begins his piece by discussing the difference between self-defense training and other training out there (e.g., offensive (military), law enforcement, competition, etc.) before moving to discuss some basic elements of self-defense with a firearm and a bit about dealing with the aftermath. An excerpt:

 1.   The purpose of self-defense is to prevent your injury.  So, you have to strike preemptively.  In order to be able to do this you have to be aware.  No law in the United States requires you to suffer the first strike before defending yourself.  If you allow the bad guy to strike first, you will not be able to defend yourself.  You'll be on the ground getting stomped to death.  Your loved ones will be kidnapped, raped, and eventually murdered.  

2.   If you fail to prevent the attack, the purpose of self-defense is to stop the attack so you don't get injured anymore.  You are shooting or striking to stop the attack, not to kill.  The condition of the bad guy is incidental to our purpose of stopping the attack.  In order to stop the attack, you must either zero the bad guy's blood pressure or break his central nervous system.   

* * *

3.   If the assailant is walking away, after having beaten and raped you, shooting him in the back is not self-defense.  Self-defense only works to prevent the attack or stop the attack.  Shooting the assailant as he is departing is murder.  Such are the laws of our civilized society.  

Read the whole thing. He chains together a lot of other tips, so read the whole post. 

• Jon links to a video from Tom Givens on "How Powerful Is A Handgun?", or more accurately, how little power has a typical defensive handgun. Givens demonstrates this using a Glock 9 mm, putting his thumb behind the slide to hold the slide forward and then discharging the firearm. No injury to the thumb and, of course, the pistol failed to cycle. 
• Finally, he discusses encryption and secure communications near the end of his post. Check it out.

The Docent's Memo (3/28/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Massad Ayoob looks at four different angles of shoulder holster positions - Critical Mas Episode 17"--Wilson Combat (16 min.)

Firearms/Shooting/Self-Defense:

• "Why the Pistol is the Most Important Weapon"--Pistol-Training.com. The author explains that we, at least in the United States, do not live in perpetual fear of low-level war and raiding parties. Consequently, ...

... defensive civilian encounters in America are generally short-lived, spontaneous, and completely resolvable with a concealed carry handgun. It is mostly internet fantasy that you will get your truck gun and go save the day when the flag flies. In fact, way more guns are stolen from vehicles, than ever get to play a role in defending their owners. So, the plain ‘ol pistol, carried concealed (NOT carried openly), is the superior weapon for today’s defensive needs.

• Yes. "Is the .357 Magnum the Most Versatile Handgun?"--Firearm News. 

Its high velocity, impressive terminal performance and deep penetration provides stellar performance not only in terms of self-defense, but also medium game hunting and steel silhouette shooting. Yet, in a duty-size revolver it was still controllable while also being capable of excellent accuracy. 

And you can shoot less expensive and lower recoiling .38 Special for practice or hunting small game.

• "How to Clean a Rifle Barrel the Effective and Harmless Way"--Rifleshooter Magazine. An excerpt:

    Choosing a good copper fouling solvent is critical to the health of your bore. Traditionally, the active ingredient in most dedicated copper solvents is ammonia. It works great on copper, dissolving it in pretty short order. However, it can etch the steel in your barrel, too, particularly if it’s left in for more than 10 to 30 minutes, depending on the strength of the solvent.

    Modern “gentle” copper solvents utilize chemicals that are harmless to steel, and won’t harm your bore even if left in for extended periods. They take a little longer to dissolve the copper, but it’s well worth it.

    It’s difficult to drive home strongly enough the risk inherent to ammonia-based solvents. Once, while touring the Norma Ammunition facility in Sweden, I had the opportunity to visit with one of the company’s lead product managers. This gentleman had qualified for four consecutive Olympics during his career. In other words, he knew shooting, and he knew rifle barrels.

    He told me he’d never use any ammonia-based solvent. I asked why. “It gets into the microfractures of the steel, and keeps on working, eroding,” he responded. “Eventually, like a crevasse in a glacier, the inside of those microfractures get hollowed out, leaving pockets in the steel.

    “Plus, it’s very hard to get out,” my friend continued. “It migrates into every pore, and can’t just be wiped out with dry patches. And a coat of oil on top of it doesn’t neutralize it; it just traps it inside the pores of the steel.”

    That wasn’t a pretty picture, particularly because I’d cleaned the bore of my favorite custom 6.5-284 rifle with an aggressive ammonia-based copper solvent just before flying to Sweden. “Can you get it out?” I asked.

    “Yes…” came the response. “Flush your bore with hot water for 10 minutes every day for five days after using ammonia in it.” 

The author recommends the following copper solvents: Sharp Shoot’R's Wipe Out and Patch Out products, and Bore Tech's Eliminator solvent. 

• "Case Prep"--GUNS Magazine. Case preparation is, in my opinion, the most odious chore in hand loading. This involves depriming, cleaning, sizing and trimming the cases. The author describes the following steps:

1.  Clean the cases. He recommends a tumbler using stainless steel pins as a tumbling medium. The author relates: "I pour in the pins, the cases, about a tablespoon of Dawn dishwashing liquid, fill to the top with plain water and screw on the cap." He lets the tumbler run for one hour at this step.  After separating the media from the cases, he lets the cases dry. 
2. Resize and deprime the cases. The author then uses a Lyman primer pocket uniformer to ensure all primers are seated to the same depth. "When brass cases are extruded and the flash hole is punched, there is usually some small ragged pieces of brass in the case. A Lyman flash hole cleaner reams out this excess brass evenly so a uniform burn of the powder is achieved."
3. Next he trims the cases to make sure they are a proper and uniform length. He notes that he uses a Forster Power Case Trimmer which is designed to work with a drill press. It also chamfers the inside and outside of the case neck. 
4. Then put them through the cleaning process again before finishing the reloading process in order to get rid of any case lube, metal shavings, etc. The author indicates at this stage he adds to the cleaning media "a teaspoon of Lemishine (a hard water softener), a teaspoon of Dawn and a teaspoon of Armor-All Ultra Shine Wash and Wax. The results are a lustrous shine on the inside, outside and even the primer pockets."

• "Reloading On The Range"--American Rifleman. Frank Melloni has some tips for, where possible, taking some reloading equipment with you to the range as you work up loads, as well as discussing the advantages. The primary advantage is time. If you are working up a new load, even if you put together multiple loads, you only have those loads to test at the range. If you want to fine tune a load or explore something outside the range of loads that you tested, you have to leave the range, go home, and then come back out to the range to do your tests. This lets you fiddle with the loads while at the range to come up with the ideal load. I've always wanted to do this, and I actually have a portable stand for my reloading press that I could take out. But the problem for me is that there always seems to be enough breeze to kick up dust or to blow away powder while trying to weigh it on a scale. The author uses an electronic powder measure/scale with a cover, so it is not an issue for him. 
• "SKS Collecting And Identification: A Buyer’s Guide"--Gun Digest. The author presents a basic overview of SKS rifles and variants produced in different countries and which you might come across at a gun show or in a gun shop. There is a lot more to this hobby, though, as there would have been different factories with different roll marks and even variations in manufacture. 
• "When Hunting, Use Enough Gun"--Rifleshooter Magazine. The basic premise behind this article is that hunting is different than punching paper or ringing steel--you need a round that will be large enough to penetrate as needed and put energy on target. So, although the trend is toward smaller calibers (6.5 being a popular one currently as well as .223), it might not be powerful enough for game larger than white tail deer. The point I would add is that it is more than just having a more powerful or larger round, but also bullet selection. Rounds such as the .308 and .30-06 are only going to provide hydraulic wounding within 150 to 200 yards. So, for ranges longer than that,  you need a bullet that will fragment after strikes a target, but still penetrate. If you are using an old fashioned open-tip design with a relatively heavy jacket, not only will it not deliver the hydraulic shock at longer ranges, it likely will not even expand beyond the 150 to 200 yard range. 

VIDEO: "War Belt Set Up For Real Combat"--Modern Tactical Shooter (22 min.)

Prepping & Survival:

• "Why A Sillcock Key Is The Secret to Survival" by Nicky Hoseck, Primal Survivor. The author outlines the problem for the urban survivalist: finding uncontaminated water. The key, pun intended, to solving this problem is a sillcock key.

    Although not specifically designed for survival situations, a sillcock key is a handy item to have in your bug-out bag. Widely used by plumbers, contractors, and engineers, it’s a simple device used to open tamper-resistant sillcocks and hose bibs.

    You’ll find these outdoor water faucets on almost every residential, commercial, and industrial building.

    Also known as hose bibs, spigots, and valves, sillcocks are external water supplies that you can attach a hose to or use to access water outside. Even if the power is off, there will still be water in the pipes. For any self-respecting prepper, that means a vital step towards survival. 

• I've been thinking of buying or building something like this: "Solar generator"--Prep Club. This article is a review of the Jackery Solar Generator, but I know there are others out there. The reason for something like this is not only can it provide emergency power if the lights go out, but it gives you an electricity option for the long term.
• Related: "How I built a power station in an ammo can"--The Prepared. In this article, Gideon Parker explains how to make your own charging station. "The project is simple enough," he writes, "you add batteries, a solar charge controller, and various ports to a waterproof ammo box so that you can charge and power small electronics like phones, tablets, laptops, lamps, and fans. And you don’t have to be an electronics whiz or have any soldering skills in order to make it. It is cheap and can help make future power outages more bearable." Per the author, the project cost around $180 for 198 usable watts hours of power in an approximately 22 pound package. 
• Related: "The Best Battery for UPS Backup"--Power Electronics News. "Many people consider only two options for battery technologies in uninterrupted power supply (UPS) backup systems: the old workhorse lead-acid and the up-and-coming lithium-ion. But there’s another alternative for critical facilities such as data centers — nickel-zinc (NiZn) technology — that comes with a better set of tradeoffs."
• "A few Reasons Why Your Hens Stop Laying Eggs"--Prepper's Will. The reasons covered in the article include your failure to collect eggs, molting, stress, not enough food or the wrong type of food, calcium deficiency, dehydration, old age, egg binding, health issues, hot and cold, overcrowding, and harassment from other hens.
• "Garden Planning 101: Success with Preparation"--Mom With A Prep. The author begins by explaining why planning is so important to success:

    Different plants have different needs. Those needs range from the amount of sun they get to the pH balance in the soil and the amount of water they need to flourish. It all takes careful planning.

    If you’re going to have a plentiful garden, you have to plan based on a few variables. That includes the amount of space you have and what kind of garden you want. Once you’ve narrowed that down, you can pick plants that will fit in that garden.

    If you have a busy life, it’s easy to bite off more than you can chew. You could end up with a giant garden and no time to take care of it.

    By making a plan ahead of time you can ensure that you have a garden that will be useful, and reasonable for your lifestyle. Over time you will learn exactly what you can manage.

• Preparedness Mamma has an article on how to store flour in bulk for the long haul. She begins:

With the right storage conditions and proper packing, flour can last a quarter century! The first step is to make sure your food storage area (whether it be the basement, the pantry, your friend’s house, etc) is kept between temperatures of 40 and 70 degrees. Once the temperature is right, you can prepare your flour for storage. You will need a few food grade 5-gallon buckets, ziplock bags, oxygen absorbers, and a measuring cup. The flour will be poured in bags, the bags placed in buckets, and the oxygen absorbers added to ensure long-term freshness.

• "'It's kill or be killed': Missouri mother, 38, reveals she has spent 11 years and $20,000 on doomsday preparations - from stockpiling two years' worth of food and loading up on WEAPONS to building a BUNKER in her basement"--Daily Mail. The article mentions her having a bunker in her basement, but neither the video she shot nor the photographs show such a room, unless she has a daylight basement. What we see appears to be an extra bedroom/bonus room in which she has put shelving units to hold food, water, and medical supplies. I have a set of the same shelving she is using, and I haven't been too impressed with it over time. Nevertheless, where the shelving is sitting on a hard wood floor, it probably is the best option to avoid marring the finish. Anyway, take a look to see if there are any ideas you can use.
• Glenn Reynolds writes that "Looming food shortages is the next ‘slow-moving disaster’ to hit world," due to the "shortages of food and fertilizer brought about by the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the sanctions enacted by the West in response." He explains:

    The issue is that farmland without fertilizer is vastly less productive. Without fertilizer, corn and wheat yields in the United States would decline by more than 40%. But as prices promise to go much higher, farmers will either have to skimp on fertilizer or raise prices of their own products a lot.

    Then, too, there are skyrocketing prices for gasoline and diesel, which are essential for today’s mechanized farming and for getting food to consumers. Add these increases in cost and decreases in production to the shortages likely to come from the Ukraine invasion, and we’re looking at really dramatic increases in food prices. In the West this will mean discomfort. Elsewhere it will mean starvation. Bureaucrats aren’t helping.

    Some people want to put more land under cultivation. Scottish farmers and planners have asked the government to allow farmland programmed for “rewilding” to be put back into production in response to anticipated food shortages. But that’s too sensible for our green elites. Scotland’s Minister for Green Skills, Circular Economy and Biodiversity Lorna Slater — yes, that’s her full title — has flatly refused. According to Slater, “We are still in a nature emergency that hasn’t gone away … so it’s a no.”

    Nature emergencies outrank human emergencies in the green world, so that’s not a surprise. Voters may feel differently as prices skyrocket.

People should. Biden and his flunkies should be at the least thrown out of office; as should every politician and government official that has supported this "green" nonsense.

    It should be kept in mind, though, that we in the United States and Western Europe are not likely to see the food shortages that other parts of the world will see. At Lawrence Person's BattleSwarm Blog, Person discusses this, stating:

    There are a lot of posts on Twitter postulating a food shortage due to the Russo-Ukranian War. The reasoning goes that, on top of existing supply chain disruptions, Russia and Ukraine were big wheat exporters, and Russia is the world’s biggest fertilizer exporter.

    Those are concerns, and I think there’s a real good chance of food shortages…in Russia. That’s the sort of thing that happens when you unplug yourself from the world economy. And Europe might have some disruption, given that they’re net food importers.

    But I doubt we’re going to have that problem in the U.S. of A. First, our supply chain problems were started easing when vaccine mandates started getting lifted due to the dread midterm variant. Second, America makes lot of fertilizer ourselves, and Russia isn’t the exclusive source of nitrogen, phosphorus or potassium. (Though a Canadian rail strike might impact the last.) Third, capitalism has a great way of supplying substitute goods if left to its own devices.

VIDEO: "Tucker: We may not have enough food soon" (14 min.)

News & Headlines:

• Cause: "In blow to Biden, Saudi Arabia considers helping China unseat US dollar as world's reserve currency"--Washington Examiner. 
• And effect: "Biden sends multiple Patriot missiles to Saudi Arabia to try and fix tense relationship and urge them to pump more oil to reverse surging gas prices"--Daily Mail. 
• "Evergrande Investors Left Baffled by $2.1 Billion in Seized Cash"--Bloomberg (via Yahoo). 

    Investors in China Evergrande Group are still in the dark over just how $2.1 billion of deposits at its property-services unit came to be used as security for pledge guarantees and seized by banks.

    In a call with investors late Tuesday, the developer’s officials reiterated comments from earlier filings that they were investigating the matter without sharing fresh details, according to people who attended and asked not to be identified. The third-party pledge guarantee wipes out most of Evergrande Property Services Group Ltd.’s cash holdings.

    “It’s peculiar because investors expect Evergrande management should be aware of where the cash went rather than instead setting up an investigation committee to find out,” said Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Andrew Chan.

• "'New type of ultraviolet light' kills 98% of airborne microbes in a room and could help prevent the next pandemic, scientists claim"--Daily Mail. 

    Researchers say 'far-UVC' light emitted from ceiling lamps can kill bacteria, fungi and viruses, including coronavirus, without causing damage to the human skin. 

    In experiments, far-UVC took less than five minutes to reduce the level of indoor airborne bacteria by more than 98 per cent. 

The article explains that far-UVC "has a wavelength between 207 to 222 nanometers (within the UVC range), efficiently inactivating microbes without harm to exposed human skin." This "means it can only travel a very short distance in biological material and can’t penetrate the layer of dead cells on the surface of our skin, nor the tear layer covering the surface of our eyes."

• Ok, Groomers: "Portland Children's Hospital Gives Kids Tips on 'Tucking' and Sex Shops"--PJ Media. Tucking apparently is a method of hiding one's testicles in order to more easily pass as female.
• Speaking of child sex groomers: "Woke Disney staff stage walk-out over firm's 'slow response' to Florida's 'Don't Say Gay bill' - despite CEO Bob Chapek vowing to produce more gay content for kids"--Daily Mail. 
• "Woman outraged over ‘sexist’ mommy song taught at elementary school"--New York Post. Sophie Hill was butt-hurt because her daughter was taught a song praising mothers including their nesting and nurturing abilities. Hopefully she has a husband that fights patriarchy by letting his wife change the car tire and other masculine duties (video).

VIDEO: "A Photographic Study of Blast and Thermal Phenomena - Operation TUMBLER"--Nuclear Vault (23 min.)

Analysis & Opinion:

• "An ACLU Observer With A Gun"--The American Conservative. You may remember from the Kyle Rittenhouse case that Rittenhouse blew a big chunk out of the arm of a man, Gaige Grosskreutz, who pointed a pistol at him. And as you probably know Grosskreutz was illegally carrying that weapon. What you may not know was that Grosskreutz was working as an ACLU observer. David Hines writes:

    For the purposes of this column, however, what is really interesting is that Grosskreutz testified under oath that he was on the streets that evening as a legal advisor for the Wisconsin ACLU.

    Legal observers are so important to leftist movements that a friend involved in lefty organizing was shocked when I explained to him that right of center legal observers do not exist. ...

    Officially, legal observers exist to be impartial witnesses—on the scene to witness and record the actions of the police and protect the civil rights of the public. In the words of their ACLU training, they are there to “observe, educate, document, and deter.” In practical terms, legal observers are an arm of the demonstrators who launder their demonstrator-friendly recordings and testimony through a separate organization that provides a veneer of impartiality to media for complaints about police actions.

After discussing ACLU training and the ACLU's promise to help out their observers should they be arrested, Hines continues:

    The tension between the appearance of impartiality and the reality that legal observers tend to come from the radical community also manifests in the training’s attitude towards breaking the law. On the one hand, legal observers are expected to refrain from breaking the law—no violence, no public urination (which can be a surprising temptation during lengthy protests), no theft; not even taking down an old poster to write on if you need paper (Slide 11, 15:32). There is an exception if someone is in immediate danger or hurt, but even then the trainer stresses a separation of roles: “If you feel you see something untoward—maybe there’s some sort of violent clash between protesters and counter protesters—and you have a moral obligation to step in, just take off your legal observer vest before you mix it up. But do what you need to do within the general parameters of the rules that we have set up” (Slide 76, 1:43:44).

    On the other hand, more than once the question comes up about what legal observers, whose job is recording evidence, should do when protestors may be breaking the law. The trainer reassures them that protecting the public from protestors is not part of their job. ...

    Legal observers themselves are not just told to be law-abiding, but unarmed (Slide 11, 18:06): “Don’t bring drugs, alcohol, or weapons. I don’t care what you do in your free time. I don’t care what you have the right to do or what you feel you have the right to do while we’re legal observing. Many people have different comfort levels with other—with many different issues. And we just don’t bring drugs, alcohol, weapons.” The trainer notes that “people have a right to demonstrate with weapons in Wisconsin,” but it’s important to respect the lead of the organizers—and, of course, the law.

To Hines this raises interesting questions--questions so interesting that no one in the MSM ever bothered to ask:

If Grosskreutz’s testimony was truthful and he was actually a legal observer for the ACLU-WI, did the ACLU-WI stand by Grosskreutz? Did he benefit from their offer of support? Given that he violated law and the ACLU’s rules by illegally carrying a firearm, is he still a legal observer for the ACLU?

• OMG! "30 Percent of Americans Still Oppose Same-Sex Marriage"--Reason. Who are the recalcitrants? According to the article, Republicans, black Americans, and white evangelicals. For instance, only 59% of blacks support gay marriage. That drops to 50% among Republicans. The article also observes:

    Majorities of many major religious groups are also supportive. This includes Jewish Americans (83 percent), white Catholics (74 percent) and Catholics of color (80 percent), white mainline Protestants (76 percent), black Protestants (55 percent), Orthodox Christians (58 percent), Hindus (86 percent), Buddhists (81 percent), and Muslims (55 percent).

    The only major religious groups without majority support were Latter-day Saints (46 percent), white evangelical Protestants (35 percent), and Jehovah's Witnesses (22 percent).

I have to say that I was surprised to see that 46% of LDS supported gay marriage. That is extremely disappointing and spells trouble ahead for the Church and its members. After all, the Church has officially rejected gay marriage time and again, so this can only reflect a growing schism within the Church.  

    The article also notes that "[n]early eight in ten Americans (79%) favor laws that would protect gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender people against discrimination in jobs, public accommodations, and housing, including 41% who strongly support them." That would indicate that 79% of the population does not understand anti-discrimination laws and their impacts, including the minimal burden of proof required to show discrimination. 

VIDEO: "Brushless Motor - How they work BLDC ESC PWM"--Engineering Mindset (16 min.)

And Now For Something Completely Different:

• Oops: "Moment armed Peruvian mugger accidentally shoots dead his accomplice while the pair try to rob a frightened victim's bike"--Daily Mail. 
• "There are more than 5,000 confirmed planets beyond our solar system, NASA says"--NPR. Those are just those confirmed to date.
• Another example of the great filter at work: "Astronomy's contribution to climate change rivals the emissions from some countries"--NPR. 

    A new estimate of the greenhouse gas emissions linked to all ground- and space-based telescopes, in the journal Nature Astronomy, says the annual carbon footprint of astronomy's research infrastructure is equivalent to about 20 million metric tons of carbon dioxide.

    "Just to give you some perspective — 20 million tonnes of CO2 — this is the annual carbon footprint of countries like Estonia, Croatia, or Bulgaria," says Jürgen Knödlseder, an astronomer at IRAP, an astrophysics laboratory in France.

    He and IRAP colleagues including Annie Hughes and Luigi Tibaldo got the idea to do this study while making an estimate of the greenhouse gas emissions from their own institute.

* * *

    The most prolific emitters were the biggest, most expensive observatories, such as the new James Webb Space Telescope and the Square Kilometer Array, according to the report.

* * *

    And that's just from using the telescopes — it doesn't include things like scientists' travel to conferences, supercomputing power and office heating. "For our lab, the total is actually about 50 tonnes of equivalent CO2 per year an astronomer," he says.

    Hughes believes that astronomers need to set an example when it comes to action to mitigate climate change. "If we as scientists do not react to the reports and warnings from our colleagues," she says, "then it's a bit like your dad telling you that you shouldn't smoke, while he himself is smoking a cigarette. Why would you take his word seriously?"

I don't know why anyone would take an astronomer's word as to climate change anyway. That would be like asking your doctor for legal advice. Totally different field about which they wouldn't know any more than someone randomly plucked off the street.

• Another argument against masking: "Looking at a Human Face Triggers Activity in Our Brains Unlike Any Other Object"--Science Alert.  

It may not feel like it, but our eyes are constantly making rapid, tiny movements called saccades, taking in new information as we focus our gaze on various things in the world. As we do so, our brains receive the input – and depending on what the object of our gaze is, it turns out the brain activity triggered can be quite unique.

The article then explains how researchers used epilepsy patients who already had electrodes implanted in their brains to examine how their brains reacted when they viewed a range of visual stimuli displayed on a screen, "including images of human faces, monkey faces, and also non-face imagery (pictures of flowers, fruit, cars, and so on)" while also using a camera based eye-tracking system which monitored what the participants were looking at. 

    When the participants looked at human faces, neurons fired and synchronized between the amygdala and the hippocampus in a specific pattern that was different to the results from the other stimuli – which the team interprets as evidence of how the brain handles memory encoding for important social information, distinct from other non-social objects.

The article continues: 

    It's long been known that seeing faces makes neurons fire in the amygdala more so than for other forms of stimuli, although the reasons for this have remained uncertain.

    "One hypothesis is that these signals are transferred from the amygdala via strong projections to the hippocampus, where they elevate and prioritize hippocampal processing of stimuli with high social and emotional significance," the researchers write.

    "This may serve hippocampal memory encoding for salient stimuli and events."

    That could be what we're seeing here, with the researchers noting that the proportion of cells that were visually selective for human faces was substantially larger in the amygdala than in the hippocampus, suggesting that the amygdala plays a more important frontline role in identifying social stimuli in the first instance.

    "We think that this is a reflection of the amygdala preparing the hippocampus to receive new socially relevant information that will be important to remember," Rutishauser says.

    Another key finding was that long-distance communication between different parts of the brain was increased when social stimuli were present.

    "When a fixation on a human face followed a saccade, neural communication between the amygdala and hippocampus was enhanced," the researchers write. "The same effect was not observed for saccades and fixations that landed on other stimuli."

    However, when the participants looked at human faces they had already seen earlier in the experiment, the neuron-firing pattern in the amygdala appeared more slowly – suggesting learned and familiar faces don't spark the same level of neural excitement as new social stimuli.

• Health advances for mice: 
• "Oral drug prevents death from COVID-19 in old mice by reversing immune aging"--Medical Xpress.  

In the study, daily doses of BGE-175 (asapiprant) protected aged mice from a lethal dose of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. Ninety percent of mice that received the drug survived, whereas all untreated control mice died. BGE-175 treatment was initiated two days after infection, when the mice were already ill, a time-frame relevant to real-life clinical situations in which patients would receive medication only after becoming symptomatic.

• "Scientists successfully REVERSE ageing in mice using cellular 'rejuvenation' technique - and say it could work in humans too"--Daily Mail. 

    The California-based experts have shown they can partially reset mice cells to 'more youthful states', using four molecules known as the Yamanaka transcription factors. 

    After injecting these molecules into mice of various ages, the animals' kidneys and skin showed promising signs of rejuvenation, while their skin cells had a greater ability to proliferate and were less likely to form permanent scars. 

• "Virgin births! Fatherless mice are created in the lab using only unfertilised mouse eggs - marking a huge step towards one-parent babies"--Daily Mail. 

Bombs & Bants Podcast (Streamed 3/23/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bombs and Bants Live! Ep 28" (50 min.)

The Docent's Memo (3/21/2022)

 

VIDEO: "What Explosions Do to the Body"--Institute of Human Anatomy (15 min.)

He also has some discussion about gunshot wounds.

Firearms/Shooting/Self-Defense:

• "Weekend Knowledge Dump- March 18, 2022"--Active Response Training. If you are a revolver fan, Ellifritz has included a few articles specific to revolvers, including one on dealing with malfunctions. Although the author discusses several causes of malfunctions such as high or blown primers, bullets sliding out of cases because of recoil, or a case stuck under an extractor star, the most common malfunction I've experienced is a cylinder rod loosening and unscrewing just enough to bind the cylinder. Other articles to check out have to do with safety tips for when you live in an apartment, an article on using a knife for self-defense ("The Myth Of The Knife") and an article looking at how firearms were carried concealed in the Old West ("Hideout Hijinks"). I found this interesting:

    One holster type that did see fair usage out West was the shoulder holster. Contrary to popular belief, shoulder rigs were not a product of the gangster era of the Roaring 1920s. Rather, its roots lie with the gunfighters of the Old West—from both sides of the law. Even shoulder slings were common as early as Colt’s Model 1848 Dragoons. The shoulder holster allowed Western shootists the luxury of being “well-heeled” while not attracting unwanted attention.

    The most common type of shoulder rig used on the frontier, which is believed to be the earliest style, was the “Texas” pattern, which made its debut sometime during the late 1870s. Texas gunman Ben Thompson packed his pistol in such a manner.

    This style of shoulder holster was a contoured and pliable, half-pouch-type, single-ply leather scabbard that was sewn, and sometimes also riveted, to a heavier, two-ply back panel. The rig relied on a looped shoulder strap and often a narrower strap affixed to the lower portion of both sides of the harness to secure it in place.

    Unlike today’s rigs, this shoulder holster did not have a securing strap connected to the toe of the holster to fasten to one’s belt. That’s because belt loops on trousers were not commonly found on trouser waistbands during the frontier era. This drawback made drawing a slower, two-handed proposition. If trouble appeared to be forthcoming, a savvy gunman might carry his revolver partially withdrawn.

    By the late 1890s, a much-improved “Clip Spring” or “Skeleton” model was available. This shoulder holster type may be the collaboration of two Montana saddlers—Al Furstnow of Miles City and E.D. Zimmerman of nearby Custer County-—who began producing the model at about the same time.

    This holster style consisted of the stiff, two-ply contoured backing with a single, leather covered, steel spring band, or strap, which supported the frame of the weapon, while the muzzle was held in place by a small socket at the base of the backing. This skeletonized rig left the firearm exposed for fast removal by simply pulling it forward, yet kept the gun held firmly in place. A leather flap covering the upper portion of the handgun sometimes added protection against perspiration and also from snagging on clothing.

    The early years of the 20th century brought Westerners the “Half Breed” shoulder rig. Similar to the Texas pouch shoulder rig, the Half Breed differed in that the seam facing the front of the wearer was left open, and the rig used the clip spring to hold the gun in place, giving the shootist the ability to quick draw by pulling the gun forward. The shoulder holster’s full, two-ply leather housing granted the wearer almost complete protection from the gun catching on clothing.

    The Half Breed came too late for the Old West era, since Reno, Nevada, holster maker F.R. Lewis did not patent it until 1911, but it did see service during Prohibition when the West was still open and wild. Many of today’s shoulder holsters are based on the Half Breed design.

• "First Look: SIG Sauer P365-380 Pistol"--Shooting Illustrated. As the subtitle succinctly sums up, "The P365 in .380 ACP: Same size, less recoil and more control." And it is optics ready.
• Scattered Shots has been accuracy testing a vintage Colt SP-1 AR15 rifle. His test rifle sported a period correct Colt 3x scope attached. The author relates:

    The SP-1, otherwise known as the Colt AR15 is essentially an M16 in all but the fire control group.  The barrel is the same as was used on the M16 series.  Like the SP1 carbine, the  barrel is the 1/12 twist chrome plated ( bore and chamber)  milspec barrel.   The twist rate means you won’t be using any pet 69 or 77 grain bullets, but they didn’t really exist in its original day so your choices were simple.

    I put the gun up on bags and use the original Colt 3X scope I have mounted on the gun for shooting the groups.  I wanted to stay within what some one would have used at the time but wanted to be able to squeeze more out of the gun than irons sights would allow me.

    Most of the ammo I used were hand loads I have developed over the years that  have always given me great accuracy from bolt guns and semi autos.  I did shoot one group using M93 just to see, but since I wanted to test what the gun could do, I gave it the best ammo I had.

The author had also put a quality trigger on the weapon. With that, although the author didn't provide measurements for his groups, comparing them to the 1 and 2-inch dots he was using, it appears that most of the groups were about 1 MOA. His most accurate load used the 50-grain Hornady V-Max bullet. That produced an approximate 1 MOA 20-round group. Of course, these groups were with careful shots and allowing the barrel to sufficiently cool down.

• The Mag Life discusses some in-vehicle storage options. We've all hear the saying that your car is not a holster; a warning not to store your firearm in your car. But cops do it all the time and its fine. Well, actually, cops commonly have firearms stolen from their cars. But there are times when you may need to leave the firearm in your car because you must enter a gun-free zone: e.g., running into a post office, picking your kids up at school, or working at a place of employment that would instantly terminate your employment if you were discovered with a weapon. The primary methods discussed in the article are: using the cable lock that comes with firearm to secure the firearm around a seat bracket; a console vault; Boss StrongBox drawers;and trunk vaults. I will point out right now that the lock on the cable locks that come with firearms are so easily picked that they are practically useless, and I don't think I would trust them. While I don't have one of the car vault units, I've a relative that installed one under one of his back seats. Bolted into the car floor, they are going to be almost impossible to pry loose and the locks, while certainly not pick proof, are probably as good as found on any steel gun cabinet. 
• "ATF Ponders Changing Definition of What Is a Firearm To Target Growing Gun Diversity"--Ammo Land. The article explains that under current regulation 27 C.F.R. 478.11, the definition of firearm frame/receiver states that it is that part of a firearm which provides housing for “the hammer, bolt or breechblock, and firing mechanism, and which is usually threaded at its forward portion to receive the barrel.” Of course, many firearms, including the AR, do not fit this definition--something that has forced the ATF to drop some criminal cases when challenged on whether the AR lower receiver is actually a "firearm." Same goes for most any semi-auto pistol. In the latter case, the article relates:

Sources inside the ATF tell us that the agency is considering changing a firearm’s definition to encompass the upper instead of the frame. The ATF reasons that anyone can finish an 80% frame or even 3D print one, but most of the general public do not possess the tools to complete a slide.

• Now this looks like a great personal defense weapon: "The Maxim PDW Rifle Goes to Gunsite Academy"--Shooting Illustrated. The author says this about this 7.62x39 SBR: "At 19 inches long with the nifty stock collapsed and measuring only 23.5 inches when extended and weighing 7 pounds (unloaded, with BUIS, red-dot and sling), the PDX allows you to take a rifle to a pistol fight. It’s eminently concealable, and quick to deploy." The bulk of the article is about the author's experience at a multi-day advanced carbine class, but he concludes:

The Maxim Defense PDX is a superior weapon, especially for its role as a CQB platform.  It’s extremely well built, with excellent fit and finish.  It’s as accurate as the round it shoots can be.  It was most reliable in its 5-inch configuration, and the placement of the controls were immediately familiar to me. It’s light and handy and will hit targets with authority out to the limit of the cartridge [i.e., 300 yards or so]. It delivers a stronger blow in 7.62x39 mm than in 5.56 NATO, in my opinion. It deserves your consideration either in braced pistol format or as an SBR. 

• "How to Secure a Sliding Glass Door to Prevent Burglary and Home Invasion"--Bob Villa. The steps he advises: (1) install a shatter proof window film to the glass; (2) add a rod or deadbolt lock; and (3) invest in a home security system with cameras, alarms, sensors, monitoring, etc.

VIDEO: "Fallout: When And How To Protect Yourself (1959)"--Nuclear Vault (14 min.)

An oldie but still useful information.

Prepping & Survival:

• John Wilder has some good advice on how to deal with modernity. And keep a sense of humor.
• On top of the wheat shortage that will be caused by the 2022 Russo-Crimean War, we also have this: "Plains Drought to Curb U.S. Wheat Harvest, Adding to Global Supply Worries"--Ag Web.

    A worsening drought in the southern U.S. Plains is threatening the region's winter wheat crop just as the Russian invasion of Ukraine dents global supplies.

    Some farmers in southwestern Kansas, the top U.S. wheat producing state, have not received much measurable rain or snow since October. Winter wheat is planted in autumn, lays dormant in winter and begins sending up green shoots in spring. Proper soil moisture is critical at this stage for the crop to thrive.

    More than half of Kansas was classified as under severe drought or worse as of March 8, the driest conditions since 2018, according to the National Drought Mitigation Center. Severe drought is also covering three-quarters of Oklahoma and more than two-thirds of Texas, both of which also are large wheat producers.

Also:

    U.S. hard red winter wheat represents nearly half of the country's overall wheat production and is milled mainly for bread flour. A reduced crop could further stoke food inflation that the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) said was the highest-ever in February. The FAO's Food Price Index averaged 140.7 points last month, a 20.7% increase from a year earlier and surpassing the 2011 record.

    U.S. wheat futures soared to the highest levels in 14 years early last week as the Russia-Ukraine conflict pushed two of the world's largest wheat exporters out of the market. That has importing countries scrambling for replacement sources. Meanwhile, the winter wheat crop in China, the world's largest producer of the grain, is expected to be among the worst ever after heavy rainfall delayed planting.

• More: "NOAA Warns US Megadrought Will Persist; May Impact Food Supply Chains "--Zero Hedge.
• WRSA linked to John Spencer's "Mini-Manual For Urban Defense." This is a very basic text and it appears to be written for Ukrainian defenders against Russian forces and armored vehicles, but it has value to those of us in the U.S.
• "Chinese Geiger Counter Arrived"--Come and Make It. As the author remarks, it isn't lab grade but it is better than a home-made version. And it was $40 delivered. The author did not provide a link, but it is apparently marketed by CA JOE (www.cajoe.cn) and was their model GMV2. However, I don't see anyway to order directly from the manufacturer. Amazon is selling geiger counters, but not for that price. Looks like you will have to pay about double ($80) for a basic one.
• "Experts warn central U.S. should prepare for devastating magnitude 7 earthquake that could hit Missouri fault line at any time as 'fear of the big one' in California remains"--Daily Mail. This would be equivalent to the 1811-1812 New Madrid Earthquakes. Scientists put the probability at 10% over the next 50 years.

VIDEO: "The US Dollar's Downfall Has Begun..."--Stoic Finance (9 min.)

News & Current Events:

• The conflict in Ukraine increasingly looks like it is reaching a stalemate. The Institute for the Study of War says the following in its March 20 summary:

Russian forces did not make any major advances on March 20. Russian forces around Kyiv are increasingly establishing defensive positions and preparing to deploy further artillery and fire control assets. Ukrainian forces repelled continuing Russian efforts to seize the city of Izyum, southeast of Kharkiv, and Russian forces did not conduct any other offensive operations in northeast Ukraine. Russian forces continue to make slow but steady progress on Luhansk Oblast and around Mariupol, but did not conduct any offensive operations towards Mykolayiv or Kryvyi Rih.

This is what the prior 3 or 4 days pretty much said. The only new development is that Russia is resorting to using their stock of hypersonic ballistic missiles to strike targets in Ukraine. There are only two reasonable possibilities why they would do so: Russia is running out of standard ballistic missiles and cruise missiles, or Ukraine has air-defenses able to shoot down their other, slower, missiles. I doubt the latter. 

• Of course: "Moderna CEO sold more than $400 million in company stock during pandemic"--The New York Post. 
• Ok, Groomers: "Disney employees stage walkouts over 'Don't Say Gay' bill"--The Hill. They are protesting over a bill that prohibits teaching sex education to children in 3rd grade or lower. The article reports:

    Disney employees this week are staging a number of walkouts to protest the company’s response to Florida’s Parental Rights in Education bill, which has been dubbed by its critics as the “Don’t Say Gay” bill.

    In an open letter, organizers of the “Disney Do Better Walkout” demanded the company “regain the trust of the LGBTQIA+ community and employees” by taking more meaningful action against the bill, which seeks to restrict classroom instruction related to sexual orientation and gender identity in primary schools.

    “The recent statements by The Walt Disney Company (TWDC) leadership regarding the Florida legislature’s recent ‘Don’t Say Gay or Trans’ bill have utterly failed to match the magnitude of the threat to LGBTQIA+ safety represented by this legislation,” walkout organizers wrote. 

    “Primarily, those statements have indicated that leadership still does not truly understand the impact this legislation is having not only on Cast Members in the state of Florida, but on all members of the LGBTQIA+ community in the company and beyond.”

And the protest worked: "During the company's annual shareholder meeting March 9, [Disney Executive Director Bob Chapek]  announced Disney's plans to donate $5 million to pro-LGBT groups." Every civilization that has gone down this path of feminization and gay rights has either collapsed or been overrun by healthier civilizations: e.g., Greece in the second century B.C., Rome in the second and third century, and Islam in the 9th century.

• Related: "ESPN Takes Moment of Silence to Protest Florida’s Don’t-Groom-Kids Bill"--Breitbart. ESPN is owned by Disney.
• Seems like bad timing: "Four Disney employees arrested in Florida human trafficking, child predator sting"--NBC News.
• And more grooming by Disney employees: "Disney reinstates gay kissing scene between two female characters on Pixar's Toy Story spinoff Lightyear after outrage from workers who claimed the film giant actively censored 'overtly gay affection'"--Daily Mail. 
• Speaking of groomers: "Teachers in Eau Claire School District in Wisconsin Are Being Instructed to Keep Students' Gender Experimentation Secret From Parents"--Ace of Spades.

    Teachers at a school district in Wisconsin are being instructed to hide their students' changing gender identities from parents on the grounds that "parents are not entitled to know," and that it is "knowledge that must be earned," according to leaked training documents.

    The instruction was part of several recent staff development sessions for teachers in the Eau Claire Area School District in central Wisconsin that focused on safe spaces, gender identity, microaggressions, and oppression. According to one of the trainers, parents who disagree with their kids about gender identity issues are guilty of a form of "abuse." The trainers also encouraged the teachers to be activists: "to vote, to demonstrate, to protest."

• Related: "Group Promotes Transgender Ideology in Florida: ‘There Is No Such Thing as Other People’s Children’"--Breitbart. 

    Leftist organization Together Rising is investing money and raising funds to help transgender youth advocacy organizations in Florida after the Sunshine State passed a bill prohibiting gender theory from being taught from kindergarten to third grade.

    “There’s no such thing as other people’s children,” the group claims, following a longstanding narrative from leftists that children do not belong to their parents, but rather to the community as a whole and are effectively wards of the state.

• Related: "Abigail Shrier: Activist Teachers Recruit Middle Schoolers for ‘LGBTQ Clubs,’ Mock Parents"--Breitbart. Among other things in the article: "'Speakers went so far as to tout their surveillance of students’ Google searches, internet activity, and hallway conversations in order to target sixth graders for personal invitations to LGBTQ clubs, while actively concealing these clubs’ membership rolls from participants’ parents,' she added."
• This is where these programs lead: "'I knew the hormones wouldn't work. Why did they play with her life?' Bereaved mom blames LA County for her teenage daughter's suicide, claiming school pushed her to transition to a male instead of properly treating her depression"--Daily Mail. 

    A California mother says the government wrongfully took away her daughter, pushed the girl into transitioning to male, and is to blame for his suicide age 19.

    Andrew Martinez, born Yaeli, stepped in front of a train on September 4, 2019.

    In an exclusive interview with DailyMail.com, bereaved mother Abigail Martinez accused her Los Angeles County school of encouraging Yaeli to take hormones and undergo gender reassignment surgery as a child, while failing to properly treat her severe depression.

    Martinez, 53, a mother of four, claimed school staff told Yaeli not to speak to her mother about transgender issues, but secretly had her join an LGBTQ group that persuaded the girl that the only way to be happy was to transition.

    The El Salvador-born mother said an older trans student 'coached' Yaeli on what to tell social workers to put her into foster care, so that the state would pay for her gender reassignment. 

    In a statement to DailyMail.com, LA County agreed that they 'aggressively pursued the implementation of inclusive, gender-affirming laws, policies and supportive services for LGBTQ+ youth,' but partially laid the blame for Andrew's death on 'higher rates of suicide' among queer young people.

• Shaming anyone that dares oppose the grooming: "Los Angeles Schools’ ‘Cult-Retreat-Like’ Gender Reeducation Targets Teachers Who Disagree"--Breitbart. The article relates:

    Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD) trains teachers in “critical social justice gender ideology” in part to “address when students or staff make an ‘unacceptable’ error in words or actions that are against gender ideology,” according to a staff member who participated.

    It was a “cult-retreat-like-experience” the LAUSD teacher who shared the information with Parents Defending Education (PDE) said. “The trainers called for us to raise our hands if we could commit to using preferred pronouns and STAND UP if we commit to using trans students’ preferred names.”

    If the staff did not commit to the ideology, “it was an obvious sign that you’re problematic and bigoted and in the wrong.”

    The training slideshow says that gender identity is “our innermost feelings of who we are as a woman, man, both, and/or neither.”

    In a section called “Interrupting Bias: Calling Out vs. Calling In,” staff are encouraged to go after staff and students who may disagree with the ideology because “we need to let someone know that their words or actions are unacceptable and will not be tolerated [and] we need to interrupt in order to prevent further harm.”

    Even though it “will likely feel hard and uncomfortable,” “calling out” noncompliance with the ideology remains “necessary.”

• Modern day witches: "Owner of 'Sexy Summer Camp' for teenagers says she has been forced into hiding after backlash over her encouragement of masturbation for toddlers and 'self-managed abortions'"--Daily Mail. 

    The owner of 'Sexy Summer Camp', which teaches teens about being becoming a prostitute, 'self-managed abortions' and BDSM, says she and her fellow counselors have been forced into hiding after furious backlash over the controversial camp. 

    Christopher Rufo, who specialized in culture wars, revealed the Sexy Sex Ed team's 'Sexy Summer Camp' program from last year.

    He wrote that the sessions for teenagers, aged 13 and above, 'included lessons on 'sex liberation,' 'gender exploration,' 'BDSM,' 'being a sex worker,' 'self-managed abortions,' and 'sexual activity while using licit and illicit drugs.' '

    Sexy Sex Ed was founded in 2012 in Whitesburg, Kentucky, to provide sex education to young people in rural Appalachia.

    Rufo notes that the founder, Tanya Turner, 'calls herself a 'femme, fat, queer, magical pleasure worker' who was raised by 'a host of witchy women' in a 'coven-like mountain matriarchy' and uses 'crystals,' 'sex toys,' and 'tarot' in her teaching.'

In a more civilized time, people like her would have been burned at the stake (or, if in Britain, hanged until dead).

VIDEO: "China's Population Problem (Not Overpopulation)"--The Geography Bible (9 min.)

Opinion & Analysis:

• "Why Government Schooling Came to America" by C. Bradley Thompson. An excerpt (citations omitted).

    In all instances, schooling in America until the twentieth century was highly decentralized. Many if not most of the tuition-charging or “free” schools, particularly those in more populous areas, were run by individual men or women who simply hung out a shingle, advertised for students, and ran a school out of their home. Some of these schools taught only the Three R’s, while others offered classical curricula where students were taught classical Greek and Latin. It was in one of these “home” schools that John Adams first learned the ancient languages.

    This decentralized, parent-driven form of schooling was how the generation of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Hamilton, and Madison was educated. Not a single one of America’s founding fathers attended a government school. The very idea is and was anathema to a free society.

    It is therefore imperative that we understand why government schools were ever established in the United States.

    One thing is certain: America’s system of government schooling was not established because the extant system of private schooling was failing to educate America’s children. Quite the opposite.

    American schooling in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was highly democratic, in the sense that virtually all children received some kind or degree of education. They did so because that’s what their parents wanted for them, thereby dispelling the calumny that parents won’t do whatever it takes to make sure their children are educated in a free-market system of education or schooling. In economic terms, the supply met the demand.

    Not surprisingly, Americans educated their children to a very high degree—indeed, to such a high degree that America had the highest literacy rates of any country in the world!  European visitors to the United States were astonished by the levels of education achieved in the United States. In his National Education in the United States (1812) published forty years before the introduction of government schooling, Pierre Samuel Du Pont de Nemours expressed his astonishment at the extraordinary literacy rate he saw amongst ordinary Americans.

    Likewise, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America that the Americans were “the most enlightened people on earth.” Even on the frontier where schools and libraries were in short supply, Tocqueville noted that one-room cabins hidden deep in the woods typically contained a copy of the Bible and multiple newspapers.

    All of this was achieved without government schools.

    And then, everything changed.

Government Schooling Comes to America

    America’s experiment with universal compulsory education (i.e., government schooling), which began in earnest in the years immediately before the Civil War and picked up steam in the postbellum period, was created with different purposes in mind than just teaching children the Three R’s and a body of historical, moral, and literary knowledge to help them live productive, self-governing lives.

    The early proponents of government schooling in nineteenth-century America imagined new and different goals for educating children. The advocates for forced schooling took the highly authoritarian, nineteenth-century Prussian model as their beau idéal.

    The leading proponent of government schooling in Prussia and the man from whom the Americans learned the most was the philosopher Johann Fichte (1762-1814), who, in his Addresses to the German Nation (1807), called for “a total change of the existing system of education” in order to preserve “the existence of the German nation.” The goal of this new education system was to “mould the Germans into a corporate body, which shall be stimulated and animated in all its individual members by the same interest.” This new national system of education, Fichte argued, must apply “to every German without exception” and every child must be taken from parents and “separated altogether from the community.” Fichte recommended that the German schools “must fashion [the student], and fashion him in such a way that he simply cannot will otherwise than you wish him to will,” so that the pupil might go “forth at the proper time as a fixed and unchangeable machine.” Children should therefore be taught “a love of order” and the “system of government must be arranged in such a way that the individual must . . . work and act, for the sake of the community."

He adds:

The goal of government schools is not and never has been to serve children by teaching them to think and acquire important knowledge for the benefit of their own individual lives. Instead, the goal of government schooling is for children (and their parents) to serve the State by forcing them to conform to its will. The U.S. Bureau of Education made the point absolutely clear in 1914: “The public schools exist primarily for the benefit of the state rather than for the benefit of the individual.”

• "When Bolshevik Schooling Came to America" by C. Bradley Thompson. In this piece, Thompson writes (citations omitted):

    Once the system of government schooling was established in the United States by the early twentieth century, its proponents were then faced with the inevitable final battle—the battle against America’s parents for control of their children. This is what government schooling has always been about. 

 

    In his 1901 book Social Control, Edward A. Ross, a prominent American sociologist and education “reformer,” declared that the primary goal of government schooling “lies in the partial substitution of the teacher for the parents as the model upon which the children forms itself.” Government schooling, he continued, was “an engine of social control,” and to that end it should “collect little plastic lumps of human dough from private households and shape them on the social kneading-board.”

    And then there was Ellwood P. Cubberly, who went even further than Ross. Cubberly argued in his 1909 book Changing Conceptions of Education that the government school system must be viewed as a powerful tool of the State and that twentieth-century government schooling must be “paternalistic, perhaps even socialistic, in the matter of education,” and that with each passing year the child must come “to belong more and more to the state, and less and less to the parent.”

    Likewise, George S. Counts, a leading Progressive-socialist educator, insisted that children be liberated from “the coercive influence of the small family or community group.”[7] The real purpose of separating children from their parents was to prepare the way for remaking society along socialist lines.

    In his 1932 manifesto Dare the School Build a New Social Order? Counts encouraged teachers and the Education Establishment to seek power for the purpose of transforming America from a capitalist nation (with property rights, profits, division of labor, supply and demand, competition, and prices) to a socialist nation (with collective owners ownership of natural resources, capital, and the means of production and distribution). Teachers were to be the vanguard of the revolution:

To the extent that they [teachers] are permitted to fashion the curriculum and procedures of the school, they will definitely and positively influence the social attitudes, ideals and behavior of the coming generation. . . . It is my observation that the men and women who have affected the course of human events are those who have not hesitated to use the power that has come to them.

    Beginning in the 1920s and 1930s, Progressive educators urged America’s schools to take the lead in planning and creating a new social order. Their immediate goal was to remake the nation’s schools in order reconstitute American society. These Progressive educators (largely connected with the Teachers College of Columbia University) sought to replace individualism with collectivism, the rule of law with the rule of social engineers, laissez-faire government with bureaucratic central planning, and capitalism with socialism.

• "The Architects of Our Present Disaster" by Benjamin Braddock, American Greatness. The bulk of the article describes how the U.S. engineered a  color revolution in Ukraine and its impact. Braddock then continues:

    The successful overthrow of the Trump presidency returned to power the same cast of characters that had carried out the color revolution in Ukraine in 2014. Joe Biden, who as vice president had shepherded the deal to set up a puppet regime in Ukraine is now president. Victoria Nuland has returned as undersecretary of State for political affairs. Jen Psaki, who served as propaganda mouthpiece for the State Department during the Obama Administration, is now the propaganda mouthpiece for the Biden White House. Biden declared upon taking office, “America’s back,” which is only true if you define America as a government run by insane kleptocratic clowns whose problem-solving abilities amount to those of a farmer who sets fire to his cotton fields to drive out the boll weevils. 

    These are people who think they’re clever enough to deal with powerful foreign countries run by sane people. They’re not, and those foreign powers have taken note of that fact. The kind of Americans the world fears or respects have been put out of government and military leadership and replaced by a menagerie of nursing home patients, human resources ladies, affirmative action hires, sexual degenerates, and obese four-star generals angling for board seats on the next Theranos start-up. The day of reckoning has arrived. Leaders like Putin, Xi, and Mohammed bin Salman are no longer amenable to being pushed around and morally browbeaten by the circus freaks that constitute the United States Government. 

    The Washington cabal has long treated Ukraine as their own personal playground. From Hunter Biden’s adventures with Burisma to U.S.-funded bioweapons labs to Ukraine’s status as the top source country for Clinton Foundation donations and child sex slaves, the place is a base for the most corrupt of the Western elite. They don’t want to let it go, which is partly the reason they’ve propagandized the entire Western world into a frenzied mania over a military operation that has thus far avoided the civilian population to a far greater extent than NATO’s past operations in Libya and Yugoslavia. 

    We have functionally entered some version of a third world war already. So far, both Biden and Putin have avoided direct military conflict, but there remains the danger that the logic of events could escalate into a disastrous war between Russia and NATO. Senate Republicans are pressuring Biden to up the ante by supplying Ukraine with fighter jets. Politicians on both sides of the aisle are calling for a no-fly zone, which if you will remember the example of Libya, is the first step to a general war. Even without direct military involvement we already face economic fallout comparable to that of a world war. 

    Sanctions leveled against the Russian economy are already blowing back against our own people. Currently, this is in the form of soaring prices at the gas pump and soon those gas prices will factor into the cost of groceries and other goods. This will increase the inflationary dangers I warned about late last year. Russia has also suspended the export of certain key commodities to “not-friendly countries” which will lead to painful global shortages, the most alarming one being fertilizer, of which Russia produces over half of the global supply. This is likely to lead to significantly lower crop yields, which will lead to insufficient food for hundreds of millions of people globally. The geopolitical instability this will cause will have disastrous consequences for the world. 

    Let there be no doubt about it: This is not a transient moment but the entry into a new geopolitical paradigm. Instead of going back to normal as we were promised, the COVID emergency was replaced with yet another emergency, while COVID itself continues to linger and mutate through our population. We are in an extraordinary time that would be a challenge to the most competent of leaders. We don’t have any of those at hand at present, but maybe we will soon enough.

• "The Specter That Haunts America" by Michael Walsh, The Pipeline. And that specter is the Democratic party but we may be finally at a point where the Democrats lose power. Walsh explains:

    Rather than being ashamed of their explicit anti-Americanism, the modern Democrats have doubled down on betting against the U.S.A. Their shambolic, cognitively crippled president shuffles through one executive order after another, signing anything his handlers in the exiled Obama administration up in Kalorama shove under his nose. The domestic energy industry has been at least temporarily hobbled, our woke armed forces are an international joke, career criminals like George Floyd are elevated to secular sainthood, and behavior that not long ago would have gotten you arrested for child abuse, such as "transgender"  hormone blockers for toddlers, or for contributing to the delinquency of a minor with explicit homosexual propaganda in grade school. Democrats hail these "advances" with their usual blather about "breaking barriers" and "pushing boundaries" but anyone with an ounce of common sense knows what they're really up to. 

    The midterms are still eight months away but Real America is crying out for succor right now. Gasoline, home heating oil, electricity, natural gas—the prices continue to soar, already past the point of recent plausibility and heading into economic terra incognita. Millions of illegal aliens pour across the nearly erased southern border. A befuddled Joe Biden threatens to sleepwalk us into an armed conflict with the ghost of the old Soviet Union in the form of Vladimir Putin's Russia, and disinformation is rife on both sides of the conflict in the Ukraine. In a parliamentary system, Biden's government would have fallen right after the debacle in Afghanistan—but barring a miracle we've got another three years to suffer.

    For just over a year, Americans have watched with admirable patience as their economy collapsed, their legal system was perverted to serve the interests of a few, their nation's military degraded, and their freedom of speech subverted via the government's fascistic and unconstitutional co-opting of the social media sites. Meanwhile, woke corporations and a thoroughly compromised media crack down on the commercial and personal privacy of anybody that runs afoul of the New Normal while manic Greens demand a return to the days of three-masted schooners and windmills. Such relentless cultural and economic sabotage would be considered an act of war if done by anyone else—but here it goes by the fellow-traveler names of "dissent," "patriotism," and "progressivism."

VIDEO: "Bad Eyesight Before Glasses: What Did People Do?"--History Dose (5 min.)

And Now For Something Completely Different:

• "AI suggested 40,000 new possible chemical weapons in just six hours"--The Verge. 

    It took less than six hours for drug-developing AI to invent 40,000 potentially lethal molecules. Researchers put AI normally used to search for helpful drugs into a kind of “bad actor” mode to show how easily it could be abused at a biological arms control conference.

    All the researchers had to do was tweak their methodology to seek out, rather than weed out toxicity. The AI came up with tens of thousands of new substances, some of which are similar to VX, the most potent nerve agent ever developed. Shaken, they published their findings this month in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence.

• "Foxconn In Talks To Build $9 Billion Factory In Saudi Arabia"--Nation & State. From the article:

    In what could be a victory for Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman’s effort to attract tech companies to help diversify Saudi Arabia’s economy away from oil and gas, Foxconn, the Taiwanese consumer tech giant that’s one of Apple’s biggest contractors, has reportedly submitted a proposal to build a $9 billion factory in the Kingdom.

    WSJ reports that the kingdom “is reviewing an offer from the company, formally known as Hon Hai Precision Industry, to build a dual-line foundry for surface-mount technology and wafer fabrication in Neom, a tech-focused city-state the kingdom is developing in the desert.”

    For those who aren’t familiar with Neom, here’s what the BBC has to say about the planned futuristic tech-centric city in the desert. The Kingdom plans to use its massive sovereign wealth fund to finance the effort.

Glow-in-the dark beaches. Billions of trees planted in a country dominated by the desert. Levitating trains. A fake moon. A car-free, carbon-free city built in a straight line over 100 miles long in the desert. These are some of the plans for Neom – a futuristic eco-city that is part of Saudi Arabia’s pivot to go green. But is it all too good to be true?

Neom claims to be a “blueprint for tomorrow in which humanity progresses without compromise to the health of the planet”. It’s a $500bn (£366bn) project, part of Saudi Arabia’s Vision 2030 plan to wean the country off oil – the industry that made it rich.

    The factory isn’t a done deal – at least not yet. The Saudis are reportedly still conducting due diligence and “benchmarking the offer against others Foxconn has made for similar projects globally”.

    The Saudis are also reportedly in talks with the UAE about potentially building the factory there.

    Foxconn has long been looking to diversify its factory capacity away from China. But Riyadh wants the company to guarantee that it would direct “at least two-thirds of the foundry’s production into Foxconn’s existing supply chain…to ensure there are buyers for its products and the project is ultimately profitable.”

    But if the company meets all the Saudis requirements, the kingdom is prepared to co-invest, while also offering low-interest loans, and other incentives.

• "Panic Selling Grips Chinese Stocks in Biggest Plunge Since 2008"--Bloomberg (via Yahoo).

    The broad rout follows a report citing U.S. officials that Russia has asked China for military assistance for its war in Ukraine. Even as China denied the report, traders worry that Beijing’s potential overture toward Vladimir Putin could bring a global backlash against Chinese firms, even sanctions. Sentiment was also hurt by a Covid-induced lockdown in the southern city of Shenzhen, a key tech hub, and the northern province of Jilin.

    That comes on top of a spate of regulatory worries. Tencent Holdings Ltd. is reportedly facing a possible record fine for violations of anti money-laundering rules, which pushed the stock down nearly 10% on Monday. There’s also a risk of Chinese firms delisting from the U.S., as the Securities and Exchange Commission identified some names as part of a crackdown on foreign firms that refuse to open their books to U.S. regulators.

• Scientists have mapped the entire genome of the Dodo bird; the first step to cloning one.
• Starkiller Base? "A Huge Beam of Antimatter Has Been Caught Streaming From This Runaway Pulsar"--Science Alert. 

    The star is a pulsar called PSR J2030+4415 or J2030 for short; it's around 20 kilometers (12 miles) in diameter, and it's speeding through space at a breakneck velocity of around 450 kilometers per second (about a million miles per hour). 

 

    This set of features has led to the star's enormous, comet-like tail of particles, extending for 7 light-years across interstellar space.

    Those particles are matter (electrons) and antimatter (positrons), seen in a new image from the Chandra X-ray Observatory, and they could help scientists figure out why there seems to be more antimatter in the Milky Way than predictions say there should be.