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Monday, March 21, 2022

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.

    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. 


VIDEO: "Fallout: When And How To Protect Yourself (1959)"--Nuclear Vault (14 min.)
An oldie but still useful information.

Prepping & Survival:

    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.


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

News & Current Events:

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. 

    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.

    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."

    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.

    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.

    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.”

    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:

    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.”

    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:

    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.

    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.

    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.

    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.

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2 comments:

  1. John WilderMarch 22, 2022 at 9:10 PM

    So, AI has already figured out how to kill us . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentMarch 23, 2022 at 12:37 PM

      It's one thing to find a deadly chemical or biological weapon; it is another to mass produce it and figure out a way to spread it. So we probably have a few years.

      Delete

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