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Monday, March 7, 2022

The Docent's Memo (3/7/2022)

VIDEO: "Carrying a Paint Can Opener with Your Plate Carrier / Kit?"--Tactical Hyve (3 min.)
A good tip on a simple tool that can help with extracting stuck cases.

Firearms, Shooting& Self-Defense:
  • If you haven't done so already, be sure to check out Greg Ellifritz's March 4 Weekend Knowledge Dump. 
  • "The Truth About AR-15 Pistols and Stabilizing Braces"--The Truth About Guns. A good article on what is a pistol brace and basic guidelines of using one legally, as well as tracing the history of the current regulatory actions taken by the ATF. But the view forward is most important, with the author writing:
The ATF published its final rule in the Federal Register in January and will take effect some time in August of 2022. To be clear, the new rule does not outlaw AR-15 pistols or pistol braces. It will continue to be legal to make, buy, sell, or own them. The ATF’s new regulations will only apply to the configuration of the complete firearm on which a brace is used. ATF can’t rule on the brace itself, but they can rule on a complete firearm that includes a brace. Those complete firearms will be evaluated based on the ATF’s points-based factoring system.

FYI, the Federal Register did not publish the final rule, but only indicated the purpose and legal authority for the rule and that final action would be in August 2022. This indicates that the proposed rule will be adopted. 

  • "ATF Goes After Homemade Silencers Through Mass Form 1 Disapprovals"--The Truth About Guns. Apparently, when a person submits a Form 1 for permission to manufacture a homemade silencer, the ATF has been issuing blanket rejections with the explanation that the parts the applicant has already constitute a silencer and, by the way, it is illegal to have those parts! The specific language is below:
A SILENCER IS DEFINED UNDER FEDERAL LAW TO INCLUDE, IN RELEVANT PART, ANY COMBINATION OF PARTS, DESIGNED OR REDESIGNED, AND INTENDED FOR USE IN ASSEMBLING OR FABRICATING A FIREARM SILENCER OR FIREARM MUFFLER, AND ANY PART INTENDED ONLY FOR USE IN SUCH ASSEMBLY OR FABRICATION. SEE GUN CONTROL ACT (GCA) AT 18 U.S.C.921(A)(24) AND NATIONAL FIREARMS ACT (NFA) AT 26 U.S.C. 5845. PARTS THAT FALL UNDER THE DEFINITION OF SILENCER MUST COMPLY WITH THE REGISTRATION, TAX, AND TRANSFER PROVISIONS OF THE NFA. UPON REVIEW OF YOUR EFORM 1 APPLICATION, THE PART FROM WHICH YOU INTEND TO MAKE A SILENCER ALREADY MEETS THE NFAS DEFINITION OF SILENCER. THE PART WAS NOT REGISTERED NOR TRANSFERRED IN COMPLIANCE WITH THE NFA, THEREFORE, YOUR EFORM 1 APPLICATION TO MAKE A SILENCER IS DISAPPROVED. NFA DIVISION NOTES THAT IT IS UNLAWFUL FOR YOU TO POSSESS A SILENCER MADE OR TRANSFERRED IN VIOLATION OF THE NFA. 26 U.S.C. 5861(B)(C).
  • "NEW High Ready Chest Holster From Galco Holsters"--The Firearm Blog. A couple downsides to this holster that I can tell. First, it is a hybrid design using a hard Kydex shell which is attached to a softer nylon backing, which carries closed-cell foam padding. The other is that it is currently only available for Glock pistols. 
    The better option would be the Kenai chest holsters from Gunfighter's Inc. which uses a full Kydex shell--i.e., it is not a hybrid designs--and is available for literally dozens of different models of firearms, or you can order a custom model. And once you have the harness, you can order "shells" (i.e., the holster without the harness) for about 60% of the cost of a shell and harness combo. 
 
    Another option is the Hill People Gear kit bag. I found these to be a tight fit for a 4-inch .44 Magnum S&W revolver, but more than adequate for a Glock 34, and probably any Glock 10 mm.
    It’s a single stack 9mm handgun in the subcompact variety. At its launch, the Stance drew comparisons to the Honor Defense Honor Guard. My local gun store just happened to have an Honor Guard in stock, and I was able to compare the two.

    It certainly seems like Savage licensed or purchased the Honor Guard design. The guns aren’t that similar on the outside, but internally, they are almost identical, and the magazines are compatible. Honor Defense had some drop test issues years ago and issued a recall and fix. I’m betting that fix made its way into the Stance. I couldn’t see Savage releasing a pistol with the same issue when a fix already exists.

The pistol uses a chassis system, so there will undoubtedly be subsequent grip modules available. This is also a truly ambidextrous pistol--no switching around magazine releases. The reviewer really liked it, citing its limited magazine capacity due to it being a single-stack. 

Morgan's Sharpshooters, also called Morgan’s Riflemen and Morgan’s Rifles, were elite light infantry units commanded by Daniel Morgan during the American Revolutionary War. These riflemen were equipped with cutting-edge long rifles (known as Pennsylvania or Kentucky rifles) instead of typical smoothbore muskets, and that allowed them to double their effective range. Some historians credit them with turning the tide of the war. 

And:

One of Morgan’s sharpshooters in particular was credited with some outstanding shooting. Timothy Murphy was his name, and he employed a unique Golcher double-barreled long rifle. During the siege of Boston, Murphy is said to have sniped a group of British soldiers rowing a flat-bottomed boat in the harbor near Boston at a distance of a half-mile from an overlooking hilltop, dropping them one by one. In another instance, during the Battle of Saratoga, Murphy, perched in the branches of a tree, shot British Gen. Simon Fraser in the center of his chest from a distance of 330 yards. Then with the second shot from his unique two-shot rifle, Murphy dropped Fraser’s senior aide, Sir Francis Clerke. By the end of the war, Murphy was credited with 42 confirmed kills. 

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been a strategic failure because it assumed and required a quick and decisive victory, and at best it will get victory slow and Pyrrhic. But the Ukrainians have failed badly as well, by waiting too long to arm and train their citizens. If you want ordinary people to make your society occupation-proof, you have to teach them to kill well before they need to do so.

He continues:

The strategist Edward N. Luttwak has proposed that countries aligned with NATO shift in this direction preemptively, as a matter of policy. Instead of buying heavy, technologically advanced equipment, Luttwak told me, they should adopt the Finnish model. In Finland, adolescent males report for a short and intense period of military training, followed by shorter refreshers for most of their adult life. The training is not, as in the Israeli model, a few years of dedicated service. Nor does it emphasize military discipline, such as keeping one’s bunk tidy and shoes polished, or the Prussian-style transformation of citizen-recruit into fighting machine. Instead, it prepares civilians to be ready to join their unit and harass and kill invaders. A country of Finland’s size can rapidly field nearly 1 million trained soldiers. “Ukraine could have done this,” Luttwak said, “and they should have.”

However, there are some that would prefer Americans to lie prostrate before their enemies, foreign or domestic: "Wesley Clark on Twitter: "Why don't we have a program where Americans can donate the 5-10 million privately owned assault rifles they do not need to Ukraine? It would help both countries." Clark knows that semi-auto AR style rifles are not assault rifles, yet he deliberately misused the term at the same time he argues for disarmament of American citizens in favor of the citizens of another country.

VIDEO: "Off Grid Power on the Move"--Dave Canterbury (29 min.)

Prepping & Survival: 

    We are witnessing the remaking of the world order in front of our eyes — and this will impact global supply chains in unforeseen ways.

    We are about to experience the most dramatic and unpredictable supply chain map we’ve experienced since World War II.

    If the Russia-Ukraine conflict’s international ramifications keep spreading, we face a real possibility of a bifurcating global economy, in which geopolitical alliances, energy and food flows, currency systems, and trade lanes could split.

    During the first Cold War, the world was anything but flat. There were two worlds — the East and the West. That world is being recreated as we speak, and with it, Western companies will start to shift sourcing away from the East and more toward Western and neutral states. North American economic integration will become a new priority. Surface transportation across the Eurasian continent will become more complex, and possibly contested.

    Entire supply chains will be rewritten, with new sources and partners — all in the interest of corporate and national security. This will create massive volatility and unpredictability.

    Companies will prioritize vendors that can provide consistent and dependable supplies, likely paying a premium. In the end, those costs will be passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices.

    While prices will become an important consideration for consumers, brands that offer a consistently and predictably available set of choices will enjoy pricing power. 

    The future market winners will be the corporations that make the investments in supply chain infrastructure and reliable, Western-friendly production locations.

Peter also notes that inflation is out of control, and food prices will get worse: Ukraine and Russia, between them, produce one quarter of the world's wheat. WSRA linked to this piece by Michael Yon in which Yon maintains that PanFaWar (pandemic, famine and war) is already here:

    Chances are extremely high of tens or hundreds of millions dying of PanFaWar in next several years.

    Notice they blame Putin for the lot. The reality is that this elective war creates additive stresses that can, and likely will, lead to toppling of governments. Mass migrations. Possibly a toppling of various State governments in the United States, and even of the Federal Government. And all this is without a use of a single WMD other than hunger and other forms of silent attack such as fake ‘vaccines.’

    That said, chances that nuclear weapons will be employed has never been higher other than just before bombs detonated over Japan. We are toe-to-toe with World War III. Even short of nuclear weapons, conditions are growing to create massive starvations that would make the term Biblical entirely appropriate.

    Consquences of failure to prepare may be final.


VIDEO: "How to Survive Nuclear Fall Out"--City Prepping (15 min.)
As mentioned in the video, 99% or so of the radiation from the fallout will be gone in 2 weeks (which is why old fallout shelters were designed to support a group of people for two weeks). Even if you don't have a shielded location such as a fallout shelter or root cellar to which you can retreat, you can still minimize exposure by staying in the center of your house where you are the farthest from walls and the ceiling. The most important thing is to avoid going outside so you don't track fallout inside or expose yourself to the radiation. This is why you should try to have a two week supply of water on hand. But I would also point out that there is very little fallout produced from airburst explosions; rather, it is ground level detonation (such as to destroy missile bunkers) that will produce the most fallout. In any event, none of this does you any good if you are so near the center of the blast that your home (or wherever you find yourself) is incinerated in the blast or crushed by the pressure wave. So, the first step to surviving a nuclear blast is to make sure you are outside the blast zone.

News & Current Events:
    America’s ruling elite is so used to kicking its own impotent population around with no fear of any kind of repercussion that they think they can do the same with a nuclear power. The ruling class is wrong, and its arrogance is courting existential calamity. Russia has amassed more than 6,000 nuclear warheads, which is more than even the United States possesses. Nearly 1,500 of these weapons are deployed, ready for use. Russia possesses a full nuclear triad of nuclear-armed bombers, submarines, and land-based ICBMs (Inter-continental Ballistic Missiles). Russia cannot be immobilized with a single first strike; if it feels cornered it has the firing power to bring down all of civilization.

    Such a reality requires leaders who will treat the situation with caution and seriousness. Right now, the only acceptable and responsible approach is one that prioritizes de-escalation, and takes the conflict closer to a negotiated peace. But instead, our flippant leaders are babbling about whatever makes them feel toughest, creating an environment of constantly-escalating peril.
    Secretary of State Antony Blinked told CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the United States had given NATO countries a “greenlight” to send fighter jets to Ukraine if necessary to assist in their war against Russia.

    Blinken specifically said Ukraine’s neighbor Poland has permission to send the planes and that the U.S. has already been in discussion with the Polish government about the matter, CBS reported

          It comes as Russia's Defense Ministry today warned countries, including NATO member Romania, against hosting Kyiv's military aircraft, saying they could end up being involved in an armed conflict.          

          Defence ministry spokesman Igor Konashenkov said in a video briefing that some Ukrainian combat planes had redeployed to Romania and other Ukraine neighbours he did not identify.

          He warned that if those warplanes attacked the Russian forces from the territory of those nations, it 'could be considered as those countries' engagement in the military conflict'.       

          Mr Konashenkov said: 'We know for sure that Ukrainian combat aircraft have flown to Romania and other neighbouring countries.

          'The use of the airfield network of these countries for basing Ukrainian military aviation with the subsequent use of force against Russia's army can be regarded as the involvement of these states in an armed conflict.'  

      Also:

          But the Polish government is concerned Russian President Vladimir Putin would see the Ukrainian's being given warplanes as a direct escalation or even NATO interference. 

          'Poland is not in a state of war with Russia, but it is not an impartial country, because it supports Ukraine as the victim of aggression. It considers, however, that all military matters must be a decision of Nato as a whole,' a Polish official said. 

          Polish president Andrzej Duda has previously brushed aside the entire idea noting that supplying the planes would be seen as essentially interfering in the conflict. 

          But the idea of Poland tacitly allowing Ukraine to borrow its fighter jets was given the thumbs up by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and his foreign minister Dmytro Kuleba, who both argued that if NATO were refusing to set up a no-fly zone over Ukraine, then it could at the very least supply the Ukrainian air force with fighters.      

          In a country crammed with Russians, they were trying to make Russian a second-class language. 

          Russians who had lived there happily for decades were pressured to take Ukrainian citizenship and adopt Ukrainian versions of their Christian names. 

          The schools were promoting a national hero, Stepan Bandera, who Russians strongly disliked and regarded as a terrorist. 

          And they were teaching history which often had an anti-Russian tinge. Quite a few people told me they felt put upon by these policies. Why couldn't they just be left alone?

          Until that point, Ukraine had been a reasonably harmonious country in its 20-odd years of existence. After that visit I saw big trouble coming, both in the Crimea and in the Don Basin, where I also travelled that year.

          Far out among the abandoned slagheaps of the dying coalfields, I found the decaying semi-deserted town of Gorlovka, now in the midst of an unofficial war-zone, where it has been since 2014.

          This town had been officially renamed Horlivka by Ukraine in its high-handed way, though hardly anybody I met there called it that. Gorlovka in those days still hosted the rather pleasant Cafe Barnsley, the last echo of the Soviet days when Gorlovka had been twinned with Barnsley in a gesture of Communist solidarity with Arthur Scargill's miners.

          I remember, that boiling hot, almost silent afternoon, enjoying a Russian beer there, while listening to music from a Russian station on the radio. I wrote rather vaguely at the time that the people of Crimea and Donbas were hoping for – and expecting – a Russian future.

          I thought that if Ukraine wanted to be a rigid ethnic nationalist state, then some sort of peaceful deal with its Russian minority was going to be needed. Little did I know what passions I had touched on. 

      And moving to the present hysteria, Hitchens writes:

          I have heard a respected MP calling for the deportation of all Russians from this country – all of them. I have heard crazy people calling for a 'no-fly zone' in Ukraine. 

          If they got their way it would mean a terrible and immediate European war. I suspect they do not even know what they are calling for. Can you all please call off this carnival of hypocrisy?

          I cannot join in it. I know too much. I know that our policy of Nato expansion – which we had promised not to do and which we knew infuriated Russians – played its part in bringing about this crisis.

          I know that Ukraine's current government, now treated as if it was almost holy, was brought into being by a mob putsch openly backed by the USA in 2014.

          I know that the much-admired President Zelensky in February 2021 closed down three opposition TV stations on the grounds of 'national security'. They went dark that night. I know that the opposition politician Viktor Medvedchuk was put under house arrest last year on a charge of treason. Isn't this the sort of thing Putin does?

          I know that Ukraine's army has used severe force against Russian civilians in the Don Basin since 2014. The Russians have done dreadful things there, too, but there are plenty of people who will tell you that. The point is that this is not a contest of saints versus sinners, or of Mordor versus the Shire.

          I also find it awkward that, when Britain and the USA rightly denounced Putin's illegal invasion of a sovereign country, they seemed to have forgotten that we gave him the idea, by doing this in Iraq in 2003. Unlike them I can truly claim to have opposed both these actions.

          I tire of being told that Nato is purely defensive alliance when we know it bombed Serbia in 1999, incidentally killing civilians, when Serbia had not attacked a Nato member. 

          I also don't recall Libya attacking a Nato member before that 'defensive' alliance launched the air war on Tripoli which also killed civilians, children included, and turned that country into a cauldron of chaos, benefiting nobody.

          And then there's the other thing that sticks in my gullet. The countries of the West have egged Ukraine on into a confrontation with Russia which has predictably ended in Putin's barbaric invasion. 
          Pro-Kiev volunteer battalions are increasingly blocking humanitarian aid into eastern Ukraine in a move which will exacerbate a pending humanitarian crisis in the run up to Christmas and New Year, said Amnesty International today (24 December).
       
          Amnesty has received information that the pro-Kiev battalions, which include the Dnipro-1 and the Aidar battalions, have blocked aid entering territories controlled by the self-proclaimed Donetsk and Luhansk People’s Republics. 
       
          The Dnipro-1 volunteer battalion, along with members of the Donbass battalion and the Pravyi Sector militia, are reported to have blocked 11 roads leading into the Donetsk People’s Republic-controlled territory. They’ve refused to allow most aid convoys through, saying they believe food and clothing are ending up in the wrong hands and may be sold instead of being given as humanitarian aid. They are also insisting on the release of prisoners held by the separatist forces as a condition for allowing humanitarian aid through. 
       
          Last week at least four convoys sent by the humanitarian foundation of Rinat Akhmetov, one of Ukraine’s richest men, were blocked on the roads leading to the separatist-controlled territory by the Dnipro-1 battalion. After stopping one of the convoys Vladimir Manko, deputy commander of the Dnipro-1 battalion, told Ukrainian media: “It turns out that we're at war with them and we're spilling our blood, but in the same time we're feeding them.”
       
          An aid worker from the Luhansk Region has informed Amnesty that the Aidar battalion is also stopping and searching cars that travel from Starobil’sk to Luhansk and vice versa. Members of the battalion, which was previously implicated in arbitrary detention and torture, are reportedly stopping food and medicines getting through to the region. The aid worker recalled a particular case when medicines for four elderly people in Krasnodon, who are suffering from heart and blood pressure conditions, were snatched from a bus at a checkpoint. 
       
          Over half of the population in the affected areas are now entirely dependent on food aid, as wages, pensions and social benefits are not being paid regularly as a result of the seven-month-long conflict. The Kiev authorities’ decision last month to essentially cut the region off from the Ukrainian financial system is also adding to the hardship of the local population. 

          When the invasion began less than a fortnight ago it was assumed to be inevitable that Russian tanks would roll into Kyiv within hours. But after a series of strategic blunders and the remarkable resistance of Ukrainian troops on the battlefield, the outcome of the campaign could now be in doubt.

          Sir Tony, the former head of the Royal Navy, who was appointed Chief of the Defence Staff late last year, was speaking after eight Russian aircraft were shot down in 24 hours.

          The Russians, contrary to their military doctrine, have also been forced to admit that almost 500 of their soldiers have been killed.

          And in a highly embarrassing example of ineptitude, a convoy of hundreds of Russian vehicles and an estimated 15,000 troops has ground to a halt.

          The column, including tanks, missile batteries and armoured personnel carriers, had been earmarked by Putin to encircle Kyiv and pound the Ukrainians into submission.

          But this operation is considered at least a month behind schedule, according to UK military sources. Given the unified approach to sanctions that the UK, US and other world powers have displayed, the Kremlin chief may not be able to sustain a military campaign for that long.

      This article from AND Magazine, "Ukraine – The Killing Field For Russians," similarly discusses Russian losses and that the Russian military is using portable crematoriums to cover up the number of Russian troops that have been killed.

          This piece from Chicago Boyz, "Day Eight of the Russian Column Held Hostage (by the usual Russian incompetence)" relates:

          I have posted on twitter about the Russian Army columns North of Kyiv decaying into immobile blobs due to the Rasputitsa, poorly maintained Chinese truck tires and shear “follow the plan” Russian incompetence.

          The head and first dozen or so kilometers of the southernmost column north of Kiev have been stuck there for EIGHT DAYS.  The Russians have since rammed more and more vehicles into this monster traffic jam (idiotically “following the plan” Soviet-style) so the whole thing is now 65-70 kilometers long (almost 40 miles).

          And, because the trucks can’t go off-road due to the Rasputitsa mud and tire problems, they’re stuck on the roads and the roads’ shoulders three vehicles wide for the whole @40 miles.   That means fuel and resupply trucks can’t move on or off road to deliver anything to anybody.

          So all the columns’ heads are now out of fuel and battery power.  They can’t move north, south or sideways, and everything behind them is stuck because of the mud, and rapidly running out of fuel and vehicle battery charge too (assuming they haven’t already).  Nor can any of those columns defend themselves because they’re too densely packed.  They’re just targets waiting for the Ukrainians to destroy them.

          Only the Ukrainians had something better to do.  They opened the floodgates of reservoirs around those columns to flood them and turn the surrounding areas into impassable quagmires for months – probably until July or August.  (See photo below) Probably several thousand Russian vehicles in those columns will be irrecoverable losses.  Hundreds of Russian soldiers might have drowned.

          This was not just a debacle, but an EPIC one. About 1/5th of the Russian force in Ukraine is now flooded or trapped, and are definitely out of the war for good.

       I had thought that a Russian invasion was not going to be possible the longer the Russians waited because of the spring thaw and mud--something that the Germans had to deal with in WWII. Nevertheless, the Russians held off until the thaw had set in--at the insistence of China that it wait until the Winter Olympics had finished--and then had their cheap Chinese tires fail on them. I think the Russians made a fatal mistake: they trusted the Chinese, who played them like a fiddle.

      • Speaking of China: "China’s Plans For Taiwan: Ukraine Sends Xi Jinping Back To The Drawing Board" by Grant Newsham, AND Magazine. Newsham speculates that what is going on in Ukraine must be giving Xi pause because of how united the American Empire was in condemning and punishing Russia. Also, as Newsham points out, unlike Ukraine, Taiwan is the perfect environment for guerrilla tactics. I suspect that it might be giving Xi second thoughts because the Russian military, which is better trained and led than China's military, has not done very well. Combined arms operations are hard. And then there are those Chinese made tires....
      • We'll be seeing more of this in the future among many denominations: "New more conservative denomination announces split from United Methodist Church over LGTBQ rights"--The Hill.  From the article:

        •     The Global Methodist Church on Thursday announced that it would officially launch on May 1, kickstarting what the church described as a "new, theologically conservative Methodist denomination."

            The launch of the new denomination marks the latest step in the split of the United Methodist Church following years of debate over LGBTQ rights.

            A plan for the division of the United Methodist Church, the largest mainline Protestant denomination in the U.S., was agreed to by leading United Methodist Church bishops and leaders of centrist, progressive and conservative groups in 2019, per the announcement.

            The agreement followed a warning issued by about 1,500 churches that year that they would break away from the United Methodist General Conference over a vote to drop official language banning same-sex marriage and ordaining LGBTQ clergy. Though the church voted against the change, the division proceeded.

            The plan for the split, the "Protocol of Reconciliation and Grace through Separation," was set to go to a vote at the United Methodist Church's General Conference in May 2020, the announcement noted, but the conference has been postponed three times due to issues related to the pandemic. The new denomination is proceeding with the launch outside the terms of the plan.

      What we will also see is that after such splits, rather than leave them alone, Leftists will infiltrate such denominations in order to subvert it to their worldly teachings.
          Average hourly wages grew by just 1 cent in February. (Yikes!) Overall, for the year, wages rose 5.1% from February 2021 to February 2022. That’s good news, right?

          Not so fast. 

          We don’t have the final inflation numbers for February yet, but we do have January. And the January Consumer Price Index showed that average consumer prices rose 7.5% from January 2021 to January 2022. So, a rough but fairly accurate comparison suggests that Americans purchasing power—their real wages—has declined by 1-2.4% over the last year. 
      How many disappeared in this cartel “extermination site” on the outskirts of Nuevo Laredo, miles from the U.S. border? After six months of work, forensic technicians still don’t dare offer an estimate. In a single room, the compacted, burnt human remains and debris were nearly 2 feet deep.
      • Corruption in the U.S. often goes under the title of "cost-plus" contracting: "Finally, we know production costs for SLS and Orion, and they’re wild"--Ars Technica. NASA Inspector General Paul Martin has revealed that "the operational costs alone for a single Artemis launch—for just the rocket, Orion spacecraft, and ground systems—will total $4.1 billion." 
          What is striking about these costs is that they do not include the tens of billions of dollars that NASA has already spent developing the Orion spacecraft since 2005 and the Space Launch System rocket since 2011. If one were to amortize development costs over 10 flights of the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft, the $4.1 billion figure cited by Martin would easily double.

          That figure is far higher than NASA might have hoped. Five years ago, a senior NASA official told Ars that the space agency would like to get its operational costs for a single mission a year down to $2 billion or less. Another source at the time said the internal goal was $1.5 billion.

          Martin also said NASA is obscuring costs that it is spending on the Artemis program and that, in aggregate, his office believes NASA will spend $93 billion from 2012 to 2025 on the Artemis program.

      In spite of these costs, there is no guarantee that the SLS will ever fly--it is well past its original deadline to fly, the launch date for a test keeps getting pushed back, and there have been technical issues. Meanwhile, SpaceX, with just a fraction of that money, has advanced space flight more in the last 10 years than NASA has in the past 50.

          The past two weeks have denoted a remarkable transformation in the pushing of the fraudulent fearmongering narrative about a relatively non-lethal flu, vaccine mandates, masking and shaming those with the common sense to rely on their immune systems, to trying to provoke a world war over a border dispute with absolutely no relevance or strategic value to our country, other than to further enrich the military industrial complex and the parasites and leeches in government, finance, media and war making industry who live for and love war.

          The shift has been effortless because the ruling Party, over the last two years, learned they could make the willfully ignorant and indoctrinated masses believe the most absurd story-lines with broadcast propaganda, social media influencing, and using highly compensated “experts” to lie, obfuscate, and say whatever they were paid to say.

      He goes on to compare this to the two minutes of hate described in Orwell's 1984, and how the target of the hate could so easily be changed without any apparent cognitive dissonance. But now that Covid is receding (and with it the immediacy of hating anti-vaxxers) the hate has been redirected to Russia and all things Russian. The author continues:

          Everything we’ve been put through over the last two years has been pre-planned by Schwab, Soros, Gates, the Davos World Economic Forum crowd, and their acolytes positioned in governments across the world. They have been testing how far they could push their citizens before getting pushback. Lockdowns, masks, vaccines, electronic vaccine passports, social credit scoring, and conspiring with Big Pharma, Big Media, and Big Corporations to force a fake vaccine into the veins of hundreds of millions has all been part of the plan.

          Trudeau’s totalitarian crackdown on peaceful protestors, declaring dictatorial emergency powers, stealing their donated funds, freezing their bank accounts, beating them, imprisoning them, seizing their property, and trying to ruin their lives by publicly releasing their names and addresses, was just another test run by one of Schwab’s young global leader graduates. The same has been done in New Zealand and Australia. These actions are a prelude to what comes next. Orwell was right. Once they have seized power, they have no plans of relinquishing it and the object of power is power.

      He predicts that the metaphorical beatings will continue against anyone that dares disagree with the party line. And with real inflation over 15% and real wages stagnating or even falling, he wonders if we will even be allowed a presidential election in 2024.

          Yes, Americans are plenty polarized, red vs. blue, rural vs. urban, Fox News vs. MSNBC. And yet for all this hostility, we lack a Fort Sumter, that is, an actual outbreak of heavy violence as when the South Carolina militia started shooting on April 12, 1861. Indeed, it seems fair to assert that the United States has all the preconditions for a civil war today except one: the willingness to actually fight for the sake of disunity.

          Admittedly, there was that riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, yet that mob violence was notable for its lack of guns and gunfire—at least on the side of the intruders. Whatever one thinks of the overall seriousness of January 6, the attack on the Capitol was not the revolutionary storming of the Bastille or the seizing of the Winter Palace. In the year since, hundreds of the rioters have been arrested without incident, and many have apologized and pleaded guilty—not exactly the stuff of a second civil war.

          Still, the Biden administration seems helpless to stop red-state America from going its separate way. The federal government finds itself challenged and blocked by activist Republican governors, most notably Ron DeSantis of Florida. After a long period in which the federal government gained power relative to the states, Red America is now charting its own destiny. Madisonian federalism is on the upswing.

      He continues:

          The federal government itself is increasingly seen as a Blue Thing. In the view of Red America, it’s an occupying force controlled by the woke. The deep state is now risen, in all its Lovecraftian horror. In response, Republicans in red states have gone about building up their own independent institutions, including new universities and social media platforms. Florida is even setting up a new military unit, because you just never know what will happen.

          So now we might ask: Given this divided national mood, what would happen today, if, say, South Carolina were to take a step toward divorce? Here we needn’t cite the full Fort Sumter; instead, suppose that the Palmetto State simply pulled the American flag down from its state capitol. How now would the Biden administration react? How would Republicans react? What would Tucker Carlson say? What would be Trump’s view?

          Here’s a prediction. The federal reaction to South Carolina getting out of line would be muted. The near octogenarian commander-in-chief, not much of a speechmaker, would say little, and the closely divided Congress would enact nothing. Yes, of course, many Democrats would say this is a new rebellion, yet other Democrats would say, Good riddance! After all, Democratic concerns about holding their majority in national elections would fade away if they knew that red states were leaving.

          In the past, it was different—the feds were tougher. Less than seven decades ago, President Dwight Eisenhower (West Point class of 1915) sent the 101st Airborne to Little Rock to enforce school desegregation. To Ike, this was no big deal; after all, he had ordered the Screaming Eagles into action before, as when they parachuted into France on D-Day.

          The contrast between the 34th president and the 46th president is stark. Ike spent four decades in the military, including during two world wars. By contrast, during the Vietnam War, Biden was in a classroom, or working as a lifeguard, or even playing football. It seems that the asthma that gained him five draft deferments only erupted at certain times. Would Biden (University of Delaware ’65, Syracuse Law ’68) have the same confidence to command the military in a tough domestic mission? Would he really want to test the willingness of the armed forces—at the mid-rank unit level, deeply Fox News-influenced—to carry out an order to muscle, and perhaps kill, Red Americans?

          Most likely, Biden would seek some way out, short of confrontation. Bolstering Biden’s instinct to dither and ramble would be congressional oversight, media second-guessing, lawsuits, judicial injunctions, and, of course, environmental impact statements. If South Carolina (or Florida, or any red state) showed even the slightest subtlety in its separatism, the Biden administration would find a way to look the other way. Today’s left, including the persons now shaping strategic thinking at the Pentagon, is more likely to be triggered than to want to pull a trigger.

          So for all the talk of kulturkampf, there’s no real prospect of a blitzkrieg. If anything, it would be more like a “sitzkrieg,” with nobody wanting to fight.

      Pinkerton goes on to suggest that the best (i.e., least worst) path forward would be to emulate the Hapsburg Empire and, later, Austro-Hungarian Empire by allowing substantial internal autonomy while providing some sore of overarching unity. Something, that to me, suspiciously sounds like the federalism envisioned by our founders. 

          Pinkerton goes on to warn, however, that we must emulate other aspects of Austro-Hungaria including its forbearance from obtaining an overseas colonial empire and war. Pinkerton explains:

          First, as we have seen, the internal divisions of the Habsburg dominions cut against their military power. That’s one reason why they never sought out overseas colonies, saving them all the grief and guilt suffered by more aggressive powers. There’s something we could learn: Knock it off on the force projection. Our sword is brittle, so it’s best to use it only sparingly. Defense yes, offense no.

          Second, in the absence of hard power, soft power looms large. From Mozart to Haydn to Liszt, the Austro-Hungarians developed much of the world’s high culture—that’s soft power. In 1914, when the same empire tried to project its hard power against Serbia, a nation with a fraction of its population, it was defeated. Thus the lesson: Stick to what you’re good at. The peoples of the world from Vietnam to Somalia to Afghanistan have shown that they don’t want us to invade their countries. Even after beating back our hard power, they are enticed by our soft power; many of those same peoples wish to come here. We certainly don’t have to let them all in, but it’s still flattering to be an object of desire, confident that at minimum they’ll continue to consume our pop culture.

          Third, speaking of desire, we can recall that the Austrians were often more effective at making love, not war. In our time, in the same suggestive spirit, we can recall a 2012 book co-authored by Meghan McCain: America, You Sexy Bitch: A Love Letter to Freedom. Our Constitution and our Bill of Rights weren’t written for the sake of l’amour, and yet Aphrodite smiles at the way it has worked out. In the coming struggle against the neo-Maoist puritans in China, our Vegas ways will have the talented and the creative streaming from there to here.

          Fourth, we must fear over-centralization—of any kind. The Habsburgs didn’t have an ideology that favored decentralization and subsidiarity, but it was their tradition. As part of their regnal prudentialism, they tolerated and respected lumpy local ways. This live-and-let-live policy didn’t save them, but it kicked the can forward for a few hundred years—which is a kind of saving. We must prevent an over-concentration of power at the top. As Michael Lind wrote recently in American Affairs, “There is increasing evidence that the overstaffed, ever-expanding managerial elite has mutated into a parasitic caste that is destroying its host, the wage-earning national majority.” So there’s a project, Americans: Push back against the bureaucratic and technocratic soul-suckers.

          Fifth, as did the Habsburgs, we must recognize the inevitability of internal division. In fact, properly thought through, internal distinctions can be a strength, not a weakness—that’s the genius of federalism, which is, after all, planned compartmentalization. If we allow for that sort of healthy distributism, we can free ourselves from an unhealthy subservience to a central authority. Kevin Roberts, the new president of the Heritage Foundation, made this point when he wrote recently, “The woke Left has seized control of just about every major institution in American life and turned America’s classrooms, boardrooms, and newsrooms into ideological reeducation camps.” So what to do? Roberts’ answer: “In an economy and culture as centralized as ours, conservatives should be looking not just to federalism, but an overdue campaign of decentralization.”

          In the years to come, the U.S. is unlikely to stop the further striation of the nation, red against blue. But so what? If the men and women (and others) of Massachusetts don’t want to fight anymore, well, they won’t ever have to; most likely, enough South Carolinians will still wish to serve and protect, so long as we choose our foreign enemies with parsimony. Then the people of Massachusetts can double down on being themselves, advancing everything from the biotech revolution to gender fluidity.

          In the meantime, the people of the Palmetto State, and all the other red states, will be happy knowing that folks in the Bay State, and the blue states, will be staying exactly where they are—on the other side, perhaps, of a quasi-divorce divide. This is not a formula for heroic feats, but it might prove to be a formula for dualistic flourishing. As the Habsburgs demonstrated, surviving is winning.

      What Pinkerton is arguing is, in essence, a return to the founder's ideals of federalism where the individual states were, in fact, states as that term was originally defined, with their own laws, control over voting and the requirements for citizenship of that particular state, and other indicia of independence from one another. I don't see it happening because the Left, by its very nature, want to replace everything good and beautiful and replace it with their ugly tyranny. And that fits just fine with the elites and their love of monopoly powers.

      The PTB [powers that be] have scientifically reached the conclusion that human overpopulation has placed the planet in an existential crisis. They’ve determined that if drastic population control measures aren’t enacted soon, irreparable damage to the planet and its ecosystem is inevitable. They intend to address this issue in three phases: 1. Socially-engineered sterilization, 2. Technological escapism, 3. Space Emigration. We are in Phase 1 and on the verge of entering Phase 2.


      VIDEO: "Shocking Discovery, Pole Shift Hitting Ionosphere | S0 News Mar.6.2022"--Suspicious Observers (5 min.). Pay particular attention to what he says about the shut down of the Atlantic Meridian Overturn Current (AMOC).


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