New Bombs & Bants Podcast (streamed 4/27/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bombs and Bants Live! Ep 33" (46 min.)

The Docent's Memo (April 18, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "Is it time to kick the 5.56 to the curb and upgrade to a modern cartridge?"--Military Arms Channel (53 min.). While I can see the point that there are more effective cartridges out there without going much larger or heavier, I think that Tim Harmsen is too focused on what he would have liked when serving in the military and ignoring the logistical realities. For instance, he argues that the switch to 6mm ARC  (the cartridge that he believes should replace the 5.56mm) will be easy and with minimal cost as it would only require the change of a barrel, bolt and the magazines. There are advantages to the 6mm ARC. But replacing one with the other in the military inventory is not going to be cheap, quick and easy. First, such a momentous change does not happen overnight. The U.S. Army began to phase out the M1 Garand in the late 1950s; it was not completely phased out of use in Guard and Reserve units until the early 1980s. Second, it isn't just a change of barrel, bolt and magazines. Rather, you would have to update training both of soldiers and armorers, you would have to replace spare parts, manuals, reevaluate and modify training ranges, and myriad other things that come with making a major logistical change. Even the stripper clips used to hold the ammo would have to be replaced. Third, it took decades to get NATO to actually be using rifles that used the same ammo and standard magazines--all of that would be thrown out the window. Fourth, Harmsen can say all he wants about the recoil difference being minimal, but a 105 pound woman (or 105 pound Asian male from an allied country) might disagree. Fifth, Harmsen is suggesting that the military switch to a long range cartridge at the same time that everything is telling us that the next major conflict will be in a mega-city. Afghanistan should be seen as an anomaly, not the future. 

Finally, Harmsen's opinion is based on the old, tired idea that there is one battlefield cartridge and/or infantry weapon to rule them all. Yet the history of warfare since the invention of the metallic cartridge has been pointing to the need for at least two standard issue battlefield cartridges: a more powerful cartridge suitable for longer distance shooting such as in mountains or other open areas (and for its ability to penetrate barriers), and a less powerful cartridge suitable for urban combat, assaults, and which is controllable in full auto.  In my mind, the use of designated marksmen using a more powerful cartridge at a squad level is a step in the right direction. However, trying to turn everyone in a rifle squad into the equivalent of a designated marksman may be counterproductive. 

Firearms, Shooting & Self-Defense:

• The April 15, 2022, Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. Another good selection of articles, but here a few that stood out:

1. ANOTHER ROUND OF LOW LIGHT CONSIDERATIONS. A good article on weapon lights including how to compare lights: i.e., what lumens, candela, lux, throw, and spill all mean.
2. Concealment Tricks and Tips, Vol. 3: The “Shoot Me Last” Vest. Notwithstanding the ridicule reserved for those that use gun vests to conceal a firearm, vests actually can be quite effective ... so long as they vest itself doesn't suggest that you are carrying a concealed weapon. The author suggests a fleece vest.
3. SHOOTING WITH X-RAY VISION PART II | Ethics Of Deadly Force Training. The article concerns whether it is ethical to teach anatomy to shooters so that they can more effectively stop an attacker. I say yes. I also try to incorporate anatomically correct targets into my shooting regimen. 
4. Shooting from Retention: A Necessary Skill for Armed Citizens? I think so. It may be true that most civilian shooting encounters are at 3 yards or more, but a gun fight can quickly turn into a fight for the gun, so every defensive shooter should know how to use a gun when someone is trying to take it from them. This is also where I put in my traditional plug for the efficacy of snubnosed revolvers in such situations.
5. Who Knew? A Guide to 7.62 Ammo. The author of this article extolls the 7.62x39 as a defensive or hunting cartridge. In fact, in full metal jacketed versions, it is grossly inferior to the 5.56 in full metal jacket when it comes to wounding. Ballistic tests and battle field experience back me up. Frankly, so do mass shootings. In any event, putting a hollow point or lead tipped hunting bullet on it doesn't do much either as the muzzle velocity is already at or below the speed necessary for expansion. You will have to look for cartridges that are designed to expand/fragment at low velocities to get the most out of this cartridge.
6. Using a Bathroom With a Concealed Carry Handgun. This is a topic that needs to be discussed more but isn't. With the spread of "family friendly" restrooms in public places--those where it is intended that only one person, or perhaps just a child and parent, will be using the facility--a good solution is to simply use such a restroom, making sure that the door is locked. But most public restrooms are not like this, and so this article has good advice for your standard public restroom. And whether using a standard public restroom or the "family friendly" style, don't remove your firearm from your holster. If you look at incidents involving firearms and restrooms, the most common situation is someone leaving the firearm behind when they exit the stall or the restroom.

• "BASIC STREET SMARTS" by Ari Kandel. His basic points:

1.    Keep up maximum situational awareness. Don't be an easy target.

2.    Perceive possible threat from as far away as possible. Distance = Time = Options.

3.    Take subtle measures to avoid possible threat.

4.    Take direct measures to avoid threat.

5.    Counter threat.

6.    Get outta there.

7.    Check yourself for injuries.

8.    Call 911 to get medical attention, whether you think you need it or not, and report incident.

He includes subpoints and recommendations as to each of the 8 items I've copied here. For instance, as to point 8, he writes: "'I was attacked. They were killing me! I escaped. I need an ambulance at [your location].' That’s all! Do not give details before consulting an attorney." So be sure to reach the whole thing. 

• "Making the J-Frame .38 Snub Work"--The Snubnose Files. An excerpt:

Clint Smith is reputed to have said something to the effect, “Handguns are meant to be comforting, not comfortable”. I tend to agree if one is pretty sure of treading a hazardous path, leads a high-risk life-style, or works in a dangerous profession. Before retiring as a full-time peace officer, I seldom carried less than a 9mm or .45 automatic off duty. Were I in the jewelry business in Los Angeles or a bodyguard or something similar, I would not rely solely on a snub. More than likely I’ve served my last arrest or search warrant. I’ll not kick in any more doors or be sworn to confronting and arresting wanted felons known to be dangerous on sight. These days I’m around the house feeding ducks or goldfish, writing a bit, at the range, or hunting lease and that’s about it. Before he passed, my father was in need of constant medical attention. On one hurried trip into a large city after the midnight phone call, the snub was in my pocket all right but there was a cocked-and-locked .45 in a strong side belt holster as well. The area around the hospital had been the scene of a recent homicide and several aggravated robberies. Going into a know risky area I wanted “comforting” more than “comfortable.” You get the idea; for most of my time I’m in a very, very low risk environment. True warriors will opine that one could be under deadly attack at any time and that is true, but we all play the odds to a degree. Knowing that a dozen gang bangers were heading my way to rid the world of my shadow and that I couldn’t retreat or get police intervention, I’d go with something other than a handgun to be sure. At the same time, I refuse to be “naked” and want a firearm on or near me 24/7. More than any compact 9mm or .380 ACP, the snub .38 meets my own personal requirements at least to the minimal level. For me, the .38 snub excels as a pocket gun. If going to a belt gun, OWB or IWB, a more effective and larger handgun can easily be carried.

The article goes on to discuss ammunition selection as well as instruction on practicing with a snubnosed revolver. The highlights from the latter section:

1. Start at relatively close range (3-5 yards).
2. Don’t shoot beyond your individual fatigue limit.
3. Use realistic targets (e.g., a 4-inch dot rather than a 1-inch dot).
4. Shoot regularly.
5. Shoot ammunition you can handle (i.e., "While it is necessary to shoot some of the ammunition we intend to carry in the gun, not each and every shot has to be."). 
6. Practice reloading. 
7. Make sure that your snub “fits” you (i.e., a set of grips that works for you--I will again throw in my usual recommendation of the Ergo Delta grips; the author states, "So far the 'best' carry grip I’ve tried for pocket carry has been the checkered rubber copies of Craig Spegel’s popular boot grip.").
8. Forget ego and shoot beyond your comfort zone (e.g., increase the range from 5 to 7 and, eventually, 10 yards; or try increasing your cadence).
9. Shoot in various ways (e.g., try shooting with just one hand, your off-hand, point shooting, etc.).

• "Situational Awareness: Nice Guys vs. 'Nice Guys'" by Wendy Lafever, NRA Women. She begins:

A “Nice Guy” (which I’m going to call an NG from now on) is a man who uses social pressure to try to coerce you into doing things you don’t want to do. The NG may or may not want to actually harm you, but whatever it is he wants, he’s going to use the sheep’s clothing of niceness to try to get it. Since the NG is wearing the same costume as an actual nice guy, we can’t rely on visual cues. Here are some simple ways to tell NGs and nice guys apart.

Some of the points she discusses:

• Actual nice guys don’t need to tell you they’re nice.
• Actual nice guys hate the thought of making you uncomfortable.
• Actual nice guys listen and learn.
• The NG will always tell you how nice you aren’t.

VIDEO: "Loading Shotgun Ammo With Lena Miculek"--Sportsman's Warehouse (6 min.)

Some tips for the competitive shooter or home defender on how to top off your shotgun double quick.

Prepping, Outdoors & Survival:

• "8 Best Charge-Stopping Bear Cartridges" by Eric Conn, American Hunter. They are, in the author's opinion:

1. .45-70 Government.
2. .454 Casull.
3. .44 Remington Magnum.
4. .375 H&H Magnum.
5. .50 Alaskan.
6. 12-Gauge Slug.
7. .338 Winchester Magnum.
8. .357 S&W Magnum.

Of course, listing the calibers or cartridges is really only half the story, if even that. You need a bullet that will provide the necessary penetration to punch through the hair and hide, thick layer of fat, thick bone (if necessary), and reach vitals. Thus, many of the handgun rounds will make use of a hard-cast lead bullet; your defensive ammunition that meets the FBI requirements (including avoiding overpenetration) will not be a very good selection, even if shooting it from a .44 Magnum or .357 Magnum. The same applies with 12-gauge slugs. A common Foster slug intended for deer hunting will probably work fine on a black bear and might work on larger grizzly and brown bears, the one that I see most recommended is Brenneke’s Black Magic Magnum, which uses a 3-inch shell, because of its superb penetration.

• "Bear Gun Shootout: 10mm vs .44 Mag." by John B. Snow, Outdoor Life. The topic interested me. Unfortunately, though, the test was rigged to make sure that the 10mm came out on top. Why do I say this? Because the authors used three tricked out 10mm pistols which they compared to a  scandium framed Smith & Wesson 329 PD--the lightest .44 Magnum and, therefore, the one that will exhibit the most recoil and be the least controllable. I suspect that most people carrying a .44 Magnum revolver are going to use something with a steel frame such as the S&W 629, Ruger Redhawk or Super Blackhawk, and similar. It might be that a semi-auto pistol is faster to deliver multiple hits on a charging bear, but I would at least like to see an honest test before coming to any conclusions.
• "Why Chest Holsters Make Sense For Backwoods Carry" by Brad Fitzpatrick, NRA Family. An excerpt:

    For years, the conventional carry position for handguns has been the shooter’s strong side hip. This position makes the handgun easy to reach in many circumstances, and allows the firearm to be tucked out of the way and concealed if necessary. But hip carry has its issues. For starters, carrying a heavy firearm (especially something as large as a big-bore revolver) on the hip causes imbalance and even discomfort while you’re walking several miles. In many cases, such as when sitting on a bike, on horseback or in a canoe, accessing a hip-mounted handgun can be difficult. And fly-fishing? Forget it; it simply isn’t an option when you’re wearing waders.

    Enter the chest rig. For starters, chest holsters offer rapid access to your firearm when you need it most. It may initially seem that the hip position is easiest to access—after all, your arms hang down at your sides, right? Think again. Begin tracking your arm position throughout the day and you’ll find your hands are most often in front of your body. This is particularly true when you’re in the outdoors. You’re using your hands to clear brush, to paddle, support a bike, tie a fly to a tippet, or you’ll simply loop your thumbs in your pack straps. In any case, a chest holster offers the fastest, easiest access point if you need to reach your gun in a hurry. Many backpackers mount their firearm to their pack straps, but that’s not the ideal carry solution because if you drop your pack—and you inevitably will—you’re unarmed.

    Comfort is another reason why many shooters are turning to chest holsters. Anyone who has carried a large handgun in a belt holster while walking long distances understands how irritating that extra weight can be (not to mention having to hike up your pants over and over and again). Chest holsters balance the gun and distribute weight evenly across the shoulders.

    “You can carry very large handguns on your chest very comfortably, and with the right loadout you'll barely notice you have a .500 Magnum,” Harris says. “If (chest holsters) carry a large revolver, the comfort only increases with smaller revolvers and semi autos.”

    The "Harris" mentioned above is Adam Harris who owns GunfightersINC which, among other products, offers the excellent Kenai Chest Holster. And because the article is as much about Harris and the bear encounter that convinced him to make a chest holster, the article really focuses on the Kenai Chest Holster.

    Of course, GunfightersINC did not invent the chest holster and are far from the only company to sell them. The big names such as Galco and DeSantis offer chest holsters. Other manufacturers, including Falco and Alien Gear, offer them as well. Some offer models with flaps to protect the firearm from moisture while others (even from the same company) leave the handgun exposed for quick access. Some offer or come with accessories to conveniently hold a reload. While the major hunting handguns are represented among the choices, only a few have models for more standard handguns.

    But when I was looking for a chest holster and researching what others had to say, the Kenai Chest Holster kept popping up again and again. And that is what I eventually settled on for my S&W .44 Magnum. The key factors that influenced my decision was not only the positive reviews, but the fact that the holster was pretty much impervious to damage due to rain since it used a Kydex holster and elastic straps made of manmade materials. You can read my initial thoughts about the holster here. An additional factor I would add is that the once you have the harness, you can purchase additional holsters which cost about half of the total cost of the harness/holster set. And GunfightersINC has a wide selection of such holsters for most any popular or semi-popular firearm out there. Thus, for instance, you could have a holster for a large bore revolver, but order a second holster for something lighter and smaller when you don't need or want the big artillery, like your Glock, Sig, or whatever (although in those situations, I have been using my Hillpeople Gear Kit Bag). 

• "Keep the Ice On"--Backwoods Home Magazine. The author observes that the primary reason given for using a generator during a power outage is to keep a refrigerator and/or freezer running. "Yet," he points out, "most will typically have only a week’s supply of fuel to power a generator during an extended power outage." "In my opinion, that’s a very large investment for such a short-lived benefit. Perhaps it’s time to rethink your emergency refrigeration needs during an extended power outage, lasting weeks or even months if we are considering a real grid-down event." In this vein, the author suggests looking at some low energy consumption ice makers to provide ice for freezers and coolers--ice makers that could be powered by a deep cycle battery attached to solar panels:

    It’s time to toss out everything you know about making ice cubes in a freezer. In fact, making ice is not only easy without a working freezer, it’s also very fast. It takes only seven minutes per batch at room temperature in a small counter-top ice maker. You can make ice all day as long as you have a supply of clean water, a small inverter, and a fully charged deep-cycle battery. This battery can be kept fully charged using your generator, your car or truck, or even a small solar array.

    You can make an endless supply of ice without a working freezer and can even take it with you if you go camping or must evacuate.

The author relates that he found a wide selection of portable countertop ice makers in the $120 to $150 range that are perfect for this application. 

    The downside with these lower cost ice makers is you must fill the water reservoir by hand and the ice cube compartment is not refrigerated, so the ice will start to melt if left in the unit. You have to remember to fill and empty it while in runs. However, we have found emptying the hopper is not a problem since my wife, Sharon, and I schedule an ice making day every few weeks. On this day we bring the ice maker out of the closet and place it on the kitchen counter near the sink. We then plug it in and fill the reservoir using a water pitcher. As the unit is making ice, we check the hopper several times an hour to empty the ice cubes into our freezer. During a full day we can fill two 10-pound bags of ice.

    Being able to make an unlimited supply of ice during a power outage lasting weeks or months without a working refrigerator or freezer could be a real lifesaver. In addition, unlike most of the emergency equipment people buy, then immediately store away for a major disaster that may never come, a portable ice maker can be used regularly during normal times, and this is a real advantage.

He then goes on to review some different models of ice makers.

• "How to Break Into Your Own House: Without Looking Like a Burglar"--Skillset Magazine. Seems like it would be easier to use a keypad linked to your garage door opener or hide a key, but whatever. It is a good review, however, of how criminals can break into your house so you can consider ways of hardening your house.
• "How to Scavenge for Survival Items Post-Collapse" by Tom Marlowe, The Survivalist Blog. The author begins:

    It’s natural for many preppers to have at least considered the option of taking what they need, if necessary, from the scattered remains of their home town.

    Even in the midst of the destruction left in the wake of a disaster, useful materials and goods will remain. It may just be one more thing you have to do to survive.

    Scavenging is frequently discussed in prepper circles as a given, a process with little risk of consequence.

    But when you are talking about a real-deal survival situation, nothing happens in a vacuum. Your little scavenging expedition will not be so easy in the real world, nor will it be without legitimate risks.

    We must also consider that scavenging, even in extreme times, is very much an ethical gray zone.

    We’ll go through scavenging as a survival technique in this post, including how to use it to improve or replace what supplies you have or need.

    There are plenty of moral and practical issues that must be considered before you go swiping any unused supplies or materials in and around your area.

The article then goes on to discuss why you might need to scavenge notwithstanding your having stocked up on supplies, the difference between scavenging and looting, and how not to get shot while doing your scavenging. Finally, the author addresses some actual techniques and safety tips for safely scavenging (you may not want the bottles with the big green biohazard labels you found outside the hospital, for instance), including some scavenging sites you may not have considered. 

    If this topic interests you, I would recommend reading Joe Nobody's book, Without Rule of Law, as it addresses equipment and techniques for scavenging missions. Another book to consider is The Prepper Pages: A Surgeon's Guide to Scavenging Items for a Medical Kit, and Putting Them to Use While Bugging Out by Dr. Ryan Chamberlin as the author offers tips on scavenging medications and medical supplies. I've reviewed both (see here and here).

VIDEO: "Ukrainian Raids Into Russia - Missile & Helicopter Attacks 2022"--Mark Felton Productions (5 min.)

News & Current Events:

• They really do hate you: "Woke North Carolina medical student put on LEAVE after tweeting about deliberately injuring a patient for mocking her pronoun badge - but university says she 'didn't intend to harm' the man"--The Daily Mail. Kychelle Del Rosario, a medical student at Wake Forest School of Medicine, bragged on social media how she had deliberately missed a patient's vein during a blood draw because the patient had mocked Del Rosario's pronoun badge. The patient did not mock Del Rosario's choice of pronouns--her/she--because it matched Del Rosario's gender, but just the idea of wearing a pronoun badge. In any event, probably after a discussion with an attorney, Del Rosario is now saying that her missing the vein was an accident--so she either lied on social media or she is lying now (but admitting that she is incompetent); either way, she is definitely a liar. I think police should prosecute Del Rosario.
• "First images 'show Putin's doomed flagship Moskva on fire and sinking into the Black Sea after being shot by Ukraine' as conscripts tell of horrors on board with hundreds thought to have died"--Daily Mail. It was not in rough seas, as the Russians have claimed was the cause of the actual sinking.
• "RT reporter discovers banned anti-personnel mines used by Ukraine"--RT.
• "Russia warns it will view NATO and US vehicles moving weapons in Ukraine as targets"--The Mirror. From the article:

    Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov told the TASS News Agency the shocking development in an interview today.

    He was quoted as saying: "We are warning that US-NATO weapons transports across Ukrainian territory will be considered by us as legal military targets.

    "We are making the Americans and other Westerners understand that attempts to slow down our special operation, to inflict maximum damage on Russian contingents and formations of the DPR and LPR (Donetsk and Luhansk People's republics) will be harshly

suppressed."

    This comes as Russia's aggression and attempts to curtail NATO's influence has actually pushed more countries into considering whether to join the defensive bloc.

• Inside every liberal is a tyrant screaming to get out: "Dem Sen. Coons: U.S. Needs to Discuss Sending Troops to Ukraine — ‘Putin Will Only Stop When We Stop Him’"--Breibart.
• Wars and rumors of war: "Captagon: Jordan's undeclared war against Syria drug traffickers"--BBC News.

    At the height of the conflict in Syria, smugglers and militant groups took advantage to supply Captagon - which is often laced with caffeine - to fighters, to boost their courage and help them stay alert on the frontlines.

    With few legitimate work opportunities and growing poverty, many ordinary Syrians became involved in the drugs trade.

    Now, with the Syrian economy shattered by a decade of war and still stifled by international sanctions, it has turned into a multi-billion-dollar industry, worth far more than any legal exports.

    Although there have been public denials from Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's government, reports have linked powerful figures in business and the military to the manufacturing and distribution of Captagon.

And:

    Once it was wave upon wave of Syrian refugees that spilt across the border into Jordan. Now, it is drugs.

    Skirmishes between the Jordanian military and drug traffickers are becoming more frequent, with larger hauls being made.

    Since the start of 2022, the army has intercepted more than 17,000 packets of hashish and 17 million pills of Captagon. Only 15.5 million Captagon pills were picked up in all of 2021, while 1.4 million were seized in 2020.

    Jordan is largely a transit route to the drug's biggest market: the Gulf states, particularly Saudi Arabia.

    "The most dangerous thing we've noticed recently is the presence of armed groups alongside the smugglers," says Colonel Zaid al-Dabbas of the Jordanian army, who has taken me on a tour. 

    He estimates there are about 160 groups operating in southern Syria. They have "new tactics, like those of organised crime" and use drones and expensive, customised vehicles, he says.

    The increase in illegal activity, along with the killing of a Jordanian soldier, has prompted a change in the army's rules of engagement: it now has a shoot-to-kill policy.

    On 27 January, the military says, 27 traffickers were killed when it foiled a co-ordinated effort to cross into Jordan at several points along the border. Four others have been killed in separate operations.

    The army would like more support for what another officer describes as "an undeclared war" on Jordan's borders.

    "We're fighting on behalf of other countries in the region and the world at large," says Colonel Mustafa al-Hiyari. "Drugs are destroying our families, morals and values."

• Leftists can't meme: "Boston University Professor Ibram X. Kendi declares Republicans 'The Party of White Supremacy' and claims conservative efforts to limit teaching of critical race theory are really 'grooming' children to become racist"--Daily Mail. "Grooming" works as a meme to use against the leftists that want to sexualize kids because the term has long been used to refer to sexual predators. Besides, a good meme has to be based in reality. The party of Abraham Lincoln being the party of  white supremacists? Not believable. Liberals grooming children? It happens before our eyes every day.
• Related: "Parent dressed as Easter Bunny hands out eggs with condoms inside to children at Austin elementary school"--The Blaze. 
• Diversity! "Riot cops clash with protesters hurling rocks and setting cars alight in Sweden after anti-Islam Danish politician threatened to burn the Koran in Muslim areas"--Daily Mail. It's okay-- celebrated actually--for Muslims to murder non-Muslims, rape and sexually assault Christians, burn, vandalize, or otherwise destroy Christian churches, complain of Christians singing Easter songs, burn Bibles. But the so-called Religion of Peace will throw a violent hissy fit if the Koran is "disrespected."
• More diversity! "Michigan police release footage of white cop fatally shooting black man in the head during struggle over taser after traffic stop: Man's family retain Benjamin Crump who says 'excessive force was used'"--Daily Mail. A Congolese immigrant, Patrick Lyoya, decided he didn't need to obey police officers, engaged in a game of tag, and then while fighting off an officer armed with a Taser, decided to grab the Taser. At that point, Lyoya learned the hard way that a handgun beats a Taser.
• Gun control at work: "NYC subway 'shooter' Frank James' NINE past criminal charges include sex crimes and burglary in New York and New Jersey: 62-year-old is charged with terrorist attack on mass transit"--Daily Mail. Amazing how gun prohibitions seem to only disarm victims.
• But all we need to do is take away everyone else's guns, sniff the useful idiots: "Cops remove evidence from home of murdered Queens mom who was stabbed 60 times and stuffed into a duffel bag: Killer texted husband claiming she 'sent him to jail years ago'"--Daily Mail.
• The federal judiciary has taken the position for years that nothing untoward can happen when housing men and women together: "Two inmates at all-women's New Jersey jail are PREGNANT after both had sex with transgender prisoners: ACLU won battle to house 27 trans inmates there"--Daily Mail. 
• The left hates the Catholic Church because of its strong support of the family: "Media that gleefully pilloried the Catholic Church over pedophilia charges avert their eyes over much larger schoolteacher pedophilia problem" by Thomas Lifson, American Thinker.

VIDEO: "Massive Food Shortages Coming from China’s Covid Lockdowns"--China Uncensored (13 min.)

Opinion & Analysis:

• "Invasion" by Sarah Hoyt. She writes, in part (underline added):

    It’s worse than you think

    Well, perhaps not if you’re a reader of this blog and others like it, but most people are bombarded with images of children, and mothers carrying children in arms, and they think that’s what immigrants are.

    Most immigrants coming in are in fact males of military age. Before you attribute super powers to the left, part of that is what every “wave” of immigrants starts off as. Because men come over, establish themselves, then “send for” the family.

    However, we do have evidence from when people did deep-dives into the “caravans” that a lot of these pseudo migrants are being actively recruited by communist groups. And yes, of course — do I look stupid? — the left is intending to use them as shock troops of sorts in a conflict they desperately want to go physical. (Because they’re stupid in a highly specialized way, okay. They have watched all the movies of communist revolutions. They think that’s reality. No. Even the migrants wouldn’t save them. But that’s besides the point.)

    Leaving aside that a lot of these people are ideologically opposed to us, the demographic tilt is bad bad bad news — salutes BGE — because a large, undigested, probably largely unemployable population of young males will have bad effects. Bad effects for general disorder. Bad effects for crime. Just bad effects in general, regardless of what the population is.

    In this case, the fact that most of the populations are less “civilized” by which I mean more actually racist, patriarchal, homophobic and violent (because most of the cultures they come from are that also) and from lower trust cultures than ours means bad bad bad results.

• An interesting mix of misunderstanding and making stuff up: "In This Time of War, I Propose We Give Up God" by Shalom Auslander, New York Times. Auslander writes:

    This weekend, Jews around the world will celebrate the holiday of Passover, the name of which comes from the story of God “passing over” the homes of our distant ancestors on his way to slaughter the first born sons of evil Egyptians. Our forefathers, the story goes, marked their doorposts with lamb’s blood in order to spare their own sons the awful fate of their enemies.

    In this time of war and violence, of oppression and suffering, I propose we pass over something else:

    God.

    Two aspects of the Passover story have troubled me since I was first taught them long ago in an Orthodox yeshiva in Monsey, N.Y. I was 8 years old, and as the holiday approached, our rabbi commanded us to open our chumashim, or Old Testaments, to the Book of Exodus. To get us in the holiday spirit, he told us gruesome tales of torture and persecution.

    “The Egyptians,” he told us, “used the corpses of Jewish slaves in their buildings.”

    “You mean they used slaves to build their buildings,” I asked, “and the slaves died from work?”

    “No,” said the rabbi. “They put the Jewish bodies into the walls and used them as bricks.”

    My father was something of a handyman at the time, and this seemed to me a serious violation of basic building codes, not to mention a surefire way to lose a home sale.

    “Is this brick?” the interested couple asks.

    “No, no,” says the realtor. “That’s corpse.”

    But just as troubling — even more so today in light of the brutal slaughter taking place in Ukraine — were the plagues themselves.

    God, the rabbi said, struck all the Egyptians with his wrath, not just Pharaoh and his soldiers. Egyptians young and old, innocent and guilty, suffered locusts and frogs, hail and darkness, beasts running wild and water becoming blood. Mothers nursing their babies, the rabbi explained, found their breast milk had turned to blood.

    “Yay!” my classmates cheered.

    But Pharaoh, the story continues, still wouldn’t relinquish his slaves. Technically this was God’s fault as he “hardened Pharaoh’s heart,” but the issue of free will wouldn’t begin troubling me until my teens. And so God, in his mercy, started killing babies.

    “Every firstborn son in the land of Egypt shall die, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sits on the throne to the firstborn of the servant girl.” Exodus 11:5.

    Surely, I wondered, there were some Egyptians who didn’t whip Jews, who didn’t have anything against Jews at all? Surely there were Egyptians horrified by slavery, Egyptians who disagreed with Pharaoh as often as we do with our own leaders?

    “Everyone?” I asked the rabbi. “He struck everyone?”

    “Everyone,” the rabbi said.

    “Yay!” my classmates cheered.

    God, it seems, paints with a wide brush. He paints with a roller. In Egypt, said our rabbi, he even killed first-born cattle. He killed cows. If he were mortal, the God of Jews, Christians and Muslims would be dragged to The Hague. And yet we praise him. We emulate him. We implore our children to be like him.

    Perhaps now, as missiles rain down and the dead are discovered in mass graves, is a good time to stop emulating this hateful God. Perhaps we can stop extolling his brutality. Perhaps now is a good time to teach our children to pass over God — to be as unlike him as possible.

    “And so God killed them all,” the rabbis and priests and imams can preach to their classrooms. “That was wrong, children.”

    “God threw Adam out of Eden for eating an apple,” they can caution their students. “That’s called being heavy-handed, children.”

    Cursing all women for eternity because of Eve’s choices?

    “That’s called collective punishment, children,” they can warn the young. “Don’t do that.”

    “Boo!” the children will jeer.

    I was raised strictly Orthodox. Old school. Shtetl fabulous. Every year, at the beginning of the Seder, we welcome in the hungry and poor Jews who can’t afford to have a Seder themselves. It’s a wonderfully human gesture. A few short hours of God later, at the end of the Seder, we open the front door and call out to Him, “Pour out thy wrath upon the nations that did not know you!”

    And God does. With plagues and floods, with fire and fury, on the young and old, the guilty and innocent.

    And we humans, made in his image, do the same. With fixed-wing bombers and cluster bombs, with self-propelled mortars and thermobaric rocket launchers.

    “Why did God kill the first-born cattle?” my rabbi said. “Because the Egyptians believed they were gods.”

    Killing gods is an idea I can get behind.

    This year, at the end of the Seder, let’s indeed throw our doors open — to strangers. To people who aren’t our own. To the terrifying them, to the evil others, those people who seem so different from us, those we think are our enemies or who think us theirs, but who, if they sat down around the table with us, we’d no doubt find despise the pharaohs of this world as much as we do, and who dream of the same damned thing as us all:

    Peace.

The Communists gave up God. The result was not peace, unless you count the peace of the grave: 94 million dead in the 20th Century. The Nazis were also a godless regime and look at all the peaceful things they did. The problem with modern intellectuals such as Auslander is that they elevate theories and models over reality and experience. Yes, what is happening in Ukraine is terrible. But what was it like under the Soviet Union? Andrew Roberts in his book Storm of War: A New History of the Second World War describes some of what the Nazis encountered when they drove the Soviets back at the beginning of Operation Barbarossa (footnotes omitted): 

     As though the citizens of Occupied Poland, the Ukraine and the Baltic States did not have enough to be terrified of during the German advance, the NKVD also unleashed on them an orgy of sadistic violence quite unlike its normal murder sprees. After Stalin had ordered Beria to purge the Army, wipe out defeatism and rumour-mongering and investigate with maximum distrust anyone who had escaped from the Germans, horrific scenes took place in Russian-held areas just before the Wehrmacht’s arrival. ‘When the prisons were opened up after the Soviet retreat there were scenes of indescribable horror,’ records Richard Overy. ‘Bodies had been savagely mutilated; hundreds of prisoners had been tortured to death rather than dispatched with the usual bullet in the back of the head. In one incident in the Ukraine the NKVD dynamited two cells filled with women prisoners. In another prison the floor was strewn with the tongues, ears and eyes of the dead prisoners.’ Overy concludes that the NKVD guards had been ‘convulsed by a spasm of retributive violence induced by fear, desperation and rage’. In Lvov alone, 4,000 people were shot, including almost everyone in the city’s prison, which was then burnt down.

    Small wonder, therefore, that when the Germans arrived in many parts of western Russia, the Ukraine and the Baltics, the village elders came out to greet the invaders with their traditional welcoming offers of bread and salt. ...

That Hitler, who was anti-Christian if not an atheist, squandered all this good will by being almost as brutal as the Communists only reinforces the inhumanity of those that reject God.  

VIDEO: "Sap, Blackjack & Slungshot- Overview and History"--Object History (13 min.)

And Now For Something Completely Different:

• Evolution in action: "California man, 56, is crushed to death between his car and rollers after getting out of his vehicle during an automatic car wash"--Daily Mail. To summarize, a man drove his vehicle into an automatic car wash that was not operational, set his car in neutral, got out of his car for an unknown reason, and when the car rolled (because no brakes and not in park), it pinned him against equipment for at least a half hour before anyone realized anything was wrong. 
• Rev. 13:17 alert: "The microchip implants that let you pay with your hand"--BBC News. The article explains:

    And when it comes to implantable payment chips, British-Polish firm, Walletmor, says that last year it became the first company to offer them for sale.

    "The implant can be used to pay for a drink on the beach in Rio, a coffee in New York, a haircut in Paris - or at your local grocery store," says founder and chief executive Wojtek Paprota. "It can be used wherever contactless payments are accepted."

    Walletmor's chip, which weighs less than a gram and is little bigger than a grain of rice, is comprised of a tiny microchip and an antenna encased in a biopolymer - a naturally sourced material, similar to plastic.

    Mr Paprota adds that it is entirely safe, has regulatory approval, works immediately after being implanted, and will stay firmly in place. It also does not require a battery, or other power source. The firm says it has now sold more than 500 of the chips.

    The technology Walletmor uses is near-field communication or NFC, the contactless payment system in smartphones. Other payment implants are based on radio-frequency identification (RFID), which is the similar technology typically found in physical contactless debit and credit cards.

Now all they need to do is combine this with a social credit score to keep people that have "wrongthink" from purchasing anything. What could go wrong?

New Defensive Pistolcraft Post

 Jon Low's most recent compendium of comments and links can be found here. My favorite quote from this post: "Train and practice so that violence is not a shock to your system.  Because going into shock will slow you down.  Shock may cause you to stop completely.  Training and practice will prevent shock." Runner up: "This morning my son said his ear hurt.  So, I said, on the inside or outside?  So, he walked out the front door comes back in and says both.  Moments like this got me wondering if I'm saving too much for college."

    An important point for the trainers out there are Jon's comments regarding whether defensive firearm trainers should train to protect against domestic violence. Jon says "yes" for the reason that women are most likely to be murdered by someone they know (men are most likely to be murdered by a stranger). (Playing devil's advocate, though, I doubt the women that own a firearm and attend a firearms training class fall much within the demographics of women killed by intimate partners). As Jon points out, telling a woman to leave her abusive relationship may not be realistic in many cases. Moreover, "Self-defense against a known-assailant is the same as self-defense against an unknown-assailant.  (So, don't worry about teaching it differently.)" Read the whole thing.

    Moving one: One of the videos to which Jon links is from Tom Givens discussing violent criminals. Jon comments:

     Fuck up the criminal's OODA loop by doing what he does not expect.  He expects compliance.  

     When he demands your money, he expects you to reach for something on your waistline.  Feign compliance as you step to the side (to get out of his field of view), present your pistol, and fire to center of mass.

     He's not going to drop his weapon and surrender.  He's not going to run away.  He's going to shoot you.  So, you must shoot him before he shoots you.  If you attempt to talk to him, he will be shooting you while you are talking.  

       If he is close to you, present to your close contact position and fire.  Elbow pulled back as far as you can.  Bottom of your pistol grip pressed firmly against your rib cage.  Top of the pistol tilted away from your body so that your slide doesn't get fouled in your shirt.  If he has a knife, use your support-side hand to protect your carotid arteries.  If he has a gun, use your support-side arm to protect your heart and lungs.  If he has fists, use your support-side arm to protect your head.  

Hopefully it won't come to that because you either are not there (Farnam's rules of self-defense) or you have failed "the interview" and the criminal passes you by. Farnam observes that "A big part of our training is avoidance and disengagement. When someone is offering violence, we teach to aggressively disengage and separate." He also explains:

    We’re saying, “I’m sorry, sir, I can’t help you,” with the knowledge that we are carrying our trump card. My trump card is right here [pats holstered pistol]. He can’t see it; he doesn’t know it, but I do. I know I have options. I know that if nothing I’m doing is adequate, I can always go to the next step. With that knowledge, I can be far more convincing. I can be far more successful with my less-than-lethal approach than someone who has nowhere to go when it doesn’t work.

    Disengagement is a big part of our training, but we can’t give students the impression that it just ends there, that any lethal confrontation can be avoided and diffused. That is not true! We have to have the ultimate solution at hand and ready to go and then, with everything else in place, a lethal confrontation is only less likely, not impossible.

    You do not get a risk-free life. Students come with the false expectation, asking, “Show me what to do. Show me if I adhere to what you tell me to do, that nothing bad will ever happen to me.” I can’t.

    The only thing I can guarantee you is that in the end, the Valkyries will have their victory. Between then and now, I want to expose myself to every good thing this life has to offer. Part of growing up and maturing is developing the ability to distinguish what we call normal risk from suicidal risk or risk that has no benefit. When people take suicidal risks and are injured then say, “I had no idea! This was not fair,” I wonder, “What planet are you from? Are you six years old or something?!” This is something you should learn as an adult.

    It applies to what we do with guns and when we take the same philosophy and apply it to everyday life, we don’t go to stupid places, we don’t associate with stupid people, we don’t do stupid things. Will that guarantee that nothing bad will happen to us? Of course not! It makes it less likely. In the end, despite your best efforts you may be confronted by a circumstance where you have no choice but to apply deadly force in a very ruthless and aggressive manner.

    One of the points that Jon hits hard in this post is to not talk to the police, observing that "[t]he effects of high stress are diarrhea of the mouth and constipation of the brain." We've seen this before. Michael Drejka, you may remember, shot dead a man that had shoved him (Drejka) to the ground outside a convenience store in Florida several years ago. Drejka was going to walk on self-defense, but wound up talking the police into bringing a manslaughter charge against him. In short, you are not as clever as you think and your memory is fallible. 

    But it is a highly contentious topic. Other trainers, including Massad Ayoob and Greg Ellifritz, have taken the position that you should at least try and provide basic facts (i.e., "he pulled a gun on me; I was defending myself") and perhaps point out witnesses or evidence (i.e., "that guy over there saw the whole thing" or "you can see his gun under that car"). But even they advise against trying to get into lengthy discussions without your attorney or trying to provide specifics like how many shots you fired, how many feet you were from the person, etc. 

    The devil is in the details and that, frankly, is where people often screw up. I know a guy that lost his automobile accident case because instead of sticking to generalities, he decided to try and answer a question of how far behind the other vehicle he was when that vehicle made a sudden U-turn. He replied "30 feet". I'm sure that (a) he didn't actually know how far he was behind the other vehicle and (2) he was actually probably much farther back, but once the "30 feet" was out of his mouth--which was far too close given the speeds the vehicles were traveling--it was pretty much the end of the case and his insurer settled the claim. It is exactly that type of game you want to stay away from: getting pulled into answering questions on specifics that you probably don't know and are likely to just guess about. And if you do decide to talk to the police, don't guess about something--if you don't know, say you don't know (or don't recall or are unsure).

    The answer to this question also depends on the attitude of the police force and prosecutor. A more conservative police force or prosecutor will probably cut you some slack; a liberal or, God help you, radical leftist prosecutor will do everything to put you away if you fall within the "wrong" (i.e., privileged) demographic or just because he/she/it doesn't like the idea of peasants owning firearms. It is probably the latter case were you most assiduously want to avoid talking to the police. Oh, and the police "bug" holding cells and waiting areas, so don't talk to anyone else--family member, another arrestee, etc.  

    I like examining real world incidents, and so apparently does Jon because he includes links to videos and articles about some incidents, including the women that was kidnapped from a Walmart parking lot in Nevada and murdered. Check out the article for more of the details, but Jon offers this warning and advice:

     Statistically speaking, all crime occurs in Wal Mart parking lots from 22:00 to 06:00 (10:00 PM to 6:00 AM).  So, DON'T BE THERE!  

     If you have to be there:  Park under a light.  Pay attention to who is around you.  Letting the assailant know that you see him by shining your flashlight at him is a big deterrent.  The criminal predator wants surprise.  Deny him surprise, and he will move on to easier prey.  

     If he attacks, FIGHT!  The bad guy expects compliance and submission.  The sooner you gouge out his eyes, the sooner you can escape.  The shorter the fight, the less hurt you get.  KEEP FIGHTING!  You will win.

     You may lose.  But, if you are able to take out his eyes, you will be saving all of his subsequent victims.  Which is a big win for your community.  

     As Jeff Cooper says in his book, "Principles of Personal Defense", the first person to fight back usually stops the serial murderer.  The reason there were serial murders in the first place is that all of the previous victims surrendered without a fight.  

I've read comments from other LEO and ex-LEO that have noted that local Walmarts represent a significant, if not a majority, of their calls. If you do decide to visit a Walmart, try and do it during the busy time of the day (day as in daylight) and check out the people shopping there. At least half of the people shopping there should look like you. If not, you might consider going someplace else.

    We, in the gun community, harp on the need for situational awareness, but that is because it is so important. Jon links to a video featuring Ken Hackathorn talking about situational awareness, decision making skills and, as a distant third in importance, combat marksmanship; as well as Tactical Professor post with some comments about the same video. As Hackathorn notes, combat marksmanship is actually the least important and typically represents a failure of situational awareness and decision making. Hackathorn also recommends watching a video from Paul Howell about target discrimination: essentially identify friend or foe. On this latter point, Jon adds:

     Some guys are proud of the fact that they got a certain score, or they got A-zone hits on all their targets.  But, the tactically correct thing to be proud of is "no hits on no-shoot targets".  Can you claim that?  If you passed though a shoot-target and hit a no-shoot target behind it, you can't claim it.  If you killed the little girl in the dressing room who you didn't even know was there, you can't claim it.  

    Another article to which Jon links is by Erick Gelhaus at American Cop and discusses flashlights, not only as a piece of equipment but their use in a police or defensive situation. Jon comments:

     Outside your house, you probably won't need your flashlight for self-defense, because the robber has to have enough light to target you, which means you have enough light to defend.  

     Inside your house, the probability of encountering a no-shoot-target is much higher than encountering a shoot-target.  So, you have to have your flashlight to positively identify the target.  You should also use your words.  Loud and clear, "Who's there?"  But, won't that give away your position?  Yes, it might also cause the bad guy to flee, which is a big win for you.  But, most likely it will be some relative answering, "It's me."

    Something I had never thought about, but which Jon brings up, are the dangers of loosening a tourniquet. Jon observes a couple of what I would consider significant problems:

1.  The patient will bleed to death.  

2.  Toxins that built up in the limb when the blood flow was stopped, will be released into the blood stream.  

     Just wait for a doctor to release the tourniquet.  

    In response to an NRA article on why you should shoot with both eyes open, Jon states: "If you aim with both eyes open you will get a double image.  Murphy's Law guarantees that you will shoot at the wrong image, missing your target, destroying property, hitting bystanders, maybe killing them." I know that most people can train to shoot with both eyes open by only having one eye focus on the sights. I question why bother when you can keep both eyes open until you need to take the shot, and then close the eye you are not using for aiming. It gives you the tactical awareness you need without the hassle of trying to ignore one eye. I can get away with not closing one eye if I'm not wearing my glasses because one of my eyes is so much worse than the other that my brain automatically shuts down most of the input from the worse eye. But with my glasses on, I just close the eye I don't need for that final sight alignment. 

    Anyway, I could go on and on discussing various comments or articles. There is a reason Jon only puts out these posts once or twice a month and it is because there is so much information there. Check it out and read through to the end.

Bombs & Bants (Streamed 4/6/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bombs & Bants" (49 min.)

The Docent's Memo (April 4, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "You Don't Own a Scout Rifle"--Ron Spomer Outdoors (11 min.)

Spomer interviews Richard Mann about Cooper's Scout Rifle concept. Short version is that the final criteria established for such a rifle are so onerous that no one can make a rifle that meets all the requirements, and, therefore, no rifle is actually a Scout Rifle. I would note that Mann is very much a purist with a bunch of "thou shalt" interpretations of what constitutes a Scout Rifle (e.g., it must have a barrel of 19-inches, no more and no less) which doesn't come across in what I've read from Cooper--he (at least what I've read) wanted a short handy rifle of no more than one meter in length, and subtracting the necessary length of stock and receiver on a short action bolt-action left 19-inches. Mann has researched this in more depth, and perhaps has some later pronouncements from Cooper that I've not seen (I don't really want to buy Mann's book on the subject).

Firearms, Shooting & Self-Defense:

• Don't forget to check out Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump posted on April 1, 2022. Some of the links of particular note include: (i) some tips on preparing for World War III (pay particular attention to what the author says about possible food shortages); (ii) a "Skill Set" article from Tiger McKee on the importance of the covert draw; (iii) a link to an article and video concerning your favorite topic and mine--fighting around vehicles; and (iv) another look at the caliber wars and why that 1/10th of inch might be important. And, for an honorable mention (just because the caliber interests me) an article on the .38 S&W and its British derivative, .38/200.
• "Federal 30 Super Carry Ammunition" by Richard Mann, Shooting Illustrated. The first articles and video reviews of the 30 Super Carry tried to emphasize that it lay between the .380 and 9x19mm in terms of power and recoil. But with most acknowledging that the cartridge has comparable recoil to the 9x19mm, the marketing, as demonstrated in this article, is now concentrating on the larger magazine capacity over 9x19mm. Mann writes:

    Throughout history, handgun cartridges commonly used for hunting, competition, recreation and self-defense were originally designed for military or law enforcement applications. The new 30 Super Carry is, at least as far as I’m concerned, the first serious pistol cartridge of the last 100 years purposely designed to address concealed-carry needs. Federal’s goal was to create a cartridge that offered higher capacities in compact pistols without increasing size, but at the same time deliver a proven level of terminal performance with a recoil-impulse manageable by most shooters.

    Admittedly, that’s a lofty goal, but one Federal seems to have achieved. I’m very optimistic about the concept, partly because I’ve always liked the .327 Fed. Mag. What does the .327 have to do with the 30 Super Carry? You could argue the 30 Super Carry is a semi-automatic version of the .327, because both utilize a .313-inch-diameter bullet and both are loaded to the same pressure. I was made aware of the 30 Super Carry more than a year ago, and have been excited ever since. I have a great deal of experience with the .327 Fed. Mag.; I’ve carried one off and on for 14 years and have taken several deer with it. The potential of a semi-automatic pistol cartridge approximating .327 Fed. Mag. terminal performance, while offering increased capacity beyond the 9 mm, was clear.

But is the one or two round advantage going to convince buyers to go with a .32 caliber round? I don't know. Of course, the real meat in the pudding is the ballistic performance of the round. It is obviously too new for reports of its effectiveness on the street, but Mann did conduct some tests with ballistic gel, reporting: 

    The 100-grain HST load averaged 13 inches of penetration into a block of Clear Ballistics (which is not what the FBI uses, but a fair substitute for our purposes) for five shots. The 115-grain Gold Dot load averaged 15.5 inches. Federal lists the penetration of these loads at 12- and 13.85-inches respectively in 10-percent ordnance gelatin (which is what the FBI uses). Regarding bullet upset, the HST load averaged a recovered diameter of .51 inch and the Gold Dot .55 inch. In 10-percent ordnance gelatin, Federal says to expect recovered diameters to between .56 and .59 inch. Experience has shown it’s common to see slightly less expansion and more penetration in Clear Ballistics than in 10-percent ordnance gelatin, so this all tracks as it should.

    But what does this mean when compared with the 9 mm? Having tested many 9 mm loads, I believe the best are of the 124-grain variety. So, I tested the 9 mm 124-grain HST and Gold Dot loads in the same Clear Ballistics blocks. The 30 Super Carry had a slight edge in penetration and the 9 mm had a slight edge in expansion, but all loads met the FBI penetration minimum, albeit in a slightly different test medium.

    One way to balance these comparisons is to look at crush cavities, which is the hole the bullet makes based on its upset diameter and penetration depth. The average crush-cavity volume for the two 30 Super Carry loads was 3.16 cubic inches. The average for the two 9 mm loads was 3.17 cubic inches. I doubt even the most experienced forensic medical examiner could differentiate between 9 mm and 30 Super Carry wounds. 

So this cartridge looks good on paper. But what I foresee is that given on going ammo shortages and rising prices, the 30 Super Carry is going to be both hard to find and expensive if you do find it.

• "Thoughts On The Compact Service Revolver"--Revolver Guy. What the author is talking about is something on a compact but still duty frame size--e.g., a S&W K-frame--allowing for a full 6 rounds but with a short 3-inch or shorter barrel for concealed carry. Besides the extra round of ammunition, what does such a revolver offer? The author explains:

What sets the compact service revolver apart from the snub, in my opinion, is that concealability takes a back seat to the other factors. Concealability is still a priority, which is why we go to the effort of making the service gun smaller and lighter, but the compact service revolver places things like power, capacity, handling qualities, and “shootability” ahead of concealability.  This makes it different than the snub, where concealability is always the first consideration, and we’re willing to sacrifice some of those other qualities to achieve it.

The improved "shootability" is the consequence of having a larger grip than on a snubby, improved sights over a snubby, the full 6-round capacity, and potentially a more powerful round (e.g., .357 Magnum).

• "Used Revolver Checklist"--Blue Collar Prepping. A good list of tips and tests for checking out a revolver before you buy or shoot it.
• "TFB Armorer’s Bench: Techniques and Types – Punches"--The Firearm Blog. A look at steel, brass, nylon, roll pin punches and roll pin starter punches, and for what each is used. Unmentioned in the article, but which I've found useful, are parallel pin punches with a guide sleeve. These are especially useful for starting a pin: the pin goes into the guide sleeve and the pin is centered over the hole. The sleeve holds the pin and punch aligned while you use your other hand to wield the mallet or hammer. Much better than trying to pinch the pin and the punch with your the fingers of one hand and hoping that they stay aligned.
• "The Spice Of Life: Rotating Your Carry Gun" by Richard A. Mann, Gun Digest. Some people like to switch which carry gun they use just because they can. That is not what this article is about. It is about changing your firearm and/or method of carry due to weather (i.e., summer versus winter carry), type of clothing or activity, the need for greater comfort or concealability under different circumstances, and so on. The question is whether you should stick with one gun so you don't fumble under pressure, or switch to a different firearm/method of carry so you will actually be armed. Mann seems to favor sticking with the same firearm. I'm not so sure that it matters. 

    I note that there seems to be a widespread belief that your performance will completely go to crap under stress, particularly fine motor control. However, we also know that driving a vehicle pretty much refutes that notion--at least when you have lots of practice and experience, such as most people have with driving cars.

    Using the driving analogy, I don't see that rotating a firearm is going to be an issue either. For instance, I don't have a problem with switching between driving my car or my wife's car, even though I may only drive the latter once a week. I am familiar with it and it is an easy transition from one to another. I find the same thing when rotating firearms: those firearms that I've practiced with and carried over a long period of time pose no issues when I switch from one to another, or different methods of carry. For instance, I've carried my J-frame snubby in the pocket, a belt holster, and a fanny pack so often that it takes no mental effort to switch from one method to another.

    Now if I have to drive a totally unfamiliar car--such as when I travel and have to rent a car at the airport--then there is a bit of learning curve; and, in fact, I've found myself fumbling and searching for controls when I've just jumped in the car and driven off. What works to overcome this is for me is to spend 5 or 10 minutes familiarizing myself with the controls of the car (e.g., where the lights are, the controls for the windshield wipers or cruise control, and, more recently, adjusting to using a rotating knob to change from park to drive to reverse over the older style shifting levers). It helps a great deal. 

    The same applies to carry. For instance, Greg Ellifritz has weighed on this topic before and suggests a few practice draws before going out just to load the correct "program" into the brain before going on the street. 

• "The 5 Long Guns I Just Can’t Live Without"--The Truth About Guns. The author of this piece is Austin Knudsen, the Attorney General of Montana. Being in Montana, his choices mostly center around hunting, but he also includes an AR15 for self-defense. Like me, his first experience with an AR style rifle was less than impressive and put him off the weapon system for years afterward. Interestingly, the rifle that he probably uses the most did not make the top 5 list, but only received an honorable mention. That is a .243 bolt-action rifle. He explains:

If I’m on the farm and ranch in northeast Montana, odds are this is the rifle I have in the pickup. I do a lot of winter coyote hunting, and this is my go-to coyote rifle, as I prefer a heavier 6mm bullet over the various .22s for sly dogs at distance.

VIDEO: "Why I Stopped Hating the Shockwave (And Other Stockless Shotguns)"--Lucky Gunner (13 min.)

Prepping & Survival:

• "How Will You Get Water From Source To Home After SHTF"--Modern Survival Blog. Good question. Especially, as the author notes, you have run out of gas for the car or truck you were using to haul large quantities of water--the 3 or 4 gallons, per person, per day. He has a bunch of questions and links to possible answers on storing, purifying, collecting, and transporting water. For some, the solution may be as easy as a spring or stream on your property or installation of a rain catchment system. 

    For short term emergencies, I have water stored on my property. For longer term, I am not too far from a reliable source of water. For transportation, my plan is to use a water filled lawn roller to fill up and roll back to my home where I can then filter and purify the water for use.

• "Selco: The “Camping Trip” Is Ending and the REAL SHTF Is About to Start"--Organic Prepper.

    “Camping trip” is something that I use for the description of a stage, a specific stage of SHTF. Every SHTF scenario will have a “camping trip” stage. It is usually not even important if we are talking about a local event like a storm for example, or terrorist attack in the city, or a longer and bigger event-like this pandemic. The “camping trip” stage will always be there. Sometimes that stage will be very short and barely recognizable, and sometimes it will be longer.

    You know when you go camping with friends, you have tents, a barbecue, a party planned. It may however be cold, damp, it may rain, mosquitoes will bite, it may suck in general, but there is a feeling of friendship and general sharing of food, drinks. There is a feeling of helping each other etc. no matter “how bad the circumstances.”

    The analogy of a “camping trip” may not be great, but the point is that it is a situation where you share things, help each other, try to kinda have fun, no matter what. Or maybe not to have fun but to make the “best of it”.

    Now, let’s say something bad happens in your city, and you are not aware of exactly what it is, how bad it is, how long it is going to last…you have the urge to help folk in your neighborhood, to “give a hand” those who need it. In short, there will be strong feeling of community. There will be a sense of unity and of “we’ll get through this together”. All that is admirable, BUT humans have a tendency to get tired of things, not only physically tired – more mentally tired, and for us here mental fatigue is more important.

    So one day, let’s say a week from that bad event in your city (let’s say dirty bombs activated by terrorists in several cities in your region, including your city, no electric power, no services, no information) you suddenly realize, “I need to watch my food levels in my storage” and that means no more cans sharing with Jim from next house and his kids. That means Jim cannot come anymore in your house because he might see what you have. You’ll have to pay attention to what you say in front of him, so no more hanging out with him and other neighbors in yard and discussing what is going on, etc. etc. You realize the importance of OpSec.

    The “camping trip” stage ends there, and the new stage of SHTF starts. 

 

    In that new stage of SHTF, the rules are different, because “Jim the neighbor” will conclude too that he probably has only a few days left of food for his kids, so he need to look for other solution of acquiring goods.

    The camping trip stage ends when your neighborhood finally understands that this is not a temporary event.  It is not ending in a week or two. Nobody is coming to help. They are on their own to look for resources. And in that game of “looking for resources” new rules usually apply, or more precisely – no rules.

• "Rice and Beans, A Survival Combination"--Modern Survival Blog. Why? "Rice is rich in starch, and an excellent source of energy. Beans are rich in protein, and contain other minerals. The consumption of the two together provides ALL the essential amino acids, and it is no wonder that this combination is a staple of many diets throughout the world." He discusses the caloric content of both, and the amount to store of each for one year (per person). Something to think about as the world faces potential food shortages (see the stories farther below).
• "Prepping for a possibility of survival challenges"--Downtown News Magazine. This September 2021 article by Lisa Brody is an overview of the prepping movement and history. An excerpt:

    Prepping isn't a new phenomenon. The origins of the modern survivalist movement can first be traced to the 1930s to 1950s, in the United Kingdom and United States, where perceived threats included government policies during the Great Depression, religious beliefs, threats of nuclear warfare after World War II, and writers who warned, in both fiction and non-fiction, of social and economic collapse. Readers began to not only read about, but to believe in a post-apocalyptic world. Some early survivalists cite the Great Depression and the stock market crash of 1929 as examples of the need to be prepared for anything.

    The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (LDS) has long directed its members to store a year's worth of food for themselves and their families in preparation for such possibilities, and current teachings, according to “Food Storage,” in the LDS Gospel Library, advises beginning with a minimum of a three-month supply.

    “After World War II, the interesting thing is we had a very good civil defense system in this country. It was an all-volunteer, strongly community-centered civil defense system,” said Dr. Alex Bitterman, architecture professor, Alfred State College in New York, who studies how extreme events shape communities. “Everyone was involved. It was amplified by the early days of the Cold War, when the nuclear threat was very real and very nascent.

    “There was a very big interest in building home fallout shelters,” he continued. “It's where the beginnings of what we call the 'prepper' movement began.”

    But with neighbors and community organizations looking out for one another, there was less of a sense that the bottom would fall out. Like today, people put away canned goods and paper products, but there was not a wholesale movement. Then, in 1973, Federal Emergency Management Act (FEMA) was created as part of the Department of Homeland Security, and in 1979, by executive action by President Jimmy Carter, FEMA was officially formed to centralize federal emergency functions. 

    FEMA's creation led to the gradual dissolution of the community-centered civil defense system, Bitterman said. “The perception was the government had deeper pockets, it was better prepared and had specialized equipment.”

    However, over time, FEMA became stretched thin as more and more emergencies, notably natural disasters, came to plague the system. 

    “It became apparent over time that FEMA does it's very best, but in a huge country like the United States, to mobilize itself from one end of the country to other, it is very slow and not very efficient,” Bitterman noted. “We see the disasters and their aftermaths on the nightly news. Eventually FEMA gets there, but until FEMA gets there, there's a huge gap and because there's no citizen mobilization, what happens is people see an armchair analysis of the disaster aftermath on TV. Those images leave a very indelible fear on our psyches – which is unfortunate.

    “Whenever someone is confronted with a fear, their response is to prepare,” he noted. “So prepping comes out of that very real fear, that helplessness, of not being cared for or being prepared.”

• "This Prepper Is Building a Post-Apocalyptic Internet"--Vice. This is about an open source communications protocol called Reticulum. The article notes that this is not like the NYC Mesh project which seeks to build wide-band access across the city. "It’s built with encryption and privacy in mind, is open source, and is primarily designed to to route digital information between peers without going through a server or service provider." 

    I looked into the NYC Mesh project a few years ago when I first heard about the program and it piqued my interest for a grid down system, and it was very much the opposite of open source: the project was not providing the information to anyone (it seemed that you pretty much had to be a leftist NGO) and it apparently took a specialized equipment package that they sold. According to this article, Reticulum can be run on a Raspberry Pi Zero, and it can run over VHS radio. 

    "Reticulum is an effort to build an alternative base-layer protocol for data networks,” Qvist told Motherboard in an email. “As such it is not one single network, but a tool to build networks. It is comparable to IP, the Internet Protocol stack, that powers the Internet, and 99.99% of all other networks on earth. In essence, it solves the same problems that the Internet Protocol stack does, getting digital data from point A to point B, but it does so in a very different way, and with very different assumptions.”

    “The real strength of the protocol is that it can use all kinds of different communications mediums, and connect them together into a coherent mesh,” he added. “It can use [long-range] transceivers, modems, ham radio, ethernet, WiFi, or even a roll of old copper wire if that is what you have.”

    For Qvist, the circumvention of central control and privacy are just as important as resilience to disaster. “Without such an effort, our communications infrastructure (even if it runs entirely in private overlay networks) will always be at the mercy of various control complexes,” he said. “The power to simply disconnect the entire civilian population of an area from the Internet, for example, is readily available, and has been exercised many times.”

    It’s his dream that people adopt Reticulum and use it to build networks on top of existing structures. 

    “We don't just need one big network, built as an overlay on the Internet, we need a multitude of networks, and we need to connect them in a myriad of ways. We need thousands of networks without kill-switches and control mechanisms, and we need to bind them together, both over the Internet, around it and outside of it,” he said. “We need a Hypernet that is constantly morphing and evolving, reconnecting, healing and developing itself. We need to give people the tools to build their own networks, anytime and anywhere, and to connect them together as they see fit, without arbiters, gatekeepers or external control. The Internet is great, but we need a lot more than just one of them.”

    Qvist said that Reticulum is very much in the early days and that he needs help to develop and improve it. Indeed, the project documentation states that it hasn’t been externally audited for security guarantees, and “there could very well be privacy-breaking bugs.”

VIDEO: "AMERICA Becomes a PIRATE STATE (Again) After 210 Years"--Felix Rex (15 min.)

News & Headlines:

• Ragnarök: "PETER HITCHENS: The USA wants this war... so it can drive Russia back to the Stone Age"--Daily Mail. An excerpt:

    A ‘senior diplomat’ was quoted on Friday, by a commentator with ready access to the great and the good, as saying: ‘If you look at all the options, our strategic interest is probably best served in a long war, a quagmire that drains Putin militarily and economically so he cannot do this again.’

    This is no doubt true. Since the American neo-conservative politician Paul Wolfowitz set out his ‘doctrine’ in 1992, Washington has wanted to crush any revival of Russian power. The flaw with this scheme is that it was, in fact, China that was the threat, not Russia. But there you are. Mr Wolfowitz, a keen backer of the disastrous Iraq war, is not as clever as he thinks he is.

    It is this policy which explains the otherwise mad expansion of Nato, against the warnings of every qualified expert in the world. It also explains the taunting of Russia by President George W. Bush’s 2008 suggestion that Ukraine should actually join Nato. 

    This came just a year after Vladimir Putin, still more or less open to reason, said very clearly that he’d had enough and that Nato expansion should stop. Then, of course, came the events of 2014, in which the USA openly backed a mob putsch which overthrew Ukraine’s legitimate President Viktor Yanukovych. More responsible nations, including France, Germany and Poland, tried to broker a peaceful, lawful path.

    But when Ukraine’s democratic opposition leaders told the Kiev mob about this deal in the early hours of February 21, one of the mob chieftains snarled that they did not want deals, that Yanukovych must go immediately, ending with this threat: ‘Unless this morning you come up with a statement demanding that he steps down, then we will take arms and go, I swear!’

    The elected president soon afterwards fled for his life, probably wisely, and was formally removed in a shabby procedure that fell far short of lawful impeachment.

    This putsch was the true beginning of the war now raging, the initial act of violence which triggered everything else.

This putsch, as he terms it, fell on the date predicted for Ragnarök.

• Related: "'It's not a battlefield, it's a crime scene': Putin's fleeing troops leave behind 410 bodies amid evidence of civilian executions, rapes and mass graves in worst European atrocity since Balkan Wars as Europe's leaders call for international probe"--Daily Mail. 

    Ukrainian prosecutors said they had found 410 bodies in towns near the capital Kyiv. They said some witnesses were too traumatised to speak. 

 

    Two mass graves were discovered in Bucha, one of more than 30 towns and suburbs liberated in recent days.

    Bodies of civilians, their hands bound and bullet wounds in the back of their heads, littered the streets of the small commuter town north of Kyiv.

    Survivors emerging from basements after weeks underground told of summary executions, sexual violence and terror not seen since Joseph Stalin's Soviet rule of terror in the 1930s.

    Bucha was dubbed the 'New Srebrenica' in reference to the 1995 slaughter of 8,000 Muslims during the Bosnian War. Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and Kyiv mayor Vitali Klitschko accused the Russian state of 'genocide'.

Allegations of wide-spread execution of civilians, rape of women, and mass graves. Unfortunately, we are going to be seeing a lot more of this in the coming years.  

• Related: "Two Russian soldiers have died and 28 are in hospital after being POISONED by pastry delicacies offered to them by civilians near besieged Kharkiv, according to the Ukraine Ministry of Defence"--Daily Mail. 
• Related: "Ukrainian soldier proudly poses with flag at recaptured Chernobyl nuclear power plant as retreating Russian forces leave trail of dead civilians in their wake with 'hundreds buried in mass graves'"--Daily Mail.  
• "Global Food Crisis: Russia Threatens to Limit Vital Agri Supply to ‘Friendly’ Countries Only"--Breitbart. 

    Dmitry Medvedev, a senior Russian security official who previously served as the nation’s president, has threatened that Russia may soon cut off the West from food exports.

    A major player in the global market for wheat and other agri-food products, Russia will instead focus on keeping itself fed, according to Medvedev, alongside supplying its friends and close allies.

    Posting on his Telegram, Medvedev said that cutting off the likes of North America and the European Union from its agricultural produce would be a very good way of retaliating against sanctions imposed by the West.

    “It so happened that the food security of many countries depends on our supplies,” the Russian official wrote. “It turns out that our food is our quiet weapon. Quiet but ominous.”

    “The priority in food supplies is our domestic market. And price control,” he continued. “We will supply food and crops only to our friends (fortunately, we have a lot of them, and they are not at all in Europe and not in North America). We will sell both for rubles and for their national currency in agreed proportions.”

Since the Middle-East is a major market for Russian grain, this will undermine the U.S. dollar as a reserve currency among many of those countries that trade in oil. Let's Go Brandon. 

• Related: "Peasants in China ordered to clear forests to grow emergency grain supplies in anticipation of global famine"--Starvation.news. 
• Related: "Supermarkets Allowed to Begin Rationing, Says Spain’s Socialist Government"--Breitbart.
• Flashback: "Global Famine Feared as Russian Fleet Blocks Ukrainian Grain Ships"--Breitbart. This March 20, 2022, article reported:

    Famine is now on the cards for many across the world, with food insecurity dramatically increasing as a result of the ongoing invasion of Ukraine and the associated sanctions war between Russia and the West.

    Known as the breadbasket of Europe, Ukraine is responsible for a significant share of the world’s grain production, with both it and Russia usually exporting over 30 per cent of the world’s wheat alone.

    However, according to a report by Deutsche Welle, that vital supply is now being threatened, with Russian forces blocking Ukrainian grain exports from traversing the Black Sea.

• The Ukrainian bio-weapon labs are just a myth: "Hunter Biden’s Laptops Are Now An Active National Security Threat"--The Federalist. 

    But even The New York Times has finally admitted the laptop was real and the emails were legitimate. Initially, that admission proved significant because it likewise legitimizes the scandals spawned from the documents recovered from Hunter’s abandoned laptop. However, the trajectory of the scandal changed Friday with The Daily Mail’s exclusive.

    “Emails from Hunter’s abandoned laptop show he helped secure millions of dollars of funding for Metabiota, a Department of Defense contractor specializing in research on pandemic-causing diseases that could be used as bioweapons,” The Daily Mail announced last week. The article continued: “[Biden] also introduced Metabiota to an allegedly corrupt Ukrainian gas firm, Burisma, for a ‘science project’ involving high biosecurity level labs in Ukraine. And although Metabiota is ostensibly a medical data company, its vice president emailed Hunter in 2014 describing how they could ‘assert Ukraine’s cultural and economic independence from Russia’– an unusual goal for a biotech firm.”

• "Russia's military failures in Ukraine 'have prompted China to review its armed forces and delay a possible invasion of Taiwan by up to four years'"--Daily Mail. What with all the corruption and none of the combat experience of the Russian military, seems like a wise choice. And there is the issue of those Chinese manufactured tires that so spectacularly failed the Russian military.
• Western Rifle Shooters Association recently linked to the 2021 Crime and Enforcement Activity in New York City report. Per the report, White (non-Hispanics) make up 30.89% of New York City's population. Black (non-Hispanic) make up 20.18%; and Hispanics make up 28.29%. Of the murders and non-negligent homicide cases, 61.7% of the arrestees were black, 30.9% were Hispanic, and Whites were 3.3%. 
• Good thing Mexico has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world: "Gun Control Only Disarms Victims, Not Criminals: 20 Dead in Michoacan, Mexico Massacre"--The Truth About Guns.

    Mexican authorities have confirmed that 20 people were killed when a group of gunmen stormed a cockfight, in a small town in the western state of Michoacán.

    Officials and witnesses described a choreographed massacre in which assailants in military uniforms arrived just after 10.30pm on Sunday night and opened fire with assault rifles at the crowds of primarily middle-aged men.

    Two small trucks, one of them branded with the logo for Sabritas, a potato chip company, were used to block the highway leading to the cockfighting arena.

    Video filmed by witnesses nearby captured the sound of machine gun fire, which could be heard several miles away.

    Photos leaked to social media showed the aftermath of the massacre, with barriers and chairs knocked over, and bodies scattered inside and outside the building.

    Mexican police told local media they found 19 bodies – 16 men and three women. Another victim died en route to the hospital. More than 100 shells from 7.62 caliber rifles littered the ground.

• Gun control fail: "At least six people are killed and ten wounded after gunman with automatic rifle opens fire on group of revelers fighting outside Sacramento bar"--Daily Mail. 

    Six people were killed and ten injured in a mass shooting in California's capital city early Sunday morning as a gunman with an automatic rifle opened fired on a group of revelers fighting outside a bar.

    Sacramento police said shots rang out near 10th and J Streets, about two blocks from the capitol building, around 2am, prompting officers to rush to the scene.

    When police arrived to the area, known for its strip of nightclubs and bars, they found a large group gathered and six dead in the street. Ten other victims were transported to area hospitals by ambulance and private vehicles. Their conditions remain unknown. 

The firearm, the possession of the firearm, the possession of the magazine, the possession of the ammunition, the discharge of the firearm within city limits, the aiming of a firearm at individuals, the killing and maiming of people, were all illegal. But I bet that the response will be that California needs more gun laws. And on cue:

    Sacramento Mayor Darrell Steinberg offered his thoughts to the community, while also promising that Lester has made battling gun violence a 'top priority'.

    'Words can’t express my shock & sadness this morning. The numbers of dead and wounded are difficult to comprehend. We await more information about exactly what transpired in this tragic incident,' he tweeted.

    'Rising gun violence is the scourge of our city, state and nation, and I support all actions to reduce it. Our new Police Chief, Kathy Lester, has made it a top priority, and I stand firmly behind her.'  

Since gun violence is a racial problem, not a gun problem, don't expect anything meaningful to happen.

• In other California news: "Californians urged to save water as state faces dismal snowpack in Sierra Nevada"--LA Times. According to the article, "[t]he mountain snowpack, as measured by snow sensors across the Sierras, now stands at just 38% of the long-term average." And as we are facing world-wide food shortages, the article observes: "Water deliveries have also been cut back for many farming areas in the state this year. Nemeth said those cutbacks are expected to lead to more farmland being left dry and unplanted." This is not something limited to just California but is a concern for all the South West and Intermountain states. "Scientists have found that the extreme dryness since 2000 in the West, from Montana to northern Mexico, now ranks as the driest 22-year period in at least 1,200 years," the article reports. Unmentioned in the article are any plans to build new reservoirs. Or close golf courses.
• Related: "Lake Powell water levels fall to historic low: Reservoir dips below 1,075meters and is now threatening to no longer have the capacity to generate hydropower"--Daily Mail. 

    Water levels at Lake Powell have dipped below a critical threshold threatening the source of power that millions of people across seven states rely on for electricity. 

    Lake Powell's fall to below 1,075 meters (3,525 feet) puts it at its lowest level since it was filled after the federal government dammed the Colorado River at Glen Canyon in 1963 and threatens to hit 'deadpool' - the point at which water likely would fail to flow through the stream - if it drops even more.

    The Glen Canyon, which the lake's main body stretches across, won't be able to pull the water needed to generate power at 1,064 meters (3,490 feet)  - just 11 meters (35 feet) below the recent record low.  

    Sitting at the border of Utah and Arizona, Lake Powell is part of a system that supplies water for 40 million people in multiple western states, and through the Glen Canyon Dam, supplies power for more than five million people.  

• The Left continues to sexually groom children, and are proud of it:
• "Disney Executives Admit: Of Course We’re Grooming Your Children"--The Federalist. 

    Disney isn’t just grooming children with radical sexual propaganda — now they’re bragging about it.

    On the heels of Florida’s new Parental Rights in Education law, which bars educators from instructing kindergarten through third-grade students about sexual ideology, multiple executives and employees from the Walt Disney Company admitted their own personal missions to deluge 5- to 9-year-olds with as much of their own sexual ideology as possible.

    One Disney executive boasted about her “not-at-all-secret gay agenda” and efforts at “adding queerness to” children’s programming, in leaked audio published by investigative journalist Chris Rufo on Tuesday.

    “Our leadership over there has been so welcoming to my, like, not-at-all-secret gay agenda,” said Latoya Raveneau, an executive producer for Disney Television Animation. “I was just, wherever I could, just basically adding queerness … No one would stop me and no one was trying to stop me.”

    “Something must have happened in the last — they are turning it around, they’re going hard,” Raveneau noted. On Monday, Disney vowed to keep fighting Florida’s new law, after speaking out against the bill before Gov. Ron DeSantis signed it (though Disney’s activism was not enough to satisfy a handful of employees enraged that the Mouse didn’t do more).

    Another Disney employee, production coordinator Allen March, was caught in a video call advertising a “tracker” he uses to meet self-imposed quotas for LGBT characters in Disney’s “Moon Girl” TV series.

    “I’ve had the privilege of working with the ‘Moon Girl’ team for the last two years and they’ve been really open to exploring queer stories,” March said. “I put together like a tracker of our background characters to make sure that we have the full breadth of expression [with] all of our gender non-conforming characters.”

    But having a quota was insufficient in pushing his agenda. “It’s not just a numbers game of how many LGBTQ+ characters you have,” he continued. “The more centered a story is on a character, the more nuanced you get to get into their story, and especially with like trans characters … kind of the only way to have like these canonical trans characters, canonical asexual characters, canonical bisexual characters, is to give them stories where they can like be their whole selves.” 

 

And there is more.

• "Disney Queers Children, Says Disney Exec" by Rod Dreher at The American Conservative. Dreher points out:

Groomers. They are all groomers. Why do some of the richest and most powerful people in America, executives of a company that has unparalleled access to the imaginations of America’s children, care so much about the sexuality of kids? It’s creepy. It’s demonic. This is happening right now in our country. You are foolish and cowardly if you minimize it for the sake of avoiding conflict.

• "But OUR Public School is Great"--Vox Popoli. A look at how teachers and administrators at local schools are pushing students toward deviant sexuality. Just one point of many: "An Austin, Texas school teacher said that of the 32 fourth-grade students in her class, 20 have 'come out' to her as 'LGBTQIA+,' according to a leaked internal school message."
• "Florida teacher upset he can't share gay experiences with kindergartners"--Washington Examiner.
• "Public Schools Are Cesspools of Debauchery. Get Your Kids Out Now, Before It's Too Late" by Paula Bolyard, PJ Media. An excerpt:

    ... But at what point do we say it’s abusive to force a child to spend 6.64 hours per day, 180 days a year, being indoctrinated by people who don’t have your child’s best interest at heart and who are actively recruiting them into a radical left-wing ideology, not to mention the LGBTQLMNOP cult?

    Of course, there are still a lot of good teachers out there — including my daughter-in-law and several good friends — who aren’t abusing and indoctrinating kids, but they are fewer and farther between with each passing year. America’s universities are hotbeds of radicalism, and the teachers coming out of them are products of those regressive indoctrination machines. They’d rather teach kids to be woke, to question their gender, and to disregard the authority of their parents than teach the three Rs. It’s appalling — indeed, terrifying — to see the lengths many teachers will go to in order to subvert the will of parents. Every sane person knows it’s wrong, but we’ve now had several generations of children who have suffered through such abuse and indoctrination. A quick glance at any social media platform will give you a glimpse into the world of teens and college students. It’s a sea of delusion, mental illness, and downright evil.

• "Leaked documents show how teachers recruit students, form gay and transgender clubs in schools"--Washington Examiner. The article begins:

Imagine a scenario in which your child comes home from school and tells you that they now identify as “pansexual.” Or, while telling you about the school day, your child mentions that he or she was told he or she was gay based on a test a teacher gave them. Or you discover he or she was recruited by a teacher to lead a gay and transgender student club but was instructed not to tell any parents because “what happens in the student club, stays in the club.” These are the alarming contents of a packet distributed by the California Teachers Association regarding the formation of gay and transgender clubs in schools.

It gets worse from there. 

• "Democrats And Media Enablers Are Overlooking Child Sex Crimes To Protect Ketanji Brown Jackson"--The Federalist. "In every single child pornography case handled by Judge Jackson, she went below the maximum recommendation, below the minimum recommendation, and below the prosecutor’s request."
• More: "Ketanji Brown Jackson chose leniency even in baby sex torture cases"--New York Post.

In the eight child-porn cases that came before her court, former D.C. District Court Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson heard horrifying details of “sadomasochistic” torture of young kids — including “infants and toddlers” — yet challenged the disturbing evidence presented by prosecutors and disregarded their prison recommendations to give the lightest possible punishments in each case, according to transcripts of sentencing hearings obtained by the Post.

• Socialism in action: "‘Zero Accountability’ – Police Cleared in Rotherham ‘Grooming’ Rape Gangs Scandal"--Breitbart. 

    In a decision widely condemned by victims’ rights activists, politicians, and lawyers, the Independent Office for Police Conduct (IOPC) has cleared former detective David Walker of any wrongdoing in the Rotherham child sex abuse scandal. The decision to not punish Walker means that all 47 officers who were investigated following the 2014 Jay Report in grooming gang failures have not faced punishment.

    Walker, formerly of the of the South Yorkshire Police, had been accused of ignoring tips about potential child grooming, but the IOPC claims that he “acted appropriately with any information” provided to him, the BBC reports.

• Legalized retroactive abortion: "Death Is in the Details of Maryland Abortion Bill"--PJ Media. 

    Under Senate Bill 669, no person can be investigated or charged for “experiencing a miscarriage, perinatal death related to failure to act, or stillbirth.” The perinatal period consists of “the period shortly before and after birth, from the 20th to 29th week of gestation to one to four weeks after birth.”

    In other words, it’s anywhere up to four weeks after the birth of the child you and your sexual partner conceived, and you decide you really don’t want the child, hey, no problem, just don’t feed it, don’t get medical care, don’t do a thing. Eventually, the child will die.

    If this provision becomes law — and it almost certainly will be passed by the Maryland legislature’s Democratic majority over the veto of Republican Gov. Larry Hogan — every citizen of this state will become, willingly or unwillingly, an accessory to legalized infant genocide.

• By their works shall ye know them: "Moment Jada Pinkett Smith LAUGHED when Will Smith assaulted Chris Rock at the Oscars and then chuckled again as he cursed him for mocking her alopecia"--Daily Mail. She humiliates him with her open marriage so it only makes sense that she would goad him into slapping someone on live TV. 
• Not if the loud speakers are vandalized: "Minneapolis Mosques Will Be Allowed to Blast Call to Prayer on Outdoor Loud Speakers All Year Round"--Gateway Pundit. The only restriction is that the calls can only be played between the hours of 7 a.m. and 10 p.m. per the City's noise ordinance. That means that the dawn prayer cannot be played. However, not satisfied with what they got, City Council Member Jamal Osman and CAIR promise to fight to overturn the ordinance so they can get that 4 a.m. prayer in as well. 

VIDEO: "Gruesome evidence points to war crimes on road outside Kyiv - BBC News" (12 min.)

Analysis & Opinion:

• "Why U.S. Population Growth Is Collapsing" by  Derek Thompson, The Atlantic. Thompson begins:

    The U.S. population grew at the slowest pace in history in 2021, according to census data released last week. That news sounds extreme, but it’s on trend. First came 2020, which saw one of the lowest U.S. population-growth rates ever. And now we have 2021 officially setting the all-time record.

    U.S. growth didn’t slowly fade away: It slipped, and slipped, and then fell off a cliff. The 2010s were already demographically stagnant; every year from 2011 to 2017, the U.S. grew by only 2 million people. In 2020, the U.S. grew by just 1.1 million. Last year, we added only 393,000 people.

He then observes that "[a] country grows or shrinks in three ways: immigration, deaths, and births." Starting with deaths, he notes that not only do we have a substantial (in excess of 1 million) excess deaths because of Covid-19, but that deaths exceeded births in a record share of U.S. counties--more than 2/3 of counties according to the Census. 

    Excess deaths accounted for 50 percent of the difference in population growth from 2019 to 2021. That’s a clear sign of the devastating effect of the pandemic. But this statistic also tells us that even if we could have brought excess COVID deaths down to zero, U.S. population growth would still have crashed to something near an all-time low. To understand why, we have to talk about the second variable in the population equation: immigration.

    As recently as 2016, net immigration to the United States exceeded 1 million people. But immigration has since collapsed by about 75 percent, falling below 250,000 last year. Immigration fell by more than half in almost all of the hot spots for foreign-born migrants, including New York, Miami, Los Angeles, and San Francisco.

The author then discusses how policies limiting immigration are ultimately self-defeating for the United States because, according to the article, "[i]mmigrants bring breakthroughs, patents, and Nobel Prizes in droves." I hate these type of arguments because they are deceptive and assume economic principles should outweigh cultural and ethnic concerns.

    Looking at the first point, even when the United States had stringent immigration requirements starting in the 1920s, there was a strong preference for immigrants from Western Europe (i.e., higher I.Q. populations) and for bringing in talent. Certainly no one can say that between 1924 (when the Immigration Act was passed) and 1965 (when Immigration was opened up) that the United States suffered from a lack of breakthroughs, patents and Nobel Prizes. No, the objection here is to the mass immigration of low IQ, uneducated from the Third World. And as it has been well documented, open immigration of this type brings more crime, poverty, and collapsing social services. But even turning to the educated immigrants, I've linked to many articles in the past showing that not only is this type of immigration via B1 visas mostly intended to drive down wages by replacing American tech workers with foreign tech workers (who notoriously provide poorer quality work-product), but also tends to introduce racial biases in hiring that runs contrary to American views on meritocracy--e.g., the well-known biases of Indian and Chinese managers to only hire others of the same nationality (and in the case of Indian managers, even particular castes).

    Turning to the second issue, Thompson makes the assumption that economics outweighs culture and ethnic issues. That is, he views the U.S. as an economic unit and its perpetuation as an economic unit is all that is important, even if this results in fundamental shifts in the culture and ethnicity of the country. In other words, to Thompson and his ilk, the importance of the country outweighs that of the nation. He would rather than the United States become a Chinese or Indian colony than retain its original character.

    Finally, turning to declining fertility rates, Thompson acknowledges the fundamental cause: "Around the world, rising women’s education and employment seem to correlate with swiftly declining birth rates." But then he makes the incredible assertion that "[i]n just about every possible way you could imagine, this is a good thing: It strongly suggests that economic and social progress give women more power over their bodies and their lives." Even if we go extinct? 

    The other unmentioned factor in declining birthrates is religiosity and faith. All dying cultures have faced declining births. It isn't something to celebrate, but it is warning.

• "How Liberalism Ruined Sex And Degraded Women" by Nathaniel Blake, The Federalist.  In The Atlantic article cited above, the author makes the assertion that declining birth rates is a good thing because it "strongly suggests that economic and social progress give women more power over their bodies and their lives." But is that really true? Studies have shown women are actually less happy now than in the past. For instance, in "The Paradox of Declining Female Happiness," the authors observe:

By many objective measures the lives of women in the United States have improved over the past 35 years, yet we show that measures of subjective well-being indicate that women's happiness has declined both absolutely and relative to men. The paradox of women's declining relative well-being is found across various datasets, measures of subjective well-being, and is pervasive across demographic groups and industrialized countries. Relative declines in female happiness have eroded a gender gap in happiness in which women in the 1970s typically reported higher subjective well-being than did men. These declines have continued and a new gender gap is emerging -- one with higher subjective well-being for men.

Apparently selling your soul to mindless corporations is not the road to happiness. 

    But besides overall happiness, I've seen many articles over the years that have explored that the more successful and educated women are, the more sexually degradation they face. For instance, in the cited article, Blake notes:

    That the sexual revolution has failed to deliver on its promises is increasingly obvious, even to those who loathe Christian sexual ethics. For example, Michelle Goldberg of The New York Times has returned to the problem, this time with a review of “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation” by Washington Post columnist Christine Emba. Although Goldberg dislikes the book’s Christian influences, she concedes that “modern heterosexual dating culture appears to be an emotional meat grinder whose miseries and degradations can’t be solved by ever more elaborate rituals of consent.” 

    Despite this admission, Goldberg isn’t ready to abandon the sexual revolution, but instead wants to save it. She concludes that the problem “is that many women are still embarrassed by their own desires, particularly when they are emotional, rather than physical.”

Blake blasts back:

    This unrealistic analysis reveals the impoverishment and impotence of modern liberalism’s moral vocabulary. All that this sort of liberalism can offer women who have been immiserated by our sexual culture is the suggestion that they negotiate for more romance and less sexual degradation from porn-addled men.

    But liberals remain insistent that these preferences are purely subjective, and are not normative in any way. Thus, liberalism can only suggest a more inclusive settlement between warring desires, with emotional needs now balanced with sexual fetishes.

    It would, of course, be good if more women told men to take their internet-induced perversions and shove them. It would also be good if women demanded more emotional commitment from men, rather than settling for hookups. But liberal culture cripples women’s ability to take such stands by vitiating the necessary moral and cultural support for them. 

    Morally, liberal ideology deprives a woman of anything stronger than setting her own “I want” against the “I want” of a man. This refusal to judge between desires leaves modern liberals such as Goldberg stuck, able to recognize the disaster of the current relational marketplace, but unwilling to accept any moral judgments that would give women’s desires more than subjective value. After all, without a normative understanding of what is good in a relationship (including sex), why should a woman’s desire for romance, or even simple kindness, matter more than a man’s porn-induced kinks?

    Furthermore, liberalism’s theoretical neutrality between competing desires in practice favors desires that are simple and intense over those that are more complex and diffuse.  Thus, in a liberal culture, emotional needs and relational longings will naturally take second place to immediate sexual gratification. To be uncomfortable with unbounded indulgence is to mark oneself as an enemy of liberalism. This is why liberalism’s supposed neutrality about the nature of the good and the good life actually denigrates self-control and commitment while promoting selfish indulgence. Our culture is filled with celebrations of the liberation of desire, including the sexual desires and relational habits that are proving so harmful to women. 

While Blake recognizes that so-called liberalism has imposed a type of sex slavery on women, his putting the blame on men, generally, indicates that he has little appreciation of why this situation has arisen. Basically, it boils down to the fact that the sexual revolution and women's "liberation" gave full reign to women's hypergamy: the desire to mate upward by finding a male mate that is more successful and educated than is the woman. This results in more women chasing after fewer men at the top of the economic pyramid, and the concomitant increase in competition between females. Thus we see article like this 2019 New York Post article on how "Broke men are hurting American women’s marriage prospects."

    Research now suggests that the reason for recent years’ decline in the marriage rate could have something to do with the lack of “economically attractive” male spouses who can bring home the bacon, according to the paper published Wednesday in the Journal of Family and Marriage.

    “Most American women hope to marry, but current shortages of marriageable men — men with a stable job and a good income — make this increasingly difficult,” says lead author Daniel Lichter in a press release.

    Lichter adds that unless your dream man is an Uber driver, the dearth of would-be grooms is prominent “in the current ‘gig economy’ of unstable, low-paying service jobs.”

    Turning to another article, "The elusive American husband" by Suzanne Venker, published at the Washington Examiner, it similarly relates:

    Millions of single women in America today cannot for the life of them find a "suitable" husband.

    That's according to a new study from researchers at Cornell University, who examined data on recent marriages and found women’s ideal husband has an average income about 58% higher than the actual unmarried men currently available to single women. These optimal husbands were also 30% more likely to be employed than real single men and 19% more likely to have a college degree.

    In other words, American men are no longer educated enough or rich enough to be suitable for marriage. This is exactly what we should have expected to happen.

    For the past 40 years, women have been demanding their relationships with men be free of traditional sex roles. Women said they can do everything themselves and “don’t need a man.” They wanted to lead and to be their own heroes. In exchange, they wanted men to be more like women: soft and nurturing and flexible.

    Men listened and responded accordingly. They took a step back to accommodate women’s demands and as a result are no longer providers and protectors. They did exactly what women asked of them.

    If traditional sex roles were truly passe, as the culture has insisted for years, women would have no problem finding a husband. If it didn't matter which sex is richer or more educated, women would be perfectly happy in the provider role and would marry any one of the countless men of lesser status who are readily available.

    But they aren't doing that. Many of the women who are doing that are miserable.

(See also my prior post, "Hypergamy and Delayed Marriage Among Women").

        The result of the increased competition among women? Women having to be more attractive to the men that are worthy of their attention, whether that is increased sexual availability or other means.  An interesting Time Magazine article titled "What Two Religions Tell Us About The Modern Dating Crises" explores this problem. From the article:

    Multiple studies show that college-educated Americans are increasingly reluctant to marry those lacking a college degree. This bias is having a devastating impact on the dating market for college-educated women. Why? According to 2012 population estimates from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey, there are 5.5 million college-educated women in the U.S. between the ages of 22 and 29 versus 4.1 million such men. That’s four women for every three men. Among college grads age 30 to 39, there are 7.4 million women versus 6.0 million men—five women for every four men.

It’s not that He’s Just Not That Into You—it’s that There Just Aren’t Enough of Him.

    Lopsided gender ratios don’t just make it statistically harder for college-educated women to find a match. They change behavior too. According to sociologists, economists and psychologists who have studied sex ratios throughout history, the culture is less likely to emphasize courtship and monogamy when women are in oversupply. Heterosexual men are more likely to play the field, and heterosexual women must compete for men’s attention.

    Of course, tales of scarce men and sexual permissiveness in ancient Sparta won’t convince everyone, so I began to explore the demographics of modern religion. I wanted to show that god-fearing folks steeped in old-fashioned values are just as susceptible to the effects of shifting sex ratios as cosmopolitan, hookup-happy 20-somethings who frequent Upper East Side wine bars.

    Eventually I hit pay dirt.

    One of my web searches turned up a study from Trinity College’s American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) on the demographics of Mormons. According to the ARIS study, there are now 150 Mormon women for every 100 Mormon men in the state of Utah—a 50 percent oversupply of women. On a lark, I emailed my friend Cynthia Bowman,* a devout Mormon who grew up in Salt Lake City and returns there often, and asked her whether Mormon sex ratios are as lopsided as the ARIS study claimed. [Editor’s note: “Cynthia Bowman” is a pseudonym, as are other names denoted with an asterisk. Some biographical details have been altered to hide their identities.]

    Yes, she told me, the ratios are lopsided. And yes, Mormon men take full advantage. “They wait for the next, more perfect woman,” grumbled Bowman, a veterinarian in San Diego. Premarital sex remains taboo for Mormons, but the shortage of Mormon men was pushing some women over the brink. “There might actually be a more promiscuous dating culture than there otherwise would be in the Mormon culture because of this gap.” 

She discovered a similar marriage crises among Orthodox Jews.

Secular-style dating is rare in the Orthodox community in which Elefant lives. Most marriages are loosely arranged—“guided” is probably a better word—by matchmakers such as Elefant. The shadchan’s job has been made exceedingly difficult, she said, by a mysterious increase in the number of unmarried women within the Orthodox community. When Elefant attended Jewish high school 30 years ago, “there were maybe three girls that didn’t get married by the time they were twenty or twenty-one,” she said. “Today, if you look at the girls who graduated five years ago, there are probably thirty girls who are not yet married. Overall, there are thousands of unmarried girls in their late twenties. It’s total chaos.”

    For Orthodox Jewish women, as for Mormon ones, getting married and having children is more than a lifestyle choice. Marriage and motherhood are essentially spiritual obligations, which is why the Orthodox marriage crisis is so hotly debated and why it has earned its own moniker. Shidduch is the Hebrew word for a marriage match, and Orthodox Jews (including the more assimilated Modern Orthodox) now refer to the excess supply of unmarried women in their communities as the Shidduch Crisis.

    Mormon and Orthodox Jewish leaders alike fear that their respective marriage crises reflect some failure to instill proper values in young people. Perhaps young people are too self-absorbed? Maybe the men are just too picky? Or maybe it’s the women who are holding out for the Mormon or Jewish George Clooney?

    In fact, the root causes of both the Shidduch Crisis and the Mormon marriage crisis have little to do with culture or religion. The true culprit in both cases is demographics. The fact is that there are more marriage-age women than men both in the Orthodox Jewish community and in the Utah LDS church. And just as I predicted, lopsided gender ratios affect conservative religious communities in much the same way they affect secular ones.

The competition among Utah Mormon women has led to Salt Lake City having the highest concentration of plastic surgeons in the nation and well above average expenditures for beauty products. The author also notes a similar push among Orthodox Jews, although the results there is not more plastic surgery but an anorexia crises.

    So what is the solution? According to Suzanne Venker, supra:

    Stop encouraging women to value education and career above all else, as though their identity can be found in the marketplace. A man's identity is typically wrapped up in his job — for good reason. That is his main contribution to family life. Not the only one, but to him it's the most important.

    A woman's identity is, typically, wrapped up in her relationships at home. That is what pulls at her. It is what matters most and why she ultimately does want, and need, to depend on a man. Why, then, do we not prepare women for this inevitability?

    In other words, ladies, change your aim. Start mapping out a life that takes your unique biology into account. Stop mapping out your lives the way men map out theirs, and stop letting men know you don't need them. Clearly, you do.

• "The Cold Civil War: Is freedom our right or our privilege?" by Leighton Woodhouse, Tablet Magazine. An interesting analysis to explain the political split in our country by looking at the politics of our founding colonists:

    A map of America these days is not a map of who “follows the science” and who “denies” it. It’s not a map of penchants toward conspiracy theories. It’s not a map of altruists versus egotists. It is a map of how Americans regard authority.

    I recently read David Hackett Fischer’s cultural history of colonial America, Albion’s Seed. [epub/MOBI] In the conclusion to that book, written in 1989, Fischer notes that federal census data have consistently shown the various geographical regions of the United States to have even more cultural differences between them than do the myriad nations of Europe.

    Fischer’s thesis is that American social and political history has been shaped fundamentally by the disparate ancient cultures of the populations of four geographical regions of England, which were the respective sources of four waves of migration to the American colonies. The first was the Puritan East Anglians who settled Massachusetts. The second was the Royalist cavaliers from the south and west of England who emigrated to Virginia. The third was the Quakers of the English Midlands who colonized Pennsylvania and the Delaware Valley. And the last was the anarchic warrior clans of the north counties of England, Scotland, and Northern Ireland who made their new homes in the mountainous backcountry of the Appalachian South.

    By the 20th century those four cultures had expanded across the continent. The Puritans dispersed westward, across a northern belt of the present United States, settling upstate New York, the upper Midwest, the northern Plains and the Pacific Northwest. The Quakers and their descendants fanned out from Pennsylvania to the Ohio Valley, and farther to the Rocky Mountains. The cavaliers of Virginia spread into the Deep South and west into Texas, mixing there with the progeny of the backcountry Appalachian colonists, who had moved west into the Ozarks, Texas, and Oklahoma, and then to Southern California as Okies in the Dust Bowl.

* * *

    A couple of obvious things stand out across most of these data visualization maps. First, there’s an unmistakable division between the northern and the southern sections of the eastern United States. Second, the West Coast shares the lexicon of the Northeast and the mid-Atlantic much more than it does that of the Southeast.

* * *

    The distinct British ethnocultural groups that settled America carried with them ancient cultures—what Fischer calls “folkways”—that were startlingly different from one another. From the ways they built their dwellings to the ways they cooked their food to the ways they named their children, each of the four groups had distinctive customs, values, and manners that endured through generations and across thousands of miles of westward expansion.

    Perhaps the most consequential of those differences were their political philosophies. Fischer describes those of all four in detail, but to me, two of them are particularly relevant to our current day: that of the New England Puritans, and that of the Appalachian Scotch-Irish.

    The New England Puritans believed in what Fischer called “ordered liberty.” Ordered liberty was the notion—intuitive to many of today’s American liberals and conservatives alike—that while individuals have rights, it’s necessary for the state to put limits on them to preserve the social order. Gun control is a straightforward example: Individuals may have the right to bear arms (for the purposes of sport and self-defense, for instance), but if there were no limits on that right, so the thinking goes, America would turn into a bloodbath. To protect our right to go about our lives without getting shot, we forfeit some of our individual rights to the state, which is granted the power to regulate us for our own good (permits, background checks, wait periods, red flag laws, bans on certain kinds of guns, etc.). The same logic holds universally, whether the issue is environmental protection, public safety, drug use, speed limits, labor laws, or whatever.

    “Forfeit some of our individual rights to the state” might actually be understating the case. Legally speaking, the principle that encapsulated the Puritans’ view was that of “prior restraint”—that is, the notion that the individual doesn’t have a “right” to much of anything until it’s granted to them by the commonwealth, like a driver’s license or a fishing permit. The Puritan colonists took this idea to a weird degree. The Massachusetts town of Eastham, for example, required that a bachelor must kill six blackbirds or three crows before being permitted to marry.

    The political philosophy of the Scotch-Irish colonists of the Appalachian backcountry was the inverse of that of the Puritans. The settlers of this region came from the northern counties of England, the lowlands of Scotland and the north of Ireland. This region, along the border of two kingdoms, had been ungovernable for centuries. The monarchs of neither England nor Scotland could tame its fierce, unruly and pugnacious inhabitants. In the mid-16th century, the parliaments of both countries passed a decree that held that “All Englishmen and Scottishmen are and shall be free to rob, burn, spoil, slay, murder and destroy, all and every such person and persons, their bodies, property, goods and livestock … without any redress to be made for same.”

    Nearly every bit of the region’s culture, from how they constructed their cottages to the sports they played, were rooted in this history of perpetual warfare and arbitrary violence. Their political philosophy was no exception. The Scotch-Irish were militantly committed to their unconditional independence and autonomy. Unlike the Puritans, they did not view their individual rights and freedoms as privileges granted them by the state. Far from the bestower of rights, to the Scotch-Irish, governments were an invading, oppressive force, that could only encroach on one’s freedom, not give it. One’s entitlement to be left alone, to do what one wished with one’s family, property and land, was a natural right, which the Scotch-Irish were prepared to fight and die for. The colonists from this warring border region brought these convictions with them to the Appalachian backcountry, and, in time, west to Missouri and Texas and Oklahoma and all the way to Southern California, which, it should be recalled, was the birthplace of the Reagan revolution.

    Today, the United States is a patchwork tapestry of these fundamentally incompatible political world views. In some regions, they’ve fused in unexpected ways, such as in Northern California, where a traditional New England penchant for moralistic government has been merged with a countercultural version of Appalachian anti-authoritarianism in a unique and, some might say, uniquely dysfunctional ideology that Michael Shellenberger calls “left libertarianism.” But in most places they exist, from one county to the next, in entirely separate proximity from one another, like neighbors who only talk to each other when they’re fighting over the property line.

 

VIDEO: "Where There's a Whip (There's a Way) - Clamavi De Profundis" (2 min.)

Some of you may remember this song from when you were a kid. I like this arrangement better than that in the "Return of the King" animated movie.

And Now For Something Completely Different:

• "Pluto’s peaks are ice volcanoes, scientists conclude"--The Guardian. 

    “If you look at Mount Fuji from a distance or one of the Hawaiian volcanoes, they look like these big, broad, smooth features, which is just not what we see there,” said Singer, whose findings are published in Nature Communications. “So, we think, probably the material is extruded from below, and the dome grows on top.”

    As for the nature of this material, the compositional data suggests it is mainly water ice, but with some additional “antifreeze” components mixed in, such as ammonia, or methanol. “It is still difficult to think that it would be liquid, because it’s just too cold – the average surface temperature on Pluto is about 40 Kelvin (-233 C),” said Singer. “So, it’s probably more, either slushy material, or it could even be mostly solid state – like a glacier is solid, but it can still flow.”

    Even this is quite surprising, she added, because, given the extremely low temperature, this material shouldn’t be mobile at all. Possibly, it suggests Pluto’s rocky core is warmer than anticipated, and that heat energy released from the radioactive decay some of its elements is being somehow becoming trapped, for example by an insulating layer of material, and periodically released, triggering volcanic eruptions.

    All of this is speculation. “I will freely admit we do not have a lot of information about what’s going on in the subsurface of Pluto,” said Singer. “But this is forcing people to come up with some creative ideas for how [ice volcanism] could happen.”

• Interesting if it works: "Scientists build circuit that generates clean, limitless power from graphene"--The Brighter Side. 

    A team of University of Arkansas physicists has successfully developed a circuit capable of capturing graphene's thermal motion and converting it into an electrical current.

    “An energy-harvesting circuit based on graphene could be incorporated into a chip to provide clean, limitless, low-voltage power for small devices or sensors,” said Paul Thibado, professor of physics and lead researcher in the discovery.

    The findings, titled "Fluctuation-induced current from freestanding graphene," and published in the journal Physical Review E, are proof of a theory the physicists developed at the U of A three years ago that freestanding graphene — a single layer of carbon atoms — ripples and buckles in a way that holds promise for energy harvesting.

Apparently the science wasn't settled.

    The idea of harvesting energy from graphene is controversial because it refutes physicist Richard Feynman’s well-known assertion that the thermal motion of atoms, known as Brownian motion, cannot do work. Thibado’s team found that at room temperature the thermal motion of graphene does in fact induce an alternating current (AC) in a circuit, an achievement thought to be impossible. 

    In the 1950s, physicist Léon Brillouin published a landmark paper refuting the idea that adding a single diode, a one-way electrical gate, to a circuit is the solution to harvesting energy from Brownian motion. Knowing this, Thibado’s group built their circuit with two diodes for converting AC into a direct current (DC). With the diodes in opposition allowing the current to flow both ways, they provide separate paths through the circuit, producing a pulsing DC current that performs work on a load resistor.

• What was that? "Reversing hearing loss with regenerative therapy"--Medical Xpress. "The company uses small molecules to program progenitor cells, a descendant of stem cells in the inner ear, to create the tiny hair cells that allow us to hear."