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Monday, April 4, 2022

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.
    “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:

        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.
        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.  

        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. 

        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.
        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.”
        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.
        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.
        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.  

        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.

    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 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.
    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. 

        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.

        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.

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

    Analysis & Opinion:

        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.

        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:

        “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.”

        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."

    By at
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    2 comments:

    1. John WilderApril 5, 2022 at 8:52 PM

      Don't tell Pugsley about the progenitor cells. He'll sign me up in a heartbeat.

      ReplyDelete
      Replies
      1. DocentApril 6, 2022 at 10:26 AM

        Maybe we can discuss this treatment in an upcoming podcast?

        Delete

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    The Diversity Report #21

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