For Those Of You Carrying The TDI Knife

 

"Matthew's Fabrication TDI Knife Sheath"--Tier 1 Citizen (5 min.)

A quick refresher on how and when to use the knife in a gun grab situation and a review of how this sheath makes it easier to do so.

Armed & Styled On Using Handheld and Weapons Lights

The YouTuber Armed & Styled recently posted a couple videos on flashlights and weapon mounted lights and using them in defensive contexts. The first video is her going over the various terms used to describe brightness, intensity, etc., and a few basic considerations in using a light. The second video delves into the topic deeper with an interview of John Johnston of Ballistic Radio on using the handheld or weapon mounted light.

"What the heck is candela? Lumens? Photonic Barriers?? Why should YOU care?" (5 min.)

"Handheld and Weapon Mounted Light Tactics with John Johnston" (32 min.)

The Docent's Memo (6/27/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Three Robberies Show Various Response Strategies"--Active Self Protection (8 min.)

Greg Ellifritz had recommended, in this past weekend's Weekend Knowledge Dump, that his readers watch this video to get an understanding how fast a robbery can go down. Basically, if you aren't paying attention to your surroundings, you could easily be completely surprised; and, even if spot the robbers before they strike, as happened to the guy getting out of his car in his driveway, you might not have time to draw a concealed handgun.

Firearms & Self-Defense:

• A couple days ago, the Firearm Blog's picture of the day post featured the H&K Mark 23 developed for the U.S. Army Special Operations Command and using the .45 ACP cartridge. It made me wonder about the extent to which U.S. special forces units used .45 ACP handguns and whether they still use them. The answer is not as clear cut as one would hope, with some of the information being somewhat contradictory. On one hand (no pun intended), George E. Hand IV, a former Delta operator, penned an article for SOFREP in 2021 explaining that when he was in the Unit, he used a highly tuned 1911 and it remains his favorite, adding that "There was no option to train with another caliber of a pistol in the Delta training course for new operators; this was standard issue and would be mastered to successfully pass the five-month course." On the other hand, I came across a 2014 article at Military.com by Michael Cox on why SOF prefers 9 mm over the .45 ACP. It relates:

    Many readers are under the impression that U.S. special operations forces have returned to using .45 caliber pistols since the adoption of the M9 9mm in 1985.

    This has some truth to it, but in most cases SOF units use 9mm, experts maintain.

    The Army’s Delta Force adopted .40 caliber, but the elite unit is having the same problems as the FBI – the heavier caliber is causing excessive wear problems in guns that were originally designed to be 9mm. Delta is now using 9mm Glock 17s, 19s and 34s.

    The 75th Ranger Regiment and Special Forces units use M9A1s and Glock 19s.

    SEAL Teams mostly use the Sig Sauer 226.

    DEVGRU, or SEAL Team 6, does use Heckler & Koch .45 for special occasions when they need a suppressed capability.

    Now about two years ago, Marine Corps Special Operations Command awarded a $22.5 million contract to Colt Defense LLC for new .45-caliber Close Quarter Battle Pistols for the service's elite special operations troops.The Colt 1911-style pistol replaced the fleet of worn-out Marine Corps Forces Special Operations Command, or MARSOC, M45 pistols.

    The Corps began issuing custom 1911 .45 pistols to its elite Force Reconnaissance units in the 1990s. Gunsmiths at the Quantico Weapons Training Battalion Precision Weapons Section hand built them from old 1911s that had been replaced by the M9 in the mid-1980s.

    The creation of the first MARSOC units in 2006 caused the requirement to grow from 400 pistols to 4,000 pistols. Finding enough surplus 1911s for the Precision Weapons Section's custom rebuilds became impractical, Marine officials maintain.

    Most MARSOC operators, however, are not carrying their nifty new .45s because units are having a problem getting .45-caliber ammo in theater for some reason, sources maintain.

A December 2021 article at We Are The Mighty, titled "How Army Special Forces pulled a sneaky to get Glock pistols," isn't just about how much Special Forces units like 9mm Glocks, but also about how Special Operations Command was able to formally adopt the Glock 19 as a sidearm. But it notes that in the early 2000s "[t]he elite Delta Force adopted the Glock 22 [which is .40S&W caliber] which further increased the demand for Glocks in Special Forces."

• I was doing some research on tips on spotting criminals and came across some good articles on home burglaries and tips to avoid being a victim. Per my search parameters, they included tips on figuring out if an erstwhile burglar is casing your house.  Tomasz Borys, writing for a site called Deep Sentinel, probably has the most comprehensive list of signs you are being targeted (bold in original):

    Many of us are oblivious to what’s going on around us, especially when it comes to spotting crime. But if you pay attention, you should be able to identify the telltale signs someone is casing your house before the burglary takes place. Here’s how you can tell if a burglar is watching your house:

• The same unfamiliar vehicle hanging around over the course of several days, either frequently driving by your place, or parked nearby.
• Unfamiliar individuals walking back and forth on your street or back alley [ed.: or, as Ahmaud Arbery was doing, jogging through the neighborhood].
• Anyone taking photos of your home or property. You might not necessarily catch them in the act but if you see a stranger with a camera on your street, that is a cause for concern.
• Loose light bulbs on exterior lights. Burglars will often unscrew them a day or two prior to a break-in attempt.
• Strangers at your door. Burglars will frequently walk up and knock on the front door to see if someone is home, giving an excuse – asking for directions, have you seen my dog?, oops wrong house – whenever someone answers it.
• Mild vandalism like a rock through a side window. This is done so that burglars can get an idea of what happens if a window is broken? Is there an alarm system on the windows they need to be aware of?
• Someone lets your dog out of your yard. Or someone shows a fond interest in your dog. Getting rid of your dog makes their lives a lot easier.
• Telephone calls that hang up as soon as you answer. Burglars often do this to find out who, if anyone, is home right now.
• Clear tape over the keyhole to your front door. This is done so when you enter your keys, they know that you’re home. This could provide them with an idea of your schedule and help them plan better.
• Trash rummaging. Many times, burglars might go through your trash to try to find important documents that reveal important details about you. This is done to find out about you, the more they know, the easier target you are. Always remember to shred your documents before discarding them.  

The article also mentions that in North America and Europe, strange signs--which reminded me of the hobo codes--have been left somewhere on the outside of the house. "According to the authorities, these are often left by criminals as either reminders to themselves or messages to their accomplices." The author adds: "If you find odd chalk markings on your property, it’s a good idea to inform the proper authorities. These marks may have been made by the kids down the street, or they could be from a burglar. House robbery markings aren’t always obvious and their meaning usually isn’t clear, but the police may have information on what (if anything) they mean."

    Another article, "Common Burglary Tactics (and How to Stop Them!)" at a site called Dengarden is mostly about methods to discourage burglars or make it more difficult for burglars to break into your house, but it discusses a few signs that burglars might be interested in your home. One of these is leaving trash in front of your house:

    Criminals will leave things outside your house like cans, litter, bags, and so on – these mean something. Whatever you do, do not ignore them. This is why you should always pick up litter outside your house because they may well be signs put there by scouts for criminals targeting a house or neighborhood.

    They can denote how many people are in a house, how many of them are male or female (houses with female occupants only are more likely to be targeted). They may also indicate if there are any dogs – the list goes on. Always take a photo first if it looks to be constructed in some fashion, and then bag it and put it in the bin. Wear gloves when you do, because you never know if they may have put substances on it. More on this later.

In a similar vein, the article warns about taking business cards from strangers and to be careful with your mail because they might be dosed with chloroform or another substance meant to incapacitate you. The article also mentions the tactic described above about calling the house to see if anyone is home, but also points out that if they know your email address, they might send an email to see if there is a ping-back message saying you are out of town.

• Another article that I came across, "The strange expertise of burglars," discusses that there is a learning curve to becoming a successful burglar--seizing opportunities, patterns in how to search a home, and knowing what items to steal to maximize your take. An excerpt:

    [British researcher Claire] Nee might have known that they would instantly home in on the cash. Throughout her experiments, she has shown that most burglars are operating on a skilled “automatic pilot” that allows them to quickly exploit an opportunity.

    It begins long before the day of the crime. When he (or she) starts to need money, the burglar will begin noting potential targets during their day-to-day activities – walking the dog, say. They are surprisingly flexible, however, and may quickly change their mind on the day, if they see another house that is easier to access – thanks to an open window or door, or if the owners are away.

    Once inside, the automatic pilot proves to be essential to stop the criminal losing their head, as I find out myself in my own botched burglary. ...

    I had, however, been sceptical of Nee’s claims that much skill is required. “How hard can it be?” I asked myself as I entered the virtual house. But although I know to focus on the small, portable, high-value items – somehow my eyes glide right over them. My mind is racing, but I can’t find anything – and so I go for the big, cumbersome items instead. Rather than being a smooth criminal, I am like a hyperactive kid on an Easter egg hunt. (If you don’t believe me, I would suggest you take a look at the video below, to see how many items you would have spotted during this staged crime.)

    My confusion is a stark contrast to burglars’ behaviour in Nee’s simulations, which she developed with Martin White at the University of Sussex. Experienced burglars almost all followed the same route through a house, heading first to the upstairs bedrooms, and then to the living rooms downstairs. Along the way, they easily spot the coat pockets for wallets and credit cards, as well as the designer clothes, jewellery and other small valuables – while neglecting the electronic equipment that will quickly age. With an average of just four minutes in the house, the professionals accumulated around £1000 ($1560) more booty than Nee’s control group of law-abiding students.

    Strikingly, most of the thought processes involved in this search seem to take place below consciousness, giving the burglar greater mental space to deal with the risk of being rumbled. “I could have done it with my eyes shut,” one told Nee during her prison interviews. “The search becomes a natural instinct, like a military operation,” is how another described it. “It becomes routine to concentrate on what’s going on around you and where to find things. Most concentration is on the risk of someone coming back – the search is natural.”

    Given this rapid, systematic, non-conscious behaviour, Nee compares burglary to other, more functional forms of skilled expertise – from music to chess to tennis – where top performers claim to enter a similar kind of “flow state” in which most of the most crucial decisions rumble away below awareness.

    And as with those other kinds of experts, she thinks burglary relies on intricate “psychological schemas”. “They are bunches of recipes for how to do things. And as you get more expert, it’s not that you get more of the schemas, but they get more dense and interrelated,” she says. “So you can pluck a solution instantaneously out of your memory, just by seeing a cue.”

    For a chess player, it’s the detailed strategies that can be called to mind in an instance; for a burglar, it’s an encyclopaedic understanding of house layouts and the likely locations of the most valuable objects, as well as planned routes for the getaway. Having experienced many different scenarios, they already have a plan that suits the crime in hand, meaning they don’t have to work through all the possibilities. A novice, by contrast “will be processing everything at once,” Nee says. As I found, doing that leaves you paralysed with indecision.

VIDEO: "4 Psychological Tricks To Command Respect Immediately"--Charisma on Command (8 min.)

Prepping & Survival:

• If you follow the Suspicious Observers channel on YouTube, you probably already caught this, but if not: "Here Comes the Sun—to End Civilization"--Wired. From the article:

When a coronal mass ejection comes your way, what matters most is the bullet’s magnetic orientation. If it has the same polarity as Earth’s protective magnetic field, you’ve gotten lucky: The two will repel, like a pair of bar magnets placed north-to-north or south-to-south. But if the polarities oppose, they will smash together. That’s what happened on September 2, [1859] the day after Carrington saw the blinding beam.

Also:

    The Carrington Event, as it’s known today, is considered a once-in-a-century geomagnetic storm—but it took just six decades for another comparable blast to reach Earth. In May 1921, train-control arrays in the American Northeast and telephone stations in Sweden caught fire. In 1989, a moderate storm, just one-tenth the strength of the 1921 event, left Quebec in the dark for nine hours after overloading the regional grid. In each of these cases, the damage was directly proportional to humanity’s reliance on advanced technology—more grounded electronics, more risk.

    When another big one heads our way, as it could at any time, existing imaging technology will offer one or two days’ notice. But we won’t understand the true threat level until the cloud reaches the Deep Space Climate Observatory, a satellite about a million miles from Earth. It has instruments that analyze the speed and polarity of incoming solar particles. If a cloud’s magnetic orientation is dangerous, this $340 million piece of equipment will buy humanity—with its 7.2 billion cell phones, 1.5 billion automobiles, and 28,000 commercial aircraft—at most one hour of warning before impact.

But, Docent, you say, we already know all of this. And you would be right. But these coronal mass ejections typically occur when there is a lot of sunspot activity; and that, the article goes on to explain, has a lot to do with the Sun's magnetic field. For instance, during a solar cycle, sunspot activity increases until the Sun's magnetic field flips. And that takes the article to the research by Scott McIntosh, an astrophysicist who serves as deputy director of the US National Center for Atmospheric Research.

    His grand unified theory, developed over a decade, goes something like this: Every 11 years, when the sun’s polarity flips, a magnetic band forms near each pole, wrapped around the circumference of the star. These bands exist for a couple of decades, slowly migrating toward the equator, where they meet in mutual destruction. At any given time, there are usually two oppositely charged bands in each hemisphere. They counteract each other, which promotes relative calm at the surface. But magnetic bands don’t all live to be the same age. Some reach what McIntosh calls “the terminator” with unusual speed. When this happens, the younger bands are left alone for a few years, without the moderating influence of the older bands, and they have a chance to raise hell.

    McIntosh and his colleague Mausumi Dikpati believe that terminator timing is the key to forecasting sunspots—and, by extension, coronal mass ejections. The faster one set of bands dies out, the more dramatic the next cycle will be.

    The most recent terminator, their data suggests, happened on December 13, 2021. In the days that followed, magnetic activity near the sun’s equator dissipated (signaling the death of one set of bands) while the number of sunspots at midlatitude rapidly doubled (signaling the solo reign of the remaining bands). Because this terminator arrived slightly sooner than expected, McIntosh predicts above-average activity for the current solar cycle, peaking at around 190 sunspots.

The article also discusses what we could expect if something like the Carrington Event were to happen again:

     The plasma will begin to flood Earth’s ionosphere, and the electron bombardment will cause high-frequency radio to go dark. GPS signals, which are transmitted via radio waves, will fade with it. Cell phone reception zones will shrink; your location bubble on Google Maps will expand. As the atmosphere heats up, it will swell, and satellites will drag, veer off course, and risk collision with each other and space debris. Some will fall out of orbit entirely. Most new satellites are equipped to endure some solar radiation, but in a strong enough storm, even the fanciest circuit board can fry. When navigation and communication systems fail, the commercial airline fleet—about 10,000 planes in the sky at any given time—will attempt a simultaneous grounding. Pilots will eyeball themselves into a flight pattern while air traffic controllers use light signals to guide the planes in. Those living near military installations may see government aircraft scrambling overhead; when radar systems jam, nuclear defense protocols activate.

    Through a weird and nonintuitive property of electromagnetism, the electricity coursing through the atmosphere will begin to induce currents at Earth’s surface. As those currents race through the crust, they will seek the path of least resistance. In regions with resistive rock (in the US, especially the Pacific Northwest, Great Lakes, and Eastern Seaboard), the most convenient route is upward, through the electrical grid.

    The weakest points in the grid are its intermediaries—machines called transformers, which take low-voltage current from a power plant, convert it to a higher voltage for cheap and efficient transport, and convert it back down again so that it can be piped safely to your wall outlets. The largest transformers, numbering around 2,000 in the United States, are firmly anchored into the ground, using Earth’s crust as a sink for excess voltage. But during a geomagnetic storm, that sink becomes a source. Most transformers are only built to handle alternating current, so storm-induced direct current can cause them to overheat, melt, and even ignite. As one might expect, old transformers are at higher risk of failure. The average American transformer is 40 years old, pushed beyond its intended lifespan.

    Modeling how the grid would fail during another Carrington-class storm is no easy task. The features of individual transformers—age, configuration, location—are typically considered trade secrets. Metatech, an engineering firm frequently contracted by the US government, offers one of the more dire estimates. It finds that a severe storm, on par with events in 1859 or 1921, could destroy 365 high-voltage transformers across the country—about one-fifth of those in operation. States along the East Coast could see transformer failure rates ranging from 24 percent (Maine) to 97 percent (New Hampshire). Grid failure on this scale would leave at least 130 million people in the dark. But the exact number of fried transformers may matter less than their location. In 2014, The Wall Street Journal reported findings from an unreleased Federal Energy Regulatory Commission report on grid security: If just nine transformers were to blow out in the wrong places, it found, the country could experience coast-to-coast outages for months.

You might think that I've reproduced most the article, but I haven't and I encourage you to read the whole thing including how easily and relatively inexpensively the grid could be hardened to prevent outages in the event of a solar storm.  

• Related: "Wild solar weather is causing satellites to plummet from orbit."--Daily Timewaster. An article on how in late 2021, the ESA noticed that satellites had started to sink toward the atmosphere at a rate almost 10 times normal, going from 2.5 kilometers per year to 20 kilometers per year. 

Scientists know that the intensity of this drag depends on solar activity — the amount of solar wind spewed by the sun, which varies depending on the 11-year solar cycle. The last cycle, which officially ended in December 2019, was rather sleepy, with a below-average number of monthly sunspots and a prolonged minimum of barely any activity. But since last fall, the star has been waking up, spewing more and more solar wind and generating sunspots, solar flares and coronal mass ejections at a growing rate. And the Earth's upper atmosphere has felt the effects.

This isn't a major problem, but it does mean that a satellite has to burn additional fuel to maintain altitude and, therefore, shortens the life of the satellite. I would expect, however, that a coronal mass ejection could actually punch satellites down must faster.  

• "It’s All Coming Down…"--Modern Survival Blog. The author lays out a TEOTWAWKI scenario based on runaway inflation causing supply chain collapses as diesel fuel, oil, and diesel exhaust fluid (DEF) becomes too expensive for truck operators. An interesting look at how possible cascading effects could cause a widespread economic collapse and lawlessness.
• Related: "Could the Railroad Industry Go Completely Off the Track?"--PJ Media. According to this article, we could see a national railway strike over issues of pay (the proposed pay hike is much less than inflation) and overwork (the latter so bad, that railroads have actually had to resort to advertising for jobs; jobs that used to be so coveted that you had to know someone to even be considered). The parties have been negotiation, according to the article. But...

The current negotiations are nearing an impasse, according to employees. The National Mediation Board (NMB) convened in January and required the parties to come to Washington, D.C. to meet, which is unusual. On June 17, 2022, the NMB released the parties from statutorily mandated mediation. The National Carriers Conference Committee (NCCC) and the 12 unions remain without a contract for the members to vote on. The required 30-day cooling-off period started on June 18, 2022. At the end of the cooling-off period, the union members will vote to authorize their bargaining committee to call a strike.

 The article continues:

    The parties anticipate that President Biden will establish a Presidential Emergency Board (PEB) in the next 30 days. The PEB is a last-ditch attempt to prevent a strike. The unions declined binding arbitration in order to settle the contract disputes, and it will be up to the PEB to hand the 115,000 employees a contract to vote on. The board has 30 days to develop the offering, and employees would vote on it in the 30 days that follow.

    This situation is unlike the air traffic controllers in 1981 or the railroads when there was a strike in 1992. There is no way for the government to force an agreement by threatening to fire striking employees. Open railroad jobs no longer have a line of willing applicants. Employees say that management cannot pick up the slack as they have in the smaller strike in Canada.

    If the employees vote down the PEB’s contract, management may try to impose their offering unilaterally. At this point, the union can strike if the members authorize their representatives. This situation would put Democrats in a precarious position. The only way the rail workers can be compelled to return to work is through an act of Congress or an order to return from President Biden.

    That would require a Democratic majority in Congress or the Democrat president to overrule the will of union members. ...

• Related: "Every single nation is getting pounded down, because of globalist extra-national interests." Peter Grant at Bayou Renaissance Man mentions one of his recent posts where he outlines why he doesn't believe the current economic and supply chain chaos was planned before moving on to a post by Aesop at the Raconteur Report reaching essentially the same conclusion, and then adding some additional data points. And be sure to watch the embedded Tucker Carlson video about the Uniparty in Washington, D.C., and how Republican politicians across the nation seem to be aiding and abetting Biden. The next step will be an American Caesar. As Grant points out, "It's more clear every day that we're dealing with a Uniparty - an alliance of politicians from both sides of the political aisle, whose aim is to subject us to their whims and laws and deprive us of our freedom."
• Not The Bee reports on a lefty urging his fellow pro-abortion protesters upset about the Dobbs decision to look to invade rural areas rather than attack targets in urban centers. The guy's post:

    The radical Christians are found in the rural areas. Their towns are defenseless, they have almost no cops and their firemen are volunteers. They have to borrow cops and firemen from neighboring jurisdictions miles away in order to handle anything big. And they think they're safe out there. Forget burning cities, cities are on our sides. It's time for rural areas to feel the heat.

    You show up 100 deep in every rural town in a 50 mile radius intent on revolution, you'll crash their system and make them pay.

    And if you all think I'm kidding, I'm dead serious. This was caused by backward ass rural conservatives operating out of a Christianized worldview (even if theyre not Christian, they're heavily influenced by it), they were the ones who voted for Trump in '16; those disillusioned redneck/white trash/blue collar (to quote a country song) types who flipped massively for the GOP. Punish them. Punish their towns. They say "BLM burned the cities to the ground, " I say "let them see firsthand what it's like when a community is truly burned to the ground. They want a civil war? They should have been careful what they asked and voted for."

    I'm not the organizing type. But maybe someone who is can organize that. Start in a certain state in the Midwest often called "the south's middle finger to America." It's literally what the south would've looked like if it wasn't reconstructed.

The author of the Not The Bee post took a mocking tone, convinced that the rural inhabitants would easily handle the situation. I don't have as much confidence because such "peaceful protests" are probably not going to be advertised before hand so they will have the element of surprise; and of the people in such a town only a handful, at best, have the ruthlessness to actually take action, especially since they will be facing state and federal charges--we saw this with the BLM/Antifa riots and there is no reason to believe that it would not occur under a Democrat president. And, so, 100 determined leftist attackers might be more than even a well armed community could handle. By way of example, I would direct my readers' attention to the Haun's Mill Massacre where a sudden attack--even though the people there were aware of the potential danger--left no time for any sort of organized defense. Even Poncho Villas' attack on Columbus, New Mexico, in 1916, where approximately 350 troops were stationed and able to quickly mount a defense, resulted in 18 killed on the American side (10 of which were civilians) and several houses and commercial buildings being looted and destroyed.

    That said, and as I discuss below, we are not seeing anywhere near the size and violence of protests following the death of George Floyd, which suggests to me that these protests are not going to have the staying power. Besides, with Democrats facing a pummeling at the polls this fall, I'm sure that the DNC and powerful Democrats are not providing the support that undoubtedly flowed to BLM and Antifa in the runup to the 2020 presidential election. 

VIDEO: "Hoes Mad"--Paul Joseph Watson (7 min.)

Warning: Since he includes video segments of leftists being leftists, this is NSFW.

News & Headlines:

• And the crazies come out. Umair Haque, writing at Eudaimonia and Co (part of Medium) claims that "The End of Roe Is a Bullet to the Heart of American Democracy," even though the decision expressly overturned a decision made by 9 white guys and returned it to the states where it will actually be decided by democratic methods. Hack writes:

    Today is one of the darkest days in American history. The end of Roe v Wade, which is the decision that legalized women’s reproductive healthcare rights in America, aka “abortion.”

    A Supreme Court made up of fanatics and lunatics, whose vision is a fascist theocracy, has, in one fell swoop, eviscerated American democracy. Five people have taken the most basic of rights away from 330 million. 70%, by some counts, 80%, of Americans don’t want this. This is how a democracy ends.

    Let me put in context just how incredibly dark this day really is. It’s one of the darkest in modern history, period. I can’t think of another example, certainly not in the developed world, where such fundamental rights, and so many of them, have been lost, for so many, in one fell swoop.

He goes on to suggest that because of this ruling, a complete stranger sitting the next table over in a bar, could arrest a woman if he (no she, apparently, would do it) overheard the woman discussing having an abortion. He also asserts that some states will surveille women to make sure they can't leave that state to get an abortion, suggesting that these state could even set up checkpoints at border crossings. 

This is the end of abortion. It’s also the end of democracy. How so? Well, think about the examples above. They are about to become true. But what is really happening in them? Basic rights no longer exist. Privacy. Expression. Association. Movement. The most basic rights of all — poof, gone. Not just for women. For everyone, because, well, anyone can “aid and abet” a woman.

But that isn't all. He continues:

Next to fall? All the cases alongside Roe, which guaranteed rights for anyone in any way outside theocratic-fascist lines. Gay rights, rights to gay marriage, equality, representation. Rights to contraception. And then, of course, “interracial” rights — the return of segregation. 

I am surprised that he didn't add something about fire and brimstone coming down from the skies, rivers and seas boiling, forty years of darkness, earthquakes, volcanoes, human sacrifice, and dogs and cats living together. As if that isn't enough, the editor appended some additional comments expressing her thoughts as a woman:

    I don’t think men understand how it feels. To know that the government is inside your body. To know that your body is a political battleground, that is no longer your own. It is a violation. It is violent. And that is the point. To punish women for the “sin” of being sexually active. To put women in their place, to remind us that our bodies aren’t ours. They belong to men. To externalise costs to women, because that is what patriarchy is built on. So to me, I see the inaction that came after Roe, the way both left and right use us as pawns in a political game, as proof of just how much patriarchy hates women. And that’s how I really feel. I feel hated right now.

    And I am furious. I am white hot with rage. I am furious at the far right, who dehumanise us and hate us. I am furious at the Dems, who did not care enough about us to codify Roe when they had the chance. I am furious at the inaction. To me it says: women weren’t worth the fight. I am furious that I have to explain to people that they won’t stop at abortion, that contraception is next, that America is going to become a country, save for a few liberal havens, where women are forced to become pregnant and give birth. Like chattel. That’s what we are now. Again.

Men don't know what it is like to have the government control their bodies? Yeah, right. Selective service. Covid masking and vaccinations. TSA searches. And chattel? I thought the whole purpose of family law courts was to make men chattel. Men are forced to work to support their ex-wife with it being very difficult to reduce support payments even if the man loses a job or otherwise sees his gross income decline.

    But it isn't just that author, of course. Just The News reports that "[i]ndividuals have been calling on social media for the assassination of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas after he issued a separate concurring opinion on Friday in a ruling that struck down Roe v. Wade." It adds that "[a]bortion activists have also published his home address, and others have called to burn down the Supreme Court." The Blaze reports on a "Socialist Reddit group posts home addresses of Supreme Court justices, discusses hunting them down at their churches. TikTok user hint at using pipe bombs in retaliation to Roe v. Wade reversal." The Life Choices Christian crisis center for pregnant women in Longmont, Colorado, was torched by one or more pro-abortion terrorists. 

    Notwithstanding all of this, we haven't seen the types of protests and riots that followed after George Floyd died of a drug overdose while in police custody. The unlimited access to abortion that the left wants has never been all that popular in the United States (although a total ban on abortion hasn't either) and I suspect that most people have no problem with this being decided on a state-by-state basis. I thought we would see much more in the way of protests--especially given how long the pro-abortion crowd had to prepare between the leak of the draft opinion and the final opinion that was released. That we haven't is probably a strong hint on how unpopular are the left's current demands for abortion (for instance, California allows it up to birth and, actually, right after birth).

• "At least 22 'students' dead in South African nightclub while 'celebrating end of exams': Police probe deaths at venue in southern township amid claims victims were 'poisoned'." Per the article, local media reported that "Bodies are lying strewn across tables, chairs and on the floor; with no obvious signs of injury".  
• We hear a lot of leftist trot out the old, tired argument that mass shootings are a uniquely American thing. We know its not true, and when pressed, leftist will qualify their comment, restricting it to developed countries. But even with that qualification, it still isn't true, as the June 24, 2022, attack on a gay nightclub in Oslo, Norway, showed. That attack left two dead and 20 more injured. As is usually the case, the shooter was already known to the police. The shooter was identified as Zaniar Matapour, an Iranian refugee. "The Norwegian Police Security Service (PST) investigated Matapour just a month ago, but decided he was 'not an imminent threat', Norwegian national broadcaster VG reported." 

    A secondary school dropout with a long history of mental health issues, Matapour was sentenced to ten months in prison as a teen after he was tied to a stabbing at a school prom.

    He was acquitted by the Court of Appeal, according to court documents reviewed by Norwegian outlet NettaVisen. 

    Matapour's involvement in serious crime did not end there, with the Oslo terror suspect charged with attempted murder and possession of a firearm in 2019.

    He was again released after a court appeal.

Authorities are treating the attack as an act of Islamic terrorism. Per the BBC, "Two weapons were retrieved at the crime scene by police, one of them a fully automatic gun." Strange how gun control laws didn't stop this. However, a few governments are beginning to catch on to the fact that arming law-abiding citizens can be a benefit: "Nigeria's Zamfara state will start issuing licences to individuals to carry guns to defend themselves against armed gangs of kidnappers causing havoc in the country's northwest, the state's commissioner for information said on Sunday," reports U.S. News. Its a small step with only 500 licenses being authorized, but it is a start.

    The state also banned the use of motorcyles and selling of petrol in three districts and one emirate, in areas which are the most affected by banditry, Dosara said. The state is divided into emirates and the emirates into districts.

    "Anybody found riding motorbike within the areas is considered as bandits and security agencies are thereby directed to shoot such persons at sight," said Dosara.

• You will own nothing and be happy: "Bezos-Funded Real Estate Investment Platform Acquires $23 Million In Rental Homes." The article begins: "As demand for fractional real estate investing grows, Jeff Bezos-backed Arrived Homes, which specializes in single family rentals, is ramping up acquisitions." After detailing the companies portfolio, which is still quite modest, it explains how it works:

    The way the company works is it purchases single family rental homes and then allows investors to view the homes on their website. If the investor wants, they can invest in the home by purchasing a share of it, with a minimum investment of $100.

    The company handles property management, and the investors receive their share of the rental income, as well as wait for the property’s value to appreciate over time.

    After five to seven years, the property will be sold, and the equity and profits from the sale are divided up among the shareholders.

    Investors have been showing increasing interest in single family homes as home prices have skyrocketed, and rents rose an average of 16.4% in the last 12 months, and as much as 32% in cities like Miami over 12 months.

    Now with higher interest rates entering the mix, home ownership is even more unaffordable, forcing even more people to rent, and further increasing the cost of rentals.

• "China’s Rise Will Be Short-Lived" by Peter Zeihan, Barrons. Another demographics related article:

    The Brits were the first to industrialize, and since they were literally inventing industrialization as they went, the process took seven generations. The Germans came after, but they learned from the Brits, and so completed the process in four. The Koreans, who didn’t begin until 1953, did it in two. The later the start, the more paved the road to industrialization, the faster and easier the journey. China, not beginning until after one Richard M. Nixon traveled to Beijing to visit one Mao Zedong, has done it in one. 

    There is more to industrialization than “merely” steel and rail and electricity and oil and mass transport options. There are also cities. Industrialization means farmers become more productive, pushing people into the cities, while simultaneously there are rafts of infrastructure and industrial plants to construct and operate, which pull people in. On the farms, kids are free labor. In town, children are expensive conversation pieces. Adults aren’t stupid, so urban dwellers have fewer kids. It happened to Britain and to Germany and to Korea and to…China. 

    The key to understanding China’s success in these past few decades as well as its fall in the next few is this intersection of industrialization and urbanization. Cramming two centuries of development into 40 years means China crammed two centuries of growth into that same 40 years. Of course China’s growth has been shockingly fast—but that can only be done once. Similarly, advancing from preindustrial farms to postindustrial condos pours all a society’s energy into industrial development. Great for growth, but it leaves exactly zero space (or time) for children.

    It isn’t that other factors play no role. That’d be a silly position to take. Cultural unity, a work ethic that makes Protestants seem lazy in comparison, a government that is, shall we say, involved with managing the minutiae of people’s lives. It factors in. It all factors in. But I don’t care how unified and hardworking or coordinated a population is if the country in question has…

    …no…

    …people.

    A replacement birthrate is 2.1 children per woman. China slipped below that in the 1990s. Birthrates in Beijing and Shanghai are now the lowest in the world. China’s labor force and overall population peaked in the 2010s, heralding the fastest increases in labor costs in the world. Ever. The average Chinese citizen aged past the average American citizen sometime around 2018. Recent analysis by the South China Morning Post of data from the Chinese census authority suggests China’s population will be half the size in 2050 compared to today. 

    It’s (far) worse than it sounds. Nearly all of China’s 600 million-strong population growth since 1970 isn’t from more births, but from longer lifespans and fewer deaths. Any disruptions in the flows of foods and fuels that enable modernity will earn the Chinese another “world’s best” title; Not only is China the fastest-aging population in human history, soon it will also be the fastest-collapsing.

    Even that assumes nothing else goes even a little bit wrong. 

• This week's long read: "A New Theory of Western Civilization" by Judith Shulevitz, The Atlantic. This is a review of the book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous, by Joseph Henrich. Henrich is known due to research by him and fellow researchers that showed an incredible bias in psychological and sociology research:

In the run-up to writing the book, Henrich and two colleagues did a literature review of experimental psychology and found that 96 percent of subjects enlisted in the research came from northern Europe, North America, or Australia. About 70 percent of those were American undergraduates. Blinded by this kind of myopia, many Westerners assume that what’s good or bad for them is good or bad for everyone else.

But beyond that, he also discovered that WEIRD (Western, educated, industrialized, rich, democratic) peoples are actually psychological and sociological outliers. And that led him to wonder if there are cultural traits that would explain why WEIRD cultures suddenly shot past all other cultures in terms of technological and economic advancements ... and wealth. As the article points out, "Henrich’s ambition is tricky: to account for Western distinctiveness while undercutting Western arrogance." That is, he had to make his case without relying on hereditary or racial differences. Consequently, while Jerod Diamond focused on "guns, germs, and steel" to explain Western success, Henrich focuses instead on cultural traits. Out of his analysis came the idea that perhaps what made WEIRDs so different was rooted in Catholic family policies that banned polygamy and consanguineous marriage, and shifted the Western cultural focus from the extended family or tribe as is the case among other peoples.

Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.

But this is not all: 

Forced to find Christian partners, Christians left their communities. Christianity’s insistence on monogamy broke extended households into nuclear families. The Church uprooted horizontal, relational identity, replacing it with a vertical identity oriented toward the institution itself. The Church was stern about its marital policies. Violations were punished by withholding Communion, excommunicating, and denying inheritances to offspring who could now be deemed “illegitimate.” Formerly, property almost always went to family members. The idea now took hold that it could go elsewhere. At the same time, the Church urged the wealthy to ensure their place in heaven by bequeathing their money to the poor—that is, to the Church, benefactor to the needy. In so doing, “the Church’s MFP [Marriage and Family Program] was both taking out its main rival for people’s loyalty and creating a revenue stream,” Henrich writes. The Church, thus enriched, spread across the globe.

It's a long article but an interesting read.

• Another long read: "Europe’s Death Rattle: Part I" by John Waters (h/t WRSA). This is a long look at demographics in Europe and Africa and the disfunction of Western aid to Africa. Or, as Waters sums up this piece, "In the culmination of a longtime plan, a global calamity of food scarcity, due to Covid measures and 'sanctions', will soon cause record numbers of mainly African migrants to enter Europe seeking food." An excerpt:

    Much of our attempting to deal with the effects of global poverty takes the form of a kind of guilt-displacement, whereby the objective often looks less like the alleviation of the suffering of the poor than the dispersing of guilt in those apparently seeking a solution. The FUGAP approach may be well-suited to emergency situations, but is not a panacea for Africa’s more workaday ills.

    The latest manifestation of these syndromes takes a new and more immediate form: the insistence from European goverments and the European Union that migrants fleeing from Africa to their continent must be welcomed and accommodated, often without the consent of the peoples among whom they are destined to arrive  — indeed, even at the expense of those people and their own needs. In a variant on the FUGAP method, the people of Europe are told we must open our borders and shut our mouths. Clerics exhort us that ‘Jesus was a refugee,’ and speak piously about ‘embracing the Other,’ as though there was no difference between a single ‘other’ and a hundred or a million. The idea that the world operates at different moral speeds, but that these differentials can be disposed of with the odd handful of coins, has mutated and metamorphosed, nowadays taking the form of a non-negotiable requirement for Europeans to surrender their homelands at the behest of their own debased elites, who themselves appear to imagine they can remain insulated from the consequences of their ‘compassion.’

    The government of my own country, Ireland, has for two decades been stealthily importing significant numbers of migrants (increasingly from Africa) to comply with UN and EU directives that nobody was given an opportunity to discuss and which the media and churches appear to have been enlisted and incentivised to support by, firstly, a policy of evasions and public silencing, and latterly providing covering fire that targets anyone who dares question what’s happening as ‘racist.’ At roughly one-fifth, the (officially admitted) proportion of non-natives living in Ireland now is, after twenty years of a largely stealthily organised influx, more or less equivalent to the proportion of immigrants who have settled in the UK in sixty years of the same approach. 

    Christians, who stand to be swamped within a couple of generations by incoming Muslims, are told — usually by atheists— that it is ‘unChristian’ to be concerned about such a question. Is there anything especially urgent or vital, we hear fellow Europeans ask, about European survival, or the survival of its ‘white’ population?  It need hardly be noted that these questions are usually asked by people with conspicuously pale faces but little understanding of how the culture they take for granted actually works. 

The author contends that it didn't have to be this way--that Africans could do well if they were given a proper boost up--but that aid is mismanaged and focuses around, to borrow a phrase, giving Africans a fish today rather than teaching them how to fish. This, the author suggests, is by design as it provides a ready supply of cheap labor for Europe while making Africa easily exploitable for its natural resources. 

In part 2 of his article, Waters continues his analysis including how charges of racism is being used to tamp down dissent:

    Of course, the obvious risks and dangers of this are fudged and camouflaged by a narrative that reduces things to a simplistic and malevolent racial hypothesis, using the culturally immobilising weapons of prejudicial ideological categories: ‘black’ Africans versus ‘white’ Europeans. The idea is put about that the sole factor prompting the escalating alarm at these drifts on the part of whole sections of every European population is an antagonism towards people of a different skin colour and/or ethnicity. Those who seek to point out that, self-evidently, the indigenous population of Europe is being ‘replaced’ from the ‘developing world’ (for which read ‘the undeveloping world’) are accused of ‘racism’, a charge that resonates jarringly with both the residual ‘compassion’ of Western cultures and the guilt that underlies it. In reality, of course, the issue of race is but a superficial manifestation of a process that has a far deeper and more ominous meaning: the cultural supplanting of the greatest civilisation the world has known, more or less randomly, from the population of an undeveloping culture, whence people cross into Europe imagining that they can immediately acquire, as though by magic, the inheritance, personalities and auras of Western civilisation. This, of course, is a fallacy of quite an extreme kind, for the integration of such outsiders into the Old Continent can be beneficial only up to an indeterminate point, which will be attained by osmosis without any indication that this has occurred, and after which the culture of Europe will descend into an abyss, in which it will become not a second Africa, or a second Pakistan — and still less a ‘New Europe’ — but a nothing culture comprising nihilism, degeneracy and anomie. Those who say, ‘If you import the Third World, you get the Third World’ are wrong: If you import the Third World you destroy both the Third World countries — from which you will have sucked the human energy and cultural memory — and eventually also the cultures of ‘host’ countries into which these vast tranches of humanity are being channelled. The continent of what was previously ‘Europe’ will remain, and that name may be preserved over the door, but the fabric of European civilisation will have corroded and dissolved, to be replaced by something else that we are unable to imagine in advance of its manifestation. Although unlikely, it is theoretically possible that this culture or civilisation might in time prove to be an improvement on that which, debased and intimidated, now prevails on the Old Continent. This is so because Europe has indisputably undergone some radical degeneration in the past half-century or thereabouts, though it is ominously interesting that those most to blame for this degeneration are more or less conterminous with those who advocate mass inward migration, who now add the risk of imposed undevelopment to their crimes against Europe. But whatever it may be, what will emerge will not be Europe in any sense referential to the Europe of Erasmus, Joyce, Proust, Yeats and Havel, but something new, or perhaps, as already noted, a ‘new nothing’.

    And here is the core point: This will have occurred without any consultation or conversation having occurred between those promoting this agenda of replacement and the vast majorities of the indigenous peoples of the Old Continent — the home of democracy, liberty and human rights. 

    The chief instrument of this ruse is the use of the spell-word ‘racism’ to intimidate the indigenous populations of Europe into silence in the face of their own obliteration. In this process, the word is used as a cultural cattle-prod to humiliate and punish those who dissent or protest, isolating them from their fellows as examples of nefarious defenders of past injustice and wrongdoing, and purported continuing harmful discrimination. It is an objectively astonishing thing that the fear of being sanctioned with this word is sufficient to outweigh even the inevitable consequences, which include the loss of just about everything Europe has achieved, promised and stood for, as well as the personal cost, which amounts to the existential and metaphysical homelessness of the successors of each European currently answering to that categorisation. 

Bombs & Bants (Streamed 6/22/2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bombs and Bants Live! Ep 41" (42 min.)

Note that there were some audio issues at the beginning, so you will need to skip to about the 4 minute mark.

Review: African Safari Pith Helmet

I recently purchased an African Safari Pith Helmet from the Village Hat Shop for $49.95. Because I chose the slowest shipping method, there was no charge for shipping. It was three days before the helmet shipped and then it took another 4 or 5 days to arrive, which was fine. They offer faster shipping, at a price, if you prefer. 

    The price is actually pretty good on this item. I had intended to get one last summer, but the only seller that had them in stock was charging about twice as much. This year that seller was out of stock and a search brought up the Village Hat Shop. Obviously at this price, it is not a U.S. made item, but this and all the other pith helmets in stock were made in Vietnam. But the helmets I was looking at last year were also produced in Vietnam. 

    I would note that the Village Hat Shop sells different types of pith helmets, including the style issued to British troops during the colonial period, with colors (depending on the style) in either khaki or white. I went with a basic African Safari version because it wasn't as tall as the British pith helmet and had a broader brim, but also featured the green lining unlike some of the other styles of pith helmet. 

    So, the first thing to note about this helmet is that it is an actual pith helmet and not a reproduction "jungle hat" or some such made of cloth covered plastic and lacking the pith wood. That means that the hat is intended to be soaked in water so the wood will absorb water. The idea behind these helmets is to take advantage of evaporative cooling. That is, as the helmet heats from the sun and from your body heat, the warmer water evaporates leaving the cooler water molecules behind and lowering the temperature in the helmet and keeping you cool. This is assisted by the fact that the helmet has webbing to keep it up off your head to allow air to circulate; and by venting holes on the sides of the helmet and at the top of the helmet. Obviously, it works much better if there is some air movement and, as I discovered, even a slight breeze made a wonderful difference over dead air.

    The instructions on the web site indicate that the helmet should be inverted and placed in a bucket of water to absorb the water through the top (outside) of the helmet, and specifically warns against trying to fill the helmet from the inside. The reasons for this, I would suppose, is that it provides for better absorption of water; there are large holes in the sides of the helmets for circulating air, and so if you try just dumping water into the helmet, it is just going to run out anyway, before it has a chance to soak up any of the water. 

    I let mine soak for about 20 or 30 minutes before using it for a long walk, but I think that it really needed a longer period as the water seems to have fully evaporated after about 30 minutes or so.

    

    One of the nice features with this particular model is that it featured green colored lining which, as you may know, is much easier on the eyes in bright light (thus the "green rooms" used by actors to give them a break from bright stage lights). I've seen some pith helmets issued with tan or grey linings which are not going to be as easy on the eyes if there is a lot of glare. 

    You can also see in the photograph above the interior webbing intended to keep the helmet perched above your head and aid with air circulation. On each side you can see two air holes with aluminum grommets to let air in, and then an aluminum piece at the top where are the vents to allow air out. The head strap/sweat band is adjustable somewhat, using a piece of velcro tab. 

    The chin strap was a little disappointing. The website describes it as a composite leather, but it looks like a thin strip of vinyl or Naugahyde. I haven't tried it. The web site calls it decorative, but the buckle is serviceable, so I might give it a try when in the desert where it is typically windier than in town. 

    Going around the helmet so you can view it from all sides:

    As you can see, it seems pretty well put together.

    I tested it on a recent weekend. We've been having unusually cool weather this month, so temperatures were only in the upper 70s. The hat worked well for about 30 minutes, with the evaporative cooling in a brief but brisk breeze making me wonder about taking it off because my head got so cold. But after the water had evaporated, it basically turned into a normal sunhat, albeit with a bit better air circulation. As I mentioned above, I think that soaking it longer initially might help. I may also try the initial soak and then periodically stop and splash some water into the interior to see if that might help refill the hat, so to speak.

    I didn't see any discoloration in the fabric after soaking and using the hat. I'm sure that if I were using natural sources of water there would be some natural discoloration develop. 

    In conclusion, the helmet seems of good quality for the price and works as intended. Although it may not be the height of fashion, it was originally intended as a piece of practical headwear and that is my intention with using it.

The Docent's Memo (6/20/2022)

 

VIDEO: "The Legendary 7N6 Poison bullet. How deadly is Russia's Military Ammo?" Garand Thumb (14 min.). The fragmentation was pretty good--very little neck until it started, either. The bullet sharply curved in all their tests such that it arced out of the first block of gel so it was impossible to get a good measure of its penetration. Although the ATF classified it as an armor piercing round, Garand Thumb's test shows that it is not capable of piercing Level III rifle armor.

VIDEO: "Personal Protection: .30 Super Carry Evaluation"--Paul Harrell (32 min.)

It didn't perform very well in the meat target compared to 9 mm.

Shooting & Self-Defense:

• "11 Research Based Concealed Carry Tips From Criminal Video Analysis"--Tier Three Tactical. Just the top two tips for those defenders that successfully engaged a bad guy:

Obscured Draw 

    This was a key predictor of success in any engagement.  In 73% of the engagements the good guy, hid his draw from the bad guy(s).  This also flies in the face of conventional wisdom, where we think of the good guy racing to draw his gun, and engage the bad guys in clear view.

And: 

 

Delayed Draw 

    This was closely associated with the obscured draw, and likewise, was present in nearly all successful engagements, with the exception of uniformed police officers.

    There were 53% of scenarios where the good guy saw the threat, waited, then delayed his draw.  Often times they delayed their draw, and also obscured it as well.

    In every successful scenario the good guys, delayed, and obscured their draw.

• "5 Tips: How to Stay Safe While Pumping Gas." The five tips, which are discussed in more detail in the article, are:

1. Do Not Leave Your Car Running
2. Keep Your Children Locked in the Car
3. Stay Off Your Cell Phone
4. Be Alert, Constantly Scanning Your Surroundings
5. Pump Gas at a Time & Place of Your Choosing

• "Can Revolvers Be Used for Self-Defense? Yes, But No" by Kat Ainsworth. The author goes through some of the standard argument against a revolver and offers some damned-by-faint-praise rebuttals before concluding that it really is up to the person and with what they are comfortable. But then she adds this caveat: 

A word on snubby revolvers:

    No, they aren’t a great idea for concealed carry. They might have a smaller profile thanks to their super short barrels, but that doesn’t make them a good idea for self-defense. This is doubly true for snubbies that are extremely lightweight. That’s a case where it’s accurate to say they’re harder to control. It isn’t that it cannot be done, it’s more an issue of why would you make it harder than necessary? And why make it harder on your hands than need be (yes, recoil really can be punishing, especially to your thumb joints and wrists).

I, on the other hand, believe that a snubby is a perfectly good choice for concealed carry for most people, even if I wouldn't recommend it as a firearm to use to learn how to shoot. Recoil control is mostly an issue of not going the "bigger is better" route and instead of stoking it with .357 Magnum loads, stick to .38 Special (the .38 Special models are less expensive, anyway). In fact, as Greg Ellifritz and others have discussed, you can drop the recoil even more while maintaining performance by using wadcutter loads. You can also get better control over recoil with better grips. Factory grips are generally not all that good. Having that third finger (the pinky finger) on the grip really helps.

• For you Glock 43 users, Shield Arms has released a 9-round magazine for the weapon (product announcement here; video review here).
• Do you carry at church? "A 71-year-old man fatally shot two elderly people and wounded a third with a handgun during a potluck dinner at an Alabama church where he occasionally attended services, police said Friday." 
• "Customizing My Stoeger Coach Gun For Cowboy Action Competition." The author started out with the Supreme model with double-triggers and a bead sight. The main problems he identified was that it was hard to open, the shells didn't just "fall out" like other competitors' weapons, and the safety automatically engaged when the action was opened. The first thing he did was shorten the lock impeller so it didn't automatically engage the safety. At the same time he shortened the lock impeller spring to make it easier to open the action. He also polished the mating surfaces so that it would open easier. Turning to the barrel, he enlarged the chambers using a Dremel and sandpaper until the shells simply fell out; and chamfered the chamber mouth to make it easier to insert the shells. He obviously goes into more detail in his article and includes photographs. He concludes with a quick review:

    This piece isn’t intended to be a gun review in the classic sense of a review, especially since there is already a Stoeger Coach Gun review on TTAG. But I will offer a few review-type comments about this shotgun.

    It is a simple gun. Broken down, it will fit in a backpack. The 20 inch barrels are the longest component when broken down. Overall, it is 36.5 inches long.

    Fit and finish are nice and consistent with, or a little better than, what I expected for the price point. It’s easy to load and shoot and would be a good first shotgun for someone who doesn’t know much about loading and operating a pump or semi-auto.

    It is easy to work on, as I have described above. I’ve heard that repair parts can be hard to come by, but I haven’t had to deal with that aspect of it yet. I’ve been told that competition guns will all break at some point, usually in the middle of a match, so I’m sure I’ll be looking for parts eventually. Or I will have to buy a new one and start the slicking up process all over.

    This is a great shotgun for getting started in cowboy action shooting. I have no buyer regrets and will likely get another at some point in the future as a backup. I also hope to try it out at a local skeet range sometime before dove season starts this fall so that I can decide whether it is as good a hunting gun as it is a cowboy gun. But, when I do, I’ll be sure to have a range of shotshells handy and a backup gun just in case.

• "Gun Review: Ruger Mini Thirty Rifle in 7.62x39mm." 

The first thing you’ll notice about the Mini Thirty is its wood stock. It gives it a more docile appearance like grandpa’s old Savage 99. Although it’s functionally no different than any other semiautomatic rifle out there, it is far less ‘scary’ to the uninformed and uneducated masses on sight. Which may have something to do with why the Mini Thirty and its Mini-14 little brother have been excluded from past “assault weapons” bans.

• "The Heckler & Koch Volkspistole" by Will Dabbs, MD, American Handgunner. This is a 2017 article reviewing the HK's VP9, the people's pistol. The VP9 is, in many respects, similar to the P30:

    The latest HK combat pistol does not represent groundbreaking new technology. The HK Volkspistole is rather simply a perfected amalgam of proven engineering concepts. Volkspistole is German for “People’s Pistol.” After decades of listening to American gun nerds gripe about “HK doesn’t really make anything for civilian shooters” — they finally built a gun for us.

    The operating system has as its genesis the inimitable Browning Hi-Power. The last of John Moses Browning’s many revolutionary pistol designs, the Hi-Power, was finalized by a Belgian engineer named Dieudonne Saive after the great man’s death. Between them, they created what appeared to be the ultimate manifestation of the combat handgun. Now nearly a century later, this same short-recoil tilting-lock linkless operating system drives most everything. Whether your autoloading pistol has FN, HK, Springfield, S&W, or Glock etched into the frame, it’s John Moses’ short-recoil system derived from the Hi-Power driving the train.

    HK’s take on this time-tested design includes a proprietary flat cross-section captive recoil spring, a cold-hammer-forged polygonally-rifled barrel and a reinforced polyamide frame equipped with a Picatinny rail. The slide release and magazine catch are perfectly replicated on both sides of the gun, and the enlarged, heavy-duty extractor doubles as a loaded chamber indicator. The rear portion of the slide sports unique patented appendages called “cocking supports” facilitating manipulation when rushed or sweaty. These delightful little ears do not interfere with holstering and are removable should you tire of them.

    Three different backstraps combine with six different side panels to contrive an imminently customizable grip. Swapping grip components requires a small punch and maybe five minutes. You can adjust which part of your finger contacts the trigger and thicken one half of the grip while thinning the other. Lots of guns have interchangeable backstraps. Nobody else even comes close to this.

Where it differs, of course, is that it is a striker fired system:

The trigger is HK’s inspired take on the striker-fired system made universally familiar by Gaston Glock. The gun’s only external safety consists of a blade imbedded within the trigger face. The trigger incorporates a 5.4-pound break along with a total travel of less than a quarter inch and just a smidge of creep. The return is only 0.1″. HK calls it their “precise pull” system. The end result is the fastest striker-fired trigger in the industry. 

• "Safariland Model 25 Pocket Holster Review." Short take:

    Being a pocket holster, the Safariland M25 is pretty simple in design.

    The interior is reinforced, made from something that appears similar to kydex or another plastic. This keeps the mouth of the holster open after drawing your pistol. The non-porous material prevents moisture transfer, helping to protect the gun from sweat, rain, and other harmful conditions. This also makes cleaning the holster of dust and lint simple, requiring only a rag or canned air and a few seconds to wipe out the interior.

    The exterior of the Safariland M25 pocket holster is wrapped in black suede, with some markings on one side of the holster. This suede helps to improve stability within the pocket, ensuring the gun is consistently oriented throughout the day.

And, most important:

    Over the last nine months, the Safariland Model 25 has never left my pocket during the draw stroke; the suede exterior keeping it firmly in place. In addition to this, the gun has always stayed properly oriented in my pocket, despite significant movements such as roughhousing with my partner, ensuring a consistent draw stroke.

• "A Guide to Smith & Wesson .38 Special & .357 Magnum Revolvers." Lucky Gunner created tables that summarize the different revolvers (by model number) for each frame size. Check it out if you are having troubles keeping all the numbers straight. 
• "TFB Review: InfiRay Tube TH50 Thermal Imaging Riflescope." If the photographs are anything to go on, it has remarkable detail and clarity. Price is out of my league, though: ~ $4,800.
• Sig wins another military contract: "U.S. Army Selects SIG SAUER Advanced Sniper Rifle Ammunition."

VIDEO: "Water Glassing Eggs: Preserve Your Eggs For Winter!"--Homesteading Family (13 min.)

VIDEO: "It happened again"--Paul Joseph Watson (8 min.)

Muslim "immigrants" from North Africa mob, threaten and assault locals and tourists in an Italian resort town, all the while bragging about reconquering their former territory. My European readers had better be paying close attention to this type of thing because it is only going to get worse. You can read more about this particular incident in this article: "ITALY: Thousands of North African illegal alien Muslim invaders unleash chaos and terror on beach, clash with police, stab people, rob families, attack tourists." 

Survival & Prepping:

• "Jane’s Revenge Plans Roe v. Wade Reveal ‘Night of Rage,’ ‘Carrying that Anger Out into the World Expressing it Physically’."

    The radical pro-abortion group, Jane’s Revenge, is planning more acts of domestic terrorism when the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision on Roe v. Wade is revealed, dubbed a “Night of Rage: An Autonomous Call to Action Against Patriarchal Supremacy.”

    

    The group posted its plans on the Anarchists Library website at the end of May in expectation of the ruling, expected sometime in June.

According to their on-line manifesto, they want the rioting to start at 8 pm, but this is a suggestion--there is no known chain-of-command for the group. (See also "Pro-Abortion Organization Threatens 'Increasingly Drastic Measures' Against Pregnancy Centers" and "Have you heard about the 41 pro-life organizations and churches that have been vandalized in the last 40 days?").

• "Hard Head Veterans Micro Lattice Pads: Shock Absorbers For Your Lid." Older helmet designs were pretty much designed to keep the helmet on your head while providing room for air to circulate. But with the GWOT, suddenly protection from concussions drove changes to the suspension system, and various models featuring pads appeared. I haven't used such systems--not even sure if I could replace the suspension system in my older style helmet with a padded system--but looking at them I'm somewhat cynical if they would offer an appropriate level of air circulation. These lattice pads reviewed here, however, are a course lattice, however, that appears would easily allow air to circulate.
• "Could Your Next Fill-Up Damage Your Engine?"--Smarter Fuel Future. Excerpt:

    Do you own a car? If the answer is yes, then you should know that the ethanol lobby is trying to force its way into your gas tank. For example, in places like Chicago they’re conspiring with local law makers to mandate that your local gas station sell fuel that could not only damage your car’s engine but also void your manufacturer’s warranty, leaving you on the hook for the repair bills.

    For approximately 90 percent of automobile owners, mandates that force ever-increasing amounts of ethanol into their gas tanks translate to engine damage and voided warranties. Automakers, AAA and the National Association of Convenience Stores (who actually sell the fuel) have all sounded the alarm on high-ethanol blended fuels like E15, which contains 15 percent ethanol. (Not to mention anti-hunger advocates who decry correlated rising food prices).

    Specifically, Toyota, who produces the bestselling car in America (the Camry), said:

“Moving  from  E10  to  E15  represents  a  50%  increase  in  the  alcohol content  of  the  fuel  compared  to what the vehicles were designed to accept…Accordingly, Toyota cannot recommend the use of fuel  with  greater  than  E10  (10%  ethanol) for Toyota vehicles currently on the road,  except  for  the  FFV’s [emphasis added].”

• "Cheaper than Store-Bought Eggs"--Backwoods Home. The author of this 2019 article breaks down the costs of raising your own chickens to produce eggs:

    ... Ordinary store-bought eggs in our area cost $2.19 for 12 eggs (making them about $0.18 each). These are not organic, free-range, or from the farmers’ market … all of which would make a better comparison to what we get off our homestead. But I chose to use the price of ordinary, conventionally-raised eggs because if we didn’t raise chickens on our homestead, that’s what we could afford to buy. After a little figuring, I discovered our homestead eggs cost $0.08 each — not bad, considering we currently feed a rooster and several older hens who are good mothers but don’t lay well. Overall, we save about $244 a year by raising hens on our homestead.

    Of course, I’m not factoring in start-up costs. The coop we currently use cost $150 off Craigslist (about seven years ago). Of our current flock, six hens were purchased as chicks for $1.50 each at the local farm store. (The rest we hatched with a broody hen at a cost of $0.) To feed the chicks and supply them well, a liberal estimate of what we’ve spent is about $50 (which includes a brooder and heat lamp for our store-bought chicks). However, our only continuing expenses — and the expenses I considered when pricing out our homestead eggs — are feed and a rare bale of straw for bedding.

• "Life's Not Fair" by Will Dabbs, MD, American Handgunner. This isn't an article on shooting or medicine, but it is about survival and adaptation learned from Dabbs' experiences with a patient of his who had been rendered a quadriplegic by an auto accident. An excerpt:

    Quadriplegia was suddenly Milton’s new normal. In fairly short order he also tragically found himself the sole parent to two girls. Milton could not get into and out of bed without assistance. He could no longer do his job. Most normal folk might have contemplated suicide. Milton, by contrast, just went out and found a different job.

    It was honestly surreal to deal with this guy. He would come in sick with the inevitable maladies that went along with his unfortunate injury. Every single time his first question was to ask when he could get back to work. Deep inside that horribly broken body of his, Milton’s heart was simply indestructible.

    His story was undeniably pitiful. However, Milton didn’t want pity. He wouldn’t take it were it offered. He ministered to strangers in the waiting room and had zero tolerance for laziness. I have seen folks work harder to get on disability for some hallucinated malady than they ever would have worked at a real job. Milton had little patience with folks like that and told me so on numerous occasions.

    Every time I saw Milton he made a point to shake my hand. It was a floppy sort of shake, but it was a sincere gesture between friends. In all the years I knew him I never saw him break. He had good days and bad, to be sure. But he always had a spark of sincere joy just underneath the surface. Why was that? How could that possibly be?

    Milton had Jesus in his heart, and that extraordinary power was bigger than a lifetime of confinement in a wheelchair. Milton was a good man caught in a bad situation, and he never let it beat him down. Milton inspired me way more than I ever helped him.

• "This $20,000 Underground Shelter Is Where You Want To Be If The World Ends." Well, as long at the world doesn't end with flooding! This is another article and photo essay on Atlas shelters. It isn't the luxury underground condos that some have developed using old missile silos, but it also isn't a small section of culvert in which you can't stand up. $20,000 is the starting price; I'm sure that pictured model is much more. I like the "backdoor" to the shelter but if I were to install one, the backdoor would lead to a longer escape tunnel that would angle off. 
• Jared Diamond should hide his face in shame for writing such drivel as Guns Germs Steel: "Black Death mystery SOLVED: Bubonic plague outbreak originated in Kyrgyzstan in 1338 and spread across the Mediterranean via the Silk Road before sparking a 500-year-long pandemic, ancient DNA reveals." This isn't really the breakthrough the article makes it to be since researchers had traced it to the Nestorian Christian community in Kyrgyzstan at least a couple decades ago (and as described in Plague: The mysterious past and terrifying future of the world's most dangerous disease by Wendy Orent and published in 2004 and which I reviewed here). What seems the most significant here is that the researchers have mapped out the entire genome of the plague bacteria from this site. Although the article mentions how the plague spread throughout the Middle-East and Europe, they neglect to mention that it spread the opposite direction as well, infecting China. Anyway, you can read the researcher's article in Nature here.

VIDEO: "Levin: We are living in a post-constitutional America" (15 min.)

Mark Levin discusses the Jan. 6 show trial.

News & Headlines:

• "Narrative and the Leftist Fairy Tale" by David Solway. In this 2020 article, Solway 

    “Narrative” is technically apt when defining a literary genre – say, the novel, as expounded by Mieke Bal in her Narratology, in which “discourse” involves “aspects” (levels of presentation) and “elements” (events, locations, times, etc.). Her somewhat clotted and obscure treatment is tailored for an academic readership, but worth disambiguating here. Bear with me for a bit. For Bal, a narrative is a mix of the personal and the apparent impersonal, of convincing language (“discourse”) generating a world-replica rich with internal details (“elements”) and mediated by “aspects” (real-world factors), together constituting a parallel universe or “text.” 

    In literary fiction, the only way out of the narrative enclosure is through the portal of “aspects” or levels – that is, where the “levels” involve “presentations” from reality itself rather than from the imaginary realm of the story. Thus, the author or character may refer to the indisputably and objectively real – e.g., falling objects accelerate at the rate of 32 feet per second per second; D-Day occurred on June 6, 1944; etc. But instead of leaving the narrative, walking through the portal, we accept these aspects as being part of and validating the larger narrative communion.

    As Jordan Belfort argues in Way of the Wolf , eloquence, confidence and tone, amalgamated with pertinent aspects of the real world, are features that generate emotion-based belief in narrative conventions. It’s what helps you sell a product – a bar of soap, a smartphone, a car, or a story. In essence, narrative involves a sleight of mind in which rhetorical conviction conjures a (presumably) real state of affairs, whose assembled particulars, both fictive (elements) and actual (levels), in turn validate the rhetoric. In short, it is an alternate world.  

    Bal’s exposition may seem somewhat wiredrawn, but it does make sense. What Christopher Paslay says of Robin DiAngelo’s bestselling leftist hallucination White Fragility, for example, illustrates the point: “She’s taken up the mission of antiracist work with a fervor and zeal that makes her questionable conclusions and untested theories appear infallible and beyond criticism.” In such cases, ardour deputizes for fact, replacing reasoned analysis, and “facts” are cherry-picked or fudged to substantiate the sense of conviction, assurance and inevitability. In effect, the reader is unable to distinguish elements from levels.  

Read the whole thing.

• Speaking of Leftist narratives being false or fake:
•  Heh: "Wells Fargo is accused of scheduling FAKE job interviews with black applicants for roles that have already been promised to other candidates to boost its diversity statistics." 
• So soy-boy is an appropriate term for Leftist "men": "Testosterone Treatment Turns Democrat Voters More Conservative."
• It's not an insurrection when the Left does it: "7 arrested in House office building linked to Colbert show."

    U.S. Capitol Police said Friday that officers arrested seven unauthorized people in a congressional office building Thursday night and charged them with unlawful entry.

    The people identified themselves as being affiliated with CBS’ “Late Show with Stephen Colbert,” a person familiar with the matter told The Associated Press.

    Another person familiar with the matter provided the AP with a list of nine people who had been stopped by Capitol Police. They included several producers, along with Robert Smigel, the voice behind Triumph the Insult Comic Dog.

    The two people who spoke with the AP could not discuss details of the investigation publicly and spoke on condition of anonymity.

    The incident Thursday night followed the third public hearing by the House panel investigating the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.

• Move along here, nothing to see: "Swiss-born billionaire who became mega-donor of 'dark money' to Democratic causes may have broken the law because he's 'NOT a US citizen or resident', lawsuit claims." 
• "Moment Barcelona mugger snatched $45,000 designer watch off American father's wrist in front of his family near their five-star hotel: Victim 'told cops it was an $800,000 Hublot'." I'm sorry, but you will actually have to click and go to the story to understand this one. I've included it here because the video of the incident has the brightness cranked up so absurdly high in an attempt to conceal the fact that the attacker was black. We see this all the time, but this is one of the most extreme examples I've come across.
• Contra the stories that police in Uvalde couldn't locate a key to the classrooms where the shooter had holed up: "Uvalde cops 'didn't even try to open door of massacre classroom for 77 minutes as gunman murdered 19 kids and two teachers inside' as it's claimed room may have been UNLOCKED."

    Surveillance footage from inside Robb Elementary School is said to show shows [sic] that police made no effort to open the door, and there is reason to believe it may even have been unlocked, a law enforcement source told the San Antonio Express-News.

    The surveillance footage from inside Robb Elementary School during the May 24 massacre has not been publicly released, but has been seen by the Express-News.

Anonymous Conservative has some more thoughts on the matter:

 The most amazing part – the classroom door malfunctioned too, and did not lock automatically when the teacher closed it to teach the class that morning, the way it was supposed to, so the shooter was able to just open the door. They say the shooter could not have locked the door either, so the whole thing about waiting an hour to find a key was total bullshit. All they had to do was turn the knob. And on top of it, the outer door “malfunctioned” too, allowing him in the building, after a teacher opened it a minute prior to his arrival and jammed a rock in it, and then supposedly tried to close it. It isn’t just that they didn’t go in. That could be fear and cowardice. But when Bortac shows up, wants to go in, and they actively stop them, send them to guard a fence line, and then try to prevent them from going in, until Bortac decides to go in and take the career consequences, probably after a confrontation with those guarding the room that we have yet to hear about, that makes no sense. All they had to do was step aside, and let Bortac kick ass for them. Lots of things don’t add up about that event, if you think we live in the world they told us we live in. By now it should be obvious to everyone something is very, very off about this world, even before you hear about this broke guy having $8 grand in gear, and nobody even trying to explain where it all came from, despite it being a potentially huge media story and massively curious question.

• The peasants are revolting: "Rising cost of living sparks massive protests in UK and Ireland." An excerpt: 

    Thousands of protesters marched in London on Saturday, accusing the government of failing to tackle the rapidly rising cost of living in the UK. Similar marches took place in multiple Irish cities, where citizens say they are facing the same struggles.

    Demonstrators marched from Portland Place to Parliament Square in the British capital, where Trade Unions Congress (TUC) leader Frances O’Grady blamed decades of austerity policies for rising costs and wage stagnation.

    “Prices are skyrocketing, yet boardroom bonuses are back to bumper levels,” she told the crowd. “Everyone who works for a living deserves to earn a decent living, but UK workers are suffering the longest and harshest squeeze on their earnings in modern history.”

    “If we don’t get pay rising across the economy, we will just keep lurching from crisis to crisis. This cost of living emergency has not come out of the blue. It is the result of more than a decade of standstill wages.”

• Heh. "A California hate crimes bill separates Nazi symbols from Hindu swastikas." While I commend the effort, the craziness still continues. The article explains: "The Nazi symbol, which most people picture when they think of a swastika, is actually called the Hakenkreuz. Adolf Hitler appropriated the image for his Aryan cause, flipping the direction of its lines and rotating it." Except, the swastika can be drawn in either direction at any orientation in the Hindu and Buddhist traditions. I don't know why Hitler decided to use the swastika for the Nazi symbol. At that time, in the 1930s, it was a symbol of good luck in Europe; but Hitler also had an interest in the occult, including the religions of Tibet and India. It just goes to show the continued absurdity of "hate crimes." There shouldn't be a difference between vandalism to a Jewish center and vandalism to a home or business.
• Oh crap! They figured it out: "73% of Trump voters think Democrats are trying to REPLACE white people with 'immigrants and people of color who share their political views', shock new poll shows."
• "Why Team Biden might be purposefully grinding down the middle class" by Glenn H. Reynolds. Here is an excerpt. Keep in mind it was written about on May 26:

    Gas prices going up? Not only was Biden’s spending program stimulating inflation, but at the same time Biden policies were reducing the amount of gasoline, diesel and heating oil those dollars could buy. Biden went wild canceling pipelines, ending gas and oil leases, imposing stricter environmental rules and — in cooperation with big institutional investors — choking off the finances of people trying to produce new fuel supplies.

    As Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-Alaska) observed, “There has been a comprehensive hostility to the energy sector by this administration.” And how.

    Even electric-car king Elon Musk has been mocking the Biden administration’s fixation on ending fossil fuels. The realities of physics and the marketplace mean that replacing gasoline vehicles with electric cars isn’t going to happen soon, no matter how big a squeeze Team Biden puts on Americans.

    And what a squeeze it is. Even in Knoxville, where gas prices tend to be lower, I’ve paid more than $5 a gallon for gas. In other parts of the country, it’s selling for more than $7. Diesel — needed to move goods whose prices are already going up because of inflation — is even more expensive, adding costs to everything in what’s left of our supply-chain network. And there’s no relief in sight.

• "Pope Francis tells couples not to have sex before marriage in Vatican guide that argues 'chastity teaches the timing and the method of true love'." Sad that this is so radical that it is front page news.
• Stripping the sheep skin off the wolf: "Private Massachusetts Catholic school is EXCOMMUNICATED by local bishop for refusing to remove BLM and Pride flags after being warned both represent ideologies that 'contradict' church teaching." Robert J. McManus, the Bishop of the Diocese of Worcester, sanction the facility for their refusal to take the flags down, saying that the facility - the only tuition-free private school in the region - cannot continue to call itself Catholic while flying in the face of key church teachings.  Another article explains the consequences for the school:

Mass or sacraments can no longer be celebrated on school premises, and the school is not allowed to conduct fund-raisers involving diocesan institutions and cannot advertise in the diocesan directory.

• Leftist projection: "A 'socialist high school teacher' from Hawaii said anti-grooming Republicans want to 'show kids porn.' What happened next is ... well, I guess it's not surprising." The teacher, Alden Bunag, has been arrested for distributing child pornography and having sex with a 13-year-old student.
• "Michigan Dem Calls for a ‘Drag Queen for Every School’." 

    Michigan attorney general Dana Nessel (D.) said Wednesday that drag queens ought to be in every school.

    Nessel, who is best known for passing out drunk in the stands after two Bloody Marys at the 2021 Michigan-Michigan State football game, admitted she did not poll-test the idea before floating it at a civil rights conference in Lansing.

    "A drag queen for every school! That is what would be fun for the kids and lift them up when they are having emotional issues," Nessel said. "Drag queens—not only are they not hurting our kids—drag queens make everything better! Drag queens are fun."

She's not the only Democratic politician that wants to see more drag queen story hours. For instance, New York City Mayor Eric Adams took to social media Thursday evening to defend drag queen story hours at local libraries, tweeting: “Drag storytellers, and the libraries and schools that support them, are advancing a love of diversity, personal expression, and literacy that is core to what our city embraces.” He also rebuked a city councilwoman for calling such events "grooming," stating: “At a time when our LGBTQ+ communities are under increased attack across this country, we must use our education system to educate. The goal is not only for our children to be academically smart, but also emotionally intelligent.” And the head of Drag Queen Story Hour (DQSH) has said that Republican proposals to ban drag shows for children are "just smoke and mirrors" to distract from the party's failure to prevent gun massacres. 

• "Drag queen who sings 'all the kids who look up to me can s*ck my d*ck' hosts story time at SF area library."
• "Idaho Police Investigating Drag Queen Who May Have Exposed Genitals To Children At Local LGBT Event."
• “It’s not gonna lick itself,” read the sign under which children danced alongside drag queens at Mr. Misster’s gay nightclub in Dallas, Texas. The Saturday event, titled—quite unpleasantly—“Drag The Kids To Pride,” welcomed parents to the gay bar and invited their children to “hit the stage with the queens.” Disconcerting footage shows grown men dressed in thongs not only performing down a main walkway with parents and children surrounding, but walking directly up to dance in front of them and then proceed to pluck dollar bills from the elementary school children’s outstretched hands. 
• "Moment furious Italian motorists drag Extinction Rebellion protesters away to let traffic pass after activists staged a sit-in blockade of one of Rome's busiest roads." This would never happen in the U.S. because the police would never allow it to happen. As we saw in the BLM/Antifa riots, the police turn their back on incidents where BLM or Antifa where attacking or threatening people, but would immediately swarm anyone that dared stand up to the rioters and protestors. 
• E.g.: "'Pro-life Spider Man' is arrested after scaling 50-story skyscraper in Oklahoma in anti-abortion protest - a month after free-climbing San Francisco's 1,070-foot Salesforce Tower."
• More: "Corporate Media, Law Enforcement Uninterested In Political Violence When It Involves Pregnancy Centers." 
• "'I'm done!' Republican John Cornyn WALKS OUT of gun legislation talks in wake of mass shootings as he vents 'people don’t want to make a decision'." What, he thought he was going to become some sort of hero, walking in to save the day, by joining the enemy? But, as this video shows, Cornyn's attempt to be the next John McCain did not set well in Texas, where he was booed off the stage when he spoke at the Republican Party of Texas convention and brought up his wonderful ideas for Red Flag laws. He exemplifies the problem with the political class today, which is that they no longer view themselves as representing their states or constituents--i.e., working for voters--but see themselves, instead, as leaders who tell their constituents what they (the constituents) need to do. 

• Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf helpfully shows how Red Flag laws will be abused using the following infographic (h/t Based Politics):

Unfortunately, the infographic leaves out the part about Jane, assuming she ever exists in any given case, being batsh** crazy or just hating gunowners; or the SWAT team gunning Randy down in cold blood when they serve their no-knock warrant at zero-dark thirty. But the example provided by Zero Hedge does not:

    Under these red flag laws, what happened to Duncan Lemp—who was gunned down in his bedroom during an early morning, no-knock SWAT team raid on his family’s home—could very well happen to more people.

    At 4:30 a.m. on March 12, 2020, in the midst of a COVID-19 pandemic that had most of the country under a partial lockdown and sheltering at home, a masked SWAT team—deployed to execute a “high risk” search warrant for unauthorized firearms—stormed the suburban house where 21-year-old Duncan, a software engineer and Second Amendment advocate, lived with his parents and 19-year-old brother.

    The entire household, including Lemp and his girlfriend, was reportedly asleep when the SWAT team directed flash bang grenades and gunfire through Lemp’s bedroom window.

    Lemp was killed and his girlfriend injured.

    No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, had a criminal record.

    No one in the house that morning, including Lemp, was considered an “imminent threat” to law enforcement or the public, at least not according to the search warrant.

    So what was so urgent that militarized police felt compelled to employ battlefield tactics in the pre-dawn hours of a day when most people are asleep in bed, not to mention stuck at home as part of a nationwide lockdown?

    According to police, they were tipped off that Lemp was in possession of “firearms.”

    Thus, rather than approaching the house by the front door at a reasonable hour in order to investigate this complaint—which is what the Fourth Amendment requires—police instead strapped on their guns, loaded up their flash bang grenades and carried out a no-knock raid on the household.

    According to the county report, the no-knock raid was justified “due to Lemp being ‘anti-government,’ ‘anti-police,’ currently in possession of body armor, and an active member of the Three Percenters,” a far-right paramilitary group that discussed government resistance.

    This is what happens when you adopt red flag gun laws, painting anyone who might be in possession of a gun—legal or otherwise—as a threat that must be neutralized.

• I like the cut of the author's jib: "The Right To A Javelin" by Micah Meadowcroft. An excerpt:

Much is made by proponents of stricter gun control of Europe and Japan; to which I say, America is a nation of pilgrims and pioneers, a frontier country, and not a defeated people long occupied by foreign powers. Much is also made of the military style of popular firearms; a recent political cartoon for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution depicts Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky saying, “We want America to provide Ukraine with powerful military weapons like the ones U.S. 18-year-olds can buy.” To this I say, never mind the inanity of the apparent point about AR-15s, let the right of the people to keep and bear Javelins not be infringed. Much is made of the vast inequality in fire power between the U.S. federal government and American citizens, to suggest that since the armed preservation of rights would be impracticable it need not be countenanced; to that I say look at Afghanistan and asymmetric warfare everywhere. But I also say look back to the hoplites, and the origin of self-government in the alliance of armed citizens, and back to the breaking of martial aristocratic orders on the equalizing barrels of the gun, and hope for some new instrument of leveling the battlefield. Power armor, perhaps.  

• Waa, ha, ha: "Push To Ban ‘Assault Rifles’ Like Fight To End Slavery, CRT Backer Ibram X. Kendi Tells CBS News." Paraphrasing a bit here, but Kendi explained in his interview that taking away the civilian firearms best suited to preventing tyranny was the only way to prevent tyranny. What a tool.
• Mass shootings only happen in the United States:
• Last week, gunmen killed 50 people at a Catholic church in southwestern Nigeria, shooting worshippers both inside and outside the building in a coordinated attack before escaping the scene.
• "55 people killed in latest attack in northern Burkina Faso." Not the same incident as above.
• "Four people are massacred during birthday breakfast celebration as gunmen storm Denny's restaurant sending terrified customers running for their lives in 10-second Mexico execution." Happened in Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.
• Mass shootings are a white thing:
• "Man, 21, is killed and eight more people are injured in shooting at 'barbecue gathering' in Harlem as violent crime skyrockets in NYC."
• "Boy, 15, is killed and three others - including a cop - are injured by shooting at unauthorized DC Juneteenth music festival Moechella: Revelers were seen TWERKING atop truck then fleeing as gunfire rang out."
• Guess who came to dinner: "Pregnant woman, 22, is decapitated as her family planned baby shower: Horror as head is found in a dumpster outside house as police charge her 'savage monster' ex-boyfriend, 22, with murdering her and unborn child." But I'm sure her relationship was exciting up to the very end.
• "One in FIVE pregnancies was aborted in 2020, new research shows, with 930,160 terminations carried out: Demand for procedure rises for first time in 30 years as Supreme Court moves to end Roe v. Wade." 
• Related: "What's In The Sack" by Will Dabbs, MD, American Handgunner. 

    The young woman walked into the labor and delivery suite of the University hospital unannounced. She carried a big red biohazard bag with the top tied in a knot. I inquired what we could do for her.

    She reported that she had undergone an abortion that morning at a local clinic. Afterwards the doctor had given her the bag and told her to come see us. He had not told her why. She reported a little abdominal pain but otherwise felt fine. She seemed confused by the whole affair.

    We made her comfortable in a labor room while we tried to sort this all out. A fellow resident and I took the bag into another room, put on some gloves, and opened it up.

    Inside we found a dismembered baby. Amongst a little extraneous goo were two perfectly formed arms, two similarly perfect legs, and a miniature torso. It was a little boy. There was no head.

    We reported all of this to our attending physician, a highly experienced gynecologist. He just sighed. He suddenly seemed very old.

    “If you’re not willing to go all the way you shouldn’t be doing the job,” he said with resignation.

    I asked him what he meant by that.

    ... He said that not infrequently when you are extracting the fetus it comes into pieces. It must be accounted for on the outside to ensure nothing was left behind that could serve as a nidus for infection. In this case the doctor who had performed the procedure had recovered what was in the sack but had been unable to retrieve the baby’s head.

• TikTok star Remi Bader upset that she was not allowed to abuse and cripple a horse. From the article:

    The online star shared her experiences on TikTok, where she posted a video claiming that Deep Hollow Ranch - which charges $250 plus 22 per cent gratuity for a 30-minute riding session for a family of four - had turned her away from a horseback riding session 'because she weighed over 240[lbs]'.  

    To add insult to injury, Remi later revealed that the ranch owner's son, Brody Keogh, had posted a video in response to her post, in which he branded her a 'fat b***h', saying: 'When you're not a fat b**** you can ride at Deep Hollow Ranch.'

• Shades of The World According To Garp: "Florida woman performing oral sex on driver nearly bites his penis off when they get into head-on collision with FedEx van."
• Now even bugs are off the table: "World Economic Forum Urges People To Eat Seaweed, Algae, & Cacti To Save The Planet."
• Related: "WEF Advisor Yuval Harari Ponders How World Will Deal With ‘Useless People’."

Yuval Harari, an Israeli philosopher who serves as an advisor to the World Economic Forum (WEF), has frequently warned of a growing class of “useless people.” According to the WEF advisor, the rise of artificial intelligence will give rise to billions of “useless people” who humanity will have to “deal with.” In order to address the growing number of so-called “useless people”, Harari suggests keeping them docile with drugs and video games.

• Related: "New super PAC aims at electing pro-Israel Black Democrats." The lede: "A new super PAC led by 'Black and Jewish' leaders has endorsed five Black Democrats who have positions that are friendly to AIPAC, the latest sign that pro-Israel donors are determined to stem erosion of support for Israel among African Americans."
• Of course. "Police charge big pharma boss with falsifying his Covid vaccination status."

    Jose Maria Fernandez Sousa-Faro, president of European pharmaceuticals giant PharmaMar, has been charged by police with being falsely vaccinated against Covid-19. Dr. Sousa-Faro has been caught up in a scandal in Europe involving people being added to the National Immunization Registry in exchange for large sums of money, with many of them familiar faces and household names.

    Police allege that Sousa-Faro arranged to be injected with a saline solution instead of a Covid-19 vaccination and paid thousands of dollars to have his name added to Spain's immunization register, as confirmed by police sources and reported by El Periodico de Espana.

    Dr. Sousa-Faro is among more than 2,200 celebrities and European elites on the list drawn up by National Police of those falsely vaccinated against Covid.

Few people would have been in as good a position to know whether the vaccines were safe as this guy would have been. 

• "Vienna Celebrates The New Religion." Rod Dreher writes about last weeks pride festival in Vienna:

    Today was the big Pride Parade in Vienna. I’ve never seen a Pride parade. The most striking things were all the kids there, especially middle school and teenage girls, all decked out in their rainbow gear. Everybody seemed to be really into it, and having a good time.

    It really was like a huge religious festival. A Christian friend with whom I walked through the city today said, “Imagine being a pagan in fourth century Rome, and seeing Christians gathering for a procession honoring the Virgin, or something. You might think it’s an odd thing, but let them have their parade, what does it hurt. Thirty years later, they’re tearing down your temples. Doesn’t this have the same feeling?”

    Yes, it does. Can you imagine telling any previous generation that worshiped at St. Ruprecht’s, founded in the eighth century, and the oldest church in Vienna, that one day, a banner would fly from their tower celebrating a festival of sodomy? It happened today. The parish priest is — surprise! — a Jesuit.

    The Pride festival is the most vivid expression of the repaganization of the West via the overturning of the Christian order. ... 

• Related: "Methodist Church’s First Drag Queen Pastor: ‘God Is Nothing’."

    “God is nothing,” the self-described “dragavangelist” repeats throughout the poem, adding, “the Bible is nothing” and “religion is nothing.” In the end, he concludes God and the Bible are nothing “unless we wield it into something.”

    “God must be f***ing nothing,” he says, “if her boundaryless, transubstantiated bodies of color are run down, beaten, and strewn in the streets of America instead of ruling the runways of life.”

    He speaks of God not as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, but rather as the source of queerness, describing him as “nothing but a drag queen with a microphone of biblical f***ing proportions,” “nothing, but if she were, she would be ‘yes, queen’-ing her way down the runways of Paris and Montreal,” and “nothing, but if she were, she would be a seamstress of divide couture, weaving together string theory and self portraits to form the fiercest gowns of queer existence.”

    He believes humanity, then, is an emanation of that divine queerness: “From under a shroud of secrecy came the beauty of humanity, humanity made in the gender-bending, identity-breaking, system-shaking image of God, the imago Dei.” He refers to humanity as “God’s queerly anointed creation.” 

    Simmons writes that the poem is “directed to those who actively and passively cause harm against the LGBTQIA2S+ Community due to their understandings of Scripture.”

• "The Unraveling"--Wilder, Wealthy & Wise. Money quote:

    Whatever fetish sex act that any individual wants to do “because it’s Thursday” now seems to take the place of virtue. Replacing actual virtue with temporary individual passions is exactly what every single functioning society in history has avoided to in order to remain functioning. When people follow passions that are productive, like building rockets, they add to society. When people act on passions counter to virtue?

    Those passions consume and destroy society. Period.

    We don’t live in a world where “if it feels good, do it” can ever be a policy that lead to a productive society. At some point, we must be guided by virtue, we have to have a shared vision for a future, and a shared desire to build. Can you imagine a single event that would bring us all together again?

    I can’t. We have to have that shared vision – if nothing else, to survive. Do we have it?

• This explains the real failure of the public school system which is forcing everyone onto a college track: "College Is Not For All." Oren Cass and Wells King write:

    According to new data from American Compass’s “Failing on Purpose” survey of 2,000 young adults and parents, only one in eight young Americans aged 19 to 22 are enrolled in college more than one hour from home. By comparison, half are still living at home. Look further down the road, and only one in eight young Americans in their mid-to-late 20s have earned a degree, moved out of their parents’ house, and found work that they consider a “career” rather than “just a job.” One in four never went to college at all; one in four dropped out.

    This reality has made little dent in America’s commitment to “college for all.” Under the twin banners of “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility,” we continue asking our public schools to identify the most academically talented children and prepare them for leafy academic enclaves, from whence they can be sorted into well-paying jobs in the globe’s most prosperous cities. In our zeal to optimize this system for extracting each diamond from the rough, we willfully neglect everyone else. 

    The choice is most obvious in data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which reports that most of its member nations have 35 to 55 percent of their upper secondary students enrolled in vocational education and training. The United States is excluded from the data because we have “no distinct vocational path at upper secondary level.”  President Barack Obama’s comment, “I’m glad that everybody wants to go to college,” captured well our nation’s college-for-all mindset and helps explain our conversion of high schools into college-prep academies.

    According to new data from American Compass’s “Failing on Purpose” survey of 2,000 young adults and parents, only one in eight young Americans aged 19 to 22 are enrolled in college more than one hour from home. By comparison, half are still living at home. Look further down the road, and only one in eight young Americans in their mid-to-late 20s have earned a degree, moved out of their parents’ house, and found work that they consider a “career” rather than “just a job.” One in four never went to college at all; one in four dropped out.

    This reality has made little dent in America’s commitment to “college for all.” Under the twin banners of “equal opportunity” and “upward mobility,” we continue asking our public schools to identify the most academically talented children and prepare them for leafy academic enclaves, from whence they can be sorted into well-paying jobs in the globe’s most prosperous cities. In our zeal to optimize this system for extracting each diamond from the rough, we willfully neglect everyone else. 

    The choice is most obvious in data from the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), which reports that most of its member nations have 35 to 55 percent of their upper secondary students enrolled in vocational education and training. The United States is excluded from the data because we have “no distinct vocational path at upper secondary level.”  President Barack Obama’s comment, “I’m glad that everybody wants to go to college,” captured well our nation’s college-for-all mindset and helps explain our conversion of high schools into college-prep academies.

The authors suggest that the reason for this is to minimize the chance that a financial or scientific genius is passed over for Harvard, or Yale, or other elite schools. Which is bullcrap; otherwise, every National Merit Finalist would be admitted to the elite schools, and participating in 4-H would not count against admissions in the Ivy League. The better way to view this, I think, is to view it in the context of elite overproduction as explained by Turchin. The 1960s saw increasing conflict among the elite due to elite overproduction and that fact that with longer lifespans, the older, established elites just weren't dying off fast enough. The solution to this is to create more elite positions, which means more government and academic positions. But that means increasing demand for more government and academic positions. Sure, useless and expansive government programs can work, but so can funneling more kids into the university pipeline.

• "Researchers Have a Controversial New Hypothesis For How Civilization First Started." The supposedly new hypothesis is that it wasn't just having a surplus of food that led to complex societies but foods that could be stored, transported long distances, and easily traded (or taxed) like grains. 
• "Extreme DROUGHTS on the Arabian peninsula paved the way for the rise of Islam in the seventh century, study reveals." This theory is that the Himyarite kingdom in Arabia provided stability and wealth, but severe drought between 500 and 530 AD led to its demise. 

    The experts from the University of Basel in Switzerland therefore believe that extreme drought may have been decisive in contributing to the upheavals in ancient Arabia from which Islam emerged. 

    They said 'people were searching for new hope, something that could bring people together again as a society', adding: 'The new religion offered this.' 

• "Has China found alien technosignatures from space?" No. Turned out it was Radio Frequency Interference from terrestrial sources. But ... affixing aluminum foil hat ... maybe China realized the importance of such signals and made the researchers change their story ... hmm?
• "'The Game is Over!' Google's DeepMind says it is close to achieving 'human-level' artificial intelligence – but it still needs to be scaled up."

    DeepMind, a British company owned by Google, may be on the verge of achieving human-level artificial intelligence (AI). 

    Nando de Freitas, a research scientist at DeepMind and machine learning professor at Oxford University, has said 'the game is over' in regards to solving the hardest challenges in the race to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI). 

    AGI refers to a machine or program that has the ability to understand or learn any intellectual task that a human being can, and do so without training. 

    According to De Freitas, the quest for scientists is now scaling up AI programs, such as with more data and computing power, to create an AGI.

    Earlier this week [ed: actually a couple weeks ago now], DeepMind unveiled a new AI 'agent' called Gato that can complete 604 different tasks 'across a wide range of environments'.

    Gato uses a single neural network – a computing system with interconnected nodes that works like nerve cells in the human brain. 

    It can chat, caption images, stack blocks with a real robot arm and even play the 1980s home video game console Atari, DeepMind claims.