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Monday, June 20, 2022

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:
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.
  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.

    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.
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. 

    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.


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:
    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].”
    ... 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” 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.
    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.
    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.

    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.”
    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.
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.
    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. 


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.
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.  
    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.
    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.'
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.
    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. 

    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. ... 
    “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.”
    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.

    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.' 
    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. 

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2 comments:

  1. John WilderJune 21, 2022 at 9:45 PM

    Wow, there's a whole lotta clown world in these. I can't even pick one . . .

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentJune 22, 2022 at 9:42 AM

      Remi Bader wanting to break a horse's back in order to push body positivity ranks near the top.

      Delete

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