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Monday, June 6, 2022

The Docent's Memo (June 6, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "Stormtroopers, but They're ACCURATE" (6 min.)
My YouTube feed didn't spit up any firearm related videos this past week that I thought worth sharing, but this has to do with shooting, and is funny to boot.

     "Billions of people woke up today all over the world and many died at the hands of evil
yesterday all over the world.  You can't pass a law to stop evil.  You can't rationalize against evil.  You can't "empathize" against evil.  You can't ban evil.  If you want to fight evil, you have prayer, you have good men and women who are willing to stand against evil, and you have the option to arm yourself both figuratively and literally to defeat evil in every form in takes.  Do not be lied to by tyrants in government who prefer that you respond like sheep by
abdicating your options and powers to a government that they alone control.  For when they
ask you to do that, it is not that they will step in like a true shepherd to defeat evil for it is them that used and manipulated evil to oppress you into submission.  At that point, you are nothing more than their livestock, not free men."  

And this quote from a video by Tom Givens on the Uvalde shooting: "The next time someone tells you that 'you don’t need a gun, just call 911', remember that these are the kind of responders you may well get.  You are on your own.  Be armed, be vigilant, and be prepared." 

    Jon also links to articles related to surviving vehicle attacks, car jackings, defense against multiple assailants, why you should train with a barricade--one of those with multiple holes at awkward heights and angles--tips on shooting a pistol when suffering from arthritis, and a lot more. And, finally, he offers some commentary on a video from John Correia at Active Self Protection about whether you need to carry spare ammunition. I won't try and summarize the whole thing, but Jon falls into the camp that maintains that you should carry a spare magazine if for no other reason than that "[c]arrying an extra magazine is for clearing malfunctions." This is why I have recommended in the past that you don't practice with your carry magazines, especially any drills or practice which involves dumping the magazine into the dirt or onto the floor. Yes, function test those magazines, but otherwise treat them like babies because it is too easy to bend a magazine lip or get dirt or a pebble in the magazine.  Have a separate set of magazines for practice. 

  • Also, don't forget to visit Active Response Training for Greg's latest Weekend Knowledge Dump. Notable links this week are a report showing that 72% of Americans have fired a gun, an article on mounting telescopic sights, developing "wide band" situational awareness (if you don't read any of the other articles, read this one), how shooting a revolver can make you a better semi-auto pistol shooter (the double-action trigger forces the user to better develop trigger control), filing a revolver's front sight (for those using revolvers with fixed sights), a look at the shotgun versus the AR for home defense (and you might notice a pattern with the conclusion being that they both have their place), and the top four survival skills to teach your kids. 
  • Some tips on fighting around vehicles from The White Report. An excerpt:
    If you are caught in a vehicle during a blitz attack you may have been targeted because of the vehicle. The attack's location was chosen solely based on the vehicle being there. The intent of the blitz attack is to stun you into inaction; smash your will to fight. If you live through the initial onslaught, your only option is to run away from the car to the next piece of cover and continue the fight. Every yard you are able to get away from the car increases your life expectancy. Fighting over the hood or around the car comes down to whoever gets spotted first, gets shot first.

    Try not to fight from the ground around your vehicle unless you have no other choice. If your attacker rapidly closes, it is very difficult to quickly thwart his rush by trying to get to your feet and engage with fire.

    Being inside your vehicle and having to engage a threat through your windshield is not ideal. There are two schools of thought on how to quickly eliminate the threat.

    First option: drive your pistol out, shoot through your windshield creating a port, and then release your seatbelt. It is important to recognize that your pistol is what makes the threat stop, not your seatbelt. You want to first drive your pistol out and eliminate the threat then worry about your seatbelt. This is your best option. Second option: release your seatbelt, drive your pistol out and shoot.

    Think about manipulating your pistol while seated in your car. Position SUL is hazardous since you are covering both your legs and your femoral arteries. In position SUL, your support hand is flat on the chest, thumb pointed up. Shooting hand is wrapped around the pistol grip with the thumb flagged up. The middle knuckle on the middle finger of the gun hand rests on the same knuckle of the support hand. Thumbs are engaged at point to point and thumbs act as a swivel when the pistol is moved from SUL to a two-hand shooting grip. SUL is a great position but not inside your car.

    Instead, Street Fighters should consider using the temple index. By employing the temple index, you are not flagging your teammates or yourself. Temple index is achieved by applying counter pressure against your head. You don't want the muzzle below your head nor do you want it too high above your head. If held too high, your muzzle can get caught against the frame of the car. Place the meaty part of your thumb against your ear, indexed on your temple. The reason you apply counter pressure, is to prevent your pistol from dropping lower on you.

The author also discusses some options and tactics if you are a passenger, as well as special consideration for a left handed shooter, drawing from appendix carry or a shoulder holster, carrying a spare magazine, and more. Admittedly, the author is writing from the perspective of a narcotics officer, but even for the mere civilian, you could be the victim of a violent car jacking or robbery while in your car, or be caught in or around your car as part of the increasing number of follow-home robberies. Two other tips from the article: (1) "If you are going to fight, fight like you are the third monkey on the ramp into Noah's ark and it is starting to rain!" and (2) you cannot prepare for every possible event so you need to focus on what is probable or plausible. 
  • "Zero Distance for a Home-Defense AR-15" by Kenan Flasowski, Shooting Illustrated.  The author discusses some of the ballistic considerations, the need to remember holdover due to the height of the sights over the bore, the problems with attempting to zero at a short range (say 15 or 20 yards) and so on, but this is his short answer:
    The short answer to the "At what distance do I zero?" question is, in my opinion, 100 yards (or meters). Here's why: The bullet should never rise above the LOS [i.e., line of sight]. This means the shooter does not need to use holdunder at any range, eliminating that factor and leaving only holdover as a matter of concern. The amount of holdover needed to meet the aforementioned level of accuracy is very small with a 100-yard zero—approximately 2.5 inches at 200 yards, .5 inch at 150 yards, and .75 inch at 50 yards. On most ARs using 55-grain or 62-grain ammunition, the bullet is generally never more than 3 inches below LOS until the target is beyond 210 yards. For most of us, this means that to hit a man in the chest out to 150 yards, we do not need to hold over. You can't get any simpler than that.

    The bottom line: if we have a rifle/ammo combo that shoots 3 MOA or better accuracy and we do not apply any holdover at a 150-yard target, the lowest round from the resulting 4.5-inch group should be no more than 3 inches below the "X." Good enough. For engagements inside your home, at distances inside of 20 yards, you can use a consistent 2.5-inch holdover and still make acceptably accurate head shots.
  • In answer to why you might want an AR15 for home defense, I offer this link: "M-1 Carbine vs. 1911 | Showdown On the Range"--The Mag Life. This is a summary of a video by Ian McCollum of the Forgotten Weapons YouTube channel. As you may know from your firearms history, the M1 carbine was developed for truck drivers, engineers, mortar and artillery crews, and others in place of the 1911 handgun. Records from World War I showed that the handgun was not a very effective weapon for the battlefield, but the duties of these auxiliary soldiers didn't make it practicable for them to be issued an infantry rifle. Ian decided to test the two weapons out, head-to-head, using several drills to emulate scenarios in which a support or auxiliary soldier might be involved. As far as I could tell, all of the targets were within 20 yards with most at 10 yards. The M1 carbine was faster and more accurate across all of the stages.
    Ten yards is 30 feet, which is a distance one could encounter in the typical home. 20 yards is 60 feet and well within the distance you might encounter within the curtilage of your yard. So, what Ian is demonstrating is that even at these shorter distances where you would typically think of using a handgun, a light, semi-auto carbine can be faster and more accurate. And keep in mind that Ian was using a carbine with iron sights. A red-dot would just make it faster and more accurate (assuming it was correctly zeroed). 

    Of course, there are pros and cons to using a carbine or other long arm in a home. And perhaps the best answer is, as Greg Ellifritz noted with his own setup the other day, you need different weapons for different missions.  I've tended to favor a handgun as my recommendation, but this has more to do with its compactness and ability to be used with one hand than most any other factor. 

Most rifle calibers have a portion of their bullet flight where the relationship between the drop of the bullet and distance traveled is consistent. A zone where every 100yds of distance is an additional 1mil of elevation. As an example, if our data says 500yds = ~2.5mils, 600 = ~3.5mils, and 700 = ~4.5 mils we can start to see this consistent relationship between distance and come-up. For every 100 yards traveled the come-up is changing 1 mil. As the bullet gets further away and starts to slow down more quickly, this relationship will start to change and will no longer be a constant value, but in the ranges that it works we can use it to our advantage to quickly calculate our come-up.

The article then goes into how to determine it for your rifle. One word of caution: the author states that this only will work with a mil-dot scope, not one relying on MOA or other types of measurements. 

    For instance, my wife and I obtained our security system through a company that offered the equipment, installation and monitoring for a monthly subscription fee, with our being free to keep the equipment after a 2 year period. We have stayed with the company and, as a consequence, have been able to update and expand our system over the years simply as a result of "rewards" for loyal customers. 

    CCTV systems have also become inexpensive, with fairly sophisticated internet enabled systems available for less than $200. And, of course, there is the near ubiquitous Ring doorbell and similar products.

    Ironically, though, these systems are to blame, in part, with the spread of other types of crimes such as the follow-home robberies mentioned above as a response to the better physical security and alarm systems found in up-scale homes. I also expect to see more instances of criminals getting pictures of keys in order to produce 3D printed keys for better access. 

VIDEO: "Nova Astronomy in Upheaval | Predictions Come True"--Suspicious Observers (13 min.)
For many years anyone wishing to use solar power had to assemble the separate solar panels, charge controllers, and batteries, while suppliers provided little or no wiring instructions. Today solar has clearly gone mainstream and you can find prewired packages and kits for every solar system you will ever need. Most kits require little or no wiring skills and utilize safer low-voltage battery power. Any solar components that are still installed separately have been selected and pre-matched with the other supplied components to maximize system performance and eliminate installation problems.

    For example, when those of us early adapters that helped start the solar industry were installing these early systems, we had to go through lengthy calculations for every project to estimate how many amp-hours a specific load would consume each day. Then we had to estimate how many solar modules will be needed to generate this amount of power based on the charge controller used, the ambient temperature, and review sun-hour tables which were still rarely available for many locations or for the tilt and orientation of the proposed solar array. Next, you had to determine the amp-hours and depth of discharge needed to size the battery or batteries, and finally figure out the safest way to wire all these separate components together.

    These days things are much simpler since most manufacturers now offer prepackaged solar systems that include simple sizing tables to pick the best solar package for your specific application. Many solar kits now include the battery, solar charger controller, and inverter prewired and pre-installed into a single enclosure, with one or more solar modules and separate connecting wire and mounting kits. This allows the solar panel to be located separately from the battery and inverter or solar load for more direct solar exposure.

    Many of these kits include all connecting cables which have polarized male and female plugs and receptacles making it almost impossible to connect something reversed. The earlier solar components being sold when the solar industry was just beginning would be instantly destroyed if you mistakenly connected the positive and negative terminals backwards! Most of today’s solar charge controllers and inverters will simply say “hey dummy, switch the wires” in the digital error display with no harm done. Solar is clearly much more user friendly today and there is no reason any farmer, rancher, or weekend gardener cannot install these systems themselves with only basic hand tools.

    If you listen to enough bear stories from folks like Coughlin and read enough news, you might be convinced of a prevalent narrative: As grizzly bear populations increase in the West, bears are attacking more people—especially backcountry hunters and transplants to the West who don’t know much, if anything, about bear safety. Simply Google “grizzly attacks,” and you’ll find a glut of stories that at least imply an alarming trend.

    While that narrative makes for sensational headlines, it’s not really what’s happening on the ground. The reality, it turns out, is more complicated. Yes, bear populations are increasing, and yes, human–grizzly bear conflicts are on the rise. And that’s a real problem. But the best research available shows that grizzly attacks and human deaths aren’t increasing—at least for now.

Also:

Just two people in the lower 48 were killed by grizzlies last year; both attacks occurred in Montana. (Alaska and Alberta each saw a pair of fatal grizzly attacks in 2021, and there were also two fatal black bear attacks in the lower 48 last year.) These were the first fatal grizzly attacks in the state since 2016. 

    “Have there been big quakes here before?” I asked.

    “We know from the geologic records that earthquakes have taken place along the Cascadia fault, irregularly, about every 500 to 600 years, for the last 10,000 years.”

    “What do you mean ‘irregularly’? Dave asked.

    “It’s not a 500 or 600-year ‘cycle,’ it’s an average. They run from about 100 years apart to about 1,000 years apart. And each was accompanied by tsunamis that swept ashore.”


VIDEO: "How the World REALLY WORKS: in 6mins"--Black Pigeon Speaks (6 min.)

"You know who didn't have due process?" Cicilline asked, growing heated. "You know who didn't have their constitutional right to life respected? Kids at Parkland, and Sandy Hook, and Uvalde, and Buffalo, and the list goes on and on," he said. "So spare me the bullsh*t about constitutional rights."

With his utter disregard of the Constitution--the "social contract" that is the only thing that holds this country together--and contempt for the average citizen's ability to protect their lives, it is no surprise to see that Cicilline is very much in favor of killing unborn babies.
    It’s a standard pattern. After a horror like the Uvalde, Texas, school shooting, pundits, journalists and politicians come forward to say that the event is evidence of some deep moral failure, a flaw in America’s soul. Predictably enough, of course, they then preach that salvation can only come by doing what they want.

    But when the facts come in, it invariably turns out that the tragedy doesn’t stem from a spiritual failing in America but rather from the fact that some (most?) of our institutions are run by creeps, crooks and incompetents. 
“This is often what happens in police work, a field in which adherence to the chain of command is relentlessly emphasized. Such adherence serves the organization well under mundane conditions, but when a crisis occurs, as happened in Uvalde, Texas, on Tuesday, the chain of command does not always produce the leader the circumstances demand. When rapid, tactical decisions are called for, the highest-ranking officer at the scene may not be the most qualified to make them, and in most cases is guaranteed not to be.”

While this is not addressed by Ellifritz, nor part of his discussion, I would like to invite the reader to look at what happened in Uvalde--the fact that over 100 police officers stood by and knowingly let children be shot dead by a madman rather than violate an obviously stupid order--and consider what these same officers would do if ordered to do something just as heinous. If they could stand by while children screamed and called 911 for help, and gun shots continued to ring out, they would have no problem with rounding up "deplorables" and carting them off to death camps, just for one example. Ellifritz explains why he would have disregarded orders and how he would have justified it, and I believe him; and, undoubtedly, there are others like him. But as this event shows, that is a very small percentage of officers.

It’s funny how agency flits back and forth between the gun and the shooter, depending on the murderer’s race — but of course, correctly understood, it’s all perfectly consistent: the aim at every opportunity (and in war, every event must first and foremost be analyzed in terms of the opportunity it presents for action) is to advance, and to seize territory, whether by demonizing Whiteness or disarming the Resistance.

And there is this:

Perhaps, however, the problem is something else. I’m just spitballing here, but maybe a little structured order and deeply rooted meaning in young people’s lives might help: something to live for, and to look up to, so that they don’t have to make up every aspect of their being all alone, completely from scratch. Perhaps if they felt that they were a vitally important link in a great chain of civilized society, the heirs of a venerable past and stewards of their children’s futures, rather than formless atoms dropped into a stormy sea — perhaps, if young people didn’t look for meaning and guidance in the modern world and find only a deranged, screeching chaos — our prospects might improve a little. 

    But that is the million dollar question: why are mass shootings, including school shootings, more common now than 50 years ago? Obviously a great deal of it is related to the drug trade, but then there are the crazies that kill just because they want to kill. The Left and the Bureaucracy seem to agree that the the problem is, as noted above, either guns or "white supremacists." On the latter point, however, even the FBI is having to admit that the "white supremacist" trope is beginning to outlive its usefulness. "FBI Director Christopher Wray said recent mass shootings underscore the increasing threat from lone actors who may be difficult to detect and stop in the planning phases and may ascribe to a 'weird hodgepodge' of ideologies rather than commit acts of violence in furtherance of a defined extremist movement."

    Chairwoman Jeanne Shaheen (R-N.H.) asked the director if he had statistics reflecting an increase in the rate of crimes committed by lone actors who indiscriminately attack people they don’t know. “And do we have any idea, any research into what is motivating those kinds of lone individuals?” she asked.

    Wray said he couldn’t quote statistics at that moment, but stressed that the FBI has “been highlighting this threat, the lone actors — or, effectively, lone actors — using readily accessible weapons attacking what is often referred to as soft targets.” [Ed: what the rest of us call gun-free zones]

    “As to what motivates them, that’s all over the map. I mean, it’s everything from the racially motivated violent extremists to different sorts of anarchists and militia violent extremists to homegrown violent extremists, which is a term we use to sort of distinguish people who are here already in the U.S. but who are inspired by foreign terrorist organizations like ISIS, like al-Qaeda,” he said. “And then, increasingly, we’re seeing people with this kind of weird hodgepodge blend of ideologies. The old-school world of kind of people with some purity of radical ideology then turning to violence is often giving way to people who have kind of a jumble of mixed-up ideas. And, you know, we’ve seen cases where somebody one month is saying they’re an ISIS supporter, and then the next month they say they’re a white supremacist.”

    “We had a case in Minneapolis where a bunch of guys that described themselves as Boogaloo Boys then ended up deciding to provide material support to Hamas. I look at the El Paso shooter in the Walmart there. And if you look at his so-called manifesto, it’s all over the place. So we’re having more and more challenges trying to unpack what are often sort of incoherent belief systems, combined with kind of personal grievances.”

    Sam Faddis, at AND Magazine, considers the latest school shooting and asks "What Made Ramos Kill?" Like myself and many others, Faddis points to the breakdown of the American family. He writes:

    Humans are social animals. It is not just that they are born physically helpless and must be nurtured and cared for by others. We do almost nothing by instinct. Everything we are - in essence - is imparted to us by the social structure around us.

    The most basic element of that social structure is the nuclear family, two parents, typically male and female raising a child. That process does not simply involve clothing and feeding and housing. In fact, the most important elements of that process involve the teaching of rules, values, and morals. A child who grows up without this instruction becomes a wild animal.

    For decades in this country, we have effectively waged war on every element of this social fabric that binds us together. We have emphasized personal gratification and “fulfillment” above all else. Husbands and wives that encounter marital difficulties, which is to say all of them, are encouraged to destroy the marriage, consider children they may have together an afterthought, and march off in search of their own happiness. A child support check in the mail every month is considered the complete satisfaction of any parental obligation.

    Getting married at all is increasingly optional at best. Impregnating a woman and bringing a child into this world is no reason to interrupt your quest for your own personal fulfillment. You “owe it to yourself” to do whatever makes you “happy.”

    Being a “baby daddy” is the new norm.

    Religion is increasingly branded the same as superstition. Moral equivalency is everywhere. There are no absolutes. Good and evil do not exist. It is all about what makes you feel good, right now, right here. The consequences ‘be damned’.

    Our children are adrift in a sea of ambiguity. They are not disciplined. They are not loved. Such parents as they may have, are absent in every way imaginable. Our kids absorb lessons about what to do and what to think from increasingly ubiquitous electronic sources that tell young men to be thugs and young women to be whores.

Read the whole thing. 

    While murders and shootings are down 9 and 6.5 percent respectively from 2021, overall crime in the Big Apple is up 38.42 percent so far in 2022.

    That includes an 18.4 percent rise in felony assaults, a 16.1 percent increase in rapes and a 39.3 percent jump in robberies.

    Consider America today. By comparison with Japan, China, Korea, it is a barbarity, a dumpster, an asylum, an abattoir, an astonishment. San Francisco loses conventions because of needles and excrement on the sidewalks. Almost weekly we see multiple shootings in stores, high schools and, now, grade schools. Murders of whites by blacks run at thirty a month, the news being suppressed. In cities across the country crime is out of control, the tax bases moving out, bail abolished so criminals are freed in hours. stores leave to escape undiscouraged shoplifting and robbery. Seven hundred homicides a year in Chicago, 300 in Baltimore, and at least twice as many shot but survive, similar numbers in a dozen cities. For practical purposes law does not exists in these ungovernable enclaves. Sexual curiosities, once called perversions, flourish with American embassies hoisting flags in support of transsexualism Mobs topple historical statues. Many tens of thousands live on sidewalks and a hundred thousand a year die of opioid overdoses. The country drops math requirements and English grammar in schools, AP courses, and SATs as racist. The economy declines, jobs have left for other climes, medical care in beyond most people’s means, government is corrupt and incompetent, and wars are unending. There is actual hatred between racial, political, and regional groups. Ominously, gun sales are up.

    How is this going to end well? How did we get here?

    America has never been a nation in the correct sense of the word, a people sharing values, language, a culture. Rather it has been, and is, a collection of peoples having little and common and, often disliking each other. West Virginia has nothing in common with Massachusetts which has nothing in common with the Deep South which has nothing in common with coastal California which has nothing in common with Cavalier Virginia which has nothing in common with Latinos who have nothing in common with blacks.

Unfortunately, our so-called betters never will learn: "Former Bush Officials: Amnesty for Illegal Aliens ‘Vital to the Future’ of American Economy." Of course, when the elites say that immigration, legal or not, is better for the economy, what they really mean is that it is better for their economy. That it will drive up the costs of housing and other goods while simultaneously depressing wages matters not to them because they are both (a) insulated from the problems such policies create and (b) benefit from the increased profits realized by industry and business. 

    Among the 120 invitees this year publicly acknowledged by Bilderberg are Pfizer CEO Albert Bourla, Henry Kissinger, former CIA head David Petraeus, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt,  Sen. Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ), and CIA Director William J. Burns.

    UK Member of Parliament Tom Tugendhat, chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee in the House of Commons is also present.

    So too Canada Deputy Prime Minister Chrystia Freeland and Mark Carney, vice chair of Brookfield Asset Management who served as the governor of the Bank of Canada from 2008 to 2013 and the governor of the Bank of England from 2013 to 2020.

    The conference, initially started by the Dutch royal family in 1954, is seen as the genesis for ideas ranging from free trade agreements like NAFTA to the creation of the European Union, as Fox Metro reports. Key topics acknowledged for discussion in D.C. include:

  •  Geopolitical Realignment
  • NATO Challenges
  •  China
  • Indo-Pacific Realignment
  • Sino-US Tech Competition
  • Russia
  •  Continuity of Government and the Economy
  •  Disruption of the Global Financial System
  •  Disinformation
  • Energy Security and Sustainability
  •  Post Pandemic Health
  •  Fragmentation of Democratic Societies
  •  Trade and Deglobalisation
  •  Ukraine 

  • Tanner Greer, at The Scholar's Stage, takes a look at "Generational Churn and the CPC." Building off the thesis in Vladislav Zubok’s book, A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev, which attributed the fall of the Soviet Union of generational turnover, and his own ideas of generational turnover and American politics, the author now turns his eye toward China and the Chinese Communist Party. The basic idea behind generational churn is that "cultures change when people with new ideas replace the people with old ones." Thus, for instance, he argued that in the United States, "America’s future is godless not because the God-fearing were convinced of the errors of their faith, but because their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren never adopted their faith to start out with." Turning to the CCP, Greer takes note of the age distribution of the 205 members of the Central Committee versus that of the U.S. Congress. The age difference between the oldest members of Congress versus the youngest is 62 years. But for the Central Committee, it is only 17 years. This current crop of post 1950 members will still retain power for the party congress later this year, but by the end of year, the majority (some 80%) will be from the post-1960s generation of members as the older members are forced into retirement under current party rules. Moreover, Greer points out that the Chinese born after 1960 tend to be more liberal and pro-market. These same rules will usher in an even more liberal generation, those born after 1970, in the 2030s. 
  • Since we are on the topic of China: "China’s population is about to shrink for the first time since the great famine struck 60 years ago. Here’s what it means for the world." An excerpt:
    China’s working-age population peaked in 2014 and is projected to shrink to less than one third of that peak by 2100.

    China’s elderly population (aged 65 and above) is expected to continue to climb for most of that time, passing China’s working-age population near 2080.

    This means that while there are currently 100 working-age people available to support every 20 elderly people, by 2100, 100 working-age Chinese will have to support as many as 120 elderly Chinese.

    The annual average decline of 1.73% in China’s working-age population sets the scene for much lower economic growth, unless productivity advances rapidly.

    Higher labour costs, driven by the rapidly shrinking labour force, are set to push low-margin, labour-intensive manufacturing out of China to labour-abundant countries such as Vietnam, Bangladesh and India.

    Already manufacturing labour costs in China are twice as high as in Vietnam.

    At the same time, China will be required to direct more of its productive resources to provision of health, medical and aged-care services to meet the demands of an increasingly elderly population.

    Modelling by the Centre of Policy Studies at Victoria University suggests that without changes to China’s pension system, its pension payments will grow five-fold from 4% of GDP in 2020 to 20% of GDP in 2100.
    A trio of judges in California said on Tuesday that bees could be legally classified as a type of fish as part of a ruling that gave added conservation protections to the endangered species.

    "The issue presented here is whether the bumble bee, a terrestrial invertebrate, falls within the definition of fish," the judges wrote in their ruling. And, they concluded, it does.

    Formerly, the problem for bee lovers — and lovers of all Californian terrestrial invertebrates — was down to the way protected animals had been classified in the state's laws.

    While four bee species were classified as endangered in 2018, land invertebrates are not explicitly protected under the California Endangered Species Act, which protects endangered "native species or subspecies of a bird, mammal, fish, amphibian, reptile, or plant."

So, in what has become almost the norm in courtrooms headed by liberal judges, the judges inverted reality, grossly misinterpreted statutory language, ignored legal rules on how to interpret legislation, and twisted logic to arrive at the decision they wanted notwithstanding the law and the facts. 
    The monarch butterfly population in Mexico is on the rise again, following several years in which the number of butterflies had dwindled to worrying lows.

    In a report from the World Wildlife Fund-Telmex Telcel Foundation Alliance and the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas in Mexico, experts say there has been a 35 increase in the number of butterflies wintering in Mexico's mountaintop forest compared to previous seasons.

  • "Intelligent aliens are ‘hiding on Dyson spheres circling “white dwarf” stars throughout Milky Way,’ expert claims." Ben Zuckerman, who teaches physics and astronomy at the University of California Los Angeles and fellow researches believe that it is unlikely that aliens would bother to travel to another star system, but would instead maximize the use of resources in their own star system. Accordingly, he believes that the search for extraterrestrial life should be focused on finding Dyson spheres, which he believes would mostly centered around white dwarf type starts. Dyson spheres, if you don't know, are a theoretical construct that would maximize capturing the energy from a star by completely surrounding the star to capture as much energy as possible. While popular fiction tends to portray such spheres as a solid shell, the more recent thoughts on the subject have focused on swarms of smaller constructs rather than a single shell. 
    In any event, it seems a reasonable solution to the Fermi Paradox: that the reason we haven't encountered aliens is that the aliens simply don't spread. The problem with this theory, as Isaac Arthur explains in one of his videos, is that once a civilization is able to construct a Dyson sphere, the resources available to such a civilization make it a trivial matter to journey to other star systems. Arthur made the point that such voyages could, in effect, be crowdfunded by even a tiny minority of the members of that civilization. In other words, spreading through the galaxy would, at that level of technology, become inevitable.
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2 comments:

  1. John WilderJune 7, 2022 at 10:34 PM

    Fermi: we might be close to seeing the infrared signatures of Dyson structures.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentJune 11, 2022 at 4:26 PM

      There were a couple possibilities using older telescopes (e.g., Tabby's star), but the new James Webb not only collects more light than Hubble, but it also sees into the infrared, so if they are out there, we probably would see them in the next decade.

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