The Docent's Memo (Aug. 22, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "Bowie, Big Knife & Bayonet Fighting: TAKE THE HAND! Lessons from Biddle WW2"--Scholagladiatoria

Firearms & Self-Defense:

• First off, Jon Low published a new Defensive Pistolcraft roundup of articles and commentary this past week, which you can find here. Be sure to check it out.
• Also, be sure to check out Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump.
• "If You Could Only Have Two: Selecting Survival Firearms." The "if you could only have one" debates aren't really all that interesting to me because they are too limiting, but the "if you could only have two" can be useful because it really forces you to think about what you would want or need out of a long gun and a handgun. The considerations, of course, are largely driven by what is meant by "survival"--survival deep in the wilderness is a different creature altogether from an urban survival scenario post economic collapse. The author, here, defines his as the former scenario:

Here’s the scenario: You’re about to be thrust into a survival situation for an extended period of time. You’ve had to take to the wilderness. Say, a couple of weeks to a couple of months. You can only have two survival firearms; a rifle and a handgun. Which would you choose?

The author begins by going delving deep into the different types of rifles and them moving on to shotguns and handguns before moving to considering for what the weapons will be used and restrictions you will likely have as to size and weight. This probably makes the article more interesting to readers, but it is backwards of the proper way of analyzing the situation which should be for what you will be using the weapon and restrictions on size and weight, and then considering the weapons that will fulfill these requirements. In this case, the author decided on his scoped Savage MK II FV-SR .22 rifle for all around hunting needs (although he acknowledges that the Ruger 10/22 is another good choice) and a .357 Magnum revolver for defense against dangerous critters (whether using snake loads on one hand, or something suitable for bear defense on the other) or on the off chance he comes across larger game. Under the scenario that the author offers, and assuming that the "wilderness" is in the lower-48 states, I pretty much agree with the author's selection. I could see substituting a polymer framed .45 ACP, 10mm, or even a 9mm with 142-grain deep penetrating bullets, if you didn't need to be able to shoot snake loads, as that would lighten your load considerably.

• From the same author as the preceding article: "Savage Mark II FV-SR — A Yute-Sized Sniper Rifle." These are youth sized bolt-action .22 rifles that come with a 5-round detachable box magazine, but Savage also makes a 10-round that works with them. Most of my experience with this rifle mirrors that of the reviewer. The primary problem I had with the rifle was that the stock is shaped for shooting with iron sights with the result that the comb is far too low for an optic. As I described in a 2018 post, I wound up using the Voodoo Tactical Cheek Rest to get the right comb height rather than replacing the stock as many have done. I think the rifle might benefit from a bedding job, but haven't done so on my rifle.
• "Point Shooting: The Untold Story." At one time, almost all of the top gunfighters relied on and taught point-shooting techniques for up-close encounters. One of these, who had developed his own unique style, was Col. Rex Applegate. This article goes into the history of point shooting with particular focus on Applegate's system. An excerpt:

    When Colonel Applegate was personally recruited by the legendary “Wild Bill” Donovan (director of what began as the Coordinator of Information (COI) and later became the Office of Strategic Services OSS), he was initially paired with another close-combat icon, William Ewart Fairbairn. With decades of experience with the Shanghai Municipal Police, Fairbairn already had a highly evolved curriculum of armed and unarmed combat to offer. The system — including the point shooting system he developed with his Shanghai colleague Eric Anthony Sykes — therefore became a significant turnkey part of the OSS curriculum. However, it wasn’t the only influence on Colonel Applegate’s approach.

    Those familiar with the Colonel’s history know he also conducted extensive personal research into combat shooting — including research into the methods of Western gunfighters. In the course of this study, he discovered a letter written by the legendary Wild Bill Hickok in which Hickok explained the secret of his gunfighting success. Specifically, he revealed during his gunfights he always took the time to raise the gun to eye level before firing. That revelation really resonated with Colonel Applegate and became a key element of his preferred shooting method.

    A somewhat lesser-known fact is one of the Colonel’s earliest shooting influences was his uncle, exhibition shooter Gus Peret. Like most exhibition shooters of the early 20th century, Peret had uncanny eye-hand coordination and performed feats including both incredible kinesthetic/point shooting and the amazingly precise use of the gun’s sights. Through Peret the Colonel learned at a very early age both the advantages and limitations of both approaches to shooting. He also learned there is a huge difference between the skills of a naturally gifted shooter with an unlimited supply of practice ammo and the capabilities of the common man. That understanding would later serve him and his students very well.

    When you combine these influences and compare the WWII era Applegate technique with Fairbairn’s technique, there is one major difference. While Fairbairn acknowledged that shooting from eye level was preferable, he placed a heavy emphasis on what he called the “Three-Quarter Hip” position, in which the gun hand was only raised to center-chest level. The Applegate technique, however, reflected his own research and experience and adamantly advocated raising the gun to eye level. In fact in his classic Kill or Get Killed he specifically warns against hip shooting and other below line- of-sight methods and clearly separates the from his recommended method of combat point shooting.

• "Your Tactical Training Scenario…Attacked While Doing Yard Work." Greg Ellifritz, in this article, recounts a news report about a man whose wife was attacked by a naked man while the couple was working in the yard. The husband pulled the naked man off his wife, was attacked by the naked man, who then returned to assaulting the wife. The husband had to retrieve a gun in order to dispatch the attacker. Ellifritz then discusses some points and issues about what to do in such scenario. Of course, the first is to carry a weapon: Greg recommends a .38 snub-nosed revolver, but also suggests a knife or prepper spray, or, since you are doing yardwork, a machete or ax. I always carry some sore of knife, and frequently will wear a handgun, when doing yard work--especially if working in my unfenced front-yard. Greg also recommends you think of improvised weapons that might be available. In that regard, don't underestimate the value of a shovel or spade as a defensive weapon.

    Other considerations that he raises are whether you carry a communications device (I will have my cell phone on me), use headphones (that reduce your ability to hear), and whether you secure your house while you are outside. As to the latter issue, he remarks: "It makes a lot of sense to shut and lock exterior doors to your house whenever you are not in their direct line of sight or are mentally preoccupied." I agree. My wife and I have always been conscientious about keeping exterior doors locked, even when home, and I think it has made a difference. 

    The one thing I would add to Greg's comments is to take the time to look up and around you periodically to see what is going on. 

    Another situation, which is similar, is self-defense when working in your garage. If you are like me, for most of the year when you are working in your garage the garage door will be open in order to let in light and to keep it cooler. The advantage to working in the garage is that there are probably lots of improvised weapons around you from screwdrivers and hammers to large wrenches and crowbars.

VIDEO: "DESERT TECH TREK- 22 - 10/22 BULL-PUP"--22Plinkster (8 min.)

This looks like it would be great for a backpack gun.

Prepping & Survival:

• Daisy Luther at Organic Prepper points out that "The SHTF Is Happening RIGHT NOW." The basic gist is that what with inflation and the job situation and continued shortages, we are--right now--in an economic crises. She observes, for instance:

    A lot of folks think that jobs are easy to find right now. They cite the signs that are up everywhere, announcing that businesses are hiring. As the mom of someone in her early 20s who is out there looking for a second job to increase her household income, I can tell you that just because there’s a sign out doesn’t mean the business is actually hiring.

    A lot of places are required by their corporate headquarters to put these signs out to make it look like they’re thriving, but they aren’t actually hiring. Go in with a resume, and you’ll soon find out this is true. Obviously, it’s not the case with all businesses posting such signs, but it’s very much the situation in urban North Carolina right now.

    Places that hire minimum wage workers are operating with skeleton crews, leaving too few frazzled employees to handle long lines and unhappy patrons. Have you been someplace like Walmart or Target lately? At least at our local stores, there’s generally one register with a human operating, and quite often, the line winds down the front aisle with dozens of customers.

    Wages haven’t matched the increase of inflation. If you’re still making what you made a year or two or three years ago, you’re able to pay for far less with it. ...

• "Developing a Flexible Team Communications Setup." Some ideas from Everyday Marksman on putting together radio and headphone sets for communications on a budget. An excerpt:

    My flexible comms system is built around the idea that there are many ways you might want to use the radio. That could mean full on “tactical” use, completely by itself, or something in between. I want to tailor communications to many situations, both high and low profile, and also not cost a huge amount of money.

    My idea started when I noticed the number of electronic ear pro options on the market that included an aux-in audio jack. The Howard Leight Impact Sports, for example, have this feature and most people only talk about in terms of hooking it up to a phone for music. This little feature is an obvious answer for listening to a radio, but it doesn’t really help when it comes to talking.

    The next light bulb moment happened while researching speaker mics, as seen on the shoulders of law enforcement officers for generations. The key benefit of the speaker mic is that it allows me keep the radio itself on the belt line or attached to a pack. The speaker mic allows me to both talk and listen without touching the radio itself. The downside is that the speaker mic is still a speaker, which means if you can hear it then so can other people. That’s not very “tactical.”

    Then it hit me while reading the spec sheets. Most quality speaker mics have an audio-out jack for routing to a pair of headphones. That gave me an idea. By  running a speaker mic somewhere close to the mouth, like the chest or shoulder, and then a second audio cable from the speaker mic to hearing protection, I get the same basic benefit as a high-end tactical headset for a fraction of the cost.

• "15 Handyman Kits the Self-Sufficient Prepper Needs" by Fabian Ommar, Organic Prepper. Ommar, who apparently has published a couple books on prepping, has made a very helpful list of tool kits and their basic contents for specific categories of tasks for repairs and such including a woodworking kit, plumbing kit, sewing kit, bicycle repair kit, leather kit, lubrication kit, and so on. Now these are very basic kits. The sewing kit, for instance, represents just the bare minimum for attaching buttons or some limited hand sewing. But I like how the article is organized because it allows someone to think of a task which they might want to prepare for and provides a list of simple tools. 

    And if these lists represent all that you plan on gathering (e.g., you don't plan on doing large leatherworking projects or a seamstress), it appears that most everything in a given category would fit into a small storage bin which could be labelled and stacked on shelves. Thus, for instance, if your bike tire went flat, you could go to your storage area, look for the bin marked "bicycle repair kit" and it would have most of the tools you would need in that one bin.

•  "Hunting With The Ancient Atlatl." If you don't know what is an atlatl, it is a type of spear thrower that uses a relatively short shaped wood piece to hold a lightweight spear or dart and, effectively, lengthens your moment arm when throwing the spear. The article discusses the history of the device (as best as we know), it uses, the science and ballistic information, and efforts to expand legal hunting opportunities with an atlatl. 

VIDEO: "Explaining America’s Nine Nations part 1"--WhatIfAllThis (46 min.)

News & Headlines:

• Saber rattling: "US deploys nuke-capable B-52 bombers to UK." This contingent of bombers is from Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota and apparently adds to a number moved to Europe earlier this year. The article also indicates the Sweden and Norway provided fighter escorts for a B-52 exercise. 
• Ditto: "Russia Deploys Hypersonic Missiles Along Baltic Sea." From that article:

    Russia has deployed aircraft armed with hypersonic missiles along the Baltic Sea, a move that inches the country's forces closer to its NATO border, The Associated Press reported.

    In a Thursday announcement, the Russian Defense Ministry revealed that it moved three MiG-31 fighters brandishing Kinzhal missiles to Chkalovsk air base in Kaliningrad — a Russian enclave north of Poland and south of Lithuania.

    Moscow asserts that the Kinzhal missiles, which have already been used in its ongoing invasion of Ukraine, have a range of up to roughly 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) and fly at ten times the speed of sound.

    The ministry's stated purpose for moving the weapons is to shore up "additional measures of strategic deterrence," with the aircraft on constant alert for immediate orders.

    Russian Foreign Ministry spokesman Ivan Nechayev said on Thursday that the country fears a coming confrontation with the West, emphasizing that "Russia, as a nuclear power, will continue to act with maximum responsibility."

• "New WHO guidelines: Monkeypox could be classified as an Sexually Transmitted Infection."

    Monkeypox may be reclassified as a sexually transmitted infection by the World Health Organisation (WHO), The Telegraph understands.

    The virus is transmitted almost exclusively through the sexual networks of gay men but can also spread through other forms of close contact.

    As a result, there has been a reluctance to formally recognise the virus as an STI by public health officials, with only the WHO able to re-categorise the disease.

    Now, the WHO received a formal proposal to change the classification and not "turn a blind eye" to the spread from Prof Rossi Hassad, an epidemiologist at Mercy College in New York and a statistician.

    He argues there is now "compelling evidence" that the virus is spread through sex and that, although there are also other means of transmission, it would be "more precise to say monkeypox is also a sexually transmitted infection".

• Related: Nothing to see here--move along: "New York records first pediatric monkeypox case - just as officials fear return to schools this fall will cause surge in infections among children."
• "China’s Property Sector Approaches The Brink." From the lede: "China’s real estate crisis took one more step toward the abyss this week, as new numbers showed property investment dropping, new construction slowing to a crawl, and foreign analysts showed the cash flows of property developers have turned to a trickle."
• One of my favorite topics and one I've posted about quite a bit: "The Unexpected Future"--Quillete. That the West--well, actually, almost the whole world--is facing a dangerous demographic decline has been known for a long time by demographers. The first signs of this actually appeared even before the now thoroughly debunked Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb was published in 1968. One of the first popular books to challenge the overpopulation canard was The Birth Dearth published in 1988. If anything, the situation has only grown worse as population decline has set in much faster than expected throughout the third world. This article does a good job of summarizing the issue even if the author dishonestly suggests that this is something only just discovered. It begins:

    We are entering an unanticipated reality—an era of slow population growth and, increasingly, demographic decline that will shape our future in profound and unpredictable ways. Globally, last year’s total population growth was the smallest in a half-century, and by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to see population declines while the world’s population is due to peak sometime later this century.

    This kind of long-term global demographic stagnation has not been seen since the Middle Ages. World population has been growing for centuries, but the last century has dwarfed previous rises. About 75 percent of the world’s population growth has occurred in the last hundred years, more than 50 percent since 1970. But now, population growth rates are dropping, especially in more developed nations, according to the United Nations (all subsequent references to UN research in this essay are drawn from these data).

    It’s not a matter of if but when global populations will start to decline. Under the UN’s medium variant projection, the world’s population will peak in 2086, while under the low variant, the peak will occur in 2053, and by 2100, the population will be about a billion below today’s level. Demographer Wolfgang Lutz and colleagues project a global population of between 8.8 and 9.0 billion by 2050 falling to between 8.2 and 8.7 billion by 2100. The projected declines are concentrated in countries with high fertility rates, especially in sub-Saharan Africa. In the process, we will inhabit a rapidly aging planet. In 1970, the median world age was 21.5 years. By 2020, it had increased to 30.9 years, and the UN projects that it will be 41.9 years in 2100.

    We are well past the time when we need to concern ourselves with Paul Ehrlich’s long-standing prophecy that humanity will “breed ourselves to extinction.” On the contrary, we need to worry about the potential ill-effects of depopulation, including a declining workforce, torpid economic growth, and brewing generational conflict between a generally prosperous older generation and their more hard-pressed successors. The preponderance of low fertility in wealthier countries also presages a growing conflict between the child-poor wealthy countries and the child-rich poor countries.

The article also explains:

    Generally, countries with severely low birth rates will eventually experience reduced economic growth, as has been the case in Japan for decades. Japan’s long economic slowdown reflects a labor force that has been declining since the 1990s and will be a third smaller by 2035. China faces a similar dilemma. The senior population there is expected to have more than tripled by 2050, one of the most rapid demographic shifts in history.

    As the employment base shrinks and the demands of the elderly rise, countries like Germany are raising taxes on the existing labor force to pay for the swelling ranks of retirees. For the OECD as a whole, “the dependence ratio of older people (i.e., those aged 65 and over as a proportion of those aged 20–64) will rise from the current figure of 22 percent to 46 percent in 2050.” Given the higher costs of housing, the current generation will not be able to count on pensions to maintain their post-retirement living standards, even in well-managed countries like Singapore.

    For its part, the United States already faces a massive public pension crisis and security reserve funds are expected to be depleted by 2035. As in other countries, this stems largely from the reduction of new entrants into the labor force due to low birth rates. US population growth between ages 16 and 64 has dropped from 20 percent in the 1980s to less than five percent in the past decade. In 1970, there were 19.1 persons aged 65 and older for each 100 aged 20 to 64. By 2020, this had increased to 28.4 and is projected by the UN to increase to 40.4 by 2050 and 54.1 by 2100.

And this:

    Birth rates may never—and probably should never—reach 1950s or 1960s levels, but we need to consider ways to reverse or at least slow rapid depopulation. This is as much a civilizational or spiritual crisis as an economic one, and it requires a shift in values, including perhaps religious ones. As Eric Kaufmann, professor at Birkbeck College in London, explains in his important book Shall the Religious Inherit the Earth?, secular people or members of the progressive faiths have fewer children than adherents of evangelical Christianity, orthodox Judaism, or fundamentalist Islam. And as a Japanese professor told the Wall Street Journal, basic attitudes would also need to change if we want to become “a society where people have fun working and raising children.”

    Economics will play a critical role. People tend to have children if they are able to envision a better economic future for themselves and their potential offspring. Pew has noted that, “the U.S. birth rate dipped in 2011 to the lowest ever recorded, led by a plunge in births to immigrant women since the onset of the Great Recession.” What happens during the emerging recession may not be pretty. Birth rates cannot be expected to recover as long as economic prospects are bleak for the young and child-raising is devalued and even denigrated.

Although the article touches on a lot of good issues, it doesn't really delve into any one topic in enough detail. For instance, while mentioning the economic issues, the article does not discuss, for instance, how the costs of having children have increased over time while real wages have largely been stagnant since the 1970s, or the role that our current rent-seeking economic system has played in that stagnation. It doesn't address how government programs and edicts--everything from the current family court system to child seat laws--have driven up the costs of having children. It only briefly mentions the role of strong religious faith in family formation and having children, and doesn't really address how more education of women leads to lower fertility rates--something that has been observed since at least the 19th Century.

• The Anthropic Principle at work: "Get above 30 degrees latitude on Mars and you can find ice everywhere." It's like God intended for us to settle the solar system.