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Monday, September 5, 2022

The Docent's Memo (September 5, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "ATF Announces Pistol Brace "Amnesty" Period: What It Means For You"--Mr. Guns N Gear Channel (8 min.)

Firearms & Self-Defense:

  • Greg Ellifritz recommended this article to his readers: "THE TRUTH ABOUT VIOLENCE" by Sam Harris. In the article, he discusses three principles to avoid becoming a crime victim:
    • Principle #1: Avoid dangerous people and dangerous places. There are a lot of sub-principles here, but one is to not make a person or place more dangerous by antagonizing a person or escalating the situation--you need to be able to deescalate.
    • Principle #2: Do not defend your property. You can't legally use lethal force to protect property in most jurisdictions, anyway, so trying to do so moves you outside the self-defense "box" and potentially puts you in the role of "bad guy". 
    • Principle #3: Respond immediately and escape. On this point, he writes: "If you have principles 1 and 2 firmly installed in your brain, any violence that finds you is, by definition, unavoidable. There is a tremendous power in knowing this: When you find yourself without other options, you are free to respond with full commitment."
A lot here, so be sure to read the whole thing.
  • I would suggest that you all read the Wikipedia article on the "Murders of Haile Kifer and Nicholas Brady." Kifer and Brady were bad people that decided to break into the home 64 year-old Byron David Smith in Little Falls, Minnesota, on Thanksgiving Day in 2010. Smith had been burglarized before by Kifer and Brady and decided to do something about it. His solution, however, ended up with his being found guilty of premeditated murder. Basically, he saw Kifer and Brady reconnoiter  his home and recognized Kifer. So he laid in wait for the two, waiting in his basement with the light bulbs unscrewed so they couldn't turn on the light. When the Brady entered his basement, Smith shot him twice while he was on the stairs and then once more after he had rolled to the floor of the basement. He then wrapped the body up in a tarp. Kifer entered about 10 or 15 minutes later looking for her cousin and was shot as she made her way down the basement stairs. Smith apparently made a sarcastic comment to her about "sorry about that" and then shot her multiple times in the torso and once in the head. He concealed both bodies initially, only reporting the matter to police a day later. Strangely, he had recorded the whole incident.
    The primary problem here is that Smith went into the confrontation with the purpose of killing the two intruders and arranged things to that end. That is, this wasn't a scared elderly man who shot and killed the two young adults when they broke through a door. Rather, he had withdrawn to his basement, sat in the shadows and shot each as they crept into his basement, and then administered a coup de grâce to each. This is one of those situations where it would have been better to call the police and warn them to leave when they tried to enter the house.
  • "The thing about violence is…" the author writes, "…it’s not as easy to administer or endure as some gun owners and gun-carrying responsible citizens might believe." He elaborates:
It’s one thing to own and carry a firearm or weapon, it’s another thing entirely to deploy and employ them correctly. This is partially remedied in specific skills training (i.e. going to the range, attending a formal class, etc.) but that is by no means the entirety of it. There are other aspects to consider, not least conditioning and judgment.

He then discusses the importance of physical conditioning and training. An excerpt:

    Improving your strength, mobility and stability for fighting in ambush/counter-ambush situations is not widely understood, nor is it promoted in the training world enough.  There is a big disparity in physical capabilities and understanding in both classes I teach and those I attend. I see more people who have zero idea how to actually move their bodies into and out of positions for fighting than people who do.

    I know that sounds like such a simple statement, but it never fails to give people a reality check when they attend their first firearms class that includes basic level hands-on fighting concepts, as some of mine do, and they quickly realize that they never had a clue as to how to actually engage in a physical fight with someone. Or, and often simultaneously, they realize that their physical condition is nowhere near what is needed to perform the tasks they’ve intended or planned.

    They adopted a plan of action and never tested it.

    In other words, many people just believe they will grapple and/or shoot and win. Then when put up against pressure testing, they learn that not one part of that plan was properly prepared for. They are walking around with an untested plan to save their own life or that of their loved ones. 

He also advises that you avoid the "sheep-dog" mentality: that is, the mentality that it is your job to fight crime simply because you are armed. 

    To fight effectively with firearms requires training – receiving instruction on fighting techniques and combative theory – and practice, the actual learning and improvement of those skills. During a firearms class, you’ll perform numerous repetitions of the material being presented, but the bulk of the learning process begins after class. Applying these skills under the stress of actual combat requires learning at the subconscious level, which is only obtained with thousands of repetitions. Whether you have a firearm for self-defense or carry a weapon professionally, the best way to develop and hone your fighting skills is with dry-practice.

    You can dry-practice with an actual weapon, using dummy ammo or snap-caps to drill on the fundamentals of marksmanship or manipulations. You can practice with plastic dummy weapons or airsoft weapons, realistic replicas that fire plastic pellets are valuable training tools when used properly.

    In the absence of other training tools, the simple repetition of working on smooth movement, the geometry of slicing around corners, or using cover is highly effective. Then there is “mental-imagery” practice, a valuable and underrated practice technique where you vividly imagine yourself performing complex tasks under duress. The point is there is no excuse for not practicing your fighting skills everyday in some form or fashion.

He goes into more detail on different types of dry-practice, including dry fire and using air soft, so be sure to read the whole thing. 


VIDEO: "Avoiding detection from your enemies. Mountain Recce (visible, IR, Thermal)"--Garand Thumb (38 minutes). Since he was a military SERE instructor and has experience with military systems, this is probably going to be one of the better videos on hiding from thermal. But, as he notes, the vehicle mounted systems (aka, "the Eye of Sauron") are so good that you are not going to be able to hide from them with just thermal camouflage. They can be effective, however, against the smaller weapon mounted systems or monoculars. 

Prepping & Survival:
    Famine is not hunger or starvation. That is something separate. Workers trapped in a coal mine may starve to death, but that is not famine. That’s starvation. People on Mars likely eventually will suffer Famine and Pandemic — if we get that far.

    Starvation occurs in many ways. People often have starved to death even when plenty of food is available. Example: ‘rabbit starvation,’ AKA protein starvation, when there is plenty of protein and calories, but a nutritional deficit leads to slow starvation — even while mouth and belly are full of food. Arctic explorers have had plenty of rabbits and starved to death. Scurvy emerges from Vitamin C deficiency.

    Famine emerges when a population-sized nutritional deficiency leads to emergent behaviors and diseases such as “Famine Fevers”. “Famine Fevers” include typhus and relapsing fever. And other emergent killers such as cholera are often found in the waters during famine due to collapsing infrastructure and poor sanitation. And emergent behaviors such as extreme criminality, mass migration, and war.

    In short, much of the population becomes so malnourished that the population, the herd, suffers from Famine-AIDS. The collective immune system is weakened. Poor sanitation. Migration. Eating things we do not normally eat and often uncooked. Energy shortages. Cold and hot without escape. Mosquitos and rats galore. Flea outbreaks, etc.

    Famine is something far bigger than mere hunger or malnutrition. And to better understand Famine one must study Pandemic. They simply are inseparable.

    Inseparable legs of the PanFaWar Triangle. Pandemic, Famine, War. Get one, get all.

    All three legs create HOP: Human Osmotic Pressure — the push and pull Migration.

    Urban planning scholar John Renne also gave a heads-up to residents of Honolulu, Colorado Springs, El Paso, San Antonio, Memphis, and Indianapolis, after he rated those cities' evacuation plans as weak.

    ‘To the mayors of these cities, I say there’s no excuse not to have a plan, and there are federal resources available to help you put one together,’ Renee told DailyMail.com.

    ‘People living in those cities need to demand more of their officials, and have their own personal plan, especially if they look out for an elderly parent or somebody else who can't drive.’

    Contrary to the classic evacuation scene of gridlocked highways in many disaster movies, Renne says motorists can typically navigate their way to safety given notice of a coming hurricane.

    ‘Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy and there won’t be traffic,’ he added.

    He focuses on the estimated 25 percent of city dwellers who would otherwise be left behind — the poor, elderly, carless, unaccompanied children, homeless, tourists, and those with certain conditions, like blindness.

    He evaluated the plans — or lack of them — in America’s 50 biggest cities released between 2010 and the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Cities were scored on whether officials kept records of people with special needs, had specialized vehicles and arranged pick-up points, or had a plan for evacuating throngs of pedestrians — as was required in New York after the 9/11 attacks.

    Seven ‘model’ cities were ranked as having strong plans — Charlotte, North Carolina, Cleveland, Jacksonville, Miami, New Orleans, New York, and Philadelphia — some of which learned from errors from past disasters.

    The study, published in the International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction, said there was a widespread ‘lack of preparedness’ and ‘only marginal improvements’ since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans in 2005.

    That storm left 80 percent of the Louisiana city underwater, displaced 130,000 residents, claimed 1,500 lives and mushroomed into a political embarrassment for the White House and emergency chiefs for a slow and confused response.

  • "Security Concerns Against The Roving Horde After Cities Collapse." This article explores the concept of "the Golden Horde" as that term is used by preppers and survivalists and then discusses some concepts for keeping such groups from coming to your retreat and/or surviving such an encounter (because, as the author notes, a big enough group will quickly overwhelm whatever defenses you might have). Most of his strategy is to be inconspicuous to avoid attention.

    As best as I can determine, the term "Golden Horde" was popularized within prepper and survivalist circles by James Wesley Rawles although the concept--masses of people evacuating from cities and spreading into the countryside in the event of a disaster or nuclear war--has been popular within the survivalist community for a long time and probably arose from the the Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) promulgating a policy in the early 1950s calling for the evacuation of cities in the event of a nuclear attack as well as a subsequent “crisis relocation program” initiated under the Carter Administration in the late 1970s (you can read a 1981 FEMA document on crises relocation here (PDF)).

    The reality is that absent some evacuation order, there probably won't be a Golden Horde as envisioned by most preppers.  Rather, in a slow motion collapse, there will be ever increasing levels of burglary, home invasions and banditry in rural areas as law and order collapses just as we have seen in various third world countries that have seen economic collapse or partial governmental collapse. The sophistication and size of these attacks will increase as time goes on. Such attacks will, generally, focus on richer targets. Where a small retreat with no significant equipment, food or wealth will likely face problems is when a bandit or local government decides to engage in collecting "taxes" and trying to visit as many households as possible. 

    A civil war will most resemble the "Golden Horde" scenario because roaming bands of fighters or troops attempting to live off the land may seemingly select a house or farmstead at random out of simple expediency and then "appropriate" what they find there: you food, weapons, valuables, and even a daughter or son. 

    If a disaster is strong enough to smash national or state governments, do not expect municipal governments or military controlled areas to sit idly by. With the manpower and weapons, they will by in an ideal situation to form military and paramilitary groups that could be used to scour the countryside for food and supplies. Due to their possession of aircraft, don't expect that your retreat will escape notice. Rather, you best defense would be to be so small that it doesn't warrant their attention ... at least, not until the tax man cometh. 

    I suspect, however, that a prepper's or survivalist's greatest threat will not be from strangers travelling from distant cities but from neighbors and local communities. 

    An estimated 70,000 people protested in Prague against the Czech government on Saturday, calling on the ruling coalition to do more to control soaring energy prices and voicing opposition to the European Union and NATO.

    Organizers of the demonstration from a number of far-right and fringe political groups including the Communist party, said the central European nation should be neutral militarily and ensure direct contracts with gas suppliers, including Russia.

    The Biden administration has leased fewer acres for oil-and-gas drilling offshore and on federal land than any other administration in its early stages dating back to the end of World War II, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis.

    President Biden’s Interior Department leased 126,228 acres for drilling through Aug. 20, his first 19 months in office, the analysis found. No other president since Richard Nixon in 1969-70 leased out fewer than 4.4 million acres at this stage in his first term.

    Harry Truman was the last president to lease out fewer acres—65,658—in 1945-46, when offshore drilling was just beginning and the federal government didn’t yet control the deep-water leases that have made up the largest part of the federal oil -and-gas program in modern times.

    Mr. Biden pledged to stop drilling on federal lands as a candidate, saying the nation needs to transition to clean energy. He softened his stance as oil prices soared following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine—calling for boosting oil supplies to ease runaway inflation—but he has nonetheless spurned a leasing program that for decades has been a go-to asset for presidents looking to raise US energy production .

    “The president said he was going to stop leasing. And he’s been remarkably successful,” said David Bernhardt, an energy lawyer and former Interior secretary in the Trump administration.

    The program had already been in a long decline as oil-and-gas companies shied away from offshore drilling and federal lands amid the boom in fracking shale. Under Mr. Biden’s stewardship the decline has accelerated, with leasing down 97% from the first 19 months of his predecessor Donald Trump’s term.

VIDEO: "Why China Will Not Last This Decade - Peter Zeihan" (11 min.)
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VIDEO: "Bidens Unifying Speech"--Freedom Toons (1.5 minutes)

News & Headlines: 

    Bank of America Corp. started a trial program aimed at helping first-time homebuyers in Black and Hispanic neighborhoods by offering mortgages that don’t require down payments, closing costs or minimum credit scores, all considered longtime obstacles to narrowing the gap between White and minority ownership.

    Customers using the program will be evaluated for a home loan not by credit scores, but rather factors such as their history of making rent, utility, phone and auto-insurance payments on time, BofA said in a statement Tuesday. The program will be tried out in certain predominately Black and Hispanic areas of Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami and Charlotte, North Carolina. BofA wouldn’t disclose the planned size of the program, which may be expanded later to other cities.

And even though the program won't be limited to just blacks and Hispanics (wink, wink, nudge, nudge), BofA will make sure that the wrong type of people do not get the loans. For instance, per the article, "[t]he Bank of America offering requires borrowers to have certification from the US Department of Housing and Urban Development and counseling to qualify[.]" And, although "[a]pplicants don’t need to disclose their race," the article indicates that "US Census data will be used to determine that eligible neighborhoods are predominately Black or Hispanic[.]" If it walks like a duck, looks like a duck, and sounds like a duck....

Since this program is focused on developing the company’s future upper management, it essentially guarantees that only these specific minorities will be qualified for that management. Or to put it more bluntly, this program is a new “old boys” network created to purposely exclude whites from management positions.

    The report, published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, concluded that those born between 1981 and 1996 had less average wealth than all other age groups in the workforce in 2016, with those 75 and older enjoying the most wealth. 

    Researchers said among the key factors limiting millennials' wealth was the impact of the 2007 Great Recession, which affected debt-ridden young workers at a higher rate than older, more established Americans, some of whom have seen their wealth grow by as high as 60 percent following the recession. 

Also:

    Millennials' median net worth went from just above $25,000 in 2007 to less than $15,000 by 2010, according to the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System.  

    Unlike other age groups that managed to bounce back, millennials' average wealth continued to fall, a scenario likely to be repeated following the COVID-19 economic shutdown in 2020.  

    'Between the Great Recession and the COVID pandemic, Millennials have already experienced two major economic disruptions during their adulthood,' the researchers wrote. 

    'Substantial economic inequality has been an enduring fixture of Millennials’ adulthood. 

Documents Berenson obtained during the discovery phase of the lawsuit he filed against Twitter illustrate how the government actively works to shut down free speech on issues of public interest. Berenson’s criticisms of the Covid vaccines, which he claimed were ineffective and possibly harmful, came exactly at the time when the federal government, as well as many states and cities, were using every available coercive means at their disposal to force Americans to take them. As such, his speech was deemed extremist and needed to be suppressed to save lives during the pandemic. 
The New Civil Liberties Alliance, the Attorney General of Missouri, and the Attorney General of Louisiana, have filed a lawsuit that blows the lid off a sprawling federal censorship regime that will shock the conscience of Americans. The joint statement on discovery disputes in the lawsuit, State of Missouri ex rel. Schmitt, et al. v. Joseph R. Biden, Jr., et al., reveals scores of federal officials across at least eleven federal agencies have secretly communicated with social-media platforms to censor and suppress private speech federal officials disfavor. This unlawful enterprise has been wildly successful.

The agencies implicated include the White House, HHS, DHS, CISA, the CDC, NIAID, the Office of the Surgeon General, the Census Bureau, the FDA, the FBI, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Election Assistance Commission.

“For women, it is found that having no sexual partners, as well as having 10 or more lifetime sexual partners is associated with lower satisfaction from sex life,” Peri-Rotem explained.

And:

The research suggests people who are more promiscuous are less likely to form longer relationships and, therefore, both men and women who admitted to having many casual encounters were less satisfied sexually. 

  • No, tell us how you really feel: "CHRISTOPHER STEVENS reviews The Lord Of The Rings: The Rings Of Power: No turkey, however bloated and stupid, could ever be big enough to convey the mesmerising awfulness of Amazon's billion dollar Tolkien epic." I watched the first episode and was underwhelmed. No show is completely free of woke, and such is the case here what with a heroine that is written as a man, but with boobs (!), the white men (elves) are all shown as incompetent, a complete lack of regard for the laws of genetics, and the obligatory interracial romance; but even with all that it wasn't as heavy handed as the fare coming out of Disney. But that wasn't the whole issue. Rather, the writing was mediocre even for a television show, the story was uninspiring, the characters weren't all that engaging, and it didn't really seem to fit in with the rest of the Lord of the Rings universe. In fact, it was so mediocre and slow paced that I finished the first episode and literally did not care whether I ever saw the second episode. If I were to sum it up in one sentence: The writing and acting reminded me of lackluster British fantasy shows like Merlin, Atlantis or Sinbad, but with a bigger budget for the computer animation. Which is really sad considering that Amazon was able to give us some spectacular science fiction in The Expanse series.
  • Remember when you would have been considered crazy to say something like this? "Congress Admits UFOs Not ‘Man-Made,’ Says ‘Threats’ Increasing ‘Exponentially’." From the article:
    After years of revelations about strange lights in the sky, first hand reports from Navy pilots about UFOs, and governmental investigations, Congress seems to have admitted something startling in print: it doesn’t believe all UFOs are “man-made.”

    Buried deep in a report that’s an addendum to the Intelligence Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, a budget that governs America’s clandestine services, Congress made two startling claims. The first is that “cross-domain transmedium threats to the United States national security are expanding exponentially.” The second is that it wants to distinguish between UFOs that are  human in origin and those that are not: “Temporary nonattributed objects, or those that are positively identified as man-made after analysis, will be passed to appropriate offices and should not be considered under the definition as unidentified aerospace-undersea phenomena,” the document states.

    The admission is stunning chiefly because, as more information about the U.S. government’s study of UFOs has become public, many politicians have stopped just short of claiming the unidentified objects were extraterrestrial or extradimensional in origin. The standard line is typically that, if UFOs exist, then they're likely advanced—although human-made—vehicles. Obama refused to confirm the existence of aliens but did say that people have seen a lot of strange stuff in the sky lately when asked directly on The Late Show with James Corden, for example. But now Congress seems to want to specifically distinguish between objects that are “man-made” and those that are not.

    A “cross-domain transmedium” threat is one that, by the Pentagon’s definition, can move from water to air to space in ways we don’t understand. In July, the Pentagon announced it was opening the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) to investigate these threats. The bill would reclassify Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (the government's term for UFOs) as Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena and rename the Pentagon's office in line with the new designation. Last year, a leaked video that was confirmed by the Pentagon as being authentic appeared to show a UFO seamlessly flying beneath the waves. 

    Senator Marco Rubio, the vice chair of the Senate Select Committee overseeing intelligence that issued the report,  has publicly said he wants the UFOs to be aliens and not foreign weapons.

    A large question, of course, is why Congress is seemingly admitting this now, in public. After all, lawmakers are privy to classified information that the general public isn't. “It strains credulity to believe that lawmakers would include such extraordinary language in public legislation without compelling evidence,” Marik von Rennenkampff, an Obama-era DoD official, said in an op-ed in The Hill about the budget. According to the op-ed, the comments were first noticed by UFO researcher Douglas Johnson.

    "This implies that members of the Senate Intelligence Committee believe (on a unanimous, bipartisan basis) that some UFOs have non-human origins," von Rennenkampff continued. "After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?"

    "Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development." 

    Alcohol remains a leading cause of humans getting into fatal situations, including freezing to death. Nevertheless, the relaxing qualities of the drug have long been known to give humans an uncanny ability to survive trauma.

    A recent study looked at 14 years of Illinois hospital data and found that stab and gunshot victims were more likely to survive the more inebriated they were.

    “In an ER, cold patients who are really drunk can walk in and they’re conscious at a temperature that they shouldn’t be,” said Giesbrecht.

    And indeed, Joughin’s actions that night speak to a man unfazed by impending disaster.

    Immediately after hearing the collision with an iceberg, the chief baker leapt out of his bunk and began dispatching his staff to stock the lifeboats with bread and biscuits.

    This done, he popped back into his cabin for a drink before heading topside to help load lifeboats.

    Not only did Joughin refuse his own place in a boat, but he and a few other men began forcibly chucking reluctant women into empty seats, likely saving their lives.

    “We threw them in,” he testified later.

    The top deck of the increasingly listing Titanic was mostly cleared of lifeboats by 1:30 a.m. To most, this was a panic-inducing sign that all hope of rescue was gone. But to Joughin, it was a cue to head back to his cabin for another drink.

    “He sat down on his bunk and nursed it along — aware but not particularly caring that the water now rippled through the cabin doorway,” wrote historian Walter Lord in A Night to Remember. Lord was in touch with Joughin just before the baker’s 1956 death.

    Joughin then splashed topside again, where he took it upon himself to begin throwing deck chairs overboard, with an eye to filling the water with impromptu floatation devices.

    Parched, he then worked his way back to his pantry to get a drink of water.

    The baker was standing on the stern when the ship broke in half. And yet, he remembered the violent, catastrophic breakup only as a “great list over to port.”

    “There was no great shock or anything,” he told the inquiry.

    Deftly moving through swarms of people, Joughin made it to the stern rail of the ship. At exactly 2:20 a.m., he rode the sinking Titanic into the sea like an elevator.

    As with all surviving Titanic crew members, 2:20 a.m. on April 15, 1912, was also the exact moment at which the White Star Line stopped paying him.

    The first stage of cold water immersion is known as “cold shock,” the horrifying sensation of having the skin cool. The feeling is what the Titanic’s second officer, Charles Lightoller, described as being “like a thousand knives being driven into one’s body.” Common side-effects include gasping and hyperventilation.

    Even today, the myth persists that the human body cannot withstand more than a few minutes in the ocean. Thus, many people thrown into the sea assume that cold shock is the icy grip of death closing around them.

    In reality, the cold shock ends after 90 seconds. Even in the winter waters of the North Atlantic, an average-sized adult still has 10 minutes before going numb and at least an hour before the heart stops.

    “The average adult is a big chunk of meat and it takes a lot of energy to cool it off,” said Giesbrecht.

    Regardless, cold shock was a stage that many Titanic victims did not survive. In the panicked flailing of those first minutes, many drowned or dramatically sped up their loss of body temperature.

    But Joughin, who had made sure to cinch his lifebelt before going in, met the ice-choked North Atlantic with a stiff upper lip of almost mythic proportions.

    “I was just paddling and treading water,” he testified.

    Brock University’s Stephen Cheung is another leading Canadian expert in hypothermic responses. While he is certainly not in the camp to advocate alcohol as an antidote to shipwrecks, he noted that the effect on Joughin would have been to “increase or bolster his courage.”

    “It would also decrease his feeling of cold, so he may have indeed been more fearless and not feeling as cold and therefore as panicked,” he wrote in an email to the National Post.

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2 comments:

  1. John WilderSeptember 6, 2022 at 10:08 PM

    So, UFOs are real, and they don't belong to humans. I did *not* have that on my bingo card.

    ReplyDelete

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