The Docent's Memo (Nov. 7, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "Are Mini Shotgun Shells Viable for Self-Defense?"--

Lucky Gunner Ammo (12 min.)

Self-Defense & Firearms:

• Be sure to check out Greg Ellifritz's most recent Weekend Knowledge Dump. This might just be me, but I thought the most interesting of the articles to which he linked was one from Revolver Guy on metal injection manufacturing (MIM) manufacturing and rebutting the assumption that MIM parts were necessarily inferior or used as a more cost effective alternative to machining. But even if that doesn't interest you, there are many more links to good articles and videos on the topics of firearms, self-defense or concealed carry. A couple of those that I found interesting and/or useful was the article (transcript) of Lucky Gunner's video on the effectiveness of mini-shot shells for self defense (I'd obviously seen the video previously--see above--but there is something about reviewing points in writing that I like) and the article on drawing a pistol while in a close quarter engagement.
• "This Bill Would Put a Public Shooting Range in Every National Forest in the Country." This article is about the Range Access Act introduced by Utah Congressman Blake Moore that would require the Forest Service and BLM to “ensure that each qualifying National Forest and BLM district has at least one designated public recreational shooting range that does not require a user fee". 

The bill defines a qualifying range as one that “shall be able to accommodate rifles, pistol, and shotguns and may accommodate archery.” It further requires land management agencies to design ranges with public safety in mind, including berms, buffer distances, a designated firing line, and shooting benches.”

The purpose of the bill, according to Moore, is to reduce the amount of garbage found on public land at informal shooting sites as well as provide a safer place to shoot for recreational shooters.  Also:

The bill requires land-management agencies to consider the “proximity of areas frequently used by recreational shooters when identifying a suitable location for a designated shooting range” and requires agencies to ensure that a designated shooting range is available prior to closing federal land to recreational shooting. That requirement should help ensure that recreational shooters always have access to federal public lands. 

    This would be nice in the Mountain West where we have huge swaths of public lands but shooting ranges are few and far between and most of those are reserved for members of shooting clubs. I doubt that such shooting ranges will have much impact because much, of not most, of the garbage and debris you see dumped on public lands that are shot up are from people that simply don't want to pay the fee and/or take the time to take it to a land fill or other disposal facility--shooting it up is just an added bonus. Heck, the people shooting the debris may not even be the people dumping it. As for shot up signs, the people shooting up signs aren't doing it because they are frustrated at not having a shooting range: they are shooting up signs because they want to shoot up signs.

• "The M1907 Sling: What It Is And How To Use It?"--The Firearm Blog. Even if you don't know what is the M1907 Sling, you've probably seen them: they are leather shooting slings with a row of parallel holes running down the length that allow the sling to be adjusted to fit a loop around the upper arm and help brace the rifle. This article describes (with photographs) how to set up and attach the sling to a rifle as well as how to adjust and use it as a shooting sling.
• "Meet the 375 Raptor: a Heavy-Hitting, Short Action Cartridge." First developed in 2014, the .375 Raptor takes a .308 case, shortens it and opens up the neck to accept .375 projectiles. From other sources I've read, the cartridge was originally intended for hog hunting and to give shooters the same options as using .300 BLK over standard .223: a larger heavier bullet with both super-sonic and sub-sonic capabilities. Anyway, from this article:

Projectiles from 175 grains to 350 grains can be loaded to supersonic velocities. A fantastic, all-around hunting load capable of confidently taking any animal in North America is the 270 grain Speer Soft Point Boat Tail bullet, which is very affordable, shockingly accurate, and absolutely devastating on big animals. When loaded in 375 Raptor, velocity ranges from 2,100 FPS to 2,400 FPS depending on barrel length (10-inch to 20-inch). Raptor has been used to take everything from moose to Kodiak bears to Cape Buffalo and other African game.

As for subsonic loads, the author relates:

Projectiles from 350 to 450 grains are ideal for loading at subsonic velocities around 1,050 FPS. 400 grain subsonic expanding hollow points are available from a couple of respected projectile manufacturers, including Maker Bullets, and are available in loaded ammunition from a few companies. A 400 grain subsonic 375 Raptor still has more energy at 100 yards than 300 Blackout has at the muzzle! 350 grain Sierra MatchKing loads are amazingly accurate out to hundreds of yards. 

If you are wanting to build an AR10 in this caliber or convert one to this caliber, the author recommends going with 16-inch barrel for a rifle build, noting: "While you can (obviously) go longer, you’ll only gain about 12-15 FPS per inch of barrel beyond 16 inches and the juice just isn’t worth the squeeze. Go handy, go short."

• "TFB Armorer’s Bench: Commentary on the Remington 74 Series." The 74 series--which includes the 740, 742, 7400, Remington FOUR, and 750--was a family of semi-automatic hunting rifles produced in one iteration or another from 1956 until 2016. It appears to have been a work in progress throughout its lifetime, and after reading the article, I can better see why survivalist/prepping authors from the pre-2000 period were careful to distinguish between hunting and combat rifles while noting that the former could take a life, but only the latter could save lives.
• "Tactical Lever Gun: Marlin 1894 CST." The Marlin 1894 CST is a .357 Magnum caliber lever action rifle (see this review by Matthew Allen at Shooting Illustrated for more information). In the article, Josh Shaw, Grandmaster in USPSA and Instructor for Green Ops, describes what he did to make his lever action more suitable for self-defense applications. He relates, in part:

    I started with the Marlin 1894 CST model. The stainless steel rifle comes with a 16” threaded barrel and screws on the receiver for mounting an optic rail, making it a great starting point for a tactical gun. 

    The first things I wanted to do were to add a red dot sight, a lighter loading gate, and a white light in order to make the gun easier to shoot, easier to load, and be low light capable. Ranger Point Precision makes a large number of excellent aftermarket accessories for lever guns, so I went with their flyweight loading gate, self-cleaning magazine tube follower, and their Picatinny rail for the top of the receiver. For the M-LOK handguard, I chose Midwest Industries as the Ranger Point Precision handguard was not out yet.

    The Marlin 1894 CST has a medium-sized loop that when running the gun fast can bruise hands. To mitigate this I looked up how to wrap 550 cord and installed that on the lever.

    For ammo holders, I added a Hoptic USA 6-round quiver to the MLOK handguard. For the stock, I put on a Triad Tactical Stock Pouch which will add 18 more rounds to the gun. All together with these installations, there are 24 rounds on the gun…tactical guns need to eat. The ammo chosen for this gun is Speer Gold Dot 38sp 125gr +P ammo. It shoots great and has an added benefit: I can fit more in the tube than full power .357mag.

    To get a higher sight picture for the red dot the Triad Tactical Stock pouch also serves this purpose by providing a cushy cheek rest and extra height on the comb which can be adjusted by adding more wrap on the comb if needed.

More at the link, including a video. 

• "N.Y. Law Banning Gun Carrying in Churches (Including by People Authorized by the Church) Struck Down." Struck down by the federal court for the Northern District of New York.
• Only police should have guns: "Sansom Park officer shot during active shooter training at elementary school, police say."
• "Cartels Buying Weapons From Mexican Military." Of course they are. You didn't buy the B.S. that they got their weapons from gun stores in the U.S. did you? They've long obtained weapons directly or indirectly from the Mexican military. And before the Mexican military, the cartels bought up weapons that the U.S. had provided to Nicaraguan rebels and to El Salvador's military. 

VIDEO: "Will the World Starve this Winter?"--

Whatifalthist (26 min.)

Prepping & Survival: 

• "Long-Term Survival Food Storage: Salt" by Robert Wayne, Red Tea. An article looking at why salt is so important and discussing ways to store it and use it. An excerpt:

The way you’re going to buy and store salt will likely depend on the type of salt you’re looking to store.

• Iodized Table Salt
• Sea Salt
• Rock Salt
• Curing Salt
• Pickling Salt

1. Iodized Table Salt 

 

Most people are familiar with the round containers of iodized table salt that are purchased in stores. They’re cheap, ubiquitous, and what most people think of when they think of salt. But because of the iodine added into the salt, the shelf life of iodized table salt isn’t indefinite.

It’s generally recommended that iodized salt be consumed within 5 years for peak quality. After that, you may want to consign that salt to other uses, like smothering metal fires.

2. Sea Salt 

 

Sea salt is normally formed through evaporation, as seawater is exposed to air and sunlight and the resulting salt left over after evaporation is harvested. Sea salt contains trace minerals, but its shelf life is indefinite. As long as it is stored in dry conditions, salt can be stored for years or decades.

3. Rock Salt 

 

Rock salt is normal sodium chloride mined from deposits that are already in rock form. Much of the rock salt you’ll find available for sale isn’t intended for human consumption. One of its primary uses is for making ice cream.

4. Curing Salt 

 

Curing salt is often known as “pink salt” or Prague powder. But don’t confuse it with pink Himalayan salt or Andean or Bolivian pink salt. Those salts are sodium chloride. Curing salt is sodium chloride mixed with sodium nitrite, which is dyed pink to ensure that no one tries to consume it. Consuming sodium nitrite can be fatal.

The nitrites in curing salt kill toxins in meat and other foods, which is why nitrites are so common in so many cured foods today. If you expect your diet to rely heavily on cured foods, especially cured meats, you may want to lay up a store of curing salt.

5. Pickling Salt 

 

Pickling salt is pure sodium chloride, specifically formulated to ensure that no impurities cause pickled foods to discolor. These salts contain no caking agents, iodine, or other additives that table salt does.

• "The EDC Tool Roll: Knipex Pliers Wrench (86 04 100)"--Jerking the Trigger. This review covers the 4-inch sized pliers wrench, which because of their smaller size and lack of rubber coating on the handles are easier to carry in a pocket. Other changes include a "slightly slimmer jaws and a sliding mechanism that does not require a button press to adjust the opening of the jaws."

Speaking of adjusting the opening of the jaws… Like all other Pliers Wrench iterations, these things offer a massive range of adjustment allowing them to be used on larger fasteners than you might expect – up to a 3/4″ nut comfortably (or even just a bit larger if you push your luck).

    Size and features aside, these are basically as functional as their larger counterparts. They offer a tight grip on the fastener that only gets tighter as you pull the tool through the arc of its motion. The faux ratcheting effect that makes these so darn handy is also intact making these a reasonable replacement for a ratchet set in some cases.

    At this point, you may be wondering what you are giving up with this new smaller version. They definitely lack a bit of leverage compared to larger versions and the checkered handle, while grippy, is not as comfortable to use as the red rubber-dipped larger variants. For those reasons, I definitely prefer this in a pocket-carry role. If you are going to carry them in an EDC Bag or Range Bag, go with the 5″ version.

You have to go to the article and look at the photographs to appreciate how small are these tools.

• "How Much Land Would You Need To Be Self-Sufficient?" by Rebekah Pierce, Urban Survival Site. There is no definitive formula to answer this question, but Pierce offers some guidelines on how much land you might need depending on the size of your family/group, the type of soil and aridity, crops you will be growing, and so on.
• "Famine Patterns" by Michael Yon. He discusses how the supply chain disruptions (due to many causes) is going to mean less fertilizer going to countries that need it for growing crops; and less fertilizer means less food which means less people. And if that is not enough, he adds:

    Masako Ganaha is over in Japan pouring over old books about Japanese famines. She messaged yesterday from a library after finding an old book on famine. Masako found in one book a tally of 506 famines in Japan in the past roughly 1,500 years. Biggest was due to volcanic activity.

    Speaking of volcanos…pay attention to this: there was serious volcanic activity this year in southern hemisphere that may seriously impact southern hemisphere crop yields. David DuByne and Mike Adams have been warning about this all year.

• "The Preppers Were Right All Along" by Amanda Little, Washington Post. Yet another article admitting that, rather than being crazy, preppers were prescient. Oh, and admitting that prepping is increasingly becoming mainstream. Unfortunately, Little contends that the primary factor driving people to prepping is global warming based on her parroting the party line and linking an "increase" in natural disasters to global warming and climate change. (The data actually shows that the number of climate related disasters actually declined over the last 20 years by about 10 percent and, despite an early forecast to the contrary, 2022 has had a below normal number of hurricanes and named tropical storms). "Global unrest" and "public health crisis" are mentioned in passing, but there is nothing about declining trust in government or fears of an economic crash or civil unrest in the article. In any event, an excerpt:

    The growth of this industry speaks volumes about the fear mindset that has crept into mainstream consumer behavior. You probably have at least one friend, colleague or neighbor who has been toying with the idea of becoming a “prepper.” Maybe not building a full-on bunker, but lining their pantries with long-storage food in the event that another major storm, blizzard, wildfire or another public health crisis hits.

    “Early on, our market was mostly the people preparing their bunkers for Armageddon or resisting a government they feared would take away their guns,” Aaron Jackson, former chief executive officer of ReadyWise, told me. Like Augason Farms and most other survival food companies, ReadyWise was founded in Utah to serve the Mormon community, which is encouraged by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints to prepare for the end of times. But Mormons, and more broadly, men, no longer represent even the large majority of survival food’s exploding market.

    In less than a decade, said Jackson, the ReadyWise market shifted from about 95% men to more than 50% women, most of them mothers — known in industry patois as “guardian moms” — concerned about a reliable food supply for their kids.

    Even Joe Rieck, vice president of sales at My Patriot Supply, a direct-to-consumer brand associated with a right-wing base that sells fire starter kits, gas masks and water filtration pumps along with its freeze-dried kibble, told me: “Ten years ago preppers were considered the crazies putting away food. Today you’re crazy not to. We don’t just sell to the extreme bible-carrying, gun-loving Americans. It’s everybody, because everybody’s affected.”

• Speaking of climate change and natural disasters: "Drinking water for homes and schools in Arizona is DRYING UP because foreign owned megafarms are sucking it up for their crops . . . which are then shipped to Middle East."

    While Arizona's La Paz County is experiencing its worst drought in 1,200 years, as are other areas in the state and Southwestern region of the Unite States, foreign-owned farms growing crops requiring extensive amounts of water, such as alfalfa, are being blamed for the dry spell.  

 

    To make matters worse, the crops grown by these megafarms are eventually shipped to feed cattle and other livestock in other places around the world, particularly in the United Arab Emirates, rather than the state's own.

VIDEO: "Israelis: Do you see non Jews as equal to you?"--

Corey Gil-Shuster (9 min.)

News & Analysis:

• Modern day protection rackets: "Kyrie Irving says ‘I take responsibility’ for tweet, will donate $500K to anti-hate causes"--Jewish Telegraph Agency. Irving, if you don't know, is a basketball player for the Brooklyn Nets. Just before Halloween, he urged his Twitter followers to see a documentary called "Hebrews to Negroes: Wake Up Black America." According to the description at IMDB, the film "uncovers the true identity of the Children of Israel by proving the true ethnicity of Abraham, Ishmael, Isaac, Jacob, the Sons of Ham, Shem and Japheth," which is that they were, according to the film, Negro.

    The Anti-Defamation League (ADL) dislikes the film not only for its basic thesis that the Ashkenazi Jews are not God's chosen people but also because, the group alleges, the film "includes extensive antisemitism, including claims of a global Jewish conspiracy to oppress and defraud Black people, allegations that Jews are in part responsible for the transatlantic slave trade and the claim that Jews falsified the history of the Holocaust in order to 'conceal their nature and protect their status and power.'" (I would note that the second point is actually well established--see, e.g., the 1993 Washington Post article, "Half-Truths and History: The Debate Over Jews and Slavery" by David Mills which discusses the role of Sephardic Jews in the slave trade in Brazil and the West Indies--while, in reference to point 3, there has been debate on the actual number of Jews killed in the Holocaust, especially since the total is still asserted to be 6 million even after it was discovered in the early 1990s that approximately 2.5 million fewer Jews were killed at Auschwitz as previously believed--see the 1992 Chicago Tribune article by Dan Stets and Knight-Ridder/Tribune, "Fixing The Numbers At Auschwitz").  

 

    In any event, Jewish NBA commissioner Adam Silver was not happy and demanded that Irving apologize which he refused to do. However, after the ADL communicated to Irving and the Brooklyn Nets that it would be a shame if something happened to their career and business, respectively, Irving and the Brooklyn Nets agreed to each "donate" $500,000 to anti-hate causes. Moreover, "[i]n the joint statement, the Nets said Irving and the team will work with the ADL in 'an effort to develop educational programming that is inclusive and will comprehensively combat all forms of antisemitism and bigotry.'" Paying the ADL for its services, no doubt, as that is the norm in the run of the mill anti-discrimination complaints brought by civil rights groups. 

 

    This wasn't enough, though, since "Irving refused to say he was sorry, refused to say he didn’t hold anti-Semitic beliefs, refused to say the Holocaust happened and cast himself as the victim in the entire saga," so he has now been suspended from the team and ordered to meet with Jewish leaders before he can return. And just in case he didn't get the message, Nike announced last Friday that it was suspending its relationship with Irving as well as pulling the latest iteration of Irving’s shoe, the Kyrie 8. After witnessing what happened to Kanye West, that was apparently enough for Irving as yesterday it was reported that "Brooklyn Nets basketball player Kyrie Irving apologized for posting a documentary that included anti-Semitic material after the team suspended him without pay for at least five games." By the way, don't think for a minute that there was a "Jewish conspiracy to oppress and defraud Black people" generally, or Irving specifically; because, if you do, you are an anti-Semite. 

    But while they may be done with Irving--at least for now--this isn't the end of the matter. The New York Post story cited above also reports that "[t]he Anti-Defamation League, along with the Nets, have sent a letter to Jeff Bezos and other leaders at Amazon asking to have the film and book Irving promoted removed from the platform — or at the very least have an explanation added about the issues, according to The Athletic."  

    And, in an example to members of other religions:

    In the week since Irving’s tweet — which he later deleted without additional comment — pressure has mounted for the team or the NBA to punish the All-Star, including Tuesday night from former star Charles Barkley, who specifically called out Jewish NBA commissioner Adam Silver.

    “I think Adam should have suspended him. First of all, Adam’s Jewish. You can’t take my $40 million and insult my religion,” Barkley said, referencing Irving’s contract.

    Jewish fans of the Nets, meanwhile, expressed trepidation about continuing to support the team without substantive consequences for their star guard. A group sat courtside Monday donning “Fight Antisemitism” T-shirts. 

Amazing unity within a religious group. 

    Rod Dreher argues in his book The Benedict Option that Christian churches will need to hunker down and build resilient communities to weather the storm of anti-Christian persecution, but I wonder if we need, instead, a more militant and aggressive response similar to what we see from the Jewish community: calling out critics for their bigotry, protests, lawsuits, bad press spread through sympathetic journalists, boycotts, burning businesses (okay, maybe not this one), and other threats of financial and personal ruin, as well as working together to maneuver devout followers into powerful positions in government, academia, finance, entertainment, and industry to protect our interests. Certainly the Left is not going to leave Christians alone to build their own independent platforms: e.g., this AP article describing the video sharing site, Rumble, as spreading misinformation and being popular among "the far right". But imagine what impact it would have if someone that wished to produce works that profaned Christian subjects or otherwise said or did something that put Christians in a bad light knew that doing so would lead to them having to fork over large sums of money and publicly apologize or face complete ruin and social and commercial ostracization. I think we need to make being anti-Christian as morally bad and financially ruinous as being anti-Semitic. 

    Whatever Christians decide to do, we had better act quickly because the Deep State has painted a big huge target on us: "California professor and ex-CIA staffer claims that 'Christian, white men' are primed to start a civil war in America because they 'were once dominant and are in decline' - and blames the right for spike in violent extremism." The Daily Mail article reports:

    [Barbara F.] Walter then went on to explain the past '100 years' showed that civil wars are typically started along divided religious and ethnic lines, when a previously dominant group begins to see their position wane.

    She then went on to say that 'white men' who 'also tended to be Christian,' were beginning to see such a decline in their position in the US, and that they had 'almost exclusively' been the perpetrators of violent extremism in the country since 2008.

    Walter is a professor of pacific international relations at the University of California San Diego. She describes herself as 'one of the world's leading experts on civil wars, political violence, and terrorism' on her website.

    Her latest book claims that 'healthy democracies' tend to be safe from civil wars, but suggests the US is becoming increasingly unstable. Walter's website calls her book 'urgent and disturbing,' and says it is about identifying the signs of a civil war in the US in the hopes of avoiding one. 

Also:

    Walter then explained that she felt white Christian men felt their power was waning, and had been behind extremist violence in the US for the past 14 years.

    'We've seen a significant rise in violent extremism since 2008,' she said. 'Some of it's been on the left, but the vast majority of it has been on the far-right. And it's been perpetrated almost exclusively by White men.'

    'And again, if you look at the history of the United States, the group that had been dominant since the very inception of our country were white men. They also tended to be Christian, and they are losing that position.'

    She then said that white Christian men's notion that they are the 'true identity' of the nation, and a fear over losing that ownership, was driving the nation towards violent war.  

    'You see a subset of this population becoming increasingly resentful, angry, and they truly feel that this is their country,' she said. 'And that they're being patriots by saving what they believe is the true identity of this country and they're willing to use violence to do it.' 

According to the article, "she worked for a 'US government task force that was run through the CIA, that was designed to help our government predict where around the world civil wars and political instability, and political unrest was likely to break out.'" She is also a permanent member of the Council on Foreign Relations and works for the RAND Corporation. I wasn't kidding when I counted her among the Deep State.

    The interesting thing is that the blurb for her book says (underline added): "Perhaps surprisingly, both autocracies and healthy democracies are largely immune from civil war; it’s the countries in the middle ground that are most vulnerable. And this is where more and more countries, including the United States, are finding themselves today." So it is fascinating for her to seemingly take a position that, rather than attempting to rebuild a healthy democracy, the U.S. should follow the path of autocracy by crushing white Christian men.

• Speaking of being anti-Christian: "European Court: Aborting Jesus At Mass A Sacred Right"--The American Conservative. Quoting from a news report:

    The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) recently overturned the ruling of a French court that had fined and issued a jail sentence to a feminist who interrupted a Roman Catholic church service and "aborted" Jesus on the altar while topless.

    Eloïse Bouton was bare-breasted and painted in pro-choice slogans all over her body when, in December 2013, she interrupted Christmas carols at Paris' famous Madeleine church and protested the Catholic Church's teachings against abortion by simulating an abortion of Jesus.

    Wearing a crown of thorns to mock Jesus Christ and a blue veil to deride the Virgin Mary, Bouton carried pieces of ox livers to symbolize an aborted baby as she stood in front of the church altar and pretended to perform an "abortion" before urinating on the ground in front of the congregants.

I would point out that this is the same court that only two months ago issued a "Guide to Article 9 - Freedom of Thought, Conscience, and Religion" which stated (p. 88): "Article 9 (like Articles 10 and 11) cannot be interpreted as authorising an individual who disagrees with a religious organisation on a given point to interrupt or cause a disturbance during a ceremony." What a bunch of hypocrites. Again, if this woman knew she would be treated as harshly for being an anti-Christian as she would have been if she had acted out as an anti-Semite, would she have done this?

• Speaking of the Deep State: "Republicans drop 1,000-page report saying FBI is 'rotted at its core', manipulated domestic violent extremism statistics for political purposes, and deliberately downplayed 'serious allegations of wrongdoing' from Hunter Biden."
• Liberalism as a mental illness: "Washington State Supreme Court gives black plaintiffs a racial advantage"--Liberty Unyielding. "But in a truly bizarre ruling, the Washington State Supreme Court has unanimously ruled that it is presumptively racist to characterize litigants as 'combative' or 'confrontational,' if the litigants happen to be black." The article explains:

    Lawyer Ted Frank calls it an example of “a state Supreme Court applying critical race theory for the purpose of discriminating against whites in civil litigation” and how “pseudoscientific nonsense is infecting our institutions.” The ruling does indeed rely on Critical Race Theory books, such as “Racial Microaggressions: Using Critical Race Theory to Respond to Everyday Racism,” and critical race theorists, such as a founder of Critical Race Theory, Derrick Bell. The ruling also contains all sorts of bizarre unnecessary claims unrelated to its holding, like suggesting that welfare fraud doesn’t exist (it routinely occurs) and that its existence is just a racist trope invented by Republicans.

    The case involved a black woman asking for a new trial because of opposing counsel’s successful attack on her credibility and calling her “combative” in cross-examination. The black woman sued for $3.5 million after a white motorist had a rear-end collision with her. Video showed the black motorist was faking the extent of her injuries. After defense counsel called into question her credibility, based on the video, the jury awarded the black woman only $9200.

    In response to the request for a new trial, the trial judge did what trial courts would do in most of the country in this situation: it refused to do so. The Washington State Supreme Court reversed that ruling, saying that the burden was on the defendant — a white woman — to prove the judgment was not affected by racism. If the white woman can’t prove that, the plaintiff can have a new trial, and sue her all over again. The black plaintiff had sued for a whopping $3.5 million after her car was hit from behind in a car accident. The jury awarded her $9,000, which the black plaintiff said was due to racism. But it is rare for juries to award $3.5 million for a traffic accident. $9000 is a much more typical amount for a motorist to collect.

• Speaking of liberals, it is well known that liberals throw around the fascist moniker quite a bit, especially when referring to anyone that disagrees with them. Rod Dreher asks the important question: "What Is A Fascist Anyway?" He concludes: "For a lot of ordinary people, what the liberal and progressive establishment condemns as 'fascism' is just plain law and order."
• Hmm: "Mystery of Paul Pelosi hammer attack deepens as new police account reveals how Speaker's husband calmly opened door to cops after phoning 911, did NOT reveal he was in trouble and then walked BACK towards 'intruder' who bludgeoned him."
• Biden vows to crush the economy: "Biden says there will be 'no more drilling' as he almost falls off stage at NY rally for Gov Hochul - just a day after he was blasted by key Democrat Manchin for 'ignoring severe economic pain' with vow to close coal plants." Cheap energy is vital for economic prosperity but Biden is hell-bent to make sure that we never see cheap energy again.
• True colors: Anonymous Conservative linked to these two headlines earlier today:
• "RNC chair says committee can’t pay Trump’s legal bills if he announces 2024 run."
• "Controlled Opposition: RNC Chair Ronna McDaniel Says Republicans Will Work with Joe Biden if They Take Control of Congress… WTH?"

There seems to be a lot of institutions that need to be gutted and rebuilt from the ground up.

• A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step: "Standoff as Italy stops male migrants from disembarking rescue ships." The BBC reports:

    Charities have branded the actions of the Italian government "illegal" after it prevented 250 people disembarking two migrant rescue ships.

    There are 215 blocked on the Geo Barents and 35 on Humanity 1.

    Children and people with medical issues were allowed to leave the ships in Catania, Sicily, but others were not. Two other rescue boats remain at sea.

    The new Italian PM has promised to crack down on migrants travelling across the Mediterranean.

    Italy is one of the main entry points into Europe and since the start of the year 85,000 migrants have arrived on boats, according to the UN.

    Migrants set sail in small, overcrowded boats from North Africa - often they get into distress and are rescued by charity vessels.

But is it really distress if the boats only travel far enough from the beach that the ships can pick them up? It is all a sham and the "charity" vessels should be seized and the crews arrested for human trafficking. At some point--probably sooner than anyone thinks--the Europeans will have to sink the boats in order to not be completely overrun by Africans and Middle Easterners fleeing famine in their own countries.

• This is why God gave us machine guns: "Illegal migrants wave Venezuelan flag after entering Texas, attack Border Patrol."
• Hmm. "Nord Stream operator finds man-made craters near explosion-damaged pipeline" by Daniel Stewart. Initial photographs of the damage seemed to show damage consistent with a blast from inside the pipeline, from which I had inferred that the Russians were responsible, whether by accident or design. But I may have been wrong:

    The operator of the Nord Stream gas pipeline, Nord Stream AG, announced Wednesday that, after an initial inspection, it has found man-made craters in the seabed near a pipeline damaged by the September explosions. 

 

    "Technogenic [i.e., man made] craters with a depth of 3 to 5 meters were found on the seabed at a distance of about 248 meters from each other. The section of the pipeline between the craters is destroyed and the dispersion radius of the pipeline fragments is at least 250 meters," the company detailed in a statement.

Not good for Nord Stream AG because the finding will probably make it more difficult to recover its loss from the insurance companies.

• Just another day in Democrat controlled Chicago: "Halloween horror as kids aged 3, 11 and 13 are among 14 shot and injured in bloody drive-by shooting during balloon release at vigil in Chicago."
• There is a metaphor here: "Thieves steal entire SCHOOL: Every single piece of the building - from bricks to plumbing - is swiped by crooks in South Africa." Six months after the school was closed, it had been deconstructed down to just the concrete slab on which it had been built. From the article:

    A former school caretaker who refused to be named for fear of gang reprisals said: 'It was a good school but over the years drug gangs took over the area.

    'Pupils became scared and there was just constant vandalism, and the school became run down and in the end in 2019 it was closed down altogether.

    'I do not joke when I say the day after it was closed the thieves moved in and stole the school brick by brick and window by window until it was all gone.

    'The bricks went for 50c (2.5p) each and the windows for R100 (£5) each and all the sinks and toilets and cisterns and plumbing pipes and electrics went.

    'There was nothing left except the concrete floors where the buildings used to be and now it is just a derelict open space where bad people hang out' he sd [sic].

• Green tech at work: "Deadly E-Bikes: Four Explosions in New York Every Week."
• "Should you save a dying stranger if you know they eat MEAT? Oxford philosopher controversially argues that it's ethical to let them die because of the suffering they cause to animals (and he's not even a vegan!)." The flaw in Dr. Richard Plant's argument is that it equates the life of a chicken (or even many chickens) to the life of a person. 
• Seems a little creepy to me: "Woman, 24, reveals she was so determined to get back together with her ex that she sat outside his house until they matched on Bumble – and now they're getting married."
• A reversal of fortune: "Cobra dies after being bitten by eight-year-old boy in India."

    The boy, known only as Deepak, was attacked by the snake in the remote Pandarpadh village in India’s central Chhattisgarh region on Monday, it was reported. 

    The cobra latched on to him while he was playing outside his family home and wound its body around his arm, before rearing back and biting down to inject its deadly poison.

    Fighting through the pain, Deepak furiously shook his arm but couldn't release the reptile, at which point he decided to give the attacker a taste of its own medicine and viciously sank his own teeth into its body, successfully killing the animal. 

Fortunately for the boy, the cobra had not released any venom when it bit him. The article explains: "Snakes use venom to kill their prey, or when fighting off dangerous predators. Dry bites are often delivered when the snake is trying to warn or scare off animals, rather than kill them." The article also notes that "of the 63,000 people estimated to have died from snakebites in 2019, 51,000 were killed in India."

• Not something you would have seen in an episode of Lassie: "Dog runs down street with a HUMAN HEAD in its mouth after snatching it from grisly crime scene where human remains were dumped at Mexican ATM booth with message warning 'the next head is yours'."
• "Wokeness Is The Acid Dissolving Christianity" by Rod Dreher, The American Conservative. "Wokeness" is a shorthand for the critical studies and identity politics that we inherited from the Frankfort School and its theories to replace "class" with "identity" in Marxist theory. One of the identities that is being pushed is gender and sexual orientation which is what has so violently butted against basic Christian beliefs including, as Dreher explains, basic concepts such as God and the creation of mankind. For instance, Dreher explains, that spiritual order "is woven into the very fabric of reality." Thus, "[t]o deny the gender binary is to deny not only biological reality, but the meaning of reality itself, and how the universe works." He continues:

    How many people -- even Christians today -- understand that sex and gender are intricately connected to the divine cosmic order, and to transgress against the givenness of this order is to invite catastrophe? Matthieu Pageau explains that purity laws in the Bible are about maintaining stability. To violate the purity laws -- including with sexual sin -- is to bring chaos into the community and, if it spreads, to cause the social order to collapse. We are living through the truth of that Biblical insight. We have come to believe that matter doesn't really matter, that disobeying the Bible's sexual proscriptions is simply a matter of what you can get away with in your group, and rationalize within your own conscience. In fact, we have gone so far away from Biblical cosmology that we don't even think of sex and the human person in a cosmic way -- that is, as an inextricable part of a greater order, to which we are bound and responsible.

    To center and uphold queerness as the pinnacle of progress, as the Nation essayist did in 1993, and as our society has achieved, is to unavoidably negate the Biblical cosmic order. There is no way around it. And, let us note without hesitation that the victory of LGBT folks in this front would never have happened without heterosexuals first demolishing the basis for Biblical sexual order with the Sexual Revolution. Look around you at the chaos and destruction. It's going to get much worse before it gets better.

Dreher had written in 2013: 

 

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

As things are going, it appears that we will not keep our human rights as evidenced by the widespread censorship and blacklisting we see and experience.

• Related: "New Study: Intact Heterosexual Married Home Still Critical For Children’s Academic Success."
• "'Any Idea What They Are?' American Pilots Report Multiple Encounters With Unusual 'Racetrack' UAP In Recent Weeks." From the article:

    Pilots and crews from more than 15 commercial aircraft say they have encountered unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP) in American airspace in recent weeks, according to eyewitness testimony and videos that detail the unusual events.

    According to witnesses, the rash of incidents occurred over a seven-week period and involved sightings of bright luminous aerial objects in airspace from the American Midwest to as far west as the Pacific. The Debrief has learned that several of the objects were reportedly observed performing unconventional tight-circling maneuvers, which pilots and others involved said defied simple explanation.

    The objects, which have since garnered the nickname “Racetrack UAPs” for the descriptions of their odd circular flight paths, were first reported by researcher and television personality Ben Hansen on social media and his YouTube channel, where he has featured several videos detailing the pilot encounters.

    While several of the incidents were reported to air traffic controllers, no official investigations are known to have taken place, although The Debrief has learned that the events were reported to at least one Federal Aviation Administration unit tasked with responding to potential threats to American airspace.