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Monday, November 21, 2022

The Docent's Memo (November 21, 2022)

 

VIDEO: "DE-ESCALATION - Massad Ayoob examines the Curtis Reeves, popcorn theater case - Critical Mas EP 43"--Wilson Combat (7 min.)

Firearms & Self-Defense:

  • Jon Low has a new Defensive Pistolcraft newsletter. Be sure to check it out. Among other things, he has some thoughts and links to a couple articles on safeguarding your (or someone else's) kids from being kidnapped. I would note, however, that the vast majority of kidnappings of children are by a non-custodial parent. Continuing, Jon has tracked down a series of videos showing (most of) Dave Spaulding's final handgun combatives class on the east coast. Another article that caught my attention was on topic of intuition versus logic and why you might want to trust your gut. This was the subject of the book The Gift of Fear. Whether you are a creationist or evolutionist, the fact is that the more basic parts of your brain are better designed and quicker to identify and react to danger than your frontal cortex, so it behooves you to listen to "your gut". Anyway, a lot more articles, excerpts and commentary there so be sure to go through it.
  • "Polar Bear Attack Stopped with .500 Magnum"--Ammo Land. Warning shots with flares and firearms did not dissuade the bear, but the defender waited to shoot until the bear was 5 feet away! He is lucky that the bear immediately turned away rather than continuing to attack.
  • "CCI .22 Long Rifle Mini Mag: You Can’t Go Wrong"--The Mag Life Blog. Although the article is mostly about the performance and reliability of this round, the author includes a bit on its potential use for self-defense:

    Although these are listed as Target bullets, I think the range of uses for these particular rounds could be a bit wider. I’m certain they could fit the bill for hunting small game. Another use that comes to mind is Self Defense. Penetration is a positive attribute when being used for self-defense, and the solid nature of these rounds will facilitate that.

    My friend, Terril Hebert, conducted some tests with these rounds in 10% ballistic gelatin and had some interesting results.

    From a revolver with a 2.5-inch barrel, shooting through a couple of layers of denim, the rounds penetrated around eight inches. Sure, that’s no house on fire, but still, a 40-grain projectile going up to 8 inches into the body is going to create some issues for the recipient. And let’s not forget the havoc wrought by John Hinkley, Jr. during his attack on President Reagan—several people, including the President, went down.

    When Mr. Hebert used a 16-inch barrel, things became more interesting. Shooting into the same type of gel through denim, he saw penetration in the 12 to 13-inch range. The FBI recommends at least 12 inches of penetration, so this meets their minimum penetration requirement.

  • "TFB Armorer’s Bench: Things in My Portable Gunsmith Kit".  This is probably more kit than most people take with them to the range: I bring a set of screwdrivers, a pair of needle-nose pliers, set of the compact hex and torx head wrenches that fold up, and a cleaning kit (including one with a brass rod), but that is about it. The core of the author's kit (which the author does not suggest is the best choice, merely noting that is what he started with) is an NC Star brand "Essential Gun Smith Tool Kit" which retails for about $77 on Amazon to which he has added Allen wrenches, a small torque wrench, some additional screwdrivers, and a few other items. The base kit includes a small bench block which would probably be a good idea to have along--I may need to pick up an extra to throw in my range bag.
  • "Taking A Tumble" by Dave Workman, Guns Magazine. An article on what the author does to clean and polish spent brass for reloading, mostly focusing on the benefits of wet tumbling using steel pins as a tumbling media.
  • "World Standard: Why the 9mm?"--The Mag Life. Why, with all the other good handgun cartridges out there, did the 9mm become the de facto world standard for combat and pistol defensive ammo? The article goes through Mas Ayoob's reasoning. Some of the reasons listed are historical: the adoption of the 9x19mm by the German military in the run up to World War I, the wide spread availability of surplus 9mm pistols after WWII, and, more recently, better bullets for defensive purposes that have increased the terminal effectiveness of 9mm. He also notes that Hollywood has played a role with several popular movies with characters using "wonder-9s" (e.g., Die Hard). And, finally, since the most popular semi-auto pistol designs come from Europe and Europeans have a strong bias for 9mm, it has impacted tastes and availability in the United States.
    It may always be a mystery why some cartridges become so popular that they eclipse their competitors and others languish and pass into obscurity. Unfortunately, in many cases it has as much to do with the weapon that launched them into popularity as much as anything else, and in the case of the 9mm it had a lot to do with the popularity of the 9mm Lugar pistol, adopted by Germany as a military sidearm, which then led to other weapons being chambered in that round. But, even so, many other popular weapon and ammo combinations have come and gone, so the question really should be why the 9x19mm has hung on for so long. And I think that the answer to that is that it hits a sweet spot of performance, recoil, size, and price. That is, while not as lethal as other calibers (and isn't that the case with most .38 caliber weapons), it is good enough (even better now with better bullets). It's reasonably powerful but without the excessive recoil that people complain of with the .45 ACP and .40 S&W. And it comes in a size that can be fit into a magazine and pistol grip that can still be sized small enough for most people to grasp without sacrificing capacity: in fact, when the double-stack 9's--the wonder nines--hit the market in the 1980s, they had a surfeit of capacity compared to the .45 ACP. And, finally, the 9mm has typically been significantly cheaper than its main competitor, the .45 ACP.  
 
VIDEO: "The 2nd Coming - An Approach to the Timing"--Gospel Lessons (13 min.)
The author notes that there are a lot of things that have to happen, according to scripture, before the Second Coming; and it might be farther off than we might think (or hope).

Prepping & Survival:

    One of the country's largest rail unions has rejected a White House proposal to better pay, increasing the likelihood of an industry-wide strike just before the holidays that would kneecap America's supply chain. 

    SMART Transportation Division, which represents 36,000 of the country's rail workers, rejected the deal on Monday morning in an ongoing dispute over sickness and attendance policies. 

    BLET, the Brotherhood of Locomotive Engineers and Trainmen, has 24,000 members and voted to ratify the deal but said it would join the picket line with SMART if they continue to refuse the new terms. 

According to the article, this represents more than half of American rail workers.

  • "What To Look For In A Good Knife"--Shooting Illustrated. Just some basic considerations on selecting the right knife for the job. I wish it had more detailed, but it really is just a starting point from which to do more research.
  • "CPAP Battery Solutions 2"--Blue Collar Prepping. In a prior article, the author had gone over her power requirements, some ways to reduce the power requirements, and a few other considerations, but had not settled on a solution. This article addresses her choices. She has selected a Rockpals Freeman 600 powerbank for storing and feeding electricity to her CPAP machine, and is considering the Rockpals SP003 100W Portable Solar Panel for emergency charging. She acknowledges that one of the main reasons for the Rockpals powerbank was the cost: $500 normally through Amazon (she was able to save over $100 more due to a sale).
  • "10 Ways to Use Up Expired Cooking Oil" by Bernie Carr, Apartment Prepper. Although I've been able to get cooking oil to store longer, the accepted storage life (absent freezing it) is generally considered to be 6 months. So, rather than throw that oil away, the author suggests different ways to use it, everything from lighting and pest control to various lubrication solutions. 
  • "Learn What Is Gaslighting And How To Recognize It"--Modern Survival Blog. From the article:
    Because we are living in a perpetual state of gaslighting. It’s being used to brainwash the people. And most do not recognize it. Unfortunately that group is quite large, and the technique is quite successful. It is an extremely powerful psychological tool being used to influence one’s perception of reality.

    As someone who recognizes gaslighting, I see it predominantly used by the political left, their mainstream media, and their many influencers.

    Someone recently put it his way… “The reality that we are being told by the mainstream media is often at complete odds with what we are seeing with our own two eyes. And when we question the false reality that we are being presented, or we claim that what we see is that actual reality, we are vilified [and ridiculed, silenced, de-platformed, shunned, called racists, conspiracy theorist, or just plain nuts].” The thing is, you’re not any of those. Rather, you’re being gaslighted.

    “Being called a conspiracy theorist is perhaps one of the greatest tools in their arsenal for gaslighting the public. Any skepticism that goes against the establishment is deemed conspiracy theory, and they use their corporate media empires to label all dissent against them.”

Well, I think accusations of racism and bigotry have largely replaced being called a conspiracy theorist. E.g., when people noticed that fake fans were being used to fill the stadium in Qatar for the World Cup, "FIFA president Gianni Infantino claimed the suggestions were ‘pure racism’."

    Think of all the times in just the past few years you’ve been gaslighted. They lied to you about open borders…they lied about Hillary’s 30,000 deleted emails…they lied about spying on Trump…they lied about Russian Collusion…they lied about a perfectly fine Ukrainian phone call…they lied about massive Biden corruption in Ukraine and China… they lied about the Hunter Biden laptop…they lied about the origins of Covid…they lied about the need for lockdowns and masks…they lied about the need for Covid vaccines…they lied about the vaccines being “safe and effective”…they lied and covered up all the deaths and injuries from the vaccine…they lied about the success of miracle drugs Hydroxychloroquine and Ivermectin…they lied about the stolen 2020 election…

    You’ve been the victims of nonstop severe gaslighting for a decade now. You’re all part of a human psychology experiment in the limits that government and media can go in propaganda and brainwashing…while you can see they’re lying right in front of your eyes.

    And these are the exact same people now telling you Democrats just over-performed, and stopped a GOP red landslide, against all odds, without cheating and stealing the midterm election.


VIDEO: "China’s Xi Jinping Knows He Screwed Up"--China Uncensored (10 min.)
China's economy continues to slow.

News & Analysis:

    Lost in the whirlwind of midterm election news last week was an announcement that not only will Washington send $400 million worth of additional weapons to Ukraine, but it is pushing forward with a new joint forces command, to be stationed in Germany, to “handle weapons shipments and personnel training.”

    According to the Department of Defense, the new command, which was previously reported this summer, will be officially called the Security Assistance Group Ukraine, or SAGU, and will be based out of U.S. Army Europe and Africa headquarters in Wiesbaden, Germany. It will be a led by a 3-star general.

    The command will involve 300 U.S. military personnel but will likely work closely with U.S. Army Europe and Africa’s training center in Grafenwoehr and Hohenfels as well as the service’s garrison in Baumholder. In addition, “the thousands of U.S. soldiers now positioned at training areas in Poland and Romania … could factor into the plans,” Stars & Stripes reported.
    Contrary to Western media disinformation, Ukraine has already lost the war. The fact is that from the start of the conflict, Russia has been fighting at a one-to-three manpower disadvantage. Despite the handicap, Russia has been inflicting a minimum of 600 to 1,500 casualties a day on the Ukrainian army, taken 20 percent of the country, and is dismantling its power grid. Ukraine has lost 100,000 soldiers so far. 

Now, because of its partial mobilization, Russia is drastically changing the odds—and in the coming weeks will deploy 300,000 army reservists along with 70,000 new volunteers. The Russian withdrawals in the Kharkov and Kherson regions, hyped by Western media as devastating Russian defeats—are nothing of the kind. These are instead short-term tactical realignments designed to minimize casualties by the still-temporarily-outnumbered Russian forces. Unless Joe Biden and NATO launch World War III with a direct military intervention—the remnants of the Ukrainian army will be destroyed by spring or summer. 

He also discusses the deep and pervasive corruption in Ukraine, how sanctions have backfired, and the totalitarian nature of its government.

The story you’re about to hear concerns the third-largest crypto-currency on the planet, which you’ve probably never heard of. It is a story of how a former Disney child-actor — a Jeffrey Epstein associate who was embroiled in an under-age sex scandal — bizarrely emerged as one of the world’s strangest crypto-currency moguls. It is the story that raises serious questions as to whether an entire cryptocurrency is a scam — effectively a private money-printer. And to top it all off, there is reason to believe that if this cryptocurrency is the scam that it appears to be, it will nonetheless be allowed to continue because of this particular cryptocurrency’s usefulness to intelligence agencies in funneling money to foreign rebel groups and jihadis with plausible deniability.
    The driver of an SUV veered into the wrong lane and plowed through dozens of Los Angeles County sheriff’s academy recruits running in formation during a training exercise early Wednesday, injuring 25 of the cadets, authorities said. 
 
    The most serious injuries included head trauma, broken bones and “loss of limb,” said Sheriff Alex Villanueva. He said five people were critically injured, four had moderate injuries and 16 had minor injuries.

    The city's Mayor, London Breed, said the new program will provide low-income transgender residents with payments up to $1,200 each month for up to 18 months. 

    The city says the payments will help the trans community with financial insecurity. 

    The program will support 55 people. In addition to guaranteed income, participants will be provided with gender-affirming medical and mental health care, case management and specialty care services, and financial coaching. 

    The disgraced former narcotics agent met with The Associated Press for a series of interviews before he headed to prison this week, revealing that he wasn't going down for this alone, accusing some long-trusted DEA colleagues of joining him in skimming millions of dollars from drug money laundering stings to fund a decade's worth of luxury overseas travel, fine dining, top seats at sporting events and frat house-style debauchery.

    According to Irizarry, dozens of other federal agents, prosecutors, informants, and in some cases cartel smugglers themselves were all in on the three-continent joyride known as 'Team America' that chose cities for money laundering pick-ups mostly for party purposes or to coincide with Real Madrid soccer or Rafael Nadal tennis matches. 

    They partied in VIP rooms of Caribbean strip joints, Amsterdam's red-light district, and aboard a Colombian yacht that launched with plenty of booze and more than a dozen prostitutes.

    'We had free access to do whatever we wanted,' Irizarry said. 'We would generate money pick-ups in places we wanted to go. And once we got there it was about drinking and girls.'

    All this revelry was rooted, Irizarry said, in a crushing realization among DEA agents around the world that there's nothing they can do to make a dent in the drug war anyway. 

    Only nominal concern was given to actually building cases or stemming a record flow of illegal cocaine and opioids into the United States that has driven more than 100,000 drug overdose deaths a year.

    'You can't win an unwinnable war,' he said. 'The drug war is a game. ... It was a very fun game that we were playing.'

    Plummeting sperm counts are not just a symptom of reduced fertility, but will also be accompanied by higher levels of chronic disease, testicular cancer and shorter lifespans in men, they warned.

    Low testosterone, one of the physiological causes of a low sperm count, increases the risk of chronic disease, while testicular cancer can also cause declining sperm levels.

    Co-author Professor Shanna Swan, an epidemiologist at the Icahn School of Medicine, Mount Sinai, New York, said the fall could seriously harm men's health. 

    She said: 'The troubling declines in men's sperm concentration ... are consistent with adverse trends in other men's health outcomes, such as testicular cancer, hormonal disruption, and genital birth defects, as well as declines in female reproductive health.

    'This clearly cannot continue unchecked.'

    She previously warned that 'everywhere chemicals', such as phthalates found in toiletries, food packaging and children's toys, are to blame. 

    The chemicals cause hormonal imbalance which can trigger 'reproductive havoc', she said.

    Factors including smoking tobacco and marijuana and rising obesity rates may also play a role, Dr Swan said previously.
    A new scientific study claims to have found little to no health risks related to eating red meat. The study says previous studies that claimed there was a link between red meat consumption and health issues are based on "weak evidence."

    Researchers at the University of Washington’s Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) released a study titled: "Health effects associated with consumption of unprocessed red meat: a Burden of Proof study." The paper was published in Nature journal in October.

    The scientists declared, "We found weak evidence of association between unprocessed red meat consumption and colorectal cancer, breast cancer, type 2 diabetes, and ischemic heart disease. Moreover, we found no evidence of an association between unprocessed red meat and ischemic stroke or hemorrhagic stroke."

    The authors of the study noted, "While there is some evidence that eating unprocessed red meat is associated with increased risk of disease incidence and mortality, it is weak and insufficient to make stronger or more conclusive recommendations."
Here is my prediction. Iger will not only double down on Disney’s convergence, he will also attempt to buy Netflix. Growth through leveraged buyout is the only thing he knows, and the seeds of future failure are always planted in the flowering of success.

  • Lies, Damn Lies, and the FBI: "SHOCKER! WaPo Update About Mar-A-Lago Raid Doesn't Fit the Narrative." Remember how the FBI raided Trump's home to recover stolen nuclear secrets and the main stream media blasted this story over and over? Well, the FBI has finally admitted that it found no nuclear secrets. Just another lie to justify a search warrant. 
  • "Just Like Home" by Helen Andrews, The American Conservative. Andrews' commentary builds off the thesis advanced in Garrett Jones' book, The Culture Transplant: How Migrants Make the Economies They Move To a Lot Like the Ones They Left. Andrews' describes Jones' thesis thusly: 

    A country’s level of prosperity is in large part determined by its culture, specifically on key questions such as “frugality, trust in strangers, the importance of living near family, and opinions about government regulation.” These traits are even more important than whether a country has natural resources or whether it is a liberal democracy. They determine whether a country will be able to make good use of any natural resources it has or make the institutions of liberal democracy function successfully.

    According to Jones’s research, these basic values are resilient in immigrant populations even after generations. One study looking at social trust found that “46 percent of the home country attitude toward trust survived” in second-generation immigrants to the United States. The same 46 percent persistence was found in fourth-generation immigrants. No gradual assimilation to American trust levels occurred. Other studies found similar persistence in other cultural traits, such as attitude to the role of government.

Jones' conclusions, apparently, is that nations need to import lots of Chinese because they have cultural traits conducive to economic prosperity even if it results in occasional ethnic violence aimed toward the Chinese such as has happened in South-East Asia. But immigration has its down sides as Andrews explains:

    Living in a high-trust society is much nicer than living in a low-trust society. Sweden is nicer than Somalia. But what is best of all is to be a low-trust person in a high-trust society. It is like being the lone defector in a prisoner’s dilemma.

    One of the advantages of a high-trust society is that strangers cooperate easily. You assume the person you are doing business with will keep his promises, and if he doesn’t, the police and the courts can be counted on to offer adjudication and redress. In low-trust societies, people compensate for the greater possibility that strangers will cheat them with impunity by doing business within their own family or clan. (Jones notes this, too: “You might think that family-run companies are charming, but they’re often a sign that the firm can’t convince total strangers to invest in it. Why won’t strangers invest? Because the strangers can’t be sure they’ll get a fair shake of the firm’s profits.”)

    Many of the countries from which America draws Asian immigrants fit this description of low-trust familism to one degree or another. As Jones might have predicted, this clannishness persists even into later American-born generations. In 2000, Indian Americans were less than 1 percent of the population but owned more than 50 percent of the motels in the country, and the vast majority of those motel owners had the surname Patel and traced their origins to the same region of Gujarat. As social scientists found when they researched this phenomenon, the “Patel motel cartel” arose because the immigrants used their immediate families as staff, keeping labor costs down, and used their extended immigrant community as a professional network to expand their market share.

    Ironically, one of the reasons the Patels emigrated in the first place was that post-independence Gujarat was not friendly to capitalist entrepreneurs. It turned out that the traits they adopted in order to cope with rampant corruption and overweening government back home were equally advantageous, maybe more so, in free-market America.

Of course, it is not just Chinese and Indians which demonstrate this clannishness. It has long been the secret to the success of most successful, but insular, minorities: e.g., the Jews. (There is a certain irony that the Jews are losing control of the international diamond market to equally clannish Indian families because the Indians are reproducing faster). 

     Andrews also addresses a point that I raised recently when I noted another piece on Jones' book: what happens when we import a lot of people with less desirable traits?

    Is it possible that the traits that make immigrant minorities successful in America are the same traits that, in broad majorities, hold their home countries back? That would explain the paradox of why some immigrant minorities have higher incomes than native white Americans even though their home countries struggle to escape poverty.

    But the most important question is whether people from a low-trust society can, in sufficient numbers, transform a high-trust society into a low-trust one. Because if being a low-trust person in a high-trust society is the best of both worlds, being a high-trust person in a low-trust society is the worst. All the characteristics that made your country attractive to immigrants in the first place become maladaptive overnight.

    Much of the literature on immigrant assimilation looks at easily observable questions about subsequent generations, such as whether they are learning English, graduating high school, and moving up the income ladder. Jones’s book proves that these external accomplishments do not necessarily indicate assimilation at the deeper level of cultural values. This is of the greatest possible importance, because every day social science discovers further evidence that these cultural values, more than anything else, determine what a country’s politics and its economy will look like in the future.

    Orion is already some 200,000 miles (320,000 kilometers) from Earth and preparing to perform the first of four main thrusts scheduled during the mission using its engines.

    This maneuver, which will take place early Monday morning, will bring the spacecraft as close as 80 miles (130 kilometers) from the lunar surface, in order to take advantage of the Moon's gravitational force.

    Since this will take place on the far side of the Moon, NASA is expected to lose contact with the spacecraft for approximately 35 minutes.

    "We will be passing over some of the Apollo landing sites," said flight director Jeff Radigan, although they will be in darkness. Footage of the flyover will be released by NASA.

    Four days later, a second thrust from the engines will place Orion in a distant orbit around the Moon.

    The ship will go up to 40,000 miles beyond the Moon, a record for a habitable capsule.

    It will then begin the journey back to Earth, with a landing in the Pacific Ocean scheduled for December 11, after just over 25 days of flight.

By at

2 comments:

  1. John WilderNovember 22, 2022 at 2:42 PM

    I'm shocked, shocked I say to hear that a government agency is riddled with corruption.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. DocentNovember 22, 2022 at 3:02 PM

      And that was just the DEA. Imagine what it is like at the CIA.

      Delete

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