Time got away from me this weekend, so I wasn't able to finish my planned post for this week's RPG Saturday column. So let me leave you with this excellent video from Seth Skorkowsky giving advice to game masters on how to get your players more invested in their characters and the NPCs. If you like the Monster Hunters Inc. books by Larry Correia, you will probably enjoy Skorkowsky's "The Valducan" book series.
VIDEO: "Getting Players Invested - Running RPGs"
Seth Skorkowsky (16 min.)
The Declaration of Independent did not come out of nowhere. It was not simply a revolt against taxes imposed without any representation. Rather, it contains a long list of grievances which had been brought before the British King and had been ignored or punished:
We could draw up a similar list of grievances against the federal government. For instance:
Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:
Your shooting should always be a separate intellectual decision. Your shot should never be part of a presentation or reload or stoppage reduction. Tap, Rack, Bang! is wrong, on many levels.
It's fine to make the decision to shoot before the presentation. It's fine to make the decision at some point during the presentation. But the shooting should never be part of the presentation. So, shooting every time you present is WRONG. Because such practice engrains firing when you decide to present. And if you have engrained such, it is impossible to present and not shoot. That's why the NRA and many gun schools do not teach Tap, Rack, Bang! Instead they teach Tap, Rack, Assess.
And some schools teach presentation without firing. At Front Sight, they taught to present to the target, sights lined up, slack out of the trigger. Getting up to that point should be fast. But a lot can happen / change between your decision to present and the attainment of your sight picture. So automatically shooting when presenting is not a good idea.
A few articles to which Jon linked that caught my attention in particular:
Two details stand out once the shooting started. People saw the rifle from a distance and were already moving before the first shot, which is awareness doing its job. And Green returned fire while moving instead of standing flat-footed in the open. I don't know if he was trying to close distance for an easier shot, get a better angle that removed innocent people from the background, or perhaps something else.
Be honest about the matchup, though. A pistol against an attacker in body armor carrying a rifle is not a fair fight. The rifle reaches farther and hits harder, and the armor covers the high-percentage targets. What carried the day was not gear. It was a defender willing to move and put rounds on the threat instead of freezing.
Don't chase the bad guy! Your goal is always to get away from the bad guy. The victim got body slammed. She could have gotten killed or permanently disabled. Don't chase the bad guy.
Don't get angry. Getting angry makes you do stupid things, like chasing the bad guy. If you have the chance to run away, RUN AWAY!
"What a cowardly thing to advise."
Running away is the smart thing to do. Regardless of how cowardly it may appear. Chasing the bad guy is stupid, no matter how brave it may appear.
If you are accosted by a group, the loud, mouthy one is the Double-D. He’s there to take your attention from the quiet one hanging back and looking around. If anybody has a gun, the quiet one does. Don’t get so tunneled-in on the loudmouth that you miss the others fanning out around to cut off your escape routes.
A good kit gun isn’t meant to replace your deer rifle or defensive handgun.
Think of it more like a quality pocketknife.
You may not use it every trip, but when you need it, nothing else is quite as convenient.
A kit gun should be lightweight enough that you’ll actually carry it, accurate enough for small game, reliable enough to ignore until needed and durable enough to live outdoors.
Those four characteristics matter far more than caliber or barrel length.
You might think that you are most likely to be attacked by bears when in the woods, but according to this article, "The animal behind most aggressive wildlife encounters may surprise you," elk may pose more of a danger. It notes that "[o]ut of nearly 3,000 wildlife incidents in Canadian national parks, more than half involved an elk, researchers report July 2 in Frontiers in Conservation Science."
Landles and Balakrishna analyzed 2,878 aggressive wildlife incidents from 2010 to 2023 involving five animals: black bears, grizzly bears, elk, coyotes and mule deer. Aggressive behaviors included chasing, attacking or bluffing a charge. The analysis identified which animal–human activity combinations were especially risky.
Elk topped the list, involved in 62 percent of all the incidents. One of the riskiest combos was elk and camping — the animals turned up in 84 percent of campground incidents. This may be because Canada’s peak camping season aligns with when the animals mate and give birth — times of heightened aggression for the species.
“Elk are herbivorous herd animals that don’t immediately inspire fear like a carnivore does,” Balakrishna says. Visitors may underestimate how aggressive they can be.
Grizzly bears and black bears accounted for 14 percent and 13 percent of the total, respectively.
The first desecration was discovered on July 12, 1957, by a groundskeeper at Roberts Cemetery on Creighton Road. A half-ton slab protecting the grave of a recently deceased woman had been moved to the side and the grave was opened. The woman's clothing was, according to reports, "disheveled."
Authorities converged on the scene and found that the body of the woman, a 22-year-old who died during a recent child birth, was soaked from the previous night's rain. Her right leg had been pulled up and was dangling over the edge of the coffin.
On July 15 at nearby Whitmire Cemetery, a man went to visit the grave of his recently deceased wife, clutching flowers for her grave. When he arrived at her burial site, he was horrified. Her grave's slab had also been removed. Her pajamas, the report said, had been pulled down.
The local sheriff called a press conference and ordered sex criminals rounded up and his deputies to "check all haunts or dives where odd ball character congregate." Patrols of the cemeteries commenced and things quieted down.
But on Feb. 23, 1958, a woman visiting the Whitmire Cemetery found the desecrated grave of a young girl who had been killed by an automobile on Nine Mile Road only a few months earlier. The slab, this time 1,200 pounds, had been moved, the lid of the casket smashed, and her clothes tampered with.
A reward for the ghoul's capture rose to $1,500, nearly $17,000 in today's money. But that was not the end.
On March 8, 1958, a woman visiting her husband's grave found a nearby gravesite had been disturbed and notified authorities. The body of an 11-year-old girl was missing, removed by the ghoul.
A team of deputies and other law officials began searching the cemetery and found nothing. A city patrolman arrived on his horse Trigger to search near the cemetery, which was surrounded by thickets of brush and bushes and swamp land to the northwest. About 250 yards away, in that swampy area, the body was found on the edge of the swamp. Her clothes were described, again, as "disheveled" but this time matches were found next to the girl's body.
Her body was taken to a mortuary for an examination. Doctors found that lipstick and rouge that had been applied to the girl before burial had been wiped away.
They also found that her body had been burned, and authorities speculated that's what the matches were used for.
No one was ever prosecuted. Jacki Wilson, a retired archivist for the University of West Florida Historic Trust, who has relatives buried at Whitmire Cemetery, "has heard whispers and theories too, though no suspect was every publicly named."
"There was some lore that it was a prominent person, though I never heard a name," she said. "It was all hushed and I have nothing to back that up, but it was just something that came down through the years. Either way, it was horrible if you have family members here."
A file obtained from the Sheriff's Office by a local newspaper showed that the Sheriff had, over the years, investigated several leads, including a similar incident from Feb. 18, 1965. In that case,
Dirt had been removed down to the casket boards and the casket of Maxine Cooper, a Black female around 47, opened. Investigator Otis Davis wrote the clothes had been disarranged, and her slip “had been pulled up exposing the pelvic area,” and the “area of clothing around the breasts apparent molested.” A shovel was found near the grave. Cooper had been buried four days earlier.
The Benboe Funeral Home told the investigator that the woman had been sick a long time and had died at home. No jewelry had been buried with the body. An additional examination found the body had no indications of being mutilated or disfigured. The file had no additional information on the crime.
No more reports of grave robberies were in the folder, but the documents did contain a sheet of paper with this note—“This case has not been cleared—it is filed with murder cases—do not destroy. Ghoul of Whitmire Cemetery.”
They could have made a small fortune auctioning off tickets to participate, but instead the state will be using experienced law enforcement officers that volunteer to be part of the firing squad. From the article:
Beginning July 1, Idaho became the only state in America where condemned inmates will, by default, face a hail of bullets instead of lethal injection—a dramatic policy shift prompted by last year’s botched attempt to execute convicted murderer Thomas Eugene Creech.
Republican Gov. Brad Little, who seeks a third term this November, signed both firing squad bills into law. The 2025 bill delayed implementation so IDOC had time to rebuild its execution chamber.
I would point out that Creech is a serial killer and seriously evil. It is an affront to all that is good that Creech is still alive. Anyway, after an attempt to execute him with lethal injection went wrong--the doctor spent over an hour unsuccessfully trying to find the vein, which sounds a lot like the phlebotomist at my doctor's office--the legislature and governor had enough and a bill was quickly passed changing the preferred execution method from lethal injection to firing squad.
Of course, being the government, they had to waste as many tax dollars as possible. Law enforcement insisted on a special facility to conduct executions at a cost of $1.2 million. And for some reason also insisted on the latest and greatest rifles: "five Daniel Defense DD5-P [sic: probably the DD5-SBR] rifles chambered in .308 Winchester, fitted with scopes, suppressors and bipods, at a cost of more than $24,000." I'm pretty sure that five Ruger American bolt action rifles would do a better job at a fraction of the cost. And bipods? And scopes? Seriously? It's in a room at a distance of only 10 yards, not hundreds of yards across a canyon up in the mountains.
From the Daily Mail: "Indian migrant murdered wife at $1.3m mansion just six days after he arrived in Canada." He claims he only "accidentally poked" her in the stomach once and has no memory of how the other six stab wounds happened.
"Minnesota's Democrat Governor Tim Walz pardons illegal migrant PEDOPHILE who raped girl aged 10 to stop the predator from being deported"--Daily Mail. Tou Lue Vang had "admitted to repeatedly sexually abusing the child for four years when he pleaded guilty to first-degree criminal sexual conduct in 2006, and at the time he justified his actions by claiming it is a 'cultural thing' to 'marry and have sex with girls as young as 12.'" Vang, it should be noted, had initially entered the country illegally.
A headline from the New York Post states: "NYC bakes as Central Park hits 100 degrees for first time in over a decade amid blistering heatwave." How can it be the hottest in decade if every year for the past decade has been the hottest on record? The hottest temperature recorded in Central Park was 106° in 1936, and the other big years for heat with 4 days each where it was more than 100° were in 1953 and 1966.
Following up on news earlier today of a transgender shooter who was apparently stopped before committing a mass shooting, we have another incident where a transgender killmonger, "Teha Delaruelle, who briefly volunteered on the campaign of Wisconsin Democratic Socialist Katrina deVille, who is also transgender, sits in front of a dry-erase board scrawled with 'kill your local Republican' in black marker" and "vowed to unleash 'trans jihad' against the 'animals' in the MAGA movement in a series of unhinged videos on social media."
"12 Gauge Buckshot Range Report" by Ben Adams, Appalachian Tactical Academy. A comparison between Federal Tactical 00 8-pellet Buck with Federal’s Flitecontrol wad and Remington Express Tac 12 00 8-pellet Buck, pattern tested at 5, 15, 25, and 35 yards. At 5 yards, the Remington had already opened up a lot more than the Federal, although both patterned within the A-zone on the target. At 15 yards, however, the Remington pattern was significantly larger than the Federal. At 25 yards, the Federal load's pattern was about the size of the Remington's at 15 yards, while the Remington had opened up enough that some pellets were no longer striking on the silhouette. At 35 yards, the Federal was still doing pretty well (1 pellet off the target), but the Remington pattern was so large that it was no longer going to be effective. 35 yards is far beyond any distance you would ever need to shoot in a home defense scenario (unless you lived in a mansion), but could be well short of a property line (or border of your curtilage). Just something to keep in mind. In any event, the author concludes:
The Federal load I tested is the clear winner over the Remington, but what does that actually mean for you as the end user? Don’t assume that the Federal load is automatically superior for your purposes. A 25+ yard shot just may not be a reality for your individual situation, so why stress about ensuring you have ammo to meet a situation that you are not going to experience?Both loads do just fine at distances of 15y and in, which accounts for the longest indoor shot 99% of Americans might have to take. Keep that in mind when choosing a load for your gun. With all that said, my preference is still going to be for the tighter-patterning load, all other things being equal. But what if all other things aren’t equal? Price and availability have to factor into your decision-making process as well.
The latter has certainly played into my selection of shotgun ammo. It was years after I first started hearing about the Federal Flitecontrol 8-pellet buckshot load before I ever came across it in any of the stores in this area, and supply has been very spotty. And when I check online, it seems to always be out of stock or on back order. Consequently, most of my supply is more standard 00 loadings.
In case you doubted me, Just The News reports: "Many Democratic Socialist leaders are self-professed communists, DSA caucus statements show." The article begins:
In the wake of the shocking victory of several Democratic Socialist candidates in the New York City primary elections, President Donald Trump is warning that the candidates are “hardcore Godless communists” and a serious threat to the United States. He received immediate pushback, not least from CNN’s chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins, who said that Democratic Socialist candidates are not communists.
“While Democrats themselves have been wrestling with what Tuesday night means for the direction of their party, socialism, much less democratic socialism, is not communism,” Collins said on air earlier this week.
The same Democratic Socialists of America often identify as Marxist or Communist
Collins may have missed the fact that many of the leaders of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), belong to internal party caucuses that explicitly define themselves as Marxist and advocate for achieving communism.
These groups control a significant portion of the DSA’s National Political Council, the body responsible for governing the party, according to a review of party records, social media posts, and caucus platforms. In fact, 10 members of the 25-person body belong to a caucus that espouses communism or have explicitly supported the ideology in public statements.
The article then goes on to discuss specific DSA leaders and politicians who have either said they are communist, support communist goals, or praise communist leaders.
From the New York Post: "Trans gunman caught in alleged casino terror plot with huge cache of weapons — as cops release chilling footage." The article relates that "Allison Howlett, 36, who was born a man but lives as a woman, was arrested Saturday on charges of making terroristic threats, assault with a deadly weapon, auto theft, gun theft and other offenses." Howlett's former spouse informed police that Howlett had stolen her car and had firearms inside, and they tracked him to a hotel parking garage.
The officers were shocked to see that Howlett had been sitting on a handgun and had an MP5 submachine gun sitting on the back seat.
When cops searched Howlett’s car, they recovered 22 other guns and hundreds of rounds of ammunition.
Cops who searched the suspect’s home in Henderson found 30 more firearms, including automatic rifles, plus ammo, grenade launcher attachments and silencers.
Officers said Howlett made several threats going back years, a including a 2024 call where Howlett threatened a mass shooting.
An interesting discussion of how real violence differs from what you will encounter in the dojo; fear and the flinch response; and training to control the fear.
VIDEO: "Violence Expert: Real Self-Defense Is TERRIFYING"
Jesse Enkamp (31 min.)
"Pre-Attack Warning Signs" by Michael T. Rayburn, Police One. Although directed at law enforcement officers, most of the tips are applicable to the regular civilian. The photos are my addition, but the text from the article relates:
What are the pre-attack warning signs? ... The most obvious ones are the verbal cues. The bad guy will tell you, "... I'm going to kick your a--."
Recognizing nonverbal preattack warnings signs is something we all need to work on, as they are not as obvious. It's said that between 60% and 90% of human communication is body language, or nonverbal communication. ...
Let's take a look at preattack warning signs you're likely to encounter on the job.
Unconscious Body Changes
There are many non-verbal cues signifying a potential attack that the subject might be unaware of exhibiting. One of them is conspicuous ignoring. You're asking this person some questions, and they just stare at you with this blank look on their face. ...
Body tightening or flexing of the muscles are other good cues to look for. Subtle ones include the muscles in a person's neck tightening up, or seeing a person's shoulders rise up slightly as the related muscles tighten up. Maybe you'll notice a clenched ja[w] as the subject's face tightens.A change in breathing is something that's done completely subconsciously. It goes back to our fight or flight syndrome. The brain, automatically, is preparing the person for fight or flight by oxygenating the blood. The brain is telling the lungs to get that air in because something is about to happen for which the body is going to need it.
The Eyes Have It
Quite a few preattack warning signs involve the suspect's eyes. A big one, and it gets overlooked a lot, is target glancing. There are a number of videos out there where you can actually see the perpetrator glancing or looking right at the officer's weapon. Have you ever been talking to someone and noticed that they keep looking down? You probably thought they were just being rude by not looking you in the eye, but they could have been looking at your gun and trying to figure out how to get it out of your holster instead.
As you're questioning a subject he or she may start looking around. The person could be looking for a way to escape, for your backup, or for any witnesses or other people who may try to help you. They may also be looking to see if any of their fellow criminals or gang members are in the area to help them.
For preattack warning signs you'll also want to look at the suspect's eyes themselves. On most people you'll only see the white portion of their eyes on either side of the pupil. On excited or agitated people, you will see white on the top and or bottom of the eyes. Have you ever heard of the expression, "their eyes got really big?"Persons with dilated pupils are in a state of great emotional excitement or anger and could potentially pose a real threat. Even if the person's eyes are dilated as a result of narcotic use, this person still poses a real threat, as the majority of subjects who assault officers are under the influence of narcotics and or alcohol.
Overt Movements
But not all body movements warning of an attack are so subtle. Squaring off or blading the body is a well-known and easily recognized sign. It's commonly referred to as a "boxer's stance." The subject's strong side foot will usually drop back, and they may crouch a little to lower their center of gravity by bending slightly at the knees and leaning forward a little.
Crowding the contact officer is another sign. If someone is going to assault you with their hands, an edged weapon, or some other personal weapon, they need to get in close to do it. They're not going to stab you from 21 feet away. They're going to close the distance and try to catch you off guard.
Also be on the lookout for exaggerated movements or ceasing all movement. They're stomping the ground, throwing their arms in the air yelling and screaming. Or, they're doing all that, and then immediately cease all movement and become totally cooperative. There may be some mental health issues going on there, but either way it's a preattack warning sign.Any sudden movement, or any covert movement, should be taken seriously as a preattack warning sign. They could be ... reaching for a weapon. ...
For example, take notice if you see a subject protecting personal items or rearranging clothing. This includes removing a watch or putting their cell phone "someplace safe." For the guys out west, this could include removing their cowboy hat. It sounds a little clichéd, but it happens. Rearranging clothing could be a means to conceal a weapon, or maybe they're untucking their shirt so they can swing their arms better.
Any attempt at distraction is another preattack warning sign. They could be pretending to look over your shoulder at something. Maybe point behind you to make you turn around. If you're dealing with more than one person, the other person could try to distract you in some way. You see that with gangs, especially in prisons. A small fight will break out; meanwhile, someone is getting shanked on the other side of the yard.
There is a lot of advice out there on managing recoil, most dealing with the handgun. So, naturally, I will start off by recommending an article on managing recoil with a rifle. Why? Because marksmanship principles start with shooting a rifle.
The article to which I want to direct your attention is "Recoil Management" by Caylen Wojcik published at the Journal of Mountain Hunting. He explains:
What is recoil management? Effective recoil management is using our bodies’ mass and bone structure to absorb the recoil energy of a rifle and transfer that energy throughout the body so that the shooter can easily re-acquire a second sight-picture after the process of recoil and follow-through is complete. More on that second sight-picture shortly. Of course, rifle setup is a very important factor here but plenty of people go about this process in the wrong way. First and foremost, the rifle scope’s eye-relief should be set for the shooter in a “middle-ground” shooting position as I like to think of it. What I mean by that is we can’t set optimal eye relief for just one shooting position if that rifle is meant to be used in a variety of positions.
The author warns about shooting too much gun, noting that if the rifle has so much recoil you don't want to shoot it, you will never be able to shoot it well. He continues:
The goal in any shooting position is to apply the seven factors common to all shooting positions (see below) and get the body square to the rifle so we can present as much mass as possible behind the rifle to absorb and spread that recoil energy. What this is doing is reducing the amount the rifle is going to move during the recoil process. I can’t stress how important this is in becoming an independent shooter. If, after you fire at your target and you recover from the recoil, your rifle is pointed at something 20-feet to the left of your target there’s no way you’re going to be able to process the vital information the bullet is telling you, especially if you’re solo and don’t have an observer. Besides, an observer should be looked at as an added bonus, only telling you what you already know. After all, whose perspective is going to be the most accurate? Yours, looking at what you just shot at, or theirs sitting a couple feet away?
Another contributing factor to effective recoil management is a proper natural point of aim (NPOA) for that particular shooting position. If you have a solid NPOA, the rifle is going to go through the process of recoil, but it will ALWAYS recover to where the rifle naturally wants to point. It’s all interconnected, and there’s no getting away from applying ALL the fundamentals.
In other words, we want to (a) get as much mass behind the rifle as possible to absorb recoil from (b) with a weapon set up to shoot from a variety or positions (or situations) and (c) with a natural point of aim (NPOA) such that the rifle will recover to where the rifle naturally wants to point, which should be aligned with your target.
Moving on to the handgun, let's start with an article from the Shooter's Log by Bob Campbell entitled "How to Control Recoil When Shooting a Handgun." Similar to Wojcik, above, Campbell also warns about trying to start out with too much gun:
Some calibers are just too much for the occasional shooter. Working people on a budget (in terms of time and money), should not jump into the .357 SIG, 10mm, or a lightweight magnum of any type. It is a process to learn to control recoil. Once you have thoroughly mastered the .38 or 9mm, you may wish to move up in caliber. But not before you have mastered the standard calibers.
I have trained quite a few shooters and attended many classes as a student. Firing a pistol and hearing the report a few feet in front of your eyes isn’t a natural thing. Recoil control must be learned. Many focus more on recoil than on marksmanship. The greater the concentration on marksmanship the less you will notice recoil.
Flinching, and failing to control recoil, kills accuracy. Failing to control recoil makes accurate follow-up shots impossible. In a defensive encounter — if you fire accurately— you will probably solve the problem without using the full gun load. However, chances are you will need more than one shot. Handguns just are not that impressive concerning wound potential. Likewise, there is the problem of multiple assailants. This means you must learn to control recoil effectively.
With rifle shooting, the majority of the recoil energy will be through the weapon's stock into the shoulder. With the handgun, the majority of the recoil energy will go into the hand. The goal for proper recoil control is to take that energy going into the hand and transfer it somewhere else.
I had linked to a video not too long ago where the author showed how to let a handgun with a plow handle grip roll in the hand so that the firearm absorbed most of the recoil, even letting his arm rise with more powerful loads. And that is one way to transfer the recoil energy. And if you look at old photographs of shooters using revolvers, you will often see them shoot with the shooting arm bent, which allows the arm act somewhat like a spring also helping absorb recoil.
Those methods will not work with semi-auto pistols. And allowing the revolver to roll upward in your hand won't even work with most modern revolver grips.
Instead, what we aim for is gripping the handgun in such a way that the recoil energy is transferred to the hand and up the arm to the shoulder, and the gun returns to a natural point of aim where it is still pointed at the target. This involves both grip and stance.
Starting with grip, Campbell states: "The hand should ride as high on the grip as possible with a self-loading pistol. The hand must ride high on a revolver backstrap as well — to offer good leverage for the finger to press the double-action revolver trigger, straight to the rear. But don’t override the revolver backstrap. This will result in what is called heeling." He goes on to discuss other points with your grip/stance, and includes a slide show at the bottom of the article to better explain some points.
Campbell's points work well for both revolver and semi-auto handguns. But the reality is that most people are using the semi-autos for self-defense and there are a few things that work well for semi-auto pistols that are not easily transferable to the revolver. So, next I would direct your attention to an article by "The Humble Marksman" at The Armory Life entitled "Practical Skills: Recoil Management for Speed and Accuracy." And he begins by noting that recoil management involves "managing both muzzle climb and muzzle bounce (when the slide goes back into battery)." With that, he delves into the three parts of recoil management:
And this brings us to the NPOA issue raised as to rifles, but applying the concept to pistols. The Humble Marksman observes on this point:
A good grip is going to reduce muzzle climb and speed up sight recovery — but there’s more to it than that. A good grip is also going to align your sights for you, so you don’t have to do it consciously (this is referred to as “index” or “natural point of aim”).
The grip will cause your sights to behave predictably with a perfectly neutral rise and return. A good grip will make you more accurate because it stabilizes the gun through the trigger pull, making you more accurate.
The sights lifting straight up is critically important for speed shooting. If you overpower the gun on the support side so that that sight or dot lifts up to your dominant side, when the slide closes it’s going to come down on the support side.
Often hitting “low and left” when shooting fast is misdiagnosed as a trigger control problem when it is actually a grip-imbalance problem. The problem is it’s nearly impossible to see this on a set of iron sights.
The remainder of his article is on how to properly grip the pistol, so be sure to check it out. See also Michael Seeklander's article, "6 Things You Can Do To Improve Your Recoil Control With A Handgun" who also covers some finer points of a good grip; and Richard Nance's article at Handguns Magazine, "How To Properly Grip A Pistol: Step-By-Step Instructions"; and Dave Spaulding's Guns and Ammo article, "Proper Combative Pistol Grip (And A Whole Lot More)."
Those of you that teach may find this PDF from NRA Online Training showing a two handed grip useful to hand out to your students although the revolver grip appears to be too low on the grip.
Finally, most of the articles I came across assumed a two handed grip on the weapon. But there are many situations where you might have to shoot a handgun with a single hand. Dan Abraham has an article and video at The Armory Life: "The Art of One-Handed Shooting."
The argument is that the refugees and migrants are used as a back channel method to funnel money (via remittances) back to intelligence and/or military assets in foreign countries.
VIDEO: "Why The West Will NEVER Be Allowed To Stop Mass Immigration | Mike Benz"
Winston Marshall Clips (12 min.)
The New York Post reports: "Socialist congressional candidate Melat Kiros defeats longtime Rep. Diana DeGette in Colorado primary in another blow to establishment Dems." The article mentions that Kiros was born in Ethiopia and was backed by socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders. She is, of course, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America.
John Wilder's latest is "Birthright Citizenship, The Economics Of Infinity, And The Inevitability Of War." He is, of course, talking about the consequences of the June 30 decision of the four women on the Supreme Court (he counts Roberts as a woman) of ruling that any kid popped out by an illegal or vacationer on U.S. soil becomes a citizen. Or as Wilder phrased it:
If an illegal steps one foot into Arizona and squats a tot, the squatted tot is just as American as Neil Armstrong. If a woman on a legal visa drops a moppet, even if she overstays? It’s an American citizen, just as American as Mark Twain.
The American people, therefore, have no say in who becomes an American.
So why can't the U.S. have an effective border. It all comes down to the interests of those that actually call the shots:
Why they’ve been allowed is simple.
For the GloboLeftElite, they represent a new voter bloc that’s skewed to vote against nationalism and for communism.
For the Institutional Elite, they represent more demand for their services and more job for their gay friends.
For the “Idaho Rancher” they represent a way to get cheap labor and avoid paying the prices it would take for Americans to do the work, and the “Idaho Rancher” doesn’t have to pay for the services like medical and child care and prisons.
For the “Wall Street Firm” it’s a way to get cheap labor that will never say no, and will never report you for doing something shady.
These groups are all traitors.
He goes on to discuss the consequences, including why it will lead to civil war, so read the whole thing.
Over at the Anonymous Conservative, some thoughts as to whether Barrett's vote was bought through a book deal arranged by anti-Trumpers.
Meanwhile, the issue is being resolved in South Africa, where anti-immigration groups had given illegals until yesterday, June 30, to leave the country. The government has deployed police to protect the illegals while President Cyril Ramaphosa calls any calls to violence vigilantism. But this doesn't appear to be a fringe issue:
Reporting from a protest in Johannesburg, Al Jazeera correspondent Haru Mutasa said the demonstrators were both working-class and middle-class South Africans and from different tribes around the country.
“They all have one goal, which is basically that they want the government to do something about undocumented foreigners in the country,” she said. “They’re saying that they’re frustrated, that they’ve heard promises from the government but they’re not seeing any difference on the ground.
VIDEO: "Forced to flee South Africa as anti-immigrant deadline approaches"
Channel 4 News (10 min.)
The Daily Mail reports that "Supergirl braces for a $100million loss: Milly Alcock's movie misfire marks a major setback for the rebooted DC Universe as it bombs at the box office." The article states that the film cost $170 million to produce with $120 million in marketing costs, but then states that "[t]he film would need to earn $300million - $375million to break even[.]" I do not believe this is correct because it doesn't consider the split between studios and theaters, which is typically around 50/50. If the production and marketing costs totaled $290 million, the film would need to earn around twice that--$580 million--for the studio to break even.
Interestingly, despite the studio spin that it was misogynist haters that killed interest in the film, it was women who avoided the film. Metro News pointed out:
You need only look at the demographic for this weekend’s audience, as reported by Deadline – 59% of the audience was male, and 65% was over the age of 25 – which shows that young women, surely the target audience of this particular entry, simply didn’t show up.
The Critical Drinker offers his own thoughts on why the film didn't succeed in the video, below. I haven't watched it, but my sons--who are big superhero film fans--all went to see it this past weekend. And the best they had to offer was that it was "okay". Even my son who is consistently the biggest defender of the actors and directors of these films wasn't that impressed.
VIDEO: "Supergirl - The Most Predictable Of Disasters"
The Critical Drinker (12 min.)
Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented. Justice Brett Kavanaugh concurred in the judgment, but dissented in part, saying Trump’s executive order does not violate the 14th Amendment, but does violate the federal statute that codified the amendment. Kavanaugh’s perspective is that Congress could limit birthright citizenship via federal statute, but has not.
Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, held that it was enough that the child was born on U.S. soil to become a citizen.
“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights — to freely participate in our political community. The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today,” Roberts added.
Of course, that wasn't true because the members of Indian tribes were not considered citizens until a much later act of Congress.
This was a poor decision by the court. Not only does it misconstrue the law, but it contributes to a potential legitimacy crisis. Or, as Vox Day observes: "As one diehard liberal recently pointed out, the use of liberal democratic institutions to defend the indefensible and defeat the will of the people is only going to guarantee the eventual destruction of those institutions." It is something that Rod Dreher touches upon as well in his review of the film Citizen Vigilante:
... Not gonna lie, I felt dirty watching it.
But I’m glad I did, because it is an extremely powerful movie, for one reason: it tells forbidden but widely known truths about life in lawless Europe overrun by migrants, and it speaks deeply — deeply — to the sense of suppressed outrage that many ordinary Europeans feel towards the film’s twin villains: migrant criminals and the European establishment (law enforcement, courts, politicians) that allow them to tyrannize innocent Europeans. The academic David Betz warns of civil war coming to Europe if those in power don’t do something serious about migration and the problems it causes. This movie shows you exactly what he means.
[snip]
I have been accused by well-meaning people — people who understand the problem — of somehow encouraging civil unrest by talking about it. They’re wrong. In fact, the outright refusal of those in power to talk about it, and to suppress and punish people who are trying, however crudely, to face the truth, makes propaganda works like this inevitable. And it also makes the fascist fantasy of the film likely to come true.
In fact, let me make this clear: “Citizen Vigilante” is a fascist film, in the sense that it valorizes lawless violence in service of restoring social order and an ideal of justice. It shows exactly why an exasperated people turn to fascism as a solution to a problem liberal democratic governments have proven unwilling or unable to solve.
If you don’t understand that, you will not understand the malign power of this film. Nor will you get why it will become an underground smash, no matter what the authorities do. “Citizen Vigilante” is also a fulfillment of Ross Douthat’s famous prophecy from about twenty years ago, that went something like this: “If you don’t like the Religious Right, just wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.”
But as Peter Turchin has pointed out, based on his research of the causes of revolution and civil war, government policy reflects what the elites want, not what the people want. And it has been clear for decades that the elites want open borders and mass migration.
Turchin is not the first to hold the position that there is an elite that controls government policy. Carroll Quigley also wrote about a network of financial and banking elites who, for all intents and purposes, controlled the West. If you don't know who he is, Grokipedia has this summary (footnotes omitted):
Carroll Quigley (November 9, 1910 – January 3, 1977) was an American historian and longtime professor of history at Georgetown University's Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, he earned his doctorate from Harvard University and specialized in the comparative study of civilizations and twentieth-century geopolitical developments.
Quigley gained prominence for his expansive Tragedy and Hope: A History of the World in Our Time (1966), a 1,300-page analysis tracing the shift from nineteenth-century European hegemony to a bipolar world order dominated by the United States and Soviet Union, with particular emphasis on the instrumental role of Anglo-American financial and establishment networks in orchestrating global stability through institutions like the Council on Foreign Relations and the Bank for International Settlements. In this work, he candidly described how "the powers of financial capitalism" pursued "a world system of financial control in private hands" to dominate national politics and economies via central banks and secretive agreements, a perspective drawn from his access to elite archives that has since fueled debates on power structures despite academic tendencies to sideline such causal admissions in favor of less confrontational narratives.
It's been a long time since I read Tragedy and Hope. The book was a history of the modern world from about 1880 up through the mid-1960s. Not a newspaper headline history as we get in school, but the underlying forces at work--particularly economic and financial issues and decisions that the public rarely hears about.
But amongst this, we see that the extremely wealthy formed a loose network to make decisions which would then be put into action by the various entities and politicians they controlled or had influence over. A site called PhiloCrux summarizes this aspect:
According to Quigley's historical analysis, this network did not rely on brute force. Instead, it operated through the sophisticated capture and alignment of crucial societal pillars: international finance, mainstream media, prestigious academia, and government policy-making. By subtly influencing public opinion and financing strategic think tanks, this group worked tirelessly from the late 19th century onward to establish a framework for global governance.
Their overarching vision was one of international stability and peace, aiming to prevent the devastating global conflicts that had defined the early modern era. Yet, the methods they employed to achieve these utopian goals required a profound concentration of power entirely removed from the democratic process.
What makes Quigley’s historical lens so compelling is his own nuanced stance on the network. He did not fundamentally oppose their goal of a unified, peaceful world order. In fact, he largely agreed with their ultimate geopolitical aims. Where Quigley drew the line, and what he fiercely criticized in Tragedy and Hope, was their profound commitment to secrecy and democratic manipulation.
He argued that a free society cannot function if its most consequential policies are decided behind closed doors by unelected, unaccountable individuals. Understanding Quigley’s findings offers a profound paradigm shift. It provides a sobering, academically rigorous framework for analyzing modern power structures, the influence of modern think tanks, and the quiet forces that continue to shape the geopolitics of our time.
But the Morgans, Rhodes, Rockefellers, and so on, are no longer around. What replaced them? Well, this is what Google's AI had to say:
In his 1966 book Tragedy and Hope, historian Carroll Quigley described a network of elite British and American financiers, industrialists, and academics—most notably the "Round Table" movement and the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR). Quigley posited that this Anglo-American establishment held disproportionate influence over global capitalism and 20th-century foreign policy.
Because this network was deeply tied to the power of the British Empire and post-WWII American economic dominance, it evolved rather than being overtly "replaced." Today, the functions, ideologies, and goals of Quigley's historical network are carried forward and expanded into broader globalist networks:
Expounding further:
| Organization | Primary Network Function | Membership Base |
|---|---|---|
| Council on Foreign Relations (CFR) | Policy Incubation: Drafts specific, actionable foreign and economic policy templates for the U.S. government. | Exclusively U.S. citizens; heavy concentration of diplomats, academics, and intelligence officials. |
| Trilateral Commission | Geopolitical Alignment: Harmonizes policy goals between the dominant capitalist regions (North America, Europe, Asia-Pacific). | Geographically restricted quotas; mostly business executives, central bankers, and politicians. |
| World Economic Forum (WEF) | Global Implementation: Acts as a marketing and consensus-building platform to merge public policy with private corporate interests. | Global; heavily focused on Fortune 500 CEOs, tech founders, and international heads of state. |
More:
Time got away from me this weekend, so I wasn't able to finish my planned post for this week's RPG Saturday column. So let me leave ...
