Weekend Reading #62

Some longer and more involved reading for the weekend:

• Active Response Training's Weekend Knowledge Dump for this week. A few of the links that caught my attention in particular:
• The Spectator Australia has a piece on crime in Australia, including this bit: "When we compare these broader estimates, Australia’s rape and sexual assault rate is roughly three times higher than that of the United States. Australia’s assault rate is about twice as high, and its burglary rate is about 2.5 times higher. Robbery is the only category where the two countries report similar rates."
• Gat Daily has some tips on body language that will communicate that you are not a soft target to a criminal, such as "You should attempt to walk confidently, at a purposeful pace. Your arms should swing naturally and utilize full-body movement."
• Jerking the Trigger has a simple knife hack: using a static cord to hold the knife, allowing it to be completely carried completely concealed rather than wearing it on a belt.
• Gun Digest has some information on the legality of brandishing or displaying a firearm.
• For those that shoot revolvers in competition, Caleb Giddings has an article on determining if your .38 Special loads meet the necessary power factor.
• Urban Combatives has a video on using a water bottle in a sling bag as an improvised weapon.
• Tactical Wisdom discusses what it terms the three blade rule: that you should always have available to you a pocket folding-knife, a fixed-blade knife, and a multi-tool. The author contends that these three knives will allow you to solve most problems requiring blades and other tools. Greg, commenting on this article, also discusses why he does not carry a dedicated self-defense knife.
• Finally, an article on the dangers of bullet setback, which is often due to the constant unloading and loading of your duty or concealed carry weapon with the same bullet always being the one chambered. Each time you do that, the bullet is getting force applied and pushed slightly into the case. I also commonly see it with misfeeds, which can push a bullet quite far back into the case. The danger is that as the bullet is seated deeper, the gas pressure upon firing increases: "It’s estimated that 0.10 inch of bullet setback in the .40 Smith & Wesson can cause pressures to double."

• "CIA Drug Pilot Claims to Have Flown JFK Assassins Into Dallas"--Covert Action Magazine.  The article begins by noting:

    In a February 1985 episode of the hit NBC television series Miami Vice, Eagles singer Glenn Frey played a swashbuckling CIA pilot, Jimmy Cole, who flies ace detective Sonny Crockett (Don Johnson) and Rafael Tubbs (Philip Michael Thomas) to Colombia to conduct a drug deal.

    Crockett and Tubbs had been recruited by the DEA to work undercover as drug smugglers to help bust cartel operatives. 

    Frey’s character was loosely modeled after Robert “Tosh” Plumlee, a CIA pilot whose exploits over a 40-year career are detailed in a new memoir, Deep Cover, Shallow Graves, with Ralph Pezzullo.

    Contrary to the depiction on Miami Vice, Plumlee’s memoir shows that the CIA often worked hand-in-glove with organized crime and was the one at times smuggling drugs into the U.S.

    Plumlee claims that, on the morning John F. Kennedy was killed, he flew Johnny Roselli, a CIA-Mafia liaison, and other members of the assassination team into Dallas.     

The article traces Plumlee's history from 1957, when he was helping run guns to Fidel Castro, to the 1980s when he was flying guns to the Contra rebels and bringing back drugs. The article also notes:

    Declassified FBI and CIA files from the 1990s, and as recently as 2023, confirm Plumlee’s role as a pilot with ties to several federal agencies, sometimes under the pseudonym of William H. “Buck” Pearson. Plumlee also testified multiple times under oath before congressional committees, including the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late 1970s and the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (1990-1991).

    This testimony, Russell says, much of it originally classified as top secret, reveals not only Plumlee’s proximity to the CIA’s JM/WAVE station in Miami in the early 1960s but his involvement in clandestine aviation activities during the 1980s “drug war.”

    Released documents in 2023 and 2025 provide further strong evidence supporting Plumlee’s having operated as a deep cover “asset,” challenging the FBI’s characterization of him as an “unreliable chronic complainant” who “gave confusing, illogical” accounts concerning the abort mission in Dallas. Senator Hart stated publicly that Plumlee’s information about the Kennedy assassination and CIA-mob connections was significant enough that he sought to follow up on it, only to be stymied by the powers that be. 

• "'Kill Your Parents' at the Obama Presidential Center"--Daniel Greenfield. At the recent opening of Obama's Presidential Library, the peasants "were forced to squat in camp chairs on the dying grass of what remained of a once beloved neighborhood park, burning in the hot sun, while their betters, politicians and celebrities, watched the spectacle up close."

    Media reporting spent a good deal of time spotting celebrities in the VIP section. There was a sprightly Tom Hanks in sunglasses, there was Oprah, on her fortieth diet, and girlfriend Gayle King, and LA Mayor Karen Bass who had to return home after Los Angeles burned again which seems to happen every time she leaves town.

    And then again there were the people who actually mattered, who had made Obama and the era of radicalism he brought into national politics, happen.

    “Dig it!” the old woman in the third row of the Obama Presidential Center, had once gloated over the brutal murder of Sharon Tate by the Manson Family. “First they killed those pigs, then they ate dinner in the same room with them. They even shoved a fork into the victim’s stomach! Wild!”

    “Kill all the rich people,” the old man wearing the Communist ‘red star’ had defined his radical movement. “Break up their cars and apartments. Bring the revolution home, Kill your parents.”

    Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn, the former terrorist leaders of the Weathermen and the Chicago power couple who spotted Obama and moved him up the political ladder getting third row seats to the opening of the Obama Presidential Center spoke more eloquently about what Obama represented than any of the hollow political speeches and media press releases.

• "Postmodern Marriage" by C. Bradley Thompson. An excerpt:

    We live in a postmodern age that seeks to change or destroy the core principles and institutions that are at the foundation not just of the West but of all civilizations. Under the long shadow cast by Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse, we live in a time of nihilistic totalitarianism (nihilism is the means and totalitarianism is the end) that has as its direct goal the dismantling of those ways of living grounded in metaphysical reality.

    Let’s begin by putting our concerns in a broader context. Those who seek to destroy marriage, do so in the name of an ideological passion.

    When early twentieth-century Marxists realized that there would never be a proletarian revolution of oppressed workers because the working class was the greatest conservator of the bourgeois way of life, they recalibrated their strategy and decided that the values most important to the working class would have to be destroyed first and foremost. This led the twentieth-century Left on its “long march through the institutions” to extinguish those moral values and institutions that were suppressing and holding back the Marxist-Leninist revolution foretold by the laws of dialectical materialism. That’s when the Left discovered Nietzsche and Freud and began to wheedle away at the soul of Western man.

    After the Left captured and transformed the universities, schools, media, Hollywood, and various professional associations, etc., they went for civilization’s jugular. The single greatest scalp won by the Left in the last twenty years has been their corruption and transformation of the institution of marriage. The postmodern Left is now giggling as their minions have stripped marriage of its necessary component parts and left it corpse dangling for all to see and mock. (Apologies for mixing my metaphors!)

He goes on to describe post-modern marriage, which is defined more by what it is not than what it is. And because it is nothing concrete, it can therefore be anything. Or as the author puts it:

Ultimately, the postmodern definition of marriage is open-ended and therefore unintelligible. It has no objective referents other than whims and feelings; in fact, it represents an attempt to rewrite reality. But a concept that means everything means nothing. Ultimately, the argument for same-sex marriage is a case of ideological wish-fulfillment. 

Read the whole thing.