There Is Something Really Wrong With Leftists

"Progressive podcaster Jennifer Welch jokes about 'digging up Charlie Kirk and doing it again' in wake of Democrats' huge midterm victories"--Daily Mail.

    The moment quickly went viral across social media as Welch's remarks were met with fierce backlash. 

    Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet, a close friend of Kirk's, responded on X: 'I don't know where, when, or how, whether in this life or the next, but Jennifer Welch will regret being an ugly, demonic witch who laughs at the murder of an innocent man.'   

The Left Just Won't Give Up

The Daily Mail reports: "Secret Service stop attempted assassination of Trump as Venezuelan national arrested outside White House with car full of guns." From the lede:

    A Venezuelan man who claimed the voices in his head told him to travel to Washington to kill Donald Trump was arrested in a stolen car with multiple firearms near the White House Thursday.

    Ronny Yordrix Guanipa Chrinos was previously subject to the catch and release policy of the Biden administration at the Texas border in March 2024, a Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told the Daily Mail.    

I doubt the voices in his head bit--probably just to establish the grounds for an insanity defense. But maybe he was hearing voices in his head? It could be schizophrenia, but...

• "The US Military Is Making Lasers That Create Voices out of Thin Air"--Defense One (2018). 
• "Hearing Voices? You May Not Be Nuts…"--IRD Glass.
• "Traditional Loudspeakers vs. Directional Audio"--Holosonics.
• And getting into the more theoretical: "Can the Microwave Auditory Effect Be 'Weaponized'?"--Front Public Health.

Weekend Reading #79

Some longer or more involved reading:

• First up this week is the most recent newsletter from Jon Low's Defensive Pistolcraft. The first thing I will bring up are comments regarding the videos on cut shotgun shells I had posted recently. You might remember that in one of the videos, the host quickly mentioned that using a cut shell was for emergency exigencies or something like that. Jon reached out to Greg Ellifritz about his thoughts about cut shells, and Greg responded:

     Thanks for thinking of me, but those things are worse than useless.  I got introduced to them almost 30 years ago.  Local ATF agents were encountering them during warrant service attempts and they wanted to see how well they worked.  

     The local ATF firearms instructor used my range to test them.  I was there when he did it.  Results:  
- Didn't reliably feed in pump or semi autos
- Horrible accuracy beyond about 10 yards
- Only penetrated about 6" in gelatin

     After shooting a couple dozen of them with the ATF agents, I came to the conclusion that I would rather shoot someone with birdshot, even at longer ranges where it is ineffective.  The cut shells are nowhere close to the ballistic capability of slugs or buckshot.   

So there you go, in case you were thinking of experimenting with them.

Some other items to look for:

• Jon has collected quite a few comments, links to articles, and offers some of his own comments regarding the recent Silver Rail Elementary School shooting in Oregon. Check it out.
• You've probably all heard some formulation of the observation that you will react under stress the way you have trained. Thus, Jon warns against training to automatically aim and fire your weapon upon drawing it:

     No, you don't need to aim at the target.  No, you don't need to take the slack out of the trigger.  No, you don't need to fire.  Those are all actions based on decisions, that you make, based on what you see.  To automatically shoot as part of your presentation from the holster to the target is WRONG!  If you practice shooting on every presentation, engraining that behavior, striving to achieve a sub-second to first shot, you will be shooting faster than you can think.  You need time to abort the shot when you recognize the silhouette is your teenager sneaking back into your house in the middle of the night.  Oh yes, lots of documented cases.  Tragic. Due to incorrect training.   

In a similar vein, he includes the following quote from Tim Larkin:

     "When you're training to protect yourself and others, speed always comes last. In the more than twenty-five years I've been training people in self-protection, I've never heard from someone who used self-protection tools in the field and felt like they suffered from a lack of speed at the moment of truth.  In fact, I usually hear the opposite:  it's much more common to suffer from a lack of accuracy or force." 

• Jon provides a link to a series of videos under the general heading "Jeff Gonzales Concealed Carry Manual" with each video covering a different topic knowledge, training, holsters, marksmanship, etc.
• Another video he links to is "How to Grip a Pistol So You Stop Re-Aiming Every Shot" with Jon adding:

     The low-left scattering for right-handers, and low-right scattering for left-handers is caused by anticipating the recoil and pushing against the anticipated recoil.  Calling it a flinch is not technically correct.  The solution is the surprise trigger break, as taught by Jeff Cooper and his disciples.  

     When using iron sights, the left-right scattering can also be caused by the rear sight notch being too narrow, making it difficult to center the front sight in the rear sight notch.  The solution is to widen the rear sight notch by about 2 hundredths of an inch (machine out 1 hundredth on each side).  

• Jon has some advice as to a defensive pistol, including that your pistol:

   Must NOT have a compensator, ported barrel, muzzle break, or anything that directs the hot gasses and burning powder in any direction other than straight head.  

You will be firing from a close contact position, because combat is usually close contact.  If your pistol blows hot gas and burning power into your eyes, or if the 
concussion causes you traumatic shock or breaks your ear drums, you will disable yourself.  

     If you think you will be shooting from your isosceles position at full extension, you're delusional.  Ask Jared Reston.  Ask George Zimmerman.  Just because you have a warped perception of reality doesn't mean reality is going to accommodate you.  Instructors who advise you to use a compensator are doing you a grave disservice.   

Lots more, so be sure to read the whole thing. 

• Greg Ellifritz has his latest Weekend Knowledge Dump at Active Response Training. Some links that stood out in particular to me:
• An article by Massad Ayoob on drawing with the weak hand from a holster set up for your dominant hand.
• Links to a couple articles on ambushes. The articles are intended for a law enforcement audience, but have obvious application to armored car drivers as well. But I think there are lessons here for the average citizen, particularly as to car jackings or civil unrest.
• The article "Recognizing and Controlling Courtroom Tricks" was written to help police officers giving testimony in court avoid tricks that a criminal defense attorney might try, but these also have application to things a prosecutor or plaintiff's attorney might also use.
• A good prepping article with the strange title, "Dragging The Futon Mattress Into The Closet." He links to other resources, so pay attention to the links. 
• A fairly detailed article on "How To Track A Human". Greg points out that it has good tips on searching and observation, which it does, including some tips for looking for stuff when it is dark.
• An American Partisan article on the bullet resistance of the average American home, which is pretty much none you can depend upon. There are also plenty of videos on YouTube testing the bullet resistance of different types of walls and appliances. Strangely, though, tightly packed books in a bookcase works pretty well for most small arms (assuming the bullets strikes the books rather than passing through a gap). 
• An article on the differing bullet nomenclature for various handgun rounds, with a particular emphasis on the various .38 handgun rounds used in the latter part of the 19th Century and early 20th Century. Someone once showed me a Colt revolver they had inherited from their grandfather that was simply marked ".38" so it behooves you to know that there are other .38s out there other than .38 Special. 
• And on that same note, Greg linked to a piece discussing the various .32 handgun calibers.
• And, finally, I found the article on why cartridges "nose-dive" in single stack magazines to be interesting. 
• John Wilder's latest, "What Is Your Profession?," looking at where we are, politically, in this country and where we are headed. An excerpt:

    Remember Leonidas in the movie 300, when he asked the Athenians what their profession was, and he got back an accountant and a project manager (or whatever it was)?  What was the profession of the Spartans?

    War.

    That’s where we are today.  The TradRight has to create value in the world to make money, and hires based on merit.  The GloboLeft hires GloboLeftists so that its ideological army is funded.  The politicians go along with this, and if D.O.G.E. tries to shut it down?

    Some GloboLeftElite federal judge will keep the money flowing, while they rule that TradRight words are violence, and GloboLeft violence isn’t punishable.

    The money must flow. 

•  This was interesting: "Male students show more tolerance for political enemies than females show for their own allies"--Expression. The article explains:

    The data, taken from FIRE’s annual College Free Speech Rankings, reveals that overall tolerance for opposing views is low among both male and female students — but the males consistently display far more tolerance than females, regardless of their politics. In fact, with the exception of male libertarians, who are slightly more tolerant, men of all political ideologies have roughly the same level of tolerance as each other. The same is true of women.

    In other words, it’s not that liberals are more tolerant than conservatives, or vice versa. Liberal and conservative men are more or less equally tolerant, as are liberal and conservative women. It’s being a man, liberal or conservative, that makes the difference. 

It brings to mind that famous quote from George Orwell in his novel, 1984:

“It was always the women, and above all the young ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the Party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.” 

Orwell knew. 

•  "The self-making world"--Aeon. A look at the ideas of French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, who hypothesized that "all living beings are constantly transforming themselves, from the tiniest microbes to the most complex mammals, gaining new forms and new abilities." 

It wasn’t the bodily structures of organisms that determined their ways of life, Lamarck said, but just the opposite: their ways of life in response to their circumstances gave rise to their changing bodily forms. ‘Can there be any consideration in natural history more important,’ he demanded, ‘or deserving of greater attention, than the one I have just set forth?’ (My translation.) 

Although Lamarck influenced Darwin, his ideas were later ridiculed and dismissed. But, as the article continues, Lamarck's ideas are making a comeback. 

    Lamarck’s ideas have been making a comeback in several areas of biology. For instance, the study of epigenetic inheritance – involving structures outside the DNA that influence gene expression – has demonstrated, throughout every kind of organism, that characteristics acquired in an individual lifetime can indeed be inherited. Many of the examples that scientists have been finding involve the responses of various kinds of animals to climate change. An example is the spiny chromis, a slender damselfish inhabiting the coral reefs of the Pacific. In 2015, marine biologists showed that its metabolism responds to the higher water temperatures brought on by climate change by transforming in myriad ways, and that these changes are inherited from generation to generation. The spiny chromis isn’t alone. In 2020, scientists found that the reef-building coral that provides the damselfish’s home also responds to changing ocean temperatures and salinity with epigenetic changes that it passes on to its offspring.

    German evolutionary geneticists have found that wild guinea pigs subjected to heat-stress show heritable alterations in their livers, which play a crucial role in metabolic regulation; and biologists in the United States and Kenya have shown that the metabolisms of baboons also heritably change in response to differences in their food supply. In fact, it seems increasingly apparent that all kinds of living beings respond to their changing environments with heritable epigenetic transformations. These might provide means of rapid adaptation that precedes, and perhaps shapes, slower genetic changes. 

There's more, so read the whole thing.

VIDEO: Mark Dice Talks About The MIGA Pundits

He begins his video by observing: "The same exact people who had been claiming for eight months that the regime change war in Iran would have no negative effects whatsoever on Republicans in the midterm elections are now claiming that if you point out that fact, you are an anti-semite."

 VIDEO: "THEY KEEP LYING - BUT THE RECEIPTS ARE ALL SAVED"
Mark Dice (15 min.)

Indy Neidell Will Be Doing A Series On The Roman Empire

Indy Neidell has done some great week-by-week history series on YouTube starting with The Great War, and continuing with World War II, and the Korean War; as well as shorter series such as his Between Two Wars series on the Time Ghost channel and his Cold War series. 

Now he has announced that starting in February 2027, he will be releasing a video series on the Roman Empire, including a short 4 min. introduction video that dropped yesterday. 

Texas Went Blue Because The Voters Went Brown

Vox Day notes that in Texas, whites voted Republican by a significant margin, while Latinos, blacks, and other races went heavily for the Democrats. From this, he observes: "Politics proper can only function in the homogenous polis. Once different religions and ethnic groups live in the same government structure, all the ideological disagreements vanish and only the raw struggle for power between the different groups remains." 

But it isn't a complete picture, either, because the margin of white women voting Republican was much less than the margin of white men; and the margin of Latina women voting Democrat was much larger than the margin of Latino men voting Democrat. Similar among blacks.  

Lessons On School Security From Oregon

An interesting piece from Tactical Science entitled "The Lock Held. The Glass Didn't." It discusses how the active shooter at Silver Rail Elementary was still so easily able to gain entry despite the physical security measures. An excerpt:

Key points

• Early reports said the Silver Rail shooter shot his way through locked doors. That is not quite what happened. He fired into the glass panes of a locked set of exterior double doors and went through the opening. The lock held. The glass did not.

• We have seen this before, every time. Across 54 K-12 active shooter events from 2000 to 2025, every attacker who forced his way past a locked door did it through glass. Not one defeated the lock itself.

• Better hardware will not fix a glass problem. If a school's entry is mostly standard glass, the lock on it matters much less than we tend to assume.

And more detail:

    We coded every K-12 active shooter event in the FBI's data from 2000 to 2025, 54 events in all, and documented 66 doors that attackers interacted with. For each one we used records requests, after-action reports, and interviews with schools and agencies to work out what the door was made of, how it was locked, and what the attacker did to it.

    Attackers tried to force their way through a locked or barricaded door nine times and got through six times. All six went through glass. They shot out a glass panel in the door, a glass panel beside it, or a sidelight, and stepped or reached through the opening. Not one of them got past the lock itself.

    The three failed attempts point the same way. In each, the attacker shot at the door or the lock itself, and the door held. Solid doors with working locks were never breached.

    The 2023 attack at The Covenant School in Nashville, Tennessee, shows both halves in one building. The attacker got in by shooting through the glass entry doors, then went upstairs, fired at secured classroom doors, and couldn't get into any of those rooms.

    What this means for your school. When someone with a gun meets a locked door, the weak point hasn't been the lock. It's the glass in or beside the door. So the question to ask isn't only about hardware. If someone shoots out the adjoining glass, can they get in?

 Something you should also consider as you look at your home security measures. 

Repurposing SSD Cards

This article--"Don't throw away your laptop's old SSDs — do this instead"--from Engadget explains how to convert old SSD cards to function as external storage devices. 

If you're planning to extract the SSD out of your older laptop, it's worth checking if it's even possible since some ultra-thin laptop makers, like Apple and its MacBooks, solder storage directly onto their logic boards. If your SSD can be removed, you just need to pair it with an external shell. There are fairly affordable enclosures on Amazon, but make sure you have the right one to match your SSD's form factor, whether it's the larger 2.5-inch SATA or the much faster and compact M.2 NVMe. 

Matt Walsh Delivers A Postmortum

 VIDEO: "The Truth Hurts"
Matt Walsh Clips (11 min.)

I believe that this is an excerpt from a longer video, but here Matt Walsh focuses on the economic factors that brought about the Republican loss--especially high fuel prices (Trump's popularity ran lockstep with gas prices). And those high gas prices was a direct result of the war with Iran. But he also notes that the Republicans in Congress were never on board with Trump's plans. And this is something I'm seeing from other writers as well: the Republican Congress refusing to follow through on the cuts recommended by DOGE, failing to codify the changes to immigration that Trump has been trying to carry out by executive order, failing to enact the SAVE Act, and on and on. 

Vice President JD Vance also didn't mince words. He wrote on X:

Another pollster—one of the smartest people I know in politics, told me yesterday we’d lose the generic ballot by 13 points. I felt negative going into Tuesday, but even I was shocked by this. In his polling, he saw that a lot of Trump 2024 voters were angry and planning to vote for Democrats. He asked those voters who had abandoned us what would cause them to come back on our team. The top four answers, accounting for nearly all of the responses were:

1) End the war
2) Focus on cost of living/inflation
3) Put America First
4) Change our relationship to Israel

Our voters showed up. And the above four reasons are why many of them voted for Democrats. This is according to a pollster who nailed the results. ...

A lot of conservatives who voted for Trump have been pointing this out in subtle and not-so-subtle ways for a long time, urging the President to keep his campaign promises of no new Middle-East wars, putting America's interests first (including above that of Israel), building the economy, mass deportation, and prosecute those that used Epstein's services, those responsible for the massive fraud, those espousing violence on the Left, etc.  Mike Dice has more thoughts on that in the video below:

 VIDEO: "President Trump Finally Admits It"
Mark Dice (15 min.)

 It will be interesting what comes next. I remember that the Tea Party was a polite, activist movement concerning about taxes and the economy, and they were roundly ridiculed by the Left and ignored by politicians on the right. That produced MAGA. 

MAGA was more blunt. It wanted a president and other politicians that would eschew the milquetoast attitudes of the old Republican party and actually fight for the American people. Trump started out his second term doing pretty well, but he was sidetracked by the siren song of Israel; and the Republicans in Congress still ignored MAGA. 

So what comes next? Will the Republican leadership go on ignoring the concerns of the average Americans? Will MAGA come back in some new form, more lean and extreme in order to better fight the Left? My guess is that the Democrats will fail to read the room and think that they have some mandate from hell (because they don't believe in heaven) that will allow them to run roughshod over the American people.  

VIDEO: The 1911 Is Obsolete For Military And Police Use

This is a lengthy discussion of the history of the 1911 pistol and its cartridge, the developments in handgun design that followed its adoption, the efforts to try and modernize the 1911, and the host's final conclusion to the question posed by the video: is the 1911 obsolete for military and police use? And the short answer to that question is "yes" according to the host. In fact, he believes it was obsolete by the 1950s, and certainly by the 1970s. 

Looking at the original M1911 or M1911A1 designs, there is no question but that the design has been obsolete for quite a while. But neither has the 1911 sat still in its design and features, anymore than the AR15 has. The sights on the original were terrible, but that has been addressed in more modern variants. The drop safety issues have been addressed with more modern variants. You can buy versions sporting accessory rails and optic cuts. The heavy steel frame can be replaced with a lighter alloy or polymer frame. Issues with feeding hollow points were addressed with changes to the feed ramp. Even the limited magazine capacity has been addressed with double stack versions (commonly termed the "2011"). 

But even with all that, I would probably still agree that it is obsolete for standard military or police use.  The complex design and number of parts is one item, but primarily it is the single action design that favors the weapon being carried cocked and locked (Condition 1) for quick use and the lack of a decocker. Historically, the 1911--particularly carrying in Condition 1--has been viewed as an expert's pistol because most people will not practice to a level allowing them to safely carry and operate it in Condition 1. (Even when it was issued to troops, they were supposed to carry it hammer down on an empty chamber). And that is why, IMHO, it is unsuited as a general issue weapon for the military and police. 

VIDEO: "Is the M1911 Obsolete for Military and Law Enforcement Use Today??"
SmallArmsSolutions (53 min.)