Bombs & Bants Episode 127 (Streamed 5/9/2024)

John Wilder, his wife, and I mock Clown World and the head clowns.

VIDEO: "Episode 127" (38 min.)

Oops! 3 Boeing Plane Crashes In 2 Days

 From the Daily Mail: "THREE Boeing crashes in two days: Terrified passengers scramble to escape burning jet in Senegal and tyre explodes on 737 landing in Turkey - 24 hours after nose gear failure caused 767 to slam into runway." But at least Boeing is committed "to advancing a collaborative, inclusive and globally diverse culture that creates unique careers in aerospace."

Impro Guns: Homemade MAC-10s

Impro Guns has collected three videos that apparently showcase homemade MAC-10s. The first video is in English with the maker discussing his weapon a bit, but it is not a tutorial of any kind. The second video is in Spanish and really only shows someone shooting his homemade MAC-10. The third is also in Spanish but only shows the parts and dimensions needed--it doesn't appear to provide any explanation on the manufacturing process. As a word of warning: each of the videos was at maximum volume when I started watching them. 

Cultural Enrichment in Belgium, Germany and Sweden

 The Daily Mail reports that "Girl, 14, 'gang-raped by up to ten children aged 11-16 was taken to a park by her boyfriend to be "loaned out" for sex assaults more than once, with the attacks filmed on their phones'." The incident occurred in a wooded area called Kabouterbos in Kortrijk, West Flanders, Belgium. Although the identity of the rapists have not been released, the article relates that "[p]rosecutors arrested ten suspects aged between 11 and 16 - all reported by local outlets to be boys of 'immigrant origin' - and hauled them in for interrogation." The next question, probably never to be revealed, is what type of immigrants. Statistically, they are members of the "religion of peace" from Africa or Afghanistan. 

    But it is apparently illegal to point out such inconvenient truths in German. Modernity News reports (h/t Vox Day) that a German politician (District council member Marie-Thérèse Kaiser of the AfD Party) was been found guilty of ‘incitement’ by the Verden regional court in Lower Saxony 2021 posts showing the government’s own statistics on crimes committed by migrants, specifically rape, and asked why they are so disproportionately high.

The European Conservative adds:

The verdict has now also caught the attention of X CEO Elon Musk. He retweeted a post summarizing the punishment and wrote: “Are you saying the penalty was imposed for repeating accurate government statistics? Was there anything wrong with what she said?”

But the truth is irrelevant, at least according to the judge presiding over the case, Heiko Halbfas, who stated: “Those who attack human dignity cannot invoke freedom of speech.” The article continues: "Kaiser deliberately created an image in the minds of others that led to hatred of a nationally determined group, the district newspaper reported." Is there any human dignity in being 41 times as likely to commit gang rapes?

    Of course, it is not just rapes, but other violent crimes which are being perpetrated at much higher rates by migrants than natives. Going back to the Modernity News article, it relates:

    As we have repeatedly highlighted, crime in Germany has exploded to levels not seen in close to a decade, with a huge increase in migrants committing offences, especially violent crimes.

    Statistics from the German Interior Ministry released last month show that the number of foreign suspects rocketed up to around 923,000 in 2023, correlating to a whopping 18 percent increase in just one year.

    The data further shows that 41 percent of all crime suspects in Germany are foreigners, despite only representing 15 percent of the total population.

    Overall there has been a massive 14.5% increase in the number of non-German suspects of violent crime.

    The report notes that there has been a 5.5% increase in crime and an 8.6% rise in violent crime in 2023, which is now at a 15 year high.

    Opposition parties on the right, including AfD, have argued that the data shows the urgent need for a cap on immigration, and have argued that such ‘integration’ policies are a key component of the coalition government’s race to naturalize millions of foreigners, thereby masking the truth of who is behind the crime surge.

    Indeed, the stats don’t even provide the full shocking picture of what is happening because many of the “German” suspects are really foreigners who have obtained German citizenship, or they are Second or third generation migrants.

But, similar to the U.S., the German government insists that it actually conservatives that are the biggest threat. 

    Finally, Vox Day observes that Sweden "has gone from having one of the lowest levels of fatal shootings in Europe to one of the highest in just a decade," citing a Powerline article, and asks the obvious question: "I wonder what could have changed in the last ten years." 

PJ Media: "How 'Woke' Social Conditioning Almost Cost My Friend His Life ..."

I've mentioned before that because black males have a much, much greater propensity to commit violent crime, one should exercise a correspondingly greater care and avoidance when around them. It may seem unfair since we ideally base our judgment of a person on the individual rather than broad generalizations; but in this case, the statistics are so skewed that you are much better off applying the broad generalization until you have evidence to the contrary.

    Case in point is the article "How 'Woke' Social Conditioning Almost Cost My Friend His Life and Is Killing Our Nation" by Kevin Downey Jr. at PJ Media. Downey relates:

    A friend I'll call Tom, a gay man who is as liberal as they come in New York City, was walking along West 42nd St., approaching 10th Ave., around midnight. The bright lights of Times Square and the relative safety they offered were blocks behind him. He was in a notoriously dodgy neighborhood called Hell's Kitchen where the further west one goes, the more dangerous the neighborhood becomes. 

* * *

    When Tom got to the corner of W. 42nd and 10th, he saw what he described to me as a "scary-looking black man" across the street. Tom's instincts told him to cross the street and play it safe. But Tom is a woke gay man in NYC, not a racist peckerwood redneck, and he was sickened by what he referred to as his "inner racism." Determined to prove to himself he wasn't a bigot, Tom crossed 10th Ave. and walked toward the man.

* * *

    Nothing happened until Tom got to a darker part of the block. Then the man that his instincts had warned him about — instincts his woke social conditioning deemed "racist" and told him to ignore — maneuvered in front of Tom and placed a revolver to my friend's head.

    "Give me your wallet, f****t," the man commanded. 

    Tom froze. That shouldn't have been happening. He was a good liberal who didn't pass judgment on a threatening person simply because of the man's skin color. After all, black and gay people are both victims of "white privilege." Shouldn't they be buddies, sipping appletinis at the Stonewall Inn?

    Tom handed the man his wallet and went to find a bathroom, which was no easy task in New York City.

This is also a good example of the principle described in the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin De Becker that our more "primeval" brain is much better at recognizing danger signals than the more logical portion of a our brain, and so we should trust our gut instincts when it starts to send us danger signals. 

This Is The Way: Irish Protests Against Mass Immigration

From Breitbart: 

    One of the largest anti-mass migration protests to date took place in Dublin on Monday as protesters decried the open borders agenda of the neo-liberal Irish government.

    Bearing signs reading “Ireland belongs to the Irish”, “Irish Civil Rights”, “Mass deportations”, “Economic Migrants are not refugees”, and “Irish Lives Matter”, among others were seen as thousands took to the streets of Dublin as anti-migration sentiment continues to grow across the Emerald Isle, The Journal reports.

Bullet Migration in 9mm Revolvers

 John Farnam has an article up at AmmoLand.com on this topic. As you may realize either from practical experience and/or application of basic mechanics, when a firearm recoils, the bullets in the cases tend to try and stay in place--i.e., not moving backward or upward with the recoil. The result is that bullets that are not sufficiently crimped into place can start to work their way out of the case--migration. In a revolver, the bullet can actually work out far enough to interfere with the turning of the cylinder. I've had it happen a couple times where the bullet actually jammed the cylinder tight enough that I needed a rubber mallet to encourage the cylinder to open. 

    It's less likely in a semi-auto, but Bond Arms' Bullpup 9, because of how it operates, has a tendency to cause the bullet to completely come out of the case when cycling unless the bullet has been sufficiently crimped. Thus, Bond Arms has created a list of commercial ammunition--both defensive and range ammo--that will work with their handgun.

    Most of the time, this is only an issue in a revolver when shooting magnum rated loads with no or little crimping. The solution is using a sufficient roll crimp at the end of the cartridge. But in most semi-autos, such as the 9x19, the cartridge actually headspaces on the rim of the cartridge, so you can't (safely) use a roll crimp. Instead, such cartridges use a taper crimp which just means that the case is tightly squeezed against the bullet to prevent bullet migration without mashing in the rim. 

    The consequence, as Farnam explains, is that because 9 mm ammo does not use a roll crimp, the bullet is more likely to migrate out upon recoil, potentially interfering with the turning of the cylinder. Accordingly, Farnam does not recommend a 9 mm revolver for self-defense, writing:

I’m still a fan of snubby revolvers and own several, but my recommendation, when you share my enthusiasm for them, is to stick with 38Spl. The bullet-jump issue still exists, to be sure, but to a much lesser degree, particularly when you’re shooting high-performance ammunition, like Cor-Bon’s 110 gr DPX or Speer Gold-Dot. Manufacturers ensure that these bullets are adequately crimped-in and are thus unlikely to migrate.

BSA Changes Name To SA ... Did Anyone Think This Through?

The Boys Scouts of America (BSA) is officially changing its name to Scouting America (SA) to boost inclusion, reports the Daily Mail. "The historic change is the latest in a series designed to take the troop into the 21st century, including allowing gay youth and welcoming girls throughout its ranks," the article relates. But was a name that abbreviates to SA really the best choice?

Shooting Illustrated: About the FBI's Ammo Testing Protocol

A useful article at Shooting Illustrated on "Understanding the FBI’s Ammo-Testing Protocol" by Richard Mann. The author explains:

The FBI measures performance after its agents fire bullets into bare 10-percent ordnance gelatin, gelatin covered with heavy winter clothing and gelatin placed behind 20-gauge steel, wallboard, plywood and a laminated car windshield. Thirty shots are fired—five for each portion of the test—and data are input into a calculating spreadsheet that delivers a score from 0 to 500. This all seems very practical and scientific, but it’s not intended as a measure of lethality. Rather, it’s only used as a numerical estimation of terminal-performance reliability.

Mann then describes the scoring system used by the FBI, which looks at things like penetration, expansion, and retained weight. But there may be some problems with the system. Says Mann:

Some claim the test is better at identifying projectiles good at shooting through things as opposed to stopping bad guys. There may be some truth to that, but the FBI believes the ability for a bullet to shoot through common barriers, yet still provide reliable penetration and upset, is paramount for success in a law-enforcement setting. One problem I see with the method is that a difference of only .01 inch in average penetration depth—depending on the depth at which it occurs—can translate to a difference in score of as much as 50 points, or 10 percent.

If you've wondered about the FBI's method to determine what are the best bullets/rounds, this article is a good start.

Latest "Civil War 2.0 Weather Report" From John Wilder

John at the Wilder Wealthy and Wise blog has posted a new "Civil War 2.0 Weather Report" which is his monthly assessment of how close we are to civil war in the United States. The major factors he looks at are: violence, political instability, the economy, and flow of illegal aliens. Because violence, political instability and the economy haven't seen much change, John has elected to not advance us on his civil war scale (currently at 8 "Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology"). 

    I would argue that one of the reasons that violence and the economy appear to be relatively unchanged is government is cooking the numbers--many large cities do not even report crime statistics anymore; and it seems that almost every monthly economic report touted by the Administration is revised in subsequent months and show that things are worse than first reported. But by that point, it is old news. 

    John was also taken to task by Aesop of the Raconteur Report for overstating the situation. Aesop believes we are, at most, at a 5 ("Those who have an opposing ideology are considered evil") or 6 ("People actively avoid being near those of opposing ideology.  Might move from communities or states just because of ideology"). 

    I won't get into John's response and argument for why he believes we are at an 8--you can read that in his post--but I want to approach where we stand vis-à-vis a possible civil war from a slightly different perspective. 

    Peter Turchin, in his books Ages of Discord and End Times, found that periods of significant civil unrest and civil war (and not all civil unrest led to civil war) shared some common characteristics. Among these--and which he considered to be the most significant factors--were elite overproduction (basically too many elites competing for too few elite positions in government, finance, etc.) and popular immiseration (basically how well off were the populace as a whole relative to the elites). 

    Elite overproduction leads to conflict among elites and prospective elites; and since you need elites to prosecute a civil war, this is probably the most telling factor of whether you are facing war versus less organized social unrest in the form of protests, strikes, riots, and the like. In the past, elite overproduction was mostly the result of too many children among the elites. A king having one or even two princes was not a problem. A king having several princes, and the dukes and other nobles siring lots of male heirs is quite another issue as they jockey for position and power. 

    In the modern world, it is not just elites producing children that create new elites, but the university system which anoints new elites. While you and I might scoff at someone getting a degree in political science, gender studies, community organizing, etc., they all expect jobs, preferably in government. The protests that we are seeing in relation to the Israel/Palestine war are only about Israel and Palestine on a cursory level. I believe they are more accurately viewed as a battle within the Democrat party for control of the party pitting a generation of nouveau elites and putative elites against an older generation of elites that just cannot let go of power no matter how old and decrepit they have become.  

    This seems to be the position taken by Park MacDougald in his recent article at Tablet Magazine entitled "The People Setting America on Fire." His article is primarily a deep dive into the various radical groups behind the protests. These groups--a mixture of Marxists, Anarchists, Islamic, and, yes, even Jewish groups--may cooperate and coordinate, but they have no central leadership. 

    But the funding is a different matter. Backers include: the Rockefeller Brothers Fund; the Ford Foundation; "various branches of George Soros’ philanthropic empire", the Open Society Foundations; the Kaphan Foundation; the Quitiplas Foundation; and other wealthy donors that run their contributions "through the charitable giving arms of Fidelity Investments, Charles Schwab, Morgan Stanley, Vanguard, and TIAA". 

    Another key funder is WESPAC, which is run by the market researcher Howard Horowitz According the article, WESPAC has received significant funding from the Elias Foundation (a family foundation run by the private equity investor James Mann and his wife), Grassroots International (an “environmental” group heavily funded by Thousand Currents), the Sparkplug Foundation (a far-left group funded by the Wall Street fortune of Felice and Yoram Gelman), the Bafrayung Fund (run by Rachel Gelman, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune and the sister of Democratic Rep. Dan Goldman), and the Eutopia Foundation (founded by Albert Wenger, a German American computer scientist and managing partner at the New York venture capital firm Union Square Ventures, and his wife, Susan Danziger). 

    But a key player that shows up again and again is the Tides Foundation. MacDougald elucidates:

    The Tides Nexus, of which the Tides Foundation is a part, is one of largest progressive dark-money networks in the country, controlling upward of a billion in assets; its list of major donors is an all-star cast of left-wing billionaires and foundations, including Soros, Peter Buffett and his NoVo Foundation, eBay founder Pierre Omidyar, the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, the Ford Foundation, and the New Venture Fund, controlled by another Democratic dark-money powerhouse, Eric Kessler’s Arabella Advisors. A pioneer of what critics have called “charitable money-laundering” through the use of fiscal sponsorships to obscure money trails through multiple layers of bureaucracy, Tides, through its donations and fiscal sponsorships, has emerged as a major backer of the anti-Israel protest movement across the country.

    Indeed, scratch a pro-Palestinian radical organization, and you are likely to find Tides’ involvement somewhere. The Arab Resource and Organizing Center (AROC), which organized an illegal blockade of the Port of Tacoma in November and an anti-Israel walkout of high school students in San Francisco—where AROC contracts with the unified public school district—is a fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center. So is Palestine Legal, which has coordinated with the National Lawyers Guild to provide legal support for students at the encampments and filed civil rights complaints with the Department of Justice alleging “hostile anti-Palestinian and Islamophobic” environments on American campuses. Another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Adalah Justice Project, whose executive director, Sandra Tamari, was arrested on April 30 at the encampment at Washington University in St. Louis, and who is also the co-founder of the St. Louis Palestine Solidarity Committee, which participated in the April 15 “Strike 4 Gaza” by blockading the local Boeing manufacturing plant. Still another fiscal sponsorship of the Tides Center is the Community Justice Exchange, which ran the legal defense and bail fund for the A15 Action/Strike 4 Gaza “blockade,” raising money through the Democratic fundraising platform ActBlue. Since 2020, Tides has also donated just under $3 million to the Alliance for Global Justice, a far-left nonprofit that fiscally sponsors Samidoun, a PFLP front led by Charlotte Kates, the wife of PFLP Central Committee member Khaled Barakat. Barakat, in turn, addressed Columbia students at a seminar in March organized by WOL and SJP.

    Whether Tides itself is selecting these organizations for donations, or whether it is merely acting as a pass-through for large donors who would prefer to avoid the spotlight, is difficult to know—which, one might say, is the entire purpose of Tides’ byzantine corporate structure. But we are left with the fact that wealthy donors have been subsidizing months of rolling disruptive street protests by a grab bag of revolutionary and anti-Israel radicals. That leads naturally to a question: To what end?

In that regard, MacDougald notes that, although the Tide Foundation and other billionaire groups have funded other radical protests and riots, this is the first time they have targeted a Democratic president. He believes this is key:

... [Kyle Shideler, the director for homeland security and counterterrorism at the Center for Security Policy in Washington, D.C., and an expert on far-left domestic extremism] speculates that whatever the ultimate goal of funding the anti-Israel protests, it is to be found closer to home than Gaza. “It has more to do with domestic politics, and we can see this by the language targeting Joe Biden explicitly, even though he and his administration have already handled the conflict in an exceedingly anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian way.” One reason to target Biden is that it provides his administration cover to ignore a weakened but still influential block of pro-Israel Democrats—allowing the president to claim, in essence, that his hands are tied. But it may also reflect a power struggle within the party, between what was formerly an insurgent progressive fringe—now backed by a murderer’s row of billionaire donors and energized by young cadres rising through the professional-managerial cursus honorum—and what remains of the teetering old Clintonian establishment. Or, rather, it is a display of force by the faction that has already won, complete with a message for the losers: This is who we are now. Get in line or be destroyed.

He continues:

    It is here that the outsize role of Tides in funding the protests may be especially significant. More than any of the dark-money giants on the left, Tides has become tightly integrated with the ascendant Obama faction of the Democratic Party. Tides board member Cheryl Alston, for instance, was appointed by Obama to serve two terms on the advisory committee of the federal Pension Benefit Guaranty Corporation. Board member Dylan Orr worked in Obama’s Department of Labor, becoming the first “openly transgender person appointed to a U.S. presidential administration.” Board member Tim Wang is a managing partner at the Westley Group, a clean-energy venture capital firm founded by Steve Westley, the former California co-chair of Obama for America whom Obama nearly appointed as Secretary of Energy. Board member Lori Chatman serves as president of the capital division of Enterprise Community Partners, a housing and “racial equity” nonprofit helmed by Shaun Donavon, who served as Obama’s secretary of housing and urban development and director of the Office of Management and Budget. And the former secretary of the Tides board, Suzanne Nossel, served as deputy assistant secretary of state for international organizations in the Obama administration (Nossel resigned from the board in 2021).

    Maybe it is a coincidence that a dark-money philanthropy empire tied to Obama would be bankrolling a protest movement designed to undercut American support for Israel’s war on Hamas—which just happened to be the White House nickname of one Ben Rhodes, the man responsible for building the media-NGO echo chamber that would initially sell the Iran deal and later be repurposed for domestic political warfare during the Trump years. Perhaps it is a coincidence that an Israeli victory in this war, which started with a grisly terrorist attack planned and sponsored by Iran, would deal a crushing blow to the Obama-Biden project of realignment with Iran, which remains the current administration’s real but unacknowledged policy in the Middle East. That realignment has in turn required seeding the generally pro-Israel and anti-terror American public with the idea that Israel isn’t actually a friend but rather a sectarian ethnostate with a pushy domestic lobby bent on dragging American boys into another pointless Mideast war, all so the Jews can continue kicking around the poor Palestinians—just like those bitter whites in flyover country who vote Trump because they want to kick around the Blacks and Mexicans. Which seems, in what is no doubt another coincidence, to be precisely the message of the protesters, who explicitly liken Zionism to domestic white supremacy.

    Thus do we find ourselves in a regular lattice of coincidence.

• See also: "Pro-Palestinian protesters are backed by a surprising source: Biden’s biggest donors"--Politico (also noting the role of the Tides Foundation and other big donors). 

    We cannot know whether this will lead to open conflict. Perhaps this is a victory dance of the Obama wing of the Democratic party, but to me it feels more like a fight between the old guard, AIPAC funded wing and the younger Obama faction. 

    The next civil war will be one that, at least initially, will be widespread mob action; but through their influence over these radical street protestors and connections in minority communities, it appears that the Obama faction is ready to begin this war if they start to lose the ongoing behind the scenes fight.     Consequently, on John Wilder's scale, I believe we are at 9: "Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case." It's just that the opposing sides are both nominally "Democrats".