Heading toward Fourth of July weekend, I was looking through YouTube for more things that go boom when I came across this video of a gun infamous for not going boom. Ladies and gentlemen, feast your eyes on the nightmare-fueled horror that is the Zip 22:
It’s bad enough that it’s butt-ugly, cheaply made and anti-ergonomic, but is also infamous for malfunctioning. “Worst gun ever” has to be a target-rich environment, but the Zip 22 seems like a real strong contender. (I suppose the World War II Japanese Nambu Type 94 Shiki Kenju 8mm pistol, which could be fired accidentally by touching the sear, is actually worse from a safety viewpoint.)
But the detail that made write this post was the fact that the manufacturer offered an optional backward Picatinny rail for the top so you could mount this gun on the rail of a real gun. It’s like all those “Chainsaw bayonet attachment” memes come to life.
How unreliable is it? Ian McCollum was surprised he was actually able to fire off an entire magazine before it malfunctioned.
Here’s a guy shooting a Zip 22, who experiences a host of malfunctions (failure to eject, double-feed, etc.) in the course of firing off six magazines.
And the ejection port is so close to your finger that sometimes you get hot brass jammed up against your digits, as in this NSFW video:
Don’t think I’ll be buying one of these anytime soon…
Today my brain decided it didn’t want to write up a blog post, so instead let’s start easing into the 4th of July weekend with things that go boom. Today, one of the most awesome things that go boom: the legendary M134 Minigun.
On the firing range:
Here’s Ian McCollum of Forgotten Weapons describing in detail how it works:
Stefan Molyneux makes the case for the Chinese Communist Party’s culpability for the Wuhan Coronavirus:
Toward the end, he talks about the $20 trillion lawsuit Larry Klayman filed in Texas. Eh, I wouldn’t put much credence in him winning that lawsuit, as Klayman is a bit of a gadfly.
But Molyneux makes a compelling case for China’s culpability.
I know, two Rogan interviews in less than a week. Is it my fault he gets really good guests?
For this one, he interviews Second Amendment advocate (and former NRA host) Colion Noir.
Some takeaways:
“There is a subversive group in this country that wants to topple the structure of the United States so that they can gain power, because they think they can rule better. And a lot of those people are Marxists.” You don’t say.
“Black Lives Matter the sentiment, I can get down with. Black Lives Matter the organization, I cannot…the founder of Black Lives Matter said they’re trained Marxists.”
“Black Lives Matter has become this all encompassing umbrella of LGBTQ and some other stuff, aspects of antifa, and the whole communist/socialist aspects of politics creeping into that as well.”
“They’re wolves hiding among sheep.”
Noir says he’s shadowbanned on Instagram.
Rogan mentions The Seven Five, a documentary about police corruption in New York in the 1970s that was already on our to-be-watched list.
Rogan: “Who’s gonna be a cop now?”
Rogan: “In Santa Monica, they have police, but they were told to stand down. They were told to stand there while people were looting.”
Here’s the Bugs Bunny segment they talk about some 24 minutes in, where Elmer Fudd’s shotgun has been replaced with a scythe:
This is a small rabbit hole that proved more interesting than I thought.
I’m on all sorts of auction mailing lists because I buy and sell science fiction first editions, but on some of the aggregate mailing lists, things other than books show up. One auction was for a piece of farm equipment called a tedder, and since I had no idea what a tedder is I did some research. It turns out it’s a tool made in making hay, specifically one to spread out the hay for drying and uniformity before the actual baling operation.
Since I didn’t know the details of how baling works, I went searching for some videos on it. I came across this video on the economics of baling hay on a ranch in Wyoming, where the cold weather and low precipitation means the window for baling is very short.
Ironically, maybe because of the low precipitation, he doesn’t seem to use a tedder…
A three hour interview. Yeah, I know I’m not making things any easier on you.
Still, I suggest watching it, even though I think Rogan and Weinstein are wrong on some fundamentals (see my notes below) because Weinstein, having lived through the Evergreen State College nightmare, has a far better (and scarier) understanding of what outlandish ideas animate the unholy Social Justice Warrior alliance that has set America’s cities aflame.
Some of the money quotes:
“We were in a faculty meeting [at Evergreen], and I said that the proposals that were moving through were a threat to the Enlightenment values that were the basis of the institution. And what I got back was something I had never heard before, which was an attack not only on the Enlightenment but on the idea of enlightenment. I was just so stunned. I was a college professor amongst faculty and somebody was actually saying out loud that Enlightenment was a problem and nobody in the room said anything.”
“If you end up in Critical Theory, any one of these fields, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, whatever, it is you have already foregone this option [of studying STEM]. You don’t end up in Critical Theory if you have the chops to do science. So in effect you have people who don’t stand to personally benefit from opening those doors wider, because they wouldn’t go through them, arguing that nobody should go through those doors.”
“An excellent student, one of the best ones we ever had, was a young woman named Odette. Odette is half black her mom is Afro-Caribbean, she was known to be my student and Heather [Haying, Weinstein’s wife and also a teacher at Evergreen]’s student during the riots. And she was actually confronted and physically bullied by the rioters who accused her of being a race traitor for studying science. This actually happened.”
“If #BlackLivesMatter just simply meant what those words imply, I’d be on board with it. It doesn’t. It means a great deal more than that, and we’re beginning to see that in the last couple of weeks.”
“There’s something in us that thinks that the Great Leap Forward in China cannot happen here. That what happened in Cambodia cannot happen here. That Nazi Germany cannot happen, and that the Soviet Union couldn’t happen here. I don’t know what characteristic it is that people think makes it impossible. I don’t think it’s impossible. I think if there is a characteristic that makes it unlikely, it is the structure it is the Constitution.” (I would contend that widespread gun-ownership and ingrained American individualism make it very unlikely. I also wonder if he means the Cultural Revolution rather than the Great Leap Forward.)
“The proposals that are coming out of this movement are quite foolish. The strategy is incredibly smart.”
“If there’s one most important lesson out of the whole Evergreen fiasco, it’s that the police can be withdrawn from a situation and chaos takes a matter of hours to emerge, which we are also seeing in Seattle.”
“The idea that you could withdraw the police first is absolutely insane.”
“Joe Biden is an influence peddler. He is not an idea guy. He’s the same idea as Hillary Clinton in a different morphology. Who cares? This is not an answer to any known question. This is stay the course at a moment when we could not afford to stay the course less right. How dare the Democratic Party do this to us again at this moment?”
“Hillary Clinton advanced Trump’s candidacy because she wanted to run against him. So if you if you have Trump Derangement Syndrome, you still have to be angry at the Democratic Party for putting us in this predicament.”
The biggest thing Weinstein and Rogan get wrong: The lack of opportunity in inner cities isn’t an effect of mass incarceration, but of the breakdown in the black nuclear family brought about by the perverse incentive structures of Johnson’s Great Society welfare programs, which preceded rising black crime rates and increased incarceration. Widespread black economic progress was proceeding and converging toward white norms before the Great Society. Once again, read Charles Murray’s Losing Ground, which goes into great statistical detail to prove the case.
Also, Occupy Wall Street was in no way, shape or form an “organic” movement, it started out battlespace preparation by the Obama team to face Mitt Romney in 2012, but quickly became the prototype for the organizational insurrection we saw first in Ferguson and which has now been rolled out nationwide.
His argument for a “radical centrist duo” to run for President and Vice President outside the two-party system just isn’t going to work, for political, cultural and (most important) Constitutional issues. And it can’t work this year for calendar/ballot access issues. (And the idea that former Admiral William McRaven is even remotely possible as a center-right white horse savior is laughable. Weirdly, Andrew Yang strikes me as much more plausible candidate, even if Universal Basic Income is wrong, but he’s neither rich nor famous enough to pull it off.) When he starts talking about that, feel free to skip to 1 hour and 44 minutes in for Rogan to start talking about Biden’s cognitive decline.
To be honest, I made it about an hour and fifty minutes in, only because I need to post this do other stuff. I fully intend to watch the rest this weekend.
Once again Project Veritas has managed to plant people inside an institution to obtain footage inside an organization. This time it’s Antifa. The first two videos focus on violent fighting tactics:
The next video focuses on “Redneck Revolt,” the gun-toting, rural militia wing of antifa:
In 2018, Redneck Revolt was already talking about “abolishing the police.” Also “If you want to hunt down police you’ll have to do it on your own time.”
For an organization that doesn’t exist, they certainly have a lot of chapters.
I’m hoping additional Project Veritas videos will focus on the group’s command and control structure.
Here’s podcaster, tech investor and conservative orthogonal thinker Hotep Jesus (born Bryan Sharpe) interviewing Dilbert creator and persuasion expert Scott Adams on a wide variety of topics.
A wide-ranging discussion of the Wuhan coronavirus, race relations, etc. Food for thought.
Ben Shapiro debunks the myth that police kill black men at a high rate because of racism.
“If you look at the Washington Post database of how many people in America were black and unarmed and shot by police in 2019, in the Washington Post database the answer in 2019 was nine. If you want to talk about the number of black Americans who were shot who are unarmed and who are not fleeing from police the answer is three. Does that sound like the extermination of black people across the country? It does not.”
“A police officer is 18 and a half times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male is likely to be killed by a police officer.”
“A 2015 Justice Department analysis of the Philly Police Department found that white police officers were less likely than black or Hispanic officers to shoot unarmed black suspects.”
