J. Kb

How to not understand security threats and be an asshole

On Saturday, February 25, there was supposed to be a “day of hate.”

According to The Jerusalem Post:

News of the “Day of Hate” came following a leaked internal memo by the New York Police Department’s Intelligence and Counterterrorism Bureau. The memo warned officers that online organizers are “instructing likeminded individuals to drop banners, place stickers and flyers, or scrawl graffiti as a form of biased so-called action.”

“While there are no identified threats to New York City, out of an abundance of caution, the Department will deploy additional resources to sensitive locations, including houses of worship, throughout the weekend,” an NYPD spokesperson told The Jerusalem Post on Friday. “We urge all New Yorkers to remain vigilant.”

Yair Rosenberg, an Atlantic reporter, shared a Facebook post from New York City Councilmember James Gennaro saying that a flyer for the Day of Hate that’s been circulating on social “has been fabricated” but there will be a higher law enforcement presence near synagogues on February 25. Gennaro’s office followed up with a post on Facebook confirming that the Day of Hate is real.

“I have just received a call from CO Kevin Chan at the NYPD 107th precinct, and my office can now confirm that the memo regarding the “Day of Hate” is, in fact, real,” the post said. “It appears as though the previously released flyer was a leaked draft, and therefore, was determined to be unsubstantiated at the time. While this is an unfortunate development, know that my office remains committed to ensuring our community remains safe. Per my request, there will still be additional patrol and police presence near synagogues in the district this Saturday. As always, we ask all to remain vigilant and call 9-1-1 to report any suspicious activity and/or crime.

Police were on alert in my area.

Police in New England Increase Patrols After ‘National Day of Hate’ Social Media Posts

Police departments across New England have issued alerts and stepped up their presence this weekend after social media posts referenced a supposed “National Day of Hate” against Jewish groups.

Brookline police said the situation started with an anti-Semitic group based in Iowa, which reached out to its supporters calling for them to “shock the masses with banners, fliers, & graffiti.” The department has plans to increase patrols in areas of religious institutions, especially temples and synagogues.

Authorities say there is no immediate threat of violence to the community and that they are adding the patrols out of an abundance of caution. In the meantime though, police are asking people to report anything suspicious.

Fortunately, nothing happened.

Now let us consider the totality of the situation.

Antisemitic violence is at an all-time high in the post WWII era.

Antisemitic hate crimes are up in every major city.

In 2020, 60% of all hate crimes were against Jews.

Antisemitic hate crimes doubled in New York over the last couple of years.

So the threat to the Jewish community is real.

So what was the response to police in major cities playing this nebulous threat safe by increasing patrols around Synagogues on Saturday.

 

Given the number if violent antisemitic incidents that have happened, I don’t believe the added patrols were unwarranted.

Moreover, if there is any job the police do that is worth the cost, attempting to prevent crime by visibly patrolling an area is definitely that.

That is, ideally, what we pay police for, to try and prevent crime.

Nope, the Jews don’t deserve that.

 

I’m glad he was prescient enough to guarantee that nothing would happen.

 

Now we’ve reach the point where he is an utter asshole.

No matter the facts, the Jews are not worthy of any preventative police action.

Good to know.

But, here is the bigger problem.

We understand, from a security perspective, how those who are a threat probe and harass the system.

We see this from terrorists all the time.

Make a threat.

The system responds.

Do not carry out the threat.

The system calls it a hoax.

Repeat this process until the system stops responding to threats, assuming they are hoaxes.

This is when the attack comes.

This is why the police always respond to bomb threats.

This is why the Israelis take every threat seriously.

It was a hoax this time.  Or was it the security system being probed.

When white supremacist groups, or anyone else, makes threats like this on the internet, it’s a worthwhile use of law enforcement to increase presence to show that the system takes these threats seriously.

This asshole thinks that and resources used to protect the Jews is a waste.

 

 

 

This checks out

 

I have spent a lot of time in and around veterans, the competitive shooting community, and the firearms industry.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that competitive civilians out shoot the military every time.

The only military personnel who can shoot well are in the Army Marksmanship Unit, where they train for civilian competitions, or compete in civilian matches on their own time.

Even among the elite military units, they really can’t shoot for shit.

It’s not their fault, kick in a door, toss in a stun grenade, hit everything with a three round burst from an M4 is very effective but isn’t how you score points in a USPSA match.

So I can absolutely believe this happened because I’ve seen it with my own eyes, some ego driven operator wannabe go all roid-rage because he got his ass whooped by some accountant in New Balance sneakers who trains to win matches.

 

I could really go for some mean Tweets right now

I is currently 12 degrees where I live in New Hampshire.

This is the temperature downstairs in my house.

 

That’s right, 55.4 fucking degrees.

That’s what happens when heating oil hits $5 per gallon.

Fuck Joe Biden and fuck everyone who voted for him.

I’m sorry you were offended by the mean Tweets and locker room bro talk about pussy grabbing, but did that reall justify making heating oil go from $1.25/gal to $5/gal?

Becacuse now if I dont want to spend $1,000 pee month on heating oil (January was $600), my house is a refrigerator.

FUCK!!!


When I buy I’m putting in a wood burning heater because I can get unlimited pallets for free.

I’m tempted to build a sand thermal battery but I need to secure permission for an outdoor fire pit which means I need a letter from my landlord that I can take to the local fire department.

The plan is to use a 55 gal burn barrel (I can get that for free), a 35 gal metal wash tub, 100 lbs of playground sand, and a heat driven stove fan.  Total cost, about $75.

Then I fill the burn barrel outside with free pallet wood, put the tub of sand on it and light it.  Get the sand up to about 500F.  Carry it inside (with the wife’s help) and set it down on some concrete blocks on top of a piece of MDF in the corner of the living room.  Set the stove fan on the sand, and let all the heat stored in the sand bleed off into the house as it cools.

By my math, that’s about 8,000 BTUs of stored heat.

It’s not perfect but the fuel is free, the capital investment is less than 15 gal of oil, and it should take the edge off cold.

 

 

Peak DeSantis Derangement Syndrome

Strapped to a gurney, death row inmate Donald Dillbeck saves his last words for DeSantis

Donald Dillbeck didn’t mince words in the minutes before the state executed him Thursday night.

“I know I hurt people when I was young. I really messed up,” Dillbeck, 59, said, strapped to a gurney in the Florida State Prison death chamber. “But I know (Florida Gov.) Ron DeSantis has done a lot worse. He’s taken a lot from a lot of people. I speak for all men, women and children. He’s put his foot on our necks.”

Donald Dillbeck shot and killed a police officer in 1979 and was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1990, he escaped from prison during a work assignment and stabbed a woman to death during an attempted car jacking.

He has been on death row ever since.

Dillbeck has been in prison since Ron DeSantis was one year old, what the fuck does he know about what is going on in Florida?

He murdered two people, a police officer and a woman, what had DeSantis done that’s worse than that?

But the Democrats are going squee that a two-time murder, death row inmate, used his last words to criticize DeSantis.

These people are truly broken.

Better monster killing through metallurgy

This post has been several months in the making.  It is a follow-up to a previous post What happens when a metallurgist weapon engineer reads fantasy.

In that post I postulated that silver plated monolithic copper hollowpoints would be more effective than the Cor-Bon Powerball type silver bullets that Larry Correia describe in his Monster Hunter International series.

If you haven’t read that post yet, go back and do it.

Well, I thought about it for a while and decided to just fucking do it.

I started by purchasing Barnes 185 grain, 0.451 inch, 45 ACP TAC-XP all copper hollowpoints.

 

I gave them a quick bath in an ultrasonic cleaner with a commercial degreaser.

Then I sent them off for plating.

I made a bit of an estimate for a first plating spec:

ASTM B700 silver plate, Type II (99.0%), semi-bright, no chromate finish, 0.0005-in thickness.

That should give a good balance of toughness and ductility.  Pure silver is both very expensive and not particularly durable.  The addition of 1% brighters adds a little strength and reduces tarnish.

The bullets I got back looked good.

 

Keep in mind that a plating is only as good as the surface finish of the substrate.

If you were expecting it to look like silver jewelry, I would have had to polish the copper to a high shine.  These are bullets, this is what silver plate looks like for industrial applications, like electrical connections.

My plater was even able to adjust the current to throw the plating into the hollowpoint cavity.

That is tough to do.  Electrolytic plating usually doesn’t plate well on concave surfaces.

 

 

Now I got excited.

I checked the bullet dimensions with a micrometer.  They ranged from 0.45059 to 0.45105 inches.  The diameter was well within spec for the bore size.

The weight also was 185 to 186 grains.

The quantity of silver was low enough not to affect the diameter or weight outside the tolerance of the bullets.

I had a colleague load some rounds for me.

I’m not exactly what load data he used but it was a published, standard pressure load for the Barnes TAC-XP bullet.

Here are the loaded rounds.

 

Next was a live fire expansion test.

I wasn’t going to reinvent the wheel.  The Barnes bullet has an established track record of being an excellent performer.  Penetration in gel is constantly about 16 inches, with good expansion, and of course, 100% weight retention.

If you’re interested, YouTube is full of ballistic gel tests of the Barnes bullet.

I was interested in seeing how the plating handled a trip down the bore and expansion.

I trust the Bullet would do exactly what it was designed to do.

I used a Para-Ord 1911 as my platform, with an AAC TiTAN 45 can.

 

I fired into a barrel of water.  This would be the easiest way to capture the bullets after expansion.

Here are the results.

 

There is still a lot of silver still adhered to the surface of the bullets.

The bases are completely covered with silver, as is also the bottom of the hollowpoint cavity.

The sides are still plated where the bullet contacted the grooves of the rifling.

There was some plating loss were the bullets were engraved by the lands of the rifling.

The tips and underside of the pedals retained plating as well.

There appeared to be no plating loss on the front of the bullets.  It appears as though the plating was stretched and cracked in the region where the pedals underwent the most severe deformation exposing the copper substrate, but the silver is still adhered to the surface.

For a first attempt with a plating spec I made an educated guess at, I think the results are extremely positive.

Remember that I postulated that the silver affects monsters by surface contact.

The use of a silver clad bayonet on Owen’s Abomination indicates that.

Scientifically, that makes sense if you assume that silver acts as some sort of catalyst on monsters.  Precious metals, including silver, are used as catalysts in other chemical reactions.  Catalysts are not consumed, and the effectiveness of a solid state catalyst is entirely driven by surface area.

Given that assumption, it’s clear that the exposed silver surface area on a silver plated copper hollowpoint is orders of magnitude more than the surface area of a tiny silver ball in the cavity of a standard jacketed hollowpoint.

This would be a more effective bullet.

Additional, with the use of a tiny quantity of silver, plated on with a thickness of 0.0005 inches, the raw material cost of silver is substantially decreased over the silver ball design.

One ounce of silver could plate hundreds of bullets.  At current market rates of $21/Oz, the cost of silver would go from $30 per mag of ammo to $30 per case of ammo.  PUFF bounties may be high, but there is no reason to reject a cost savings on materials.

This is not the first bullet I’ve improved the performance of with metallurgy.  However, the previous design was not intended for the supernatural.

If you follow this blog you probably know of other posts I’ve done on the technical aspects of making the things that make other things dead.

It’s what I do for a living and it’s what I’m good at.

Better killing through metallurgy.

Now, better monster killing through metallurgy.