It's just over a week since I did my last look at the deteriorating situation in the civil war we're not engaged in. Certainly nothing has gotten better or offered more optimism. The violence level nationally has cranked up and not gone down in any way. Phil at BustedNuckles linked to a scary article at American Partisan about the situation on the ground in Portland. These are combat veterans with experience from "multiple tours in the late 2000s" and they describe a well-trained unconventional army that ran them off. It's worth your time to read, but here's the opening paragraph.
“Me and three of my buddies were in Portland this weekend, got attacked by Antifa. There’s a Twitter video with millions of views on it. They ended up on Hannity and Tucker Carlson, Ben Shapiro etc., of us getting beaten with bats and rocks the size of cantaloupes thrown at us, getting spit on etc. We were all carrying pistols as well. Opportunity, ability and jeopardy, we were in a deadly force situation and we could easily articulate the use of deadly force, but they had pepper sprayed us. They were using industrial strobe lights on us, etc. We couldn’t PID our target and what lied beyond it, They did a great job of taking our situational awareness away, it was fucking incredible.
Bro my perspective on this changed so much.
To me, these are mob tactics that will destroy an under-prepared group going against them. They've been fighting a guerilla war unopposed for 100 days and are now very confident in their guerilla tactics. It has always been assumed that the mobs will scatter after the first shots. If you've taken the common self defense training classes for concealed carrying, I'm sure you've heard this before: if you're surrounded, make the closest one bleed and the rest will probably decide they need to be somewhere else.
As Michael Bane says in his podcast this week, the Kyle Rittenhouse incident says that's just not true anymore. Kyle was attacked by three separate guys over a period of time; it wasn't three guys alongside each other that were all in one group; it was spread out in time and space. The second guy, the guy with the skateboard, knew there was gunfire and he knew Kyle had defended himself. Kyle is running away and is chased by this guy. The third guy, the guy with the gun in his right hand until Kyle blew off his biceps, was even farther along in time and he definitely knew that Kyle had already shot the other two guys in self defense. The fact he was using a rifle didn't slow down any of these guys at all.
That's just Kenosha. Last night, BLM and Antifa not only went into Rochester, New York, destroying restaurants and scaring off diners, they went into suburbs and climbed on people's roofs, probably to look for ways into their houses. They also attacked an apartment building.
Around the same time, the BLM mob was attacking in Denver, again attacking restaurants and the people dining there, as well as cars in traffic.
Two weeks ago, I was saying to mentally try to have a plan for being out dining and having BLM screaming in your face to raise your hand to show support or having lights shined in your windows in the middle of the night. That needs to be expanded. Assuming you don't need to train for actual combat, you need to expand that to include restaurants being set on fire while you're inside, and people climbing around on your roof. Think about lasers that can blind you shining into your house. Above all know your neighborhood and the nearest neighborhoods from which people could walk to your house. Again, there's that axiom that "no battle plan survives contact with the enemy" but it's also undeniable that having a plan and thinking about these things puts you ahead of 90% of the people.
The overall situation continues in its down spiral with the revolutionary forces getting bolder and taking bigger steps. People talk as if they expect fighting to remain sporadic until the election, and then it starts off no matter who wins. I could see wider scale fighting as potentially starting any moment.
A group of BLM rioters on the roof of a Rochester home. From The Gateway Pundit.
I know we have a cadre of trained operators who could put a world of hurt on the BLM/Antifa organizations, without involving the regular US Army. I also know that in the last hundred years, regular armies have fared poorly against insurgencies like this; regular armies are built to fight regular armies, not guerilla armies on their home turf. I would hope that the Fed.gov has infiltrated these groups and is gathering the intelligence needed to take them down. At least, I hope they have the sense to be doing that.
There was a shooting about two miles from my sister's place in ChIraq a week ago. Yeah, I know, it's Chicago, but she lives in one of the nicer neighborhoods well outside the Loop.
ReplyDeleteNot much has happened here, but my spidey sense makes me keep tabs on the Denver metro area.
How much RF power can you focus and steer?
ReplyDeleteAsking for a friend
Get a magnetron and power supply from a 1500W microwave oven. Put about a 3' piece of waveguide on the magnetron output flange, and use a "Standard Gain" horn antenna on the other end. Presto! A "Microwave Rifle" that I've seen scatter small animals from 25 yards.....
DeleteA parabolic dish behind the magnetron is a nice touch. People have been talking about this since at least 1990.
DeleteI'm not an RF engineer, but I know a bit about optics. Light is light - what allows us to get away with our "ray-optics" approximations when dealing with visible light is that the wavelength of the light is much smaller than the optical elements or the focus spots.
DeleteFor microwaves, you're starting to get into the mm-cm range for wavelengths, so diffraction effects become important. With a uniform small-number wavemode (TEM-00) you can focus a beam in a hyperboloidal envelope to a focus spot.
w(z) = w0*sqrt(1+(z*lambda/(pi*w0))^2)
w0 - the beam diameter at the focus
w(z) - the beam diameter at the projecting dish, lens, or apeture, or anywhere along the path
lambda - the wavelength of the light
There's this book by Paul Goldsmith: QuasiOptical Systems that covers this.
Diffraction effects also become important if you're trying to put a laser on a target over 10skm - interplanetary distances.
Buried in that math is where the
theta = 1.22*lambda/d expression came from for beam-divergence (or angular resolution) from a primary reflector.
MadRocketSci
Any wavelength chosen to excite water is probably going to be eaten by the water-vapor in the atmosphere over long enough ranges. Would have to figure out what those are.
DeleteMadRocketSci
correction: w(z) = w0*sqrt(1+(z*lambda/(pi*w0^2))^2)
DeleteAlways do a dimension check. :/
MadRocketSci
drjim - is that man portable or does it need to be plugged in? I'm guessing 3 to 5kW power supply - it's not going to run long on batteries.
DeleteThe one my friend and I built was plugged into the wall. If *I* were going to deploy one, I'd have it in a pick-up bed or van connected to a Harbor Freight generator of appropriate size, approx 2kW.
DeleteMight want to tweak the antenna type, too. We went with stuff that we had just laying around, so some optimization may be required.....
Interesting - I hadn't thought before about what one of these HERF guns would do against the SDF radios and cell phones they use for C&C. I would expect they would be very effective.
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to keep track of the level of violence in different cities. Anyone who can help me with this project, please check it out.
ReplyDeletehttps://street-pharmacy.blogspot.com/2020/08/danger-zones.html
Arizona seems to be coping well under the Democrat siege. There will come a time when vets will just kill them.
ReplyDeleteThese self described soldiers who were run off by a bunch of kids using asymmetrical warfare should use the OODA process to develop effective countermeasures and return, this time kicking ass.
ReplyDeleteLOL. Then they will get arrested and charged with multiple counts of first degree murder. That is, if the cops don't just kill them. Dude, Portland is an active battlefield where the local and state government is openly siding with the communist insurgents. It will fall to the communists before the end of the year. That battle is already lost. The only thing left to do is pay the butcher's bill and count the casualties.
DeleteGee, I wondered why "nobody is stopping this" until James LaFond laid it out.
ReplyDeletehttps://identitydixie.com/2020/08/29/myth-of-the-20th-century-james-lafond-waking-up-in-indian-country/
Worth the listen on Labor Day, before you go back to paying for it...
I could see wider scale fighting as potentially starting any moment.
ReplyDeleteSomething I haven't seen mentioned anywhere is the possibility of Antifa violence on election day, especially at or around polling places. Trump will be dependent upon in-person voting, Democrats will depend on vote fraud with mailed ballots.
If in-person voting can be compromised by violence, or enough people scared away from voting by nearby violence, it will make the Left's job easier.
And, remember, almost all CW states prohibit carrying your firearm in a polling place, so you'll be defenseless standing in line.
Very important point, Chuck. I have seen it mentioned, but not nearly often enough. That could well happen in the cities. Away from the cities, where the police are less likely to be under the orders of leftist county boards or mayors, I'm not so sure antifa could make anything stick. Dare I hope conservatives in cities organize in preparation for that kind of harassment?
DeleteI'm in Oregon, where we've had vote by mail or at ballot boxes in libraries etc. since Nov. 2000. I don't expect antifa intimidation at ballot boxes here. We have plenty of antifa intimidation elsewhere already.
Two weeks later, late to the party. A couple of observations.
ReplyDeleteFirst. The people attacking Kyle Rittenhouse were STUPID, not brave or well trained. A well trained person would immediately seek cover and concealment if they knew they were being fired upon, especially if its by a rapidly firing rifle. They were probably thinking that they could just run up and put the beat down on him. This had gone way past harassment, and I'm betting that all of them knew they were dealing with a rifle. I dunno, I wasn't there.
Second..As for the 'trained' group of folk who got messed up by Antifa, they were simply unprepared for determined opponents who have a few brains. Did they do any recon before they blundered into the riot? Or did they just strap on their pistols, don some 'tactical' gear and go in to kick ass (Ass u ming that antifa is a bunch of pussies)?
Last....that picture from Borepatch of the 'protesters' on the porch roof of a house in Rochester looks a LOT more like the residents crawling out a window to get a better look. Getting upon the roof of a homeowner in a suburban neighborhood is asking for some high velocity trouble. It may be New York, but Rochester ain't NYC. Those folk (at least a few) have guns. The windows behind them are open. Did they actually enter the well lit house, go up the stairs and out the upstairs window, leaving all the lights on?