NC Renegades

Imagine if this was the street where you lived. It looks like the Nazis marching into Czechoslovakia (sans uniform). This is in Slovenia where there are now more migrants than Slovenians.

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FREEMANSPERSPECTIVE

An unusual set of family events found me sitting in a Starbucks last Saturday night. It had been a reasonably decent day, but there are, as we all know, plenty of things in this world to be depressed about. And those things, as we also know, are massively amplified by the attention-seeking class. (Bad news sells.) Somehow, the parade of negativity had its effect on me.

Sitting in the Starbucks cured me.

What I Saw

It was a very average Starbucks in a very average location. And the very average people sitting with me were a near-perfect cross-section of the American demographic.

To my left was a middle-aged black man, doing something on his laptop. Just past him was a middle-aged white woman doing the same. Past her, in the corner, were three teenage girls – one black, one white, one Latin – studying something together.

Behind me was another black man with a laptop and piles of papers, and past him was a young couple falling in love over lattes.

At the big center table was a 25ish woman, with multiple piles of paper upon which she was working very hard. After a while, her boyfriend showed up. She hugged him, laid her head on his shoulder, and they kissed. It was sweet. Then he got to work with her.

There were also people coming and going. They were more of the same: A cross-sectional American parade of people behaving quietly and well.

This is the larger part of human life – the life that you don’t see on the news. And they reminded me that all is not dark, no matter how much darkness we see on television and streaming across the Internet.

This is the part of human life that we should be giving our attention to. Watching them, I decided that it would be far better to spend time helping these people than to obsess on all the bad things in the world. These people deserve our efforts.

What Would Help the Bright Side of Humanity?

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When the global economy is doing well, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes up, and when the global economy is in recession, the amount of stuff that is imported and exported around the world goes down.  It is just basic economics.  Governments around the world have become very adept at manipulating other measures of economic activity such as GDP, but the trade numbers are more difficult to fudge.  Today, China accounts for more global trade than anyone else on the entire planet, and we have just learned that Chinese exports and Chinese imports are both collapsing right now.  But this is just part of a larger trend.  As I discussed the other day, British banking giant HSBC has reported that total global trade is down 8.4 percent so far in 2015, and global GDP expressed in U.S. dollars is down 3.4 percent.  The only other times global trade has plummeted this much has been during other global recessions, and it appears that this new downturn is only just beginning.

For many years, China has been leading the revolution in global trade.  But now we are witnessing something that is almost unprecedented.  Chinese exports are falling, and Chinese imports are absolutely imploding…

Growth of exports from China has been dropping relentlessly, for years. Now this “growth” has actually turned negative. In September, exports were down 3.7% from a year earlier, the “inevitable fallout from China’s unsustainable and poorly executed credit splurge,” as Thomson Reuters’ Alpha Now puts it. Most of these exports are manufactured goods that are shipped by container to the rest of the world.

And imports into China – a mix of bulk and containerized freight – have been plunging: down 20.4% in September from a year earlier, after at a 13.8% drop in August.

This week it was announced that Chinese GDP growth had fallen to the lowest level since the last recession, and that makes sense.  Global economic activity is really slowing down, and this is deeply affecting China.

So what about the United States?

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U.S. adversaries including China, Russia, and Iran are developing military capabilities that will allow them to compete with shrinking and aging American forces in the coming years, according to a new report.

The report, authored by the American Enterprise Institute and the Foreign Policy Initiative, warns that U.S. adversaries have been bolstering their militaries and purchasing cheaper weapon systems as the United States cuts its defense budget and delays acquisition of new equipment. Both China and Russia have increased their defense budgets by double digits in recent years, for example, while the United States could reduce its military spending by as much as $1 trillion in a decade under cuts known as sequestration.

“After a procurement holiday in the 1990s and a hollow buildup during the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, American military capabilities have declined independently and relatively to adversaries like China, Russia, and Iran,” the report said.

These adversaries are “closing the technology gap” with the United States, the report added.

The size of the U.S. Navy fleet and the total number of Air Force squadrons have dwindled by more than half since the end of the Cold War. Of the 54 squadrons, less than half are combat ready.

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On Saturday, 17 Oct 2015, we minted three new Amateur Extra class licensees, all the way from the ground up, for our son Morgan (age 20), daughter Jess (13) and me (Waifu will follow along shortly). That’s right, three simultaneous triple plays: Technician, General and Amateur Extra tests passed in a single session for three people at one time. We followed a process we developed for homeschooling our children (brick-and-mortar ABET accredited Electrical Engineering degree earned at age 19 for our son, and nine college credit hours in history earned at age 11 for our daughter). I believe this process is repeatable, and can achieve similar results, regardless of your particular background.

The entire amateur radio licensing swath includes Technician, General and Amateur Extra class licenses, in order. I leave it to other sources to explain all these in detail (example:ARRL’s website), but to those interested in militia or community protection teams, I think everyone, no matter what their intended role, should at least get the Technician class license and start practicing for base defense or emergency center operations. This level is the communication equivalent of having a personal weapon and being able to punch holes in paper with it. The next step up, the General class license, should be the default standard, and is the communication equivalent of being able to operate in a team, even if only to lay down a base of fire, to help in a triage operation, or work in an operations center. Another advantage of a General license is that it lets three of your adult General licensees become Volunteer Examiners (VEs), and begin testing and qualifying new Technician licensees.

The Amateur Extra class license adds a few features in some bands, but to me the major advantage of this class of license is that now your VEs can test and qualify new licensees at any level, including Amateur Extra. This will greatly decouple your growing team from needing to depend on others for testing. It will also allow you to help the VEs who tested you by making it easier to schedule tests and to handle when one of the VEs comes down sick. Everyone benefits from adding more Amateur Extra VEs to the mix. As a result, any sizeable group should hold itself accountable for getting three Amateur Extra VEs in place, and then start offering at least the Technician class tests at every training session. I think you should also deliberately cross-deck VEs across groups and regions, if for no other reason than to build larger coordination networks and esprit de corps, making sure that your test sessions also borrow at least one VE from elsewhere. Morgan and I will be starting the VE certification process ASAP, and then we will be available on demand wherever and whenever practical.

Our total investment of time for this result was about three and one-half weeks, starting from literally zero, outside our engineering degrees, which were helpful but not sufficient nor required. My original intention was to get us all licensed at the Technician level, and then build up from there, possibly tossing myself and Morgan across the General level at the first test session if practical. So, in the last week of September, we ordered two study guides, one for the Technician class and one for the General class.

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h/t WRSA

Warplanes strike the countryside of Aleppo, and clashes erupt in the south of it

Suspected Russian warplanes struck places in the town of al- Zerbah in the western countryside of Aleppo, places in the Khan Toman and al- Muhandisin area in the west of it, no information about casualties. Meanwhile, the helicopters dropped barrel bombs on the two villages of al- Eas and Kafar Kirmin.

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UN: Tens Of Thousands Fled Syria’s Aleppo Amid Army Offensive

Some 35,000 people have fled Syria’s second city of Aleppo since government forces, backed by Russian air strikes began an offensive there last week, a UN agency said on October 20.

The displaced – mostly from Hader and Zerbeh on the southwestern outskirts of Aleppo — were living with host families and in informal settlements further west in the province, said Vanessa Huguenin, a spokeswoman for the Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

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Syrian Rebels Battling in Aleppo Say They Receive More Weapons

Rebels battling the Syrian army and its allies south of Aleppo say they have received new supplies of U.S.-made anti-tank missiles from states that oppose President Bashar al-Assad since a major government offensive began there on Friday. Rebels from three Free Syrian Army-affiliated groups contacted by Reuters said new supplies had arrived since the start of the attack by the army backed by Iranian fighters and Lebanon’s Hezbollah.

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