Practical Eschatology: A Quick Run Around the Web--January 17, 2016

First off today, I would refer you to this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. There are a couple articles I would point out specifically:

Mr. Ellifritz links to a video illustrating a type of self-defense situation you may very well encounter. This particular example is a drunk woman that shows up on a door step, banging on the door, and attempts to attack the homeowner with a bottle. Ellifritz writes:

This situation requires patience, verbal skills, and physical skills. Those are attributes many CCW permit holders don’t practice. You may be able to draw from concealment and get a one-second hit on a target, but what if the problem you face isn’t a shooting problem? One could argue that a glass bottle is a deadly weapon, but this woman could barely stand. She doesn’t need to be shot.

Absent your being in an active war zone, you are more likely to be involved in situations requiring you to not respond with force, or use less-than-deadly force. This is why the majority of time a firearms is used in self-defense, there are no shots fired: the show of the firearm dissuades the attacker (unfortunately you can't rely on this happening all the time ...). I'm reminded of an incident in my college days, when up late studying for an exam, I heard noises outside the door of my second floor apartment. After the noises continued awhile, I looked through the peep hole of the door just in time to see someone heading down the stairs with my bicycle. I rushed into my bed room, grabbed a pistol, and ran out the front door and down the stairs just in time to see the bike thief peddling out of sight. For just a moment I considered running after him and then thought how stupid it would be to potentially shoot someone over a stolen bike. After this incident, I decided I needed to procure some means of defense less lethal than a firearm, eventually deciding on an ASP collapsible baton and canister of pepper spray. It is also useful to learn techniques to deescalate a confrontation. And, of course, avoid getting caught up in the trap of escalating a confrontation. This doesn't require you to always back down, but it may require you to simply keep your mouth shut.

Another article to which Mr. Ellifritz directs attention is one on using speed loaders, speed strips, or clips for reloading revolvers. Mr. Ellifritz makes the following comment: "For what it’s worth, when I carry a revolver, I use eight-round Quick Strips (loaded with five rounds with spaces in between each pair of bullets) for my reloads." This is a really good idea of which I would never have thought. You can only load two chambers at a time with a speed strip, so it makes sense to leave a bit of space between each pair (actually, 2 pair and a single round, when for a 5-shot snub nose revolver).

"Defending Our Homeland: How Neighbors Can Protect Their Community"--Daily Caller. An article discussing basic concepts on setting up and pursuing a community defense plan. The author points out:

Protecting a community is more complex than securing a home, business, church, or school. The people or private property you seek to protect may be interspersed among public areas and even other private properties whose owners may not support or approve of your activities. That geographical reality imposes legal restraints on your freedom of action beyond what pertains to private property and personal space, and makes community defense a wickedly complex endeavor. Operating as a group of armed citizens to deter and prevent violent crime entails risk and may itself incite trouble. You absolutely must respect those risks and hazards. You must understand the legal boundaries and stay well within them.

In this regard, the author recommends that a community defense be organized around (a) community observers (i.e., like the "neighborhood watch," those involved with keeping an eye out for suspicious activity and reporting it to authorities or others in the community defense network), (b) community patrols, and (c) protected locales (i.e., properties that are defensible and can be used as rallying points or refuge). On this latter point, the author notes that the "[c]ommon law recognizes a right to defend yourself on your own property, but not as armed groups in public – this remains largely a monopoly of the state," and "[s]ome people in your community will not be capable of effective self-defense, and some properties will not be defensible." Anyway, read the whole thing.

"Century Arms C308 1K Round Torture Test"--The Truth About Guns. The Century Arms C308 is built using CETME Mod-C parts kits (the CETME was the predecessor to the HK G3/HK 91), with a U.S. made barrel, receiver and lower receiver (which appears to be a copy of the later HK G3) and stocks (also based off the HK G3). As such, it uses a delayed blowback system, that uses the recoil of the round to operate the action, rather than a gas system. (I mention this specifically because the shooter in the video repeatedly, and erroneously, refers to the cocking tube as a "gas tube"). The delay is occasioned by the use of two rollers on either side of the bolt head that must be forced in by ramps on the inside the chamber, which, when forced in, unlock the bolt allowing it to freely move backward. A return spring forces the bolt carrier forward to pick up the next round. To assist with extraction, the chamber is fluted, to loosen the seal between the chamber and the cartridge walls. The CETME can use the plentiful and inexpensive G3 magazines.

The article links to a video of the 1000 round shoot. The shooter does have occasional extraction problems once the barrel heats gets really hot (400+ degrees Fahrenheit). Since it was only for a few magazines, I suspect it may have been an ammunition or magazine issue. At about 12 minutes into the video, the front handguard falls off. The issue here has to do with the sustained heat (the handguard had been heated to several hundred degrees at this point) and the materials. The front of the handguard is attached via a pin (or screw using the original CETME furniture). The rear of the handguard has a lip that fits into a groove or space in the trunnion/receiver. The original CETME rifles used a wood handguard with metal reinforcements on the front and rear. The Germans started with a similar wood furniture set, then switched to a fiber-glass polymer system, and then a polymer with the later handguards and stock. Both of these latter two systems placed a metal heat shield in the handguard. Century probably uses a simple polymer handguard with no heatshield. The handguard falling out is probably simply a situation where the plastic simply softened (remembering that this is after a few hundred rounds had already been fired through the weapon) allowing the back of the handguard to fall out of the trunnion groove.

At this point, just shortly after the handguard fell off, the shooter had a cook-off: the barrel and chamber were so hot that a round simply went off when chambered.

The firearm otherwise appeared to perform fairly well. The shooter had periodic failures to extract, but because it was episodic, it is not clear what was the cause(s).

"Hawaii baby with a shrunken brain is born with first-ever U.S. case of mosquito-borne Zika virus"--Daily Mail.

The mosquito-borne virus, which has been spreading rapidly through the Americas since it arrived on the continent last May, is strongly associated with microcephaly - a congenital condition which causes abnormal brain growth.

It is believed that the mother was infected with Zika during a trip to South America last year and she then returned to Hawaii to give birth in a hospital on Oahu.

"'It has been a good day': Obama applauds his own 'smart' diplomacy with Iran claiming the country will NEVER get a nuclear bomb as plane carrying released prisoners heads home"--Daily Mail. It reminds me of how Hitler became increasingly delusional as Germany headed toward defeat in World War II.
"Iran sanctions: Middle East stock crash wipes £27bn off markets as Tehran enters oil war"--The Telegraph. The fear is that Iran will be inserting an additional 500,000 barrels of oil per day into the current market.
"SpaceX Launch Successful, But Drone Ship Landing Fails"--Popular Science. The SpaceX rocket successfully deployed a satellite into orbit, but had one of its legs crumple on the attempted landing onto a ship.
"Is the Left Even on America’s Side Anymore?"--National Review. If you have read the Anonymous Conservative's book on The Evolutionary Psychology Behind Politics, the following from the cited article will be familiar to you:

The Left is blind to the responsibility of inner-city populations for their off-the-charts violent-crime rates. The failure to embrace the responsibilities of parenthood is as characteristic of the progressive attitude as is its blindness to the betrayal of inner-city communities by Democrats, responsible almost entirely for the disgraceful condition of America’s cities. Chicago, Detroit, Baltimore, St. Louis, and numerous other centers of out-of-control black poverty, failed public-school systems, and black-on-black violence are 100 percent controlled by the Democratic party and have been so for 50 to 100 years. Yet 95 percent of the black vote and 100 percent of the progressive vote continues to go to Democrats who oppress African Americans.

Unfortunately, progressives’ sordid history of supporting criminals at home is accompanied by an equally dishonorable record of sympathy for America’s enemies abroad. The Iraqi dictator, Saddam Hussein, was one of the monsters of the 20th century, launching two aggressive wars, dropping poison gas on the Kurdish minority, and murdering 300,000 Iraqi citizens. But when America proposed deposing him, more than a million progressives poured into the streets in protest. At first, the Democratic leadership supported the Iraq invasion as a just and necessary war. But three months later, with American men and women still in harm’s way — and under pressure from the progressive Left — they turned against the very war they had voted to authorize and, for the next five years, conducted a malicious propaganda campaign, worthy of the enemy, to discredit America’s intentions and to obstruct our military mission.

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... Progressives have created seditious “sanctuary cities,” which refuse to cooperate with Homeland Security and the immigration laws in more than 300 outlaw municipalities under Democratic control. This betrayal has gone un-reversed for years and led to the needless deaths of numerous American citizens at the hands of illegal-alien criminals, of which there are more than 200,000 in our jails alone, and obviously many more inside our borders.

Leftists and Democrats have also joined the Islamist propaganda campaign to represent Muslims — whose co-religionists have killed hundreds of thousands of innocents since 9/11 in the name of their religion — as victims of anti-Muslim prejudice, denouncing critics of Islamist terror and proponents of security measures as “Islamophobes” and bigots. ...