June 1, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

".357 Magnum vs. .44 Magnum"--Paul Harrell (29 minutes)

A test with various length barrels for each caliber, as well as comparing different loads. The conclusion is that no matter how you cut it, the .44 Magnum offers better terminal performance than the .357 Magnum. However, while terminal performance is an important factor, it is not the sole factor in selecting a defensive firearm. Otherwise, we'd all be carrying revolvers shooting .500 S&W.

• TGIF: Greg Ellifritz's Weekend Knowledge Dump for this week.
• While you are there, check out his article on body armor: "Seven Things You Don’t Know About Body Armor." Some advice on how body armor will affect your movement, that it can be used to choke you out, tips on caring for soft body armor, and more.
• "Paramedics Wanted To Enter Parkland School Where Kids Were Dying, Broward Sheriff’s Office Said No"--Weasel Zippers. The Miami Herald continues to dig up the ugly truths about the shooting and the Broward County's Sheriff's response.
• "Calibers for Beginners: .223 Remington/5.56mm NATO"--The Truth About Guns. 
• Civil Disobedience? "Molon Labe: State Bans Popular AR-15 Accessory—Not a Single Person Complies"--Freedom Outpost. New Jersey made possession of bump fire stocks punishable by 5 years in prison, and gave gun owners 90 days to turn in or otherwise dispose of their bump fire stocks. No one (zero, nada) turned in a bump stock. So, either a lot of people sold their stocks to their cousins in the Midwest, lost them during boating accidents, or we are seeing civil disobedience on a large scale.
• "Do Gun Buyers Really Want Innovation?"--Ammoland. Patrick R. mulls over the failure of certain innovative handguns to gain any real popularity, and questions whether gun buyers really want to see innovation. The thing is, most gun buyers aren't in a position to buy a firearm out of curiosity or just to have something unusual. They buy the firearms for a specific purpose--for instance, handguns are generally purchased for self-defense--and they want a design that is proven, dependable, and, to the extent possible, inexpensive. Glocks, for instance, are popular because they have good reputations for reliability and they aren't excessively expensive compared to competitors. Innovative firearms are generally more expensive and represent an unknown; and should something not be quit right with a new, innovative product, the gun reviewers will eviscerate it, effectively killing its broader market appeal. I guess you could compare it to cars: people purchasing automobiles want innovation, but they aren't going to buy a Formula 1 race car just to have the latest and greatest innovations.
• When your revolver jams: "Revolver Malfunctions: Tips & Troubleshooting"--Shooting Illustrated. Generally it is because the bullet has worked loose, binding the cylinder, or a primer is not seated correctly, also binding the cylinder. Or the ejection rod may have loosened, binding the cylinder. If you shoot a lot of revolvers, especially magnums, you should keep a rubber mallet in your range bag in case you need to tap the cylinder open.
• "Air Rifles and Backstops"--Blue Collar Prepping. The author recommends air rifles both for pest control and cheap practice, offering some ideas as to backstops to stop errant pellets or BBs. He recommends loosely hanging carpet remnants as they are cheap, and heavy enough to catch a pellet.
• Do you trust me or not? "Congress mulls lowering age requirement for truck drivers to prevent national shortage"--Fox News. Currently, drivers have to be 21 years or older to drive a commercial vehicle in interstate commerce (i.e., across state lines). However, there are concerns of a looming shortage of truck drivers. So Congress is considering a bill that would drop that age to 18 years or older. In other words, in several states, an 18 year old will be trusted to drive an 80,000 lbs vehicle and trailer, potentially hauling hazardous chemicals or fuel, in heavy traffic, by crowds, etc., but they won't be trusted to buy a .22 rifle.
• MSM sticking its head into the sand: "This Strike Could Bring Down The Mullahs In Iran, But The Mainstream Media Are Ignoring It"--Daily Wire. A 10+ day strike of truck drivers, taxi drivers, and others, has brought Iran to a halt. But all we are hearing from the major media outlets is crickets.
• A bit of cultural diversity in London: "Terrifying moment cyclist armed with a huge 'zombie knife' tries to smash motorist's window after rush hour 'road rage row' breaks out in front of stunned London commuters"--Daily Mail. The bike rider was just riding down the middle of the street (the literal middle of the street--you know, the divide between two lanes of traffic where you aren't supposed to ride a bike), and a car pulls out in front of him to pass another vehicle, nearly hitting the biker. The bike rider looses it, pulls a Rambo style knife (it literally looks like a reproduction of one of the knives from a Rambo movie) and starts banging on the side of the offending vehicle attempting to break in and attack the driver. Oh, the bike rider was obviously an African migrant. 

• Related: "Khan’s London: Gang Warfare Kills More than Terror, Despite Tightest Gun Controls Firearms Are ‘Easy’ to Buy"--Breitbart. 

• "Study shows that a large minority of Germans would not accept Jewish or Muslim family members"--Deutsche Welle. The study is intended to shame Christians, as that is the only group whose responses are reported. That is, it doesn't say, for instance, how many Muslims would accept a Jew into their family.
• Embrace the word "and": "The IQ Gap Is No Longer a Black and White Issue"--Unz Review. There is a lot of evidence that IQ is mostly an inheritable trait--i.e., that IQ is mostly determined by nature, not nurture. Moreover, IQ tests from around the world universally show that sub-Saharan Africans, on average, have IQs far below the average Western European and North East Asian. However, there seem to be some instances of exceptional intellectual performance that undermine this general hypothesis. The author of this article, for instance, observes:

         The fact that black immigrants to the United States have shown achievements that are superior to native black Americans has been a phenomenon studied since at least the 1970′s. At first it was just the Caribbean blacks who were a subject of this unexpected outcome. As black Africans kept immigrating into the US, they showed even higher levels of achievement than the native blacks. Many scholars theorized on the reasons for these differences, from Thomas Sowell’s proposal that this disproved the validity of discrimination against native blacks as an explanation for their underachievement (Sowell, 1978), to other scholars who suggested that these immigrants were just the most highly driven members of their home countries as evidenced by their willingness to migrate to a foreign country (Butcher, 1990).

          What most of these theories failed to predict was that the children of these immigrants would also show exceptional achievements, especially academically. It is only in recent years, as the immigrants have stayed long enough to produce a sufficiently high number of offspring, that it has been observed that they are over-represented among high academic achievers, especially when compared to native blacks, particularly at very elite institutions. What has been missed in the IQ debate is the full logical implication of these achievements: they have effectively nullified any arguments for a racial evolutionary explanation of the well-known IQ test score gap between blacks and whites. Even more fatal for the racial hereditarian side of the debate has been the corroborating data of school children performance in the UK, particularly when the black Africans are divided into their respective nationalities and tribal ethnicities, as reported in the latter section of this article.

Whether IQ is a matter of nature over nurture has significant implications for public policy in areas such as crime, welfare, education and so forth. However, the United States has pursued policies based on the presumption that better education, better diets, reducing poverty, etc., would elevate black performance (essentially, IQ) for the past 50 years ... and none of it has worked. Thus, these anomalies cited above aside, the evidence seems conclusive that IQ is inheritable. But it still leaves the question of these anomalies.

       As an initial matter, I would note that the anomalous facts concerning black immigrants out performing black Americans itself does not suggest that the blacks that do not migrate to the U.S. are better performers. That is, if Caribbean blacks were universally of higher IQ, then it should have shown up in tests conducted of Caribbean blacks or in the level of their technological attainment and social well-being. Yet we do not see that. Haiti, in particular, stands out because blacks have ruled that country for over 200 years, yet it is one of the poorest Caribbean nations.

       I would suggest that the answer to this lies with assortative mating. This issue has caught the attention of researchers in the United States over the last several years, because it has been noted that people of higher incomes and educations are increasingly choosing to marry and have children with others of similar incomes and education. This is a fairly new phenomena in the United States, but the United States has been somewhat unique in that marriages have traditionally been based on love and not economic benefit. Most of the rest of the world, however, bases marriage on economics, such as the wife being expected to bring a dowry into the marriage, or the groom having to pay a bride price. Marriage is often more cliquish in most areas of the world. For instance, under India's strict caste system, you will rarely see marriage between members of different castes. Since there is a correlation between intelligence/education and wealth, the result, whether considering two young people that meet while attending Yale, or two people belonging to a high caste in India whose marriage is arranged, or marriages among and between the relatively small number of families that control the wealth in most Latin American countries, is that marriages generally stratify. That is, the intelligent and wealthy marry the wealthy and the intelligent in the upper strata, while those less endowed with intelligence/wealth marry persons similar to themselves.

         The end result is that instead of a single bell-curve for intelligence within a country, there may two or more bell curves representing different strata or castes within that society. Thus, while the overall IQ in Somalia, for instance, is 68, you may actually have overlapping bell curves, where the average in the highest strata, for instance, may be equal to or even exceed that of the average European or East Asian, but the overall IQ may still be quite low.

       In any event, the anomalies cited by the author of the foregoing piece do not negate a conclusion born out by genetics research, and many social and cognitive science researchers that IQ is an inheritable trait. Hence, there may be both a low average IQ for a certain population, overall, AND a higher average IQ for certain pockets of that population, both of which are the result of inheritability and genetics.

• "Inconvenient: new treeline paper suggests temperatures were warmer 9000 years ago"--Watts Up With That. Not just a little bit warmer, but a lot warmer--3 to 4 decrees Celsius (5.4 to 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit). In other words, even under the worst case predicted by the Global Warming fanatics, the Earth would still be cooler than it was 9,000 years ago.
• Heh. "President Obama Went Through Multiple Emotional Stages After Trump’s Election"--Weasel Zippers. The article cited by WZ indicates: "Obama also expressed rare self-doubt, wondering whether he had misjudged his own influence on the country." Oh, I think the result of the election was definitely because of Obama's influence on the country.
• "The Double-Edged Sword Of Identity Politics"--Château Heartiste. CH quotes from Chris Langan about identity politics (I was going to link to Langan's original post, which I had read, but he has apparently taken it down). Anyway, Langan wrote:

         My view on identity politics is that it can be justified only if everyone of any ethnicity is entitled to participate, in which case it is necessary for all (because failing to assert it, as when White people of European ancestry fail to assert it lest they be branded as “racists”, means leaving oneself and one’s group defenseless against competition for resources and opportunity). Alternatively, lest any group be denied its identity while others assert their own, group identity must be equitably denied to everyone.

         Human identity is stratified, and thus has both individual and group levels. Accordingly, we can (and sometimes must) reason in terms of group identity. But when group self-identification is officially granted to some groups yet denied to others against which they compete, this can only result in imbalance and injustice. For example, when some overpopulating groups which have overtaxed their own resources by reproductive incontinence and homegrown oligarchy are allowed to migrate into the sovereign territories of worldwide ethnic minorities – e.g., people of European descent – and enjoy special “oppressed” status whereby they reap special benefits such as free food, free housing, free education, free healthcare, affirmative action, reproductive subsidies, and special treatment under the law, and are even credited with moral superiority due to their alleged “oppression”, this can result in the destruction of the national, cultural, and ethnic identity of the hosts, leading ultimately to their extinction. Incoming groups which assert their own collective identities while denying their hosts any reciprocal right of political group cohesion thus amount to noxious, invasive, and ultimately lethal socioeconomic parasites. Obviously, any governmental authority which enforces or encourages such asymmetry – e.g., the European Union – is illegitimate.

         Bear in mind that once we cease to treat individuals as individuals per se, thus allowing members of their respective groups to assert their ethnic, cultural, or religious (etc.) identities against their “oppressors”, their group properties and statistics are automatically opened to scrutiny and comparative analysis. For example, if after several generations of special treatment in the educational sphere (compulsory school integration, special programs, modifications of educational procedure, racially defined college admission preferences, etc.), a particular “oppressed” group fails as a whole to outgrow these measures, its members are no longer entitled to exemption from objective characterization in terms of associated group statistics; if one wants to enjoy the social benefits attending ethically loaded group-defined properties like “belonging to an oppressed group”, one must submit to rational policies formed on the basis of not just individual assessment, but empirically confirmed group-defined properties such as “belonging to a group exhibiting a relatively low mean IQ and a tendency to violently disrupt the educational environment”. Continuing to pursue racially parameterized measures of human worth and achievement can only lead to personal injustice, social degradation, and biological degeneration (because such measures inevitably supplant any rational form of social, economic, and reproductive selection).

         In short, identity politics should either be shut down immediately, or the majority populations of Europe and North America should be encouraged to assert their own ethnic and cultural identities and group interests with full force. Any governmental, academic, religious, or media authority which tries to prevent it is clearly unworthy of respect and obedience.