August 29, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

".357 Sig: What's the Point?"--Lucky Gunner Ammo (8 min.)

Lucky Gunner has added ballistic gelatin tests that include self-defense loads for the .357 Sig. This video discusses the cartridge, a bit of its history, and, most importantly, the results from the ballistic tests. The title of the video comes from the fact that the results were comparable to what you would see from a 9 mm, begging the question of whether there is any advantage to using .357 Sig over 9 mm. To understand the test results, you have to keep in mind that a bullet will begin to rapidly decelerate once it hits the block of gelatin. If the bullet expands, it increases the frontal surface area which further acts to decelerate the bullet (sort of like a plane or drag racer opening a 'chute to help with braking). The advantage I would expect from .357 Sig would be threefold. First, the higher velocity should help ensure expansion of the bullet in the first place. Second, the higher velocity should allow for better penetration of bone or barriers. Third, if you ascribe to Michael Courtney and Amy Courtney's "ballistic pressure wave" theory, there should be a greater pressure wave transmitted through the vascular system due to the greater loss of energy as the bullet slows down. Of course, you have to balance this against higher cost, lower magazine capacity, greater wear and tear on a firearm, recoil and ability to make follow-up shots, etc. 

• "Are Guns From The Past Better Than Today’s?"--The Truth About Guns. An interesting discussion, but it is very subjective. Basically, it comes down to the fact that older firearms were generally the product of a fair amount of hand work by a craftsman, whereas modern manufacturing techniques have largely eliminated the need for the hand work. Also, there is the aesthetic element, such as the nice bluing applied to older handguns, versus a practicality approach to modern weapons.
• Speaking of classic designs: "Smith and Wesson Model 10 Overview"--The Survivalist Blog. The roots of the Model 10 can be traced back to 1899, but it is still produced and sold. What we would recognize as a Model 10 was originally the Military and Police model, which was also used as the "Victory" model of WWII, before being re-designated as the Model 10. According to the article, it is the most widely built and adopted revolver in the world.
•  "US CALIBER .30 M2 AP ACCURACY"--Loose Rounds. So, when the .30-06 was first introduced into service (the M1 round), it used a 174 grain bullet which gave very good accuracy and longer range. However, the military decided to switch to a lighter 150 grain bullet (the M2) which is what we were using upon entering WWII. It was, however, not as accurate. Tthe military also distributed an armor piercing round (M2 AP) which used a bullet of 165 to 168 grains, and, because it was more accurate, began to be used as the standard round for all purposes.
• "Plan For The Worst- Preparing for Abduction and Restraint"--Active Response Training. Ellifritz notes that "[i]f you believe you are going to be restrained, it’s time to act.  People who get tied up or zip tied lose just about every conceivable option.  Those who get restrained don’t fare very well afterwards." But if you get tied up, you should have a knife you can reach with either hand to cut yourself loose. The most common material for tying someone up, he relates, is duck-tape, although zip ties are becoming more popular. You can break standard zip ties, but the ones specifically designed for police use will need to be cut.
• "Why Root Causes Matter"--Liberal Gun Club. A good article debunking several of the primary talking points used by anti-gunners, but explaining that firearms are not the root causes of the problems anti-gunners purportedly want to solve.
• "Controlled Round Feed Rifles vs Push Feed Rifles"--Shooting Times. Most military bolt-action rifles and designs based on them (e.g. the Mauser design) used a controlled round feed (CRF) system where the bolt positively grips and holds the rounds throughout the feeding cycle. Thus you could, if necessary, work the bolt and loads rounds with the rifle canted onto its side or even upside-down. Push feed rifles do not do this, but merely push the cartridge into the chamber. But they are easier (read: less expensive) to make, and are found on most bolt action hunting rifles. Anyway, this is an interesting article for those who want to know the differences between the two systems.
• "Hunters: The time to check your gear is NOW"--The Firearm Blog. The author relates:

If there was a major theme I saw while gunsmithing and working behind the counter in a local gun store, it was that every year the day after opening day of any hunting season, we would be hit with an influx of crestfallen and stressed customers.  Their woes ranged from lost tags to loose scopes or broken firearms.  The items they sought were often magazines for rifles (they’d lost their only one), scope covers, slings, and the most frustrating item of all: a box of ammo that they’d zeroed their rifle for but run out of.  Some even forgot to purchase a license or tag before the season started.  Many of these hunters discovered these SNAFUS only when they put on their blaze orange and started to head out the door.  Worse yet, some had things go wrong in the field.

He also gives a list of things to check before you hit the forests and fields.

• Chicken!

• "Intro to Raising Chickens"--Survival Magazine. 

• "Choosing the Right Chickens"--Survival Magazine. 

• "Chickens: The most valuable animal on the homestead"--Backwoods Home Magazine.

"Linux Mint 19 For Windows Users"--Explaining Computers (22 min.)

I haven't messed around with Linux for several years now. This version appears to be very easy to set up and operate for even those without a technical background in computers, and offers heightened security over what you find in Windows--at least as to what information is shared with the developer. I couldn't tell if this was a straight up version of Linux from the Ubuntu developers or not. I noticed when the author was loading his system, many of the files incorporated Ubuntu into the name, but I think this is just a different GUI set up over the Ubuntu flavor of Linux.

• "SOURCES: CHINA HACKED HILLARY CLINTON’S PRIVATE EMAIL SERVER"--The Daily Caller. Per the article, "The Chinese firm obtained Clinton’s emails in real time as she sent and received communications and documents through her personal server, according to the sources, who said the hacking was conducted as part of an intelligence operation." So, does this have anything to do with how the Chinese were able to roll up America's espionage network? And did Clinton choose to use a private server for the express purpose of making it easy for foreign governments to access the information? 
• South Africa is taking steps to make sure that the Afrikaners can't oppose the confiscation of land: "South Africa Calls for 300,000 Gun Owners to Turn Over Their Weapons"--Gunpowder Magazine (h/t Instapundit).
• "There’s no risk-free amount of alcohol, population-level study finds"--Ars Technica. In other words, this is not a personal assessment, but statistical: "For the study, hundreds of researchers collaborated to lump together 3,992 estimates for relative risks of alcohol drinking. That is to say, they combined estimates of how drinking increases a person’s risk of a particular potential harm—such as being injured in a drunken accident or developing throat cancer—relative to someone who does not drink or drinks less." 
• They're lying to you: "The School Shootings That Weren't"--NPR. The author of this piece has uncovered another bit of government sponsored propaganda:

       This spring the U.S. Education Department reported that in the 2015-2016 school year, "nearly 240 schools ... reported at least 1 incident involving a school-related shooting." The number is far higher than most other estimates.

       But NPR reached out to every one of those schools repeatedly over the course of three months and found that more than two-thirds of these reported incidents never happened. Child Trends, a nonpartisan nonprofit research organization, assisted NPR in analyzing data from the government's Civil Rights Data Collection.

      We were able to confirm just 11 reported incidents, either directly with schools or through media reports.

      In 161 cases, schools or districts attested that no incident took place or couldn't confirm one. In at least four cases, we found, something did happen, but it didn't meet the government's parameters for a shooting. About a quarter of schools didn't respond to our inquiries.

The Dept. of Education statistic was not a mathematical error, but suggests active misfeasance.

•  "Brazil sends troops to Venezuela border as President warns thousands fleeing the socialist state's economic collapse 'threaten the whole continent'"--Daily Mail. From the article:

      Brazil is sending armed forces to keep order at the Venezuelan border as thousands continue to flee the South American country amid economic collapse and food shortages.   

      Brazil's President Michel Temer blamed socialist President Nicolas Maduro for the migration crisis, calling it a 'threat to the whole South American continent'.

      Temer has today signed a decree to deploy troops to the border state of Roraima, saying their aim is to keeping order and ensuring the safety of immigrants.

If Hillary had won, they would all be coming here. And voting for someone like Chavez or Maduro.

• "Did Germany Win The 100-Year War?"--Victor Davis Hansen at the Hoover Institution. How we demark the beginning and end of wars if very subjective. For instance, smaller wars often are part of larger and longer conflicts, which is why we refer to the 30-Years War or the Hundred Years War. It is also not clear cut when wars end. Although WWII's ending is generally associated with the formal surrender of German and Japan, respectively, certain portions of the conflict continued into the 1950s. Arguments have been made, including by such as Winston Churchill, that World War I and World War II were actually a single conflict with a space to allow the combatants to recover their strength. Hansen goes further and suggests that "the birth of a united German state in 1871 was a century-long checkered project, aimed at consolidating German power and eventually adjudicating Europe from Berlin," and, therefore, "a subsequent 100 Years War started around 1914 and wound down after 2018—and that all the horrific ups and downs in between were detours to victory." 
• Keep Hansen's general argument in mind as your consider this piece: "Chicago 1968: The Night the Democratic Party Died"--National Review. The riots occurred on August 28, 1968. The author has this to say:

       ... This was America’s privileged white youth attacking the police and shouting “f*** the pigs,” and even threatening to put LSD in the Chicago water supply. But in the glare of TV camera lights as liberals watched their youngsters being beaten by working-class cops, a new media paradigm was born. Left-wing rioters, black or white, urban poor or Harvard grads, became “protesters”; their violence would be downplayed or ignored while underscoring the justice of their cause. At the same time, the police now became the villains of any confrontation, to be portrayed as having a tendency to overact violently to challenges to their authority — and to the oppressive system they defend. A direct ideological line runs from that night to Black Lives Matter a half century later.

        More immediate was the damage the riots, and their negative coverage, did to the Democrats. They destroyed Humphrey’s chances in the 1968 election, and Richard Nixon won instead. But the damage ran deeper. Humphrey would be the last Democratic presidential nominee to represent the values of Truman and JFK: compassionate big government at home, and resolute anti-Communism abroad. Instead, a new Democratic party was born, one that increasingly reflected the radical views of the Chicago protesters: that America, not Communism, was the real force for evil that needed to be contained and transformed. That Democratic party would nominate George McGovern in its 1972 convention and become a party obsessed with social justice, identity politics, and America’s past sins — essentially the party it is today. Meanwhile mainstream Democratic voters began their flight to the Republican party, “Reagan Democrats” who would enable the GOP to win four of the next five presidential elections and who later became the foot soldiers of the Trump insurgency.

       In the end, the main ideological battle lines of American politics were drawn that night, and the shadow of Grant Park still hangs over all of us 50 years later.

It could be argued that the Second Civil War began that August. Although the Frankfort School had already begun its long march through the institutions, and we had certainly seen race riots begin earlier, August 1968 ushered in nearly a decade of extremists bombings and other terrorism. "The 1970s underground wasn’t small. It was hundreds of people becoming urban guerrillas. Bombing buildings: the Pentagon, the Capitol, courthouses, restaurants, corporations. Robbing banks. Assassinating police. People really thought that revolution was imminent, and thought violence would bring it about." The last couple of decades may have seen that war transition to a cold civil war, but it was still there, being fought in the schools and universities, courts, executive boardrooms, and government agencies. But, for the first time, the Left is feeling real push back, which raises the question of whether this cold civil war might, again, go hot.

• Secret combinations: "New Report Exposes Global Warming ‘Law Enforcement for Rent’"--Lifezette. The author warns: "Deep-pocketed global warming activists have been pouring big bucks into attorneys general’s offices to pay for lawyers to advance their agenda and use the powers of the law to take actions they never could achieve alone, according to a new report." The article further relates:

       Environmental activists spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year in an attempt to discredit global warming “deniers,” according to the report. That eye-popping total emerges from a public records request by CEI that produced an email from an aide to California Gov. Jerry Brown last year to staff members of the governors of Washington and New York states.

        The email made a pitch for asking private donors to underwrite a $50 million annual campaign to set up an off-the-books network of “support functions” to promote the global warming policy of a handful of progressive governors.

       “Before you gasp,” the Brown aide wrote, “please note that foundations are currently spending over $1 billion a year on climate work.”

       A chunk of that $1 billion, according to the CEI report, goes to pass-through entities that allow donors to directly fund prosecutors assigned to specific work that attorneys general do not have the staff to perform.

• Another Red Pill Truth supported by science: "'Daddy's girls' are less likely to be lonely as they grow up – but their relationships with their mothers have no effect"--Daily Mail. The article explains: 

       Daughters who have a close relationship with their fathers are better able to cope with feelings of isolation when they reach primary-school age than little girls who do not have a close bond with their dads, a study found.

       Study author Professor Xin Feng, from Ohio State University, said: 'The bond between fathers and daughters is very important. We found that closeness between fathers and daughters tends to protect daughters and help them transition out of loneliness faster.'

      'Daddy's girls' are thought to be less at risk of loneliness due to them looking to their fathers for help and protection during challenging times, such as starting school.