April 25, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Fire Kit Perfection JMHO"--David Canterbury (18 min.)

Canterbury presents a fairly compact fire kit that not only has several different ways of making fire, but also would allow you to make additional char cloth or similar.

• If you haven't already done so, be sure to check out this week's Woodpile Report.
• Related to the topic of the video above: "Make Your Own DIY Fire Starter Kit"--Simply Preparing.
• "Shooting Drill- Diminishing Dots"--Active Response Training. There is always a trade-off between accuracy and speed when shooting for self-defense. Too fast, and you risk missing the critical zone of your target or, worse yet, missing altogether. Slow down too much to get the perfect sight picture and trigger squeeze, and you might not have time to get a shot off before the attacker shoots you or moves to contact. Fortunately, a large target (e.g., an attacker up close) takes less accuracy to hit than a smaller target (e.g., a target farther away and/or behind cover). Greg Ellifritz offers this drill and an accompanying target to get you used to shooting at both larger and smaller targets.
• Speaking of time used in shooting: "Spend Your Time Wisely: Economy Of Motion In Action Shooting"--Shooting Sports USA. The author advises against dropping the gun between targets or groups of targets, or when reloading:

        Experienced shooters don’t drop the gun. They keep it up, and in the shooting position as they move. When they hit their next position the gun is up, in their field of view, and ready to shoot. This can save over a second (or more) in breaking the first shot. That can be over three seconds for a stage requiring three new shooting positions. Multiply that by four or five stages in a match, and the time factor gets big! It takes no more effort to run with the gun up instead of down, and “Time is money.”

       The same theory applies to reloading a semi-automatic. Why drop the gun to the waist to reload and then have to bring it back up, find it and the targets? With the gun in the shooting position it’s a simple matter to eject the mag, roll the magwell inward, slap in a new mag and go. The time savings aren’t as significant—but split seconds add up.

• "M1152 & M1153: The Army’s New 9 mm Luger Loads"--American Rifleman. The rounds are produced by Winchester. The M1152 uses a 115-gr. full-metal-jacket, flat-nose (FMJ-FN) bullet, while the M1153 uses a 147-gr. jacketed-hollow-point (JHP) bullet similar in appearance to Winchester's Ranger T-series. According to the article the FMJ cartridge is intended for use against "enemy personnel, for training, and for force protection," while the hollow-point cartridge is "for use in situations where limited over-penetration of targets is necessary to reduce collateral damage." It seems pretty clear that the two rounds will shoot to different points of aim, so I don't see where training with one is going to translate well to the other.
• "Home Invasion! Grab The Defensive Rifle- Dead Trigger….What The Hell Do You Do Now??"--Shooting Performance. The author suggests that in a home invasion, you don't have time to tap, rack, and ready, but should transition to a secondary weapon if possible. He writes:

• If you are likely to be armed with a handgun when you deploy your rifle, then train the handgun transition as your immediate response.  No need to look at the rifle or think about it, simply go to the next weapon system.  If the distance and circumstance limits your ability to hit with the handgun, then obviously stick with the rifle and fix it if possible.  Set up drills that mimic these needs.  For example, practice the transition at distances from 3-10 yards, and set up a secondary drill with a piece of cover (like a barricade) and practice ducking behind cover and reloading the rifle or clearing the malfunction.

• If you are likely to be armed with a rifle ONLY (like I was during my career in the U.S.M.C) then train yourself to respond accordingly.  For example if you are training in the 3-10 yard range, your response to a dead trigger while under fire might be an immediate muzzle strike to the target if you are in range, then a reload.  If you are a bit farther away, sprinting offline to another position (like a room or piece of cover) would be your response.  So the stimulus response might be: dead trigger – strike the target (0-3 yards) or dead trigger – sprint offline (4-10 yards).

• Related: "How to Transition from Rifle to Pistol"--NRA Blog. Nathan Judd has a video demonstrating a transition drill at the link.

• "Coming Rise of the 1911? Part I: Safety"--Revolver Guy. The author has observed a resurgence of interest in the DA/SA handgun and firearms with manual safeties, which he attributes to appendix carry. He explains:

Appendix carry has a ton of benefits ... But it also comes with a downside. The gun’s muzzle is pointed at some pretty critical areas, including one’s genitalia and perhaps a femoral artery, especially when the wearer is seated. The longer, heavier trigger of the traditional DA pistol offers a perceptible margin-for-error when reholstering. So does the ability to check and/or control the movement of the gun’s hammer.

• "Spices for Long Term Storage"--Survival Blog. Spices are highly dependent on international trade. In fact, for much of history, the spice trade drove international trade, and many spices were literally worth their weight in gold. Christopher Columbus didn't risk having to sail from Spain across a trackless ocean all the way to the Far East because pepper was cheap. In any event, in a serious SHTF situation, spices will probably again become an important and valuable good. The author of this piece discusses some of the more commonly used spices (including where they are grown), as well as some methods for storing spices. The author recommends storing "– per person/per year – one pound of cumin, cinnamon, and paprika; 8 ounces of vanilla, ginger, allspice, mustard seeds and turmeric; 4 ounces of nutmeg (about 20 nuts), cloves, cardamom, coriander, bay leaves, celery seed and cayenne pepper."
• "MAKING THE CUT: KUKRI HISTORY & PRACTICAL USE"--Recoil Offgrid. A look at the history of the Kukri, how it can be used for common camp and field tasks, and its application in combat. Although the prices have gone up since I got one many years ago, a traditional Kukri can still be had with a 12" blade (1/4" spine) from Atlanta Cutlery for $50. While a Kukri can serve as a machete, I prefer a machete ... or, better in my opinion, the parang. As a weapon, the machete is designed for chopping and therefore is very intuitive for most people; yet is still has a point allowing a thrust. But other than sweeping motions, it isn't much for parrying or blocking an attacker's blows. Like the article describes, the best option would be to step in and counter an attack with your own attack before your opponent is able to complete his attack, or to strike immediately after a failed attack while your opponent is (hopefully) still off balance or vulnerable. Timing and distance is everything.
• "Fighting or shooting...which are you practicing?"--Handgun Combatives. The author explains:

But shooting is not the problem, its teaching students to fight…to be combative… which is much more difficult as many instructors really do not comprehend the concept. Now, I am not bashing on our nation’s Firearms instructors, conflict should be avoided at all costs because every time one enters conflict, they run the risk of loosing no matter how well trained.  If an instructor does not understand the dynamics of conflict its easy to focus on splits, draw times, speed of reload and other skills that can be improved with practice. But does such skill make one better prepared to fight? Ahhh…is that not the million dollar question?  Skill certainly makes on more confident, but does it make one more ruthless? As the author of THE SHOOTIST so clearly pointed out…and it has been born out by history…the winner of a fight is not necessarily the person with the fastest draw, most bullets, most accurate, best gear…it’s the more ruthless of the two combatants…the one who will not hesitate to inflict harm on an opponent. 

"Armed Escorts Drop Off Migrants Near Ajo, Arizona"--Ultimate Military Archive (2-1/2 min.)

They weren't planning on letting Border Patrol or militia interfer with them.

• "Trump is sending ARMED SOLDIERS to the border after Mexican military disarmed U.S. Army troops on the AMERICAN side of the border"--Daily Mail. I really doubt that the DoD will allow American troops engage Mexican troops, even if there is an incursion by Mexican troops. But, we've had shooting wars with Mexico before, and it will happen again. One thing to consider is what happens on this side of the border if some conflict erupts with Mexico. Do you think that all the immigrants and illegal aliens that wave Mexican flags at soccer games, march and shout "La Raza," speak Spanish at home, and have lots of close family living in Mexico are going stand up to defend the United States? I don't. Instead, there would be riots, crime, and perhaps some sort of insurgent actions.'

• Related: "‘This is a war’: Meet the Texas ranchers forming their own border militia"--New York Post. This is what happens when the government cannot even perform its most basic function. Note the references to illegal aliens from China. From the article:

       The land, cut by mesquite and cactus, lies nearly 90 miles from the Mexican border but only 4.5 miles from a US Border Patrol checkpoint.

       Traffickers want to avoid this interior checkpoint — located on the only highway in this part of the state — so vehicles crammed with drugs or migrants from Central America and even China drop off the migrants and smugglers south of the checkpoint.

      Smugglers and their human cargo jump fences onto private ranches to traverse the vast expanses on foot.

      The mesquite canopy is ideal cover, allowing them to hide from drones and National Guard helicopters that patrol the area.

       “You never know what’s under that next tree,” said Vickers, whose 1,000-acre spread is one of the area’s smaller ranches.

      The mission is dangerous for the Volunteers, and the journey is deadly for the migrants.

      There is an emergency call station in the middle of one ranch where migrants can summon the Border Patrol for help, Vickers said. The call station has messages in Spanish and Mandarin, as well as a tank with jugs of water.

       “We always investigate a buzzard or a bad smell,” Vickers said, adding that since it began patrolling in 1988, his group has found more than 100 bodies of migrants who died crossing the terrain.

• Nothing to see here, move along... "Another French Church Burns on Easter Sunday, Probable Arson"--Breitbart. From the lede: "Police have confirmed that a fire in the French church of Notre-Dame de Grâce on Easter Sunday appears to have been intentionally set, making it the latest in a string of desecrations of Christian churches in the country."

• Related: "Armenian Genocide Remembrance Day: Revisiting Islam’s Greatest Slaughter of Christians"--PJ Media. An excerpt:

         Because these atrocities mostly occurred during World War I, so the argument goes, they are ultimately a reflection of just that—war, in all its chaos and destruction, and nothing more.  But as Winston Churchill, who described the massacres as an “administrative holocaust,” correctly observed, “The opportunity [WWI] presented itself for clearing Turkish soil of a Christian race.”  Even Adolf Hitler had pointed out that “Turkey is taking advantage of the war in order to thoroughly liquidate its internal foes, i.e., the indigenous Christians, without being thereby disturbed by foreign intervention.”

        It’s worth noting that little has changed; in the context of war in Iraq, Syria, and Libya, the first to be targeted for genocide have been Christians and other minorities.

       But even the most cited factor of the Armenian Genocide, “ethnic identity conflict,” while legitimate, must be understood in light of the fact that, historically, religion accounted more for a person’s identity than language or heritage.   This is daily demonstrated throughout the Islamic world today, where Muslim governments and Muslim mobs persecute Christian minorities who share the same race, ethnicity, language, and culture; minorities who are indistinguishable from the majority—except, of course, for being non-Muslims, or “infidels.”

       As one Armenian studies professor asks, “If it [the Armenian Genocide] was a feud between Turks and Armenians, what explains the genocide carried out by Turkey against the Christian Assyrians at the same time?”

• "Sri Lanka Massacre"--Diplomad. He writes:

        These attacks form part of a long-running war, one of some 1400 years, of Islam against Christianity and Judaism. This war takes place in Western places such as New York, San Bernardino, Tampa, Boston, Ft. Hood, Copenhagen, London, Paris, Nice, Madrid, Barcelona, Amsterdam, Brussels, Sydney, and Ottawa; let us not forget, however much the press might want us to, that it also occurs even more violently and often with much higher death tolls in places such as Kenya, Sudan, Nigeria, Indonesia, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, India, and, now, Sri Lanka.

        As I noted long ago, "We should be at war; instead, we are under attack." Let's be very clear: these murderers were not "radicalized" by the internet, nor do they comprise some crazy 1% fringe that have misinterpreted the teachings of Islam. They are Islam.

       When you look in front of your nose you will see, it is the Islam.

        Islam is not a religion like the others. It is a creed of conquest and destruction. We see that, again, this time in the churches, hotels, and streets of Sri Lanka.

• Related: "Denmark's richest man's children killed in bomb massacres"--Ekstra Bladet. This is a link to the Google translate version, but, essentially, billionaire Anders Holch Povlsen lost 3 of his 4 children in the attacks. Islamic bombings can be overlooked when they don't impact the elite, but when someone from the top 0.1% gets killed, things tend to happen.

• "New Harvard Research Says U.S. Christianity Is Not Shrinking, But Growing Stronger"--The Federalist. The important bit:

        Mainline churches are tanking as if they have super-sized millstones around their necks. Yes, these churches are hemorrhaging members in startling numbers, but many of those folks are not leaving Christianity. They are simply going elsewhere. Because of this shifting, other very different kinds of churches are holding strong in crowds and have been for as long as such data has been collected. In some ways, they are even growing. This is what this new research has found.

       The percentage of Americans who attend church more than once a week, pray daily, and accept the Bible as wholly reliable and deeply instructive to their lives has remained absolutely, steel-bar constant for the last 50 years or more, right up to today. These authors describe this continuity as “patently persistent.”

       The percentage of such people is also not small. One in three Americans prays multiple times a day, while one in 15 do so in other countries on average. Attending services more than once a week continues to be twice as high among Americans compared to the next highest-attending industrial country, and three times higher than the average comparable nation.

       One-third of Americans hold that the Bible is the actual word of God. Fewer than 10 percent believe so in similar countries. The United States “clearly stands out as exceptional,” and this exceptionalism has not been decreasing over time. In fact, these scholars determine that the percentages of Americans who are the most vibrant and serious in their faith is actually increasing a bit, “which is making the United States even more exceptional over time.”

      This also means, of course, that those who take their faith seriously are becoming a markedly larger proportion of all religious people. In 1989, 39 percent of those who belonged to a religion held strong beliefs and practices. Today, these are 47 percent of all the religiously affiliated. ...

• Discovery can be fun: "FBI Admits Hillary Clinton Emails Found in Obama White House – In the Executive Office of the President"--Gateway Pundit. Short version: the FBI was able to recover some of Hillary's emails that she had deleted from her private server because she had sent them to the White House and they still resided on computers or servers there.

“This astonishing confirmation, made under oath by the FBI, shows that the Obama FBI had to go to President Obama’s White House office to find emails that Hillary Clinton tried to destroy or hide from the American people.” said Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton. “No wonder Hillary Clinton has thus far skated – Barack Obama is implicated in her email scheme.”

• When the cucks have lost the National Review... "The Mueller Report Exposes the Absurdity of the Governing Class"--National Review. Jay Cost writes:

       Now let’s think about part one of the Mueller report: the finding of no collusion. Nothing. Nada. Zip. Zilch. Zero. It was all a hoax — paid in part by the Hillary Clinton campaign. And yet . . . and yet! A vast concatenation of journalists, public officials, and public intellectuals have been screeching from the top of their lungs for more than two years about the dire threat to the republic. They even managed to jawbone the tech companies into restricting speech on social-media sites to combat this insidious threat.

       Have they ever been more wrong?

      Why yes! Yes they have!

      The Russia hoax was only the latest in a long chain of grievous errors. In the past 20 years, the number of times that our civic betters have royally screwed up is astounding. They missed 9/11. They wrongly thought Saddam Hussein had chemical weapons. They didn’t see that Iraq was sliding into chaos by late 2005. They allowed Julian Assange, Chelsea Manning, and Edward Snowden to steal our secrets. They didn’t see the 2008–09 economic crisis coming until it hit them square in the jaw. They missed how a vast array of government policies and decisions contributed to it. They told us that the stimulus would reduce unemployment. They assured us that if we liked our health care we could keep it. They couldn’t even get a website running. They let Libya and Syria fall into chaos.

       That works out to be about one massive screw-up every 20 or so months. That is insane. The array of mistakes is bipartisan, and it has been committed collectively by journalists, bureaucrats, and public intellectuals. There is one, abiding constant: The people tasked with the day-to-day management and oversight of our government have an arrogance-to-excellence ratio that is shockingly high.

       These people are a testament to the failure of our higher-education system over the last generation, which has produced an untold number of second-raters who are convinced they are first-raters. They are also a shining monument to the virtues of federalism — for all the many problems with returning power to the states, at least these dummies won’t have as much influence. These middlebrow poseurs are a better argument for libertarianism than F. A. Hayek could ever conjure up.

      I am now more discomfited by them than I am by Trump’s tomfoolery. At least we will be rid of Trump eventually. Despite literally decades of egregious errors, this class of “leaders” remains steadfastly in place, waiting to take charge once more when Trump exits the political stage.

      God help us.

• Related: "Donald Trump is a symptom of a new kind of class warfare raging at home and abroad"--Glenn Reynolds at USA Today. He explains:

Around the world in the postwar era, power was taken up by unelected professional and managerial elites. To understand what’s going on with President Donald Trump and his opposition, and in other countries as diverse as France, Hungary, Italy and Brazil, it’s important to realize that the post-World War II institutional arrangements of the Western democracies are being renegotiated, and that those democracies’ professional and managerial elites don’t like that very much, because they have done very well under those arrangements.  And, like all elites who are doing very well, they don’t want that to change.

• Hmm. "U.S. Navy drafting new guidelines for reporting UFOs"--Politico. Part of the purpose is to destigmatize the reporting of unidentified aircraft. Per the article, "[t]he previously unreported move is in response to a series of sightings of unknown, highly advanced aircraft intruding on Navy strike groups and other sensitive military formations and facilities, the service says."
• "A MYSTERY AGENT IS DOXING IRAN'S HACKERS AND DUMPING THEIR CODE"--Wired. "For the last month, a mystery person or group has been targeting a top Iranian hacker team, dumping their secret data, tools, and even identities onto a public Telegram channel—and the leak shows no signs of stopping." 
• "Evil Medieval Christians or Islam's Victims Retaliating?"--American Thinker. Vlad III, aka Vlad the Impaler, aka Dracula, was the good guy.