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Friday, April 26, 2019

April 26, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"GEAR: HELMETS - The Why, What, How for Day & Night Tactical Operations"--Max Velocity Tactical (19 min.). This is a follow-up to the recent video on gear (belts, load vests, etc.) to which I linked. This one looks at the different types of helmets, whether you need a helmet, and setting up night vision and/or communication or ear protection equipment with a helmet or head gear.

  • Be sure to check out this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. He has links to articles on the best respirators/gas masks for preppers, a list of mass shootings stopped by concealed carry license holders, and why jogging is actually one of the worst activities for health and fitness.
  • "How to Properly Mount a Rifle Scope"--The Truth About Guns. Good advice on using a level and plumb bob to make sure everything is lined up correctly (although I just use a small spirit level rather than something specific for firearms). Also read the first few comments for additional tips and suggestions from readers on adjusting your focus.
  • "Idaho P.O.S.T. Patrol Rifle Familiarization Course - 2009" (PDF, 180 pages, approx. 3.8 mb). The focus is mostly on the AR style of rifle, but they also have short sections on the Mini-14 and AK style rifles. It also covers methods of carrying or slinging a rifle, shooting positions, principles of marksmanship, as well as training drills. 
  • Marlin has moved the lever-action into the 21st Century with the Marlin Dark 336 (.30-30) & 1895 (.45-70). The rifles have a black parkerized finish with a black hardwood stock/forend. They also come with a threaded barrel, big-loop lever, and a rail system for optics. The rear iron sight that comes with the weapon is a peep ghost-ring style sight.
  • "Avoiding the .300BLK AR-15 ‘ka-boom!’"--NRA Blog. It is possible, especially with the lighter, shorter bullets, to chamber .300 Blackout in a .223/5.56 chamber so that the firearm goes into battery. Some tips offered by the author is visually inspect the ammunition when you load it into the firearm, carefully label ammunition boxes, and use different magazines (or differently marked magazines) for each caliber, and perhaps not shoot the two calibers during the same outing. I take the latter two routes: I don't take both calibers to the range at the same time, and I use different styles or colors of magazines. 
  • "Civilian-legal Flashbang Grenades?"--Recoil Magazine. As the article notes, actual flashbang grenades are classified as destructive devices and are not available to the general public. But IWA International makes a facsimile that is considered a "firework." The article continues:
There are currently three models available from IWA – the M11 multi-burst, the M12 Distraction Device, and the M13 Thermobaric Canister. The M11 gives off a single loud bang followed by two smaller bangs. The M12 is a single charge, and the M13 Thermobaric produces a single loud bang and a “mild overpressure” as described by the folks at IWA. Fortunately, they sent us a couple of each for testing. All three models sport OD green cardboard bodies and pull-ring fuses with a safety spoon that flies free when the safety ring is pulled. Each grenade is individually labeled and, though the bodies look identical, the labels are large and clearly marked so you know what you’re getting when you pull the pin. They are roughly the same size as an actual flashbang and seem to fit in most nylon pouches made for the real deal.
The sound level is not as high as an actual flashbang: 125 dB for the IWA product versus 175 dB for the real deal. Price for the IWA product is $29.99 each.
  • I think the author of this piece, Chelsey Kivland, has spent too much time in Haiti and gone native, inasmuch as she ascribes a voodoo-like power to firearms: "WHAT GUNS DO TO OUR STATE OF MIND"--Pacific Standard (h/t Captain's Journal). She writes about a Smith & Wesson .38 caliber revolver that passed through the hands of three Haitian men, who were all killed in shootings. She explains:
            Yet when neighbors relayed how the deaths happened, they offered explanations involving a different kind of occult transformation: the supernatural potency of the .38 to change people into unethical agents. With each subsequent death, lore intensified around the gun, with people surmising that "touching" this gun could portend death. "Ever since they touched the gun, those poor young boys were not the same," said one community member. Residents spoke about the gun as if it were an amulet that could change otherwise good people and what they did in the world.
             It would be shortsighted to dismiss these claims as the misguided logic of a "superstitious people." That racially inflected trope, long used to marginalize and demonize Haitians, among others, blinds observers to the way in which guns do exhibit a power akin to magic: the power to create a change in someone's state of mind.
              Taking seriously the supernatural effects of guns has broad relevance for understanding and addressing gun violence globally. In the U.S., gun advocates tend to view the gun as a value-neutral tool. As they say: "Guns don't kill people. People kill people." On the other side are gun control advocates who argue that guns do indeed kill people: Without their lethal power easily at hand, as in other countries, far fewer deaths occur. But the anthropological lesson from Haiti is that the truth is more complex. It isn't just the technological lethality of guns that makes them dangerous: They also exert a power on human agency. They change us. It is both the technology and the symbolism of a gun that can encourage someone to shoot.
        Ah, yes. To the fevered mind of a leftist, firearms are fetishes (in the anthropological meaning of the word). Of course, like other areas with similar demographics, homicides are high in Haiti. Crime statistics for Haiti are unreliable and it is believed that crime rates are severely underreported. Nevertheless, based on the information available, the capital of Haiti, Port-au-Prince, has a murder rate of 60.9 per 100,000, which is considered low for the Caribbean. Fortunately, "white people [are] not vulnerable to witchcraft and [can] neither feel it nor understand it." That must explain why murder rates are so much lower among Western nations. 
                 An authoritative paper in the American Medical Association Journal Surgery has added independent weight to the assertion long made by United States military officers, officials and politicians that US troops wounded in Afghanistan and Iraq had the best survival rates for any wars in US military history. Perhaps more significantly, it has also for the first time assessed combat casualty care statistics over the period of military operations in both campaigns, from 2001 to the end of 2017, to show how mortality rates were reduced in both Afghanistan and Iraq over time by some 44%.
                    The authors conducted an analysis of medical data for all 56,763 US casualties in Afghanistan and Iraq wounded between October 2001 and December 2017. This showed that in the early years of the Afghanistan conflict the fatality rate for casualties was 20%. By the beginning of 2018, this had fallen to 8.6%. Over the same period, the fatality rate for US casualties in Iraq decreased from 20.4% to 10.1%. These were the best-ever survival rates for US military casualties. ...
                      The study points to three primary factors in these improved survival rates: better measures to control bleeding, more rapid blood-loss replacement and reducing the time from injury to reaching a field hospital (to 60 minutes or less, known as the ‘golden hour’).
                        In the case of the first, greater use of anticoagulant bandages, complemented by more rapid use of tourniquets, was of significant benefit. Traumatic amputation as the result of an improvised explosive device emphasised the importance of the fast application of tourniquets. Coping with and replacing blood loss was made easier by the extensive deployment of military paramedics, both with front-line troops down to platoon level and in land-based and helicopter ambulances.
                         In terms of the third factor, in Iraq, a combination of dedicated ambulance vehicles and helicopters meant that most US casualties reached hospital within an hour. ...
                            If police show up at your door, are you really going to fight to the death to resist instead of submitting to a(n admittedly wrong) short-term inconvenience? That doesn’t make sense. Especially if you’re a normally well-balanced individual who, when you appear in court, will show up reasonably well-dressed, well-groomed, calm, cool and collected. Seeing that, the judge will probably throw out the original order.
                            After all, if a judge sees you don’t have a tail, horns or fangs and you appear mentally and emotionally sound, the claims against you will look unfounded at best, and maliciously defamatory at worst.
                              Yes, it will cost you a thousand bucks or more to hire a decent attorney to fight the bogus accusations. Is your life worth a thousand bucks? Mine sure is. Yours is too.
                          Of course, are you and your neighbors as organized and trained as were the Minutemen? 
                                  Twenty-five years ago today, FBI tanks smashed into the ramshackle home of the Branch Davidians outside Waco, Texas. After the FBI collapsed much of the building atop the residents, a fire erupted and 76 corpses were dug out of the rubble. Unfortunately, the American political system and media have never faced the lessons from that tragic 1993 day.
                                    Fifty-one days before the FBI final assault, scores of federal Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms agents launched an attack on the Davidians’ home spurred by allegations that they had converted semi-automatic rifles to full-automatic capacity. The ATF’s lead investigator had previously rejected an offer to peacefully search the Davidians’ home for firearms violations. Four ATF agents and six Davidians were killed in the fracas on February 28, 1993. At least one ATF agent told superiors that the ATF fired first, spurring an immediate end to the official shooting review. But the media trumpeted the ATF storyline that its agents had been ambushed, entitling the feds to be far more aggressive in the following weeks.
                                      What lessons can today’s Americans draw from the FBI showdown on the Texas plains a quarter century ago?
                                  According to the author, the lessons are: 
                                    (1)  Purported good intentions absolve real deadly force (e.g., "we had to kill the children in order to save the children").
                                      (2)  It is not an atrocity if the U.S. government does it.
                                        (3)  Orwellian language will vaporize federal aggression (e.g., as the ATF assaulted the building, they had loudspeakers blaring out the message that "this is not an assault").
                                          (4)  Truth delayed is truth defused (e.g., if you can drag the investigation out long enough, no will care anymore).
                                            (5)  Don’t trust Congress to expose federal misconduct.
                                              (6)  Media favorites can perform rhetorical magic tricks.
                                                And I think that the author missed one lesson, which is that the whole point of the raid wasn't to enforce gun laws or rescue children from abuse, but to remind the Deplorables of their place.

                                                "Use Your Standard Lower to Shoot 9mm? CMMG 9 ARC"--VSO Gun Channel (6 min.)
                                                CMMG has developed a "full size" AR magazine that feeds 9 mm. You can buy their magazine, or a kit to convert PMAGs you might already have. The purpose is to allow you to shoot 9 mm using a standard lower without the issues that can come with using magazine well inserts.

                                                        The Los Angeles County Civilian Oversight Commission has directed their inspector general to examine secret societies within the L.A. County Sheriff's Department. Most of the commissioners say they fear deputy subgroups have become a pervasive problem. 

                                                  * * *

                                                          Deputies are accused of acting more like gangsters. The group the Banditos have reportedly controlled the East L.A. Station for years. Last fall, the Banditos allegedly attacked several younger deputies after a department party. In a government claim, one deputy said he was "beat, hit and choked into unconsciousness." 
                                                             The secret societies were recently highlighted when Sheriff Alex Villanueva reinstated Deputy Caren Carl Mandoyan. Mandoyan admits to being a member of the Reapers. Last month, Villanueva said he was addressing cliques within the department. 
                                                      Courts have sought to overcome concerns that scrutiny would diminish the effectiveness of the software for law enforcement or infringe on intellectual property rights by ordering only secret and monitored third-party review processes. But federal prosecutors have rejected even these compromises, drawing worry that it's not legitimate concerns driving their secrecy but a lack of confidence in the software's efficacy or some other more nefarious reason.
                                                      But, according to the article, "[p]rosecutors say they can't share any details about it 'because it is proprietary and not in the government's possession.'" Does this mean that investigators believed (or still believe) that they can bypass Fourth Amendment considerations by using a non-government entity to perform the searches?
                                                      • "Rheinmetall seeking to gobble up BAE Global Combat Systems????"--SNAFU. And Germany (aka, the EU) looks to buy up one of Britain's largest defense contractors.
                                                      • "Therapists may have inflamed Parkland shooter, lawyer claims"--South Florida Sun Sentinel. The criticisms seem to primarily be that the therapists recommended that Cruz be allowed to play violent video games and use a punching bag to focus and work off anger issues, that he be allowed to use an airsoft gun (of course, he actually owned an AR), and recommended that he be allowed to join the JROTC program. Just more fuel to theories that Cruz may have been "programmed" to conduct the shootings. 
                                                      Instead of children, she has soul-conflicts; marriage is a craft-art for the achievement of “mutual understanding.” It is all the same whether the case against children is the American lady’s who would not miss a season for anything, or the Parisienne’s who fears that her lover would leave her, or an Ibsen heroine’s who “lives for herself”—they all belong to themselves and they are all unfruitful.
                                                      It helps to understand what Spengler means if you are familiar with Ibsen's work or, at least, the social message he was trying to convey. Ibsen was a famous playwright in the latter half of the 19th Century. His plays were very influential in the nascent feminist movement. In one of his most famous plays, A Doll’s House, the protagonist, Nora, is "a woman in need of a fulfillment that she cannot achieve while she is trapped by marriage, motherhood, and the ghosts of received ideas about truth and virtue." The play ends with her abandoning her husband and children in order to "discover herself," as we might phrase it today. As Robert W. Merry explained Spengler's ideas on feminism: "Whereas the advent and success of feminism in the West is heralded in our time as a sign of civic progress, Spengler’s study of other civilizational cycles convinced him that it was just the opposite—a reflection of cultural decline, largely because it curtailed the production of children." (See also my earlier posts on "The Decline of Civilization--Part I" and "Part II").
                                                      Migrants generally pay smugglers and smuggling networks anywhere from $2,000 to $7,000 per person to get to America. A portion of that money ends up in the hands of Mexican drug cartels—TCOs—even though the cartels don’t directly participate in the smuggling.
                                                      If you do the math, even at the high estimate of $7,000 per person, that would be 328,571 illegal immigrants ... from Central America (not Mexico) ... just in 2017!
                                                                 With leading academics and professionals in architecture generally being hostile to building or restoring anything in styles predating the infamous Le Corbusier (Charles-Édouard Jeanneret) and the Bauhaus school, they were quick to pounce when President Emmanuel Macron’s prime minister announced there would be a competition to “ask the question of whether we should even recreate the spire as it was conceived… Or if, as is often the case in the evolution of heritage, we should endow Notre-Dame with a new spire”.
                                                                 The Telegraph published an article claiming it would be a “travesty” to restore Notre Dame as it was just a day after the fire, while Rolling Stone quoted a Harvard architecture historian as saying that the burning of a building “so overburdened with meaning… feels like an act of liberation.”
                                                            One group wants a glass roof with a stainless steel and glass spire (or, rather, shard). Another group of architects propose replacing the roof with a greenhouse filled with plants. The issue is whether to restore the cathedral to what it was, or to make it more "modern". As one article explains:
                                                                     According to Taliesin School of Architecture president Aaron Betsky, the question is whether to re-create its classic design or "try to do a better job not only in reconstructing the roof but also in finishing the twin towers and other elements of the medieval design (at least as far as we can know it). If the choice, on the other hand, is to invent something new, what should that be?”
                                                                      Betsky points out many factors that go into any rebuild of a historic structure. With today's social climate it would be almost impossible to make every group pleased. However, perhaps that is not the goal. What makes this rebuild different from any other Notre Dame reconstruction is time. This is a rebuild of the 21st century, not the 17th century — and with 21st-century approaches comes 21st-century discussion heightened by media and public opinion. Technology, intention, and money are what will shape the future of the structure. “We have to ask what not only Catholicism but the notion of an iconic object in a multicultural and therefore multi-religious city such as Paris means for architecture, and how current technologies and materials influence the development of form. If anyone can answer that knot of questions, they might come up with a design that continues the work of faith that has made Notre Dame such a majestic object, tested by time and now fire, that keeps acting as a symbol and a fact of faith,” he explains.
                                                                  I don't believe it is possible for Notre Dame to be restored. Not because it is technically impossible, but because it is spiritually impossible. We are in the winter of Western Civilization, as Spengler would have adjudged, and so disconnected from our roots that a Medieval cathedral might as well be the artifact of an alien civilization. Spengler distinguished societies by whether they were a culture (i.e., still young), or a civilization (matured but disconnected from the root culture). Notre Dame was the product of a Western culture which has long since disappeared. As Andrew Sullivan wrote:
                                                                            But it also reminded me of the question of beauty in modernity. By which I mean: Can our civilization ever create anything of comparable beauty to Notre-Dame, or indeed the archipelago of cathedrals across Europe, stemming from the middle ages? I can’t see it. The core criteria for creating modern architecture — even if it is not brutally ugly or mediocre — are usefulness and cost. Beauty — even if it is formally considered in architecture — is usually subordinate. Even if you survey modern cathedrals, there is a lack of detail, and an absence of the kind of skill that enabled the twelfth century to construct marvels beyond our capacity. We have technique in abundance; we have technology that would have appeared as magic to the designers of Notre-Dame; we have wealth beyond measure in comparison. But even the architectural baubles of our new religion — think of Apple’s new headquarters, for example — contain nothing as complex or as overwhelming or as awe-inspiring as the rose stained glass window of an eleventh century masterpiece.
                                                                             I’m not saying I want to go back to the Middle Ages. We have gained a staggering amount of peace, security, freedom, health and knowledge. Theocracy is no longer an option. But they had something we don’t, didn’t they? A unifying vision of the whole of life and death, a common, metaphysically-rooted faith, and an enchantment modernity has banished. I think of these cathedrals as they must have appeared at the time to peasants on a pilgrimage, looming on the horizon like a space-ship compared to the misery and brutality of life in that era, overwhelming the senses, commanding awe and devotion, reifying faith in an almost unanswerable way. When we see Notre-Dame burn, we see the reality of our time: that this exquisite kind of architectural beauty is never going to be summoned up again, nor the souls who imagined it, nor the human beings who crafted every inch of it with love.
                                                                        The writer known by the  nom de plume "Jesse James" at American Partisan also captured the conundrum.  He notes that the cathedral took between 4 and 6 generations to build--a devotion that is unfathomable now, and, for that reason, he questions why most Westerners should even care about the building:
                                                                                  So why should anyone but conservatives care about what was valued by an alien culture, created by alien men for an alien God? We didn’t care about the dozens of other churches desecrated in France or the religious cleansing of the Middle East and central Africa. American’s rejected the concept of cultural, genetic or intellectual differences in mankind in 1776. We rejected God in the same breath, settling for a benevolent cosmic intelligence, placated by platitudes but ignoring that which we actually did. In short, the Notre Dame may as well be the Great Pyramid of Giza for all it represents of our current culture. If that bites, it should. The reality is we are not those men who built the Hagia Sophia, St. Peter’s Basilica or Notre Dame. We couldn’t even keep our seminaries from turning into Ivy League champions for atheism and overt enemies of our culture and people. Silicon Valley is our Notre Dame, a vacuous mix of decadence, worship of the obscene, a black hole churning out broken people and magnifying the worst in us.
                                                                                   Take from this what you will, but do not insult me with mourning an idea which you do not believe, a culture you do not subscribe to and a society for which you will not fight. The burning of the Notre Dame, whether arson or happenstance is indeed an excellent representation of the West. What once was is gone. The fact it lasted this long is a testament to a feat better men than us accomplished. None of us have known that level of brotherhood or national and religious identity. We have absolutely no frame of reference to get back there. Notre Dame is tragic to those of us who embraced the social and religious constructs that got us those monuments to Western Culture. We look back and pay homage to the products of that system, but we are intellectually honest enough understand that you cannot have the fruit without the tree.
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                                                                            Weekend Reading -- A New Weekend Knowledge Dump

                                                                            Greg Ellifritz has posted a new Weekend Knowledge Dump at his Active Response Training blog . Before I discuss some of his links, I want to ...