7 mm Remington Mag. v. .270 Winchester In Africa

In interesting 2022 article from Guns & Ammo comparing the 7 mm Remington Magnum against the .270 Winchester on a safari to Africa. The impetus for this article was piece written in the 1980s by former Guns & Ammo Hunting Editor Jon Sundra comparing the two and concluding that the 7 mm Rem. Mag. was clearly superior. The author here--Eric Poole--wanting to see if modern bullet designs made any difference. The rest of the article recounts the different animals he shot with the two calibers and some of the bullets used. And while both performed well, his conclusion was ultimately the same as Sundra's: the 7 mm was the better hunting cartridge because the additional power resulted in higher velocities (and, therefore, a flatter trajectory) and more decisive wounding. And, as a side note, the author relates what a springbok’s tail smells like. So you get a bit of a safari hunting story mixed with some discussion of bullets and ballistics. 

This Is How Liberals Show Compassion

"In Cities Across America, Homeless Services Are Doled Out Based on Race and Sexual Identity"--Washington Free Beacon. How does this work out in Portland (Multnomah County) Oregon?

Rolled out in October 2024, the Multnomah Services and Screening Tool awards up to 5 points to non-white, non-straight applicants who speak English as a second language—more than the 4 points it would award a domestic violence survivor with a six-year-old child who has been homeless for over a year. 

Ann Arbor, MI, Removes Neighborhood Watch Signs

Ann Arbor, Michigan, spent $18,000 to remove neighborhood watch signs claiming they were racist. Soy-boy Mayor Christopher Taylor explained that neighbors looking out for one another was "inconsistent with our values" and an expression of exclusion. Black council member Cynthia Harrison was also concerned that the signs sent an unwelcome message to criminals that look like her. Mayor Taylor reminded residents that if they wanted to file complaints about the police, however, they could do so by contacting the Ann Arbor Independent Community Police Oversight Commission (AAICPOC). The Commissions' mission statement includes this: "To promote positive interactions between the police department and members of vulnerable, at-risk and marginalized groups within the community."

Diversity In Action

From the Daily Mail: "Camaro-driving child snatcher's astonishing excuse for abducting boy as he pleads not to be deported to India." Manoj Govindbalunikam, was sentenced to 18-months in prison for his abduction of a 9 year old Ontario, Canada, boy in 2023. His explanation for picking the child up, giving him ice cream and a toy, and not driving the boy to his house as promised was that it was a "cultural misunderstanding," and that such actions were perfectly acceptable in India.  It that is what is acceptable in India, then we definitely can't have them coming here. He also tried the racism card. 

    In any event, under Canadian law, receiving a sentence of more than 6-months means that he will be automatically deported back to India. So he can go back there and see how well child-abduction goes over. 

Be Careful What You Vote For ...

A couple articles from the New York Post that caught my eye:

• "Vile antisemitic outburst at Park Slope Coop meeting sparks outrage: ‘Jewish supremacism is a problem in this country’." 
• "Protesters scream revolting anti-Israel slurs at diners outside NYC Jewish restaurant, call to ‘Bomb Israel’." 

Jews in the United States overwhelmingly vote Democrat and support liberal causes. And this was the result.

LA Halting Congressional Primaries Due To SCOTUS Ruling

Democrats have long used the Voting Rights Act to force states to create racially gerrymandered districts to guarantee Democrats win House seats even in conservative states. However, a recent decision from the U.S. Supreme Court has struck down a map creating a majority black district in Louisiana that zig-zags across much of the state. SCOTUS Blog gives the background:

    The decision was the latest, and presumably final, chapter in a long-running dispute arising from Louisiana’s efforts to adopt a new congressional map in the wake of the 2020 census. The first map that the state adopted, in 2022, had one majority-Black district out of the six allotted to the state. A group of Black voters – who comprise roughly one-third of the state’s population – went to federal court, where they alleged that the map violated Section 2 of the VRA, which prohibits discrimination in voting.

    A federal judge agreed that the 2022 map likely violated Section 2, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit upheld that ruling. It instructed Louisiana to draw a new map by January 2024 or risk having the court adopt one for it.

    The map that Louisiana drew in 2024 created a second majority-Black district, leading to the election in November of that year of Cleo Fields, a former member of Congress who had represented another majority-Black district during the 1990s.

    The map also prompted the lawsuit leading to Wednesday’s opinion. It was filed by a group of “non-African American” voters who contended that the 2024 map violated the Constitution’s equal protection clause by sorting voters based on race. A three-judge federal district court agreed with them and barred the state from using the 2024 map in future elections, but a divided Supreme Court temporarily paused that ruling in May 2024.

The Court ordered the parties to submit new briefing to address "whether 'the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates' either the 14th Amendment or the 15th Amendment, which bars the government from denying or restricting voting rights based on race," and set a second hearing date.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday, in the case of Louisiana v. Callais, struck down a Louisiana congressional map that a group of voters who describe themselves as “non-African American” had challenged as the product of unconstitutional racial gerrymandering. By a vote of 6-3, the justices left in place a ruling by a federal court that barred the state from using the map, which had created a second majority-Black district, in future elections.     

Notwithstanding the lamentations of the Democrats, the Voting Rights Act does not trump the Constitution. As a consequence of the decision, the Louisiana congressional primaries have been suspended pending, presumably, drawing up a new Congressional redistricting map. The consequence of this action is that Republicans will pick up an additional House seat this fall. 

Wilder: China's War On The U.S.

John Wilder's latest piece is "China’s Unrestricted Economic War on America." He notes that in 1999,  two PLA colonels, Qiao Liang and Wang Xiangsui, wrote a treatise called Unrestricted Warfare describing how to take down the U.S. without open warfare. And they have been following it since. He explains:

    The idea was simple: use every possible tool to erode the enemy’s strength while pretending you’re just a friendly neighbor.

    How many of those boxes have they checked?

• Trade warfare? Done. They flooded our markets, stole our manufacturing base, and used the WTO like a Trojan horse.
• Financial warfare? They’ve been buying up U.S. debt, manipulating currency, and positioning themselves to pull the rug out when the time is right, which might be now.
• Ecological warfare? See the citrus groves and the poultry barns and the Michigan fungus folks.  Introduce a pathogen here, a pest there, and watch the food supply strain.
• Smuggling warfare?  Fentanyl, anyone?
• Cyber and network warfare?  Constant hacks, intellectual-property theft, missing hard drives from Los Alamos, and infrastructure probes that never quite rise to the level of “war.”
• Psychological and media warfare?  Want to bet that China was stoking the fires on both sides in Minnesota during George Floyd?   

And this doesn't even include China buying up U.S. farms and ranches, buying up land abutting U.S. military bases, and flying drones over sensitive locations.  

    I know that a lot of readers probably disagree with the war against Iran, but it is important to understand that Iran is just a pretext. If it were just about Iran and its nuclear arsenal, the Democrat leadership--at the least the ones that matter--would be all for it. But the real target of the war is China. 

    Zineb Riboua, in an article penned for The Free Press, explained at the beginning of March:

    Operation Epic Fury, this weekend’s joint U.S.-Israel attack on Iran, has been widely described as an extraordinary assault on the world’s leading state sponsor of terror. That is true, but it misses a critical dimension. For years, Beijing has spent billions of dollars building Iran into a structural asset. By striking Iran directly, the Trump administration is dismantling, whether by design or by consequence, a pillar of China’s regional architecture.

    In other words: This is all about China.

She continues:

    Iran’s value to China also extends to proxy warfare. When Iran’s Houthis began attacking commercial shipping in the Red Sea in late 2023, the consequences rippled across the global economy. Container traffic through the Red Sea fell by 90 percent within three months. Goods worth roughly $1 trillion were disrupted in the first seven months. The rerouting of ships around Africa’s Cape of Good Hope added nearly two weeks and about $1 million in fuel costs to every voyage, driving freight rates between Asia and Europe.

    The U.S. bore the heaviest burden of response. Carrier strike groups were deployed, air campaigns were sustained for months, and precision munitions costing between $1 million and $4 million per interceptor were expended at a rate that, by mid-2025, had consumed roughly a quarter of America’s high-end missile interceptor inventory. Last week, it was reported that Tehran was close to finalizing a deal for Chinese-made supersonic anti-ship cruise missiles, capable of threatening American carriers now massing in the Persian Gulf. Earlier, Chinese suppliers shipped over 1,000 tons of sodium perchlorate, a key missile propellant ingredient, to an Iranian port, enough to rebuild a substantial portion of the ballistic missile stockpile that Israel spent 12 days destroying. Why would Beijing do this? And what does that mean for the United States? Answering those questions requires looking beyond Iran and toward the broader global contest in which Iran plays a role.

    Start with oil, because oil is where the entire relationship begins. China buys more than 80 percent of Iran’s crude oil exports at steep discounts. The shipments travel on a ghost fleet of tankers that switch off their transponders and relabel their cargo as Malaysian or Indonesian to circumvent American sanctions. Since 2021, the cumulative value of these purchases has exceeded $140 billion. This makes China the main reason the Islamic Republic has not gone bankrupt.

    The arrangement works beautifully for Beijing. It gets cheap oil for its industrial base, saving billions annually compared to market-rate suppliers. And in exchange, China acquires influence over a nation of 90 million people sitting astride the world’s most consequential energy corridor.

    Meanwhile, Tehran, increasingly cut off from every other major economy, has nowhere else to turn. When Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei received Chinese president Xi Jinping in Iran in 2016, he praised the 25-year strategic partnership as “totally correct and endowed with wisdom,” adding pointedly that “Western governments have never been able to win the Iranian nation’s trust.” Khamenei was not merely flattering a guest. He was describing a structural reality: Iran’s economy now runs on Chinese money, and both capitals know it.

    In 2021, the 25-Year Comprehensive Strategic Partnership committed China to invest an estimated $400 billion across Iran’s energy, banking, telecommunications, and infrastructure sectors, formalizing a relationship that was already underway. The deeper this integration runs, the less leverage anyone else has over Tehran, and the more leverage Beijing accumulates.

    Meanwhile, Chinese-flagged ships sailed through with less interference. Beijing contributed no vessels to the multinational protection force and issued no condemnation of the attacks. In fact, Chinese satellite companies were providing the Houthis with intelligence to enable their targeting of commercial vessels.

    The logic here is simple. Every dollar the United States spends defending Red Sea shipping lanes is a dollar unavailable for submarine production, Pacific bases, or Taiwan contingency planning. Every carrier group stationed in the Gulf of Aden is a carrier group absent from the Western Pacific. Iran’s proxies, armed with Iranian weapons and supported by Iranian intelligence, function as a mechanism of American strategic attrition, and the costs fall entirely on Washington while Beijing accumulates strategic gains. 

Real Clear Defense similarly noted in mid-March that the war is really about China, explaining:

    Iran is a theater, but it does not hold the final stage. The real battlefield lies within the larger contest between the United States and China over the architecture of the international order.

    Seen through that lens, American military pressure on Iran—and earlier actions against Venezuela—assume wider significance. These moves do not merely punish hostile regimes. They strike at elements of the geopolitical framework Beijing has spent decades constructing.

    China’s rise has depended not only on domestic economic growth but also on the steady expansion of influence abroad. Beijing has cultivated relationships with states willing to trade with China, align diplomatically with China, or simply welcome a world less dominated by Washington.

    Iran occupies a crucial place in that system.

    The oil that sustains Tehran’s economy has long flowed eastward to China, often at discounted prices. Countries now under American pressure have supplied nearly 17 percent of China’s imported oil, providing Beijing with a quiet but significant buffer against Western leverage.

    To remove Iran from that equation—or even threaten doing so—is to reach directly into China’s long-term energy planning and development strategy.  

    Iran's importance to China is reflected in the assistance China has given Iran. The Strategist reports:

    Several reports in recent weeks have revealed the extent of China’s active support for Iran. The Financial Times reported on 15 April that China had given Iran a commercial reconnaissance satellite, providing Tehran with precise targeting information to hit US military facilities in the Middle East. A Chinese company, Earth Eye Co, reportedly built and launched the TEE-01B satellite and provided in-orbit delivery to Iran. Another Chinese company, Emposat, also supplied Iran with satellite data and control services. These must have helped Iran target US bases in the war.

    Other reports point to a Chinese geospatial AI and software company, MizarVision, which published satellite imagery with tagging data on several US military facilities prior to and even during the war.

    On 12 April, CNN reported that China was providing Iran with new air-defence systems in the coming weeks. These were shoulder-fired anti-aircraft missiles, CNN said. These are relatively short-range systems, but they still represent a serious danger to both helicopters and low-flying combat aircraft. The US-built Stinger is a good example, and its earlier version was credited with playing a major role in defeating Soviet forces in Afghanistan in the late 1980s. CNN’s sources said that China was shipping the weapons through third countries to hide their origin. China has denied the report.

    A 3 April Telegraph report revealed that China was providing Iran with chemicals for fuel for ballistic missiles. The report added that four sanctioned vessels were at Iranian ports, with one more ship waiting offshore. They’d come from China’s Zhuhai Gaolan port and were transporting sodium perchlorate, a precursor material for solid-fuel rocket propellant. The quantity is reported to be enough for hundreds of ballistic missiles. The five ships reportedly belong to the Iran Shipping Line Group, which is under sanctions by the US, Britain and the European Union.  

    So how long should we expect the war to continue? That's hard to say, but one data point has to do with China's strategic oil reserve.  Prior to the war breaking out, "China surged oil imports in January and February alone by 16 percent, with Russia exporting around 300,000 additional barrels per day to China," and "China’s combined strategic and commercial reserves now stand at 1.3 billion to 1.4 billion barrels, covering roughly four months of imports." That means that the U.S. blockade may need to go on for more than four months to be effective. But even that may be in doubt, as China expects to benefit from the UAE leaving OPEC. 

     I fully expect things to get spicy this summer as China begins to feel the bite of sanctions. First, China's Leftist tools will be working overtime to protest and disrupt life in the U.S. and prepare for cheating in the fall elections. Second, we should see China step up its modes of attack outline in Unrestricted Warfare. In that regard, it is notable that a synthetic opioid, cyclorphine, has started showing up on American streets. 

VIDEO: Comparison Between 9mm and .40 S&W Federal HST

This is a good test as the author uses the same pistols (other than caliber) and the same brand and type of ammo (Federal HST in this case) to compare the .40 S&W and 9mm +P. Obviously, these results are only for the Federal HST and might be different for other ammo. Notably, the Federal HST was picked for the test because it is what the host would recommend for carry.

The results were interesting. Both the 9mm and .40 S&W had excellent expansion with the longer barreled pistols, giving the win to the .40 S&W: it started larger than the 9mm and so, fully expanded, it was still larger than the 9mm, and the penetration was basically the same. But the lower velocity out of the shorter barrel weighed against the .40 S&W such that the 9mm performed better both as to expansion and penetration when using the compact pistols. 

The takeaway, then, was that with this ammunition, the 9mm was a better choice out of a compact pistol while the .40 S&W would be the better option for a full sized pistol. Selecting a round is about more than just how well it works in a ballistic test, though. One of the reasons 9mm has been so successful is that it hits a sweet spot balancing size, recoil, and effectiveness.  

 VIDEO: "As a Ballistic Tester - The 9mm and .40 S&W Ammo I Would Recommend - Worth Going up to .40 S&W?" -- Gun Sam Revolver Ballistics (18 min.)

Is The SPLC Handing Out More Money?

The New York Post reports: "Sicko walks through quiet Rhode Island town in KKK robes: ‘That’s a whole different level of racism’."

Reports of Christianity's Death May Be Premature

Rod Martin reports that "Christianity’s Decline in America Has Halted, and May Now Have Reversed." Martin offers two explanations:

    First, he believes that the decline was being led by people who didn't truly believe or were shaky in their faith who were leaving. But now that those types are mostly gone, the decline halted. He explains (bold in original):

    But why? Why would it stop? If the problem is that Christianity is outdated or offensive to our culture, why wouldn’t we continue to collapse?

    The answer is simple, as I’ve been telling you for decades. The people who were leaving Christianity were not leaving because conservatives were “mean,” or because Christians “lacked winsomeness,” or because the church failed to wrap historic orthodoxy in the therapeutic language of NPR. 

    They left because they were leftists. The belief system of the modern Democrat Party is anathema to the Christian faith.

    Or let me put that another way: the fakers have left.

    There’s no longer any benefit to your business, or to your personal prestige, that derives from pretending to be a Christian. There is no financial gain that comes from sitting on the second pew. To be a Christian today means you have to really mean it, or you just wouldn’t bother.

    And they don’t.

    So the half-believers left. The brunch Christians left. The “Jesus was a socialist community organizer” crowd left. The people who wanted the church to baptize abortion, transgenderism, Critical Race Theory, and every other fashionable madness of the age left.

    Second, Martin links the reversal to a growing number of young conservative men turning to Christianity. He notes: "Young conservative men helped drive the stabilization, and they may now be helping drive the reversal. They are embracing Christianity as part of a broader rejection of leftist ideology, secular despair, and the cultural war against masculinity itself." And it seems the numbers support this:

    Gallup’s newest data show a remarkable shift among young men ages 18–29. In 2024–25, 42 percent of young men said religion is “very important” in their lives, up from 28 percent just two years earlier. Young women, by contrast, remained roughly flat at about 30 percent. Gallup says young men now surpass young women on this measure by a statistically significant margin, a stunning reversal of the long-standing pattern in which young women were more religious than young men.

    Let’s put that in perspective. For the first time in 300 years, among young adults aged 18-24, the gender gap in religiosity has flipped. Historically, women have long been 15-20 percentage points more religious than men (which accounts for much of the church and the clergy’s feminization). But among Generation Z, those days are over.

    This is a very, very big deal.

    My LDS readers may be wondering about all this as it seems the LDS Church is still drifting left and embracing "social justice," DEI, and illegal immigration. For instance, the recent pronouncement allowing women to serve in Sunday School presidencies notwithstanding Paul's admonition in 1 Timothy 2:12. But looking at the statistics, you will see that the Church seems to be following the same trend lines as Christianity in general, albeit lagging by several years. This is illustrated by this article from April 21, 2026: "Why Latter-day Saints appear to be politically shifting to the left." The article explains that contrary to the general trend among Christian denominations, "[o]ver the last 18 years, [LDS] members moved 19 points to the left, according to a new report from the global analytics firm YouGov based on data from the Cooperative Election Survey." However, those members moving to the Left are less devout:

    ... When [Alex Bass, a data scientist] plotted the share of devout Latter-day Saints — those with the highest levels of religious practice, such as praying and attending church — and the share of Latter-day Saints who identify as Republican, they seem to be declining in tandem.

    Of course, correlation isn’t always causation. Bass said, however, the political beliefs of the different devoutness groups haven’t changed — devout members are firmly Republican, and cultural members are near the political center. Now, there are just more Latter-day Saints who are less devout and less Republican.
    
    The share of devout Latter-day Saints dropped from 52% in 2008-2012 to 39% in 2021-2025. Cultural members, those who attend church less than once a month, grew from 21% to 31%. 

And in going to Bass's blog, he reports that there is some data showing a resurgence in Church activity, but warns that "the limited data we have more likely suggests a retrenchment where those who remain are more likely to participate in all religious measures, but people are lost at the fringes." And in line with what Martin was saying, Bass notes: "Looking at party affiliation, in-line with the practice metrics and increasing 'devout' status, we see a rise in Republican Party affiliation. This again shows how strongly correlated these two things are!" 

    The correlation shouldn't be all that surprising. Church members were, prior to the 1970s, roughly split evenly between Democrats and Republicans, but as the Democrats moved ever leftward, the membership shifted to voting Republican. Given the current state of the Democratic party and its embrace of communist theories if not outright communism, it is notable that on July 3, 1936, the First Presidency of the Church issued a statement concerning communism that warned members that communism was anathema to both the teachings of the Church and to our Constitutional form of government, stating in part:

    Since Communism, established, would destroy our American Constitutional government, to support Communism is treasonable to our free institutions, and no patriotic American citizen may become either a Communist or supporter of Communism.

[snip]

    Furthermore, it is charged by universal report, which is not successfully contradicted or disproved, that Communism undertakes to control, if not indeed to proscribe the religious life of the people living within its jurisdiction, and that it even reaches its hand into the sanctity of the family circle itself, disrupting the normal relationship of parent and child, all in a manner unknown and unsanctioned under the Constitutional guarantees under which we in America live. Such interference would be contrary to the fundamental precepts of the Gospel and to the teachings and order of the Church. Communism being thus hostile to loyal American citizenship and incompatible with true Church membership, of necessity no loyal American citizen and no faithful Church member can be a Communist.    

Leftists cannot abide Christianity and Christianity cannot abide Leftism. So eventually the Leftists, where they are unsuccessful in destroying a religious institution, will eventually leave.