July 2, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Setting Up A Home Defense AK-47 or AK-74: Gear & Ammo Advice (4K)"

Mrgunsngear Channel (39 min.)

• "Fiber Optic Sights: Which Color?"--The Truth About Guns. Green or yellow. Read the article to find out why.
• "Trijicon ACOG In Use"-- John M. Buol Jr. at 1800GUNSANDAMMO.COM (h/t The New Rifleman). This 2015 article provides a brief history of optical sights in the military and the adoption of the ACOG. He then discusses BAC (Bindon Aiming Concept), named after Trijicon found Glen Bindon, explaining:

       ... With binocular vision, both eyes see an image and the brain process views from both into a single image. Different things seen by different eyes can be superimposed into a single, combined view. Red dot reflex sights work best with both eyes view down range and the sight is brought up like a heads up display. The aiming eye sees the aiming dot and the other eye continues to view the scene with the brain imposing both views together.

        A good way to learn efficient use of a red dot reflex sight is to block the objective lens, thus blocking the aiming eye’s view of the target. While the aiming eye can only see the dot, and the other eye can continue to see the target but not the dot. When done correctly, the brain superimposed both images together and dot simple appears floating in space onto of the target. The concept was first noted with the Armson OEG sight as that sight required it for use as the aiming tube is closed off at the objective end and can not be seen through.

It was interesting to see this because, by coincidence, I had an email from a reader recently who was having good luck using this method with his ACOG sight. 

• "Maximizing ACOGS"--John M. Buol Jr. at 1800GUNSANDAMMO.COM (h/t The New Rifleman). This is a follow up to the article cited above. In this article, the author discusses the BDC on ACOG models, including what mounts and bullets weights for which they were intended. For instance, he notes that "most Trijicon 4×32 .223 pattern reticles (TA01, TA11, and TA31) are set for 55 grain bullets out of a twenty-inch barrel when mounted to the carry handle," whereas others are designed for flat-top rifles using shorter barrels and different bullet weights. He then goes on to discuss zeroing, adjusting for different distances, and ideas for correcting for wind using hold points. For instance, as to zeroing, he advises:

Using an ACOG, or other good BDC-based sight, it’s best to establish a solid zero that maximizes the reticles effectiveness. Trijicon recommends a 100 meter zero. It’s best to follow that from a prone, magazine-supported position at a MEASURED 100 meters. This is confirmed in full kit as directed by the match. Once this is set, the idea is to never use the adjustment knobs. In practice, there might be a tweak needed as data is compiled. A common joke is that a good shooter is 95% zeroed within 2-3 rounds and then uses 200 to 300 rounds to refine that last 5%. In other words, a good marksman firing and calling the first round can make a bold correction that is close, well inside typical Army or Marine zero standards. A couple rounds more finishes this up. However, matches are won and lost with V or X counts. Where qualification standard is “good” with a hit anywhere in the silhouette, competition demands greater precision. Getting it so that first group fired cold is always centered in the V-ring on demand, and not merely somewhere inside that relatively small area, is the last refinement and takes some work. Especially considering this is done with issue rifles and ammunition which isn’t as consistent as we’d like.

He also notes that some competitors will use install a "peep" sight (a sticker with a hole in it) on the ACOG to make sure that their eye and cheek placement are consistent from shot to shot.

• The wages of sin socialism: "Venezuela Proceeds To The Looting Phase Of The Apocalypse"--Anonymous Conservative. Commenting on a story of looting of stores and shops, including of equipment like refrigerators, the author writes:

       This is where economic collapse goes. Once there is enough shortage that a few people begin breaking the rules (and being rewarded), everyone will break the rules. At that point, not only do you have the shortage of food and resources – you have a destruction of the very machinery which delivers those resources to everyone on top of it all.

       Once the stores are unable to operate, what little food was produced cannot be supplied, and now the only source of resources will be what you can take from other people. In the cities, where the only thing allowing that density of the population is the food delivery infrastructure, things will get particularly horrific once it is destroyed.

        The next phase is raiding and robbery, and Venezuela doesn’t even have the added factor of diversity and religious strife.

• "Yemen Is Suffering from the World’s Worst Cholera Epidemic"--American Conservative. According to the article, "Yemen is suffering from multiple humanitarian disasters, and each one contributes to the next: millions are internally displaced, tens of millions are starving or severely malnourished, and hundreds of thousands are becoming ill from preventable and treatable diseases." According to international health officials, over 200,000 are suffering from Cholera, with an estimated 5,000 new cases every day. 
• "Armed 11-year-old boy saves fishing party from charging bear"--Juneau Empire. The boy, his father, and his grandfather were charged by a brown bear. All three were armed, but the boy was the only one that didn't have his shotgun slung. The first shot was apparently just bird shot, which didn't really do anything, but the subsequent 3 shots were with slugs.
• Italy is going K: "Italy plans to seize aid agency boats in new crackdown on migrants - and push for new processing centres in Libya and voluntary repatriation"--Daily Mail. In just a few days, Italy's government has gone from threatening to close ports to aid vessels, to seizing those vessels; and to keeping migrants from getting to Europe in the first place. How soon until they insist on forced repatriation? 
• Diversity is our strength: "Swedish music festival is cancelled for 2018 after multiple sex attacks and a rape at this year's event"--Daily Mail. The attacks at past festivals have been committed by migrants, so I presume that these were as well.
• "The Hidden Signs That Can Reveal A Fake Photo"--BBC. And an analysis of the famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald posing with his rifle, which the analysts conclude was not tampered with.
• "Losing the Nation-State" by Andrew A. Michta at The American Interest. This seems a nice follow up to Rolf Peter Sieferle's essay, "Germany — Land of Milk and Honey", which I cited to yesterday. Michta writes that the West--Europe and the United States--is in flux, and "[t]he people seem less and less willing to listen to the explanations and admonishments of their leaders and the media, nor to accept that their nations are merely a transitional phase before the emergence of a multicultural, globalized world." The populist movements active in the West are, he suggests, "all symptoms of a deeper yet seldom articulated structural problem that has been straining democratic politics in the West: the progressive fragmentation of the nation-state.

       The weakening of the consensus that the nation-state should remain paramount in world politics lies at the base of the deepening political crisis in Western democracies. Since patriotic civic education all but disappeared from American public schools as well as from Europe’s government school curricula, two generations of Western elites have been progressively unmoored from their cultural roots, often all but bereft of even a rudimentary sense of service to and responsibility for the nation as a whole. As fractured group identities and narratives of grievance began to replace a sense of patriotism and national pride, college educated elites across the West became ever-more self-referential in their pursuits, locked in an exercise of inward-looking collective expiation for the centuries of Western racism, discrimination, and “privilege”—all allegedly the hallmarks of the culture they have inherited, which they must redefine, or repudiate altogether.

* * *

       ... So long as this shared national identity remained strong—call it patriotism, love of country, or belonging beyond one’s immediate family and local community—the nation-state retained its cohesion, resting on a sense of reciprocity between the government and the citizen.

       Today after decades of espousing multiculturalism and group rights buttressed by the politics of grievance, the foundations of a larger shared national identity have eroded such that governance—or better yet, governability—has become an increasingly scarce commodity across the West. We are at an inflection point, where a growing systemic disorder is stoked not just by shifts in the global power distribution, but by the progressive decline in governability. The dismantling of the core principle that the national homeland should be under the sovereign control of its people lies at the root of this problem.

        The hypothesis that institutions ultimately trump culture has over the past quarter century morphed into an article of faith, alongside the fervently held belief that nationalism and democratic politics are at their core fundamentally incompatible. The decades-long assault on the very idea of national identity steeped in a shared culture and defined by a commitment to the preservation of the nation has left Western leadership frequently unable to articulate the fundamentals that bind us and that we thus must be prepared to defend. The deepening fight over the right of the central government to control the national border—which is at the core of the Western idea of the nation-state—is emblematic of this situation.

       He goes on to argue that nation-states are the core building blocks to a successful international order, and that the degradation of the nation-state will weaken the international system. 

       While Michta won't go so far as to present a solution to the weakening of the nation-state, Ben Shapiro at Town Hall does in his article "Transfer is not a dirty word." Shapiro's article is about the Israeli-Palestinian issue. He concedes that "[t]he Arab enmity for Jews and the state of Israel allows for no peace process," and concludes, therefore, that the only way forward for lasting peace is to physically expel the Palestinians (it is not clear if he means all Palestinians, or only those who are Muslim) from Israel and Israeli territories. As justification, he cites to post-World War II Europe which saw Germans expelled from various countries in order to produce stable borders and populations. He writes:

       After World War II, Poland was recreated by the Allied Powers. In doing so, the Allies sliced off a chunk of Germany and extended Poland west to the Oder-Neisse line. Anywhere from 3.5 million to 9 million Germans were forcibly expelled from the new Polish territory and relocated in Germany.

       British Prime Minister Winston Churchill was pleased with the result. In 1944, he had explained to the House of Commons that "expulsion is the method which, so far as we have been able to see, will be the most satisfactory and lasting. There will be no mixture of populations to cause endless trouble ... a clean sweep will be made. I am not alarmed by the prospect of the disentanglement of populations, nor even by these large transferences, which are more possible in modern conditions than they ever were before." Churchill was right. The Germans accepted the new border, and decades of conflict between Poles and Germans ended.

       I don't know if Shapiro is ignorant of the fact, or did not want to undermine his argument, but the ethnic cleansing of Poland involved not only the expulsion of Germans, but other ethnic groups, including Jews. It similarly occurred all over Europe, not just in Poland. We will probably see the same within our lifetimes all over the West.