August 15, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web (Updated)

"Either Act to End the Threat or Leave the Area"--Active Self Protection (4 min).

The example used in this video is surveillance footage of a hitman shooting his victim. During the shooting, the victims friends/colleagues just mill around unsure of what to do. Related article here. 

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

• While still maintaining that its P320 is still safe, "SIG SAUER Announces Details of Free P320 ‘Voluntary Upgrade’ Program"--The Truth About Guns. You can register your upgrade with Sig here.
• "Back to Basics: Rifle Barrels"--American Rifleman. Barrel nomenclature and manufacture.
• "More on the Soldier’s Load: Pounds Upon Pounds"--The Firearms Blog. The author was directed to a couple studies showing how overloaded soldiers and marines are currently--and now they want to move back to heavier cartridge.
• "Radiology student, 25, is found alive after going missing in the Alabama wilderness for a MONTH, surviving on only berries and wild mushrooms"--Daily Mail. She apparently got involved with a "bad boy" type who took her along to rob a remote cabin. She didn't like what was going on and fled on foot into the woods where she promptly became lost. Nevertheless, she was able to survive, although she lost 50 lbs.
• "Exploded View: Remington Model 870 Shotgun"--American Rifleman. Those of you with an 870 might find this useful: disassembly instruction and diagrams, as well as an exploded parts diagram of the entire weapon.
• "Solving Cross-Eye Dominance in Rifle Shooting"--Shooting Illustrated. From the article:

You have three choices when you have cross-eye dominance in this situation [shooting using an open sight]: Close the dominant eye (opposite your strong shooting side) so that only the non-dominant eye sees anything, switch your shooting to the weak-hand/dominant eye side or train your non-dominant eye to be dominant. I took the last approach by retraining my brain to ignore the dominant-eye image and instead give prominence to the non-dominant eye image when both eyes are open. I have no idea if optically educated folks or the expert-shooter class would condone my method, but I stopped worrying about such things a long time ago. I used this technique through a great deal of real-world CQB and I’m still here to write about it, so I know it works. But, practice is required to get to the point where you don’t have to think about which sight image to use under pressure. You can practice on the range, during dry fire or simply with your finger out in front of your face, but using the strong shooting side/weaker eye image has to be an automatic process before you rely on it in a pinch.

• Forward Observer is moving. New site here.
• "Don’t Get Locked Out"--Breach Bang Clear. The author recommends carrying a basic set of lockpicks taped to the inside of your cell phone case so you always have them (assuming that you always carry your phone). I would remind readers that some jurisdictions make it illegal to carry burglary tools, so you may want to check your state or local laws.
• "Homemade Pistols and the Post Shooting Investigation"--Gabe Suarez has a word of caution for those using 80% lowers to build a weapon: according to detectives with whom he has been working, law enforcement looks dimly on persons using firearms without serial numbers, assuming that you only have such a weapon for some nefarious purpose.
• "The Woodpecker In The Quiet Wood"--Mason Dixon Tactical. A response to negative comments that have been made concerning the author's statements that no amount of civil training will ever make up for lack of military training.

Other Stuff:

• Some more indications that the Charlottesville incident was manufactured: "Antifa Started Violence In Charlottesville, Police Directed White Nationalists To Disperse To Where Antifa Was"--Weasel Zippers. According to the author: "When the rally was declared an illegal protest, the Unite the Right folks were directed to disperse in direction of the Antifa." Video at link. I think the Unite the Right folks should practice close order formation and use of a shield wall. Nobody was better at that than the Romans, so there is no lack of information on how it was done.

• Update: This is interesting: "White Supremacist Leader in Charlottesville Jason Kessler Was Obama Supporter – Occupy Protester"--Gateway Pundit.

• Antifa and BLM are emboldened and go on vandalizing spree:

• "NC Confederate monument vandalized following events in Charlottesville"--Fox 46 Charlottesville. 

• "Protesters topple Confederate soldier statue in downtown Durham"--The Herald Sun.

• "Sheriff's office to seek charges for vandalism of Confederate statue"--WITN.

• "Confederate monument in Baltimore drenched with red paint"--Baltimore Sun.

• "Charlottesville Riots Ignites Atlanta Protest Vandalism in Piedmont Park."--CBS Atlanta.

• "Confederate memorial park in Florida vandalized with paint"--ABC News. 

• "North Carolina protesters topple Confederate soldier statue as several memorials across the U.S. are vandalized in the wake of deadly Charlottesville clashes over Robert E. Lee statue"--Daily Mail. 

• Lest we forget where letting the socialists win will lead: "Hungry Venezuelans turn to Colombia for a plate of food"--Fox 5 NY. Colombian organizations have apparently set up soup kitchens just across the border in Venezuela to provide assistance. Per the article:

       An estimated 25,000 Venezuelans make the trek across the Simon Bolivar International Bridge into Colombia each day. Many come for a few hours to work or trade goods on the black market, looking for household supplies they cannot find back home.

       But increasingly, they are coming to eat in one of a half-dozen facilities offering struggling Venezuelans a free plate of food.

• "WHO: Yemen cholera infections exceed 500,000"--Deutsche Welle. That is the number of infections; an estimated 2,000 have died.
• The convergence continues: "No One Expects The Google Inquisition, But It’s Coming"--The Federalist. The author explains:

We have already moved into the inevitable next stage of the James Damore “Google memo” saga. This is the stage where it’s not enough to fire Damore. We also have to fire everyone left at the company who might agree with him in any way. No one expects the Google Inquisition.

He continues:

       ... Remember that Damore originally circulated his memo privately on an internal Google message board for discussing work policies. There was no immediate crackdown from his bosses and there probably wouldn’t have been—except that one of his co-workers clearly wanted to force Google’s hand by leaking the memo to the press and creating a frenzy.

        Well, they’re at it again. Someone followed up by sending further leaks to the media, consisting of photos of internal message board discussions showing that some other Googlers agreed with Damore, at least in part. The obvious purpose of those leaks is to keep up the pressure on Google, to set off an inquiry into how many other horrible, raging, sexist bigots—as Damore has been styled in the technology media—also need to be purged from the company. That’s the clear implication: that Google needs to conduct a thorough investigation to root out any other James Damores who might be lurking there.

• Just like Aesop warns in several fables on snakes and scorpians: it is in their nature. "Syrian Migrants Visit Swedish Family Who Sheltered Them, One Rapes Their 14"--Blazing Cats Fur. Here is the story:

       In the Swedish region of Västmanland, a woman lived in a house in a town, together with her children. Her house had previously been the home of a so-called ‘unaccompanied refugee child‘.

       According to Västmanland District Court records, this former resident, accompanied by his brother and three other men aged 20 to 25, went back to his old house in November 2016, to greet the family which had sheltered him. They stayed two nights, after which the mother reported to the police that her 14-year-old daughter had been raped by one of them, a 25-year-old from Syria.

• "Turkey to China: Your Security Is Ours"--American Interest. From a couple weeks ago:

Turkey regards China’s security as akin to its own and will move to stamp out any anti-China reports in its media, Turkish Foreign Minister Mevlut Cavusoglu said on Thursday, after meeting his Chinese counterpart Wang Yi. 

Given its rapprochement with Russia and China, it appears that Turkey is betting that America (and Europe, for that matter) are no longer the strong horse when it comes to global matters. 

• "Hostile Terrain: Tank Traps, Fake Towns & Secret Tunnels of the Korean Borderlands"--99 Percent Invisible. Photographs and more concerning the fortifications and tunnels along the Demilitarized Zone.
• "Uncivil Religion" by Angelo M. Codevilla at the American Affairs Journal. This is a review of the book The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: How America’s Civil Religion Betrayed the National Interest by Walter A. McDougall. By civil religion, he is not talking about Christianity, per se, but the drive to improve the world that underlies late Christianity, the Progressives, and the Socialists/Marxists (by the way, it is this connection that led Oswald Spengler to conclude that socialism is the natural successor to Western Christianity). An interesting excerpt from Codevilla's essay:

       McDougall reports that William Randolph Hearst bankrolled a movie, Gabriel over the White House (1933), about a president who “miraculously transformed into that Platonic ideal, the benevolent dictator.” That, of course, is the whole rationale behind the campaign for the administrative state, which Progressives have waged since the 1870s. FDR loved the movie. More important, the taste for supposedly benevolent administration was widespread enough in those years to lead countless American Progressives to see all manner of good and imitable things in the regimes of Benito Mussolini, Adolf Hitler, and especially of Joseph Stalin. The archives of America’s prestige press bear witness to how unshakable was that passion. Diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union in 1933—just as the genocide-by-starvation of the Ukraine was getting into high gear—was Franklin Roosevelt’s only major foreign policy initiative between his inauguration and 1940.

        Only outright lies could balance the equation between religious universalism and pro-Soviet foreign policy. FDR delivered them with a straight face. The Soviet constitution of 1936, he said, guaranteed religious liberty. America did not believe him. That disbelief helps explain why, especially after June 1941, when Germany broke the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and invaded Russia, only an attack on America itself could convince the vast majority of Americans to enter a war whose winner would be either Hitler or Stalin, both equally godless. That in turn is why FDR resisted all attempts to bring the question of war and peace to Congress and why he yearned for Germany or Japan to do something that would outrage Americans.

        McDougall’s account of what that yearning entailed is limited to the Roosevelt administration’s drafting of (and perhaps being responsible for the leak of) Rainbow 5, a plan for war with Germany, as well as to Roosevelt’s request to his principal advisers to ensure “that Japan was put into the wrong and made the first bad move—overt move.” Hence the provocative effects of the economic sanctions and diplomatic demands placed on Japan in the autumn of 1941 were far from accidental, in McDougall’s view. His point is that FDR and his class had come to desire the war precisely in order to mobilize the American people behind a gigantic enterprise in which the defeat of Germany and Japan was merely instrumental. Indeed, he shows that utopian postwar planning for “extra-regional hegemony” had begun at least a year before the war broke out, and two years before U.S. entry into it “in the expectation that the United States would eventually have the means, motive, and opportunity to achieve it.”

       McDougall’s use of the language of criminology is no more an accident than administration officials’ appeal to the American people’s religiosity. In 1942 the Federal Council of Churches’ Commission on a Just and Lasting Peace (established by John Foster Dulles) declared that it is “the purpose of God to create a world-wide community in Jesus Christ, transcending nation, race and class.” The statement was unexceptionable as an expression of Christian theology, but heretical in its intended confusion of God and the U.S. government, and perverse in the result it produced: indulgence of the deadly fantasy that the Soviet Union’s purposes were potentially allied with America’s. This view, George Kennan wrote, was “the great deceit that was practiced on the American public.” Reinhold Niebuhr “sensed power-hungry elites lurking behind the utopian plans for postwar collective security. . . . It would be fatal to assume that the wiser and more sensitive forces of America have already lost the battle against an irresponsible expression of American power in the postwar world.” This world would be one of illusions manipulated by illusion-makers in government, academia, the media, and corporate and religious life. Disney figured in at the 1964 World’s Fair, with child dolls, identical but for color and dress, singing “It’s a Small World (After All).” Librarian of Congress Daniel Boorstin diagnosed it thus in his The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1962): “we are the most illusioned people on earth. . . . Our illusions are the very house in which we live; they are our news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our very experience. . . . We have come to believe in our own images, till we have projected ourselves out of this world.”

Read the whole thing. 

• As a follow up to my Inconstant Moon post, from Malachi 4:1:

For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble: and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.