September 18, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Why the West HATES and is DESTROYING Itself"--Black Pigeon Speaks (10-1/2 min.)

Black Pigeon presents an interesting argument that World War II, the Nazis, and the Holocaust created a new foundation myth for the West--one that is self-destructive rather than uplifting or inspiring.

Range Notes:

        One of my friends picked up a Keltec KSG shotgun this weekend and we took it out to run a few rounds through it. Although he purchased a vertical foregrip, he hadn't purchased sites, so it was more of a handling and function test rather than accuracy (such as hitting a bouncing target or clay pigeons).  As you may know, the KSG is a bullpup, pump action shotgun that uses duel magazine tubes to give you up to 17 rounds on board. The controls are pretty straightforward: the action release is an ambidextrous lever ahead of the trigger; the safety is a push button that is above the trigger; and the switch for changing tubes is in the loading/ejection port just behind the two tubes. Take down is fairly simple as well, with two retention pins that can be removed to slide out the but stock and allow access to the internals, similar to HK/CETME pattern rifles. One trick, however, is that when sliding the butt stock into place, you need to lift up slightly on the bolt to provide clearance for the butt stock to slide into place.

       Although we only ran 17 rounds through it (basically loaded it up with a mixture of slugs and buckshot and shot through it), its mechanical function was fine for that limited shooting. The action seemed solid--it wasn't loose and locked up nicely. Like most pump action shotguns, you do need to make sure to solidly pull the slide to the rear to avoid short-stroking. Ejection is straight down from the ejection port which, if you have the weapon to your shoulder, will drop the empty shell between your torso and your arm.

       Recoil mitigation was surprisingly good. The weapon comes with a thick recoil pad that does a very good job of absorbing recoil. It was more a shove than a blow when firing. And, between the in-line action and stock arrangement and use of a vertical front grip, the climb was minimal.

       The switch between each of the magazine tubes is manual: it didn't shift automatically. You can shift back and forth while shooting, but we noticed on a couple of occasions that a shell was sticking out just enough to occlude easy movement of the switch without pushing on the back of the shell slightly. However, when we had finished off one magazine, it was just a simple click of the switch to change tubes. Also, a nice feature, is that there are small slots along each tube that allow you to gauge how many rounds you have left.

       All in all, it seems like a very nice product, and certainly an imposing weapon. The two tubes and the bullpup configuration do a good job of eliminating two of the disadvantages to shotguns: insufficient capacity and overall length.  I would need to play with it some more, but I was favorably impressed with it.


Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

• "Surviving Irma - The Lessons Learned Post"--Silicon Greybeard. The author recommends not putting all your eggs into one basket, so to speak. He relates that he and his wife figured that electrical power would not be an issue because they had an LNG powered generator and plenty of fuel. However, a defective valve meant that the generator, while operating fine, was spraying out LNG. The author couldn't smell it, but a neighbor had and called the fire department. So, after that, they only ran the generator for an hour or two at a time ... which the author learned was not enough to keep refrigerated items cold.
• And a couple from Bayou Renaissance Man (Peter Grant):

• "In preparing for an emergency, flexibility is vital"--noting that even with the best of plans and preps for "bugging in," you may need to evacuate, so make sure you have a plan for evacuating that includes a reasonable amount of your supplies and what not.

• "A useful tip for storing emergency water supplies"--he notes that you can get rid of the plastic taste from most water storage containers using plain white vinegar (a half-gallon per container, and fill the rest of the way with water), let stand in a warm location for 2 days, and then empty and replace with clean water. He has some other useful advice for water storage, as well, so read the whole thing.

• "Hot Off the Assembly Line: Ruger AR-556 MPR"--The Firearms Blog. Ruger's new "multi-purpose rifle" is essentially what I did when I built an AR. It has an 18-inch barrel with a rifle-length gas action, and free floated in a 15-inch tube capable of accepting M-LOK accessories. The butt stock is adjustable, and it also comes with Ruger's "Elite 452" trigger at 4.5 pounds. The MSRP is $899, which seems a good deal considering what is included.
• "Don’t Dig the Rig #12"--Active Response Training. Greg Ellifritz will periodically post comments about a concealed carry rig featured in Concealed Nation's "Dig The Rig." Most of the time, it is because the set-up is impractical or presents some problems. In this post, however, Ellifritz's critique is not so much what is wrong, but tips on how it could be made a bit better: specifically, avoiding an after-market recoil spring in the Glock pistol, and picking better performing ammunition (the "Dig the Rig" guy was using 135 grain Hornady Critical Duty ammunition, which is designed for a full size pistol, not a short barreled concealed carry rig).
• "Hornady 62 Grain BLACK Accuracy Evaluation"--The New Rifleman. Short take: using two different rifles, the author found that the Hornady ammunition could only provide about 2 MOA accuracy.
• "The Many Moral Aspects of Violence and Resistance"--Ammo Land. The author discusses the Moriori people that once inhabited the Chatham Islands near New Zealand. After the island was discovered by the Maori and the British, the Moriori were quickly wiped out because of their strong pacifistic culture based on the teachings of a revered Chieftain, Nunuko. The author writes:

       Chief Nunuko had created a suicidal culture that would eventually accept slavery, rape and death for their families and themselves.

        We today view this as a failed culture, but there are some who would thrill to the bravery of the Moriori, whose principles guided them onto the path of death rather than to the use of violence, violence that would have protected their families and children. One might almost admire such a virtuous path, until we imagine the horendous screams of dying families.

The author goes on to discuss the obvious parallel that can be drawn between the Moriori and those who support open borders for the United States. Read the whole thing.

Other Stuff:

• Fake News: "The 'slowdown' in global warming is OVER: Met Office warns changes in the Pacific Ocean will make the Earth heat up faster"--Daily Mail. The problem with the Met Office's prediction is the timing: if they had made this announcement a couple of years ago, when the El Nino was starting and the Pacific was heating up, they at least would have had a leg to stand on. However, the NOAA is saying that the current El Nino is over, and are predicting a La Nina--a cooling of the Pacific Ocean. The NOAA explains:

        The sea surface temperature in our favorite Niño3.4 region in the central Pacific was about 0.1°C colder than the long-term average over June – August, smack-dab in the neutral range. The atmosphere also reflected neutral conditions during the summer, with the winds above the equatorial Pacific neither particularly enhanced nor weakened, and an average pattern in the clouds and rainfall.

         While neutral prevailed during meteorological summer (what we call June – August, while the summer solstice through the vernal equinox is “astronomical summer”), we began to see some indications over the course of August that a change may be afoot. The first of these is the downward trend in central Pacific sea surface temperature anomalies (departure from the long-term mean) from July into August, with the August average in the Nino3.4 region of about -0.4°C, using ERSSTv4 data.

• Related: "Greenland Ice Sheet's 2017 weigh-in suggests a small increase in ice mass"--NOAA. Per the article and included graphics, the melt area in 2017 was smaller than average in late spring and early summer, and the ice sheet actually gained in size in August.

• Yes, if there is a correlation: "Looting and Race: Should It Matter?"--PJ Media. And the article supports a correlation. The subject of the article is a news reporter in Houston that reported on blacks looting and but whites carrying items that they found, suggesting racial animus on the part of the reporter. Except, what the reporter described was true. The blacks had broken into intact stores to steal merchandise such as shoes; whereas the whites were actually carrying food items they found floating in the water. But even if both were looting, Kira Davis, a black woman, makes some good points:

So what if it’s an unfair comparison? Is no one going to say anything about the fact that it’s a damn embarrassment as a black person to watch other black people so gleefully and pathetically steal the labor of others when the people around them are at their most vulnerable? We should be talking about how disgusting it is to watch our own people act like thieves and feral animals. We should be talking about how there is an entire segment of our community that seems to think these actions are justified because of oppression, slavery or hypocrisy. Black Lives Matter demands that all Americans display more respect and compassion for black Americans, but has no words at all about the disrespect we show for ourselves. How can we expect the American majority to take us seriously and show us more respect when we refuse to be accountable for the rot in our own communities?

• "Diversity Can Spell Trouble"--Victor Davis Hanson at the Hoover Institute. While he probably would not like the characterization, Hanson has picked up on something that the Alt-Right has been saying for years:

       ... Amid all this turmoil, we forget that diversity was always considered a liability in the history of nations—not an asset.  

        Ancient Greece’s numerous enemies eventually overran the 1,500 city-states because the Greeks were never able to sublimate their parochial, tribal, and ethnic differences to unify under a common Hellenism. The Balkans were always a lethal powder keg due to the region’s vastly different religions and ethnicities where East and West traditionally collided—from Roman and Byzantine times through the Ottoman imperial period to the bloody twentieth century. Such diversity often caused destructive conflicts of ethnic and religious hatred. Europe for centuries did not celebrate the religiously diverse mosaic of Catholic, Orthodox, and Protestant Christians, but instead tore itself apart in a half-millennium of killing and warring that continued into the late twentieth century in places like Northern Ireland.

        In multiracial, multiethnic, and multi-religious societies—such as contemporary India or the Middle East—violence is the rule in the absence of unity. Even the common banner of a brutal communism could not force all the diverse religions and races of the Soviet Union to get along. Japan, meanwhile, does not admit many immigrants, while Germany has welcomed over a million, mostly young Muslim men from the war-torn Middle East. The result is that Japan is in many ways more stable than Germany, which is reeling over terrorist violence and the need for assimilation and integration of diverse newcomers with little desire to become fully German.

• Speaking of diversity: "Pregnant woman believed among 4 shot dead in Brighton Park rifle attack"--Chicago Tribune. According to the article, "[t]he shooting happened about 8:40 p.m. in the 4700 block of South Fairfield Avenue, police said. Three men and a woman were inside a vehicle when someone inside a white SUV opened fire on them with a rifle, police said.: What makes this article notable is that the four killed were all Hispanic, and it occurred in a Hispanic neighborhood. 
• "Sombrero massacre: Drugs gang victims are decapitated and dumped in the street with their heads in traditional headwear after being kidnapped in Mexico"--Daily Mail.
• "The party's over: Republicans and Democrats are both finished"--CNBC.  Discussing the current hollowing out of the two parties:

        Never before have we seen the leadership of both major political parties so humbled. That power vacuum is currently enabling the president to act without any loyalty to his own party, while working with whomever he pleases on whatever issues he wants.

         It's why we have a Republican congressional leadership, headlined by a Senate Majority Leader with an 18 percent approval rating in his own home state, that could not deliver on its party's seven-year-long promises to repeal and replace Obamacare.

         And it's why the Democratic Party is getting more and more embarrassed as its highly-experienced-but-failed 2016 presidential nominee continues to weaken the brand by going on a national tour blaming everyone else for her election loss.

The result, as the author describes in detail, is a president that will free to work with either party, and individual members siding with the President as is politically expedient, weakening the influence of the Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House positions. Truly setting the stage for the age of Caesarism. 

• And, to add icing to the cake: "Senators near deal to stabilize ObamaCare markets"--The Hill. Instead of getting rid of ObamaCare, or even letting it implode of its own volition, senior Republican leaders are working on a plan to use the public fisc to bail out insurers.
• "Street Hypnosis And Amygdala Function"--Anonymous Conservative. 

So the street hypnosis. The reporter had been off the grid for a while, and away from his normal haunts. A stranger approached out of the blue, and said something strangely specific to the individual, and indicative of knowing something unusual which he couldn’t possibly have known. The reporter reported feeling both extraordinarily confused and shocked. As he stammered a response, the approacher said more things, and the reporter said he couldn’t remember exactly what was said because he was so confused and shocked at the initial statement as he tried to figure out what was happening and how it could be happening. The middle of the encounter was a black hole in his mind.

• More research suggesting that there is no dark matter or dark energy: "New supernova analysis reframes dark energy debate"--Royal Astronomical Society.  

The accelerating expansion of the Universe may not be real, but could just be an apparent effect, according to new research published in the journal Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The new study—by a group at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch, New Zealand—finds the fit of Type Ia supernovae to a model universe with no dark energy to be very slightly better than the fit to the standard dark energy model.