October 26, 2017 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Rules for Rationalists: Out-Alinsky the Snowflake Monopoly"--Black Pigeon Speaks (14 min.)

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:

• "Surveillance video shows a violent carjacking at a Philadelphia gas station that left a pizza deliveryman, 56, in a coma for THREE DAYS"--Daily Mail. You should check out the video at the link. The gist of the incident is this: 5 young blacks--ages estimated at between 14 and 25 years of age--went up to the front door of an establishment and waited there until the victim left. One of them pulled a revolver on the victim, who either did not realize it or ignored it, and subsequently struck the victim on the back of the head with the revolver. The perpetrators then milled around for a few seconds (probably to see if anyone reacted), then one searched and took items of the unconscious victim while another drove off in the victim's car. So, lesson is that if you see a group of young black men (or other street toughs) hanging around the door to a pizza shop or convenience store, expect that there might be trouble.
• "Americans Connect at 5,000 Yards (2.84 Miles) for NEW Long Range World Record"--The Firearms Blog. According to the article, the rifle used was "an Armalite AR-30 chambered in '.408 Tejas' which is another wildcat caliber based off of the .408 Chey Tac."
• "The Drawbacks of a Subcompact Single-Stack 9mm"--Shooting Illustrated.  Tamara Keel notes that single-stack 9 mm's tend to suffer from the same drawbacks of other small handguns: short sight radius, low magazine capacity (6+1 for most models), and issues with recoil control due to the light weight and the fact that the grips on such handguns are generally so short as to only give you a two-fingered grip without some sort of magazine extension. The shorter barrel also means lower muzzle velocity which can translate into lower penetration or reduced expansion of the bullet. But she also mentions a psychological factor: that you may believe that the handgun is the equal of a larger pistol and act accordingly:

In reality, the G43 is a lot closer, capability-wise, to a J-frame revolver or a pocket .380 ACP, and that is going to drive my tactics and decision making. In a scenario such as one with a lunatic in a movie theater or mall, the little G43 can’t engage from ranges where I’d be perfectly comfortable making a shot with a G17. They may both say “Glock 9x19” on the slide, but the gulf in capability between duty size and pocket size is broader than some people realize. The armed citizen who carries a single-stack 9mm owes it to him or herself to know exactly what can or cannot be done with it.

• "Australian Gun Control Won’t Work in the USA – Part One"--Ammo Land. Samuel Clemens purportedly observed that there were three types of lies: lies, damn lies, and statistics. Statistical analysis is an important tool, but they can be easily be manipulated. Case in point, the author of this piece notes how statistics have been misused to exaggerate the affect on crime and suicides in Australia due to that countries ban on firearms. The problem is that proponents of the firearms bans only focus on deaths by firearms rather than deaths overall. For instance, although suicides dropped slightly immediately after the gun ban, it was temporary, and suicide rates remain about the same post-ban: it is just that suicidal people have found different ways to kill themselves. Overall homicide rates have decreased, but this is due to a downward trend in homicides that had begun before the firearm ban, suggesting that the firearm ban did nothing to reduce overall homicide rates.
• "Mossberg Adds a 20 Gauge Non-NFA 590 Shockwave"--The Truth About Guns. I think that this would be a better sized cartridge for these type of firearms inasmuch as they lack a butt stock.
• "Magpul Disputes Army Claims of PMAG Cold Weather Performance"--Kit Up.  The issue here is that the Army subjects magazines to drop tests at -60 degrees Fahrenheit. If the magazine cracks, it is considered to have failed the test regardless of whether the magazine is still usable. The PMAGs cracked when dropped, so it failed the test. Magpul's dispute is that the magazines may have cracked, but they still functioned.
• "A Soldier’s Mind: PTSD Marked by Shame More than Guilt, Study Says"--Lab. From the article:

        But now a study conducted on dozens of current and former warriors points to a subtle distinction in the psychological suffering of the PTSD brain: it is shame, and not guilt that is driving these effects.

         Shame is the feeling that one’s person is bad, as in in, “I’m a monster.” Guilt, on the other hand, is limited to a feeling of culpability for a specific incident, as in “I killed civilians during the war.”

        The shame was a more accurate predictor of PTSD, writes the team from Department of Veterans Affairs and the University of Tulsa in the British Journal of Clinical Psychology.

       “The findings of our study provide additional evidence that we should see shame and guilt as distinct emotions with unique roles in PTSD,” said Katherine C. Cunningham, corresponding author, of the VA’s Mid-Atlantic Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center in North Carolina.

• "'Go ahead, skin that smokewagon and see what happens' by Secret Squirrel"--Brushbeater. This is guest post that is intended to follow up Brushbeater's prior article on selecting an AR caliber (see my October 15, 2017 post). In his article, Brushbeater presumed that his readers would be using an AR style rifle for SHTF and focused on caliber selection. This article is similar: the author presumes that you will be using a quality semi-automatic handgun (his favorites are Glock, CZ and H&K) and mostly limits his discussion to 9x19mm versus .40 S&W versus .45 ACP. Basically, while he likes the .40, he discounts it on account of recoil (it really puts a lot of wear and tear on the handgun) and logistics: that it is being abandoned by many shooters and law enforcement, and he anticipates that ammo availability will follow. So, it comes down to .45 versus 9 mm which each have their advantages and disadvantages. Again, however, logistics (cost and availability) favors the 9 mm, as does magazine capacity.
• "The H&K’s Grandaddy Is Back (Almost!): Gerät 06 Reproductions Undergo Test Firing"--The Firearms Blog. As some of you know, the HK roller lock system was inherited from the CETME rifle developed in Spain, which was a continuation of development that had begun in Germany during World War II. This article notes that a company that is intending on reproducing the early German models has reached its testing phase. 
• A reminder why you don't want to shoot .357 Magnum out of a J-frame sized revolver: "Gun Review: Smith & Wesson Model 360 .357 Magnum Revolver"--The Truth About Guns. If you want .357 out of a short barrel revolver, you will need to look at the Chiappa Rhino.
• "New Dot Torture Variation"--Active Response Training. Another target with accompanying drill to test your handgun skills. There is a link for downloading a printable version of the target in the article.

Other Stuff:

• I had linked the other day to Michael Owen's article on "Two Americas," but it was not the original article. I finally tracked down the original of his article at The Burning Platform.
• "Open Sources 16 OCT 17: The Pending Kurdistan-Shia War"--Brushbeater. It's going to happen whether or not the U.S. refuses to recognize the Kurdish territories in Northern Iraq as independent. And it will suck in Syria and Turkey to boot.
• "North Korea May be Ramping up Biological Weapons Program Under Guise of Farming"--Lab. From the article: "'North Korea’s Biological Weapons Program: The Known and Unknown' concludes there could be as many as 13 biological agents cultivated by the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea – and it [sic] could be delivered on missiles, by drone, or even through human agents with backpack sprayers and/or directly into water supplies."
• "London now more dangerous than New York City, crime stats suggest"--The Telegraph. The article reports that "London is now more crime ridden and dangerous than New York City, with rape, robbery and violent offences far higher on this side of the Atlantic. The latest statistics, published earlier this week, revealed that crime across the UK was up by 13 per cent, with a surge in violence in the capital blamed for much of the increase." Of course it is. London is a "minority-majority" city comprised of people from societies that never went through the full civilizing process as did the West. Barbarians will be barbarians; savages will be savages.
• "Majority Of White Americans Say They Believe Whites Face Discrimination"--NPR (see also this Daily Mail article). I figured this out my senior year of high school when my high school counselor handed me a big fat book of scholarships to go through to see for which ones I might qualify. If your parents didn't work for a big corporation, the remaining scholarships fell into two categories: those for women and those for racial minorities. Fortunately, I had other financial aid and scholarships due to my SAT scores and doing very well in a science competition, and my parents being so poor that I qualified for Pell Grants. But I knew after looking through that book that minorities had no excuse for not being able to go to college. While I'm not aware of any jobs that I didn't get because of my race, I know at least one internship that I didn't get while in college because I wasn't a woman, and another professional job that I have strong suspicions that I didn't get because I wasn't a woman.
• "Vice President Mike Pence says the Trump administration will subvert the UN and send help directly to Christians in Iraq."--PJ Media. It is a sad day that the U.S. has to go around the UN in order to prevent a genocide of Christians. It shows how truly useless and corrupt the UN has become.
• Ignorance must be bliss: "Michael Barone: Jeff Flake is the senator from the wrong state"--Washington Examiner. Jeff Flake is a current senator from Arizona that has decided to not run for reelection. Some have argued it is because Flake changed when he moved from the House of Representatives to the Senate. Barone argues in this article that Flake didn't change: he has always been a globalist (e.g., supporting open borders as to trade and immigrants). Barone goes farther, however, in contending that this is in tune with Flake's religious beliefs as a practicing "Mormon." Barone writes:

As voters, members of the LDS Church tend to be Republicans, free market on economics, conservative on such cultural issues as abortion, but also sympathetic to immigrants. These are all Jeff Flake's positions.

He also adds:

        Utah voters, much like Flake, have been largely resistant to the charms of President Trump. As I noted in March 2016, Trump's appeal has been weakest among people with high degrees of what social scientist Robert Putnam calls social connectedness, and no identifiable group of Americans has higher social connectedness than members of the LDS Church.

        In its March 22 caucuses, Utah Republicans gave only 14 percent of their votes to Trump; far behind Ted Cruz's 69 percent and trailing even John Kasich's 17 percent. Trump's 13.82 percent was barely higher than the 13.77 he got in the District of Columbia and his 13.80 percent in Puerto Rico. In the 2016 general election, Trump carried Utah, but with only 45 percent of the vote, as Independent Evan McMullin, an LDS Church member and Brigham Young graduate, got 21 percent, almost as much as Hillary Clinton's 27 percent. Trump's 45 percent was far behind Mitt Romney's 73 percent in the state, and indeed was fractionally lower than the 45 percent Barry Goldwater got there in 1964.

I would agree that many prominent LDS Church leaders appear to support globalist ideas. It is also true that the LDS Church has a very vocal minority of members that trend left when it comes to issues such as immigration. However, that is not the majority of Mormons. While it is true that Evan McMullin pulled a lot of votes from Trump in Utah, it probably had more to do with the McMullin being Mormon than with Trump's policies. Moreover, Barone's statistics are misleading. 60.7% of Utahans are Mormon. Although Trump had less support among Utah Mormons than other recent Republican candidates, Pew’s national exit polls showed that 61% of LDS voters in Utah voted for Trump. A further breakdown of Mormon voters and their stand on the issues is given in "Mormons, Trump and McMullin: A 2016 postmortem by the numbers," which shows that a significant number of LDS supporters of Trump were concerned about immigration and did not view racial diversity as positive.  If Trump, and his platform, had truly been unpopular among Mormons, as Barone argues, Trump would have lost Utah. 

• The swamp needs to be drained: "Here Are The 10 Most Important Reported Claims About The Steele Dossier On Russia"--Mollie Hemingway at The Federalist. And No. 10: "The Steele dossier was a Clinton/DNC-funded operation supported by the FBI and influenced heavily by Russian operatives in the Kremlin."
• "The devil that is Disney"--Vox Popoli. The upcoming second season of the Disney Channel series Andi Mack will feature a gay character with a crush on another one of the male characters. Vox Day comments: "They [Disney] are one of the primary engine's of the West's degeneracy and decline. It is not an accident that everything they touch, in every industry, turns into morally radioactive slime."
• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "In Flesh-Cutting Task, Autonomous Robot Surgeon Beats Human Surgeons"--IEEE Spectrum.