March 21, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Best Short Barrel 9mm? Asym 9mm 115gr +P TAC-XP gel test"--TFB TV (7 min.)

This cartridge did well both in the bare-gel test and the heavy clothing test in both penetration and expansion.

• "What and Why 5R Rifling?"--Faxon Firearms. Standard rifling uses an even number of lands and grooves, such that the lands and grooves are opposite one another: that is, a groove will have a groove opposite it, and a land will have a land opposite it. 5R uses an odd number, so a groove will have a land opposite, and vice-versa. The advantage (or so it is advertised) is that 5R causes less deformation to the bullet as it is squeezed into the rifling which, in theory, should provide more accuracy down range.
• "Centerfire Rifle Wounds"--Bev Fitchett's Guns Magazine. A discussion of contact, intermediate and distance wounds. The photographs are gruesome, so this may not be safe for work.
• "4 Go-To Setups for Any Defensive AR-15"--Shooting Illustrated. One of the difficulties in attempting to present a general review of the AR-15 is that it is no longer a particular model (or even closely related model) of firearm, but a whole class or family of firearms, with widely disparate configurations, calibers, quality of parts, etc. Although the author of this article did not intend to produce a generalized taxonomy of AR rifles and carbines, his classification system can be helpful in that regard. In any event, the author's concern in his article is that "[t]he challenge for the AR-15 owner isn’t whether something exists to enhance your system’s performance, it’s a question of which combination of products best meets your needs." He then offers up four (4) basic configurations which he believes addresses certain common needs of the shooter.

         First is the what he terms the Type 1 AR-15: "a basic and inexpensive, yet functional, carbine." It uses only the iron sights for a sighting system, but will still sport a flashlight and a 2-point sling. As the author writes:

Starting with a Type 1 MSR allows you to field a capable system immediately at the lowest cost possible, while leaving you room to expand into optics and lasers as the resources become available. The other types of carbines we’ll cover are built upon the Type 1. If your finances allow, skip the Type 1 and go straight to the type that best meets your mission needs. 

         The Type 2 is fitted with a red dot or holographic sight of some sort and, optionally, a laser sight if you might be using night vision devices or shooting while wearing a gas mask. The author explains:

While iron sights are serviceable, a red-dot sight enhances your carbine’s capabilities significantly in several ways. First, a red-dot sight eliminates the need to line up three objects in space (the rear sight, front sight and target) while focusing on the one in the middle. While this focus becomes second nature with training, it still takes time to do in real life. If your carbine is intended for defensive use, every millisecond is life or death in a gunfight, and the milliseconds gained by being able to just focus on the target (which your brain wants to do anyway) and put the dot where you want the bullets to go (compensating for offset at close range), could be the margin you need. A red-dot sight also allows for more-precise shots in low-light conditions, reduces the imperative of a perfect cheek weld and makes shooting from unusual positions a more-realistic affair. 

        The Type 3 uses a fixed power, ACOG type sight, and is intended for where the carbine will generally be used a longer distances, in the open (i.e., not CQB).

         The Type 4 uses a variable power 1-4x, 1-6x, or 1-8x, The author writes:

This is the most versatile of all the AR-15 types, giving you the ability to work very close to all the way to the outward edge of the .223 Rem./5.56 NATO ballistic envelope. This versatility, however, comes at a price. Variable-power optics require a significant amount of training effort in order for you to become accustomed to the specific eye-relief, reticle use, power adjustment and range-estimation skills required to get the full use of your particular optic. Having said that, if by some freak accident of law or circumstance I could only have one AR-15, it would be a Type 4 MSR or a Type 2 MSR with a 3X magnifier behind the unmagnified red-dot sight (making a kind of hybrid Type 4).

• "The impossibility of surrender"--Oleg Volk comments that at some point the government will come for your guns. He suggests that if you can't produce all the firearms the government says you own, no matter whose fault or what explanation is given, the government set on tyranny will imprison or execute you; but, on the other hand, the government can't risk there being undocumented arms, so it may kill or imprison you anyway.
• "Global warming on trial and the elementary error of physics that caused the global warming scare"--Watts Up With That. The author's abstract:

Abstract: In a dynamical system, even an unamplified input signal induces a response to any feedback. Hitherto, however, the large feedback response to emission temperature has been misattributed to warming from the naturally-occurring, non-condensing greenhouse gases. After correction, the theoretically-derived pre-industrial feedback fraction is demonstrated to cohere with the empirically-derived industrial-era value an order of magnitude below previous estimates, mandating reduction of projected Charney sensitivity from 3.3 +/- 1.2K to 1.2 +/- 0.15K.

• "How Activity On The Sun Could Change The Economy"--Forbes. From the article:

         However, the whole matter is complicated by the fact that while the world was warming up in the 20th century the number of sunspots were above their average count. Remember, other things being equal, more spots means warmer earth temperatures.

         When the book was published in hardback in 2015, the author was reluctant to forecast the likely outcome of the current sunspot cycle.

          But what has become more apparent based on more recent research from NASA is that we are now in a period of very few or no sunspots. This has coincided with the brutal winter we are going through now.

         The question is whether we will enter another grand solar minimum just like the Maunder minimum which if history is a guide would mean a period of much colder weather winters and summers. More than a few experts with whom I speak regularly believe that we shall enter such a grand minimum along with the resulting bone-chilling weather.

         If that happens, then there will be profound influences on the economy, including possible crop failures and rising energy use for home and workplace heating. Or in other words, expect bigger bills for food and energy. After a period in which the supply of both has been increasingly abundant then this change will likely come as a shock to many people and likely the broader global economy as well.

• Related: "Make it stop! 75 million Americans on alert and 3,900 flights are cancelled as fourth nor'easter in a month threatens to dump a foot of snow from West Virginia to Massachusetts on the first full day of spring"--Daily Mail. 

• "NOAA Data Tampering Approaching 2.5 Degrees"--The Deplorable Climate Science Blog. The author notes: "NOAA’s US temperature record shows that US was warmest in the 1930’s and has generally cooled as CO2 has increased.  This wrecks greenhouse gas theory, so they 'adjust' the data to make it look like the US is warming." The adjustment upward is especially puzzling because honest adjustments would be downward. The reason is that rural weather stations have gradually disappeared, while urban stations are generally in "heat islands" caused by being surrounded by concrete, asphalt, or being located near heat producing devices such as air conditioners.
• "Devout Christian Austin bomber, 23, who blew himself up after cops released CCTV of him in disguise sending two packages at a FedEx office in campaign of terror"--Daily Mail. Per the article, the alleged bomber, Mark Anthony Conditt, 23, blew himself up as police tried to arrest him on Wednesday. The article does not list any evidence or justification for the claim in the headline that the bomber was a devout Christian, and there is currently no information on a motive. Using liberal logic, though, I believe that the only correct response would be to boycott FedEx until it agrees that only people 25 years or older can use its services ... after an appropriate background check, of course.
• "Deputies: Woman and girl dead after man attacks family, sets home on fire"--Fox 13 News. Unlike the prior headline, this one is silent on the religion of the perpetrator, even though he is a member of the Nation of Islam and was screaming "Allah snackbar" or something like that in the background of the 911 call.
• "Electing a New People"--Vox Popoli. Commenting on a Pew Poll regarding the changing demographics of the political parties (especially the Democrats), Vox Day comments:

So, what Pew is observing is nothing less than the large-scale transformation of white people from ideology-based politics to identity-based politics in a single generation. As I predicted several years ago, the two major parties will be the White Party and the Not-White Party, regardless of what they are officially called in order to maintain the pretense of a single nation.

• Law enforcement won't protect you: "Woman who took in Nikolas Cruz and his brother breaks her silence: 'I did everything I could'"--Sun Sentinel. Multiple calls to police about Cruz's violence and threats. Interestingly, the woman (Rocxanne Deschamps) indicated that she told police that Cruz was emotionally and mentally like a 12 year old. This would suggest that not only was he mentally ill, but may have been mentally retarded as well. It reminds me of the plot of Jonathan Kellerman's novel, Time Bomb, where a mentally deficient young woman is psychologically programmed to shoot up an elementary school.
• British police just didn't want to get involved: "Telford: Police Failed to Act While Shahzad Khan Made £2,000 a Night Selling Victims at ‘The Rape House’"--Breitbart. From the article:

        Grooming gang victims have described how police failed to act as paedophile Shahzad ‘Keith’ Khan raked in money selling their bodies to scores of abusers at a property dubbed ‘The Rape House’.

         The Pakistani migrant, who died in 2015 aged 61, had targeted girls in the town since 1981, picking up at least one of his victims from under the noses of the authorities outside a police station on a regular basis, the Mirror reports.

        “He’d pick me up right outside the police station in Wellington and sometimes police cars would drive past us,” she said.

        “They must have realised something was very badly wrong but they never said a word, nor asked me what I was doing with a much older man.”

• Why don't they just make mudslides illegal? Or perhaps students could demonstrate against mud slides? "Montecito is under mandatory evacuation AGAIN ahead of a massive Pacific storm warning that could bring more rain than the deadly mudslides that killed 21 people earlier this year"--Daily Mail. 
• "Invisible Mask: Practical Attacks on Face Recognition with Infrared." (PDF). This appears to be an unpublished paper by Chinese researchers. The abstract:

        Accurate face recognition techniques make a series of critical applications possible: policemen could employ it to retrieve criminals’ faces from surveillance video streams; cross boarder travelers could pass a face authentication inspection line without the involvement of officers. Nonetheless, when public security heavily relies on such intelligent systems, the designers should deliberately consider the emerging attacks aiming at misleading those systems employing face recognition.

         We propose a kind of brand new attack against face recognition systems, which is realized by illuminating the subject using infrared according to the adversarial examples worked out by our algorithm, thus face recognition systems can be bypassed or misled while simultaneously the infrared perturbations cannot be observed by raw eyes. Through launching this kind of attack, an attacker not only can dodge surveillance cameras. More importantly, he can impersonate his target victim and pass the face authentication system, if only the victim’s photo is acquired by the attacker. Again, the attack is totally unobservable by nearby people, because not only the light is invisible, but also the device we made to launch the attack is small enough. According to our study on a large dataset, attackers have a very high success rate with a over 70% success rate for finding such an adversarial example that can be implemented by infrared. To the best of our knowledge, our work is the first one to shed light on the severity of threat resulted from infrared adversarial examples against face recognition.

I've seen similar devices (a cap with a bunch of infrared LEDs) before, but those relied on the LEDs to blind a camera, not an attempt to mislead a facial recognition system using the camera.

• Related: "How tech caught a killer: The tech behind catching the Austin serial bomber"--Fox News.  Authorities used surveillance camera footage to help identify the shooter, cross referencing driver's license data; they used requests from Google to check the suspect's search history for suspicious searches; and they used device location and cell-phone triangulation to pinpoint the suspect's location when they decided to arrest him.