October 22, 2018 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"The Briefing Room: Rifle Light Placement"--Guns & Tactics (9 min.)

A discussion of why you should have a rifle light and why the best mounting position is at 11 or 1 o'clock.

• "Snapshot: Majority in U.S. Now Oppose Ban on Assault Rifles"--Gallop. I know that the gun media has been running with this, but I would also note the the vagueness of the question, which asks the person being polled about "semi-automatic guns, known as assault rifles." 
• "State Your Case: .308 Win vs. .30-06"--The Truth About Guns. According to the author, for mid-weight bullets, the .30-06 only offers a slight advantage to the .308, but it is a different matter for bullets at either end of the spectrum:

The .30-06 can push a big Hornady 208gr ELD bullets at about 200fps faster than the .308 can. In fact, the .30-06 can fire bullets as large as 225gr at the same speed that the .308 can launch a 190gr projectile. When it comes to light bullets, the .30-06 takes advantage again. The large case capacity of the .30-06 and typical barrel length of 24” allows 110gr bullets to be loaded at 3700fps, which makes it devastating on varmints.

The .308 is generally lighter and handier, however, and was designed for semi-auto fire.

• "Holster Roundup: the Back Pocket Holsters"--Guns, Guns, Guns. A brief look at 37 pants back pocket holsters.
• "6.5 Grendel vs 308 – The Part Everyone Misses"--Abe's Gun Cave. The drop is almost identical between target .308 loads and the 6.5 Grendel out to about 800 yards, and the velocity is identical at 800 yards. The author also asserts at standard hunting ranges or 200 yards or less, the 6.5 Grendel is just as capable of anchoring game. Plus, the author points out, it weighs less and costs less for practice ammunition. 
• "Rise of the M-16 Rifle…& Political Skullduggery"--Ammo Land. There is so much wrong with this article, it is hard to know where to start. I would say that if there was skullduggery in the whole M-14/M-16 debacle, it was an Ordnance Department that ignored its own research to select the .308/7.62x51 over a smaller, lighter cartridge, did all it could to sabotage the AR-10 during trials, and then seemingly attempted to sabotage the release of the M-16 to troops by changing powders and telling soldiers that the weapons didn't need to be cleaned.
• "FATHER OF MODERN WOUND BALLISTICS"--Small Arms Defense Journal. A short biography of Colonel Martin L. Fackler, whose work help standardize terminal ballistic testing of small arms, including the adoption of 10% ordnance gel. 
• The Truth About Guns offers some sage wisdom from Rory Miller about when violence is the answer:

The simple truth is that when you are slammed up against the wall and the knife is at your throat, when a circle of teenagers is kicking you as you curl into a ball on the sidewalk, or when the man walks into your office building or school with a pair of guns and starts shooting, only violence or the reasonable threat of violence is going to save your life. In the extreme moment, only force can stop force.

"Merkel ACCELERATES the Kalergi Plan in Europe"--Black Pigeon Speaks (14 min.).

• "Trump's Merkel Moment -- and Ours"--Michael Walsh at PJ Media. He warns:

Thousands of economic migrants -- they make no bones about it -- are heading our way, insouciantly traversing the basket-case failed state of Mexico on their trek to El Norte and boasting that there's no stopping them. The media, speaking for the Democrat party, acts as if this is some sort of natural phenomenon, like an earthquake or a hurricane, and the only "humane" thing to do is to accommodate them in America, no questions asked.

He continues:

        Yes, this is a deliberate provocation -- the Left is betting that America won't dare use force to protect itself, wouldn't want to take the public-relations hit that would come with images of American Border Patrol, National Guard or even regular Army soldiers preventing the horde from entering the country. But, as Trump has often observed, either we have borders or we don't, and if we don't we no longer have a country, but simply an economic system that works better than anything in the Arab world or the Latin American countries.

       But their problems are not our problems, unless we make them our problems. The president and the country are now being tested, as surely as Khrushchev tested Kennedy with the missiles of October 56 years ago. The former Soviet premier bet the young American president, having botched the Bay of Pigs, would do nothing stop the installation of Russian ballistic weapons in Cuba. He guessed wrong.

      Now Trump must hold fast. This has gone beyond a "humanitarian" crisis (one which in any case should be dealt with by the Central Americans themselves) and now a national crisis. If allowed to continue, it will establish a nation-killing  principle.

• "The United States of Empire"--Roads Less Traveled. From the article:

There are great pivot points in history, and we’ve arrived at one. The United States, ruptured by a thousand grievance groups, torn by shadowy agencies drunk on a gross excess of power, robbed blind by oligarchs and their treasonous henchmen and decimated by frivolous wars of choice, has finally come to a point where the end begins in earnest. The center isn’t holding… indeed, finding a center is no longer even conceivable. We are the schizophrenic nation, bound by no societal norms, constrained by no religion, with no shared sense of history, myth, language, art, philosophy, music, or culture, rushing toward an uncertain future fueled by nothing more than easy money, hubris, and sheer momentum.

• "The Big Question: Evolution, Journalists, Beer (and Girls), and the Fate of Intelligent Life on Earth"--Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise. The author notes that if we (speaking of humanity) were to die off there is still plenty of time for other intelligent species to evolve and try and get to the stars. The earth's crust will churn, more oil will be created and new mineral deposits cast up. But for us, the time is getting short:

         ... we are the only species to have developed art, music, poetry, Twinkies® and PEZ™.   People have passed the age of no return – we have one shot at building a galactic empire.  We’ve used the easy oil, we’ve mined the easy resources.  Now?  We’re on the treadmill.  We can’t stay at this level of technological progress.  We either advance, or we regress.  It’s like the Red Queen said in Alice in Wonderland:

        “My dear, here we must run as fast as we can, just to stay in place. And if you wish to go anywhere you must run twice as fast as that.”

       Our technological progress has to increase just to support the billions living on Earth today.  To support more people?  To give more benefits and luxuries (like health care)?  We have to get smarter, faster still.

• "THE SPIRITUAL PHYSIOGNOMY OF AFRICAN MAN"--Setting the Record Straight. As long time readers know, I'm a bit of a fan of Oswald Spengler's ideas on the rise and fall of civilizations, so I was excited to come across an author who attempts to apply Spengler's ideas to our modern world. (Spengler wrote in the early 20th Century). Physiognomy, if you don't know, was a belief that one's physical features reflected personality and intelligence. Spengler believed that the art, science, architecture, and mathematics and so on could act as a kind of civilizational physiognomy, which is why so much of his writings are spent discussing different arts, sciences and architecture and what they meant. Spengler, however, kept himself to only discussing major civilizations. 

        In this piece, the author attempts the same process, but looks at a portion of the world that is, shall we say, not known for having produced any great civilizations. Unfortunately, the author doesn't see much hope for the future for that region. He writes:

        I’ll just throw the main premise out here first: the prime symbol of the African soul is the demonic possession.

        Don’t believe me? The now-classic meme of “he’s a good boy, he dindu nuffin” falls very differently on African ears than our Western. The African sees nothing false about a confessed criminal not having committed the crime in the moral realm, because he believes that impulsive passions are external to the individual. To us, the bestial, vicious animal nature is a part of ourselves to be constrained and mastered, and the failure to do so represents a personal fault. The African deals with the problem of human animality by placing it above the human self. Both excessive genius and impulsive violence are believed to be the work of spirits which, sometimes randomly, sometimes not, come to possess a person and then leave them. The African considers it a monstrous unfairness and hypocrisy that a man can be a ‘good boy’ for sixteen years of life, commit one horrible crime, and then be executed or imprisoned for the rest of his life. Only a consistent pattern of demonic possession, or the intent to infuse evil spirits into one’s own body, can mark an African as evil in the eyes of the fellow African. He considers it perfectly normal that a good person will be seized by bouts of uncontrollable violence or lust, and should not face consequences for acting on them. Even Africans like Martin Luther King or Jimi Hendrix, sacralized by our culture, are prone to this. Both were men seized by violent passions, kept absolutely private and nearly erased from history.

        Because of this, African politics and rhetoric universally center on removing pernicious influences from the environment. The fault is never with the moral agency of the persons so afflicted, but always on demonic entities such as “the legacy of colonialism”, “institutional racism”, etc. Sometimes, the evil influence comes from a physical fetish that exercises a form of black magic. The problem of violence would be solved by getting the drugs and guns out of the ghetto. Or by moving Africans to the magic dirt that projects a good juju onto him. The human himself, to the African, is considered in his uninfluenced form to be a contented head of cattle without agency. The African is always tempted towards millennialism and utopianism; such a condition, in his mind, is reached when evil spirits and fetishes are exorcised entirely and humanity reverts to a peaceful state.

Read the whole thing.