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Friday, December 21, 2018

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

"Bolt Guns Really Are Obsolete"--In Range (3 min.)
What the producers of this video mean is that bolt action guns are obsolete for combat applications. In this particular video, they compare the times between an AR15 and Gewehr 98 on an identical run and gun course of fire.

  • TGIF: Be sure to check out this week's Weekend Knowledge Dump from Active Response Training. One item I was glad to hear about was that Marcus Wynne has a new novel that has been released (I've been reading through some of his past novels and am almost done with another one) and plans on releasing two books on the training methods he has devised.
  • "Sneaky Draw"--Tricon. The author contends that not only should we practice drawing quickly (expeditiously), but also surreptitiously. As to the latter, he suggests:
Drawing your handgun without attracting unwanted attention is comprised of two points. The first is your movement speed. If your movement speed is fast or jerky it  most likely will attract the attention you are trying to avoid. The eyes are attracted to movement, faster movement is even more alluring. If you find your opponent distracted or otherwise occupied it is a great opportunity to employ a sneaky draw. The second is natural movement. If the movement to your holstered gun can be disguised or merged with other actions it has a tendency to draw less attention. If your hands are along your side it gives you the best chance. Once you have decided to move your hands above your waistline it will make disguising the movement to your holster more challenging.
He also indicates that a "sneaky draw" will require that you be able to draw your pistol with just one hand--the other hand can be used to do other things, such as distract from your draw stroke.
  • Um, I don't think so: "This Ultimate Doomsday Rifle Shoots 21 Different Of Ammo"--National Interest. The rifle is the Scavenger 6. Based on the description in the article, and the photographs, the weapon is a pepper-box style revolver (the cylinder includes multiple chambers and barrels), with a faux barrel at the end to make sure that it meets the minimum barrel length for a rifle (or shotgun). Each chamber/barrel is for a different caliber. The idea being that you could scavenge for cartridges and be able to use what you find and shoot it from a single weapon. And, unlike the chamber inserts that you can get for single-shot shotguns, it would allow for quick follow-up shots (albeit, in different calibers).
        I suppose the concept is attractive if you think you will be living in a Mad Max style post-apocalypse ... as long as you don't think about it too much. Here are a couple of the problems I see. First, and foremost, you are shooting different calibers with potentially very different ballistics, from the same weapon, meaning that your zero will be different for each chamber. Second, if you want to have six shots available, you need one of each of the calibers for each cylinder. So, for instance, if you find a box of .223 as you dig through the rubble, you now have ammo! But only for one chamber out of 6 on the cylinder (assuming that you have one of the cylinders that has a .223 chamber).
As a result, when talk about carrying a .380 auto pistol in our pocket versus carrying a compact 9mm on our waist, we are talking about degrees of compromise. The compromise happened when we decided to carry a pistol, not a rifle: Anything else is just moving the needle in one direction or another.
  • "Twist the Stick: It’s not a tourniquet without a windlass"--Crises Medicine. The author explains that "[a]rterial flow into the limb is a high-pressure system and requires high pressure deep in the limb to occlude or stop its flow." Consequently, "[s]imply tying a constricting band tightly around a limb rarely provides enough pressure to occlude arterial flow.  To stop bleeding requires a mechanical advantage, and to obtain that advantage you need a windlass or twist stick to tighten the constricting material." The author goes on to cite some statistics from the Boston Marathon bombing concerning bleeding injuries, and notes:
At one receiving hospital, six casualties all had “improvised tourniquets” placed without a windlass and thus were “venous constricting bands.”  All had to be replaced with commercial tourniquets to prevent ongoing hemorrhage.
If you do need to improvise a tourniquet, the author states:
       An improvised tourniquet should be wide enough (2 to 3 inches) to compress both arteries and veins within the limb and have a device attached to generate the mechanical advantage necessary to cause circumferential limb constriction, with a goal to stop all blood flow.
           This mistake is how you turn a non-life threatening injury into a fatal one. What was noted at Boston as “paradoxical bleeding” from the “improvised tourniquets” and quite possibly the 7-year-old with “slow” bleeding, was likely the result of a venous constricting band and was, in fact, increasing the blood loss to the casualties.
             In a study using a large men’s cotton t-shirt wrapped tightly around the thigh of a computerized tourniquet trainer, the windlass lacking t-shirt “improvised tourniquet” failed to generate enough pressure to stop the computerized bleeding in 79 out of 80 attempts.  Although it generated 46 mmHg pressure on the limb, this is not nearly enough for arterial occlusion but is more than enough for venous constriction. Venous constriction actually increases blood loss from an otherwise minimally bleeding wound.
               The same t-shirt with a windlass made from chopsticks stopped the computerized model bleeding in 54 of 80 attempts.  Although far from 100% effective, 68% effectiveness is substantially better than doing nothing when lacking the ideal or dedicated equipment.
            Read the whole thing.
            • What? No flashlights? "5 Sure-Fire Training Drills For Your Concealed-Carry Pistol"--NRA Family. The first two involve dry-fire practice for practicing trigger and drawing techniques. The third drill is the 5x5 drill (5 rounds into a 5-inch diameter target at 5 yards in 5 seconds, repeated 5 times). Fourth, the author recommends practicing shooting one-handed, both with your strong hand and your weak hand. Finally, practice the failure-to-stop (aka, Mozambique) drill. 
            • Not all of us will have seen the elephant, so to speak, but we can learn from those who have: "A Self Defense Story"--Loadout Room. The author recounts hearing screams from outside his house and confronting a man atop his girlfriend and choking her with a baseball bat across the throat. When the author attempted to intervene, the man initially complied and then decided to attack the author. The author describes what happened next:
            At this point, I’m just waiting for the police to arrive… he had other ideas. At this point, he stood up, shouted “YOU DON’T KNOW ME MOTHERFUCKER”, and started rapidly moving toward me, I started retreating backward, around 10-15 feet but I knew that my wife was back there, along with one of the other witnesses, so I couldn’t just run home… this guy was going to hurt anyone he could get his hands on, or beat my ass and take my gun away if I let him get too close.. he was quite a bit bigger than me and definitely spent a good amount of time at the gym. When he was about 5 feet away he lunged at me, and I shot him four times in rapid succession. The whole time he was approaching me I was yelling “STOP, DON’T DO IT!, STOP!, STOP!” His legs just collapsed under him and I will never forget seeing the blood rushing out. At this point my wife told 911 that he had been shot and I was told to put the weapon down so I sat it on the back of my wife’s car and just stood there and shook, and waited. The cops got there 30 seconds after I had shot… 30 seconds. The whole situation lasted from 8:00PM to 8:03PM when the wife hung up with 911 after the police arrived.
            One thing that the author discusses again and again in the article is the blood spatter on him and his gun. While he sat handcuffed in the back of the patrol car, he first noticed it, and couldn't do anything until after photographs had been taken and released from custody, after which he was given wipes to clean up a bit. When he went to the police station to give his statement, he had his wife bring down extra clothes because there was blood spatter on his clothes and he had to turn them in for evidence. Fortunately, the department armorer was nice enough to clean the blood off the man's gun so it didn't rust.
                     When Trump won, Waugh felt “numb.” His wife was “catatonic.” They both feared for their lives. The couple, liberal Mississippians and stalwart Obama supporters, were not the primary targets of the right-wing vitriol directed primarily at Latino immigrants and Muslims during Trump’s campaign. But from Waugh’s liberal perch, seeing the new president’s supporters on the news screaming “We’ll take back our country!” and hearing similar sentiments from conservatives in his home state, even from friends, felt like a genuine threat.
                      “For the first time in my life, I realized my own freedom was my own responsibility,” says Waugh. “I could no longer trust Trump, or Congress, to reassure my rights and liberties would remain in place.”
                         But even though he sought self-sufficiency in his new America, Waugh realized he would need a new community of sorts. So on Nov. 10, 2016, Waugh logged onto Facebook and set up the Liberal Prepper.
                    * * *
                             “They’re laughing at us, thinking that we’re people with no guns,” Stabler says of right-wing survivalists. “But there’s an attitude with some of us who are like, ‘Bitch, bring it. Come see the snowflake.’”
                      • "Doomsday Goes Mainstream"--Utne. Another article on the increasing numbers of liberals turning to prepping. An excerpt:
                        Wild Bill’s colleague, the founder of The Prepper Journal who uses the pen name Pat Henry, wrote a post last year welcoming liberal preppers to the party: “Your politics might be driving your rationale for prepping but you are trying to achieve the same personal goals as all the rest of us.” He makes the case that the prepper community ought rightly to be a big tent: “We have people who love guns, who wear MAGA hats, hold lifetime memberships to the NRA as well as vegans, pacifists and yes, Liberals.” Not everyone agrees, though, that prepping and progressivism can be compatible. “I would like to think we can all get along, but my instincts tell me to stay far away from liberals in a SHTF situation,” writes one commenter on Wild Bill’s welcoming post. “Liberals tend to support wealth redistribution. Liberals tend to favor the seizure of property by the government. Liberals tend to favor gun control. Liberals tend to believe that profiling is wrong. None of those things tend to increase my odds of survival.”
                                 At his house at Lørenskog, Michel has stored everything he needs from basic food to hunting equipments so that he and his partner Anne will manage for two to three weeks without electricity and water. Moreover they have a hidden place in the forest where they have food for at least four to six months.
                                 – If people become desperate, they start to steal from each other. Should I sit in the house and defend myself? Then I’d rather go out into the forest, it’s a lot easier, says Michel.

                              "The Great Lisbon Earthquake of 1755"--The History Guy (14 min.)
                              The earthquake was estimated to have been in the 8 to 9 range. Not only did the shaking destroy most of the stone and masonry structures in the city, but resulting fires created a fire storm. And to cap it off, it created tsunamis. The earthquake essentially hastened the decline of Portugal's Empire--up until the earthquake, Portugal had been one of the wealthiest and powerful countries in Europe.
                                     This is part of a larger winding down process where responsibility was being passed to regional players. The Washington Post article cited above noted that Trump had worked to get other nations, including the Gulf states, to contribute toward the rebuilding of Syria in order to limit Iran's ability to step in an exert control. Saudi Arabia had finally agreed to provide some funds--$100 million--this past summer, but those amounts were not finally transferred to the U.S. until October. Other nations had also committed to contribute funds to Syrian stabilization, according to this August 2018 article from CNN.  In the same article, CNN noted:
                              Trump said in March that the US would "be coming out of Syria like very soon" and trumpeted his administration's success in ejecting ISIS from most of Syria and Iraq. "We're knocking the hell out of ISIS," Trump told an Ohio audience. "We'll be coming out of Syria like very soon. Let the other people take care of it now."
                              I agree with the President's decision for several reasons, not the least of which is that we were coming dangerously close to a shooting conflict with Russian forces in the area. ISIS may still control forces in Syria, but its back has been broken, and the decline in oil prices have crippled its ability to raise cash. Let's be honest: we will still have special forces operating in Syria even if we withdraw our troops, but at least we won't have to have so many troops or get further entangled in an intractable problem. From a realpolitik perspective, we don't have to win, we just need to make sure that no one else can, and the latter is better assured by leaving the area unstable than to engage in nation building only to have our efforts sabotaged by someone else or, worse, have the newly stabilized nation jump into our enemy's camp.
                                        Critics say Obama made a strategic error by publicly announcing when he planned to withdraw the surge troops; this put the Taliban on notice that they could simply wait out the United States, then step up the fight after we’d gone. Theoretically, the critics had a point. But in fact, the Taliban put up a very fierce fight during those 18 months; they showed no sign of hanging back.
                                         By contrast, President Donald Trump announced in August 2017 that he was sending a few thousand more troops to Afghanistan and imposed no timetable for their withdrawal; they might stay there forever. This has had no effect on the Taliban’s behavior either.
                                          It is likely that no U.S. military campaign—whether based on COIN, counterterrorism, or some other principle—would have much chance of success, and this has been clear for nearly a decade. Early on in the Obama phase of the war, Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the main obstacle was “clearly the lack of legitimacy of the government.” Sen. Lindsey Graham asked, “We could send a million troops and that wouldn’t restore legitimacy in the government?” Mullen answered, “That is correct.”
                                      I would also direct you to Erik Goepner's September 2017 article for the Cato Institute, in which he stated, in opposition to Trump's announcement then to increase the number of troops:
                                        Instead of defending a surge on the basis of efforts already spent, U.S. policy towards Afghanistan should rely on the 16 years of data available since initiation of the war on terror. All of that data strongly communicates two points: 1) the terror threat to Americans remains low and 2) a strategy that emphasizes military power will continue to fail.
                                                I have never made my distaste for the Afghanistan war a secret. Afghanistan, as a nation, is a fiction. It is an arbitrary line on a map around dissimilar and mutually antagonistic peoples and tribes. It's not so much the graveyard of empires, but just a money pit. My belief after 9/11 was that our response should have been a punitive expedition, only. Go in, kill as much of Al Qaeda as we could, preferably with a nuclear weapon to impress the natives, and leave. Repeat if necessary. My only change, based on what we have learned since, would be to target and destroy Pakistan's intelligence apparatus as part of the punitive strike, because of its ties to Al Qaeda and the Taliban. 
                                                 I have also repeatedly expressed my belief that the United States does not have the backbone to do what is necessary to win the war, which would involve moving the population to resettlement camps, reservations, or whatever you want to call them, and then killing everyone and everything left in the depopulated area, including all remaining livestock and crops. So, I applaud Trump's decision to remove our troops from a no-win situation. As an added bonus, it might result in China getting bogged down in Afghanistan. China has already established a military base in the Wakhan Corridor of Afghanistan’s Badakhshan province, and should have an opportunity to demonstrate to the world its ability to bring peace and stability to the region.
                                                    In the 1960s the U.S. was supporting the fledgling Congo government. Our mission was to defeat the Simba rebels, who were proxies for the Soviet Union and China. The two communist nations were backing the Simba rebellion in Eastern Congo.
                                                     Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had stated that “the key to the control of Africa, is control of the Congo.”
                                                       In 1965 I was sent to the combat zone alone, with cash stuffed in my socks and a bag full of morphine syringes. Supplied by the CIA, these were determined to be essential combat assets for the inevitable casualties in an area with no medical facilities.
                                                         The Simba rebels we opposed were a ragtag group that enjoyed support not just from the Soviets and the Chinese, but from beyond. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro was making his first attempt at exporting the Cuban Revolution, sending Che Guevara and his Cuban communist thugs covertly to Congo to motivate, propagandize and lead the rebel movement.
                                                           The rebels were trained in Eastern Europe and China. Both the Soviet Union and China provided weapons, materials and supplies out of the Tanganyikan (now Tanzanian) Port of Kigoma and transported them across Lake Tanganyika to communist fortifications along the Congolese side of the lake. These were also the bases from which Guevara and his men provided on-the-ground leadership and strategy.
                                                            The goal of Guevara and the Cubans was to spark global revolution. But the goal of the Chinese and Soviets was more pragmatic. Uranium, cobalt, rare earth minerals and industrial diamonds were their prizes.
                                                                Soros gave $1.35 million to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW), a Washington, D.C.-based 501(c)(3) nonprofit that does not reveal its donors. The group has been involved with a number of high-profile lawsuits and complaints against Trump and other Republicans. Its top members regularly appear on news programs attacking the administration and members of the GOP but are rarely identified as having a left-wing mission by the outlets and on-air personalities.
                                                                 Soros's donations to CREW came from two entities in his Open Society Foundations network including $1,250,000 from the Foundation to Promote Open Society and $100,000 from the Open Society Policy Center, according to a review of his groups' most recent tax forms covering the 2017 fiscal year that were provided by Soros's spokesperson.
                                                                    David Kramer, a former State Department official who was an executive at the McCain Institute, met on Dec. 29, 2016 with BuzzFeed reporter Ken Bensinger, according to a filing submitted Wednesday by U.S. District Court Judge Ursula Ungaro.
                                                                     BuzzFeed published the dossier, which was authored by former British spy Christopher Steele, on Jan. 10, 2017.
                                                                      The disclosure was made as part of a final report ahead of Ungaro’s ruling in favor of BuzzFeed in a defamation lawsuit.
                                                                          Facebook gave Netflix, Spotify, and the Royal Bank of Canada access to private messages and the ability to see all participants on a thread, according to the internal records. 
                                                                           It also allowed Microsoft's search engine, known as Bing, to see the name of all Facebook users' friends without their consent. 
                                                                            Amazon was allowed to obtain users' names and contact information through their friends, and Yahoo could view streams of friends' posts. 
                                                                                As of last year, Sony, Microsoft, and Amazon could all obtain users' email addresses through their friends.  
                                                                                 Facebook never received monetary payment for this kind of access, which was permitted even if its users had disabled all data sharing on their profile. 
                                                                                   It has argued that these major companies were merely acting as an extension of Facebook, which is why any information that a user shared with friends on the site could be shared with the companies without their consent. 
                                                                              "An extension of Facebook." Does that include for purposes of liability?
                                                                              • Evil: "Boise priest who lived in ‘world of Satanism and pornography’ sentenced to 25 years in prison"--Idaho Statesman. The Rev. W. Thomas Faucher had amassed and shared thousands of pornographic images of young boys that authorities described as "violent, disturbing and torturous, some involving children crying." Faucher also engaged in online conversations discussing his "fantasies, including the sexual abuse of altar boys and babies, and saying that he liked a video of a boy being being beaten to death." Authorities also found "images of Faucher urinating on a cross and canon law book. Faucher also wrote that he urinated in the wine for Mass at least once, Brumbaugh told the courtroom." And this:
                                                                                Faucher bragged to Bruno [the investigator] about how easy it had become to lie: “It felt good to lie for no good reason except to do it ... Most of the time, I just make a new reality and believe it as long as it suits me.”
                                                                                  In Revelation we read that "But the fearful, and unbelieving, and the abominable, and murderers, and whoremongers, and sorcerers, and idolaters, and all liars, shall have their part in the lake which burneth with fire and brimstone: which is the second death." (Rev. 21:8) (underline added). Christ also said the following about Satan: "He was a murderer from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and the father of it." (John 8:44). I had come across something recently, but I can't locate the source, that suggested that "liar" in the sense of "all liars go to hell" was not just someone that told falsehoods, but someone that enjoyed doing so. 
                                                                                           The computer simulations show that the collision and reshaping of Uranus — maybe enveloping some or all of the rock that hit it — happened in a matter of hours, Kegerreis said. He produced an animation showing the violent crash and its aftermath.
                                                                                            It’s also possible that the big object that knocked over Uranus is still lurking in the solar system too far for us to see, said Green. It would explain some of the orbits of the planet and fit with a theory that a missing planet X is circling the sun well beyond Pluto, he said.
                                                                                        If the rings around Uranus are supposed to be from that collision, there is no way that the collision was billions of years ago because the rings would have disappeared long ago.
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