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Friday, February 1, 2019

February 1, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Is Civil War The Answer To The Problems In South Africa?"--South Africa Awakening (8 min.)
The author discusses what would likely happen in a civil war in South Africa and why a peaceful secession would be preferable. 

  • TGIF: Active Response Training's "Weekend Knowledge Dump- February 1, 2019." Check it out. One article I thought particularly interesting was one from Shooting Sports testing different 9 mm. ammunition from various manufacturers by shooting a whole box (50 rounds) and measuring group size. It bears out the general observation that, in pistols, flat tip or hollow point bullets are inherently more accurate than rounded point bullets like your typical ball ammo.
  • If you missed it earlier this week, here is the link to Grant Cunningham's Hump Day Reading List for this week. It looks like Cunningham has changed up his format a bit, focusing on a single article in each of three categories: Defense and Training; Security; and Preparedness.
  • "A Legit AR-10 Patterned 12 Gauge: The Gen-12 From Genesis Arms – SHOT Show 2019"--Guns America Digest. This shotgun can be purchased as a complete weapon, or as an upper that fits on a standard DPMS AR-10 style lower. Expensive, though: A complete weapon is $2,230, while the separate upper receiver has an MSRP of $1,550.
  • "When the S really does HTF"--Bayou Renaissance Man. A review of Selco Begovic's new book, The Dark Secrets of SHTF Survival: The Brutal Truth About Violence, Death, & Mayhem You Must Know to Survive. Peter Grant highly recommends the book, noting:
         Selco has written a truly superb insider's story of his own experiences during the civil war in Bosnia. He perfectly describes how things went to hell in a handbasket with almost no major warning signs - only trends that most people (including himself) dismissed as temporary or passing problems. His descriptions of foraging for food, defending himself and others, trying to help his extended family to survive, and the lasting effects of his experiences on himself and those around him, ring absolutely true.
          I've seldom read a more brutally factual account. This is an indispensable book for anyone wanting to understand how a situation such as that in Bosnia (or many other places around the world, for that matter) can (and will) strip the veneer of civilization away from anyone and everyone, and force us all into a survival mode that we'd rather not even think about.
            After shootings, guns in the UK are often passed on, traded, rented or hidden away.
             That is how this gun travelled across a major city without being seized, and was used in multiple, unrelated shootings.
              Some of these shootings remain unresolved.
                The police give every gun they know about a different number, so that they can be tracked and monitored depending on their own unique characteristics.
                   This particular gun is a black CZ 75 semi-automatic pistol made in the Czech Republic.
                    Investigators have called it Gun No 6.
                Of course, the article has to explain how, given the UK's strict gun laws, criminals nevertheless obtain firearms. In this particular case, the weapon seems to have been a "community gun"--that is, a firearm passed along or rented to different people as they needed a weapon. Such firearms are generally tracked by ballistic evidence:
                          “You’ve got two things when you fire a gun,” Andy explains.
                            “You’ve got the rifling [spiral grooves that add a spinning motion to the bullet] within the barrel, and you’ve got where the hammer of the gun hits the back of the bullet.
                            "There are then two sets of marks - one along the length of the cartridge, and one on the circular bit on the back of the cartridge.
                              “These both leave distinct markings, because each gun is slightly different. We don’t always recover the gun itself, but by looking at these prints we can tell when bullets in different shootings were fired from the same weapon.”
                          Although used in multiple murders, Gun No. 6 has never been recovered. Ignored by the story, most of the crime mentioned in the article, much as in the United States, involved black gang violence.
                          • "Baltimore County Police to Replace FNS-40 with Glock 17 Following Accidental Discharges"--The Firearm Blog. At first glance, this appears to be a department that just wanted to switch to 9 mm, but had to explain why the change only 4 years after adopting the FN pistol. But there were three incidents that may have been related to a trigger pin backing out.
                          • This 2015 article from Psychology Today tries to explain to liberals "The Psychology of Guns: 3 reasons that people like and own firearms and 3 proposals to start reform." The three reasons why people like guns, according to the article, is that (1) gun culture is American culture, (2) shooting firearms is fun, and (3) gunowners feel safer owning firearms for self-defense. While a good start, the authors ignore the research from John Lott showing how often firearms are used in self-defense, and so perpetrate the lie that a firearm in the home is more of a danger than a help. But then he lays out a strategy for liberals to enact gun control that could garner wide support:
                                   First, anti-gun advocates must realize that a complete ban on private gun ownership, nor the kind of sweeping gun restrictions imposed in Canada, Australia, and the UK, is probably not a realistic goal in the US at this time. Less ambitious reforms with a high likelihood of actually reducing gun violence are more likely to gain wider support.
                                    Second, public health efforts should be directed at educating people about the significant risks of gun ownership. ...
                                      Third, anti-gun proponents are going to have to address the perceived benefits of gun ownership. That needs to start from a place of knowledge. ...
                                  On the latter point, the author argues that anti-gun nuts will do better if they actually know what they are talking about instead of coming across sounding stupid and ignorant.
                                           Finally, the author suggests the reasoning behind the current push for "red flag" laws:
                                      If rational gun control reform is to ever happen, anti-gun proponents must steer clear of popular myths about gun violence and mass shootings and think about proposals to limit gun ownership to those most at risk for committing gun violence without taking away the pleasure and sense of safety responsible pro-gunners associate with firearm ownership.
                                        The problem is how to identify those most at risk. Is such attempt going to be individual or group based. For instance, targeting black youths would reduce crime, but may not be fair to individual citizens. More broadly, simply prohibiting Democrats from owning firearms would probably do wonders for reducing firearm related deaths. On the other hand, specific predictions (such as envisioned by the "Red Flag" laws) may be impossible; certainly psychology, with the reproducibility problem in its research, appears even more to be a pseudo-science, incapable of giving reasonably accurate and useful information.

                                        "Earth Catastrophe Cycle | Cosmic Blast Scale"--Suspicious Observers (6 min.)
                                                 Hollywood has basically turned its products, and its award shows, into showcases for "the resistance." Americans are already sorting themselves into communities that are predominantly red or blue. And in heavily blue Washington, D.C., Trump staffers find that a lot of people don’t want to date them because of their politics.
                                                   White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders was even kicked out of the Red Hen restaurant in Lexington, Virginia, because the owner and employees disliked her politics. This seems like a small thing, but it would have been largely unthinkable a generation ago.
                                                     And, in a somewhat less “soft” manifestation, Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen was bullied out of a restaurant by an angry anti-Trump mob, and a similar mob also showed up outside of her home.
                                                       Ten people died and two more were wounded in a gunfight yesterday between a community police force and a self-defense group in Chilapa, Guerrero.
                                                         Paraíso Tepila community police, affiliated with the regional community organization CRAC, clashed with a self-defense group believed to be connected with the Ardillos crime gang.
                                                          The confrontation took place when the self-defense group attempted to enter the town.
                                                            CRAC spokesman Jesús Plácido Galindo reported that the showdown lasted about three hours.
                                                              The state government said when the army and state police arrived at the scene they found a truck with the 10 bodies in it, along with two people with bullet wounds.
                                                               Yesterday’s is the latest and most intense confrontation between both groups in recent weeks.
                                                                  Around 200 members of the army, navy and Federal Police carried out an operation in the municipality of Villagrán that resulted in the seizure of at least 24 tanker trucks filled with gasoline, seven trailers and 5,000 liters of stolen fuel, all of which were found on a property in the community of San Salvador Torrecillas.
                                                                    Angry residents responded to the raid by placing barricades at the entrance to the small town of Santa Rosa de Lima to prevent the security forces from reaching an illegal gas station.
                                                                      The mask-wearing, stick-wielding residents who, according to municipal police, are complicit with fuel thieves, claimed that the authorities didn’t have a search warrant to enter the property where the stolen fuel and vehicles were seized.
                                                                        Other residents set up a blockade made of burning tires on the Celaya-Juventino Rosas highway and set at least four vehicles on fire on other roads in order to block access to Villagrán.
                                                                    In his paper Peralta actually uses the phrase “zero-sum” and argues that white men should, effectively, be locked out of the publishing arm of the discipline, that in order to rectify inequality and racial injustice editors should exercise discretion and stop publishing work produced by white men, dedicating their publishing space entirely to women and especially to “people of color”. He seems to reject the concept of merit and the utility of blind peer review.
                                                                             The secretary said the states with the highest numbers of abandoned homes are all in the north of the country, specifically Nuevo León, Tamaulipas, Baja California and Chihuahua.
                                                                               He explained that the presence of organized crime was one factor that led families to abandon their homes in the north but added that there are a high number of migrants from southern states, such as Oaxaca, who travel to the border states to work in maquiladoras, or factories, before moving on.
                                                                                 “. . . There is a constant turnover of people,” Meyer said.
                                                                          That is at least 4 million families that in all likelihood "moved on" by crossing the border into the United States.
                                                                                    [A]bout a decade ago, a NASA probe discovered water on the Moon’s poles. This discovery was a big deal because it has potential to change all we know about spaceflight economics.
                                                                                      It is expensive to go into space, even with the advantages granted by reusable first stages, because it takes a lot of fuel to climb out of the earth’s gravity. Apollo missions required a massive rocket, weighing about 6,500,000 pounds at launch, to place two men on the Moon in a lunar lander weighing about 15,000 pounds at touchdown. The difference in weight consisted mostly of fuel and tanks.
                                                                                      However, if fuel can be made from frozen water at the Moon’s poles and then moved into low, medium or geosynchronous earth orbits, everything changes. Satellites can be refueled in space, requiring smaller rockets to place them into orbit. Routine travel to the Moon from a space station becomes practical. Missions to Mars become affordable. Most importantly, it may become economically viable to mine near-earth asteroids, potentially unlocking literally quintillions in resources, an economic bounty unmatched in human history.
                                                                                        The key terrain at these polar locations is incredibly small.  While the lunar North Pole has some water, most is located at its South Pole in deep craters free from sunlight.  To make fuel, processing equipment must be installed on two or three crater tops exposed to the sun, the largest of which is only a few football fields wide. Thus, these crater tops may become the solar system’s most exclusive addresses.
                                                                                           If the Moon does open to fuel production, several other points become strategically important. The first are the so-called Lagrange Points in cislunar space where the relationship between Earth and Moon’s gravity allows a spacecraft to park in one spot.  These points could serve as transfer hubs for fuel shipments to earth orbit or could be used for military purposes to control earth orbits or lunar transit routes.
                                                                                            To effectively leverage these points, spacecraft need power. Large amounts of power can be generated and beamed to the Lagrange Points from a few locations at the Moon’s central latitudes. Thus, holding positions at both the Lagrange Points and at the right lunar locations enables anyone to control access to the Moon who wants to do so.
                                                                                        The problem is the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that prohibits nations from laying territorial claims to extraterrestrial bodies. NASA however, has declared "safety buffers" around equipment which may be tantamount to limited territorial claims. So the key to obtaining these resources may be getting their first.
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