March 20, 2019 -- A Quick Run Around the Web

"Remington 1100 and 1187 - What's the difference?"--HR Funk (4-1/2 min.)

He also discusses the differences in the gas system between the standard 1187 and the law enforcement version of the 1187.

• First up, if you haven't read it yet, here is the link to this week's Woodpile Report.
• Just a reminder that the Baugo Blades website will be closing down on April 12 and they are having a clearance sale.
• Also, don't forget Jon Low's monthly post rounding up news and articles on self-defense at Defensive Pistolcraft. Lot's of good stuff, so I recommend reading the whole thing, but there was this sobering note:

       FBI Special Agent Jeff Dale addressed the Tennessee Firearms Association meeting last night.  He told us that 120 innocent persons died last year from gun shot wounds (including police fire, friendly fire, and self fire) in criminal attack incidents.  While drunken drivers killed 58,000 innocent persons last year.

     So, if your are spending a great deal of time practicing your self defense gun skills, while neglecting your defensive driving skills, you're not operating in reality.

• "Storms Leave Nebraska With ‘Largest Widespread Amount of Flooding’ in the Last 50 Years"--Legal Insurrection (h/t Instapundit). And given the late cold, we are still in the early stages of spring runoff.
• "Part 2 Of “Are You A ‘Snowflake’ Or A ‘Meteor’?” Becoming A Meteor."--Mason Dixon Tactical. Excerpt:

        Last week a group of four Combat Arms Veterans contributed to a post I wrote concerning the premise that, “on a good day, a civilian that has taken 3 or 4 SUT type classes from a Tactical Trainer won’t even be at the experienced Infantry PFC level”. ...

       I have mentioned a number of times (these highlighted links are just a few examples) a variation of this theme, “You are not a Commando/Infantry, but you do not need to be.”. I actually had a guy say, “YES! and if you had just said it this way from the beginning then you might not be getting any negative feedback.” to part of my response to another comment he had made. My actual comment to him consisted of this, “Here’s the thing, “You can’t be what we are/were without doing what we do/did (BUT YOU DON’T NEED TO BE).”.

He goes on to discuss the skills that you should develop. He adds:

      Post SHTF, Offensive Ops shouldn’t even be considered till your defensive ops are underway, and even then, probably not because most just will not have the appropriate manpower for anything but defense.

      Start with the basics. Lay the groundwork for a solid defensive foundation, then MAYBE move on to the consideration of an offensive action if urgently needed. But keep in mind, depending on perspective, that offensive operation you conducted could come back to bite you in the ass legally. If you believe that’s BS, look at some examples from the former Yugoslavia, and tell me that possibility isn’t there.

• "Swaggering Around, Unseemly As It May Be"--Marcus Wynne.  An excerpt:

        I remember, not long ago, doing a training demonstration for the Assistant Chief of the Minneapolis Police Department, her Training Lieutenant, and the very seasoned Sergeant in charge of the MPD Tactical Team (used to be ERU when I kicked a few doors with them, don’t know what they call themselves now…). After going through a brief session (30 minutes) designed to help them recognize their own somatic markers in the presence of danger, the Sergeant made six out of six entries into a room where he was required to state, based on his monitoring of his somatic markers, where the “bad guy” inside the room was — before he entered.

       He was right on six for six out of all entries.

      What I remember most, with a mix of amusement and resignation, was his complete flabbergastment at his own performance. He didn’t want to believe what he’d just done, because by his (previous) belief system, what he had just done was impossible, and therefore was some kind of arcane trickery on my part.

And more:

        Specifically we’ve developed a number of exercises designed to help operators more rapidly recognize (and act) upon their individual somatic markers (insert Wikipedia link Somatic Marker Hypothesis) in the presence of danger. Primarily this is focused on refining the sense of imminent danger from humans nearby (though we have validated it in the field at over 300 meters) and the response it elicits in humans who, these days, are more unaware than not of everything, especially subtle feelings in the body traditionally associated with emotions (hair standing up on the neck, sinking feeling in the stomach, etc. are examples).

      This plays off our fundamental emphasis on the importance of preconscious processing as a foundational element in survival in the face of extreme stress and extreme danger.

      In other words, we train the brain’s pattern recognition program to recognize its own signals faster and sooner so as to speed up the decision making process in fast breaking human on human conflict. To recognize danger early. To recognize the shift in another human from OBSERVATION to ATTENTION and then ATTENTION to INTENTION.

• Related: "People can sense Earth’s magnetic field, brain waves suggest"--Science News.

• Ouch! "Indiana father, 46, who shot himself in the genitals when his handgun slipped from his waist band is charged with carrying the firearm without a license"--Daily Mail. According to the article, the man "was carrying the Hi Point 9mm firearm in his waist band and had not secured it in a holster," and at some point the gun began to slip, so he "reached down to adjust the gun, at which point it fired the bullet which hit just above his penis." In other words, he felt the gun slipping and he suddenly grabbed it to keep it from falling.

• Related: "Involuntary Hand Clenches Leading to Accidental Discharge"--Active Response Training.  Ellifritz notes that "most shooters don’t know that certain situations can cause involuntary hand clenching.  The tightening of the hand causes a contraction of all of the fingers with a force up to 30 lbs. (the Glock trigger pull weight is around 6 lbs.) and cannot be consciously controlled." Thus, even if you think you are safe because you finger is off the trigger and extended along-side the trigger guard, you may not be safe. He explains:

The three most commonly identified causes of involuntary hand clenching have been extensively studied.  They are as follows:

1) Postural Imbalance.  When the shooter loses balance or trips, his hands will clench.

2) Startle Effect.  When the shooter is under stress and surprised, there will often be a hand clench.

3) Interlimb Interaction.  Under stress, when the non gun hand closes violently, the gun hand will clench,  spontaneously duplicating the actions of the non-gun hand.

So be safe out there and don't shoot your junk off.

• "Here’s Why Bikes Are Great Bug Out Vehicles"--The Survivalist Blog. The points raised by the author are: (1) flexible routing (e.g., you can ride between cars and along paths that won't allow other vehicles); (2) bicycles are quiet; (3) bicycles are faster than walking; (4) increased carrying capacity over walking; (5) easy to split up your group if you are being pursued; (6) they don't need gasoline; (7) spare parts will be plentiful [ed: although from my own experience in trying to scavenge parts for fixing bikes, this may be more difficult than you might think]; (8) you probably already own one; (9) it is easier to learn to fix than motor vehicles; and (10) they are EMP proof.
• "Rats – Mice – Insects After SHTF – What To Do About It"--Modern Survival Blog. Short version is that "cleanliness is next to Godliness," and don't forget the mice/rat traps and insect repellent. The author's favorite repellent is Picaridin Insect Repellent. 
• Speaking of rats and SHTF: "President Evil"--Richard Fernandez at PJ Media. He writes:

       The inability of the Maduro regime to restore power supplies to more than an intermittent fraction of Venezuela's population has provided the 21st Century with its first glimpse of what a network collapse can do to a modern society. The EMP Commission Report anticipated civilization's increasing dependency on electric power, telecommunication, banking, fuel, transportation, food distribution, water supply and emergency services grids. They concluded that if these crashed our seemingly solid world could come tumbling down faster than we think.

      Nearly a week after the Guri Dam, which provides most of Venezuela's base electric load, broke down, people are drinking from sewers, patients are dying in hospitals, prisoners are starving in their cells, gasoline is running out at stations from lack of distribution, food is rotting in the reefers and looting has become widespread. All cascaded from a fault that until now has not yet been fully explained. One Venezuelan described the day the grid died almost as if civilization were in the past tense[.]

• "5 Key Changes You Need To Make To Improve Your Prone Position"--Shooting Sports USA. They are: (1) consistency (especially keeping the butt of the rifle against your shoulder between shots); (2) keep your gear close so you can reach it without disturbing your shooting position; (3) make sure you shooting coat fits, especially around the shoulders, to avoid fabric bunching up under the rifle butt; (4) correct arm and rifle position (more below); and (5) consider the rotation of the sling on your arm if you are using a shooting sling. Now more on point number 4:

Once while at a national competition, I overheard the then-National Rifle Coach explain to someone how the two forearms should form a triangle with the floor, like a bipod for the rifle. This triangle need not be equilateral; the sling arm may be more vertical than the trigger arm. But essentially, all I needed to do was move my left elbow out from under the rifle. After trying it out, I realized this technique did not stretch my arm and relied purely on bone structure for support—meaning my arm no longer stretched or sagged as I shot my match. My other elbow now has more pressure on the mat as well, which means a more durable position with recoil for me.

"MOST POWERFUL, RARE AND INTOXICATING IMAGES FROM THE PAST"--Perfect Life (14 min). A reader brought this to my attention, and it is interesting.

• More evidence of a palace coup against Trump: "Steele admits he used posts from 'random individuals' on CNN website for Trump dossier"--American Interest. Christopher Steele has testified under oath that "[t]he dossier that launched several investigations into Donald Trump and his presidential campaign was based, in part, on posts from 'random individuals' from a CNN website that allows the public to publish unverified information." Steele was hired by the investigative firm Fusion GPS with funds from Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee. And then to add insult to injury, the Washington Times has reported that a "John McCain aide spread Steele dossier around Washington during Trump's presidential transition." From that article:

      Mr. Kramer, a former State Department official and a Trump detractor, leaked the Democrat-financed dossier material to The Wall Street Journal, The Washington Post’s Fred Hiatt, CNN’s Carl Bernstein, National Public Radio, McClatchy news service and others, he said during his deposition in the libel case.

     But his most momentous meeting was with Ken Bensinger of BuzzFeed. In Washington during the Christmastime holidays, he let Mr. Bensinger read the dossier. He then stepped away.

     The reporter took cellphone photos. They ended up on Jan. 10, 2017, on BuzzFeed’s website, forever changing political history.

Remember that it was the so-called "independent" reporting of the dossier's allegations in the mainstream media that was used to justify the FISA warrant. In any event, the article also reports: "Mr. Steele, whose mission was to sink the Trump campaign and then his presidency, believed Mr. McCain’s involvement would give 'the FBI additional prod to take this seriously,' Mr. Kramer testified." Kramer also took the dossier to Obama's National Security Council. I'm more and more convinced that the issue with Trump, as far as the Deep State was concerned, is that they didn't have sufficient "dirt" on him to use for purposes of blackmail. 

• More: "JOHN MCCAIN ASSOCIATE HAD CONTACT WITH A DOZEN REPORTERS REGARDING STEELE DOSSIER"--Daily Caller. 

• But that is not all, no, that is not all: "Mark Meadows: US ambassadors conspired with DOJ to take down Trump"--Washington Examiner.  From that article:

        Rep. Mark Meadows, R-N.C., hinted Monday the coming release of documents that will "show" U.S. ambassadors conspired with the FBI and the Justice Department to harm President Trump.

       “It's additional information that is coming out that will show not only was there no collusion, but there was a coordinated effort to take this president down,” Meadows told Fox News’ Sean Hannity. “We talk about the 'Deep State.' There are players now, even ambassadors, that are sitting ambassadors that were involved in part of this with the FBI-DOJ.”

      Meadows did not name any ambassadors.

• Stupid pissing contests: "Professor says she plays 'chicken' with men while walking to empower women"--The People's Ledger. Basically she does not move out of the way of men when walking, so they have to swerve to avoid her. She terms the "game" "Patriarchy Chicken." I don't see her as being particularly progressive in this, since most women are oblivious to what is going on around them and don't step aside, especially when moving in herds in a lunch or shopping crowd; and women expect men to move aside because of chivalry. However, this professor's glee will probably end when she encounter's some clueless or malicious man that decides not to move, and she gets knocked down on her butt.
• "Total US Firearms: Not 300 Million, but 412-660 Million?"--Weapons Man. This is a post from October 2016. In 2014, I cited an estimate that indicated that there would be over 400 million by 2016, while even acknowledging that those estimates probably severely undercounted the number of firearms. The problem, it seems to me, is that reporters look at old estimates (say the 300 million estimate) and then just repeat them as though they are still current.
• "Parabon Helps Investigators Solve 1,000 Years of Cold Cases in 9 Months"--Ammo Land. "Since the introduction of its Snapshot® Genetic Genealogy Service last May, Parabon has assisted law enforcement agencies in making positive identifications in nearly 50 [cold] cases." The article continues:

The magnitude of the achievement is noteworthy since cold cases are particularly difficult to investigate; memories fade, witnesses and suspects move away or die, and leads have typically been exhausted.  Until recently, even DNA evidence was of little value if it failed to produce a match.  However, genetic genealogy can breathe new life into a cold case investigation by using DNA as a “genetic witness” to generate leads.  Even if a suspect in a particular crime had no known connection to the victim, DNA can still connect him or her to the crime scene and genetic genealogy is providing a powerful new approach to tying such unknown DNA to an identity.

• Related: "Forensic Science Has Finally Identified ‘Jack the Ripper’"--Breitbart. From the article:

       Now, more than a century after his reign of terror, forensic scientists have pinpointed his identity from a list of over 100 hypothetical possibilities. Primary police suspect, a then 23-year-old Polish barber by the name of Aaron Kosminski, is Jack. And while he died in an asylum by 1919, he left behind a vital clue to his bloody past.

        Eddowes, Kosminski’s fourth victim, was found on September 30, 1888, allegedly near a shawl stained with blood and semen. Forensic scientists, led by microbiologist Jari Louhelainen, were able to sample mitochrondrial DNA from those traces to a living descendant of Kosminski, all but proving his guilt.

I've read several books on the Jack the Ripper mystery, and Kosminski has always been one of the key suspects, even in the minds of the investigators at the time ... seemingly confirmed because the investigators contrived to have Kosminski put into the insane asylum. According to Vox Day, Kosminski was Jewish, and "the police note[d] that the one of the only eyewitnesses refused to testify on the grounds of the man he had seen was a fellow Jew." 

• Build the wall! "Group of 170 Migrants Dug Under Arizona Border Fence, Say Feds"--Breitbart. Not even cows are safe from their predations.
• Hmm. "Armed gang raids convoy carrying uranium fuel to Brazil nuclear plant"--RT. The article reports:

The uranium shipment came under attack on Tuesday in the town of Frade, about 30 km (19 miles) from Angra dos Reis, where the Angra 2 nuclear power plant is located. Following an intense fire exchange with the gunmen, the [police] officers [guarding the shipment], none of whom were injured, managed to thwart the assault, police said.

The company that operates the power plant suggested that the attackers weren't after the uranium shipment, per se, but that the fight was the result of local turf battles between gangs.

• To globalists, you are just an interchangeable cog in the economic machine: "The Coming Demographic Disruptions"--Larry Diamond at American Interest. After describing the "birth dearth" amongst developed nations, the author suggests:

There is no social model for societies that will be as old as these industrialized countries will be unless one of two things happens: They dramatically increase fertility, or they import people. Even with economic and social incentives to encourage more births, these societies cannot escape the imperative to welcome precisely the phenomenon against which many advanced democracies now seem to be rebelling: immigration.

He continues: 

       It is immigration that will give these four societies (and Canada and Australia) economic dynamism, cultural vitality, and greater fiscal sustainability—if they can “govern over diversity.”  The key lies in the traditional American formula, e pluribus unum, out of many one. The imperfect, at times shamefully disappointing, but still remarkable success of the United States in assimilating immigrants while forging the most diverse nation in world history has been an indispensable key to America’s economic and political vibrancy. Will we now squander it in an atavistic and misplaced fear of the “other”, stimulated by demagogues seeking to manufacture fear in order to ride to power? That is one of the key questions confronting the future of the United States and its global leadership.

      Yet it is not the whole story. The United States is surprisingly well positioned to absorb and manage immigration. For one thing, we are a nation of immigrants with a history of assimilating successive waves of immigrants. For another, the principal source of immigration across our land border, from Latin America, is expected to decline sharply in the decades ahead. Fertility in Mexico (and in El Salvador) has already fallen to replacement levels, and the undocumented Mexican population in the U.S. has been trending downward since 2008. With planning and rational policy (such as keeping highly educated workers in the United States once they finish their science and engineering degrees), the United States could continue to dominate all its competitors in the new global economy of high technology. Industrialized Asia—Japan, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore—needs this immigration even more, but save for Singapore, these countries lack a strategy for recruiting and absorbing it.

The article concludes by looking at the special problem Europe faces vis-a-vis sub-Saharan Africa.

• It is a small club, and you don't belong to it: "'The system is rigged, there is no such thing as meritocracy': Woman reveals how she used to write rich children's college applications, essays, and resumes to get them into America's top schools"--Daily Mail. And it goes beyond getting into an elite college. The subject of the article explained how she ghost wrote papers and theses so the privileged could graduate. But that is still not all:

       Leigh said this all ensures that the student graduates with an Ivy degree, which then gets him internships and jobs at the best companies in the country. 

       'It means he gets interviews, even if his GPA is sub-3.0. It means he gets the best jobs when he graduates. He's still an idiot, but now he's an idiot earning high-five or low-six figures,' she writes. 'This is when the next dominos start to fall.'  

      Leigh said the company that hires the student then begins to groom him with an executive coach, deciding that he's 'executive material' because he has the 'right name and the right degree and the right presentation'. 

      He will also get a mentor, who will help him 'meet the right people, form the right connections' and take him to the right events to make sure 'he knows all the power players in their city', she continues. 

       It is these key figures who help the student sign up for the right charities to build his 'Personal Brand', getting him seats on 'the best non-profit boards in his city'. 

      'Some of these are competitive,' Leigh writes. 'Want to know how I know that? Because they require an essay, resume, and bio. And guess who writes those.' 

      The student eventually gets promoted, making 'low-mid six figures'. But thanks to his good school, good job, and good philanthropy, he begins being considered for 'a whole host of things most average people have absolutely no awareness of'. 

       'He's going to apply for and be named one of his city's "40 Under 40" and get a spread in a local, glossy magazine. He's going to apply for and get a position in his city's Up and Coming Young Leaders' program, and be interviewed on TV. He's going to apply for and win a spot in his city's "Wealthy People Pretending To Do Good But Really Just Hanging Out With Other Wealthy People" initiative, and get newspaper coverage,' Leigh continues. 'I'll give you one guess who writes those applications.' 

     By the time he's in his 40s and 50s and now earning high-six figures, the man is now ready to apply to a for-profit board, Leigh explains. 

There's more at the article. As I've said many times before, a meritocracy will only last for one generation.

• Related: "The Four Unspoken Rules for Getting Into College"--Minding the Campus.

• Related: "Unmasking the College-Admissions Fraud"--City Journal. According to the article: "The celebrity college-admissions cheating scandal has two clear takeaways:  an elite college degree has taken on wildly inflated importance in American society, and the sports-industrial complex enjoys wildly inflated power within universities." Also this: "America’s education problem is not that too few students are going to college, but that too many are. One easy solution to the college-debt crisis would be to stop encouraging so many people to go to college in the first place. Policymakers and philanthropists must start valorizing vocational training and hands-on work experience, instead of relentlessly trying to boost the number of university graduates."

• Rabbit parenting: "The 'ethical' porn film made by MOTHERS worried about effects of hardcore films on their children"--Daily Mail. From the article:

       The women made their own X-rated film as part of new Channel 4 documentary Mums Make Porn after being disgusted by the adult movies they found online.

       The three-part series which starts tomorrow saw them direct and produce a video to create porn that is realistic and promotes positive attitudes towards sex.

• Is someone taking the law into their own hands? "Salinas psychiatrist found bludgeoned to death in trunk of car in Las Vegas"--The Californian. Dr. Thomas Burchard was a child psychiatrist for the Community Hospital of the Monterey Peninsula.

• Related? "Defrocked priest accused of abusing teenage boys fatally shot in Nevada, police say"--Fox News.

• Do you remember from a few weeks ago the article about the 5 heavily armed men arrested in Haiti that claimed they were working on a top secret government job? I hadn't seen anything further in national news, so I decided to see if I could find out more. The February 21, 2019, Miami Herald reports that Haitian authorities had apparently turned the men over to the United States to stand trial in the United States, but upon their return to the states, the men were released. From the article:

       Federal sources told the Miami Herald that the men will not be charged criminally, but are being debriefed. They told U.S. authorities they were on the island providing private security for a “businessman” doing work with the Haitian government.

      The five American citizens, who returned on a commercial flight to Miami on Wednesday night and were met by U.S. law enforcement, did not have any scheduled appearances in Miami federal court.

      The U.S. Attorney’s Office referred calls to the State Department, which said only: “The return of the individuals to the U.S. was coordinated with the Haitian authorities.”

NPR original reported about the men:

The five Americans have been identified as Christopher Michael Osman, Kent Leland Kroeker, Christopher Mark McKinley, Dustin Porte and Talon Ray Burton. At least two of them are former Navy SEALs; another two also served in the U.S. military, and the fifth man has worked as a contractor with the Department of Homeland Security[.]

See, this is what happens when you let those Navy guys be in charge.

• "Scientists make ‘impossible’ discovery off coast of Africa"--The New York Post. The article reports:

       The quartzite makes up one half of a mountain on Anjouan island, a 400-square-mile island that is part of the Comoros Islands. Like the Hawaiian island chain, Anjouan formed due to volcanic eruptions, which makes the presence of quartzite on the island all the more interesting. “All those years, it has bothered me that I didn’t understand how those rocks got there,” Class told Live Science.

       The presence of quartzite is not the first non-volcanic rock to be found on the island, Live Science added. In the 1980s, there were “scattered outcroppings” of quartzite, but nothing like the discovery Class and her team found in September 2018.

      More information and study is needed to determine just how much quartzite is on the island, as well as determine where it came from. One explanation has been continental and tectonic plate drift, but the chemistry of the volcanic rocks on the island don’t correspond with any association of a continental crust, Live Science added.

• A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Air Force To Turn Navy Air Defense Busting Missile Into High-Speed Critical Strike Weapon"--The War Zone. From the article:

The U.S. Air Force has revealed that it is working to turn the U.S. Navy’ s Advanced Anti-Radiation Guided Missile-Extended Range, or AARGM-ER, into a fast-flying strike weapon that its F-35A Joint Strike Fighters will be able to use against a variety of time-sensitive targets. This is something that The War Zone had thought would be the case based on previous information about this program. The new missile would give those stealthy jets, as well as other aircraft in the future, an important tool for quickly knocking down anti-access and area denial threats, as well as destroying pop-up targets on short notice.

       ... “The target environment includes Theater Ballistic Missile Launchers, Land Attack and Anti-Ship Cruise Missile Launchers, GPS Jammers, Anti-Satellite Systems, and Integrated Air Defense Systems.”

Although based on an existing system, the new missile will be able to fly farther and faster.