"Why Clear Gel May Be Lying To You: 10mm Federal 180gr Trophy Bonded soft point gel test"-The Chopping Block (10 min.). Andrew finds very little expansion when shooting into clear gel, but good expansion when shot into 10% ballistic gel. The reason, he surmises, is that clear gel is less dense than the 10% ballistic gel. The takeaway is to take clear gel tests with a grain of salt, especially if the bullet fails to expand.
- "More Than CCW: Self-Defense Beyond the Firearm"--Shooting Illustrated. An excerpt:
Another moment of inspiration hit me while I was attending Craig Douglas’s “Extreme Close Quarters Combat” (ECQC) class earlier this year, where I learned how to deal with someone close to me (within grappling distance) who wants to do me harm. Watching my fellow class attendees roll around struggling to get in a position to either get clear of the encounter or end it in someway was a revelation to me. I noticed that students who drew a gun (in this case we were using pistols that fired paint-marking simunition rounds) in a close-quarters situation would rarely, if ever, get off a useful shot at their opponent, even though their opponent was quite literally within arm’s reach. The rough-and-tumble nature of a close-quarters situation meant that it may not be possible to draw a concealed firearm in time to dealt with a threat, or it could be wrestled away, out of the fight, and became irrelevant to the outcome.
A training knife carried on the centerline, however, was a different story. The students in my class who were able to draw a training knife and get it into use when grappling usually emerged as the winner in a life-or-death wrestling struggle.
- "PRACTICING THE DRAWSTROKE…."--Civilian Gunfighter. The author relates:
[W]ith the one handed sweep, two garments aren’t as much of a problem. The sweeping motion of the hand pulls the closed front inner garment up and then strikes the outer open front garment hem, sweeping it back and away from the grip of the gun. Indeed, this is very similar to the open front garment draw that Mike Pannone teaches. The only problem I encountered was holstering the gun. The hem and zipper pull of my outer jacket wound up hanging down near the mouth of the holster. As always, deliberate due diligence is required when holstering a loaded gun. I also tried the draw with the outer jacket zipped up, in effect making two closed front covering garments, and it continued to work well for me.
- "THE SECRETS: WINNING THE AFTERMATH, PART 2"--Gabe Suarez. Dealing with the 911 call and police. Part 3 has more with dealing with the police. (See also Part 1, which discusses the importance of being seen as a victim and not a suspect).
- "BRACKEN: COVINGTON GIVES A GLIMPSE OF CIVIL WAR TWO"--American Partisan. Bracken explains that the current vilification of white heterosexual males is part of an "othering" process used to produce scapegoats, and is the first step toward genocide. He writes:
As the government fails to keep up with its social welfare promises, the Democrats will blame their pre-designated scapegoats for every one of their own failures. In the United States, Public Enemy Number One will be older white Christian conservative heterosexual men who will be called obstructionists and saboteurs. Being morons, the Dunning-Kruger Democrats will fall for the party line, and also blame white heritage American scapegoats for the failure of their own party’s utopian promises.
He continues:
Nobody can say when or where the precise Fort Sumter moment will occur, but when it comes, a bloody civil war will follow. However, unlike the 1861-65 festivities, there will be no convenient regional divide between the warring camps. Instead, the red-blue county-level election maps will be a more useful blueprint for the coming mayhem, and even then, counties will often be too broad of a measure. I would suggest readers might review my earlier essay The CW2 Cube: Mapping the Meta-Terrain of Civil War Two, as well as When the Music Stops, How America’s Cities May Explode in Violence, for an in-depth look at how a dirty civil war may unfold and manifest itself.
In short, Civil War Two will quickly become an urban versus rural conflict divided along demographic and cultural lines. This type of dirty civil war will be fought at the zip code and neighborhood level. Front lines will be vague and constantly shifting, with three or more local factions often competing for supremacy. It will be a civil war of secret arrests, disappearances, IEDs and targeted assassinations that will have many of the worst attributes of Argentina and Northern Ireland in the 1970s, or even Rwanda and former Yugoslavia in the 1990s.
- Related post: "Matthew Braken Discusses Civil War in the U.S."
- Related post: "The Coming Civil War."
Just to remind you where this is all heading: in his book, Prophecy--Key to the Future, Duane S. Crowther cites various early LDS Church leaders concerning a second civil war. For instance, Orson Pratt, speaking in 1879, described this second civil war:
[I]t will be very different from the war between the North and the South. Do you wish me to describe it? I will do so. It will be a war of neighborhood against neighborhood, city against city, town against town, county against county, state against state, and they will go forth, destroying and being destroyed and manufacturing will, in a great measure, cease, for a time among the American nation. Why? Because in these terrible wars, they will not be privileged to manufacture, there will be too much bloodshed, too much mobocracy, too much going forth in bands and destroying and pillaging the land to suffer people to pursue any local vocation with any degree of safety. What will become of millions of the farmers upon that land? They will leave their farms and they will remain uncultivated, and they will flee before the ravaging armies from place to place; and thus will they go forth burning and pillaging the whole country; and that great and powerful nation, now consisting of some forty millions of people, will be wasted away, unless they repent.
(Crowther p. 50). Joseph Smith is also quoted as saying:
A terrible revolution will take place in the land of America, such as has never been seen before; for the land will be literally left without a supreme government, and every species of wickedness will run rampant. Father will be against son, and son against father, mother against daughter, and daughter against mother. The most terrible scenes of murder and bloodshed and rapine that have ever been looked upon will take place.
(Crowther 53). That is, unlike the Civil War of the 1860s, this will be a war without set geographic boundaries or front lines, and protests will blend into mobs will blend into armies.
- Related: The front lines of the new civil war: "In Overwhelmingly White Buckhead Community of Atlanta, Citizens Irate Black-Run City Stopped Police from Responding to Shoplifting/Property Crimes"--Unz Report.
- Related: "MS-13 members planning to target city cops: NYPD"--New York Post. The article reports:
In a memo released Tuesday, authorities from the police department’s 105th Precinct warned officers that the department has received “threats against [members of service]” who live in Brentwood and Central Islip, both hamlets in the Suffolk County town of Islip, as well as Patchogue.
“Intel has been obtained that members of MS13 are looking to ‘hit’ NYPD police officers, specifically in the Brentwood/Central Islip area, as well as possibly Patchogue in order to gain street credibility,” according to the memo. “These members are conducting reconnaissance of [member of service] private residences.”
The memo goes on to explain that police officers should “always be cognizant” and alert, should change their routine, keep an eye out for any strange vehicles and, if they do see anything unusual, make note of it.
It is not just the United States. Police in El Salvador have been targeted by MS-13 to such a large extent that police officers are purportedly fleeing the country.
- Flashback: Thomas Sowell's 2013 National Review article: "Early Skirmishes in a Race War." Sowell writes: "Initial skirmishes in that race war have already begun, and have in fact been going on for some years. But public officials pretend that it is not happening, and the mainstream media seldom publish it at all, except in ways that conceal what is really taking place." He describes these skirmishes as the "innumerable organized and unprovoked physical attacks on whites by young black gangs in shopping malls, on beaches, and in other public places all across the country today."
- "Why Democrats are not afraid of gun control anymore"--CNN. Because Democrats don't care about rural voters. From the article:
Compared with the 1990s or even the early 2000s, House Democrats today are far less dependent on districts with large numbers of culturally conservative blue-collar and rural voters. Instead, the party's new majority is centered on urban and suburban districts that are either racially diverse, well educated, or both.
The willingness, even eagerness, of most House Democrats to embrace new gun control measures highlights how the party's evolution into a metropolitan-based coalition is shifting its incentives -- and reconfiguring its central fault line. For years, social and cultural issues -- ranging from abortion, gay rights and guns to questions of racial equity and immigration -- created the most difficult divisions for a Democratic House caucus trying to protect a large number of rural and Southern seats.
But those social issues are likely to prove much less divisive for today's metro-centered party. The big vote expected Wednesday for the background check bill will likely be only the forerunner for aggressive House action in the months ahead on an array of other hot-button cultural issues that once divided the party -- from providing legal status to undocumented immigrants brought to the country as children by their parents to expanding protections at work for gays and other measures to restrict access to guns, for instance by raising the minimum age to purchase one.
(Underline added).
- Blowback: "New Mexico Gov Grisham: 2A Sanctuary ‘Rogue Sheriffs Throwing a Childish Pity Party’"--The Truth About Guns. According to the article, "21 of New Mexico’s 33 counties have now declared themselves 'Second Amendment Sanctuaries.'"
- Related: "‘Second Amendment Sanctuaries’: 21 of New Mexico’s 33 Counties Refuse to Enforce Gun Control"--Breitbart.
- Related: "Maryland Gun Owners Vow They Will Not Comply, Gun-Grabbers and Legislators Freak Out"--The Truth About Guns.
- Related: "Maryland Sheriffs Won’t Enforce New Gun Law Say It’s A “Suicide Mission” For Cops"--The Lid.
- The other day, I linked to a story from the Washington Free Beacon reporting "FBI: Crime Dropped in 2018--Violent crime rate declined 4.3%, robbery and burglary down double digits". That decline is not reflected in the cities with the greatest gun control. CBS New York reports, for instance: "Despite City’s Positive Outlook On Crime Numbers, NYPD Reports Murders & Rapes Soaring In 2019." According to the article:
According to the NYPD’s weekly CompStat reports, 51 murders were reported through Feb. 24 – a staggering 50-percent increase from the same point last year.
Authorities are reporting a 23.6 percent increase in rapes in 2019. There have been 267 cases reported through Feb. 24, with 31 coming in just a seven-day period from Feb. 18-24.
While the latest CompStat report claims there has been an 8.3 percent decrease in crime, those numbers don’t include misdemeanor offenses in their totals.
A deeper dive into those statistics find that misdemeanor sex crimes have skyrocketed in 2019, going from 459 in 2018 to 580 through the same point in 2019. That’s an increase of over 26 percent.
There has also been no change in the level of shooting incidents around the five boroughs this year.
The only area of increased crime city officials have repeatedly addressed is the spike in hate crimes. Through Feb. 17, the number of bias attacks had jumped by a stunning 72 percent from 2018.
- Related: "SAFE Act Be Damned: NYC Cop Charged With Illegally Making, Selling Guns to Gang Members"--The Truth About Guns.
- "DEVELOPING AND EXPLOITING OPEN SOURCE SIGNALS INTELLIGENCE"--American Partisan. Some explanation:
There’s a reason I don’t write a lot about line unit tactics (UW is NOT just learning battle drills and how to conduct an L-shaped ambush) even though I could- there’s no need. There’s only so many times you can read about breaking contact or magazine dumps; all of that fun range stuff will become absolute hell because you didn’t take the time to work on the enablers & supporting tasks now. Not having to do that break contact because your dedicated signals collection guy on the patrol intercepted the OPFOR’s commo plan (because they were probably pretty sloppy) is a hell of a lot better than walking into an ambush. You might even get to lay one in for them and take their stuff. But don’t listen to me, I’ve only done this for real a few times.
Read the whole thing.
Andrew tests the Barnaul 125 gr. SP and finds excellent performance both in expansion and penetration.
- The Yellow Vest protests continue apace: "Tear gas v flowers: Yellow Vests march through Paris for 16th week in a row"--RT. Protests this past weekend were not as violent as protesters kept to approved locations.
- Big Brother loves you: "China bans 23m from buying travel tickets as part of 'social credit' system"--The Guardian. From the article:
China has blocked millions of “discredited” travellers from buying plane or train tickets as part of the country’s controversial “social credit” system aimed at improving the behaviour of citizens.
According to the National Public Credit Information Centre, Chinese courts banned would-be travellers from buying flights 17.5 million times by the end of 2018. Citizens placed on black lists for social credit offences were prevented from buying train tickets 5.5 million times. The report released last week said: “Once discredited, limited everywhere”.
The social credit system aims to incentivise “trustworthy” behaviour through penalties as well as rewards. According to a government document about the system dating from 2014, the aim is to “allow the trustworthy to roam everywhere under heaven while making it hard for the discredited to take a single step.”
Social credit offences range from not paying individual taxes or fines to spreading false information and taking drugs. More minor violations include using expired tickets, smoking on a train or not walking a dog on a leash.
- Related: "Massive Database Leak Gives Us a Window into China’s Digital Surveillance State"--Electronic Frontier Foundation. From the article:
Earlier this month, Gevers discovered an insecure MongoDB database filled with records tracking the location and personal information of 2.6 million people located in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The records include individuals’ national ID number, ethnicity, nationality, phone number, date of birth, home address, employer, and photos.
Over a period of 24 hours, 6.7 million individual GPS coordinates were streamed to and collected by the database, linking individuals to various public camera streams and identification checkpoints associated with location tags such as “hotel,” “mosque,” and “police station.” The GPS coordinates were all located within Xinjiang.
This database is owned by the company SenseNets, a private AI company advertising facial recognition and crowd analysis technologies.
A couple of days later, Gevers reported a second open database tracking the movement of millions of cars and pedestrians. Violations like jaywalking, speeding, and going through a red-light are detected, trigger the camera to take a photo, and ping a WeChat API, presumably to try and tie the event to an identity.
- Barack Obama's legacy:
- "Ex-PM Malki Divulges Hot Secrets of How US Supported ISIS to Gain Power in Iraq"--Al Bawaba. Former Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has stated that the Obama Administration was behind the ISIS's rise to power.
- "Obama Tied Donors Who Trafficked Aborted Baby Parts From Planned Parenthood, Arrested"--Explain Life. The article reports:
Two wealthy Ecuadorian brothers, Roberto and William Isaías, who were owners of companies fined and ordered to shut down for illegally trafficking world-wide in aborted baby parts purchased from Planned Parenthood, were arrested by ICE on February 13, 2019.
According to Law.com: Roberto and William Isaías, 74 and 75, were detained Wednesday in Miami, Florida and taken to a detention facility for undocumented immigrants awaiting deportation, The New York Times reported.
ICE told the Times that the brothers were “unlawfully present” in the U.S.
- "The Threat to English"--American Greatness. Jason Richwine observes that the lack of assimilation among immigrants--particularly Hispanic--threaten the use of English as a universal language. He also observes that the benefits of a multi-lingual society are the product of false thinking:
Unfortunately, arguments in favor of a polyglot society are difficult to defend.
For example, the belief that bilingual people develop superior cognitive functioning has fallen victim to the “replication crisis” in psychology. Researchers had already been struggling to replicate the alleged bilingual advantage, and a meta-analysis published last year in Psychological Bulletin amplified the skepticism. After correcting for publication bias—the tendency for significant results to be published, while null results get discarded—bilinguals had no measurable advantage over monolinguals.
As for the claim that the United States must become multilingual in order to compete in the global economy, it is undercut by numerous counterexamples. Look no further than China, which has grown wealthy selling products to the West despite having only a tiny percentage of citizens who are fluent in a European language. Similarly, monolingual Japan developed a tremendous export-based economy. Its problems today are due to a low birthrate, not homogeneity per se.
Far from enriching, multilingualism stresses cultural fault lines. Even in First World countries such as Canada, Spain, and Belgium, ethno-linguistic tensions have lingered for centuries. The best way to confront the problem here in the United States is to debate it openly, and that starts with questioning superficial reassurances, such as “multilingualism is wonderful” and “Hispanics will adopt English the same way past immigrants did.” Unfortunately, any questioning of the language issue—even by a famous liberal in good standing with the media—is met with swift condemnation, and so the empty assurances endure.
- One of the driving forces behind Evil is to corrupt everything so there can be no Good. "The Pedophile Project: Your 7-Year-Old Is Next On The Sexual Revolution’s Hit Parade"--The Federalist. The author warns:
We cannot dismiss the campaign to legalize pedophilia as fringy stuff that will get nowhere. It’s real and it’s here and it’s gaining strength. It’s a very logical outgrowth of the nihilism inherent in the sexual revolution.
* * *
As with any propaganda campaign that pushes outrageous changes on an unwary public, it’s all about timing. Academics might refer to timing as the Overton Window or the Availability Cascade. But we should all be able to understand the process of conditioning the public to accept the unacceptable.
First, the groundwork is laid through carefully planned propaganda. There are various types of messaging for various audiences: the medical establishment, the education establishment, legislators, judges, the general public, and so forth. Then the agitation begins with poster people who are “just like you.” And before you know it, it’s all over.
Unveiling pedophilia as “just fine” will likely be an ambush if we aren’t prepared. It promises to be as swift as the “transgender tipping point” campaign that shrewdly coincided with the Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision in 2015. It will be accompanied by a defiant campaign to paint any resistance as a relic of outdated morality that oppresses the rights of an identity group and the civil rights of any children caught in it.
So, when that inevitable time comes, will we just sit back and cower in confusion? Or will ample voices be able to break through the pressures of political correctness beforehand and shout “Enough!” Be prepared to make that happen, because the pitcher is full and they are mixing the Kool-Aid.
- Seems like a lot of articles about gold have been popping up my radar lately. Just a few recent ones:
- "US Army Takes 50 Tons Of Gold From Syria In Alleged Deal With ISIS"--Zero Hedge. From the article:
According to reports by Syrian state news agency SANA, U.S. forces struck a deal with ISIS whereby the terrorist group would give up 50 tons of gold across eastern Syria’s Deir el-Zour province in exchange for safe passage.
The precious metal, worth about $2.13 billion, was plundered by the self-designated “caliphate” as its reign of terror spread across Syria and Iraq between 2015 and 2017.
Turkish newspaper Daily Sabah reports that local sources claim U.S. Army helicopters have already transferred the gold from the U.S. forces’ base in Kobani, the Kurdish-controlled city that lies close to Syria’s northern border with Syria. A portion of the gold was also distributed to the Kurdish People’s Protection Units (YPG), which dominates the U.S.-allied Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF).
The news comes after SANA claimed that locals witnessed U.S. helicopters airlifting large cases of gold amounting to about 40 tons from the al-Dashisha area in Hasaka’s southern countryside earlier this month. The gold was purportedly looted by ISIS from Mosul in Iraq and other parts of Syria.
- "‘Just bring the gold back’: RBA responds as conspiracy theories swirl around Australia’s ‘missing’ gold"--News.com.au. From this article:
Most people would be aware that the Reserve Bank of Australia, like all central banks around the world, holds a portion of the country’s reserve assets in gold.
What you may not know, because it was only made public in December 2012, is that 99.9 per cent of Australia’s $4.4 billion worth is actually held by the Bank of England.
Of that gold, 11 tonnes is “leased” out to earn interest — it brought in around $700,000 last year — while the other 69 tonnes is sitting in a vault in London. Or is it?
“There are all sorts of conspiracy theories and rumours in the gold market as to what’s going on,” said economist John Adams, who has been on a crusade to find Australia’s “missing gold” in a series of videos with Digital Finance Analytics founder Martin North.
The crux of the conspiracy theory, promoted by the likes of Swiss gold trader Egon von Greyerz, is that China, India and other eastern countries are accumulating more gold than can be explained by mining production.
He believes much of it is actually western central banks “covertly disposing” of their gold, or otherwise leasing it to China and India through bullion banks which then “issue an IOU only backed by paper since the physical will never return from Asia”.
“Since 2008 just China and India have accumulated 26,000 tonnes of gold,” Mr von Greyerz wrote recently. “That is a remarkable figure and virtually the total mine production for that period.”
An audit of Australia’s gold holdings was conducted in 2013, but a freedom of information request for the findings and the final report was denied as providing the documents “would, or could reasonably be expected to, cause damage to” the relationship between the RBA and the BoE.
- Yay. "NASA is going back to the future with nuclear rockets"--The Hill. The article notes that "Tucked into the recent spending bill that was passed by Congress is a line item for $100 million for NASA to develop nuclear thermal rocket engines[.]" Also:
A nuclear thermal rocket superheats liquid hydrogen in a nuclear reactor and shoots the resulting plasma out a rocket nozzle. Nuclear Thermal Propulsion (NTP) is far more efficient than a chemical rocket, reducing flight times to destinations such as Mars and requiring less fuel. Astronauts would be subjected to less radiation and less time in microgravity using NTP. Even uncrewed space probes would be able to reach their destinations more quickly, opening the solar system to further exploration.
Recent developments in nuclear technology allow engineers to develop cheaper, lighter and safer nuclear thermal propulsion than was envisioned under the NERVA program. Once flight-ready articles are developed, deep-space missions would become even cheaper.
- A reminder that we live in the 21st Century: "Unpiloted SpaceX crew ship pulls off flawless station docking"--CBS News. The Dragon capsule is pretty much fully automated. The next step for the Dragon capsule is a test of the emergency escape system in the event of a bad launch (the capsule has its own rockets that can take it clear of the primary system) and, if that works, it should be ready for a manned mission.
- Related: From a couple of weeks ago: "SpaceX launches moon lander, lands booster despite tough conditions"--Mashable.
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