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Friday, August 16, 2019

August 16, 2019--A Quick Run Around the Web

"Organization of the WWII U.S. Army Infantry Rifle Squad"--G.I. History Handbook (22 min.)

 I often thought about buying one of the older model 84’s but certainly not the trash Beretta is making today. The reason I did not was the same reason I never bought a CZ 82 which is another pistol I always wanted but will never buy. So why not? Simple, these pistols are so large that you may as well buy a 9×19 pistol some of which are smaller than they are. In the real world neither the Beretta 84 or the CZ 82 has any practical purpose these days except as a collectors item as time as moved on and no one I know would not rather have a 9×19 in same size or even smaller pistol for discrete carry.
While the author of the comment is correct that you can find smaller handguns than the Beretta 84 in more potent calibers, he misses an important point: the Beretta 84 is not a concealed carry pistol, but a full-size .380. It wasn't intended for concealed carry, but as a duty pistol for police or military officers. It's 9 mm equivalent is the Beretta 92. It has a practical purpose because for those wanting less recoil or a smaller grip size, but still wanting something to fill the role of a full-size weapon, the 84 and similar handguns work, and can work well. The fact that because it is .380 and can, therefore, be made small enough to conceal easily is just a bonus. 
      The same issues come up with other weapons. For instance, the S&W Model 10 revolver, especially an older one with a tapered barrel, is actually a fairly small and lightweight weapon as far as steel frame revolvers go, particularly if sporting a 4-inch barrel. Of course, I could find a weapon that is the same size or smaller with a more effective caliber, such as a J-frame .357 Magnum, or a Model 629 Deluxe in .44 Magnum. But that misses that point that the Model 10 is a full sized revolver, although shooting a less powerful caliber. And sometimes you want something that is full-sized but without the greater recoil.
  • Related: "The ‘Liberator12k’ – A DIY 3D Printed 12 Gauge Revolving Shotgun"--The Firearms Blog. The author explains: "The Liberator12k is a revolving 12 gauge shotgun which uses mostly 3D printed parts combined with easily available metal components including steel tubing for the barrel and chamber inserts. The basic idea behind the design is to allow anyone with a $200 3D printer to be able to simply order some suitable steel tubing along with some standard steel fittings and from then be able to easily assemble a reliable and safe homemade repeating shotgun capable of 6-7 successive shots of widely available 12 gauge."
  • "Gunsmithing Tools You Need: Left Hand Drill Bits"--The Truth About Guns. For removing screws when you've stripped the head.
  • What? They don't come prepackaged! "How to Field Dress and Prepare Game Birds"--Outdoor Life. 
  • "Prairie Landmarks"--Blue Collar Prepping. The author writes about navigating in areas that are flat: "Even though we don't have mountain peaks to navigate by, we still have local landmarks. Knowing your local area is key to being able to travel safely through it, so get out and explore a bit. Dust off the paper maps and see how much has changed since it was printed, making notes for yourself as you go." Landmarks he mentions are roads, railroad tracks, grain silos, and waterways.
  • Crimson Trace has a good article "About Green Lasers". Key point: "a green laser is not actually, measurably brighter than a red laser. We simply perceive it as brighter - which is functionally the same thing. As such they are almost always going to be superior to red lasers in bright conditions, both for 'picking up' the laser with your eye and shooting with it effectively at a greater distance."
  • "Handgun or Pistol Defense Against Bear Attack: 73 cases, 96% Effective"--Ammo Land. While a .22 can work, I wouldn't rely on it to do so. One of the successful .22 cases he cites, the victim of the attack shot a black bear 14 times with a .22, but only 2 of the shots actually reached a vital organ. Of course, larger, more powerful calibers didn't necessarily work all of the time either (well, the .44 Magnum did). But it is interesting the number of cases where the bear was driven off merely by shooting into the ground ahead of it, apparently scaring the bear.
  • "Look At Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Assault Rifle’ with High Capacity Magazines"--Ammo Land. The weapon in question is the Girandoni Air Rifle that "were .46 caliber, military, magazine fed, rifles with high capacity magazines capable of firing 22 shots in 60 seconds," and even came with "four, 22 round speedloaders." One of these rifles accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition.
  • "The Bystander Effect: Myth or Fact?"--Foundation for Economic Education. Recent research suggests that it is largely a myth. 
After reviewing more than 200 videos of real-life altercations in which bystanders were present, a recent study revealed that at least one bystander intervened 91 percent of the time. Far from discouraging individuals from helping, the researchers concluded, the presence of bystanders actually increased the probability that someone would intervene, precisely the opposite of what the theory of the bystander effect would predict.
It's not surprising because the incident of indifferent or scared bystanders that prompted the theory of the bystander effect, the rape and murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964, was itself essentially a work of fiction by the New York Times. I've written about the Genovese incident a couple of time (see here and here).
  • Lol: "As summer violence rages on, a Chicago gang member’s jail recordings offer a rare look at the city’s entrenched gun culture"--Chicago Tribune (via MSN). A Chicago gang banger's telephone conversation to a friend was recorded and revealed that the gang banger believed that the only way he could escape the violent gun culture was to move out of Chicago. Yes, gun control has worked so well in Chicago that a gang banger thinks he has to move to areas with less gun control in order to not become a murderer. 
  • "SHARPEN YOUR HATCHET"--American Partisan. "Once more, a President who was elected by an angry base has turned his back. Once more, that base who peacefully asked for a return to sanity, a return to the rule of law, a return to a nation they recognize, has been shunned. It should be the last time." And a message to the Republican politicians: "The Left hates all of you, all of us, and is actively organizing to murder us. But it will be you first. So all this pandering to them won’t save you, and neither will we."

Sound advice for all of us: "You don't have to be a dick"--Vigilance Elite (4 min.)

          In a free-market economy everyone is supposed to have the chance to get rich. The dream of making it big motivates people to take risks, start businesses, stay in school and work hard. Unfortunately, in the U.S., that dream seems to be dying.
           There are still plenty of rich people in the U.S., and their wealth is increasing. But people outside that top echelon are having a tougher time breaking in. A 2017 study by the Federal Reserve Bank of Cleveland found that the probability that a household outside the top 10% made it into the highest tier within 10 years was twice as high during 1984-1994 as it was during 2003-2013.
      Well, the biggest predictor of whether you will be rich is whether your parents were rich. To wit:
      Even if one doesn’t win big in the housing or stock markets, it is possible to get moderately wealthy by working one’s way up the corporate ladder. And companies are still throwing big salaries at data scientists with doctorates, as well as executives and top managers. But hopping on the bottom rungs of the ladder usually requires an elite and very costly education. Sometimes this even means an advanced degree. That kind of credential can only be attained by way of not just talent, but increasingly a privileged background. 
             At school, we're introduced to a different distribution, the more familiar "normal" (or Gaussian), which is best displayed in the bell-curve spread of values around an average. Measure the heights of a random selection of men, say, and most will be around the average value, with progressively fewer as you go in either direction away from the middle. Plot this on a graph and you get the bell curve.
               Power law distributions, however, do not cluster around a single value. The impact of one big earthquake, for example, is bigger than the sum of millions of smaller, more common ones. Very few huge solar flares erupt from the surface of the sun, but those few are more significant than the endless thousands of smaller ones. The same applies to the numbers of big cities, the size of the Moon's craters and the occurrence and citations of scientific papers.
                 Once you know power law distributions exist, they become very useful. The concept of the "average" is useless, for example, when talking about things that follow power laws. The average height of the people in a room (following the normal distribution) might tell you a lot about the spread heights of people in that room, but the average wealth of a country's citizens (which follows a power law distribution) tells you little or nothing about how rich or poor most people are. And listening to the maths also tells you that the Occupy protesters have got it right that focusing on the extremes (a tax on the wealthiest 1%, say) will bring disproportionate results for the number of people it will affect.
                   The unfortunate truth is that this road is in such a poor state, it isn't even worth repairing. Last May, a 100-meter stretch had deteriorated to such a state that it had to be demolished.
                    According to Le Monde's report, various components of the road don't fit properly — panels have come loose and some of the solar panels have broken into fragments.
                       On top of the damage and poor wear of the road, the Normandy solar track also failed to fulfill its energy-production goals. The original aim was to produce 790 kWh each day, a quantity that could illuminate a population of between 3,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. But the rate produced stands at only about 50% of the original predicted estimates.
                    * * *
                           Even rotting leaves and thunderstorms appear to pose a risk in terms of damage to the surface of the road. What's more, the road is very noisy, which is why the traffic limit had to be lowered to 70 kmh.
                        Of course, all of these possible explanations for the panics we are seeing are rooted in the general sense that society is fragmenting. That’s because current year America is fragile and possibly ready to shatter. The old political order is in decline and the rise of identity politics promises to replace it. These panics are as much about the fear of what comes next as superstition or immediate threats. The White Fright may one day be seen as the turning point in the rise of white identity politics.
                          My opinion is that the "white scare" is the consequence of a growing realization and fear on the Left (and Center, for that matter) that white Americans will, like every other minority group, adopt a politics based on ethnic identity. Blacks can have their National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Latinos can have their "La Raza" (The Race), Jews can have their Anti-Defamation League, but, to the Left, it would be the end of the world if there were a National Association for the Advancement of White People, or a white version of "The Race," or a White Anti-Defamation League. But the immigration paradigm in place since the 1970s have assured that result. Now if they can just get all our guns before that happens....
                                  In August of 1966, the Chinese Cultural Revolution was shifting into high gear. Egged on by Chairman Mao, student groups calling themselves the “Red Guard” had been popping up at schools, colleges, and universities all over the country. They were drunk with power and convinced of their own victimhood (rather like our Antifa).
                                   “To rebel is justified!” Mao told them.
                                      At an August mass rally in Tiananmen Square attended by over a million, Mao’s right-hand man, Lin Biao, instructed his young audience on what to do. Standing next to Mao, Lin Biao exhorted them to destroy “all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes.”
                                       Yes, all of them.
                                          Destroy they did. According to historian Frank Dikötter in The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History 1962-1976, the first death occurred in a school for girls run by Beijing Normal University. On the afternoon of August 5th, self-appointed Red Guard students accused five of the school’s administrators of disloyalty to the Revolution. Forcing them to kneel, the students hit them with nail-spiked clubs. When the vice principal, Bian Zhongyun, after hours of torture, lost consciousness, her body was stuffed into a garbage can.
                                           The students had no need to fear retaliation. Mao had ensured that no measures would be taken against them. At Beijing’s 101st Middle School, where powerful party leaders sent their own children, more than 10 teachers were forced to crawl on their hands and knees through hot coals. In the same city, at the Third Middle School for Girls, the principal was beaten to death and the dean hanged herself. At another Beijing middle school, the principal was forced to stand in the summer heat while students poured boiling water on him. And at yet another, a biology teacher was tortured and dragged to her death. Her colleagues were then forced to take turns beating her dead body.
                                             Fellow students were not exempt. Students from so-called “bad backgrounds” (i.e. the sons and daughters of alleged capitalists, landlords, rich peasants and counter-revolutionaries) were forced to engage in heavy labor, locked up, and sometimes tortured to death.

                                          * * *

                                                 As the month wore on, massive book burnings took place in several cities. Temples, churches and public monuments were attacked.  Staggering numbers of homes were ransacked in search of evidence of the occupants’ disloyalty or a piece of porcelain to smash.
                                                   August of 1966 was a ghastly month in China. But then again the Cultural Revolution was just getting started.
                                                     By the end, according to Dikötter, “between 1.5 and 2 million people were killed, but many more lives were ruined through endless denunciations, false confessions, struggle meetings and persecution campaigns.”

                                                         The United Nations Committee on the Rights of the Child (CRC) urged Britain to do more to stop this brutal form of people trafficking.
                                                          “We’re concerned about reports that hundreds of children have been abducted from their families in Africa and trafficked to the UK, especially London, for religious rituals,” Kirsten Sandberg, head of the CRC and a former Norwegian Supreme Court judge, said Thursday.
                                                            She said that trafficking for rituals was part of a wider problem where thousands of minors are brought to the UK, who end up being child prostitutes or being sexually exploited.
                                                              The CRC advised that Britain should “strengthen the capacity of law-enforcement authorities and judiciary to detect and prosecute trafficking of children for labor, sexual and other forms of exploitation, including for religious rituals.”
                                                               There have been numerous cases of children who have been brought to the UK from Africa and suffered torture and abuse, often as part of witchcraft rituals, AFP reports.
                                                          • Don't hold your breath for any media outlet to issue a retraction: "Greenland’s ‘Record Temperature’ denied – the data was wrong"--Watts Up With That. Every year for the past several years, we've been hearing about record high temperatures in Greenland and warnings about the ice melting. The latest was just a couple weeks ago. But now we learn that it was all just a mistake:
                                                                  The Danish Meteorological Institute, which has a key role in monitoring Greenland’s climate, last week reported a shocking August temperature of between 2.7C and 4.7C at the Summit weather station, which is located 3,202m above sea level at the the centre of the Greenland ice sheet, generating a spate of global headlines.  
                                                                   But on Wednesday it posted a tweet saying that a closer look had shown that monitoring equipment had been giving erroneous results.  
                                                                     “Was there record-level warmth on the inland ice on Friday?” it said. “No! A quality check has confirmed out [sic] suspicion that the measurement was too high.”
                                                                        By combining measurements with observations from other weather stations, the DMI has now estimated that the temperature was closer to -2C.
                                                                    So they were "only" off by 4.7 to 6.7 C. When we are arguing over tenths of a degree Celsius when we talk about global warming, a 4.7 to 6.7 degree difference is huge.
                                                                    • I wonder how this got past the censors: "Environmental racism is bad for your brain"--Think Progress. An article from a very liberal news site that actually admits that there are racial differences to IQ scores, although the author credits this to "environmental racism":
                                                                            There are a lot of explanations for the apparent gap in IQ test scores of white Americans and Americans of color.
                                                                              Some experts point to things like bias in the exam itself, or the fact that white students tend to go to better-funded schools. Others tout racist myths. Take biologist James Watson, who wrongly claimed the black-white IQ gap is genetic, or writer Jason Richwine, whose doctoral dissertation asserted that “the low average IQ of Hispanics is effectively permanent” — Harvard gave him a PhD for that discredited gem.
                                                                               One factor that is little considered, even by academics who rail against racist stereotypes, is pollution and its impact on the brain. Research shows that contamination from cars, planes, power plants, factories and landfills is eroding the bodies and minds of black and brown Americans.
                                                                          The Chinese must be immune, considering both the massive pollution in China, but their allegedly higher than average IQs.
                                                                                 ... tardigrades can live in water or on land, and are capable of surviving temperatures as high as 150 degrees Celsius (302 degrees Fahrenheit) and as low as minus 272 degrees Celsius (-458 Fahrenheit), albeit for a few minutes.
                                                                                   The grub-like, eight-legged animals can come back from being dried out to a lifeless husk for decades, withstand near-zero pressure in outer space and the crushing depths of the Mariana Trench.
                                                                                     If they did not burn up in an explosion, they could in theory survive the tiny pressure on the lunar surface, and the extremes of temperature, William Miller, a tardigrades expert at Baker University, told AFP.
                                                                                      "But to become active, to grow, eat, and reproduce they would need water, air and food," so it would not be possible for them to multiply and form a colony, he added.
                                                                                  ... we came across documents that seem to suggest, at least by the Navy's own claims, that two highly peculiar Navy patents, the room temperature superconductor (RTSC) and the high-energy electromagnetic field generator (HEEMFG), may in fact already be in operation in some manner. The inventor of the Navy's most bizarre patent, the straight-out-of-science fiction-sounding hybrid aerospace/underwater craft, describes that craft as leveraging the same room temperature superconductor technology and high energy electromagnetic fields to enable its unbelievable speed and maneuverability. If those two technologies are already operable as the Navy claims, could this mean the hybrid craft may also already operable or close to operable? Or is this just more evidence that the whole exotic 'UFO' patent endeavor on the Navy's behalf is some sort of ruse or even gross mismanagement of resources?
                                                                                          On Friday afternoon, the Air Force announced a $23 million sole-source contract for two of Raytheon’s High Energy Laser Weapons Systems, through which the systems are to be tested for 12 months in an undisclosed “contested environment” outside the continental United States.
                                                                                            “What we really want to do is figure out how we can deploy these systems in an environment where our warfighters work and train every day,” said Evan Hunt, director of high energy laser and counter-UAS at Raytheon. (UAS stands for unmanned aerial system.)  
                                                                                              The 10-kilowatt lasers are to be mounted on small ground-based vehicles and aimed using an interface similar to a video game controller. The prototype laser weapons were built by Raytheon and incorporate a range of components from the commercial technology industry, including high-performance lithium-ion batteries, the same type used in electric vehicles.
                                                                                                Because laser weapons could fire constantly without wasting ammunition, military technology experts have theorized they could one day be useful in combating the small, remotely operated quadcopter drones that ISIS has used. They are also expected to be an effective counter against swarming attack drones, a concept that a handful of countries are exploring.
                                                                                                 “The fact that it’s a laser weapon allows you to put energy in target at the speed of light. It can be an instantaneous heating event,” said Michael Jirjis, who leads the Air Force’s directed energy experimentation projects.
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