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Thursday, October 22, 2020

A Quick Run Around The Web (October 22, 2020)

 

VIDEO: "Smyth Busters: Is It OK To Use the Slide Release?"--Brownells (4 min.). Short answer is "yes".

Firearms/Self-Defense/Prepping:
  • "Skill Set: Control Drill" by Tiger McKee, Tactical Wire. This drill uses a negative target: a target with the scoring areas cut out so that it only shows misses. He explains:

    ... Negative targets – anything outside the open area is a miss – are great for training and practice. Too many people get caught up in exactly where the bullet went. Where the last round hit isn’t important; it’s history - nothing you can do about it. And if that one’s not effective, you should be thinking about where you’re going to put the next hit. ... As I like to tell people, if you have to look to see where the hit went you haven’t actually learned how to shoot. ...

    Negative targets are also great for developing efficiency. In order to discover at what speed you can fire, you have to determine what’s “too fast.” Negative targets let you know immediately what too fast is. Any round that actually hits cardboard means you fired too fast (usually “too fast” on pressing the trigger).

    I use negative targets with different size zones. The areas representing the head – ocular cavity, center mass of the chest and the pelvic area are cut out. The different size and shaped holes require you to regulate speed based on the accuracy required. The larger the hole the quicker you can fire; smaller targets require you to slow down. Vary the distance from close to far. Now, you’re starting to develop “control.”

Target: B8 bullseye

Distance: All shots fired at 25 yards from ready position

Sequence:

– 10 shots in 30 seconds

– 10 shots in 20 seconds

– 10 shots in 10 seconds

Scoring: Hero or Zero scoring. Anything outside the 8 ring is – 10. 8, 9, and 10 rings scored as usual. 300 points possible, X count breaks ties. Your goal should be able to get a score of 270 or higher. Greg Ellifritz notes that it is a challenging drill, and you may want to start at 10 yards and slowly increase the distance out to 25 yards.

In regard to using a speedloader there are many overall techniques that shooters employ.  One of the elements involved in this skillset is whether to lift the speed loader up and away from the cylinder of the gun after the rounds fall into the charging holes, or to simply let go of the speedloader and let it fall away as the cylinder of the gun is pushed closed.  The argument to pull the loader up and away states that the speedloader can often bind on one or more of the cartridges, thus getting stuck between the cylinder and gun when trying to close the action.  The argument to simply let go of the speedloader is that it is simply faster, and the action of pulling the speedloader away can actually cause cartridges to not seat in the holes anyway.

Which method to use depends on the speedloader. The author indicates that in his experience speedloaders like the Safariland Comp I and the HKS are rather wide and bulky and can bind when used with small J-frame sized revolvers unless they are pulled away. Conversely, his experience with the 5 Star speedloader is to just let it drop away--pulling it away can result in cartridges not seating or falling to the ground.

  • "New Raptor F1 Shotgun Forend From Shockwave Technologies"--The Firearm Blog. A nice looking forend with stops and slots for attaching M-LOK compatible devices or rails. It will be available for both Mossberg 500 and Remington 870 pump shotguns.
  • "M1 Garand Rebuilds: History & Markings"--American Rifleman. As the article notes, "[f]rom its adoption in 1936 until production ceased in 1957, well over 5 million M1s were made[.]" Even though it was phased out as the M14 and, later, M16 were adopted, M1s continued to be used in reserve units and National Guard up to the late 70's or early 80's. During this time, not only would M1 Garand rifles be repaired at smaller facilities, the military also undertook widespread refurbishment of the rifle at different times at various armories, including during WWII (to correct some issues that arose), after WWII and to about the time of the Korean War, and then in the 1960s. This article covers some of the arsenal markings that you might find on a rifle indicating where it might have been rebuilt or refurbished. 
    • Related: "Village Praxis: Drive the Right Rifle: The M1 Garand" by Bill Buppert, Zero Gov. Buppert shares a photograph of his own "refurbished" M1 Garand with a new composite stock and a forward optic mount, apparently refinished in an olive-green cerokote. He also shares some tips on troubleshooting problems. Because of the number of Garands in civilian hands, and unlike many other surplus rifles, there is a thriving market in replacement parts, barrels and accessories. 
  • "Combat Tips From an Old Doggie"--Men of the West. This is a reprint of an article by David J. Daze is extracted from Infantry, Volume 78, Number 1 (January-February 1988). The tips, which are explained in more detail in the article, are:
    1. Learn how to shoot left-handed.
    2. Practice walking quietly. 
    3. When you go on a patrol, never return by the same route.
    4. When attacking a room in a building, go in as low to the floor as possible since defenders will generally shoot at chest level.
    5. Always be aware of the immediate terrain so you know where you can take cover.
    6. When approaching a new area, put yourself in the place of the enemy.
    7. Watch the old pros in a combat-wise outfit. 
    8. Never walk on a ridgeline or the crest of a hill. 
    9. When resting or waiting, stay in the shadows if possible. 
    10. Use all your senses! (Including your sense of smell).
    11. Do not use a house or a village as a fort as they can become a deathtrap and don't provide good fields of view or fire.
    12. Learn to improvise.
    13. When advancing, fire your weapon in the enemy’s direction, even if you don’t have a specific target.
    14. Always brief your men, showing them the objectives to be taken and letting them scan the immediate terrain, if possible. 
    15. When clearing a town of the enemy, stay out of the streets as much as possible.
    16. Practice these tips in training.

The CMMG 22LR drop-in kit that Stubbs used goes for around $200 (he got his for $140) on the CMMG website. The kit itself is self-contained on both the front and back ends of the unit and thus does not transfer any energy to the upper receiver making it much safer to use a 3D printed upper receiver. Normally the upper receiver bears quite a bit of force during the cycling of a gun but the CCMG drop-in kit essentially lets you “make the lower out of glass if you wanted” to use Stubbs’s own words. The charging handle used is the CMMG 22LR proprietary charging handle. The kit works with a standard handle but you can occasionally get a 22LR shell stuck up inside the charging handle and the CMMG is solid to prevent that.

  • "Chiappa Little Badger: A Survival-Focused Single-Shot"--American Rifleman. This little rifle has M1 style iron sights, rails for attaching accessories, and a shell holder for extra ammunition. It comes in .22 LR or .22 WMR for $216, or in .17 HMR for $229. At least in my area, .17 HMR is one of the few rimfire rounds that was available during the last great ammo drought.
  • "Tough Meets Tiny – The Beretta APX Carry"--Guns America. A favorable review of this pocket-sized single-stack 9 mm.
  • Breaking all four rules of gun safety: "Florida man accidentally kills his twin brother, 23, by shooting him in the face while they were 'joking around with guns' in a parked car"--Daily Mail.
  • "Getting Started with Cloth Diapers" (Part 1) (Part 2) -- Survival Blog. Instruction, advice and tips for using cloth diapers--something you may be forced to resort to if there are supply chain disruptions.
  • "How to get a head start on preparing for post-election civil unrest" by Lee DeCovnick, American Thinker. Practical advice on purchasing food and other supplies prior to the inevitable riots and protests that will follow the election. Besides a list of food stuffs and quantities, she also advises that you have the following on hand:
    • A two-month supply of your prescription medications and your over-the counter medications.
    • 20 AA and 20 AAA batteries.
    • Two good flashlights per person plus extra batteries
    • 20 Bic lighters.
    • 25 candles. 
    • Two portable radios plus extra batteries
    • 3 rolls of Duck Tape
    • 2 extra tarps.
    • 200 feet of 550 lb. paracord.
    • An everyday carry knife for each person
    • A professional bleed/trauma first aid kit
    • 2–3 bottles unscented household bleach
Also:
    This week, fill up your vehicles with gas, and don't let them go under three fourths full.  Check the spare tire and buy a couple quarts of oil.  Also fill up your propane tanks.

    Check to see that your cell phones' OS and your cell phone apps are updated.

    Make two copies of all your important documents and send the copies to family or friends out of state for safekeeping.

 

VIDEO: "The Spear - King of Weapons? Or Just a Pointy Stick?"--Skallagrim (18 min.)

The Current Unrest:

          In the days following the election we’ll continue to come out into the streets every day to respond to rapidly changing events. We may be waiting for votes to be counted or we may be responding to major attacks on democracy. Over the next few weeks we’ll use our Spokes Council process to plan actions that are flexible and can scale to respond to a lot of different scenarios.

          They also plan on harassing Congressmen as they return to Washington in mid-November. Also, from the group's website:

              We’ll keep it going until Trump concedes. We could be in the streets throughout the fall and into the winter– maybe as lots of rolling waves of action or possibly as a few major tsunamis! In other parts of the country, as vote counts conclude, our focus will turn from protecting the vote counts to themselves being ungovernable. 

              As it becomes clear that Trump’s coup is failing, institutions and the elites will start to abandon him – or we will approach them as part of the problem. Either Amazon will shut down AWS for the Trump loyalists in the government or we’ll shut down their fulfillment centers. Either governors will tell their national guards to stand down or we’ll shut down their state capitals as well. Over time, Trump will grow increasingly isolated and his empire will crumble down around him. 

              Then — and this is the important part — Biden will move into the White House and be sworn in as the 46th President of the United States. 

          ... there’s a general consensus that the results of the election will not matter. Even in the event of a landslide Biden victory – not particularly plausible, but let’s allow the possibility – disruptions and violence intended to induce President Trump to leave office will follow. Homeowners known to have supported the president will be targeted for arson. Individuals who’ve been seen wearing Trump-supporting T-shirts, hats, or buttons will be assaulted when they leave their homes. Aggressions far beyond the usual “cancel culture” BS will be rampant.

          One of the articles cited by Liberty's Torch is by Osita Nwanevu at The National Review titled "The Constitution Is the Crisis" in which Nwanevu argues that "[t]here’s no reason why a rigged Supreme Court should have the final say on the law of our land." What follows is an argument for court packing in order to reestablish a Democrat majority. But Nwanevu goes even further and argues that it is time for the United States to adopt a new Constitution or, even, move forward without a written constitution. I will once again remind my readers that the angst over the Supreme Court is because control of the Court represents the power to amend the Constitution. Make no mistake but that when the Supreme Court finds some new right, or expands or restricts an established right, it is amending the Constitution. In 1920, it took a Constitutional amendment ratified through the proscribed method set forth in the Constitution to make the purchase or sale of alcohol illegal throughout all of the states. In 2015, it took only 5 justices to find in the Constitution a new right requiring the states to abandon thousands of years of custom and laws limiting marriage to the union of a man and woman.

          VIDEO: "The Antichrist Explained in Detail by Scripture"--Nelson Walters (1 hr. 35 min.)

          Miscellany:
          Note that one of the first of the emails published, and therefore (purposefully?) easy to find, from Hunter to his daughter Naomi, reads:

          “But I don’t receive any respect and that’s fine I guess. Works for you, apparently. I hope you all can do what I did and pay for everything for this entire family for 30 years. It’s really hard, but don’t worry, unlike Pop I won’t make you give me half your salary.”

          We also saw email of a prospective billion dollar deal with Chinese businessmen whose profit percentages would be divided with “10 held by H for the big guy?”
          You can see why all these foreign oligarchs would be falling all over themselves to offer such an extinguished, I mean distinguished, person such outlandish sums — $1 million a year from Burisma, $10 million a year from a Chinese company “just for introductions,” another “850” for Hunter, not to mention, of course, the 10 for “the Big Guy.”

              NATO was quite pleased with its 2011 handiwork, which saw Moammar Gaddafi removed from power and quickly killed. The assumption was that this would lead to an orderly transition of power. Instead it led to a civil war that’s continued to tear the country apart ever since.

              Earlier this month, it was confirmed that the European Union is in the process of developing multiple potential military options for intervening in Libya, all intended to stabilize the situation. This is being done with an eye toward getting Libya’s oil industry back to exporting.

              Since 2011, Libya has had as many as three, and at times zero, self-proclaimed governments operating out of different areas of the country. At times, the UN has endorsed a government, or created a government to endorse, and other nations in the region have backed either those governments or other rival governments, though none has ever controlled more than a fraction of Libya in any real way.

              As it stands right now, there are two would-be governments in Libya. The Tripoli-based faction, endorsed by the UN and Turkey, is the Government of National Accord (GNA). The rival faction is a parliament running out of Tobruk, with the loyalty of the self-proclaimed Libyan National Army (LNA). The LNA is run by General Khalifa Hafter.

              Hafter was a Gaddafi-era general, and later a CIA-funded rebel leader. Since 2011, he’s tried to launch several coups d’etat, and the LNA was the closest to being successful, bringing international recognition as his forces made it to the outskirts of Tripoli in an attempted invasion. Recent defeats have pushed the LNA back from western Libya, and the threat of a new stalemate is why the EU is interested in getting involved.

              That raises multiple questions, the most obvious of which is what side the EU military would be on. Italy is seen as backing the GNA, while others, notably France, are leaning toward Hafter under the assumption that post-Gaddafi stability rests in another strongman.

          It's not too difficult to see what is going on here. Turkey has intervened in support of the GNA with the hope of having influence, if not outright control, over Libya and its oil exports if the GNA wins. But there is more than that. As I've previously noted, Turkey wants to use Libya's economic zone in the Mediterranean to try and link up with its own zone in order to obtain some control over undersea oil and gas rights. The EU--at least France, Germany, and Greece--will want to prevent this from happening. Thus, I would expect to see the EU, or certain of its more powerful neighbors, back Hafter against Turkey. 

              According to officials at the DOJ, the lawsuit will focus on Google’s illegal actions in creating exclusive contracts with companies such as Apple, to make Google the default search engine on their line of software products like Safari.

              It is these types of exclusionary billion-dollar agreements, the government will argue, that gives Google a market edge, “controlling about 80% of search queries in the U.S.,” that no competitor can match, hurts consumer choice, and prevents innovation.

              The suit is expected to be filed in federal court in Washington. D.C., but is just the beginning of lawsuits headed Google’s way.

              According to the New York Times, “about four dozen states and jurisdictions have conducted parallel investigations and are expected to bring separate complaints against the company’s grip on technology for online advertising.”

          [Francis's encyclical] Fratelli Tutti, unsurprisingly, confirms the pope’s solid positioning on the left as an ecologist and anti-capitalist, a stance rooted in the revolutionary doctrines of his Argentine youth among the Jesuits of Buenos Aires—fellow travelers of Liberation Theology and hostile to the economic “liberalism” favored by military dictators. Times have changed, and the poverty that rightly haunts Pope Francis has massively diminished around the world thanks to globalization, free trade, the market economy, and the scientific revolution in agriculture (GMO soybeans in Argentina, for example). The encyclical takes no account of this progress but presses on in the fight with a largely imaginary enemy that the pope, like all leftist intellectuals, calls “neoliberalism.”

          You want to teach people to fish?  Economic growth.  And we’re wasting 25%  of our GDP not on developing and growing the economy but on regulatory burden.  Is some regulatory oversight necessary?  Probably.  But 25% of our economy?  That’s resources that could be used to make life better for all of us, frittered away on some government bureaucrats.

              Sleeping was not an option for Syed in early September last year.

              For three days and night, the Bangladeshi shop owner in central Johannesburg said he had to stand guard to protect his store during an outbreak of xenophobic violence that saw rioters throw stones and other objects at him and other businesspeople in the area.

              Syed said the shopkeepers had called the police but they showed up only on the third day. By then, more than 1,000 Bangladeshi shops were looted, he added.

              His account is one of the dozens included in a report released on Thursday by the Human Rights Watch (HRW), documenting mob attacks on migrant communities in South Africa by people who are angry at the dire economic and living conditions they are experiencing.

              According to the findings in the HRW report, xenophobic harassment and violence against other Africans and Asians living in the country are routine and sometimes lethal.

              Foreigners are scapegoated and blamed for economic insecurity, crime and government failures to deliver services, the report said. Non-South Africans are also being accused of stealing jobs and women, depleting the country’s basic services, spreading diseases and running crime syndicates.

          Just to be clear, the violence is being instigated by black South Africans. 

              In terms of forecasting social trends in the United States, the participation by millennials and Generation Z in BLM could be an important indicator. In the November 2020 presidential election, people in this age bracket (18–40) will constitute the largest group of eligible voters, and in another 10 or 20 years, they will have moved into society’s leadership positions. On the whole, they are more sensitive than their parents to social injustice and more inclined to support such liberal causes as gun control, environmental protection, higher taxes for the wealthy and big business, more generous social services, minority rights, and cutbacks in defense spending.

              Other demographic changes are likely to amplify this trend. Non-Hispanic whites (the country’s ethnic majority) accounted for 76% of the population in 1990 but only 64% in 2010, and their share is expected to fall below 50% by 2045. Ethnic minorities tend to be more liberal on the whole.

          Watanabe adds:

              Until recently, I thought of America as a diverse society with the ability to unite in the face of a national emergency. But the COVID-19 crisis has merely sharpened the battle lines, and recent incidents of police brutality have deepened the divisions. Each tribe, convinced that it is under siege, has intensified its resistance. As the November election nears, it is looking more and more like a culture war.

          Feminists have sold their birthright for a messy cottage, and will come increasingly to suffer for it in the coin of regret, loneliness and despair. In The Sickness unto Death, Danish philosopher and master ironist Soren Kierkegaard discussed the source of feminine despair, which he sensed gradually taking hold of the feminine psyche. Women, he felt, were being encouraged to file, so to speak, for self-divorce, to violate their own essential nature, which he understood as the capacity for devotion. “In devotion she loses herself, and only then is happy, only then is she herself…Take this devotion away, then her self is also gone.” “Devotedness” is her essential nature. Kierkegaard, a devout Christian, clearly had Matthew 16:26 in mind: For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul? The word “man,” of course, is intended generically. 

          • A reader sends: "The Mystery of the Immaculate Concussion"--GQ. Marc Polymeropoulos, a CIA official, was suddenly beset with nausea, dizziness, and headaches while on assignment in Moscow. He believes that he was attacked with a microwave weapon. A long excerpt:

              In the spring of 2018, a private neurologist gave Polymeropoulos a diagnosis: occipital neuralgia, a condition resulting from damage to the two nerves that run from the base of the skull, curving toward the front of the head. Despite the private diagnosis, Polymeropoulos says the Agency kept refusing to refer him to the University of Pennsylvania, telling him it wasn’t necessary.

              As he grasped for an explanation, Polymeropoulos was paying careful attention to what was being discovered about the incidents in Cuba and China. By the summer of 2018, scientists, intelligence officials, and journalists were zeroing in on a potential culprit: microwave weapons.

              The notion of weaponizing microwaves dates back to the Cold War, when, in 1961, an American biologist named Allan Frey discovered that irradiating a human head with microwaves could produce the sensation of sound—even in deaf ears, even from thousands of feet away. Playing with the frequency and intensity of the microwave beam could produce a range of different sensations in a person. In 2018, Frey told the New York Times that the Soviets took immediate notice of his work and flew him to Moscow, where they squired him around secret military facilities and asked him to give lectures about the effects of microwaves on the brain.

              As the Cold War progressed, both the United States and the Soviet Union raced to find military uses for what came to be called directed energy weapons. American researchers had studied things like beaming words into subjects’ heads—great for psychological warfare—while also researching the thermal aspects of microwaves. Packaged in the right way, researchers theorized, a microwave weapon could be mounted on a truck, where it could cast a beam outward to create an invisible barrier anywhere, anytime, capable of immobilizing any person who got within its range. This research ultimately culminated in the development of a weapon the Pentagon calls an Active Denial System, or ADS. In a video touting its capabilities, the U.S. military boasts that this highly portable weapon can be attached to a military vehicle and used to direct precise beams of electromagnetic radiation at, say, an armed militant in a crowd or a suspicious person approaching a military checkpoint. The beam would instantaneously produce a sensation of heat on the skin, which would trigger a person’s reflex to flee. (This summer, a military official inquired about deploying the technology against American protesters who flooded into the streets of Washington, D.C., to protest police brutality.)

              On the other side of the world, the Soviets focused on the non-thermal applications of microwave radiation. A 1976 report compiled by the Pentagon’s intelligence branch, the Defense Intelligence Agency, reviewed Soviet research on the topic. The report detailed Moscow’s investigation of the effects of microwaves on the nervous system. Soviet, and later Russian, scientists found that exposing an animal’s brain to microwaves changed the frequency at which neurons fired. Neurons also became suddenly out of sync with one another. Some brain cells in mice were found to have withered. Nerves became damaged. The radiation also showed the potential to disturb the sacrosanct blood-brain barrier and, according to the DIA, resulted in “the alterations of brain function.” The most common symptoms reported in humans who had been exposed to microwaves for long periods of time sounded familiar: headache, fatigue, perspiration, dizziness, insomnia, depression, anxiety, forgetfulness, and lack of concentration.

              Like Frey, Soviet researchers found that turning the intensity of the beam up or down could produce differing effects in its target. A target’s unique physiology—a slightly different curvature of the skull, for example—also determined how this directed energy would affect them. A weapon that created an ever-changing kaleidoscope of neurological symptoms would have a powerful psychological dimension. If everyone’s symptoms are all slightly different, victims might question whether they’d all been exposed to the same thing—or if they’d been hit at all.

              In September 2018, a California physician and scientist named Beatrice Golomb published a paper that tried to link the suffering of American diplomats to directed microwaves. She connected what came to be known as the Frey effect—using microwaves to create the false sensation of sound—with the fact that some, but not all, of the diplomats in Havana reported hearing the kinds of noise described by Allan Frey. This would suggest that these symptoms were not the result of sonic attacks, as some had speculated. She also offered an insight that could explain Polymeropoulos’s persistent migraines. “Brain injury may be a predisposing factor for…[microwave] injury,” she wrote. That is, people like Polymeropoulos, who was frequently around explosions in his time in Middle Eastern war zones, may be especially vulnerable to brain injury from directed microwave weapons.

              Not all scientists agree with Golomb’s conclusions, and some challenge her methodology. Andrei Pakhomov, a scientist who studied microwaves both in Russia and in the United States and wrote a comprehensive review of Soviet research on the subject, told me he is still not convinced that microwaves could do this kind of damage. Douglas Smith, a neurosurgeon who heads the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Brain Injury and Repair and was the principal investigator on the JAMA study, says he doesn’t understand how microwaves could target an organ so precisely, damaging the brain but not any peripheral nerves. Still, the fact that the Havana victims felt the buzzing and tingling on one side of their face, or that the sensation stopped when they moved to another room, indicated to Smith that these injuries were caused by some kind of directed energy weapon. “We believe there was something directed, but we don’t know what it was,” he told me. “It is quite a mystery. There’s no question that something happened, but there’s not a fingerprint for this kind of injury.”

          The article goes on to discuss that the attacks have continued on intelligence officers, and that, using cell phone data, the CIA has been able to match the location of Russian agents up with the location of American officers when they suffered attacks. 

              China has poured billions of dollars of investment into the Caribbean while signing tax and trade deals in an attempt to wrest the region out of the West's sphere of influence and bring it under the sway of Beijing.

              The Chinese government has invested at least $7billion in six Caribbean nations since 2005, records show - building roads, ports and the five-star Baha Mar casino and resort in the Bahamas - though the true figure is thought to run well into the tens of billions.

              While some of the money arrives as part of trade and investment deals, much of it is offered as 'soft loans' for infrastructure projects that are harder to track and typically come with requirements to use Chinese contractors for the work. The loans also provide long-term leverage for Beijing over the cash-strapped island nations. 

              It was the charismatic head of Israeli military intelligence, Major-General Eli Zeira, who had dismissed all the warning signals because he was (rightly) convinced that Egypt could not win a war without air superiority, and therefore (wrongly) concluded that Egypt would not start a war, without considering the possibility that Egypt’s President Sadat might choose to attack the Suez Canal anyway, in order to start a diplomatic process that might regain the lost Sinai Peninsula for Egypt. His explanation for the vast gathering of troops on both the Egyptian and Syrian fronts was exactly in line with Sadat’s intent, minus the fighting: The buildup was meant to frighten the Israelis into opening talks.

              That was Zeira’s “concept,” which led him to ignore all the hard information that contradicted his certainty, including the just-revealed agent report that arrived at 16:45 on Oct. 5, 1973—just over 21 hours before the Egyptian surprise attack that overran the very thin line of defenders scattered along the Suez Canal.

              The message was pure “gold,” without any dross to be polished away by analysts: Soviet military advisers with their families were rushing and scrambling to board aircraft flying out of Egyptian airfields, very obviously to avoid being caught up in the fighting that was about to break out.

              Instead of distributing the message to his military colleagues and political superiors, Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and Prime Minister Golda Meir, and then having to explain to them that it too was pure misdirection, Zeira simply kept the news to himself.

              Instead, Khrennikov and colleagues say a different scenario fits the facts. They say the explosion must have been caused by an iron meteorite about the size of a football stadium. This must have passed through the upper atmosphere, heated rapidly, and then passed out into the Solar System again. The shock wave from this trajectory was what flattened trees.

              The shock wave would have caused an explosion of about the right magnitude, and any vaporized iron would have condensed into dust that would be indistinguishable on the ground. Crucially, this scenario would not have left any visible asteroid remnants.

              It could also explain reports of dust in the upper atmosphere over Europe after the impact.

              If Khrennikov and colleagues are correct, then Earth had a lucky near-miss that morning. A direct impact with a 656 foot-wide (200 meter-wide) asteroid would have devastated Siberia, leaving a crater 2 miles (3 kilometers) wide. It would also have had catastrophic effects on the biosphere, perhaps ending modern civilization.

          By at

          5 comments:

          1. BrianOctober 24, 2020 at 4:55 AM

            Thanks for the speedloader article. In fact, thanks for the occasional revolver articles which you include in your "Quick Run Aroundthe Web" blogs. As a somewhat long-time follower of your blog...I have noticed a subtle increase in wheelgun content in more recent times. As a revolver devotee, I really appreciate that. My own EDC is, by choice, a snub-nose, moon-clip fed .357 revolver! And I arrived at that choice after carrying various Glocks for a few years. These contraptions aren't dead...they never were...and from the statistics I recently read, a respectable percentage of guns sold these days are revolvers. I may be biased, yeah I definitely am, but as I see it from the trenches, revolvers are experiencing something of a Renaissance lately. True that this unexpected boost in popularity might be more due to video games and Zombie-themed television series, but it's all good. Please continue to toss in an occasional wheelgun article when you can. We "eccentrics" appreciate it.

            ReplyDelete
            Replies
            1. DocentOctober 24, 2020 at 9:32 PM

              I’m a wheel gun fan as well. My EDC for nearly two decades was a J-frame snubby in . 38 Special, and I have a few other revolvers besides. I will definitely keep my eye out for wheel gun content to include.

              Delete
          2. John WilderOctober 25, 2020 at 7:39 PM

            When the corrupt don't even feel the need to lie about it?

            The end is near.

            ReplyDelete

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