Are you gonna bark all day, little doggy?

Iran is talking smack again:

Asked if Tehran would engage if the U.S. weighed in, Foreign Ministry spokesperson Nasser Kanaani said: "Iran considers that the United States is already militarily involved in the conflict between Israel and Palestinians."

"The crimes of the Zionist regime are carried out with the support of the United States and Washington must be held accountable," he added at a news conference.

Then again, they're pretty much always talking smack and have been since they had that revolution back when I was in 4th grade. It makes it hard for me to get too agitated over any particular threat.

"Yeah, yeah, Dariush... you've been going on about those seas of blood to drown the Great Satan and whatnot for forty years now. Whatevs."

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The Return of History...

From the close of WWII to the fall of the Iron Curtain, the world was locked in a sort of geopolitical stasis. Even after the Soviet empire disintegrated, the "rules-based" order was more or less held in place by the Pax Americana for another decade or so.

Then Al Qaeda's attack on Manhattan sent the World's Policeman haring off into the desert for a couple decades looking for the perps, and just look what's happened to the globe since.

The history of Armenians in Nagorno-Karabakh was ended in the old manner of conflict resolution: siege, conquest, expulsion. After a 10-month blockade, Azerbaijan launched an attack on Sept. 19, claiming the enclave in a day and causing nearly the entire ethnic Armenian population to flee. Give war a chance, as the saying goes.

For Armenians, a classic relic ethnic minority whose Christianity and peculiar alphabet date to the epic struggles between the Romans and the Parthians, it was another genocide. For the Azerbaijanis, Turkic in language and historically Shia Muslim, a great triumph. Yet despite appearances, the conflict is not a Samuel Huntington-style clash of civilizations. Instead, in its emboldening of traditional regional powers like Turkey, scrambling for geopolitical spoils after the retreat of superpowers, it’s a harbinger of the coming world disorder.

Abkhazia, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh, Ukraine... it you want more territory or resources the way to get it now it is the old fashioned way: You take it by force. 

I don't know that Taiwan's half as nervous as it should be.

Anything by Kaplan's a worthwhile read, but I have The Coming Anarchy down off the shelf at the moment. I'd originally pulled it out to check something he'd written about the Sahel, actually, but events of the last couple weeks have me re-reading it now.

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Shoe leather and notebooks...

Listening to the Tactical Tangents podcast about the Austin, TX serial bombing spree in March of 2018, I'm freshly reminded how these sorts of cases are so often solved by old fashioned detective work rather than sci-fi CSI: Star Trek stuff.

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Handing out free guns again...

In Columbus, Ohio yet another bad guy failed to be deterred at the sight of a gun on some oblivious citizen's hip (well, hip pocket in this case) and decided to snatch it for hissownself.

(h/t to Greg.)

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Point of order...

"The babies weren't beheaded, they were just killed and some were set on fire" isn't the slam dunk rebuttal some folks seem to think it is.

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Ugh.

Yesterday afternoon and early this morning I was one of the world's leading producers of mucus.

My cough wasn't just "productive", it was downright overachieving. Every void in my skull was full of the stuff and when I'd blow my nose my head would creak and groan and make weird popping noises like a Russian sub changing depth. My upper molars felt like they might pop out like champagne corks from the pressure.

Only the mildest of fevers and never lost my taste or smell, so it's probably a bad cold or a very mild flu and not the 'Rona. That, and I'm already feeling a lot better than I did late last night.

Ignorance is No Excuse…

Several years ago at TacCon…this was one of the ones I attended at DARC outside of Little Rock, so it would have been 2017 or 2018…I attended a lecture presented by Claude Werner. 

I can’t remember the exact title of the block of instruction and my notes aren’t handy because I’m typing this on my iPad at lunch, but knowing the Tactical Professor, it was some variation on The Serious Mistakes Gun Owners Make.

Anyhow, early in the class, he asked how many people in the audience had traveled from out of state to get there. Most every hand went up. He then asked how many were carrying firearms while they were visiting Arkansas. Again, most hands in the tent.

Then he asked how many had looked up the specific Arkansas legal codes surrounding carrying firearms and how they may be used in the defense of self and others.

There was a lot of uncomfortable shuffling of feet and nervous glancing around the room, and I was among those doing so*.

Claude looked like a disappointed professor. He pointed out that the information was online for free and that carrying in another jurisdiction and expecting everything to operate the way it did back home was courting disaster.

Know the applicable law.

*At the time, my usual check when traveling to another state was whether “No Guns” signs had the force of law or not, and whether or not it was a no-no to carry in a sit-down restaurant that served alcohol.

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The next phase.

We've reached the next landmark of autumn: Switching out my summer-weight gun burkhas for my winter-weight ones.

Alas, Royal Robbins has since discontinued the Expedition Light shirts, and none of the equivalents I've yet found have the document pocket on both breasts, which is kind of something I really prefer. Still looking for the right replacement.

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QotD: Unforgiving Edition...

In a post about a Texas man injuring his grandson with a homemade .45 Colt blank, Claude Werner writes:

Firearms are relentlessly unforgiving of the slightest lapse in attention or competence. The shooter has probably been ‘shooting for years.’ Unfortunately, as is sometimes said of the law enforcement profession: “Some people have 20 years of experience and some people have one year of experience 20 times.”

Go and RTWT.
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1150...

It's good and dirty at this point, but still runs just fine even with jacketed hollow point ammo.

The optics mount is still snug. Everything's going great.

Also, those lens protectors are a godsend.

(There's a good article by my friend Chris Cypert on optimizing the home defense handgun here.)

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Automotif CDXX...

A 1971 Dodge Demon in Hemi Orange, featuring one of the great giant-slayer small blocks of the Muscle Car Era, Mopar's 340cid V-8.

The single-4bbl version of the 340 had a 10.5:1 compression ratio and was ridiculously underrated at a claimed 275bhp SAE Gross horsepower.

How do we know it was underrated? Well, there are two big clues.

First of all, when you stuck it in one of these little A-body coupes, they were running legit high thirteens off the showroom floor...on bias ply street tires. That was normally the province of the more wild-eyed big blocks.

The other way we know that it was underrated was that in 1972 they went to heads with smaller ports and a lower 8.5:1 compression ratio for emissions and fuel economy reasons, and switched to SAE net horsepower ratings. Somehow this only resulted in a drop to 240 SAE net, indicating that the "275" number had probably been closer to the net output all along.

Facing Reality

Having an awareness that certain bad things can happen is necessary for overcoming the trap of normalcy bias when something starts to go south.

Otherwise the tendency is to try and rationalize away a developing bad situation as something that isn't bad. "That guy who suddenly changed course toward me in the parking lot probably just wants to talk," or "The woman knocking on my door at 11:30PM just needs to use my phone."

Being aware that violence and predation can happen, and knowing the cues, are involved in what the late Dr. William Aprill referred to as "Having a mental parking space" for those events. Otherwise your brain just keeps driving in circles until reality crashes into it.

An example is this piece by Greg Ellifritz on the tendency of people to attribute the sound of gunfire in mass shootings to more innocuous reasons...

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Halftime.

Yesterday's range session of a hundred and fifty rounds upped the count since the pistol was cleaned and lubed to an even one thousand.

That's seven hundred and fifty rounds of various types for the magazine test, a notional cleaning and a dollop of lube, and now we're halfway through the 2,000-round test for Shooting Illustrated Online...and the pistol has yet to fail to go through the complete cycle of operations with every one of the 1,750 pulls of the trigger.

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Automotif CDXIX...

I remember when this '62-'65 Austin Healey Sprite Mk.II was all primer, dents, and sunburned red paint, and now just look at it! 

It sounds nice and snarly, too, and zips along like an oversized slot car.

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BE THERE!

The story behind "Sunday! Sunday! Sunday!", the most memorable intonation in motorsports advertising.



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"Proportionality"

Kevin D. Williamson ain't pulling any punches with this one:

"The first cliché that usually comes into play in times such as these is the demand that Israel forgo any “disproportionate response.” NPR: “Egypt warns Israel not to take disproportionate action against Palestinians.” U.N. human-rights commissioner Volker Türk warns “all parties” against actions that would cause “disproportionate death and injury of civilians.” The cheap moral equivalency of the U.N. grandee is really something: Imagine the denunciations that would—rightly!—rain down upon Israel if they carried out a response that was even merely proportionate in terms of death and injury to civilians, a tit-for-tat operation going door-to-door and murdering innocents, kidnapping children, etc. The fact that a perfectly proportionate attack would constitute a gross crime against humanity tells us a great deal about the character of the combatants here. In a similar vein, the European Council on Foreign Relations warns Israel against “a full ground invasion and disproportionate attacks against Palestinian civilians,” again, as though the Israelis were engaged in the same kind of ISIS-style brutality as the Palestinians."

I am unfailingly annoyed by the false moral equivalence that gets drawn between a terrorist attack that deliberately targets noncombatant civilians...children and the elderly...and parades their naked corpses in the streets, and a military response that does what it can to avoid collateral damage but accepts that some will occur because c'est la guerre. 

Something tells me that Israel is about to do what they can to end the fighting capacity of Hamas for the foreseeable future, no matter how many skirts and playgrounds behind which Hamas attempts to hide.

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Such a deal!

Amongst the special sale items at BezosMart today are Walker's Razor Slim active ear pro for 47% off.

Don't they know people might use those while touching icky guns?

(Remember when using them in classes or matches to wear them backwards so that the mics are aimed at the RSO or instructor.)

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Tab Clearing...

• In the wake of the Hamas attack on Israel, exTwitter is a sea of disinformation.


• The Greatest Sculptor You Never Heard Of


• Get a load of the size of this frickin' tree!

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Pew! Pew! Pew!

Another hundred and fifty rounds on Monday morning at Indy Arms Co, following the usual pattern of a hundred rounds at seven yards just hosing away at the eight-inch circle, and then fifty rounds at the 3x5" from five yards at a slightly slower pace, around .5-.75ish.

The ergos on this thing really agree with my hand.

Panic at the Crisco...

Cook with olive oil? Buckle up. Weather in the Mediterranean has supplies all jacked up for the foreseeable future, and the prices are already double what they were a couple years ago.

“Should this pace of depletion persist, market insiders warn that olive oil supplies could be exhausted before the arrival of fresh harvests, which traditionally commence in Spain around October,” Mintec analyst Kyle Holland wrote in an email.

And that’s not looking great, either.

The drought and lack of water over the past months in Spain is creating concerns about the new season, according to a recent Rabobank agriculture report. And in recent weeks, storms have affected Apulia, the most important olive oil production region in Italy, damaging the upcoming harvest. Italy is the world’s No. 2 olive oil producer.

The news is similar among other major producers in the Mediterranean, with drought having affected crops from Portugal, Tunisia, Morocco and Greece. Turkey, which had a good harvest, is compounding the worldwide shortage by banning bulk olive oil exports to ensure adequate domestic supplies.

I am Tamara's absolute lack of surprise at the Turkish government somehow finding a way to make my life worse.

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