[S]cientists have confirmed that a bracelet found in Siberia is 40,000 years old. This makes it the oldest piece of jewelry ever discovered, and archeologists have been taken aback by the level of its sophistication.
The bracelet was discovered in a site called the Denisova Cave in Siberia, close to Russia’s border with China and Mongolia. It was found next to the bones of extinct animals, such as the wooly mammoth, and other artifacts dating back 125,000 years.
The cave is named after the Denisovan people — a mysterious species of hominins from the Homo genus, who are genetically different from both Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
This poor girl had no choice of rifle and had to make do.
I get emails from Quora, inviting responses to questions I previously answered or responded to. One common topic they pertain to is guns.
I don’t normally think of Quora questions and answers as blog fodder, but there was this answer today which was so out there that I feel obliged to quote it and comment on it.
What would be a good, fairly accurate and easy-to-maintain rifle I could buy without breaking the bank?
I’ve been interested in shooting for a while, and shot .22s, .223s and 7.62 at summer camps and a neighbor of my grandfathers, but never owned my own gun. I would like to get better at shooting and buy my own rifle, but none of my relatives know anything about guns, and a lot of advice I have gotten thus far was for either very expensive or very basic guns. I’m not a bad shot, and don’t need an absolute beginner rifle, but something fairly cheap that still has the recoil, heft and feel of a like a Remington 700 or equivalent gun.
I live in NH, if that helps.
and Bradley Peterson replied:
I just wrote out a thorough answer about the Remington 700, Winchester Model 70, Ruger American, etc. and then I said to myself “screw that”.
Buy a Mosin.
Pay around $200 for a run-of-the-mill 91-30, and you buy a ticket into an all inclusive club of Soviet conscripts, Tsarist soldiers, Finnish and Russian super snipers, Chinese phesants, Vietcong Guerrilas, Olympians, Ukranian Rebels, Bubba, and now, you.
I’d say the rifle is “good”. It has a proven track record – is first version was made in 1891, making the M91, and its 7.62x54r cartridge the longest serving cartridge in existance, and the longest serving rifle design on the battlefield. The cartridge itself is powerful enough to take down any North American game animal. The Mosin is probably the most deadly firearm ever invented – I seriously doubt another has killed more people. Its a sobering thought, but its a piece of history, and you have to accept it for what it is – a tool for breaking and killing things that was used A LOT.
Fairly accurate? It depends on which rifle you get. They are basically all used – coming in crates after years of storage covered in a preservative called cosmoline, and accuracy is a crap shoot. My 91/30 infantry rifle has a bright brand new looking bore, and is pretty darn accurate for having fairly poor iron sights. A realistically sized target is easy to hit out to 200 yards, at least. My PU sniper rifle, like the one held by Roza Shanina in the above photo, will shoot ~1-1/4 MOA. I’ve seen some shoot sub MOA – not bad for a 70 year old WWII rifle.
Ammunition is easy to come by. It was made by the Soviet Union and other Eastern Bloc countries during the Cold War by the crap ton, and its cheap, at around $.20 a round, or $100 for a 440 round can.
Did I mention it comes with a bayonet?
You can skewer a pig, drive a screw, or roast marshmellows with this thing (I’ve done the latter). Yeah, you can roast hot dogs with your rifle. Try that with a Remington. You can break bricks with the steel buttplate. The rifle has less than 40 parts. In a pinch, you can shoot a 30-30 round out of it, and the action is ridiculously strong. It is nearly impossible, save a bore obstruction, to blow this rifle up.
The drawbacks? The basic rifle weights around 8.5 lbs. With bayonet, sling, and ammunition, count on 10. Even with that weight, it kicks like a mule. When shooting my sniper rifle with high power commercial loads throwing heavy bullets, it hurts. The rifle is also sighted in with the bayonet attached – meaning to be accurate, you need to add an additional pound, and 1 foot to the end of your rifle, which is already hardly manuverable. You can move around the front sight base and re-zero, but its a pain.
In addition, people will look at your rifle, then at you, and think “poor guy, doesn’t have money for a real rifle”. The course of action to take from here is pretty simple. Put the stripper clip of ammunition into the rifle, and pump that target full of steel. They might try going *pew pew* with their glorified .22s while you produce smoke, fireballs, and a TON of noise, but you go home satisfied, knowing you have an awesome rifle.
I have posted previously on the current craze for purchasing and collecting (cheap, cheap, cheap) Mosin Nagants being imported by the container-load from Russia and other former Soviet Empire countries. The obvious foundation cause of Mosin collecting is the fact that Mosins are cheap right now and are bound to go up in price, the same way SKS-es did, once they run out of them, and the fact that the ammo is incredibly cheap as well.
The only real argument for owning a Mosin (they are really too expensive to use as boat anchors or tomato stakes) is they are very cheap to buy and very cheap to shoot.
They are a historic arm, of course, if you want to get in closer touch with the history of red-beet-munching peasants being conscripted and used as cannon-fodder; of purges, mass executions, and innocent people being marched off to Siberia; of totalitarian dictatorship, human life valued as next to nothing, the clash of two barbarous dictatorships and subsequent Third World wars of Revolution. Why! the proud owner of one of these can hold it in his hands, and imagine all the joys of being driven in mass formations into the fire of German machine-guns by commissars with machine-pistols ready to execute on the spot anyone who falters.
Factually speaking, Mosins are a crude, primitive military long-arm, featuring a design dating back to 1891, older than the Krag and not as good. They are ugly, non-ergonomic, ugly, heavy, ugly, and inferior in every way (other than price) to nearly all the best-known bolt-action rifles of WWI and WWII.
Mosins are at the bottom of heap, battling it out for last place and the title of most inferior and repulsive rifle with the Japanese Arisaka and the Italian Mannlicher Carcano.
What I would say to the unidentified author of the question is: Go to a gun show, or look on Gun Broker, for a nice, good quality sporterized 1903 Springfield or 1917 Enfield or 1898 Mauser or 1909 Mauser. I would suggest looking for one chambered in .30-06 Springfield or .270 Winchester. You will have to pay about double what a Mosin would cost you, but you will have a lot more attractive, lighter, more accurate, more ergometric and –in the long run– more valuable rifle.
Rebecca Roache, Research Fellow and Senior Research Associate at Oxford, was moved to anger by the Conservative victory in the recent British election.
One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to hang out with people who hold abhorrent political views, even if it’s just online. …
[T]he view that I have arrived at today is that openly supporting a political party that—in the name of austerity—withdraws support from the poor, the sick, the foreign, and the unemployed while rewarding those in society who are least in need of reward, that sells off our profitable public goods to private companies while keeping the loss-making ones in the public domain, that boasts about cleaning up the economy while creating more new debt than every Labour government combined, that wants to scrap the Human Rights Act and (via the TTIP) hand sovereignty over some of our most important public institutions to big business—to express one’s support for a political party that does these things is as objectionable as expressing racist, sexist, or homophobic views. Racism, sexism, and homophobia are not simply misguided views like any other; views that we can hope to change through reasoned debate (although we can try to do that). They are offensive views. They are views that lose you friends and respect—and the fact that they are socially unacceptable views helps discourage people from holding (or at least expressing) them, even where reasoned debate fails. Sometimes the stick is more effective than the carrot.
For these reasons, I’m tired of reasoned debate about politics—at least for a day or two. I don’t want to be friends with racists, sexists, or homophobes. And I don’t want to be friends with Conservatives either.
[T]wo Dutch researchers, Marc Cornelissen, 46, and Philip de Roo, 30, are assumed to have died in the Arctic. “They wanted to collect data about the melting ice cover.â€
According to Cornelissen’s Twitter site, the pair began their expedition in late March. By early April they has set off on skis across Arctic sea ice accompanied by a husky. They had been posting daily reports at Twitter.
ResoluteAt times Cornelissen tweeted of unusually warm temperatures and even posted audios claiming to be skiing in shorts.
On April 29 things took a turn for the worse and the pair sent out an SOS while traveling near Bathurst Island, approximately 200 kilometers north of Resolute Bay.
On April 30 Cornelissen’s Twitter site posted that the two were missing.
Spiegel writes that it is suspected that one of the pair fell through “thin ice†and that their situation went unknown for a week. A Canadian search party found one body but the other member of the party remains missing. It is assumed that he has perished. Only the husky dog survived.
The site Cold Facts here posted a report stating that the ice conditions there were “very poorâ€. The two researchers are said to have been experts in their fields. Question: Why were the two trekking on ice conditions described as “very poorâ€? Shouldn’t experts know better?
1. Osama bin Laden was being held in Abottabad as a prisoner of ISI, the Pakistani Intelligence Service, which was using him as a hostage to keep al Qaeda from attacking Pakistan. The Saudis were funding his detention.
2. There was no courier trail. A former Pakistani intelligence spilled the beans to the CIA in order to get the offered reward.
3. The Pakistanis knew we were coming, and reluctantly agreed to let the US conduct the hit under threat of loss of US aid.
4. There was no heroism and no firefight. Osama had no guards. He was a helpless invalid and a prisoner and the Seals were under orders simply to kill him out of hand.
5. Osama was not in touch with, or directing, al Qaeda operations, and there was no treasure trove of intelligence.
6. Barack Obama then completely broke his word to the Pakistanis. There was supposed to be a delayed announcement that Osama had been killed by a drone strike on the Afghan side of the Hindu Kush, no mention of the house in Abottabad, and no clues whatsoever of Pakistani involvement or cooperation. By exploiting the killing of Osama for personal prestige immediately and abandoning the agreed-upon “drone strike” story, Obama double-crossed Pakinstan’s Intelligence Service, leading to a four-year-long rupture in relations.
7. There was never any burial at sea or Islamic service. Osama was literally shot to pieces, and the Seals happily tossed body parts out of the helicopter while flying home over the Hindu Kush.
Bob Owens argues, perfectly correctly, that policemen should not be carrying Glocks.
In terms of mechanical design, there are few flaws with Glock pistols. If a law enforcement officer, soldier or citizen does exactly what they are supposed to do all of the time with cyborg certainty, there will be no problems with the Glock or other popular pistols mimicking its basic design. Unfortunately, “RoboCop†is only a movie, and humans are liable to make similar mistakes over and over again.
The underlying problem with these pistols is a short trigger pull and the lack of an external safety. In real-world encounters, a short trigger pull can be lethal, in part because a significant percentage of law enforcement officers — some experts say as high as 20% — put their finger on the trigger of their weapons when under stress. According to firearms trainers, most officers are completely unaware of their tendency to do this and have a hard time believing it, even when they’re shown video evidence from training exercises.
For more than 35 years, officer-involved accidental discharges with Glocks and Glock-like weapons have been blamed on a lack of training or negligence on the part of the individual cops. What critics should be addressing instead is the brutal reality that short trigger pulls and natural human reflexes are a deadly combination.
Though short trigger-pull guns dominate the law enforcement market, they aren’t the only game in town. A number of major and minor agencies use guns with much longer double-action triggers that are just as easy to fire deliberately but that are much harder to fire accidentally. The half-inch difference of trigger travel may not sound like much, but it can be the difference between life and death.
Among the many very bad ideas that proliferated in Western society since the 1960s is the pernicious notion that one should have a trigger-safety and go around treating a semi-automatic pistol as if it was a revolver.
This has even led to people going around asserting that you don’t want a pistol with a real safety, because it’s so hard to move a safety lever to the off position.
Glocks are cheap, reliable, and easy to shoot accurately… but they are a very bad choice for careless people and non-experts. Really, the Glock design is best carried, the way the Israelis do, with an empty chamber.
Gaston Glock should have put a regulation safety on his design.
Why, one well might wonder, are all sorts of people on the Left, and even Bill O’Reilly on the Right, hurrying to condemn Pam Geller rather than the Muslims extremists who wanted to murder her for the violence in Garland, Texas?
This is about, specifically, the careerist, cowardly, go-along-to-get-along mores of the Upper Middle Class, the class of people whose parents were all college educated, and of course are college educated themselves; the class that dominates our thought-transmitting institutions (because non-college educated people are more of less shut out of this industry).
It is a class which is deathly afraid of social stigma, and lives in class-based fear being grouped with the wrong people, and which is more interested in Career, quite frankly, than in the actual tradecraft of that Career, which is clarity of thought and clarity of expression.
Thus, our institutions of thought propagation are dominated by the very people who can be easily cowed by the Social Justice Warriors, and who will, therefore, adjust their speech in order to not run afoul of the thoughtless — and frequently lunatic — thugs of the censorious left.
Some states haven’t got any imaginary monsters. Connecticut and Rhode Island, for instance, are out of luck. Pennsylvania gets Thunderbirds, which I and Wikipedia have never heard of.
The Manor House in Downton is tucked away next to the church in a peaceful corner of this bustling village. It is said to be the longest continually inhabited house in the South of England, from its original foundation as a chapel in around 850, and later as a medieval hall house. In the 16th Century, Elizabeth I leased the house from Winchester College and gifted it first to Thomas Wilkes, Clerk to the Privy Council, and then to Sir Walter Raleigh, who made significant home improvements, not least to impress Queen Elizabeth when she came to stay at the Manor House in 1586. The Raleigh family remained in occupation for the next hundred years and the Raleigh coat of arms is still to be found over the fireplace in the drawing room (historically known as the ‘Great Hall’ or ‘Parlour’).
After Ilya Repin, Бурлаки на Волге [Barge-Haulers on the Volga], 1873, Russian State Museum, St. Petersburg.
The Telegraph reports on Mr. Putin’s embarrassing failure.
A new Russian tank announced with much fanfare as superior to Western machines stalled during a dress rehearsal for Victory Day celebrations in Moscow on Thursday.
The T-14 Armata, making only its second public appearance, ground to a halt on Red Square, opposite Vladimir Lenin’s mausoleum.
Sergei Shoigu, Russia’s defence minster, was reportedly forced to approach the tank to find out what had happened; servicemen then tried to hook it up to another military vehicle and tow it away. …
The stalled tank – which was stationary for about 15 minutes – was an embarrassment for the military. Dmitry Rogozin, the deputy prime minister in charge of defence, called the T-14 “a beauty†earlier this week, and Russian experts have been lauding its superiority to Western rivals such as the US Abrams and British Challenger.
The T-14 Armata is to be the main battle tank of Russia’s ground forces, and 2,300 are expected to be produced for the army by 2020. It has a remotely-controlled turret with an automatic weapons loading system and an armoured capsule for the three-man crew.
