• Navy SEAL Sniper School: Part I and Part II By E.J. Smith
• 2000-2010: 55,000 U.S. Factories Close By Richard C. Young
• The Armed American Family, Part V By Richard C. Young
• The Flat Tax Answer By Richard C. Young
• Summertime and Rosé Is Easy By Debbie Young
• A Few Hundred ISIS Fighters Capture Ramadi By Richard C. Young
• Burgundy or Bordeaux? By Richard C. Young
• Finding Midnight in Paris By Debbie Young

How hard is Navy Seal Sniper School? Hard. In this article former Navy SEAL sniper head instructor Brandon Webb explains that you get instant cred just by getting into the school. I first read Webb’s description of sniper school in his New York Times bestseller, The Red Circle.

Sniper school is one of the very few courses a SEAL will not be looked down upon for failing to complete. It’s an unwritten rule that you don’t give guys a hard time for washing out of sniper school. Because the course is known for its insane difficulty, just being selected or volunteering to go automatically elicits respect in the teams.

Here Webb describes the mental side of long-range shooting and how you can think about it:

Some of our most extensive classroom study was in the area of ballistics, including internal ballistics, externals ballistics, and terminal ballistics.

Internal ballistics refers to what’s happening on the inside of the rifle. When your firing pin hits the bullet’s strike plate, it sets off an initial powder charge, and the exploding powder creates a rapidly expanding gas bubble, which propels the slug, or front portion of the bullet, through the chamber. It’s very much a miniature version of a rocket ship launch: just as the rocket discards its boosters once it’s in flight, the rifle ejects the empty cartridge, sending only the relatively small front portion on its journey. In the rocket’s case, that’s the capsule that houses the astronauts. In the bullet’s case, it’s the death-dealing slug.

The inside of the rifle’s barrel is inscribed with a series of spiral grooves, or rifling (where the term rifle comes from). This puts a fast spin on the bullet, giving it stability in flight, much the way you put a spin on a football when you throw it. Internal ballistics has to do with how many twists there are in the barrel and their precise effect on the bullet, how fast the bullet travels, and how it’s moving when it exits the rifle.

This is where external ballistics takes over. Your bullet will start its journey at a velocity of over two thousand feet per second. However, the moment it emerges from the barrel its flight path is already being influenced by its environment. Leaving aside for the moment the effect of wind, there is a universal drag created by the friction of that ocean of air the bullet pierces through in order to fly, combined with the downward pull of gravity. At a certain distance, different for different weapons and ammunition, your particular rifle bullet slows to the point where it passes from supersonic to subsonic. As it eats through the yards at rates of something like one yard every one-thousandth of a second, the integrity of its flight path starts becoming compromised. A .308 bullet traveling at 2,200 feet per second will lose its flight-path stability to the point where it starts tumbling head over heels by about 900 or 1,000 meters out.

External ballistics is also about exactly what that flight path looks like. When you shoot a .308 at a target 800 yards away, you’re not shooting in a straight line: it actually makes a pretty big arc. Imagine throwing a football from the fifty-yard line to the end zone. You don’t throw it straight toward the goal; instead, you know you have to throw it upward so that it arcs through the air, hitting its high point at about the twenty-five-yard line and then curving back down to reach the end zone. The same thing happens with the .308 bullet: you’re not shooting it in a straight line, you’re really throwing it up in the air so that it arcs and comes down where you want it to. Understanding exactly how that works can have a make-or-break bearing on your successfully hitting your target.

For example, let’s say you’re shooting at something 800 yards away. In the terrain lying between you and your target, you notice a low-hanging bridge. From all appearances, that’s no problem. Your target stands at maybe five foot eight; you are lying on the ground, on your stomach; and the bridge is a good ten feet off the ground at its lowest point. When you sight down through your scope at the target, you can see a clear pathway from you straight to the target. No problem, right?

Wrong. That bridge may not look like it’s in the way—but when you take into account the arc your bullet needs to travel to land at your projected site, that bridge could be lying directly in the path of what we call the bullet’s top arc.In other words, it could stop your bullet cold, halfway to your target. And in the kinds of circumstances a sniper will often be facing, you may not have the luxury of a second shot. You have to know your bullet’s maximum ordinate, that is, the maximum height that bullet will travel on its path to your target, and calculate for that.

Once we had mastered the M14 we moved on to other weapons, starting with the .308 bolt action Remington, a very solid weapon and quite capable out to eight or nine hundred yards, in the right hands. This was our first look at a real scoped weapon—and right away, I knew had a problem. There was a Leupold scope on one of my guns that just didn’t seem quite right. I pretty quickly realized that it wasn’t maintaining at zero: it was slipping off. There was no way I could shoot with a scope that wasn’t reliable.

When retired Navy SEAL Sniper School grad and head instructor Brandon Webb first decided that “This is the life for me” as described in June 2015 Men’s Journal:

The same could be said for Webb’s upbringing. Born in 1974, he and his younger sister Maryke were raised in British Columbia, on a remote cattle ranch without running water or electricity. Webb’s father, Jack, had met his mother, Lynn Merriam, while working as a landscaper in Los Angeles. A year later they married, moved to the ranch to start their own construction business, and had Webb. “We lived way out in the woods with wolves, coyotes, and bears,” Merriam says. “I was washing Brandon’s diapers in the lake.”

By the time Webb was 13, the family lived in a large house across the border, in Everett, Washington, when the construction business took a dive. “We were building a big project for someone, they pulled out, and we were left holding the bag,” Merriam says. “We lost everything.” So the family moved into their 47-foot Agio sailboat and became gypsies, moving to a harbor in Ventura, California. Webb began working part-time on the Peace, a 70-foot charter dive-and-spearfishing vessel with a hot tub on its deck, captained by a middle-aged divorcé named Bill Magee. “Bill was kind of like a seafaring Hugh Hef­ner,” Webb says. “You’d walk to the boat, and he’s got his superhot stripper girlfriend in the hot tub half-naked while he’s winking at me and drinking a gin and tonic.” Magee took weekend fishermen out to sea in pursuit of lobster, tuna, and yellowtail while blaring the theme to Rawhide. “I learned how to captain a boat, scuba dive, drink, and play poker,” Webb says. “Older women were hitting on me — it was crazy.”

When Webb turned 16, his parents uprooted the family again to realize a long-held dream — sailing to start a new life in New Zealand. But after pushing off from shore in Ventura, things unraveled fast. The kids resented being pulled from their friends, and Webb fought with his father over control of the ship. “I had a lot more boating experience, had a problem with following rules, and it drove me nuts when somebody wasn’t doing something the right way,” Webb says. “My dad was like, ‘You’re under my roof — I don’t care what you say.’ ” In Tahiti, after 30 days at sea, Webb and his father argued over an accident with the anchor — and finally came to blows. “Jack was really mad and had Brandon’s back up against the boat’s stairway,” Merriam says, “and I remember thinking, ‘Brandon can take his dad.’ ” Webb says the loss of the family business and his own coming of age rattled his father. “I couldn’t wait to get off that boat.” So he did. Webb’s parents found passage for him with a family sailing to Honolulu, gave him money for a plane ticket back to Ventura, and arranged for him to live aboard the Peace while going to school. “I cried myself to sleep every night for weeks,” Webb says, “and then realized, OK, I’ve got to rely on myself from here.”

Back in Ventura, he dedicated himself to diving and spearfishing. At night, he would descend 80 feet, take off his scuba tanks, and crawl into holes to retrieve 10-pound lobsters. By day, he would free-dive 30 feet below the surface to stalk 50-pound halibut with a speargun. “You’ve got to have a pretty good set of balls to do that stuff,” Magee says, “but he wasn’t scared of it.” One day a group of SEALs rented out the Peace, noticed Webb’s skills in the water, and said he should enlist. “I was looking for a way out and thought the SEALs sounded badass,” Webb says. “I was like, ‘This is the life for me.’ ”

Over this period, Pat Buchanan writes, 5 to 6 million manufacturing jobs were lost in the U.S. As Pat notes, we need not look further than job-killing NAFTA, GATT, and MFN for China, all championed by Bill and Hill, the GOP establishment, and the globalization crowd at the WSJ.

Now we are staring at the prospect of an Obama trade deal known as the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The globalizers at the WSJ, who quite wrongly are attacking Pat Buchanan (among the few journalists in America who is on the right side of most major issues), are again championing this trade travesty.

Through the years, Pat’s agenda has been clearly presented in his excellent series of books (See Suicide of a Superpower and The Death of the West). As Pat notes, “Our agenda in that decade (2000-2010) was—stay out of wars that are not our business, economic patriotism, secure the borders, and America first.”

Henry Repeating Arms Company is the U. S. manufacturer of over a dozen .22 rifles owned by Debbie and me and all members of our family. (See our favorites the Survival AR-7 and the Lever Action Youth). The ammunition of choice is CCI Stinger (Hypervelocity) 22LR Long Rifle Copper-plated Hollow Point 1640PPS 32 Grain Varmint ammo.

Among the five personal defense guns Debbie and I keep at the ready for unexpected nighttime readiness are three Henry survival rifles with ten round magazines loaded and, for purposes of safety, positioned separately. I recommend you are skilled at getting these guns into a state of quick readiness in fully darkened conditions. Keep at hand, as we do, a couple of SUREFIRE FURY flashlights as well as a couple of NEBO%20Larry2%20Flashlight%20Lime%20GreenLarry2 red dot pointer, laser lights.

More on the history of Henry Repeating Arms here.

The Cato Institute’s Dan Mitchell offers a way out for America. The question is which candidate for president will have the intelligence and common sense to run with Dan’s plan? All Americans will benefit. And most politicians will not. See any problem here. Individual Americans must carry the day and can work to this end by bombarding representatives in Washington with emails, phone calls and personal visits. The first two questions any voter should hit presidential candidate with are (1) Are you against foreign intervention, nation building and our current state of perpetual warfare? (2) Will you support the flat tax?

Dan Mitchell lays out three irrefutable flat tax benefits. (1) Minimize penalties on productive behavior. (2) End the bias against saving and investment. (3) End distorting loopholes.

Is there anything more cliché ridden than calling rosé “food friendly”? It sort of like calling mustard and ketchup BBQ friendly, which of course is all true. Rosé wine is versatile because it lies somewhere between the extremes of red and white wines—more depth than a light white, but less intense than big, tannic reds. Pale pink to salmon colored, rosé tends to be fresh and acidic, without extra sugar that would disguise its mineral/fruity flavors and aromas.

Will Lyons of the WSJ writes, “This is a wine you can enjoy chilled and served on its own while sitting in the garden or as a simple aperitif before supper. It should possess good citrusy acidity and a smell replete with summer fruits—strawberries, raspberries, peaches and melon. And it should be dry.”

France is the motherland of traditional, dry rosé, and it’s hard to go too far astray with any rosé from Provence or the Rhone or Loire valleys.

To put his taste buds to the test, Mr. Lyons did a blind tasting of 32 rosés from different countries and regions. What stood out? The Provençal rosés. Read here from Mr. Lyons his top 10 picks for French rosés.

A votre santé!

What are America’s choices in Iraq now?

Pat Buchanan lays out three choices and, as Pat writes, none are good: (1) Reintroduce 10,000 ground troops, (2) Adopt a policy of degrade and contain, (3) Accept the inevitable that Iraq “is going to be in the orbit of Iran.”

One: Reintroduce 10,000 ground troops and Marines to retake Ramadi and Anbar, and thousands more to retake Mosul and cleanse Iraq of ISIS. Another surge, like 2007.

Yet that does not solve the problem of the Islamic State, which would retreat to Syria and wait for the Americans to leave Iraq again.

Two: Adopt a policy of degrade-and-contain by continuing air strikes on the Islamic State in Iraq, while training and backing the Iraqi army and Kurds in keeping ISIS out of Baghdad and Irbil.

Three: Accept the inevitable — that the Shiite-led Iraq we created by dethroning Saddam and smashing his Baathist state and army is going to be in the orbit of Iran. For we cannot now, without a major and indefinite reintroduction of U.S. forces, alter the existing balance of military and political power in Iraq.

Before the United States replicates the epochal blunder Bush II and the neocons committed, we should look hard at the realities of Iraq and the region, as we failed to do before we invaded.

See more here on how the crisis is pushing rivals Turkey and Saudi Arabia closer together.

In The Wine Questionnaire, Daniel Johnnes, wine director for Daniel Boulud’s Dinex Group, responds, “Ask anyone in the world of wine and they will laugh at the question. Burgundy!!!”

Michael Dovaz, author of Fine Wines, “Burgundy.”

Jay McInerney, wine columnist for The Wall Street Journal, “Burgundy.”

Mario Batali, Italian chef, “Burgundy.”

Benjamin Roffet, head sommelier at the Trianon Palace at Versailles, “Burgundy.”

In Secrets of the Sommeliers, Rajat Parr, wine director of the Mina Group, writes, “My favorite wine, my obsession for many years, is Burgundy. … At their best, the reds and whites of Burgundy are perhaps the greatest wines in the world.”

In Secrets, Ragat devotes 25 pages to the 30-mile slope of Burgundy’s Cote d’Or and perhaps 250 words to Bordeaux, writing, “As a destination in the French wine country, Bordeaux is less appealing than almost anywhere else. … I see no reason why I should go to Bordeaux when I can go to Burgundy and actually learn about wine and experience the true environment of its making where I can see vineyards, visit cellars, and talk to winemakers.”

For more information on Burgundy read My Favorite Investments: Part II, and Best of Burgundy.

Why do tourists flock to Paris? Well yes, to see the Louvre and La Tour d’ Eiffel, to walk along the Seine and in the Jardin des Tuileries, to shop at Hermes and Bon Marche, to light a candle at Notre Dame and hear a pipe-organ concert at St. Sulpice, and to walk endless miles in the rain (sometimes even in the sun) in arrondissments on both the Left and Right banks, taking in Parisian élan.

But visitors also flock to Paris, of course, to eat at a traditional French bistro. As though in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris, one evening near the Luxembourg gardens, Dick and I stumbled upon the red-checked cloth-covered tables and cooper-potted Polidor. It seemed magical. Because I had often thought of the duck confit and buttery sauerkraut I enjoyed that night, we returned. But upon return, like Gil the next morning in Midnight in Paris, the magic was gone and the food just so-so.

So where does one go to get the classic bistro dishes so wonderfully described by Julia Child, Patricia Wells, Anthony Bourdon, David Lebovitz, et al.? Well thanks to a new generation of young chefs, some classic bistros are back in style, serving up signature bistro dishes, perhaps with a twist or two. And thanks to our friend Alec Lobrano, you can read where to find the bistros joining in this renaissance in traditional bistro cooking.

And if you are planning on going to Paris anytime soon, you must not go without having read Alex’s Hungry for Paris. It’s funny, insightful and mouth-watering good.