Continuing The CZ History Books series of posts dedicated to the company’s history and their most interesting firearm designs, Ceska Zbrojovka has published an article about an extremely obscure gun from the ’90s – the CZ Tarantule water cannon. Shooting a high-velocity jet of water, the CZ Tarantule was designed to be used in applications like destroying locks, punching through walls and disposal of explosives. CZ themselves say that this gun is probably the strangest weapon in their collection.
CZ Tarantule was supposed to be used in cases where explosives couldn’t be used due to a high risk of collateral damage. The Tarantule uses a modified .50 caliber blank round loaded from the breech of the 18mm caliber smoothbore barrel to propel the 70ml of water which is poured down the muzzle and sealed in the bore via a special plug. The muzzle velocity of the water jet is a whopping 3500 m/s or 11,483 fps.
After loading the CZ Taratntule, the operator uses the two wires attached to the gun to fire it with an electrical current from behind a cover, to be protected from any debris that can be blown back as the distance to the target has to be very short – 3 to 5 meters. For aiming the cannon, there are two lasers and also optical sights can be attached. Although the gun weighs 20kg (44 lb) and is mounted on a heavy tripod, the large spring wrapped around the barrel is for recoil mitigation.
Despite being such an interesting design with many advantages for use in the above-mentioned applications, the CZ Tarantule was never adopted by any unit and only 6 samples were ever made. CZ says that “it probably became a victim of being way too progressive as it often happens with such products“.
Pictures by Česká zbrojovka a.s., www.czforthosewhoknow.com
Gazprom, Russia’s main natural gas supplier, has announced a complete halt in gas exports to Bulgaria and Poland on Wednesday after the two countries refused to make payments in rubles. Supplying Sofia and Warsaw with gas will resume once the countries agree to pay Russia in Rubles.
The Saint Petersburg-based energy giant also warned that if Bulgaria and Poland start siphoning off Russian transit gas intended for other countries, it will reduce supplies by the amount Sofia and Warsaw have illegally withheld.
In a statement early on Wednesday, the company explained that “as of the end of the working day on 26 April, Gazprom Export had not received ruble payments for gas deliveries in April from the companies ‘Bulgargaz’ (Bulgaria) and PGNiG (Poland),” as required under President Vladimir Putin’s decree dated 31 March. It noted that “payments for gas delivered since 1 April must be made in rubles,” and that both companies had been notified of this “in a timely manner.” -RT
Poland has so far refused to follow this procedure set forth by Russia and on Tuesday sanctioned Gazprom, which owns a 48% stake in the Polish company that co-owns the Yamal-Europe gas pipeline. The 4,000-kilometer route transports gas from the Yamal Peninsula and western Siberia to Germany and Poland via Belarus. Poland has stated it will no longer buy gas from Russia.
Bulgaria currently has a 10-year contract with Gazprom that is set to expire at the end of this year. The ministry’s statement said that Bulgargaz would not finish the contract if it had to pay in rubles, stating that the setup “poses significant risks to Bulgaria.” Sofia relies on Russia for around 90% of its gas, with the remainder coming from Azerbaijan, according to a report by RT.
Prepare for higher prices and more fuel shortages. Things are getting a little out of hand, and we should be as prepared as possible for what’s looking like the inevitable.
INFLATION IS RUNNING AT 40-YEAR HIGHS!
NEGATIVE INTEREST RATES ARE TAXING SAVERS,
CREATING FOOD SHORTAGES
AND MAKING LIFE MISERABLE IN THE UNITED STATES!
There’s Little Time Left Before the REAL DISASTER occurs!
Just after their 30th anniversary of being in business in the states, Mec-Gar USA is excited to announce the launch of their new 9mm 10 and 19-round CZ75B competition magazines. These new magazines make use of a 17-round magazine body with a pre-installed black aluminum +2 base pad. For the 10-round magazines (for use with Limited 10 and Production divisions) the magazine tube will be dimpled to restrict the capacity down to 10-rounds without affecting the fit or length of the magazines in the pistol.
New CZ75B Competition Magazines Released by Mec-Gar USA
These magazines are kind of a big deal for USPSA competitors who use CZ75Bs as the guns have to fit inside of a box that has internal dimensions of 8-5/19″x6″x1-5/8″ for the production division where you’re limited to 10-round magazines. Additionally, the magazines also need to meet specific length requirements and are often measured to make sure competitors aren’t cheating the system by sneaking in slightly longer magazines, for this purpose, Match directors will often use an EGW mag gauge to see if the magazines fit within the specified dimensions as determined by the rules.
These magazines will also be compatible with other popular CZ guns like the 85B, SP-01, Shadow, and Shadow 2 – all very popular within USPSA.
Photo: @jessiejimenez_
According to Mec-Gar USA Vice-President David Kochol, “the magazines have the high quality and attention to detail expected of Mec-Gar magazines”, with the following attributes:
·Anti-friction coating which helps reduce malfunctions
·Body manufactured from carbon steel & heat treated for strength
·Spring manufactured from Type D music wire
·Aluminum basepad with a texture to aid in removing the magazine from the pistol
·Numbered witness holes for remaining-round calculation
Each of the new magazines will cost $66.25 from the Mec-Gar USA website and while that does seem expensive, it’s kind of par for the course when it comes to competition magazines meant for use within USPSA. Mec-Gar will also be selling these magazines through their network of retail partners meaning you’ll probably be able to find them on places like GunMagWarehouse and possibly even pick them up for sale in a bundle pack at some point down the road.
If you compete in USPSA what are your thoughts on these new magazines? Will you still be sticking to your personally extended baseplates or would these Mec-Gar-produced 19-round magazines be worth looking into?
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Americans thought that Afghanistan was bad. Now we find out that Ayatollah of Iran could have a nuke within weeks.
Barack Obama did all he could to allow Iran to move ahead with its nuclear program. Despite Obama’s claims otherwise, Obama sent Iran billions of cold hard cash to get Iran to sign an Iran deal, and then Biden reportedly has done it again.
In working on the deal, the Iranians wouldn’t work with the Biden team so Biden brought in Russia to help negotiate. Of course, Russia made out and Iran got what it wanted. We don’t know yet if this deal was ever signed.
But now it’s being reported that Iran is only weeks away from having a nuke. Newsmax reports:
The White House confirmed a warning issued by Secretary of State Antony Blinken to senators earlier on Tuesday that Iran could obtain a fully developed nuclear weapon in a ”matter of weeks” as their refining program ”has galloped forward,” Newsweek reported.
“What Secretary Blinken said during his testimony this morning was that [Iran’s] breakout period is down from about a year — which is what we knew it was during the deal — to just a few weeks or less,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said in a press briefing.
Psaki added that the thought of a nuclear-armed Iran ”definitely worries” the Biden administration.
Although Blinken and Psaki blame this on President Trump, the whole world knows Iran would never get a nuke under a Trump Presidency.
Biden’s foreign policy has brought an $84 billion surrender to the Taliban in Afghanistan, Russi invading Ukraine and now Iran having a nuke.
According to The Daily Wire, conservative political pundit Dan Bongino received a message from a Disney insider who told him that Disney executives are tracking the “overwhelming” number of negative phone calls and emails they’re receiving regarding the company’s stated, not-so-secret gay-trans activism and attempts to sexualize children’s entertainment.
This outcry is being led by Association of Mature American Citizens’ (AMAC) activism non-profit, the conservative alternative to AARP. Two weeks ago AMAC Action launched a nationwide campaign on the conservative advocacy platform AlignAct targeting Disney executives and the response from Americans has been indeed been “overwhelming.”
Finally, freedom-love Americans’ voices are being heard loud and clear by the woke corporate executives at Disney.
So far tens of thousands of phone calls and emails to the executives at Disney have been generated. Americans, of all parties, are mad as hell about Disney’s attempt to sexualize children and force a radical agenda on them.
Thanks to AMAC Action and AlignAct, people don’t just need to be mad, they can actually do something about it. In less than 60 seconds anyone in America can contact the “woke radicals” running Disney. You can join their national campaign here.
According to AMAC Action’s AlignAct campaign, “We think [Walt] Disney would be as concerned about what’s happening [to his company] as we are. And we think he would say it’s time for concerned Americans to take a stand for the health and safety of our children!”
They go on to say, “Join millions of mature Americans to Honor Walt by telling the “woke” radicals running his company to stop the sexual identity exploitation and “character indoctrination” of our children and grandchildren.”
If Disney refuses to drop their woke agenda the millions of people contacting them are threatening to “stop spending our money on Disney parks, merchandise, programming, and more.”
After years of constantly praising The New York Times, capitulating to Liz Cheney and the Democrat leadership and kicking members who stand in the way of advancing a progressive agenda off of their committees, thereby crippling their ability to fundraise, inescapable karma is coming full circle for conniving House GOP Leader Kevin McCarthy, warns former Rep. Steve King.
“The New York Times is McCarthy’s Bible,” King told The Gateway Pundit in an exclusive interview. “McCarthy, more or less worshipped the NYT and the NYT reporter to me. He said the NYT would not make a mistake; they are professionals — they wouldn’t make a mistake even in punctuation. Now here we are, the NYT turned around and laid this on him.”
“He’s also said that he can remember every word, every pause, every punctuation that he ever said to the press in the last six months,” the former Iowa congressman added. “That’s Rainman stuff. There is no one that can do that.”
Last week, the New York Times leaked explosive secretly recorded audio from a private conversation between McCarthy and Liz Cheney on Jan 10, 2021. During the call, McCarthy assured Cheney he would advise Trump to resign following Cheney’s references to the events of January 6 and the 25th Amendment.
McCarthy also argued members of Congress who were complaining about the rigged election results should be censored and banned from social media platforms along with the sitting president of the United States.
Kings cautioned that the California politician longs to be Speaker of the House and with “cunning duplicity” will act as cutthroat as needed to get that position, primarily by derailing and unseating members that challenge him or the establishment’s agenda.
“Every move that he makes goes through the filter – the calculation of, ‘Does it hurt me or help my prospects to become Speaker of the House?’ That’s his abiding goal in life. Most of us that have been around him have recognized that for a number of years. Whatever heavy-handed stuff that he thinks he can get away with that advances that cause, that’s what he will do,” he said. “People being removed from committees was almost unheard of until McCarthy came on the scene.”
MCCARTHY’S ‘PAY TO PLAY’ SYSTEM
Just a handful of Republican members of Congress have called attention to the current crises that present existential threats to the U.S. Constitution and the republic. Any lawmaker who strays from McCarthy and the globalist agenda, dares to call attention to political prisoners who are languishing in solitary confinement for protesting glaring election theft on January 6, attempting to halt governmental “vaccines” mandate compulsory, or refusing to compromise their values, for example, face penalty.
King detailed McCarthy’s “pay to play” apparatus for distributing powerful positions in the House.
“Almost all of them are compromised – wherever they might stand on any of those issues,” explained the former chairman of the Constitution and Civil Justice Subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee. “Here’s how that works. A freshman gets elected and most of them are ideological, they want to go make a difference and they’ve got an agenda. They get in and leadership says to them, ‘Now, you elected people to come into Washington, we are going to give you orientation.’ For me, that was eleven days — two days of orientation and nine days of indoctrination.”
“And they’ll tell you this: ‘Your job is to raise money. You go to your committee and vote when you have to, go to the floor and vote when you have to. Otherwise, we’ll bring you over to the National Republican Congressional Committee. Pick up the phone and dial down through this list and raise money. Then you give the money to the party and that will have a lot to do with your next committee assignment and a lot to do with your pathways into leadership or your legislation that might be getting passed. And if you don’t do that, they will shut down your endeavor,” he continued. “They are policing it through all of this.”
While previous GOP Speakers of the House, John Boehner and Paul Ryan threw their lot in with the Trump-haters and leftists, “greedy” McCarthy takes the cake, King argued.
“I put this at the feet of McCarthy, and I’ve watched him for three years putting this together. It was served up to me in a blander way when I arrived than what it is now. Now, Kevin McCarthy gets to unilaterally make these decisions: what committees you will be on, whether you’ll have a role ever as a subcommittee chair, a full committee chair or an honorable role as the whip, the deputy whip or something along that nature – or maybe the chairman of the NRCC itself. He’ll make those decisions,” he said. “McCarthy controls every assignment. He will say the Steering Committee makes those decisions — that’s a flat-out lie. The Steering Committee is handpicked by McCarthy and their assignments depend also upon the goodwill of McCarthy. Every gavel, McCarthy can kill. He can bypass somebody that has 15 years of seniority over the second guy because he doesn’t like what they say or think. If he says to the PACs on K street, ‘Don’t send money to candidate X,’ they don’t send money.”
King explained how McCarthy controls the House GOP through fear.
“All of these members are afraid that their political careers are going to come to a halt,” King continued. “If you get leadership to endorse your legislation, it’s coming to the floor. McCarthy withholds that unless you play ball with him. He also decides whether you do foreign travel or not – that comes right out of the mouth of Kevin McCarthy. Then the non-governmental organizations out there, other organizations that are operating around the Hill, get that message. So, the invitations that you were getting to give speeches and build that network and support from the NGOs, stops, dries up and may even stop immediately.”
MCCARTHY COLLUDED WITH THE NEW YORK TIMES TO DEFAME KING
After serving in the U.S. House of Representatives for 17 years, King lost his re-election bid in 2020 following a hit piece on the conservative firebrand published by The New York Times.
During a 2019 phone call with NYT reporter Trip Gabriel, King discussed the perils of mass illegal immigration to Western civilization, as he had throughout his entire political career. Gabriel allegedly conflated King’s references to “Western civilization” with “white supremacy.”
“It was a 56-minute interview. There’s no tape. There are no notes. I thought that interview was going to be approved by my communications director and it hadn’t,” King explained. “Since 2000, I had never been quoted uttering those words, ‘white nationalism, white supremacy’ – I don’t think in those terms. But during that same period of time, I had been quoted saying ‘Western civilization’ 276 times.
“Gabriel admitted that he had been fed me those terms ‘white nationalism, white supremacist.’ If I said those words, it was to say, ‘Yeah, I understand how these got to be pejorative terms and they were weaponized by the Democrat Party.’ But Western civilization, how did that language become offensive?”
Carrying water for “the globalists and Never Trumpers,” the California lawmaker who aspires to ban his colleagues from the social media platforms, allegedly conspired with the New York Times to frame and oust the conservative firebrand and then refused to allow due process.
Just hours after the libel spread like wildfire, McCarthy shut down all paths that would allow King to set the record straight, removed King from all committees and shut down the longtime congressman’s ability to fundraise.
“People being removed from committees was almost unheard of until McCarthy came on the scene. Nobody in history was bounced for a misquote anywhere, or for what they said anywhere at any time. Every lawmaker that had been previously removed from the committees had convictions or indictments, and federal ones at that,” King said. “I never had any place that I could make my case. There was no due process of any kind. Every effort I made was shut down and blunted by Kevin McCarthy, his staff and Liz Cheney. This came down and all of a sudden I am utterly canceled. No one that had been removed from their committees by their own party has ever survived the next election. McCarthy knows that.”
King agreed that he should have recorded his conversation with the NYT to protect himself from libel and advised others to take the same precaution when engaging with dishonest media.
IDENTITY POLITICS
GOP Members of Congress quickly make enemies when they refuse to play ball or “stand in the way of the establishment’s agenda over and over again,” the ex-congressman admonished.
“I was elected to Congress in 2003, and then from that point forward, I carved out more and more independence. I emerged throughout those years as the “conscience of conservatives” in the House of Representatives,” King said. “I led on trying to kill Obamacare. After Obamacare passed, I led on the cutting off of all funding to implement or enforce Obamacare. I brought the first repeal legislation to repeal it. I drafted that and the morning after, it passed and was signed into law – as soon as the door opened, I was there.
“I was one of the handful of people that pushed John Boehner out of the speaker’s chair. He was cutting deals with Nancy Pelosi and trying to force-feed them to conservatives. It was clear to me that he wasn’t going to secure the border or repeal Obamacare. Those guys, they had me marked and they were going to kill everything I tried to do. So, I’d bring in my amendments rather than legislation. And I ended up with more amendments offered and a higher percentage of them passed than any active amendment offerors,” he continued. “I just went to battle every day. All of those things just irritated leadership.”
King described how McCarthy uses racial, ethnic and sexual quotas in his political calculations including the endorsement of candidates and selection of committee assignments.
While every Republican member of Congress is forced to raise money for the National Republican Congressional Committee, the NRCC uses the money to advance identity politics under the guise of “equity,” “diversity” and “affirmative action” and fund the campaigns of progressive candidates.
King’s refusal to fundraise for the left-wing causes of the National Republican Congressional Committee irked McCarthy. But aggravation between the GOP minority leader and renegade Iowa lawmaker came to a boiling point when King introduced the “heartbeat bill.”
“I brought the Heartbeat Protection Act to Congress. I had 174 cosponsors on that bill – that’s almost twice as many as you need to get a markup in a committee. I had a hundred percent promise to get the mark up in the Judiciary Committee, not a promise to go to the floor, but we had the votes to pass it,” King said. “Kevin McCarthy flat killed that bill in December 2018 while we had floor time to do it. I pushed the issue until I forced an answer, but he killed it. He did this damage to the pro-life movement. At that time, I was the strongest pro-life voice in the country, and he killed it off. McCarthy attacked me. He said that’s not the platform. He excoriated me for defending those babies.
“Then, Kevin McCarthy continued to agitate from behind the scenes. The establishment globalists decided they wanted to get rid of me and unloaded everything on me in the fall of 2018. They had already had a few million dollars lined up against me on the Democrat side – I could withstand all that they would throw at me on that side. But a week out from the elections, Steve Stivers, then-chairman of the NRCC, tried to politically assassinate me — calling me a ‘racist,’ ‘bigot’ and every kind of ‘phobe.’ My ‘close friends’ in the Republican Party started to say, ‘Steve King is going to lose his seat’ and undermining me.
King urged every Republican member of Congress to expose McCarthy and expel the aspiring Speaker of the House from the party.
“Every single institution in America has been influenced or corrupted by the leftists and new world order proponents. That explains the Never Trumpers and the elitists and the establishment. They are aggressive, they are well-funded and there’s a network of this,” he said. “Nothing changes until leadership changes. They will perpetuate this same thing over and over again.”
“This book – I couldn’t get anybody to publish it because they didn’t want my name on their website. I’m too ‘toxic.’ They’ve turned my career in public service which spans nearly a quarter of a century into toxicity. It so toxified me that my leverage has been reduced substantially,” he said. “This book should be required reading for every candidate for Congress and could be the very document that denies the speakership to Kevin McCarthy.”
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s “quarantine lottery” violated citizens’ rights, a high court found on Wednesday.
Far-left PM Jacinda Ardern imposed a dystopian zero-Covid policy that resulted in New Zealanders stuck offshore or stuck in other countries and unable to return home.
New Zealanders desperate to return home were forced to participate in a ‘quarantine lottery’ in order to secure a bed in a military-run ‘quarantine hotel.’
Many New Zealanders were stuck waiting in other countries as their visas expired.
High Court Justice Jillian Mallon on Wednesday ruled this violated New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act, which guarantees every citizen the right to enter New Zealand.
“New Zealanders’ right to enter their country could be infringed in some instances in a manner that was not demonstrably justified in a free and democratic society,” the judge concluded.
The lawsuit was brought by Grounded Kiwis, a lobbying group that used crowdfunding to bring the case to the high court.
During the height of pandemic restrictions, thousands of New Zealanders desperate to return home essentially had to roll the dice month after month as they tried to secure a coveted bed in a quarantine hotel run by the military.
On Wednesday, a New Zealand court ruled that the government had breached the rights of its own citizens by imposing the lottery-style system on them.
A group called Grounded Kiwis had used crowdsourcing to help fund their case against the government.
But while they were celebrating their victory, the case may have little impact going forward as New Zealand has since abandoned its zero-tolerance approach to the virus and largely dismantled its contentious quarantine system.
Central to the case was New Zealand’s Bill of Rights Act, which guarantees every citizen the right to return home.
High Court Justice Jillian Mallon ruled that forcing people to stay in quarantine hotels for two weeks initially, and later for one week, was reasonable given the circumstances of the pandemic.
But she found that operating a lottery-style system for the beds was unreasonable, and did not take into account how long people had been waiting abroad, or whether they had a compelling need to return home.
Dr. Fauci on Tuesday told PBS’s Jody Woodruff that the US is “out of the pandemic phase.”
“We are certainly right now in this country out of the pandemic phase,” Fauci said. “Namely we don’t have 900,000 new infections a day and tens and tens and tens of thousands of hospitalizations and thousands of deaths. We are at a low level right now.”
“So, if you’re saying, are we out of the pandemic phase in this country, we are. What we hope to do, I don’t believe, and I have spoken about this widely, we’re not going to eradicate this virus,” he said. “If we can keep that level very low, and intermittently vaccinate people — and I don’t know how often that would have to be.”
Fauci continued, “That might be every year, that might be longer, in order to keep that level low. But, right now, we are not in the pandemic phase in this country. Pandemic means a widespread, throughout the world, infection that spreads rapidly among people. So, if you look at the global situation, there’s no doubt this pandemic is still ongoing.”
SAR USA has a new striker-fired pistol called the SAR9 Compact X. The SAR9 Compact X features a compact size for concealability, a polymer frame and a 4″ forged steel barrel and slide with lightening cuts. The “X package” features a Cerakoted slide with a matching color frame on some models. There is a choice of three insertable back straps to personalize the grip. The pistol also comes with a paddle holster, double mag pouch, magazine loader and a weapon light.
Miami, FL- April, 2022 – SAR USA, exclusive importer of one of the oldest firearms manufacturers in the world, SARSILMAZ, is proud to announce the introduction of the new SAR9 Compact X striker-fired semi-automatic 9x19mm pistol.
The SAR9 Compact X DNA comes directly from the SAR9 pistol which was originally designed and engineered to compete on the world stage as a military sidearm, and to fill a military contract. Now SAR USA is offering the SAR9 Compact X package which includes: paddle holster, double mag pouch, magazine loader and accessory flashlight. All are packaged in a rugged carrying case.
The SAR9 Compact X striker-fired pistol features a lightweight polymer frame with accessory rail, serrated slide with Cerakote platinum finish and a 4″ hammer-forged barrel with recessed crown for increased accuracy. With a 3-dot sight optic-ready mount plus a choice of three insertable back straps to personalize your fit, the SAR9 Compact X points naturally and is a pleasure to shoot. Its low barrel axis-to-grip ratio lessens muzzle climb, and the 20-degree grip angle provides superior control and fast second-shot recovery. …the accuracy is built in. Couple these features with an ambidextrous safety trigger that is smoother than a double-action revolver and the SAR9 Compact X becomes the perfect carry-pistol when you want a round in the chamber.
The SAR9 Compact X incorporates a unique safety trigger that features a tab safety in the center to prevent inertial discharges should the gun be dropped onto the rear of its slide. There is also a bright-red insert at the top that is visible from the side. This feature enables the shooter to see, at a glance, whether the gun is cocked or not, even from a distance. The SAR9 Compact X comes standard with two 15rd. magazines. For compliant restricted states 2-10rd magazines are included.
Technical Specifications:
Caliber: 9mm luger Height: 5.1”
Capacity: 10+1 or 15+1 Width: 1.4”
Overall length: 7.2” Barrel Length: 4”
Weight: 26.8 oz Colors: Black, Black & Black w Stainless Slide, Platinum, OD Green w
MSRP: $632.00 Black Slide, White
About SAR USA
SAR USA is an exclusive importer of one of the oldest firearms manufacturers in the world, SARSILMAZ. Their state-of-the-art facility produces weapons for 30 NATO allied countries along with an additional 78 countries around the world. Founded in 1880 in Duzce, Turkey, SARSILMAZ is one of the largest producers of firearms worldwide with over 140 years of innovation, expertise, and proficiency. SAR USA is dedicated to providing the same level of standards, trust, and quality in the US market for many years to come.
For more information about the new SAR9 Compact X please visit: www.sarusa.com
King’s refusal to fundraise for the left-wing causes of the National Republican Congressional Committee irked McCarthy. But aggravation between the GOP minority leader and renegade Iowa lawmaker came to a boiling point when King introduced the 
