A very cool and informative video if you care how things work and how to troubleshoot them.

News.

A federal judge in Louisiana issued a nationwide preliminary injunction Tuesday against President Biden’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate for health care workers.

Judge Terry A. Doughty in the U.S. District Court Western District of Louisiana ruled in favor of a request from Republican Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry to block an emergency regulation issued Nov. 4 by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services that required the COVID shot for nearly every full-time employee, part-time employee, volunteer, and contractor working at a wide range of healthcare facilities receiving Medicaid or Medicaid funding.

Louisiana was joined in the lawsuit by attorneys general in 13 other states.

Doughty argued in his ruling that the Biden administration does not have the constitutional authority to go around Congress by issuing such a mandate.

“If the executive branch is allowed to usurp the power of the legislative branch to make laws, two of the three powers conferred by our Constitution would be in the same hands,” he wrote. “If human nature and history teach anything, it is that civil liberties face grave risks when governments proclaim indefinite states of emergency.

“During a pandemic such as this one, it is even more important to safeguard the separation of powers set forth in our Constitution to avoid erosion of our liberties,” he added.

[ … ]

Doughty’s ruling echoes one from U.S. District Judge Matthew Schelp, who issued a 32-page order on Monday blocking the Biden administration from enforcing their vaccine mandate on health care workers in 10 states.

Ah, I see that the lower courts are doing the heavy lifting for the Supreme Tyrants, work they’re too cowardly to do themselves.

I had been cataloging the number of times this had been rejected with no explanation from the Supreme Tyrants, but have lost count now.  This is their latest cowardly act when they denied yet another appeal.

Perhaps when they’re no longer afraid and have stuck their fingers up in the air for long enough, they’ll do the right thing and bash this mandate.

Or perhaps not.  Perhaps they’ll show yet again what tyrants and cowards they really are.

Reason.

A SWAT team destroyed an innocent woman’s house after a fugitive barricaded himself inside. Last week a federal court ruled that she can sue the government for damages.

In July 2020, Wesley Little—who Vicki Baker had terminated as her handyman about a year and a half prior—arrived at Baker’s home in McKinney, Texas. Baker’s daughter answered. Recognizing him from news reports that he was wanted for the abduction of a 15-year-old girl, she left the premises and called the police.

SWAT agents soon arrived. They set off explosives to open the garage entryway, detonated tear gas grenades inside the building, ran over Baker’s fence with an armored vehicle, and ripped off her front door, despite being given a garage door opener, a code to the back gate, and a key to the home. The house was unlivable when they were through.

She sued. So the city asked the court to dismiss the lawsuit.

“In its pursuit of the fugitive and pursuant to its police powers, Baker alleges the City caused significant economic damage—over $50,000—to her home. Then, the City refused to compensate her for the damage,” writes Judge Amos L. Mazzant III of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. “Baker has alleged damage to her private property—and the City’s refusal to compensate for such damage—that plausibly amounts to a Fifth Amendment violation.”

The fact that this needed to be spelled out is a commentary on how difficult it has become to get meaningful accountability from the government.

The ability to do this sort of thing without accountability turns cops into nothing more than home invaders, hoodlums, gangsters and vandals.  Those who do this are deserving of no respect at all.  I would have been just fine if the cops perpetrating this had been shot.

They had no right to do this to anyone’s home.

Asset Forfeiture even under criminal conditions is immoral and should be illegal.  This case is all the more galling because no illegality occurred.  The ability to seize assets turns cops into highway robbers, and deserving of absolutely no respect at all.

Interesting experience he has with Louisiana floods and what it does to guns and ammo.

Via Ammoland, this report.

The Biden administration is rolling out a new initiative aimed at reducing suicides by gun and combating the significant increases in suicides by members of the military and veterans.

The White House is announcing the new plan on Tuesday, which officials say is an unprecedented focus by the federal government on reducing the risk of suicide through awareness and training campaigns and new regulations to increase the availability of gun storage products.

The plan calls for federal agencies, including the Defense Department, Homeland Security, the Justice Department, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs and the Department of Transportation’s emergency medical services office to create public awareness campaigns to encourage safer storage of guns and training for counselors, crisis responders and others.

The effort also includes the Justice Department finalizing a rule that was first proposed in 2016 and would require stores that sell firearms to also offer secure gun storage and safety devices, the White House said.

John Feinblatt, president of Everytown for Gun Safety, commended the administration’s efforts on gun storage, saying they were “blazing a new path” to keep guns away from people who could be a danger to themselves.

In 2019, firearms were the most common method used in suicide deaths in the United States, accounting for nearly 24,000 deaths, or a little over half of all suicide deaths, according to federal health statistics. Experts say many people who take their lives using guns typically have quick access to firearms and have tended to be gun owners or their family members.

As part of the plan, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives will distribute a guide for firearms dealers that spells out both safety steps that are required under the law and additional steps the federal government recommends. The guide will also detail the Justice Department’s focus on prosecuting gun crimes and violations of federal firearms laws.

The administration said ATF would also “seek to revoke the licenses of dealers the first time that they violate federal law,” with limited exceptions for “extraordinary circumstances.” Those violations would include selling guns to someone who can’t legally own them, failing to run a background check, falsifying federal records or refusing to cooperate in required ATF inspections.

The federal government will also create maps to help people find places to safely store guns outside of their homes, officials said. Officials will also expand efforts within the Department of Veterans Affairs focused on suicide prevention and safety planning, along with training for family members of people who could be at higher risk for suicide, administration officials said.

The Department of Defense’s annual calendar year suicide report released in September showed that 580 military personnel, including 384 active duty service members, died by suicide in 2020. The suicide rate among active duty service members has statistically increased since 2015, the report said. There’s been no statistical change for reservists and National Guard members during the same timeframe, according to the report.

What’s not mentioned in this article is how pressure will be brought to bear on the VA to ensure that veterans don’t have access to firearms.  If a veteran has been diagnosed with PTSD, he is already presumably on the NICS list as a prohibited individual.

This just makes things harder for the veteran.  A firearm for self defense is useless for self defense when it’s not within reach.  Besides, if Biden cared about the physical and mental health of veterans, he wouldn’t be pushing a vaccine mandate on the defense department.  None of this has anything to do with care for the veteran.  It’s about disarmament.

To be sure, suicide is awful, but suicide doesn’t obviate the right and duty of self defense among those who are not predispositioned to this awful thing.

Readers know I’m a sucker for dogs.  I miss my Heidi-girl so much that I still grieve her loss.

WiscoDave sent this along today.

Despite trying surgery and chemotherapy, Hutchison died on August 11, at age 25, after an eight-year battle with cancer, Mirror reported. Things took a devastating turn in June, when Hutchison learned that his cancer had spread to most of his brain and to his bones and pelvis.

Nero would likely have passed away due to a broken heart anyway.

Also today, this is a report about how a woman and a dog copes with the dog going completely blind soon after adoption.

Because.  Love.

Berliner Zeitung.

This is just among European soccer players.  All of them in peak physical condition.

Take it all under advisement.  You know the cause, yes?

So says someone named Becky Bennett.

The Kyle Rittenhouse acquittal and the arrival of hunting season are making guns a topic around rural holiday tables.

I’ve written about how guns are a “normal,” even necessary part of everyday rural life. But gun owners need to think hard about our reaction to the debacle in Kenosha—in which Rittenhouse, a teenager with an AR-15, went looking for trouble and found it. Rural people who revere the Second Amendment, but feel joy, or improbably, vindication in the verdict, are in danger of undermining any legitimate place for guns in our society.

[ … ]

Because you never know, acquaintances often urge me to carry a gun while hiking. It’s why, during an office security check after the mass shooting at a newspaper in Maryland, one of my colleagues gestured meaningfully toward her purse and assured me she was prepared.

The problem with Rittenhouse was that he knew exactly what might happen because his behavior provoked the attacks he then defended himself from.

There’s a difference between reasonable defense and a parade. Parades are intended to impress spectators and to make the parader feel big. In the past, no one bragged about owning guns or flaunted them outside a shooting range. They bragged only about hunting prowess.

Rittenhouse loved a parade. If he wasn’t just feeding his ego—if he sincerely believed that waving an assault-style firearm in a chaotic situation improved security—then whoever taught him to behave this way with a gun damaged him immeasurably. No credible rural gun owner would teach children that guns are playthings or props (they teach constant awareness of a gun’s capacity for harm).

Unfortunately, in our presently unhinged society, allowing guns for responsible defense also opens the way for self-gratifying and provocative displays. Not to mention for exploiters like Gun Owners of America, which intends to “award” Rittenhouse an AR-15 like the one he killed with, as a thank-you “for being a warrior for gun owners and self-defense rights across the country!”

When pro-gun organizations and gun owners conflate self-defense and self-aggrandizement, they affirm the weak-minded and guarantee tragedy.

Rural residents, who claim to have their heads on straight about guns (unlike hand-wringing liberals), should know, and do, better. Anyone who cheers the Rittenhouse debacle betrays their rural values of respect for guns, responsible use, and responsibility for yourself and others.

They also risk undermining support for the Second Amendment. The National Rifle Association, untroubled by contradiction or nuance, quoted the amendment after the Rittenhouse verdict. Of course, “well-regulated militia” and “security” were the antithesis of the Kenosha debacle.

Rural gun owners used to take the Second Amendment seriously as the underpinning of responsible self-protection and the freedom that security brings. If we no longer believe these things, why should our urban counterparts support the right to bear arms?

Based on their focus on hunting and support for the NFA, GCA, bump stock ban, assault weapons ban, and universal background checks, this commentary sounds like it could have been written by the NRA.

Note her focus on rural America and hunting prowess.  Guns, for her, aren’t for personal defense in urban areas, nor for the amelioration of tyranny (the Raison d’être for the 2A).

Guns are to be hidden, not seen, and going outside the home with them invites combat.  Never mind that Kyle showed up begging people of both sides to come to his station for medical aid, and that when he was first attacked he ran and yelled “Friendly, friendly, friendly!”

Never mind that the rest of that fateful night as he suffered more attacks, he was running from the threat.  And never mind that this wasn’t a parade – it was known terrorists burning a city to the ground (Antifa / BLM).  Finally, never mind that at least one of his attackers tried to kill him by striking him in the back of the skull, and that at least one of his attackers pointed a gun at him.

To Becky, you invite combat by openly carrying a firearm.  This is the same argument the prosecution used.  And there is no basis for this in law, no basis in fact, and no basis in ethics for a position like this.

Where I live it’s legal to openly carry, as it should be.  No one even looks twice.  Open carry is far more comfortable than concealed carry, and it’s quicker to presentation.  It’s often what I choose to do, and it’s both legal and moral to do so.

Becky lives in another world, one where the police are legally obligated to protect her, one in which they can be there instantaneously, and one in which Antifa / BLM conducts “parades” rather than commits arson, vandalism, theft and rape (in Portland and Seattle).  This is a world of her imagination, for the police cannot be there instantaneously, and are under no obligation to protect her (see Castle Rock v. Gonzalez, Warren v. District of Columbia and DeShaney v. Winnebago County).

Moreover, the police are bound by the politics of the administration they serve.  “To Protect and Serve” is a meaningless political jingle.  The prosecutor in the Kyle Rittenhouse case wasn’t just going after Kyle.  He is a gun controller and was going after the 2A.  He was going after anyone who presumes the effect self defense.  His ultimate goal is for there to be no capability of defense of life and liberty.

How Becky feels about my open carry, or whether Kyle showed up with an AR-15 or an M1A1 Abrams tank, is really quite irrelevant.  The businesses of hard working men and women were burned to the ground that fateful night, and many people were injured outside of what happen with Kyle.  The police were told to stand down, as they have been on multiple occasions throughout the U.S. over the last year.

Becky wants a return to the days of yesteryear where men in flannel discuss the latest deer hunt and seldom carry outside the home.  Alas, it will not happen.  There are no “parades” any more.  There is looting and burning and destruction.  But good men are armed, and there are problems on the horizon.

Those problems aren’t a function of what sorts of conversations occurred over Thanksgiving dinner five decades ago.  Those problems are a function of the rejection of God’s law for society.

Becky would do better to turn her attention elsewhere for solutions than whether we celebrate Kyle’s exoneration of charges that should never have been brought to begin with.

Finally, it’s surprising that so many people have turned their attention to making out criminal behavior by criminals (Rosenbaum was a convicted child anal rapist, Gaige Grosskreutz was a career criminal, etc.) to be a “parade.”  Maybe it shouldn’t be, but it’s as if there is no shame left.

We’ve covered both of these guns in previous posts, and guys really liked the CZ Shadow 2.  According to this review, the performance and specs of both guns are about the same.

Beretta apparently built this gun to compete with the Shadow 2.

I missed this video when it first came out.  Sorry about that.

I’ll take one of each.