Articles by Herschel Smith

We saw it, but not he full video.  Here it is.

The only animal in North America other than a large pack of dogs that will stand down a bear. On the videos they go after the legs, the same approach the honey badgers take with lions in Africa. A single bite could break bones.

Ammoland.

Bidens (sic) DOJ doesn’t like the idea that the State of Missouri has decided to protect its citizens from an overreaching federal government and unconstitutional laws. HB85 also known as the Second Amendment Preservation Act or SAPA has really gotten under the skin of the Biden administration because it prevents gun-grabbers at the federal level from coercing with state officials for gun grabs. The law does not extend to various federal statutes, executive orders, administrative orders, court orders, rules, regulations, or other actions that collect data or restrict or prohibit the manufacture, ownership, or use of firearms, firearm accessories, or ammunition exclusively within the borders of Missouri.

The Federal government’s complaint alleges that the restrictions within HB85 have hindered cooperation and other activities that aid federal, state, and local law enforcement efforts in creating joint Federal Task Forces against Missourians.

The legislation, which was signed into law in 2021 and sponsored by Representative Jered Taylor, invalidates federal firearms laws. Under SAPA, law enforcement agencies can be fined up to $50,000 if they enforce federal gun regulations. You can imagine how infuriated the gun grabbers would be over something like this.

Principal Deputy Assistant Attorney General Brian M. Boynton, head of the Justice Department’s Civil Division said, “A state cannot simply declare federal laws invalid,” “This act makes enforcement of federal firearms laws difficult and strains the important law enforcement partnerships that help keep violent criminals off the street.”

Missouri Attorney General Eric Schmitt said, “After their disastrous arguments in the Missouri Supreme Court last week, the Biden Department of Justice has now filed yet another partisan lawsuit that seeks to attack Missourians’ Second Amendment rights.”

This is not an especially well written article.  Nonetheless, I told you that the FedGov hated this law.  I told you so.

I think the thing about this the FedGov hates so much is that state, county and local LEOs can be sued for $50,000 and fired for cooperating with agents of the FedGov, and barred from ever working as a LEO again in the state of Missouri.

The reason they hate this is because they need local LEOs to assist in protection, addresses, processing, records (e.g., let’s say that FedGov wants to press other charges) and the like.

This continues the saga of he Missouri 2A preservation act.

I wouldn’t make a prediction on what the SCOTUS will do.  What I do know is that if the state of Missouri is serious about this, it won’t matter and any SCOTUS decision will be ignored.  The state doesn’t have to cooperate with the FedGov in anything.  They could decide to arrest agents of the FedGov and thrown them in the state penitentiary if they so choose, and there’s nothing the FedGov could do about it.

One has been seen in the wild.  Despite my predictions of poor performance and rim-locking, it seems to be well-functioning.

Might have to look into one of these given the good price point.

News from Florida.

Florida’s Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo said on Monday that the state would be the first in the US to recommend that healthy children not receive the COVID-19 vaccination.

“The Florida Department of Health is going to be the first state to formally recommend against the COVID-19 vaccines for healthy children,” Ladapo said.

Ladapo announced the move at an event held by Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis titled “The Curtain Close on Covid Theater.” The name of the panel appeared to be a reference to a press event last week where DeSantis snapped at several high-schoolers standing behind him, criticizing them for wearing masks and participating in “COVID theater.”

Good.  It should have been done a long, long time ago.  But at least one state and governor has the balls to do it.

Now.  How about open carry and constitutional carry, DeSantis?  Give me some more read meat.

Andy with practical accuracy sends me a note with a video he did as a challenge from a commenter here at TCJ.

First of all, it’s nice to be in the mix of thing where you can affect outcomes like testing of weapons systems.  Second, his results are interesting and seem to me to put to bed the notion that a 1:9 twist rate can’t stabilize a 77 grain bullet.  This is the same thing Steve Mayer at Rock River Arms told me several years ago.  But it’s nice to see it tested.

By the way, nice shooting Andy.  A 1 MOA group is always good in my book.

My goodness I did love my Heidi and mourn her loss to this day, my red and rust Doberman, all 92 pounds of her sitting in my lap like a lap dog.

This Dobie is just sweet and cute as she can be, and is crying over seeing her first love.  It’s worth the few seconds it takes to watch this.  I want her.  But I’m not mean enough to take here away from her love.

Video.

This dog doesn’t much like lemons.

Video.

This Raccoon likes to drop her kiddies off at baby day care.

Video.

Here are pictures of a rare sighting of a wolverine in Yellowstone.

Source.

A stuck goat.  Maybe he should have kept the goat.

Video.

I have been watching (perhaps not closely enough).  This is the first time I’ve seen anything other than COMBLOC weapons.

It also appears to have a nice charging handle (perhaps a Raptor charging handle?).

TFB.

It’s compatible with AR-15 lowers, and with the package comes a magazine and buffer and buffer spring.  The cost is $350.

I still think the wise move is to wait and get a feel for its performance (e.g., rimfire cartridges tend to get rim-locked, tend to be too weak to hold the slide back, etc.).

But I have to say that the price point is right.  They haven’t overpriced the upper.

Via Chicago Boyz, this Twitter post.

Here is the link.

As correctly pointed out by some of you, Ukrainian troops seems to flooded the area north of Kyiv. That's the reason why the Russian advance is stagnating there. #Ukraine #UkraineRussiaWar #Kyiv https://t.co/aHRDDu1EC4 pic.twitter.com/ZUmQMRlvAh

— MilitaryLand.net (@Militarylandnet) March 4, 2022

He also observes that Ukraine has allowed the reservoirs to flood the region, and further makes the prediction that while Kiev might still be taken, these troops and this equipment won’t be involved.

They’re stuck in mud, likely for months.  They are likely out of fuel, out of food, and with batteries dead.

Read the entire post.

This is the winter thaw.  The spring rains have yet to arrive.

This is intended to be a tactical analysis.  If true, it suggests that mechanized warfare still suffers from the same sort of thing it always has.

I am currently reading this book (a gift from my oldest son).

Mud affects everything from mechanized machinery to infantry health.  It rots feet, keeps boots wet, cracks the boots when it dries, causes gangrene, messes up grease and bearings, breaks tank tracks, causes trucks to get stuck, and if it buries tanks to the point of sucking up to the underside of the vehicle, causes them to be immobile.  Mud contains bacteria and pathogens that can kill troops.

Mud is the enemy of warfare, or the friend, depending upon your perspective.

Via WRSA, this dumb commentary was seen.

What actually happened was:

At 11:11 AM Moscow time (about an hour ago) the authorities of Zaporozhye Region announced that Zaporozhskaya AES is under control of the Russian forces.

At 6:20 AM Moscow time the fire at the administrative building at Zaporozhskaya AES was extinguished with no casualties. It was probably set on purpose to create the media picture of “Europe’s largest nuke plant on fire!”

At 5:36 AM Moscow time the International Atomic Energy Agency announced that the fire in the area of Zaporozhskaya AES did not affect any of the main equipment at the plant.

At 4:47 AM Moscow time president Zelensky goes live to announce that the Russians are trying to create a new Chernobyl. A likely story, that.

Between 3:51 AM and 3:59 AM Moscow time fire crews were on site putting out the fire. Apparently, there wasn’t a lot for them to do.

Between 2:00 AM and 3:30 AM Moscow time there was a shootout at the power plant’s administrative building. Somehow it resulted in a fire at the administrative building.

So much for a new Chernobyl.

He has no idea what happened.  He just made that up.

Unless there is a failure investigation team on site, running fault tree analysis and MORT evaluations, and unless that team has access to event recorder logs dumping to computer point IDs (and retrievable and uncompressed), no one at the moment knows the sequence of events.  I know.  I’ve done these evaluations before for both routine events and accidents.

No one said it was a new Chernobyl (at least, one who was has any intelligence and no know who talked to me for an analysis of the situation).

What I said was very specific, and I’ll add to it here.  I suggested that the fire was either in the auxiliary building (the worst place it could be) or the service building.  Fire can spread from building to building and from nuclear unit to nuclear unit.  I further described the accident at Chernobyl at least in basic detail.  At Chernobyl, the test engineer bypassed the electrical control system that is designed to account for the fact that the reactor can have an overall positive power coefficient.  Worse still, the steam explosion blew the building apart, allowing the unmitigated escape of radioactive fission products to the environment and workers (as well as the public).

That was likely not to be exactly the same situation here.  I won’t go on about how an accident might proceed, except to say that it might involve loss of essential power MCCs, loss of emergency power supply D/Gs, loss of SFP cooling equipment, loss of SSCs necessary for the ultimate heat sink, or a host of other things.

The details aren’t the point.  It could have happened.  It was dumb then to shoot at nuclear power plants and it’s still just as dumb today.  Furthermore, regarding fire, American reactors are designed with fire protection in mind.  Here we aren’t talking about fire hoses.  We’re talking about safety train separation.  For example, you can’t have redundant trains of equipment in the same fire zone, or any other component that could lead to a common mode failure.

We have 10 CFR 50 Appendix R for that, or more recently NFPA-805.  I do not know that this plant was designed to that criteria, probably not, and certainly not upgraded to NFPA-805 or other PRA (risk-based) considerations.

Additionally, to say that a fire at the admin building wasn’t significant is stupid because the author is stupid.  Suppose that the EQ engineer has all of his records and calculations in the admin building pertaining to radiation dose to equipment and TLAA (time limited aging analysis).  They now have no capability for traceability of SSCs in the plant as it pertains to aging analysis and required replacement intervals.  From the perspective of EQ, it’s a disaster.

To say that something didn’t happen and fail to acknowledge that it could have is dumb.  That makes the quality of everything else this writer says suspect.

I don’t claim to be a doctor, nurse practitioner, tax accountant or lawyer.  I’m a nuclear engineer and have been one my entire career.  This writer should refrain from making commentary about engineering until he gets education, training and experience.

In other words, stay out of my shop, boob.  Write and ask if you have questions and you may learn something.