Articles by Herschel Smith

Jeff Knox at Ammoland.

Cotton and LaPierre conspired to keep the meeting as sparsely attended as possible, moving the scheduled meeting from Houston to Charlotte, then not promoting it at all, and finally, setting up a ticketing service that reported the event as “sold out” almost as soon as the “tickets” were made available. Nothing about the meeting ever appeared in any of the NRA’s magazines, but they did, in a minimal nod toward technical compliance with New York law, publish two or three small notices in a local Fairfax, Virginia weekly newspaper. Information was belatedly added to the official website, in such a way as to be hard to find, then a few emails were sent out, but apparently only to relatively new Annual Members, who would be the least likely to be concerned about all of the accusations of financial chicanery in the Association, and who can’t even vote on most matters at a meeting.

In the end, the meeting room was only set up for between about 400 and 500 people, but counts by multiple attendees came in at between 120 and 140 people. That’s barely enough to comprise the 100-member quorum needed for a legal meeting. And almost half of those attendees were NRA Directors, many of whom were accompanied by their spouses, easily accounting for close to two-thirds of all attendees. Directors also got advance notice of the meeting and registration requirements, along with encouragement to bring friends and supporters.

With all of that, it was not at all surprising when a complex resolution from the floor by Director candidate Frank Tait, calling for a vote of “no confidence” against Wayne La’Pierre and others, and calling for their resignations, was blocked by a parliamentary move by Director Joel Friedman of California, with the support of 75% of the members present.

Seriously, what’s this guy smoking? Revenues are down dramatically. Membership is down dramatically. Influence on the Hill has all but disappeared. The headquarters building is mortgaged to the hilt and reported to be suffering from serious structural problems, particularly with the roof, which is reportedly leaking so badly that ceilings on the top floors have collapsed, forcing some offices to be relocated. Even Lloyds of London has refused to extend their liability insurance coverage for officers and directors. And the trial phase of the New York Attorney General’s suit against the NRA and its top executives is scheduled to begin in just a few more months.

[ … ]

I now believe that the NRA is a lost cause. The “leadership” has effectively shut out dissenting voices, ignored valid, serious concerns, promoted corruption and incompetence, and stifled member participation. They’ve blown off documented and self-admitted breaches of NRA policies and basic business practices, as well as clearly criminal activities, yet they continue to claim that they are stronger, healthier, and moving in the right direction, like never before.

Moving deck chairs on the Titanic.

We’ve known that for a long time now, those of use who pay attention to things.

Honestly, the sooner the entire thing collapses, the better off we’ll be.  The NRA has done nothing to help gun rights in America, and has done an awful lot to harm them.

Good riddance to the corruption and lies.  Be gone.

But not of course by U.S. troops, who stood and looked while enemies of the U.S. launched machine gun fire into the country from Mexico.

Because no one cares enough to stop it.

Mexican cartels were seen firing automatic weapons across the border and INTO the United States last night. #BuildBackBetter 💩 pic.twitter.com/NjReYHQ0F9

— The Real Queen of Naboo (@dawnstar1776) October 8, 2021

News from the Northwest.

Four days in jail—that’s the sentence for Samantha Dehring, 25, of Carol Stream, Ill., who pled guilty to “willfully remaining, approaching, and photographing wildlife within 100 yards,” said Wyoming U.S. attorney Bob Murray on Oct. 7.

Dehring also is banned from visiting Yellowstone National Park for a year following her incident with a charging grizzly bear sow and her three cubs while in Yellowstone as Outdoor Life reported in May 2021.

According to a report in the New York Times, U.S. Magistrate Judge Mark L. Carman on Oct. 6 also sentenced Dehring to one year of unsupervised probation and was ordered to pay a $1,000 fine and make a $1,000 community service payment to the Yellowstone Forever Wildlife Protection Fund.

“The park is not a zoo where animals can be viewed within the safety of a fenced enclosure,” U.S. Attorney Murray said. “Approaching a sow grizzly with cubs is absolutely foolish,” he said. “Here, pure luck is why Dehring is a criminal defendant and not a mauled tourist.”

Get that?  The penalties are in place for her own protection.

I think this is stupid, and that laws aren’t made – or shouldn’t be made – for that purpose.

Okay, she did something that wasn’t wise.  So what?  Let her suffer the consequences, if there are any.  People do stupid things all day every day.

Jails aren’t a place for “time out” because someone was being a dumb little boy or girl.  How many gang members or illegal immigrants were running around the state while she was occupying the jail space that should be been used by real criminals?  How much time did it take this attorney to prosecute the woman?

I really don’t want to rehearse the goings-on surrounding Marine Lt. Col. Scheller any more, but this article caught my eye, where this is said.

Scheller responded with another video on Aug. 29 that appeared even more emotional. His former mentor, retired Col. Thomas Hobbs, had commented on his first video and said that if Scheller was honorable, he would resign his commission.

“You didn’t say, ‘is,’ as if challenging me,” Scheller responded to Hobbs in the video. “You said, ‘was,’ as if I wouldn’t do it.” Scheller then announced that he was resigning, and told viewers that if people followed him, they would bring “the system down.”

Hobbs, in a brief phone interview, said on Tuesday that Scheller served under his command at one point, and was one of his best company commanders. Hobbs said that while Scheller was a top performer, he warned him long ago that his arrogance could be his downfall.

“He hasn’t shown one speck of remorse or admitted he was wrong in any way,” Hobbs said. “I 100 percent believe it’s a ploy for him to run for office.”

Uh huh, and Hobbs himself has no dog in this political fight, does he?  But maybe he does.  From his commentary at Marine Corps Times (The Marine Corps: Always faithful – to white men), he makes some startling assertions.

The struggle of minority officers I witnessed at TBS has never left my mind. Over time, I have come to understand the cause. TBS is a high-pressure environment where lieutenants are in direct competition with one another. The first three significant tests are swim qualification, rifle/pistol qualification, and land navigation. Many of the minority officers I led grew up in low socio-economic areas, typically poor urban neighborhoods. They did not have access to scouting, neighborhood pools or hunting. Many of my minority officers struggled with swim qualification. Ultimately, every one of those officers passed, but at a cost to their prestige, confidence, and lineal standing. The pattern remained the same for rifle/pistol qualification and land navigation. Furthermore, remediation and re-qualification attempts were time intensive, fostering a vicious cycle as the lieutenants fell behind in other topics. These three major evaluations occurred during the first third of TBS, and by the time those events concluded, reputations were set for the remainder of school and, one can argue, the remainder of their Marine Corps careers.

Another aspect of TBS that favors lieutenants from white middle- and upper-class families is the language we use in the Marine Corps, particularly among officers. We speak “proper” English, that is English deemed proper by those who have power and determine the standards. Even if no one ever said it out loud, those who struggled to write and speak “correctly” were not respected by the officer culture, a culture determined by white men over the past 244 years.

My white lieutenants who excelled at TBS did so because they worked hard. This fact is not in dispute. What is in dispute is whether the institution creates a level playing field for all officers. I believe the institution has not and does not. The institution is biased towards middle- and upper-class white culture. The institution perpetuates the unspoken narrative of white superiority by setting up minority officers for failure. It puts minority officers in occupational specialties they did not want or have not been thoroughly prepared for by the system.

The fact that this should all be embarrassing for him – and isn’t – should cause even more embarrassment.  He should be humiliated that he isn’t humiliated by such tripe.

He claims he wants a “level playing field,” and recognizes that hard work results in advancement, but wants equality of outcomes, which is precisely the opposite of all of that.

If a Marine cannot shoot, he should never have graduated from boot camp, much less school of infantry.  If an infantry officer cannot shoot, engage in land navigation, speak English, and compete with others, he shouldn’t be a Marine Corps infantry officer.  How on earth is someone who cannot excel at those things going to conduct warfare or lead other men?

I don’t care whether they hunted, swam or had been part of the Boy Scouts as a child.  That’s irrelevant to their skills, drive, motivation and moral constitution today.  If Mr. Hobbs wants better blacks to join the Marine Corps, the problem isn’t the Marine Corps.  The problem is rotted out inner cities, fatherless families, gangs, SNAP, TANF and the rest of government handouts.  Study in school, learn to speak English, learn calculus, take AP courses, get a part time job, and stop joining gangs.

There is a rejoinder at the Marine Corps Times, but it should never had to have been written.  It should be enough to let Mr. Hobbs’ stupid commentary stand on its own, forcing all good Marines to look away in shame at what the Corps has become that a man like Hobbs would ever have been an officer to begin with.

And by the way, the play on words of the post title, is a reminder to readers that Hobbes believed that “state and government are necessary for the realization of acceptable social conduct by its citizens.”

Hobbs also appears to be a lover of the state.

Shameful.  The entire thing is shameful.  The Marine Corps is just a shell of what it once was.

Remember I included Aspirin in the Covid treatment protocol?

The Blaze.

A new study finds that simple, over-the-counter aspirin may be able to protect COVID-19 patients from extreme risk, including the need for mechanical ventilation, the Jerusalem Post reported.

New research from George Washington University has determined that treating COVID patients with aspirin reduced the risk of severe illness by nearly half.

The report noted that an aspirin regimen in more than 400 COVID-19 patients in hospitals across the United States cut the need for ventilation by 44%, slashed ICU admission by 43%, and reduced overall in-hospital mortality rates by 47%.

Dr. Jonathan Chow, one of the study’s researchers, said, “As we learned about the connection between blood clots and COVID-19, we knew that aspirin — used to prevent stroke and heart attack — could be important for COVID-19 patients. Our research found an association between low-dose aspirin and decreased severity of COVID-19 and death.”

A low-dose aspirin regimen has long been touted as potentially lifesaving for people at risk of heart attack or stroke or who are afflicted by blood clotting issues.

This isn’t the only study professing the possible benefits of aspirin in COVID patients. Earlier in October, Medical Express reported that researchers from the University of Minnesota and Basel University in Switzerland came to the same conclusion.

The researchers’ findings were published in Lancet’s Open Access eClinical Medicine and revealed that patients on blood thinners before getting COVID were admitted less often to the hospital despite being older and having more chronic medical conditions than their peers. The findings also revealed that blood thinners — whether started before or after COVID-19 infection — reduced death by nearly half.

Such a simple, simple thing as aspirin.  My pediatrician was prescribing baby aspirin to me when I was an infant.

But there isn’t any money in it for big pharma if we just kill Covid with aspirin, is there?

A few odds and ends.

Via David Codrea, cops kidnapping children.  Yes, seriously.

How to remove an AR-15 trigger group.  Now do one on proper installation.

Removing an AR-15 barrel nut (hint: he heats it with a torch).

Rex reviews some really, really light Level IIIA body armor.  Yea, it’s not good for rifle rounds, but it’s significantly less expensive and you’re protected against the most probable shot (and more likely to wear it given how light it is).

First up, it looks like even Britain is finally telling the truth about the shots.  It doesn’t help with the disease, and it makes matters worse for certain age groups (via Karl Denninger via WRSA).

Second up, statistically excess mortality in Europe has some folks pondering.

For a while now, we’ve had a mysterious jump in excess mortality in Europe. At first, nobody really paid any attention to it, with the exception of a handful of “right-wing populist anti-science conspiracy theorists”. At this point however, experts whose job it is to study trends like this are beginning to notice it too.

[ … ]

What we notice in the most recent week, is that the mortality is most strongly elevated among the younger age groups. Last week we had 300 more deaths than we’re supposed to have. Twenty of those are COVID-19 deaths, the rest are mysterious and unexplained.

Finally, if you’re a pilot and sustain long periods of stationary work plus large changes in pressure, this means trouble for you (and it’s why you shouldn’t fly after taking the shot).

As reported in American Military News:

“A U.S. Army flight surgeon is warning that known side effects associated with the COVID-19 vaccines pose a potentially deadly risk to pilots and is alleging the Army isn’t following Department of Defense protocols to screen pilots for those potentially deadly side effects.”

In May, the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) recognized the risk of heart inflammation conditions like Myocarditis and Pericarditis associated with the two COVID vaccines.

Long said in her affidavit: “complications of myocarditis include dilated cardiomyopathy, arrhythmias, sudden cardiac death.” She also shared an assessment, reported through the National Center for Biotechnology Information, U.S. National Library of Medicine, which states the long-term mortality rate for Myocarditis “is up to 20% at 1 year and 50% at 5 years.”

[ … ]

Lt. Col. Long says she will ground her pilots until the “health risks” of the shots “can be more fully and adequately assessed.” She said:

“That, without any current screening procedures in place, including any Aero Message (flight surgeon notice) relating to this demonstrable and identifiable risk, I must and will therefore ground all active flight personnel who received the vaccinations until such time as the causation of these serious systemic health risks can be more fully and adequately assessed….

That’s nice.  So some U.S. military pilots are grounded.

What could go wrong?

Praying for Southwest today. They are being forced to cancel thousands of flights due to weather conditions that only affect their airplanes and nobody else's. Very unique weather phenomenon.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) October 11, 2021

This is the single bravest thing I have seen in years. God bless these Pilots. The heroes we need right now 🇺🇸✈️ pic.twitter.com/ZxuRseDoAq

— Benny (@bennyjohnson) October 11, 2021

More than half a million adverse side effects have been reported from the various Covid vaccines (Ken’s place), and here are some good pictorial depictions of the damage (in graphs).  Here is one more related post.

But a large number of Congress critters and Congressional staffers understand.

According to Dr Pierre Kory, MD, MPA, and verified by the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC), 100 to 200 congressional reps and/or staff and families who contracted COVID-19 were treated with the Front Line Ivermectin protocol. [LINK and LINK]

This successful treatment is happening at the same time many congressional representatives are playing politics in favor of the vaccine; downplaying the effective anti-viral treatment and therapeutic approach with Ivermectin; and taking action to block regular American citizens from seeking similar treatment with Ivermectin.

Congress can seek treatment with a medication they simultaneously deny to others?  This is well beyond a “scandal”, and needs to be investigated quickly.

Additionally, as Merck has announced a new and similar anti-viral drug called Molnupiravir, two trial studies in India have requested to exit the trials.  Apparently the issue surrounds the new drug providing no benefit once a patient is moderately ill and hospitalized (READ MORE, Reuters Link).

Fun fact: Between 100-200 United States Congress Members (plus many of their staffers & family members) with COVID.. were treated by a colleague over the past 15 months with ivermectin & the I-MASK+ protocol at https://t.co/OvU8SLfLJq. None have gone to hospital. Just sayin'

— Pierre Kory, MD MPA (@PierreKory) October 8, 2021

Because they know.  Oh, they know.  But you see, their rules are for little people, and you’re a little person.

I think Tim is underplaying the importance of functional reliability, and thus doesn’t appreciate the radial delayed system in CMMG.  It’s very hard to get reliable feeding, bolt cycle and operation with pistol rounds in a carbine and CMMG has done that.

But that’s just my opinion.