Articles by Herschel Smith

NRO:

WBUR:

Here’s a conversation I was in on recently between a pediatric intern and the parents of a healthy, 1-day-old baby. It occurred in the Yale-New Haven Hospital well baby nursery.

“Your daughter’s physical exam is perfect,” the intern said. “She’s eating well, peeing and pooping well. I want to talk to you a little about how to help you keep her safe and healthy.”

Next came a standard discussion about the baby’s sleeping position and whether she’s got a car seat. Then, the next question:

“Do you have any guns in the home?”

Suddenly, the genial tone changed.

“I don’t think you should ask that question,” said the child’s father.

“Should I take that as a ‘yes’?” the intern pressed.

“I just don’t think you should ask.”

“Sir, we ask because we want to make sure that your baby is as safe as she can be, making sure you keep any guns locked up and away from her.”

“It’s none of your business.”

What started out as a lovely interaction between two new parents and the pediatric intern, with me observing, suddenly turned into the reprimands of an angry father. No matter how the pediatric resident and I tried to explain that we were asking for the safety of his newborn daughter, he persisted in telling us it was none of our business and not relevant for the child’s health. The mother sat silent in her hospital bed.

This really shouldn’t be controversial.

Since 1992, the American Academy of Pediatrics has encouraged primary care providers to discuss firearm safety with families. This reflects the influential group’s acknowledgment that keeping a gun locked and unloaded dramatically reduces the risk of firearms accidents, and the belief that brief counseling by physicians promotes safer storage of guns in homes with children.

Still, sadly, some controversy remains.

[ … ]

This means if you’re a Florida pediatrician, no asking about guns in the home or documenting them in the chart of a baby or young child …

This commentary was written by Marjorie S. Rosenthal, assistant director of the Yale Robert Wood Johnson Clinical Scholars Program and associate research scientist in the Department of Pediatrics at the Yale University School of Medicine.

You see Marjorie, the fallen nature of mankind is wicked.  That means that totalitarians of all stripes want to exercise control over others.  The desire to exercise control over other people is often sinful.  Every genocide in modern history was preceded by gun confiscations.  As you know, the government has exceptions to medical privacy laws, and with the stroke of a pen (followed on by thousands of pages of federal register notice that explains how the executive intends to carry out his nefarious plans), those laws can be expanded.  The last little bit … “or documenting them in the chart of a baby or young child,” is a big part of the problem.

We know that you would willingly turn in records of gun owners to the government, enabling confiscatory measures and schemes.  Furthermore, we really don’t want your counsel on how we handle our guns.   We would prefer that you spend your time and focus on medicine.  For instance, the human error rate in medicine is still much higher than the commercial nuclear power industry, commercial airlines and pharmaceutical industries (all of which practice and focus on human error reduction tools and techniques).  We would prefer that you study disease, diagnosis, pathologies, biology and pharmacology as opposed to trying to understand the mechanics of machinery or fix the error rate for anyone else.  Tend to your own house and get it in order.  It’s a mess.

So to summarize, the gentleman you cited in the initial example was kind to you, kinder that I will be.  As for whether this has to be controversial, you’re right.  It certainly doesn’t have to be.  Mind your own damn business.  Now I have a few questions for you, beginning with this one.  What is your favorite position for sex?

Fred:

My nephew is in tech school (navy) and I told him before he went in to seek a deep understanding of illegal orders and to make sure they trained him on it. I also told him that if he took his training and turned it on his fellow citizens I would hunt and kill him, this child that I love and helped to raise up. He understood that this is no small matter.

And thus it will necessarily be like it was in the days of the war of independence, with family turning against family over the king.  Dark days may lie ahead.

From PJ Media:

I don’t frequent bars, and in fact I try to stay away from crowded areas and venues (I’m not always successful).  But I’ll defend your right to do so.  So you think Islam is at peace with the West?  Do you think that they won’t attempt to enforce sharia on infidels like you?  Do you think president Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton will protect you?  Hillary will be more concerned with being queen, and Trump will be more concerned with what it does to international business and his hair farm where he gets his wigs.

It’s coming our way, folks.  Get guns and ammunition ready.  Today it might be drinking beer.  Tomorrow it will be the fact that your wife or daughter walks around without a hijab or burqa, or deigns to put on a swimsuit and go swimming, or that your family eats pork.

Be prepared to shoot.  I can’t say it any other way or with any more sincerity.  If you don’t want to have your family taken into slavery and lose your own life, kill the bastards who try to do this to you.  Remember Herschel’s Dictum: “There aren’t too many human interaction problems that can’t be fixed with a .45 ACP 230-grain fat-boy.”

David Codrea:

I just ran across a post from two months back on the CDR Salamander blog, “The Sad Truth About Illegal Orders.” I can’t really claim to know much about the blog or this blogger, but I cite it here because he raises a question that seems particularly suited for Oath Keepers. He recounts  an exchange between presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump and Bret Baier of Fox News, specifically on Trump’s endorsement of waterboarding, going “stronger” on terrorists, and targeting their families.

Baier referred to an open letter signed by “almost 100 foreign policy experts,” saying “the military will refuse because they’ve been trained to turn down and refuse illegal orders. So what would you do, as commander-in-chief, if the U.S. military refused to carry out those orders?”

“They won’t refuse,” Trump replied. “They’re not going to refuse me. Believe me.”

“Citizens of a free republic are applauding a man who is telling everyone two things that should disgust anyone who took an oath to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States,’” the blogger notes. “1. The CINC will issue illegal orders. 2. His military will gladly follow those illegal orders. 3. Citizens applaud 1 & 2.”

As for members of the military who might refuse?

“The more I’ve thought about it, the more I think my initial instinct is wrong,” CDR Salamander admits. “That might be an internal dialog, but once a senior officer looks you in the eye, and even if you make a protest says, ‘The JAG stated,’ or ‘The Justice Department ruled that,’ there are very few who will resist.”

That goes to the crux of what Oath Keepers is about, noting the oath is to the Constitution and the applicability of the Uniform Code of Military Justice as binding law prohibiting a Nuremberg-style “I was only following orders” defense. That’s the legal basis for “Orders we will not obey.”

And that, of course, is used by subversive “progressives” to label Oath Keepers “anti-government extremists” (and worse). That’s part of the Orwellian “War is peace; Freedom is slavery; Ignorance is strength” contradictions employed by the evil to influence and exploit the ignorant and advance the totalitarian agenda.

But here’s the thing …

Well, this is a heavy issue.  See also Son, Will You Fire On American Citizens?  My son won’t, and I know that for an absolute fact.  But he is no longer in the Marine Corps.  LEOs are something different altogether.  I’ll leave it to another time to explore the many facets of differences between the two, but for now suffice it to say that I’m not too worried about the military.

LEOs  – perhaps.  Let LEOs have children, get their medical care and family support dependent on the government, and my bet is that they will just about to a man say, “Well, if you don’t like the laws elect men who will change them.  In the mean time, I’ll enforce the laws on the books that the courts have found constitutional.”  They will defer to the black robed tyrants for their moral framework, and they’ll do it because of the pressure from their spouses to provide for the family.

That’s just what I think.  If you disagree, then name me a single time in history – anywhere, anytime – where law enforcement has refused to obey orders?

Outdoor Life has an interesting list of 26 survival myths that can get you killed.  It’s well worth reading all of them.  This one in particular struck me.

14. A big fire beats a shelter
Large-log fires have kept people alive in the cold, but that doesn’t mean you can afford to skip building a shelter. What if it rains or becomes really windy? You never want to sleep out in the open if you can help it. Take the time to build a shelter. It will pay you back every time.

Well yes, there’s the issue of rain, which will kill you if you attempt to sleep in it all night.  The wind is another issue, and is related to the primary reason I would recommend building a shelter.

There are four types of heat transfer: conductive, convective, radiant and evaporative.  In the absence of survival gear, you need to build a bed of pine bows, straw, leaves and other things to lift you off of the ground to prevent conductive heat transfer (which occurs when two bodies are in contact) from your body to the ground.

If the wind is blowing, that means that convective heat transfer is occurring.  But one often overlooked reason for a shelter is the fact that the universe becomes an infinite heat sink at night.  Your body is radiating heat to the universe without a shelter over you.

Even if you only bend branches and use saplings and construct a hemispherical cage over which you throw leaves and mulch (a common emergency shelter in the South), you need to have a shelter at night.  Never travel so long and so far that you forego the construction of a shelter to keep you alive until morning.

TownHall.com:

So, you know Venezuela is on the verge of economic collapse. The price of oil has dropped precipitously over the past few years—that’s a budgetary nightmare for a nation dependent on its oil exports. As a result, basic necessities, like toilet paper, are being rationed. There’s limited access to television and long distance phone service. There are rolling blackouts due to energy shortages. And now the government is cutting back the workweek to just two days. This comes at a time when Venezuela’s citizens need government services the most. Supermarkets are not stocked regularly, so there’s a food shortage; people are starving. They’ve resorted to looting to survive. You would think that the government can’t really afford to print its own currency because it’s so broke would be the cherry on top of this socialist nightmare. Nope—the hunger games appear to have begun, as Venezuelans are now hunting stray dogs, cats, and pigeons for sustenance …

Do you think these poor folks would like to have a gun for protection, to prevent looting, and to kill animals (no, not dogs) for sustenance?  But Hispanic and Latino cultures are totalitarian and statist, and there are very few legal gun owners.  The government both failed the people in terms of providing the liberty to catalyze a well-functioning economy, thus ensuring its failure, and at the same time prevented the people from being prepared for that assured and certain failure by disarming them.

There’s a special place in hell for such rulers.

Occasionally one makes dear friends for life, even among men whom he has never met.  That’s the case with Mike Vanderboegh, and it’s also the case with a man named Tim Lynch.  I have more respect and fondness for those two men than they can possibly know.  For my readers who were not with me when I covered the debacle that was/is OEF, and conveyed my utter contempt for the likes of Stanley McChrystal and David Rodriguez, my friendship with and support of Michael Yon when jerk-bloggers attacked him, my problems with the rules of engagement, and so on, Tim Lynch was a contractor who was in theater for nearly a decade.  He has spent more time in Afghanistan than any white man alive.  He knows everything – and I mean everything, about Afghanistan.

Tim had a difficult time decompressing stateside, and he paid a huge price financially and personally for being in theater, but I’ll let him tell you his story.  It’s at the same time enlightening, exciting, troublesome, breathtaking, joyful and sad.  He previously blogged, and is blogging again, at Free Range International.  He recently pointed to a post I made on Operation Red Wings concerning tactics, planning, logistics and execution, here and as a guest blogger on another blog.

In my son Daniel’s assessment he takes a classic Marine view of the operation, but if you can wade through the Marine Corps way of doing things versus other branches of the military, his views are still salient and on-point.  Many of the comments are agreeable, many of them violently disagreeable.  The disagreements come mainly from the notion that we (Daniel and I) just don’t understand the nature of recon missions or the kit carried for said insertions, etc., etc., blah blah blah.  And the whole point of the post was that it should never have been a recon mission of that sort or like that to begin with.  Read it if you wish, but you don’t have to to get the point Tim Lynch makes now.  Tim observes the following in his post on this operation.

On June 28, 2005 a Marine battalion working out of Jalalabad launched Operation Red Wing. They lacked their own helicopters so they went to JSOC to ask for helicopter support.  JSOC was game but only if they could play too so they sent a 4 man SEAL detachment to do the recon piece instead of the 6 man STA platoon unit the Marines had planned to use. With that change came a change in the recon insertion plan; instead of sneaking in on foot like the STA platoon had planned the SEALs opted for a helicopter insert using several dummy landings to fool the AOG as to their true location. The SEALs also ignored the Marine snipers warnings that sat phones and light weight PRC148’s would not work and that they needed to lug a PRC 119 in with them.

In one sentence Tim explains what we all needed to know about the attitudes of the SEALs.  This tidbit could have been in a book, or not, or it could have been said before by someone official, or not, or it could have been tribal knowledge, or not.  It doesn’t really matter to me.  The fact that Tim has said it gives it authority.  Tim will know, and that’s the end of it.

This article isn’t really about communications gear.  It’s about who you are and whether you can “sit at the feet” of someone else and learn.  As for my line of work, I was an average engineer until I learned to listen to others, from technicians to PhDs.  Then I became a really great engineer with the help of others.  The SEALS had the attitude that they were SEALS, and so no one could tell them anything.

If you have the attitude that you have nothing to learn from those around you, then regardless of how much money has been spent on you, regardless of how highly regarded you are, regardless of how good you are, regardless of how much you know and what you can do, you have no business leading other men and you will never excel at your station in life.

News from Georgia:

So this report is confusing, and I doubt that anything about the store manager’s reaction was well thought out or deliberate.  It needed to be.  First of all, open carry isn’t the same thing as concealed carry, and the patron was openly carrying.  When he returned without his weapon, the sign in the door referred to firearms not being welcome, as opposed to open carry.

Second, if you do a search of the Cracker Barrel web site, you’ll find nothing there that even hints of a formal corporate policy concerning firearms.  They also don’t seem to me to make it easy to contact them.  Third, if you do a Google search of Cracker Barrel firearms policy, you’ll get everything from all firearms being banned to only open carry being banned.  And of course as I said, there is no formal published policy, and there are never any postings from what I can recall from being in that store.

So here is the deal, Cracker Barrel.  Man up.  Make your decision regarding carry of weapons, concealed and/or open, publish the policy decision on your web site, and post your stores in a manner consistent with your policy.  Don’t play games with patrons – that’s rude and ill mannered.  Tell us what you want, and we can then make our decisions according to our own beliefs in light of your corporate policy.

Is that such a difficult thing to do?

The Trace:

Governor Nathan Deal rejected a bill on Tuesday that would have allowed eligible students in Georgia to carry concealed weapons at public universities. In a lengthy veto statement, Deal said he found “enlightening evidence” for his position in the views of pair of Founding Fathers who, nearly two centuries ago, opened a college where guns would not be allowed.

In October of 1824, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison attended a board meeting of the University of Virginia, which would open the following spring. Jefferson and Madison had spent not a little time thinking about individual liberties. But minutes from the meeting show that their new school would not extend the right to bear arms to its red-brick grounds.

“No student shall, within the precincts of the University, introduce, keep or use any spirituous or vinous liquors, keep or use weapons or arms of any kind …” the board declared. In his veto statement, Deal zeroed in on that passage …

Yea, well those same rules stipulated studies in Latin, Greek, Mathematics, Philosophy, forbade visits to taverns, the consumption of “spirits” or wine of any sort, insubordination and contumacy, and a host of other things commonly practiced on the campuses of America.

So let’s see an end to physical education majors for those football players in favor of training in Latin, Greek and Math, and a prohibition of alcohol, shall we?  I’m waiting?  No, in fact, none of these rules will ever obtain, and I don’t think that anyone who cares about property rights wants to force carry of weapons onto private property (of course, for State-owned property that’s a different matter).

I think the Governor is too clever by half, and by saying just a little bit he has said too much.