Articles by Herschel Smith

Via WRSA, this from Zero Hedge:

Here it is crucial to remember that no Ukrainian politician has any real power, not even Poroshenko, Iatseniuk or Turchinov.  The real rulers of the Ukraine are the US ambassador and the Kiev CIA station chief.  These are the people who literally administer the Nazi junta on behalf of the US deep state and its imperial interests.  As for the Ukrainian members of the junta, they all perfectly understand that their future is 100% dependent on being a faithful servant of the AngloZionist Empire.  They all understand that they came to power by means of an completely illegal coup, that the elections they organized this year were a total farce and that they will soon have to use repressive measures against their own population just to stay in power …

Simply put, there is nobody on this planet which has done more to oppose the AngloZionist Empire than Vladimir Putin.  I think that the hysterical and vicious demonization campaign against him in the western media is the best proof of that.

You can read all of it at Zero Hedge.  Good grief, and a thousand good griefs.  This comment best sums up my initial reaction to the post.

This guy is a moron. Example – “the AngloZionist Empire”. Nuff said. He’s just another facist with a Putin man crush.

No one has invaded Russia, but Russia has taken openly hostile action to regain territory lost in the Soviet break up. This is really quite undeniable unless you are a facist Putin man crusher. Poland and the Baltic states have been invaded by Russia so many times over the centuries. Their fear of Russia is quite real and well founded. When the Russians invade, there tends to be a lot rape and out and out murder of innocent people (like mass shootings of army officers, politicians, etc.) and the then general rape of the land and its wealth, with political and cultural oppression.

The idea NATO would ever invade Russia is perposterous (sic). A least the moron writer gets that right. It is not perposterous that smaller countries that have been invaded by Russians on numerous occassions throughout history might seek to voluntarily join a defensive alliance like NATO to ward off another Russina invasion. In fact, the act is quite rational.

Ok, so here come the America and Jews suck fusilade. If you think the USA is an opressive (sic) empire, how can you possibly support Russia? If you were logically consistant (sic), you would have to dislike both. The only conclusion is you are a facist with a supressed (sic) homo-erotic crush on Putin. I can really see no other alternative.

And I will say one more time, there is no grand plan, either by the Russians, or the US, or NATO, or the Jooooos. They are all people and, as such, are far too disorganized and incompetent to have anything close to a grand plan. Mainly, people just react to events.

Listen folks.  You can hate the EU/Fed/Banker cabal all you want.  But here’s a news flash for you.  Putin is a communist (or at the very least, a uber-nationalist and Fascist), and he wants to control the world like all Fascists.  He is a former KGB knuckle smasher and strongman, an enforcer for the state.  He has his own fan-boys, and he is the very definition of totalitarian.

Furthermore, the Soviet Union existed for one reason alone: communist-sympathizer FDR gave away Eastern Europe to create the communist bloc after World War II.  The very existence of the Soviet Union was illegitimate, and certainly the Ukraine wanting to exist as it did before being starved by the communists isn’t illegitimate.  It isn’t illegal, it is entirely understandable and sensible.  Most of the Ukraine doesn’t want to exist as communists, and they’re willing to perish for that belief.

The history of Russia is totalitarianism, witness the history of the Eastern Orthodox Church which has resolutely failed to speak truth to power, turning inward to liturgy and navel gazing exercises (as allowed by the state) rather than providing a check and balance on the power of the state.  Communists – whether Putin or Obama – are communists, and none of them deserve your support or advocacy.

The Putin worship I see around the web is both sickening and creepy, as sickening and creepy as Obama worship.  But specifically I’m saying to the American patriot community, it is unbecoming, weird and wholly inconsistent with your view of man, church and state.

The New Yorker:

The news that the parents of the children massacred two years ago in Sandy Hook, near Newtown, Connecticut, by a young man with a Bushmaster semi-automatic rifle, were undertaking a lawsuit against the gun manufacturer was at once encouraging and terribly discouraging. The encouraging part is that those parents, suffering from a grief that those of us who are only witnesses to it can barely begin to comprehend, haven’t, despite the failure to reinstate assault-weapons bans and stop the next massacre, given way to despair. Like Richard Martinez, after his son was murdered by a weapon that should never have been in the hands of a lunatic, or anyone else, for that matter, they’re allowing themselves to be angry, and then turning their anger into action: they’re naming the business that helped kill their children and asking a court to hold that business responsible.

The filed complaint—the numbered paragraphs give it an oddly religious feeling, like theses nailed to a church door—is worth reading in full, however painful that might be, not only because of the unbelievable suffering and cruelty it details on that terrible morning but also because it offers, in neatly logical fashion, an indisputable argument: the gun manufacturer is guilty of having sold a weapon whose only purpose was killing a lot of people in a very short time. Despite the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives having previously declared that such weapons “serve a function in crime and combat, but serve no sporting purpose,” Bushmaster sold it anyway—and precisely on the grounds that it could kill many people, quickly. “Forces of opposition bow down. You are single handedly outnumbered,” the advertising copy read.

… one of the ironies of the whole story is that there already is a long-standing ban on truly automatic weapons—machine guns—whose legality not even the N.R.A. or their allies dispute. If anything, they tend to make a sniffy point of discriminating actual machine guns from mere semi-automatic ones, among them the Bushmaster. (Back in the twenties, the availability of the tommy gun to gangsters meant that the police were often brutally out-gunned.) But all of the talk about legal and illegal weapons, automatic and semi-automatic—as about the treatment of the psychologically troubled—evades the simple, central point: it ought to be very, very difficult, as it is in every other civilized country, to get your hands on a weapon whose only purpose is to kill people quickly. The N.R.A. and their allies make it very, very easy.

There are replies to Gopnik, but thus far I have yet to see one that targets the fundamental flaws in the argument.  To begin with, I don’t stipulate at all to the notion that the ban on fully automatic weapons is legal regardless of what the NRA believes.  I believe that the Hughes amendment is an unconstitutional and obscene abomination.  Adam needs to get out of Manhattan a little more and see the world.

Second, his categorization of weapons “whose purpose is to kill” shows fundamental ignorance of guns and the history of them.  The sporting purposes test applied by the ATF and codified into law is circular reasoning as I commented on the ATF study on importability of certain shotguns.

Wrapped up in this paragraph we have not only an amusing logical blunder but also the real crux of the problem. Authors have presupposed the answer (so-called circular reasoning) at which they must arrive, i.e., the statute must remain useful. Thus, all interpretations by ATF are biased to yield that result. It is not the responsibility of the ATF nor is it within the purview of their authority to ensure the continued usefulness of a statute, if in fact it is rendered useless by advances, common practices, evolution in sporting, or lack of wise crafting of the statute (such as the fact that nowhere in this discussion of “sporting purposes” is there any latitude given for personal protection and home defense under the second amendment to the constitution of the United States). This single paragraph renders the study itself as useless as the statute has become.

Let’s use another example in order to make the point clear.  Short barrel revolvers.  While some hunters use long barrel revolvers with scopes for hunting, no one uses a short barrel revolver for hunting.  It has no purpose except to kill (whether used in crime or in self defense).  And yet these aren’t the weapons Adam refers to when he discusses guns with a single purpose.  He is referring to AR-15s and other similarly-styled weapons, which ironically are used quite a bit for hunting (as well as for other sporting purposes such as 3-gun competitions).  You see, the ATF has written the rules by formulating a list and then trying to ban anything on the list – which is circular reasoning.

Scoped bolt action rifles are used as sniper rifles – or for hunting deer.  Shotguns are used for turkey – or to clear rooms in Now Zad Afghanistan by the U.S. Marine Corps.  There is no list that doesn’t ‘beg the question’ (as a formal logical fallacy) when it comes to military or sporting purposes.

Furthermore, a weapon’s capacity to kill is precisely what makes it valuable when it comes to the amelioration of tyranny, which is what the second amendment is all about anyway.  You see, death comes to us not from an imperfect society that lacks the proper state supervision, needing just one more law or the right kind of leadership in order to be the utopia on earth envisioned by Gopnik.  Death comes to us at the hands of criminals, petty and state-sanctioned, due to something called federal headship in Adam and original sin.  Gopnik must return to Genesis Chapter 3 in order to craft a meaningful and consistent anthropology that explains reality.

As with all statists, their god fails them.  They will forever be waiting on the providence of an impotent totem, and may as well slash their wrists and bleed before Baal.  God sits in the heavens and mocks them (Psalm 2:4).  Their attempts to bring heaven down to earth through lawfare and social programs will only end in failure and suffering.  Statistics on guns and crime aren’t relevant to Gopnik’s problem.  He needs to jettison his fundamental world view in order to understand who he is, who man is, and what man must do to be saved.

David Codrea:

It’s not often I find myself in agreement with a “gun control” zealot, but in this case, I’m on board with Rejina 100 percent. By all means, if you don’t want her to think you are a coward, please share. Some may even want to start with these guys.

It might actually be rather nice if the whole thing got a little more legal scrutiny than it has to date.

David Codrea:

Perhaps when enough citizens realize the police can’t protect them and won’t allow them to protect themselves, their attitudes and political choices will change, or at least their inclination against proud and defiant civil disobedience. Some of us would love to help, but we can’t force people not to enslave or harm themselves. Meanwhile, those of us who already know the score will continue to protect ourselves and our rights, and oppose that New York state of mind whenever the fascist Mayor of Everytown tries to impose it beyond the five boroughs.

I’ve said before and will continue to drive the point that totalitarians will answer for every crime committed upon their people that could have been prevented or ameliorated if they allowed their people to defend themselves.  Politicians and police who lobby against the God-given right of self defense will ultimately answer to the one who gave those rights.

Kurt Hofmann:

And that’s another problem for your side, Diamond–the principles on which our republic (as opposed to your “democracy”) was founded are indeed worth dying for, in the eyes of many of us, and perhaps an even bigger problem for you, worth killing for. So if you and your “decent Americans” decide to appeal to “authoritarian government” to deal with us, bring it.

As I survey the ideological landscape, it’s not entirely clear to me yet that the totalitarians get the fact that the civil disobedience we see now in New York, Connecticut and Washington are based on irreducibles, axioms that define character and circumscribe actions.  Let’s hope they do before they do things from which there is no return.

Mike Vanderboegh:

Faith in God (Part III)

The Long Game (Part II)

Squirrel Away As Much Powder As Possible (Part I)

Read them all.

Kurt Hofmann sends this along.

First of all, the folks carrying the cartoon are rude and ill mannered.  The cartoon is poorly done.  I don’t mean just in poor taste, I mean poorly done.  It’s an awful cartoon.  My dog could draw better than this.  Second, the cartoon is in poor taste.  Blood dancing is in bad form no matter who the dancer or victim.

There are good cartoons and bad ones, and I don’t even have to agree with the cartoonist in order to appreciate good art and clever ideas.  For example, a very liberal cartoonist with whom I seldom if ever agreed, Doug Marlette, once gave us this after the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster.

The Eagle cries.  Now one doesn’t have to agree with huge government programs in order to appreciate Doug’s having captured the moment with a cartoon.  Furthermore, as an engineer I know full well how Morton-Thiokol had ignored their own engineer’s warnings concerning temperature and O-rings.  The failure never had to occur.

Still, whether one agrees with the cartoon or not, Doug wasn’t blood dancing.  He was showing true grief and sorrow over needless deaths.  The folks at CSGV have latched on to crap and made it their own.  Very well.  It suits them.

Mike Vanderboegh does us a service by reminding us of Peter Muhlenberg.  I’ve read it before, but my favorite anecdote goes as follows.

Coming to the end of his sermon, Peter Muhlenberg turned to his congregation and said, “In the language of the holy writ, there was a time for all things, a time to preach and a time to pray, but those times have passed away.” As those assembled looked on, Pastor Muhlenberg declared, “There is a time to fight, and that time has now come!” Muhlenberg then proceeded to remove his robes revealing, to the shock of his congregation, a military uniform.

Marching to the back of the church he declared, “Who among you is with me?” On that day 300 men from his church stood up and joined Peter Muhlenberg. They eventually became the 8th Virginia (Regiment) fighting for liberty.

I’ll also remind you of what my own professor, Douglas Kelly, said of the role of religion in the war of independence.

Their experience in Presbyterian polity – with its doctrine of the headship of Christ over the church, the two-powers doctrine giving the church and state equal standing (so that the church’s power is not seen as flowing from the state), and the consequent right of the people to civil resistance in accordance with higher divine law – was a major ingredient in the development of the American approach to church-state relations and the underlying questions of law, authority, order and rights.

[ … ]

It was largely from the congregation polity of these New England puritans that there came the American concept and practice of government by covenant – that is to say: constitutional structure, limited by divine law and based on the consent of the people, with a lasting right in the people to resist tyranny.

If you don’t do anything else today, read Mike’s whole article, and then read mine.

The Spokesman-Review:

Environmental groups say a recent court loss won’t make them remove lead ammo from their crosshairs.

“We are absolutely going to push forward with our campaign to end lead ammunition. We think it’s the right thing to do for both wildlife and human health,” said Bill Snape, a senior attorney with the Center for Biological Diversity. “This is not about ending hunting, this is about having safe hunting, not only for wildlife but for hunters as well.”

In late December, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia upheld a lower court’s ruling that the Environmental Protection Agency has no jurisdiction to regulate lead used in ammunition. The case was brought by the Center for Biological Diversity, which joined 100 other groups in petitioning the EPA under the Toxic Substances Control Act and asking the agency to regulate spent lead ammunition.

The groups contend lead ammo is responsible for poisoning millions of birds and other animals each year and say it also poses a threat to people who consume game killed with lead shot and bullets.

I won’t hold my breath while the environmental lobby compares the number of bird deaths from wind farms with that from hunting.  But hold on.  The best is yet to come.

But Snape said the groups will be back in some manner and suggested that could include more petitions to the EPA. He said they will also work to convince hunters to use nontoxic substitutes such as copper.

That’s right.  Copper.  One of the most expensive metals today, worthy of theft if left in unattended buildings.  Do you see that one of the goals is to make ammunition prohibitively expensive?

We’ll see how durable gun rights advocates are.  The anti-gunners aren’t giving up.  They never will.  We can’t either.

Winston-Salem Journal:

Davidson County deputies arrested a man who was walking around a neighborhood with an assault rifle, according to a news release today from the Davidson County Sheriff’s Office.

Danny Gray Lambeth, 51, of Old U.S. 52 in Winston-Salem was charged with going armed to the terror of the public.

According to the sheriff’s office, deputies responded to the area of 10711 Old U.S. 52 on Saturday after receiving a report of a man walking around residences with an assault rifle. During the investigation, Lambeth was identified as the suspect.

Let’s ignore for the sake of argument the idiotic press report about this being an “assault rifle” (which is wasn’t unless it had select fire mode).  As I’ve discussed many times before, I open carry from time to time as a resident of North Carolina.  We are a traditional open carry state.  I have never had any problems from Baker 2 of the CMPD (who usually ignore me or wave and smile), but even the Charlotte-Mecklenburg Police Department had to be reminded by the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals that the open carry of a firearm in North Carolina does not create a “reasonable suspicion” to effect arrest.

It simply doesn’t, so says a federal court.  Case closed.  End of discussion.  Moreover, North Carolina has no stop and identify statute.  Case closed.  End of discussion.  It couldn’t be clearer.  If LEOs aren’t being taught that in their classes, they are being misled and put on the street without the proper training.  That’s malfeasance on the part of the chief LEO.

We have dealt with this before, where I have noted instances where LEOs have unholstered their weapons and pointed them (I assume with a round chambered) at men simply for openly carrying a weapon.  Someone will be killed in such an exchange one day, I have admonished.  And yet, we still see arrests for open carry in North Carolina.

I want to know why?  What about North Carolina being an open carry state don’t CLEOs get?

USA Today is carrying an editorial that has no apparent author (except perhaps Remington Arms).

For nearly 50 years, the Remington Model 700 rifle has been the preferred choice for millions of hunters, shooting sports enthusiasts and military and law enforcement personnel.

Despite emotional reporting of baseless and unproven allegations and plaintiff lawyer assertions, several undisputed facts remain:

The Model 700 is the most popular, reliable, accurate and trusted bolt-action rifle in the world, with over 5 million rifles produced and billions of rounds fired over nearly five decades.

The Model 700 is the firearm of choice for elite shooters from America’s military and law enforcement communities, and has been the platform for the United States Marine Corps and the U.S. Army precision sniper weapon systems for over two decades, both of which specifically require the “Walker” trigger mechanism.

The Model 700, including its trigger mechanism, has been free of any defect since it was first produced and, despite any careless reporting to the contrary, the gun’s use by millions of Americans has proven it to be a safe, trusted and reliable rifle.

Both Remington and experts hired by plaintiff attorneys have conducted testing on guns returned from the field which were alleged to have fired without a trigger pull, and neither has ever been able to duplicate such an event on guns which had been properly maintained and which had not been altered after sale.

Remington takes safety very seriously. We support hunter safety and other educational programs nationwide, and include with every Remington firearm the “Ten Commandments of Firearm Safety,” which urgently remind every gun owner that if proper firearms safety rules are followed, no accidental injuries would ever occur.

The men and women who build, own and shoot the Remington Model 700 take great pride in a product that, over the last half century, has set the bar for safety, reliability and performance.

I just don’t know how else to say it: this is false.  The evidence shows that numerous malfunctions occurred during internal Remington testing, from the firing pin moving forward during the bolt locking cycle to firing when the safety was moved to the “off” position.

As I’ve said before as a registered professional engineer, if I designed a machine that had such malfunctions I would immediately demand “stop work” on the manufacture of the machine until I understood what exactly had happened in the design or manufacture to cause the malfunctions.  Only when those problems had been corrected would I have allowed manufacture to continue.

I wouldn’t do this because I fear retribution from customers, or neglect to do it because I fear retribution from the employer.  I would do this because it is the right thing to do, because it is the ethical thing to do, and because I swore an oath to protect the safety and health of the public in order to be granted my license to practice engineering.  There are things more important than money.

Remington didn’t do any of this, but rather, fought it all the way through the process, even ignoring their own internal reports and concerns of their testing engineers.  Don’t take my word for it.  Go read the evidence for yourself.  In my estimation, Remington is suffering for their ethical failures even as I write.  And I don’t understand why Remington is still trying to rewrite the history of the Model 700.  This is just befuddling.

NBCDFW.com:

Southlake police say a licensed concealed handgun holder intervened when he saw a man allegedly assaulting a woman Friday, and the assault suspect now faces charges.

Police were called at about 1:35 p.m. to Farm-to-Market Road 1709 about a block west of Carroll Avenue, where they found two men standing in the middle of the road with one man pointing a gun at the other.

Their preliminary investigation indicated the witness saw a man in another car physically assaulting his female front seat passenger, so when both cars stopped the witness confronted the man in the other car at gunpoint because he believed the female to be in imminent danger of a felony offense, police said …

Police said they consulted with the Tarrant County District Attorney’s Office to determine if the witness had done anything illegal, and based on the information gathered at the scene the D.A.’s office determined he hadn’t …

A statement from Southlake Police Chief Steve Mylett said, “While we commend this citizen’s willingness to get involved in order to protect a victim of crime, the Southlake Police Department does not encourage the public to expose themselves in such a manner. Instead, we strongly recommend citizens who witness a crime in progress to contact the local police department by dialing the police emergency number 911.”

It isn’t very odd at all that a concealed carrier saves a person from death or imminent bodily injury or sexual assault.  It’s rather commonplace, actually.

What is more interesting here is the reaction of the police.  Not only did they “consult” with their attorneys to see if a “crime” had been committed, they actually came out and recommended against this sort of thing.  Because, you know, the police can be everywhere at all times.  Or more realistically and less sardonically, it’s better in their estimation that a woman get the hell beaten out of her or die than be saved by someone who isn’t a representative of the state.

It’s good to give gifts on Christmas.  It’s also good to be given them.