BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Measured in minutes, not hours or days or weeks or months. Presidential palace has been taken, the airport is surrounded and being hit with artillery. Panicked residents are fleeing Kabul.
I’ll say again what I’ve said before many times. We should have dropped the Rangers and Marines at the Pakistan border, and let General Dostum round up every last Taliban and kill them. And then put him in charge and left.
Instead, we played nation-building so that Halliburton, KBR, and defense contractors everywhere could get rich. And the CIA too, presumably getting a cut on the opium market.
This is why I called for a complete end to our presence years ago, as did Michael Yon and Tim Lynch.
I know men whose son died in that war. Two $ Trillion and 1000 lives later, here we are.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
The Taliban have now captured Kandahar. Kabul won’t be long behind.
This is their booty.
The last quarter’s most valuable items included six EMB 314 Super Tucano light attack aircraft, 174 Humvees, almost 100,000 2.75 inch air-to-ground rockets, 60,000 40mm high-explosive rounds, and more than 2 million 7.62 mm cartridges.
[ … ]
The air force flies at least nine Sikorsky-made UH-60A Black Hawk helicopters—of the original 159 ordered at a cost of between $5.75 billion and $7 billion—and 68 McDonnell Douglas-made MD530F light helicopters, part of a deal for 150 aircraft at a cost of $1.4 billion.
Among the ANA’s armored vehicles are hundreds of American-made platforms. Kabul signed a deal for 8,500 Humvees, at least hundreds of which are already believed to have been captured by the Taliban.
The ANA also agreed on deals to receive more than 200 Mine-Resistant Armored Vehicles (MRAPs) from the U.S., plus 634 M117 Strike Force Vehicles at a cost of $661.3 million.
ANA armored vehicles are supported by a range of artillery pieces, both American and Soviet. The ANA has more than 20 U.S-made M114 155mm howitzers.
Hey, how about sending some of that armament this way. We paid for it.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
News and views from Iowa.
As Iowa lawmakers debated a gun rights bill this past legislative session, critics issued some dire warnings. Without requiring Iowans to get government permission to buy and carry firearms, they said, the state would devolve into lawlessness.
Under consideration was a proposal to modernize Iowa’s gun permit system, making permits to carry or acquire guns optional.
“This bill bans or kills background checks in this state, there’s no doubt about it,” state Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, D-Ames, said on the Iowa House floor this spring.
The Legislature passed the bill — known as “constitutional carry” or “permitless carry” — along party lines and it took effect July 1. Iowans now may purchase and carry weapons without a permission slip from the state.
“The sky is falling! The sky is falling!”
” … the state would devolve into lawlessness.”
In other words, if there is no law by which the controllers could govern something, then the people are free to engage in something out from under the control of the controllers.
That, my friend, is what’s called a tautology.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Would Extinction Be So Bad?
In recent decades it has often been said that we are living at the “hinge of history”, an unprecedented period during which a catastrophic event such as rapid climate change, nuclear war or the release of a synthesised pathogen may bring an end to human and perhaps all sentient life on the planet.
Most people think that such extinction would be bad, in fact one of the worst things that could happen. It’s plausible that the process leading to various forms of extinction, and extinction itself, would be bad for many of us, given that our lives are, overall, good for us and that, all else being equal, the longer they are the better. But it’s also plausible that extinction would be good for some individuals – those in the final stages of an agonising terminal illness, for example, whose pain can no longer be controlled by drugs. This means one key factor in judging the overall value of non-extinction will involve weighing these disparate interests against each other.
With the current Covidians ruling the roost, the willing followership of the lemmings, and this sort of claptrap, does anyone get the feeling we’re in Jonestown awaiting a mass suicide?
I won’t go along with it, but it seems that Western society is sick unto death.
Via David Codrea.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
News from lower state South Carolina.
BEAUFORT COUNTY, S.C. (WTOC) – On Aug. 15, a new law will go into place that will allow those with the proper permits to open carry handguns in South Carolina.
The Beaufort County sheriff was very clear that he does not believe the new open carry law will directly correlate to an increase of gun violence in the county. He did acknowledge though, that this is a change that will take time for everybody to get used to.
“There’s going to be a training curve through this and there’s going to be mistakes made. There’s going to be mistakes made by those who are carrying an open carry weapon and there’s going to be mistakes made by law enforcement officers,” Sheriff P.J. Tanner said.
The sheriff went on to explain that he doesn’t believe this will be as common in the Lowcountry as it will be elsewhere in the state.
“Currently, we’re on Hilton Head Island. I don’t know that we’ll see that big of an issue here on Hilton Head, but I think there are other areas of South Carolina that I think open carry is going to be trendy and I think people will take advantage of it,” Sheriff Tanner said.
He went on to explain that the law does have some benefits, including allowing officers to see someone’s weapon immediately on approach.
Ooo … “trendy.” “Issue.” “Take advantage of it.”
Here’s what needs to happen with law enforcement. Ignore it. It isn’t trendy. It’s a God-given right, finally recognized by the tyrants in South Carolina.
Educate your 911 operators to tell callers that this is within the law and no LEO will be sent out to stop peaceable men. Don’t make “mistakes.” Just ignore it. Cops in North Carolina do. That’s how you keep from making mistakes.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Fox News.
Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett denied an appeal from students at Indiana University to block the school’s vaccine mandate.
Barrett, who has jurisdiction over the appeals court involved in the case, denied the students request for an injunction against Indiana University’s vaccine mandate on her own without consulting other colleagues on the court and without hearing from the school.
Some “Justice,” eh? Great sensibilities Trump had with her. Then again, it was Trump who rolled out the push for vaccines to begin with, and then dragged the ubiquitous and detestable Tony Fauci out in front of the cameras every day for half a year.
What a putz. He proved himself totally unable to deal with the deep state. Or unwilling.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Via David Codrea, at TTAG.
Last year, then-New Jersey Attorney General Gurbir Grewal subpoenaed Smith & Wesson, trying to force the manufacturer to hand over internal information regarding its marketing practices. The Civilian Disarmament Industrial Complex’s is conducting a coordinated effort to try to skirt the PLCAA’s protections by claiming gun makers are engaging in allegedly false and deceptive advertising.
Smith & Wesson refused to cough up the documents and sued the Garden State to block them. That suit was tossed out and the state filed their own suit to enforce the subpoena. This week, the New Jersey Supreme Court denied Smith & Wesson’s request to stay a lower court’s order to produce the documents, in effect ruling the manufacturer has to produce the documents.
Said the NJ AG, “Getting access to Smith & Wesson’s internal documents was a way “to hold manufacturers liable.”
The problem here is that this is still just about money to the manufacturers, rather than an existential war for survival. They still want it both ways. They want to sell firearms in communist states like New Jersey, and they still want to outfit the police state with weaponry, but they don’t like what follows.
When you dance with the devil …
The solution is to refuse to do business in any state like that, whether New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, or wherever. Not even selling weapons to the police.
Manufacturers are going to have to stay out of such states, and the longer they wait, the better the chance that they end up like Remington.
They have been warned.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Reason.
“[T]he search of the passenger compartment of an automobile, limited to those areas in which a weapon may be placed or hidden … if the police officer possesses a reasonable belief based on ‘specific and articulable facts which, taken together with the rational inferences from those facts, reasonably warrant’ the officers in believing that the suspect is dangerous and that the suspect may gain immediate control of weapons.” …
On this record, no reasonable officer could conclude that Plaintiff posed a meaningful threat of being “armed and dangerous” simply because he disclosed that he had a pistol and a license to possess it. Any contrary holding would make it practically impossible for the lawful owner of a firearm to maintain a Fourth Amendment right to privacy in his or her automobile.
Well, right. The judge happened to get this one right – this time.
I have an idea how to help cops get it right all the time. Do away with the stupid permitting scheme and adopt constitutional carry. Make it clear in the law that cops have no right to infringe upon your right to be armed, anywhere, anytime, and for any reason.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
News from Santa Cruz.
A gun owner himself, Benitez has made rulings that have taken aim at California’s decades-old attempts by lawmakers and voters to toughen gun laws. He deemed the state’s assault-weapon ban — signed into law in 1989 by Republican Gov. George Deukmejian — a “failed experiment.”
California’s assault-weapon ban violates the 2nd Amendment in part because militias could be forced to settle for “less than ideal” weapons rather than the “ideal” AR-15 rifle, Benitez wrote. (“That may not be a severe burden today when the need for the militia is improbable,” he wrote. “One could say the same thing about the improbable need for insurance policies.”)
“That was a new and deeply disturbing line of thinking,” said Ari Freilich, the California policy director for the Giffords Law Center. Benitez, he said, seemed to suggest that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of “average people in a civilian militia to make war against their government.”
“If we take that seriously, then there’s no limiting principle on the types of firearms that people should be allowed to possess, including tanks, anti-aircraft missiles and machine guns,” Freilich said.
New, he says. Perhaps he could go back in time a bit and recall what the founders did to King George. And then ponder the fact that the very second amendment he’s calling unserious was written by men who had just made war on their government.
BY Herschel Smith
4 years, 2 months ago
Informed consent. They know what it means, but the news isn’t so good and they know it, so they just ignored it. Even back in December of 2020 they knew that Antibody Dependent Enhancement was a thing, and yet they drove ahead.
And this will be the most important watching you’ll do this week. Yes, I know it starts slowly, and he speaks in a monotone for a while, but this will be mesmerizing, I promise you. There is nothing at all novel about this virus, and they knew everything about it, and they released a patented “vaccine” for it a mere three days after patent of the virus.
The CDC/NIH made this thing. It’s their fault. They did this. And they are doing the vaccine injuries too.
