Articles by Herschel Smith

Cops.  Arresting people on false grounds and just making things up about it during Google searches using cell phones.

Only the best and brightest.

Oh, and somebody should tell fat boy to start and exercise program.

And it just seems like we’re being inundated with this, especially the invasive kind.

Asian longhorned ticks (ALTs) have been spreading across the Eastern and Midwestern U.S. since at least 2017, according to the Center for Disease Prevention (CDC), and the pests’ numbers are now on the rise in Ohio—a recent study from the Ohio State University reveals. According to the study’s authors, 9,287 invasive ticks were removed from a farm in eastern Ohio in the summer of 2021 after three cattle were reported dead from tick bites by the landowner.

During the study—lead-authored by Ohio State Assistant Professor of Veterinary Preventive Medicine Risa Pesapane—scientists continued to monitor the invasive tick population after most of the pests were killed off with pesticides. They found that the Asian longhorn ticks returned to the pasture and continued to spread in June 2022, despite the tick control efforts undertaken in 2021.

“You cannot spray your way out of an Asian longhorned tick infestation,” Pesapane said in a Nov. 3 news release. “They are going to spread to pretty much every part of Ohio and they are going to be a long-term management problem. There is no getting rid of them.”

Pesapane said that the cattle killed during the 2021 ALT infestation in eastern Ohio sustained thousands of tick bites. “One of those was a healthy male bull, about 5 years old,” she said in the press release. “Enormous. To have been taken down by exsanguination by ticks, you can imagine that was tens of thousands of ticks on one animal.” The term “exsanguination” refers to the action of draining a person, animal, or organ of the blood needed to sustain life.

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According to Pesapane, the invasive tick’s rapid spread lies in its ability to reproduce asexually, without mating. “There are no other ticks in North America that do that. So they can just march on, with exponential growth, without any limitation of having to find a mate …

Great.  Does anything good come out of Asia?

If it isn’t ticks, it’s chiggers.  This one is especially dangerous to humans.

Wildlife researchers at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro found a novel pathogen for the first time in North Carolina that is carried by chiggers.

Bacteria called Orientia tsutsugamushi causes the disease scrub typhus, which is spread to people through bites of infected chiggers, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

“That is a disease that has never been described in North America or in the Americas altogether,” Dr. Gideon Wasserberg, an infectious disease expert who works in the UNCG Department of Biology, said.

Symptoms include:

• a dark scab at the site of the bite
• confusion
• fever
• chills
• headache
• body aches
• rash
• larger lymph nodes

In some extreme cases, it can lead to organ failure.

Just great.

I’m happy that the suffering from summer is over and we’re facing some cold weather now, but summer will be back with a vengeance, so stay diligent.

This guy had some gear I’ve never seen before, and I need to take a look at the water purification system he had going on.

Related, I see that he recommends powder mix (e.g., Gatorade) for electrolyte replacement.  This is important because water isn’t enough.

In the oral argument he presented from the trial, I’m surprised that, when questioned by the judges, the lawyer didn’t bring up the analogy that if a city, county or state chose to tax firearms or ammunition to the point that poor people couldn’t afford them, that would be a violation of the second amendment.  Likewise, preventing anyone from being able to practice with firearms also violates the second amendment.

It’s our choice how and when to train, and what to train with, as well as what firears to own.

I have several remarks before you watch this video.

First, I’m neither a S&W fan nor a detractor.  I don’t like the gap between the M&P frame and slide, and never have, so I don’t have any.  Next, I don’t know the real reason their 10mm models are duds, nor even if they are.  I will say, however, that the first video of someone shooting one shows him firing it limp wristed.  In fact, he is using almost “cup and saucer,” which will never cycle the firearm correctly, or at least, it reduces the likelihood that it will.

Then finally I’ll observe that I’ve never heard any complaints about the Springfield Armory 10mm handguns, despite how much grief they take over Reddit/Firearms and Reddit/Guns.  I simply don’t get why the grief – the only one I ever had was a fine, well-functioning machine.  I just don’t use striker-fired pistols.  If Springfield Armory sold a hammer-fired option I might consider it.  In fact, I think they do in the 1911 model.

But I don’t have a 10mm handgun anyway.  I just don’t see the point because it would be so redundant with 450 SMC and .44 magnum.

He answers the legal questions.  Here are my problems – or at least, a few of them.

I don’t believe cops should be doing any of this. Entering homes should be verboten, and the fact that our society allows such as this shows its sickness.

Next, the cops use pistol-mounted lights and muzzle flag literally everyone, or if anyone would have been in the domicile, they would have been muzzle flagging them.  This violates the ruled of gun safety regardless of how cool you want to be.

Next, many cops are just plain stupid.  He explains what it means to make good effort to ensure that you have the right home, including “reliable informants.”  There is no such thing as a reliable informant.

Finally, my biggest problem with all of this is that the American citizen simply cannot trust it when someone announces that they are cops, or Federal Marshal, or anything at all.  That has become a favorite tactics of criminals.  But unholstering or presenting a weapon in order to secure your home from possible invaders is a sure way to get killed if the invaders are police (and I did use the word invaders).

As I said, the fact that we allow this sort of thing to occur is a sign of a very sick society.

If you have the time for it, these are two interesting videos. There are an awful lot of devotees to the 7mm Rem Mag. For those who have a rifle chambered in this cartridge, what are your thoughts on it?

🚨 The federal government has mandated that all vehicles sold after 2026 must have a kill switch that can disable your vehicle based on your driving performance.

My amendment to defund that unconstitutional mandate failed tonight.

Here is the roll call:https://t.co/YWufj9BuMv

— Thomas Massie (@RepThomasMassie) November 8, 2023

David Codrea points out that this will soon come to American gun owners if we lose the fight for our God-given rights.

If you want another vehicle, make sure to get it before this goes into effect.

What a dumb article.

• A World War II-era AR-15 ammo factory is linked to several mass shootings, the Times found.
• The Lake City Army Ammunition Plant was built to supply the US military.
• But the plant shifted to commercial sales in the last decade.

A World War II-era ammunition factory meant to supply the US military has been linked to more than a dozen mass shootings.

The Lake City Army Ammunition Plant shifted to commercial sales in 2011 and is now one of the biggest manufacturers of commercial AR-15 ammunition in the United States. According to The New York Times, it has made “hundreds of millions” of commercial rounds every year since 2011.

The facility was built during World War II and has since been operated by US government contractors to produce ammunition, but its focus has gradually shifted to commercial production as military demand waned, The Times reported.

By 2021, commercial production in the facility was more than two times higher than the rate of production for military ammunition, The Times found.

I see.  So we’re putting bullets at the beginning of articles now for idiots to read in two seconds.  Alrighty then.

So, here’s another take.  The U.S. military should in general avoid foreign entanglements.  American citizens should be armed, and in fact, “every terrible implement of the soldier” is the birthright of the American citizen.

Moreover, rather than lay off good men working at the ammo plant, they repurposed the plant to do what they should have been doing all along rather than enabling foreign entanglements, as well as making better American riflemen.

I love a happy ending.

First, the Biden era frame and receiver rule has been vacated.

If I went to a junk yard and picked up a piece of metal that used to be part of a truck, no reasonable person would say I’m holding a truck because the metal has been formed beyond primordial ooze and hence could be “completed, assembled, restored, or otherwise converted to function” as either a truck or truck frame. Likewise, if I cut a truck into 100 pieces, scattered them on the ground, and then picked up some, no reasonable person would say I’m holding a truck or truck frame because the piece hadn’t been melted down to its primordial state.

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Consider the “cakes that look like food” Internet trend. See, e.g., Chelsweets, Cakes That Look Like Food: 10 Amazing Cakes, YouTube (Jan. 22, 2018), https://perma.cc/UGH6-MXA2. One could make a cake that looks like a hamburger, just as one could make a cake that looks like a gun frame or receiver. One is “clearly identifiable” as a hamburger, just as the other is “clearly identifiable” as a gun part. But that does not make the former taste like a Big Mac, just as it does not make the latter covered by the GCA.

The Fifth Circuit has got some characters.  I like them.

The supreme court has decided to hear the bump stock ban case.

And Mark Smith is in the mines digging for nuggets of gold in the fight against the controllers. Honestly, I cannot think of a character as odious to me as AG Garland. I feel like puking every time I hear him speak. The lying, conniving, controlling little weasel.