For various reasons (some work-related), I was unable to attend the 2018 NRA Annual meeting in Dallas. But here are reports from a people who did:
Roundup of 2018 NRA Show Notes
May 7th, 2018Did John Kerry Tell Palestinians Not To Make Peace?
May 6th, 2018So says this report on Fox, based on Israeli news outlet Maariv:
Former Secretary of State John Kerry reportedly tried to meddle in Middle East peace talks, allegedly telling a close associate of Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas not to “yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Israeli news outlet Maariv reported on the apparent meeting between Kerry and Hussein Agha in London, where the 2004 Democratic presidential nominee also reportedly floated a possible encore bid in 2020.
But in the conversation, Kerry reportedly told Agha to share a message with Abbas – urging him to “hold on and be strong” during talks with the Trump administration and “play for time … [and] not yield to President Trump’s demands.”
Kerry, who served as former President Barack Obama’s secretary of state during his second term, also reportedly told Agha that Trump would not be in office for long, suggesting he could be out in a year.
According to the report, Kerry used derogatory terms when referring to Trump, and offered to help the Palestinians create an alternative peace initiative. He reportedly asked Abbas not to attack the U.S. or the Trump administration, but rather focus attacks on the president himself.
(Caveat: I don’t know enough about Maariv to judge the veracity of its sources (it’s generally described as “centrist” and critical of the Netanyahu government), and the report includes those “allegedly” and “apparent” words that are so frequently the hallmark of fake news in American media outlets.)
I would say this is a new low for Kerry, but the Iran deal is still more idiotic and there was little indication that the intransigent dumbasses running the Palestinian state were even remotely interested in making peace with Israel anyway. But trying to thwart any chance at peace in the Middle East because you hate President Trump, hate Israel, and treat the terrorism-loving Palestinians as some sort of progressive victimhood identity politics totem for Democrats is plenty low indeed.
This would also appear to be a clear violation of the Logan Act, everyone’s favorite unenforced statute from 1799 that criminalizes freelance negotiation by American citizens with foreign governments hostile to the United States.
Hillary Clinton was running a crooked pay-for-play graft machine out of the State Department and yet, somehow, she was only Obama’s second-worst Secretary of State…
(Hat tip: Fred Reitman on Twitter, via Steve Berman and Instapundit.)
Waco Biker Trials Update: More Dismissals
May 5th, 2018More news on the Twin Peaks biker fight indictments:
Frustrated by a lack of movement in the Twin Peaks cases, a judge set trial dates Friday for three bikers, while McLennan County prosecutors dismissed 13 more cases involving those indicted in the May 2015 shootout.
Judge Matt Johnson of Waco’s 54th State District Court summoned six members of the Cossacks motorcycle group or their support groups to court Friday to get updates on how their cases will be moving forward.
On Thursday, prosecutors dismissed 15 cases against bikers who had been summoned to court Friday, leaving a much smaller group at the hearing in Johnson’s court. Prosecutors also formally refused an unindicted case involving Donald Fowler on Thursday.
After the hearing, prosecutors presented Johnson with 13 new dismissals, most of them involving members of the Bandidos group or their support clubs.
Cases dismissed Friday involve Justin Garcia, Cory McAlister, Jimmy Pond, Jason Dillard, Kenneth Carlisle, Richard Donias, Gilbert Zamora, Ronald Warren, Richard Smith, Phillip Sampson, Christopher Rogers, Rolando Reyes and John Martinez.
The dismissals this week bring the number of pending cases to 98, down from 155 bikers indicted after the shootout in which nine were killed and 20 were wounded and injured.
Since District Attorney Abel Reyna was defeated in the March Republican primary, his office has dismissed 56 indicted Twin Peaks cases and refused prosecution on 33 others. Special prosecutors appointed to handle four cases in which Reyna recused his office dismissed one indicted case this week.
Reyna did not attended Friday’s hearing, nor was he at a similar hearing 19th State District Judge Ralph Strother held last week.
Johnson set Wesley McAlister’s case for Sept. 10 as a backup case to the retrial of Jacob Carrizal, the Bandidos Dallas chapter president whose trial ended in November with a hung jury and a mistrial.
Carrizal has a new attorney, and the judge said if he is not ready to try the case on Sept. 10, Wesley McAlister will take that trial slot. A jury panel has been summoned to report to court Aug. 24 to fill out questionnaires in the case.
Johnson also set trial dates for early November for Jacob Reese and Timothy Shayne Satterwhite.
Dallas attorney Clint Broden, who represents Richard Luther, asked the court to set a trial date, but said he will file a motion to recuse Reyna that would require a hearing because he thinks Reyna is a material witness in the case.
The judge agreed to set Luther’s trial date after the first of the year, when Reyna will be out of office and the potential conflict will be resolved.
It’s hard to think of such a high-profile modern criminal prosecution, following an incident in which so many people dead, where the prosecution of the case was so badly bungled. (Feel free to suggest alternate candidates in the comments below.) It’s almost as though all the mass indictments and endless delays were monuments to Reyna’s inability to actually indict specific individuals for the murders of other specific individuals, and now that he’s out of the way, maybe some actual justice can be salvaged from the ruins of his incompetence…
(Hat tip: Dwight.)
LinkSwarm for May 4, 2018
May 4th, 2018(Insert labored Star Wars reference here.)
Republicans have serious leads in West Virginia, where incumbent Democrat Joe Manchin trails by 14 points; North Dakota, where incumbent Democrat Heidi Heitkamp trails by 8; Indiana, where incumbent Democrat Joe Donnelly trails by 5; Missouri, where incumbent Democrat Claire McCaskill trails by 5; Montana, where incumbent Democrat Jon Tester trails by 5; Florida, where incumbent Democrat Bill Nelson is locked in a near-deadlock with Rick Scott; and Pennsylvania and Ohio, where incumbent Democrats Bill Casey and Sherrod Brown are leading by less than two points each, plus Virginia, where Tim Kaine leads by just 3 on the generic ballot.
(Hat tip: Stephen Green at Instapundit.)
When Obama left the White House in a helicopter that horrible day, I had the impression our true father was leaving & the nation was stuck with a stepfather who was going to rape us. Now I increasingly believe that the media is the mother who won’t stand up for us & defy him.
— Virginia Heffernan (@page88) April 30, 2018
I’m just giving readers what they want…
Islamic State Inspired Texas Mall Attack Thwarted
May 3rd, 2018Another day, another another jihad attack thwarted in the Metroplex:
Texas law enforcement officials said they have foiled an alleged ISIS-inspired attack on a north Texas mall with the arrest of a teenager whom authorities said tried to recruit others to join his planned attack.
Matin Azizi-Yarand, 17, of Plano was arrested on Tuesday on charges he was plotting to shoot up the Stonebriar Centre Mall in neighboring Frisco, Texas, Collin County District Attorney Greg Willis announced in a statement.
Law enforcement officials say Azizi-Yarand had sent more than $1,400 to others for the purchase of weapons and body-armor. Authorities allege that he was planning to carry out the attack in mid-May. Officials say the teen also planned to “disseminate” a “Message to America” explaining the motives behind the alleged plot.
Azizi-Yarand talked online with undercover FBI confidential sources about his desire to either “make Hijrah [a Muslim term meaning to travel to a more desirable place],” or to conduct a terrorist attack within the United States, according to court documents.
Authorities said Azizi-Yarand even spent time at the Stonebriar mall planning how he would carry out the alleged plot. A court affidavit details the teen’s alleged communication with an FBI source, in which he’s accused of describing how he would kill a responding police officer.
This is not the first time the Islamic State has targeted the Metroplex for a terrorist attack:
By my count, Islamic State-pledged terrorists are 0-3 attacking the Metroplex.
But it brings up the question: Why have all the Texas Islamic State jihadi attempts targeted the Metroplex rather than, say, Houston, San Antonio or Austin? (There was Ft. Hood jihadi shooter Nidal Hasan, but he predated the rise of the Islamic State. And there was the wanna be Houston jihadi, but I don’t think he even got to the planning stages.)
Austin Cops and Detroit Crooks
May 2nd, 2018Two interesting dispatches from the frontlines of urban crime.
First, Dwight has a really interesting post on various Austin Police Department doings.
The other thing I hear training officers say: they’re dealing with entire generations of people who have never been in a fistfight. They have no idea what it’s like to take a punch, or get into a physical confrontation. Not only have they never done it, they’ve been actively discouraged from doing it all of their life. And the academy has to teach them to get past and through that. You can’t quit if you hurt a rib or got punched in the face. You have to keep going, or else you will die. Or your partner will die. Or both of you will die.
I’m not one of those people who blindly says “Oh, the cops have a dangerous job” as an excuse for bad behavior. Yes, it is dangerous (not so much so as commercial fishing, for example) but I still want my police to behave properly, and treat everyone with dignity and respect up until the point they forfeit that right. Then I want them to end the threat as efficiently and humanely as they possibly can. To steal an old CHL saying, “Be polite, be professional, and have a plan to kill everyone you meet.”
On the criminal side of the ledger, here’s the first part of an in-depth look at a Detroit drug gang known as the Seven Mile Bloods, who made rap videos and put death lists up on Instagram.
Since 2003, prosecutors say gang members targeted for death dozens of rivals on Instagram hit lists, participated in more than 14 shootings, at least four homicides, 11 attempted murders and drug crimes that eroded the quality of life on the gang’s home turf, known by locals as The Red Zone.
“The SMB made The Red Zone into a war zone,” U.S. Department of Justice Trial Attorney Julie Finocchiaro said.
More than 1,000 pages of federal court records and trial testimony illustrate how prosecutors used Facebook and Instagram posts, YouTube videos and rap lyrics to try and topple a social-media savvy gang that had a death grip on both the opioid drug trade and violence on the east side of Detroit.
Five defendants in the Seven Mile Bloods case face possible death sentences under federal law, even though Michigan has abolished the death penalty. The five face possible death sentences because prosecutors say they were involved in homicides and violence as part of an organized criminal enterprise that operated a pain-pill pipeline between Detroit and Charleston, West Virginia, the epicenter of the nation’s opioid crisis.
The court records and testimony also provide a street-level look at life and death in the The Red Zone. The gang’s turf is in the northeast corner of the 48205 ZIP code between Seven Mile and Eight Mile roads, east of Gratiot and west of Kelly.
The ZIP code is so dangerous some locals call it the 4820-Die.
Plus a gang murder that occurred because members of rival gangs ran into each other seeing their parole officers…
May 1st: Victims of Communism Day
May 1st, 2018Once again it’s May 1, a very important date of observance: Victims of Communism Day.
This is a day to remember that communism killed some 100 million people.
Here’s a link to the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation. (They also have a Twitter feed.)
Note that last year, the White House declared November 7 Victims of Communism Day for the 100th anniversary of the Bolsheviks revolution overthrowing the short-lived Russian Republic. But that may have been a one-time thing.
President Trump to Attend Dallas NRA Convention
April 30th, 2018President Donald Trump will speak at the NRA national convention happening at the Kay Baily Hutchison convention center this weekend.
Alas, I will not be attending, but Dwight will. Hopefully he can obtain for me a Trump-signed MAGA hat…
Israel Blew Up Something Huge in Syria
April 30th, 2018Another weekend, another Israeli strike on Syria. This time the result was that something huge blew up:
Syrian military positions in the province of Hama and Aleppo were targeted Sunday by a series of strikes that caused an explosion reportedly strong enough to trigger an earthquake observed by neighboring countries.
Citing an unnamed military source, the official Syrian Arab News Agency reported that military positions in villages of Hama and Aleppo were hit by a still unidentified rocket attack at around 10:30 p.m. local time (3:30 p.m. EDT), causing loud explosions. Al Jazeera said one of its correspondants confirmed explosions at a Syrian military base at Al-Bahouth mountain in southern Hama.
Bassam Jaara, a supporter of the Syrian opposition, shared to social media pictures of what appeared to be flames and smoke rising from the Syrian countryside, saying “a large number” of casualties were incurred by an attack on what was believed to be an Iranian military position at “mountain 47” in southern Hama.
It appears that the strike targeted Iranian surface-to-surface missiles. The resulting explosion measured 2.6 on the Richter scale.
And here’s video of the explosion:
Here’s another video. The quality is fairly crappy, but you can see the secondary explosions the main explosion set off, suggesting that whatever the Israelis hit was filled with munitions:
It’s got to be frustrating to be the Islamic Republic of Iran. You spend all that time and effort schlepping massive amounts of ordinance into Syria, only to see Israel blow it all up with ease.
And once again Russian air defense systems were as good at keeping Israel out of Syria’s airspace as Jerry Seinfeld’s door was at keeping Kramer out of his apartment…
The Math Behind Prepping
April 29th, 2018If you think that all this talk of violent revolution or civil war in the United States is nonsense, this piece, from a flood hydrologist, makes a compelling mathematical case that you should think again.
While we don’t have any good sources of data on how often zombies take over the world, we definitely have good sources of data on when the group of people on the piece of dirt we currently call the USA attempt to overthrow the ruling government. It’s happened twice since colonization. The first one, the American Revolution, succeeded. The second one, the Civil War, failed. But they are both qualifying events. Now we can do math.
Equations omitted.
Stepping through this, the average year for colony establishment is 1678, which is 340 years ago. Two qualifying events in 340 years is a 0.5882% annual chance of nationwide violent revolution against the ruling government. Do the same math as we did above with the floodplains, in precisely the same way, and we see a 37% chance that any American of average life expectancy will experience at least one nationwide violent revolution.
This is a bigger chance than your floodplain-bound home getting flooded out during your mortgage.
Snip.
Two instances in 340 years is not a great data pool to work with, I will grant, but if you take a grab sample of other countries around the world you’ll see this could be much worse. Since our 1678 benchmark, Russia has had a two world wars, a civil war, a revolution, and at least half a dozen uprisings, depending on how you want to count them. Depending on when you start the clock, France had a 30-year war, a 7-year war, a particularly nasty revolution, a counter-revolution, this Napoleon thing, and a couple of World Wars tacked on the end. China, North Korea, Vietnam, and basically most of the Pacific Rim has had some flavor of violent revolution in the last 100 years, sometimes more than one. Africa is … hard to even conceive where to start and end the data points. Most Central and South American countries have had significant qualifying events in the time span. And honestly, if we were to widen our analysis to not only include nationwide violent civil wars, but also instances of slavery, internment, and taking of native lands, our own numbers go way up.
Or we could look at a modern snapshot. Counting places like the Vatican, we have 195 countries on the planet today. Somalia is basically in perpetual war, Syria is a hot mess with no signs of mitigation any time soon, Iraq is sketchy, Afghanistan has been in some flavor of civil war or occupation my entire life outside the salad days of the Taliban, and Libya is in such deep throes of anarchy that they’ve reinvented the black slave trade. Venezuela. Yemen. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict may be a qualifying event depending on how you define it. And again, Africa is … hard to even conceive where to start. Spitballing, perhaps 3% of the nations in the world today are in some version of violent revolt against the ruling government, some worse than others. There’s at least some case to be made that our 0.5% annual chance estimate may be low, if we’re looking at comps.
Or we could look at a broader historical brush. Since the fall of Constantinople in 1453, there have been 465 sovereign nations which no longer exist, and that doesn’t even count colonies, secessionist states, or annexed countries. Even if we presume that half of these nation state transitions were peaceful, which is probably a vast over-estimation, that’s still an average of one violent state transition every 2.43 years.
If we just look at raw dialectic alone we reach dismal conclusions. “Do you think the United States will exist forever and until the end of time?” Clearly any reasonable answer must be “no.” So at that point, we’re not talking “if,” but “when.” If you don’t believe my presumed probability, cook up your own, based on whatever givens and data pool you’d like, and plug it in. The equations are right up there. Steelman my argument in whatever way you like, and the answer will probably still scare you.
Plus some bits on Silicon Valley entrepreneurs building bunkers, a zombie apocalypse as a good proxy for real disasters, and the AR-15. Read the whole thing.
(Hat tip: Instapundit via Michele Frost on Twitter.)