• Are Americans Lab Animals? By Richard C. Young - with video.
• Paul Ryan D.O.A. By Richard C. Young - with video.
• McGovernment By E.J. Smith
• Dr. Ben Carson on WWII Gun Rights By Richard C. Young - with video.
• Obama at War with Himself? By Richard C. Young
• The Final Solution By Debbie Young - with video.
• Precision Scoped Rifle: Part II By E.J. Smith - with video.
• Wrong Year to Shelve Your Hallucinogens? By Debbie Young - with video.
• Unintended Consequences By Richard C. Young

Former CIA bin Laden unit chief Michael Scheuer states, “Obama and his party are the enemies of all Americans. They use and exploit Blacks, Hispanics, illegal immigrants, feminists, and other trifling, block-voting minorities to move their authoritarian agenda forward.”

Mike writes that Obama, Hillary Clinton, Biden, Bloomberg want to install a one-party, minority-run, police state in America—though they will call it “effective central government” or some dissembling term—and they will have to disarm Americans to do so.

Scheuer concludes: “Quite simply, only a well-armed citizenry can install the mandatory caution, worry, and fear for their lives in the governing elite, men and women who seem to want other Americans not as equals and countrymen, but as laboratory animals on which they can conduct their social, medical, economic, educational, and multicultural experiments.”

Related video:

Pat Buchanan warns readers that Paul Ryan will end up “toes up in the OK Corral” should he mistakenly become Speaker of the House.

Ryan is on the wrong side of key issues—such as amnesty for people here illegally and “Obamatrade” or the disastrous Trans-Pacific Partnership the Obama crowd has cooked up to benefit transnational corporations.

Pat warns readers, “On the issues of mass immigration and illegal immigration that have roiled the Republican race, Ryan is regarded as an open-borders-man.”

Pat quotes Rosemary Jenks of NumbersUSA, which is fighting to halt the immigration invasion: “He (Ryan) has been … pro-amnesty, pro-mass immigration, pro-replacing American workers with foreign workers … all of his career.”

Pat continues:

In the early 1960s, the Goldwaterites demanded “A Choice, Not an Echo”… They wanted to change the direction of the country…. Backing the Freedom Caucus in the House and the “outsiders” in the GOP presidential race are men and women of a similar mindset, who have been recognized and re-identified by the National Journal’s John Judis….They are the Middle Americans Radicals, the “MARS.”

Debbie and I recently returned from France, and I can support Pat’s view: “The spirit of revolt in the GOP, indeed, in both parties today, is not confined to the USA. It is roiling Europe. In Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Belgium, nationalism is tearing at the seams of nations. Secession from the EU appears to be an idea whose time is coming.”

Paul Ryan is indeed D.O.A.

FLASHBACK VIDEO:

Government is killing free enterprise by wrapping its tentacles around anything it can hold on to, then taxing and regulating it. Bob Funk writing in the WSJ:

For decades, most businesses operated, innovated and expanded despite what was happening in the nation’s capital, or perhaps even oblivious to it. But now the goose that laid the golden egg is on the run. Free enterprise, which made the economy grow and produced rising wages for middle-income Americans, is under assault.

Too many policy makers evaluate new interventions—labor rules, wage laws, environmental regulations—only by what they hope to accomplish. They do not consider the consequences, the unintended effects, and the trouble that their policies will cause for employers and workers, especially when the burdens are placed one on top of another.

For example, the National Labor Relations Board in August issued a sweeping ruling that could fundamentally change millions of workers’ relationship with their employers—and not for the better. The NLRB is taking the position that under the new rule, a franchiser (say, McDonald’s) will be considered the “joint employer” of workers hired by its independent franchisees.

But the issue goes far beyond fast food. My company, Express Employment Professionals, is a franchised staffing company that could be affected as well. Our local offices are owned and run by franchisees, who hire and supervise their own staffs. Now those local workers will be my employees, too. Who is ultimately responsible for their well-being? Good question.

From The Washington Post:

Ben Carson said Thursday that Adolph Hitler’s mass murder of Jews “would have been greatly diminished” if German citizens had not been disarmed by the Nazi regime.

When it comes to disarming Jews during WWII, history is clearly on Dr. Carson’s side. To indicate otherwise is simply historical revisionism.

More on how armed resistance kept the Nazis at bay here.

And more on the contrived outrage concerning Carson’s self defense comments here.

Related video:

My friend Chris Preble, Cato Institute vice president for defense and foreign policy studies, writes, “It appears that the president is at war with himself. No one can dispute that the Syrian civil war is a tragedy. But no one can credibly claim that there are vital American security interests at stake in Syria. Who rules Damascus, and whether they rule it poorly or well, will not materially affect the safety of the average American.”

As Chris points out, “Americans are willing to support U.S. military missions abroad when this nation’s security is at risk. … That has never been the case in Syria.”

On 20 January 1942, 15 high-ranking Nazi Party and German government officials met in the Berlin suburb of Wannsee to discuss and coordinate the implementation of what they called the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question.” The Wannsee Conference was held for the specific purpose: to further coordinate a policy aimed at the physical annihilation of the European Jews.

Ben Carson started a media firestorm when, during a recent interview, he pointed out to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that Hitler himself acknowledged that Jews in Nazi Germany would have been better off with firearms instead of without them. In The Federalist, Daniel Payne writes about “the perfectly defensible comments” Ben Carson made:

By the time of the Wannsee Conference, it was probably too late for anyone outside of an invading army to do anything to stop the sure march of extermination. But prior to the full implementation of the Final Solution, an armed Jewish population would almost certainly have had a positive effect on the Jewish casualty rate.

The forced-labor camps, the einsatzgruppen, some of the pogroms and ghettos, Kristallnacht—an armed Jewish population could have had a lot of success pushing back against certain elements of anti-Semitic hostility in Nazi Germany. Armed civilians might have saved a decent number of lives from the clutches of the Nazi Party. This is a fact.

But it’s a fact the Left cannot treat with: to acknowledge that Hitler disarmed the Jews in order to make them weaker opponents, and to acknowledge that the Jews, with guns, could have had moderate success fighting against the Nazis would offer legitimacy to one of the Left’s most hated boogeymen: an armed civilian populace.

If logical, well-documented historical arguments cannot persuade progressives that Carson is neither wrong nor crazy, Mr. Payne asks them to answer a simple question: “(I)f you could be transported back in time and assume the role of a Jew in late-1930s Poland, would you rather be disarmed—or would you rather have a gun?” Read more here.

Here’s the video of Carson’s interview with Blitzer. The conversation about the Nazis begins around 4:18.

The 4:20am wake-up comes pretty fast when you’re up late the night before making last minute preparations to your rifle scope. I’ll explain why I was doing that in a minute, but one of the takeaways of doing any serious handgun or rifle training is that it gets you off of the sidelines and into the game. Actually getting prepared, going through the check-lists, and shooting cannot be replaced. As my friend Bill likes to say, “shooting is a perishable skill”.

I’ve taken a number of shooting courses with Bill. He’s regular at reaching and hitting Coke can sized targets at 1,000 yards and had already taken the precision scoped rifle course I was about to take. He called me the night before around 7:00pm just to check-in and offer up some last minute advice: “Make sure you know your scope.” Hence, the later than anticipated bedtime.

I had my scope dialed in and was more than comfortable making adjustments on the fly. But I have a Night Force scope that has a zero stop. A zero stop is a clutch system that locks your elevation turret on a specific zero, say 100 yards. I had already zeroed my scope at 100 yards and planed on setting the zero stop when I got to the range. But after talking to Bill I figured I should get that done before hand and it was a great decision. There were simply too many things to think about on the range.

Thinking is such a huge part of shooting and proper gun management period. Just getting my rifle from Rhode Island, through Massachusetts and into New Hampshire is stressful. Driving in RI and MA and the arrival in live free or die NH feels like flying Apollo 13 past the dark side of moon. Once you’re in NH, it’s just less stressful traveling with a firearm. And stress is not your friend.

As an example of the level of paranoia you must endure driving through states with such strict gun laws, a number of years ago I had just picked-up Bill on a foggy, rainy, dark Rhode Island morning. As soon as we started driving we began rattling off a checklist about our guns and gear. One of Bill’s questions, “Did you empty and eject your magazine?” Once we were back on the road I was thinking how difficult it is to travel with this stuff in RI and MA. And it’s always helpful having a friend to travel and train with.

But this was a solo trip and I made the voyage to NH without incident and got to Sig Sauer Academy with time to spare. It was nice to have a few minutes to relax because class would begin in 20 minutes and I needed all the brain power I could muster. After all, this is rocket science. Stay tuned.

Peggy Noonan writes that, not unlike the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, she is seeing her friends go through the five stages of Trump:

1. Denial (“He’s going nowhere, he’s a farce”).

2. Anger (“This vulgar slob of a fool has some nerve messing with the American electoral process for his own enjoyment”).

3. Bargaining (“If we make him promise to support the party if he doesn’t win, and he refuses, won’t that ruin him with the base?”).

4. Depression (“He’s a reality-TV star! He has the hair of an abnormal person! He’s our next president? I must have picked the wrong year to give up hallucinogens”).

5. Acceptance (“We’ve had worse”—a Democratic political professional actually said that to me).

Read more here from Peggy Noonan, who explains in the WSJ why the one candidate who might have derailed Hillary is unlikely to jump in now, and how, in 2020 and 2024, we’ll likely look back at 2016 as the good ol’ days.

Related video:

Writing in the WSJ, Yaroslav Trofimov asks, “So how deep—and how permanent—is this deterioration of the U.S. ability to shape events in the Middle East?”  As Mr.Trofimov notes, some believe “the decline is not irreversible at all. … But others have concluded that the Middle East’s Pax Americana is truly over.”

Emile Hokayem, a senior fellow at the International Institute for Strategic Studies in Bahrain, claims, “Whoever comes after Obama will not have many cards left to play, I don’t see a strategy even for the next president. We’ve gone too far.”

Gone too far from what? Early on the article states: “The Obama administration’s pivot away from the Middle East is rooted, of course, in deep fatigue with the massive military and financial commitments made by the U.S. since 9/11, above all after the 2003 invasion of Iraq: Since 2001, at least $1.6 trillion has been spent, according to the Congressional Research Service, and 6,900 U.S. troops have been killed in the region.”

But the statistics above are but one side of the foreign policy equation. Let’s look at the other side of our equation. What has America gained? How about a massive destabilization of the entire Middle East, including Libya? Well I guess we shouldn’t look at massive regional destabilization as a gain, should we. I would like to ask former President Bush exactly what he thinks has been gained by going into Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya. And I would also like to pose the same question to former national security advisor Brent Scowcroft. My guess is that there would be not much to assist in developing the other side of my hypothetical foreign policy equation. History is clear—America’s intervention in Afghanistan, in Iraq, and in Libya has been a failed strategy with little of value gained for the U.S..

So now Syria. Russia’s Vladimir Putin has decided that it is in Russia’s best interest—crashing economy, currency, et al.—to intervene in Syria in support of longtime ally Bashar Assad. I wonder how much reading Mr. Putin has done on how Russia fared the last time it ventured forth in the Middle East, specifically into Afghanistan. Not well is an understatement. The Obama administration would prefer Assad to be removed. The central issue here is, as it was with Afghanistan, Iraq and Libya,  what’s next. Are we facing the prospect of another lawless, leaderless Middle Eastern country certain to exacerbate the migration tsunami that is today roiling Europe and for that matter the U.S.?

Finally back to Brent Scowcroft and his concern for unintended consequences. In The Stratgist, Bartholomew Sparrow writes:

Scowcroft too, was extremely conscious of what could go wrong. He saw the risks inherent in initiating new policies and the possibility of unintended consequences. Scowcroft was superb at analyzing issues, managing operations, fixing problems, and handling crises—at working with existing pieces and placing them in such a way as to best protect US interests and values. But even more, thanks to his knowledge of world history, he looked out for the potential pitfalls that could accompany significant departures from existing policies and established institutions—not to mention radical changes. He could envision the downsides to proposed actions.