Orient Your Optics Correctly
Navy Embarrassment, NPR, Civics, Antisemitism, &tc.
Dear Friends,
The US Navy posted a photo of one of their commanders participating in a live-fire exercise on the deck of his ship.
I am not going to criticize everything people are dunking on here. Some macho guys don’t like the way the stock is so high on his shoulder, but that isn’t a very big deal; he’s got plenty of shoulder connection and a very nice “cheek weld” on the buffer tube—these rifles don’t have a lot of recoil. And, sure, that isn’t really the optimal way to hold the foregrip; you ideally want to just have your bottom fingers on it so that your thumb can wrap around the top of the rail to minimize the “rise.” And the size of that scope is complete overkill for an MK18 (which is what I’m surmising this is); a 10.5- inch barrel isn’t reaching out to distances that require that kind of magnification. But those are all matters of personal taste.
No, the problem is that his rifle scope is installed backwards.
And that, my friends, is embarrassing. But not quite as embarrassing as the fact that you can see two rounds of brass flying through the air in the photo. The man is literally firing rounds while looking through the wrong end of his optic.
I get it. He’s the Commander of the ship. He doesn’t get a lot of range time. But the US Navy pulled the photo pretty quickly, as it doesn’t quite have the intimidation factor we want to project to the world.
A Senior Business Editor for National Public Radio, a 25-year veteran, took to the pages of The Free Press to lambaste his employer for being a Left-wing echo chamber completely out of touch. It is well worth the time to read.
You might shrug your shoulders and think, “Where’ve you been?” NPR has always slanted pretty sharply to the Left. But he makes some interesting points about their internal demographic data. While it is true that it has always slanted that way, over the last decade they have fallen off of cliff. He writes:
It’s true NPR has always had a liberal bent, but during most of my tenure here, an open-minded, curious culture prevailed. We were nerdy, but not knee-jerk, activist, or scolding.
In recent years, however, that has changed. Today, those who listen to NPR or read its coverage online find something different: the distilled worldview of a very small segment of the U.S. population.
If you are conservative, you will read this and say, duh, it’s always been this way.
But it hasn’t.
I can testify that the last few times I’ve turned on “All Things Considered” while in the car, I couldn’t believe my ears. Because they might have been bleeding. The news coverage was like listening to people from a different planet. He isn’t making it up. NPR has ZERO diversity of opinion, outlook, worldview, or values. And he’s right: they lost any trust they might have once had. Read the whole thing.
In today’s installment of Why America Needs to Teach Civics Again, you might have seen the headline that Arizona’s Supreme Court made an appalling ruling outlawing abortion. It it making great fodder for political purposes. The Left is holding it up as the “real” agenda of the anti-democratic, Theocratic Right-Wing that desires to oppress women. Even the MAGA folks like Senate Candidate Kari Lake are outraged at this draconian ruling.
I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there was no other possible outcome. It is basic civics. You see, when Dobbs was decided, and Roe v. Wade was overruled and no longer binding, that meant that every state decides its own abortion laws. And—follow me closely here—the last standing law in Arizona regulating abortion was one from 1864. So, once the Federal law disappears, the law reverts back to the status quo that was in effect before the Federal law superseded it.
We Montanans are very familiar with this little civics lesson. When the Federal highway speed limits were finally sent to the dustbin where they belonged, our speed limit laws reverted to the last standing Montana law. Which was, quite famously, no speed limits. The law was you had to drive in a “reasonable and prudent manner.” That was really fun for awhile, until one [insert derogatory name here] fellow decided to be an [insert epithet here] and drive at some reckless and ridiculous speed and get ticketed. He appealed to the Montana Supreme Court, who agreed with him that “reasonable and prudent” was too vague to enforce as a law. Alas, now we have to keep it an 80mph. Thanks a lot, pal.
Anyway, Arizona is free to pass whatever abortion bill they prefer to the 1864 version. It’s not some vast Right-Wing conspiracy.
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