Great News: Brandon Herrera Has Won His Primary

Brandon Herrera is legendary in the gun community (.50 Browning AK, anyone?) and runs a great gun YouTube channel. He was running against U.S. Rep. Tony Gonzales for Texas’ 23rd Congressional District and actually ended up winning more votes than Gonzales. But because neither reached the 50% threshold, they were being forced into runoff. It's now a moot point as Gonzales has dropped out of the race under pressure (including an ethics investigation by the House of Representatives) over his affair with a female staffer who later committed suicide by setting herself on fire.    

Not Good: Post Office Expects To Run Out Of Cash

ABC News reports that the United States Postal Service is expecting to run out of cash unless Congress authorizes it to borrow more money. Postmaster General David Steiner, a former member of the FedEx board of directors, says that the extra cash is needed to enact needed reforms. One source of revenue that the USPS is looking at is expanding the offering of "last mile" delivery to more businesses. "Last-mile delivery refers to the final step of getting a package from a local distribution center to a customer’s door, the most labor-intensive part of the delivery process." I don't know about your area, but I have found the USPS to be more reliable than many other carriers, so I hate to see this happen. Besides which, the Constitution provides for the federal government to run a postal service. 

Questions Asked And Answered

 These are questions that were posed to Anthropic's Claude AI (h/t Instapundit):

 

This Is California: SF Mayor's Security Detail Attacked

The New York Post reports that the San Francisco mayor got to experience some diversity and inclusiveness up close, stating:

    San Francisco Mayor Daniel Lurie’s police security team was attacked Thursday evening near the edge of the Tenderloin, the city’s most infamous drug-plagued neighborhood — leaving an officer bleeding from the back of his head after a chaotic street confrontation.

    The mayor was not hurt in the incident, which unfolded just before 6 p.m. near Cedar Street, according to Mission Local.

    One San Francisco Police Department officer assigned to Lurie’s security detail was left panting and bleeding after he slammed his head during a struggle with a suspect.
    
    Tony Phillips, who was booked on suspicion of murder in 2019 but never faced charges, was arrested in the incident. 

Another article relates that the reason that Phillips never faced charges was because "[t]hen-District Attorney George Gascon tossed out Phillips’ murder case due to a lack of evidence, according to the San Francisco Examiner," even though the fatal stabbing was caught on surveillance video.

    Per Wikipedia, Lurie is an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune, executive director of the Jewish Community Federation of San Francisco, and has an extensive background running charities that take taxpayer money and ... do something with it that supposedly is to help alleviate poverty. (But we know how that system works). One of his key achievements was working to reduce homelessness in San Francisco. After becoming mayor, "On September 30, 2025, Lurie hosted the consul general of China in a flag-raising ceremony and proclaimed October 1, 2025, the National Day of the People's Republic of China, as 'China-US Friendship and Heritage Day.'" And yet he is described as a centrist Democrat. 

Weekend Reading #46

Some longer and more involved reading for weekend:

• Jon Low has a new Defensive Pistolcraft Newsletter. Right at the top, he begins with a series of articles on what the author terms "home defense thresholds"--literal deadlines--legally and defensively sound points at which to use deadly force. The first article discusses several examples: for instance, a man who fired blindly into a darkened garage killing a thief versus those who called police and didn't take any action until a criminal forcibly broke into the home, crossing a threshold. Related to that discussion, Jon links to a 3-part article on the case of Byron D. Smith who, it was alleged, had specifically engineered a situation to lure two repeat burglars into his home where he executed them. He was convicted of murder. Some other notable links:
• On the issue of preventing burglaries, Jon has a lengthy quote from  Joe Shahoud with some burglary statistics, simply advice on dissuading burglars, and a couple security product recommendations (a security system and a quick access gun safe).
• Jon links to several articles on situational awareness and weapons retention (if you are carrying a firearm there is an overlap between these two topics) and includes this quote from Stephen Wenger: "... if the assailant has a gun, it may actually be the easiest 
  gun for you to access, if you know how to take it from him." There are some pistol disarming techniques that end with you in possession of the firearm. 
• Jon links to a lengthy piece entitled "The Final Category Problem" discusses our different memory and learning skills (with a focus on firearms/self-defense skills) with the author noting: "The vast majority of what our eyes and brain need to do during gunfights is not done AT ALL during most firearms training and is completely excluded from all qualifications that we are aware of." Jon also outlines the steps to better learning (applicable to both firearms classes and other types of classes and training). 
• I also liked this bit:

Jeff Cooper gave us the Combat Triad:  mindset, gun handling, and marksmanship.  Three legs that support the entire structure of armed defense.  What makes the presentation from concealment so critical is that it does not live on one leg of that triad.  It touches all three.  The decision to act is mindset.  Getting the gun out efficiently is gun handling.  And establishing a solid master grip during the presentation directly affects the marksmanship that follows.  If the presentation falls apart, the entire triad is compromised before we ever press the trigger.  

     Nothing else we train matters if the gun never comes out.  Or if it comes out too late.

     That is not a ranking of skills or an argument that the draw is more important than shot placement or decision-making.  It is simply a logical reality.  Everything downstream of the presentation depends on it happening.  An efficient, automatic presentation is the gateway to everything else we need to do in a fight.   

• Greg Ellifritz at Active Response Training has a new Weekend Knowledge Dump.  Some notable links:
• A couple shotgun posts: (i) a review of a 20-gauge tactical semi-auto shotgun from Beretta; and (ii) why No. 1 buckshot looks good on paper but is actually inferior to 00 Buckshot. 
• An article on common semi-auto pistol malfunctions and how to clear them.
• A piece discussing some research on why or how someone might shoot the wrong person. One key point is this: "What I find compelling here is that it appears that shooting speed and the ability to stop a response appear to be genuinely separate mechanisms - not two ends of the same dial. That has real implications for how we think about selection and training, because you can’t assume that getting faster makes someone more likely to shoot the wrong person, or that working on restraint slows them down." Greg also comments: "You should also be training yourself to STOP SHOOTING quickly as well.  I would argue that practicing stopping shooting quickly is more important than taking .03 seconds off of your shot-to-shot split.  Very few people are training that skill."
• A link to a piece from Shooting Illustrated entitled "How to Adjust Your Rifle Setup for Body Armor." While this may be more theoretical than practical for most home defenders, there are a significant number of civilians that own Kevlar vests and/or rifle plates and, if the political situation continues to deteriorate, I could see the number of civilians getting body armor increase. 
• Some hard truths about knife fighting and defense against knives. I don't have the statistics to show whether I'm correct or not, but I seem to be seeing more articles about knife attacks--particular mass stabbings--rising in the United States.
• An article on selecting the right weapon light for a handgun. However, Greg relates: "I have a light on my bedside pistol.  I haven’t carried a gun with a light on it since I retired from my cop job more than five years ago." I'm in the same situation: I have a light on my nightstand pistol but none on my carry guns.  
• "How to Take the Best Photos of Your Firearms"--Guns & Ammo.  This article is intended for the general gun owner, not a professional photographer--someone maybe wanting some photographs for purposes of an advertisement to sell a firearm or sharing a firearm on social media. As such, it assumes you will be using a cell phone or basic digital camera and have no other specialized photographic equipment. As such, it discusses in detail how to use a table lamp or natural sunlight to take photographs, some simple DIY methods to diffuse and reflect light, composing the scene, etc. As such, it is longer than your typical gun magazine articles. 
• "Thoughts on our ruling class monoculture" by Glenn Harlan Reynolds. An excerpt:

    Our ruling class is particularly vulnerable to mind viruses for several reasons.  First, it is a monoculture, so that what is persuasive to one member is likely to be persuasive to many.

    Second, it suffers from deep and widespread status anxiety – not least because most of its members have status, but few real accomplishments to rely on – and thus requires constant reassurance in the form of peer acceptance, reassurance that is generally achieved by repeating whatever the popular people are saying already.  And third, it has few real deeply held values, which might otherwise provide guard rails of a sort against believing crazy things.

    In a more diverse ruling class, ideas would not spread so swiftly or be received so uncritically.  People with different worldviews would respond differently to ideas as they entered the world of discourse.  There would be criticism and there would be debate.  (Indeed, this is how things generally worked during the earlier, more diverse, era described by Codevilla, though intellectual fads – lobotomy, say, or eugenics – spread then, too, though mostly through the Gentry/Academic stratum of society that now dominates the ruling class.)

    Also, a society in which people hold firm beliefs on important moral and ethical issues is less vulnerable to rapid swings in many areas.  “Guard rails,” as I said.  ...  

• "The Camp of the Living Dead"--Postcards From Barsoom. A review and commentary on Jean Raspail’s 1973 novel The Camp of the Saints, which has been re-released in English. The author believes that this novel would have been more influential--at least in the English speaking world--if English language editions had been available, writing:

One of the reasons that The Camp of the Saints is not actually all that widely read is that the book has been suppressed in the English-speaking world. The book was a bestseller when the first translation was published in 1975, after which there were a few reprintings, but it has been effectively out of print since the mid-90s. This meant that if you wanted to read it, you either had to track down a bootleg pdf (and who wants to read an entire novel in pdf), or pay extortionate prices on Amazon’s secondary market. You’d think that the publisher would see the insane prices used editions were going for and conclude that there was money to be made from unmet demand but, you see, The Camp of the Saints is a xenophobic, racist, sexist diatribe that good people need to protect impressionable minds from reading lest they acquire bad opinions and become bad people. This kind of copyright-squatting is how books are actually de facto banned in the Western world, by the way; those prominent displays of ‘banned books’ assembled by your local libtard bookseller more or less uniformly consist of softcore porn that some school board in the Bible Belt decided were a bit much for the resource library in the elementary school. When the cathedral wants to ban a book, it simply buys up the rights to it, refuses to publish it, and then buries it in obscurity by refusing to talk about it.

The rest of the piece is a review and analysis of the book, comparing it to the zombie genre, and the spiritual ennui that has fallen over the West such that it cannot bring itself to protect Civilization from the hordes coming to its shores. 

VIDEO: 9mm Ammo Quest Roundup

About 6 years ago, now, the YouTube channel ShootingTheBull410 did a comprehensive test of 9mm defensive ammo on the market. His testing was multiple shots for each type of round into calibrated ballistic gel through the heavy clothing barrier instead of the single round we often see in such tests. After his tests he did a "wrap up" video which is the one shown blow. There were a lot of good rounds, but the ones that he felt were the best were the Federal HST 124 grain standard pressure and the Winchester Defender 147 grain. 

    But he had tested the HST in the clear ballistic gel, so he did a showdown between the HST and the Defender in the calibrated organic gel. Out of that round, it was very close between the two, but ultimately he decided that the edge went to the Defender. 

    There are few newer designs that weren't tested. For instance, I don't believe the Federal Punch had released at the time he made his videos, so they weren't included in the tests.  

VIDEO: "9mm Ammo Quest Winner and wrap up"
ShootingTheBull410 (17 min.)

False Flag Attack On British Airbase?

Our NATO allies for the most part, including the UK, don't want anything to do with the war against Iraq, going so far as to prohibit the U.S. from using airbases on their territories and complicating U.S. logistics. And yet this is coming to an end after an Iranian made drone struck a British airbase on the island of Cyprus. The response, per Reuters, was that "Britain, France and Greece are sending air-defence forces to Cyprus after drones struck the Royal ‌Air Force Akrotiri base on the island, prompting a broader regional defence military response on Tuesday from European allies." And other reports indicate that "Italy, France, Spain and the Netherlands will send naval assets to Cyprus." "France also said it would allow US aircraft to access some of its bases in the Middle East during the conflict with Iran," that latter article also reports, adding:

    Starmer initially refused to have any role in the US-Israeli war with Iran but later agreed to a US request to use two British military bases for a "specific and limited defensive purpose".

    Those bases are in Gloucestershire, western England, and the UK-US Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean.

    Starmer insisted that the Akrotiri base is not being used by US bombers.

But even that has changed, with the Guardian now reporting:

    Britain has not ruled out joining in future strikes against Iranian ballistic missile launch sites amid concerns that otherwise Iran may be able to deplete allies’ stocks of air defence interceptors, officials have indicated.
    
    US heavy bombers are expected to reach UK bases at Diego Garcia in the Chagos Islands and Fairford in Gloucestershire in the next few days, from where they are expected to attack Iran’s underground “missile cities”.

    In a briefing, western officials did not rule out the possibility that the UK could assist in striking missile depots. “I wouldn’t rule anything out at all because we just don’t know what will happen day to day, week to week as this progresses,” one said.

The bases will be hosting stealth bombers, according to Fox News. 

    The interesting part, though, is that the drone that struck the Cyprus airbase did not come from Iran. Per the Guardian, "Cypriot officials have indicated the drone that struck the runway came from an area of Lebanon controlled by Hezbollah. That has not been confirmed by the UK Ministry of Defence, though a launch from Iran has been ruled out." And a more recent article from earlier today relates:

    A drone which hit Britain's Royal Air Force Akrotiri base in Cyprus was not launched from Iran as many had initially assumed, the Ministry of Defence (MoD) has revealed.

    Officials reportedly believe the "Shahed-type drone" evaded detection by flying low and slow on Sunday. It hit a hangar used by American U-2 spy planes and burst into flames.

    There were no casualties and the MoD said there was "no damage to equipment inside the hangar".

    But the UK has still not confirmed where exactly the drone was launched from – and who was responsible.

    The MoD said it believes the drone was launched by a pro-Iran militia in Lebanon or in western Iraq, but an investigation has proved unable to conclusively establish where.

     There has been speculation that Israel may have been behind the drone attack in order to draw the UK into the conflict (see, e.g., this video from History Debunked), which has worked to some extent since the U.S. now has access to airbases that had previously been denied to it. This isn't as farfetched as it may sound as Israel has done something similar at least once before in 1954 now called the Lavon Affair. As Wikipedia explains (footnotes omitted):

The Lavon affair was a failed Israeli covert operation, codenamed Operation Susannah, conducted in Egypt in the summer of 1954. As part of a false flag operation, a group of Egyptian Jews were recruited by Israeli military intelligence to plant bombs inside Egyptian-, American-, and British-owned civilian targets: cinemas, libraries, and American educational centers. The bombs were timed to detonate several hours after closing time. The attacks were to be blamed on the Muslim Brotherhood, Egyptian communists, "unspecified malcontents", or "local nationalists" with the aim of creating a climate of sufficient violence and instability to induce the British government to retain its occupying troops in Egypt's Suez Canal zone. The operation caused no casualties among the population, but resulted in the deaths of four operatives. The overseer of the operation allegedly informed the Egyptians, after which 11 suspected operatives were arrested. Two died by suicide after being captured, two were executed by the Egyptian authorities, two of them were acquitted at trial, and the remaining five received prison terms ranging from 7 years to life in prison.  

So, on one hand, we know that Israel has carried out these type of operations in the past, and the drone attack (which caused minimal damage) was successful in getting Britain and other European countries to be more supportive of the U.S. air operations than they otherwise have been. On the other hand, with Iranian military leadership destroyed or in disarray, there have been suggestions that the Iranian military and Iranian proxies (such as Hezbollah) would act according to prearranged plans; and an attack on U.S. spy planes housed in Cyprus would certainly seem to fit that bill. But my question is why that particular airbase and not other U.S. assets in the area? Certainly even Hezbollah should have been smart enough to know that an attack against a British airbase had a high likelihood of bringing yet another country into the war as an ally to the U.S. and Israel. 

Laser Weapons Deployed In Middle-East

 The New York Post reports: "Laser weapons deployed in Operation Epic Fury, as Space Force stops Iran’s missiles in their tracks." The article is mostly about what the Space Force is doing to help stop Iranian missile launches and identify the locations of its missile launchers. But it also mentions reports of laser weapons being used to destroy drones, mentioned unconfirmed reports that Israel has used its new Iron Beam weapon, "an advanced laser able to disable rockets and defend territory"; and that the U.S. Navy has deployed a destroyer outfitted with the High-Energy Laser with Integrated Optical Dazzler and Surveillance (HELIOS) system. 

The Orc Invasion of Britain

History Debunked observes that the people invading England do not much look like the native inhabitants.  

 VIDEO: "Why Britain now seems to have been invaded by orcs, straight out of Lord of the Rings"
History Debunked (2.5 min.)

They don't act like the native inhabitants, either. But they do act like marauding orcs. There is a 98% correlation between the Pakistani population in the UK (the green line) and the use of the orange highlighted term below. 

Source: Simulatory on X (h/t Anonymous Conservative)

News Article Or Press Release?

CNBC reports that "Target is making big changes to win back customers. Here’s what shoppers can expect to see," then goes on to regale the reader with how they are remaking their makeup sales area, the sports and toy aisles, and update home goods and furniture. Nowhere in the article is there anything about its DEI policies, its annual "Pride collections" or sale of trans-friendly apparel, including "tuck-friendly" swimwear, and the backlash it engendered among customers. Which marked the beginning of its decline in sales.