I’ve not blogged much since getting back from tour. I’m still playing catch up. There has been a ton of things to comment on, so in brief:

Paris. Coming soon to a location near you. Mumbai, Beslan, and a thousand others, we’ve seen this before, and we’ll see it again.

On the personal, local level, this is another example of why you should carry a gun. No, we don’t expect every permit holder to be a Navy SEAL, just a speed bump. The best way to stop a mass shooter is an immediate violent response. At best, you drop them before they can hurt too many people. At worst, congratulations you were a distraction, but even distractions can save lives or derail plans.

Running is great. I’ll never fault somebody who chooses to run or hide when bad things happen. Every one of us has a different level of training, knowledge, and commitment, and what is the right answer for you, isn’t the right answer for your grandma. If you are the kind of person to get involved, you need to have a clue. However, since the only constant of gunfights is that they suck for somebody, you can do everything right and still die. On the bright side you at least bought everybody else some time.

For the pacifistic anti-gun dumb asses on the internet who always crop up in the aftermath of any violent event, bitching about imaginary crossfires, or how fighting back would just make things worse. Just shut up already. You’re children, with a child’s grasp of the subject. When people are being mass butchered, barring tossing hand grenades at the bad guy, it is pretty damned hard to make it worse.

Then I see the idiots claiming that they’re only worried about the quality of the regular people with guns… Liars. But okay, thought experiment time. Say there was a proposed law for a federal “super permit”, where if a regular person could pass a rigorous background check and, oh say, the same firearms qualification as an FBI agent, that individual would then be allowed to carry a gun anywhere in the fifty states a federal agent could, and ignore things like idiotic gun free zones, or could carry a gun in states where concealed carry is banned.

This doesn’t replace state laws. Heck, make the federal super permit really hard to get. Have it require a really high level of proficiency, a big knowledge of use of force laws, and one hell of a tough qualification. Make the applicant foot the bill for everything. And you know what? I bet you within a week we could still provide a million of my people as defense in depth, worst case scenario interrupters, spread all over America, for when bad things happen.

Would these people so worried about our level of training be in favor of this? Of course they wouldn’t. They’d find some other reason to bleat. And murderous assholes will continue to target disarmed populations. Besides, this is just wishful thinking, because any federal program which would empower the general populace would be designed to suck and fail from the get go. Ask any pilot who went through the armed pilot training post 9-11 how easy the feds made that simple,obvious, no brainer program.

Other than learning to shoot, learn first aid. The main things to remember about gunshot wounds is direct pressure. For most of them there’s not much else you can do. Learn how to apply a tourniquet.

That’s all personal stuff that could actually help. You want to argue about putting a French flag over your profile pic, I don’t care if you do or not. Whatever makes you feel better. I’ve seen some people saying that if you want to actually make a difference you need to join the military. That’s great, but missing the point. We don’t have a lack of warriors problem, we have a lack of leadership problem.

Now, big picture. Militant Islamist Wahhibi douchebags want to kill you. Period. Don’t make excuses for them. Don’t try to explain them away. They literally want you to submit or die. This isn’t rocket science. Just ask them. They’ll tell you.

In our current stupid society, you can’t talk about this topic without being accused of racism. That’s just idiotic, since a religious philosophy isn’t a race. But these same idiots like to bitch about Christians being awful and look under every rock for an imagined slight to rail against. Only Christians aren’t blowing people up. But libs love to throw out the racism card to automatically shut down all dissent, because most cons are nice people, who don’t like being accused of being vile, repugnant things. So they shut up.

Like if you say, hey, maybe taking in tens of thousands of completely unvetted refugees from a war torn third world nation that is a hotbed of the philosophy that wants to saw our heads off is a bad idea… They scream racist.

For the people saying the refugees are vetted… How? The Syrian Bureau of Criminal Identification? I’ve seen some people quoting the plaque from the Statue of Liberty. Really? Did you miss the point of what Ellis Island was for?

Do I feel bad for the actual refugees? Yep. The decent people are running from the same scumbags we’re worried about. However, that doesn’t mean the western world has to commit suicide in order to save everybody. It sucks. There’s evil in the world. Not having it on your doorstep makes it easier to treat it elsewhere. When you’ve got a disease you quarantine it. You don’t purposefully spread it everywhere. We’re in the position to help other countries only because ours isn’t currently on fire.

Some of you are under the mistaken impression that there is a good answer.

Another thing that I keep seeing are two opposing, equally idiotic schools of thought. The immediate knee jerk reaction of liberals flipping out about potential retaliatory hate crimes that almost never happen, but will eventually. Because push someone far enough, and they will inevitably lose their shit. Europeans are good at that.

And the other is the they’re all guilty, kill 1/6th of the world’s population, let God sort them out rage posters. Not getting into morality at all, that’s dumb just from a logistical and target selection stand point. That’s just good business. You’ve got a particular problem, focus on that specific rather than the overwhelming whole. Of course we aren’t fighting all Muslims. If we were fighting a billion people, you would know it. However, we are fighting millions. This isn’t some tiny, violent splinter group. This is a fairly wide spread, violent, jihadist, idealized imaginary history, philosophical movement, and they are motivated and think they can win.

The problem is that this murderous faction has taken over large swaths of everything, all over the world, and it has been going on for a long time. I’m not talking physically taking over either, but they’re in the mosques, in the leadership, and in the money. Yes, there are plenty of moderate Muslims who fight these people. That’s why the nut jobs spend most of their energy blowing up people who are supposedly of the same religion. There are bombings and shootings daily across the third world that barely make a blip in our media because they’re business as usual.

For the vast majority of the moderates however, what do we expect them to do? You can ally with the west, where you can fight against the death cultists, but the minute a progressive gets elected, you are going to get sold out and left to die. So why ally with us? Because the death cultists aren’t going anywhere. Those fuckers are committed.

Look at what happened to Iraq and Afghanistan. Why would any leader side with us now? America will come in, kick ass with the greatest fighting force ever… Oh, wait. MSNBC is upset. Buh bye. We’re out. Everybody who helped us get massacred. A year later, if they’re lucky they might get a hashtag on twitter, because that’s how America shows it cares.

Boko Haram, ISIS, and Hamas are all different groups, but they all share that idealistic, death cult, militant, asshole philosophy.

Barack Obama has two signature achievements. No seriously, check google. That’s all they can come up with. Two. Obamacare and pulling out of Iraq. Obamacare is an expensive train wreck, that didn’t solve the problems it was supposed to, which raised everybody else’s costs, and now for the handful of the population it did help, all of the exchanges are imploding like everybody who can do math said they would. Brilliant. But back to Muslim extremists, we pulled out of Iraq, and Daesh rolled right in. Yay.

Meanwhile, the rest of the middle east fell apart. Hillary Clinton and John Kerry showed us the brilliance we’ve come to expect from democrat presidential candidates and did… shit. I can’t tell. Our administration totally sucked it up to the point that the western world was literally cheering Putin getting involved. How badly do you have to fuck up that your allies are happy the Russians moved in instead?

Mostly it looks like our State Department yelled at the one little country in the region who isn’t trying to blow us up, for being too mean to the philosophical allies of the people trying to blow us up, or for trying to stop the biggest country that wants to blow them up from getting a nuke, even though they get the population adjusted equivalent of a Paris attack all the freaking time.

Liberalism is a suicidal political philosophy that focuses on non-problems and ignores real problems. We’ve got an actual death cult massacring people? Well, we’d better crack down on regular Americans civil liberties. Hey, there’s a conservative organization in rural Nebraska that has absolutely nothing to do with militant Islam, better tap their phones and sick the IRS on them. We do security theater at the airports, while having a foreign policy that makes zero sense and no border. Bad guys are massacring people with machine guns they smuggled into a country with incredibly strict gun control? Well, we’d better double down on gun free zones to minimize the number of people who could effectively fight back. DHS leadership is issuing warnings about American veterans, while the actual guys fighting terrorists are stymied with rules that make absolutely no sense.

I’ve got a ton of fans who are feds. Oh, the horror stories I hear from these guys. So many plots have been foiled, so many bad guys have been caught, and the stuff they are worried that is coming next is frankly terrifying… I mean, we’ve not seen anything yet. There are some nightmare scenarios out there that I won’t talk about on the internet. But don’t worry, our administration’s greatest concern is climate change. They’re all over that.

Seriously, this bunch of fuck ups will go down in history as the most clueless administration we’ve had. ISIS is the JV team! They’re contained. We spent like half a billion dollars on a training program that produced, what? A squad? But even if we’d turned out an actual Syrian fighting force, because of stupid campaign promises to Code Pink, heaven forbid we let our SF guys do their freaking job, and actual lead or help, because that would be “boots on the ground”, and that is so much worse than having hundreds of thousands of refugees overwhelming the western world a year later.

The other day on book tour I was stuck in an airport watching CNN. I swear airports are the only place that play CNN anymore (and before anybody bitches at me about bias, I’m not a FOX news guy either. I cancelled cable years ago). I caught Obama’s speech about the Keystone Pipeline, and it was just asinine. The whole thing was bullshit. He talked about the lowered energy costs, as if that was his doing, and not because of North Dakota, and Saudi Arabia going all bargain basement to try and stop them. Hang on… Isn’t this the same administration that is always bitching about the evils of fracking. Yeah, heaven forbid we be energy independent. Because if you think things suck now, just wait until the house of Saud collapses, and the same militant asshole extremist JV team that we’ve contained so well rolls in there. But don’t worry, before that we’ve got a nuclear deal with Iran that will surely result in Peace in Our Time.

But that’s us. Europe has been following the liberal, progressive, pseudo-socialist path a lot longer than we have. Instead of doing little things that make sense all along, they’ll let the problem get really big and stupid, and then it is guillotines, gulags, and cattle cars. There’s a lot of really pissed off Europeans right now, and over the centuries we’ve got plenty of examples of what masses of pissed off Europeans do when pushed.

The death cultists are totally cool with that, because they truly believe they’re going to win the apocalypse. The only long term problems liberals can fixate on are imaginary ones that allow them to make the government more intrusive for regular law abiding citizens. So I expect everything to get far stupider from here on out.

For the super isolationist types of the Perhaps if We’re Nice They’ll Go Away school of foreign diplomacy, too late now. We’re dealing with a group of people who literally think they’re helping bring about the apocalypse, and that’s a good thing. Our leadership is made up of petulant children more worried about poop swastikas that may or may not have existed, than actual killers who believe in real oppression.

Solution? Beats the hell out of me. It certainly isn’t whatever it is we’ve been doing. The ball is now in Europe’s court. America’s bipolar leadership has abdicated responsibility. Europe can either decide it is in it to win it, and fight like their survival is at stake, or keep doing their thing. The extremists are happy to die, and they consider everybody on their side expendable.

My guess? Retaliation. Our warriors will do what they’re awesome at, and kill a whole bunch of assholes. Depending on how hard and fast we, or in this case the French, do it, that will stop a whole bunch of other attacks. However, innocent people will die as has happened in every war in human history, which will cause liberals to flip out, which will cause the west to go all half-hearted and stupidly forward. So nothing will get fixed. The west will go back to the next imaginary issue that allows liberals to be control freaks. The security apparatus will then go back to being an ever tightening ratchet against the wrong people. We’ll repeat this cycle until the west collapses, or one particular brand of religious philosophy is utterly annihilated forever.