Tex's Place

View Schedule Good morning troops!     Welcome to another day in paradise, and our next installment of REVEILLE!     This is your daily forum to share what you've heard, what you've learned, and what you know, and just shoot the breeze.     All subjects are on the table, just be sure to stay within the comment policy, as usual.      This is also a great place to tag me, Goofy, or Trackman ...

By Ryan Petty Let me get this out up front.  I know Brandon Herrera and I’d call him a friend.  What else do you call a guy that invites you to spend a day shooting his guns, at his range, with an almost inexhaustible supply of free ammunition? If that isn’t a friend, I don’t know what is. Brandon (and I’d be remiss to exclude  Donut Operator , co-host of Range Day) is a fantastic Second Amendment ambassador. And that’s the point.  I’ll explain. Being a Second Amendment ambassador requires advocacy beyond the friendly confines of the gun community. For example, reaching out to those that are perhaps “gun curious”, but don’t follow the day to day politics of the Second Amendment.  Sometimes that advocacy requires putting on a suit, traveling to a foreign land (for a Texan, that is anywhere outside of Texas), and testifying before elected officials about the impacts of federal agencies that overstep Constitutional limits. In a highly anticipated hearing on ATF...

By Tyler Durden Social unrest exploded across France this week, forcing the government to deploy 40,000 police officers to quell the violence. The turmoil was sparked after police fatally shot a 17-year-old teenager of North African descent during a traffic stop.  The police killing of the teenager occurred on Tuesday, captured on video, shocked the country, and has since unleashed riots across major cities.   France Police Shooting a 17year-old teen: Police said he refused to obey traffic rules ❗ pic.twitter.com/G51bMQ9pNc — Hassan Ssemujju (@HassanSsemu) June 29, 2023 The epicenter of the unrest is around Nanterre, located on the western outskirts of Paris. A map of the unrest shows riots are occurring nationwide. On Wednesday night, chaos worsened, leading Interior Minister Gérald Darmanin to announce that 40,000 officers would be immediately deployed. He said: "The professionals of disorder must go home. There will be a lot more police and gendarmes present tonight....

By Cam Edwards While many U.S. cities are seeing a drop in violent crime after three years of rising numbers of carjackings, armed robberies, and homicides, Washington, D.C. is bucking the trend. The nation’s capitol is on pace for its deadliest year in almost two decades, but the Democrats in charge are divided on what exactly to do about it. If the D.C. City Council could pass an ordinance that would make every gun (legally owned or illegally possessed) in the District disappear overnight, I’m sure it would be unanimously approved. But that’s not how gun control works, and despite the restrictive laws on both gun possession and lawful carry D.C. is home to plenty of individuals who are keeping and bearing arms without complying with the local gun registration and permitting requirements. Now the question for city council members is what to do about it, and on that the council is  bitterly divided . The D.C. mayor’s legislative proposal that would impose new penalties for gun ...

By Jim Thompson In the Shanxi Provence of China, the hills aren’t alive with the sound of music—they are dead under a blanket of solar panels. In China, in the Shanxi province, there is a huge solar energy farm right on the mountain. Solar panels stretch for 80 kilometers. It looks as if the mountain was covered with a blanket. (Shanxi is on the Loess Plateau which has nothing but silt and dust. Nothing grows there.) pic.twitter.com/Z49WAvZGjv — ShanghaiPanda (@thinking_panda) May 31, 2023 The Panels stretch for 80 kilometers (close to 50 miles). It looks like an alien virus has infected the Earth, and it’s spreading. In a morbid way, it makes sense that China would appropriate entire mountain ranges for solar panels. China controls the market, and the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t wait for an EPA study. They  bury cities  under a mountain of water. Eighty percent of solar panels come from China, and 95 percent of the polysilicon wafers come from Communist China.  ...

By Hannah Nightingale On Thursday, the Supreme Court ruled to strike down  affirmative action  in colleges and universities. The court  ruled  6-3 that affirmative action is unconstitutional, and violates the equal protection clause of the 14th amendment. The ruling came as part of two cases, Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. University of North Carolina and Students for Fair Admissions, Inc. v. President & Fellows of Harvard College.  The group asked the court to overturn a 2003 ruling,  Grutter v. Bollinger , which allowed ethnic and racial identities to play a part in the acceptance of students to colleges and universities.  The cases were brought forth by Students for Fair Admissions, who allege that schools  taking race into consideration  on college applications violate equal protection under the law. Attorney for the University of North Carolina, Ryan Park, argued during the hearing that diversity within the...

By Ranjit Singh As our lives go online and electronic, with a lifetime of public and private documentation, the risk and ease of surveillance go up. It’s much harder to go through unscanned, undigitized paper receipts and accounting books to find information about someone. But once everything is electronic, either natively or  digitized from paper , a herculean task can be accomplished with a query that runs in milliseconds. The gun grabbers know this. They want to know and track every gun owner. They also know that the Constitution, Bill of Rights, and the separation of powers make it very hard for the government to do that. Their end-run around that limitation is  Surveillance Capitalism .  Wikipedia has a good summary definition of Surveillance Capitalism, reproduced below: Surveillance capitalism is a concept in political economics which denotes the widespread collection and commodification of personal data by corporations. This phenomenon is distinct from governm...

In a Chicago speech meant to hype his economic record, the president and his spinners told us not to believe our lyin’ eyes.     By Douglas Andrews “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics,” Mark Twain once famously said. And one of Joe Biden’s claims about the economy is living proof of it. See if you can spot the technically true statistic in the following sentence that’s worse than a damned lie: “My Administration has created more jobs in two years than any previous administration has created in the first four years.” Time’s up. As the Claremont Institute’s Nick Short  tells us : “72% of all job gains since 2021 were simply jobs that were being recovered from the pandemic, not new job creation. Prior to the pandemic, job creation under Trump was 6.7 million — 3 million more jobs than the current president.” So you see, Joe, the vast majority of those jobs you’re taking credit for are due to our economy having fallen off a cliff when your business partners, the Comm...