To begin with, this is your president. This ought to be one of the most shameful things ever said by a sitting president.
"Do you have any words to the victims of the hurricane?"
BIDEN: "We've given everything that we have."
"Are there any more resources the federal government could be giving them?"
BIDEN: "No." pic.twitter.com/jDMNGhpjOz
— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) September 30, 2024
We must have spent too much money on Ukraine to help Americans in distress. I don't…… [read more]
If and when women assume the role of infantry soldier, one of the biggest challenges they may face is the weight on their backs, according to an official at the Veterans Health Administration.
The average female will have trouble as infantry soldiers must carry a load often weighing more than 80 pounds for many hours at a time over rugged terrain in some cases, said Dr. David Cifu, national director of physical medicine and rehabilitation at the Veterans Health Administration.
“I’m certain the majority of women doing this won’t be physically able to do it as long as the men. It’s a matter of body size and body mechanics,” Cifu said.
Kurt Hofmann on whether the proposed gun control laws “deserve” a vote up or down:
The only problem is that they do not “deserve a vote,” not really. The Constitution, with its limits on federal power, takes certain policy options off the table–no matter how popular they are. Fundamental human rights are not subject to a popularity contest–they cannot be. When the rights of 49% of the people can be voted away by the other 51% (or even the rights of 10%, by the other 90%), they are not “rights” at all.
As longtime readers know, I have little passion for pure democracy — a system by which 51 percent of the people can give 49 percent of the people a wedgie. If America were a pure democracy, the citizens of the 10 most populous states could impose their will on the other 40 states.
Read it all at Examiner. But expecting the Senate to understand the constitution is like expecting my dog to do calculus.
A pair of bipartisan senators on Wednesday announced they’ve reached an agreement over a bill to expand background checks for gun sales, marking a significant first step as Congress attempts to tackle the thorny issue of gun control. While the Senate is now one step closer to actually voting on the legislation, the bill’s fate remains far from certain, its authors acknowledged.
“I think this is a fluid situation, and it’s hard to predict,” said Sen. Pat Toomey, R-Pa., one of the drafters of the background check bill, said of the legislation’s chances. He added, however, that the legislation represents common ground and that he’s “hopeful” it can pass.
“Criminals and the dangerously mentally ill shouldn’t have guns,” Toomey said. “I don’t know anyone who disagrees with that premise.”
You’re a liar. That criminals and the dangerously mentally ill shouldn’t have guns isn’t your premise. Your premise is that what you propose for universal background checks would have any effect on criminals and the dangerously mentally ill having guns. I think you know that this is a false premise and doesn’t comport with the facts and data. In fact, let me remind you just why the left really wants universal background checks.
The only way we can truly be safe and prevent further gun violence is to ban civilian ownership of all guns. That means everything. No pistols, no revolvers, no semiautomatic or automatic rifles. No bolt action. No breaking actions or falling blocks. Nothing. This is the only thing that we can possibly do to keep our children safe from both mass murder and common street violence.
Unfortunately, right now we can’t. The political will is there, but the institutions are not. Honestly, this is a good thing. If we passed a law tomorrow banning all firearms, we would have massive noncompliance. What we need to do is establish the regulatory and informational institutions first. This is how we do it. The very first thing we need is national registry. We need to know where the guns are, and who has them.
Thus ends two non-remarkable careers in politics. I hope you enjoy your new buddies, Pat.
Why Toomey felt compelled to take this stance, particularly noting the slim margin he was elected to office by and the likelihood that angry gun owners will remember at the polls if he decides to seek office again, remain unclear. While the bill is far short of what President Obama wants to sign into law, if it passes, it will be used as the plateau from which the next series of demands will be issued.
I don’t know why Toomey felt compelled to take this stance. Why does any tyrant feel compelled to be one? Original sin due to the “federal headship” of Adam. If you don’t like that answer, you don’t hurt my feelings. Queue one up of your own. Either way, I hope Toomey chokes.
Survival Blog has a great article up on winter outdoor survival lessons, and I’ll reiterate part of it here while driving you to the Survival Blog for the rest of it.
Darkness was rapidly settling in, I was soaking wet, and the temperature was falling as fast as the snow. There were still about 8 miles of very rough country between me and my truck and I was flat out smoked from hiking all day in deep snow at high elevation. I realized I could not hope to navigate by headlamp the many blow down trees and steep canyon walls that separated me from my truck in my current condition. While I realized the seriousness of my situation, I was not particularly worried and silently thanked the Lord I had practiced the skills essential to surviving in the wild and carried the appropriate gear on my back. As I quickly went about the tasks required to set up a field expedient bivouac camp, I contemplated the many similar situations I had been through in my life were the main goal and focus was to not die.
Curled up comfortably in my emergency blanket with my face towards my fire and my back to a large log serving as a heat reflector, I realized that without the proper skills and some basic gear the situation good have been deadly. The sounds of a distant wolf howl in the night reminded me of the thin veneer between polite society and the wild, were man is reduced to the basic necessities of survival; food, fire, and shelter. In my experience, most people fail to realize how delicate the balance of our society is and how quickly they can be thrust into a situation where the main focus is survival.
Not dying has frequently been a priority of mine while fighting in Iraq as an Infantry team leader and designated long range marksman, followed by a career in law enforcement in western Montana. My love of hiking, hunting, and camping has resulted in many hours spent in the wilderness of western Montana and northern Idaho. While enjoying these pursuits, my focus has had to frequently switch from hunting and camping to not dying. While some of these instances were indeed emergencies caused by bad decisions and a general lack of intelligence, some of them were self induced to practice survival skills in the wild. After surviving several life threatening situations while hunting and camping with me, many spouses of my friends no longer allow their husbands to go hunting or camping with me. I have had to resort to marketing my frequent hunting trips as “hands on survival courses” graded on a pass or fail depending on whether they make it back alive or not.
I have an affliction that is probably encouraged from reading way too many books about Mountain Men and Native Americans that causes me to constantly push myself to the limits and test myself by surviving in the wilderness with minimal equipment in varied terrain and all kinds of weather. Frequent trips into the wilderness to practice survival skills have resulted in a fairly good working knowledge of what actually works when the chips are down versus what just sounds good in a book read by the warmth of a fireplace. After spending his childhood tramping around the woods with me and camping with minimal equipment, my son decided to join the Marine Corps to relax for a while. He’s joked that after some of our hunting trips, the Marines should be a walk in the park.
There have been countless books and articles written about what to carry in your survival pack and how to survive if lost in the woods. I don’t plan on reinventing the wheel and will not bore you with writing a field manual on the many varied tasks and skills required to survive in the wild. I would like to share a few of the lessons I’ve learned and some of the items I always carry whenever I go into the backcountry along with a few essential skills that I’ve found to be absolutely necessary for survival.
Now that it has grabbed your interest, go read the rest at Survival Blog. He has some great counsel, and I don’t necessarily disagree with any of it, but would emphasize other things.
I’m not a proponent of pushing the edge. If you need to climb, do it with qualified ropes. For example, rappelling is safe if done correctly. Don’t see how little you can get away with – carry the right equipment for the job and make it as light as practical. Cordage is a necessity, and paracord is cheap. Don’t look for cordage in the wild. It’s a waste of precious time. Time is one of your greatest assets.
Don’t start fires with primitive means, even if you know how. Never walk into the wild – even if for a day trip – without a knife, cordage, a container, cover, and a means of starting a fire. Carry multiple means of starting a fire, such as a lighter and a ferro rod. Never plan to be out in the wilderness where you could get lost or stranded for weeks. Be closer than that to egress. There are so many things to address and yet the author has done a good job of listing most of the considerations. But I note that the author didn’t address guns.
Guns may be the most important asset at your disposal, and as one who carries, I certainly wouldn’t be in the wilderness without a firearm, even if only for a day trip. I would like to address a little about survival guns as an adjunct to Jim’s post at Survival Blog.
A long gun is an unlikely asset on a long hike or overnight trip. It’s just too heavy and bulky to carry, especially a .308 or 7.62 mm rifle. Too much weight can be a detriment to your survival. I am a proponent of the .270 cartridge, but a rifle still suffers from the same fate regardless of caliber.
What is true of the large caliber or bolt action rifles is also true of carbines such as the AR-15, M1 Carbine or pistol caliber carbines. While it may be nice to have rapid fire capabilities, it’s just not feasible at least some of the time.
Frankly, if you’re going to carry a long gun, a shotgun may be the best choice given the fact that you can hunt fowl (with bird loads) and larger game (with slugs). But because of weight of the weapon plus ammunition, it still suffers from the same limitations as other long guns.
So if we’ve settled on hand guns, this narrows the field a bit and makes our choice easier. Here the best counsel I think anyone can give. Choose reliability above all else, and choose the weapon with which you are practiced and familiar. There is no comparison to hitting your intended target.
For semi-automatic weapons I like my .45 and .40, Springfield Armory XDm and Smith and Wesson M&P, respectively. But it might be a different manufacturer for you. If I carry a revolver I like my Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum. I would carry any of those weapons into the wilderness, as I consider them large enough calibers to accomplish the intended purpose. I have hand guns that I consider to be range toys, and I wouldn’t carry those for self defense whether in the wilderness or not.
Remember too that whatever weapon you carry must be accompanied by enough ammunition to make it effective. Except for the .357 Magnum, none of the rounds I mentioned would likely be enough for game hunting, so the goal of the weapon would be personal defense. If you intend to carry a weapon with which to hunt, you are planning a different trip than the one Jim and I have described.
Richard Ahlstrand, of Auburn, Massachusetts, faces criminal charges after encountering a bear in his back yard and shooting the damned thing to avoid being mauled or eaten. Specifically, as noted at Reason 24/7, he’s charged with “illegally killing a bear, illegally baiting a bear, illegal possession of a firearm and failure to secure a firearm.” All of these charges, once translated from Massachusetts to American, seem to stack up to outrage that Ahlstrand didn’t make his yard completely inhospitable to animals that are rarely seen in the area, and then investigated a suspicious noise with a weapon in hand rather than cower under the bed. Worst of all, he actually defended himself when he encountered danger.
According to the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, Ahlstrand had a 50-gallon drum of birdseed in his backyard, and this appears to be the basis of the “baiting”charge against him. Leaving the birdseed outside might be considered a foolish idea in an area where bears are known to congregate, but the same article quotes the police chief claiming that “bear are not common in Auburn” with the last such sighting about a year ago. So Ahlstrand shouldn’t have had birdseed because … ?
When confronted by the bear, Ahlstrand had a shotgun with him — in his own backyard, remember — because he’d heard a noise and thought he’d seen a bear the day before.
Richard Ahlstrand told WBZ-TV he was stocking his bird feeder Friday night when a bear about seven feet tall and 300-to-400 pounds started chasing him.
That’s when he turned his shotgun on the bear.
“I didn’t have time to aim through the sights, but I aimed in the direction of the head on this thing and I pulled the trigger before it got to me. It just dropped,” he said.
Ahlstrand said he was carrying the shotgun Friday night because he thought he saw the bear in his yard Thursday.
Chief Sluckis said the bear is believed to have been attracted to a 50-gallon drum of birdseed Mr. Ahlstrand had in his backyard. He said Mr. Ahlstrand told police he heard a noise outside and felt in fear of his life.
“He went back inside, retrieved a shotgun and decided to shoot the bear,” Chief Sluckis said. “Obviously we believe if Mr. Ahlstrand was truly in fear for his life he would have stayed secured in his home and would have called the police.”
I’ve lived in Boston and Worcester both, sad to say, and so I’m fairly certain that official Massachusetts policy is that people should dial 911 and then curl into a fetal position whenever they hear a curious noise. But living in the wide open spaces of Arizona, as I do, I’m called upon to investigate suspicious noises fairly frequently.
When backpacking I am a great proponent of taking smells away from camp as much as possible. We have had all manner of wildlife in camp even in spite of our best efforts. Having a large container of food in the yard may not be the wisest thing to do.
But this is a man, made in God’s image, contrasted with an animal, which is not. Laws that favor animals over man are immoral, and there is no question what a judge or jury should do in this case. If I carry a gun in order to stop an assault by another human, I’ll surely stop an assault by an animal.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals is actively shopping for a drone that would “stalk hunters,” the organization said Monday.
The group says it will “soon have some impressive new weapons at its disposal to combat those who gun down deer and doves” and that it is “shopping for one or more drone aircraft with which to monitor those who are out in the woods with death on their minds.”
The group says it will not weaponize the drones, but will use them to film potentially illegal hunting activity and turn it over to law enforcement.
[ … ]
The group may want to carefully monitor its drone—last year, an animal rights group drone was shot down while it was attempting to monitor pigeon hunters in South Carolina.
Pigeon hunters in South Carolina. Did PETA think it would end well? South Carolina? Really? And the PETA representative on the video thinks it amazing that “a blogger” would advocate shooting down this drone.
Let me say it here and now, for everyone to see. I not only advocate shooting down this and similar drones, I advocate that we find out when the drones will be used and we deploy hunting parties specifically for them.
Can we get a PETA representative here to debate it?
A firearms company that makes AR-15 style rifles for the iconic brand Colt, will open a plant in Breckenridge in Stephens County. Oregon company Bold Ideas confirmed the development Friday.
Bold Ideas goes by the name Colt Competition, making high accuracy rifles for competition shooting.
The company has not officially announced the opening, but employment applications are already available at the Breckenridge Chamber of Commerce. A non-specific, help wanted ad appeared in the local newspaper classifieds earlier in the week.
Sources say Colt Competition will move into a large vacant industrial space on the north side of town, previously used by Karsten Homes to manufacture mobile homes.
The move by Colt Competition into Breckenridge comes as the CEO of Colt Manufacturing in Connecticut has said there will soon be few good answers to keep his company in the state. Connecticut passed some of the nation’s most restrictive gun laws this week.
It also comes weeks after Governor Rick Perry reportedly sent letters to gun companies, encouraging them to move to Texas. Perry sent a message on Twitter to Colorado company Magpul as recently as March 21, saying “Come on Down to Texas.” The Governor’s office did not confirm Friday if it had sent a recruitment letter to Colt Competition.
Like on so many occasions in the company’s history, Colt’s CEO has his head up his ass.
1.) Colt’s “ties” to Connecticut are just lengthy because of tenure. They’re not “deep” because the state would ban Colt’s product and put them out of business tomorrow, if it could.
2.) Colt’s real legacy is in the West — can any other manufacturer EVER compete with the picture of a cowboy holding a Colt Dragoon, Navy or Peacemaker? If Colt were serious about their “heritage”, they’d long ago have moved out of the gun-hating East and moved West, to a state which would not only welcome them, but protect them.
3.) Colt probably thinks that the military will save them. I imagine that the manufacturers of Garands, M14s and M1 Carbines probably thought the same.
4.) Colt regards the civilian market with the same regard as a man does his laundry: tiresome, but something that must be looked after. (Run your eye down a list of wonderful, beautiful Colt models which have long since disappeared from their catalogue because of “lack of demand” and then look at the prices which second-hand Diamondbacks now command.)
5.) One of the reasons Colt’s civilian guns suffer is because they are expensive compared to the competition. One of the reasons ANY product is expensive is high overhead — reasons such as real estate, taxes and salaries. Anyone care to compare the salaries of Connecticut with, oh, Texas, Oklahoma or Arizona in comparable jobs?
Let Colt sleep in the bed they’ve made in Connecticut. Good luck to them.
So was the comment wrong? What do readers know of this move by Colt, and how much of the company does this segment represent?
Two influential senators, one from each party, are working on an agreement that could expand background checks on firearms sales to include gun shows and online transactions, Senate aides said Sunday.
If completed, the effort could represent a major breakthrough in the effort by President Barack Obama and his allies to restrict guns following last December’s massacre of schoolchildren in Newtown, Conn.
Sens. Joe Manchin, D-W.Va., and Pat Toomey, R-Pa., could nail down an accord early this week, said the aides, who spoke on condition of anonymity to describe the private talks. With the Senate returning Monday from a two-week recess, the chamber’s debate on gun control legislation could begin as soon as Tuesday, though it might be delayed if the lawmakers need more time to complete a deal, the aides said.
The potential deal, which aides cautioned still might change, would exempt transactions between relatives and temporary transfers for hunters and sportsmen, they said.
Manchin is a moderate who touts an A rating from the National Rifle Association, which has opposed Obama’s gun control drive. Toomey has solid conservative credentials and was elected to the Senate two years ago with tea party support from his Democratic-leaning state.
A united front by the two lawmakers would make it easier for gun control advocates to attract support from moderate Democrats who have been wary of supporting the effort and from Republicans who have largely opposed it so far.
As for Toomey, you go right ahead and connect with your “moderate” constituency. I hope you choke on them. Remember when it was urgent necessity to elect Toomey to the Senate? Yea, just like it was to elect Scott Brown, who supports a so-called assault weapons ban.
The Republican party is dead. It’s merely a different color of vanilla, no different than the Democrats. And that’s why they lost the last election. And lose they will, again and again, trying to connect with their “moderate” constituency, because that’s what the highly paid talking heads and moron consultants are telling them they need to do. Choke and turn blue on it.
David Codrea is a little wiser in his counsel for Toomey:
As for Toomey, if he and his staff hadn’t opened their yaps to indicate things were open to discussion, they wouldn’t be in this self-created pickle. He, too, has had a pretty good record on guns (even Gun Owners of America grades him at “A-”), and he needs to be reminded that his duty is to improve that score, not to threaten the rights of a core constituency that entrusted him with power.
Read it all at Examiner. Okay. Change his mind and remember his supposed values, or choke and turn blue. Either way is fine with me.
Nonprofit Quarterly recently carried a commentary on Lindsey Graham and his comments on AR-15s that took a detour into the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Rick Cohen’s thoughts make for interesting reading.
Our impression of American behavior during disasters has been that people generally pull together, that adversity brings out the best in us. Sure, we know that people do very bad things, but the press often notes how people also go out of their way to help and protect their neighbors. In fact, that feeling of mutuality was what we thought undergirded the nonprofit sector in a democratic society.
It must be that we fell for some Panglossian view of America, if we are to believe Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.). At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing yesterday, Graham grilled Attorney General Eric Holder about the proposed ban on assault weapons. We haven’t seen the news reports that verify what Graham says happened—or sort of happened—to spark his support for carrying around military-style assault weapons:
“Can you imagine a circumstance where an AR-15 would be a better defense tool than, say, a double-barrel shotgun? Let me give you an example, that you have (sic) an lawless environment, where you have an natural disaster or some catastrophic event — and those things unfortunately do happen, and law and order breaks down because the police can’t travel, there’s no communication. And there are armed gangs roaming around neighborhoods. Can you imagine a situation where your home happens to be in the crosshairs of this group that a better self-defense weapon may be a semiautomatic AR-15 vs. a double-barrel shotgun?
I’m afraid that world does exist. It existed in New Orleans, to some extent up in Long Island [after Hurricane Sandy], it could exist tomorrow if there’s a cyber attack against [the] country and the power grid goes down and the dams are released and chemical plants are — discharges.
What I’m saying is if my family was in the crosshairs of gangs that were roaming around neighborhoods in New Orleans or any other location, the deterrent effect of an AR-15 to protect my family, I think, is greater than a double-barrel shotgun.”
As far as we can tell, Graham must be referencing a gang of white vigilantes in New Orleans’ Algiers Point neighborhood who, armed with shotguns and assault weapons, allegedly opened fire on African Americans “with impunity” after Hurricane Katrina; the militia was reportedly on the lookout for anyone who “didn’t belong” in the neighborhood, as reported by ProPublica and The Nation. If so, maybe Graham’s fears would have more of a basis in reality if he looked a little more like Holder and was facing a white militia armed with AR-15s.
It is in vogue to tell this revisionist history of Katrina. We’ll deal with this shortly, but before we do that and in order to set the stage for our response, we will now be the ones to take a detour into another crisis to watch how a nation behaved. We’ll address AR-15s, catastrophies and totalitarian governments, but for now let’s briefly revisit the fall of the Berlin wall, the role of one church, and the actions of the East Gernam Army.
OathKeepers has an interview with Lt. Colonel Gunter Spens, in which he describes the fact that the East German Army simply refused to obey orders to stop the protests at the wall and stayed on base. True enough for part of the story, and as much as I admire Oath Keepers, it isn’t as simple as this and there is more to the story. This is the church that brought down the wall.
In the GDR, atheism was the norm. Churches like St. Nikolai were spied on but allowed to remain open.
“In the GDR, the church provided the only free space,” Fuhrer said in an interview with Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly. “Everything that could not be discussed in public could be discussed in church, and in this way the church represented a unique spiritual and physical space in which people were free.”
In the early 1980s, Fuhrer began holding weekly prayers for peace.
Every Monday, worshippers recited the Beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount. Few came at first, but attendance grew as the Soviet Union began opening to the West.
The prayer service, Fuhrer said, “was something very special in East Germany. Here a critical mass grew under the roof of the church — young people, Christians and non-Christians, and later, those who wanted to leave (East Germany) joined us and sought refuge here.”
As a college student in those years, Sylke Schumann was one of the hundreds, then thousands, who joined the vigils in the sanctuary at St. Nikolai and then marched in the streets holding candles and calling for change.
“Seeing all these people gather in this place … from week to week and more and more people gathering, you had the feeling this time really the government had to listen to you,” Schumann said.
In October 1989, on the 40th anniversary of the GDR, the government cracked down.
Protesters in Leipzig were beaten and arrested. Two days later, St. Nikolai Church was full to overflowing for the weekly vigil. When it was over, 70,000 people marched through the city as armed soldiers looked on, but did nothing.
And even this report doesn’t tell the whole story. I was a member of a church during this time that received regular (underground) reports from East German churches about the events of that era. When society has rejected God and embraced totalitarianism, the men can become lovers of power or drunkards and whore chasers. Not all men do, but many succumb to this fate.
But oftentimes the women – mothers and grandmothers who want their children to be raised with a sense of morality and the knowledge of God – toe the line. Secretly they teach their children. Their children learn to love their mothers and the instruction, and like ticking time bombs that explode later in life, that instruction proves determinative.
And toe the line the women did. The crowds were heavily populated with mothers and grandmothers, and the boys who populated the East German Army remembered their instruction. They wouldn’t discharge their weapons at their own blood, and whether it was the instruction in underground churches or the simple fact that the boys wouldn’t kill their mothers or mothers of colleagues, no rounds were fired. It had little to do with orders to stay in garrison. If the East German Army had deployed (as some of them did), they would simply have watched as the wall fell without a shot.
Now, let’s return to the issue of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. Except for the horrible racist, Aryan gangs who abused the black folk, it was a veritable Shangri La indeed. Except for the white folk everyone would have gotten along just swimmingly. White Aryan gangs in the middle of New Orleans. You simply can’t make this up.
Except that this isn’t reality. Revisionist doesn’t even begin to describe that view. That view is an outright fabrication and falsehood. A more accurate and honest accounting shows how rough the time was.
In the City of Vultures, a New Zealander is one of the few remaining police officers who has stayed behind to protect the helpless.
James Gourlie, 30, formerly of Christchurch, is one of six officers who have remained out of a district force of 200.
“This is my district. I will not abandon my district, my county, my workmates or these people,” he told the Herald On Sunday last night.
Mr Gourlie was speaking while preparing for another night patrol from the Hampton Inn, which he and fellow officers took over after their police station was overrun. For its single entrance, and the war zone outside, they have dubbed the hotel “The Fortress”.
It’s been six days and five nights of lawlessness since Hurricane Katrina hit. In the vacuum left by Katrina, anarchy has reigned. Human vultures have preyed on the helpless, pillaging homes and shops, committing murder and rape.
The decision to stay while hundreds of fellow officers fled has left them bitter. Mr Gourlie returned after getting his American wife Jennifer out of New Orleans.
When one fellow officer and friend pulled out for Texas on Friday, taking two automatic rifles and a shotgun, he earned his colleagues’ anger.
“They’re preserving their lives but they’re risking their friends,” said Mr Gourlie, of the “cowards” who have left. “You know what the New Zealand and Australian way is – and that ain’t the Anzac way. You sacrifice yourself for your mates.”
There are incidents every day involving weapons, although Mr Gourlie is thankful he has not yet had to shoot anyone. The times the officers have intervened, those desperate for help have wept and offered thanks.
A fellow officer was killed after warning looters away from a store. A looter pushed a gun against his head and pulled the trigger. “It was heartbreaking to see this police officer lying on his back, blood pouring out of his head.”
There are gangs of armed thugs in the convention centre. One young hood the officers pulled up was carrying a civilian version of a military M-16 rifle.
“There’s shooting. The thugs inside, they have come outside. They are running up and down, disturbing people with impunity. They know we can’t cross the road and engage them because we don’t know where their cohorts are. We are so vastly outnumbered, especially at night,” said Mr Gourlie.
There has also been murder and rape. In one awful case, a 15-year-old girl had suffered both, her body stuffed into an oven with her throat slit.
“I would expect something like this in a war zone in the Middle East. You’d be stupid not to be afraid. It’s how you face it that counts.”
The gangs in the centre have now destroyed the generators, and last night was the first Katrina’s survivors have spent without light. “That’s one of the reasons why people are so afraid today.”
I am certainly no admirer of Lindsey Graham. His criticism of Ted Cruz, Mike Lee and Rand Paul over their filibuster was petulant, and his friendship with John McCain shows that he wants to stay in power rather than hold government accountable. But from the mouth of the unexpected sometimes comes wisdom, even if by accident.
Unfortunately like the author says, Ameica is indeed like this concerning violence and danger, even if his intended target – white gangs – is a fabrication of his imagination. And during this period of peril for the citizens of New Orleans did the National Guard keep order? No, to their everlasting shame they spent their time confiscating weapons from law abiding citizens.
And yet, the National Guard had no evidence that New Orleans wouldn’t devolve into something like the L.A. riots, leaving people helpless and defenseless.
America as we have know it is dead. It is no more. The cities are violent and the government totalitarian. America is more bifurcated than it has ever been in history. Ninety million people are out of the labor force, and something approaching half of America pays no income tax. Keynesian economics has failed like a star burning out. The first medium size city has gone bankrupt, taking with it nearly one billion dollars in pensions for state workers. Note that this doesn’t include Medicare, Medicaid, food stamps, unemployment payments, welfare, social security or any other federal program. One billion dollars – just on state pensions, just with one medium size city.
While the states are going down, the federal government is working hard at making itself more totalitarian than before.
The ATF doesn’t just want a huge database to reveal everything about you with a few keywords. It wants one that can find out who you know. And it won’t even try to friend you on Facebook first.
According to a recent solicitation from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, the bureau is looking to buy a “massive online data repository system” for its Office of Strategic Intelligence and Information (OSII). The system is intended to operate for at least five years, and be able to process automated searches of individuals, and “find connection points between two or more individuals” by linking together “structured and unstructured data.”
Primarily, the ATF states it wants the database to speed-up criminal investigations. Instead of requiring an analyst to manually search around for your personal information, the database should “obtain exact matches from partial source data searches” such as social security numbers (or even just a fragment of one), vehicle serial codes, age range, “phonetic name spelling,” or a general area where your address is located. Input that data, and out comes your identity, while the computer automatically establishes connections you have with others.
Many other specific requirements are also to be expected for a federal law enforcement agency: searching names, phone numbers, “nationwide utility data” and reverse phone searches. The data will then be collected to help out during investigations and provide “relevant information and intelligence products.”
To do this and similar things they are spending the wealth of your children and children’s children. Ben Bernanke is trying ever so hard to keep hyperinflation under control and interest rates low in order to keep the deficit from exploding, but sooner or later America’s unfunded liabilities will come due and no amount fiat money will suffice. Fractional reserve banking will prove to people when hard times hit that their money doesn’t exist and cannot be withdrawn from their accounts. It’s just a waiting game, because the system cannot be saved.
The American experiment – subtended by wealth redistribution, race baiting, totalitarianism and the creation of taker class that leeches off of workers – is over. It has been replaced by Fabian socialism. But all is not lost. America will be reborn in a different form. Hard times are approaching, and there are some salient and hard questions that are a function of those hard times.
Will police, soldiers and Marines raise their weapons against American civilians? The Louisiana National Guard did. To each and every officer, soldier and Marine I tell you, you’d better not. God will condemn you for it. Your orders must be legal and moral to require your fealty, and notwithstanding the [il]legality of such an order, it would be immoral. Will you confiscate weapons if so ordered? You’d better not – God will condemn you for it. Each man lives his appointed days, and then he will face judgment. Do not face God having removed means of legitimate protection of the family. And do not face God having been the stooge for a tyrant. It matters little how long you live. It matters much how you live, and how you perish.
To parents, you must teach your children and instill in them a reverence for and love of liberty. Even for the old among us, you may very well end up training the very men who would otherwise be your tyrants, but who will remember their upbringing instead. Mothers and grandmothers, you essentially saved the day in East Germany. Don’t underestimate your role. Teaching the children is the most important job on earth.
Men, don’t be naive. God apparently granted a special dispensation to East Germany for a bloodless coup. It won’t happen that way anywhere else. The National Guard in many states has already shown that they will assist totalitarianism. The race riots in Los Angeles were nothing compared to what it will be like in the event of an economic collapse in America.
Teach the children. Defend the family. It isn’t just a right, it’s your God-given duty. And never, ever relinquish your weapons. That would be as immoral as the actions of totalitarians in confiscation. You shall not cooperate with the totalitarians and be approved by God. Never give up. God is on your side.
