I was noticing the nice, new weapon this Syrian jihadist was toting around, and especially that high powered glass he is sporting.

If I was a Muslim jihadist, who has vowed to slaughter Christians once the U.S. “liberates” Syria and who likes to kill babies, maybe I could get some of that U.S. taxpayer love Obama has promised.

Instead, I’m a Christian.  But I sure would like to have another gun and some high powered glass, so I’ll have to work and pay for mine myself rather than use U.S. handouts.  Somebody has actually got to work and hold down a job these days.

Business Insider:

Bad idea: holding up a store clerk who happens to be proficient in firearms.

Worse idea: holding up a store clerk who is not only proficient in firearms, but who also happens to be an Iraq war veteran and a former prison guard and private investigator.

Jon Lewis Alexander, 54, is no ordinary store clerk. He has worked several “high risk” jobs and served four tours of duty in Iraq during his 30 years in the U.S. military.

And his training shows.

Video surveillance from Saturday night captures the moment a would-be thief entered the Marionville, Mo., store where Alexander works. The thief hesitates for a moment and pulls a gun — but not fast enough to dissuade Alexander from pulling his own Walther PPX 9 mm handgun and sticking it in the hapless thief’s mouth.

[ … ]

Alexander said the man walked in smoking a cigarette, which he was promptly told to put out. The thief then reached for his gun and demanded “all the (expletive deleted) money,” News-Leader.com reports.

The veteran reacted quickly, throwing down the thief’s arm. Alexander then drew his own weapon and, according to the report, threatened to “blow his (expletive deleted) head off.”

Pistol at his side, the thief backed away slowly and then bolted from the store. The store clerk remembers being amused by the fact that he “didn’t even bother holstering his weapon.”

Seriously.  In the dude’s mouth.  “Here boy.  Taste the business end of the gun.”  On a serious note, he responded very quickly to the threat.  His actions were seamless, fast, determined and confident.  I hope I react the same way to any potential threat.

David Codrea:

Two women have been brutally gang raped “by a group of 10 to 12 black male juveniles” in a Wilmington, Del. park, CBS Philly reported yesterday. “According to police, the suspects, who range in age from 12 to 17-years-old, remain on the loose.”

Councilmember-at-large Maria Cabrera was quick to size up the content of their character and state the obvious.

“The new criminal we’re seeing, they’re bold, they’re brazen, and they have a total disregard for life,” Cabrera admitted.

Continue to read David’s piece to see what remedy Cabrera advocates (hint: it is ostensibly religious based, but since it relies on statist solutions her religion is collectivism).

I document instances of morally obscene advocacy for going to the extreme even of allowing your own children to be killed rather than take another life, which is presumably the opposite of statism but with the same theme of religious-based malfeasance concerning protection of man’s life.

A New Yorker gives us his view of gun control, and it’s worth reading.

“I tell the kid I don’t want no trouble. I open the door to start getting out. But then I make a big mistake. When he reaches through the window to grab my keys, I grab the keys before he can get them.

“He says, ‘I’m gonna pop you, man!’ I look into his eyes and they’re black as death. Then BOOM!

“The next thing I know, I wake hooked up to all kind of wires in the hospital and the doctor is telling me how lucky I am. The bullet hit me in the right shoulder and passed out the left armpit — just missing my heart.

“That was three years ago, but I’m OK now. I guess it wasn’t my time to go.”

I was spellbound by his story and the matter-of-fact way he told it, but his story grew more fascinating when he told me how he now is breaking the law to protect himself and his family.

“In New York,” he said, “the gun laws are so strict, the majority of people who have them are the criminals. Maybe if you’re a small-business owner or have some other valid reason for protecting yourself, you might get a permit to carry. But if you’re a regular guy like me, forget about it.

“But I live on the Brooklyn-Queens border, and in that part of town there’s only one way to protect yourself — you got to let the punks know you’re packing heat.

“So I bought myself a street gun that I carry with me everywhere. Lots of the decent people in my neighborhood are carrying illegal guns. It’s the only thing we can do.”

The fellow knew what he was talking about.

A Cato Institute study found that 60 percent of criminals would not attack if they knew a potential victim were carrying a gun.

That’s the end result of people who for whatever reason, religious based or otherwise, force common folk into a position of impotence when it comes to self defense.  People deal with the moral obscenity by ignoring the law, turning innocent people who want means of self defense into criminals.

This is what they do in New York, it’s what they do in Chicago, it’s what Ms. Cabrera advocates, it’s what some ignorant religious folk do, and it’s what the collectivists want.  And it’s morally obscene and they will be judged for it.

So let’s deal with objections right up front.  If chemical weapons aren’t adequate justification to attack Syria, then they weren’t justification to attack Iraq either.  Right.  And I didn’t agree with or support Operation Iraqi Freedom Phase I, while I did support OIF II and OIF III because I watched as 80-100 jihadists per month crossed the Syrian and Jordanian borders to fight us inside of Iraq, and because leaving would have had catastrophic consequences once the eggs were broken.  Briefly said, once there we had to stay and finish the job, however horrible it was.

But the horror of chemical weapons is being trotted out as justification for degrading Syrian capability to make those weapons, or deliver those weapons, or something.  It isn’t clear.  How that horror is different from what preceded it, I wonder?  Bashar Hafez al-Assad and his father before him were and are brutal dictators who rule by the use of fear.  Torture, beheadings, imprisonment of political opponents, assassinations and all manner of horror has been perpetrated on the Syrian people for many years.

And even now, anti-regime terrorists in Syria (our would-be allies) are actively working their horror (via Mike Vanderboegh).

Al-Qaeda linked terrorists in Syria have beheaded all 24 Syrian passengers traveling from Tartus to Ras al-Ain in northeast of Syria, among them a mother and a 40-days old infant.

Gunmen from the terrorist Islamic State of Iraq and Levant stopped the bus on the road in Talkalakh and killed everyone before setting the bus on fire.

According to media reports, the attack was carried out because the passengers who were from three different villages in Ras al-Ain, supported anti-terrorist Kurdish groups which were formed recently to defend Kurdish population against anti-Syria terrorists.

Bodies of a mother and her 40-days infant were also seen among the dead, which were recognized by their relatives.

So what about chemical weapons?  Michael Fumento gives us the straight scoop in a different context, i.e., the chlorine attacks in Fallujah, Iraq, in the spring of 2007.

Insurgents launched three more chlorine truck attacks in Al Anbar province on March 17, killing two and sickening an additional 350. Is this a disturbing new trend? No. Had those trucks been filled with high explosives, each could have killed around 100 people. Instead, combined, they killed two. Probably all those sickened will recover with little or no lasting damage, as opposed to losing limbs and eyes. Chemicals have never lived up to their reputation as weapons.

That’s why even though the Germans invented Sarin gas, which is vastly more deadly than chlorine, they decided not to use it. Hitler didn’t forego its use because he was a nice guy. Rather, his generals convinced him that high explosives are far more effective in causing deaths, not to mention that all the poison gas in the world can’t destroy material objects. That said, gas is a good terror weapon because most people have a more innate terror of being gassed than of being blown up or shot. But that’s primarily or exclusively because gas is such a rare threat. The more the terrorists use chlorine, the less the terror effect will be.

I remember this vividly since my son was deployed in Fallujah in 2007.  When the Marines finished taking over the industrial area of Fallujah from al Qaeda in the summer of 2007, they found many thousands of gallons of chlorine, all unused – unused because it was completely, tactically ineffective.  And I am on the record concurring with Michael’s assessment here and here.

If your desire is tactical effectiveness, you use conventional ordnance.  In other words, as horrible as it sounds, you blow people and things up.  And it is horrible, just as horrible as killing far fewer of them with chemical weapons.  And it is just as horrible as your supposed allies in Syria shooting and/or burning infants to death.

I have my own views of the administration’s case (or lack thereof) for any strategic value in Syria, but whatever else one may believe about the situation, the use of chemical weapons as justification for military action is either ignorant or disingenuous.

Matt Bracken is said to be a write of dystopian fiction, but more about this in a moment.  Western Rifle Shooter’s Association had a piece up publishing some of Matt’s most recent work, “Alas, Brave New Babylon.”  Matt’s story follows one man’s journey who intends to begin it by hiking part of the Appalachian Trail, but soon finds himself on a far different path than the one he intended.

In time, our friend finds himself gazing into the distance to see what signs of life were there.

The one-time history teacher turns reflective at one point and gives a dispassionate assessment of the causes or genesis of the collapse in which he finds himself.

Soon after the screens went black, the pharmacy-dispensed medications ran out as well, the cold-turkey withdrawal pouring more fuel on our raging social fires. Our Brave New World featured Huxley’s “Christianity without the tears,” until the Soma was gone. A gram is better than a damn, until there are no more grams left but plenty of damnation to go around—and people are damned mad when they’re starving.

If you ask me, looking back, our society went mad long before the Rupture. Who could honestly believe that modern first-world economies could continue to borrow half their annual operating costs from their own future generations, and from foreign banks and foreign governments that were likewise borrowing from their future generations? When in history has that sweetly delusional practice ever lasted more than a few generations before cracking up? Never, that I am aware of.

Frankly, for the rapidly diminishing minority of us left who were neither mathematically nor historically illiterate, the years before the Rupture were like living on the slopes of Vesuvius around AD seventy-something, while sniffing the stink of sulfur on the wind. What’s all that smoking and rumbling? a few of us asked. Smiling mainstream media news anchors answered: We’re not sure, but rest easy. Top government experts are studying it, and they will have a full report ready soon.

In the meantime, pop another Soma and switch back to Celebrity Nation. A gram is better than a damn, so why not make it two? Who needs old-fashioned morality when we have fashioned a brave new reality better suited to our own modern tastes? New and improved, by Ford! Just Google it. Remember Google? Gone with the wind.

I’m just a former world history teacher, but I believe that the edifice of Western Civilization was already rotten and hollowed out long before the final collapse—and it was an inside job by cultural traitors. The final toppling required only a light touch. By the end the Fabians’ disciples in politics and education had rendered Western man impotent, emasculated, ridiculed for his very maleness. Men were unneeded and unwanted by the brave new world’s brave new mommies.

And what of modern woman? Increasing numbers were too busy with their newly unleashed career opportunities and personal ambitions to have children. Or they were simply too busy partying through their fertile years to bother to produce a next generation.

I said that Matt was considered to be a dystopian fiction writer.  This is fiction, true enough, but it isn’t make-believe.  If you think this cannot happen, then you must believe that our unfunded liabilities don’t matter; that we can continue to print money to pay for the usury on our national debt; that we don’t need the gold standard; that half the nation can continue to bilk the other half of its wealth without consequences.

You must believe that those cities going bankrupt are just a fantasy, and surely there won’t be more to come; that Greece was just bad management by the financiers and governors; that regardless of what else happens, there will be an endless supply of electricity, gasoline, food, money, medical care and habitable domiciles.

You must believe that you can be your own God, making laws that comfort you while they dishonor your creator; and that at death your body cools to ambient temperature and you cease to exist.

And if you believe all of those things you are to be pitied.  Matt’s story is interesting, and perhaps in the future Matt will send me a pre-publication copy for review.  His prose is inspiring, fascinating, and completely mesmerizing.  It’s difficult to turn away from it, and that’s the end to which what any good writer aspires.

But belief in the false things that appear to be the cause of the rupture is pitiable not just because those things are wrong.  And wrong, they are.  The house of cards that is our monetary system will not last forever.  Greece will quickly turn into America, except on a much larger scale and longer timetable, when something sets off the disturbance and people figure out that their money isn’t really theirs.  That it isn’t really in the bank, isn’t really in paper form there in a vault on main street, and that the bank cannot hand it to them.

Fractional reserve banking means that in a run on the bank, the bank cannot give them 10 cents on the dollar because their money has been loaned out more ten times over, and the electronic money system contains many more dollars than really exists, or another way of saying it, contains as many dollars as the federal reserve wants it to contain.  But printing more money to fill the needs doesn’t work because that deflates the value of existing dollars and makes money worthless, thereby making the federal reserve worthless.  And thus, the horns of the dilemma are born.

So believe in false gods like Keynesian economics is only part of the sadness.  The worst of it, in my opinion, is that a man dies like he lives.  And die he will.  We won’t all remain vertical in any upcoming catastrophe, and even if we do, we won’t get out of this alive.  We will all die at some point, and it’s how we perish that’s important.  What did we believe, what did we do, how did we live, and how will we meet out maker?

And this makes Matt’s analysis of the genesis of the collapse – through the eyes of his character – even more important than what happens to the character.

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The book is Isaac Watts, “Logic: The Right Use Of Reason In The Inquiry After Truth,” with a nice note to me from R. C. Sproul.  The dog is Heidi, an 82 pound Doberman who worships me.  As you can see from the leather chair that she claims as her very own, she’s very uncomfortable and I abuse her regularly.  The gun is a .357 magnum S&W.