Category: Informational

Organic Prepper: All-Out Civil Unrest to Erupt?

Photo courtesy Newsweek

Daisy Luther at The Organic Prepper has a piece up about widespread unrest because of stay at home orders and economic carnage – Tempers Are Flaring Over Lockdown, Masks, and Money: Is All-Out Civil Unrest About to Erupt?

Across the nation, tempers are flaring over the continued lockdowns in many parts of America, and also on the requirement to wear masks in public. I wrote previously about the possibility of civil unrest over the lockdowns, and unfortunately, it appears that’s where we’re headed.

The longer the lockdowns are continued, the more likely it is that we are going to see violence erupt.

People seem unable or unwilling to respect the opinions of others with regard to COVID19, which has affected every family differently. Some are devastated by the loss of or risk to loved ones, while others are struggling to put food on the table and keep a roof over their heads. Others are rightfully concerned about the losses of liberty that we’re seeing. All of these concerns are valid, and not mutually exclusive.

Some violence has already occurred over mask requirements.

Just over the past couple of days, there were several disturbing incidences of violence when people refused to wear face masks in businesses that required it. Whether or not you think that you should be wearing masks, violence toward employees is not the answer. People working in retail just want to keep their jobs, and unfortunately, that sometimes leaves them in the vulnerable position of having to police customers who don’t want to comply with store policies.

A physical fight erupted at a gas station in Decatur, Illinois when a customer refused to don a mask to pay for his fuel. Sgt. Brian Earles with Decatur Police spoke to the press about the incident. It seems that a 59-year-old customer got into a verbal altercation with a 56-year-old cashier when he was trying to pay for gasoline without a mask, as is mandated by the state of Illinois. The customer allegedly shoved the cashier, who said he felt threatened, and the cashier responded by punching the customer in the face. The customer was arrested and charged with battery over the incident.

In Holly Michigan, a Dollar Tree customer refused to follow the posted store policy of wearing a mask. When a young female employee approached him and let him know of the policy he responded by saying, “Here, I will just use this as a mask,” and wiped his face on her sleeve. The customer continued to behave belligerently until he left. The entire incident was caught on store surveillance.

At a Family Dollar store in Flint, Michigan, the most violent response yet occurred when Calvin Munerlyn, a security guard for the store, was shot and killed after he refused to allow a customer’s daughter to come into the store without a mask.

Genesee County Prosecutor David Leyton said Sharmel Teague “began yelling at Munerlyn and spit at him and Munerlyn told her to leave the store and instructed a cashier not to serve her.”

Sharmel left the store. About 20 minutes later, she returned with two men who officials identified as Larry Teague and Ramonyea Bishop. The two men confronted Munerlyn, and Bishop shot Munerlyn in the back of the head, the prosecutor’s office said.

Bishop is Sharmel Teague’s son, the office said. (source)

Sharmel Teague and both men have been charged in Munerlyn’s death.

Anti-lockdown protests are spreading across the nation.

A lot of people aren’t formally protesting – they’re simply ignoring restrictions. Parks and beaches have been full of people who are sick of being stuck at home. Police officers are fed up with going out to break up crowds and enforce social distancing.

While some states are beginning to lift lockdowns, others are not. Protesters across the United States are demanding that restrictions be lifted. The Hill reports that protests are taking place in California, Colorado, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Tennessee, and Washington. There are also protests occurring in Massachusetts, Vermont, and Maine, as well as North Carolina.

Protests are scheduled this coming weekend in Oregon, Maine, Massachusetts, Nevada, Louisiana, and Wisconsin…(continues)

Click here to read the entire article at The Organic Prepper.

Raconteur Report: Remember These -Clowns?

Aesop at Raconteur Report is an anesthetist currently dealing with covid-19 patients. He has been commenting on the pandemic for weeks now and has become increasingly fed up with people’s ability to believe only what they want to in regards to the virus. In Remember These —Clowns? Aesop once again tackles the ridiculously incompetent viral interview by Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi from California who foolishly estimated a fatality rate of 0.03% for the virus based on their own inability to understand statistics. As previously noted, Aesop has been fed up for a few weeks, so his articles are liberally sprinkled with colorful epithets which may well be offensive to some.

…I asked four doctors at work this week about the (now banned) video; they’d all seen it, and I got three facepalms, and one double facepalm, by way of their thoughts on the content. The latter from someone who went to medical school with them. Emergency medicine is a very small pond, as it turns out.

But it also turns out I wasn’t the only one to see through their bullsh#t in about a minute.
Besides about a hundred YouTube and Twitter takedowns of their ascientific horsesh…er, rose fertilizer, everyone not wowed by their name-imprinted scrub tops has pretty much debunked every bit of malarkey they pimped last week. To the point that even the MSM has taken official notice of what legendary internet idiots they were:

(KQED) Drs. Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, co-owners of Accelerated Urgent Care, which offers Bakersfield’s only private walk-in COVID-19 testing site, held a press conference on April 22 to report their conclusions about COVID-19 test results. During the conference, broadcast on YouTube, the doctors said that 12% of Californians tested so far have been infected. Extrapolating that to the general population, they estimated that as many as 5 million Californians have likely contracted the virus. They then used the total number of COVID-19 deaths statewide (roughly 1,200, as of last week) to calculate a death rate of just 0.03% — similar to the average death rate from seasonal flu.

“Millions of cases, small amount of death,” Erickson stressed repeatedly during the press conference, saying fears about the virus were overblown and questioning the need for widespread quarantine measures.

But public health experts were quick to point out the major flaws in the doctors’ methodology – namely that only a tiny percentage of Californians have actually been tested, a group that is more likely to test positive and is not representative of the larger population.

They were also quick to debunk the doctors’ findings as misguided and riddled with statistical errors — and an example of the kind of misleading information they are forced to waste precious time disputing.

The doctors should never have assumed that the patients they tested — who came for walk-in COVID-19 tests or who sought urgent care for symptoms they experienced in the middle of a pandemic — are representative of the general population, said Dr. Carl Bergstrom, a University of Washington biologist who specializes in infectious disease modeling. He likened their extrapolations to “estimating the average height of Americans from the players on an NBA court.” And most credible studies of COVID-19 death rates are far higher than the ones the doctors presented.

“They’ve used methods that are ludicrous to get results that are completely implausible,” Bergstrom said.

In a rare statement late Monday, the American College of Emergency Physicians and the American Academy of Emergency Medicine declared they “emphatically condemn the recent opinions released by Dr. Daniel Erickson and Dr. Artin Messihi. These reckless and untested musings do not speak for medical societies and are inconsistent with current science and epidemiology regarding COVID-19. As owners of local urgent care clinics, it appears these two individuals are releasing biased, non-peer reviewed data to advance their personal financial interests without regard for the public’s health.”

Those who support continuing to shelter in place described the doctors as self-promoters whose chain of urgent care centers would benefit from reopening. Non-COVID medical visits have plummeted during the pandemic, they note, endangering the practices of many doctors.

“As struggling business owners, their economic frustration is understandable. But it can’t be mistaken for science. People trust doctors,” Michigan emergency room doctor Rob Davidson wrote on Twitter. “When they tell Fox viewers to ignore recommendations from real experts, many will believe them. … The impact of rejecting science-proven recommendations in exchange for these erroneous ideas would overwhelm health systems and cost lives. While re-opening the economy might be good for their Urgent Care Centers (sic), it would kill medical personnel on the actual front lines.”

Word to your mother: ACEP and AAME aren’t political organs, they’re professional organizations, representing not two urgent care doctors, but 31,000  and 37,000 (respectively) board-certified emergency room physicians, and they tend to stay apolitical. So when they tell you you’re full of sh#t, jointly, in public, in front of everyone, and make a special web page to make an example out of you and call you out as poster children for how not to do your job, it’s the equivalent of the Pope telling a priest he’d better re-think his doctrine, as the archbishops start pilling up bundles of kindling, straw, and wood around the priest’s feet.

The inside-baseball word is that these two wingnuts may have their board certifications challenged with BCEM, and have it pulled as a result of being this egregiously and publicly stupid. They’re concerned, based on video views before it was pulled, that the average person can’t tell the difference between these two jackasses, and any other ER doctor.

There are limits, it seems, to how big a jackass ACEP /AAEM will tolerate, and still allow someone to practice as a certified emergency doctor.

Which means business at those two idiots’ urgent care center is about to take an even bigger turn for the worse.

I’ve told you before, half of all doctors (nurses, veterinarians, and everyone else) graduated in the bottom half of their class. There’s no crime per se in that, but it also means their degree or license doesn’t trump everyone with more IQ points than they have, who subsequently points out their shortcomings. With a flamethrower.

But those of you desperate for anything to bolster a weak position probably shouldn’t so quickly latch onto guys willing to set themselves on fire, personally and professionally, just to tout conclusions based on something they mined from deep up their own hindquarters.
It never ends well, for anyone.

But it’s always fun to watch from the third-person perspective.

AIER: Why Didn’t the Constitution Stop This?

Robert Wright at the American Institute for Economic Research writes about Constitutional issues surrounding the pandemic and lockdown orders in Why Didn’t the Constitution Stop This?

constitution

The genius of the U.S. Constitution is that the Framers, especially James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, saw it as a constraint on bad policymaking. Given the number of really bad policies that various US governments and officials, from school boards to POTUS, have implemented, especially recently, it is high time to restore weakened or lost Constitutional restraints against arbitrary rule.

Five forces threaten Americans with destruction: 1) nature; 2) foreign powers; 3) the national government; 4) state and local governments; 5) themselves. The threat from 3, 4, and 5 is double-edged, meaning that Americans can be harmed by the actions of those forces as well as by their inaction.

The national government, for example, can harm Americans by being insufficiently prepared for natural catastrophes and foreign incursions, as with Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and the 9/11 attacks. It can also harm Americans, though, by doing too much, as with the invasion of Iraq and the way-too-long occupation of Afghanistan. (Relying too much on FEMA instead of states or private initiatives may be another example, but less clear cut than the needless wars.)

The national and state governments are supposed to check each other’s power, so that if one overreaches, the other can thwart it. We usually think about this in terms of “states’ rights” but in fact federalism, as the concept is sometimes called, runs both ways: the states should check the national government when necessary but the national government should also check the power of the states when they overreach, as they sometimes do.

Advocates of states’ rights often cite the Tenth Amendment, which reads in its entirety “The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.” Because the word “expressly” does not occur before “delegated” in the ratified version of the amendment, however, it is among the weakest parts of the Constitution.

Traditionally, though, the states retained primary control of so-called “police powers,” the powers that form the legal basis for the economic lockdowns that have imprisoned most Americans for over a month now. Books have been written about this stuff so obviously I cannot relate all the details and nuances involved but ultimately they matter little in the present case. The key point is that police powers, national, state, or local, do not provide carte blanche to governments. Specifically, the Constitution constrains state police powers in numerous ways.

Importantly, courts see Constitutional rights as tradeoffs between conflicting interests. So while the Constitution says that the national and state governments cannot infringe individual speech rights, they can pass laws that make it illegal for an individual, for example, to falsely yell “fire” in a crowded theater. The notion is that the property and natural rights of the theatergoers trump the free speech rights of the liar.

Similar restrictions apply to the right of assembly. All Americans have the right to assemble with other Americans for any lawful purpose but state police powers, the positive duty of states to protect the physical safety of assemblers and non-assemblers, mean that governments may restrict assemblies through permit systems.

Similar arguments are made to defend the pistol permit systems common in many states. They are bogus but show how far courts go to balance one person’s rights with those of others. If you believe that gun control laws should be followed because they are laws passed by democratically elected representatives you have missed the point of the Constitution, which, again, is to constrain policymakers, to protect individual Americans from the national and state governments and also other Americans.

Just because a majority wants some policy doesn’t mean that that policy is a good idea, after all. I imagine at one point in March 2020 a majority of Americans might have thought it a good idea to deport, tax, infect, or maybe even kill Chinese-Americans in order to make “them” pay for what “they” did to “us.” (I don’t want to link to evidence of that … just look at your social media feeds if you need evidence.) That is a typically ugly human reaction to trauma but one that would have been proven empirically wrong as well as morally bankrupt and economically inane (sunk costs). Thankfully, the Constitution remained strong enough to prevent that horror.

It did not, however, prove strong enough to prevent state governments from taking their police powers too far. They engaged in fancy word play to hide the fact that they acted without a shred of precedent. What they imposed is not a quarantine, which constrains the movement of sick people, nor a cordon sanitaire, which locks people into an afflicted area, nor a protective sequestration, which locks people out of an unafflicted area. Instead, they have implemented partial martial law (military rule essentially) by imprisoning Americans in their own homes without due process of law and stolen their property by shuttering their businesses. (Some recompense has been attempted but of course only bluntly and at a cost to all taxpayers, including those in states that did not shutter most businesses.)

Remember, just because a state has general police powers doesn’t mean it can do whatever it wants, whenever it wants, simply because its actions are popular, or passed into law, or urged by some scientist. Imagine, for example, if some executive thought everyone ought to drink bleach, crazy as that seems, and actually mandated it. Would you do it? (Hint: Don’t do it! Even if some guy in a suit or lab coat tells you that you must.) What if some leader believed that the coronavirus is spread primarily by clothing and mandated that we all go naked in public, except for our masks and gloves of course? Or if one thought an EMP (electromagnetic pulse) would solve the problem (and destroy all computers in the process)?

Any promulgation that violates the Constitution, in any way, shape, or form, is null and void. A federal judge has the authority to declare any state law or executive order unconstitutional and demand that it be revoked. Judges generally give governments broad leeway to protect “public health” but the policies must be rational and they must weigh the rights of all involved parties. Historically, many government epidemic responses never got litigated because the crises passed before suits could be brought and because quarantines, cordons, and sequestrations can make rational sense in specific situations. But, again, state governments for some reason have tried to combat the novel coronavirus with novel policies that come with huge negative side effects for everyone — workers, consumers, and taxpayers — and that have and will continue to cause deaths, minimization of which is the ostensible goal of lockdown policies.

Why draconian lockdown rules have not yet been deemed unconstitutional I still do not know, but the fact that a former federal judge who teaches at Harvard apparently does not know the difference between a quarantine and a lockdown might provide a clue…(continues)

Click here to continue reading at AIER.

Mises Institute: Bitcoin and the Theory of Money

It has been a while since we last ran a bitcoin article, but we certainly haven’t forgotten about it. With the economic woes gripping the world, the precarious place of the US dollar, and a lot of uncertainty about everything, gold has risen 12.8% year to date and thoughts turn to alternative money. Here’s Robert Murphy at Mises Institute with Bitcoin and the Theory of Money.

In a modern primer on money mechanics, it is necessary to provide at least an introduction to Bitcoin.1 Consequently, in this final chapter we will first give a basic explanation of what Bitcoin is and how it works. Then we will place Bitcoin in the framework of money that we developed in chapter 2, seeking to answer the fundamental question: Is Bitcoin money?” Finally, we will relate Bitcoin to an important component in the Austrian school’s discussion of money, namely Ludwig von Mises’s “regression theorem.”

Explaining Bitcoin with an Analogy2

“Bitcoin” encompasses two related but distinct concepts. First, individual bitcoins (lowercase b) are units of (fiat)3 digital currency. Second, the Bitcoin protocol (uppercase B) governs the decentralized network through which thousands of computers across the globe maintain a “public ledger”—known as the blockchain—that keeps a fully transparent record of every authenticated transfer of bitcoins from the moment the system became operational in early 2009. In short, Bitcoin encompasses both (1) an unbacked digital currency and (2) a decentralized online payment system.

Bitcoin

According to its official website: “Bitcoin uses peer-to-peer technology to operate with no central authority; managing transactions and the issuing of bitcoins is carried out collectively by the network.”4 Anyone who wants to participate can download the Bitcoin software to his or her computer and become part of the network, engaging in “mining” operations and helping to verify the history of transactions.

To fully understand how Bitcoin operates, one needs to learn the subtleties of public-key cryptography, which we briefly discuss in a later section. For now, we focus instead on an analogy that captures the economic essence of Bitcoin, while avoiding the need for new terminology.

Imagine a community where the money is based on the integers running from 1, 2, 3, … up through 21,000,000. At any given time, one person “owns” the number 8, while somebody else “owns” the number 349, and so on.

In this setting, suppose Bill wants to buy a car from Sally, and the price sticker on the car reads “Two numbers.” Bill happens to be in possession of the numbers 3 and 12. So Bill gives the two numbers to Sally, and Sally gives Bill the car. The community recognizes two facts: first, the title to the car has been transferred from Sally to Bill, and second, Sally is now the owner of the numbers 3 and 12.

Further suppose that in this fictitious community an industry of thousands of accountants maintains the record of ownership of the 21 million integers. Each accountant keeps an enormous ledger in an Excel file. The columns run across the top, from 1 to 21 million, while the rows record every transfer of a particular number. For example, when Bill bought the car from Sally, the accountants who were within earshot of the deal entered into their respective Excel files “Now in possession of Sally” in the next available row, in the columns for 3 and 12. In these ledgers, if we looked one row above, we would see “Now in the possession of Bill” for these two numbers, because Bill owned these two numbers before he transferred them to Sally.

Bitcoin Car Sale

Besides documenting any transactions that happen to be within earshot, the accountants also periodically check their own ledgers against those of their neighbors. If an accountant ever discovers that his neighbors have recorded transactions for other numbers (i.e., for deals for which the accountant in question was not within earshot), then the accountant fills in those missing row entries in the columns for those numbers. Therefore, at any given time, there are thousands of accountants, each of whom has a virtually complete history of all transactions involving all 21 million numbers…

Click here to read the entire article at Mises Institute.

Off Grid Ham: Small Solar Can Give Big Results

Chris Warren at Off Grid Ham has another good article up on small solar arrays for power, Small Solar Can Give Big Results…If You Play It Right.

Call now! Operators are waiting! small solar power

You’ve probably seen the campy ads hawking small solar power systems and “solar generators”. These ads make some remarkable claims and the manufacturers are deliberately vague on the technical specifications of these products. They further fuzz up the facts with unrealistic depictions of hypothetical situations. small solar power

I especially get a chuckle from the TV commercial showing happy, cheerful kids playing a board game in a large, well-lit house during a power outage and raging storm outside. The entire house is powered by, we’re supposed to believe, the advertised product which is a small battery pack weighing almost nothing and fits under the bed. Are small solar power systems worthwhile, or are they junk? As anyone with at least one functioning brain cell should suspect, the truth lies somewhere in the middle grey area.

Pictures are better than words. small solar power

This video was recently posted to the Off Grid Ham YouTube channel. It’s just over three minutes long and demonstrates the power of small scale solar.

Small scale solar has been addressed on this blog before, and my advice is still the same. If you are looking to take amateur radio off grid with solar, your best option is a purpose built home brew system made from components that you personally selected for your application. Furthermore, a DIY system is almost always less expensive. If you don’t care about cost and just want a plug-and-play “solar generator,” then by all means go drop several hundred dollars for a glorified battery in a box (you’ll lay out another few hundred on a matching panel to charge it). To be fair, it’s a very cool looking box but in the end you’re only paying for looks so in that regard you’re getting your money’s worth. small solar power

I’m not knocking the functionality of these products. They actually do work very well if used within reasonable expectations. I’m sour on them because of their breathtaking price tags and marketing that vastly oversells their capabilities. The ads are targeted to non-technical people who will not bother or know to ask the right questions. The technically-savvy people who know what to look for will have a hard time finding even basic specifications such as amp-hour ratings on batteries. The information is usually dumbed down with generic statements like, “runs a laptop for twelve hours!” small solar power

The bottom line: They work, if you keep it real.

small solar power

Off Grid Ham original photo ©2017

The bottom line is that small solar power systems do work, up to a point. Forget about powering your house through a storm with anything that will fit under a bed, unless there is physics-defying alien technology out there I haven’t heard of yet. But if you need to run a QRP radio, charge up your handhelds, and have some juice leftover for other needs, a little 50-150 watt solar setup paired with a modest battery should suit the job just fine. And you don’t need to plop down six hundred-plus dollars to do it.

In the video a continuous 50 watt load is easily supported by the small system. It gets better: The system in the video is overbuilt for a 50 watt load. I used it for demonstration purposes, but you could get by with much less…(continues)

Click here to read the entire article at Off Grid Ham.

The Prepared Homestead: Coronavirus – Six Actions You Should Be Taking Now

The Prepared Homestead has a video out talking about six steps that you should taking right now in regards to the pandemic and resultant/simultaneous supply chain/economic problems. He covers (1) sizing up the situation, (2) scenario development – best, most likely, worst case, (3) taking stock of your financial situation, (4) topping off supplies, (5) growing some of your own food, (6) working on your health. Much of one and two will be familiar to you if you’ve taken or read Forward Observer‘s SHTF Intelligence or Area Study book/classes.

Alt-Market: The Next 60 Days

Brandon Smith at Alt-Market writes about the Pandemic and Economic Collapse: The Next 60 Days.

The news cycle moves so quickly these days writing analysis on current events becomes difficult; the moment you publish an examination of the situation people have already moved on to the next disaster. So, today I’m not going to do that. Instead, let’s look at current trends and project what is likely to happen in the next couple of months. In my article ‘How The Pandemic Crisis Will Probably Develop Over The Next Year’ published in early March, I outlined what I believed would be the major developments on a longer timetable. Some of these predictions have already occurred.

Now I would like to tackle a shorter timetable and focus more specifically on the economic side of things, along with the effects of government lockdowns and how they will continue. Yes, that’s right, if you think the “reopening” of the economy is going to be widespread, or that it will last, don’t get your hopes up. I am using a 60 day model because I have observed that the average non-aware person appears to be about two months behind those of us in the liberty movement in terms of seeing the dangers ahead.

First and foremost, the lockdown issue is on almost everyone’s mind, and as I’ve been saying for the past month, it would not take long before people start freaking out about their financial prospects once they realize this thing may not be over “in two weeks” as we keep hearing every two weeks from the mainstream media, state governments and Donald Trump. The “two weeks until reopen” mantra is designed to keep the public placated and docile, and the establishment will continue to use it until people are finally fed up, which is already beginning to happen.

Lockdown protests are sparking up across the country and it’s only going to get worse from now on. Understand though that establishment elites probably expected this, especially in the US, and they are planning to use civil unrest to their advantage.

Do not be surprised if some areas of the country do indeed “reopen” next month, but expect these locations to be primarily rural. Do NOT count on first and second tier cities to reopen, at least nowhere near the activity that they had previous to the viral outbreak. In fact, while rural towns try to go back to normalcy, many major cities will probably double down and increase restrictions rather than loosen them.

Why do I think this will happen? I’ve noticed an odd narrative being pushed in the mainstream media lately that has me concerned. The MSM is aggressively promoting the notion that rural states and counties are about to be crushed by the coronavirus, and looser restrictions in these places are “a danger to everyone”.

Now, if you read between the lines in this propaganda, what I see is not the media reporting on what is happening now, but what they expect to happen soon. In my area of Montana there is no community spread of the virus, and this is common to many parts of rural America. However, what if rural towns reopen while large metropolitan areas remain closed for business? Unless travel restrictions are instituted, expect a FLOOD of city dwellers to pour into rural areas looking for a taste of freedom and some open bars and restaurants.

If your small town is within 1-2 hours drive of a large city, get ready for a parade of yuppies on mainstreet looking for a vacation from lockdown.

This in itself is not a big deal. If people want to drive from the city to spend money in small town America then that’s a benefit to struggling rural communities (and a bizarre 180 degree shift from the norm). But here is what I think will happen next:

After about two weeks of reopening, small towns across the US will have a massive spike in infection numbers and community spread. Viral clusters will develop and some people will die. Does this mean our economy should be frozen to the point of collapse or that medical martial law is the answer? No, absolutely not. But the media is already gearing up for the big “we told you so”, and as rural infections skyrocket state governments and the federal government will start calling for renewed lockdowns even more harsh than before.  The rest of the world will say “that’s what those Americans (conservative Americans) get for being selfish and trying to reopen too soon”.

The economy cannot be opened one piece at a time, it has to be opened all at once. Otherwise, you are going to get a huge influx of people to reopened regions and an inordinate amount of infection cases will follow in those areas, exaggerating the spread of the virus.  Of course, a full reopening of the nation is not going to happen.

Get ready for a great big fake wrestling match between state governments and Trump in terms of how to handle ending lockdowns. Take note though that Trump flip-flops so much on state power vs. executive power that no one actually knows where he really stands on the issue; this is by design…(continues)

Click here to read the entire article at Alt-Market.

Tri-Cities Potato and Onion Giveaway, May 1st

From KNDU news:

As local farmers are seeing an abundance of crops due to the COVID-19 pandemic, they need to give away some to the community.

Farmers are told to keep their crops as trading with other countries has somewhat stopped as COVID-19 fears mount.

The Tri-Cities farming community will come together Friday, May 1st for a potato and onion giveaway for those who need food assistance.

The owners of AgriNorthwest and Rover Point Farms have teamed up with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints to host multiple potato and onion drive-thru giveaways for free.

They are located at the following locations:

2004 N. 24th Ave, Pasco

820 S. Buntin, Kennewick

5885 Holly Way, West Richland

Volunteers will open these locations at noon and will remain open until supplies last.

For more information you can reach out to justservetc@gmail.com.

Forward Observer: Leveraging HUMINT Sources

Intelligence Analyst Sam Culper of Forward Observer continues writing about human intelligence (HUMINT) — see part one here — and how to exploit it for better decision making in Frontline Intelligence: Leveraging HUMINT Sources.

I continue to pick my way through Frontline Intelligence (1946), guide for new intelligence officers. One of the key responsibilities of an S2 during World War II was to gather information from friendly units. Your job as the Neighborhood S2 is no different.

“Every soldier, not just those designated as reconnaissance or Intelligence personnel, should provide the maximum information [possible]… [They should] know what you want, [should] keep their eyes and ears open, and when they find out anything [should] immediately report it.”

 

As the Neighborhood S2, it’s important that the members of your preparedness group, community security team, or neighborhood watch know what our requirements are. They have to know what has intelligence value and what they should be reporting about crime, violence, suspicious activity, etc. Additionally, they should understand how to report this information to you: phone call, email, face to face, etc.

In the Army, we used to say, “Every soldier is a sensor.” Well, every person in your group should also be a sensor and understand that they’re a sensor.

The authors continue with this advice: talk to as many soldiers as possible, explain what information you want, why you need to know it, and how it will be used to benefit the troops. “Only in this way will you ever overcome the two main stumbling blocks to troop collection of information, namely: inertia and preoccupation.”

One of the problems we encountered in Iraq and Afghanistan is what we called “the stovepipe of excellence” (because everything in the Army is “of excellence.”) Like smoke through a stovepipe, intelligence information would be pushed up from subordinate units to higher commands, but often the finished intelligence would never make it back down to the lowest levels. That in turn kept a lot of soldiers in the dark, and they often didn’t understand why it was necessary for them to report up information. They thought their efforts were useless and they were less interested in continuing to report.

The authors solved this intelligence problem as early as 1946, but it’s a lesson forgotten by many today. Don’t forget this important lesson as a Neighborhood S2.

Engage the members of your preparedness group, community security team, or neighborhood watch. Get them to understand what has intelligence value (i.e., what are your intelligence gaps?), and why reporting that information is critical. Don’t hide your conclusions from those who contributed to them. Finish that loop, so to speak. The more they understand what’s going on, the more likely it is that they’ll know where they fit in the process, and the more engagement and cooperation you’ll get from them.

The authors also point to training as a part of the solution. “The average soldier is apathetic toward all extra chores and particularly so to any which do not appear to him to be immediately and vitally essential… In battle men do most things by reflex. The things they are properly trained to do they will do automatically. It should be automatic for all seasoned troops to look for the right enemy information, and to tell the right people about it promptly.”

This means we have to invest our time and effort into our sensors, whether they’re frontline troops, our neighbors, or community members. You must develop in them a mindset geared towards recognizing information of intelligence value at all times, and then passing that on to you.

One of the largest challenges you’re going to face in organizing a local intelligence network is developing this mindset in other people. And maybe this applies to you, too. Most people are just not accustomed to being ‘turned on’ to the nuances of their environment…(continues)

Click here to read the entire article at Forward Observer.

Rural Revolution: Were Stoics on to Something?

Patrice Lewis of Rural Revolution writes about finding happiness in virtue and rejecting unhealthy passions in Were Stoics on to Something?

After a lifetime of hearing virtually nothing about the philosophy of stoicism, suddenly I’m seeing articles about it everywhere.

Stoicism, as you may know, is a school of philosophy founded in ancient Greece in the 3rd century B.C. by Zeno of Citium. Famous adherents include Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius.

According to the Daily Stoic, “The philosophy asserts that virtue (such as wisdom) is happiness, and judgment should be based on behavior rather than words. That we don’t control and cannot rely on external events, only ourselves and our responses. … Stoicism doesn’t concern itself with complicated theories about the world, but with helping us overcome destructive emotions and act on what can be acted upon. It’s built for action, not endless debate.” (This website also offers nine exercises for developing stoicism.)

The philosophy is a lot more complicated than that, but you get the gist.

So why, after a lifetime of barely hearing a peep about this philosophy, am I seeing stoicism get so much coverage? I’m sure the timing — coming as the globe shuts down over the coronavirus pandemic — is no coincidence. Now that life has suddenly become very complicated, I suppose stoicism may offer ways to handle those complications.

The concept of “It’s not how you feel, it’s how you behave” is a new and possibly difficult philosophy for many people to abide by. Our modern society teaches us emotions and feeeeelings are paramount. Every little perceived microaggression must be treated as earth shattering and personal. We are literally enshrining emotions (hurt feeeeeelings) into law.

But with so much now out of our control, maybe the stoics are onto something.

This article, for example, recommends stoicism for anger management: “Seneca thought that anger is a temporary madness, and that even when justified, we should never act on the basis of it because, though ‘other vices affect our judgment, anger affects our sanity: others come in mild attacks and grow unnoticed, but men’s minds plunge abruptly into anger. … Its intensity is in no way regulated by its origin: for it rises to the greatest heights from the most trivial beginnings.'”

Or, as Marcus Aurelius put it, “Choose not to be harmed and you won’t feel harmed. Don’t feel harmed and you haven’t been.” (In other words, anger is a choice.)

The author recommends behaving like a rock when insulted. “Stand by a rock and insult it, and what have you accomplished? If someone responds to insult like a rock, what has the abuser gained with his invective?” This way, the insulter can be “livid with rage” while the insultee can retain his serenity. (This author also offers tips on how to keep from getting angry.)

In another article, the writer points out two foundational principles of stoicism: “The first is that some things are within our control and some are not, and that much of our unhappiness is caused by thinking that we can control things that, in fact, we can’t. What can we control? Epictetus argues that we actually control very little. We don’t control what happens to us, we can’t control what the people around us say or do, and we can’t even fully control our own bodies, which get damaged and sick and ultimately die without regard for our preferences. The only thing that we really control is how we think about things, the judgements we make about things.”

The second principle is: “It’s not things that upset us, but how we think about things. Stuff happens. We then make judgements about what happens. If we judge that something really bad has happened, then we might get upset, sad, or angry, depending on what it is. If we judge that something bad is likely to happen then we might get scared or fearful. All these emotions are the product of the judgements we make. Things in themselves are value neutral, for what might seem terrible to us might be a matter of indifference to someone else, or even welcomed by others. It’s the judgements we make that introduce value into the picture, and it’s those value judgements that generate our emotional responses. … Another Stoic strategy is to remind ourselves of our relative unimportance. The world does not revolve around us.” …(continues)

Click here to continue reading at Rural Revolution.

16th Leg. Dist. Republicans Open Letter to People of Benton County

The Benton County Republicans for the 15th Legislative District have written an open letter to the people of Benton County about the county commissioners and their saying that they have no authority to resist the governor’s stay at home orders. The letter reads, in part:

…Shon Small, Jerome Delvin, and James Beaver made the statement “The Benton County Board of Commissions does not have the legal authority to override the Governor’s ‘Stay Home, Stay Healthy’ proclamation…” The Commissioners’ job is to oversee the county and also, we firmly assert, to protect the citizens from overreach of power by the capital. All three of our Commissioners are either willfully ignorant or just negligent in their role…

It is time to get business’s open and the people back to work. We firmly believe that every
person in Benton County is essential. We know there are veritable public health concerns and
those who ought to stay home, can chose to do so. The working people of Benton County
know what is best for them, not the Governor’s boot-licking Commissioners, whose income
rolls in whether they work or not. It’s time the Commissioners earn their paycheck and protect
the good and hard working people of Benton County from the bureaucratic double speak of
Olympia. The woes of King and Pierce County are not the identical worries of Benton
County; we are a different demographic, climate, economy, and culture. The citizens of this
community possess an undeniable right to make decisions autonomously from our State
government; to tailor our county government to serve the people of this area as is fitting to the
citizenry of this particular locality. Top down, authoritarian mandates from the capital are ‘one
size, fits the capital alone’ decisions – they are made without a thought of us here! We are
calling on the Commissioners to do what is prudent for Benton County; they are elected to a
very well compensated position, as a public servant, and ought to conduct themselves
accordingly…

Click here to download the letter in PDF format.

Liberty Blitzkrieg: Chinagate Is the New Russiagate

Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg writes about the current nonsense of blaming China for the US (and other countries’) lack of preparedness and the reasons behind it (dodging responsibility for incompetence by local, state, and federal politicians and bureaucrats, coupled with the need to extend the national security state and the flow of spice money). Who didn’t see China lockdown a few hundred million people and think, “Whoa, this looks serious” — apparently politicians. They must have just thought, “I wish I could do that.” Chinagate Is the New Russiagate.

I’ve become convinced the next major event that’ll be used to further centralize power and escalate domestic authoritarianism will center around U.S.-China tensions. We haven’t witnessed this “event” yet, but there’s a good chance it’ll occur within the next year or two. Currently, the front runner appears to be a major aggressive move by China into Hong Kong, but it could be anything really. Taiwan, the South China Sea, currency, economic or cyber warfare; the flash points are numerous and growing by the day. Something is going to snap and when it does we better be prepared to not act like mindless imbeciles for the fourth time this century.

When that day arrives, and it’s likely not too far off, certain factions will try to sell you on the monstrous idea that we must become more like China to defeat China. We’ll be told we need more centralization, more authoritarianism, and less freedom and civil liberties or China will win. Such talk is nonsense and the wise way to respond is to reject the worst aspects of the Chinese system and head the other way.

– From my 2019 piece: Two Paths Forward with China – The Good and The Bad

As the clownish farce that is Russiagate slinks back into the psyop dumpster from which it emerged, an even more destructive narrative has metastasized following the U.S. government’s incompetent response to covid-19.

It was clear to me from the start that Russiagate was a nonsensical narrative wildly embraced by a variety of powerful people in the wake of Trump’s election merely to serve their own ends. For establishment Democrats, it was a way to pretend Hillary Clinton didn’t actually lose because she was a wretched status quo candidate with a destructive track record, but she lost due to “foreign meddling.” This allowed those involved in her campaign to deflect blame, but it also short-circuited any discussion of the merits of populism and widespread voter dissatisfaction (within both parties) percolating throughout the land. It was a fairytale invented by people intentionally putting their heads in the sand in order to avoid confrontation with political reality and to keep their cushy gravy-train of entrenched corruption going.

Russiagate was likewise embraced by the national security state (imperial apparatus) for similar reasons. Like establishment Democrats, the national security state also wanted to prevent the narrative that the status quo was rejected in the 2016 election from spreading. It was incentivized to pretend Hillary’s loss was the result of gullible Americans being duped by crafty Russians in order to manufacture the idea that U.S. society was healthy and normal if not for some external enemy.

Another primary driver for the national security state was to punish Russia for acting like a sovereign state as opposed to a colony of U.S. empire in recent years. Russia has been an increasingly serious thorn in the side of unipolarism advocates over the past decade by performing acts such as buying gold, providing safe harbor for Edward Snowden, and thwarting the dreams of regime change in Syria. Such acts could not go unpunished.

So Russiagate served its purpose. It wasted our time for much of Trump’s first term and it helped prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the Democratic nomination. Now we get Chinagate.

When the premier empire on the planet starts blaming external enemies for its internal problems, you know it’s almost always an excuse to let your own elites off the hook and further erode civil liberties. While it appears the novel coronavirus covid-19 did in fact come from China, and China tried to discourage other countries from taking decisive action in the early days, our internal political actors blaming China for their own lack of preparation and timely reaction is patently ridiculous.

If Stacy and myself were able to see the situation clearly and respond early, why couldn’t our government? This isn’t rocket science. The Chinese were acting as if the world had ended in cities across the country and we’re supposed to believe U.S. leaders simply listened to what the CCP was saying as opposed to what they were doing? How does that make any sense?

It makes even less sense considering the Trump administration has been in an explicit cold war with China for almost two years. This concept that the American national security state just took China’s word for what was going on in the early days is preposterous. So what’s going on here? Similar to Russiagate, the increased focus on directing our ten minutes of hate at the Chinese provides cover for the elites, but Chinagate is far more dangerous because the narrative will prove far more convincing for many Americans…(continues)

Click here to continue reading at Liberty Blitzkrieg.

Citizens Journal: Boost Your Immune System, Too

In Karen Selick’s article Coronavirus Crisis Reopens 150-Year-Old Controversy at Citizens Journal, she reminds us that there is another side to fighting viruses besides just avoiding the virus itself, i.e. you can boost your body’s ability to fight off viruses by improving your immune system.

…French scientist Louis Pasteur (1822-1895) is widely celebrated as “the father of germ theory”— the idea that we become sick when our bodies are invaded by foreign organisms such as bacteria, molds, fungi, and of course viruses. Although the idea had been circulating long before Pasteur achieved eminence, his laboratory work in the 1860s appeared to provide the scientific proof that had previously been missing.

What’s not widely known is that other French scientists working in the same field in that era held somewhat different beliefs, known as the “terrain theory”. They believed that the most important factor that determines whether or not a person becomes ill is not the presence of a germ, but rather the preparedness of the body’s internal environment (the “soil” or terrain) to repel or destroy the germ…

But regardless of Pasteur’s character, and regardless of whether he recanted at the end or not, what lives on after him is the mindset, clearly visible amongst most of today’s medical professionals and health care bureaucrats, that it is the germ (formally designated SARS-CoV-2) that has to be tracked down, isolated, avoided, and eradicated—and that’s all that matters. The “terrain”, to conventional modern thinkers, is nothing.

For instance, on the Ontario government’s website telling its citizens what to do about COVID-19, its advice consists entirely of measures designed to prevent people from coming in contact with the virus: stay home, wash your hands often, don’t touch your face, maintain physical distancing and wear a mask when you have to go out.

No mention is made of any measures individuals can take to ensure their immune systems are operating at peak efficiency (or as the French scientists would have put it, their terrain is well prepared to mount a defence). It’s almost as though the Ontario government doesn’t believe human beings have immune systems or that they’re of any use whatsoever. The only hope, Ontario seems to believe, is for a pharmaceutical company to patent a vaccine, because that is the only way that human beings can defend themselves against a virus, or acquire immunity.

In fact, Ontario and Canada have gone out of their way to discourage people from looking for methods of helping themselves. Ontario’s website says “there is no specific treatment” for COVID-19. End of story. Canada’s government-owned broadcasting company, the CBC, recently published this article denouncing “bogus cures” including vitamin C, zinc, medicinal mushrooms and oil of oregano.Vitamin D3, Zinc and M…Jeffers, NancyBest Price: nullBuy New $6.98(as of 03:40 EST – Details)

This official attitude is utter nonsense—there is actually an abundance of scientific evidence supporting various nutritional supplements as being instrumental in preparing people’s immune systems to repel or overcome viral infections.

Take zinc, for example. Many COVID-19 patients have mentioned as symptoms the loss of their senses of smell and taste. According to the BBC, these symptoms affects as many as 18 percent of infected patients. This CNN article says that some people  will take days or weeks to recover these senses after having the virus, while others may take months or years.

But the loss of these senses is a well-established symptom of zinc deficiency, a fact not mentioned in either of the two articles cited, and apparently not known to most of the mainstream medical community. Yet here is a PubMed study connecting zinc deficiencies with “smell and taste disturbances”. Here’s one specifically connecting “older patients” with zinc deficiencies and loss of acuity in the senses of taste and smell. Both of these studies also mention that zinc deficiencies lead to impaired immune function or an increased risk of infection. Can medical “experts” and governments not connect the dots?

Vitamin D is another nutrient (a hormone, actually) well recognized by scientists to have antiviral benefits. Google Scholar lists 3,670 research reports published in 2020 alone containing the words “vitamin D” and “virus”…(continues)

Click here to continue reading at Citizens Journal.

John Mosby on Pandemic

John Mosby of Mountain Guerrilla has been writing about Covid-19 for his Patreon subscribers for a few weeks, now. While he acknowledges the uncertainties, he tries to point out the things than you can/should act on regardless of other uncertainties. His articles on the topic are long, and the following is just a small excerpt. The most useful parts are on his Patreon and are worth a read.

…I hinted at it above, but further issues with this virus are coming to light. Among these is the already known/suspected possibility of reinfection, due to inadequate antibody production. In at least one study I’ve seen, of the test results that came back positive for antibody presence, in the NY population, only about 30% actually had adequate antibody presence to indicate even the possibility of immunity. So, despite around 20% of the population of NYC potentially having been exposed to the SARS-CoV-2 already, of that 20%, only about 30% may even have any level of immunity to reinfection.

Second, there are increasing number of otherwise healthy patients (no previous medical history, no relevant comorbities), who have recovered from COVID-19, only to suddenly drop dead from stroke, later, because of blood-clotting caused by the disease. This seems to indicate another potential example of the lasting organ damage that can occur despite “recovery” that aren’t immediately apparent.

Finally, one of the claims that has circulated repeatedly, since the beginning, was the theory that summer time would find a reprieve from the virus, allowing us time to “catch our breath” and get ready for another round of the fight with it, come next autumn and winter. The problem with THAT one is that, well…the southern hemisphere (with the apparent exception of Australia, which is actually kind of an outlier for a number of reasons, mostly because of the level of lockdown they initiated early on) and the equatorial regions seem to be getting hammered pretty fucking hard…and their numbers don’t even account for the shoddiness of what passes as “record keeping” in those shitholes.

So, What?

(1) This isn’t the fucking flu. If you still think it’s anything like the flu, choke yourself. Seriously.

(2) You really don’t want to catch this virus. By all accounts, it’s a fucking miserable experience, even with “mild” symptoms, in fit, athletic young people. Then, there’s the whole possibility of dying from it thing…That doesn’t even account for the possibility of “recovering” and then dying from a stroke a couple of weeks later.

(3) The “lockdowns” are politically and economically impossible to sustain for much longer. So, the numbers are going to increase, both in total case numbers, and in fatalities. Your goal should be (ours certainly is!) to avoid contracting it at all, and if it is unavoidable, to contract it as late as possible, so there has been more time to consider all possible treatment options, come up with viable, working treatments, and get the requisite materials into the supply pipelines to help (which may not happen anyway…).

Interestingly, I’ve noticed that nobody in a position of authority is claiming “we’ll have a vaccine in a few weeks!” anymore. Instead, they’ve switched to the 12-18 months timeline that some of us have been trying to explain to people for the last couple of months. Further, I haven’t done a lot of digging yet, but to the best of my limited research (thus far), there’s NEVER been a viable vaccine for a coronavirus. Not SARS-COV (the first one). Not MERS-COV. Not the Common Cold. None, that I’ve been able to discover. I’d love to see evidence refuting that…

SocioEconomic Impacts

There are a number of very real impacts coming down the pipe, as a result of this pandemic. While it’s becoming increasingly popular, in some circles (mostly on the Right, but I’ve seen some circulating on the Left as well), to blame all of the impacts on the lockdown/quarantine response to the virus, the fact is, most of us have KNOWN the system in place, as it was, wasn’t really sustainable in the long-term. Whether you were concerned about the political issues, the economic issues, the resource issues, or the environmental issues, the reality is, COVID-19 hasn’t “destroyed” anything. The lockdown/quarantine response hasn’t “destroyed” anything. This—whether the pandemic itself, or the response thereof—just gave the system the nudge off the edge of the precipice it was hanging off of.

I’ve seen a number of claims circulating that “the response” is nothing but a political ploy to avert blame for a “controlled collapse” of an unsustainable economic model. To that, I have three responses, which have guided my own response to the situation.

(1) Anyone who has been prepping for any length of time should have considered the impacts of potential pandemics. Especially in light of “Swine Flu” and “Bird Flu” scares in recent years, even those of us that didn’t spend much time considering it, have to have spent SOME time considering it. If you did, you knew—or should have known—that lockdown/quaratine was one of the major planning elements for controlling/containing the spread of pandemic disease. You would also have discovered that medical authorities—even contrarian medical authorities—around the world have warned, repeatedly, of the possibility—actually, the PROBABILITY, even INEVITABILITY—of an international pandemic of this scale. So, none of this is particularly surprising, either the pandemic itself, or the response thereto…

(2) The whole “it’s all a plan by the government to bail out the elites” would seem to have some grounding in possibility, when you look at the way the “Stimulus” has gone. Most citizens got their paltry little $1200/person “Please Don’t Riot Yet” checks, while hundreds of billions of dollars went to the banks, airlines, and corporations…again.

The fact that the Fed “shored up” the markets, with an infusion of newly created “money,” even as they’re predicting record unemployment levels and loss of up to half the US GDP in the coming months, would seem to reinforce that possibility. The markets crashed, but then magically rebounded, despite no real reason, other than the Fed pouring made-up money into them, would seem to give legs to the idea it was done just to give the “elites” the chance to get out from under their portfolios.

The problem I see with that argument—that it was all intentional—is that it would require basically every government in the world to be in on the game. That’s a pretty big stretch of the imagination. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but I AM saying, it’s improbable. I don’t subscribe to that belief (which is not the same thing as saying the political and bureaucratic classes aren’t taking advantage of the situation to leverage things to their favor, as much as possible).

(3) The biggest issue with the whole conspiracy theory though is…”So what?” If that theory IS right, what impact does that have on YOUR ability to deal with the situation? What impact does that have on the ability of YOUR FAMILY, and YOUR COMMUNITY to weather the storm? Because, honestly? That’s all that matters, at this point. Anything larger scale is probably completely outside of your sphere of control anyway.

It certainly doesn’t do any good to bitch and whine about it. You’re not going to change it, by venting to your (probably) like-minded friends on Facebook or Twitter or Instagram. Far better is to use a little mental Judo, and simply refuse to focus on it. When you feel a rant or anger about it coming on, simply find something USEFUL to focus on. It’s not “suppressing” it. It’s acknowledging it exists (“Man, I’m really pissed that I think the elites are taking advantage of this!”) and then acknowledging that there’s fuck-all you can do about it, and moving on to something you CAN control (“Man, it sucks that I’m pissed, but I really don’t want to get my blood pressure all jacked up, so I’m gonna go weed the garden bed!”)…