The Organic Prepper: Biden’s New Executive Orders Could Turn a Whole Lot of Gun Owners Into Felons

Robert Wheeler at The Organic Prepper talks about President Biden’s gun control orders in Biden’s New Executive Orders Could Turn a Whole Lot of Gun Owners Into FELONS

Joe Biden promised to do it and he has finally delivered. Today, the cognitively declining President of the United States signed a number of Executive Orders allegedly designed to “curb gun violence” but actually designed to destroy the Second Amendment and the Bill of Rights.

In the process, Biden has turned many Americans into felons with a stroke of his pen.

Details are still emerging as to just what the Executive Orders will mean for gun rights but we are aware of some of the ramifications.

Biden has signed 6 Executive Orders related to guns:

1.)Tightening regulations on “ghost guns.” Ghost guns are of course the labels liberals use to describe homemade firearms (because “we will win by slogans”) that are generally put together from parts assembled and drilled with machine tools. As a result, they often do not have serial numbers so it is harder for the government to be able to trace them. It is legal to build a gun in a home or workshop and there is no federal requirement for a background check. But Biden aims to stop this, saying his administration will “rein in the proliferation of so-called ‘ghost guns.’”

“These are guns that are homemade. Built from a kit that include directions on how to finish the firearm. You can go buy the kit. They have no serial numbers. So, when they show up at a crime scene they can’t be traced. And the buyers aren’t required to pass the background check to buy the kit. To make the gun. Consequently, anyone from a criminal to a terrorist can buy this kit for as little as 30 minutes, put together a weapon,” Biden explained.

Biden wants these guns treated as firearms under the Gun Control Act. He argues that, under the act, key parts of gun-making kits would be required to have numbers for traceability and would also require background checks for people purchasing the kits.

The White House stated:

We are experiencing a growing problem: criminals are buying kits containing nearly all of the components and directions for finishing a firearm within as little as 30 minutes and using these firearms to commit crimes. When these firearms turn up at crime scenes, they often cannot be traced by law enforcement due to the lack of a serial number. The Justice Department will issue a proposed rule to help stop the proliferation of these firearms.

2.) Measure the “problem of gun violence” in a “data driven way.” The Justice Department will issue an annual report on firearms trafficking. According to the official White House statement:

In 2000, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (ATF) issued a report summarizing information regarding its investigations into firearms trafficking, which is one way firearms are diverted into the illegal market where they can easily end up in the hands of dangerous individuals. Since the report’s publication, states, local, and federal policymakers have relied on its data to better thwart the common channels of firearms trafficking. But there is good reason to believe that firearms trafficking channels have changed since 2000, for example due to the emergence of online sales and proliferation of “ghost guns.” The Justice Department will issue a new, comprehensive report on firearms trafficking and annual updates necessary to give policymakers the information they need to help address firearms trafficking today.

3.) The Justice Department, within 60 days, will issue a proposed rule to make clear when a device marketed as a stabilizing brace effectively turns a pistol into a short-barreled rifle subject to the requirements of the National Firearms Act.  “The alleged shooter in the Boulder tragedy last month appears to have used a pistol with an arm brace, which can make a firearm more stable and accurate while still being concealable,” the White House says.

4.) The Justice Department, within 60 days, will publish model “red flag” legislation for states.

From the White House:

Red flag laws allow family members or law enforcement to petition for a court order temporarily barring people in crisis from accessing firearms if they present a danger to themselves or others. The President urges Congress to pass an appropriate national “red flag” law, as well as legislation incentivizing states to pass “red flag” laws of their own. In the interim, the Justice Department’s published model legislation will make it easier for states that want to adopt red flag laws to do so.

5.) The Administration is investing in evidence-based community violence interventions.

Community violence interventions are proven strategies for reducing gun violence in urban communities through tools other than incarceration. Because cities across the country are experiencing a historic spike in homicides, the Biden-Harris Administration is taking a number of steps to prioritize investment in community violence interventions.

  • The American Jobs Plan proposes a $5 billion investment over eight years to support community violence intervention programs. A key part of community violence intervention strategies is to help connect individuals to job training and job opportunities.
  • The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is organizing a webinar and toolkit to educate states on how they can use Medicaid to reimburse certain community violence intervention programs, like Hospital-Based Violence Interventions.
  • Five federal agencies are making changes to 26 different programs to direct vital support to community violence intervention programs as quickly as possible. These changes mean we can start increasing investments in community violence interventions as we wait on Congress to appropriate additional funds

6.) The President will nominate David Chipman to serve as Director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms.

According to the White House:

ATF is the key agency enforcing our gun laws, and it needs a confirmed director in order to do the job to the best of its ability. But ATF has not had a confirmed director since 2015. Chipman served at ATF for 25 years and now works to advance commonsense gun safety laws.

It should be noted that Chipman served an important role in the coverup of the Oklahoma City Bombing and the First World Trade Center bombing and is now serving an even more important role in the war against American citizens.

Biden says no Amendments are absolute.

The President is unconvinced that these orders infringe on the Second Amendment but seems cool with it even if they do.

“Nothing, nothing I am about to recommend in any way impinges on the Second Amendment,” the president said, calling arguments suggesting that those constitutional rights are at stake “phony.”

“No amendment, no amendment to the Constitution is absolute,” he said. “You can’t yell ‘fire’ in a crowded movie theater — recall a freedom of speech. From the very beginning, you couldn’t own any weapon you wanted to own. From the very beginning that the Second Amendment existed, certain people weren’t allowed to have weapons.”

He added: “So the idea is just bizarre, to suggest that some of the things we’re recommending are contrary to the Constitution.” (source)

This is just the beginning.

Make no mistake, the Biden Administration is declaring war on the rights of the American people and the first act of resistance is non-compliance. But there seems to be more on the horizon both coming from the White House and Congress itself.

Zero Hedge: After Questioning The Constitution’s Absolutism, Biden Creates Commission To Study Supreme ‘Court-Packing’

Zero Hedge writes After Questioning The Constitution’s Absolutism, Biden Creates Commission To Study Supreme ‘Court-Packing’

Having refused to answer the question of whether a Biden administration would expand the Supreme Court (so-called ‘court-packing’) in mid-October, “we, the people” are perhaps closer to knowing the answer as to what happens next to the nation.

As a reminder, when presidential candidate Joe Biden was asked by a reporter “will you stack the courts?” – he replied that voters “don’t deserve” to know his stance until after the election…

But now, as The New York Times reports, The White House is taking action after progressives pushed to add seats to the court to balance the conservative stamp put on it by President Trump.

“There’s growing recognition that the Supreme Court poses a danger to the health and well-being of the nation and even to democracy itself,” said Aaron Belkin, director of the group Take Back the Court.

“A White House judicial reform commission has a historic opportunity to explain the gravity of the threat and to help contain it by urging Congress to add seats, which is the only way to restore balance to the court.”

President Biden on Friday will order a 180-day study of adding seats to the Supreme Court, making good on a campaign-year promise to establish a bipartisan commission to examine the potentially explosive subjects of expanding the court or setting term limits for justices, White House officials said.

In his executive order on Friday, the president will create a 36-member commission charged with examining the history of the court, past changes to the process of nominating justices, and the potential consequences to altering the size of the nation’s highest court.

The panel will be led by Bob Bauer, who served as White House counsel for former President Barack Obama, and Cristina Rodriguez, a Yale Law School professor who served as deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel under Mr. Obama.

The issue of whether to alter the size of the court, which has been set at nine members since just after the Civil War, is highly charged, particularly at a moment when Congress is almost evenly divided between the two parties. An attempt by Mr. Biden to increase the number of justices would require approval of Congress and would be met by fierce opposition.

The New York Times admits that activists who say a larger court would give Mr. Biden the chance to appoint a number of liberal justices may be disappointed by his commission. Additionally, Justice Breyer, 82, is the oldest member of the court and the senior member of its three-justice liberal wing, warned this week that efforts to expand the court for political reasons could undermine the trust that the public has in the court and the decisions that it makes on important issues.

“I hope and expect that the court will retain its authority,” Justice Breyer said.

“But that authority, like the rule of law, depends on trust, a trust that the court is guided by legal principle, not politics. Structural alteration motivated by the perception of political influence can only feed that perception, further eroding that trust.”

As a reminder, this comes after President Biden said yesterday that “no amendment to the Constitution is absolute” when discussing his plans for gun control.

But, in theory, we already know Joe’s “opinion” on packing the courts – he thinks it’s a “bonehead idea.”

“But it was a bonehead idea. It was a terrible, terrible mistake to make, and it put in question, for an entire decade, the independence of the most significant body—including the Congress in my view—the most significant body in this country, the Supreme Court of the United States of America.”

You cannot make this up! Have we reached peak-gaslighting yet?

AIER: Three Reasons to Reject Biden’s Tax Harmonization Scheme for “Global Minimum Taxation”

In Three Reasons to Reject Biden’s Tax Harmonization Scheme for “Global Minimum Taxation,” Daniel Mitchell at the American Institute for Economic Research discusses attempts to harmonize tax rates globally in order to bolster countries with high tax rates against economic competition in taxation.

Way back in 2007, I narrated this video to explain why tax competition is very desirable because politicians are likely to overtax and overspend (“Goldfish Government“) if they think taxpayers have no ability to escape. https://www.youtube.com/embed/nJWLemN29Wc?enablejsapi=1?feature=oembed

The good news is that tax competition has been working.

Maximum Individual Tax Rates

As explained in the above video, there have been big reductions in personal tax rates and corporate tax rates. Just as important, governments have reduced various forms of double taxation, meaning lower tax rates on dividends and capital gains.

Many governments have also reduced – or even eliminated – death taxes and wealth taxes.

These pro-growth tax reforms didn’t happen because politicians read my columns (I wish!). Instead, they adopted better tax policy because they were afraid of losing jobs and investment to countries with better fiscal policy.

Now for the bad news.

There’s been an ongoing campaign by high-tax governments to replace tax competition with tax harmonization. They’ve even conscripted international bureaucracies such as the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) to launch attacks against low-tax jurisdictions.

And now the United States is definitely on the wrong side of this issue.

Here’s some of what the Biden Administration wants.

The United States can lead the world to end the race to the bottom on corporate tax rates. A minimum tax on U.S. corporations alone is insufficient. …President Biden is also proposing to encourage other countries to adopt strong minimum taxes on corporations, just like the United States, so that foreign corporations aren’t advantaged and foreign countries can’t try to get a competitive edge by serving as tax havens. This plan also denies deductions to foreign corporations…if they are based in a country that does not adopt a strong minimum tax. …The United States is now seeking a global agreement on a strong minimum tax through multilateral negotiations. This provision makes our commitment to a global minimum tax clear. The time has come to level the playing field and no longer allow countries to gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.

As Charlie Brown would say, “good grief.” Those passages sound like they were written by someone in France, not America

And Heaven forbid that  countries “gain a competitive edge by slashing corporate tax rates.” Quelle horreur!

There are three things to understand about this reprehensible initiative from the Biden Administration.

  1. Tax harmonization means ever-increasing tax rates – It goes without saying that if politicians are able to create a tax cartel, it will merely be a matter of time before they ratchet up the tax rate. Simply stated, they won’t have to worry about an exodus of jobs and investment because all countries will be obliged to have the same bad approach.
  2. Corporate tax harmonization will be followed by harmonization of other taxes – If the scheme for a harmonized corporate tax is imposed, the next step will be harmonized (and higher) tax rates on personal income, dividends, capital gains, and other forms of work, saving, investment, and entrepreneurship.
  3. Tax harmonization denies poor countries the best path to prosperity – The western world became rich in the 1800s and early 1900s when there was very small government and no income taxes. That’s the path a few sensible jurisdictions want to copy today so they can bring prosperity to their people, but that won’t be possible in a world of tax harmonization.

If you want more information, here’s a three-part video series on tax havens, and even a video debunking some of Obama’s demagoguery on the topic.

The American Mind: Terms of Servitude

The editors of The American Mind write about the chilling of online political speech in Terms of Servitude.

After January’s explosive drama, the battle for digital control of American life is now proceeding quietly, by soft degrees. The shock of 1/6 has morphed into a pretext for something still more consequential: a new phase of national crisis wherein corporations with strategic control over Americans’ communications enforce a creeping line of censorship against critics of the sitting regime. While online platforms claim only to be applying their terms of service in neutral fashion, those terms themselves stink of delegitimization. Once this shadow falls upon you and your account, you are as good as deactivated. You know this; you know they know this; they know you know they know it. Forced de facto to impose a precautionary principle on yourself, you “voluntarily” recoil well from the fuzzy line of unofficial censorship that advances far beyond the bright official line.

Already in March of 2020, Google had erased heterodox research on COVID-19. But things escalated rapidly when election season came in earnest. The New York Post was locked out of Twitter for breaking a story about Hunter Biden’s Chinese business ventures. The sitting president had his social media accounts shut down entirely. Twitter competitor Parler was removed from Amazon’s servers for hosting discussions among Trumpists about the unfolding events. And YouTube banned even the allegation of widespread election fraud. Americans realized—or should have—that they had suddenly been herded into a communications control system unlike any ever imposed—or even conceived—in America.

Not merely a handful of fringe cranks, but a full half of the country, is being pre-screened out of the kinds of political discourse fundamental to American citizenship. Yet this radical change is setting in with unnerving ease and rapidity. Day by day, Americans are losing faith that there is anything they can do about it. Day by day, they are getting used to it. Ryan T. Anderson’s fair and sensible interrogation of transgenderism was stripped off of Amazon; Shelby Steele had to fight tooth and nail before his documentary on race relations would stream on Prime, which also axed Michael Pack’s Created Equal: Clarence Thomas in his Own Words (which even PBS was open-minded enough to air) during black history month. Though all these turns of events got some press in the predictable places, each new act of censorship goes down a little easier with the general public. This “reset”—this revolution—is just the way things are now.

This week, The American Mind experienced the new “normal” firsthand. A recent piece of content entitled “The Ruling Class Strikes Back” was removed from YouTube “due to a violation” of what YouTube calls its Community Guidelines, specifically the prohibition regarding “spam, deceptive practices, and scams.” Our colleagues pressed YouTube’s support team on the claims and discovered that the video was flagged for “advancing false claims that widespread fraud, errors, or glitches changed the outcome of the U.S. 2020 presidential election.”

This action is much more than the online equivalent of a moving violation. It is a permanent warning, which flags not just one’s challenged content but one’s entire account. In this way, any finding of another infraction between now and eternity results in a suspension and, in effect, a blacklisting. Officially, it’s three strikes you’re out. Unofficially, and no doubt deliberately, after just one transgression against the political speech code, the only reasonable reaction is to bend over backwards to silence yourself—not just on the original matter, but on any matter that might cause the Eye of Sauron to swivel your way again.

In our case, we suspect the offending verbiage concerns the election-season wave of court suits and legislation deployed to strengthen the prospects of the Left: “Its lawfare had the effect of making vote fraud on a mass scale far easier, and harder to trace, than ever before. If nothing else, this had the effect of irrevocably undermining American confidence in our elections.” In other words, it is “deceptive practice” to suggest that the 2020 election was anything other than perfectly regular and beyond reproach in every regard. Though the podcast is still accessible on our Apple Podcasts feed, the black mark will remain on our record with YouTube—making us vulnerable to a complete account wipe down the line should we “misstep” again.

None of this is illegal. We recognize that. We understand the argument, repeated somewhat tiresomely, that private companies are free to host speech or not, and to do business or not, as they wish. But Twitter, YouTube, Google, and Facebook are more than private companies. They are now powerful quasi-government entities, with no precedent or constitutionally established role in our government, which, by their own admission, have a profound national effect on American politics. (That’s how Twitter justifies the need for its “Civic Integrity policy” in the first place.) Clinton voter Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology, found in 2018 that “no company in the history of the world has had the ability to shift votes and opinions to the extent and on the scale that Google has.” These companies are not just doing business: they are reshaping our regime. At the very least, we should have a say in how this goes down. But on just this question of the ruling class transforming our form of government against our will and without our participation, the noose of suppression tightens, and Americans slip into silence.

As a governing logic for our national culture, as a regular dynamic of public life, this creeping censorship is inescapably un-American. Our colleague Michael Anton pointed out to Tucker Carlson that the way to settle concerns about election integrity in a free society is not to punish them but to answer them, with open discussion in the public square. Instead, even a conscientious objection to proclaiming affirmatively what the ruling class demands is being denied.

And what is good for the goose of the 2020 election is good for the gander of whatever the regime chooses to officialize, from the politics of transgender activism to those surrounding coronavirus lockdowns. To make the broadcast of one set of views all but mandatory, and to keep those who disagree from organizing, having their say, and engaging on their merits, is flatly inconsistent with our most fundamental habits and mores, our way of life, and, ultimately, our form of government.

We will continue sharing our frank assessments of this and subsidiary issues at the heart of the political crisis forced on our country by its current revolutionary regime. We will not stick to the pre-approved script of a powerful minority or sing from the hymnal of policed opinion. For Americans’ concerns to be answered honestly and resolved legitimately, we must protect their digital communications from the command and control of ruling-class authoritarians. Technologized censorship cannot coexist with the American way of life. It is an irrepressible conflict. And we know which one has to go.

Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise: Civil War 2.0 Weather Report

Mr. Wilder at Wilder, Wealthy, and Wise writes another installment of his Civil War 2.0 Weather Report.

  1. Common violence. Organized violence is occurring monthly.
  2. Opposing sides develop governing/war structures. Just in case.
  3. Common violence that is generally deemed by governmental authorities as justified based on ideology.
  4. Open War.

March was had increased violence as the country warmed up.  Sadly for the Left, none of the violence measured up to their requirements – they were looking for very specific circumstances.  They needed a white guy with an AR-15 killing four or more people, kids if possible.  The Left was disappointed.  All of their lottery violence tickets turned out to be of the wrong ethnicity, and then they were immediately disappeared from the news.  Poof.

I’m holding March at “just” a 9 out of 10.  That’s still two minutes to midnight.

I currently put the total at (this is my best approximation, since no one tracks the death toll from rebellion-related violence) holding at 650 out of the 1,000 required for the international civil war definition.

As close as we are to the precipice of war, be careful.  Things could change at any minute.  Avoid crowds.

In this issue:  Front Matter – The Cold Civil War – Violence And Censorship Update – Enter The Leftist Panopticon – Updated Civil War 2.0 Index – Running The Gun Gauntlet – Links

Front Matter

Welcome to the latest issue of the Civil War II Weather Report.  These posts are different than the other posts at Wilder Wealthy and Wise and consist of smaller segments covering multiple topics around the single focus of Civil War 2.0, on the first or second Monday of every month.  I’ve created a page (LINK) for links to all of the past issues.  Also, feel free to subscribe and you’ll get every single Wilder post delivered to your inbox, M-W-F at 7:30 Eastern, free of charge.

The Cold Civil War

Loudoun County, Virginia – A group of school staff and elected officials formed a Facebook® group:  the “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County”, which sounds nice enough, I guess.  What they were doing was, however, the opposite of nice.  They were plotting how to publicly destroy people who differ with their ideology.  You can read about the details here (LINK).

The Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County primary spokesthing, Jabba The Teacher.

What was the difference?  The “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” believe strongly in Marxist societal division theory Critical Race Theory (CRT).  If you haven’t read much about CRT, I can assure you that CRT is 100% a collectivist’s dream.  The laundry list of things that CRT advocates is pretty rough:

  • Dismantling merit-based systems
  • Removing rationality
  • Removing legal equality and Constitutional and legal race-neutrality
  • “Naming one’s own reality” – as in “My Truth” and not The Truth
  • Reparations, and nationalism (but only for non-whites)
  • And a lot of other things

In most bullet-point lists, I throw in a few silly ones just for fun.  Not in the list above, since almost everything that CRT stands for is very, very silly…

This is cancer in our country.  CRT is specifically designed to create division.  It is working.  The scariest part of this is that a group of publicly paid teachers and elected officials have set up a secret club to publicly destroy parents who disagree with them philosophically.

Welcome to the Cold Civil War.

Violence And Censorship Update

The biggest story in censorship this month is the censoring by Amazon® of the book When Harry Became Sally by Ryan T. Anderson.  The reason?  “Amazon™ has “chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness.”

Now, since one study showed that 41% of transgender folks had attempted suicide, well, there is at least an argument that mental illness may be at play in some cases of transgenderism.  That’s a weak statement, and almost certainly true.  Yet, Amazon© wouldn’t allow that to be published in 2021.

What message does that send to a writer?  More importantly, what information does that send to a publisher?  Since Amazon™ sells between 50% and 80% of the books sold in the United States, would a major publisher take a chance on ideas that Amazon© might find objectionable?

No.

And it’s looking like YouTube™ wants to remove the “dislike” button.  Why?  There are several theories, but one that amuses me the most is that Joe Biden’s handlers are upset that whenever he has a video out, that the dislikes overwhelmingly swamp the people who hit the “like” button.  The comments are already turned off.

In YouTube©’s latest idea, the “dislike” button will still be there, and you can still use it.  The video creator can see the number of dislikes, too.  So, if it’s an anti-bullying campaign, it’s the stupidest one ever because the bullied person can still see how many people don’t like them.

I’ll note that in the videos I reviewed for this post, none of them have comments available.

They know you don’t like them.  They know what you think of them.  They just don’t want other people to be able to see it.

Enter The Leftist Panopticon:

There was a creepy English guy named Jeremy Bentham who was a “social” thinker in 18th century England.  One of his inventions was a prison.  The idea that Jeremy had was a prison where just a few guards could look and see everyone at once.  This panopticon was a prison where you were never really free of the gaze of the guards.

Welcome to 2021, so we have to be able to do better than that, right?

If Donald Trump had indicated that he was going to use government money to hire private companies to scour social media to find people that opposed him, and use the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to run the program, Elon Musk would have been able to hear the Leftist outcry from his pleasure palace on Mars.

But swap out the name to “Joe Biden” and there has been remarkably little negative comment.  Have a need to update the No-Fly™ list with pesky people from the Right?

Go for it.  And here’s the (LINK) to prove I’ve not been making this up after watching too much Alex Jones.

The Left will certainly do it.  And it won’t be limited to recent ideas, either.  The way that Leftists feel about the Right is simple:  if you ever, ever supported something the Left is against now?  You’re a heretic.  Cancelled.

Do you expect the DHS to be any different now they’re in the hands of the Left?

We have entered an era of technology where every move that you make can be tracked.  I noticed this on my phone when I stopped at a new restaurant.  Google® popped up with, “Hey, can you tell us if this restaurant has any typographical errors on the menu?”  Google’s® A.I. was asking little old me to help it know absolutely everything about everyplace.

That same Google® data was used and cross-referenced to bring charges against people who were in the Capitol on January 6, 2021.  This data went from, “we can’t use” to “we won’t use” to “we will use” in just a few years.  It’s now a primary tool for law enforcement.

As will be your friends, your email, your web history, your web search history, and, soon enough, a track of you moving from camera to camera in any urban space.

The Civil War 2.0 implication is this:  the Left is using this information actively.  Act accordingly.

Updated Civil War II Index

The Civil War II graphs are an attempt to measure four factors that might make Civil War II more likely, in real-time.  They are broken up into Violence, Political Instability, Economic Outlook, and Illegal Alien Crossings.  As each of these is difficult to measure, I’ve created for three of the four metrics some leading indicators that lead to the index.  On illegal aliens, I’m just using government figures.

Violence:

Up is more violent, and violence is up in March.  I expect it to jump in April.  If Chauvin is found not guilty?  Through the roof.  The state-media propaganda of “home grown terrorism” is increasing the public perception of violence at this point.

Political Instability:

Up is more unstable.  Instability is near record levels, as the Right doesn’t believe in President *, and the Left wants to cancel the Right.

Economic:

I expected this number to be more positive.  It’s not.  I think we will find that April is the month that we find that inflation moves from a thought to a widely-felt reality.

Illegal Aliens:

This data is at record levels for this time of year.  Comments from the Left?  “There needs to be more.”

Running The Gun Gauntlet

I had predicted that the ludicrous Sheila Jackson-Lee bill for gun control would be dead on arrival.  I was right.  But the other bills keep moving along and are a lot more likely to pass.

They’re smaller bills.  Increasing the number of background checks by making almost all transactions require background checks.  There’s a “family exemption” that soon enough will become a “family loophole” after the appropriate victim and shooter combination is found.

In reality, there’s no way to track these background checks, since a very large number of guns in existence have absolutely no paperwork of any type connecting them to their current owner.  After the background checks don’t stop gun violence, the call will come for a national gun registry so that ownership can be tracked.

Registration at the Federal level won’t happen, because people won’t register.  Okay, some would.  But most won’t.  When Connecticut tried to get “assault” weapons registered, it is assumed that only one weapon out of eight was registered.  People know what is at stake.

Doing all of this at once is too much, and too far.  The average American gun owner simply will not comply with registration in 2021, and even the stupidest Leftist understands that widespread noncompliance just gives people a reason to understand the relative strength of individuals and the relative weakness of the government.

As I’ve said before on another post (LINK), the largest army that the world has ever seen are the 80,000,000+ members of the Right in the United States.  As soon as the Right realizes that, they will understand that we truly are only ruled by our consent.

And that is truly what the Left fears.

LINKS

As usual, links this month are courtesy of Ricky.  Thanks so much!!

The MSM narrative remains fragmented.

The Alt-Right Civil War

https://www.politico.com/news/2021/03/30/jan-6-capitol-riot-jail-time-478440

https://www.opb.org/article/2021/03/28/proud-boys-clash-with-anti-fascists-in-salem/

https://wwmt.com/news/local/fbi-testifies-wolverine-watchmen-were-trying-to-instigate-a-second-civil-war

https://www.newsweek.com/pastor-rick-joyner-urges-american-christians-prepare-civil-war-1576570

https://napavalleyregister.com/opinion/letters/trump-s-undeclared-civil-war/article_16821682-efae-5831-868b-a239815747ba.html

https://napavalleyregister.com/opinion/letters/the-real-civil-war/article_6c453064-39db-5540-949e-e8f9dfd071be.html

The Republican Civil War

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2021/03/31/cold-civil-war-being-waged-republicans

https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2021/3/29/a-cold-civil-war-is-being-waged-in-america

The next battle for American democracy is around the corner — and moderates must be in the fight

https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2021/4/1/22356594/conservatives-right-wing-democracy-claremont-ellmers

The Black Civil War

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2021/04/the-many-lives-of-grandmaster-jay/618408/

https://allhiphop.com/features/the-nfacs-grand-master-jay-speaks-out-on-legal-status-hip-hop-freedom-and-the-future/

https://www.msnbc.com/craig-melvin/watch/-it-means-that-you-re-preparing-yourself-to-defend-yourself-nfac-leader-on-militia-name-meaning-108925509977

https://news.yahoo.com/inside-look-black-militia-group-110636647.html

https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/armed-protesters-in-douglasville-were-peaceful-sheriff-says

The Armed Forces Civil War

https://www.defense.gov/Explore/News/Article/Article/2542699/seac-dod-will-move-fast-against-extremism-after-completion-of-stand-downs/

https://www.military.com/daily-news/2021/03/19/some-troops-see-capitol-riot-blm-protests-similar-threats-top-enlisted-leader-says.html

https://www.airforcetimes.com/news/your-air-force/2021/03/29/civilian-employee-who-allegedly-advocated-for-civil-war-banned-from-air-force-base/

https://www.forbes.com/sites/aaronsmith/2021/04/01/gun-sales-soar-from-stimulus-and-bidens-gun-control-plan-amid-mass-shootings/?sh=378c7e866020

https://slate.com/technology/2021/02/3d-printed-semi-automatic-rifle-fgc-9.html

https://www.amestrib.com/story/news/2021/03/25/iowa-state-isu-students-emailed-3-d-printed-guns-day-after-boulder-mass-shooting-colorado/6995202002/

Could the U.S. Ban Guns? Australia Tried Something Pretty Close.

The American Civil War

The End of America?

https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/17179/hr1-for-the-people

https://wirepoints.org/mass-federalization-how-washington-is-bailing-out-failed-states-decapitating-competitive-ones-and-ending-america-as-you-knew-it-wirepoint

https://www.persuasion.community/p/john-mcwhorter-the-neoracists

https://thecritic.co.uk/schools-gone-woke/

The Burning Platform: Money, Politics, and Corruption

In a post titled The Last Link, ZMan writes at The Burning Platform about the difficulty of sustaining sound money among a corrupt political class.

Way back in the early days of the conservative movement, it was assumed that Federal spending was both unsustainable and damaging to the country. Cutting the size and scope of government was their thing. The tool they eventually settled on to reduce Federal spending was taxes. If they made high taxes so unpopular with the public, the Left could not keep raising taxes. If they could not raise taxes to cover their spending, they would eventually have to yield to the mathematics.

Obviously, that never happened. The big tax reforms of the 1980’s did simplify taxes and lower rates on rich people, but revenues remained stable. At the same time, spending kept growing. One of the unspoken truths of fiscal policy is the percent of GDP that is consumed by Federal taxes does not change much of time. The range is between 15% to 18%, depending on when tax policy was changed. This is the logic of the flat tax. One rate, no deductions and no more IRS.

Spending, of course, keeps going up, no matter who is in office. Despite their rhetoric, the Republicans are the big spenders. In the 1980’s they had to spend on the military to win the Cold War. In the Bush years it was the crusades against Islam. It is only when a Democrat is in the White House that the Republicans get tight-fisted, and even that is mostly ceremonial, as we have seen with the last Covid bill. It turns out that there is no relationship between taxes and spending.

Another shibboleth of conservatives is that eventually the bond markets will force a haircut on the government. The so-called bond vigilantes will drive up interest rates, which will make borrowing more expensive. The theory here is that there is a hard limit on debt. Once that limit is reached, spending must go down or taxes must go up in order to reconcile the books. Like the belief that taxes will curtail spending, faith in the mythological bond vigilantes has been misplaced.

Of course, you can go back further and find arguments from the hard money crowd about the limits of fiat currency. There was an argument in the old days that said fiat currency not only unleashes spending and inflation, but it eventually makes the money worthless, thus bankrupting the state. We have been off the gold standard for a very long time now and none of the predictions came true. The spending continues, the borrowing continues, and the money creation continues.

The gold bugs have now moved to crypto currency as the savior. Once everyone is using digital money that is outside the control of the state, then we end up with a de facto gold standard. That will force fiscal discipline on the state, which means radically reducing spending. The fact that this will never happen has so far not dimmed the enthusiasm, but like all of the other schemes to cut spending, this one will prove no match for the animal cunning of the ruling class.

There is another theory related to money. The monetarists have always argued that sound monetary policy would impose discipline on the state. Since central banks are independent of the state, they can maintain a stable money supply. While not the same as a gold standard, sound monetary policy has similar effects. That has turned out to be a myth as well. The Fed is now captive to the spending frenzy of Washington, finding new ways to underwrite trillions in new outlays.

Now, there are those who will keep lighting candles for their favorite theory. The gold bugs, for example, are sure hyperinflation is around the next corner. The bond vigilantes are similarly sure the next crisis will confirm their theory. The truth is though, none of these theories turned out to be true. The official debt is $28T, but that excludes things like Social Security. The real debt obligations of the Federal government are incalculable. No one knows and no one seems to care.

The lesson of the last half century is one the monetarists learned from the battles over the gold standard. If the ruler is so corrupt you need hard money to control him, your ruler is corrupt enough to find a way around the limits of hard money. It turns out our rulers are more than capable of conniving around every limit put before them. They have reached levels of corruption that were though impossible half a century ago. The display being put on now suggest they are just getting warmed up.

This rather shabby track record should raise a question. That is, is the field of economics just pseudoscientific nonsense? It has lots of complexity and lots of very clever solutions to the complex problems it unearths, but outside of the most basic of concepts like supply and demand, economics is not very useful. In all of the important things, it turns out to be wrong. Astrologers have a better record than economists, because they know they are grifters, not scientists.

Putting that aside, the lesson here is that contra the libertarians, economics is downstream from politics. No amount of fiddling with the tax code can fix the defects of the political class. Even further, the right people in a corrupt system cannot correct the defects of the corrupt system. This is why the people come and go in Washington, but the corruption rolls on unimpeded. In the great chain of causality, economics is the last link in that chain. It is the final effect of a chain of many causes.

Practical Self Reliance: 15 Ways to Use Borage

Ashley Adamant has a typically well-written article on 15 Ways to Use Borage. Borage grows pretty well in our area. It was one of the first herbs that I planted in our garden, and, as Ashley mentions, it has reseeded itself every year since then. We always have a few plants growing even though we’re not taking any particular care with nurturing them.

Borage is a beautiful annual flower that’s popular with gardeners, mostly for its abundant display of showy blue flowers.  It also happens to be both edible and medicinal, and it has a number of uses in the kitchen and around the house.

Borage Flowers in Hand

Borage is one of those underappreciated herbs from long-ago.  While lots of gardeners grow it, few people know it as a medicinal herb (or edible flower).  For the most part, it’s planted and simply enjoyed visually, which is a shame because there are so many ways to use borage.

It’s an old-fashioned plant that has a number of medicinal properties and culinary uses. Borage Flower Cluster

Borage growing in my Vermont garden

What is Borage?

Borage (Borago officinalis) is an annual herb that grows quickly but self-seeds, so it continues to reappear year after year. When you pick a spot to grow borage, make sure it’s somewhere you want it to grow year after year. 

In the summer months, borage plants bloom with small, beautiful, blue flowers that attract pollinators and butterflies to your garden. The plants have hairy, rough leaves that measure four to six inches in length.

Don’t be surprised if your plant spreads out; one borage plant reaches 12-18 inches wide. It’s easy to see how they can overtake an area of your garden after a few years of vigorous self-seeding!

For new gardeners, borage is the perfect herb to grow. It grows well in average soil with organic matter, and you can directly sow the seeds into the garden after the last frost date. If you don’t mind reseeding, the plants will continue to show up each year, which means no work for you.

To prevent self-seeding, just be sure to harvest (and use) all the flowers, or try growing borage in containers.  It stays smaller that way, and it’s a lot easier to keep track of the seeds.

growing Borage in Containers

Borage Medicinal Properties

One look at the list of borage’s medicinal purposes, and you’ll wonder why everyone doesn’t grow it in their herb garden. This herb is a cooling, cleansing herb with adaptogenic, demulcent, diuretic, expectorant, and anti-inflammatory properties. 

All parts of the borage plant contain medicinal properties. The flowers are the most commonly used part, but the leaves and oil from the seeds are useful if you want to create herbal remedies. 

Oil from the seeds is sold as a popular borage oil herbal supplement, and it’s a plant-based source of Omega fatty acids.

Herbalists use borage to treat a variety of ailments, such as:

  • Eczema
  • Rheumatoid Arthritis 
  • Stress
  • Premenstrual Syndrome
  • Diabetes
  • Attention deficit-hyperactivity disorder
  • Acute respiratory distress syndrome
  • Asthma
  • Heart disease
  • Strokes
  • Fevers
  • Cough
  • Depression

Growing borage in your herb garden gives you a potent, versatile medicinal herb, but personally, I love it most as a culinary herb for its delicious flowers and leaves.

Borage Flowers

Ways to Use Borage

You’ll find many ways to use borage once it grows in your garden. Here are some medicinal and culinary uses for this lovely herb. 

Borage Tea

Borage tea has many uses. It helps treat nervous conditions, and tea made out of borage leaves stimulates lactation in breastfeeding mothers. Herbalists use borage tea to reduce fevers, relieve stress, and stop coughing. 

Borage tea is best made out of fresh leaves and flowers. You need around ¼ cup fresh borage leaves or flowers and one cup of hot, boiling water. Let the tea blend steep for 10-15 minutes, and use honey to sweeten to the taste you prefer. 

Borage Tea

Borage Tincture

Making a borage tincture is the same as making any other herbal tincture. Start by filling a glass jar with borage flowers, packing them tightly into the jar. Then, fill the jar with vodka or whatever alcohol that you prefer.

Seal the jar and keep it in a cool, dark, dry location for two to six weeks. When it’s time, take the jar out, and strain all of the flowers out of it.

Now, you have a homemade borage tincture, which is a shelf-stable medicinal extract that can be used year-round (even when borage is not in season). 

Borage Plant

Borage Infusion

Making an infusion with borage is so easy. 

All you need is a quarter of a cup of bruised, fresh borage leaves. Pour one cup of cool water over the top of the bruised leaves and let it soak in the refrigerator for a few hours (or overnight).

After steeping, strain it, and you have a simple infusion that’s cooling, and refreshing on hot summer days.

Borage Infusion

Borage Poultice

A crushed borage poultice helps with bug bites, bee stings, swelling, bruising, rashes, and boils. It’s a useful, versatile herbal remedy to have up your sleeve, especially in the summertime when bug bites happen frequently. 

I actually used this on my son, who was stung by a bee in the garden not too far from our patch of borage.

Start by gathering enough fresh borage leaves and stems to cover the area that you need to treat. Chop up the leaves and place them over the affected area; use cotton gauze to keep the poultice in place while it works.

In my case, I just quickly chewed the leaves in the garden and placed them directly on the sting.

A borage poultice works fast. You’ll quickly feel the soothing effects that help reduce skin inflammation, just be sure to get the stinger out first if it’s still in the skin.

Borage Infused Oil

The most popular type of borage oil is borage seed oil, but you can make a herbal infused oil out of the flowers. The same process that you might use for other herbs works for borage a well.

Start by picking enough borage flowers to fill a glass jar, and spread them over a baking sheet or screen. Let the flowers dry for several days, and then put them back into the glass jar. It’s important to let them dry beforehand to reduce the risk of spoiling or mold developing.

Fill the jar with olive oil, and let it sit for four to six weeks. Remember to shake it up every few days. After the time is up, strain out the flowers, and you have DIY borage-infused oil. 

You may use this oil on your skin for irritation and rashes, or you can use it to create homemade herbal salves and ointments. 

Borage Infused Oil

Borage Salve with Calendula and Lavender

This recipe combines three potent, healing herbs to create the perfect salve for skin problems. You can use hemp or olive oil for your calendula, lavender, and borage salve. This method creates an infused oil much faster than the traditional method, but the quality stays the same.

Use beeswax pastilles to make a salve after the infused oil is ready. Borage and Calendula Drying for Homemade Salve

Borage and Calendula Drying for Homemade Salve

Cucumber Borage Soap

I love cucumber soaps; the smell is so refreshing and makes your skin feel better. The mixture of cucumber and borage is perfect for those suffering from skin irritation, bug bites, inflamed skin, or eczema.

Take a look at this easy cucumber borage soap recipe. 

Borage Recipes

Beyond borage’s medicinal and cosmetic uses, it’s also just a tasty edible herb.  The leaves can be eaten like spinach, and it makes delightful soup.

Though it’s eaten like a cooking green (or salad green), the leaves actually taste more like cucumber than lettuce or spinach.

The flowers have a milder flavor and are best fresh.  The leave can be eaten fresh or cooked, and the stems are best cooked in my opinion.

Borage leaves and stems

Borage Cucumber Jelly

This jelly recipe is showstopping and delicious. To make borage cucumber jelly, you need six cups of borage leaves and flowers and one cucumber juiced. The recipe is easy enough that those who are new to canning will be able to make it…(continues)

OH8STN: Zero Dependency Winklink

Justin, OH8STN, has a good post up about emergency communications, talking about Zero Dependency Winlink, or using communication modes that don’t rely on other grid-up resources like the internet.

Recently having a discussion with Dean K5MPG about Winlink Radio only networks. This topic is so important, I thought to turn my responce to his email into a blog post, albeit with a bit more context.

In emergency communications and communications for preparedness, we see the usual blogs and youtube vids talking about repeaters, winlink gateways, DMR, DSTAR, Fusion, … All of them are excellent for what they were designed for, but also heavily dependent upon the internet in some way, based of course on how we use them. They certainly work for simplex comms in a grid down, but with severe limitations. On VHF/UHF there is also a finite number of these services available, or in range of our stations. These are fine for soft events or “after the fact”, once grid power has been restored. This is the risk we take when basing our communications plan, on infrastructure dependent platforms. Not right or wrong, just not as robust as they could be.

Another approach, and one which brings the majority of hate to the channel focuses entirely on HF communications. Unlike its VHF/UHF cousins, HF communications has little to no dependency on infrastructure. If fact, other than station power, there is barely any infrastructure dependency at all! What we are talking about is Radio Only Winlink Networks. Networks with no services dependent upon the internet, not on cloud servers, and networks which can adapt to changing operational variables DURING THE DISASTER!

For personal preparedness communications, nobody gives a monkey butt about “disaster relief” while the hurricane is ripping the roof off, or forcing us away from our homes. That’s not a knock against emergency services, just a part of the puzzle which until recently, has been ignored. Disaster relief is what comes after the storm has passed. It is extremely important, but not until later. Most of us still require a layer of communications during the storm, after it has passed, and before emergency services arrives in the region. Even when disaster relief is on site, their equipment will be used for their own logistics and communications. Not for finding out where your loved ones are. This is where personal communications for preparedness becomes important. It is the layer which allows us to get in touch with family, friends, or coordinate meet ups while primary infrastructure is still down, congested or somehow unavailable.

MPS settings can be found in Winlink Express under Hybrid Network Settings. These settings allow a station to set primary secondary and a third alternate station to pick up messages, without connecting to the CMS.

The last week of March 2021, Finland had a emergency grid down communications training exercise. The exercise focused on creating a Winlink radio only network to handle message traffic, WITHOUT “any dependency on the internet”. Winlink Radio Only networks are not using cloud based services to store email for retrieval. Instead they act more like store and forward hubs, forwarding and storing messages on a primary MPS, secondary MPS, or a Third alternate if one is configured. This means messages come in from their senders, are forwarded to the recipients configured MPS (Mail Pickup Station) where they are stored. The recipient then retrieves messages from one of the MPS stations he or she configured. This works just as it would from the CMS, only without the need for the internet. Even if one of the configured MPSs go down, messages can still be retrieved from one of the others configured mail pickup stations. These mail pickup stations also synchronize mail between themselves, routing messages between them, when receiving a message intended for a recipient registered to another hub. It is actually quite ingenious.

History has taught OH-Land that some or part of the grid will eventually go down. This will happen either from a mishap, attack, or from mother nature showing us how small we really are. This is odd since OH has a reasonably robust infrastructure. Still, experience has shown us the need to augment traditional means of communications, is real. A need which can fulfil disaster relief, personal preparedness, or augmenting communications for regional services alike.

We augment traditional commercial communications methods , with slower but more robust HF networks. Networks which are able to adapt to a fluid situation. For this reason many operators in OH-Land participate once or twice a year in grid down comms practice, on a national level. This is a deployment and operation of a radio only hybrid winlink network, routing traffic correctly, discovering any weak points or bottlenecks in the system, testing peer-to-peer connections, …. There are a combination of radio only hubs set up for collection, dissemination, and temporary storage of messages. Outside connections to individual stations are still possible through any remaining gateways, or in the case of Finland through gateways in bordering countries. Although Chat and file transfer mechanisms over HF were not tested, I do hope individual radio operators find interested partners to test Vara Chat for file transfers, and JS8Call for near real-time tactical communications, stations tracking and to augment asynchronous messaging. https://www.instagram.com/p/CNFms6PDmsH/embed/captioned/?cr=1&v=13&wp=500&rd=https%3A%2F%2Foh8stn.org&rp=%2Fblog%2F2021%2F04%2F05%2Femcomm-and-comms-preparedness-zero-dependency%2F#%7B%22ci%22%3A1%2C%22os%22%3A1199%7D

From a personal preparedness perspective, this should be our goal! A dynamic network made up of hubs. Some of them permanent, others field deployable as required. Then augment the hybrid radio only network with other tools like JS8Call for tactical comms, along with Vara chat for file transfers without unnecessarily congesting the hybrid network channels. This is how we build a robust communications layer, whether for emergency communications, personal preparedness or as a partisan communications network over HF.

I first discovered Radio Only Winlink messages by mistake. I sent a radio only message (by mistake) to an OE station, which actually made it through. We talked about how that was possible for weeks. I understand technically how it worked, but still find it amazing.

IMHO, Radio only email is most effective for “regional “communications, when “hubs” can find a path to one another. Naturally “regional” in HF terms can span multiple countries, so we need to zoom out a little in comparison to VHF/UHF. The more hubs deployed, the the more robust our network. Still, once we start crossing plains, oceans, … it becomes more difficult. Even so, this is the beauty of HF. In part, it is also why my own focus is on NVIS/HF comms, over the infrastructure requirements of VHF and above.

Recently I mentioned on Patreon how the channel is stepping up the technical content once again. One of the projects mentioned was the RMS gateway. Since Dean brought up that topic, I suppose it is ok to let the cat out of the bag. The goal is to deploy a Radio Only network hub for the Northern Gulf of Bothnia region between Finland and Sweden. Naturally it will also route winlink email to the CMS, but that is a secondary function. In our world, many operators mistakenly believe Winlink works like Google mail, eg cloud based email server and storage. It certainly does have that cloud component, but it also has a robust network layer, based entirely on moving email along from hub to hub, until it reaches the Mail Pickup Station the mail is addressed to. I am hoping this change in direction will inspire other operators, bloggers and YouTubers in setting up their own “fill in” stations whether VHF/UHF or HF.

ARES, RACES and the like have this part covered, but Survivalists & Preppers often focus on buying gear, protecting gear, maintaining gear, … We rarely if ever see any videos or blogs about “deploying services”. There is talk about AREDN networks, which are very infrastructure intensive, but a nice attempt at recreating a fast, wide area network. Like VHF/UHF services, I’ll have to pass for now! My personal belief and strategy sees a basic traffic net as a critical requirement, before we start sharing “Nice to have” naughty videos over 5Ghz links. (I digress).

Bottom line, and the reason for the post.
Radio Only Network would work extremely well, if more of us put up our own Radio Only Hubs to pass messages through the network or on to other networks. If we start providing services to the network rather than just consuming resources from the network, we can create a much more robust radio only system. This approach will end up being more valuable to everyone. Think of it as a grass roots radio only traffic net. One which adapts to adding or removing hubs, balances congestion, and easily adapts as it grows or contracts. This as opposed to simply consuming resources as a user eg repeaters, gateways, … all of which have weaknesses most of us already understand. This is where the channel is headed!

Xiegu G90 oh8stn

Today we have good choices for reasonably priced low current draw, CAT controllable rigs like the Xiegu G90. We can combine them with any one of the increasing number of micro computers on the market today. Add a battery, solar power or wind generator, and we have the makings for own Hybrid Network Hub.

Let’s get off grid capable together!

73
Julian oh8stn

Doom and Bloom: Active Shooters In The New Norm

The Altons at Doom and Bloom Medical write about Active Shooters in the New Norm and training and first aid for the same.

On March 23rd, 2021, a man thought to be mentally disturbed entered a Boulder, Colorado grocery store and began a shooting rampage. 21-year-old Al Aliwi Alissa, born in Syria but living in the United States since the age of three, managed to kill 10 people, including a police officer, before disrobing and surrendering to authorities. It’s thought that the gunman has a long history of anger issues and may have paranoid tendencies.

The shooting follows an incident where another 21-year-old killed 8 people in Georgia at local massage parlors, which he saw as a form of temptation for what is described as a “sex addiction.” The recent shootings in diverse settings follow a lull during the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic.

In the last few years, shooting events by the disaffected, disturbed, and disgruntled have occurred on a regular basis.  Schools, churches, places of business, and other public venues are now fair game for those with bad intentions. Armed not only with weapons but with a blueprint from previous incidents, gunmen can identify soft targets easily and are more “successful” in achieving their goal of creating mass casualties.

Like COVID-19, have these events become part of the “New Normal”? Should we just get used to them?

You might think that the “successes” achieved by active shooters occur at random. The increase in the sheer number of casualties, however, reveal a strategy that is being refined to deadly effect.

The selection of soft targets is becoming a science and is leading to higher numbers of deaths and injuries. In the 2018 South Florida high school shooting, for example, the gunman activated the fire alarm to make sure there would be lots of targets in the hall. To create confusion, he tossed smoke bombs (but prudently wore a gas mask).

If the ill-intentioned are now that much better at creating mayhem, it stands to reason that our society must become better at thwarting those intentions. Here are ways that would, in my opinion, decrease the number of shooter incidents and the deaths caused by them:

Improve security in areas at risk. I would define an “area at risk” as just about anywhere where a crowd of people would gather. Better protection at malls or grocery stores may just be a matter of hiring more security personnel. Given the loss of so many jobs during the pandemic, it’s not a bad idea to train and hire workers specifically to keep an eye out for those with bad intentions. If the money isn’t there, establishing and training a volunteer safety team in places like churches, schools, or workplaces can increase the level of vigilance and identify threats early.

Although the recent attacks occurred in cities, rural areas aren’t immune. Establish volunteer safety officers in small towns where there may not be law enforcement and emergency medical personnel just around the corner. These persons should have training in security, firearms, and first aid for bleeding wounds. If there are volunteer fire departments, while not trained volunteer safety departments?

Instill a culture of situational awareness in our society. Situational awareness is a state of calm, relaxed observation of factors that might indicate a threat. These are called “anomalies”; learning to recognize them can identify suspicious individuals and save lives.

Situational awareness involves always having a plan of action when a threat occurs, even if it’s as simple as making a note of the nearest exit in whatever building you’re in. Seems like common sense, but in these days of smartphone distractions, many are oblivious of their surroundings.

Identify persons of interest through their social media posts. Some active shooter candidates are vocal about their intentions. You might be concerned about “big brother” monitoring our public conversations on social media. It concerns me also, but you must answer this question:  How many deaths are you willing to accept in your community due to a lack of vigilance?

We must always be on the lookout for signs of trouble. Even if this drives some potential gunmen underground, it might identify others in time to abort their mission.

In the case of Alissa, his sister-in-law felt compelled to take a gun away from him when he was acting erratically. In some states, it is possible for family members or police to ask the court to order the temporary removal of firearms from someone who may present a danger to others or themselves. A judge makes the determination to issue the order based on statements made and actions of the person in question. Controversial? Yes, but it could save lives.

Each municipality must set a mechanism (and an earlier trigger) for the authorities to apprehend and interrogate suspicious characters. Indeed, Ali Aliwi Alissa was a known person of interest to authorities before the attack.

Learn how to stop bleeding in wounds
Learn how to stop bleeding in emergencies

Learn how to stop bleeding in emergencies: Teach our citizens to avoid the natural paralysis that occurs in an unexpected event. This paralysis occurs as a result of “normalcy bias”, the tendency to discount risks because most days proceed in a certain standard manner; we usually assume that today will be the same.

By teaching simple courses of action such as the Department of Homeland Security’s “Run, Hide, Fight” triad, the decision-making process may be more intuitive and more rapidly implemented. This is more effectively taught and ingrained at a young age. Make sure it’s a part of every child’s education.

We should also teach our students simple first aid strategies to stop bleeding, the most likely cause of death in these scenarios. Rapid action by bystanders is thought to decrease the number of deaths from hemorrhage. Add “Reduce” hemorrhage to “Reading, ‘Riting, and ‘Rithmetic” as part of school curriculum, and lives might be saved.

Bleeding Control Kit

Provide first aid kits for bleeding in public venues. In the last few years, bleeding kits have been packed into fire extinguisher wall cabinets in many public venues and can be accessed by those at the scene. Unfortunately, in most places, there isn’t a sign that indicates their presence. With supplies, the Good Samaritan will be more likely to save a life. I predicted, years ago, that these kits will be fixtures everywhere one day. It’s good that they’re there, but let the public know they are.

Our response as a nation has been to do little to correct the problem. I say that era must end. Let’s stop being “soft” targets. We must forsake the notion that shootings are just part and parcel of the New Normal and begin the process by which we change our attitude and level of vigilance, not in isolated cases, but as a society.

The above recommendations wouldn’t affect the average (sane) citizen’s right to bear arms. It would mean more situational awareness so that people can be more ready to “Run, Hide, Fight”.  

If it means more surveillance, we should realize how much there is already. Watching people who publicly threaten violence more closely makes sense; so does increasing access to mental health resources to, perhaps, prevent someone from going off the rails.

The New Normal is an angry, dangerous place. The American identity has been replaced by many tribal ones; Most seem to hate each other. It’s a recipe for disaster that’s likely to get worse if we don’t reverse course, but that takes fortitude and determination on the part of all parties.

You don’t have to be a Department of Homeland Security official to know that there are more active shooter events on the horizon.  Watch for anomalies in behavior and always have a plan of action. A prepared nation wouldn’t be invulnerable to attacks, but its citizens would have a better chance to survive them.

Joe Alton MD

Multiperson Bleeding Kit from Alton First Aid
Single gunshot kit from
Alton First Aid
Public hemorrhage control module from Alton first Aid

Rutherford Institute: Stand Up to Tyranny — How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

Constitutional lawyer John Whitehead at the Rutherford Institute writes Stand Up to Tyranny: How to Respond to the Evils of Our Age

“The church must be reminded that it is not the master or the servant of the state, but rather the conscience of the state. It must be the guide and the critic of the state, and never its tool. If the church does not recapture its prophetic zeal, it will become an irrelevant social club without moral or spiritual authority.”—Martin Luther King Jr. (A Knock at Midnight, June 11, 1967)

In every age, we find ourselves wrestling with the question of how Jesus Christ—the itinerant preacher and revolutionary activist who died challenging the police state of his time, namely, the Roman Empire—would respond to the moral questions of our day.

For instance, would Jesus advocate, as so many evangelical Christian leaders have done in recent years, for congregants to “submit to your leaders and those in authority,” which in the American police state translates to complying, conforming, submitting, obeying orders, deferring to authority and generally doing whatever a government official tells you to do?

What would Jesus do? 

Study the life and teachings of Jesus, and you may be surprised at how relevant he is to our modern age.

A radical nonconformist who challenged authority at every turn, Jesus spent his adult life speaking truth to power, challenging the status quo of his day, pushing back against the abuses of the Roman Empire, and providing a blueprint for standing up to tyranny that would be followed by those, religious and otherwise, who came after him.

Those living through this present age of government lockdowns, immunity passports, militarized police, SWAT team raids, police shootings of unarmed citizens, roadside strip searches, invasive surveillance and the like might feel as if these events are unprecedented. However, the characteristics of a police state and its reasons for being are no different today than they were in Jesus’ lifetime: control, power and money.

Much like the American Empire today, the Roman Empire of Jesus’ day was characterized by secrecy, surveillance, a widespread police presence, a citizenry treated like suspects with little recourse against the police state, perpetual wars, a military empire, martial law, and political retribution against those who dared to challenge the power of the state.

A police state extends far beyond the actions of law enforcement.  In fact, a police state “is characterized by bureaucracy, secrecy, perpetual wars, a nation of suspects, militarization, surveillance, widespread police presence, and a citizenry with little recourse against police actions.”

Indeed, the police state in which Jesus lived (and died) and its striking similarities to modern-day America are beyond troubling.

Secrecy, surveillance and rule by the elite. As the chasm between the wealthy and poor grew wider in the Roman Empire, the ruling class and the wealthy class became synonymous, while the lower classes, increasingly deprived of their political freedoms, grew disinterested in the government and easily distracted by “bread and circuses.” Much like America today, with its lack of government transparency, overt domestic surveillance, and rule by the rich, the inner workings of the Roman Empire were shrouded in secrecy, while its leaders were constantly on the watch for any potential threats to its power. The resulting state-wide surveillance was primarily carried out by the military, which acted as investigators, enforcers, torturers, policemen, executioners and jailers. Today that role is fulfilled by the NSA, the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security and the increasingly militarized police forces across the country.

Widespread police presence. The Roman Empire used its military forces to maintain the “peace,” thereby establishing a police state that reached into all aspects of a citizen’s life. In this way, these military officers, used to address a broad range of routine problems and conflicts, enforced the will of the state. Today SWAT teams, comprised of local police and federal agents, are employed to carry out routine search warrants for minor crimes such as marijuana possession and credit card fraud.

Citizenry with little recourse against the police state. As the Roman Empire expanded, personal freedom and independence nearly vanished, as did any real sense of local governance and national consciousness. Similarly, in America today, citizens largely feel powerless, voiceless and unrepresented in the face of a power-hungry federal government. As states and localities are brought under direct control by federal agencies and regulations, a sense of learned helplessness grips the nation.

Perpetual wars and a military empire. Much like America today with its practice of policing the world, war and an over-arching militarist ethos provided the framework for the Roman Empire, which extended from the Italian peninsula to all over Southern, Western, and Eastern Europe, extending into North Africa and Western Asia as well. In addition to significant foreign threats, wars were waged against inchoate, unstructured and socially inferior foes.

Martial law. Eventually, Rome established a permanent military dictatorship that left the citizens at the mercy of an unreachable and oppressive totalitarian regime. In the absence of resources to establish civic police forces, the Romans relied increasingly on the military to intervene in all matters of conflict or upheaval in provinces, from small-scale scuffles to large-scale revolts. Not unlike police forces today, with their martial law training drills on American soil, militarized weapons and “shoot first, ask questions later” mindset, the Roman soldier had “the exercise of lethal force at his fingertips” with the potential of wreaking havoc on normal citizens’ lives.

A nation of suspects. Just as the American Empire looks upon its citizens as suspects to be tracked, surveilled and controlled, the Roman Empire looked upon all potential insubordinates, from the common thief to a full-fledged insurrectionist, as threats to its power. The insurrectionist was seen as directly challenging the Emperor.  A “bandit,” or revolutionist, was seen as capable of overturning the empire, was always considered guilty and deserving of the most savage penalties, including capital punishment. Bandits were usually punished publicly and cruelly as a means of deterring others from challenging the power of the state.  Jesus’ execution was one such public punishment.

Acts of civil disobedience by insurrectionists. Starting with his act of civil disobedience at the Jewish temple, the site of the administrative headquarters of the Sanhedrin, the supreme Jewish council, Jesus branded himself a political revolutionary. When Jesus “with the help of his disciples, blocks the entrance to the courtyard” and forbids “anyone carrying goods for sale or trade from entering the Temple,” he committed a blatantly criminal and seditious act, an act “that undoubtedly precipitated his arrest and execution.” Because the commercial events were sponsored by the religious hierarchy, which in turn was operated by consent of the Roman government, Jesus’ attack on the money chargers and traders can be seen as an attack on Rome itself, an unmistakable declaration of political and social independence from the Roman oppression.

Military-style arrests in the dead of night. Jesus’ arrest account testifies to the fact that the Romans perceived Him as a revolutionary. Eerily similar to today’s SWAT team raids, Jesus was arrested in the middle of the night, in secret, by a large, heavily armed fleet of soldiers.  Rather than merely asking for Jesus when they came to arrest him, his pursuers collaborated beforehand with Judas. Acting as a government informant, Judas concocted a kiss as a secret identification marker, hinting that a level of deception and trickery must be used to obtain this seemingly “dangerous revolutionist’s” cooperation. 

Torture and capital punishment. In Jesus’ day, religious preachers, self-proclaimed prophets and nonviolent protesters were not summarily arrested and executed. Indeed, the high priests and Roman governors normally allowed a protest, particularly a small-scale one, to run its course. However, government authorities were quick to dispose of leaders and movements that appeared to threaten the Roman Empire. The charges leveled against Jesus—that he was a threat to the stability of the nation, opposed paying Roman taxes and claimed to be the rightful King—were purely political, not religious. To the Romans, any one of these charges was enough to merit death by crucifixion, which was usually reserved for slaves, non-Romans, radicals, revolutionaries and the worst criminals.

Jesus was presented to Pontius Pilate “as a disturber of the political peace,” a leader of a rebellion, a political threat, and most gravely—a claimant to kingship, a “king of the revolutionary type.” After Jesus is formally condemned by Pilate, he is sentenced to death by crucifixion, “the Roman means of executing criminals convicted of high treason.”  The purpose of crucifixion was not so much to kill the criminal, as it was an immensely public statement intended to visually warn all those who would challenge the power of the Roman Empire. Hence, it was reserved solely for the most extreme political crimes: treason, rebellion, sedition, and banditry. After being ruthlessly whipped and mocked, Jesus was nailed to a cross.

As Professor Mark Lewis Taylor observed:

The cross within Roman politics and culture was a marker of shame, of being a criminal. If you were put to the cross, you were marked as shameful, as criminal, but especially as subversive. And there were thousands of people put to the cross. The cross was actually positioned at many crossroads, and, as New Testament scholar Paula Fredricksen has reminded us, it served as kind of a public service announcement that said, “Act like this person did, and this is how you will end up.”

Jesus—the revolutionary, the political dissident, and the nonviolent activist—lived and died in a police state. Any reflection on Jesus’ life and death within a police state must take into account several factors: Jesus spoke out strongly against such things as empires, controlling people, state violence and power politics. Jesus challenged the political and religious belief systems of his day. And worldly powers feared Jesus, not because he challenged them for control of thrones or government but because he undercut their claims of supremacy, and he dared to speak truth to power in a time when doing so could—and often did—cost a person his life.

Unfortunately, the radical Jesus, the political dissident who took aim at injustice and oppression, has been largely forgotten today, replaced by a congenial, smiling Jesus trotted out for religious holidays but otherwise rendered mute when it comes to matters of war, power and politics.

Yet for those who truly study the life and teachings of Jesus, the resounding theme is one of outright resistance to war, materialism and empire.

Ultimately, as I point out in my book Battlefield America: The War on the American People, this is the contradiction that must be resolved if the radical Jesus—the one who stood up to the Roman Empire and was crucified as a warning to others not to challenge the powers-that-be—is to be an example for our modern age.

After all, there is so much suffering and injustice in the world, and so much good that can be done by those who truly aspire to follow Jesus Christ’s example.

We must decide whether we will follow the path of least resistance—willing to turn a blind eye to what Martin Luther King Jr. referred to as the “evils of segregation and the crippling effects of discrimination, to the moral degeneracy of religious bigotry and the corroding effects of narrow sectarianism, to economic conditions that deprive men of work and food, and to the insanities of militarism and the self-defeating effects of physical violence”—or whether we will be transformed nonconformists “dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.”

As King explained in a powerful sermon delivered in 1954, “This command not to conform comes … [from] Jesus Christ, the world’s most dedicated nonconformist, whose ethical nonconformity still challenges the conscience of mankind.”

Furthermore:

We need to recapture the gospel glow of the early Christians, who were nonconformists in the truest sense of the word and refused to shape their witness according to the mundane patterns of the world.  Willingly they sacrificed fame, fortune, and life itself in behalf of a cause they knew to be right.  Quantitatively small, they were qualitatively giants.  Their powerful gospel put an end to such barbaric evils as infanticide and bloody gladiatorial contests.  Finally, they captured the Roman Empire for Jesus Christ… The hope of a secure and livable world lies with disciplined nonconformists, who are dedicated to justice, peace, and brotherhood.  The trailblazers in human, academic, scientific, and religious freedom have always been nonconformists.  In any cause that concerns the progress of mankind, put your faith in the nonconformist!

…Honesty impels me to admit that transformed nonconformity, which is always costly and never altogether comfortable, may mean walking through the valley of the shadow of suffering, losing a job, or having a six-year-old daughter ask, “Daddy, why do you have to go to jail so much?”  But we are gravely mistaken to think that Christianity protects us from the pain and agony of mortal existence.  Christianity has always insisted that the cross we bear precedes the crown we wear.  To be a Christian, one must take up his cross, with all of its difficulties and agonizing and tragedy-packed content, and carry it until that very cross leaves its marks upon us and redeems us to that more excellent way that comes only through suffering.

In these days of worldwide confusion, there is a dire need for men and women who will courageously do battle for truth.  We must make a choice. Will we continue to march to the drumbeat of conformity and respectability, or will we, listening to the beat of a more distant drum, move to its echoing sounds?  Will we march only to the music of time, or will we, risking criticism and abuse, march to the soul saving music of eternity?

Why do you look for the living among the dead?

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn, they came to the tomb, taking the spices that they had prepared. They found the stone rolled away from the tomb, but when they went in, they did not find the body. While they were perplexed about this, suddenly two men in dazzling clothes stood beside them. The women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground, but the men said to them, “Why do you look for the living among the dead? He is not here, but has risen. Remember how he told you, while he was still in Galilee, that the Son of Man must be handed over to sinners, and be crucified, and on the third day rise again.” Then they remembered his words, and returning from the tomb, they told all this to the eleven and to all the rest. Now it was Mary Magdalene, Joanna, Mary the mother of James, and the other women with them who told this to the apostles. But these words seemed to them an idle tale, and they did not believe them. But Peter got up and ran to the tomb; stooping and looking in, he saw the linen cloths by themselves; then he went home, amazed at what had happened.

Joyous Easter

Mises Institute: Decentralization Is a Step toward Self-Determination

Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute writes that Decentralization Is a Step toward Self-Determination about state pre-emption laws.

For decades now, advocates for freedom and free markets have disagreed over whether or not political decentralization and local self-governance are important principles in themselves.

Most recently, this debate flared up here at mises.org over the issue of state-level preemptions of local government. Specifically, Connor Mortell objected to the State of Florida’s prohibition of local policymaking autonomy on the issue of covid lockdowns and mandates.

In response, a number of readers both in social media and in the comment section here at mises.org insisted that centralization of political power is fine so long as it’s the good guys who are doing the centralization.

We’ve certainly been here before. Indeed, this debate is essentially identical to the one over whether or not the US Supreme Court’s 2005 Kelo decision was a good thing. In that case, both sides were in agreement that eminent domain powers—practiced by any level of government—are a bad thing.

The disagreement was over whether or not states and the federal government ought to be able to prohibit local governments from exercising local eminent domain powers.

Lew Rockwell, building on Murray Rothbard’s decentralist views, took the position that eminent domain is bad (of course), but faraway governments ought not be in the business of meddling in local affairs to prevent it.

In an article titled “What We Mean by Decentralization” Rockwell writes:

The Kelo decision, in which the Supreme Court refused to intervene in the case of a local government taking of private property, touched off a huge debate among libertarians on the question of decentralization. The most common perspective was that the decision was a disaster because it gave permission to local governments to steal land. Libertarians are against stealing land, and so therefore must oppose the court decision.

And yet stealing isn’t the only thing libertarians are against. We are also opposed to top-down political control over wide geographic regions, even when they are instituted in the name of liberty.

Hence it would be no victory for your liberty if, for example, the Chinese government assumed jurisdiction over your downtown streets in order to liberate them from zoning ordinances. Zoning violates property rights, but imperialism violates the right of a people to govern themselves. The Chinese government lacks both jurisdiction and moral standing to intervene. What goes for the Chinese government goes for any distant government that presumes control over government closer to home.

Rockwell doesn’t mention it, but he’s likely taking a page from Ludwig von Mises here on the matter of “self determination.” For Mises, self-determination was a key element in limiting the power of political regimes and opposing the “princely principle” of political centralization and maximization of a state’s area of control.

Mises and “Self-Determination”

As Mises put it in Nation, State, and Economy, the “doctrine of freedom” offers an alternative—“the principle of the right of self-determination of peoples, which follows necessarily from the principle of the rights of man.”

Mises goes on to clarify that this type of self-determination is also about local control:

To call this right of self-determination the “right of self-determination of nations” is to misunderstand it. It is not the right of self-determination of a delimited national unit, but the right of the inhabitants of every territory to decide on the state to which they wish to belong.

What does this mean in practice? Mises insists on the right of inhabitants to choose their own state. By this he means that localized groups of people with similar cultural and political interests—even down the level of a village—must have the freedom to function independently of the impediments of a larger centralized state. 

Murray Rothbard, not surprisingly, was in agreement with this, and noted the implications of Mises’s position: that self-determination at the local level is a key step in securing self determination not only for small groups, but for individuals themselves.

The reasons for this are numerous, and they’re why most libertarians (i.e., the liberals of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries like Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Constant) preferred local government to government by larger, less local regimes. Like his liberal predecessors, Mises understood that larger “national” regimes tend toward abuses committed by large majorities on smaller linguistic, cultural, ideological, and ethnic groups.1

These problems tend to be made less bad by more localization. 

Decentralization of this sort is also important, because it allows individuals greater ability to exercise their freedoms by more easily changing the regime under which they live. Rothbard explains that decentralization

means greater competition between governments of different geographical areas, enabling people of one State to zip across the border to relatively greater freedom more easily; and it exalts the mighty libertarian principle of secession, which we hope to extend on down from the region to the city to the block to the individual.

Rothbard speaks of state boundaries—here meaning the American political units called “states” and not to be confused with the Weberian sovereign state—but of course he also applied the same principle down to local governments:

Pending total privatization, it is clear that our model could be approached, and conflicts minimized, by permitting secessions and local control, down to the micro-neighborhood level, and by developing contractual access rights for enclaves and exclaves. In the U.S., it becomes important, in moving toward such radical decentralization, for libertarians and classical liberals—indeed, for many other minority or dissident groups—to begin to lay the greatest stress on the forgotten Tenth Amendment and to try to decompose the role and power of the centralizing Supreme Court. Rather than trying to get people of one’s own ideological persuasion on the Supreme Court, its power should be rolled back and minimized as far as possible, and its power decomposed into state, or even local, judicial bodies.

“Uniformity” Is No Virtue

Nonetheless, one recent commenter at mises.org argues local autonomy is unacceptable because travelers ought not have to deal with a patchwork of different legal regimes:

[In Wisconsin] I drive 40 miles to work and 40 back. I pass through at least 8 different towns on the way. If every town had different gun laws, my freedom to protect myself [with legal concealed weapons] would be compromised or curtailed altogether.

The conclusion we are presumably supposed to draw is that some centralized political authority must intervene to ensure uniformity among laws, presumably in a way that protects the rights of residents. Of course, this sort of reasoning takes the naïve view that the central government is likely to implement laws that favor the legality of concealed weapons. Experience suggests this is a rather fanciful notion, and we can see the benefits of local control if we consider the case of a state that takes an unfavorable view toward firearms.

Consider New York State, for example, where the state government heavily restricts the use and ownership of firearms. It is likely that many towns and cities in the northern and western part of the state, however, would prefer to allow more freedom in firearms usage in their jurisdictions. If these local communities were allowed local control,  at least the residents in those communities would have greater freedom with firearms. But as it is, the presence of a strong centralized state government ensures these freedoms are heavily curtailed everywhere within the state. Thus, the overall amount of freedom is greater in a scenario with decentralized political power.

The argument that laws ought to be uniform is equally suspect when dealing with passing across state borders. For example, consider a commuter who must drive from southern Maine to the northern end of the Boston metro area. This is a trip of only about eighty miles, but requires the commuter to travel through three states. Two of these states tend to be permissive on guns—Maine and New Hampshire—but Massachusetts tends to heavily restrict firearms usage and ownership.

If uniformity in law is important, then we must therefore insist that the federal government intervene to ensure that we aren’t inconvenienced by the fact gun laws change every time we cross state lines. 

But, of course, we know how well that would work out. Inviting federal lawmakers to “protect rights” or make gun laws “uniform” would almost certainly result in far more restriction than is currently the state in many states. Unfortunately, uniformity across state lines tends to favor the areas with the most restrictive mandates.

The Problem with Asking Higher Levels of Government to Protect Our Rights

Another objection is that a profreedom position requires support of any regime that lowers government regulations or mandates, regardless of how immense or distant that regime is:

Government at any level, other than at the individual level, is illegitimate … it makes more sense to support any individual action that comes closer to enforcing the NAP [i.e., the nonaggression principle] whether it is the president, governor, or mayor.

This is the logic behind the EU: the national governments are imposing tariffs, so we need the European Commission to ensure “free trade.” Indeed, the EU has long been sold as a profreedom institution, because it supposedly lowered trade barriers erected by more local government units. Of course, we can see where that led. The net effect of the EU has been the exact opposite of the expansion of freedom. Instead, the EU has given the world a giant bureaucracy that limits trade with the non-EU world and imposes countless regulations of its own.

The same logic could also be employed to call in the World Trade Organization to force down Trump’s tariffs. After all, if the US is raising taxes on trade, we need somebody to “enforce the NAP.” Why not strengthen the WTO so it can dictate tax rates to member states? The problem with this should be obvious: calling in some international body like the WTO to better “protect rights” is just asking for trouble. Americans would soon find themselves in a position similar to that of the British under the EU. Would surrendering more local prerogatives to an international group of politicians be a solution to high tariffs? This could potentially work in the short run, but experience has taught us that the potential for lost freedom in the longer term is enormous. 

  • 1. On this, Benjamin Constant writes: “It is clear that different portions of the same people, placed in circumstances, brought up in customs, living in places, which are all dissimilar, cannot be led to absolutely the same manners, usages, practices, and laws, without a coercion which would cost them more than it is worth.”

Economic Collapse Blog: America’s Cities Are Being Turned Into Crime-Ridden War Zones

The other day we posted an article saying that America has already collapsed. Here, Michael Snyder at the Economic Collapse Blog writes America’s Cities Are Being Turned Into Crime-Ridden War Zones, And Murder Rates Are Way Up Again In 2021.

The wealthy are reveling in their giant mountains of money, but meanwhile our society is literally coming apart at the seams all around us.  The stock market has been hovering near all-time record highs, and for those at the very top of the economic pyramid these may seem like the best of times.  But for most Americans, the “good old days” are a long distant memory.  More than 70 million new claims for unemployment benefits have been filed over the past year, poverty is absolutely exploding all around us, and crime rates are shooting higher at an unprecedented rate.  In fact, one study of 34 big U.S. cities found that their murder rates rose by an average of 30 percent in 2020…

A study by the National Commission on Covid-19 and Criminal Justice found that murders increased by 30% across 34 large U.S. cities.

In some areas, carjackings, robberies, shootings, sexual assaults and violence have become so common that it seems like the crime literally never stops.

Unless you have a death wish, there are certain parts of Los Angeles, Minneapolis, Chicago, Philadelphia and Baltimore that you should never enter night or day.  If you doubt me, just go wander the streets of the worst neighborhoods of those cities and see what happens to you.

This was supposed to be a year when crime rates began to return to normal, but instead they are on the rise again.  One study that looked at 37 large U.S. cities found that murder rates are up by an average of 18 percent so far in 2021…

The big increase in the murder rate in the United States in 2020 has carried over to 2021.

A sample of 37 cities with data available for the first three months of this year shows murder up 18 percent relative to the same period last year.

What is truly frightening is that this is about as good as things are going to get in America from here on out.

So if murder rates are spiking this much under relatively good conditions, what will our cities look like when things get really crazy?

Some of the crimes that we are witnessing are almost too horrible for words.  For example, just consider what just happened to a 12-year-old boy in Miami…

A suspect in a black car kidnapped the boy at about 2 a.m. early Saturday morning from a Miami street, according to the Miami-Dade Police Department.

He drove a few blocks, raped the boy, and then shoved him out of the car and drove off, police said.

A good Samaritan on a bike near the scene of the crime came to the boy’s rescue. He was bleeding from the head and said he had been shot.

How sick do you have to be in order to do something like that?

Sadly, I could write about nightmarish crimes such as this every single day of the week if I wanted to, because they happen constantly.

Much of the crime boom is being fueled by gangs.  There are more than 100,000 gang members living in the city of Chicago alone, and a steady stream of illegal immigrants ensures that the gangs will always have an influx of new recruits.

Securing our borders would go a long way toward solving this problem, but we refuse to do that.

Just recently, a sheriff in Texas took a reporter from the Daily Mail down to “the easiest illegal border crossing along the Rio Grande”…

The crossing point is on private property where an abandoned house sits on a quiet rural street that runs parallel to the Rio Grande, about 5 miles out of town from Del Rio, Texas, 150 miles southwest of San Antonio.

Law enforcement has nicknamed it ‘Border Lawn.’

‘It’s the easiest illegal border crossing along the Rio Grande,’ Val Verde County Sheriff Joe Frank Martinez told DailyMail.com in an exclusive interview.

When the river is low, immigrants can wade across the Rio Grande in about five minutes.

Authorities know that hordes of people come across the border at this spot each week, but they won’t stop it.

Of course any immigrants that are detained need to be held somewhere, and facilities at the border are already packed beyond overflowing.  In particular, the infamous facility in Donna, Texas is already holding more than 10 times more migrants than it was designed to hold…

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) holding facility in Donna, Texas, is supposed to house no more than 250 migrants during the coronavirus pandemic.

On Tuesday, the tent complex was holding more than 4,100 migrants, including 3,200 unaccompanied children, according to Oscar Escamilla, a Border Patrol official in the Rio Grande Valley who briefed reporters during the first press tour of a CBP facility under President Biden.

So much of the immigration debate is focused on the unfortunate children that are being held in places such as this, but that is just a drop in the bucket.

Each week, thousands of grown men illegally cross the border without being detained at all.  Many of those grown men end up in our core urban areas, and with few legitimate employment prospects available many of them turn to crime.

In an article that I published yesterday entitled “We Have Never Seen A Home Buying Frenzy Quite Like This”, I discussed the fact that we have seen a mass exodus from our core urban areas over the past year.  Millions of Americans have been looking to buy homes in desirable rural and suburban locations, and this has pushed housing prices into the stratosphere.

Today, I came across another example of this phenomenon.  122 offers were made on a 1,400 square foot home that was listed for sale in Citrus Heights, California in just one weekend…

A Citrus Heights home in a quiet cul-de-sac received 122 offers in one weekend on the market.

The 1,400 square feet home has three bedrooms, two baths and a spacious backyard with a swimming pool and an asking price of $399,900.00.

Could you imagine paying $400,000 for a house that is just 1,400 square feet in size?

The real estate agent that listed this property was astounded to receive so many offers, because it wasn’t underpriced at all…

“People would think that it was underpriced. It was not underpriced. It was straight on with the comps,” said Deb Brittan, the listing agent for the property. “I had hoped, I thought, maybe if we get 20 offers that would be amazing.”

As for the couple that sold the house, they don’t need it anymore because they are moving to Idaho.

As conditions in the United States continue to deteriorate, we will continue to see people flock to rural and suburban communities at an unprecedented rate.

So if you are planning to move, I would not wait.

Millions of Americans have already been priced out of the market, and the feeding frenzy is not going to subside any time soon.