The Organic Prepper: Unconventional Warfare in the US

Political warfare location within four implements of power

Daisy Luther of The Organic Prepper writes about the use of unconventional warfare techniques with the US recently in her article There’s an Actual Playbook for Everything Happening Right Now and the US Wrote It. But Who Is Using It Against Us? Some of this echoes themes written of by intelligence analyst Sam Culper of Forward Observer on low intensity conflict in the US, as you may have seen from articles of his that we’ve posted to this site.

While it might seem like everything that is happening is just chaotically bouncing from one shocking event to the next, that assessment couldn’t be further from the truth. There’s a playbook – a literal playbook – and we’re being manipulated toward the endgame that does not benefit the American people.

What’s the endgame?

Spoiler alert.

It’s widespread guerrilla actions and the destabilization of our country.

What’s this playbook?

The playbook I’m referring to in this article is the US Special Forces Unconventional Warfare Manual from 2010. These were methods that the United States military employed against Libya.

The intent of U.S. UW efforts is to exploit a hostile power’s political, military, economic, and psychological vulnerabilities by developing and sustaining resistance forces to accomplish U.S. strategic objectives. Historically, the military concept for the employment of UW was primarily in support of resistance movements during general-war scenarios. While this concept remains valid, the operational environment since the end of World War II has increasingly required U.S. forces to conduct UW in scenarios short of general war (limited war).

Enabling a resistance movement or insurgency entails the development of an underground and guerrilla forces, as well as supporting auxiliaries for each of these elements. Resistance movements or insurgencies always have an underground element. The armed component of these groups is the guerrilla force and is only present if the resistance transitions to conflict. The combined effects of two interrelated lines of effort largely generate the end result of a UW campaign. The efforts are armed conflict and subversion. Forces conduct armed conflict, normally in the form of guerrilla warfare, against the security apparatus of the host nation (HN) or occupying military. Conflict also includes operations that attack and degrade enemy morale, organizational cohesion, and operational effectiveness and separate the enemy from the population. Over time, these attacks degrade the ability of the HN or occupying military to project military power and exert control over the population. Subversion undermines the power of the government or occupying element by portraying it as incapable of effective governance to the population. (source)

And now this guideline is very clearly being used against the United States. It started years back, but recently, we’ve watched things escalate rather dramatically.

Here’s the guideline.

Consider this a pyramid that begins at the bottom and builds to the apex. This all begins with underground activities and the fanning of legitimate flames, like Selco mentioned in his article about defunding the police.

Does that stuff look familiar? It should because we’re more than three-quarters of the way through this escalation.

The causes are not unjust.

The thing that makes this technique so effective is that the causes themselves are not unjust. They are things that would rightly anger any reasonable, compassionate human being.

Most white people don’t want to see people of other races suffer indignities and violence based on the color of their skin. (I say “most” because there are always outliers and extremists.) Most Americans in general do not want to see police brutality. They don’t want to see families split up or people imprisoned for decades for victimless crimes.

Let me be perfectly clear when I say that it is not unreasonable or wrong to be outraged and want things to change. I hate some of the things I’ve seen our government and police officers do and have written about these misdeeds for years.

But this article isn’t about whether or not our anger is justified. It is an assessment of a playbook.

All of this outrage over injustice forms the foundation of something that can be used against us. The agitation has been building up for years – far longer than President Trump has been in office – so as much as people love to hate him, he isn’t the cause of all this. But he’s certainly not making things go any more smoothly.

An early timeline

Everything I’m writing about today is about how our government in the past has encouraged a resistance in other countries, and how a resistance is being nurtured here in the United States right now.

So what does it take to cause people to be angry enough to resist?

Resistance generally begins with the desire of individuals to remove intolerable conditions imposed by an unpopular regime or occupying power. Feelings of opposition toward the governing authority and hatred of existing conditions that conflict with the individual’s values, interests, aspirations, and way of life spread from the individual to his family, close friends, and neighbors. As a result, an entire community may possess an obsessive hatred for the established authority. Initially, this hatred will manifest as sporadic, spontaneous nonviolent and violent acts of resistance by the people toward authority. As the discontent grows, natural leaders, such as former military personnel, clergymen, local office holders, and neighborhood representatives, emerge to channel this discontent into organized resistance that promotes its growth. The population must believe they have nothing to lose, or more to gain. (source)

There can be more than one resistance going on at a time, too. Currently, everything that is in the news is about the resistance that has sprung up over the death of George Floyd. A few months ago, it was about the sanctuary cities in Virginia standing up against state legislators.

Resistance organizations have been around for years: Black Lives Matter, the NRA, Antifa, the Boogaloo movement, the Black Bloc, the Gun Owners of America. I’m just listing off examples of organizations here, not passing judgment whether they’re good or bad. I’ll bet that most people who join do so because of their own deeply held beliefs. They sincerely feel they’re doing the right thing and have the best of intentions.

But then there are the other people who join – the infiltrators – and they take these kinds of organizations to dark places. Much has been written about the involvement of the Communist Party, neo-Nazis, George Soros, and white supremacists in various groups. And while some of it may be the stuff of legends and propaganda, a lot of it is very likely to be true…(continues)

OH8STN: How to Ham Radio Off Grid

Julian, OH8STN, has another video on How to Ham Radio Off Grid.

Hello Operators. Todays video is very special, since it answers many of the questions we’ve asked about portable ham radio off grid. Operating a ham radio station off grid and or in the field is not something to be taken lightly. We need to look at our field communication goals, how long we’re going to be out there, the type of equipment we need in the field, and battery power for our ham radio, when off grid or in the field. If you’re a ham radio beginner or seasoned veteran adding additional skills and capabilities to your station, you’re going to love this series.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avGBTzWAqbo

How-To Geek: How Worried Should You Be About the Health Risks of 5G?

There have been concerns expressed about the health effects of electromagnetic radiation for some time. Recently, with the introduction of 5G wireless services, there has been a new upswell of concern. While this article from Dave Johnson at How-To Geek is not a comprehensive or technical article, I think it frames the health concerns in a way that is understandable to most – How Worried Should You Be About the Health Risks of 5G? Most of the US places where 5G is already deployed are using frequencies (In the 450 MHz – 6GHz ranger) that are already in use by current LTE phone data networks. So there isn’t much difference at all between the 5G and LTE as far as health effects would go. As 5G matures and more compatible phones are out there, there will be more use of the 25 GHz – 53 GHz range. Higher frequencies mean that more data can be added to the signal, translating to higher bandwidth. These higher frequency access points have a shorter range, transmitting at lower power, and thus need to be deployed closer to the end users with fewer users per access point.

5G logo over a city at night
areebarbar/Shutterstock.com

 

5G, the next generation of cellular technology for the next generation of smartphones, is imminent. And with it, there’s concern about the health risk of this new, more powerful network. How worried should you be about the coming 5G healthpocalypse?

By now, you may have seen articles on Facebook or alternative health websites. The gist: 5G is a dangerous escalation of traditional cellular technology, one packed with higher energy radiation that delivers potential damaging effects on human beings. Some 5G conspiracy theorists contend that the new network generates radiofrequency radiation that can damage DNA and lead to cancer; cause oxidative damage that can cause premature aging; disrupt cell metabolism; and potentially lead to other diseases through the generation of stress proteins. Some articles cite research studies and opinions by reputable organizations like the World Health Organization.

It sounds worrisome, but let’s take a look at the actual science.

What Is 5G?

5G has been hyped for a few years, but this is the year that carriers begin the process of rolling out the new wireless standard. AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have all started to deploy their networks in the first half of the year, though widespread availability is still a year or more away. 5G will get a foothold in little more than a handful of cities this year.

Update: With the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, a number of viral social media conspiracy theories have speculated that 5G is the cause of the world’s current problems. Simply put, these claims are factually false. 5G does not cause Coronavirus.

That isn’t keeping device manufacturers and service providers from jumping onto the 5G bandwagon. Samsung’s new Galaxy S10 and Galaxy Fold (the phone that unfurls into a tablet), for example, are both 5G-ready, along with models from LG, Huawei, Motorola, ZTE, and more.

5G offers at least a tenfold improvement in network performance. The last major network upgrade was 4G, which debuted in 2009 (the year of the Colorado balloon boy hoax), with a peak speed of about 10 Mbps. In comparison, 5G is poised to deliver peak speeds between 10 and 20 Gbps. And network latency will drop from 30ms to about 1ms, ideal for video game streaming, online video, and the Internet of Things, which is anticipating 5G to connect sensors, computers, and other devices with ultra-low latency.

An Evolution of Concerns

Before we address 5G, it’s worth pointing out that the latest health fears about radiation aren’t happening in a vacuum (there’s some physics joke in there, no doubt). Concerns about 5G are the latest iteration of decades of headlines about the dangers of electromagnetic radiation. We’ve seen controversies about everything from the health risks of Wi-Fi to smart meters.

Electromagnetic hypersensitivity, for example, is a hypothetical disease in which certain people experience debilitating symptoms in the presence of radiation like cell phones and Wi-Fi—so yes, Michael McKean’s bizarre behavior on “Better Call Saul” is a real thing. But despite people claiming such sensitivities for at least 30 years, systematic scientific reviews have found that “blinded” victims can’t tell when they’re in the presence of an electromagnetic field, and the World Health Organization now recommends psychological evaluation for people so afflicted.

Likewise, decades of studies have found no link between cell phones and cancers like brain tumors, though that hasn’t kept municipalities like San Francisco from passing laws requiring stores to display the radiation emitted by handsets—which implies, in the minds of consumers, risk.

How Dangerous Is Radiofrequency Radiation?

5G cellular base station
kriangphrom/Shutterstock.com

At the root of all concerns about cell phone networks is radiofrequency radiation (RFR). RFR is anything emitted in the electromagnetic spectrum, from microwaves to x-rays to radio waves to light from your monitor or light from the sun. Clearly, RFR isn’t inherently dangerous, so the problem becomes discovering under what circumstances it might be.

Scientists say that the most important criterion about whether any particular RFR is dangerous is whether it falls into the category of ionizing or non-ionizing radiation. Simply put, any radiation that’s non-ionizing is too weak to break chemical bonds. That includes ultraviolet, visible light, infrared, and everything with a lower frequency, like radio waves. Everyday technologies like power lines, FM radio, and Wi-Fi also fall into this range. (Microwaves are the lone exception: non-ionizing but able to damage tissue, they’re precisely and intentionally tuned to resonate with water molecules.) Frequencies above UV, like x-rays and gamma rays, are ionizing.

Dr. Steve Novella, an assistant professor of neurology at Yale and the editor of Science-Based Medicine, understands that people generally get concerned about radiation. “Using the term radiation is misleading because people think of nuclear weapons—they think of ionizing radiation that absolutely can cause damage. It can kill cells. It can cause DNA mutations.” But since non-ionizing radiation doesn’t cause DNA damage or tissue damage, Novella says that most concern about cell phone RFR is misplaced. “There’s no known mechanism for most forms of non-ionizing radiation to even have a biological effect,” he says.

Or, in the less refined but more visceral words of author C. Stuart Hardwick, “radiation isn’t magic death cooties.”

Studies Aren’t Clearcut

Of course, just because there’s no known mechanism for non-ionizing radiation to have a biological effect, that doesn’t’ mean it’s safe or that no effect exists. Indeed, researchers continue to conduct studies. One recent study was released by the National Toxicology Program (NTP), an agency run by the Department of Health and Human Services. In this widely quoted study about cell phone radio frequency radiation, scientists found that high exposure to 3G RFR led to some cases of cancerous heart tumors, brain tumors, and tumors in the adrenal glands of male rats.

The study is a good object lesson in how hard it is to do science like this. As RealClearScience points out, the number of tumors detected were so small that they statistically could have occurred by chance (which may be more likely since they were only detected in male subjects). Moreover, the level and duration of the RFR exposure were well in excess of what any actual human would ever be exposed to, and in fact, the irradiated test rats lived longer than the unexposed control rats. Says Dr. Novella, “Experienced researchers look at a study like that and say that doesn’t really tell us anything.”

Sizing Up 5G’s Risks

Ongoing studies aside, 5G is coming, and as mentioned, there are concerns about this new technology.

A common complaint about 5G is that, due to the lower power of 5G transmitters, there will be more of them. The Environmental Health Trust contends that “5G will require the buildout of literally hundreds of thousands of new wireless antennas in neighborhoods, cities, and towns. A cellular small cell or another transmitter will be placed every two to ten homes according to estimates.”

Says Dr. Novella, “What they’re really saying is the dose is going to be higher. Theoretically, this is a reasonable question to ask.” But skeptics caution you shouldn’t conflate asking the question with merely asserting that there’s a risk. As Novella points out, “We’re still talking about power and frequency less than light. You go out in the sun, and you’re bathed in electromagnetic radiation that’s far greater than these 5G cell towers.”

It’s easy to find claims online that the greater frequency of 5G alone constitutes a risk. RadiationHealthRisks.com observes that “1G, 2G, 3G and 4G use between 1 to 5 gigahertz frequency. 5G uses between 24 to 90 gigahertz frequency,” and then asserts that “Within the RF Radiation portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, the higher the frequency, the more dangerous it is to living organisms.”

But asserting that the higher frequency is more dangerous is just that—an assertion, and there’s little real science to stand behind it. 5G remains non-ionizing in nature.

Devices emitting electromagnetic fields in the home
elenabsl/Shuttterstock.com

The FCC—responsible for licensing the spectrum for public use—weighs in as well. Says Neil Derek Grace, a communications officer at the FCC, “For 5G equipment, the signals from commercial wireless transmitters are typically far below the RF exposure limits at any location that is accessible to the public.” The FCC defers to the FDA for actual health risk assessments, which takes a direct, but low-key approach to addressing the risks: “The weight of scientific evidence has not linked cell phones with any health problems.”

In 2011, the World Health Organization weighed in, classifying RF Radiation as a Group 2B agent, which is defined as “Possibly carcinogenic to humans.” This, too, is nuanced. Says Novella, “you have to look at all the other things they classify as a possible carcinogen. They put it in the same class as things like caffeine. That is such a weak standard that it basically means nothing. It’s like saying ‘everything causes cancer.’”

Part of the problem with the WHO declaration is that it’s focused on hazard, not risk—a subtle distinction often lost on non-scientists, not unlike the rigorous distinction between “precision” and “accuracy.” (Precision refers to how tightly clustered your data is; accuracy refers to how close that data is to the real value. You might have a dozen miscalibrated thermometers that all tell you the wrong temperature with a very high degree of precision.) When the WHO classifies coffee or nickel or pickles as a possible carcinogen, it’s asserting hazard without regard for real-world risk. Explains Novella, “A loaded pistol is a hazard because theoretically, it can cause damage. But if you lock it in a safe, the risk is negligible.”

Scientists will continue to test new networks as technology evolves, to make sure the technology we use every day remains safe. As recently as February, U.S. Senator Richard Blumenthal critiqued the FCC and FDA for insufficient research into the potential risks of 5G. As the NTP study shows, research into radiation risks is difficult and often inconclusive, meaning it can take a long time to make real progress.

But for now, everything we know about 5G networks tells us that there’s no reason to be alarmed. After all, there are many technologies we use every day with a substantially higher measurable risk. And as Dr. Novella says, “With 5G the hazard is low—but non-zero—and the actual risk appears to be zero. We’ve picked up no signal in the real world.”

See also:

Healthline: Should You Be Worried About EMF Exposure?

ARRL: Radio Frequency Safety (PDF) This gets a bit more technical but shows that there ae definitely known thermal dangers from RF radiation.

American Cancer Society: Microwaves, Radio Waves, and Other Types of Radiofrequency Radiation

The Medic Shack: Triage

Chuck at The Medic Shack has an article introducing people to the concept of Triage.

Triage. An introduction to combat medicine.

Welcome to the next level of preparedness. Trauma. Trauma can come from many sources. A slip with an knife in the kitchen. A smashed thumb in the workshop. A terrible cut from a chainsaw. Being at the wrong place at the wrong time and caught up in a riot. Now add in those same injuries, but multiply times 10. You now have a MCE. Pick the scenario. It can happen. Learning how to prioritize, delegate, investigate, assess and treat are skills anyone can learn.

Applying them with out emotion is a different beast altogether. It is doable. One of the hardest things to master in triage is seeing the injuries, and not getting personal with them. Another is being able to itemize the injuries, almost coldly and place them in the order of severity, and the order of treatment.

This is a HUGE deviation from the basic first aid that we talk about. With the fast moving changes sweeping the country and the world, Cat from The Herbal Prepper and I decided that we need to change up some of our topics and delve into more advanced lifesaving.

A word of warning and disclaimer. We are not doctors. We can not diagnose, prescribe or treat injury nor illness outside of a SHTF situations. This blog post is for informational use only. Pagan Preparedness, nor the owners, operators, instructors or author’s claim any responsibility for people using this information in any manner.

Glossary of terms

MOI= Method Of Injury

LOC=Level Of Consciousness

LOR = Loss of Resistance

MCE Mass Casualty Event

Triage= The process of sorting people based on their need for immediate medical treatment as compared to their chance of benefiting from such care.

The military triage flow sheet.

This is the method I used as a combat medic. There are terms here that people may be uncomfortable with. Items like balancing resources that you have now, to what you may have to what benefit it will give the patient, AND what loss/benefit of the expending those supplies will have on the group

Triage Decision Flowchart

Triage Decision Flowchart, showing the five steps in the triage process.

Step 1: Remove GREEN patients. Get help, you can’t do it all yourself

ASSESS:

2: MOI

3: LOC

4: Breathing.

 

Always remember. There are many more patients than rescuers.

Triage is designed to separate patients into categories according to their injuries, level of consciousness , and yes even if they are alive. It is important to do the examination quickly but be very complete with it. Lives depend on it. This is one the things that gives us medics bad dreams. At the triage station you may have to make a decision on if someone lives or dies.

The triage that we’ll go over here, is slightly different than what one will see in the local emergency room. The basics are the same, but the application of a hostile or dangerous environment adds a new level of difficulty,

An example of the difference between combat and civilian triage is the Boston Marathon bombing. The civilian medics on site risked their lives and rushed to the aid of the victims. And treated them where they fell. There also was a detachment of Army Medics to support the Army team running. They risked their lives and rushed to the aid of the victims AND SNATCHED THEM UP AND BROUGHT THEM TO SAFETY BEFORE TREATING THEM. The civilian medics triage and treated on site. Military medics, train to if at all possible get the victim to a safe or at least safer area before triage or treating…(continues)

Human Path: Making your own Herbal Medic First Aid Kit – Online Course, Aug. 2020

The Human Path is hosting an eight hour, online course on Making your own Herbal Medic First Aid Kit Aug. 3 – 16, 2020 for $100 ($65 if you register by July 13).

Making your own Herbal Medic First Aid Kit

Building your own first aid kit can be a daunting task – trying to find the best pack to hold your gear, keep the weight manageable and have all the equipment you need in one place..

It even becomes more complicated when you want to add herbal remedies to your first aid kit.

Do you know the essential equipment you must have in your kit?

Do you know the best type of packs to use for small, medium and large first aid kits?

What are the most important herbal first aid preparations to include in every kit and why?

Do you know how to improvise bandages, splits, packs and kitchen first aid herbs?

This is an 8-hour course that includes lectures, videos and resources on:

FIRST AID KIT CONTAINERS

  •  The top three items every kit MUST haves
  • Improvisation – making a great herbal first aid kit from containers EVERY household has
  • How a kit opens and why this is important
  • Compartmentalizing: containers within containers
  • Sizing and weight
  • Car kits, work kits, go bags and mini (every day carry) kits

ESSENTIAL TRAUMA FIRST AID SUPPLIES

  • Necessary bandaging equipment from minor to life-threatening
  • Wound & burn management
  • Sharps from A to Z
  • Hydration, nutrition and recovery
  • First aid improvisation: using materials on hand for your kit (and in emergencies when you have no kit)

MUST-HAVE HERBAL PREPARATIONS

  • Infection control for respiratory, UTI, Gut and Skin
  • Nervines/Adaptogens for anxiety and trauma
  • Immune supportive herbs for medical emergencies
  • Venomous bites and stings
  • Salves and powders (which to use, when and contraindications)
  • Working with herbs you probably have in your kitchen

The Herbal Medic First Aid Kit Course will include eight hours of video lectures, resources for supplies and materials, slideshows and handouts.  Students will also receive access to ‘The Top 25 herbs for the end of the world’ pdf and the ‘Building Your Own Herbal First Aid Guide’ pdf for download. 

In addition, students will be mailed two full-size glossy 11”x17” posters:  “First Aid Kit Essentials” and “Herbs for Emergency First Aid”. One of these posters includes an organized and visual layout to help you understand what to pack in your first aid kit and how to organize it, whether you know nothing about first aid or you are a medical doctor. The other poster includes an organized structure that will help you pick the most essential herbs you need for your kit, with over 50 herbs spanning multiple health care issues from acute to chronic!

This incredible online course will open on August 3rd with 60 days access. All course materials can be downloaded for personal future reference and use, and the posters will ship out on receipt of tuition.

Dates: The online classroom access will open on August 3rd, 2020, with materials made available for download.

Live Session TBA.

Registration will remain open until August 16th, 2020.

Location: This is an online class – you do not have to be in our area to participate! You only need access to the internet to take this class.

Click here for the class info and registration page.

Liberty Blitzkrieg: Resist the Crazy

Michael Krieger at Liberty Blitzkrieg writes about how elites try to divide the people in order to maintain power, and how you must keep your mind guarded to resist such efforts in Resist the Crazy.

Where’s evil? It’s that large part of every man that wants to hate without limit, that wants to hate with God on its side. It’s that part of every man that finds all kinds of ugliness so attractive – it’s that part of an imbecile that punishes and vilifies and makes war gladly.

– Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

As things felt like they were spiraling out of control last week, as Americans and people around the world were inundated with endless videos of street violence in addition to reactionary calls to deploy the U.S. military to cities across the country, the temptation to lose control of one’s mental faculties and basic humanity was heightened.

I saw evidence of this all around me. There was a dark and vicious energy in the air, and it felt contagious.

The responses to the tweet above were encouraging and demonstrated many others sensed the same thing and were likewise troubled by it. The overall madness of last week reminded me of the months following Donald Trump’s election. In both cases, the worldview of large numbers of people was shaken to its core. I think the root cause of the breakdown in both instances was that many people’s model of what is “normal” was suddenly shattered.

For example, the idea of Donald Trump being elected president was so incomprehensible and concerning to so many, they completely lost it when he won. Likewise, images of American cities burning amidst widespread looting caused another group to crack. Neither group had fully come to grips with how broken and corrupt the U.S. economy and society had become, and that these sorts of things happen when states begin to fail.

The reaction to Trump being elected from many of those traumatized by it was to try to remove him at all costs, even if this meant spreading an outlandish Russiagate theory for three years straight. Likewise, the knee-jerk reaction from many to the riots was to send in the military to crush them. In both cases, those who had their comfort zones shattered responded by trying to make the uncomfortable situation go away as soon as possible. Nobody wanted to ask why.

Why was Trump elected? People are angry. Why did cities erupt into civil disobedience? People are angry. Lots of people are angry, but why? We should probably try to honestly answer that question sooner rather than later. There are a lot of very good reasons to be angry.

That being said, unless your life is in immediate danger, the best response to an event that shocks you to your core is to step back and take a deep breath.  You don’t have to like what’s happening, but you should consider what a productive or creative response to the situation might look like, as opposed to immediately resorting to an instant-gratification, emotionally charged, reptilian response. The response to a crisis is often worse than the crisis itself.

Someone mentioned to me that he tells all his friends: “you must stand guard at the door of your mind.” Great advice in general, but particularly necessary during times like these. This is also partly what it means to be more conscious, a topic I’ve written about extensively in recent years (see my series on Spiral Dynamics)

It’s never been more important for those who are somewhat conscious to remain that way, because just as consciousness can evolve, it can also devolve. Characteristic of an evolved consciousness is being able to acknowledge one’s own flaws and vulnerabilities. It means being aware of your more base instincts as a human, which means admitting that just as you have the capacity for love, compassion and generosity, you also have the capacity for hate, apathy and selfishness.

Being honest about this and attempting to confront it is key to evolving one’s consciousness, but ego tends to get in the way. The ego has an image it needs to maintain and protect, which ends up acting as a severe roadblock on the path to sustainable self-improvement. It affects and stifles everyone to varying degrees.

An old Cherokee is teaching his grandson about life. “A fight is going on inside me,” he said to the boy.

“It is a terrible fight and it is between two wolves. One is evil – he is anger, envy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego.” He continued, “The other is good – he is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith. The same fight is going on inside you – and inside every other person, too.”

The grandson thought about it for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf will win?”

The old Cherokee simply replied, “The one you feed.”

It’s important to understand that virtually everyone considers themselves a good person. That person on the complete opposite side of the political spectrum whom you detest, thinks of themselves as a righteous warrior fighting for all that’s good and just. Everyone sees themselves in this sort of way to a greater or lesser degree, but not everyone can be right. So we divide ourselves into tribes that reinforce our views of how right and great we are, and how bad everyone else is. This prevents us from seeing where other people are coming from, and it prevents us from uniting on the really big issues that affect us all.

Moreover, there are people who understand this about human nature and intentionally use it against us. A perfect summary of how this plays out every day via social media can be found in the following excerpt from a post recently published at The Prepared.

You should also remember that the split-screen effect means media types can tell whatever story they want to tell. As in the Venezuela clip above, there are some outlets who focus on the peaceful and joyful parts of the present protests, and others who focus purely on the violence and chaos.

All of this stuff—the beautiful and the ugly—is really happening and really matters, but you have to be extremely careful in using news reports to develop a sense of how much of what is happening where.

You need to be the guardian of your mind, and you need to recognize that people are constantly trying to push your consciousness into a fight or flight state where you’re malleable and easy to manipulate. There are times in life when fight or flight is appropriate to survive, but it’s not a healthy state of mind to resonate in over the course of an average day.

You can contribute to the crazy, or you can contribute in some other way.  A new world is on the horizon, but we need to be careful about how we go about building it. What the world desperately needs right now is more conscious people. From that well, a brighter future can be born.

Forward Observer: Is This a Revolution?

Intelligence analyst Sam Culper of Forward Observer asks Is this a revolution?

Last night, a veteran friend and I were talking about our takes on the protests and riots.

Is this a civil war? A revolution? A rebellion or insurrection?

My initial assessment is that this actually is a revolution, in the sense of the Maidan or Tahrir Square, where organizers attempt to foment a popular uprising against the government.

Maidan, of course, was Ukraine’s 2014 revolution. Tahrir Square, Egypt’s during the 2011 Arab Spring. In both cases, mass protests and violence eventually succeeded in forcing the resignation of the countries’ leaders. There were other cases, too: Puerto Rico, South Korea, Spain, Iceland, and Finland each had their own bouts of widespread protests that led to political change.

All the way back in 2017, which now seems like 20 years ago, a U.S.-based militant socialist web magazine began promoting the idea of mass protests and small scale direct action as a means to bait President Trump into cracking down on Leftists nationwide.

The anticipated iron fist reaction would rally support for the Leftist cause, the authors explained, and expand the class conflict against capitalism and the state.

Since then, the idea of mass mobilization has become regular fare for both liberal and leftist think-pieces.

Rising to its highest popularity during the impeachment debacle, left wing authors encouraged mass protests where millions of Americans would fill the streets in major cities across the country, demanding an end to the Trump administration. According to this calculus, only mass mobilization could produce enough sustained political, social, and economic pressure to force President Trump’s resignation.

The country’s proponents of class conflict saw this push as a launching pad for socialist revolution. That mass mobilization effort fizzled along with impeachment, but what we’re seeing now is the result of the same organizing.

Riding on top of the protests against police brutality and the death of George Floyd is the socialist class war against law enforcement, capitalism, and the state. This is their revolution — not a singular event but a process.

In response to the protest demands, some municipalities are cutting police budgets. In some cases, there’s serious talk about dissolving police departments altogether. Ostensibly, this is to reduce police violence and redirect budgetary savings to social programs.

For the socialist revolution, without police, there are no evictions. There’s no one to stop looting, theft, and the forced redistribution of goods. Without police, there’s no one to enforce laws that protect the exploitative capitalist class against expropriation and violence from the proletariat, so the theory goes.

Now let’s answer the question: is this an actual revolution? Yes, for a few reasons.

1. These aims are nothing short of revolutionary.
2. The proponents of these political, social, and economic policy changes believe this is a revolution and describe themselves as revolutionaries.
3. We’re seeing some signs of success towards these revolutionary aims.

Success isn’t assured through electoral politics. This is why “dual power” exists. This is the concept of developing both political and social power. Institution-building in oppressed communities, outside of politics, is a form of power that can accomplish what politics often can’t. According to the theory, social power eventually grows larger than the opposition’s political power, and that becomes the basis for socialist revolution.

The bottom line is that the conflict here and it’s going to get much worse as the other side responds. Welcome to the next phase of our low intensity conflict.

Regular Assembly of the Whole, Thurs. June 11, 2020

Our next regular assembly of  the whole will be held at The Patriot Barn on Thursday, June 11th, 2020. We’ll have Benton County Sheriff Hatcher and Yakima County Sheriff Udell in order to discuss the recent/on-going protests and also contact tracing activities. Update 6/11/20: Franklin County Sheriff Raymond may also be in attendance to address the topics.

Click here to download a printable PDF copy of the agenda.

Columbia Safety Holding Classes Again

Medical skills trainer Columbia Safety of Kennewick, WA is holding classes again. You can check out their calendar of classes here. Retired St. Louis police captain David Dorn was murdered earlier this week, shot by looters breaking into a friend of Dorn’s pawn shop. Some of the incident had been posted as video to Facebook. I watched a good portion of the video. He was conscious and while he was verbally encouraged to stay alive, he didn’t appear to have received any first aid. While I don’t know if rapid first aid would have saved his life, it is a good reminder that 20% of people who have died from traumatic injuries could have survived with quick bleeding control. Please take a Stop the Bleed or first aid course!

Some courses coming up:

Red Cross Adult and Pediatric FA/CPR/AED – Sat, June 13, 9:00am – 3:30pm

Stop The Bleed – Mon, June 15, 6pm – 9pm

Red Cross Adult FA/CPR/AED Hybrid – Tue, June 23, 1:00pm – 2:30pm

Stop The Bleed – Wed, July 15, 6pm – 9pm

Unz Review: The Systemic Collapse of the US Society Has Begun

The Saker has written an article for The Unz Review on the failing state of the USA, The Systemic Collapse of the US Society Has Begun. Other writers who have been featured on this site (such as John Mosby of Mountain Guerrilla) have been writing about the slow collapse of the US for some time. Empires collapse. The decline often takes place over decades with periods of slower or faster decline. Perhaps one day we’ll be saying that the US failed slowly, slowly, then all at once. Only time will tell.

Cops in DC

I have lived in the United States for a total of 24 years and I have witnessed many crises over this long period, but what is taking place today is truly unique and much more serious than any previous crisis I can recall. And to explain my point, I would like to begin by saying what I believe the riots we are seeing taking place in hundreds of US cities are not about. They are not about:

  1. Racism or “White privilege”
  2. Police violence
  3. Social alienation and despair
  4. Poverty
  5. Trump
  6. The liberals pouring fuel on social fires
  7. The infighting of the US elites/deep state

They are not about any of these because they encompass all of these issues, and more.

It is important to always keep in mind the distinction between the concepts of “cause” and “pretext”. And while it is true that all the factors listed above are real (at least to some degree, and without looking at the distinction between cause and effect), none of them are the true cause of what we are witnessing. At most, the above are pretexts, triggers if you want, but the real cause of what is taking place today is the systemic collapse of the US society.

The next thing which we must also keep in mind is that evidence of correlation is not evidence of causality. Take, for example, this article from CNN entitled “US black-white inequality in 6 stark charts” which completely conflates the two concepts and which includes the following sentence (stress added) “Those disparities exist because of a long history of policies that excluded and exploited black Americans, said Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute, a left-leaning group.” The word “because” clearly point to a causality, yet absolutely nothing in the article or data support this. The US media is chock-full of such conflations of correlation and causality, yet it is rarely denounced.

For a society, any society, to function a number of factors that make up the social contract need to be present. The exact list that make up these factors will depend on each individual country, but they would typically include some kind of social consensus, the acceptance by most people of the legitimacy of the government and its institutions, often a unifying ideology or, at least, common values, the presence of a stable middle-class, the reasonable hope for a functioning “social life”, educational institutions etc. Finally, and cynically, it always helps the ruling elites if they can provide enough circuses (TV) and bread (food) to most citizens. This is even true of so-called authoritarian/totalitarian societies which, contrary to the liberal myth, typically do enjoy the support of a large segment of the population (if only because these regimes are often more capable of providing for the basic needs of society).

Right now, I would argue that the US government has almost completely lost its ability to deliver any of those factors, or act to repair the broken social contract. In fact, what we can observe is the exact opposite: the US society is highly divided, as is the US ruling class (which is even more important). Not only that, but ever since the election of Trump, all the vociferous Trump-haters have been undermining the legitimacy not only of Trump himself, but of the political system which made his election possible. I have been saying that for years: by saying “not my President” the Trump-haters have de-legitimized not only Trump personally, but also de-legitimized the Executive branch as such.

This is an absolutely amazing phenomenon: while for almost four years Trump has been destroying the US Empire externally, Trump-haters spent the same four years destroying the US from the inside! If we look past the (largely fictional) differences between the Republicrats and the Demolicans we can see that they operate like a demolition tag-team of sorts and while they hate each other with a passion, they both contribute to bringing down both the Empire and the United States. For anybody who has studied dialectics this would be very predictable but, alas, dialectics are not taught anymore, hence the stunned “deer in the headlights” look on the faces of most people today.

Finally, it is pretty clear that for all its disclaimers about supporting only the “peaceful protestors” and its condemnation of the “out of town looters”, most of the US media (as well as the alt media) is completely unable to give a moral/ethical evaluation of what is taking place. What I mean by this is the following:

By repeating mantras about how “Black anger is legitimate” the US liberal media is basically placing a seal of approval on the violence and looting. After all, if Black “anger” is legitimate, and if “White privilege” is real, then it is quite “understandable” that this “anger” “sometimes” “boils over” and leads to “regrettable” “excesses”. Just take a look at this image of Biden kneeling down before a Black demonstrator:

Of course, Biden and his supporters will claim that Biden was only kneeling before a cute little girl and her peacefully protesting father, but when combined with the attacks against Trump’s “law and order” rhetoric by Biden and his supporters (including four former US Presidents!), I believe that these kinds of photo-ops are sending a very different message: keep “protesting” as we are on your side which, coming from a guy like Biden, the ultimate symbol of the 1%er elites and a perfect example of “White privilege”, just goes to show that the hypocrisy of US politicians really knows no bounds or limits.

I have to note here that these riots also represent a potential danger for both factions of the Uniparty in power: for the Demolicans the riots probably represent the very last chance to prevent a Trump-reelection, but if the Demolicans are too obvious in support of the riots, then it could backfire against them and turn all the frightened “law and order” types against them. But if they do not support the riots, then the Demolicans will alienate their core constituency (a hodgepodge of various “minorities” pushing their narrow identity-politics agenda). Likewise, for Trump this is an opportunity to show his “law and order” credentials and promise the White people and the relatively fewer Blacks of his base that he will protect them. However, if he is too direct about this and if Trump orders what might be seen by many as unfair or excessive force (of which there has been a lot almost everywhere), then he risks pushing many moderate Republicrats over the edge and side with the Demolicans (or, at least, withhold their vote). In other words, both factions of the Uniparty feel that the riots are both an opportunity and a threat and this is why neither faction can come out and speak truthfully about the real causes of the riots.

The exact same message of weakness and even submissive impotence is, I believe, sent every time a cop kneels when confronting even peaceful demonstrators like on this photo. While this might be intended as a message of compassion, and maybe even an apology, the only thing the rioters will see here is a powerful sign of surrender of the local authorities and I find that extremely dangerous.

Yes, there are plenty of racist, violent and otherwise incompetent cops in the USA. And yes, many of my Black friends reported feeling singled out and treated rudely by cops. But having extensively traveled the world, I want to assure you that the US most definitely does not have the worst cops out there. In fact, I believe that most US cops are decent people. Much more importantly, these cops are the “thin blue line” which protects society against criminals. And while I do believe that US policemen ought to be better educated, better trained, better led and better supervised, I also realize that there is also no short term alternative to them. It is all very fine to dream about educated, peaceful and non-racist cops, but if you remove the existing police force from the equation, there are no other alternatives (the national guard or the regular armed forces do not qualify and don’t have the correct training to deal with civilians anyway), especially in those states which have successfully killed the 2nd Amendment by means of what I call “death by a thousand regulatory cuts” (including NY and NJ)…(continues)

Forward Observer: Where Do We Go from Here? Riot Edition

Intelligence analyst Sam Culper at Forward Observer discusses riots and low intensity conflict in Where to we go from here?

Are these protests and riots the beginning of something larger in our country’s low intensity conflict?  I’m going to try to answer that question here in a few points…

First, let’s start with a simple fact: These riots are what we consider “low intensity conflict,” which exists below the threshold of conventional war (tanks and bombers) but above routine, peaceful competition. This is a gray zone between the black and white of war where we see both violent and nonviolent activity that fails to meet the definition of declared war.

The United States is in a low intensity conflict and has been since at least 2016, if not 2008.

Second, these riots are a continuation of a broader conflict. While many were rather pure in their desire to protest the death of George Floyd, there were other elements using the opportunity to take other action.

Those who committed violence over the past several days can be separated into four categories.

1. Opportunistic actors who sought personal gain.

2. Social conflict actors who expressed their anger over the death of George Floyd and used violence as a means to coerce the political class into making desired changes.

3. Class conflict actors who committed acts of violence in their class struggle against the capitalist system. As one professor recently put it, “[L]ooting is an expression of power.”

4. And, yes, I’ve seen plenty of criticism over some of law enforcement’s heavy handed tactics. This violence should not go unnoticed, because police forces are a part of this conflict, too.

(I’ve also seen some claims that “white supremacists” were in some way responsible for the violent rioting, which comes as no surprise when one considers the outlets pushing that narrative. Pressed on that claim, Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison said over the weekend that “nobody really knows” the political motivations behind the violence. It didn’t stop him from making that claim prior to the interview. I’ll wager a guess: those responsible for the violence weren’t doing it on behalf of white supremacy.)

Third, it’s important to note the development of soft power. Some on the Right minimize the capability of the Far Left because the Far Left is largely unarmed. This is a mistake.

Aside from hard power — the ability to project force — there’s soft power, which exists on the moral and information plane of conflict.

Over the weekend, we saw much of mainstream media excuse the behavior of the rioters and deflect responsibility for what’s happening.

CNN’s Don Lemon complained on his show that America’s power class weren’t coming to the defense of the protestors and rioters.

“Why aren’t they helping these young people? These young people are out there standing on a platform at the edge of an abyss by themselves… Get on television or do something and help these young people instead of sitting in your mansions and doing nothing. And have some moral courage and stop worrying about your reputation and your brand,” Lemon begged.

That’s soft power. Money and funding, influence, moral support and framing the moral authority — these are the elements that enable hard power. And Don Lemon pleaded with celebrities and the donor class to help develop this soft power.

Finally — let’s look at where we could go from here because the worst might still be ahead for at least two reasons.

First, over the past few days, I’ve seen numerous examples of protestors and rioters saying they want to go to the suburbs next.

With the exception of the one video that was linked to the Drudge Report, the evidence has been on social media, with organizers and influencers putting out these suggestions to those who want to continue the protest outside of urban areas.

I read most of these comments with some skepticism, but I’m completely open to the possibility that protests and violence do migrate in some instances. That would be a mistake, in my opinion.

Today (Sunday), Attorney General Bill Barr published a press release in which he warned that the Department of Justice and the states will “reestablish law and order” through a large scale presence of police and the National Guard.

Barr also threatened that federal law enforcement is out for “violent radical agitators,” and labeled the antifascists as engaging in acts of domestic terrorism. The Department of Justice is working with all 56 regional Joint Terrorism Task Forces (JTTF) to facilitate this action.

The risk in either of these cases is that violence is escalated.

For one, some suburbs might make easy targets in the beginning, but just as we saw militias forming to protect businesses, the suburbs are likely to become harder targets for would-be rioters and looters. If it develops, this scenario obviously brings a likelihood of violence.

And two, law enforcement actions, to include arrests or raids on the homes of “violent radical agitators,” are going to aid the argument that the United States has descended into fascism. That could spark more protests and more unrest.

Mises Institute: Three Ways Lockdowns Paved the Way for Riots

Ryan McMaken at the Mises Institute has an article on Three Ways Lockdowns Paved the Way for These Riots

There were many reasons to oppose the COVID-19 lockdowns.

They cost human lives in terms of deferred medical treatment. They cost human lives in terms of greater suicide and drug overdoses. Domestic abuse and child abuse have increased. There is also good reason to believe that lockdowns don’t actually work. The lockdown activists capitalized on media-stoked fear to push their authoritarian agenda based not on science, but on the whims of a handful of experts who insisted that they need not present any actual evidence that their bizarre, draconian, and extreme scheme was worth the danger posed to human rights, health, and the economic well-being of billions of human beings.

Those who lacked the obsessive and irresponsible tunnel vision of the prolockdown people warned that there were other dangers as well, in terms of social and political conflict.

It didn’t require an especially clear crystal ball to see that destroying the livelihoods of countless millions while empowering a police state to harass and arrest law-abiding citizens would create a situation that maybe—just maybe—could lead to greater social and political conflict.

Specifically, there are three ways in which the lockdowns laid the groundwork for our current state of unrest.

The Lockdowns Created an Economic Disaster

The COVID-19 stay-at-home orders, business closures, and other forms of coerced social distancing have so far led to job losses for well over 30 million Americans. The unemployment rate has risen to levels not seen since the Great Depression. Food banks are under strain as Americans line up for free food. Thanks to government moratoria on evictions in many areas, it is still unknown to what extent homeowners and renters are unable to pay mortgages and rents, but a wave of delinquencies is almost certainly coming.

To advocates of lockdowns, this is all “worth it” even though these sorts of economic stresses often lead to suicide, stress-induced disease, and death. But impoverishment, unemployment, and financial ruin are all merely “inconvenient,” as described by head lockdown advocate Anthony Fauci.

To someone who isn’t enamored of lockdowns, however, it is clear that millions of job losses are likely to worsen a variety of social ills, sometimes even resulting in violence. Moreover, the current job losses appear to be affecting the young and those who earn lower incomes most.

Lockdown advocates have attempted to avoid responsibility for all this by claiming that it is the pandemic itself that has caused the current economic disaster, and not the lockdowns. This is a baseless assertion. As has been shown, neither the pandemics of 1918 or 1958 led to the sorts of job losses and decline in economic growth that we’re now seeing.

The Lockdowns Destroyed Social Institutions

Another outcome of the lockdowns has been the destruction of American social institutions. These institutions include schools (both public and private), churches, coffee shops, bars, libraries, barbershops, and many others.

Lockdown advocates continue to claim that this is no big deal and insist that people just sit at home and “binge watch” television shows. But researchers have long pointed to the importance of these institutions in preserving peace and as a means of defusing social tensions and problems.

As much as lockdown advocates may wish that human beings could be reduced to creatures that do nothing more than work all day and watch television all night, the fact is that no society can long endure such conditions.

Human beings need what are known as “third places.” In a 2016 report, the Brookings Institution described what these places are:

the most effective ones for building real community seem to be physical places where people can easily and routinely connect with each other: churches, parks, recreation centers, hairdressers, gyms and even fast-food restaurants. A recent newspaper article on McDonald’s found that for lower-income Americans, the twin arches are becoming almost the equivalent of the English “pub,” which after all is short for “public house”: groups of retirees meeting for coffee and talk, they might hold regular Bible study meetings there, and people treat the restaurant as an inexpensive hangout.

Third places have a number of important community-building attributes. Depending on their location, social classes and backgrounds can be “leveled-out” in ways that are unfortunately rare these days, with people feeling they are treated as social equals. Informal conversation is the main activity and most important linking function. One commentator refers to third places as the “living room” of society.

The lockdown advocates, in a matter of a few days, cut people off from their third places and insisted, in many cases, that this would be the “new normal” for a year or more.

Yet, these third places cannot simply be shut down—and the public told to just forget about them indefinitely—without creating the potential for violence and other antisocial behavior.

Indeed, third places act as institutions that provide a type of social control that is key to a well-functioning society. In his trenchant book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy, historian and social critic Christopher Lasch described the importance of third places in communicating political and social values and conventions to young people, and in setting the bounds of acceptable behavior within the community. Lasch notes that these institutions are also important in defusing violent impulses among the young. Also of great importance is the fact that third places provide a means of social control that is voluntary and not a form of state coercion.

Writing in the 1990s, Lasch was lamenting the decline of third places, although he emphasized their importance even in their modern reduced form. Thanks to the lockdowns, however, these places have been crippled far beyond what Lasch might ever have imagined.

The Lockdowns Empowered the Police State

The lockdowns have created a situation in which millions of law-abiding citizens have been deemed criminals merely for seeking to make a living, leave their homes, or engage in peaceful trade.

In many areas, violations of the lockdown orders have been—or even still are, in many places—treated as criminal acts by police. This has greatly increased negative interactions between police and citizens who by no moral definition are criminals of any sort.

Many have already seen the stories: police arresting mothers for using playground equipment, police arresting business owners for using their own property, police beating people for the “crime” of standing on a sidewalk.

Complicating the issue is the apparent fact that police have not enforced social distancing edicts “uniformly.” Some have alleged, for example, that the NYPD has lopsidedly targeted nonwhites in enforcement:

of the 40 people arrested [for social distancing violations in Brooklyn between March 17 and May 4], 35 were African American, 4 were Hispanic and 1 was white. The arrests were made in neighborhoods—Brownsville, Bedford-Stuyvesant, Cypress Hills and East New York—which have large concentrations of blacks and Latinos.

This may or may not reflect the reality of the general situation, but the fact is that the lockdowns created the perception among many that this is just yet another case of law enforcement targeting certain populations over small-time violations.

Moreover, it is quite plausible that lower-income populations have more often been on the receiving end of state harassment in the name of social distancing. After all, compliance with lockdowns is something of a luxury reserved for higher-income, white-collar residents who can work from home and remain comfortable for long periods in their roomy houses. Working-class people and those with fewer resources are far more likely to need to find income and venture outside during lockdowns. This attracts the attention of police.

Lockdown advocates, apparently in their usual state of extreme naïvete, perhaps believed that further empowering police to violently enforce government decrees against petty infractions would not lead to any unfortunate side effects down the road. Yet criminalizing millions of Americans and subjecting them to heightened police harassment is not a recipe for social tranquility.

Worsening a Volatile Situation

Of course, my comments here should not be interpreted as making excuses for rioters. Smashing up the property of innocent small business owners—or worse, physically harming innocent people—is reprehensible in all circumstances. But this isn’t about making excuses. We’re talking about avoiding extreme and immoral government policies (i.e., police-enforced lockdowns) that remove those institutions and conditions which are important in helping minimize conflict.

Some may insist that the riots would have occurred no matter what, but it’s easy to see how the lockdowns made a bad situation worse. Yes, some of the rioters are lifelong thugs who are always on the lookout for new opportunities to steal and maim. But experience suggests that the pool of people willing to engage in riots is often larger during periods of mass unemployment than during other periods. In addition, those people who exist on the margins of criminality—the sorts of people for whom third places serve an important role in moderating their more antisocial tendencies—are more likely to be swept up in these events when third places are abolished. And, as we have seen, lockdowns also create more opportunities for police abuse that ignite riots of the sort we’ve seen in recent days.

It’s true the responsibility for the riots lies primarily with the rioters. But we cannot deny that policymakers fuel the flames of conflict when they outlaw jobs and destroy people’s social support systems by cutting them off from their communities. It’s also wise to not provoke people by pushing for widespread human rights violations and additional police harassment. But this is what lockdown advocates have done, and their imprudence should not be forgotten.

James Kunstler: That Change You Requested…?

Author James Howard Kunstler gives his opinion on recent events in That Change You Requested…?

All the previous incidents of white cops killing blacks were just too ambiguous to seal the deal. Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri (a murky business); Tamir Rice in Cleveland (waving the BB gun that looked like a .45 automatic); Trayvon Martin (his killer George Zimmerman was not a cop and was not “white”); Eric Garner, Staten Island (black policewoman sergeant on the scene didn’t stop it); Philando Castile, Minneapolis (the cop was Hispanic and the vic had a gun). Even the recent February killing of jogger Ahmaud Arbery in Brunswick, Georgia, had some sketchy elements (did Arbery try to seize the shotgun?) — YouTube has scrubbed the video (?) — and then it took months for the two white suspects (not cops) to be arrested.

The George Floyd killing had none of those weaknesses. Plus, the video presented a pretty much universal image of oppression: a man with his knee on another man’s neck. Didn’t that say it all?  You didn’t need a Bob Dylan song to explain it. The Minneapolis police dithered for four days before charging policeman Derek Chauvin with Murder 3 (unpremeditated, but with reckless disregard for human life). The three other cops on the scene who stupidly stood by doing nothing have yet to be charged. Cut it, print it, and cue the mobs.

The nation was already reeling from the weird twelve-week Covid-19 lockdown of everyday life and the economic havoc it brought to careers, businesses, and incomes. In Minnesota, the stay-at-home order was just lifted on May 17, but bars and restaurants were still closed until June. Memorial Day, May 25, was one of the first really balmy days of mid-spring, 78 degrees. People were out-and-about, perhaps even feeling frisky after weeks of dreary seclusion. So, once the video of George Floyd’s death got out, the script was set: take it to the streets!

Few Americans were unsympathetic to the protest marches that followed. Remorse, censure, and tears flowed from every official portal, from the mouth and eyes of every political figure in the land. The tableau of Officer Chauvin’s knee on Mr. Floyd’s neck was readymade for statuary. Indeed, there are probably dozens of statues extant in the world of just such a scene expressing one people’s oppression over another. And yet the public sentiments early-on after the George Floyd killing had a stale, ceremonial flavor: The people demand change! End systemic racism! No justice, no peace! How many times have we seen this movie?

What is changing — and suddenly — is that now it’s not just black people who struggle to thrive in the USA, but everybody else of any ethnic group who is not a hedge fund veep, an employee of BlackRock Financial, or a K-Street lobbyist — and even those privileged characters may find themselves in reduced circumstances before long. The prospects of young adults look grimmest of all. They face an economy so disordered that hardly anyone can find something to do that pays enough to support the basics of life, on top of being swindled by the false promises of higher education and the money-lending racket that animates it.

So, it’s not surprising that, when night falls, the demons come out. Things get smashed up and burned down. And all that after being cooped up for weeks on end in the name of an illness that mostly kills people in nursing homes. Ugly as the ANTIFA movement is, it’s exactly what you get when young people realize their future has been stolen from them. Or, more literally, when they are idle and broke and see fabulous wealth all around them in the banks’ glass skyscrapers, and the car showrooms, and the pageants of celebrity fame and fortune on the boob tube. They are extras in a new movie called The Fourth Turning Meets the Long Emergency but they may not know it.

Hungry for change? You won’t have to wait long. This society may be unrecognizable in a few months. For one thing, there’s a good chance that the current violence in the streets won’t blow over as it has before. There hasn’t been such sudden, massive unemployment before, not even in the Great Depression — and we’re not even the same country that went through that rough episode. Just about every arrangement in contemporary life is on-the-rocks one way or another. Big business, small business, show business… it’s all cratering. The great big secret behind all that is not that capitalism failed; it’s that the capital in capitalism isn’t really there anymore, at least not in the amounts that mere appearances like stock valuations suggest. We squandered it, and now our institutions are straining mightily to pretend that “printing” money is the same as capital. (It’s just more debt.) Note, the stock markets are up this morning at the open! Go figure….

Change? We’re getting it good and hard, and not at a rate we were prepared for. It’s hugely disorienting. It produces friction, heat, and light, which easily becomes violence. There’s, for sure, plenty we can do to make new arrangements for American life without becoming communists or Nazis, but a lot of activities have to fail before we see how that could work. The overburden of obsolete complexity is crushing us, like Derek Chauvin’s knee on George Floyd’s neck. They were both, in their way, common men, caught in the maelstrom of metaphor. That proverbial long, hot summer we’ve heard about for so long…? It’s here.

Liberty Blitzkrieg: We’re in the Thick of it Now

Michael Krieger of Liberty Blitzkrieg writes about recent rioting and government tyranny in We’re in the Thick of It Now – What Happens Next?

It’s with an extremely heavy heart that I sit down to write today’s post. Although widespread civil unrest was easy to predict, it doesn’t make the situation any less sad and dangerous. We’re in the thick of it now, and how we respond will likely determine the direction of the country for decades to come.

If the combination of peaceful protesting, looting and violence witnessed across American cities over the past few days completely caught you off guard, you’re likely to come to the worst possible conclusion about what to do next. The knee-jerk response I’m already seeing from many is to crush the dissent by all means necessary, but that’s exactly how you give the imperial state and oligarchy more power. Power it will never relinquish.

The pressure cooker situation that erupted over the weekend has been building for five decades, but really accelerated over the past twenty years. After every crisis of the 21st century there’s been this “do whatever it takes mentality,” which resulted in more wealth and power for the national security state and oligarchy, and less resources, opportunities and civil liberties for the many. If anything, it’s surprising it took so long to get here, partly a testament to how skilled a salesman for the power structure Obama was.

The covid-19 pandemic, related societal lockdown and another round of in your face economic looting by Congress and the Federal Reserve merely served as an accelerant, and the only thing missing was some sort of catalyst combined with warmer weather. Now that the eruption has occurred, I hope cooler heads can prevail on all sides.

On the one hand, you can’t pillage the public so blatantly and consistently for decades while telling them voting will change things and not expect violence once people realize it doesn’t. On the other hand, street violence plays perfectly into the hands of those who would take the current moment and use it to advocate for a further loss of civil liberties, more internal militarization, and the emergence of an overt domestic police state that’s been itching to fully manifest since 9/11.

It’s my view we need to take the current moment and admit the unrest is a symptom of a deeply entrenched and corrupt bipartisan imperial oligarchy that cares only about its own wealth and power. If people of goodwill across the ideological spectrum don’t take a step back and point out who the real looters are, nothing’s going to improve and we’ll put another bandaid on a systemic cancer as we continue our longstanding march toward less freedom and more authoritarianism.

While we aren’t going to solve everything at once, something should be done as soon as possible to at least partially address current anger and frustration.

Clearly there’s a major problem when it comes to policing in America, particularly in poor inner-city communities. Let’s start by ending qualified immunity.

Qualified immunity, created by the Supreme Court in the 1970s, shields police and other government officials from liability in civil rights lawsuits when the illegality of their actions was not “clearly established” at the time of the offense.

Attorneys representing the families of Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor called for policing reforms—including rolling back qualified immunity—at a press conference today…

While it may seem like George Floyd’s right to not be choked to death by a police officer would be rather obvious, the fuzzy phrase “clearly established” has evolved over time to become a pedantic and unforgiving standard. Plaintiffs are often required to go fishing for cases that match their exact circumstances, lest their lawsuit get tossed. Last year, a 9th Circuit Court of Appeals panel granted qualified immunity to an officer who, without warning, shot a 15-year-old holding an airsoft gun. 

Ending qualified immunity may seem like a small thing, but it’s an important step toward adding some accountability to those in positions of power. As it stands, power at all levels in our society largely operates above the law. This applies to politicians, national security state operatives, CEOs, Wall Street, the police, and of course, Jeffrey Epstein. Those in positions to do the most damage to society are simultaneously most immune from the consequences of their actions. This is a core systemic problem in our country, so let’s take a small step and start with qualified immunity for police officers while the opportunity exists. From there we can turn our attention to the bigger fish.

I understand my message will likely fall on deaf ears, and I’m used to things not going the way I want them to. I have no idea where society will go from here, but I know we’re at a key inflection point in our nation’s history. We can begin to turn this thing around, or we can go totally off the deep end. Try to be as creative, constructive and conscious as possible during these trying times.

See also Michael Snyder’s The Horrifying Civil Unrest We Have Been Warning You About Is Here, And America Is Literally Coming Apart At The Seams at TMIN.

For a very long time, many of us have been loudly warning the American people that this was coming.  The mainstream media and many of our national leaders have been fanning the flames of hatred, anger, frustration and division on a daily basis for many years, and it was just a matter of time before we witnessed an eruption of violence of this magnitude.  Over the last week, we have seen protests in at least 145 different U.S. cities, and reports of rioting, looting and violence are coming in so fast that it is literally impossible to keep up with them all.  So far, at least 40 U.S. cities have imposed curfews, the National Guard has been activated in at least 15 states, and at least 4,100 people have been arrested.  On Sunday night, the violence in Washington D.C. became so alarming that President Trump was actually rushed to a secret bunker under the White House…

The Prepared Homestead: The Most Important Self-Defense Principle

Sean of The Prepared Homestead talks about the most important self-defense principle in this video.

This principle is foundational in the self defense world. It is more important than studying the martial arts, owning and training with a firearm etc… it is to avoid dangerous places and people. It’s so simple but will keep you clear of the vast majority of potential problems. In this video I cover a couple of key points regarding this principle like the Gift of Fear and situational awareness.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uVXoAAC4JlU