Stop Focusing on the Tools

 Here's another piece from Bearing Arms by Tom Knighton hammering home the fact that universal background checks will do nothing to stop criminals, nor for that matter to help stop crime. So, why do they want them so badly? Skip to the end to find out.

The article at Bearing Arms is entitled Texas Man Arrested for Stealing Guns From Homowner Who Hired Him.

I can't say that I don't understand stealing because I suppose there are situations where I can. If you're starving--literally starving, not just hungry--and you steal food, I won't approve but I'd get it.

Most people never reach that level of desperation, though.

Yet even if you are, one would imagine that the average person might think stealing from someone they're working for is a bad idea. However, most crooks aren't that bright.

Or, at least, this one wasn't.

"The Atascosa County Sheriff's Office apprehended David Alviso III, a Jourdanton resident, after finding 13 stolen guns, six vehicle titles and a computer that belonged to the homeowner, according to an Atascosa County Sheriff's Office Facebook post."

Deputies Tim Challes and Stephen Cook arrived at the Blackhill Community residence, which is roughly eight miles east of Pleasanton, after getting a call about a theft. When the two deputies got to the property the homeowner and Alviso were both at the home. The homeowner accused Alviso of stealing from him after watching surveillance footage, according to the release. Alviso had reportedly been hired to do work on the home.

The deputies followed footprints from the house into the woods where they found a bag with the stolen goods.

Yeah, this guy wasn't in serious contention to join Ocean's Eleven by any stretch of the imagination.

Yet think about what all it would have taken for him to get away with it. Without surveillance footage, it's unlikely Alviso would have been fingered so early. It's even possible that the homeowner wouldn't have known about the theft for some time. By then, the footprints might have been gone from wind, rain, or someone covering their tracks. Literally.

And this, boys and girls, is how criminals get guns.

Given that this is fundamentally true, that criminals get guns mostly by either stealing them, or buying from someone else who stole them, a universal background check will do nothing either to stop criminals from getting guns, or the help the police track down the perpetrators of crimes. So why does the Left so badly want universal background checks? Because they want to build a registry of who has what guns at any given time. Such a registry makes it easier to order the confiscation of weapons.

Given how slowly justice moves, they would hope to have either rounded up the guns, or put the refuseniks in jail, or just executed them before anyone could mount sufficient opposition. We have plenty of history from other countries to show this is true. National Review has a detailed report of How the Nazis Used Gun Control to first register, then disarm those suspected of being "politically unreliable" and Jews. Once defenseless, the Jews were exterminated to the tune of 6 million of them.

The Left has been attacking the American republic for now 170 years. Yes, the Left is the aggressor here, not the other way around.  The attack has been on all fronts and lately has accelerated. But they fear our guns, which may be the only thing keeping us from being overwhelmed. But in the end guns are just tools. Stop focusing on the tools and focus on the bad guys abusing the tools.

The Hypocrisy of Tech Giants

 Olivia Murray has a great post at the American Thinker today exploring the hypocrisy of the Tech Billionaires entitled Silicon Valley progressives buy up nuclear reactors to power their AI data center needs, after pushing us to subsist with wind and solar power.

When the rubber met the road and the progressive climate change warriors in Silicon Valley needed energy to power their AI and data centers, you might be surprised to learn they didn’t opt for the “renewable” energy technologies they’ve been forcing down our throats (wind turbines and solar panels), using the weight of big government, but instead went for…reliability and affordability.

Or maybe it’s not all that unexpected, considering these are the same people who fly from climate conference to climate conference in personal private jets and gorge themselves on Kobe beef while calling on us to limit ourselves to crickets and lab-grown “meat” mash.

...snip...

As we are all miserably aware, these three companies are radically left, both in their company mission and the personal ideology of their executives, and they use their weight to influence policy—they’re leading proponents of the progressive “climate change” narrative. While they’ve certainly “invested” a bit into the “zero-carbon” energy schemes, they abandoned their positions for personal gain when they needed reliability and affordability—the very reason we conservatives have insisted that nuclear energy is a great and clean option.

Does that mean we “unwashed masses” will be afforded the same opportunities? Or will we still be saddled inefficient and unaffordable?

I suspect the latter.

I do not resent that the tech billionaires make a lot of money by supplying people with products they like. That is capitalism. What I resent is that they then use the money they have made through capitalism to impoverish the rest of us and to force us to live on a subsistence level. I suspect that Murray believes similar. If nuclear is good enough for tech giants, it is good enough for the rest of us too.

A Pox on Both Their Houses

 Today is the first day of voting in North Carolina in the 2024 voting season.  Democrats of course are expected to set records for first day voting, if other states are any example.  For myself, I cannot wait for the voting season to be over.  This has been the nastiest, most lie filled election at all levels in my lifetime.  I am thoroughly disgusted with it.  Most of the lies, of course, come from the Democrats, though there are some from Republicans as well.  I will vote, of course, but a pox on both their houses. 

I am especially disgusted with the Democrat obsession with abortion.  Here in Raleigh, we get television ads for many district races as well as statewide races because WRAL covers a huge area.  We get ads for races from the coast to as far as the Greenborough area.  In every case, the Democrat candidate has touted their support for essentially unlimited abortion, while castigating their Republican opponent as taking away a woman's "right" to choose.

I have to ask, do these people who support abortion not hear themselves?  Do they not realize that a  "woman's right to choose abortion" is actually legalizing a woman's ability to murder her unborn child?  Do they not hear what they are saying, do not realize the horror of what they are proposing?  In ancient times, people threw their first born sons and daughters into the firey belly of Molock as a sacrifice to the anciet gods.  This is usually referred to as "passing through the fire."  But such language doesn't cover the horror of such behavior, as the child would scream as it burn up.  The LORD God punished Israel for that as well as other offences against Him.  And we are doing the same thing.

Democrats claim that their Republican opponents would disallow all abortions.  While that would be the ideal, just as divorce is allowed because of the hardness of our hearts, no states are going to absolutely oulaw all abortions.  There will be exceptions for rape, incest, and the health of the mother.  While some Republicans may talk about the ideal, the facts are that they will not be able to get the votes for it.  So, in the end, the Democrats are just trying to scare their voters.  Is that what we want as voters, or do we want them to represent us?

Another big lie is that the Republicans, particularly Trump, will implement the horrible, no good, abominable Project 2025.  This has been thoroughly debunked, and I don't see many candidates advertising about it, but some outside groups do.  First of all, Project 2025 is a production of the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank.  I don't think any conservative, however, agrees with all of the wish list contained in the 920 page document.  Again, even if Trump were attempting to put some of these proposals, he wouldn't have the votes in Congress.  Let us remember that the use of executive orders can not be used to implement laws, nor can executive agencies interpret the law to favor administrative priorities.

I hope future elections can focus more on the issues and less on tearing each other down.

Anti-Gunners Surprised Criminals Break Laws

 One has to wonder what kind of people believe that by making a law, they will stop criminals from being...well, you know...criminals.  It reminds me of those public service ads that used to show up on the television when I was young telling people lock their cars because they didn't want a good boy to go bad.  But of course, a good boy wouldn't be tempted to steal a car even if the keys were in it.

Yet, it seems that The Trace wants us to believe that criminality is because some states have something like Constitutional laws. The report comes from Townhall.com by Tom Knighton entitled Anti=Gun Organization Shocked To Learn That Criminals Break Laws

Being a criminal isn't a very difficult field to get into. You just have to break the law.

Sure, being good at being a criminal is a different matter--most suck at it, really--but it doesn't take a whole lot to be a criminal. Yet despite this simple tautology, some people are absolutely shocked to learn that criminals don't obey the law. They even write about it like it's news.

The latest example of this phenomenon is from the anti-gun "journalist" organization The Trace.

Please go and read the article at The Trace to find out the details. To make a long story a bit shorter, one Dylan Russell bought a number of guns over a two year period, which he was allowed to do because he had no convictions. Unfortunately, Russell wasn't entirely truthful, as he was using heroin at the time. Indeed, Russell bought the guns and them traded them for heroin. So he broke several laws as you may not purchase a gun while using illgal drugs, and you certainly may not buy a gun for another party.

In January 2024, Russell was charged in U.S. District Court in Burlington for his role as a straw purchaser in what prosecutors allege was a drugs-for-guns operation orchestrated by gang members based in cities including Springfield, Massachusetts, and Hartford, Connecticut. Russell, who has pleaded guilty in the case and is set to be sentenced in November, bought guns on behalf of drug traffickers; he got drugs from them in return.

Here's the question though, exactly what law would have prevented Russell from committing these crimes while still allowing honest citizens to purchase guns for self defense and other legal purposes? Perhaps making the use of illegal drugs more illegaler?

So what laws would have stopped Russell that wouldn't have infringed on the rights of ordinary, law-abiding citizens?

Of course, the answer is that there are no such laws. They don't care about you and me and our ability to exercise our right to keep and bear arms. People like Russell aren't even the problem for them. The problem is us. We don't want to give up our guns, so they try to use the people like Russell to justify their need for more and more laws, none of which would do a blasted thing to stop people putting guns in criminal hands.

Mob of Street Thugs Blocks the Freeway

 At Ammoland John Farnum warns us that When Stalled By A Violent Riot, Stationary Vehicles Are Death Traps. Farnum suggests crossing the median if necessary to turn around and get out of there. As long as you are moving, you have a chance. We can expect more of these as the election draws near and after the election. Keep your powder dry but stay armed.

Happy Columbus Day

 Happy Columbus day.

This is what indiginous people were doing before the Europeans arrived.  I would think all would be greatful.

Someone had to say it:

Hat tip to Theo Sparks.

Judge Tears Out Another Brick in the Wall That Is Election Fraud

 In order to be believed by all parties, elections must be honest.  But the Left and some on the Right have fought tooth and nail to keep the tactics that make our elections insecure and cause the losing side to cry foul.  Too many courts have failed in their duty to acknowledge the evidence of voter fraud brought to them.  Building election integrity has thus been slow, and I doubt that we can restore it in time for a vote to make a difference.  While the 2024 election is not likely to be our last, it is probably the last one before the Communists take over completely.  Still, miracles do happen.

Today at the American Thinker Jerome R. Corsi has an article explaining that one of the ways elections can be stolen has been cut off: How a Federal District Court Judge Weaponized Secret Algorithms to Stop Election Fraud Hidden in State Voter Rolls. Actually, while Corsi speaks of databases themselves, the actual problem is not the database per se, but the software used to manipulate the database.

On September 27, 2024, Federal District Court Judge Michael T. Liburdi rendered a decision in American Encore v. Adrian Fontes that weaponized algorithms surreptitiously embedded in various state boards of elections official voter registration database, turning them into a tool to block elections that bear the modus operandi of mail-in ballot election fraud from being certified.

In his decision, Judge Liburdi referenced a provision in the Elections Procedures Manual (EPM) that Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, had issued. That provision required the Secretary of State to certify an election by excluding the votes of any county that refused to certify an election. Justice Liburdi quoted the EPM language that became known in Arizona as the “Canvass Provision.” The quoted EPM language, including the parenthetical remark included in the original EPM document, reads as follows:

"If the official canvass of any county has not been received by this deadline, the Secretary of State may proceed with the state canvass without including the votes of the missing county (i.e., the Secretary of State is not permitted to use an unofficial vote count in lieu of the county’s official canvass)."

Judge Liburdi characterized the rule as “probably unprecedented in the history of the United States” because it “gives the Secretary of State nearly carte blanche authority to disenfranchise the ballots of potentially millions of Americans.”

Judge Liburdi’s ruling is a bulwark against secret algorithms in the state voter databases that create a pool of hidden “non-existent voters.” Beyond just creating “non-existent voters,” the cryptographic algorithms assign legitimate state voter IDs to the “non-existent voters.” This last step enables the criminal perpetrators to vote these “non-existent voters” as apparently “legal” mail-in votes in what could be sufficient quantities to steal otherwise losing elections.

To get a better feel for exactly how these secret algorithms are used to create non-existent voters that nonetheless appear as legitimate voters, I suggest you go to God's Five Stones, a website created by Corsi to report the group's findings.

The Democrat (read Socialist and Communists) have several built in advantages in any election. One is a belief that government is their highest priority, therefore they have a strong get-out-the-vote organization everywhere. But their real advantage is their belief in "by any means necessary." Therefore there is little to no qualms about lying, cheating and other skullduggery to win an election. The only way to discourage such actions is to provide sufficient consequences to discourage them. But if the one encouraging such shenanagans is also the one who benefits from them and who enforces laws against them, consequences mean little. That is why it is important to have to competing parties always watching the other.

We Walk By Faith, and Not By Sight

 I have been fasinated by the Shroud of Turin for many years.  Now, I am not a relic seeker, and I do not base my faith on the existence of relics from 2000 years ago.  Even less do I adore these supposed relics.  Oh, it is interesting to visit the supposed tomb of Jesus, or the skull of St. Paul.  These are material remains which Jesus warns us not to focus on, but on heaven itself.  But when archeologists turn up evidence for events and people in the Bible, it is satisfying nonetheless.  On the other hand, it is no surprise that relics are not abundant, for God wants us to believe in HIM completely without proofs. Faith is the key. If you know because you have seen, where is room for faith? Did not Jesus say: Those who believe and are baptized shall be saved?

Kevin Mooney today at the American Thinker has an article entitled The Shroud of Turin - Can It Be Found in the Bible?. Having read all four Gospels, I can assure you that the burial cloth of Jesus is mentioned in the Bible. The real question is, is the Shroud of Turin the same as the burial cloth mentioned in the Gospels? We may never know for sure, but that is not for a lack of research on the Shroud. As Mooney notes, we can say with certainty that the Shroud is NOT a painting, nor a reenactment. But we cannot say what it IS. Do I believe it is the burial cloth is Jesus? Yes, yes I do. But that is faith, not objective science. In the end, everyone walks by faith, not by sight. The question for each of us is, in what are we going to put our faith? I know where I put mine, do you?

Please read the whole article, and consider getting Robert Orlando's book The Shroud: Face to Face. My backlog of reading material keeps growing it seems.

In time for Halloween, the Ghost in the Machine

 Mike McDaniel has a post today at the American Thinker entitled Ghost guns and liberty in which he reports on the Van Der Stock case before the Supreme Court. Based on court watchers reading the tea leaves, it could go either way. The term "ghost guns" is like the term "assault weapon" in that neither appears in the lexicography of guns. They are made-up terms by gun grabbers to scare the public.

McDaniel points out that Americans have been making their own guns for...well...centuries. Indeed, a serial number on a gun was not a requirement until the 1968 Gun Control Act. Serial numbers are really just a convenience for the manufacturer and in the case of the government to keep tabs on to whom they have issued the weapon and ensure they get it back. As McDaniel points out, no crime has ever been solved by knowing the serial number of the weapon used. What this is really about is power.

It's perfectly within America’s Second Amendment rights to make their own guns, and a number of manufacturers make parts kits, including unfinished lower receivers—the portion of a gun housing the trigger and hammer/striker mechanisms—“80%” complete, that require some drilling and/or other machining/filing to finish. Because these are not complete firearms—they’re parts--they are not required to have serial numbers, and that, to federal and state bureaucrats, presents two problems: (1) That’s too much freedom for Deplorables, and (2) they need the power to write their own laws to keep Deplorables from having too much freedom.

That’s why the ATF has unilaterally declared such parts kits, and particularly non-serialized lower receivers (in the case of AR-15 pattern rifles) and frames (in the case of pistols) illegal, though the relevant laws say nothing about them. Revolvers aren’t really involved as they take far more work, specialized machinery and knowledge to make. It’s another case of the administrative state writing law through rule making. Congress, for many years, hasn’t cared enough about its own legislative prerogatives to reign in federal agencies, and the agencies just love having that kind of unaccountable power. The best part for the agencies is they get to be all three branches of government. They write the laws, enforce the laws and are the judges and juries as well. If they’re accused of violating citizen’s rights, they investigate themselves and find themselves blameless.

Gentle readers should go and read the whole of McDaniel's article. Like so much about the Second Amendment, the government keeps overstepping its bounds because it desparately wants to limit the citizen so as to allow it to tyranize us without the messy consequences. We can not let that happen.

The Mask Comes Off

I remember being accused by a leftist at work during the Obama administration of not liking Obama because he is black. I replied that I didn't care if he was green. I did not like him because he is a damn Communist. My accuser then feigned outrage and said "So, am I a Communist?" to which I replied "If the shoe fits..." He shut up, but that was when he became positively hostile. He has moved on so I no longer have to deal with him. Around that time, I had a great awakening to the fact that the Democrat party leadership, a great many Democrat voters, and perhaps some Republicans had become either Communist, or sympathizers of Communists.

Yesterday, James Simpson had an article at the American Thinker that outlined exactly how the Communists have marched through our institutions and attained the power necessary to now be poised to overthrow the Constitutional Republic and replace it with a Communist Tyranny. You can read it at Communists Out Of The Closet. Essentially, they have assiduously employed the Cloward-Piven strategy wherever they could.

Longtime AT readers will remember my viral 2008 article: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis. That article described the Cloward-Piven Crisis strategy that Richard Cloward and Frances Fox Piven, two radical Columbia University professors, dreamed up. Their first target was the welfare system. They hoped that signing up every person eligible for every public service would overwhelm the system and cause its collapse. In the ashes, they would then suggest the solution: a guaranteed annual income for all Americans. (Note that such proposals have been added to Biden spending bills but were stripped out). They went on to target voting and were the authors of the National Voter Registration Act (i.e., Motor Voter). That law made voter roll maintenance much harder while making non-citizen voting much easier.

Since then, the Crisis strategy has expanded into virtually every area of our lives. Almost everything we are witnessing in our nation today is part of it. From tidal waves of illegal immigration (don’t call them “migrants,” which is leftist terminology; they are illegal aliens), the fentanyl crisis, suicides at record numbers (especially among the young and members of the military), to the war on energy, the war on morality and sexuality, the War on White America and the War on Black America (yes there is one of those too)—everywhere you turn the Left has put our nation at war with itself, with the ultimate goal of overwhelming it to the point that the entire society degenerates into chaos and civil war. That end goal will provide the pretext for the powers that be to declare martial law, seize our guns and take over by force if necessary.

In just those two paragraphs you will find most of the things plaguing our nation today. They have all been foisted upon us by design. Working from the shadows, each thing seems like a separate calamity overwheming normal Americans. You can read the rest of Simpson's article for yourselves. I also encourage you to buy his latest book: Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America of course in the kindle edition because we need to save our sheckles.

I want to explore the "why" of it. What drives people to become Marxist, especially those living comfortable lives in the United States, such that they want to burn it all down?

Of course, behind Marxian philosophy lies the devil, Lucifer, who Jesus said was a liar and a murderer from the start. He hates all humanity (as does the Left) and wants to see as many people in misery and debouchery as possible. The devil laughs when we do his will, because it hurts God. And his constant intelligence may explain why this philosophy constinues generation after generation despite its utter failure everywhere.

But beyond this explanation lies an old idea that what has been the way of doing business since time immemorial is exploitive of people. Today it is called capitalism. But capitalism is best understood as each party to a transaction is trading something they have for something they want. Where it gets exploitive is when the government interferes on one side and we then have what is often called "Crony Capitalism." In exchange for campaign contributions or other valuable consideration, polititions set taxes and other regulations to favor certain capitalist businessmen over others and over workers. But the Communists don't really care about the workers, they just use them as their army to batter down the existing system so they can take power themselves. It is really all about power.

Until the Obama administration, the United States has stood as a rebuke to all Communist regimes. Today, we are on the cusp of a Communist take-over of our Republic.

Be clear on this: we are witnessing an attempted Communist overthrow of our great nation. Vote and help get others out to vote as if your life depended on it because it does. If Christians had voted in greater numbers in 2020, we could have overwhelmed the steal. We will need more this time around because the Democrats are registering illegals and millions of non-Americans overseas!

Christians have no excuse not to vote and, when they do so, they must vote for Donald J. Trump. His election will give us four more years to begin the arduous process of rebuilding our nation—ravaged by the Left for over a century, as described in Manufactured Crisis: The War to End America.

A Little Good News

Good news from Rebecca Downs at Townhall.com Cue the Outrage As Georia Supreme Court Reinstates State Abortion Ban. We need more like this.

The Democrats Hate You and Me

 Vince Conyer has a well written article today at the American Thinker entitled Recent Events Force Us To See The Reality of Today's Democrats. In point of fact, the party, which is led by the pooh-bahs in Washington, aren't just indifferent to you, they actively hate you. Of course, they hate conservatives and Christians, who don't toe their line. But they also hate Democrat voters like the longshoremen or the auto workers, the steel workers, the truckers...you know, the working men and women who keep this country running. Conyer employs an odd scene from the movie The Sixth Sense.

One of the most stunning moments I ever had watching a movie was during The Sixth Sense (spoiler alert) in the scene when the ring crashes to the floor and we suddenly realize that Bruce Willis’s character is dead. I was simply dumbfounded. It immediately made sense, but I couldn’t believe that I’d not recognized it the whole time. The movie flashes back over the different scenes from Willis’s newly revealed perspective, and it was as if I’d just watched a different movie than the one I’d actually seen. Seen through Willis’s eyes, everything was clearly there, but I simply hadn’t seen it. The signs were there, but I just didn’t recognize them…

That movie came back to me this week when a piece of news emerged about FEMA that was every bit as crystalizing as that ring crashing to the floor and rolling: The Democrats hate Americans.

As millions of Americans picked themselves up and surveyed the extraordinary damage wrought by Hurricane Helene, they discovered, to their horror, that the Federal Emergency Management Agency, an agency specifically set up to help American citizens and communities recover from natural disasters exactly like Helene, was almost out of money.

And it wasn’t because the agency wasn’t given any money. No, FEMA didn’t have any money to help Americans who had lost everything, were waiting to be rescued, or were hungry and thirsty because, through fancy bookkeeping, the Biden / Harris administration spent $1 billion in the last two years providing housing and other services to illegal aliens. Literally, a program specifically created to help Americans recover from disasters was drained almost dry, leaving it with few resources to help Americans recover from disasters because it had spent all the taxpayer dollars sent its way on services for people who had come into the country illegally.

I realize that I am preaching to the choir here, for I doubt anyone who is of a leftist or woke mindset reads this blog. My hope is that you, gentle readers, will take away some facts to use to perhaps open a Democrat's eyes, rather like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense. The hope is that they will see that voting Democrat is voting for their own destruction. Harris intends to impoverish us with her tax on unrealized capital gains, which includes houses. If the price of you house has gone up, you may have to sell it to pay the tax on the unrealized capital gain.

One thing that you learn from reading the Bible is that the globalists always lose in the end. God eventually destroys their empires, but he often uses them to destroy first the ones who have fallen away from him, as he did when ancient Babylon carried the people of Judah into captivity. So, please read Conyer's article, but also pray that we repent in time from our sin. The Democrat agenda must be soundly defeated before it is too late.

The Courage of Our Convictions

 Today's highlighted article comes from the American Thinker by J. B. Shurk and is a meditation on the frailty of the human condition in the face of tyrannical government. It is entitled Are We All Criminals?

Shurk paints a picture of national governments in the West replacing their fiat currency with central bank digital currency. The reason for going to digital currencies is to stop criminal activities.  He asks the obvious question: Will this prevent criminals from their activities?

If the answer is, “No,” why not? Don’t human traffickers and international drug cartels depend upon a supply of paper currency that they can move back and forth across borders and launder through unrelated businesses for future use? If there were no money except for the digital ones and zeroes created and monitored by national governments, surely major criminal organizations would have no way to operate and nowhere to hide.

How could prostitution and corner drug sales survive within a system that traces all digital transactions in real time? How could black market trades in illicit commerce or between sanctioned nations continue if Western central banks actively surveil each digital dollar that changes hands? Surely the imposition of government-mandated digital currencies would usher in a more peaceful planet that is relatively free of crime…right?

If you’re still not convinced, let me suggest what might be tripping you up: your instincts tell you that criminals will find a way to skirt any future digital surveillance. Somehow, human ingenuity will succeed in creating effective workarounds to government-imposed central bank digital currencies. The sale of illegal narcotics, weapons, and other banned materials will continue around the world because, at the end of the day, humans adapt and overcome whatever obstacles stand in their way. Crime will continue to exist because criminals will continue to exist, and criminals will continue to exist because in every generation some faction of the human race behaves immorally, disregards social mores, or flat out refuses to obey.

The imposition of a digital currency where the government can and does track every purchase, every transfer, allows the government to tell you how and where and when to spend your money.  You cannot make any transaction not approved by the government. If the government doesn't want to eat meat, you will not be able to buy it with digital currency. You see, then that to proceed you will necessarily become a criminal. If the government decides that your Christian faith is not approved, well tough luck making contributions to your church.  Christians will see this as the mark of the beast from Revelation, where people cannot buy or sell without the mark of the beast.

An immoral law is no law at all — which is to say, whenever governments use the force of law to coerce citizens to do immoral things, moral citizens will choose to become “criminals.” This is more difficult than it sounds.

It is natural for people to overestimate their willingness to stand up to the State in matters of conscience. From the comfort of our armchairs, we often judge too harshly those who yielded to tyrants in the past because we cannot step faithfully into our ancestors’ shoes. We cannot accurately feel what they experienced as the coercive machinery of the State operated in their day. Would we have hidden Jews in our cellars while the Nazis were rounding them up to be murdered in camps? Would we have taken a strong stance against Japanese internment during WWII? Would we have opposed racial segregation laws in Brazil and the United States, caste oppression in India, or ethnic cleansing in Africa, the Balkans, and the Middle East? Many people would proudly say, “Yes.” Most would be sorely mistaken. Standing up to evil when it is backed by the authority of government offices and enforced by real human beings with guns and badges is no easy thing. Moral people too often balance an abundance of conviction with a scarcity of courage.

The question of moral courage becomes even more difficult when we ask ourselves what we would do in situations that don’t rise to the level of evil we associate with persecution and genocide. In 1933 President Roosevelt ordered Americans to hand over their gold savings. Although justified as a policy for fighting the worsening depression, critics warned that the action was nothing short of government-sanctioned robbery and would only increase inflation and exacerbate economic suffering. The critics were right, and a substantial number of Americans denounced the president’s order as entirely immoral. Still, most complied.

What would we do if the government came for our greenbacks, gold, silver, or bitcoin today? If the Federal Reserve and the Department of Treasury joined other Western central banks in making all digital currencies illegal except their own, would you comply? What if the FBI claimed that uncontrolled, decentralized currencies are used only by criminals who are most likely narco-terrorists and child sex-slavers? Would federal officials’ concerted efforts to use your morality and sense of shame as psychological weapons ultimately succeed? If the U.S. government used those same moral arguments to trash the Second Amendment and confiscate Americans’ firearms, would you hand over your weapons? What if all your favorite athletes, movie stars, and musicians told you 24/7 that we must disarm ourselves in order to “save the children”? Would you allow others to shame you into compliance?

I have to confess that during the "pandemic" my employer blackmailed me into getting at least one mRNA shot that proved useless. It starts small. The "vaccine" is safe. If you take it, you won't be able to pass it on or catch it. All three statements are lies, as it turns out. But now they have another piece of you. You have to think about these things ahead of time and determine where your line in the sand is.

Every act of compliance comes with two costs: we lose whatever liberty we freely hand over, and we invite further encroachment upon our liberty in the future. Loss of personal freedom is like a loose thread that gets only longer with time. Before you can repair the damage, you must make sure that your rights and liberties stop unraveling. There has to be a moment when people say, “Enough.”

In other words, there has to be a moment when citizens accept that the State sees them as common criminals. The price for speaking our minds will not stop with censorship. It will not stop with de-banking. It will not stop with professional blacklisting. It will not stop with the J6 political prisoners. It will not stop with all the Republican attorneys who have been disbarred and prosecuted for fighting election fraud. It will not stop with the DOJ’s efforts to imprison President Trump. It will not stop with all the servicemembers whose military careers came to an end because they refused to submit to the government’s experimental “vaccines.” Like a loose thread coming undone, the State will continue to yank at our freedoms until we are left naked. Only we can decide whether to remain so.

Because we have a choice, we don’t really fear that there is nothing that can be done about growing totalitarianism in the West. We are apprehensive about what will be required to thwart it. That’s a fine and prudent feeling to have, but it’s altogether different from the miserable dread of acquiescence. Knowing that a fight is coming and worrying about its costs do not reflect weakness. Nor does it matter whether an immoral government calls moral people, “criminals.” We’ll have to get over that.

Please read the entire article. It is important to consider where you will draw the line. What are your vulnerabilities. What preparations can you make now. For some things, whether Trump of Harris wins, we are screwed either way. Sadly, I think God will allow these things to happen because He wants us to rely on Him, and not our puny selves and our politics.

What One Doesn't Want to Believe

Despite being on different sides of the political spectrum, I don't like to think that my fellow North Carolinians are being made to suffer more because of politics.  When I watch the television "news" I hear that everything is being done that can be for the people in Western NC.  But then I learn that DHS has spent the money Congress appropriated for hurricane disaster relief on illegal aliens instead.  Thus, the best it can do is to give the people who have lost everything $750.  Elon Musk sends Starlink communications systems to help out people unconnected from the rest of the world and FEMA seizes the systems and puts them under lock and key.  What gives?  Private helicopter pilots rescuing people are told to stand down.  Again, what gives?  It seems the Federal government won't do anything, and the private sector is not allowed to help their neighbors.

At The Federalist today a retired Army Colonel who worked logistics for a number of humanitarian relief efforts including Hurrican Katrina tells us the different response to that hurricane and to Hurricane Helene. The article, by Cynical Publius (obviously a pseudonym) can be found at Comparing Helene to Katrina Suggest Americans Are Left to Die Because Democrats Run the White House

Cynical Publius first establishes his bona fides pointing out that he has been a logistics officer for the Army his entire career, and indeed was involved in the military's response to Katrina:

The devastation wrought across the American Southeast by Category 4 Hurricane Helene last week has naturally drawn comparisons to the 2005 Hurricane Katrina response. As a veteran of military logistics, I can confirm that President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’ response to this round of mass suffering has been orders of magnitude worse than federal actions taken after Katrina.

In August of 2005, I was a U.S. Army colonel serving on the Army staff in the Pentagon. Before Hurricane Katrina was even nearing landfall, I was detailed as a shift officer in the National Military Command Center (NMCC) for hurricane support operations. As a career logistics officer, this was the culmination of a noncombat mission I had been associated with since I was first commissioned: disaster relief and humanitarian support operations.

From the Yellowstone fires in 1988 while I was a mere first lieutenant, through Hurricane Fran while I was serving on Fort Bragg (now Fort Liberty) as a major in the 82nd Airborne Division, through the humanitarian missions the support battalion of the 82nd I commanded in Afghanistan accomplished, and through the many training events and “orders drills” I endured in this arena, this secondary mission of all logisticians was something that defined a substantial part of my military career. As such, I was privileged to be a part of the national support to Katrina.

Despite the misleading media reports of failure, as I served in the NMCC I was enthralled and impressed with the sheer power that was brought to bear by our military to support endangered Americans in Katrina. Nothing feels better than making a difference for your fellow Americans, and as such I (now a long-retired veteran) paid careful attention to Hurricane Helene, anticipating the same robust military and federal support. As you can imagine, I have been grossly disappointed with the delayed and inept nature of the federal response.

Getting suspicious, our Colonel and a group of followers on X noodled out what could be the reasons for the difference in response to a massive hurricane. You are encouraged to read the various theories which Cynical Publius has helpfully consolidated for the reader. Cynical Publius's readers think it is largely a matter of incompetence of the Biden-Harris administration combined with various previous deployed military units to hotspots around the world. But then there is this:

7. The Biden-Harris administration and/or the Democrat North Carolina governor are maliciously and deliberately denying or delaying the use of these assets for nefarious reasons only they know, such as, for example, making sure red counties in North Carolina cannot vote for Donald Trump.

As I said, I don't like to think that people would be so cruel to each other...but having read the Bible, I know differently.

Things That Make My Blood Boil

 Chris Talgo at the American Thinker today has a post entitled We need nuclear power for AI and quantum computing. Talgo points to the fact that AI and quantum computing gobble up vastly more power than, say, a simple Google search. Of course, and I always want to point this out, AI and quantum computing are not generating new ideas. They just reveal what we already know (and think we know that isn't so) and regurgitate them faster than we can. People have been agape at what AI can apparently do, but it cannot generate new ideas. Only a genius human can do that.  It only tells you very rapidly what is already known. If we had had AI in 1900, it would have told you that man could not fly, yet men thought up how to do it using God's plan with birds.

Talgo, and others look upon the wonders of AI and quantum computing, and he and they are right that we have no idea yet of the wonderful new technologies they will bring us. Just remember that everything man touches sooner or later is also used for corrupt purposes.

With those caveats, I repeat that Talgo is correct in his assessments that we are going to need vastly more power. We would need it even without the burden AI is going to place on our energy requirements. If we are ever to have most cars all electric, we would have to have vastly more power production and vastly more power lines connecting that power to the retail customer.

By far, the most important preparation that must be addressed as soon as possible is the lack of available electricity on demand that will be necessary to power the enormous energy consumption that AI and quantum computing will require.

Compared to traditional computing and search engine activities, AI and quantum computing consume vastly more energy. To put this into perspective, a ChatGPT query consumers 25 times more energy than a Google search. What’s more, a single AI image generation program requires about as much energy as it takes to fully charge a modern cell phone.

When one combines the sheer amount of energy that quantum computing, AI, and huge server farms will devour in the decades to come, it becomes glaringly obvious that the U.S. grid, in its current form, simply cannot provide enough energy to power the world of tomorrow.

Talgo makes the case then that the only way out of this hole we are digging is to build more nuclear power plants and reactivate those we have mothballed. I agree with Talgo again. Is nuclear power potentially dangerous? Well...sure. But we do many things that are potentially dangerous every day. How many times a week do you pump gasoline into your car? This is an extremely flammable liquid. Imagine pumping gasoline into your car on a very low humidity day, while wearing a wool suit and talking on your cell phone. What could go wrong? Yet we mitigate for all these potential factors. We do the same with nuclear.

The part that bothers me is this:

On the subject of nuclear power specifically being used to power AI, quantum computing, and the requisite server farms, Gates is also bullish. “Demand for electricity is going to go up a lot,” Gates says. “And now these data centers are adding to that. So the big tech companies are out looking at how they can help facilitate more power, so that these data centers can serve the exploding AI demand.” To supply this huge increase in power, Gates thinks nuclear power is going to play a vital role.

On this point, Microsoft, founded by Gates, recently announced a deal to restart a shuttered reactor at Three Mile Island to provide enough power for the company’s sprawling network of data centers. The Three Mile Island resurrection comes after Michigan officials approved a similar plan for the Palisades Nuclear Plant.

It is highly likely that the redeployment of these two nuclear power plants could serve as a tipping point. In fact, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, and Google CEO Sundar Pichai have made similar statements that they think nuclear power should be the primary energy source of these future technologies.

I am glad that the billionaire class is pushing nuclear on the government, now that they realize the need for their own purposes. But for the last 4 years Democrats have been trying to stuff the American people into worthless EVs without the power to charge them. The Democrats have pushed a "green energy agenda" that is anything but green against the best interests of the American people and that for all I can find, benefits China most of all. It makes my blood boil.

The Triumph of Hope over Reality

You may remember the Make Your Own Gun Free Zone meme. If not, it is preserved on the interwebs. It was a funny take on the fact that criminals don't really obey a sign when they seek to commit a crime. It also highlights the utter stupidity of those who think a mere sign is going to keep anyone but the law abiding from doing what they want. It is, in short, the triumph of hope over reality.

Still, some people desperately want to believe that gun free zones actually work, so apparently someone paid to have some research done to prove that gun free zones aren't a problem when it comes to gun violence and mass shootings. Cam Edwards has the story at Bearing Arms entitled New Study Claims 'Gun Free Zones' Reduce Mass Shootings, But There's A Catch. So, what's the catch, you might ask? Apparently, our intrepid researchers excluded schools. According to the research team:

The research team conducted a case-control study, focusing on active shootings that occurred in the United States between 2014 and 2020. Active shootings, as defined in this study, refer to incidents where one or more individuals intentionally shoot at bystanders in public spaces. The study excluded shootings in schools because all schools are federally mandated gun-free zones, which would skew the comparison.

As Cam notes though:

No, it wouldn't skew the comparison. It would, however, likely raise the percentage of shootings in "gun-free zones" to above 50%, which would at the very least provide more evidence that "gun-free zones" don't stop individuals intent on committing mass murder.

One does not have to be a researcher or a post doctoral student to understand basic human nature. If one wants to commit mass murder, where would you go to do it? Would you choose a gun shop, where all the employees and a significant number of the customers are armed? Or would you choose a place where nobody is likely to be armed, and you will have free reign? It really doesn't take a genius to figure these things out. And the people who promote them clearly do not have the public's best interests in mind.

Please go read the whole article and the embedded links.  I suspect though, that academia has too much time on its hands.