The Monkey Wrench Gang: A theory on America's increasing infrastructure disasters

 By Brandon Smith of Bob Livingston's Personal Liberty

Accidents happen, all the time in fact, and often the American public barely takes notice of the number of such events that occur on a monthly basis. The reason for this is that the vast majority of accidents leading to industrial and infrastructure damage are small in scale.

Look at the statistics for train derailments in the U.S. and you might be surprised to discover that there are thousands of these incidents every year. "Fact-checking" websites are quick to cite these statistics as a way to dismiss concerns over increasing disaster events in the U.S. What they don't mention, however, is that the vast majority of these incidents are minor, with negligible damage.

When was the last time the U.S. saw a train derailment similar to the chemical destruction in Ohio?  Not since 2002 when a train carrying ammonia crashed in Minot, North Dakota, and kept clean-up workers at bay due to air hazards. The generalized data used by fact checkers lumps events with a single boxcar derailment in with widespread environmental catastrophes (which are exceedingly rare).

The multiple Ohio events in particular are very concerning to me for a number of reasons. The media barely reported on the train derailment and chemical cloud the first week. Joe Biden has essentially refused to address the severity of the East Palestine disaster and has not announced plans to visit the area to survey the damage. There has also been confusion over the deployment of FEMA; not that I'm a fan of FEMA, but I'm starting to get Hurricane Katrina vibes from this mess, as if the government is trying to deliberately ignore it.

Even Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg waited 20 days to visit the train derailment. And when he finally did, he disguised himself in a worker's uniform in a quick appearance in the early hours of the morning to avoid the public.

I generally don't engage in theory without considerable evidence detailing clear motive or clear involvement. Call it a gut feeling that I think needs to be addressed, but something very strange is going on here.

Why is the White House acting like this? How easy would it be to make a quick appearance and put people's minds at ease? This is the kind of behavior that leads the public to entertain "conspiracy theories."

We have seen many conspiracy theories proven true over the past couple of years, from the COIVD pandemic lockdowns, mandates and death numbers being exposed as a sham, the former Twitter management colluding with government officials to censor conservatives, and, according to Seymour Hersh's sources, the U.S. government blowing up the Nordstream gas pipeline to Europe. Conspiracy theorists are racking up an impressive list of wins lately.

So, I would like to offer my theory on recent events surrounding what seems to be a spike in major infrastructure accidents including numerous food distribution plants catching fire, trains derailing, factories exploding, etc.

Hiding in the swarm

Imagine you are incredibly evil or incredibly mentally deranged, or both, and you wanted to incrementally destabilize the U.S. from the inside. How would you do it?

First, you would have to have some help from government authorities because if serious investigation was a concern, you are likely to be caught. Officials would have to look the other way, which in the case of Ohio and many other disasters, they currently are. Questions of sabotage are actually attacked as ridiculous, rather than considered as a possibility that needs to be pondered.

With the government on your side, as it remains passive, you can then operate with impunity. But what then? You would have to commit acts of sabotage in a way that avoids drawing too many public questions. You would have to make the events look like accidents. Industrial and infrastructure failures are statistically common and nuance in terms of scale is often overlooked. As noted above, if a person looks at the stats out of context, they might think a disaster like the one in East Palestine, Ohio, is a normal occurrence.

Then, you go to work, rigging localized crises across the U.S. using simple tactics. It doesn't take much to sabotage a train track, or set a fire in a food plant, or explode a metal factory. And, your acts of subterfuge mix in with other commonly occurring disasters, washed away in the swarm as the public becomes too overwhelmed to focus on any single calamity.

Slowly but surely, you and whatever group you are working with are able to wreak havoc on U.S. infrastructure while operating in perfect cover.

The Monkey Wrench Gang

In 1975, author Edward Abbey published a politically charged fiction book titled The Monkey Wrench Gang. The book portrays a group of environmentalist extremists out to stop the "pollution" of the southwestern U.S. using sabotage of machines and infrastructure as a means to grind development to a halt.

The Monkey Wrench Gang has long been considered an inspirational work of fiction for the political left, but it is also treated as a sort of instruction manual for leftists and anarchists. A guide for bringing down the system. It depicts the destruction of minor targets like billboards and bulldozers, up to and including the destruction of bridges, the derailment of trains and the attempted bombing of a dam. 

It's sort of like the leftist version of The Turner Diaries.

After witnessing the background activities of groups like Antifa and BLM during the riots, I don't find it hard to believe that there may also be an environmental or political element in the U.S. that is engaging in infrastructure terrorism. This is not to say that the protesters themselves are highly organized, but there is evidence that they are managed by organized people behind the scenes.

For example, law enforcement offices in multiple cities reported numerous pallets of bricks and rocks magically appearing on mornings before protest marches and riots. Media fact-checkers once again tried to protect leftist groups by claiming that the strategic piles of bricks and other riot fodder were "for construction," only to be fact-checked themselves later. There was no construction in those areas.

Media outlets asserted that Antifa essentially "doesn't exist" during mass rioting by groups calling themselves Antifa. CNN claimed that riots in Kenosha by BLM and Antifa were "fiery but mostly peaceful" while the city burned in the background. And, if you try to Google information on leftist riots the majority of the results you get back will be on the Jan. 6 event instead of the two years of SJW actions across the country.

When mass civil unrest is protected by corporate "journalists" and leftist groups are funded or even coordinated by think tanks like the Ford Foundation and the Open Society Foundation, we have to consider the scenario of organized sabotage in the U.S. as a means to ratchet up the chaos.

Remember, the motto of these people is "burn it all to the ground."

A rising flurry of disasters?

Again, what I am discussing here is merely a theory, but it is not outlandish to suggest that there may be an organized monkey-wrench campaign made to look like a series of unfortunate "accidents." I suspect that there will be an increasing number of these localized disasters in the coming year with an increasing level of severity. And mark my words, one day you will begin to hear whispers of law enforcement investigations into terrorism surrounding these events.

The value of a compartmentalized sabotage effort cannot be overstated. The overall instability it would cause creates national panic and fear, but if ever exposed as deliberate the campaign could also be blamed on a useful scapegoat. Would China or Russia engage in such attacks?  Maybe, but it would also be advantageous to the current administration to place the culpability on foreign enemies.

The White House response to the East Palestine disaster alone warrants inquiry, and the steady drone of the media chanting that "there's nothing to see here, move along" is revealing. Certainly, most of these events including the train derailment in Ohio will be labeled fatal accidents and the public will move on. Just keep an eye on the news feeds, because, very likely, there are many more East Palestines on the way.

To truth and knowledge,

BRANDON SMITH

The dark side of the Democrats

Democrat politicians have successfully positioned themselves as the party of the poor, and they've created an enmity between the poor and the rich.

Democrat leaders perpetuate this enmity with popular slogans like "living wage," "fair share," "wealth tax," "greedy rich," "rich Republicans" and "evil profits." Their rank and file have bought it hook, line and sinker, never once thinking that they must be kept "poor" in order for their party to thrive.

It also doesn't matter that Democrat policies have been devastating to the poor and middle-class workers in this country for almost 100 years. The poor and middle class still turn out in droves to vote for them.

The Great Society

By the late 1950s, America had somewhat recovered from the effects of Woodrow Wilson's policies — the Federal Reserve, the income tax and World War I — and Franklin Delano Roosevelt's policies — the New Deal and World War II — and prosperity was returning.

Then along came Lyndon Baines Johnson, the Great Society and the next great expansion of the nanny state. Previous Democrat administration policies had been destructive to the people they purported to help and, with his Great Society programs Johnson continued the assault on the poor, always under the auspices of "helping."

Within three years of assuming the Presidency in 1963, Johnson had requested 200 major pieces of legislation and Congress had approved 181 of them. According to Leslie Carbone in Slaying Leviathan: The Moral Case for Tax Reform, "Roosevelt had peddled the drug of government giveaways primarily in the poor neighborhoods; Johnson set up shop in middle-class cul-de-sacs, and most Americans, willingly or unwillingly, wittingly or unwittingly, are forced to shoot up. Johnson's sweeping proposals sought to address almost every issue of concern to Americans: civil rights, poverty, education, health, housing, pollution, the arts, cities, occupational safety, consumer protection, and mass transit, to name only the most prominent."

And what have these programs wrought? Mark Owen, adjunct professor of economics at Northwood University, wrote a column for LewRockwell.com entitled The Welfare State: Shredding Society. In it he said:

 

"Births out of wedlock were consistently at or below 5% between 1940 and 1960. By 1970, the rate had risen to over 10% and has continued to rise..."

(It is almost 40% today)

 

"Divorce rates increased from 9 to 23 per 1,000 married couples annually from 1960 to 1980, while leveling off at 20 per 1,000 through 1998 ... While crime and family destabilization may be two of the more obvious results of the welfare state, there are many others. The stigma for single mother births has virtually disappeared. Intergenerational dependency on government programs with the related lack of skills for self-sufficiency, much like a farm animal unable to live without the farmer for food and shelter, has created people without hope or ambition."

Now there are third and fourth generations of single women living off welfare and raising children in single-parent homes. Typically these women live in urban areas and their children are held hostage to failing inner-city school systems. And Democrat politicians, who have run these cities for decades, are to blame for these failing schools.

Poverty mindset — manna comes from the government

In 1965 Johnson signed the Elementary and Secondary Education Act. It provided for aid to poor children in slums and rural areas, created a five-year program for school libraries to buy textbooks and other instructional materials and provided for educational research, among other things. Essentially, the Federal government took over the education of the children.

Carbone wrote: "Representative Charles Goodell warned that the bill's ‘clear intent is to radically change our historic structure of education by a dramatic shift of power to the federal level.'"

The National Education Association (NEA) teacher's union, a supporter of Democrat candidates and causes, opposes any and all efforts to inject competition or reform into the failing schools. Therefore Democrats oppose them as well. Combined with local teacher unions, the NEA also fights efforts to change the tenure system which protects the jobs of bad teachers to the detriment of the children.

LBJ's War on Poverty programs were dismal failures. The only success these programs had was in exploding the size of government and its reach into our lives. "Within two generations, more than $10 trillion have been spent on this war, more in current dollars than was spent to win World War II," Carbone writes.

And through all that, Democrats are still looking for ways to spend money to fund programs to "fight the War on Poverty." Who benefits? As always, follow the money! Michael Barone wrote for The Washington Examiner, "One-third of the 2009 stimulus money went to state and local governments – an obvious payoff to the public employee unions which gave hundreds of millions of dollars to Democrats and got hundreds of billions of dollars in return, to insulate public employee unions from the effects of the recession which has affected everyone else."

There was another provision in the $787 billion stimulus bill that provided a sop to unions. The money for "shovel-ready" construction projects required it to be spent on firms using union labor. This raises the cost of the projects and freezes out many non-union poor or middle-class construction workers.

This is not to absolve Republicans of responsibility. They were complicit in that they didn't do enough to try and stop the practices before they were implemented nor have they done much to repeal them. Republicans like big government almost as much as the Democrats.

The government has never before been under the complete rule of ideologues of such stripes. They've pushed the government to take over many of the roles traditionally carried out by families and local communities. It doesn't take a village... but "it" also should not be up to the Feds. The cradle-to-grave welfare state of Sweden has always been the envy of the American left, and after implementing as much of it as possible, Americans now get to experience the dark side of the nanny state of high taxes, a sluggish economy that struggles to adapt and innovate, and the erosion of family and community.

Democrats are determined to engage in his type of faith-destroying, socialist legislation to expand the welfare state. They want to grow the government to solve a problem created by the government, and to do so under cover of mob rule (the vote).

The government has nothing good or nice to give to you. The government is in the business of shrinking freedom (and wealth), not expanding it. Growing government and creating a cycle of dependency is always the goal of the Democrats. Only old dogs waiting under the table for scraps survive under Democrat policies.

Freedom and happiness are only restored through self-reliance and acting on our own judgment. Self-sufficiency and self-worth produce ultimate happiness and human liberty.

Manna to the group is poison to the individual.

- Bob Livingston = 

How Soros works to make humanity go extinct

The following message is from George Soros' own AVAAZ emailer, dated Dec 13, 2022 at 1:26 a.m EST; and here's proof he owns the UN:

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2022/12/7/humanity-has-become-a-weapon-of-mass-extinction-un

And i can only assume the text is right-justified because it was translated into English by its own Hebrew writers:

Extinction epidemic

Dear friends,

Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction.

As the human population tops 8 billion, the rest of life is being decimated. We've destroyed two-thirds of the rainforests, half the coral reefs, and a million species are now facing oblivion.

For the future of life on Earth, the next 5 days are absolutely critical.

Right now, governments and scientists are in final negotiations for a new global deal to stop the destruction of nature -- but there's real danger it will be weak and full of holes.

We literally have a few days to ensure leaders follow the science and give us a treaty that is ambitious enough to be a turning point for life on Earth. Our team is on the ground, going all out -- but your urgent support now could supercharge their crucial work!

If 40,000 make a small donation, we can shake the halls of power, at the talks and beyond, with the voices of Indigenous people, scientists, and millions of citizens. We'll face down the polluters and poachers, pushing leaders to do what the planet is screaming for.

I promise you this: we'll fight with every fibre of our being.

Because Earth can't wait anymore. For the bees, birds, bears, and every strand in the fragile web of life, join this deafening roar for the planet -- donate what you can now:

I'LL DONATE $3

I'LL DONATE $6

I'LL DONATE $11

I'LL DONATE $22

I'LL DONATE $44

OTHER AMOUNT

More than 100 governments want to protect 30% of the planet by 2030 -- but scientists say it isn't enough. For nature to regenerate, and to save our planet's life-support systems, we have to protect half the Earth, and we need a global treaty to enforce action.

Our team of campaigners has been fighting tooth and nail to shape this treaty -- and they're at the global summit, right now. But our budget is already at breaking point, and too many leaders are still siding with the polluters and weakening the agreement.

We need a major surge of people power to save life on Earth! And we can start right now -- if enough of us make a small donation, we will:

Fight shoulder to shoulder with key advocates and scientists, putting maximum pressure on world leaders at the talks and beyond; 

Ensure Indigenous voices are at the heart of protecting nature -- we cannot defend life on Earth without securing their rights to their lands and homes;

Go all out at the talks with a media blitz, hard-hitting stunts, and social media storms to put pressure on governments who are sabotaging ambition, and the future of our planet;

Work with dozens of celebrities around the world to amplify our call for politicians to conserve at least half of our planet by 2030 and restore our relationship with nature; and, 

Continue to power Avaaz's fight to defend critical ecosystems, fighting to give nature space to recover and to defend our common home while we still can.

Ultimately, this is about our survival. Even as the planet withers, the chainsaws, diggers, and polluters are charging ahead, pulverising the planet into a barren, lifeless tundra. We cannot miss this opportunity to fight for life on Earth. Donate what you can now: 

I'LL DONATE $3

I'LL DONATE $6

I'LL DONATE $11

I'LL DONATE $22

I'LL DONATE $44

OTHER AMOUNT

What happens to the natural world, happens to us all. We are not separate from nature; we are part of it, connected to the very trees, rivers, and oceans that are being decimated. But it's not too late, we can still change course. For the Earth of our dreams, let's rise together, now!

With fierce hope and endless determination,

Mike, Marigona, Adela, Kaitlin, Camille, Bert, and the whole team at Avaaz

PS. This might be your first donation to our movement ever. But what a first donation! Did you know that Avaaz relies entirely on small donations from members like you? That's why we're fully independent, nimble and effective. Join the over 1 million people who've donated to make Avaaz a real force for good in the world.

More information:

'Humanity has become a weapon of mass extinction': UN (Al Jazeera)

'Fate of the living world' will be decided at Cop15, say scientists (The Guardian)

The plan to turn half the world into a reserve for nature (BBC) 

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Being alert for medical fraud is not paranoia but survival

Fraud always operates under the color of law. Look for fraud anywhere. You will find it in government, in politics, in religion, in money and finance and absolutely in organized medicine.

Fraud and deceit has carried teeming millions to an early grave. Just think of the millions of young boys and men who have died in phony wars camouflaged with propaganda. Now consider the millions who have suffered a living hell and then were sent to an early grave at the hands of "orthodox medicine."

It's called "iatrogenic death," that is, death induced inadvertently by a physician or surgeon or by medical treatment or diagnostic procedures. In the U.S. annually is the third leading cause of death in the U.S. Some estimates put the total even higher — at almost a million deaths a year. That makes the medical-industrial-pharmaceutical complex itself possibly the leading cause of death in the U.S., period.

Yes, orthodox or organized medicine has a pretty face and is almost untouchable. In fact, organized medicine, which should be called "organized promotion of sickness and death," persecutes and prosecutes truth in healing with all the police power of government.

Orthodox medicine is modern medicine that promotes "treatment" but denies healing. Money is in treating but never in curing. So-called "medical research" is hunting but never finding. This is the cloak of modern medicine. We succumb to this deception and fraud because we are too trusting and too lazy to question establishment medicine. The price is high.

In this instance, we have on our mind the millions of men, dead and alive, who have been victims of "cancer treatment" burning and poisoning, which is actually an industry under the color of conventional and orthodox medicine, sanctioned by the American Medical Association (AMA) and the force of law.

Yes, the force of law. Just try an alternative cure and see what happens to you.

Things that are equal to each other are equal to the same thing. Evil is evil, no matter the pretense. Does it matter by what name we call the death of human liberty?

The "health" arm of the U.S. government, The Food and Drug Administration (clever propaganda in that name; placing in the mind of the citizen the notion that drugs are somehow equal in importance to food) has always worked for the best interests of large corporations — Big Pharma and Big Farms — rather than the best interests of the consumer — or the small food producer.

The FDA's record of "protecting" consumers is shoddy at best. It has gone out of its way to ignore critical evidence about dangerous drugs to the benefit of Big Pharma. It censors the scientific truth about natural remedies and nutritional supplements and has killed more people than the CIA, FBI, ATF and DEA combined.

Founding father Dr. Benjamin Rush argued before the American Continental Congress:

"Unless we put Medical Freedom into the Constitution, the time will come when medicine will organize into an undercover dictatorship… to restrict the art of healing to one class of men, and deny equal privilege to others, will be to constitute the Bastille of Medical Science. All such laws are un-American and despotic, and have no place in a Republic... The Constitution of this Republic should make special privilege for Medical Freedom as well as Religious Freedom."

Unfortunately, the right to medical freedom was not added to the Bill of Rights in the Constitution; and now we have the government, medical and pharmaceutical groups working together to limit our health choices. In short, we have a monstrous medical monopoly enforced by the increasingly compromised and corrupt Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), which routinely censors truthful health claims.

Additionally, the U.S. Government promotes and protects the organized crime of the FDA by protecting their pals at Big Pharma with the new pre-emption policy that bans private lawsuits against drug companies in State courts once a drug and its label have been approved by the FDA. I don't know about you, but that seems like a protection racket for their financiers at big Pharma.

For an understanding of medical organized crime, read the book The Medical Mafiaby Ghislaine Lanctôt.

What is health, then?

The FDA's position has always been that natural products are either illegal or harmful, yet falsely marketed drugs from Big Pharma, with at best dubious research on their effectiveness, are perfectly okay for consumers.

It seems that the protected criminality goes on and on. But the reality is that even criminal organizations always self-destruct. Their satanic greed consumes them. The medical mafia commits many overt crimes with the complicity and blind obedience of doctors. But it will eventually end in a state of collapse. It is so evil that it cannot sustain life support.

The medical mafia has built a huge financial empire out of and on fiction like cholesterol and open-heart surgery. The only success they have achieved is a multibillion-dollar medical monopoly.

Medical care in America is political. It is what the "consensus of medical opinion" says it is. "Consensus of medical opinion" is mysteriously stamped on American medicine as a control system to create conformity; alias monopoly. Medical monopoly kills medical freedom and causes costs to skyrocket.

Medical care today is commerce. It's money, and healthcare is only incidental.

To get serious healthcare in America today, one has to avoid the "consensus of medical opinion" and seek out alternative medical care wherever it can be found.

If you keep listening to the extremists... that means modern medicine and the nutritionists — who will endlessly tell you what to eat and what not to eat this holiday season, as if they know anything except what standard medicine allows — and dieticians, you'll never get off the disease-producing treadmill.

One of the ways medicine profits most handsomely from you is this: The advertisements all ask you to "talk to your doctor." They do this because they know what standard doctors have been taught — drugs and surgery.

Would you like to get off this treadmill to nowhere?

If so, my team and I have identified the group of doctors who resist the medical-industrial complex's money-grabbing scheme. we have put together a report to tell you about who they are, where they are, and how you can contact these holistic doctors.

Holistic means "whole body," and that means these doctors don't just treat one symptom, they look at all of you. Maybe that's why they're also called "alternative" doctors. If you are looking for one near you, just go here to get a copy of this exclusive guide right now.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

Here's why a majority of leftists would not survive an economic collapse

There is one factor that constantly stands out as absolutely essential to a person's chances of surviving a crisis event, and that factor is mindset. Experience and training are highly valuable. Having proper tools and preps on hand is a huge advantage, but in the end, without mental toughness and the ability to adapt the most prepared person in the world will still likely bite the dust.

Mental toughness is something that can be taught... to a point. This is the entire purpose of basic training methods used in the military: To take mundane details and elevate them in the minds of trainees while wearing them down with physical punishment. The goal is to condition the mind to ignore distraction and to ignore fear and pain while focusing on the task at hand. Failure is not an option in war, just as it is not an option in survival. Those who embrace distraction and embrace failure because they think it will make things easier for them are filtered out of the recruitment pool, or the gene pool.

It is no coincidence that the U.S. military is dealing with some of the worst recruitment conditions they have ever seen in terms of people being physically and mentally capable of finishing basic training. The Pentagon currently estimates that 77 percent of young Americans are unfit for recruitment without a waiver for obesity, drug use and mental health problems. Meaning, Gen Z is so unfit physically and mentally that if there was a major war, almost 80 percent of them would be erased from existence.

The problem has gotten so bad that militaries in the U.S. and throughout the west are being forced to lower standards just to meet minimum personnel goals. One can argue that many young people don't want to join the military anyway, but this is beside the point. Even if they wanted to, they would be incapable.

There are a number of reasons for this development, but I would suggest that the spread of leftist ideology among 63 percent of Americans aged 18-29 has created a survival vacuum. A generation of mental weaklings. It's important to remember that younger people have adopted more liberal views for decades, but the political left is not liberal today. The leftists of today are full-bore Marxists, both economically and culturally. They support establishment centralization, they support economic centralization, they support corporate centralization, they support authoritarianism and censorship, they support moral relativism, and they applaud the concept of an all-pervasive welfare state.

In 1980 you might have been able to find a large number of mentally tough people that considered themselves on the left. Today, you will not find anyone.

With America hovering in a precarious netherworld between stagflationary crisis and deflationary crisis depending on which poison the Federal Reserve chooses to give the country, the stage has been set for an economic disaster similar to the Great Depression or worse. In two years, our system, which is already dealing with a number of threats including high prices and supply chain instability, will not remain functional in the manner most people are accustomed.

If we accept this inevitability, we must then ask a logical question: Who is going to rebuild? Whoever inherits the mantle will either bring America back to freedom and prosperity or plunge our society into perpetual tyranny. It all depends on who survives the crisis.

One thing that gives me some hope is the fact that leftists as a sub-group of our population are completely incapable of surviving a major economic crisis event. This is not to say that I wish them all to die; I'm only pointing out the reality that most of them won't make it because they are ill-equipped to handle a calamity. Here are the reasons why a post-collapse world would probably be devoid of leftists...

Leftists Thrive On Crisis... But Die Out During Collapse

Leftists tend to exploit crisis and tragedy to shore up power and expand their numbers through fear, but there's a problem with this tactic. If the crisis is fabricated, a tempest in a teapot, then they do very well; if the crisis turns into an actual disaster with real-world consequences including financial decline, supply chain disruptions, shortages, and civil unrest, they have no tools to deal with the effects other than mob action and looting.

What happens if they use mob action and looting when the rule of law is no longer a factor in a country with millions of guns? They will die, by the tens of thousands, as people defend their businesses and homes. The violent hordes we witnessed during the BLM riots would not last long during a collapse scenario where people are more inclined to fight back.

Leftists Are Anti-Preparedness

The political left has spent the better part of the past 15 years demonizing the concept of preparedness as a tinfoil hat philosophy for “right-wing extremists.” They have set themselves up for complete failure by refusing to acknowledge the practicality of prepping, just so they can attack their political opponents. The stupidity of it is truly mind-boggling.

There are some indications that the COVID lockdowns may have shocked a small number of them out of their foolishness. It's hard to deny the threat of economic collapse when the beginnings of collapse are right in front of your face. That said, prepping is not the only requirement for survival, and progressives buying a few months of food and some guns is not going to save them.

Leftists Have An Aversion To Hardship

The vast majority of people that argue in favor of an expanding welfare state are on the left. While conservatives support individual charity for those that deserve it, leftists believe that people need to be forced by the government to provide and pay for others who may not deserve it. This ideal is driven by their desire to avoid hardship.

I often find that leftists have delusions of grandeur. They assume that they are destined for great things, that they are smarter than the rest of us and that work or sacrifice are problems relegated to the rural “peasants” in “flyover country.” Their vision of work is a daycare, a place to socialize, find comfort and self-identity, do the minimal amount of labor required and then collect a paycheck. Just look how leftist-dominated Twitter was being operated a few months ago. It was not a workplace, it was a day spa for lunatics.

These kinds of people are not equipped to endure backbreaking struggle to build a survivable environment. They wouldn't know where to begin.

Leftists Have No Practical Skill Sets

The avoidance of technical skill sets is a real problem for progressives. There are a handful of people on the left that engage in micro-farming and other basic skills as a form of activism, but they are few and their methods are limited by their ideology. As noted above, leftists believe themselves to be too valuable to be wasted on production. Rather, they see themselves as “management,” the people in charge of the people that do the actual work.

A person could get by on that kind of thinking in a first-world environment where office jobs, tech jobs and social work is the norm, but in a collapse environment there are no management positions, there are no office workers, there are no elementary school teachers, there are no trust and safety advisers, there are no platform moderators and there are no bureaucrats. You either have a valued knowledge set that can be traded, or you have nothing. You can either produce necessities for yourself, or you can't.

The development of the information age and the data-driven economy of first-world nations has made matters even worse by convincing people that data is a currency. This is a concept that leftists in particular adore because they think labor will become a thing of the past; they will only need their brains and laptop to provide everything they need. This is a delusion. The “Metaverse” is a facade, a con, and there will always be a need for humans to dig in the dirt, to forage and hunt, to farm and to build with their own hands. As the economy derails further, progressives are going to realize this too late.

Leftists Rely on Government To Fix Their Problems

If the idea of taking matters into your own hands is abhorrent to you, then you might be a leftist. Leftists view individual action during a crisis as almost criminal; it is important to them that the correct authorities with the correct permissions handle any dangerous situation. Leftists love to defer to the “experts” because this takes the responsibility out of their hands, along with the blame should something go wrong.

But what happens when government is not functional enough to save the day? What happens when inflation or supply chains or personnel shortages make it impossible for government officials to help? What happens when government officials don't want to help? What happens when they are corrupt and want to see you suffer?

Leftists rarely consider such possibilities. For them, the idea that government could break down, that the grid could break down and that the rule of law could break down is a conspiracy theory. It's only happened hundreds of times around the world in modern history, but because they have never experienced the threat personally, they think it is impossible. These are the kinds of people that die very quickly during collapse.

Leftists Value Feelings Over Reason

The root foundation of leftist ideology is that everything is relative according to one's personal feelings. That is to say, they believe that their feelings shape their reality, and that “their truth” is the only truth that matters. There are some subjective truths that are near-universal which is why moral conscience is a thing that exists in every culture in the world. That said, personal ideals are still subject to the forces of nature.

You cannot pretend that you are not starving when you are starving. You cannot pretend that you are not dehydrated when you are desperately thirsty. You cannot feel your way out of a crisis, the crisis is not subject to your fantasies, the crisis will step on your throat and teach you otherwise.

At bottom, their feelings do not matter. They are irrelevant. And this is a lesson leftists will learn as the system continues to degrade. They can cry and scream and wail and make all the demands they want for fairness and equity and welfare but in the end, they will face the clarity of self-reliance or they will face the Ferryman.

It's not my purpose here to revel in the erasure of the political left. I am only pointing out that leftist ideology is a product of extremely safe and controlled environments where people have the privilege to engage in frivolity. 

They think they want deconstruction. They think they want chaos as a means to break the system and rebuild it in their image. What they don't realize is that if they get what they want most of them will die in the process and they will not be around to rebuild.

To truth and knowledge,

Brandon Smith

What the gun grabbers' rhetoric can teach us

Do you remember the Obamas' interview with ABC's Barbara Walters, where President Barack and First Lady Michelle joked about the president's second term being a ploy to continue having their young children protected by guns?

In the highly personal interview, the President and first lady discussed their marriage and family life in the White House. When the conversation moved on to the Obama's two daughters, the President joked, "One of the main incentives of running was continued Secret Service protection so we can have men with guns around at all times."

This is the same man who tried to skirt the Constitution by issuing a flurry of gun control executive orders; who appointed an anti-gun zealot as a representative to the U.N. assembly; encouraged doctors to ask their patients about guns in their homes; said federal gun control was necessary because it was government's responsibility to protect innocent Americans from deranged extremists armed with "weapons of war" (that means taking guns away from American citizens who own them, because of course, anyone who does is a "terrorist" and an extremist anti-government zealot); and who told participants of an Internet Q&A session that he felt his biggest frustration as President was his inability to convince Congress to pass stricter gun control legislation.

Because the rules are always for thee, and not for me, according to those in the elected class.

They want you to think citizens don't need, shouldn't have, and weren't ever meant to have any kind of armaments... but it's perfectly fine for them when they feel they need protection.

They don't have a care in the world that the intent of the Founders was for free men to be able to protect themselves, especially from the evils of government. But don't take my word for it. The Militia Acts of 1792 were some of the first bills passed by the First Congress and as Mike Maharrey pointed out correctly, "Every able-bodied free man was part of the militia. You'll also note that the act actually requires all men between the age of 18 and 45 to have military-grade weapons. This kind of undermines the whole, 'the Second Amendment wasn't so you could have an assault rifle' argument."

The Founding Fathers and members of the first Federal government feared a standing army and wanted individual citizens to be armed and ready at all times.

Contrast this with today's gun-grabbers, of whom Obama was just the most prominent example. John Rappaport pointed out, "During the reign of Barack Obama, mass shootings prompted a White House declaration that community mental health centers would be created across America, in order to spot and treat persons before they committed violent acts. ... The Trump administration consider[ed] a proposal that would use Google, Amazon and Apple to collect data on users who exhibit characteristics of mental illness that could lead to violent behavior," so that their guns could be confiscated.

Still at it

Despite the Supreme Court's ruling that is having the effect of nullifying many unconstitutional gun restrictions...

(Rollcall.com reports: "A judge in West Virginia this month cited the Supreme Court case when he struck down a federal law that required guns to have serial numbers. So did a judge in Texas who ruled last month that people under criminal indictments can still possess guns and a judge who this month tossed New York's prohibitions on carrying concealed firearms in Times Square, summer camps, subways and theaters. More than a dozen other challenges to gun control laws are pending in federal courts, which legal experts say could leave holes in efforts to curb gun violence and the use of weapons in crimes.)

...President Biden is continuing his anti-gun rhetoric and his lies about guns in general.

According to Reason.com, Biden said in a recent speech: "'Do you realize the bullet out of an AR-15 travels five times as rapidly as a bullet shot out of any other gun, five times — is lighter — and can pierce Kevlar?' he insisted on August 30 while touting his administration's "Safer America Plan," which includes tighter firearms restrictions.

"Really? Well, no. 'President Biden's statement that a bullet shot from an AR-15 travels 5x faster than a bullet shot out of "any other gun" is false,' Greg Wallace, a Campbell University law professor who focuses on Second Amendment issues, told the Washington Post early in September. As for bullets fired from AR-15s piercing Kevlar, 'that is true of almost all centerfire rifle bullets. Body armor protection against rifle bullets requires steel, ceramic, or composite plates. Biden was clearly wrong in his statement,' Kessler concluded."

The lies are part of a much wider net being cast by the anti-gun crowd. They want you to think owning a gun is a disease. Daniel Webster, a health policy expert and co-director of the Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Policy and Research in Baltimore, said that disease patterns, observing how a problem spreads, applies to gun ownership, and that gun ownership — a precursor to gun violence — can spread "much like an infectious disease circulates."

In discussing gun ownership as if it were a disease, it follows the trend of many news stories that have appeared after shooting tragedies that portray gun ownership as an oddity at best, at worst, something you need to be cured of, or that goes against God's wishes. I wish I were kidding. Representative Steve Cohen (D-Tenn.) once told MSNBC that Republicans on his committee were "...murderers' Row; that's Foxx, Gehrig and Ruth. They all like their guns... I think their guns are next there to their Bibles. I'm not sure which they find more important to them... I think guns trump Bibles on that side of the aisle."

Handguns, not just 'assault weapons' (which are already banned)

During a CNN presidential town hall, the NRA's Institute for Legislative Action points out that "Joe Biden expressed his support for a ban on commonly-owned handguns. Responding to a question about the recent increase in violent crime [he] stated, 'I'm the only guy that ever got passed legislation, when I was a senator, to make sure we eliminated assault weapons. The idea you need a weapon that can have the ability to fire 20, 30, 40, 50, 120 shots from that weapon, whether it's a 9-millimeter pistol or whether it's a rifle, is ridiculous. I'm continuing to push to eliminate the sale of those things.' Of course, any semi-automatic firearm capable of accepting a detachable magazine has the "ability to fire" in the manner Biden deemed objectionable. Therefore, the president's statement was a call to ban all semi-automatic handguns, rifles, and shotguns capable of accepting a detachable magazine."

As Ron Paul often pointed out, that cultural Marxists and progressives like Biden and Cohen and their fellow Democrats push for gun control and conveniently "ignore how gun control has been used against African-Americans in the past and how new gun control laws will disproportionately harm racial minorities" whom they purport to protect.

Unfortunately, for 100 years the courts and politicians and the power elite have used laws and propaganda to slowly but steadily erode the 2nd Amendment protections that guarantee the right of self-defense for everyone. Even Supreme Court rulings that seemed to uphold the right to keep and bear arms were designed to erode that right, as we explained regarding the District of Columbia v. Heller ruling written by Justice Antonin Scalia, mistakenly hailed as a gun rights defender by conservatives.

The gun control problem is a mind control problem. The authorities know full well that they, even with all their high-tech weapons, cannot subdue a determined people with private arms. This is why they want your guns. Therefore, they use all manner of spurious persuasion to get you to give up your arms and to exert hostility toward others who won't. Same old divide and conquer.

Nothing is more dangerous to liberty than an unarmed populace. As always, it is why I urge you to purchase a firearm, become trained in its use and maintenance, and practice with it. Here's a list of waiting periods by state before you can take possession of a gun you wish to purchase. If you need a conceal-carry license, go here for one that works in multiple states.

The man or woman who silently keeps arms and learns to effectively use them is the greatest force there is in defense of freedom.

As of now, there are only a few federal politicians with the courage to try and make this illegal, though they have done all possible to impress upon the public mind that private arms possession for any reason is un-American and even sick or terroristic behavior. Their debate is twisted nonsense, but people believe it.

Yours for the truth,

Bob Livingston
Editor, The Bob Livingston Letter®

Response to Volkischexe's essay on Nihilism

In response to:

https://gab.com/volkischexe/posts/108745645184350950

https://wiccawicci.com/philosophy/nihilism

Okay, I read it. 

You assert that nihilists are basically lazy and inconsistent because they don't believe anything matters. But they do - to them, it matters very much that everyone else accept their apparent point of view and Submit to it, lest they remain dangerously motivated against it. 

Further, while it's true that they love to initiate change - seemingly for its own sake - it's really so they alone can control the infliction of pain-causing damage first rather than continue to have it inflicted on them by others. 

Change initiated by others really scares them, which is precisely why they so-fervently want to dominate it ALL. 

They hate and fear their own brains' "painful" detection of patterns of difference - and so try to neutralize such "diversity" by ignoring it, and/or "equalizing" it just by "including" it in the same categories as that which it clearly differs from. 

But difference is endemic to existence, so their desire to crush all of the risky dynamics of life to render them "safely" static, can never succeed. 

As for whether or not any truly objective "Greater Meaning"/Higher Purpose" (and/or Greater Purpose/ Higher Meaning) exists - no it doesn't: the only purpose of existence is to exist, and of life is to life. 

The purpose of consciousness seems to be to sort and discriminate patterns, to categorize them into dynamic perception and static conception, and perhaps maybe even to try to turn all risky dynamic perceptions into safely static conceptions after all, but in a sane and logical way, as in to learn to heed one's fears as helpful internally generated warnings to learn from to avoid future pain-causing damages, rather than illogically in the literally backwards and insane manner as to regard one's own fears as threatening externally-inflicted additional damage-causing pains, to be ignored avoided and even foolishly attacked, to embrace hope as a plan in order to heal damage, as Christians are taught to do. 

In short, I believe this has always been a war of hypocrite criminals against their honest civilized law-abiding victims, not one where we are only harming ourselves and our posterity by attempting to conform to universal, global ideologies - as long as that global ideology is hypocritology. 

This could well lead to a Roddenberry-like Utopian future for all of mankind in its various nations - where the Blacks and Muslims, like the "Klingons" they were coyly mocked as, must learn self-control of their own greater violent animal instincts than ours, but also to not resent us for the relative ease by which we can control ours.

However, regarding your final conclusion that: "you were not gifted with free will and intelligence so that you can send yourself down a spiral that ends in black nothingness. Your existence matters because you exist."

Well, maybe not, but "the gods" certainly can and often do - my family has a history of Alzheimer's, where all of our thoughts and free-will choices and intelligence spiral down into black nothingness where we are forgotten and erased, whether we like it or not.

As for being deliberately Created - again, No.

As I like to tell Abrahamic monotheistic Christians:

There is no higher power, greater meaning or higher purpose; it's always all material. The purpose of existence is to exist, of life to live, and of consciousness to sort symptoms from causes to better avoid pain-causing damage, the fear of it, the greed for less and the ultimately useless hope of no more of any of it ever again. 

That emotional and sensational cycle is known as dharma. 

Christianity is a lie, as it promises an eternal damage, pain, fear, and greed (and therefore also hope and consciousness-free) heaven, which is totally impossible because without experiencing all of them, we can't experience any of them. Further, "Sin!" by all of its symptoms, is nothing more than all-too-common hypocrisy; it's not some magical, "spiritual stain" on one's "soul" (consciousness) which only a god can absolve forgive and remove. It was the criminal choice to attack thereby innocent other people first, and as it was one's own free-will choice, only one's self can remove it by first repenting of it and asking one's victims for forgiveness while offering them reparations. No one - not even the alleged One True God, Creator of the entire Universe, aka the First Cause and Prime Mover (which by definition must always attack every one and every thing else first, even if just by the act of creating them, and thus is by our definition entirely immoral itself) can defeat and save even its self from dharma, much less promise anyone else that it can and will "Save!" them from it, much less just for declaring by turning off their equally allegedly god-given brain's pattern-detecting ability, to have some sort of false "Faith!" and to "Believe!" in what they do not know and even if they did, makes no logical sense, as I have just explained. Nor can anyone just "not-attack-first" their way into heaven, either. It doesn't exist. 

There is no "after" life which can be any different than this one. Dharma is eternally part of consciousness.

As for "Faith:"

Re: "Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen." Hebrews 11:1 KJV

No. Hope of things not proven by yet being seen and realized is the exact OPPOSITE of "evidence." It's denial of evidence. And mere Hope (aka "Faith!" and "Belief!") is NOT "A Plan!" at all, and in fact, it's a recipe for disaster.

Christianity projects nebulous hope as a solid future fact, as "Faith!" and "Belief!" that God has, embodies and will reveal the perfect solution to every problem in one Final Day of Judgment. The problem with this idol is, "The" Perfect Solution to every problem can't exist, because the perfect solution for one problem not only wouldn't also perfectly fit even a slightly different problem, and might cause other ones;  but even if it could, it would unify the whole universe to such an extent that it would cease to be fractured divided and "damaged" and so we would all  simply cease to be conscious at all, as no differences would exist for our brains' pattern detectors to discriminate, de-fine, etc and it would all become a solid Nothing. 

And of course there can be no "Beginning" of Everything and/or End of it all/Final Day of Judgment, simply because the only thing which cannot exist is Nothingness "itself" and to have a 'Beginning' implies Nothingness DID once upon a time exist, and the putative End of All Things presumes it will exist again in the future.

Re: " We weren't created to conform to a single, unchanging worldview - if we were, achieving such unity would be a trivial matter, because it would be natural. n our limited capacity as humans, we cannot possibly play the role of the gods. It isn't within our authority to determine which nations - or which people - have a right to exist. The intentional nature of our existence is what gives us the right to exist." And, re: "we are only harming ourselves and our posterity by attempting to conform to universal, global ideologies."

So again, I say: No!

Maybe there aren't any more things, people, nations, or "souls" (consciousnesses) than just you. 

Let's speculate about the Christians' theology, where their One True God, Creator of the Entire Universe, Prime Mover and First Cause ideal, is omniscient and supreme, and, as Spirit trumps flesh, only dynamic mind truly exists, and static matter is only an illusion. 

But then that also means that for the illusion to fool the Godly uber-mind, it must be created by that same God's Mind - as Doubt. 

So thoughts alone, even as a god (say, Thoth) doesn't mean all "spiritual" thought is logical sane or even good and efficient - there can be mistakes and "bad" thoughts, too. 

God thinks: "I am Perfect, and, as I Am everything, I can and will do anything I want, when and where ever I want to do it! Whee!" 

But then, because he is thought and therefore has to think all thoughts, even the incorrect ones, he also thinks: 

"But what if I'm wrong? What if I did evolve from mere insensate matter, but, since then I was insensate until I wasn't, I certainly couldn't remember any of it?" 

So God, by being infinite and eternally conscious, must invent Doubt. Which means our "Faith!" in Him as the Only Perfect Being is utterly useless, as not even He can have Perfect Faith in His own Self, much less in us and ours!

And more, since he can and will do anything and eventually, through being bored and distracted by doubts, everything, he eventually creates a whole lot of little versions of him self (aka the pagan gods, and then us) to play out his infinite mental/spiritual speculative fantasies - and because we have different hopes dreams wishes and desires in our doubt-limited ("faithless") lives, we are in conflicts with each other, and so we are limited to "laws" of physics just to even peacefully co-exist?

So maybe, as you say, he speculates that other councils of lesser, "pagan" gods have also always existed (and therefore they do) to monitor and influence the various Nations and Tribes in their separately "evolved" environments, too.

So we can see how that Judeo-Christian "God is pure spirit, power and will, and thought itself and is omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent" theory works out in real life?

As in: it doesn't, because it can't. If and when one is omniscient, then, since consciousness can only exist to learn to think about things, and one already knows everything, then one cannot learn or think because one has literally nothing left to learn.

Similarly, if one is both omnipresent and omnipotent, then, as one is already everywhere, having left and arrived, one has nowhere left to go, and nothing left to do to expend any more power, having already done everything - so in effect one is mindless, powerless, and nowhere; again, when one's god is generally only "Everything!" then it is also by definition specifically only "Nothing."

In Conclusion: What you call "Nihilists," I identify as hypocrites!

;-)