FedUpUSA

Archive for the ‘America’ Category

Rights are an inherent part of the American psyche, at least as much as the fabled baseball and Mom’s apple pie. More so, as we don’t get nostalgic about rights bestowed upon us by our Creator – they’re just there. Like our right hand, we know it is there and cannot imagine what it would be like if it were missing, and we have little sayings such as “know [it] like the back of my hand”… but how often do you really look at the back of your hand?

There seems to be such a lot of confusion about those rights we all purport to know so well. Call it a normative bias, or just too much TV (when the national conversation is that the Second Amendment only protects hunting, but health care is a human right, you know someone is surely confused about something). The biggest intellectual distortion of them all appears to be the difference between rights and privileges.

Privilege just means “private law”. The utilization of resources perhaps not available to all, in order to bring about beneficial circumstances to you personally. Human rights are natural law, a set of rules under which you are born, and under no circumstance may be taken away. The fabled “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness”, for example. The difference between rights and privileges is easy to delineate, and yet profound. Even the Founding Fathers missed the mark, although perhaps the Bill of Rights and Constitution were always meant to be a codified wish list. Heinlein explained this quite well.

“Ah, yes, the ‘unalienable rights.’ Each year someone quotes that magnificent poetry. Life? What ‘right’ to life has a man who is drowning in the Pacific? The ocean will not hearken to his cries.

As to liberty, the heroes who signed the great document pledged themselves to buy liberty with their lives. Liberty is never unalienable; it must be redeemed regularly with the blood of patriots or it always vanishes. Of all the so-called natural human rights that have ever been invented, liberty is the least likely to be cheap and is never free of cost.” ~ Colonel DuBois, Starship Troopers

Health care as a human right is too simple to disprove, the brain cells hardly have to break a sweat. Health care is something which must be provided by others; medicines, testing equipment, the time of people who have exerted themselves to gain knowledge and experience, all things which are necessary to provide “health care” and all things which have value. To require others to give all of this to you without giving them something of equal value in compensation is merely a polite way to describe stealing, and to force another man to offer the effort of his labor for your enrichment, and no benefit to him, is slavery. Advocating common thievery and enslavement in the name of compassion shows how far critical thinking skills have deteriorated in this country.

The human right to health and health care does not exist and never has. A child does not have a natural right endowed by their Creator to be born in perfect health. No man who smokes for thirty years has the natural right to genes unsympathetic to the growth of cancerous lung cells, nor does he have the right to use a gun to force a doctor to cure him of the effects of his thirty-year dissipation. What humans have instead is the right to decide to exert their privileges in order to eat healthy meals, lead active lives, moderate all dangerous or risky consumption/behaviors, and get out in the fresh air from time to time, and to take whatever lumps come their way. That is what a natural right looks like.

Shining a light on the delusion of a natural right to peacefully assemble in public, say, is a bit more difficult. Fortunately, governments have already demonstrably proven this all by their onesies. Tiananmen Square. Kent State. Greece. Americans very recently watched hundreds of cops descend on other Americans peacefully assembling in public; shooting Americans in the head, beating Americans, handcuffing Americans tightly enough to cause long-term damage and leaving Americans in cuffs until they soiled themselves, and finally ordering $10,000 bonds for jaywalking violations. Doesn’t sound like much of an inherent unalienable right, does it?

Right to liberty? NDAA.

Freedom of speech? Watch lists. Warrantless wiretaps. Alphabet agencies with keyword alerts and searches. FBI citizen files.

Freedom to travel for private non-commercial purposes, a perfected right? Checkpoints. Show me your license, insurance, registration. Government-issued identification required.

Freedom of religion? Crosses and prayer banned in public schools.

To wit, those human rights of which Americans are so proud – habeus corpus, mens rea, freedom of speech, the sanctity of private property – are no longer available in America.  Rather, we have seen these same inherent human rights be violated time and time again, but we persist in knowing, deep in our heads, that those rights that have been denied to others are still available to us, should we need to use them. We are different than those other Americans. Right?

More fool you. A benevolent Creator may have bestowed upon the created a certain set of inalienable rights, the number depending upon the privilege of country of birth (Rwanda doesn’t seem to have many, but can’t really think of any that are more than marginally better in anything but rhetoric) . That same Creator may also have seen fit to bestow at birth perfect health. What you do to enforce that health and those rights afterward is entirely your business.

Ah, that’s the sticky wicket, eh wot? Enforcement, and whose job that is. The government’s? American government is on a nearly century-long blatant campaign to hem round and limit “inalienable” rights. They’re so terribly inconvenient to government control and bureaucratic power. Your Creator, maybe? Let us know how that works out for you. Other Americans, then. Perhaps we should all wait quietly and safely in our homes whilst others risk all to enforce our inalienable rights. Yeah, that’s a great idea! We’ll just wait for someone else to step up to the plate!

In truth rights once codified were never inalienable – codifying them would have been redundant if they were. Those rights we cherish, once held and hope to have again are privileges, and as all men know privileges are earned. We Americans were fortunate to be descended from men who once earned those rights for us, paid the price in blood and sacrifice and, for many, their lives. Those rights were never bought, however, merely leased. The lease has expired. Further privilege must again be earned – not given by the government, or by your Creator, or by waiting for someone else to make the sacrifice to earn it back.

Start mourning the loss of your comfy little lives, couch-potato existence, coddled push-button middle-class safety now. If it helps, it was always a legal and financial fiction. Hard times are coming. You can pray for easier lives, for the Federal Reserve to kick the economic can, for someone else to make the sacrifice to save American values… or you can pray to be stronger men.

by Jo Newton

FedUpUSA

Fox News argues….

In the wake of tragedies we tend to react out of emotion. When dealing with policy-making, however, we all benefit if logic enters the discussion. It is difficult to imagine a more heart-wrenching event than the Newtown, Conn. shootings. The inevitable calls for more gun control legislation reflect an understandable desire to do something after 26 defenseless and innocent people are slaughtered.

The more important question, however, is what can we do that will make a difference? That, I suggest, is the best way to honor those who lost their lives. Making us feel better should not be the measure. We should try to make a difference.

Correct.

And to do so we need to look at what happened objectively, which is very difficult to do in the “heat of the moment.”

So let’s agree on a couple of things — first, those who argue in the heat of the moment are not arguing for safety.  They’re trying to play on the “feel better” side of the ledger, and we must reject that.  Second, we must demand and discover their true motive, which is not making a difference — at least not when it comes to the issue at hand.

We also must look at the facts, no matter where they lead us.  Like, for instance, the fact that alcohol kills roughly as many people as do guns (most of the deaths are self-inflicted or accidents, as is true with guns) and indeed alcohol causes well over a thousand homicides a year which is remarkable considering how horrifying people consider guns to be and the fact that a bottle of booze has zero defensive value.

Now for those inconvenient facts that nobody wants to discuss…..

First, the current furor over “assault rifles” is a false, media generated hype campaign that lawmakers have seized upon — and they know they’re lying as well.

First, there are no legal ”assault rifles” manufactured since 1986 in civilian hands.  That’s because an “assault rifle” is aselect-fire weapon – that is, it is capable of firing more than one cartridge with each depression of the trigger.  The common name for such a weapon when that mode of operation is selected is machine gun.  No select-fire weapon made since 1986 can be lawfully transferred to a civilian, and ones made prior can only be transferred when registered with the BATFE (and with payment of a $200 tax.)

Oh, and unless I missed a news story in my sweep one legitimately civilian-owned select-fire weapon (that is, an actual assault rifle) has been used in a crime in the last 20 or so years — and the person who did so was a police officer.  (There have been plenty of very-illegal select-fire weapons used in crimes, but I’ll get to that in a bit.)

What the media and Feinslime want to call an “assault rifle” is in fact an automatic-loading rifle similar in design and operation to hunting and sporting rifles used for target practice, varmint control, plinking and competitive shooting.  In fact, that’s exactly what such a rifle is almost-always used for.  The only distinction between an “evil assault rifle” and a rifle that lawmakers “accept” as being intended to shoot varmints on a farmer’s land is the color of the weapon and its decorations, along with things such as a handguard (which helps prevent you from burning your hand by touching the barrel after the gun has been fired) and a “flash-hider” (which serves to direct where the flash goes, but does not prevent it from being seen — in short, it keeps it out of your eyesight and is useful for shooting said varmints in low light conditions, or in some cases is fashioned to help control the muzzle by directing the blast in a fashion that counter-acts the natural motion of the barrel as the weapon is fired.)

The other interesting statistic is that only about 1 in 500 guns used in a crime are “assault weapons” as these people would define them according to some statistics, and less than 2% of people in prison for a firearms violation (including simple possession by a felon or other crimes where no violence took place) involve such a weapon – yet there are some 3.5 million of them, according to various surveys, in civilian hands. Indeed these weapons are extremely popular among law-abiding Americans; the much-maligned “adjustable stock”, for example, allows the same gun to be comfortably fired by a 6’4″ man and his 5’8″ wife at the range — a perfectly-lawful and reasonable consideration.  The removable “flash-hider” is popular as it can be replaced if it is damaged in the field (while hunting varmints) at low cost and protects the crown of the barrel rather than forcing a barrel replacement or if you wish to change it out for one that better-controls muzzle flip (the tendency of the barrel to rise when the weapon is fired) at the range.

Why do they appear to be used by whack jobs like the Sandy Hook shooter?  Probably because they look scary. After all, these are whack-jobs we’re talking about; they are unlikely to pick the most-lethal weapon as they probably haven’t studied weapons well-enough to do that (and that’s a good thing as it keeps them from choosing bombs and similar items that would do even more damage) but a scary-looking gun, oh boy, that’s just the ticket in a mentally-disturbed person’s mind.

Are you really going to suggest that if a particular scary-looking gun wasn’t available for some reason that this would actually deter said whack-job from committing his horrific act?

And besides, are you really going to argue that we should ban something because of how it looks?  If that’s the case then Dianne Feinstein is certainly on top of the list of things to ban!

Speaking of that fine gentleman with which Feinstein shares a particular love of firearms registration (and confiscation), I’d like to draw the reader’s attention to this chart up on JPFO’s web site.  It lists nine acts of genocide in the 20th century alone, each of which was preceded by gun permitting, restrictions, registration in and many cases confiscations and/or outright prohibitions.

Not one of these incidents occurred without first disarming the people to be exterminated.

You may have heard about some of these people; certainly everyone knows about the Jews in Nazi Germany.  But it was not just Jews — anyone critical of the regime, Gypsies, political opponents and even just people who they thought would make “good examples” were shoved in the hole, some 20 million in all.  The law requiring registration began in 1928; 10 years later Hitler used it to begin murdering millions.

I’m sure some will argue that this is a “bygone era” since WWII.  Well then I’m sure you can explain away Rwanada in 1994, which came about 15 years after a 1979 law requiring gun registration, justification of need and restriction on ammunition – - along with confiscation powers.

Fifteen years later fully 20% of the population, some 800,000 people, were slaughtered in 100 days.

Oh, and the left’s beloved President Clinton did exactly nothing about it.  I guess he was too busy getting blowjobs in the Oval Office to worry about 800,000 black people being slaughtered like rats.

In Guatemala it was Mayans, other Indians and political enemies.  In Uganda, Christians.  In Cambodia it was anyone that the government didn’t like (about 2 million people fell into that category) and China had two bouts of this in the 20th Century, totaling somewhere around 40 million citizens, all murdered in cold blood.

All told the count is somewhere north of 170 million citizens that have been executed not by combat in war or as “collateral damage” (accidental injury) but rather simply because once the government obtained an absolute monopoly on force it was able to slaughter people with impunity, and did.

170 million people is an extraordinary number.  Since we’re only 330 million out of a world population of something like 7 billion, it is not fair to charge all of them against us when making comparisons.  We’re about 5% of the world population, basically, so you could “charge” 8.5 million of those deaths (5%) to us in comparison.

How’s that work out?

Well, we have 11,000 firearms homicides, more or less, annually.

Objectively looking at this issue it would take 772 years for civilians to murder 8.5 million people, most of them one at a time, but the comparison table only runs in the last century. 

It is therefore nearly eight times more likely that you will be slaughtered by your government wholesale if you give up your guns than the risk you run of being murdered by a bad guy if you don’t and this assumes that all of the 11,000 gun murders do not happen if we ban all or some firearms.

But many if not most — or possibly even all of those killings will still happen, and we all know it.

How do we know it?

Because they have and do occur in the past and present.

The worst mass-murder in a school in US history took place in Bath Township, Michigan.  The assailant used explosives to blow the place up.  Tim McVeigh used home-made explosives to blow up a federal building in Oklahoma City.  A bunch of Islamic nutjobs used aircraft as bombs to kill over 3,000 Americans on 9/11.  A handful of Islamic nutjobs tried (and mostly failed) to blow up the WTC several years earlier — with a truck bomb, not a gun.  A deranged individual used a can of gasoline to burn up a nightclub and murder 80 people.  Just the other day a nutjob murdered a man because she thought he was Muslim — she used her hands to push him in front of a subway train.  In China, which disarmed its citizens and then suffered not one but two acts of genocide in the last 100 years, knife attacks have become commonplace with horrific results.

Mentally-deranged individuals use all sorts of implements of destruction.  Guns are tools, and like gasoline, airplanes, explosives (both commercially available and home-made), automobiles, trucks, knives, crowbars, chainsaws, baseball bats and other items they can be used for good or evil.  A mentally-deranged person is not particularly concerned with what implement he or she employs to commit their dastardly deed.

Now let’s separate the gun murders out a bit, and I’ll refer to ”the bible” on this — the FBI’s statistics.

I’m going to first go after the single largest group of people who both shoot and die, because if we’re serious about addressing gun violence instead of playing politics (or setting up your own personal genocide a few years hence) you have to start where most of the violence is centered.

And the fact is that it is gang-bangers, mostly black gang-bangers, shooting one another.  These are all our (collectively) our fault (I’ll get to that later), and account for about half of all gun murders.

Here’s an ugly fact — black people were charged with 49.7% of the murders in 2011 but are only about 13% of the population.   What’s worse is the distribution of victims by age.

In short if you’re black, male and make it to 25 your risk of being gang-banged (that is, dead by gunshot) drops by about half.  But here’s the key – it’s still four times that of a white person and was nearly 10 times greater before your 25th birthday!  It’s not much better if you’re black and female — your risk is four to five times greater than if you’re white.

So if you want to talk about people being shot to death, it’s black people, especially young black people, who are both doing the shooting and being shot.

But that’s not the “pretty white face of a child” we saw in Newtown, is it?

Nope.

It is, however, one Newtown worth of dead black youth approximately every day.

Where’s the outrage?  Why is this not a Newtown-style scandal and media event every single day?

That outrage and attention is in the exact same place it was in 1994 with Rwanda — all missing.

You know why?

Because both the victims and the killers are black, that’s why.

You want to argue otherwise?  Then go ahead and explain it.  Close to a Newtown’s worth of youth murdered every day.  That’s a fact folks, and there’s a huge concentration of those shooters and victims in one small subgroup of our nation’s population — the 16-24 year old black youth.

And while you’re at it, pay close attention to what happened during Rwanda (that would be “nothing”) and what the United States did in response.  Who also remembers Madame Albright and the “little dustup” she subsequently got us involved in over in Bosnia, Kosovo and Croatia?

What was the difference?

Gee, not the color of the skin of the participants and how that sells to both the government and the people, eh? 

Riiiiiight.

Let’s cut the crap — about half of the murders in this country are committed by and against one tiny subset of our population.  That subset of our population has a risk of homicide ten times that of the same age group outside of that ethnicity.  Simply put young black men are killing one another at an outrageously high rate, this is roughly half of our homicides all-in, it amounts to roughly a Newtown every single day and nobody gives a damn.

What could we realistically do to address this problem?  That’s not hard to figure out either.

If we were serious about this issue we’d legalize all drugs tomorrow, selling them in pharmacies to anyone with ID for 21.  And yeah, I said all drugs.  It would put the gang-bangers out of business in an afternoon and a huge percentage of those homicides would disappear overnight.  We’d also stop incarcerating half of the people we currently hold in federal prisons (who are there on drug charges) and about 1/3rd of those in state prisons (ditto.)  Those people, having no felony record any longer, would have better economic opportunity, which would do even more toward making it possible for them to choose a productive life instead of a criminal one.

The fact is that nobody is interested in putting a stop to all the black youth being killed in this country.  Nobody is proposing that which we know would stop it, just as it did when we repealed Prohibition.

If we were really going to have a logical examination of the problem of gun homicide and violence in this country, this is what we’d do.

But we’re not going to do that, are we?

No, we’re not.  At least not thus far.

Instead we have official racism throughout our government, media and nation as a whole.

Yes, even Barack Obama practices it personally by refusing to deal with the real issue, instead stomping his feet like a petulant child with his minions in Feinstein and now Blumenthal.

Now let’s look at history.

You want to know where gun laws came from and why they were first enacted?  The same place marriage laws came from: To keep “those people” from having firearms.

This is not conjecture; it dates to 1751!  There was actually law in Louisiana requiring colonists to stop any black and“if necessary, beat any black carrying any potential weapon, such as a cane.” 

Free blacks in slave states were required to obtain a license and show need to have a firearm.  Whites of course, did not have any such restriction.

So official racism is dead in the United States eh?

Bull.  We may be better at hiding it but we’re still practicing it to this day and it originates in our government and mainstream media, exactly as it did in the 1700s and 1800s.

So having settled that our government doesn’t want to talk about where the real problem lies, nor to fix it, because the folks who are both doing the shooting and dying have the wrong color skin, we’ll turn next to that tiny subset of those who commit such crimes that our screech-owls are desperately trying to focus our attention on – mentally-deranged individuals.

What can we actually do about this subset of the problem?

Can we ban guns?  No.

How do I know this?  Because we can’t successfully ban drugs despite a near-100 year attempt, and yet if you get caught with drugs, whether possessing or selling them, you may go to prison but it is generally not a life sentence.  The same would be true for a “bare” firearms offense.

The problem is that once someone decides to commit murder all of the other crimes are free.  You see, it’s only possible to imprison someone for life — or hang them — once.  Therefore once the decision is made to commit homicideno other law is of any effect whatsoever upon that person’s conduct.

This is a matter of basic logic and is irrefutable; anyone claiming otherwise is mentally deranged themselves — or lying.

Let us remember that the shooter at Sandy Hook apparently murdered his mother to obtain the weapons he used in the assault.

Once he had made the decision to murder the children at the school there was no barrier to any other crime he would then have to commit in order to carry out his original intent, up to and including killing his mom to obtain the weapons he used.

There is no “gun law” that will prevent what Adam did.  Not only are there over 100 million guns in America but our borders are swiss cheese, as we’ve seen with 20 million illegal immigrants that we refuse to force to leave this country.  Hell, some states even issue them driver licenses and all look the other way when they take jobs that citizens could be performing.  Literal tons of cocaine, meth, heroin and marijuana come into this country every year over those very same borders.  Guns are trivially easy to move across our borders as well; they don’t smell like dope does, among other things.

To those who propose that an “assault weapons ban” will help: Have you forgotten Columbine?  It happened duringthe previous assault weapons ban!  That assault occurred when high-capacity magazines were banned and Harris carried 13 10 round magazines for his pistol, 10 of which he consumed.  So much for 10-round magazine limits “slowing people down” and “preventing mass-murder.”

It did neither.

The pair also sawed off two shotguns (instantly making them federal felons; note that they didn’t care as they intended to commit murder) and constructed nearly 100 improvised explosive devices (also making them instant federal felons for that too) – fortunately, the two largest ones made with propane tanks didn’t explode.

Once Harris and Klebold decided to murder people in the school all the other felonies, well over a hundred of them that they committed first, were “free.”  There was no law that inhibited their actions nor could there be – not the acquisition of the firearms, their felonious modification, the felonious construction of explosives and the placing of said explosives.  All those crimes were free because once they decided to commit murder no other sanction could be applied to them for the other offenses.

So we can’t stop nuts with gun restrictions; we can neither get rid of the guns successfully nor will limiting certain guns stop the nuts or even slow them down — they’ll just choose different guns.  A shotgun is a basic weapon; Harris and Klebold procured two of them (illegally) and then sawed them off (illegally.)  Just as with Adam Lanza they didn’t give a damn what the law was or what it restricted, as they already had decided to break the most-serious law we have (murder) and as such all other violations of the law were “free.”

Now let’s talk about the shooters themselves.  Virtually all of these deranged individuals are on psychotropic drugs of some sort.  And we know full-well that these drugs can cause homicidal rage along with suicide; it’s documented as a “black label” warning. 

Indeed this warning singles out teens and young adults under 25 as being at particular risk!

Yet we continue to give these drugs to teenagers and young adults, who are the group that continually are overrepresented in these homicidal rages.

Yes, I understand that the reported incidence of such “bad reactions” is under 1%.  But let’s face reality; if there are 1 million young people prescribed these drugs then that’s 10,000 potential homicidal or suicidal maniacs we createwith these drugs.

Of course the NIH and other agencies all maintain we’re “appropriately” using these drugs.  The problem is that they can be statistically correct (that is, 99% of the people prescribed them are helped rather than harmed) and at the same time be responsible for the creation of the monsters that go insane and shoot up movie theaters, US Representatives and schools.

The question then legitimately becomes this: Is the creation of thousands of potential homicidal maniacs anacceptable price for our society to pay so we can medicate our youth with these drugs?  Are we willing, as a society, to accept the price that the medical and pharmaceutical profession imposes along with the claimed benefits? 

That’s a policy question for our society to examine in depth and a debate we must have as a society.  We must confront this head-on and bring into the forefront the facts.

And the facts are that virtually all of these “active shooter” incidents involve someone who is on, or has recently been on, psychotropic medication.

Again, that 99% of the people who are prescribed these drugs are helped doesn’t change the fact that according to the prescribing information some percentage — even if a very small percentage — of the people who take it, especially among teens and young adults, become psychotic to a degree where extreme violence or suicide are recognized risks.

It’s either worth it or not, and if we’re going to hand these drugs out to this segment of the population which the drug-makers themselves have documented as being “at risk” for extreme negative side effects we must accept that price, or we must stop prescribing these drugs to the segment of the population that is “at risk” for turning into homicidal maniacs when using said drugs.  Period.

If you want to actually make a difference when it comes to mass-shooting incidents you start here because it is a statistical fact that virtually all said mass-shooters are either using or were recently using these drugs.

Finally, we must talk about deterrence.  And this too comes from our knowledge and history of “mass-shooting” incidents.  In virtually every case these people are documented cowards — when faced with resistance they either give up (e.g. in Aurora) or kill themselves.

The sooner someone can offer effective resistance the fewer people will die. 

We saw this in Oregon where, despite having a full magazine once the shooter saw a man with a concealed weapon draw he killed himself instead of continuing his rampage.  Time and time again as soon as these shooters hear the police sirens they blown their own brains out or give up.

The people who do this, by the manifest weight of the evidence, are fundamentally cowards; they’re not looking for a fight, they’re looking for a shooting gallery with unarmed targets.

That means we must stop advertising “free-fire kill people zones”, which is what the insanity of passing laws and posting signs for “Gun Free” zones actually represent.

With exactly one exception (Giffords) all of the contemporary “mass active shooter” incidents have taken place in allegedly “Gun Free” zones because they are looking to minimize the odds of running into effective resistance.

The people who commit these acts are insane — they are not stupid.  They are specifically looking for targets of opportunity and are demonstrably, in case after case, cowards.  This is not “Seal Team Six gone bad” or some Rambo-type looking to “go to war” (with all that comes with doing so including being shot at), they’re sniveling keyboard warriors who spent too much time in their mother’s basement with a video game screaming DIE! at the monitor.  As soon as their fantasy world of firepower and invincibility turns to shit and bullets start flying the other way they either stick up their hands and surrender or blow their own brains out.

If we’re not willing to stop dispensing the drugs that we know are correlated with these events and are documented to produce homicidal rage in some percentage of teens and young adults who take them we must increase the odds that anyone attempting such an act will rapidly, within seconds, face such resistance.

And that means we must allow everyone who is not insane to pack heat.

That means everyone, all the time and everywhere.  No permits, no BS, no kidding.  If you’re a law-abiding citizen and wish to carry, especially concealed, you may exactly as The Constitution provides.  Period.  I am all in support of charging straw purchasers accessories before the fact to crimes committed with the weapons they procure; indeed, I see no reason why that couldn’t be charged under existing law in exactly this fashion (as is done today if you knowingly give someone a ride to the bank for the purpose of robbing it.)

The bottom line on risk reduction is really rather simple:  If we will not stop turning out mental zombies willing to commit mass murder because we are so married to the pharmaceutical industry that we will not force them to stop marketing and making available these drugs to people under the age of 25 — the population that we havedocumented evidence are at heightened risk of psychotic reactions while using these drugs — then we must do what we can to put an end to “free fire” zones where the zombies we create can murder with impunity.

Since the police cannot be everywhere all the time, there’s only way to do that — drop the pretense that paper stops bullets, that signs deter aggression instead of encouraging it to be focused where there is no resistance, and exchange the “gun free” signs with one that looks like this:

You want a thoughtful discussion and debate focused on logic?

Here it is.

The Market-Ticker

Discussion (registration required to post)

Dear Mr. Security Agent

FedUpUSA received a request to circulate this essay by Matthew Bracken, and it is worth every second of the time it takes to read.

Federal, state, or local. You, the man or woman with the badge, the sworn LEO or FLEA and those who inhabit the many law enforcement niches in between and on all sides. This essay is directed to you, because in the end, how this turmoil about gun control turns out will depend largely upon your decisions and actions over the coming months and years.

….

The unintended consequences of this misguided utopian fool’s crusade to ban guns would include a second civil war as agonizingly painful as the first one, if not more so, since there would be no front lines and no safe areas for anybody, anywhere. Every sane American wants to prevent such a calamitous outcome as a “dirty civil war” on United States soil.

But know this: those tens of millions will never be quietly disarmed and then later forced at government gunpoint onto history’s next boxcars. If boxcars and detention camps are to be in America’s future, then you, Mr. Security Agent, will have to disarm them the hard way first. Not Piers Morgan, not Michael Moore, not Rosie O’Donnell, not Dianne Feinstein, not Chuck Schumer.

You.

Dear Senator Feinstein

As if to prove Bracken’s point, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) recently proposed some very strict gun control legislation. In response, former Marine Cpl. Joshua Boston wrote her a now-viral letter, which partly reads:

“I am not your subject,” Boston wrote.

“I am the man who keeps you free. I am not your servant. I am the person whom you serve. I am not your peasant. I am the flesh and blood of America. I am the man who fought for my country. I am the man who learned. I am an American. You will not tell me that I must register my semi-automatic AR-15 because of the actions of some evil man.”

Fox and Friends interviewed Mr. Boston about his letter to Sen. Feinstein. Click the link below for their article, a link to Mr. Boston’s complete letter, and a video of the interview.

U.S. Marine Talks About Letter to Sen. Feinstein: Assault Weapons Ban Would Start Country on ‘Slippery Slope’ to Americans Being Disarmed

In Truth

Governments never truly have “your own good” or “your protection” in mind when they begin to strip rights away from a populace, and ours is no exception. Mr. Bracken and Mr. Boston are both correct: We, in America, are starting down the path to tyranny, and unless we change course soon, we will become the country our Founding Fathers most feared. Once stripped of the natural right to bear arms, there will be nothing to prevent the utter subjugation of America, and the mass imprisonments and murders that usually follow. While there has historically been some “lead time” between gun registration and gun confiscation, it is never very long, and invariably leads to very ugly things.

Randy – FedUpUSA

The weather conditions in the middle part of the country during the last couple of months have been highly unusual.  The following is from a recent article in the Los Angeles Times….

It’s not that the Midwest hasn’t been extremely hot before, and it’s not that it hasn’t been incredibly dry.

But it’s unusual for a vast swath of the Midwest to be so very hot and so very dry for so very long — particularly this early in the summer.

The current heat wave — which is spurring comparisons to the catastrophic heat of 1936 –  is “out of whack,” meteorologist Jim Keeney said Friday in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Corn crops typically pollinate and mature in June and early July.  That is why this time of the year is so vitally important for corn.  We have reached a make it or break it moment.

The following is how an Accuweather.com report described what is happening right now….

Either heat or drought can stress the stalks, but both can basically shut down the pollination process. When this happens few, small or no ears of corn form.

According to AccuWeather.com Agricultural Meteorologists, you can’t raise a corn crop with less than an inch of rain over six weeks, combined with 100-degree and higher temperatures. However, these conditions have taken place in much of the southern corn belt through the week of July 4, 2012.

If pollination does not happen, corn farmers might as well give up.

Just check out what agricultural economist Chris Hurt said the other day….

“Pollination problems just can’t be overcome, even if the weather turns. There’s no turning back. There’s just failure.”

At this point, half of all corn in the state of Indiana is already in poor shape.

With each passing day, the condition of the corn gets even worse.

As a recent article in the Chicago Tribune detailed, many farmers feel completely helpless at the moment….

Dave Kestel, who farms about 1,300 acres in Manhattan about 40 miles southwest of Chicago, said he feels helpless.

“Every day you get out there and it’s the same heat and cloudless sky,” he said. “You see your corn just withering out there, knowing you can’t do anything about it.”

The United States is suffering from a severe lack of rain.  Just look at the chart posted below.  According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, most of the country is experiencing drought conditions right now….

These drought conditions have also played a major role in the huge number of wildfires that we have seen lately.

There are a few northern states that are not feeling the drought right now, but otherwise the rest of the country is extremely dry.

So what does all of this mean for you and I?

A recent article by Holly Deyo summarized why we should all be praying for rain….

Since 75% of grocery store products use corn as a key ingredient, expect food prices to skyrocket. Corn is also a staple in many fast foods. Corn is in ethanol and the main food source or chickens. In addition to this, maize is in many things that aren’t obvious like adhesives, aluminum, aspirin, clothing starch, cosmetics, cough syrup, dry cell batteries, envelopes, fiberglass insulation, gelatin capsules, ink, insecticides, paint, penicillin, powders, rugs and carpets, stamps, talcum, toothpaste, wallpaper, and vitamins. That’s just for starters…

This is a huge heads up for you to purchase corn-using products NOW before these conditions reflect in grocery goods. It will be a narrow window of opportunity.

These thoughts are being echoed by many agricultural economists as well.  According toBusinessweek, the outlook for U.S. food prices is bleak….

“When people look at rising prices for hamburger, butter, eggs and other protein sources from higher corn costs, that’s when more money ends up in the food basket,” said Minneapolis- based Michael Swanson, a senior agricultural economist at Wells Fargo & Co., the biggest U.S. farm lender. “We were hoping for a break, and we aren’t going to get it.”

Unfortunately, the fact that the corn is dying all over America is not just a problem for the United States.

As Businessweek also recently noted, the fate of U.S. corn affects the entire globe….

When rain doesn’t fall in Iowa, it’s not just Des Moines that starts fretting. Food buyers from Addis Ababa to Beijing all are touched by the fate of the corn crop in the U.S., the world’s breadbasket in an era when crop shortages mean riots.

This year they have reason to be concerned. Stockpiles of corn in the U.S. tumbled 48 percent between March and June, the biggest drop since 1996, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said last week. And that was before drought hit the Midwest.

The United States is the world’s biggest exporter of corn by far, and if there is a massive corn crop failure in America it is going to be felt to the four corners of the earth.

Just check out what Abdolreza Abbassian, a senior economist with the U.N. Food & Agriculture Organization, said the other day….

“Everyone watches the U.S. because they can rely on it. Without it, the world would starve.”

Back in February, I wrote an article that suggested that we could see dust bowl conditions return to the middle part of this country in the years ahead.

A lot of people were skeptical of that article.

Not quite as many people are skeptical today.

The following is from a recent article posted on MSNBC entitled “Fears of new Dust Bowl as heat, drought shrivel corn in Midwest“….

Crop insurance agents and agricultural economists are watching closely, a few comparing the situation with the devastating drought of 1988, when corn yields shriveled significantly, while some farmers have begun alluding, unhappily, to the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Far more is at stake in the coming pivotal days: with the brief, delicate phase of pollination imminent in many states, miles and miles of corn will rise or fall on whether rain soon appears and temperatures moderate.

As I wrote about last week, if the weather does not turn around soon the implications are going to be staggering.

Even if we got some significant rainfall at this point a tremendous amount of damage has already been done according to the Washington Post….

Jay Armstrong, owner and operator of Armstong Farms in Kansas, flew his small plane over a portion of the affected area and landed with the impression that the potential damage is far worse than is commonly understood.

“At this time of year, when you look down in a place like Indiana or Illinois, you should see just lush green fields,” Armstrong said. “I saw bare soil. I just thought to myself, the market has no idea what’s coming.”

So is there significant rain in the forecast?

Unfortunately, the answer is no.

The National Weather Service says that the corn belt will experience “above-normal temperatures” and “below-normal rainfall” over the next week.

At this point it does not look like there will be any significant rainfall for the foreseeable future….

“We got a break in the temperatures over the weekend but no rain of significance is in sight for next seven days,” said Jim Keeney, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service the US central region based in Kansas City, Missouri.

Needless to say, that is really bad news.

Right now we just have more heat and more dryness to look forward to.  The skies are like iron and the earth is like brass.  We like to think that we have conquered nature, but at moments such as these we see that is not true at all.

A couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about all of the reasons why we should be concerned aboutthe second half of 2012.  In that article I did not even mention drought and crop failures.  Sometimes major problems have a way of piling on top of themselves.

The U.S. economy is already in bad enough shape without adding major crop failures to the mix.  This is something that we just don’t need right now.

But it looks like we are going to have to deal with it.  Unless there is a major change in the weather, food prices are going to go up even more and large numbers of farmers and ranchers are going to be absolutely devastated.

Let us all pray for rain.  We desperately need it.

The Economic Collapse

If you went out and took a poll of the American people on July 4th (Independence Day) and asked them if they are free, what would the results look like?  Of course the results would be overwhelmingly lopsided.  Most Americans believe that they live in “the land of the free” and that they are not enslaved to anyone.  But is that really the case? Slavery does not always have to involve whips and shackles.  There are many other forms of slavery.  One dictionary definition of a slave is “one that is completely subservient to a dominating influence”.  I really like that definition.  Today, millions of Americans are slaves of the system and they don’t even realize it.  Debt is a form of slavery, and millions of Americans having become deeply enslaved to our debt-based financial system.  When someone enslaves someone else, the goal of the master is to reap a benefit out of the slave.  You don’t want the slave to just sit there and collect dust.  Today, most Americans have willingly shackled themselves to a system that systematically drains their wealth and transfers it to the very wealthy.  Most of them don’t even realize that they have been enslaved even as the system sucks them dry.

Just think about it.  Where is the “big money” in the United States today?

When asked that question, most Americans think of Wall Street.

Well, who controls Wall Street?

The bankers do.

The borrower is the servant of the lender, and they generate massive amounts of wealth by lending us money.

Perhaps an example will be helpful.

Have you ever run up $5000 of credit card debt?  Many people have run up much, much more than that, but let us use $5000 for our example.

According to the Federal Reserve, if you only make the minimum payment every month, at a 20% interest rate it will take you 49 years to pay that credit card off and you will pay back a total of $26,169.

So you would have gotten the original benefit of spending the $5000 and you would have had to work extremely hard to pay back an additional $21,169 to the bankers.

In essence, you would be working as a servant of the bankers until you had paid back that entire debt plus interest.

Unfortunately, our entire system is now designed to get you to go into debt.

It starts before we even get into the “real world”.  We are constantly told that we cannot get a “good job” without a college degree, but a college education is so ridiculously expensive these days that most of us cannot afford one without going into lots of debt.

Many of you out there know exactly what I am talking about.

Do you have a pile of student loan debt?

I do.

In fact, the total pile of student loan debt in the United States is now over a trillion dollars.

Unfortunately, when a lot of us graduated we found out that the “good jobs” that we were promised simply were not there.  Last year, 53 percent of all Americans with a bachelor’s degree under the age of 25 were either unemployed or underemployed.

So many young adults are starting out life already enslaved to a gigantic pile of debt but without a good job that will enable them to comfortably service that debt.

The really “lucky” graduates from the top schools flock to Wall Street so that they can make lots of money running the debt-based financial system that is enslaving all the rest of us.

Once young people leave school, there are lots of other “debt traps” to fall into.

Once you get out into the “real world”, just about every major purchase is going to involve another pile of debt.

Do you want a house?

That is going to mean more debt.  As I have written about previously, mortgage debt as a percentage of U.S. GDP has more than tripled since 1955.

Do you want a car?

About 70 percent of all vehicle purchases in the U.S. now involve at least some borrowed  money.

Consumer debt is particularly insidious.  Our stores are filled with very beautiful things, and it is really easy to buy a bunch of stuff and “put it on plastic”.

Since 1971, the total amount of consumer debt in the United States has increased by 1700%, and approximately 46% of all Americans now carry a credit card balance from month to month.

We just keep plunging ourselves deeper and deeper into debt slavery.  Most Americans never seem to learn.  Over the past 30 years those of us in the “bottom 95 percent” have seen our financial shackles just get heavier and heavier.  The following is from a recent CNN article….

In 1983, the bottom 95% had 62 cents of debt for every dollar they earned, according to research by two International Monetary Fund economists. But by 2007, the ratio had soared to $1.48 of debt for every $1 in earnings.

When you pile up lots of debt, you aren’t just working for yourself anymore.  You are also working for those that you owe the debts to.  Your hard work and sweat end up making them a lot wealthier.

Our state and local governments have enslaved themselves to debt as well.  Total state and local government debt is now about 8 times higher than it was 30 years ago.

At this point, many U.S. cities are in very serious trouble with debt.  In fact, another California municipality has just declared bankruptcy.  On Monday, the town of Mammoth Lakes announced that it has formally filed for bankruptcy.

But this is just the beginning.

The truth is that we are a nation that is absolutely drowning in debt and we need a lot more money in order to keep up with all of this debt.

But there is a problem.

In our debt-based financial system, the creation of more money actually creates more debt.

So how are we ever going to get out of the hole that we are in?

Today, the U.S. national debt is more than 5000 times larger than it was when the Federal Reserve was first created back in 1913.  This is why it is so important for the American people to realize that the Federal Reserve is a perpetual debt machine.

The Federal Reserve system itself does not make much money.  The vast majority of the profits that the Federal Reserve makes are transferred back to the U.S. government.

But that is not what the Federal Reserve was created to do.

What the Federal Reserve was created to do was to set up a system where the U.S. government would borrow money and pay interest on it instead of just creating the money itself.

Last year the U.S. government spent more than 454 billion dollars just on interest on the national debt.  That is a form of national slavery.  454 billion dollars that we worked very hard to make was taken from us and transferred into the pockets of some very wealthy people.

The truth is that the U.S. government does not actually need to ever borrow a single penny from anyone.  As a sovereign government it could directly issue money into circulation.

But lending money to governments is very, very profitable and it is the kind of thing that wars are fought over.

For example, the First Bank of the United States (the very first central bank in our country) was established in 1791 and the charter for that bank expired in 1811 and was not renewed.

So what happened the very next year?

The War of 1812.  During that war Washington D.C. was actually captured and burned.  The final major battle of that war was the battle of New Orleans which took place on January 8, 1815.

So what happened the very next year?

President James Madison signed the charter for the Second Bank of the United States on April 10, 1816.

The goal has always been to enslave the American people.  Debt is used to enslave us individually, it is used to enslave our businesses, it is used to enslave our state and local governments and it is used to enslave our federal government.

So are you a slave of the system?

If you are in debt, then you are a slave at least to some degree.

Unfortunately, the global financial system has become so saturated with debt that it is now on the verge of collapse.  It appears that things could be getting significantly worse during the second half of this year, and the years ahead do not look very promising at all.

Sadly, most Americans do not see any of this coming.  In fact, a new CNN/ORC International poll has found that about 60 percent of all Americans think that the U.S. economy will be in good shape next year.

Can you believe that?

The mainstream media has done a fantastic job of brainwashing the general public.

The “blue team” is convinced that if Barack Obama wins the election and the Democrats take control of both houses of Congress that prosperous times are on the way.

The “red team” is convinced that if Mitt Romney wins the election and the Republicans take control of both houses of Congress that the U.S. economy will be put back on the right track.

Well, the truth is that there is not going to be a solution to our economic problems on the national level.  We have accumulated the greatest mountain of debt in the history of the world, and it is going to collapse and crush us no matter which brand of corrupt politicians we sent to Washington.

On July 4th, millions upon millions of Americans will celebrate “Independence Day” with cookouts, parades and fireworks without ever realizing the true nature of what is really going on.

Hopefully we can get more of them educated while there is still time.