Tag: gun control

Keep An Eye on South Africa – The USSA is Following a Similar Road

Volunteer John Badersire cleans the streets after several days of looting following the imprisonment of former South Africa President Jacob Zuma in Durban, South Africa, July 15, 2021. REUTERS/Rogan Ward

One has to stay wise these days. One needs to decide for themselves how proactive to be as well as to self-educate in the ways of protecting one’s self, family and property.

While it may not be natural as a US citizen to pay attention to what the innocent people in other countries are going through to learn from their wisdom AND mistakes, I contend that y’all give it some thought in the days and weeks to come. A lot of history has happening very fast these days and having the wisdom to see the red flags can help.

An article from Alt. Market US by Brandon Smith helps us fast-track today’s learnings .. here is his summary:

South Africa is a warning to Americans: Do not get too comfortable. Do not get complacent. Be ready for the next shoe to drop. Prepare accordingly, and understand that a fight is coming.

The establishment will place its bets that the unrest and economic disaster will create manufactured consent. They believe that the public will be sufficiently desperate and will beg for totalitarianism as a solution. Do not find yourself among the desperate, and if you can, organize your community to weather the storm.

Finally, always remember who the people are that caused this mess in the first place. Rioters and looters are going to be a problem, but they are not the true enemy. The people behind the curtain need to be dealt with if we are ever going to find peace again.

If you haven’t seen the pictures and videos from South Africa .. you might want to acquaint yourself:

Just know this is not a recent occurrence. Back before Covid in 2018 the ANC (African National Congress) was already “legally” (by way of altering laws) confiscating land and ensuring the minority white population bore the brunt of the struggles this once prosperous country is now going through. Even then there were blacks in South Africa who understood that racial based land expropriation was not honorable:

The largest ethnic group in South Africa, Zulu, has spoken out against the racial expropriation of land without compensation in the country. Zulu is ready to cooperate with the country’s white farmers, known as “Afrikaners” or “Boers” to prevent the seizure of their land

So this past month’s violence has a familiar ring to it .. try this insight and see if you don’t agree:

South Africa’s government under the ANC (African National Congress) was already going full communist in 2018-2019 before the covid pandemic. Under proposed amendments to the constitution, they demanded that “reparations” be taken from white farmers in the form of land grabs, which would then be redistributed to black citizens.

This is the classic critical race theory argument – That because colonialism once existed, all beneficiaries and their supposed descendants owe dues to the descendants of indigenous people who lost their lands. The problem is, only the descendants of WHITE colonists are required to pay dues.

So how is this Antifa/BLM-like violence in South Africa supposed to make a difference here in the USA?

This is on top of South Africa’s already high poverty level and the fact that, unlike the US with its world reserve currency, South Africa does not have the same ability to print stimulus checks from thin air to placate the masses and hide the damage.

Not surprisingly the ANC refuses to acknowledge that the primary cause of the riots has been their own lockdown policies. Instead, they have blamed the the crisis on the arrest of former president Jacob Zuma for contempt of court charges as the trigger. This may have added gasoline to the fire, but it was not the cause. When the government is actively sabotaging the ability of millions of people to work and feed their families the only other option left for most is theft, or revolution.

Supply chains in the country have been completely disrupted and the only retail outlets with stock are those protected by the military or those protected by business owners armed with guns and baseball bats. Only 6% of the population is allowed to own firearms under South Africa’s gun control bureaucracy and red tape. The government has a near monopoly on force and it is unlikely that the mobs will change much in terms of policy, but they do make life hell for the rest of the population.

The civil unrest in this region is, in my opinion, a preview of what is to come in the US and other western nations. We have already seen riots in France, Italy and other parts of the western world over legislation that would make the experimental mRNA vaccines mandatory through vaccine passports.

The unrest the US saw in the summer of 2020 will return. Time will tell what components of our various societies will take part in the city streets and beyond.

Personally, I do hope that the concept of nation-states reemerges like it did with the original 13 colonies became sovereign and came together in a confederation in 1781 against the British Empire. The efforts by those who love ONE nation/empire to wage war on the 7 southern states in 1861 will initially make people think to split the US is a pipe dream. But there is nothing like loss of property and life to transition one’s thinking to this realm of thinking ..

Stay tuned .. and keep an eye on South Africa!

-SF1

War Can Be Avoided – Even for the US Empire! (Rarely) – Retro 1983

Service members pick through the rubble following the bombing of the USMC barracks in Beirut, Lebanon on Oct. 23, 1983. The terror attack resulted in the deaths of 220 Marines. File Photo by USMC/UPI

You can count on one hand the times that the United States of America refrained from its drive for war. While its third president said on 04MAR1801:

… peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations, entangling alliances with none …

… in hindsight, presidents that followed Thomas Jefferson did not have those ideals and/or could not resist the unity that happens when the war path is decided on. War is good for the state as well, which statesmen back in the day and politicians today realize clearly. The state was meant for war.

However, there was a time in the early 1980s when the US backed off from the war path. It was tempting, but at the end of the day, cooler heads prevailed. As Kenny Rogers sang

He said, “If you’re gonna play the game, boy
You gotta learn to play it right
You’ve got to know when to hold ’em
Know when to fold ’em
Know when to walk away
And know when to run

In this article, the details emerge from a time in 1983-1984 when the US Empire acted more like a man of character than that of a bully. Confident that knowing when “to hold them, and knowing when to run” displayed more meekness, power under control, than most Presidential administrations to date.

While Reagan’s administration piled on the debt more than Carter’s, engaged in the drug trafficking trade called the Iran-Contra Affair, and also ratcheted up “gun-control”, this event in Lebanon and the US response is something that needs to be remembered and admired.

Setting the stage:

In October of 1983, a truck filled with explosives leveled the four-story U.S. Marine Barracks in Lebanon, killing 241 American military personnel. The intelligence community laid responsibility for the act at the feet of Tehran’s mullahs, who’d tasked Hezbollah, their proxy in Lebanon, with pushing the U.S. (which had deployed the Marines as part of a multinational peacekeeping mission) out of the region. The incident (the largest non-nuclear explosion since World War Two, as we were told at the time), touched off a legendary internal Reagan Administration dispute over how, and whether, the U.S. should retaliate.

As today, there were members of the administration that were more war-hawk in nature, and others who have been in combat, and acutely know what the unintentional consequences might be in ordering a retaliation.

I do like Caspar Weinberger’s (US Army veteran of some intense Pacific fighting in WWII) angle:

Secretary of Defense [Weinberger] had opposed the deployment of the Marines to begin with, and had the support of the military. Colin Powell, Weinberger’s senior military assistant, spoke for many of the military’s leaders when he described the Lebanon deployment “goofy from the beginning.”

On the other side was Secretary of State George Shultz:

For Shultz, however, revisiting the deployment decision was a waste of time. In a series of knock-down-drag-outs that pitted him against Weinberger, the Secretary of State argued that “American credibility” (that old standby), was being tested and that, therefore, the deaths of 241 U.S. Marines was cause enough for a military escalation.

The kicker comes here where Weinberger’s wisdom is revealed:

Weinberger disagreed: “retaliation against who?” he asked. Slow-rolling the president, he argued that the U.S. needed better intelligence before deciding who to punish. Weinberger was adamant: the U.S. had just left one unwinnable conflict (in Vietnam), and shouldn’t be so quick to start another. He dug in.

I do wish that this effort could be made today. Instead of lashing out like a bully swinging wildly to and fro, connecting here, connecting there mainly with innocent people and missing the real culprits, can’t today’s US government ever take time and wisely ascertain what is really happening? No more “WMD’s in Iraq”, no more Colin Powell holding some “chemical weapon” in his fingers at the UN, no more stories of babies in incubators left to die. The CIA/MI6/Mossad deep state “evidence” needs to be compared to truly independent science, if one can every practically get there.

Maybe, just maybe today’s announcement that Sen. Rand Paul has been chosen to be a point of dialog with the regime in Iran, is a rare piece of good news that I myself have been waiting years if not decades for.

Back to 1983.

It seems that the Vietnam War was not too far in the rear-view mirror as men with war experience from WWII in the South Pacific, who started as PRIVATES, who have seen the elephant, could wisely speak into:

NOTE: “Weinberger was a Harvard-educated lawyer, his formative experience came in World War II, where he served as an infantry officer during the 1942 Battle of Buna—a fetid, leech-infested Japanese base on the rim of northern New Guinea. For those who survived, including Weinberger, the swamp-slogging battle was an unrelenting nightmare: at its end, the Japanese resorted to cannibalism and used the bodies of the dead to reinforce their defenses. ”

Staying strong:

The Shultz-Weinberger tilt dragged on until February of 1984, when Reagan decided to “redeploy” the Marines to U.S. ships on station in the Mediterranean. The “redeployment” was seen by Shultz as an ignominious retreat, a sign of American weakness. But, as capably rendered by Marine Colonel and historian David Crist in The Twilight War, that’s not the way the Pentagon viewed it.

Only the insecure thinks this is a loss. The mature and secure person can see better the big picture and risk the possibility of this reaction to be seen as week.

Then the truth is unearthed, something that the US Empire struggles with to this very day:

The problem with American policy in the Middle East, Koch implied, was American hypocrisy—and our selective use of the word terrorism: when our friends plant bombs we say it’s because they’re defending our values, but when our enemies do it, it’s terrorism.

The entangling alliances will always cause hypocrisy. We had been warned from over 200 years ago and we (especially our leaders) still don’t get it.

Over reaction to the sinking of the USS Maine in Havana harbor, or to anything we might see in the Persian Gulf in the coming weeks and months is a recipe for a disaster that will over-shadow Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya and Syria. Things were very different even 5, 10, 15 and even 20 years ago. The world has changed, Russia and China have not only survived US sanctions and tariff wars, but they also have allies in other countries that have been bullied by the US Empire especially since the end of WWII.

.. striking back, killing who you can because you can (and simply to assuage your own anger) is not only “beneath our dignity”—it’s a signpost on the road to unwinnable wars.

Don’t we know it. The US Empire legacy lives on, and it ain’t a pretty sight.

-SF1

Protecting Single Women With or Without Kids

To start with, the US Constitution is in fact non-binding .. like wedding vows, it has been broken so many times and in so many ways by our government that it really is “just a piece of paper” in addition to that, my being born here does not mean I gave my consent .. duh.

[Please research Lysander Spooner’s monumental essay “The Constitution of No Authority.” ]

Contracts need at a minimum two signatures:

“.. Under more appropriate and restrictive definitions, police kill more Americans in just one year than mass shooters have in several decades. Moreover, school shootings present an even smaller risk than mass shooting more generally. As a matter of fact, the American student is today safer in the classroom “than at any time in recent memory.”

Choking on your food, for example, is much more likely to end your life than is a mass shooting, to say nothing of the risks associated with activities like driving in cars or swimming. In the wake of a tragedy, no one likes to hear such facts, as they seem to minimize the pain and loss of the survivors and the families of victims.

The hypocrisy of gun control advocates is striking, or it should be; obsessed with the extraordinarily small risk presented by mass shootings, they strain at a gnat yet swallow a camel. They plead for gun control—really disarmament—for the dominated as they exempt the dominators ..”

Bingo!

Thinking about one position on gun “control”:

The proponents of gun control, broadly defined, seem to believe that private citizens with firearms are likely to pose a danger to society, while agents of the state (e.g., soldiers and law enforcement officers) will act justly and nonviolently, using their weapons only to protect the innocent. If we take seriously the idea that the incentive structures surrounding individuals bear on their behaviors, then this assumption appears untenable, for agents of the state, when they commit violent attacks and injustices, are rarely held accountable for their actions.

The data speaks for itself. Those with badges have a conviction rate in the extreme single digits.

The non-conservative, radical advocate for gun rights contends that the normative questions surrounding gun ownership are far more important than the legal questions

Far, far more as the legality of hiding a Jew in The Netherlands during WWII in German occupied Holland was indeed a crime BUT it was the right thing to do. [I hope you know the story about Anne Frank]

Unarmed people are usually slaves:

The egoist writer and publisher Dora Marsden deftly captured this point:

What profit can a labouring man feel in voicing any desire to be his own master when he sees himself at the apex of a triangle which broadens out to its base in serried rows of armed men, each with his rifle, bludgeon and lash raised threateningly at him? As the mildest-mannered policeman would tell him, to do so would be “asking for it.” That an unarmed populace under a government possessing an armed force is in a condition of slavery, is a fact which shouts. To be free is to have the power to treat on equal terms (emphasis added).

Free or slave, that is the question .. and the weakest among us are the widows, single women and single parents that find them in some rough spots in life where defending life itself, even sacrificially, is the “right thing to do” .. regardless of the “law”.

Gun control advocates who point to Parkland and say “never again” are the humanitarian with the guillotine, their misplaced righteous indignation sweeping away all other concerns. They can’t consider the dangers that inhere in their position because the position is a matter of faith, of religious certitude. Crafting policy as a response to a school shootings is a lot like crafting policy as a response to the September 11th attacks: informed more by fear than fact, scare tactics than good sense. Politicians, overeager to do something to respond to tragedy, are prone to enact “solutions” that are worse than the problems themselves. The desire for “safety” at any cost—for perfect safety of an unattainable kind—leads to policies that make us more unsafe, vulnerable to a more powerful and dangerous enemy: the security state. Because it neither appeals to emotion nor offers an easy fix, this standpoint is unlikely to grab many headlines—unlikely to compete with the righteous indignation of well-meaning high school students. When tragedy strikes, libertarians are often in the uncomfortable, unenviable position of saying that politicians and government ought to do nothing. Looking at the state without the rose-colored glasses of ideal theory, government is just an institution of violence, its actions entailing more costs than benefits. During times of tragedy, when emotions run high, it’s worth reminding oneself of this.

Bingo .. again. This article earned 2ea “bingo’s”