The secondary kill

In the real world, there are no guarantees.

Learn to be content with the air you breathe.

I was still in high school when I read a sci-fi novel Earth Abides by George Stewart (IIRC). The premise of the novel was that a pandemic had come through and wiped out well over 99% of the population leaving little pockets of survivors here and there. The novel chronicles one little pocket’s efforts to reestablish a form of primitive civilization that was sustainable.

The Primary Kill was the pandemic. The Secondary Kill was of survivors of the Primary who could not see life worth living so laid down and died or did nothing to ensure their survival as local resources were used up.

Thus, that moment a person realized they would never eat chocolate again, combined with everything else that had happened, could be the straw that broke the camel’s back. (Metaphor there.).

If you can get through the initial shock of realization, the pain eventually goes away.

Part of avoiding the Secondary Kill is knowing what your alternatives are, and how to best make use of them.

This or something similar has been written about the NAZI death camps. When prisoners concluded there was no hope in ending the pain often they would lay down and give up their life. One prisoner was said to have written that when observing someone giving up their life there was only one action that some times brought them back. If you would yell at and beat on the prisoner and made them angry enough they would get up to fight with you.

Knowledge and your faith are two things that nobody else can take away from you, and are the most powerful tools in your arsenal of weapons against changes in life that don’t work in your favor. With correct application both, prove VERY beneficial to the user.

The spiritual seekers and indigenous content themselves with such as a cool breeze on a hot day, a good harvest following a diligent growing season, a beautiful view from a lofty peak……and they learn, early on, that when these are lacking, patience will carry them through to the next of life’s small blessings.

A spoiled society is not so invulnerable to calamity.

In the real world, there are no guarantees.

Learn to be content with the air you breathe.

Sophistication is apparently the greatest enemy of the institutionalized.

I had an old wise woman tell me once many years ago- You have a choice in life: You can be Crystal and shatter on life’s Wheel. Or, you can be Willow, and bend to adapt to its Changes. I have tried to live this and it is not easy but it can be done.

Thoughts on Civil War

It has been over 150 years since the United States has had serious internal distension. The closest to a revolt was the Civil Rights Movement, but the blacks were easily bought off after some protests and riots. America seems due for a violent adjustment.

A prevailing assumption in all of outsider politics, both Left and Right, is that America is headed for a civil war. The details are not all that clear, but that is the assumption. Even the mainstream political types think it is possible. A regular part of Tucker Carlson’s act is to warn his fellow political elites that they better shape up or the else. From time to time polls are done that show Americans are increasingly sure that a civil war is the most probable outcome for the turmoil and conflict of the current year.

At first blush, it is not a silly assumption. After all, empires tend to end in violence, either they are conquered or break apart. Even if you think America is some sort of exception when it comes to being an empire, every society is racked with conflict. It has been over 150 years since the United States has had serious internal distension. The closest to a revolt was the Civil Rights Movement, but the blacks were easily bought off after some protests and riots. America seems due for a violent adjustment.

Further, the far Left assumes they will win such a conflict. How is never explained, as most are noodle armed sissies, but they probably think they will have the full support of the police, like they see at their protests. Maybe the cops will side with the far Left in an armed conflict. If it means keeping their pensions and benefit packages, that’s probably a safe bet. On the other hand, history says police forces tend to scatter quickly when order falters to the point where there is fighting in the streets.

Many on the far Right make the same assumption as the Left, with regards to the outcome, owing to the fact that most of the guns are owned by whites. Those noodle armed Antifa sissies and their mouthy women would not last long in a fair fight, much less an armed fight. That’s certainly true, but if they did have the cops fighting for them that would be different. Then there is the fact that the same people controlling Antifa also run the military, so the gun disparity would change quickly.

The main trouble with the civic war bogeyman is no one bothers to imagine how it would be conjured in the first place. Civil wars are fights between two or more factions, led by members of the elite. The American Civil War was a fight between New England elites and Southern elites. Modern elites, not just in America, but across the West are in lockstep on every important topic. It is inconceivable that they would take up arms against one another. If anything, they will take up arms against the people.

That leaves open the other option for a social war. An armed rebellion of some sort, maybe due to divisions within society that the elites can no longer contain. The Antifa media, for example, harasses the wrong people and the result is organized white terrorism against Progressive targets. Alternatively, the media agitation results in some left-wing street protesters moving from theater to violence. The media did convince that guy to shoot up the Republican softball game a few years back.

The trouble with the rebellion scenario is that a decent rebellion has to be led by people capable of organizing a lot of people. The structure of the Left precludes a rebellion from that side of politics. They control the institutions and the rank and file lack the will and brainpower to go it alone. The Left is not going to revolt against itself, so they will continue to ratchet up their terrorism against everyone else. Red flag laws, for example, will be used to jail dissidents in the near future.

Outside of left-wing circles, organizing a rebellion seems less likely. Blacks have rioted in the past and they have some reason to rebel against the prevailing order. History says they will just burn down their own neighborhoods and loots some local stores. Hispanics seem to be the most passive group in America. As long as they have cheap food and cheap entertainment, they are not rebelling. The squalor of America beats the squalor of back home, so getting them angry enough to rebel seems implausible.

If there is to be a rebellion, it will be among whites, but whites are far from being a monolithic group. There are regional divides, as well as class divides, which are easily exploited by the people in charge. Ruling class whites, for example, hate all lower class whites. That’s part of what motivated the FBI to spy on the Trump people in the last election. It’s why the IRS harassed white people in the 2012 election. Ruling class whites have a deep loathing for the rest of white America.

At the other end, the working classes have had plenty of reasons to revolt since the 1970’s, when the usual suspects began auctioning off the manufacturing base. In coal country, for example, where you will find the most rebellious whites in America, an all-out war on their way of life has not resulted in much resistance. The semi-urban white working class has continued to support a system that shows every sign of trying to snuff out the white working class. There’s no rebellion in that group.

That leaves the white suburban middle-class, who are certainly the angriest cohort in the country, but they are the most docile too. Perhaps if they fear a real threat to their economic position, they will become less docile, but middle-class revolution remains an oxymoron at this stage. For now, they will remain committed to the system, taking out their anger on politicians at the ballot box. Even though voting has had no impact on the trajectory of American society, it seems to be enough for this class.

Even if you can conjure a scenario in which a group revolts or the ruling class splits, resulting in a civil war of some type, it’s hard to imagine it being violent. For starters, rebelling against the local police department, much less the military is laughably implausible, given the disparity in firepower. Even small town cops these days have been militarized. They have assault units, armored vehicles, drones and electronic surveillance equipment. America is literally a police state now.

Rebellion would have to be guerrilla war, turning the weight of the surveillance state against itself. Instead of blowing stuff up, the rebellion of the future will be placing racist material in strategic locations, forcing the police to spend hundreds of man hours looking for invisible Nazis. More sophisticated tactics will require infiltration of ruling class assets, so rebels can easily and surreptitiously throw sand in the gears of the custodial state. The war will be fought in cubicles, not the streets.

Now, this may seem depressing at first blush, but civil wars and rebellion never encompass the whole of the society. The American Revolution directly involved less than five percent of the population. The American Left radicalized the country with less than 20% support among whites. For those hoping to see the next American civil war, it will not take much of a change in the above dynamics to get the conditions for it. A serious economic catastrophe or a major foreign policy setback could be enough.

There’s also the fact that the nature of rebellion changes with the times. The rebels of the agrarian age faced men with bayonets and muskets. Men with muskets and rifles hiding in the woods could do real damage to their rulers. In the industrial age, general strikes and urban riots were enough to counter state power. In the information age, the rebellion will be about sapping the strength of the rulers, with regards to their ability to control data. Unplugging a data center will be the new terrorism.

When you start to puzzle through it, the probability of an old fashioned civil war is close to zero, while armed rebellion is in the single digits. Things will have to change a lot for the conditions to be right. On the other hand, a new type of rebellion, one suited for the age and the sorts of people unhappy with the system, is increasingly likely. Middle-class mom giving company passwords to rebel hackers is a likely scenario. The revolution of the future will be low-grade and mostly non-violent.

What’s in YOUR wallet?

The reality of martial law

“I just need to obey the rules and look after my own business and all will be fine.”

Actually yes, this is true. But it is hard to obey rules when those rules actually take all of your freedoms.

Let’s talk about martial law. This is when the normal law of the land is suspended and the authority comes from the military or federal government.

One recent example of undeclared martial law in the US was when the police were looking for the suspects in the Boston Marathon bombing and went door to door, forcing innocent people to come outside with their hands on their heads at gunpoint, while their homes were searched without warrants. 

It turns out that many of us have some serious misconceptions of what it’s really like to live through a martial law situation. I asked a survivor of the Bosnian war, who has personally been through it, to clear up the myths and tell us what it’s actually like. You can count on him for the unvarnished truth, and that’s what we need to be prepared to survive extreme situations.

During Yugoslav wars, in different regions (states) based on particular timing and events you can say that martial law was in place, or “state of direct war threat” as some call it here.

There were different “stages” or even levels of it, but one common fact is that during that all normal civil rights and laws were completely and absolutely a matter of the will of the “war government.” (Or “military council” or “war headquarters”.)

The names were different for different regions, even cities, but the results were the same.

In the case of my city in that particular time, it was “war government” that had little influence on ordinary citizen simply because there were too many factions.

But prior to that time and after that year I experienced and went through something that looks more like real “martial law” as your readership imagines it.

Many people in the prepper community think they’ll be able to take on the militarized police or army rather than bending to the new rules. How do you think that will go? Can you give any examples of people attempting to defy the military?

Yes, I am aware that lot of preppers imagine martial law to be like some black and white situation (with clear causes, solutions, and views). In reality, it is quite different.

It is a situation where all stakes are much higher, and solutions-actions  that the government ( ruling  party, military leaders or whoever in your case) wants to achieve will be attempted with all means. That can include some new rules where what you think about it usually does not mean anything.

A lot of preppers think about “martial law” but in reality, they think about it still in normal terms, with rights, law, constitution, and rules…

You cannot defy military, at least not openly, because they will deal with you fast and efficiently. In times like that it is so easy to get labeled that you are dangerous, an enemy of the state, a terrorist or anything similar, and most probably you will not have any help.

Forget about the movie illusions of openly being a freedom fighter.

No matter how well-organized you are, those who impose martial law have better organization than you. Remember that martial law usually means an information blackout.  “They” will own information and present it to the public the way that they want to present it.

In my opinion here are a few really widespread myths in prepper movement about martial law:

“The UN will somehow “occupy” my land, impose martial law.”

When it comes to martial law I would choose to be worried about my own government first when times get really hard. That’s because most probably your freedom will be taken by those people through the martial law so they can achieve they own goals, or in order to stay in power when all goes to s..t.

It is not about who lives where, and what kind of system you have, and how much you love your country. It is about powerful people staying in power when times get really hard, even if that means taking all your rights and eliminating all possible threats from the common folks.

Patriotism does not have anything to do with that.

While you are looking for some outside “exotic” threat, the danger may be next to you all the time.

“I will recognize the threat (coming martial law, repression etc), and fight against it.”

Most probably you won’t because it will be arranged into something easily “digestible.”

For example, it will be a fight against terrorism, foreign threat, patriotism euphoria, or something similar, and then one day you’ll realize you are living in the middle of “no more rights” situation. Maybe even you’ll even be labeled as an enemy of the state simply because you have a weapon, or an off-grid retreat or similar.

Do not expect to see one day a big neon sign that says “martial law is coming”, because it will be smartly packaged into something reasonable and understandable. And most probably it will not be called martial law.

It will be packaged in a way that most people will actually welcome it, because they will not recognize what is actually, and those who openly recognize it and call it by its real name will be the first in danger.

The majority of people will look for it and ask for it, because they will think it will resolve a hard situation.

If you are going to be able to fight it, most probably you’ll have to fight it in a silent way, like a real underground resistance movement.

“I just need to obey the rules and look after my own business and all will be fine.”

Actually yes, this is true. But it is hard to obey rules when those rules actually take all of your freedoms.

One of the first actions in martial law situations is to eliminate possible threats – or let’s say “subversive elements”.

It can be done in a soft way by shutting down free press. for example. Or making you obedient (docile) by taking away your resources, and making you dependent on resources that they will give you. Or it can be done the hard way by making “problematic” people “disappear” after raids for example.

You can be that problematic man if you are openly opposed to them taking your rights, if you have other political opinions, are in the prepper movement, or similar.

Maybe you are already on some list of “emergency detention people” in case of an event.

Run away, or obey publicly while you are silently working whatever you can against it.

You simply need to be grey.

Food Terrorism

In 1984, a woman deployed a salmonella-tainted liquid onto a salad bar. It was exceptionally lucky that no one did, in fact, die.

“What if terrorists used fentanyl to poison our food supply?”

This was the frightening thought that raced through my mind while scrolling through Facebook. I came across an article with an image of a lethal dose of the opioid drug next to a penny. It was shocking how such a tiny amount of this white powder could kill a single adult.

I couldn’t help but wonder how easily this tiny amount of white powder could be mistaken for flour or powdered sugar. What would happen if a terrorist got a job at a flour or a sugar company and mixed this drug into the product? How many people would die before authorities could figure out what happened?

I know, what a scary thought, right?

Fentanyl is a highly-potent, synthetic opioid drug. It has legitimate uses for extreme pain management, such as with some cancer patients. Fentanyl, both legally and illegally made, is currently the leading cause of opioid overdoses.

Fentanyl, like most of our pharmaceuticals, is manufactured in China.

Some of the legally manufactured fentanyl falls into the hands of drug dealers here in the US. The precursor chemicals needed to manufacture illegal analogs of fentanyl are also largely sourced from China.

Mexican drug cartels have found fentanyl analogs cheap and easy to manufacture. They simply import the needed chemicals from China, synthesize it, and then sell their DIY fentanyl through the same channels that they sell other drugs. Fentanyl is often mixed with heroin or cocaine without the user knowing.

This is not just a problem in the United States.

When most people think of a terror attack, they think of mass violence with bombs, planes, trucks, and guns. It’s a shock and awe attack that leaves people fearful and confused.

We also think of biological attacks. Back in 2014, one of the biggest worries of many preppers was what if someone purposely became infected with the Ebola virus, and traveled to the US before symptoms surfaced to spread the disease.

We don’t tend to think of terrorism through contamination, and especially not through our groceries. When we consider how centralized our food production and packaging are, a large amount of food could be contaminated from just one or two locations. The illnesses and inevitable deaths would take place far away from the contamination site. The culprits would just walk away, free to strike somewhere else. No suicide vests necessary.

Let’s take this one step further. Let’s consider how “cheap and easy” it is to synthesize fentanyl powder. This powder could be manufactured in large amounts. Terrorists could then use this powder to contaminate products at any of the large flour mills and food manufacturers.

Is grocery store poisoning a real threat?

Terrorists have been threatening terror by food for a long time. Agroterrorism is the introduction of a biological agent into the food supply, for example, foot and mouth disease to livestock. This probably wouldn’t make anyone too sick, but it would disrupt the beef industry, as well as trust in the food supply in general. It would wreak havoc on the economy.

In 1984, a woman deployed a salmonella-tainted liquid onto a salad bar. It was exceptionally lucky that no one did, in fact, die.

Her act began the first — and worst — case of bioterrorism in US history. Investigators ultimately determined that the woman and her associates had contaminated 10 salad bars in the town of The Dalles with a strain of salmonella bacteria, giving 751 patrons nausea, diarrhea, bloody stools, fever and other symptoms of severe food poisoning. (Fortunately, no one died.) (source)

Contamination with a drug is a little different, as it isn’t a disease being spread. It would still result, however, in both hospitalizations and deaths. All the other problems of trust in the food supply and economic damage would follow as well.

Here are a few more headlines to make you think:

And this lovely article from September 2017, ISIS Supporters Call for Poisoning of Food in Grocery Stores across US and Europe

“In the third part of an English-language series promoting lone-wolf jihad in Western countries, potential attackers are advised to inject food for sale in markets with cyanide poison,” U.S.-based jihadi monitoring group SITE Intelligence reported. (source)

The article continues:

The potential use of poison is one that has been publicized by the group’s supporters for several years, but never used. Jihadists published a guide that directed “six ways to kill the Jews” in October 2015, the methods given were to “stab him, burn him, poison him.” They have also distributed a guide on how to poison food eaten by “crusaders.” Pro-ISIS groups have also published handbooks on how to make homemade poison. (source)

We know that terrorists are interested in poisoning our food supply. We should probably include our water supply too. We know that fentanyl is cheap and easy to synthesize. We also know that it only takes a tiny amount of fentanyl powder to kill an adult.

What could possibly go wrong?

What foods would be most at risk of a fentanyl terror attack?

“Street fentanyl” is a plain, white powder. Any food that is similar would be at risk. That includes (but is not limited to):

  • Flour (All types- white wheat, rice, coconut, etc)
  • Sugar, especially powdered sugar
  • Baking soda
  • Baking powder
  • Yeast
  • Cream of tartar
  • Artificial sweeteners (Splenda, Equal, etc)
  • Natural and alternative sweeteners (Stevia, Swerve, etc)
  • Protein powders
  • Potato starch
  • Corn starch
  • Clear Jel
  • Collagen powders

There are a lot of common pantry items on the above list

This kind of attack would be frighteningly simple to carry out.

All it would take is one lone wolf to easily acquire a moderate amount of fentanyl powder, get a job at one of the large flour mills in the US, and lace the product with this deadly substance. Poisoned flour would be on grocery shelves all over the country. It would take a little time for authorities to figure out what has happened. In the meantime, people would get very sick, and some would die from a drug overdose they never knew they took.

Safety is never guaranteed. One thing I do know is that the more you take control of the food you put into your body, the better off you are. You will be trading your time and labor for this, but you and your family are worth the effort.

Majority of under 30’s approve socialism

” Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice.”

Many times we hear the question; “Why do the young people accept the premise of Socialism as espoused by the far left factions of the Democrat party in America? Why do they either embrace, or at the very least accept the destructive actions of the AntiFa wing of the Democrats? Are they truly malicious?

I tend to believe that the answer lies in something that was written by Dietrich Bonhoeffer on the occasion of Adolph Hitler’s ascension to the Chancellorship of Germany;

” Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One may protest against evil; it can be exposed and, if need be, prevented by use of force. Evil always carries within itself the germ of its own subversion in that it leaves behind in human beings  at least a sense of unease. Against stupidity we are defenseless. Neither protests nor the use of force accomplish anything here; reasons fall on deaf ears; facts that contradict one’s prejudgment simply need not be believed- in such moments the stupid person even becomes critical – and when facts are irrefutable they are just pushed aside as inconsequential, as incidental. In all this the stupid person, in contrast to the malicious one, is utterly self-satisfied and, being easily irritated, becomes dangerous by going on the attack. For that reason, greater caution is called for than with a malicious one. Never again will we try to persuade the stupid person with reasons, for it is senseless and dangerous. ”

As comedian Ron White has said; “You can’t fix stupid.”

The Andromeda Strain – Redux

So the conclusion at this point is an uncomfortable one. You are likely infected by a mysterious virus that might be nothing, or it may become active at some point and almost certainly kill you.

I’m becoming extremely concerned we are massively unprepared for the next epidemic.

People imagine that any kind of epidemic that occurs today can be more or less mitigated through modern public health infrastructure, stocks of vaccines and antivirals, and basic quarantining measures.

The issue is that in modern, densely populated cities, a sufficiently advanced pathogen would be capable of infecting the vast majority of inhabitants in weeks, before any health measures could have an effect. The population density is enough that current quarantining techniques used in cases like smallpox would be completely ineffective. Antivirals have historically proven ineffective and hard to disseminate while our current vaccine stocks might not work at all.

Currently computer simulations indicate that a dangerous enough pathogen could effectively destroy a city like Los Angeles in a few months. “Destroyed” in the sense that emergency services are shut down, medical services are shut down, all economic output ceases and over 30-60% of the population is wiped out.

In short, a small nation-state or even well-funded terrorist organization could easily reduce the US to the state of a third world nation with. Yet no one  seems to give a shit

There has been a lot of work done with engineering viruses for specific functions such as gene therapy. The main problem and the reason a lot of this research is highly restricted is that many of the same techniques for engineering a virus to kill off all mosquitoes can be applied to almost any target, including hominids.

That and the risk of spillover. You might intend to wipe out mosquitoes, but you end up wiping out a whole class of insects causing complete ecological collapse.

Of course if you’re a terrorist that probably sounds delightful. I’m obviously biased but I considered biological agents, especially viruses, to the be the most dangerous thing in the world today, even more so than nuclear weapons due to their relative affordability and ease of dispersal.

China is one major source of concern. Not only is the place a massive breeding ground for novel agents due to poor agricultural practices, the proximity of humans to animals ensures that novel strains of influenza and other viruses will hop to humans and spread like wildfire.

It literally only takes one mutation of one virus to unleash a pandemic. Every infectious pig or bird is a little viral containment vessel that could birth the next plague.

Though I’d be surprised if China is actively doing large-scale tests on their population, it wouldn’t surprise me. That said, China’s biological weapons program is much larger than the public or even experts in the field are aware of. They are almost certainly genetically engineering certain viruses (smallpox) to be vaccine immune, but they are probably also engineering them to be more lethal agents in general. We really don’t know the full scale of China’s biological weapons program but I would bet you wouldn’t be able to sleep well if you knew its full scope.

But theoretically, any well-stocked university lab with trained professionals would be capable of genetically modifying a virus to do all sorts of things.

The most difficult thing would be gaining access to some of the more virulent agent such as smallpox or Ebola. Most of these are only available in incredibly well guarded facilities in just a few countries.

North Korea likely has a decently sized biological weapons program as well as a cache of some of the more deadly pathogens. A desperate worker there could theoretically smuggle out any number of terrible diseases and sell them on the black market for $10-$100k, which for a lot of terrorist organizations would be a pittance.

Publicly, we have ceased production of biological weapons. Privately, we already know how to make effective dispersal munitions, and the kind of viral engineering work we do for the purpose of “good” can just as easily be repurposed for evil. If the US military wanted it could quite easily engineer and disperse a literal apocalyptic plague for less money than it takes to build an F-35.

Hypothetically, if our government turned fully tyrannical and evil a-la Nazi Germany, we could have a very robust biological weapons program producing munitions within a year or so… if we don’t already.

I’ve run across a few documents that scared me pretty badly.

One was regarding what are called chimera viruses and research work done in the Soviet Union and more recently in North Korea (hypothesized).

The simple idea of a chimera virus is you combine two viral agents into one, which as you can imagine would make it easy to create a virus with more than 95% mortality rate.

The scarier part is that a chimera virus can theoretically have multiple traits that make it far superior as a biological weapon, and the traits can present at different time periods. For example, Ebola is quite deadly, but it’s actually pretty hard to spread due to needing direct blood contact.

So what would happen if you combined Ebola with say, a common flu? With sufficiently advanced engineering, you could have an Ebola that initially only presents as a standard flu for the first 1-2 weeks. People would continue to take flights, go to work etc thinking it was just a relatively harmless flu.

Then two weeks later you’d have massive “mysterious” outbreaks of Ebola all across the world. Millions of people would suddenly present with symptoms of Ebola and be freaking out.

Meanwhile, people who still had the “flu” would continue taking flights, going to work etc.

By the time we discovered that the flu and Ebola outbreaks were all a part of the same virus, you’d be looking at easily over 100 million dead, completely collapsed infrastructures etc. It would be unprecedented in modern times.

Hypothetically there was a country that wanted to create a doomsday weapon that would function even beyond the deterrent capabilities of nuclear weapons. Basically a “Screw you, world” kind of weapon.

If certain dissidents are to be believed, this weapon has been produced, likely still exists, and may have even been used at some point.

The key feature of the virus is the incubation period. The claim is they extended the incubation period of a certain highly lethal virus to not days, or weeks, but possibly a decade or more, (Think AIDS).

During this extended incubation, the number of virus particles is low enough that it shows zero symptoms, and it would be undetectable unless you were actually looking for it. While transmission rates would be quite low, over the course of a couple years it should be able to easily spread throughout an entire population. A literal 100% rate of infection.

Now this has been known about in the scientific and military communities for a while.

Well one group had the idea of testing this. Is there a latent and highly lethal virus lying dormant in the population?

They took blood samples from people across the US as well as some Western European countries and discovered something quite disturbing. A mysterious virus, referred to internally as “pathogen X” present in something like 95% of the samples.

It’s an unusually large virus with a very particular shape, like a large toroid, ( a toroid is a surface of revolution with a hole in the middle, like a doughnut, forming a solid body. The axis of revolution passes through the hole), with spiky protuberances along the central axis.

The genome is HUGE, and that makes knowing its actual payload at this stage almost impossible. It shares significant similarities with smallpox, Lassa, influenza, and HIV, but it neither looks nor behaves like any of these.

So the conclusion at this point is an uncomfortable one. You are likely infected by a mysterious virus that might be nothing, or it may become active at some point and almost certainly kill you.

Basic sanitary practices work quite well, (sort of). Keep your house clean, and if possible the surrounding area. Don’t over clean, though.

If you live in a dense city, it’s not the worst idea to wear a medical mask in very crowded spaces (buses/subway) and keep a bottle of Purrell on you.

Obviously, getting away from population dense urban areas before infection would be one of the best ways to protect yourself. The problem is you and everyone else would have the same idea so there is no guarantee freeways would even be functional in a mass panic. You’d need to move quickly after the first signs in the news of some “Mysterious new illness” started appearing.

Sleep well, kiddies.

Prayer for Saturday, October 26, 2019

Genesis 2:21-24

21 And the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh instead thereof;

22 And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

23 And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man.

24 Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

The Warrior Code

In a world of chaos, gender confusion, divisiveness and stress where the prevailing motto seems to be “Mea Est” (where’s mine?) would that it became possible to return to a time of morality and honor.

Honor is a concept that has, somehow, fallen out of favor in our society. There was a time, not that long ago when part of the definition of being “a man” had much to do with the ascribing to and striving for moral excellence. Our republic was founded by men who lived by the code handed down, in some respects, from the Spartan warriors.

Warrior Ethos

I will always place the mission first

I will never accept defeat

I will never quit

I will never leave a fallen comrade

Honor is the idea of a bond between an individual and a society as a quality of a person that is both of social teaching and of personal ethos, that manifests itself as a code of conduct, and has various elements such as valor, chivalry, honesty, and compassion. It is an abstract concept entailing a perceived quality of worthiness and respectability that affects both the social standing and the self-evaluation of an individual or institution such as a family, school, regiment or nation. Accordingly, individuals (or institutions) are assigned worth and stature based on the harmony of their actions with a specific code of honor, and the moral code of the society at large.

There are still some institutions that follow this code of morality and honor. One of them is the College of the Ozarks in Point Lookout, Missouri, (an institution well worth researching). Another is the Citadel, (known as the West Point of the South), located in Charleston, South Carolina in 1842.

The cadets at the Citadel follow “The Honor Code” cadets do not lie, cheat, steal, nor tolerate those that do. The code is based on Core Values:

Honor

First and foremost honor includes adherence to the Honor Code of The Citadel. A cadet “will not lie, cheat or steal, nor tolerate those who do.” The commitment to honor extends beyond the gates of The Citadel and is a life-long obligation to moral and ethical behavior. In addition, honor includes integrity; “doing the right thing when no one is watching.” Finally, honorable behavior includes exercising the moral courage to “do the right thing when everyone is watching.” The Honor Code is the foundation of our academic enterprise.

Duty

First and foremost duty means to accept and accomplish the responsibilities assigned to me. At The Citadel, my primary duty is to perform academically and then to perform as a member of the Corps of Cadets and the campus community. I accept the consequences associated with my performance and actions. Once I have held myself accountable for my actions, then I will hold others accountable for their actions. Finally, duty means that others can depend on me to complete my assignments and to assist them with their assignments. Duty is also a call to serve others before self.

Respect

First and foremost respect means to treat other people with dignity and worth – the way you want others to treat you. Respect for others eliminates any form of prejudice, discrimination, or harassment (including but not limited to rank, position, age, race, color, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, religion, physical attributes, etc.). In addition, respect for others means to respect the positions of those in authority which include faculty, staff, administrators, active duty personnel and the leadership of the Corps of Cadets. Finally, respect includes a healthy respect for one’s self.

The College of the Ozarks has a similar code.

In a world of chaos, gender confusion, divisiveness and stress where the prevailing motto seems to be “Mea Est” (where’s mine?) would that it became possible to return to a time of morality and honor.

The Constitution and its meaning

“[T]he ignorance of the people,” he said, “is the footstool of despotism.”

You could argue that there are two basic visions for America: the Hamiltonian and the Jeffersonian. The former is nationalist, calling for centralized power and an industrial, mercantilist society characterized by banking, commercialism, and a robust military. Its early leaders had monarchical tendencies. The latter vision involves a slower, more leisurely and agrarian society, political decentralization, popular sovereignty, and local republicanism. Think farmers over factories.

Both have claimed the mantle of liberty. Both have aristocratic elements, despite today’s celebration of America as democratic. On the Hamiltonian side we can include John Adams, John Marshall, Noah Webster, Henry Clay, Joseph Story, and Abraham Lincoln. In the Jeffersonian camp we can place George Mason and Patrick Henry (who, because they were born before Jefferson, could be considered his precursors), the mature (rather than the youthful) James Madison, John Taylor of Carolina, John C. Calhoun, Abel Upshur, and Robert Y. Hayne. The Jeffersonian Republicans won out in the early nineteenth century, but since the War Between the States, the centralizing, bellicose paradigm has dominated American politics, foreign and monetary policy, and federal institutions.

Jeffersonians hold a “compact theory” of the Constitution:

“The constitution of the United States of America . . . is an original, written, federal, and social compact, freely, voluntarily, and solemnly entered into by the several states of North-America, and ratified by the people thereof, respectively; whereby the several states, and the people thereof, respectively, have bound themselves to each other, and to the federal government of the United States; and by which the federal government is bound to the several states, and to every citizen of the United States.”

Under this model, each sovereign, independent state is contractually and consensually committed to confederacy, and the federal government possesses only limited and delegated powers—e.g., “to be the organ through which the united republics communicate with foreign nations.”

Employing the term “strict construction,” many decry what we call “activist” federal judges, insisting that “every attempt in any government to change the constitution (otherwise than in that mode which the constitution may prescribe) is in fact a subversion of the foundations of its own authority.” Strictly construing the language of the Constitution meant fidelity to the binding, basic framework of government, but it didn’t mean that the law was static. Among legitimate concerns, for instance, was how the states should incorporate, discard, or adapt the British common law that Blackstone had delineated.

We understand the common law as embedded, situated, and contextual rather than as a fixed body of definite rules or as the magnificent perfection of right reason, a grandiose conception derived from the quixotic portrayals of Sir Edward Coke. “[I]n our inquiries how far the common law and statutes of England were adopted in the British colonies,”

In other words, if you want to know what the common law is on this side of the pond, look to the operative language of governing texts before you invoke abstract theories. Doing so led Founding scholars to conclude that parts of English law were “either obsolete, or have been deemed inapplicable to our local circumstances and policy.” In this, they anticipated Justice Holmes’s claim that the law “is forever adopting new principles from life at one end” while retaining “old ones from history at the other, which have not yet been absorbed or sloughed off.”

What the several states borrowed from England was, for the Founders, a filtering mechanism that repurposed old rules for new contexts. They used other verbs to describe how states, each in their own way, revised elements of the common law in their native jurisdictions: “modified,” “abridged,” “shaken off,” “rejected,” “repealed,” “expunged,” “altered,” “changed,” “suspended,” “omitted,” “stricken out,” “substituted,” “superseded,” “introduced.” The list could go on.

The English common law, accordingly, wasn’t an exemplification of natural law or abstract rationalism; it was rather the aggregation of workable solutions to actual problems presented in concrete cases involving real people.

Having been clipped from its English roots, the common law in the United States had an organic opportunity to grow anew in the varying cultural environments of the sovereign states.

St. George Tucker, a scholar who studied Blackstone’s legal thoughts as they related to US jurisprudence

had a knack for aphorism. “[T]he ignorance of the people,” he said, “is the footstool of despotism.” More examples: “Ignorance is invariably the parent of error.” “A tyranny that governs by the sword, has few friends but men of the sword.”

Reading Tucker reminds us that for most of our country’s formative history the principal jurisprudential debates were not about natural law versus positivism, or originalism versus living constitutionalism, but about state versus federal authority, local versus national jurisdiction, the proper scale and scope of government, checks and balances, and so forth. To the extent these subjects have diminished in importance, Hamilton has prevailed over Jefferson. Remembering Tucker today can help us see the costs of that victory.

Sedition

McRaven does not argue that President Trump has done anything wrong in particular, but that he has no respect for America’s values. These values, McRaven declares, involve a commitment to “help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice” around the world.

Retired Admiral William McRaven has published an op-ed in Friday’s New York Times titled, “Our Republic Is Under Attack From the President,” urging that Trump be removed from office — “the sooner, the better.”

McRaven’s op-ed gives a military imprimatur to what President Donald Trump has already likened to a “coup,” as Democrats attempt to impeach him with barely a year to go before the next presidential election.

” These men and women, of all political persuasions, have seen the assaults on our institutions: on the intelligence and law enforcement community, the State Department and the press. They have seen our leaders stand beside despots and strongmen, preferring their government narrative to our own. They have seen us abandon our allies and have heard the shouts of betrayal from the battlefield. As I stood on the parade field at Fort Bragg, one retired four-star general, grabbed my arm, shook me and shouted, “I don’t like the Democrats, but Trump is destroying the Republic!”

The admiral, well-respected for his role in overseeing the operation to kill Al Qaeda terrorist Osama bin Laden in 2011, argues that senior military leaders have lost confidence in the president and feel he is a threat to the nation.

McRaven does not argue that President Trump has done anything wrong in particular, but that he has no respect for America’s values. These values, McRaven declares, involve a commitment to “help the weak and stand up against oppression and injustice” around the world.

The admiral is unwilling to wait for the 2020 presidential election to see a change of power. He declares (emphasis added): “It is time for a new person in the Oval Office — Republican, Democrat or independent — the sooner, the better. The fate of our Republic depends upon it.”

Moreover, McRaven makes no reference to voting, or elections — or even impeachment.

McRaven might want to consult with a competent attorney regarding Article 88 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and U.S. Code § 2384. Seditious conspiracy