The Collapse

In September of 2020, NPR accused Steve Bannon and Rudy Giuliani of colluding with the Russians and Rupert Murdoch to fake the Hunter Biden laptop story. That was followed just a few weeks later by NBC discrediting a story from March of 2020 that Hunter Biden was also involved with back door deals to sell access to then Vice-President Biden to foreign governments, including the Chinese.

During the Presidential debates that year, then candidate Biden accused President Trump of colluding with a foreign government, the Russians, to discredit him. The CIA and FBI backed Biden up on this, followed by CNN. It came to be that the discussion of the material was shut down by Twitter and Facebook, which effectively banned the story from public political discourse.

As a result of these accusations, Rudy Giuliani was disbarred by the New York Bar.

Not only does it appear that the entire story was true, but it also appears that the news media and social media companies were actively working at the behest of the FBI and the CIA to change the outcome of the 2020 election. These companies included the New York Post, NBC, CNN, CBS, Twitter, and Facebook. At this point, we can assume that the entire election was engineered and manipulated by government intelligence agencies, and so is social media. None of it can be trusted. It isn’t new that the press has put their thumb on the political scales. What is truly concerning is that branches of the government itself are consolidating power.

As I pointed out in December of 2020 over at Joe Huffman’s place, our nation was the target of a coup. A prominent blogger laughed it off and mocked me for it. It’s clear that this was indeed the case. So now the question rears its head: What do we do about it? What CAN we do about it?

Let’s hope that history has a happy ending in this case.

Some J6 protesters pled guilty to trespassing in the Capitol for 30 minutes and got as much as 15 months in prison. The reasoning that the judge gave? “There is no mob without members of the mob.” Doesn’t the same reasoning hold up for the left? If you are a leftist and firebomb a police car, you get 15 months in prison.

Should you get caught filming a leftist who is in the process of committing violent felonies, that leftist has the right to commit strong armed robbery against you and steal your camera equipment. At least that is what the judge in the case had to say.

Now comes word that the Republicans are adopting the same tactics of ballot harvesting and ballot box stuffing used by the Democrats. This is anything but good news. Now that it is out in the open that elections are nothing but a game that all sides are cheating, the elections and our government have less and less legitimacy every day.

Our legal system, our government, our very nation is based upon the idea that its citizens know believe that things are just and fair. As soon as the citizens no longer believe that, the entire society will collapse.

Buy ammo, lay in supplies, trade goods, and precious metals. I have a feeling that you are going to need them.

This is the worst year in the US stock market since 1969. The S&P 500 is down 24% year-to-date, and the Bloomberg U.S. Aggregate Bond Index has surrendered about 16%.

The job market is actually much worse than the Government has let on, because they have been using larger than normal “seasonal adjustments” to hide the fact that the job market is worse than it actually is. Through the first nine months of the year, seasonal adjustment has boosted private payrolls by 851,000. That’s a half-million extra jobs compared to the average seasonal adjustment from 2013 to 2021. The gap is even higher over the past seven months, with this year’s seasonal adjustment providing an average boost of 539,000 more jobs than the average seasonal adjustment over the prior nine years. This is causing the numbers to appear far better than they are. For example, this year private-sector employment fell by 2.4 million jobs, but the Labor Department reported a gain of 492,000 private jobs after “seasonal adjustment.” A swing of nearly 3 million jobs.

The average price of gasoline in the US was $2.33 per gallon in January 2021. It hit a peak of $4.93 in June, but then Biden began artificially manipulating the price by releasing oil from the SPR. The price now stands at $3.70 per gallon, and more than half of our petroleum reserves are gone.

Inflation is running wild. That’s causing the IRS to have to increase the standard deduction and adjust ta brackets by far more than the previous few years. Social Security is increasing its payments by large amounts. The Biden administration is playing this as a good thing, but that has caused the Fed to massively increase interest rates.

In the past three weeks, our national debt has increased by a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Crime is up. For 2021, the number of murders reported in the U.S. rose by 4.3% since 2020, according to the FBI. 2020 itself was a record, with the murder rate rising by 29.4% from 2019 to 2020. 

But leading officials do not believe this is an accurate picture, since only 11,794 of 18,806 law enforcement agencies chose to submit expanded homicide data. With 52% of law enforcement agencies nationwide reporting, this means roughly 48% of law enforcement agencies across the country did not submit any data in 2021, leaving significant gaps in coverage. The FBI has concluded that participation for 2021 remained “below a statistically acceptable level to be nationally representative,” meaning that crime is likely even higher.

The CDC thinks that it is even worse. They think that US firearm homicide and suicide rates each increased by more than 8% from 2020 to 2021. CDC researchers estimated that there were over 20,000 firearm homicides and over 26,000 firearm suicides in the United States in 2021. This means that the US had more homicides than in any year in over 25 years.

Our border is not so much a sieve as it is simply wide open.

Name one thing that has improved in this country in the past 36 months.

Don’t think for a second that this isn’t being done to influence elections:

DeSantis just wrecked a CNN "reporter" pic.twitter.com/t7Hm8xitsV

— Kevin Tober (@KevinTober94) October 3, 2022

The CNN reporter is trying to paint DeSantis as the bad guy because Lee county didn’t order mandatory evacuations until 24 hours before Ian made landfall. DeSantis is replying that everyone up to that point was calling for a Tampa landfall. This is what the cone looked like on Monday night. Note that Ft Meyers isn’t in the cone, and the NWS was calling for a Tampa landfall. Note also that Ft Meyers is only under a Tropical Storm warning (in blue) and not a hurricane warning (in red) :

The second point here is this: Why do people wait for the government to tell them to get out? Can’t people think for themselves? If you believe that a deadly storm is headed for your barrier island, why wait for someone else to tell you what to do?

This is our supposedly neutral press playing games in order to help Joe Biden, because DeSantis has been owning his wrinkled, senile ass for months and everyone believes that DeSantis is a real threat to his election chances in 2024.

Twenty two years ago today. I still remember that morning in more detail than all but of a few of the mornings that have come since. The sky was a beautiful blue, the sun was warm, and there wasn’t a cloud in the sky. A typical Central Florida day. My shift, C shift, had just started our 24 hour workday.

I was driving Engine 2 that morning. Dennis was riding in the seat next to me as the Lieutenant, and Justin was the back seat firefighter. Our shift had begun at 7:30 that morning as it always did. We did our morning routine as we always do. At 8:30, we left the station to do annual flow testing of fire hydrants.

By 8:45, we were behind the Winn Dixie and just about to test our first hydrant. Our Battalion Chief called us and told us to return to the station and turn on the TV. I remember jokingly asking Dennis who the guy on the radio was and what they had done to the Chief, since he would never tell us to watch TV during the workday.

We arrived back in the station just in time to see the second plane hit the south tower. I remember watching Fox news and seeing them switch to the DC bureau, where reporters said they could see a column of smoke. Things were happening so fast, I couldn’t figure out what that smoke was coming from. I commented “There is no way that the smoke from NYC is visible in Washington.” It was then that a fellow firefighter told me that the Pentagon had been hit.

The chief called us to disclose the plans for the remainder of the day. While I was on the phone with him, the first tower fell. The chief said to me, “Oh my God. 30,000 people just died.” I remember being stunned that so many people could be in a building.

By noon, we had an armed SWAT officer with an MP-5 riding along with us on all of our calls “for security.”

For weeks, we firefighters were stunned at the loss of 343 firefighters. I felt a sense of awe and respect for the guys who went into that second tower after watching the first tower fall. They went into that building knowing that they would never come out of the second tower. What was going through their minds? I asked myself if I was capable of making the same choice if I knew that I would not come out?

We all wanted to be able to say yes. It isn’t the same thing when you go into an ordinary fire. Firefighters are a cocky, professional bunch. When we run into a burning building, we tell ourselves that we are trained and experienced enough that it will not happen to us. Not so with those guys in the towers. They went in KNOWING that they wouldn’t come out. That is a time that you don’t know what you would do until the moment of truth comes.

I just hoped that I would have the fortitude to make the choice that needed to be made, to have the courage to choose duty and honor over self preservation and the fortune to never be placed in that position. I hoped that I would never have to make that choice.

I spent the majority of my adult life in one uniform or another, dedicated to the protection of American lives and values. I spent six years in the Navy, doing two combat tours in the Persian gulf. I wasn’t a big hero or anything. I, like millions of others, did my job. After that, I spent two decades in a firefighter’s uniform. In that time, I ran into hundreds of burning buildings, jumped into a dozen lakes, thousands of medical scenes, and traveled to 22 natural disasters. I was injured three times in the line of duty. I saw a couple of thousand dead bodies, dozens of shootings and stabbings, and saved more than a few lives.

In 2011, I retired. I had seen enough death, misery, and blood for one lifetime. I thought that the time of risking life and limb for the good of this nation and its people was over. I had given enough. I deserved to be left alone to grow old and enjoy the rest of my life in as much peace as I could manage.

All I want is to be left alone to grow old in peace. The events of the past two and a half years make me believe that this won’t happen. I fear that I may have to make that choice after all.