We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are right now. If the conflict in Ukraine sparks a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, billions of people could die.
This is why so many of us desperately want leaders from both sides to sit down at the negotiating table and try to work out their differences peacefully. Perhaps a peaceful solution is not possible, but for the good of humanity they should at least make an attempt. Because as things stand right now, all it is going to take is one mistake for the world to be plunged into an unthinkable nuclear cataclysm.
According to author Annie Jacobsen, the U.S. has a network of satellites that is constantly watching for an ICBM launch from one of our enemies…
“The US Defense Department has a early warning system. And the system in space is called SBIRS, a constellation of satellites that is keeping an eye on all of America’s enemies.”
“So the moment an ICBM launches, they see the hot rocket exhaust on the ICBM a fraction of a second after it launches. And so there begins this horrifying policy called launch on warning, and that’s the US counterattack.
“The reason that the United States is so ferociously watching for a nuclear launch somewhere around the globe is so that the nuclear command and control system in the US can move into action to immediately make a counterstrike.
“That policy, launch on warning, is exactly like it says, it means the United States will not wait to absorb a nuclear attack. It will launch nuclear weapons in response before the bomb actually hits.”
In the event of a surprise first strike, there would only be a handful of minutes to get the president out of bed and decide what to do.
Needless to say, the president would not want to launch a counterstrike if it is a false alarm.
Because once the missiles are in the air, there is no calling them back.
Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.
The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.
The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.
If you are at ground zero, you will have zero chance of surviving.
According to a study that was conducted several years ago, approximately 34 million people would die during the first few hours of a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia.
Using archived weather data over 48-hour periods across a number of dates in 2021 to simulate the expected radioactive plume, the scientists found that the West Coast states were the lowest risk due to a prevailing easterly wind.
However, depending on the exact wind direction, the worst fallout could fall over any part of the U.S. and Canada east of Idaho. Based on weather patterns on December 2, 2021, Chicago, Illinois and D.C., among other population centers, would be in the direct path of a fatal dose of radiation.
In a worst-case scenario, almost all of Montana and North Dakota, as well as parts of Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming, South Dakota and Kansas would receive a dose more than 10 times what is considered lethal, resulting in deaths in a matter of days. Most of the Midwest would receive a lethal dose, while elsewhere would see deaths occur in weeks.
Radioactive fallout would kill far more people than the initial explosions would.
But the “good news” is that radiation levels would dissipate fairly rapidly.
So if you are far enough away from a ground zero and you are able to survive the initial tsunami of radioactive fallout, it will eventually be safe to go outside again.
As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.
Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.
Two years after any nuclear war—small or large—famine alone could be more than 10 times as deadly as the hundreds of bomb blasts involved in the war itself.
Ultimately, nuclear winter will kill more people than anything else.
For those of us that live in the northern hemisphere, it will be exceedingly difficult to grow much of anything once temperatures drop far below normal…
This makes Earth freezing cold even during the summer, with farmland in Kansas cooling by about 20 degrees centigrade (about 40 degrees Fahrenheit), and other regions cooling almost twice as much. A recent scientific paper estimates that over 5 billion people could starve to death, including around 99% of those in the US, Europe, Russia, and China – because most black carbon smoke stays in the Northern hemisphere where it’s produced, and because temperature drops harm agriculture more at high latitudes.
Can you imagine what our world would look like if such a war actually happened?
Unfortunately, relations between the United States and Russia are the worst that they have ever been, and we are getting closer to a nuclear war with each passing day.
Politicians in the western world assume that the Russians would never risk a nuclear war because the consequences would be so apocalyptic for everyone.
But Russian politicians have warned us over and over again that if we push Russia too far there will be a nuclear war.
And as I detailed in my new book entitled “Chaos”, the Russians have been feverishly preparing to fight a nuclear war for many years.
They know that there are no “winners” in a nuclear war.
But they also know that whoever strikes first will have the best chance of surviving one.
Right now, Russian forces are advancing and Ukrainian leaders are becoming increasingly desperate…
“Western leaders are bracing for the Ukrainian army’s collapse as it has only been able to slow the advance of Russian forces amid weapons and ammunition shortages, the Times writes.
In its editorial, titled ‘It’s time we talked about the fall of Kiev’, the paper points out that ‘contrary to the predominant view that this is a perpetual frozen conflict, with neither side able to win a decisive advantage, the front line is bitterly contested and there is a real risk of Ukrainian forces being pushed back’.
‘This is the nightmare scenario now being contemplated by western policymakers’, the Times notes.
Russia’s advance ‘would obviously be disastrous for the Ukrainians’. ‘It would also confront the West with all manner of tough challenges’, the newspaper says. ‘The consequences of a partial or complete defeat would be calamitous in ways western populations have barely begun to understand.
But we have a lazy habit in the comfortable West – away from Europe’s front line in east and south Ukraine – of wishful thinking and being unprepared for bad surprises’, the Times emphasizes.”
Ukrainian officials realize that the only way they can win the war is for NATO forces to intervene, and some western leaders such as French President Emmanuel Macron are very open to the idea.
But Vladimir Putin has warned that this will put us one step away from nuclear war, and he has decided to conscript another 150,000 men into the Russian military…
Vladimir Putin has called up another 150,000 men for Russian army conscription, the highest figure for eight years.
This comes as Orthodox priests have been ordered to say prayers in church for the dictator’s victory in the war.
The recruits are aged 18 to 30 and will be conscripted between 1 April and 15 July amid his war against Ukraine.
The Russians are convinced that western leaders want to bring down the Russian government and divide Russia up into a bunch of smaller pieces.
On the other side, politicians in the western world are determined to do “whatever it takes” to keep the Russians from winning in Ukraine.
Both sides are being unreasonable and paranoid, and that is a recipe for disaster.
All it is going to take is one mistake to unleash a nuclear cataclysm, and billions of lives hang in the balance.
Aman comes to Northwell Health’s hospital on Staten Island with a sprained ankle. Any allergies? the doctor asks. How many alcoholic drinks do you have each week? Do you have access to firearms inside or outside the home? When the patient answers yes to that last question, someone from his care team explains that locking up the firearm can make his home safer. She offers him a gun lock and a pamphlet with information on secure storage and firearm-safety classes. And all of this happens during the visit about his ankle.
Northwell Health is part of a growing movement of health-care providers that want to talk with patients about guns like they would diet, exercise, or sex—treating firearm injury as a public-health issue. In the past few years, the White House has declared firearm injury an epidemic, and the CDC and National Institutes of Health have begun offering grants for prevention research. Meanwhile, dozens of medical societies agree that gun injury is a public-health crisis and that health-care providers have to help stop it.
Asking patients about access to firearms and counseling them toward responsible storage could be one part of that. “It’s the same way that we encourage people to wear seat belts and not drive while intoxicated, to exercise,” Emmy Betz, an emergency-medicine physician and the director of the University of Colorado’s Firearm Injury Prevention Initiative, told me. An unsecured gun could be accessible to a child, someone with dementia, or a person with violent intent—and mayincrease the chance of suicide or accidental injury in the home. Securely storing a gun is fundamental to the National Rifle Association’s safety rules, but as of 2016, only about half of firearm owners reported doing so for all of their guns.
Some evidence shows that when health-care workers counsel patients and give them a locking device, it leads to safer storage habits. Doctors are now trying to figure out the best way to broach the conversation. Physicians talk about sex, drugs, and even (if your earbuds are too loud) rock and roll. But to many firearm owners, guns are different.
Not so long ago, powerful physicians argued that if guns were causing so much harm, people should just quit them. In the 1990s, the director of the CDC’s injury center said that a public-health approach to firearm injury would mean rebranding guns as a dangerous vice, like cigarettes. “It used to be that smoking was a glamor symbol—cool, sexy, macho,” he told The New York Times in 1994. “Now it is dirty, deadly—and banned.” In the 2010s, the American Academy of Pediatrics’ advice was to “NEVER” have a gun in the home, because the presence of one increased a child’s risk of suicide or injury so greatly. (“Do not purchase a gun,” the group warned bluntly.) And when asked in 2016 whom they would go to for safe-storage advice, firearm owners ranked physicians second to last, above only celebrities.
In the past couple of decades, some states have toyed with laws that curtail doctors’ ability to talk with patients about firearms and the information they can collect, to assuage gun owners’ privacy concerns.
Only in Florida did the most restrictive version—what physicians call a “gag law”—pass, in 2011; six years later, a federal court struck it down. But “I think the gag orders, even though they’re not in effect now, really scared people,” Amy Barnhorst, an emergency psychiatrist and firearm-injury-prevention researcher at UC Davis, told me. A smattering of studies have found that doctors—particularly pediatricians—generally think talking with their patients about firearm safety is important, but most of the time, they’re not doing it. As of 2019, only 8 percent of firearm owners said their doctor had ever brought it up.
That year, in California, Barnhorst launched the state-funded BulletPoints Project, a free curriculum that teaches health-care workers how and when to talk about firearms with their patients. The program instructs them to keep politics and personal opinions out of the conversation, and to ask only those patients who have particular reasons for extra caution—including people with children, those experiencing domestic violence, or those living with someone with a cognitive impairment. It also suggests more realistic advice than “Do not purchase a gun.” Maybe a patient has a firearm for self-defense (the most common reason to have one), so they’d balk at the idea of storing a gun unloaded and locked, with the ammunition separate. A health-care worker might recommend a quick-access lockbox instead.
Researchers are now testing whether these firearm conversations have the best outcome if doctors broach them only when there’s a clear reason or if they do it with every patient. Johns Hopkins is trialing a targeted approach, talking about firearms and offering gun locks in cases where pediatric patients have traumatic injuries.
Meanwhile, Northwell Health, which is New York State’s largest health system, asks everyone who comes into select ERs about gun access and offers locks to those who might need them. Both of these efforts are federally funded studies testing whether doctors feel confident enough to actually talk with patients about this, and whether those conversations lead people to store their firearms more securely.
For doctors, universal screening means “there’s no decision point of who you’re going to ask or when you’re going to ask,” Sandeep Kapoor, an assistant professor of emergency medicine who is helping implement the program at Northwell Health, told me.
So far, Northwell’s trial has screened about 45,000 patients, which signals that the approach can be scaled up. Kapoor told me that with this strategy, gun-safety conversations could eventually become as routine for patients as having their blood pressure taken. When she was in primary pediatrics, Katherine Hoops, a core faculty member at Johns Hopkins’s Center for Gun Violence Solutions, worked firearm safety into every checkup, as she would bike helmets and seat belts.
(The American Academy of Pediatrics still maintains that the safest home for a child is one without a gun, but the organization now recommends that pediatricians talk about secure storage with every family, and offers a curriculum on how to have this conversation.)
Universal screening can also find people whom a targeted approach might miss: The team at Northwell recently learned through screening questions that a 13-year-old who came in with appendicitis had been threatened with guns by bullies, and brought in his parents, a team of social workers, and the school to help.
But a patient in the ER for a sprained ankle may understandably wonder why a doctor is asking about firearms. “There’s no context,” Chris Barsotti, an emergency-medicine physician and a co-founder of the American Foundation for Firearm Injury Reduction in Medicine, told me. The firearm community, he said, remembers when “the CDC wanted to stigmatize gun ownership,” so any movement for health care workers to raise these questions needs nuance. To his mind, these should be tailored conversations.
Betz, of the University of Colorado, raises the question only when a patient is at risk, and believes that firearm safety can otherwise be in the background of a practice—for example, in a waiting room where secure-storagebrochures are displayed alongside pamphlets on safe sex and posters on diabetes prevention.
About half of firearm-owning patients agree that it’s sometimes appropriate for a doctor to talk with them about firearms, according to a 2016 study by Betz and her colleagues. They’re even more okay with it if they have a child at home. The physicians I asked said that the majority of the time, these conversations go smoothly.
But Betz’s study also found that 45 percent of firearm-owning patients thought doctors should never bring up guns. Paul Hsieh, a radiologist and a co-founder of the group Freedom and Individual Rights in Medicine, wrote in an email that gun owners he’s spoken with “find the question about firearms ownership intrusive in a different way than questions about substance use or sexual partners.”
Chethan Sathya, a pediatric trauma surgeon and the director of Northwell Health’s Center for Gun Violence Prevention, pointed out that those topics used to be contentious for physicians to talk about. To treat guns as a public-health issue, “we can’t be uncomfortable having conversations,” he told me.
But doctors have more power in this situation than they do in others. They might tell someone with diabetes to stop having soda three times a day, but they can’t literally take soda away from a patient. With guns, they might be able to. In states with extreme-risk laws, if a health-care provider believes that their patient poses an immediate threat to themselves or others, they can work with law enforcement to petition the court to temporarily remove someone’s firearms; a handful of states allow medical professionals to file these petitions directly. There are many people “across America right now who own guns and won’t come to counseling, because they don’t want their rights taken away for real or imagined reasons,” Jake Wiskerchen, a mental-health counselor in Nevada who advocates for such patients, told me. They worry that if their doctor includes gun-ownership status in their medical record, they could be added to a hypothetical national registry of firearm owners. And if questions about guns were to become truly routine in a doctor’s office—such as on an intake form—he said owners might just lie or decide they “don’t want to go to the doctor anymore.”
Physicians accordingly choose their words carefully. They talk about preventing firearm injury instead of gun violence—both because the majority of gun deaths are suicides, not homicides, and because it’s a less loaded term. Telling a diabetic patient to cut back on soda might work, but people “are not just going to throw their guns in the trash,” Barnhorst, of UC Davis, told me. “There’s a lot more psychological meaning behind firearms for people than there is for sodas.”
Barsotti says a public-health approach to firearm safety requires more engagement with the upwards of 30 percent of American adults who own a firearm. Owners of shooting ranges and gun shops are already “practicing public health without the benefit of medical or public-health expertise,” he told me. They’re running their own storage programs for community members who don’t want their guns around for whatever reason; they’re bringing their friends for mental-health treatment when they might be at risk. Betz’s team collaborated with gun shops, shooting ranges, and law-enforcement agencies in Colorado to create a firearms-storage map of sites willing to hold guns temporarily, and she counsels gun clubs on suicide prevention, as a co-founder of the Colorado Firearm Safety Coalition. Exam-room conversations can be lifesaving, but in curbing gun injury, Betz told me, health-care workers “have one role to play. We’re not the solution.”
While trying to figure out the answer, I’ve looked inside of prepping blogs to find a consensus for the criteria known to be essential for any place to survive in during the wake of such an event. That is, any event that can potentially destabilize society to the point of no return to normal any time soon. It will be important for you to have whatever supplies you need ready ahead of time before you travel to your destination. So start getting ready.
That being said, the criteria for the best area to survive in can be broken into three categories:
1. Human factors, 2. Natural factors, and 3. Economic factors
Human Factors:
Low population density (40 people per sq. mile or less)
Distance to major/minor cities (50+ miles away)
Distance to military bases (50+ miles away)
Distance to nuclear power plants (100+ miles away)
Distance to interstate highways
Low poverty rate
Low violent crime rate
Natural Factors:
Easy access to fresh water
Abundance of wild game
Low natural disaster risk
Dense forest cover
Adequate soil textures
Adequate rainfall
Low drought risk
Economic Factors:
Higher job growth
High abundance of non-renewable natural resources available for extraction (coal, oil, natural gas, metals and minerals, lumber, etc.
Higher educated citizens
Now that we know what to look for, I’ll narrow down a map of the U.S. by one category at a time using other maps I have compiled. The “Orange” counties are those disqualified, which will then become and remain dark gray when the next factor is applied. For simplicity reasons, we’ll focus on the continental U.S. But before starting I will say that the state of Hawaii is probably a fairly safe place to be considering its isolation, moderate climate, and the Polynesians have managed living there by themselves for millennia.
If you want to see what happens when things go south, all you have to do is look at Venezuela: no electricity, no running water, no law, no antibiotics, no painkillers, no anesthetics, no insulin or other important things.
The first most important thing is population density or lack of it. This is common sense since you don’t wanna be around massive numbers of unprepared people when SHTF. Ideally anywhere under 40 people per square mile is best. The blue shaded counties are where to go.
Next is proximity to major and minor cities. A distance of at least 50 miles away is best.
We are now isolated from any major threats from large populations and groups of people. But, there is still the possibility of martial law being put into effect. So it’s best to keep our distance from military bases.
The last places to “watch out” from are areas with already high poverty and crime rates. When they no longer can depend on Uncle Sam for their existence, it will get ugly. Avoiding these areas may potentially eliminate our options in the Southern states but I would like to keep them open for now for climate reasons. We’ll use a 25% poverty rate limit for the south and 20% everywhere else. (The south includes WV, southern MO, and eastern half of OK and TX)
I won’t make any exception for violent crime rates. Those will be applied evenly across the board. Lighter counties are safer.
We are now looking at a map of what are probably the “safest” counties in the United States. But now that the potential for human threat is minimized, we must figure out where is the best place to settle down based on what resources there will be available. The most important thing is easy access to fresh water always within close proximity.
Next in my opinion is wild game abundance, which you need for food during winters and harsh growing seasons, and for protein in general.
You wanna be safe from natural disasters such as tornadoes and hurricanes. Given recent events I think it’s safe to eliminate the lone county remaining in Florida.
This is a potentially controversial assumption, but the amount of forest cover over an area may be a good indicator for how much local resources there will be for us to utilize for our way of life. Everything from ecosystems that support wild game and edible plants to having plentiful amounts of lumber if needed (especially in the winter). Forests are just as useful as farmland. At least 25% forest cover is beneficial.
We need to grow food. This requires a number of things. Most important of them are good soil textures and rainfall. Drought-prone areas must be avoided. Warm climate isn’t necessary and depending on your environment you can expect to have different lengths of growing seasons. I will subtract all these variables all at once from the next map.
The best soil textures are ones with a close to even mixture of sand, silt, and clay, together known as loam. This mixture holds nutrients best. Anywhere on the scale from sandy loam to clay loam will work for most vegetables, fruits, wheat, nuts, and other produce.
This map is just for reference. Knowing your plant hardiness zones is key to scheduling your growing seasons with which types of produce you can expect to grow based on the average climate of your zone. Generally speaking, your options get wider the more south you go with more varieties of produce able to grow in warmer climates. There is also the potential for yielding not just one but two or more crop yields in a year with longer growing seasons in warm climates.
Rain should be 20 inches or more a year. So anything from dark green (40″+) all the way to light orange (20″) is good. Of course avoid regions that most often experience drought.
With all agricultural factors considered, this is what’s left on the map.
A variety of choices are left spanning different parts of the US. These are places that have everything we “need” to survive. You can perhaps at this point choose to pick whichever is closest to where you currently live. It is arguable that depending on the nature of the apocalyptic event the local economy may or may not make a difference on your quality of life. But let’s see where factoring it leads us.
A strong local economy in a rural area can indicate the presence of a stable natural resource based economy be it agriculture, mining, logging, etc. These resources can potentially be very important for the economic growth of the area and in the rebuilding of other economies through the exporting of these resources. It’s best to pick the areas with current stable job growth with high natural resource reserves.
Areas with 2.5%+ job growth with heavy natural resource reserves and industries:
The culture of where you live can be rather important. To borrow from one commenter, “You need a community. No matter how much of a bad ass you are you have to sleep sometime. It is great to consider things like natural resources and growing conditions, but you also need people with the knowledge to put those attributes to work for the community.” Areas with a high concentration of college graduates can indicate the presence of a college or of other skilled service providers which can potentially contribute to the needs of a community in areas such as healthcare, engineering, agriculture, etc. Areas with a population of at least 20% college graduates would be good.
We have 5 finalists:
Archuleta Co., CO
Hinsdale Co., CO
San Juan Co., CO
Hubbard Co., MN
Highland Co., VA
At this point, let’s eliminate by comparing.
For extra isolation, eliminate Highland County, VA.
For better access to water, rain, and wild game, eliminate Archuleta County, CO.
For a place with less poverty and crime, stay out of San Juan County, CO.
At this point the decision for me comes down to the potential for future economic growth and a population that is more wilderness survival conscious, which leaves us our winner….
Hinsdale County, Colorado
I welcome any suggestions from you for additions, corrections, or edits to help accurately improve the results I have found and will perhaps make updates to everything based on them in the future
MUST WATCH BELOW!!!
Food Confiscation: How to protect your food stores and production from government confiscation
Federal investigators asked banks to scour customer transactions for terms like ‘Trump’ or ‘MAGA’ and purchases at stores including Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bass Pro Shops after the Capitol riot, shocking Republican probe claims
Federal officials investigating Jan. 6 asked banks to filter through customer transactions including key terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘Trump’
The government has been ‘watching’ Americans who frequent Bass Pro Shops, Cabela’s and other outdoors stores that sell guns
Federal investigators asked U.S. banks to scour customer transactions for key terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘Trump’ to identify ‘extremism’ in the aftermath of January 6, shocking details uncovered by Republicans reveal.
According to bombshell documents obtained by the House’s ‘weaponization’ committee led by Chairman Jim Jordan, the federal government has been ‘watching’ Americans who frequent outdoor stores that sell guns – or who are religious.
Treasury Department officials suggested that banks review transactions at sporting and recreational supplies stores like Cabela’s, Dick’s Sporting Goods and Bass Pro Shops in order ‘to detect customers whose transactions may reflect ‘potential active shooters.”
Federal investigators suggested that banks use search terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘Trump’ to identify purchased that could be associated with ‘extremism’
Transportation charges for travel to areas with no apparent purpose could be an indicator of ‘extremism,’ according to the letter
Subscriptions to news outlets containing ‘extremist’ views would also be an indicator for financial instructions to look at, according to the material the Treasury provided to banks.
‘Did you shop at Bass Pro Shop yesterday or purchase a Bible? If so, the federal government may be watching you,’ Jordan posted on X.
‘We now know the federal government flagged terms like ‘MAGA’ and ‘TRUMP,’ to financial institutions if Americans completed transactions using those terms,’ he wrote in another post. ‘What was also flagged? If you bought a religious text, like a BIBLE, or shopped at Bass Pro Shop.’
The federal officials may have illegally provided financial institutions with suggested search terms for ‘identifying transactions on behalf of federal law enforcement,’ said Jordan.
DailyMail.com reached out to the Treasury Department for comment.
Jordan is also demanding information from a Treasury official, Noah Bishoff, after the alarming documents came to light.
‘Despite these transactions having no apparent criminal nexus — and, in fact, relate to Americans exercising their Second Amendment rights — [the Treasury] seems to have adopted a characterization of these Americans as potential threat actors,’ Jordan wrote.
Purchases from Bass Pro Shops could also be an indicator of extremism
The committee also obtained documents indicating officials suggested that banks query purchases with keywords such as ‘Dick’s Sporting Goods’
‘This kind of pervasive financial surveillance, carried out in coordination with and at the request of federal law enforcement, into Americans’ private transactions is alarming and raises serious doubts about [the Treasury’s] respect for fundamental liberties.’
‘In other words, [the Treasury] urged large financial instructions to comb through the private transactions of their customers for suspicious charges on the basis of protected political and religious expression,’ said the committee’s letter to Bishoff.
House Speaker Mike Johnson on Thursday called the revelation ‘yet another glaring example of the weaponized federal government targeting conservatives.’
Republicans are also requesting that Bishoff appear before the committee for a transcribed interview by January 31.
On Wednesday, State Senator Julie Morrison, the Majority Caucus Whip, introduced legislation that could result in Illinois gun owners’ losing their driver’s licenses without due process, less than two weeks after 2 million Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card holders rebelled and chose not to register their firearms in protest of Gov. Pritzker’s assault weapons ban that he signed into law last January.
In a video statement released on Thursday evening, Illinois State Rifle Association president Doug Mayhall said, “Now the anti-gun legislators are coming after your Driver’s License!”
Mayhall went on to explain Senate Bill 2720, which “proposes that when a FOID card is revoked – and the FOID card holder does not comply with Section 9.5 of the FOID Act by surrendering their FOID card to authorities – the gun owner may not be issued a driver’s license; renew a driver’s license; retain a drivers license; or be issued a permit to drive under the Illinois Vehicle Code.”
The legislation also requires the Illinois State Police to notify the Secretary of State’s office and report anyone that fails to comply with Section 9.5.
But the issue is more troublesome than simply having your FOID card revoked according to Mayhall.
“Under the Red Flag Law – there can be an ex parte case filed against you. In other words, someone can say you are a problem and go before a judge without you present. You then can lose your FOID card and not get a hearing for at least two weeks.
So what’s the bottom line here? A person under this bill can be falsely accused and lose their right to drive without a single hearing.”
The loss of a driver’s license can have serious implications, and it has the potential of completely disrupting one’s livelihood – including someone’s ability to get to and from work.
The timing of the legislation to coincide with the January 1st deadline of Illinois’ gun registry and the one year anniversary of the assault weapons ban is not accidental, as Mayhall pointed out.
“After Governor Pritzker was left embarrassed when less than 2 percent of the 2.4 million FOID Card holders registered their firearms by the January 1st deadline, he’s now looking for new ways to target and harass gun owners.”
The legislation is awaiting a committee assignment, and the Democrats maintain a comfortable 40-19 supermajority in the state Senate.
Here is where all this stuff comes from. I live on my laptop
whenever I’m not at the clinic, asleep or in the shower.
I write a lot. It’s honestly a compulsion not unlike alcohol or drugs. Other guys are addicted to porn. If I don’t bang out a Guncrank column every week, I start to feel like I’m developing a skin rash. We all have our burdens.
I typically post my writing efforts on Facebook as they come out. I don’t know why, but I’ve been doing it for years. A lot of my patients are Facebook friends and comment on the latest efforts when I see them in clinic. There’s never any profanity, and my politics are pretty tame relative to the rest of the planet. I wear Jesus on my sleeve and strive to treat others with respect and kindness. I like to think that comes through in my prose.
I recently posted a piece about flying a vintage Grumman Goose floatplane with some buddies back when I was in the Army. For reasons I cannot begin to fathom, Facebook tagged that as offensive content and deleted it. The stated justification was that I was somehow using subterfuge to get “Likes” or some such.
I enjoy the adoration of an army of hot, rabid cheerleader groupies just as much as the next obscure gun writer, I suppose, but I really never paid much attention to “Likes.” I just felt Facebook was a good vehicle to share my work with anyone who cared enough to read it. I had never been cancelled before. It was a weird experience.
I clicked on the review tab and, in due time, got a note back that my post was reinstated. Facebook said they had removed it by mistake. And then it got removed again. I subsequently penned a brief second rebuttal that formed the basis for this column. My story about flying WWII airplanes got duly banned once more. I still have no idea why.
Apparently the automated Facebook Gestapo does not care
for lighthearted tales about flying vintage-WWII airplanes in Alaska.
Grand Scheme
I published 255 commercial writing projects last year. I am hardly the best writer in my genre, but I am arguably the most prolific. As I said, I can’t help it. However, getting banned was thought-provoking.
This is quite literally nothing. So the Facebook spam filter is set to Nazi Gruppenfuhrer and excludes homey little tales about flying in Alaska. What difference does that make? Well, perhaps a lot.
I met a young lady several years ago who had recently spent six months living in China — the massive communist sort, not the tiny free island. I asked her what that was like. She was a college student — sweet and smart but naïve. She said at first, having everything she did scrutinized was kind of novel, exciting and cool. She felt like a character in a spy movie. After a while, however, she began to notice a trend.
Whenever she would say anything, even vaguely negative, about the government or the country in an email, she noticed that her internet connection would fail for a while. Over time, that became predictable. After six months, she was starving to get back to home and freedom. Living in a draconian dictatorship for real was simply suffocating.
We’re really not so far from such stuff over here on our side of the pond as we might think. We enjoy such a precious birthright of freedom that we do not adequately appreciate. All that could be gone with a headline.
If anybody cares about my opinion, I think censorship in most any form is bad. The Nazi death camp guards thought they were the “good guys.” Whoever wrote the Facebook content restrictions probably believed they were acting in the best interest of the common good. It is simply that absolutely everyone is biased. We can’t help it.
We live in the Information Age. The free flow of information defines our everyday lives. Humankind has never lived like this before. We’re figuring it out as we go along. It’s a brave new world.
That can indeed be dangerous. I am fairly convinced this is where so much ADHD comes from. We bombard the human mind with loud, flashy stuff from the moment we first draw breath and then subsequently struggle to pay attention. Who could have seen that coming?
I certainly acknowledge that folks do stupid things in response to propaganda. History is littered with bad behavior that spawned from passionate oratory or carefully metered information. A lot more people have died as a result of behavior safeguarded by the First Amendment than ever perished by that of the Second.
That being said, methinks we still need to be careful letting the censor bots determine what we should and should not be allowed to read. I’ve seen those movies. They never end well. I don’t trust any of them. It’s not that I’m paranoid, it is simply that I’d sooner not end up someday paying taxes to my microwave.
A US Navy warship operating in the Middle East intercepted multiple projectiles near the coast of Yemen on Thursday, two US officials told CNN.
One of the officials said the missiles were fired by Iranian-backed Houthi militants, who are engaged in an ongoing conflict in Yemen. Approximately 2-3 missiles were intercepted, according to the second official.
The officials said it was unclear what the missiles were targeting. It’s possible the missiles were fired at the USS Carney or launched towards another target.
A Pentagon briefing is expected Thursday afternoon.
This story is developing.
—————————————————————————————–I am getting the feeling that A. Not a lot of Folks are scared of us. & B. That somebody is just spoiling for a serious fight. God help us all!! Grumpy
The mechanism really doesn’t make all that much difference, the end result is the same.
It really doesn’t matter what you did. By this point, none of that really matters. Once these gears start turning there is no stopping them.
Nobody has to think about anything — and that’s intentional. There is a big book, and at each stage of the operation those tasked with its execution need only turn to the appropriate page and do what it says. It helps absolve those who must undertake this macabre operation of any undue moral responsibility. They were just doing what the book directed.
Twenty-four hours in advance, the prison SWAT team reports to your cell to move you to the observation area. You can walk along with them peacefully or not, but they will move you.
The observation cell has entire wall constructed of nothing but bars. It’s here where you take your last meal. The prison makes every reasonable effort to accommodate this request. Some poor guy sits and stares at you for the full 24 hours. This is to keep you from killing yourself. The government will not be denied.
A few hours before the big event, the SWAT team shows up again, this time to move you from the holding area to the place of execution. There is a series of stone steps leading down to the death room. As I walked down these steps, I couldn’t help but imagine what it might feel like to do this for real.
Two walls are one-way glass, one window is for government witnesses and the other is for the victim’s family. The inside is covered with acoustic soundproofing. The ceiling is formed from those banal institutional ceiling tiles, but more on those in a minute.
Once in the room, the SWAT team ensures you stretch out peaceably on the table. There are extensions for your arms. The table looks like a cross, and the thing is festooned with straps. Your arms, legs, torso and head are securely affixed. There can be a little movement but not much. I assumed the position. This may seem unduly dark, but I wanted to know how it might feel.
Paramedics then start a large bore IV in each arm. Physicians are intentionally excluded from the process as this would be such an egregious violation of the Hippocratic Oath. The IV lines run through a pair of innocuous-looking holes in the wall. And then you wait.
This is the lethal injection room at San Quentin (Ca.) Penitentiary.
Mine was a bit different. (Source: Wikipedia)
There is a bank of five identical telephones with sequential phone numbers standing side by side. Should there be a last-minute stay there is no way word won’t get there in time. On the other side of the wall are two little closets. Inside each closet is a handcrafted wooden contraption to hold the mystical elixir affixed to each IV line. One is normal saline, the other is something else. On the wall is also a pair of lights, one red and the other green.
Meanwhile, the subject of this exercise stares at those accursed ceiling tiles. Think back to the last time you were enduring some ghastly dental procedure or other. It’s like that, but much worse.
There is a little microphone hanging down from the ceiling; a tiny corner of one tile carved away to accommodate its cord. At the appointed time the warden enters the room and reads the charges against you. The condemned then has three minutes to say anything they want. The warden actually has a stopwatch. At the end of three minutes the warden turns and leaves whether you are still speaking or not. When you die, you die alone.
Gravity is ultimately the engine behind this enterprise. The IV bottles sit inverted in their holders. The executioners enter their closets and wait for the lights. When the lights change, they each flip the bottles upright and leave, never seeing the object of the exercise. This is by design.
As I lay on that hard table, technically padded but only just, I was so viscerally struck by those ceiling tiles. They’re the last thing one sees. It doesn’t matter what a heartless bloodthirsty monster you might be, the process of bringing you to this point will invariably break you. You have absolutely no control over anything.
Our actions have consequences, and this is a really big one. The ponderous machinations of the legal system tend to separate cause and effect substantially in situations of such exceptional gravitas. However, Lady Justice is a cold-hearted lass. She ultimately extracts her due.
We have never been closer to nuclear war than we are right now. If the conflict in Ukraine sparks a large scale nuclear war between the United States and Russia, billions of people could die.
On Wednesday, State Senator Julie Morrison, the Majority Caucus Whip, introduced legislation that could result in Illinois gun owners’ losing their driver’s licenses without due process, less than two weeks after 2 million Firearm Owners Identification (FOID) card holders rebelled and chose not to register their firearms in protest of Gov. Pritzker’s assault weapons ban that he signed into law last January.
Here is where all this stuff comes from. I live on my laptop
Apparently the automated Facebook Gestapo does not care
