More battlespace preparation from the media.

Commentary and video link found here.

Widow and grandson of Medal of Honor winner turned away from White House tour.

But while they were gone to DC to bury Vernon Baker, the community repaired their house in tribute.

Baker was born on December 17, 1919, in Cheyenne, Wyoming, the youngest of three children. After his parents died in a car accident when he was four, he and his two sisters were raised by their grandparents. His grandfather Joseph S. Baker, a railroad worker in Cheyenne, taught him to hunt in order to feed the family and became "the most influential figure in Vernon's life." His relationship with his grandmother was much more strained, and he spent a few years at the Boys Town orphanage in Nebraska to be away from her.

Baker graduated from high school in his grandfather's hometown of Clarinda, Iowa. He then worked as a railroad porter, a job he despised, until his grandfather's death from cancer in 1939. A series of menial jobs followed until his enlistment in the U.S. Army in mid-1941. At his first attempt to enlist, in April 1941, he was turned away, the recruiter stating "We don't have any quotas for you people." He tried again weeks later with a different recruiter and was accepted; he requested to become a quartermaster but was instead assigned to the infantry.

Military service

Baker entered the Army on June 26, 1941, six months prior to the U.S. entry into World War II. He went through training at Camp Wolters, Texas, and after completing Officer Candidate School was commissioned as a second lieutenant on January 11, 1943.

In June 1944, Baker was sent to Italy with the all-black 92nd Infantry Division. He was wounded in the arm in October of that year, hospitalized near Pisa, and in December rejoined his unit in reserve along the Gothic Line. In early spring, 1945, his unit was pulled from the reserves and placed in active combat. On the morning of April 5, he participated in an attack on the German stronghold of Castle Aghinolfi. During the assault, Baker led his heavy weapons platoon through German defenses to within sight of the castle, personally destroying three machine gun nests, two observation posts, two bunkers, and a network of German telephone lines along the way. It was for these actions that he was later awarded the Medal of Honor.

After the end of the war, Baker remained in Europe with the Allied occupation forces until 1947. He later joined the Army Airborne forces and left the military in 1968 as a first lieutenant. . .

Baker's first wife was Leola Baker. His second wife was Fern Brown; the couple had three children. After his wife's death in 1986, he moved to a cabin in the Benewah Valley of northern Idaho. Baker was an avid hunter, and hunted elk in northern Idaho before and after moving to the area. In 1989, he met a German woman visiting the U.S., Heidy Pawlick, whom he would later marry.

Baker died at his St. Maries, Idaho, home on July 13, 2010 after a long battle with cancer. He had been near-death due to brain cancer in 2004 but had recovered. His funeral at Arlington National Cemetery on September 24, 2010, was attended by three other Medal of Honor recipients, and his family, for whom funds to travel to the service were raised by their local community. -- Wikipedia.

From his MoH citation:

For extraordinary heroism in action on 5 and 6 April 1945, near Viareggio, Italy. Then Second Lieutenant Baker demonstrated outstanding courage and leadership in destroying enemy installations, personnel and equipment during his company's attack against a strongly entrenched enemy in mountainous terrain. When his company was stopped by the concentration of fire from several machine gun emplacements, he crawled to one position and destroyed it, killing three Germans. Continuing forward, he attacked and enemy observation post and killed two occupants. With the aid of one of his men, Lieutenant Baker attacked two more machine gun nests, killing or wounding the four enemy soldiers occupying these positions. He then covered the evacuation of the wounded personnel of his company by occupying an exposed position and drawing the enemy's fire. On the following night Lieutenant Baker voluntarily led a battalion advance through enemy mine fields and heavy fire toward the division objective. Second Lieutenant Baker's fighting spirit and daring leadership were an inspiration to his men and exemplify the highest traditions of the Armed Forces.

OK, I missed this dirty copulating lie by Time about the Three Percent.

Barton Gellman

Thanks to those of you who pointed this graph out that I missed.

And yet there are exceptions, and law-enforcement officials say domestic terrorists are equally the products of their movements. Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words. Brian Banning, who led local and interagency intelligence units that tracked radical-right-wing violence in Sacramento County, California, says, "The person who's interested in violent revolution may be attracted to a racist group or to a militia or to the Tea Party because he's antigovernment and so are they, but he's looking on the fringe of the crowd for the people who want to take action."

My email response to the author:

TO: Barton Gelman, Time Magazine
angler@rushpost.com

RE: Your dirty, copulating lie about the Three Percent.

I note in your article on militias shot through with elision and conflation that you have this line:

"Those most inclined toward violence sometimes call themselves three percenters, a small vanguard that dares to match deeds to words."

Really? Can you name one Three Percenter who has committed a crime of violence? What "deeds" do you refer to? Broken windows in a few political party offices? This is your justification for linking us to the domestic terrorism referred to in the rest of the paragraph? Does petty political vandalism against property and property alone now constitute domestic terrorism?

And how do you write an article without exploring the provocation by a tyrannical federal government that prompts the rise in the number and activity of constitutional militias? This is not a "conspiracy theory," as the bureaucratic functionaries of the previous Democrat administration proved on a number of occasions. Many of those same people, notably Eric Holder, are now positions of even greater authority than before. This is why I wrote the Attorney General a letter entitled, "No More Free Wacos." They had their free Waco in the 90s. No one was ever disciplined for the massacre of 80 men, women and children. The constitutional militias are a reminder that when the rule of law no longer protects the people, it no longer protects their oppressors either.

Ancient history, you may say. But the way we look at it, in the present day it was Nancy Pelosi and her ilk who first brought the threat of violence to the table by plunking down the pistol of mandatory "health care" on the table. If we refuse out of principle to participate in this unconstitutional tyranny, we will be fined. If we refuse to pay the fine, at some point we will be ordered to be arrested. If we refuse to be arrested on our doorsteps at the point of an IRS agent's gun, we will be killed -- all in the interest of our "health."

That is the logical progression, is it not? Ask Vicki Weaver or the Davidians if you can find any yet alive. It was this threat that prompted me to call for the breaking of the windows of local headquarters of Pelosi's predatory party. Given that Pelosi would use the entire paramilitary police force of the federal leviathan to force us to her will, a few windows broken in warning seem to me to be simple manners.

I also note that you quote me in your article though you did not trouble your lazy, royal editorial ass to seek an interview with me, though I am the founder of the Three Percent movement. Neither did you quote Professor Robert Churchill, whose book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face is the definitive history of the militia movement up to the year 2000.

A simple visit to my blog, http://sipseystreetirregulars.blogspot.com, would have shown you that although it is true that we insist that we will not accept any further infringements on our liberty, we are also insistent that the federal government be the agent to fire the first shot. The sentiment "No Fort Sumters, No Oklahoma City Bombings" is woven through all of my writing and into the credo of the Three Percent. Does that sound to you like a call to pro-active deadly violence?

I rather suspect that your lie about us was handed to you by one of the federal "authorities" quoted (by name or anonymously) in your story, and being the sloppy/lazy "journalist" common to your breed, you simply plugged it in there without verification. Doesn't Time do fact-checking any more?

I will take the Feds seeming fear of the Three Percent as a complement, but I insist upon a formal retraction from you and your magazine.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

Time Magazine Does Battlespace Preparation for Leviathan (and unwittingly does us a favor).

"Locked and Loaded: The Secret World of Extreme Militias" is full of the usual lying conflation of constitutional militias and racial collectivists. Funny, they don't consult Professor Robert Churchill who is the premier authority on the subject since his well-researched book, To Shake Their Guns in the Tyrant's Face. Neither do they quote long-time constitutional militia leaders like Bob Wright.

Without bothering to inconvenience themselves by interviewing me, they quote me nonetheless:

Regardless of what conscience tells them, what chance do would-be armed rebels possibly have of prevailing against the armed might of the U.S.?

One answer comes from former Alabama militia leader Mike Vanderboegh, who wrote an essay that is among the most widely republished on antigovernment extremist sites today. In "What Good Is a Handgun Against an Army?" Vanderboegh says the tactical question is easy: Kill the enemy one soldier at a time. A patriot needs only a "cheap little pistol and the guts to use it," he writes, to shoot a soldier in the head and take his rifle; with a friend, such a man will soon have "a truck full of arms and ammunition." Vanderboegh is hardly a man of action himself, living these days on government disability checks. Even so, when he wrote a blog post in March urging followers to protest the health care bill by breaking windows at Democratic Party offices, they did so across the country.

They do not mention the Three Percenters. This is unfortunate. Can you imagine the effect that the concept of "One Hundred Heads" in a national rag like Time would have on the collectivist tongue cluckers of the Ruling Class in their deliberations?

The "Letter From the Editor" which accompanies the cover story frets:

True patriotism is not owned by any party or person. Nor is there a one-size-fits-all definition that would please all those who consider themselves patriots. We each define the idea — and act on it — in our own way. But there are some definitions that cross the line, that pervert patriotism and take it to a place that is hateful and dangerous. Barry Goldwater famously declared in his acceptance speech at the 1964 Republican Convention that "extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice." Fine. But some forms of extremism in defense of a misguided sense of liberty can be poisonous. And such noxious extremism can come from left or right — or anywhere.

In this week's powerful and disturbing cover story, Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative correspondent Barton Gellman explores the world of extreme antigovernment alienation, from the training protocols of America's militias all the way to the deranged plans of a neo-Nazi who sought to plant a dirty bomb in Washington. In recent years, rhetoric on the left and the right of the political spectrum has grown more incendiary, but both sides still aim to achieve their ends with ballots, not bullets. The story portrays those who believe that government is more than just the problem; they believe it is the enemy. The most extreme militants do not believe in change through peaceful means and think it is only a matter of time before they will have to take up arms against the federal government.

Now I'm a "noxious extremist." Noxious. Who knew?

That the Ohio Defense Force violated one of my frequently expressed prime directives and allowed Time to embed a reporter and photographer on an FTX ought to be cause for condemnation. But looking at the overall result, I can't work myself up to be angry about it.

Look at this series of photos. Then look at them again. What do you see? What would an average member of the public see? You know what comes through these photos to me? Although I'm sure that the purpose was to focus on the scary firearms, what I see in these photos is the militiamen's (and women's) essential humanity. On the move and at rest, they look like nothing so much as those photos of American soldiers and Marines in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Though certainly a conflationary mess in its entirety and full of qualifying language to achieve its purpose, the article's quotes of the unit members are of the same sort that you would hear from the vast majority of constitutional militia units, causing Time to admit, "As militias go, the Ohio Defense Force is on the moderate side."

Of course they go on to say:

"Scores of armed antigovernment groups, some of them far more radical, have formed or been revived during the Obama years, according to law-enforcement agencies and outside watchdogs. A six-month TIME investigation reveals that recruiting, planning, training and explicit calls for a shooting war are on the rise, as are criminal investigations by the FBI and state authorities."

I'm not so sure that this message is a negative one for our ultimate purpose. Is this not the idea we have trying to get across?

"If you try to take any more of our liberty, we will kill you."

Although they try their damnedest to conflate us with racial collectivists, this message still comes through. In attempting to do battlespace preparation for a federal crackdown, Time has also helped us.

Mike
III

ENEMY AT THE GATES. Circling the wagons at the BHO Corral: A fly's eye view of the White House strategy meeting.

September 29, 2010

Obama, top Democratic leaders plan WH huddle

Erica Werner
Associated Press

President Barack Obama will meet Thursday with top congressional Democrats for one last strategy session before lawmakers flee town to campaign for re-election.

A Democratic aide said House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and other top leaders of the House and Senate will attend the White House meeting. The aide spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss the private gathering.

The session will give the president and his top allies on Capitol Hill a chance to talk politics and discuss their legislative agenda, including plans for a lameduck session after November's election. Democrats have punted action on extending expiring tax cuts until then.

"OK, who's got a good idea for getting our asses out of this crack? Raise your hand." "Me!" "Me!" "Call on me, Mr. President!" "Nancy, you go first."


"Sh-shoot all the other Blue Dogs who have retreated, and their chiefs of staff, too."


"M-m-m-make some examples. D-d-d-d-d-d-deport the families of the B-b-blue Dog d-d-d-deserters."


"Yes, yes, that's all been done."


"Give them hope!"

"All right, who's the smartass who said that?"


"Look, the voters' only choice is between GOP policies and ours. They're screwed either way. But there's another way. The way of courage. The way of love of the Homeland. Without getting our fingerprints on it, we must scare the shit out of them with something more frightening than us or the GOP. Then we must give them hope. We must rescue the friendly newspapers again. We must tell magnificent stories, stories that extol sacrifice, bravery. We must make them believe in the victory over this evil. We must give them hope, pride, a desire to fight. Yes... we need to make examples. But examples to *follow*. What we need are heroes."


"Do you know any heroes around here?"


"Yes, comrade. I know one."


"Who?"

ME! Look, Barack, let me tell you how we did it in the old days. After 1994, I was on the ropes. They said I was irrelevant. They said Newt Gingrich was the big dog in town. Then some FBI sting went haywire and the Oklahoma City federal building blew up, killed a buncha people, women, little babies. The country was scared, the country was outraged. All I had to do was play the lip-quiverin', emotin', big daddy leader who was goin' to save 'em from all these right-wing maniacs and all of a sudden I was 'relevant' again. We even managed to cover the whole thing up. Got me a second term, Barack. Could do the same for you."


"Hmmm. Eric, the FBI dogs jump through your hoop. You think you can arrange something like that?"

"Let me think . . . Hmmm. . . Yes, I think I can do that. And I know just the asshole in Alabama we can blame it on."


"And if that doesn't work, Mr. President, George Soros says we can always have you assassinated!"

"Say WHAT?!?!?

(Michelle thinking to herself: 'Hmmm. The martyred president's beautiful young widow. I could be the new Jackie O. Find myself a super-rich guy to marry. I could even run for president myself in 2012. Lemme think. . . So where's the downside? Of course I don't want to end up like Elene Ceausescu. Gotta remember not to stand too closely to Barack.')

An Alaskan Fairy Tale

With a headline like this . . .

"Man gets probation in wrong-car defecation," and with a name like Austin Horries Purifoy coupled with the fact that the fecal assailant is joining the U.S. Army, I just had to pass this silly-human-tricks story on to you, dear readers.

I especially liked this comes-the-dawn bright boy of the week moment:

"This is your car?" Purifoy said before bolting the scene, according to documents filed in court. "I thought this was Desiree's car."

Presumably the Army will give the boy some lessons in target identification. Pity the poor drill sergeant. Pity Austin Horries Purifoy. Pity the taxpayers.

Border, A 2006 documentary about the border and the Minutemen.

The Right Network is now posting segments of Border, the Chris Burgard documentary about what I called at the time, "The Magnificent Minutemen." Parts One and Two are up, with three more to follow.

You might recognize the grody, unshaven, hadn't-slept-for-a-week guy in the hat in the opening frames. Oh, yeah, and Bob Wright has the best line in the whole documentary. Bar none. (As usual.)

Part One

Part Two

Here is what I wrote after I got back in October, 2005:

New Mexico After Action Report: The Magnificent Minutemen

I just returned from a week on the Mexican border with the New Mexico Minuteman Project. Based in Hachita, the New Mexico Minutemen, aided by volunteers from all over the country-- Washington state to Georgia, Alabama to Pennsylvania and Florida to California-- spend their time broiling by day and freezing by night trying to assist a Border Patrol whose leaders do not want their help. I led a three man recon team from Alabama but this is not about our story, it is about theirs.

Hachita was chosen by the Minutemen because it lies at the junction of Routes 9 and 81 and is the freeway interchange for most of the human and drug smuggling in New Mexico. The Border Patrol maintains a daylight crossing point at Antelope Wells further to the south on 81. Once across the border, this road leads to Mexican Route 2 and Chihuahua State. Route 2 more or less parallels the border as it swings through Little Nogales and Janos before ending at Ciudad Juarez, opposite El Paso. As far as New Mexico is concerned it is the lower nexus of the Ho Chi Minh trail, with all the traffic headed north this time.

The country here is one of savage beauty and frankly alien to this Alabama boy's eyes. Volcanic mountains jut starkly up from a plain that is already a mile above sea level. The Big Hatchet mountains tower some 8440 feet. It is a harsh land where contact with every bush can draw blood from the unwary and where some of the vegetation seems to have leapt from the drawing pad of Dr. Seuss. It is a land of rattlesnakes, Gila monsters, scorpions and tarantulas. The first day we were there, the ambient temperature on our Blazer's dash readout was 90 degrees. That night it got down to 45.

As far as volunteers go, the Minutemen weren't much to look at. Just average folks of the kind you might see at a ball game anywhere. The oldest fellow I met was a Navy radio operator in WWII, flying PBM patrol planes. Now this Georgian was back for one more war because his country needed him.

And it is a war, make no mistake. Most people who admit there is a "War on Drugs" shrink from applying the same terms to illegal immigration, but the two are indissolubly linked. The old Miami Vice model of huge shipments of dope hardly obtains anymore. The risks to the cartels of seizure are too great. Nowadays, they count on thousands upon thousands of lowly mules who filter across our border. Once they make their drops, they are free to continue on into the land of plenty. No, there is nothing benign about illegal immigration.

The locals, those who do not make a living profiting from this trade, live in a state of suspended fear. If they keep their heads down and their mouths shut, the contrabandistas will allow them to live. If they do not, their cattle turn up dead, their stock ponds poisoned, their houses and barns burned. Still there are the quietly courageous who support the Minutemen openly and dare the contrabandistas to do anything about it.

As for the volunteers, there is little to recommend Hachita as a vacation spot. On vigil by night, freezing despite thermal underwear, they fall exhausted into Korean War vintage tents for a couple hours sleep before the baking sun awakens them and they are forced to flee their cots. For those of us who slept on the concrete floor of the somewhat cooler Hachita Community Center, we had to share it with tarantulas and deadly scorpions, forcing us to check our bedrolls and boots morning and night.

Numbering only a few dozen, in the first five days we were only credited by the Border Patrol with 8 capture assists, a mere fraction of the traffic we knew from local knowledge was passing through here. For all of the misery the Minutemen suffered in accomplishing it, it seemed like a pitiful payback. A few grew discouraged and left. But as time went on we noticed something: none of our captures were occuring at night during our line operations, all had been chance encounters during the day. And we noticed something else: wherever we would set up, the Border Patrol would set up in front of us, and the Mexican Federales would set up in front of them on their side of the border. It was as if both governments were telling the contrabandistas "Minutemen here, do not cross." This impression was solidified in my mind on the last night line operation the Alabama team participated in. Just after dark, a Border Patrol vehicle came down the fence line with its brights on and highlighted our camouflaged position. Shortly thereafter, my assistant team leader with excellent Generation 3 night vision spotted an infrared strobe marking our position several hundred yards in advance of our line. All night long, on both sides of the border, the forces of the US and Mexican governments displayed flashing lights so that anyone would know not to come through there,

Frustrating? Yes. But then it began to dawn on some of us: we few dozen volunteers were forcing the governments of two nations (as well as the minions of the largest economic enterprise on the planet) to dance to OUR tune. With this knowledge, we began to tailor our operations to take advantage of that fact. And while I am back in Alabama, the Minutemen volunteers are still interdicting that part of the border, mindful of their new power to call the tune.

History, for good or ill, is made by determined minorities. Never was that truer than among that small band of New Mexico Minutemen. They were dirty, unshaven and exhausted on their best day. They didn't look like much more than a small convention of the homeless. But by their presence and their gritty determination they were calling the shots on the border. They were pitiful, they were magnificent. I am proud to have known them and to have served with them. And if we can find more of their kind, we just might be able to save the country.

Mike Vanderboegh
Alabama Minuteman Support Team
PO Box 926
Pinson, AL 35126
GeorgeMason1776@aol.com

"The Insurgency"

Part One.

Musing on possibilities for the October “surprise”

At the Cliffs of Insanity.

Latest episode in the bloody soap opera, "The Dog Killers of Prince Georges County."

Why should anybody think that calling the cops is a good thing?

Ethically-challenged fed prosecutor goes swimming in front of children in his skivvies, flashes his johnson and then jumps fences fleeing police.

Mr. Big Stuff.

But wait, he's an "Only One," right?

Cronin, who has specialized in narcotics and appellate work at the U.S. Attorney's Office in Miami, was in hot water last year when he and other prosecutors were reprimanded for mishandling evidence in the pill-peddling prosecution of a Miami Beach doctor.

In April 2009, U.S. District Judge Alan S. Gold accused three prosecutors of knowingly and repeatedly violating ethical guidelines in the high-profile narcotics trial — and then fined the federal government more than $600,000 to pay for the defendant's legal fees.

Gold took Cronin and two other prosecutors to task for acting "in bad faith" in the case of Miami Beach doctor Ali Shaygan, who was acquitted of 141 counts of illegally prescribing painkillers.

"Alabama 5th in U.S. for supplying crime guns," tra la, tra la, tra la. Mayors Against Illegal Guns persuades gullible reporter to sing their tune.

Mr. John Delicate Leaf, Criminal Justice Coordinator of the City of New York and tax-paid agitator for citizen disarmament.

Fresh from covering the Great GOP Powder Puff Incident, Birmingham News ace night-shift crime reporter Jeremy Gray reports breathlessly: "Alabama 5th in U.S. for supplying crime guns."

He writes:

A report released Monday says Alabama is the United States' fifth largest supplier of guns used in crimes in other states. In 2009, 1,561 guns sold here were used in crimes in other states, according to the report from Mayors Against Illegal Guns, a coalition formed in 2006 by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg and Boston Mayor Thomas Menino.

What? We don't get credit for doing our part to boost the sagging economy? Seriously though, to quote the Bard, "Who hath measured the ground?" As we well know from previous ATF statistics mongering, "crime guns" are not the same as "trace guns."

Three Alabama mayors -- Mobile Mayor Samuel Jones, Prichard Mayor Ron Davis and Tuskegee Mayor Omar Neal -- are among the coalition's 500 members, according to the group's website. The group works to reduce the threat of illegal guns, the site states.

Personally, I doubt that any of these Democrat mayors are making further restrictions on firearms a campaign platform this year.

Weak state gun control laws have turned Alabama into "a supermarket for guns," said the group's chief policy advisor, John Feinblatt.

"Feinblatt" translated from the German means "delicate leaf."

"John Feinblatt is the Criminal Justice Coordinator for the Mayor. Prior to his appointment, he most recently founded and directed the Center for Court Innovation. He has also served as Director of the Midtown Court, Deputy Executive Director of Victims Services (now Safe Horizon), and a staff attorney at the Legal Aid Society. Feinblatt earned a BA at Wesleyan University and a JD from the Columbus School of Law at Catholic University." -- www.nyc.gov

The state needs to implement several laws to prevent guns sold legally here from being used illegally somewhere else, the report states.

Just to make it explicit:

Among the measures the group said are needed here are: Laws making it a crime to buy a gun for someone who can't buy one legally,

Of course we already have a federal law to that effect.

requiring background checks for handgun sales at gun shows,

The old canard of the "gun show loophole" rears its ugly head once more. These people won't be satisfied until they get federal control over all private firearms transactions. Of course, they could be dead before they do.

requiring purchase permits for all handguns, requiring people to report lost or stolen guns to police, allowing cities to enact gun control ordinances, and allowing police to inspect gun dealerships.

What this is about is empowering anti-firearm rights mayors to wage their own wars of citizen disarmament without reference to vagaries of state or federal enforcement. The lords of the manor do not wish their peasants to have access to armor-punching crossbows while they steal the crops and diddle the peasant women.

James Moses, president of the Alabama State Rifle and Pistol Association, argued that such laws would not keep people from buying guns here and shipping them elsewhere. "I don't think those measures have worked anywhere else," Moses said. "It's just more talk."

One quote of counter opinion in the entire story. This is what passes for "fair and balanced" in the Birmingham News these days. It could have been a more eloquent or fact-based refutation than "Just more talk." Yet, given the political realities of this state, that's probably true. Still we should keep firmly in mind what these walking appetites for other people's property, liberty and lives have in mind.

But Feinblatt said Alabama has gained a reputation as a state with weak gun laws and more needs to be done here.

If Mr. Delicate Leaf thinks so, I invite him to come down here and try it. Please.

The report stated that Alabama has a gun export rate of 33.2 guns per 100,000 inhabitants, more than double the national average of 14.1 guns exported per 100,000 inhabitants. "For years, the thinking was what makes America safer is giving people more access to guns," Feinblatt said. "This report shows what makes people safer is common sense gun laws."

Common sense. Yes. How about this common sense proposal: If you try to take our firearms we will kill you. Does that work for you Feinblatt? 'Cause it sure as hell works for us.

The report commended Alabama for having laws making it a crime to use false information to buy a gun, selling guns without background checks, giving police discretion in issuing concealed weapon permits, and prohibiting violent misdemeanor criminals from owning guns.

Yes, well, I'd like to thank Mr. Delicate Leaf for reminding us of how anti-gun local authorities can deny CCW permits to the law-abiding out of personal animus. I'm sure that after this election, when both the Alabama House and Senate change party control, that we're going to be addressing that and other issues. I like Vermont carry, myself. And an Alabama Firearms Freedom Act will be almost a certainty.

Thanks, Feinblatt, for raising this issue just in time for the election. We needed the reminder.

"Do you love it?
Do you hate it?
There it is,
the way you made it."
-- Frank Zappa, 1965.

Mike Vanderboegh
The alleged leader of a merry band of Three Percenters.

Later: David Codrea's take on this.

Making the world safe for bureaucracy.

Evil, illegally-parked woman gets a dose of street justice while a vicious crowd of pre-criminals shouts imprecations at heroic, kind policemen.

The Peace-Loving Alabama Democrats Send a Love Note to Jihadi GOP?

The Ghost of Donald Segretti, the Original Rat Copulator, Returns.

Well, at least they didn't break any windows. I mean, that would be violence, wouldn't it? Do you suppose Rachel Madcow will be ranting about this? Maybe it will make the Ed show.

Remember who we are. An American Revival to match the Gaelic Revival?

Gaelic revival (Irish: An Athbheochan Ghaelach) refers to the late-nineteenth-century national revival of interest in the Irish language and ancient Irish folklore, sports, songs, and arts considered to be part of the pre-conquest heritage of the native Irish people and the re-emergance of the Irish language in its native Ireland. Irish had diminished as a spoken tongue, remaining the main daily language only in isolated rural areas, with English as the dominant language of the majority of Ireland. . . The Young Ireland movement of the 1840s, in common with other European nationalist movements of the time, sought a new kind of national identity in the stories and myths of ancient Celtic Ireland. This was seen in the poetry published in The Nation newspaper. The works of writers such as Thomas Davis and Thomas Moore used Gaelic themes, in the words of Kevin B. Nowlan, "to glorify the notion that although we may now be in the mire, we were once great, we were taller than Roman spears."

It is not an overstatement to say that without the Gaelic Revival, there would have been no War for Irish Independence. Bob Wright called me this evening to ask this question: "Are we seeing an American equivalent of the Gaelic Revival?" Bob pointed out the increased interest of people in the Founders, in books about the Revolution and the Constitution, even obscure ones such as The Anti-Federalist Papers. The Country Class has always had a different music and culture than The Ruling Class, but ours is increasingly proud and confrontational, such as the Krista Branch tune above.

Part of what brought this up is that Bob has had a tremendous response to his recent foray into music and has been approached by a professional producer to do a polished cut of "We Won't Buy the Lie No More" in a studio in Albuquerque.

The widespread revival of the Gadsden Flag is a part of this as well. It is adopted precisely because its message is unequivocal, direct and evokes the Founders' revolution for liberty. Sure, we saw some of this in the 90s, but never then did I see "Don't Tread on Me" tee-shirts, ball caps and bumper stickers in the MILLIONS as we do today.

Bob may indeed be right. We certainly could be witnessing an American Revival right in front of our eyes. However, it is important to remember that the Gaelic Revival preceded and laid the groundwork, the predicate, for a bloody war of liberation and then, a civil war.

In any case, we must remember who we are if we wish to remain free.

Mike
III

This was done by the GOP. As compelling as it is, I still wish THEY took it as seriously as they pretend.

Gee whiz, I hope they weren't looking for me.

Because ever since they pulled that neat speeding ticket trick on me when I was on my way to a Georgia friend of mine, I've been taking the back way. But of course this is said to be a "counter terror operation" so surely it is targeted at Jihadis and not "right-wing extremists." Right?

Of course there WAS that time, on the night of 18 April 1995, when the Fibbies were out on all the freeway overpasses of Oklahoma City with their RDF hoops looking for a rental truck they knew was coming.

Maybe this is just another little sting operation that "got away from them."

God deals out humility to me in big doses through my readers. (That's you, you know.)

SGT Rodger Young in a photo taken before he was reduced to the rank of private at his own request because he felt he could not carry out the duties of squad leader conscientiously due to problems with his hearing and eyesight. The shortest man in his company, his health qualified him as 4-F and he could have spent the war in a cushy defense plant job. He refused.

Rank and organization: Private, U.S. Army, 148th Infantry, 37th Infantry Division. Place and date: On New Georgia, Solomon Islands, 31 July 1943. Entered service at: Clyde, Ohio. Birth: Tiffin, Ohio. G.O. No.: 3, 6 January 1944. Citation: On 31 July 1943, the infantry company of which Pvt. Young was a member, was ordered to make a limited withdrawal from the battle line in order to adjust the battalion's position for the night. At this time, Pvt. Young's platoon was engaged with the enemy in a dense jungle where observation was very limited. The platoon suddenly was pinned down by intense fire from a Japanese machinegun concealed on higher ground only 75 yards away. The initial burst wounded Pvt. Young. As the platoon started to obey the order to withdraw, Pvt. Young called out that he could see the enemy emplacement, whereupon he started creeping toward it. Another burst from the machinegun wounded him the second time. Despite the wounds, he continued his heroic advance, attracting enemy fire and answering with rifle fire. When he was close enough to his objective, he began throwing handgrenades, and while doing so was hit again and killed. Pvt. Young's bold action in closing with this Japanese pillbox and thus diverting its fire, permitted his platoon to disengage itself, without loss, and was responsible for several enemy casualties. -- Medal of Honor citation for PVT Rodger W. Young.

Folks,

My legal bills are not yet outstripping my ability to pay because of notes like this:

Mike,

Please find enclosed my support for your legal issues. I understand that you put yourself squarely in the crosshairs of those who have no regard for our rights or liberties. No one man should have to shoulder that burden alone. This is the least I can do. God bless you and your family, and may He smile upon us all in this struggle against injustice, and our eternal fight for freedom!

Daniel B.

Enclosed was a check.

Mind you, I have not asked for such donations, they just flow in. Not in a flood, but in a steady trickle. Most of them are twenty dollars or less. People sending what they can, even though they could certainly use it themselves. One envelope contained seven dollars, all in ones. SEVEN dollars. Not five, not ten, but seven. That tells me that the fellow who sent it enclosed every cent he could spare that day.

Every cent.

I'm sure that Daniel and others who have sent me money had plenty of other things they could have spent it on in these times. But they didn't. They sent it to me. To ME.

Like the promises of "One hundred heads," such gestures from the heart never fail to make me bend my knees to God in thanks.

You know, I was giving a speech the other day in Michigan (the video of which we will be posting as soon as some more faces in the crowd are depixelated) and when I got to the part about how folks who call me a hero shouldn't because I don't even come close to that definition, I choked up. My voice shifted up an octave and I could barely stutter out the words. But if I wept, it was out of vast humility and a sense of inadequacy to the task, of not measuring up to the need.

Heroes, real heroes, are not celebrities high and low, or winning athletes, or even soldiers or policemen or firemen who simply do their jobs without incident. Being in a dangerous profession does not make you a "hero," and being a loud-mouthed scribbler of unpopular political opinions certainly doesn't either.

A hero, for those of you in doubt, is someone who throws himself on a smoking hand grenade to save the life of his buddy in the same foxhole, or a farm boy like Rodger Young who stands up into the middle of enfilade fire in what is certain suicide in order to charge and kill the bunker that is decimating his friends. Those are heroes.

I am not a hero. I am not even sure I'm a very good leader.

To me, it is scandalous that most folks today consider sports stars to be "heroes." They are not and to call them that devalues the word and the sacrifices of real heroes.

The truth is that I take no more risks than any one of you Three Percenters who have decided that you won't be pushed back anymore from the free exercise of your liberties. In a surveillance society that puts Orwell's 1984 in the shade, we are ALL on the front line.

But until we are called to throw ourselves on a grenade or stand up and charge a bunker, we will never be "heroes," just citizens.

But that in itself is no small honor. Citizens -- free men and free women who take their rights and responsibilities seriously -- are rare enough these days. In fact, we are in this mess because there are too few citizens and too many serfs in this country.

So, if you wish to call me a "citizen," then I will gratefully and humbly accept that honor for I feel I have tried my best to earn it. But remember, most of you have too, or you wouldn't be visiting here on a regular basis.

To all of you, but especially to the Daniel B.'s who do things, not because they are pressured or even asked but because they anticipate a need and respond willingly, I thank you humbly and am grateful to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with you all in this fight -- a fight which is perhaps the defining moment for free peoples everywhere -- for the survival and restoration of the Founders' Republic.

May God bless and keep you all, and may God save the Republic.

Mike
III

Postscript: It was no accident that Robert Heinlein named the troop transport in Starship Troopers the "Rodger Young." While the war was yet raging, The Ballad of Rodger Young became the anthem of the infantry, although these days that sort of thing is out of fashion.

"I'll take liberty," or, better yet, I'll take your work and generate ad revenue.

I think Newbius has a point about this.

Newbius writes in an email:

Mike,

I am removing "I'll Take Liberty" from my blogroll. See http://newbius.blogspot.com/2010/09/blogroll-update.html for the reasons. Right now it just looks like he is trying to generate ad revenue off of your work, and the work of Bob Wright and others. I'm not playing. I would rather support you directly than to support someone who is just playing parasite to your host.

Regards,
Newbius

OK, now the anal probers of TSA will get "secret" clearances.

Secret squirrels.

10,000 TSA employees get secret clearances

WASHINGTON – The new head of the Transportation Security Administration say he's giving 10,000 of the agency's employees access to secret intelligence information to better enable them to detect threats and stop terrorists.

John Pistole (PIH'-stohl) told an aviation luncheon that he views TSA as a counterterrorism agency. He said his goal is to get the latest intelligence to all employees who have what he called an "action need" to "inform their judgment and decision-making."

Pistole is a former deputy FBI director who was confirmed by the Senate as TSA administrator in June. He said he begins each day with an intelligence briefing.

I wrote these lyrics over a year ago for the 9/12 rally, but only now has someone put them to the tune.

Unfortunately it is Bob Wright, who (like me) has a face for radio.

UN appoints ambassador to space aliens (although exactly where they are is still a little vague).

"Coming up on Mark Koernke's Lack of Intelligence Report: UN to use Martians to disarm American public! Instructions to alien monsters written on backs of interstate highway signs!"

You know, it is impossible to make this excrement up. (Except the part about Koernke, wherein we are just extrapolating from past escapades in ludicrous disinformation.)

The Military-Industrial-Legislative Complex

Incumbents rule, taxpayers drool, apparently.

At the request of my attorney . . .

The initial hearing has been postponed until 13 December. This is a goodness thing. Trust me.

Mike
III

Got toilet paper? If you hang on to your dollars, they might be worth using someday.

"Well, it's rather brutal here. Right now we are advising all our clients to put everything they've got into canned food and shotguns." -- Brain Gremlin in Gremlins 2: The New Batch, 1990.

The worth of a thing is what it will bring. -- J. O. Halliwell, 1847.

The tottering pyramid built on fiat currency.

Forget gold. Invest in copper, brass and lead. Oh, yeah, and canned food and shotguns isn't a bad idea, either.

Birds of a Feather at the "Monster's Ball": A'jad, Louis Farrakhan and the New Black Panther Party

It was a strange week for the loony strongman from Iran.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's six nights in New York featured a secret sit-down with militant minister Louis Farrakhan, heckling in a hotel bar, and a fear of being rubbed out that bordered on paranoia.

The president shared a hush-hush meal with Farrakhan and members of the New Black Panther Party Tuesday at the Warwick Hotel on West 54th Street.

The meeting of the podium smackers took place in a banquet room, where the fiery leaders presumably exchanged theories on what's wrong with the world.

Courtesy of the New York Post.

The latest from the Judenrat of the NRA: "As sturdy as a soggy role of toilet paper."

Weenies.

To anyone who still believes the National Rifle Association cares more about protecting your Second Amendment rights than it does about kissing up to powerful politicians, it's time to wake up and smell the coffee.

For the NRA, the Second Amendment has become little more than an expedient tool for raising money, striking political compromises, and maintaining access to those in power.

This week, the NRA’s Political Victory Fund endorsed liberal Democrat Congresswoman Betsy Markey, who cares so deeply about the Second Amendment that she didn’t even bother to return the NRA’s survey when she first ran for Congress two years ago.

So why did the NRA cast its lot with Markey now?

It’s simple: the NRA likes to play it safe by backing incumbents, even those whose support of gun rights is as sturdy as a soggy role of toilet paper.

Doc at the Watchmen sounds off on Poultry Patriots.

The New York Times will be helping the Tea Party on its way to victory.

The useful idiots of the left collectivist media are about to take down John Boehner in a sex scandal.

Insiders on Capitol Hill are buzzing about an upcoming New York Times exposé that will detail an alleged Boehner affair. Sources say the Times is looking for the right time to drop the story in October to sway the election, similar to how the Times reported during the 2008 presidential campaign on an alleged John McCain affair that supposedly had taken place many years before and that was flatly denied by the woman in question.

"Catching Boehner with a mistress is the only way to destroy him politically before the election," a source said.

As if that will save the Dems at the polls in November. It will only take down Boehner. Outstanding.

Its a bird! Its a plane! No! Its Compactor Man! I'm not sure whether to file this under Stupid Ciminal Tricks or Darwin Award Nominations.

Kids, don't try this at home.

The latest from America's secret political police.

I'll be very surprised if this isn't just BS done to deflect attention from some other matter. Is pure political speech now to be considered "terrorism"? Because, you know, I ain't terrorized by a bunch of lefty anti-war types. One wonders who could be.

This just in from Daniel Almond

Naming names: 2nd update on the gun confiscation incident in TN.

"Poultry Patriots": A lie repeated by a fool. What passes for disinformation these days is truly pathetic.

"The 82nd Airborne is falling! The 82nd Airborne is falling!"

"When in peril,
or in doubt,
run in circles,
scream and shout."

So, I get a call yesterday asking me to use my sources to verify this site's email "alert" from one "M. Freebyrd."

The first clue is Freebyrd's use of "DEFCOM" and "DEFCON" (the latter being military shorthand for "Defense Condition.") interchangeably. What a "DEFCOM" is, I have no clue, but from the body of the message it would seem "Freebyrd" is the nom d'guerre of Chicken Little.

The email:

Sent: 9/23/2010 8:45:48 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time
Subj: NATIONAL DEFCOM ALERT- Status/ Level 3 Preparedness- Report Immediately

THIS IS A LEVEL 3 NATIONAL ALERT TO ALL MILITIA AND COMMAND UNITS NATIONWIDE................U.S. TROOPS HAVE BEEN ORDERED FOR 18 HOUR STANDBY FOR POSSIBLE DOMESTIC DEPLOYMENT ON AMERICAN SOIL

ALL UNITS NEED TO REPORT IN TO THEIR COMMANDERS AND COMMANDERS NEED TO REPORT IN TO THE DEFCOM PAGE FOR FURTHER DETAILS AND UPDATES.

INTEL HAS BEEN VERIFIED AND COMES FROM SEVERAL SOURCES

82nd AIRBORNE DIVISION (Fort Bragg, NC) PUT ON STAND BY AS WELL AS 101st AIRBORNE (Fort Cambell , KY)

PLEASE REPORT IN TO NATIONAL ALERT DEFCOM PAGE AT www.PatriotResistance.com

LINK:
http://patriotresistance.com/DEFCOM-STATUS-PAGE-USA.html

Respectfully

M.Freebyrd
SENTINEL.CMD
PatriotResistance.com

Let us review, shall we, the term "disinformation."

Disinformation is intentionally false or inaccurate information that is spread deliberately. It is synonymous with and sometimes called Black propaganda. It may include the distribution of forged documents, manuscripts, and photographs, or spreading malicious rumors and fabricated intelligence. Disinformation should not be confused with misinformation, information that is unintentionally false.

In espionage or military intelligence, disinformation is the deliberate spreading of false information to mislead an enemy as to one's position or course of action. In politics, disinformation is the deliberate attempt to deflect voter support of an opponent, disseminating false statements of innuendo based on the candidates vulnerabilities as revealed by opposition research. In both cases, it also includes the distortion of true information in such a way as to render it useless.

Disinformation techniques may also be found in commerce and government, used to try to undermine the position of a competitor. It is an act of deception and blatant false statements to convince someone of an untruth. . '

Unlike traditional propaganda and Big Lie techniques designed to engage emotional support, disinformation is designed to manipulate the audience at the rational level by either discrediting conflicting information or supporting false conclusions.

Another technique of concealing facts, or censorship, is also used if the group can effect such control. When channels of information cannot be completely closed, they can be rendered useless by filling them with disinformation, effectively lowering their signal-to-noise ratio and discrediting the opposition by association with a lot of easily-disproved false claims.

A common disinformation tactic is to mix some truth and observation with false conclusions and lies, or to reveal part of the truth while presenting it as the whole (a limited hangout).

The Cold War made disinformation a recognized military and political tactic. Military disinformation techniques were described by Vladimir Volkoff.

Now, I don't know M. Freebyrd so I cannot deduce his motives for blasting out such a "warning" designed to excite the credulous.

I do know after wasting a little time checking this out that it is apparent bullshit. The 82nd's four brigades are, for the first time in a while, all back in country now. There are still some 5,500 troops of the 18th Airborne Corps (also headquartered at Bragg) deployed in Afghanistan and Iraq, and some of the SpecOps aviation assets are doing an exercise in Europe. The state-side units are involved in retraining, leaves, rotations and the normal business of units just back from deployment.

You would think that such Chicken Little-ism would terminally discredit its "patriot" purveyors but how then can we explain the continued embrace of folks such as Mark Koernke and Alex Jones? Each breathless "Oh-my-Gawd-we're-ALL-gonna-DIE!" prediction is debunked by events, only to be followed by another and another. Do they ever admit their error or explain why or how they were conned? No. And the next time, the same credulous (or, uncharitably said, STUPID) people believe them all over again.

Were this embrace of disinformation occurring in a vacuum, it would be harmless, I suppose, but it is not.

Real events are threatening enough, thank you very much, and we don't need lies circulated to ratchet up the angst any more than it already is.

Disinformation (unless it is very skilled) is only believed by those predisposed to do so. It is designed that way. But remember, there are some who are sitting and waiting for an excuse to commit a Fort Sumter. How tragically ironic if such an act were to be committed based upon a lie repeated by a fool.

Yet these "patriots" apparently feel no remorse for their recidivism -- whether of lying or stupidity we are left to guess.

For those of us with more than half a brain, I urge you to ignore this kind of crap and wait for reality. Do not take decisions (or even allow yourself to waste time) based upon the fevered imaginings of "Poultry Patriots."

Mike
III

Radio show with Doc: "We are all riflemen in the brigade of freedom."

Praxis: IFF -- Identification, Friend or Foe.

The American Attack on Stony Point.

Vanderboegh's Rule # 31: When people are shooting at you, try not to get shot. Getting shot is bad for you and the mission.

Vanderboegh's Rule # 32: When you are trying not to get shot, make sure you don't get shot by your own side. This is not only bad for you, but a waste of ammunition.

Vanderboegh's Rule # 33: Likewise, try not to shoot your own guys. It is bad for the mission and makes you very unpopular.

Uniforms were first developed so the troops on one side could easily identify who to kill and who not to kill. Unfortunately, especially in low light, many uniforms look the same.

At the night attack upon Stony Point, New York in July 1778, American General "Mad Anthony" Wayne crafted a three-prong plan:

1. The smallest force, commanded by Maj. Hardy Murfee, would attack first. They would fire their muskets to create a diversion sufficient to convince the British that the main attack was being delivered up the middle.

2. A silent approach would be made from the south, across the sunken sandbar at Haverstraw Bay. This would compose the largest body of troops, led by Wayne.

3. A second silent approach would occur concurrently from the north, across the bridge at King's Ferry.

The two silent approaches would only use fixed bayonets and pikes. All of their muskets would be unloaded, making sure that an accidental discharge would not happen. The musket fire from the first force would be the signal for the two silent maneuvers to start their approach. They would also wear pieces of white paper in their hats to avoid confusion in the darkness and to be used for visual recognition. Finally, 24 artillerymen would accompany the Light Infantry, so that captured British artillery could be turned against the British gunboat and their other fort at Verplank's Point.

Improvised white strips of cloth tied around an attacker's arm have been used for centuries to help soldiers identify friend from foe in night attacks.



During the Operation Torch landings in North Africa (1942) a flag armband made of oilcloth was issued to all assaulting troops. During the Normandy drop a cloth flag was issued to the 82nd Airborne, although some photos show the earlier oilcloth armband having been cut around the flag and sewn onto the jacket. These were useful when troops were fighting before front lines were established, but the individual soldiers usually discarded them soon after as they were easy for an enemy to spot as well.

Today's military of course have sophisticated Blue Force Tracker electronics to keep track of friendlies, but modern versions of "Mad Anthony's" hats with white paper in them can be found in the "cat's eyes" helmet cover band.



IR & UV cyalume sticks, with or without a holder, can be used at night and seen only by people with night vision devices. It would be a mistake in today's environment to believe that only your side has such devices.



But IFF can be even simpler. Beginning in the early 90s the Crips street gang wore British Knights shoes and took the "BK" logo to indicate "Blood Killer," in reference to the rival gang.



Shoes as identifiers remain popular today with the rival Mexican drug gangs. See this Texas Rangers' PDF analysis of a cartel vs. cartel vs Mexican Army shootout in Nuevo Laredo on 16 July 2010.

Go to Page Six for the photo:

"Many of the subjects appear to have the identical brand/model of shoes, or the same color schemes. This may be an indicator for friendly forces recognition, particularly during surveillance."

Whatever you use for IFF, just remember you will need some method of figuring out at a glance in any light who is your friend and who is trying to kill you. Work it out now, before you need it. Then keep it to yourselves until needed.

Another homerun from Oleg Volk.

Interesting from Sipsey Streeter Stan: Has Israel ALREADY attacked the Iranian nuclear program?

Fascinating.

Can terrorism save the Obama regime?

Well, OKC saved Clinton's, didn't it?

One more thing that ATF leadership doesn't want to answer questions about under oath.

The MSNBC headline: "U.S. bid to stem flow of weapons to Mexico cartels misfires."

"Project Gunrunner suffers from poor communication, turf battles, report says."

The actual report.

This is what we waste billions on.

Be a starfish, or better yet, a CITIZEN.

The starfish and the spider.



I have written before about the folly of waiting for a superhero to save the day.

If we are to be saved, individually and as a nation, we must save ourselves. If the Founders' Republic is to be restored, we must restore it ourselves.

Mike
III

This just in from Bob Wright . . .

CAN THE COUNTY SHERIFF RESTORE CONSTITUTIONAL GOVERNANCE WITH THE HELP OF “WE THE PEOPLE?”

Must be doing SOMETHING right.

Rapidly approaching two million visits here. 1,934,185 this morning to be exact.

Thanks.

Mike
III

Welcome also to our new friends at the U.S. Coast Guard, Department of Homeland Security.

Especially the current visitor from here. There's been a lot of .gov and .mil visitors lately. Oath Keepers, you think?

We are the people your local Gestapoman warned you about.

"Yesterday Amerika, tomorrow, the World!"

Ronald Kenneth Noble (born 1956, at Fort Dix, New Jersey) is an American law enforcement officer, and the current Secretary General of Interpol. He is the son of an African-American father and a German-born mother.

He is a 1979 graduate of the University of New Hampshire with a bachelor's degree in economics and business administration and a 1982 graduate of Stanford Law School. Mr. Noble also is a tenured professor at the New York University School of Law, on leave of absence while serving at Interpol.

From 1993 until 1996 he was the Undersecretary for Enforcement of the United States Department of the Treasury, where he was in charge of the United States Secret Service, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms, the Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, the Office of Foreign Assets Control, and the Financial Crimes Enforcement Network. He was head of the Department's "Waco Administrative Review Team" which produced a report on the ATF's actions against the Branch Davidians leading to the Waco Siege. -- Wikipedia.

Once a Gestapoman, always a Gestapoman.

Interpol worried about spike in extremist websites

(AP) – 1 day ago

PARIS — The chief of Interpol says the "skyrocketing" number of extremist websites is making it easier for terrorists to recruit middle class youth around the world.

Interpol Secretary General Ronald K. Noble says terrorist recruiters are exploiting the Web to target vulnerable young people who are "not on the radar of law enforcement."

He says fighting this kind of terrorist recruitment is especially difficult because viewing websites is not necessarily criminal. (Emphasis supplied, MBV)

Noble said the number of extremist websites tracked by police was 12 in 1998 and 4,500 in 2006.

He spoke Tuesday at a closed-door conference of world police chiefs in Paris. Interpol released his comments in a statement.

Welcome to all our new fusion center friends.

Especially those from Indiana and Michigan. Glad you're here. Poke around at your pleasure. Try to recall that you're a free American, not some collectivist stooge. Remember your oath and that it isn't to the new Fuhrer. Don't cooperate with anything tyrannical. And now an appropriate selection from the Glenn Miller AEF Band first broadcast to some other collectivist stooges from England in 1944.



Or, if you just act like a secret political policeman but don't understand German . . .

The fictional attack on the Michigan fusion center. Critiques of the chapter "Wolverines."

The chapter just posted has been fisked for error, factual and ideological, by folks and here are a couple:

"He hoped the owner would forgive him for what he was about to do with his prized possession, but he doubted it."

Typical collectivist, stealing whatever war materials he wants from the war's victims. The bands of knights support their campaigns against other bands of knights by stealing from the peasants. The Camelot military industrial complex never achieves its stated goal of peace, because then the pork would stop. Why don't you write a chapter where a bandit leader gets killed by his victim's illegal and effective private security during his attempted tax collection? That would be consistent with liberty.

Anonymous -- September 20, 2010 10:47 PM

The polite anarchist would, presumably, go ask the owner who is otherwise unknown to him and might be a regime supporter -- after all, Steven Spielberg is a collector of World War II armor -- if he would lend the vehicle in an enterprise that, given the environment, the government forces might kill him for if they found out? War presents awful moral choices by its very nature. I toyed with inserting a line or two about leaving the owner a scrip promising payment after the Restoration, but the author of the criticism above would have found that equally hypocritical. I would welcome a discussion by readers of how one carries out a successful war of resistance against a totalitarian leviathan without soiling one's hands in regard to property. Taking life of course calls for a different and much higher standard, and rightfully so. But here the criticism is in regard to property. How does one fight the larger evil without committing smaller evils? The CO expresses remorse for stealing the vehicle, differentiating himself from the collectivists who take property as part of their world view entitlement. But is that enough?

Another question: The entire mission is an exercise in the destruction of government property which has been taken by that government from its people. Presumably, the regime will extort the value of its replacement from those same people. Does the anonymous critic find that to be morally repugnant on the part of the resister as well?

I repeat, how do you fight such a war without infringing, at least in some way, upon the critic's pristine property principles?

Then there is this from Dedicated Dad:

Sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but the time is long past when destroying a single installation would serve to eliminate databases such as this...

First: At a minimum, all data is backed up to some removable media - more and more often of late this means hard-disks. Backups are taken offsite at a minimum, in many cases to hardened, secure facilities designed to withstand a nuke-strike.

And that's just for "everyday" business-data.

Something like MIOC *PROBABLY* has a huge storage-array -- think hundreds of disk-drives in a huge "farm" -- which has a twin somewhere far removed from "home base."

The hardware involved is usually designed to "mirror" the entire farm -- the change of a single bit of data results in said bit also being changed on the mirror farm.

Sometimes there's a lag - a few milliseconds to a full second or two - between the updates, usually depending on the bandwidth allocated to the mirroring operation, but that's about it.

Usually, there's a contingency plan in place - businesses may allow a few hours (in the event of total destruction of the main data center) to be back in play with all critical functions online.

One can bet that anything labeled "national security" already has a full-on, 100% functional(though perhaps virtual) set of servers sitting idle, ready to resume immediately in the event of failure or destruction of the main data-center.

Bottom line: Makes for good fiction, proving the Resistance could pull off such a feat might even make for some pretty amazing psychological warfare, but otherwise the net result of a mission like this against a NS-related target would be to inconvenience a bunch of geeks, and perhaps cause some hiccups for a few days while the undiscovered bugs were worked out of the stand-by systems.

Even total destruction of all systems would only hamper operations for as long as it took to restore their backups.

This is why so many nations are developing cyber-warfare strategies and capabilities -- something your fictional folk might want to think about as well....

G*D -- now I just seriously depressed MYSELF...

DD

DD, you are pretty much correct technically and I knew that going in (I take my research seriously). So why did I write it the way I did?

First, recall that the entire point of writing Absolved is as a "useful dire warning," as David Brin puts it. Pat Frank wrote Alas, Babylon, for example, in the hope that if people understood how devastating a nuclear war with the Soviets would be that they would do their damnedest to prepare for one and hopefully by that preparedness avoid one.

But any story of "useful dire warning" has three audiences and a different message for each. For those who agree with the author and see the danger, it should spur their preparations for the perceived coming calamity. For those who were unaware of what was going on around them, the story should wake them up to the danger and begin preparations. And, perhaps more importantly, it should raise in the minds of the people who intentionally or unintentionally are driving the real-world conflict described in the story to the brink (whatever that is) the caution that such conduct may have personal consequences.

Pat Frank was no unilateral disarmament advocate when he wrote Alas, Babylon. Somewhere around this impending avalanche of a mess that is my office, I have an interview with Pat Frank right after his book came out that I found in an old yellowed newspaper. Asked who he wanted to read his book, he replied (And I'm probably paraphrasing here because I can't find the article and haven't read it in ages.): "The Russians. I want them to understand that no matter how weak the United States may seem or how indecisive some of our leaders act sometimes, that we still win our wars."

Now, with that in mind, go back and re-read the chapter Wolverines from the perspective of a mid-level bureaucrat in a fusion center. You may find it utterly fantastic, because it challenges everything you think you understand about yourself. You don't see yourself as a secret political policeman, even though you will admit that you and your agency do represent federalization of local and state law enforcement and thus puts them in the chain of responsibility for present or future federal tyranny. After reading it, you will still reject the notion that you are a traitor to the Founders' Republic, but you will be put on notice that others think you are. Others who are at least willing to discuss in a fictional setting the deliberate killing of people just like you. Remember Hannah Arendt's comment on Eichmann about "The banality of evil." Most Gestapomen were ordinary folks who kissed their wives and children goodbye in morning after breakfast, patted their dogs on the head and went forth to a JOB that they believed needed doing, like a municipal garbageman. They thought of themselves as patriotic Germans. They did not look in the moral mirror. And, like today's "anti-terrorism" cop, he thought he was on the right side of history, and, more importantly, the WINNING side of history.

What then of today's state and local cops who participate in the fusion centers? Merely introducing the idea between their ears that what they do is viewed as treason to the oath they took by others who will make it their business to reverse -- perhaps with personal consequences -- is a "goodness thing."

Count on this: Most of these folks who work in fusion centers are highly intelligent. They are also, the best of them, very curious. They wouldn't be intelligence analysts if they weren't. Now, one of the things that their federal bosses are convinced of is the "right wing terrorist." Apart from racial collectivists which they wrongfully (per the SPLC's "Narrative of 1995" which Prof. Churchill has indentified) lump in with constitutional militiafolk, they are, as we know our own hearts, absolutely wrong. We view ourselves rightly as the bulwark of ordered liberty, not a threat to it.

Ah, but here in this chapter of fiction is "proof" of their bosses' prejudices. Not seeing themselves as doing wrong in any way -- not even in some fictional showdown between federal tyranny and people who insist upon being left alone -- they will seize upon this chapter and distribute it to their fellows and subordinates. "Did you read this Vanderboegh thing about destroying fusion centers and killing cops?" they will ask. Missing the underlying point, they will still be circulating the message -- an inherently subversive message to their purpose -- to ANY and ALL fusion center employees, not just in Michigan where I'm SURE it is already fodder for water cooler chat, but EVERYWHERE.

Thus is the third audience of the "useful dire warning" recruited. Like a squeamish traffic expert bystander to a deadly car crash, they will not be able to look away from the fictional gore without first analyzing the facts presented, simply because they will perceive that it is one of them in the car. Merely getting a few of them thinking along these lines, if those few are well-enough placed, could help avoid the accident -- in this case, the accidental civil war.

Now, as Dedicated has pointed out, utterly destroying the physicality of a single fusion center, or group of fusion centers, will not likely destroy all the data.

But, in the first place, the data system is neither as "seamless" nor as "collaborative" as it seems -- something that the fusion center employees know themselves and something that the bosses and academic Heideggers ceaselessly complain about in public hearings and on the Internet. They demand more resources and more top-down "collaboration" to address the nagging inefficiencies at the Department of Pre-Crime.

Secondly (in our fictional future universe), the destruction of ANY fusion center, even if no data was lost to the federal domestic spies, would be a blow the entire system. Think. These centers represent hundreds of millions of investment in electronic and other infrastructure. The destruction of one, even only by EMP, would necessitate its replacement. And destruction by EMP, in a world of increasingly restricted government income streams and "meddlesome" politicians, would perhaps be even worse than by C-4. What do you do when you want to deny a bridge to an advancing enemy? You only blow it PARTWAY up. Enough so the enemy cannot use the damaged remains, but not so much that you help his reconstruction efforts by utterly destroying it. You leave enough useless wreckage that he has to waste time and effort and resources clearing it before starting the rebuilding.

A building left standing, but electronically gutted, would be an imposing piece of such wreckage. There is also the matter of will. Without the initial shock of 11 September 2001, they would never have received the acquiescence of the public to build such an Orwellian future. How then will they replace it when the taxpayers are tired, jaded and bled white?

In addition, there is the far greater psychological wreckage in the fictional fusion center employees' heads. Like the Doolittle raid was "a pinprick to the heart," an EMP attack (using a new technology demonstrating a hitherto unused Fourth Generation warfare capability on the part of the Restoration forces) on a fusion center would demonstrate to every regime employee that the enemy they fight is not as stupid or unsophisticated as they had imagined. If an enemy is audacious, brave and technically brilliant, he just may be smart enough to beat you. That thought, set loose among bright minds that have been intellectually surprised and emotionally shaken yet remain curious, is ultimately subversive to the purpose of their less intelligent, thuggish bosses who use their work product to target tyranny.

Finally, there are the limitations of posting a single chapter. In my head (and on paper) but necessarily unknown to the reader, the attack on the MIOC was mere cover for the larger plan to take down the tyrannical infrastructure on the part of my new Polish-American freedom fighter character, John Piasecki. (And yes, boys and girls, the name is no accident. Think about what a helicopter DOES.) All I can say is don't catch a cold while you are trying to work it out.

I hope this helps explain some of my seeming lapses.

Mike
III