Submitted by Gun Owners of America,

Looks like Biden’s ATF director has drastically changed his views from his Senate confirmation hearing.

During a recent interview with Caroline Light, the Director of Undergraduate studies in Women, Gender and Sexuality at Harvard University, ATF Director Steve Dettelbach was asked about his gun control “Wish list.”

According to Harvard Magazine, ATF Director Dettelbach answered that he’d like to revive the federal prohibition on “assault weapons,” which expired in 2004. 

The so-called “assault weapons” that Dettelbach refers to are commonly owned modern sporting rifles that 1 in 20 Americans own.

This is a drastic change from Dettelbach’s nomination hearing, where he promised to be a fair regulator and only use the tools that Congress gave him.

These words earned him his nominations from holdouts like Senator Angus King of Maine and West Virginia Senator Joe Manchin.

Senator King was credited with torpedoing the previous ATF director nominee, David Chipman.

Chipman, a former ATF agent and veteran of the gun-control lobby, was withdrawn after his views on firearms confirmed that he would be antagonistic towards the firearms industry as a regulator.

Dettelbach was seen as a law enforcement candidate, with a background as a United States Attorney who promised to “never let politics in any way influence my action as ATF director.”

It is clear that Director Dettelbach has become a gun-control advocate in the vein of David Chipman. In fact, according to the National Shooting Sports Foundation, no ATF director has ever advocated for an assault weapon ban until now.

This is unsurprising, as the Biden administration recently announced an office of gun violence prevention — its sole purpose being to cozy up the gun control lobby with a direct link to ATF. Look no further than the Office of Gun Violence Prevention’s Deputy Director, Rob Wilcox.

ICYMI📢

Last week, Biden’s White House announced the new gun violence prevention office. This is just another attempt to take away your Second Amendment rights. pic.twitter.com/r1HejsNWvh

— Gun Owners of America (@GunOwners) September 30, 2023

Wilcox was the Senior Director of Federal Affairs for Michael Bloomberg’s gun-control organization Everytown for Gun Safety before working directly for the White House in their newly created office.

Interesting as well in Dettelbach’s interview was his attempt to characterize a GOA-backed overturning of an egregious gun control policy by the Department of Veterans Affairs as somehow related to the mass shooting in Lewiston, Maine.

Dettelbach suggested that the GOA-backed policy lowered barriers to gun ownership for those found to be mentally incompetent. This is the furthest thing from the truth.

In reality, the provision reversed a sinister policy by the VA, which added veterans to the list of prohibited persons in the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (NICS) if they used a fiduciary to manage their finances. Over 250,000 veterans were disarmed because of this policy.

ATF is currently working to implement Universal Registration Checks by executive fiat (another item on Dettelbach’s wish list), and the rule is now up for comment. Click here to let ATF know that you oppose this rule by leaving a public comment.

Gun Owners of America proudly stands in opposition to ATF and Director Dettelbach in the defense of law-abiding gun owners’ Second Amendment rights.

*  *  * 

We’ll hold the line for you in Washington. We are No Compromise. Join the Fight Now.

Authored by Marie Hawthorne via The Organic Prepper blog,

Talk of a “Cyber 9/11” has been circulating for years.  With the next presidential election twelve months away now, some folks are predicting that a major cyber event will happen before then, throwing a monkey wrench into the 2024 election process.

What the heck is Cyber 9/11?

What does Cyber 9/11 mean?  Is there a real risk?  What should we be preparing for?

There are two aspects to the Cyber 9/11 concept.  The first is the disaster itself; 9/11 was a catastrophe that ended the lives of over 3000 people in one day.  There are fears that if power grids were hacked or enough damage was done to logistical centers, the ensuing chaos would cause deaths.

Quite memorably, back in 2000, a disgruntled public works employee in Australia hacked into the water treatment system and caused raw sewage to pour into public areas, flooding a Hyatt hotel.  One man acting alone caused a disgusting, expensive mess. Of course security experts are concerned with what a team of angry individuals could do.

The second aspect to a potential Cyber 9/11 is the change in the regulatory landscape that occurred after 9/11 in 2001.  I remember flying as a teenager in the 90s. So many things changed later.  The airport changes were most obvious to regular citizens, but the passage of the Patriot Act in October 2001 was far more consequential.  It dramatically changed the way surveillance was conducted.

Under the Fourth Amendment, private citizens are supposed to be protected from warrantless search and seizures.  The Patriot Act really weakened that. Law enforcement is now allowed to delay the notice of search warrants.  They don’t need nearly as much oversight from judges to conduct phone and internet surveillance.

These Constitution-weakening changes occurred after 9/11 in 2001.

How might our Constitutional rights be altered after a Cyber 9/11?

Centralized powers have made it obvious that they love using calamities to push through changes the public would never otherwise accept.  Winston Churchill was the first person on record to say, “Never let a crisis go to waste,” as he worked to establish the UN in the 1940s, but he was hardly the last.

• Rahm Emmanuel, regarding the 2008 banking crisis: “You never want a serious crisis to go to waste.  And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things that you think you could not do before.”

• Hillary Clinton, regarding the push for universal healthcare in 2020: “This would be a terrible crisis to waste.”

• Klaus Schwab, regarding the Covid pandemic: “. . . the pandemic represents a rare but narrow window of opportunity to reflect, reimagine, and reset our world to create a healthier, more equitable, and more prosperous future.”

Understanding this tendency to see crisis as opportunity is absolutely vital to understanding everything else going on today.

So, is a Cyber 9/11 something we should be preparing for?

Some experts believe that a Cyber 9/11 would be difficult to pull off by the known terrorist groups for technical reasons.  And the world is too connected, globally, for most governments to pursue large-scale cyberattacks, even between unfriendly nations.  For people who want to use the internet to harm American society, there are simply better ways to do it.

However, we can’t ignore the fact that cyberattacks have been increasing.  Ask any small business owner. Daisy has mentioned in previous articles that most of this site’s income goes to security.  And I’ve heard similar things from friends that work in fields as diverse as accounting and energy.

These stories from friends align with what security professionals have found, too.  The Information Security Forum is a London-based firm that provides guidance on internet security for many Fortune 500 companies and governments around the world.  They have seen a huge increase in cyberattacks, too, and in June this year, they hosted an Operational Technology Cyber Simulation exercise in Brussels.  This gave industry leaders an opportunity to meet and collaborate, working through a simulation of a cyberattack on a fictitious manufacturing facility

How would governments react to a major cyberattack?

I don’t think a major cyberattack is an unreasonable concern.  I also don’t think it’s unreasonable to ask, if we did have a major cyber event, how would our governments react?

Central banks and governments around the world have been talking an awful lot about implementing CBDCs.  In late June, 130 countries representing 98% of the global economy were exploring CBDCs.  This is despite a lack of interest by average citizens.  During Covid, many people became aware of how China used its social credit system, interconnected with online banking, to enforce compliance.

It’s not just China that people can look to with alarm. When Nigeria’s government tried to impose CBDCs on their citizens, widespread protests erupted.

In the U.S., Republican Senators introduced legislation that would ban the federal government from implementing a CBDC.   Europeans don’t want CBDCs, either.  It has simply become too obvious that CBDCs will be used as a means of control, and politicians have been caught admitting it.

Look at the Rumble pranksters who convinced European Central Bank President Christine LaGarde that she was on the phone with Ukrainian President Vlodymyr Zelensky.  She admits, thinking that she is speaking privately, that CBDCs would be used to control what kind of payments the population would be able to make.

There’s no putting the cat back in that bag.  Politicians and central bankers want total financial control, and they think they have the technology to do it, through CBDCs.  Average citizens worldwide have been making it clear that they would really prefer to have the option of private, decentralized payments through crypto or cash, and so there is a legitimate concern that any upcoming cyberattack (no matter who actually conducts it) could be used to reset financial systems worldwide.

But do they have the technology to pull this off successfully?

Who knows.

We’ve talked before about Ukraine’s Diia app and how, shortly after it launched, they had a massive data breach in which millions of people had their personal information released all over the dark web.

This breach was tiny compared to what just happened to the people of India in the recent Aadhaar data breach.

Aadhaar is the Indian program launched to streamline the identification process of Indian citizens.  The program was rolled out in 2009, issuing a unique 12-digit number to each person who registered in exchange for their biometric data/

Before Aadhaar, there was no universal identification program within India, and as you can imagine, this led to widespread abuse and corruption.  Aadhaar claimed to solve that problem.

Within a few years of launching, Aadhaar had become the world’s largest biometric data collection service.  As of 2023, 99% of Indians, or 1.3 billion people, have handed over their fingerprints and iris scans in exchange for access to government services.  The Indian government has boasted that this allows the poorest Indians, many of whom had no official identification beforehand, to receive benefits.

A court ruling in 2018 claimed that the Indian government could demand Aadhaar data, but that private entities such as banks and phone companies could not.  However, despite this court ruling, many educated people within India claim that it was not clear what services would or would not be withheld based on Aadhaar participation.  Instances of fraud have been playing out since its adoption.  It has been used for voter fraud.  And, once you opt-in, there’s no opting out.

Within the past two weeks, India has suffered a massive data breach, with 815 million people having their biometric data and banking information put up for sale on the dark web.

This is the biggest data breach in history.  Eight hundred fifteen million people means that more than 1 in 10 people on planet Earth just had their data stolen.  You can find many, many videos on YouTube of furious Indians talking about the data breach, but Western media has totally ignored this for reasons that are probably obvious.

How am I preparing?

So, after all this, am I preparing for Cyber 9/11?  Am I prepping for the attack itself, or some kind of biometrically linked CBDC to roll out?

General chaos, leading to Thirdworldization, is my pre-2024 election prediction.  There are some power-hungry people individuals who would love to have the whole world living under a global digital system, but I think that forced implementation is more likely to cause chaos than anything else.  These systems are not foolproof and lead to problems wherever they’re tried.

We may not be able to avoid attempts at forced implementation.  But we can prepare by paying attention to our surroundings, becoming more skilled producers rather than consumers, and most of all, developing trusted networks of friends and family in the real world.

For more information on preparing for a cyberattack, check out this article and this one.

Authored by Caden Pearson via The Epoch Times (Emphasis ours),

GOP presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy has denied claims made by Republican National Committee (RNC) Chair Ronna McDaniel that he voted for former Democratic President Barack Obama.

The Ohio entrepreneur took to social media to accuse Ms. McDaniel of “flat-out lying” and reiterated his call for her resignation.

He repeated online anonymous claims that the RNC chair had allegedly vowed not to give “one cent” to his campaign after he criticized her during the third GOP debate held on Wednesday.

“I’ve never voted for Obama in my life,” Mr. Ramaswamy told Fox News on Thursday. “So, for a chair of the RNC to be saying that on national television, is malpractice.”

The RNC, in response to inquiries, directed The Epoch Times to a statement denying Ms. McDaniel’s reported remarks about withholding financial support for Ramaswamy’s campaign.

At the third GOP debate in Miami on Wednesday, one day after the Nov. 7 off-year elections that saw Democrats gain ground in key elections, Mr. Ramaswamy said the GOP had become a “party of losers.” He attributed the blame to the Republican establishment and called on Ms. McDaniel to resign.

“Since Ronna McDaniel took over as chairwoman of the RNC in 2017, we have lost 2018, 2020, 2022,” he said. “We got trounced last night in 2023, and I think that we have to have accountability in our party.

“For that matter, Ronna, if you want to come on stage tonight, you want to look the GOP voters in the eye and tell them you resign, I will turn over [and] yield my time to you.“

Following the debate, Ms. McDaniel said the GOP should be focused on domestic issues, such as the border and fentanyl crisis, crime, U.S. families, and defeating President Joe Biden—not her.

“I’m not running for anything, so let’s focus on Joe Biden and beating the Democrats,” she said Wednesday night.

In further comments on Thursday, Ms. McDaniel dismissed Mr. Ramaswamy’s comments calling on her to resign, saying that he “needs a headline” and noting that he’s polling at “4 percent.”

She also said the RNC, a federal committee, isn’t involved in state elections.

“We’re a federal committee, so we weren’t involved in those races on Tuesday,” Ms. McDaniel said. “I know Vivek is kind of newer to the party. He voted for Obama, so he may not know that, but this is something we’re going to have to get right … as a party.”

Ms. McDaniel made her remarks during an interview with Fox News, in which she was responding to criticisms Mr. Ramaswamy leveled at her during the third GOP debate on Wednesday night.

Among the victories for Democrats on Tuesday were Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear’s reelection and the keeping and flipping, respectively, of the Virginia state Senate and House of Delegates.

To qualify for the fourth GOP debate, candidates must meet either of two polling thresholds: “at least 6 percent in two national polls” or “6 percent in one national poll and 6 percent in one early state poll from two separate ‘carve out’ states,” according to the RNC.

They also need a minimum of 80,000 unique donors, with at least 200 donors from each of 20 or more states and territories.

The obesity drug price war has just begun following the Food and Drug Administration’s Wednesday approval of Zepbound, a weight-loss drug from Eli Lilly and Company. Zepbound is anticipated to be more affordable than Novo Nordisk’s Wegovy and will be stocked at US pharmacies after Thanksgiving. 

Zepbound is the latest entrant into the GLP-1 craze this year as obese Americans give up Pelotons for ‘miracle’ weight loss drugs that can help people lose up to 5% of body weight in a month. The new drug costs 21% less per month – or about $1,060 for a shot, compared with the premium price of $1,349 a month for Wegovy, according to Bloomberg. 

Despite the high monthly cost of Wegovy, which can be comparable to expenses like car payments, rent, or mortgage payments and thus unaffordable for many folks, along with some insurance companies unwilling to pick up the bill, the introduction of Zepbound offers hope for more affordable options in the GLP-1 space. 

Bloomberg noted Lilly’s discount has likely instigated the opening move of a “war between the two drugmakers to win over insurers’ dollars.” 

There could be a divide-and-conquer strategy between the two drugmakers with insures:

Even as list prices remain high, drugmakers often offer insurance companies steep behind-the-scenes discounts in exchange for favorable coverage, especially when there’s competition from a very similar drug. What drugmakers lose in rebates — as these deals are often called — they gain in potential market share. Winning over the fragmented, complex and lucrative US health-care system is imperative for Lilly and Novo in maximizing long-term profits.

The two drugmakers are experts at navigating the behind-the-scenes fights with insurers for access to their patients. For years, the two competed to get coverage for injectable diabetes drugs, including more recently Mounjaro and Ozempic. They have historically split market-share for diabetes treatments, but the stakes are higher for weight-loss medicines. -Bloomberg

Bloomberg Intelligence’s Michael Shah said Lilly and Novo “want to get broad access, so insurers will likely pit one against the other to secure the biggest discount.” 

Shah estimates that Novo has discounted Wegovy by at least 55% to secure access with insurers. He said the obesity drug war will likely mean rebates will move higher. This is a good sign for obese folks that more affordable pricing is ahead.  

On Wednesday, after Zepbound’s approval, Lilly wrote in a press release that its new drug is a “powerful new option for the treatment of obesity.” Clinicals have shown it can help people lose up to 52 pounds in 16 months. 

Patrik Jonsson, a Lilly executive vice president, recently said the more affordable Zepbound is a “signal from our side” that Lilly is taking drug costs seriously. 

Bloomberg noted the obesity drug wars will accelerate this weekend:

Novo is expected to present data at the American Heart Association meeting from a big trial showing that Wegovy can prevent heart attacks and strokes in cardiovascular patients without diabetes. Those findings could also pressure insurers to cover the drug if it has more perceived health benefits.

The beginning innings of the obesity drug price war appear to have started this week to ‘make America slim again’ (also make billions of dollars along the way). 

Authored by Jeffrey Tucker via The Epoch Times,

Headlines in recent weeks blared that crime is down, all based on a new report from the FBI.

News media picked it up and did the predictable kabuki dance over the greatness of the Biden administration, as if the president has anything to do with it.

Mainly, the point is that all is well.

There’s nothing about which to complain.

You’re safe and prosperous, so just stop your kvetching.

The report stated the following:

“The FBI’s crime statistics estimates for 2022 show that national violent crime decreased an estimated 1.7 percent in 2022 compared to 2021 estimates: Murder and non-negligent manslaughter recorded a 2022 estimated nationwide decrease of 6.1 percent compared to the previous year. In 2022, the estimated number of offenses in the revised rape category saw an estimated 5.4 percent decrease. Aggravated assault in 2022 decreased an estimated 1.1 percent in 2022. Robbery showed an estimated increase of 1.3 percent nationally.”

Before we examine this reported data, consider that there’s no reason to believe that it’s even close to the truth.

In all the chaos of the last several years, people have mostly stopped reporting theft and even assault. It’s so routine and everyone knows that the police will not and probably cannot do anything anyway. This truth is easily confirmed by asking any street-level store owner in any big city. Theft is rampant. Cameras are everywhere. But there’s nothing they can do about it.

Just a couple of days ago, I was in a CVS Pharmacy and startled that the toothpaste was under lock and key. That’s how terrible things have gotten in formerly civilized places.

One wonders about assaults, too. Based on what you can see in midtown Manhattan on any night, does anyone believe that assaults in this setting are being reported? What precisely would be the point?

To be sure, murders are different. Those data are less subject to reporting problems. But here’s another problem: a basic statistical error in how it is presented. It’s a sophomoric point but nonetheless real. Whether something is up or down, getting better or getting worse, entirely depends on the baseline that you choose as your starting date. If you choose the absolute worst peak of a trend, everything else looks good by comparison.

That’s precisely what the FBI has done.

It has chosen the worst possible year in order to make our present hellish reality seem great by comparison. Joshua Crawford of the Georgia Center for Opportunity explains:

“Part of the problem with most media analysis is that 2019 didn’t represent a historical baseline of homicide and violent crime rates in America—2014 did. Nationally, violent crime and murder were much more prevalent in 2019 than in 2014. So though U.S. rates have fallen back to pre-pandemic levels, the country is well above normal violent-crime rates. Total violent crime in 2022 was 5 percent higher than in 2014, an increase that represents tens of thousands of additional victims in a single year. The national homicide rate in 2022 was 43 percent higher than in 2014. Since 2015, there have been roughly 30,000 more murders in the U.S. than there would have been if the homicide rate had stayed at the 2014 low.”

Which is to say, this is all terrible news. It’s only not as terrible as the most terrible possible reality of 4 years ago. This isn’t crime being down; this is crime persisting and even worsening in many respects in many places, especially in blue areas such as San Francisco.

We’re all getting pretty fed up with the lying by statistics. Sadly, it often works. It depends fundamentally on the public’s statistical ignorance, which is undoubtedly very high. People can only understand the most rudimentary notions, such as “up” and “down,” without asking more important questions such as “Compared with what?” much less more sophisticated questions such as “Are we talking about an absolute fall or a drop in the rate of increase?”

We experience this constantly with inflation data. For more than two years, we’ve kept hearing about a fall in the inflation rate. People hear that and think, “Oh, prices are coming back down,” without even realizing that this isn’t what it means. It means a falling rate at which prices are going up. Prices are still going up.

Mass statistical ignorance is extremely costly. It allows a ruling class to toss around numbers all the time to sound vaguely sciency but without having any real substance behind the claims. This is what enabled the Biden administration to say daily that the job market is great, that economic growth is strong, that Americans are growing wealthier, and now, that crime is down. It’s all completely gibberish and contradicted by every bit of reality that we observe with our own eyes.

The crime problem is a major one because it directly affects two fundamental points of security that are essential to the good life: security of property and security of person. Both are in deep trouble in America today. It only adds insult to literal injury that our own FBI is tossing around extremely misleading data to suggest that it’s all in our heads.

If and when things settle down, and America gets its act together again, there needs to be a mass educational campaign to do remedial classes in math and statistics (and probably logic, too). It was the ignorance of the basics that allowed so many people to be bamboozled during the COVID-19 era. When you don’t really understand the math or data, you have no real choice but to trust the interpretation of the featured experts. This is a huge problem.

During this period of our lives, property became ever less secure, first wrecked by government edict and then threatened by mobs of riots and now under assault from petty thieves and organized shoplifting gangs. Respect for life has declined, too. Generally, the very notions of human dignity and bodily autonomy have declined in moral legitimacy in the public mind.

Foot traffic in our cities has fallen dramatically, and this is partially a result of crime fears. Will murders decline from their highs, too? Certainly. But this isn’t because our streets are safer. It’s because people are too terrified to go there. This isn’t an improvement but evidence of a worsening problem.

That kind of analysis is too deep and rich for sound bites in today’s manipulated public square, where propaganda always seems to prevail over facts. It’s true in economics. It’s true in public health. And now we see that it’s true in crime reporting as well. It’s just another sector of life in which the decline in trust is much merited.

Authored by Riley Waggaman via Off-Guardian.org,

The transition to CBDCs will be completely voluntary, though. You needn’t worry!

Alexei Moiseev, Russia’s deputy minister of finance, is the world’s most candid space lizard.

When he announced in a September 2021 interview that “the digital ruble is a replacement for the cash ruble”, skeptics and haters spread hurtful rumors that Moiseev’s refreshing and award-winning honesty had been taken out of context.

Here’s what Mr. Moiseev told RIA Novosti two years later, on October 30, 2023:

Essentially, [the digital ruble] is the real currency of the 22nd or any other century, which at the end of the day must replace cash.

He also promised that the digital ruble would be more “convenient” than cash and non-cash transactions. Safety and convenience are the guiding principles of the 21st century, so it’s easy to imagine that the 22nd century will be extremely safe and outrageously convenient.

source: ria.ru

But just to be 100% clear: Elvira Nabiullina and her devoted blog-admirers promise that Russians will never be coerced into using digital rubles.

The gradual transition to CBDCs will be an organic process—a naturally occurring result of Extreme Convenience.

Russians will never be prevented from using cash in certain situations, even though this is already happening right now, today, in 2023.

That was fast. (source / source)

But that’s neither here nor there. As the Bank of Russia’s universally loved chairwoman said just yesterday, Russians will always be allowed to decide how they receive their salaries and pensions—that is her current “position” and it would be rude to even consider the possibility that this position might change.

Just like it would be uncouth to think that the Bank of Russia’s position on placing restrictions on how digital rubles can be spent (“coloring” them) would ever change.

All Russians understand how convenient and voluntary the 21st and 22nd centuries will be.

Just look at what they’re saying on the internet forums:

source: yaplakal.com

This week, gun owners scored two major victories in the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit. One judge granted a preliminary injunction that halts the enforcement of the recent Biden Administration’s pistol brace rule by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives on a nationwide basis, while another determined that the Biden administration did not have the authority to regulate ‘ghost guns.’ 

On Wednesday, in the case Britto v. ATF, Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk of the US District Court for the Northern District of Texas issued a nationwide injunction halting the ATF’s enforcement of the rule that redefines braced pistols as short-barreled rifles under the National Firearms Act. 

Enacted earlier this year, the pistol brace rule would jail or fine tens of millions of law-abiding Americans who refused to reclassify their braced weapons as short-barreled rifles. 

Two of the three plaintiffs in Britto v. ATF were injured Marine veterans represented by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, who argued the rule violates their Second Amendment and be thrown out for “vagueness.” Pistol braces were designed in 2012 to help disabled veterans shoot rifles more accurately. Meanwhile, radical Democrats on Capitol Hill frequently lied about the braces, saying they were ‘machine guns.’ 

“Additionally, ATF admits the 10-year cost of the Rule is over one billion dollars,” Judge Kacsmaryk said. “And because of the Rule, certain manufacturers that obtain most of their sales from stabilizing braces risk having to close their doors for good.”

Kacsmaryk claimed, “The Court is certainly sympathetic to the ATF’s concerns over public safety in the wake of tragic mass shootings.”

“The Rule embodies Salutary policy goals meant to protect vulnerable people in our society. But public safety concerns must be addressed in ways that are lawful. This rule is not,” he added. 

The Biden administration’s Justice Department will most likely appeal to the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals on the pistol brace ruling. 

The next win for gun owners was realized on Thursday when a three-judge panel of the New Orleans-based 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals sided with gun owners, gun rights groups, and manufacturers in declaring the ATF’s 2022 ‘ghost gun’ rule is “unlawful.” 

The rule updated the definition of a “firearm,” “frame,” and “receiver” under the Gun Control Act of 1968 to force ghost gun makers and gun shops to run background checks. 

In writing for the 5th Circuit panel, Circuit Judge Kurt Engelhardt said ATF’s rule “flouts clear statutory text and exceeds the legislatively imposed limits on agency authority in the name of public policy.”

“ATF, in promulgating its final rule, attempted to take on the mantle of Congress to ‘do something’ with respect to gun control,” Engelhardt wrote, adding, “But it is not the province of an executive agency to write laws for our nation.”

In a statement, Cody Wisniewski, a lawyer for the plaintiffs at the Firearms Policy Coalition Action Foundation, called the ruling a “massive victory against ATF and a huge blow to the Biden administration’s gun control agenda.”

“The Fifth Circuit has thoroughly rebuked the Biden ATF for acts of legislation, which only Congress may do under our Constitution,” said Defense Distributed’s Cody Wilson, also one of the plaintiffs in the case. 

*   *   *

Rulings:

Britto v. ATF

VanDerStok v. Garland

Authored by James Howard Kunstler via Kunstler.com,

Party, Party!

Of course, you already sense that the 2024 election will be a freaky event, if it happens at all. If it’s not America’s last election altogether, it may be the last one that follows the traditional format that has signified stability in our country’s high tide as a great power: that is, a contest between Republicans and Democrats. Both parties are likely to crash and burn in the year ahead, along with a whole lot of other things on the tottering scaffold of normal life.

Have you lost count yet of the number of things in our country that are broken?

• The justice system.

• Public safety.

• Education.

• Medicine.

• Money.

• Transportation.

• Housing.

• The food supply.

• The border.

• The News business.

• The arts.

• Our relations with other countries.

That’s just the big institutional stuff.  

At the personal scale its an overwhelming plunge in living standards, loss of incomes, careers, chattels, liberties. . .  poor health (especially mental health). . . and failing confidence in any plausible future.

The reasons behind all that failure and loss are pretty straightforward. The business model for operating a high-tech industrial economy is broken. That includes especially the business model for affordable energy: oil, gas, nuclear, and the electric grid that runs on all that. We opted out of an economy that produced things of real value. We replaced that with a financial matrix of banking fakery. That racket made a very few people supernaturally wealthy while incrementally dissolving the middle-class. We destroyed local and regional business and scaled up what was left into super-giant predatory companies that can no longer maintain their supply chains. Fragility everywhere in everything.

Bad choices all along the way, you could say, but perhaps an inexorable process of nature. Things are born, they grow, they peak, they decline, they die. The difference this time is the scale of everything we do is so enormous that the wreckage is also epic. It’s happening in Western Civ at the moment, led by its biggest nation state, us, the USA, but it will eventually go global, spread to the BRICs and the many countries that will never actually “develop.”

I started writing about the fiasco of suburbia decades ago, and now the endgame of that living arrangement is in view. The dissolving middle class has gotten priced-out of motoring. Motoring is the basis of the suburban living arrangement. No motoring, no suburbia. It’s that simple. There was widespread belief among idealistic reformers that suburbia could just be “retrofitted” for “smarter” daily life, but that dream is over. The capital (money) is not there to fix it, and there’s no prospect that we’ll somehow come up with it as far ahead as we can see.

So far, the collapse of suburbia has happened in slow motion, but the pace is quickening now and it’ll get supercharged when the bond markets go down, as they must, considering the country’s catastrophic fiscal circumstances. That will produce exactly the zombie apocalypse telegraphed in all those movies and TV series over recent years: normality overrun by demonic hungry ghosts. Every day in suburbia will be Halloween, and not in a fun way.

All this is apprehended to some degree by the increasingly frightened public, though they have a hard time articulating it within any of the popular frameworks presented by politics, religion, or what appears lately to be extremely corrupt science. The people see what’s coming but they can’t make sense of it, and the stress makes a great many of them insane. Without a way to construct a coherent view of reality, or tell the difference between what’s real and what’s not, they behave accordingly: anything goes and nothing matters.

In the face of all this the two big political parties are helpless and clueless. The Democrats have made themselves into a giant feedback loop amplifying the poor mental health of their constituents. They are in CrazyLand, where there are no boundaries anymore, and to insist that there should be is an affront that gets you cancelled. They are in upside-down inside-out world. Hillary Clinton demonstrated this perfectly the other day on ABC’s The View when she accused her party’s opponents of trying to “do away with elections, trying to do away with the opposition, and do away with a free press….” It’s hard to imagine a more impressive lack of self-awareness.

.@HillaryClinton tells #TheView a win for former Pres. Trump in 2024 “would be the end of our country as we know it.” https://t.co/cVclFZQmjA pic.twitter.com/E8tevUoZbs

— The View (@TheView) November 8, 2023

And, of course, they are the party of “Joe Biden,” the moneygrubbing ghoul pretending to be president and pretending to run for another term — with hard evidence of his crimes publicly unspooling day by day now. The Democratic Party will not survive after an election that he runs in, and there is plenty of reason to believe that his regime might cancel or postpone the election on account of some contrived “emergency.”

The Republican Party is also badly splintered. Forces in the party are trying like hell to dissociate from Donald Trump, despite his clear domination in the polling. And another faction led informally by Rep. Matt Gaetz and new speaker Mike Johnson is in active rebellion against the GOP blob cabal around deposed speaker Kevin McCarthy, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, and the evanescent uber-fool, Mitt Romney.

You may have seen candidate Vivek Ramaswamy go after Republican Party chair Ronna McDaniel (Mitt’s niece) in this week’s debate, a pretty savage attack, but well-earned. Ms. McDaniel has a unique libido for losing elections. She has especially helped deploy money from the GOP campaign war chest against candidates in her own party. The perfidy is quite out of this world. And it looks like the Matt Gaetz / Mike Johnson faction is good and goddam sick of it, too.

The net result of all this internal strife is a party that can’t function as an opposition to the Democratic Party of Chaos. So, chaos reigns for now. Chaos at the border. Chaos in foreign wars. Chaos in government finance. Chaos in the streets and the stores. Chaos in the school curricula. Chaos in the kids’ minds. Chaos in the household. Chaos in the supply chains. You can expect the chaos to really amp up when the financial markets blow and every household mired in debt faces its own margin call — along with every business in America.

Meanwhile, Mr. Trump slogs through an Okeefenokee Swamp of tribulations laid before him like the supernatural character he is. If he gets to the nomination despite it all, and happens to win the election, if there is one, every reptile and rodent will get bum-rushed out of the party and it will be transformed into something new. If not, the brand is finished and many in it will be looking to start a completely different brand.