Should the NRA be dissolved?

It seems the New York Attorney-General has filed suit to dissolve the National Rifle Association (NRA) in response to what she calls "fraud and abuse".

Attorney General Letitia James claims in a lawsuit filed Thursday that she found financial misconduct in the millions of dollars and that it contributed to a loss of more than $64 million over a three-year period.

The suit alleges that top NRA executives misused charitable funds for personal gain, awarded contracts to friends and family members, and provided contracts to former employees to ensure loyalty.

There's more at the link.

On the one hand, I'm reluctant to see the NRA disappear, because it does so much good for the shooting community:  education and training programs, assistance to local shooting ranges, etc.  On the other hand, as I've said in these pages before, the open corruption exhibited by its current leadership is inexcusable.  There's no way I'll donate to or support the organization unless and until a wholesale house-cleaning has been conducted, and Wayne LaPierre and all his cronies and supporters are evicted from the NRA once and for all.

I'm very conflicted about this lawsuit.  It's been filed by an Attorney-General who's been outspoken in her determination to tackle the NRA as a symbol of the "gun culture" she deplores.  I'm sure there's political animus involved on her part.  On the other hand, if she's right about finding corruption and illegal activity in the NRA, she's entirely within her rights to file for its dissolution - and that may not be a bad thing.  Indeed, if LaPierre and his cronies are determined to hold onto control no matter what, it may be the only way to get rid of them.  The problem will be to stop them moving into other organizations and mounting a take-over bid.  Prison terms might be the only way to avoid that.

Whatever happens, the shooting sports community will be impacted by this mess.  I suggest we all do our best to support other activist groups who'll work to support our Second Amendment rights - organizations such as Gun Owners of America, the Second Amendment Foundation, etc., as well as regional and local groups.  I also hope right-minded individuals within the NRA are already taking steps to "export" its training programs and other important operations to other groups, so that if the NRA disappears, they can continue seamlessly under another umbrella.

Even if the NRA survives, there's the problem of what to do with those complicit in any illegal or corrupt acts.  I hope they go to prison.  They deserve no better, and they've forfeited our trust.  Strip them of their ill-gotten gains, and let them rot behind bars.

Peter

When the "rule of law" makes no sense, vigilante law takes over

The Foundation for Economic Education (FEE) has just published a very good article examining why respect for the law is diminishing among Americans.

Given the events of the last few months, there can be little doubt that Americans’ respect for the rule of law is dissipating, and this is happening in no small part because inconsistencies in the law are becoming obvious.

. . .

Governor Cuomo recently issued emergency orders that New Yorkers must wear face masks in public, practice social distancing, and self-quarantine when they return to New York from various high-risk states. The Governor managed to violate all three of his own rules recently on a trip to Savannah. A private citizen who behaves contrary to his own rules is merely a hypocrite. But when an elected official does so, it sends a message to the people. It tells them the official’s orders just aren’t that important.

. . .

In response to COVID-19, the government has suspended all manner of rules and regulations originally enacted for public safety. To encourage telemedicine, the Department of Health and Human Services suspended rules requiring medical professionals to have separate licenses to practice medicine in multiple states. The Food and Drug Administration relaxed regulations in order to allow companies producing COVID-19 test kits to get the kits to market faster. The Department of Transportation suspended rules limiting the number of hours truckers could drive per day so as to get products to markets faster. It’s inconsistent that the government would find it necessary to suspend rules enacted for our safety in order to make us safer. Either the suspension is not making us safer, or the suspended rules weren’t making us safe to begin with.

When the law becomes incomprehensible and inconsistent, people lose faith in both the law and government institutions that secure it. This may go a long way toward explaining the growing political animosity of the past decades. In ceasing to be a nation of laws, we have become instead a nation of lawmakers. If the law is to be king, it must speak in a clear and consistent voice. And if that can’t happen, it should say as little as possible.

There's more at the link.

Sadly, that's typical of most governments, and has been throughout history.  The initial tendency for any government is to rule imperiously.  "Do as I say, because I say so!"  Kings and emperors were notorious for this.  As democracy spread, the new style of government found it necessary to persuade people to respect the law rather than merely command it;  but that wasn't too difficult if obedience to the laws was associated with receiving benefits from the government that made them.  "You want roads, and sewers, and street lights, and good governance?  Then you have to accept these rules and regulations along with them.  They're part of the package.  Rebel against them, and your towns/cities/states will become a lot less habitable."

After a while, when society grew too big, and there were simply too many people to pay attention to minor groups or problems, the unelected bureaucracy took over.  Politicians were too busy attending to the broad sweep of problems to worry about how to implement solutions.  Instead, they delegated that authority to faceless bureaucrats who didn't have to answer to the people for what they did.

That's how a simple legislative act like establishing the Transportation Security Administration can lead to endless delays and pettifogging bureaucracy imposed on our travel.  As FEE's article points out:

TSA regulations ... restrict the size of liquid containers that may be brought on board aircraft. Passengers caught with over-sized containers are required to throw them in a trash can located at the security checkpoint. If over-sized liquids are a danger, they should be disposed of in a secure location, away from people. If they aren’t a danger, the TSA is simply wasting people’s time and causing aggravation by collecting them. The rule is inconsistent with the rule’s implementation.

Quite so.  Those regulations aren't included in the law establishing the TSA.  They're add-ons by faceless bureaucrats drunk with power.  "Do as I say, peasant, even if it doesn't make sense, or you won't fly today!"

An even worse danger is when politics determine how the law is applied.  Take St. Louis, Missouri.  Rioters who are clearly breaking the law are arrested by police - and immediately released without charge by the left-wing District Attorney, who sympathizes with their position.  On the other hand, the McCluskeys, who took up arms to defend their home (entirely in accordance with the provisions of Missouri law) are charged with "brandishing a weapon" by that same DA, in defiance of the law (so much and so obviously in defiance of it that the State's Attorney-General immediately moved to dismiss the charges, and the State's Governor promised to pardon the McCluskeys if necessary).

When the enforcement of laws is selective, depending on the political views of those charged with their enforcement, then the rule of law no longer applies.  That's one of the primary reasons why the USA is in such turmoil today.  The law is not being equally or fairly applied in far too many jurisdictions.  Did the residents and businesses in the so-called "CHOP" zone in Seattle consent to be stripped of police protection, and governed by arbitrary "mob rule"?  Of course they didn't - but they weren't asked for their opinion.  Political correctness overruled their rights under the law.

Tragically, such policies and incidents can have only one outcome.  People will take the law into their own hands, because they can't trust the authorities to administer it fairly and even-handedly.  Are demonstrators approaching a neighborhood, and those living there know the law enforcement authorities will do little to protect them from extremists?  Then they're going to protect themselves, by any means they deem necessary.  Genuinely peaceful demonstrators will be treated the same as violent extremists, because there's no time or inclination to distinguish between them.

What's more, locals will probably obstruct any subsequent investigation, because they have to look after their own.  After all, they know law enforcement authorities won't.  Indeed, in some jurisdictions, investigators may turn a blind eye to defenders' transgressions.  After all, when so many demonstrators are calling to "defund the police", the police know who's on which side - and they're almost certainly reluctant to crack down on their own supporters.  If evidence conveniently "can't be found" to support charges, those charges will never be brought.

I fear vigilantism and "lynch law" are about to make a comeback, because in the absence of the even-handed, objective rule of law, there's little alternative.

Peter

"The Incredible Economic Costs of Political Censorship"

That's the title of a long, but very interesting article by Aaron Clarey about the real cost of political correctness and "woke"-ness to the US economy, both businesses and consumers.  He goes into a lot of detail about how political and social issues are creating an economic burden of colossal proportions.  Here's a lengthy excerpt from a still longer article, which I do recommend you read in full.

So what is politics but a dump truck full of sand being poured into the US economic engine?

Here this is not so much Big Tech as it is every company that has decided to pursue a marketing strategy of [corporate social responsibility] and corporate virtue signalling.  The explicit financial outlays corporations have made to "celebrate diversity" or "celebrate Gay Pride month" or hire something as wasteful as a "Diversity and Inclusion VP" ... is a profligate waste of money.

. . .

But real cost to the US economy comes at the micro-economic level.  Specifically, "diversity/sensitivity/sexual-harassment/CSR/otherwise-political" meetings.

Why an accountant has to sit through a meeting of any political flavor is beyond any sane, rational person's guess.

Why you're forcing your entire labor force into an "environmentalism" meeting to "save the planet" can only be a statement to your political-radicalism and not your ability to be a manager.

And why you shut down the presses, so you can have some huckster in the form of a "diversity consultant" insult your entire staff by falsely accusing the of race/sexism, means you're just a grade a political prick who really wants to destroy employee morale.

With employers replacing merit with traits, they not only piss off their largely un-bigoted labor force, they also heavily disincentivize people to perform their best.  And as they promote people based on the color of their skin and not their content of character, there is a huge talent loss to the corporate sector of the economy.  So when you tally up the costs of:

• The explicit financial costs expended on political virtue signaling
• Lost economic production do to unnecessary meetings
• The demoralization of your employees accusing them of being race/sexist
• The loss of loyalty from your employees
• The lower economic production
• The exodus of your best talent to competitors or self employment

The total economic costs to society are easily in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year.

But this is just one example of political grains of sand getting in everybody's engine.  The (largely) leftist political zeitgeist is everywhere in the US.

I've spent about a week's worth of labor going through THREE different merch sites because Cafepress won't allow "guns" on their products, Redbubble won't allow anything Corona-related, and Zazzle is just a nightmare of an interface to use.

A buddy of mine I know uses his wife's SS number as a shell company to get government contracts because "vagina > dick."

Nearly every college student has to waste 2 years and $40,000 taking unnecessary leftist-liberal arts prereqs to get degrees that has nothing to do with them.

And how many death by a thousand cuts do you think these debatably-valid mask mandates are costing society both in terms of micro-economic costs as well as mental illness?

These daily micro-transactions/costs add up, slowing economic production as we waste time jumping over these unnecessary hurdles, all because corporations (among other institutions) insist on politics and political censorship.

And then finally, switching costs.

Though, not major, if corporate politics gets too insulting, people will leave.  This was the case where nearly every corporation converged and universally took a knee, and sent out some kind of lecturing "letter from the CEO" essentially accusing their entire customer base of being rac/sexist.  The taste left in customers' mouths when corporations go political is not pleasant to any one.  But being accused of being "toxic," "racist," "sexist," or plain simple "evil" is not acceptable at all.  And so now many people want to leave certain corporate brands and find new ones.

In the case of Gillette razors, this is simple.  You simply don't buy Gillette or any Proctor and Gamble product.  But what about cell phone providers?  Retirement brokerages?  Banks?  Or anything more infrastructural to your life?

Now we once again have a triple cost of labor.

The customer has to go and research and find a company that isn't a marxist, insulting, sanctimonious, virtue-signaling slime bucket (which is harder than you think as all corporations have jumped on the virtue signaling bandwagon).

The customer also has to change and update all their credit card numbers/billing addresses/EIN/etc. etc. (I got to have this fun experience when I was switching from Patreon to Subscribestar).

The company losing the customer now has to spend resources on closing the account, but not first without having the uneviable customer service rep waste resources trying to plead with you to stay.

Then the company acquiring the new customer has to spend resources setting up your new account.  Happy as they may be to take your apolitical business, they still need to spend resources setting it up.

If corporations had just shut the f up about politics in the first place, following the golden rule of you don't talk politics or religion, they could have kept their clients, saved their money, and people would have been happy with the good product at a fair price they were selling.  But no, corporations had to get woke, they had to introduce politics, and now we all get to spend our afternoons changing usernames and passwords...which, if you didn't know, doesn't improve the economy or society.

In the end there is no way to tally what the costs of politics, political censorship, and corporate virtue signaling is.  As an economist I would put the back-of-napkin calculations at easily half a trillion in explicit financial costs, but (more importantly) easily two trillion in lost potential economic production.  And this says nothing of the ancillary mental and psychological costs of stress, frustration, anger, even suicide/depression people suffer (least of all, those unfortunate souls who have to sift through all the horrific content being uploaded to Big Tech platforms).  But whatever the number, it is a steep price to pay to either pander to advertisers' political sensibilities, pander to society's preferred politics, or to pander to the political pet-projects of the now-Gen X managerial class who truly believe "diversity" is a marketing strategy.

There's much more at the link.  Very worthwhile reading, and food for thought.

Peter

The Congo mine that made the Hiroshima bomb work

Seventy-five years ago today, on August 6th, 1945, the first atomic bomb used in combat was dropped on the Japanese city of Hiroshima.  It killed 70,000-80,000 people through blast and the subsequent firestorm, while another 70,000 or so were injured.

Many people still don't know that the uranium used in the bomb did not come from North America.  It originated in an obscure part of Africa.  The BBC reports:

The Shinkolobwe mine – named after a kind of boiled apple that would leave a burn if squeezed – was the source for nearly all of the uranium used in the Manhattan Project, culminating with the construction of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945.

. . .

The story of Shinkolobwe began when a rich seam of uranium was discovered there in 1915, while the Congo was under colonial rule by Belgium. There was little demand for uranium back then: its mineral form is known as pitchblende, from a German phrase describing it as a worthless rock. Instead, the land was mined by the Belgian company Union Minière for its traces of radium, a valuable element that had been recently isolated by Marie and Pierre Curie.

It was only when nuclear fission was discovered in 1938 that the potential of uranium became apparent. After hearing about the discovery, Albert Einstein immediately wrote to US president Franklin D Roosevelt, advising him that the element could be used to generate a colossal amount of energy – even to construct powerful bombs. In 1942, US military strategists decided to buy as much uranium as they could to pursue what became known as the Manhattan Project. And while mines existed in Colorado and Canada, nowhere in the world had as much uranium as the Congo.

“The geology of Shinkolobwe is described as a freak of nature,” says Tom Zoellner, who visited Shinkolobwe in the course of writing Uranium – War, Energy, and the Rock that Shaped the World. “In no other mine could you see a purer concentration of uranium. Nothing like it has ever been found.”

Mines in the US and Canada were considered a “good” prospect if they could yield ore with 0.03% uranium. At Shinkolobwe, ores typically yielded 65% uranium. The waste pile of rock deemed too poor quality to bother processing, known as tailings, contained 20% uranium.

In a deal with Union Minière – negotiated by the British, who owned a 30% interest in the company – the US secured 1,200 tonnes of Congolese uranium, which was stockpiled on Staten Island, US, and an additional 3,000 tonnes that was stored above ground at the mine in Shinkolobwe. But it was not enough. US Army engineers were dispatched to drain the mine, which had fallen into disuse, and bring it back into production.

Under Belgian rule, Congolese workers toiled day and night in the open pit, sending hundreds of tonnes of uranium ore to the US every month. “Shinkolobwe decided who would be the next leader of the world,” says Mombilo. “Everything started there.”

All of this was carried out under a blanket of secrecy, so as not to alert Axis powers about the existence of the Manhattan Project. Shinkolobwe was erased from maps, and spies sent to the region to sow deliberate disinformation about what was taking place there. Uranium was referred to as “gems”, or simply “raw material”. The word Shinkolobwe was never to be uttered.

This secrecy was maintained long after the end of the war. “Efforts were made to give the message that the uranium came from Canada, as a way of deflecting attention away from the Congo,” says Williams. The effort was so thorough, she says, that the belief the atomic bombs were built with Canadian uranium persists to this day.

There's more at the link, including the less savory side of the mine and the damage it's done to the Congo over the decades since then.

I've been in that area.  Shinkolobwe isn't far from the road between Lumumbashi and Kolwezi, in southern Congo.  I've traveled between them more than once.  I knew there was a mine there, still operational at the time, but didn't know the details.  It's interesting that I had to wait until I was on another continent, decades later, to find out its history.

Peter

Trite, perhaps, but still very, very true

Here's Stephan Pastis' "Pearls Before Swine" comic strip from last Sunday.  Click the image to be taken to a larger view at the strip's Web page.

That's something I tried to get across to my congregations as a pastor.  Am I praying for God to do something?  Guess whose hands and feet and eyes and ears and mouth he has to do it with?  That's right . . . mine.

When I hear people saying that "something should be done about" or "the government should fix" this, or that, or the other problem, I find all too often that they mean someone else should do it.  Challenge them to be part of the solution, and they'll recoil in indignation.

It's the old saying writ large about "putting your money where your mouth is".  Too few of us are prepared to do that.  It's a permanent challenge to me, too, and a salutary reminder that I have to practice what I preach, and not just say it.  Actions speak a heck of a lot louder than words - and I don't mean activism, demonstrations, rioting and extremism, either.  Any fool can tear down.  It takes a worthwhile human being to build up . . . and that starts with us.

Peter

Burning Bibles? If that's the way they want it, so be it.

To my surprise, I've seen relatively few comments from any mainstream Christian denominations about the burning of Bibles by extremist demonstrators in Portland.  What's more, I note that Twitter and other outlets are systematically deleting and/or making unavailable all video evidence of it happening - almost as if they're aware that the demonstrators crossed a line by doing that, and want to cover for them.

Well, I'm not a representative of any denomination, but I am a Christian:  so let me put in my $0.02 worth.  When I see someone burning a Bible, I see that person rejecting what I believe and stand for, not just in terms of beliefs, but in terms of the moral foundation of how I try to live.  It's also the foundation of most of our legal system, no matter what anyone might try to deny.  Almost all Western laws and jurisprudence stemmed from Christian dominance of Europe, and spread from there to European colonies in the New World.  That's an historical fact that can't be denied.

I'm not personally offended by Bible-burning;  nor do I think God, as I understand him, is personally offended.  Rather, I'm saddened by the lack of tolerance shown by the demonstrators.  If they expect me to accept them as fellow citizens, and tolerate their beliefs, shouldn't they be extending the same courtesies to me?  Clearly, they're not:  therefore I have to believe that their intolerance extends, not just to what I believe in, but to me as a believer as well.

So be it.  "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you."  They've just done that.  Their behavior marks them as my enemies.  They need not be surprised if I view them, and respond to them, as such - with as much mercy as possible, sure, but nevertheless with determination that they will not intimidate me, and will not deter me from living my life as I believe God requires of me.

What say you, readers?

Peter

Ship construction: an economic canary in the coal mine

Canaries were carried into coal mines by miners for many years.  Being far more susceptible to coal gas than humans, the birds would die quickly if the gas seeped into the workings, thereby alerting the miners to get out before they were overcome themselves.  The expression "a canary in a coal mine" has come to mean something that indicates serious problems ahead.

Orders for industrial plant and machinery have long had that status as far as the general economy is concerned.  Shipbuilding is a harbinger of the health of world trade.  Ships wear out, and must be replaced;  and, in times of economic growth, more ships are needed to expand the world's merchant fleet, to carry more goods.  Therefore, the latest news on shipping orders is not good.

Pre-COVID, the bull case for shipping rates was all about plunging newbuild orders. A drop in orders in 2019 pointed to rising freight rates in 2021, given the lag between contract signing and delivery.

Mid-COVID, the bull case for rates is even more about plunging newbuild orders than before. There will be a lot fewer vessels on the water in 2021, 2022 and beyond than previously thought.

New data provided to FreightWaves by U.K.-based VesselsValue confirms that 2020 is shaping up to be an exceptionally weak year for tanker, bulker and container-ship orders.

New data from Alphaliner shows that container-ship newbuild capacity is down to just 9.4% of capacity on the water. “For the first time in more than 20 years, the global newbuilding pipeline fell below the 10% threshold,” reported Alphaliner on Wednesday, calling it a “historic low.”

According to VesselsValue, the tanker orderbook has fallen to 9% of the operating fleet in terms of capacity (measured in deadweight tons or DWT) as of July. This is down sharply from a high of 23% in January 2016.

The dry bulk orderbook is only 7% of the on-the-water fleet. This is down from 24% in January 2015 and an even higher peak — 27% — in January 2010.

There's more at the link.

Shipping is the backbone of trade around the world.  About 90% of it is transported by sea.  Therefore, if those carrying it are not replacing ships as often as they should, and are not expanding their fleets but rather contracting them by idling existing vessels, it's a very serious warning sign that the world's economy is still slowing down.

As for the US economy, John Wilder points out:

“Collapse” is a word that gets overused by the news media ... In this case, however, the use of the term “collapse” is entirely appropriate when 32.9% of the economy disappears.  And that dismal number is after an unprecedented borrowing and spending.  The US had a GDP of about $20 trillion in 2018.  This year, so far, there has been about $5 trillion in extra spending and balance sheet expansion.

So, $10 trillion in half a year, reduced by the 32.9% lowering in GDP takes us to $7 trillion or so.  That’s how big they’re saying the economy is.  That’s bad.  But if you subtract out the $2 trillion in “stimulus” funds that takes you down to $5 trillion.

Borrow a million dollars, and the bank owns you.  Borrow a billion dollars, and you own the bank.  Borrow $26.6 trillion dollars? You are the United States.

Even if NONE of the Federal Reserve’s balance sheet where they sprinkled money into the stock market got added to the GDP figure, we’re talking a 50% reduction in the economy in real terms.

50%.

Half.

The economy isn’t an economy at this point – it’s a smoking crater.  Well, it would be a smoking crater if there was enough money to pay for the smoke.

Again, more at the link.

This is going to translate to a direct impact on what we, as consumers, can expect to see on supermarket shelves.  Many have already noted a smaller selection of goods, compared to what used to be in stock.  I'm hearing that most Christmas shopping season orders, which should by now be in or near this country prior to distribution, have not yet showed up.  That may be due to slowdowns in overseas manufacturing, or a shortage of ships to deliver them . . . but it could also be (and I think it is) due to stores in the USA not ordering as much as they usually do for the festive season, and slowing the pace of deliveries, to conserve their cash flow.  Either way, it's not healthy.

Friends, given the disruptions we expect (thanks to Antifa, BLM, and who knows what other extremist groups) as the November elections draw nearer, and given the warning signs (including rapidly rising food prices) that world trade and the US economy are not in a healthy state, we need to be on our guard.  We spoke yesterday about the need to re-evaluate our emergency preparations.  This news is yet another indicator of how important that's becoming, for anyone who has eyes to see and ears to hear.

The warning signs are flashing orange.  Don't wait until they turn to red to prepare yourselves.  We can't necessarily stockpile enough to insulate ourselves completely from what's coming;  but we can buttress our foundations, to ensure that even in very hard times, we can at least survive, even if we don't thrive.

• Pay off debt if at all possible, and build up what financial reserves you can in cash, even if they're small.
• Stockpile at least 30 days of essential supplies;  food, household consumables, etc.  Longer would be better.  It doesn't have to be luxurious.  Rice and beans may be boring, but you can live on them if you have to - and they're still available, and cheap!  Neither may be the case in future.
• Build up an emergency reserve of critical items such as essential medications.  I'd say plan on at least 90 days' supply.  If necessary, ask your health care provider to give you an extra prescription for them, and pay cash for it if your insurance won't cover it - that's what I did.
• Have your vehicle(s) in good working order, with tires, belts, hoses, etc. in good condition.  Put aside spares of essential parts, and of lubrication oil, transmission and brake fluids, etc.  Try to store at least one tank of fuel per vehicle in approved containers, in case of shortages or other emergency (but don't store it in your residence!  Keep flammable stocks away from people, in a garden shed or something like that.)
• Have alternate means of cooking food, washing clothes, etc.

I've written about such things before.  Follow that link and read the archived articles for yourself.  If guns aren't your thing, ignore those articles, and skip through to those dealing with general preparations.

I believe time is growing short. Let's not waste what we have of it.

Peter

The Beirut blast: nitrates, yes, but was anything else involved?

I'm quite prepared to accept that fireworks sparked the massive explosion in Beirut, Lebanon yesterday.  If you look at video of the incident, the initial fire shows sparkling minor explosions all around the central smoke, typical of ignited fireworks.  As for the enormous blast that followed, I'm also prepared to believe it involved thousands of tons of stored nitrates.

If you look at the color of the smoke cloud left by the explosion, it's got the rusty-red tinge characteristic of nitrate explosions.

I've seen a couple in Africa (on a much smaller scale), and they showed the same effect.  The damage is also consistent with such an explosion.

Consider the Texas City disaster of 1947, which involved a similar amount of nitrates and devastated the port and surrounding areas.  Consider, also, the explosion at a nitrate fertilizer plant in Texas a few years ago, which offers a useful comparison.

However, it's known that Hezbollah had a missile manufacturing and/or maintenance facility in the port area.  I won't be at all surprised to learn that it's no longer there, and that the warheads and propellant of any missiles that were there at the time contributed to the blast and destruction.

You can take it as read that Beirut's harbor will be severely affected by this explosion for years to come.  I doubt it'll be back in any sort of meaningful operation in less than a month, and it'll operate at greatly reduced capacity until port facilities can be rebuilt, restored and replaced.  It'll be a major blow to the city's and the country's economy.

The damages caused by the explosion range between three to five billion dollars and between 200 to 250 thousand people have been left without a place to live.

Lebanon's main wheat silo was destroyed in the explosion, leaving the country with about a month's worth of grain. "We are currently looking for storage areas," Nehme said, adding that Lebanon needed enough inventories to last at least three months to ensure its food security.

There's more at the link.

The explosion will also cause major disruption to Hezbollah's ability to recruit and deploy its forces, and put a major crimp in its wallet, because it supports so many people in southern Lebanon who will now need so much more help than usual.

I doubt very much whether Israel had anything to do with this explosion, in terms of an air or missile strike or sabotage.  The video evidence of a preliminary fireworks fire is convincing.  From Israel's point of view, of course, it was a very fortunate accident, inflicting severe damage on an enemy (Hezbollah) by crippling the country that shelters it (Lebanon).

Geopolitics aside, let's pray for the dozens (at least) of people who died, and the (probably) thousands of injured and bereaved.  It's going to take Lebanon in general, and Beirut in particular, a long time to get over this.

Peter

EDITED TO ADD:  Here's a compilation of videos showing the blast from all angles, and from very close to far away.  It's the best I've seen so far.

The lesson from Minneapolis: If you defund the police, you encourage criminals

The consequences of the riots in Minneapolis on that city's police force, and their effect on crime, are becoming clearer by the day.  The picture is not encouraging for those who live there.

First, the city's police force is losing staff hand over fist.

Minneapolis police are down at least 100 officers since the killing of George Floyd — more than 10% of the force — straining department resources amid a wave of violence and adding extra urgency to the political debate over its future.

Over the past two months, 40 cops have resigned, been fired or are in the process of leaving the force, and another 75 have taken a medical leave for post-traumatic stress disorder they say was caused by the riots that followed Floyd’s death. Dozens more are expected to file for leave in the coming months.

MPD officials not authorized to speak publicly estimate the department, which is budgeted for 888 officers this year, could lose as much as a third of its workforce by the end of the year.

. . .

Though total reported crimes were down 31% in June and 4% by July’s end, gunfire incidents, which tie up multiple squads, soared 224% and 166% during the same period, according to MPD records ... Meanwhile, police stops are down more than 50% each of the last two months.

. . .

The deployment picture has worsened as the department tries to dig itself out of the budgetary hole it’s been in since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. While a recent class of recruits hit the streets last month, another class that was scheduled to start training in August has been canceled. And with a citywide hiring freeze in effect until at least the end of the year, there are no replacements in sight.

There's more at the link.

As a result, police are now warning residents to comply with criminals' demands.  Click the image below for a larger view.

That's cold comfort if you're living in the affected areas, isn't it?  In so many words, the cops are saying "Let the criminals do their worst.  We can't stop them."  So much for protecting and serving the public!

I'm willing to bet similar problems are affecting every city where major riots and protests have erupted, and/or where calls to "defund the police" have dominated city politics.  If I were a cop in those cities, I'd be looking for another job in a more law-abiding community, at once if not sooner.  I'd even be willing to take a cut in pay and accept a loss on the forced sale of my home.  Why should I risk life and limb serving a city that regards me as a sheep to be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness?

Friends, if you find yourselves in such an environment, please be very careful.  I expect tensions to get worse before the November elections - and after they're over, who knows what might happen?

Stay safe, and keep your powder dry.  You may need it real soon now.

Peter

Preparing to weather the COVID-19 economic storm

I've written extensively about the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, and I'm not going to repeat it all here.  Many others have shared similar observations.

I found a recent article at Dark Brightness, a New Zealand blog, to be a very good checklist for my own preparations.  The blog has a lot of faith-based content, but being a retired pastor, that's something I don't mind at all, so I've become a regular visitor there.  I had to laugh at the author's meme about New Zealand prime minister Jacinda Ardern:

The article from which it came contains a lot of very useful thoughts.  Here's an excerpt.

Deleverage.

Sell your assets now, before the file sale. Prices are flat to going up: use that. You need to free up capital. Sell your house first and rent out of town.

Look around the house: Do you have collectables? Downsize your car. Get the mortgage gone and the credit card paid up and torn up.

If we head into a depression, cash is king ... There is a chance that the government will either hyperinflate or confiscate savings, but the biggest risk right now is a global depression, and in such a time you want to have cash for the fire sale that will happen after the storm and when the banks are forced for foreclose.

If you do sell, don’t spend your capital. You are going to need it.

. . .

Minimize.

Live not as your parents lived. They grow up with inflation: if you did not buy something now it would be more expensive in a year’s time. That includes my parents, and they predate boomerdom. Instead think of their parents who lived during the depression. They did not have much, but what they had was very good quality and they cared for it.

The aim here is to spend as little as possible over the long term, use as little outside the house as possible, and survive on one full time income – which may be two or three part time jobs.

Buy carefully and buy quality. Have good clothes (it is time to resurrect “Sunday best”) and work clothes and then rugged clothes: for many work clothing will be rugged clothing.

Get good tools, learn how to use them, sharpen them, and repair them.

About a year ago ... we went through a lot of our clothes, got rid of the worn out ones and the things we did not wear, and bought a few needed replacements. We had found, when traveling, we only wore half of what we bought. Do likewise: repair, reuse, wear out. Shopping is now hunting for quality – and you won’t find that in the main city streets, but you may find it in the farm equipment shops.

There's more at the link.  Interesting and thought-provoking reading.

At a recent gun show in a city near us, I saw signs confirming much of what I've forecast, and what the article above warns about.  There were a lot fewer people than usual walking the aisles.  That may have been due to fears of being exposed to COVID-19, or perhaps because after several months of economic hardship, people didn't have much money to spend.  I suspect the latter.  Nevertheless, business was abysmally slow, and many vendors were despondent.  If one had cash to spend, some real bargains were available as sellers tried to get whatever they could, and cut their prices.  Cash was, indeed, king that day.

I also noted several vendors who were private citizens looking to make ends meet.  They were unemployed, and had no way to earn a living except to sell their personal firearms and ammunition stocks.  Some had sold most of their collections.  That's sad for them, but at least they had something to sell, and could raise money that way.  Others are not so fortunate, right now.

The Wall Street Journal posits that COVID-19 promises to bring long-term disruption to the world.

The pandemic’s legacy will be crisis and chaos—and the trajectory of human civilization has shifted in ways that will test political leaders and economic policy makers more severely than anything since World War II. This is partly because the return of great-power competition introduces new risks and complications into the international system. More fundamentally, it is because the information revolution is beginning to disrupt the world as profoundly and traumatically as the Industrial Revolution disrupted the 19th-century world.

The transformation of the workplace by information technology has been a bright spot in the pandemic, allowing many businesses and important institutions to continue functioning even as key employees stay home. But the same transformation is also driving many of the forces destabilizing society: declines in stable manufacturing jobs, whole regions hollowed out by economic change, the collapse of professional journalism and the rise of social media, the implosion of traditional retail, and looming job threats as self-driving cars and other new technological innovations move into the marketplace.

A host of 21st-century problems threaten to overwhelm the institutions of both national and global governance: the emergence of China as a new kind of economic and geopolitical challenger, the escalating arms races in cyber and biological weapons, the global surge of populism and nationalism, and the growing risks from poorly understood vulnerabilities and relationships in volatile and rapidly changing financial markets. Any one of these could push the world into a cycle of crisis and conflict resembling the first half of the 20th century.

Covid-19 is less a transient, random disturbance after which the world will return to stability than it is a dress rehearsal for challenges to come. History is accelerating, and the leaders, values, institutions and ideas that guide society are going to be tested severely by the struggles ahead.

Again, more at the link.

In case the WSJ article isn't clear enough, its reference to "the first half of the 20th century" encompasses the Great Depression, sandwiched between the First and Second World Wars, the bloodiest conflicts in human history.

I don't see any rapid recovery on the horizon, economic or otherwise.  I continue to predict hard times ahead.  Please think about your own situation, consider what I've written (and what the blogger at Dark Brightness has to say), and prepare as best you can.

Peter

Discreetly carrying a personal defense rifle or shotgun

Following my recent three part series of articles on personal defensive rifles and other riot-related posts, I've had a few questions from readers about how best to carry such a weapon discreetly, without anyone knowing it's there.  I'll address this with an AR-15 rifle, carbine or pistol in mind.  Other weapons such as shotguns may fit the same criteria.

There are several options available, but one consideration is paramount.  In general, if you're discreetly carrying a rifle or carbine, you'll need to do so in disassembled form.  Most AR-15's are simply too long to fit into readily available concealment cases, so you'll probably need to separate the upper and lower receivers when concealing them.  An average 16"-barreled carbine upper will be at least 24" long, perhaps 27" or more if fitted with a longer muzzle adapter such as the Blast Can.  The lower receiver, even fitted with a stock, is usually shorter than that.

AR-15 pistols (and short-barreled rifles or SBR's) are, of course, usually shorter than that, and may fit into such cases without needing to be disassembled.  One can also shorten an AR-15 (rifle, carbine or pistol) for carry purposes by using something like the LAW Tactical folding stock adapter (shown below), which is ferociously expensive for what it is, but does work well.

Image courtesy of Ammoland.com's review of the product

The LAW adapter adds a little over 1" to the length of the buffer tube and stock when extended, but of course reduces the overall length of the weapon when it's folded.  For AR-15 pistols, be sure to use a short buffer tube with the LAW adapter.  This is because the total length of pull - the distance between the trigger face and the rear face of the tube, or the rear edge of a pistol brace if one is used - should not exceed 13.5", according to the ATF.

As for discreet containers or cases for your long gun, the primary criterion is that the longest component of your weapon (for AR-15's, usually the complete upper receiver) should fit inside the length of the container.  This rules out many smaller items.  Here are a few suggestions.

• Tool boxes and bags:  These won't attract much attention in many settings (although taking one to and from the office might attract unwelcome comment!).  Long tool boxes such as those from Craftsman (28"), DeWalt (28"), Plano (26") or Stanley (28") are rather large and unwieldy, but long enough for the purpose.  They offer space inside for not just your weapon, but also ammunition, magazines and other accessories.  Tool bags are usually shorter than tool boxes, so they're not as useful to conceal a rifle or carbine, but larger models such as this one may serve to conceal a short-barreled AR-15 pistol (and would probably be lighter and more compact than a big tool box).  One can also modify a purpose-built case for power tools to accommodate a rifle, such as this example.
• Luggage.  Many suitcases and carry-on bags are big enough to accommodate a long gun, particularly in disassembled form.  You can also get purpose-built briefcase adapter systems for AR-15's, such as this Tac2 model.  They're expensive, but may be useful in an office setting.
• Sporting gear:  Golf bags are big, bulky and heavy, but long enough to conceal most AR-15's.  Of course, if you take them anywhere but a golf course, you're likely to attract attention!  Some tennis racket cases (like, for example, this one) are also long enough to conceal an AR-15 pistol, or a disassembled rifle or carbine.  There are other options in other sports.
• Musical instrument cases:  Despite being a favorite of the movies, these tend to be big and awkward, and may stand out too much for discretion in the wrong environment.  One can get instrument cases purpose-built for carrying firearms, such as guitar cases from Cedar Mill or Savior Equipment, but they're very expensive.  It's probably much cheaper to buy a used guitar case and foam to fit inside it, and make your own.  Cases for other musical instruments can be adapted in the same way.
• Backpacks:  School-type backpacks are usually too short for our needs.  However, by shopping carefully, you can find taller day packs like this one, which measures 24" in height and can accommodate an AR-15 pistol with relative ease.  Larger backpacks, designed for multi-day hikes, may accommodate longer weapons.  Choose colors and external features carefully so that the backpack blends in with your surroundings, and doesn't stand out and make you conspicuous.  For that reason, avoid anything too military-looking, or using camouflage colors and patterns, particularly in an urban environment.

What about vehicles?  You can leave containers like those above in the trunk or back seat, but there's the risk that they might be targeted by thieves.  A relatively low-cost solution for pickup trucks is to modify a truck box (see here for some examples) to contain your firearm(s).  This can even include fitting a false bottom to the box, so that your weapon(s), magazines, ammo and accessories are concealed from your workmates and friends when you open the box.  Other options are purpose-built drawers that fit under rear seats or beneath the load, such as those from Truckvault.  These are a lot more expensive, but are high-quality, and used by many law enforcement agencies.

Personally, I don't like storing valuable weapons in a vehicle-mounted container.  There's too great a risk that the vehicle might be stolen, or disabled in an accident so that I'm forced to leave it, or watch it being towed away.  I'd rather have my weapons in something I can take with me.

For any form of concealed use, AR-15 short-barreled rifles and/or pistols are generally simpler and easier to carry than full-length rifles or carbines.  Yes, the shorter weapons have disadvantages at medium to long ranges, but for most of us in urban environments, that's not a major factor.

Finally, consider ways to make carrying your weapon easier when concealment is no longer as important.  A good gun sling can make this a lot more comfortable.  Tactical slings such as the Blue Force Gear Vickers 2-point sling (which I personally recommend as the best of its kind I've encountered) are more useful in a fight than general-purpose carry slings.

If any reader has good ideas about discreet carry of a long gun, please share them with us in Comments.  We can all learn from each other.

Peter

Foxes, pictorial and acquisitorial

Two snippets about foxes caught my eye in recent days.

The first was this outstanding photograph of a melanistic red fox, found on Gab.  Click the image for a larger view.

Isn't that lovely fur?  I wasn't aware that melanism occurred in foxes, but on investigation, it seems the Arctic silver fox also has a melanistic branch.  See here for some lovely photographs of that sub-species.  Here's one example from that report.

Also, a fox in Berlin, Germany has been in the news for its taste (?) in shoes.  The BBC reports:

A fox in a leafy suburb of Berlin has been getting into the spirit of summer - by collecting flip flops.

For weeks residents of Zehlendorf were baffled that a thief was stealing their flip flops and sports shoes from their gardens at night.

Finally a man spotted the culprit on a patch of wasteland, "in flagrante, carrying two blue flip flops in its mouth", the daily Tagesspiegel reports.

The fox had a hoard of over 100 shoes, but not the man's missing running shoe.

There's more at the link.

A fox collecting Crocs?  That seems . . . unnatural, somehow!




Peter

Who's behind BLM and "Defund The Police"? Follow the money...

We're obliged to the Capital Research Center for uncovering the source of the funding for Black Lives Matter and a host of other far-left-wing and progressive groups.  CRC reports:

To discover who is leading—and financing—the war on America’s police, look no further than the Tides Center.

We recently broke the story that the Black Lives Matter Global Network Foundation—the leading group in the radical, Marxist-led movement that has inspired waves of riots and demands that cities “defund the police”—transferred ownership from its fiscal sponsor Thousand Currents to the Tides Center, effectively confirming that this “spontaneous” movement is controlled by professional left-wing activists.

This also makes the leading group of Black Lives Matter (BLM) just one more face in the $636 million “dark money” web known as the Tides Nexus, already infamous for sponsoring the creation of new activist groups in a process called “incubation.”

But BLM and its “defund the police” slogan is far from the only campaign Tides has launched against American law enforcement. The Tides Center’s 501(c)(4) lobbying “sister,” Tides Advocacy, runs the Fund for Fair and Just Policing—a leading group in the campaign to overturn the “stop and frisk” policy enacted by New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg (D) in the early 2000s.

Like all Tides-sponsored groups, the Fund for Fair and Just Policing is a product of the professional Left’s nonprofit netherworld. It was ginned up in 2011 with funding from billionaire George Soros’s Open Society Foundations and Atlantic Philanthropies, a Bermuda-based foundation that also poured hundreds of millions of dollars into the U.S. to push Obamacare through Congress and transform our immigration system—the latter via yet another Tides Advocacy project.

Unsurprisingly, Atlantic Philanthropies bestowed the Fund for Fair and Just Policing with $2.2 million “to reform the stop and frisk practices of the New York Police Department.” The fund in turn passed along $8 million to Communities United for Police Reform, a far-left “defund the police” group whose membership includes Black Lives Matter NYC, Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Color of Change, and the local SEIU branch.

Another Tides project, Fair and Just Prosecution, bills itself as a moderate reform organization. In reality, it employs lawyers from the activist Left and Obama administration aiming to fundamentally transform the criminal justice system by demanding removal of police officers from schools, decriminalizing drugs, expanding the “definition of profiling” to include “sexual orientation” and “gender identity,” and forcing police and prosecutors to “acknowledge and apologize for decades of racially disparate policing and criminal justice practices.”

There's more at the link, including the financial forces behind far-left-wing District Attorneys such as St. Louis DA Kim Gardner and her attempts to prosecute the McCluskey's for "brandishing firearms" in the face of BLM and Antifa protesters.

I urge readers to follow the links provided in profusion in the CRC's report, both the excerpt above and in the original document.  They offer exhaustive evidence that its analysis is both fair and balanced.  The protests, riots and violence we're seeing on our streets is planned, orchestrated and financed at a far higher (or is it deeper?) level than anything visible to the immediate observer.  It's nothing more or less than a not-so-carefully-disguised attempt to subvert democracy, intimidate the electorate and impose a left-wing tyranny of the masses.

Take heed, take note, and remember in November.  The coming elections aren't about Republican versus Democrat, or Trump versus Biden.  They're about freedom versus Big Brother, the individual versus the state, and democracy versus oligarchy.

Peter

Memes that made me laugh 18

From around the blogosphere and elsewhere last week.

And lastly: not funny, but sadly very true.

If we aren't treating all law-breakers equally, then the rule of law is broken.  We need to fix that.

Peter

Sunday morning music

Last week's news that rioters are using fireworks as improvised IED's did nothing to help ease tensions in our benighted country.

I thought it might be appropriate to remember that fireworks can celebrate peace, as well as war.  George Frideric Handel composed his "Music for the Royal Fireworks" to celebrate the end of the War of the Austrian Succession and the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle in 1748, which formalized the cessation of hostilities.

The first performance of the work led to some rather spectacular real-life fireworks, according to the video's description.

On the great day, the King and his entourage toured the "machine," presenting purses to its operatives while the entire band played, commencing at 6 o'clock. The beginning of the fireworks display went well enough, as "The Gentleman's Magazine" vol. 19 (April, 1749), describes:

"At half an hour after eight, the works were begun by a single rocket from before the library, then the cannon within the chevaux de frize were fired...101 pieces of cannon placed on Constitution-hill, were discharged; after which a great number of rockets of different sorts, balloons, &c. were discharged, to surprising perfection."

However, catastrophe ensued when the great "machine" misfired and burst into intense flame. The left pavilion of the structure was most affected, and according to the "Description II" of the celebration, published afterwards, the contrivance "burnt with great Fury." Two of the arches smoldered to the ground, and the whole building was only saved when carpenters cast away another two arches and fire engines were brought in to suppress the flames. The stress was apparently great, because another misfortune followed when Florentine Servandoni threw a tantrum and drew his sword on Charles Frederick, Comptroller of the event. Servandoni was imprisoned but released the next day after tendering his apologies. In the end, the great sun, "32 feet in Diameter," the literal high-light of the arrangement, survived the disaster to fulfill expectations.

Sounds like a lively time was had by all!

Peter

Saturday Snippet: Urban terrorism in the USA

While writing several blog articles over the past week or two about the current riots in many US cities, I was led to a book by Bryan Burrough titled "Days of Rage".

It describes the urban terrorism that flourished in this country during the 1970's.  I wasn't aware that things had been that bad, as I wasn't in this country at the time (I came to America in the late 1990's).

Reading Mr. Burrough's book has been eye-opening.  In a sense, the urban unrest we're seeing today is merely the 1960's and 1970's redux, although on a larger scale with more people - not surprising, as the US population is considerably larger today.  The left-wing activists and extremists of that earlier period went on to become university lecturers and professors.  They took advantage of their positions to drip their ideological poison into the minds of our young people.  Inevitably, it's now manifest on our streets once again.

Here's a passage from the introduction to "Days of Rage".

Imagine if this happened today: Hundreds of young Americans—white, black, and Hispanic—disappear from their everyday lives and secretly form urban guerrilla groups. Dedicated to confronting the government and righting society’s wrongs, they smuggle bombs into skyscrapers and federal buildings and detonate them from coast to coast. They strike inside the Pentagon, inside the U.S. Capitol, at a courthouse in Boston, at dozens of multinational corporations, at a Wall Street restaurant packed with lunchtime diners. People die. They rob banks, dozens of them, launch raids on National Guard arsenals, and assassinate policemen, in New York, in San Francisco, in Atlanta. There are deadly shoot-outs and daring jailbreaks, illegal government break-ins and a scandal in Washington.

This was a slice of America during the tumultuous 1970s, a decade when self-styled radical “revolutionaries” formed something unique in postcolonial U.S. history: an underground resistance movement. Given little credibility by the press, all but ignored by historians, their bombings and robberies and shoot-outs stretched from Seattle to Miami, from Los Angeles to Maine. And even if the movement’s goals were patently unachievable and its members little more than onetime student leftists who clung to utopian dreams of the 1960s, this in no way diminished the intensity of the shadowy conflict that few in America understood at the time and even fewer remember clearly today.

In fact, the most startling thing about the 1970s-era underground is how thoroughly it has been forgotten. “People always ask why I did what I did, and I tell them I was a soldier in a war,” recalls a heralded black militant named Sekou Odinga, who remained underground from 1969 until his capture in 1981. “And they always say, ‘What war?’ ”

Call it war or something else, but it was real, and it was deadly. Arrayed against the government were a half-dozen significant underground groups—and many more that yearned to be—which, while notionally independent of one another, often shared members, tactics, and attorneys. Of these, only the Weather Underground, the first and by far the largest, has earned any real analysis. The Symbionese Liberation Army, a ragtag collection of California ex-cons and radicals who pulled off the underground’s most infamous action, the kidnapping of newspaper heiress Patricia Hearst in 1974, was widely dismissed as a pack of loonies. Many doubted that the Black Liberation Army, a murderous offspring of the Black Panthers, even existed. A Puerto Rican independence group known as the FALN, the most determined bombers in U.S. history, remains cloaked in secrecy to this day; not one of its members has ever spoken a meaningful word about its operations. The United Freedom Front, a revolutionary cell consisting of three blue-collar couples and their nine children, robbed banks and bombed buildings well into the 1980s. An interracial group of radicals called the Family did much the same, yet remained so obscure that no one even knew it existed until a fateful afternoon in 1981 when an armored-car robbery went badly awry, three people died, and America was reintroduced to a movement it had assumed dead years before.

This was strange, even at the time. Because radical violence was so deeply woven into the fabric of 1970s America that many citizens, especially in New York and other hard-hit cities, accepted it as part of daily life. As one New Yorker sniffed to the New York Post after an FALN attack in 1977, “Oh, another bombing? Who is it this time?” It’s a difficult attitude to comprehend in a post-9/11 world, when even the smallest pipe bomb draws the attention of hundreds of federal agents and journalists.

“People have completely forgotten that in 1972 we had over nineteen hundred domestic bombings in the United States,” notes a retired FBI agent, Max Noel. “People don’t want to listen to that. They can’t believe it. One bombing now and everyone gets excited. In 1972? It was every day. Buildings getting bombed, policemen getting killed. It was commonplace.”

There are crucial distinctions, however, between public attitudes toward bombings during the 1970s and those today. In the past twenty-five years terrorist bombs have claimed thousands of American lives, over three thousand on 9/11 alone. Bombings today often mean someone dies. The underground bombings of the 1970s were far more widespread and far less lethal. During an eighteen-month period in 1971 and 1972, the FBI reported more than 2,500 bombings on U.S. soil, nearly 5 a day. Yet less than 1 percent of the 1970s-era bombings led to a fatality; the single deadliest radical-underground attack of the decade killed four people. Most bombings were followed by communiqués denouncing some aspect of the American condition; bombs basically functioned as exploding press releases. The sheer number of attacks led to a grudging public resignation. Unless someone was killed, press accounts rarely carried any expression of outrage. In fact, as hard as it may be to comprehend today, there was a moment during the early 1970s when bombings were viewed by many Americans as a semilegitimate means of protest. In the minds of others, they amounted to little more than a public nuisance.

Consider what happened when an obscure Puerto Rican group, MIRA, detonated bombs in two Bronx theaters in New York on May 1, 1970. Eleven people suffered minor injuries when one device went off at the Dale Theater during a showing of Cactus Flower. The second exploded beneath a seat at the cavernous Loew’s Paradise while a rapt audience watched The Liberation of L.B. Jones; when police ordered everyone to leave, the audience angrily refused, demanding to see the rest of the movie. When the theater was forcibly cleared, an NYPD official said later, the audience “about tore the place apart.”1 Neither the bombings nor the Paradise audience’s reaction was deemed especially newsworthy; the incident drew barely six paragraphs in the New York Times.

The public, by and large, dismissed the radical underground as a lunatic fringe, and in time that’s what it became. But before that day, before so many fell victim to despair or drugs or the FBI, there was a moment when the radical underground seemed to pose a legitimate threat to national security, when its political “actions” merited the front page of the New York Times and the cover of Time magazine and drew constant attention from the White House, the FBI, and the CIA. To the extreme reaches of the radical left, to those who dared to believe that some sort of second American Revolution was actually imminent, these years constituted a brief shining moment, perhaps its last. To others, the bombings were nothing more than homegrown terrorism; the excesses of the radical left during the 1970s helped nudge America toward the right end of the political spectrum and into the arms of Ronald Reagan and the conservatives. But in the eyes of much of mainstream America, to ordinary working people in Iowa and Nevada and Arkansas who hadn’t the time or the inclination to study the communiqués of bomb-throwing Marxists, who wanted only to return to normalcy after long years of disorienting change, it was insanity.

In the end, the untold story of the underground era, stretching from 1970 until the last diehards were captured in 1985, is one of misplaced idealism, naïveté, and stunning arrogance. Depending on one’s point of view, its protagonists can be seen as either deluded dreamers or heartless terrorists, though a third possibility might be closer to the truth: young people who fatally misjudged America’s political winds and found themselves trapped in an unwinnable struggle they were too proud or stubborn to give up. This book is intended to be a straightforward narrative history of the period and its people. Any writer makes judgments, but I have tried to keep mine to a minimum, especially where politics is concerned.

It is ultimately a tragic tale, defined by one unavoidable irony: that so many idealistic young Americans, passionately committed to creating a better world for themselves and those less fortunate, believed they had to kill people to do it. The story is long and labyrinthine, alternately exciting and sad, and it all begins, in a way, with a tortured couple living in New York’s East Village in the summer of 1969. They were like so many in the faltering protest movement at that restive decade’s end: long-haired, free-spirited, and mired in gloom. The one thing that set them apart from friends who raised their fists and chanted antiwar slogans in demonstrations of the day was that late one night, after removing a carton of cottage cheese, a quart of yogurt, and some leftover salad from their refrigerator, they replaced it all with a hundred bright red sticks of dynamite.

The nation got over its earlier "Days of Rage" in due course, and went on to chart a more peaceful course into the future.  One hopes we can do the same again.

Peter