Democrats Just Made a Huge Confession About Clinton’s Run Against Trump – This Could Be a Game Changer

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Democratic Party activists are conflicted over whether Hillary Clinton can take on Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump in the general election, with some fearing she provides too much ammunition for the flamboyant businessman’s style of attack.

While Mr. Trump is leading the national polls and calling the shots in what’s become a circuslike GOP primary season, Mrs. Clinton tops a sedentary Democratic race with two other opponents respectfully nipping at her without doing much damage — and party stalwarts are happy to have it that way.

“I hear a lot of people saying, ‘You know, I’ve watched the Democratic debates and the Republican debates, and they’re so different. I’m sure glad I’m on the Democratic side and they’re talking about the issues. They don’t always agree with one another, but they explain why,’” said David Allen, a Democratic Party leader in Barnstead, New Hampshire. “Democrats have resolved themselves to not go into a circus and tear one another down.”

But Mr. Allen said he does worry about how the eventual Democratic nominee will stand up to the sort of withering barbs Mr. Trump has dished out to his own side.

“We’re going to start to have to look at how the [Democratic] candidates play against Donald Trump, because he’s certainly holding onto his lead in the Republican Party, and he has certainly played the Republican candidates in a way that has hurt some of his opposition, and I think people are going to start asking, ‘All right, who’s going to stand up under his type of campaigning?’” Mr. Allen said. “If Bernie [Sanders] is the candidate, Trump will play up how un-American socialism is, and if Hillary gets it, he will dig up everything in the past 40 years and use it — and won’t mince words in using it.” (Read more from “Democrats Just Made a Huge Confession About Clinton’s Run Against Trump – This Could Be a Game Changer” HERE)

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What Really Happened in 2015, and What Is Coming in 2016…

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A lot of people were expecting some really big things to happen in 2015, and most of them did not happen. But what did happen? It is my contention that a global financial crisis began during the second half of 2015, and it threatens to greatly accelerate as we enter 2016. During the last six months of the year that just ended, financial markets all over the planet crashed, trillions of dollars of global wealth was wiped out, and some of the largest economies in the world plunged into recession. Here in the United States, 2015 was the worst year for stocks since 2008, nearly 70 percent of all investors lost money last year, and it is being projected that the final numbers will show that close to 1,000 hedge funds permanently shut down within the last 12 months. This is what the early stages of a financial crisis look like, and the worst is yet to come.

If we were entering another 2008-style crisis, we would expect to see junk bonds crashing. When financial trouble starts, it usually doesn’t start with the biggest and strongest companies. Instead, it usually starts percolating on the periphery. And right now bonds of firms that are considered to be on the risky side of things are rapidly losing value.

In the chart below, you can see that a high yield bond ETF that I track very closely known as JNK started crashing in the middle of 2008. This crash began to unfold before the horrific crash of stocks in the fall. Investors that saw junk bonds crashing in advance and pulled their money out of stocks in time saved an enormous amount of money.

Now, for the very first time since the last financial crisis, we are seeing junk bonds crash again. In December, there was finally a sustained crash through the psychologically-important 35.00 level, and at this point JNK is sitting a bit below 34.00. This stunning decline is a giant red flag that tells us that stocks will soon follow in the exact same direction…

In 2015, Third Avenue Management shocked Wall Street when they froze withdrawals from a 788 million dollar mutual fund that was highly focused on junk bonds. Investors that couldn’t get their money out began to panic, and other mutual funds now find themselves under siege. If junk bonds continue to crash, this will just be the beginning of the carnage.

One of the big reasons why junk bonds are crashing is because of the crash in the price of oil. Over the past 18 months, the price of oil has plummeted from $108 a barrel to $37 a barrel.

There has only been one other time in all of history when we have ever seen an oil price crash of this magnitude. That was in 2008 – just before the greatest financial crisis since the Great Depression…

Why can’t people see the parallels?

Crashes are happening all around us, and yet so many of the “experts” seem completely blind to what is going on.

Unlike 2008, the price of oil is not expected to rapidly rebound any time soon. The following comes from CNN…

Crude prices dropped a whopping 35% last year and are hovering around $37 a barrel. That’s a level not seen since the global financial crisis.

It won’t get better any time soon. Most oil experts believe prices will bounce back in late 2016, but they expect more pain first.

Goldman Sachs forecasts that oil will average about $38 a barrel in February, even lower than for most of 2015.

Meanwhile, the prices of industrial commodities have been crashing as well. For example, the chart below shows that the price of copper started crashing hard just before the great financial crisis of 2008, and the exact same thing is happening once again right before our very eyes…

Things are unfolding just as we would expect they would during the initial stages of a new global financial crisis.

And we have already seen a full blown stock market crash in many of the largest economies around the planet. For instance, just look at what has been happening in Brazil. The Brazilians have the 7th largest economy in the world, and Goldman Sachs says that they have plunged into an “outright depression“. In the chart below, you can see the sharp downturn that took place in August, and Brazilian stocks actually kept falling all the way through the end of 2015…

We see a similar thing when we look at our neighbor to the north. Canada has the 11th largest economy on the entire planet, and I recently wrote a lengthy article about the economic difficulties that the Canadians are now facing. 2015 was a very bad year for Canadian stocks as well, and they just kept falling steadily all the way through December…

Of course nobody can forget what happened to China. The Chinese have the second largest economy on the globe, and news about their economic slowdown in making headlines almost every single day now.

Last summer, Chinese stocks crashed about 40 percent, and they did manage to bounce back just a bit since then. But they are still down about 30 percent from the peak of the market…

And there is plenty more that we could talk about. European stocks just had their second worst December ever, and Japanese stocks are down about 500 points in early trading as I write this article.

Here in the United States, the Dow Jones Industrial Average, Dow Transports, the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000 all had their worst years since 2008. As I mentioned the other day, 674 hedge funds shut down during the first nine months of 2015, and it is being projected that the final total for the year will be up around 1000.

But we aren’t hearing much about this financial carnage on the news yet, are we?

Many people that I talk to still think that “nothing is happening”, but don’t you dare say that to Warren Buffett.

He lost 7.8 billion dollars in 2015.

How would you feel if you lost 7.8 billion dollars in a single year?

The truth, of course, is that signs of financial chaos are erupting all around us. Corporate profits are plunging, the bond distress ratio just hit the highest level that we have seen since the last financial crisis, and corporate debt defaults have risen to the highest level that we have seen in about seven years.

If you run a business, you may have noticed that fewer people are coming in and it seems like those that do come in have less money to spend. Economic activity is slowing down, and inventories are piling up. In fact, wholesale inventories have now risen to the highest level that we have seen since the last recession…

Do you notice a theme?

So many things that have not happened in six or seven years are now happening again.

History may not repeat, but it sure does rhyme, and it astounds me that more people cannot see that 2015/2016 is looking eerily similar to a replay of 2008/2009.

Another number that I watch closely is the velocity of money. When an economy is running well, money tends to circulate efficiently through the system. But when an economy gets into trouble, people get scared and start holding on to their money. As you can see from the chart below, the velocity of money declined during every single recession since 1960. This is precisely what one would expect. And of course during the recession that started in 2008, the velocity of money plunged precipitously. But then a funny thing happened when that recession supposedly “ended”. The velocity of money just kept going down, and now it has fallen to an all-time record low…

A big reason for this is the ongoing decline of the middle class. In 2015, we learned that middle class Americans now make up a minority of the population for the first time ever.

But if you go back to 1971, 61 percent of all Americans lived in middle class households.

Meanwhile, the share of the income pie that the middle class takes home has also continued to shrink.

In 1970, the middle class brought home approximately 62 percent of all income. Today, that number has fallen to just 43 percent.

As the middle class is systematically destroyed, the number of Americans living in poverty just continues to grow. And those that often suffer the most are the children. It may be hard for you to believe, but the number of homeless children in the U.S. has increased by 60 percent over the past six years.

60 percent!

How in the world can anyone dare to claim that “things are getting better”?

Anyone that says that should be ashamed of themselves.

We are in the midst of a long-term economic collapse that is now accelerating once again.

Anyone that tries to tell you that “things are getting better” and that 2016 is going to be a better year than 2015 is simply not being honest with you.

A new global financial crisis erupted during the last six months of 2015, and this new financial crisis is going to intensify throughout the early months of 2016. Financial institutions will begin falling like dominoes, and this will result in a great credit crunch around the world. Businesses will fail, unemployment will skyrocket and millions will suddenly be faced with economic despair.

By the time it is all said and done, this new financial crisis will be even worse than what we experienced back in 2008, and the suffering that we will see around the world will be off the charts.

So does that mean that I am down about this year?

Not at all. In fact, my wife and I are greatly looking forward to 2016. In the midst of all the chaos and darkness, there will be great opportunities to do good and to make a difference.

What a great shaking comes, people go looking for answers. And I think that this will be a year when millions of people start to understand that our politicians and the mainstream media are not telling them the truth.

Yes, great challenges are coming. But now is not a time to dig a hole and try to hide from the world. Instead, this will be a time for those that have prepared in advance to love others, help others and show them the truth.

What about you?

Are you ready to be a light during the dark times that are coming? (For more from the author of “What Really Happened in 2015, and What Is Coming in 2016…” please click HERE)

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Saudi Arabia Cutting Ties With Iran, Tensions Reach Fever Pitch After Execution of Shiite, Calls For “Divine Revenge”

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By Newsmax. In a significant escalation of tensions, Saudi Arabia cut ties with Iran and expelled the Islamic Republic’s diplomats, a day after its embassy in Tehran was attacked to protest the Saudis’ execution of a prominent Shiite cleric.

Iran’s ambassador in the kingdom has 48 hours to leave, Saudi Foreign Minister Adel al-Jubeir said late Sunday in Riyadh. “Saudi Arabia will no longer deal with a country that supports terrorism and sectarianism,” he said.

The move marks the biggest crisis in relations between the regional powers since the late 1980s, when the Sunni-led kingdom suspended ties with Shiite-ruled Iran after its embassy was attacked following the death of Iranian pilgrims during Hajj in Mecca. Saudi Arabia also supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against Iran during the Iran-Iraq War. (Read more from “Saudi Arabia Cutting Ties With Iran, Tensions Reach Fever Pitch After Execution of Shiite, Calls For “Divine Revenge” HERE)

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Saudi Arabia Severs Ties With Iran as Mideast Protests Rage

By Ben Brumfield, Yousuf Basil and Catherine E. Shoichet. The two countries have long been at odds, but Saudi Arabia’s execution of Shiite cleric Nimr al-Nimr Saturday kicked off a new round of sparring between them that analysts say could mark a dangerous shift in an already volatile region.

“I think you’re going to see a period of very harsh rhetoric, and the cutting of diplomatic ties comes at a very bad time. … This is Saudi Arabia saying, ‘The gloves are off,’ ” said Bobby Ghosh, a CNN global affairs analyst and managing editor of Quartz. . .

In Iran, the last word belongs to Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. And on Sunday, he tweeted, “Doubtlessly, unfairly-spilled blood of oppressed martyr #SheikhNimr will affect rapidly & Divine revenge will seize Saudi politicians.”

(Read more from “Saudi Arabia Severs Ties With Iran as Mideast Protests Rage” HERE)

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Yahoo Is Celebrating a Disgusting Article on Late-Term Abortion as One of Their ‘Best of 2015’

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One of America’s top media companies celebrated parenting in 2015 with a republished essay from a mother who called her husband’s support for aborting their second child when it was in its 36th week “a gift.”

In the essay, originally published on April 30, an administrator for the support group “Ending a Wanted Pregnancy” told Yahoo Parenting’s Rachel Bertsche that she aborted her daughter, Rose, because doctors diagnosed the child with Dandy-Walker malformation and agenesis of the corpus callosum.

According to “Kate,” these diagnoses “meant there were holes in [Rose’s] brain” and “the bridge between the two hemispheres of her brain didn’t grow,” respectively.

“The doctor said, ‘We expect your baby to have moderate to severe mental retardation; she’s going to have moderate to severe physical disability; she is probably never going to walk or talk; she will possibly never be able to lift her head; she is going to have seizures all of the time.’”

They were also told the baby was unlikely to live very long if brought to term. But rather than letting nature take an unsure course, they decided to take matters into their own hands. In order to get a very late-term abortion, Kate and her husband traveled from Boston to Colorado, for an abortion that cost her $25,000 — an amount her parents took out of their retirement account. (Read more from “Yahoo Is Celebrating a Disgusting Article on Late-Term Abortion as One of Their ‘Best of 2015′” HERE)

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Five Page-Turner Conservative Novels That Predicted the Mess We’re In

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Sometimes the truth is too painful or offensive to speak directly, so we tell it by means of a story. An old joke goes that while a sensitive eight-year-old boy was away for his first summer at camp, his beloved tabby cat, Rufus, got crushed by a passing car. His overprotective parents decided to break the bad news to him gradually, so their first note said that Rufus had climbed on the roof, and wouldn’t come down. He worried at night, but didn’t despair. The next week he got a note that the fire department had tried but failed to catch the cat. The boy sulked a little, but he didn’t fall apart. On the third week, he learned that Rufus had disappeared, and probably would not be found. He cried for a while, but having been gradually prepared for losing Rufus, he took the news pretty well. Then a few weeks later, the boy got a fresh new note that informed him, “Your grandma is up on the roof….”

Ladies and gentlemen, our country is up on the roof, and with it our fragile liberty. Since we care about these good things even more for our descendants than for ourselves, in fact it is our children and grandchildren trapped on the roof — the roof of the White House, peering down with tearful eyes and trembling fingers to see if the next President who comes to inhabit it will offer them a ladder down to safety… or will set the place on fire.

We didn’t get here by accident. There were wise men who foresaw it, whose sensitivities as artists let them craft works of fiction that warned the West where it was headed. They weren’t heeded. But there is still time to learn from them now. So here’s a gift list of five prophetic novels, which I recommend that you read, then hand out to well-meaning friends who don’t quite “get” the gravity of the threats to faith and freedom. Each book is listed by the crisis that it predicted:

The Islamic Colonization of the West

The Camp of the Saints by Jean Raspail (1973) is a powerful apocalyptic novel and a scathing political satire. Its target is liberal Camp of the Saintselites and their systematic perversion of Christian compassion into a civilizational death wish.

In the book, a mass exodus of non-Christian refugees is sailing for the West, in numbers large enough to overwhelm any country that accepted them. At the borders of every Western nation, including Israel, large crowds of disgruntled “have-nots” gather to see if the West will turn back the armada, or shrug and accept them — which they will take as a signal for tens of millions more to pour across Western borders. Endorsed by National Review when it was translated from French, this novel has done more to change minds on undisciplined immigration than any other book. Some of the language is rough, and borderline racist — but then, that’s true of many great works of literature, which this undeniably is. The portrait of the masochistic, multiculturalist, open-borders pope in the novel is worth the book’s price by itself.

Ecological Tyranny and the Attack on Sex and Marriage

The Wanting Seed by Anthony Burgess (1963) is a fascinating and deeply disturbing book, which imagines all Western history as a seesaw between those who imagine that human nature can be perfected, and those who consider it hopelessly depraved.

The first group thinks that big government, central planning, eugenics, and strict population control can solve the problem of scarcity, dissolving all reasons for social conflict in a pink fog of mild goodwill and quasi-brotherhood. And it’s these perfectionists who are in charge at the novel’s outset, reacting to food shortages and environmental problems by imposing a rigid Malthusian scheme akin to China’s One Child Policy.

To emphasize the evils of heterosexual reproduction, the government encourages flagrant homosexuality, sterilization and even castration — granting plum positions via affirmative action to characters who will remind you of “Caitlyn Jenner.” Of course, this can’t last forever, and the conflict in the novel comes when rebels who emphasize man’s fallenness, to the point of wallowing in it, push back in the form of religious fanaticism and terrorism … an eerie prognostication of Islam’s response to the West’s Culture of Death. (Full disclosure: the author didn’t see quite that far ahead; his religious terrorists are radicalized Anglicans — a detail which is unintentionally hilarious.)

The Hedonistic Culture of Death

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (1932) is a book that you probably had to read in high school, when yoBrave New World Coveru were too young to appreciate it. The society crafted by technocrats in this novel is in fact what too many high school students (especially boys) would find the perfect world: Sex is abundant, guilt-free, and offered with no strings attached. Work is easy, pleasant, and brief. All anxieties and unhappiness are dulled immediately with a quick dose of happy pills. The price of these happy times is that the state suppresses religion and bans great works of literature, such as the Shakespeare plays that high school students would rather not have to read anyway. What’s not to like?

Of course, as the book makes clear, the down side of organizing society around the greatest number of pleasant moments for the greatest number of people is that no one becomes an adult. No one makes any meaningful sacrifice for any cause at all, much less for another person. So there is no real love, either — not even parental love, since all reproduction is done in labs and children are raised by government experts to be cheerful and well adjusted. Sound familiar? Because Huxley was a masterful literary artist, his depiction of this dystopia is rich and three-dimensional; he doesn’t stint when he shows the painful price of embracing tradition and religion as alternatives to post-modern subhumanism. The outcome is a novel that helps us to understand exactly why so many of our contemporaries are willing to trade their human dignity for a promise of greater contentment, and the book helps grant us the imaginative sympathy required if we hope to guide souls to the straighter, narrower path.

The Infantilizing Power of the Secular State

Love Among the Ruins, by Evelyn Waugh (1953), is a futuristic novella, by turns amusingly horrifying and darkly, sadly funny. It was Waugh’s attempt to follow the logic of milk-and-water humanitarian socialism to its logical conclusion: a society where criminals are treated as wounded victims, where private property is seized by the state and used “for the common good,” and every moral or character ideal is turned upon its head, in the name of a false, post-Christian humanism. (The Christmas season, in Waugh’s future, is renamed “Santaclaustide.”)

Waugh’s “hero” is a lifelong arsonist, whom the state houses in a cozy rehabilitation center set in an old aristocratic home that had (of course) been confiscated. He pursues his love of pretty, pretty fires and of a lovely hermaphrodite, a woman whom state experiments with gender identity have equipped with a long, golden beard. Fittingly, in this socialist paradise, the only government agency that is profitable and popular is the Ministry of Euthanasia, where the lines of hopeful customers always extend around the block. This is not Waugh at his subtlest, but at his most bleakly prophetic. The book reads as if he had somehow been granted access to this year’s newscasts from Belgium.

The Dissolution of Christian Faith into Humanitarian Sentiment

The Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson (1908) is a long and psychologically insightful novel, a precocious instance of the genre that sci-fi fans now call “Cybersteam.” It was written in the wake of the Victorian era by the son of the Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, who had dabbled for some time in the occult before converting to Catholicism. The novel takes the strands of religious liberalism current around 1900 and projects them a hundred or so years into the future — to create a society perfectly ripe for the coming of the Antichrist.

What’s so chilling about the book is how accurately the author predicted the church of today, where many Christians have lapsed into a teary-eyed, self-aggrandizing “tolerance” and abandoned core Christian doctrines, especially when the State applies the slightest pressure and offers its squalid bribes.

As the Antichrist arrives, it is as a sponsor of humanitarian values, winning the equivalent of the Nobel Peace Prize simply for showing up. In due course, he does defuse a threatened European war, and dissolves social conflicts with a preternatural ease. He also offers to solve all ecclesiastical conflicts, by drawing believers together into an uplifting, pan-religious movement that goes beyond “divisive” moral issues and “outdated” doctrinal claims. Those Christians too pig-headed and uncharitable to accept his kindly offer face the prospect of euthanasia or worse — chief among them, the reigning pope. (For more from the author of “Five Page-Turner Conservative Novels That Predicted the Mess We’re In” please click HERE)

Watch a recent interview with the author below:

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Was This Top North Korean Official Assassinated?

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North Korea announced Wednesday that its most senior official in charge of inter-Korean relations died in a car accident.

Kim Yang-gon was head of the United Front Department of the ruling Korea Workers’ Party, a member of the North Korean Central Committee and alternate member of the Politburo. He had most recently negotiated with senior South Korean officials in August to defuse a crisis caused by a North Korean incursion into the demilitarized zone and exchange of artillery fire.

Kim Yang-gon’s demise raises suspicions that he was killed by the regime, particularly since several other officials over the years have suffered a similar end. But prior to his death, there were no indications that Kim was distrusted or in danger of being purged.

In addition to the August 2015 negotiations, he had also participated in a senior delegation that made a surprise visit to South Korea in Oct. 2014. He had recently escorted North Korean leader Kim Jong-un on inspection tours to military and civilian sites, suggesting that he remained a trusted aide.

His frequency of accompanying the leader had increased under Kim Jong-un’s reign as compared with the era of Kim Jong-il.

Parsing natural deaths from a forced demise among the senior leadership of North Korea is always difficult, particularly nowadays, given Kim Jong-un’s extensive purging.

Kim Yang-gon’s death in a car accident might be interpreted as paying the ultimate price for the collapse of the inter-Korean mini-détente following the August agreement.

However, the official announcement of Kim’s death described him as Kim Jong-un’s “closest comrade-in-arms and steadfast revolutionary comrade” who had made “dedicated” efforts to achieve Korean unification.

The North Korean leader attended the funeral, expressing “bitter grief” and bemoaning the loss of his “his faithful helper whom nobody can replace,” suggesting an accidental rather than planned death. That said, other North Korean elites may now be more wary of getting into their cars.

Suggestions by some pundits that Kim’s death will hinder inter-Korean dialogue are a red herring, since Pyongyang had already spiked Seoul’s latest attempts at engaging the regime. While the August agreement had led to more reunions of Korean families separated since the Korean War, subsequent senior-level dialogue collapsed in early December over the inability to reach consensus even on an agenda.

During those meetings, North Korean representatives insisted on discussing only the resumption of the Kumgangsan tourist venture, a special region in North Korea for South Korean tourists, which has been a cash cow for the regime.

South Korea called for standardizing family reunions and addressing North Korean denuclearization. Pyongyang subsequently declared that “prospects of North-South relations became even bleaker.”

It is unknown who will succeed Kim Yang-gon, and his replacement may not be announced until the convening of the 7th Congress of the Korea Workers’ Party in May 2016.

But North Korea has repeatedly demonstrated that it rejects implementing the political and economic reforms necessary to justify a principled South Korean engagement strategy. Nor will the regime moderate its aggressive foreign policy to refrain even from threats of nuclear incineration and highly insulting diatribes against President Park Geun-hye. (For more from the author of “Was This Top North Korean Official Assassinated?” please click HERE)

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Veteran Armed With Assault Rifle Walks Into Church – What the Pastor Does Next Is Incredible

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A North Carolina pastor has described how a veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder walked into a church with a high-powered assault rifle and asked the pastor if he could pray for him.

Pastor Larry Wright, who is a retired Army drill sergeant as well as a city councilor in Fayetteville, N.C., told the Fayetteville Observer that he was conducting a New Year’s Eve prayer service at Heal the Land Outreach Ministries when the unidentified man walked into the sanctuary with the gun in one hand and an ammunition clip in the other.

“I asked him ‘can I help you?'”, Wright told WRAL-TV. “[The gunman’s] next words were ‘can you pray for me?’ When he said that, then I knew everything was going to be all right.”

Wright took the man’s gun and patted him down to be certain there were no other weapons hidden on him. The man was invited to sit in the front pew, then approached Wright after the service.

“He gave his life to Christ,” Wright told the Observer. (Read more from “Veteran Armed With Assault Rifle Walks Into Church – What the Pastor Does Next Is Incredible” HERE)

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In 2016, Buy a Gun

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It’s time to double down in defense of the U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, in defense of the personal liberties that make our country so extraordinary. So this is my New Year’s Resolution.

I am going to buy a gun.

Maybe this sounds almost trivial coming from a committed libertarian. Big government types love to characterize us small government types as hunkered down in our basements, armed to the teeth, waiting for the End of Days, and clinging to our guns…. Not me. I’ve never felt particularly compelled to own a gun, although I have shot plenty of them over the years.

Now, I feel a responsibility.

I have spent a lifetime learning about, organizing a community around, and mobilizing in defense of, the non-negotiable right of each one of us to be left alone by government; free as long as we don’t hurt other people, or take their stuff. If you’re reading this, you likely have plenty of battle scars and deeply-held commitments just like mine. Together we have done so much in defense of Liberty.

But it’s just not good enough any more. I am particularly worried that we will lose what makes America so exceptional, as politicians grab more of our liberties from us in the name of “security.” Hillary Clinton is going after First Amendment speech and encryption. “Neo-Conservatives” like Senator Lindsey Graham think that the Fourth Amendment is antiquated; that your right to be secure in your person, home, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, no longer applies. Bipartisan congressional collusion has empowered an unaccountable mass surveillance state, and the Legislative Branch has abdicated its responsibility to authorize war, shifting ever more power to the Executive Branch.

And the President of the United States, who swore an oath of office to defend and protect the Constitution, shows open distain for its key provisions protecting our liberties, particularly the Second Amendment. Barack Obama seems to genuinely believe that he can staunch the threat of homegrown Islamic terrorism simply by taking away the right of every law-abiding American to own a weapon — the right to defend yourself from attack from those who would want to hurt you and your family.

If you want to understand what’s at stake, take a look at the French government’s response since terrorists brutally murdered so many innocents inside the Bataclan Theater last November. “Imagine a Bush or Obama administration unchecked by the Bill of Rights or by Article 5 — which sets the bar high for altering the Constitution — and you’ll begin to understand the situation in France today,” writes Matt Welch in the Los Angeles Times. He continues:

After the November attacks, the French government approved extraordinary measures constraining civil liberties. To extend these measures permanently in the constitution, all the government requires is a three-fifths majority when Parliament meets again in February. France’s current state of emergency is already a doozy — warrantless searches, preemptive house arrests (more than 300 so far, without any convictions or involvement by a judge), plus the authority to shut down websites…. To this illiberal list, Prime Minister Manuel Valls on Dec. 23 added a controversial new item: the ability to strip French citizenship from dual nationals ‘who have been sentenced by a judge for committing crimes against the nation….’”

“What, exactly,” Welch asks, “is a crime against the nation?” One can imagine future *crimes* that have nothing to do with real acts of terrorism — or crime for that matter – a “constitutional” blank slate for some future tyrant to further centralize control.

In France, it is virtually impossible to legally obtain a gun.

The natural, inexorable tendency of governments to grab power from the citizenry is exacerbated during times of crisis by the political imperative to “do something.” I have no doubt that some of this authority-grabbing is done with the best of intentions – “to make us safe,” as more than one of the presidential candidates have recently put it. Leftists prefer to grab guns, and NeoCons prefer to grab your metadata and your due process, but the urge for control seems to infect almost everyone in a position of power.

But in defending the homeland from a decentralized, and increasingly homegrown, threat, more centralized power has a bad track record. All of the unconstitutional expansions of the surveillance state implemented since 9/11 failed to identify, let alone stop, jihadists Syed Rizwan Farook and Tashfeen Malik from gunning down fourteen innocent coworkers in a meticulously planned act of terror. “The governmental failure at San Bernardino,” writes Judge Andrew Napolitano, “was the confluence of a state government with antipathy and animosity toward the natural right of self-defense and a federal government attempting to devour far more data than it can handle.”

The fundamental challenge faced by increasingly centralized federal law enforcement apparatus was anticipated by Ori Brafman and Rod Beckstrom in their 2007 book The Starfish and the Spider: The Unstoppable Power of Leaderless Organizations. Starfish organizations decentralize information and decision-making, and are leaderless in the sense that there is no central command center or bureaucracy that dictates things from the top down. A terrorist network fits the model, driven by a radical ideology that holds it together. Cut off an arm of a starfish, the analogy goes, and you don’t kill the organization, you just make it stronger by creating more starfish organizations.

How do we defeat a leaderless movement that has tapped into the power of decentralized information and decision-making? Is there a more potent, shared set of values that bind us as a community? Doesn’t this all remind you of the genius of America and the shared values enshrined in our Constitution? Why not double down on the Bill of Rights as a first response to terrorism?

It seems to me that our essential liberties are least pliable during times of crisis.

So, I’m going to buy a gun. I want to be prepared to defend myself and my family, and my community if necessary. I have been putting this off for years, but now it feels like free riding. Sure I have my excuses, because obtaining a gun in the District of Columbia where I live is particularly, purposefully, difficult.

But that’s not good enough anymore. Here’s more from Judge Napolitano:

“Can the civilian use of guns keep us safe? Of course it can. The police simply cannot be everywhere. Anything that diminishes the shooting-fish-in-a-barrel environment of no-gun zones is an improvement over the carnage we have witnessed in them.”

If you don’t own a gun, you should consider joining me. It used to be our choice. Now it feels like a responsibility.

What does it say about our current political leaders when a lawful act, protected by the Constitution, feels like an act of civil disobedience? (For more from the author of “In 2016, Buy a Gun” please click HERE)

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Devastating: Massive Earthquake Shakes India

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Five people died in a magnitude-6.7 earthquake that occurred Monday morning in northeastern India, 29 kilometers (18 miles) west of the city of Imphal, the capital of Manipur state, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. A further 33 have been reported injured, home ministry spokesman Kuldeep Singh Dhatwalia told CNN.

He added that there was some damage to residential and government buildings in Imphal.

The temblor, which hit at 4.35 AM local time (7:05 PM ET), was centered in an isolated area. Imphal itself has a population of more than 250,000. Emergency crews from a variety of agencies responded quickly to provide relief and rescue, Dhatwalia said. (Read more from “Devastating: Massive Earthquake Shakes India” HERE)

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ESCAPE FROM CHICAGO: An Illustrated Tale

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Based upon an article by Daniel Greenfield and illustrated by Biff Spackle.

You can read the entire article here and follow @BiffSpackle on Twitter. You can see more of Biff’s political graphic stories here.

(For more from the author of “ESCAPE FROM CHICAGO: An Illustrated Tale” please click HERE)

Follow Joe Miller on Twitter HERE and Facebook HERE.