If you stop and think about it, Israel is run by politicians who are pretty much guaranteeing the destruction of Jews, not just in Israel but worldwide.

Picture this: you’re a Jew, you’re already facing headwinds. Anti-semitism has been a thing for thousands of years. Jews have been expelled from their homes in countless countries. Pogroms were basically racist riots. There are people today saying the holocaust never happened, even though people are still alive who lived through it.

Any reasonable Jewish person would be trying to find a safe place to live, build alliances, and maybe prove that they’re not conspiring behind closed doors, or whatever else it is that anti-semites accuse Jews of doing.

So what is Israel doing?

Conspiring behind closed doors, controlling the U.S. government like a puppet, and causing untold destruction all around them. The genocide in Gaza, bombings throughout Lebanon and Iran, the wholesale slaughter of villages.

Jews are a tiny minority in the world. In the Middle East, it’s a country of about 7 million people, surrounded by almost 500 million Arabs who hate them because instead of making friends, they steal land and bomb their neighbor’s houses and kill their kids.

None of that is to say that the Arabs surrounding Israel are saints. They’re not. Both sides are murdering each other with wanton abandon. But here’s the question - why are Jews even in Israel? Why, after suffering through a holocaust that wipes out half your population, would you decide that creating a state in the most contested plot of land on earth is a wise survival strategy?

Increasingly, the U.S. population is turning on Israel too. The younger generations are realizing that Israel is a war-mongering, fundamentalist, genocidal state hell-bent on conquest and destruction, and they don’t want to pay taxes or blood to keep supporting that.

So what happens when a tiny country with a tiny population makes the entire world upset at them and loses their final ally?

No reasonable human being who spent even a minute thinking about what strategy Israel should be pursuing would think, “Oh yeah, this is a good idea, we should totally make everyone hate us.”

If Israel wanted to survive and thrive, they’d stop bombing people and start making friends. In fact, if Jews really wanted a place to call home and have peace, they would have picked a different spot, not literally the most religiously contested area in the world.

But Zionism isn’t a strategy, it isn’t a religion, it’s become a death cult, marching towards one final, inevitable result. And all it’s accomplished in the last century is make everyone around the world hate Israelis, and to some extent Jews, even more.

The fact that studies show over 90% of Israel’s population backs the war with Iran is proof that the war-mongering doesn’t stop with the leadership of Israel, it’s permeated their entire society. This is what happens when you have forced conscription (slavery) for over three generations, including of women. The amount of brainwashing and trauma becomes completely unsustainable.

If you have no sane people in a room, bad, self-destructive decisions will continue to be made.

But the nukes!

I know what the pro-war people are saying, “But we can’t let Iran have nukes!”. Right, but what about the U.S. and Israel? They have nukes.

The double standard is palpable.

To date, the U.S. is the only country to have used nukes, and on civilian populations at that, murdering hundreds of thousands. Remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

Iran’s possible future nuclear weapon dangers are entirely hypothetical. America’s? Historical and proven. The government that annihilated Vietnam with napalm and agent orange? That used depleted uranium munitions in Iraq? They get to have thousands of nukes.

It’s also well known that Israel has over 100 nukes. That Zionist death cult hell-bent on destroying everyone around them? They get a free pass to have nukes. The ones who systematically destroyed thousands of homes in Gaza and tried to starve the population to death? Sure, they can have a nuclear program.

Who’s caused more state-sponsored terrorism in the past 5 years, the Israeli government or Iran? I think any honest person can easily answer this question.

I have a suspicion that when the U.S. government stops supporting Israel, they’ll have to wake up to the reality that they’re alone, surrounded by enemies they’ve systematically murdered for almost a century, and maybe, just maybe, they might re-think their “strategy”.

But… probably not. It turns out that making friends requires empathy, and that’s something the Israeli leadership has repeatedly shown they have no capacity for.

The U.S. government needs to back away from Israel, stop taking sides in wars on the other side of the world, and focus on fixing its own disasters, which are too many to list. Inserting yourself in the middle of a religious war that’s been going on for millennia is foolish.

The end to this support will come either way, the question is whether the U.S. government will withdraw because the leadership finally realizes the error of their ways, or because the entire system collapses and the U.S. simply can’t afford to fund endless wars thousands of miles away anymore.

I guess we’ll find out in the next few years. The clock is ticking.

Every time there’s a new war, like the one just started in Iran by the US and Israeli fascists, my first reaction is always disbelief and anger.

Another war? Again? And with the fake WMD excuse, again?

It’s 2026, we have life-saving medical technology; humans have mastered flight and millions of people fly every day; the internet has connected people all over the world, and… the government is still dropping bombs on kids.

At first, the anger is at governments. Those mafia organizations filled with psychopaths who crave power and control above all else. The evil people who want to tell you what to do, and have no problem killing you if you disagree.

Eventually, though, the anger and disbelief moves on from the politicians and soldiers doing the murdering, to… you. And no, probably not actually you. If you’re reading this post, you’re probably as anti-war as me. But you, as in, all the other people out there. The brainwashed fools posting on social media in support of murder.

Those people.

That’s who pisses me off. The ones who worship at the altar of the military industrial complex. The ones who hang American flags in their yards and cheer when bombs fall on innocent people. You.

None of these wars could happen if at least a significant minority, if not an actual majority, of people didn’t support them. Over 80% of Israelis support bombing Iran. Think about that. Over 80% of Israelis are either brainwashed or mentally ill enough to want innocent children to die.

There’s no other way to put it.

Imagine, for a moment, that you’re a parent. You’ve dropped your kids off at school in the morning and you’re heading into work. As you’re driving off, you hear an explosion behind you. A plume of black smoke rises in your rear window.

Your heart sinks.

You drive back to the school, and find it on fire. Rubble, body parts, screaming.

You dig in the rubble for days, and find that all three of your children are dead. Why? Because some piece of shit coward in an airplane 10,000 feet up in the sky pushed a button and dropped a bomb, killing everyone in that school.

I want you to imagine what that would actually feel like. Really think about it. Think about what having everything taken from you, by evil and callous people, would feel like. The grief, the anger, the confusion.

Nobody capable of basic empathy and imagination can support war. It’s simply not possible. The moment you put yourself in the other person’s shoes, all the justifications, the propaganda, the why’s - they all fade into meaninglessness.

War is evil. EVERY war is evil. Every politician that’s ever started a war is evil. Every soldier that’s ever willingly pushed that button is evil (conscription is a gray area). And if I had the comforting belief that a hell existed (I don’t), they’d be in it.

And as long as we’re surrounded by callous, un-empathetic people who support murdering little kids, we simply cannot move forward as a society. Until we figure out how to wake people up and get them to grow a backbone and stop supporting the lies and the murders, how can we build a better society? If we can’t even agree on basic principles like “dropping bombs on kids is bad” - everything else just seems futile.

One thing I do know, is that as Trump continues to become more openly fascistic and insane in his second term, it’s becoming increasingly easy to spot the fake conservatives who continue to support and defend his actions, despite their obvious immoral nature or the fact that they run counter to almost every one of their stated values (or at least the ones they claimed they had a couple of years ago).

For example, how many fake conservatives turned against the 2nd amendment after the Alex Pretti murder a few days ago? Like the FBI director saying insane crap like “no one who wants to be peaceful shows up to a protest with a firearm”.

As if someone’s 2nd amendment rights to protect themselves and others can be suspended just because they attended a protest and filmed some cops abusing people. Peaceful people absolutely can and should carry firearms everywhere they go. That’s how they can keep themselves and their families safe. Disarmament is both unconstitutional and unconscionable. And protests are often dangerous places, so having the ability to defend yourself makes perfect sense.

The idea that mere possession of a firearm implies criminal intent runs counter to everything this country is founded on.

But it wasn’t just politicians, it’s the comments on social media too. For instance, in this downright demonic video by a YouTube former-cop turned celebrity Brandon Tatum, where the ex-cop celebrates the murder of a protestor, there are comments like this:

What is that, if not naked fascism-worship? If this were WWII these people would be telling anti-government protestors “you shouldn’t have been protesting the concentration camps, it’s your fault you were even there. My chance of dying is 0 because I stayed home.”

Or imagine if the brave men and women who sheltered Jews and hid them from Nazi government investigations were told “well, you wouldn’t have been executed if you had just not interfered with the government investigation and handed over the Jews. Stay home and don’t interfere with the SS.”

A “government investigation” means nothing. Governments routinely investigate, raid, assault, kidnap (“arrest”), and murder people for things like smoking pot or owning the wrong configuration of a firearm. The average American unknowingly commits about 3 felonies per day, just peacefully going about their life. The word “felony” has lost all meaning.

America as a country was built by brave people who stood up to the government. A true patriot is someone who protects liberty against tyrants. The mental gymnastics required to call Federal Agents assaulting people “patriots” is beyond insane. What exactly are these conservatives conserving? In what universe is an ever-growing police state patriotic or beneficial to Americans?

These people are immoral, pathetic cowards. And these are exactly the kind of people that evil regimes throughout history (like the Nazis and Communists) would have depended on for support and justification.

In the video, Brandon repeatedly says things like “the officers are just doing their job” and “it’s a felony to interfere with an investigation”, describing Alex Pretti trying to protect a woman from being assaulted by ICE goons.

Let’s be clear here: there is no justifiable reason to knock innocent people over on the street. Whether you call them protestors, agitators, or anything else. There is no justifiable reason to pepper spray someone who is protecting a woman from being assaulted by a deranged psychopath who happens to be wearing a uniform.

These people chose this job. They’re not “just following orders”. They chose to put on body armor, grab a gun, put on a “badge” that gives them legal immunity, and then go out and physically assault and murder people. This isn’t something they have to do. There are plenty of perfectly normal jobs in the world where you can mind your own business and not be roped into state-sanctioned murder.

Putting on a badge and uniform changes nothing. The morality of your actions is still based on the actions themselves. You don’t magically get immunity just because some higher-up psychopath told you to commit a crime. And protecting oneself from assault by a uniformed psychopath (aka Federal Agent) is not a felony in any kind of sane moral system, regardless of what the U.S. government claims when it gives these cops immunity.

The idea that Alex Pretti deserved to be executed because he may or may not have tried to reach for his pistol after being assaulted and tackled to the ground by a dozen psychopaths is a complete perversion of morality, and the people who believe this are just as much a part of the problem as the psychopaths in uniform enforcing Trumps’s orders.

If those people weren’t wearing badges, the entire narrative would be different. The right-wing headlines would read: “Man murdered by gang of criminals.”, or “Gang executed man after he tried to protect a woman.”

Here’s a tip: if your entire interpretation of what is right or wrong changes based on the uniform someone is wearing, you might as well have no morals.

At least now we know who the fake conservatives are.

A Manufactured Crisis

Almost two years ago, I wrote an article that predicted exactly what would happen, and, unfortunately, I was right. The immigration crisis is created by both parties, on purpose, as a way of growing the police state.

The scam works as follows: both parties take turns allowing large numbers of immigrants in, or giving them amnesty, to disrupt communities. The immigrant flow is partly natural (and normal), and partly manufactured, with literal cash incentives and handouts. Some immigrants come to work, others come to live off welfare. Some come to deal drugs and hurt people, though they are a relatively small minority.

We want some immigration (isn’t that how we all got here, at one point or another?), but we don’t want more than a community can reasonably assimilate, or you end up with ghettos where people don’t talk to each other.

At the end of the day, the effect on communities is clear: study after study has shown that the more diversity you have in a community, the less cohesion there is. People literally stop talking to each other; kids stop playing outside in their neighborhoods. People raised in vastly different cultures that don’t share their values, their religion, or a language just don’t mix well together, no matter how much you try to ignore the problem or make people feel guilty about it. It takes generations to heal that divide.

So why do governments do this? Because they can assert more power by dividing and conquering their population. A unified people with a strong sense of morals, a shared culture, and religion, are far more likely to stand together against government abuse. People siloed into apartments and houses, watching Netflix and porn all day long, completely dependent on the grid and just-in-time deliveries, represent no threat whatsoever. It’s a simple strategy, and it works very well.

Problem → Solution

So, the government creates the foundation for discontent by creating artificial diversity, and then, when the next party takes its turn telling people how to live, comes the solution: forced deportations.

The immigrant crisis can then be used as yet another polarizing topic - left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative. Pit groups of people against each other. Because while the left and right are busy fighting each other, the government is stealing everybody’s money with taxation and inflation, and murdering people at home and abroad to gain more power.

The ICE raids, kidnappings (so-called “arrests”) and killings, which seem to be happening without repercussion, and which violate more constitutional amendments than I care to list, aren’t going to stop. And as much as the left dislikes this now, they will 100% use these powers on the people they don’t like once they’re back in power.

This is just two sides of the same coin. Just like the NSA never gave up all their secret surveillance programs after the so-called “war on terror” (actually, war of terror by the U.S. government) ended. They claimed to create them to spy on terrorists, but of course now they spy on everyone.

The U.S. government is detonating the economy. Silver has quadrupled in price in the past few months. Gold has more than doubled. The U.S. dollar’s purchasing power is imploding. Inflation is soaring. The Trump brigade is busy trying to annex countries around the world like imperialistic fascists.

The immigration crisis is here to distract you from the fact that we have a very narrow timeframe left in this country to prepare for what are going to be very difficult times. I suggest you start now.

Background

My wife and I live completely off grid. We have an array of solar panels that feeds our house with electricity during the day, and charges out batteries for the night.

On a sunny day, halfway through the day our batteries are full, and then we have nowhere to put the extra electricity. Since we have no connection to the grid, we can’t resell the surplus, it just… disappears.

So the prepper in me thought - wouldn’t it be cool if I had an electric vehicle I could charge off grid? I’d save on gas, and if there were gas shortages or supply chain disruptions, we could still drive around and charge the vehicle ourselves.

While everyone else was stuck with empty gas tanks, we could be self-reliant. It’s a pretty cool idea… in theory.

My wife and I also talked about how FSD (full self-driving) would be a handy feature on long road trips. We could just engage that mode and have the car mostly drive us… or so we thought.

Fast forward a few months and I somewhat strong-armed my wife into getting a Tesla to replace her 20 year-old gasoline car.

Full self-driving mode

Day 1, it almost killed my wife in a near-wreck. She used FSD on a highway just to try it out, and within minutes the car started swerving wildly near a semi. She had to fight the car to regain control and ended up in the grass, barely avoiding a crash.

My wife calls me, in shock, and asks me to help drive it back - she’s not going to be able to keep driving it, it’s too scary. I drive it home, starting to feel a bit ambivalent about the whole thing.

Next week I decided to be brave and try out FSD myself. On a sunny day in ideal lighting conditions, it did a mediocre job of driving me around. I had to take over every 5 minutes or so, so not exactly self-driving, but it was an interesting technology, and in one case it managed to drive me entirely from one store to another without my assistance. I was starting to become a believer… until it drove me straight into an oncoming traffic lane later that day. Luckily there were no cars there and I was able to maneuver back into my lane. Perhaps it got confused by the way the lanes were split, but there was a clear sign right in the middle of the median. An issue I would have never had driving myself.

So within a week, we realized a 2025 Tesla with the latest hardware and software could not drive itself safely, not even remotely. All the hype was fake, and if you look it up you’ll find more people having accidents where FSD tries to kill their drivers. It also doesn’t work at night, or when it rains, or when it’s foggy. In fact, any time you drive it at night there’s a constant stream of distracting notifications telling you one or another camera is “blocked” when really it’s just dark outside.

You see, they don’t have radar or thermal imaging or any of the technologies you’d think a self-driving car would have. They rely entirely on cameras that see worse than people (a common complaint on Tesla forums) - not a good setup for success.

What’s the point of a self-driving feature that needs constant monitoring and intervention to use? We realized we were the beta testers that Tesla was using to collect data. Every FSD-induced crash was a valuable data point for them.

No thanks, I don’t want to be some mega-corporation’s data point.

Unfortunately, whistleblowers from Tesla have shown that these issues are common, and FSD often puts drivers and their passengers into dangerous situations, including crashing them into oncoming vehicles.

What about regular cruise control?

Unfortunately, even the simple cruise control feature is too “smart”. And by that I mean, it thinks it’s smart, but it’s actually pretty stupid. With cruise control engaged, on a perfectly clear road, I’ve had the Tesla randomly hit the brakes and then speed back up again, for no apparent reason. Perhaps a bug flew in front of one of its cameras and it freaked out? Another “feature” is that on curvy roads the cruise control will slow you down a bit to make it easier to take the turn, but the problem is it’ll only work half the time. So when it works, it’s actually pretty handy, but when it doesn’t work, you have to cancel out of cruise control and take over, and since it only works about 50% of the time, you end up never trusting it and always coming out of cruise control anyway.

Oh and the Tesla is constantly trying to break the speed limits. By default, if I turn on cruise control, it’ll go above the speed limit. It even says what the speed limit is, and then right next to it, the “max” cruise control speed is there, set way above it. Go figure. Maybe I’m the odd one out but I rarely speed more than a few miles over the speed limit, and this car was going uncomfortably fast in poor lighting conditions.

Off-grid living

A few days into owning the Tesla, I plug it in at home and charge the car up using just the power of the sun. I’m not going to lie, this was a magical moment. Perhaps the only magical moment with the Tesla; but for a second, I felt like I was part of the future. What if everyone had off-grid homes and EVs? We could all be self-reliant in terms of our transportation, and gas stations and exhaust fumes could be a thing of the past.

But, unfortunately, Teslas uses up about 1% of their battery life just… sitting around doing nothing. That translates to around 3 miles of range lost per day, even if you don’t drive the car or do anything with it. They also recommend you don’t charge it up past 80% except for long road trips, or you’ll wear out the battery prematurely. So if you do the math, a Tesla with 330 miles of advertised range only really has 264 miles of range if you follow the 80% charge limit recommendation, and losing 3 miles of range per day means that in less than 3 months of no charging your Tesla would be dead in the water.

This is without Sentry mode (video surveillance) on or any other such features. Turns out all the constant data transmission the car does even when “sleeping” has a significant parasitic drain on the battery.

I could leave my Toyota unattended for half a year, come back, and it would still function just fine. Eventually the battery would die and I’d have to jump start it, something you can easily do with any other car or a generator.

Meanwhile, Teslas cannot be jump started, and cannot jump start other vehicles.

What about off-road worthiness?

One night when coming home I suddenly hear this horrible grinding sound from what sounds like my tire. Luckily I was already on my driveway so I just hobbled to a halt and left it there to deal with it the next day.

Come morning, I conscripted my wife to look into what was causing the noise as I drive around at 3 mph around my driveway. Suddenly, the noise gets much worse and is now a shrill shriek. She identifies the wheel that seems to be the culprit, and I call Tesla roadside assistance.

I’m told it’s likely a small rock stuck in between the rotor and brake shield, and get directed to this self-help article on their website.

To me, this is a red flag. If you have a dedicated support article for getting gravel out of your brakes, something is wrong.

Half an hour later and I work the gravel out with a screwdriver and a crowbar, putting an end to the miserable screech. I go online and find forum threads full of people with this same issue. Apparently this is a design flaw in Teslas going back years that’s never been fixed.

Turns out, despite all the talk of AWD and off-road capability, the Tesla SUV can’t actually handle gravel roads. Whoops.

You know what else Teslas can’t handle? A flat tire. Teslas don’t come with spares, not even the crappy donut kind. If you have a flat tire, they expect you to call roadside assistance to help you out. Being a pepper, I bought an aftermarket spare tire, but without a dedicated spot to put it, it ends up taking up half the trunk space and we can’t realistically drive around with it while also doing basic shopping chores, so it just gets left at home anyway.

Both my wife and I have had flat tires and been able to change to our spare and continue with our day. But without a spare? You’d be screwed. And maybe that’s okay for a hipster living in a city 5 minutes away from help, but what if you’re in a rural area where the closest tire shop is 40 miles away? And what if it’s night time too? You might be stuck there until the next morning.

Also, just as a heads up, it turns out Teslas cannot be towed with two tires down. You can’t pull it behind an RV either. It has to have all 4 wheels off the road. The manual says that exceeding even 30 feet of movement in neutral could cause the motors to overheat and get damaged. Yeah…

Tesla’s so-called SUV can’t handle gravel roads, or flat tires. Not much of an SUV if you ask me.

Let’s talk about EMF

Probably our two biggest issues were privacy and EMF. The Tesla is constantly transmitting. I have an assortment of EMF meters I use to test any new device or appliance, and I can confirm, for instance, that if you put an iPhone into airplane mode and disable Bluetooth and WiFi, it really does stop transmitting.

But a Tesla? Well, there is no way to disable any of that. There’s no airplane mode, no Bluetooth off switch, and it has a cellphone modem that’s always on and always transmitting your location, telemetry, and likely video (despite what their sketchy privacy policy says). Teslas have something on the order of 18 antennas, so it’s kind of like sitting in a microwave. Imagine strapping 18 phones to your head every time you drive.

Also, the A/C magnetic fields are completely off the charts when you’re charging this thing, so I recommend putting some distance between you and any Teslas being charged. The EMF is worst in the second row, nearer the charger, which is also where you’d have your kids strapped into a car seat. We realized, a regular gas station stop which takes 5 minutes (and the kids stay strapped in the car) is infinitely more convenient than stopping at a supercharger, taking the kids out for half an hour due to the dangerously high EMF, and walking around the nearby store aimlessly waiting for your car to charge up. Anyone who’s had little kids knows how much of a difference 25 minutes makes. And what if they were asleep?

Overall, to me the EMF is a dealbreaker. I could maybe deal with that if it was just me and my wife and we really loved the car otherwise, but with little kids, there was no way I was going to put them into that vehicle for hours at a time. Unfortunately, there’s not a lot of information about EMF in Teslas online, so I had to find this out the hard way.

But at least it’s convenient, right?

Speaking of bluetooth - that’s how you get into the car. Your phone has to have bluetooth on, and when you’re near the car, it’s meant to sense that and automatically unlock the doors when you pull on the handle. It works, about 80% of the time. 20% of the time you have to pull out your phone, go into the app, refresh, and then it can detect you. Sometimes you have to kill the app and restart it. The walk-away lock is similarly unreliable. Sometimes it locks the car when you get 10ft away from it, sometimes 30ft away, sometimes you look back and wait, wondering if the car will ever lock, and then end up pulling out your phone, opening the Tesla app, and tapping the “lock” button.

On the other hand, sometimes it overreacts. For instance, yesterday when I unlocked the frunk (that’s a front trunk, something EVs have since they have no traditional engine), standing right in front of the vehicle, it immediately locked the car. Why? Why would you assume that someone using the frunk would want to lock the car at that moment? It makes no sense.

Meanwhile, my Toyota is 100% reliable. I walk up to it, it senses the key fob in my pocket, and when I pull on the handle it unlocks. When I push the button on the handle, it locks. No bluetooth required, no charged phone, no app. It just works, and with way less EMF, if you care about that sort of thing.

Another ding on the convenience front: Teslas lack a lot of traditional buttons found on normal cars. For instance, there’s no lock or unlock button on the doors, so the only way to lock it is via the phone app or the giant screen. That means the usual trick of opening the door, locking it, and then closing it behind you as you walk away is simply not available. Teslas advertise convenience and ease of use, but in reality, they’ve removed so many features that regular cars have, and replaced them with buggy software-enabled versions, that the car is actually far more inconvenient to use in regular life than a regular vehicle.

Speaking of missing features - Teslas have no sunglasses holders! A basic feature that even cheap early 2000s cars have, a Tesla doesn’t have.

But hey, at least I can unlock my frunk from the bathroom using the app!

What about the privacy issues?

Finally, we have to address the privacy issues. Teslas have an internal microphone and camera that is constantly pointing at you, the driver. In addition to the array of a dozen or so external cameras and microphones that can see and hear everything outside the car, they can also listen in on any conversations you have inside the car. Say goodbye to having a private conversation with your spouse or kids.

And there’s no way to switch these off, nor is there a way to disconnect the Tesla from cell towers. It’s always on, always listening, always recording, and we have to simply hope that Tesla isn’t collecting and abusing all that information - which, it turns out, they are. A Tesla whistleblower has revealed that employees routinely share sensitive videos of people using their Teslas, including videos of naked people, children being hit by cars, etc.

So yeah, Tesla is a scummy company harvesting your videos and mis-using them, and all their privacy policies are worthless. They’re just another big tech company, masquerading as a vehicle manufacturer. They probably make more money off your data than the cars they sell to you, and that makes Elon “freedom of speech” Musk a complete clown of a hypocrite.

But if you go on Tesla forums to try to find solutions to the privacy or EMF issues, you’ll just hear from tons of abusive trolls. What I’ve learned is that the demographic of people who drive Teslas don’t care about privacy, EMF as it pertains to health, or preparedness, even for basic issues like flat tires.

Tesla’s Customer Support sucks

Before I forget - Tesla’s horrendous, mostly non-existent customer support deserves a mention. Do a search and you’ll see endless forum threads of people complaining about it. It was extremely hard for me to reach anybody at Tesla. They literally don’t have a regular phone number you can call. All you can do is make a support request via your phone (but there’s no way to call anybody, they call you, if you’re lucky). You can also call a Tesla store, but only the sales line. They care about making sales, but not supporting their product, so the only way I was able to talk to a human was to talk to the sales team and try to get their help. (Spoiler: they weren’t very helpful.)

TLDR; we’re selling the Tesla

At this point we’ve decided we’re done and we’re just going to sell the car. Of course, Tesla no longer has a return policy, so we start trying to sell it, and to our dismay discover that unlike Toyotas that have been so reliable for us, Teslas has no resale value. They drop like a rock. My Toyota is more expensive now with several years and thousands of miles on it than it was when I first bought it. A brand new Tesla with <500 miles? Not worth even 80% of what we spent on it.

Maybe if Elon spent more time making cars and less time trolling people on Twitter they’d have figured out how to make a car that works by now. Alas, perhaps you can learn from our costly mistake.

So yes, the cool thing is we can charge our Tesla at home with our solar, off-grid. But is that worth everything else that’s wrong with the car? No, no it isn’t. We’re selling it.

My wife and I watched Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning a few days ago and it hurt our brains, both literally (with the extremely fast <100ms cuts in some scenes) and metaphorically, with the very deep well of utter nonsense that this movie kept drawing from.

In case you haven’t watched part 1 of this last movie, the basic plot synopsis is: an evil AI is taking over the world and planning to nuke all of mankind into oblivion. Why? Oh, who knows, we’re never told.

Here’s my brief review of some of the utterly stupid parts of this movie’s plot:

1. Tom Cruise, while flying down in a parachute in the middle of nowhere South Africa, plugs in one USB drive into another to somehow “synthesize” a virus that can destroy the evil AI. There is no antenna, no Wi-Fi, no cellular connection here, yet somehow, in less than a second, the virus on this drive wirelessly transmits itself to… everywhere in the internet, infects the evil AI that has spent the last few months infecting every computer network in the world, and then tricks it into isolating itself on a hard drive in some data center. Literally in less than a second. With no internet connection.

2. The virus that can kill the evil AI was developed by a dying man in a basement who’s never seen the AI’s source code, but he knows that if you plug the flash drive with the virus on it into a hard drive that contains the AI’s source code (which Tom Cruise has to retrieve from a sunken submarine), it will somehow be able to figure out all its weaknesses and kill the actual live AI that’s spread throughout cyberspace. Anybody who has ever written a program (or who can reason with logic) knows that viruses cannot be developed in isolation without ever having seen the system they’re targeting. This entire part of the plot is total nonsense.

3. The team’s plan hinges on the AI wanting to download itself into a data center bunker to protect itself from nuclear armageddon, and it can supposedly place itself on a 360 terabyte drive in a few seconds. Anybody who has experienced internet download speeds and general hard drive transfer speeds knows this is nonsense. Even though the movie involves a made-up 360 terabyte drive technology that glows (you know, for extra magical effect), even if such a drive existed, the existing regular technology in the data center would still not be able to transfer that kind of file in a couple of seconds. If you had an EXTREMELY fast data center connection you could maybe do it in an hour. More realistically you might be looking at a half-day transfer.

4. The AI’s grand plan is to nuke humanity by taking over the world’s nuclear arsenals and unleashing armageddon, and then hiding in a solar-powered data center in South Africa for 1,000 years. It’s never explained why this is a good idea, or how it benefits AI to sit around with no data inputs our outputs for a thousand years until it eventually also dies. Presumably this self-aware AI loves data and learning, so annihilating all sources of data input makes no sense.

5. For some reason, instead of making a copy of itself on the data center servers, it literally moves itself over, meaning it deletes itself from all of the internet first. This is vital to the plot because this allows Tom Cruise’s team to “trap” the evil AI in the data center. But why on earth would a computer program that spent months taking over the entire internet then delete itself from it all? Why not just make a backup copy?

6. In the last day before AI takes over all the nuclear arsenals (which somehow the U.S. government has predicted to the minute), the U.S. president (who is a black woman, of course), is told to nuke the capitals of every other nuclear-armed nation in the world. Beijing, Paris, Moscow, London, etc. - she’s told that this preemptive strike will stop them from being able to use their nukes, which by then were already taken over by the evil AI.

   1. First of all, silos, submarines, trains, airplanes, and other forms of nuclear warhead delivery devices. do not require a functioning capital city to work, that’s a basic redundancy. Most of them are independent, so all this would do is kill millions of people.

   2. She is told that if she “sacrifices” one of America’s cities, it will somehow make the other countries hate the U.S. government less, as if this is some kind of sick modern take on Aztec human sacrifices. “Look! We killed millions of our own people for literally no reason - now that you know we’re total psychos, you can relax and not go to war with us even though we nuked you.”

7. The plan hinges, among other things, on a woman staring at the hard drive and snatching it to disconnect it from the servers within less than 100 milliseconds of when it starts to glow. Any longer and the AI will realize it’s placed itself on a hard drive trap and leave. She’s a thief, so she has fast reflexes you see. Meanwhile, the hard drive, virus, and all the technology made to infect and trap the evil AI was made by supposed computer geniuses, who couldn’t have simply severed the connection to the drive within 100 milliseconds programmatically?

Note that I’m not even criticizing the action scenes, which are of course unrealistic - but part of the fun. You watch a Mission Impossible movie for the over-the-top action scenes, so that’s expected. But this movie wasn’t fun. It was painful to watch.

My advice? Only watch this movie if you enjoy taking apart absurd plots or if you like action scenes that make no sense. Otherwise, skip it.

The current government administration is imposing some pretty wild tariffs on imported goods. The idea is simple: if goods made in China and elsewhere are more expensive, corporations will build factories in the U.S. and bring back manufacturing, since it’ll be economically viable to do this.

It’s a decent hypothesis, but it misses a pretty major trend that has happened in this country, and throughout Western civilization in general: people here don’t want factory jobs.

Factory jobs are hard. They’re dirty, they’re dangerous. You’re much more likely to get injured operating a chop saw than you are operating a computer keyboard (although computer use brings about a certain kind of long-term injury of its own).

After decades of moving these dirty and dangerous jobs overseas, the odds of successfully bringing them back to the U.S. are extremely low. Even though many factories are mechanized with robots and high-tech assembly lines, you still need people. And who is going to work at these factory jobs? The social media-addicted teenagers and young adults who need their instant dopamine hit at the click of a button? They want to be celebrities and social media influencers, not factory workers.

You might argue it doesn’t matter what they want, what matters is what jobs are available - but the follow-up question is, want or not, are these people even capable of doing the labor? These kinds of jobs require an entirely different upbringing. Both in terms of work ethic, physical endurance, and mental fortitude. A population that for decades has had its attention span and grit eroded and replaced with instant gratification and easy air-conditioned office jobs is unlikely to form a good labor pool for re-industrialization.

I suppose we could recruit factory workers from all of those immigrants, who often have better work ethics as they came from poorer countries with fewer luxuries. Oh wait - we’re in the process of deporting them.

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In an ideal scenario, the U.S. would not have become so dependent on cheap communist labor in countries like China, and would have continued to produce at home, perhaps with the use of more automation and less harsh work - but now that this trend has all but entirely happened, with “Made in the U.S.A.” a rarity across virtually every product group, and given that this trend has happened over the past 2 generations, can we really expect a reversal to work?

Here’s what I think will happen: a few corporations will successfully bring back some production. In poorer areas where there’s still some desire for these factory jobs, they’ll be able to make some good ol’ Made in America goods. But by and large the effect of the tariffs will be:

1. Increased prices and therefore increased poverty for the middle and lower classes.

2. Decreased international cooperation leading to more tension and war.

I want to focus on the second point for a moment.

Why have China and the U.S. been in a strained but generally peaceful relationship for the past 35 years? Because of trade.

There are more millionaires in the communist party than there are in the U.S. congress. A lot of so-called Chinese communists have made millions or even billions off of the capital investments and trade that have happened because of international cooperation.

It should come as no surprise that when politicians can make tons of money during peacetime, they have no need of war. That’s what we want. We want politicians (even the corrupt ones) to have more wealth from peace than from war. The moment that equation changes - for instance due to sudden high tariffs that destroy international trade - we’re in big trouble.

Although China has danced around Taiwan for decades with military drills and threats, they’ve never made a move. TSMC, the corporation that produces virtually every electronic chip in the world, has been too profitable of an enterprise for the Chinese to risk destroying, which an invasion of Taiwan likely would.

But with tariffs killing the international trade goose that laid the golden anti-war egg (excuse the long-winded metaphor), I can see things changing rapidly.

The tariffs aren’t going to reduce the U.S. dependence on foreign goods. What they will do is reduce the dependence of other countries on U.S. good will. Why keep the Americans happy (e.g. by not invading Taiwan) if you can’t trade with them anyway?

We’re in dangerous territory folks. As Bastiat once said, “When goods don’t cross borders, soldiers will.”

These tariffs, far from making America stronger, will simply accelerate its collapse by making its people poorer and harming its security. The idea that a top-down government crackdown on trade will reverse decades of cultural decadence and decline is absurd. The ship has sailed. All the government can do now is accelerate the collapse.

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Stuffed animals are an ubiquitous toy every one of us has grown up with. We cuddled them, played pretend, had tea parties and slept with them. In books, on television screens, in movie theaters, and in video games, walking, talking animals that have wisdom to impart on us (or just look cute) are a staple of every Western childhood.

My daughter has a puzzle she loves playing with that has a little teddy bear flying in an airplane. The bear looks cute, of course, but is that really more interesting to a child than a little boy or girl flying in an airplane? Wouldn’t they relate more to the latter? Why is it that almost every bit of media, including the clothing children wear, adorned with cute versions of vicious animals?

In real life, bears are not cute. They’re strong, fast, can climb trees (at least the black bear can) and can be extremely dangerous - especially to children.

Lions are not cute animals to be cuddled with, they’re dangerous predators that will eat you without hesitation - especially if you’re a small child.

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Not all stuffed toys are of predators. There’s also elephants or giraffes, for instance - and while these wild animals won’t hunt humans for food, they could easily trample them if they got in their way or if they were scared or protective of their young.

So, given that these animals are not inherently more relatable than, say, a stuffed animal of a dog or cat (which a child might actually cuddle successfully without being killed), or just other children and adults - why have they completely overtaken children’s media? Could there be some nefarious propaganda at play here, innocently masquerading under the disarmingly false pretense of “cuteness”?

My wife, who as a child loved the Lion King, tells me that when she had to write a school report on actual lions, she was shocked to find out just how vicious these predators were. Seeing videos of them devouring their prey almost scarred her. Yet by then she was already a teenager. She understood in theory that lions eat other animals, but she couldn’t fathom what that really meant.

My theory is that the personification of animals is so prevalent for two reasons:

1. They’re commercially successful, as children (and many adults) love cute things. For over a century, starting with the first teddy bear, companies have been making stuffed animals cuter and cuter, figuring out the perfect formula for how to appeal to a human being’s innate desire to care for and cherish “cute” things - originally a mechanism in our brain designed to encourage us to take care of otherwise noisy and objectionable human babies, and also to stop us from eating the immature young of other animals - for the simple reason that leaving a baby deer to grow up and become an adult is a much more viable hunting strategy, giving us more meat in the long-run (and allowing that adult to reproduce, too).

2. Vegan and environmentalist propaganda. Think about it: veganism was virtually non-existent even just a few generations ago. Rates of veganism and vegetarianism have gone up from about 1% in the 1970’s to over 5% now. Who does this benefit? Well, there might be vegans who just want more people to be vegans - but there’s also a whole industry of meat-substitutes popping up, from fake meat like beans made into a meat-like container, to full on lab-made atrocities. And let’s not forget the massive profits of the grain industry.

But what if we get even more conspiratorial for a second? Does the philosophy of vegetarianism and veganism fundamentally detach human beings from their natural drive to hunt and slaughter animals? Does decades of indoctrination via cute animals create generations of people who are terrified of fulfilling their genetic destiny as hunters? That is what we are, after all.

A generation of children raised on cute stuffed animals will be all the more incapable, and therefore dependent, on governments and corporations to provide for their needs. And independent and capable people are any government’s worst nightmare.

What do you think? Why are vicious animals personified as cute toys to cuddle or watch on TV?

Imagine if politicians were forced to wear uniforms with their corporate sponsors on them.

Imagine if Dick Cheney, while lying to the American people about WMD’s in Iraq, instead of standing in a suit and tie, had a onesie (yeah, it has to be a onesie. Politicians need to feel humiliated, that’ll filter out a lot of egomaniacs) - and the onesie had a giant Halliburton corporate logo on it.

Would anyone take them seriously? Would their desire to wage war for the benefit of the military industrial complex be under question? Imagine how fewer wars we’d have.

Or think about the vaccine mandates! Imagine if Fauci’s onesie had a giant Pfizer logo on it, would anyone really believe the vaccine mandates were pushed for Americans’ health?

While I would encourage almost everyone to try to become as independent from the system and as self-reliant as possible; ideally moving to a rural area and going off-grid with your own sources of power, water, and food, the reality is that this lifestyle isn’t “simple”, and I’m getting tired of it being advertised everywhere as if it were.

Last year we moved off-grid. Throughout the winter we’ve had to feed the wood stove we have several times a day, we’ve had to split wood to make kindling, we’ve had to carry wood from our outside wood racks to inside the house every 2-3 days, and take the excess ash out of the fireplace about once a day. Because our firewood wasn’t properly seasoned, it doesn’t last all night and we have to wake up and feed the fire, or our mornings are cold.

We use a composting toilet, and that’s great because it means we have no need for water (which worked out well when our pipes froze the other day), but it also means you have to manage a compost pile and manually take the compost out every couple of weeks.

We have solar panels and batteries and no grid connection. If the grid went down, we wouldn’t even notice. But in the winter months we’ve had to carefully manage our electricity usage on cloudy days, and when it snowed several inches and our solar panels were completely covered, we had to run a generator, which means storing gasoline, doing generator maintenance, etc.

I won’t bore you with all the details, but suffice it to say, living off-grid is hard. It isn’t simple, and it isn’t easy.

You know what’s easy? Living in a city apartment. Electricity and water are wired and piped into your home, and food is a 5 minute drive away neatly wrapped in plastic; but, you’re also completely at the mercy of a delicate and extremely complicated supply chain.

There’s an inverse relationship between convenience and self-reliance. You have to choose where you want to be on that line.

Most people choose convenience, and it works out fine for them… until it doesn’t.

Recall that just a couple of years ago utility companies were shutting down people’s homes for violating draconian Covid laws and hosting - gasp - parties in your home, and you’ll quickly realize that the abuse of power is not a matter of if, but rather of when. And of course there’s the looming threat of old infrastructure decay as the economy crumbles under a mountain of debt.

On the other hand, though not easy, it is extremely fulfilling knowing that you’re able to heat your home whether the local utility company likes you or not.

But if you’re going to embark on this journey, you should be realistic about your expectations. You’re going to have to adjust your lifestyle. There will be new chores. You’ll have less time for social media (that’s not a bad thing!), and you’ll be spending a lot more time outside in the sun.

Are you ready to move off-grid and take control of your life?

I almost never talk about preparedness with people in any kind of a direct way. Most people who are not into prepping just don’t get it, and unfortunately having more than 3 days of food is “crazy” to a large segment of the population.

But, living in a rural place off the grid, it inevitably comes up that we produce our own electricity with solar panels, harvest rainwater, burn wood for heat, and, if needed, could hunt for sustenance. Most of the time this is just a curiosity to normies and people living in cities, but, every now and then, something interesting happens.

Whenever there’s a news story of some impending danger or disaster, or sometimes even just when discussing disasters in fiction (such as one of the never-ending stream of zombie apocalypse movies), almost in unison people will say things like:

“Well I’m glad we know someone who lives off-grid on a homestead, if something happens, we’ll just come to you!”

I kid you not, I hear this at least once a month from somebody.

When the news started to be abuzz with drones and possible aliens around New Jersey, my coworkers said, almost in unison, “Hey, you should send us your address so we know where to come if the aliens invade!”. They laughed, I laughed, but I knew that a part of them was serious.

A month ago I was talking to a guy I bought some firewood from, and he casually invited himself to my homestead if “things ever go to crap”.

We have friends who, right before the election, said, “If things turn violent and there’s civil unrest, can we come camp out at your property?”

Personally, I don’t mind. I don’t see regular people as the enemy. The way I see it, the more, the merrier. In a serious, prolonged, wide-scale disaster scenario, you’re going to want all the help you can get. More people means more work getting done, more firewood getting cut, more food getting grown. I don’t see people as a burden, I see people as community, and I’m happy to help to the extent that I don’t endanger my own family’s survival.

That’s why I store extra tents, sleeping bags, blankets, and mattresses. If friends, family, or neighbors had to crash at our place for a while, we’d have them covered.

But I think this trend of people inviting themselves over to preppers’ homes is interesting, because it comes from people across the political spectrum. Lefties, Trump supporters, libertarians. Anybody who isn’t already living off-grid on a homestead instinctively knows that their lifestyle is fundamentally unsustainable, that just-in-time deliveries are fragile, and that sooner or later supply chains will get disrupted again.

They know this deep down, even though they won’t admit to it, or, unfortunately too often, do anything to prepare themselves.

What do you think? Have you had people invite themselves to your property? Or are you perhaps planning to bug out to a relative’s homestead in a disaster scenario?

I was recently at a kids birthday party and everybody, from the kids to the parents, had some kind of special dietary requirement. One kid couldn’t eat eggs, another couldn’t eat dairy, and so on.

When I was a child I don’t remember this being an issue. I had heard of peanut allergies, though never knew of anyone in my school who had one, and other food allergies were unheard of.

People have been eating wheat, and therefore gluten, for thousands of years. Yes, it’s not the right food for us to be eating (the ideal diet is some form of Paleo diet), but even so, it’s one thing for people to be somewhat unhealthy from eating food, it’s another entirely to be having very strong reactions that put them out of commission. Celiac disease isn’t just being better diagnosed, it’s becoming a lot more common.

I know a man with celiac and if he eats so much as a breadcrumb with gluten in it he’s bed-ridden for 3 days while his bowels recover.

I myself have all kinds of food allergies and intolerances too, unfortunately. It certainly makes life harder.

So why is this all happening? Why is a 2024 birthday party for kids all about special dietary needs when 30 years ago this wasn’t the case?

Food today is more poisonous than it ever has been. Even during the times of food adulteration in 19th century England the poisoned food was not killing as many as it is now. Diabetes, obesity, cancer, heart disease - all of these diseases are primarily due to our diet (and to some extent lifestyle).

But what puzzled me was realizing that when one switches to organic food - the allergies remain. For instance, give someone with gluten intolerance organic wheat, and they’ll still feel like crap.

If you have an intolerance for dairy, giving you grass-fed organic raw milk is unlikely to make much of any difference (I’ve tried). So what’s the deal?

People who have grown up eating food laced with pesticides and other toxins develop a reaction primarily to the toxins in the food - in other words, gluten sensitivity comes from an immune reaction to glyphosate, not gluten. It’s just that conventional wheat, since 2006, has had massive doses of glyphosate sprayed on it ever since farmers realized they could use glyphosate not just as a weed killer but also to dry out the wheat and get it ready for harvest - so they started spraying it with glyphosate right before harvest, and much more of it stayed on the wheat than it had when glyphosate was only used as a weed-killer around planting time.

My theory is that when our immune systems react to the toxins, they lump the food and the toxin together. In other words, our immune systems begin to associate the poison (glyphosate) with the food (wheat) or some component of it (gluten). Do you have dairy allergies? Maybe you spent your childhood drinking toxic milk full of growth hormones and antibiotics from factory grain-fed cows.

Once your immune system decides that wheat or milk itself is bad, even switching to the organic alternatives isn’t going to make a difference.

If however you can grow up eating organic food to begin with, which is what people had done for thousands of years until about the mid-20th century, then your immune system won’t learn to over-react to the food and associate toxicity with it.

So far this seems to be holding true for my kids. We feed them a 95% organic diet (we slip up occasionally) and so far none of them have any food allergies. Is it luck? Maybe.

If you have any ideas about this growing allergy to food please let me know in the comments - the idea that human beings are slowly poisoning our own food supply is a terrifying thought, and something more of us should be worried about.

What started out in 2024 as promises of Joy, quickly became a concrete plan as the Harris regime won the 2024 election by an overwhelming majority of votes.

After she took office, Harris announced that her solution to economic and political problems would be Joy. At the time, many were confused by her cryptic rhetoric. How could one spontaneously feel joy when inflation was eroding our incomes, the world was closer to nuclear war than it had been in 50 years, and the new generation couldn’t figure out which bathroom to use?

Well, in 2025, Harris got to work. She rolled up her sleeves, and created a new Department of Public Moods, which would supervise the most technologically advanced research program in modern times. She called it Operation Joy. Scientists at the DPM worked day and night for 2 years until in early 2027, Joy became approved by the FDA for first human trials.

After a whirlwind trial, the results of which were so shockingly positive that they had to be patented and kept from the public, Joy is ready for use!

Available at your local pharmacy for pickup, Joy will solve all your problems.

Depressed about the state of human civilization? Take Joy!

Worried about where your next meal will come from because the 2025 riots destroyed your business? Take Joy!

Anxious that the newly re-introduced conscription of 2026 has taken your son and your daughter and sent them to the Eastern Front? Joy is all you need!

Concerned that your neighbor might report you to the First Amendment Detention Center for speaking out about the Harris Regime? Well, those camps won’t fill themselves up! Take Joy and forget all those nasty thoughts you had.

And remember, if you don’t take your Joy, we’ll freeze your bank account and turn off your power. Because nobody should be feeling things for themselves. It’s 2027, and it’s about time Science™ told us what to feel. After all, the government already tells you what to do, eat, and inject into yourself. Why not dictate your mood, too!

I wrote an article a few years ago about the necessity of not just being armed, but also of being healthy. You can’t effectively wield a firearm if you’re obese and can’t walk further than from your front door to the car.

For many Americans, I think the decline in their (or their fellow citizens’) health has been a slow process. Kind of like a frog being boiled in water. If each generation is a bit fatter than the one before it, will anybody notice?

Sure, people talk about obesity in this country, but half that talk is about how we need to support obese people, rather than focusing on actually getting them back to health.

As someone who grew up in Europe and immigrated here several years ago, it was frankly a shock. Yes, Europeans are also dealing with rising chronic health problems, including obesity, but it’s nothing like over here. The difference is staggering.

Better yet, go to Japan for a week. Then come back here, and see if you notice the difference. Japan’s obesity rate is extremely low - you’ll almost never see any overweight people there. You don’t even need to come back to the U.S., you’ll start to notice the health shift as soon as you get to the departing gate for your flight back to the U.S.

If you’re in the liberty movement and you want to build a better future for yourself and your children, you’re better off focusing on health issues (atrazine, glyphosate, the sugar epidemic, big pharma, fluoridated water) than first and second amendment rights. Yes, those are important too, but it turns out you need a functioning body to really exercise your rights.

Last year I suffered a pretty bad shoulder injury that put me out of commission for a few months, and even after more than a year I’m still recovering. This bout of bad health has put the need for good health, and community, into a sharper focus for me.

While I was not the biggest fan of RFK Jr. - he seemed like too much of a socialist, and I don’t believe in political “solutions” anyway, I did admire the fact that he was the first presidential candidate I’ve ever heard talk seriously about the decline in Americans’ health. I’m hoping he can do for the health movement what Ron Paul in 2008 did for the liberty movement - mass education.

No top-down solution to this problem exists. The corporations and government agencies that have caused this annihilation of Americans’ health did it on purpose, and they are far too powerful to “fix” from the inside like what RFK Jr. would like to do. The only solution, as always, is to first change yourself, and then lead by example.

Everything else is wishful thinking and a waste of time.

So, what are you doing for your health today?

While thinking about the proper role of law enforcement in a free society (and yes, there is a proper role, but it’s extremely narrow), I thought of a simple litmus test we can all apply when judging a cop’s behavior.

“As a regular person without a badge and uniform, can I do the same thing they just did and not go to prison for it?”

If the answer is no, then what the cop is doing is immoral, should be illegal, and has no place in a free society.

For example:

1. Stopping cars to check a driver’s ID or because they thought the car was “suspicious” somehow. If you or I did that, it would be considered harassment or even assault.

2. Searching through someone’s car or house to find drugs. If you or I did that, it would be considered breaking & entering, and, if you took that drug or whatever you were looking for, it would be considered theft.

3. “Arresting” somebody for “possession” of some “illegal” thing. Whether that’s a particular gun, drug, alcohol, you name it. If you did that and brought them back to some facility and put them in a cage, it would be considered kidnapping and you’d probably have a SWAT team bearing down on you shortly. Also, there is no such thing as an “illegal” object. Any laws prohibiting the possession of things are wrong.

What is the (very) limited role law enforcement could have in a free society? Well, you still need tough men to deal with murderers, rapists, thieves, and deal with the dregs of society. Most people would rather not do that, so it makes sense for it to be a paid profession.

But the number of laws that a police officer would be able to enforce in a free society would likely not exceed about 10 (e.g. murder, rape, theft). Once you get rid of all the immoral laws forbidding possession of things, plus all the random tax and regulatory laws floating around, and then simplify the remaining laws, there’s not that much left. Indeed, I suspect most lawyers would soon be out of a job. They thrive on confusion and complexity, and free people have no need of that.

Finally, a police officer operating within a free market environment without a government would not have “immunity” from prosecution. They would have to think before they go and break into someone’s house or kidnap someone: “Would a judge reasonably deem this to be acceptable behavior if a private citizen did it?” Yes, if they’re breaking into a house because someone is being murdered and they need to stop the murderer. Not so much if it’s because they think the occupant has marijuana.

The French government is taking political prisoners.

For 5 years, the British government held Julian Assange in a maximum security prison colloquially called “Britain’s Guantanamo Bay”, in conditions amounting to solitary confinement and psychological torture: “Assange had been confined to his cell at HM Prison Belmarsh for 23 hours per day and given one hour of recreation per day conducted inside.” What did he do? He revealed the truth about crimes committed by the U.S. and NATO.

The British government takes political prisoners.

In America, a mostly peaceful protest on January 6th after a fraudulent election resulted in the arrest of hundreds of people who had committed no crime whatsoever and held in prisons for years awaiting sentencing. The idea that trespassing on government property (everything the government owns is stolen from the people to begin with) is some kind of crime is false on the face of it.

The U.S. government takes political prisoners.

Meanwhile, who’s not in prison? The bankers that stole people’s money and ruined lives after the 2007/8 crash. The politicians who lied about WMD’s in Iraq, murdered thousands, displaced millions. Why are Bush and Dick Cheney not being prosecuted like Trump is? Surely their crimes are obvious for all to see. What about all the folks who went to Epstein’s island? The FBI has the list. Why aren’t they in prison yet? Oh, right. Pedophilia is not a crime in the government’s eyes. Murdering thousands under false pretenses. Illegal drone strikes. None of that gets punished.

Whatever we thought remained of decency in the West, the so-called “free democracies”, is gone. Justice has been corrupted absolutely. And with drag queen shows front-and-center on every streaming platform, I’m not sure there’s much of civilization left to save either.

What can decent, freedom-loving people do in the face of the collapse of civilization and everything our forebears fought for? We exit, and we build something better, something more local. We stop participating in the obviously fake elections. We stop going to protests and putting targets on our backs. We start gardening, building communities, and exiting from the Matrix.

The train is about to go off the cliff, folks. The only choice we still have is whether we want to be on it or not, when it does.

Have you ever heard Joe Rogan roll out the old question: “Why would these hunter-gatherers who are fighting for food scraps take the time out of their day to document [insert crazy alien sighting here]?”

It’s in virtually every video in which Joe Rogan interviews some “ancient aliens” type of guest.

Now, don’t get me wrong - I’m a sucker for wild and wacky theories. I love listening to Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan show talk about his ideas. Some of them sound plausible, others don’t. Nobody is right 100% of the time.

Am I saying ancient aliens didn’t exist? Nope. I think there’s a decent likelihood that on the scale of millions of years of human evolution, or even billions of years of the Earth existing, aliens probably visited at some point. The idea that we’re the only life in the universe is highly unlikely, given how big the universe is.

But are all these ancient tablets, scrolls, and texts describing real events? Were the ancient gods just ancient aliens?

Think about this: Harry Potter is probably one of the most popular fiction franchises in the world. There are millions of copies of this book. People have spent billions of dollars making blockbuster movies, merchandise such as t-shirts, little statues and toys, etc.

Is Harry Potter real? No.

If our civilization collapses under the weight of [insert disaster of your choice here], and some future humans dig up some old “relics” or “artifacts” from the Harry Potter stories, would they automatically know that it wasn’t real?

Would some of them look back and think - “Man, these Harry Potter artifacts are all over the world. Why would these people go to such great lengths to document these stories if they weren’t at least morally important, if not literally real?!”

It might sound far-fetched, but that’s exactly how some people interpret ancient myths and stories.

Let’s go back in time 10,000 years…

Imagine you’re a hunter-gatherer. You and your buddies went out and had a good hunt, you got a mammoth. You have so much meat you’re not sure if you can eat and preserve it all before it spoils. You celebrate by holding a feast and invite the neighboring tribe, too.

Then, at night, under the influence of hallucinogenic mushrooms, you and your buddies fantasize about where people are really from, how they got here, and what it all means.

Or maybe you come up with stories you tell each other to deal with the boredom.

One guy, let’s call him SpearShake, turns out to be a great storyteller, and his stories resonate so much with people that they decide to write them down with cuneiform on tablets. The whole thing is just for fun.

Back to the present…

10,000 years later some guys discover it and start thinking all the stuff they made up is literally real. The idea that magical weapons were actually alien or ancient tech that people really did possess gets airtime on the most popular podcast in the world, and people forget that humanity spends an inordinate amount of time telling each other completely made up stories. We have monthly recurring subscriptions to services that fund multi-million dollar productions of every flavor of TV entertainment imaginable.

And have you ever talked to a little kid? Kids make stories up all the time. I watch my toddler play with dolls and come up with all kinds of goofy tales.

I think maybe we need to take ancient people a little less seriously. They had time for entertainment (especially during hunter-gatherer times), and if they’re anything like us, they had wild imaginations too. Plus, hallucinogenic mushrooms were all the rage back then.

Here’s a snippet:

“I feel way more safe in a place where the people are legally armed
If something happens like a mass shooting, I have a way less chance of being lethally harmed
A criminal is gonna think twice if he knows everybody has a piece underneath their clothes”

And another one:

“And no before you ask, I don't wanna be like Canada either
And I don't wanna be like Australia
I'm sick of everybody using them as a humanity meter
There's a reason that they can do whatever they want to their citizens like fuckin' throw them in camps
And there's a reason that our government doesn't even try that shit...cause they know that they can't. (nope)”

Check out his YouTube below, he does a great job of rapping and acting, and his profanity seems more justified and less over the top than a lot of rappers.

He has other songs too, about taxes, COVID, and a lot of other topics those of us in the freedom crowd care about.

I’ve tried smartwatches before and always been disappointed in them. The Apple Watch has a laughably short 1-day battery life. Although it boasts sleep tracking features, you’d have to carefully manage how you use it during the day and when you charge it before night to even use that feature.

Plus, the last time I tried out the Apple Watch a year ago the sleep tracking was pretty inaccurate too. It couldn’t properly figure out when I was actually asleep or awake.

But the worst thing about the Apple Watch, to me, was not even the bad battery life or inaccurate sleep tracking. It’s the fact that this was an always-connected tracker that eroded my privacy even more than my smartphone already did.

And, unlike my smartphone, the airplane mode didn’t even work. I keep my smartphone in airplane mode for privacy and health reasons about 95% of the day, and it works properly.

I have an RF meter and even with Airplane mode on and Wi-Fi and bluetooth both off, the Apple Watch was still radiating and transmitting data. Not good for privacy, and certainly not good for health if you care about the effects of EMF.

But, this isn’t a review of the Apple Watch, this is just me setting the scene for the watch that I thought would be the change I wanted to see in the smartwatch market: the Garmin Instinct 2X Solar (tactical).

I gotta admit, I was pretty excited to get this watch. The day I got it I felt like a kid on Christmas, diligently tracking where the package was. It helped that I got it on sale, too.

Privacy and EMF

Let’s start with the good.

Unlike other smart watches, Garmin’s airplane mode (which is really just the Phone mode “disconnected”) actually works. I used an RF meter and confirmed that. It also has a Stealth mode, in case you want to be extra private and not store any of your location data either.

Unlike other smartwatches, the Garmin (supposedly) doesn’t have a microphone, so your conversations are private.

Battery life

And… onto the bad.

The 2X solar edition advertises a 30 day battery life with normal use, or infinite battery life if you spend at least 3 hours in bright sunlight every day (what they call 50k Lux hours).

Well, it’s a lie. It’s all a lie.

First of all, with minimal use of the GPS (five or so 20-30 minute activities, usually walks, tracked per week), heart-rate monitoring always on, and Pulse Ox only on at night when you sleep, you get 20 days at best. That’s with a moderate amount of time (1-2 hours) spent outside every day. And unfortunately the watch misleads you the whole time about it, telling you that you have more days than you really do. It doesn’t seem to adapt to actual usage. Every 1 day I’d lose 1.5 days of battery life.

Secondly, even if you get way above the recommended 3 hours of sunlight a day, there’s no way to keep the battery charging. I remember there was one day where I got almost 80k lux hours, spending half the day outside in bright sunlight and even getting a mild sunburn. Yet even on that day my watch battery still went down by 2%.

My trusty old Casio (non-smartwatch) solar watch will happily charge in a few hours in the sun and then not need another charge for 9 months of darkness. This is not the case here.

The only way to get the solar charging to keep the Garmin’s battery topped off forever is to:

1. Disable all smartwatch functionality. No GPS use at all, turn off heart-rate monitoring, turn off sleep tracking.

2. Spend a minimum of 4-5 hours in direct sunlight every day.

3. Live in a hot place where it’s always summer. It’s winter? You’re screwed.

So if you make your fancy $400 watch not a smartwatch and just use it to tell the time, and you live in Texas and spend all day outside, yeah, you can make the battery last all day.

I think that’s probably not what people are expecting, and with all the glowing reviews for this watch on YouTube and elsewhere claiming this model finally solves the problem of having to charge your watch, you’d think there were a few more honest voices out there who actually tested it extensively.

Tracking accuracy

I’ve previously used both Apple Watches (various generations) and the Oura ring, and the Garmin outperforms them in sleep tracking by far. I’ll wake up one morning having had a bunch of dreams, and sure enough, the watch knows I spent the last hour in REM sleep. It’s uncanny.

It isn’t perfect, but it’s probably 90% of the way there, which is saying a lot considering my Oura ring couldn’t even figure out when I fell asleep, thinking I was still up at 4am.

Heart rate tracking however was a lot more unreliable. I would put my watch on and it would tell me my heart rate was 35. Now, I’m no athlete, and I’m not dying either, so I knew this wasn’t right, but the only way to fix it was to take the watch off and put it back on my wrist. Sometimes I had to do it more than once.

One time I decided to leave it on for the duration of an entire activity, hoping it would fix itself, and it never did. Here you can see the average heart rate of 37 bpm right next to the usual heart rate when I do this activity above it: 139 bpm.

So… yeah. Fitness tracking is hit or miss.

The last walk I went on the heart rate kept jumping up from 70 to 120, then back down again, and no amount of taking it off and putting it on again was helping.

Most of the time it does an okay job, I’d say it’s 80% accurate. But that 20% that it’s wrong - it’s very wrong, and sometimes hard to fix.

GPS features

One feature that really sold me on this watch was the GPS tracking. While it doesn’t have topo maps like some of the more expensive color-display models, it does have a “TracBack” feature. You can start an activity or save your current location, and then get the watch to tell you how to get back to your start point. Pretty nifty, right? If I’m in a new city, or on a trail, I can tag the location of my car, and always make it back, even if my phone was lost or its battery died.

Unfortunately, it’s a buggy mess and doesn’t work properly.

When you save your current location, sometimes you get duplicate locations saved, and other times it overwrites and deletes your previously saved locations!

I fairly diligently entered the location of my house, my bug out location, etc. only to lose all the data when I put in another location a few hours later. I contacted Garmin tech support, and they claimed to not be able to reproduce the issue, so I made a video and sent it to them and they opened a bug report ticket.

Two months later and I’m still waiting for them to fix what I think is a pretty critical flaw. It’s a large company with thousands of employees, so bugs take time to fix. As is though, this feature is not usable. Imagine being on the trail and losing the location of your car so you’re not able to get back. Seems like a pretty big safety problem.

The Flashlight

I loved the flashlight. Especially since I had my watch on at night for sleep tracking, being able to double click a button on my wrist and see at night was invaluable. I used this watch on a 2-week trip abroad and being able to navigate strange hotel rooms in the dark was a blessing.

Alarms

The alarms work about as you’d expect. You can set it to use a tone, or vibrate, or both. Handy if you don’t want to wake up your wife or kids with your alarm - just set it to vibrate only.

The one annoyance I had with alarms is there’s no way to give them custom names, you’re stuck with a small handful of presets.

Watch faces and display

The watch faces are fantastic. There’s one to suit every style, from data-rich digital displays all the way to simple analog watch hands.

Moreover, the screen is nice and easy to read in the sun or indoors. Some AMOLED screens you find on other smartwatches (including some of the other Garmin models) are supposedly hard to read outdoors, and my Casio watch is a pain to read indoors, so this was definitely an improvement.

Compass and other ABC features

The compass works pretty well. It’s fast and responsive, unlike my Casio which seems to refresh about every second. But, it’s not quite as accurate as I’d like. Even after a very confusing calibration procedure that looked like you had to do a magic trick with your wrist, it was still about 5 degrees off. Not a huge deal but I wouldn’t want to rely on it unless it was a last resort.

The altimeter seemed pretty accurate.

The barometer? I’m not sure. I had bad weather alerts on and the only time I got a warning was when I was in an airplane and sudden cabin pressure changes caused it to go off. Other than that, nothing. I even had it on the night of a tornado in town that blew over a bunch of trees and it still didn’t tell me anything was going on. My Casio was definitely more accurate with bad weather alerts here.

Calendar bugs

The calendar is another feature where I ran into some issues. The watch incorrectly thought I still had an all-day calendar event that had actually completed a week earlier, and every morning it would tell me about it. No matter how many times I synced the watch with my phone, that event wouldn’t go away. I ended up disabling the calendar and hiding it from my watch face entirely just to stop seeing that event.

Weather

If you sync the watch with your phone every morning like I did, you’ll get a few hours of weather forecast. Why a few? For some reason the weather forecast doesn’t go past 8pm. Moreover, if you don’t sync it the next morning, you don’t get any weather details at all. So even though my phone has the next 10 days of weather available to it, Garmin only preloads that same day. It’s a missed opportunity to make this device more useful offline when going on camping trips or expeditions where the internet is not available.

TL;DR

Well… I’m selling the watch. As much as I liked the sleep tracking, after a month or so the novelty wore off and I lost interest in wearing it at night. I am going to miss that flashlight though!

As a survival watch I think it’s pretty lame - the battery doesn’t really last forever (and with a proprietary charging cable could be an issue if you were separated from your backpack), the compass is a few degrees off, the barometer doesn’t properly warn you of bad weather, and the GPS function is so buggy as to be useless for my purposes (marking locations to get back to).

The heart rate monitoring was mostly accurate but occasionally wildly wrong. And the other random bugs also got annoying after a while.

I give it a 3/5.

My recommendation? Get a Casio ProTrek. They’re cheaper, far more reliable, and the solar feature actually works as advertised. Yeah, you lose some of the fitness tracking, but I think that’s largely a novelty anyway.

One of the defining characteristics of a stable government is peaceful transfer of power. When one president can step down, and another one take over; and there’s no civil war, coup, or massive election fraud involved.

This used to be the case in America for a long time, but things are changing, and quickly.

To clarify: As a libertarian, I don’t think government should have any power at all. But, given that a group of psychopaths called “politicians” (as well as lobbyists, bureaucrats, and corporations) wield massive power in this country, I’d prefer the transfer of power be peaceful rather than violent.

However fake or irrelevant that transfer might be (considering we live in a Uniparty state).

We’ve known for a few years now that the President has dementia and isn’t really in charge. It’s worrying considering that, at least in theory, this man is in charge of the world’s largest military and nuclear arsenal. Shaking hands with invisible people is not a good sign.

At some point in the last decade, Democrats and the corporate media have decided that having a Democrat in charge of the nuclear arsenal is more important than anything else, even if that man is literally out of his mind.

But in the past couple of weeks things have really escalated and accelerated.

Biden’s dementia was suddenly acknowledged by the media after years of lies and deceit, and then just last week someone tried to assassinate the opposition leader, Trump.

Now we find out Biden has been removed from his candidacy for his second term under extremely suspicious circumstances. He’s being replaced by Harris, a woman who was selected not in any kind of primary, but by apparatchiks and party leaders in D.C.

Are we still in a democracy? Were we ever? Or has the veil just finally been lifted?

Either way, whether they’ve stopped caring enough to pretend we still have rule of law in this country, or if we’ve really lost it; I think we’re going to be in for a rough next few years.

I hope everyone’s storing food, building their community, and figuring out how to be as self-reliant as possible - I fear time is running out.

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