Alexis Del Cid A local business owner is flabbergasted after a shipment of 30 toy guns for his store was confiscated by ATF agents in Tacoma.
Brad Martin and his son, Ben, sell the Airsoft BB guns from their store in Cornelius where they’ve been in business for seven years.
The Martins said they buy their stock from Taiwan because the merchandise is less expensive. But the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives seized a shipment of 30 in October. That shipment is worth around $12,000 and the ATF is promising to destroy the entire shipment.
Special Agent Kelvin Crenshaw said the toys can be easily retro-fitted into dangerous weapons.
The notion of roving cameras snapping pictures of license plates conjures up television shows like Fox’s counterterrorism series, “24.”
It’s not just fantasy, though. Americans are already watched by a variety of security agencies using electronic surveillance technology, and in this post-9/11 world, there seems to be no turning back.
Privacy advocates, though, are not altogether comfortable with license plate numbers being electronically recorded by commercial operations.
While their views on the gathering this data may vary, privacy groups uniformly agree that the real issue is what happens to the photos after they are taken: how long they are stored and by whom; how secure the data is and whether it might be shared with third parties. Are the photographed license plate numbers matched against other lists, like credit scores or addresses?
Police in Louisiana’s Bossier Parish are training for an “end of the world” scenario, according to the Shreveport Times. The program is dubbed “Operation Exodus,” inspired in part from the Book of Exodus in the Bible.
Parish Sheriff Larry Deen told the newspaper the “buck stops” with him. “The liability stops with Larry Deen. I am the chief law enforcement officer in this parish, and it is incumbent upon me [to] protect all of the people in it,” the officer said, referring to himself in the third person.
Deen’s plan is to protect Bossier Parish’s vital resources, like food and gasoline, in the event of a catastrophic event, such as war or a terrorist attack. Deen said he had been thinking of the plan since the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, reports Drew Pierson.
Under Deen’s plan, the police will use volunteers, supplemented with active public safety personnel, that will be dispatched to vital areas in Bossier to protect them from looters and rioters. Deen listed as examples grocery stores, gas stations, hospitals and other public meeting places.
Instead of normal riot equipment such as shields and batons, the volunteers will be armed with shotguns and have access to a .50-caliber machine gun mounted on a vehicle dubbed “the war wagon.” On February 20, the volunteers were trained in hand-to-hand combat techniques.
“I think every public safety agency should be prepared for disaster response,” said Sandy Davis, director of the Caddo-Bossier Office of Homeland Security and Emergency Preparedness.
In 2008, respected trends forecaster Gerald Celente predicted food riots, squatter rebellions, tax revolts and job marches by 2012. “America’s going to go through a transition the likes of which no one is prepared for,” said Celente. “It’s going to be very bleak. Very sad. And there is going to be a lot of homeless, the likes of which we have never seen before. Tent cities are already sprouting up around the country and we’re going to see many more.”
IMF boss Dominique Strauss-Kahn has also warned there will be food riots and unrest in response to what Celente calls The Greatest Depression. “Strauss-Kahn argued that government efforts to tackle the economic downturn so far have been uncertain and largely insufficient, which could lead to severe consequences,” The Guardian reported.
Warfare training drills “are taking place across the country as numerous public figures, including Senator Christopher Dodd, leading economist Nouriel Roubini, top trend researcher Gerald Celente, the head of the International Monetary Fund, the head of the World Trade Organization, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, former national security director Zbigniew Brzezinski, and Director of National Intelligence Dennis C. Blair have all warned of coming civil unrest and global instability,” Paul Joseph Watson wrote on March 2, 2009.
Celente predicted riots and unrest on during a Fox News broadcast in November, 2008
“Widespread civil violence inside the United States would force the defense establishment to reorient priorities in extremis to defend basic domestic order and human security,” a study produced by the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Institute predicted in late 2008. Economic collapse, terrorism and disruption of legal order could require deployment of forces within the U.S., it said.
In response to the report, state and local police in Arizona told the Phoenix Business Journal they have broad plans to deal with social unrest, including trouble resulting from economic distress. “The Phoenix Police Department is not expecting any civil unrest at this time, but we always train to prepare for any civil unrest issue. We have a Tactical Response Unit that trains continually and has deployed on many occasions for any potential civil unrest issue,” Phoenix Police spokesman Andy Hill told the newspaper on December 17, 2008.
Northern Command is specifically tasked with implementing martial law under Continuity of Government. The Military Commissions Act of 2006 voided restrictions placed on the military to support civilian administration by the Posse Comitatus Act, the latter restricting the military from working with local law enforcement. In addition to the Military Commissions Act of 2006, a 1994 U.S. Defense Department Directive (DODD 3025) allows military commanders to take emergency actions in domestic situations.
The exercise held in Louisiana’s Bossier Parish is but another example that police departments and officials around the country are taking seriously the inevitability of civil unrest as the economy continues to unravel.
Unemployment in the United States is currently over 20% and a record number of people are on food stamps. The share of the unemployed who lost their jobs permanently is at its highest level since at least 1967, the first year for which the Labor Department has these numbers available, according to The New York Times.
Meanwhile, the establishment tells us the worst is over. “The mainstream economics profession is guilty of dereliction of duty. They should be telling people that this ‘recovery’ is a scam. They should be warning investors that the markets could fall apart any day,” writes Bill Bonner for The Christian Science Monitor.
“I see growing signs of desperation and anger as the wealth of this nation continues to get transferred to the elite of this nation,” notes Seeking Alpha. “People are starting to ‘lose’ it as a result. This past week’s airplane event in Austin was a disturbing development. I must admit that I really am not surprised. The government shouldn’t be either.”
The government is directly responsible for the unfolding economic catastrophe. Instead of throwing out the banksters and providing sound money, they are preparing for food riots and martial law.
The “debt based monetary system, controlled and operated by the global central banking system, of which the apex is the Bank for International Settlements, is unsustainable,” writes Andrew Gavin Marshall. “This is the real bubble, the debt bubble. When it bursts, and it will burst, the world will enter into the Greatest Depression in world history.”
Even Goldman Sachs, responsible for ransacking the economy, predicts doom. “I see nothing but large increases in the deficit,” Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead told Reuters way back in 2008. “I just want to get people thinking about this, and to realize this is a road to disaster. I’ve always been a positive person and optimistic, but I don’t see a solution here.”
Short of dismantling the Federal Reserve and arresting and prosecuting the bankers, there is no solution short of training police to shoot starving food rioters and declaring martial law.
The president would have the power to safeguard essential federal and private Web resources under draft Senate cybersecurity legislation.
According to an aide familiar with the proposal, the bill includes a mandate for federal agencies to prepare emergency response plans in the event of a massive, nationwide cyberattack.
The president would then have the ability to initiate those network contingency plans to ensure key federal or private services did not go offline during a cyberattack of unprecedented scope, the aide said.
Ultimately, the legislation is chiefly the brainchild of Sens. Jay Rockefeller (D-W.Va.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), the chairman and ranking member of the Senate Commerce Committee, respectively. Both lawmakers have long clamored for a federal cybersecurity bill, charging that current measures — including the legislation passed by the House last year — are too piecemeal to protect the country’s Web infrastructure.
Leaked policy documents reveal that the United Nations plans to create a “green world order” by 2012 which will be enforced by a structure of global governance and funded by a gargantuan $45 trillion transfer of wealth from richer countries, as the globalists’ insidious plan to centralize power, crush sovereignty while devastating the economy is exposed once again.
As we warned at the time, the failure of Copenhagen in December did not spell the end of the global warming heist, but merely a roadblock in the UN’s agenda to create a world government funded by taxes paid by you on the very substance you exhale – carbon dioxide.
Using the justification of the vehemently debunked hoax that carbon dioxide is a deadly threat to the planet, the UN is already working to resurrect the failed Copenhagen agreement, with a series of new Copenhagen process negotiations set to take place in April, May and June.
Leaked planning documents (PDF) obtained by Fox News lift the lid on the UN’s plan to impose global governance by the time of their 2012 World Summit on Sustainable Development in Rio, which will mark the 20th anniversary since the notorious “Earth Summit” held in the same city.
“The new Rio summit will end, according to U.N. documents obtained by Fox News, with a “focused political document” presumably laying out the framework and international commitments to a new Green World Order,” reports Fox News’ George Russell.
“Just exactly what that environmental order will look like, and the extent of the immense financial commitments needed to produce it, are under discussion this week at a special session in Bali, Indonesia, of the United Nations Environment Program’s 58-nation “Governing Council/Global Ministerial Environmental Forum,” which oversees UNEP’s operations.”
The document outlines the globalist’s mission to enact a “radical transformation of the world economic and social order” by putting “a new treaty in place as the capstone of the Green World Order”.
This system will be managed by “an additional governing structure composed of exactly those insiders,” writes Russell.
“Moving towards a green economy would also provide an opportunity to re-examine national and global governance structures and consider whether such structures allow the international community to respond to current and future environmental and development challenges and to capitalize on emerging opportunities,” states the white paper (emphasis mine).
The imposition of such “global governance structures” will be achieved with the help of “vast wealth transfers” from richer countries (in the form of carbon taxes levied on citizens) to poorer nations, amounting to no less than $45 trillion dollars. The paper also outlines the need to change the “consumption patterns” of people living in richer countries, which undoubtedly is a euphemism for lowering living standards.
The policy proposes that the old economic model be discarded in pursuit of a new global green economy focused around “green jobs”.
As we have previously highlighted, the promise that the creation of “green jobs” will offset the inevitable damage to the economy that a 50 per cent reduction in carbon dioxide emissions will cause is a complete fallacy.
The implementation of so-called “green jobs” in other countries has devastated economies and cost millions of jobs. As the Seattle Times reported back in June, Spain’s staggering unemployment rate of over 18 per cent was partly down to massive job losses as a result of attempts to replace existing industry with wind farms and other forms of alternative energy.
In a so-called “green economy,” “Each new job entails the loss of 2.2 other jobs that are either lost or not created in other industries because of the political allocation — sub-optimum in terms of economic efficiency — of capital,” states the report.
As we have documented, a reduction in carbon dioxide emissions of 50-80 per cent would inflict a new great depression in the United States, reducing GDP by 6.9 percent – a figure comparable with the economic meltdown of 1929 and 1930.
The very foundation of the global warming argument has been completely eviscerated by the Climategate scandal, which proved that United Nations IPCC scientists forged and exaggerated data to “hide the decline” in global temperatures while engaging in witch hunts to cull dissenting opinions from appearing in IPPC reports.
Despite this, control freaks intent on taxing the life-giving gas carbon dioxide have signaled that they no longer care about the truth behind man-made climate change and have resolved to slam through their totalitarian agenda anyway. EPA head Lisa Jackson told reporters this week that “The science regarding climate change is settled, and human activity is responsible for global warming,” even though she failed to refute the fact that there had been no global warming since 1995, as was admitted by CRU scientist Professor Phil Jones.
Climate scientists must do more to work out how exceptionally cold winters or a dip in world temperatures fit their theories of global warming, if they are to persuade an increasingly sceptical public.
At stake is public belief that greenhouse gas emissions are warming the planet, and political momentum to act as governments struggle to agree a climate treaty which could direct trillions of dollars into renewable energy, away from fossil fuels.
Public conviction of global warming’s risks may have been undermined by an error in a U.N. panel report exaggerating the pace of melt of Himalayan glaciers and by the disclosure of hacked emails revealing scientists sniping at sceptics, who leapt on these as evidence of data fixing.
Scientists said they must explain better how a freezing winter this year in parts of the northern hemisphere and a break in a rising trend in global temperatures since 1998 can happen when heat-trapping gases are pouring into the atmosphere.
PHILIP SHABECOFF
The New York Times
February 26, 2010
After examining climate data extending back nearly 100 years, a team of Government scientists has concluded that there has been no significant change in average temperatures or rainfall in the United States over that entire period.
While the nation’s weather in individual years or even for periods of years has been hotter or cooler and drier or wetter than in other periods, the new study shows that over the last century there has been no trend in one direction or another.
The study, made by scientists for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration was published in the current issue of Geophysical Research Letters. It is based on temperature and precipitation readings taken at weather stations around the country from 1895 to 1987.
Craig Schneider
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
February 26, 2010
Georgia has a glut of 2 1/2 million doses of swine flu vaccine, and some local health departments are working hard to use them before they expire.
Only 978,092 doses of the vaccine have been administered — less than a third of the total allocation to Georgia of 3 1/2 million doses, according to the state Department of Community Health.
With only weeks left in a flu season that traditionally ends around late March, state and county health officials are faced with distributing a large amount of vaccine to a public that has largely lost interest in swine flu. Some local health officials say the vaccine, some of which was produced last spring, will start to expire at the end of March.
Glenn Beck has failed to respond to a firestorm of reaction to his comments made during a February 21st interview with USA Weekend magazine in which he completely reversed his position on climate change by revealing that he believed in man-made global warming.
As we reported earlier this week, Beck appeared to stab his conservative audience in the back when he told USA Weekend magazine that man-made climate change was occurring in an article entitled Don’t judge Beck by his cover.
In the article, Beck tells interviewer Dennis McCafferty, “You’d be an idiot not to notice the temperature change.”
“He also says there’s a legit case that global warming has, at least in part, been caused by mankind,” writes McCafferty, under the sub headline, “He believes in global warming.”
“The blogosphere is on fire with reaction to McCafferty’s USA Weekend piece,” according to World Net Daily’s Chelsea Schilling, who pointed out that posters on the prominent conservative forum Free Republic were furious at Beck for seemingly performing a huge flip-flop on the issue.
“Seems like the rose-colored glasses are beginning to fall off those who used to view Mr. Beck with good approval?” wrote one.
“OK, final straw for Beck with me,” added another.
“When an unflattering quote comes out about someone, anyone, they all say, “I was misquoted.” Everyone does it. The people who were actually misquoted take legal action if a retraction/correction isn’t printed. In fact, that’s why newspapers print retractions/corrections. If Beck doesn’t sue USA Weekend, then it tells me his protestations ring hollow,” writes another.
Other respondents said they thought the article was a hit piece and that Beck’s comments on global warming had been misreported. However, Beck’s reaction to the controversy suggests otherwise.
Following the outcry, Beck responded by accusing McCafferty of inventing four of the ten things attributed to him in the article, but since Beck made no mention whatsoever of it, we can only assume that his global warming comment wasn’t one of them.
“Beck had plenty of criticism of the USA Weekend story… he didn’t raise any objections to the article’s portrayal of his environmental views,” remarks Mother Jones’s Kate Sheppard.
Since Beck changes his tune every time the wind blows (he was for the bailout before he was against it), we can only assume that increasing suspicion from conservatives over his global warming comments will force Beck to back peddle and issue some form of retraction.
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