NC Renegades

Attend the Second Amendment Town Hall meeting, featuring GRNC President Paul Valone…

The Mountain Country Rod & Gun Club and The Appalachian Messenger are sponsoring a Second Amendment Town Hall on Monday, August 17, at 7:00 PM.

What, exactly, is the NRA supporting when the organization gives its blessing to “universal background checks?”

What part of “shall not be infringed” do politicians not understand? Are proposed background checks being directed toward the wrong group of people?

Learn more, and be heard at this Second Amendment Town Hall meeting, featuring GRNC President Paul Valone.

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The media enthusiastically remind us that it’s the first anniversary of the death of Ferguson’s Michael Brown, a death that spawned the so-called Black Lives Matter movement.

In a September speech at the United Nations, President Barack Obama said, “The world also took notice of the small American city of Ferguson, Missouri — where a young man was killed, and a community was divided.”

Never mind that both a grand jury and the federal Department of Justice exonerated the officer who shot and killed Brown. Never mind that neither the physical evidence nor eyewitness testimony corroborated the assertions that Brown had his hands up or that he said, “Don’t shoot.”

Never mind that cops, fearing false accusation of racial profiling and police brutality, are increasingly reluctant to engage in proactive policing — to look for suspicious activity in an effort to prevent crime. As a result crime has gone up, particularly in cities with high-profile cases of alleged racial profiling.

Call it the “Ferguson effect.”

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We’ve written before that governments all around the world have borrowed too much money and the weight of these debts are choking economic growth.

And to make matters worse – these very same governments and their central banks have implemented various plans that have only made matters worse.

Our view has not changed – the global debt crisis has escalated to a point where the government bond bubble has inflated itself to become the mother of all bubbles. It’s going to burst, and when it does it wont be pretty.

Further evidence to support our view is as follows:

Canada – the collapse in oil and commodity markets has pushed the country into recession and the Canadian Dollar to decline to levels lower than that reached during the 2008 crisis.

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Australia – Over the last 20 years, China has been viewed as the growth engine of the world, and justifiably so. With annual growth rates between 8% to 15%, China’s economy was literally eating every rock, stalk and barrel of practically every commodity in the world.

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Brazil – Like Australia, Brazil has benefitted immensely from China’s growth. And now, also like Australia, it too is feeling the affects of the dramatic Chinese slowdown.

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Sweden – Unlike Australia and Brazil, Sweden relies very little on China as a buyer of last resort. Yet, the Swedish economy is also not very hot these days.

In fact, instead of spectacular and dramatic declines in anything, it is doing the exact opposite – it just isn’t moving.

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China, Australia, Brazil, Canada, Sweden – it is beyond us how anyone can declare the crisis isn’t spreading. Be prepared – there are going to be lots of opportunities to both make and lose money.

But first, you have to recognize what is happening.

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A school in Tennessee is refusing to ban the Confederate battle flag from being displayed on campus, even though a black student has expressed discomfort at the sight. The freshman from Rutherford County, Tennessee, came home from school and told his mother that students were displaying the flag from their cars and wearing T-shirts with the symbol.

At least one of the flags flying from vehicles in the school parking lot had the words “Heritage, Not Hate” written on it when local ABC affiliate WKRN-TV drove by recently. The news comes nearly two months after a racially motivated church shooting in South Carolina sparked national debate on the propriety of the flag on public property.

“I felt sad and hurt when I saw [the flags]” flying from trucks at the school, the freshman’s mother told the ABC affiliate. “I don’t think it is the appropriate place for my child to be subjected to this.” In the report, the names of the mother and student remained anonymous.

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h/t NC Links

Is a great shaking coming to America?  An amazing convergence of events is going to take place during the last several weeks of September 2015.  Many are suggesting that this could indicate that something really big is about to happen.  In fact, some vendors of emergency food are reporting shortages because so many people are stocking up on food and supplies in anticipation of what is coming.  And of course the list I am about to share with you is not necessarily exhaustive.  There are events that are currently unknown or unanticipated that could also fall during this time frame.  But without a doubt, the incredible confluence of events that we already know will happen appears to be unlike anything that we have ever experienced before.

It all starts with the end of the Shemitah year on September 13th.  If you are not familiar with the Shemitah year, please see this article.  During the last two cycles, we witnessed historic stock market crashes on the very last day of the Shemitah year (Elul 29 on the Biblical calendar).  For example, if you go back to September 17th, 2001 (which was Elul 29 on the Biblical calendar), we witnessed the greatest one day stock market crash in all of U.S. history up until that time.  The Dow plunged 684 points, and it was a record that held for exactly seven years until the end of the next Shemitah cycle.

On September 29th, 2008 (which was also Elul 29 on the Biblical calendar), the Dow plummeted 777 points, which still today remains the greatest one day stock market crash of all time in the United States.

Now we are in another Shemitah year.  It began in the fall of 2014, and it ends on September 13th, 2015.

So will we see a stock market crash in the United States on September 13th, 2015?

No we will not, because that day is a Sunday.  So I can guarantee there will not be a stock market crash in the U.S. on that day.  But as author Jonathan Cahn has pointed out in his book on the Shemitah, we have witnessed major stock market crashes happen just before the end of the Shemitah year and we have also witnessed major stock market crashes happen within just a few weeks after the end of the Shemitah year.  So we are not necessarily looking at one particular date.

And this time around, a whole bunch of critical events just happen to fall in the period of time immediately following the end of the Shemitah year.

The following are 10 things that are going to happen within 15 days of the end of the Shemitah…

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The average person is a statist, whether he realizes it or not. It is important that liberty activists recognize and accept this fact because the truth of our limitations as a movement determines the kinds of solutions into which we should ultimately put our time and energy. The fantasy of a final grand march of an awake and aware majority on the doorsteps of power is just that: a fantasy. Some people might argue that given more time, such an event could be organized or could happen spontaneously. But these people seem to forget that the immediacy of any crisis inspires awareness and cuts the bindings of complacency for only a certain percentage of any given population. With “more time” often comes more complacency, not less.

So, history becomes a kind of balancing act, with crisis generating the necessity of intelligent and moral action in some people but rarely, if ever, in most people (even during the American Revolution, in which patriots represented a stark minority). The reason that the culture of freedom consistently plateaus and remains stuck at underdog status is because human beings are, first, often acclimated to the idea that crises are things that only happen to other people, and, second, they are obsessed with the idea that governments should retain prohibitory and administrative power over the public as a means to “prevent” crisis from occurring (the sheepdog and sheep mentality).

Not all people necessarily “love” their current government, but many citizens tend to see the idea of government as an inevitability of a stable society. They assume pre-eminence of the state because they have never known anything else. Not only that, but as people separate into political and ideological factions, often based on false paradigms (such as the false left/right paradigm), they covet government as a kind of tool or weapon that can be used for “the greater good” if only their side had total control of it. Very few people in this world want to shrink government down to a manageable size comparable to that which existed just after the American Revolution, and even fewer would entertain the idea of erasing central governments entirely. The allure of the federalized state as a means to impose ideological control over others is intoxicating.

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There’s a good case to be made that the subjects of medieval kings were freer de facto than a contemporary American. In theory, those subjects had no rights and little power with which to resist the myrmidons of the State. In practice, the ability of the monarch and his nobles to exercise power over them was limited by a combination of two factors: the weakness of the intrusive techniques available to them, and a lack of interest. If you’ll allow me a somewhat facetious comparison, George III could not control how fast the water streamed through his subjects’ shower heads, but at least as important, he didn’t care.

The techniques of omnipresent intrusion and control have been greatly elaborated since then. No, there’s no meter on your shower head that reports your current rate of water consumption to some level of government. Rather, the EPA, by decreeing regulations with the force of law concerning the manufacture of shower heads, has controlled your rate of water usage “at the source.” If the busybodies should some day decide that stiffer measures are “necessary” to prevent “waste,” similar clamps would be applied to local and regional water distributors. New federal regulations would decree that no household shall be supplied with more than X gallons of water per day. Water meters would be retrofitted with compliance measures. If you doubt the plausibility of this, note that similar changes to the metering of electrical power consumption are already proliferating.

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U.S. officials believe the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) used chemical weapons in an attack on Kurdish forces in Iraq earlier this week.

“We have credible information that the agent used in the attack was mustard [agent],” a senior U.S. official said, according to the report in The Wall Street Journal.

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It appears that the Kurds are being attacked from both ISIS and Turkey. I am sure that Israel is closely watching how the United States treats its “allies” when they are under attack.

David DeGerolamo

Republican political consultant Ed Rogers said no, it doesn’t. In fact, it hurts them. From his post on the Washington Post’s PostPartisan blog.

As the Black Lives Matter movement increases its profile, I am reminded of Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy Movement quickly swelled in size and garnered a lot of attention, then entered an awkward era where it couldn’t really think of what to do next. And beyond a retro, reminiscent-of-Woodstock destruction of some public parks, the Occupy Wall Street movement and its “We are the 99%” slogan didn’t go anywhere.

The Black Lives Matter movement appears to be louder and more pointed, but is perhaps even more aimless than Occupy. In fact, the Black Lives Matter protesters have contorted their message into a political statement meant to intimidate politicians from even acknowledging that “all lives matter.”

Some of us conservatives believe the “Black Lives Matter” narrative merely is a convenient tool to guilt politicians into taking more of our hard-earned money. If black lives truly mattered to these disgruntled liberals, that concern would encompass the voiceless, the defenseless, the most vulnerable: black babies in the womb. If you don’t include the unborn or even mention the disproportionate crime rate among blacks, the cause is disingenuous.

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