Special to L. Neil Smith’s The Libertarian Enterprise

“Routine feeds the illusion of safety…”
—Christopher Moore

All safety is an illusion. There are two ways for that illusion to exist. Either the illusion that you are safe exists in your mind, in which case it is a source of difficulty because you really are not safe. In that instance, the illusion of safety causes you to be less watchful, reduces your awareness of your situation, causes you to walk around in a fog, and can get you killed.

The other way for the illusion of safety to exist is in the minds of those who may wish to harm you. If they feel you are safe, if they feel that the hazards attending any attack on you or your property are too great, then the illusion is working for you.

One of my friends, David Mayer, went over these facts with me about 30 years ago. Suppose you walk down the street in your neighbourhood and see a sign in front of a home that mentions a security alarm monitoring service. A few doors down, you see a dog in the window of another home, and it barks as you walk by. To a burglar looking for a place to steal, these are bad prospects. The alarm might go off, which brings trouble. A dog is its own set of troubles, and its barking may bring further trouble. “Somewhere nearby there is a house with no alarm system and no dogs. The casual burglar is looking for that place.”

Lock Your Doors

Many houses are built of wood, sometimes with brick or stone facade, and have windows. Perhaps you are very careful to lock your doors at night and when you leave home. Good. The casual burglar or random visitor to your area who might check to see if the door opens won't get in. But next to the door are these windows. A really determined person can break a window.

Suppose the police are tasked with rounding up dissidents. Your name is on their list. Although you keep your address out of public records, a trust is the owner of record of your home, and you don't mention your address on social media nor in email, still someone has shared your home address in a way that has exposed you. The police will be really determined. Your door locks won't stop them from breaking down the door. A heavily reinforced door won't stop them from breaking windows. And what are your neighbours going to do, call the cops?

Scanners

There are scanners available to the fire department to locate fires. They use different wavelengths of light, such as ultraviolet and infrared. They are very high resolution. They can look right through walls. You'd need about half an inch of lead to completely stop all light across the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Steel might be easier to work with and would hold up to some kinds of attack better, but would need to be thicker to be certain of keeping in the light.

As well as scanners in the hands of persons on the ground, there are aerial and satellite surveillance systems. These have a variety of detectors. The ground-penetrating radar could look a kilometre into the dirt back in 1988 when I worked with a radar tech expert on a small business innovative research proposal. About the same distance into limestone or sandstone, about a foot or so into granite. So a passive system for reducing detection would involve a thick metal barrier, or a thicker granite barrier. Windows could be replaced with flat screens hooked to fibre optic cables and cameras.

Scanners and satellites could be defeated by an active system emitting light in various frequencies. Set up a flat screen the width and length of your roof, and have it emit light across the spectrum, you might be able to convince satellites that things are there which are not, or hide what is there behind the illusion of nothing. Such a system would need a lot of experimentation and effort to make it work right. But, in theory at least, one could disappear behind a screen if it were emitting the same pattern of light as would be found behind it across all parts of the spectrum.

Powerlessness

Now, there are many reasons to feel empowered. There are a huge number of houses and other structures in the USA and there is some safety in looking like all the other houses. There is a valuable strategy “hide in plain sight.” Being like all the other people in your area makes it hard to remember you are there.

It is an axiom of fourth-generational warfare (4GW) that partisans without guns look just like the local population. In the work of resisting an occupying army, be more like Fabius and less like John Bell Hood. In other words, strike against remote forces, reduce the enemy's supply train, make it difficult for him to project force, but do not expect to win in a head-to-head battle. Resistance fighters have to be willing to put down their weapons and blend in with the local population in order to escape and live to fight another day. Of course, you can choose to go down gloriously fighting to your last round and then using your knife and teeth to keep fighting, but if you are overwhelmed, discretion may be the better part of valour. Remember that it too 60 years for the Vietnamese to defeat the French, the Japanese, the French, the USA, and the People's Republic of China (1919 to 1979) to win their freedom. Sixty years is a long time. See what you can do to live through it.

There is another sort of powerlessness you may want to think about. If your power goes out, how do you cook? If the electric power and natural gas both go out, how do you cook? How do you stay warm? Connect to the Internet? Make phone calls? Call for help? Sure, some systems keep working, with backup generators, like cell towers near you. Others don't. And an electromagnetic pulse from a Carrington event or from a nuke at altitude can make your whole day a lot more difficult.

Do you have a plan? Does your safe house have a generator? Food that doesn't need to be heated? A polar sleeping bag? Supplies of water and medicines? You cannot ever be completely safe from all risks, but you can do many things to prepare for a wide variety of difficulties. Please see to it that you do, as the life you save may be your own. And you'll be in a better position to build a lasting civilisation if you aren't dead.

Yang Gang and New Zealand

If you aren't expecting to see the corrupt government start to fail and turn on the people you love, if you don't feel you need a safe house, or even a backup generator, then this essay is not for you. And I'd be surprised you got this far.

Recently Andrew Yang started his campaign for the presidential nomination of the Democratic party. I've seen some of his pronouncements. Americans who would never vote for him are going to round up Asian Americans and put them in camps, he says. He thinks only racist, bigoted people are gun owners. He thinks there are only 300 million “firearms” in the country, which may be what the Bureau of Alcoholics, Tobbaconists, Firearms, and Explosions (BATFE) has told him. However, the BATFE has admitted that many guns exist which are not as-they-define-them firerams.

My own estimates run from 750 million guns up to a billion or more guns. Many more are coming now that 3D printed receivers are available. The number of “ghost” guns cannot be estimated.

A poor excuse for a human being took about seven semi-automatic rifles, a few hundred rounds of ammo, and his car to a mosque in New Zealand. He live-streamed his cold-blooded murder of, from what I could see on the video of part of his activity, thirty unarmed civilians. He spent considerable time, maybe 8 minutes, not only inside the mosque but making two trips back to the car park to change weapons and then drive away. He shot more people on his trip away from the scene of most of his crimes. In the video he is seen shooting the same victims repeatedly on these various trips into the mosque. I would not be surprised to learn that MK Ultra and mind-altering substances were involved.

Nothing about what he did has anything to do with Candace Owens, but he does claim that she “radicalised” him toward violence. Nothing she ever wrote advocated anything he did. However, his actions are being used to justify further attacks on the right of people to keep and bear arms, not only in New Zealand but everywhere.

Let me be clear: I believe Diane Feinstein, Andrew Yang, and all other gun grabbers want to put Americans who disagree with them in death camps. They want to round up dissidents for re-education based on things I've read about their political views. Anyone who voted against Hillary in 2016 is someone they would be willing to see killed in my opinion. These are people who seem to want to rule, dominate, and control. They do not want you to have an opinion unless it is theirs based on things they've said, including to school children in the case of Feinstein.

As things fall apart, those who lust for power are willing to do more and worse things to gain or hold power. If you aren't preparing yourself and your family for those eventualities, I think you should be.

 

Jim Davidson is an author and entrepreneur. He has written four books, started and operated over a dozen businesses, written hundreds of business plans, raised money, had his businesses destroyed, been arrested, visited Somalia, built roads in Africa and Texas, and doesn't think a government is needed for anything. People should not rule over other people, especially without the consent of the governed. You can find Jim's writings on the web at ResilientWays.net and HoustonSpaceSociety.net among other places.