Exploring practical methods for preparing for the end times, including analysis of end time scripture and prophecy, current events, prepping and self-defense.
But now that we are learning that hundreds of billions—at least—of government expenditures go to fake nonprofits and businesses, and that likely a similar amount is sent out in inflated costs attached to legitimate government contracts, it has been dawning on me and others that some significant fraction of our apparent economy amounts to storefronts that provide little to no actual goods and services.
[snip]
How much? God only knows, but it can't be a small percentage.
Ten percent of all employment in the US is in the NGO sector, and much of that money comes from local, state, and federal governments. The people who run these nonprofits are often, perhaps usually, tied in some way to government officials or even former government officials, and there sure are a lot more "service providers" than services provided.
As Nick Shirley showed, you only have to scratch the surface to discover that recipients of government largesse are frauds, and that many of the people who provide the funding are in on it.
Read the whole thing and particularly the excerpt he quotes about how the dumpy, run down businesses are mostly fronts for money laundering ("In Los Angeles, and many other cities, there are miles and miles of streets full of businesses with no customers. And yes, most of them are owned by immigrants."). But it is more than just empty storefronts with sham businesses. He notes that Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon just bragged about getting $689 million for a rural broadband connection program that started under the Biden Administration that has yet to connect anyone to broadband. That money that Oregon got will pay for approximately 104,654 connections or $6,854 per connection, but Starlink is only $350 with free shipping. "That's $6500 of pure waste per connection, assuming it ever happens, and that money goes somewhere."
At first I thought the piece by Josina Manu Maltzman ("all pronouns" per its bio) at the Literary Hub, "Letter From Minnesota: Echoes of the Other Occupation," to be just another example of liberal double-speak by comparing illegal alien invaders in the United States to the Palestinians in the West Bank who are being displaced by Jewish settlers. The more appropriate analogy would have been comparing the illegals to the Jewish settlers, but Maltzman was not going to let logic or facts get in the way of it equating ICE to the IDF. Besides, as they say, inversion is the only version liberals know.
But as I read on, I quickly realized that besides showcasing its creative writing skills, what its article reveals is the high level of organization and coordination amongst illegals and traitors. For instance, intermixing its tale of moving from one house to another with the resistance against ICE, it writes:
... We talk about our experiences doing protective presence in Palestine, and how it’s the same work here. “Protective presence” is a tactic utilized by a targeted group of people in which they get untargeted people to be a buffer so that they can go along with trying to resist their occupation and live a normal life. In Palestine this looks like recording settler violence, accompanying shepherds in their orchards and kids to school. It looks like staying up all night and keeping watch, it means going back home and telling people about what you’ve witnessed.
Here in Minneapolis, because I’m not living in the crosshairs, the mandate is the same: protective presence. Here in Minneapolis it looks like giving rides to and from work to people who are taking the gamble to leave their homes. Delivering groceries to families sheltering in place. It looks like the elaborate networks called sanctuary schools, helping get kids fed and to/from school as safe as possible. It looks like the rapid response network. It’s the people in the streets planning rallies or just spontaneously [hah!] showing up to combat an ICE presence, people maintaining vigil sites in negative twenty degrees. It’s the care network of healers doing bodywork for those targeted and those doing frontline response, it’s the street medics and their dispatchers, the people researching hotels and car rentals that do business with ICE and staging relentless noise demos and call-ins to ruin those businesses, it’s the people holding a presence at the Whipple building where detainees are caged, it’s being stationed at stores, at mosques, at schools. It’s the tow truck drivers moving vehicles abandoned when their drivers are snatched in the street. It’s the distribution sites and businesses donating all their meals, and the elaborate mutual aid infrastructure getting supplies and money in the hands of people who need it. It’s the people giving and taking know-your-rights and observer trainings. It’s the safety and security teams, the vets and doctors doing house calls, the journalists documenting all of it and getting arrested for doing so, and the artists and culture workers trying to make meaning out of all of this. And it’s everyone, targeted and not, who are living into this mandate.
What it is describing are communication and intelligence networks, smuggler networks, underground medical networks, and protestors and harassers (and, presumably, security) that can quickly be mobilized. This is a parallel government and guerilla force mostly financed, as we are only beginning to fathom, by tens and probably hundreds of billions of stolen tax dollars. And the thing is, we see this all over the country. When things go hot, it may well be less like the outbreak of the Civil War in 1860 and more like the Tet Offensive.
First excavated a century ago from a cemetery at Badari in Upper Egypt, the tool shows wear consistent with rotary drilling.
The tool contained arsenic and nickel, with notable amounts of lead and silver, suggesting deliberate engineering choices and pointing to early material trade or shared technical knowledge across the ancient Mediterranean.
Lead author Dr Martin Odle from Newcastle University said: 'This re-analysis has provided strong evidence that this object was used as a bow drill, which would have produced a faster, more controlled drilling action than simply pushing or twisting an awl-like tool by hand.
'This suggests that Egyptian craftspeople mastered reliable rotary drilling more than two millennia before some of the best-preserved drill sets.'
Per the article, the drill dated back to "Naqada IID, a late Predynastic period around 3300 to 3200 BC, [which] saw the inception of kingship, writing, and organized religion, which would become the basis of the classical Egyptian civilization." Although we generally think of bronze as an allow of copper and tin, it can also be made by alloying copper with arsenic.
In 2020, as we witnessed widespread BLM riots (the only type of gatherings where COVID could not spread according to the boffins and politicians), the author of the New Rifleman blog wrote a piece asserting that "Your Rifle Needs a Bayonet." He argued (bold in original):
Your primary home defense rifle needs to be able to take a bayonet, and you need to have a bayonet ready to mount to it. You scoff, of course. You think, “I’ll just shoot them. The military hasn’t used bayonets in years”. But I ask you to remember what you’ve seen on the nightly news for the last few weeks and think about it. What are you going to do when you find yourself in the middle of a violent mob that will rush you and kick your head into the pavement if they decide they don’t like you? The military may have abandoned the bayonet, but I’m not in the military. Most of the time I’m at home with my family. I have to think about what benefits me and my situation. I have seen enough videos by now to convince me that a sharp, pointy blade on the end of my rifle is very good, for two reasons.
The first reason he gives is that "it serves as a psychological motivation for people to keep away from you." He raises a point that I've seen from several sources which is that because most people have experience with being cut but not with being shot, most people will have a greater fear of being stabbed or cut than being shot.
... If a mob rushes upon you to do violence, a gun pointed at them may not deter them much if they don’t think you will use it (shooting it probably will), but if there’s a bayonet on the end of it, they will avoid it. If they rush you, you don’t have to take much action; they will be the ones injuring themselves. No one hates their own body, but cherishes it and cares for it. Nobody will willingly impale or cut themselves. A bayonet is like barbed or razor wire for your person, clearly stating “STAY BACK”. A group of friends all together with bayonets pointed outwards would be even better. Your rifle needs a bayonet. Your friends need bayonets too.
The second reason he gives is as a backup to bullets--particularly, running out of bullets or if the distances are so short you can't employ your rifle.
Leroy Thompson, writing at SWAT Magazine, similarly states in his article, "Bayonets for Bad Times": "If you have a rifle with a bayonet and run out of ammunition, you have a pike, which is still a formidable weapon until you get more ammunition." And, he continues:
A weapon mounting a bayonet is an excellent deterrent as well. Given any breakdown in society, your likelihood of encountering undesirables will increase. You will want to keep those undesirables at a distance. A bayonet does a really nice job of that. Someone who comes onto your porch or approaches you in your yard uninvited during disturbing times will likely hesitate to come too close to a leveled bayonet. In many cases, the fear of getting jabbed will be more of a deterrent than the fear of getting shot.
He also notes that it may provide some defense against a weapon being snatched (assuming you know how to properly use it). For instance, he argues, "[i]f you’re searching your house at night after the power has gone out, the bayonet can be the first thing through a door, once again discouraging anyone from attempting to grab your weapon." And maybe more important than other reasons in a SHTF situation: "Another consideration in bad times might be that you don’t want to call attention to yourself. If lethal force is necessary, it might be better to administer it with a quieter weapon such as the bayonet."
The next issue is whether your rifle can take a bayonet. Going back to the New Rifleman article, the author relates that most rifles with bayonet lugs can mount a bayonet (there are apparently some rifles with lugs that are just for show--too large to fit a bayonet--with Ruger specifically mentioned). But he notes that sometimes the distance between the lug and the end of the rifle may preclude bayonets. For instance, speaking of the AR system, he observes:
If you have a 20-inch rifle or a 16-inch midlength AR-15 with a bayonet lug, it will take an AR-pattern bayonet. But many older 16-inch AR rifles have the shorter carbine gas system, and although they have a bayonet lug, a bayonet will not fit properly. The end of the muzzle is too far from the lug. The bayonet will go on the rifle, but the seating ring will sit on the thinner barrel rather than be held properly by the flash hider.
He also mentions that bayonets will work with the 14.5-inch carbine and 14.5-inch midlength with an extended flash hider. If you do have a 16-inch carbine length system, don't despair. He mentions a bayonet adapter made by Triple R Products (which appears to be available here) which is an arm or extension with a bayonet lug on it that essentially pushes the lug out to the correct distance from the muzzle, and I discovered that Midway sells a sleeve that fits over the barrel to make it thick enough to accept a bayonet. Or if you are using a free-float handguard, Geissele makes a "Super Stabby" bayonet mount in black or FDE. (At the time of this writing, the black was out of stock but the FDE model was still available).
Finally, there is the question of learning to use the bayonet if you have not been through basic training or boot camp. For a book, probably one of the best for giving you a simple but effective system is Cold Steel by John Styers (here is the Amazon link and here is a link to a PDF you can download for free). Much of the book is about using a knife, but there is a detailed section on using the bayonet. While one of the articles stated that videos on how to use a bayonet were easy to find on YouTube, I did not find that to be true. Most were just short clips showing one or two maneuvers, or were news stories discussing whether or not the military should bother with bayonet training. However, I did find a 1938 Army training film (see below) that is about 1 hour and 16 minutes long that looked pretty good based on what I've watched so far. It begins with the proper stance and goes from there. The Brent0331 YouTube channel also has a relatively short (17 min.) video on the bayonet and its use (link here).
I will point out, though, that self-defense laws still apply to bayonets. I suspect that pointing a bayonet at someone would be considered an assault or brandishing. As always, consult your local laws or legal counsel. And remember: I'm not your attorney and this article is not legal advice.
NASA's SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer) space telescope captured views in December 2025 of the comet releasing a surge of gas, dust and complex molecules two months after the object's closest approach to the sun — a surprising outburst that's giving scientists their clearest chemical look yet at material formed around another star, according to a statement from NASA.
The IDF, for the first time on Wednesday, confirmed that approximately 70,000 Gazans were killed during the Israel-Hamas War, while disputing the percentage of civilian deaths claimed by the UN and declaring that no healthy persons died from starvation.
Nevertheless, the IDF still contests what percentage of these 71,000 were civilians and argues that many of the deaths were caused by the misfiring rockets used by Hamas or were executed by Hamas. But Hamas was not the one leveling whole apartment blocks.
The clip begins with [Texas Democrat] Wu, who was born in China, saying, 'I always tell people, the day the Latino, African American, Asian and other communities realize that they share the same oppressor, is the day we start winning.'
'Because we are the majority in this country now,' the congressman continued.
'We have the ability to take over this country and to do what is needed for everyone, and to make things fair, but the problem is our communities are divided - they're completely divided.'
The account captioned the clip: 'Rep. Gene Wu (D) goes mask off: "Non-whites share the same oppressor and we are the majority now. We can take over this country."'
