You Won’t Like How Congress Wants to Crack Down on “Money Laundering” and “ISIS”

Survival Saturday is a round-up of the week’s news and resources for folks who are interested in being prepared.

This Week in the News

This week on Survival Saturday, we’ll talk about the new bill to fight ISIS by forcing us to tell the bank where we keep our money, cop “warrior” training, and people being replaced by digital kiosks.

Congress cracks down on “money laundering” and “ISIS” with a bill to make you file forms about where you keep your money.

It’s all for our own good, of course.

A bill introduced in Congress on May 25th would make it illegal to keep your money outside of the bank unless you file paperwork explaining where you’re keeping it.

Time to buy old US gold coins

This includes cash, Bitcoin or other cryptocurrencies, prepaid mobile phones, retail gift vouchers, or even electronic coupons.

Always remember that registration is the first step toward confiscation. This is true whether it’s guns or whether it’s money.

Loathsome Attorney General Jeff Sessions will be thrilled with the bill, as it also greatly expands the government’s reach in Civil Asset Forfeiture (theft without due process). Sessions is a huge proponent of Civil Asset Forfeiture, which to me negates anything positive he could ever bring to any position of power.

This new bill adds a laundry list of offenses for which they can legally seize your assets… all of which pertain to money laundering and other financial crimes.

Here’s the thing, though: they’ve also vastly expanded on the definition of such ‘financial crimes’, including failure to fill out a form if you happen to be transporting more than $10,000 worth of ‘monetary instruments’.

Have too much cash? You’d better tell the government.

If not, they’re authorizing themselves in this bill to seize not just the money you didn’t report, but ALL of your assets and bank accounts.

They even go so far as to specifically name “safety deposit boxes” among the various assets that they can seize if you don’t fill out the form. (source)

So, let’s assume this bill passes. If you don’t fill out their forms and you get caught, they can take everything you own. Without a trial or any due process of law.

Your house.

Your car.

Your other bank accounts.

Oh, and after they take all your stuff and impoverish your family, they’ll throw you in jail for 10 years. For not reporting $10,000 in cash, prepaid stuff, and cryptocurrency.

This’ll sure hurt ISIS.

This makes the “Patriot” Act look warm and fuzzy in comparison and will be every bit as useless in the “War on Terror.”

It’s more like a War on Freedom.

Is cop “Warrior Training” why CCW holder Philando Castile died?

Speaking of war, there is a dangerous trend in police training that could be responsible for the death of innocent men like Philando Castile. There are courses like “Bulletproof Warrior” designed to teach cops how to make the decision to kill. (Hat tip to my friend Steve for this one.)

The most popular of these are taught by Dave Grossman, whose website is literally called “Killology.com” and his business partner Jim Glennon. Here’s the blurb on his homepage:

KILLOLOGY, (n): The scholarly study of the destructive act, just as sexology is the scholarly study of the procreative act. In particular, killology focuses on the reactions of healthy people in killing circumstances (such as police and military in combat) and the factors that enable and restrain killing in these situations.

Here is some of the mindset taught in these classes:

In the class recorded for “Do Not Resist,” Grossman at one point tells his students that the sex they have after they kill another human being will be the best sex of their lives. The room chuckles. But he’s clearly serious. “Both partners are very invested in some very intense sex,” he says. “There’s not a whole lot of perks that come with this job. You find one, relax and enjoy it.” (source)

Here is a creepy video of Grossman talking about killing (and sex) from a “scholarly” point of view.

And then there is the class that Officer Yanez himself attended in 2014:

The seminar was called “The Bulletproof Warrior,” and the instructors urged the law enforcement officers in the hotel conference room to make the decision to shoot if they ever feel their lives are threatened.

Videos of bloody shootouts between police and civilians emphasized a key point: Hesitation can kill you.

In the audience at the May 2014 seminar was a young St. Anthony police officer, Jeronimo Yanez, city records show. He’s now known around the world as the officer who killed Philando Castile minutes after making a traffic stop in Falcon Heights last week. (source)

Officer Yanez had been a regular attendee of “officer survival” courses that had militaristic leanings.

According to this article, Glennon was a co-instructor of the course that Yanez attended. A non-police officer named William Czech who attended the same course says he was horrified at the content.

He said he expected to see a presentation about understanding both how to avoid using deadly force as well as how to realize when it’s unavoidable. Czech said the course consistently emphasized the risk of hesitation.

A copy of the seminar booklet that he made shows a page titled “Thou Shalt Not Kill?” It cites Bible verses that emphasize prohibitions on murder, not all killing.

On the second day, the group watched the shootout videos. One is the particularly gruesome dashcam video of Andrew Brannan pulling over in his white truck in Georgia in 1998 and then shooting Deputy Kyle Dinkheller to death.

Czech said Glennon ran that part of the seminar.

“Every time a video came up where the officer hesitated, he would stop and he would say ‘This is a point where there should have been a reaction, he should have engaged,’ ” Czech said. (source)

Glennon downplayed Czech’s assessment, saying he just doesn’t understand.

He called Czech’s interpretation of the seminar “totally inaccurate.”

“That’s why we don’t let the press in,” Glennon said.

…The Bible verses are part of a discussion about officers dealing with guilt following a shooting, he said. (source)

Grossman and Glennon aren’t the only ones out there who recommend escalating the violence in our police forces.

When it comes to teaching cops how to escalate, how to see the world as their enemy and how to find the courage to kill more people, more often, there’s no shortage of options. (The syllabus for one of these courses includes a page of Bible verses relating to when it’s moral and just to kill.) It’s part and parcel with the pseudoscience churned out by William Lewinski at the Force Science Institute in Minnesota, who also preaches that cops should learn to become more lethal (and will testify in court for any cop who takes his advice). (source)

Did training like this actually make Officer Yanez more fearful and thus, more likely to shoot an innocent man? I saw the dashcam video. It certainly looked to me like the situation could have been de-escalated, and that Mr. Castile, a CCW holder, tried to do the right thing. We can all armchair quarterback what happened that day. But the bottom line is that Officer Yanez not only shot an innocent man, he fired 7 rounds into a car with a 4-year-old girl and a woman in there. He panicked. He did exactly what his extracurricular training had taught him to do. He didn’t hesitate. And a judge and jury were okay wth that.

Don’t take it from me or from some secondhand reports. Here’s a video of one of Grossman’s seminars. What do you think of this training?

McDonald’s is replacing thousands of humans with kiosks.

What a surprise. No one saw this coming when they raised the wage for unskilled labor beyond what the market would bear.

In a report released this week by Cowen’s Andrew Charles, the analyst calculates the jump in sales as a result of the company’s new Experience of the Future strategy which anticipates that digital ordering kiosks (shown above) will replace cashiers in at least 2,500 restaurants by the end of 2017 and another 3,000 over 2018. Cowen also cited plans for the restaurant chain to roll out mobile ordering across 14,000 U.S. locations by the end of 2017. (source)

Thank goodness now everyone is getting a “living wage.”  Well, everyone with a job and there will be fewer and fewer of those.

This Week in Preparedness…

The news above is a warning about the future.

We’re losing our personal sovereignty. Our ability to own property and hold wealth is at risk. Our police forces are becoming ever more militarized. And if you are unskilled, heck, even if you are skilled, finding a job is going to become increasingly difficult as more of us are replaced by robots. Heck, I read last week that a lot of the content being created out there in Internetland is no longer being written by people, but by computer software.

Now, more than ever, you need to get your skills and preps in order. Get some money put aside before that awful bill (or another one that’s even more Draconian) gets passed. Learn how to be self-reliant so that you don’t depend so much on your income. Learn survival skills so that in the midst of an epic disaster, you will know exactly what to do.

Grow some food.

Build a barter community.

Live beneath your means.

Save up for a rainy day.

Do it now, because once it’s too late, you will have only your regrets to feed you and keep you warm.

Reprinted with permission from The Organic Prepper.