Use of 2nd amendment rights to combat government overreach is an outright declaration of rebellion. Cross that line and you are no longer playing rebel. If you dont have enough people behind you it will not go well.
The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy.
This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?
> The second amendment as a serious option for a regime reset button was always a fantasy.
This federal government would happily take a lesson from the Chechen wars and use ballistic missiles against a rebelling city if the chips were down. Any 2A fans have their own Patriot missile defense systems? No?
If it's that easy, why did we spend 20 years in Afghanistan only to suffer defeat by goat herders holding AK-47s?
A quick review of the last 100 years will educate you on the viability of asymmetric warfare.
There are plenty of examples of asymmetric warfare where the stronger party crushed the weaker one. WW2 was full of such examples. People point to Afghanistan and Vietnam as if they apply in every situation, for some bizarre reason (I assume motivated reasoning).
The NATO forces defeated the Taliban in a timeframe that could be measured in hours. The remaining years were an exercise in nation building, there was never “defeat.” The military simply isn’t the right tool to lift a nation out of poverty and eventually the voters got bored.
In Vietnam, the US was fighting an army backed by the Soviet Union and China that had anti-aircraft and artillery.
No, the US insurgency would turn into a Grozny unless the insurgents get backing from China or some other serious player.
>The NATO forces defeated the Taliban in a timeframe that could be measured in hours. The remaining years were an exercise in nation building, there was never “defeat.”
There was never a "defeat" indeed but the taliban grew in numbers manifold over the course of the occupation so saying you defeated them in hours is also a funny take.
This is my point: the war was over almost immediately, and since there was never any intention of permanently colonizing Afghanistan the occupation always had an expiration date.
On the other hand, the United States already lives in the United States, there's no 'waiting it out.'
I don’t think it’d be easy to get a Chinese ABM to Minneapolis without anyone noticing.
What could happen in this scenario would be either local military defecting or guerrilla warfare while the US military targets them from afar. You can easily bomb anyone back to Stone Age in hours, but taking control of the ground can be a lot more challenging if the locals don’t cooperate.
Anyway, a full-on civil war is a very unlikely - and undesirable - scenario.
Lol thats so untrue, are we already at the phase of rewriting this recent history?
US and coalition held Kabul (mostly) and their bases, and that was about it. Rest of the country was lets say contested territory, never really conquered, never yielding to Kabul government or coalition.
Ambushes, attacks, suicide bombers were daily grind. Not really conquered territory, is it.
Whether it was or wasnt defeat - when you see soldiers desperately running away from the country in a very similar fashion that happened in Vietnam, I struggle to not describe it as a full military defeat. The fact that it was orchestrated by politicians doesn't change much.
The rebels (against the American regime) were all rural, ballistic missiles weren’t very effective when your enemy is wandering around the desert coming in out of rural Pakistan.
To get rid of the libs…they live in dense cities, trump would just have to lob a missile at Minneapolis, Denver, Portland, NYC, Chicago, Seattle, Austin, etc…it’s a war he can actually win quickly. Heck, why do you think it’s so easy for him to sh*t stir right now with a few strategic ICE surges. It’s easy when 90% of the left in Minnesota lives in one urban area.
If Trump bombed a US city there are enough people that would head to DC for his head he wouldn't last long. This is not Iran.
I very much doubt, at this point in time, that anybody in the military would follow that order. The correct response to that order is to arrest the president. Their oath is to the Constitution not the president.
There are examples of 2A being used against tyrants in the US. Just not the federal level. The higher up you are rebelling against the more people you need to support you. The point of 2A is that you don't need to continue to suffer under tyrants because they have guns and you don't. If you decide it is 2A time before everybody else you are just an idiot. Actual rebellion requires support of the people and planning.
The Battle of Athens, Tennessee is one example of 2A rights being used against government successfully. The Fat Electrician has a great video about it.
It doesn't make me feel safe. It makes me annoyed. Since TSA are government agents it also pokes a tyranny button for me. I despise TSA with a passion and there is not a damn thing I can do about it. They also have the gall to offer a paid service to get around the delays they cause with taxpayer money. If airport security checkpoints need to be done it shouldn't be government doing it.
Just curious, nn-DMT or 5meo-DMT? I haven't tried either but have heard nn-DMT to be more the machine elves type experience and 5meo-DMT to elicit a feeling of not existing in the physical world anymore.
Usually when people just say DMT they mean nn-DMT (which is a lot more visual/weird and can bring on the "elves" at breakthrough dosage). 5-meo-dmt(/bufo) is much more of a felt thing, but can definitely have some visual effects (I usually get enveloped in the bright white light of god before dissolving into everything/nothing, ymmv).
Interesting fact: A lot of modern gas cooktops have safety features that will cut the gas off when the electricity is out. The safety mechanisms are powered by electricity, so if they can't confirm that the operation is safe they fail with the gas valve shut off.
It comes as a surprise to most users because power outages are so rare. They just assume it will work until 8 years later when they try to cook something during the first long outage in their area.
TIL. Never used a modern gas stove, so I had not considered that without a pilot light, there must be a way to disable the flow or constantly spew gas into the house. Then again, I have had a pilot light go out for some amount of time without obvious ill effect, so the volume of gas must be low.
Pilot lights stay lit all the time so no igniter is required. My range has electric spark igniters. They don't work when the power is out but there is also no pilot light expelling gas. I just manually light the burner when the power is out.
My gas stove has spark ignitors for the burners and the oven has an incandescent ignitor. The oven has safety interlocks so the gas valve won't open if the ignitor is not hot. The oven cannot be lit manually, but the stovetop burners can. So in a power outage, I can cook in pots and pans but not bake.
You could get a small propane burner or a lot of people have propane grills (sometimes with burners) in their backyards. Gas burners and stoves aren't bad but expanding the gas network to new homes is a huge expense.
I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time our power went out (Western Europe).
I have gas-cooked since I was a kid (living in an area with a lot of natural gas, so houses were connected to gas since the 50ies), but induction is so much nicer that I'm happy to not be able to cook during a once in a ~10-20 year outage. Also a lot safer (it still happens quite frequently that a house blows up because of a gas leak, just this week there was a huge explosion in Utrecht what was presumably a gas leak).
Of course, the equation may change for countries with less stable power.
It's very local here. I'm in the suburbs of Philadelphia, in one of the highest income counties in the state, two blocks from a major hospital, one block from a suburban downtown. Despite that, I've experienced one or two 4-6 hour long power outages per year the past few years. (Mostly correlated with weather.) One outage in June 2025 was 50 hours long!
Many larger homes in this area have whole-house generators (powered by utility natural gas) with automatic transfer switches. During the 50-hour outage, we "abandoned ship" and stayed with someone who also had an outage, but had a whole-house generator.
Other areas just 5-10 miles away are like what you describe: maybe one outage in the past 10 years.
Sadly one of those countries is the United States.
Here in Colorado they've started pre-emptively shutting off power during wind storms when it's hot and dry because there have been multiple instances of wind blowing down power lines which then start big fires. We had one instance in December where the power was out 2-3 days for tens of thousands of people, and over a week for some people.
Of course the problem is that nobody wants to pay to bury the lines. They'd need all new equipment for digging, to retrain all of the technicians, and get permission from a million different entities to dig up their land. We're effectively locked in to overhead cables.
North America generally has more extreme weather (everything from tornadoes to hurricanes and usually a much larger temperature range) and more above-ground electrical distribution than Europe.
I live in downtown Toronto and we get ice rain that occasionally knocks out power in portions of the city, though I live downtown where most of the lines are buried and I'm on the same electrical sub-block as several hospitals. The last time I lost power was the massive North American blackout of 2003.
In the central USA my power is out up to 3 or 4 times a year for an hour or more, and momentarily maybe once every month or two. It's due to our power distribution being mostly overhead lines which are vulnerable to falling trees, squirrels, ice accumulation, storm and wind damage, etc. Even though my neighborhood has buried lines, that's just the last mile. The incoming power is all overhead lines.
On an island, in a rainforest with regular storms. The power goes out multiple times a year due to trees falling on power lines. We also don't have municipal gas lines piped everywhere. Delivery only. If you have a leak they won't deliver until its fixed.
> I am not sure where you live, but I cannot remember the last time...
Here in SE Michigan (USA) I have quite a few friends who've totaled more than 15 days without power in the past couple years. Most of that in multi-day outages.
Sure, as long as you size the system to expected loads.
An 8kW generator suitable for occasional use is only ~1,000$. A Powerwall 3 does 11kW continuous and peaks at 30kW for transitory loads like starting heavy equipment.
The most convenient solution where a generator automatically kicks in during a power outage requires an electrician and extra equipment, but there’s also real tradeoffs to having gas lines going to your home.
There is a good technology connections video about building backup batteries into the actual stove.
I think part of the problem with whole home backups is that they tend to be sized to a maximum load that is unusual or could be avoided with some effort. And that providing a backup for the essentials you actually need is relatively cheap and uncomplicated if you make some modest sacrifices.
There are models that include a battery to reduce the input power requirement. That's not quite the same as the question, but it answers it, you just need a big enough battery and they are fine.
Any licensed wireless networking gear is going to operate in very specific frequencies. The government requires it! If we were going for "the best" gear for avoiding detection you would have frequency hopping with jumps far enough apart that a listener has a harder time pinpointing a transmitter. Making repeaters roving makes it even harder for your adversary.
The same government can trivially make these frequencies completely unusable by just blasting noise across all the ISM frequency bands. As far as I read, it is already happening in Russia, making LoRA anything but long-range...
Private cells or wireless mesh networks with satellite links to avoid government controlled networks. The problem is for a robust network you have to be prepared with gear ahead of time.
I could see capturing cell towers and replacing the network link with satellite to restore some network without controlling physical wires.
The goal is to have comms even if the government turns off their networks. Mesh networks or private cell networks do that. Some desire to get information out of Iran. Others just want to check in on loved ones. Anything is better than nothing.
Running comms during war is dangerous but it has to be done. I think the people I have seen asking how to communicate when the government turns of networks understand the risks.
That could be malfunctioning hardware, turned off AIS, or a gap in recording. Smaller deviations from a line are most likely GPS jitter. AIS is transmitted over VHF. Terrestrial stations listen for the transmitted AIS messages to record them for public consumption.
Source: I collect AIS data over TCP/IP directly from my orgs ships.
A contractor manages bridge hardware so I am missing details. They set it up. I troubleshoot and use the data.
AIS is connected to a serial-to-ethernet converter. That allows me to get the AIS stream over TCP/IP. I wrote an application to consume AIS and do what they wanted with it.
The serial-to-ethernet converters are the magic ingredient. It allowed us to have tracking and telemetry regardless of terrestrial VHF stations in the area. The original setup also provided a feed from Transas but we stopped using it. We also use a private AIS VHF recorder as a backup source of AIS messages. We used that a lot more before Starlink due to terrestrial blockage of VSAT links. The backup source was a good compliment to the primary. They had the most infra in areas that were blocked most often.
Don't tell the current administration that there's something so un-American about the currency: they will insist on fixing it, and probably retire Jefferson as well.
Fun fact: While the US spent more than 3 cents for every penny minted and distributed, it spends about 14 cents for every nickel minted and distributed!
When they decided to stop minting pennies I think they should have gotten rid of nickels and (I know this will be controversial) quarters as well!
Keep dimes and ramp up production of half dollars. Then we can just drop the second decimal place and standardize pricing everything in 0.1 dollar increments.
The fact that quarters are still somewhat commonly used in machines (vending machines, parking meters, laundry) is probably the biggest practical obstacle.
This may be the most practical go-forward plan. The Euro's .20 coins are also attractive too. But you're correct that quarters, as the smallest common currency that you can plausibly buy something with just a couple of them, are just everywhere, from laundry to car washes, so the pain in retiring them would be widely felt.
What I've learned from the penny retirement is that people are deeply distrustful of simple high school level statistics! Millions of people have angrily seethed that somehow stores are or will be using the penny retirement to rob them, despite knowing that most transactions have an unknowable amount of different items, and sales tax, so attempting to manipulate prices to gain a statistical advantage out of rounding would be incredibly difficult and would yield a pitiful return. Let alone how the cash transaction share is declining every year.
We need to keep the physical dimensions and material properties of the quarter, but why not change the face value? Demote them to 20 cents, or even better, make them 50 cents because the real half dollar coin is obnoxiously huge and impractical.
What of the economic impact of doubling the value of all quarters? Eh, it'll probably be fine. We'll just write it off as an AI datacenter loan somehow
I have long believed that changing coin value upward would be the #1 way to get 100% of citizens on board with currency reform. Or at least buy them from citizens at above face value.
Unfortunately, I think that vending machines specifically would frustrate this scheme though, because you can bet that most operators of them would, rather than reprogramming the machines which would be expensive (especially given how many old machines must be out there without any manufacturer support available), just leave everything the same physically and double all their prices.
Do you mean in the zinc mining and Coinstar? Pennies have been a bizarre ritual for years, wherein the government made zinc worth less than its pre-minted value, distributed them to banks nationwide, banks in turn to stores, stores using them once to give meaningless amounts of money to customers, customers in turn immediately throwing them on the ground or at best eventually dumping them into a coinstar, and coinstar returned those to banks.
Nothing of value was going on there. I'd rather pay any zinc miners and coinstar drivers who have been displaced to play video games all day while still saving all those resources, fuel, and most of all, time.
I, for one, look forward to the new 5oz "Donald Trump Freedom Nickel". Probably resulting from a deal he did with the Big Trousers lobby groups to wear out coin pockets faster.
(I would have made a gag about a 7g replacement nickel, but you people have already used up the team "quarter" for different denomination. Although the idea of a new 40 cent coin called an "eight ball" amuses me...)
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