In general, I avoid TV. I won’t try to present the arguments and research here, but TV watching is promoted only because it has a subtle hypnotic effect. This effect is denied by the primary victims, and proven repeatedly in every honest lab test available on the subject. The act of giving that device your attention will cause you to suspend at least a portion of your normal reasoning process, will degrade the filters we all have to test whether perception is reality. The effect is not absolute, in that the less you watch TV, the weaker it is. So I carefully select when I’ll give that time. I never watch national news for more than a few moments, because it is by far one of the most egregious forms of manipulation. Local news broadcasts are at least marginally useful, if only so you can learn what local politicians want you to focus on, while they do their nasty deeds in the background.
Local news channels live and die by sensational reporting. If nothing is happening, they’ll always pull out some filler, but if there is anything which can be portrayed dramatically, that always trumps everything else. While specific stories are most certainly spiked by local editors, who are kept in line by any number of inducements and threats from higher up the chain, in general: If it bleeds, it leads. So you can be sure if there is a violent incident, it will be on the air, albeit surely highly slanted.
Thus, we can discern at least one basic fact of our local situation. If there is more violent crime, you’ll see more stories about it on the local news channels. There are known factors which contribute to provoking more crime from the folks who typically do them. You might expect more crime when the weather is hot, because fools who lose their temper do so more frequently and with greater effect when the weather is hot. If they are poor and out of work, all the more so, since they are bored and don’t have much access to air conditioning.
Density of the various contributing factors is a consideration, of course. If only a few folks in a poor shack town are out of work, the crime will be unreported, because most of it will be amongst their own kind. As more of them lose that income, they have to find other prey, which means folks in the better neighborhoods. Then it gets reported on the news. Along with these considerations are the trends in the types of crimes. So for example, stealing copper is pretty big right now, because recently the price one could get for scrap copper went up. The easily accessible copper infrastructure which no one bothered before is now a high-value target for theft. In times past it was movable electronic entertainment devices. Trends are noted by the experts, and sometimes that makes the news.
Having once served in law enforcement, I am familiar with the statistical trends. When you account for those trends, I would say we are beginning to see the first wave of economically based violence. That is, we are seeing locally a wave of crime which cannot be explained merely by the current heat wave, because the nature of the violence is not random enough. It’s much more purposeful. Most of it arises as a contingency to economic crimes. More and more of the perpetrators are not members of the typically defined “criminal class.” Statistics are about to be shaken out of place.
Net result: Folks in flyover country are about to experience a crime rate more consistent with major urban centers. At the same time, agents for public order are more likely to escalate, rather than deescalate tensions. We are seeing the results of a higher degree of dependence on government, with an increasing inability to deliver on the promises which justified that dependence. But in order to maintain that dependence, government-sponsored violence against civilians will rise precipitously. So there is a collision of greater desperation among the general population as government policies remove life support, more aggressively interfere with self-reliance, at the same time mindlessly crushing anything which resembles mere dissent.
Not everyone in the system is aware of it all. Most of the enforcers, for example, are not informed they are pawns in an ugly game. For decades their training has increasingly aimed at making them intolerant of normal human behavior. Most cops have a deeply perverted sense of what to expect in their daily encounters with the civilian population. Most bureaucrats aren’t aware the entire regulatory system assumes dehumanizing people is a good; they simply absorb it and become less human themselves. There is, however, at some level a pervasive intelligent evil at work creating this impossible situation.
This isn’t your ordinary crime wave resulting from perceived loss of comfort. This is a diabolical provocation, a carefully structured incitement equivalent to chasing down rats and cornering them. Everyone denies it, yet no other explanation covers it. Christian Mystics cannot afford to let this pass unnoticed. In the coming days, even years, we must carefully note how God is granting those who reject the norm — humans steered by conscious awareness of convictions — enough rope to hang themselves. The dead souls channeling our Enemy will succeed in the sense of creating chaos, but they do not realize it will overtake them, too. In the midst of the storm, surely severe beyond imagining, we can see where this is going. Our hope is the divine sanity of clinging to ineffable truth.
