Hurricane Harvey Will Render Some Parts Of Texas ‘Uninhabitable For An Extended Period Of Time’

Do you remember what Hurricane Katrina did to New Orleans?  Well, now we are watching the same thing happen to southeast Texas.  On Friday, Hurricane Harvey made landfall as a category 4 hurricane.  It is the first hurricane to make landfall in the United States in 12 years, and it is the most powerful storm to hit the state of Texas in at least 50 years.  One meteorologist is saying that what we are witnessing is “worse than the worst-case scenario for Houston”, and another stated that this storm “could easily be one of the worst flooding disasters in U.S. history”.

It would be difficult to overstate the devastation in the Houston area at this moment.  Hurricane Harvey has ripped roofs off of homes, turned vehicles over and snapped thousands of trees.  Thousands have been rescued from their homes and vehicles, and it is being reported that so far five people have died.  In fact, one woman’s dead body was actually spotted floating down the street.

According to the National Weather Service, over 24 inches of rain fell in Houston in just a 24 hour period.  More rain continues to fall in southeast Texas, and meteorologists are running out of adjectives to describe the nightmare that is currently unfolding…

“It’s catastrophic, unprecedented, epic — whatever adjective you want to use,” Patrick Blood, a National Weather Service meteorologist, told the Chronicle. “It’s pretty horrible right now.” The newspaper reported the weather service said five people have died in the Houston area in unconfirmed flood-related deaths.

The latest forecasts are telling us that we could see a total of 40 to 50 inches of rain in southeast Texas by Thursday, and so some areas will actually receive a “year’s worth of rain” in less than a week…

“A year’s worth of rain may fall in the span of a few days near the Texas Gulf Coast,” reported Weather.com. “A multi-day deluge of the Texas Gulf Coast with catastrophic and life-threatening flooding and destructive winds through could leave areas uninhabitable for an extended period of time, the National Weather Service has warned.”

Did you catch that last part?

The National Weather Service is actually saying that some portions of Texas could be “uninhabitable for an extended period of time” as a result of this storm.

It appears to be inevitable that more people are doing to die before this is all over.  Authorities are trying to rescue as many people as they can, but there just aren’t enough resources.

As the water continues to climb, some people are actually climbing into their attics in a desperate attempt to save themselves, but that is a very bad idea…

“We are getting calls from people climbing into their attic. This is along I-45 between downtown and Clear Lake,” Lindner said. “This is along Berry Bayou, Beamer Ditch, Turkey Creek, portions of Clear Creek, Vince Bayou, Little Vince Bayou in Pasadena,” he said. “Pretty much the entire southeast side of Harris County has had 13 to 15 inches of rain in three hours.”

Lindner said they’re also seeing flooding along portions of Hunting Bayou, downtown along Buffalo Bayou, Brays Bayou and Keegan’s Bayou.

Chief Art Acevedo tweeted,” have reports of people getting into attic to escape floodwater do not do so unless you have an ax or means to break through onto your roof.”

This is already being called “a once in a 500 year flood”, and the experts are already telling us that the total economic damage is going to be in the tens of billions of dollars.

Earlier this month, I wrote about an unusual series of events that would happen over a 40 day period starting with the recent solar eclipse, but of course at the time I couldn’t account for additional unexpected events such as Hurricane Harvey.  And I find it very interesting that this hurricane began forming just about the same time as the eclipse.  The following comes from Wikipedia

The eighth named storm, third hurricane, and the first major hurricane of the 2017 Atlantic hurricane season, Harvey developed from a tropical wave to the east of the Lesser Antilles on August 17. The storm crossed through the Windward Islands on the following day, passing just south of Barbados and later near Saint Vincent. Upon entering the Caribbean Sea, Harvey began to weaken due to moderate wind shear and degenerated into a tropical wave north of Colombia early on August 19. The remnants were monitored for regeneration as it continued west-northwestward across the Caribbean and the Yucatán Peninsula, before re-developing over the Bay of Campeche on August 23. Harvey then began to rapidly intensify on August 24, re-gaining tropical storm status and becoming a hurricane later that day. Moving generally northwestwards, Harvey’s intensification phase stalled slightly overnight from August 24–25, however Harvey soon resumed strengthening and became a Category 4 hurricane late on August 25. Hours later, Harvey made landfall near Rockport, Texas, at peak intensity.

As a result of this storm, thousands could be trapped in their homes without power for an extended period of time.

Do you think that those that have been storing up food and emergency supplies all this time will be glad that they have done so?

Of course the answer to that question is obvious.  If you wait until disaster strikes to get prepared, it will be too late.  A whole lot of people down in Texas are going to end up in some very desperate situations because they never believed that something like this could ever happen to them.

For those of you that would like some helpful advice on getting prepared for future disasters, I would encourage you to check out a book that I co-authored with Barbara Fix entitled “Get Prepared Now”.  Barbara is a highly respected prepping expert, and she is also getting heavily involved in my campaign for Congress.  So much of the information in that book is timeless, and my hope is that we can encourage as many people as possible to start getting prepared because very troubled times are ahead of us.

Please pray for the people in Houston and throughout the entire southeast Texas area.  We truly have not seen a storm like this since Hurricane Katrina, and many portions of the Texas Gulf Coast will be changed forever by this disaster.

Michael Snyder is a Republican candidate for Congress in Idaho’s First Congressional District, and you can learn how you can get involved in the campaign on his official website. His new book entitled “Living A Life That Really Matters” is available in paperback and for the Kindle on Amazon.com.

Get Ready For Civil Unrest: Survey Finds That Most Americans Are Concerned About Election Violence

city-abstract-public-domainCould we see violence no matter who wins on November 8th?  Let’s hope that it doesn’t happen, but as you will see below, anti-Trump violence is already sweeping the nation.  If Trump were to actually win the election, that would likely send the radical left into a violent post-election temper tantrum unlike anything that we have ever seen before.  Alternatively, there is a tremendous amount of concern on the right that this election could be stolen by Hillary Clinton.  And as I showed yesterday, it appears that voting machines in Texas are already switching votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.  If Hillary Clinton wins this election under suspicious circumstances, that also may be enough to set off widespread civil unrest all across the country.

At this moment there is less than two weeks to go until November 8th, and a brand new survey has found that a majority of Americans are concerned “about the possibility of violence” on election day…

A 51% majority of likely voters express at least some concern about the possibility of violence on Election Day; one in five are “very concerned.” Three of four say they have confidence that the United States will have the peaceful transfer of power that has marked American democracy for more than 200 years, but just 40% say they are “very confident” about that.

More than four in 10 of Trump supporters say they won’t recognize the legitimacy of Clinton as president, if she prevails, because they say she wouldn’t have won fair and square.

But many on the left are not waiting until after the election to commit acts of violence.  On Wednesday, Donald Trump’s star on the Walk of Fame was smashed into pieces by a man with a sledgehammer and a pick-ax…

Donald Trump took a lot of hits today, and not just in the Presidential race. With less than two weeks to go before America decides if the ex-Apprentice host will pull off a surprise victory over Hillary Clinton, Trump’s star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame was destroyed early Wednesday morning by a man dressed as a city construction worker and wielding a sledgehammer and pick-ax in what looks to be a Tinseltown first.

And there were two other instances earlier this year when Donald Trump’s star was also vandalized.  One came in January, and the other happened in June

This is of course not the first time the GOP candidate’s star has been attacked or defaced since Trump announced his White House bid in summer 2015. The most extreme measure was a reverse swastika being sprayed on the star at 6801 Hollywood Blvd in late January. In June this summer, a mute sign was painted on Trump’s star in a seemingly protest against the antagonistic language and policies some have accused Trump of promoting and reveling in during the campaign. In both cases, Trump’s star was quickly cleaned and back as new within a day.

We have seen anti-Trump violence on the east coast as well.  Earlier this month, someone decided to firebomb the Republican Party headquarters in Orange County, North Carolina.  On the building next to the headquarters, someone spray-painted “Nazi Republicans get out of town or else” along with a swastika.

There have also been other disturbing incidents of anti-Trump violence all over the nation in recent days.  A recent  Lifezette article put together quite a long list, and the following is just a short excerpt from that piece…

On Oct. 15 in Bangor, Maine, vandals spray-painted about 20 parked cars outside a Trump rally. Trump supporter Paul Foster, whose van was hit with white paint, told reporters, “Why can’t they do a peaceful protest instead of painting cars, all of this, to make their statement?”

Around Oct. 3, a couple of Trump supporters were assaulted in Zeitgeist, a San Francisco bar, after they were allegedly refused service for expressing support for Trump, GotNews reports. “The two Trump supporters were attacked, punched, and chased into the street by ‘some thugs’ that a barmaid called out from the back.” Lilian Kim of ABC 7 Bay Area tweeted a photo of the men, in which one was wearing a Trump T-shirt and the other was wearing a “Blue Lives Matter” shirt.

On Sept. 28 in El Cajon, California, an angry mob at a Black Lives Matter protest beat 21-year-old Trump supporter Feras Jabro for wearing a “Make America Great Again” baseball cap. The assault was broadcast live using the smartphone app Periscope.

There is a move to get Trump supporters to wear red on election day, but in many parts of America that might just turn his supporters into easy targets.  Let’s certainly hope that we don’t see the kind of violent confrontations at voting locations that many experts are anticipating.

Of course there are also many on the right that are fighting mad, and a Hillary Clinton victory under suspicious circumstances may be enough to push them over the edge.

For example, this week former Congressman Joe Walsh said that he is “grabbing my musket” if Donald Trump loses the election…

Former Rep. Joe Walsh appeared to call for armed revolution Wednesday if Donald Trump is not elected president.

Walsh, a former tea party congressman from Illinois who is now a conservative talk radio host, tweeted, “On November 8th, I’m voting for Trump. On November 9th, if Trump loses, I’m grabbing my musket. You in?”

And without a doubt, many ordinary Americans are stocking up on guns and ammunition just in case Hillary Clinton is victorious.  The following comes from USA Today

“Since the polls are starting to shift quite a bit towards Hillary Clinton, I’ve been buying a lot more ammunition,” says Rick Darling, 69, an engineer from Harrison Township, in Michigan’s Detroit suburbs. In a follow-up phone interview after being surveyed, the Trump supporter said he fears progressives will want to “declare martial law and take our guns away” after the election.

Today America is more divided than I have ever seen it before, and the mainstream media is constantly fueling the hatred and the anger that various groups feel toward one another.

Ironically, Donald Trump has been working very hard to bring America together.  In fact, he is solidly on track to win a higher percentage of the black vote than any Republican presidential candidate since 1960.

If Hillary Clinton and the Democrats win on November 8th, things will not go well for Hillary Clinton’s political enemies.  The Clintons used the power of the White House to go after their enemies the first time around, and Hillary is even more angry and more bitter now than she was back then.

And the radical left is very clear about who their enemies are.  This is something that I discussed on national television earlier this month

As I write this, it is difficult for me to even imagine how horrible a Hillary Clinton presidency would be.

But at this point that appears to be the most likely outcome.

Out of all the candidates that we could have chosen, the American people are about to put the most evil one by far into the White House.

Perhaps Donald Trump can still pull off a miracle and we can avoid that fate, but time is rapidly slipping away and November 8th will be here before we know it.

It Is Happening Again! Voting Machines Are Switching Votes From Donald Trump To Hillary Clinton

vote-with-check-mark-public-domainIs the 2016 election in the process of being stolen?  Just a few weeks ago I issued a major alert warning that this exact sort of thing might happen.  Early voting has already begun in many states, and a number of voters in Texas are reporting that the voting machines switched their votes from Donald Trump to Hillary Clinton.  The odd thing is that none of the other choices were affected when these individuals attempted to vote for a straight Republican ticket.  If Hillary Clinton is declared the winner of the state of Texas on election night, a full investigation of these voting machines should be conducted, because there is no way that Donald Trump should lose that state.  I have said that it will be the greatest miracle in U.S. political history if Donald Trump wins this election, but without the state of Texas Donald Trump has exactly zero chance of winning.  So those living down in Texas need to keep reporting anything unusual that they see or hear when they go to vote.

Most Americans don’t realize this, but the exact same thing was happening during the last presidential election.  The state of Ohio was considered to be the key to Mitt Romney’s chances of winning in 2012, and right up to election day the Romney campaign actually believed that they were going to win the state.

Unfortunately for Romney, something funny was going on with the voting machines.  In a previous article, I included a quote from an Ohio voter that had her vote switched from Mitt Romney to Barack Obama three times

“I don’t know if it happened to anybody else or not, but this is the first time in all the years that we voted that this has ever happened to me,” said Marion, Ohio, voter Joan Stevens. 

Stevens said that when she voted, it took her three tries before the machine accepted her choice to vote for Romney.

“I went to vote and I got right in the middle of Romney’s name,” Stevens told Fox News, saying that she was certain to put her finger directly on her choice for the White House.

She said that the first time she pushed “Romney,” the machine marked “Obama.”

So she pushed Romney again. Obama came up again. Then it happened a third time.

“Maybe you make a mistake once, but not three times,” she told Fox News.

And we did see some very, very strange numbers come out of certain areas of Ohio four years ago.

For example, there were more than 100 precincts in Cuyahoga County in which Barack Obama got at least 99 percent of the vote in 2012.

If that happened in just one precinct that would be odd enough.  But the odds of it happening in more than 100 precincts in just one county by random chance are so low that they aren’t even worth mentioning.

And of course this didn’t just happen in Ohio.  Similar things were happening all over the country.

The reason why I bring all of this up is to show that there is a pattern.  If a fair vote had been conducted, Romney may have indeed won in 2012, and now it appears that voting machines are being rigged again.

In Wichita County, Texas so many people were reporting that their votes were being switched from Trump to Clinton that it made the local newspaper

Shortly after early voting booths opened Monday in Wichita County, rumors swirled online about possible errors in the process. Several online posts claimed a friend or family member had attempted to vote straight party Republican ticket, but their presidential nomination was switched to the Democratic nominee, Hilary Clinton. None of the local reports were from people who experienced the situation first hand. A Bowie woman posted that a relative who lives in Arlington saw her votes “switched.” The post was shared more than 100,000 times Monday.

And Paul Joseph Watson has written about some specific individuals that are making allegations that their votes for president were switched by the machines.  One of the examples that he cited was a Facebook post by Lisa Houlette of Amarillo, Texas

Gary and I went to early vote today…I voted a straight Republican ticket and as I scrolled to submit my ballot I noticed that the Republican Straight ticket was highlighted, however, the clinton/kaine box was also highlighted! I tried to go back and change and could not get it to work. I asked for help from one of the workers and she couldn’t get it to go back either. It took a second election person to get the machine to where I could correct the vote to a straight ticket. Be careful and double check your selections before you cast your vote! Don’t hesitate to ask for help. I had to have help to get mine changed.

I don’t know about you, but major alarm bells went off in my head when I read that.

A similar incident was reported on Facebook by Shandy Clark of Arlington, Texas

Hey everyone, just a heads up! I had a family member that voted this morning and she voted straight Republican. She checked before she submitted and the vote had changed to Clinton! She reported it and made sure her vote was changed back. They commented that It had been happening. She is trying to get the word out and asked that we post and share. Just want everyone’s vote to be accurate and count. Check your vote before you submit!

And of course they weren’t the only ones reporting vote switching.  It turns out that lots of other Texans have also experienced this phenomenon

texas-votes-being-switched-from-trump-to-clinton-facebook

So is there a serious problem with the voting machines?

According to Breitbart, one county in Texas has already removed all electronic voting machines and has made an emergency switch to paper ballots…

Chambers County election officials have executed an emergency protocol to remove all electronic voting machines available during early voting until a software update can be completed to correct problems experienced by straight-ticket voters.

Chambers County Clerk Heather Hawthorne told Breitbart Texas Tuesday morning that all electronic voting was temporarily halted until her office completes a “software update” on ES&S machines that otherwise “omit one race” when a straight ticket option is selected for either major party. The Texas 14th Court of Appeals race was reported to be the contest in which voters commonly experienced the glitch.

Let’s keep a very close eye on this.  If the state of Texas ends up in Trump’s column on election night, perhaps no harm has been done.

But if Trump loses Texas there is no possible way that he will be able to make up those 38 electoral votes somewhere else.

Despite what the mainstream media is saying, the truth is that election fraud is very real.  Just the other day, WND published an article that contained a list of documented cases of election fraud in 23 different states.  And Devvy Kidd just authored a piece that pointed out that there are 24 million voter registrations in this country that are “no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate“…

In 2012 the highly respected Pew Research Center exposed the sickening state of voter rolls in this country:

Nearly 2 million deceased registered to vote
Close to 3 million registered in multiples states
Approximately 24 million—one of every eight—voter registrations in the United States are no longer valid or are significantly inaccurate
More than 1.8 million deceased individuals are listed as voters
Approximately 2.75 million people have registrations in more than one state

But despite everything you just read, the mainstream media is trying very hard to prop up faith in the integrity of the process.  In fact, just today CNN came out with an article entitled “Poll: Most see a Hillary Clinton victory and a fair count ahead“…

Almost 7 in 10 voters nationwide say they think Hillary Clinton will win the presidency next month, but most say that if that happens, Donald Trump will not accept the results and concede, according to a new CNN/ORC poll.

Americans overall are more confident that the nation’s votes for president will be cast and counted accurately this year than they were in 2008. Whatever the outcome, however, nearly 8 in 10 say that once all the states have certified their vote counts, the losing candidate has an obligation to accept the results and concede to the winner.

Unfortunately, CNN does not have much credibility left at this point, and it is getting harder and harder to believe the polls that are being put out by the mainstream media.

And the mainstream media would also have us believe that if evidence of election fraud does emerge that it will be because the Russians have made it up

U.S. intelligence and law enforcement officials are warning that hackers with ties to Russia’s intelligence services could try to undermine the credibility of the presidential election by posting documents online purporting to show evidence of voter fraud.

The officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said however, that the U.S. election system is so large, diffuse and antiquated that hackers would not be able to change the outcome of the Nov. 8 election.

But hackers could post documents, some of which might be falsified, that are designed to create public perceptions of widespread voter fraud, the officials said.

Now that is a real “conspiracy theory”, and it would be incredibly funny if all of this wasn’t so serious.

During this election season, if you see or hear anything unusual about voting in your area, please report it.

The American people should be allowed to make a free and fair choice, and anyone that attempts to alter an election is committing a crime against all of us.

And let’s watch the state of Texas very carefully.  If it goes blue, you will know that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong.

Ebola Travel Ban Now!

Ebola Travel Ban - Public DomainIs Barack Obama completely insane?  By not instituting an immediate ban on all non-essential travel between the United States and West Africa, he is putting the lives of more than 300 million Americans at risk.  Anyone with a shred of common sense knows that you keep more people from getting sick by keeping the sick people away from the healthy people.  Because the Ebola outbreaks in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone are raging out of control, it is extremely difficult to tell who is carrying Ebola and who is not carrying Ebola.  Therefore we need to keep everyone from those countries away until those outbreaks subside.  If Barack Obama had established an Ebola travel ban a month or two ago like he should have done, Thomas Eric Duncan would never have entered the United States, and we would not have two Texas nurses infected with the virus.  But because Barack Obama did not do his job, now we have a new Ebola scare popping up somewhere in the country almost hourly.  If this outbreak eventually evolves into a full-blown pandemic, we will know who to blame.

Will an Ebola travel ban work?

It has worked in Africa.  Even as the outbreaks in Liberia, Guinea and Sierra Leone have spread like wildfire, the nations immediately bordering them are doing just fine.  And there is one primary reason why this is the case…

Ivory Coast, Guinea-Bissau and Senegal, all of which share borders with at least one of the three most affected countries, have closed those borders.

At this point, nearly 30 countries have instituted an Ebola travel ban.

So why won’t Obama do it?

This is clearly what the American people want.  For example, one recent survey asked the following question…

Should the government allow people who have recently been in any of the countries in western Africa where there is a major Ebola outbreak to enter the United States?

Only 23 percent of respondents said yes to that question.

We aren’t talking about the flu or the measles or some other disease that we are accustomed to dealing with.

We are talking about a brutally efficient killer that could kill millions of us if it were to spread widely inside the United States.

Sadly, at this point Barack Obama and the CDC are dead set against a travel ban, and there are “experts” popping up all over the mainstream media explaining to us why an Ebola travel ban would be a bad idea.

They say that a travel ban would provide a “false sense of security”.

Of course they never mention that travel bans are working quite well in Africa.

They say that a travel ban would make the Ebola outbreaks worse by keeping people from going over there to help.

But very few people are suggesting that essential medical personnel should be banned from traveling.  So that argument makes no sense whatsoever.

They say that travelers would just find another way into this country, and that it is better for us to be able to screen them when they come through the airports.

What are they going to do?  Swim over here from West Africa?

If we ban all sea and air travel from those nations, the only way that they would be able to come in would be through the Canadian or Mexican borders.  And if Obama had secured those borders like he should have done by now, we wouldn’t have a problem.

Some “experts” are even suggesting that a travel ban would be “racist”.

Really?

What about all of the other African nations that have instituted Ebola travel bans?

Are they “racist” too?

Right now, the dead bodies of Ebola victims are decaying in the streets over in West Africa.  Ebola corpses are being dumped into rivers and are being eaten by animals.  Grave diggers can’t keep up with the number of bodies being delivered to them.  The Liberian government estimates that it will soon need more than 84,000 additional body bags as the death toll climbs at an exponential rate.

We don’t want that coming here.

But thanks to Obama, most Americans now believe that we will see a major Ebola outbreak in the United States during the coming year…

According to a Wednesday poll by the Harvard School of Public Health, 52 percent of Americans surveyed said they believe the country will experience a large outbreak in the coming year, while 38 percent said they believed they or a family member would be infected.

In a previous article, I blamed the current state of affairs on Obama’s incompetence.

But to be honest, I was giving him the benefit of the doubt.

The truth is that Obama being incompetent is the best case scenario.

There is also a possibility that Donald Trump has raised.  We could actually be looking at a situation where there is something wrong with his mental health

Thursday on NewsMax TV’s “The Steve Malzberg Show,” real estate mogul Donald Trump called into question President Barack Obama mental health for refusing enact a travel ban on commercial flights from West African nations suffering with the Ebola outbreak.

When Malzberg asked if Trump, who had tweeted that the president was “psycho” for not stopping the flights, stands by questioning Obama’s mental health, Trump doubled down saying, “There is something wrong, and nobody knows what it is, but there is something wrong. There are so many bad decision. Can anybody be that incompetent? There is something wrong.”

Others have suggested that Obama may even be doing this on purpose.

Whatever his motivation is, the truth is that he is endangering all of us and our families.

Meanwhile, the CDC also richly deserves all of the criticism that it is currently getting.

This is an agency that is absolutely showered with money.  It gets more than $6,000,000,000 a year, and it is supposed to be preparing our health care system for events such as this.

And without a doubt, the money is in their budget

This lack of response is despite having these line items in its budget (2012 numbers):

  • Quarantine (non-add) $25,866,000
  • Healthcare-Associated Infections – PPHF (non-add) $11,750,000
  • Workplace Wellness – PPHF $10,000,000
  • Surveillance, Epidemiology, and PH Informatics $262,129,000
  • Personal Protective Technology $16,791,000
  • State and Local Preparedness and Response Capability $657,418,000
  • Public Health and Social Services Emergency Fund Transfer (non-add) $30,000,000

How much of these funds were used to monitor, consult, advice the nurses in Dallas who were treating a man with deadly Ebola? $0.00

“Incompetent” is far too kind a word to describe the performance of the CDC so far.

But of course this is just par for the course for federal agencies these days.  This has become so glaringly obvious that even CNBC is talking about it…

The CDC is just the latest in a line of federal agencies viewed as bumbling and incompetent. First it was the botched rollout of Obamacare by the Department of Health and Human Services and the IRS seemingly targeting conservative groups for extra scrutiny. More recently, the Secret Service came under heavy criticism for allowing a knife-wielding intruder to burst in and run wild inside the White House, among other appalling lapses.

The CDC now is under heavy scrutiny for not moving more swiftly to ensure that Ebola patient Thomas Eric Duncan did not spread the disease to American nurses and for apparently unclear direction to one of those nurses, Amber Joy Vinson, about whether she could fly after treating Duncan.

As political pressure has mounted, Obama has finally made a “big move” to get a grip on this crisis.

He has appointed an “Ebola czar” to oversee the federal response to Ebola.

His name is Ron Klain, and he is a Democratic political hack best known for his work during the “hanging chads” episode of the 2000 presidential election.

The White House says that they were not looking for an expert on Ebola.

Mission accomplished.

The “Ebola czar” heading up the response to what could be the greatest health crisis in U.S. history does not know anything about the virus.

Let us hope that this Ebola outbreak fizzles out somehow and that by some miracle no more Ebola victims travel to the United States.

Because it has become exceedingly clear that our government is not equipped to deal with something like this.

Matt Drudge recently sent out a tweet warning that we need to be ready to “self-quarantine” if necessary.

I think that is very good advice.  Obviously the government is not going to be able to protect us if Ebola starts spreading like wildfire.

The only people that you are going to be able to depend on are yourself, your family and your close friends.

I encourage all of you to get prepared while we still have time.

Illegal Immigration And Gangs: Someday Our Cities Will Burn Because We Didn’t Protect Our Borders

Latin Kings by Javier RamirezDid you know that the number of illegal immigrants that enter Texas each week is greater than the number of babies being born to citizens of that state?  The mainstream media is shining the spotlight very brightly on all of the children that are coming over, and there is a reason for that.  They are trying to tug on our heartstrings.  But there is another part of the story that you aren’t hearing much about.  By refusing to protect our borders, Barack Obama has allowed hundreds of thousands of gang members to illegally enter the United States and settle in our major cities.  In many communities, gang activity is already wildly out of control, and someday our cities will burn because of the foolishness of the federal government.

The Obama administration knows that one out of every five illegal immigrants has a criminal record.  And we are not just talking about illegal immigrants taking “upskirt photos” of women like just happened in Texas.  We are also talking about rapists, murderers, drug dealers and hardcore gang members.

According to Texas state Senator Dan Patrick, illegal immigrants have been formally charged with nearly half a million crimes in his state over the past four years alone.  And he also says that there are “at least 100,000 illegal immigrant gang members” living in his state right now…

Hours before Texas Gov. Rick Perry announced he would send National Guard troops to the border, Texas state Senator Dan Patrick said there are at least 100,000 illegal immigrant gang members in the state.

On Monday’s The Laura Ingraham Show, Patrick, who is also the Republican candidate for lieutenant governor, said from 2008 to 2012, 143,000 illegal immigrant criminals were arrested and jailed in Texas. He said these were “hardened criminals, gang members, and other criminals that we identified as being in Texas illegally.”

We charged them with 447,000 crimes, a half-million crimes in four years, just in Texas, including over 5,000 rapes and 2,000 murders,” Patrick said. “We estimate we have 100,000 gang members here illegally.”

Why won’t Obama do anything to stop this madness?

There are at least 70,000 gang members living in Obama’s home city of Chicago.  Other estimates put that number closer to 100,000.  But everyone agrees that it is a number that is growing every day.

So it shouldn’t surprise any of us that at least 40 people were shot in Chicago over one recent July weekend.

I just fear for what Chicago will look like when things get really bad in this country.  Many of our major cities are literally being transformed into tinderboxes that could erupt in flames at any time.

Overall, there are now approximately 1.4 million gang members living in the United States according to the FBI.  But that number is actually a few years old now, so the true number is undoubtedly far higher at this point.

In addition, we know that illegal immigrants make up approximately 30 percent of the total population in our federal, state and local prisons.

And yet we refuse to stop more waves of illegal immigrants from coming in.

Are we willingly committing national suicide?

Just the other day, I noted that Honduras has the highest murder rate on the entire planet and that the Mexican drug war has claimed more than 120,000 lives since 2006.

That is what is coming here if we allow this insanity to continue.

Unfortunately, political correctness reigns in America today.  Under current policies, our border agents are not even turning away minors with known gang affiliations that have gang tattoos all over them.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent National Review article

Border Patrol officials struggling to keep up with the increasing number of minors illegally crossing the Mexican border are not turning away persons with known gang affiliations. Chris Cabrera, vice president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 3307 in the Rio Grande Valley, explained that a Border Patrol agent he represents helped reunite a teenage gang member with his family in the United States. Cabrera notes the young member of Mara Salvatrucha (MS-13), a transnational criminal gang, had no criminal record in the U.S., but asks, “If he’s a confirmed gang member in his own country, why are we letting him in here?”

“I’ve heard people come in and say, ‘You’re going to let me go, just like you let my mother go, just like you let my sister go. You’re going to let me go as well, and the government’s going to take care of us,’” Cabrera says. “Until we start mandatory detentions, mandatory removals, I don’t think anything is going to change. As a matter of fact, I think it’s going to get worse.”

Art Del Cueto, president of the National Border Patrol Council Local 2544 in Tucson, says agents who recognize the gang-affiliated tattoos of minors crossing the border must treat them the same as anybody else. He says these people are afforded the same rights provided to anyone crossing the border.

And according to the Border Patrol, some of these “processing centers” that we have seen pictures of lately are actually being used by the gangs to recruit more gang members

According to Border Patrol sources, violent MS-13 gang members are using the Nogales processing center in Arizona as a recruitment hub and as a transfer point for gang members to get into the United States.

The Red Cross has set up phone banks inside the processing center so unaccompanied minors can make phone calls to family members inside the United States and back home in Central America. According to sources, those phones are also being used by MS-13 members to communicate with gang members already in the United States and operating in cities like Atlanta, New York and Chicago. Further, many teenaged males inside the facility have approached Border Patrol agents and have said gang members have tried to recruit them from shared cells. According to the FBI, MS-13 regularly targets middle and high school students for recruitment.

“The National Border Patrol Council believes there to be serious security issues at the Nogales Processing Center. Agents’ hands are tied due to the policies governing the care and lodging of juveniles and this has allowed gang recruitment and activity to flourish amongst those being detained,” vice president of the National Border Patrol Council Shawn Moran tells Townhall. “Customs and Border Protection needs to do more to ensure that gang members that are in custody at the NPC are identified, prosecuted, and prohibited from benefiting from this crisis.”

Barack Obama can see all of this happening and yet he refuses to secure our borders.

What in the world is he thinking?

Dust In The Wind: Dust Bowl Conditions Have Returned To Kansas, Oklahoma And North Texas

Dust BowlIn early 1978, a song entitled “Dust in the Wind” by a rock band known as Kansas shot up the Billboard charts.  When Kerry Livgren penned those now famous lyrics, he probably never imagined that Dust Bowl conditions would return to his home state just a few short decades later.  Sadly, that is precisely what is happening.  When American explorers first traveled through north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, they referred to it as “the Great American Desert” and they doubted that anyone would ever be able to farm it.  But as history has shown, when that area gets plenty of precipitation the farming is actually quite good.  Unfortunately, the region is now in the midst of a devastating multi-year drought which never seems to end.  Right now, 56 percent of Texas, 64 percent of Oklahoma and 80 percent of Kansas are experiencing “severe drought”, and the long range forecast for this upcoming summer is not good.  In fact, some areas in the region are already drier than they were during the worst times of the 1930s.  And the relentless high winds that are plaguing that area of the country are kicking up some hellacious dust storms.  For example, some parts of Kansas experienced a two day dust storm last month.  And Lubbock, Texas was hit be a three day dust storm last month.  We are witnessing things that we have not seen since the depths of the Dust Bowl days, and unless the region starts getting a serious amount of rain, things are going to get a whole lot worse before they get any better.

Over the past two months, very high winds and bone dry conditions have made the lives of ordinary farmers in the state of Kansas extraordinarily difficult.  Just check out the following excerpt from a recent article posted on Agriculture.com

The dust has settled, but for how long no one can be sure. At any moment, the winds may blow, moving the topsoil — soil that took Mother Nature generations to craft — even farther from its origin.

One farmer reckons that precious topsoil, native to his farm in Kearny County, Kansas, now sits in a field at least 200 miles away, blown there by the relentless winds of March and April 2014.

Affecting counties in western Texas, Oklahoma, and Kansas, and eastern Colorado, it was reminiscent of what folks in the same region faced 80 years ago.

“There were several days we couldn’t see 100 yards in front of us,” says Tom Hauser, a farmer near Ulysses, Kansas. “We didn’t know where the dust was coming from. It was moving in here from somewhere else, just like it did back in the 1930s.

When heavy winds blow day after day but there is no rain, it creates ideal conditions for dust storms.  According to the same article that I just mentioned, the average wind speed in the little community of Syracuse, Kansas has been over 50 miles an hour so far this year…

Since the beginning of 2014, the average maximum daily wind speed in Syracuse, Kansas, is 50.6 miles per hour, according to the Kansas State University Weather Data Library. In that same time, Syracuse has received just 1 inch of total precipitation.

That is a recipe for disaster.

“I’ve had to chisel more ground this year than the last 20 years put together,” says Gary Millershaski, who farms near Lakin in Kearny County. Chiseling the ground roughs it up, and helps prevent soil from blowing – at least for a little while.

I couldn’t imagine living somewhere with such high winds day after day.

But this is what farmers in the High Plains have to deal with on a constant basis.

And needless to say, when things are this dry those kinds of winds can kick up some immense dust storms.  In fact, a dust storm in late April was so large that it covered most of the region…

Monday’s dust storm was so large it covered most of Kansas, western Oklahoma, the Texas Panhandle and eastern Colorado, said weather service meteorologist Jeff Hutton in Dodge City. Tuesday’s dust cloud was more localized, only found in some parts of Kansas.

“That is what happens when you get drought, a lack of vegetation and you have wind,” Hutton said. “I mean, that is just the nature of the High Plains. And then that dirt that was lofted is eventually carried into eastern Kansas.”

When one of these dust storms strikes, you want to get indoors and stay there.  It isn’t even safe to be driving.  When you can’t even see five feet in front of you, the odds of getting into a fatal accident rise exponentially.  Just check out what happened earlier this year near the little town of Liberal, Kansas

At least 12 vehicles were involved in an pileup accident near Liberal, Kansas.

The accident happened around 1:40 p.m., nine miles southwest of Liberal. It appears that blowing dust limited visibility so severely that it cause vehicles to not see each other until it was too late and they collided. One report states that visibility was less than five feet.

According to Chief Anthony Adams of the Tyrone Fire Department in Oklahoma, six of the vehicles involved were cars and trucks, the other six were tractor trailers.

As bad as things are in Kansas right now, the truth is that things are probably even worse down in Texas.  Amarillo has had 10 dust storms so far this year, and Lubbock has already had 15 days of dust storms in 2014…

The number of dust storms seems to rise with the length of the drought. Amarillo has had 10 this year; it had none in 2010. The city is about 10 percent drier now than the 42 months that ended April 30, 1936, and drier than the state’s record drought in the 1950s.

Lubbock already has seen 15 days with dust storms this year, the National Weather Service said.

And remember, we haven’t even gotten to the summer months yet.

As conditions get even worse in the heartland of America, it is going to end up deeply affecting all of us.  The farmers and ranchers that live there provide a tremendous amount of food for the rest of the country, and food prices are already starting to rise at an alarming pace.

So what is going to happen if this drought extends for several more years or even longer?

Some experts such as paleoclimatologist Edward Cook have suggested that we could be in the midst of a “megadrought” that could last for decades or even centuries.

Many of those that were convinced that we could never see a return of the Dust Bowl days are now being forced to reevaluate their beliefs.  According to the National Weather Service, parts of Kansas, Colorado, Texas and Oklahoma are already drier than they were in the 1930s.  The following is an excerpt from a recent National Geographic article entitled “Parched: A New Dust Bowl Forms in the Heartland“…

Four years into a mean, hot drought that shows no sign of relenting, a new Dust Bowl is indeed engulfing the same region that was the geographic heart of the original. The undulating frontier where Kansas, Colorado, and the panhandles of Texas and Oklahoma converge is as dry as toast. The National Weather Service, measuring rain over 42 months, reports that parts of all five states have had less rain than what fell during a similar period in the 1930s.

It is hard to put into words how incredibly serious this all is.

A few years ago, when I wrote articles with titles such as “20 Signs That Dust Bowl Conditions Will Soon Return To The Heartland Of America“, a lot of people laughed.

Not that many people are laughing now.

The truth is that we are now in the midst of the worst drought crisis since the days of the Great Depression.

Fortunately, over the past week or so there has been some rain in some of the hardest hit areas.  Let us hope that this is a sign of better things to come.

Because if this drought does not come to an end, it is going to become much, much more expensive for Americans to feed their families.

And considering the fact that 49 million Americans are already facing food insecurity, that is a threat that should not be taken lightly.

U.S. Cattle Herd Is At A 61 Year Low And Organic Food Shortages Are Being Reported All Over America

Drought 2014If the extreme drought in the western half of the country keeps going, the food supply problems that we are experiencing right now are only going to be the tip of the iceberg.  As you will see below, the size of the U.S. cattle herd has dropped to a 61 year low, and organic food shortages are being reported all over the nation.  Surprisingly cold weather and increasing demand for organic food have both been a factor, but the biggest threat to the U.S. food supply is the extraordinary drought which has had a relentless grip on the western half of the country.  If you check out the U.S. Drought Monitor, you can see that drought conditions currently stretch from California all the way to the heart of Texas.  In fact, the worst drought in the history of the state of California is happening right now.  And considering the fact that the rest of the nation is extremely dependent on produce grown in California and cattle raised in the western half of the U.S., this should be of great concern to all of us.

A local Fox News report that was featured on the Drudge Report entitled “Organic food shortage hits US” has gotten quite a bit of attention. The following is an excerpt from that article…

Since Christmas, cucumbers supplies from Florida have almost ground to a halt and the Mexican supply is coming but it’s just not ready yet.

And as the basic theory of economics goes, less supply drives up prices.

Take organic berries for example:

There was a strawberry shortage a couple weeks back and prices spiked.

Experts say the primary reasons for the shortages are weather and demand.

And without a doubt, demand for organic food has grown sharply in recent years.  More Americans than ever have become aware of how the modern American diet is slowly killing all of us, and they are seeking out alternatives.

Due to the tightness in supply and the increasing demand, prices for organic produce just continue to go up.  Just consider the following example

A quick check on the organic tree fruit market shows that the average price per carton for organic apples was $38 per carton in mid-January this year, up from an average of just $31 per carton last year at the same time. At least for apple marketers, the organic market is heating up.

Personally, I went to a local supermarket the other day and I started to reach for a package of organic strawberries but I stopped when I saw that they were priced at $6.99.  I couldn’t justify paying 7 bucks for one package.  I still remember getting them on sale for $2.99 last year.

Unfortunately, this may only be just the beginning of the price increases.  California Governor Jerry Brown has just declared a water emergency, and reservoirs throughout the state have dropped to dangerously low levels.

Unless a miracle happens, there is simply not going to be enough water to go around for the entire agriculture industry.  The following is an excerpt from an email from an industry insider that researcher Ray Gano recently shared on his website

Harris farms has released a statement saying they will leave about 40,000 acres fallow this year because the FEDS have decided to only deliver 10% of the water allocation for 2014. Lettuce is predicted to reach around $5.00 a head (if you can find it). Understand the farmers in the Salinas valley are considering the same action. So much for salad this summer unless you grow it yourself.

The reason why the agriculture industry in California is so important is because it literally feeds the rest of the nation.  I shared the following statistics yesterday, but they are so critical that they bear repeating.  As you can see, without the fruits and vegetables that California grows, we would be in for a world of hurt

The state produces 99 percent of the artichokes grown in the US, 44 percent of asparagus, a fifth of cabbage, two-thirds of carrots, half of bell peppers, 89 percent of cauliflower, 94 percent of broccoli, and 95 percent of celery. Leafy greens? California’s got the market cornered: 90 percent of the leaf lettuce we consume, along with and 83 percent of Romaine lettuce and 83 percent of fresh spinach, come from the big state on the left side of the map. Cali also cranks a third of total fresh tomatoes consumed in the U.S.—and 95 percent of ones destined for cans and other processing purposes.

As for fruit, I get that 86 percent of lemons and a quarter of oranges come from there; its sunny climate makes it perfect for citrus, and lemons store relatively well. Ninety percent of avocados? Fine. But 84 percent of peaches, 88 percent of fresh strawberries, and 97 percent of fresh plums?

Come on. Surely the other 49 states can do better.

Are you starting to understand how much trouble we could be in if this drought does not end?

About now I can hear some people out there saying that they will just eat meat because they don’t like vegetables anyway.

Well, unfortunately we are rapidly approaching a beef shortage as well.

On January 1st, the U.S. cattle herd hit a 61-year low of 89.3 million head of cattle.

The biggest reason for this is the 5 year drought that has absolutely crippled the cattle industry out west…

Back in the late fall 2013 there was a freak snowstorm that killed close to 300,000+ cattle. This is a major hit to the cattle market.

I know in Texas where they still have a 5 year drought they are dealing with, they are having to ship grass bails in from Colorado, Utah and other parts of the country just to feed the cattle. Ranchers are sending their female cattle to the slaughter houses becasue they can not afford to feed them anymore. It is the females that help re-stock the herd. SO if you are slaughtering your females, your herd does not grow. It is expected that the US will not see cattle herd growth returning until 2017, maybe even later.

This is a problem which is not going away any time soon.

According to the Washington Post, the U.S. cattle herd has gotten smaller for six years in a row, and the amount of beef produced is expected to drop to a 20 year low in 2014…

The U.S. cattle herd contracted for six straight years to the smallest since 1952, government data show. A record drought in 2011 destroyed pastures in Texas, the top producing state, followed the next year by a surge in feed-grain prices during the worst Midwest dry spell since the 1930s. Fewer cattle will mean production in the $85 billion beef industry drops to a 20- year low in 2014, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said.

It would be hard to overstate how devastating this ongoing drought has been for many ranchers out west.  For example, one 64-year-old rancher who lives in Texas says that his herd is 90 percent smaller than it was back in 2005 because of the drought

Texas rancher Looney, who is 64 and has been in the cattle business his whole life, said his herd is still about 90 percent below its size from 2005 because of the prolonged dry weather. It will take years for the pastures to come back, even if there is normal rainfall, he said. About 44 percent of Texas was in still in drought in the week ended Jan. 7, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

And it isn’t just the U.S. that is dealing with this kind of drought.  The largest freshwater lake in China that was once about twice the size of London, England has almost entirely dried up because of the ongoing drought over there.

Meanwhile, global demand for food just continues to rise.

If this drought ends and the western half of the nation starts getting lots of rain, this could just be a temporary crisis.

However, the truth is that scientific research has shown that the 20th century was the wettest century in the western half of the country in 1000 years, and that we should expect things to return to “normal” at some point.

So is that happening now?

Over the past couple of years, I have warned that Dust Bowl conditions are starting to return to the western half of the United States.  Just see this article, this article and this article.

Now the state of California is experiencing the worst drought that it has ever gone through and “apocalyptic” dust storms are being reported in Colorado and Nevada.

Just because things seem like they have always been a certain way does not mean that they will always stay that way.

Things out west are rapidly changing, and in the end it is going to affect the lives of every man, woman and child in the United States.

Tide Thefts, Cargo Hijacking And Cattle Rustling: Why Is An Epidemic Of Thievery Sweeping America?

TideDesperate people do desperate things, and it appears that Americans are rapidly becoming a lot more desperate.  An epidemic of thievery is sweeping across America, and authorities are not quite sure what to make of it.  Down in Texas, cattle thieves can get up to $1,500 per head of cattle, and cattle rustling was up nearly 40 percent last year.  As you will read about below, cargo hijacking is becoming much more sophisticated, and it is being estimated that losses from cargo thefts will total about $216 million this year alone.  And for some reason, Tide laundry detergent has become a very hot commodity among common criminals all across America.  In fact, it is being reported that some grocery stores are “losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month” as a result of Tide thefts.  So why is all of this happening?  Well, as I have written about previously, crime is on the rise in the United States, and poverty is absolutely exploding.  In fact, according to the latest numbers from the U.S. Census Bureau, 49.2 percent of all Americans are receiving benefits from at least one government program each month.  Over the past five years, we have seen an unprecedented rise in the number of people that cannot take care of themselves without help from the government.  Millions upon millions of Americans that have been forced into poverty are becoming increasingly angry, frustrated and desperate.  And what we are watching right now is only just the beginning – all of this is going to get a whole lot worse.

When people think of the “social decay” that is happening to America, most of the time Texas and Oklahoma would not be the first places that come to mind.  But according to NPR, there was nearly a 40 percent rise in the theft of cows and horses down in that area of the country last year…

Ranchers saw a sharp jump in cattle rustling last year in Texas and Oklahoma. Over 10,000 cows and horses were reported missing or stolen. That’s an almost 40 percent increase from the year before. It’s a trend that’s surprised some in law enforcement.

And this is happening even though the penalties for cattle rustling have gotten much stronger…

Penalties against rustlers were toughened by Texas lawmakers in 2009. Now, the crime could put you in prison for up to 10 years. But ironically more and more cattle have gone missing or stolen since that law was passed.

Another trend that is baffling law enforcement authorities is the huge wave of cargo hijackings that they have been seeing.  According to a recent CBS News article, cargo thefts are becoming a lot more elaborate these days…

To steal huge shipments of valuable cargo, thieves are turning to a deceptively simple tactic: They pose as truckers, load the freight onto their own tractor-trailers and drive away with it.

It’s an increasingly common form of commercial identity theft that has allowed con men to make off each year with millions of dollars in merchandise, often food and beverages. And experts say the practice is growing so rapidly that it will soon become the most common way to steal freight.

You may not think that stealing truckloads of walnuts or cheese is a big deal, but the truth is that the dollar values of some of these thefts are absolutely staggering…

News reports from across the country recount just a few of the thefts: 80,000 pounds of walnuts worth $300,000 in California, $200,000 of Muenster cheese in Wisconsin, rib-eye steaks valued at $82,000 in Texas, $25,000 pounds of king crab worth $400,000 in California.

And this is not just happening in a few isolated locations.  We are literally seeing an epidemic of cargo theft that stretches from coast to coast…

Although cargo thieves prey on companies across the nation, the hot spots are places with shipping ports or rail hubs. California leads the nation. Large numbers of thefts have also been reported in Texas, Florida, New Jersey, Michigan, Illinois, Georgia, Pennsylvania and Tennessee.

Perhaps most fascinating of all is the wave of Tide thefts that is sweeping the nation.  The following is an excerpt from a New York Magazine article from earlier this year…

The call that came in from a local Safeway one day in March 2011 was unlike any the Organized Retail Crime Unit of the Prince George’s County Police Department had fielded before. The grocery store, located in suburban Bowie, Maryland, had been robbed repeatedly. But in every incident the only products taken were bottles—many, many bottles—of the liquid laundry detergent Tide. “They were losing $10,000 to $15,000 a month, with people just taking it off the shelves,” recalls Sergeant Aubrey Thompson, who heads the team. When Thompson and his officers arrived to investigate, they stumbled onto another apparent Tide theft in progress and busted two men who’d piled 100 or so of the bright-orange jugs into their Honda. The next day, Thompson returned to the store’s parking lot to tape a television interview about the crimes. A different robber took advantage of the distraction to make off with twenty more bottles.

So why are criminals so interested in Tide detergent?

Well, apparently it is heavily used as currency in the drug trade

Southern California authorities say it’s a dirty business and a bizarre trend – drug users trading Tide detergent for crack.

The Riverside Press-Enterprise says it’s a nationwide problem – people are stealing the popular but expensive detergent and trading it for marijuana and crack cocaine.

San Bernardino police Sgt. Travis Walker says detectives raiding dope houses in recent years were puzzled when they found lots of Tide. Turns out it wasn’t being used to make drugs but to buy them.

We live at a time when an increasing number of Americans will do just about anything for money.

Down in Florida, one mother was so desperate for money that she was actually prostituting her three teenage daughters.  Two of them were under the age of 18…

A St. Cloud mother was picked up Thursday on charges of serving as her three teenage daughters’ madam in a West U.S. Highway 192 prostitution ring, according to the Osceola County Sheriff’s Office.

At 2:30 p.m., Paula Howard flagged down an undercover detective acting as a “John” in front of a bus stop and arranged for him to have sex with one of her girls, ages 16, 17, and 18, an arrest record states.

The daughter agreed to perform the act for $20 and hopped into the car, telling the detective, “Oh yea. That’s my family, but don’t even worry about it. They know what I do,” the report states.

But haven’t you heard?

Everything is just fine in America.  Barack Obama and the mainstream media keep telling us that over and over, so it must be true.

Right?

I think that we got a glimpse into the true condition of America last month when a “technical glitch” caused the system that processes food stamp card payments to malfunction for a couple of hours.  A Time Magazine article described what happened at one Wal-Mart in Louisiana…

Customers cleared shelves and police were called in to control crowds taking advantage of suddenly unlimited spending allowed on their Electronic Benefits Transfer cards, which are issued to recipients of government food stamps. Spending limits on the cards were reportedly disabled for about two hours.

When a store in Springhill, La., announced over the loudspeaker that the glitch was fixed, shoppers simply abandoned loaded carts, according to Springhill Police Chief Will Lynd.

And similar “mini-riots” happened in a bunch of other locations as well.

For example, customers at one Wal-Mart in Mississippi just started taking groceries out of the store that they hadn’t paid for when their food stamp cards were not accepted…

Customers staged a disturbance then walked out of a Mississippi Walmart store with groceries that hadn’t been paid for Saturday night after a computer glitch left them unable to use their food stamp cards.

People in 17 states found themselves unable to buy groceries with their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program cards after a routine check by vendor Xerox Corp. resulted in a temporary system failure.

Shortly after the mini-riot, managers decided to temporarily close the store, citing customer safety.

Keep in mind that all of this was caused by a “technical glitch” that only lasted for a few hours.

What would happen if there was a problem that lasted for much longer?

That is a sobering thing to think about.

And as I wrote about recently, all 47 million Americans on food stamps just had their benefits reduced on November 1st.  This is causing food banks all across the country to brace for a huge influx of needy people

Food banks across the country, stretched thin in the aftermath of the recession, are bracing for more people coming through their doors in the wake of cuts to the federal food stamp program.

Food stamp benefits to 47 million Americans were cut starting Friday as a temporary boost to the federal program comes to an end without new funding from a deadlocked Congress.

Under the program, known formally as the Supplemental Nutrition and Assistance Program, or SNAP, a family of four that gets $668 per month in benefits will find that amount cut by $36.

In fact, the president of the Food Bank for New York City says that members of her organization “are panicking”

As president of the Food Bank for New York City, Margaret Purvis expects those cuts will draw even more people to organizations that already provide 400,000 meals a day to hungry city folks.

“Our members are panicking,” she said as time wound down before the benefit decreases go into effect. “We’re telling everyone to make sure that you are prepared for longer lines.”

Purvis also told Salon.com that “when people cannot afford to eat food” it has the potential to start “riots”…

“If you look across the world, riots always begin typically the same way: when people cannot afford to eat food,” Margarette Purvis, the president and CEO of the Food Bank for New York City, told Salon Monday. Purvis said that the looming cut would mean about 76 million meals “that will no longer be on the plates of the poorest families” in NYC alone – a figure that outstrips the total number of meals distributed each year by the Food Bank for New York City, the largest food bank in the country. “There will be an immediate impact,” she said.

So will we see riots as a result of these food stamp cuts?

No, I do not believe that we will see riots yet.

But the volcano of anger, frustration and desperation that is simmering just below the surface of this country continues to get hotter.

Someday it will explode.

What will you do when that happens?