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Carnival Cruise Ship degenerates rapidly

February 14, 2013
Wilson

Writer

A Carnival Cruise ship in the Gulf of Mexico lost power, causing passengers to go into somewhat of a ‘roughing it’ mode. Power went out Sunday night - how long did it take for people to start fighting over food? Glenn explains and shows how dangerous things can get when access to our normal lives are cut off.

TheBlaze reported:

The stranded Carnival cruise ship and its more than 4,000 passengers enter day five without power after a fire in the engine room disabled the ship Sunday. Although the ship is currently being towed into an Alabama port and could arrive late Thursday or early Friday, conditions are still worsening.

Since the initial incident, many passengers have been living on deck in conditions that include feces and urine on the floor with some cases of food poisoning occurring. Recent footage of the ship shows passengers holding signs made with bedsheets and a deck that looked like “a shanty town, with sheets, almost like tents,” one father of a stranded passenger recounted.

Glenn said, "There's a story on the 3,000 passengers on the cruise ship off the coast of Mexico. They have no power, they have been forced to sleep on deck in tents, that you had the toilets are not working, meaning the passengers have to make do with bags and buckets. Now help is on the way. I don't know why it takes this long, but help is on the way. It's not like it's in the ‑‑ it's not like it's at the North Pole. It's in the Gulf of ‑‑ it's off the coast of Mexico, for the love of Pete."

"So here's this giant Carnival cruise ship and on Sunday the power went out. They can't cook any food, and it's all because they have engine problems. Okay. Now, I've been telling you for a while, what happens to us if our lifestyle dramatically changes? I want you to ‑‑ I want you to think about, Sunday, where were you on Sunday? How long would it take for you to go into complete and total chaos and become somebody described as a savage? Where you are fighting people for food? How long would it take?"

"Sunday, I was in my kitchen on Sunday. It was my birthday. And we were having birthday pie because my sister came down and she ‑‑ even though she is on a piatus, she is ‑‑ she's an unbelievable chef and she's a pie chef. And she has this ‑‑ her own business where she makes pies, and she ‑‑ I mean, I don't know how many hundreds of people, actually every month they get a pie from her and they're delicious. And so she came down and she just made an apple pie for me and a lemon meringue pie. My doctor came over and he made a strawberry rhubarb pie. And she made a banana cream pie and a coconut pie. But anyway, so she made some pies."

"So anyway, I was standing in my kitchen with my family on Sunday eating pie. Now, what would it take ‑‑ where were you on Sunday? What were you doing? What would it take for you to be described by somebody who met you yesterday to describe you as a savage? For these 3,000 people, it took living in a tent on a cruise ship with very little food, but food, and no toilets. But you can take it in a bucket and they can clean the bucket out. I mean, I know this is not ideal, but they, you know, you can throw it overboard. I mean, you can still ‑‑ you know, you don't have to keep the filth there in the ship. But they did. The carpets are soaked with urine, and people are fighting each other for food."

"It took them Sunday night, Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday before they were savages. Now here's the amazing thing, to me at least. It's not like they're in the middle of Africa. They're in the Gulf of Mexico. They know help is coming. They know the Coast Guard cutters are coming. They can still ‑‑ they can still have outside communication. They knew that everybody was aware, there's got to be some backup generator, something that's at least enough for communication on that ship. So at least the captain and the crew can say, "We've alerted the authorities, they're on their way, it's going to be a few days." So they know they're getting off. They have to get off, and they will, you know, what do you call it, deboard the ship, what, tomorrow, the next day? And they have to ‑‑ they know they are going to have to live with themselves for the rest of their life and how they behaved. Because they were on a vacation cruise that went bad. And all of a sudden it's become, what is that, Lord of the Flies. All of a sudden it's Lord of the Flies. But in Lord of the Flies, I never read it, but those were kids that were ‑‑ and it ‑‑ and there was no hope of rescue. If I understand Lord of the Flies enough from memory, there was no hope of rescue. And there were kids that were raised as savages fending for themselves. That's not what this is. It's three days on a Carnival cruise ship, with the Coast Guard cutters coming."

"How long will it take for our society to break down? You're all having fun, but then the TVs stop working and the toilets won't flush. All of a sudden I have to eat cold food. All of a sudden I have food that was brought onto the ship in freezers and it's shrimp and so they can't get it to the right temperature. I'm going to have to eat ‑‑ I'm going to have to eat some cold veg ‑‑ you know they have enough food that they don't have to cook. There's enough food on that. It's not like anybody's going to starve to death. And it's not like, 'That's the last coconut! I'm going to kill you for it!' Quite honestly have you seen the American people? We could all stand to lose a few lbs. I'm just sayin'. Go to Disneyland. Look at us walking around. Look at us waddle around. You can the people who are from America because we're all like, 'Yeah, I've got to get an ice cream cone but first I've got to stop and get a corn dog.' We're not exactly the most in‑shape people."

"I wonder, I wonder ‑‑ we'll hear the stories of the savages but I wonder if anybody is looking for the stories of the pockets. Because out of 3,000 people, you know there have to be pockets of people. Because they will attract. Light attract light; dark attracts darkness. There has to be somewhere on that ship a pocket of light to where the people on board will become forever friends. They will probably vacation together, not on a cruise ship, but they will probably vacation together many times in their life even though they didn't know each other. But they will become lifelong friends. There will be a group of people that get off that ship that the captain or the crew members sincerely with tears in their eyes say, 'It was a pleasure to have you on board. Thank you.'"

"Are we going to hear the stories of those guys? I challenge the writers at TheBlaze to find those stories because somewhere on that ship out of 3,000 people, there was somebody, and most likely not a preacher like it was in the Poseidon Adventure where the preacher was leading the way out to the light. Most likely it was somebody that is pretty much a nobody that had perspective on the Carnival cruise line from hell. Just yet one of the other 150,000 reasons I ain't getting onto a cruise line ship. 'Here's a bucket for you to pee in." Yeah. Yeah. Thank you. It's been a great holiday.' How many of these people are going to get off the ship and sue?"

"Carnival cruise lines is in trouble because the lawsuits ‑‑ that's what everybody ‑‑ instead of making the best out of it, and I mean, I know this is horrible. I don't want to live like that, I don't want to be on that vacation, and believe me, I'd be pissed. Because I've worked hard for my vacation and I'm going to take this and then I'm going to go right back to work. It will be crazy. I'd be pissed. But somebody in my family, if it wasn't me and if it wasn't my family, if I was alone on the Carnival cruise lines, I'd be trying, 'Where's your 3‑D printer because I'm going to print a gun.' I would probably go crazy but if my family was there, I would be leading, for my wife and my children, I would be leading and saying ‑‑ because you know you're like this, at least I am. When everything else is burning down and the kids are crying and everything, there is a time that I just go, all of you, shut up. Shut it. And there is a time that you then after that say, 'Let's make the best of this. It doesn't have to be this way. Let's make the best of it.'"

"I told you last hour about a pocketknife that my daughter gave me. And if I were on that ship, I would hope that I would have this in there because at some point I would reach into my pocket and I would be saying to my family, 'Hard times make us.' How many people up in Connecticut with 40 inches of snow and they can't get out, that are complaining right now, 'It's been four days and the city hasn't cleared any of the streets.' Yep. Yep, sure is. How many are complaining? How many have their families, you know, falling into fights and everything else? And then how many families in that same situation are experiencing it? I think this is why the Lord said 'Come to me as a child,' are experiencing it like children experience. That they have done enough preparation so they have the food or they have whatever they need. They know they're not going to starve to death. And, yeah, we're going to ‑‑ you know, if you're at Pat's ‑‑ or Stu's house, you're going to ‑‑ you know, you're going to have sweet‑and‑sour sauce and pickles. But how many families have weathered that storm up in New England and now will come out the other end and they will talk about it for a few years and say, 'You know what? That was hard, but that was one of the best times of our life. Brought the family together. We sat and we played games, we read books, we told stories, we were cold, we were ‑‑ remember we were all bundled up, we all had to sleep in one bed and we had get extra blankets, we were all sleeping on the floor by the fireplace?'"

"This pocketknife that my daughter gave me just says four words: Hard times made us. The people on the cruise ship will say the same thing. But instead, instead of looking at that and really realizing that those hard times did make them in their case a savage, instead of doing self‑reflection on that and saying, gee, the hard times I could have gone a different way, instead they will call an attorney because it stops them from looking at the choices that they failed to make, and they'll sue because they'll say the Carnival cruise line made me into that."

Trump v. Slaughter: The Deep State on trial

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The administrative state has long operated as an unelected super-government. Trump v. Slaughter may be the moment voters reclaim authority over their own institutions.

Washington is watching and worrying about a U.S. Supreme Court case that could very well define the future of American self-government. And I don’t say that lightly. At the center of Trump v. Slaughter is a deceptively simple question: Can the president — the one official chosen by the entire nation — remove the administrators and “experts” who wield enormous, unaccountable power inside the executive branch?

This isn’t a technical fight. It’s not a paperwork dispute. It’s a turning point. Because if the answer is no, then the American people no longer control their own government. Elections become ceremonial. The bureaucracy becomes permanent. And the Constitution becomes a suggestion rather than the law of the land.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

That simply cannot be. Justice Neil Gorsuch summed it up perfectly during oral arguments on Monday: “There is no such thing in our constitutional order as a fourth branch of government that’s quasi-judicial and quasi-legislative.”

Yet for more than a century, the administrative state has grown like kudzu — quietly, relentlessly, and always in one direction. Today we have a fourth branch of government: unelected, unaccountable, insulated from consequence. Congress hands off lawmaking to agencies. Presidents arrive with agendas, but the bureaucrats remain, and they decide what actually gets done.

If the Supreme Court decides that presidents cannot fire the very people who execute federal power, they are not just rearranging an org chart. The justices are rewriting the structure of the republic. They are confirming what we’ve long feared: Here, the experts rule, not the voters.

A government run by experts instead of elected leaders is not a republic. It’s a bureaucracy with a voting booth bolted onto the front to make us feel better.

The founders warned us

The men who wrote the Constitution saw this temptation coming. Alexander Hamilton and James Madison in the Federalist Papers hammered home the same principle again and again: Power must remain traceable to the people. They understood human nature far too well. They knew that once administrators are protected from accountability, they will accumulate power endlessly. It is what humans do.

That’s why the Constitution vests the executive power in a single president — someone the entire nation elects and can unelect. They did not want a managerial council. They did not want a permanent priesthood of experts. They wanted responsibility and authority to live in one place so the people could reward or replace it.

So this case will answer a simple question: Do the people still govern this country, or does a protected class of bureaucrats now run the show?

Not-so-expert advice

Look around. The experts insisted they could manage the economy — and produced historic debt and inflation.

The experts insisted they could run public health — and left millions of Americans sick, injured, and dead while avoiding accountability.

The experts insisted they could steer foreign policy — and delivered endless conflict with no measurable benefit to our citizens.

And through it all, they stayed. Untouched, unelected, and utterly unapologetic.

If a president cannot fire these people, then you — the voter — have no ability to change the direction of your own government. You can vote for reform, but you will get the same insiders making the same decisions in the same agencies.

That is not self-government. That is inertia disguised as expertise.

A republic no more?

A monarchy can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A dictatorship can survive a permanent bureaucracy. A constitutional republic cannot. Not for long anyway.

We are supposed to live in a system where the people set the course, Congress writes the laws, and the president carries them out. When agencies write their own rules, judges shield them from oversight, and presidents are forbidden from removing them, we no longer live in that system. We live in something else — something the founders warned us about.

And the people become spectators of their own government.

JIM WATSON / Contributor | Getty Images

The path forward

Restoring the separation of powers does not mean rejecting expertise. It means returning expertise to its proper role: advisory, not sovereign.

No expert should hold power that voters cannot revoke. No agency should drift beyond the reach of the executive. No bureaucracy should be allowed to grow branches the Constitution never gave it.

The Supreme Court now faces a choice that will shape American life for a generation. It can reinforce the Constitution, or it can allow the administrative state to wander even farther from democratic control.

This case isn’t about President Trump. It isn’t about Rebecca Slaughter, the former Federal Trade Commission official suing to get her job back. It’s about whether elections still mean anything — whether the American people still hold the reins of their own government.

That is what is at stake: not procedure, not technicalities, but the survival of a system built on the revolutionary idea that the citizens — not the experts — are the ones who rule.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

1 in 20 Canadians die by MAID—Is this 'compassion'?

Vaughn Ridley / Stringer | Getty Images

Medical assistance in dying isn’t health care. It’s the moment a Western democracy decided some lives aren’t worth saving, and it’s a warning sign we can’t ignore.

Canada loves to lecture America about compassion. Every time a shooting makes the headlines, Canadian commentators cannot wait to discuss how the United States has a “culture of death” because we refuse to regulate guns the way enlightened nations supposedly do.

But north of our border, a very different crisis is unfolding — one that is harder to moralize because it exposes a deeper cultural failure.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order.

The Canadian government is not only permitting death, but it’s also administering, expanding, and redefining it as “medical care.” Medical assistance in dying is no longer a rare, tragic exception. It has become one of the country’s leading causes of death, offered to people whose problems are treatable, whose conditions are survivable, and whose value should never have been in question.

In Canada, MAID is now responsible for nearly 5% of all deaths — 1 out of every 20 citizens. And this is happening in a country that claims the moral high ground over American gun violence. Canada now records more deaths per capita from doctors administering lethal drugs than America records from firearms. Their number is 37.9 deaths per 100,000 people. Ours is 13.7. Yet we are the country supposedly drowning in a “culture of death.”

No lecture from abroad can paper over this fact: Canada has built a system where eliminating suffering increasingly means eliminating the sufferer.

Choosing death over care

One example of what Canada now calls “compassion” is the case of Jolene Bond, a woman suffering from a painful but treatable thyroid condition that causes dangerously high calcium levels, bone deterioration, soft-tissue damage, nausea, and unrelenting pain. Her condition is severe, but it is not terminal. Surgery could help her. And in a functioning medical system, she would have it.

But Jolene lives under socialized medicine. The specialists she needs are either unavailable, overrun with patients, or blocked behind bureaucratic requirements she cannot meet. She cannot get a referral. She cannot get an appointment. She cannot reach the doctor in another province who is qualified to perform the operation. Every pathway to treatment is jammed by paperwork, shortages, and waitlists that stretch into the horizon and beyond.

Yet the Canadian government had something else ready for her — something immediate.

They offered her MAID.

Not help, not relief, not a doctor willing to drive across a provincial line and simply examine her. Instead, Canada offered Jolene a state-approved death. A lethal injection is easier to obtain than a medical referral. Killing her would be easier than treating her. And the system calls that compassion.

Bureaucracy replaces medicine

Jolene’s story is not an outlier. It is the logical outcome of a system that cannot keep its promises. When the machinery of socialized medicine breaks down, the state simply replaces care with a final, irreversible “solution.” A bureaucratic checkbox becomes the last decision of a person’s life.

Canada insists its process is rigorous, humane, and safeguarded. Yet the bureaucracy now reviewing Jolene’s case is not asking how she can receive treatment; it is asking whether she has enough signatures to qualify for a lethal injection. And the debate among Canadian officials is not how to preserve life, but whether she has met the paperwork threshold to end it.

This is the dark inversion that always emerges when the state claims the power to decide when life is no longer worth living. Bureaucracy replaces conscience. Eligibility criteria replace compassion. A panel of physicians replaces the family gathered at a bedside. And eventually, the “right” to die becomes an expectation — especially for those who are poor, elderly, or alone.

Joe Raedle / Staff | Getty Images

The logical end of a broken system

We ignore this lesson at our own peril. Canada’s health care system is collapsing under demographic pressure, uncontrolled migration, and the unavoidable math of government-run medicine.

When the system breaks, someone must bear the cost. MAID has become the release valve.

The ideology behind this system is already drifting south. In American medical journals and bioethics conferences, you will hear this same rhetoric. The argument is always dressed in compassion. But underneath, it reduces the value of human life to a calculation: Are you useful? Are you affordable? Are you too much of a burden?

The West was built on a conviction that every human life has inherent value. That truth gave us hospitals before it gave us universities. It gave us charity before it gave us science. It is written into the Declaration of Independence.

Canada’s MAID program reveals what happens when a country lets that foundation erode. Life becomes negotiable, and suffering becomes a justification for elimination.

A society that no longer recognizes the value of life will not long defend freedom, dignity, or moral order. If compassion becomes indistinguishable from convenience, and if medicine becomes indistinguishable from euthanasia, the West will have abandoned the very principles that built it. That is the lesson from our northern neighbor — a warning, not a blueprint.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

A Sharia enclave is quietly taking root in America. It's time to wake up.

NOVA SAFO / Staff | Getty Images

Sharia-based projects like the Meadow in Texas show how political Islam grows quietly, counting on Americans to stay silent while an incompatible legal system takes root.

Apolitical system completely incompatible with the Constitution is gaining ground in the United States, and we are pretending it is not happening.

Sharia — the legal and political framework of Islam — is being woven into developments, institutions, and neighborhoods, including a massive project in Texas. And the consequences will be enormous if we continue to look the other way.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

Before we can have an honest debate, we’d better understand what Sharia represents. Sharia is not simply a set of religious rules about prayer or diet. It is a comprehensive legal and political structure that governs marriage, finance, criminal penalties, and civic life. It is a parallel system that claims supremacy wherever it takes hold.

This is where the distinction matters. Many Muslims in America want nothing to do with Sharia governance. They came here precisely because they lived under it. But political Islam — the movement that seeks to implement Sharia as law — is not the same as personal religious belief.

It is a political ideology with global ambitions, much like communism. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently warned that Islamist movements do not seek peaceful coexistence with the West. They seek dominance. History backs him up.

How Sharia arrives

Political Islam does not begin with dramatic declarations. It starts quietly, through enclaves that operate by their own rules. That is why the development once called EPIC City — now rebranded as the Meadow — is so concerning. Early plans framed it as a Muslim-only community built around a mega-mosque and governed by Sharia-compliant financing. After state investigations were conducted, the branding changed, but the underlying intent remained the same.

Developers have openly described practices designed to keep non-Muslims out, using fees and ownership structures to create de facto religious exclusivity. This is not assimilation. It is the construction of a parallel society within a constitutional republic.

The warning from those who have lived under it

Years ago, local imams in Texas told me, without hesitation, that certain Sharia punishments “just work.” They spoke about cutting off hands for theft, stoning adulterers, and maintaining separate standards of testimony for men and women. They insisted it was logical and effective while insisting they would never attempt to implement it in Texas.

But when pressed, they could not explain why a system they consider divinely mandated would suddenly stop applying once someone crossed a border.

This is the contradiction at the heart of political Islam: It claims universal authority while insisting its harshest rules will never be enforced here. That promise does not stand up to scrutiny. It never has.

AASHISH KIPHAYET / Contributor | Getty Images

America is vulnerable

Europe is already showing us where this road leads. No-go zones, parallel courts, political intimidation, and clerics preaching supremacy have taken root across major cities.

America’s strength has always come from its melting pot, but assimilation requires boundaries. It requires insisting that the Constitution, not religious law, is the supreme authority on this soil.

Yet we are becoming complacent, even fearful, about saying so. We mistake silence for tolerance. We mistake avoidance for fairness. Meanwhile, political Islam views this hesitation as weakness.

Religious freedom is one of America’s greatest gifts. Muslims may worship freely here, as they should. But political Islam must not be permitted to plant a flag on American soil. The Constitution cannot coexist with a system that denies equal rights, restricts speech, subordinates women, and places clerical authority above civil law.

Wake up before it is too late

Projects like the Meadow are not isolated. They are test runs, footholds, proofs of concept. Political Islam operates with patience. It advances through demographic growth, legal ambiguity, and cultural hesitation — and it counts on Americans being too polite, too distracted, or too afraid to confront it.

We cannot afford that luxury. If we fail to defend the principles that make this country free, we will one day find ourselves asking how a parallel system gained power right in front of us. The answer will be simple: We looked away.

The time to draw boundaries and to speak honestly is now. The time to defend the Constitution as the supreme law of the land is now. Act while there is still time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.

Why do Americans feel so empty?

Mario Tama / Staff | Getty Images

Anxiety, anger, and chronic dissatisfaction signal a country searching for meaning. Without truth and purpose, politics becomes a dangerous substitute for identity.

We have built a world overflowing with noise, convenience, and endless choice, yet something essential has slipped out of reach. You can sense it in the restless mood of the country, the anxiety among young people who cannot explain why they feel empty, in the angry confusion that dominates our politics.

We have more wealth than any nation in history, but the heart of the culture feels strangely malnourished. Before we can debate debt or elections, we must confront the reality that we created a world of things, but not a world of purpose.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

What we are living through is not just economic or political dysfunction. It is the vacuum that appears when a civilization mistakes abundance for meaning.

Modern life is stuffed with everything except what the human soul actually needs. We built systems to make life faster, easier, and more efficient — and then wondered why those systems cannot teach our children who they are, why they matter, or what is worth living for.

We tell the next generation to chase success, influence, and wealth, turning childhood into branding. We ask kids what they want to do, not who they want to be. We build a world wired for dopamine rather than dignity, and then we wonder why so many people feel unmoored.

When everything is curated, optimized, and delivered at the push of a button, the question “what is my life for?” gets lost in the static.

The crisis beneath the headlines

It is not just the young who feel this crisis. Every part of our society is straining under the weight of meaninglessness.

Look at the debt cycle — the mathematical fate no civilization has ever escaped once it crosses a threshold that we seem to have already blown by. While ordinary families feel the pressure, our leaders respond with distraction, with denial, or by rewriting the very history that could have warned us.

You cannot survive a crisis you refuse to name, and you cannot rebuild a world whose foundations you no longer understand.

We have entered a cultural moment where the noise is so loud that it drowns out the simplest truths. We are living in a country that no longer knows how to hear itself think.

So people go searching. Some drift toward the false promise of socialism, some toward the empty thrill of rebellion. Some simply check out. When a culture forgets what gives life meaning, it becomes vulnerable to every ideology that offers a quick answer.

The quiet return of meaning

And yet, quietly, something else is happening. Beneath the frustration and cynicism, many Americans are recognizing that meaning does not come from what we own, but from what we honor. It does not rise from success, but from virtue. It does not emerge from noise, but from the small, sacred things that modern life has pushed to the margins — the home, the table, the duty you fulfill, the person you help when no one is watching.

The danger is assuming that this rediscovery happens on its own. It does not.

Reorientation requires intention. It requires rebuilding the habits and virtues that once held us together. It requires telling the truth about our history instead of rewriting it to fit today’s narratives. And it requires acknowledging what has been erased: that meaning is inseparable from God’s presence in a nation’s life.

Harold M. Lambert / Contributor | Getty Images

Where renewal begins

We have built a world without stillness, and then we wondered why no one can hear the questions that matter. Those questions remain, whether we acknowledge them or not. They do not disappear just because we drown them in entertainment or noise. They wait for us, and the longer we ignore them, the more disoriented we become.

Meaning is still available. It is found in rebuilding the smallest, most human spaces — the places that cannot be digitized, globalized, or automated. The home. The family. The community.

These are the daily virtues that do not trend on social media, but that hold a civilization upright. If we want to repair this country, we begin there, exactly where every durable civilization has always begun: one virtue at a time, one tradition at a time, one generation at a time.

This article originally appeared on TheBlaze.com.