1. Art and Diseño

Easton’s Point Capital
Socioeconomic Views
By
TIMOTHY VON FUELLING STRAUS
It is just human nature
from which there is no escaping
5/30/2012
D’où Venons Nous / Que Sommes Nous / Où Allons Nous,
Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?
-----Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin
“Humanity today is like a waking dreamer, caught between the fantasies of sleep and the chaos of the real world. The mind seeks
but cannot find the precise place and hour. We have created a Star Wars civilization, with Stone Age emotions, medieval
institutions, and godlike technology. We thrash about. We are terribly confused by the mere fact of our existence, and a danger to
ourselves and to the rest of life.”
---The Social Conquest of Earth, Edward O. Wilson
“Together our sensory systems are organized to give us a detailed and accurate view of reality, exactly as we would expect if
truth about the outside world helps us to navigate it more effectively. But once this information arrives in our brains, it is often
distorted and biased to our conscious minds. We deny the truth to ourselves. We project onto others traits that are in fact true of
ourselves—and then attack them! We repress painful memories, create completely false ones, rationalize immoral behavior, act
repeatedly to boost positive self -opinion, and show a suite of ego -defense mechanisms. Why?
Surely, these biases are expected to have negative effects on our biological welfare. Why degrade and destroy the truth? Why
alter information after arrival so as to reach a conscious falsehood? Why should natural selection have favored our marvelous
organs of perception, on the one hand, only to have us systematically distort the information gathered, on the other? In short,
why practice self-deception?
Applied more broadly, the general argument is that we deceive ourselves the better to deceive others. To fool others, we may be
tempted to reorganize information internally in all sorts of improbable ways and to do so largely unconsciously. From the simple
premise that the primary function of self -deception is offensive—measured as the ability to fool others—we can build up a theory
and science of self -deception.”
-- The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Robert Trivers
"In the beginning there were only probabilities. The universe could only come into existence if someone observed it. It does not
matter that the observers turned up several billion years later. The universe exists because we are aware of it."
--- Martin Rees, quantum physicist
“Democracy breeds gullibility. Lord Bryce observed in 1 921 , “State action became less distrusted the more the
State itself was seen to be passing under popular control. ” The rise of democracy made it much easier for
politicians to convince people that government posed no threat, because they automatically controlled its actions.
The result is that the brakes on government power become weakest at the exact time that politicians are most
dangerous.
Blind trust becomes a substitute for informed consent. But mass trust in government compounds the political damage
brought about by pervasive ignorance.
The bias in favor of trusting government brings out democracy’s worst tendencies. The normal defenses that people
would have against alien authority are undermined by a chorus of politicians and government officials continually
reminding people that government is themselves, and they cannot distrust the government without distrusting
themselves. ”
---How Democracy Breeds Political Idiocy, James Bovard
1
For the greatest enemy of the truth is very often not the lie - deliberate, contrived and dishonest- but the mythpersistent, persuasive and unrealistic."
- John Fitzgerald Kennedy, Yale University June 11, 1962
“Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
Mind numbing is it not, the Orwellian Newspeak that mocks all who enter the headquarters of
the CIA? In fact, these words, carved upon an entrance foyer wall in Langley, are a testament to
what a Kafkaesque absurdity our nation’s “intelligence” agencies are. Perhaps this sentence
from the Gospel of John should now become the official words of greeting throughout our nation’s
capital. For even without an officially designated “Ministry of Truth” and the ubiquitous visage
of “Big Brother” staring down at us from every wall, we have become a culture based on lies and
untruths that now permeate our everyday existence as if it were the air we breathe. In addition,
when faced with the overpowering undertow of our hidden government, whose agenda is
seemingly immune to the rapidly depleting democratic American voice, we have become passive idiots watching our
own destruction without any meaningful dissent. America has entered a black hole of ignorance and apathy from
which only the most violent burst of energy can save us. As we crossed the event horizon some time ago, we have
been accelerating down the path of the inevitable. The inevitable has arrived or will very, very soon. It will not be
pleasant for anyone, regardless of wealth or political power.
It is hard not to be in awe of the state of ennui, of delusional psychosis and willful stupidity of the American
population, ever more so of the supposed intellectually attuned class of professional investors running the bulk of
the nation’s private financial wealth. Of course, readers are not included in this rant, at least for the most part, nor
can we include those at the pinnacle of the financial elite, the folks that directly, intentionally engage in the support
of the illusions that are America. Nevertheless, for a cohort of relatively likeminded members of the American elite
who should be more versed in knowledge of the inevitable economic laws so blatantly disregarded, there is a sense of
Omertà. We remain silent as our economic system is destroyed and the constitution and American democratic order
is made a mockery of. We watch, like helpless, mute children as a massively invasive police state is erected, whose
all seeing eye is trained to search within, not, as we were led to believe, just in foreign lands. We seem even more
enveloped in a fantasy of our own creation than the poor souls ruled by the visages of the Kardashians and the fate
of false American Idols, forgiven for either being brainwashed into stupidity from birth or simply gladly accepting of
their cocooned, lobotomized existence. Content to be fed by the hand of the state and
molded by corporate propaganda; the optimal American is the docile, force-fed, suckling
shopaholic, the debt-indentured servant who cannot afford to suffer the luxury of
freethinking and intellectually supported doubts. The Prols of 1984 or the lower castes of
Epsilons, Gammas and Deltas in Brave New World come to mind, as we have all become
products of Bokonovsky’s process, cloned not genetically but seemingly just as successfully
into a state of ordered submission; that is until we aren’t anymore. Do we need to hear the
boots kicking down the doors first?
2
Ulpiano Checa (1860–1916), Horseman of the Apocalypse
It is astounding how much our world can mirror futuristic fiction, particularly that of a dystopian nature. When
opining on the future, the authors of this fiction were clairvoyant, or more likely, just uniquely capable of
extrapolating perceived subtle evolutionary trends in society and culture and taking them to their logical natural
conclusions. This is not, however, an easy task. The restraints of the concurrent era’s socioeconomic and cultural
thought usually entice all but the most immunized to the allure of the ruling elite’s propaganda. To capture the
essential surviving memes and cultural adaptations before they are fully recognized as the future’s normative
standards, and not view them as incongruous deviances from the then perceived state of the human social and
political condition, is only achieved by the most fertile and courageous minds. America and a large part of the world
we have attempted to lead by either force of arms or cultural and economic assimilation are now an intricately
woven fabric of Orwell, Huxley and Burgess with a bit of Conrad and Heller thrown into the pot for added social
flavoring. Paine, Jefferson, Madison and Locke, Montesquieu, Plutarch and Polybius to name a few are discarded as
the detritus of a white, European Judeo-Christian heritage whose “universal” laws are but anachronistic dinosaurs
with bones left to bleach in the sun of moral, ethical and socioeconomic relativism.
Where this dead-end evolutionary path has led is to an America unrestrained by necessary rules, laws and social
mores, not just of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but also of the rationalist’s understanding of human nature and its
innate imperfections. All of our core human traits, in any geography and in any cultural environment, have
indisputable similarities, if not exact phylogenetic imprints. To have survived the Darwinian competition over
millions of years these traits, even the most obscure recurring cognitive patterns, did so for a reason. That reason is
very simple-they enhanced survival of the species.
For the agnostics among us, original sin is a concept that does not compute, but evolutionarily reinforced tendencies
deemed sinful are evidenced throughout the history of man. They have always existed in some form from the very
birth of the first stirrings of man’s conscious thought. Humankind has evolved in an uneasy co-existence with
seemingly contradictory universal behaviors. But for the force of religious, cultural, and social taboos and the
enforcement of socially acceptable rules of conduct and normative behavior, the long process towards increasing
complexity in human social organization would have long ago been foreshortened. Depravity and virtuousness,
kindness and savagery, egotistic selfishness and selfless altruism, avarice and generosity, honesty and
deceitfulness, self-deception and self-delusion; (of which there are no qualified antonyms, so we shall simply say
non-delusional, objective self-awareness); all have competed with each other within every man, women and child
throughout the history of homo sapiens and its various humanoid predecessors. They exist, have existed and will
continue to exist inside all of us and collectively so within our social and political mechanisms. Though we tend to
wrap around these innate, incompatible behaviors the relative value judgments of our own particular age, evolution
has already passed judgment. Millions of years of internal and social competitive development have given a
pronounced thumbs up on them all. Each human trait and propensity, apparently incongruous; and almost
Manichean in nature, with little grey area between them, is in fact necessary for the success of the human species. If
it were not so, the less effective, more burdensome and less competitively important behaviors would have been
winnowed out of humankind’s gene pool long ago.
Liars, cheaters and egocentric manipulators do often win. One just need look to Washington D.C. and Wall Street. A
society ruled by such qualities, however, is destined for inevitable retribution.
3
Thus, from the earliest cave dwellers to the Ten Commandments of the Bible’s Moses, all the way to the American
Constitution and beyond, self-delusion, dishonesty, greed, egotistical and narcissistic self-seeking were all as
essential to our survival as their opposite traits, particularly those supported and transmitted generation to
generation by society’s moral, religious and ethical codes. The transmission of essential, socially binding and
culturally productive mores has tended to be found in the generational transference mechanisms of language,
religion and mythology, and with the invention of writing, codified law. However, those characteristics deemed as
“bad”, “evil” or “self-destructive” in cultural constructs provided necessary tools to the survival capabilities of the
human race. No matter how ethically repugnant or culturally suppressed,
they have always been present, ready to erupt. It is easy to understand
humankind’s fascination with evil, sin and deceit. We need them.
The Constitution of the United States and the Bill of Rights are
representations of the Founders’ awareness of the dichotomous nature of the
human soul. Our Constitution and the competitive balance of the three
branches of American government were designed to protect this fledgling
nation from the vagaries of the undesirable, always present, and potentially
competitively superior human traits, those considered objectively as ethically
unacceptable. Keeping the powerful corrupting influences of the darker side
of human nature from becoming dominant, America’s founding minds
constructed a government that was to protect us from ourselves. Without
these codified restraints, any system of government would eventually fail, the victim of hubris and a myriad of
evolutionarily essential sins. A perpetual war exists between honor, virtue, and duty, the products of group selection
on the one side, and selfishness, cowardice, and hypocrisy, the products of individual selection on the other side.
Liars, self-delusional narcissists, the powerful and wealthy along with unbridled greed, when unshackled by the
absence of restraining social mores and universal ethical codes have appeared
more competitively and evolutionarily fit for extended periods of history, while the
truly virtuous eras are fewer and of less durability. Our human battlefields are
strewn with the bones of competing personalities and civilizations, each similarly
“When we are planning
imbued with such characteristics. The American experiment was designed, as best
for posterity,” wrote
as thought possible, to last, but to do this placed restraints on the darker passions,
Thomas Paine, “we
both of a cultural and codified nature. Unfortunately, the design was clearly
ought to remember
flawed. For the passage of time since America’s birth has laid bare very likely
that virtue is not
irreparable fault lines. The evidence of failure abounds, but, trapped within the
anachronistic myths and ideological framework that defines this nation, we are
hereditary.
blind to it. It will take a larger socioeconomic earthquake than experienced to date
to open the nation’s eyes.
The only universally true absolute must be the rule of law. Without its
restoration, this nation will follow the same pathway as all others before us. Relative decline is inevitable, absolute
collapse increasingly possible. It is, unfortunately, very likely that America is simply following down the pathway of
the preordained, made so by the innate evolutionary conflicts between a society of men and men in society.
America has been undergoing one giant evolutionary experiment since 1776. Heed the warnings of those who
constructed it, abide by the restraints imposed on human behavior and its social manifestations, culture and
governance, and the most likely outcome would be a volatile, but seemingly perpetual success—the longest surviving
democratic republic. Succumb to the dark side by disregarding the historical ruins of the all too numerous former
empires of national hubris, who failed because of the unrestricted expansionist impulses of an increasingly isolated
and powerful ruling elite unbound by the restraints of law or religion-- and it is inevitable ruin.
“We have no government armed in power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by
morality and religion. Our Constitution was made only for a religious and moral people. It is wholly
inadequate for the government of any other.” - John Adams
“We have given you a Republic, if you can keep it.” --Benjamin Franklin
Can we indeed, at least what is left of it?
4
America has taken the wrong path. This leads either to America’s national extinction or to a rebirth of our
civilization, ever mindful of the necessary restraints of law, morality and an ethical culture, codified or not. It is
beyond folly to believe that we are a distinct race, Homo Amercanus. We are not unique. Every prescient warning
from the great minds of our founders and the many who followed them that has not been heeded over the past 100
years has led this nation further and further from its intended destiny—the survivorship of a prosperous,
democratic state. Yet this fantasy built on myth, manipulated by a collective consciousness that cannot let it go, is
about to rapidly disintegrate on the unforgiving, jagged rocks of reality. For reality does exist, so indeed does truth,
moral action and, much to the chagrin of liberal relativists, a Manichean world of very strongly defined right and
wrong. There are “truths” that are immutable, and the universe is and always will be subject to them. Not
everything is relative, and to assume so is beyond ignorant. It is completely contrary to the evolutionary patterns of
humankind. The Constitution binds us together as a nation, or at least it once did. Liberty is not divisible, nor is its
violation, yet we all sit in front of our PC’s, ultra-thin laptops and iPads reading almost daily about the rapid
erosion of our liberties and the direct attacks on our Constitution, from Washington to our town halls, and do
nothing. We play the game according to the rules set by those who we know in our hearts, if not our minds, intend to
destroy us.
Irish and British Tourists Sent Home over “Threatening” Tweet.
Wednesday, February 01, 2012
For tourists Leigh Van Bryan and Emily Bunting, their trip to the U.S. never got past the airport in Los Angeles. That’s because
security officials detained the couple after some tweets from Van Bryan alarmed the Department of
Homeland Security.
In one posting on Twitter, the 26-year-old Irish bar manager wrote about his plans while on holiday to
“destroy America”—destroy meaning party in British slang. However, U.S. officials didn’t get the joke.
Separated and locked up with common criminals for several days the pair of innocent visitors were
unceremoniously exported back to England. If the government could monitor their “tweets”, do you
think they are not doing the same of yours of your children’s?
“You can be stylish and powerful, too. That's Michelle’s
advice.”
-- President Obama telling graduates to temper but preserve their interest
in clothing during his commencement address at Barnard College, a
women-only college of New York’s Columbia University.
What have we become?
We live deep in a surreal world of lies, blatant falsehoods and manipulated propaganda. If they serve to enhance our
ability to survive with the least amount of anguish and anxiety, most of us would rather remain embraced by the
warmth of these lies. Thus, we face again the power of self-delusion as an evolutionary propensity of great force.
Better, it would seem, to live the delusional life than to live in fear of a reality that we feel helpless to affect.
Moreover, despite American’s seemingly insatiable appetite for manipulated realities and the opiate of selfdelusional myths, the fabric of America is unraveling at an increasing intensity. It cannot last much longer. This is
the missing ingredient in common economic forecasting. We are witnessing far more than a decaying, indebted
America fighting for a renewed economic vibrancy. We are watching an accelerating collapse of the entire edifice of
American civilization. The process of economic collapse is coexistent in time with our social, ethical and political
decay. The search for first cause is irrelevant; the end game is what should be of concern. The solutions for the
economic and the political are one. The study of human economics was once called political economy—before it
assumed the obnoxiously false mantle of science. It should be again.
5
“I intend to show that, by the line of action now proposed to us, which we call expansion and imperialism, we are throwing
away some of the most important elements of the American symbol and are adopting some of the most important elements of
the Spanish symbol. We have beaten Spain in a military conflict, but we are submitting to be conquered by her on the field of
ideas and policies. Expansionism and imperialism are nothing but the old philosophies of national prosperity, which have
brought Spain to where she now is. Those philosophies appeal to national vanity and national cupidity. They are seductive,
especially upon the first view and the most superficial judgment, and therefore it cannot be denied that they are very strong
for popular effect. They are delusions, and they will lead us to ruin unless we are hardheaded enough to resist them. In any
case, the year 1898 is a great landmark in the history of the United States”
William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, 1898—Yale Lecture
Americans have chosen their nation’s path poorly and we will all suffer the consequences. We will not be sitting at a
banquet table of our own choosing, however. Even the elite, the Alphas and Betas
of our corporate, financial and political class will not be immune. Unfortunately,
we could not have chosen differently, despite the false sense of free will that we
could have done otherwise. It is only a uniquely human psychological support
mechanism, the result of the capacity of hindsight and heuristic fallacies. We
could not have chosen differently. However, if we had not decimated the core
principals of our nation’s founding, if we had not slowly shredded the
Constitution, if we had not followed the same worn path towards empire taken by
every nation before us endowed with similar opportunities, wealth and power, and
if we had not lost our nation’s soul in the contradictory pursuits of military and
socioeconomic dominance abroad while trying to maintain an increasingly false
ideal of freedom and private rights at home, then we might not be the financially and morally bankrupt nation we
are today. When the final curtain falls, as Americans, we will all sink, no matter the ever-widening gap between the
elite and the rest. This Titanic has no lifeboats.
“Individuals trapped in a dying culture live in a twilight world. They embrace death through infertility, concupiscence, and war. A
dog will crawl into a hole to die. The members of sick cultures do not do anything quite so dramatic, but they cease to have
children, dull their senses with alcohol and drugs, become despondent, and too frequently do away with themselves. Or they may
make war on the perceived source of their humiliation.”
How Civilizations Die: (And Why Islam Is Dying Too) -David Goldman
“Of all the enemies to public liberty, war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every
other. War is the parent of armies; from these precede debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known
instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.” — James Madison
A disturbing belief, apparently widely held in the subconscious mind of American investors is that financial reality
is nothing but a state of mind which, totally contradicted by objective reasoning, is a fabrication of the Federal
Reserve and the “Powers that Be”. The seemingly insatiable gluttony for paper wealth and perpetual good times
amongst a population that reads the same words every day, from the same corporate mouthpieces, and with a
shared common desire to keep the game going on forever, reinforces a tenuous fog of supportive illusion. Apparently,
reality is to be kept at bay through a combination of lies, half-truths and the blatant withholding of critical
information. Of course, at some point the chimera of our mass self-deception will be decimated by truth. Financial
unreality is priced accordingly in our markets every day. An equally pervasive sense of delusion is found amongst a
vast majority of our political and business class outside of the true ruling elites, and subsequently through the
propaganda machinery, the proletarian masses.
It is not, of course simply that we have become a nation of genetically, intellectually deficient morons. We have
arrived at our lobotomized state of self-delusion and mass ignorance as a direct result of the purposeful actions of
the corporate and government political elite that have been feeding our avarice and sense of national hubris with
propagandist mush, as well as a systematic omission of information and its meaningful analysis by the government
and corporate media, for many, many years.
6
“The great foe of democracy now and in the near future is plutocracy. Every year that passes brings out this antagonism more
distinctly. It is to be the social war of the twentieth century. In that war militarism, expansion and imperialism will all favor
plutocracy. In the first place, war and expansion will favor jobbery, both in the dependencies and at home. In the second place,
they will take away the attention of the people from what the plutocrats are doing. In the third place, they will cause large
expenditures of the people's money, the return for which will not go into the treasury, but into the hands of a few schemers. In
the fourth place, they will call for a large public debt and taxes, and these things especially tend to make men unequal,
because any social burdens bear more heavily on the weak than on the strong, and so make the weak weaker and the strong
stronger. Therefore expansion and imperialism are a grand onslaught on democracy.”
William Graham Sumner, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain”, 1898—Yale Lecture
Americans are molded at an early age by an educational system designed to breed complacently docile, vulnerable
minds. Although diversity in its biological sense is a term of vibrancy and eco-systemic strength, the term in our
current politically correct, relativistic usage is nothing but a mechanism to atomize the ability to form consensual
mental constructs and unified, shared American perspectives and values. The relativistic worldview unhinges the
role of church and community, as it decomposes moral, ethical and cultural mores and guideposts that previously
bound us together as a defined civilization. We have become untethered from the necessary restraining mechanisms
developed over hundreds of thousands of years, as has much of Western civilization, by the insidiousness of postmodern, politically correct relativism. Chaos of the mind is the orgasmic joy of the propagandist and a significant
goal of the manipulative, plutocratic state. The corporate colonization of consciousness, fully enabled through the
control of the pivotal heights of cultural, social, political and economic power is in lockstep with the increasingly
totalitarian, overarching nature of the American security state, a state long waiting upon its burgeoning need to
come out of the closet and fully embrace its sole purpose.
That purpose is not to confront the much manipulated, deftly controlled and enhanced global crisis of terrorism, but
to destroy American democracy and solidify the massive gap between the wielders of power and those who think
they can still control them. 9/11 was the United States government’s “Reichstag fire”, regardless of a lack of
evidence of direct government complicity. Germany’s subsequent decree, named for the Nazi’s convenient little
pyrotechnics, allowed a democratically elected Hitler to justify the removal of key civil liberties of the German
people and ultimately to impose the powers of dictatorship given to his government under the Enabling Act, legally
signed by President Hindenburg in November of 1933. The Patriot Act and the subsequent onerous laws extending
its conceptual reach, legislated by Congress or as a direct result of Presidential executive orders, may very well
match the legally sanctioned abrogation of German citizens’ rights in 1933. Terrorism started out as the needed
external threat, allowing for an explosion in the power and wealth of the military industrial complex and massive
expansion of the subterranean intelligence services beyond anything ever imagined by even the most ardent covert
malefactors and assassins, the founding fathers of the CIA.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, only 47 percent of high school seniors have mastered a minimum level of U.S. history,
66 percent of civics. Only 14 percent perform at or above the “proficient” level for history, 27 percent for civics. The Intercollegiate Studies
Institute found in 2007 that U.S. college students missed almost half the questions on a civics literacy test. Only 45.9 percent of those surveyed
knew that the clause “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal” is in the Declaration of Independence. The study
also found what many other studies confirm: that civics illiteracy equals disengagement. Conversely, the more students know about the system,
the more likely they are to vote and engage in other ways
"Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principle."
Ralph Waldo Emerson
---
FY2011 sets record for military surplus transfers to police departments
7
“You and I are meant to take back the founders’ mandate, and you and I are meant to lead. You and I must protest, you and I must
confront our representatives, you and I must run for office, you and I must write the op-eds, you and I must take over the battle.
The founders—the unknown as well as the well-known Americans who “conceived” the nation in liberty—did not intend for us to
delegate worrying about the Constitution to a cadre of constitutional scholars, or to leave debate to a class of professional pundits, or
to leave the job of fighting for liberty to a caste of politicians. They meant for us to defend the Constitution, for us to debate the
issues of the day, and for us to rise up against tyranny: the American who delivers the mail; the American who teaches our children;
ordinary people.”
Give Me Liberty, Naomi Wolf
FBI warns of threat from anti-government extremists
Mon, Feb 6 2012
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Anti-government extremists opposed to taxes and regulations pose a growing threat to local law
enforcement officers in the United States, the FBI warned on Monday.
These extremists, sometimes known as "sovereign citizens," believe they can live outside any type of government authority, FBI
agents said at a news conference.
The extremists may refuse to pay taxes, defy government environmental regulations and believe the United States went
bankrupt by going off the gold standard.
Routine encounters with police can turn violent "at the drop of a hat," said Stuart McArthur, deputy assistant director in the
FBI's counterterrorism division.
"We thought it was important to increase the visibility of the threat with state and local law enforcement," he said.

Following the protests, riots and visible social discord of the 1960s and early 1970s the US government, with increasing
cooperation from local law enforcement organizations, began a successful campaign to radically restrict mass movements
from attaining anything close to the visibility of such anti-government protests. The increasing concentration of
corporate controlled media, whose expansion, directly controlled by regulatory authorities in Washington, aided and
abetted in the ultimate covert gagging of any form of public protest. One wonders why there has been no outrage and
few true mass movement demonstrations during the past four years of our quasi-economic depressionwith increasing
suppression of American freedoms. Look to no further than the MSM approach to protest, even the Catholic Church’s,
let alone the bedraggled OWS and related movements. Look at the police lines in Chicago, the FBI’s and Homeland
Securitie’s entrapment of renowned, dangerous killer terrorists in Chicago. Look at the massively expanding police state
and its media supporters.
Look to HR 347—a bill that breezed through Washington with bipartisan support a few weeks back. HR 347 will
empower federal agents to arrest and bring felony charges against citizens engaged in political protests anywhere in the
USA.
Almost
every
single
Democrat
voted
for
this
democracy-killing
bill.
They say that bi-partisanship is dead in DC, yet here we have all the Democrats uniting with all the Republicans to pass
this egregious and fascist bill. Obviously it is aimed at the Occupy movement and any other protests that one assumes
may eventually arise from the economic, social and political hell that we will be experiencing for many years to come.
Where is the outrage at Congress? Where is the outrage at the Democrats? Protesting will be a felony - where is the
outrage?
In the future, all protests, emails, twitters and social media of every kind will be electronically monitored with the data
stored by the NSA at their new multi-billion dollar site in Utah. They will be observed from the air with the 30,000
drones expected in our skies over the next few years, operating for the myriad of government and private intelligence
organizations,which no one has a clue what they do or how they spend our tax dollars. In addition, they will be
infiltrated by agents providing money and any and all the accoutrements necessary to entice and entrap a variety of
misfits into spending the rest of their lives in prisons. They will be maintained by private organizations and monitored
by prison guards who received their training abusing the unofficially designated less than human citizens of Muslim
lands, and will be increasingly likely to apply their skill sets to Americans. First will be the weakest and ideologically
scapegoated, then slowly but surely all but the ruling elites, whose rare appearances behind bars may become more
frequent with the passage of time. It is an absolute given. Apply to the victims of our wars of aggression and “peaceful”
humanitarian missions the status of subhuman with legal and moral justification, and these attitudes will become
normalized back home. Again, we had been warned of this throughout our history by intellectual minds far greater than
the combined intelligence of the entire political class calling Washington, DC their home.
8
The rise of this homeland security and intelligence class, operating in secret, signals a distressing threat to American
democracy from those ostensibly sworn, or hired, to protect it, according to Washington Post journalists Dana Priest and
William Arkin in Top Secret America: The Rise of the New American Security State. The book, deriving from a special
investigative series in the Washington Post, is a testament to the hard work and delayed gratification of investigative
journalism. It’s a mostly successful, albeit padded, detective story spanning the decade since 9/11, as Priest and Arkin try to
understand the cult of security that has invaded the Washington, D.C., area and that has grown fat and wealthy on taxpayer
money drained through fear.
“The complexity of this system defies explanation,” admitted retired Army Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, although its power centers
include the nation’s 16 intelligence agencies, the Department of Homeland Security, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the
Pentagon, state-based intelligence-fusion centers, and the hundreds of thousands of contractors hired to support each
organization’s mission. Starting to piece this new system of state capitalism together, Priest and Arkin describe it as a
disease:
Just as the most significant thing about a spiking count of white blood cells was what the blood test couldn’t see — the
infection that prompted the white cells to multiply in the first place — the top secret jobs and companies, and the government
organizations they worked for, pointed to something unprecedented that had yet to be identified in the body politic.
“There are those who still think they are holding the pass against a revolution that may
be coming up the road. But they are gazing in the wrong direction. The revolution is
behind them. It went by in the Night of Depression, singing songs to freedom.
There are those who have never ceased to say very earnestly, "Something is going to
happen to the American form of government if we don't watch out." These were the
innocent disarmers. Their trust was in words. They had forgotten their Aristotle.
More than 2,000 years ago, he wrote of what can happen within the form, when "one
thing takes the place of another, so that the ancient laws will remain, while the power
will be in the hands of those who have brought about revolution in the state."
In a revolutionary situation mistakes and failures are not what they seem. They are scaffolding. Error is not repealed. It is compounded
by a longer law, by more decrees and regulations, by further extensions of the administrative hand.
To the revolutionary mind, the American vista must have been almost as incredible as Genghis Khan's first view of China — so rich, so
soft, so unaware. No politically adult people could ever have been so little conscious of revolution. There was here no revolutionary
tradition, as in Europe, but in place of it the strongest tradition of subject government that had ever been evolved — that is, government
subject to the will of the people, not its people but the people. Why should anyone fear government?
In the na'ive American mind the word, revolution had never grown up. The meaning of it had not changed since horse-and-buggy days,
when Oliver Wendell Holmes said: "Revolutions are not made by men in spectacles." It called up scenes from Carlyle and Victor Hugo,
or it meant killing the Czar with a bomb, as he may have deserved for oppressing his people. Definitely, it meant the overthrow of
government by force; and nothing like that could happen here. We had passed a law against it.
Well, certainly nothing like that was going to happen here. That it probably could not happen, and that everybody was so sure it couldn't
made everything easier for what did happen.”
“The Revolution Was”—Garrett Garrett, 1938
What If We Have Only Memories of Freedom?
Andrew P. Napolitano
“What if Memorial Day reminds us of times when we had more freedom? What if freedom is dying right under our eyes? What if
the memory of the past is more fulfilling than the reality of the present?
What if the federal government could write any law, regulate any behavior and tax any event, no matter what the Constitution
authorized? What if the majority in Congress rejects the idea of limited government and views the Constitution as granting it
blanket power to do whatever it can get away with? What if the constitutional prohibition on the government's taking of life,
liberty or property without due process of law is only for show and is not for real?”
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What of democracy as well as what of capitalism?
“Is it as if we created a class where responsibility for actions is not understood in the lower classes and responsibility for actions
is just not assumed or enforced for the upper classes, only the working and middle classes still understand the word.”
“It was precisely to guard against the dangers of usurpation, either by a willful man, or by an oligarchy, or by the majority -usually expressing themselves through some demagogic leader -- that they planned a division of the powers of government. They
knew that this would not promote the greatest possible efficiency; they knew that benevolent tyrannies -- of which we have so
many modern equivalents -- are far more efficient and often enjoy immense popular favor. But they also knew that tyrannies,
benevolent or otherwise, seldom survive the lives of their founders. And like all the great political historians and thinkers from
Plato to the present day, they were convinced that from the viewpoint of man's dignity, development, progress and ultimate wellbeing, tyranny, however benevolent, is, of all forms of government, the very worst. And man's dignity, his spiritual role on earth,
concerned them. And it was for the same reason, in their case fortified by their recent experience with George III, that these
extraordinary men not only divided the powers of government but set definite limits to those powers, reserving whole spheres of
life into which government might not penetrate at all. This, in fact, was one of their leading contributions to human freedom.”
--A Study if American Liberalism and its Relationship to Modern Totalitarianism , Dorothy Thompson, 1935
Because 16 intelligence agencies just wasn't enough.
U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced that the Pentagon will soon launch a new intelligence agency to
be known as the Defense Clandestine Service that will be tasked with tracking
issues of "global strategic importance," such as nuclear threats from Iran and
North Korea. The DCS will become the 17th active intelligence agency within the
sprawling U.S. government and is expected to complement Defense Intelligence
Agency, which is more focused on finding out information on battlefield tactics
and maneuvers of enemy combatants. DCS, then, will take a broader approach
to military intelligence, which is sort of what the Central Intelligence Agency
already does, but hey, at least it means someone in the U.S. government will be
doing some hiring in the near term. It's expected that the DCS will also take a lead role in intelligence operations in
Africa and the Middle East in efforts to stay on top of the amorphous spread of radical Islamicism and other such
terrorist operations, as well as in emerging powers such as China, India, and elsewhere.
February 5, 2012
U.S. Said to Target Rescuers at Drone Strike Sites
“WASHINGTON — British and Pakistani journalists said Sunday that the C.I.A.’s drone strikes on suspected militants in Pakistan have
repeatedly targeted rescuers who responded to the scene of a strike, as well as mourners at subsequent funerals.
The report, by the London-based Bureau of Investigative Journalism, found that at least 50 civilians had been killed in follow-up strikes
after they rushed to help those hit by a drone-fired missile. The bureau counted more than 20 other civilians killed in strikes on funerals.
The findings were published on the bureau’s Web site and in The Sunday Times of London.
The bureau’s findings are based on interviews with witnesses to strikes in Pakistan’s rugged tribal area, where reporting is often
dangerous and difficult. American officials have questioned the accuracy of such claims, asserting that accounts might be concocted by
militants or falsely confirmed by residents who fear retaliation.”
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During World War II, the U.S. government created and operated a system of fascist central planning. (I have described this system in
my books Crisis and Leviathan and Depression, War, and Cold War.) After the war, much of this system was abandoned, but it was
revived in large part during the Korean War, and it was retained afterward in the form of statutory authority for its reinstatement
whenever the president might so order under the authority of the Defense Production Act of 1950, as amended. As I wrote in Crisis and
Leviathan (p. 246), after the Korean War “[t]he wartime wage-price and production controls lapsed, although the authority to reinstate
the production controls remained”—that is, the Defense Production Act was never repealed, and it has been in force continuously since
its initial passage, though amended from time to time. Under this statute, the president has lawful authority to control virtually the whole
of the U.S. economy whenever he chooses to do so and states that the national defense requires such a government takeover.
The latest executive order to stipulate in detail how the president will exercise these standing powers over energy, transportation, human
resources, raw materials, and so forth—stating in particular the subordinates to whom he will delegate various specific powers, among
other things—was issued last Friday, March 16, 2012. It shows plainly that private control of economic life in the United States, to the
extent that it survives, exists solely at the president’s pleasure and sufferance. Whenever he chooses to put into effect a full-fledged
operational fascist economy, controlled from his office, he has the statutory power to do so; all he has to do is to murmur the words
“national defense” and give the orders. In this regard, as Paul Begala’s infamous saying puts it, “stroke of the pen, law of the land, kinda
cool.”
“The Specter of Centrally Planned Economic Fascism Continues to Hover over the United States”, Robert Higgs
The Worm Ouroboros
We are as a worm eating its tail

Although there are many gigabytes of information that support the case made herein, if the reader by slim chance has
made it this far in my tome, hopefully the picture is clear. The message can be summed up simply:

The American experiment is likely at an end, if it has not already achieved that status. This nation ceased
being a Republic many years ago with the insatiable centripetal forces of federal authority and control. We
have become our own worst enemy and the self-destructive process of eating our own tail started years ago,
perhaps with the last state’s ratification of the Constitution. However, the ultimate point of no return is
likely demarked further back in our nation’s history than you might suspect. I hold with William Graham
Sumner, that the true beginning of the end to American republican democracy was the year that the nation
embarked on its unquenchable imperialism that gained us world domination, both militarily and
socioeconomically, but with the ultimate price of the loss of humanity, national dignity, freedom and our
national soul. All other dates pale in comparison, as much of what has befallen ussince 1898 can be traced to
that ignominious three month war against Spain.

We are sadly anesthetized to the lies, propaganda, and complete illusions generated with intent to deceive,
as well as through the self-delusions of our collective minds. From the ruling elite, inculcated with
subliminal messages driven by intensely similar educational experiences and through an increasingly
protected genetic pool’s propensity to generate a truly defined separate class, comes a dangerous new hubris
that has led to a breakdown of universal law.

It is unlikely, despite the cries in the wilderness from our Toto’s tugging at the curtains of the great and
powerful Oz that Americans will awaken from their opiated stupor in time to reverse the damage already
done. The past cannot be relived, and if it were, I am afraid that we would end up in the same exact place.
Far too many years ago, I wrote how freedom of choice was like watching a dog tied behind a moving cart;
the longer the rope the more freedom the dog would express by moving back and forth, but ultimately the
dog had to follow the cart. The rope around our national neck is, unfortunately, very, very short indeed.
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“It is militarism which is eating up all the products of science and art, defeating the energy of the population and wasting its savings. It
is militarism, which forbids the people to give their attention to the problems of their own welfare and to give their strength to the
education and comfort of their children. It is militarism which is combating the grand efforts of science and art to ameliorate the
struggle for existence.”
The Conquest of the United States by Spain, William Graham Sumner, 1898

The architects of the Constitution had the intention of making a republican and federal government, which would
endure with stability, insure justice, promote the general welfare and be proof against usurpation, by the few and the
rich or by the poor and the many. For the founding of a republic, they had guides. For a federal system, they had none.
Nevertheless, they thoroughly believed that help could be found in the successes and failures of the past. They knew all
about the "class struggle" -- so, for that matter, did the Greek philosophers, although you would think from our socialist
friends about the country that Karl Marx was the first person ever to notice it. They knew all about Fascism and its
causes, although they called it by another name. They knew the difference between a Free State, a plutocratic oligarchy,
a tyranny, monarchic or otherwise, and pure democracy. They set out to make a free federal state and in doing so, they
definitely rejected pure democracy, and for a very clearly seen reason; they knew that every attempt at pure democracy
in the history of the world had quickly degenerated into tyranny.

Despite the brilliant efforts of our nations founders to wrap America in the safety nets of a Republic with sufficiently
competing political power bases all bound by the rule of law, America is coming close to shredding these self-protecting
binding ropes. We now hang by a few rapidly fraying twines.

There is significantly greater pain ahead, but to restrict observation to purely economic and financial market events is
simply to deny the interconnectivity of all that is happening in the United States as well as in most of the world. We are
in the midst of an economic, political, social, cultural and civilizational transformation that will be, nay, must inevitably
be collectively bathed in the bloodbath of chaos, before order and true prosperity can be restored. Be engaged. The
tectonic plates are moving and we have only yet felt the tremors.

Out of chaos springs order…chaotic chaos births fascism or an ism derivative of totalitarianism, an ordered centralized
police state—stasis, entropy and soon, once again chaos. Planned or structured chaos brings forth democracy, freedom
and dynamic, emergent order.
So What?

“ We are paid to play, game or not, reality or not, if we can make money off the illusion for our clients and
ourselves we will always do so.” Granted, there is a chance all will work itself out and we masters of the
universe ( and former ones like myself) will dance happily into the new dawn of wealth beyond our wildest
dreams of avarice—but I sincerely doubt it.

Despite the rise of the drone enhanced supper police state, truth will win out and the economic laws that have, since humankind
developed the crudest of economies, will prevail. The Federal Reserve will be stormed before they can successfully monetize the
world, stormed by the continued avalanche of debt destruction and by a people that will awaken from their slumber to the reality
of the Fed’s birth and increasingly transparent purpose.

I have been, and remain, a global deflationist.

The whipsawing of an increasingly desperate “austerity” panicked populace flailing about a sinking ship is not a harbinger of a
successful shift, yet again, towards good time financial and fiscal stimulus, but a sign of increasing desperation. It is quant to sit
back with our short positions or theoretically hedged book and arrogantly mutter, “Those damn Greeks,” as if the same process is
not to unfold in our capitals of finance. As if we too were not subject to the same irreducible laws of physics, at least those laws
that pertain to anything larger than an atom and a smaller than a universe.

There has been no “real” recovery, it has been an illusion hoisted on us by the Federal Reserve and central banks around the world
with 3-D enhancement of the modern bureaucratic state, the elite ruling financial, political and corporate elite and the
concentrated media powers that serves them all. The current political process is a fraud there is no real choice.

Print away, but when the curtain is finally, truly pulled back by the exhausted, emaciated Toto to reveal the monsters behind it, we
will then have a chance at freedom again, if the honest, vibrant, intellectually prepared amongst us will guide the recovery. First the
chaos will come. The real deal, not the bandaged, stumbling relic of an economy we dream is going to be fine again. I have been
warning of this since the end of 2006. There is no exit without passing through the fires. It is human nature.
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“When I think about, ah, those soldiers
out there fighting on my behalf …”
or airmen or Marines, sailors, who are
“Well, I say…tonight, there's not a liberal America and a conservative America; there's the United States of America.
“There's not a black America and white America…there's the United States of America. “ The pundits like to slice and dice our
country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I've got news for them, too.
“We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.”
Poor Charlie Brown, should he not have learned what we already think we have--Einstein’s definition of insanity.
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What you need to succeed is sincerity, and if you can fake sincerity, you’ve got it made. (Old Hollywood axiom)
“A few months ago I told the American people that I did not trade arms for hostages. My heart and my best intentions still tell
me that is true, but the facts and evidence tell me it is not.” — President Ronald Reagan, 1987 1
On April 23, speaking at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, President Barack Obama told his assembled
audience that as president “I’ve done my utmost … to prevent and end atrocities”.
Do the facts and evidence tell him that his words are not true?
Well, let’s see … There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Iraq by American forces under President Obama. There’s the
multiple atrocities carried out in Afghanistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in
Pakistan by American forces under Obama. There’s the multiple atrocities carried out in Libya by American/NATO forces under
Obama. There are also the hundreds of American drone attacks against people and homes in Somalia and in Yemen (including
against American citizens in the latter). Might the friends and families of these victims regard the murder of their loved ones and
the loss of their homes as atrocities?
Ronald Reagan was pre-Alzheimer’s when he uttered the above. What excuse can be made for Barack Obama?
To protect our way of life..and what is that way?
FBI organizes almost all terror plots in the US
The Federal Bureau of Investigation employs upwards of 15,000 undercover agents today, ten times what they had on the roster
back in 1975.
If you think that’s a few spies too many — spies earning as much as $100,000 per assignment — one doesn’t have to go too deep
into their track record to see their accomplishments. Those agents are responsible for an overwhelming amount of terrorist stings
that have stopped major domestic catastrophes in the vein of 9/11 from happening on American soil.
Another thing those agents are responsible for, however, is plotting those very schemes.
The FBI has in recent years used trained informants not just to snitch on suspected terrorists, but to set them up from the get-go.
A recent report put together by Mother Jones and the Investigative Reporting Program at the University of California-Berkley
analyses some striking statistics about the role of FBI informants in terrorism cases that the Bureau has targeted in the decade
since the September 11 attacks.
The report reveals that the FBI regularly infiltrates communities where they suspect terrorist-minded individuals to be engaging
with others. Regardless of their intentions, agents are sent in to converse within the community, find suspects that could
potentially carry out “lone wolf” attacks and then, more or less, encourage them to do so. By providing weaponry, funds and a
plan, FBI-directed agents will encourage otherwise-unwilling participants to plot out terrorist attacks, only to bust them before
any events fully materialize.
US more unpopular in the Arab world than under Bush
A new poll confirms prior ones: anti-American sentiment is now at dangerously - even unprecedentedly - high levels
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ree fall
Misinformation campaign targets USA TODAY reporter, editor
WASHINGTON – A USA TODAY reporter and editor investigating Pentagon propaganda contractors have themselves been
subjected to a propaganda campaign of sorts, waged on the Internet through a series of bogus websites.
Fake Twitter and Facebook accounts have been created in their names, along with a Wikipedia entry and dozens of message
board postings and blog comments. Websites were registered in their names.
Obama Food Czar Warns Obesity Could Be “Nation’s Greatest National Security”…
It really does not matter, as long as we all continue to take the right pill. They are all the same, with a different tilt, “left” or
“right” leaning talk, but in the end all are members of the same damn party, the Fascist Empire of the United States of America.
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