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Police State • The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix
The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix
The individual vs. the collective in the Matrix
by Jon Rappoport
May 24, 2013
In the 1950s, before television had numbed minds and turned them into jelly, there was a growing sense of: the Individual versus the Corporate State.
Something needed to be done. People were fitting into slots. They were surrendering their lives in increasing numbers. They were carving away their own idiosyncrasies and their independent ideas.
Collectivism wasn’t merely a Soviet paradigm. It was spreading like a fungus at every level of American life. It might fly a political banner here and there, but on the whole it was a social phenomenon and nightmare.
Television then added fuel to the fire. Under the control of psyops experts, it became, as the 1950s droned on, the facile barrel of a weapon:
“What’s important is the group, the family, peers. Conform. Give in. Bathe in the great belonging…”
Recognize that every message television imparts is a proxy, a fabrication, a simulacrum, an imitation of life one step removed. It isn’t people talking in a park or on a street corner or in a saloon or a barber shop or a meeting hall or a church.
It’s happening on a screen, and that makes it both fake and more real than real.
Therefore, the argument that television can impart important values, if “directed properly,” is specious from the ground up. Television tells lies in its very being. And because it appears to supersede the real, it hypnotizes.
When this medium also broadcasts words and images of belonging and the need to belong, it’s engaged in revolutionary social engineering.
The very opposite of living as a strong, independent, and powerful individual is the cloying need to belong. And the latter is what television ceaselessly promotes.
This is no accident. After World War 2, psychological-warfare operatives turned their attention to two long-term strategies: inculcating negative stereotypes of distant populations, to rationalize covert military plans to conquer and build an empire for America; and disseminating the unparalleled joys of disappearing into a group existence.
When, for example, television promotes “family,” it’s all on the level of fictitiously happy, desperate, yearning, last-chance, problem-resolving, melted-down, trance-inducing, gooey family.
This isn’t, by any stretch, an actual human value. Whether it’s the suburban-lawn family in an ad for the wonders of a toxic medical drug, or the mob family going to the mattresses to fend off a rival, it’s fantasy time in the land of mind control.
Television has carried its mission forward. The consciousness of the Individual versus the State has turned into: love the State. Love the State as family.
The political Left of the 1960s, who rioted against Democratic President Lyndon Johnson, at the Century Plaza Hotel, and ended his hopes to run again in 1968…that Left is now all about the State and its glories and gifts. The collective.
A great deal of the television coverage of mass shootings is now dedicated to bringing home the spurious message: we all grieve together and heal together.
In the only study I have been able to find, Wictionary partially surveys the scripts of all television shows from the year 2006, to analyze the words most frequently broadcast to viewers in America.
Out of 29,713,800 words, including the massively used “a,” “an,” “the,” “you,” “me,” and the like, the word “home” ranks 179 from the top. “Mom” is 218. “Together” is 222. “Family” is 250.
This usage reflects an unending psyop.
Are you with the family or not? Are you with the group, the collective, or not? Those are the blunt parameters.
“When you get right down to it, all you have is family.” “Our team is really a family.” “You’re deserting the family.” “You fight for the guy next to you.” “Our department is like a family.” “Here at Corporation X, we’re a family.” “Above all, this is a community.”
The committee, the group, the company, the sector, the planet, the family.
The goal? Submerge the individual and tie him inexorably to a group.
Individual achievement, imagination, creative power? Not on the agenda. Something for the dustbin of history.
All you need to do is fall into the arms of a group. After that, everything is settled. You can care exclusively about the collective.
Aldous Huxley, Brave New World: “‘Ninety-six identical twins working ninety-six identical machines’! The voice was almost tremulous with enthusiasm. ‘You really know where you are. For the first time in history.’”
George Orwell, 1984: “The two aims of the Party are to conquer the whole surface of the earth and to extinguish once and for all the possibility of independent thought.”
Television seeks to emphasize one decision: inclusion or exclusion. Exclusion is portrayed as the only condition that is possible if you aren’t part of the group. And exclusion carries the connotation of exile, excommunication, and criminality.
The soap opera is the apotheosis of television. The long-running characters in Anytown are irreversibly enmeshed in one another’s lives. There’s no escape. And with that comes mind-numbing meddling.
“I’m just trying to help you realize we all love you (in chains).”
“Your father, rest his soul, would never have wanted you to do this to yourself…”
“How dare you set yourself apart from us. Who do you think you are?”
http://jonrappoport.wordpress.com/2013/ … he-matrix/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 25, 2013 1:55 pm
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Police State • Uncle Sam Wants You…Under His Thumb!
May 25, 2013
Uncle Sam Wants You…Under His Thumb!
By Jim Yardley
It’s really difficult to keep track of the many ways that the Obama administration is chipping away at the freedoms and independence that were the foundations of our nation, bequeathed to us as a birthright.
Let’s just summarize the more egregious behavior of our Beloved Leader and his Apostles.
Fast and Furious
The administration, under the non-leadership of Attorney General Eric Holder, shipped about 2,000 weapons into Mexico and straight into the hands of the narco-terrorist cartels effectively in a state of armed rebellion against an allied nation.
When asked about this situation, Eric Holder repeatedly said that he knew nothing about it.
Apparently, the government would have us believe that junior bureaucrats, acting on their own, decided to create their very own foreign policy. This new, extralegal program resulted in the deaths of at least two Americans and at least one hundred times that many Mexican citizens.
It should be recalled that not one of these junior bureaucrats is currently languishing in a jail cell. It appears that the punishment was simply to be told: "That was naughty. Don’t do it again."
So, on one hand, the Obama administration will apparently allow subordinates to create their own foreign policy, but if a state, on the other hand — let’s just say Arizona — tries to enforce laws already on the books that touch upon the sovereignty of Mexico and the apparent right of Mexican citizens to come and go over our borders at will, then the DOJ under Eric Holder will jump right in with a federal lawsuit to stop that state in its tracks, because that would be interfering in foreign policy.
Then, the administration, prior to the discovery that they, themselves, were actually the source of these weapons that had been shipped to our southern neighbors (without even telling them about it), branded ordinary Americans and American firms the culprits of gun-trafficking into Mexico.
This appears to have been merely another attempt to control the constitutionally protected right to keep and bear arms that is crucial to the birthright mentioned earlier.
Got all that? The only objective of Fast and Furious was to justify ever more draconian measures to reduce Americans’ 2nd-Amendment right to defend themselves. If it cost a few hundred lives, well, it appears that was the price Obama and company were more than willing to pay. Like Mr. Obama’s drone strikes, those deaths are classed only as collateral damage. The administration appears to view the evisceration of the 2nd Amendment as nothing more than collateral damage as well.
Benghazi
The president’s relationship with nations and power blocs in the Middle East has always been marked by his ambivalence in dealing with anything even remotely associated with the words "Islam," "jihad," or "terrorism." He also seems to be a little unclear about the limits of his authority. Take, for instance, claims that he is waiting for the FBI to apprehend the perpetrators of the Benghazi massacre, so he can (one infers from earlier behavior in similar situations) have them read their Miranda warnings or suggest that they claim 5th-Amendment privilege or something. This is exactly what happened when Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, the so-called "Underwear Bomber," was arrested, and what happened again with the younger terrorist, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who decided to use a pressure cooker for something other than cooking a pot roast in Boston.
Apparently our "smartest guy in the room" leader is under the impression that the FBI can enforce the laws of the United States within the confines of an independent sovereign nation. But then, perhaps he believes that the very phrase "sovereign nation" is obsolete. After all, it certainly wouldn’t be used by the New World/One World Order.
Obama touted his view that the "Arab Spring" was a grassroots striving for democracy. This is an unlikely characterization.
Obama’s secretary of state, Hillary Rodham Clinton, should have been able to tell him based on her vast experience in foreign affairs that there wasn’t the chance of a snowball in hell that democracy was going to spring into being in the Maghreb, or in any Islamic nation anywhere.
The president’s behavior, speeches, and policies in the Middle East have emboldened al-Qaeda, its affiliate Ansar al Sharia, and the Muslim Brotherhood. It was they who were responsible for the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi — not, even though Obama kept repeating and having others in his administration continue the fantasy, the result of a nearly unknown YouTube video.
Yet the American people are being instructed to simply wait patiently for Obama, Holder, and the new secretary of state, John Kerry, to smooth things over with these radical jihadists, and everything will be just wonderful as long as we don’t "offend" them. Apparently the fact that more than 300 million Americans are a little offended by the deaths of their brothers is of no consequence to Obama or his minions.
It would seem that in this case, the Obama crew looks askance at the constitutional "equal protection" afforded under the 14th Amendment when providing that protection might "offend" some Islamic jihadist who has murderous intent.
IRS targeting of conservatives and the Tea Parties
One has to admire the president’s reprise of the role of Captain Renault from the film Casablanca when he said that he was "shocked" to find that the IRS had acted improperly in delaying the approval of the 501(c)(4) non-profit status of Tea Party organizations nationwide.
The fact that these same individuals had been acting this way for at least two and possibly as much as three years, to the utter obliviousness of any senior member of the administration, has resulted in a bipartisan cry that Congress is also "shocked."
I’d be happy to be brought to justice under this administration if, like Ms. Lois Lerner, who refused to testify (as is her constitutional right under the 5th Amendment) before Congress, I could be "punished" by being placed on "administrative leave," which would mean I would still receive all of my salary and my extremely generous pension and medical benefits.
Targeting various news organizations and specific reporters for the temerity of asking questions.
Since Barack Obama declared his intent to run for the presidency, the mainstream media has protected, shielded, defended, and sheltered him and his administration from any and all criticism. And how did the administration reward such (frequently mindless) loyalty? Well, the relationship between Obama and the press can be summed up with the words of Bart Simpson: "I dump on you, and you take it. That’s how friendship works."
Obama and his administration apparently hate leaks, which is seemingly how they define any truth published in the media which is "leaked" by anyone other than themselves. So if a reporter asks a question of a governmental official, and gets an answer, and then publishes that answer, he or she is subjected to massive research of his or his organization’s phone records, the phone records of others in his or her organization, and, unbelievably, research on the phone records of his or her parents.
Once again, the administration is trashing the 1st Amendment, and doing its level best to suppress speech that might in even the slightest way run counter to the administration’s institutional narrative. The administration seems intent on silencing anyone who appears, even slightly, to be "anti-government." It’s worth pointing out that no matter who is in charge in the White House, every single individual currently breathing is "anti-government."
If a Democrat is in the White House, conservatives, Republicans, libertarians, Tea Partiers, and others on the right view him as the embodiment of out-of-control spending and rapacious taxation, favoring specific groups that make up his political base and appeasing America’s enemies all over the world.
If a Republican is in the White House, Democrats, progressives, liberals, and RINOs take the view that the administration is hurting the poor by not spending on them, hurting the middle class by not "stimulating" the economy enough, not caring about anyone except the "fat cats on Wall Street," and on and on with the usual litany of complaints.
This administration is doing everything it can to suppress the complaints of the first group in any way that it can, regardless of the constitutional protections of the 1st Amendment — which, in the more elegant language of the 18th century, declares that Americans have the right to tell both the Congress and the administration, and specifically the president, that they are completely brain-dead and the essence of evil. Right or wrong in that assessment, they have that right. Period.
Obama apparently thinks that constitutional right applies only when he himself is not in office.
If there is anyone who believes that none of these actions on the part of the Obama administration can possibly affect him, let me remind you of the words of Martin Niemöller (1892-1984), who wrote about conditions in Germany when Hitler was consolidating power:
First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.
Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out–
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me — and there was no one left to speak for me.
Jim Yardley is a retired financial controller for manufacturing firms, a Vietnam veteran, and an independent voter. Jim blogs at http://jimyardley.wordpress.com, or he can be contacted directly at james.v.yardley@gmail.com.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2013/05/ … thumb.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 25, 2013 2:24 am
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Police State • Re: The modern-day ‘slave class’ is anyone who cannot do mat
That last sentence about stop watching television is probably the most insightful comment of all.
It is the systematic brainwashing of unthinking citizens.
Statistics: Posted by Deo Vindice — Fri May 24, 2013 11:59 am
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Police State • U.K.: Where reading can send you to jail
U.K.: Where reading can send you to jail
Under the U.K. Terrorism Act, having any material deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” is a crime.
"
By: Corinne Purtill Global Post, Published on Mon May 20 2013
LONDON—In the deepening investigation of the Boston Marathon bombings, federal officials have reportedly found copies of the Al Qaeda magazine Inspire and other extremist materials on a computer belonging to Katherine Russell, the widow of suspect Tamerlan Tsarnaev.
If these reports are true, and if this case took place in the U.K., no other evidence would be needed to arrest and prosecute Russell, 24.
Simply having a copy of Inspire — or any other material deemed “likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism” — is a crime here.
Under Section 58 of the U.K.’s Terrorism Act, a 2000 law granting sweeping powers to law enforcement, it is a criminal offence to download, copy or otherwise possess Inspire. Same goes for bomb-making instructions, extremist speeches or any number of materials that in the United States are protected under the First Amendment.
No other evidence of terrorist activity, or intention to engage in it, is necessary to prosecute under the U.K. statute, which carries a sentence of up to 10 years in prison.
“You don’t have to necessarily be planning any terrorist activity to be prosecuted under that bit of legislation, if you are possessing those type of materials,” a Scotland Yard spokesman said on condition of anonymity.
The law makes an exception for individuals who can demonstrate a “reasonable excuse” for accessing the material, such as academics or investigators. It is a narrow exemption, however, and does not automatically cover those reading the materials for research or educational purposes.
“We wouldn’t say just because you were doing it for journalistic purposes you would be immune,” the Scotland Yard spokesman said.
Launched in 2010, Inspire is an English-language online magazine published by Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula. It has the earnest stock-art images and slightly off-kilter layouts of a doctor’s office newsletter. But it features articles like “Make a Bomb in the Kitchen of Your Mom” and “Open Source Jihad: Sending and Receiving Encrypted Messages.”
The magazine’s second issue carried an op-ed by U.S. citizen Samir Khan, 24, in which he wrote that he was “proud to be a traitor to America.” Khan, whom U.S. government officials have named as the editor of Inspire, was killed by an American drone strike in Yemen in 2011, along with the radical cleric and Inspire backer Anwar al Awlaki.
Copies of Inspire and other extremist texts, speeches and images have surfaced in the confiscated property of terror suspects in the United States and the United Kingdom. There are no firm figures on exactly how many people have been arrested and tried under the law since 2000. In most cases, Section 58 charges are bundled along with other terror or criminal offences, said lawyer Simon McKay, who has advised the U.K. government on terror cases.
Yet there have been several recent cases of people charged solely for possession of terror-related documents.
In April, a former Hackney council employee named Khalid Javed Baqa, 48, was jailed for two years after being found with several hundred copies of CDs containing “extreme ideology and material relating to violent jihad,” according to the Metropolitan Police.
Niall Florence, 21, received a suspended 18-month jail sentence in February after he was found with copies of the weapon-making manual The Anarchist’s Cookbook, a jihadi training manual and instructions for making the poison ricin. Judge Adrian Fulford said he was satisfied the “young and naive computer addict” was not a terrorist.
And in December, a 22-year-old accountant named Ruksana Begum received a 12-month sentence after police discovered a memory stick containing two editions of Inspire in her purse. Begum’s brothers were convicted in a 2010 plot to blow up the London Stock Exchange. Her husband was arrested in 2012 and charged with travelling to Pakistan to obtain terrorist training.
Begum pleaded guilty to the possession charge. She told the judge that she accessed the magazine to understand what had drawn her brothers to extremism, an explanation the judge accepted.
“There is no evidence that she was motivated by their ideology or was preparing to follow them,” said Fulford at her sentencing, adding that Begum was “of good behaviour and a good Muslim.”
The U.K. approach to such documents is radically different from the U.S. approach.
“In the United States, not only is possession of Inspire magazine constitutionally protected, but writing something like Inspire magazine is constitutionally protected,” said Ben Wizner, director of the Speech, Privacy and Technology Project at the American Civil Liberties Union.
If such material isn’t found to be a direct incitement to violence, and the owner isn’t co-ordinating with a terrorist organization, then it’s protected under the U.S. Constitution’s First Amendment. The U.K. approach “invests so much authority in the government,” Wizner said.
“We’re always very skeptical of government line-drawing, because it’s never enforced in the way that people would like it to be,” Wizner said.
The U.K. is seeking to further its powers of internet surveillance. A draft bill — known in the media here as the “snooper’s charter” — would allow the government to track all email, internet and text use in the country.
The bill died in Parliament last year, though mentions of Internet security in the recent Queen’s Speech indicate the government may revisit the issue.
http://www.thestar.com/news/world/2013/ … _jail.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Mon May 20, 2013 11:01 am
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Police State • 10 MILLION PEOPLE
10 MILLION PEOPLE
May 18, 2013 by calamity3039
The Bengal famine of 1770 had dire consequences for the rest of the world. The Bengal providence first became trading partners with the British Empire in the early eighteenth century. Through force, the British military overthrew the government. Since the British East India Company had influence in the region they became the de facto rulers. They had a military, the right to make and enforce laws, and the right to tax the people.
Before the famine began, the land taxes in the region rose sharply. Taxes had gone from 10% to 50% within a decade. To oppress the people more, the Company imposed harsh tariffs on the region. Not being able to compete with the Company, their local economy eroded. Within six months people began to starve. During the same time the Company’s profits grew by 50 percent.
As the famine worsened, the Company started to lose revenue because of a declining tax base. To remedy this problem, they decide to increase the land taxes. The people who hadn’t starved to death saw their taxes go up another 10 percent. Despite a good harvest the people’s starvation increase. The death wave accelerated.
At this point the Company had a serious problem on their hands. They didn’t care about starving people, but they found that dead people are bad for business. They started to realize that dead people don’t pay taxes. The don’t make the best slaves either. Also, dead people are quite costly. Not only do they require resources to be buried, but they tend to spread disease. Unable to bury the dead quickly tends to result in more dead people.
It wasn’t so bad for the Company though, another business venture was presented to them. The Chinese government had banned the growing of poppy plants. This was good for the Company because the Chinese population had an addiction problem. So they decided the best solution to their revenue problems were to expand into the opium market. With limited labor they decided cut back on growing crops. So more Bengals died in the millions.
Even though the Company thought the opium trade was a good idea, they underestimated the Chinese. Despite being addicted to narcotics, but they were very clever businessmen. Instead of trading with the Company based on good faith, they had all commodity prices based in silver. This hindered the Company, they had a hard time making money at fair market prices. They assumed that they would be able to get cheap tea from the Chinese for the West. In exchange, they wanted to make money off the Chinese by hyper inflating the price of opium.
It didn’t work out in their favor. They were going bankrupt. Their influence in the East was deteriorating rapidly. Even though they kept all the Bengals tax money for themselves, they had to be bailed out by their government. To pay for the bailout a tax increase on tea went into effect for all British subjects. The Colonists were paying for the bailout the most. Harsh tariffs on the colonies were imposed at the same time. Just like the Chinese, the Colonists weren’t idiots either. They started a rebellion against their government.
https://timeofcalamity.wordpress.com/20 … on-people/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 18, 2013 10:01 am
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Police State • This Is What Tyranny Looks Like
May 18, 2013
This Is What Tyranny Looks Like
Bryce Buchanan
Here is a woman we will need to learn much more about in the coming weeks. Sarah Hall Ingram is a highly valued employee at the IRS. In the last three years she has received $103,390 in bonuses for her excellent work. She was the Commissioner of the Tax-Exempt and Government Entitles Division. Under her leadership, groups that expressed a fear of large, out-of-control government were systematically crushed by her branch of our large, out-of-control government. They were specifically singled out for harassment for political reasons. Secret information about the conservative applicants was leaked to leftist opposition groups to facilitate further harassment.
This was an organized political operation using State power to silence opposition voices. It is part of every tyrant’s playbook. It tells you everything you need to know about the current state of our country to see that those who favor a limited government, the explicit goal of our founding documents, are now considered enemies of the State.
In a 2009 speech, Ms. Ingram explained her approach:
As a practical matter, we cannot subject every application for tax-exempt status to a painstaking, leave-no-rock-unturned review. Nor can we audit every organization’s 990 every year. Nor would you want us to do so, right? To govern is to choose, and we must choose appropriately which applications or 990s to focus most attention on.
It is clear now that by "choose appropriately", she meant to harass the limited-government groups endlessly and let liberal and Islamic groups sail right through the approval process.
The good news is that this woman is no longer in charge of that department. The bad news is that she has been promoted and is now the head of the IRS’ Affordable Care Act office. She and her comrades could have access to all your medical records. They will "choose appropriately" who has trouble with the state-controlled medical system and who sails right through. They will decide if it is appropriate to share your medical history with others.
But don’t worry. I heard the outgoing IRS Commissioner say in Friday’s congressional hearings that he has reviewed the situation and found that there was "no partisanship" in the years-long practice of singling out conservative groups for IRS harassment. None at all. There is just no reason to think that specifically targeting one side of the political spectrum had anything to do with politics.
And when Commissioner Steven Miller was asked why conservative groups were targeted for prolonged scrutiny, he said that it just happened because people were trying to be efficient. Sure. Months and months of delays with endless demands for more paperwork is the efficient way to go.
Miller was forced to admit that secret information gathered from certain conservative groups was passed along by the IRS to their leftwing political opposition. So the IRS illegally gathered information and illegally passed it along for political reasons. Mr. Miller said that these actions were "inadvertent".
There is more evidence of direct lies from IRS officials in Kevin Williamson’s column, "The Nine Lies of Lois Lerner". One thing we learn from Williamson’s article is that the current campaign by some officials to act surprised and disappointed by the news of IRS criminality is just a scam to deflect their own culpability. Everyone knew the Inspector General’s report on the IRS was about to be released. The IRS needed to jump ahead of the report and act concerned. They were not concerned for years prior to being caught.
http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/201 … _like.html
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 18, 2013 12:49 am
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Police State • Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigra
Biometric Database of All Adult Americans Hidden in Immigration Reform
BY DAVID KRAVETS05.10.136:30 AM
Illustration: National Institutes of Health
The immigration reform measure the Senate began debating yesterday would create a national biometric database of virtually every adult in the U.S., in what privacy groups fear could be the first step to a ubiquitous national identification system.
Buried in the more than 800 pages of the bipartisan legislation (.pdf) is language mandating the creation of the innocuously-named “photo tool,” a massive federal database administered by the Department of Homeland Security and containing names, ages, Social Security numbers and photographs of everyone in the country with a driver’s license or other state-issued photo ID.
Employers would be obliged to look up every new hire in the database to verify that they match their photo.
This piece of the Border Security, Economic Opportunity, and Immigration Modernization Act is aimed at curbing employment of undocumented immigrants. But privacy advocates fear the inevitable mission creep, ending with the proof of self being required at polling places, to rent a house, buy a gun, open a bank account, acquire credit, board a plane or even attend a sporting event or log on the internet. Think of it as a government version of Foursquare, with Big Brother cataloging every check-in.
“It starts to change the relationship between the citizen and state, you do have to get permission to do things,” said Chris Calabrese, a congressional lobbyist with the American Civil Liberties Union. “More fundamentally, it could be the start of keeping a record of all things.”
For now, the legislation allows the database to be used solely for employment purposes. But historically such limitations don’t last. The Social Security card, for example, was created to track your government retirement benefits. Now you need it to purchase health insurance.
“The Social Security number itself, it’s pretty ubiquitous in your life,” Calabrese said.
David Bier, an analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute, agrees with the ACLU’s fears.
“The most worrying aspect is that this creates a principle of permission basically to do certain activities and it can be used to restrict activities,” he said. “It’s like a national ID system without the card.”
For the moment, the debate in the Senate Judiciary Committee is focused on the parameters of legalization for unauthorized immigrants, a border fence and legal immigration in the future.
The committee is scheduled to resume debate on the package Tuesday.
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/0 … -dossiers/
Statistics: Posted by yoda — Sat May 11, 2013 9:58 am
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Prophets of the Communist Police State
David Boaz
In a review of five books on the Soviet police state, David Satter notes this prophetic volume:
Landmarks
By Nikolai Berdyaev, et. al (1909)
The year was 1909. Terrorists were murdering not only czarist ministers but provincial officials and police. It was in this atmosphere that “Landmarks” was published in Moscow. The contributors, all of them Russian Orthodox believers, called on the intelligentsia to reject materialist moral relativism and return to religion as a means of grounding the individual. Their essays, with stunning foresight, described all of the characteristics of the coming Soviet state. The religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev explained the roots of its contempt for the individual. He said that the revolutionary intelligentsia hungered for a universal theory but was only prepared to accept one that justified their social aspirations. This meant the denial of man’s absolute significance and the total subordination of spiritual values to social goals. Bogdan Kistyakovsky wrote that the intelligentsia’s predilection for formalism and bureaucracy and its faith in the omnipotence of rules were the makings of a police state. A hundred years later these essays are still among the best arguments ever made against revolutionary fanaticism, political “correctness” and the drive to create “heaven on earth.”
Sounds like a book I should have heard of before now.
View full post on Cato @ Liberty
Ricin Suspect Used His Home to Elude Police
Tim Lynch
An interesting report from the Washington Post:
Dutschke went into hiding on Thursday to escape the media attention. The FBI and local law enforcement officials spent five hours hunting for him before his attorney revealed her client’s location.
Evidently, the attorney directed the police to her client’s home address.
James Everett Dutschke, 41, was taken into custody about 12:50 a.m. Saturday at his home in Tupelo, Miss., the FBI said.
According to the story, that’s the very same house the police searched earlier in the week. Note also the number of law enforcement agencies that were on the case:
Among the government agencies that joined the FBI in the investigation were the Secret Service, the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the Capitol Police, the counterterrorism section of the Justice Department’s national security division, the Mississippi National Guard, the Mississippi Office of Homeland Security and multiple county and city law enforcement units.
And they needed the attorney’s help to discover Dutschke at his home? As Glenn Reynolds likes to say (in jest), “we’re in the very best hands.”
Policymakers might just want to take stuff like this into account when the agencies say their budgets can’t be cut and that their surveillance powers must be “enhanced.”
View full post on Cato @ Liberty