An old post from October 16, 2011, which prefigures the debate generated by William Binney and Snowden today about “turnkey tyranny.”

Gerald Celente Calls For Direct Democracy

Memewatchers (via Korey Snodgrass, from the comment section of The Daily Bell):

http://memewatchers.com/gerald-celente-calls-for-new-world-order

“Government is corrupt and abusive but it can be fixed all we need is transparent and direct democracy. Now thanks to the Internet it is all possible. Hurray!!! Big government is now finally gonna work. We are gonna create our own New World Order.

George Celente was interviewed by Alex Jones yesterday and during the interview he called for a New World Order controlled by Direct Democracy. Amazingly Alex failed to question him on this astounding proclamation, instead Alex simply replied ‘well it is no doubt our republic is broken’. Claims like these are very troublesome especially when they are coming from well known figures in the alternative media known to be allies in the fight against the New World Order.”

My Comment:

No, dear memewatchers. It is not “troublesome”.

It is to be expected.

Where have you been? Celente’s stuff is all over the net, he is interviewed on TV, and there is always a price for such acceptance and approval.

We have quoted Celente many times and we like what he says, when it is on specific topics. But we have seen how he picks up themes and even ideas that are in the air but never gets too concrete about anything. We said nothing, hoping for the best, but prepared for the worst.

Celente cannot change the terms of the debate.

The corporate-state cannot be fought on its own terms – mass acceptance, traditional outlets, PC-bounded debate. The medium will kill the message everytime.

James Altucher, the financial blogger, has already broached “Direct Democracy” (abolish the President and Congress and take referendums on the net directly). Gerald Celente is another. Both are from the financial media in New York. That is significant, surely. They are surely not outsiders in the financial media, however much they might adopt the language of outsiders.

And there will be many more such insider “outsiders” using the language of the politicians and the business classes.

This language – advertising, opinion-polling, perception- management, consumer satisfaction – is nothing more than the language of corporations and the methods of mass manufacture and distribution.

It is also the language of the state.

Government (posing as anti-government) will operate forcibly, through secret control of weaponry by agents of the NWO in each ostensibly sovereign state; through the infiltration and subversion of government organs on behalf of transnational rather than local interests; through the human rights regimes and NWOs; and through blackmail and bribery by the spy agencies and police forces of all kinds.

Anyone can see how this will enable the social media mafia (Google, Facebook, Wikipedia, Digg, etc), the establishment media (CJR,  WashPo, NY Times, WSJ etc), the establishment alternatives (Nation, Democracy Now, Alternet etc), the speculator-hedge funds and banksters (Soros etc.), the psyops folks (probably Wikileaks, and other “controlled opposition” anti-empire and even anti-NWO mouthpieces) and the secret spy agencies (NSA, CIA etc) to come together to control what becomes an issue, what doesn’t, what the parameters of debate are, how problems are solved, and who profits.

With advertising, and behavior modification as highly developed as they are now, it will be nothing to sway the masses one way or other from behind the curtains. The wizard will be gone. But a whole team of puppet-masters will take his place.

Thus the corporate-communist convergence instantiated in Occupy Wall Street.

Local autocrats will be overthrown. In their place will come scientific tyranny, masquerading as Direct Democracy, Free Markets (if that’s your cup of tea) or Anarchist Socialism (if it’s not).

Different strokes, but the same folks.

There is no such thing as a large centrally-controlled republic.

There can only be federated republics.

A large centrally controlled republic is only another name for oligarchy.

Oligarchy, disguised as “direct participatory democracy” is secret rule by oligarchs.

Secret rule = Tyranny.

I do not  say that direct referendums necessarily lack merit. They might work, were we living in small city states…. and were the internet discontinuous, fragmented, and highly private…. and were most people rational, well-educated, self-critical and self-reliant.

But we aren’t, it isn’t, and they aren’t.

So Direct Internet Democracy will not be anarchism, right or left, and it won’t be Christian liberty. Nor will it be federalism or decentralization.

It will be the direct control of the masses through electronic networks, propaganda, surveillance, and co-option of alternative mouthpieces of all stripes, across the board.

Direct Electronic Democracy = Tyranny

I call it Direct Electronic Action for Tyrants and Demagogues

Which equals DEATH. The death of true liberty.

Still,  I let me be perverse and say that I don’t oppose OWS completely, because that is what the mass of people want.

The mass of people, of course, is not the majority of people. The mass of people is simply people acting as masses. Which is a different thing.

But nonetheless the masses are a lot of people.

Now, truth (little t) lives in some form in all people, no matter how far they seem to be from Truth (big t). And so the truth of this moment is exhaustion, fear, burden, terror. The truth of this moment is security.

People want security and are willing to give up their freedom for it.  So be it.

It cannot be too much worse than the nightmare that the corporate-state brought to the world in the 20th century.

Those who had liberty used it to worship power. State power and money power.

Now their worship of power is moving toward to its logical conclusion.

Yet, it isn’t for us to predict doom. We were not called to be Jeremiah.

So we will hold out some small hope.

OWS and Assange may be red flags, but red is as good a color as any. It beats being blue. Blue is sad, it’s fearful. You see red, you’re angry.

Anger is fear projected outward. It’s action. Even if the action is not so much direct action, as directed action.

Action –  good or bad, we’ll see.  Perhaps it will correct itself as it goes along..

Meanwhile, we tend our own garden and keep our distance, if not our silence..

Peter Hitchens, the Christian brother of famously atheistic writer/activist Christopher Hitchens, identifies the increasing power of the state with the decline of dad.

I’ve had the same thought. Here’s a Counterpunch piece, “Witches and Bastards” on the subject:

“But there is a difference between bastardy inside the imperial state and outside that is crucial. In the imperial state, the missing father is replaced by the state. Outside imperium, that is not yet the case.

In the imperium even those who do have a father end up overshadowed by the hyper-masculinized image created, manipulated, and projected by the imperial state. Under its domination, the hyper-masculine father cripples the growth of his child, either turning him into a replica of himself or a pale, emasculated shadow.

The hyper-masculine male is both beneficiary and sacrificial victim of the imperial machine which employs him as soldier, sailor, beggar-man, and thief as it suits its purposes. We talk of the nanny-state but really it’s the Daddy-State, the substitution of organic, biological fatherhood with the robotic state. The Daddy State teaches its progeny well – through the mythologizing of sports, war, and crime – the three horsemen of the imperial apocalypse. In video games and films, the cult of violence of the Daddy-State reigns – children of all classes slouch around in the baggy, beltless trousers of prisoners to the phallic throb of rap, the soul music of the ghetto war-zones where the unofficial violence of the underclass plays out; their older siblings wear army camouflage and olive drab and their parents cruise the highways in sports utility vehicles and the military’s own Hummer, celebrating the official violence of the over-class. Roughly a third or more of the American economy depends on the prison-military complex. Whole sections of the populace are imprisoned at rates second only to China in the world while other sections profit from the jobs that accompany the growth of the complex. In America, there can be no true bastards or true witches under the all-seeing eye of the Daddy-State.”

Peter Hitchens writes:

“The fundamental prayer of the Christian church begins with the words ‘Our Father’. Americans speak of their ‘founding fathers’. The father has since human society began been protector, provider, source of authority, bound by honour and fidelity to defend his hearth.

>If he is gone, who takes his place ? Of all people, D.H. Lawrence, author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, wrote of a man and his wife as ‘a king and queen with one or two subjects and a few square yards of territory of their own…true freedom because it is a true fulfillment for man, woman and children.’

But he warned of a great danger if marriage, which makes fatherhood what it is,  fell. ‘Break it, and you will have to go back to the overwhelming dominance of the State, which existed before the Christian era’.

And now we see his prophecy fulfilled. The state spends billions, and intervenes incessantly, to try to replace the lost force of fatherhood, and it fails.”

Comment:

Although I’ve read quite a bit of Lawrence, I don’t recall this particular line. I’ll have to go hunt for it.

It only reinforces my admiration for Lawrence. What didn’t he get right?

Dr. Stanley Monteith (via NewsWithViews):

“John Swinton was the editorial page editor of the New York Times from 1860-1870. When he addressed a group of journalists at the Twilight Club in New York City on April 12, 1883, he stated:

“There is no such thing in America as an independent press, unless it is in the country towns. You know it and I know it. There is not one of you who dare to write his honest opinions, and if you did you know beforehand they would never appear in print. I am paid $150 a week for keeping my honest opinions out of the paper I am connected with. Others of you are paid similar salaries for doing similar things. If I should permit honest opinions to be printed in one issue of my paper, like Othello, before twenty-four hours, my occupation would be gone. . . . We are intellectual prostitutes.”[3]

Very little has changed since that time except for the fact that members of the secret cabal control more media outlets, and they have developed very sophisticated methods of controlling the reality of the American people.

(Lila: I have had seven years of first-hand observation of the way it is done today. You post a piece. It goes no where, but suddenly the points you raised are taken up by a bunch of people who massage its message so that it comes to mean a slightly different thing from what you intended. Slightly different, but none the less crucially different. Your piece vanishes into oblivion. The creators of the massaged message rise to prominence. Things go on as before, even while the massagers are awarded prizes for their exposes by Yale, Harvard and the rest.]

On rare occasions a courageous member of the media has tried to expose the influence of the secret cabal. Richard Harwood worked for The Washington Post for 22 years, and during those years he wrote what he was told to write, but after Richard Harwood retired, he wrote an article titled “Ruling Class Journalists” that exposed the totalitarian influence of the Council on Foreign Relations. Why is that important? It’s important because the CFR is one of the major “front organizations ” for the secret cabal that controls our nation.

On October 30, 1993, Richard Harwood wrote:

“The president is a member. So is his secretary of state, the deputy secretary of state, all five of the undersecretaries, several of the assistant secretaries and the department’s legal adviser. The president’s national security adviser and his deputy are members. The director of Central Intelligence (like all previous directors) and the chairman of the Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board are members. The secretary of defense, three undersecretaries and at least four assistant secretaries are members. The secretaries of the department of housing and urban development, interior, health and human services, and the chief White House public relations man, David Gergen, are members along with the speaker of the House and the majority leader of the Senate.”[4]

If Richard Harwood’s information is correct, why don’t the American people realize the CFR controls the American government? Richard Harwood’s article was published on a back page of The Washington Post, the article wasn’t mentioned on radio or television, and the article was never quoted by other newspapers. A similar fate has befallen every effort to expose the existence of the secret cabal.

you would like to verify the fact that most of the major media outlets are owned by “front organizations” affiliated with the secret cabal; i.e. the Trilateral Commission, the CFR, and the Bilderbergs, you should read Professor Ben Bagdikian’s book, “The New Media Monopoly” because it identifies the five (or six) international corporations that control 90% of the major media outlets in the United States, [5] and you should also read “The Membership List of the Brotherhood of Darkness,” compiled by Radio Liberty, or Robert Gaylon Ross’s book, “Who’s Who of the Elite.” [6] The major corporations are:

Times Warner (AOL) (Trilateral Commission)
Bertelsmann (Trilateral Commission)
Viacom (CBS) (Council on Foreign Relations) (CFR)
Disney (ABC) (CFR)
GE-Comcast (NBC) (CFR)
Fox News: Ruppert Murdoch (CFR)

Do you remember how Nafissatou Diallo, an immigrant maid in New York, was trashed as a whore because she accused famous establishment socialist, Dominique Strauss-Kahn, of rape?

That trashing was recycled even by at least one libertarian blog (EPJ), where I was commenting at the time. You’d think libertarians would love someone who lied to the Immigration & Naturalization Services, to commit the non-crime of emigrating to another country.

In fact, I was hoping that Diallo would be lauded by at least one American libertarian for her keen entrepreneurial ability, her resolution and drive in crossing continents and oceans to get to the US, and her indifference to legal niceties, in allegedly lying/exaggerating to the INS.

Had she been a New York financier setting up a shell company in the Virgin Islands in order to pump-and-dump stock, the same people would have been posting  long-winded theories about why her behavior was both morally correct and economically productive.

However, given that Diallo was an immigrant of the darker persuasion, her libertarian attitudes only got her what unconventional women usually get – the label of whore.

New York Daily News:

The hotel maid who claims she was sexually assaulted by would-be French president Dominique Strauss Kahn is poised to ink a multi-million settlement Monday to end her civil suit against the randy European.

In a sign that a deal is imminent, Bronx Supreme Court Justice Douglas McKeon has ordered up an interpreter for the maid, Nafissatou Diallo, a Guinean immigrant, a court official said this weekend.

Strauss Kahn will not be there, the official said.

The settlement would bring a end to a saga that ended the career of the egotistical French politician known globally by his initials DSK.

In May, 2011, Diallo claimed Strauss-Kahn forced her to perform oral sex when he was a guest at the midtown Sofitel Hotel where she worked.

Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance eventually dropped the criminal case, citing inconsistencies in Diallo’s statements, so she sued Strauss Kahn in civil court.

In May, Strauss Kahn countersued, accusing Diallo, 33, of ruining his reputation with a claim that sent him falling from his post as head of the International Monetary Fund poised to become the president of France.

Last week, lawyers reached the broad outlines of a deal, sources said, though Strauss Kahn’s team denied a published report that he would shell out $6 million.

Meanwhile, Diallo has settled a defamation lawsuit against The New York Post, which reported she was a prostitute, citing sources close to DSK’s defense.

A court spokesman said the Post case was settled after McKeon incorporated that lawsuit into the settlement discussions between Diallo and DSK.

“The judge had the lawyers for the parties (Diallo and DSK) in his chambers trying to discuss a settlement. It only made sense for the sake of judicial economy to settle all of the related cases at one time,” said the spokesman, David Bookstaver.

The terms of the settlement are unclear because the parties have signed a confidentiality agreement, Bookstaver said.”

Comment: Well, feisty New York papers and big-name Socialist politicians do not settle claims for multi-millions of dollars, coupled with confidentiality agreements, without being GUILTY AS HELL.

ND could have no interest in confidentiality, since her life has already been publicly raked through and trashed.

I was very sympathetic to DSK, in so far as the state treated him like a perp from the get-go. And in sexual crime cases, I really find the public nature of the proceedings and the violation of privacy involved disgusting.  I commented as much at Wenzel’s EPJ. But I also said at the time that because ND might have lied in some proceeding with the INS (and since when do libertarians care about people lying to some bureaucratic paper-pushers, anyway?), it did not mean that she was a whore, and that most likely the NY papers (the NY Post is a Murdoch rag), were simply libeling her.

My theory was that both of them has been used in some way. DSK was perhaps set up by someone who knew he was given to assaulting maids. Most likely he called in for a hooker and then someone had a legit maid sent his way. She might not have known.

But, at the time, Wenzel ran triumphantly with the Post’s version….which was that she was a hooker. It always makes for a lot of hits to call a woman a whore….even if there’s no evidence.

Meanwhile, I notice the silence of that same blog on the character of Ms. Mees, also an immigrant, who after all is an alleged PERP, not an alleged VICTIM….. for whose crime there seem to be at least one thousand pieces of evidence (her emails).

That piece of obvious bias was the reason, along with Wenzel’s gratuitous hit-garnering attacks on Ayn Rand, that I stopped posting there. I returned the favor by applying the same critical eye to Mr. Rothbard on my blog, although with much more evidence and argumentative skill.

Hint to libs:

There is a way to advance the legitimate interests of men, without diminishing those of women.  Using the same tactics as the MSM only makes you like them, only less powerful.

Here are my comments:

From Stephen Lendman:

“It doesn’t surprise. On June 8, Haaretz headlined “What was the Israeli involvement in collecting US communications intel for NSA?” More on that below.

On April 3, 2012, James Bamford headlined “Shady Companies with Ties to Israel Wiretap for US for the NSA.”

He said NSA chief General Keith Alexander’s “having a busy year.” He’s “cutting ribbons at secret bases and bringing to life the agency’s greatly expanded eavesdropping network.”

“In January he dedicated the new $358 million CAPT Joseph J. Rochefort Building at NSA Hawaii, and in March he unveiled the 604,000-square-foot John Whitelaw Building at NSA Georgia.”

It’s for around “4,000 earphone-clad intercept operators, analysts and other specialists, many of them employed by private contractors.”

Spies “R” Us defines US policy. NSA’s “mammoth 1-million-square-foot, $2 billion Utah Data Center is far more sweeping.”

It’s located at Camp Williams. It’s a Utah National Guard training facility. Once fully operational, says Bamford, it’ll “become, in effect, the NSA Cloud.”

It’ll receive data from NSA satellites, overseas listening posts, and nationwide multipleNo telecom facility monitoring rooms. What’s planned is an unprecedented global spy network.

NSA operatives and hackers will harvest around 2.1 million gigabytes of data per hour. It’ll do so on the world’s most powerful computer.

It’s call Titan Supercomputer. It can handle over 20,000 trillion calculations per second or 20 petaflops. One petaflop = one quadrillion instructions per second.

Supercomputer power will be used to collect and analyze foreign and domestic communications from all possible sources.

Two Israeli companies are involved. High-tech firms Verint and Narus have longstanding US/Israeli intelligence connections. For many years, Verint was a majority-owned Comverse Technology subsidiary.

Both companies have about half their employees in Israel. In August 2012, Verint acquired Comverse. It now operates independently.

It makes security software. It calls itself “a global leader in Actionable Intelligence solutions.”

Narus calls itself a cybersecurity company. It’s an independent Boeing subsidiary. It provides real-time network traffic and analytics software. It does so with enterprise class spyware capabilities.

In 1997, it was founded in Israel. It created NarusInsight. It’s a supercomputer system. A previous article said AT&T uses it at their secret San Francisco facility. It lets NSA spy on its customers.

Verint’s software also is used to do it. Bamford called it “especially troubling that both companies have had extensive ties to Israel, as well as links to (its) intelligence service.”

A previous article discussed Israeli spying on America. The CIA calls Israel America’s main regional spy threat. An Israeli-based CIA operative once found food in his refrigerator rearranged.

Washington knows what’s going on. Publicly it’s ignored. Pre-9/11, the FBI uncovered a massive US-based Israeli spy ring. It remains active.

It betrays America. Numerous Israeli citizens are involved. They have close ties to foreign military, criminal and intelligence sources. They reportedly breach US laws with impunity.

Israel’s featured prominently in annual FBI reports. It actively seeks proprietary/secret US information. It’s mainly on military systems and advanced computer applications.

Proprietary commercial and industrial data are stolen. Israel recruits spies. Sophisticated methods are used. Computers are hacked for information.

Washington’s Government Accountability Office (GAO) said Israel “conducts the most aggressive espionage operation against the United States of any US ally.”

The Pentagon accused Israel of “actively engag(ing) in military and industrial espionage in the United States. An Israeli citizen working in the US who has access to proprietary information is likely to be a target of such espionage.”

FBI whistleblower John Cole said Justice Department officials ordered dozens of Israeli espionage cases dropped. At issue was political pressure.

Washington gives Israel billions of dollars in annual aid, state-of-the-art weapons and technology, and numerous other special privileges. In return, it steals US state and commercial secrets.

Despite longstanding close ties, Washington considers Israel both ally and counterintelligence threat. In terms of technical capability and human resources, it matches America’s best.

It has access to the highest US political, military and intelligence sources. Bamford said NSA-developed advanced analytical/data-mining software was lawlessly given Israel.

An Operations Directorate technical director did so secretly. Apparently Israeli companies got access. Technology they got advanced their own.

Narus once boasted about being “known for its ability to capture and collect data from the largest networks around the world.” Unexplained was that stolen software facilitates is capabilities.

Retired Israeli General Hanan Gefen ran its secret Unit 8200. It’s Israel’s NSA equivalent. He admitted Israeli ties to Comverse.

At the time, it owned Verint. It owns other Israeli high-tech companies. They specialize in eavesdropping and surveillance. They operate globally.

According to Gefen, the “correlation between serving in the intelligence Unit 8200 and starting successful high-tech companies is not coincidental.”

Lila:

I’ve written about Israeli spying on all US telecommunications (and all Indian, as well) in this piece, as well as in LOE.

From L.A. Weekly.com:

“Nine years after investigative reporter Gary Webb committed suicide, Jesse Katz, a former Los Angeles Times reporter who played a leading role in ruining the controversial journalist’s career, has publicly apologized — just weeks before shooting begins in Atlanta on Kill the Messenger, a film expected to reinstate Webb’s reputation as an award-winning journalist dragged through the mud by disdainful, competing media outlets.

Kill the Messenger is based on Webb’s 1998 book, Dark Alliance, in which he attempted to rebuild his ruined reputation, as well as my 2004 biography of Webb, Kill the Messenger, which shares the movie’s title. (I worked as a consultant on the script.)

The movie will portray Webb as a courageous reporter whose career and life were cut short when the nation’s three most powerful newspapers piled on to attack Webb and his three-part Mercury News series on the CIA’s crack-cocaine connection.

The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America’s most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.

Much of the Times‘ attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb’s reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.

Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide.”

Comment:

So Katz only apologized so he’d look a little better when the movie came out. It was a PR move to preempt the revulsion he knew was coming his way.

UPDATE :

Mencius Moldbug, the author of the excerpted article, is a neo-cameralist or maybe even a monarchist. I’m not.  At least, not a monarchy on its own.

Neo-cameralists see no problems with the state as a joint-stock company. I do.

Further differences:

He does not believe in “natural rights.” I do.

He does not seem to believe in religion, although I’m not completely sure about that.

I do, at least, in my fashion, Cynara….

But, he subscribes to the position, “libertarianism is not enough.”

There, I concur.

I post him, because his writing is intelligent and not easy to put in a box. When that is a genuine stance, and not a pose worn simply for marketing purposes, I respect it.

ORIGINAL POST
A brilliant and searching indictment of our moral posturing over surveillance and civil liberties from the original mind at Unqualified Reservations:

“The Constitution is great, but Nature has laws as well.  One is that the fickle are generally not left in charge of armies, battleships or nuclear weapons.  If the Constitution declares that the fickle shall rule, too bad for the Constitution.  By contradicting Nature, the Constitution has contradicted itself.  And it shall not rule.  And that, dear Americans, is when you finally settled in under your new communist oligarchy.  Whether you knew it or not.  Not, mostly – but that’s what it is to be a chump.

Nature’s inflexible law is that if you want to hold power, you need to be competent to retain it.  Otherwise, it is no use getting power.  It will be taken away from you, for good and ill, by someone capable of defeating you.  And the only thing more ignominious and pathetic than being defeated in the eternal contest for power, is being so owned and not even knowing it.

Alas, dear Americans – “progressives,” ie, communists, and “constitutionalists,” ie, fascists – the both of you, this is your pathetic condition.  And you’re worried that someone is grepping your emails?

Since this last epic battle between the Congress and the Executive, your country, not to mention its gloriously liberated “allies,” ie, captured satellite states, has been run (with spasmodic, unserious, temporary attempts at resistance, but not reversal) by its permanent civil service.  This is what “democracy” means to you: government by permanent civil servants.  As for your elected officials, you could dismiss them all tomorrow, and not elect more, and your experience of government would not change in the slightest.

This bureaucratic oligarchy is a common historical form in large old states.  Regardless of formal status, a “permanent civil servant” is anyone who sets government policy, is funded by the government, or has privileged access to government secrets, and who cannot be fired by any practical executive action.  This definition includes essentially all professors and journalists – and all legitimate and/or respected professors and journalists.  It’s really quite sustainable.  For instance, for the last two millennia it’s been the normal condition of Chinese government.  It is unusual to have a figurehead People instead of a figurehead King, Pharaoh Emperor.  But since neither matters, the difference doesn’t matter much, now, does it?

And this is how you come to live in a world where there are these two separate concepts, “politics” and “democracy,” with opposite emotional valence.  Calling anything “political” is a harsh condemnation.  But if it is “democratic,” it is good and sweet and true.  But what is democracy without politics?

Nothing more than the American system of government – communism, ie, rule by the party of civil service. As Americans, we can at least be thankful that communism has done less damage here than elsewhere.  It’s great to be an exporter, especially when your product is dioxin.  It gives you the comforts you need to worry that someone is grepping your emails.

Thus, while I am not really one for purges, I’d be dismayed to see anyone who calls himself a real reactionary worrying at all that Obama is reading his email. Or whatever.

First of all, a reactionary is a gentleman (or a lady).  A gentleman (or a lady) doesn’t whine.  If he finds himself whining, it will be because his leg has been crushed by a truck and he’s in enormous fucking pain.  It won’t be because some meanie is denying him his universal human right to rule the country, or his 1/10^8 share in that right, or whatever.

My son actually thinks he has human rights.  It’s because he’s 2.  This morning he asserted his right not to take his amoxicillin – with some success, but not much.  I expect the critics of the NSA to have about the same luck.  When I became a man, I put aside childish things.

For a man or for a community of men, the right to rule is a function of the might to rule.  If the sound competent Midwest can get itself euchred out of its democratic right to rule by a bunch of slick Harvard men, the sound competent Midwest cannot maintain its authority and will get euchred by someone someday.  If it’s not Harvard today it’ll be Yale tomorrow.

As for your right to “privacy,” as if having your emails grepped affected you in any way, it is by accident.  Forget about the opponents of the government being persecuted.  If they are persecuted, which is not their decision of course, (a) it will not be by means of grep, and (b) they’ll have to learn to deal with it, like men, rather than whining like little girls.

Obviously, almost all of those complaining are complaining because they are better communists than the Obama administration.  A remarkable achievement, though it owes more to the complainees.  Power does season a man – maybe only Nixon could go to China, but only Eric Holder could crack down on the Associated Press.  (Hey guys – I know you’re big fans – don’t you like the way that red lightsaber feels in your hand?  Swing it around a little.  Well-balanced, isn’t it?  Nice test cut you’ve taken – maybe it’s time for some real rail-splitting? Take it home, use it for a week, bring it back if you don’t like it?  You’ll really enjoy working out with this little baby, I can tell you.)

But unfortunately, America is a communist country and Americans are not persecuted for being too communist.  Au contraire – they are petted and lionized.  They appear daring while taking no risks.   It’s perfect. It’s true that there were a couple of periods where as many as ten or twelve communists suffered mild professional consequences for cavorting too openly with the Soviet mass-murder cult.  Surely ten Americans a day are fired for racism.  Hitler has been dead for 70 years, and the Brown Scare rolls on – at a thousand times the maximum intensity of “McCarthyism” or the Palmer Raids.

So if you’re a good communist, you have only symbolic worries about your privacy.  These worries are simply a projection of your political penis envy. You react the same way to having your emails grepped as if someone said you weren’t allowed to vote in 2016.  In reality, this loss would not affect you at all.  Symbolically, however, it would represent a profound Freudian castration.  In fact, if you fail to express your symbolic political masculinity, preferably through a Facebook update, you will feel castrated by default. But gross public outrage restores your hypothetical testosterone.

Whereas out here on the “extreme right,” some of us actually do oppose the government.  I would be genuinely worried if I thought Washington was capable of persecuting dissident intellectuals.  One way to see where America is going is to look at where its satellites in Europe are, and Britain and other countries certainly treat jokes on the train and casual anti-Party tweets much the same way the Czech authorities in 1971 or the German authorities in 1937 treated unconstructive public comments about the Party or the Leader.

But really, these fools are easy targets.  Yo, don’t be an easy target.  Don’t blow shit up and don’t try to found any tax-exempt organizations, and you ought to be fine. The Cheka ain’t in the building.  And the process of turning our progressive bureaucrats into Chekisty would not involve making them more awful, but more energetic, manly and capable.  I won’t hold my breath.

It is obvious to those of us who actually have a reason to consider the government a genuine threat, that these surveillance mechanisms are not a genuine threat.  Rather, they are designed, probably not very well, to do the job they are supposedly doing, which is a hard job and really can’t be done well.

A prudently governed nation would not need to record everyone’s phone calls and emails.  A prudently governed nation would concern itself with its own affairs and no one else’s.  It would thus maintain either a culturally and politically homogeneous state in which terrorism was no more a concern than in the conflict between Vermont and New Hampshire, or a polycultural regime like the Ottoman one, in which every culture governs itself and knows it will suffer, not advance, if its members go crazy. But apparently the Orwellian panopticon creates more jobs in Virginia than the boring alternative of fencing the borders and enforcing consular law, so we can expect it to thrive. Americans prefer this ridiculous regime to any other.  Yet they still object to being blown up indiscriminately in public places as if they were Israelis enduring the “peace process.”  So there is really no alternative, especially as our impending defeat in Afghanistan will swell the jihadi supply.

Moreover, the fascist militarists who actually do this job are some of the best men in America.  American communism, for obvious reasons, loves to send America’s best men to Afghanistan to get their private parts Osterized by fertilizer bombs.  This is American war since 1945: State solving the problem of how it can get DoD to stick its dick in a blender.  Solving it rather well, I’d say.  Many of America’s best men are in the Pentagon, and good men know how to obey, and into the blender goes that dick.  Still, much testicle remains.

All this said, no nation is or ever has been perfect.  All have committed terrible crimes.  All men, of course, are sinners.  America is a communist country, the whole world is America, and communism is a religion of pure hate and murder with 100 million corpses on its conscience.  Still it continues.  Many, even most, “progressives” are perfectly nice people.  Libertarians, such as Edward Snowden (whose girlfriend, sadly, will have no alternative but to seek tingles in the arms of Roissy), are often even better.  I used to be a libertarian myself.  I didn’t realize my brain was doing the nasty with Roger Baldwin. Snowden himself seems like a nice guy, and future pressure-cooker bomb victims can only wish he’d found UR in time.
…………………………………..

Just as I have a genuine respect for Roissy’s honest, if foul, amorality, I have an enormous contempt for sham moral outrage. Can there be real outrage?  Absolutely.  But you cannot get from the sham directly to the reality.  You have to abandon it for pure cold cynicism, then work hard for even the smallest scrap of genuine human feeling.  Alas, it will not be as stimulating as your porn, your “civil liberties” and the like.  Hopefully in time you will nonetheless come to prefer it.

From Steve Sailer’s blog, more truth-telling about Marc Rich:

“The plundering of the ex-Soviet Union in the 1990s, which was egged on by the Clinton Administration,

Wall Street, Harvard, and other highly respectable American institutions was misreported at the time as a triumph of the free market. And now it’s mostly being forgotten. A 15-year-ago PBS Frontline documentary explained:

The auctions, simply put, were imperfect. … A series of privatization “auctions”–whose results were determined beforehandówere held by the GKI. (There are books out on this phase, but in essence, they held the firesale of the century. ) The engines of Soviet industry –oil companies, metals plants, utilities– were sold for a song. Russia is among the world’s richest countries in terms of natural resources–(The Natural Resources Minister, Viktor Orlov, can run down the list of gold, nickel, silver, timber, oil and of course natural gas–one-third of the world’s reserves–for you.). And in short order, the riches were exported by the shipload east and west.

Ever wonder how Estonia, a country that produces no aluminum, became one of the world’s top aluminum exporters?

Aluminum plants are typically gigantic investments built near hydroelectric dams. The Soviet Union churned out gigantic amounts of aluminum for its huge air force. Aluminum is pretty much of a commodity in quality, so the general cruddiness of everything Soviet mattered less in aluminum than in just about anything else: the Russians had hydroelectric power galore in Siberia and they had huge, valuable aluminum plants.

This was the market’s main cancer: theft. The greed that motivated it (and still does) was impressive. But the theft will go down in history. Economists now talk about state corruption, and of course graft was a contributing cause of the market’s death, but pure and simple robbery played the leading role. The rape of Russia’s riches in its first decade of “independence” will doubtless be remembered in a century’s time as unprecedented.

Rich’s lawyers continue to press for his return to the U. S., offering to pay multimillion-dollar fines he still owes. Rich’s one condition is that he avoid prison. He may have allies in the State Dept. U. S. marshals have tried several times to trap Rich, most recently in September, when they alerted officials in Finland that he was due to arrive by private plane. But in that instance, as in previous ones, Rich got away. A. Craig Copetas, author of a 1985 book on Rich, says the marshals suspect that someone in State, which must be notified of such operations, is leaking their plans to Rich because they value his high-level contacts around the world.

Clinton also cited clemency pleas he had received from Israeli government officials, including then-Prime Minister Ehud Barak. Rich had made substantial donations to Israeli charitable foundations over the years, and many senior Israeli officials, such as Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert, argued on his behalf behind the scenes.[24] (Speculation about another rationale for Rich’s pardon involved his alleged involvement with the Israeli intelligence community.[25][26] Rich reluctantly acknowledged in interviews with his biographer, Daniel Ammann, that he had assisted the Mossad, Israel’s intelligence service,[12][4] a claim that Ammann said was confirmed by a former Israeli intelligence officer.[11] According to Ammann, Rich had helped finance the Mossad’s operations and had supplied Israel with strategic amounts of Iranian oil through a secret oil pipeline.[4] The aide to Rich who personally traveled to the U.S. from Israel and persuaded Denise Rich to ask President Clinton to review Rich’s pardon request was a former chief of the Mossad, Avner Azulay.[20][27])

Sounds rather like Robert Maxwell, another James Bond supervillain-type. Unlike Maxwell, I fortunately didn’t have to do business with Rich. Like Maxwell, Rich is being buried in Israel”

The estimable Jeffrey St. Clair tells it like it at Counterpunch (June 28, 2013, reprinted from March, 2008):

“Even as he neared the top of the FBI’s Ten Most Wanted list, Rich also didn’t see any reason to abandon his operations in the United States. In fact, his hand is seen orchestrating one of the most savage crackdowns on organized labor in recent decades. In 1989, Rich secretly acquired the controlling interest in a West Virginia-based company called Ravenswood Aluminum. Ravenswood was embroiled in a tumultuous battle between management and workers at the plant when in 1990, under Rich’s long-distance orders, the company tried to bust the union. On a bitterly cold night, a private security force arrived at the plant, set up armed guards at the gates and surveillance cameras around the perimeter of the facility, and locked out 1,700 workers, all members of the Steelworkers Union. Over the ensuing weeks, the armed guards repeatedly clashed with picketing union members, fogging the air with tear gas and beating skulls with their police clubs.

(Lila: There’s that non-aggression principle at work).

Soon Rich made the call to hire permanent replacement workers, for less pay and reduced benefits. The lockout went on for two more years. “It was a brutal affair,” says Dan Stidham, president of the Ravenswood union local  at the time of the lockout. “I’m still pretty upset with Clinton for pardoning that guy after all we went through.”

Meanwhile, back in Lucerne, Rich was beginning to cultivate the Israeli government. He established the Rich Foundation in Tel Aviv, which would distribute more than $100 million to Israeli causes over the next decade. To oversee the foundation, Rich selected a former high-ranking Mossad official named Avner Azulay, whose ties to the intelligence agency probably never totally evaporated. Azulay was a useful conduit to Israel’s political elite. He was close to Yitzak Rabin, Ehud Barak, Shimon Peres and Ehud Olmert. A decade later, Azulay would play a key role in securing Rich’s pardon from the Clintons.

Through Azulay, Rich offered his services to the Israeli government, especially the Mossad. Indeed, according to letters from Israeli officials, Rich played the role of a “Say-Ayon,” or unpaid asset of the Mossad. In fact, Rich was subsidizing Israeli intelligence operations. He financed numerous covert missions and allowed Mossad operatives to work covertly in his offices around the world.

(Lila: That’s a true libertarian for you – government is no good and evil when it hands out a dole to the poor and elderly, but it’s just fine and dandy when it’s servicing corporate bosses with intelligence, espionage and blackmail material).

With experience as an international spook now added to his C.V., Rich reached out through intermediaries to both the FBI and the CIA. He offered his services to both agencies in exchange for dropping the charges against him. The CIA’s response is unknown, but the FBI was intrigued and sent the request to the Justice Department, where it was quashed.

Around this time, Rich launched into a public liaison with a glamorous Italian widow by the name of Gisela Rossi. He flaunted the affair in front of Denise, the tycoon’s wife who had followed him into his luxurious life on the lam. Denise filed for divorce and prepared to return to New York. But Rich, whose net worth now neared $10 billion, was offering her only a tiny settlement. So Denise took matters into her own hands. She removed a Van Gogh painting from the wall of their palace in Lucerne and warned her estranged husband that unless he ponied up more money, she would take the masterpiece with her. Ultimately, Rich offered her a settlement of $200 million.

(Lila: Now, there’s a real libertarian hero).

Although the amount is far less than she would have gotten in most U.S. courts, Denise signed the papers and took her daughters with her back to Manhattan.

Rossi and Rich soon married and now divide their time between St. Moritz and Marbella, Spain.

A year after the Rich’s divorce, their oldest daughter, Gabriella, was diagnosed with a rare and terminal form of leukemia. She died within the year. Marc Rich made no effort to visit Gabriella in her final months. Denise Rich seethed.”

And that about sums up why I could never call myself a libertarian. Look at their heroes.