After the aristocracy was gradually deposed, leading up to near-complete irrelevance after WWI, society faced a difficult question: its mercantilism and colonialism had brought it vast wealth, but its societies were becoming increasingly corrupted. This was because commerce puts the individual in command of choices that affect others because the individual is the purchasing agent.

One side suggested that, as under aristocracy, individuals needed a guiding hand or their demands would re-shape society in a corrupt manner. The other side suggested that any form of rule would be oppressive, and therefore that the free market was a better ruler than any leader. This latter view spawned modern neoconservatism, liberalism and anarchism.

As time went on, liberalism however was forced to acknowledge that free markets do not reward equality. As a result, liberalism allied itself with the idea of a command economy under control of a strong centralized government. This tendency peaked in Stalinism, which remained the Soviet system until their economy collapsed in 1991.

Now we have a long list of deposed forms of government:

• Aristocracy
• Military juntas
• National Socialism
• Communism

Some are telling us that this recent recession heralds the end of the free market. Like many other conservatives, I find that unlikely. First, the free market is the default of human activities. Without government, people tend to cluster into small communities and interact through commerce. Second, I find it to be a highly useful system if applied in the right context; just as most governments now adopt some methods of socialism, where resources or control is centralized to make it more efficient, governments of the future will always incorporate some large aspect of free market design. The end of the Soviet Union showed us that command economies find it difficult to compete with free markets, in part because command economies can be derailed by dogma and are not able to react as quickly as more granular, responsive free markets.

Two decades past the fall of the Soviet Union, and six decades past the fall of National Socialism, we are still struggling to find the idea method of governing our countries — the 20th century question persists, with a 21st century pessimism about capitalism.

Yet as we’re finding out, there are limited variations on the idea of government (and non-government). Whether we make the church, a bureaucracy, aristocrats or a lawless mob our masters, we will need leadership and hierarchy to be able to sustain the needs of permanent civilization. Backing down the history tree, and trying to become hunter-gatherers or divide into small autonomous states, is no longer possible or even likely.

What is likely is that we’ll see a variation on the past that incorporates more of a command economy into its mixed free market and socialist system. But this may take the form of a values consensus, or leaders less timid than our democratic societies with their encrustations of checks and balances will permit. And this will be a delicate task: just like the extreme of socialism is Stalinist Russia, the extreme of free market systems is McDonald’s and anal midget porn in the 7-11.

In the meantime, we’re also seeing a problem here in the West: as we have further liberated ourselves from the past, we have started to focus on anything but reality. Morality, social thinking, and aesthetics have all become disconnected from an idea of cause and effect, where effect is important. Now we just focus on mental cause, and try to be friends with everyone and not tell anything what not to do, so that way we’re popular and no one rocks the boat.

This detachment from reality has brought huge social decline, but since it coincided with our great wealth, we also have bred up a bumper crop of homegrown lazy and confused, and now are importing people to replace our declining native people. It’s unlikely that importation will work, as whatever laid the original group out will deck the newcomers too.

Because this large group of homegrown and lazy likes to agitate for political change, we are seeing a case that Plato predicted: the productive middle class is rebelling against the drones (unskilled laborers and chronically unemployed) and the artisans (hip, urban, educated people who work in media). They’re doing that because the productive middle class recognizes that turning our government into an entitlement engine will sap enough middle class wealth that re-investment in the future will not be possible for middle class families.

David Brooks as always has a lucid view:

Blond argues that over the past generation we have witnessed two revolutions, both of which liberated the individual and decimated local associations. First, there was a revolution from the left: a cultural revolution that displaced traditional manners and mores; a legal revolution that emphasized individual rights instead of responsibilities; a welfare revolution in which social workers displaced mutual aid societies and self-organized associations.

Then there was the market revolution from the right. In the age of deregulation, giant chains like Wal-Mart decimated local shop owners. Global financial markets took over small banks, so that the local knowledge of a town banker was replaced by a manic herd of traders thousands of miles away. Unions withered.

The two revolutions talked the language of individual freedom, but they perversely ended up creating greater centralization. They created an atomized, segmented society and then the state had to come in and attempt to repair the damage. – NYT

Any revolution based on the individual always creates a stronger centralized state, because the more different directions we have going on in our population, the more we need a guardian figure to keep them in line. Organic consensus like culture and heritage is the exception. Most unity comes through forced dogma.

Like dogma, excessive socialization causes a problem in that people start gaming the system, instead of using it for rational ends, because they have deferred the costs they incur. It’s like free money, right? And so then the socialist system becomes a centralized control authority, trying to guard the giving away of a supposedly “free” resource:

Once the health-care markets are put through Mr. Obama’s de facto nationalization, costs will further explode. The Congressional Budget Office estimates ObamaCare will cost taxpayers $200 billion per year when fully implemented and grow annually at 8%, even under low-ball assumptions. Soon the public will reach its taxing limit, and then something will have to give on the care side. In short, medicine will be rationed by politics, no doubt with the same subtlety and wisdom as Congress’s final madcap dash toward 216 votes.

As in the Western European and Canadian welfare states, doctors, hospitals and insurance companies will over time become public utilities. Government will set the cost-minded priorities and determine what kinds of treatment options patients are allowed to receive. Medicare’s price controls will be exported to the remnants of the private sector.

All bureaucratized systems also restrict access to specialists and surgeries, leading to shortages and delays of months or years. This will be especially the case for the elderly and grievously ill, and for innovation in procedures, technologies and pharmaceuticals.

Eventually, quality and choice—the best attributes of American medicine in spite of its dysfunctions—will severely decline. – WSJ

We run the risk of assuming the healthcare debate is about healthcare. It’s not; it’s about type of government, and the underlying attitude of our country. The old American attitude was closer to natural selection, in that good people always found a way to make it work; the new way is a cross between gift-giver and babysitter. It’s no wonder this has been such a divisive issue in American politics.

Speaking as someone with no shortage of experience in education, there’s only one rough way to do it correctly. As in writing, where what you write depends on your audience, in education what you teach depends on your students — except that they come in strata. You either teach to the top or to the bottom. All subvariants of a plan distill or decay down to one of these two: teach to top, or teach to bottom.

Teaching to the bottom is the “inclusive” and politically correct method. In this view, all your students and the teacher are so damn smart that a new idea will be introduced, they’ll get it, and then wait patiently for Joe Slow and Callie Clueless to catch up. In reality, while we’re waiting, everyone zones out including the teacher. This produces school that bores its students, causing more discipline problems, which ends up becoming a jail (to handle the discipline problems) in which boredom is the norm (because everyone is zoned out or waiting for the slow). In Texas schools, they’re even “mainstreaming” retarded (sorry: “mentally challenged” and “learning disabled”) students so that the whole class gets to wait for the 70 IQ point kids in the back to grasp what a concept is, or even remember the name of the subject.

Teaching to the top is how we used to do it in this country and Europe. In this view, education is like a speed train or a hose you drink from in the summer. It constantly generates high-intensity material so that smart kids are not bored, and lets everyone grasp what they can. A student who is both intelligent and organized will capture the 90% of this material necessary to perform quite well. Dumb students are just screwed, but they end up getting mercy Cs and getting passed along to next year.

Obama’s plan combines teaching to the bottom with penalties for those who do not make bricks out of mud alone, e.g. somehow motivate those politically equal but mentally unequal slow kids to perform as well as the smart ones:

In interviews, they said the administration’s proposal for rewriting the main law outlining federal policies on public schooling, No Child Left Behind, would continue what they called an overemphasis on standardized tests, impose federal mandates on issues traditionally handled in collective bargaining, and probably lead to mass firings of teachers in low-performing schools.

The proposals, Mr. Duncan said, would encourage states and school districts to develop better teacher evaluation systems, better teacher education programs, and more effective career advancement systems.

The administration’s plan for the No Child revision would, if enacted by Congress, replace the law’s accountability system, based around the goal of bringing all students to proficiency in reading and math by 2014, with another intended to help all students graduate from high school ready for college and career by 2020. The current system has labeled one in three of the nation’s 98,000 schools as failing, far more than any level of government can help, and the process has left many teachers demoralized.

The administration’s proposal would instead focus the most intense school turnaround efforts on about 5,000 of the most chronically failing schools. – NYT

So Obama’s plan is to penalize teachers for lagging behind, and throw our money into the chronically failing schools. This not only neglects our best hope, which is the smart/motivated/organized kids, but also will penalize teachers for not being able to make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. If a student has an IQ of 90, they’re not fodder for high school or college. They will never be in an advanced class. They will only fail.

Even worse, by continuing our deflation of the value of an American high school education, we’ve forced colleges to take over the tasks of remedial education, which wastes half of a college degree on menial stuff. That means in turn that a college degree is not worth much, and so we all must rush out for graduate education. In turn, that isn’t worth that much, since a lot of it gets dedicated to filtering and re-reducating undereducated college students.

By teaching to the bottom, we’ve reduced our education system to three tiers of high school.

As a result, every single person out there wants a college degree and thanks to the dumbing-down, they can get one — but this in turn dumbs down college further and makes each college degree that much less valuable. If every job candidate went to college, and even elite colleges accept relatively unstellar students for political or financial reasons, the college degree becomes the new high school diploma.

Two articles in the last year have attacked this idea. In the first, Charles Murray points out that college for people under 115 IQ points is a total waste of time. In the second, Thomas Reeves shows how many students do better by not going to college, which in turn prevents the dilution of the value of a degree.

America stumbles downward toward third-world status not because we’re importing third world workers, but because we’ve dumbed ourselves down to the point where we’re useless and expect a gold ribbon for showing up and writing our name on the page. The rest of the world doesn’t work that way, and we can’t afford to keep working that way as we get more dysfunctional. We need to reverse dumbing down, but Obama’s combination of focusing on the negative low performers, and penalizing teachers for not making them high performers, only worsens the situation.

Repeating a key point, we create pathology in order to determine how to interact with physical stimuli. The goal of pathology is to create a desired outcome. Where error often occurs is not misuse of the material through which we create this outcome, but the congruency of the desired outcome with the mechanics of the system within which the outcome arises.

Between the environment and our analysis of it there lies an emotional layer, or for lack of better terminology, how we feel about both the environment and our own thought processes. When the immediate need to ensure survival was taken out of our hands by technological advancement, this emotional layer in all of us was opened up to the possibility of having a far greater influence placed upon it from the same emotional layer of those around us.

Because of this, human beings began to form their thought processes around how they wanted to think, or how they hoped to view themselves in order that others view them in a similar manner. This fulfillment of an idea has become top priority in the minds of almost every person alive today; disregarding those who reside in third world countries.

The entire structure of our society revolves around how we sell ourselves to each other, because, frankly, we have no time for other things. Functionally we have reduced any danger in obtaining the basic needs for survival, and from there, unable to determine a greater use of our time; we used our technological prowess to pursue satisfying our emotional needs.

Of course, the emotional needs of individuals often come into conflict. When someone attaches themselves to an appearance that they wish others to accept then they in turn become threatened when that appearance’s validity, or approval from others, is threatened. This most often comes in the form of another individual attempting to prove the validity of his appearance by disproving the validity of another’s, and it often leads to infighting, depression, doubt, and a lack of confidence. When a person’s mind is afflicted by these feelings, they are unlikely to identify the positive within the world around them, and work with it, due to a greater desire to focus on the self. Consensually, this alters the entire direction of a society. And what are most people’s minds afflicted with today?

“Mental Disorders in America

Mental disorders are common in the United States and internationally. An estimated 26.2 percent of Americans ages 18 and older — about one in four adults — suffer from a diagnosable mental disorder in a given year.¹ When applied to the 2004 U.S. Census residential population estimate for ages 18 and older, this figure translates to 57.7 million people.²Even though mental disorders are widespread in the population, the main burden of illness is concentrated in a much smaller proportion — about 6 percent, or 1 in 17 — who suffer from a serious mental illness.¹ In addition, mental disorders are the leading cause of disability in the U.S. and Canada for ages 15-44.³ Many people suffer from more than one mental disorder at a given time. Nearly half (45 percent) of those with any mental disorder meet criteria for 2 or more disorders, with severity strongly related to comorbidity.¹”

That means that one in four people that you meet everyday has a co-opted mind; a thought-process interrupted by their inability to cope with the perception of those around them. This often results in a need to create an alternate symbol of focus that is akin to frenzy. People have reduced the ability to functionally analyze the world to simply ensuring that the basic survival needs of everyone are met, and this creates a purpose for society for a small period of time.

But as technology advances, and we become more and more able to meet these needs for a greater number of people, what will be left on our hands to occupy our time with? Error arises from an incongruousness of one’s perception with the environment that surrounds them, and it seems that the more we fervently attempt to reduce the interaction of people with the dangers of their environment around them, the more likely they are to spend their time creating social symbols to place a greater focus on than reality.

The possibility of using our functional analysis of the world to create ever greater purpose and levels of achievement for our people has been road-blocked by our intense focus on the self. Creating such purpose demands standards, and demands a physical reaction to an ideal. This is dangerous to the ongoing battle of the self to assert their appearance over others, as they would have to take a break from constructing their social symbols to meeting the needs of these goals. This is why such a great division is created between traditional and modern pathology.

Whereas the goal of traditional logic was to create a life worth living by analyzing every facet of reality in order to place them within a path of achievement, the goal of modern logic is to eliminate all obstacles in the way of the self’s relentless promotion of the self. This has done away with our only methods of evaluation: standards and expectations. We have exchanges such things for preference, and preference, being only relevant to the self and those who approve of that individual, is completely arbitrary.

All human beings must bear this burden of wandering aimlessly throughout the void, and as a result the little boats of intellect that are the greatest minds have also gone astray. We are trapped within a hall of mirrors, and even the greatest stars discover themselves in the looking glass.

An ad for $13.99 toilet plungers just blends in to the optical background ambience of 30 other ads within our field of view. As a result, we never distinguish Pete’s plungers from Margaret’s $8.99 margarita mix.

It’s all a wall of badly contrasting, incoherent optical ambience we reflexively shove to the back burner of our immediate awareness. If you regularly travel to non-rural places for business or as a consumer, or regularly use electronic media, you already know what I’m driving at.

Outdoor advertising has experienced such a phenomenal growth that some downtown cores resemble the not-so-far-fetched city blocks out of the film Blade Runner. At the sides of major highways, in washrooms and even permanently etched into skin, advertisers and their agencies are on a constant lookout for innovative, and sometimes shocking, ways to get their message to you.

“The ad agencies keep fighting against each other, making more and more and larger and larger ads,” Dave Meslin of the Toronto Public Space Committee says. “But no one is buying.”

corporateknights

People seem to appreciate the coherent information they planned to tune into. They shun irritating interruptions and confusing sensory clutter. The former aids our pleasure or survival. The latter just gets in the way.

And even though the audience for broadcast radio is actually growing, stations cannot seem to increase their revenue.

Radio advertising was down 10 percent last month from October 2007, according to the Radio Advertising Bureau, the 18th consecutive month of declines.

nytimes

Most of us understand the idea of noise pollution. Optical pollution is no different. It’s probably worse. If we are primarily visual creatures as natural senses go, trashing our visual environment demands attention as well.

Marketing oversaturation along with other overt forms of modern blight heightens our antipathy reactions to our own shared public spaces. At least some segment of the population who are visually oriented with discernment in taste will avoid such spaces, leaving those less perceptive and careless about their surroundings as regulars.

Which segment likely has money to spend and which is likely lower class?

Retreating from one failing venue to the next, the mindless corporate marketing herd stampedes to another niche, oversaturates it, devaluing its time and space as a data distribution node.

One newspaper after another is going out of business across the United States, and the ad revenues of traditional print media, even of highly respected magazines, is declining. The ultimate failure of broadcast media advertising is likewise becoming clear.

Pushing a message at a potential customer when it has not been requested and when the consumer is in the midst of something else on the net, will fail as a major revenue source for most internet sites. This is particularly true when the consumer knows that the sponsor of the ad has paid to have this information, which was verified by no one, thrust at him.

techcrunch

When done right, one sign can help us orient our bearings or offer helpful advice. But twelve signs are a nuisance when they point us in twenty directions, none of which lead to where we had planned to go.

If we started as hunter-gatherers, wouldn’t it make sense to let us mostly forage on our own for what we seek? Advertisement overkill hits us with the opposite: our products probably aren’t what you wanted, so waste your limited time to let us tell you where you can find them.

Depressing.

Those living in areas that were 10 percent green in a one kilometer radius had an anxiety disorder rate of 26 per 1,000. In contrast, those with 90 percent of the area green within a one kilometer radius had an anxiety disorder rate of only 18 per 1,000. Likewise, those living in the 10 percent green zone had a depression rate of 32 per 1,000, while those in the 90 percent green zone had a rate of 24 per 1,000.

This translated into a 21 percent lower risk of depression. The effect was strongest among children under the age of 12.

naturalnews

But when it doesn’t, they’re quick to make a claim they cannot: that out of all the possibilities, the one they pick is the sole cause.

Usually, they’ve confused cause and effect, because a cause sets in motion a chain of effects, ultimately ending up at a final state. But it’s easy to confuse those effects in the middle with the end result.

Here’s a good case in point:

According to a new federal study, women with a college education are much more likely to be married than are women who have never graduated from high school. And men and women who married after the age of 25 have lower divorce rates than couples who were married at younger ages.

We could have predicted these results. The US family system, which once differed little by class or region, has become a marker of race, culture, and religion. A new “blue” family paradigm has handsomely rewarded those who invest in women’s as well as men’s education and defer childbearing until the couple is better established. These families, concentrated in urban areas and the coasts, have seen their divorce rates fall back to the level of the 1960s, incomes rise, and nonmarital births remain rare. With later marriage has also come greater stability and less divorce. – Christian Science Monitor

So many factors remain unanalyzed here that it’s comical to draw the conclusions this writer did.

The family paradigm isn’t “blue” at all — it has to do with social class. The upper middle classes concentrate in these areas, and they tend to get educated and defer marriage in favor of career, then throw it away and be stay-at-home moms. They’ve done this for over a hundred years. In the old days, education wasn’t so much college as high school and apprenticeship. But it happened.

In the red states, there’s less of the city wealth, and more lost people. But it doesn’t mean the upper middle classes there don’t do the same thing.

Of course, it was convenient for the authors of these studies to ignore such ideas. They don’t get any points for writing about class; that’s potentially offensive. But claim that the city lifestyle is, contrary to all indicators, brilliantly healthy — and then you’ve got lots of eager blank faces hoping you’re right. And they buy your books and vote you into office and so on.

Here’s another:

As the media focuses on Senate votes and market debacles, though, there is a larger issue that threatens to rip the country apart. That issue is race.

…

The findings of a recent report by my organization, the Applied Research Center, and our partners in eight states indicate the importance of racial equity across the board.

The findings illustrate how a racially conscious approach to lawmaking is essential to rooting out institutional racism. Taking equity into account means addressing the causes of inequality and racially disparate outcomes.

We found that when elected officials consciously considered the effects of policy proposals and budget measures mindful of racial issues, they increased the state’s ability to address racial disparities and prevent unintended consequences that harm whole communities. – Christian Science Monitor

We’re measuring effects here, not causes. We’re hoping to ascertain a cause from an effect, without considering all the factors that guided this cause-effect cycle.

While I agree with the author of the article, her logic is sloppy — and that lays the seeds that drive us further from hope of sanity, not closer to it.

Decay is general because it affects most things larger than stable atoms and a constant because its basic effects, although they may appear variable, nonetheless do not cease.

For our purposes, we will understand decay to mean a transition from a higher state of organization or potential to a lower one.

If you assert that nature tends to take things from order to disorder and give an example or two, then you will get almost universal recognition and assent. It is a part of our common experience. Spend hours cleaning your desk, your basement, your attic, and it seems to spontaneously revert back to disorder and chaos before your eyes. So if you say that entropy is a measure of disorder, and that nature tends toward maximum entropy for any isolated system, then you do have some insight into the ideas of the second law of thermodynamics.

gsu.edu

Unless maintenance, effort, or energy is actively applied, dissolution of potential and organization is inevitable. More local to our rather limited human perspective, we see this happening all the time.

A small town gathers its potential and grows into a large city only to have this potential disperse as time passes. The once thriving city center ages, and some parts are abandoned. Its potential moves to the outskirts as suburbs and industrial parks while the center is given over to low potential slums.

Kipple is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s home page. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you to go bed leaving any kipple around your apartment, when you wake up there is twice as much of it. It always gets more and more.

from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick

We understand the basic pattern occurs in nature. Thick forests dry up, the trees recede and grassland or savannah takes over. Before long, with soil nutrients all but consumed and erosion having its way, verdant thickets have fallen to vast desert expanse.

Living things grow, experience a stage of vigor and reproductivity, then eventually age and perish. Stars form in gaseous nebulae, enter a thriving main sequence, eventually exhaust their fuel, begin inefficiently consuming iron, expand into old red suns and recede in death as a white dwarf husk.

Scattered villages find common cause when a foreign conquest oppresses them. They overthrow the ruling king then create a republic and a mutual cause against further incursions. The republic expands into an empire, both overextends its commitments beyond and consumes itself from within only to fall to dust and ruin thereafter.

Now, Harvard’s Niall Ferguson, one of the world’s leading financial historians, echoes Diamond’s warning: “Imperial collapse may come much more suddenly than many historians imagine. A combination of fiscal deficits and military overstretch suggests that the United States may be the next empire on the precipice.” Yes, America is on the edge.

Dismiss his warning at your peril. Everything you learned, everything you believe and everything driving our political leaders is based on a misleading, outdated theory of history. The American Empire is at the edge of a dangerous precipice, at risk of a sudden, rapid collapse.

marketwatch

Linear progressive history was marketed to us in the wake of industrialization and liberal democracy, a time of gathering potential, particularly in terms of living standards. Progressivism is fairly utopian in outlook; social interactions and standard of living cannot do other than improve, indefinitely.

However, by delocalizing and commodifying cultures into a generic liberal democratic way of life, globalism, like imperial expansion and over-commitment of past historic cycles, establishes a path of dispersal to a devalued state of potency.

A cyclic historic view predated progressivism. Cyclic history was demarcated by distinct ages of best of times leading to worst and back around to best again. The limitation with cyclic history was not so much the cyclic algorithmic structure, but with the separate demarcations.

This two dimensional model is coming back into vogue following our recent modern regression to a linear progressive historic model. However, because it accounts only for distinct subjective conditions in time, cyclic history needs updating.

If we modeled the gradient processes of cohesion to diffusion and back, or gathering of potential like wealth or stored energy to its expenditure into its surroundings, we would need to account for space in addition to time.

Think of the early town of Rome, having overcome Etruscan dominion, now forming a republic. It appears as a dot on the Italian peninsula. Time passes and the dot has expanded into a blob. A coalition of townships has turned into a large republic. The blob grows, overtaking Italia, turning to empire and expanding further.

Centuries pass and holes appear in the blob. It recedes in areas and its shade is dulled because it is dying. It then shrinks back to its home origins where its potential first appeared during prior cyclic ages.

From the Roman point of view during the death of empire, the model is two dimensional in perspective. History is a cycle turning from one conditional demarcation to the next. But, let’s instead be objective observers beyond the Roman point of view and turn the clock forward.

A new blob appears in the north as Frankish potential expands into the recesses of some formerly Roman areas. Later, the same goes for the Ottoman in now low potential areas further south. Our model would not show one cycle for history. It would show parallel ages overlapping in time: an iron age of ruin for the spent Romans and Golden ages for the upcoming newcomers.

Our new model shows multiple parallel areas of cohesion or diffusion in space that expand and contract, even overlap in conflict, with the passage of time; a true four dimensional structure. The model is also consistent with:

• the dynamic of nebula and the lifecycle of stars
• the expansion, recession, and transformation of ecosystems
• memes, cultural dominion and decay
• land clearing and settlement, urbanization, suburban dispersal, ugly sprawl

Essentially, we have effects that are natural laws existing before, beyond, and amidst mankind. The ancients passed these laws down the generations to us in myths.

Hindus believe his powers of destruction and recreation are used even now to destroy the illusions and imperfections of this world, paving the way for beneficial change. According to Hindu belief, this destruction is not arbitrary, but constructive. Shiva is therefore seen as the source of both good and evil and is regarded as the one who combines many contradictory elements.

bbc

The Greeks spoke of the Apollonian, a lawful, martial ordering and concentration of potential. Its antithesis was found in the Dionysian way as a chaotic, carefree diffusion of spent energy.

Should America’s world influence recede, another rising power will eventually fill the vacuum only to predictably expand beyond the limits of its own maintainable potency, leaving ruin in its wake like all the others before. Additionally, the coming post-global world will likely experience many pockets of relocalized autonomy within its opened recesses.

If our general constant laws of decay remain true, the future awaits within such emerging pockets. The only remaining questions then are when and where they will appear and what qualities these newly concentrated potencies generate.

Like Sarah Palin, it’s popular with a specific group, with a few exceptions on the fringes — white, middle-class, mostly nativist Americans. They like it because it resembles them. Their basic message is that we just want to be us. We don’t want to pay for anyone else, true, but that’s a sleight of hand. What they’re really saying is that they want to be themselves, and not be obligated to admit anyone else to their world.

This is probably a direct response to the 1960s and 1970s, where a mania for including everyone diluted our communities and forced us all into a chaotic environment where few people have anything in common. Especially values. I think that’s even more important than religion; in the Tea Party, “Christianity” is another code-word, this time for traditional values.

Naturally, the Left has freaked out about this, because the Tea Party is an authentic groundswell — and this time, it’s by the people who despite 150 years of various well-intentioned government programs, are the highest earners and most productive citizens we have. They’re calling tea partiers racists, ig’nant and selfish bastards who don’t want to pay for anyone else.

While that’s true, not paying for anyone but themselves is again, a code-word. What is really meant is white middle class secession from the mess of diversity, bureaucracy, corruption, universalist theory and voodoo economics that America has become.

This is what Plato predicted when he suggested that as a civilization becomes corrupt under democracy, the middle classes adopt a quasi-Libertarian Social Darwinist attitude in order to escape the empire of the drones:

And there is another class in democratic States, of respectable, thriving individuals, who can be squeezed when the drones have need of their possessions; there is moreover a third class, who are the laborers and the artisans, and they make up the mass of the people.

When the people meet, they are omnipotent, but they cannot be brought together unless they are attracted by a little honey; and the rich are made to supply the honey, of which the demagogues keep the greater part themselves, giving a taste only to the mob.

Their victims attempt to resist; they are driven mad by the stings of the drones, and so become downright oligarchs in self-defence. – Plato, The Republic

While the Tea Party movement has made an interesting start, it still must figure out what it wants, because otherwise it will get boiled down to the lowest common denominator. As an identity movement, it is promising because it encourages us to rediscover ourselves.

The Tea Party is unique in that it is not theoried, and not particularly academic, although far from un-educated. Tea Party people did not go to elite colleges and learn postmodern theory; they started businesses and learned real world ideas. If academia had not drifted into spacy new age postmodernism that is wholly unrelated to reality, the tea partiers might have been theoried, but who has time for the irrelevant?

In my view, the ultimate future of the Tea Party movement is going to be literary, or at least, narrative. It will be this way because without theory, disorganization and assimilation by the lowest common denominator occurs. But what works better than airy theory in dense white papers is a simple story. And here’s what that story will be.

A long time ago, people left Europe looking for a new way. Europe was divided by people fighting over kings, religion and politics. In America, people wanted to focus on a more elemental vision: quality of life, and the production of competent, honest, kind, morally alert families. As a result, Americans threw out theory, and launched a new type of government that was half-oligarchy, half-democracy.

Over time however people showed up who did not share their values. These people did not want to deal with the constant pain of being morally alert. They wanted an “everything goes” mentality, probably because life wasn’t working out so good for them. They started changing the laws to this effect, most notably in the 1820s. In order to justify themselves, they claimed the moral upper hand, but this was moral theory, not the practical production of well-adjusted people who share our values.

After a disastrous Civil War, we saw that trying to police our neighbor is a dead-end. We need to focus on values and raising our families, and let other people face the fate they take upon themselves. Even if they’re doing something horrible like enslaving people, or committing genocide, it’s not really our business. Because at a biological level, what matters most is that we produce good children and healthy families and a healthy society to raise them.

True, there is evil in the world, and it thrives if good doesn’t oppose it. So in our local communities, where everyone shares the same values, we like to throw out the people who don’t share our values. The problem is that someone in a distant city will decide that is wrong because values are universal, which translates to us changing our values to “everything goes.” We don’t agree with that; if we did, we would have stayed in Europe.

Right now, we’re trying to break away from the anything goes people. We’re trying to get back to biology and get away from spaced-out theory that translates into “everything goes, because we can’t figure out what reality is.” We just care about our shared values, and raising children in the American middle class method: traditional values, stable two-parent families, education and hard work. We also like being who we are and aim to perpetuate that.

Our society hovers in the balance between European-style political instability, Brazil-style third world disorganization, and the traditional American method of making a nice place for people who want to raise stable healthy families. We know that most people on earth want what we have, but for various reasons, haven’t made it in their own countries or communities. So we need to shut them out, or they’ll take what we have and destroy it, as has happened before.

That’s the kind of story you will hear from an articulate Republican, Tea Party or American New Right individual. While it seems dumbed-down compared to the grand-sounding theories of the left, it’s actually more coherent according to science: individuals are opting to raise healthy generations instead of getting side-tracked into symbols on paper. This is why the Tea Party is important: it’s a revolution in politics based on biology.

The term critical mass applies to any situation where a number of causes have set it up to detonate. The term means that enough of these causes are interacting that if events just continue on their present trajectory, the explosion becomes unavoidable. When a political situation reaches critical mass, it will turn ugly unless someone intervenes and disrupts the many causes that await igniting.

In our modern time, the most prominent voice for the study of multiple causes reaching critical mass is chaos theory, which is usually explained in terms of “the butterfly effect”:

His simple model exhibits the phenomenon known as “sensitive dependence on initial conditions.” This is sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect, e.g. a butterfly flapping its wings in South America can affect the weather in Central Park. The question then arises — why does a set of completely deterministic equations exhibit this behavior? After all, scientists are often taught that small initial perturbations lead to small changes in behavior. This was clearly not the case in Lorenz’s model of the weather. The answer lies in the nature of the equations; they were nonlinear equations. – Larry Bradley

Linear thinking arises from deconstruction. In our media, popular politics and social groups, we like to express simple clear ideas that everyone in the room can understand. But these are “clear” only in that they’re dumbed down, so that one trigger event “equals” one result. This kind of thinking works well in industrial production, or basic algebra. We can study “before” and “after” states and conclude what causes what.

However, in complex real-world situations like politics, linear thinking is out of its depth. Yet it is comforting to us, so we cling to it, and as a result become increasingly unaware of how our world works. Natural forces elude us except in very simple, laboratory-like procedures. We begin treating trigger events as causes and then become symbols.

We want the world to work like our minds, and treat it like a personality. As a result, we get further away from reality itself. In doing so, we bring our civilizations to critical mass, where without intervention they face a downward path.

Philosophers call this condition “solipsism,” meaning that we treat the world like it is part of our own minds. It is the opposite of a scientific outlook where we observe the world, test our hypotheses of it, and try to figure out how it works. Instead, we project ourselves onto it. This reverses the process of natural selection, in which we adapt to the world. We’re forcing it to adapt to us, and for a short time at least, that works thanks to our technology.

On the long term, however, the forecast spells doom. Civilizations die when they become disconnected from reality. Any group of people can set up camp and decide to agree on a false reality, and because they only need to work together, they get away with it until they collide with nature. If five friends decide that rain is an illusion, and build their society on a flood plain, they’ll be just fine — until rainy season.

Deconstruction starts the process of leaving reality behind. Instead of considering the whole of a situation, we consider the parts we can most easily grasp. And soon we start forging those. This process is inevitable because what started us down this path was backward thinking. Instead of treating the world in a scientific manner, we approached it with a superstitious one. We looked for a single cause when a situation of many causes needed to be understood.

We began going down this path long ago in the West, but we really picked up speed with “The Enlightenment.” In a desire to get rid of Kings and Gods, we declared that all individuals were equal, so no hierarchy was needed. This is backward thinking, a justification and not a reason why. Instead of seeking a positive goal, we became reactionary, defending against things we saw as a threat to the individual. This dissolves the social contract that holds a society together.

In order to uphold this fiction, we had to assume that every individual has the same faculty of judgment. Of course, that isn’t so. Most of us can’t balance a checkbook, figure out that a $40,000 SUV on a $30,000 salary is a dumb idea, or remember to not throw our garbage out the window as we drive down the freeway.

It’s not that these people are morally bad; they’re just out of their depth when it comes to thinking ahead more than ten minutes into the future. But freeing the individual from paying attention to reality caused a big problem. Our society no longer had consensus about what was right and good. As a result, we invented The Progressive Fallacy.

The Progressive Fallacy is the idea that as time passes, and our technology grows, society comes closer to a Utopian moral state of equality, diversity and freedom. Unlike previous ideals, which held that life is a cyclic process of getting better at the same task, Progressive ideals hold that the task changes over time. Conveniently, this fallacy relies on the deconstructed utilitarian sense of how people “feel” about their place in society. It slowly distances us from causes and effects, and puts us into the spacy ground of emotions and symbols.

In the Western world, particularly since the Enlightenment, people view the human story as a linear tale with a beginning, middle and end. We’ve also projected a happy ending onto the tale, assuming that, generation by generation, the human lot improves and that, as Gray says, “improvement in society is cumulative.” Gray’s dour prognosis is that “human knowledge tends to increase but humans do not become any more civilized as a result. They remain prone to every kind of barbarism, and while the growth of knowledge allows them to improve their material conditions, it also increases the savagery of their conflicts.”

If humanity simply is what humanity is, then no magic of technology, discovery of abundant resources or extraterrestrial intervention will free people from suffering and self-inflicted cruelty. Gray prefers ancient, pre-Christian myths that, he says, explain the human condition without appealing to progressive notions. In the Garden of Eden story, he says, “there is no promise … of any return to a state of primordial innocence. Once the fruit has been eaten, there’s no going back.”

Gray’s advice at the end of Black Mass is to stop trying to change the world, especially through politics. Modern life requires “no grand vision of human advance, only the courage to cope with recurring evils.” He may be right, but his outlook is too bleak to win many converts. Forbes

This book like others before it points out that our fond notions of “progress” hide a negative outlook on life. We are no longer striving for a goal; we’re instead striving to avoid bad consequences defined by our dogma, not the science of adapting to reality. As a result, we live in a schizophrenic mental state where we must pay attention to social appearance and the official story of how we’re doing, but then also be aware of the real-world consequences of our actions outside the happy world of politics, advertising, and socialization.

Even more, our thinking has become inherently negative. We strive for nothing. Our entire outlook is defined by what we want to avoid, and we have created a hollow myth — that someday, humanity will stop having wars, fighting for supremacy and so on — which requires we neglect the brilliance of nature’s design. War, natural selection, and Darwinism may not appear to be ideal methods, but they work. Progressive ideas don’t work — they cause decline.

Progressive logic is the crux of our human failing. When people behave morally badly, and their economies fragment, and they pollute their earth to the point that it’s clear they live in denial of reality, they are thinking negatively. They have separated themselves from any cause/effect analysis and are thinking in that world composed of personalities, memes, emotions and slogans in which cause and effect are the same thing. Change a symbol, and that is the result you desired. Reality is far away.

Back outside the tautological ghetto of the human mind, reality moves on. We are one planet of billions. Scientists think many others have the potential for life. And when we observe nature, that makes sense. No tree drops one seed — it drops ten thousand for every one it hopes to see survive into adulthood. There is never only a single way to achieve a task. This means that on these other life-supporting planets, there is most likely other life.

Each of these species will like us grow from primitive origins to a basic level of intelligence, technology and learning. It will then face the same dilemma we do, a threshold of greatness: can it gain control of itself, or does it drown in its own wealth? Because it’s easier for most individuals to space out and ignore problems, most societies follow this path of least resistance. But like many apparently easy paths in life, it’s a straight route to self-destruction and elimination from existence, or at least breeding back down to a monkey-level of intelligence.

You may think it’s impossible for a society like this to fail. After all, we have technology, lots of laws, a huge government, a giant media and millions of people watching. But even the biggest thing, if it has no cohesion or can’t respond to changes in its environment, can collapse. Does anyone believe that banks are “too big to fail” anymore? We don’t think Rome, or the modern West, or even globalized humanity, is either!

Nothing I’ve said in this article is in any way difficult. In fact, it’s all obvious. However, the fact that it is obvious means that people are more likely to go into denial about it, and therefore need to be reminded of it. It’s too easy to hide in our big brains and push reality away. But if you believe in humanity, as I do, you will trace our decline to its cause and fight against it, so that we do not perish at the threshold of greatness.

Fascism

Fascism believes in uniting a civilization through nationalism, authoritarian politics, and corporatism socialism.

Benito Mussolini – What is Fascism?

National Socialism

National Socialism is an organicist, capitalist-infused version of European Socialism that is organized around nationalism and national culture.

Programme of the NSDAP

As you can see, there is minimal compatibility between Obamaism (to coin an unnecessary word) and national socialism or fascism.

If we’re going to criticize the man, we should do it coherently.

Well Mr. Big Brother IRS man… take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

If you’re reading this, you’re no doubt asking yourself, “Why did this have to happen?” The simple truth is that it is complicated and has been coming for a long time. The writing process, started many months ago, was intended to be therapy in the face of the looming realization that there isn’t enough therapy in the world that can fix what is really broken. Needless to say, this rant could fill volumes with example after example if I would let it. I find the process of writing it frustrating, tedious, and probably pointless… especially given my gross inability to gracefully articulate my thoughts in light of the storm raging in my head. Exactly what is therapeutic about that I’m not sure, but desperate times call for desperate measures.

We are all taught as children that without laws there would be no society, only anarchy. Sadly, starting at early ages we in this country have been brainwashed to believe that, in return for our dedication and service, our government stands for justice for all. We are further brainwashed to believe that there is freedom in this place, and that we should be ready to lay our lives down for the noble principals represented by its founding fathers. Remember? One of these was “no taxation without representation”. I have spent the total years of my adulthood unlearning that crap from only a few years of my childhood. These days anyone who really stands up for that principal is promptly labeled a “crackpot”, traitor and worse.

While very few working people would say they haven’t had their fair share of taxes (as can I), in my lifetime I can say with a great degree of certainty that there has never been a politician cast a vote on any matter with the likes of me or my interests in mind. Nor, for that matter, are they the least bit interested in me or anything I have to say.
Why is it that a handful of thugs and plunderers can commit unthinkable atrocities (and in the case of the GM executives, for scores of years) and when it’s time for their gravy train to crash under the weight of their gluttony and overwhelming stupidity, the force of the full federal government has no difficulty coming to their aid within days if not hours? Yet at the same time, the joke we call the American medical system, including the drug and insurance companies, are murdering tens of thousands of people a year and stealing from the corpses and victims they cripple, and this country’s leaders don’t see this as important as bailing out a few of their vile, rich cronies. Yet, the political “representatives” (thieves, liars, and self-serving scumbags is far more accurate) have endless time to sit around for year after year and debate the state of the “terrible health care problem”. It’s clear they see no crisis as long as the dead people don’t get in the way of their corporate profits rolling in.

And justice? You’ve got to be kidding!

How can any rational individual explain that white elephant conundrum in the middle of our tax system and, indeed, our entire legal system? Here we have a system that is, by far, too complicated for the brightest of the master scholars to understand. Yet, it mercilessly “holds accountable” its victims, claiming that they’re responsible for fully complying with laws not even the experts understand. The law “requires” a signature on the bottom of a tax filing; yet no one can say truthfully that they understand what they are signing; if that’s not “duress” than what is. If this is not the measure of a totalitarian regime, nothing is.

How did I get here?

My introduction to the real American nightmare starts back in the early ‘80s. Unfortunately after more than 16 years of school, somewhere along the line I picked up the absurd, pompous notion that I could read and understand plain English. Some friends introduced me to a group of people who were having ‘tax code’ readings and discussions. In particular, zeroed in on a section relating to the wonderful “exemptions” that make institutions like the vulgar, corrupt Catholic Church so incredibly wealthy. We carefully studied the law (with the help of some of the “best”, high-paid, experienced tax lawyers in the business), and then began to do exactly what the “big boys” were doing (except that we weren’t steeling from our congregation or lying to the government about our massive profits in the name of God). We took a great deal of care to make it all visible, following all of the rules, exactly the way the law said it was to be done.

The intent of this exercise and our efforts was to bring about a much-needed re-evaluation of the laws that allow the monsters of organized religion to make such a mockery of people who earn an honest living. However, this is where I learned that there are two “interpretations” for every law; one for the very rich, and one for the rest of us… Oh, and the monsters are the very ones making and enforcing the laws; the inquisition is still alive and well today in this country.

That little lesson in patriotism cost me $40,000+, 10 years of my life, and set my retirement plans back to 0. It made me realize for the first time that I live in a country with an ideology that is based on a total and complete lie. It also made me realize, not only how naive I had been, but also the incredible stupidity of the American public; that they buy, hook, line, and sinker, the crap about their “freedom”… and that they continue to do so with eyes closed in the face of overwhelming evidence and all that keeps happening in front of them.

Before even having to make a shaky recovery from the sting of the first lesson on what justice really means in this country (around 1984 after making my way through engineering school and still another five years of “paying my dues”), I felt I finally had to take a chance of launching my dream of becoming an independent engineer.

On the subjects of engineers and dreams of independence, I should digress somewhat to say that I’m sure that I inherited the fascination for creative problem solving from my father. I realized this at a very young age.

The significance of independence, however, came much later during my early years of college; at the age of 18 or 19 when I was living on my own as student in an apartment in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. My neighbor was an elderly retired woman (80+ seemed ancient to me at that age) who was the widowed wife of a retired steel worker. Her husband had worked all his life in the steel mills of central Pennsylvania with promises from big business and the union that, for his 30 years of service, he would have a pension and medical care to look forward to in his retirement. Instead he was one of the thousands who got nothing because the incompetent mill management and corrupt union (not to mention the government) raided their pension funds and stole their retirement. All she had was social security to live on.

In retrospect, the situation was laughable because here I was living on peanut butter and bread (or Ritz crackers when I could afford to splurge) for months at a time. When I got to know this poor figure and heard her story I felt worse for her plight than for my own (I, after all, I thought I had everything to in front of me). I was genuinely appalled at one point, as we exchanged stories and commiserated with each other over our situations, when she in her grandmotherly fashion tried to convince me that I would be “healthier” eating cat food (like her) rather than trying to get all my substance from peanut butter and bread. I couldn’t quite go there, but the impression was made. I decided that I didn’t trust big business to take care of me, and that I would take responsibility for my own future and myself.

Return to the early ‘80s, and here I was off to a terrifying start as a ‘wet-behind-the-ears’ contract software engineer… and two years later, thanks to the fine backroom, midnight effort by the sleazy executives of Arthur Andersen (the very same folks who later brought us Enron and other such calamities) and an equally sleazy New York Senator (Patrick Moynihan), we saw the passage of 1986 tax reform act with its section 1706.

For you who are unfamiliar, here is the core text of the IRS Section 1706, defining the treatment of workers (such as contract engineers) for tax purposes. Visit this link for a conference committee report (http://www.synergistech.com/1706.shtml#ConferenceCommitteeReport) regarding the intended interpretation of Section 1706 and the relevant parts of Section 530, as amended. For information on how these laws affect technical services workers and their clients, read our discussion here (http://www.synergistech.com/ic-taxlaw.shtml).

SEC. 1706. TREATMENT OF CERTAIN TECHNICAL PERSONNEL.
(a) IN GENERAL – Section 530 of the Revenue Act of 1978 is amended by adding at the end thereof the following new subsection:
(d) EXCEPTION. – This section shall not apply in the case of an individual who pursuant to an arrangement between the taxpayer and another person, provides services for such other person as an engineer, designer, drafter, computer programmer, systems analyst, or other similarly skilled worker engaged in a similar line of work.
(b) EFFECTIVE DATE. – The amendment made by this section shall apply to remuneration paid and services rendered after December 31, 1986.

Note:
· “another person” is the client in the traditional job-shop relationship.
· “taxpayer” is the recruiter, broker, agency, or job shop.
· “individual”, “employee”, or “worker” is you.

Admittedly, you need to read the treatment to understand what it is saying but it’s not very complicated. The bottom line is that they may as well have put my name right in the text of section (d). Moreover, they could only have been more blunt if they would have came out and directly declared me a criminal and non-citizen slave. Twenty years later, I still can’t believe my eyes.

During 1987, I spent close to $5000 of my ‘pocket change’, and at least 1000 hours of my time writing, printing, and mailing to any senator, congressman, governor, or slug that might listen; none did, and they universally treated me as if I was wasting their time. I spent countless hours on the L.A. freeways driving to meetings and any and all of the disorganized professional groups who were attempting to mount a campaign against this atrocity. This, only to discover that our efforts were being easily derailed by a few moles from the brokers who were just beginning to enjoy the windfall from the new declaration of their “freedom”. Oh, and don’t forget, for all of the time I was spending on this, I was loosing income that I couldn’t bill clients.

After months of struggling it had clearly gotten to be a futile exercise. The best we could get for all of our trouble is a pronouncement from an IRS mouthpiece that they weren’t going to enforce that provision (read harass engineers and scientists). This immediately proved to be a lie, and the mere existence of the regulation began to have its impact on my bottom line; this, of course, was the intended effect.

Again, rewind my retirement plans back to 0 and shift them into idle. If I had any sense, I clearly should have left abandoned engineering and never looked back.
Instead I got busy working 100-hour workweeks. Then came the L.A. depression of the early 1990s. Our leaders decided that they didn’t need the all of those extra Air Force bases they had in Southern California, so they were closed; just like that. The result was economic devastation in the region that rivaled the widely publicized Texas S&L fiasco. However, because the government caused it, no one gave a shit about all of the young families who lost their homes or street after street of boarded up houses abandoned to the wealthy loan companies who received government funds to “shore up” their windfall. Again, I lost my retirement.

Years later, after weathering a divorce and the constant struggle trying to build some momentum with my business, I find myself once again beginning to finally pick up some speed. Then came the .COM bust and the 911 nightmare. Our leaders decided that all aircraft were grounded for what seemed like an eternity; and long after that, ‘special’ facilities like San Francisco were on security alert for months. This made access to my customers prohibitively expensive. Ironically, after what they had done the Government came to the aid of the airlines with billions of our tax dollars … as usual they left me to rot and die while they bailed out their rich, incompetent cronies WITH MY MONEY! After these events, there went my business but not quite yet all of my retirement and savings.

By this time, I’m thinking that it might be good for a change. Bye to California, I’ll try Austin for a while. So I moved, only to find out that this is a place with a highly inflated sense of self-importance and where damn little real engineering work is done. I’ve never experienced such a hard time finding work. The rates are 1/3 of what I was earning before the crash, because pay rates here are fixed by the three or four large companies in the area who are in collusion to drive down prices and wages… and this happens because the justice department is all on the take and doesn’t give a fuck about serving anyone or anything but themselves and their rich buddies.

To survive, I was forced to cannibalize my savings and retirement, the last of which was a small IRA. This came in a year with mammoth expenses and not a single dollar of income. I filed no return that year thinking that because I didn’t have any income there was no need. The sleazy government decided that they disagreed. But they didn’t notify me in time for me to launch a legal objection so when I attempted to get a protest filed with the court I was told I was no longer entitled to due process because the time to file ran out. Bend over for another $10,000 helping of justice.

So now we come to the present. After my experience with the CPA world, following the business crash I swore that I’d never enter another accountant’s office again. But here I am with a new marriage and a boatload of undocumented income, not to mention an expensive new business asset, a piano, which I had no idea how to handle. After considerable thought I decided that it would be irresponsible NOT to get professional help; a very big mistake.

When we received the forms back I was very optimistic that they were in order. I had taken all of the years information to Bill Ross, and he came back with results very similar to what I was expecting. Except that he had neglected to include the contents of Sheryl’s unreported income; $12,700 worth of it. To make matters worse, Ross knew all along this was missing and I didn’t have a clue until he pointed it out in the middle of the audit. By that time it had become brutally evident that he was representing himself and not me.

This left me stuck in the middle of this disaster trying to defend transactions that have no relationship to anything tax-related (at least the tax-related transactions were poorly documented). Things I never knew anything about and things my wife had no clue would ever matter to anyone. The end result is… well, just look around.

I remember reading about the stock market crash before the “great” depression and how there were wealthy bankers and businessmen jumping out of windows when they realized they screwed up and lost everything. Isn’t it ironic how far we’ve come in 60 years in this country that they now know how to fix that little economic problem; they just steal from the middle class (who doesn’t have any say in it, elections are a joke) to cover their asses and it’s “business-as-usual”. Now when the wealthy fuck up, the poor get to die for the mistakes… isn’t that a clever, tidy solution.

As government agencies go, the FAA is often justifiably referred to as a tombstone agency, though they are hardly alone. The recent presidential puppet GW Bush and his cronies in their eight years certainly reinforced for all of us that this criticism rings equally true for all of the government. Nothing changes unless there is a body count (unless it is in the interest of the wealthy sows at the government trough). In a government full of hypocrites from top to bottom, life is as cheap as their lies and their self-serving laws.

I know I’m hardly the first one to decide I have had all I can stand. It has always been a myth that people have stopped dying for their freedom in this country, and it isn’t limited to the blacks, and poor immigrants. I know there have been countless before me and there are sure to be as many after. But I also know that by not adding my body to the count, I insure nothing will change. I choose to not keep looking over my shoulder at “big brother” while he strips my carcass, I choose not to ignore what is going on all around me, I choose not to pretend that business as usual won’t continue; I have just had enough.

I can only hope that the numbers quickly get too big to be white washed and ignored that the American zombies wake up and revolt; it will take nothing less. I would only hope that by striking a nerve that stimulates the inevitable double standard, knee-jerk government reaction that results in more stupid draconian restrictions people wake up and begin to see the pompous political thugs and their mindless minions for what they are. Sadly, though I spent my entire life trying to believe it wasn’t so, but violence not only is the answer, it is the only answer. The cruel joke is that the really big chunks of shit at the top have known this all along and have been laughing, at and using this awareness against, fools like me all along.

I saw it written once that the definition of insanity is repeating the same process over and over and expecting the outcome to suddenly be different. I am finally ready to stop this insanity. Well, Mr. Big Brother IRS man, let’s try something different; take my pound of flesh and sleep well.

The communist creed: From each according to his ability, to each according to his need.
The capitalist creed: From each according to his gullibility, to each according to his greed.

Joe Stack (1956-2010)
02/18/2010