Ten for Orwellistan!

"The legal hallmark of dictatorship has always been Preventative Law -- the concept that a man is guilty until he is proven innocent..." --Ayn Rand

"Bear with us here. We are used to reacting to crime after it happens. Preventing crime before it happens is new to us and we must adapt. Prevention is now our top priority. We're learning with each new incident." --U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft, CNBC, October 16, 2001, 12:45:10

Homeland Security moves forward with 'pre-crime' detection --Privacy Inc. - Declan McCullagh CNET News

"This study, just released, reveals that the U.S.government has played a major role in orchestrating most of those (399 U.S. Justice Dept. reported) terrorist plots. 94% of those cases involved pre-emptive prosecutions. That's the practice of targeting those who officials deem predisposed to committing crimes before an actual crime is committed. ...Unless there is a public outcry over government manufactured crimes, that too may become common practice to target anyone." --Marina Portnaya, Headline News, RT, June 13, 2014

There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws." --Atlas Shrugged (1957)

...approximately 40,000 new state laws took effect in the U.S. just at the beginning of 2012 alone. There are so many, even Congress can't figure out how many it passed, let alone all the laws passed by states, counties and municipalities, etc. And the rules, regulations, orders and controls promulgated by bureaucracies at every level. And remember, ignorance of the law is no excuse - - - even when there are millions of them. --But Does Peeping Tom Protect You?, by L. Reichard White

There are 100 million words of binding federal law or regulation... more than any person or business can reasonably expect to comprehend. Only a small fraction of these can be enforced - but which [fraction] changes depending on the whim of the inspector on the scene. --'The Rule of Nobody' - Washington Times

"Even if you're not doing anything wrong, you're being watched and recorded. You simply have to eventually fall under suspicion from somebody, even by a wrong call, and then they can use the system to go back in time and scrutinize every decision you've ever made, every friend you've ever discussed something with." --Whistle blower Edward Snowden: Leak of NSA spy programs "marks my end" - CBS News

Every year, thousands of upstanding, responsible Americans run afoul of some incomprehensible federal law or regulation and end up serving time in federal prison. What is especially disturbing is that it could happen to anyone at all -- and it has.... Federal law in particular now criminalizes entire categories of activities that the average person would never dream would land him in prison. --You're (Probably) a Federal Criminal, Brian Walsh - FOXNews.com, - July 21, 2009

Boston civil-liberties lawyer Harvey Silverglate calls his new book "Three Felonies a Day," referring to the number of crimes he estimates the average American now unwittingly commits because of vague laws. ... L. Gordon Crovitz: You Commit Three Felonies a Day - WSJ

JEREMY SCAHILL: …you were one of only half-a-dozen members of Congress - not a single senator - to simply state on the record that American citizens have the right not to be assassinated by their own government without due process.

REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: …it's amazing that we're in an America where we have to defend the rights of Americans to be free from assassination by their own country… How long is it before some local police department uses a drone to intercept and kill a suspect, and when that becomes commonplace? --Jeremy Scahill and Dennis Kucinich: In Obama's 2nd Term, Will Dems Challenge U.S. Drones, Killings?

ALSO OF INTEREST?

"Fiat money: The historical connection to totalitarianism" | L's Little Letters

UNCOMMON SENSE: The FBI's Greatest Hits, February 26, 2012

Who Ya Gonna Call? -- LewRockwell.com

The Handschu Scam: Short & Sweet, By L. Reichard White

Brief History of a Banana Republic, Compiled by L. Reichard White

UNCOMMON SENSE: Orwellistan? Are we there yet mommy??

Bonus Army: US military attacks demonstrating American War Veterans - YouTube

What CAN happen here -- « Antiwar.com Blog

EU funding 'Orwellian' artificial intelligence plan to monitor public for "abnormal behaviour" - Telegraph

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What's with gold? The Bigger Picture - - -

The titular price of gold dropped about $84 dollars on Friday, April 12, 2013 in an obviously unprecedented manner. Yet, at the same time, ABN AMRO, one of the largest banks in Europe, failed to deliver the PHYSICAL gold it had contracted to deliver and defaulted, Venezuela, Germany, and apparently the Netherlands are repatriating their gold from the U.S. Fed -- and the U.S. Mint has periodically suspended sales of precious coins because of a lack of metal to cast them with.

SOMETHING is going on. Maybe it's just a normal trashing of the gold price by the government-banking axis, but to an extreme degree.

The question is, "Why NOW?"

Hopefully the answer is, "Because we've been trying to do this to protect our Keynesian zero-real-interest-rates against gold ever since it hit $1900/oz and threatened them -- and just NOW all the factors were finally right." Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of the Treasury Paul Craig Roberts thinks this is the case.

That's most likely.

BUT if the answer is, "We see a serious ripple in the fiat force, and we're trying to head the disaster off at the pass," they may be right. Worse, their blatantly obvious action against gold may precipitate the very disaster they fear and perhaps are even semi-aware of from history.

In that case, here's what that would likely look like - - - My Blog Former U.S. Under Secretary of Treasury Paul Craig Roberts explains what the bankster-government axis may be worried about.

According to veteran metals trader Andrew McGuire, the western banking-government amalgam, spearheaded as usual by Bankster Goldman Sachs, dumped more than an unheard of 500 tons of PAPER gold on the market late last week. And pimped, cajoled, and forced other weak hands to play along.

What's paper have to do with it? "Paper gold" merely means it was promises to deliver gold, not gold itself. Which is what makes the failure of ABN AMRO to deliver promised gold very interesting indeed.

It's directly analagous to the beginning of an old fashioned run on a bank where the bank was unable to redeem its "Redeemable in Gold on Demand" dollars -- the only Constitutional kind -- because they'd printed those redeemable I.O.U.s for more gold than they actually had. If anyone else had done that, it would be called "counterfeiting."

And because the banks are so interconnected, this isn't just a run on ABN AMRO.

AND maybe the repatriation movement, besides being interesting, is the straw that lit the fuse as Venezuela, Gremany, probably Holland, and perhaps some other countries are repatriating their gold which has been theoretically stored in the valuts beneath the Federal Resreve Bank of New York -- made famous in Die Hard With a Vengeance, the third in the series.

History? That was when France, a few other countries, and most importantly, the markets, called Uncle Scam's Bretton-Woods "London Gold Pool" paper-gold bluff by taking delivery of actual physical gold from the U.S. and its other eight dragooned central banks. In stupidly trying to again raise the market bet and cap the price of gold, Uncle airlifted a bunch of gold to London, ultimately collapsing the floor of one storage vault. But that was all to no avail. Being caught with its counterfeit shorts down, finally, on August 15, 1971, with Executive Order 11615, Nixon "closed the gold window," thus abrogating the international convertibility of the U.S. dollar to gold and finalizing the biggest default in history. So far.

P.S. As of April 14, 2013, 22:57, it looks like Goldman et.al. are still working the plan. Be interesting to see just how far they can go before the markets once again slap them upside the head.

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The REAL Fear Factor

Can YOU find the common denominator?

Folks including H.L. Mencken, U.S. founder James Madison, U.S. President Dwight D. Eisenhower, Henry Kissinger, Soviet dictator Josef Stalin, U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, and Prof. Chalmers Johnson all explain the main factor we should fear.

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed -- and thus clamorous to be led to safety -- by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary." -- H.L. Mencken

"It is a universal truth that the loss of liberty at home is to be charged to the provisions against danger, real or pretended, from abroad." --James Madison

"Our (U.S.) government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear - kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor - with the cry of grave national emergency ... Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." --US General Douglas MacArthur, Address to the Annual Stockholders Sperry Rand Corporation (30 July 1957)

"Today Americans would be outraged if UN troops entered Los Angeles to restore order; tomorrow, they will be grateful. This is especially true if they were told there is an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being by their world government." --Henry Kissinger, June 8, 1992, Evian, France, Media Protects Bilderberg, Spotlight.org

"It is part of the general pattern of misguided policy that our country is now geared to an arms economy which was bred in an artificially induced psychosis of war hysteria and nurtured upon an incessant propaganda of fear. While such an economy may produce a sense of seeming prosperity for the moment, it rests on an illusionary foundation of complete unreliability and renders among our political leaders almost a greater fear of peace than is their fear of war." --U.S. General Douglas MacArthur, Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan (15 May 1952).

"The easiest way to gain control of a population is to carry out acts of terror. [The public] will clamor for such laws if their personal security is threatened." --??Josef Stalin

Given this background, it is not surprising that some have seen the US failure to avert the 9/11 attacks as creating an invaluable pretext for attacking Afghanistan in a war that had clearly already been well planned in advance. There is a possible precedent for this. The US national archives reveal that President Roosevelt used exactly this approach in relation to Pearl Harbor on December 7 1941. ... Similarly the PNAC [Project for a New American Century] blueprint of September 2000 states that the process of transforming the US into "tomorrow's dominant force" is likely to be a long one in the absence of "some catastrophic and catalyzing event -like a new Pearl Harbor". This war on terrorism is bogus, Michael Meacher, MP & U.K. environment minister, The Guardian, Saturday September 6, 2003

"In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the militaryindustrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

"We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together." --Dwight D. Eisenhower, Military-Industrial Complex Speech, 1961, Public Papers of the Presidents, Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960, p. 1035- 1040

"Barbarian invasions would be superfluous: we are our own Huns." --Bertrand de Jouvenal

"This time his [Prof. Chalmers Johnson] tone was more alarmist, while his focus was on the way an American version of military Keynesianism was failing the country. He feared that the U.S. would be simultaneously overwhelmed by related tides of militarism and bankruptcy. ...and predicted that, in the reasonably near future, the U.S. would have to choose between remaining a democratic society or becoming a military dictatorship." --Chalmers Johnson vs. the Empire by Tom Engelhardt -- Antiwar.com

[Police Chief] Stovall told the group of almost 40 residents that beginning in 2013, the department would deploy a new street crimes unit to high crime areas on foot to take back the streets. "[Police are] going to be in SWAT gear and have AR-15s around their neck," Stovall said. "If you're out walking, we're going to stop you, ask why you're out walking, check for your ID." Arkansas Police chief says citizens could be subject to ID checks

Government officials are quietly installing sophisticated audio surveillance systems on public buses across the country to eavesdrop on passengers, according to documents obtained by The Daily. Plans to implement the technology are under way in cities from San Francisco to Hartford, Conn., and Eugene, Ore., to Columbus, Ohio. ...With the new systems, experts say, transit officials can effectively send an invisible police officer to transcribe the individual conversations of every passenger riding on a public bus. BIG BROTHER'S LISTENING - The Daily

The Pentagon has confirmed plans to deploy hundreds of additional spies overseas as part of an effort to expand its intelligence operations worldwide. The Washington Post reports the Defense Intelligence Agency hopes to use the covert operatives as part of an overall force of some 1,600 officials around the world. The proposed expansion would ultimately result in what the Pentagon aims to be an espionage network rivaling the CIA in size. It would also likely result in an increased number of deadly air strikes and other covert actions that would otherwise be subjected to congressional oversight. --Pentagon to Deploy Hundreds of Spies Worldwide, Democracy Now! December 03, 2012

William Binney, the former chief of research, the National Security Agency's signals intelligence division, describes this situation that we are in now as "turnkey totalitarianism," that the whole system of totalitarianism has been built -- the car, the engine has been built -- and it's just a matter of turning the key. And actually, when we look to see some of the crackdowns on WikiLeaks and the grand jury process and targeted assassinations and so on, actually it's arguable that key has already been partly turned. --Wikileaks' Julian Assange

Talk of imminent threat to our national security through the application of external force is pure nonsense. Our threat is from the insidious forces working from within which have already so drastically altered the character of our free institutions - those institutions we proudly called the American way of life." --General Douglas MacArthur, Speech to the Michigan legislature, in Lansing, Michigan (15 May 1952)

So tell me, what did all these informed folks think the main factor we have to fear is?

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ALSO RELEVANT:

Freedom and the Indians

What the Elders Say

The nature of "reality" via Bohr, Feynman, & Quantum Mechanics

The Essence of Government by Ostensive Definition

Governments don't aid progress, they retard it

UNCOMMON SENSE: The REAL Fear Factor

Franz Oppenheimer, The State [1919], Translator: John Milton Gitterman

The Criminality of the State - Albert Jay Nock - Mises Daily

Silicon Valley Roused by Secession Call - NYTimes.com

The End of the Nation-State? - NYTimes.com

It's not who or what you think - - -

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Where Wars Do -- and Don't Come From

Where wars DO come from:

Why of course the people don't want war. ... That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along --Head NAZI Hermann Goering

"It is not civilizations that promote clashes. They occur when old-fashioned leaders look for old-fashioned ways to solve problems by rousing their people to armed confrontation." --Kenichi Ohmae, The End Of The Nation State, (New York: The Free Press 1995), p. 11.

Mr. Bertie Felstead: "A German began singing All Through The Night, then more voices joined in and the British troops responded with Good King Wencelas... the next morning, all the soldiers were shouting to one another, "Hello Tommy, Hello Fritz" ... The Germans started it, coming out of their trenches and walking over to us. Nobody decided for us - we just climbed over our parapet and went over to them, we thought nobody would shoot at us if we all mingled together... There wouldn't have been a war if it had been left to the public. We didn't want to fight but we thought we were defending England." England's Oldest Man Remembers The 1915 Christmas Truce

People do not make wars; governments do. --U.S. President Ronald Reagan

President George W. Bush and seven of his administration's top officials... made at least 935 false statements in the two years following September 11, 2001, about the national security threat posed by Saddam Hussein's Iraq. ...an exhaustive examination of the record shows that the statements were part of an orchestrated campaign that ...led the nation to war under decidedly false pretenses. --Charles Lewis and Mark Reading-Smith, False Pretenses: Iraq THE WAR CARD Orchestrated Deception on the Path to War, www.publicintegrity.org

Wars throughout history have been waged for conquest and plunder. ...The feudal barons of the Middle Ages, the economic predecessors of the capitalists of our day, declared all wars. And their miserable serfs fought all the battles. The poor, ignorant serfs had been taught to revere their masters; to believe that when their masters declared war upon one another, it was their patriotic duty to fall upon one another and to cut one another's throats for the profit and glory of the lords and barons who held them in contempt. And that is war in a nutshell. The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and all to lose--especially their lives. ...the working class who freely shed their blood and furnish the corpses, have never yet had a voice in either declaring war or making peace. It is the ruling class that invariably does both. They alone declare war and they alone make peace. Yours not to reason why; Yours but to do and die. That is their motto ... The Anti-war Speech That Earned Eugene Debs 10 Years in Prison, Socialist Party convention in Canton, Ohio, 16 June 1918

By contrast, where wars DON'T come from:

...we preferred hunting to a life of idleness on our reservations. At times we did not get enough to eat and we were not allowed to hunt. All we wanted was peace and to be left alone. Soldiers came and destroyed our villages. Then Long Hair (Custer) came...They say we massacred him, but he would have done the same to us. Our first impulse was to escape but we were so hemmed in we had to fight. - Crazy Horse/Tashunkewitko

The Aztec strategy of war was based on the capture of prisoners by individual warriors, not on working as a group to kill the enemy in battle. By the time the Aztecs came to recognize what warfare meant in European terms, it was too late. - Aztec

New England's first Indian war, the Pequot War of 1636-37, provides a case study of the intensified warfare Europeans brought to America. Allied with the Narragansetts, traditional enemies of the Pequots, the colonists attacked at dawn. ... The slaughter shocked the Narragansetts, who had wanted merely to subjugate the Pequots, not exterminate them. The Narragansetts reproached the English for their style of warfare, crying, "It is naught, it is naught, because it is too furious, and slays too many men." In turn, Capt. John Underhill scoffed, saying that the Narragansett style of fighting was "more for pastime, than to conquer and subdue enemies." Underhill's analysis of the role of warfare in Narragansett society was correct, and might accurately be applied to other tribes as well. Through the centuries, whites frequently accused their Native allies of not fighting hard enough. -James W. Loewen, LIES MY TEACHER TOLD ME, (New York, NY: Touchstone 1996), p. 118

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Which side of the same party will you vote for?

"The argument that the two parties should represent opposed ideals and policies, one, perhaps, of the Right and the other of the Left, is a foolish idea acceptable only to the doctrinaire and academic thinkers. Instead, the two parties should be almost identical, so that the American people can 'throw the rascals out' at any election without leading to any profound or extreme shifts in policy." --Carroll Quigley, U.S. President Bill Clinton's mentor, "Tragedy and Hope," pg. 1247, 1966AD

"In the US, there is basically one party -- the business party. It has two factions, called Democrats and Republicans, which are somewhat different but carry out variations on the same policies. By and large, I am opposed to those policies. As is most of the population." --Noam Chomsky

Orwellistan? Are we there yet mommy??

Well, are we??

Unfortunately the stuff below only starts with impeccable Democracy Now and from three nearly impeccable guests:

1. William Binney, an NSA whistle blower who worked as a manager there for more than 30 years,

2. Jacob Appelbaum, a TOR and privacy software designer and activist

3. Laura Poitras, an Oscar-nominated anti-war filmmaker intimidated by Uncle ~40 times because she is.

--Whistleblower: The NSA is Lying-U.S. Government Has Copies of Most of Your Emails  http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/whistleblower_the_nsa_is_lying_us

--Exclusive: National Security Agency Whistleblower William Binney on Growing State Surveillance   http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/exclusive_national_security_agency_whistleblower_william

--Detained in the U.S.: Filmmaker Laura Poitras Held, Questioned Some 40 Times at U.S. Airports  http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/detained_in_the_us_filmmaker_laura

--"We Do Not Live in a Free Country": Jacob Appelbaum on Being Target of Widespread Gov’t Surveillance  http://www.democracynow.org/2012/4/20/we_do_not_live_in_a

And another interview with Mr. Binney:

--NSA Whistleblower: U.S. Assembling Information On Every U.S. Citizen

And here's a good measure of just how pervasive Orwellistan U.S.A. has already become:

--Confirmed: New Nationwide "Trapwire" Surveillance System Is Actively Recording, Monitoring Everything

--WIKILEAKS: Surveillance Cameras Around The Country Are Being Used In A Huge Spy Network - Business Insider

Then there are the USA domestic spy-drones:

--These Police Surveillance Drones Could Be Watching You Right Now - Business Insider

And, perhaps, even more "interesting" tools and techniques:

--14 Incredibly Creepy Surveillance Technologies That Big Brother Will Soon Be Using To Spy On You - BlackListedNews.com

Don't even have an appropriate closing.  Maybe - - - 

"Of course you're free. Now shut-up     ---    if you want to stay that way."

r.

P.S. Great weather!  How about those Cubbies!  I think I'll plant zucchinis again this year.  Do you guys like pizza as well as I do?  

The OTHER police state - - -

With the death of Kim Jong Il, everyone was reminded of the North Korean police state. But what about the OTHER police state - - -

Study: One-Third of Young People Will Be Arrested Before Age 23

Another study found about one-third of young people [in the U.S.] will be arrested before they turn 23. The study examined arrests - not including minor traffic violations - for kids ages eight to 23. Researchers said they found between 30.2 percent and 41.4 percent had been arrested. --DemocracyNOW! Headlines for December 20, 2011

And that's BEFORE the indefinite detention of Americans without charges or trial enshrined in the so-called "National Defense Appropriations Act."

That OTHER police state also treats its unjailed kids well - - -

Study Finds 1.6 Million Children Homeless in 2010

In other economic news, a study has found 1.6 million children in the United States - or one in 45 kids - were homeless last year. The National Center on Family Homelessness said its study is a "call to action for all of us to address child homelessness before we lose another generation." The group said the child homelessness rate has jumped 33 percent since 2007. --DemocracyNOW! Headlines for December 20, 2011

Fascism = Socialism = Totalitarianism

Socialism, once it gets bigger than face-to-face , gets taken over by those who follow the Golden Rule -- as in "he who has the gold makes the rules." SEE "Capture Theory," for example. Today, the catch-phrase is "public-private enterprise." Normally that morphs into full frontal Fascism (partnership between business & government), as confessed by, among others, the Nazis.

But "NAZI," the acronym for Hitler's so-called fascists, stands for "Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei" or "National Socialist German Workers' Party," defining fascism and national socialism to be one and the same.

These supposedly "fascist" Nazis originated the Volkswagen, translated literally as "People'sWagon," a name one would expect to be more at home with avowed socialists. With an apparent flash of insight, head Nazi Joseph Goebbels, in a letter to a Communist leader, assured him that "Nazism and Communism are really the same thing. You and I are fighting one another, but we are not really enemies," he wrote according to William L. Shirer in his The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, (Greenwich: Fawcett Crest, 1959)

The "same thing" in the case of "Nazism and Communism" is a centralized totalitarian state which, as history proves again and again, results in death, destruction, misery, and disaster for it's citizens no matter which way it starts out.

The common denominator of "socialism" and "fascism" is that once you create a "government" it is eventually taken over by the moneyed interests and those with political influence and hierarchical tendencies -- which guarantees application of The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

These folks don't care what you call them, in fact it often serves them well to pretend "socialism." Being the power whores they are (don't mean to insult sex-workers), they'll take the power and money any which way they can.

As the quip goes, "When you go to bed with government, you get more than a good night's sleep." It doesn't matter too much whether they claim they're socialists or fascists -- invite a government into your bed and you'll likely end up with a seriously painful and persistent case of herpes in undesirable places. And, eventually, totalitarianism.   

ALSO RELEVANT:

What the Elders Say

--L. Reichard White, Wednesday, October 05, 2011 3:52 PM

Nature of the Beast

"In India, the word public is now a Hindi word. It means people. In Hindi, we have sarkar and public, the government and the people. Inherent in this use is the underlying assumption that the government is quite separate from 'the people.' ...Even today, fifty seven years on to the day, the truly vanquished still look upon the government as mai-baap, the parent and provider. The somewhat more radical, those who still have fire in their bellies, see it as chor, the thief, the snatcher-away of all things." --Arundhati Roy, Public Power in the Age of Empire

"I discovered that in our country [Pakistan] there's a tiny elite who has usurped the resources of the whole country. The whole country panders to this tiny elite. By the way, I belong to them. And the rich are getting richer. And the vast majority of people don't even have basic rights.... what is happening is, the elite has basically captured the government. Whether it's one party or the other, basically the interests are the same. And so, they come into government, and they plunder the country. They usurp the resources. And so, common people are deprived of all the basic needs..." --Pakistani Opposition Leader Imran Khan, January 30, 2008

"Government is not eloquence, it is not reason; it is force, and like fire, makes a dangerous servant and a fearful master." --George Washington

The revolution HAS been scheduled

It's Februay 6, 2011, Super Bowl Sunday.  The middle-east uprisings are in full swing. Especially in Egypt.

The Egyptians are poorer than we are, had  undergone Mubarak for 30 years, and believed they would never escape the totalitarian yoke. But that was 12 days ago.

In 1987 I was traveling with Monica, a Polish girl from behind the "Iron Curtain...." We had many discussions about the, at the time, Russian "Evil Empire." She believed the hated "soviets" were solidly in control -- and would stay that way for the foreseeable future, perhaps 1,000 years.

I'd read "Can The Soviet Union Survive Until 1984" by a Russian dissident and so I questioned her  assumptions. She held firm.

About two years later in Nov. Dec. 1989, the Germans tore down the most prominent expression of the  "Iron Curtain," the "Berlin Wall." Monica told a lot of her friends about our discussions, and as a result, I got the mostly undeserved reputation among my Polish friends of being a savvy if unconventional social historian.

I just recorded John Kerry, appearing on Meet the Press, trying to explain why the CIA was caught flat-footed in anticipating the timing of the Egyptian uprising. He correctly observed that it's impossible to predict such things.

So, the Second American Revolution HAS been scheduled - - - it's just that no one knows exactly when.

RE: Revolutions

I've got good news and bad news:

The good news is that revolutions are usually bloody, chaotic events where innocent people die, dreams are smashed, and no one in their right mind wants one.

The bad news is that revolutions are caused by those in power who think of themselves as "governors."
And they quite regularly don't know -- or try to ignore -- this observation:

"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." --U.S. President John F. Kennedy

These "governors" finally abuse this power to such an extent that, despite prudence -- and "that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed," mankind finally abolishes them anyway.

More bad news: A new crop of "governors" will immediately try to take over as per

"Good intentions will always be pleaded for any assumption of power. ...There are men in all ages who mean to govern well, but they mean to govern. They promise to be good masters, but they mean to be masters." --Daniel Webster

And this - - -

"Within any society, there appears to be a minority that thinks in terms of power and measures the worth of all actions in terms of whether they increase the personal reach of the actors and increase their capacity for control. This is why practically every society of any size is hierarchical, and why hierarchy is never eliminated, only replaced by a different hierarchy -- the same wine in a new bottle."  --Steven Yates, TAKING THE RED PILL, THE REAL MATRIX, PART 3, December 7, 2004, NewsWithViews.com

"The Who" got it exactly right - - - 

For example:

 --Egypt's military keeping repressive practices in place - The Washington Post

and,

I think many people realize that with this election and with this supposed transfer of power, that we still have a long way to go, that the essential institutions of the state have not been reformed whatsoever, that the military has not been reformed, the police, the security and intelligence agencies have not been touched, that really we didn't have regime change in Egypt, we had change within the regime. --Egypt Votes: Sharif Abdel Kouddous Reports from Cairo on Historic Post-Mubarak Election

This will likely continue until we catch on to The Iron Law of Oligarchy.

There IS an answer.
What is it?
Need a hint?

I am convinced that those societies (as the Indians) which live without government enjoy in their general mass an infinitely greater degree of happiness than those who live under the European governments. Among the former, public opinion is in the place of law, and restrains morals as powerfully as laws ever did anywhere. Among the latter, under pretense of governing they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep. I do not exaggerate. --Thomas Jefferson

And a bit more motivation? 

It's not who or what you think - - -

Ten for Orwellistan!

The REAL Human Condition:.

You're NOT the way they told you you are

Freedom and the Indians

What Went Wrong With the World-wide Socialist Revolutions?

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Who luvs ya babe? Episode 3

HINT: NOT politicians. In this case, not Brit politicians

...a more fundamental point is this: all these three [British political] parties agree with each other on the economic measures that have to be taken, i.e., massive cuts in social welfare public spending, which will hurt the poor, and to support the banking system and the financial system in this country. ...All three political parties are agreed that the war in Afghanistan has to continue as long as the United States says it has to ... So I'm just bemused when I hear talks of a progressive coalition. What is going to be progressive about it? All three parties are going to do more or less the same thing, which is attack the poor. --Tariq Ali on Britain's Political Deadlock, Gordon Brown's Resignation and Pakistan's Role in the Times Square Bombing Attempt

The Iron Law of Oligarchy: Another Case Study

The "Iron Law of Oligarchy:" Another example - - - 

...I discovered that in our country [Pakistan] there's a tiny elite who has usurped the resources of the whole country [Pakistan]. The whole country panders to this tiny elite. By the way, I belong to them. And the rich are getting richer. And the vast majority of people don't even have basic rights.... what is happening is, the elite has basically captured the government. Whether it's one party or the other, basically the interests are the same. And so, they come into government, and they plunder the country. They usurp the resources. And so, common people are deprived of all the basic needs... Pakistani Opposition Leader Imran Khan on Musharraf, Bhutto, and How the U.S. Has Undermined Pakistani Democracy, January 30, 2008

How inflation led to totalitarianism in Rome

The episodes of extreme inflation took a standard form. ... The government ...resorted to debasing the coins of the realm. This took the form of replacing the gold and silver in coins with copper and other cheaper metals. Over the period 218 to 268 A.D. the silver content of Roman coins dropped to one five thousandth of its original level. Sometimes the size and weight of coins were reduced. It also meant vastly increasing the amount of coins in circulation. There was a corresponding increase in prices. The emperors usually blamed the price increases on the greed of merchants. ... In 301 AD Diocletian issued an edict declaring fixed prices; i.e., price controls. His edict provided for the death penalty for anyone selling above the control prices. There was also penalties (less severe) for anyone paying more than the control price. Irate consumers sometimes destroyed the businesses of those who sold higher than the control prices. In the short-run these draconian measures may have curbed inflation but in the long-run the results were disaster. Merchants stopped selling goods but this led to penalties against hoarding. People went out of business but Diocletian countered with laws saying that every man had to pursue the occupation of their father. The penalty for not doing so was death. This was justified on the basis that leaving the occupation of ones father was like a soldier deserting in time of war. The effect of this was to turn free men into serfs.   EPISODES OF HYPERINFLATION, Thayer Watkins, ECONOMICS DEPARTMENT, SAN JOSE STATE UNIVERSITY