DHS Thought Police already own your body, soon your mind

SCIPIO

If one still needed further proof that America has become a police state then read the following: http://news.cnet.com/8301-31921_3-20117058-281/homeland-security-moves-forward-with-pre-crime-detection/. In summary, The DHS intends to deploy a security protocol called FAST that would help authorities ferret out individuals harboring, get this, malintent. Using algorithms and sensory data that monitors speech and vocal patterns, breathing, eye movement, body heat and even fidgeting, DHS "professionals" will determine your threat potential and take any necessary preemptive steps.

Here is an extended quote from a DHS pdf file.

"The baseline for the project is the development and validation of the Theory of Malintent.  Malintent is the intent to cause harm. Although individuals may experience malintent in a variety of situations, the specific focus of FAST is identifying individuals who exhibit physiological indications, which in the specific screening settings, are determined to be associated with malintent. Behavioral scientists hypothesize that someone with malintent may act strangely, show mannerisms out of the norm, or experience extreme physiological reactions based on the extent, time, and consequences of the event. The FAST technology design capitalizes on these indicators to identify individuals exhibiting characteristics associated with malintent.

The scope of malintent has three distinguishing factors: the extent of planned harm, the future  time horizon of the event, and the consequences to the individual who is planning the event. The extent of harm can range from individuals planning to cause a disturbance or use false documents to individuals who are planning an assassination or terrorist attack. The future time horizon can range from planning an event years in advance to planning to carry out the act immediately after passing through screening. The consequences to the actor (perceived as either positive or negative) can range from none to being temporarily detained to deportation, prison, or death."

Wow! What a terrific pretext for killing anyone on the State's shitlist.  Evidence, you say? Please, who but DHS professionals could make sense of the gobbledy gook data from FAST? ("Trust us, there was a really bad guy inside him just waiting to get out, to explode, he had to go down, don't talk to me about proof, it'd be too scientific for you to follow you simple sheeple civilian")

One wonders: With FAST in place how many people would get arrested for walking into the company office nursing harmless escapist fantasies about kicking the boss in the sack?

The DHS , as we all know, has already made it its business to look up America skirts and fondle America's "junk." Everyday hundreds of thousands of men, women and even children are harassed, harangued, humiliated and sexually violated by uniformed badge wearing thugs in the name of national security. But they are just warming up. Now they claim the right to detain, imprison and or/kill you for something you haven't even done. Ladies and gentlemen, its official, the DHS believes in the existence of Thought Crimes.

First Leviathan struck down the hallowed veneration for the creed that a man's home is his castle, then It struck down the sanctity of the body (per the 4th amendment) and now It says even your thoughts are no longer your own.

I would like to close with two quotes from Thomas Jefferson, who more than anyone, explained the nature of the social contract and how the preservation of liberty was the paramount function and most sacred duty of government and, in fact, the only legitimate basis for the State's authority.

When the people fear their government, there is tyranny; when the government fears the people, there is liberty.


The strongest reason for the people to retain the right to keep and bear arms is, as a last resort, to protect themselves against tyranny in government.

U.S. Intellectual History: Occupy Wall Street: The Culture Wars of the “New C...

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Too Big To Fail, Part II

Scipio

Crackpot as it may sound to many, there exists a deep affinity between the Occupy Wall Street crowd and the original Ron Paul style Tea Partiers. The rage and indignation that animates both groups is merely aimed at different heads of the same hydra.

I had something like an epiphany the other day when a "conservative" talk radio host went on a hate filled tirade against the Wall Street protesters variously calling them commies, Marxists, Leninist, traitors...Admittedly I'm sure some of each of these were present but that misses the point entirely; the Occupiers are mostly young, well educated and underemployed. Herman Cain sounds like an ignorant fool when he labels the entire movement lazy and resentful. Such rhetoric is as intellectually dishonest as labeling the Tea Party movement as greedy racists.This is not the America of thirty or forty years ago. This piece was reprinted in the Chicago Tribune and has many good points: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/opinion/ct-oped-1011-jobs-20111011-7,0,175730.story

Yes this was a real a-ha moment for me, because I remember thinking to myself, you idiot (the aforementioned fill in talk show host with a speech impediment) don't you see, the real villains aren't on the streets marching and shouting, they're inside those vast buildings, trading America's economic and military primacy for a quick buck. Outsourcing, off shoring, gutting domestic manufacturing, destroying the dollar, and so much more. If middle America vanishes, so be it, for in the social Darwinist view of the Wall Street crooks any form of national allegiance is for fools, after all most of their loot is in offshore accounts. What all the drones on the right and the left don't get is that Big Brother and Big Business have come together to stick it to the middle class having realized that there are enough pieces of the pie to share. They can perhaps dismember the corpse of the American Dream more efficiently by working in conjunction just as Nile crocodiles, who in every other instance act only out of self interest, come togethor to take turns holding the prey or performing the death roll.

To restate, the combined project of Wall Street and Washington is to destroy the middle class so that they can remake America (or perhaps the whole western world) as they see fit. For Big Brother 9/11 was the perfect pretext (whoops I mean tragedy) to strip Americans of basic civil liberties and turn the country into a police state...In a similar manner the economic elites may want a full scale global economic collapse so as take open control of the world economy. The m.o. is the same; never let a good crisis go to waste. If the State can make servile cowering wretches of the descendants of the people that once cried "Give me liberty or give me death!" it stands to reason that a massive underclass of ignorant fearful dependants is also a great boon to plutocrats and oligarchs. Concurrent with the extinction of the middle class is the disappearance of such nuisances as independent journalists, rogue dissenters, civil watchdogs, free thinkers, in short the whole intelligentsia. God only knows what form of nightmare will emerge from the shadows on that day.

The American Conservative

The American Conservative

Too Big to Fail

Scipio

Once, not too long ago, it was widely held that capitalism was a game of winners and losers. The players would proceed on the basis that the market would either respond favorably or unfavorably to their respective offerings. The game was only viable if the possibility of great reward was accompanied by great risk. After all, what incentive is there to play any game if one does not, at the very least, pay lip service to honest competition? So here we are circa 2009-2011 and the jig is up. The game is rigged. The Wall Street paper traders, who incidentally create nothing, can and do reap the rewards of speculation but perversely can also rely on tax payer hand outs to resurrect their failed business ventures under the hateful rubric ‘too big to fail.’ Historians and scholars have for years struggled to find the right translation for Voltaire’s infamous phrase ‘ecrasez l’infame.” One widely agreed upon construction is ‘crush the hateful thing.’ Could Voltaire have meant and felt exactly the same thing about the indefensible ancien regime as we today feel about the monstrous entitlement that belies ‘too big to fail’? Crush the hateful thing.

So. We’ve all heard the hated phrase. Like an insufferable smug uncle they (you know who they are) pat you on the back and say ‘sometimes ya gotta take one for the team son.’ Naturally the plutocrats and their creatures amongst the cognoscenti media sell this tough love in the language of unassailable technocrat authority – you can hear the sonorous lecturing tone dripping with condescension (Sen. Dianne Feinstein, Warren Buffet anyone?) for the great unwashed middle classes who have the chutzpah to argue from the evidence of their senses (to say nothing of common sense) and the quaint audacity of Aristotelian logic. The law of the excluded middle says A) the lot of the middle class is improving, B) the lot of the middle class is worsening. It cannot be both A and B. In exhibit A we have stagnant wages, spiraling living costs, rampant joblessness, decaying infrastructure, failing schools, criminalization of dissent, signs of rapid acceleration towards a police state and wholesale demographic replacement via unchecked third world immigration. Clearly, in spite of all this however, it must be B.

No, our new plutocrat overlords on Wall Street and in Washington are here to set the record straight; while risk and reward , success or failure (bankruptcy) maybe part of small capitalism, who cares if Vinny’s Pizzeria, or Rob’s Hardware and Supply thrives or dies, really, but woe betide America if the sumptuous life styles of the great paper traders and high wizards of arcane finance should ever diminish, for so vital are the services of these celestial personages that ruin for them must, perforce, mean the collapse of  our economy, civil society and possibly even Western Civilization itself. Too big to fail. Verily, they are Capitalists and they are to ordinary men as man is to the ape. Yessir, be glad you worked all that overtime at the autobody shop, Joe, because while all your sacrifice and drudgery almost certainly will not buy your children a brighter future the sweat of your brow means a few more years of Bearnaise sauce and Chateau Lafite for your infinitely more refined( and nicely manicured) betters in the Hamptons. Be proud of your toil, for as the yoked oxen stoically plow the hard ground so should your unsung servitude be your badge of pride. The great paper traders can hang on to their Swiss chalets a little longer and their lovely pleasure craft are a few more years postponed from being commandeered by the PRC as fishing junks for the glory of the proletariat.

(Ladies and gentlemen it is with the gravest trepidation and existential dread that I inform you of breaking news that the Euro is in peril. Something about the insolvency of Greece spreading like an unspeakable contagion across the Continent, threatening to bring down the very European Union itself! Horror of horrors, sic gloria et transit mundi. Obviously the situation cries out for a bailout which only the prosperous North can deliver. Apparently however the self righteous heartlessness of the Teutonic peoples in their cold and misty hinterland has reared its ugly head for they do not want to help their Mediterranean brothers. These mean spirited Goths talk of a strong work ethic and spending within one’s means and all this self reliance stuff. Where is their humanity I ask? The Greek model was a noble one: shorter weeks, perpetual job security and a lavish welfare state, and yes its true that it was fiscally unsustainable but the intentions were good and that’s the important thing. We would do well to be mindful of the wise teachings of Professor Jeffries who tirelessly cried out against the perpetual victimization of Sun People by the callous predatory Ice People.)

To wit, in America we have socialism for the rich, underwritten by the waning middle class, in Europe we have socialism for the profligate Mediterranean South, paid for by Northern Europeans who mostly get up before 10 in the morning. Do we begin to see a trend?

The author proposes the following allegory for illustration. At some point in the history of conservation the relevant authorities realized that in attempting total suppression of natural forest fires they had in fact created the perfect conditions for truly cataclysmic conflagrations, fires that could utterly destroy a forest. This is because natural fires cleanse forests from accumulating detritus and decay and allow for the possibility of new growth. Instead the massive accumulation of decaying biomass provided the necessary fuel for unstoppable raging firestorms. So in attempting to protect the ecosystem from the occasional natural calamity (fire) their do-gooding, in fact, destroyed it. Nature is cruel and callous but can little compare with the folly of deliberate ‘improvers.’

If half of the American dream is that the ambition of a hot dog vendor can lead him to rule over a mighty business empire the other half demands that the hubris of a CEO can bring him down to selling hot dogs.

Unhappy about all of this? Deal with it. Be happy because the Nanny State will give you the table scraps and leftovers …to quote from the peerless insight of Jello BiAfra: “Do not attempt to think or depression may occur…at last, everything is done for you.” George Orwell famously said that his nightmare vision of the future was of a jack boot kicking a face over and over and over again, ad infinitum. Well this author’s present nightmare is of the middle class taking it in the shorts over and over and over and over…