The Individual Mind

Book recommendation. I’d read Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago years ago, never realizing how much more he’d written. That one work is an incredible revelation of his personal history with Stalin’s political prison system in the 1940s-50s, but he wrote so much more great stuff. This small book of autobiographically-based fiction stands with Orwell and Huxley, not as another warning of dystopian fiction, but as an exposure of a centralized state, dystopian, genocidal reality that was hidden from the world for decades. (Perhaps democide would be the better word?)

The book came to my attention a few weeks ago as I was listening to a Tom Woods podcast with the president of the local historical society of Cavendish, Vermont – the site to which Solzhenitsyn emigrated after his second Soviet exile. Do yourself a favor.

“Would you like the $9,400 CT scan or the $450 CT scan?”

     We’re not all careful. Some of us ride motorcycles on the highway,… recklessly. A nephew ended up at a Level I trauma center in Houston, Texas, in March of 2016 as a result. He was patched up and lived to ride another day. Ten months later, his dad gets the final itemized hospital bill. As doctors in the family, my wife and I opine on medical matters with some frequency. The dad texted us a picture of the bill. As you are sure to expect, the charges were for ridiculous amounts that no one really pays. Most people probably think that these matters just get handled somehow, somewhere, between insurance companies and hospitals, then the patient pays some reduced amount of that massive charge, bewildered but happy to walk away still financially solvent after the threat of a bankrupting and indecipherable hospital bill. For most people, that vague understanding (and narrow fiscal escape) seem to be enough to be able to put the experience behind them. For others, though, we want to understand what the *expletive* is going on?!

Click here for full article.

Mr Scheuer is an insider, ex-CIA, an expert for decades on anti-terrorism, even prior to the attack on the Towers in 2001. He says things, and critiques in ways, that the Establishment does not tolerate from others because those critics do not carry the desired “insider” status. Of course, they reject his insights, as well, but the gnashing of teeth is less vehement, perhaps.

The book, while still too supportive of many government polices and persons, in my opinion, offers excellent insights into the multiple and entangled root causes of terrorism, of the very poor outcomes of decades of bad US foreign policy and interventionism, and the misguided and erroneous visions of US “leadership” which perpetuate continued loss, failure, instability and blowback. He asserts and defends very well the argument that terrorism is not an attack on American values or freedoms, but rather it is deliberate retaliation for a long series of US actions and presences in lands and among peoples where the US had no business inherent to its own defense or sovereignty. Although written in 2003-4, nothing has fundamentally changed in the still-losing War. Over a decade later, the same failed beliefs, policies and interventions persist at great cost in blood, treasure and international goodwill.

There are many great quotes to be pulled from the book, some of which I will add in the comments section, but this excerpt may be among the most insightful and representative of the work (from pg 251-2):

Perhaps the best book I read while writing this study was Ralph Peter’s Fighting for the Future: Will America Triumph? In it, Peters makes a suggestion that still stuns, haunts, and encourages me. “We Americans must avoid fantastic schemes to rescue those for whom we bear no responsibility,” Peters said. “In dealing with nationalism and fundamentalism we must be willing to let the flames burn themselves out whenever we are not in danger of catching fire ourselves. If we want to avoid the needless, thankless deaths of our own countrymen, we must learn to watch others die with equanimity.” Peters is right, brutally updating the guidance of Washington and Adams. Can any U.S. official, academic, politician, or pundit credibly claim to know what is going on in Iraq’s sectarian and tribal politics, Afghanistan’s tribal and ethnic rivalries, or the tribal-religious-ethnic politics of the Balkans, Rwanda, Liberia, or Congo? Can anyone honestly believe the claim that Washington will broker a “just peace” between Israel and Palestine is anything other than a thirty-year-old, mindlessly repeated mantra? Can anyone even describe the basic elements of the Islamic faith and their impact on world affairs? More to the point, can it be proven that it would make a substantive – vice emotional – difference to U.S. security if every Hutu killed every Tutsi, or vice versa; every Palestinian killed every Israeli, or vice versa; or if Serbs, Croats, and Bosnians exterminated each other to the last person? The brutal but correct answers are: we do not understand these conflicts, and none of them, regardless of who wins, endanger U.S. interests. All evoke empathy and stir emotion, but it is, as always, a cruel world, and each nation’s one mandatory duty is to care for and defend itself.

“For our own welfare and survival, we must watch others die with equanimity” and help after ‘the flames burn themselves out” by focusing our overseas intercourse on trade, sharing knowledge, and donating food and medicine. America must not commit abroad unless genuine national interests are at risk, and she must go to war only for survival and then act to annihilate the enemy. We must let our efforts to perfect self-government and ensure equality for all at home be the example that spurs democracy abroad. We must unflinchingly let foreign dragons devour each other without expending American lives, treasure, and self-respect on an endless series of fool’s errands.”

I’m referencing an enlightening zerohedge article on the topic today: “‘There’s Chaos Everywhere’ – Indians Angry As ATMs Run Dry After Cash Ban”

This is Governments’ and Big Banks’ continued war on cash, India version. As powermongers and money-lusters continue the thrust to push people into their fee and surveillance-ridden systems, people are strangled in their ability to engage in commerce with one another outside of the purview and parasitism of third parties. Who benefits? The tired refrain from the statists is that getting rid of cash will reduce corruption(!) as large transfers will be documented. Sweet baby Jesus. The corruptions aren’t happening in the markets in India or the trade days in middle America or the garage sales or the used car purchase. Those corruptions happen at corporate and government levels, in the hundreds of thousands and millions of dollar denominations. And it doesn’t really matter if those are documented or not because the “Justice System” is beholden to the politicians and big donors. No. These are simply efforts to control, to tax, to extract electronic transaction fees, to drive money into the banks to attempt to make them solvent (which they can’t be in a fractional reserve system of artificial zero and negative interest rates). Wakey, wakey. Coming to a country near you,… yours to be specific.

Mr. Snowden, considered an enemy of the state by some, is a hero, patriot and statesmen for others of us. His whistleblowing from inside the US Surveillance Apparatus revealed illegal, unconstitutional and immoral secret activities by the US government against its own citizens. As a result, he lives in exile in Russia, although he has attempted to negotiate a return to the US to stand a fair and open public trial with a jury of his peers. The US government has refused that offer, intends to prosecute him as a foreign spy through secret courts associated with the Espionage Act, and has only committed itself to not torturing him.

In this hour-long interview with Edward Snowden, he encourages citizens to not place their trust in politics or politicians, but to work with fellow citizens to demand transparency, to encourage the development of technologies and businesses that augment privacies and freedom, to learn to protect themselves, to distrust secretive government and corporate entities that indiscriminately collect our information for their own ends. He speaks of the qualities that are considered to have made America a great place to live – of citizenship, of voluntary interactions, of tolerance for others’ ideas and speech, of the protection of the natural rights of humans in their quest for progress and innovation as opposed to the promotion of a system of all-encompassing rules and laws that create an authoritarian rigidity of control, stagnation and intolerance.

Throughout the recent years of endless political speeches by a sea of barely distinguishable, philosophically malleable, self-serving public figures, Mr. Snowden’s remarks and insights stand out as singularly informative and inspirational. He is, thankfully, not an elected official. Quite the contrary. He is a leader, a thinker, a disruptor and an innovator. To have a thousand more like him!

NEW YORK, NY – NOVEMBER 08: People watch voting results at Democratic presidential nominee former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s election night event at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center November 8, 2016 in New York City. Clinton is running against Republican nominee, Donald J. Trump to be the 45th President of the United States. (Photo by Drew Angerer/Getty Images) Getty Images North America 681261599 621808502

I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t vote for either (or any) of them – for reasons economic, philosophic, and moral. None could enunciate a consistent philosophy of civil liberties and personal freedoms, of privacy, of respect for the individual, of peace, of a cessation of foreign invasions and bombing and death and refugee formation  and arming rebels and provocative international tensions with global nuclear powers, of a way out of ever-increasing national debt that threatens the sustainability of the nation and the promises made to citizens, of a fair playing field for businesses against crony capitalist corporations, of monetary policy which stabilizes the currency and denies special advantage to the banksters at the expense of savers and the middle class, of an end to the destructive and failed Drug War,… of many issues across the politico-economic spectrum.

What politicians and their ilk realized millennia ago is that they don’t need to answer these types of questions. They don’t need to be philosophically consistent or plan for the future or make the world a better place. To serve their interests, their income, and their power lust they only need to pick a few issues that alarm the public, that isolate out single-issue voters to their side, that drive the people to the polls out of anxiety and fear. Those issues may be gay rights or abortion or gun control or taxes or pornography or drug legalities or any number of social services or health care or immigration or national security, etc, etc, etc. While a politician may occasionally happen upon a reasonable position or two on any such issues, being generally unprincipled persons, it is unlikely that their overall platforms will be consistent or meaningful. Additionally, while government is the great fiction whereby we all live at the expense of each other (thank you, Mr. Bastiat), the game is set up as zero-sum, a fixed pie, as necessarily having a winner and loser, typically a reluctant payor and an undeserving recipient. The very purpose of politics is to divide, to fragment, to classify, to create oppositions –  and based upon those divisions and enmities, to wrest control in order to derive benefits at the expense of others. Thus, government powers grow: taxes, mandates, regulations, prohibitions, fines, incarcerations, licensing, permissions. The tool gets stronger and bigger and more encompassing until he who wields it has powers to wreak havoc, to threaten, to intimidate and to control.

Today, a few days after this recent presidential election, I have friends and family divided to Left and Right (whatever that is supposed to mean). Some are elated that their few important issues will be supported by the winner, and some are genuinely fearful that issues of extreme importance to them will be addressed in ways that could alter their lives. Few are able to recognize the perceived threats that the candidates posed to others of differing belief systems, lifestyles, world views or concerns. In an era so self-professed, or at least supposedly inclined towards, diversity and inclusion, there has not likely been a less inclusive environment in my lifetime than what exists immediately following voters’ results just 72 hours ago. But that lack of diversity and the resultant tensions are not an accident. They are an unspoken, but undeniable and purposeful, result of the very machinery of politics and government. Classifications, identity politics, religion, nationality, race, gender and sexuality are the core distinctions which are used as wedges by the astute and cunning political class. Mixed with an ever-increasingly powerful government, with its double-edged sword which swings according to the elected partisan in current power, there must be losers, victims, aggrieved and oppressed. Government is a game of fear, of self-defense, of retaliation, of threat by force. It has always been so. The shock is not that this is the reality, but that in our age of information and communication, that people remain oblivious to being made pawns in the game which is reliant on their validation, authorization, participation and voluntary subjugation.

I am sorry and sad that people that I care about are hurt and that people close to me may be fractured by these issues in the drive to protect that which they consider very important. They are not wrong. They are just different from one another. They have unique interests, beliefs, drives and views. And the American system does not allow for difference. The system of democracy is designed to force the 49% into the construct decided upon by the 51%, and that construct becomes more tentacled and invasive with time. Metastatic. It increasingly gains control over every aspect of life: work, family, profession, recreation, property.

Most will believe that the answer to their current plight is to have elected “the other guy,” then everything would be better,… although not for the citizen against whom the pendulum has now swung and whose most important interests are now at risk. At what point do we realize that the paradigm presented is flawed? That the beliefs and systems inculcated in us from childhood are neither inspired nor correct? That creating bigger and stronger controls puts everyone at risk? That a government strong enough to give you what you want is strong enough to deny you it (thank you, Mr. Jefferson)? That perhaps very little should be left in the purview of the pseudo-enlightened class and the controlling bodies that they direct? That there can be no such thing as “the public interest” because those interests are infinitely diverse? That perhaps it should be no business of government who marries whom or how one makes a living or spends one’s income or what one puts in one’s own body? That a government and its elected officials that are powerful enough to scare you may just be too powerful altogether? If you create a government large and intrusive enough to force your preferences upon others, what do you think happens when you lose control of it? Or when a tyrant or sociopath or imbecile gains control of it? (Which has actually been the case for decades, in the opinion of some). How many question the very design of a system which mandates obedience and reverence towards a few select individuals, as if they were divinely appointed kings or demi-gods? How many confuse government with society? Political boundaries with communities? Politicians with statesmen? Ideologies with ideas? Demagoguery with leadership by example? How many refuse to be either master or slave? How many recognize the benefits of voluntary interaction to mutual benefit, absent coercions, threat or fraud?

I am sorry that so many hurt, are angry or feel extreme anxiety with the recent relative majority’s choice. I did not vote a Master for you. I do not desire to control you or take from you, yet there are many that do desire those controls and expropriated loot. The way forward is unlikely to be found in the failures of the past. If we desire freedom, prosperity and respect, we must be willing to grant the same universally. We must deny the agitators and dividers our emotional energy. We must remove from the public and legal spheres those things that do not belong there, e.g. marriage licenses, ingestibles, beliefs, commerce, perhaps the education of our children,…. We must recognize the failures of our systems, refuse to endorse them, withhold our validation of them, supplant them with community and society and family rather than majority-appointed managers and controllers. Ultimately, it is not red versus blue, but rather the manipulative state and its actors versus you. In our societies and associations we find inclusion, and we work for common goals to mutual benefit. In politics and government, participation is either an offensive move for gain or a defensive maneuver to protect self and property. As you consider issues in relation to moral and philosophic consistency, you, too, may find yourself unable to validate those which maneuver to get themselves put on ballots to become your leaders and directors – not for your benefit, but for theirs. What happens when the majority rejects the sociopaths, the emotional manipulators and the snake oil salesmen? It can’t be any worse than what you’re experiencing now. Some of the political disruption and unrest this political cycle is likely an ember of this societal awakening and recognition that the individual is a host for parasitic forces beyond his control. I don’t care if you’re queer, black, Mexican, a privileged white boy, or even a lawyer. Take the blue pill with me, let’s turn our backs on the dysfunction, and travel down the road together.

Great article on the highly “educated,” yet extremely vision-limited, pseudo-intellectual class of idiots which collude to rule the world, impose their ideology and views on the vast majority of regular humanity, and have no insight into the endless harm done through the consequences of their poorly-founded interventionism. “What we have been seeing worldwide, from India to the UK to the US, is the rebellion against the inner circle of no-skin-in-the-game policymaking ‘clerks’ and journalists-insiders, that class of paternalistic semi-intellectual experts with some Ivy league, Oxford-Cambridge, or similar label-driven education who are telling the rest of us 1) what to do, 2) what to eat, 3) how to speak, 4) how to think… and 5) who to vote for.”

Referencing a zerohedge article from this morning. Democracy has been hi-jacked by Gov and its political forces. Co-opted for its own well-being. Turned on its head, from a method of public representation to one of citizen control. “Democratic politics is a vital power ritual for the government. It makes the government all-important, all-relevant, all-preoccupying; this is especially so during election season. Each side’s enemy candidate is demonized as an existential menace who can only be warded off by throwing all support behind your party’s candidate. ‘Candidate X is not perfect, but we must stop Candidate Y!’ If your candidate wins power, you become doubly loyal to the regime to keep the enemy herds down. If your candidate loses, you become doubly determined to help your tribe regain its grip on the levers of power. Dismantling the machine is the last thing on your mind. Using democratic politics to foment civil strife is how the government divides and more fully conquers its subjects.”

From a CNN report some months ago, but increasingly relevant in a terror war that has no end – perhaps of purposeful design. Decades and decades of filling the Middle East with US weapons, of funding and arming and training fly-by-night “rebel groups,” of shifting alliances, of inept handling of weapons caches, of propping up and funding the puppet-regime-of-the-moment until the winds shift and that puppet becomes public enemy number one and therefore assassinated,…. THIS is how societies are destabilized and destroyed, how the crazy groups in them become so heavily armed and powerful, how millions of refugees are created, how civil wars are fueled, how the US/Western foreign policy of resource extraction and global domination has led the world to the brink of total war. This is what you’ve been voting for, sending to office, supporting with your tax dollars. You, destroyer of worlds.

James Risen, a Pulitzer Prize winning investigative reporter with the NY Times (despite their many efforts to suppress his work), has written an enlightening, although in no way surprising, account of the mismanagement, greed and idiocy involved in the War Machine of your Gov and the Police/Surveillance State at home promoted to advance it. From many $billions in misspent and lost money through “private” contractors, cargo planes worth of cash, arming and training of untraceable rebel group activity to the obstruction, persecution and prosecution of those that attempt to correct these crimes, misadventures and moral reprehensions, Risen’s work is eye opening. It landed him in years of gov lawsuits as his sources were sought,… in your Land of the Free, and with your Free Speech, and your Freedom of the Press, and your Representative Government, and all of those non-existent mythologies.

WASHINGTON, DC – AUGUST 14: New York Times reporter James Risen (C), RootsAction.org co-founder Norman Solomon (L) and national security attorney Jesselyn Radack, who has NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden as a client, participate in a news conference where he and other journalists and journalism advocates talked about the Justice Department’s pursuit of Risen’s confidential sources at the National Press Club August 14, 2014 in Washington, DC. Risen could face jail or punshing fines for not revealing his source of classified information for his 2006 book that detailed the CIA’s efforts against Iran’s nuclear program. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)

*press excerpt from Huffington Post