Doug Casey On What Happens After The Next 9/11

Authored by Doug Casey via InternationalMan.com,

Is a police state in the US possible? Absolutely.

That’s because people are essentially the same the world over, regardless of their culture, religion, race, or what-have-you. A certain percentage of them are sociopaths.

There is a standard distribution of sociopaths across time and space. It’s a function of Pareto’s Law, better known as the 80-20 rule. 20% of the people do 80% of the work. Another 20% are responsible for 80% of the crime. 20% of the population always winds up with 80% of the wealth. And so forth, through all areas of human endeavor. This observation can be represented by a bell-shaped curve—a “standard distribution”—with a small minority at each extreme, but the large majority in the middle. The people who will take us to a police state are sociopaths—criminal personalities who don’t respect the liberty or property of others. And sociopaths gravitate towards government, and eventually come to control it.

My view is that 80% of human beings are basically decent, get along, go along types. 20% are what you might call potential trouble sources, that can go either way. But then you take 20% of that 20% and you’re dealing with the sociopaths.

When social conditions reach a certain stage these really bad guys come out from under their rocks and take advantage of the situation. We’re seeing that right now in the US, across the political spectrum. Just as we’ve seen in the past in hundreds of places throughout history.

A major tipping point occurred sixteen years ago, on September 11, 2001, with the attacks in New York and Washington. They were disastrous. But not nearly as disastrous as the government’s reaction to them.

Among them the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. Anybody that speaks German knows that a reasonable translation of Homeland Security is Geheime Staatspolizei, which is usually abbreviated to Gestapo. Anybody that goes through airline security these days should ask themselves, “Where the hell did they find these people? Didn’t they have jobs before they went to work for this moronic agency?” The answer is that there are people out there who like wearing costumes, are willing to boss, herd, interrogate, and go through the dirty laundry of their fellow citizens. They take their jobs seriously and you better not even look at them sideways. There’s no reason to believe it’s going to get better as they groove into their jobs, and their employer cements itself into place. More likely the trend will accelerate.

Is America currently a police state? Well, let’s see. You can still get in your car and go anywhere, although you might be stopped by the police and you might be detained if your papers aren’t in order. Or the officer thinks you’re not properly respectful. Or you have “too much” cash.

Was there any particular day that Germany became a police state in the 1930s? I’m not sure you can put your finger on any one particular day, even after Hitler was legally and democratically elected. It was a progression, with new laws, new regulations, new taxes every day. While more fear and hysteria were worked up among the populace. Kristallnacht didn’t occur the day after the National Socialists took power.

It’s a case of the frog being put in a kettle of water where the temperature is gradually raised to a boil. That’s what’s occurring in the US. After 9/11, in addition to Homeland Security, we got the Patriot Act, with, among other things, its suspension of habeas corpus. That means that the government can lock anybody up for any reason and not even have to tell them why. Accuse them of being an “enemy combatant”—a neologism that justifies anything, and is robotically and thoughtlessly accepted by Boobus americanus—and anything is possible. Including a trip to a CIA black site in some Third World hellhole. This is something I thought was settled in Western Civilization with the Magna Carta and King John. But we’re going backwards in most areas of personal freedom. And America, of all places, is leading the way—even while falling behind economically.

I don’t know if I can put my finger on exactly when we’re going to go over the edge, but if I was going to guess I would think the real catalyst is going to be the next 9/11-type event. And I don’t doubt it’s going to happen.

How are we any different than the Germans in the 1930s? This was one of the most civilized, best educated countries in Europe and they fell into the abyss. I suppose we’re a bit different. Americans are addicted to welfare, anti-depressant drugs, food, and electronic devices. That should certainly give us a better outcome…

There’s a joke I like to tell. Let me ask you this: Which is the gravest danger? Is it the ignorance, or is it the apathy of the average American today? Stumped? Here’s the answer: I don’t know and I don’t care.

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When we do tumble over the political edge—which will likely happen sooner rather than later—complete economic collapse is sure to follow. That’s why we’re sharing our field guide to Surviving and Thriving During an Economic Collapse. Click here to download your free PDF copy now.

 

When the Enemy of Your Enemy Is — Your Enemy

Ideas and values should matter more than tribal identity.

(snip)

Unfortunately, many conservatives have embraced this sort of binary thinking: If it angers the Left, it must be virtuous. Undoubtedly, that’s a crude shorthand for political thinking. It means you never have to check the ideas of the speaker, you merely have to check how people respond to him.

That’s dangerous. It leads to supporting bad policies and bad men. The enemy of your enemy isn’t always your friend. Sometimes he’s your enemy. Sometimes he’s just a dude sitting there minding his own business.

You don’t have enough information to know. The logic of “if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us” actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’ friends. It gets to choose whom we support. This isn’t speculative. It happened during the 2016 primaries, when the media attacked Trump incessantly, driving Republicans into his outstretched arms. The media’s obvious hatred for Trump was one of the chief arguments for Trump from his advocates: If, as his detractors claimed, he wasn’t conservative, then why would the leftist media hate him so much?

The logic of ‘if he melts snowflakes, he’s one of us’ actually hands power to the Left, by allowing leftists to define conservatives’ friends. To be fair, after Mitt Romney’s bludgeoning at the hands of the media, there was at least a shred of justification for this logic. Romney wasn’t a hard-core conservative, wasn’t a personal shambles, and got savaged by the media anyway, simply for the sin of having an R after his name. The same happened to John McCain, a “maverick” Republican the leftist media had openly pushed for years. If the media opposed Trump with all their heart and all their soul, that must have been some sort of reaction to Trump himself.

It wasn’t, though. It was a combination of factors, including the fact that Trump was amazing press and the press thought Trump an unusually weak candidate. More-honest leftist commentators openly preferred Trump to more-conservative candidates such as Ted Cruz or Marco Rubio.

But Trump’s war with the media carried him to the nomination, and from there to the presidency.

In fact, Trump continues to live off of this backward logic. His press conference last week was no ballet of informational expertise and policy knowledge, nor was it a brilliant recasting of his policy successes. It was a blunderbuss attack on the media, entertaining in the extreme, occasionally daft, occasionally ridiculous. Yet many on the right immediately concluded that it was the most successful press conference in world history, not because it was successful with Americans per se — there was no evidence of that — but because it was a successful assault on the media, who had it coming.

Never mind if Trump lied to the media. They were angry. That showed it worked. Watching Chuck Todd fulminate and Chris Wallace rage and Don Lemon bemusedly tut-tut scratched conservatives where they itch — and it made Trump a hero.

None of this is to argue that Trump is a leftist or that conservatives are wrong to support many of his policy prescriptions. But if your standard of right and wrong is whether the Left hates it, you’re making a category error.

It’s not good enough to just be opposed by the Left – you must actually oppose the Left. We must ask what someone is fighting against, not merely whom. We must ask what tools they’re using — and we must insist they use the truth. Ideas and values matter more than identity.

But not anymore. The Left’s identity politics is focused on racial, ethnic, and sexual identity — aspects of identity that place you somewhere in the hierarchy of intersectionality. The Right’s identity politics comes with a label: enemy of the Left. So long as you’re wearing that button, you’re presumptively on our side and you’re nearly bulletproof.

Until it turns out that you’re not. Until we jump the wrong way because we substituted political laziness for a philosophy. Until we embrace somebody nasty because the other side hated him or her and stop caring about truth so long as the other side is triggered.

Then we become the bad guys. And that’s a problem.

Read more at National Review

New Cold War with a different enemy

As all the alarm bells ring continuously that the Russian Federation is the cause for the latest cold war, the actual risk for a hot conflict or an intentional brinkmanship of worldwide proportions should focus on the real enemy of humanity. The Brexit campaign was about more than just leaving the European Union.  Likewise, the Trump movement is about a great deal more than just keeping Hillary Clinton from the oval office. Formerly the nation-state was the organizational format for government. Europe emerged from the dark ages to carve out kingships and spend centuries of warring with mostly bloodline relatives. When the bonds of feudalism loosened and economic advancement expanded the enlightenment of human thinking altered the political landscape. Notions of democratic principles germinated into ushering aside Kaisers, Czars and Kings. The popular vote in a strange ritual came to be known as an election, was culturally adopted as registering the popular will of the people.

Oh, what a charming fairy tale, if only folks could really live happily ever after. What is missing from this Grimm’s’ fable is that the planet has never been ruled by benevolent government. Often the officials that administer the institutions of the state are not the real power. If you have the intellectual courage to face the way the world actually operates, clear your mind from all the false narratives that want people to accept that there are good political regimes that need to prevail against oppressive authorities.

Indeed, this game does not fly. At the root of the never-ending conflict that has enslaved mankind from the days when Cain killed Abel, the forces or coercion has dominated political affairs. At last, excuses of blindness do not apply. The lines between complete world subjugation and a reprieve from the edge of insanity have presented itself.

The Economic Nationalism: Alternative to Globalism makes the following point, “Globalism is on the precipice of a world-wide implosion. The danger is not just a planetary economic depression, but an intentional political crisis that will demand even more control and loss of access to meaningful commerce.”

Money in whatever form that can be manipulated best runs the skids of collectivist control for all the naïve populations that delude themselves into accepting this totalitarian paradigm. In spite of this, ordinary oppressed citizens can advance the collapse of the unambiguous controllers for this incessant dialect for unending war fever.

The once secretive elites of financial domination want people to believe they are so confident in their power command that they can go public with their announced plan to kill the populist dragon. Actually, they are desperate to keep a lid on their cryptic matrix, because the truth be told, only a destructive global war can save their financial house of cards.

With all the press from the beautiful people gathering at the World Economic Forum in Davos you get the opposite side of the blue blood Bilderberg coin from the counterfeit mega-rich. So when Reuters reports that the World’s eight richest as wealthy as half humanity, Oxfam tells Davos, just ask; how did they accumulate all this absurdly disproportionate disparity?

Hey, in the age of digital technology, the art of price fixing and monopoly preeminence has allowed the alchemy moneychangers to literally print their immense return even quicker than compound interest. When currency and equity transactions can generate ill-gotten gains for the privileged of all elites you know that the Rothschild architecture for financial captivity has done very, very well.

Remember all the financial institutions for bankster management of the billions of serfs; reside in their World Bank, International Monetary Fund, Central Banks and the Bank of International Settlement. In layman’s terms this is the heart of the New World Order. This system of autocratic domination forms the marrow of the established international community. People are expendable, but their interlocking of mutual authoritarian interests must prevail.

So it comes as no surprise that In Davos, Xi makes case for Chinese leadership role: “In the first appearance by a Chinese leader at the annual meeting of political leaders, CEOs and bankers in the Swiss Alps, Xi also cautioned other countries against blindly pursuing their national interests, in an apparent reference to the “America first” policies of Donald Trump.”

China has always been the darling of the globalists. The entire Free Trade swindle was maximized under the Red Chinese Communists. It is the preferred model upon which national independence can be exterminated.

Back in the U.S.A., the parasites within government are working overtime to retain their influence as the Trump administration starts taking their turn at taming the establishment bureaucracy. With the appointment of seasoned Wall Street insiders, the prospect of reinventing the monetary system is doubtful.

The fate of Trump prosperity relies upon preventing a staged collapse. Being at the mercy of algorithm computerized shorting as the central bank holds hostage the money supply might forecast that a successful national restoration would be so difficult that the global financial system will just continue to dominate over the common folks.

Still, the restless sentiments within the European Union countries may well erupt into a dramatic renunciation of the EU technocrats. Can the money mongers risk a continental uprising when one of their favored distractions can be used to keep the printing presses running at a fevered pace?

The munitions merchants that played such an important role to keep WWI going have transformed into vast corporatist defense contractors who are most proficient at travelling the revolving door circuit. War, whether real of imaginary is a sure profit center.

The difference in the 21^st century is that European countries are not defended by large standing armies nor do they want to disturb their commercial cash flow. Into this mix, China represents the biggest threat to any nation, who wants to survive as an independent cultural and commercial entity.

The alliance between the EU globalists and the Chi-Coms is a union made in hell. Keeping the corporatist cartel a competitive completion free zone is reason enough to gin up a new cold war. After all, if the prognoses that the stability and fortunes of your own nation are profoundly threatened, should not a country understand their real enemy?

Hey, the multi-billionaire elites buy their way into political influence. So why should they be concerned about all the billions of peons when they are sterilized from consummating any profound retaliation? Just threaten them with an economic depression or a nuclear winter and the unruly will grovel to get back in line.

The best way to keep the fearful and insecure in their prison of despair and apathy is to nip in the bud the animal spirits that start to unleash when measurable successes from national pride and independence spread.

Capitalizing on scaring people into thinking a frosty fight is eminent is like pumping up the fright that global warming will melt the world’s ice caps. Sorry, this new cold war is being marketed as keeping people in the dark. No sunlight is allowed to shine upon the international climate change of commercial corporatist extortion.

Every American has an economic self-interest in eliminating the U.S. trade deficit. The many decades of China’s unscrupulous imbalance in trade practices has fueled the globalist shakedown racket. Now that the Trump Nation is pushing back, the fake news from the mainstream media controlled by the globalists preaches their free trade financial Judgment Day scenario.

With all the Chinese acquisitions of Hollywood film enterprises, it will not be long before the brainwashing messages will script the Red Commies as the savior to our America First nationalism.

The fifth column within our own borders and all the damage from Bill Clinton’s surrendering of military missile technology has added to the threat from mainland China. The globalists need a new protector, even if it means bringing the doomsday clock to almost midnight.

Abandoning the TPP is a clarion call to go much further. It is long overdue to withdraw from the World Trade Organization. Globalism Destroys America: 10 Reasons Why The World Trade Organization Is Bad For The United States Economy demonstrates that reason or common sense does not exist within the establishment elites. “The vast majority of our politicians are 100 percent behind this system which is designed to deindustrialize the United States, ship our jobs overseas and substantially lower our standard of living.”

The globalist demand that America must continue the same failed policies of the last half century is a bluff to swallow our diminished place in the world. Trump voters know better. It’s only the economic illiterates or the corporatist lackeys that panic about taking on China or International Finance.

When the Democrat Senate knuckle draggers cease their obstruction, Trump’s commerce team will prove that the world wants to trade with the U.S. under fair and mutually beneficial terms.

The globalists have already been waging war on America. One day people will get so mad that the small group of oligarchs and plutocrats will not be safe on their island retreats of underground bunkers. Maybe then they will feel the chill from their Davos carnage.

Via BATR

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