A year ago i would have laughed........

[Mega]

http://lewrockwell.com/wenzel/wenzel154.html
Not now.
Mike

[wayiwalk]

Re: A year ago i would have laughed........

Almost enough to WANT to keep our military at its present size and more importantly, overseas....I mean, what the heck kind of work will half a million ex servicemen going to find on short notice unless the feds hire them for.....something

[davidstvz]

Re: A year ago i would have laughed........

I would have laughed as well. Even 3 months ago. I saw the erosions of liberty, but I didn't see any overarching purpose to it. It just seemed like a stupid but natural fear response to 9-11. When I think back to how I got to the point of agreeing with your opinion, I'm amazed. It was an incredible amount of work and luck. We're still surrounded by masses that don't have the faintest clue of the danger we are in.

In August my little brother (an underemployed college grad living with my parents) sent me a link to an old video of Bill Stills (Money as Debt). I later found The Secret of Oz and bought some gold and silver (with no real idea of what I was doing). Suddenly I owned my first investment and was looking to reassure myself that it was a wise one. I also had an increased respect for the potential of some conspiracy theories to be disturbingly plausible. At about the same time I was moving after seven years in a rental, and that caused me to realize that storing and moving paper books is a major pain and expense. I picked up a Kindle to save space (more than money) and *that* unexpectedly allowed me to make impulsive book purchases. I picked up Aftershock (2nd ed.) and after reading it, I decided to pick up their previous book (America's Bubble Economy) and found it to be largely the same book. The outstanding difference was EJ's chapter on gold. Based on the quality of that, I picked up EJ's book and despite the relatively optimistic outlook, that convinced me that peak oil wasn't some distant problem, but an immediate threat. After a couple of months frantically reading many, many things on the Internet and some more books (The End of Growth), I now have a growing conviction that peak oil is in the driver's seat. Every major political event in the last 10 years, perhaps the last 30, potentially revolves around that.

Financialization is a convenient way for us to get cheap oil and use up prodigious amount of it, draining the rest of the world's resources. Out-sourcing of jobs places a further burden on external resources and further impoverishes Americans ensuring a slow and steady decline (necessary for avoiding a revolution). September 11th provided the pretext for growing the police state even more than the ongoing War on Drugs had allowed by itself. Finally, if we don't maintain a steady stream of oil, that will create the conditions necessary to really ramp up the police state in order to maintain the lifestyle and security of the really wealthy.

If you want to be even more terrified, read the book "Crazy". It's a pre-crisis book (2007) about our incredibly dysfunctional mental health system. Reading it, you will learn how mentally ill people bounce between prisons and mental institutions repeatedly being unfit to stand trial and are thus locked up indefinitely just as surely as someone accused of terrorism could be. The only thing needed to make use of this in the service of tyranny are some psychiatrists who feel sufficiently threatened (or rewarded) for declaring sane people insane.

I sure hope that the lure of knowing the future and being aware of secret conspiracies has just driven me off the deep end. That would be far preferable to any of this being true.

[LorenS]

Re: A year ago i would have laughed........

What if Shindler had packed his bags and left?

What if Bonhoeffer had slipped quietly away?

[LorenS]

Re: A year ago i would have laughed........

Any society, any government is susceptible to being corrupted. The only "good" society is a society of good people. Sure there are mechanisms that give the bad folks more power, but overall, you're never safe unless you're in good company.

The bulk of the "cost" of an expensive house is the perception you're buying good neighbors, or at least neighbors who won't rob and strangle you.

[cjppjc]

Re: A year ago i would have laughed........

Any society, any government is susceptible to being corrupted. The only "good" society is a society of good people. Sure there are mechanisms that give the bad folks more power, but overall, you're never safe unless you're in good company.

Very well said. Or to put it another way, Can I be corrupted?