"All the World's a Stage We Pass Through" R. Ayana

Showing posts with label homeland security. Show all posts
Showing posts with label homeland security. Show all posts

Thursday, 23 October 2014

The Blue Pill People: There are none so blind as those who will not look

The Blue Pill People
There are none so blind as those who will not look

 https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7319/11602800996_d90eeb59e4_k.jpg

By Hari Heath


There are none so blind as those who will not look. If you are one of those who will look, take a look around. You are surrounded -- surrounded by millions who will not look. These are the blue pill people. Who are these blue pill people and why won't they look?

“The Matrix” may be only a movie, but it presents some scenarios with much relevance to our current situation. In the movie, Neo meets Morpheus and is offered an opportunity and a choice. Neo can take the red pill and see the truth for himself, or he can take the blue pill and return, comfortably unaware, to the illusion of the Matrix. There he can live out his life undisturbed by the truth. The truth depicted in The Matrix is an extreme version of modern socialism.

In the futuristic scenario of the movie, a massive array of human beings are kept in self-contained pods that resemble artificial wombs. These “row-cropped” human entities are maintained in their pods, from their in vitro conception until they are no longer useful to the Artificial Intelligence (AI) entity. The AI entity needs certain things from these “humans” for its own sustenance, so it continuously breeds new human crops and extracts from them what it needs.

In return, the AI entity supplies the humans' needs with several permanent intravenous connections and a neural link. The neural link provides the pod-bound humans with a complete illusion -- the Matrix. In the AI-created illusion the humans have a normal life in a real world. In reality, however, the civilized world was destroyed some time ago and humans have been harvested as crops for the benefit of the Al entity ever since. The Matrix is a complete digital holographic type “world” created by the AI entity to mentally contain its human crops while it extracts what it needs from their pod-bound bodies.

 http://surrealparadigm.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/pill.jpg

In the movie, when Morpheus is about to offer Neo the choice between either the red pill or the blue pill, he explains:

“You're here because you know something. What you know you can't explain -- but you feel it. You've felt it your entire life; that there's something wrong with the world; you don't know what it is, but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad. It is this feeling that has brought you to me. Do you know what I'm talking about?”

“The Matrix,” Neo asks?

“Do you want to know what it is? The Matrix is everywhere, it is all around us. Even in this very room. You can see it when you look out your window or when you turn on your television. You can feel it when you go to work, when you go to church, when you pay your taxes; it is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.”

And Neo asks, “What truth?”

“That you are a slave Neo, like everyone else, you were born into bondage; born into a prison that you cannot smell or taste or touch; a prison for your mind. Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to experience it for yourself.”

Those few humans who were either born into reality, or have successfully taken the red pill, become the focus of the movie's story -- their attempts to destroy the Matrix and liberate the mass of humanity that lives completely encapsulated in their pods and the illusions fed to them by the powers that be -- powers that will go to any length to maintain the illusion.

Extreme, but not much different than our modern system of corporate government and capitalistic socialism. The governing powers need things from us, not the least of which is our consent. To obtain our consent we are fed all manner of benefits. We are programmed from an early age to believe that such benefits are necessary. To obtain these benefits, a number of conduits are attached to each of us. Adhesion contracts like Social Security, a driver's license; voter registration for a pretended choice of social masters, bank accounts where credit is manufactured for our use and other memberships, registrations, licenses, deeds and permits to insure the conduct of our affairs will be confined within the “matrix” of corporate governance.

We are given our own numbered “pod,” a social net provided by the government. Educated according to mandates of the state, our belief system is further cultured by corporate media.

There are various forms of “welfare” should we succumb to poverty or disease. If we are threatened or in danger we can call 911. Government's job of “securing” us is made easier by the massive database tracking our movements, our finances, the location of our homes and businesses and our tax records. When old age creeps up, we can rely on government to take care of us.

The corporate/government/financial interface combines to create a massive illusion of benefits -- the American dream. For the price of a promise to indebt our future labors, pay our taxes and play within the system, there are seemingly limitless toys, castles, comforts and consumables for those who believe in this Matrix. For half our productivity taken in taxes (the other half in payments) and the deeds and title to whatever we think we own, government and its private affiliates will take care of us.

To live in this Matrix, all we have to surrender is any genuine sense of independence, personal responsibility and our right to live freely and actually own the fruits of our labors.

And, like in the movie, a contingent of agents are deployed to combat any renegade humans who have a will for freedom from the Matrix which surrounds us.

As Morpheus expiained,

“The Matrix is a system Neo, and that system is our enemy. When you are inside, you look around, what do you see? Businessmen, teachers, lawyers, carpenters, the very minds we are trying to save. Until we do, these people are part of that system and that makes them our enemies. You have to understand that most of these people are not ready to be unplugged and many are so hopelessly dependent on the system, they'll fight to protect it.”

Why will blue pill people fight to protect a Matrix that enslaves them? It's all they know. And all their toys, castles, comforts and consumables will be gone without the Matrix. Their whole illusionary existence will evaporate, leaving them naked and alone.

What won't the blue pill people in our current “real” world look at? They refuse to acknowledge they are they are funding their enslavement to a socialist homeland police state. A few “red pill” people traveled to D.C. for an eloquent conclusion to Freedom Drive, exposing the fraud of the l6th Amendment, the IRS, and the federal income tax. But the blue pill people remained comfortably in their coma, ever willing to pay a tax they do not owe. They fund Congress and the Nazi/moron president's implementation of America's new Third Reich, so they can feel “secure.”

And, so the blue pill people can finally understand what really happened the morning of September 11, 2001, Henry Kissinger, the angel of death and global tyranny, will investigate the facts and tell us the blue-pill truth. Will Americans really believe the Doctor of genocide?

Hidden away on the 6th floor of the Department of Justice building is the secret FISA Court. U. S. attorneys have been going there for years to get secret search warrants from in-house, rubberstamp judges under the guise of “national security.” This parallel “legal” system can order clandestine searches of citizens' and non-citizens' homes. From the “evidence” gathered, we can be secretly declared “enemy combatants” and held indefinitely at U. S. military bases.

Remember the detainment camps those paranoid conspiracy theorists told you about years ago?

U.S. officials claim they can detain and interrogate enemy combatants until the executive branch declares an end to the war on terrorism. This includes no access to lawyers or family members; investigations, interrogations, trials and punishments can be held without the protections secured by the Constitution. The Nazi/moron president's administration says there is ample precedent for what it is doing. Are we following the “ample precedent” of a man named Hitler?

Meanwile, the Congress has passed the American Gestapo Authorization (Homeland Security) Act which defines a terrorist as:

“The term “terrorism' means any activity that -- involves an act that is dangerous to human life or potentially destructive of critical infrastructure or key resources; and is a violation of the criminal laws of the United States or of any State or other subdivision of the United States; and appears to be intended to intimidate or coerce a civilian population; to influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion; or to affect the conduct of a government by mass destruction, assassination, or kidnapping.”

As a test for social compliance, 838 blue pillers passed blissfully through an unconstitutional random roadblock in Pittsburgh without “seeing” the real “terrorists” in Homeland Security's new America -- the police state. Is our present police state “dangerous to human life” and “destructive of critical infrastructure” like the Bill of Rights? Is it “against the laws” (18 USC 241; 242) to deprive a citizen of their right to travel and be secure in their persons, houses, papers and effects? Do random roadblocks, by design, “intimidate or coerce a civilian population?” What happens if you don't comply with the roadblock?


The next test for blue pill compliance will be mass inoculations…. Will the blue pill population literally trample all over each other to get their shots as some officials predict? Has the vaccination “matrix” been so well entrenched in the blue pillers' minds that they will actually let mercury, monkey puss and aborted fetal tissue be injected under their skin based on an unproven theory that such things promote health and prevent disease?

And what greater “matrix” is there, than our current “fiat;' financial system? We “believe” that a piece of paper with the picture of a dead president has the value of the number printed on it and that one dead president is more valuable than another. We don't even consider that the use of this dead president paper is the direct cause of our own enslavement.

Have you ever seen your bank account? It's not there. Only the slight-of-hand practiced by the teller and the accountant behind the scenes makes this illusion look real to the blue pill people.

How deep does the rabbit hole go? Near the end of the movie, the Matrix's agent Smith acclaims the virtues of the Matrix to the captive red pill people's leader Morpheus:

“Have you ever stood and stared at it? Marveled at is beauty; its genius? Billions of people, just living out their lives -- oblivious.”

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Source: The Idaho Observer, 2001 



 
From The Information Clearing House @ http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/article1543.htm

For more information about the virtual reality matrix of human existence see http://nexusilluminati.blogspot.com/search/label/matrix   
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Tuesday, 27 March 2012

Orwell’s Startling World Is Officially Here

Orwell’s Startling World Is Officially Here





by Zen Gardner




The following quotes from “1984 should send shivers down anyones spine. Orwells work is mentioned frequently in the context of today’s society, and rightfully so. But do people realize just how incredibly exact these predictions are that are happening before our eyes?

Unfortunately it’s all, as in all, coming to pass, and then some. These few quotes from George Orwell’s predictive work will be an eye-opener to those who only have a cursory knowledge of the book and simply remember the Big Brother image and the control issue and accompanying paranoia.

That it was predicted so perfectly is still up for grabs. Was he privy to inside information? And if so, was he laying the groundwork for the future? Or was he blowing the whistle on what he’d found out while inside the Fabian Society with his predictive cohort Aldous Huxley?

Something is super fishy for sure, as always. Either way it’s happened.

Watch your mind fill in the blanks of just how today’s surveillance state has implemented these very control techniques that seemed like a far-fetched nightmare scenario years ago. Written in 1948 (hence the reverse 1984) in the sci-fi genre, it may just be the kind of wake up tool to use for those you’ve been trying to get through to. So called science fiction transcends the normal mind patterns and can elevate consciousness.

Any way you look at it, one cannot help but see this predictive programming fits like a glove for today’s dystopian world.

And that’s no mere coincidence.




 

Citizen Spies, Thoughtcrime and Disappearing People

 

 

The Department of Homeland Security, founded on the heels of a staged 9/11, opened the floodgates for surveilance and citizen spying. Here’s an allusion to the eventual consequences of just such paranoid, oppressive state control to start off the book.


Book One, Chapter 1


“Winston had disliked her from the very first moment of seeing her. He knew the reason. It was because of the atmosphere of hockey-fields and cold baths and community hikes and general clean-mindedness which she managed to carry about her. He disliked nearly all women, and especially the young and pretty ones, who were the most bigoted adherents of the party, the swallowers of slogans, the amateur spies and nosers-out of unorthodoxy.”

“The thought police would get him just the same. He had committed—would have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper—the essential crime that contained all others in itself. Thoughtcrime, they called it. Thoughtcrime was not a thing that could be concealed forever. You might dodge successfully for a while, even for years, but sooner or later they were bound to get you.”

“People simply disappeared, always during the night. Your name was removed from the registers, every record of everything you had ever done was wiped out, your one-time existence was denied and then forgotten. You were abolished, annihilated: vaporized was the usual word.”


 

Ministry of Truth, Thought Police, and Educational Indoctrination by the State

 

 

Government fully took over education decades ago, and for a reason. It’s a slow process to change people, but that is the tactic of the would-be controllers. This talks about the degradation of children, as we’re seeing today through dumbing down education, mandatory drugs and vaccines, adulterated food and an infected media.


Book One, Chapter 2


“Parsons was Winston’s fellow employee at the Ministry of Truth. He was a fattish but active man of paralyzing stupidity, a mass of imbecile enthusiasms—one of those completely unquestioning, devoted drudges on whom, more even than on the thought police, the stability of the Party depended.”

“Nearly all children nowadays were horrible. What was worst of all was that by means of such organizations as the Spies they were systematically turned into ungovernable little savages, and yet this produced in them no tendency whatever to rebel against the discipline of the Party. On the contrary, they adored the Party and everything connected with it… All their ferocity was turned outwards, against the enemies of the State, against foreigners, traitors, saboteurs, thought-criminals. It was almost normal for people over thirty to be frightened of their own children.”

“Thoughtcrime does not entail death: thoughtcrime is death.”


 

 

Rewritten History and Total Media Control

 

 

The centralized “ministry of truth” has not been realized until recently with only 6 mega corporations owning the mainstream media today. This, along with an iron grip on so-called academia, after generations of cultural amnesia, is a slam dunk.


Book One, Chapter 3


“If the Party could thrust its hand into the past and say this or that even, it never happened—that, surely, was more terrifying than mere torture and death.”

“And if all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed—if all records told the same tale—then the lie passed into history and became truth. ‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past.’”

“Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.”

 

Language Manipulation – Facecrime

 


Extremely profound. “Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.” That the world is based on heirarchy, dogma, self-identity paradigms and a false adherence to belief systems speaks for itself. To “narrow the range of thought”? Piece of cake.


Book One, Chapter 5


“Don’t you see that the whole aim of Newspeak is to narrow the range of thought?… Has it ever occurred to you, Winston, that by the year 2050, at the very latest, not a single human being will be alive who could understand such a conversation as we are having now?…The whole climate of thought will be different. In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness.”

– Syme


“It was terribly dangerous to let your thoughts wander when you were in any public place or within range of a telescreen. The smallest thing could give you away. A nervous tic, an unconscious look of anxiety, a habit of muttering to yourself—anything that carried with it the suggestion of abnormality, of having something to hide. In any case, to wear an improper expression on your face… was itself a punishable offense. There was even a word for it in Newspeak: facecrime…”

 

Surveillance of your Nervous System

 

 

This is very real, and coming down the pipe fast. Biometrics, pre-crime, implants, mind control devices, all in the mix. And it’s out in the open for all to see. Only they’ve gotten the public to marvel at it as scientific advancements instead of seeing them as the new caging and manipulative devices that they truly are.


Book One, Chapter 6


“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”

 

The People (Proles) are the Enemy – Keep them Unconscious

 

Same old story. Bread and circuses. “Numb down the masses, they might realize we’re farming them.”


Book One, Chapter 7


“If there was hope, it must lie in the proles, because only there, in those swarming disregarded masses, eighty-five percent of the population of Oceania, could the force to destroy the Party ever be generated.”

“Until they become conscious they will never rebel, and until after they have rebelled they cannot become conscious.” – referring to the proles.




Even “Loners” are Dangerous – “Ownlife” Will not be Tolerated


This is more in place than hardly anyone would be willing to realize. The actual poster excerpt above is real, and just a few items on their long list.


Book One, Chapter 8

“…to do anything that suggested a taste for solitude, even to go for a walk by yourself, was always slightly dangerous. There was a word for it in Newspeak: ownlife…”



True Science, False Choice and Unseen Controllers

How do most people conceptualize science? What they hear on the news. face it. “Oh, science has found that…”. No one investigates the findings. They do and think what they’re told.


Book Two, Chapter 9

“In Oceania at the present day, Science, in the old sense, has almost ceased to exist. In Newspeak there is no word for ‘Science.’ The empirical method of thought, on which all the scientific achievements of the past were founded, is opposed to the most fundamental principles of Ingsoc.”

“The citizen of Oceania is not allowed to know anything of the tenets of the other two philosophies, but he is taught to execrate them as barbarous outrages upon morality and common sense. Actually, the three philosophies are barely distinguishable…”

“Oceania has no capital, and its titular head is a person whose whereabouts nobody knows.”

“Sanity is not statistical.”



Separated by War in the Name of Unity



This is interesting. That yearning of humanity to feel connected is so strong, yet the political divisions imposed on them by controlling tribal leaders tells them otherwise. Fight, attack, destroy anything foreign to ourselves and our way of life, and maintain that state of continual war. All false stimuli.

Why?

An imposed fear of differences with a desire for commercial exploit for power and profit. And extermination of those native cultures who remember the true “Way”.

All these motives are anti-human and clearly for control.

Yet something still stirs within the human heart.


Book Two, Chapter 10

“It was curious to think that the sky was the same for everybody, in Eurasia or Eastasia as well as here. And the people under the sky were also very much the same—everywhere, all over the world, hundreds or thousands of millions of people just like this, people ignorant of one another’s existence, held apart by walls of hatred and lies, and yet almost exactly the same—people who had never learned to think but were storing up in their hearts and bellies and muscles the power that would one day overturn the world.”


Let’s Hope So

The dystopian nature of today’s world becomes eerily apparent in those few quotations. The hope that humanity would some day throw off the chains of such Machiavellian control has echoed down through history. Whether that too is just a release valve given or allowed by these iron-fisted controllers is something to consider.

Are we being so played that even our hopes and aspirations are being channeled into impotence?

Religion is one such manifestation of that. The hope of a future that billions pray for but do little to realize besides be a better slave of the state is a pretty clever ploy. Politics is another clear example, illusion of freedom and choice to pacify the masses.



Who Will Open Their Eyes?

Are we willing to stand back and see the picture of the world for what it really is?

Or would that require actions on our part we’re too entrained against and thus intimidated from doing? Has humanity been too placated to protect its own family from suffocation?

Where is the courage? Or is humanity just too afraid to stand up to its executioners, even though they are an infinitesimal minority.

Time will tell.

But time in this physical reality waits for no man. What’s in motion will not stop until something changes its course or stops it all together.

Will you put your shoulder to the wheel? Something to seriously consider.

I guarantee you… if you’re willing to see the world for what it really is, you will do something…and fast!

Otherwise you are not really seeing it.

Love, Zen


From http://www.zengardner.com/censorship-2/orwells-startling-world-is-officially-here/





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Tuesday, 14 December 2010

The United States of Fear

The United States of Fear

The National Security State Cops a Feel: Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)

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It's finally coming into focus, and it's not even a difficult equation to grasp. It goes like this: take a country in the grips of an expanding national security state and sooner or later your "safety" will mean your humiliation, your degradation. And by the way, it will mean the degradation of your country, too.
Just ask Rolando Negrin, a Transportation Security Administration (TSA) screener who passed through one of those new "whole body image" scanners last May as part of his training for airport security. His co-workers claimed to have gotten a look at his "junk" and mocked him mercilessly, evidently repeatedly asking, "What size are you?" and referring to him as "little angry man." In the end, calling it "psychological torture," he insisted that he snapped, which in his case meant that he went after a co-worker, baton first, demanding an apology.
Consider that a little parable about just how low this country has sunk, how psychologically insecure we've become while supposedly guarding ourselves against global danger.
There is no question that, at the height of Cold War hysteria, when superpower nuclear arsenals were out of this world and the planet seemed a hair-trigger from destruction, big and small penises were in play, symbolically speaking. Only now, however, facing a ragtag set of fanatics and terrorists – not a mighty nation but a puny crew – are those penises perfectly real and, potentially, completely humiliating.
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Failed Bombs Do the Job
We live, it seems, in a national security "homeland" of little angry bureaucrats who couldn't be happier to define what "safety" means for you and big self-satisfied officials who can duck the application of those safety methods. Your government can now come up with any wacky solution to American "security" and you'll pay the price. One guy brings a failed shoe bomb on an airplane, and you're suddenly in your socks. Word has it that bombs can be mixed from liquids in airplane bathrooms, and there go your bottled drinks. A youthful idiot flies toward Detroit with an ill-constructed bomb in his underwear, and suddenly they're taking naked scans of you or threatening to grope your junk.
Two bombs don't go off in the cargo holds of two planes and all of a sudden sending things around the world threatens to become more problematic and expensive. Each time, the price of "safety" rises and some set of lucky corporations, along with the lobbyists and politicians that support them, get a windfall. In each case, the terror tactic (at least in the normal sense) failed; in each case, the already draconian standards for our security were ratcheted up, while yet more money was poured into new technology and human reinforcements, which may, in the end, cause more disruption than any successful terror attack.
Directly or indirectly, you pay for the screeners and scanners and a labyrinthine intelligence bureaucracy that officially wields an $80 billion budget, and all the lobbyists and shysters and pitchmen who accompany our burgeoning homeland-security complex. And by the way, no one's the slightest bit nice about it either, which isn't surprising since it's a national security state we're talking about, which means its mentality is punitive. It wants to lock you down, quietly and with full acquiescence if possible. Offer some trouble, though, or step out of line, and you'll be hit with a $10,000 fine or maybe put in cuffs. It's all for your safety, and fortunately they have a set of the most inept terror plots in history to prove their point.
By now, who hasn't written about the airport "porno-scans," the crotch gropes and breast jobs, the "don't touch my junk" uproar, the growing lines, and the exceedingly modest protests on the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, not to speak of the indignity of it all?
Totally been there, completely done that; totally written about, fully read. Shouldn't we move on?
http://lefttochance.com/wp-content/plugins/wp-o-matic/cache/29205_airport_x-ray_scanner_sexy_woman_naked.jpg
Taking Off the Gloves (and Then Everything Else)
And yet there are a few dots that still need to be connected. After all, since the beginning of George W. Bush's second term, Americans have been remarkably quiet when it comes to the national security disasters being perpetuated in their name. America's wars, its soaring Pentagon budgets, its billion-dollar military bases, its giant new citadels still called embassies but actually regional command centers, its ever-escalating CIA drone war along the Pakistani tribal borderlands, the ever-expanding surveillance at home, and the incessant "night raids" and home razings thousands of miles away in Afghanistan, not to speak of Washington's stimulus-package spending in its war zones have caused no more than the mildest ripple of protest, much less genuine indignation, in this country in years.
American "safety" has, in every case, trumped outrage. Now, for the first time in years, the oppressiveness of a national security state bent on locking down American life has actually gotten to some Americans. No flags are yet flying over mass protests with "Don't Scan on Me" emblazoned on them. Still, the idea that air travel may now mean a choice between a spritz of radiation and a sorta naked snapshot or – thrilling option B – having some overworked, overaggressive TSA agent grope you has caused outrage, at least among a minority of Americans, amid administration confusion. (If you want evidence that Hillary Clinton is considering a run for president in 2012, check out what she had to say about her lack of eagerness to be patted down at the airport.)
Local authorities have threatened to bring sexual battery charges against TSA agents who step over the line in pat-downs. Some legislators are denouncing the TSA's new security plans. Ron Paul has introduced the American Travel Dignity Act. And good for them all.
But here's the thing: in our deluded state, Americans don't tend to connect what we're doing to others abroad and what we're doing to ourselves at home. We refuse to see that the trillion or more dollars that continue to go into the Pentagon, the U.S. Intelligence Community, and the national security state yearly, as well as the stalemated or losing wars Washington insists on fighting in distant lands, have anything to do with the near collapse of the American economy, job-devastation at home, or any of the other disasters of our American age.
As a result, those porno-scanners and enhanced pat-downs are indignities without a cause – except, of course, for those terrorists who keep launching their bizarre plots to take down our planes. And yet whatever inconvenience, embarrassment, or humiliation you suffer in an airport shouldn't be thought of as something the terrorists have done to us.
It's what the American national security state that we've quietly accepted demands of its subjects, based on the idea that no degree of danger from a terrorist attack, however infinitesimal, is acceptable. (When it comes to genuine safety, anything close to that principle is absent from other aspects of American life where – from eating to driving, to drinking, to workinggenuine danger exists and genuine damage is regularly done.)
We now live not just with all the usual fears that life has to offer, but in something like a United States of Fear.
So think of it as an irony that, when George W. Bush and his cronies decided to sally forth and smite the Greater Middle East, they exulted that they were finally "taking the gloves off." And so they were: aggressive war, torture, abuse, secret imprisonment, souped-up surveillance, slaughter, drone wars, there was no end to it.
When those gloves came off, other people suffered first. But wasn't it predictable – since unsuccessful wars have a nasty habit of coming home – that, in the end, other things would come off, and sooner or later they would be on you: your hat, your shoes, your belt, your clothes, and of course, your job, your world?
And don't for a second think that it's going to end here. What happens when the first terrorist with a suppository bomb is found aboard one of our planes? After all, such weapons already exist. In the meantime, the imposition of more draconian safety and security methods is, of course, being considered for buses, trains, and boats. Can trucks, taxis, cars, and bikes be far behind? After all, once begun, there can, by definition, be no end to the search for perfect security.
You Wanna Be Safer? Really?
You must have a friend who's extremely critical of everyone else but utterly opaque when it comes to himself. Well, that's this country, too.
Here's a singular fact to absorb: we now know that a bunch of Yemeni al-Qaeda adherents have a far better hit on just who we are, psychologically speaking, and what makes us tick than we do. Imagine that. They have a more accurate profile of us than our leading intelligence profilers undoubtedly do of them.
Recently, they released an online magazine laying out just how much the two U.S.-bound cargo-bay bombs that caused panic cost them: a mere $4,200 and the efforts of "less than six brothers" over three months. They even gave their plot a name, Operation Hemorrhage (and what they imagined hemorrhaging, it seems, was not American blood, but treasure).
Now, they're laughing at us for claiming the operation failed because – thanks reportedly to a tip from Saudi intelligence – those bombs didn't go off. "This supposedly 'foiled plot,'" they wrote, "will without a doubt cost America and other Western countries billions of dollars in new security measures. That is what we call leverage."
They are, they claim, planning to use the "security phobia that is sweeping America" not to cause major casualties, but to blow a hole in the U.S. economy. "We knew that cargo planes are staffed by only a pilot and a co-pilot, so our objective was not to cause maximum casualties but to cause maximum losses to the American economy" via the multi-billion-dollar U.S. freight industry.
This is a new definition of asymmetrical warfare. The terrorists never have to strike an actual target. It's not even incumbent upon them to build a bomb that works. Just about anything will do. To be successful, they just have to repeatedly send things in our direction, inciting the expectable Pavlovian reaction from the U.S. national security state, causing it to further tighten its grip (grope?) at yet greater taxpayer expense.
In a sense, both the American national security state and al-Qaeda are building their strength and prestige as our lives grow more constrained and our treasure vanishes.
So you wanna be safer? I mean, actually safer? Here's a simple formula for beginning to improve American safety and security at every level. End our trillion dollar wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; set our military to defending our own borders (and no, projecting power abroad does not normally qualify as a defense of the United States); begin to shut down our global empire of bases; stop building grotesque embassy-citadels abroad (one even has a decorative moat, for god's sake!); end our overseas war stimulus packages and bring some of that money home. In short, stop going out of our way to tick off foreigners and then pouring our treasure into an American war machine intent on pursuing a generational global war against them.


Of course, the U.S. national security state has quite a different formula for engendering safety in America: fight the Afghan War until hell freezes over; keep the odd base or two in Iraq; dig into the Persian Gulf region; send U.S. Special Operations troops into any country where a terrorist might possibly lurk; and make sure the drones aren't far behind. In other words, reinforce our war state by ensuring that we're eternally in a state of war, and then scare the hell out of Americans by repeatedly insisting that we're in imminent danger, that shoe, underwear, and someday butt bombers will destroy our country, our lives, and our civilization. Insist that a single percent of risk is 1% too much when it comes to terror and American lives, and then demand that those who feel otherwise be dealt with punitively, if they won't shut up.
It's a formula for leaving you naked in airports, while increasing the oppressive power of the state. And here's the dirty, little, distinctly Orwellian secret: the national security state can't do without those Yemeni terrorists (and vice versa), as well as our homegrown variety. All of them profit from a world of war. You don't – and on that score, what happens in an airport line should be the least of your worries.
The national security state is eager to cop a feel. As long as Americans don't grasp the connections between our war state and our "safety," things will only get worse and, in the end, our world will genuinely be in danger.

Tom Engelhardt [send him mail] co-founder of the Nation Institute's TomDispatch.com, is the co-founder of the American Empire Project. His book, The End of Victory Culture, has recently been updated in a newly issued edition. He edited, and his work appears in, the first best of TomDispatch book, The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso), an alternative history of the mad Bush years. His new book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s.
Copyright © 2010 Tom Engelhardt
Via Lew Rockwell.com @ http://www.lewrockwell.com/engelhardt/engelhardt411.html?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter
December 2, 2010

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