Out of control, again

After reading this, the idea that a conspiratorial
group is in control of any economy is ludicrous...or
anyone else, for that matter.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) -
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told
France's Finance Minister Thierry Breton the
United States has "lost control" of its budget
deficit, the French minister said on Saturday.

"'We have lost control,' that was his
expression," Breton told reporters after a
bilateral meeting with Greenspan.

"The United States has lost control of their
budget at a time when racking up deficits has
been authorized without any control (from
Congress)," Breton said.

"We were both disappointed that the management
of debt is not a political priority today," he
added.

Full story.

Befuddled, bewitched and bewildered

Calling for a global currency A year ago, former
U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker told
WorldNetDaily: "A new mechanism was needed for
the world financial system" and that "in a
globalized world, we should have an international
currency."

Already done. Defacto. The planet is papered with
dollars.

Dumb sumbitch doesn't get out much, does he.

Bankers are idiots but if you think he's just
following orders, doesn't that just add another
group of idiots with him as their spokesman?

Read.

--This has been another Zombie Alert brought to you by jomama.

Time for a new game. One without a ball

Steiger's Law:

"People in a very good structure spend 85% of
their time and energy maintaining the structure
and only about 15% working towards its stated
goals."

Corollary to Steiger's Law (L. Reichard White)

"People within a structure divorced from
market forces will expend more time and
energy defending it than can economically be
spent by people outside the structure attempting
to modify or eliminate it."

The corollary applies to taxpayer funded or
other handsomely funded organizations like the
AMA along with a whole host of other professional
organizations.

The power of the consumer, in this case, to just
say "No" is not a factor. This acts as a great
lead weight on the evolutionary process.

The Quantum Vacuum - Part III - Paradigm Shift

In fact, despite all the positive attributes of
the rapidly developing technologies, massive
resistance is almost guaranteed. There is a
fundamental resistance to change, what Eric
Hoffer termed The Ordeal of Change. Add to this
inbred resistance to change, the enormous power
of vested interests to maintain the status quo at
all costs, and one has the ultimate bifurcation
point. From stability and near equilibrium,
spontaneous events will be proceeding to chaos
and, eventually, to a new, unknowable re-
organization. It may not be pretty, but it’s
going to be exciting!

After reading that you probably thought it's a
rendering of what happens to government at some
bifurcation point.

No, this is all about the coming unlimited energy
tapped from the quantum vacuum.

When (not if) that happens, everything will be
stood on its head, including our way of living.

Think about it.

Full article.
(Note: I had to disable java in Firefox to keep
some of the pages on this site from hanging.)

This site is going in the links section on the side
(bottom in IE) panel under "Tapping the quantum
vacuum". It's huge.

The disappearing political machine

We take it for granted that political parties
are vital to modern political life. They have
shaped representative democracies since the late
19th century. Yet, their prospects are not bright
in today’s large democracies. In fact, these
powerful political machines may soon disappear.

Of course many will disagree, wrapped as tightly
as they are to one political view or other.

I don't.

You probably heard this here first.

Read.

Update:

See what I mean?

"The debate here is not between Democrats and
Republicans but between those who favor
regulating and those who don't," Ney said at last
week's hearing. "I'm supportive along the lines
of not regulating."

Read.

British SAS caught in the act

It seems, if one does not have enough enemies,
one makes them. SAS operatives caught attacking
in Arab garb in Basra.

But that's the prime mover of power. Its job is
creating new enemies.

That is also true for all institutions divorced
from market forces. More on that later.

Read.

Support your local Grinch

"The monstrous evils of the twentieth century
have shown us that the greediest money grubbers
are gentle doves compared with money-hating
wolves like Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler, who in
less than three decades killed or maimed nearly a
hundred million men, women, and children and
brought untold suffering to a large portion of
mankind." -- Eric Hoffer

...and Stalin was the worst of all.

In one of the recent comment sections here,
Viscount LaCarte objected to the use of the word
"collectivist". He apparently wasn't aware of the
existence of three of the world's exemplary
collectivists mentioned by Hoffer.

He was also unaware of how important "greed" is/was
in the exposure of these and many more masters of
death.

Support your local Grinch in the fight against
democide.

--This Zombie Alert brought to you by just plain jomama.

I owe, I owe, it's off to work I go

An equal opportunity basher writes...

How can you spend $286.5 billion dollars if your
account is already overdrawn by over $7.9
trillion? In the case of these inept, ignorant
and cowardly members of Congress, they simply
continue to borrow away your children and
grandchildren's future. Actually, our children
and grandchildren have no future except financial
bondage to the international banking cartel.

It was putrid when Clinton was in office and the
ignorant media lap dogs – as well as duplicitous
members of Congress – declared there was a
surplus. Such a fat lie was never challenged
properly. By the time that national disgrace left
office, the "national" debt in 2000 was over $5.6
trillion. How do you have a surplus when you're
over $5.6 trillion dollars in the hole?

The same applies for Bush and it has nothing to
do with his endless "war on terrorism." Right
now, every man, woman and baby in this country
each owes the international banking cartel
$145,000 with the interest compounding every day.
Is anyone beginning to see the swindle going on
here?

Odd kind of bi-partisan Communist/Capitalist/Fascism
going on here. What does that say for those three
old definitions and political parties?

Gone. They come tutti-frutti now.

So here I'm gonna say it again.

Do you honestly think Your Very Special Pol,
elected and governing, will change anything?

Who or what did I leave out here?

Just the suckers.

Oh, sorry, it's a swindle.

So much for the free market, what your pols in the
uS say you have.

Read.

Government buying?

Who would be foolish enough to buy up the shares
and debt of struggling Delta Air Lines and
Northwest Airlines? Some of the smartest
investors on Wall Street, that's who.

In recent months, hedge funds including Ziff
Brothers Investments LLC and Kingdon Capital
Management LLC, as well as money managers like
Charles Schwab Corp.'s U.S. Trust Corp.,
Wellington Management Co. and Deutsche Bank AG
all piled into shares of the airlines, according
to regulatory filings. And in recent days, a rush
of hedge funds bought up Northwest's debt,
betting that the airline would avert a bankruptcy
filing.

Bad call. Northwest and Delta both made
voluntary Chapter 11 filings Wednesday. Delta's
shares, which hit $4 in June, closed Friday at 85
cents in trading on the New York Stock Exchange.
Northwest closed Friday at 90 cents a share on
the Nasdaq Stock Market, after trading above $6
in June.

Smart investors?

Are there any?

I'd bet that was done by a government-operated fund
--using other people's money, of course--in an
attempt to prop up two failing businesses.

Read.

Another illusion exposed

I have written elsewhere that the meme that
runs the show is authority worship – in any
manifestation – but the 2,000-year-old lie that
fuels the meme is that freedom is a subset of
submission to authority, that we are free only
within the context of the clan, upon the strength
(security) of the clan, by virtue of the clan,
and, therefore, through subordination to the clan
(from which all blessings flow).

Full essay.

The Iron Law of Oligarchy

Conservatives who were looking for a way of
debunking the utopian promise of socialism found
considerable ammunition in Michels' thesis, but
many liberals were disturbed by its wider
implications. If oligarchy is inseparable from
any form of political/social/economic
organization, then, to the extent that any
society is organized, it will be, in essence, if
not in name, an oligarchy. Hold all the free and
fair elections you want; write the best
constitution you can; educate the voters and make
them turn out in droves to vote -- do all these
things and yet, when all the hoopla is over, the
day-to-day operation of governance will be
carried on by only a handful of people.
[My emphasis]

...with or without revolution or reform, and
contrary to the "solutions" drawn by the reviewer,
a kind of theocracy.

Odd how some folks can see what's going on and
just offer up the same game with new players.

Full review.

Rudderless - What will save them now?

Europe’s largest economy is momentarily
rudderless as both incumbent Chancellor Gerhard
Schröder and his challenger Angela Merkel claimed
Germany’s top office the morning after one of the
biggest election surprises in the country’s
recent history.

Don't have the url.

Feel the panic in this voice. Rudderless, without
a leader?

Oh my. What will the Germans do, fall off the face
of the Earth, starve to death...what?

Bwahahahahaha.

The Fracturing

JOURNAL: A Map that Sums it Up

If you want to glimpse the future of Iraq (our
current headliner) in ten years; go no further
than a map of Colombia. This map depicts the
division of the country by group: the FARC
(yellow), the ELN (green hatch), the AUC
(multiple paramilitaries in orange), and the
government (what's left). Each group is fueled
(from global sources) by a combination of drugs,
oil, or a nation-state sponsorship.

Just an advance look at what all nation states
will eventually morph to...and even much further
disintegration than is seen here...and fast. Much
faster than almost anyone realizes, as in a
whirlwind.

Decentralization in all things is on the way.

The Institution/Top Down Folks will be found
grossly wanting.

Read.

Who has the beef?

So let's just recap briefly, shall we? We've got
a million or so human beings living in a low-
lying area created in the first place by
government engineers. The local government of New
Orleans, apprised of an approaching storm,
summarily orders everybody out of the city about
36 hours too late without lifting a finger to
provide the means to do so. At the last minute it
occurs to somebody to herd those left behind into
a large government-built structure, the
Superdome; no supplies are on hand for its
inhabitants, and the structure itself is rendered-
-according to the government's assessment--
permanently useless. Even though the storm misses
the city, government-built levees fail in
unforeseen and catastrophic ways. Many of the New
Orleans cops opportunistically quit their jobs,
many more simply fail to show up for work, others
take the lead in looting supplies from storm-
stricken neighbourhoods, and just a few have the
notable good grace to shoot themselves in the
head. The federal government announces that
assistance is on its way, sometime; local and
state authorities--who have the clear-cut burden
of "first response" under federal guidelines
nobody seems to have read--beg for the feds to
hurry up while (a) engaging in bureaucratic
pissing-matches behind the scenes and (b) making
life difficult for the private agencies who are
beating the feds to the scene. Eventually the
federal government shows up with the National
Guard, and to the uniform indignation and
surprise of those who have been screaming for it,
the Guard turns out to have a troubling tendency
to point weapons in the general direction of
civilians and reporters. I'm not real clear on
who starts doing what around mid-week, but the
various hydra-heads of government start
developing amusing hobbies; confiscating guns
from civilians, demanding that photographers stop
documenting the aftermath of America's worst
natural disaster in a century, enforcing this
demand by seizing cameras at gunpoint, shutting
down low-power broadcasting stations in shelters,
and stealing supplies from relief agencies and
private citizens. In the wake of all this, there
is probably no single provision of the U.S.
Constitution left untrampled, the Posse Comitatus
Act appears destined for a necktie party, and the
49% of Americans who have been complaining for
five years about George W. Bush being a dictator
are now vexed to the point of utter incoherence
because for the last fortnight he has failed to
do a sufficiently convincing impression of a
dictator.

It's been said that Hurricane Katrina has
confirmed pretty much everybody in his pre-
existing political beliefs. I can't say the
record gives me any reason to change mine. But if
I can't have a libertarian paradise where state
power defers to social power, or use recent
events to urge others to the wisdom of such a
state of affairs, I'm willing to propose a second-
best for America: replace the three branches of
republican government with permanent joint rule
by Wal-Mart and the Salvation Army. Go on, tell
me you could honestly do worse.

Does this look like an exclusively Republican
problem, a Bush problem or a systemic problem?

Think about it.

Read.

Via Catallarchy.

Fred goes to China

I couldn’t find the commies. Conservatives, who
apparently preserve their minds in amber at
birth, ramble on about Communist China. I guess
their brains have parking brakes. Things are much
less confusing if you have only one idea and
stick with it. Anyway, if China is a communist
country, I’m Julius Didianus. Who ever heard of a
communist economy growing at nine percent? Or at
all?

The whole thing.

A closer look at Plato

Though protected from criticism by the moldy
gauze of antiquity, Plato and his
teacher/mouthpiece Socrates are not so different
from us; they had their fears and prejudices just
as we have ours. We still live in the fabled cave
Socrates describes in The Republic, watching the
shadows on the walls and thinking them reality.
He thought that only the philosopher could throw
off his shackles in the sensible world and leave
the cave for the heaven of Ideas; the philosopher
alone could wield this pure knowledge in ruling
the Republic. In didn't occur to Plato/Socrates
that the World of Forms beyond the cave might
only be another shadow or even hallucination.
Plato could not escape the trap into which any
utopian can fall: he didn't believe enough in his
own fallibility.

So goes Plato. Into the shitter.

Overdue.

Read.

Had enough yet, IE users?

The discovery of this IE flaw comes just over a
month after Microsoft issued a cumulative patch
addressing three vulnerabilities for IE.

Why not get a real browser?

The article.

For the inmates of The System

It is interesting – albeit not pleasant – to
observe a civilization in freefall. Panglossian
optimists continue to hope – as they would at the
death-bed of a loved one – for a miracle to
reverse the terminal course. The belief that
someone in authority can change all of this; that
new leadership or new machinery can make us
better than we are, continues to drive minds that
have been conditioned in institutional thinking.
Most of us have simply accepted, with little
examination, the statist premise so well
articulated by Jacques Ellul: “[w]e believe that
for the world to be in good order, the state must
have all the powers.” “Waiting For a Leader,” the
title of a New York Times editorial written in
response to New Orleans, reflects the same
pathetic attitude one saw on the faces of victims
at the convention center in New Orleans. This
inclination is as fatal to a society as it is to
those who passively await salvation by the state.

Western civilization will not be saved by the
same forces that are destroying it. Einstein said
it best: “a problem cannot be solved by the same
thinking that created it.” Neocons and other
deluded minds continue to dream of empire, as
though the arrow of time can be reversed and, in
the process, resurrect the fantasized world of
Roman emperors or Napoleon. While the pretenders
at various Washington, D.C. think-tanks continue
to fancy themselves in purple and ermine robes,
the realities upon which the world functions will
continue their incessant march toward the
decentralized, horizontally-networked systems
that are rapidly displacing the command-and-
control vertical structures that have long
dominated mankind.

That just about covers it.

Read.

The Projects

"We have scaled back our projects in many
areas," James Jeffrey, a senior advisor on Iraq
for the State Department, told lawmakers at a
hearing of the House Appropriations subcommittee
on foreign operations. "We do not have the money."

More than two years after Congress approved
funding for the rebuilding effort, electricity
and oil production in Iraq are at or below prewar
levels; and unemployment remains high. Less than
half of the U.S. reconstruction money has been
spent, but in some sectors, such as electricity
and water, security costs have eaten up much of
the budget. [My emphasis]

Many say Amurika went to Iraq for their oil.

My gracious. Yet another fuck up.

How should I put it?

To hell with it.

Draw your own Bigger Picture.

If you can't, it really doesn't matter. Just go
along for the ride. It'll be spectacular.

Read.

Back to school

President Bush for the first time took
responsibility Tuesday for federal government
mistakes in dealing with Hurricane Katrina and
suggested the calamity raised broader questions
about the government's ability to handle both
natural disasters and terror attacks.

If it's not good for those things, what is it good
for?

Is it good for anything?

Now I'm going to my blackboard to write "I'm on my
own" 50 times, smiling all the while.

Full article.

The future of warfare?

U.S. Forces Trade Humvees for Donkeys

According to Iraqi sheep smugglers, U.S. forces
operating in the deserts of Al-Anbar Province
have decided to eschew their Humvees for the
humble pack-animals, because they are more able
to 'sense danger before it occurs, and they are
not easily spotted by attackers.'

Do you suppose the real reason is that the Humvees
are outta gas?

The U.S. Military has their donkeys. What are you
waiting for?

Read.

Via Donkeys info

Where's the beef?

I dunno.

It's all been said before so why bother?

Ah, you say, he has a crack in his will. Maybe.

This is getting old and tired, pissing in the
wind and wondering what's the point with this
blog so now I feel like backing off a bit. It all
sounds like a bad re-run after awhile. Death and
destruction has a tendency to do that I suppose,
even tho I expected it, but not like this. No one
to blame but the weather. Where's Al-Qaeda or
some other two-legged bogeyman to lay it all off,
everyone pointing to the Man in the Hat, the
current terrorist of the day instead? How anti-
climactic when I thought The System would be
brought down by some unnamed human scapegoat.

What will They do with the weather as the unexpected
invader? Where will they send their troops?

Now that's a real conundrum, isn't it.

Unbelievable.

Unheard of.

Nothing to focus on but an enemy beyond Their
control. Where are the battle lines?

Ironic, eh, dealing with a new enemy who doesn't
give a shit about rules, an enemy completely
beyond reason.

The real economy vs. the political economy

The giant supplier has supplied, with a vengeance.

A small part of the story...

Wal-Mart's response to Katrina -- an unrivaled
$20 million in cash donations, 1,500* truckloads
of free merchandise, food for 100,000 meals and
the promise of a job for every one of its
displaced workers -- has turned the chain into an
unexpected lifeline for much of the Southeast and
earned it near-universal praise at a time when
the company is struggling to burnish its image.

The Bentonville, Ark., company is rushing to set
up mini-Wal-Marts in storm-ravaged areas, handing
out clothing, diapers, baby wipes, toothbrushes
and food. With police escorts, it delivered two
truckloads of ice and water into New Orleans. It
is shipping 150 Internet-ready computers to
shelters caring for evacuees.

During a tearful interview on "Meet the Press"
on Sunday, Aaron F. Broussard, president of
Jefferson Parish in the New Orleans suburbs, told
host Tim Russert that if "the American government
would have responded like Wal-Mart has responded,
we wouldn't be in this crisis."

Not everything has gone perfectly for Wal-Mart.
Several of its New Orleans stores were looted,
and 126 of its stores in the region have been
closed at some point. About 20 remain that way.
"We did not try to stop the looting or take
merchandise out" of the stores, company
spokeswoman Mona Williams said in an e-
mail.

Full article.

*Correction: 100 trucks.

So you don't want a Wal-Mart in your neighborhood?

Maybe you'd rather have FEMA...

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen
facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the
occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver
meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given
two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able
to cook. In fact, the “host” goes on to explain,
some churches had already enquired about whether
they could come in on weekends and fix meals for
the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won’t
allow it because there could be a situation where
one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs -
and…

it could cause a riot.

It gets worse.

And, of course, all that Wal-Mart did is good for
business. Very good.

They have customers.

FEMA has prisoners. Why the fuck would they care
what prisoners think of them?

Now, who would you want on your block?

Read.

The lit fuse - more to come

This time the Washington insiders have gotten
so far ahead of themselves, and the rest of the
country, that the illusion of 'democracy' is
dangerously close to being completely debunked.
We are rapidly approaching the point where it
will only take one incident, perhaps a relatively
minor one, to spark a social explosion from that
will make our republic reel.

New Orleans has lit the fuse. I would advise
everyone to stand back ...

The man's right.

Democracy, a euphemism for voting for someone else
to do your killing and looting for you by his rules
and not yours.

Now that you've had a good look at it in New
Orleans without suits, ties and fine words, how
do you like it? Why should you be surprised when
you get caught in the crossfire?

So here you might say, "Ok, but let's bring back
the suits and fine rhetoric. It's at least a more
civilized way of looting."

It's too late. It always was.

Constantly fixing a system with ever more rules
and ever more dependence on them was what brought
the whole thing on. Rapid flexibility is gone.
Expect even more rules yielding fewer options
to those that see no other way. They're in the
majority. Political man is king...for now. Let
them eat themselves.

As I've said many times before here, the system
will fail. There is no political solution, even
revolution, just the worst of all political
solutions. Let the beast die of natural causes or
he'll resurrect. Most likely in worse form.

And when you hear a lot of howling and screeching
about the failure of government in your area, it
would be best to git to an area where folks are
more inclined to handle their own problems...
without waiting for the help that never comes or
worse, the kind of "help" that's not conducive to
healthy living. The weather will probably not be
a factor.

Read.

Thanks to Richard Rieben.

Yahoo news

A French media watchdog said Tuesday that
information provided by Internet powerhouse Yahoo
Inc. helped Chinese authorities convict and jail
a journalist who had written an e-mail about
press restrictions.

The harsh criticism from Reporters Without
Borders marks the latest instance in which a
prominent high-tech company has faced accusations
of cooperating with Chinese authorities to gain
favor in a country that's expected to become an
Internet gold mine.

Yahoo, the pilot fish of the state.

Fuck Yahoo or any other sycophant that participates
in that.

Others are also listed in the report.

Big kinks in the supply hose

While alternative ports in Houston, Corpus
Christi and Tampa say they're ready to handle
incoming ships, New Orleans ports are critical to
what goes out, industry experts say. New Orleans
traditionally has handled more than half of the
country's grain exports to overseas destinations.
...
Barges carrying grain, goods and oil remained
halted on the river as government and industry
officials focused on efforts to rescue New
Orleans residents and repair the sodden city's
broken levees.

"It doesn't look like ocean freight will ship
out of that area for some time," Kelley
said.

The whole report.

*****

Major airports in the East and Southeast could
run out of jet fuel as soon as next week if
refinery and pipeline shutdowns aren't resolved
soon.
...
The problem of short supply comes on top of the
airlines' longer-term problem with fuel: price.
Gulf Coast jet fuel fell to $2.27 a gallon
Wednesday, down 3 cents from Tuesday. But the
price is up 20% from where it opened this week
and far higher than the financially struggling
industry can handle.

Also, the hurricane has knocked out several
Mississippi and Alabama pumping stations along
two of the USA's biggest and most critical fuel
pipelines, running from the gulf region to New
Jersey and Virginia.

The rest.

*****

Offshore platforms were damaged by Katrina's
winds and waves, and some had snapped out of
their moorings and were drifting away; 10
refineries, accounting for 10 percent of the
nation's capacity, were shut down and remained
without power Tuesday; strategic pipelines
linking the gulf to key markets in the rest of
the country were still closed because they too
lacked power.

Katrina's impact also highlighted how reliant
U.S. domestic production has become on this
fragile region. The United States imports more
than 10 million barrels a day of crude oil and
more than 1 million barrels a day of gasoline --
60 percent of which comes through Gulf Coast
ports. Nearly half the nation's refining capacity
is located along the coast, from Texas to Alabama.

"We are very dependent on energy resources
produced in the Gulf of Mexico, not just the
Persian Gulf," said Stephen Brown, director of
energy economics at the Federal Reserve Bank of
Dallas.

Read.

The Quantum vacuum - Part II - Looking for results in the wrong places

Quantum electrodynamics predicts that empty
space (the quantum vacuum) contains a large
amount of energy that corresponds to the lowest
energy state (energy > 0) of the electromagnetic
field. Surfaces in the vacuum can experience
forces that arise from the disturbance in the
vacuum energy. The presence of attractive
"Casimir" forces between uncharged, parallel,
metal plates has been accurately verified in the
last several years. Theoretical calculations have
suggested the presence of repulsive vacuum forces
for certain geometrical configurations. . . .

. . . Can we make use of this energy in some way
to facilitate space travel, such as energy
generation, propulsion, or creation of wormholes?
. . .

If we can obtain repulsive as well as attractive
vacuum forces by a suitable choice of geometry,
we are one step closer to being able to design a
variety of novel MEMS devices using vacuum energy
that could assist in attaining some of the NASA
objectives for space travel.

Don't expect NASA to produce anything useful from
this. Look for it coming from a guy like Burt Rutan
or someone as yet unknown.

—Jordan Maclay, Jay Hammer, Michael A. George,
Rob Ilic, Quinn Leonard, Rod Clark,
"Measurement of Repulsive Quantum Vacuum Forces" (PDF)

Via Orlin Grabbe

From the Hurricane Katrina blog at New Orleans...

...and another guy gets it right, backed up by
on the scene reports.

An important piece for future reference.

Let me address the political situation for a
moment. I noticed that the responses I've been
getting on the blog and the stuff I've been
reading in the mainstream media has become very
politicized. I'm not going to get into politics
here -- I'm just going to do my work and then
report what I see and hear throughout the day. If
you guys want to play Democrat vs Republican vs
Independent, go right ahead, but I'm really weary
of the permanent election season this country's
turned into. Honestly, these are politicians you
guys are getting so excited about. Politicians.
As far as I'm concerned, I don't trust people who
want to tell other people how to spend their
money and what they can read or see on television
and what they can do in the privacy of their own
homes. There's no way I'm going to feel
comfortable supporting someone who thinks he
knows what's best for the rest of "society" and
is willing to use force and the threat of force
to make others fall into line.

So yeah, I'm not going to support or condemn
anyone specific for what's going on here.

And another thing to think about when we start
pointing fingers is this. The government is never
equipped to handle a crisis like this. There's
too much bureaucracy -- initiative-stifling
bureaucracy which prevents swift, effective
action. I would like to hear from government
employees on this. The nature of that bureaucracy
is such that you have very specific guidelines to
follow for even the most minute tasks. You need
approval for just about everything, and the
person you need approval from usually needs
approval to give you the approval.

It's not as easy as say rounding up 4 of your co-
workers and saying, "We've got someone at such
and such an address, let's go grab her and get
her out of there." Now add a destroyed or
disabled command and control center to that
bureaucracy and you've got a total and complete
mess.

You (as a civilian) don't need "Approved"
stamped on 3 different forms before you can run
into your neighbor's house and pull them out. I
hope this makes sense.

Anyway, I'm sure there's been human error in
this catastrophe. How could there not be? But
what I'm saying is that I've come to expect poor
decision making and a total lack of initiative
from government. They can't even balance a
budget, at the federal, state, or local levels. I
could balance my checkbook and spend within my
means when I was a teenager. But I'm not gonna
point fingers and get into the blame game. If you
want me to blame something besides the storm
herself, I blame the nature of government in the
first place. It's too big, it's too slow, it's
too inefficient, it's too bloated, and it's too
intiative-stifling to be effective in normal
circumstances, much less in a disaster. It's a
systemic issue, more than an issue of individual
people in government.

It's entirely a systemic issue.

See it all. (with webcam)

The Humpty Dumpty principle

If the state system is in decline (ala Martin
van Creveld), states will find it increasingly
difficult to maintain financial viability,
deliver critical services to citizens, control
their borders and economy, and maintain a
monopoly on violence. States that are disrupted
will find it difficult, if not impossible, to re-
establish order and functionality. Historical
forces will conspire to defeat any attempt at
reforming the order of the state.

The Forces of Top Down Order and Control will hear
nothing of this, firmly entrenched as they believe
they are.

Do nothing. Just watch and maybe this will be their
last hurrah.

Read.

Dance like a butterfly

Propaganda can supply the rationale for the
herd. The individual can choose otherwise and
sanely. The group has shown its inability. The
herd should die with its system. The possibility
can be anticipated, avoiding victimization by
thugs and fascists.

Can't disagree with the basics here. Rather black
humor sprinkled with bits of light. Most would call
it cynicism. I would call it a most probable future
for the blind.

"Avoid crowds and other non-profit organizations." --jomama

Read.

See the whole series.

Wired backwards

"The theory seems to be that as long as a man is
a failure he is one of God's children, but that
as soon as he succeeds he is taken over by the
Devil." --H. L. Mencken

Odd, these hyumans.

If that is the predominant view, and I believe it
is, what does that say about our future?

Sad.

Very sad.