Participating In Your Own Demise

A THOUGHT: How about a mass movement to rescind Obama's Peace Prize?  Might send a pretty loud message!  Something to consider...

Back in my idealistic youth, when I used to think it was worth fighting 'the system', I was arrested a lot for exercising my right to travel.  Didn't matter, since I always won in court, but it did give me quite an insight into the world of the police state.

Back then, in the early 1990s, I was being transported from one jail to another (just to give the lazy bastards something to do).  The cop drove most of the way at 90+ miles per hour down city streets, and at a red light that he couldn't run, he spotted an attractive young woman in the car next to us.  He delayed a bit at the green light and typed her license plate into his on-board computer, getting her vital stats and home address, among other things.

Supposedly, this type of thing was supposed to be illegal.  But so was careening at high speed down city streets when there was no emergency.  He did it because he could.  He had power, and who was going to do anything about it?  His colleagues who were doing the same thing?

You see, that's the thing about having power - the temptation to use it is overwhelming.  Especially when the only people who can stop you are doing the same thing.

When the NSA was given the power to spy on everyone, foreign and domestic, all that did was legally sanction what they had been doing for decades.  Snooping on people's private lives is what the CIA and NSA were designed to do from the get-go.  The FBI was doing it on American citizens since it was founded.  That agency was used by presidents to keep tabs on various critics and J. Edgar Hoover's files have been 'discovered' many times over the years.

It all started with drivers' licenses.  That one item allowed state governments to build databases of photos, vital stats, home addresses, and signatures.  Those files were appended with any notes and records the state cared to keep on you.  Then a law back in the 80s authorized the states to share that information with each other and the feral gummint in the name of catching 'deadbeat dads'.

They always couch these things in terms of a greater good: licensed drivers (safe roads), deadbeat dads (The Children), mass shootings (gun control), terrorism (snooping).  And it doesn't matter the original intent.  It only matters that they have the information and can use it with impunity for any purpose.

What's more, the NSA and its ilk have all the latest high-tech stuff, including super-computers and massive backbone internet lines.  If Goldman Sachs has the ability to front-run stock market trades, then you can bet the NSA has it.  In fact, it was probably developed for the government's crash prevention efforts, but with that kind of power lying around, who needs Iran-Contra to fund your black projects?  Just play the market for a day or two and *POOF*, you have tons of money to fund coups, secret incursions and any other hobbies you have picked up over the years.

Just like the cop I saw illegally getting information on a private citizen just because he took a liking to her, being able to manipulate markets for personal and departmental profit, not to mention just for the hell of it, would be a rather tough temptation to resist.  If you could push a button and make the stocks in your 401(k) skyrocket, would you think to yourself, "No, that wouldn't be ethical, even though all my co-workers are doing it and getting rich."

The fact is that ANY power in the hands of government is destined to be abused, as history shows.  Things as innocuous as census questionnaires and passports are being used to delve into people's personal lives and track/control their movements.  No amount of power is without the risk of abuse by government, any more than it is safe in the hands of individuals.  All power is subject to abuse, and greater power is subject to greater abuse, to paraphrase Baron Acton.  The most frightening abuses come when power is centralized, as it has been over the past century in the US.

The only solution is the complete dissolution of large, centralized governments, but that hardly seems likely.  Concerted efforts on the part of people to regain their power and rights might work for a time, but governments thus denuded will begin almost immediately retaking the same ground.  A neo-Luddite solution is also doomed to fail, as folks like their gee-gaws.

The only realistic solution is for people to stop participating in their own enslavement.  Let you driver's license expire and don't renew it.  Stop using taxpayer numbers for any reason.  Stop filling out the census questionnaires.  Don't use real names or data on any social media or electronic devices.  Try using hushmail.com or following some of these suggestions.

Whatever you do, spend at least some part of each day throwing as many monkey wrenches into the works as you can.  It is our civic and spiritual duty to start unraveling this mess.  After all, we are at least partly responsible for allowing it to happen.

As a vast number of people are starting to realize, freedom is something that is earned each day and in each generation.  We can not trust ANY government to protect our rights, no matter how benign it may seem or how many flowery words are written into the law.  All governments are enemies of peace and freedom by their very natures.  Don't they enforce their existence with guns?  It is the threat of violence that keeps people in line, so what's to stop them from taking more and more power from the same people at whom they point guns?

Governments are like unruly chidren: they will continue to misbehave until they find the limits of tolerance.  As long as we allow government to ride rough-shod over us, it will continue to increase the abuse until we finally put a stop to it.

The problem is, once genies are out of the bottle, they can be awful difficult to stuff back in.

At The Mercy Of Symbols

How often have you stopped to consider how much of our lives are controlled by symbols?  When you think about it, we are literally ruled in every aspect of our lives by abstractions.  We submit to costumes, pictures and pretty words without hardly a thought to what we are doing.  Isn't it time we started questioning some of our most basic assumptions?

At the root of most cultures is something called 'law'.  Law is nothing more than a symbol for morality and ethics, not the real thing.  Law assumes that human beings are incapable of being kind, generous and loving, and substitutes those real things with codified penalties for not acting like human beings.

Those who profit from making, enforcing and judging laws tell us that without them, humanity would devolve into chaos.  Yet there are precious few cases to point to where the absence of law has led to utter dehumanization.  In fact, it has never, in anything approaching human history, been tried.  The reason is simple: in any group of humans, there are always those who want privileged positions of power over all the other humans.

The only palpable examples where the absence of law existed are war zones, which are artificial contrivances by the very people who create the laws.  Because war is, by definition, the breakdown of normal order, the result is naturally chaos and anarchy.  To point to those situations as justification for legal systems is rather disingenuous, at best.

In fact, the vast majority of people do not need laws.  Most people live their lives blissfully uncaring about laws because they don't need them.  Any given individual is driven by a desire to be left the hell alone to go about their business of raising and providing for a family.  For the most part, legal systems impinge on that normal desire.  Policing agencies, tax authorities and government at all levels are all designed to do one thing: interfere with the individual's life.

To do that, government agencies use a complex set of ritual costumes, logos, emblems, songs, pledges, and ultimately weapons to force people to conform to an abstraction that approximates morality and ethics.  We are all indoctrinated from birth to fear those symbols and do whatever they order without question under penalty of death.  Incarceration is nothing more than a form of living death because it robs us of some amount of our lives.  However, most of the infractions encoded as law are of little consequence other than to maintain control over the individual for the profit of another individual.

For instance, drug laws do little to protect me from you.  People who do drugs do little harm to others.  One could argue that the drug user harms their family, but that is hardly the concern of society.  That is a problem for the family to address and deal with.  Others argue that the drug user is a drain on society in lost productivity and additional resources such as healthcare.

That person's productivity means absolutely nothing to society other than in the loss of tax revenue to the state.  As for additional resources used, that is only a concern in cases where society at large is robbed of productive output to pay for the drug user's needs.  If the drug user is forced to pay for his own care, how has that affected society in general?

There are many people, commonly referred to as bleeding-heart liberals, who say that it is society's responsibility to save the individual from himself.  I beg to differ.  Society's function is to provide a mutually supportive network of individuals.  If someone doesn't want to avail themselves of it, why must they be forced, except as an exercise in control exerted by people who believe they are empowered to do so?

How many times have we heard that we should respect the office, if not the man?  We are supposed to show due respect for judges, elected officials and the like by the virtue that they hide behind revered symbols.  A judge is no more qualified to determine whether I am right or wrong than any other person on the planet.  But put him in a black robe and surround him with flags and seals and seat him on a platform, and suddenly this man stands above all other humans in his ability to determine the fate of others.

Take away the symbols and these people are indistinguishable from any other sot on the street.  They are just a fallible and prone to error as any other human on Earth.  The only difference between a judge and a rapist is that the judge has been trained to manipulate a symbol called 'law'.  But it sure doesn't take a judge to know that the rapist's actions are wrong.

A policeman is no more immune from the temptation to commit crime than any other human.  But give them a silly little uniform with lots of emblems and badges and suddenly that stand apart from all other humans as enforcers of an abstraction called 'law'.  It doesn't take long before the human in the silly suit starts to think that he is more special than the rest of us because people fear the symbols he hides behind.  That feeling of power almost invariably translates into the belief that he can break the law with impunity.

These are but a few examples, but once you start pondering this problem, you quickly realize that we grant a tremendous amount of our personal power and responsibility to nothing more than symbols.

Money is a symbol, and those who accumulate a significant amount of money are perceived to be more special than the rest of us.  You can take a homeless man and a banker, have them say the exact same thing, but people will discount the homeless man while giving great weight to the banker.  The only difference between the two is a suit and some money...symbols.

Another good example: how many people do you know with college degrees that are complete boneheads? Yet how many employers would give greater weight to the degree (a symbol) over someone far smarter with an 8th grade education?  And this in spite of the fact that some of the greatest minds in history did not complete a high school level education.

Symbols run our lives, but we devote precious little time to questioning the basic assumptions behind those symbols.  Take TeeVee commercials, for instance.  Take any old actor, put them in a white lab coat and sling a stethoscope around his neck, and suddenly we imbue him with the authority to speak about our medical needs.  Put a ring on his finger and we assume he is married - take it off and we assume he is not.

Place an actor in a kitchen with a bag that has a loaf of bread and a bunch of celery sticking out of it, and we assume that they just came home from shopping, not stealing those items from their neighbor.  Put an actor in overalls and have him wipe his hands on a rag, and suddenly he's an expert on car engines and motor oil.  And worst of all, take a celebrity face and have them expound on the virtues of your product and people will give his opinion far more weight than some putz standing on a street corner.

Our entire lives are run by symbols, and more insidious, those symbols are controlled by people who want something from us that we would otherwise be unwilling to give up.  The fact of the matter is, if all authority figures were to disappear tomorrow, it wouldn't take long before life settled right back to normal.  Sure, there would be a few bad apples, but they wouldn't last long as now you and I and our friends and neighbors would start relying on each other rather than muscle-bound boneheads in silly outfits who could care less whether we lived or died - as long as they get their pension and paycheck from you.

Individuals are more than capable of running their own affairs.  Mutually supportive groups of individuals are far more effective than layers of authorities whose only motivation is to get paid for producing nothing.  The only thing that keeps us from doing away with the whole damn lot of them is symbols, and the conditioning we receive to surrender our personal power and responsibility to those symbols.

We are fast approaching an epoch in history where all the symbols that have ruled us for millennia will break down.  As we sit here, all those layers of authority are crashing down around us.  People no longer trust government.  Money is no longer all-powerful.  Laws have so far overstepped the bounds of reason that people are rejecting them out of hand.  Schools, religion, science are decaying rapidly.  Eventually, the preponderance of lies and weight of corruption will erode any last vestiges of trust in the underpinning symbols of our civilization.

What then?

We have come to a point in history when those who manipulate symbols are making a concerted effort to unify all their symbols into a worldwide power base.  At the same time, individual humans have been empowered like no other time in history.  All the while, humans are going increasingly distrustful and unwilling to surrender their power to traditional symbols because of the heavy weight of corruption behind them.

When it all collapses, as it must at this point, are we prepared to take back the individual responsibility implied by the loss of the symbolic power structure that has ruled our civilization for thousands of years?

This is an important question and one that must be widely debated over the next couple of decades.  How we answer that question will determine the course of humanity for a long time to come.  It will profoundly affect every aspect of life for our descendants.  Will we simply replace our current symbols of power with another system like it?  Or will the individual become the ultimate symbol of ethics, morality and enlightenment?

Our technology has placed power at the most democratic level possible - the individual.  This is an awesome responsibility, but also a liberating one.  We have the ability now to make each person their own legislature, judge, pope, and police.  We have the power to make each of us an authority, expert and professor.  But we can just as easily piss away the opportunity and allow the corruption to continue unabated.

Will we continue to respects the office or the person holding it?  Will we continue to allow the will of others to be forced upon us through fear of symbols?  Will we take back the responsibility to chose our own paths, and accept the consequences good or bad?  Or will we continue to abdicate that personal power out of laziness and ignorance?

The profound implications of our current epoch are mind-boggling in their breadth and scope, but the challenge before us should not stop us from thoroughly considering what we want for humanity going forward.  Our progeny will either respect us or deride us for the choices we make now.

The first step is a complete examination of the symbols we fear and submit to in our daily lives.  Is self-rule really as frightening and chaotic as we are told, or is that a fairy tale to reinforce the stranglehold on power that a very few have in our society?

Perhaps it's time we found out.

Repatriate Games

For some time now, Joseph Farrell has been monitoring the ongoing gold repatriation efforts worldwide.  if you've been under a rock for the past two years, allow me to fill you in.

A while back, Germany politely asked to audit its gold holdings in the Federal Reserve of New York.  Seems that after World War 2, one of the requirements to keep Germany in its place was that it had to store a fair amount of its gold in France, Britain and the US.  For the past 70 years, this hasn't been much of an issue, until the Federal Reserve began printing dollars like two-ply toilet paper and handing out bundles of 'bailout' to all their buddies.

Naturally, the Germans, being the second largest gold owner in the world (as far as we know), wanted to check up on its gold.  Naturally, the Federal Reserve, being the nastiest bunch of liars in the world, hemmed and hawed over this request.

Smelling a rat, German then decided to call back a portion of its Federal Reserve holdings.  If memory serves, they wanted 300 of their 3,000 tons of booked reserves sent home.  The answer?  No problem!  We'll get that to you in seven years or so...

?!

Seven years to collect and send over one-tenth of the gold that Germany supposedly has on deposit in New York.  Wait a minute...do you catch the sent of rotting fish here?  Even if you don't smell it, a lot of other countries did, and now they want their gold returned, as well.  And the chorus of nations is growing almost daily across the planet.

Something is rotten in the state of New Amsterdam and its making plenty folks nervous.

Farrell speculates, and I agree, that Germany would not be making this much noise if it didn't have a back-up plan.  The Germans know that a significant amount of its energy resources come from Russia, and that China is one of its largest trading partners.  Meantime, the US debt is running at 107% of GDP and the dollar is showing significant long-term weakness.

If you were Germany, what would you do?  Why, pack up the Chancellor and her Cabinet and head for China for extended talks, of course.

This whole gold repatriation thing might be a one-off event without a whole lot of context until you add in a few more data points.

After 9/11, there were numerous reports of dump trucks hauling gold (or something) out of the basement of the World Trade Center, which just happened to be one of the Federal Reserve's main vaults.  At the time, this was easily dismissed as 'conspiracy theory', but in light of recent events, it deserves closer scrutiny.

Another recent development that is just starting to gain notice, and which I have been tracking here and on UrbanSurvival since last year is the wave of currency revaluations going on in Asia.

It began when I heard about the Indonesian rupiah revaluing to lop off three zeros from the exchange rate.  Currently, it trades at roughly 10,000 to 1 with the dollar.  By itself, this sounds like the Indonesian government is trying to simplify trade calculations using US dollars, until you look at something else.

The rupiah trades at approximately 1,500 to 1 with the Chinese renmembi.  Lop off three places and you get a near perfect parity with the Chinese currency.

Reports are that at least Vietnam and SKorea are also rolling out revaluations.  I would not be surprised to see those currencies come closer to parity with the remembi than with the dollar in the aftermath.

To my mind, this is a clear signal that the Chinese economy is quickly supplanting the US as the global standard.  The revaluations also reveal a possible long-term plan to issue a singleAsian currency along the lines of the euro, but perhaps with some adjustments to avoid the calamity sweeping the Euro Zone.  One of them being realigning Asian currencies to be at parity before the debut of the single currency.  That is something that was not done in Europe with the Greek drachma or the Italian lira, and guess which countries are having the biggest fiscal problems right now...

So, if we align all these dots - dump trucks full of gold, financial crisis, gold repatriation movement, Asian currency revaluations, German high-level visits to China - what is clearly emerging is a crisis of confidence in Anglo-American hegemony and a global realignment with the new top dog, China.

Even without other side issues, such as George Ure's Resource Wars and Richard Dolan's Breakaway Civilizations, we are seeing a massive shift in the basic power structure of the globe.

The only thing the US has to back up its economic hegemony is a powerful military, but its not enough to keep the whole world in line.  In the wake of World War Parts 1 and 2, there was a similar shift that left the US as the only major Western economy with any strength, and Russia as the only Eastern bloc (China had not yet emerged from its dark ages).  But the US sold out its underlying strength of manufacturing and innovation to the low-cost bidders, who in turn have taken the economic mantle with them.

Whether there is a bigger picture here is a matter of great speculation among a lot of thinkers, but one thing is quite clear: the Anglo-American empire is dying.  It is losing traditional allies at an alarming pace as they bail out of a sinking ship and cozy up to stronger and more stable partners.  The US response has been to deploy a global fleet of flying robots that can strike targets at will as a means of terrorizing nations into submission.

At home, the US is trying to keep the locals in line with similar, though more egregious means because it can not afford to allow its tax base to revolt, which would be a huge propaganda nail in its coffin.

The only ace in the Anglo-American hole is space, and we are seeing some interesting developments there, as well.  Things like the Curiosity rover are not just scientific programs, they are technological displays of superiority in the new frontier.  They are also the 21st century equivalent of running around planting flags in other people's lands, or really just a high-tech version of pissing on fire hydrants.

The current decade will see major changes in how the world works, with traditional leaders fading and new ones emerging.  Currently, the sun rises in the East where low debt and manufacturing are creating wealth, while in the West they have sat on their laurels and diluted their wealth to the point of self-destruction.

It is safe to safe the West will act increasingly belligerent and desperate, which will in turn lead to more and more war fronts opening up (see Africa).  The race now is to commercialize space before the king's coffers are completely empty.  However, even those efforts can backfire like the influx of New World gold and silver into the Spanish economy in the 15th century.

It's a game of very delicate balances and one which is a fool's errand.  History tells us these kinds of power shifts happen on a regular basis (even if the time spans seem quite long by human reckoning).  The question is, what will be the tipping point?  And when it all tips over, how many folks will die in the shift?

If, like George Carlin, we step back and become spectators no longer having a stake in the outcome, it is a fascinating process to watch, painful though it is to so many unsuspecting folks.  The normalcy bias can be destructive when we refuse to observe and accept reality.

The forces are stronger than any one individual, or even groups of individuals, but as individuals, we can prepare to ride out the storm as best we can, if we admit to ourselves that these things are happening.  The wheels are in motion and they will either run us over or offer us a lift, depending on whether or not we see the bus coming.

Now is the time for clear vision and thinking on the part of us regular folk.  We need aware of what's happening and acknowledge the forces swirling around us without prejudice.  If we can do this, we have a chance to change things for the better.  If not, we are doomed to repeat history until we do get it.

In the meantime, watch the gold games, the currency manipulations and the movements of 'leaders'.  Also, watch the space game.  There is a major shift there, as well.  Controlling the high ground will have a profound affect on the outcome of current events.

In any event, it might be a good idea to sell stocks at the top of the market and buy a little gold as speculation.  Certainly seems that markets are doomed and metals are favored in this environment.

Happy, happy, joy, joy, as Stimpy likes to say....