The Rich Will Buy Up The Burnt Up Part Of Maui While The Governor Pretends To Stop Them

Hawaii is unique. The islands and what was the Kingdom of Hawaii have been victims of colonialism. The Hawaiian people’s fear of a land grab is real, and based on historic actions of both Britain and the United States. The 1993 Appology Resolution from US Congress on this was a small step in the right direction. There is still a strong sovereignty movement in Hawaii who seek sovereignty from the US. This issue ties in with that. No different than the history of Continental North America, and even presently, Indiginous peoples are always faced with others trying to take their land for monetary gain. Hawaiians are not recognized as “Native Americans”, but the historic facts would support that the Hawaiian people do hold Indiginous title/Aboriginal title/Native title to the islands.

It is kind of like banning Indian names for football teams while taking away their land and keeping them on a reservation. The government will probably ban the word "aloha" and use of leis while taking away their land. Uncle Ben and Aunt Jamaima scenario, we cannot have anything that reminds us how the Democrats oppressed people outside of their hate groups. Be ready for any reminder of Maui being take off the shelves.

I am not surprised that liberals do not realize that negating cultural appropriation is the epitome or embodiment of racism. Telling people to stay in their own lane, or race that is, is what people in the klan used to always say. Dumbing down people in public schools was entirely effective.

npr  |  Hawaii's governor vowed "to keep the land in local people's hands" when Maui rebuilds from a deadly wildfire that incinerated a historic island community, as local schools began reopening.

Gov. Josh Green said Wednesday that he had instructed the state attorney general to work toward a moratorium on land transactions in Lahaina. He acknowledged the move will likely face legal challenges.

"My intention from start to finish is to make sure that no one is victimized from a land grab," Green said at a news conference. "People are right now traumatized. Please do not approach them with an offer to buy their land. Do not approach their families saying they'll be much better off if they make a deal. Because we're not going to allow it."

Also Wednesday, the number of dead reached 111, and Maui police said nine victims had been identified, and the families of five had been notified. A mobile morgue unit with additional coroners arrived Tuesday to help process and identify remains.

The cause of the wildfires, the deadliest in the U.S. in more than a century, is under investigation. Hawaii is increasingly at risk from disasters, with wildfire rising fastest, according to an Associated Press analysis of FEMA records.

Since flames consumed much of Lahaina about a week ago, locals have feared that a rebuilt town could be even more oriented toward wealthy visitors, Lahaina native Richy Palalay said Saturday at a shelter for evacuees.

Hotels and condos "that we can't afford to live in — that's what we're afraid of," he said.

Many in Lahaina were struggling to afford life in Hawaii before the fire. Statewide, a typical starter home costs over $1 million, while the average renter pays 42% of their income for housing, according to a Forbes Housing analysis, the highest ratio in the country by a wide margin.

Never Forget That Fish Rot From The Head...,

theeconomiccollapseblog  |  In order for a civilized society to function, most people have to willingly follow the rules of that society.  If that happens, law enforcement authorities can deal with the few that choose to be lawless.  For generations, that is how things worked in America.  There was a high standard of morality among the general population, and so the police were able to successfully handle the few bad apples that insisted on breaking the law.  But now everything has changed.  As a result of decades of extreme moral decay, lawlessness is rampant and there are vast multitudes of young people that openly flaunt the rules of our society.  In fact, there are already some areas of the country that are literally on the verge of being ungovernable.

A perfect example of what I am talking about happened in southern California on Saturday.

Dozens of lawless young thieves systematically looted the Nordstrom store at the Westfield Topanga mall, and they were able to get away with tens of thousands of dollars worth of merchandise…

Shoppers at the Westfield Topanga mall in Canoga Park were in for quite a shock when dozens of thieves ransacked the Nordstrom inside the mall on Saturday, Aug. 12, smashing displays and stealing an estimated $60,000- $100,000 worth of merchandise, authorities said.

The Los Angeles Police Department responded to the mall at around 4 p.m. after hearing reports that between 20 and 50 people ran through the Nordstrom grabbing merchandise, leaving some on the ground and taking armfuls with them.

When I was growing up, this sort of thing simply did not happen.

But now we are seeing mobs of looters go haywire all over the nation on a regular basis.

This heist was obviously well coordinated, and not one of the thieves even showed a shred of remorse.

Apparently these young people are not exactly languishing in poverty, because a BMW and a Lexus were among the getaway vehicles that they used…

After grabbing between $60,000 and $100,000 worth of goods, the crew fled in several cars including a BMW and a Lexus, cops said.

At least one guard was doused with bear spray — which causes violent eye and respiratory irritation in humans. The guard was treated by paramedics.

How are we supposed to respond to this?

As I stated earlier, we are seeing robberies of this nature so often now.

Several days earlier, dozens of  young people looted the Yves Saint Laurent store in Glendale…

Earlier this week a high-end designer store in Glendale, California was looted by dozens of people in another flash mob burglary on Tuesday.

At least 30 suspects “flooded” the Yves Saint Laurent store in The Americana at Brand Tuesday afternoon and stole clothing and other merchandise before fleeing on foot and leaving the location in numerous vehicles, said police in a statement.

The total loss is estimated to be approximately $300,000.

Some people attempt to downplay the severity of these crimes by saying that these big corporate retailers can afford the losses they are experiencing.

No, they can’t.

Overall, U.S. retailers will lose more than 100 billion dollars due to theft this year alone.

This has become a major national crisis, and as J. Lee Grady has aptly pointed out, we truly have become “the land of the free-for-all”…

 

 

 

The Profound Irony Of David Brooks Sermonizing On Moral Formation In Collapsing America

theatlantic  | A modern vision of how to build character. The old-fashioned models of character-building were hopelessly gendered. Men were supposed to display iron willpower that would help them achieve self-mastery over their unruly passions. Women were to sequester themselves in a world of ladylike gentility in order to not be corrupted by bad influences and base desires. Those formulas are obsolete today.

The best modern approach to building character is described in Iris Murdoch’s book The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch writes that “nothing in life is of any value except the attempt to be virtuous.” For her, moral life is not defined merely by great deeds of courage or sacrifice in epic moments. Instead, moral life is something that goes on continually—treating people considerately in the complex situations of daily existence. For her, the essential moral act is casting a “just and loving” attention on other people.

Normally, she argues, we go about our days with self-centered, self-serving eyes. We see and judge people in ways that satisfy our own ego. We diminish and stereotype and ignore, reducing other people to bit players in our own all-consuming personal drama. But we become morally better, she continues, as we learn to see others deeply, as we learn to envelop others in the kind of patient, caring regard that makes them feel seen, heard, and understood. This is the kind of attention that implicitly asks, “What are you going through?” and cares about the answer.

I become a better person as I become more curious about those around me, as I become more skilled in seeing from their point of view. As I learn to perceive you with a patient and loving regard, I will tend to treat you well. We can, Murdoch concluded, “grow by looking.”

Mandatory social-skills courses. Murdoch’s character-building formula roots us in the simple act of paying attention: Do I attend to you well? It also emphasizes that character is formed and displayed as we treat others considerately. This requires not just a good heart, but good social skills: how to listen well. How to disagree with respect. How to ask for and offer forgiveness. How to patiently cultivate a friendship. How to sit with someone who is grieving or depressed. How to be a good conversationalist.

These are some of the most important skills a person can have. And yet somehow, we don’t teach them. Our schools spend years prepping students with professional skills—but offer little guidance on how to be an upstanding person in everyday life. If we’re going to build a decent society, elementary schools and high schools should require students to take courses that teach these specific social skills, and thus prepare them for life with one another. We could have courses in how to be a good listener or how to build a friendship. The late feminist philosopher Nel Noddings developed a whole pedagogy around how to effectively care for others.

A new core curriculum. More and more colleges and universities are offering courses in what you might call “How to Live.” Yale has one called “Life Worth Living.” Notre Dame has one called “God and the Good Life.” A first-year honors program in this vein at Valparaiso University, in Indiana, involves not just conducting formal debates on ideas gleaned from the Great Books, but putting on a musical production based on their themes. Many of these courses don’t give students a ready-made formula, but they introduce students to some of the venerated moral traditions—Buddhism, Judeo-Christianity, and Enlightenment rationalism, among others. They introduce students to those thinkers who have thought hard on moral problems, from Aristotle to Desmond Tutu to Martha Nussbaum. They hold up diverse exemplars to serve as models of how to live well. They put the big questions of life firmly on the table: What is the ruling passion of your soul? Whom are you responsible to? What are my moral obligations? What will it take for my life to be meaningful? What does it mean to be a good human in today’s world? What are the central issues we need to engage with concerning new technology and human life?

These questions clash with the ethos of the modern university, which is built around specialization and passing on professional or technical knowledge. But they are the most important courses a college can offer. They shouldn’t be on the margins of academic life. They should be part of the required core curriculum.

Intergenerational service. We spend most of our lives living by the logic of the meritocracy: Life is an individual climb upward toward success. It’s about pursuing self-interest.

There should be at least two periods of life when people have a chance to take a sabbatical from the meritocracy and live by an alternative logic—the logic of service: You have to give to receive. You have to lose yourself in a common cause to find yourself. The deepest human relationships are gift relationships, based on mutual care. (An obvious model for at least some aspects of this is the culture of the U.S. military, which similarly emphasizes honor, service, selflessness, and character in support of a purpose greater than oneself, throwing together Americans of different ages and backgrounds who forge strong social bonds.)

Those sabbaticals could happen at the end of the school years and at the end of the working years. National service programs could bring younger and older people together to work to address community needs.

These programs would allow people to experience other-centered ways of being and develop practical moral habits: how to cooperate with people unlike you. How to show up day after day when progress is slow. How to do work that is generous and hard.

Moral organizations. Most organizations serve two sets of goals—moral goals and instrumental goals. Hospitals heal the sick and also seek to make money. Newspapers and magazines inform the public and also try to generate clicks. Law firms defend clients and also try to maximize billable hours. Nonprofits aim to serve the public good and also raise money.

In our society, the commercial or utilitarian goals tend to eclipse the moral goals. Doctors are pressured by hospital administrators to rush through patients so they can charge more fees. Journalists are incentivized to write stories that confirm reader prejudices in order to climb the most-read lists. Whole companies slip into an optimization mindset, in which everything is done to increase output and efficiency.

Moral renewal won’t come until we have leaders who are explicit, loud, and credible about both sets of goals. Here’s how we’re growing financially, but also Here’s how we’re learning to treat one another with consideration and respect; here’s how we’re going to forgo some financial returns in order to better serve our higher mission.

Early in my career, as a TV pundit at PBS NewsHour, I worked with its host, Jim Lehrer. Every day, with a series of small gestures, he signaled what kind of behavior was valued there and what kind of behavior was unacceptable. In this subtle way, he established a set of norms and practices that still lives on. He and others built a thick and coherent moral ecology, and its way of being was internalized by most of the people who have worked there.

The Destruction Of NASA

strategic-culture  |  In her 2012 book Area 51 Uncensored, journalist Annie Jacobson provided lengthy detail of the Cold War experiments, aerospace technology and nuclear bomb testing that took place at Area 51 during this period which largely put the earlier social engineer experiment of H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds emergency broadcast read aloud in 1938. The mass panic that ensued the broadcast provided an insight into the levers of mass psychology that certain social engineers drooled over.

What could account for observed UFO phenomena?

In an interview with NPR Radio, Jacobson stated: “The UFO craze began in the summer of 1947. Several months later, the G2 intelligence, which was the Army intelligence corps at the time, spent an enormous amount of time and treasure seeking out two former Third Reich aerospace designers named Walter and Reimar Horten who had allegedly created [a] flying disc. … American intelligence agents fanned out across Europe seeking the Horton brothers to find out if, in fact, they had made this flying disc.”

During WWII, the Horten brothers were associated with the Austrian scientist Viktor Shauberger whose innovative designs for implosion (vs explosion) flying technology utilized water currents, and electromagnetism to generate flying machines that by all surviving accounts flew faster than the speed of sound. While much of his research was confiscated and classified by victor nations after WWII, Schauberger was promised government sponsorship in America which induced the inventor to move across the ccean where Canada’s Avro Arrow program sought his designs for supersonic nuclear missile delivery aircraft. When he discovered that his work would only be used for military purposes, Schauberger pushed back and over the course of several months, his patents were essentially stolen, and he returned to Austria to die broke and depressed in 1958.

The Strategic Importance of Space

It was never a secret that the post-1971 globalized world order championed by the likes of Sir Henry Kissinger, David and Laurence Rockefeller and other Malthusians throughout the 20^th century was always designed to collapse. With the mass shock therapy that such a collapse would impose upon the world, it was believed that a deconstruction of the Abrahamic traditions that governed western society for 2000 years could be accomplished and a new society could be socially engineered in the image of the Brave New (depopulated) World that would live like happy sheep forever under the grip of a hereditary alpha class and their technocratic managers. The story of the Tavistock-led attack on scientific progress is told brilliantly in the 2010 Lpac film The Destruction of NASA.

The only problem these social engineers have encountered in recent years is the re-emergence of actual statesmen who are unwilling to sacrifice their people and traditions on the altar of a new global Gaia cult. Such defenders of humanity’s better traditions have launched the multipolar alliance and have driven a policy of long-term growth and advance scientific and technological progress which is embodied brilliantly by the New Silk Road, and its extensions to the Arctic. The most exciting aspect of this New Silk Road/Multipolar Paradigm is the leap into space exploration as the new frontier of human self-development which has not been seen since the days of President Kennedy.

With China and Russia signing a pact to jointly develop lunar bases and the NASA Artemis Accords calling for international cooperation on Lunar and Mars resource development/industrialization, the age of unlimited growth that was lost with the LSD-driven mass psychosis of 1968’s “live in the now” paradigm shift may finally be recaptured. Programs designed to put humanity’s focus on real objective threats like Asteroid collisions, and solar-induced new ice ages are seriously being discussed by leaders of Russia, China and the USA.

There are billions of suns and potentially billions of galaxies, and chances are there is indeed life on many of the planets orbiting some of the stars within our growing, creative universe… and there is also a fair chance that cognitive life has also emerged on some of those planets. The best way to find out is not to sit at home while the world economic system collapses under a controlled disintegration thinking about Rockefeller-funded conspiracy theories, but rather to fight to revive humanity’s open system destiny starting with a cooperative space program to extend human culture and economy to the Moon and Mars, and then onto other planetary bodies followed by missions to deep space.

If other civilizations exist, maybe it is our duty to take up the torch left to us by JFK and go find them.

The Dollar Is Finally Being Dethroned

unherd  |  In short, America is bankrupt. Our governments from the federal level down, our big corporations and a very large number of our well-off citizens have run up gargantuan debts, which can only be serviced given direct or indirect access to the flows of unearned wealth the US extracted from the rest of the planet. Those debts cannot be paid off, and many of them can’t even be serviced for much longer. The only options are defaulting on them or inflating them out of existence, and in either case, arrangements based on familiar levels of expenditure will no longer be possible. Since the arrangements in question include most of what counts as an ordinary lifestyle in today’s US, the impact of their dissolution will be severe.

In effect, the 5% of us in this country are going to have to go back to living the way we did before 1945. If we still had the factories, the trained workforce, the abundant natural resources and the thrifty habits we had back then, that would have been a wrenching transition but not a debacle. The difficulty, of course, is that we don’t have those things anymore. The factories were shut down in the offshoring craze of the Seventies and Eighties, when the imperial economy slammed into overdrive, and the trained workforce was handed over to malign neglect.

We’ve still got some of the natural resources, but nothing like what we once had. The thrifty habits? Those went whistling down the wind a long time ago. In the late stages of an empire, exploiting flows of unearned wealth from abroad is far more profitable than trying to produce wealth at home, and most people direct their efforts accordingly. That’s how you end up with the typical late-imperial economy, with a governing class that flaunts fantastic levels of paper wealth, a parasite class of hangers-on that thrive by catering to the very rich or staffing the baroque bureaucratic systems that permeate public and private life, and the vast majority of the population impoverished, sullen, and unwilling to lift a finger to save their soi-disant betters from the consequences of their own actions.

The good news is that there’s a solution to all this. The bad news is that it’s going to take a couple of decades of serious turmoil to get there. The solution is that the US economy will retool itself to produce earned wealth in the form of real goods and non-financial services. That’ll happen inevitably as the flows of unearned wealth falter, foreign goods become unaffordable to most Americans, and it becomes profitable to produce things here in the US again. The difficulty, of course, is that most of a century of economic and political choices meant to support our former imperial project are going to have to be undone.

The most obvious example? The metastatic bloat of government, corporate and non-profit managerial jobs in American life. That’s a sensible move in an age of empire, as it funnels money into the consumer economy, which provides what jobs exist for the impoverished classes. Public and private offices alike teem with legions of office workers whose labour contributes nothing to national prosperity but whose pay cheques prop up the consumer sector. That bubble is already losing air. It’s indicative that Elon Musk, after his takeover of Twitter, fired some 80% of that company’s staff; other huge internet combines are pruning their workforce in the same way, though not yet to the same degree.

The recent hullaballoo about artificial intelligence is helping to amplify the same trend. Behind the chatbots are programs called large language models (LLMs), which are very good at imitating the more predictable uses of human language. A very large number of office jobs these days spend most of their time producing texts that fall into that category: contracts, legal briefs, press releases, media stories and so on. Those jobs are going away. Computer coding is even more amenable to LLM production, so you can kiss a great many software jobs goodbye as well. Any other form of economic activity that involves assembling predictable sequences of symbols is facing the same crunch. A recent paper by Goldman Sachs estimates that something like 300 million jobs across the industrial world will be wholly or partly replaced by LLMs in the years immediately ahead.

Another technology with similar results is CGI image creation. Levi’s announced not long ago that all its future catalogues and advertising will use CGI images instead of highly-paid models and photographers. Expect the same thing to spread generally. Oh, and Hollywood’s next. We’re not too far from the point at which a program can harvest all the footage of Marilyn Monroe from her films, and use that to generate new Marilyn Monroe movies for a tiny fraction of what it costs to hire living actors, camera crews and the rest. The result will be a drastic decrease in high-paying jobs across a broad swathe of the economy.

The outcome of all this? Well, one lot of pundits will insist at the top of their lungs that nothing will change in any way that matters, and another lot will start shrieking that the apocalypse is upon us. Those are the only two options our collective imagination can process these days. Of course, neither of those things will actually happen.

What will happen instead is that the middle and upper-middle classes in the US, and in many other countries, will face the same kind of slow demolition that swept over the working classes of those same countries in the late 20th century. Layoffs, corporate bankruptcies, declining salaries and benefits, and the latest high-tech version of NO HELP WANTED signs will follow one another at irregular intervals. All the businesses that make money catering to these same classes will lose their incomes as well, a piece at a time. Communities will hollow out the way the factory towns of America’s Rust Belt and the English Midlands did half a century ago, but this time it will be the turn of upscale suburbs and fashionable urban neighbourhoods to collapse as the income streams that supported them disappear.

 

Not Big Lots!! EBT/SNAP Cuts Fitna Hurt One Of My Favorite Stores...,

businessinsider |  Discount chains like Dollar General and Big Lots are warning that cuts to food stamps and lower-than-usual tax refunds this year could start hurting sales. 

This month, 32 states ended the federal increase to food stamps, known as SNAP benefits, that began during the early weeks of the pandemic. At the same time, certain beefed-up tax credits are no longer available, which means many taxpayers are preparing for smaller tax refunds this year. 

Both changes are the result of a wind-down of pandemic-era policies, and it's the combination of factors that has retailers worried — they're coming at a time when inflation has kept prices for everyday goods unusually high, straining the budgets of lower-income consumers in particular. 

Now, the retailers that serve those consumers are preparing for a possible slowdown in spending. 

"In particular, we remain concerned about the lower-income customer, our core customer," Michael O'Sullivan, CEO of off-price department store Burlington, said during a call with investors this month. "In 2022, this customer group bore the brunt of the impact of inflation on real household incomes. We think the impact of inflation will moderate this year, but there are other factors that could hurt this customer, such as a rise in unemployment and the ending of expanded SNAP benefits." 

At value chain Big Lots, where nearly 80% of shoppers have a household income under $100,000, "customers are pinched," CEO Bruce Thorn said during a recent investor call.

"At this point, 30% of that lower household income customer, their expenses today are greater than their income coming in. And 70% of them have curbed spending as a result of that," he said. 

Thorn estimated that the tax refunds, though arriving earlier this year, are about 10% to 15% lower than last year, and when combined with the reduced SNAP benefits, it "further deteriorates lower household income spend." Those shoppers, he said, are "going through a tough time right now." 

 

Americans Will Suffer Devastation And Hell Because Of Our Failure To Hold Anyone Accountable

kunstler  |   “The White House has taken the entire West in such a direction and speed of triumphalism, arrogance and “egregious” imbecility that there is no going back or reversal possible without a total defeat of the official narrative and the consequent eternal shame.” — Hugo Dionisio

The New York Times — indicted this week as a chronic purveyer of untruths by no less than their supposed ally, The Columbia Journalism Review — is lying to you again this morning.

        This whopper is an artful diversion from the reality on-the-ground that Ukraine is just about finished in this tragic and idiotic conflict staged by the geniuses behind their play-thing President “Joe Biden.” By the way, it’s not a coincidence that Ukraine and “JB” are going down at the same time. The two organisms are symbionts: a matched pair of mutual parasites feeding off each other, swapping each other’s toxic exudations, and growing delirious on their glide path to a late winter crash.

      The point of the war, you recall, is “to weaken Russia” (so said DoD Sec’y Lloyd Austin), even to bust it up into little geographic tatters to our country’s advantage — that is, to retain America’s dominance in global affairs, and especially the supremacy of the US dollar in global trade settlements.

     The result of the war so far has been the opposite of that objective. US sanctions made Russia stronger by shifting its oil exports to more reliable Asian customers. Kicking Russia out of the SWIFT global payments system prompted the BRIC countries to build their own alternative trade settlement system. Cutting off Russia from trade with Western Civ has stimulated the process of import replacement (i.e., Russia making more of the stuff it used to buy from Europe). Confiscating Russia’s off-shore dollar assets has alerted the rest of the world to dump their dollar assets (especially US Treasury bonds) before they, too, get mugged. Nice going, Victoria Nuland, Tony Blinken, and the rest of the gang at the Foggy Bottom genius factory.

      All of which raises the question: who is liable to bust up into tatters first, the USA or Russia? I commend to you Dmitry Orlov’s seminal work, Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Experience and American Prospects, Revised & Updated. For anyone out there not paying attention the past thirty-odd years, Russia, incorporated as the Soviet Union, collapsed in 1991. The USSR was a bold experiment based on the peculiar and novel ill-effects of industrialism, especially gross economic inequality. Alas, the putative remedy for that, advanced by Karl Marx, was a despotic system of pretending that individual humans had no personal aspirations of their own.

    The Soviet / Marxist business model was eventually reduced to the comic aphorism: We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us. It failed and the USSR gurgled down history’s drain. Russia reemerged from the dust, minus many of its Eurasian outlands. Remarkably little blood was shed in the process. Mr. Orlov’s book points to some very interesting set-ups that softened the landing. There was no private property in the USSR, so when it collapsed, nobody was evicted or foreclosed from where they lived. Very few people had cars in the USSR, so the city centers were still intact and people could get around on buses, trams, and trains. The food system had been botched for decades by low-incentive collectivism, but the Russian people were used to planting family gardens — even city dwellers, who had plots out-of-town — and it tided them over during the years of hardship before the country managed to reorganize.

      Compare that to America’s prospects. In an economic crisis, Americans will have their homes foreclosed out from under them, or will be subject to eviction from rentals. The USA has been tragically built-out on a suburban sprawl template that will be useless without cars and with little public transport. Cars, of course, are subject to repossession for non-payment of contracted loans. The American food system is based on manufactured microwavable cheese snacks, chicken nuggets, and frozen pizzas produced by giant companies. These items can’t be grown in home gardens. Many Americans don’t know the first thing about growing their own food, or what to do with it after it’s harvested.

      There’s another difference between the fall of the USSR and the collapse underway in the USA. Underneath all the economic perversities of Soviet life, Russia still had a national identity and a coherent culture. The USA has tossed its national identity on the garbage barge of “diversity, equity, and inclusion,” which is actually just a hustle aimed at extracting what remains from the diminishing stock of productive activity showering the plunder on a mob of “intersectional” complainers — e.g., the City of San Francisco’s preposterous new plan to award $5-million “reparation” payments to African-American denizens of the city, where slavery never existed.

      As for culture, consider that the two biggest cultural producers in this land are the pornography and video game industries. The drug business might be a close third, but most of that action is off-the-books, so it’s hard to tell. So much for the so-called “arts.” Our political culture verges on totally degenerate, but that is too self-evident to belabor, and the generalized management failures of our polity are a big part of what’s bringing us down — most particularly the failure to hold anyone in power accountable for their blunders and turpitudes.

      This unearned immunity  might change, at least a little bit, as the oppositional House of Representatives commences hearings on an array of disturbing matters. Meanwhile, be wary of claims in The New York Times and other propaganda organs that our Ukraine project is a coming up a big win, and that the racketeering operations of the Biden family amount to an extreme right-wing, white supremacist conspiracy theory. These two pieces of the conundrum known as Reality are blowing up in our country’s face. It will be hard not to notice.

 

Crime And Violence In Mexico - By The Numbers

statista |  Despite being one of the leading tourism destinations in the world, Mexico regularly makes international headlines due to widespread violence and organized crime. According to the Global Peace Index (GPI), Mexico ranks among the least peaceful countries in Latin America. Although internationally recognized as a country with a complex and high criminal activity, where drug trafficking and related crimes are commonplace, pettier crimes such as theft on the street or pickpocketing on public transportation are some of the most reported occurrences in Mexico, followed by fraud and extortion cases. Kidnapping, on the other hand, is one of the crimes against personal freedom that most afflicts the Mexican population. In 2018, Mexico was the Latin American nation with the highest number of kidnappings.

The perceived level of insecurity in Mexico has worsened in the past few years, with almost 76 percent of the adult population stating they did not feel safe where they lived. Baja California and Zacatecas, in particular, are among the Mexican states with the poorest peace levels. This feeling of insecurity directly affects the population's quality of life, as many people avoid performing basic outdoor activities due to fear of becoming a crime victim. For instance, 69 percent of Mexicans who participated in a survey did not allow underage children or teenagers to go out on their own.

Violence in Mexico is already considered an epidemic and it has significant repercussions on public health, specially when it comes to longevity and the overall life expectancy of the Mexican population. Annual murder rates stand at 13 intentional homicides committed per 100,000 inhabitants at the first half of 2021. The alarming rate of life-threatening crimes particularly affects women. In the past decade, Mexico registered an increasing number of femicides, the second highest in Latin America.

Violence is also a deterrent for economic growth. Crime does not simply increase people’s vulnerabilities and endangers lives; it also imposes a heavy burden on both public and private financial resources. In 2021, the cost of violence in Mexico amounted to a staggering 4.9 trillion Mexican pesos. This amount includes not only preventive and containment measures but also the economic losses due to victimization, the expenditure related with the judicial system and the recovery and well-being of the victims. In Mexico City, for example, violence was estimated to cost over 45,600 Mexican pesos per capita in 2021.

The Limits Of Private Corporate Governance (Power)

aurelian2022 |  There’s a pretty solid consensus that the western political class today is totally incapable, and that it presides over fragile state systems, that it has itself hollowed out and de-skilled progressively for the last forty years. Conversely, it is agreed that the West faces an array of existential problems never seen before, some already with us, others yet to arrive. Yet there’s been a surprising lack of reflection on the implications of these two truths together. Let’s peel away a few scabs, and try to see what’s likely to be hiding underneath.

Almost everyone who’s not a member of the western political class, or a parasite upon it, views it with a kind of numb despair. Increasingly professional in the blinkered and isolated sense, it is increasingly amateurish in every other. This would matter less if the class were supported by competent and properly staffed state structures, but that is seldom the case. Most state services in western countries have been reduced to shadows of what they once were.

That much is generally agreed, but there has been little attempt to think about what exactly the practical consequences are, and how they might complicate, or even prevent, an effective response to problems caused by climate change, disease, war, mass population movements, and all the rest. The conclusion of this essay will be a bit like an Aristotelian syllogism: western states are increasingly being confronted with massive, interlinked  problems, requiring competent and far-sighted management. But there is no competent and far-sighted management. Therefore we are stuffed. I’m now going to try to put a little flesh on these unattractive-sounding bones.

Let’s start with the biggest weaknesses of the system. The first is the incestuous and exclusive nature the political class, Now of course this is not new. The House of Lords in eighteenth-century England, or the aristocracy at Versailles, were at least as ingrown and far removed from the concerns of ordinary people then, as their descendants are today. But in the eighteenth century there was no question of a notionally representative political class, theoretically owing a duty to the people: now there is. It’s a familiar story: the end of mass political parties, the dominance of politicians without experience of anything outside politics, the capture of the main western parties by a well-off, culturally homogeneous professional and managerial class, the triumph of image and discourse over reality, and the increasing contempt of the political class for the people who elect them. Beyond valid concerns about corruption and nepotism, there are two entirely technical consequences of all this, that bode ill for the political management of even relatively simple problems, and which will make facing up to the kind of complex crises that are starting to arise now difficult, if not impossible.

The first is that fundamental traditional political skills are no longer needed for career success. Once upon a time, politicians would try to get elected, and to develop personal and organisational skills that made that possible. They would rely on large numbers of volunteers for canvasing and to get the vote out, and on convincing as many people as possible to vote for them by personal contact and giving speeches. Few politicians are capable of that today. Rather, success comes from appealing to an in-group, to positioning yourself well with party militants, and to getting favourable coverage from certain media sources. “The electorate” is those who read your Twitter posts. Why does this matter? Well, it means that when a genuine crisis arrives, such politicians are incapable of understanding, let alone communicating with, and certainly not motivating, ordinary people. The epitome of this type of politician must be Emmanuel Macron, whose attempts to talk directly to the French people during height of the Covid crisis were so awful, and so embarrassing, that people hid under the table to get away from him. Here was a man clearly hopelessly out of his depth, in a situation where McKinsey was not the solution.

The second is that genuine ideas are no longer needed either. True, governments are still elected with notional programmes, but that’s a polite fiction. Politics is about winning the media battle, looking good on TV, massaging genuine political issues so that they go away, internal warfare within the party, and winning the next election. Government “initiatives” are generally sterile technocratic exercises which take money from those who have too little already, or give even more to those who already have too much. When a genuine political crisis arises (Covid, Brexit, Ukraine) the system finds that it cannot be managed or Twittered away, and has no idea what to do, other than to try to look good on TV. So it inevitably panics. With Covid, western governments have effectively surrendered, and allowed the disease to propagate freely, because they don’t have the moral or intellectual capability to fight it effectively. And Ukraine is being dealt with, so far as I can tell, on the basis that winter isn’t coming this year after all. The result is a kind of paralysis at the heart of government, where nothing is ever done except in haste and for immediate effect on one hand, or out of sheer panic on the other.

Even without forty years of the hollowing out of state capacity, this would still cause problems. Contrary to myth, public servants prefer to work for a government that knows what it wants, and sets objectives (and no, not those sort of objectives). Most senior figures in western public services have now spent their careers working in a political culture which is obsessed with image and with instant effects. There are no rewards any more for being prudent, for thinking long-term, or for telling the political class that they are storing up trouble for the future. All this produces a kind of corruption: the prizes go to those ready to tell the political class what it wants to hear, and to help them do whatever it takes to get good media coverage. Good people leave, or just never join.

Roe vs. Wade Didn't Usher In The Conservative Christian Movement, School Integration Did...,

msn  |  Sen. Josh Hawley predicts the overturning of Roe v. Wade will cause a 'major sorting out across the country' and allow the GOP to 'extend their strength in the Electoral College'

• Sen. Josh Hawley predicted that the overturning of Roe v. Wade will help Republicans in the long run.
• He argued the decision would polarize the country in a way that benefits Republicans in the Electoral College.
• He also said the alliance between big business and social conservatives that underpins the GOP is now "over."

On the heels of a 6-3 Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and revoking the constitutionally protected right to an abortion in America, Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri predicted a dramatic shift in the country's political fabric.

"I really do think that this is going to be a watershed moment in American politics," he said on a call with reporters on Friday. "The first decision — the 1973 Roe decision —  fundamentally reshaped American politics, it ushered in the rise of the Christian conservative movement, it led to the forming of what became the Reagan coalition in 1980."

First Comes Job-loss/Precarity, Then Comes Addiction, Then Mental Illness

Wired |   To promote policy that actually works, reporters and editors need to act more like science journalists and less like stenographers who—whether implicitly or explicitly, accidentally or deliberately—bolster political campaigns that use ignorance to drive fear.

It would be hard to find a better example of this problem than Nellie Bowles’ recent essay in The Atlantic, which argues that San Francisco is a “failed city,” in large part because liberal policies have worsened addiction and mental illness. These policies persist, she suggests, because local politicians refuse to confront the empty-headed but well-intentioned delusions of the hippies and their descendants who just want to let it be. She also claims that the recall of progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin in a June 7 election demonstrates that the city is finally awakening from this daze.

Bowles’ work is far from alone in its failure to look at evidence of effectiveness of various policies when discussing the politics around them. In one 24-hour period in June, a columnist for The Washington Post argued that “Boudin’s recall proves that Democrats have lost the public’s trust on crime”—without any mention of data on which policies work best. A similar news analysis from The New York Times also mentioned no actual data. And a New York magazine essay on “Chesa Boudin and the Debacle of Urban Left-Wing Politics” similarly ignored the question of whose preferred approaches are supported by evidence—and whose aren’t.

Bowles writes that her hometown “became so dogmatically progressive that maintaining the purity of the politics required accepting—or at least ignoring—devastating results.” She describes the city’s de facto supervised injection site in the Tenderloin as a place that looks like “young people being eased into death on the sidewalk, surrounded by half-eaten boxed lunches.”

Her argument falls apart in the face of scientific data. Hundreds of studies support the “harm reduction” approach used in clean needle programs and supervised injection sites—and none of them show that it makes drug use or civic life worse.

Indeed, harm reduction was deliberately adopted based on research evidence, not platitudes from the 1960s. Further undermining her analysis, studies overwhelmingly illustrate the counterproductive nature of using cops and coercion first. For one, red states with old-school tough prosecutors actually have worse crime rates than liberal ones like California.

However, since Bowles apparently assumes that harm reduction tactics were adopted because they seemed groovy, she ignores this research base. (Which, ironically, is the type of mindless approach she critiques San Francisco policymakers for supposedly having used.) What she and many other journalists frame as the failure of harm reduction is actually the failure of criminalization.

A brief tour of the data: According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and dozens of other obscure organizations like the World Health Organization, the National Academy of Medicine, and the American Medical Association, clean needle programs dramatically reduce HIV transmission without increasing drug use rates. One study published in the Journal of Substance Abuse Treatment showed that, compared to people on the street who do not, those who participate in syringe service programs are five times more likely to seek more traditional forms of recovery and three times more likely to quit injecting.

What about supervised drug consumption? Here are three reviews of the literature, which show that it reduces HIV risk, injecting, harm associated with injection, and overdose death rates—while not increasing and sometimes reducing local crime and needle litter. (A 2018 review widely touted by critics for suggesting that supervised consumption did not have a significantly positive outcome had to be retracted by the International Journal of Drug Policy due to poor methodology.)

How about the “problem” that Bowles identifies with reduced penalties for drug possession and the increased use of incarceration and coerced treatment she apparently prefers?

 

We Live In The Toxic Hen-House That White Women Have "Created"...,

newyorker  |  In 2013, when people still nursed high hopes for the salvific effects of the Internet and cancellation was a fate reserved for poorly rated TV shows, a private citizen with a hundred and seventy Twitter followers was loitering in Heathrow Airport, waiting for a flight to Cape Town, South Africa. “Going to Africa,” she dashed off before boarding. “Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!” By the time she landed, eleven hours later, her ill-advised missive had gone disastrously viral. She stumbled off the plane to discover that a multitude of online detractors had weighed in on her character. Now she was a globally known racist.

The woman, Justine Sacco, was one of the first high-profile casualties of public shaming in the digital era, and she suffered all the consequences that have since become routine: job loss, wide-scale condemnation, and a public identity subsumed by a very public sin. Still, in the wake of subsequent disasters, her story is almost quaint. How pleasant it is to recall a simpler, kinder time when an online mobbing was an occurrence so unusual that it merited two articles in the Times.

Our social fabric has since frayed considerably. What’s curious about the brutality that fuels Internet shaming frenzies is that in real life—that is, IRL, in the usual online parlance—most of us would hesitate to consign a normal nobody to nationwide notoriety and several years of unemployment. We might even have mustered the charity to read Sacco’s quip as a satirical, if clumsy, sendup of the white privilege and parochialism that give rise to public-health inequalities. (Sacco, as people in her inner circle would have known, was no stranger to either Africa or progressive causes.) Yet the nasty comments went on accumulating, as if of their own accord. “We are about to watch this @JustineSacco bitch get fired. In REAL time. Before she even KNOWS she’s getting fired.” “All I want for Christmas is to see @JustineSacco’s face when her plane lands and she checks her inbox/voicemail.” “Her level of racist ignorance belongs on Fox News. #AIDS can affect anyone!”

It’s an open question whether there is anything redeeming about our transformation into bloodhounds as soon as we log on, and two new investigations into the nature of shame offer contrasting answers. In “How to Do Things with Emotions: The Morality of Anger and Shame Across Cultures” (Princeton), Owen Flanagan, a professor of philosophy and neurobiology at Duke University, suggests that our tense political climate is the product of poor emotional regulation. In “The Shame Machine: Who Profits in the New Age of Humiliation” (Crown), the data-scientist-cum-journalist Cathy O’Neil suggests that shaming is structural: its ubiquity is the fault not of individual vigilantes but, rather, of the many industries that manufacture and exploit mortification for profit.

At the heart of these diverging perspectives is an ambiguity built into the very concept at issue. Shame is an emotion—a person can suffer from its bilious bite, as Sacco did—but it is also a state of affairs. No matter how Sacco felt, her ostracism was an established fact, a thing that happened to her. Is shame fundamentally a feeling or fundamentally a social phenomenon? Should we treat it as a matter of psychology or of politics?

In “How to Do Things with Emotions,” a scholarly plea for a renovated emotional landscape, Flanagan casts his vote for psychology. Troubled by the churlishness of contemporary American politics, he sets out to isolate “emotional habits that are mixed up in our troubles,” by which he means our descent into polarity, chaos, and mutual mistrust. He’s against the more vituperative forms of anger, which he believes are too prevalent, and is in favor of shame, which he regards as all but absent from our ethical repertoire. Shame, in his view, is an unjustly maligned emotion that we might rehabilitate in order to discipline racists and misogynists.

Shame, canonically, is the sinking sentiment that attends deviation from widely endorsed mores, whatever they happen to be. You can be sad or elated for any reason or for no reason, but shame requires a shared social context. The emotion in question arises not because you violated a standard that you set for yourself but because you violated a standard that your milieu (perhaps policed by Twitter) imposes on you. Because shame is a means of enforcing whatever values are operative in a given society, whether it proves salutary hinges on the merits of the moral system in which it is deployed, at least according to Flanagan. He admits that shame has too often been conscripted as a weapon against the oppressed—as when women and queer people have been encouraged to suppress their sexual impulses. Nonetheless, he calls for shame to be enlisted in the service of social justice, as it was when a concerted social-media campaign ejected the Hollywood producer and serial rapist Harvey Weinstein from power.

Nobody Thought The "Rules-Based" World Order Would Give Way This Fast...,

thesaker  |  So I am somewhat chagrined as I watch the speed at which this U.S.-centered financialized system has de-dollarized over the span of just a year or two. The basic theme of my Super Imperialism has been how, for the past fifty years, the U.S. Treasury-bill standard has channeled foreign savings to U.S. financial markets and banks, giving Dollar Diplomacy a free ride. I thought that de-dollarization would be led by China and Russia moving to take control of their economies to avoid the kind of financial polarization that is imposing austerity on the United States.^[2] But U.S. officials are forcing Russia, China and other nations not locked into the U.S. orbit to see the writing on the wall and overcome whatever hesitancy they had to de-dollarize.

I had expected that the end of the dollarized imperial economy would come about by other countries breaking away. But that is not what has happened. U.S. diplomats themselves have chosen to end international dollarization, while helping Russia build up its own means of self-reliant agricultural and industrial production. This global fracture process actually has been going on for some years, starting with the sanctions blocking America’s NATO allies and other economic satellites from trading with Russia. For Russia, these sanctions had the same effect that protective tariffs would have had.

Russia had remained too enthralled by free-market neoliberal ideology to take steps to protect its own agriculture and industry. The United States provided the help that was needed by imposing domestic self-reliance on Russia. When the Baltic states obeyed American sanctions and lost the Russian market for their cheese and other farm products, Russia quickly created its own cheese and dairy sector – while becoming the world’s leading grain exporter.

Russia is discovering (or is on the verge of discovering) that it does not need U.S. dollars as backing for the ruble’s exchange rate. Its central bank can create the rubles needed to pay domestic wages and finance capital formation. The U.S. confiscations of its dollar and euro reserves may finally lead Russia to end its adherence to neoliberal monetary philosophy, as Sergei Glaziev has long been advocating, in favor of Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).

The same dynamic of undercutting ostensible U.S aims has occurred with U.S. sanctions against the leading Russian billionaires. The neoliberal shock therapy and privatizations of the 1990s left Russian kleptocrats with only one way to cash out on the assets they had grabbed from the public domain. That was to incorporate their takings and sell their shares in London and New York. Domestic savings had been wiped out, and U.S. advisors persuaded Russia’s central bank not to create its own ruble money.

The result was that Russia’s national oil, gas and mineral patrimony was not used to finance a rationalization of Russian industry and housing. Instead of the revenue from privatization being invested to create new Russian means of protection, it was burned up on nouveau-riche acquisitions of luxury British real estate, yachts and other global flight-capital assets. But the effect of sanctions making the dollar, sterling and euro holdings of Russian billionaires hostage has been to make the City of London too risky a venue in which to hold their assets – and for the wealthy of any other nation potentially subject to U.S. sanctions. By imposing sanctions on the richest Russians closest to Putin, U.S. officials hoped to induce them to oppose his breakaway from the West, and thus to serve effectively as NATO agents-of-influence. But for Russian billionaires, their own country is starting to look safest.

For many decades now, the U.S. Federal Reserve and Treasury have fought against gold recovering its role in international reserves. But how will India and Saudi Arabia view their dollar holdings as Biden and Blinken try to strong-arm them into following the U.S. “rules-based order” instead of their own national self-interest? The recent U.S. dictates have left little alternative but to start protecting their own political autonomy by converting dollar and euro holdings into gold as an asset free from political liability of being held hostage to the increasingly costly and disruptive U.S. demands.

U.S. diplomacy has rubbed Europe’s nose in its abject subservience by telling its governments to have their companies dump their Russian assets for pennies on the dollar after Russia’s foreign reserves were blocked and the ruble’s exchange rate plunged. Blackstone, Goldman Sachs and other U.S. investors moved quickly to buy up what Shell Oil and other foreign companies were unloading.

This Isn't An Accident, It Is Desired By Global Capital And Will NOT Go Away

consortiumnews |  A few days after the Nov. 2 election, The New York Times published a vehement editorial calling for the Democratic Party to adopt “moderate” positions and avoid seeking “progressive policies at the expense of bipartisan ideas.” It was a statement by the Times editorial board, which the newspaper describes as “a group of opinion journalists whose views are informed by expertise, research, debate and certain longstanding values.”

The editorial certainly reflected “longstanding values” — since the Times has recycled them for decades in its relentless attacks on the progressive wing of the Democratic Party.

The Times editorial board began its polemic by calling for the party to “return” to “moderate policies.”

Translation: Stick to corporate-friendly policies of the sort that we applauded during 16 years of the Clinton and Obama presidencies.

The board also said the election results:

“are a sign that significant parts of the electorate are feeling leery of a sharp leftward push in the party, including on priorities like Build Back Better, which have some strong provisions and some discretionary ones driving up the price tag.”

Translation: Although poll after poll shows that the Build Back Better agenda is popular with the broad public, especially increased taxation on wealthy and corporate elites to pay for it, we need to characterize the plan as part of “a sharp leftward push.”

And the board noted:

“the concerns of more centrist Americans about a rush to spend taxpayer money, a rush to grow the government, should not be dismissed.”

Translation: While we don’t object to the ongoing “rush to spend taxpayer money” on the military, and we did not editorialize against the bloated Pentagon budget, we oppose efforts to “grow the government” too much for such purposes as healthcare, childcare, education, housing and mitigating the climate crisis.

“Mr. Biden did not win the Democratic primary because he promised a progressive revolution. There were plenty of other candidates doing that. He captured the nomination—and the presidency—because he promised an exhausted nation a return to sanity, decency and competence.”

Translation: No need to fret about the anti-democratic power of great wealth and corporate monopolies. We liked the status quo before the Trump presidency, and that’s more or less what we want now.

“‘Nobody elected him to be F.D.R.,’ Representative Abigail Spanberger, a moderate Democrat from Virginia, told the Times after Tuesday’s drubbing.”

Translation: Spanberger, a former CIA case officer and current member of the corporate Blue Dog Coalition in Congress, is our kind of Democrat.

“Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people.”

Translation: Democrats should work to implement policies to help the American people but not go overboard by helping them too much. We sometimes write editorials bemoaning the vast income inequality in this country, but we don’t want the government to do much to reduce it.

“Congress should focus on what is possible, not what would be possible if Joe Manchin, Kyrsten Sinema and — frankly — a host of lesser-known Democratic moderates who haven’t had to vote on policies they might oppose were not in office.”

Translation: We editorialize about social justice, but we don’t want structural changes and substantial new government policies that could bring it much closer. We editorialize about the climate crisis, but not in favor of government actions anywhere near commensurate with the crisis.

Has McKinsey Been Crafting The Plans To Kill Off People?

The pathological elite of this country are in process of narratizing themselves through a controlled population decline. All institutions of public health seemingly accepting this top-down narrative. 

Mckinsey was the major force multiplier of the opioid crisis, and it is because of that fact that when I read this piece on the panicdemic, I'm drawn to conclude that the plan is simply to kill off people. Whether opioid addiction or viral contagion, the plan is simply to kill off unprofitable population. 

After all, it was McKinsey who advised the Sacklers how to make more money than god selling opioids legally. (coincidentally, this program coincided with the U.S. occupation of Afghanistan from whence tons of opium were exported back to the U.S.) The result was deaths of addiction and despair all across the country, by prescription. 

McKinsey gives out the usual one size fits all advice to everyone, streamline your business, make sales triple, socialize your costs, demand tax exemptions… I can even remember – less than 10 years ago – walking into same-day surgery and seeing big stickers on the floor both advertising opiod pain killers and advising to take them with caution. Laughable because when you are in serious pain post surgery, you are inclined to pop that stuff like candy. And then ask for more. I wonder if McKinsey advised Pharma to install advertisements in hospitals. 

That certainly sounds like McKinsey.  

The 1973 Film Soylent Green Was Set In The Year 2022 - YOU Are The Soylent Green...,

rutherford  |  It’s no longer a question of whether the government will lock up Americans for defying its mandates but when.

This is what we know: the government has the means, the muscle and the motivation to detain individuals who resist its orders and do not comply with its mandates in a vast array of prisons, detention centers, and FEMA concentration camps paid for with taxpayer dollars.

It’s just a matter of time.

It no longer matters what the hot-button issue might be (vaccine mandates, immigration, gun rights, abortion, same-sex marriage, healthcare, criticizing the government, protesting election results, etc.) or which party is wielding its power like a hammer.

The groundwork has already been laid.

Under the indefinite detention provision of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the President and the military can detain and imprison American citizens with no access to friends, family or the courts if the government believes them to be a terrorist.

So it should come as no surprise that merely criticizing the government or objecting to a COVID-19 vaccine could get you labeled as a terrorist.

After all, it doesn’t take much to be considered a terrorist anymore, especially given that the government likes to use the words “anti-government,” “extremist” and “terrorist” interchangeably.

For instance, the Department of Homeland Security broadly defines extremists as individuals, military veterans and groups “that are mainly antigovernment, rejecting federal authority in favor of state or local authority, or rejecting government authority entirely.”

Military veterans returning from Iraq and Afghanistan may also be characterized as extremists and potential domestic terrorist threats by the government because they may be “disgruntled, disillusioned or suffering from the psychological effects of war.”

Indeed, if you believe in and exercise your rights under the Constitution (namely, your right to speak freely, worship freely, associate with like-minded individuals who share your political views, criticize the government, own a weapon, demand a warrant before being questioned or searched, or any other activity viewed as potentially anti-government, racist, bigoted, anarchic or sovereign), you could be at the top of the government’s terrorism watch list.

Moreover, as a New York Times editorial warns, you may be an anti-government extremist (a.k.a. domestic terrorist) in the eyes of the police if you are afraid that the government is plotting to confiscate your firearms, if you believe the economy is about to collapse and the government will soon declare martial law, or if you display an unusual number of political and/or ideological bumper stickers on your car.

According to the FBI, you might also be classified as a domestic terrorism threat if you espouse conspiracy theories or dare to subscribe to any views that are contrary to the government’s.

The government also has a growing list—shared with fusion centers and law enforcement agencies—of ideologies, behaviors, affiliations and other characteristics that could flag someone as suspicious and result in their being labeled potential enemies of the state.

This is what happens when you not only put the power to determine who is a potential danger in the hands of government agencies, the courts and the police but also give those agencies liberal authority to lock individuals up for perceived wrongs.

It’s a system just begging to be abused by power-hungry bureaucrats desperate to retain their power at all costs.