It is SOP for police, FBI, and all sorts of private corps. and military orgs. to work with criminals to achieve their own criminal goals. We all remember how our Pure President Ike Eisenhower set up a CIA assassination black ops. unit to work with the Mafia to murder foreign heads of state the U.S. found unseemly. Nixon, of course, was Ike’s liaison man with that special ops. murder unit, which was a crucial reason the CIA wanted Nixon hit in the Watergate crimes, to shut him up by getting rid of him.

Of course, an even bigger reason they wanted to get rid of Nixon by setting him up with McCord and all the Plumber arch criminals from the CIA and FBI was to prevent his getting a real détente with the Soviets. No Soviets, no big terror to push the American ignorati into supporting more power and money for the CIA, FBI, etc.

The con is simple. The Big Criminals feed little criminals and innocents to the cops, FBI, etc., in exchange for protection of themselves from the cops, FBI, etc. It works that way up and down the System. I and fellow investigative researchers stumbled on it decades ago in studying crime and the police. It was especially rampant in drugs and DEA ops.

The Boston FBI, like the local Boston police, were more exuberant in their high crimes than most local agencies, but probably less so than in Daley City [Chicago] and maybe Philly.

As we all know, the Boston Mafia and local pols. gave us our first openly Mafioso President, JFK. Jack’s father, Joe, made his vast fortune working with the Chicago Mob running booze in Prohibition, then was appointed head of the new SEC by FDR so he could milk the Big Time Criminals for Big Money.

Once you know how the System works at all levels, with local variations, you can spot the ops. behind the lies and BS right away. When Obama appointed a son of the Irgun and totally corrupt politics in Chicago and national money hatchet man for the Demos. as his chief of staff, BINGO. BO has been obvious from the beginning. JFK was obvious to those in the know and a friend of mine at Harvard in Ted’s class told me crucial things about the Kennedy boys, but I was naive and it went right by me. It was only Vietnam and then intensive research that woke me up so I could see the light. I once was naive, but now I see the light.

And that was in spire of growing up in the rackets in Miami, where I could even see my mother paying off the Sheriff’s Deputies for Al Yost, a mobster who had built his fortune in the La Paloma Club before he got sent to Atlanta for a 20 year vacation, came back and turned the old club into a huge bookie and wire outfit that my mother fronted for as bar maid to hide what went on in back of the bar. Any local cop in the know knows what’s going on, so they have to be on the payroll.

But I did not know that was true in the White House until Jack opened my eyes. So when you see the Bushes and all their successors in the U.S. hob-mobbing with the Sheiks raking in hundreds of billions through Opec monopoly pricing, you know the score, if you’re in the know and can see the light. Just open your eyes and believe what is obvious.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

It’s obvious that Edward Snowden was able to copy massive amounts of NSA secret data because at Booz Allen he had access to it. He has specifically said he could have revealed NSA material damaging to the U.S. but chose not to do so. There are reports that “more explosive material” will be forthcoming from The Guardian. [Booz Allen is in reality a CIA-NSA subsidiary now and quite international, but I doubt they deal much with the military docs on the U.S. secret wars around the world.]

Right now the U.S. is trying desperately to come up with any ways they can to criminalize him, stigmatize him, etc. This is SOP in these cases – as we saw in the Swedish criminalization of Asssange over night.

The cat and mouse game is in full play now. The strategies are complex but clear.

Wikileaks has released massive secret U.S. documents in batches and has promised a million more in 2013. Snowden is probably following that example, but the U.S. is hoping to give him a Stalin deal he can’t refuse to stop the publication of the NSA crown jewels he may have in his possession and The Guardian and Third Parties have IF he is playing this game intelligently. [Americans generally do not realize that totalitarians like Stalin and Obama use extreme threats to get "confessions of guilt" in open court from their victims to deceive the Dumbos who still trust the totalitarian systems.]

IF Snowden and The Guardian continue to publish more NSA secrets AND get to the crown jewels, he could become as significant as Daniel Ellsberg, a claim that I think has already been made by The Guardian.

IF they do not deliver, this will all just be a flash in the U.S. Captive Media and lead to tighter security than ever and more and more atrocities. The Congress is already taking that totalitarian route along with most of the U.S. Captive Media.

The Guardian has been pretty steadfast on Assange in their own country, continuing to publish massively on him and the attempts to destroy him.

Assange is making strong statements in The Guardian about Snowden being a hero of truth and freedom. Looking good, so far.

But most Americans now are tuned out and don’t give a damn what the System Does as long as they get their lollipops and booze and drugs and Media Pap, very different from the days of Vietnam and Ellsberg. Even IF he can publish documents on the horrific murders and everything else by the CIA, NSA, etc., I don’t think most Americans will give a damn until the System Implodes, which it is rushing toward faster and faster by simply refusing to really reform anything and doing more and more of the same catastrophic things across the board. The U.S. has the same Totalitarian Sclerosis the Soviets died from. U.S. “Reforms” are just as vapid and silly as Gorbachev’s jumping up and down on the Media about “Perestroika.” Funny, but catastrophic.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

I think the immediate US goal in rapidly expanding its Special Ops forces, Patriots, air wings, etc., in Jordan is to prevent the overthrow of the Jordanian puppet regime, to prevent encirclement of Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, and Israel.

It looks reasonably clear now that Hizbollah has committed massive support to Assad’s forces in Syria and, with the growing support of Iraq, Iran, and Russia, is turning the tide of revolt back. Jordan would be an easy regime to overthrow and put the Shia forces on the border of Saudi Arabia, and thus threaten world oil supplies from the entire Persian Gulf.

The US is obviously also building up its forces for possible invasion and occupation of Syria. That would be another US catastrophe, since it would unite most Syrian forces against the US and trap the US in another Killing Field with its forces already over-stretched, shredded, and demoralized. It could also trigger a Great Regional War to destroy Saudi Arabia, the other Sheik tyrants, and the Israelis, which would unite Sunni Holy Warriors with the Shia for that purpose.

The Kearsarge amphibious assault ship apparently has 4,000 marines and can rapidly put in place the systems and facilities for massive US forces.

The US has ignited a vast Holy War in the Muslim World to try to divide and conquer them and impose new puppet regimes. But those who ignite Holy Wars die by Holy Wars when the Holy Warriors unite against them.

The US thinks the uprisings in parts of the Muslim World – Syria, Libya, Egypt – show that the world is divided. Of course, there are pro-Western, anti-Islamist minorities, especially in the capitals of the former US puppet regimes, but they are dead-enders, desperately trying to save themselves and their riches.

The Muslim World is united against Israel, the US, and Europe, especially the imperialist cinders of the UK and France. When the imperialists attack Muslims, they unite more. These are not totally corrupt puppet regimes like that of Afghanistan, which is loathed by almost all Afghans and will be replaced by Holy Warriors.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

I wrote briefly about the growing wars in Syria many months ago before the U.S., U.K., France, Russia, Iraq, et al., got so involved. I thought the Assad regime could probably defeat Sunni guerrillas from inside Syria because the regime has very strong support from Shia, some Sunni groups, Christians, business people, probably most Kurds [but not strong], etc. I did not at the time think the U.S., U.K., Israel would be irrational enough to get involved and set the vast region on fire even more than it is from Iraq, Afghanistan, etc.

I have not written since because the situation in the Syrian Wars has become so secret, so hidden from independent, honest, outside observers, so complex, so rapidly changing, and so explosive for the whole region and beyond because of the outside arming and training and probably leading of Sunnis that I cannot understand what is happening now, nevertheless what will happen in the distant future of a month or so. After all, just a week ago it was not clear that Hizbollah, the most effective guerrilla force in the world [which has defeated and driven the Israelis from Lebanon twice], was going to intervene in force on the side of Assad’s forces. Now they have, though we don’t yet know if they are going to be full-force allies. This could drastically change the vastly fluid situation and bring in more outside forces–Israel, the U.S., Russia, Turkey, Iraq, Iran…. There are all kinds of wild cards being readied for action in Syria and the region.

Syria is a vastly complex conglomerate of nations within what was one totalitarian empire-state for decades. Iraq is like that, with three major nations within one empire-state largely imposed the U.K. and then the U.S. But Syria is far more divided among the Sunni. It is not as divided as Lebanon in religions and ethnicities, but now there are so many outside supporters of different Sunni groups vying for power that it is close to being a war-of-many nations and armies against each other like the Lebanese Civil War was that led in time to the emergence of the Shia Hizbollah as the dominant power.

The Assad government was actually becoming a less totalitarian, more pluralistic government, trying to maintain some balance among the many powerful groups, while retaining the supreme power for the minority Shia. Syria was open to the world, secularizing, building business and education. As far as I can tell, and the recent Wall St. Journal reporting agrees on this, Assad is still supported by the major business groups who fear Sunni Islamists will come to power if Assad falls. The Christians and other, smaller religious groups quietly support Assad for the same reasons. They have thrived under the regime recently.

But Assad was playing a dangerous game of working with the U.S. and Israel [quietly] to maintain the general status quo, while working with the soaring Shia Powers Iran-Iraq-Hizbollah and, thence, the Sunni Islamist groups like Hamas fighting Israel and moving closer to the new Islamist Egypt, which frightens the U.S. and Israel and Saudi Arabia and the other U.S. totalitarian puppets working with the Saudis.

I think the U.S. and Israel became more and more frightened by the rise of the Shia Power Block and the move of the Sunni Islamist regimes, especially Egypt, to work with them quietly, step by step. Israel feels mortally threatened by the vast forces tightening their grip on all sides of them, even in Jordan [especially now with Syrians pouring in]. They want the U.S. to attack and cripple Iran. The U.S. wants to cripple Iran, but not take the risks of direct attack, which are vast on all sides, including next-door neighbors Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Russians and Chinese are quiet allies of Iran and Syria and thence the Shia Power Block. Turkey is more and more Islamist and anti-U.S. quietly and Israel more openly, trying to work with Iraq while trying to build a Kurd nation controlling the oil in the North of Iraq working with Turkey, not supporting Kurd revel lions in Turkey.

I think the U.S., U.K., et al, and Israel thought the Sunni insurgents emerging inside Syria might provide an easy victory over the Shia government of Assad and the Shia Power Block, so they strongly supported it secretly and then openly.

I think, but obviously do not yet have any grounds to do so confidently, that was a fatal error for the U.S. and its puppets. The whole region is being pulled in and getting more and more explosive. Russia is being pulled in. Hizbollah is in. Even if the U.S. or its puppets kill Assad and overthrow the regime, it looks likely that the holy-warrior Sunni Islamists will come to power in most of the Sunni areas of Syria, the Shia will form their own nation next to Lebanon and be strongly allied with Hizbollah and the Shia Power Block, and Islamists forces wiil be stronger everywhere and more anti-U.S. and Israel.

The U.S. might go-for-broke by attacking Iran massively and that will probably lead to massive attacks against the Saudis and other U.S. puppets in the Persian Gulf and thence to….

Russia might….

Turkey might….

Egypt might…..

Afghanistan might…

You can try to fill in the wide-open possibilities.

I think this is another U.S. Catastrophe that is getting worse and worse, all the way from Gaza and Egypt and Lebanon and Syria and Iraq to Afghanistan and Pakistan and Central Asia and….

The U.S. needs desperately to cut its immense financial and military and political and diplomatic losses in this whole vast region. But it seems caught in the vast, boiling vortex of complex forces it has unleashed.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

My fascistograph index would rank the following as the vital, core factors and roots of fascism in a society, from the most important powers at the top down.

1. A hardcore, totalitarian party masquerading as the people’s party, but secretly working totally with the rich and powerful corporations, uniting them under the party. [Fascism, unlike communism and other forms of socialism and so on, is above all a corporatist form of totalitarianism.]

2. Stroking mass vanity with big lies – “Germany over all,” “America is the greatest nation in the world.” And mass greed and lust for power with utopian promises of free money and endless prosperity and great conquests over nature and nations

3. Infiltration secretly by the party of all major institutions at the top by secret take-overs, threats, bribes, co-optation, etc.

4. Secret media content control in many ways by the ruler[s]

5. Imperial powers, party powers, the ruler principle

6. Massive, powerful secret police under direct control of the ruler[s], spying, black ops,

7. Secretly taking over the traditional laws and institutions, hollowing them out and refilling the empty forms with fascist ideology

8. Filling the government secretly with party hacks and puppets from top to bottom

9. Politically correct education and mass-mind training from early age [pre-school onward]

10. Foreigners, racial or religious or party groups or others  used as “evil and secret witches”  to stoke terror and blood lust for wars, used as threats and as conquests to fuel vanity and hubris. [Germany and the US.  Used the "communists" as witches to inspire terror and hate and blood lust in their early rise to power, then used religious-race groups, foreign enemies, drug fiends destroying the nation, etc.]

Fascist regimes follow this general index of core factors. But they differ widely in specific, public details. Germany was very different in public from Italy, Mexico, etc. But their core was roughly the same, though the rose to power in somewhat different ways, ranking the index factors somewhat differently.

Note that factors often mistakenly seen as core factors of fascism, such as “racism,” are common but not really core factors. The rulers use racism when it is useful and shun it when it is not. Hitler and the US used racism blatantly in later years. Hitler had screamed against the Jews in Mein Kampf, but most people did not take it too seriously until later. The US fascist system grew by incorporating poor blacks and browns, raging against the “commie witches” and “drug fiends” and “Russian witches” and “Chinese witches” and “Iraqi witches” and on and on, but recently  has become virulently anti-Islam, treating that as a “racial taint,” though technically it is religious, not racial.

Needless to say, there has been vast historical and political argument about what the real fascism is. Much of this has been ideological. The historical truth is clearly that there are different forms of monarchy, democracy, fascism, communism and so on. There are common, core factors in such categories when used correctly, empirically [historically], but there are always important variations. The US fascism system pretends to be drastically different from German and Italian fascism, but is a corporatist, totalitarian, party system masquerading as the “welfare state” for all the people and so on down the index. The US Is much more like Italian, Mussolini, fascism than like Hitler’s ruler-dominated party.

I have thought endlessly about this core issue for most of my adult life, but I do not pretend to be a ruler dictating such things. There are good arguments for different rankings of the core index factors, certainly because there have been real historical differences in fascist systems, like in democracy systems. I have used the Nazi, Italian, and US fascist systems as my main historical examples for constructing this core index and have used the US as the most important fascist system, since it is the one that threatens all of mankind today.

America is mankind’s existential threat – a doomsday threat with immense, world shattering arsenals of weapons of mass destruction of every kind, from thermonuclear weapons to utopian financial central planning of money.

A few days ago a very old friend sent me an article about five shooting deaths in his small home town south of Seattle. I had not heard anything about it.

These local shootings and other violent deaths and injuries of every conceivable kind, from medical mistakes to huge industrial explosions, happen every day around America but rarely get any mention in the national Media.

Of course, these serial and mass killings are routine in America. They happen every day, but get no mention nationally. Bank robberies and bomb threats are routine. My daughter just sent us an article about a bank robbery with bomb threat in Marin County, across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, reported in the Marin Indep. Jour. Yesterday the San Diego Union-Tribune reported another San Diego P.D. police killing. A woman with a knife who may have stabbed some family member[s?] was found by the police when they arrived at the scene with a knife, she would not put it down, so they shot to kill, not to wound and disarm. SOP, everyday stuff. I’ve written about the killings in our very rich La Jolla neighborhood, including the shooting death of the former head of the Afghan National Bank across our back fence, just about 50 ft. from our house, a few years ago. Throughout my life, especially when young living in poor neighborhoods, I knew of many violent fights and deaths involving family members and neighbors. SOP.

We now know the police and D.A.’s imprison many hundreds of innocent people even for murders, later proven to be innocent by pro bono legal workers. They also kill hundreds of innocent people every year, maybe some thousands. No one knows how many.

Every day the U.S. drones and armies and spies and totalitarian puppet regimes and terrorist guerrillas around the world kill and maim and imprison illegally hundreds of victims, sometimes thousands.

Every day medical mistakes, overdoses, negligence, criminal negligence and even homicide kill between 300 and 600 Americans. [The studies at Harvard Med., etc., show the total per year to be between 100,000 and 200,000 even using only official medical records to estimate the causes of death, so many are missed by medical lies in the official data, non-reporting, etc.] I have written about the medically caused deaths and catastrophes suffered by friends and their families – and three catastrophes suffered by me, one of which I think was very dangerous to me, but after immense suffering I was released from the hospital to suffer chronic pain and psychic wounds from it.] This past week alone I learned of three more serious mistakes and negligence close to us – one life long friend, one husband of a friend of my wife, one sister of my wife. SOP.

Industrial accidents, even huge explosions, kill and maim many people every day on average. Road accidents kill and maim about a hundred Americans a day and almost all of us have lost friends and family members to them. Suicides kill about twice as many and homicides about half as many every day on average. Far more are maimed by suicides, shootings, knifing, beatings and so on.

All of this gets almost no national coverage. We all suffer greatly from such events throughout our lives.

But every few years the FBI-CIA and other armies of secret police and the White House and Pentagon and Big Media go into a vast uproar internationally over a “terrorist bombing” that kills none or three and injures dozens, which the secret police may have helped create or simply let go on to produce the up-roar. Then they insist the whole society must be made secure from such rare events by eliminating more Constitutional rights, as if there were any left to eliminate, and more vast sums spent to make us all safe from a few psychotic Chechens or Saudis, which earlier vast sums and vast armies of secret police did not keep us safe from.

One such event over many years led to the lockdown of the huge city of Boston for two to three days, schools and universities were closed, Amtrak from Boston to New York was closed, Black Hawk gun ships patrolled the skies, vast armies of military and police rushed through a huge area, armored cars patrolled streets, armies of swat teams used assault rifles to riddle possible hiding places, the whole population was put at risk from lack of food and medical attention, and accidents, and heart attacks from the officially induced terrors, and the Media went berserk with national coverage around the clock for these catastrophic official actions.

All of these are everyday indices of a society that is obviously psychotic. This Social Psychosis is SOP in totalitarian societies but I know of no other society which has gone to such extremes of vast mobilization and Media terrorism for such a local, relatively small crime. In any big city like San Diego we have had vastly greater crimes which never involved shutting down anything but the immediate locale of the crimes. James Huberty’s mass murder by rifle fire killed 21 people, including 5 children, and injured 19 others in a southern suburb of San Diego [San Ysidro] in July of 1984, but San Diego was not shut down and the mass murder, while six times worse than the Boston killings recently, has been all but forgotten. Other mass murders, accidents and so on have been much worse without shutting down cities, trains, schools, universities or calling out the military, armor, Black Hawks, and going berserk in the Media.

A few people or even large armies of real terrorist bombers can never destroy or seriously threaten America unless they get weapons of real mass destruction from one of the totalitarian governments like the U.S. Even setting off a nuclear bomb in Washington would have only a serious short run effect. The U.S. killed and maimed hundreds of thousands of Japanese children and women and old people in Nagasaki and Hiroshima in a few minutes of nuclear incineration. Those had serious short run effects, but Japan was soon immensely stronger.

The only people who can destroy the U .S. are the psychotic U.S. officials filled with the hubris of absolute power, which drives them insane.

All sane Americans want all of these vast killings and woundings and other atrocities that happen routinely in America to stop. But no sane American wants to go berserk over one such event in Boston, shut down the city and transport and schools and send in vast armies of overt and secret police and armored military forces and murder more of the Constitution to stop a few psychotic murderers. Only the psychotics ruling our society and the ignorant citizens they terrify with their Media insanity want those ghastly things.

And anyone like me who points out these obvious indices of America’s Totalitarian Social Psychosis is immediately branded by the psychotics as “one of the terrorists” or “NUTS.” This is actually a tribute to our sanity from the obviously insane. But it is also a grave warning that America is now ruled by psychotics who are destroying our nation.

Let me see if I have this straight.

The U.S. secret police armies, apparently led in this case by the FBI working for the White House, took custody of a 19 year old immigrant boy riddled by bullets in the head, neck, legs, arm [s?] and [one or two?] hands, totally isolated him in a Boston hospital prison ward [strapped down?] surrounded by vast police and secret police forces, declared the boy cannot speak, was unconscious, on many strong drugs sedating him, might not live or even regain consciousness, declared he would be denied all visits from family and legal counsel until they had thoroughly questioned him, then the next day secretly let in a federal magistrate appointed by the White House Justice Dept., to arraign the boy, then announced that he could not speak, but confessed to what they and the Republicrat Media charge him with by nodding [and winking?] and signing something they gave him in his stuporous state and he signed with a hand not too crippled or drugged to sign, his only unwounded body member, then they announced it to the world to give him Justice under the American Constitution by disappearing him forever and preventing any possible legal investigation and defense.

If I’ve got this straight, Obama has made sure no one can find out what really happened between the FBI, CIA, etc., and this boy and his brother riddled to pieces in the road before he could deny anything and we’ll never know what kind of deal they offered him, such as “Sign now or your family gets sent to prison as co-conspirators.” “Of sent to Chechnya for Russian execution.” Or….

If anyone ever gets the freedom and courage to do the movie on this, I hope Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor star in it. Only they can do real justice to the hilarious extremes of this Obama Inquisitorial Trial.

Now what? Public hanging and quartering of the drugged, mute and crippled remnants of a boy in the Boston Commons??? Or in front of the White House??? Or burning the remnants inside the Jefferson Monument memorializing the American people who have sworn eternal hostility to tyranny???

Obama and his vast armies of totalitarian, secret police have become America’s Undertakers, so it makes perfect sense to carry out the witch burning in the Jefferson Memorial. It will be a perfect Celebration of The Death Of America.

But here’s the final twist on Obama’s supreme trashing of our Constitution. He and his totalitarian secret police have gone to such a total extreme in tyranny that they make the infamous Inquisitors of witches look like freedom and justice loving Americans. Some charged witches survived similar mutilations and mind-destruction under torture and imprisonment and were able to defend themselves in public and escape and even bring to an end local Inquisitions and witch burnings. An old friend of mine and his wife have just been telling me of the book they have done based on a young woman who did survive and help stop the witch burnings, a young woman who was a member of the wife’s family in Noerdlingen, Bavaria, at the end of the sixteenth century and left a written account of all of it.

You know this remnant of a boy is never going to get a chance to be heard in public as a free man. And if he secretly writes up his defense, they’ll catch it on their omni-sphying cameras, put him in deeper dungeons of solitude, and burn his defense in secret.

How strange that Americans have become more tyrannical and insane than those Inquisitors centuries ago.

Ah, but let us not be maudlin. Like most Americans today, let us blind ourselves to what is really going on and yuk it up. This burning of the remnants of the witch in the Jefferson Memorial will be a hilarious ending to that comedy on American justice by Gene Wilder and Richard Pryor.

Karzai’s public denunciation yesterday of the U.S. collusion with Taliban forces in Taliban attacks on his government forces in Afghanistan to lead the U.S. forces to stay in Afghanistan longer may be true or false, but they miss the point of U.S. military strategists who want to stay in Afghanistan with massive bases and forces. They are not simply playing an imperial game of milking the resources of puppet nations. That is probably true for U.S. Oligopoly Corps., but the U.S. is playing a vastly more deadly game than that.

I have argued for years that a crucial reason the U.S. wants major air bases and massive forces in Afghanistan is that the U.S. is very afraid of what will happen in Pakistan, especially the massive nuclear forces and missiles. The Pakistani government is very likely to fall soon. The society is in worse shape than the U.S. economically and financially and politically and legally, so it may implode at at any time or erupt in civil war[s]. It does have a dominant cultural-ethnic nation and religion, unlike the U.S. which is very splintered now. But it has massive subcultures and simmering civil wars on the borders of Afghanistan and inland. The U.S. has relied on its secret satellite spying and forces within Pakistan to keep tabs on where the nuclear weapons are so a sudden strike can take them out or even land forces and seize them. But Pakistan is hiding them more and more and, like North Korea, with whom they cooperate, they are apparently rapidly building up small nuclear forces that can be moved around and hidden better. The U.S. cannot rely on carrier air strikes because they could be knocked out and, if not, cannot provide sufficient land forces against a major power like Pakistan, if they become needed. India will not likely cooperate for many reasons with the U.S. on this, such as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons that could easily target their vast cities. China is a major ally of Pakistan. That leaves major U.S. bases and forces in Afghanistan looking necessary to the imperial central planners in Washington.

N.B. Nothing is simple in Afghanistan. The major guerrilla forces, some paid by the U.S., some Taliban, some anti-Taliban, and Karzai, and the three major nations within Afghanistan have their own strategies. Karzai is trying to become more “cooperative” with the winning Taliban and other guerrilla armies, in case the U.S. does leave.

But any strategist not blinded by hubris would worry most of all in that area about Pakistan’s disintegration and nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, the U.S. has been the major cause of the disintegration of Pakistan and the building of more and better hidden nuclear forces. The longer the U.S. stays on its borders and keeps slaughtering women and children inside Pakistan with Obama’s Drone Slaughters, the worse the U S. makes the Pakistani threats, thus the more the U.S. wants to stay, thus…..

It’s a lose-lose situation, something U.S. central planners of the world can almost never see because they are blinded by ignorance and hubris.

It seems most likely the U.S. is maneuvering to leave vast bases and mobile force capabilities in Afghanistan. The U.S. has done this in Iraq in a major but not huge way because it has massive forces in the Persian Gulf region, bases it can use all around Iraq if necessary, and puppet allies like Saudi Arabia. The heavily armed U.S. division sized forces and secret Special Ops in Iraq can call on those massive forces in the region within hours. Not so in S. Central Asia where the Pakistani crisis is soaring.

The U.S. strikes against Pakistan or invasion when Pakistan implodes or is taken over by a more openly anti-U.S. army dictatorship could trigger the first nuclear war. Or they might simply lead to another huge land war in Asia for the U .S. that will help to bleed the U.S. to death immensely faster than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghansitan, etc. and trigger its own financial-economic-political-cultural implosion. The U.S. was loved by most Pakistanis before it invaded Afghanistan and slaughtered women and children in Pakistan. Now even Western polls there show almost total loathing of the U.S., which is obvious without any poll.

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: The Secret Government

Karzai’s public denunciation yesterday of the U.S. collusion with Taliban forces in Taliban attacks on his government forces in Afghanistan to lead the U.S. forces to stay in Afghanistan longer may be true or false, but they miss the point of U.S. military strategists who want to stay in Afghanistan with massive bases and forces. They are not simply playing an imperial game of milking the resources of puppet nations. That is probably true for U.S. Oligopoly Corps., but the U.S. is playing a vastly more deadly game than that.

I have argued for years that a crucial reason the U.S. wants major air bases and massive forces in Afghanistan is that the U.S. is very afraid of what will happen in Pakistan, especially the massive nuclear forces and missiles. The Pakistani government is very likely to fall soon. The society is in worse shape than the U.S. economically and financially and politically and legally, so it may implode at at any time or erupt in civil war[s]. It does have a dominant cultural-ethnic nation and religion, unlike the U.S. which is very splintered now. But it has massive subcultures and simmering civil wars on the borders of Afghanistan and inland. The U.S. has relied on its secret satellite spying and forces within Pakistan to keep tabs on where the nuclear weapons are so a sudden strike can take them out or even land forces and seize them. But Pakistan is hiding them more and more and, like North Korea, with whom they cooperate, they are apparently rapidly building up small nuclear forces that can be moved around and hidden better. The U.S. cannot rely on carrier air strikes because they could be knocked out and, if not, cannot provide sufficient land forces against a major power like Pakistan, if they become needed. India will not likely cooperate for many reasons with the U.S. on this, such as Pakistan’s nuclear weapons that could easily target their vast cities. China is a major ally of Pakistan. That leaves major U.S. bases and forces in Afghanistan looking necessary to the imperial central planners in Washington.

N.B. Nothing is simple in Afghanistan. The major guerrilla forces, some paid by the U.S., some Taliban, some anti-Taliban, and Karzai, and the three major nations within Afghanistan have their own strategies. Karzai is trying to become more "cooperative" with the winning Taliban and other guerrilla armies, in case the U.S. does leave.

But any strategist not blinded by hubris would worry most of all in that area about Pakistan’s disintegration and nuclear weapons.

On the other hand, the U.S. has been the major cause of the disintegration of Pakistan and the building of more and better hidden nuclear forces. The longer the U.S. stays on its borders and keeps slaughtering women and children inside Pakistan with Obama’s Drone Slaughters, the worse the U S. makes the Pakistani threats, thus the more the U.S. wants to stay, thus…..

It’s a lose-lose situation, something U.S. central planners of the world can almost never see because they are blinded by ignorance and hubris.

It seems most likely the U.S. is maneuvering to leave vast bases and mobile force capabilities in Afghanistan. The U.S. has done this in Iraq in a major but not huge way because it has massive forces in the Persian Gulf region, bases it can use all around Iraq if necessary, and puppet allies like Saudi Arabia. The heavily armed U.S. division sized forces and secret Special Ops in Iraq can call on those massive forces in the region within hours. Not so in S. Central Asia where the Pakistani crisis is soaring.

The U.S. strikes against Pakistan or invasion when Pakistan implodes or is taken over by a more openly anti-U.S. army dictatorship could trigger the first nuclear war. Or they might simply lead to another huge land war in Asia for the U .S. that will help to bleed the U.S. to death immensely faster than Vietnam, Iraq, Afghansitan, etc. and trigger its own financial-economic-political-cultural implosion. The U.S. was loved by most Pakistanis before it invaded Afghanistan and slaughtered women and children in Pakistan. Now even Western polls there show almost total loathing of the U.S., which is obvious without any poll.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: Mass Murders in Schools

Most Americans do not know it, but they are seeing secret government ops behind plain-paper-bag fronts.

In recent years there have been some detailed articles about the thousands of small companies the U.S. has funded to do “anti-terrorist” research of every kind imaginable. The D.C. area and areas surrounding it in Md., Va. and beyond have vast numbers of these secret firms that are right out in the open and hidden by being visible, but with no business i.d. as a front that could lead people to seek to do business with them. I suspect some have fronts, as in most movies about such things, but plain-ordinary-brown-bag-wraps seem SOP. There are, of course, the Big Corps. who have real businesses of many kinds who serve also as fronts for U.S. secret ops, from spying to snipers shooting villagers. Firms with offices around the world, like Bechtel and McKinsey, seem to be part of that. I’ve known people at both of those who seemed pretty obvious.

A friend from UCSD was married to a physicist who has seven top-secret “defense electronic” firms in the San Diego area. This area is crammed with ONI, etc., secret firms. San Francisco is crammed with all kinds of electronic firms. [You will remember the top secret AT&T office in downtown S.F. which served as the point for sending web-messages coming into the U.S. from the Pacific area to a CIA office in the same little "business" building for routing and copying.] I expect the southern area of Texas is also full of some of these.

There have always been some “stores” near us which obviously were big money losers because of high rents and almost no business that go on for years. A friend who was a bank manager in the area of one of these was sure it was a money laundering outfit, presumably for drug money here near the border [but the CIA et al. have fronts for this too, mainly small banks, which I've written about before]. There are some Big Corp. outlets that go on for years with little business which seem to be real estate plays, but small firms can’t do that unless they are fronts for illegal money coming into the country, etc. It’s not just drugs and major crimes. One neighbor who was a S. African Jew had gotten out of SA with enough money to set up a big furniture store where our son worked for a while as a teenager. An outfit like that can send bills to S. A. which they pay, without getting any goods of comparable value, then the local firm holds the surplus for them until they get out, for family or for a fee, etc.

There are parts of the world, like the Cayman Islands, where money laundering is rampant so there are all kinds of individuals and companies that just have mailing addresses and others with offices that pretend to work.

There are, of course, a lot firms that are doing research, etc., here for international firms who do not want any publicity and use the plain-paper-sack front. Some of the Big Pharma local outfits look a bit like that, but generally have cars and people!

As all police and private detectives will tell you, once you have a general knowledge of such activities and have the attitude of suspicion and pay attention, you can see all kinds of things other people walk by with no idea anything “strange” is going on.

The same thing is true of individuals doing “strange” things, like being gay, street walking where police are a danger, etc. The experienced gays can almost always spot other gays. There are little things from ways of walking and talking to clothes, the way they watch people, etc. Gays also have always been keyed into the gay “back channels” or “grape vines” and know who knows. One of my Ph.D. students who was very bright and a secret lesbian knew all about major public, male gays before it ever got out more broadly. Jerry Brown when he was governor the first time used to date beautiful young women to throw people off the scent, but she knew all about his life in the Newport gay community underground. Rock Hudson….you name him, she had him tabbed correctly.

There was just a news item this morning about Strom Thurmond’s half-black, illegitimate daughter that he had with his black house maid down in super-seg country. It mentions that for all those years the black community and some of the rest of the local community where they lived buzzed with those “rumors.” Of course they did. The black community would damn well know because it was tight and very keyed into such things. People like us have known all kinds of U.S. “spooks,” but, even though we are not really in favor of secret police, we do not reveal who they are or were. This reminds me of a major point I’ve made many times about the open-secret world of political sexual deviance. As Super K said, “Politics is a great aphrodisiac.” It is for both the powerful pols. and for the mass of female [or male] groupies, even for frogs like Super K when he is a very famous and powerful frog. Politics is also a “wine, women [and men] song trip.” Almost all of the big dogs are into sex in big ways. “Charley Wilson’s War” was too obvious, but very realistic. JFK, LBJ and Bill Clinton were extreme satyrs. So everyone close to them or keyed into the grapevines of people close to them knew they were wild sex fiends, but almost no one ever made it public, partly because the media people are very involved in that world and want to continue to play ball in all ways.

Here’s another real-world example which I’ll mention only because the parties are now dead. I never mentioned it when they were alive. When my life-long friend Bill Marina worked in Washington a close friend of his was inside the Jack Kemp team, very close. This friend told Bill repeatedly of the wild sex Kemp had with groupies in his office and of his fears it would leak out. We never said a word about it, probably until this. It was and still is vitally important not to reveal the source and violate a friend’s trust. [The source is still very much alive.] Bill and I thought it might well leak out during the presidential race since the spotlight was so strongly on him. But it did not. My bet is that someone published it somewhere locally, but no one would touch it, just as I assume now they are doing with Obama. This ability of the American Media and political communities to keep things secret which are known by thousands and are obvious to those in-the-know about such things is very striking. We see the same thing about really important things, unlike sexual blasts.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: The ‘Cliff Hanger’ Is a Republicrat MediaCharade

In my early life [born 1937] I lived all over the U.S. I saw lots of guns. I was present at various gun incidents in arguments and fights. Few ever ended in shootings. My mother’s employer threatened my stepfather with a pistol to stop his beating my mother. He stopped. I did know people who were shot or shot other people. A younger brother shot the husband of one of my mother’s sisters near the heart to stop him from beating our aunt. [It was a 22. He lived with the bullet in place. My brother was sent to a minimum security camp for months and eventually walked away and came to live with us.] The employer of that aunt caught a robber in the act where she worked and shot him to death with a shot gun. A cousin even snot me in the bare heel one day with a B-B rifle as I was running home because he wanted me to stay and help him defend a mango tree full of mangoes in his yard. I and one of my brothers and a few other boys about 11 were playing behind a bar and bookie joint one day when the owner came out and started shooting in our direction with a rifle. We ran and hid behind some mounds of earth and waited for him to go back inside. We were scared but unshot. These things were not normal, but they were not extremely rare in America many decades ago.

But I do not remember ever hearing of a mass murder except gangster mass murders in history books or movies during Prohibition. It had nothing to do with a lack of guns. Guns were everywhere. Shot guns were deadly, but used in hunting. People sometimes carried pistols in their glove compartments to protect themselves from union strikers, as one man did who gave me a ride. Rifles were deadly and fast reloading, but we used those for target practice in the Glades [outside Miami, Florida], not for shooting people. Anyone who was fast at using such guns could have killed many people in a few minutes. You don’t need a 9mm. pistol or automatic assault rifle.

It would have been very easy to commit mass murder in any school I attended across the country, dozens of them. It did not happen. Other than one boy hitting another, like a bully hitting me in the mouth once on the basketball court in about the sixth grade, I don’t remember any kind of violence. There were no security forces, lock-down plans, or nightmares about such things. The schools were wide open. Anyone could enter them. I never heard of any student or teacher being attacked, shot, raped, kidnapped, or secretly fed twinkles or GMO corn. My high school, Miami Jackson High, was open on all sides. I don’t even remember any fights among the few thousand students, though there must have been some small ones. About 20 years ago my old friend from that High School, Bill Marina, drove me by the once beautiful school. It was sealed from outside. The big windows were concreted. There was a tall security fence around the whole school. I assume there were security guards, metal detectors, etc., when it was in session, as is common around the U.S. in big cities. The Drug War and black gangs had devastated the once lovely, prosperous commercial center of the Allapatah neighborhood around it.

All competent Americans know America today is drastically different from my experience in schools around the country, at least in the big cities. The public schools are generally much bigger, more bureaucratic, more political, more controlled from state capitals and from Washington, and drowning in “testing” to try to slow the steady decline in real learning. They have from 200 to 300% more money from governments. Political protests, union strikes, bullying, fights, and mass killings keep growing at an accelerating rate. That leads to more massive security measures at a rapidly accelerating rate. The problems keep growing. More security, more money, more bureaucracy, more testing, less learning, more violence.

There are still good public schools isolated from all of this. Newtown, Connecticut, was one of them. The catastrophes are spreading outward from the urban catastrophes and from D.C. controls.

I’m sure private schools are not immune to all of these now standard American education catastrophes. But they are not a hot spot of catastrophes so far. They are not as controlled by Washington, but Washington will keep groping for more and more power to “save them” from something awful we cannot yet see. But who will save them from the Washington Catastrophes – the destruction of standards, discipline, parental and teacher nullification by politicians, parental loss of local controls, community spirit, student love and neighborliness.

The U.S. is a vast imperial power with vast, immensely armed and murderous military forces, killing people, including children, every day around the world. This is all blasted at children on tv and the movies and the news from infancy. These killers are heroes. Super-heroes kill the “Evil Ones.” America is now a very enraged, mass society where scores of millions feel they are victims and lust for revenge. America is disintegrating along all its major fault lines, the poor against the rich and vice versa, the races against each other in the great fight for Entitlements and power and money, and on and on. America has a far higher rate of imprisonment than any other nation. America has one of the highest divorce rates, abandonment rate, etcetc. Families are torn by conflicts and eat most meals out of the quasi-homes. Love is now a four letter word. Bullies are everywhere. The poorer people are really scared by their vast unemployment [505 for young, urban blacks], sinking real incomes, disappearing savings and retirements, job speed-ups, massive Fed money for the Big Banks…..

America is a failing state, society and culture. It is always at war around the world and loses those wars. The world hates the U.S.

Violence and theft of all forms is rampant, far more than the official stats. show.

A few days ago my wife was telling me about the phone discussion she had just had with our Honda repair man of many years. He is temporarily shut down and cannot immediately do a repair we need, as he usually does. The reason is that he fired one of the lowest employees in the shop for being incompetent. [He used to give my wife rides as part of his job when out car was in shop.] The shop was burglarized and ripped up. He did it and is under arrest. Knowing of all the employee grudge attacks on employers and other employees, I muttered, “Whoa…They’re lucky these days he did not shoot them!” I then went in to hear the latest tv-news report on the markets. I heard that Newtown had just suffered a mass murder. So what’s new????

Obama wept a tear on tv about the murder of innocent children. Good. They are the ultimate victims of insane hatreds and violence.

Then I remembered: I’ve never seen him shed a tear for one of the vast mass of children murdered by the armadas of murder drones he sends to incinerate people with Hell Fire Missiles in their homes having dinner and by the F-16 and F-18 strafings and bombs and by….

He sees them as “Collateral Damage” that got in the way of his drive for American power around the world, not as “innocent victims.” Tell that to the incinerated babies and school children, Obama.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: Petraeus and the Fierce Struggles for Imperial Power

We have known since the ancient world that all great power drives human beings insane with hubris so that they are blinded to the dangers their powers produce and to the total moral blindness that engulfs their minds and hearts — sociopathy.

The ancient Greeks thought of this catastrophic madness overwhelmingly in terms of political and military power because hubris is most obvious in those realms and has always led quickly to the destruction of those blinded by it and their armies and states, if the people do not first overthrow the blinded sociopaths.

But vast power is also bestowed by vast wealth, fame, and sexual prowess and these also trigger soaring hubris and its blindness and sociopathy.

In America we see all of these sources of hubris at the extreme in the first truly global empire, in the world-destroying nuclear and bio-chemical weapons, in the vast concentrations of wealth at the top, in the vast fame of the global media, and in the sexual revolution and all the drug and beauty industries supporting it.

Hubris engulfed the Church as its vast powers and wealth grew over the centuries. But all concentrations of power, wealth, fame and sexual prowess were small and local compared to the explosion of all of these at the top of the U.S, global empire in this past century.

And, of course, hubris has totally engulfed everyone at the top of the immense U.S. system. Our rulers are so totally blinded by hubris that they cannot even see the obvious fact that America has become a travesty of the original land of Constitutional freedoms and the land of the brave defending those. The shining city on a hill that inspired the world with hope has become a vast, totalitarian police state and murderous empire loathed by all of mankind except other sociopaths wanting to share in the immense plunder and power and by those too ignorant to see that the once shining city has become a terrible black hole of debts and atrocities.

Hubris engulfed not only the political and military rulers, but also the big corp. rulers and even big science in the past 65 years as the “famous scientists” became the high priests of government weapons industries and the absolutist proclaimers of media truth. The Los Alamos scientists fought against this sociopathic “science” at first, but they died away or joined the political empire and went on to help produce more world-destroying weapons, such as hydrogen bombs and bio-chemical dooms-day poisons, viruses and bacteria.

Now the big bio-scientists are powerful, famous, rich and the absolutist proclaimers of truth, so they are engulfed by hubris and sociopathic blindness to their dangers to mankind. They cannot see that they have become Frankenstein pseudo-scientists and death.

No human society can survive long when ruled by totally blinded sociopaths. They quickly destroy themselves, as we older people have seen over and over again in our own lives if we have closely studied what has been happening around the world. The Soviet Sociopathocracy lasted only one long lifetime and then destroyed itself, imploding from the inside. The Nazi Sociopathocracy grew into a totally blinded empire far faster than the Soviets and lasted only about fourteen years. The American Sociopahtocracy grew slowly for most of the last century and then began soaring from the victories of WWII. It took many more decades for the rulers at the top to get total control of our society. They have had that total control for only the past few decades. They are now destroying themselves and their vast, totalitarian system at a soaring rate. Their immense black hole of bad debts alone is swallowing up America at the rate of many trillions more in bad debt every year, much of it hidden by the sociopathic lies broadcast by the sociopathic Republicrat media to the American slaves.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: The Lull Before the Social Storm

Almost everyone analyzing the many political crises and scandals erupting at the top of the U.S. is overlooking the Big Picture of the vast struggles for power at the top. There are always such struggles in powerful nations and in vast imperial powers there are commonly fierce struggles. Even totalitarian regimes in which “one man dictatorship” is what people outside see are riven with fierce struggles at the top. Hitler by the late 1930′s was about as close to being a one-man dictator as anyone ever is. He is still referred to that way routinely in the U.S. But that was the Public Front he worked furiously to maintain while carrying out fierce struggles of many kinds against the SA heads, against most of the General Staff of the Wehrmacht which was led by the top General Ludwig Beck, and against many other plotters, some of whom eventually joined von Stauffenberg’s Valkyrie plot to kill Hitler and sue for peace with the West.

I and many other people have been writing about these struggles at the top in the U.S. for many years. They were fierce in the Vietnam era of the 1960′s and into the 1970′s and involved many conspiratorial groups from the generals to the FBI, the Kennedy and LBJ coalitions, and so on. They are every bit as fierce now.

The U.S. government, Fed, et al., have produced The Greatest Financial Crisis in history and are digging this Black Hole deeper and deeper; they have triggered vast catastrophes in the Middle East and Central Asia, especially in Afpak; they have pushed Western investment in China which has transformed China from a poverty stricken cauldron of civil wars into the most mighty industrial power and a great power in general; they have recently been threatening a Global Financial Implosion by threatening a Great War against Iran which can shut down the Persian Gult oil, and wars against Russia and China that could become nuclear showdowns.

There are vast political and military and secret police conflicts over all of these. These are life-and-death issues for the U.S. Empire and nation and it is impossible to get agreement among all the elites who are “All In” on the Empire and nation in such life-and-death issues, especially in a nation as torn as the U.S. is, just like totalitarian Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, Stalin’s USSR, Imperial Japan and FDR’s U.S. Anyone who has seen historically truthful movies about any of these will remember some of the striking portrayals of political revolts against the “one man dictators” or “party dictators.”

Though the conflicting elites and agencies are carrying all of these vast struggles out in great secrecy, with leaks in the vast Media Warfare involved in all of this, and struggles cut in many directions and change over time, some general properties of the Big Picture of the struggles for power now seem reasonably clear.

The top U.S. military people in the Army and Navy and many officers and grunts at all levels are clearly extremely angry at the political leaders who are largely fighting each other to a state of near paralysis. The Army brass and to a lesser extent the Navy brass have in recent years been largely making the decisions about the wars and potential wars. I have argued, for example, since Bush 2 and his Neo-Con conspirators began strangling Iran that the military brass has been quietly opposing such a vast war that could produce a global implosion, that this has continued for the most part in opposition to the Obama conspirators and Israelis conspirators who keep tightening the nooses around Iran. [For one thing, I cannot imagine the Navy admirals have become so incompetent that they would actually support having their most vital ships in the Persian Gulf pond with vast Russian-Chinese, top-grade missiles and much else within striking range from the vast nation of Iran.] I think they have mostly been appalled by Obama’s flip-flops in the Middle East and his support of utopian schemes like “Democracy in Syria” which are producing vast chaos and possible armageddon at the middle of all that oil and gas and vast populations.

These subterranean struggles broke out into the open when Gen. Petraeus’ subordinate in Afghanistan, Gen. McChrystal, went along quietly with his top staff officers openly making fun of political leaders around Obama which got into Rolling Stone. I believed then and believe now that those officers were just expressing the secret views of almost all competent officers from the field to Petraeus at Central Command and that they directed their contemptuous spoofing at Biden only to avoid directly showing contempt for the Emperor. Biden is actually knowledgeable about foreign affairs, while Obama knows very little and entered the White House very ignorant.

I think the officers, especially those top brass in Afghanistan, have gotten more furiously opposed to the politicians recently as the politicians moved quietly behind the scenes to try to get a Fig Leaf Agreement with the Taliban and other major guerrilla groups of Afpak so the U.S. can withdraw behind the fig leaf to avoid looking like losers right away and deserters of the totally corrupt and incompetent Karzai regime the U.S. imposed by corruption on the Afghans. This would make Obama et al. popular at home and allow them to deal with bigger, more deadly crises at home, but it would make the “All In” brass the “Losers,” very much like Westmoreland et al. were hung out to dry and swing in the winds in Vietnam by LBJ, Nixon et al. [N.B. I totally support getting out--and never getting ALL IN anywhere. But I can understand how the brass and so many lower officers and grunts and their families feel--betrayed.]

Petraeus has been one of the top, secret opponents of the politicians, in my estimate the “top dog” of what has been emerging slowly as the Real U.S. government behind the political front in Washington.

The politicians and the FBI, probably the only secret police agency they can count on along with the Secret Service, set out certainly by the time of the McChrystal eruption, to secretly set up these conspirators to regain control over them. They did this with all the SOPs of secret police from the early days of the Soviets, Hitler and the Gestapo and special ops, FDR and Hoover, et al. They use “honey pots” to lure them into crimes and scandals, informants to spy on them, traitors to lie about them, and on and on.

When Benghazi erupted into massive public view Obama et al. quickly started a SOP op to shift blame to others, such as the CIA, by lying in all necessary ways. Petraeus made it clear he was not going to take the blame as Director of the CIA and the latest internecine struggle was on. The Obama-FBI plot to get Petraeus by giving him a deal he can’t refuse was set in rapid motion to keep him from testifying as head of the CIA to the Senate Intelligence Committee, an admiral in command of an attack carrier Task Force near Iran and Libya was summarily removed from command, the Seal officers who revealed some of the Lies of Obama’s Hero Story about killing bin Laden were strongly reprimanded and their careers almost certainly ended in the near future, and it keeps erupting.

I think the politicians immediately seized their reelection as a proof of their power to try to put down the military and secret police conspiracies and they were flying sky high with hubris so they did not think much of the dangers of doing this.

No one who is not at the heart of these vast, conspiratorial struggles for power at the top of the U.S. can have any clear idea of where they are now headed. I doubt the conspirators really do, though anyone sky high on Hubris may think he knows and can make whatever he wants happen.

I certainly do not have prophetic powers to predict the outcomes of such vast power struggles at the top of the Greatest Empire in history. My best guess is that anything can happen. This seems very explosive and seems to be getting more so in the midst of these vast crises the U.S. and the world are trapped in now. I keep wondering what might have happened to Hitler when he managed to outwit and betray Beck and most of the other top staff officers of the Wehrmacht and Abwehr [military intelligence], if those officers had commanded many thousands of Special Ops killers and Hitler had not long before started the vast SS with their personal allegiance all down the line to him. And what might have happened to De Gaulle as Pres. of France when he pulled out of Algeria and let the brass take the blame as “Losers,” if the brass in Algeria had had their own jets and Special Ops and helicopter assault ships and Hell Fire drones.

Oh, of course, such things cannot happen in the happy Let’s Pretend land of the U.S., no matter what happened to people like JFK and Nixon who tried to get control of the brass and CIA and negotiate a withdrawal from Vietnam and a detente with the Soviets that they fiercely opposed. Things like that can’t happen in the U.S. any more than Great Financial Crises and military defeats by small peasant nations can.

Perish such thoughts and have a nice day.

Still, I have to admit all of this makes me a bit queazy and glad I’m not in the White House. Maybe knowing the history of other empires and this one makes me a wimp.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: Obama, the White House, Petraeus, theCIA

Vast social revolutions and wars are often preceded by periods of giving up on reforms, despairing withdrawal from public life by the best and brightest, and even peacefulness which seems to have become the normal condition in spite of deep conflicts and growing crises beneath the surfaces of public life. Often, earlier periods of intense conflicts and crises have been overcome and resolved, so it comes to look like that is the normal in life. This lulls most people into assuming their worse fears cannot happen, but this leads them to lowering their guards against growing conflicts and crises, so small ones can more easily cascade down into massive ones. If people expected they could become vast wars or revolutions or implosions, they would take more precautions to prevent that. But when lulled in expecting the worst cannot happen, the worst than they could ever imagine often explodes suddenly.

The cataclysmic French Revolution came after many decades of attempted reforms and conflicts which people had come to think of as unending. It started with new attempts at reforms, then incidents that did not seem so important, then all of it a sudden it exploded. WWI came after so many decades of peace in Europe, in spite of imperial conflicts around the world and an arms race, that most people thought a major war was impossible. Then a single murder in the far away Balkans set in motion an explosive cascade of events that led to a cataclysmic war. The Russian Revolution was preceded by such a long “lull” encouraged by European peace and reforms by the tsar that even Lenin was near despair and was living abroad. After several years of WWI and growing poverty at home, the Russian front imploded and a small event at home triggered a revolution that started small and democratic and then exploded into one of the vastest social revolutions in history. The beginning of WWII on the crucial German-French front was so quiet for so many months after France and Britain had declared war on Germany after it invaded Poland that it was called the “Sitzen Krieg” in Germany, the sit-down war, then it exploded as Germany invaded through the Ardennes. This was repeated near the end of the war as Germany built up its forces secretly for attacking through the Ardennes again.

The American Revolution looked very unlikely until that fateful British march to Concord and Lexington to enforce gun control laws. Then it exploded. The conflicts between the North and South had been so intense for so many decades, off and on, and then resolved again and again by major compromises that the Ante-Bellum period of the 1850′s seemed another replay of that scenario. Then all of a sudden there was a small incident near Charleston, moves to secession, calling up the Northern troops and an explosion of war vastly more ghastly than Americans imagined possible. War between Japan and Germany and the U.S. had been put off so many times and so long that Pearl Harbor came as quite a shock to most Americans. The 9/11 attacks on the U.S. were just as shocking all over again.

In the early years of this new century, the U.S. had used soaring paper money and paper-asset inflation to fuel a great Bubble and apparent “prosperity” over twenty years and repeated crises [1980, 1987, 1990, 2000] were ended by pumping out more paper money and inflating assets [both paper and houses after the Nasdaq Crash in 2000] that the Fed and almost all economists and Bankers and speculators declared we had entered an Age of The Great Moderation in which financial crises were impossible, as Bernanke declared with gusto. Then housing and stocks started slowly cascading down, then did so more rapidly, then one Big Bank was hit by a sudden crisis and had to be “saved” from implosion, then others followed, then suddenly one weekend Lehman imploded and the the whole top of the U.S. financial system imploded and had to be taken over by the U.S. to save it from what looked like total implosion. The Great Moderation was suddenly replaced by The Greatest Global Financial Crisis in history. Europe and the rest of the world soon followed the U.S. into growing crisis.

By pouting out vast and soaring trillions and using vast distortions of the System [such as Quantitative Easing by the Fed] to hold the System up, they managed in the past several years to stop the accelerating cascade down and have kept it bumping along the bottom in official statistics like the GDP and unemployment, while the debts and distortions and all the real crises keep growing. The apparent bump up in the official stats on GDP are an illusion, below the real rate of inflation for GDP, while real unemployment and all the other real economic crises keep growing.

We’re now in a lull before a vast, revolutionary storm. The U.S. is sinking faster and faster in all the ways vital to the future of our society, from the The Great Global Economic-Financial Crisis which the U.S. produced with insane Big Bank speculations and corruption to educational decline and bureaucratic strangulation to losing imperials wars around the world to political deadlock. I’m sure any intelligent American who is honest with himself can quickly write down a long list of the crucial ways in which the U.S. is declining now. Maybe half of Americans are too ignorant about the world or lack the intelligence to see all of this Big Picture of Crisis and Decline. They are confused and mad and despairing and see no way out, but assume the Republicrat System will go on and on and are trying merely to fit in and keep or get a job with a livable wage for them and their families. Even some knowledgeable and intelligent people see what is happening but see no exit and despair and simply withdraw and hide from it all, implicitly or explicitly assuming The System will just keep getting worse and worse and never end.

But nations, like individuals and groups and companies, cannot simply drift downward faster and faster into worse and worse crises they patch up but cannot escape or reverse. We’ve been doing that now for decades, as France and Russia did before their vast social Revolutions, as the nations did during long decades of peaceful imperial conflicts before the utterly immense conflicts of the American Civil War, WWI and WWII. There comes a time finally when the accelerating crises and sufferings and rages become too much to bear and something, often a seemingly small event like a murder of a young man in the Balkans, or an attack by “hotheads” on a small fort near Charleston, sets off an explosive cascade of events that quickly leads to a vast social explosion.

The U.S. is now rushing downward along all vital dimensions of social life. If this continues much longer, the U.S. will simply implode and that will lead to vast social revolution or revolutions. But maybe the vast social revolution will come before implosion.

The one thing we can be sure of is that we have sunk so far so long and are now accelerating down so fast that this cannot continue long without producing an implosion or a vast social revolution.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

Recently by Jack D. Douglas: The New Declaration of Independence From the Corrupt and Tyrannical USEmpire

The generals are always fighting the last war, and the one before that, and…..

Military Bureaucracies almost always suffer the SOP Deadly Disease Of Bureaucratic Blindness And Paralysis. A Bureaucracy is a system of “rationalistic” rules for controlling masses of people down the line from the top. In the rare occasions in which the ruler at the top is not merely a Legacy Baby who inherited power in some way, and is open to reality and feedback and can think at least a bit creatively, the bureaucracy he rules can be very effective under him, if it follows his leads. This was true of Alexander and Genghis Khan [who apparently invented or adopted a system of tens to build and run a vast army with vast mobility and flexibility--one man ruled ten, who ruled ten, who ruled ten, so you soon have a vast army with each man burdened mostly by ruling ten, not the whole mass-mess.] But they are quite rare, no once can be taught to become that way, they are irreplaceable, and they eventually arouse growing envy and resentment and back-stabbing from the lower ranked bureaucrats. Adm. Rickover was a techie leader like that of the U.S. nuclear subs, but he was irreplaceable, one of a kind at the top. Sure, there are bright commanders open to reality and creative, but they do not normally become flag officers at the top and, if they do, they get crushed by the standing bureaucracy.

You see over and over again in military history that the dumb-head bureaucrats running a massive, standing army are murderously incompetent. Apparently, all the top brass on all the Allied sides in WWI were like that. The Germans had learned big lessons on this in the losses to Napoleon and in subsequent wars with France they learned more about how to overcome Bureaucratic Blindness And Paralysis. The German staff’s openness at higher levels to officers down the line was important, the “Flying Colonels” who rode across the rear of the lines finding out what was happening and reported directly to the top was another. The cultural dedication to warfare among the Junkers was also important. They were able to defeat the vast Russian armies and hold off the vast Allied forces on the Western Front until the Germans started starving. This led to the superb top staff officers like Manstein and Rommel and to the defeat of the vast French and German forces in WWII when a Sgt. at the front saw the panzers could cross a small bridge [railroad?] and get behind the “impenetrable” Maginot Line and quickly got this plan to the top and it was carried out with gusto, leading quickly to Dunkirk and French Surrender.

But you also see that human beings starting from basic human nature and immediate realities always create Guerrilla Tactics and then strategies, as Young Lions do. That’s what happened at Lexington and Concord and beyond, as the Americans hid behind trees and walls to pick off the far more heavily armed and bureaucratically trained Red Coats marching in line; in New Jersey’s Bergen County, studied by Bill Marina, and other counties where the local guerrillas finally convinced Washington and the Continentals to cross the Delaware secretly in the dead of night and catch the drunk Hessians sleeping; and the locals in the forests cut up Burgoyne marching down from Canada; and the Over The Mountain Boys came over the mountain and crushed the Kings’ men in W. S. C., and on and on. Sun Tzu did it 2500 years ago. Mao redid it. Giap did it and crushed the French and the U.S. Superpower. The tiny Iraqi Sunni in the iron triangle did it. The Taliban are doing it. Hizbollah is doing it. If the Immense U.S.-E.U. Military Bureaucracy attacks Iran, Iran’s Holy Warrior Revolutionary Guards will do it in all directions and crush the U.S. Global Empire Superpower, but the Perfumed Princes at the top of the immense Pentagon Bureaucracy cannot see that clearly even after all this vast history and their defeats over and over again by many swarming, small peasant armies of guerrilla irregulars constantly surveying realities, probing, search for weaknesses and strengths, responding immediately to those, creating new tactics. cooperating with each other at crucial points, then disbanding and disappearing, and reappearing……

Guerrilla warfare is an extreme free market form of warfare in a situation of low and constantly changing information about what works and does not, a creative, swarming, ever changing, seeming-chaos of orderly responses to the vast complexities and inherent uncertainties ["fogs of war"] of many local realities.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

As the Great Crisis we are now trapped in gets worse and worse and more and more Americans realize the government, especially the Fed System of Money Tyranny, was the ultimate cause of it all, they will rediscover the wondrous joys of freedom and independence from tyrannical government and will reread the American declaration of independence, which was the legal and moral call for American Disintegration from British Tyranny. Why don’t you get one of those pocket copies and read it with them when any ignorant Americans express shock at a “new Idea,” which is ancient and very American. And give them copies.

One of the first serious acts of the Glorious Movement For Independence From The U.S. Imperial Tyranny will be issuing a declaration of independence from the totally corrupt tyranny of the U.S. empire.

It’s happening very fast worldwide, as I have said in many of my essays. Every day there are big new moves to disintegrate from the tyrannical and suicidal, gigantic central planning, tyrannical states around the world, but specially from the terrorist U.S. Global Empire. Just yesterday major developing nations of the world and Japan and the head of the IMF in Europe bitterly attacked the global monetary tyranny of the U.S. Fed which they rightly said is causing terrible problems of inflation, rising commodity prices, and other awful problems, for the whole world; a major independence candidate won a major election in Belgium, which is almost certainly headed for freedom and independence from the central-planing tyranny; and Scotland set a 2014 date for a vote for independence from the new tory redcoats, which I believe the people will vote in favor of because the Crisis will be so much worse in 2014.

Almost all Americans before 1776 rejected the idea of Independence from the UK, then suddenly over a few years they realized that the UK was a terrible, tyrannical threat to the de facto independence of Americans from such tyranny. When the Tyrants sent soldiers to invade and occupy Boston, Americans knew it was only the beginning of a terrible occupation of America. Almost over night the people woke up and became enraged at the tyranny. The same thing is happening now in the U.S., in all of the Americas, and around the world. The terrible U.S Imperial Tyranny is enslaving us more every day and invading and occupying more and more nations around the world and sending its vast secret police and military armies to spy on, kidnap, torture and murder people everywhere who dare to seek real freedom and independence from this Global Slave Empire. All intelligent people around the world are coming to realize that when one of the U.S. Imperial Murder-Drones fires its Hell Fire missiles into a home in Pakistan, or Yemen, or Afghanistan, or Somalia, or anywhere and burns a mother and her chidden to death as they say their prayers or eat their breakfast in peace the U.S. will be coming some day to murder them and their children in this Satanic way with Hell Fire.

I have always been 100% American and lived in and loved almost all parts of this glorious land from sea to shining sea, and, though I treasure all we have learned and gained from the whole world, I even found it difficult living for some months in my mother’s ancestral land in London. Two New Zealanders who had fled the UK earlier put it beautifully in a splendid talk we had with them on a train. They had gone back to visit the old, beloved England, which is still lovely in the countryside, but they found that “only the Cabbages had remained there.” These centrally planned, bureaucratized Animal Farm slaves are exactly that – cabbages. They don’t even have the freedom, independence and courage of an Animal Farm pig slurping up the welfare state subsidized slime.

Even a few years ago, I did not think much about American Independence from the U.S. Imperial Slave State which now oppresses us and the world, because it seemed very distant and painful. Now I think Americans will soon have little choice as the Great Crisis grows and grows and threatens the lives of all of use with starvation and Hell Fire. I am not a Sam Adams hot head. I am like his relative, John Adams, who long did not like the idea of revolting against the King’s growing tyranny, until the King and his stupid bureaucrats forced intelligent Americans finally to make their Glorious Declaration.

The vile liars and thieves in Washington and the Fed and the Big Banks and the vast speculators will not stop oppressing Americans into an ever more vile form of modern, wrap-around slavery, so Americans are coming more and more to see that they have no choice but to become free and courageous, the land of the free and the home of the brave in reality, once again. We are being forced to be born again Americans and to save the real American nation from the preposterous and evil impostors who have stolen the government in Washington from the sovereign people. and made a ludicrous mockery of our beloved nation and constitution.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

An essay by Simon Black, sent to me by Wes Drawdy down in South Carolina, is a very good overview from the ground up of what’s happening in the Spanish Financial Crisis and is very similar to what is already happening in Greece, Italy and Portugal and will likely soon be happening in France and northward. He emphasizes the “capital flight” he could see all around him, people rushing to get their money out of the Spanish banks before emergency laws impose severe restrictions on withdrawals, as has already begun in less drastic ways in Italy, and getting it out of Spain, especially to nearby Andora. The financial Media are covering this, but they are emphasizing the banks’ massive borrowing to the de facto insolvent Spanish government, which makes the banks de facto insolvent, while all officials are pretending this is not yet at the critical level which could produce a full scale banking panic any day. The Media also do not catch the sense of growing panic among the people in general, as Black does.

Black does not mention that the banking crisis involves the regional banks, not just a few Big Banks. He does not mention that the natives are beginning to revolt. The richest, industrial province of Catalonia is planning to hold a referendum on secession because the central government is taxing them severely to help faster sinking provinces, pushing Catalonia into ever deeper debts it cannot pay. Roughly 75% of the people in Catalonia tell pollsters they want a referendum on secession. Just yesterday the federal government moved to take more direct control over Catalan education to Hispanicize the people more, which was already a major reason the people want to go free. A few other provinces are rumbling and seem to be moving in the same direction.

My life long friend Bill Marina was Anglo-Hispanic-Cuban. His father and his family were Spanish-Cubans who moved to Cuba early in the last century. The family was not from Catalonia, but we paid attention to Catalonia because they have been so important in Spain and retained much of Catalan culture and nationalism. I used to remind Bill that Catalonia would likely rise again some day by simply saying, “Viva Catalonia!,” to which he merely smiled. I think we were right. I’ve long thought the same of my ancestral nation of Scotland and thought it absurd for such a fine nation dedicated to education, intellectual life, science, and Adam Smith should be tied to London, though I’ve also thought it would be nice to take Cambridge and Oxford and some other good schools along with them when they break free.

The societies that have already been decentralizing and disintegrating faster and faster, such as the .K, will very likely disintegrate into their more tightly, culturally knit local, provincial societies, especially along the ancient lines of earlier nations. The Irish are already free, Wales and Scotland have been growing in power with “devolution” of power from the UK, and now Scotland is becoming more nationalistic. I expect Italy will likely break up in part, at least losing the Northern League nations.

The U.S. has been fighting cultural wars along largely regional lines for decades and these are now rapidly intensifying under the strains of the Great US-Global Crisis. The N.E. obviously is a largely foreign nation to the vast majority of us Americans and we are now more and more angry over The System and foreign policies they support and we pay for and suffer from. There are other huge fault lines among the regions of America, but none are as deep and wide as those separating the N.E. Nation from the rest of us. I went to major colleges and taught in some in the NE (Harvard, Princeton, Hopkins, Dartmouth, Wellesley, Syracuse) for many years of my young adulthood and there are many things I love about it, especially New England, but I have lived most of my life in other regions of the U.S. and am very aware from the ground level that the NE in general (excluding New Hampshire) is a largely separate nation.

The Big New York Banks and Big Media and Gargantuan DC now make me feel that more than ever. The South and other cultural nations are not yet ready to rise again, but a catastrophic implosion produced by the insanities of the NE, mostly DC, will change that drastically. If so, I think Southern Blacks, who have been returning home from the NE, Middle West, and West, will join in singing “Dixie” and that will finally end the awful, fatal fault line of the earlier Southern American nation.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

All Great Catastrophes seem impossible until the day they become reality. If people took them seriously, they would act to avoid them.

Did Caesar think his friend Brutus would join others one lovely day in Rome to cut him up? Did Romans think the Empire could finally fall? Did the Greatest Empire the world had seen think a small nation of upstart peasants with no army could defeat the mighty Red Coats? Not until the day it happened at York Town and the world turned upside down. Did Americans believe the people who were screaming that Pearl Harbor was wide open to attack by Japanese carriers after FDR forced the Navy to move from San Diego to Pearl? Not until that fateful Sunday morning. Did the U.S. believe a small peasant nation could defeat the Greatest Empire the world had ever seen and lead its Embassy staff to flee in panic in helicopters from the roof?

I believe there was only one person who believed a catastrophic attack on the World Trade Center was going to happen. That one guy believed it would happen because of the first attack on the Center years earlier. But he went there that day anyhow and got killed. A sister-in-law of one of my daughters was a bond saleswoman in the small, nearby building that imploded. She knew it was possible because she was there in the first attack. As soon as she heard a crash, looked out and saw the smoke from one of the Towers high above her, she grabbed her purse, ran downstairs and got a cab home in Manhattan. She was saved by believing it could and was happening.

The Great Depression 1 was impossible to almost everyone. Ditto for Depression 2. Greenspan and Bernanke said any great financial crisis was impossible in the modern world, so they let it happen in spite of the yelling and screaming of me and a lot of other analysts.

This morning I spent about a half hour watching a brilliant discussion by Steve Leason of CNBC, Sens. Bowles and Simpson and CEO Blankfein of Goldman-Sachs about this Great Crisis. The Goldman-Sachs CEO put the catastrophic danger of the soaring U.S. debts very nicely. He said that the U.S. is now dependent for half of its annual budget on borrowing, half from Americans and half from foreigners. He said right now they are lending freely, but they are not stupid and know there is great risk in buying U.S. long Treasuries at 1.7% for 10 years when the government is sinking into debt faster and faster, with the power to inflate and send their bond values crashing. He said it all looks great until one day, all of a sudden with no warning, the music stops and the bond market comes crashing down. Did you believe the Soviet System would implode one day and the Wall would be torn down by the people in the streets? Did you believe Lehman would implode over one weekend, thus imploding the whole top of the U.S. financial system in a few days after that?

Now the same Bozos tell us the Implosion of the U.S. is impossible. It is, until the day it happens.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

All official, statist statistics are only about the subjects and categories, and use only operational definitions and procedures to construct those statistics, which are determined ultimately by the politicians who control the state. All official statistics are, thus, inherently biased by the powerful individuals who run the states, so official stats. vary wildly among nation-states and other political groups. In America, for example, there are massive official stats. on the deaths the state categorizes as due to drug uses defined by the state as “illegal,” almost entirely those of poorer people. There are no official slats. on the deaths due to prescription drugs the state defines as legal, even though non-state studies show prescription drugs kill many times more Americans than the illegal drugs. Big Pharma. Corps. and doctors and the politicians they pay-off massively want to control non-pharmaceutifical drug uses to end them, not the immense drug uses of Big Pharma drugs. Only a tiny part of human experience is the subject of official stats., those parts that the state wants to know about in detail to control in some way for statist purposes. There are no official stats. on “paying officials bribes to get profitable legislation passed for the payers.” There are massive official stats. on the knowledge of k-12 students. Where are the official stats. on “Ignorance of Officials.”?

I started my Ph.D. study of suicides by going back and studying the history of official statistical data because almost all social science studies of suicide used the official, statist statistics on suicides uncritically [which no real scientist would do with any statistics]. I went back to the ancient world briefly [there is little info. on that] and began more detailed work on the tax roles from Medieval England, the moral statistics from the 17th century on in major states, and up to the modern states. When you study the origins of official stats. it is perfectly obvious they are created and collected for statist purposes and not for scientific purposes. They are obviously inherently biased by political power. Modern citizens and slaves who live inside these massive, bureaucratic states are controlled massively in a total-wrap-around way by the statist concepts and data the people of power create and use to control the citizens and slaves. As long as people live within those official data, they are being sub-consciously controlled by the people of power running the states.

My earliest book, The Social Meanings of Suicide [originally my Ph.D. thesis at Princeton, published by Princeton UP], reports on my findings from historical and comparative studies about the invalidities and unreliabilities of official reports and statistics on suicide in general. ["Valiidity" concerns the "truthfulness" of definitions of categories in statistics. "Reliability" concerns the degree of agreement among all the people using the definitions to construct the actual statistics.] I then did a study of coroner and medical examiner categorizations of suicide as a cause of death in the counties of New York State and showed the wild differences in definitions and methods used, making them totally unusable as any kind of “scientific data.” This was reported in various of my works, such as American Social Order and Investigative Social Research.

The coroner of Buffalo was very blunt. It was and is a largely Catholic county, so official categorization of cause of death as “suicide” is very controversial most of the time because it leads to not being buried in the Catholic way, etc. He said no death was categorized as “suicide” officially unless a note in the victim’s handwriting was found. This was totally different from the med. exam. system in NY City where the med. exam. has total power. Buffalo rarely did autopsies, but in NYC any unattended death was generally followed quickly by a full-scale autopsy, used partly as “practice” for med. students and interns and residents at NYU at that time, where I was invited to take part in one such autopsy to show me how they inferred suicide. It was very hot that day and I was already queasy, so I begged off. A med. examiner just north of the City told me you could throw all the possible “suicide” reports up and count as suicides those which stuck to the ceiling and you’d be as right as the official categorizations. And she was not laughing. She took it for granted as true after all her experience.

I and my students and many other colleagues did massive studies of official stats on crimes, etc., and showed the same things.

I tend to take this for granted and rarely bother writing about it for any data, especially economic data, though I’ve done that massively decades ago, as in The Myth of the Welfare State. There are no official stats. on social phenomenon that are “scientific.” Even population stats., counting heads, is inherently only roughly approximate when vast money and work is put into it. Fred Stephan, at Princeton, my first thesis chair, had been Pres. of the American Statistical Association, but he agreed with me that population stats. vary wildly, especially in other countries. My tutor from Harvard undergrad. days, Ivan Vallier, was doing some research in Argentina back then and asked to see the official pop. data for a recent period. They gave him the only official book of those stats. and he kept it under his bed in his hotel until returning it. In America that would seem insane to the statisticians. Fred had had similar experience in other countries,

“Suicide” is officially undefined or defined as “the intentional killing of one’s self” almost everywhere, “Intention” is inherently very problematic, then the operational procedures used are wildly different, so the stats. are inherently very unscientific. The individual categorizations vary wildly in their degree of uncertainty. For example, did Marilyn Monroe commit suicide? Unless someone killed her on purpose and comes forward and gives conclusive proof, we cannot know. We can only argue empirically and common-sensically to infer subjective probabilities.

All of these things are true, to widely varying degrees, about all the economic stats. Unemployment data is notoriously invalid and unreliable in the U.S. and everywhere. They change the small-print, hidden operational definitions frequently, normally in part to keep the official rates down. The mass of Labor Dept. statisticians have nothing to do with this. The few top political appointees and “expert” committees they appoint make the decisions, as is usually the case with official stats. If you read the fine print of the “experts,” you can follow these things. Who does? The top “experts” working with the political leaders of all these official statistical organizations can vary all kinds of “small variables” hardly noticed by non-experts — “seasonal adjustments,” periods considered, the wordings and personal characteristics of telephone pollsters, decisions to recall or not, etcetc.

All serious pollsters learn early in their training that face-to-face and telephone and written poll statistics can be changed — biased — widely by the wordings of questions, the tones of voice, the introductory messages, the accents of the pollsters talking on the phone, etcetc. There is a whole literature on this and any good and honest pollster knows that. Seymour Martin Lipset once told me that a good, serious pollster knows that he must know the general situation he is trying to get details on from the poll before he begins the polling, obviously from other, more reliable information about the general situation. So they do pretesting of how different groups interpret different words used in the polling, etc. I always thought Marty was one of the best precisely because he studied the real world with all good data and used polling in that context to get more precise about population proportions, distributions, changes over time, etc.

Huge masses of “data” come in to such agencies and they differ wildly in their apparent qualities. Some is thrown out as obvious trash, mistakes, or even hoaxes. How you define what is acceptable and what is not can make a big difference.

The rules of inclusion and exclusion of data in general, the times for beginning a study [e.g., Jan., 2012, versus Feb., 2012] and ending it, and on and on, make big differences in the official stats. produced by these bureaucracies.

There are good books on how to lie with statistics of this sort and how to defend against the liars. Reporters and the overwhelming majority of Americans obviously never read such books, unless they want to do the official statistical lying and then they always deny these obvious truths and pretend those books and essays like this one do not exist — they disappear the truth from the public, as usual.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

I’m 75 years old now and can identify completely with an old man watching in despair as his once great nation crumbles down around him. It’s happening faster and faster to us every day. The diaries of people in nations like Nazi Germany are the precedents for those of us writing for private audiences about the awful truths about America today.

I was born in Paradise and have lived through a very long, slow motion Paradise Lost and the birth of Dystopian America.

I was born in Miami, Florida, Jan. 14, 1937. That was the nadir of Depression 1, but in Miami we lived largely outdoors in the shade of mango and avocado and many other trees, with the balmy Gulf breezes blowing gently around us to soothe us. There was fruit growing in the fields and yards, especially sweet, pink-yellow guavas which I loved and sumptuous Hayden mangoes with their entrancing bouquet and Caribbean papayas and avocados. The air was pure and sweetly scented. We could catch and eat delicious ocean fish in Biscayne Bay, which was sparkling clear. We had no “freeways” or traffic jams.

We had Gulf air conditioning in our small homes made of wonderfully strong, slatted Key pine, with overhanging shutters and awnings to block the mid day sun while letting the Gulf breezes flow through the screens around us. We were at peace with the world with lovely music on the radio, such as my mother and father’s song — “As Time Goes By” — and no shrill war reports about U.S. forces invading the Middle East, Asia, or anywhere else. We did not hear daily reports of police shootouts with narco lords and gangs. We ate delicious vegetables and fruits out of the fields and yards without getting cancers from toxic pesticides. I was born in a very small hospital, Jackson Memorial, with Spanish tiles on the roof, and even when I was about four and had to spend a night there, it was tiny and friendly with screens on the windows and I left through one of those windows when my grandfather came to get me, without any doctor’s permission. My first school was a very small and lovely school where every day was a delight without metal detectors. And the teachers were gentle and loving, almost like our mothers at home, and did not go out on strike or march in gay parades or any others.

Of course, if you write that today in a children’s Little Golden Book on “I Was Born In Paradise,” everyone would laugh at you as if you were insane and telling them a crazy, utopian fairy tale.

But it was all true, just as I write about it now. I even had close touch with my ancient relatives, including Mama Knox who visited us in late 1942 from the Old South, She was 102 years old and was born in the Old South in 1840 when America was still young and hopeful. We still had ancient, strong roots that helped give meaning to our happy lives amid the conflicts and worries of everyday life common to all human societies.

My Paradise all began to crumble away with the sudden arrival of WWII. I don’t remember the beginning of the far away war, but it soon led my father to march off into the Army and disappear across the Pacific for the next several years. My mother, who had so lovingly taught me all the basics of life and reading and writing and numbers, apparently ran off to hitchhike in the West and I and my brother were put in a foster home that was like a prison for a year or two.

As the end of the war drew near, my mother returned, got us out of prison and we lived with her on South Beach just across the Bay from Miami. It was a cauldron of military training from which we could not escape day or night. It was exciting but scary. Almost every day the soldiers marched in long columns down the ocean boulevard past “The Circus Bar” right on the beach where my mother was a friendly bar maid. Many of them seemed to be her boy friends and sang a popular serenade to her as they marched by, substituting her name in “Wait ’til the sun shines, Marion, and the clouds go drifting by.” Finally, the glorious day of Victory came and the soldiers disappeared and my father came home. But he and my mother were not the same and soon divorced. My Paradise had become my Paradise Lost.

America would never be the same again. We lost our Paradise in a mad rush to victories in wars around the world and “security” in atomic and hydrogen bombs and in a paroxysm of modernity which swept away much of our ancient cultural wisdom and family and social foundations. We lost our American Paradise and gave birth to Dystopian America which would soon lead to MAD [Mutual Assured Destruction].

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

This question has been raised a vast number of times since LBJ.

It misses the crucial reality of power at the top of the U.S.

The “Presidents” have long been front men for the vast military, secret police, government bureaucracies, big corps…..Reagan was the beginning of the obvious Actor-Lip-Synching-Presidents. [JFK and Nixon were probably eliminated by the CIA et al. because they insisted on pursuing Detente with the Soviets in reality, rather than as mere rhetoric for the Mass-Mediated Dunces. That enraged the CIA and other Brass. Ford went along. Carter was kind of out of it and irrelevant.] Since Reagan, all have been acting their parts, Clinton and Obama brilliantly, except Bush 1 who was the Director of the CIA and all the Secret Government in the White House. Iran-Contra was a tip of the iceberg of the Secret Coup In The White House, in that case obviously run by admirals and colonels under Bush 1.

Obama or Romney would probably love to become America’s Augustus, maybe even the first American Hitler, but the decision is not theirs to make. Gen. Petraeus was the head of Centcom in the Middle East, all U.S. forces in the area, when the top staff officers of his field commander in charge of all of their Army forces in Afpak, Gen. McChrystal, made derisive fun of the Obama crew’s ignorance and abilities in an interview published in Rolling Stone. This extreme insubordination had to be dealt with. McChrystal was allowed to retire, but the buck stopped with him. Petraeus was appointed downward to fill McChrystal’s subordinate position, which gave the appearance of being a a bit of a wood-shed punishment, perhaps. He announced idealistic plans to avoid civilian killings, but the slaughter went on and drones soon extended their blatant killing of civilians in Pakistan. The U.S. continued losing the war in Afghanistan at an accelerating rate, but the buck stopped below Petraeus,as usual. He had become a Teflon General in a war the U.S. was losing to peasants armed with little more than old rifles and a few explosives.

Petraeus finally decided it was time to get out of Afpak before he got stigmatized as the Westmoreland of Afpak, The Loser. Do you know where he is now? Living in the glory and secret power, very quietly, as The Director of the CIA. I suspect he is our Augustus, a very quiet dictator among quasi-equals at the top of a vast Secret Government in which the people at the top never admit their mistakes and take no blame, so there is no negative feedback for their insane mistakes. They smile in the pictures, pretend all is coming up roses with no thorns, and blissfully continue to wreck havoc on us and the world.

The party still needs Americans to believe that the old bottle of the Constitution — the external forms — they have preserved are the reality, that America is still a land of the free and a democracy in which the people can choose who is president, even if they only get a choice of alpha and beta, a black republicrat or a white republicrat.

The party will not break the old constitutional forms — the bottle now filled with the new wine of totalitarian tyranny, as seen blatantly in the fed — until the coming implosion frightens the masses into submission to martial law. In the grip of terror over the chaos and dread of starvation, the masses will go beyond their present “President” Worship and embrace a Savior Dictator, as the Russians, Italians, Germans, Chinese and so many other terrified people have done before in this Modernist Age of Chaos, Implosions and Dread caused by cutting away the roots of human nature and ancient cultural traditions and replacing them with bureaucratic central plans for paper money, the economy, health and everything else.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

This is a good study of the soaring rate of dangerous MRSA infection from hospital stays by academic hospital insiders who used their inside knowledge of the U. of Chicago hospital and three others to correct for the massive 30% to 50% official underreporting and found that one out of twenty plus patients now gets serious MRSA hospital infection in the U.S., more than all the influenza and AIDS hospitalizations combined. That was a 100% increase in five years and the study ended in ’08, so there has probably been another near doubling, or less if the growing infection control efforts coming out of Hopkins, etc., are beginning to pay off.

I would say from my experience and from many studies that far and away the number one danger of medical care in and out of hospitals is misdiagnosis and mistreatment — misprescription, etc.

Doctors don’t know their patients, don’t know them as whole people in whole life situations, don’t know much up-to-date out of their specialties, don’t see anything but their narrow specialty as their concern, don’t really even know the records of patients they have worked with for many years in most instances. Ignorance is soaring for many reasons. The fifteen minute run-by med. appointment is absurd for dealing seriously with basic causes and preventives, so they rarely try to get to the obvious basics.

Dr. Laura Nathanson, a doctor here in San Diego, did an excellent book in 2007 based on the terrible, mortal experience of her husband and herself with a misdiagnosis of her husband’s illness — What You Don’t Know Can Kill You.

Misdiagnosis killed her husband. I’ve had many misdiagnoses, some that were very dangerous. I have also been permanently maimed by surgical mistake for a hernia that destroyed my left testicle and has left me with knotted veins in the groin and intermittent pains. I have dealt with a dozens of medical people who are inherently dangerous to me because about 40 years ago an internist put me on hypertension drugs because of a blood pressure spike in his office which I learned [in part by working with John Ross, a great cardiologist] was due to ‘White Coat Syndrome” — anxiety about doctors because of such ghastly mistakes. They routinely insist adamantly on putting me on powerful drugs for life, refuse treatment, etc.

I normally pretend not to know as much about my problems as I know when dealing with doctors. They deeply resent anyone who knows something they do not, anyone who does things to correct their mistakes [even when you cannot get them on the phone to check with them], and “troublemakers” and “amateur doctors.” They can become dangerous if they put you in any such category because they have sky-high Hubris from their God Complex in the Medical Realm.

Doctors are like the police: they can be very helpful in some situations, but are inherently dangerous and should be avoided as much as possible. You do not argue with doctors or police and you must be submissive in demeanor at all times. They insist on being called Doctor, even when you have a doctorate and full professorship and are three times their age and they call you “Jack.” That name puts you down at the bottom of the totem pole on purpose. You must bow and scrape and say “Yassah, Maasah!” like the slaves did. But be aware they are very often very wrong and dangerous, like slave drivers. Slaves had a secret, underground of knowledge and wisdom and support against the Masters. You must do the same.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

I have no definite idea whether Iran has been involved in any way in the murderous attacks against Israeili citizens in recent months, such as the reported attack on Israeli tourists on a bus in Bulgaria yesterday. They could be “false flag” Israeli or American murders of Israelis intended to produce outrage against Iran to get more support for the mass murders of Iranians both have been launching by economically strangling the whole nation of Iran, about 75 million people, and threatening to do on a vaster scale with immense military attacks on Iran any day now.

Certainly most nations would have struck back long ago in some desperate way against the huge Cyber War attacks on Iran the U.S. has admitted and bragged about, and against the murders in broad daylight of Iranian nuclear scientists which Iran blames on Israel’s Mossad [like the CIA] for obvious reasons.

But Iran has shown immense self-restraint over these and earlier attacks on their nation and people by the U.S. and Israel for many years. Iran has obviously tried NOT to get involved in any forms of counter attacks that would lead Western peoples biased by the Media reports to be outraged and enraged more against them.

Since this would be so contrary to what Iran has done over and over again for years — complain bitterly and warn the U.S. and Israel, but hold back their outrage and hope the other Western nations will come to their senses and stop the U.S. and Israeli attacks, I have doubts they were involved. I also think the attacks have been so dumb and against such innocent people, that it does not seem like what Iranian agents or, even less, what Hizbollah agents would do. It seems more like false flag attacks intended to kill but not much or, even more likely, a third party attack intended to arouse anti-Iranian passions, maybe by amateur Israelis.

On the other hand, maybe Iran has concluded the West will never act with reason and humanity toward them and they must begin giving graduated, step by step warnings of what they could do if the attacks on them persist. One thing the attacks show is a vast range of vulnerability by Israelis — and by implication Americans. Maybe they’re “sending a message” — “Look what we can do and consider how bad it could be for you if you continue attacking us!”

That’s possible, but does not explain the ineptness of most of these attacks. Some look more like Charlie Chaplin attacks than attacks by the Revolutionary Guards or Hizbollah, which is the opposite of what Iran is trying to tell the U.S. and Israel. IF it were Iran, would they not want to look very intelligent, capable of inflicting mass casualties in a counter-attack? They do that routinely in their massive War Games, missile firings, the brilliant Cyber capture and landing of the top secret U.S. Stealth Drone, etc.

Overall, this looks anti-Iranian and amateurish, not like a planned and executed Iranian series of attacks.

Of course, we will have to wait and see and try to get more info. But, IF I had to bet on the options so far, I’d bet on amateurs for or against Iran, more like against Iran than for, quite possibly a Mossad false flag attack intended to make Iran look very evil and inept, thus encouraging Americans to attack Iran to stop the evil but without worrying about Charlie Chaplin counter attacks.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

BO and the Supremes lunge to finalize the totalitarian central planning of the vast health care pseudo-system in the U.S. was so full of verbiage, rationalizations, shilly shalling, one step back and two steps forward into totalitarian central planning that it was ludicrous in a very grim way. The details are absurdly complex and obfuscating, but basically BO imposed a "universal insurance dodge" similar to Social Security to pay for the vast trillions more in costs needed to pay for 60,000,000 new patients who cannot pay for themselves, the Supremes by 5 to 4 said that’s illegal, but you can do the same scam by changing the name to a "tax" and get away with it. The Media at first thought the Supremes had rejected the obviously unconstitutional forced purchase, then got muddled up by the wording and shilly shalling in the actual decision, then reversed themselves, then….

The Supremes, of course, are just playing their usual game of moving two steps forward into totalitarianism, while hiding this from Dupes by taking one tiny step back and throwing out very obfuscating verbiage in 90 pages. They are Total Party Hacks these days, but they pretend to be independent and "only serving the law of the land," just like Egyptian Supremes and those in all the totalitarian regimes.

It was more extreme than the absurdities of the Brezhnev era of the USSR, more like a comic opera scene from "Evita" in which everyone contradicts everyone else and everyone is confused and lost, but the totalitarian system trundles on toward its doom.

I expect many states will join in the fun by proclaiming they "might" secede from the illegal, buffoon pseudo-system, some young people will go into hiding to avoid paying soaring costs for other people, and on and on.

By using police powers to force everyone to pay this "non-insurance tax" to pay for health care for other people, BO et al. hope to kick some of the soaring costs down the alley into the darkness to hide them. But it is perfectly obvious that health care costs will soar by trillions in the short and medium term and the whole pseudo-system will help to implode the whole government and clear the land of such absurdities. Big Pharma and Big Bureaucratic Oligarchic Pseudo-Medicine will soar to new heights of government mandated thievery and more millions will die and be maimed and injured.

It’s all just more of the same. yada-yada, as Americans say these days.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

The Great Myth of the Welfare State and all of the lesser myths and lies on which it was built are now being totally confounded by the harsh realities of human nature and finance and economic life and politics built on human nature. Socialism, Communism, Fascism, Nazism, Mixed Economies, Democratic Fascism, and all the other brands of this Great Myth of the Welfare State are rapidly imploding. The utopian ideologists of all stripes of this insane and fierce certitude of impending heaven on earth are completely confused and in a state of total denial and are trying every wild-eyed scheme they can to revive the dying Great Myth. Ignorant armies of ideology are striking out against everyone they assume has threatened their Great Myth of heaven on earth created by endless paper-money debts and spending and consumption and dreaming and illusion.

They dream in desperate ignorance and ideological certitude of reviving their Great Myth and will stop at nothing to try to bring it back to life to stalk the earth once again with huge bubbles of paper money and debts that cannot be paid and the inevitable Busts and Depressions and the final Great Global Crisis it produces.

The enraged mobs of True Believers are becoming more and more murderous toward realists and anyone who dares to tell them the truth. Like all totalitarians, they are trying desperately to banish reality and replace it with their utopian dreams, illusions, and lies.

They will fail in the end and finally reconcile themselves bitterly to realities built on human nature. Only then will it be possible to rebuild realistic foundations for a workable, livable society and once again, begin the long and tortured trek of human beings to slowly, step by step, improve our world and lives and inner selves.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

The U.S. Global Strangulation of Iran has nothing to do in the short or intermediate terms with any fear Iran will get a nuclear weapon. American intelligence and former heads of Israel’s Mossad agree with the international assessment that there is no evidence Iran is now trying to produce nuclear weapons or that they could do so in less than several to ten years if they tried to do so. There is also nearly universal agreement among serious analysts, including U.S. intelligence sources going back many years, that attacking Iran would likely lead to severe cuts in oil supplies from the Persian Gulf that would produce a severe shock to the global economy, especially in this time of financial crisis.

This does not mean Obama or the entire U.S. leadership at the top is going insane or trying to destroy the U.S. Empire. There is a “method to this seeming madness,” a very clear grand strategic goal involved in these constant threats and attacks on Iran. The general goal is to save the U.S. Empire and its domination and exploitation of the world to stop the accelerating decline and disintegration of the Empire and the American financial system and economy. The specific goal of all the attacks on Iran is to stop the rise of the Iranian-Shia superpower in the Middle East and its rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunni powers growing across North Africa, the Middle East, South Central and Central Asia.

Iran is also the core leader in the growing alliance of Shia and Islamist Sunnis with the vast nations of Russia, India and China against the U.S. Empire’s energy and dollar imperialism.

all of this makes Iran and its allies a mortal threat to the U.S. global empire and the present U.S. financial system tied to that empire. this is why the U.S. is taking such desperate risks to try to strangle Iran and to destroy its central position in this anti-American imperialism coalition that is growing rapidly.

Iran and its Shia Allies across the whole Middle East are a very real threat to the U.S. Global Empire’s domination and exploitation of this whole vast region. That Iranian superpower Shia bloc’s rapidly growing alliance with Islamist Sunnis makes Iran the core of a very grave threat to the U.S. global empire which I believe has already developed far enough to prevent the U.S. from continuing its imperialist suppression of muslim nations with totalitarian, puppet regimes and the use of those to exploit this vast region.

By attacking Iran and all of the Shia and Islamist Sunni nations allying more and more closely with Iran, most obviously Syria right now, the U.S. is in fact turning the vast Muslim World of nearly one and a half billion mostly young and very fertile people and much of the rest of the world against its brutal Empire.

This desperate grand strategy has, therefore, put the existence of the U.S. empire and of the U.S. financial system dependent on it at grave risk. at the very least, the U.S. is “going for broke” — “playing for all the marbles” — in its blatantly brutal, imperialistic strangulation of Iran and now some of its allies such as Syria.

The U.S. destroyed the Sunni block to the rise of Shia Iran as a Super Power in the Middle East when it destroyed Hussein’s Iraqi military machine, which the U.S. had earlier secretly supported in Iraq’s vast invasion of Iran [which led to the defeat of Iraq and the U.S.] Sunni Iraq was the only major block to the rise of the Shia as a Super Power at the heart of the Middle East. When the U.S. also installed a totalitarian Shia military power in Iraq which from the beginning was quietly allied with their brother Shia in Iran [where many of the new rulers of Iraq had lived for many years to escape Hussein's secret police], the new, rising Shia Super Alliance of Iran and Iraq became a huge military power of 100,000,000 mostly young people who loathe the U.S. and control more oil and gas than the Saudi Arabian and UAE puppets of the U.S. Iran was by then already building its Super Alliance with Syria, Hizbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Palestine, an Alliance at the very heart of the Arab World and the Middle East. That alliance grew very rapidly after Hizbollah defeated Israel and drove them out of Lebanon for the second time.

Beginning over a year ago the U.S. puppet Sunni regimes across North Africa started falling to popular revolutions against the puppets and, above all, against the U.S. Empire which replaced the U.K. and French Empires that had oppressed them earlier. The revolutions are still going on in almost every U.S. Sunni puppet nation, but in almost all of them the people are winning their revolutions and moving steadily into a new age of Islamist governments which are in fact very anti-American and becoming more so as the U.S. allys itself more and more openly with the most hated totalitarian regimes, such as the Egyptian Army. the absurd, monarchical and pseudo-democratic tyrannies in Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Yemen and a few others.

From the beginning of these new Sunni Islamist movements and governments, the Iranians and their Shia allies have allied themselves more and more with the Sunni Islamists, based largely on their common loathing of the Great Satan — the U.S. — and the terrorist threat it poses to all of them. Turkey has not had an Islamist revolution, but the Sunni Islamists are taking over more and more in Turkey and becoming more and more Islamist, more and more anti-American and more and more quietly allied with the Iranians and the rising Sunni Islamists.

At the same time the U.S. was enraging the people of the Middle East against itself, the U.S. was enraging the Afghans and Pakistanis in the same way only more virulently with its terrorist murders and raids everywhere. The hearts and minds of nearly 200,000,000 Afghans and Pakistanis are now virulently anti-American. Though they are not yet allied with the rising Iranian Super Alliance, they are becoming more friend;y and will almost certainly find more and more common causes against the U.S. as the U.S. and its European [Nato] puppets flee the rising power of the Islamist guerilla armies. The U.S. has lost its terrorist war against Afghanistan and Pakistan and pushed them closer and closer to both iran and china, and even to some degree india and russia, to counter-balance the u.s. in its final desperate war against the world.

All of these vast developments are being hidden from the American and European peoples as much as possible by vast propaganda Media Wars against Iran and its grand global alliance against the U.S. But intelligent leaders around the world see the U.S. is desperate and is losing and even in Latin America the few remaining puppet regimes of the U.S. Empire, notably Mexico and Colombia, are turning more and more against the U .S. even in full public view. This happened just this weekend in Cartagena, Colombia, where Obama and his motley crowd of Key Stone Cop “security guards” were publicly humiliated by the still partially puppet regime of Colombia which needs vast U.S. military help in oppressing the peasants of the North for the vastly rich landowning families of the South. All 30 Latin Leaders there opposed even a future meeting of this sort with the U.S. without the U.S. allowing Cuba to attend and almost all insist as well on an end for support of the U.K. puppet regime’s claims to the Falklands off the coast of Argentina. Hugo Chavez, the elected president of Venezuela, was not even there because he is getting more cancer treatment in Cuba [not Miami]. He is more and more an ally of Iran, as is even Brazil on crucial matters like opposition to Dollar Imperialism and Inflation Thievery. Had he and his few very close allies from Latin America, Ecuador and Nicaragua, been there, the anti-American thrust would have been even greater. As it is, the Cartagena police wound up mortally embarrassing the Secret Key Stone Cops, the U.S. Army and Obama by taking U.S. security guards into custody over refusal to pay a prostitution bill for servicing rendered. Obama et al were made a laughing stock in a way that never happened before when these terrorized nations were ruled by oppressed puppet regimes. [Like Congressman Issa, I think these were SOP activities which led to police custody and massive public exposure for the first time. The U.S. Empire is losing its grip even on still dependent puppets.]

The U.S. has gotten very desperate in the Middle East. It is not only risking a cut off of oil by Iran over the U.S. strangulation of Iran, but the U.S. is now more and more openly involved in supporting the Sunni revolt against Syria and the Sunni oppression of Shia revolt against Bahrain by Saudia Arabia, the only major U.S. puppet left in the Middle East and a tyrannical monarchy loathed by the whole vast region and its own population [as far as we can tell in such an extremely closed police state].

It is always possible the U.S. will realize it is risking its entire Empire in this grand strategy, or that Iran will buckle under the strangulation pressures and retreat, or an Iranian ally like Syria will start a war inadvertently with another, more important ally, Sunni Turkey, that might reverse the growing great alliance. Maybe the U.S. will become more wise in its mix of sticks and carrots in dealing with Iran.

But I think these would be temporary set-backs for Iran and its great alliance of nations lining up against the U.S. Empire. I think the world sees the Giant is crippled severely by its losing wars, by the decline of the U.S. economy relative to the rising nations around the world, the so-called BRICKS, though one must add another I to that for Iran [in addition to India] — BRICKS, and The Great Global Financial Crisis the U.S. produced and is making worse and worse with vast help from its puppets in the EU and elsewhere, as even the “liberal” Brookings Institute just reported on the basis of global indices they analyze.

I think the U.S. is desperately fighting its last great imperial war against the world. I think the U.S. will lose this WAR and destroy its Empire and its global financial system. Obama has become the Undertaker of the U.S. Global Empire and, if he and his desperate strategists keep attacking the world, he will be the Undertaker of the U.S. as it now exists. By all indications, they will continue to destroy the U.S. unless some greater power, perhaps a Great Awakening of the American people who would prefer not to be impoverished or torn apart by the Obama Undertaker Strategy.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

The U.S. carried out a systematic program of racial clearing of the valuable land of Native Americans. I don’t know of evidence many thought of it as genocide or even ethnic cleansing, though some probably did, since Social Darwinism of various kinds was loose in the world and by the early twentieth century some might have thought of it in genetic terms. I think most of the massacres and policies that led to the rapid dying away of the millions of Native Americans were aimed at getting control of the valuable lands at the local and national level.

There is no question, though, that the national massacre mentality, which later exploded so immensely against other nations, from the Philippines and WWII saturation bombing and burning of all the cities of Germany and Japan (except Kyoto) to Vietnam and the use of economic national strangulation against Iraq, Afghanistan and now Iran , existed very early in some U.S. officials at the top. I first became aware of this as a young teenager when I read about four of Kenneth Robert’s novels about pre-revolutionary and revolutionary America — Rabble in Arms (my first and favorite), Arundel, Northwest Passage….Northwest Passage contained a bit of a shocker for me. The young hero (?) center piece of the novel who witnesses it all, Langdon Towne, and an old geezer friend join Roger’s Rangers on a mission to attack a Huron village on the border. When they get there they attack at dawn and trap the Indians, massacring with abandon. One crazed Ranger is even found later with a head of one of the victims in a sack — he’s been eating it. Bit shocking when you’ve grown up on American State Textbook Fantasies about the Good Americans Saving The World. (I think the victims had sent marauding border parties that killed some frontier Americans, so this was a Reprisal Massacre, which is the way Americans and other nations normally “Justify” their more immense massacres.)

When you get to Jackson’s slaughter of the Seminoles in the Florida Glades and the later March of Tears to Oklahoma, etc., which would make Bataan look tame, you realize how horrific the U.S. Racial Clearing was. Sheridan was a late comer. And when you see the massive forcing of native Americans onto useless land that could not support them, imprisoning them in open air concentration camps (“Reservartions”), and letting them die away on booze and government handouts that were inherently very unhealthful, Sherman burning a huge swath across Georgia and burning a big city like Atlanta, and the use of vast firepower against Vicksburg and other Southern areas, and Sheridan’s slaughters, you know the U.S. ushered in the modern age of total warfare against nations and immense slaughters committed in a rage of moralistic hubris and greed and blood lust.

And look at Lincoln and the other Republicans who made huge land grants to Big Rail Roads in the West of Indian lands the size of France. They gave away those vast lands indiscriminately which continue to this day to vastly enrich some, such as Burlington-Northern under its new names — and the Fascist Hero Buffet who bought the whole gigantic B-N Corp. and much of that huge basin of gas and coal they’ve found from Canada down into North Dakota. I think that’s a case where simple justice would be served immensely by turning that huge area into a Native American Trust Fund for rebuilding their homes and lands and cultures — and help them escape the diabetes and gambling trap.

The British concentration camps in S. Africa and the Nazi Death Camps had their beginnings in the vast annihilation of Christian and Classical Liberal Standards that began in the U.S. and the similar clearings of Native Americans by Spain and local states south of our border (and to a lesser degree in the Russian pogroms against Jews in the nineteenth century).

The late Bill Marina and I started realizing those things, after all that Textbook Fantasy Propaganda, in early high school at Miami Jackson (named after that Seminole mass murderer) , the tenth grade, and began talking about some of it in my tenth grade civics class run by a wonderful teacher, Mrs. O’Hara, dedicated to Liberal Education principles and practices of free speech. We especially talked about the totally unnecessary nuclear bombing of women and children in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Once you begin to see those things clearly for what they were, you cannot go back to the mindless American Hero Fantasies and you see more and more clearly how awful the U.S. global empire has been for mankind and finally that it is the greatest threat mankind has ever faced. It took decades to get to that, but, once you can see clearly where before you could not see at all, the awful truth of American guilt dawns slowly on you.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

For hundreds of years Americans have been committing massacres of women and children, old men and sometimes even young men, mostly unarmed or armed only with primitive weapons. The early massacres were mostly of Indians who refused to leave their lands when Americans decided it was God’s will that they steal those lands for nothing or for a few trinkets. In the Civil War Sherman and Grant routinely massacred Southern civilian populations with bombardments of cities, burning homes and Atlanta [though I do not know death figures], and so on. The introduction of automatic weapons led quickly to far more massive U.S. massacres, obviously in the Philippines where freedom fighters were using primitive weapons to try to gain freedom from the U.S. Empire. The U.S. gunned down tens of thousands of the Philippine sons of liberty and piled them in mass graves. In WWII the U.S. massacred vast numbers of Japanese soldiers trapped and starving on remote islands, bombed and burned all the cities of Germany and Japan [except Kyoto] and killed and maimed millions in a vast American Holocaust, capping it all off with the ghastly murder and maiming of hundreds of thousands of women and children in seconds by two nuclear weapons dropped to catch them going to school and in ways to maximize the deadly blast effects. The nuclear bombings were done against the pleas of Adm. Nimitz and most U.S. scientists who made the bombs. Nimitz said the Japanese were starving, surrounded and strangled by U.S. ships and would have to surrender soon to avoid starvation mass deaths. But Truman and his War Dept. and Pentagon brass wanted massacres to terrify the world into submission, especially the Soviets who had no such weapons.

Most U.S. massacres are totally censored by the U.S. and its Big Media. Some come to light many decades later, as in the case of No Gun Rhi in which the U.S. gunned down unknown numbers of South Koreans. Lt, Calley and his company in South Vietnam massacred somewhere near 500 women and children in the My Lai Massacre. Much to his horror, it got into the Media around the world, so the U.S. carried out a Sweet Heart Show Trial. Only Calley was convicted and sentenced to many years up to life, but he only served about three years in comfy house arrest.

American troops know they can massacre innocent civilians and captured POW’s with impunity, as long as they don’t get into the headlines of the world and make the Empire look like a Great Satan. Almost all the Iraqi massacres that did get into the headlines led to Sweet Heart Show Trials. The DOD talks tough and shouts naughty! But, as soon as the headlines go away, the mass murderers go free with sweetheart taps on the wrist or the rump.

There have been masses of massacres in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Most of them are done by the Special Ops Cowards at night when they attack single homes and small villages and murder women and children. Many are done by using the Murder Joy Sticks of the drones in the air-conditioned GHQ’s where they fire these Hell Fire Missiles with the Joy button as they eat pop corn and slurp beer. It’s an All American Pasttime for the Special Ops and CIA and BO who obviously get a real kick out of these “fun murders” and “massacres.”

The Media got hold of the latest Special Ops Massacre in Kandahar sometime yesterday. This broke the total shut down of Afghanistan reporting in the U.S. I think foreign Media probably put out the news first and forced the U.S. Official Media Corps. to follow up or lose all credibility. So far this seems to be a small, SOP Special Ops Massacre. As usual, they killed almost entirely women and children and old men when the young men were away and unable to fight back. The Black Ops of the Special Ops are especially cowardly. The U.S. says only one U.S. murderer did it, systematically shooting all the women and children in their sleep. Afghans near by say more troops were involved in this systematic, intentional massacre. That would be SOP for the Seals, etc.

By the way, the U.S. air attacks in Yemen yesterday killed nearly two dozen civilians, probably mostly women and children, as usual. They almost certainly used the standard Hell Fire Missiles which are SOP for The Great Satan.

When these guys get back to Miramar or North Island they will be greeted as Heroes, as usual. I see it all the time in the local Media of San Diego, the biggest military base in the world. They never took the slightest risk or even got dusty in their air-conditioned F-18 cockpits pushing that Joy button to massacre the women and children below, then flying back to base for some pop-corn and beer. The Good Life American style these days.

Most Americans will hardly notice the few minute blips on tv-news about this poor “psycho” who has suffered such immense stress in killing Iraqis and now Afghans who are unarmed and mostly tiny children in their sleep. BO will shed a few Media tears for show. Many Americans will dance with glee inside their smiling faces. They really love massacres like this and greet the returning “Heroes” with real joy. This “psycho” might get a Show sentence, but he’ll fly free and live happily ever after as another American “Hero.”

Western cultures became the great centers of Creative Carnage in the ancient world and have taken the lead in developing ever more horrific, terrorizing weapons over all these eons. The U.S. emerged at the end of WWII on top of all these Cultures of Carnage as the Great Victor because it was the most creatively gory of them all. This did not happen by accident. Americans are in love with terrorism and mass murder. It fills them with joy and their Entertainment Media are vast oceans of gore, including these days heroic vampires who love the taste of blood from their victims.

Victor Davis Hanson, an American military historian, has celebrated the fundamental ways in which Western and especially American culture have been focused on Carnage and Culture in his book by that name. He routinely celebrates the vast carnage of American wars in Iraq, Afghanistan and wherever. You can read some of the gory details in works such as that, but, of course, they are not going to reveal the most ghastly details of America’s love affair with Carnage. You can see that in all the movies and pictures of all the burned out cities of Germany and Japan in WWII and in lesser ways in all of America’s vast celebrations of Carnage.

Obviously, not all of us American are in love with vast Carnage. If I were, I would write Lies about it all like the official text book historians, not essays like this. We are the minority who have not been massacred yet.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

"The receptivity of the great masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, but their power of forgetting is enormous. In consequence of these facts, all effective propaganda must be limited to a very few points and must harp on these in slogans…”

~ Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf, Ch. 6.

"The first casualty when war comes is truth."

~ Sen. Hiram Johnson, 1917.

"…much, if not all, of the major news about Vietnam could have come out at the time. Even the information eventually revealed in the Pentagon Papers was available or could hve been deduced at the time, as I.F. Stone demonstrated, by diligently ploughing through government reports and transcripts of open hearings, and by reading between the lines.”

~ Phillip Knightley, The First Casualty, pg. 422.

The U.S. and British governments and Media Corporations developed an immense Propaganda War of lies and half truths in World War I to deceive their own people and the enemy people of Germany and its allies to make the "Huns" look like baby murderers and everything else evil.. They used the already highly developed mass media advertising industry to create and perpetrate their Propaganda War and they coordinated it with massive shows of "agitation" to create what the Soviets later came to call Agitprop. This Agittprop War of almost a century ago against their own people and the enemy was so powerfully effective that Adolph Hitler studied it intensively for three years, according to his account in Mein Kampf, to develop his massive fascist or Nazi Propaganda War. (He did not call it Agitprop, probably because his Soviet enemies had preempted it, but his information war against the German people was a brilliant melding of propaganda and agitation, as seen in the vast Nuremberg Party gatherings and Albert Speer's thrilling "light cathedrals" glorifying The Party.)

The U.S. government has made immense strides for almost a century now in developing its totally enveloping Agitprop World to deceive its own people and the Global Empire. Many thousands of scientists, psychologists, political scientists and other social scientists, advertising people, broadcast technicians, official statistics experts, sigint secret police, and psyops military officers and technicians work constantly to improve these techniques of mass deceit and to suppress any truth that tends to undermine the Official Agitprop. Very importantly, the mass broadcasting corporations have been completely married to the state and the Republicrat Party at the top through the immense regulatory agencies and the vast Party "legal system" known as administrative law and the court system, almost all of whose higher level members are loyal Party members and are appointed by the Republicrat Party. (Local court judges are often elected with Party help.) And, nearly as importantly, the Big newspapers and giant corporations owning almost all of the middle size news papers and magazines are now completely wedded to either the Republican wing or the Democratic wing of the Party. Few Americans have any idea that they literally live their entire lives within a Party information cocoon. We are not yet under the secret totalitarian observation and control that Truman is in The Truman Show, but the wraparound information cocoon is in place and when the artificial intelligence programs become available for such massive surveillance and control it is entirely possible that some U.S. government will secret decide that "National Security" in a time of war demands it be put in place. This vast Party Agitprop Cocoon has grown at an accelerating rate since World War II. (Much of the apparatus was shelved after WWI until WWII, though the U.S. rapidly developed its global sigint spy networks to keep minute tabs on the movements of Japanese ships and the British did the same to follow the movements of each major German military unit.)

The Korean and Cold Wars were used as the Party justifications for imposing an official national State of Emergency which was then used as the supposed legal basis for building the immense secret police armies and constantly extending the vast Agitprop Cocoon. We have been officially in a state of war now for over a half century, the most important laws of the Constitution have been suspended wholly or in part to allow the Party Leader to rule largely in secret and largely by dictate, and to carry on the Party Agitprop War.

The obvious first casualty in America's Permanent State of War has been truth. Americans now routinely use the term "it's official" to mean that a bit of information is not be be questioned in public, most obviously not in the Big Media. The Truth is mandated by official procedures. If a secret or overt police agent gives official testimony and official documentation of your guilt, you are routinely found guilty by the court. If you maintain that the official documentation is wrong or a lie, that is up to you to prove. It is not up to the official to prove you are guilty. You are guilty by that official procedure establishing official information unless you can prove beyond a shadow of a doubt that you are innocent. Even the most immense official investigations and court trials have led to the official processing and sentencing and execution of a huge number of people for murder whom DNA evidence is revealing to be innocent. The vast majority of official cases get almost no significant attention and are merely routinely found guilty by official documentation and procedure.

At the top level of the most important issues decided and administered by government, from printing money and training all the young children how to think and act through state education to waging war, the official information and the politicians in control of creating it is inherently deceitful (not merely inherently statistically invalid, which it certainly is, but purposefully biased — that is, in non-statistical terms, distorted by lies.) This is not the least bit surprising to anyone who knows that even the personae — the public "images" — of the politicians creating and running this whole immense System are themselves Big Lies. Tricky Dick is now infamous for his Big Lies about himself and his policies. But all of our top Leaders since roughly WWII have been Tricks upon the public in the same way, though to varying degrees along different dimensions.

This crucial fact about our System was made by George Orwell, who learned it by his experience with the British variant on the fascist state, shortly after WWII. The finest insider expose I know of the Big Lies about their public selves of our American Leaders was written by Meg Greenfield in the last year of her life as she waited to die from cancer. She was totally immersed in American political life at the top in Washington for forty years as a political journalist and most of that time as editor of the editorial pages of the vast Washington Post and columnist with Newsweek. She revealed the awful truths about the total deceitfulness of American political life only between the lines during the half century she wrote about politics (the first period being with The Reporter in the 1950's when I started reading her work and decoding it). She knew she would be totally banished from the System if she openly said what she thought. So she wrote Between the Lines and In Code for intelligent people with enough experience to be able to decode it truthfully. In her last year she got out her secret diaries and wrote openly about the terrible pall of total deceit that had been built by The Party around the System. In her brilliant book published after her death, Washington, she says explicitly that no one can understand this System unless they see it stripped bare of the Lies as Orwell did half a century ago. And she shows in detail that at the center of this vast System of Agitprop [a term she did not use but would probably have loved] is the Big Lies about the Political Personae — the images of their lying, pseudo-selves they project on the public through the Media. As she said, when she started studying them from the inside in the early 1960's there was a "two track" life, the "real self" and the "image" which they switched back and forth in projecting, the real in private and the lies in public. But by the end of her life in the late 1990's there were only the lies. The real had almost been totally eaten away by the lies and they came to think of themselves in terms of the lies they had created. Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, the Bushes and Obama are what you see and nothing more — all lies — and you get what you see, lies. (She did not draw that stark conclusion, but that is the obvious implication of her brilliant analysis and I think she would accept it if she were with us today. She died before Clinton, Bush 2 and Obama hit the national scene at the top, but they are more extreme than what she saw.)

Since these empty self Lies are at the center of the whole System and create and administer it, it is not the least bit surprising that the whole vast, global System of Official Information long ago became a System of Official Propaganda (a felicitous term used as the title of a book by my friends David Altheide and John Johnson, though I do not think they would yet agree with my more sweeping conclusions about The Party Agitprop System). I myself first became aware of the vast system of official mistakes and lies by doing meticulous studies of official information on suicide and crime and then extended that to official information on inflation, unemployment, and on and on. I came over the decades to realize that the statistically invalid and biased definitions were more and more lies, especially about information of major importance to the Party Leaders. Suicide statistics are invalid and biased largely by mistakes and by local lies of coroners and (less so) medical examiners (who are not elected by the local populations). But the official information about wars and economics and politics are overwhelmingly lies. Even the number of ships in the U.S. Navy, which you might think would be impossible to lie about, is a lie because much of what the Navy does is done by pseudo-private ships under contract to the Navy. The same is true even of the number of "troops" in Iraq and so on. Hard Numbers are now normally lies when it involves something important to The Party Leaders. The official U.S. National Debt is only about one sixth to one tenth the real accrued deficits of the U.S. government — which is quite a whopping Big Lie. There is a lot of unofficial analysis of such Official Lies today, though generally done in the meek, sotto voce tones of supplicants found in all fascist states rather than the blatant terms of lies.

We are, then, encapsulated by the Party Agitprop System. If we are highly experienced and have not been swept away with power lust by joining the Party and the System, we can see the general outlines of the Big Brother System of Lies Orwell first showed us (much as an astronomer shows us we are not the center of the Universe about which everything turns but a tiny planet in an immense galaxy of many billions of stars and perhaps an infinite number of galaxies). Anyone who does not see that Big Truth cannot possibly see the myriad smaller truths about the System. But, once you do see the Big Truth, how do you determine the myriad lesser truths?

You absolutely do not determine the truth by asking officials and believing what they tell you. That is the standard operating procedure of almost all American journalists and that is why almost all of America's Big News about the important issues to officials is lies. When you live inside a Party Agitprop System you have to always do investigative social research and creative interviewing (the names of two books I did about these strategies of truth seeking). Since you can rarely use the ideal methods of deep immersion in the things you want to determine the truth about, you have to become a investigative guesstimator. You will probably rarely get the whole truth about what is going on and, if you do, you will not know it until it is too late to do you much good. You must adopt an attitude of suspicion, just as any good detective does (and I think the gut-level sense of this truth is one reason people in the past century have become so obsessed with the detective story). Officials can rarely do effective Agitprop out of whole cloth, especially since there remain some small media outside of their control and they know that a loss of "credibility" will undo the whole System. So they only tell big lies when they know they cannot get caught. Bush 2, for example, told colossal whoppers about Hussein, al-Queda, etc., because he knew Americans know nothing about them and had been primed to believe all kinds of Big Lies about them (such as that bin Laden is trying to destroy freedom in America, Lies exposed by the Michael Scheur of the CIA al-Queda desk in his Anonymous book Imperial Hubris). Most of the time they have to "be in the ball park" or even reveal some small truths to support their bigger Lies. The System is also so immense and needs more truthful information to be able to control it that they often cannot prevent other officials in the System from "spilling the beans" that reveal their own "bean counting" is a "pack of lies" supported by little truths. This was what I.F. Stone realized in the early days of The System and he showed how to use all the information available in highly suspicious and analytical ways to ferret out partial truths — guesstimate the truth.

Very importantly, always think analytically and creatively, using your knowledge of how human nature works, what people do in such situations, what the history of such things is, what the officials are trying to lie about in this situation for what purpose, what might have happened (look at the full gamut of possibilities and weigh them), and so on.

Obviously, the more experience and knowledge one has about the issues, the more effective one has become at analyzing official information and spotting the lies and wheedling out the bits of truth hidden in the lies, and the more wisdom one has accumulated over a lifetime, the more effective the analysis will become. Young people are at a tremendous disadvantage and are easily taken in by the Lies du jour coming at them from all the Media at the same time. More intelligent people learn to defend themselves by "Just Saying No," at least sotto voce, and getting on with their lives as best they can. Over the decades vast networks of underground communications develop so that the more knowledgeable and wise can help those who do not yet have those assets. People learn by watching who is right in their analyses whom to trust. Officials, for example, never predict recessions or admit Bubbles or predict Bubble Crashes. Most security analysts use their "up-beat lies" to lure the "suckers" in at the top of markets. But there are some honest people outside the System, even a few economists like Robert Schiller, author of Irrational Exuberance, who tell the truth as best they can: they do analayze Bubbles and try to predict when they will fizz or Crash. They have good records, especially in spotting autocatalytic (self-reinforcing) Bubbles, the classic kind. Pay attention. If you don't have a powerful memory, keep diaries about official statements to check them against outcomes. When Bush proclaims with absolute certainty that the U.S. must invade Iraq because of the imminent danger of his attacking us with WMD's, then softens this to "Someday," then admits there are none but switches to a series of new justifications for "Staying the Course," this fact of Lies will jump out at you from your diaries and you will be much wiser the next time.

Learn to watch intently for tips of the ice-bergs of reality. When officials proclaim that "everything is coming up roses," but you are running faster and faster to keep up with inflation and you have bright friends who have not gotten a worthwhile job since the crash of the Great Bubble, and you know you will never be able to afford to buy a house at these prices, and people all around you are going into debt and cashing out the equity in their houses to stay afloat, you know they're lying. Learn to watch for even smaller tips that are crucial. When they tell you the U.S. soldiers are treating Iraqis kindly and the Iraqis love them, then you see tv-news video of U.S. Special Ops tying up and putting sacks over the heads of Iraqis in front of their families and tossing them in the back of trucks, you know they are lying. When four star generals tell you on live tv that the "terrorists" are done for and then they have to duck for cover in the heart of a big city in Iraq, you know…Be alert, watch, think, look around the corners, consider the alternative possibilities and Lies, remember, and don't let them take you in.

Do not go off the deep end. When you start to see through the Lies it is easy to jump to the conclusion that there are vast conspiracies of all kinds out to get you and everyone else. Paranoia in a vast fascist System of secret police armies is justified and necessary up to a point, but all things must be balanced. The System armies of secret police and Special Ops Death Squads have limited resources and they probably are not interested in you at all as long as you stay below the Big Media radar. If you become an enemy of the state in the big media, they will try to destroy you by character assassination, charges of being a paranoid "conspiratorialist,' and all the rest. But they have bigger fish to fry than the vast majority of us. The same was true in Nazi Germany where the Gestapo had immensely more limited resources than our gigantic System does, so most people lived out the System and eventually were able to live in the sunshine once again. The Gestapo was so distant that They Thought They Were Free (an excellent book about that). They were not. As in America today, the System was a total wrap around System that largely cut you off from reality out there, but people who did not become public enemies of the party had wriggle room. You do to as long as you are not on that secret Black List that changes with the Threat List. Stay off it. You can't beat the System. The System will Implode some day. Don't attack them. Wait. They will think you are a "nut case," just as they will think I am if they take note of me, because I am not going to attack them or call for revolution or any such thing. I knew the Soviets would crash (but expected it later than it came) and I know this System will crash (but not when). Wait. Do not go off the deep end. Enjoy your family and friends and your Taoist or Zen garden or your petunias or roses.

Be judicious and hopeful. This is one of the hardest things to do. When people realize they are being lied to by a whole gigantic system they often "Freak Out" and begin thinking the world is coming to an end — or should do so. I get letters from honest and anguished young people saying just that. It's heart-breaking and I understand the despair. I went through many years of growing "feeling down" and sometimes downright "depressed" as America spiraled downward into this vast vortex of lies. It is a great catastrophe for mankind that the cradle of modern democracy is being destroyed from the top down by its leaders. But you have to survive, live for a better day, make a living, provide for your family, and be of good cheer as much as you can in the realm of your family and friends. We are not the first people to suffer such catastrophes and ours are nothing much yet compared to what happened to the Germans, Italians, Russians and many other people caught in the backwash of their evil fascist and communist Systems. If you survive and retain your sanity, rather than jumping out the window as one fine journalist in Vietnam began to dread he was going to do when he realized that the U.S. military and government were carrying out an immense terror in Vietnam and telling total lies about it all, you can start over and help to rebuild a better world. Maybe it will not be as bad as I fear it will. Maybe I am all wrong and America will soar onward and upward forever on Obama's bright balloon of happiness and some day you can exult with him "MISSION ACCOMPLISHED!" I certainly know I could be wrong about all of this. I am not filled with hubris and I do pray I'm wrong. If you feel yourself about to jump out the window, remember I and all these other investigative thinkers might be all wrong. Maybe America is still a land of the free and a home of the brave, not a land of immense bureaucracies of secret police and Special Ops Death Squads roaming the world.

Dream a happy dream of deliverance. Life is worth living if you keep your balance and surround yourself with loving family and friends. That was true in Nuremberg under the Nazis and in Moscow under the communists. If you can learn to meditate on the good things in your life and let the evil things you can do nothing about float off into the darkness, you will survive and live a fulfilling life.

Do not deny the realities, but learn to live in spite of them and learn to avoid their worst effects. Above all, be of good cheer in spite of the awful truths out there. Guesstimating the truth is a first step to learning to live well in spite of it.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas

“Playing a Game of Chicken” seems to be a term taken from American teen-ager pop-cult. The game was made famous as early as 1955 in James Dean’s classic teen flick, Rebel Without A Cause, in a scene in which two separate cars are driven at top speed toward a cliff. The first driver to stop or veer away from sudden death is the loser — a “chicken” lacking courage. There are movies since then depicting variations on that specific form of the “Game.” (There are probably earlier forms of it which I do not know.)

Needless to say. this is a very dangerous game unless both — or all — the participants are “wimps” willing to veer off early and avoid sudden death by choice or, far more likely, by accident — misjudging the distance it takes to turn away, losing brakes, etc.

The use of the term in other realms such as strategic analysis of conflicts between enemy nations is obvious. The actual practice is probably very rare except in some arms build-ups and war-mongering, jingoistic battles of taunts which make it harder and harder to turn away because more and more “face” is lost.

But we seem to be seeing an incredible instance of a three way “Game Of Headless Chicken” between the U.S. and Israel and Iran. The U.S. and Israel, aided by their puppets and allies, keep imposing more and more strangling embargoes and other very painful measures on Iran, and threatening to attack and annihilate Iran’s nuclear facilities and inevitably much else, if they do not do as ordered by the U.S. and Israel, including most importantly proving that they are not planning to build nuclear weapons. Iran totally denies this but refuses to obey and does not [or cannot?] prove they are NOT planning to build nuclear weapons. For a long time Iran merely resisted the taunts and refused to obey the commands and continued building their clearly observed, non-weapon nuclear programs, insisting they have no such plans and obviously no one outside has any proof they do. But recently they obviously decided they have to explicitly join this game of chicken against the U.S. and Israel and any supporting nations. They are now issuing counter orders to the U.S. and its puppets and allies, such as “Keep your carriers out of the Strait of Hormuz or else.”

Now any of the three major players — and maybe some lesser players — who backs down [veers off and does something to appease the others] severely loses face and is set up for more and more commands of obedience.

Consequently, they are less and less willing to veer off in any way, such as by compromising, and negotiating such a new move has become far more inherently uncertain, since there are now three primary players that can act independently and many lesser ones who can do so.

Moreover, they are playing some crucial parts of this game in the very narrow waters of the Strait and Gulf where there have been many dangerous mistakes and chosen wars before. And they are playing with missiles and other weapons that can be fired and hit targets in a few minutes, so an accidental Pearl Harbor can happen at any minute.

Even worse, they all know that any forces that do not launch immediately upon any sign of attack can be destroyed in minutes and devastate the chicken who did not fire immediately on suspicion of attack.

It looks to me like they have unintentionally, step by step, created an exceedingly dangerous War Game of HEADLESS Chicken in which the whole thing can blow up into attacks all around without anyone ever intending to do that, a situation possibly even more volatile and unstoppable once it gets going than the situation that led to the horrific World War I without the “heads” actually deciding to fight a vast war. The ruling heads then set early mobilization in motion and the massive plans and movements led others to rush to the next stage of mobilization, which led others…

Word War I started with a single shot, then grew and grew and became an immense war that killed tens of millions, maimed scores of millions, destroyed vast empires and many nations, and set the stage for the more immense and destructive WW II, many later wars and our global dilemma today of Nuclear Mad.

Israel and the U.S. look to me to be like that crazed, paranoid assassin who fired one shot in the Balkans which led in vastly complex, interdependent, inherently uncertain ways to a global catastrophe that still endangers all of mankind.

The whole vast Middle East and South Central Asia are already fighting wars, drifting wildly into civil wars, very explosive tinderboxes in a world in a Great Global Crisis on the edge of vast national implosions. This is one of the most inherently uncertain and dangerous situations mankind has faced and we are ruled by very ignorant bureaucrats and demagogues who understand none of this. And they are playing a vast Real War Game of Headless Chicken with many paranoid participants pulling the triggers.

Jack D. Douglas [send him mail] is a retired professor of sociology from the University of California at San Diego. He has published widely on all major aspects of human beings, most notably The Myth of the Welfare State.

The Best of Jack D. Douglas