American society and culture is a world of illusions. The population born and raised in America has from early childhood been force fed a narrative of bullshit. Mr Collum thinks he knows who he is like everyone else in America, but a society where everyone believes obvious lies, ignores obvious truths and facts, and the exploration of reality is a minefield of cognitive dissonance to be avoided, is a culture of lost people. I gave a short synopsis of The Milgram Experiment to a woman in her late sixties, retired, a widow that has her deceased husbands pension, owns her house, and is in every way typical of todays baby boomers. She was appalled that people had voluntarily administered what they and everyone knows are potentially lethal shocks of electricity. She adamantly professed that she would never do such a thing, and was in fact incapable of such acts. That the experiment was conducted all over the world and in different environments outside the prestigious Yale University, that the results were similar everywhere and showed there was little variation in the 65% of people that completed the original experiment, and that not one person in the original experiment stopped before reaching about the 300 volt level, were facts that she could not acknowledge. The fact that she utterly refused to accept facts for which the implications would by necessity either include her, or for her to assume the position that she was extraordinarily exceptional, is virtually proof in of itself that she was no different than the test subjects that believed the lies of the authority figure telling them he was responsible, and the person with a heart condition that was screaming wouldn't suffer any long term damage. Pointing out that irony, would have been as useless, so I didn't. The point I'm making to Mr Collum, is that he thinks he knows how he would react to being the victim of tyranny, but that knowledge is only gained from having been tested. There is a reason that what use to be called the mafia, biker gangs, the Bloods and Crypts and a host of other violent gangs with members that revel in the violence of gang life, never whack police, prosecutors, or judges, though in places like California, they have been filling its prisons with their members for years. Terrorism is a function of the State. Violence directed at the State by direct targeting of its functionaries is virtually unheard of. Regardless of the injustices suffered by people from the State, very few people can mount a serious challenge, and far fewer still can sustain it for any length of time, and virtually no one ever gets the satisfaction of justice being served at the end. America has been a growing police state for decades as the explosion during the Regan Administration in its prison population attests to. Mr Martenson's observation that things seem to have gotten really bad after 9/11 is only true for those who refused, and still refuse to accept responsibility for saying nothing and doing nothing, and thinking nothing of the segment of the American population that an army of police were victimizing, or worse supporting it. The ground work for immoral preemptive war was laid right here in America when the citizenry accepted the morally untenable position of forcing the values dictated by the status quo on to a minority in the population that were claimed by decree, a cancer growing on society that had to be cut out. Everyone knows it is not their place to force their will on other people, so the last refuge for supporting the drug war always ends by having to protect children and nobody dare challenge that, but I will, because I must. To actively support the injustice of blaming some other, them over there, for the behavior of children that parents alone are responsible for, to subject children to the violence of the state, the violence of gangs, make children in to criminals, make parents the enemy of children that need help, to destroy the families of others in order for parents to prevent the possibility of their own failure by abdicating their responsibilities, is an act of selfish depraved cowardice by people that have destroyed the civil rights that now nobody has. The police state that surrounds us all now is there for a reason, the same reason the police have been militarized, the same reason the military has developed protocols and training programs on how to deploy US military forces here in America, control a federalized national guard, and set up shop in local police stations and headquarters, and the same reason the NSA is spying on, and profiling everyone, composing lists. The time for Mr Collum to fight back, like everyone else, was when they could. People that are only now seeing the police brutality and criminality of the system that has plagued minorities, the poor and those who refused to conform, lack the eyes to see the true nature of the beast poised to devour them. The systemic corruption that the abandonment of reality has fostered has consequences that can not be contained in the abstract, or restricted to some place over there. Unsustainable is not an abstract concept, nor is it to be ignored if your life and most of the population in America depend on what can not be sustained. What is going on in the middle east, and all the trouble everywhere that America is causing around the world is an effort to control and/or steal what it's parasitic economy can't buy. Consumer economy is "New Speak" for parasitic economy. The reason Europe supports the American war machine is because of its key countries being members of NATO, they all share same corrupt banking system, and aside from Germany none of them produce the goods that would justify the energy resources required to sustain their current population and governments. If America fails to neutralize Russia as a threat for its seizing control of the oil reserves it now covets, the oil will be used by those countries that produce natural resources, and tangible products and services like China that is also on an unsustainable course . Countries like America that can not export enough value to sustain its physical and economic infrastructure will collapse. England is an island death trap if America and NATO fail, and its zest for committing war crimes and it population being the most surveilled in the history of the world reflects that reality. The economic system of the west that miraculously manages to stay afloat, has been and is managed by hook or crook, murder and mayhem, what ever it takes to keep it afloat, and anything goes, including most of us if that's what it takes. The people that run the empire are not stupid or crazy, they are desperate psychopaths. Anyone that doesn't think so, try to explain how Predator Drones evolved, what they could be used for aside from using them against people unable to defend themselves from slow flying aircraft, but most importantly, explain how killing what Obama and war criminals claim to be evil doers, bad guys, terrorists, Taliban and collateral damage in occupied territories, isn't mass murder when the only known truth for who these victims are, is that they are all civilians. I guess people would rather play in the stock market, than see the beast that threatens them. "It is the nature of the human species to reject what is true but unpleasant, and to embrace what is obviously false but comforting. “ - H.L. Mencken
