Following provided by a retired Marine colonel now serving in Afghanistan:
THOUGHTS ON FORT HOOD FROM JERRY POURNELLE: “The politically correct spin is coming like a tidal wave. He is a crazy guy who happens to be a Muslim. All of that misses the point: he was disloyal to the United States, and said so openly and many times; yet he remained a commissioned officer of the United States. That is the point that is being overlooked. Whether the disloyalty is due to a psychotic episode or some other cause is not important.”
Phi Beta Iota: We recommend Jerry Pournelle be read, it is a good overview of treason (includes overt act) and the politically correct view on loyalty being confused with integrity. He also makes an erudite mention of Richard Weaver's 1984 book, Ideas Have Consequences. What everyone is missing is the Cognitive Dissonance aspect of Empire as Usual causing people to snap. We certainly condemn overt act of violence, but a major problem in the USA specifically is what we have called the Paradigms of Failure. It is no longer possible to articulate “loyal opposition.” Under Bush-Cheney General Tony Zinni was called a traitor by Valley Girl Condi Rice and as best we could tell we were the only ones to call this mis-labeling an outrage. The USA is at the bottom of the hook on the Davies J-Curve–the bubble has burst, the middle class has been screwed, everyone recognizes the two-party tyranny for what it is–a same bird two wing servant of Wall Street–and most of us are ashamed of how incompetent and corrupt our own government has become. The Harvest of Rage and the Rage of the Random Actor are upon us. We will have many more acts of violence, both among our own domestic population, and among the alpha males unable to find employment among the corrupt regimes that we support (the USA is best pals with 42 of the 44 dictators on the planet, see The Real Axis of Evil). One final point: when loyalty replaced integrity as the core value, all of the feedback loops are corrupted, as with sand in the cogs, and the system grinds to a halt. Fort Hood–and Orlando–and all the bombs across the country that do not make the news–represent three big failures coming together:
1. The failure of the USA as a Nation-State
2. The failure of our mid-level leaders who are not corrupt but confuse loyalty with integrity
3. The failure of individual minds that snap when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great to bear.
Recently there was a case in which a veteran of the Gulf War was allowed to plead insanity as a defense against murder, and it worked. What is being done in our name as a Republic is driving all of us insane, and that is the Republic's epitaph if we do not dismantle the two-party tyranny, audit the Fed, kick Goldman-Sachs out of the Treasury, and surround Obama with people that can think critically instead of slobber uncritically. Vice President Biden is where Colin Powell was in the face of Dick Cheney, and all signs are that Biden will make the same mistake Powell made and not resign on principle.
