The only serious opposition to this arrogant Ruling Party is coming not from feckless Republicans but from what might be called the Country Party — and its vision is revolutionary. Our special Summer Issue cover story.
When Codevilla’s article appeared I stated that it was the most important essay I had ever read. I still believe this because it is a superb synthesis of class analysis with keen insights on contemporary power elite relationships regarding today’s rulers and the ruled.
This class division of present-day America into two factions, Court and Country, has absolutely nothing to do with any Marxian view or analysis. It is a reaffirmation of the seminal insights of Bernard Bailyn’s Pulitzer Prize winning volume, The Ideological Origins of the AmericanRevolution, and Murray N. Rothbard’s Conceived in Liberty.
These books demonstrate that the Founders’ world-view saw the crucial struggle of the Revolution as a battle of liberty versus power. Codevilla posits today’s battle in the same dramatic terms.
Every political movement needs a manifesto. The Tea Party surely needs one. So do other grassroots political resistance organizations. They don’t have it yet, but they now have its preliminary foundation, Angelo Codevilla’s essay, “America’s Ruling Class — And the Perils of Revolution.”
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I regard this essay as the finest statement on the two-fold division in American political life written in my lifetime — more than this, in the last hundred years. He has laid it out clearly, accurately, and eloquently.
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Codevilla correctly identifies the source of legitimacy for the ruling class: Darwinism. Darwinism removed God from the vocabulary of self-accredited academia. Once liberated from the doctrine of original sin, the Progressives regarded as illegitimate the Constitutional limits placed on the Federal government.
I've been following the story about the scientists who have been working to figure out how H5N1 bird flu might become transmissible from human to human, the controversial research they used to study that question, and the federal recommendations that are now threatening to keep that research under wraps. This is a pretty complicated issue, and I want to take a minute to help you all better understand what's going on, and what it means. It's a story that encompasses not just public health and science ethics, but also some of the debates surrounding free information and the risk/benefit ratio of open-source everything.
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I make the same argument today that we made in 2005 — publishing those experiments without the details is akin to censorship, and counter to science, progress and public health. … Giving the full details to vetted scientists is neither practical nor sufficient. Once 20–30 laboratories with postdoctoral fellows and students have such information available, it will be impossible to keep the details secret. Even more troublesome, however, is the question of who should decide which scientists are allowed to have the information. We need more people to study this potentially dangerous pathogen, but who will want to enter a field in which you can't publish your most scientifically interesting results?
Phi Beta Iota: From 1990-1994 various parties tried to censor Peter Black, Winn Schwartau, Robert Steele, and others laying out the grave dangers that lay in cyberspace if the US Government continued to be stupid about it. In 1994 Steele finally assembled a one billion dollar a year budget from four world-class experts and delivered it to Marty Harris. Nothing was done. Secrecy kills. Secrecy not only keeps vital information from being shared with those able to do something about it whom we do NOT know beforehand, but secrecy also allows grotesquely inept and unethical programs to survive absent accountability.
The Internet is in an uproar over proposed U.S. Senate bill Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and it's corresponding bill in the House, the Protect Intellectual Property Act (PIPA). Among other consequences, these bills would lead to blocking websites (the way China does), and stopping ads & Visa/Mastercard payments to them, simply by alleging – not proving – that they are engaging in, enabling or facilitating copying content illegally. This and other features of the bills are so broad that many in the technology world have been organizing against the bills, concerned that they are an extreme overreaction which would greatly inhibit free speech and fair competition. Protest before Congress' annual winter break (including a mass defection from domain name registrar GoDaddy for their support of the bills) have slowed things down enough for many more people to get involved. As Congress reconvenes, a number of large websites plan to shut down for half the day on January 18, to raise awareness on the issue. Wikipedia may join in, which would obviously gain a lot of people's attention, and Anonymous has already signed on:
Bin Laden died in 2001; several fakes followed. The last Bin Laden was a patsy provided by the government of Pakistan to give Leon Panetta and Barack Obama a re-election bonanza. The SEALS figured it out and were killed over time. For Hillary Clinton to claim this as some kind of “qualification” simply sickens me. We are being led by the criminally insane.
NOTE: The Bin Laden Show is a series of many links to enable the readers to cull out the ones that matter to them. We are “sharing our confusion” and relying on the collective for additional sense-making. All the individual bits are back-dated to be in sequence from 0000 1 May, this is the only post that will move forward as it is updated. To scroll them all in reverse order, use this search <Bin Laden Show>
Phi Beta Iota: This is not correct. Bin Laden was used by politicians and the military-industrial complex to justify trillions in war-related expenses, generally co-equal to the trillion a year the US Government has been borrowing “in our name.” Immature intelligence and a lack of integrity in Whole of Government programs cost us trillions. As we document in both a chapter and a book, terrorism is a traffic accident. It is bad government that ends up costing us trillions.
There were no armed guards around the compound, said a U.S. official who asked not to be identified because the official was not authorized to speak on the record.
Image of bloodied man picked up by British newspapers has been circulating online for two years
Essence: Pictures of Bin Laden’s bloodied and shattered face were broadcast on Pakistani television, and soon found to be fake. Within hours of the pictures circulating, the US announced it hadburied the body at seain accordance with Muslim rules [actually not]. [Another report says US State Department claims to have the body.] US claims to have known of this location since August 2010. Others have documented Bin Laden's death years ago. Seal Team Six deep inland? Launched from where?
Phi Beta Iota: Who are we kidding? The gullibility and ignorance of the US public is quite troubling. Resurrect the dead, fake the death, exit Afghanistan as demanded by Pakistan. The truth will emerge eventually, meanwhile, Obama buys time for the “system” to win four more years from a population that has lost its ability to think. As a general observation, the 2001 reports of Bin Laden's death could possibly have been a Pakistani disinformation campaign, but the combination of lung and urinary tract and other infections Bin Laden was known to have could have spawned multiple variations of his death (or not), his death and a pretense he was still alive, etcetera. From where we sit until proven otherwise, this is a massive deception of the US public–Dick Cheney would be proud–and if Bin Laden was actually delivered (we tend to doubt it)–it was a Pakistani gift not the result of US intelligence. The Pakistani Air Force is neither stupid nor ill-equipped–US helicopters–including “stealth” helicopters–coming all the way in to Islamabad's suburbs from Afghanistan had to have clearance. There are just too many dangling doubts on this, including double-tap to the face instead of the body. High probability: not Bin Laden at all, or a decomposed corpse to begin with.
Interview with James Corbett. Comparison of Bin Laden with Lee Harvey Oswald–and stark absence of evidence–while validating extra-judicial assassinations (including Libyan leadership). Buries “War on Terror” as US covert operations false flag threat.
Phi Beta Iota: Many links. Not an intelligent skeptical question in the lot. This is a classic deception that seeks to bury the truth about 9/11 while enabling an exit from Afghanistan as demanded by Pakistan.
Phi Beta Iota: This is absurd. How can anyone with a brain buy into this fiction? This was staged in a Pakistani military resort town because it could not be done in Waziristan. It is highly unlikely that Bin Laden was actually here, 1.3 kilometers from the national military academy, the town would have known. At this time, all “evidence” points to a US deception operation fabricated in full partnership with the Pakistani's who donated a general officer's retreat and–if Bin Laden was there–put him in for the one night show in return for a US commitment to claim victory and leave Afghanistan. 9-11 truths remain to be brought forth.
It's Not Just the Politicians Who Have Cheapened the Defense Debate
Winslow Wheeler
I recall from early in my career when Sen. Barry Goldwater (R-AZ) took to the floor of the Senate to attack the allegedly scurrilous report that the B-1 bomber would cost as much as $60 million a copy: in truth, it turned out to cost $200 million per copy. I also remember when Sen. Dale Bumpers (D-AR) opposed keeping battleships in the Navy because of their “teak deck:” In peacetime, the Iowa class battleships did lay wood on top of their 7.5 inch thick steel decks. No one needs to be reminded that Congressman Buck McKeon (R-CA) and Leon Panetta (formerly D-CA) have termed any further cuts in the defense budget to be “catastrophic:” If returning to 2007 levels of defense spending is so terrible, why did Donald Rumsfeld and Robert Gates not tell us back then?
Such outrageous statements are so ignorant that you have to assume the politicians knew they were full of baloney when they made them. They probably assumed no one would check up on them or that such bunkum “will go around the world while the truth is still pulling its boots on.” (Thank you, Mark Twain.)
Think tanks have been a part of the Washington scene since at least the end of World War II. People expect them to have competent research and logical analysis behind their comments. That can be a perilous assumption. A recent example occurred just after Christmas when the Director of the Heritage Foundation's Center for Foreign Policy Studies invoked the name of a chief architect of the F-15 and the F-16 (and more) in a commentary to promote the F-22 and the F-35. The willfulness of the ignorance is something that senators Goldwater and Bumpers and today's Pentagon budget boosters would recognize.
There are other characteristics of the debate on the F-22 and the F-35 that need to be recognized as badly misinformed, especially that either one is an asset to our air forces.
Four of us worked with that genius who, among many other things, had a fundamental role in two of the most successful fighter designs in recent aviation history, Col. John Boyd. We took profound offense at the ignorant and misleading assertion that he had anything but derision for the F-22 and the thinking behind the F-35. In response, we wrote a commentary–not just on the aircraft but also on the depths to which the Washington debate on these subjects has sunk.
Find our comments at any of the websites that follow, and below:
By Thomas Christie, Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney & Winslow Wheeler
Almost 30 years ago, in 1983, The Heritage Foundation stepped forward as a thoughtful, independent thinking participant in the then-raging debate over Ronald Reagan's defense budget increases. In one of its major policy publications, Heritage published an insightful analysis with an unambiguous conclusion: “The increased spending secured by President Reagan should afford significant improvements in force size. It does not.” (See Agenda '83: A Mandate for Leadership Report, Richard N. Holwill, ed., The Heritage Foundation, 1983; see chapter 4, p. 69 of “Defense” by George W.S. Kuhn.) The analysis was crammed with data and straightforward logic as it made the case for real reform in America's overpriced, underperforming defense budget.
Since then, Heritage has come a long way in defense policy analysis, all of it downward.
Phi Beta Iota: The corrupt government is surrounded by thousands–perhaps tens of thousands–of corrupt second-string piglets. While most people are good people trapped in a bad system, the net result is that everyone lies and the public trust is betrayed. The truth at any cost lowers all others costs. 2012 is the year in which we battle for the soul of the Republic.
UPDATE: I was not happy with these, the first one got a lot of views, the other two did not, so I have removed them. Instead I recommend the below mid-1990's condensation of my 1976 thesis.
This is Where Osama Was Hiding, According to Google Maps
