Zero Hedge Lays It Down, Mead Sort Of Picks It Up

Posted on | January 31, 2013 | 17 Comments

by Smitty

For most of the past four or five years, I have spent the majority of my time studying the dominant forces that fuel the power structure that exists in these Unites States today, and indeed throughout the world. My education began quite suddenly and unexpectedly in the middle of the last decade when I started understanding fiat money, Central Banking and the global monetary system. Since then, I have expanded my understanding to mainstream media brainwashing, the military-industrial complex, the role of the political oligarchs in Washington D.C., the corruption of the food industry under the complicity of the FDA itself and much more. The more I peered under the curtain, no matter what the industry, the clearer it became that the system had no chance of survival under its current form. What’s worse, it became obvious that the very small 0.01% of the population that I call oligarchs (financial and political), who are actively gaming the system for their own pleasure, are well aware of the system’s terminal nature. That’s why they are rapidly putting in place the police state grid.

That said, this article is not about the implementation of the surveillance state. I cover that pretty much daily these days. This post is more of a philosophical stream of consciousness; a guilty pleasure that I have not engaged in as of late.

Read the whole thing. I don’t disagree with the big picture being offered here. I also don’t thing the surveillance state is going to prove feasible. Walter Russell Mead, via Instapundit, enumerates seven trolls working for “the oligarchs” that the Middle Class must vanquish, and then he concludes:

Add to that the worries about federal deficits and debts (Troll 6) and the palpable unease about the financial system (Troll 7), and it’s easy to see why the middle class feels harassed and defensive.
These problems are real and they are serious; people are not wrong to worry. But attempts to perpetuate the blue model don’t help. Many of the seven trolls are the results of the high cost blue model approach to governance, the health system and higher education, and in any case the forces ripping the blue model apart are too strong and too deeply rooted in the way our economy works to be stopped.
Yet if the worries are real, the pessimism is excessive. The information revolution destroys jobs, but it also creates them, and we are already in the early stages of a jobs explosion. And as it proceeds, the information revolution is likely to propel the rise of a middle class that is more productive, better educated, more autonomous and more interested in and capable of civic leadership than the Fordist middle class of the late industrial age.

We need to distinguish between, say, entertainment industry jobs created because so many people can do their own media, as distinguished from economic activity pertaining to over-regulation.

I more or less agree with Mead’s assessment, but I don’t think he’s a big enough nerd to grasp some key points. Information is a fluid. Power (in both economic and political phases) is derived from controlling that information. Thus, we se an unholy alliance of a permanent political class using legislation to milk the stock market, and by extension, the people.

As I was noting earlier today, Senator Coburn is doing yeoman work identifying just the easy overlaps in our beloved Federal government. The amount of churn, legal action, and re-work triggered by

sheer bureaucratic bloody-mindedness,
obstructive conformity*, and
malicious compliance

is astounding.

Actual reform will arrive in waves of decentralization. Sadly, I’m no longer sure that a purely political expression of the voter’s will at the ballot box is going to get it done. That information technology Mead touts has not overcome the human capacity to avoid paying attention.

No, I think that this lousy opening January to 2013 is only going to worsen as we celebrate the 100th Anniversary of Woodrow “Effing” Wilson. It’s going to be a long eleven months getting through the rest of this lousy year, I reckon. God grant this country peace due to all the firepower out there.

*You ever start up a blog to test out a piece of software, write one post, forget about it, and then discover it 6.5 years later as the top return on a Google search? Scratch that. Too far-fetched. Never happens. No one would believe it.

Category: End The Fed

Comments

17 Responses to “Zero Hedge Lays It Down, Mead Sort Of Picks It Up”

Mike G.
January 31st, 2013 @ 9:35 pm

Unless they actually hit the link. Unfortunately, many artistic endeavors never get off the ground for some reason or another.
Finrod Felagund
January 31st, 2013 @ 9:46 pm

One time I went searching for a rulesheet (a complete description of how to play it) for the pinball machine that I had just bought– and found the only thing out there was the rulesheet that I had written from memory nearly a decade earlier.
Jeff Carlson
January 31st, 2013 @ 10:10 pm

you can often hear the beat of the black helicopter blades over at Zero Hedge … the tin foil is strong with them …
Extractor Economics | The Lonely Conservative
January 31st, 2013 @ 10:38 pm

[…] be okay no matter what happens. The rest of us, well, we’ll just have to wait and see.(Via The Other McCain and Zero Hedge)Tweetvaso linkgoogle_ad_client = "ca-pub-1395656889568144"; /* 300×250, created […]
Evi L. Bloggerlady
February 1st, 2013 @ 12:21 am

Zero Hedge is a great site. It may be pessimistic, but it has good reason to be so.
JDP
February 1st, 2013 @ 1:17 am

this sounds like paranoid bullshit

why does it always have to be a conspiracy with some people to make their worldview sound appealing. why can’t it just be, ideologically, i think this is wrong.

if there’s a problem with The Elite ™, replace it with a better elite.
JDP
February 1st, 2013 @ 1:18 am

also have this Smitty guy blog less, he’s as one note as people who blame all the ills of the world on Republicans. Woodrow Wilson blahblahblah.
Gerard Vanderleun
February 1st, 2013 @ 1:36 am

sorry, but since Mead cut off commenting I’ve had no use for his one-trick pony. Useless blather.
MrPaulRevere
February 1st, 2013 @ 2:34 am

I like WR Mead, but he tends to be verbose. Painting a verbal picture if you will sometimes works, but using words like a sledgehammer is frequently necessary.
jsn2
February 1st, 2013 @ 4:12 am

“…Google search?…No one would believe it.”

I believe you. Maybe it proves the google nerds have created an algorithm that works really well. To bad they’re a bunch of pinkos.
smitty
February 1st, 2013 @ 5:34 am

Indeed. If only we had elected more good Democrats like Ronald Reagan and Barack Obama sooner, all of this recent unpleasantness could have been avoided.
JAMed171
February 1st, 2013 @ 6:33 am

Pessimistically optimistic, or the other way around. I’m honestly not sure what is going to happen in America. I don’t think it is going to be pretty, it will hurt, but I think… we will pull out of it. How many people are going to get hurt is the only question. For the first time in my life, I honestly, openly, and truly… fear my government in more than just a theoretical way. Should have seen it coming, and did, but… the speed of it…
Bob Belvedere
February 1st, 2013 @ 8:20 am

No one makes you come to this site, Clyde. Beat it before you get more dope slaps, you dope.
Bob Belvedere
February 1st, 2013 @ 8:22 am

Many of us didn’t grasp just how quickly the Left In America would move. Lesson learned.
Bob Belvedere
February 1st, 2013 @ 8:27 am

Okay then: we blame all the ills on Robert “Fighting Bob” La Follette, Sr.
smitty
February 1st, 2013 @ 11:50 am

The joke is that this wasn’t fast. It was a century in the baking.
JAMed171
February 1st, 2013 @ 4:05 pm

Yes and no, sort of. I mean, certainly, but…