Homeland Insecurity Department

But it goes back to trust.

The banks themselves, as well as the media, as well as the current crop of
politicians, have all been seeding the ground (and fertilizing) with
massive missives of distrust.

"Report suspicious packages" "Make sure you have virus protection, look out
for phishing and bots".don't trust your neighbor, don't talk to him, don't
even say hi when you pass him on the street. Late fees. Interest on the
late fees. Late fees on the interest. All the fine print on the microsoft
licensing agreements, on credit cards, on insurance policies. No one helps
anyone anymore, most help desks are either computer audio or in
Bangalore reading from a script.

Security cameras everywhere. Security guards everywhere. Torture ships
ply the oceans. IT departments concentrate on securing their information,
keeping users out, blocking any experimentation. Helicopters hovering
overhead, for no known reason. National electronic ID cards in the works.
Anyone who carries and uses a cell phone is carrying a device which can
keep track of everywhere he goes and everything he says, and soon will
also keep track of all his expenditures as well.

Its not to say that there are not legitimate concerns. But as my friend
Ferret points out, the authorities are “leveraging” the fear to such an
extent that originality, creation, productivity are crushed.

Now, all of a sudden, that mistrust has built up to the point where no one
trusts anyone.

And , guess what, money is just like a neutrino. What is money? Paper, that
doesn’t even burn well, just trash. Or, more and more often, only a few
microscopic magnetic fields on a hard disk somewhere. If there is no trust,
no faith, no agreement, no desire to cooperate with other people, all of whom
will have some divergence of opinion somewhere from our own, then money ceases
to have any meaning, any value. When it stops changing hands, when it
stops spinning, its gone.

And all the kings men and all the kings horses can't bring it back ...

We don't need to concern ourselves with muslims.
The enemy is here, and it is us (as Pogo said so long ago ....)
Where is the outrage?

"Someday soon, you might wake up to the call to prayer of a muezzin"
I have, many times, and my heart aches for that quiet, lonely, peaceful sound
in the mornings. Instead, I wake to trucks, freight trains, helicopters, and
sirens, sirens, sirens, in ever-proliferating plethora of new, more frightful
cacaphony. Friends of mine joke that its the new national anthem.
Since almost no one sings anymore, that's about right ....