Give 'em a medal

Avedon points to a recent post of Chris Floyd's:

...In a land crawling with armed - and armored - SWAT teams, with operatives from innumerable federal agencies packing heat and happy to use it, a land where more than 2 million people languish in prison (many of them captives of an endless "war on drugs" that has done nothing to curb substance abuse but has greatly augmented the power of the state and the criminal gangs whose laundered money enriches Establishment elites), a land where almost every transaction is wired up to some national grid, where national ID cards are now being imposed - a land where you literally cannot exist without placing your liberty, your privacy, your very life at the mercy of a government apparatus besotted with violence, coercion and intrusion, there is no place left for the kind of action that Thoreau advocated. His way - and that of Gandhi and King, who took so much from him - envisions a state opponent which one could hope to shame into honorable action by the superior moral force of principled civil disobedience. But the very hallmark of the present regime is its shamelessness, its utter lack of any sense of honor or principle, its bestial addiction to raw power...

I think we are far, far beyond the kind of nation Thoreau thought he lived in.

But what's the point of giving up, really? There is no point in fighting the Power to try to change it. You fight the Power to keep it from changing you.

You can not make it less evil. It's like Professor Tolkien said. The only way to fight the Power is to never use it and destroy it when you can.

This is going to be the real problem if Obama does win. We have to try to dissolve the corporate center that views Power as just another asset. The problem is global, though. The scope of the issue is as international as Dubai and as profit-driven as the Arabic, Russian, Chinese, and American syndicates that play the game for oil, money, and its own sake.

Some guys just like to be the killer ape on top.

Speaking of killer apes, orcs, and Mouths of Sauron, Greenwald has come up with some interesting facts about the social worker the FBI's used to defame Ivins to the main$tream. It turns out she's got multiple charges of DUI and drug paraphenalia pending. Plus battery charges for beating her ex-husband.

That's some social work.

Laris Alexandrovna has more details.

Once again, I'm impressed by the caliber and the integrity of the tools the FBI uses to get its man and close the case.

Maybe there's a Presidential Medal of Freedom lurking in the wings for Ms. Duley and/or her case handler(s) for the Feds.

If it's good enough for the man who ran around with his hair on fire before 9/11, it's good enough for the Untouchables framing the anthrax Terra.