SPY

While 'zombies' may be the personification of our darkest fears, they embody the government’s paranoia about the citizenry as potential threats that need to be monitored, tracked, surveilled, sequestered, deterred, vanquished and rendered impotent. Why else would the government feel the need to monitor our communications, track our movements, criminalize our every action, treat us like suspects, and strip us of any means of defense while equipping its own personnel with an amazing arsenal of weapons? For years now, the government has been carrying out military training drills with 'zombies' as the enemy. “We the people” or, more appropriately, “we the zombies” are the enemy in the eyes of the government.

Update: According to reports in on Monday evening, the USS Lassen has indeed sailed within 12 nautical miles of China's islands in the Spratlys.  

For weeks, the US was rumored to plan a "freedom of navigation" exercise in the contested Spratly islands which, as we’ve pointed out several times this month, amounts to sailing by China's man-made outposts just to see if the PLA will shoot. Moments ago, the wires lit up with news that President Obama has green-lighted the exercise. The USS Lassen, a guided-missile destroyer, is now set to sail within 24 hours.

• European shares slip as easing expectations fade (Reuters)
• Valeant and Pharmacy More Intertwined Than Thought (WSJ)
• The Pawn Isolated: Valeant, Philidor and the Annals of Fraud (WSJ)
• Strongest Afghan Quake Since 1949 Triggers Search for Survivors (BBG)
• EU Agrees To Tighten Border Controls And Slow Migrant Arrival (AP)
• Volkswagen Suspends More Employees (WSJ)
• Volkswagen Loses Global Sales Lead to Toyota Amid Diesel Scandal (BBG)

It’s no secret that the Social Security system is effectively one giant Ponzi scheme. Actually, I think it’s worse. That’s because the government uses force and the threat of force to coerce people into it. People don’t have the option to opt out. They either pay the tax for Social Security or someone with a gun will show up sooner or later. I imagine Bernie Madoff’s firm would have lasted a lot longer had he been able to operate this way.

"The United States is in decline. While not all major shocks to the system will be devastating, when the right one comes along, the outcome may be dramatic." Once upon a time America fought a great war to rid the world of the Nazis, but now we have become just like them.

"It was like ‘Hey,…. its Crackas With Attitude.’ He was like ‘What do you want?’ We said ‘2 trillion dollars hahhaa, just joking. 'How much do you really want?' 'We just want Palestine to be free and for you to stop killing innocent people.'"

Another day, another "crackdown" by the CFTC on an "evil spoofing mastermind."

The American people accept the persecution of truth-tellers, because they have been brainwashed into believing that patriotism means defense of the government no matter what. As truth is so unfavorable to Washington, Americans believe that it must not be revealed, and if revealed, covered up, and those who reveal truth must be punished. A country with such a population as this is a police state, not a free country.

Whatever the efforts of that expansive corps of intelligence analysts (and the vast intelligence edifice behind it), when anything happens in the Greater Middle East, you can essentially assume that the official American reaction, military and political, will be “surprise” and that policymakers will be left “scrambling” in a quagmire of ignorance to rescue American policy from the unexpected. The evidence, after all, is largely in.  In these years, for what now must be approaching three-quarters of a trillion dollars, the national security state and the military seem to have created an un-intelligence system.  Welcome to the fog of everything.

"China mustn't tolerate rampant US violations of China's adjacent waters and the skies over those expanding islands. If the US encroaches on China's core interests, the Chinese military will stand up and use force to stop it."

The reason these articles are so important, is not because they are based on intel leaked by an additional whistleblower (i.e., not Snowden), but because you can’t read the information without concluding quite simply that the U.S. empire is completely and totally out of control. That the plethora of American military adventures overseas are not only not making us safer, but are in fact making us far more vulnerable.

Allen Dulles, the CIA director under presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy, and younger brother of Secretary of State John Foster Dulles, was the architect of a secretive national security apparatus that functioned as essentially an autonomous branch of government. In a Cold War-era world full of spy games and nuclear brinkmanship, in which everyone is either a good guy or a bad guy, Dulles - who deceived American elected leaders and overthrew foreign ones, who backed ex-Nazis and thwarted left-leaning democrats - falls firmly in the latter camp.

“I can’t even say with conviction that I’m sure, looking strictly on a cost-benefit basis, that FATCA’s... benefits are going to outweigh the cost.” FATCA constitutes theft. The US government is generating a little bit of revenue and the great expense of foreign banks and governments (not to mention the thousands of Americans who have had to renounce their citizenship because of FATCA’s idiotic rules).

"A U.S. official confirmed Sunday that a decision had been made to conduct such patrols but said it was unclear when that might happen or where exactly. 'It’s just a matter of time when it happens,' the official said. Another U.S. official indicated that the operation could come within days."