ARMED-M

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The Armed M is a publication of the 2nd Amendment SIG, a special interest group of American Mensa Ltd. Opinions expressed herein are the opinions of the writers, and not of American Mensa, Ltd., which has no opinions. This newsletter is linked to the Mensa web page WWW.Mensa.org as WWW.2Asig.iqhost.net.  Almost all editions are on the web site.  It takes about two minutes to download each of the sixty editions using dial up.

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NOV. 2003 I have moved and am now in Wilmington North Carolina. My E-Mail address is Smith705@Juno.com. I can always use contributions to the newsletter. If you write something or find something e-mail it to me I'll put it in the newsletter as space and theme allows. Bob Smith -----

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"If you keep a gun in your home," a University of Pennsylvania press release said last week, "you dramatically increase the odds that you will die of a gunshot wound, according to research published in the June issue of the Annals of Emergency Medicine." "Keeping guns at home is dangerous," the researcher was quoted as saying. A New York Times story likewise reported: "People with guns in their homes are almost twice as likely to be killed by guns as people who do not keep them at home." Another article echoed the same point; so do the websites of advocacy groups (here and here).

Frightening results for people who own guns, or who are thinking of buying them. Frightening, but, it turns out, meaningless another example of how unsound social science is being used in public-policy debates.

What the University of Pennsylvania study found was a statistical correlation:  Gun ownership is correlated with gun deaths.  But that two things are correlated doesn't prove that one causes the other.  The sex-crime rate is correlated over time with the use of air conditioning, but not because air conditioning causes sex crime; rather, both rise during the summer months.  Likewise, whether someone in your home has been to the hospital recently is correlated with death in your home, but not because hospital care tends to kill people (though sometimes it does). Rather, both hospital stays and deaths often have a common cause: serious illness.

It turns out that a hugely disproportionate fraction of homicide victims are themselves criminals -- criminals do dangerous things, and deal with dangerous people. In a recent San Francisco study, two-thirds of all gun-homicide victims (and one-third of all gun suicides) were found to have had arrest records, and other studies of gun-homicide victims yield similar results. And criminals, especially drug dealers and gang members, are particularly likely to own guns; most gun owners aren't criminals, but many criminals are gun owners. So even if gun ownership and gun homicide are correlated, both may be caused by a common factor: Hardcore criminals are especially likely to own guns -- and to be killed by guns.

Social scientists have long recognized that correlation doesn't prove causation, because the two correlated things may actually be caused by a third thing. That's why sound social science requires that scientists use statistical tools that control for a wide variety of such "confounding factors."

This particular study in fact tried to control for various factors. Before controlling for those factors, the study actually found that gun-homicide victims were slightly less likely to own guns than the nonvictims were. The correlation between gun ownership and gun homicide arose when the study controlled for sex, race, age, marital status, education, income, veteran status, region, population of area of residence, and whether the person lived alone.

The study, however, completely failed to control for what might well be the most important factors: whether the household contained violent criminals, gang members, drug dealers, and the like. These are the very factors that might cause both gun ownership and gun death. And because the study didn't control for them, it says nothing about whether gun ownership really "increases the odds" that a law-abiding citizen will be killed. The study's results could easily flow simply from the huge set of homicide victims who are themselves criminals.

Curiously, the study starts by pointing out that an earlier study, which used a similar approach, "inspired a paper trail of challenges that continues to grow." The new study was partly a reaction to those challenges. But a key argument in those challenges was precisely that the earlier study didn't adequately control for the victim's criminal background -- and yet the new study made the same mistake, and in fact control for fewer factors than the earlier study did. The new study didn't even try to deal with the possibility that law-abiding citizens aren't endangered by their own guns, but rather that gun-owning criminals are jeopardized by their gun-owning criminal associates or enemies.

To its credit, the University of Pennsylvania study does mention this potential problem (though the press release and the New York Times article don't). "The results could be biased," the study says, "because risky behaviors like drug dealing could not be controlled with the data used here." But, the study argues, this confounding "is not likely to explain the results completely" -- if the victim's own criminal background caused both the gun ownership and the victim's death, "a gun in the home should be associated . . . with homicide by all means," and not just guns. This, though, is unpersuasive: Drug dealers or gang members may be especially likely to kill each other precisely with guns, and not knives, clubs, or bare hands.

Likewise, the study finds a correlation between gun ownership and suicide -- but doesn't control for the obvious possibility that some people bought the guns precisely because they're suicidal. The study points to another study that supposedly shows that gun ownership is correlated with suicide even when the gun had been owned for years (though much less strongly than when the gun has been owned for only a short time). But that other study is itself similarly flawed: It controls only for age, sex, and geography, and ignores other important factors such as history of involvement with drugs and with drug dealers, a history of chronic depression, or other personality or environmental traits.

Unfortunately, this is how conventional wisdom is molded. A badly flawed study leads to an even more flawed New York Times article. Readers read it and say "Wow, it's dangerous for me to own a gun" -- or "Since guns endanger even their owners, there's really no reason to keep them legal." Precisely because the study seems so authoritative, so scientific, it's likely to be influential, even when it's misdesigned and misreported. And this is especially so when these flaws are repeated in study after study, as they have routinely been in the gun debate. Bad social science leads to bad legal policy.

Finally, the study concludes with a recommendation to the medical profession: Physicians should "discuss with all patients" "the consequences of having access to guns." But "discussions" are only helpful if the physician actually knows what he's talking about. Many physicians have little personal knowledge about guns, and haven't read the rebuttals to these studies. If they start spreading this erroneous information to their patients, the results won't be good either for the patients or for the reputation of the medical profession.   =============

CENTER-RIGHT is edited by Eugene Volokh, who teaches constitutional law, copyright law, and a seminar on firearms regulation at UCLA Law School (http://www.law.ucla.edu/faculty/volokh), and is organized with the help of Terry Wynn and the Federalist Society (http://www.fed-soc.org/).

Check out (and link to) our Web site, http://www.center-right.org . Check out also Eugene's Web log, http://volokh.blogspot.com, for daily commentary on law, politics, and other matters. Finally, check out Shards: Poems of the War, edited by yours truly, http://shards-poems.blogspot.com .     

Invasion of the Mind Snatchers by Nelson Hultberg

More and more Americans today are coming to understand the terrible truth about our Federal Government -- that it seeks to dominate us as citizens, to mold us into a society of dutiful Stepford Wives totally beholden to the wishes of elite politicians, bureaucrats and bankers. Those who study history, independent of the public school system, understand that this state aggrandizement process has been under way for the past 100 years in America in one form or another. And that it is taking place because too many of our citizens sanction such dictatorial usurpation and actually work diligently for its implementation.

This process has resulted in the lion's share of our earnings being annually confiscated by these governmental elites and then redistributed to despicable projects of waste and war to further their dream of world collectivism. It has led to the shocking debasement of our currency and an endless escalation in the cost of staying alive. It has brought about the degeneration of our economy from a robust engine of industry and personal self-reliance to an effete conglomeration of bloated consumers subsisting on financial gimmickry and debt addiction. As a result, America, once a proud land of muscular factories and productive people, has become a stuporous society of shopping malls and welfare crybabies. Once scintillating lives of freedom are now humdrum tenures of conformity to the insufferable Nanny State.

Why this process is taking place is one of the most disheartening questions of our time. What follows is an an attempt to show why and how it is unfolding. There are other reasons as to "why and how" than the one given here, for no country's evolution into despotism is due to a singular, clear cut cause. Tyranny's evolution is always a highly complex process with many convoluted and puzzling forces all-coalescing to bring about freedom's demise. This essay, however, is a look into one of the most important of those forces.

A very popular and frightening science-fiction movie in 1956, called Invasion of the Body Snatchers, is an apt metaphor for what is taking place in our country. In the movie starring Dana Wynter and Kevin McCarthy, a network of aliens are slowly and secretly taking over the bodies of the citizens of a small town by use of mysterious cadaver-like "pods" that are left in their backyards and basements. Once transformed into an alien, each citizen then tries to recruit the rest of his family and friends. It's absolutely chilling in its impact -- one of the great science-fiction movies ever.

Today's collectivists, working so assiduously to transform America, are like the aliens in that movie. They permeate our entire society and are after not our bodies, but the enslavement of our minds and souls. Ideological fallacies and moral inversions are the mysterious pods that these aliens leave in the cerebral backyards of our lives. They are aliens because they wish to destroy our system of natural liberty and limited government. And even though most of them believe what they are doing is right, they are far from innocent, for they have chosen to blank out on the horrendous ramifications of what they are doing.

Teaching a False Ideal

It begins in the school system. All modern authoritarian political movements of history require recruitment of an intellectual vanguard to proselytize the masses into accepting the authoritarian rule. This vanguard is recruited from the "ablest and brightest" of the nation involved. History shows how leading intellects of Europe used this strategy starting in the 1880's and 1890's to move Germany, Russia, and Italy into authoritarian political systems by the 1917-1930 period. What history also shows (if one wants to view it objectively) is that the same thing has been going on in America for many decades, only on a much more subtle level. The problem is that our media and our scholars quickly lose their objectivity when analyzing their own political system and the propagandistic methods used to promote it. Thus, history's lesson is ignored for modern day consumption in order to further the recruitment of the American intelligentsia into promotion of the ideology of collectivism.

Instead of being forums for the transmission of the values of civilization to the young, our colleges and universities have now become the breeding ground for this statist recruitment process, in which the better students get swept up in the "false ideal" of collectivism. These better students then proceed out into the world. To positions of intellectual, political and economic leadership, to proselytize the masses into this alleged ideal just as church missionaries used to go out into the world to spread the gospel. The difference being that the missionaries was spreading good, while today's collectivists are pushing fallacies.

Such a vision very subtly conveys the notion that mankind is capable of achieving an egalitarian world where there will be no poverty, no disparity of wealth, no prejudice, no ignorance, no wars -- in short a heaven on earth. The requisites for bringing about such a world are to eradicate the "nefarious workings" of the free-market through centralization of government power in Washington, and then eventually move to some form of world governing body. This is necessary because it is allegedly capitalism and man's drive for profits, which are responsible for the strife, wars and poverty from which the world suffers. Western civilization, having been built upon capitalism and profit, must be razed and replaced with a new civilization that will usher in this heaven on earth.

It is a powerful futuristic vision that is insidiously instilled into callow minds who lack the necessary sophistication to resist. Being young and prone to idealism, they perceive "political centralization and a one- world government" to be an ideal just as the students in Marx's day mistook his "dictatorship of the proletariat" as some sort of ideal. Thousands of highly intelligent students spring forth from this brainwash every year to enter the world and spread their newly learned convictions that capitalism and Western civilization are the "roots of all evil."

These "ablest and brightest" of our youth advance over the years into prominent careers as teachers, journalists, publishers, movie directors, ministers, politicians, bankers, and businessmen -- all the time working for and promoting collectivism. Yet they don't see themselves as working for anything dictatorial. They think the political centralization and Keynesianism taught to them by their mentors will heal the strife in the world, cure the poverty of the ghettos, smooth out the prejudices between races, etc. They think gold money is primitive and inflation progressive. When they push for more and more centralized government, more and more taxes, more and more regulations, more and more "liquidity" from the Federal Reserve, they are working for what they think will be a more benign civilization. They think they are working for an "ideal."

As the great philosophers tell us, it is ideals that are the primary movers of men throughout history. Our tragedy is that we are educating one generation after another with "false ideals," and the evidence that would expose the falsity of those ideals is not allowed a respectable place in our public schools due to those schools' control by government bureaucracies and the statist viewpoint.

The New World Order

One of the most influential institutions resulting from this indoctrination process is what is called the Trilateral Commission. This is an international group of about 300 elite intellectuals, statesmen, bankers, and businessmen founded in 1973 by billionaire banker David Rockefeller as a spin off from the older Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).

The Council on Foreign Relations is like the Trilateral Commission, only much larger; it is composed of approximately 4,000 prominent leaders in business, government, and education, etc. It was formed in the 1920's by a group of progressive intellectuals of Woodrow Wilson's era led by the openly acknowledged Marxian socialist Edward Mandell House who was Wilson's chief advisor. Its officially stated purpose was to coordinate America's foreign policy with other nations to create a more peaceful and orderly world. But in actuality, its originators designed the organization to lead America into world collectivism.

The group today claims vague educational goals as its purpose, but numerous public statements from its leaders indicate that its policies are clearly directed toward transforming U.S. sovereignty and national independence into some form of all-powerful world government. It has, since the days of its inception, been patiently working for this goal, and its spin-off group, the Trilateral Commission, is doing likewise.

In his book, With No Apologies, the late U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater tells us that while David Rockefeller publicly launched the Trilateral Commission, the brains behind its formation was CFR member Zbigniew Brzezinski, whose 1970 book Between Two Ages set the tone for what is now referred to as a "New World Order," in which the major nations of the world -- the U.S., Europe, Japan, etc. -- link together to plan and direct the fortunes of the rest of the world. In short, Brzezinski condemns national sovereignty as outdated and unworkable, says that we need to rewrite the American Constitution, and eliminate our system of federalism in favor of a more centralized government in Washington and eventually subordination to a world government. 1

Here we have a profound demonstration of how ideas shape the unfolding of history. The Trilateral Commission and its parent, the Council on Foreign Relations, are the end results of many decades of ideological corruption in our colleges and universities beginning as far back as the late 19th century. The men of zeal who are inducted into the Trilateral Commission have been indoctrinated with false philosophical, political and economic theories that have their origin in the works of powerful collectivist thinkers such as Jean Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, and John Maynard Keynes. The overwhelming majority of academics throughout the West have been taught to revere such false theories (that declare laissez-faire capitalism and gold money to be a "chaotic and unworkable system" of economic organization), and they have in turn taught the elite Trilateral members this erroneous conception of history and economics. Is it any wonder then that the Trilateral members, in their zeal for order and armed with egregiously flawed ideological views, are driven to try and "help the people of the world" by centralizing them under one rule. This is the nature of intellectual men and women; most of them will always attempt to further the cause of what they feel to be right.

Of course, it doesn't hurt the Trilateral members' motivation in all this that they see themselves as part of the leadership elite that is to organize, advise and run this future One World Government. Power has consumed men throughout history, and it is no different today. Its lure takes well-meaning men and makes them zealous and arrogant; it makes them believe that the Gargantua of government can be controlled once unchained from the Constitution because it is in their "well-meaning hands." When this lust for power is united with irrational ideas such as Keynesianism, central planning, social welfarism, one-world government, etc., then individual liberty is overwhelmed with disaster and despotism.

This then is one of the important links in the chain of causes moving America closer and closer to an egalitarian world dictatorship -- the Trilateral Commission's elite power brokers who spend their lives working for the "false ideal" of world collectivism which has been taught to them by our government dominated school system.

"In my view," wrote Goldwater, "the Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilaterals truly intend is the creation of a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nation-states involved .As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future." 2

President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, Strobe Talbot (a Trilateral member), succinctly expressed the organization's long range goal recently in Time magazine: "In the next century," he declared, "nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority .National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."

Protectors of the Empire

In ancient Rome after the Republic had expanded into Empire, there evolved a super elite of ruthlessly skilled soldiers whose sole job was to look after the Emperor and protect him at all cost; it was called the Praetorian Guard, and its responsibility was to perpetuate the rule of the reigning despot in power, to guard him against all enemies, to use whatever means necessary to extend his power.  Goldwater likened the CFR and Trilateral Commission to a new Praetorian Guard for our age. The job of these highly influential academics, politicians, bankers, and businessmen is to insure the perpetuation of America's centralized state and pave the path for its merging into a World State by any means. "To accomplish this purpose," he writes, "they [mobilize] the money power of the Wall Street bankers, the intellectual influence of the academic community -- which is subservient to the wealth of the great tax-free foundations -- and the media controllers represented in the membership of the CFR and the Trilateral."

A very apropos analogy indeed. The combine of the CFR and the Trilateral Commission is a modern reincarnation of Caesar's corps of elite soldiers pledged to protect despotism -- not literally in terms of physical prowess, but much more sophisticatedly in terms of intellectual and financial prowess. The New World Order requires a new methodology of usurpation, and these ideological authoritarians have risen up to provide it in spades.

This New World Order that is taking shape among the intellectual and power elites of modern civilization has no place in its goals for national sovereignty, economic freedom, objective law, and decentralized government. Such values as these (the cornerstones of America) are in the minds our leaders today the causes of war, poverty, inequality and chaos. WORLD ORDER, rather than INDIVIDUAL FREEDOM is what these power elites seek; and they intend to do away with the founding principles of America to achieve it.

Such a vision is 180 degrees wrong, for war, poverty and chaos are not caused by economic freedom and objective law. They are caused by the very central planning and arbitrary law that world collectivism is structured upon. But rationality and truth are never the hallmarks of men of zeal in pursuit of power over their fellow men. Hubris of the most blatant kind moves the New World Order elites.

Their methodology has worked well for the past 100 years: Teach a subtle, socialistic serfdom to the more intelligent of our youth under the guise of an "ideal" society in which there will be no more poverty, hardship, and inequality in life if only we will construct a government that has the ability to print money at will and is far reaching enough to control all the political-economic endeavors of man. Then sell this mess of pottage by throwing reason, history and the economic facts of reality down the memory hole.

Their total state is not here yet, but it's on its way. When it arrives, it will be as Tocqueville warned, "unlike anything that ever before existed in the world." It will be a dreadful omnipresent power that "compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people" until they are "reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd." 5 Imagine a Swedish style social welfarism (with 75 percent tax rates) mixed in with a neo-fascistic global corporatism in the manner of the original movie Rollerball, that has to contend with desolate outback sectors of the world like we saw in Mad Max. This is what the 21st century holds for us.

In the Introduction to Brave New World, Aldous Huxley wrote, "A really efficient totalitarian state would be one in which the all powerful executive of political bosses and their army of managers control a population of slaves who do not have to be coerced, because they love their servitude. To make them love it is the task assigned, in present day totalitarian states, to ministries of propaganda, newspaper editors and schoolteachers."

The "army of managers" Huxley was warning about is already upon us. They are the statist intellectuals in our colleges and universities. They have a powerful control over the minds of our ablest and brightest youth, and they're turning them into the most dutiful of apparatchiks for a new world collectivism.

What Manner of Man?

In light of the above, the questions that we as a people need to ask ourselves are as follows: Why are those of collectivist persuasion on the political left not content with merely correcting the flaws of the original American vision? In other words, why are they not satisfied with merely assuring equal rights for all minorities and all women? Why do they also advocate massive redistribution of individual wealth and the regimentation of our economy with draconian bureaucracies? Why do they persist in debasing our currency year after year? If they were really champions of freedom, prosperity and justice as they claim, then should they not fight for equal rights and free enterprise, rather than the forced collectivization of society into a centralized welfare state? Should they not seek a financial system based upon money with intrinsic worth, rather than one based upon whim and artifice?

The historical evidence is abundantly clear. Capitalism works! Gold retains its value! A free enterprise system with gold as its money produces phenomenal wealth that ENDURES. It allows men and women to be free to live as they please, while knowing that their life's work will not be destroyed by political rulers. And it does so for all classes, producing a rising tide that lifts all boats. The problems attributed to capitalism (inflation, depressions, monopolies, shortages, etc.) are not caused by businessmen in a free-market, but by government intervention into the marketplace to convey favors and privileges to special groups. In other words, our problems stem from our evolution into fascism, which is what extensive government regulation, monetary inflation, and profit confiscation is. One merely needs to read Ludwig von Mises' Human Action, George Gilder's Wealth And Poverty, and Ayn Rand's Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal to validate the overwhelming merits of a "laissez-faire" economy as compared to the "government regulated" economy we suffer from today. One needs only to read Ferdinand Lips' Gold Wars along with Congressman Ron Paul's and Lewis Lehrman's The Case for Gold to grasp the paramount necessity of basing all nations' currencies on the gold standard.

Why would anyone of genuine intellect and integrity wish to eradicate such a free and prosperous society? Such a stable and reliable money? Why would anyone evade, suppress and ignore the literature that so irrefutably authenticates the merits of freedom? One's only conclusion is that despite their vehement fight for the liberation of blacks and women from the "shackles of the 19th century," advocates of the liberal welfare state are, at heart, loathers of freedom. They are in pursuit of tyranny under the guise of a "New World Order."

But why would anyone despise freedom? What manner of man would wish to change a free economy into a regimented one? An open society into a closed society? Gold into paper? In other words, why would anyone want to change a vibrant society with individually earned ascent and descent between classes into a stagnant society with bureaucratically granted movement up and down the class ladder? Why would anyone want to give up the dynamic resplendencies of the American Founders' vision for the stultifying servitude of ancient collectivism?

Sanity and Rationality Give Way

The answer to this, of course, is multi-faceted. But far and away the primary reason is the false worldview taught to all young people today from grade school on. Outrageous philosophical fallacies and socialist falsifications of economics and history have gained sway in the academy and the media to poison our citizens minds against America and the concept of freedom. Such fallacies have created a grossly distorted image of the way the world works for the man in the street, in which freedom itself is seen as inimical to human dignity -- where creative entrepreneurship is portrayed as exploitation of the poor instead of their only hope -- where gold is termed a "barbarous relic" instead of history's proven store of value -- where wealth is thought of as a part of nature and static instead of created by free men and infinite -- where arbitrary government, the most brutal violator of individual rights in history, is now held to be man's "beneficent savior."

All the values that sustain civilized life (freedom, strength of will, independence, honor) are endlessly denigrated in our schools and media today with tyrannical sophistries designed to make us accept sloth as normalcy, servility as dignity, weakness of will as compassion, and government conveyed privilege as justice. The world of sanity and rationality gives way to regimental nightmares of Orwellian "newspeak" and "political correctness," in order for legions of middle-class sluggards to feel good about themselves while they live out their spiritually squalid lives queuing up to the entitlement troughs of the mega-state. The academy, once the bastion of objective value and truth where the individual was primary, fragments into myriad cults of subjective idiocy and senseless pedantry to worship the hideous idols of Egalitarianism and Central Planning.

>Pretty bubbleheads preen daily on our financial networks, playing the shill to Wall Street and Washington in order to lure unsuspecting Americans into buying insanely overvalued stocks. The great market exchanges, once prudent arenas of investment where the engine of capitalism traded value for value, have become sham casinos staggering under decades of massive Fed created debt and lurching into oblivion on the greater fool theory. Yet our high level bureaucrats, led by Alan Greenspan, exhort all Americans to consume still more of their seed corn and seek still more fools.

Mole-like men now posture as intellectuals with a perspective that extends no further than the previous decade. Oliver Wendell Holmes' "one story intellects" (the fact mongers, memorizers, and calculators) wheel and deal from the corridors of power and slick TV talk shows -- to spew out grandiose prescriptions for "government investment" of our earnings along with absurd partnerships attempting to merge drone like bureaucracies, incapable of creativity, with highly innovative private companies totally dependent upon creativity.

Communism fell to the only fate its barbaric nature could have produced -- brutal starvation and debilitating chaos. Yet these bureaucratic mole-men claim they will get the socialist utopia right this time, that they have learned how to centrally plan the totality of man's economic needs, that they know how to control the hydraulic mastodon of federal power. We now can have freedom without risk, plenty without work, and hope without heartache.

Such are the illusions of modernity's short-range mentalities. Such is the fate of those who believe knowledge is numbers and truth a remnant of primitive times, that technology is a substitute for values and security more precious than liberty.

Such are the irrational pretentions of our age. These monstrous absurdities, being promoted today as humane social policies, are the result of deeply flawed theoretical doctrines that have slowly permeated our academic community over the past 100 years -- doctrines such as absolutism of the general will, the labor theory of value, the organic concept of society, moral relativism, majoritarianism, and inflationary monetary policy.

Such doctrines have been handed down to us from the likes of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Auguste Comte, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Lester Frank Ward, John Dewey and J.M. Keynes. They have produced what historian, Clarence Carson, calls a "collectivist curvature of the mind."

Origin of the Conspiracies

It is this "collectivist curvature of the mind" that leads to all the conspiracies (both secret and tacit) that move many prominent and powerful people in our society today. Check out G. Edward Griffin's website [www.freedom-force.org] and his very scary article, "The Grand Deception," for a look into the dark machinations that possibly lie behind much of the tragedy that has transpired over the past century.

Once the Mind Snatchers have worked their ideological venom into the brains of our youthful intelligentsia during their schooling years, they have recruited in most instances a lifelong collectivist apparatchik for their cause. If that apparatchik is brilliant and ruthless, he will rise to high levels in today's government and banking circles. He will seek to join elite organizations such as the CFR and the Trilaterals. He will seek relentlessly to move the country toward the collectivist ideal of One World Government.

Mr. Griffin is one of today's most brilliant and provocative intellects (see his book on the Federal Reserve, The Creature from Jekyll Island). He supports the thesis that there is a SECRET conspiracy motivating modernity's drift into world tyranny. It stems from a clandestine group of Fabian socialists that was formed at the end of the 19th century by the statesman Cecil J. Rhodes in Britain to recruit and educate a steady stream of "advocates for world collectivism" through front organizations such as the CFR and the Trilateral Commission. He has termed this conspiracy the Fabian Network, and the tale he tells in "The Grand Deception," if even remotely true, is as horrific and sinister as it gets in the pages of human history.

I certainly agree with Mr. Griffin about the collectivist movement plaguing our world. But in my opinion, the important conspiratorial elements of this movement are TACIT rather than SECRET. It's a multi-faceted phenomenon of many levels and subtlties, with its dream of world domination openly advocated in all leftist circles. But Mr. Griffin and I both surely agree on the source and the ultimate goal of the collectivists. While we may differ on which method of implementation is more important in the furtherance of collectivism (clandestine front groups or open proselytization), we both realize that it starts with the big thinkers of civilization such as Rousseau, Comte, Marx, and Keynes, etc. It then works its way into the academic arena to capture elite professors, where it proceeds to poison generation after generation of the "best and the brightest" of our youth. The goal is WORLD COLLECTIVIST TYRANNY and the cessation of America as a sovereign nation. The end of our free enterprise system and the Founders' vision of liberty must naturally follow in order to complete the tyrannical vision. My book, Reality's Golden Mean (hopefully to be out by early next year), is all about this takeover of the American people through a twisting of their minds.

Taught to Do Evil

Today's political and financial leaders are, thus, smuggling America into global collectivism because they have been taught to do evil by perverted scholars throughout our school system who have lost faith in the great truths of man's history. Deep and nightmarish forces are at work lurking in the subconscious minds of today's intellectuals that are poisoning the dreams and ideals of our entire culture.

We have been invaded by alien Mind Snatchers who are turning America into a nation of sheep akin to the zombies we saw in Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Like the pod people in that famous movie, these Mind Snatchers have, over the past 100 years, saturated many of our important institutions -- from government, to Hollywood, to the schools, to the churches, to the media. They operate under the guise of a "warped idealism" to work their invidious goals into the minds and hearts of an unsuspecting people.

A gargantuan crash of prosperity and freedom now looms up ahead as a result of this ideological invasion and corruption. Out of the crash will come a new society. Our only hope for that new society lies in whether we, who have kept the faith of our fathers, can inform enough of our fellow citizens as to what the requisites of freedom truly are. If we can, then a rebirth of America will take place. If not, then some variant of Orwell's nightmare will descend upon the world to enslave and stultify life for the upcoming centuries.