A Market Ticker blast from the past

Mr. Denninger recommends you read this old post.  As do I.

There are approximately 150,000 federally-attached law enforcement personnel.  Another 750,000, roughly, state and local cops are employed by our various government arms.  Of those various officers well more than half sit behind a desk and haven't left one gram of shoe leather on a street or in a cruiser in the last year.  The majority of you fire your weapons for periodic qualification and they have never been warm or dirty besides.  You've never faced death, you've never had a weapon pointed at you in anger, and you've never drawn your service weapon in the line of duty.  Those are facts.

Now consider the "bad side" of America.  The Justice Department estimates there are at least one million gang members - active gang members - in America.  These people, mostly young males, have nearly all drawn or fired weapons in anger.  They are responsible for more than three quarters of all crime in this country, and some eight out of ten violent crimes.  Those gang members have families - younger males who are "coming up", "friends" (if you can call a murderous thug a friend) and others.  Between all of those "loosely attached" folks and the hard-core inner circle itself we probably have somewhere between 5 and 10 million people in this nation who, given the wrong sort of provocation, might decide that "Zombieland" wasn't just a movie.

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To the politicians who are reading this, your Thorazine dosage needs adjustment as well.  The math is irrefutable.  If, in point of fact, AIG has entangled itself with the European Continent there is no escape from what is to come.  There is only destruction, and our only two choices are to cause as much of it as we can to occur there, by pulling the plug on these clowns now, or risk a literal World War.  We may get one anyway, but if we bring the bulk of the damage here we'll be dealing with a civil collapse at the same time, and have no chance of being able to deal with the geopolitical implications.  We must not allow that to happen.  You must not allow that to happen.

We understand you give the orders to the people I've been talking to (mostly) up above.  But you have less excuse than they, when it comes to oaths.  You all took an oath to uphold The Constitution as well.  You've used it as toilet paper, and that's on a good day.  The rest of the time we see you gleefully burning it in the Wells of the House and Senate, dancing around the smoke and fire like some odd pagan ritual.

It's time to stop.  Not because you want to, not because you fear us (even though you should - after all, we're your employers and can fire you) but because if you don't there won't be a nation worth governing left.  You know who the crooks are - including those among you. 

Much, MUCH more here.  Points worth pondering by all.