a bandit gang writ large warning the wire spoilers within

fig23a you can sleep easy

"Without justice, what are kingdoms but great robber bands? What are robber bands but small kingdoms? The band itself is made up of men, is ruled by the command of a leader, and is held together by a social pact. Plunder is divided in accordance with an agreed upon law."
- St Augustine

fig23b roberts rules say we gotta have minutes

"This is a court of law, young man, not a court of justice."
- Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr

fig23c many ways to play the game

"The state calls its own violence law, but that of the individual crime."
- Max Stirner

fig23d quiet violence in the merikan desert

"I have my own army in the NYPD - the seventh largest army in the world."
- Mayor Michael Bloomberg

fig23e military surplus for the war on terror or immigrants or whatever

"So these villains, who call themselves governments, well understand that their power rests primarily upon money. With money they can hire soldiers, and with soldiers extort money. And, when their authority is denied, the first use they always make of money is to hire soldiers to kill or subdue all those who refuse them more money."
- Lysander Spooner

fig23f cmon books are you really gonna go there - yeah i went there

"For if the bulk of the public were really convinced of the illegitimacy of the state, if it were convinced that the state is nothing more nor less than a bandit gang writ large, then the state would soon collapse to take on no ore status or breadth of existence than another mafia gang."
- Murray Rothbard

fig23g once theyve stopped working for the state theyre just dudes with a sweet ride

"Politics would be a helluva good business if it weren't for the goddamned people."
- Richard M. Nixon

fig23h damn people think they can just use their own bridges whenever they feel like it

"Sometimes the law places the whole apparatus of judges, police, prisons, and gendarmes at the service of the plunderers, and treats the victim - when he defends himself - as a criminal."
- Frederic Bastiat

fig23i stop resisting

"You may think you belong to a big gang, you may be 50 people, even 100, but we have 32,000 in our gang. It's called the metropolitan police."
- Chief Inspector Ian Kibblewhite

fig23j see also a list of countries by size of police force

surely there is data to be considered here

"There is no crueler tyranny than that which is perpetuated under the shield of law and in the name of justice."
- Charles De Montesquieu

fig23k the more translucent the window the more invisible the state

that
did not take as long
as i thought it would

yours for the revolution
forbidden books

forever smile for the camera

fig1a: martial fashion

you wont see this on a paris runway any time soon

well

probably not

there are few depths to which corporations wont sink to turn your head

so anyway
this photo causes a stir
probably mostly in the media if at all in the usa
but maybe with the public in france
who knows im not french
this french general has de gall to say
something along the lines of

this isnt indicative of the french intervention in mali

because
you know
war is an industry
its spokespeople
are all

pr

promise
every time you hear a talking head
talking bout some conflict
humanitarian intervention
successfully blown up brown folks alleged terrorist baby eaters
remote controlled precision slaughter

youre being sold something
an image a paradigm
a narrative
its like a commercial

root commerce
well
you know better than to believe that
right

mister african soldier worker shame on you
for covering your face with the true face of your profession
revealing
apocalyptizing
frances efforts for what it really is
a white mans war
paving space for capital

we dont pay you to showcase truth

!

kill something already

yours for the revolution
forbidden books

over the top and under the radar squeezing through your keyholes leaking through the cracks in your foundations

and we will not discuss this like gentlemen
this is genocide, we are desensitized
we are the set aside setting our sights on the enterprise
we were never meant to find
this is America: one big happy prison
but we wrote our names on the walls
you thought it was graffiti, but it was a sign
to everyone looking, from those already inside
- Guante, "Welcome to the Border"

we the people
(clients, customers, or citizens?)
(from homeland security watch)

my response here reproduced,

hmmm, this is a really thought-provoking one….

“Citizen” is quite the ancient Roman term. Greek, too, but more importantly Roman because our government structure is based on the Republic, not the polis. The citizen has rights, most definitively the right to vote – the other rights are historically negotiated and vary from area and epoch.

“Client” is a management term. A client is both a customer and a boss.Complicated relationship. The proletariat does not deal (has not dealt) in clients and has (had) a customer and/or a boss, never both in the same person (until the advent of the “independent contractor”).

“Customer” is a market term, in both the abstract (“the market economy”) and concrete (the physical marketplace) sense. Producers seek customers in the first sense in order to convert goods into money and complete the circuit of capital accumulation. A customer in this sense is merely a link in a chain and a necessary evil in the process of making money. The retail worker handles customers in the second sense and may either be petit-bourgeoise or employed by one (wherein petit-bourgeoise means either small business owner or retail management of a corporation). Increased use of the term “customer” indicates an attempt at increased market penetration or market ideals, capitalism being a totalitarian and colonizing system.

So the debate illustrates, I think, a further shift towards the marketization of government, and works a double function of obscuring the military-industrial oppression of people in occupied territory, folks subjected to oppression, incarceration, and a deprivation of direct participation in their own environment. Thus:

What word best describes who to enlist in “efforts to ensure a homeland that is safe, secure, and resilient against terrorism and other hazards”?

A: Praetorian fits, I think.

please forgive the use of convention
in language

a final word/2:
empire replicates.

yours for the revolution
forbidden books