Eisenhower had no idea . . .

… of just what his-day military-industrial complex would eventually evolve into.

He had no idea: A Force Unto Itself: A Military Leviathan Has Emerged as America’s 51st and Most Powerful State

It used to be said of Prussia that it was a military with a state attached to it. America’s post-democratic military, combined with the proliferation of intelligence outfits and the growth of the country’s second defense department, the Department of Homeland Security, could increasingly be considered something like an emerging proto-state. Call it America’s 51st state, except that instead of having two senators and a few representatives based on its size, it has all the senators and all the representatives based on its power, budget and grip on American culture.

It is, in other words, a post-democratic leviathan to be reckoned with. And not a single Democratic or Republican candidate for commander-in-chief has spent a day in uniform. Prediction for November: another overwhelming victory at the polls for America’s 51st state.

Several weeks ago I had an online discussion with a colleague about the ethics of abstaining from voting this November, no matter who the nominated presidential candidates turn out to be. However, I long ago decided that voting for president today is an exercise in self deception and that for both Democrats and Republicans (who are together a unified party usually called the Political Class) the Marxist theory of elections is present reality: elections are intended to do nothing more than give the voters the illusion that they actually have a say in how the country is to be run.

But we are long, long past that point. What Eisenhower cautioned about the military-industrial establishment long ago became true for many other government entities and civilian industries. That is, there are greatly overlapping Venn diagrams of far more than just the Pentagon and defense industries.

No wonder that Americans have lost confidence in everything. Here is one of many excellent reasons, provided by US Senator Mike Lee:

The caption reads,

Behold my display of the 2013 Federal Register. It contains over 80,000 pages of new rules, regulations, and notices all written and passed by unelected bureaucrats. The small stack of papers on top of the display are the laws passed by elected members of Congress and signed into law by the president.

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That is why come November, you can “Vote all you want. The secret government won’t change. The people we elect aren’t the ones calling the shots, says Tufts University’s Michael Glennon”

The ultimate problem is the pervasive political ignorance on the part of the American people. And indifference to the threat that is emerging from these concealed institutions. That is where the energy for reform has to come from: the American people. Not from government. Government is very much the problem here. The people have to take the bull by the horns. And that’s a very difficult thing to do, because the ignorance is in many ways rational. There is very little profit to be had in learning about, and being active about, problems that you can’t affect, policies that you can’t change.

After all,

But the Political Class depends on the American people actually being pervasively politically ignorant. It has spent at least the last four decades making sure that each year’s graduating class is more ignorant than the ones before. Such as,

Our company has been searching to find a decent graphic/web designer who can actually spell (so interacting with clients won’t embarrass us) and learn coding but these colleges spit kids out with $200k degrees in art and a useless portfolio that doesn’t translate to the business world.

We’re a growing company, constantly hiring. We’ve found millennials are complete idiots. We try to hire older workers when we can. Millennials want to set their own hours, work from a literal to-do list that never needs to be completed. They can’t hit a deadline or fathom independent action. Utterly incapable of coming up with a strategy or a plan to complete a task that isn’t spelled out — plus you need to hold their hand or they’ll wait for more instructions while fiddling on facebook or SMS.

It’s not getting better. American Millennials Are Some Of The World’s Least Skilled People, Study Finds.” And that’s from the HuffPo!

Fortune reports that Generation Y Americans (those born after 1980) lag behind their overseas peers in literacy, numeracy and problem-solving in technology-rich environments. Researchers at the Princeton-based Educational Testing Service (ETS), who conducted the study, administered a test called the Program for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies, to measure the job skills of adults in 23 countries.

“We really thought [U.S.] Millennials would do better than the general adult population, either compared to older coworkers in the U.S. or to the same age group in other countries,” Madeline Goodman, an ETS researcher who worked on the study, told Fortune. “But they didn’t. In fact, their scores were abysmal.

Be design and on purpose by the political master class.

Update: This too.