I tend to be a little paranoid, but as William Burroughs said: “A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on”. You may have heard that the Pentagon, for the first time ever, has dedicated an Army force specifically to securing not some foreign region but instead to the continental United States. This has Senator Patrick Leahy, among others, reasonably concerned. Combined with last year’s National Security Presidential Directive 51, which gives the president unusually broad powers in the event of a “Catastrophic Emergency” (which means “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage, or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions”) sounds a little fishy to me. Combine this with massive market and banking failures, and VOILA! No need to set the Reichstag on fire. The administration can just suspend the elections as soon as the Dow hits 5,000 and the bank runs begin. All of this is unlikely, of course, but I think I’ll be renting a copy of The Siege just for old time’s sake anyway.