That's the scary part. The "system" seems to have a life of its own, its own malevolent personality and intelligence, independent of the people in it. And its never the same twice, as my cousin Rudy pointed out while describing his own experience in the early years of the Cuban Revolution. Even the people in charge sometimes seem surprised when things suddenly change. One thing inevitably leads to another, almost imperceptibly. And before you know, something else seems to have slipped away forever.

Sure, there are parallels, coincidences! But this time its different, isn't it? We won't make the same mistakes again, will we? We don't persecute Jews, we don't round up people into camps, we don't assassinate people in the street or in police interrogation rooms like the Old Regime did. We do it legally, with courts and warrants. And we do it to guarantee rights and privileges we have had all long and traditionally respected: life, liberty, privacy, property.

The key is the mid-term elections. They will be the max, or the min, depending on how you think of things. They will be the inflection point, the derivative will be zero, the slope will be flat. After that the process will either come to a stop, and then slowly start to unravel, to head back to the middle. This is the last chance for the centripetal forces to take hold. Or maybe not. Maybe things will pick up speed, start to accelerate, start to go out of control. Either the nonsense will come to an end, or it will suddenly blossom into a complete nightmare.

This is the singularity. This is the point where the machine takes over, when the Frankenstein comes to life. But it will not be a living creature, or a machine of wire and silicon. It will be an administrative entity of rules and statutes and laws and instructions, one independent of its authors and creators but just as real as if it were a robot or a dinosaur. And it will only answer to its own appetites. And those who benefit (albeit briefly) from it will be the last to realize what they have unleashed on the rest of us, and on themselves, until its too late. It could go either way, but its already been decided. There is nothing we can do about it now. By November we will know what actually happened, but I'm afraid it already has. There is nothing we can do to make it happen, or to stop it. It has already been decided.

"The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way."

Man, those are chilling words.