“Incentives,” Religion, Capitalism, and Things Inherently Evil in General.

It is all but impossible these days to get the "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth" from the media. Everyone in today's journalism has an axe to grind, and they are not above doing it in the guise of news. It seems to me, therefore, that we ought get a few things straight.

I was moved to this when recently a “print on demand” publisher offered me one of those “special, if you pay before the end of the month” deals. I’m the wrong guy to say that to, just as I’m the wrong guy to offer religion, capitalism, or prostitution. Having been reared by a German nobleman grandfather to consider everything logically and scientifically as a matter of honor, I realized the evil inherent in such things when I was twelve years, two weeks, and eleven hours old. I often forget my birthday, meaningless construct that it is, but I never forget that day. Nor should I. Frost’s road that divided in a wood, it has, after all, made all the difference.

You may see why one of my wives called me “Spock” during most of our marriage.

The publisher in question seeks to increase his business by assuring that I will purchase his product. That is a practice as old as the concept of capitalism, which, of course, is a system driven by greed, and whose logical consequence and end is the exploitation and enslavement of all by one of their members.

Take the oil and military industrial industries today for an example.

The capitalist seeks justification in the logically specious argument (the Existential Fallacy, to say nothing of Circulus in Probando, the circular argument) that “circumstances” make such a result impossible. The vicissitudes will somehow intervene for the weak and the poor. In order to support his petitio principii (begging the question) asseverations, he quickly develops a creed wherein wealth is created out of nothing, ignoring the rather obvious fact that all wealth must come from – out of - the planet we occupy. Either practice or creed, of course, seeks to justify its means by its end, and is inconsistent with the basis of all human ethics he himself preaches so cynically – and illogically.

Apologists for capitalism must also be religious, seeking as it does justification from God. Religion is in its essence an illogical practice, one as despicable as that of capitalism, and one based almost invariably on what is called “prayer.” Prayer seeks favor from a god who is held at the same time to be just, yet another logical impossibility. If god is completely just, he must be completely indifferent, inasmuch as to answer one of his creation’s prayers, he must favor one above the others. One cannot be partially just, any more than one can be partially immaculate. Or pregnant.

"The great tragedly of science," Huxley noted. "A beautiful theory slain by an ugly fact."

The concept of capitalism is, of course, rooted in the religions of unjust gods. Capitalism’s second premise is that god rewards the labors of some men over those of others. If he does that, then he favors one over the rest, a definition of injustice.

Governments which provide for favoritism are equally lacking in impartiality, and therefore unjust. Our own practice of “lobbying,” wherein certain segments of society – invariably the already monumentally rich – seek ascendance over their fellows by offering incentives to the people’s representatives is inherently evil – to say nothing of cynical, conniving, and hypocritical. It resembles closely the religion that seeks the same kind of favor from god; indeed, in the United States, government by criminal conspiracy – for a nation that tolerates, encourages, or provides for lobbying, there is no way to escape the fact of that logically – is a religion, one which has supplanted prayer to god with prayer to government. God or government that offers “incentives” is evil, inasmuch as the incentives have to be favor for those who can in some way pay for it, meaning that others who can’t are left wanting.

Neither is government that is unjust orderly, the purported reason for all government, and the stated purpose of our own. The fact that “incentives” like prayer and secular blandishments build uncertainty into any system that provides for them is logically escapable. If I can change at will – mine own - the value of any given number or several, there is no way for others using the system to be sure of the sum or product of any set of numbers. If god answers this prayer or that one, there is no way for any of his creation to know what he expects or demands – what is “right,” in other words.

If government awards favors to one or a number of its citizens, there is no way for the rest to know what is expected of them, and lawful (anybody recognize our own, benighted system of “regulation” and “justice?”).

The inherent evil of any chaotic – and capitalism, religion, and similar systems must by their nature be chaotic (a conclusion which parallels Arrow’s Theorem) – is the scientifically observed fact of entropy. Entropy is defined as the measure of disorder in a system, and physics tells us never decreases toward order; rather, it increases toward more disorder. In a closed system like a society, that means that someone must become a victim (where one assumes that destruction of one member by another or others is disorder). The fact, for instance, that there is so much food on a table where a certain number of people sit means immediately and irrevocably – the fact is its god – that the diners either share or compete for the food. Sharing, of course, provides for “order,” while competition provides for the survival of the fittest, whatever that may mean. One thing it “means,” inevitably, is a free-for-all. Somebody “wins,” somebody goes hungry (the weakest, that is – like children), and somebody dies (the weakest again). Capitalism.

Not for nothing was prostitution the first profession. And religious practice.

Things I Learned From a Hurricane

Thirty-five dollars for a case of bottled water, one hundred, thirty seven to rent a small car, and five for a gallon of gas, Et cetera, etc., etc., etc. In the book “Jonatha’s Truth,“ Fidel Castro asks U.S. President William Jameson Clayton, “How is it that when a disaster occurs, all of the common people behave like socialists, only to return to capitalism as soon as the crisis is over? Of course, there are the same few, the kind who rule in your country, who always seize the opportunity offered by disaster and misery to profit immensely.” Johanna, the book’s heroine, adds, “¡Cierto! you are a fraud, señor presidente, and a fraud before the wide world. The world and the nearly forty millions of your people who live in poverty know it, we know it, and you know it. What you are, yanqui, thunders so loudly, we can’t hear what you say to the contrary.”

Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans have exposed the fraud, played the little boy in the Hans Christian Anderson tale, “The Emperor and His Wonderful Clothes. The naked truth behind the “Land of Opportunity,” the “Land of the Free,” the “Nation of Laws,” and the “Greatest Nation in History” rhetoric is there for all the world to see.

Now Rita, with a knowing giggle, it seems, has pointed HER finger. “The Emperor doesn’t have any clothes on!” We’ve never been so naked, matter of fact.

So it may be time to call a spade a spade elsewhere, too.

Isn’t Mexico the way it is because Mexicans live there? How about Africa? Didn’t Somebody apparently long forgotten once say, “By their fruits shall ye know them?”

Texans, the news reports this morning, are on the way back home. Fuel has finally reached the two and a half million people who bugged out of Houston and places in the path of Hurricane Rita, and they’re going home in the same sane and careful manner they left. Behind them is a veritable garbage dump of dirty diapers, bottles, cans, clothes (amazing the amount of women’s underwear that always shows up in the aftermath of these events), wrappers of every conceivable sort, and more et cetera. All of it left by someone else (all those foreigners in the country, you know).

“Fruits?”

It was another society, and nation, who left town without thought for the obvious, got trapped in an instant parking lot, and ran out of gas. Not us. We’re far too “advanced.”

(During Hurricane Brett, in ’99, I had a ball riding alongside the stalled cars - and brains, conducting all kinds of surveys and experiments. For instance, forty-one people gave me the middle finger salute as I rolled past them. Two carloads offered me twenty dollars each for my twelve ounce water bottles, one fifty. In the second instance, kids, I gave everybody a swig (the guy did pass the bottle to the two kids in the back before helping himself. An astonishingly obese woman prompted another mental game: first, I confirmed the recently published figures telling us that sixty percent of us are grossly overweight. Then, I computed the amount of extra fuel necessary to transport all that blubber. I don’t remember any more, but it was a hefty figure, that I can tell you. There were other things I surveyed – you can gauge the flow of illegal aliens by checking the used toilet paper stacked in the corner of the rest and truck stop bathrooms, you know – but that will do to make my point. After watching two fights at the first truck stop, I decided to get off the interstate - and away from the carbon monoxide – and used back roads to go over to Kerrville.)

In the apartment complex where I’m currently shacked up to write, the recent hurricane was felt, too. Just two (the apartment manager and I) of the residents of the literally dozens of apartments boarded up windows and made preparations. The rest – never mind the fact that had the storm bulls-eyed us, they would have had no time to do anything and would have lost everything they own – are now telling the prudent ones, “See, we were right?” For them, things are back to normal – brain-dead, that is. Dumpsters are still overflowing, trash scattered from hell to breakfast everywhere, largely due the fact that two new families have moved in and haven’t the “smarts” to know that a packing box occupies fifty times the space it would were it crushed or flattened (when I removed and flattened them, the several dumpsters were less than half full).

“Fruits,” huh?

“Elsewhere,” to borrow from the news “anchors,” the nation’s oil companies, slobbering in anticipation of $6.00 a gallon gasoline, and certain in the knowledge of their victims’ mindless addiction, stand over an apprehensive and cowering populace, kicking it contemptuously in its figurative derriere. On the highways, nevertheless, proud (“united we stand”) “Americans” – there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere, you know - go on driving at 90 mph, driving concomitantly the price – of gasoline and everything dependent upon it (which is nearly everything they consume) even higher. The world watches in stupefied amazement, and growing irritation (“they hate us for our freedom”). The fat man at the planetary table is becoming a real menace.

The world has to pay more at the pump, too, you know. “Fruits.”

Of course, it would subject me to the righteous fury of all the unco guid (Robert Burns' Scottish dialect – he was an eighteenth century Scottish poet), were I to mention that I made during the Hurricane Brett evacuation a survey of which racial, ethic, and cultural groups did what along the way. It’s right there for all the world to see, and I can’t help looking. There isn’t any doubt about it, either. Mexico is like Mexico because of Mexicans, Africa like . . . oh, never mind. I know. Racist.

You’ll have a hell of a time baking an apple pie with what you pick off a pomegranate tree, on the other hand. YOU celebrate diversity. I don’t like to take my walk through the f------ garbage. I have a hunch – my casual study of mankind being what it is – that the rest of our global neighbors feel the same, “hate us for our freedom,” or not. I shouldn’t imagine that the ad hominem and name calling is any different, either.

“Fruits,” you know.

"Intelligent Design," "Evolution," People Who Literally Don't Know What They're Talking About, and Things We Ought to be Talking About

I've been asked by a couple of readers here to weigh in on both this subject and that of sexual mores and their effect on our deliberations having to do with the crime of rape. Frankly, I've been putting them both off - the Bush League Administration and its nonsensical machinations and continual “policy” pratfalls is easier. Much easier. Mr. Bush and the clusterf--- he laughably calls an “administration” have been exposed for what they are, after all; and attempts by his remaining supporters to cover for him are like the emperor’s magical clothes, invisible to everybody but George and his wonderful tailors. That's much easier that matters as abstract and non-sensory as things like “carnal knowledge,” “intelligent design,” and “Darwinism.”

But it’s all about our kids – right? Our concern for them is demonstrated incontrovertibly by things like our magnificent educational system and its stupendous results. Things like wide-spread practice of self mutilation, drug consumption, savage hazing, orgiastic sex and drinking, drive-by shooting, and commando-like raids on their school make any criticism of our schools merely hypercritical. Kids will be kids – right? The only thing remaining for us to teach them is how it was that God made them (not that they might not be confused, appearances what they are). Right?

What – me, cynical? Whatever gave you that idea?!

Anyway, the latest spate of would-be reasoning concerning how life on our planet came to be what it is is so very typical of our deliberations having to do with almost every other subject and issue that I choose it first. Sex crime can wait. Of course, it’s not as important. The determination of the precise manner of creation is obviously far more important than 144,000 missing women, skyrocketing incidence of rape, and that sort of thing. First things first.

Frankly, nevertheless, I approach the subject with both wonderment and trepidation. Why the hell does it seem to make so much difference? You think God really cares as much as you seem to about how you think he did it all? For the “creationists” and “intelligent design” people - what the devil (you should pardon the expression) does it all have to do with how you treat one another (which, I remind you, the same scripture you hold infallible says will decide it all for you anyhow)? What, really, is the difference?

For the other side of the goofy shouting match, what difference does it make if you tell kids some people think they know the mind of God so well that they know exactly how He created man – and He didn’t do it in any kind of stages – evolution, in other words. Kids nowadays are pretty darned bright, some of them, and they’re going to see the logical fallacy in that in short order.

What does I mean by that? Well, folks, not even God – a real one, not the one you make up in your bewildered heads – can do everything all at once. That’s an impossibility, like making a rock he can’t lift. So you call it “intelligent design” if you want to, but now you’re “hoist on your own petard” (Shakespeare, that), because that means in some kind of states, and that means “evolution” to most of the rest of homo sapiens (what we’re arguing with such feckless fury and frustration about – remember?). If He did it all at once, then He did it without thinking about it, and that’s also impossible, even for Him.

What’s singularly salient about it all is the fact, that the existence of god has now been proved by one of the leading mathematical physicists, cosmologists, and quantum physicists on earth. The scientist is Dr. Frank J. Tipler, and the book is “The Physics of Immortality.” There’s no doubt about it, unless you’re not very smart and your brain is stuck on mythology and religious doctrine. The scientific, logical and mathematical fact of it is that “intelligent design” irrevocably implies “evolution,” and “evolution” implies “intelligent design.”

So now you can argue about whether He did it with his right hand or left. Sheesh! – get a brain! And teach your kids to love one another (no, not have sex . . . damn it all, why can’t you grow up and stop looking for trite and trivial definitions to quarrel about?!). THAT’s how they got here, both in the obvious and the creation-evolution sense. When do you think we can expect you to wake up, look around, and realize that there are fifty or more far more important problems the kids are going to need a wh-o-o-o-o-le lot of help with during their lives? We have a nitwit administration in Washington, picking a fight with every other country on the globe, stealing us blind, bungling everything we put them there to do, and all the rest, and you’re fighting about precisely how god made man . . .?! Good grief!

When your kids are suffocating in their own waste, shriveling and dying of thirst, scrabbling to grow food out of the exhausted earth, and trying to defend themselves against their religiously demented fellow human beings, they’ll have little time for the hair-splitting rhetorical nonsense their pampered and sated parents engaged in.

If you think it all was “intelligent design,” maybe you ought to try a little of that in your own life and that of your country.

If you know it all “evolved,” you may need to explain why you haven’t evolved enough intelligence to see that “evolution” IS an intelligent design.

But then, maybe I don’t know what the argument is all about. I certainly hope so.

"I accept responsibility," and deja vu

I was wrong when I said no one in government would lose anything in the aftermath of Katrina. Michael Brown, the feckless head of FEMA, has resigned (never fear, he’ll be back as a billion-dollar lobbyist for Halliburton – special interest, disaster operations). But I was wrong. I accept responsibility.

“I accept responsibility.” Where have we heard that before? It’s becoming, of course - especially of late - de rigueur for public officials, a veritable mantra. I heard it first in 1978, when an IRS plenipotentiary said he would "take responsibility" (for an auditor, the accuracy of an IRS audit and tax assessment, and the deal worked out with my attorney). When the agreed arrangement proved disadvantageous - very - for the government, the panjandrum for the nation's purported revenuer promptly repudiated everything he'd said, even though everything had been recorded and was on tape.

I heard the "responsibility" burp again when Janet Reno covered herself with it after having been responsible for barbecuing 78 women and kids in the Branch Davidian Compound at Waco. In my book, “Letters to Aaron,” I asked, “So what does that mean, Frau Obergruppenfuehrerin? You’ll throw yourself on your sword? Yeah, right! Sure.”

Now Mr. Bush says he’ll take responsibility. (notice that he said “IF” he’s done anything wrong.- George NEVER admits a mistake straight out). Same question: What the F--- (“To speak of outrage in mild language is treasonous to virtue,” to paraphrase Edmund Burke) does that mean, sir? Specifically – well, even generally – I mean. Will you resign (that you’re incompetent is painfully obvious by now)? Or should we recall JFK’s mea culpa, mea maxima culpa to CIA Director Allen Dulles after the Bay of Pigs debacle (“Somebody has to take the fall; and since it can’t be the president, it has to be the head of the agency.”)?

What does it mean, Mr. President, that you’ll take responsibility? Will you write a check (your own money, I mean)? Take a cut in pay? Do time? Help in the clean-up (you know, like you “clear cedar” down at the ranch for the cameras)? Will you pile sandbags? Swing a hammer? Help clean up the scum and sewage? No, I don’t suppose – too much like Cain killing Abel (the scum, I mean).

Mild language, etc.

What the hell does it mean, “take responsibility?” ). Like you take responsibility for the carnage in Iraq and Afghanistan? Like you did on the World Trade Center (who can you bomb hell out of for causing a hurricane . . . oh, no – watch out Fidel!)? Like you took responsibility in the National Guard? Like you took responsibility for all the failed companies and bankrupted enterprises you used for rungs on the ladder in your climb to millionaire (billionaire) “success?”

Odd, isn’t it – the way the country lets the Congress grill hell out of a nominee for the Cabinet or Supreme Court, but lets a guy running for president off with whatever reporters controlled by the people who put the people running in the race can come up with? Imagine Mr. Bush having to stand up to what Robert Bourke and Clarence Thomas had to put up with, or what John Roberts Is putting up with.

And Governor Blanco is “responsible, too.” Isn’t that precious?! Gracious? Do you suppose that means she won’t run again next time? Sure (fat chance, anyway, huh).

SO. What does it mean when a “leader” says he’ll accept responsibility? IT MEANS ABSOLUTELY NOTHING. It means that once you have slept on duty while a bunch of Keystone Kops clowns slipped by a National Security Adviser who wasn’t alarmed when she learned that the National Transportation Board didn’t consider a four-inch bladed knife a weapon to high-jack airliners, the nation re-elects you bungling butt.

It means that once it’s become incontrovertible – after months and months of lying by equivocation, insinuation, and “there must be weapons there, because we don’t know there aren’t” – that you lied about “weapons of mass destruction,” the public will continue to think you’re a leader, anyway. No one realizes that a Judas goat is a leader, I guess.

But you know that, don’t you? So you’ll “take responsibility.” You know, SIR, it’s well known that my respect for your kind wouldn’t make you blink if you got it in your eye, but you’re special. In fact, I was wrong in comparing you and your ilk to scum and the other things that rise to the top in a sewer like federal politics. You rise even faster and higher, like a bubble. And bubbles are a perfect example of things empty, the emptiness hiding hopelessly behind a thing veneer.

Like, “I’ll take responsibility.”

Poverty the "American" Way

In the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” Anthony Hopkins, in the role of Diego de la Vega the old Zorro, is instructing the new Zorro, Antonio Banderas, concerning a party they will attend in disguise. Raphael Montero, the story’s villain, will not recognize his old enemy de la Vega, Hopkins says, because a member of the Spanish nobility “would never look directly at a servant.”

A few months ago, I happened during a trip to read the “Letters to the Editor” section of the San Angelo, Texas newspaper. A lady wrote indignantly that the poor in the United States had, “house, cars, even televisions sets.” Poverty in the United States, she said, was different from poverty elsewhere. A couple of days ago, referring to the Hurricane Katrina disaster, another American Hidalgo, this one a columnist, expressed the same opinion. It fascinates me.

You see, it is like so many other things in our benighted nation. We live – evidently (and I mean the evidence is, not that this is a mere figment of imagination) – in a state of virtual reality. For nearly ten years, the victim of IRS and federal government excess, I was one of those poor our ivory tower talks about. I lived off the wilderness, often digging squaw root and other tuberous plants for food. I hunted and fished, planted gardens on public lands and in forests. I also walked into pizza parlors, to glean off the tables left-over slices of pizza. I gleaned coins in the parking lots of the malls, where the wealthy people lose carelessly enough money to provide someone like I was a meal.

I did not have a television set. I did not have a car (I walked or rode a bicycle everywhere I went). I lived either in a tent or an old RV (1971 Ford), a gift from a friend.

And I lived among the nation’s poor. I met engineers, lawyers, a doctor of medicine, an aerospace technician (Ph.D. degreed), farmers, auto mechanics, several ex-professional athletes (one who once made more than a million dollars a year), and one ex-showgirl. I met, and occasionally cared for, dozens of children. Several stray dogs, too. None had a television set, none a car, none a roof to sleep under. All were primarily concerned with their next meal.

Oh, I also met a lot of drunks, alcoholics who simply couldn’t save themselves from the “couple of quarts” they desperately needed. I met druggies, too, pushers and pimps, a few outright thieves. I met dozens of people just out of jail, people who knew damned well there was no way to get by outside of crime. I knew what they meant. I was very, very close to crime a number of times myself, pretty pissed off.

I discussed the ethics of poverty a number of times, with some very bright people. All poor. When you can’t get an honest job, it’s a crime not to have housing, and the only way to get money is to find or steal it, ethics takes on a whole knew meaning. I also discussed poverty with the capitalist ivory tower. And the rich (not always the same people). When you have three cars, live in a house with six bedrooms, vacation in San Moritz, and jet to San Francisco from Texas in order to have fresh lobster, ethics has another meaning. When you’ve commissioned the construction of your own $17,000,000,000 island (built by dredging up the ocean floor) in the Philippines or off the coast of Dubai (in the shape of a palm tree, no less, so everyone can have ocean-front property), and your income is $1,000 a second, ethics has still another meaning. In fact, you need to have few ethics at all. “Poor” doesn’t really have a meaning. You don’t see it, because you never have. You’ve never looked.

One of the conversations I had with the rich was with a retired Air Force officer, a graduate of West Point. Another, almost identical in topic to the one I had with the officer, was with the owner of a National Basketball Association franchise. Drawn out on the subject of whether I could steal a million dollars and get away with it, I gave each of the men ten ways to succeed. Both professed astonishment, but agreed that I was right. I could get out of poverty, and be a millionaire, in less than a year. I would only have to pay what every other rich man pays. It goes without saying that, for me, the price was too high (it wasn’t for one of the gentlemen, incidentally – he used one of my ideas to “earn” just under six million dollars).

Ethics is not only a different thing to different people, it varies a great deal with the nature of the test given it.

Poverty is the natural result of what is now known as capitalism. If there are twenty people at the table, and one or two eat all the food, the rest eat nothing. The fact of there being only so much food and so many people is an obvious one, too. That’s when the table is just a table; when it’s a planet, the obvious isn’t so obvious. The ethics change. Capitalism was once referred to as the Law of the Jungle, but with riches, ethics become a matter of justification. The poor must be their own victims, not those of the rich. The rich not only seek comfort for the body, they seek comfort for the mind, too. The legerdemain is simple, easy, a matter of rhetoric.

But they mustn’t look at you. Oh, they can be near you every day, walk by on the street so close you could reach out and touch them. They speak to you, even eat and drink, sometimes, with you. They might even give you something. Money. But they don’t look at you. Not really. Reality would explode in their faces.

In my book, “Letters to Aaron,” I recall the morning a van (the eight or ten passenger kind) “blew” a stoplight and rammed me as I crossed a street in a protected crosswalk. Hurled sixty-one feet and ten feet into the air by impact, I landed on the street to be hit again by the same van. It left eighty-four feet of skid marks. The aftermath was fascinating, and a warning microcosm of a society in denial, virtual reality created by ideology.

An old man (I have gray hair, and wore a jacket – you couldn’t see the muscles) has been hit in a crosswalk by a vehicle that was speeding and ignored a stop light. As he lies on the street, one of the men in the van attacks him viciously, smashing the vehicle’s door into his face, then proceeding to kick him in the stomach several times. Desperately (that’s admitted, I was scared), the old grabs his assailant, pulls him down into the judo hold (one of my own invention). Struggling against the grip that he realizes could break his neck, the assailant punches the old man in the groin several times. What do you think quickly gathering, and gaping, passersby do?

Well, working at the time on my van, I was on the way to an auto parts story, and dressed in old, dirty clothes. I was also a frequently seen sight in the area, riding my bike and carrying on it groceries in small bags. There is little doubt (I was stopped several times and searched while leaving a nearby H.E.B. grocery) that denizens considered me a bum. The man above me, the one beating hell out of me so far as anyone can see (it’s highly unlikely that any recognized my hold on the man as anything potentially lethal) was well dressed, and had just stepped from a brand new Dodge van. So you tell me what happened. It’s your country.

Fortunately, an ambulance called by personnel at an auto parts store also nearby
arrived in only minutes. In the intervening time, I had pleaded again and again with people standing over my assailant and me to “get the names of witnesses.” No one did. When police arrived at the hospital emergency room where I was taken, I was questioned closely about what I was doing in the area. Days later, when I obtained a police report, I learned that no charges had been filed (as a matter of fact, I also learned that the name of the driver had obviously – for me, that is - been falsified).

Uh-uh. When you’re poor, no one looks at you. If Katrina changes that, I’ll be amazed. So should you. No matter what the media and your president tell you, the United States is not only NOT the Land of the Free, it is a nation of hypocrites.

Mene, Mene, Tekel, Upharsin

Mene, mene, tekel, upharsin – the “handwriting on the wall.” When Daniel translated it, we are told, it was actually written on a wall of the King Belshazar’s palace. No translation now, is necessary of course. The “handwriting’ for the United States is everywhere. It’s in the apartment complex where I stay currently, in the form of garbage strewn everywhere by the wind, pets, and animals which are now beginning to frequent the place. Oh, this is a nice place, high rents and the like, but the tenants are “Americans” (I always point out that there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere). Americans are simply too lazy or too stupid to close the dumpsters the complex management provides in profusion. They simply refuse to close the receptacles, the result being that the contents are soon scattered all over the place. During my morning exercise, I pick it all up and put it back, same thing every morning.

“Americans” never prepare for anything, you see. You can warn them again and again. It’s no use; they have better things to do with their precious time. From Pearl Harbor to today, we get caught with our pants down every time anyone chooses to give us what we deserve. Literally thousands of Americans knew something like the World Trade Center attack was coming, hundreds wrote about it long before (I was one, and several times). No one listened, as obvious as the threat was. Neither is the recent carnage and devastation done by Hurricane Katrina an exception. As hateful as it sounds – the truth is so often that way – we got what we had coming.

What’s the reason “Americans” are so stupid? Invariably, it’s their dependence on government. “People,” Michel de Montaigne said, “always have the government they deserve.” So there’s your syllogism. People rely for their safety on government; the people know that government is always careless with the result that people die; therefore, when people die, the nation deserves what it’s gotten. The corollary is that the nation is responsible for the devastation and death. No way out of it.

In the decade that I was a “storm trooper” – the insurance adjuster who works disasters like Katrina - I never once saw local Civil Defense prepared. It just doesn’t happen. Once, arriving within minutes after the strike of a tornado (I used to hunt them both out of youthful daring and scientific interest), I personally ran necessary Civil Defense search and rescue operations for two days – until organization could be accomplished. The sheriff, returned the first day from ferrying injured people to the local hospital, had no idea what to do, and finding someone who did already in charge, he had the good sense to become a subordinate. That was another time, of course, when people in government had that kind of character.

"Americans" have unfortunately and unwisely let themselves come to be like the Dodo and the flightless birds of the Pacific islands. Protected too long from natural enemies by oceans, freed of natural tougheners like weather and the elements by "climate controlled" environments, and having surrendered most of their freedoms in return for the security of virtual prison, they have let their natural defenses – intelligence is the human being’s principle defense against nature and his enemies – devolve. The result is that they are nearly helpless when catastrophe comes, powerless against things like the guerrilla and special warfare their effeminated natures must label "terrorism." Faced with devastation and death like that resulted from 9-11, Hurricane Katrina, and the ominously obvious promise of the breach in levee that is our border with Mexico, they dither fecklessly, bleating for their supposed savior, federal government, to do something. As they do with just about any problem, their response is to pick up the phone and call someone. “Call 911.”

And, as we’ve heard ad nauseum, when help arrives, almost invariably far too late, it's in the form of a woman cop, or the Bush Administration.

But people have what the government they deserve. They let it get that way. Their choice. Never mind that anyone who has any knowledge of our system knows that it is a system not unlike a sewer. Certain things always tend to be on top. Ponds and stagnant water are like that, too. Scum on top. A nation that puts in charge of their money and economy the most greedy, power-mad people it can find ought not complain when their money begins to vanish in mountainous proportions. It shouldn’t be surprised, either, when their “leaders” are too busy looting the treasury to stand guard – one of the very few things they are actually put in charge to do.

I’ll try – one, more, time – to put it all in perspective. WHAT IN HELL KIND OF PERSON DO YOU THINK WANTS TO CONTROL THE LIVES OF OTHER PEOPLE? WHAT KIND IS IT THAT THINKS HE KNOWS WHAT IS GOOD FOR EVERYONE ELSE? WHAT IN HELL DO YOU THINK IS THE REASON HE SEEKS PUBLIC OFFICE?

So let’s cut the bullshit about Katrina. You saw your “leadership” in operation after the World Trade Center attack. The border with Mexico is STILL so wide open that private citizens – the government calls them “vigilantes” - are trying to help. Four years later, any commando worthy of the name could take the heart out of a major city, and kill tens of thousands, even millions. AND WHEN YOU PUT THE SAME GUARD BACK ON DUTY, AND A “TERRORIST” NAMED KATRINA CAME CALLING, YOU WANT TO SAY YOU AREN’T RESPONSIBLE?

Go to hell!

Talks Shows, Logic, and Things (obviously) Unrelated

Remember the joke about the guy who comes home one day to find the neighbor guy cannonading his wife? The wife looks over her lover's heaving shoulder and says to her husband, "Well, are you going to believe me or your eyes?" On a trip to Oklahoma and back yesterday and the day before, I listened to the talk-show hosts rally round their hero, Dubya and his Bush League administration. In various forms, I heard the joke about the cuckold again and again. George and the Bush League isn't to blame. Natural disasters aren't his problem. Besides, things weren't FUBAR, not as bad as we think, anyway. The far left is just trying to "politicize" the screw-ups. The Democrats are really at fault. Time and again, one of the cuckoo-birds correspondents would play the inane raving of one or another "entertainer" (how's that for absurdity?) like Celine Dion or Terri Koyne, to insinuate illogically that they were representative of their hero's detractors.

One guy kept repeating (we were trying to count, couldn't keep up—traffic in San Antonio can be very distracting, you know) how we should "forget the blame game and get on with the recovery" (yeah, the guard who slept on duty can always be expected to approve that approach, all right). If Ruby Ridge, Waco, the World Trade Center, and the like are any indication, that's how it will turn out, too. The Senate will hold "hearings" (which have the same relation to the old-fashioned meaning of the word that "debate" has to the presidential candidates' duet charades every four years). The House will have hearings, and the government will investigate itself. Result? Nobody will get fired, or even chewed out, and we'll go right back to our feckless "normal" (in a nation that has become only virtually real, a lot of quotation marks are necessary, it seems; see, the quotation marks mean the word has a special meaning . . . oh, never mind). "Whom the gods would destroy, they first make insane." Or stupid.

Et cetera. Anyway, here comes another World Trade Center cover up. When it's all done, I wonder how far we'll be from claiming it was all in our imaginations (frankly, the only reason I listen and watch anymore is to see how far down the rabbit hole we've gone).

And I'm fascinated with what Steven Allen called "the dumbing down of America." During the trip and our radio talk show patronage, we were also trying to count logical fallacies. As fast as I would name them, Rita would make a note. We only got a rough tally—the poor woman couldn't write that fast. "Our president is a good guy because he's a Christian" (on reporting the Prez' declaration of a national day of prayer). That's begging question, by the way (petitio principii). "A national day of prayer is a good thing because it's good to pray" (begs the question again). "We shouldn't criticize our president at a time like this because he's our president (beg . . . oh, never mind). We even heard from one self-styled genius that we shouldn't let the Koreans (or was it the Iranians) have nuclear weapons because it isn't good to have nuclear weapons (pick one—there's a list). There were more—types of fallacy, I mean. Lots of them, from ad hominem, to ad misericordiam, to illicit major and minor and all forms of illicit syllogism. You name it, we heard it. A veritable barrage of brainless, bloviating B.S.

My companion, a high school English teacher, and I began to consider the crippling effect of a nation which no longer teaches logic during elementary and college preparatory education. It ought to be taught, we concluded, like basic mathematics. A kid should be able to recite the logical fallacies, recognize modus ponens, modus tollens, hypothetical and disjunctive syllogisms like he does the multiplication tables. Stupidity both like that pouring from the radio and that obviously being exploited by the "talk show hosts" (just the fact alone that no one recognizes this for the propaganda that it is is worrisome and vexing enough).

Worst, perhaps, of all was the fact that I found myself agreeing with everything Bill O'Reilly said. Now, THAT is worrisome!

Oops—that reminds me. A whole lot of people assume that because I criticize a conservative, I'm a liberal. Now, without reminding you (again?) that that's illogical—which I just did, anyway, didn't I? (anybody able to identify the logical paradox that represents?)—the fact is that all my friends here in my little coffee shop tertulia had a good time with that one. Hal a liberal. "Hal," Ed, my engineer friend said, "if you're a liberal, so was Attila the Hun." Dear reader, the reason I never criticize anyone liberal is the fact that I never listen to them. Matter of fact, I consider liberalism a form of mental illness. Brain gone to mush, is one way to describe it. What I criticize is my side, because that's the side I want to succeed. It won't if it's stupid. Our team has the water boy starting at quarterback. The greediest, most power-mad eminence gris in history (rhymes with brainy) is the blocking back (whose selfless trustworthiness you've gotta be able to count on . . .). That's stupid.

In the same vein, I've heard no objection to my politics more than, "If you don't like it here, why don't you leave?" That's the kind of logic and reasoning we've relegated ourselves to, I guess. The answer is that this is my country. Another is that I've never run from a fight in my life. I know how my country was intended to be by its Founding Fathers, and I decided long ago that's how I wanted it to be. And if John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Patrick Henry and the rest were reincarnated on the floor of Congress or in our courts today, they'd have no damned idea where they were. Sad.

Finally, not only do public figures like the talk radio hosts and their nitwit nostrums reflect on all of us and demonstrate to the world how stupid (spell that v-u-l-n-e-r-a-b-l-e) we are, so does a cluster---- like the New Orleans disaster operation. Bill O'Reilly made a point or two, like I said. One was that when you're poor in the U.S., you're gonna get hammered. That's obviously true, and there's a corollary: if you're stupid, you're going to get it worse. He was right about another thing, oil companies profiting from the nation's misery. He just didn't go far enough (I think his capitalist soul just couldn't do it). We are presented with another of those paradoxes of logic. "America" is just about the only place it could happen. The taxpayers big oil is ripping off so eagerly (and sanctimoniously—capitalist religious doctrine provides for that) have been investing in their tormentors business for decades, in the form of huge tax breaks and allowances totaling in the hundred of billions. Now, anywhere else, anyone contributing to a company without exchange of consideration (property or services) acquires a share of the company's ownership. But not if it's taxes. Cute little finesse, isn't it? You buy the sucker, but you don't acquire any kind of ownership or control. It's a handout. So how does the guy you handed out to show his gratitude? Why, the first and every time he gets a chance, he sticks it to you. And you play along. "Whom the gods would destroy . . ."

The Bush League "Christians" and All Their "Christian" defenders.

The oil companies have announced that they intend to make even more profit as the result of Hurricane Katrina. If anything is certain, its that you can trust an oil company mogul when he says he's about to make money at your expense. There's a word for that—other than "capitalism," I mean, and it's time to ask my question again.

The question is: why is it that some of us—the incredibly, fabulously wealthy—continue being permitted; encouraged, by some—to grow even more wealthy, while the rest—that's the poor, the middle class (remember when we had a middle class?) and the wage-earner—make all the necessary sacrifices? If our soldiers can be asked to give their bodies, limbs and lives, why should people like Halliburton not be required to contribute their services, too? If millions are busting their butts to help New Orleans, the Gulf Coast, and other victims of Katrina, if thousands of National Guard and regular military troops can be wading in noxious slime and dogging bullets aimed at their helicopters, why shouldn't the Brobdingnagian Oil Companies also contribute without profiting?

Now, I know I may as well save my breath, my ink, my electronics or whatever the devil it is makes this thing work. The public mind has been subjected to relentless media mind control for so long, it's useless. They're like sheep behind a Judas Goat. But wait a minute - these are the folks who call themselves "Christian." Let's try this:

We are told, aren't we, that the Judge on Judgment Day will say, "I was hit by a hurricane and left homeless, hungry, and thirsty . . . " He might add, "I wanted to get out of town, or to go to the aid of others who were homeless, hungry, and thirsty, but you raised the price of gas to six dollars, and I couldn't." We are told whenever we hear that "lesson" that the condemned will begin to make excuses (maybe that's why the "leaders" televised comments sound so familiar?) We're also told the Judge will say, "As long as you did it to the least of mine, you did it to me."

It's just my hunch, but I suspect he will add, "And what you did was profit immensely by my trouble."

Do I have to ask my question again?

The blundering Bush League and its destructive pratfalls, and lies; lies, lies, lies, lies, and more lies.

My god, there are still people like Brooks - a friend, by the way - who feel it necessary to defend what is surely the most frequently caught liar ("yellow cake uranium," "weapons of mass destruction," "everythings as planned in Iraq," etc. etc., etc.) ever to be President of the United States.

"No one could have expected this." That's in the face of literally hundreds who have been saying this would happen, and for literally decades. I personally wrote an e-mail to Chertof and the governor of Louisiana (to be hones, it came back for wrong address) two days before, after telling my friends here at the Half Price Bookstore, "This is gonna be really bad. The dikes (that's what we call them back in Iowa where I used to work on the things before every flood) are going to go. Half (I was wrong; it was more) the city will be under water."

If that weren't enough, the same government who is charged with establishing justice, insuring domestic tranquility, providing for the common defense, promoting the general welfare, and securing the blessings of liberty acted like a spastic drunk once they woke from their continual stupor. HOW MANY TIMES DOES A SENTRY HAVE TO FALL ASLEEP OR BE DRUNK ON DUTY BEFORE WE REPLACE HIM? People, Montaigne said, always have the government they deserve.

Ruby Ridge, Waco, Murrah, the World Trade Center, Iraq, Afghanistan, and now, New Orleans; the gestapo we call INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE, and an internal revenue system that even directors of the IRS have been calling "insane" and a "national disgrace" for DECADES. With corporations leaving in droves, almost nothing made in the U.S. anymore, aliens being exploited by the millions, and real inflation and prices twenty to thirty times what they were just after the war, we'll hear, "well, gee, nobody could have foreseen this" when the economic end comes.

Then there's the border with Mexico, too. When the back-pack nuke - or worse - goes off in San Antonio, LA, or another, we'll have Bush, Chertof and the rest on television, telling us "no one could have anticipated such a dastardly thing." YOU DON'T CALL AN ADMINISTRATION WHO DOESN'T KNOW HOW TO BUILD A FENCE INCOMPETENT?

From now on, "America," you DESERVE whatever happens to you.

P.S. Why, knowing that a city vulnerable as was New Orleans was about to be hit by a force five hurricane, would you wait until after the storm had done what you knew was going to happen to mobilize the national guard and federal militaries? Why wouldn't relief ships and convoys be on the way?

INCOMPETENCE. I-N-C-O-M-P-E-T-E-N-C-E. Bush League. Stunned, stolid, stupidity.

P.P.S. Now, as if there were any doubt about what I say here being correct and justified, comes the news that the U.S.S. Bataan, a hsopital ship with six operating rooms, hundred of hospital beds, and the ability to make 100,000 gallons of fresh water a day, has been sitting idle off the devastated Gulf Coast. It's still there. Is that a "high crime and misdemeanor?"

New Orleans, the gulf coast, and lessons we'll learn about "representative government."

Still don't know about Krissie, my daughter in Mississippi, except that there don't seem to have been any fatalities in the little town of Petal. Now, I'm a survivor, so I have a viewpoint far different from the average to elite "American" (there are thirty-four other countries in the Americas, you know). For seventeen years, I survived much of what the people in New Orleans, Mississippi, and Alabama are experiencing, all of it at the hands of the U.S.government. Flat broke and fresh out of a home, I, too, had to find food and water, shelter, and the rest. I had taken a lot of precautions, of course. You learn to do that when you're growing up by yourself in a sod hut beside a river back in Iowa. Forced to live in the wild and live off the land when a federal hurricane named IRS struck, I had the little additional problem of people actively trying to assassinate me. But, like I say, I had experience, and I survived. I knew, for one thing, that any time the government does anything for you, it's with an eye toward how much it will benefit government. No benefit to government, nothing for you.

So it was that the difference in my case was that no one in government would lift a finger. The courts denied me access, police harassed me continually (more than 120 "stops" in fifteen years), and welfare agencies denied me assistance resolutely. So, like I say, I have a rough idea of what Hurricane Katrina's victims are experiencing.

I should feel for them. Sorry. All of that was ripped out of me by the same people who are now posturing mightily in order to profit politically by what's happened. A guy fighting for his life is pretty selfish. You're that or you're not here to write essays.

Then too, we had another disaster on September 11, 200l, you'll remember, and the parallels are remarkable. FEMA says they did a study two years ago, and knew what to expect should a force five hurricane hit New Orleans. So?

I have fifty "whys" here, but a few will do. If we can have two or three divisions of troops in Iraq in a few hours, and 130,000 in a few days . . . ????

If we knew what would happen were the levees to go (not exactly rocket science, folks), why . . .?

A Sikorsky CH-54 SkyCrane (out of shear genius, we retired them - didn't think of them during that FEMA "planning" - I'm told - but we have CH-47 Chinooks, don't we?) helicopter can lift a house, cannon. or even a tank - would a few loads of sandbags be out of the question?

WE CAN'T GET PEOPLE OUT OF NEW ORLEANS (General Motors, who reminds us that they are the world's biggest auto maker, is "donating" TWENTY-FIVE trucks!)? We have the biggest navy in the world - by TWENTY TIMES, we have the biggest fleet in the world - and we can't get people out of New Orleans?

So far, if I've added the various and vague accounting's correctly, we've sent less than 10,000 National Guard troops to the three states. Where the hell are the rest? You get one guess.

Et cetera. If we knew what would happen two or three years ago, why this? Why, because we have the government we have. The government we deserve. The "leaders" are right there where you'd expect them, in front of the cameras spouting platitudes and self-serving write-ups handed them by speech writers who were obviously caught as unprepared as all their bosses were. The nation's wisemen, "correspondent" and "commentator" geniuses like Al Franken, Michael Moore, Bill O"Reilly, Sean Hannity, Allen(sp.?) Colmes, and all the newspaper pundits who have a wondrous opinion on everything else, have nothing more relevant and effective to say beyond blather like "the nation is thinking of you and praying for you." If "you're looking out" for us, Mr. O'Reilly and gentlemen, now's the time.

Meanwhile (there is life, and all its troubles, elsewhere on the planet, you know), friends of mine in Iraq are being told they're in for third and fourth tours (I always loved that terminology - "tour," like you were sight-seeing) of duty over there. Isn't it time all the big supporters of the Bush League signed up for a "tour?" Send your kid. He (or she, since we started sending women to fight) shouldn't mind a year or two delay in getting his degree, not for a great cause like "Iraqi Freedom." Isn't that the patriotic thing to do?

You're either for Mr. Bush or against him, you know.

Maybe that's why 100,000 in New Orleans are getting out of town forty or fifty at a time, on a bus. Or having to commit burglary for food and water.

The blind do lead the blind, it seems. "Leaders," they call themselves.

Addendum: God, I can't stand to see the suffering of those people, and the unconscionable political posturing of the shit swum to the top who have the colossal temerity to call themselves "leaders." The human condition is is incapable of rescue, but if your "leaders" had a shred of decency, we would have heard things like this: Every morning, there is water safe to drink everywhere. On every glass, plastic, metal, or similar surface there is condensation. You can make what is called a "solar still." Take plastic sheeting like Visqueen or dozens more, stretch out over anything green, put something heavy in the middle to form a shallow (or deep, for that matter) cone. Put a cup under the rock or weight. In time (a very short one, in that climate and under those conditions) condensation will form on the sheeting and run into the cup. Your baby can drink that safely.

There are literally dozen ways to make a fire, for light and to boil water or cook food. For light, steal (if you have to) flashlights and what have you from the sporting goods stores, K-mart, Wal-Mart, drug stores and more. The sporting good shops and camping stores all have fire starting equipment, too, beside manuals explaining all the ways to make a fire. Ferro rods are available in many stores, and make a fire that will burn even wet wood and paper. Magnesium shavings, cut from blocks of the same, or dust made with a hacksaw, can be started with matches, sparks made with the hacksaw, or even, failing that (if they're wet), a bow and arrow drill. Make a bow from a limb and shoelace, wire, or the like. Wrap it around a dry stick in such a way that pulling the bow back and forth twists the stick and "drills" it into a block or base made of dry wood. It's a good idea to dig a little hole in the block or base. Set the stick in the hole on block where you've piled the magnesium shavings. Put some dry wood shavings there, too, if you have them. Pump the bow until the friction between the "drill" and base heats to smoldering and starts the shavings. Have some kindling ready. Make torches. Steel wool can be ignited by holding it between two dry cell batteries until it heats and catches fire. Have tinder ready, 'cause it doesn't burn long. Nail polish, hair spray, and twenty things with alcohol in them will work, too. Tampons, shredded and fluffed make good tinder for fire-starting.

If there's a library nearby, you may be able to find survival information there (above the water, of course).

An egg, any egg, is edible if it sinks to the bottom of a container of water. If if floats, it will kill you. An egg shell in dirty water will make whatever kind of particulate that's in it sink to the bottom. Boil what's on top, and you can probably(!) drink it (condensation is surer). Everything that's alive and swimming in all that water is a food source. This is no time to be squeamish. If you see sharks, like the media is bellowing, eat the SOB. If I were you, I steal food before I'd loot shit like TV sets. You'll die of thirst trying to carry the f------ thing.

People, if anybody reads this and can contact anybody in the city, tell them. Newsmen, if you have a particle of decency left in you capitalist souls, broadcast info like this to people with radios and television (like cops, fireman, and rescue people) who seem to have forgotten. I've been listening for days now, and not one damned "correspondent," or "leader" has mentioned a single one of these things. If you can't do better than stand around broadcasting and bloviating, come and get me. I know how to live in conditions like this—your slimeball government taught me.

I wrote this in great haste; excuse the typos, please