State of the Union; or "Bloviating with the Stars."

Shortly, we will endure what is always called the “State to the Union Address.” I won’t be listening, of course – I’ve heard sixty-some examples of this bloviating bullshit, and like another “Titanic” or “King Kong,” I just can’t stand any more. Just the shear folly of the damned things would be enough, but this time we have one delivered by a man who seems to live in another world entirely. One thing that won’t be in the speech - as it never is - is any explanation for why, in a nation where appointments like the Supreme Court are fought over by the partisan interests like the proverbial cat and dog fight, the “nomination” for Chairman of the Federal Reserve has the smoothest of sailing. There’ll be no mention, either, concerning why four different presidents, two from each party, have approved of Alan Greenspan. You’d have to be a moron to believe that doesn’t tell us who really runs the nation, but there are obviously a lot of morons around these days.

When you put it all with the fact that George W. Bush is a politician and the archetypical professional liar, the only reason anyone would watch the State of the Union speech is for the theater. I’m not “into” theater where the future of my country is at stake, however. I hope the bastard’s tongue goes spastic like it often does. Otherwise, this is the speech:

Everything is wonderful. The economy is booming, jobs are being “created” (you know they think they’re god when their floundering fecklessness is “creation”) by the millions, environmental pollution is getting better, crime is down, and illegal immigration has been slowed to a crawl. Education is so wonderful that our kids can’t wait to get into college and the really serious stuff like physics, rocket science, and – well, of course – politics.

Have you ever wondered what would happen if the Prez somehow got a shot of pentothal sodium (truth serum, co-called) in the butt? Well, THEN you’d hear something like this: Our corporations, corporations who used to say things like “what’s good for General Motors is good for the United States,” are eliminating tens of thousands of jobs, “down-sizing” and running to foreign labor pools or importing as many aliens who’ll work for peanuts as possible, or going bust. The ones too small to move overseas – buying your way into a country takes some REAL bucks to say nothing of Washington-style diplomacy – are importing illegal aliens as fast as they can, and fighting any effort by the government (or anyone else, for that matter) to close the border or even slow the stampede.

We’d hear that we’ve pissed off so many people with exploitation like that last that some are attacking us with bombs, biochemical agents, and high-jacked jetliners. We call that “terror.” That’s when they do it, of course. When we do it, it’s called freedom-fighting and the War on Terror, and you should support it – support our troops, remember?

Of course, and in order to fight “terror,” we are violating the Constitution at will, tapping your phone, reading your e-mail, bugging your house and car, and arresting people without warrant or probable cause. Some people are all worked up about that, but it’s all more of that Constitutional bullshit, anyway – how do you expect me to protect you, if I have to obey nonsensical shit like our legal system and it nitwit laws? The people who bitch about being a little collateral damage in the War on Terror are traitors. You’re for me or you’re against me.

We – when I do it, goddammit, it’s WE – attacked . . . Let’s see . . . I know I – we – attacked somebody (the bill so far is like three hundred billion) . . . IRAQ – we attacked Iraq. We attacked Iraq because somebody we thought was in Afghanistan attacked us. I guess.

Well, goddammit – they incinerated themselves when those airliners crashed into the World Trade Center, so how the hell do you expect me to know?

Anyway, we attacked Iraq. The fact that a few missiles flew clear over the place and blasted somebody else’s country was just a mistake. COLLATERAL DAMAGE, dammit. The other day, when we thought al Zawahiri was in that little town in Pakistan and when we obliterated a few blocks a few women and kids got killed . . . Yeah, COLLATERAL DAMAGE! These things just happen. I’m not apologizing.

The CIA – who has nothing but the benefit of the country in mind, mind you (and if anybody mentions that they were created, organized, and are owned by military industrial corporations like Halliburton, I’ll walk right out of here) – said they had “weapons of mass destruction.” Some traitorosotous . . . traitoress . . . well, you know – the people who aren’t on my side . . . sonofabitch said the other day that any bomb bigger than a washtub is a “weapon of mass destruction” to the CIA.

Look, the boys over there are doing better. We’ve got a new man in there and he’s straightening things out. The little problem we had when Hurricane Katrina and Rita hit was just transition. How the hell did we know the levees would break? And if anybody smarts off by saying that sounds like Nine-Eleven, the WMD intelligence, and all that, I’ll sic IRS on him. You’re either with me or you’re a traitor.

We’re gonna keep bugging the phones and reading the e-mail. There’s some great stuff in there. We’re learning all kinds of things. Like did you know that sixty percent of American women will do it with a stranger for money? Forty percent have cheated on their husbands. A big percentage of them say they’re not sorry, too. Thirty percent of our young women will screw on camera for a month’s pay. Older ones say they’ll do it for a week’s pay. Hey, we’re getting some great shots through the bedroom windows, too. The Supreme Court, you know, said that was all right if we’re collecting taxes – hey, this is the War on Terror. That has to mean we can do it any time we suspect she could be making it with an Arab, right?

Anybody who won’t let us peek up their skirt is a traitorous. Traitoress. Your know – female traitor.

We also find out who’s got something on us. There was a guy a few years ago who damned near shut down the government because he started bugging OUR phones, reading our mail, and listening at our keyholes. He had so much shit on the people over at IRS and a few more that when the shit hit the fan, it would have tied things up in knots for years. We had to order a court to rule that the records he wanted were all a matter of national security, and quash his Freedom of Information Act suit for the stuff. Shit, it’s bad enough that these days everybody runs around with a damned video camera. Cops are getting caught in the act all over the place. There you have it again. A few cops getting out of hand, knocking a few heads, and you’d think it was a big damned deal.

It’s like the thing with IRS, too. Some of the lads were getting a little pussy instead of tax money. Man, you’d think anybody with the brain of a piss ant would expect people with all that power to scratch their horny itch with it every once in a while. But there you have it again - a cop gets a little pussy to stuff a ticket, and we’re supposed to go out of business? I don’t think so. It’s just COLLATERAL DAMAGE! Goes with the territory.

And so on. That’s what we’d hear, because that’s the truth. But we’re not going to hear that, principally because we don’t WANT to hear it. We like the lies because they make us feel good for another day. Anybody who stops to think a minute would expect all that other stuff, anyway. When Lord Acton found that power corrupts, he overlooked something. That’s that people who want power are already corrupt. You don’t put a drunk in charge of the liquor cabinet and act surprised when the booze disappears.

So you’ll sit like the Man With The Hoe stood, and listen. “Stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” you’ll listen. Now I know why John Adams said democracy never lasts long.

"Dancing with the Stars" and the Bush League "Administration"

To watch "Dancing with the Stars" the last couple of weeks has been excruciating, at least where one P. Miller and his evidently long suffering partner are concerned. The guy is supposedly a NBA basketball star, but he dances like a bear in concrete boots. This guy has all the grace of an "Imperial Walker" in Star Wars. Still, he remains in the competition, and on the show, because half the criteria for keeping him there is television audience response. The fact that the show's experts have been telling Miller to go home, that he dances like a drunk on stilts, isn't enough.

But the situation is much - damned near identical - to what we have in the White House and on the dance floor that is U.S. Foreign Affairs. George W. Bush and the Bush League he obliviously calls an administration handle things like the War on Terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the rest in a manner very much like the way P. Miller "dances." More, these Keystone Kops stay in power and on the dance floor for much the same reasons as the ponderous basketball player Miller has stayed on "Dancing with the Stars." It's time to get over the sophomoric, "support your team" mentality, folks. This is a lot more serious than loyalty to a sports hero. You may think the f------ Super Bowl or whatever the hell the call the NBA version of the same is more important than war and the vicious killing of innocents it entails, but it isn't.

And while I'm on the subject, the next mental midget jackass who tells me that because I know better than what the Bush League and its clownish machinations mean for Iraq, Afghanistan, and the rest of the world I don't "support our troops" may damned well get his arm torn off and being beaten unconscious with its gushing stump. If we chose to invade the Switzerland - or the Vatican - would that mean that my disapproval also meant I didn't support our troops? We're wrong, and to support our troops means to demand that they come home. You do not support me by sending me into a fight I can't win. You REALLY piss me off when the reason I can't win is because you won't LET me win - especially while all the while you are tying my hands - and feet - you insist that you're supporting me.

On to another subject (that one pisses me off so, I can't type): If anything pisses me off more than the way we were lied into war, it's the latest Big Lie, that having to do with the illegal and unconstitutional - that by a guy whose oath of office says he won't do that - surveillance of citizens. They are reading my e-mail and regular mail, and listening to my phone calls as I write this, they have been doing that for the last twenty three years, and this twisted son of a bitch dares stand in front of us and make speeches wherein he says the only eavesdropping is on suspected al Qa'ida operatives and associates. I haven't made an overseas call in fifty years, and have never in that time corresponded by e-mail or otherwise with anyone outside the U.S. THE MAN AND HIS "ADMINISTRATION" ARE LIARS!

Added to the monumental frustration of it all is the cynical lying of the media
as regards the matter. It's similar to the way that congressmen, senators, and the media ignored FOR YEARS continual proof of high - that's felony - crimes by the Internal Revenue Service and other federal bureaucracies and bureaucrats. I mailed proof of rape, extortion to commit rape, wrongful conversion of property, and much more, again and again, and to no avail. THIS NATION'S NEWS MEDIA AND ITS GOVERNMENT ARE A CYNICAL, DECEPTIVE, PROPAGANDIST FRAUD. It's a lie. The dissimulating partisan "debate" between Conservative and Liberal, between Republican and Democrat, is a Mutt and Jeff, Bad Cop-Good Cop fraud, designed and intended to keep the public stupefied and stopped.

ONE, MORE, TIME: The "military industrial complex" President General Dwight Eisenhower warned of is in power. LOOK AROUND YOU! See if your normal mind will let you interpret what is going on any other way. The fate of our Jeffersonian Democracy is being decided as we speak. If Bush gets away with this, we will become a totalitarian state in a very, very short time. The Constitution of the United States. I remind you, must be enforced by the people because it is a law intended to control government. Now we are being told that the President is the sole judge of how the Constitution applies to him, and what power he has. To leave enforcement of the law - any law - to the people it seeks to control is utter nonsense.

More, the arguments being put forward by supporters of the President are stunning in their incoherent and bewildered rationale. The President is a good man - he talks to god! He needs to be able to listen to your private conversations because there are evil people trying to hurt us. That's while the borders are LEFT so open that literally droves of people pour into the country hourly. HOW CAN YOU BE SO STUPID?! It goes on, and on.

So we have it. While experts look on aghast and impotent at the guy who dances like an elephant, the public votes him back again and again. Watching the President and his FUBAR Bush League wallow about like a beached whales makes one wonder what will happen once P. Miller smashes his partners foot, or crushed her when he topples. Will the TV audience demand that someone supply him another victim?

And doesn't this clown know what he looks like?

Watching an Old Movie, and a Young (very) Nation

Before I begin here, we’ve had another appearance by the Virgin Mary. In Mexico. Now, I was raised – what raising I had – Catholic, and went to a private Catholic high school, but will somebody explain to me why the Blessed Virgin would appear as a stain (I guess that’s what this latest one is) in paneling on a wall? In Corpus Christi a little while after I arrived there, she was a stain on the floor under a carpet, then – no offense intended here; I’m just telling what happened – it was the scum in an obviously dirty shower stall. That last one really had me nonplussed.

An adjunct to my question is: what is a stain, an unusually-shaped potato, or the like supposed to mean? What does it have to do with anything?

Really, folks – this (among a host the like) is becoming worrisome. Hasn’t religion packaged and prostituted to worship “The bitch goddess Success – with the squalid cash interpretation place on the term ‘success’ . . .” caused enough freaking trouble? I mean, we have a nut case like Pat Robertson, who wants to do murder in the name of religion, added to bin Laden, al Zarqawi and the rest of the nut cases there are in Islam, all tangled up with a megalomaniac in the White House who talks to god, and gets answers. It makes me wonder – nay, it makes me want to know - Do the stains in the paneling or carpet at the White House, or vegetables in the salad with unusual shapes talk to the president? Does he answer?

Come on, people – get in the real world. You're needed here. You, too, Mr. Bush.

Speaking of things representing other things (if that's what I was doing): last night, I watched one of those “geez – you mean you’ve never seen . . .” whatever-the-hell, “the movie?” movies. I don’t watch a hell of a lot of movies. They’ve kept doing Titanic and King Kong over and over so many times, the martial arts movies are so damned implausible and nonsensical, ditto the sex scenes no matter what kind of movie it is, and the rest, that I just pass. It’s come to the point that any time a movies gets an Academy Award, I don’t bother to even read the poster outside the theater. Crap. It’s like “popular” music. Two weeks on the charts before being gone to oblivion, and it’s a classic. Like actors, the singer or “artist” will be around for a year or so before vanishing. Then he’s a “legend.” Give me a break!

Better to read a book - the movie is never as good as the book, anyway - and listen to the real classical music on the CD or tape player.

But for anyone who wants to see one of those microcosms I’m always talking about – this one a microcosm of the nation – see the Kevin Costner movie. The bodyguard client and her entourage, including her security, are so much like the United States and its bewildered security that it had me grabbing for the box (we rented the thing) to see when the movie was made. The screenwriter just had to have an ulterior motive (it looks like no such thing, though – just coincidence) in current events.
Get this: There’s someone – individual or group – outside who wants to do Somebody (can’t remember the name) Houston, the actress-singer client, great bodily harm. The enemy has been in the house – bedroom, matter of fact – several times, and when Farmer – the “wrangler” played by Costner – takes the job, he finds the security around the place downright ridiculous. Lugubrious, even. The people who are being paid to protect Houston are clowns, her manager and staff don’t know their asses from a hole in the ground, and everybody who might so much as notice any approaching danger are too busy partying to notice so much as whether they have clothes on.
Costner takes one look and says, “Thanks, but no f------ thanks.” Smart man. But then he notices there’s a little boy in the menagerie, a little guy you like right away for his little kid affability and innocence, and the bodyguard has second thoughts. He takes the job.

Funny thing, Fletcher, the little boy, got me, too – in more ways than one. I was about to hit the “off” button on the remote and pitch “The Bodyguard” when the little kid came into the picture. That made it worth watching. What was going to happen to the little guy?

That, you see, is the only reason I stay here in this sinking ship of a nation. I, of all people, don’t need anything – not one, damned thing - this country has to offer. Sure as hell not its slimeball government. And I sure as hell don’t want to be part of “collateral damaging” innocent women and kids everywhere in the world.
I stay here for the kids. Our children and grandchildren don’t deserve what’s being done to them and their future. I keep hoping I can figure something out, find some way to make the shit-for-brains people partying at life in this country come to their senses and get in the real world. Like Costner tries to do in the movie with Somebody’s Houston’s entourage.

Rent the movie, you’ll see the U.S. before – and after September 11, 2001. In fact, I think the national state of readiness in the aftermath is even less than before, the result of some kind of weird and perverse quirk in the evolved character of the public and its culture. I mean, look around. Listen. This is bedlam. From Bush and the government’s utter, Katrina-and-New-Orleans fecklessness (you don’t see another impending World Trade Center in that?) to the Schroedinger’s Cat incertitude of anything the national bodyguards say, to the profligate and absolute corruption of the Congress, to the illogical and nonsensical machinations of the Supreme Court, the public remains oblivious, partying, satisfied to demand more of the prurient, Natalee Holloway kind of “reporting” being served up by the media, and “do its thing.”

The ghost in the machine of the “Bodyguard” story is a traitor, the client’s own sister. Is that apropos? Is that a metaphor of this benighted looney-bin country? Does anybody still believe 9-11 wasn’t an inside job? In the movie, the traitor goes on concealing her complicity in what’s going on right to the bitter end, her own death at the hands of the assassin. The watch dog, in other words, doesn’t bark. Here in the real world, the post-WTC and 9-11 government goes on dissimulating, “damage controlling,” and covering up the truth of how a thing so impossible without inside help could have happened.

The metaphor goes on right down to excruciating detail. The man who is Somebody Houston’s manager and publicist personifies the U.S. citizenry and culture perfectly. The self-interested capitalist nonpareil, he cares about nothing and no one but the Academy Award he has been striving for to the exclusion of all other interests. Even when the bodyguard has thrown himself between the assassin’s fire and his meal ticket and claim to fame client, the manager’s immediate interest is the card announcing Houston the winner, not the blood that stains it. If you watch that scene and don't think of more than twenty-two hundred bodies and fifteen hundred maimed for life in Iraq and Afghanistan, while the nation’s manager – that’s the public, you know – remains concerned with national prestige to the exclusion of all else, you're brain dead. If you don't see in that bloody card a Super Bowl, Golden Globe Awards and the tawdry like, "Info-tainment" and tabloid news, "Desperate Housewives," soap operas, and who just married or divorced whom in Hollywood, you deserve what happens to you.

Your kids, like little Fletcher in the movie, don't. See the movie "The Bodyguard" again. This time, wake up and really see it.

Rules of Engagement and Civil Rights Become "Collateral Damage."

That's the wound inflicted by a federal sniper, October 6, 1986. IRS thought I would testify in the Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights hearings. Glad you asked.

Well, it’s agreed. Official. The “rules of engagement” in the Great War on Terror say that you and I, the common, everyday nobody people are fair game anytime we come as close as the bursting radius of a 2,000 pound JDAM bomb or Hellfire missile to anyone suspected of being a terrorist by the Bush Administration. The conservative pundits all say so, the generals say so, and the Great Man himself – he talks to god, after all – says so. Suck it up – that’s just the way it is.

What the hell were you doing that close to a terrorist, anyway?! Never mind that YOUR military intelligence – never mind the oxymoron, either – would have to be a hell of a lot better than that of your government and its military (the guys shooting at you), we have to save us from “terror,” and the way we do it is kill a few of the people the bad guys are terrorizing. THEY do terror. We PROTECT you from terror. If you can’t tell the difference, you’re a damned traitor. You say "no way I'm a traitor?" Well, by god, you need to start listening to Sean Hannity and the night time radio pundits. They'll tell you. You bitch about a little "collateral damage," you're a traitor.

And if you’re a woman or a little kid . . . well, it’s the terrorist’s fault. No terrorism, no women and kids killed. You just don’t understand that there’s always going to be collateral damage. F------ traitor.

We put women in combat nowadays, anyway. What’s the difference?

Apparently, if we are to believe our illustrious Attorney General (damn - how could I forget the name of a great lawyer like that?!), the collateral damage rule of engagement is true where our constitutional rights are concerned, too. If somebody the Bush League suspects of being a terrorist (hint: don’t have friends who are of Arab descent – or look like they might be) might call you, your phone can be bugged, your e-mail read, your computer monitored and “data mined,” and your wife photographed through her bedroom or bathroom window. Coppozzolli v. IRS, remember?

Even if you’re not a terrorist, they might happen to get something good otherwise - catch you having sex or the missus nekkid, for instance – and they can always sell it like they already do with tax records and all the rest.  
Collateral damage should be profitable where it can, you know. We were going to pay for the war in Iraq with all that oil, remember? If you need instruction on that, too, just ask Halliburton and its proud corporate capitalist kind.
So there you have it, the rules of engagement in the Great War on Terror. You can be killed by a terrorist, or you can be killed by your government when it kills a terrorist. That violates your rights, too, you know. You didn’t? Well, you’re a patriot. You don’t care? Well, ditto – you’re a patriot there, too.

Now that that’s out of the way, and we’re all agreed to be sacrifices to the cause, I’m kind of wondering about a couple of other things, besides. All the same great minds who are giving us those rules of engagement for patriots are also telling us that our pull-out in Iraq would be a catastrophe. Pardon me for a traitor, but – unless we’re talking about the oil and the strategic power we seek - how? What – the Iraqis would invade us? Arab terrorists would escape - into Afghanistan, maybe? What is it exactly that would be catastrophic?

“AMERICA” WOULD SUFFER LOSS OF PRESTIGE? Surely, you jest. The rest of the world doesn’t live in the benighted state we do. They know what’s going on, and what’s going on is what I said in my January 17th "blog" here. We’ve been taxing the whole world with our inflation tax – what’s good for our people is good for everybody else – and they’re tired of “taxation without representation.” That's not all, either. Four percent of the world's population, we consume thirty-five percent of the planet's energy and resources, and want more, much more. Responsible for almost half the pollution on earth, we refuse to join with the rest of the world in the effort to clean up. The United States is like my lawyer’s description of IRS. “They take whatever they want and piss on the rest.” We not only consume and pollute everything we can reach, we've begun to demand that everybody do as we say, besides. 

Loss of prestige? Damn – now that’s chutzpah!

We’re going to attack Iran, count on it. The Maine, the Lusitania, Peal Harbor, the Cold War, Nicaragua, Panama, the first attack on Iraq (“Desert Storm”), etc., etc., etc. My god, it’s like reading a play by Shakespeare.   The attack may be a conventional one, a missile barrage to take out all of Iran’s nuclear facilities. Hell, we just fired missiles into Pakistan - why should Iran be different? Or North Korea, for that matter. But it may even be a nuclear attack. The nuke would be a display of strategic power, the kind of thing I had reference to in my last “blog.” Strategic power – all those nuclear ICBMs, subs, and carriers – is one of the few things we have left to stave off the economic retribution we know is coming. That's what's really important to us.

A nuclear strike would send the message that we’re that ruthless. Bush has already warned the world that we would act unilaterally, and he did. He thinks he got away with it, and he’ll do it again. And what our “C” student (if you think he really got “C”s at Yale, I’d like to talk to you about a bargain I can give you on a famous bridge) can tell you about Arab and Islamic history wouldn’t make you blink if you got it in your eye. This is not the brightest candle on the birthday cake, you know . . .  
 
He talks to god, remember?

A friend of mine with an impressive record of forecasting economic and geo-political news predicts that oil prices will reach a hundred, even a hundred twenty dollars a barrel this year. I agree. Grab yourself by the ass and hang on, friend - this is gonna be a hell of a ride.

As I said, 2006 could be the year that was the beginning of the end.
 

No, We're Not Going to Withdraw from Iraq

January 17, 2006:

A couple of days ago, there was still another terrorist incident, the bombing of a small village in Pakistan. According to reports, an aircraft without permission and illegally entered Pakistani air space Friday, showering Damadola village with rockets. The attack, which left at least 18 persons (with the federal Bullshit Factor, that means around fifty actually died) including six children and as many women and some cattle dead, has triggered worldwide protests against the terrorists. The United States, however, was not among them. That’s because the United States, the CIA and its super-corrupt government, were the bomb throwers. So what else is new . . . ?

Supposedly (with this administration, there’s always an excuse, something hackneyed beyond all rational credibility, isn’t there?), we were trying to kill Al Qa’ida second in command Ayman al-Zawahiri. Of course, and as is also usual with the Bush Leaguers, “intelligence” was conveniently faulty, and Al Zawahiri wasn’t in the village. Once more, the innocents killed were “collateral damage.” Just tough shit. If we’re after a “terrorist,” or anything else "in the interest of the United States," what’s a couple dozen kids and a dinky-ass little village or two? Reminds anybody of the village in Vietnam that had to be obliterated in order to save it? No, I don't suppose. Everybody who listens to the media knows there are no parallels between this war and Vietnam.

Pakistan has described the United States' bombardment last week of a tribal area in the country as an attack on its sovereignty. Damned narrow-minded of them, and our pundits like FoxNews’ Bill O’Reilly are telling them so in no uncertain terms. The United States government has already refused to apologize. This president is never in the wrong, of course, whether it's violation of the rights of U.S. citizens or those of other countries. It just happens that this latest of atrocities by the United States took place a short time (January 9, as I recall) after Harry Belafonte was excoriated in the U.S. media and press for calling our president “the greatest terrorist in the world.” Harry, says, Bill O’Reilly, is a traitor.

As for me, hell, I don’t know what to say, anymore. You do have to wonder – as I imagine nearly everybody else in the world is wondering – what in hell will this megalomaniacal SOB do next? And what the hell does it take to get him impeached? The man is now guilty – and there is utterly no doubt about it - of war crimes. That’s in front of the entire planet. And I remind you that declaring "war on terror" does not in any legal - or, for that matter, moral - way justify bombing any country we happen to choose.

So where in the hell are we? What’s next? Well, obviously, the world hates our guts, and just as obviously with good reason. That means that every little country we might invade next – meaning anyone who has anything we want, meaning damned near everything we need and everybody we hate – wants to get a nuke. Otherwise, they’re going the way of Nicaragua, Chile, Panama, Grenada, Iraq, and fifty more. Face it, the U.S. invaded Iraq because of its oil resources, mostly untapped, and the fact that Iraq is right at the heart of the world's energy supply. That, in turn, means control of Iraq extends U.S. strategic power, over all of Europe and Asia. That means little countries like Iran, North Korea, and the like need a nuclear threat.

Are you wondering about Cuba, too? Once, we were willing to go to war with the Soviet Union over medium range missiles there.

But the U.S. government knows it stays in power as long as the decadent, gluttonous, and overweight U.S. public has gas for the SUVs that are as overweight and gluttonous as their owners. But even if we were living on renewable energy, we need a whole lot more than just those SUVs to maintain the “American Lifestyle.” That means all the world’s minerals, metals, soil, food, water – everything. And that's another major reason for controlling the oil resources - strategic power. And strategic power leverage is the reason for insisting that no one else get a nuclear weapon.

Oil was the reason for invading Iraq, the fundamental reason. That’s the reason we'll be there indefinitely. Just like we planned in the first place. Nobody in his right mind and with even a cursory knowledge of history would believe we really intended to make a republic of Iraq. That’s ridiculous. Let's consider that "withdrawal" we're so anxious to make. Any day's newspaper or TV broadcast starts by saying the United States intends to bring about a democratic, sovereign, and independent Iraq. Anybody who knows Islam, the Arab temperament and character knows that isn’t even a remote possibility. For one thing - in the Arab world, the ONLY thing - it would repudiate whole tracts of the Koran and Islam. Even if Iraq were more or less democratic – an Islamic democracy (how nuts can you get?), in other words, it'll have a Shiite majority.

The Shiite Iraq will immediately seek ties with Iran – that’s Shiite Iran. Most of the Shiite clerics come from Iran, you know. So you get an Iraqi-Iran alliance. On top of that, there's a Shiite population which has been bitterly oppressed by the U.S.-backed fundamentalist tyranny, and it’s right across the border in Saudi Arabia. That just happens to be where most of the Mid-East's oil is. Can you imagine the nightmare in Washington, were a Shiite alliance to control most of the world's oil? They’d soon be totally independent of Washington. More, they’d go to China and the East, people who’d be tickled as hell to go to bed with them. You think the Military Industrial Complex and corporations who own us didn’t think of that? If you do, you can start eating hay when the inevitable big economic crunch comes - you're a jackass.

The fact is that the U.S. would go to nuclear war before letting Shiite Islam control the world's oil, and the “American” people would clamor for war just as soon as the gas pumps started going dry. Power corrupts not only “leaders,” you know. Bush and his owners will keep bombing villages, and killing the innocent, and the public will let it happen, so long as it keeps gas in those SUVs. For the same reason, we’ll go on tolerating loss of our freedoms to an increasingly totalitarian president and presidency. The fat people – that’s the majority that really counts in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave, you know – will happily vote us all right into virtual prison, just so long as their creature comforts and decadent lifestyle are protected there. They'll also cluck and wag their heads at each new atrocity, domestic or otherwise, by their government, just so long as it's not they who are the victims. "Collateral damage" is a very comforting euphemism, just like "abortion" is. Like I said, power doesn't corrupt only "leaders."

That’s always been inevitable, the natural evolution of democracy, and the reason Second President John Adams observed, “Democracy never lasts long, it soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself.” Like a kind of sociological second law of thermodynamics, human beings and their societies inexorably grow more decadent and corrupt, not more virtuous and moral.

There isn’t going to be any withdrawal from Iraq. The situation there is perfect for justifying our continued occupation, and it’s just what the White House and our slavering for corruption congress planned. We’ll keep it that way. Not for nothing are we having so hard a time finding Abu Musab al Zarqawi, just like we can’t find Osama bin Laden.

So there you have it. The truth you supposedly love so much. Enjoy!

Down the Rabbit Hole

Can't seem to find out how many in Iraq yesterday. Not important enough for the people who wanted to know about somebody named Angelina Jolie's baby by some dork named Pitt. You know - what's the latest on Natalee Holloway? Odds on the Stupor - oops, Super - Bowl? By the way - has anybody EVER seen a man buy one of those tabloid magazines? A guy I know has worked at the check-out counter for nine years, never once in all that time sold a tabloid news magazine to a male. When you realize that people who believe Christ is back on earth disguised as an alligator vote - and guess who they voted for - you see some of the problem as I see it.

And, ye gods! – The rest of the news of this country sounds like something out of bedlam. Where to start . . . Well, first, we have his majesty, George the First, running around the country saying things like, “If somebody is exchanging e-mails with al Qa’ida, we want to know why.” Then he says the people who leaked the fact that he is violating the Fourth Amendment and his oath of office should be tried for revealing state secrets. The Greek chorus at Fox News and elsewhere on that side of the lunatic fringe sing back-up. Hmmm.

Let’s see if I have this straight. If you order people tortured, George, and someone “leaks,” they should be tried for revealing state secrets? How about if you rob a bank, or murder or rape somebody?

But there you have it, a microcosm that tells you just about everything you need to know about how far you can trust our Bush League Administration – and federal government in general. How far behind the e-mail and telephone bugs is torture?

Elsewhere, more results from the liberated female segment of the observer's arc. The girls have demanded liberation, and got it. So now we see more of what they wanted. The “recent” – we’re supposed to believe it’s only just lately started happening – spate of gals who want to make it with boys has everybody agape with what seems to me to be bewildered nonplussedness. Here’s a guy – happens to be fourteen – with a chance to screw a beauty queen who happens to be, say, thirty. For all the obvious – well, they would be, were it not for the weird pronouncements of militant feminism – reasons, both parties are happy as a hog in fresh mud.

But for all the factions where the battle of the sexes is concerned, there are a wh-o-o-o-le BUNCH of problems. The cuckoo bird weird (anybody remember Marilyn French's "All men are rapists, and that is all they are"?) want the women tried for rape. They have “abused” the guys. On the other hand, men all across the country – and, presumably, planet – are saying, “God – let me be abused like that! Please!”
And yeah, I know – “It’s the law.” It’s also another microcosm by which to judge the cogitative brilliance of the booby-hatch otherwise known as U.S. society, the reason I’ve always since boyhood tried resolutely to stay away.

Moving on through those chronicles of erudition, wisdom, and light, the news, we find an article concerning the convenience – for holdup and smash and grab men, anyway (did Congress invent these things, maybe) – story clerk who drove a frequent – four or five time, apparently – robber off with a baseball bat. Thankfully, the commentator reported that “The clerk won’t be charged.”

Another microcosm. First you fight for your life, then wonder it you'll be charged with anything. Or what.

Then there’s the latest from New Orleans, stuff like people who have repairs on their homes largely finished, only to learn now that the great minds of government intend to bull-doze the neighborhood. Another micro . . . oh, never mind!

What I want to know is where always are the people who bitch so loud and long AFTER something happens BEFORE it happens? There are thousands – literally – of examples, but take New Orleans for one. People to whom the fact that they were living below sea level – and what that means - was as obvious as the Rocky Mountains said absolutely nothing about the condition of the dikes, asked no questions about how dependable they were and all the obvious rest are bitching NOW? In a country whose government’s efficiency and character is as obvious as the MOON? NOW you’re expecting the class of clowns who has been promoted from grade to grade on every possible basis other than academic performance to write a doctoral thesis on something like quantum physics or higher mathematics? JESUS!

Tell me THAT’s not a microcosm of the Land of the Fee.

So here we are down the rabbit hole. Each night, we listen to the Mutt and Jeff, Good Cop, Bad Cop logomachy (look it up, O’Reilly – you supercilious, sesquipedalian nitwit), television and the print media foists on the stupefied public as political debate. Tell me, if it’s true as we’re told again, again, and again, ad nauseum, that the media is all liberal, and that the media is all that persuasive and therefore dangerous to our freedoms, why do we keep drifting – “drifting,” did I say? – we’re “drifting” like an avalanche drifts - toward totalitarianism?

For the love of Mike, the President of the country hands out cockamamie nostrums and excuses like this latest (I’m still agape at the way he hornswoggled the public on those Iraqi WMDs) eavesdropping canard and it looks like he’ll get away with it! The borders of the nation, the ports and ocean approaches are all wide open – the doors and windows of the house stand ajar – AND THE WAY TO PROTECT THE PEOPLE INSIDE IS TO LISTEN TO THEIR PHONE CALLS?! That’s, in every sense of the word possible, unbelievable! Utter nonsense.

Finally, nothing in the news is more maddening and infuriating as the blatantly cynical contempt this government and its sycophant supporters - hey, it sells yellow ribbons - show for men and women dying for them in Iraq and Afghanistan. I wrote about the yesterday and the day before; it’s making my blood boil. Things like standing a young private first class in Iraq before a four star general who then asks, “How’s your morale?” Or the FoxNews reporter – sellout pimps like Oliver North – shoving a microphone in the face of a lieutenant or captain in Baghdad and asking how things are going. On TV!

What do you think the guy will say? Try to imagine what would happen to him, were he to tell it like it is. In the novel Catch-22, Joseph Heller wrote, "All over the world, boys on every side of the bomb line were laying down their lives for what they had been told was their country, and no one seemed to mind, least of all the boys who were laying down their young lives. There was no end in sight."

Try to imagine that young lieutenant or captain saying, “Well, there’s no end in sight.”

I’m reminded again – hell, I’m reminded every day – of second President John Adams’ dictum. “The proposition that the people are the best protectors of their own liberties is not true. They are the worst conceivable, they are no keepers at all; they can neither judge, act, think, or will as a political body.”

When historians of the future write about this time, there is no doubt whatever that they will recall Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. They’ll read some of the crap we hear every night on the news, and say with the poet, "Whom the Gods would destroy, they first make mad."

As for me, I’m wondering how much longer to stay here in Wonderland. “Oh, you can't help that,” said the Cat: “we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.” “How do you know I'm mad?” said Alice. “You must be,’ said the Cat, “or you wouldn't be here.”

Yeah.

How to Be a Prophet in the Land of the Free

January 11, 2006:

Oops - started another blizzard of knee-jerk "patriotism." I'm giving "aid and comfort to the enemy" because I point out how FUBAR we are as a nation, and criticize the system that made it happen. I mean, of course, the bastardized version of what the Founding Fathers gave us, the bastard having been born of incestuous liaison between federal government and the military industrial complex immediately after World War Two. I spoke of that earlier here, so I won't repeat myself. Have a look at my "blog" for December 4, 2005. http://www.judoknighterrant.com

Anyway, to argue that anyone who points out your weaknesses is aiding your enemy is like saying your team's coach is aiding your opponent because he tells you what you're doing wrong. If you're stupid enough to make an argument like that, don't expect an answer from me. "The only thing that will argue with a jackass," my grandfather used to say, "is a jackass." I don't discuss anything, much less argue, with a jackass. Besides, I seldom make statements that I can't defend. I've been an ardent student of tactics since I was a boy, such that when I make an argument, I've laid my defenses carefully beforehand. I know the subject and the proof of my contentions in that regard thoroughly. Disagree you may - as a matter of right - but you're walking into a trap when you do.

In witness thereof, a story. Today, my friend Bill sends me an excellent article from Harvard Magazine by Professor Elizabeth Warren, Ph.D. The essay, http://www.harvard-magazine.com/on-line/010682.html entitled "The Middle Class on the Precipice," is a paraphrase - damned near verbatim - of what I started talking about in what I sometimes call "my infamous speech" at the University of Northern Iowa in 1972. I have repeated the essay's theme often during the last few (seven, at least) years, and it is printed in my book "Letters to Aaron" and its revised edition, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story. Several of the theories in the profesora's essay have been published here, as a matter of fact.

Note that I do not accuse Dr. Warren of plagiarism. What has happened - the history related by Dr. Warren - is as obvious and unmistakable as the fact that it would happen should have been all those years ago. I said so, and I went further to predict the massive avarice that would result in flight by corporate mega-business to greener pastures, together with wholesale "outsourcing" of jobs to foreigners, even enemies of the U.S. I predicted the enormous influx of "migrants" from Mexico and Latin America spurred by conspiracy and encouragement of illegal immigration by a desperate middle class and its less powerful corporations. During the time a presidential candidate, Ross Perot, predicted the "giant, sucking sound" that would punctuate NAFTA, I said the sucking sound had already started, created by the vacuum being formed as the middle class here evaporated - we just weren't able to hear it amidst all the bull-roar lying emanating from capitalist America and its corporately-owned federal government. I said it, all over the U.S., and a lot of people will remember.

I said it, and like the S.W.A.T. team concept I first propounded in 1956, then again in 1967, the idea was scoffed at. I was labeled a lunatic, and libeled as a fraud and an imposter. I was also right.

I was right then as I am now. And just like then, having become apparent as the Rocky Mountains, everybody knew I was right. In fact, it was their idea all along. They invented it.

The sad - an however deflating - fact is that any damned fool should have known. The question is why didn't they? I everybody saw it coming, why was nothing done? In the instance of S.W.A.T. (it was first dubbed "The Mongoose Tactic") concept, it took having a man named Whitman shoot dozens of people from a tower at the University of Texas to gain acceptance - and credit for somebody else. Of course. Surprise!

In the instance of our FUBAR economic state, the evolution of what came to be called "capitalism" was subject to laws so absolute, so apparent and universal as to resemble gravity. Neither can it be argued that no warnings, no clues, no parallel forces existed. "Power corrupts," Lord Acton said. "Absolute power corrupts absolutely." Lord Acton, Emmerich Edward Dalberg, First Baron of Aldenham, English and German historian born 1834 and died 1902, studied the effect of politics and power on individual and social behavior. He also reported famously - not so in this country, of course, it not being a popular theory - “It is bad to be oppressed by a minority, but it is worse to be oppressed by a majority.” That the two dicta are obvious restatements of one another is also not something you would expect to be promulgated loudly in the Land of the Fee, either. The majority wouldn't like it.
So power has corrupted. Surprise (again). Exactly what anyone reasonably well informed and/or well-versed in "American" - need I point out yet another time that there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere? - capitalism, "American" government and politics, and "American" law would have expected has happened. While the mega-corporations "earn" stupendous profits, and make ready to move on to new colonialist vistas, the population living in poverty soars apace (surprise - again), and the middle class bulwark the nation was built on in the first place disintegrates. The "great, sucking sound" has grown to a hurricane roar. Sur . . . oh, never mind!

As I said, any fool could have seen it coming. Those grown sufficiently rich from the then universally accepted exploitation of the poor went on to seek more wealth - and, in a society and nation predicated upon that kind of mores and life view - power. With many times the access to government, the rich soon did just that, and a vicious cycle - one even more insidious in its nature - started. With more wealth, the rich acquired from government more and more prerogatives. Eventually, with purchase of the courts' favor, the rich rid themselves even of responsibility by means of what was called "incorporation." Wealth became a person, with all the rights and prerogatives of an individual, but without liability for its misdeeds. All profit, no responsibility. Incredible? Un-American? You'd have thought so.

The power of wealth grew, and grew. Eventually, it purchased by bribery the monetary system of the nation itself. That was called the Federal Reserve Act, and I've discussed it here already. As a famous French nobleman and financier, Baron Amsel Rothschild, said, "Give me control of a country's money and I care not who makes her laws. I will have no need to be king." The principle is so simple a child can understand it, and I have spoken often of it, using this parable: "Imagine," I say, "that you and I form a company. You control everything: hiring, firing, product, location - everything. I control only one thing, the money. Who is running the company?"

Of course. And the United States of America - it's people, that is - have borrowed, borrowed, and borrowed in order to feed a Brobdingnagian monster government, pay the taxes of the equally colossal corporations who own the government, and provide for a military that beggars description or understanding (try $15,000,000,000,000 since World War Two, and $760,000,000,000 per year). Anesthetized and rendered functionally brain-dead by the most relentless and exhaustive mind and opinion control propaganda ever levied against the mind of man, and having spent funds in amounts inconceivable by anyone but skilled mathematicians, "Americans'" country and nation is now owned lock, stock, and barrel by bankers both domestic and foreign. The gross domestic product of the U.S. - everything it is able to produce and earn, everything it owns of value (and that set by the wealthy who otherwise own the public) - will no longer pay the interest on its debt to the bankers and financiers who effectively - and legally, incidentally - own it. All of that has come to pass while "America" continues to believe it is free, ruled by the democratic majority.

In witness of the absolutely astonishing power of the propaganda campaign levied by the wealthy and powerful against their country and countrymen, consider a few examples from the article by Dr. Warren (and I quote):

"The one-two punch of income vulnerability and rising costs has weakened the middle class, at the same time that the revision of the rules of financing delivers a death blow to millions of families each year. Since the early 1980s, the credit industry has rewritten the rules of lending to families. Congress has turned the industry loose to charge whatever it can get and to bury tricks and traps throughout credit agreements. Credit-card contracts that were less than a page long in the early 1980s now number 30 or more pages of small-print legalese. In the details, credit-card companies lend money at one rate, but retain the right to change the interest rate whenever it suits them. They can even raise the rate after the money has been borrowed—a practice once considered too shady even for a back-alley loan shark. When they think they have been cheated, customers can be forced into arbitration in locations thousands of miles from home. Some companies claim that they can repossess anything a customer buys with a credit card.
Credit-card issuers are not alone in their boldness. Home-mortgage lenders are writing mortgages that are so one-sided that some of their products are known as “loan-to-own” because it is the mortgage company—not the buyer—who will end up with the house. Payday lenders are ringing military bases and setting up shop in working-class neighborhoods, offering instant cash that can eventually cost the customer more than a thousand percent interest."


How about that?! Incredibly, an "American" will not only borrow money without knowing what he is going to pay for it, he will buy a house, or car, or whatever under the same conditions!

Surprising? No, not when you realize that he has done the same with his country and government. And the result, as I've just related, has been the same - The mortgage company has wound up with the house. AND NO ONE SEES THE PARALLEL!

When the President lies bald-faced - a lie certainly archetypical of Hitler's "Big Lie - "American" see no parallel, and nothing happens. When he violates the Constitution and repudiates his oath of office, no one see a parallel, or does anything. It goes on and on. Stupidity. Childish and immature distractions of every conceivable kind, while the really critical issues of living are left to the corrupt, greedy, and power-mad known as "politicians." While, for instance, tens of thousands are being killed in two wars being waged for personal and corporate gain by the super wealthy and the power-mad, the public manifests its decadence in anticipation, preparation, adulation, and the rest having to do with football "Bowl Games," and the Super Bowl. Men and women doing battle with tanks, guns, planes, ships, and firearms are somehow (I sure as hell have no idea) less interesting and emotive - less heroic - than men playing FOOTBALL!

That while the twenty or thirty a month death toll of the nation's troops is relegated to the rear pages in the paper and the "flow strip" at the bottom of the TV screen, and patriotism otherwise is a yellow ribbon sticker on trunk lids and bumpers.

Oh, yeah - and "support our troops." B-a-a-a-r-f!

If that weren't enough, we also have the heretofore inconceivable spectacle of the United States Senate intensively grilling a Supreme Court nominee in an effort to assure that he will continue the court and federal government's sniveling complicity in what a relatively small segment of the populace chooses euphemistically to call "abortion." That while a hideously murderous and internecine war rages, and the White House branch of government and its now private military insists upon a right similar in moral character to that of "abortion." I speak of the right to torture of prisoners of war. With the nation staring at murderous environmental pollution, a staggering economy, un-impeded, even widely abetted and supported, illegal immigration of hordes of criminals from Mexico, the threat of a crippling bio-chemical or nuclear attack by terrorist, and a host more, the nation's feminists' most pressing concern is "the right to choose." If that doesn't portray the state of the nation's mentality and character, nothing will. Obviously, we have few people left who remember to "ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country. Stick a yellow ribbon on your trunk?

AND YOU WONDER HOW WE CAME TO BE IN THE F.U.B.A.R. STATE WE'RE IN?

The Bush League, "Wag the Dog" Government

January 9, 2006:

Wow - yesterday, one of my tertulia at the Half-Price Bookstore in Corpus handed me an old movie, "Wag the Dog." Robert DeNiro, Dustin Hoffman, Anne Heche. It's what's actually happening in the U.S., and should be required viewing in every educational establishment in the country, including the family home. Many years ago, I heard a policy wonk from the Fletcher School of Diplomacy speak at a conference at the University of Colorado. He recommended and argued that the U.S. Government begin to "using state of the art propaganda and behavior-altering science and methodology propagated and disseminated by modern broadcast media to "deceive, confuse, and bewilder" the public as a means to maintain law and order superior to law enforcement and police departments. The movie written by Hilary Henkin and David Mamet (I wonder if they were at CU that day?), and directed by Barry Levinson portrays a White House doing just that.

Mamet, by the way is also quoted in my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story."

The President, it seems, has gotten himself in a bind having to do with sexual misconduct and a few days before election day. White House Aide Anne Heche sends for His Majesty the President's spin doctor, Robert DeNiro. The latter, having decided it will take at least a war to distract the public's children-like attention, hires top Hollywood movie producer Dustin Hoffman to create it. Anyone who has watched a media feeding frenzy like, for instance, the Natalee Holloway Affair will recognize the tactic immediately. Anyone who has been reading my "blogs" here will have thought that I, too, had seen the movie. Nope, I lived it - have since 1977.

It will be interesting to see how the White House and Congress' spin doctors handle the latest orgy of corporate incest from Prostitution on the Potomac. We've already got the war, of course, but the public's attention has long since shifted to things like the pizza and beer, redneck rodeo more commonly known as bowl games. The Stupor Bowl is yet to come, and guys doing celebratory bumps and grinds - or whatever moron maneuver the scorer can devise - are of far more interest than the latest real heroics and death toll from Iraq and Afghanistan. It's enough to make you puke. The bowl hype will have to be something to cover the stupefying stench - hard on the heels of the revelation that the White House had violated the Constitution it is sworn to uphold - resulted from the latest revelations of what has now become traditional Congressional behavior.

On the other hand, maybe they won't bother. The public's consciousness, having been subjected now for decades to the "Wag the Dog" behavioral science and techniques the Fletcher policy wonk expounded on all those years ago in Colorado, is so far removed now from reality that no similar propagandist prestidigitation may be necessary. No one observing the success and aftermath of the Bush Administration's bunco game having to do with Iraq and Afghanistan can expect this latest evidence of government gone mad to stir significant outcry. I think we're past that. No nation able to watch as stolidly and stupidly what happened in New Orleans in the aftermath of Katrina and Rita has the character remaining necessary to save itself from what must now occur. Thousands of lives lost, to war born of corrupted hubris and greed or to indifferent malfeasance and neglect in the aftermath of natural disaster, don't mean that much to a nation of individuals intent only upon gluttony, concupiscence, and self-interest. Their government of representatives is indeed representative of its constituency. The corrupt have elevated the most corrupt among them to the most corrupt places. What would you expect?

What can the rest do? Nothing, I'm afraid. Do you really think people absolutely corrupt will heal themselves? "You cannot show me," Patrick Henry observed, "a single instance in all of human history wherein the powerful have voluntarily relinquished power." Neither can anyone find anywhere in history wherein the corrupt have voluntarily surrendered their corruption.

There is, of course, one way for those who would help and addict free himself of his addiction. That is to take away from him the source of his addiction. The results of that, of course, are well known. "Withdrawal," it's called. It's also called "rebellion," because it is against the law to withhold from the patient the source of his insane corruption. That, you see, is tax money. Still, there are no other choices. The tail is wagging the dog. That's it. Fish or cut bait. We go back to what made us great in the first place, or we cease to be much of anything. Two thousand and six may very well be the year that decides it for the Home of the Brave.

We can't go on like this - the rest of the world won't let us, for one thing.

Meanwhile, the comedy about "truth, justice and other special effects" goes on unabated. Enjoy - while you can.

January 10, 2006:
The nation continues its dive toward crush depth in the oceans of virtual reality made of rhetoric made, in turn, in Washington, D.C. Desperate to cover its rape of the nation's female icon, the Lady Liberty, the White House has mounted, and goes on mounting, an assault on truth that makes the Normandy Invasions look like "rub a dub-dub, three men in a tub" by comparison. Lest anyone mistake how seriously the White House really takes what their tactics require making of the rape a mere peccadillo and nuisance, they've pulled all the stops. From smoke and mirrors by the media, to fustian, even if specious, pronouncements by prostituted legal scholars, to lugubriously ludicrous protests like that of FoxNews' Stuart Varney ("They've insulted my president"), the Bush League has gone "Wag the Dog" strategists DeNiro, Hoffman, and Heche one or two - or three - better. No device in the propagandists repertory is being left out. In my sixty-odd years of listening and watching the news, I've never seen anything remotely like it.

Reason? Well, for one, if there is - has ever been - a more classic example of cause for impeachment of a president, this is it. Having sworn to "preserve, protect, and defend," the guard has not just abandoned his post, he has upon being caught in the act repudiated the contract he made with the owners of the object he was to guard. How much more derelict can you be?

Ah, but that's not all. Hard on the heels of having been caught lying in order to send our nation and its military to utterly pointless war, the president guard wants not only to keep the consideration offered him for standing guard, he now wants to alter the deal he's repudiated - to do, in other words, as he damned-well pleases. That, folks, can be described by only one word: chutzpah. You doubt that George W. Bush thinks he's a king?

Only the arguments made by his sycophants rival the colossal temerity of the man. Realizing that what follows can only be a tiny précis of the veritable blizzard of falsehood blowing from the White House, listen!

"It's not a big deal - the president only bugged e-mails, and those of suspected al Qa'ida operatives." Well, then - how the hell did I get on the list?! I, and several friends, both found the federal "data miner" on my computer, we were able to demonstrate to several perfect stranger - that's utterly disinterested and impartial - witnesses the fact. I not only have no ties with any member of al Qa'ida (I detest the son-of-a-bitches), I have no ties with any Muslim or Arab. I have no ties with anyone from a foreign country, as a matter of fact. By now well-known to be a hermit loner, I have few ties with ANYBODY!

But, in contrast to the gossamer-thin depth of analysis cynically bloviated to the public by the Uriah Heep media, let's have a more penetrating look. We're asked to believe that big-time, fervent as jihaddists are commandos would put plan of attack operation details on the Internet. I'm not only going to risk capture and torture (we've publicized our intent to do just that - remember?), but failing Allah and losing my place in heaven with its seventy-two virgins, to say nothing of disappointing and dishonoring myself before my country, my race, and my family while smuggling a nuke or the like into a major city, and I put everything I plan out on the World Wide Web. YOU BELIEVE THAT?

Well, you might - you believed that World Trade Center, 9-11 fairy tale, too.
Bullshit. So what was - is - Bush REALLY up to? You could start with something simple, and much more characteristic. One of the first things a fed does with anything he gets his hands on that he can sell is SELL it. One of my first successes during the time I did electronic surveillance and convert intelligence operations against the government was the revelation that IRS was selling the taxpayers' records to the highest bidder. It was the beginning and earliest example of what was to become the now infamous "data mining" that infects the Internet. IRS sold thousands of records - that's identities, in case federal MKULTRA brain-washing has made you dead between the ears - to everyone willing to pay. That one even made the papers, briefly - just enough to create the now classic feat of legerdemain known as "damage control."

That's at least part of it, however small. No federal functionary sneak will have been able to resist the chance for a little quick profit, however earth-shaking the real reason for the burglaries (that's what this really is, you know) might have been, or is. I think tactically, though. I put little credence in "leaks" like this one. Come on. The White House couldn't keep something like this secret? Are you kidding? Maybe you should see that movie ("Wag the Dog," in case you've forgotten) again. And let me remind you of something another president once said, FDR. "If it happened in Washington, you can bet it was planned."

The White House - meaning the military industrial complex who owns the place lock, stock, and barrel - knew, and knows damned well that the cesspool of the corrupt we call Congress hasn't anything like the character - that's balls - it would take to impeach him. For Christ's sake, he lied - not once, but literally dozens of times over months - in order to send more than 15,000 of our troops to be maimed for life, and almost 2,200 to die and got away with it. You think he thought he'd get axed for THIS?

So what is he really up to? Well, "where the carcass is, there are the eagles." The NSA, and George, of course, gets the names of several thousand - judging from the fact that I seem to have been a "suspect," probably TENS of thousands - of "suspected" terrorist commandos. That would justify - to people so stupid they still believe that technology long since able to read a license plate from outer space couldn't find a chemical weapons or guided missile factories in Iraq - both years of dithering (remind yourself of New Orleans, Katrina and Rita) and f------ up. You could easily have another World Trade Center Attack; and explain why that wonderful Homeland Security dog didn't bark, too.

Or, you might use the tens of thousands of supposed new threats to justify another round of what would otherwise be staggering industrial military spending. A "Star Wars" defense able to intercept a gnat with a suitcase nuke (85-90 lbs - hey, in Washington, one fantasy spawns another; "No problem," as Dustin Hoffman's character kept saying) on its back. Bug every telephone and computer six times, with twelve back-ups. A million more federal cops. Two million more in the military. A draft. Raise taxes. SPARE NO EXPENSE - THIS IS NATIONAL SECURITY!

Damn right. All kinds of things are possible. Suppose they claim that one of the Internet intercepts has disclosed a plan to smuggle in vials of anthrax in a woman's vagina. Sure. Now we have to search them all. No time for all those warrants, either. Any babe unwilling to lie down and spread 'em is un-patriotic. A traitor. They oughta be jailed. Shot. Damned right!

Hell, for that matter, make it nukes in the vaginas; with this Texas Liar's Contest going on as it is, and the credibility of the public what it is, who can put a limit on what we might hear? Besides, that last one's about the only way they can top what we've already been told.

Whatever. If there's one thing I know, learned, from having been the object and victim of wholesale federal rights violation, and from having listened at the federal keyhole for decades, it's that they never tell it like it is. NEVER! Even when the truth would serve their purposes, there's always ANOTHER purpose they want to further even more. These are capitalists, you know - NO amount of money and power is enough.

Why did they leak the Fourth Amendment violation? Why now (again)? They've been doing that for forty years. They're up to something. Best bet? A probing attack. Washington, and the military industrial complex that owns it in plain sight, may have the final coup d'etat in mind. We may be about to see a reprise of the coup once plotted and launched from Jekyll Island, the one that turned billions of indebtedness for the nation's bankers into control of the nation's money. Now controlling completely their military industrial complex avatar, the bankers who also own completely the United States (the latter unable even to pay any longer the interest on the debt owed the former) may intend total takeover, and end to having to pretend democracy any longer. Their centuries-long dream of "new world order" will have been furthered mightily. On, by god, to subjugation of the planet! Our (manifest) destiny!

For anyone who has studied in detail events since the turn of the Twentieth Century, and especially those since World War Two, no doubt is possible about the direction we are tending. Everything must be at least considered as a factor in that equation. In this instance, it all fits. Must be. Let's see what happens.

For some of us, caught in the Land of the Fee with no way out, that's all that can be done. It's not, after all, a free country - not any more.

Congress, and the Nation, Goes on Metastasizing

The latest biopsy, proof of how sick we are, is labelled the Abramoff Bribery Affair. Hard on the heels of revelation that the president has - and goes on, it's plain - repudiated his oath of office, the latest will hardly draw a glance from the public. "Corrupt politicians" is like "birds with feathers."

The condition used to be called a coma. Brain dead. Formerly, and in individuals, it was due trauma of some sort, disease or injury. Now, in its societal form, it's a condition induced by behavioral scientists paid to study and produce it by government and those in control of government. Originally, its master and principle purveyor was a man named Joef Goebbels. Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin were pretty good at it, too. Goebbels' protogee, a guy named Adolf once observed that with the "proper use of propaganda, it is possible to make one living in hell believe he is in heaven, and one heaven believe he is in hell."

The science of propaganda is far advanced, now - like science and technology generally. We're cloning animals, transplanting organs, examining the surface of asteroids far out in space, and the like. The mind of the public is putty in the hands of government willing to do that.

And they're willing, believe me. That they are successful with Dr. Goebbels' science is very clear, too. Putty, like I said. How else would anyone - in the face of all that has gone before - that the Bush White House is only bugging computers owned by suspected al Qa'ida associations? You believe that a man with the record for mendacity this one has is telling the truthy about this?

You believe that a Congress with the record for honesty and integrity this one has can be trusted to do the right thing about protecting our Constitution? You trust with your Constitutional Rights people who take bribes like a kid takes candy? For all the behavioral conditioning you're subjected to these days, I don't believe that.

I think your representatives represent you in more ways than one. I think you're too corrupt - just like they are. I think you'll let them go on stealing us blind because you think they're stealing from everybody else - not you. I think you don't give a damn about Bush "data mining" because you think it doesn't affect you. It doesn't endanger you.

I've got news for you. Have a look at that picture. That wound was inflicted in 1986, October the sixth. It was inflicted by a federal government sniper, shooting from ambush after elements of the local sheriff's office put up to it by the feds endeavored to make sure that I was unarmed. It was inflicted because I had provided a U.S. Senator with cold, hard proof of things like what Emperor Bush just did and is still doing. It looked like I might appear at hearings to offer more proof. To cover up the shooting, the U.S. District Court for Colorado in 1988 ruled that to provide records "would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the U.S." (IRS, you see, was the subject of my prospective testimony).

If you think a government, a congress, and administration as corrupt as this one, comprised of people like Randy Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, George W. Bush and the like, will stop at stealing your money and your privacy, you're a fool. These people do things like break up my family, ruin my business and make sure that I can never work again, and drive my son to three attempts at suicide. They do things like Ruby Ridge and Waco; like The Murrah Building, the World Trade Center, and Iraq.

So do you - you put them in office. They stay there because you let them stay there.

2006: This One May Decide it All for the Land of the Fee

January 1, 2006:

Okay - to get the dreary and the de rigueur out of the way - Happy New Year! Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukah, Good (or whatever) Kwanzaa, Happy Holidays, Best of Buddha's Birthday, and whatever other "holiday" (means "holy day," you know) excuse you need for respite from the "lives of quiet desperation" (Henry Thoreau) you lead. Keep telling yourself how free you are. And that's why you're so happy. If you won the lottery.

Everybody had a blast last night - just turn on the TV, if you don't believe me. The smug and the fat cats all say you can do that, even if you're poor. Sure. The Parade magazine I picked up in the parking lot this morning says that 13,000,000 kids went to bed hungry last night; which means logically that almost one-third of the poor bought a TV instead of feeding their kids. Y-a-a-a-a-y for the Land of the Fee! I didn't misspell that, in case you're wondering.

I trust you note that I don't give a flying f--- for holidays, especially those wherein the celebrants spend millions, even billions on booze, bullshit, and waste for things like the party in Times Square. Not while 13,000,000 kids went without a meal the same day. At least hitting a rock flying past Jupiter with a $40,000,000 rocket had a purpose other than just raising hell and chasing sex. I don't celebrate because I can only buy a couple of those kids a meal, and the government makes damned sure it stays that way. Even if I were still in the bucks like I once was, and I gave a bundle to the poor like I wish I could, some capitalist would steal like a congressman, and like the tsunami relief fund, steal a huge chunk of whatever I gave. I'd be able to do nothing about that, either. In short, I'm too damned weak and worn out anymore to do much about anything like that, except write these sorry-assed "blogs." I don't celebrate.

A lot of great people died in 2005. Some of them really were great. Those, by my definition, took the part of their fellow human being. Actually, that's not my idea; I got it from the author - the Author of everything. "I was hungry, and you gave me food: thirsty, and you gave me water; naked, and you gave me something to wear." People naming the "great" invariably mention saviors, warriors, the powerful, the ridiculously rich, and the like. Never the comedians. Well, they're wrong. "I was grieving, despondent, and afraid; you made me laugh." Johnny Carson, Richard Pryor, and Nipsy Russell made us laugh. Them, I'll remember, and miss. They were great. Really great.

In 2005, there were 846 people who heard God say, "I was beset by my enemies; you stood between them and me, and you were killed." Want to talk about "great?" No comparison. Now we're talking hero. REAL hero. "Greater love hath no man, than that he lay down his life for his friend." One of these stands out, even in that company. Pat Tillman was killed in combat in 2004, but I'm still thinking about him. The man makes me feel like a pimple by comparison. I hope you know the story, because you need to know. Some of us sacrifice a little, some a lot, for those among us who need help from their fellows. For you to appreciate what this guy sacrificed, you have to learn all you can: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/4815441/ and http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2004/magazine/04/23/tillman.flashback/index.html will get you started. When you think you understand, tell your kids about Pat Tillman. They need it. They need to understand what "great" is. If it helps, remind them about what John F. Kennedy once said. "Ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country" - remember? Pat Tillman must have had that for a mantra, and he was its shining example. Makes me feel like a pimple.

Last, but certainly not least, of the people who in 2005 made a difference that will last forever was Rosa Parks, the little black woman who became one of history's biggest inspirations. Rosa Parks will forever stand in my mind as the classic example of what ONE can do. What she did remains for me the ideal example of how what is right plays judo, and an otherwise simple act at the right moment takes on power beyond all imagining. Parks' simple words one day had the power of a Churchillian speech in them, and where it was said Sir Winston "mobilized the English language and sent it into battle," all the woman said was, "No, I won't go to the back of the bus." The words went into battle, and destroyed another tyranny. I've always aspired to be like that. Rest in peace, Rosa. And thanks.

So, we've got another year. What'll we do with it? I literally hate to think. We will NOT feed the hungry, give water to the thirsty, or clothes to the naked - unless, or course, there's a profit in it. Some will, of course, but the great mass of man will go on being the greedy, self-concerned and conceited son of a bitch that he is. The "Americans" will demand that their country do for them, instead of doing for their country. Meanwhile, their capitalist country - controlled by certain of their countrymen - will go on exploiting the planet and its people for all they are worth, in effect sawing off behind us the limb we all occupy. Hatred of the nation the world's people once aspired to be will reach unprecedented mass.

Whether we take back control of our country from the military industrial complex and the people who provoke war after war for immense profit will decide our fate, maybe once and for all, in 2006. That single issue will be the one that makes all the rest insignificant by comparison. All the mathematical models I can construct for projecting the effects of peak oil, economic growth and "outsourcing," federal taxation and inflation - all the stuff the pundits and media talk about all year long - reach calculus high and low extremes in 2006.

No trend or force for change is more fearsome - not even Arab religious fundamentalism - than the behavioral drive toward mediocrity that is the natural product of the U.S. version of capitalism. "The moral flabbiness born of the exclusive worship of the bitch-goddess success; that—with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success—is our national disease." William James, an American psychologist and philosopher, said that in a letter, Sept. 11, 1906, to the historian and writer H.G. Wells. The disease, which is a cancerous one, is now far advanced. It threatens the heart, and the soul, of the nation. It now chooses our Presidents and leaders, owns our government, and holds our people helpless in its scabrous and scrofulous hands. Slave-like, we - excepting me - obey its every whim.

No group of fellows, no organization, from family to nation, can persist so without being able to trust one another. The group entity cannot co-operate, the very essence of organization and concentrated effort. Without the truth inherent in trust, order cannot be maintained and justice cannot be done. Where there is no truth, there can be no justice; and justice is the very soul of order. Without justice, rebellion is inevitable. Finally, no nation of liars can gain and maintain ascendance over its enemies.

As Johanna, the heroine in my novel said, "You can never trust a capitalist - everything is for sale."     

So, it's 2006. The year will see cataclysmic events, many foreseeable and all having been brought down upon us by our own feckless stupidity and folly. The war in Iraq will bring more and more violence to that country and our own, a parallel to the Vietnam war. The Iraq war's result will be similar, eventually, with the exception that the firestorm of Arab hatred it has ignited will last for centuries, a monument to the colossal acquisitiveness of the military industrial complex, who having once killed a president, now uses one for a Judas goat. The death toll of U.S. service men will rise until the nation no longer has the stomach for it; then, like Vietnam, we will do "the unthinkable" - leave. That probably will mean having made another "Mission Accomplished" declaration of victory. The nation of "free Iraq?" Having lost more of its citizenry by hundreds of times than their deposed dictator killed in the first place, the Iraqi nation will go back to theocracy. Iraqis who followed our Pied Piper will be pay the price, eradication. White House and Congressional propagandists will perform "damage control," and the Land of the Fee will go looking for its next nation to liberate.

The planet is warming, protestations of Congressmen and Senators shilling for the oil companies and fossil fuel exploiters notwithstanding. The scientists of one hundred and forty-one industrialized nations, those responsible for 55% of the world's greenhouse gasses and related pollution, have agreed upon that and signed the Kyoto Accords, pledging to reduce greenhouse gasses pollution 5.2% by 2012. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4267245.stm The U.S., biggest polluter by far - surprise - refuses to sign. We will increase our poisonous emissions by enough to compensate for whatever the rest of the nations manage to prevent. It's all a myth, we say. Of course, we don't believe that, but this is just another instance of how we handle truth. Politics and lobbying what it is in the Land of the Fee, the power of propaganda with the "stunned and stolid" masses what it is, we will be standing up to our chins in polar ice cap melt while listening to the cynical protestations to the contrary of oil company prostitutes like Oklahoma Senator James Imhoff and his congressionally corrupt kind. That will go on, of course, until the oil companies have either moved on to greener - meaning more exploitable - pastures or have by manipulation in the form of congressional lobbying and bribery of courts have acquired saleable control of whatever new source of energy has emerged. http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CAV111A.html

Meanwhile, the nation willing to pick a fight with anybody or everybody has even pissed Mother Nature off. That last HUrricane season was a doozy, but we don't seem to have gotten the message. If you won't listen to anyone who can hit you with a force four hurricane, you won't listen to anybody.

The global situation is and will be a redux of the history of our own nation and its relations with the oil and other industries. Spurred on by greed, industrial pollution of the planet will continue to accelerate, in other words. Nothing is more important than economic and fiscal considerations. Bewildered by state-of-the-art propaganda wielded by the corporately-owned government and its news media, together with behaviorist-coordinated indoctrination by with the state-run educational establishment, the public will continue to rejoice that they live in a free market economy, even as great masses of their fellows die of the effects of massive environmental poisoning. Concomitantly, the U.S. population's inevitable shift to the Southern Hemisphere will begin in earnest. As the planet and its oceans warm, of course, hurricanes and typhoons will worsen in force and frequency. More property damage will occur in 2006, and more will be left homeless and more will be injured and killed. Even if - when - faced with repetition of contemptuously callous disregard for the public's welfare like that demonstrated in New Orleans after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, the general public, addicted to its apotheosized federal government, will remain societally and nationally cowed and cowering - effeminate, castrated, and feckless.

The Kyoto meetings provide a glimpse of what is to come, not only as has to do with the environment, but elsewhere. The peoples of the earth must either control the cancer growing on it, us, or die with us. Economic sanctions, cutting off our oil supply or raising prices to oppressively instructive and debilitating levels, are beginning. There will be more, and everywhere. When they can't drive ninety miles an hour in their gas-guzzler busses, HUMVEES, and SUVs, the peace-loving people of the U.S. will clamor for their armies to take what they need. The better to "liberate" more oppressed nations, of course. You tell me what that means . . .

In the U.S., the chief concern of every citizen has long since become that of surviving his government, and the descent into criminal federal totalitarianism will continue. The latest outrage of the Constitution, that of the President and NSA's savaging of the Fourth Amendment, is only publication, an announcement - one intended to continue the mental bewilderment and behavioral cowing of a public already incapable of meaningful self-awareness, self-realization, and independent cognition - of what has been a practice since the late 1950s. In evidence of the befuddled and distracted state of the public's mental faculties is the fact that while the nation's law libraries are crammed full of books filled with cases which prove beyond rational doubt the lawlessness of government at all levels, the fact remains below the level of the anesthetized public and society's consciousness. Each of the Supreme Court reporters, of course, is a chronicle of government abuses of the U.S. Constitution. In my book, "Letters to Aaron," I recite a number of these.

Of course, were the public aware of what has occurred, it might also become aware that the condition could not have come to be without the deliberate and calculating efforts of the public's information and educational establishments. Like the Grand Jury and the Petit Jury, another control of government provided by the Constitution now turned against the people by their government. Surprise.

The case of "Sherry," one of the stories related in "Letters," is a microcosm of the society. One of my first "Knight Errant" cases, the mother of three was being raped continually by male members of a regional IRS office. During nearly three weeks of concerted effort, nothing we could do could enlist assistance from the rest of government (not even evidence in the form of video tape). Police, sheriff, lawyers, and judges all showed us the door. Faced already with relentless pursuit and harassment, acutely aware of federal officers watching like hawks for any and every opportunity to justify my arrest and murder, my elections and choices of tactics were severely limited. At length, my hand was forced when "Sherry" was obliged to return to the home town that was the scene of her tribulation. Impregnated almost immediately by one of the federal studs when her birth control tablets melted under a sudden roof leak and her abuser refused to wait for a new purchase or use a condom, "Sherry" had an abortion.

Alerted one afternoon by "Sherry's" daughter and after flying myself from Phoenix in a leased Mooney, I finally caught one of the IRS rapists almost literally in the act. After a judo workout including extended practice with kansetsuwaza (armlocks) shimewaza (strangle holds) and with money provided by her attacker and myself, "Sherry" emigrated to another country, the only way she could be rescued.

The analogy doesn't end there, either. There are many women like "Sherry" in the U.S., something that any rational and willing intellect would expect. Unbridled power doesn't bridle itself, certainly not its most base appetites. That the nation chooses to ignore a thing as obvious as that tells everything one needs know for explanation of the state in which we have come to exist. It also tells one like me what to expect in the future.

The federal government of the United States has become what IRS already was. When the public did all but nothing to stop the public outrages of the IRS, the rest of the criminal conspiracy had its reconnaissance. It's own excesses, long kept in the shadows, now come more and more to be committed in plain view. There are many, many, examples. As President Carter, Ramsey Clark, and others have recently pointed out, a sea change in our policy toward other nations has occurred. It doesn't take a genius to know where we are going, or what will result. What a mess!