Now or Never for the U.S.; We Govern Our Government or Die.

I've just survived another cyber-attack by the same government who says that's all for our good, and we should be grateful that it violates our god-given (I stress the "god" part in order to remind certain of us that our rights as human beings are not authored by government) are violated daily for our protection. In order to protect you from having you money stolen, the great and benevolent people in the White House will steal it. In order to assure that no one makes you a slave, they will enslave you. With friends like that, who needs enemies?

Anyway, the attack blew the monitor and discombobulated the hard drive, scrambled all my blog and website copy, put me out of action for a week. Plans are going forward for a counter-attack, and I'm learning to psycho-analyze, brainwash, fuck with, and otherwise torment the mind of the computers attacking me. Are they in for a helluva shock one of these days. Think about Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Right one and two, guys - that should give you some idea. Start shooting again like last time, and I'll hunt you down and kill you. I'm just too damned old to give a damn any more, and fighting, after all, is what I do. My places are always configured and booby-trapped in the best possible way to deal with a S.W.A.T. assault, so most - or all of you - will die when you try that. Fair warning, huh?

Oh, and a note to the pee-ons they always send to do that kind of stuff (like the poor bastards being maimed and dying in Iraq for Halliburton and the rest of that kind): what will you be dying for? You know before you start that you're in the wrong. Orders? Orders serving what purpose? I've been here for 70 years, never done anything illegal - in this country, that's saying something - never been charged with anything, and as one judge observed been scrutinized by the most powerfully invasive government in human history without that same government - my enemy - having been able to come up with a single provable excuse for any kind of indictment or charge. The cleanest, most straight arrow SOB you'll ever hope to meet - in the parlance of many, a gentleman - whose only crime is that he's the little kid who sees the king is naked, and dares to say so. Find something else to do, something other than raid people you have utterly no reason to dislike. Remember, as Dr. King said, injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere.

So. We're past the State of the Union Address. You can believe the master liar or your eyes. A nation now more than 8.2 TRILLION dollars in debt is doing fine. We pause here to let that - the breath-taking, staggering, stupefying temerity of it - sink in. Eight point two TRILLION! $8,200,000,000,000. Everything is fine. The new budget . . .

There you are, again. Budget. Everything with this government has a new meaning. It's a Schroedinger's Cat world where things are both true and false, up and down are the same, rich and poor, and His Majuesty, the President is truthful no matter what he says. BUDGET? What the hell IS a budget? The last time I asked Ben Nighthorse Campbell, erstwhile U.S. Senator and friend, the budget when printed on 8"X10" sheets would make a stack seventy six feet high. That was years ago, when the budget was small change compared to now. Estimates of how long it would take a guy, even one as bright as Ben, to read the whole damned thing ran to something like 10 years.

A trillion. What IS a trillion? What does that mean? Well, yesterday serving as the "number-cruncher" for a local Destination Imagination competition, I filled in free time with exercises in math (that interspaced with trips down the hall to the gymnasium weights room, where I did dumbbell curls and machine pull-downs - 50 on the former, bodyweight on the lat machine). Here's some perspective on a trillion dollars - and the state of the union. Remind yourself that any numerical model for the shear mendacity - that's lying - of this administration (notice how every reality nowadays beggars the words you use to describe it?) if proportionate and indicative. First, I calculated how long it would take to actually count to a trillion:

To begin with there's the fact of having to say the words. That takes time, you know, and the numbers between one and one trillion get to be a real mouthful. I timed the pronunciation of nine hundred ninety-nine billion, nine hundred ninety-nine million, nine hundred ninety-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine, and got about eight seconds. Some on the way to that one are worse (take longer). Try it. Say, 589,578,887,227 (five hundred eighty-nine billion, five hundred seventy-eight million, eight hundred eighty-seven thousand, two hundred twenty-seven). How long did that take you? Did you pronounce every syllable? How often did you stop to breathe? I did a little calculus to compute the rate changes involved, and came up with an average (the "derivative") of 6.4 seconds per number.

I won't wait while you count, even if I figure you're a fast-talking son of a bitch like King George VII or a crony.

That's because it would take approximately 202,940 years to reach the number one trillion (when I got home, I repaired to the internet where I learned that another guy - this one a professional mathematician, mind you - has calculated it would take 190,259 years. I think he forgot to allow for breathing). To recapitulate the calculation, 6,400,000,000,000 seconds divided by 60 seconds per minute divided by 60 minutes per hour divided by 24 hours per day divided by 365 days per year = 202,940 years. I think the mathematics guy used an average time per number of six seconds. For the U.S. Congress, King George, and the Halliburton lobbyists who own them, the difference is small change. Hell, the cost of the technology necessary just to count what they spend is unaffordable for all by the super-rich.

One trillion SECONDS of ordinary clock time equals (60sec/min) x (60 min/hr) x (24 hr/day) x (365.25 days) = 3.16 x 10 to the seventh power seconds. That's 31,546 years. Six trillion seconds equals 189,276 years.

A trillion dollars! That's 12 zeroes to the left of the decimal point. A trillion is a million million dollars. The incontrovertibly insane U.S. government spends yearly far more than the entire Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of Australia, China and Spain combined. If you laid one dollar bills end to end, you could make a chain that stretches from earth to the moon and back again 200 times before you ran out of bills! One trillion dollars would stretch nearly from the earth to the sun. It would take a military jet flying at the speed of sound, reeling out a roll of dollar bills behind it, 14 years before it reeled out one trillion one dollar bills.

A trillion dollars. The Bush League budget - only a Bush League accountant would call this a budget - is two point eight trillion.

So how much IS that? Let's look at the projected federal surplus. The population of the US is approximately 250 million. If we divide $2,800,000,000,000 by 250,000,000, we get $11,200. That's for each man, woman and child in the United States. If you figure there are 300 million of us, then the bill is $9,333 apiece.

THAT, PEOPLE, IS FOR JUST THE NEXT YEAR! What perhaps boggles my mind more than anything else is the fact that U.S. government "federal" (words again - remember what "federal" originally meant?) style is like disease - it grows, and exponentially. If U.S. Federal Government by Criminal Conspiracy continues to grow at the pace (calculus again) it's been on for the past forty years the federal government will have a $10 TRILLION BUDGET by the year 2010.

Now, I remind you again, the moron we have in the White House spoke in his State of the Union Address of the "strength of the economy." Which rubber room was he speaking from? Shouldn't he have to come out of the rabbit hole into the real world for a while? What kind of a Cheshire Cat, Queen of Hearts, or Mad Hatter nut case would call an economy wherein the total debt obligation exceeds 48 TRILLION DOLLARS strong? My god, people - that is utter nonsense!

Want more? American workers now net almost 33 percent less in real wages than they did in 1976. After taxes, two paychecks in a family barely equal the purchasing power one had thirty years ago. Where I once supported my homemaker, stayed at home without income wife, had a new car (paid $1500 cash for it), owned all the usual household appliances, and rented a single bedroom house on what amounted to starting wages at a factory ($1.41 an hour, then), a worker and his wife in the same situation today both work two jobs, the kids work, and so must the family dog. I wasn't in debt. Today - well, you know. Does anybody own anything?

THIS IS RIDICULOUS! That a president would dare stand in front of a national audience an talk nonsense like what we heard the other day is preposterous. The State of the Union is that the government is out of control. We take it back or we die. That's both as a nation and, as far as many, many are concerned, as individuals. Like the men and women sent to Iraq to serve criminal capitalism, we are being used like ammunition in a shooting gallery. LOOK AT NEW ORLEANS AND REST OF THE COSTAL COMMUNITIES BLASTED BY HURRICANE KATRINA. Obviously, in deeds thundering so loudly they drown out what he may say to the contrary, King George's concern is for Iraq. The citizens of Baghdad, in other words, rate higher than those of New Orleans.

But, we'll see. John Adams, second of our presidents, once observed, "The proposition that the people are the best keepers of their 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." Still, a constitutional convention may be our only chance. That's provided several things:

First, that mature, honest and predictable persons be in charge. That, in itself, is a tall order. We are a nation too long worshipping "...the Bitch Goddess Success - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word 'success..." How will we keep greed and the lust for power out of the process? Try to imagine finding today a group of men and women of the caliber of our Founding Fathers. Suffice it to say that no person currently in government at any level or in every way affiliated or related would qualify. They have demonstrated, by their desire to be in government, that they do not qualify.

Second, that states call for the convention in order to deal solely with the issue of debt and the economy. Any convention open to any other matter will immediately devolve into crap like women's "issues," and a hundred more narrowly focused and ideology-related power grabs.

Third, that all constitutional law having to do with the convention be observed. The constitutional convention, for instance, does not have the power to actually change the U.S. Constitution (it can propose amendment and language).

Fourth, the convention's goal should be not only a balanced budget, but means to prevent breach of the budget. Taxation by inflation - i.e., simply spending, should be made illegal. The criminal conspiracy and tyranny known as Internal Revenue Service should be abolished, as should the infamously contrived Internal Revenue Code. There are, after all, numerous alternatives, including a flat tax, sales tax, and "value-added" tax. There are even FAIR taxes, such as that proposed some years ago by a Nobel Prize-winning economist.

If I digress momentarily in that regard, it is not without reason. There are, or course, a lot of factors which affect any honest analysis of revenue systems. One is fairness and equitableness for the people who pay taxes. They're what it's all about, in the first place. But there are also things to consider like cost of application, and how that will be accomplished. But the single most important factor is the role played by the collection agency. That an agency like the IRS should be so much as possible, much less exist, is un-American. It's an abomination, intolerable - the very antithesis of what Jeffersonian democracy is about.

If for no other reason that abolition of IRS, in fact, I would support a national retail sales tax. There are inequities there, to be sure - but opposed to the outrageous results of IRS and the present system, they are Lilliputian. A flat tax, on the other hand, is what our current system was derived from in the first place. It is an evil construct, designed to assure that the wealthy and powerful never have to contribute to the economy that makes them ascendant and powerful. To tax an individual's income is a cynical repudiation of everything we are supposed to be about, inasmuch as it punishes those who are members of Thomas Jefferson's "natural aristocracy" ("...the grounds of which are virtue and talent").

A National Retail Sales Tax would at least rid us of intrusive government influence on the taxpayer's life by getting rid of the vicious slavery by "income tax" concept. Analysis of personal income by a government agency would be a thing of the past.

As I've said, we do this or we die. The simple fact is that the US dollar and economy is facing an imminent collapse. More, the global economy will immediately suffer catastrophic result when the US dollar begins to be rejected as the currency for trade. We're forcing the world to rebel and to attack us, because the effect of our staggering inflation by fiat is taxation - taxation of any nation whose economy is tied to the dollar. Any day now, the nations will begin to establish a gold standard for currency, the only and best alternative for world trade.

This is inevitable because even the most powerful country in the world cannot repay loans amounting to many, many trillions of dollars. The word "trillion" may be just an incomprehensible word, but it is a real number, whose effect is realm catastrophically real. If they are not already (and I think they are), central banks worldwide will reduce their US dollar reserves and switch to other currencies. If we elect one more boob like George VII Bush, there will be an economic war. Gold will become the standard for international trade, and we will be driven to our knees economically. It is one thing to tax Americans in order to self-aggrandize and pay of political debts, it's another to tax the citizens of other countries.

Even gigantic world-wide corporations are offended by the cockamamie economic antics of the U.S. government, besides. They are effective players in the world market, too, and increasingly do not want to be "short changed" by a spend-thrift nitwit like Bush and the sycophant U.S. Congress he rules. Even their insistence on payments in alternative currencies such as the euro or payment in US dollars at Euro or other currency-equivalent value would cause a hell of a row. Even military, perhaps (having a military like that of the U.S. at his command has all but demented this clown).

So, it's time. We fish or cut bait, and NOW. However we do it, the government must be put in its place. That, or our children will piss on our graves. They may, anyway.