Yes, Virginia, I DO Advocate the Overthrow of the Government - Honor Demands It.

A few years ago, during one of my many street clashes with the federal einsatzgruppen known facetiously as Internal Revenue Service, a lady scharfuehrerin sought to intimidate her supposed victim with the question, “Do you, sir, advocate the overthrow of the government of the United States?”

“Yes!” I shot back, “and as soon as possible. Anything else, and our children and grandchildren will piss on our graves.”

So yes, Virginia ("Jennifer," actually), I dissent. You’re damned right I “dissent!” A Bierkrug – you call it a “stein” – my grandfather had blazoned the motto, “Loyalty above everything – except honor.” You wouldn’t know anything about that, of course, having built a nation where most of your children can’t so much as define the word.

Speaking parenthetically, you can save the howls of protest. A few years ago, traveling the nation for the United States Judo Association, I did private several surveys, just to see how things are. I also taught school for a couple of years, for the same reason. Eighty-two percent of the kids I asked to define the word “honor” thought I meant medals, awards, and fame. Six percent knew that it had to do with right thinking and behavior. Q.E.D., and all you have to do is look around to know the conclusion is valid.

I dissent. I dissent to the nation’s lack of honor, and I dissent to government by conspiracy of military industrial criminals, in a capitol where currently 35,721 whoremongers called “lobbyists” negate the very concept of the democracy a sleaze of politicians cynically proclaim for purposes solely self-aggrandizing. How can the voter control his government and the course of his country in a nation where surpassing concupiscence, avarice, and ambition are the decisive prerequisites for election to office, and where access to those same officeholders is reserved by obvious circumstance to only those with money enough to corrupt even a nun?

I dissent to a political system wherein men of so little character and accomplishment as that of George W. Bush can rise to the highest office. As feckless as his predecessor was amoral, reared with the proverbial silver spoon in his mouth, totally without the fear of having to risk anything, protected from failure by power as corrupt as his own currently, he did not once in his life demonstrate anything remotely approaching the ability necessary to properly discharge his oath of office. That he has repudiated it recently should come as no surprise.

I dissent to a system that will pay one man five million dollars a year to play a really trivial and silly boys’ game like basketball, baseball, or football, while paying the same man what amounts to little more than a living wage for educating its children. I dissent to a system which pays a vapid teenager millions to sing or play childish music – and poorly, at that – while paying soldiers even closer to poverty-level wages to risk their lives and kill.

I dissent to and I resent most – a personal thing – supercilious men and women like late-night radio talk show hosts who archly self-aggrandize their own worth by way of denigrating the poor, to argue as do FoxNews pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity that they have “earned” their wealth. A guy sitting in a climate-controlled studio, speaking into a microphone or television camera “earns” his salary, huh? That kind of obliviousness can only be due psychosis, utter stupidity, or ulterior motive. At any rate, that kind should just stay out of my way, or keep their mouths shut in my presence. I haven’t pounded the pavement with an arrogant and preponderant asshole like them for some time, now, and I’m about due. Since 9-11 took the federal goons off my trail, I haven’t had much excitement.

Speaking of soaring arrogance and self-satisfaction, I dissent also to the use by one nation, four percent of the earth's population, of thirty-five percent of the world's energy and resources, all the while posturing as the great friend of all nations and peoples. The FoxNews crew and their pundit brethren represent in their attitude toward the poor and less fortunate (they do not, of course, attribute their "success" to anything but their surpassing talent and stalwart effort) the same attitude and posture the United States takes towards its fellow nations. The United States is not only a bully, it is a condescending bully. I dissent as a kid who once suffered under similar cruelty and condescension by the bullies of my school and neighborhood - because it angers and disgusts me.

Yeah, I dissent. I dissent to a nation that couldn’t tell the truth if its life depended on it – which, for a nation whose way of life depends on the ability to do justice by means of law, it does. How can you have justice in a nation of abject liars without honor, where “due process of law” is dependent entirely on personal oath?

I dissent to relentless interference in the affairs of foreign nations, to economic hocus-pocus, political intriguing, assassination, and wars waged in the name of freedom, all actually in order to further “American interests.” Steal, that is. Why is “interventionism” and “colonialism” wrong for every other nation on the planet, but righteous when we do it – continually?

I dissent most strongly to the killing of innocents, even – no, especially; the hypocrisy inherent in the term makes it worse – when the dead are “collateral damage.” Hypocrisy? Yeah, like calling a 2,000 pound bomb or missile warhead a “precision munition.” How can you call the explosive effect of 945 pounds of H-6, Tritanol 80/20, or PBXN-109 “precision?” Detonated, the much explosive sends temperatures at ground zero to 8,500 degrees, vaporizing everything – and everybody – in a radius of 500 feet. The blast wave reaches several thousand pounds per square inch, spewing the 1,055 pounds of metal and what- have-you that is the rest of the bomb up to 1,100 yards with murderous and destructive effect. “Precision,” my ass!

The son of a bitch who uses a weapon like that does so because he hasn’t the balls to do what men of honor have always done. That, in case you can’t - corrupt as you are - imagine it, is to seek out one’s enemy, go to him with a weapon that is precise enough to injure or kill only him, and do it. The recent careless shooting of a hunting companion by our warmongering vice-president should have come as no surprise to anyone. The victim was just “collateral damage.”

Yeah, you’re damned right I dissent. I dissent to a government and educational system that provides no better than the schools we have today, the prison-like environments there, and the undisciplined rabble represented by their student bodies. In high school, I took my shotgun to school each day of hunting season, in order that I might be able to take game on the way home. I even took my .45 caliber Colt 1911 with me, and wore it everywhere about the little farming community during the months of summer vacation from school. No one objected, or even paid any mind, because everyone knew of my upbringing and, as a result, of my character.

I dissent to a nation and society that stands idly by while their criminal government spends their children and grandchildren into irretrievable debt, fearful of rocking with patriotic protest the boat that is their over-fed, self-indulgent, and craven existence. To go on living in oblivious, “after me, the deluge” comfort at the expense of children – their own children – is akin to selling them into slavery, an act even more despicable than firing 2,000 pound bombs into primitive villages. No, this isn’t a nation who knows much of honor, that’s for sure.

I dissent, although it has resulted in my being wounded by federal government rifle fire three times, being run down by motor vehicles six times (while on the sidwalk or in a protected crosswalk), poisoned twice, attacked by a martial arts espert assassin, rammed twice while driving, burglarized more that sixty times, and stopped for harassment on the nation's streets and highways more than a hundred, ten times in fifteen years. My cars and airplanes have been sabotaged with obvious intent. Dissent has a high price in the Land of the Free.

So, I do, indeed, dissent. Had I the power, I would stop it all. I would overthrow the government. That’s tit for tat, after all. Remember John Stuart Mill? “A man who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

Eighteenth Century Statesman and Political Philosopher Edmund Burke said it all for me when he said, "All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing."

You live mindlessly, my country, surfeited and fat – it’s become a source of pride for a nation of ultra specialists and “information processors – but it’s time you take some time away from pizza and beer, football games, and other goofy entertainment – to learn something of ethics, morality, and – perhaps in the bargain – honor. An indignant world of nations and the ecosystem of a planet are about to bring you to your knees. Honor may be all that saves you.

"Undocumented Worker," "Abortion," "Collateral Damage," and Euphemism in the Land of the Liar.

This morning, wakened by the clock radio and an NPR story concerning illegal immigration from Mexico, the commentator-reporter (no one simply presents the news anymore – it’s un-American) used the term “undocumented workers.” She did not once say, “illegal immigrant,” or “illegal alien.”

“There,” I said to Rita, “is exactly what I’ve been talking about. The language of the politically correct. YOU are an undocumented worker; you don’t have any “documents,” do you? How the hell do you jump from “someone criminally living in our country” to “undocumented worker?”

Once we had gotten out of bed, and I had gone outside to pick up the morning paper, I eventually read my way to the editorial pages. There, I found the column of Thomas Sowell. Guess what? “Immigration,” Sowell wrote, “is yet another issue which we seem unable to discuss rationally – in part because words have been twisted beyond recognition in political rhetoric. We can’t even call illegal immigrants ‘illegal immigrants.’”

“The politically correct evasion is “undocumented worker,” he went on. “Do American citizens go around carrying documents with them when they applying for work? Most Americas are undocumented workers, but they are no illegal immigrants. There is a difference.”

Oh, yes, sir there IS a difference. I can tell you that. In 1996, during my war with the United States and its Internal Revenue Gestapo, I was working in a Mexican restaurant, delivering food, when a suit with a federal swagger walked up and shoved a federal ID in my face. Could I prove I was a citizen of the United States, he demanded.

Now, I happen to be about as Anglo-looking as you can get. I have spoken the English language since childhood, and my name is “von Luebbert.” As a matter of fact, it is “Harland Anton-Louis, Freiherr von Luebbert-Leiste.” How far from Mexican is that?

You will note, please, that this capon in polyester didn’t ask for my identification. Had he done so, he would have been shown not only a Texas Driver License, but a Texas Concealed Weapon License. You don’t get one of the latter while being an alien, sure as hell not an illegal one; oops, “undocumented worker.” As I related in my soon-to-be published book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I proceeded to take Elliot Ness outside and read him the riot act. If another federal agent or cop stopped me again like this, I would tear off his arm, beat him senseless with the gushing stump, then shove the gushing end up his robin’s ass.

Now, the reason for the scene I’ve described is that it was part of what had been going on for more than fifteen years. As just one example, I was stopped on the streets and highways of the nation more than (it took a while for me to realize and begin keeping a diary) 109 times by cops both local and federal, sicced by falsified police records, records falsified by IRS in hope of provoking a confrontation that would get me killed. But let us assume that such wasn’t the case for a minute. With something like 11,000,000 illegal alien Mexicans ranging about the nation, a considerable portion of them in Corpus Christi (the locale where the incident in question occurred), why would an agent of a U.S. Immigration Service really intent upon curbing or stopping illegal immigration be doing with a guy as obviously Anglo as me?

On the border with Mexico, with a torrent of illegals pouring across, he thought I was Canadian, maybe?

No, Mr. Sowell, politically correct language betrays guilt. You don’t call killing a child “abortion” out of pride, or even in self-justification. The truth about the evasion “undocumented worker” is that it covers the truth; and the truth is that politicians like our craven coward – the guy who was willing to do anything including fly a jet fighter to stay out of ware in the jungle, but is eager as hell to self-aggrandize by sending others to die in the desert – President fear losing the Latino vote. And, of course – as you also point out, Mr. Sowell – our willing-to-do-anything-for-a-buck business community wants the cheap labor.

Presto! The rapist, kidnapper, or terrorist from Mexico becomes an “undocumented worker!” I can name a few more of those, but it will suffice to say they all got on four airliners one day in September 2001, high-jacked the planes, and crashed them into buildings.

The “difference” between “undocumented worker” and “terrorist” is the angle the speaker is working. “War on Terror” is ever-so-much more heroic-sounding than “Operation Make the Military Industrial Complex Rich as Croesus.” “Iraqi Freedom” is easier, much easier, to say than “Force the Bastards to Give Us Their Oil.” And remember the archetype of it all? “Collateral Damage,” is much less disgusting, and revealing, than “Thirty Women and Children Obliterated.”

No, sir – and with all die respect - Euphemistic language is everywhere in the U.S. these days because to say “bomb that vaporizes everything within a radius of 500 feet, and with a radius of destruction measuring 2,000 yards” is easier – much more politically correct – than to say “precision munition.” “Servicing the target” makes the people who are reducing a neighborhood to rubble, and killing half the people who live there, sound like delivery boys. Much more palatable that way.

During the 23 years the federal government did everything it could to make my life Hell – if I could only have been an “undocumented worker! – I was a “suspect.” I was never so much as charged with anything more serious than traffic violation (and there have been extremely few of those), but “suspicion” is possible where the Blessed Virgin is concerned – and it makes a lovely substitute for “harassment.”

That this is a nation of profligate and committed liars is everywhere evident, from the avalanche of commercials anyone who turns on a television set sees and hears, to the hideous marathons we euphemistically call “political campaigns; but nowhere is it more evident that in the very language we speak.

Those unwilling to face the truth are likewise never willing to speak it.

"Woman Needs a Man Like a Fish Needs a Bicycle . . ."

I was the summer of 1985, and I was diving in the ten-knot current of the Cedar River, near the Main Street Bridge in Cedar Falls, Iowa. My efforts that day, as they had been for several days previous, were to find a handgun purportedly thrown from the bridge after an armed robbery. It was utterly exhausting work, inasmuch as I had to fight the river while diving with a metal detector, holding myself against the powerful current with the long blade of a sharpened screwdriver driven into the river bottom. Holding myself in place there with the improvised piton like a mountaineer scaling a rock escarpment and breathing through a long snorkel tube, I swept the bottom with the detector.

Each dive found something, all right, but always the “something” was just debris. No gun. It was frustrating, exhausting work requiring frequent rest, and when the exceptionally well-built woman in white short shorts and a halter came into view along the beach and from under the bridge, I was glad to stop – to watch her undulating stride as she approached. R-r-r-r-r-r-f! Damn - what a body!

The Cedar is perhaps fifty yards wide at that point, and having made my way there, I was standing in the shallows on the opposite side of the river, or my oversexed male nature would surely have made me call out a hopeful greeting. Apparently lost in thought, the object of my fascinated interest had not seen me where I stood observing her arrival across the swiftly running water. Neither had the three men who suddenly popped out of the trees and blackberry bushes that covered the river bank alongside the beach behind her. Watching, I saw at once that there could be no doubt as to their intent.

“White shorts” had just dipped a toe idly in the water when the biggest of the three men grabbed her from behind in a bear hug. Her startled scream drowned out by the noise of the rushing water and traffic over the bridge, the woman’s struggles against the man’s grasp were futile.

Already deciding and in motion, I yelled “hey” at the top of my lungs as I shed my gear and elected to swim the river, rather than run to and across the bridge. That would both mean losing sight of the quartet, and take just too damned long. As I watched, the man holding the shapely woman in what seemed to be one supremely powerful arm ripped off her clothes like an ape peeling a banana. I yelled again, then, seized by the powerful current, decided to save my breath for swimming.

The rest of the story is just another of the “war story” sort, and beside my point. Suffice it to say that by the time I had swum the river, to be swept far downstream and land a couple of hundred yards from the bridge, then run to where the object of my efforts was happening, the woman had been carried under the bridge and thrown to her back by her captors. With his two friends holding the still struggling woman’s arms and assisting him in controlling her legs, the third had mounted her and was humping away.

As I say, that there was a fight should be obvious, and both description and the fact that I won it is likewise obvious and not relevant here. Free of her attackers, the woman accepted my arms, to be held sobbing for what seemed a very, very long time. I’m something of an empath, and this kind of animal pain and terror sometimes seems to hurt me more that the person of thing I’m being sorry for. Can’t help it.

Finally, though, the woman came to her senses and, in the very brief discussion that ensued, I explained how I had happened to be there, and how – I suppose – she came to be sitting naked in my lap and in my arms. Her further horror at realization was kind of funny, actually, and when I laughed at the way she bounded off my legs and to her feet, she seemed to have another epiphany. She laughed, too.

Briefly, again. Very. Cowering now under my male gaze, and I suppose suddenly aware that her clothes had been thrown into the river and carried away, she started crying again. When I had succeeded in calming her enough, I clambered up the river bank, sprinted to my nearby car, and returned with the warm-up suit pants and jacket I had just remembered were there. Dressed, “Sue” – let’s call her – started to flee the scene of her travail only to be intercepted by me.

In the somewhat heated conversation that followed, “Sue” got her wits finally about her. Obviously, for one thing among others, I was not her enemy, and not dangerous – not to her, at least. Still, it took some doing to convince her that I should take her home, or at least to her car in order that I could follow her. I didn’t have much luck, for some reason, until I also insisted that she see a doctor. She didn’t want to do that, either, and seeming to choose the lesser of evils, she finally let me escort her to her car. Pushing my business card into a pocket of the jacket she now wore, I instructed that if she couldn’t bring herself to get help from anybody else, she could get it from me. I, after all, already knew what had happened. Now, see a doctor, I said in letting her go – the bastard may not have come in you, but he damned well might be diseased.

Having followed “Sue” to a dormitory at the one of the local colleges, I didn’t see her again for a couple of days. Then, I looked up from my desk one morning to see her walk shyly into my reception room. That’s where the discussion relevant here took place, and as Bill Cosby used to say, “I told you all that, so I could tell you this.”

Accepting her thanks tersely and once having been assured that she had received the medical attention I’d recommended, I let myself become sternly avuncular. What I should do, I said, was take her over my knee and whale hell out of her backside. What in hell would prevail a woman who looked the way she did – especially one her approximate one hundred and ten pounds (I underestimated by seven) – be doing all by herself and dressed as she had been in that locale?! My god, I groused, taking her the way those low-lifes had was like picking fruit from a tree.

And there’d the point of my essay today. For last several years – no for the last several decades – the news media has reported again and again, the disappearance of children, and of women young and old. Almost invariably, the stories seem to have the same script. In a while, the body is found, brutalized, raped, and discarded like garbage. Used. It’s maddening.

It’s maddening, and I’ve written about it before. In a book I wrote in 1990, I related the true (names changed, of course) story of “Becky,” the beautiful young aerobics instructor who walked home from work each night wearing tight-fitting spandex, that through an area where as many as a thirteen (I think) rapes had been perpetrated in a short period. When the inevitable happened, I reported further, there was all the usual. Feminists raged that the crime was not sexual, it was violence. The attack was a violation not only of a woman, but of her constitutional right to go and to do as she liked. Et cetera. We’ve heard it all.

We’ve heard It all, matter of fact, ad nauseum. What we have not heard is any retraction of the blizzard of pseudo-intellectual bullshit that has so much to do with our being in these asinine straits in the first place. Feminists and the sycophant wannabe males who pander to them continue their propaganda seeking to further things like female police, female fireman, and women – as utterly insane as it is sounds - in the military! Not once in my reasonably circumspect experience has any of these bubble heads had the common decency to moderate their nitwit pronouncements, or admit that they were wrong. “A woman can do anything a man can do,” “a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” (remember that one?), and the absolutely nonsensical, demented like.

The result is that the nation’s women go about publicly today as though they were doing so within the confines of their own houses. One can only wonder, as did I that day along the Cedar back home, at the utter stupidity of the society that provides and encourages an act so oblivious of reality. I use again, as I did recently when discussing the miserable scholastic backwardness of our children, the sponge analogy. When a thing designed by nature to be a certain way, and to do a certain thing does not, reasonable people look for a reason. The knowledge sponge that is the human brain, like the real sponge put in water, can be expected to soak up a certain amount. When it doesn’t, there is a reason.

What explains the shear stupidity of the “American” female? How can anything rational be so oblivious? At this writing, there are as many as 144,000 women missing in the United States. Estimators like the FBI and Interpol say that between 700,000 and 2,000,000 women in the United States are yearly sold into sexual slavery, and further estimates say that 120,000 of these women are “trafficked” into Western Europe alone.

Mexico, of course, that supremely lawful, well-regulated and orderly nation on our southern border, is famed as a society for its exemplary respect for women. Of course, on the other hand, kidnapping also happens to be a major industry there. Then, too, there is the fact that Mexican newspapers report sexual abuse of women and children with a frequency that happens to give the wrong impression to a simple mentality like mine. With literally tens of thousands of sexual criminals pouring into this country from that source alone, and with a U.S. government and commerce cynically dragging their feet about prevention, a nation of women go nevertheless on cavorting about like burlesque queens, doing as they like, and dressed as they damned please . . .

Time was, parenthetically, that a women who went about publicly without a man in immediate attendance was looked at askance. A society that knew well the dangers for a woman alone in public tended to believe the obvious inevitability of such behavior was somehow desired by any women who so ignored her own safety. I make no further comment, except to point out how video tape recordings like that recently of a man like Joseph Smith simply walking up to a girl coming across a parking lot all alone, Carley Brucia, to take her hand and lead her away to be raped and murdered, can be so totally ignored by women and the parents of children is simply beyond me. Some form of insanity is the cause of this, that’s certain.

While statistics on the subject and related subjects are very uncertain (and if you don’t find the reasons for that as obvious as what I’m discussing otherwise, you aren’t paying much attention), the United States has become the “Happy Hunting Ground” for white slavers – men, and women, who kidnap and sell women and children for sexual exploitation. The slaver finds and takes victims as easily as the girl in the video I have described was taken. That while a society only takes measures like “Amber Alerts” (that kind of tactic was once referred to as closing the barn door after the horse has escaped).

And, yes, you’re damned right there’s a reason the sponge for knowledge that is the brain has been turned to stone where it all is concerned. The reason is the bubble-headed blandishments and nostrums of modern feminism. What else in our society can explain things as insane as women – like one hundred pound Jessica Lynch, for instance - in mortal combat? What else explains women walking alone - unarmed even with awareness, - it seems, in an environment where known – that’s convicted and registered – sex offenders abound (literally hundreds of thousands of them)? What else explains women police officers? Firemen?

It is high time for the people whose emotion-driven over-reaction to obvious wrongs and inequities led them to wild-eyed and militant ideological excesses to recant and moderate their extreme views. Ironically, the people most being injured by radical feminism and its hysterical pronouncements are women. Reality sometimes is as cruel as testosterone is powerful and decisive. A one hundred and ten pound human being deprived all but totally of nature’s super-fuel does not have a chance – any chance at all – against a two hundred, twenty pound human being saturated with it. That is reality, reality that make any kind of rhetoric to the contrary absurd – and, perhaps, lethal.

The time, ladies, for a return to the real world is now. Otherwise, there will be many, many more Carley Brucias – sacrifices to the twin goddesses strident rhetoric and impudent ideology.

Further and Further, Farther and Farther - Down the Rabbit Hole.

Sen. Russ Feingold, Democrat from Wisconsin asked the other day the question could the President get away with murder. It’s a question I asked in October, 1986, when snipers in the hire of the federal government wounded me three times with a rifle, shooting from ambush. I had already begun asking that same question as the result of repeated attempts at mugging, and I would have occasion to ask the question again in the years to come when federal “pull-toy” and “wind-up toy” operatives had rammed and sabotaged of my car, sabotaged my airplane, attempted repeatedly to run me down as a pedestrian and bicyclist, and used falsified police records and radio reports to incited trigger happy cops to shoot me.

Murder is severally defined; In order for someone to be found guilty of first degree murder, the prosecution must prove that the accused killed another person; that the person killed the other person with malice aforethought; and that the killing was premeditated.

Webster’s Dictionary, moreover, defines murder simply as “the unlawful killing of one human being by another, especially with premeditated malice.”

To kill with “malice aforethought” means to kill either deliberately and intentionally or recklessly with extreme disregard for human life.

“Premeditation” means with planning or deliberation. The amount of time needed for premeditation of a killing depends on the person and the circumstances. It must be long enough, after forming the intent to kill, for the killer to have been fully conscious of the intent and to have considered the killing.

So, by any rational or reasonable definition of the term, George W. Bush is a murderer. So, for that matter, is any soldier who is aware of United States and international law, namely that a principal reason nations declare war is to legalize murder. I know about these things, because the subject and its definition came up when I returned from Cuba in 1961, after having been sent there to kill Fidel Castro and/or Che Guevara. With no war having been declared, I argued then, I would have been guilty of murder, and guilty under the legal system of any civilized nation on the planet.

But the question is: can a President commit murder and get away with it? The answer is yes, of course he can. Basically, all he has to do is protest his “right” to do it. When you command the most powerful military on earth, to say nothing of a security detail like the Secret Service, you can do that pretty much with impunity – especially in a society as demented and ignorant as this one. For a parallel or model of how an indictment charging a President, especially this one, with murder would proceed, simply replace unwarranted – that’s constitutionally illegal – eavesdropping on private citizens with the word murder in the dialectic going on where the former is concerned.

Mr. Bush, as I’ve just said, would simply say that he has the power as President to do that. The decedent victim was a suspected – note that where Presidential execution is concerned, only suspicion is necessary – terrorist. The world would be better off, in Mr. Bush’s estimation, without him. He is a traitor (we ought recall that in the estimation of media whores like Sean Hannity and the rest of out administration’s Greek Chorus, anyone who so little as disagrees with the President is a traitor). And so on. Murder by the President would immediately become a partisan “issue,” and it would remain there. Too bad for the dead guy or guys.

Let’s not forget that another President also committed what feminism has referred to as “power rape” - that until their demigod darling William Jefferson Clinton became a perpetrator, of course. Then the crime became something else. That he also committed perjury as the result of his faux pas was excusable because the perjury was about sex. Substitute murder there, and see what you come out with.

The incontrovertible fact is that George W. Bush is the murderer of the eighteen women and children who were residents of the little border village in Pakistan a few weeks ago. To shoot into a crowd of innocent noncombatants, in order to perhaps kill an enemy, is at very least a “high crime or misdemeanor.” Res ipse loquitur – the thing speaks for itself. When death to innocent people results, with malice aforethought, the crime is that of Murder in the First Degree. The same applies, of course, to persons who become “collateral damage” in an attack like the “shock and awe” bombings of Baghdad, or the B-1 Bomber attempt on the life of Saddam Hussein by dropping four JDAM “munitions” on a neighborhood restaurant during the initial days of the war on Iraq. Collateral damage in an undeclared war is murder, by every definition you will be able to find.

It is also morally reprehensible in just about every society on the globe, from aborigine tribe to the Skull and Bones Society at Yale.

Then, too, the order given to U.S. States soldiers in the absence of Constitutional authorization and a declaration of way, the order resulting in death for any of the soldiers, is also murder by any of the definitions given here earlier.

But we bandy about definitions. Face it, folks, this society went down the rabbit hole a long time ago. I first realized that I wanted to stay as far from my fellow “Americans” as possible while still in high school. “Insanity in individuals,” observed Nietzsche, “is something rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs it is the rule.” I remember having then read Lewis Carroll.

“Alice tried another question. ‘What sort of people live about here?’
“‘In THAT direction,’ the Cat said, waving its right paw round, ‘lives a Hatter: And in THAT direction,’ waving the other paw, ‘lives a March Hare. Visit either you like: they're both mad.’
"’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked.
"’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 have come here.’”

I decided that I like to live with and in reality, “the road less traveled by,” in Frost’s poem, and, to continue quoting the poet, “that has made all the difference.” My fellow “American,” you live in a menagerie of psycho-emotional chimeras so bizarre, so nonsensical, as to defy the inventive imagination of the most gifted fiction writer. The United States and what seems to be the overwhelming percentage of its society live these days in a world of virtual reality unreality and psychotically irrational fantasy. This nation and society is a Jurassic Park movie, where mad scientist experimenters and their heroic White Hunter government protects us from Tyrannosaurus Rex bugaboos at a cost that dwarfs any of the monsters supposedly being foiled.

One can hardly decided where to start with examples, but having recognized that anything having to do with sex and the reproductive act is a matter kept by society totally outside the reasoning faculty, I choose it. This evening, for instance, we have still another episode of the Debra LaFave saga. In this segment of the national soap opera, a stunningly beautiful, 24 year old female teacher, has been charged – and now admitted – with having had sex with a fourteen year old male student, setting off a national discussion and debate that is enough to curdle the blood of any sane-remaining individual in its cuckoo-bird midst.

Among the first aspects of the debate was the gender of each of the principles, and what would be the case where all the possible roles reversed. What if both people had been female or male hasn’t come up, I note parenthetically – apparently that would too much muddy the waters where this scintillating example of towering intellect is concerned.

Feminists and persons with similarly warped powers of reason and desirous of protecting their Kafkaesque concept of sexuality have demanded that the teacher be punished severely. The survey of chat-rooms, blogs, and websites I’ve just finished reveals that the number of males willing to be similarly victimized by the pretty teacher approaches the ninetieth percentile. As one who happens to have had a similar experience, the woman being a forty-ish widow for whom I was baby-sitting (I was, as I recall, fifteen then), I have more than a little understanding and sympathy for that particular point of view.

During perhaps the height of the bullshit blizzard created by the info-tainment obsessed media, a famous attorney, Mark Geragos, let a cat out of the bag when he said, “Well, I had a case about five years ago locally here where I represented a politician's wife who was prosecuted for having, supposedly having, sex with the babysitter and an old-time lawyer, friend of mine, good friend of mine, still practices, said to me and I've never forgotten this, he says "How in the heck can you prosecute a guy or a woman in this case for something that every guy fantasizes about"? And, you know, there is to some degree that problem with these cases. If it is a male with an underage female, that's one kind of a prosecution but if you're talking a female with an underage male, and the male is over 14, between the ages of 14 and 17, there's not a whole lot of sympathy.”

Oh, yeah – that, Mr. Geragos, depends on which corner of the national rubber room you’re listening to. You’re still relating to the time when a woman “bestowed her favors upon” a male. That same rubber room has made it law that what is unreal and impossible is real and possible, and that’s all there is to it. The fact that the kid was having his dreams come true and the best time of his life means that he is being abused. Legally, that is.

There are literally dozens – no, scores of dozens – of examples of the same kind of mental meandering as that engendered of late by one sociological or political pressure group or the other, a disproportionate portion of which have been inflicted upon us by that Peyton Place of Pickwickian sense, Malaprop, and mental meandering, feminism. From that particular wing of bedlam’s rubber rooms during the LaFave and similar cases, we heard the stridently repeated asseveration that because a 24 year old male having had sex with a fourteen year old student would warrant a long stretch in prison, the same should apply in the instant matter. It’s that kind of cerebral brilliance that spurred me to decision having to do with proximity where Homo Sapiens is concerned. Whew! –Talk about never-never land!

Guys LIKE sex, ladies – just about every one of them, and at any age past puberty. And, yes, there is a double standard; girls get pregnant, guys don’t.

On any given evening before the prosecutor in the LaFave case dropped charges, one could hear the media’s experts and intelligentsia discussing how many years the teacher should get, only to be squelched when the word came that the prosecutor, faced with a defense having to do with the accused’s bi-polar disorder – continuing the surrealism of the affair, since that few could imagine how that had anything to with the crime alleged – had dropped charges. Mark Geragos, it seemed, had been right. That, of course, juxtaposed with news like the O’Reilly Factor and a discussion revealing how maniacal drivers who lead police on insane chases through residential neighborhoods, thus endangering dozens of lives and often inflicting severe injury and damage there, seldom receive anything approaching remotely the penalty being demanded for Debra LaFave.

The same, of course, was true on other evenings, where demands for sentencing in the LaFave, LaTourneau, and whomever cases were unwittingly juxtaposed with stories like that of a Vermont judge who handed down a sixty DAY sentence for the three years of molestation of a seven year old child.

And over it all, in a manner that gives new meaning to the term “obsession,” there was the media’s relentless exploitation of the Natalee Holloway case. In a nation supposedly dedicated to the rights of the accused and to “due process of law,” the leading lights of journalism like those of Fox News made an air-tight murder case against three young men on the basis of evidence so minute as to lack even proof of the supposed victim’s death. In my fifty years of assiduous study of investigation and forensic science, I have never heard more shamelessly salacious, lurid and meretricious, non compos mentis theatrics.

Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera – ad infinitum.

Has it ever occurred to you how anyone who would do this sort of thing thinks of their audience?

This is the nation of Schroedinger’s cat ethics, morality, and logic, where utterances by “leaders” from local to federal level leave the loonily led in abject confusion, waiting to see how both alive AND dead statements, ideas, and what-have-you turn out. That’s while they participate meaningfully as citizens of a democratically free society, of course.

Elsewhere down the rabbit hole, Social Security is an entitlement when Congress is talking, but not an entitlement when the Supreme Court is talking. The same situation exists in another score of dozens of instances, from the citizen’s right to privacy from government to the right of property ownership. In Iraq, we have an insurrection that isn’t an insurrection, and we have removed a bloody dictator by killing nearly three times the number we speciously claimed of the people we’re rescuing. We are sanctimoniously trying to establishment a form of government where it is directly opposed, and condemned by penalty of death, by the Islamic religion of the place.

Fit in there somewhere the fact that today a municipality or corporation has forbidden promulgation of the pagan Easter Bunny for fear of offending non-Christians. “Where ignorance is bliss, ‘tis folly to be wise.” But it will make you look good to anyone as confused as you are, huh?

Today’s news, as if to underline that fact, brings news of a Moslem who has been condemned to death for having converted to Christianity. You’re gonna make that kind of sober rationality democratic, are you? Sure you are.

Still further down the rabbit hole, our own Cheshire Cat-Mad Hatter – Lewis Carroll was a piker: we are able to produce both in the person of one guy – is spending hundreds of billions to first destroy, then rebuild Iraq, while his government dithers and can’t seem to find the resources to aid meaningfully the victims of Hurricane Katrina. More, having informed prospective social security recipients that the fund is rapidly approaching bankruptcy, the government approves billions more for Iraq and more war-fighting. If that weren’t enough, the president and his band of merrily merciless men now announces that such will continue the same for the foreseeable future, at least until 2010.

And finally, the keystone in this cockamamie construction, the Zacharias Moussaoui Affair. Here, federal prosecutors, defense attorneys, and judge struggle manfully to walk a writhing and shifting line between letting the defendant get off scot-free and exposing the terrible truth in a fashion so unequivocal that even the half-wit society watching won’t tumble. That the FBI was warned again and again – and again and again, by damned near countless informants and evidence – that terrorists were preparing to attack the World Trade Center has been demonstrated so often and so thunderously that the statues in the park are aware.

It is just as obvious that the government at the very least let it happen, and that all remains is to wonder why. That, of course is also very, very obvious. It may be that you have to have just a little awareness of the history of our corporate capitalist government – things like the Ford Pinto matter, for instance – to recognize the motive in question, but not much. The dog didn’t bark because its master would profit enormously when Silver Blaze was stolen – Sherlock.

How do I know you’re mad? You must be, or you wouldn’t still be here.

What Will Posterity Think of Us?

Some years ago – 1988, matter of fact – I wrote a series of chapbooks entitled The Citizen’s Powers. In the foreword, I addressed our nation’s young people, those being raped by our government and society’s profligate abuse of what was been given the latter by the founding fathers. I quoted Benjamin Franklin comment concerning how posterity would piss on our graves, should we lose what was being given us, and said I hoped my relentless efforts to prevent what was – and still is – being done would be remembered. And that my grave would be one our children and grandchildren wouldn’t piss on.

A couple of days ago, Miami Herald columnist Leonard Pitts likewise worried in his column the same way. “Was the whole country napping when Joseph McCarthy’ bullying innuendoes and lies cast a pall on this nation and made a mockery of the Constitution? Didn’t anybody speak out when Franklin Roosevelt sent Americans to concentration camps? Where were the good people when Americans of African descent were being lynched? … What will tomorrow say about today?

Searching for an answer to the gentleman’s questions, I’m reminded of a quote from another writer, H.L. Mencken, about another time.

“The most popular man under a democracy,” Mencken wrote, “is not the most democratic man, but the most despotic man. The common folk delight in the exactions of such a man. They like him to boss them. Their natural gait is the goose-step.”

If you recognize in that people like the far right wing of the Sean Hannity’s, or the far left of the Al Franken, you must be among those who are paying attention. But you probably don’t. Rendered effectively brain-dead by stultifying and stupefying media propaganda, you are already reciting one mindless parrot mantra or the other. Mencken, of course wrote about the Prohibition era of the Twenties. That was long ago.

Yeah? Well, does anybody remember COINTELPRO? The acronym stood for “Counter-Intelligence Program” (sound familiar; no, I don’t suppose so), and was supposedly aimed at investigating and disrupting dissident political organizations within the United States during 1956 to 1971.
Caught in the act – and I had more than a little to do with that – the FBI trotted out what have come to be “damage control” recitations so standard that they may well become part of the National Anthem one day. National security (sound familiar) demanded that the FBI violate the Constitutional rights of the citizenry. Only persons suspected of attempting violent overthrow of the US government were targeted. Only a relative few were under surveillance. Sound familiar?

When it turned out that non-violent groups like Dr. Marint Luther King’s Southern Christian Leadership Conference, churches, and commoners like myself were also being surveilled and burglarized, the federal “damage control” machine’s choirmasters moved quickly to mobilize the Sean Hannitys, Bill O’Reillys, and late night talk show hosts of the nation. Up went the cry of “Patriotism.”

Sound familiar?

COINTELPRO was secret until 1971, when I caught FBI agents in my clients house in the act of burglary. When I sought legal advice on how to deal with these kinds of intrusion, several attoeney’s could only offer advice like one who suggested I confront the feds with a tape recorder in hand, ask what they were doing in my client’s house. Anything else would be illegal. Still, I began writing letters, and making threats. I made a lot of noise.

Finally, when a local FBI field office was burglarized by SOMEONE (tit for tat is fair play, you know), several dossiers and files somehow made their way to news agencies (matter of fact, it took literally dozens of copies to each of several of the nation’s “watchdogs” before the was any result). After more than two years, FBI Director j. Edgar Hoover declared that COINTELPRO – whose existence had for years been heatedly denied – was over. Future counterintelligence operations, the great man said, would be handled on a case-by-case basis.

Documentation beyond mine was subsequently revealed in the course of separate lawsuits filed against the FBI by NBC, the SWP, and a number of other groups. Finally, an investigation was launched in 1976 by the a U.S. Senate committee headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho. The committee was the typical Washington, D.C. whitewash, enormously publicized with its media Greek Chorus chanting its “the system works’ mantra. COINTELPRO was damned, its perpetrators castigated and excorriated in august and stentorian terms:

"Many of the techniques used, the horse manure barrage pontificated, “would be intolerable in a democratic society even if all of the targets had been involved in violent activity, but COINTELPRO went far beyond that...the Bureau conducted a sophisticated vigilante operation aimed squarely at preventing the exercise of First Amendment rights of speech and association, on the theory that preventing the growth of dangerous groups and the propogation of dangerous ideas would protect the national security and deter violence."

Sound familiar? I direct you to those wondrous pronouncements from the committees who investigated the federal 9-11 debacle, the Bush Administration’s “War on Terror,” and just about anything having to do with the colossal theft of public money perpetrated by Halliburton and their ilk on that account. In the instance of the Church Committee’s findings, millions of pages of documents remain unreleased, and many released documents are still entirely censored.

Does THAT sound familiar? How about "expose, disrupt, misdirect, discredit, or otherwise neutralize" the activities of these dissident movements and their leaders?” That’s from the founding document of COINTELPRO.
So Leonard, what the future say about us? Try this – it’s the rest of what Mencken had to say all those years ago:

“Every time the papers print another account of a Prohibitionist agent murdering a man who resists him, or searching some woman's underwear, or raiding a … yacht, or blackmailing a Legislature, or committing some other such inordinate and anti-social act, they simply make a thousand more votes for Prohibition. It is precisely that sort of enter-tainmanet (we call it ‘info-tainment’ now, don’t we?) that makes Prohibition popular with the boobery. It is precisely because it is unjust, imbecile, arbitrary and tyrannical that they are so hot for it. The incidental violation of even the inferior man's liberty is not sufficient to empty him of delight in the chase. The victims reported in the newspapers are commonly his superiors; he thus gets the immemorial democratic satisfaction out of their discomfiture. Besides, he has no great rage for liberty himself. He is always willing to surrender it at demand.”

Government, of course, knows that. Federal think-tanks like the RAND (“Research and Development,” back in 1946 when that had to do with Cold War technology – and some people think that meant assuring that a Cold War would occur) study ways to make that happen. You don’t think a public stupid enough to be hornswoggled by a marginal mentality like George Bush and his eminence gris Carl Rove got that way by accident, do you?

The future will say that our second president was right. “Democracy never lasts long; it soon exhausts, wastes, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that did not commit suicide.”

And the future, our children and grandchildren, will piss on our graves.

"That's Because You're Stupid!"

Remind yourself that the picture is of the wound inflicted by a federal sniper on October 6, 1986, in order to prevent my testimony concerning the criminal nature of the United States government. You might also remind yourself that I predicted 9-11, in writing (the book "Letters to Aaron) more than a year before it happened. You'd better wake up - the time before you are either in virtual prison or cannon fodder in an internecine global war grows very short.

The more I listen to the wacky pronouncements pouring out of Washington on the Potomac these days, the more I wonder about something. Matter of fact, I wonder the same thing every time I listen to the pandering polemics of people like the pundits who pose as newsmen – I guess that includes Fox, doesn’t it? - on the major networks. Actually, now that I think of it, that’s probably the same thing; after all, none of the latter say much without the approval of the former.

Anybody who knows about the gestapo we so goofily call Internal Revenue Service, but still believes we have a free press is, by definition, out of touch with reality – psychotic. Nuts.

What I wonder about is this: on what moral grounds does the United States arrogate itself the right to control the nuclear technology – “ambitions,” in the United States’ jargon of biased propaganda - of other nations? I wonder even more that it seems to arrogate even further the right to decide on a basis as arbitrary as it apparently does.

What do I mean? Well, why is it just fine that Israel has nukes, or India, but not Iran, North Korea . . . or – god forbid, Cuba? Why, when India joined the Nuclear Club back in 1974 (wasn’t it?), didn’t we raise hell like we are now about Iran and North Korea?

Actually, of course, there are several more nations who, like Israel, have quietly developed nuclear bombs and weaponry. Cuba, South Korea, and several more not so obvious have nuclear weapons, technology acquired not by conventional means – I mean projects like Manhattan and so on – but simply by covert operations and theft of ready-to-go, enriched uranium. (You haven’t thought of that? – Man, you spend too much time on beer and NASCAR, beer and football, and beer and pornography; get a LIFE!) At least a couple of the world’s filthy rich, given a supply of enriched uranium, can pay for assembly of a bomb like the ones that obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and damned near any college the size of a state university can do it, too.

We – that’s the U.S. and the “Free World,” so called – lived for decades with what was called with more propagandist rhetoric the Cold War, and there was none of that “nuclear terrorism” which has become our excuse for bludgeoning people afraid of us over the head about nuclear programs. What’s different now than then? Iran, for instance, is a bigger threat than the Soviet Union was? Iran is going to attack the “Free World?” North Korea? Are you serious?

Yeah, you probably are – the power these days of media propagandists on a public as behaviorally “hooked” as you are is jaw-dropping. As John Stuart Mill once observed, “Conservatives aren’t necessarily stupid, but most stupid people are conservatives.”

Mill made another observation you might want to consider, now that I mention him. “He who lets the world, or his own portion of it,” he said, ”choose his plan of life for him, has no need of any other faculty than the ape-like one of imitation.”

If that doesn’t remind you of Fox News and its parroting pundits, maybe you should consider some kind of psychological help. And, of course, a change of diet – jackasses do best on hay.

Considering what I’ve written here about our posture regarding other nations who want to take the same road we once did, I’m reminded even further of Mill, a quote I used in my book “Letters to Aaron.” “If mankind minus one were of one opinion, then mankind is no more justified in silencing the one than the one - if he had the power - would be justified in silencing mankind.” I was talking about individuals like myself, of course, but the ethics apply to nations, too.

If all the world’s nations save one were of one opinion (nukes, for instance), then the world’s nations are no more justified in silencing that one than the one – had it the power – would be justified in silencing the rest. I rest my case.

But this isn’t about rightness, ethics, or even morality – is it? Uh-uh. This is just the martial music that gets the dumb poor kids to enlist in the rich man’s army, to go fight the rich man’s war. This is just the “patriotism” that gets the benighted poor to pay for the rich man’s weapons, weapons the rich man will use as lavishly as he does the poor man’s tax money otherwise. The idea here is to justify all that military spending. As I write this, a sleaze of senators is stumping on Capitol Hill for another ninety-some billion for King George to spend on Iraq.

And pay Halliburton, of course.

No, all this hand-wringing about “terrorist nations with nuclear weapons” is obviously bullshit. With all the castle gates w-i-i-i-de open, and the media that serves as his global bullhorn bellowing to the word that such is the case, the president who wants even more military spending – remind yourself that we’ve blown 15,000,000,000,000 (that’s fifteen TRILLION) on military spending since WW-2 – says we are so safe that we can go on bullying and insulting, for instance, all of Islam.

What really drops my jaw is all the evidence that you BELIEVE this crap!

So what’s it really all about? Come on. You’ve never heard of the fireman who starts fires so he can put them out? You don’t remember the old Mafia game called a “protection racket?” Then you must believe, in the face of the everywhere-demonstrated fact of lowered rates of violent crime whenever people are legally permitted to carry guns, that “anti-gun” people clamoring for disarmament and the resulting rise in criminal violence are pacifists.

Have some more hay!

How the hell can a public be this stupid?! That’s the crucial question. I’ve been wondering, and thinking, about that for some time. A few years ago, when my high school teacher spouse came home to tell me that a classroom of high school seniors didn’t know what a preposition was, I was stunned. How could that be? How could a normal brain, immersed for twelve years in a system of teaching, fail to absorb information that simple?

I wondered about it so much that I actually taught school for a couple of years. What I learned was appalling. The kids in Rita’s classes aren’t alone. All but a few of high school students I encountered during state scholastic competition were incapable of writing a simple declarative sentence. Most could not identify either the Declaration of Independence or the Preamble to the Constitution (none even knew what “preamble” meant). None - not one - of the competitors in a bridge building contest – this is state level, mind you – realized that mathematical computation could help them build a winning structure. All have resorted to trial and error, one team having built thirteen bridges..

Never mind that all these kids had parent and teacher coaching and supervision.

Stupid? I don’t know what else you could call it (oh, I’m sure there is a feministic, politically correct euphemism, but it still comes out “too dumb to function in one’s own interests”). And it explains a whole lot where my topic for today is concerned. What was that quote from Thomas Jefferson? “A nation that believes that it can live long, free and ignorant, believes what never was and never will be.” A nation stupid enough to believe the incredible bloviating nonsense broadcast from our nation’s capitol by our government cannot live much longer, either.

And I’ll bet you want to think it’s all a co-incidence. Have some more hay. Has it occurred to you that a nation as far advanced scientifically as this one has determined by way of mathematical modeling, if nothing else, exactly how much information a brain of a given intelligence quotient should absorb in the presence of a certain amount of such? We know, and have a mathematical formula by which to compute, how fast data stored in the mind is forgotten, even why – and the studies in that regard have been widely published.

Aha! But now we tread on unsettling ground. If we were to model something like that, we would also realize that we must “input” certain other data. Like race, culture, gender, and the like. You may be interested in knowing that I once participated in such a study, one having to do with predicting the result of warfare, battles, and fighting. It resulted in what was called the “Quantificational Judgment Model,” later the “Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model,” and it did what it purported, that is, foretold in precise detail the outcome of recent battles.

But, of course, the data was politically incorrect – a military secret (‘Of course” further), so you didn’t hear about it.

And, yes, Virginia, we did know what would happen in Iraq, and almost exactly. Then why did we do it? In the movie “The Mask of Zorro,” Spanish soldiers taken in by a ruse, exclaim, “We thought you were tied up.” Antonio Banderas, in the role of the future Zorro, replies, “That’s because you’re stupid.”

Now the pieces come together. Our kids are stupid because of a massive program to keep them that way. In order to explain a sponge that won’t absorb water, one has to consider that something has altered the nature of the sponge. For an information sponge like the human brain to be unable to soak up information, information some of which has been taught to chimpanzees, there must be a cause – something that has altered the natural state of the sponge.

The United States of American and its education system knows exactly why our kids are stupid. They’re stupid for the same reason their parents are stupid, because it is in the interests of the powerful to make sure it’s that way. The Congress of the United States, charged by our Constitution with keeping rein on the White House and the military it may command only in time of declared war, knew exactly what would happen in Iraq. Exactly! They expected to spend three-quarters of a trillion to a trillion dollars, and they expected to sacrifice three or four thousand lives of our lives, to say nothing of hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives. All things having been considered, there is no rational escape from that fact.

And the fact that we’re doing it all was explained by none other than Zorro – another adversary of wealthy tyranny. “That’s because you’re stupid.”

More of The King and His Wondrous Clothes.

Today has been a most instructive day, inasmuch as I have again spent it in the world of the cyber-geek. Those who read my Mongoose Trick Opinion Page know that I live in reality, the world first forced upon me in childhood by bullies who couldn’t resist a target as easy as a puny classmate recovering from polio, then by my country’s military industrial complex and its CIA, and finally by the Internal Revenue Service. The world of the realist is a microcosmic one, using the comparatively tiny universe provided me by my senses, together with the equally small world of my capabilities both physical and mental, to relate to and cope with the far, far larger world of society, nation, and world.

Today, I saw the nation in précis, miniaturized in a manner that prevents it from hiding what it is to the honest and unimpeachable, just and logical eye of the realist. The United States of America, of course, is a moribund nation, writhing and lashing about in its death throes. The disease killing it is closest in its nature to cancer, metastasis. The body – the body politic, to be more precise - is attacking itself, having forgotten what is part of it and what is foreign, who is friend and who his foe. “A house divided against itself cannot long stand,” the man called Christ said.

Today, I spent the time between breakfast and supper – the last meal to a Midwesterner like myself – trying to deal with the microcosm of our society and nation that is computers and computer systems. For the how-manieth, umpteenth time, I sat down to interface with a system gone from neurosis to psychosis. Stark, staring crazy, and by a process very similar to one killing the nation it feed on.
As usual, I sat down to find that, for some reason known only to them - Microsoft, Symantec, and all the rest – those who have access to and control over my computer, had changed everything. Nearly all the screen displays – “windows” – were different. Everything I attempted, moreover, required a newer version of something. Companies and persons with whom I was to interact, on the other hand, explained when finally it occurred to them, or the urge hit them, that they still had one of the older versions of this or that. I couldn’t use what I have – and now have no way to change – because they don’t have it.
Maybe you recognize Catch 22.

Time and again, once I fired this cranky lunatic dratfangle mother up, instructions from my publisher failed to produce the result expected – by me, anyway. E-mail correspondence, of course, is no better than any other attempt to communicate with the semi-literate “American” of today. Instructions for anything are so miserably written as to draw only mirth from my high school seniors English teacher spouse. Faulty pronoun reference, garbled word order and diction, Malaprops, and the rest can be very funny, and Rita damned near fell off the couch laughing.

Yeah, sure – nonsense is comical. For instance, I recall nearly falling off the couch some time ago, at reading in the local paper an editorial stating indignantly “children who have been artificially inseminated should be informed.” I thought about sending that particular example of fracture English to Jay Leno’s segment dealing with such nonsense.

Yes, stupidity is funny - but not when you’re trying to deal with something as frustrating already as computers. I have the patience of a rock, but this is trying, even for me. It’s like dealing with Washington, D.C. and the federal government. In fact, it’s so much like dealing with the bureaucracy that no possibility remains for mistaking federal influence. King George really didn’t have to have someone blow the whistle on his having compromised the World Wide Web, it was apparent. Nothing this FUBAR is non-governmental.

And now that I think about that “for some reason known only to them” remark of mine a minute ago, it occurs to me that mental cases seldom know why they do anything or why they’ve done something – usually, it’s just to DO something. Like Washington on the Potomac.

Something else I noticed today is the fact that it’s becoming very clear that the Big Clean-up of the Congress Lobby and the Congress is going to be a lot like a down load from an Internet service provider, a “step by step” manual for a computer program, or the like. When the blizzard of pleonastic pedantry, self-serving and self-aggrandizing verbiage and nonsense are through, nothing will have been accomplished. NOTHING?

But just like the hoards of morons who tolerate the race to the tawdry, the sensationalistic, and the mediocre being run by today’s captains of industry, the same multitude will allow themselves to be convinced by a pandering and pimping media that “democracy has worked again.” The king’s ministers have assured us that the king has purchased new clothes made of a wondrous fabric, a fabric visible only to persons of great merit and worth.

“The government the people deserve” will have succeeded once again, all right – succeeded in yet another swindle.

Just like the instructions or anything having to do with computers or the Internet, everything in the decaying United States is other than its seems. Each time we are threatened or attacked by an enemy, whether foreign or domestic, the end result is that government attacks us, too. Its solution to terrorism, for instance, is to put US, the prospective victims, in prison, spend money “reserved” – “entitlement’ has a Schroedinger’s Cat meaning, too, these days – for social programs like social security, veterans benefits, and the like on weapons whose omnipotent capabilities are rivalled only by their cost, and, of course war.

Like the Vice-President paying no attention to what was beyond his target the other day, George VII and this government attack people without the faintest idea of the consequences. Absolute power, apparently, not only makes one absolutely corrupt, it makes him absolutely stupid.

Come to think of it – “come to think of it,” hell; the prurience pandering media just can’t get enough it, such that every time you turn on the T and V it’s being crammed up you nose – the United States and its FUBAR government resemble nothing so much as the feminist female of today. She wants to go anywhere she chooses, dressed – or undressed – any damned way she chooses, doing any damned thing she chooses (even killing the kid she conceives while she’s doing whatever the hell she chooses); but when the inevitable since the dawn of time thing happens, and she’s found used and thrown away like a condom, there is consternated wonderment.
When the sexually maniacal guy - or guys - has her cornered against a dumpster, it probably – the feminist female isn’t the brightest bulb in the holidays tree, you know – comes to L’il Annie Fannie that she has overdone her militant female role somewhat. When she is naked and spread-eagled on that dumpster being raped, it’s pretty certain she has second thoughts about that “I am woman, hear me roar” horse manure she’s been reciting. And I’ll bet her last thought before being strangled when her abuser is through with her is something other than how she can do anything a man can do. Reality is like that.

It’s like that for a damned-fool society, too. In the first edition of my book, the primal scream version, I said, speaking to my country, this:

“You’re a big fucking deal on a conventional battlefield, tough as the junkyard dog with the missiles, the carrier-based jets, and the rest. Pushing buttons, working computer keyboards, and wielding those arcade-game weapons, you’re a great shooter. But otherwise you’re a pussy, and when somebody shuts off your lights, to come after you in the night with a knife, you’ll do what any other pussy does. You’ll try to call a cop. But there won’t be a cop, because the guy with the knife will have killed the cop already. And the phone won’t work, the lights won’t work, the climate control won’t work, and nothing your decadent life depends on will work, because the guy with the knife will have cut the power, too.

“Everything you depend on, technology, climate-controlled buildings and vehicles, apotheosized government, your whole, hyper-civilized effeminate world come effectively down to one electrical cord and plug-in. Pull it, and you are up shit creek without the proverbial paddle.”

Oh, Hey – the news just reported that Tom (‘The Hammer”) Delay has won the Texas Republican primary! Talk about rich! How’s that?! “I don’t care is he’s a slime-ball, he’s OUR slime-ball.” If you still don’t get my Schroedinger’s Car reference, try that one. We profess to want clean government; we DEMAND it. Then, when the slime-ball we’ve sent to Congress to steal as much of the taxpayers’ money for our district as he can gets caught with a lobbyist’s dick in his mouth, we refuse to notice. The honesty and integrity cat is both alive and dead, depending upon whether we’re looking or not. Get it?

And one, last thing. A few nights ago, FoxNews whatever-is-the-latest solecism for pundit Bill O’Reilly chided the White house for not doing more to improve King George’s public approval ratings by “damage control.” The White House should obfuscate, torture the language, and transmogrify things like the blatant lie used to justify war, in other words. Right in your face, the perpetrator of the “No Spin Zone” demanded better “spin” from his leader concerning their tarnished (“tarnished’ did I say – this is tarnished like a cow yard is soiled) and battered crusader image.

So, in other words, expect O’Reilly, Hannity, and the administration’s Greek Chorus at FoxNews to trot out another massive round of nationwide media praise for the king and his wondrous suit of clothes.

Remember Yackoff Smirnoff? “What a country!”

Things A Mistake Will Tell You.

Several people have wondered why I made no comment about the famed accidental shooting incident, the one wherein our second in command of the U.S. Military shot a hunting companion.

Why? Well, I suppose you could say I wasn’t much interested. Then, too, you could say it was hardly the sort of thing I’d be surprised to hear – not from this bunch. The real wonder is that the press corps of a nation with a pratfalling, spastic, FUBAR administration like this made such a fuss. Methinks, I thought, thou doth protest too much.

Come on – you were surprised? To hear that one of these clowns screwed up something as immensely complicated and difficult as refraining from shooting yourself or a comrade clown? Tell me – what have they ever done that would make any rational and reasonable person think that?

You see no parallel between this and say, the 9-ll debacle or Iraq? I don’t believe you. Neither do I believe that the news media see no parallel. What I do believe is that all the uproar is more smoke and mirrors, the feint a magician uses to lure your eyes to one hand while he prestidigitates with the other.

Accident? Sure, probably. I don’t have to think it was anything else. The fact that a grown man did something that stupid is quite enough, especially when that grown man a heart beat from the trigger of a nuclear shotgun.

Let us go back fro a moment and review. As a boy, beginning at ten, I went hunting often and as a matter of routine. In hunting season, I hunted daily. I hunted most often with friends, as many as four or five. I shot literally thousands of game, mostly pheasants, squirrels, and rabbits. All, generally, are moving targets; more, it was considered dishonorable then to shoot “a sitting duck.” Men didn’t shoot at a bird or animal while it remained an easy target. Fish in a barrel was not sport.

But this is another time, isn’t it? In the movies, the hero never drew first, never threw the first punch. To kick or strike an opponent while he was “down” – on the ground was the act of a craven coward, an individual without honor or personal worth. To attack someone smaller, weaker, or obviously unable to mount a respectable counter-attack was despicable. To strike a woman meant absolute ostracism. Men would turn their backs upon your approach. Don’t laugh – I’ve seen it done.

But this IS another time, isn’t it? The movies are different. So are we. Time was, only the enemy did unspeakable things like torture. No decent human being did things like Nazi Germany and its SturmStaffel SS. Imperial Japanese Army soldiers who raped and pillaged in, for instance, NanKin, China were considered to be animals, vermin. We were better than that.

Sure. And we were – then. I saw it.

But I digress somewhat. This is about shooting. Raised from four years of age in the German Hunting tradition by relatives – one who flew with von Richtofen, the famed Red Baron – I learned the discipline of the gun. In the manner I would one day train to judo fight, I learned my kata, the kata of the gun. A thing of rote, the gun kata assured the absence of error. Repeated until it became habit, behavioral, it meant physical inability to do something stupid.

In the absence of memory concerning a safety check or the like, one knew with certainty because he knew he always did the correct thing. No exceptions. Oh, I can hear your comment. Like I said, this is another time. Often these days, I hear the nitwit dictum that a gun should always be considered to be loaded. No one but a rank amateur, or a damned fool who holds firearms in order to have something manly to play with, ever thinks that way. A properly trained gunslinger knows the condition of his weapon at all times. He not only knows whether there is ammunition in the “piece,” he knows how many, what kind, and how long they have been there and in his possession. No exceptions!

Neither is this the case only where guns are concerned. The gun kata teaches things everywhere applicable. It is de rigueur in aviation, for instance to do what is called a ‘pre-flight.” That means that the pilot goes over his airplane in meticulous detail before getting into the cockpit. Often, having gotten behind the controls, being distracted or having been forced by conditions to wait for a time, I have been unable to remember having done my ‘pre-flight.’ Never have I gotten out of the place to do another, because it wasn’t necessary. I never fail to do my pre-flight, so I know that my being in the aircraft’s seat means that I have done it.
No exceptions. Kata. The way of the judoka, the judoman. The way of the Samurai. No exceptions!

But this is another time! There was – actually was – a time when men did not lie. For a man to lie meant that he was without honor. In my novel, ‘Jonatha’s Truth,’ the antagonist Baron Han von Paulus confronts the President of the U.S. during a meeting on Air Force One. William Jefferson Clayton is the President, and the following is an excerpt:

"His own eyes held by those of the commanding figure confronting him, Clayton could not speak. 'Of late,' von Paulus continued mercilessly, 'we’ve become a society that doesn’t bother to teach or inculcate that in its children, so I don’t suppose that your ignorance of honor is your fault, really. More, I realize that some mistakes are much easier to make than others. Becoming President of the United States doesn’t make a man better, but it damned well exposes his weaknesses.'

"Von Paulus’ black eyes blazed. 'Make up your mind, Mister President,' he grated, 'and do it right now! I’m a citizen of the United States, too, I remind you, and I demand of you honor. Nothing less. And, sir, in my eyes - and in the eyes of all men like me – there’s nothing more. President, king, general, billionaire or millionaire, if you’re without honor, you are nothing. Less than a loyal horse or dog. I will never be the ally of a man without honor. Nation, either.'”

The men who raised me did not lie. Yes, yes – I know. This is another time. This is another time, far different from the time when children went hunting routinely, and with permission by parents who had no fear whatever of accident like that which seems to have befallen the second-highest ranking member of our government. You find nothing unsettling in that? Wow!

I’ve been saying for some time here that things are very bad with you. Now that you’ve made me consider the latest of the Bush-Cheney pratfalls, I may have to re-assess. It’s worse than I thought.

Some things are conspicuous by their absence to an old detective like moi, and one here is the total absence of so much as mention of the hardest, most fast rule of hunting with lethal weapons. Apparently, light of the conspicuous absence I refer to, you do not know the rule (neither did the Vice President of the United States, and second in command of our armed forces). So, I will tell you. Under no circumstances – no exceptions, god damn it - does a properly trained hunter-shooter ever fire when unaware – and that is with certainty – of what is beyond his prospective target. NO EXCEPTIONS!

To do otherwise is the act of a man contemptuous of other things and other people. It is the act of a man who puts his own gratification above concern for the welfare of others, the act of a selfish boor. It is the act of a man who is without honor.

Of course, there are things akin to that, things like actions that produce “collateral damage.” What happened to Harry Whittington was that kind of act, and that gentleman was “collateral damage.” The literally hundreds of thousands killed and maimed by the White House’s earlier “accidental shot” – Afghanistan and Iraq – are Harry Whittingtons. Indeed, this is, indeed, another time.

Many years ago, handgun hunting for squirrels with my son, I came upon a squirrel running down a tree trunk. Startled and surprised, the animal froze, head down only a few feet distant. Still very much in practice of the maneuver known then as “The Mongoose Trick, I drew the single action Ruger pistol from the Old West Gunfighter rig I wore the piece with for hunting, and killed the squirrel with a single shot in the head.

To my son’s enthusiasm, I replied that this was a lucky shot. Nobody is that fast, or that accurate. But, I added, when you practice as much as your dad practices, you tend to have that kind of luck. KATA!

Unfortunately, it works both ways. Everything we do is kata. Repeat an act often enough, and there is no way to do otherwise. Live selfishly, live without concern or consideration for the value, the safety, the well-being and good of others, it becomes behavior you can’t change.

When you practice that much, Mr. Cheney, you have that kind of luck.

We Do "Love Wealth More Than Liberty. . ."

March 2, 2006:

It begins to look more and more likely that we will soon contract with some Mexican security company to guard the border there. If it makes sense to hire an Islamic Arab company to guard our harbors against Arab Islamic terrorists, then it should come as no surprise that our the Street War Fox in the White House will hire Mexican security to keep illegal alien Mexicans out of the United States.

And here we go again. WHEN IN GOD’S NAME WILL IT OCCUR TO YOU THAT YOU ARE BEING SOLD OUT?

When the nuke goes off, or the microbiology war and epidemic starts, your “leaders” will – with glib assurance born of dry-run practice with Ruby Ridge, Waco, 9-11, Katrina, Rita, and the Weapons of Mass Destruction That Weren’t There – roll out their great “damage control” machine. An old boss of mine used to call his Radio Free Europe “The Mighty Wurlitzer.” “I can sell ice to Eskimos,” he would say. Another of his contemporaries, the guy known as “Virginia Slim,” used to aver that, “Deception is a state of mind, and deception is the mind of the state.”

But Frank G Wisner and James J. Angleton would be green with envy, were they able to see the level and volume of deceit government and an administration can get away with today. George W. Bush – George the Seventh – is the absolutely unrivalled master of the big, the outrageous, the deceitful and self-serving lie.

How else could anyone talk you into hiring those who share the ideology and kinship of those sworn to kill you to guard the doors while you sleep? With this guy in the White House on December 7, 1941, you would have hired Mitsubishi, Nakajima – or the Imperial Navy, for that matter - to guard our ports and harbors in the aftermath of the Japanese attack.

Of course. It would have “celebrated diversity,” shown how broad-minded and egalitarian we are. It is also evidence of bewilderment – insanity. Remember the definition? “Out of touch with reality; unable to reason or think on his own behalf and in his own best interests.” Sound familiar?

If all that weren’t enough, today the media relates that Congress has joined the terrorists and others out for both your scalp and your way of life (I do not mention your pride or honor; they will argue that you no longer have either that or any concern for it). I refer to that masterpiece of cynical double-talk and Newspeak, the Patriot Act. With the Islamic terrorist having provided the left jab at the World Trade Center and elsewhere, the Congress has nailed us with the right cross that is our right to be left alone by the terrorist known as government by criminal conspiracy – ours, obviously.

You have been raped, and the authorities’ response is to dress you in nun’s habit and handcuff you to your bedroom door.

This is a nation of two hundred million Uriah Heeps, unctuous, toadying sycophants seeking favor in Washington, crawling cowards who “deserve neither security or freedom.” Those, of course, were the words of Benjamin Franklin, one of the framers of the Constitution now being used like Charmin by our traitorous government. You were even better described by another, Samuel Adams of Boston, in 1775. In predicting that this would happen in my book “Letters to Aaron, I quoted from one of his own letters. Listen:

“If ye love wealth greater than liberty, the tranquility of servitude better than the animating contest for freedom, go home from us in peace. We seek not your counsel nor your arms. Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; may your chains sit lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that ye were our countrymen.”

Be all that as it may, there is one thing left to be said. Be very certain, anyone who seeks to deprive me of rights guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution, that nothing has changed. As I once warned during a press conference on the Capitol steps in Denver, Colorado all these years ago, I will defend my rights. If I catch anyone from government in my house, I will kill him there. If I catch anyone in government invading my house by wiretap or electronic intrusion, I will likewise seek him out, and I will destroy him. I will destroy him by means legal or illegal; it is he, after all, who says what the law is.

There is no other way. There has never been any other way. “For,” in the words of the 14th Century Declaration of Arbraoth, “we fight, not for glory nor for riches nor for honor, but only and alone for Freedom, which no good man surrenders but with his life".

Wannabe Edward the Seconds like our own today would do well to remember that. The Constitution of the United States is unlike any other law, in that it only observes a higher law, and guarantees its observance by government. Government, in short, does not have any power to change the Constitution. Rulings by courts - including the highest, these days - only seek to justify government wrongs, and do not change the fact of the crime. Both the fact and the intent of the Nation’s Supreme Law are now culturally understood, and, as such, are immutable even by the government’s courts. Historically and culturally, only the people can change their Constitution, and refusal to respect the rights enumerated there simply makes government a criminal (surprise!), and empowers the people to legally resist.

YOU ARE ABOUT TO BE DEALT A FEARFUL BLOW, MY COUNTRY; AND IT IS BEING DELIVERED BY TRAITORS AMONG US, TRAITORS SELLING US OUT TO THOSE DESIROUS OF DESTROYING AND KILLING US.

As Johanna, the heroine of my novel, says, “You can never trust a capitalist – everything is for sale.”