"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.”