WHO's a "Traitor?!"

The "American" - there are thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere, you know - public is a society awash in an ocean of lies. Most, of course, are lies perpetrated by the society on itself. The way of all flesh. Then there are lies by the government - far, far more dangerous. The following essay asks how democracy - rule of the people - is possible where the government does not have to tell the truth about its actions. If the people we elect are free to lie, what is to protect us from, for instance, electing an ally of an enemy foreign, power?

But what is even more critical, perhaps, is a news media and press complicit in the deception. If the media, with its ability to create virtual reality and vast powers of persuasion so derived, deliberately lies and deceives the voters, is that not a crime?

Cal Thomas, "nationally syndicated columnist," writes this morning that Mary McCarthy, the CIA "officer" who allegedly "leaked" secrets and was fired for so doing should be shot. "They shoot traitors in wartime, don't they?" he asks, the proceeds to quote the dictionary definition of traitor, and points out that in time of war, traitors are by law executed. Interesting. Interesting most, I mean, as a vehicle by which to assess the value of our nation's media as information services and intelligence concerning how we might - as a republic - control our government and nation. There is hardly a line here that can be taken at face value, something one finds in just about every word "reported" by the "American" press.

First, the secret that McCarthy "leaked" was the fact known to half the civilized world - citizens of the United States not included, for some reason (and, yes, I did say that the way I intended) - knew that we were running illegal prisons, where we likewise torture prisoners, in Europe (and elsewhere). Next, we learn (that apparently while Mr. Thomas was writing his latest prevarication by dissimulation) that when McCarthy's lawyer asseverated that his client had no part in the Washington Post story by one Dana Priest, the CIA was forced to admit that was true. If I wonder what it was, then, that it was that resulted in her being fired, I shouldn't be alone. Mr. Thomas doesn't mention any of this, of course - too busy preparing the rope for the lynching.

Next, to get back to the gentlemen's column and the related story, there is the indisputable fact that to know a crime is being committed - and torture of prisoners, no matter who they are, is a crime - and do nothing is a crime known to lawyers and such as misprision. Working for the U.S. Government since the big war (Two, not Vietnam) is a bitch kitty, I can tell you - always caught between the Scylla and Charybdis of being imprisoned for committing international war crimes or being shot as a traitor to your government.

Shouldn't we consider somewhere in this blizzard of bullshit, and now that we're talking about treason, that we AREN'T actually at war (that's a matter of law, and an act of Congress, let us remember), and that the only war is a politician's rhetorical device, one designed to further the lie that brought us to killing the citizens of a foreign nation?

Then we have a fact that the tunnel-visioned Thomas seems to overlook completely. If we substitute the name and title "President George W. Bush" for "CIA Officer Mary McCarthy," we have the same story - and legal reasoning - with only the further need to substitute "leaks" related to another CIA Officer, Valerie Plame. Mr. Thomas, therefore, suggests that we shoot for treason the nation's chief executive. I agree. Obviously, though, treason by the President is far more "severe to our capabilities of carrying out our mission," to quote the CIA's inimitable director, Porter Goss. Porter, of course, is our latest super-patriot and knight in shining armor.



Porter, parenthetically, you know, was among the "Operation 40" that grew out of the gay little band I was recruited for way back then, the "Executive Action Group" - "Executive Action" was synonymous to insiders with "assassination" - who planned the international crime of assassinating the head of a foreign government, one Fidel Castro. The same band of swashbuckling heroes blew up the Belgian freighter La Coubre in Havana Bay, killing 75 and injuring more than 200 innocent noncombatants ("collateral damage," you understand). When a guy named "Puerco" ("Pig") said later that this was Op 40 first operation, he termed it "successful." Porter would have agreed with that. If you think aberrations the CIA torture camps in Europe - or the School of the Americas here at Fort Benning, for that matter - you're not paying attention.

"Operation 40" wasn't just involved in sabotage operations. In fact, it was intended from the beginning to be a team of assassins. Not only was I a member of the group it was spun off from, one member, a guy named Frank Fiorini (whether his name was Rank Angelo Fiorini - the name I knew him by - or Frank Anthony Sturgis I was never sure) claimed: "this assassination group (Operation 40) would upon orders, naturally, assassinate either members of the military or the political parties of the foreign country that you were going to infiltrate, and if necessary some of your own members who were suspected of being foreign agents... We were concentrating strictly in Cuba at that particular time. During the Church Hearings - remember (no, I don't suppose)? - everybody CIA denied the whole thing. Richard Helms, convicted later of perjury in the hearings, said, "We don't do that sort of thing." That was interesting for a guy like me.

Anyway, back to our story:

It's also interesting, always, to hear one of these warrior wannabees get to bloviating about shooting people for treason, "leaking secrets" and all that. Mr. Thomas, those who read here will recall, is among those who "did not serve." Let's consider for a moment who the real threat to our nation is. Our "leaders" - congressional representatives, senators, presidents and all the rest - are beyond any reasonable doubt the biggest collection of the biggest liars on earth. Or in its history. Now who is a bigger traitor - let us recall Mr. Thomas' definition: "One who betrays another's trust or is false to an obligation or duty" - the CIA "Officer" who leaks to the press (who else would she tell that would listen or do anything about it?) evidence of actions which are crimes both here and internationally, or the "representative" who lies in order to get into office, or to stay there? How about a President of the United States who lies in order to get us to go to war and/or to further his own, personal agenda? HMMMMM?!

How do we have a democracy or republic when the prospective voting public is completely mislead? How do we know that the individual being sent to Congress, the White House, and the other seats of government is not a traitor, an ally of a foreign enemy? What if he's a rapist (we were pretty close to that here lately, you know; and he lied, too - under oath), or other kind of criminal conspirator. Of course, we know they all are, but that's a matter of more definitions and not my object here. Tell me, Mr. Thomas, why isn't lying to the public by an elected official a far bigger crime than leaking evidence of malfeasance in office? Tell us about that.


Tell us why a national media - guys like you, stud - who keep the voting public bewildered and lost in a fog of cynically deceitful propaganda from both right and left, all of it designed to further the agenda of this or that special interest - shouldn't be shot when it takes off after some tabloid tale like the latest instance of rape somewhere.

Isn't that like a guard during time of war deserting his post for a roll in the hay with some chippie?

Who's a traitor nowadays seems a question mostly of whose ox is being gored - DOESN'T it?! Or is it whose palm is being greased?

To Kill a Nation; and the Dog Didn't Bark - Remember?

To the several people who wrote concerning my 1986 (I wrote one similar for the Department of the Army in 1978) paper concerning a counter-attack by an individual against a United States intending to destroy him, here is a reprise in précis:

Parenthetically, and by way of elucidation, I was at that time recovering from bullet wounds inflicted by a federal sniper intent upon stopping my meetings or association with Senator Charles Grassley of Iowa and prospective testimony at hearings having to do with new legislation, legislation styled by the senator “Omnibus Taxpayers Bill of Rights.” A photo of my leg wound is here and on my website - and in my book “Letters to Aaron,” the Hal Luebbert Story.

I was, frankly, considering at the time ways to destroy you, and something I remembered from John Stuart Mill, was very important. “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.” If my country felt justified and meant to destroy me, why should I not be justified in destroying my country?

I decided to try a threat. Maybe they would search those records they were do damned intent upon keeping from you, the public, record of what they had taught me to do and now might use on you and them, and relent. It was worth a try, so I wrote and sent it to numbers of senators, congressmen, and news media. Didn’t hear about it did you? Think about that.

A relatively simple concoction of chemicals, placed in the appropriate containers and strewed across the mountain forests of the west by plane, could be configured to trigger when trees and vegetation reached tinder dryness. The result could be made to be and become a conflagration unlike any ever witnessed on the planet. Smoke would create to a degree the “nuclear winter” much spoken of during the Cold War, blocking out the sun. I had already decided then on a design for the pyrotechnic devices, and the one I have now is roughly ten times better.

As many as fifty chemical preparations might be compounded, then deposited in the nation’s rivers, killing not only everything in the river, but everything that bathed or drank from it. Were one to attack the Mississippi River system alone, a large part of the nation would die of resulting thirst and pestilence. If the preparation were radioactive – and it would not have to be anything as exotic and hard to come by as weapons grade uranium or plutonium; a physicist could find a dozen or more sources of such radioactivity – the effect would be even worse.
Several poisons, ones capable of preparation at home, are so toxic that a tiny amount deposited on one’s skin will kill him swiftly. One of these chemicals placed in the water system of a city would kill most of the people there before warnings could save them. After having visited several of the nation’s defense installations, I realized that most of them could be attacked that way, and neutralized.

(Try to remember that you and your government were trying to kill and destroy me. You were doing that utterly without cause except what you believe to be your brute power to do that; and, by the significant way, you will note that you were wrong).

A well conceived, prepared, and determined attack on the IRS would destroy your economy. The IRS is the beating heart of the system that enslaves millions, and critical to the corporations and military industrial complex that rules the nation. When individual members of the one hundred and fifty thousand man IRS complement began to be murdered and disappear, news of such would spread inevitably, inducing terror and ending their complicity in the wealth distribution control racket being run by the federal conspiracy of criminals. When large numbers of employees stopped coming to work, the system would die.

The Computer Age began for the IRS with the 1961 dedication of the National Computer Center at Martinsburg, West Virginia. I have been there many times, such that I know how destruction of the enormous computer employees there call “The Martinsburg Monster” (funny, the name – huh?) would also bring the nation’s tax collection system to its knees. With more than three hundred auxiliary computers slaved to it, the Monster is the brains and nervous system of the U.S. Government economic extortion racket. Destruction of the center, or sickness and/or death of all its employees would do likewise.

Incidentally, a dry run I ran on the place in 1985 made it very clear that my operations plan for an attack would be eminently and lethally successful. All that was necessary for penetration of the place’s vaunted security was compromise of one female employee. Both were a pleasure . . . (I could have used that word – penetration, I mean – twice there, couldn’t I?)

Anyone now aware of the power of a fully fueled jumbo-jet airliner knows how the nation’s economic life could be ended, besides. Al Qa’ida terrorist Mohammed Atta and his cohort were long on hatred, but short on tactical savvy. Maybe they’ll be smarter, next time.

Finally among the “Mongoose Trick” operations I am willing to discuss here – I’m still deciding whether I will take what my country did to me lying down – there is the nation’s helter-skelter cyber-technology system. Anyone observing the possibilities suggested by the Y2K scare of 1999 will realize what I mean. The possibility that computers might shut down when confused by the last two digests of the year 2000 demonstrated to anybody with half a brain what might happen, were a skilled cyber-expert to become angry enough to do what the protagonist and heroine of my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth” did there. Fortunately for the nation that was the U.S. in the book, Baron Han von Paulus was a knight, one bent only on bringing the mega corporations (like the oil companies whose lobbyist-legalized swindle of the public goes on at this very moment) to heel and restoring economic equity to the nation and its people.

There were, as I’ve already said, more than a dozen “U.S. American Freedom” ops. You don’t want to know them, because the government destroys people who know things like that. They tried with me, remember?

The fact is, it’s inevitable that one of these will happen. More, anyone observing either the callous disregard for the public’s safety as evidenced by deliberate refusal to stop illegal immigration from Mexico, or the brutal abandonment of the victims of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, should realize that the government simply doesn’t care. Their interest is power, not public service, not the public’s protection, and certainly not sympathy or pity.

The dog guarding the World Trade Center Silver Blaze didn’t bark, remember?
The government conspiracy of criminals in Washington knows full well that any day now – maybe already, as a matter of fact - Al Qa’ida or operatives for another of the dozen nations who hate us with good reason will slip across our southern border or into our equally unguarded seaports to conduct an operation like those I’ve discussed here. Or worse – one of the ops plans I haven’t discussed. Millions will die, while the criminals complicit with the perpetrators remain safe in billion dollar redoubts like those I also discussed in my novel.

One last thing that ought, as Bill Cosby says “shake up your spine”: during operations against the government, I infiltrated one supposedly secure federal installation after another. Often, I left my calling card in the center of desk belonging to the highest security official there. Guess how many of these “public servants” reported their lapse? That’s right, none.

In the Land of the Fee, where job is important above all else – including your safety, obviously – no one dares admit a mistake. It can end a career, as the saying heard everywhere in corporate business and government goes. If you are vulnerable - and you are, terribly - it is because you are hopelessly dependent on things artificial and unreal, upon wealth and technological life support.

It may end a nation, too.

Common Sense Ain't What It Used To Be . . .

Last evening, watching television news and marveling at what must be either the really incredible stupidity or dissimulating dishonest of “analysts” and pundits there, I was about continue here with examples of the ominous gullibility of “Americans” in the face of their rapidly devolving and decaying governmental systems when my wife brought in the mail. One envelope contained a check for $1.08 cents, that from my car insurance company. That’s the same company who suddenly cancelled my insurance for reasons I have yet to discover or divine, inasmuch as I simply went to my insurance agent’s office and had them put me with another insurer. I do not suffer fools gladly.

But I wondered. Having suffered through seventeen years of IRS harassment by tampering using every conceivable kind of electronic chicanery and “Nixonian dirty trick,” I wondered. From a few minutes ago, and my conversation with Oscar at Ford Credit, I’m still wondering. But I’m looking forward to the morning (I called The Border Federal Credit Union before calling Ford Credit, only to find the credit union closed for the day) with really delighted anticipation. I’ll call the bank. Oscar tells me the checks, which I have copies of, were returned because “no such account numbers exist.”

Now, that’s the same account I’ve always had – six years, now - with the Credit Union, and the check in question was the twelfth from the pad of checks those in question came from. I write only checks for payment of car insurance and car loan from that pad. So something is afoot, and I have a good idea what it is. When I finally file my lawsuit against the government, the evidence they have given me will come into court by the truckload.

The mental duel with the federal government is always entertaining, too, especially in that it serves as a measure by which to keep track of that same government’s decay. That I watch with relish. I can hardly wait for them to collapse. But there’s more. Let’s go back to that phone call to Ford Credit. The first voice - a recording, of course – instructs me if I want to speak English, I should press one. Now WHAT THE HELL COUNTRY IS THIS? Do want to speak English? Hell, no, I take option two – Spanish. When the guy answers, it’s Oscar, and he’s speaking English – sort of. I should have insisted on Spanish, because Oscar is obviously not one of us. It turns out he’s Hispanic, but I guess he didn’t like my Cuban accent.
That’s the way it is, isn’t it? When I purchased my last cell phone at the local radio shack, the counter guy attempted to make the call necessary to initiate service, only to scowl and look puzzled, then hand me the phone. “Can you tell what she’s saying”” he asked. Taking the phone and recognizing the woman’s accent, I spoke to her in my then fluent Japanese. “Nippongo o hanasu koto ga dekimasu ka?” Do you speak Japanese? Hoshii no desu ga? Would you like to?

The young woman was much relieved, and the transaction completed quickly. But you wonder. Japanese! Sometime ago, during one of the federal attacks that are launched on my website continually – none, thankfully, with any more efficacy or competence than our attack on Iraq – I was obliged to speak first with Bombay, India, then London, England. Another foray into international commerce and diplomacy required my Japanese again, plus an exchanged of e-mails with Frankfurt, Germany (I speak German, too).

And then, of course, there’s the fact that each time I’m mugged while hiking and camping or bicycling here in South Texas, I have to speak Spanish.

The girls who have fucked up my bank account and car payment will have been “Hispanic,” like the girls at the insurance company. The space between my last names is too much for them, and with the wonders of a nation incapable of thought without computerized assistance . . . . well, you know. My last trip to the doctor’s office, for another instance of same, has resulted in a brouhaha of bungling. This one, though, was not un-anticipated and prepared for, inasmuch as Medicare and Medicaid are federal matters, and when has any of our governments ever done anything even remotely efficient or well? Personnel at the Social Security Administration have already bungled the matter so badly that all hope of straightening it out – in any of seven languages I still have some command of – is hopeless. I’ll just pay the cash. Why we call as system whereby the doctor and hospital are assured of payment, but the “insured” still gets a huge bill “insurance” is still beyond me, anyway. More federal FemSpeak, I suppose.

If perhaps anyone is so astute as to notice, and wonders why my bank account is still in Del Rio, Texas while I live in Kingsville four hours away, what I’ve already said here ought be a hint. When I moved from Corpus Christi to Del Rio some years ago, it took the U.S. Mail seven months to get my mail to me, and until I was willing to open an account at the Border Federal Credit Union in Del Rio and accept direct deposit of Social Security monies owed me, I was kept completely devoid of funds. Fortunately, I do have a number of marketable skills, and know how to live off the land. When I had camped by the Rio Grande for a year, I simply decided to stay there. Meanwhile, my driver’s license, concealed handgun license, college credit transcripts, and a number of additional missives of similar importance could not be gotten to me. Too much for “the greatest nation in history.”

An attempt to do something as monumentally complex and difficult as transfer my checking account from one bank to another, and to notify the Social Security Administration, would result in a hassle at least as frustrating and annoying - not me, them; and they get mean and vindictive right away (it’s my fault, of course) – as that which I’ve already been through and described.

In my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I detail some of my travail with federal record and communication tampering, exacerbated by the spastic stupidity and incompetence of culturally mix-mastered “America.” No one need dispute with me concerning what now deceased comedian Steven Allen called the “dumbing-down of America.” I could, from my own experiences, make an open and shut case, even without Jay Leno’s Jay-Walking segment as an exhibit in evidence. In Germany, we are the equivalent of the “dumb Pollack” joke. Small wonder.

But the media’s analysts are something else again. Six months ago, when one retired general pontificating on FoxNews said something particularly stupid, I started reviewing the fustian pronouncements of people like Col. Oliver North, Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney, Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales Jr., Lt. Col. Robert Maginnis, Col. David Hunt, and Major Robert S. Bevelacqua, all FoxNews “analysts.” It would have been a bit of a coup to review the record of their tactical brilliance and related prognostications, but Media Matters has beaten me to the punch this morning (damn!).

http://mediamatters.org/items/200604240005 is the URL for the article, and it reports just what I learned with my own digging. If these guys are analysts, it must be by way of analyzing the entrails of an owl. Wrong! Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong! For god’s sake – with this kind of expert advice, is there any wonder why we can’t even accomplish something as dirt simple as stopping illegal immigration?

It’s got me wondering (to say nothing of being fearful of leaving the house). During my formative years, there was an expression, “common sense.” Most people built their lives with it, and they were successful enough to have built everything our children are now busily intent on squandering. Way of all flesh, I guess. But common sense has fallen into disrepute these days, sneered into silence by wondrous things like technology, “higher” education, the information highway (reminds me of a grandfather’s observation that a local college boy “knows a helluva lot, all right – it’s just that everything he knows is wrong”), and “Fox Reality.”

That last one, hot off the presses as it were, tickles me. Fox reality. Sounds like the diagnosis for a guy on LSD, doesn’t it? Try to think of something more oxymoronic than that one. Military intelligence? How about government organization or reasonable woman?

But I digress. Couldn’t help it – some things just blow your train of thought off the tracks. Common sense used to be the result of rationality confronted by reality – getting along in the real world. What now passes for common sense is the result of rationality confronted with rhetoric and rationalization. Everything the mind deals with now is in some major degree some kind of virtual reality (talk about oxymorons!). Where once an error in reasoning was quickly apparent, like making a mistake in a fight, it is now sometimes never apparent, or subject to more of the detached rationalization that caused it in the first place. Somebody else pays the price, too.

The historically biggest, loudest example of that the future will find is feminism. Remember all its basic tenets? Its results? Only a few will do to illustrate. The one parent – meaning mom raised the kids – family? Kids didn’t need a male parent. That, of course, quickly expanded to both parents women, or men.

“A woman needs a man like a fish need a bicycle!” Remember that little intellectual dandy? How about “All men are rapists!”? I read a whole lot of it, all mental meandering by women living in an environment – one provided by the very gender they were excoriating – that would never suffer their theorizations to be tested, that of all but total societal protection. Outside that only virtually real realm – the future then, for instance – only others would pay the price. Even when the resulting Dodo mentality resulted in turn with, for instance, the continual rape and murder of their sisters, they went on with their brainless blabber and psycho-babble.

Women in military combat, like women in police uniform and a host of similar nonsense (I use the word literally; i.e., non sense - not of the senses) are not common sense. Neither is female nudity or semi-nudity in public.

Note that if I re-phrase that to say “to invite rape,” I have, of course, committed the ultimate sin against feminism. But I have also illustrated the difference between common sense born of interface between mind and reality and interface between mind and reality that is only language and rhetoric. Reality and experience with it do not have a problem with equating or differentiating the two statements; rationalization and reality made only of words do.

“The great tragedy of science,” Thomas Huxley observed, “is the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

Things Learned at a Judo Tournament

I'm just back from having attended the 2006 version of the U.S. National Judo Championships. They were held in Houston, in the same Exhibition Center where I was lucky enough to win a title in 2000. I saw a lot, and learned a lot - especially where an event like this is a microcosm of things. People who read what I write and listen to what I say know that for most of my life I have relied upon what the microcosms of things can tell me, especially for tactics and as a means for knowing what the future holds. In an event like this one, I see behavior patterns, complexes, and syndromes - both as respects individual and group behavior. The whole science is too voluminous for the sort of thing I do here, but one rule is apropos of what I usually talk about. The rule is that any game - and life is a game - is encapsulated and formed by the rules it obeys. A people first make law, then law begins to make them. That could be said another way: things evolve.

I digress here long enough to point out to my "creationist" friends (enemies, too) that even had god made everything exactly so at the time of creation, the fact that it would have been obliged to change with time and the doing of whatever it did or does is everywhere evidence. Witness judo, the discipline, science, and sport I started in 1950, and have practiced and participated in an average of four hours a week for fifty-six years. I've watched it evolve. That's true of everything, probably, because it has to - there's a natural law involved (god?).

I am not only aware of judo's evolution, I know, by simply by comparing myself to others who have not been shaped and configured - disciplined - by judo, how it changed what I would have been without it.

One of the forces that is a factor in the evolution process where judo is concerned is, of course, human nature. Everything science or art that is converted to a game inevitably becomes a silly caricature of what it was and was derived from. Judo is no exception. I'm perhaps more aware of what has happened because I look for such things. Then, too, when I was a boy learning firearms, an uncle told me, "A gun is never a toy; never play with it. Hunting is should never be just for fun - you don't kill for fun. Honorable men kill only for food or to defend their lives, which is the same thing." That's the reason that I've never taken part in competition with guns (except in the instances having to do with attendance at the Iowa Law Enforcement and FBI Academies, where competition was required).

But another reason has to do with my judo, and what it's become. Human games, as opposed to those compelled by nature in order to assure survival, always make of their subject matter a question of winning or losing. They trivialize it, in other words. Let's take an example. In shooting, the original IPSIC - International Practical Shooting Confederation - rules required a full-power handgun, .357 Magnum, as I recall, or higher. Of course (and something to which the U.S. Army - and taxpayer - should have been paying attention when they chose the all but totally ineffective 9mm Baretta as a tool for actual combat), the 1911 Pistol in .45 caliber quickly became the weapon of choice for it's cartridge capacity, and unfailing operation. But then the silliness set in.

The game, after all was basically (save the quibbling, folks - it's beside the point) to punch as many as possible holes in paper, ding a gong, or the like in the shortest possible time. That, among other things, meant bigger magazines, longer sight radiuses, and anti-slip grips, recoil compensators and ammunition that didn't "kick," and anything that gave the owner a better chance to punch holes in paper fast while running through a course. Similar impracticality, incidentally, is true with the sportsmen who shoot rifles long range from benches, armed with rifles specially designed and sighted for the purpose, and equipped with range-finding and wind correction technology that would make NASA envious. It's a game with little resemblance to a real gunfight, and I've had some cruel fun over the years with guys who let the games con them into believing they were now gunfighters or riflemen. Games are also behaviorally powerful creators of habit, something that in a fight will kill you - or an innocent person.

That I stay digressed is for a purpose, an example for history. A few years ago, hired by the American Deputy Sheriff's Association to study the matter, I came upon case histories like these:

1. A Highway Patrolman - who in a gunfight carefully lined up on the bumper of the patrol car he was hiding behind spent brass from his service revolver on, and as a gunman armed with a shotgun approached along the side of the vehicle, went on reloading until the shotgun blast killed him. He died with, as I remember three rounds in the cylinder.
2. A Colorado policeman - who, in a gunfight outside a church where he has accosted his assailant, stood exchanging "center of mass" hits in the torso with the latter; when the two weapons (both in that wondrous 9mm "parabellum" - an inadvertent joke that means literally "for war") were empty, the men slumped to the ground. One, incidentally, survived.
3. A Texas police officer, who in a gunfight involving a killer and several fellow officers, didn't fire once; asked why, he could only lament lugubriously, "I didn't hear the whistle!"

It may be that you have to be a behaviorist to explain those incidents, but I don't think so. The first guy was in the HABIT of doing what he did. It never even occurred to him that he only needed one round in the cylinder to stop his assailant from killing him. When the fat's in the fire, you do what you've practiced to do. The officer in Colorado had trained to shoot at that "center of mass" - that's what he did. Fortunately for him - he's the one who survived - so did his assailant. You do what you practice to do. In Texas, the officer under the ruthless and unyielding pressure of a gunfight reverted to his practice: he waited for the whistle before firing. In each case, the behavior EVOLVED, the product of environment - circumstances.

Judo has likewise evolved, and while the purposes and intent of its founder were other than my own - he was an educator, interested in character development for children; mine was survival - he was not sanguine concerning competition and sport where judo was concerned. Now we see why. The object of judo is to achieve dominant control of the assailant (called "uke" - receiver - in the classic discipline) by throwing him from his feet to his back with force, by obtaining an armlock forcing his submission, by holding him on the ground by pressing down on his shoulder, or by closing his jacket or your arms (you're referred to as "tori" - taker - when you're attacking or counterattacking) around his neck. In the sport version of judo, points are scored on the basis of degree or success in each instance. Matches are six minutes in length, fought on floor mats, and controlled by three officials.

That's where the silliness begins. Like the IPSIC handgun competition, the original sport resembled the real thing - a real fight - closely. As Hayward Nishioka, a champion of judo many (sorry, Hayward) years ago said yesterday, "Hal, times change." Nowhere could one find a better example for the uninitiated than in a particularly favored technique of judo, the shoulder throw, ippon seoinage. In this waza - technique - the thrower ("tori" - remember?) steps in to turn under the opponent's arm, and driving his own arm under it, carries "uke" ("receiver," remember) off his feet and onto the back to be thrown. In an actual fight - street, that is - to be thrown over someone's shoulder while standing produces a very unpleasant, often debilitating collision with the ground. That's how it was in the earliest days of judo competition, too - the reason for the mats. That's not how it is in judo now.

I pause parenthetically for one other pertinent fact concerning the sport. Judo is a very intense exercise; in fact, it is rated by today's bio-mechanicists as the most demanding of human sports. Part of the reason for that is the fact that no stalling of any kind is permitted. Defensive tactics like posture and refusal to come to grips are permitted only monetarily, and stepping out of bounds draws an immediate penalty equivalent to giving a score to the opponent. But people play judo and there are rules, always the ingredients for chicanery. Judo contestants have found a way to stall and score at the same time (remind anyone of the tournament called Congress?). It's called "drop seoinage." The contestant caught in a bind such as inability to get his favorite grip or inability to prevent his opponent from same, simply whirls and throws himself on his face in a blatantly phony attack. Once there, he assumes a "turtle" position, face down and knees drawn up under himself, hands and elbows tightly drawn to protect his throat against a strangle hold. Once his opponent has been unsuccessful in turning him over into matwork, the fraud leaps to his feet to repeat the performance.

We now consider another aspect of the civilized human condition, that being his litigious nature. The result where judo is concerned is that rules for competition are continually tinkered with, always by persons seeking advantage for someone or something favored (remind anyone of U.S. Government?), with the concomitant result that no competitor is permitted to train long in the discipline and tactics required by the new rule. Where once, for instance, contest throws were assessed only two scores, "ippon" - the decisive full point for throwing his opponent cleanly and with force to the mat, or waza-ari - the half point awarded when some component of the "ippon" was lacking, the legislators added "yuko" and "koka" points. The latter are too technical and requiring of explanation to describe here, but the new rules have changed the face of judo drastically. More, scoring for matwork holds has changed, too, all supposedly to provide criteria for win by technical decision. Suffice it to say that a way to find a winner had to be found, inasmuch as everyone occidental seemed to hate the idea of a draw. At one time during evolution of the sport's jurisprudence, contestants were weighed after a scoreless fight, the lighter man being declared the winner. It was important, it seemed, to be able to sweat more than the other guy.

My suggestion that we simply have a bodybuilder posing contest after a fight where no scoring had occurred drew scornful - even nasty - comment.

The judo shiai - tournament - now came to resemble a courtroom far more than a gym or sports venue. Does THAT remind you of anything? How about it I pointed out the "joshi judoka" - women judoists - had begun to take part in the officiating, rule-making, and legislating processes? That's also a matter requiring far, far, more court reporting than I have space for here, but the "flop seoi" specialist now had everything he needed to turn the character of judo from that of "maximum efficiency" once enunciated by its founder to almost the direct opposite. In the new rules, each actual attack by a competitor now had, in the absence of any actual, declared score, the effect of a score. The fighter who made the greatest number of offensive moves was declared the winner. No more of that silly, who-managed-to-sweat-more stuff. And much more satisfying than a draw - even if spectators had no idea why one player was the victor.

So, the era of the "flop seoi" had arrived. Especially in the women's version of judo, where lack of upper body strength diminishes the effect of the shoulder throw almost entirely, my favorite discipline and sport had taken on a decidedly comical aspect. In the six years since my last attendance at "The Nationals," it's gotten worse. On six mats yesterday, contestants "flopped" repeatedly, sometimes six at one time and nearly in unison. Occasionally, a competitor would roll - once having flopped to his or her belly - like a dog or cat desirous of scratching its back, drawing his opponent over to some slight contact with the mat with leg or upper torso - usually only the side or back of arm or shoulder - to be awarded a "score" by officials dutiful to the new and effeminized rules. As perhaps the senior man at the tournament, I spent the day trying to explain to spectators around me why this or that was a "score." I failed often. When several persons had tried unsuccessfully - or merely reminded me that the rules had only changed a "little while ago" - to explain the new out-of-bounds rules, I gave up. I don't know the rules to the game I've played for fifty-six years. Does THAT remind you of anything?

"The more corrupt the state," observed the Roman historian Tacitus, the more numerous its laws."

And here we are. My five hour journey to Houston and the shiai, with gasoline at $2.90 per gallon, was one made in hopes of seeing old friends. That, too, was a disappointment. I saw Leo, Ed, Hayward, and few others, but none of the Old Ones. Most of those, it seems, are no longer with us, too old to make the trip, or no longer that interested. Hardly any of the competitors, matter of fact, were familiar names. And the game they were playing? Well, we've covered that. I saw Judo, the "Do" - Tao - and discipline I have followed since I was a boy, reduced to a rather peculiar game I no longer recognize, much less understand. The way of things, I suppose.

But the morning after my return from the Nationals, I went to a birthday party for a friend, and there a conversation with an educator from Texas A&M University brought the matter of a community, organization, and legal system like that of my sport as a microcosm of my country even further into focus than might have otherwise been the case. Among the things discussed among the pilots, educators, engineers, and the like was an ominous thing each and every one reported having noticed. I speak of the disconnect between the virtual and the real everywhere, especially with adolescent and older youth. I related how recently in a judo class I explained and demonstrated a defense and escape from kesa gatame, a mat hold-down. The athletes understood what I had told them, and the demonstration was very clear. Yet, asked to do the technique, none could. In fact, nothing of what they had just understood could they so much as begin to duplicate.

It was a puzzling, even astonishing and fearful thing to see; and, now, hearing highly-killed and credentialed educators theorize and explain how life in an electronically created, only virtual real environment was creating in the nation's youth the mental equivalent of the island birds I spoke of in my blogs of April 20, I could do naught but pose a simple question. "What does that mean for our future? Carried to its logical conclusion, in other words, what does it mean for the United States of America? There isn't much doubt, is there?

So, I provide my own answer: Thermodynamics' Second Law. Chaos. "Times," Hayward said, "change."

The Duke Lacrosse Team, "Vaginal Bruising," and Feminist Reality - the Rubber Room, That Is.

Double, double, toil and trouble; kettle boil and cauldron bubble . . ." Watching the women of television, from Fox to CNN to CBS and the rest last night, I couldn't help it. Hecate and the hags are back, and the apparitions they are calling are the battered remains of the hundreds of innocent men (of course, to harpies like these, that's an oxymoron) jailed for rape they didn't commit. Anyone who needs to know how that could happen need only to listen to the monotonous - the feminist litanies are all so familiar by now that it's a wonder they haven't been set to operatic music - mental meanderings of what the television networks would foist upon us as examples of superior female intellect. One such intellectual giant averred that whether the Duke University Lacrosse Team players have actually committed rape is immaterial - she is a woman and it's up to her to "support" the "victim." While the woman, an Afro-American officer of one feminist looney tune menagerie or the other, was the only one of her sisters to actually verbalize the viewpoint, the others did so with manner, tone, and tenor.

I was reminded of a purportedly raped co-ed member a government funded organization called the Rape Crisis Center, who told me several years after having sent four men to prison for forty years each that "maybe they didn't know it was rape - but that's up to the woman, isn't it?" You see, in the manner I had begun in high school, I had undertaken a research project of my own - to locate several years after trial rape victims, together with individuals who had received large awards for supposedly permanent injuries. I wanted to see how close the legal system had come to the truth. That, by the way, was two decades before the discovery of DNA testing and the first men released from prison after it had proved them incontrovertibly not guilty.

The femi-nazi (I don't think a lot of Rush Limbaugh, whose coinage that is, but this time he's hit the nail on the head) I spoke of a minute ago also asseverated that a finding of not guilty didn't necessarily mean a man wasn't a rapist. She stopped short of saying, as a feminist Canadian professor and writer did several years ago, that ALL men are rapists.

In twenty-three of the twenty-five rape cases I investigated, the victims of rape (all women, of course - this was the kind of rape we all recognize as rape, not the kind that results from goofy feminist-inspired and forced legislation) conceded, admitted, or whatever word you need to satisfy what's left of your mental programs where the subject is concerned, that they had not been raped in the classic (common sense) sense. Six - I've got it, let's just say they said "said" - said that rape meant they wanted to stop what they'd been doing, the guy didn't. Two said they weren't sure they had picked the right man out of the line-up. Eleven said they knew the man, had known him for several years, and that he had been invited to the woman's house or apartment. One said flatly the only way she could keep her wealthy husband was say that she had been raped. Five of the women told stories similar to the co-ed, and had similarly rationalized reasons for reporting they had been raped.

One of the women who actually was raped in the classic sense was raped by her ex-husband, the other by an ex-boyfriend with whom she had had frequent sex before their break-up.

I'm not even going to bother here with the usual and de rigueur protestations - how I know rape really does occur, I hate rapists (doesn't ever man with any kind of honor?), and all that. Facts are facts. Stubborn things.

But so are politics and political correctness. I don't have any facts, other than what is very apparent - and Bill O'Reilly, the "Factor" guy I often criticize here - stated them succinctly and well last night. "She has two young kids to support," said the supercilious sage of FoxNews, "and no fathers in sight. So, in order to earn money, she chooses to go to strange places and disrobe in front of strange men. Do the math." (Sesquipedalian - it means using big words - as he can be, O'Reilly is also right about the oil companies price-gouging, and like him, I won't every buy another nickel's worth of gasoline from Exxon or Mobil. Screw them.)

The witches of the major media know as little as I about the Duke matter. And they sure as hell aren't willing to ask any of the obvious questions. They haven't even the good grace - not even that of Nancy (whose "grace" you could get in your eye without the need to blink) - to look back at the history of the Joran van der Sloot pillorying, in light of recent discoveries (like the covertly obtained tape recording of van der Sloot and the Kalpoe brothers).

As I just said, I don't know anything about the Duke case; and I trust nothing the major media say - meaning I don't have an opinion about van der Sloot, either. This is what I do know about cases like the Duke matter, as taken from websites like this one: http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/article.php?scid=17&did=293

Note that as of this writing, one hundred and thirty-one men have been proved innocent of the rapes they were convicted of, and a number of additional cases are being resisted by the state and its prosecutor, something I'll discuss more in a minute. Here's what I do know about the matter of rape and our method of dealing with it:

In reviewing the cases of 110 men convicted of tape and freed after DNA proved they could not have been guilty, the AP (Associated Press) found:

"About half had no prior adult convictions, according to legal records and the inmates' attorneys. While some were picked up for questioning because they were known to police, many had never been in trouble before.

"Eleven of the men served time on death row; two came within days of execution.

"Slightly more than a third have received compensation, mainly through state claims. Some have received settlements from civil lawsuits or special legislative bills. For others, claims or suits are pending; and some had lawsuits thrown out or haven't decided whether to seek money.

"The men averaged 10 1/2 years behind bars. The shortest wrongful incarceration was one year; the longest, 22 years. Altogether, the 110 men spent 1,149 years in prison.

"Their imprisonment came during critical wage-earning years when careers and families are built. The average age when they entered prison was 28. At release, it was 38.

"Their convictions follow certain patterns. Nearly two-thirds were convicted with mistaken testimony from victims and eyewitnesses. About 14 percent were imprisoned after mistakes or alleged misconduct by forensics experts. Nine were mentally retarded or borderline retarded and confessed, they said, after being tricked or coerced by authorities.

"Finally freed - by determined lawyers or their own perseverance - the men were dumped back into society as abruptly as they were plucked out. Often, they were not entitled to the help, such as parole officers, given to those rightfully convicted.

"'The people who come out of this are often very, very severely damaged human beings who often don't ever fully recover,' says Rob Warden, executive director of Northwestern University School of Law's Center on Wrongful Convictions. 'Lightning strikes, they come out,' he says, 'and they're in bad, bad shape. They represent many walks of life - a homeless panhandler, a therapist, a junkie, a mushroom picker, a handyman, a crab fisherman - but almost all were working-class or poor.'

"Of the cases reviewed by the AP, about two-thirds involved black or Hispanic inmates, roughly reflecting state prison populations' racial makeup.

"'All of these people have a certain vulnerability. It may be race, class, mental health issues or personality problems,' says Peter Neufeld, who co-founded The Innocence Project with attorney Barry Scheck at the Cardozo School of Law in New York. About 60 percent of the men were helped by the 10-year-old legal assistance program, the rest by other groups or private lawyers. The first DNA releases came in 1989, according to the Innocence Project. "'they sort of get caught in this Kafkaesque vortex,' Neufeld adds, 'and the rest is history.'"

History? It's a little more than that. The guy who is put away in order to satisfy society - feminist society - doesn't give a damn going down in history. He cares about his life. My investigation, the one I just mentioned here, wasn't the only aspect of what I wanted to learn. After my boys' mom left as part of the deal she made with IRS, I had a whole lot of fun, and what most would call success, with the women. During that time, I asked a lot of questions about things I had wondered about since high school and my first experiences with sex. Repeatedly, women in casual and unsuspecting (concerning my ulterior motives, that is) conversation told me things, gave me statistics exactly the same as those heard in the news, a veritable litany again. I've looked up facts, the actual statistics. Here's an example, one just corroborated a minute ago on several websites:

"Somewhere in America, a woman is raped every 2 minutes, according to the U.S. Department of Justice."

"In 1995, 354,670 women were the victims of a rape or sexual assault. (National Crime Victimization Survey. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, 1996.)"

"Over the last two years, more than 787,000 women were the victim of a rape or sexual assault. (National Crime Victimization Survey. Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Department of Justice, 1996.)"

"The FBI estimates that 72 of every 100,000 females in the United States were raped last year. (Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Statistics, 1996.)"

Hmmm. "One every two minutes, there being 525,600 minutes in a year, that would mean 262,800. If I'm splitting hairs here, it's one hell of a hair. Another site says "There are 2 rapes or attempted rapes reported per 1,000 US citizens, which is 530,000 reports of rape per year. That hair must be the size of a sausage!

Another feminists statistician reports, "One in four women has been the victim of rape." Really? Of the 322 women I've known well enough to ask that question, two said they had been raped - both as a teen by her dad. None of the women in my family have been raped, and none of my three wives have been raped. That adds up to 360 women, none of whom have been raped. ?????

The fact is that a review of all the websites purporting to be reporting rape statistics shows statistics, mathematics, logic, and method just about what you'd expect in the land of the just about totally biased on any given question, barely literate, and almost totally innumerate. Shear confusion, I mean. And nobody cares; it's enough for feminism when it makes you feel good and abused.

Here's some more (hysterical people are always kind of funny - The Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy, Abbot and Costello and others made a career of it): "A review of Oklahoma University enrolment (sic) data and information supplied by campus police yielded the estimate that the annualized rape risk for 1996 freshmen women at O.U. was 1 chance in 476." Huh? There's something wrong here, isn't there?

But let's see what else some of this might mean: For instance, if there are, say, 15,000 rape convictions annually, and based on new DNA tests a third of those convictions are now found to be false, there are potentially 520,000 FALSE RAPE ALLEGATIONS a year. And how many of those resulted in an innocent man being executed? I'll do those numbers when I have more time, but off the top of a head pretty good with math (it's a hobby), I'd say about 30 since 1950. That's men killed, largely on feminism's account, who weren't guilty of anything. Remember those ugly cultures who demanded human sacrifices?

Another of the litanies having to do with rape is among the most hypocritical of our best, the one that goes, "rape is a very difficult crime to prosecute." Huh? Tell me another crime that require one witness, and no physical corroboration. If a prosecutor decides to put the woman in front of a jury, and she's actress enough (and I've been there - the "maybe they didn't know it was rape" girl, for instance), he's got a chance of convicting the guy. As a PI, I worked as many as twenty rape cases. Two resulted in convictions, the rest acquittals or dismissal of charges (with the result that the local prosecutor reported to IRS that I was a tax cheat). One jurisprudential judo trick that proved devastating had to do with the instrumentality of the crime. Yeah, that's what I'm talking about. Never comes up in discussion, does it? Never comes up in court, either. So what?

Well, think about it. Say the crime is murder. No examination, display, entering into evidence, and the rest of the weapon? That wouldn't make a jury suspicious? Remember the O.J. glove? The missing knife? Pick a crime, prosecution of which doesn't require admission of the instrumentality into evidence. In one case I worked, a guy was convicted of rape despite the fact that it wasn't possible for him. Yeah - impotent. Wet noodle in a wildcat's ass. He was present, and didn't decide to fight the other three guys; worse, probably, he testified that he thought the "victim" was having a good time - as she had had some months before with the local college football team.

That last wasn't admissible, of course. How the hell can it be that rational people don't consider that "prejudicial" - a stacked deck?

In another of my cases, this one successful for me, charges were dismissed when the woman recanted after not having been able to recollect noticing that the "instrument" of the crime was ten and a half inches in length, and SIX AND SIX AND THREE-QUARTER INCHES in circumference. And she claimed to have been "sodomized" - in the butt, I mean. Had I not insisted to a defense attorney and prosecutor who were adamantly opposed that examination of the men be done, there's little doubt in my mind that all of the four would have been convicted.

Which raises another question. Have you ever wondered, in this scheme of things - a scheme of things insisted upon by the distaff side of society - that more accused men don't just claim to be impotent? Try to imagine how that might go, things what they are.

Oh, one more thing - touched upon here the other day. "Vaginal bruising." I bring this up because of that physical corroboration I mentioned a minute ago. The woman comes in, says she was raped, picks out the guy she wants to pay the price of her umbrage, and we go through the "rape kit" drill and all the rest. If there's no semen anywhere, that's because he wore a condom. Picture that. How the hell would THAT have gone down? Never mind, your honors, I withdraw the question. Argumentative. Sexist, even. But with nothing else, there is always that de rigueur "vaginal bruising." Okay, guys, picture THAT one. How in the hell do you BRUISE it?! Has anybody EVER had a woman say you bruised her snatch after you had sex?

Now, I'm not going to brag or complain here, but I've been married four times, had three live-in girl friends, and in the years between my second and third, and third and fourth wives, I was what the prudes call "active sexually." I got laid a lot - okay? Several of the ladies liked really energetic - even violent - sex. More, it happened that I was to discover early in life - the widow who introduced me to sex - that I was unusual in the respect that I didn't lose erection after orgasm (save it - any number of the women will corroborate what I say). Many times, a woman and I had sex all night, six or seven orgasms for me. One of my wives managed to give me orgasm forty-nine times in a single week. Not once was any of these women bruised, despite the fact of having been mounted for as long as three hours by a very powerful and athletic male (a state and national judo champion, wrestler, and weightlifter) doing everything in his power to satisfy their urging that he "do it harder." Oh, and by the way - I'm actually somewhat bigger than the average. No "vaginal bruising."

Something's wrong with that, and what's even more wrong is the fact that it's never been exposed for the female fantasy myth that it is. There's not only something wrong with "vaginal bruising" as evidence, there's something damned wrong with a society where an adult writing to adults has to mince words about the most fundamental of all our drives, sex. That is also a sacrifice made by the male to female respect. I once had a grandmother who wouldn't say "leg." preferring "limb." The male organ was "his thing,' and mention of the female private parts meant banishment from the household. History of the nation tells us that the female's continual and absurdly prudish tinkering with the language has resulted in much confusion and resulted grief. Consider "sexual harassment in the workplace." Nowhere has that been more the case that where the subject was the crime of rape. This is ridiculous, and it's time it stopped. Men's lives are more important than female embarrassment.

Now. Let's get down to the really scary facts. The prosecutor in the Duke matter may be playing his cards close to the chest, but something is very, very obvious. That's the fact of both the TV women and their sisters clamor, and its political implications. Assume for a minute that the prosecutor not only has no case - the "victim's" statements are getting more and more inconsistent - and the evidence now suggest that the defense will show that the men she's named were not in the house when she says. What would a politician desirous of keeping his job do? Someone - Gerry Spence, I think - once observed, "You can get a grand jury to indict a ham sandwich."

Sure. Hell yes! He gets the grand jury to save his bacon. Even if they refuse to indict, he's off the hook - he tried. Next election he answers charges of racism, incompetence, and all the rest by putting blame on the grand jury. If the jury indicts, and he goes to court with a case so bad that the court directs a verdict (they hardly ever do that, these sick days), or a jury faced with the ineluctable fact of alibis for the defendants acquits, he's also off the political hook. Piece of cake. And the only people who get screwed - with ruined reputations - are those nasty men, and rich, white ones, at that.

Doesn't all this make your ass tired? It does mine. That we've come to these straits by permitting over-politicized government to abuse our legal system to this extent is enough to make any good man puke. And there is no denying that what I've just posited here concerning the Duke University Lacrosse Team matter is possible. It's likely. None of it will change, either, until males - is there anyone old enough to remember when the term "man" meant a hell of a lot more than gender? - stop it. The subject is one so broad in scope where numbers of possible contributing factors are concerned that I've only "scratched the surface" to use an expression as hackneyed as the "rape litany" I had reference to here, but the male citizenry of this country had better begin saying to women what I'm about to say to Greta van Susteren, Nancy Grace, her surrogate the other night, and all the femi-nazi attorneys who showed up to strew their prurient pearls of panderers wisdom:

"Want to tone down the rhetoric, stop egging on the witch hunt at Duke University a bit, girls? No, I don't suppose so. Well, let me mention that in about ten years, when the price of a barrel of crude oil is about a hundred, fifty dollars and a gallon of gas is ten dollars, there'll be a lot of changes made. Your political power will have decreased in proportion to the cost of energy (that's muscle, without mechanization and technology). Then, maybe you'll feel obliged to SHUT THE HELL UP!"

Military Tactics, RummyWar, Iran, and the Dear Departed Dodo Bird.

Watson: "Is there any point to which you wish to draw my attention?"

Holmes: "To the curious incident of the dog in the night time."

Watson: "The dog did nothing in the night-time."

Holmes: "That is the curious incident."


I've now got forty-three "folders" on my pocket recorder, questions and suggestions from friends and readers - not necessarily the same thing - for Mongoose Trick "blogs." "Americans" are very argumentative people, including those willing to argue on subjects about which they admittedly know almost nothing useful or probative, and it even seems I've started a small blogging war - people who disagree with me. That's fine: one favorite tactic of mine has always been to let the fustian and fervent one talk - sooner or later, his ignorance of the subject or the illogical character of his argument yells louder than he can. One fellow, Dr. Brooks Mick (http://www.theconservativevoice.com), who - as an instance of what I mean as respects "Conservative" reasoning - suggests that what we do about global warming is wait and see what happens. Pretend it isn't there. If the doctor uses that sort of logic concerning symptoms of infectious disease in his patients - well, you know. Sheesh! I wonder what the Liberal point of view is on that one!

Hopefully - with regard to the argument thing - somebody will write to me and tell me how to set up a comments page here that works. The several Microsoft FrontPage books I've bought are written in the gibberish and jargon typical of a nation of people who seldom or never read a book, and who think the English sentence still another place where you do what-the-hell-ever you feel like, to hell with rules or effect. A blog I intend to write shortly will discuss the growing paralysis of our society on that very account, from Malapropping nationally syndicated columnists to feminists seemingly intent upon altering all of reality by way of torturing language, to tech writers totally devoid of awareness concerning pronoun reference.

I suppose, parenthetically, that I should explain that last - this is not a super-literate or comprehending society, you know. The particular example of ambiguous pronoun reference I refer to occurs, for instance, when the author of a manual on Microsoft Office Front Page writes a paragraph in which he discussed six separate programming operations, then refers to one, several, or all them all by using the pronoun "it." A-a-a-a-r-gGH! If that weren't enough, you find - having tried all the various combinations of possibilities (seven hundred and twenty, by the way, and assuming that only one of the possible "mouse" maneuvers is the right one) - that NONE of them work.

If you were a devotee of tactical assessment and determination of best method by means of extrapolation and inference using microcosmic example - a variation on statistical probability, in other words - you'd see right there how I think our nation has come to be in such a helplessly spastic mental state. Nothing confuses like mangled communication, and we are a society hell-bent on destroying any chance that anyone might say clearly what he thinks or means - especially where communication between the public and its "leaders" is concerned. No single segment of our society has contributed more to the witch's brew of ditzy equivocation, Malaprop, and solecism that is our national discourse than the sociological mental meandering of feminism. Ladies, if you give me a pain in the ass, for instance, does that mean I have an ass "issue?" How about when - as we hear the supposed victim has in every such case we hear about (and we hear about one a week, these days) - the raped woman has "vaginal bruising." Does that mean she has "vaginal issues?" There used to be another word for that.

Anyway, having made my contribution to the futile war that seeks to restore to society some semblance of what the male once was, I come to my real topic - military tactics. When the first glimmer (actually, that was the day G.W. Bush announced his intention to run for POTUS) of possibility that we would commit the colossal blunder that is Operation Iraqi Freedom, my tertulia at the Calypso Cafe here wanted to know my opinion of the invasion. When I said "stupid," the question became one of military tactics, which happens to have been my profession for twenty three years.

Maybe I should point out here that generals - and before the dawn of RummyWar - U.S. Secretaries of Defense - haven't had much to do with the tactical, or strategic, planning of battles and warfare. Modern generals - post World War Two, I mean - are more like CEOs. They plan logistics, costs, and all the things one studies in business administration courses (remind you of anyone?). Most - and there are notable exceptions who quickly get fired nowadays - can't fight worth a shit. It's just the way it is - go back and read what I said a minute ago about "spastic."

So what did I say we should do in Iraq (besides "stay the hell out," that is)? Well, this won't be verbatim, but my friends would attest that it is damned close. First, I said (I think I said "nobody in his right mind would . . .") - I sure as hell would not go into combat led by George W. Bush or Donald H. Rumsfeld. People with degrees in Business Administration make damned poor military tacticians ("profit margin" there tends to have to do with bodies - dead ones).

Donald Henry - Rumsfeld, that is - is actually a U.S. Navy Captain and pilot (aviator). He ought to know tactics, someone at the table that day averred. Uh-uh, I said. Never let an Air Force or Navy Aviation General or Admiral run a ground war. Guys in planes always assume once they've blasted hell out of their target that everything is over. Airmen always think they can win the war from the air. They never have. Not close. "Tactical Air" - or whatever the hell they're calling it today (more foggy language, you know), will call to you from way up there in the blue and tell you "target destroyed;" then, when you go sauntering in, the bad guys jump out of the rubble and shoot hell out of you. If you note a similarity between "target destroyed" from ten thousand feet and "mission accomplished" from the deck of the Abraham Lincoln, you may have the makings of a tactician.

Rumsfeld, I said that day several years ago, would do the equivalent in Iraq, racing to an over the target and leaving behind - and all around - UN-destroyed enemy soldiers and guerrilla fighters. In combat of any kind, you do not pass over or walk around where you know your enemy was without assuring that he can't shoot any more (and if you're saying, "Big deal - I knew that," you're right - any damned fool but a general or a flyboy knows that). We must not do that, I said, and we must not get drawn into another example of the Vietnam Era "firebases," hilltop enclaves, and the like. If we did, I said, it would be just like Vietnam, where to travel on a given highway was to invite disaster because you didn't control the country around it.

And the single thing that I said that day, the thing my friends will remember most, was that were we to invade Iraq a guerrilla war would erupt with absolute certainty. Arabs would come to the aid of Arabs, no matter the cause we purported; and to starve guerrillas, we would have to seal the borders of the nation just like we failed to do in Vietnam, and the reason we could not win there. Strictly off the top of my head, I said that day that we would need to have more troops in Iraq than we did in Vietnam, and I noted that we hadn't had enough troops there for the purpose we supposedly had. The number I used that day in discussing Iraq was six hundred thousand.

SO? Yeah, I know what you're thinking, and that's damned poor tactics, too. I don't think Lieutenant George W. Bush and U.S. Navy Captain Donald H (stands for Henry, you know) Rumsfeld are stupid. Think your opposition is stupid, believe it, he'll get behind you and wax your ass. There's damned well something wrong here, but it isn't that they're stupid. Yale University doesn't give stupid people Masters Degrees in business administration, and nitwits don't learn to fly and navigate an F-102 jet fighter. Donald Rumsfeld graduated from Princeton University, learned to fly and do aerial navigation well enough to be an instructor, and the U.S. Navy neither lets dummies teach flying, nor does it promote them to Captain. So what's the real problem?

I don't know. That's because I'm a tactician, not a psychologist or sociologist. That's where the problem has to lie. There was a guy back home once, a guy who had an absolutely stunning beauty for a wife. More, she was a person of the highest character, maybe the best I ever met. The idiot I'm talking about once told me that they had never in eleven years of marriage ever had a fight, or even serious disagreement. So what am I talking about? The fact that one night he ran off to Florida with a stripper in a local nightclub. Why the hell would the man do a thing so stupid and self-destructive?

Oh, yeah - and there was "collateral damage" there, too - three kids.

Sometime during his little escapade (and I tried to talk Jeanie out of the divorce that followed), Scott should have asked himself the same question the people here on the Big Rock Candy Mountain should be asking. Why are we doing all this shit?! Iraq was not only about the stupidest thing any rational person can imagine, the way we proceeded defies all tactical science - just about every tenet of land warfare. A kid who plays computer games would know better.

Well, Hal - you're the horn-rimmed honcho here, and you got yourself into this; what IS the answer? Well, go back to the top here. Every dispute - until we recover from the malaise associated with it, I won't say the damned word "issue" - in this country goes to its extremes so fast it makes your head swim. All heat, no light - just noise. And nothing accomplished. New Orleans. Illegal immigration. National health care. Gasoline prices and oil companies reneging on the people who kept them in business with staggering welfare payments. The environment (stick your head in the sand, and see if your ass cooks or freezes solid). Name it. A flood of criminals from Mexico are here just looking for work, and I don't care if it turns out that every Duke University Lacrosse player at that party was impotent and gay, or that the men the "victim" has identified weren't there, there will be people who say the purported victim was raped. Anybody remember Tawana Brawley?

I've got to digress long enough here to ask again why the hell that is NEWS! If thirty guys - or girls - get killed tomorrow in combat, one woman claiming she was raped will push their deaths off the media. Better ratings for the rape.

And you still ask me how the hell we've come to do something as Keystone Kops Krazy as Iraq and, I remind you, the totally unrelated "war on terror?"

So my answer is that you should restore some sanity. Come back to the real world. That's the one where the Dodo bird got killed because it was stupid. The one where when a voluptuous, nine-tenths nude woman walks up to a sex maniac, she does not defeat his crazed advances with slick karate moves and deliver his battered carcass to the police station; she just gets dragged into the alley, raped, murdered, and left. The world where when the people of Sleepy Hollow elect Beau Brummel President, they can't just scare him away with a pumpkin-headed horseman when things get spooky one night. If I become too alliterative with allusions when I point out that living on the Big Rock Candy Mountain doesn't change anything down in the real world, it's just because I continue to hope there's a way to wake the Dodo birds in this country up to the fact that no matter what you think, facts and reality don't change. The Dodo is extinct because he watched his fellows be killed and eaten, and learned nothing about his own safety from what he saw.

The last time I saw my friends at the Calypso, they had the pre-Iraq question for me again - but Iran, this time. Same as before, I said, and that - for GOD's sake - means we don't let George W. Bush and Donald H. Rumsfeld run the show.

And - in the name of all that's honorable - DON'T DO IT!

Now that I think about it, that's probably what happened to the Dodo. Everybody talked about the fool who got eaten last night, but went right on talking and doing business as usual.

Bye-bye, Dodo. Too bad about you.

The Hand That Rocks The Cradle, In a World Without Cradles.

That's Karen, among the things my country took from me.

First, today, something for Jaime, whose question (what's wrong with letting people come here to work?) I've answered with all the obvious answers. While there may be people - undoubtedly, there will be those; there always are - who have racist motives, this matter has nothing to do with that. We don't let Mexican cattle come across the river, either, and that has nothing to do with their being Mexican; it has to do with disease, infection, and the like.

And by the way, if I happen to know about the races and cultures - let's say I'm an anthropologist - does that make me a "racist?" Cut the bullshit, folks - stop hiding behind a tired, hackneyed, and worn-out epithet.

Oh, and something else. Spanish is my second language, learned from the "bracero" migrant workers I worked among when I was twelve. A bracero foreman, Jesse Blanco, took me under his wing and taught me both Spanish and the love of Mexican food and culture I still have today. So, at least in that way, I'm as Hispanic as YOU are. That doesn't mean I can conveniently turn off my brain, or hide behind obvious falsehood and emotional claptrap.

And it's my turn with the questions - like how is it, if you really want to be a contributing citizen of Los Estados Unidos, that you wave the Mexican flag at every occasion, celebrate Mexican Independence Day and Cinco de Mayo, and cheer for the Mexican soccer and baseball teams when they play the United States? I don't know a single instance of anything like that among other U.S. Citizens of foreign birth or origin otherwise. And how do we know whether illegal aliens from Mexico pay more in taxes and contribute enough to the U.S. economy to offset the fiscal drain on it (The National Academy of Sciences found that the net fiscal drain on American taxpayers is between $166 and $226 a year per native household), if we have no way to know who and how many of you are here? How does a guy pay income taxes to the IRS without being found out as an illegal alien? How do we know how much illegal Mexicans earn yearly, and how much they send back to Mexico (I don't see signs in any language but Spanish in all the money order and money transfer stores; none quotes costs for money transfer to England, Germany, Japan, or the like, either)?

And one more: If you succeed, as all the "Aztlán" people so ardently desire, in turning the United States into Mexico, won't that mean more of the place where you can't make a living? Isn't Mexico like Mexico is because of Mexicans?

Answer me those things, and I'll join you, marching under the flag - not Mexico, mind you; the United States.

Which brings me to what REALLY worries me - the mess "America" has already become, and why. It seems to me, and I think history will say the same, that the people of the U.S. - the native born ones, that is - have devolved like the island birds of the Pacific and Indian Oceans. Protected by surrounding water from predators, they have gradually lost under the forces of evolution the natural protection other birds have - their wings and the ability to fly.

And, parenthetically, if you haven't the smarts to recognize the forces of evolution in this world, don't bother me with your lunatic "thoughts." That poor, demented woman (who ordered her hosts to "obey god") on Hannity and Colmes last night ought to scare out of it anybody considering aligning himself with a fundamentalist church. That's if Muslims haven't already. Scared you, I mean. Somebody asked recently what insanity is; well, that's one kind - religion.

Anyway - the birds, I mean - "Americans" are like that. In their case, the protection provided them by nature has been intellect - brains. That we've lost that natural protection can nowhere be better illustrated than with the female "American." Living in a mechanized, technological, climate-controlled nursery built for her at length over centuries by the questing courage, daring ingenuity, and evolutionarily irresistible muscle of the male, and finally deprived concomitantly of both her respect for him together with her natural caution and common sense by a mind-numbing ideology called feminism, she is much like an island bird - the Dodo, for instance.

The story of the Dodo is interesting in its similarity to what we see everywhere these days, none more chillingly appalling than the recent surveillance camera recording of the rapist-murderer who simply walked up to his victim and seized her hand to lead her away. "In the year 1598, Portuguese sailors landing on the shores of the island Mauritius discovered a previously unknown species of bird, the Dodo. Having been isolated by its island location from contact with humanity, the Dodo greeted the new visitors with child-like innocence. The sailors mistook the gentle spirit of the Dodo, and its lack of fear of the new predators, as stupidity. They dubbed the bird "Dodo" (meaning something similar to a simpleton in the Portuguese tongue). Many Dodos were killed by the human visitors, and those that survived man had to face the animals being introduced to the island by visitors, dogs and pigs soon becoming feral when introduced to the Mauritian eco-system. By the year 1681, the last dodo had died."

Yeah, I know - god made the Dodo that way, and he made just that one island for the Dodo, too. Obviously, then, he didn't ever expect anybody to bring dogs or pigs there.

Does that - either that last or what I said before it - remind you of anything, anyone, today? Hardly a week passes - Fox, CNN, and their smut-peddling cohort elsewhere in the media see to that, thank you - without a lurid account of an "American" Dodo female having been picked off the streets like fruit from a tree, to be raped and left dumped like garbage - or the feathers and bones of their ornithological counterpart in nature, the flightless island birds. Sickening. Sickening that it happens; even more sickening in the REASON it happens.

And the "Liberated" (man, nothing in their bubble-headed oblivion flabbergasts me like their Malapropping use of language!) Female's nation and countrymen are much like she. Protected all but entirely from hostile invasion as well as the terrible devastation of war, it remains largely and as a practical matter oblivious to danger from without. Enormously obese, lazy (just the absurdity of the energy being wasted to cart human whales around, lest they have to walk a step or at all, or burned by human porkers driving their SUV in circles while waiting for a parking place directly in front of and close to the Wal-Mart, is staggering to consider), intent upon nothing but Falstaffian self-gratification, "America" stands defenseless like it did on 9-11, it's borders - just for instance - wide open. Fat-headed like the Dodo, agonizing lest we be other than correct politically, we debate and dither nonsensically and mindlessly on every issue. Paralysis by analysis, in a phrase. You'd die laughing if it weren't so damaging, so injurious, and so hideously portentous.

I recall how as a boy I heard an elder back home aver that if the Pentagon were assigned the task of building an outhouse (uh, you see, there weren't so many homes with running water then, and there was a little building . . . oh, never mind!), it would cost millions and be as big as the Pentagon. The border and illegal immigration is another "Pentagon outhouse." A simple law whereby persons hiring and employing illegal aliens would be fined one-quarter of their gross income, and persons failing to report an illegal alien were similarly fined or imprisoned, would end the matter and solve the problem simply and swiftly. As it is, the law that finally results, months or years later - and after a couple of million more aliens have ensconced themselves firmly where they cannot be detected - will be pages and pages long, filled with loopholes and politics-driven, demagogic nonsense.

Taxation is a similar matter. We can't even tell ourselves the truth about what it is, believing - choosing, it seems, to do so - instead that it has to do with funding government. Growing every year like fungus on steroids (or, these days, on account of irradiation by depleted uranium or fifty things similar dumped into the atmosphere by corporations rendered impervious to public control by corrupt lobbying), the Tax Code is a convolute jungle morass of incomprehensible and un-interpretable verbal nonsense and legal shibboleth. How anyone seeing what the government has produced with respect to its tax system can expect any rational solution for any of the many other problems we face for the future is completely beyond me. It's like handing the village idiot a project like the design and construction of the main street bridge.

"Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There never was a democracy yet that didn't commit suicide." John Adams - remember?

Examples abound, the Keystone Kops opera that is the war in Iraq being just one, however vicious and painful. Still, the very recent and presently continuing history of the almost incredible (unless you've been here in the U.S. watching for a while, that is) process by which we have come to be in such an ineluctable mess might be expected by anyone who has seen the Tax Code; or watched the "American" female deliberately and seductively dangle herself in front of sexual predators who can toy with her like a cat a mouse; or followed the process by which a public has invested - by way of tax break, subsidy, and "oil depletion allowance" - $150,000,000,000 and $5,000,000,000 (http://www.taxpayer.net/TCS/fuelsubfact.htm) a year in the nation and world's oil companies, all in order to be gouged by the same on the excuse of oil shortages; or any of dozens more examples of the same kind of lobbying-promoted chicanery. Soft and decadent, almost mindless, the nation who only a few short decades ago was the envy of the world for its resourcefulness and know-how is now a nitwit Dodo bird, soon to become extinct. The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave has became the Land of the Fatheaded, Hen-pecked Wimp.

And that last brings me to my final observation here. When our Jeffersonian Democracy has slashed its wrists and breathed its last, it will have been the "American" male (oops - "male") who held the knife. This is your "metrosexual" fault . . . (I stared to say, "men" - you wouldn't make a pimple on a real man's ass). Were you not standing there silent and doing nothing, the nation's women wouldn't be offering themselves for degradation and use like toilet paper. Our children wouldn't be being abused sexually, by offenders who are again and again given their freedom and the opportunity to repeat their almost unspeakable atrocities by politically correct - i.e., humanist, liberalism, and feminism-cowed - courts. There is, of course, more - much more - a nation as great as this one once was doesn't commit suicide on a sword made up of so few elements. That we are, nevertheless, committing suicide, both personal or national, is the fault of the male U.S. Citizen.

Oh, nature will straighten it all out - she has her male and female creatures just where she wants them, thank you. As anyone who has lived in wilderness as I have knows, Mother Nature has little time for 'woman's rights' or political correctness (all provided in the first place by those male attributes I had reference to a minute ago, of course). When the terrestrial reason all this could have happened, oil, is gone, we will take a one-hundred year step backward. Power, energy, will mean muscle again, and those who have most of it will have their prerogatives (sorry, ladies; if you think historic male dominance was all that bad, wait until you face Mother Nature in the form of starvation and thirst - and, yes, rape - again).

It's infuriating, I know. Sad. It's even worse than it might be, had you not brought it on yourselves - and, by operation of that natural law I've been talking about, we on ourselves. "A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish." --John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty (1859).

But when the end does come, as it will very soon now, gentlemen, if will be your fault. Effeminized - "metrosexual," again - males like you didn't dominate and direct history as they did from the beginning because they were dominated by women. You let that happen; and, having deprived your country of its "balls," you have let it die.

You make me sick!

"Why Aren't We Ever Told The Truth?"

On the "truthout" website forum a few minutes ago, I promised to discuss here more concerning what I've learned about "why we're never told the truth" by the government and the news media. WHY? This was my answer:

"Come on, folks - ask yourselves what you do when you make a mistake at work. Do you run to the boss to tell him? Put it up on the bulletin board? During my war with the feds and the IRS, I infiltrated dozens of government offices, leaving "bugs" and, sometimes - just to taunt an enemy - my calling card. Most of these places were high-security areas (and if you knew about a couple, it would scare hell out of you). How many people do you think reported having found my card? If I had made a monkey out of you, proved that the job you were doing was crappy, what would YOU have done? My website is www.judoknighterrant.com and I'll talk about this subject (I hate the feminism engendered term "issue") more there. Ciao! Hal von Luebbert."

Smartass, huh? But it's rooted in the tactics I used to make myself a successful detective, and, once upon a time, tactician for none other than our blessed federal government. I always started operations against an opponent by putting myself in his place, to imagine what I might do if I were he. I like to think, even, that it made me a better person. Kind of humbling. You see, from high school age, and things like catching the local priest mounted up on the wife of the town's leading citizen, I've always been fascinated with human behavior. Not what they tell; what they DO. My serendipity encounter with the lovers that day occurred after I myself had become "involved" (we hide behind words, too, you know) with another local lady. Inasmuch as I was fourteen, she in her forties, both trystings were closely kept secrets. That wasn't on my account, actually - I wanted to tell everybody.

Of course, as my paramour had made very clear, you just don't DO that! When I had begun investigating on my own newspaper stories and those things "everybody knows," I came gradually to understand why it is that human beings demand privacy. It's always to cover their mistakes and sins. Oh, there ARE things like being too fat, having warts, and petty twaddle like that, but in every instance I can think of, "privacy" means hiding something. Otherwise, like an adolescent stud who's screwing the most beautiful woman in town, who also happens to be three times his age, you'd broadcast it to the wide world.

Once out of the Army, and in business as a PI and insurance company investigator, I learned just how right my boyhood suspicions had been. Peyton Place is in the heart and head of anybody who isn't brain-dead, and that means it's in every corner and crevice of society, and at all levels of business and government. More, society here in the Land of the Free has come to make appearance of absolute perfection - meaning, in this case, infallibility - the sine qua non of existence. In capitalist "America," where virtually nothing is more important than one's job, one does not admit - or permit to be discovered - an error. You lose either any chance of promotion or the job.

And that answers most of the "tvnewslies'" question. Washington - the U.S. Congress, the White House, and the bureaucracy that surrounds both - is a super-heated place, the "heat" coming from the fire of greed and lust for power burning in each member. George W. Bush, our ne'er-do well raised to the highest office in the nation, has already earned his place in history as the President who would not admit a mistake.

"REPORTER: 'Thank you, Mr. President. In the last campaign, you were asked a question about the biggest mistake you'd made in your life, and you used to like to joke that it was trading Sammy Sosa. You've looked back before 9-11 for what mistakes might have been made. After 9-11, what would your biggest mistake be, would you say, and what lessons have you learned from it?'

"BUSH: 'I wish you would have given me this written question ahead of time, so I could plan for it. [Laughter.] John, I'm sure historians will look back and say, gosh, he could have done it better this way, or that way. You know, I just -- I'm sure something will pop into my head here in the midst of this press conference, with all the pressure of trying to come up with an answer, but it hadn't yet.'

"'I would have gone into Afghanistan the way we went into Afghanistan. Even knowing what I know today about the stockpiles of weapons, I still would have called upon the world to deal with Saddam Hussein. See, I happen to believe that we'll find out the truth on the weapons. That's why we've sent up the independent commission. I look forward to hearing the truth, exactly where they are. They could still be there. They could be hidden, like the 50 tons of mustard gas in a turkey farm.'"

How about that? Is there any rational human being who has paid any attention since the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom who believes that our Malapropping and mumbling Chief hasn't made any mistakes? How about "Mission Accomplished" on the deck of the Abraham Lincoln (on the other hand, maybe we don't know what the "mission" he was talking about was)? Uh-uh. "American" "leaders" don't admit mistakes. During the lead-up to the war - during U.S. interdiction of air traffic in "no-fly zones" over Iraq - we shot down one of our own helicopters, but no one made a mistake. With as many as twenty million aliens having come across our border with Mexico, all of whom claim to be here to do hard work and pay taxes, no one has made a mistake (how do you file a w-2 form as an illegal alien and not get caught, if no one has made a mistake?).

Among the most familiar expressions to be associated with government in the Land of the Free and the Nation of Laws (a proposition demanding that we swear - or affirm - to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth), is "damage control." "Damage Control," like "plausible denial," and "we can find no record that . . .," is or means a lie and/or lying. You do not admit a mistake. During the seventeen years that I operated intensively against the United States Government in order to obtain evidence I could use to defend myself, I infiltrated government installation and offices across the nation, and dozens of times. My duel with federal security systems was one so challenging and entertaining that I made a game of it. At length, I began to leave my "Knight Errant" business card at the place that was the heart - or the private parts - of the fortress. Not once did any of these loyal "Americans," those paragon guardians of our nation's secrets and security, report their having been penetrated and compromised.

When you're looking for explanations for what happened, and how it could have happened, on 9-11, there's another one for you to consider, huh? And how many people got fired after those much-ballyhooed hearings into the debacle? Of course not - NOBODY MADE ANY MISTAKES!

Now that I get to thinking, I wrote about it all a while ago, right here on the Mongoose Trick page.


"Recently," I wrote, "FoxNews military analyst Colonel David Hunt commented on a recent demonstration of how poorly a Homeland Security Agency exercise had gone. Asked by the host why the agency - and by obvious implication, I thought, the federal government in general - fails so miserably, the colonel said, 'Nobody gets fired.'

"Bingo! And nobody gets fired because a public mostly dead between the ears doesn't demand it. That's due a number of things, none more effective than the relentless mind-control and behavioral conditioning science wielded by a fourth estate that has been co-opted by the very government it is supposed to oversee. There are hundreds of recent examples, but the latest revelation of crime by Emperor Bush, that of ignoring the Fourth Amendment, is easily the most revealing and probative. This is, in fact, probably the most concerted damage-control effort ever brought to bear in U.S. History. In my six decades of watching the news, I have never seen or heard more downright asinine and bizarre defenses raised by White House supporters, nor commentary by supposed opponents as inept and feckless. This is so obvious that as proof of theories having to do with the "dumbing down" of nation it is absolutely conclusive. Anyone who doesn't see this as the forensic and polemic equivalent of pro wrestling is braindead.

"The media assault on the public's right to know and sanity reached its zenith last night (or the night before - like I said, I've been out of it for days) with Fox Business (anybody who takes this guy's financial advice doesn't have both oars in the water, that's sure) Analyst Stuart Varney's belligerent and bewildered insistence that persons who reported that the President had committed a crime should be prosecuted for having done so.

"That, my dear sir, turns the concept of law and order on its head. A crime to report a crime! Good grief! How Uriah Heepian can you get? How un-American?'

"'Nobody gets fired.' There you have it. No matter what people in government do, they are never held accountable. That's either criminally or civilly - meaning you can't sue them, either. Even for murder. See: http://www.fff.org/freedom/fd0303d.asp Or see my book, where there are dozens more like that one. This kind of lawsuit is frequently referred to by lawyers as a "Bivens Action," after a guy who somehow managed to successfully sue "Six agents of the Federal Narcotics Bureau" after the latter brutalized without warrant or even reasonable suspicion Webster Bivens, his wife, and family. The Super Court was evidently having a fleeting flash of wisdom - or common decency, even - that day, because in 12,000 subsequent such suits, just four resulted in success for the plaintiff. Nobody in government ever pays for their wrongs, either. ISN'T IT ODD THAT YOU DON'T KNOW THAT?

"Operate any other organization, any business, or group endeavor like this and you will have what we have in Washington, D.C. Spastic confusion. Remember this?

“'At Ruby Ridge, federal agents shot in the back and killed a child’s dog, shot in the back and killed the fleeing child as well, and then blew off the head of that child’s mother . . . even after a cover-up was discovered, the federal government refused to prosecute the killers. At Waco, the government . . . roasted twenty-two children like wieners on a spit and cremated more than fifty adults in the same inferno. Yet no federal officers were prosecuted.” Gerry Spence, Esq. –'Give me Liberty.'

"Of course, that's a quote from "Letters," my book, and it represents only a small sample of what I'm talking about. And FoxNews' White House toady Varney is a microcosm of the public that has brought us to this sorry state. More about that tomorrow. I'm bushed, still not over this cold (I hope). Oh, before I quit, here's a quote from Mark Twain that comes to mind having listened to the pundits lately: 'There never was a just war, never an honorable one, on the part of the instigator of the war. Statesman will invent cheap lies, putting the blame on the nation that is attacked, and every man will be glad of those conscience-soothing falsities . . ., and thus he will by and by convince himself that the war is just and will thank God for the better sleep he enjoys after this process of grotesque self-deception.'"

Nobody gets fired. Nobody admits a mistake. There's you answer to why we never know the truth.

Oh, but there's one more thing. We never know the truth for another reason, that being that persons like the fellow who wanted to know why there was "absolutely" (I think he said) no airplane wreckage at the Pentagon after the 757 "supposedly" hit it. The fact is, and he would have known, had he taken even a little care to learn it - or if he had no hidden agenda, intended to deceive his fellows - that there was wreckage all over the place. Here's the first thing I came upon when I clicked it up on Google:

http://www.abovetopsecret.com/pages/911_pentagon_757_plane_evidence.html

We don't get the truth because we don't really want it that badly. If we knew the truth, there would be an obligation - among honorable people, and real patriots, that is - to DO something. Bertrand Russell, the great mathematician and philosopher put it eminently well, "If," he observed, "a man is offered a fact which goes against his instincts, he will scrutinize it closely, and unless the evidence is overwhelming, he will refuse to believe it. If, on the other hand, he is offered something which affords a reason for acting in accordance to his instincts, he will accept it even on the slightest evidence. The origin of myths is explained in this way."

Truth is like winning, victory. If you want it badly enough to go for it, you'll get it a lot more often than not; and you'll get it pretty much in proportion to how badly you want it. There's a corollary to that, and it's just as true: if you wait for somebody to bring the truth to you, you'll get it just about as often as you would anything else you want so badly.

I try to make people think. I hope I've done that here.