How Stupid Can We Get - and Stay Free?

I've long since begun to wonder what it would take to impeach this President. I mean, he publicly repudiates his oath of office, says he won't obey the laws he signs into effect as he does so, and treats the Congress like they were dockworkers or farmers. The man has the chutzpah of - well, hell, he beats anything I've ever heard of.

How the hell he has gotten away, for instance, with the bald-faced lying necessary to get us into the Iraq morass is impossible to grasp. There is nobody, anywhere, in any forum, who could have gotten away with a "the dog ate my homework" story like that. Every other day, we're told how sixteen satellite passes a day over Iran are detecting what the Iranians have for breakfast, and how the Koreans are getting ready to fire a test missile, but the WMDs we were dead sure were in Iraq were a mistake. They must have been built in somebody's garage or bathtub. Out of old junk and household cleaners.

A better question, perhaps, is how stupid does the public have to have been to believe a story like the Bush Tale. And what does that kind of stupidity mean for the future?

The nation's sages, the media pundits write solecistic and illogical drivel. In our courts, argument and rulings are so clumsy, inarticulate, and devoid of the gravitas one once expected of lawyers as to become the butt of ribald humor. Public speeches and debate - "but," as Mark Twain once said in discussing idiots and congressmen, "I repeat myself;" we don't have debates anymore, just speeches - are vapidly sophomoric recitation of partisan litanies.

Maybe that's just my age. Once you've heard the same tired slogans and nostrums repeated by presidential campaign after campaign, it gets to be like having to endure yet another "Titanic" remake. Enough, already!

But the scariest part of it all is the yahoo mentality and barbaric yawping of the public, especially in matters of religion, politics, and public affairs. All but totally devoid of logical basis or validity, absolutely characterized by relentlessly continual invective and insult, the public discourse amounts to little more than an infantile shouting match, no one listening to what the other side is saying. Every logical fallacy known to man is trotted out, by persons so abysmally only self-aware and ignorant as to be proud of their Malaprops, solecisms, and non-sequiturs. Like Ann Coulter recently, most of these would-be David Lettermans and Jay Lenos attempt to prove the fact of things by arguing there is no proof to the contrary. There must be WMDs in Iraq - Cuba, too - because no has proved they AREN'T there. These red-neck rhetoricians prove THEIR point by proving - in their scheme of forensics - that YOU are wrong in yours.

Recently, in one of the dozens of debates I engaged in concerning the several conspiracies having to do with the World Trade Center, a woman seemingly desperately desirous of proving the U.S. government - the reader will remember how sycophantly loyal I am to our wondrously honorable and efficient federal government - actively responsible (mind you, absence of evidence proves that) for the several plane crashes on 9-11 (she doesn't believe there WERE any), argued that "the cover-up" proved her point. When I pointed out that cover-up would require the complicity of literally hundred of people, including police officers and fireman, journalists, thousands of spectators, and even judges, to say nothing of accounting for the airplanes, their passengers and crew, she fired back to accuse me of being and "agent provocateur," and complicit in the cover-up. She borrowed, I suspect, use of the term agent provocateur from another essay of mine on the same forum.

Neither was the woman alone. More, when I pointed out to others on the same internet forum that the biggest building ever demolished by controlled demolition - as the lady and her supporters insist must have occurred - was at 439 feet just one-third the height of just one of the twin towers, and that a Controlled Demolition, Incorporated's 12 person explosives-loading crew working on the Hudson Building took twenty four days to place 4,118 separate charges in 1,100 locations on columns on nine levels of the complex, using more than 36,000 ft of detonating cord and 4,512 non-electric delay elements in the implosion initiation system - that to create the 36 primary implosion sequence and another 216 micro-delays to keep down the detonation over-pressure from the 2,728 lb of explosives which would be detonated during the demolition, the conspiracy theorists exploded with scatological fury. I was an idiot. An evil, murderous, "neo-con" idiot.

In an effort at moderation and conciliation, I asked someone to explain how a crew as big as that required for controlled demolition of the Trade Center, installing more than six times as much implosion initiation system, would accomplish such a colossal feat without a single notice and report by witnesses in the aftermath of what occurred, I was, to quote one, "stupid." I didn't "know shit."

"Everyone knows," said another, "that George W. Bush is a liar." Why would he tell the truth about this> Well, I said, maybe because it was the truth, and it was to his advantage to tell it that way. I added that, speaking logically, even the demonstrated fact that someone was a liar didn't prove that he was lying this time. That, my antagonist spat, was ridiculous. I was a traitor. More, since I was an "apologist for the Bush Administration, and therefore complicit in what happened, I was a murderer.

On another website forum, a gentleman who professed atheism contemptuous of any and all religion, asseverated that all mention of god was without exception religion. It could not be a matter for scientific consideration. Science that sought to know how the universe originated was not science. When I had - with certain obvious stipulations - offered a logically incontrovertible proof of god (all such proofs are a matter of semantics: if by "god" one means the origin of things, and there either was or was not a beginning, then god is either the initiator, or the thing that has always been), he made what has become the classic repair to insult. I was a stupid SOB - I must be, because nobody with any intelligence whatever believes in god - so it was impossible that I was right. Since I must be wrong, there is no god.

Another guy wrote to say MY argument was "circular." When I said, no, in fact, it wasn't, and invited him to prove his contention, guess what? Yeah. I was a "moronic deist," and incapable of getting anything through my "thick head."

And so on, ad dreary infinitum.

Funny? Hell, no! This is damned serious. This nation, any nation, is a system - more or less, a closed one. Everything in it bears upon, has an effect upon, everything else. More, it is in many ways a chaotic system - meaning that it is characterized by great result from relatively tiny cause. Even were that not so, and witness the no longer debatable fact that a majority of our electorate is too stupid to do basic mathematics or use simple logic, the determinism of cause and effect related systems means that we may be in trouble potentially fatal for our nation. We, the United States of American, may die of stupidity.

Let's use an analogy, that of global warming (yeah, I know a great number of us doesn't believe that - remember the tabloid magazines and how popular they are?). In a relatively short time - considering the age of the planet and that of civilization - a relatively small part of the earth's population has succeeded in raising the temperature of the atmosphere enough to produce incontrovertible and measurable evidence of world-wide warming. Scientists warn that this will soon become catastrophic. Profligate and over-indulgence in the planet's fullness and bounty, about ten percent of the world's population may well have succeeded in destroying much of the life here - including man.

The deterministic system I speak of, of course, is the ecosystem. But so is the society of the United States a system, and NOTHING IN A DETERMINISTIC SYSTEM CAN BE CHANGED ALL BY ITSELF. Nothing! Like the human body's system, anything that effects one part or component - an ingested drug, for instance - MUST have "Side effects." That means that any ideology, like that of militant feminism - no matter how beneficial to some - must have result otherwise. When a pharmaceutical company proposes to begin sale of a medication, it makes - it is required by law, that is - extensive tests, in order to identify all of the effects of the substance. Wherever harmful result occurs, the drug is not marketed, or is used stringently and in extreme instances.

But what of a swift change in the daily behavior of people - hours of immersion, for instance in televised violence? How about the effect of an ideology, that of social change demanded by a militant societal group? How, for instance, did society test the effects of radical feminism? The one-parent (meaning mother) family? What will the result of gay "marriage" be? How about "nation-building" - like Iraq?

What has been, and what will been fifty years from now, the effect of what has been the relentless lessening of discipline - and its inevitable secondary effect on education - in bringing up children? How will the stupidity resulted from until now de-emphasized education affect the society and nation's future?

Ben Franklin - being asked what kind of government Constitutional Convention was creating - said, “A republic, if you can keep it.” Two hundred nineteen years later, about one in four Americans (28 percent) are able to name more than one of the five fundamental freedoms granted to them by the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. Almost twice as many Americans (52 percent) can name at least two members of “The Simpsons” cartoon family. More than four in 10 Americans (41 percent) could name two of the three “American Idol” judges and one in four could name all three. That while just 8 percent of Americans could name at least three of their First Amendment freedoms (just for the record, that's Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, Freedom of the Press, Freedom of Assembly, and the Freedom to Petition for Redress of Grievances).

One in five Americans (21 percent) agreed that the First Amendment granted them the right to own and raise pets. Another one in five thought that the right to drive an automobile is guaranteed by the First Amendment (remind yourself that the car wasn't invented for another 100 years).

Nonsense like that would be appalling enough, were it not for the fact that it explains better than anything else our languishing under the elected officials we have. How dumb can we get without losing our freedom? How long can a society endure, in a state so stultified and gullible that it accepts as news the lurid and pandering pap being spewed out by the media? While tens of thousands of persons - look it up, dammit - are subjected yearly to what is literally atrocity by federal and state government, the media sells - that, after all, is what it's all about in corporate "American" - Natalee Holloway disappearances and the like in order to cover for an elitist, absolutely corrupted government and its crimes.

In the Land of the Free, the fourth estate is charged with keeping watch. It is absolutely essential in a republic that the electorate know the truth about government. "Know." To know requires two things, information and the intellect to interpret it. It may be, therefore, that the two most critical of the corporately owned federal governments usurpations has been that of education and the press. Both have kept us from stupidity. And, to quote Thomas Jefferson"

"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."

Now you know why the internet forums and the nightly news have me so alarmed.

* http://www.geocities.com/prisonmurder/ken_trentadue.html

The Necessity for Guerrilla Law in the Nation of Laws

In 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Webster Bivens could sue the government. Bivens, a man whose family was terrorized by "Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents" who made a "warrantless" (that's criminal, but in the Land of the Lie, there is always a way to say things in a less masculine manner) took umbrage at having his door kicked in, his wife and daughter man-handled and humiliated, all at the hands of a government too stupid to get the right address. When he sued, a Federal District Court (the court that ruled my 1988 FOI suit was for evidence that "would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the U.S.") ruled Bivens had no legal way to sue the government for a thing like that and that the government can do whatever the hell it likes to its citizens. Of course, the language was far more niminy-piminy than that, but that was what it said, what was done, and what is BEING done.

The other day, for instance, the Supreme Court ruled that the government can kick in the door without knocking, that on the premise of a warrant. You and I both know - witness a host of "precedents" in the form of actual attacks on the citizen and his rights - that kicking in the door will one day soon NOT require a warrant. They had reasonable suspicion - all in their minds - that you are a terrorist (for instance), and they kicked in the door. Oops - wrong address. Tough, but the price we pay for democracy.

Like signing up for the military in order to get a college education as promised, then being fed into the Iraq meat grinder. Tough. Price of democracy. Like I said. What don't you understand?

But Bivens sued, and in order to keep up the front - perpetuate the myths - he won (that's on the record - you don't know the rest of the story).

Anyway, I intend to sue the government again. I trust there will be those smart enough to look at what I do, and do the obvious. I can't be responsible - can I? - for what you do on your own volition. Otherwise, I'm practising law, and the government would love to be able to argue that I did that. Then they could kick in the door, huh?

Oh, to anyone who might ever intend to do that, remind yourself that I wear my .45 all the time, at home or otherwise. The first guy though the door will die, his brains splattering the guy behind him. That guy may die, too, unless you're all better than you usually are. After that, The first two guys and I will have what we wanted. As for me, I'll hear the Valkurie; as for the other two, well, that was up to them, wasn't it? Thanks.

So, today it begins. Rita and I have taken her grandkids back to their folks in Lubbock, having enjoyed immensely their being here, taking them for a sail on the sloop "Monkey Business," visiting a 242' long "tall ship" - i.e., the sailing ship bark A.R.C. Gloria - giving grandson Aidan an airplane ride - and movies, swimming, judo practice (where "Grandpa Hal" showed off), and all the stuff grandkids like to do. Three kids can give you a workout tougher than any I ever got on a judo mat. Two weeks, and the kids' visit, of course, was preceded by the latest cyber-duel with the government. I'm calling it all a warm-up. For this.

Having discussed at great and detailed length with Son-in-Law Steve and Daughter-in-Law Kathleen the book Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story" and the case against the United States it represents, I begin reading the mountain of law necessary for a suit against the sovereign. That, in itself, is a somewhat whimsical thing. Not only is the idea of suing the judge in his own court a logically nonsensical thing, a suit based upon a legal fiction, it is at this particular time even more nonsensical. This, after all, and as we all know and see, is a time when the government of the United States, in all its Constitutional branches, holds the law constraining it in utter contempt. To sue the United States and argue on Constitutional grounds is to fight an enemy on ground he controls, by rules he has made, using tactics and weapons he has supplied, and commanded by generals he has employed. Absurd.

But I'm reminded of that quote on my home page here. "There is no teacher but the enemy," Orson Scott Car wrote. "No one but the enemy will ever tell you what the enemy is going to do . . . . Only the enemy shows you where you are weak. Only the enemy tells you where he is strong. And the rules of the game are what you can do to him and what you can stop him from doing to you." That's how I beat the government last time, and it's how I'll beat him this time.

I like quotes, as you know, and another explains that last. "Of old," Chinese General Sun Tsu said, "warriors first made themselves invulnerable, then waited for their enemy's moment of weakness." I've done that, and I think the time is now.

First, though, I have to read the law. Starting with Bivens v. Six Unknown Federal Narcotics Agents, 403 U.S. 388 (1971), I will research until I have read every word that has been written the matter of suing the government. I will have to read all the case law resulting from all the suits brought under the several Federal Tort Claims Acts. Then I will file my suit. The government will answer with what is called "boiler plate," a canned, already-in-the-computers argument, and a motion to dismiss. I will have learned the very latest law. As the case progresses - assuming the court rules in my favor (not likely) - we'll learn more. I will publish it all here. The court will be furious at that, of course, and may even dismiss on that grounds. "Frivolous," they like to call such blatantly Constitutional use of Constitutional right.

Even if – when – my lawsuit is dismissed by the sycophant court, we will have learned a great deal, as I said; and it will be incontrovertible - straight from the horse's mouth. The government's Department of Justice, as I say here, has already answered thousands of suits brought by persons whose rights were utterly ignored by their government. They have, in fact, answered so many suits brought by persons abused and brutalized by their government, and the rights in question are so few in number, that government courts and attorneys have reduced their rulings and answers to a canned litany. The U.S. Constitution, in short, is far more honored in the breach than the observance. That each Bivens or Federal Tort Claims Act suit in the law library - literally hundred of volumes - represents a violation by government of the Constitution the government and its minions are sworn to uphold, and that no public rebellion results speaks also to the futility of both action against government based on law and the fecklessness of the U.S. public. The king does not restrain or punish himself, and you do not expect help from the public against their government.

A republic form of government, you see, requires one thing sine qua non - a citizenry with courage. Governments obey the people only when they are FORCED to obey.

That we are become what we are thunders so loudly that no statement seeking to excuse our cowardice will be audible historically. Neither will history fail to note that the United States’ decline paralleled growing female influence upon law and the national character - refusal, in short, to heed warnings like that of J.S. Mill (""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.").

We are a nation of pussy-whipped cowards. So it is that I begin my lawsuit with only one purpose in mind, to show - one, last time; incontrovertibly and inexcusably - both what we are and what the government knows we are. That is what history will record, too – that male “Americans” were too yellow to keep what their fathers and grandfathers gave them.

"Crouch down and lick the hand that feeds you; May your chains set lightly upon you, and may posterity forget that you were our countrymen."

Put Up or Shut Up Time in the Home of the Brave

In 1988, I held a press conference on the State Capitol steps in Denver, Colorado. I held the press conference to announce that I had come to Colorado to begin a war. At the time, I had just filed suit in U.S. District Court, a suit to obtain evidence of wide-ranging criminality in the federal government, and one that might well result in sweeping changes in our government. Had I succeeded, there is little doubt that government would be different today.

That no changes resulted is due one thing, and one thing only. The wolfpack of citizens I hoped to lead turned out to be a flock of sheep. "People have the government they deserve," Michel de Montaigne said. In the Home of the Brave, we have what cowards deserve.

But current events say that time is running short. Now we find the courage to do what is necessary, or we get what we deserve. We'll see.

Today, we see whether "Americans" will "Walk the Walk," or just "Talk the Talk." It's put up or shut up time. Today, you see, I begin to draw up my lawsuit against the United States Government, the suit that will begin a demonstration of what is right or wrong with "America." "We, the People," have, in my experiences as related in the book "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," an absolutely unique opportunity to radically change our arrogating and criminal government; i.e., to bring it back under control of the people it is supposed to serve. We'll never get a better chance. This may be our LAST chance.

The citizen of the United States, you know, has - still has - power to control his government unique in all the world. Several of the powers given him by the nation's founders have been co-opted and bastardized by the "federal" government in Washington, D. C. That's something any rational person would expect, given the near total dereliction of its civic responsibilities the country's populace and electorate has committed. The Grand Jury, for instance, is now a tool of the state, used by the state's prosecutor whenever he can't get a case by means Constitutional and legal.

The on-going matter of the Duke University Lacrosse Team is a case in point and an object lesson. Save the word of the state's witness, there is no evidence of crime. Unable to obtain the corpus delecti required by Constitutional due process, the prosecutor has obtained the "ham sandwich" indictment of a captive Grand Jury. "Due Process" has now devolved to the point that testimony by a single witness can mean prosecution and conviction.

Perhaps worse, the petit jury of peers is now controlled by the court, forced unconstitutionally and illegally to follow the court's direction. With the word of a single witness co-opted and colluding with the state, an accused person can be brought before a jury controlled by the state. Due process? It is according to the government.

But all is not yet lost. There remain to the public and in their control two of the basic Constitutional controls, those of Citizens Arrest and Access to the Courts - the right to sue. I intend to do both.

To do that, I've built a massive body of evidence - more, even, than that laid out in the book "Letters." I want more. That's because the typical "American" has now been behaviorally conditioned so exhaustively, indoctrinated so completely by government and its media that he is all but useless where defense even of his own freedoms is concerned. As I noted in my last essay, John Q. Citizen believes only what he wants to believe. That means, of course, what his indoctrination permits - what he is permitted to believe, in other words. He'll therefore be of little use here. It will take years of de-programming to restore to him his normal powers of thought and reasoning.

I don't need him. To make a corpus delecti of overwhelming evidence requires far fewer "Americans" than does an election. What I do need is for numbers of the hundreds of people who witnessed the hundreds of incidents that make up my story and my case against the government to come forward and testify. Instead of walking away as you did then, your eyes averted or deliberately unseeing, I ask that you call me and make a record of what happened. Many of the incidents I refer to are discussed here on this website. More are in my book. I will begin listing more here, and they will of course, be included in the suit paper I will publish here.

In short, "We, the People," will make my case - and it is OUR case - right here. For all the world to see. As the legal proceeding goes forward, everything will be published here, too. We'll see our government the way it really works, in a trial that is REALLY public. With the case on the U.S. District Court docket, I will have subpoena power. And I know where to look. The government will again run for safety behind it's national security shield, of course; but I have a hell of a surprise in store for them this time.

Want to see? Send me an e-mail, or write otherwise. Use the phone. If you have a website, link to this one. Have your readers contact me one way or the other. I - we - need to reach as many people as possible. Some of the faces of people I want to hear from I will remember. I have pictures of some, too.

Additional to that, I will begin contacting - I'll send them a copy of the book they tried to suppress, or were instrumental in suppressing - members of the U.S. Congress I once wrote to. That's several senators and congressmen who are still in office, still covering for a criminal President intent upon destroying what's left of our freedoms. Let's see how they explain their subornation and misprision of what happened to me. There, we'll see something a little like Iraq and those weapons of mass destruction that weren't there, or the connection with al Qa'ida and the September 11, 2001 attack that wasn't there, either; except this time there'll be no room for all that "plausible denial" or the "dog ate my homework" excuses.

I'll also send copies and summaries to all the newspapers, magazines, television stations, and radio stations who's cowardly cowering before government and its IRS Gestapo assured my torment. They can explain to us all how it was that the latest rape case or disappeared teenage beauty queen was more newsworthy than repetitive attempts by the government on the life of one of its citizens. We'll learn a lot about how the media protects our freedoms, too.

And more. I'll get shot at again, of course, and I'll have to watch my back every minute. The place I stay is booby-trapped, recorders everywhere, too. I'll ride my bike on the sidewalk like before, but that still doesn't assure safety from cars like those they sent last time. I'll have to watch it in when I'm walking from the car in the parking lots, too. I'll have to keep my electronic surveillance gear, the tape recorders and the rest, in top-notch working condition. All a prosecutor needs now is one witness, you know. And there's always what happens once you've been arrested to be concerned with. Abu Ghraib, Gitmo, and fifty more aren't aberrations, you know. It's standard procedure in the Land of the Free.

A couple of things have been added, too. Last time, there was no news of things like the little village in Pakistan, Haditha, and the rest. This time I won't be able to hide in the crowd.

And neither will you. Our oligarchy of military industrial corporations will go on metastasizing, continuing its drive to make you a slave to constantly increasing taxation. Government does not downsize, ever; it grows relentlessly - until, like cancer, it has taken everything. You'll fight because the choice will be the classic one - to die on your feet or on your knees.