"What We Have Here Is a Failure to Communicate!"

The new air filtering appliances come with a set of incomprehensible instructions. Written probably by a tech writer who first language is not English, they have omitted description or designation such as a model number, such that the actual filter components or their replacements cannot be obtained without multiple trips to the Wal-Mart where the original appliances and their filter components were purchased. At the sector of the Wal-Mart where the appliances were purchased, no one can be found who knows anything about the merchandise they are selling there, certainly not these air filters – which, of course, were made in China.

With purchase of a back up power system for my computer, I run into an infuriating scenario almost identical to that of the air filters, in this case a word-salad of incomprehensible, convolute gibberish masquerading as instructions. When I called the number provided, I got a "messenger" set-up and "you type, I type" conversation with a guy who obviously wasn't good at that sort of thing, at all. Only with atomistic sentences like, "How many wires go from the hard drive to the back-up?" did I get enough information with which to proceed, inasmuch as mention of a particular cable providing communication between the device itself and the hard drive of the computer have been totally omitted from the instructions. It’s not there. You’re just supposed to KNOW that, I guess.

Changing residence recently and unable to procure cable hook-up similar to that which we had formerly with CMA, we find ourselves relegated to a dial-up arrangement provided by Verizon. The “hook-up’ swiftly becomes yet another nightmare of the kind I’m talking about. Beginning with the “If you want to speak English, press one” and the rest of maddeningly obvious admission that the multi-millionaires with whom we have somehow been forced to associate – even do business with – care far more about profits than about service, I spend hours (six, all total, and as a matter of fact) on the telephone, talking to one person after another who obviously knows almost nothing about her job or the product for which she might otherwise be expected to provided service.

Again and again and again we are first obliged to wait long minutes (in one instance sixteen – we kept time) while the individual to whom we are speaking located another who supposedly had the answer to our question - then didn’t. After literally hours (I wasn’t kidding back there at the outset), we were delivered to a technician able to provide the instructions required. That, mind you, is not evidence that the latter knows his job thoroughly; it just so happens that our problem happened – at long last – to be one with which he was familiar. In the six – perhaps it was eight – other instances, that wasn’t the case.

These days, to call anyone on the telephone looking for the solution to any kind of problem, now matter how simple, is like groping in a tool box in the dark for a tool you need.

A short time – less than a week - after arriving here in Port Lavaca, my school teacher wife, Rita, realized that the duct work in the building where she teaches is infested with black mold. When the violent allergic reaction to the stuff hit her, we were obliged this soon to call a doctor. Obviously, having just arrived here, we were obliged to repair quickly to the telephone book, call, and request instructions for direction to the office. People at the school – teachers, mind you – couldn’t help, incidentally.

Once the number had been called, you’ve guessed it. If you’re like me, you’ve encountered dozens of times the local who doesn’t seem to know – can’t tell you, anyway - where he lives or works. Now, the distance from our house to the doctor’s office proves subsequently to be less than a mile. It also turns out that Doctor Lee isn’t the only Doctor Lee in the area immediate to our final destination. The second spells his name “Le.” He, or she, isn’t an American (surprise!).

Accompanied by a woman literally gasping for breath, on a cellular phone with another woman – one who can’t for the life of her tell us where she is by means of address, names of streets, distances, references to landmarks (she doesn’t recognize the term “landmark”) - I struggle with question after question (especially after I have spotted the name “Le” on a door in the strip mall nearby) to find my way. A stop at a “Medical Center” office two hundred feet distant from the place for which we’re searching takes me to two offices in the same building where none of the four people present there recognizes the name of either doctor.

Just when I'm considering a tracheotomy, I spot the building. It is removed from the street it faces by sixty yards, situated partially behind another much closer and a large parking lot. No sign betrays the presence of either edifice.

That, incidentally, has proved to be another peculiarity of the place: signs are generally – consistency seems to be a violation of local etiquette – far removed from the address, location, or building they locate.

The building’s construction and aspect are that of a residence, rather than an office or commercial site. An excellent disguise, shall we say. Again, you probably know the rest. Before Rita can be attended to by a physician, she must – gasping for breath - fill our completely a voluminous set of forms. These are very thorough, akin to intelligence briefing given a military commander before battle, information designed in this case to assure mortgage on the “patient’s” location, person, salary, and life. When we are not required – both of us - to put on an ankle-bracelet GPS locator, I am much relieved.

Then, I wait. Next to me on the waiting room couch, a man speaking Spanish to the cellular phone ubiquitous these days discusses in lurid detail his most recent sexual escapade - not his wife, I gather. When I say “detail,” I mean number of strokes. His three or four year old daughter sits on his lap, presumably listening. He is oblivious, either to her or to his audience, Anglos he assumes doesn’t understand Spanish.

After a while, Lothario gets up and leaves with the little girl, leaving me to wonder how and why he happened to be there in the first place.

(I just threw that in here, just to relieve the tension; but, then, this is about oblivious stupidity, isn’t it? It’s apropos, in that, at least.)

Recently, in an effort to obtain and have activated my own cellular phone at a local Radio Shack, I am obliged (use that word a lot, don’t I – it’s how I feel, anymore, about my country) to speak Japanese for several minutes with a woman in Tokyo. That after the guy behind the counter at the store, endeavoring to do the same, hands me the thing to say, “Can you understand what she’s saying?” The friend who has accompanied me stands staring in astonishment, as do several other persons nearby. Once we have found a mutually understood language, by the way, matters proceed smoothly.

To learn why my new Microsoft Publisher program won’t do “word wrap” around graphics on my website, I am obliged – that word, again – to speak to three (that’s three, during more than an hour of communicating) young men in Bombay, India! At length (THAT word again), I learn, “the program won’t do that.” Note, mind you, that nothing in the instructions that came with the program, nor anything in the manual I later bought TELL me that. I had to learn - the hard way – that “You wanted to get FrontPage – that’s Microsoft’s program to do that.”

And it goes on. In every single instance, these days, of realizing the necessity of interaction with my fellow Homo Sapiens wherein explanation comprised of simple declarative sentences will be required, further realization is that I will have to go through it all again. The girl (no comment, just no f------ comment), for instance, at the car dealership parts department who doesn’t know the difference between a conventional carburetor and fuel injection, or recognize the term “cold start valve.” Another – a guy this time - called about the same problem doesn’t know there are TWO oxygen sensors on a 2000 Toyota Corolla. Trying to find parts for Rita’s Jaguar, it takes ten full minutes to make the girl (yup, another one) at the Jaguar dealership understand what I mean when I speak about the sensors that light up the “boot open” light on the instrument panel display.

No tactical arrangement of statements of questions can communicate the idea to her. She asks, “Boot?” three times. When I say “the trunk,” it only confuses her more. Finally, in a moment of surpassing brilliance, I switch to Spanish. Bingo! That does it, but even at that, she doesn’t immediately recognize the word “baúl” (trunk). They say “trunca” in Tex-Mex Spanish. And they’ll have to order the parts.

Folks, this was funny years ago when columnists, guys like James Kilpatrick, Donald Kaul, Steven Allen, and the like, pointed it out. It’s not funny anymore. Yesterday, a plane taking off on the wrong runway crashed. ComAir Flight 5191 from Lexington, Kentucky killed forty-nine people.

To quote Strother Martin in the movie Cool Hand Luke, “What we have here is a failure to communicate.”

The plane crashed and the people died because communication between the tower and the pilots didn’t succeed adequately. That, incidentally, has happened several times, the worst at Tenerife some years ago. That particular “failure to communicate” killed five hundred eighty three people (the highest number of fatalities of any single accident in aviation history) when the confused pilots of two Boeing 747 airliners, one taxing, one taking off, collided.

Communication, the ability to explain or give clear instructions, is the foundation and basis upon which human existence and civilization depend critically. It is a life or death thing, for individuals and nations. Any day now, “failure to communicate” will result in disaster that will make the plane crash on Tenerife or that of Flight 5191 seem like an “excuse me” bump in the supermarket.. Last night, for instance, CNN (I guess – I just don’t watch that much, anymore) host Glen Beck reflected - rather lugubriously, I thought – that President George W. Bush’s “problems” with his recently abysmal approval ratings concerning Iraq, weapons of mass destruction, and the rest had to do with the Commander in Chief’s limited communication skills.

That may be the understatement of the year – and history.

Beck’s point seemed to be, first, that the President didn’t lie – he just doesn’t explain himself very well (some would say he doesn’t much care whether he does or not); and, two, that he really couldn’t think of a way to break to us gently that our real enemy was Iran. So we attacked Iraq, instead (whew!). Mr. Beck’s incoherent apology made about as much sense as any of the attempts at communication of any of the people I mentioned earlier here, actually.

This morning, on National Public Radio, commentators’ efforts to explain gaps between obvious truth and what the President said concerning Iraq had me staring. Given the mangled and solecistic diction of the commentators, “Americans” trying to explain something as incomprehensibly illogical as Operation Iraqi Freedom was in the first place, the result resembled more than anything else the splattered verbiage on the instructions for that computer power supply back-up I mentioned, or the feckless rhetorical floundering of Verizon in trying to explain their dial up system installation, at the outset here.

As I type this, by amusing – even eerie - co-incidence, NPR is reporting a new sporting event, that of throwing a cell phone as far as possible. “I’ll bet you’ve had the same experience, that of being so frustrated with instructions you were receiving that you wanted to throw the phone as far as you could.” Someone, the reporter, says, threw a Nokia over three hundred feet.

Also interesting: mine, also a Nokia, went three hundred, twenty six feet (I used to be a pitcher, and, besides, NPR reports only one hundred people in the reported contest).

But this isn’t funny. It not only explains things as serious as those planes crashes, it may explain things like the World Trade Center (even if realization that the “dog didn’t bark” makes you think it was deliberate) and the aftermath of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. At least in part, it explains the incredible events leading to invasion of Iraq, and the spastic operations and tactics that have characterized the “war” (hell, we can’t even agree or decide what to call it).

Just consider that we purport to establish “democracy” in an Islamic nation. Assuming that you can write an intelligible set of directions to the local court house, or explain how to boil an egg and change a tire, see if you can explain how that might be done.

Jesus! Now, maybe that explains why he attacked Iraq – if a regular guy, even one reasonably articulate, can get so frustrated that he throws a phone (thusly attacking the wrong source of his frustration), maybe a president, one about as articulate as Forrest Gump, got so frustrated that he attacked the wrong country? Maybe an English composition and diction test should be required or presidential candidates?

Remember the guy in the doctor’s office, the one regaling us all with his pornographic tale of sexual conquest? It occurs to me that there was another reason no one listening objected. No one could tell from his description what the hell he was talking about.

Maybe he was just explaining how to replace a light bulb.

Quis Custodet Ipsos Custodes; When the Government Scratches Its Horny Itch

If you read my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story," you'll recognize "Jane Brown," the IRS Hearing Officer who used federal power to "scratch her horny itch" (actually, that picture is a snapshot, and "Jane" is nude - I put this one here to give you an idea of what the real pic looks like). Today's pandering by the media to the White president and the putrescence of politicians on the Potomac regarding the U.S. District Court ruling that says it's unconstitutional for the government to randomly tap you phone and electronic communications reminded me of the one time I managed to screw the IRS. Man! You are being used like Charmin, people - wake up!

Oh, I have an ulterior motive, all right. It's like the price of gasoline. Because the decadent morons who are my fellow citizens keep driving 90 miles an hour, driving the price higher and higher with the damned accelerator, I have to pay at the pump. And because those same Bush League and Company ass-kissers kow-tow to illegal wire-tapping and electronic surveillance, I also have to bite the bullet that is tolerate federal "domestic spying."


It's the drizzly shits. On August 3, 2006, three days after wife Rita and I moved into our new residence, an agent or agents of the federal government of the United States – Land of the Free – entered the place surreptitiously and searched, then planted listening and eavesdropping devices. The burglars were recorded by the listening devices already here – mine. Having been obliged by my unexpected return – I do that regularly, just to see what it turns up – to leave abruptly, they were also unaware that the automatic lights in the garage would announce the fact of their having been here, by remaining on for five minutes after their departure.

Today, as I remarked a minute ago, news has come that a U.S. District Court has ruled the Patriot Act eavesdropping being done by the government is unconstitutional. We knew that, of course (you don't have to be a Judge Learned Hand or Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. to read and understand the Fourth Amendment), but the news media is spewing out the blizzard of blatherskite and pseudo analysis they always do at times like this – a cynical smokescreen of language and rhetoric designed and intended for just one purpose - deception. It’s a lie.

Recall that for weeks on end after purported enactment of the Patriot Act, the same sycophant media left and right “analyzed” the “damage” done to the Bill of Rights by the so-called “Patriot Act.” Talk about deception!

In the first place, there was NO damage done to the Constitution and its Bill of Rights by the Patriot Act. That’s because that can’t BE any such thing. CONGRESS HAS NO POWER TO CHANGE OR AMEND THE CONSTITUTION. All laws which contravene the Constitution of the United States are nugatory, without effect, stillborn. There has never been any doubt about that legally. There is only one way to change the Constitution, and that is amendment ratified by the states. Read it - Article Five. It's plain English, you know.

All doubt resulted from the specious and legally meaningless Patriot Act, therefore, comes from the effect of the kind of “analysis” being done by the treacherous media and their tawdry and phony “experts.”

That’s true, too, of the latest version of the federal Smoke and Mirrors tactic. The government of the United States has been illegally violating my rights under the Fourth Amendment for twenty-seven years. I caught them again just the other day. More – to demonstrate the cynical mendacity of the Bush Administration’s claptrap and pretense of protecting national and public security – I am one man. Impoverished by Internal Revenue Service and a Tax Code as specious and legally unenforceable as the so called Patriot Act, I am not now, nor have I ever been a threat to the national security. That the government dares not appear on the matter in court proves that, as does the ruling of a U.S. District Court in 1988.

In that matter, the court sustained the argument by the U.S. Department of Justice that my records were exempted from the Freedom of Information Act by its national security exemption. The court refused to give me the record our government has fabricated and falsified for its nefarious purposes. Interestingly enough, one of the things my record would have revealed is that the government had no justification for its illegal surveillance – the illegal surveillance they are still committing. I will file suit today in the regard, by the way, a suit intended to show the deceitfulness and mendacity.

Two of the complaints in my suit will be relevant and of interest here. First, of course, I will demand that they government stop its illegal spying on me. I will contend that the Patriot Act being used to justify the government’s violation of my Fourth Amendment rights is NOT a law, inasmuch as it contravenes the Constitution. Secondly, I will argue under Flast v. Cohen, 392 US 83 (1968), that the United States has may not use tax money to violate the Constitution, and should be enjoined from doing it any more. In Flast, the case had to do with violation of the First Amendment and school funding. If the government may not use tax money to fund schools teaching religion, it may use tax money to do illegal wiretapping.

Whatever the court’s ruling, it will be still another smokescreen. In the same manner it will ignore the ruling by the court having to do with illegal wiretapping and internet eavesdropping, the government will go right on doing whatever it chooses to do. The fact that in a particular case against a particular individual the defense might argue successfully that evidence against him and gained by illegal surveillance is inadmissible means nothing as far as continued surveillance against the public is concerned. Do you really think all lying thieves like our politicians want is information about terrorists? I don’t believe you. Nobody is that stupid.

But, WHY CAN’T THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES GET IT THROUGH THEIR THICK HEADS THAT THEIR GOVERNMENT DOESN’T OBEY THE LAW? Men like George W. Bush, our president, are contemptuous of the law. When has a man like that – or any of the filthy rich like him in government - ever had to fear the law? What is the fine you have to pay to someone who makes as much as your monthly income in an hour? How many times does a George W. Bush – or an O.J. Simpson - go to jail? You’ve been listening to that “equal under the law” horse manure until you’re so used to hearing it that you actually believe it (tell a lie often enough . . .)

Absolute power corrupts absolutely. Johanna, the heroine of my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth,” is a woman who was rescued by the story’s protagonist from being raped continually by an IRS agent. The idea came from a client I ultimately helped leave the U.S. in order to escape that very thing, together with information obtained from a “bug” I planted in an IRS regional office. As another character in the book “Jonatha” remarks, “Christ, anybody would have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid as a brick to believe that guys given that kind of power don’t use it to scratch their horny itch.”

Wake the hell up! What on god’s green earth will it take to convince a nation whose law libraries are whole buildings filled with proof that the government holds the “Supreme Law of the Land” in utter contempt? Man, every ruling by a court reported in those libraries and having to do with a civil rights case represents yet another assault on the Constitution. In every case, in other words, a cop - federal, state, or local - knowing damned good and well what he was doing sought to stretch the law a little further.

This will stop when and only when the people being affected by it put a stop to it. Seventy years old, I’ve watched our nation become a virtual prison, where only the rich have the prerogatives that mean freedom. What can you do? Do what I’m doing, and what I did. Get a book on lawsuits from Nolo Press, and file a lawsuit.

And then there’s application of the Second Amendment. During a press conference on the capitol steps in Denver, Colorado twenty years ago, I warned federal agents standing above the reporters and me there that I would one day catch a federal agent in my house and kill him. I should have done that on May 6, 1985 when I held the sights of my pistol on the head of first one IRS agent, then another, as they burglarized my house. Had I pulled the trigger, the agony of the war waged on my by people like our contemptuous patrician president wouldn’t have happened.

Finally, you can do what I did after federal burglary of my residences became to frequent and so bad that I could no longer pay for everything stolen and all the damage done by the intruders. From 1990 to 2001, I lived in an old (1971) Ford Camper, without heat or air conditioning. When a contact poison like that used to kill pigeons was put in my vitamins and damned near killed me, I retaliate by planting fish hook and razor blade traps everywhere in the vehicle. The result was more damage, blood all over the place, but the intrusions stopped. Too late to save the truck’s wiring, but sweet revenge, nonetheless.

I’ve also taken steps to stop federal “messing” with my internet website. You can do the same. A good hacker can leave booby traps for the pen trap and other forms of eavesdropping there (in fact, this is a solicitation for help from anyone willing help with that kind of counter-attack). Plant phony information to send the feds off on wild goose chases. Be careful, of course, by assuring that you have airtight alibi and other protection.

The Constitution of any nation is enforced by its people, or the government there is lawless. It is utterly insane to expect that the most avaricious, power-maddened and corrupted people – the kind sine qua non in a capitalist nation like this one – will enforce the law written to control them and their greedy depredations.

That's why some of us like me are wondering when the rest of you will get off your dead asses and do something besides whine. People always have the government they deserve.

Bigotry, Islam the Religion of Peace, and "Are You Going to Believe Me or Your Eyes?"

“Absurd – foolishly contrary to reason, ridiculous.”

“Bigot – someone obstinately and intolerantly devoted to his own beliefs, creed or party; bigoted – narrow-minded, prejudiced.”

Those terms come to mind again and again of late, in a manner and with frequency far exceeding anything prior to my adventures in the chat rooms and forums of the Internet, watching television news programs like Lou Dobbs, Bill O’Reilly, and the like, and discussing the various issues with friends. As I wrote the other day, my concern for both the health of the nation’s discourse and what might be called its national mind grows daily.

There seems no issue that doesn’t devolve swiftly to polarization, two or more parties simply shouting slogans mindlessly at one another or the group. Questioning, where possible, of the principals invariably reveals all but total ignorance of the subject beyond that provided by the arguer’s favorite affiliations and sources of information. Asked what he knows about an opposing point of view, or why its own adherents hold such view or views, he goes into a kind of catatonic state, reciting his creed's slogans mindlessly. Anyone and everyone, moreover, who does not share his point of view is an idiot or worse – sometimes, far, far worse.

Cornered rhetorically, he demands a change of subject. Or that “we agree to disagree.” That last is a threat. In the Land of Free Speech, you can not only lose your job by what you say, you can damned well lose a friend by defeating his argument.

The ploy perhaps most typical of the arguer hoist on his own petard rhetorically and polemically is “that’s only your opinion, not a fact.” Matter of fact, liberal and humanist intellectual alike – there doesn’t seem to be any liberal or humanist who doesn’t consider himself an intellectual, does there? - will tell you archly that there is no such thing as a fact. EVERYTHING is an opinion. The other extreme – somehow termed “conservative” – knows everything is a fact because it’s HIS opinion. Et cetera.

Try as I may – and it should come as no surprise – I have not yet found one of these great minds who recognizes the word “epistemology.” Repairing again to the dictionary, we find: “epistemology . . . the study or a theory of the nature and grounds of knowledge especially with reference to its limits and validity.” Epistemology is the science of knowing, and how you know it.

When I mention the word “forensics,” the results aren’t much better. These folks who are so certain of their facts haven’t the vaguest idea of what they’re talking about, even in that respect. Forensics is the study of debate, especially legal argument. Forensic science is the study and application of facts and argument to legal problems - "Finding of Fact."

One more term that might as well be a foreign language for polemicists in the U.S.A. is“ scientific.” That’s, “using methods based on well-established facts and obeying well-established laws.” Demand these three and you shut out of the national debate ninety six percent – that’s an actual statistic and conclusion from my own investigations, by the way – of today’s benighted public. Jay Leno stuff. Or worse. The public here in the land of the free isn’t very damned bright.

Of late, though, things seem to have gone from bad to worse. I’ve written about extreme bias - absurd bigotry – here before. Matter of fact, I wrote about it yesterday, and it’s a scary thing, a mental disorder that seems to absolutely freeze the thought processes in its victims. I’ve had some experience with people in that condition, one a client who had been MKULTA-ized by none other than our benevolent government. Formerly a cryptographer at the Pentagon, Richard has had a part of his brain lasered away, in order to erase everything he once knew about our criminal activities overseas and domestically.

Talk to my friend on any subject other than U.S. military affairs or foreign policy, you would never guess that he was discharged from the military as totally unfit for service, suffering from “atypical psychosis.” Apparently, he is perfectly normal. Say the right words, however, and it’s like throwing a switch on circuitry that scrambles transmission from brain to vocal cords. He recites, parroting what has been programmed, however irrelevant, immaterial, or otherwise unrelated to the subject or question. It’s spooky, I can tell you, like a conversation with a zombie. It's also too much like a conversation with a bigot to be suggestive where the latter is concerned.

If there is a better example of this Manchurian Candidate programming than where the nation and people of Israel and the Arab nations and factions sworn and dedicated to eradicating them are concerned, I can’t imagine what it might be. There is nothing – absolutely nothing – that can be said in the Israeli’s defense that will not draw contradictory response from those who hate her, however patently absurd and thought-paralyzed. For the bigot, to concede a point, ANY point, represents and act of treason to what the individual seems to consider a sacred cause.

A conversation yesterday with an otherwise good friend is an example of the mental condition I refer to. The friend, incidentally or not, is among those who against all scientific demonstration including that of opportunity (in law, the Physical Fact Rule) – the claim is not physically possible – believes that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition, rather than as the result of being hit by jetliners. I started things yesterday when I commented that the cease-fire in Lebanon would undoubtedly provide for a terrorist nuclear attack somewhere in Israel or the U.S. (you may recall that I said the same thing here).

My friends and I, parenthetically, have been for some time now deliberating and debating about what we need to do to prepare for the cataclysmic events that have been brought racing down upon us by our absolutely corrupted government.

Anyway, I made my remark and my friend shot back that he didn't agree. Hezbollah and the Arabs weren’t the villains, he asseverated, Israel was. Israel “started it” (yeah, I know - he simply ignores the kidnapping of the soldiers and the murder of the rest of their squad; he also ignores the Hamas kidnapping of the soldier to Gaza - only Israeli actions "start" things). Israel is the terrorist, killing thousands of innocent civilians in Lebanon (and later, everywhere else).

If you’ve listened to any of the apologists for Hezbollah – or those seizing an opportunity to demonize the U.S. government - during the recent shooting, you’ve heard the rest. To be honest, I got pretty angry. People who support by condoning terrorists like Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, Black September, and the rest really piss me off. I have a pathological hatred of bullies. To me, terrorist is just a bully.

During the debate, I managed to make just four definitive statements. I make them again here for all those who have e-mailed me to speak in a manner similar to my friend:

1. I have no interest whatever in who the principals here are. If the man who sent suicide bombers into crowds was my brother, I would eradicate him. If my sister were responsible for hijacking airliners, or blowing them up in mid-air, I would turn her in or kill her – immediately, lest she do it again and put it on my conscience.

2. If someone were to begin shooting into my house from amidst a crowd, I would shoot back, and with all the firepower I could muster – it’s the people in MY house I'm concerned for, not the people in his house.

3. No Israeli has ever committed acts of terror similar in nature or number to those perpetrated by Arab terrorists; neither do the Israelis, their government, or their military call – as do several or all Arab nations and factions where Israel is concerned – for the eradication of any Arab nation or faction or its people.

4. For Hezbollah, Hamas, or any Arab state to cease fire on the Israelis is in the minds of a very large number – even a majority – of Arabs a repudiation of the Koran, and a bar to heaven.

Oh, now I can hear the chorus of howls – the avalanche of bullshit. Save it. I’ve read the Qu’ran – the Koran – folks. And you, obviously, either haven’t or you are a liar. The Koran leaves no room for doubt whatever about what the Prophet and Allah demand of their followers. It says that anyone who kills another Muslim “has killed the whole of mankind . . .”

It also says, “Indeed, the punishment of those who fight Allah and His Messenger and go around corrupting the land is to be killed, crucified, have their hands and feet cut off on opposite sides, or to be banished from the land.”

You call that tolerant, peaceful? Bull! Striving to be as clear as possible, in any language you state it, the Koran says all too clearly that while Mohammed teaches its followers to respect life of other good Muslims, those who "fight Allah and his Messenger" – Mohammed – “should be killed and mutilated, or banished.“

Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Arab press everywhere are leaving no doubt whatever that the Koran makes it clear to all good Muslims that Israel, the U.S., and most of the free world – anybody who isn’t a Muslim - qualify as anti-Allah and "corrupters of the land." They’re screaming it at the top of their lungs, mobs of them. How can a mind not crippled by bias draw any conclusion other than what these lunatics are screaming at the top of their lungs? If you can be faced with an Arab jumping up and down, screaming for your death, and shooting at you, and believe that he’s trying to do anything other than destroy you, you are mentally altered. Biased. You’re crazy, in fact.

Well, my friends say, Hezbollah and the rest are only out to kill the Jews (only? – isn’t that the otherwise hated word, genocide?). They wouldn’t attack us with a nuke (no, just wide-bodied jetliners). Check this, Sura 27 in the Koran: “And there were in the city nine individuals, who worked corruption in the land and did not set things right.... They schemed a scheme and we schemed a scheme, while they were unaware. See then what was the outcome of their scheming: We destroyed them together with all their people. Their houses are in ruin, on account of their wrongdoing. There is a sign for a people who know. And we delivered those who believed and were God-fearing.”

The italics are mine, in case you might miss it. Tell me that doesn’t mean what it says. Tell me it doesn’t tell the devout Muslim that there can have been no innocent victims of “Jihad” anywhere.

I’m just following my finger here, and I come to Sura 9.73: "O Prophet, make war on the unbelievers and the hypocrites, and deal harshly with them. Hell shall be their home; an evil fate."

Next, I come to, ". . . .make war on the infidels who dwell around you and let them see how terrible you can be.”
Religion of peace, huh? The Israelis are the aggressors? Sure.

Sura 22 has some more dandy exhortations for peace and brotherhood among men: “To the unbelievers, garments of fire shall be cut up and over their heads boiling water shall be poured; Whereby whatever is in their bellies and in their skins shall be melted; And for them are iron rods.“ The concordance explains, "To beat their heads with."

And there’s more. For instance, “Fight those among the People of the Book” – that’s Christians and Jews – “who do not profess the true religion, until they pay tribute out of hand and are utterly subdued.”

Religion of peace? “Then their Lord revealed to them: ‘We shall destroy the wrongdoers,’ those who refuse to accept Allah and Mohammed. ‘Warfare is ordained for you, though it is hateful unto you; but it may happen that you hate a thing which is good for you and it may happen that you love a thing which is bad for you.’”

He’s not talking about football, folks. Peace, brother: Sure. “Allah revealed His will to the angels, saying: ‘I shall be with you. Give courage to the believers. I shall cast terror into the hearts of the infidels. Strike off their heads, strike off the very tips of their fingers!"

It goes on and on, verse after verse. COME ON! You think it’s just a co-incidence that the Hezbollah, Hamas, and the rest have in their charters resolutions demanding the destruction of Israel, and “death to the Jews?” And you're telling me THE ISRAELIS AND THE UNITED STATES ARE THE AGGRESSORS?

Let’s cut the crap. That you can – and do – prove you hate somebody does NOT mean you’re right, and he’s wrong. It sure as hell does not mean that anyone who won’t accept your illogical, unscientific, and unproven statements about him is on his side, either. The last three decades have seen continual examples – literally hundreds, now - of every kind of despicable terrorism the mind of evil men can devise, terrorism perpetrated by young, Arab Muslim men – all screaming the name of Allah. And death to Israel.

I mentioned logic, forensics, and epistemology. The rules of the truth sciences that relate here are these:


1. An act, any act, is not made more or less evil by the fact of who does it. A thing malum in se – evil in itself (the rape and/or murder of a child, for instance) – is just, plain evil. The corollary is true, too: When you are incapable of condemning an act malum in se until you know who did it, you are a bigot.

2. The fact that a person is a son-of-a-bitch is not proof that he is wrong. Even proof that he is stupid, or insane, does not prove that he is wrong - i.e., in error.

3. That fact that a person has been wrong in the past does not prove he is wrong now, but – The Physical Fact Rule – the fact that he is shooting at you and screaming “die!” means you either kill him, or he will probably kill you. Your choice.

4. The fact that someone points out your error – including ad hominem remarks and the odious like against your supposed enemy – does not mean, or prove, that he agrees with or supports your enemy. He may damned well be embarrassed that he agrees with you otherwise, though.

5. The rule of evidence known as “admission against interest” means that when someone is screaming that he intends to kill someone, he probably will do that, given a chance. When he boasts that he HAS killed someone, and shows you hands dripping in what he says are his enemy’s blood, you should believe him.

6. When you are a bigot, your opinion on any subject having to do with what you are bigoted about is worthless to anyone but yourself. It’s worthless to you, too – you just don’t know it.

7. If you profess a religion or an ideology, if you are an adherent to a social “ism” or the like, you are saying that you a capable of believing – that is, able to act upon – what cannot be found or proven in the physical world. You are also saying that you are capable of constructing reality from nothing but words. That's close to the definition of schizophrenia and it means there is no way any reasonable – that’s sane – person can trust you, because there is no certain connection between what you believe, and do, and anything your sane neighbor can be aware of and know.

8. Human beings are responsible for their actions and failures to act. If you consort and co-operate with terrorists, or let terrorists live in your midst, you have no right whatever to plead innocence when those who have been attacked by the same terrorists or their supporters fight back. If your children are killed by those counter-attacking the terrorists you harbored, the death of your children is your responsibility. It's YOUR fault.

9. You cannot prove you are right by proving another wrong; neither, a corollary, do you justify your action by proving that your opposition does or has done the same. That's the tu quoque fallacy.

10. When you condone or justify an act malum in se – for whatever reason – you are suborning it, a crime in itself malum in se. More, to rejoice over or take satisfaction from an act malum in se – whether you did it or it was done by another – is an act malum in se. A crime against my enemy is no less a crime.

Wake up, people – we’re getting pretty sick. To hear a friend condone and justify terrorism out of racist-like and bigoted hatred for its victims is a thing that will shake an honorable man to his soul.

To see his kind bargain with the devil, knowing full well that it means for the future nuclear or biochemical terrorism instead of the Katyusha rockets kind is even worse. The pseudo-humanism of Twentieth and Twenty-First Century man has cynically tolerated Islamic extremist terrorism in all its hideous aspects, all the while Mr. Pecksniffing a sober world Fifth Profession that would have destroyed it, LONG ENOUGH. There is no justification for the actions of Hezbollah, Hamas, the PLO, and the rest, because there can BE no such justification.

Who would know better than I? The United States government utterly ruined my life, drove from me my wife (twice), tormented my children, and took effective steps to assure that I would never again earn a living. And I hated. I hated with every cell in my body. I hated so that I glued a sign on the ceiling over my bunk, stuck it to the wall of the tents I was forced to reside in by a cruel and implacable enemy. The sign said, “He who fights with monsters ought take care lest he, too, become a monster.”

Thank god – he doesn’t pay any attention, of course, but it’s good to do, nonetheless – that I didn’t become such a monster that I could, for instance, kill my friend’s grandchildren in an insane act of vengeance against their country. My friend might have been able – I doubt that he is THAT bigoted - to sublimate and assuage his anguish and rage by blaming the government, but I couldn’t.

No, right is still right, and wrong is still wrong – and there are rules by which you can determine both. Bigotry is the antithesis of science and logic. And when you have to know first who shot in the head an old man in a wheelchair, then threw him over the side of the ship, before you can decide whether that was terrorism, you're a bigot.

Cease-Fire, Bargain with the Devil

“War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.” John Stuart Mill, 1862.

The "Cease Fire" in Lebanon has begun. The ravening beast who has been roving the neighborhood killing indiscriminately, has been permitted to find its lair, and recover from the wounds it suffered at the hands of its victims.

If there has ever in history been or most despicable, more cowardly, act of appeasement, I'd hard pressed to say what it is. The United Nations and the world's pseudo-pacifists make Neville Chamberlain look like Audie Murphy.
What we have decided is to provide for an nuclear attack, or worse. This is beneath contempt.

Whatever the number or designation of United Nations “resolution” that results from the world’s cowardly clamor for cease fire in Lebanon, it will go down in history as the betrayal that precipitated the first nuclear terrorist attack. Or worse. This, for moral beings, is unconscionable.

Hezbollah and the rest have as much money as they need to buy biochemical weapons from somebody as greedy as they are vicious, you know. Avid avocational historian that I have been since boyhood (I’m seventy), I can find no more egregious example of political pandering or contempt for human suffering. Thousands, even millions, will pay with suffering and their lives for this, the nadir of U.N. pandering to what is the most despicable and base ideology on the planet.

What’s next – assuming that events overtaking us will give us time for anything worse – a U.N. program to spread the ebola virus? Hemorrhagic fever?

Will the U.N. and the world's morally bewildered pacifists demand next that the United States cease fire in Iraq and Afghanistan, and negotiate with al Qa'ida and Osama bin Laden? Speaking of "morally bewildered," will someone explain to me why, if Israel has "over-reacted" in Lebanon to the murder and kidnap of its soldiers, the United States and its "Coalition" hasn't "over-reacted" in Iraq, Afghanistan, and the "War on Terror?" Why isn't the U.N. demanding that EVERYBODY cease fire on terrorists?

If ever there were a reason for the abolishment of the United Nations, and disdain for specious pacifism and those who would disarm those who care enough about peace to fight for it, this is it. Let’s imagine that another organization or group conspired to loose upon mankind a source like Hezbollah, Hamas, or the like. What it they were to spawn and support another Nazi Germany, the Gestapo, and the rest? How many times have the modern Neville Chamberlains of the United Nations announced more “peace in our time?”

WHY IS IT SO DAMNED HARD TO RECOGNIZE THE LOGICAL FALLACY IN DISARMAMENT AND PACIFISM IN THE FACE OF MURDEROUS TERRORISM? If we recognize the stupidity of putting down one's weapon at the approach of a ravening animal, what the HELL is different about this?

My god, people – WAKE UP! THIS KIND OF PEACE-MAKING IS AN EVIL GODDAMNED LIE! I'll tell what this really is. This is just one more international “protection racket” plot, a work of the devil intended to justify the sale and use of more arms, and the maintenance and funding of more armies. It’s a corporate operations plan to assure continued slaughter of innocents – both combatant and non-combatant. "Mankind," in the words of General and President Dwight Eisenhower, "hanging on a cross of iron." Militarist - and pseudo-pacifist - iron.

Had I the space and time (or patience), I would publish a list of the terrorist atrocities committed by Islamic extremists since the partitioning of Israel. I can't do that here, because it's pages and pages, thousands and thousands of incidents of cold-blooded and indiscriminant murder of innocents.

You think war ugly? Let me show you something REALLY ugly:

This miscreant savage sonofabitch is a Palestinian, and he is being cheered by a crowd of his miscreant savage sonafabitch kind. That’s the blood of an Israeli man captured a little while before. This hero of Islam is showing the crowd that he has washed his hands in another man's blood. For Allah. This is a demented, depraved animal. A devil. You need to think about that, folks. He, and those like him, will celebrate the same way when the blood is yours - or that of your children.

On October 11, 2000, Yossi Avrahami, the Israeli father of three small children, and Vadim Norvich, married four days earlier, were on their way to their yearly army reserve service, when they were unfortunate enough to take a wrong turn and end up in Palestinian police custody. They were taken to the police headquarters in Ramallah.

In a little while, the townspeople had learned that there were two Israelis in custody, and a mob of bloodthirsty savages like the guy in the window formed swiftly outside the police station. The mob, egged on and led by Palestinian policemen, beat and stabbed to death the two Israelis. When the atrocity had been accomplished, the lifeless body of one of the Israelis was thrown from a window in the police station, to be beaten to am amorphous pulp by the ravening barbarian mob. As it that weren’t enough to satisfy the satanic urges of the crowd, the body was dragged behind a car to the center of town, to be set afire.

That’s what the U.N. is protecting, encouraging, and providing for. Do you really think a rabid animal like the guy in the picture here has any compunction about whom he kills? Armed with a nuclear, or a biological, weapon, what do you think a guy who washed his hands in the blood of another man would – will – do? How about the Arab mob that day?

In the all the vicissitudes of history, I predict that never will there have been one like this. It is a betrayal of the thousands – and, god forbid, millions – who will pay for it with their misery and their lives. There’s never really been one like it, ever. The shear cowardice of the capitulation to demonic evil being arranged in the United Nations - in the name of PEACE! - is sickening and criminal, mind-boggling in its depravity. It is, in fact, a thing malum in se – evil in itself and in its essence. All who support it would be liable to a just god.

If the nations of the world have come to a moral state so decayed and degraded that they think nothing worth war, they will soon learn to their consternation otherwise. People who have nothing for which they are willing to fight, nothing more important than the specious and treacherous safety of cringing and belly-crawling passivity, are miserable creatures who have no chance of being free from men like this savage with blood on his hands unless made and kept so by the exertions of those far better than himself.

If the Israeli Defense Force honors the UN and its craven capitulation to barbaric terrorism, and fails to eradicate Hezbollah and extremist Arab savagery, it will never live down – and maybe not survive – its dereliction of duty to its nation and people. If the Israeli Knesset and Prime Minister yield to base cowardice, not only might Israel very well pay with its life, the human race will pay dearly for its abject amorality.

The captain of the legendary ship Flying Dutchman rolled dice with the devil. He lost, and his ship sails stormy seas - forever. The nations of the world, and their people, had better hear and heed the legend - and get through their thick heads that to bargain with the devil is to lose.

Just change the language - that'll make everything all right.

Using the Tu Quoque fallacy of classical logic, a couple of readers argue that I'm as biased as they admit being (of course, they are "pacifists," and that makes everything they do and say all right -very moral, you know). But there is some merit in what they say - where I'm concerned, at least. That's due the fact that I identify in a way with the people of Israel. By that I mean that I, too, once found myself facing an implacable and surrounding enemy determined and trying hard to destroy me. Like the Israelis, my enemy was totally amoral, observing no rule of civilized behavior. Also cowardly, willing to hide behind a shield made of his enemy's higher principles and morality, my enemy attacked my family, my wives and children, with alacrity. Just like any other terrorist.

Like the dithering and vacillating crowd of the U.N. and the world's nations posturing before one another their sanctimonious pacifism, a crowd stood by gawking but unwilling to lift a finger as I, too, fought for my life against a pack of ravening hyenas. When my counterattack turned the tables on the men trying to kill me, the crowd around me also clamored for a cease fire. I'll never forget the bubble-head woman who exhorted bystanders to "get his arms - he's hurting that man!" As the attackers tried to kick me in the ribs and testicles, one guy had just tried to smashed my larynx with a karate blow. The bubble-head probably had no idea that a smashed larynx means death by strangulation. All the other fights she's seen were on television or movie theater screens.

That's just like the pacifists and public in general as they watch the struggle between Israel and Hezbollah: damned little idea of what's really going on. Every time I watch the news of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Lebanon of late, I have the weird feeling that I'm watching the sports news, or that I've stumbled into a pep rally for either the nitwit left or nitwit right. A visit to any of the Internet forums gives much the same impression. Everybody seems to get his concept of the rules and morality of war and survival against an enemy made implacable by ideology nationalist, ideological, or religious from one team sport or the other. "Rah, rah, sis, boom, bah!" "It's my turn." "The other guys are not playing fair." "They're better staffed or equipped." "They're running up the score." Yap, yap, yap. Worse, it's all dependent and decided on the basis of which team I "support." My guys can't be wrong. If I thought that, it would mean I'm not loyal. Can't be disloyal, no matter what. That would mean I'm not a "team player."

These people remind me for all the world of the moron who shot the Sikh gentlemen the day after 9-11 because the latter wore a turban. Literally too ignorant to know better, the chauvinist red-neck reasoned that since his victim's headdress somehow resembled Arab headdress, the man was an Arab. Arabs, he said, had attacked the U.S., and he was a patriot. "An American," he said. "To the bone."

There's the other side of the non compos mentis spectrum, to - the militant pacifist. Of all the cuckoo-bird crowd, I think they may be more dangerous. There's a quote from John Stuart Mill, one I cite elsewhere on this website. It's so apropos, and I could never have said it so well, that I'll quote the great scholar, economist, and philosopher again here. "War" Mill said, "is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself."

"Decayed and degraded state . . ." There you have it. In the literally scores of conversations and debates I've had over the years with people who call themselves "pacifist," what I have found most often is self-reserving cowardice. The unwillingness to take part in society except for the purpose of personal gain. Were all the people they look at down their holier-than-thou, Pecksniffian noses to practice what they preach, neither we - not they - would have any chance of being free. At the risk of being repetitious - I've said this here before, too - I learned very early the lesson that only the strong, and willing to fight, or those protected by someone like that, are ever free.

The lesson didn't come easy. I hated, literally, to fight. I hated even to be near angry people. I still do, matter of fact. That's despite having participated in combative sports for fifty-eight years, more than a thousand organized judo and wrestling contests. When you fight, you get hurt, you know - no way around it. But a grandfather told me when I was still recovering from poliomyelitis, "Son you have to learn to fight, and shoot. Men are free only when it costs too much to take away their freedom. When the price may be his life, he'll leave you alone." Gramps was right. I've never seen it to fail.

But the pacifist MUST believe otherwise. He knows, like I said, that to fight means you get hurt. It's the "getting hurt" part that troubles him most. Except for human respect, that is. He wants others to see something high-minded and proud in his gutless, limp-wristed effeminacy. Yes, effeminacy. We've had several generations of female ascendancy in the U.S., and the evidence of it is everywhere. Generation after generation of wimps raised in "single-parent (still another of those feminist euphemisms - this one means divorced mom, bastard kid, or both) homes" don't want to fight, either. Won't, either - when's the last time we won a war?

Shit! Now I've butchered a sacred cow. Stepped on some toes. Well, f--- it! I don't know if it's ever occurred to you, but in Vietnam - and more recently; see if the shoe fits - our military, armed with every gee-whiz, high-tech, Buck Rogers, whoop-de-do weapon known to man couldn't defeat in a ground war an army of guys dressed in black P.J.s and armed only with small arms. In the skies, guys flying thirty year old MIG-17s fought our guys in the latest F-4s armed with air-to-air missiles and Vulcan cannon to a draw. Even with the intervention of regulars, the NVA, who were armed with everything out of date, obsolescent, and second hand, we should have clobbered them. Why didn't we? BECAUSE WE DIDN'T DO WHAT IT TOOK. Which means we weren't good enough.

Ooops! Another sacred cow. Yeah, yeah, YEAH! I know. We couldn't do this, and we couldn't do that. We couldn't go here, and we couldn't go there. Who the hell fights a war like that?! ONLY US. Do I have to repeat myself? WE AREN'T GOOD - that means we haven't the will - ENOUGH. Because we've become effeminate as a society and nation

Think about it! These days in the Home of the Brave, everybody who's ever heard a shot fired is a "hero." Everybody, in fact, who was even so much as in the same country with a war. Like so many others, we'll soon need another word to describe a real hero. How the hell did it get to be like that?

Well, think about it. Go back to the Korean "War? Does anybody remember Panmumjon, Korea? The "Truce Village?" That was the place in Korea, where during the Korean "Conflict" we "negotiated" with the enemy. We negotiated while the enemy fortified and supplied the hill we would try to take the next day. When the enemy negotiated for it, we gave up the hill. The next day or so, once the enemy had reneged on the "negotiated" deal, we paid the price in blood to take the goddamned thing back. It went on over and over. When it started all over again in Vietnam, there were those of us who just couldn't believe what was happening. But every time we got into one of these f------ idiot's nightmare scenarios, the ladies - and the pacifists - loved it. "Peace Talks" sounds to humane. Just lovely. NO MATTER HOW MANY GOT KILLED AS A RESULT.

Actually, we haven't had a war since WW-2. Think about that. We've lost more than sixty thousand soldiers without having a war! We do one thing, but CALL it another. What side of society does that sound like? Yeah. Damned right. You may be too young to remember a male-dominated world, but there are those among us who do. If you can't remember, get a history book or the old newspapers and go back to the Sixties. Listen to militant feminism. "I am woman, hear me roar," a woman named Helen Reddy sang. Women wanted all the male roles in society; and, by damn, they would HAVE them. In the climate-controlled, super civilized society male muscle had finally built for them, they could do anything a man could do - even soldier. There had to be a few concessions, made of course. A forty pound pack, for instance, is damned sexist. So is a twenty-five mile hike with one on your back, carrying a nine pound rifle. Forty pushups are forty pushups, ten pull-ups likewise - male or female.

But politics IS male or female, and the girls could vote. The country effeminized, and remembering what Gramps said would happen as it started, I recall ruefully that he didn't miss a thing that's now a fact of life. And among the first things to change was the nation's way of war. We stopped having them. Oh, we kept fighting people just like a war, but under different rules. Overrun with female influences, all that feminist, never-say-what-it is language, we just didn't have the balls to SAY it. It came to be something like killing a baby, one of the first things on the feminist agenda. When you killed a baby, it was "women's right to choose." That made it a whole lot easier, and, brother, did they ever get to KILLING!

And just like "abortion," and "woman's right to choose," so it was with war. War became a "policing action," or a "conflict." And we no longer kill the enemy, either. We "engaged" him. In the Presidential Study commission by the first "Bush Presidency," two hundred and fifty-two pages did not once use the world "kill." We ENGAGE our nation's enemies. Doesn't tell you anything? No, I don't suppose. Too effeminate. Oops - that's "metrosexual."

A few years ago - did I tell you about this one? - a female security adviser (groan) at the Pentagon recommended that we develop "a kinder, gentler Army!" No, I am NOT kidding. Soldiers in boot camp could hold up their yellow (appropriate color, anyway) "stress card" whenever things got too tough for their tender psyches. Some soldiers got time out for their period. Guess who.

Parenthetically, a few years ago I ran into an old buddy about to retire from the Marine Corps. "Hal," he said, "you got out just in time. With things the way they are now - women in combat roles and all that - they'd have drawn and quartered you." He was damned well right about that.

Hell, I served with - and there still are - guys in this country, guys so tough, smart, and well-trained that they would kick ass even against numbers twenty times theirs. Anywhere, anytime, anybody. That's when they're free to do what they've been selected and trained to do. Declare war, then let them do what men at war have done since time immemorial, and they will destroy those who want to work their will on you.

But we don't do that any more. First thing you know, if we do that, some women and kids will get killed. Never you mind that the enemy hid among them in order to shoot at our soldiers with impunity. STOP THE KILLING! In fact, it's worse than that nowadays. Now, at the first sound of guns, we have people demanding "peace talks." We negotiate. I don't care what kind of miserable, murdering, baby-killing sonofabitch you choose, there will be those here in the Land of the Free who want to protect him by negotiation from the retribution he deserves. And those who protect him will be women and effeminate males. And those people will call themselves "liberals." It's Panmumjon and the Paris Peace Talks (during the war in Vietnam, dummy) all over again.

Let me tell you something, from the view of a guy seventy years old, who's been everywhere, done everything - and everybody: IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHO HAS SWORN TO KILL YOU, WHOSE VERY REASON FOR LIVING IS TO KILL YOU, WHOSE CULTURE AND RELIGION DEMAND THAT HE KILL YOU; IF YOU NEGOTIATE WITH ANYONE WHOSE HISTORY OF MURDER, PILLAGE, AND TERRORISM IS DECADES - EVEN CENTURIES - LONG, WHO EXPLODES BOMBS ON AIRLINERS AND SHOOTS IN THE HEAD AND THROWS OVERBOARD OLD MEN IN WHEELCHAIRS, WHO SHOOTS KATYUSHA ROCKETS INTO A VILLAGE ANYWHERE, WHO HIDES AMONG AND USES FOR SHIELDS WOMEN AND CHILDREN, HE WILL USE YOUR DAMNED FOOLISHNESS TO KILL MORE OF THOSE WOMEN AND CHILDREN; AND, EVENTUALLY, HE WILL KILL YOU.

And I'll tell you what he has also done: he has shown you to the world for the gutless wonder that you are. I quote again 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."

Does that remind you of anyone - a nation, for instance - these days?

Another of the words the girls have butchered - like "chauvinist" ("male chauvinist") - is HEROES! Everybody in a military uniform is a hero. That's not the only place. There are heroes all over the place nowadays. Take sports (YOU take 'em: I lost interest with the steroids thing; but don't worry, there'll be a word pretty soon, and everything will be all right). How can anyone expect of a society whose priorities are so mix-mastered and splattered that it worships as heroes - by paying them a salary equal to literally THOUSANDS of normal people - guys who play football, baseball, basketball and the like; that's while paying people who face death just about daily, fighting psychotic enemies like the al Qa'ida, the Taliban, the PLO, Hezbollah, and Hamas with lethal weapons less than a "superstar" athlete makes for one game? Elsewhere, some bimbo whose sole contribution to the nation is basically pelvic thrusts while shrieking cacophonously into a microphone is hero-worshipped by our sleep-walking adolescent set. She makes more with one recoding than all the policeman and fireman - many of them honest-to-god real heroes in the long since passé sense of the word - at the World Trade Center on 9-11 put together. Man, we pay the people charged with educating our kids less in a year than a professional athlete "hero" makes for one game.

"Superstar," I guess you know, is much more admirable than "hero." "Hero" means basically a poor kid suckered by Madison Avenue huckster recruiters and promises to provide him the college education or training he needs give him a chance in a society owned by the corporations who have put him in this kind of straits in the first place, corporations who will profit by the wars he'll have sprung on him. What will he get for his arm, or leg, or life? The "undying respect of a grateful nation." With that and three and a half bucks, he can get a gallon of the corporation's gasoline.

But the unkindest cut of them all will be that once he's fighting the war the corporations use to make the billions they pay the "superstar" heroes, his nation's effeminate "pacifists" and humanists - liberals - will demand that he play by every cockamamie rule they can dream up to assure his defeat and death. He'll have warfare designed - cheerleaders and commercials, the whole shebang - to resemble the silly damned kids' game played by the society's REAL heroes, the ones it calls "superstars." If - perish the ugly, inhumane thought - he gets the upper hand, they will demand that he negotiate. "Peace Talks." His "kinder, gentler" Army will stand guard with empty weapons (remember the Marine - MARINES, for chrisssakes! - at Beirut?), and he won't shoot until he's shot at. Then, everybody will get a medal (remember Jessica Lynch?). And we'll go on with "policing actions" (the Korean War - remember?), "conflicts," "limited war," and abortions (notice the lack of parenthesis) the like. Killing, war - but calling it something else. Much easier, that way.

And you really expect a society and nation this FUBAR to win a war? Win peace? Be serious!

Grampa made his predictions, I'll make mine. You'll elect Hillary Clinton President of the U.S., because when she runs, ninety percent of women will vote for her. There'll be more and more women in Congress (THEY go vote, by god), too. Al Qa'ida, Hezbollah, and the rest can't wait. With a majority of Congress and government female, metrosexual, and homosexual, you'll dither and deliberate - "Let's talk" (and talk, talk, and talk) with every new attack. Then you'll negotiate. A lot of people - the innocent, as always with this kind of thing - will die. That'll be all right, as long as you can come up with the right word to describe it. You'll keep striving for peace by changing the word for everything your don't like and throwing bodies to the great gods of appeasement for political gain.

Until the inevitable happens. The Islamic Terrorists will get their hideous act together. They'll learn something beside blowing themselves up on airliners, in coffee shops, and the rest. Instead of knocking down buildings, they'll hit you where you really live. They mean to kill you all, you know (in case you've chosen not to hear what they're screeching at the top of their maniacal lungs). When they finally acquire a real tactician, they'll make life so miserable - and deadly - that you'll HAVE to do something male (gasp!). Maybe groups of people will realize first that the political process - including women in power - can't deal with psychotic killers. They'll start forming their own defense committees and enclaves (as I predicted they would in 1974).

But you'll learn, my country, you'll learn. You're a woman, and you'll learn by being raped and dying, just like all those individual women, the ones you liberated and "empowered," only to be raped, murdered, and thrown away like used condoms, already victims of feminist, "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle" indoctrination. Had you learned from them, you'd have discovered that when the rapist who outweighs you by a hundred pounds because he's a male rips off your clothes, throws you on the ground in an alley, and forces your legs apart, what happens will happen no matter what you call or characterize what he's doing. Just like his bomb-throwing, airliner blasting brethren, THIS "terrorist" won't care, either. Neither will there be a "cease fire." And all the attempts at negotiation here will result just like all the other attempts at negotiation with "terrorists" in history. You don't get to hold up your yellow "stress card." You just satisfy this guy's urges, then you die.

And you'll, no doubt, die thinking you wish there were one of those "male chauvinist pigs" you heard your hero sisters talk about still around. But then, you'll probably have never been aware of J.S. Mill, or of men bigger than the dwarfs he spoke of. Too bad.

Pacifism, Historical Prelude to Slaughter

Since the latest round of warfare between Israel and the Arabs screaming "Death to the Jews" and trying to destroy her, my friends her in Texas and on the internet have been asking me what I think will happen. I'm an ardent historian by avocation, and I know history. I was also a military tactician by profession, so I have some idea. It isn't good, and the picture here is why. And how what will happen will happen.

That barrel-like thing between the skydivers legs is a W-54 SADM - Small Atomic Demolition Munition - and it has an explosive yield equivalent to that of 1.9 kilotons of TNT. There's a bigger picture of it on my website wwwjudoknighterrant.com Here's another:

In a letter this very morning to a friend here in Texas, I made the prediction he sought. If the world negotiates still again with terrorists, I said, rather than do what it knows damned well is tactically right and righteous morally, it will happen this way.

The w-54 SADM, by the way, weighs 87 pounds. This was my letter to my friend:

"Bill,

"Actually, I'm dead certain Iran already can make and is making weapons grade uranium. This old, old technology and anyone with enough money can do it. Fifty nations would do it for you, for enough money. Just about any nation with good machinists and machine technology (that's the hardest part, once you've got the gas centrifuge or other means of enriching uranium). I could do it. It's done. They have it.

"The U.S. and Britain - probably France, too - have warned Iran that they will turn her into a radioactive dump if she makes a conventional - missile or aircraft borne - attack with a nuke. Iran knows it's true, and that Russia and Red China won't help (money, money, money). This is poor against rich again, and the populous rich nations aren't going to screw up a good racket with another damned fool war. Too profitable to keep a lot of little ones going.

"The Middle East right now is proof. Just tactical and strategic nonsense, its only possible purpose to draw out the conflict as long as possible. The "War on Terror" is a creation of the same military industrial culture and mentality - a substitute for the marketplace that was the Cold War. This sort of "war" will go on as long as war is extremely profitable.

"What will happen is an attack like you suggest, except it won't be with one backpack nuke, it'll be with several. Probably placed in strategic locations about a major city - St Louis or Omaha come to mind - and designed to create the equivalent of a super hydrogen bomb. I think the bad guys are doing that right now.

"They might also plant twenty or so around the U.S., intending to get the maximum panic effect. The Arab mind makes the first attack more likely. The government will tolerate the first attack, too. It serves their purposes just like 9-11 did. The second attack doesn't, so the first is more likely. Also, the government will tolerate - and permit - the first attack, too. It serves their purposes just like 9-11 did. The second attack doesn't, so the first is more likely.

"Of course, corporate U.S. pig-headedness where exploiting Mexicans is concerned also means the terrorists can simply walk across the border with a nuke on their backs. That's least likely because of satellite radiation detection capability and the need for speed it necessitates. It might happen that way, but the need for speed means the attackers will probably be using small planes, equipped for extreme long range (remember Max Conrad?), flying in from countries amenable to their presence, or countries too weak in security to do anything about it. It's even possible for a small plane to fly nonstop from the Middle East to the U.S. Remember my book and how the Baron might have attacked with the little Rutan planes. When they have a hundred or so W-54 type bombs in place, they'll do their customary, de rigueur theatrics, then explode the bombs. All hell will break loose.

"The attacks will come as soon as the ground support and the organization necessary are ready.

"Dismal, but that's how it is. The corporations Eisenhower once dubbed the Military Industrial Complex want the peace talks. That's how they assure continued fighting and war - and sale of weapons. Their coup d'etat in the fifties was about WW-2 profits they'd be losing, and the Cold War that followed was all about building weapons. When the big bugbear they made of the Soviet Union was gone, they needed another war. They got it - the War on Terror.

"The militarists and warmongers hide among the pacifists and peacemakers the way Hezbollah hides among the people of Lebanon. That way, the two murders get to kill while putting the blame on the people they're trying to destroy. It's been going on for a long, long time historically, and the VietCong served up an object lesson in that kind of appeal to the pacifists in the Vietnam War. The pacifists will have their slaughter, because the tactically correct way - do whatever it takes to end the killing as soon as possible - is hard. And the public here in the U.S. wants nothing that is hard. As the Ayatollah Homeini's foreign minister once observed, 'The will of the Americans is directly proportional to the availability of central air conditioning.'

"If we negotiate with terrorists like Hezbollah, tens of thousands, even millions, will pay for the lives of a few Lebanese saved now. Those suicide explosive vests will become SADM nukes."