State of the Union - More Rebuttal From the Real World

That's our man Jack S. again. These days, everything is about him, and inasmuch as it is government to whom we turn as we once did to god, it's religious. And someone – H.L. Mencken, I think – once observed, “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” "

Some time ago, a TV personality (is he a newsman? – I was still up in the woods, I guess) named Stephen Colbert supposedly coined a word, “truthiness.”

“Truthiness,” he said, is '”What I say is right, and [nothing] anyone else says could possibly be true.' It's not only that I feel it to be true, but that I feel it to be true. There's not only an emotional quality, but there's a selfish quality.

"It used to be,” he continued, “everyone was entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. But that's not the case anymore. Facts matter not at all. Perception is everything. It's certainty. People love the President because he's certain of his choices as a leader, even if the facts that back him up don't seem to exist. It's the fact that he's certain that is very appealing to a certain section of the country. I really feel a dichotomy in the American populace. What is important? What you want to be true, or what is true?”

I guess there's not much doubt about that, is there?

It happens that I came across that quote from Colbert while researching Korsakoff's Syndrome, a mental condition you might say is that of a pathological liar. The latter, of course, while the expression in the vernacular for someone who thinks something is the truth as soon as he says it, is not – as far as I know – actually a clinical term. Still, I think of it every time I hear and watch George W. Bush speak publicly. One of the first people to be trained – actually, I started training myself while a student wrestler in high school, the better to size up my tournament opposition – and hired as am analyst of body language, our esteemed president is a study in confabulative prevarication. He is, in short, a pathological liar.

George W. Bush is so completely and thoroughly a liar that at times he is genuinely confused at the inability of those around him to recognize the truth he has just created. He believes it - why don't they recognize it? WHY CAN'T THEY MAKE IT WORK?

By the way, Korsakoff’s Syndrome is believed sometimes to be due a vitamin deficiency – do you suppose we could solve all our presidential problems by slipping the man a shot of Vitamin B?

But I digress. As someone (other than Mr. Colbert) once observed in the instance of William Jefferson Clinton, Mr. Bush’s predecessor – we just go from bad to worse, don’t we? – he is the perfect representative for a nation like this one, probably the numerically largest collection of liars in human history. Stephen Colbert was right, including his remark that it’s tearing us apart.

Unfortunately, I think there’s even more to it than just his “truthiness.” Watch television and you will not only hear it argued vehemently – FoxNews Sean Hannity, for instance – that fact is no longer a matter of the epistemological sciences, but one of political result. It's what he's trying to do. Truth is whatever people can be made to think it is. It’s whatever they’re happy with.

We vote to decide what is real.

And the government knows it, the reason the CIA Operation called Mockingbird was birthed in 1949 and continues today. There is absolutely no rational doubt - Occam’s Razor, anyone? - about it. Some while ago, I related having made a survey of the logical fallacies pumped through the “boob tube” to the public by television pundits and “analysts.” It’s a blizzard, certainly to a degree that must be suspected of purpose, and the purpose is deceit. Construction of a false reality.

During any given evening – even a time as short as an hour – you will see and hear:

Argument from False Authority — From generals whose military careers were spent in a branch of service having little or nothing to do with, for instance, the war in Iraq, to a “Doctors” whose degrees have utterly nothing to do with the topic.

One, again for instance, who gives all manner of psychological and sociological advice actually has a Ph.D. in physiology. You’ll also hear repeatedly from authors of books, people whose book research was entirely in other books, and who tout their book is touted with statements like “So and so read my book and loved it.” When you check, you learn that the author has forgotten to mention that “So and So” is a professor of Korea History, commenting on a book about Arab nationalism or the like.

FoxNews’ Bill O’Reilly, by the way, was a high school teacher, then a radio talk show host, and the like. His experience and expertise having to do with military strategy – especially guerrilla warfare like that we face in Iraq – you could get in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink. You could probably say – like the guy whose “research” is other books on the same subject – that he has about as much authority when it come to “culture war” and being a “Culture Warrior” - the name of his latest book.

That book, by the way, he’ll send to our troops in Iraq – one for each one you buy.

No further comment.

Then, there’s Argument from False Dilemma — i.e., assuming that there are only two possible opinions on the subject. If you don’t recognize this one, you haven’t listened to much of what our president says, and damned little TV otherwise. It says, “If you’re not with us, you’re against us;" or, “If you’re not a conservative, you’re a liberal.” And, of course, “If you don’t support the war, you’re a traitor.”

That last brings us to Argument by Demonizing — identifying others as a mortal threat. If you don’t support the war, and/or you want to bring the troops home, you’re damaging their moral, and that’s treachery. Usually, the “analyst” – Sean Hannity just about every night of late, throws in this Argument by Scapegoating — everybody who’s not supporting the war is prolonging it. President Bush’s plan would be going better if it weren’t for your lack of support.

“Liberals,” (or conservatives - in this 'truthiness' thing, it's all about point of view) are to blame for the mess we’re in, and everybody who doesn’t agree with me is a liberal (or conservative). “Liberals” (or conservatives) are stereotyped to a fare-thee-well (if you don’t recognize the stereotype, you haven’t been listening) as people who only criticize the president, and “haven’t got a plan” (how many times have you heard that one?) for Iraq. Et cetera.

That last, incidentally is also known as false dilemma, portraying as it does any opposition group as having a value system that is the polar opposite of the “analyst’s” – rather than simply having different priorities.

Next is the Straw man Fallacy — mischaracterizing the opposing position, then making a case against the mischaracterization. A few weeks before the last election, for instance, Fox and the rest made a proving that anyone who voted for Democratic Party candidates were additionally supporting Osama bin Laden.

Then we have what I’ve come to refer to as the “Hannity Question.” It’s otherwise known as the Loaded Question Fallacy — posing a question that implies or ascribes a position that the opponent does not hold. "How long have you refused to support the troops?"

And how long have you heard that one, in one form or another, on television?

Among the most frequent of them all, most annoying, too – for me, anyway – is the Irrelevant Conclusion. In this one, the “newsman” or “journalist” makes an argument or arguments totally unrelated to the topic of discussion. When he has proved one thing, he announces that he’s just proved another. “I never said that!” he says, even proving it with a tape of a segment other than the one in question to prove it. That he did say it in another is something for the audience to discover, apparently. How dishonest can you be?

Recognize anybody, by the way?

The last (there are many more, but I’m tired of the subject – getting myself pissed off here) is one guy’s chief stock in trade, so much so that you’ll recognize his “No Spin” at once. It’s known as Argument by Emotional Appeal and (or) Personal Attack — attempting to bring a discussion to an emotional level "Everyone” (the New York Times, for instance) :is against me!" "That’s – or , when the guest makes a particularly telling point, “You’re - stupid!" "Turn off his mike!” Sometimes, it comes down to one form or other of the old classic retort, "Shut up!" High class stuff. And just as honest.

Oh, yeah – one more. This one I love, laugh all the way through the show at the antics of one little Afro-American (black? – frankly, I’m getting tired of trying to guess which term is the acceptable one lately) woman on the Paula Zahn Show. This gal simply won’t let anyone but herself talk. Smiling, anticipating and relishing now wonderful she will seem, she waits to pounce. The instant she sees that her opponent is about to speak, she shouts him down with one or the other of what must be a bookful of slogan-arguments she has memorized. The fact that her choice happens to be a mindlessly diametrical non sequitur deters her not one wit. That one you could call Argument by Blizzard of Bullshit, I think.

This stuff also includes almost invariably things like the old Apples and Oranges mix. Nowhere is it more in evidence than where the topic is federal spending, where in order to make one number appear more or less than another, the “host” or “analyst” jumps back and forth between cardinal numbers and percentages, avoiding the absolute value that will permit a real comparison. In a nation as innumerate as this one, it’s a very effective tactic for preying with political purpose.

The statistics method of lying includes the Half-Truth Argument. That one – a favorite of none other than Josef Goebbels, Hitler’s Propaganda Minister and the inventor of the Big Lie method - is the trivially true statement, one true only in a strict and relatively meaningless sense. One of my kids – the guy with the high IQ – tried to “con” his mom one night when he reported that he hadn’t left a single “veggie” on his plate during supper at a friend's house.

You guessed it – when I asked, he admitted (Aaron was always as honest as can be) that there hadn’t actually been any vegetables on his plate. All of nothing is still nothing (but then, if you heard the president's speech, you know that).

On television, the Half Truth argument one will sound something like, “we’ve increased spending on intelligence gathering ten billion dollars since taking office, while the previous administration accuses us of cutting funding for the CIA.” See if you can spot the fallacy (you should – you hear this one just about every day).

Every night now, we hear the Appeal to Fear. It's the hallmark of the Bush Administration. Iran is about to achieve a nuclear weapon. Think about that. What would they do with it? Attack Israel? Israel with as many as two hundred nukes? What? – they’d invade the U.S.?

Yeah, I know – they’d “destabilize the region.” Explain to me what that means (you can explain it to yourself before you try it on me). It comes out to “keep us from getting and keeping control” – doesn’t it? All that oil?

Tell me, while you’re at it, what the war we’re waging in Iraq is doing to “stabilize.” When has the “region” ever been less “stable?” Tell me why you think the twenty-two million people we’re keeping in the worst kind of misery imaginable here on earth (how would you handle being in danger of obliteration by explosives, kidnapping and murder by beheading - even small stuff like only three hours of electricity a day?) will remember us kindly – even if they do manage to come up with some kind of democracy. And while we’re on the subject of that last, explain to me how you operate a democracy in an Islamic country, where a religion as draconian and inexorable as Islam mandates that clerics decide anything and everything they want to decide. Do it all by yourself, with just the logic and the numbers of the thing. Oh, by all means, look up the history of Islam, for instance, but otherwise, just use your own head.

Have fun, but remind yourself that you’re all by yourself, there in your head. No popular opinions, no consensus to tell you what to think, or rely on. Try this - pretend the product the president was selling the other night – war and the military industrial complex’s weapons - was a car or any of the myriad of other things that make watching television so infuriatingly impossible nowadays. Stay away from Stephen Colbert’s “truthiness” and reality by political consensus and you’ll discover that the State of the Union Address was nothing more than Big Brother’s Big Lie – Operation Mockingbird.

You’ll see that it’s really just a sales job, and what they’re selling is their version of fact, and reality. What they’re selling is a break with reality.

Craziness.

Insanity.

Think!

(When reality gets you by the throat, you're all by yourself - ALWAYS!)

State of the Union - Rebuttal from the Real World

“The most terrifying words in the English language are: I'm from the government and I'm here to help.” –Ronald Reagan, 40th President of the U.S.

Here, we continue discussion of POTUS' fatuous "State of the Union" address. We were at:

4. Last time, discussing the cancerous effect of taxation necessary to support a Brobdingnagian military, I included that having to do with our youth. Of the president’s entire address, probably, no part was more deliberately dissimulating than his remarks concerning “No Child Left Behind.” It typifies the society as a whole, and its government as a factor in what has become our national decline.

In fact, the nation's decline has uniformly paralleled the concomitant decline in its educational system. If you're surprised, you don't know a hell of a lot about the importance of intellect to any nation. "If a nation expects to be both ignorant and free in a state of civilization," Thomas Jefferson observed, "it expects what never was and never will be."

They're related, all right.

It happens that in keeping with an investigatory practice that has been mine for a lifetime, I recently taught school for two years. You see, I’ve suspected long since that education is still another example of a system within a system that is a microcosm of the society and its government. Just as a mathematician or statistician can learn of the workings of an equation by factoring, the investigator can often learn about what’s happening in a society or nation by studying – becoming a part of - one its parts.

What, I wondered, was going on in education? I found out, I can tell you that. And – guess what? - the disease the honest investigator will find in our school system is one found everywhere within the societal system that is the United States. It’s socialism, all right; socialism that has been overcome by socialism, politically correct by our political correctness.

In the increasingly spastic U.S. system of education, “no child left behind” means that everyone in the class must wait while the slowest learns what the rest have already learned. Like the fact of physics and mathematics that says nothing within a system can be done alone – i.e., -have effect only on itself – “no child left behind” means inevitably that like an army impeded by women in its ranks must slow its march, the nation must wait while the handicapped learn.

Of course, WE decided this. It sounds so democratic, so humane, so good, so “loving.” It sounds, in fact, so much so that one may not think further. Here, in fact, the truth – be its demonstration or proof as overwhelming in size and scope as continents, nations, language groups, or cultures - is held to be odious – illegal, even. Spoken aloud, or written for publication, in fact, it is “hate speech.” Inasmuch as all races, cultures, creeds, sexes and sexual preferences must be treated as equals, all must also be treated as mental equals. No exceptions. “No child left behind.”

Of course, it is utter nonsense logically, an invented campaign “issue” created by politicians and intended for use in base demagoguery. It is nonsense that foretells and explains the decline of our nation, too. Like the “analysts” who either awarded with kudos or brickbats the president’s maddeningly oblivious - can you believe he ignored New Orleans? - State of the Union speech, all concerned with “no child left behind” have their special – racial, cultural, religious, political interests, interests that are, to them, of paramount importance.

Like the feminists of a few decades ago, none of those “issues” include the welfare or future of the children. Need I remind us all that the future of our children IS the future of the nation?

I don’t suppose – that’s another way of saying all the same things, isn’t it? That’s okay, it’s apropos. When I left the teaching profession, you see, it was under fire. Assigned an eight grade class suddenly abandoned by a teacher who quit a few weeks into the school year, I learned the reason for his departure immediately. That’s the first day. Arriving at the class room, I found the place in shambles. That’s literally. The walls, for instance, had been kicked in; in fact, holes had in several place been kicked through into the next classroom.

The class - twenty-one pupils, all but four of whom were Hispanic – simply could not be brought to order. That’s any kind of order. Few of the students could be silenced, even by yelling over them. NO school work was possible – none. Everyone in the room ignored me completely. Only by means of a tape recorder purchased during my lunch period was I able to establish any kind of order – and that didn’t amount to much. The students – and it’s on the recorder’s tape – were willing to state that they simply had no fear of being held responsible for their actions.

“Nobody,” one young woman – she and four of the boys in the class were fifteen (one sixteen) years of age – said archly, “cares.” I would soon have no doubt that she must be right.

The second day, still hoping to establish some semblance of order, I went to the rear of the room where the young woman I just mentioned and one of the young men were engaged in apparently passionate sexual foreplay. That, incidentally, included his hand inserted down the front of her unbuttoned jeans. The class, of course, was understandably distracted.

When I had separated the two, then ordered the youth to the front of the room and approached him, he suddenly flicked out a clenched fist in the old tactic commonly known as a “sucker punch.” It’s nasty, a street-fighter tactic intended to at once inflict stunning injury and permit the administering of a fearsome beating to a victim rendered no longer able to respond.

His punch caught, my would-be assailant was armlocked and delivered to the door, where he was ordered to report to the school administration office. When I had followed him there after calling assistance, I found myself “on the carpet.” “Violence,” I was instructed, would not be tolerated. I said I agreed. Wholeheartedly. I said good-bye, too. You could say that I left that child, and those children, behind, and I relate the experience because it tells us much about the U.S. system of education today. It tells us a great deal – perhaps everything that’s necessary – about the nation itself. It tells us, you see, not only about the municipal and country consolidated system where I taught, it tells us about the Texas School system of which it is a part.

And it tells us about parents of our children. It tells us that these same parents care so little, being too busy to bother, about their children that they refuse them discipline. It tells us also that they care in the same manner so little about their society and nation – being likewise too busy to bother - that they tolerate not only the cynical pronouncements of politicians, politicians like their inexorably determined and murderous president, but the relentlessly sinking condition of their country.

The state of the union is that its public – just like parents of children in Texas’ Schools - doesn’t care enough to do what is required to restore and maintain order. There are too many excuses, too many distractions, too many “issues.” There are too many politically correct ideas and ideologies to be served – nitwit nostrums cynically served by programs like “no child left behind.”

The sickness, born of racial, cultural, and gender-related political factionalism, has effects everywhere. In a way similar to the way factors in an equation relate, increase or diminish, one another, factions in a society and nation have their effect on it. You don't, for instance, rescue your soldiers from the impossible quagmire the government has delivered them into in Iraq for the same reason you don't rescue your children from the bedlam you've made for them in our schools. You don't care that much.

You don't care, and that is the one failing nature never fails to punish decisively.

Recently, my wife, a master teacher of forty years experience, was obliged by the state education system to attend classes - classes in which she was taught (extremely poorly; you’d expect that, wouldn’t you?) how to fend off violent assault by her pupils (think about the microcosm that represents).

How on god’s green earth have we come to such a state?! Why, it’s the “State of the Union.” And we got there because of things like “no child left behind.”

“For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.”

Security, Language, and the Security of Language

"It's not the men in my life that counts," Mae West once said famously (and chiastically), "it's the life in my men." We've come as a nation to something of a corollary, wherein the public has chosen to believe the life, in whatever reality is more important than the reality in life. Either out of commercial and/or governmental propagandist-directed behavior alteration and control or shear stupidity due our ill-attended and maintained public education system, the gift of language has become reality in order to protect us from the same.

It's even more chiastic than that. So convolute has the situation become in the linguistic wilderness of mirrors being created by the agency ominously known as the House of Mirrors, that little security remains except that to be found in figures of speech. The recent story of the youngster who walked through the nation and Department of Homeland Security's vaunted airport security systems is a case in point.

Semaj Booker is nine years old, four-feet, nine inches tall, and a fourth-grader. So how did he outsmart our wondrous government, those stalwart and ever-alert guardians, the people we are to trust with of our security (and our freedom)? Well, they don't know:

"S. Rep. Norm Dicks has asked the Transportation Security Administration to determine how a 9-year-old Lakewood boy used another passenger’s name to board a Southwest Airlines flight and run away to Texas this week, his spokesman said Thursday.

“If there are opportunities to exploit the system like this, and they’re so obvious to a 9-year-old, then that’s something we should look into,” said George Behan, spokesman for Dicks, D-Belfair."

NO! No kidding. You're saying that because a nine-year old beat the system, it may need some "tweaking?" AND YOU HAVE TO LOOK INTO IT, to make one of those famously federal, ten dollars on the dime investigations?! A congressional subcommittee, no doubt.

Incredible!

But not as incredible as the fact that you keep these stumbling, spastic morons in office. As Colonel David Hunt says, "Nobody gets fired." Kinder, gentler nation, you know. Mustn't take anybody's job. Maybe he's got a family. Hell, maybe his wife is the "high maintenance" kind. Besides, it just isn't the effeminate, metrosexual male thing to do.

And not incredible to me, not at all. Hell, no. I not only went through your heralded security like water paper towel, I left my calling card everywhere I infiltrated, and reported having done it to U.S. Senators and Congressmen, to Army Intelligence, to two U.S. Attorney Generals (left my card on her desk, too), to Soldier of Fortune Magazine, Sixty Minutes, Geraldo Rivera, and more (so many, I can't remember them all as I type this). Guess what happened?

Right. Nada. Zip, Zilch, Bupkis.

Incredible? Well, okay - but I did. And that's why Semaj and I were able to do it. It's so incredible that you refuse to believe it. And since you don't believe it, it can't be. Didn't happen. O-o-o-o-kay . . . .!

And, by the way, you don't see any parallel between this and the way our border with Mexico remains as compromise-able as Mae West's virtue? My turn: incredible! And, while I'm in that vein, you don't see a don't see a parallel between Mae's "Come on up and see me some time" morals and a U.S. Congress' relationship with 35,000 lobbyists?

Then I'll bet you don't see any relationship between the holes in your airport security and a military and national defense run by George W. Bush and his bungling Bush League, DO you?! A FEMA who STILL is standing and looking at New Orleans and the Gulf Coast with its collective mouth agape? Then you probably won't see why I prefer to do my own security. I sure as hell don't want YOU standing guard outside my door while I sleep.

But I've got to concede you this much - it's hard to tell whether the sleaze of politicians we have in power were put there by the military industrial complex because they're evil and corruptible or because they're stupid and inept. It's tempting to believe that we're throwing away the lives of decent young people who only wanted three square meals a day and a chance at a college education because our intelligence services - at the cost of billions and billions for those Keyhole satellites - were too incompetent to read the satellite photos or because they lied.

It's just too damned incredible. Uh-uh. Even when it comes to a nine-year old making a monkey of airport security - and our Homeland Security Agency - I smell a rat. I keep thinking about an Arab cuckoo-bird named Mohamed Atta, and the way he somehow walked - supposedly miraculously - through airport security, too (and nobody got fired, remember? - not even the National Security Adviser who didn't know that a knife with a four-inch blade was a weapon, but is now Secretary of State).

"Is that a gun in your pocket, or are you just glad to see me?"

The State of the Union Address, Rebuttal; Not From the "Other Side of the Aisle" - From the Street.

That, you'll remember, is Senator Phogbound, Jack S. He hasn't changed - his kind never do. You should remember that, too.

The CIA Operation Mockingbird-controlled media is still cramming down our throats its bilgewater concerning the State of the Union Address and the conniving rebuttal by the Democratic Party, so it seems only fair that we have a real rebuttal - from someone who represents the people who are really watching the state of the union, and really care.

First, everything uttered these days by the sleaze of politicians in the collective whorehouse on the Potomac that is our government reminds me of the old story I repeat here on occasion. That's the one about the guy who comes home unexpectedly, to catch the neighbor guy topping off his wife. The wife looks over her stud's shoulder at her cuckold husband, to demand, "Well, are you going to believe me, or your lying eyes?!"

The President's speeches are like that, and like the wife in my story, you do have to give the man credit for one thing - chutzpah.

The state of the union is this (from one who has for the last twenty years traveled its length and breadth, observing and talking to more people than perhaps any survey ever done - and that on a level no other survey can match):

1. While the military industrial complex spends upwards of $760,000,000,000 a year on a military bigger than all the others on earth combined, the society struggles to pay taxes higher by forty-two percent than any other nation on earth. The result is 40,000,000 who live below what scholars call the "poverty level," and the middle class is being consumed by corporate greed with accelerating speed. Ninety-five percent of the nation's wealth and monetary power is owned by less than one percent of its population, and each year the chasm between rich and poor widens.

The crushing tax burden born by middle and lower class "America" - ninety percent of income taxation is levied against families with incomes below $35,000, and ALL taxes are paid by non-corporate interests and individuals (If the government took 100 percent of all taxable income above $75,000, it would get enough to run the government for approximately ten days. One hundred percent of taxes collected goes to pay interest on the National Debt—money owed the Federal Reserve (i.e., domestic and foreign bankers). The result has been nothing less than a breakdown in society - something as obvious as what's going on in the bedroom of the cuckold husband in my ribald story. Whereas families were once supported entirely by one bread-earner - when I was first married, my wife and I had a car, a house, television and the usual appliances all on my wages - it is now necessary for everyone in the household to have an income, and the family owns nothing but massive, enslaving debt.

The further result of the burden imposed by a military bloated to an extent beyond either credibility or description is the ruination of society's basic unit, the family. Together with the sociological mania known as feminism and its obsession with "career," forces imposed by the need of women to be employed outside the home have resulted in exponential increase in the number and percentage single-family homes, and for the first time in the nation's history, more than half of the nation's women live in a home without a man. Deprived of parentally derived normalcy, the nation's children have become - and continue to be at an accelerating pace - an actual threat to society. Stupid almost beyond belief, often as vicious and depraved as wild animals, they roam our streets in ravening packs, pillaging, terrorizing, and killing. Where once as a high school student I was permitted to take my shotgun to school on opening day of hunting season, the better to hunt on the way home, we have now turned our schools into veritable prisons where armed guards patrol the hallways and teachers must be taught self-defense and survival skills. Terrorist shootings, by children - "drive-by" and otherwise - have become a continual event nationally. Drug use and addiction have reached colossally epidemic levels, and sexual depravity among teenagers, even children, is a national disgrace.

The "single-parent" so vaunted by feminists family apparently hasn't succeeded.

2. Everywhere in the nation, small business and entrepreneurial endeavor burdened by destructive totalitarian taxation - the purpose of taxation, after all, is to re-allocate and re-distribute wealth - are crushed by corporations favored by no such burden. Everywhere, the "WalMart Assault" strikes communities, competitive enterprise being swiftly strangled. With the trade deficit soaring, corrupt government owned by corporations and lobbyists pandering to it continues to favor the giant corporations doing business overseas, the better to "maximize" profits. Efforts to maximize profits include domestic hiring and exploitation at minimum wage, or buying merchandise made by foreign workers at sweat-shops wages for sale here at inflated prices. More, the same lust for profits (shared by stockholders who, willing to see their neighbors impoverished in the process, demand it) has brought an massive exodus of the same corporate interests, exodus to places where cheap labor and other costs promise even higher profits.

Meanwhile, thanks mostly - and, for me, incredibly - to political power having been acquired by illegal alien workers, and to the necessity imposed upon small manufacturers, farmers, and businesses generally by destructive taxation, U.S. workers are forced to compete in their own country's labor market with aliens able to easily underbid them, aliens aided by government health care and social programs unavailable to the citizen. If that weren't enough, the aliens - people from what is perhaps the most murderous and crime-ridden society on earth, certainly in the hemisphere - pillage, rape and murder almost at will. The massive influx of illegal aliens across border with Mexico has produced with a vengeance the "great sucking sound" once warned of my Ross Perot when a presidential candidate.

That while the government sworn to "promote the general welfare" of its citizens dithers cynically, sucking up to its corporate masters and availing itself of the political power represented by the aliens and their cultural brothers who reside here legally.

Perhaps nothing so characterizes the state of affairs, as well as the state of the union than the fact that U.S. citizens must now, in order to get a job in their country, speak Spanish, the language of another. Worse, in order to obtain many of the services to which he is entitled by his citizenship, he must speak Spanish. A few years ago, in fact, my application for social benefits - food stamps - was rejected, while illegal aliens recently arrived from Mexico (I speak Spanish fluently, a fact unknown to the federal employees a the office in Del Rio, Texas) were given assistance immediately.

3. In the "Nation of Laws," law and order - especially its enactors and enforcers - have fallen into disrepute and ridicule. All but daily, courts hand down rulings so bizarre as to not only offend the sensibilities of the general public, but to assure contempt for the law among youth literate and intelligent enough to understand. Courts and legislatures brow-beaten and nagged by feminists, for instance, have made the charge of rape all but indefensible. To date, as many as one hundred, thirty men convicted of rape in court proceedings made spastic by feminist-inspired and extorted legislation and procedural rules have been shown innocent by DNA and other scientifically conclusive evidence. In the "Nation of Laws," few people give a damn about real innocence of guilt, only that their point of view, their bias - ideological, cultural or otherwise - be served.

Consider the O.J. Simpson trial of a few years ago, for instance.

A few years ago, a U.S. Attorney General estimated that our jails held as many as thirty thousand innocent men. He considered that an acceptable number, he said. "It's the price we have to pay for our system of justice." Obviously, I thought then, it's not HE who pays the price.

Edwin Meese may have been referring to the "price" of a "justice" characterized by cases like the Duke University Lacrosse Team embarrassment, officials repair for guidance and what would otherwise be legitimacy to the opinion and related demands of societal factions like feminism. Officials faced with political liabilities due this or that self-serving "ism" continually and with malfeasance inflict themselves on the helpless, while disinterested, citizen. On the execrable border with Mexico lately, a drug smuggler given immunity from prosecution has succeeded in having tried and imprisoned the Border Patrol officers who caught him in the act of smuggling and illegal entry into the country. At all levels of government, moreover, law has become a matter of politics, rather than justice.

Thanks to a media compromised by Operation Mockingbird and similar journalist-controlling methods, the many cases like that of the two Border Patrol agents are obscured, kept out of the public eye.

Unfortunately, perhaps, THIS state of the union address will of necessity occupy far too much space for one day's writing. Things are in a hell of a mess; rest assured, however - unlike the "analysis" provided by a national media squirming under the boot of government pressure - there will be no control, federal or otherwise, of what I say. Impossible to control by the power to destroy of taxation, I tell it like it is. And, "To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue."

There’s Iraq, Afghanistan, and a whole lot more. I'll continue tomorrow.

The M-16, .223 Caliber Congress

Well, now. The U.S. Congress - that paragon of august propriety and virtue - is considering a "non-binding" resolution opposing the Bush League's "surge" of troops in Iraq. "Non-binding resolution." It even has a nice, safe and politically-correct, ring to it, doesn't it - and it sums up the Congress we have, too. Perfectly.

A non-binding resolution by this bunch is nothing more nor less than the posturing demagoguery that is their principal product. Just perfect.

It's meant to show their constituents that their humanely wonderful hearts are in the right place - while making sure their political asses are safe. What a crawling crowd!

You see, comic opera fans, our heroes in Valhalla for the corrupt have something of a dilemma. To cut off funding for this continuing slaughter would expose them to all kinds of political trouble, should what everyone of sufficient intellect - you'll note that doesn't seem to include any of this menagerie - expects to happen then happens. On the other hand, to continue funding Mr. Bush's private war means the concomitant deaths of hundreds more of our men and women - there seems nothing politics doesn't make us stoop to these days - in arms. "Support our troops," you know.

And feeding them into combat in small groups, armed where the real action is, with squirrel-caliber weapons and third-rate body armor, is "support." Damn betcha.

Last week, parenthetically and - for the morally honorable - inextricably related to that last, I received a video from a friend in Iraq. It's of action in Baghdad, and seems to be video of the same action that appeared on television some time ago. A team of U.S. Marines assaults a building, one of them spinning into a room after his buddy has preceded him and gone down before enemy Arab soldiers (you know, the people our mealy-mouthedly politically correct media calls "insurgents"). Inside the room, he faces two men, Arabs armed with the ubiquitous AK-47 assault rifle. Our guy has that wonder of lobbyist intervention into military affairs, the .223 caliber (my squirrel-caliber reference) M-16 -"United States Rifle." The firefight is damned near toe to toe, murderous - and I use that term advisedly.

That last is because our guy dies simply because his weapon isn't good enough. Hit many times by the Marine, the Arabs' assault rifles nevertheless blast him into oblivion -another of White house Press Secretary Tony Snow's "just a number" - and despite his armored vest.

Apparently later in the same firefight, a Marine armed with the an M-249 SAW ("Squad Automatic Weapon" - also that execrable .223 caliber - stands over a wounded comrade (or comrades - I can't tell) exchanging fire with an Arab soldier behind a coping wall on a roof. The Arab has an AK-47 - full,7.62 X 63 mm military-powered caliber, that is. The Marine rakes the parapet with fire, but the forty grain projectiles from his piece of shit weapon simply splatter against the stucco wall. When his opponent has shifted positions behind his cover, the Marine goes down. On the published video, the History Channel television commentator informs the audience that the Marine was killed. Of course, he will get a medal, the silver star.

And he gets to be another of Tony Snow's numbers.

But this isn't about White House Snow Jobs. It's not even about the damned weapons chambered for varmint-sized ammunition. The history of the AR-15/M-16 and its .223 caliber bullet are of interest here principally in the fact that their caliber and resulting performance so resembles that of the U.S. Congress - the people who have equipped our soldiers with that miserable excuse for a combat weapon. Twenty-two caliber, given inevitably to jamming, requiring constant attention better devoted to their purpose than to their miserable performance, and masquerading as a tool of democracy both rifle and Congress are simply a device by which lobbyists have made their corporate masters rich.

The rifle Colonel David Hackworth (arguable the best combat leader this country has had since World War Two) once called "the worst piece of shit ever foisted upon our soldiers," the M-16 rifle was first "foisted" onto combat troops during the Vietnam War, troops who - cleaning rods in muddy hands - were killed while trying to make their jammed weapons fire. Since the Vietnam War, the M-16 rifle and the miserable .223 cartridge have been responsible for the deaths of thousands of our soldiers. That's a matter of historic record.

But what I want to rub the public's noses in is the fact that the same can be said of another misfiring miscreant, the Congress of the United States. That's also a matter of historical record.

There's more. You see, if it all weren't frustratingly infuriating enough, we have still another instance of the effeminate rhetorical equivocation that is everywhere these days. Inevitably, it, too, serves solely as mascara with which to mask the ugly face of the truth behind it. "Resolution!" Need I remind us all that Webster's in part defines resolution as "not turned from a purpose by difficulties or opposition or risk . . ." Can anybody with any kind of consciousness imagine calling Congress "resolute?"

What we in fact have here is cowardice skulking behind language, a word, and the fact that in its craven sheltering behind the smoke screen of language Congress so resembles its constituency reveals the real heart of the problem, the root cause for the nation's accelerating decay and decline.

Jesus! How pussy-whipped, how emasculated, can a nation become?!

God damn it, "America," stand up and tell yourselves and the world the truth - that this decadent, interested-in-nothing-but-self nation, just like its corrupt Congress, hasn't anything remotely resembling the courage or integrity required to assume responsibility for declaring or managing war. "Resolution," indeed!

And as for the Congress, you might even consider that to tell the truth - just for once - is probably the most politically correct thing you can do, too. After all, the public obviously doesn't have the courage to take any personal responsibility for the mess in Iraq, either. It's somebody else's kid, somebody else's husband, father, brother or sister who's being maimed or killed. They just don't care.

Otherwise, they'd have thrown your sorry asses out a long time ago.

The State of the Union Address; or, "There ain't no Jack S. like OUR Jack S."

The State of the Union Speech was several things, among them surreal – more, that is, virtual reality. The rich and powerful – all but invariably, the former is the reason for the latter – cavorted and reveled in their legislated superiority, paying their nauseatingly de rigueur lip-service to their responsibility as “public servants.”

Mostly, our top patrician’s speech served to only underline what is already obvious:

1. The nation’s chief executive is incompetent, a religious megalomaniac just about totally out of touch with reality.

2. The Nation is in sharp decline, as megalomaniacally out of touch with the real world as is its leader.

3. Our megalomania is largely a female mental disorder, characterized by endlessly dithering talk, productive only of emotion and more talk. More than anything else, we suffer politically as nation and society from PMS. Think about it.

4. Concomitant with that (3 above), the society and nation’s priorities are in disarray, something in the individual mentally typical of hormonal imbalance, largely chaotic and incomprehensible by normal intellect (and hormones).

And then there is that "virtual reality" state I keep talking about, a specific example being New Orleans and the rest of everyone brutalized first by Hurricane’s Katrina and Rita, then by federal government indifference. With that I have real rapport. Empathy, even. I know how the hurricane victims must feel.

When the force five hurricane that is IRS struck my family(s) and me, I kept expecting, as must have the storms’ victims, that the vaunted U.S. “system” would swiftly go into operation – government here did that sort of thing. Here, the individual is important; he has a right to expect that his fellows will come to his assistance in time of disaster and great tribulation. Damned right. Just like they always say they will.

Well, New Orleans and all the rest, how do you feel today – in the hours after the great man’s State of the Union Address? Do you perhaps see how I felt, after a while? As I said the other day here, I still feel that way – like what is couldn’t possibly be.

After all, we’ve been taught from birth that it can’t be. The very expression, “United States of America” means that it can’t be. During every election, our “honorable” “leaders” recite to us some variation on the State of the Union Address: our government is striving mightily to provide for all our needs; everything is wonderful. It can’t be otherwise. It can’t be.

Well? Are you going to believe the patricians in Washington on the Potomac or are you going to believe your eyes and ears, your lives?

You don’t matter, New Orleans. The people of a place far away, another country, Iraq, matter. What could you do with the three hundred billions of dollars your government is spending there, for the people of Iraq? Or the trillion that your federal government intends to spend there, for people of Iraq? Imagine that Mr. Bush had sent one hundred, thirty thousand troops to help you, or that Halliburton were in your city the way they are in Iraq.

Just imagine that your citizens, all of those put out of work by the storms, were employed by Halliburton and the rest. What could your out-of-work people do with the two billion dollars in wages Halliburton workers in Iraq have gotten thus far?

What I would like to hear is the Halliburton State of the Corporation Address. That would really tell us something about the state of the union. But we won’t hear that, will we . . .?

I mentioned “surreal,” virtual reality. This year, something was added to the usual, repetitious, and unreal drivel. The State of the Union Address, Santa Claus, the Christmas Carol (Dickens, I mean), the Easter Bunny stories and all that are national rituals, with about the same bearing on reality. This year, however, we had something new - the Mighty Wurlitzer and Operations Mockingbird apparatus of our military industrial complex masters operating at peak capacity. “Deception is a state of mind, and deception is the mind of the state.”

Of course, I predicted it here yesterday. Kind of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Like predicting that winter in Iowa will bring snow and cold. Talk about “limited hangout!” (Well, George never admits a mistake in so many words, but everything about last night said “I made a mistake” - didn’t it?). In case you had any scintilla of doubt about the Mockingbird tactic being in use here, there was the only virtually real “Democratic Party” rebuttal to the president's self-expiating oratory.

Folks, we can’t lose. If the surpassing brilliance – all those rhetorical imaginary maneuvers on the rhetorical bunker map – of our Führer doesn’t succeed, the cavalry – our heroic and honorable U.S. Congress – will come dashing to the rescue. Sure.

Just like they did for you, New Orleans.

Just like they – and the nation’s courts – did when I was in your shoes (years before, by the way) in the way you are today.

No, we saw the state of the union, all right. Clear and cold as a one of the winter morning in the Rockies during the time I spent there while running before the hounds of government. The view was as panoramic and far-sighted, too. The people there in the House of Representatives last night were representative, all right, a microcosm of all the nation is and is becoming.

My fellow second-class citizens - second to the citizens of Iraq, that is - you’d better think about that.

The "House of Mirrors" - 2007

A while ago, tired of the neighbor who is caught from time to time peeking in our windows, I installed one-way glass. This morning, I received suit papers informing me of a hearing on his motion for an injunction seeking to prevent me from spoiling his fun. The city council now also advises that it will consider an ordinance outlawing defenses like mine. After all, I might be doing something in my house they want to know about.

You don’t believe me? Why? You think this country isn’t that crazy?

Then how is it that when a couple of days ago, the Chinese announced that they had obliterated a satellite in orbit with a ballistic missile, the right-wing media went into a snitt concerning the “unconscionable escalation” and concomitant increase in “world tension” this represents. Our entire spying and eavesdropping assault on our planetary neighbors may one day be interdicted, by god; and, as the world’s policeman and defender of truth, justice, and the “American” Way, we have a right to know what’s going on in the other nations of the world, and that sure as hell justifies peeking through their keyholes (the name, incidentally, of the satellites they might now shoot down).

Ah, you say, but that’s different – its foreign affairs. Then how come it is that in July, the absolutely corrupt – absolute power, remember? - went to local U.S. District Court, where they obtained the courts’ (malfeasant and malevolent) blessing upon the electronic equivalent to window-peeking and keyhole watching - surveillance of telephone, computer e-mail, and internet communication. After all, the government said, we’re the people’s protector, and we have the right to know everything there is to know about everything they do. Anybody who doesn’t agree is obviously a criminal – and a traitor.

So the question is, if the satellite and computer things are believable, why don’t you believe that bit about my neighbor guy?

And while you’re dreaming up a cute response to that last, you might want to explain another example of the same kind of what psychologists call “compartmentalized thinking” (and reasoning): yesterday – or was it the day before, the government trumpeted to the world that hearsay has been made admissible in trials having to do with “terrorists.” Think about it. Hearsay!

Gossip is now evidence.

Tell me – why not make the criminal charge itself evidence of guilt? Why bother with evidence at all? Why not just make the arrest equivalent to trial and proceed to execution of sentence. Hell, why not have the sentence first, then the trial – you know, like the Queen of Hearts. Yeah, I know – I’m a traitor. Well, while you’re fulminating, explain to me this: If government by the absolutely corrupt can walk roughshod on the Constitution where the rights of one guy are concerned, what stops them from doing the same where yours are concerned? ‘Splain dat to me, Luci.

Yeah, I know – you trust them. George listens to god. Why, then, even waste time and tax money on the farce of a show trial? Isn't this all god's doing? Who are we to question god?!

Well, there you have it – what I mean to talk about today. The show trial is theater necessary for a purpose. What’s the purpose? Let’s see if I can give you some insight.

Shortly after our country’s military industrial complex seized power in the U.S. by coup d’etat, the plotters moved to – “orchestrate,” one of its leading lights liked to call it – legalize their absolute power. It’s a “nation of laws,” remember? Once the necessary legislator palms had been greased, and the necessary threats made, the new U.S. Sicherheitdienst – the German word means “security service” and it included the infamous Gestapo – not only could do anything it wanted to do so long as it said it was “in the national interest of the United States,” it could spend as much as it wanted without accounting for any of it.

If you can find a better definition of “absolute power,” I’d be curious to know what it is.

But I digress. In fact, let me digress even more – it’s probably important in order to understand. And for proof. Recently a movie, “The Good Shepherd,” resurrected in me a lot of memories (to say nothing of fears). I was, you see, “recruited” – I called it “shanghaied,” but euphemism like that one seems always singularly crucial to people like those in question here – by the CIA, specifically a man named Frank G. Wisner. Wisner was then titled the Director of what had become known as the Office of Policy Coordination. Policy. The name itself – euphemistically innocuous-sounding as it is - suggests what “the company” really was; even more, what it would become.

But even that doesn’t go deep enough into the verbal deception to which I refer, the deception that would swiftly become the hallmark of the CIA. “Deception,” said CIA Counter-Intelligence Director James J. Angleton, is a state of mind; it is also the mind of the state.” The supposed Office of Policy Coordination, you see, supposedly would have to do with counter-intelligence and espionage. What it did in fact was referred to – nothing like that was ever given anything like an actual name or title – as “executive action.”

How’s that for euphemism? “Executive Action” was, in fact, plain, old, murder - that’s with the corpus delicti-required “malice aforethought,” in case you wonder. I was told years later – decades, matter of fact – that in higher circles of the “Georgetown Set” that particular “Company” project was referred to as “Operation Ten,” or just “the ten specialists.” Even more years later, reading a book concerning the ill-fated invasion known as the Bay of Pigs, I recognized that the now apparently more numerous group was called “Operation 40.”

Which is the trouble with something like what I propose to do here. It was all a very long time ago, and I can’t remember things that didn’t seem significant then, but do now. In the U.S. Post-Truman era and things like MKULTRA and CIA Operations like Mockingbird, the public’s ability to examine data and facts and draw conclusion has been degraded to the point of almost animal-like gullibility and naiveté. One error or falsehood – supposed (on account of government argument, for instance) or otherwise – makes everything anyone says false, and a lie. The people who call themselves “Americans” despite there being thirty-four other nations in the hemisphere do not distinguish between falsehood by virtue of error and that by virtue of lie.

More, “Americans” and their spastic jurisprudence hold that the individual must remember everything about an incident or event – in total and absolute refutation and denial of scientific studies proving that untrue and impossible – or be labeled a liar. Watch an actual trial today or even its enactment for theater or television drama, should you doubt my word.

Nevertheless, I trust that historians of the future will do better, and for that reason I want to leave a record. An ardent historian, you see, I’ve come to realize how inaccurate the self-serving nature of man has made his story. Once only suspicious – that the result of a penchant for examining records, testimony, and journalism with mathematics and physics – I became certain once having taken part in events, then watched as their history was written. I’m reminded, as I was in writing “Letters,” of a quote from Immanuel Kant: “Out of the crooked timber of humanity,” the scientist and philosopher said, “no straight thing was ever made.” The fact is that any intensive study of history soon concludes that it is written by liars, the reason it is generally a lie. To quote an historian, H.G. Wells, “The social contract is nothing more than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie and humbug one another for the common good. Lies are the mortar that binds the savage individual into the masonry of society.”

In 1967, as if to remove any doubt about that, a “CIA writer” named Thomas Braden published an article in the Saturday Evening Post entitled, “I'm Glad the CIA is Immoral.” In the article, Braden wrote, “In the early 1950s, when the cold war was really hot, the idea that Congress would have approved many of our projects was about as likely as the John Birch Society's approving Medicare."

So, in other words, Congress should keep its nose out of the real government's affairs. Does that remind you of anything going on today? Maybe you ought to go back and read that part about trusting the absolutely corrupt to use their gossip only against terrorists. Think about it.

Oh, and while you're thinking about that, remember what Mr. Braden wrote about CIA morality, and about their attitude toward your elected representatives in our Constitutional democracy. On the CIA building at Langley, Virginia is the motto, “Seek ye the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Think about that, too.

The group of “specialists” – a little later, “assets” – who would one day comprise “Operation 40” were recruited for the stated purpose of assassination; specifically, that of the heads of foreign states. When in 1948, Frank G. Wisner was first appointed director of the Office of Special Projects, he was supposedly – that’s historically, meaning on the record - told to create an organization that concentrated on "propaganda, economic warfare; preventive direct action, including sabotage, anti-sabotage, demolition and evacuation measures; subversion against hostile states, including assistance to underground resistance groups, and support of indigenous anti-Communist elements in threatened countries of the free world."

You’ll note that that is a quote, from the record.

With all those duties, Wisner was, indeed, a very busy man, but he had two principle interests. One was everything having to do with propaganda and control of the public’s mind and opinion, things like Radio Free Europe (he referred to it as “The Mighty Wurlitzer”) and Operation Mockingbird. The other was what would soon morph from the World War Two Office of Special Services to the Tenth Special Forces. In the manner of the CIA House of Mirrors and everything it had to do with, the Special Forces served as a smoke screen for Operation Ten, men – and from what I concluded then, at least one woman – who had skills necessary to be effective assassins. The government was now in the business of murder.

And, notice, a “terrorist” then was called a “communist” (or just “commie”). To be the target for the chief executive's “executive action,” he just had to have the correct label. The language is very important, you know. It’s important because it’s the ring in the nose with which the behaviorally-conditioned “American” public - you – is led around. In the land of the free press, it’s reality.

The movie The Good Shepherd, incidentally, is singular to those with first hand knowledge in that its metaphorical mixing of events and CIA operations and inclusion of not only characters who are composites of real life principals, but the events in which they were participants, is so like both the principal character and the CIA itself. The movie, like its subject, James J. Angleton, the late Director of Counter-Intelligence I mentioned a minute ago, is a house of mirrors – and Operation Mockingbird, the operation to take over effective control of the news media in the U.S., was probably the first of the major deceits worked during its formative years.

Soon – almost immediately after he instigated Operation Mockingbird – Frank Wisner recruited a member of the fourth estate, a very prominent journalist, to run the project from inside the industry itself. In a few years, Wisner and the CIA had gained control by one means or the other of some of the most famous names in the radio, print, and television media, all journalists not only willing to promote the views of the “Briar Patch” (the private code name given it by my now deceased wife), but to write articles commissioned by the Wisner. At length, the CIA would actually employ writers, even establish a department of them, providing then with classified information to help them with their deceptive works. Never disclosed amounts of money – from its inception and by law(!), don’t forget, “the Briar Patch” had to account for nothing it spent - were used to bribe journalists and publishers.

The “nation of laws” was now in the business of bribery, too – and the objective was nothing less than to create a false, only virtual reality, in order to assure a public that would support U.S. participation in the Cold War arms race being planned and instigated.

If that weren’t enough, Frank G. Wisner and company were constantly looking for new devices by which to “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” the electorate – i.e., to convince them of the terrible dangers of communism. There seemed to be no limit or expense to which the agency would not go. In fact, it was none other than Wisner and the CIA who in 1954 arranged for the funding the Hollywood production of Animal Farm, the allegorical novel written by George Orwell.

In short, so well was Operation Mockingbird and others like it prosecuted that the people of the United States, land of the free and a free press, languish under a lie made all the more insidious by its nature, one wherein the government lies to us while using our own money to conceal the fact of the lie itself. Behaviorally conditioned by massive mind and opinion control technology pioneered by none other that Nazi Germany’s Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, the vast majority of people in the U.S. today are unaware that they live in a reality that is only virtual, a view of the world and their position in it prepared, constructed, and fed to them by virtual senses compromised of the news media.

Proof of the fact is all around, yet in Orwellian fashion, the U.S. public - all but invariably taught from birth that our press is free from such government control – remain unaware that our condition where awareness of the world and nation's condition and affairs is concerned is in fact even worse than that of places like Nazi Germany and the old Soviet Union, nations where control of the press was overt and known to the public.

Ironically, Operation Mockingbird - the project designed to gain behavioral control of the taxpayer electorate - may well have been the most effective government program ever paid for with tax money.

Apparently, however, realization concerning the far-reaching possibilities of the Mockingbird propaganda technique came slowly even to the CIA and their military industrial complex masters. While from its inception in 1948, the CIA proceeded to spend literally hundreds of billions of dollars for the sole purpose of deceiving, confusing, and keeping bewildered the public it purports to serve, the overall purposes of Mockingbird were those necessary to conduct of their newly “orchestrated” war – the so-called Cold War. The kind of behavior-warping “intelligence” that could motivate and lead the nation to send the sons and daughters of its poor and powerless into undeclared war after war was yet to come. Congress and the courts hadn't been adequately brain-washed yet, in other words.

Not that no one in government realized what was going on. Sometime in the early fifties, FBI Chief J. Edgar Hoover became wary – jealous, maybe - of the CIA's growing power. Describing OPC as "Wisner's gang of weirdoes,” he quietly began carrying out investigations into their past, and didn’t take long to learn that some of those who had gotten his interests had been active in left-wing politics during the 1930s. Having obtained the “goods,” Hoover sought help from his friends in the Congress; the U.S. Senate, to be precise.

Pay attention, now, because there follows an object lesson – proof, even, of both what I’ve said about the “virtual reality” you live in, and the real character of the absolutely powerful. What does the term “McCarthyism” mean to you? Hold that thought while I tell you that the information obtained by Hoover and his FBI was passed to Senator Joseph McCarthy. Now you know where I’m going, huh?

When McCarthy, armed – he thought – with Hoover’s irresistible ammunition, started attacking members of the Office of Policy Co-ordination, the ammunition supplied by Hoover included details of an affair Wisner once had with Princess Caradja in Romania during the war. Caradja, Hoover claimed, was a Soviet agent known to the CIA as such. If that weren’t enough, McCarthy also began accusing other senior members of the CIA of being security risks. One of his first targets happened to be one Cord Meyer, not only hired by none other than CIA Director Allen Dulles himself, but working for Operation Mockingbird. When the Hoover and his FBI refused a security clearance for Meyer, Dulles came to his defense by refusing to permit an FBI interrogation of his man (does that sound familiar today?).

What’s crucial here is that Senator McCarthy didn’t realize what he was up against. When Wisner unleashed Operation Mockingbird on McCarthy, famous newsmen like Drew Pearson, Edward R. Murrow, and their like all lined up to go on the attack and McCarthy was permanently smeared by the press coverage “orchestrated” by the Mockingbird project people.

There has perhaps never been a more public and thunderously obvious example of how the U.S. public and history are controlled by the media and its military industrial complex federal masters than the saga of Senator Joseph McCarthy and what has become part of the language as “McCarthyism.” Remember the “Tail Gunner Joe” story, for instance? Look it up – read the award citation by none other than Admiral Chester Nimitz. “Tail Gunner Joe” was not only a real tail gunner, but one who flew at least twelve combat missions – missions he didn’t as an intelligence officer have to fly, and at least some while suffering from a broken leg.

No exactly the Joe McCarthy you think you know, huh?

Operations Mockingbird was also very active otherwise, things like during the overthrow of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala, people like Henry Luce were not only able to censor stories that appeared too sympathetic towards the plight of Arbenz, but – while ostensibly devoid of any authority within the United States - CIA Director Allen W. Dulles was nevertheless somehow able to keep “left-wing journalists” from traveling to Guatemala. "Somehow" - illegally, in other words.

J. Edgar Hoover wasn’t the only one who could smell a rat. In 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower – the president whose valedictory address to the nation included both coinage of the expression “military industrial complex” and warning about the menace it represented - established a committee charged with keeping a check on the CIA and its covert activities. The 5412 Committee (also called the “Special Group” – still another "special," huh?) included the CIA director (! – does anybody wonder how that worked?), the national security adviser, and the deputy secretaries at State and Defense and had the responsibility to decide whether covert actions were "proper" and “in the national interest.” It was also decided to include in the Special Group’s number a man who just happened to be chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee. Just happened to be.

However, as Allen W. Dulles was later to admit, because of "plausible deniability" planned covert actions were not referred to the 5412 Committee (I guess that’s how inclusion of the fox in the committee to watch the chicken coup worked; does that sound familiar?).

In peculiar fashion (considering the number of redundant levels of everything already evident in government of those days, maybe it wasn’t so peculiar; and maybe the old General of the Armies also had a trick or two up his sleeve), President Eisenhower in 1956 also appointed one David Bruce as a member of the President's Board of Consultants on Foreign Intelligence Activities. POTUS Eisenhower asked Bruce to write a report on the CIA, a report that was delivered with speed uncharacteristic of such things even in those days. In it, Bruce argued that the CIA's covert actions were "responsible in great measure for stirring up the turmoil and raising the doubts about us that exists in many countries in the world today."

Ahem! – does that ring a bell? Today? Have you perhaps got an answer now for FoxNews and Bill O’Reilly’s rhetorical, “why do they hate us” question? Need I remind you that the Bruce Report was in 1955?

In his historically tremendous report, Bruce was also highly critical of Mockingbird. He argued: "what right have we to go barging around in other countries buying newspapers and handling money to opposition parties or supporting a candidate for this, that, or the other office?"

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Can anyone doubt that pundits of today – folks like those I’ve just mentioned - would have labeled Bruce a traitor? Or maybe you think Operation Mockingbird has just gone away – in loving concern for the freedom of the press. Sure it has.

Anyway, after a Frank G. Wisner successor, one Richard Bissell, lost his post as Director of Plans in the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs disaster, a man named Tracy Barnes took over the running of Mockingbird. Barnes immediately began planting editorials about political candidates who were regarded as pro-CIA. In 1963 and thereafter, CIA hocus-pocus “orchestrated” a phony duel of monumental proportions between the agency and the news media. In it, journalists, publishers, and the news media ostensibly fought a successful war against CIA censorship. You bet they did.

One such book, entitled “Invisible Government” by David Wise and Thomas Ross and published by Random House, “discovered” CIA links with the Military Industrial Congress Complex. The authors also claimed that the CIA was having a major influence on American foreign policy, including the overthrow of Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran (1953) and Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala (1954). The book also un-covered the role that the CIA played in the Bay of Pigs operation, the attempts to remove President Sukarno in Indonesia and the covert operations taking place in Laos and Vietnam.

Reading the book at the time, I sat for an hour one night, staring at the wall. Holy crap, I thought, this "exposes" stuff that has to be among the worst-kept secrets in human history – what the hell is going on? I was shaking my head in wonder a couple days later when I learned in answer to my question of Operation Mockingbird’s “CIA writers” Programs - the house of mirrors, wherein the nation’s press apparently remained stalwart, an indefatigable defender of liberty. And they were winning, by god – the system worked. Jesus!

Think about it all. How likely do you think it is that an agency of government like the CIA – remind yourself of their all but absolute power, yoked with another like the Internal Revenue Service – in the words of Thomas Jefferson, “the power to destroy” – was and is unable to control the news media? Are you kidding?

Yeah. Even when further details of Operation Mockingbird were supposedly revealed during hearings by Senator Frank Church’s “Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities,” the house of mirrors was in fact growing more effective. Nothing, perhaps, “deceives, confuses, and bewilders” the dumbed-down public like what CIA “tradecraft” has long called “limited hangout.” Spy jargon for a favored and frequently utilized gimmick, “limited hangout” is employed when a phony cover or story is in danger of being exposed, and the clandestine operative volunteers enough truth to misinform while providing a smoke and mirrors cover for the facts most key and potentially destructive to his operation.

Parenthetically, maybe you need to go back and review the chronology here. History, you know, make a lot more sense, sometimes, once you’ve done that.

To resume our story, the sucker public, of course, is so intrigued by the “exposé" – usually as smutty and tabloid-like (“shocking”) as it can be made – that it never thinks to pursue news of the matter further. In a few days, another “shocking” story emerges, and the old one is forgotten. These days, for instance, one rape, disappearance, or kidnapping of a woman, no matter how obscure, easily replaces – and hides from public view - even a war and staggering casualty figures, something we witness almost daily now.

Remember “limited hangout?” Keep it in mind.

According to the Congress report of the Church Committee investigation published in 1976, the CIA was spending (that was then; think about what they're spending now - it's your money) two hundred, sixty-five million dollars for the purpose of the "deceive, confuse, and bewilder" tactic - controlling what the public - you - thinks.

There was more - much more. Operation Mockingbird, among other things like Operation MKULTRA, was totally exposed. "Toast." The Church Committee had really gotten the goods on the CIA. You’re supposed to be – and you were – immensely impressed. “The system had worked again,” by god. What a great country! You betcha.

You didn’t know about “limited hangout.” The only trouble with it all was - is – summed up by a question. The question was - is - “So what happened?” The CIA fell from power – right? "Toast," like I said. Totally cowed by the might of the U.S. Congress, those Knights Templar of integrity and truthfulness, the House of Mirrors folks made everything right. The government went back to being the great protector of human rights everywhere, the home front included. The truth had been sought, and the truth now made us free.”

Sure - and that was 1973.

So, look around. What’s been happening? Today, January, 2007, I still love to read this damned thing (the Church Report, I mean). For instance, Senator Church’s committee comes up with this conclusion to his examination of it all: “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the U.S. media, the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the U.S. journalists and media organizations.”

Well, now – gee whiz. 1973 - remember?

Hmmmm. In 1977 - why the old news? - Carl Bernstein (Watergate, remember?) provided further information about Operation Mockingbird in an article in Rolling Stone Magazine. In it, Bernstein asseverated that over a 25 year period, “more than 400 American journalists secretly carried out assignments for the CIA.”

Now, 2007, we have – just for the most mere of instance – FoxNews, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Followed by a lineup of broadcast “news media” propagandists – oops; analysts - that would have made Operation Mockingbird and the Mighty Wurlitzer creator Frank Wisner turn bright green with envy.

And - mirabile dictu (Latin - "wondrous to say") we’re in Iraq. Do you perhaps remember that upwards of sixty percent of the public said they were in favor of something so stupid both historically and otherwise that only my certain awareness of behavioral mind-bending programs by the military industrial complex, stuff like Operation Mockingbird, permitted me to believe it? And who was it that hornswoggled the nation into this Brobdingnagian sink hole for the taxpayers’ money and lives?

Well, who was it that for some, impossible-to-explain-by-any-known-rule-of-such-matters reason, got the Medal of Freedom a little while later? Can you imagine why? What was it that he did so well as to deserve a medal, the highest of its class there is?

You must have you forgotten the “limited hangout” maneuver already . . .?

My country, you’re so "easy" that it’s incredible, something “The Good Shepherd” now turns into something of an epiphany for me.

You don’t remember, for instance – there’s so much that I could fill volumes with it all – Yuri Nosenko. He’s in the movie, the guy who tells the Matt Damon’s character that the Soviet Union is really an empty shell, a straw man for our hero protectors to beat up on over the media’s Mighty Wurlitzer mind control machine. Kept in “solitary confinement,” the real Nosenko underwent 1,277 days of torture – “intense physical and psychological pressure.”

Torture. And that was 1964(?).

So, you think it’s only lately – with that eminently reasonable excuse, “terrorism” having replaced “communist” that we’ve started to torture prisoners. When “waterboarding” has joined “McCarthyism” in the “American” lexicon of “Mockingbird”-style truth, don’t you wonder what will come next? No, I don’t suppose. Nancy Grace will have diverted your attention with another of her lurid, “rape of the week” stories. The Super Bowl will be on, too. Important stuff.

The Soviet agent Nosenko, by the way, was perhaps never given LSD. No, the actual LSD scene came from a completely different episode in CIA history, one unrelated to the Matt Damon Jim Angleton. In the 1950s and early 1960s, on the other hands, the CIA gave mind-altering drugs to hundreds – the number their “limited hangout” of the time admitted - of unsuspecting Americans in an effort to determine if a person's mind could be controlled. One guy, a civilian researcher who worked for the Army, “jumped or fell” from the tenth floor of a hotel after he was secretly slipped LSD by the protectors of our freedom. That was 1953, but the CIA’s “limited hangout” didn’t admit that until 1975. The guy’s wife and kids were paid off in the process otherwise known as “settlement.”

By 1975, of course, the CIA had long since gone on to bigger and better things – “the state of the art.” And here we are, in what is probably the most incomprehensible state we’ve ever been in – “deceived, confused, and bewildered.” In the future, I’ll continue in the vein of what I’ve written here; meanwhile, tonight we’ll hear some more from Operation Mockingbird. Who knows, maybe there’ll be more of that “limited hangout” stuff.

They’ll call it the “state of the union” address.

"Nation of Laws" (Tell a Lie Often Enough)

Writing last time about the means by which the military industrial coup d’etat used confusion, deceit, and bewilderment to cow and subjugate the nation, I spoke of what I long ago came to call “the IRS tactic,” that of writing law so voluminous and convolute as to be incapable of interpretation or understanding. When one has been given – or has arrogated to himself - authority to interpret such a law (or laws), he has become de facto a dictator. The existence of the law is a sham, mere pretense of legality, and a mockery of democracy.

Of course, however, it is also a precept of law as old as Roman times that the government may not be a criminal. As Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis once wrote (in Olmstead v. U.S. - 277 U.S. 438), "Government is the potent, omnipresent teacher. For good or ill it teaches the whole people by its example. Crime is contagious. If the government becomes a lawbreaker, it breeds contempt for law; it invites every man to become a law unto himself; it invites anarchy. To declare that the end justifies the means -- to declare that the government may commit crimes -- would bring terrible retribution."

But who will make the government obey the law? "Quis custodet ipsos custodes," the Latin motto says – who will take custody of the custodians? Who, should the "custodians" have decided to demand their droit du seigneur, to violate brides on their wedding night, can prevent them? And who, should the "custodians" have elected to sell the prerogative provided under their ius primae noctis they have enacted, will prevent them? Which of our supposed constitutional rights is safe from sale to the highest bidder – or any bidder, for that matter?

None of the “American” freedom myths I wrote about in “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” has ever annoyed me the way the “equal under the law” myth has – and does. Nowhere is the falseness of our freedom myths more thunderously obvious than where legal process is the subject. Anyone poor who has ever sought to prosecute any kind of lawsuit, or been accused of any kind of crime – even when he has incontrovertible proof of innocence – knows better.

In the first place, the law having to do with both procedure and process and statute language itself has deliberately been made so esoteric, so convolute in structure and meaning, as to be understood only by persons with college degrees - Juris Doctor degrees. Read a legal opinion – it’s the law, you know (it isn’t, but you’re made to believe it is) – sometime. Try to read the rules of civil procedure, without which you can’t so much as get your case into a court.

Then, call an attorney; ask him what he charges an hour. Try to imagine someone poor – an unemployed white male or anyone unprotected by ideological and political correctness, for instance; how about someone living on social security – having to hire an experienced and skilled lawyer. Or, for that matter, any lawyer. If your case is against the Internal Revenue, the first thing that happens in the Nation of Laws, Land of the Free, is that the government seizes ALL your money, and attaches all your property. Imagine hiring a lawyer who knows you have, or will have, no money or property.

While you’re doing all that imagining, try to imagine an attorney who will actually represent your interests against the government - who, after all, decides (license?) whether he is allowed to practice his profession. Try to imagine a lawyer who will give you a real defense against IRS (no law vague or incomprehensible in its meaning is constitutional – so how come no lawyer has ever dared defend his client on that basis?).

Tell me, if equality under the law is the law of the land, how is it that Bill Gates and an old lady who has only enough money that she has to subsist on cat food pay the same fine for, say, speeding? A hundred bucks for the Microsoft billionaire is the same deterrent as for one of our senior citizens living on social security? Sure!

That’s justice? Sure. You can imagine that, accused of murder, Mr. Gates and the senior citizen on social security will have the same caliber of lawyer and defense? You don’t remember the O.J. Simpson case, obviously. Or is it that you can imagine that the old lady on cat food could pay fees necessary to have Johnny Cochran, F. Lee Bailey, Robert Shapiro, and Barry Scheck on her defense team . . .? And never mind money to pay for all the expert witnesses.

Sure - hell, yes! You obviously haven’t noticed how the rich always get off, while the poor don’t. You imagine that the percentage of rich and poor inside our prisons is the same as outside.

But then, there’s the myth. “Tell a lie often enough, it becomes the truth.” Maybe you really haven’t noticed. So, who “tells the lie often enough?” Why, none other than the “free press.” When I said nothing ever annoyed me like the myth of equality under the law, I should have made an exception for the myth of free press. How obvious can you get? The media in the United States amounts in fact to no more nor less than relentless indoctrination – perpetuation of those freedom myths.

And that was by design. After what was called Operation Mockingbird, a CIA program immediately after the same became the nation’s Gestapo (not my choice of terms, but that of none other than J. Edgar Hoover), that’s what our fourth estate was re-structured and directed to do, after all. By design!

More about “Mockingbird” in a minute. We were talking about equality under the law: try to imagine the IRS treating FoxNews the way the former treats John Q. Citizen. Try to imagine the tax collector treating CBS News the way they treated me. Sure you can. On the other hand, try to imagine a newscaster or pundit who dares (or dared - ever) to publish the truth about IRS outrages. Go to a law library, look up all the cases like these, then ask yourself why you never heard a word about them (note the quotation marks – this is from the record):

"'March 4, 1976: Ten minutes after Clyde H. Allisan and Ralph W. Foster, two IRS agents, left the residence of Robert Smiley in Salem, the latter was found dead from a bullet wound in the head. Two thousand dollars, which Smiley had in his pockets, was gone. Local police reported the death as a suicide. No autopsy was performed. The IRS agents were neither interviewed nor interrogated. No hearing was held.
“'A weeks later five IRS agents seized all the vehicles comprising Smiley's business inventory and sold them. The Treasury Department refused to answer any questions on the matter. They also refused to let IRS agents Allisan and Foster be interviewed. Meanwhile, IRS agents continued to harass Smiley's broken-hearted, destitute, ill widow to the point that she attempted suicide on October 23, 1976.”
'In June, 1988 Kay Council of High Point, NC came home one night to find a note from her husband, Alex: ‘My dearest Kay - I have taken my life in order to provide capital for you. The IRS and its liens against our property have dried up all sources of credit for us. So I have made the only decision I can. It's purely a business decision. You will find my body on the lot on the north side of the house.’
“'At the end of a nine-year battle, the IRS ruled that the Councils owed three hundred thousand dollars in taxes, interest, and penalties. When their financial resources were exhausted, Mr. Council committed suicide to provide Mrs. Council with two hundred, fifty thousand dollars in insurance money to continue the battle.'
“'Jasper and Lucille Gates of Denver, CO received a letter from the IRS stating that they had overpaid their 1972 tax by $1,197. However, they never received a refund. Instead, in June 1974 they were notified, without explanation, that they owed $4,451. Soon another letter came, claiming the deficiency was $4,206. In October the IRS claimed they owed $13,700, in November it was $15,000. By October 1975 the alleged deficiency had grown to $16,000 - all without explanation. Then, in August 1978, still without explanation or warning, the IRS seized their bank accounts worth about $13,000 and their home worth about $100,000. They sold the home for $16,000. Mrs. Gates, in a wheel-chair, was evicted, the Gates' furniture and personal effects were thrown into the street. When the news media contacted the IRS, the U.S. Gestapo cited the Privacy Act, and refused comment.'
"'The IRS claimed Donald McGrath owed $39.65, refusing to say why (remember my original argument with them?). Instead they persuaded McGrath's bank to transfer $39.65 from his account to the IRS. Finally, incited by IRS officials and IRS-inspired police reports, a sheriff’s deputy shot Donald McGrath to death.’
“'IRS goons jumped Stephen and Mona Oliver of Fairbanks, Alaska as they sat in their car, a Volkswagen. When they had smashed out the VW’s driver’s side window and windshield with clubs, they dragged Stephen from the vehicle. Having beaten him into submission, they likewise dragged Mona out through the broken windshield, then across the broken glass, leaving her stunned, bruised, and bleeding.'
'In 1983, five IRS thugs without warrant raid the home of Vietnam veteran Charles Streich, ostensibly to collect $500. When they have arrested Streich and taken his AR-15 rifle, it conveniently turns up in court with M-16 parts. Streich is convicted of assault and possession of an unregistered machine gun.'
"The record does not explain how the illegally obtained weapon could have been used as evidence in the first place.’
“'Colluding with Post Office officials to intercept the mail, IRS agents stole a mortgage check written by one Donald Thurow. They altered the check by stamping "Internal Revenue Service" over the payee line, and cashed it.'
“'In 1984, seven or eight armed IRS agents occupied the Engleworld day-care center in Detroit’s Allen Park. They changed the locks, took about twenty children hostage, and locked them up. Because the day-care center' allegedly owed taxes of $14,000, parents were obliged to pay ransoms before the IRS would release their children. Marilyn Derby, Director of Engleworld said, ‘It was a very scary situation, like the Gestapo was here. Children were crying. Parents were trembling. I told one woman whose hands were shaking that she shouldn't sign anything she didn't want to. She signed anyway.’”
“'In 1986, Pipersville, PA, the IRS claimed that Thomas Treadway owed them $247,000. They started seizing his assets the same day (note the absence of any concern for the law or their own rules of procedure). Without bothering to claim the lady owned taxes, they also they seized the farm and bank accounts of Shirley Lojeski, a friend. They seized $22,000 from her bank account, too.
“'Two months later, a federal appeals officer found the entire $247,000 assessment against Treadway unreasonable. When the lady sued successfully in federal court to have the lien against her farm removed, the IRS dragged its feet for four months, causing Lojeski to become far in arrears of her mortgage payments.
“'When Lojeski tried to collect damages in court, a federal court ruled that the IRS manual established only internal procedures, not a due-process standard.'”

Tell me – if the press and media are what you think they are, why weren’t stories like that nationwide news? Why didn’t they get at least the same coverage as the O.J. trial, or that of Kobe Bryant, or Natalee Holloway, or the Duke University Lacrosse Team Rape case? Why didn’t the brutal behavior of IRS merit at least the attention given any of the Nancy Grace Rape of the Week stories, or pap like “American Idol?”

Oh, yeah – by the way: Lojeski and her friend Treadway also lost $75,000 in legal and accounting fees. Remember what I said about being able to afford the law that’s for everyone? The legal fees, should you somehow be fortunate enough to be able to hire a lawyer, are just the price of being a citizen in a corporate capitalist dictatorship. You have the same rights as Bill Gates. Sure you do.

Just ask me – everything the IRS did to Tom Treadway and Shirley Lojeski they did to me long before, and twice.

But the press says we’re free. We can do anything we please. And so are they. Free! They can report on anything they like. Sure. They’re the people’s watchdog on government. But with a war going on in Iraq and Afghanistan, and thousands of our troops – that’s our fellow citizens, people like us. mind you - being killed and wounded, with literally hundreds of thousands of Iraqis having been killed on account of our illegal invasion, the nation’s journalists report on who’s screwing whom in Hollywood, and what a cute - "lovable" - dog did in Germany. It’s national news. Hell, yes!

I mentioned Operation Mockingbird. Did the media tell you about that? No, you bet your sweet ass they didn’t. After all, it’s about why the “fourth estate” in the land of the free press is so docile. You wouldn’t expect the “free press” to hold weeks of “special coverage” on something like that, now, would you? After the CIA and military industrial complex coup d’etat soon after World War Two, your government paid in big bucks of your money for a program intended to neutralize the media. “Mockingbird” was so successful that one CIA operative at the time described the news media like this: "You could get a journalist cheaper than a good call girl, for a couple hundred dollars a month." You can watch FoxNews, for instance, and tell yourself things have changed since then? REALLY?

There’s more. Your free press tells you that you’re free of want – while millions eat pet food or go to bed hungry, forego medical treatment because only a rich man can afford either it or health insurance, and the only way to get their government’s attention (unless they’re an illegal alien) is to riot or blow something up. The press says you’re free of fear and a dozen more things you know damned well are a lie, but you also know you can’t find a forum unless you sell yourself and your soul to one crack-brained “ism” or the other - your "representatives" in Congress only listen to the military industrialist lobbyists who own them.

Free? The “Land of the Free” is free when you can pay for it.

Thermodynamics, Entropy, Complexity, and Rule by Confusion.

That's Chief Master Sergeant John Gebhardt, and the child is a little girl whose family was murdered by insurgents in Iraq. The murderers shot the little girl in the head, but doctors and medical personnel at a U.S. hospital were able to save her. The picture resulted when it was discovered by nurses at the hospital that only Gebhardt could comfort the child. "So," the caption says, "the sergeant has spent the last several nights holding her while they both sleep in a chair."

I hardly know what to say, except that I'm going to keep that picture for a long, long time. I'm going to look at it a lot, too. The lessons it teaches could fill a library - even change a life.

Speaking of things that teach, consider that the sergeant and the little girl there are a microcosm, a small universe representative of a bigger one. I believe - I know - the power of what seems to the unmindful a tiny force in a universe of humongous ones. The voice of one reaches two, and each of their voices reaches two more. The four each reach four more, and so on. Two, four, sixteen, two hundred fifty-six; sixty-five thousand, five hundred thirty-six; four billion, two hundred ninety-four million, nine hundred sixty-seven thousand, two hundred ninety-six, and the next number is 1.8447 X 1019. That's 18,447,000,000,000,000,000, and the next number is too big to type here, being three, followed by thirty-eight places. It started with one person, and his word. Or example.

The fast neutron has split the atom, and the chain reaction has become inevitable. It is, you see, the very chaotic nature of a system, however large, that lends to tiny forces' enormous result within the same system - the flipping of the butterfly's wings in Borneo that results in a hurricane in the Atlantic. It's also interesting that that "result" is always more chaos, chaos worse than what caused it. The natural law is that of thermodynamics (the second). The entropy - disorder - of the universe tends inexorably toward maximum.

Like the photo of the sergeant and the little girl is capable of generating, at least in me, a myriad of thoughts concerning a myriad of related things, the Second Law of Thermodynamics has a myriad of corollaries. They have in them stern warnings for our nation and our time, if only in the fact that our time has demonstrated not only our almost total ignorance of system dynamics, but the fact of our increasing insouciance and irresponsibility where the effect of our actions in the grand scheme of history is concerned. "Après moi, le déluge," French King Louis XV said, "After me, the flood." When I'm gone, in other words, to hell with everybody.

It's the sin of the age, and its anthem, the reason, as Benjamin Franklin warned, our children will piss on our graves. The other day, my computer gutted yet another time by spyware and the avarice that spawns it, I pointed out to Joe, a "FireDog" friend at Circuit City, that layers of complexity being added daily to the internet by factors like boundless greed and the psychotic need for useless complexity were growing faster than the ability of the computer itself to cope. Cybernetically, you know, a computer is incapable of solving a problem one byte bigger than it is, a fact auguring eventual death by Lou Gehrig's disease for the internet.

Parenthetically, when will the public's outrage at having their homes and privacy invaded by these "malware" people result in legislation with fines sufficiently punitive to stop it? The situation is one of still another microcosm, that of the society being eaten alive and from within by the criminal capitalist's "après moi, le déluge" greed. The latest of this "malware" that I have run into, something called "System Doctor 2006," is outright extortion. The crooks invade your computer, swiftly shutting down systems and programs until even mere access to the Internet is impossible. The screen is not only flooded with all manner of "pop-ups," but with advertisements from the culprits - to remove for payment from your computer the spyware they have put there. I've written to the Texas Attorney General's office and to my representatives in the state legislature, and I recommend the same for my readers here. This kind of thing builds the metastistatic complexity that will eventually paralyze the Internet.

Parenthetically further, I also intend to rig a computer here for the purpose of sending "malware" of this kind back to the place it came from. We'll open all the ports hooking the culprits computers to the Net, pump junk into their memories until they're inundated. I also suggest to anyone who has fallen prey to these guys to do the same. Let's bury them.

The cancerous computer complexity - to say nothing of the "malware" situation - has many parallels - corollaries. Television, for instance. Prostrate before the greed of its executives and marketers, viewing of programming intended for any purpose other than advertising and other forms of opinion control has become so problematic as to negate the purpose the viewing public had for watching in the first place. At some point in the near future, the commercials' most pronounced effect will be that of self-paralysis. Couldn't happen to better - more appropriate, I mean - people.

Examples of the "paralysis by complexity" phenomenon are everywhere, symptomatic of a society and nation mad with concupiscence, avarice, and militant factionalism. Seized with spastic convulsions like that having to do with illegal immigration - where the confused societal nerve signals resulted from totally self-interested (note that not one of the factions shows even the slightest interest in the welfare of the nation) political arguments of all the vying parties have resulted in legislative and political paralysis - we invite disaster like a drunk falling downstairs. With the southern border open to millions of prospective welfare recipients and thieves, the nation's corporate criminals move offshore to seek greener pastures - that while the U.S. Congress and its state counterparts dither, its members too greedily busy feathering their own nests to take any kind of effective hand. Can you think of a better metaphor for "paralysis?"

But there is always more to these things than meets the eye. You may remember my having mentioned "the wilderness of mirrors" a while ago. In the CIA - spy - business nothing is what it seems to be. "Deception is a state of mind," the guy portrayed in the movie I mentioned used to say, "and deception is the mind of the state."

Who stands to gain from all this? Let me school you a bit, first. Take for an example the Internal Revenue Service, another of the criminal cohorts spawned by the military-industrial complex and its corporations. Here, the empowering document is the U.S. Tax Code. There, like what is happening with examples like the Internet, legislation having to do with national security, illegal immigration, atmospheric pollution, and the like, the level of complexity was raised to a level making the law impossible to understand or interpret. The effect? Why, it meant effectively the creation of a czar. Inasmuch as no one could say what the law meant, the czar - IRS - only could say what the law was. No argument was possible. The further effect, of course, was - is - that of total arbitrariness. Dictatorship, pure and simple.

So, effectively further - the government all but totally paralyzed by political factionalism and the rest - no one can legally run the nation. But the nation IS running. Who's doing it? Well, we have one system, one government agency, running entirely without legal justification or power - why not another? Somebody is prosecuting a war, spending hundreds of billions of dollars of the public's money, ruining social security and dozens more like it, all without legal justification or power - who might that be?

Before you bother, parenthetically, the so called War Powers Act wasn't. An "act," I mean. "Act" means law. The War Powers supposedly legalizing and justifying the Iraq War was a RESOLUTION. That's an agreement by the U.S. Congress among themselves to do nothing should a president decide to go to war. For all the attempts at rationalization contained in the "resolution," it remains nothing more than a conspiracy against the U.S. Constitution. It's illegal, but the people assigned by the Constitution and the public to defend the law have chosen not to.

See what I mean when I always refer to government here in the Nation of Laws as a criminal conspiracy? It's because they ARE a criminal conspiracy.

But I digress. Who is it that exploits the near paralysis in our legal system in order to become the further equivalent of IRS? Well, what's capitalism all about? Who's getting rich?

It ain't people like Chief Master Sergeant Gebhardt. But you're close. Who's taking advantage of HIM? Who's willing to arm every rabid skunk of a human being - like the kind who brutalized the little girl there in the sergeant's arms - then have the sergeant fight to the death those same skunks wherever they happen appear on the planet, all the while not only remaining safe, secure, and snugly out of harm's way, but making hundreds of billions on account of it all?

One guess (you ought to know them - they've been in power here in the U.S. for sixty years, now).