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).