Lead, Follow, or Get the Hell Out of the Way!

Certain males, my grandfather used to say, “… wouldn’t make a pimple on a real man’s ass!” I've been thinking about that, and the men who today foist themselves upon the nation as "leaders." Arrrrrrrgh!

A few days ago, I heard again what seems to me will one day be the dirge played whenever the former United States of American is remembered.

“Real men cry . . .”

And, of course, it was a woman – or several – who said it. Well, today’s “male” does cry; he blubbers like a baby, matter of fact – and about things so damned adolescent and puerile those of us old enough to be his grandfather find hard to believe. Or stomach. Today’s “real” man does a lot of things men didn’t do before the feminist revolution that was in reality little more than an attack – a neurotic one - on maleness. And, of course, the testosterone and muscle that had built the world that made their new offensive possible, or even feasible.

Today’s man not only cries, he is as emotional as an spoiled brat – meaning, among other things, he beats the hell out of his wife (and kids) whenever he feels the need to let off steam (odd, isn’t it, how the same women who rail against “spousal abuse” are also the same women who insist that real men cry).

Today’s “real” man not only cries, emotes, beats his wife, and is cruel to the dog, he suck drugs, imagines that muscles made of steroids make him tough, cheats at every damned sport he plays, and gets his kicks watching scum-sucker crap like cock-fighting and dog-fighting. He swills beer while watching such manly sports as NASCAR and pro football and basketball, and stuffs his face until he weighs four hundred pounds, all the while parroting one-liners from the latest macho-minimalist movie he saw.

Confronted by the possibility of any of the violence he would appear to crave, he melts like chocolate in a skillet.

More, use a term larger than two syllables, he pouts and postures, acts as though his semi-literacy is some kind of social award or credential. He’s as stupid as an ox, but you should include him in any deliberation having to do with the literature, science, or military tactics he doesn’t know the first thing about. He knows his rights, but can’t distinguish the first amendment from the Communist Manifesto (which he doesn’t so much as recognize by title). His highest ideal seems to be Larry the Cable Guy. In the alternative, he’s a limp-wristed panty-waist, metrosexual “girly-man” who wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass.

Those or he’s a bloviating bullshitter like Fox News “line-up” of phony pundits, almost any of our pandering Senator Jack S. Phogbound (anybody remember Al Capp?) politicians, or their like. Oops – almost forgot our “celebrities?” Have you ever really looked at one of these wimps?” Jesus! – they're actors all right; poseurs is more it. And what they’re pretending to be is a MAN!

And if you think my having left out the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, and dozens more who haven’t the substance of the shadows of men like the late Ed Bradley, Bill Cosby, and others their like, you’re wrong there, too. It’s just that people like Jackson and Sharpton so piss me off that I always break things before calming down.

Anyway, I hadn’t been so aware of the level to which masculinity had fallen in the general public until coming to South Texas. The astonishing rudeness of my male brethren . . . well, it astonished me. Men not only acted like boors – hats on while indoors; even at table while eating, forcing their way to the head of waiting lines, belching, farting, scratching and fifty things more obnoxious – they seemed to take a kind of perverse pride in it all. I’ve got a reputation back home, however, one for drawing a line in the sand.

A guy steps over that line when he puts his hands on me. Back when my youngest was eight or so, there was a John Wayne movie, the Shootist. Leaving the theater afterwards, Aaron said, “Hey, mom – that sounded like dad, huh?” He was referring to the line, “I won’t be wronged, I won’t be insulted, and I won’t be laid a hand on; I don’t do those things to other people, and I expect the same from them.” Several times (some of which are public record, by the way), a man availing himself of what appears to be some kind of social dispensation granted his Hispanic class and attempting to force his way into a waiting line reached out intending to shove me out of the way. That, when you think of it, is a pretty stupid thing to do when the “shove” is a two-time national champion in judo with more than a thousand organized fights on the record.

One example, excerpted in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story, it’s worth reciting for what it says about the new “real” man of America.


“As a boy, I was taught behavior and manners I still exhibit and practice today. I will not permit a man to be rude to a woman, period . . . When a friend and I happened upon one macho character as he was pummeling a woman he held pressed helplessly against a car, I answered his, ‘Who the hell are you and what gives you the right to stick your nose in my affairs’ with something that may prove instructional here. ‘I'm the guy,’ I said, ‘who's gonna kick your ass and use it to sweep this parking lot if you hit that woman again. And, mister, my ‘right’ is the same right any decent man who sees you abuse a woman has.’

“My eyes holding his . . ., I fished a business card from my pocket and handed it to the woman. ‘Ma'am,’ I said, "if he hits or abuses you again - ever, you call me and it will be my distinct pleasure to make him very, very sorry.’ I didn't hear from them again, so I have no idea – but the bull-frog bastard deflated right before my eyes like a balloon. When we came out of the store we had been headed toward, the couple was still sitting in the car talking earnestly. As we walked behind their car to our truck, the woman put her arm out the car window and waved the card. My friend and I - the lady, too, it seems - had a little laugh at Tough Man's expense.

“I do have to confess to have mellowed somewhat (don't get the idea that I've stopped training to fight or shoot, though - that could lead to error with serious effect) in my old age. After the six (or seventh - I don't really make a big thing of this) similar incident, one in a local K-Mart, it occurred to me that my penchant for kicking bully's asses might label me with local police as a provocateur. In several instances, including that of the WalMart incident, the police were called. In that instance, a burly character who pushed an elderly man and his wife aside in order to force his way into line ahead of them at the checkout counter, my armlock happened to smash his face on the conveyor belt and spray blood from his broken nose around. When the old couple and the check-out lady had explained to arriving police officers what had occurred (did I forget to say that smart-ass had attempted to give me a hard shove?), I was not arrested.”


So much for the “war stories.” I hope they make a point (other than that I’m an irascible old character who also happens to love women).

I quote this all the time lately, but I’ll do it again – it’s the ineluctable truth:

“A State which dwarfs its men, in order that they may be more docile instruments in its hands even for beneficial purposes -- will find that with small men no great thing can really be accomplished; and that the perfection of machinery to which it has sacrificed everything, will in the end avail it nothing, for want of the vital power which, in order that the machine might work more smoothly, it has preferred to banish.” -- John Stuart Mill, from On Liberty (1859)

A while ago, I posted on one of my pages here a list of questions. I said I would be adding to them as time went on. Here’s another, one asked in a recent book by Lee Iacocca, former CEO of Chrysler Corporation: Where have all the leaders gone?

There’s more: Where the hell is the public’s outrage at what the sorry pack of clueless bozos who are guiding our country to obvious catastrophic ruin? We have corporate gangsters stealing us blind, ruining the countryside, polluting and poisoning the atmosphere and environment, and making a mockery of our U.S. Constitution and law. This clusterf--- of clowns can’t so much as come to the effective aid of New Orleans after Katrina and Rita, but we let them run a war in Iraq! “Stay the course?!” With this FUBAR fraternity? You have GOT to be kidding!

In his book, Iacocca chides himself for being enraged. Well, by damn – at least I’m in good company there. The eighty-two year old stud also says something you’ve heard me say, too – if you know me or have read my “blogs.” He says that no one who isn’t outraged at what’s happening ought call himself a patriot. DAMNED RIGHT – I agree. The former CEO notes, as I have here, that the whole political “debate” has become a handy cop-out. Let me quote:

“And don’t tell me it’s all the fault of right-wing Republicans or liberal Democrats. That an intellectually lazy argument, and it’s part of the reason we’re in this stew. We’re not a nation of factions. We’re a people. We share common principles and ideals. We rise and fall together.”

When I say I couldn’t have said it better myself, I mean it – hell, it’s almost as if I DID say it!

I might add parenthetically that those who attempt apologist rationale regarding what I’ve just said are suspect of insanity in my view. There are so many proofs of federal corruption, incompetence, and contempt for the public that one could fill a volume, none more irrefutable than the fact that foreigners – even foreign governments – lobby in Washington, D.C. against the interests of the common citizen of the nation once the land of the free. No one not as corrupt as they are has any real hope of influencing the government that desecrates by its presence the city once graced by the likes of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Patrick Henry. Even illegal aliens – thieves, rapists, pedophiles, and murderers – have the ear of government, an ear not accessible to the people who must pay for it all.

I’ll tell you something else, something historians will one day say: We have no leaders today because the society that would otherwise have produced them no longer exists.

“It’s okay for men to cry . . .” The fact is that the women saying that haven’t the faintest idea of what they speak. How many men do they know? Even their knowledge and familiarity with history is invariably so little that they have no real idea of what made its great men. The historical and sociological truth is that women have always had a major role in determining what a society and nation’s men are, because a man will always in some degree be whatever his woman demands. She is the prize in the great and eternal mating game, after all – what everything he strives for IS for. If a man can be a weakling and still have her, why would he strive for more?

Have another look, dear reader, at that quote from J. S. Mill.

I have some more questions, for the women who think real men cry, and the “real” men who do:

1. What happens to the self-esteem of a nation whose male leaders cry, whose leaders male and female practice the equivalent cowardice of lying? How do you get leaders from a society of men who blubber and weep? What happens to the spirit of self-reliance and independence that once defined us as a nation?

2. How have we brought down – ladies – the proud middle class male to a majority that this as impotent and feckless as what is now called the “little man?” You expect a George Washington, a Thomas Jefferson, an Abraham Lincoln, a George Patton, a Chester Nimitz, a Dwight Eisenhower, a Douglas MacArthur from “little men?”

3. Why are we no longer capable of raising our children to be real men? What are we doing to our boys? Why is it that these “real” men can do nothing – often, as a matter of fact, don’t even care about their children being mentally degraded, reduced to idiot consumers for the mere sake of consumption, their talent, creativity, and spirits inundated in the utter garbage being foisted upon them as food and drink, music, entertainment, sports – even sex. Why is it that “real” men seem powerless to do anything, either, about a nation so self-serving and conceited that they have become willing to feed their children poison, and let all the rest happen.

Were you paying no attention when feminism, the legislatures, and the courts exalted the “single-parent” family, making the male redundant, un-necessary, and without parental rights? I wasn’t. And my on the record prediction – pooh-poohed, of course by just about all the distaff side of society - concerning what would happen as a result is now daily news.

4. How is it that “real” men seem able to have no voice when it comes to responsible dissent? How can a nation continue as a democracy when its society has no real fear of or respect for genuine and honorable male anger? What government, what foreign enemy fears a nation of wimps?

5. Why would a nation of one hundred fifty million naturally powerful males, trained and educated in weapons and manly pursuits as males once were, feel it necessary to build billions and billions – hundreds of billions – of dollars worth of high-tech, push-button, and plush guns, tanks, bombs, planes, ships, submarines, rockets, and on and on – weapons all designed in the final analysis to somehow make a wimp a warrior? How is it that in Vietnam and wars since our “real” men, armed with every gee-whiz, Buck Rogers weapon the mind and science of man can devise, could not defeat an enemy essentially armed with small arms and rocket-propelled grenades?

Yeah, I know. The truth hurts. Dealing with it used to be a thing men did – no tears.

6. Why is a nation with all these “real” men so afraid? Why so depressed? Why so (fecklessly) angry?

7. Why do all these “real” men tolerate the veritable avalanche of hideous crime by government and government by the corporations? What kind of men have stood and still stand idly and passively by while corporate crime in America has reached, and now reaches even more staggeringly epidemic proportions; all while almost no criminal outrage is not tolerated by those pandering to the criminal corporations and their lobbyists in the Potomac capitol? What kind of men suffer under and tolerate a federal tax structure like ours, one that provides corporations like Wal-Mart, K-Mart, and literally thousands more advantage - total ascendancy in the cases of the “Marts” – over struggling small businesses in the U.S.

And on and on, and on and on. “Real men.” Men who cry. You bet – instead of doing something, he can cry. That’ll fix it. Make him feel better. I have a lot more questions, but just one more, for today:

What kind of woman respects that kind of “man” . . . ?

A Boy and a Nation, a Rambling Tale - and a Warning!

Last night, still more symptoms of our national mental illness. Britt Hume of FoxNews, having first proclaimed in that imperious manner of his that a “growing number” of scientists is speaking either negatively or voicing uncertainty about the causes of global warming (logic: we don’t know for certain what it is, so we shouldn’t change anything we’re doing even it we have a very good suspect), proceeded to announce in pedagogue’s tone “findings” (with truth serum, it would be “gropings”) “proving” that ethanol and bio-fuels will contribute more to “air pollution” than petroleum-based fuels, and we should therefore stay with what we arte doing.

Read that again. I’m too tired of this rationally spastic crap to bother myself, anymore. I only mention it, as I said, it because it’s so symptomatic. Call it a warning, one I’ve been trying to sound for thirty-five years.

But the nation listens to the likes of Britt Hume or his FoxFriends, Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, and the rest friends. And “growing numbers . . .” All, no doubt, “Reliable sources.” Good grief!

Change the subject, Hal.

Okay, here’s another. It’s that I don’t like to be afraid. I’ve hated it since classmate bullies taking advantage of my polio-resulted puniness made each and every walk to and from school a nightmare of terror. At one point, I so feared what nearly daily beatings was doing to my features that I would no longer be recognizable. It wasn’t, however, until a teacher honored my nearly-closed eyes, broken nose (seven times before reaching the end of my freshman year in high school), and broken teeth with laughter and a comic line in a school play’s script, that humiliation became a factor.

When a big girl – she outweighed me by at least thirty pounds - who was a classmate threw me to the ground, then straddled my chest and proceeded to punch me in the face, the witches brew that is hate due humiliation overflowed its cup. In a men’s magazine, one of several subscribed to for me by grandparents with whom I stayed during the years I “lost the use of” my legs – as “the folks” euphemistically termed my paralysis - I found an add selling a book. “Bernard Cosneck’s American Combat Judo” cost nine, ninety-five, and I ordered it – having it sent to the school in order that pacifist grandparents wouldn’t learn of my ominous intent.

“Combat Judo” wasn’t much of a book. Even then, the world’s men’s magazines were a macho-minimalist place; bullshit, in other words. Everything in the book required strength I didn’t have, not even close. Hell, I couldn’t do ONE pushup. That, I’d learned a few days after joining Troop 43 of the Boy Scouts of America. Encouraged to try earning the Athletic Merit Badge several other scouts had decided to work on, I did likewise. The result was more humiliation.

Not to fear, said Scoutmaster Vince Miller, where there was a will, there was a way. I know you think that’s trite, the mantra of a nation devoted to the platitude and lie. Maybe, but I was desperate, and Mr. Miller was one hell of a man. Farmer and wrestler that almost all the men in the area were, he was muscular and powerful, able to handle an animal like a two hundred pound hog during castration or administration of antibiotic shots as though it were a cat. His recommendation was that I begin doing pushups against a wall, by leaning forward to fall against it with outstretched arms. When I had added a couple of repetitions, he instructed, I should move my feet back farther from the wall and continue.

I did as he said, and a red-letter day of my life – equal to my first airplane solo, my first parachute jump, marriage, the birth of my first child, and the like – was the first time I did twenty-five honestly classic pushups.

From there, I became a local legend. Everywhere in the area, people saw “that crazy Luebbert kid” running. Or snowshoeing – even in an Iowa blizzard. When that resulted in the Indian wife of a local trapper calling me “Walks-in-Storms,” the name stuck with her people. Even at work, jobs for local farmers, I did pushups and sit-ups by the hundreds, and pull-ups by the score. I ran everywhere I went, sometimes as far as Charles City, eighteen miles away and back. I ran weekly to Osage, nine miles, in order to go swimming and visit the library. Dropped off each night by a boss, the man would see me run to the hay rope hanging from the barn’s hay-mow track and begin climbing. Having gone up and down the sixteen foot rope three times, I would run to the walnut tree in the front yard, to begin chin-ups and parallel bar presses there. And so on.

And I studied ways to fight. After experimenting with boxing, I discarded “the sweet science” as stupid, not unlike mountain sheep butting heads. Besides, watching boxing matches made it very clear how generally ineffective punching was. Boxers threw literally hundreds of punches without significant effect. I wrestled, but the rules of folkstyle and freestyle wrestling prohibited the armlock I recognized early on as the most effective of fighting tactics. When I had researched carefully and exhaustively, I found the sport called judo. Formulated for the express purpose of being the state of the art for hand to hand combat, I knew it was for me the first time I saw it.

And I grew strong. I grew fearsomely strong. When one day the farmer brother of the man who was my employer playfully challenged me, I threw him and forced his surrender easily. A powerful man used to the hard labor of farming then and a former state champion in high school wrestling, he outweighed me by forty pounds. When a local bully, an all-state tackle on the Osage High football team wouldn’t take “no” for an answer from my cousin Beverly, I invited him outside the skating rink where our confrontation had begun; there, using a particular judo throw, I proceeded to literally pound the street’s parking area with his body. He was sitting on the curb vomiting when the police arrived.

I learned to shoot, too. Initiated at five into the fraternity of German hunters to which all my family belonged, I knew how to shoot and handle a weapon long before my travail with polio and the bullies of my youth. While still a sophomore in high school, however, I bought my first Browning Model 1911 pistol in .45 caliber and began practice. As I said in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” you wouldn’t believe how I practiced. Few people have ever practiced as I practiced.

I practiced until I could do what would one day be dubbed by the U.S. Army “the Mongoose Trick.” The Mongoose Trick is to draw a loaded, cocked, and locked Model 1911, .45 caliber handgun from concealment under a shirt or jacket, and fire it accurately at a target – in less than two-fifths of a second, the time it takes a coin held at holster level to fall to the floor.

It is also the time it takes a human being to react, to know he is being killed.

I practiced until I could do the Mongoose Trick with either hand, and from any of several holster positions. In a roomful of U.S. Army Generals and Colonels I would one day demonstrate the trick for Lt. Gen. Thomas Hickey and then Brigadier General Thomas Van Natta. It was only a little while later that the tactic got its then derisive name. Told by anyone who had seen it, the listener would invariably scoff. Arrogant stupidity has been S.O.P. – Standard Operating Policy – in the United States and its military establishment for a very long time.

The Mongoose Tactic would develop and evolve into what is today called “SWAT” – the acronym for Special Weapons And Training. SWAT is based on the idea of overcoming a daunting enemy or situation with surprise, speed, and decisively overwhelming force – the Mongoose Trick. It was after having been asked that day at Fort Polk, Louisiana how I would deal with a situation like that of No Gun Ri (when North Korean soldiers fired upon our troops from among refugees streaming south and our troops returned fire), I did my demonstration. Asked how it applied, I explained and added that in the alternative, one might kill a hostage taker for long range with a high-powered rifle.

Pressed a few weeks later at Fort Benning by General Hickey, a contingent of U.S. Marine officers, and others, I promised that provided a suitable fifty caliber rifle, I would be able to kill at two thousand yards. The idea was roundly jeered. That was, let’s remember, 1958.

Don’t forget that military arrogance I mentioned, either.

In 1966, while a correspondence student in criminology for Dr. Stuart Holcomb at the University of Iowa, I reprised the paper first written for General Hickey. It drew the same kind of reaction it had at first. “Lunacy,” an assistant to Professor Holcomb wrote across the paper. A few months later, when a sniper shooting from the tower at the University of Texas had killed fourteen people and wounded thirty-one others, an official of the Los Angeles Police Department, one Daryl Gates, organized the first SWAT team. The idea, it was said, was that of another LAPD officer – in 1965. The idea, you’ll notice, was no longer considered “lunacy.”

Another of my ideas of the time I might mention here by way of demonstration and to make the record was that of a suitable battle shield for close quarters combat, a light-weight shield not unlike, worn and used in a manner similar to that of the “target” of medieval times, except for use with a handgun rather than sword. With today’s Kevlar and materials the like, the shield would be immensely practical, and it will soon now gain acceptance in house-to-house fighting like that in Iraq, or in other forms of Close Quarters Combat. That’s because even in theory a soldier armed with a powerful handgun and hand-held shield would be multiples more effective than one armed with things like execrable M-16 rifle and its variants and protected by rather impractical armored vests now in use.

The “target” shield, like a number of combat tactics of the Mongoose Trick genre, is something I have recommended repeatedly over the years. An idea, it’s been said, must always pass through four stages – ridicule, tolerance, acceptance, and theft. It’s the way things are in the world of capitalism. This is, after all, the Land of the Fee, and of corporate capitalism, where stolen ideas pay off as well as stolen property, and are much easier to “fence.”

But as I often say – and do – I digress. To continue, I found it interesting to note that first organizational descriptions of the SWAT idea, as well as first organizational manuals, contained verbatim whole sentences also found not only in my 1958, U.S. Army paper, but in my subsequent, “lunacy” paper. It, as I said, happens. Yeah, I know – but can you imagine a corporation with honor? Against its “bottom line?” Imagine the stock-holders of a corporations’ reaction to an honor against profits policy?

Do I have a point to make here? Yup, and it’s this. The reaction of the townspeople in my little home town back in Iowa when observing my self-training, together with the strength and skill resulting from it so obviously, was to find it all very unsettling. The easy prey victim, butt of any annoyance or meanness otherwise they might feel, the weakling societally dependent upon them for kindness and protection, was somehow far more lovable than the formidably powerful and skilled, independent stalwart. It wasn’t good to fight, everyone agreed, not good to “study war.” I should turn the other cheek, even “offer up” to god “in expiation of sin” the injury, pain, and humiliation inflicted by my fellow student and human being.

When Sister Mary Pacifica found the book “Combat Judo” in the mail, she asked what it was. I told her. I wasn’t going to accept any more torment, I said defiantly. The nun only laughed, her eyes running over my rail-thin and puny arms and shoulders. She handed me the book.

In a book written many years ago – so long ago that I can’t find it even with the Internet – historian Etienne de Groef wrote that the people of the United States, desirous of freedom from all hardship and fear, would one day legislate themselves into virtual prison. In “Untergang Durch Instinkt,” he accurately predicted decades ago what we have today, doing so on the basis of extrapolation from observation of the forces with which I was forced to deal as a boy. Having come to the same conclusions many years before that, even, I chose to rebel against the supposed authority of the community, and to refuse to submit to the odious premise that in order to provide the community peace, one – I – or a few should submit to being beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

Faith – in a rigidly Catholic, small town community the surrogate for government under neo-conservative capitalism and humanist-feminist socialism – demanded that I submit to the modern equivalent of a tracking device on my ankle. When the Catholic Church, and so-called Christian religious dogma like it in effect murdered my wife and made me an accomplice, I rejected once and for all the rule of those who profess to talk to god.

Anyone who professes to do that is in fact a devil – that according to the man they profess and proclaim to worship as god. “False prophets.” We are again – how many times have we done this? – at war, surely, a work of the devil, in the name of religion, and god. My god – how obvious can your “devil” be?

I’ve written a book, and this is a blatant promotion. I’ve written the book because it tells a story that is the parallel and corollary of this government by military industrial corporation’s abuse of the public and their nation. An individual – me -has lived through everything that is happening to the nation and its society today.

Oh, I can hear the individual reared and indoctrinated in capitalism think – I learned to do that long ago. Forget it! I have no need at all of money. I have no need of society, even civilization. Deprivation resulted when IRS seized everything, drove from me my wives, and drove my teenage son to several attempts at suicide, taught me to live the way a wolf or coyote lives. I don’t need you at all. The book is written for the same reason this is.

I want you to destroy this government. If you don’t learn what I already know, from what I have already experienced, you will suffer what I have already suffered. Government in the Land of the Free, become the Land of the Fee, will imprison - or destroy - you.

Your choice.



P.S. I made my choice, you'll recall, long ago . . .

"We'll have to evolve . . ."

"With stupidity even the gods struggle in vain." --Friedrich von Schiller.

On television as I type today, Kitty Pilgrim of the Lou Dobbs Show is asking a guest why it is that our government “can’t protect us from shoddy and dangerous products from China.” It may be a rhetorical question – certainly for me, it is – but it is also indicative of how resolutely oblivious the nation is to the obvious, self-proclaimed, fact of corporate capitalism and its life view. Why, indeed – how is a better choice of question. How can anybody rational, having observed and heard those who call themselves “capitalists” describe themselves, their purpose, and their intent, pretend surprise that a government of corporate capitalists has no interest in controlling corporate capitalism?

If ever there were proof of my contention that capitalism has become our national religion, this will do nicely. What else but religion could explain this kind of stultified behavior? But the debate where there is nothing debatable has become peculiarly “made in the U.S.A.” (ironic, isn’t it, that little of our country IS actually made in the U.S.A., anymore?). That’s the subject today, and while I’ve spoken of it before, I confess that near panic moves me to do so again. An “America” as stupid as this one is not what I had in mind when I thought of living out my retirement years.

More, having lived as long as I have, having done all that I have, and having survived what I have, I claim the prerogatives I’ve earned.

“I am lapidary but not eristic when I use big words.” So wrote William F. Buckley (Jr.) when criticized for using “big” words. I couldn’t help recall that, having been repeatedly accused of sesquipedality since having showed up on the Internet five years ago. I couldn’t help recall, because it’s microcosmic of our incredibly stupid and benighted society.

Don’t bother to look up Buckley’s epigram, I’ll translate. “Lapidary” refers to the practice of carving the inscription on tombstones, and the assiduous – oops; that means “constant in working or giving attention’ – and meticulous – oops again; it means “paying scrupulous attention to detail” – to a duty.

In time past – and not so long ago – there would be those among us intelligent enough to squirm inwardly at that. No longer, of course.

“Eristic” means “provoking controversy, or given to sophistical argument and specious reasoning.” So, what Mr. Buckley said was “I am precise and meticulous where detail is concerned, but I do not intend to provoke anyone by sophist (oh, hell – look it up; is that too much to ask of people who think they know it all, anyway?) statement or argument. “

Nightly, I listen to a cadre of “experts,” “analysts,” and whatever vaingloriously argumentative balderdash the media can foist upon a public stultified and stupefied by propaganda, posturing blowhards who inveigh in language fit eighth graders on all manner of things political and of nationally critical import. Each morning, I read columnists who write in language likewise suited. Pitifully illogical and solecistic (look it the hell up – I don’t have a Hip-Hop, Ebonics, Pidgin English, street Hip-Hop, or aboriginal term because people who speak that kind of primitive argot seldom have use for language and terminology representing anything more complicated than the use of their genitals), the purveyors of Operation Mockingbird mind-control cover the pages of each newspaper with nitwit nonsense.

It’s infantile, “see Dick jump, see Jane run” journalistic pabulum, the kind once directed by Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels to the “stupidest of the audience” in Nazi Germany. Everywhere one looks these days, he is obliged to listen and watch as people of the most marginally possible intellect hornswoggle an audience of mentally compromised and staring morons.

The phenomenon is unique, however. It is unique in the fact that its victims have somehow been convinced of their own penetrating perspicacity (look it up – “google it,” to quote another supposed intellectual giant of the culture) and towering genius. One who does not understand, and has to look up, the meaning of the taxonomical appellation for the subject of discourse, feels nevertheless qualified and competent – entitled, even - to argue its esoteric points.

Strange? Not really – it’s state of the art propaganda. No one is as “deceived, confused, and incompetent” – as a CIA Operation Mockingbird wonk described its prospective U.S. public victims – as the individual who has been convinced of his surpassing mental acumen while remaining child-like and primitive in fact.

An idiot who somehow know he’s an idiot has a distinct advantage over one who thinks he knows everything.

Again and again and again – and again, I have in the last decade engaged in disputation with individuals who, questioned even generally and basically on the science having to do with the subject, prove to know almost nothing.

Yesterday, while assembling a WorkMate work bench the better to manufacture hurricane protection against what might be necessary for Hurricane Dean, I listened to FoxNews’ utterly unprincipled Sean Hannity deliver yet another of his (astonishingly) cynical tirades against people like Al Gore and those concerned with carbon dioxide resulted from internal combustion and other industrial-resulted emissions. For more than ten days since six miners in Utah became trapped in a mine there, we have heard experts including the miners explain the peril having to do with air content facing the trapped men. Air containing less than twenty percent oxygen would mean unconsciousness, the “reporters” have repeated mantra-like again and again.

Now, Mr. Hannity (and those who still actually believe this guy believes what he is saying and isn’t a paid actor reading a script) raises a number of typically irrelevant issues. Basically, he seeks to prove that those who don’t agree with him are cheating, accusing those not on his side of the argument of politicking and buying – is there a difference these day? – opinion favoring their point of view.

Is it really necessary to make reply to anything so obviously, characteristically disingenuous? The response to something like this was once, “I won’t dignify that with a response.” Hannity’s role as a propagandist for the corporately owned and co-opted White House - and neo-conservative corporate capitalism itself - has never been so colossally apparent. You need only listen to this guy with an open mind knowledgeable concerning the subject upon which he is currently declaiming to know what has happened to journalism and the news media in the Land of the Fee.

Frequently, friends and those who access my website essays (why does all of today’s alternative usage sound so singularly non compos mentis?), ask what I would say were I a guest on Hannity’s television “show” (it IS that . . .). Actually, Mr. Hannity (on his “fair and balanced” show) is the archetype of the dictator despot he so admires. He seldom – all but never – asks a question that isn’t the highest form of loaded question ever developed by today’s propagandist rhetorician. Master of the “when did you stop beating your wife,” question, Hannity goes one further. He uses the “is it possible” form of the meretriciously famous rhetorical device like a swashbuckler of the old pirate movies used a stage-prop sword.

Alexander Pope couldn’t have known Sean Hannity personally, but he knew the latter’s character all too well. “A killing tongue,” wrote Pope, “but a quiet sword.” Like the Jack S. Phogbound demagogue, he uses the all-too-familiar - indeed, absolutely characteristic of the politician – obliquely evasive retort of his pimp-prostituted kind. Still, it’s fun to ask these questions rhetorically. Let’s see:

“Mr. Hannity, a question where all this argument is concerned comes to the mind of logicians and tacticians otherwise. Mr. Hannity, were you the captain of the Titanic, and your ship-to-shore radio were to advise that icebergs were believed to have come further south – and into the projected path of your vessel, why would you order full speed ahead? Why – even more like the matter of internal combustion emissions-generated global warming in question - would you scoff and vilify those suggesting caution? WHY?”

Or, “Walking as per custom across a field at night, and informed that rattlesnakes had recently been seen there, why would you advise those in your company to charge straight ahead without caution?”

“Make that land mines – several having been discovered the day before. Why?”

How about this? “Going down into a mine daily as the Utah miners were, and informed that seismic reading of late were indicating extreme danger (a mountain you’re under moving is pretty scary for any miner not as colossally courageous as you are), why would you insist that work in the mine continue? Hmmmmmm? WHY WOULD YOU DO THAT, sir?”

Then, too, “Assuming that you ARE one of the miners at the bottom of that mine, and you know – as obviously you would – that when the air you have to breathe becomes eighty-one percent carbon dioxide (you’re by your breathing changing the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide, you know), you lose consciousness and die. Why do you recommend, even demand, that those with you at the bottom of the mine exercise violently, and do everything you can to hasten the time when you can’t breathe?”

“TELL us about that, sir – great seer and expert that you are. How ABOUT that?!

“And, while you’re at the ‘telling’ and pontificating you so love, tell us who stands to benefit most from continued intemperance concerning fossil fuel emissions? Tell us who would suffer most from a favorable and co-operative public response to the warnings of “global warming” exponents. Why NOT cut emissions, and stop pumping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere? Why not, sir?

“It would be BAD if everyone were to stop driving their SUVs at ninety miles per hour? It would be BAD to stop making the air over cities so filled with pollutants that you can’t see through it? Are you telling us that air so full of industrial waste, internal combustion, and the like emissions that you can’t see through it is as good for breathing as clean air?”

Sure. Hell yes! Where did you get the idea you were talking to the Man
with the Hoe (no, stupid, it’s a tool for use in the garden – not racist political demagoguery; and the title has to do with a famous poem, one inspired by a famous painting).

People like Hannity and the “today’s global warming is natural because it’s happened before” people (check your reasoning powers with that one – think about it), no doubt, learn whether the gun in their hands is loaded by putting it to their heads and pulling the trigger.

But - to those rendered fixated and without circumspection by propagandist media “personalities” (the expression suggests to you nothing about what I’ve been speaking?) like Hannity – I digress. The question, my topic, has to do with the use of “big words.” Note that no one who complains of sesquipedalian (by now, you should have looked it up) language complains of its epistemological, logical, or scientific equivalent. The individual who doesn’t recognize the meaning of “eristic,” for instance, proceeds blithely to discuss and dispute economics, sociology, politics, and military science. He knows everything necessary about matters like the collapse of the World Trade Center, the science of intelligence gathering having to do with the existence or lack thereof of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, the military science having to do with the feasibility of invasion and occupation of Iraq, and much, much more.

The guy who doesn’t recognize the term “Coriolis Effect,” much less how to write the equation for calculating it at any particular point on the earth, who doesn’t so much as know that the seas and oceans lose carbon dioxide to the atmosphere - let alone how to calculate it, who has to run for a dictionary, then a physics book, then a biology book (the dictionary suggests it) in order to identify the word “photosynthesis” – has no idea, or chance, of every calculating how much carbon dioxide is released into the atmosphere by plants . . .

But he will run off at the mouth about carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere and global warming, nevertheless. He has read that not all scientists agree upon the supposed – he hasn’t the faintest idea how to know – subject.

This morning (I stopped work on this last night, and it’s a new day), I recall an illegal immigration cuckoo-bird on FoxNews demanding to know how the government can use “a broken law” to deport the woman who sought “sanctuary” in a church. Consider the logic of THAT one, folks. Apparently, once a Mexican breaks a law, it becomes unenforceable. This guy thinks like the people who think they want to oppose cleaning up the ecosystem and the atmosphere in order to keep driving their gas guzzler at ninety miles an hour.

It goes on and on, of course – nothing worse than the educational system that has spawned it all. Yesterday, my wife Rita came home to inform me that she had in effect been demoted – to training animals. I hasten to explain that teachers in Texas are now all required to learn horse-training. This morning, Rita dressed appropriately for the horse barn where she must go for the latest of Texas education system instruction.

I swear that I'm not making this up (I wish to god I were).

A man seldom nonplussed – for something to say or otherwise – I am so now repeatedly. Everything government in this societal and national loony-bin does is akin to this latest of cockamamie nonsense. Forty two years a masters-degreed, repeatedly award-winning teacher, and now this. My god!

Now, I am one who has long recognized the parallels, repetitions, and re-iterations (if you can’t understand the language, again, this isn’t meant for you) of nature and the universe of which it is a part. This latest example of government gone goofy relates to things like the equally, and similarly stupid invasion of the Iraq and the tactics that followed. In fact, let us recall, the man responsible for the war was in no small way responsible for the miserable state of education in Texas.

And, as I say here, it goes on and on. Ruby Ridge, Waco and the Branch Davidian Compound, New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina, the World Trade Center and the federal guard dog who didn’t bark, the hapless 9-11 Commission, Iraq, and of late, the I-35W bridge in Minnesota. Incredible, incompetent, feckless, and spend-thrift government everywhere. On and on.

HORSES! We’re apparently going to educate children – or teachers – the way we educate a horse! Actually, of course, it explains a hell of a lot of what I’ve been speaking here. The horses won’t believe global warming has anything to do with engine emissions, either.

I search for a way to conclude this – that having lost all hope that a people like this one will ever have what it takes to restore to health the nation I love. Let’s try this: A week or so ago, a man with whom I was speaking casually at a coffee shop looked my in the eye when he said soberly that even if the world was being warmed by pollution, we could deal with it by “evolving.” No, I’m not kidding (I admit that I thought he was joking; but he wasn’t, and I swear that’s what he said). More, I mention it to illustrate why I am so concerned with the stupidity for which the people of the United States have become famous.

“We’ll need to evolve . . .”

"Hero" - What IS That?

I’ve added this to my www.judoknighterrant.com website: it’s sincere, the respect of one warrior to another. It’s also the sharing of status and experience with those being used like grease on an axle by the regally, capitalistic, corporately powerful:

Hero - "A man of exceptional quality who wins admiration by exceptional deeds, esp. deeds of courage." --- Webster's Dictionary of the English Language.


In Tribute and Thanks . . . .

The co-opted United States news media having become totally unreliable for the purpose, the first thing I do every morning upon rising is go to the World Wide Web and to my sources there, in order to learn the latest casualty count of our military in Iraq and Afghanistan. To that know fine troops are being used like that, by a swaggering scion of the nation's wealthy elite who himself dodged the draft, together with another, an archetypical plutocrat who also dodged the same military service he eagerly impresses upon others by seeking and obtaining five deferments from the draft, is all but unbearable.

Never in the entirety of my seventy-one year life have I known such contempt for any two men as that which I feel for George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. The possible exception is the entirety of the United States Congress, the posturing coward sycophants who stand by while the travesty that is war in Iraq continues. I take consolation only from the certainty that history will hold these craven, crawling cowards in the disrepute they so richly deserve. I hope our posterity, our children and grandchildren, remember them with the salute Benjamin Franklin reserved for their kind: "Your children will piss on your graves."

In point of fact, I hope that one day or posterity establishes a tradition, one of remembrance dedicated to peace, and that the ceremony attendant the day include urination on the tomb or tombstones of those responsible for the inane and insane slaughter in Iraq. I speak, of course, of the members of today's U.S. Congress, the U.S. President and Vice-President. Decoration of the sites with sacramental garbage and any other symbol of opprobrium should be made optional.

And then, there is the nation's pusillanimous public. What can one say about a people who have come to this . . .? Much comes to mind. The ancient Athenians, wrote Eighteenth Century historian Edward Gibbon, ". . . more than they wanted freedom, wanted security. When the Athenians finally wanted not to give to society but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for was freedom from responsibility, then Athens ceased to be free."

Another apropos observation, one as appropriate as a matter of fact as I can imagine, comes from French essayist Michel de Montaigne:

"People usually have the government they deserve."

One might expect me, a former soldier myself, to recite "war stories" and a history of the heroism of our men and women in uniform in Iraq and Afghanistan. Sent again and again - as many as five year-long tours - back into a hell the like of which none of their Commander in Chief or theater commanders has anything like the ability to contrive by anything but mind-boggling stupidity, bungling, and bumbling, they are reminiscent of no one so much as the German soldier, seaman, or airman who was sent by Fuehrer Adolf Hitler back into combat again and again until they were killed.

If there are any capable of seeing such an atrocity as anything but the machinations of megalomaniacal arrogance, the arrogance of one who holds his fellow citizen and human being in such utter contempt as to deem him a commodity for his personal use, I can't imagine it.

No, ladies and gentlemen, I do not blow smoke up your ass the like of calling everyone who wears a military uniform or goes to combat in Iraq or Afghanistan a hero. I was a soldier once, too, remember. I did not, for once second, consider that because I had gone in harm’s way I was a hero. That would have been absurd, as absurd as the cynical pronouncements of today’s White House-sycophant and pandering media. You've gone because you were sent. More, if everyone is a hero, then what do we call those whose actions " . . . distinguish . . . conspicuously by gallantry and intrepidity at the risk of his life above and beyond the call of duty"?

But I also know you could have "bugged out" - like the members of the U.S. Congress (and, for by far the most part, their own sons and daughters), our smirking President, and his Machiavellian Vice President. I might have; there is no way in hell I would ever pay with my life the price of saving face for a government like this one. Call it a matter of pride, of honor.

But you didn't "bug out." As bad as the bargain you made was, you kept your word. It's what honor is all about, and I salute you for it.

But honor is also about telling the truth when you know damned well it will draw fire (and for me - in another situation not so much unlike this one - it has already). I have to say also that I respect Lieutenant Ehren Watada, who refused to deploy to Iraq. The deadline for reconvening a court martial against him has again been rescheduled for October 9, 2007. The Army, of course, will in order to prevail and/or hide the truth, do whatever is necessary. Take the word of one who has had the U.S. over a barrel and hoist on its own petard of law, don't expect anything legal - or honorable. The character of this government is already thunderously well-known, after all. It will repudiate any and all law necessary to save face.

It is still, nevertheless, very possible that the U.S. and its execrable president, a president already impeached by his own actions, will finesse the situation, then Operation Mockingbird its way out of the harm's way represented by the truth.

If, therefore, you choose like Lieutenant Watada to refuse and reject illegal orders, I will also salute you. Soldiers, you see, also have the command they deserve. Any officer of the U.S. military knows an illegal order when he receives it and when he gives it. The U.S. Army itself knows an illegal order when it receives it – where, in other words, was the Judge Advocate Corps when the President issued orders to attack Iraq?

If Lieutenant Watada is as right as events have shown him to be, what of the rest of the U.S. Military? The U.S. Congress? The Public?

Soldiers, I wouldn't be in your shoes for all the wealth and fame on earth. Yours are some hard choices, choosing that will take awesome courage. "Loyalty," a grandfather taught me, "above everything - except honor." Honor is always the hardest part.

Before beginning anew with my essay, let me parenthetically remind the reader of something, something voiced eminently well by author George Orwell: “Freedom is the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.”

Remember that as we proceed.

Of all the great needs, the great wants, the great absences of human history, none is more pivotal, more momentous, more ineluctable and more demanding than that having to do with the question, “When will the common man refuse to be used by his fellow man – the fellow man who forgets as soon as he somehow obtains ascendancy the humanity he shares with those he now exploits?”

What will it take, when will the common man citizen of the United States ever get it through his Operation-Mockingbird-stupefied and stultified intellect, that to the corporate rich and powerful – the nouveau riche and royalty – he is a commodity, an asset like minerals, like land and the like, to be exploited, and used? A man like George W. Bush or his eminence gris, Dick Cheney – like corporate CEO Dennis Koslowski – will send as many of those less fortunate, the peon and peasantry of whatever society he rules, to their deaths without the slightest compunction.

Nothing in history tells us anything as incontrovertibly as that one fact.

Still, here we are. Again, and again, and again. And again. Almost countless times – history only goes back a few thousand years, you know – a George W. Bush or a Richard B. Cheney has insinuated his meretricious, pandering way into power, and a position from which he exercises the power of life and death over those who have not, for one reason or the other, done the same, prostitute positioning. The process having to do with that of political power, after all, is one not most like that of the sexual prostitute – research the meaning of the term – something observed by no less that a President of the United States, Ronald Reagan.

The central, sine quo non, ingredient in power derived from the masses is stupidity - more precisely, gullibility - the faculty or faculties that permit such corrupt and decadent deception. History increasingly begins to demand, that mankind, in turn, demand a say in the choice of a U.S. President. The President of the United States, after all and by our own definition is the “leader of the (free) world.” Mankind now deserves – and it must demand – to know how a monumental mediocrity like George W. Bush (or, for that matter William J. Clinton) somehow rose to the peak of political and economic power in the world.

How did the town drunk – more appropriately, the girl who offered her favors to everybody - become mayor?

Why, by what logical or scientific system or algorithm, would an individual like George W. Bush, whose intellect, competence, and ability otherwise are exceeded by as many as seventy-five to one hundred million of his own society and many multiples more of that where his species is concerned have been chosen for rule? The question not only matters - our prostituted and co-opted election process can no longer to be tolerated as it is - it has become determinative of the future for mankind. We find a better way to pick those who will hold in their hands the fate of the planet and its people - and the fact of that is being demonstrated to us today in no uncertain terms – or we die as a nation. We probably die as individuals, too – and by the millions.

Perhaps our choice of the current administration and congress has been a fortunate one in that regard.

There is still another consideration for mankind, likewise determinative of the future. How much longer may Homo Sapiens tolerate the pogroms and depredations of religion (a factor, let us not forget, in the elections of people like George W. Bush and William J. Clinton)? In human history, just two mental forces have been determinative sociologically - religion and science. Religiously, a fact – perception of reality - is established simply by saying so (the word, of course, of god). Scientifically, on the other hand, a fact was and is established by its opposition with reality - the palpable, tangible, testable, and effective world. Faith, opposed to experience.

It may be that Islam is the last (if enormous), gasp of reality constructed of and by written and spoken language alone. This last attack of nonsense – i.e., not of the senses – may result, in a manner similar to that of its brother and sister ideologies in decimation or worse of mankind. That makes no difference whatever to the religious (the will of god is paramount, however destructive and murderous it may prove), and the memory and thought process that is history is hard on the heels of behavior disordered by religion and self-serving ideologies group and cultural otherwise. Corporate capitalism, for instance, is the economic equivalent of evolution’s Tyrannosaurus Rex, inasmuch as its all-consuming appetites are in effect self-consuming: if it succeeds in what it desires and demands, it will have eaten itself to death.

Akin to religion and nonsensical ideological ideation is that related and having to do with “isms” like humanism, liberalism, feminism and their cancerous effect on this nation or any other like it. The metastasizing effect is best characterized with questions like these: what would, or will, happen to the United States, were its Congress to become controlled by a majority of Moslems? Of Mexicans? Will a United States of America devoid of the Germanic and Anglo-Saxon cultural ideals that created it remain the “Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave,” or a government {of the people, by the people, and for the people”?

There isn’t any doubt about it – the invading cultures and their cultural ideation, ideology, religions, and attitudes are making no bones about it – we are now deciding what our country will be when our children are obliged to live in or leave it. Nevertheless, the social malady that is “political correctness” – a religion-like ideology, absolute and unquestionable – forbids examination by sociologists and social scientists otherwise of critical differences in race, culture, religion and the like. In a society and nation that must “celebrate diversity,” where everyone must be considered not only equal under the law, but where, in fact, thought on the subject has been silenced along with speech.

“Hate speech” has become the equivalent of feminism’s accusation of rape, the pointed finger sufficient to send anyone it accuses to opprobrium - and prison.

Has, incidentally, anybody wondered of late what has become of Crystal Mangum? Do we recall who she is? Don Imus, we know, is still in the news. Which offense, the false and spiteful accusation of rape, or the perceived “hate speech” was more damaging to society? And why may we not discuss either without fear of opprobrium or imprisonment – in the Land of Free Speech?

The expression is “down to brass tacks.” We get down to brass tacks, and right now – or the cycles of history, things like Islam and Hispano-Islamic culture and ideology, will be have to be repeated as they once were through what was called the Dark Ages.

I have a final and concluding observation, that having to do with yet another, “issue.” As I remarked earlier, I have posted on my website posted a tribute to the U.S. military. I have included Lieutenant Ehren Watada. I have also included a letter, one recently famous among right wing extremists who demand unconditional “support” for the troops, and impose their own definition of support, the Nazi-like (of course, few have read anything whatever of Nazi propaganda, certainly not enough to recognize in it their own utterances) mantra that any criticism of their Fuehrer commander in chief or the mission given them by him is a criticism of them – and disloyal.

The September, 2004 (I hope – which is a “disloyalty” in itself - the young author survived his deployment) letter from Lieutenant Kevin Brown, USMC, can be summarized with an excerpt, a single sentence: “You cannot both support the troops and protest their mission.”

The remainder of the letter says that to do so is to give aid and comfort to the enemy – to be, in other words, a traitor. Just as we may not question his commander in chief of his mission, we may not question the lieutenant. Or those who share his view (and posted his letter everywhere).

Conceding that few people in a nation as “dumbed down” as this one are capable of such, we may not even observe that Lieutenant Brown’s letter, replete with logical inconsistencies, fallacies, non sequitur statements and arguments from irrelevant conclusion as it is, speaks poorly of the U.S. Naval Academy from which he graduated. We may not observe what is even more obvious, that the young officer’s letter, with its message fashioned and timed as it was, is exploitable as propaganda in a manner equivalent to that of Fahrenheit 9/11, the Michael Moore movie the lieutenant’s letter condemns.

The letter concludes in a manner and with method as unmistakable as any of the television commercials with which we are hammered incessantly and with purpose just as thunderously obvious:

“Sleep well on this third anniversary of 9/11, America. Rough men are standing ready to do violence on your behalf. Many of your sons and daughters volunteered to stand watch for you. Not just rough men - the infantry, the Marine grunts, the Special Operations Forces - but lots of eighteen and nineteen year old kids, teenagers, who are far away from home, serving as drivers, supply clerks, analysts, and mechanics. They all have stories, families, and dreams. They miss you, love you, and are putting their lives on the line for you. Do not make their time here, their sacrifice, a waste. Support them, and their mission.”

Anyone who doesn’t recognize in the Lieutenant’s letter the same ideological appeals made by the propagandists of the major religions, by Soviet Socialism, by Nazism, by feminism, and a dozen more of the forms of human absolutism and intolerance that have inflicted themselves upon the human race has need of an intensive review of them all – and history. The language, to anyone who reads history, is unmistakable. And it, like the economic Tyrannosaurus Rex corporate capitalism, is self destructive.

Unfortunately, if destroys itself by eating what sustains it. That’s us.

Newt Gingrich and Ruben Navarette - a "Feast of Bullshit."

A couple of nights ago, getting my therapeutic humor for the day by way of my usual practice of watching FoxNews, I heard the nation’s resident blowhard, Newt Gingrich, deliver yet another of his Jack S. Phogbound (anybody remember Al Capp, Lil Abner – Dogpatch?) pontifications. The parallel collapse of the !-35W bridge in the Twin Cities, Newt says, together with horrors like the collapse of FEMA – Federal Emergency Management Agency (how’s THAT for a laugh – doesn’t everything “federally managed” these days swiftly turn into an emergency?) after Hurricane Katrina, reveal the fact that the bureaucracy doesn’t work.

I pause to let the shear banality of that sink in. We need Mr. Speaker to tell us that?

Well, sir, where were you all those years ago when people like me started trying to tell great men like you about the nation’s decaying infrastructure, things like the levees in New Orleans and bridges all over the country, the totally FUBAR tax system, murderous incompetent law enforcement, a criminal justice system that amounted to little more than trial by gossip, a nearly comatose national security system, and dozens more?

Among the “more,” consider the woeful inadequacy of the Immigration and Naturalization service, the Border Patrol, and the torrent of criminals pouring into the country from Mexico. How many of those “parallels” you speak of would it have taken to wake you up and elicit one of nitwit nostrums with which you and your sesquipedalian, supercilious ilk belabor us of late?

The government doesn’t work . . . well, I’ll be damned! No shit?!

Mr. Speaker, you join another torrent, that of these wonderful, taxpayer-funded studies and scientific revelations inundating us of late – things like boys and girls are different as students and a host of other things, men and women aren’t the same emotionally (and a score of other ways – each the discovery of a new study), and the six hundred million cars – converters changing the planet itself into carbon dioxide and other, more noxious, gasses as they are - are changing the climate. Well, mirabile dictu! And all from the sedia gestitoria of science, our beloved, benevolent, all-knowing and all-wise government.

Wonderful!

And, of course, today’s newspaper brings us Ruben Navarette’s column on his one subject – he apparently had to go to Harvard to learn it – the criminal breaking and entering of our country by Mexicans. I remind us all that one who commits illegal acts is a criminal. By definition. A Harvard graduate, Mr. Navarette, should know that; and, as I have duly noted, sir – like the illustrious former Speaker of the House of Representatives – also pontificates, wisdom that parallels that of the former Speaker in his bloviating pronouncements and bumptious banalities.

Now, Ruben’s one topic is an argument for open borders and unobstructed immigration, and an apology for all the criminals already here illegally – provided, apparently, that Spanish is their first language. Central to his argument is that we need the “undocumented” (whenever anyone starts euphemizing and bandying about terms like that, you ought know enough to watch him like the proverbial hawk) “workers.” They do work we won’t do ourselves, Ruben says - things like the yard work in one hundred degree heat I – at seventy-one years of age - just did.

Our economy would crash, were it not for the horde of new dependents upon it. Hmmmmm. The reasoning by which suborners and misprisioners of criminal immigration and criminals from Mexico argue that last is so rhetorically convolute, so innumerate and devoid of logical validity as to make Lewis Carroll green with satirist’s envy. Mr. Navarette’s argument, in short, is pure balderdash.

But perhaps I am too abrupt. Perhaps Mexico does have much offer us – fat, lazy, and stupid as we seem to be. How we have managed to reach standard of living and other conditions so many Mexicans seem so desirous of on the one hand sharing and the other hand transforming into what they came here to escape is truly amazing. Perhaps, witness Mr. Navarette’s truly amazing verbal prestidigitation, we should hire him to explain it. I have no doubt that he could. To morons like us “yanquis, however” – racist, bigoted, and ill-informed as we are – it all seems rather contradictory.

Downright Latin - Mexican, even - matter of fact.

What will the illegal aliens contribute to their new land? Why should we be so desirous of having them here . . .?

Anyone who studies history, or – more to the point - physics, mathematics, chemistry and similar topics, finds all but comparatively very few scientific discoveries of great significance – laws of physics, natural phenomena, investigative and experimental procedures, means and methods of measurement and the like – were made by and in most instances named for European scientists of the past and present. Discoveries like, for example, Galileo’s celestial and planetary studies, Newton's laws of motion, Leibnitz’ and Newton’s calculus, Riemann Geometry, Planck’s Constant, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, Einstein’s Relativity, and the like contribute in a manner sine qua non to our technology and the standard of living it has brought.

It goes on and on, and every other name, it seems, is as a matter of fact German. It is certainly no co-incidence that prior to 1965, seventy-one percent of the names in the Land of the Free and the Home of the Brave were of German origin. Neither is it mere co-incidence that when the German United States with an Army, Navy, and Air Corps seventy percent German defeated Germany (and Japan) in World War Two, it was led by men named Roosevelt, Eisenhower, Nimitz, and others of German and European (mostly English and British) extraction.

It is high time, parenthetically and in that regard, that the humanists, liberals, and minorities racial and cultural who have for so long now foisted upon the society and nation their pretenses of supposedly critical contribution to the nation face their cynically supposed tormentors in a truly open and national dialogue and debate. Not the Operation Mockingbird co-opted, government serving and specious propagandist-scripted fraud the media call debate, but a real, forensic, one - ho did what, and let the chips fall where they may.

But I digress - sometimes, people like my present subjects and those for whom they apologize really piss me off.

Suffice it to observe that anyone who studies history or current events, who knows the people and cultures of the planet as an anthropologist or sociologist does, will notice that the vast majority of names having to do with the science and technology absolutely, without which nothing, critical to the character and standard of living of the United States and to its ascendancy in the family of nations are those of just four nationalities: German (foremost, and by a wide margin), French, English, and Italian.

Permit me to name some, and try to imagine life today without their work and discoveries:

Start with the Germans names Goethe, Kepler, Gauss, Leibnitz, Ohm, Weber, Siemens, Cantor, Riemann, Planck, Helmholz, Heisenberg, Hilbert, Einstein, Kronecker, Weierstrass, Lorenz, and Freud. And on and on, too many to list here or even in a book;

Ampere, Cauchy, Coulomb, Fourier, Laplace, Lavoisier, Lebesgue, Lagrange, Lesseps, Fresnel, St. Venant, Curie, Poisson, Poincaré and many others – French.

Among those scientists with English names – many Anglo-Saxon; i.e., German – are Newton, Watt, Joule, Faraday, Davy, Green, Priestley, Maxwell, Cavendish. Briggs, Napier, Taylor, Stokes, Gibas, and more – many more.

Italian names we find are; Galileo, da Vinci, Bernoulli, Torricelli, Levi-Cività, Volta, Marconi, Galvani and others. There are more Europeans, of course – Copernicus, Bohr, Mendel, Tesla, and others including many Russians.

I challenge you, Mr. Navarette and all those apologists for Mexican and Latin American immigration legal or otherwise, to find a single Hispanic name of any momentous character anywhere in the history of the science upon which the standard of living of the nation that you somehow demand the right to share depends. Neither is there a single Mexican name (there are more than Hispanic people in Mexico, you know . . .).

Tell me again, why do we need you? And, while you’re telling, explain to us how filling our streets with people from a culture like that of Mexico will make us better. Tell us about the high rate of Mexican literacy, about how law-abiding and societally affable and co-operative they are; tell us about how your people are so eager to contribute to our country that they honor her by first violating her. Rape, after all, is in Mexico a lesser offense, is it not?

That’s pretty complicated, all right – almost as complicated as the rest of your convolute rationalizing on the one topic you seem to find worth your Harvard effort.

Mr. Navarette, in your latest harangue, you speak of an individual Mexican sympathizer Hispanic who says his heart is in one country his soul in another.

Exactly.

Ruben, tell your man that when he can say his heart and soul are in my country, when he has made a citizens arrest of an illegal alien for desecrating our flag by flying it upside down under his own, Mexican flag, he can say it is our country.

Not before.

"The Bourne Ultimatum" - Another Look at How We Are.

In the United States of America, under the now irresistible pressure of economics, everything seems to swiftly devolve into a grotesque caricature of what it was originally. Cancerous, it probably presages the death throes of a once-great nation.

The following is an excerpt from the Impeach for Peace website, and I urge the reader to go there and peruse:

In a meeting Thursday, July 26th, 2007, members of ImpeachForPeace.org and After Downing Street met with Congressman Dennis Kucinich in his Washington DC office to present the Congressman with thousands of "Do It Yourself Impeachments" collected over the past few months. DIY Impeachment Memorials are actually a little known and rarely used part of the Rules of the House of Representatives ("Jefferson's Manual"), which empowers individual citizens to initiate the impeachment against any federal official themselves. These Memorials support the impeachment of Vice President Dick Cheney.

During our meeting, Congressman Kucinich agreed to place all signers of the DIY Impeachment Memorials specifically referencing Cheney into the Congressional record. Rep. Kucinich also agreed to enter into the record the names of signers of regular petitions to impeach Cheney. Because there is a limit to the number of pages that a representative can submit to the Congressional Record each day, Rep. Kucinich stated he will continue to submit petitions every day until all the names are submitted. The most powerful statement for impeachment is the submission of a Memorial, however, so if you have not yet sent a Memorial for the impeachment of Vice President Cheney to: Impeach For Peace, please do so! Go to http://impeachforpeace.org/ImpeachNow.html and download the Memorial. Then send it to the address listed on the cover letter.

"Jefferson's Manual" is an interpretive guide to parliamentary procedure, and is included (along with the Constitution) in the bound volumes of the Rules of the House of Representatives. It is ratified by each congress (including the current one), and has been updated continuously through the history of our democracy. The section covering impeachment lists the acceptable vehicles for bringing impeachment motions to the floor of the House.

Before the House Judiciary Committee can put together the Articles of Impeachment, someone must initiate the impeachment procedure. Most often, this occurs when members of the House pass a resolution. Another method outlined in the manual, however, is for individual citizens to submit a memorial for impeachment.

Since then, Kucinich has held a press conference informing the public of this.

I hope everyone will enter his name in the Congressional Record, and I have forwarded my own memorial to the congressman. I will also continue to do my best in order get as many people as I can to do likewise.

A couple of days ago, Ed, a friend of ours, Rita, and I went to see the new movie entitled “The Bourne Ultimatum.” A few weeks before, we also went to see the “Good Shepherd” (Matt Damon, it happens, looks so much like my youngest it’s scary). We go largely because a number of my friends always want to hear my view of the flick, me being a charter member of the fraternity of people known as “spooks.” Having seen all of the Bourne series by Robert Ludlum, I can tell the reader that the movies have a lot of realism. Like the Tom Clancy movie Hunt for Red October once was, they can be for those initiated in the shadow wars downright startling in what the author either has learned or extrapolated from already published data.

The CIA not only employs writers like Clancy in order to serve their continuing Operation Mockingbird propaganda, you know, but commissions the writing of novels and the actual production of movies for the same purpose. It’s all about controlling the public mind and opinion – not unlike what the latest movie says happened to its protagonist, a CIA “asset” named Jason Bourne whose original identity is finally revealed to be that of “David Webb.”

The flick’s premise is an eerily familiar one for me, inasmuch as two former clients, both retired members of our military, were individuals with whom the U.S. dealt in a manner similar to David (Jason Bourne) Webb. Hadley Washington was experimented with during the CIA program coded Operation MKULTRA in order to determine the feasibility of what happened to the Bourne Ultimatum’s hero, and to Sergeant First Class Richard Benton who underwent involuntary treatment he still thought then was electroconvulsive therapy. Whatever it was, the treatment excised his memory of secrets learned while he was the cryptography technician at the Pentagon.

More, to questions from my companions this evening, I replied that the U.S. has absolutely – and I use the word pointedly here – no compunctions about killing innocent people (matter of fact, that anyone can, in view of what has happened and continues to happen in Iraq, ask a question like that leaves one like me nonplussed for understanding). Neither are the “assets” of the movies – specialists in murder – unreal. I know that because I was at age fifteen recruited by the U.S. to do exactly that. My refusal to kill Fidel Castro and/or Che Guevara remains the principal source of the government’s formerly vicious and murderous antagonism toward me.

But the movie speaks to matters other than that which is already, incontrovertibly, known. Robert Ludlum and Tom Clancy aren’t alone as federal U.S. “insiders.”

Parenthetically, Senator John McCain is on television as I type, telling the public that “if we leave Iraq, al Qaeda will follow us home.” I mention this because in the movie to which I have reference here “David Webb” is at one point – a “flashback” – being “brain-washed.” Sleep deprived, water-boarded, brutalized physically and mentally otherwise, bombarded with psycho-suggestion, and only semi-conscious, the character sits numbly as the CIA doctor (who, incidentally, had a counterpart in reality), harangues. To hear a U.S. Senator and public figure like John McCain say anything as utterly and obviously absurd as “al Qaeda will follow us home,” is too similar to be anything but remarkable here. Only one certain of his audience’s behaviorally-conditioned stupefacation would make such a public statement. Anyone in his normal mind would laugh at such an utterance.

David Webb doesn’t laugh. Instead, he accepts the pistol offered him, then shoots to death a helplessly bound, hooded, and gagged man sitting in a corner. David Webb, the CIA doctor then says, no longer exists. He is now Jason Bourne, a CIA “asset.”

For me, the parallel between Jason Bourne, movie character, and the public of the United States of America simply cannot be missed. Not only did I receive training in methods very similar to those taught the movie character, but I lived with SFC Richard Benton for more than a year, seeking to understand, even prove, what had been done to him. When I had tracked down and repeatedly interviewed Hadley Washington, I learned, too. I learned that the Bourne Ultimatum’s Black Briar Program, in reality Operation Mockingbird, is real and ongoing. The propaganda prescription of Nazi Doctor Josef Goebbels has, in other words, reached the zenith of its development, and funded by its victims.

There is, as I have argued here, no other explanation for the history of the United States, and the nations of the world vis a vis the U.S. since World War Two. There is no other explanation for how, in the words of the London Mirror, “59,054,087 Americans can be so dumb.” There is no other explanation for a strategic blunder and pratfall as monumental as Operation Iraqi Freedom, or the apparent willingness of the citizenry of United States to commit murder on a scale seldom equalled in modern history. The callous disregard of the U.S. public for the horrendous suffering of the people in Iraq can only speak of a kind of un-natural stupor. Like the character Jason Bourne in the movie, “The Bourne Ultimatum.”

I must believe that; otherwise, the people of the United States are no better than those who lived in Germany, 1934-1945.

The public, therefore, must NOT be dumb; they are Jason Bournes. Stunned and stupefied by behaviorist Operation Mockingbird propagandists, they hardly listen to the horrors being wreaked on the people of Iraq. Distracted and anesthetized, moreover, by carefully crafted entertainment news – “info-tainment” – they sit in mindless stupor, watching their neighbors’ husbands, sons and daughters shipped away to die in ignominious (oh, yes – they’ll be “remembered;” god, that disgusts me!) obscurity. Reciting endlessly the “support the troops” mantra given them by the cynically complicit behaviorist media, they change their attention from one lurid “story” – its luridity the measure of the contempt held by its orchestrators for their audience-victims - to the next.

Surreal, it’s much like the Bourne Ultimatum itself in its appeal. The Bourne Ultimatum would be a good story on its merits as an adventure yarn alone. But that’s not enough these days. Repeatedly, the audience (those mentally normal, that is) is obliged to digress from the story, in order to watch while the stunt men and special effects technicians “do their thing.” The utterly absurd car – oh yes; and motorcycle – chases and fights scenes contribute utterly nothing but distraction (are you paying attention?) to the story or movie. In one fight scene, we get some insight into the asinine tactical ideation that apparently resulted in planning and deciding to attack Iraq. The fight, immediately after the hero Bourne has been sprinting and leaping across rooftops and over walls, crashing through windows and doors for as long as fifteen minutes, then goes on with intensity and duration far beyond the physical ability of any human being (even one as hyped and hyperplasia-ed as Barry Bonds or today’s equally absurd “athletes” generally).

It is, incontrovertibly, all a microcosm of the nation. Bombarded by relentless propaganda in the form of television “commercial” advertisement, the public accepts as food garbage that is the culinary equivalent to cardboard or plastic, beverage that is near poisonous (or in the case of beer, ersatz and phony), entertainment so primitive and devoid of appeal to the mind in its nature as to bore Bushman or Australian Aborigine. So uneducated and comically stupid that he has collectively become a clown and the butt of wry humor both here and overseas, John Q. Citizen stares in stolid and stultified incomprehension at the bloviating pontification and outright lying of public figures, political pundits, and politicians. Nothing is too preposterous for the American public to believe, so long as it is interspersed among the equivalent (or, in these days of eavesdropping eyes everywhere, actual and video-taped) of spectacular or lurid car chases, macho-minimalist martial arts “fights,” and groaning, clawing, face-sucking, and mutual mouth-chewing sex.

Under the colossal mental mauling, the public has grown as bewildered as the “Bourne Ultimatum” character Jason Bourne; more, though, it has become more and more psychotic. That, too, is as thunderously obvious as today’s daily events. In keeping with its implacable demeanor concerning the people of Iraq, the public here remains aloof from the neurotic and societally-threatening behavior of its own.

So, unless the U.S. public somehow experiences a horror like the murder of his “love interest” in the three Bourne movies, and has a flashback leading it to realization of the Operation Mockingbird brain-washing it has undergone, there will be no escape like that of David Webb in the last scene of The Bourne Ultimatum. “Americans” as they with dumb obliviousness refer to themselves, will go in programmed lock-step to another perfunctory election, obstinately and with cattle or sheep-like certainty that they are choosing their torturing tormentors.

See the movie, then see it you can relate it to the (other) info-tainment in which you are immersed. See the movie, and see your country – yourself, even.

"How Can 59,054,087 People Be So Dumb?"

&%$#@&! The telephone, that tool of the devil and the federal government - but, as Mark Twain once observed when he had suggested that someone imagine being an idiot, then that he was a member of Congress – I repeat myself, keeps ringing. Rita has not only been out of town for several days visiting her aging parents and leaving me to answer the damned thing (I often don’t, personally – but when Rita’s gone; well, “It might BE somebody!’).

Yeah! That is, until the birds and livestock learn to use the phone and give that much of a damn about what I’m doing.

Anyway, I’ve also stirred up a hornets’ nest – all those sheeple-people who never do anything about government but make phone calls and bitch over their coffee or beer. Of course, it’s only about their country being betrayed, and sold to the highest bidder. Not something sunshine patriots like they are care that much about. What a gutless, limp dick, bunch this the Home of the Brave has become!

In the interim between bloviate, balderdash, and utter nonsense from people who know almost nothing about their subject (whatever it is; when you can so determine, you’ve demonstrated the acumen verbally and logically of a Sherlock Holmes), I am preparing my Impeach by Memorial petition for mailing to the House of Representatives. For some reason only this confounded computer knows the otherwise simple process – damn, how I long for the days of the plain, old typewriter (I wonder it I can get one somewhere . . .?) is impossible.

As I do so, I ruminate concerning the latest news from Iraq. Every morning, the first thing I do is work – one has to go to foreign news sources for that kind of information – in order to learn how many casualties and deaths we have sustained. Somebody ought to care enough to do that; and, since the media can be counted upon to put on the screen anything that will get viewers, it’s obvious that damned few Americans care that much. But don’t get me started on the Anna Nicole Smith, rape-of-the-week, tabloid- sucking public again.

I not only worry about our soldiers, I also want to know the death toll of Iraqis. That, mind you, is the people who have now suffered many, many multiples of the injury, death, and destruction from which we were supposedly rescuing them. That I’m so concerned is not so much due worry; it’s much more like guilt. Jesus! – if I were an Iraqi, I’d feel about the U.S. the way I felt about the U.S. when they were “rescuing” me. By shooting at me. The old save-the-village-by-obliterating-it ploy, you’ll remember.

As my mind roams, I think about things like commentary the other night after the recent Democrat Party (there’s, after all, nothing in the least “democratic” about today’s political party processes and procedures). Anyone who listened to the “debate” – consider the meretricious fraud just that represents - and didn’t realize that the people who run for and obtain public office do not run this country must be semi-comatose. Nothing the “candidates” have ever said they would do has happened. To bring these guy’s past political pronouncements and speeches to a forum like this and read them aloud for the audience would by like having sex in the front pew or a Baptist Church service. Nothing they say they will do will happen. Nothing they say has happened did happen – not even the debate (what they did the other night is by no stretch of the imagination “debate”).

If you get on a ship or airliner that doesn’t go where it says it will, but flies for hours aimlessly or in circles only to finally land where you left, one thing you might consider immediately is that the pilots, ship’s officers, or whatever aren’t running the show that is your trip.

Where the hell are the minds of the public?! Have Americans been so insulated, so anesthetized, so removed from reality, so immersed in Hollywoodian reality all these years that they’ve lost touch with the real world – the world outside their virtual reality cocoon?

On CNN, an analyst-pundit-expert-commentator-journalist – “Operation Mockingbird Programmed Bullshit Spew-er” is the new terminology or appellation I suggest – named Peter Bergen lists “mistakes” the U.S. made in “not catching” Osama bin Laden. “Mistakes!” Anybody stupid enough to believe that must believe still in Santa Claus, the Tooth Fairy, and Knighthood. That, or he’s the devil himself.

Only the kind of execrable ignorance of history that has college students identifying the Battle of Yorktown and Cornwallis’ surrender there to George Washington as having occurred during the Civil War, or Pearl Harbor as a shampoo, explains a public so incredibly “out of it” that it fails to recognize the shear and basic falseness of it all and what it must mean has happened to our nation.

Next up in my mental slide show is Tim Russert, still trying by way of the dissimulation of “limited hangout” and debate intended to create the illusion in the minds of listeners rendered quasi-comatose by similar propaganda technique and technology that war in Iraq was due CIA intelligence failure. It is as obvious as the Rocky Mountains that Russert and the people who control him consider the U.S public child-like intellectually. Not for nothing are those Jay Leno “Jaywalking” surveys done. The government watches, too.

For an instant, I flash mentally on still another round of government effort to make the Kennedy assassination and Warren Report sound plausible. The ray of hope in that is that the public will finally see – and wonder at - how forlornly desperate it all is. There are few things as impossible as convincing a nation of gun owners and shooters that a bullet fired from behind the target blew away the same side of the target. Sooner or later, however anesthetized you might be, you notice that that’s never mentioned in all the smoke and mirrors, “limited hangout,” “discussion.”

And you might also recognize in that what’s being done when you hear today regarding things like, for instance, the CIA’s mistakes that “caused” our attack on Iraq.

Some things are galactically apparent by their absence. Not once in the now oceanic of talk and supposed analysis like this has anyone ever heard even a hint of discussion concerning Keyhole satellite and state-of-the-art surveillance technology. Space-based cameras able to read a newspaper or license plate couldn’t find factories or observe their construction? If we could detect and watch Cuba building missile sites in 1961, why couldn’t we do the same in Iraq, 2003 – especially since we were over-flying the place many times daily, even destroying Iraqi missile sites that fired at our spy planes?

Anybody who believes the utterly unbelievable White House story concerning CIA failures probably does think Pear Harbor was a shampoo. George Washington was the guy shaming Ingrid Bergman in Casablanca. Hell no, I don’t believe in the Tooth Fairy (I can’t tell you why I believe in the dozens of them on TV these days running for president, but I don’t believe in the tooth fairy . . .!)

The individual who believes the CIA Failure Story won’t believe that his Tooth Fairy heroes also consider the public absolutely idiotic, incapable of thought beyond listening to the media. – no matter how obvious it becomes. They won’t believe what I’m saying here, but their stunned and stolid credence in their Tooth Fairy President explains all those people who get swindled by e-mail from Africa.

Hmmmmm . . . . Why I can’t get this download for the Impeach for Peace forms to work is beyond me . . . now, it comes, to me, the CIA, the NSA, Homeland Security, and twenty more we haven’t “discovered” yet probably know all about that. It’s getting hard to sit on the old thunder mug, when you stop to think the government is probably looking up your butt. Should Congress have passed a law taxing Iraq, the IRS would have known at what time every, single Iraqi citizen went to the toilet each morning and what he had for lunch every day.

Still ruminating as I wrestle this computer drat-fangle, I recall that the new Minimum Wage Law has been enacted. Want to assess how stupid, how simple-minded and addicted to their self-serving poppycock government and the politicians think we are? Consider that one. Tell me how you can fail to see that to force an employer to pay twenty, thirty, or forty percent more than what he can hire an illegal alien for – that’s an illegal alien protected by the White House and Congress from everything societal including competition – is to legislate you right out of a job.

You’ll still have to pay taxes the illegal alien won’t have to pay, of course; and health insurance costs, and social security taxes, and . . . Oh, never mind.

THAT’s how stupid they know you are.

Next, my wandering mind comes upon the dog-fighting story, Michael Dick or whatever. The guy who gets millions for playing what must surely be one of the most infantile games every conceived by the mind of man, and who gets his kicks – if you think this is the only way this low-life bird-brain gets his kicks is watching dogs fight, you - well you probably DO think General MacArthur won the Battle of Bull Run.

Watching DOGS fight! What kind of schmuck does that? And people pay to watch somebody of that mental caliber do anything? I’ll bet this guy thinks a football playbook is rocket science. Has anybody ever done a Jaywalking segment in the NFL? Or would that be “politically incorrect?”

It occurs to me – regularly, actually; not just today – that “minorities” – blacks, Hispanics, feminists, whatever - need to be reminded that their actions speak louder than any critic could and indictment of their race, color, creed, ism, asm, spasm, or spasm is most often made by their actions and behavior itself. Black commentators, lawyers, and apologists like those arguing last night about hip-hop’s connection with dog-fighting, for instance, don’t seem to realize that the white community’s silence on the subject is, in reality, a thunderous statement.

Do you see a lot of older white guys at a dog or cock fights? Matter of fact, I don’t know any of my race or persuasion who would take the time or trouble to walk to the nearest window in order to look out and watch in his back yard a cretin-interesting “event” like that. Behavior the likes of cavorting wildly about like drunken adolescent clowns after having scored a touchdown, hit a home run, slam-dunked (now THERE’s a feat of surpassing skill for you . . .) a basketball are infantile exercises that have been acquired by white youth only after the integration of major sports and invasion from south of the border.

None of my people were ever much for torturing animals, either. It’s on the order of eating garbage – or worse.

You’re not only known by the people you hang out with, you’re known by whom and what it is you will tolerate.

Speaking of intolerance (yes, ladies and laddies, you’re damned right I am: the son of a bitch who abuses animals, is in a fashion worse than the son of a bitch who abuses children, a son of a bitch I wouldn’t urinate on if he were on fire), there’s the Ward Churchill matter (no, damn it, not “issues;” I have issues when I go to the bathroom, and . . . well, never mind). The land of the free, where free speech is guaranteed, has blind-sided – no, stabbed in the back while he slept is more like it – Professor Ward Churchill.

Now, I don’t know Ward Churchill, and before his name made the news, I wouldn’t have known him from Adam. That I care at all has to do with what happened to him, not what he said – or even did. It is beyond me why American can’t get through their thick heads . . . no, strike that; any body so stupid that in the aftermath of the 35W bridge collapse he calls in to ask where the Mississippi is stupid enough . . . to not recognize that anything done to anyone else, no matter who, what, why, where, and when, is being done to him. It took a lot longer to get Ward Churchill than it took to get Don Imus, of course. But I knew the Land of Free Speech as Long as It’s Speech That’s Politically Correct would get him. I said so. Several times. Here.

And notice that Churchill’s detractors have yet to refute what he said. Damned few will have so much as read it (which, I, of course, in my Spockian-ly contemptibly way, have). It doesn’t work that way. Not in the “Land of the Free,” and “Nation of Laws.” Uh-uh.

Of course, what Churchill did was – reminding ourselves that we are Christian nation (of course, we all think his name was Christ and he was a Christian, too) - unforgivable. He said the victims of the World Trade Center were “little Eichmans.” Is that against the law, civilly actionable? No, it’s not. Does that make any difference? Not to a Christian nation like this one. All those Christians who got Churchill are the same people who stood idly by and watched like Michael Vicks at a dogfight as their government savaged me, too.

They all “love their country,” believe in law, and their government. And they love Jesus; NASCAR, too. Football. Damned betcha!

Oh, and by the way, the monumentally less than circumspect (a guy whose “Roosting Chickens” writing was so meticulously accurate and researched didn’t know how the U.S. public would act when he used the epithet “little Eichmans?”) professor was discharged by the University of Colorado for alleged plagiarism – somebody else’s. If there’s a cheaper cheap-shot, I’d sure enjoy to hear about it.

And if there has ever been a more transparent abuse of procedures governing such matters, I‘d really like to hear about that, too. And we’re all so worried about vigilantes on the border with Mexico. Sheeeeesh!

It looks like I’m gonna have to type up these forms myself . . . Oh, well.

Let’s see, where was I? Was I impeaching Bush, or . . .

No. No, I was wondering, now that Durham County, North Carolina District Attorney Mike Nifong has been disbarred, the lives of the Duke Lacrosse players mauled and sullied for all time, and the legal system held up for the disrepute it so richly deserves, when will charges be brought against Crystal Gail Mangum, the woman who lied to start it all in the first place . . .?

Don’t hold your breath. We’re about to learn another lesson about the public’s indignation. Their love of “truth, justice, and the American Way.” Tell me, all you staunch lovers of liberty, who did us all more damage – Don Imus, Ward Churchill, Mike Nifong, or Crystal Gail Mangum?

How about Michael Vick?

If I suggest that the rest of the world sees us as having the most FUBAR priorities and moral code in the history of the race, I have to be right – or the world is the biggest looney-bin possible. And you wonder, dear reader, about why they distrust, fear, even hate us? Lord! – wake the hell up!

Pearl Harbor was an attack by the Empire of Japan on a place in Hawaii by that name. 1941. The Battle of Yorktown decided the Revolutionary War (google it). Not the Civil war. A civil war is a war fought between or among (yes, I know our president doesn’t seem to understand that, but he’s an admitted mediocrity mentally) citizens of the same country.

Oh, and to impeach the president, go to these websites. I’m apparently too ham-fisted to get you the forms. As soon as I do, though, I myself will sign and mail them.

http://www.the-signal.com/?module=displaystory&story_id=49887&format=html

http://beingism.org/DIY/Cheney.htm

http://ImpeachForPeace.org/ImpeachNow.html

If we don’t impeach these clowns, our kids and grandkids will pay the hideous price. And, when they hate us like the rest of the world does now, it’ll be richly deserved.