Nonsense, “Newspeak,” and Neo-conservative Nitwit-ism as News ”Analysis.”

It occurs to me that Rush Limbaugh has come to personify the United States vis a vis the world. That explains a great deal, doesn't it?

“Only The Rich Pay Taxes,” The Rush Limbaugh Webpage bellows. “Top 50% of Wage Earners Pay 96.03% of Income Taxes!” A recent (November 14, 2007) Walter Williams column in the local paper, “Congressional and Leftist Lies,” pontificates: “In 2005, the top one percent of income earners, those with an annual adjusted gross income of $365,000 and higher, paid 39 per cent of all federal income taxes; in 1999, they paid 36 percent.”

Williams then goes on to state as fact that the top five percent of income earners, those with incomes of $145,000 and higher, paid 60% of all federal taxes. When he has listed a series of similar asseverations concerning years past, he goes even further to say, “When all of the dependents of these income producing households are counted, there are roughly 122 million Americans – 44 percent of the U.S. population - who are outside the federal income tax system.” There’s more, but that’s the jist of this monument to mendacity and sneaky dissimulation.

Of course, one always has to give the benefit of the doubt – the “stupid or crooked” doubt – but Limbaugh and Williams aren’t stupid. They know damned good and well what the truth is. They lie because they’re paid to lie, or because they don’t dare tell the truth. That “little old letter” that “can take a person’s life” - to quote poet Langston Hughes - the one from IRS, carries with it the threat of losing everything. It happened to me, remember?

“Federal writers” like Walter Williams know that the poor pay taxes whether they earn enough to pay income taxes or not. If they drive, ride public transport, read library books, send their kids to school, eat, drink, or recreate, they pay. They pay sales taxes – and most of them, at that – business and occupation taxes, and property taxes. They pay taxes if they rent a place to stay, because rents – like dozens of other things the like, increase in order to cover the costs of property taxes. Each and every time the government cynically requires a corporation to pay a tax, the tax is passed to the wage earner and the wage earning poor. The poor even have pay taxes on public assistance.

Even more outrageous in its cynical deceitfulness is the fact that like those traffic fines I mention here in a minute, everyone, regardless of income, pays the same sales tax. When Bill Gates buys rations for his cat, the same cat food the poor have to eat, both the multi-billionaire and the low-income wage earner pay the same sales tax on it. Low-income people spend most or all of their income paying for necessities like that cat food, so they spend a larger percentage of their income paying taxes than people with more money. In point of ugly fact, someone whose income is in the lowest twenty percent – $29,000 or less a year - pays as much as 38% of his income in taxes. That same person, were he in the top one percent of the nation’s wage-earners – something like $365,000 a year (according to Williams) - pays one percent of his income in taxes.

Economists like to call this sort of thing a "regressive" tax system. Your damned right, it’s regressive – the money eventually all goes back to the corporate rich.

Why aren’t taxes putting enough money in the federal and state budgets? Unless you’re a lying crook or a brain-dead idiot, one guess will do. The corporate rich in government spend like drunken sailors; they spend – meaning pay it to the corporations who own them - in order to make themselves and their corporate owners rich. The kind of mental midget who believes the rich pay taxes might also believe a sweat shop owner, or the guy who profits immensely from child labor, is a humanitarian who is in business solely in order to provide employment opportunities.

He’d believe that oil companies now making multiples of previous profits will raise their employees’ salaries proportionately. He’d believe that each time MacDonald’s profits climb, and the value of their stock climbs, employees get a proportionate wage hike. Christ – glass more transparent than corporate capitalism would be glass more transparent than air!

I’m reminded of something basketball great (and he really was; still the best basketball player I ever saw) Bill Russell once said. “It’s not welfare for little black kids that’s costing you, it’s welfare for the corporate fat cat who gets paid millions to grow nothing, produce nothing, and do nothing.”

Yeah, Bill - while the wage earner poor have to pay taxes on everything they buy or own, the corporate rich are paid to buy and own. Oil companies having, for instance, received in the last several decades alone something like seventy billion in what’s called – they always have some slick, “what-the-hell-does-that-mean,” expression, don’t they – “oil depletion allowances,” the people money the came from – that’s the wage earner again, in case you missed it – are now paying through the teeth for gasoline (which is taxed to high heaven – taxes the rich don’t pay).

Whereas any other investor to the tune of seventy million dollars would be reaping the rewards of return on his money now that the companies he invested in are making literally hundreds of billions, the U.S. wage earner gets absolutely nothing in return for his Brobdingnagian investment but demands for more money – price at the pump and taxes.

Think that one’s bad? I used the word “cynical” a minute ago. Want to see what I mean – an object lesson in the Operation MOCKINGBIRD, rhetorical sucker punch? Try this (a paraphrase of a recent letter from Texas Congressman Ron Paul): Harlem Congressman Charles Rangel unveiled the other day a tax plan that Republicans estimate would raise taxes by 3.5 trillion dollars over ten years. Democrats questioned the math.

Next, Democrats on the Joint Economic Committee release a report on the supposed total costs of the military operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, including "hidden costs" – that, in case you’re as comatose as the typical U.S. citizen, is a tax in the form of interest on the money that means “borrowing” – that means printing cash money in order to hand it to their corporate buddies - and “long term healthcare” for vets. What a wonderful, euphemistic, way to say “tax;” who could refuse to pay a tax for the benefit of our wage earner soldiers?!

The bill for that also comes to three, point five trillion. Republicans are, Ron Paul points out again, of course, questioning the math on this item.

Aha! If 3.5 trillion is, indeed (if you believe that’ll do it, you should definitely consider hay for a diet, because you’re a jackass) the cost of this military bunglement, it means $11,500 for every man, woman and child in this country. And as Ron Paul correctly observes, for the typical family of four that means $46,000 dollars – just for this goddamned war.

And WHO is going to pay that? Not the corporate rich, that’s for damned sure. In fact, the money is going to be paid TO the corporate rich. We’re going to be taxed for it, and it’s the corporate rich who are going to GET it.

On top of that, the three, point five trillion dollar tax increase will not only be born by the wage earners in the form of taxes, if the Heritage Foundation is right it will mean something like twenty-two hundred jobs lost in Congressman Paul’s district alone, seventy thousand jobs across Texas, and even more people unable to pay for health insurance nationwide.

“Cynical?” All that tax money is supposed to benefit the poor, don’t forget. The government is going to do the low-income wage earner and the poor a big favor by taking his money in order to give it back to him – that’s those “usual closing costs,” “handling fees,” and “miscellaneous charges.” Paying taxes to this government is like sending money to one of those crooked charities that spring up after every natural disaster. How dumb can we get?!

The truth about the “graduated income tax,” so-called, is that it’s graduated, all right. The fact is that actual taxes paid decrease as income grows higher. By the time one reaches millionaire status, the only way he can be made to pay taxes is by way of his being too stupid to seek all the means provided him by the corrupt system. The corporate system created by his corporate rich brethren.

Rush Limbaugh, of course, is a famous political liar, a “federal writer” (originally, the term was “CIA writer,” meaning persons hired and trained by the Central Intelligence Agency for Operation MOCKINGBIRD in order to co-opt and control the public’s news, information, and entertainment industries by planting therein slanted and “spun” literature, journalism, and the like) propagandist paid to deliver White House and industrial military complex Newspeak.

Williams identifies himself in his columns as another. Anyone unable to detect his parrot-like recitations of corporately owned government’s Newspeak line would also fail to notice a bull in his bathroom

Anyway, were you to accept Williams’ assertions here, together with U.S. Department of Labor data that says seventy percent of all wage earners in the U.S. earn less than $50,000, you have to believe we’re all plebian leeches sucking off the largesse of the patrician rich.

But then you start checking, some of those numbers, and matters become – for a life-long skeptic, a kid who first started in that vein while still in high school, anyway – very interesting. First, what’s this “wage earner” stuff?! We jumped from “wage earner” up there to “income earners” – and in one sentence. When you know the political extremists – right or left – like I do, that’s enough to warrant a jaundiced view, and get you started checking facts.

And, ooooooooooh – the numbers! For instance, even IRS says twelve percent of those wonderful people who supposedly pay 96.03% of all the taxes the government collects, paid no tax – that’s nothing, nada, zip, bupkis – at all. Two hundred thousand, no tax. Think about that. While you’re thinking, think about why, if twelve percent of their number could get away with paying nothing, anybody in that tax bracket paid anything.

Ask yourself, too – parenthetically; it’s not actually a tax question – why it is that the rich are allowed to pay the same fine for speeding or the like as someone, say, living on social security. When you’ve thought a little about who it is that has formulated a system of fines and penalties wherein they themselves pay virtually nothing while their low-income brethren pay amounts requiring real, often severe, personal sacrifice, ask yourself why the same people who have arranged anything so inequitable would also arrange for a tax system wherein they paid most of the taxes.

When you’ve done that and still believe the rich pay taxes, you might do well to change your diet; to hay – you’re a jackass.

But back to the fun numbers. Of the approximately $1,200,000,000,000 IRS collects yearly of late, the corporate tax payer supposedly pays $380,000,000,000. “Wage earners” – this time the terminology is that used by both the Department of Labor and the IRS (gee, who can argue with honest, honorable people like that?) – supposedly pay $865,380,000,000. $814,819,000,000 of that is supposedly (Dept of Labor and IRS, again) from “payroll and employment with-holding.” And we have the word of societal seers like Limbaugh and Williams that the rich (that’s “the top fifty percent” who “pay 96.03 percent”) of the nation’s total income taxes.

Ninety-six, point zero three of $1,200,000,000,000 is $1,152,400,000,000. The Department of Labor and those benevolent and brilliant souls at IRS tell us that there are just 2,079,983 of those “wage earners” with incomes over $200,000. Since twelve percent of them supposedly paid no tax, that leaves 1,830,385 stuck with the check – which is $629,590 apiece. Each. Every individual. Every mother’s child.

Ahem! Sumpin’s haywire, here. And I’ll bet that comes as a big surprise, too – bein’s how we’re talking about things we’re told by the knights of the nation’s news and information media, that is. The free press, after all, would never lie to us. Why, the fourth estate is the bedrock of democracy. For them to lie would be the societal and national equivalent of the individual’s senses and thought processes going haywire.

Yeah, sure.

Now, D.O.L. says the median income in the U.S. was $43,318. With the minimum wage in the U.S. $5.15/hour ($5.85 as of July, 2007), $10,300/year roughly, we have $10,300 + X/2 = $43,318 to see what the top of the “wage earners” might earn. That’s $76,336!

Hmmmmm, again.

But the honorable brotherhood of newsmen would never tell us anything but Gospel truth, and the folks at D.O.L. also say 75,609,000 folks live on wages or salaries, too. 2,073,983 of them make more than $200,000 a year – remember? So, 73,535,017 of these folks make less than $200,000. If that “median” income is the statistical middle between 200,000 and 10,300 (it is), we have 200,000 + 10,300/2 = 105,150

We also have another of those “Hmmmmms.” “Stupid or evil,” Opa used to say – “dumb or a liar.”

Let’s go fetch that $865,380,000,000 that’s supposed to be the nation’s non-corporate tax revenue, see what it can tell us about these “wage earners.” $865,380,000,000/75,609,000 = $114,450 each. That’s an average, remember . . .
Yup – another “Hmmmmm!” Remember that “top fifty percent?” Well the “top” would mean half of those 75,609,000 souls the government says live on wages – 37,805,500. They, according to Mr. Limbaugh – who, being a knight of the fourth estate, also - would never lie to us – paid 96.03 percent of that $865,380,000,000 “non-corporate” tax revenue. That would be $831,020,000,000, and since 37,805,700 “rich” paid that each of the hard-working rich paid $21,981(!).

Did I say “Hmmmmmmm?” Do I have to say again that nothing adds up?

Well it IS federal, you know – Washington? The U.S. Congress? You expect anything to add up? These are the same guys who swear they thought when we marched into Baghdad that the Iraqi people would welcome us with carpets of strewn roses. The same intelligence geniuses who knew there were weapons of mass destruction (hell, we didn’t then even have a good definition of the expression), in Iraq, too – and the same tactical geniuses who knew exactly how to win the war.

Hell, they even thought they had: “mission accomplished” – remember? You expect anything these morons figure and calculate to add up? Have some more hay.

While you’re chewing, take, for instance (don’t you wish you could?) that $380,000,000,000 U.S. corporations supposedly paid. Ask yourself right off the bat why the corporations, who live entirely off the taxpayers in the first place, should pay only $380,000,000,000/$1,200,000,000,000 = 32% of the nation’s tax bill.

Think again about why a Bill Gates or Warren Buffet would pay the same fine for speeding as would I.

Next, having considered as a “for instance” that structure of traffic fines again, see if you can still tell yourself that U.S. corporations pay any taxes at all. If the nation’s legal system right down to traffic court is rigged to favor the rich outrageously, why would the tax system be any different? See if you can think of a way, under present tax law to make a corporation – the rich always incorporate, you know - pay taxes. How do you stop XYZ Corporation – an oil company, for instance - from handing any tax he pays back to those who must buy his product?

Who do you think actually pays the corporations’ taxes?

While you’re “seeing,” see if you can think of a way to make a corporation share in the tax that is inflation due federal spending. You realize, of course, that it’s the corporations who get most of the goods and services the government buys with the national debt, don’t you? Ask yourself why it is, that with a war going on and families of working class citizens across the nation contributing their sons and daughters to the war effort, the corporations contribute absolutely nothing from which they don’t reap huge – obscenely so - profits. If our soldiers, sailors, marines, and airmen can be asked to contribute their limbs and lives, why shouldn’t the military industrial complex and their stockholders?

Want to talk about those “equal under the law” traffic fines, again?

There are approximately 105 million households in the U.S. – using census data, that’s 282 million of the 300 million who are known to be here (illegal aliens amount to another 20 million). Of the 105 million households, 25% are single member households while the remaining 75% have two or more members. Those between the ages 18 and 65 make up the bulk of the population (61%), and there are 78 million - 26% - who are under 18, and 39 million – 13% - who are over 65.

Five percent – 15 million – earn more than $100,000/year. Getting confused?

That’s exactly what people like Mr. Limbaugh and Mr. Williams are paid to do; and god help them, should they quit and begin telling the truth. Four percent of U.S. citizens have accumulated a million dollars net worth; you get one guess concerning how that happened. Remind yourself that only 30 percent of U.S. citizens make more than $50,000 per year.

The IRS and Department of Labor – even “federal writers” like Limbaugh and Williams – tell us that the “average taxable income” of the millionaires is $131,000.

WHAT? They make $1,000,000, but only $131.000 is taxable? If you’re puzzled, stop chewing that hay a minute and think about a tax code comprised of 65,000 pages, written in language impossible to interpret meaningfully by anyone. If any writing ever represented a fair meaning of the term incomprehensible, the U.S. Tax Code is it. Year after year, for decades, the best accountants and tax preparers in the nation – including the IRS itself – have not been able to interpret uniformly its inconsistent, nonsensical, and convolute language and diction. At one point several years ago, a tax return with exactly the same information on it was sent to seventeen different offices of the IRS. The nations’ Internal Revenue Service computed seventeen different amounts of tax due.

Seventeen identical returns, seventeen distinctly different “taxes due” computed.

Why would that be? It is clearly and indisputably a fact that under our system of law no law incapable of uniform interpretation is constitutional, a doctrine of law that has been affirmed and re-affirmed almost countless times. Neither is any contract incapable of uniform interpretation – “meeting of the minds” – enforceable at law.

Why would the tax law of any nation – much less, this one – be incomprehensible? Shall we talk about the traffic fines again?

Any law made incomprehensible by its maker leaves the one who wrote it (or the one who enforces it; voila – the same people!) being the only one capable of saying what the law is. Why, in a nation where a multi-billionaire pays the same fine for traffic violation as someone working for minimum wage, would that be? Cui Bono? Who would have the wherewithal to provide for such a thing? Who would have so much influence in the halls of government?

Who pays the taxes? Taxes make government rich – who in the hell has always paid for that?

"That’s Because You’re Stupid!”

Controlled Demolition Theory and Uncontrolled Spending Theory - TweedleDee & TweedleDum.

During recent exchanges with the literally dozens of persons exploiting for profit the September 11, 2001 attack on the World Trade Center, the name Jim Hoffman appears regularly and prominently. Hoffman, as nearly as I have been able to determine by way of Wikipedia, his own Websites, and others is what some – he and others in that field - call a “software engineer.”

What is a “software engineer?” Well, while Hoffman has, indeed, been successful in developing computer software capable of providing visualization of certain mathematical functions, namely minimal surfaces, there is active debate among engineers concerning use of the professional designation “computer engineer.” According to Wikipedia and its contributors, typical attempts at formal definition of “software engineering” are: (1) "The application of a systematic, disciplined, quantifiable approach to the development, operation, and maintenance of software;” (2) "An engineering discipline that is concerned with all aspects of software production;" and (3) "The establishment and use of sound engineering principles in order to economically obtain software that is reliable and works efficiently on real machines."

The U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics classifies “computer software engineers,” together with “computer scientists,” “programmers,” and “network administrators,” as a subcategory of "computer specialists.” In the United Kingdom, the “specialsts” include and are called “Information Technology Professionals” and “Engineering Professionals.” Software engineering in Canada, according to Wikipedia, has seen some contests in the courts over the use of the title "Software Engineer."

Hoffman is a computer programmer.

More, and whatever Hoffman is professionally, any review of his productions concerning the World Trade Center attack soon make the reader aware that the gentleman is not above the use of amibiguity when it favors his argument, his point of view, or his personal agrandizement. “Software engineer” doesn’t in the remotest sense, on the other hand, make him qualified to hold forth on the World Trade Center attack, especially where supposed “controlled demolition” of the towers is concerned. I might in order to elucidate my meaning add that as a professional forensic investigator of twenty three years experience, I am technically and professionally far more qualified to make an investigation of the kind Hoffman purports to make or has made.

Further in that regard – and incidentally - in mathematics, a “minimal surface” is one with a mean curvature of zero. Examples of minimal surfaces are catenoids, helicoids, and the like. A “catenoid,” by the way, is described as “a three-dimensional shape made by rotating a catenary curve around the x axis. Put two wire circles in a soap solution, then slowly draw them apart, and surface tension will form a catenoid surface between them. Were one able to twist far enough in opposite directions the two wire hoops, he could make a helicoid – a kind of extended helix. An hour-glass shape, in other words. Computer programs – and people who like to play with soap bubbles, of course – can distort manifolds of all kinds into minimal surface shapes. Minimal surface shapes or manifolds can be described mathematically by coordinates on a graph, usually in the “x” and “y” form, into which one plugs numeric values, and a “parameterized” pair of equations are those which permit definition of points on a graph in terms of yet another arbitrary variable, usually “t.” Parametric equations, in short, are functions which permit one to use arbitrary values, called – mirabile dictu! – “parameters,” in place of the independent variables which in turn provide values for a dependent variable.

Not exactly rocket science. Physics, or forensic science, either. For years as a youth, endeavoring to understand Einsteinian physics, I myself practiced mental visualization of catenoids morphing into helicoids, and vice versa (among other examples of the same “manifold morphing”). In fact, it’s high school stuff, especially the math.

This guy is an engineer like Dr. Laura Ingraham is a doctor. Not quite, actually. The great, conservative talk radio political pundit does have a doctorate in something – art, I think (law, it turns out).

At any rate, I have just a few minutes ago dispatched the following e-mail to Mr. Hoffman:

Mr. Hoffman;

I find your "Text for slide presentation, The Twin Towers Demolition, by Jim Hoffman," together with what seems to be publications concerning the same, most interesting.

Why not have a public debate on the matter, you and I? We could even do it by means of the Web: a website specially intended for the purpose.

I, in other words, challenge you, sir. How about it?

H.A.L. von Luebbert

P.S. I will begin publishing this and my challenge to you on my website and the several to which I subscribe.

Of course, Hoffman won’t respond. He has no business in a debate with anyone more informed than the people he exploits for dollars, a fact demonstrated eminently by the caliber and quality of the dissertation to which I made reference in my e-mail. Its author would get a C or less in a high school physics class (which, it happens, I once taught only a few years ago). More, he isn’t interested in proving anything. He is interested in the lucrative business of exploiting the ignorant, something also made apparent by the staggering number of errors in his recorded presentations.

That is something that singularly pisses me off, as the reader may have gathered.

The wonder of all this – and I confess more puzzlement in this regard than with anything else in question here – is that he manages to evade or avoid the obvious. I mean challenges like mine. Any competent construction engineer would tear his nonsensical pronouncements concerning the WTC towers construction and matters so related to pieces. Any airline pilot, aeronautical engineer, or aviation expert would mangle his claims concerning the aircraft, as would anyone who has investigated aircraft crashes and related failures. Any metallurgist – Hoffman must be the cause of much mirth among these people – knows better than the bilge being pumped by this charlatan fraud and his ilk. And it goes on in like fashion where logicians might be concerned – one inconsistency, non sequitur, and irrelevant conclusion after another.

And that brings me to something of a great deal more importance than the ubiquitous and inevitable “capitalist” who, like those who a few years ago sold “pet rocks” to empty-headed faddists, seeks to exploit the tragedy on “9-11.” People like Jim Hoffman, in other words, have come to personify something that has for a long time continually puzzled me (the social sciences, so called – history, psychology, sociology, anthropology and the like – have obsessed me during most of my lifetime), resembling another kind of spurious pundit, today’s politician and the execrable media who serve him. Day after frustrating day, these supposed mental giants spew verbal garbage, malaprop upon solecism, logical fallacy upon innumerate and mathematical pratfall, all swimming in a witch’s brew of outright falsehood.

How do they get away with it? How the hell have these painfully obvious mental mediocrities gained wide, even national, appeal - appeal sufficient to permit them to come to leadership and celebrity in a nation as once great as the United States of America?!

It all reminds me of the Beatles. The first time I heard the “Fab Four,” I had just come back from a mission wherein I was damned near killed. At a relative’s home for the Christmas holiday, one of my friend’s children was playing “their music.” It was bad, damned near intolerable, such that I could only assume the group playing – and, sort of, singing – was that of Sandy’s high school classmates. Imagine my surprise to learn that a foursome of long-haired, barely-able-to-play-at-all musicians had captivated a continental, even world-wide, audience. They were millionaires, by dint of having sold figurative tons of utter garbage – musically speaking.

It was, of course, the time of “Naked Came the Stranger,” “Fabian” (the singer – sort of [he was so bad his voice had to be electronically “doctored”), “pet rocks,” and – co-incidence? – the CIA and U.S. Federal Government program called Project MOCKINGBIRD. I shouldn’t have been surprised. The objective of MOCKINGBIRD, after all, was to deceive, confuse, and stupefy the people of the United States - having seen the theory developed for political reasons, the corporate capitalist could, apparently, not resist its exploitation elsewhere.

Have you ever read a Harry Potter Novel, really listened to “popular” music (consider that for a moment – how is something that lasts two weeks then is forgotten popular compared to music played and listened to for centuries?)? Do it! – and learn the power of the MOCKINGBIRD, “big lie,” propagandist media turned commercial.

Consider its original originators and the corollary they represent. Consider public education in the U.S., in other words - the elementary, grammar, and high schools of the republic, those chiefly - but not necessarily exclusively - maintained at the public expense. Consider, in other words, the horrendous record of chicanery and imbecile stupidity, of wasted money, picayune parochial politics and otherwise criminal false pretenses. Consider the very theory behind that of public education, a Brobdingnagian boondoggle that costs the U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions each year, in order – from the corporate government’s point of view – to manufacture voters “stunned, stupefied, a brother to the ox” (to quote from Markham’s ‘Man with a Hoe’).” And, in order, in turn, to somehow safeguard a virtual-only “democracy” made up of an electorate so stupid that it will buy for a pet a stone (or patronize “Naked Came the Stranger” compositions like that of the Jim Hoffman and his “controlled demotion” of the World Trade Center theory).

The state and condition of the education system of the U.S., in point of everywhere-evidence fact, is a microcosm of the nation, a kind of motley menagerie comprised of talented, dedicated – even brilliant - teachers, governed by a hopelessly mindless system stupidly – or evilly; you can never be sure, can you? - dedicated to reducing the nation’s children to similarly mindless consumerism. U.S. “education” has now, in fact, become a system of behavioral conditioning; and as such it is a societal and national Judas goat, leading the sheep-like nation to economic and political slaughter.

Time was – when I was there, for instance – that even a high school class generally representative of the nation would have laughed a Jim Hoffman and his puerile productions off the stage. But it’s not funny now. Prosecutors and defense attorney’s the caliber of this secular Elmer Gantry have put literally hundreds – probably thousands, even tens of thousands – of innocent men in jail. Teachers and professors like this have graduated from college people who couldn’t read and write. A nation now subsisting mentally on bloviating balderdash like that being peddled by WTC “controlled demolition” theorists (god – talk about a solecism!) and their counterparts in government, education, and the national structure of the U.S. had produced military leaders of the kind that led us into a strategic and tactical Little Big Horn like Iraq.

My god, people, another “9-11” “theorist” named Bush has talked you into surrendering the right of habeas corpus! Because terrorists knocked down one building and killed three thousand of three hundred million people!

While you’ve been oblivious in your addict’s nodding, he and people like him have stolen nine point eight trillion dollars of your country’s – that’s your – money. They have slick-talked you into almost every nitwit nostrum of a social program conceivable – thank god most people in Congress are only a little brighter than you are – by the mind of evil man. You not only believe a Jim Hoffman when he says the government (or anyone, for that matter), without notice by a city of people the size of New York City, somehow managed to prepare for controlled demolition two buildings the size of the World Trade Center towers, you believe a government telling you that while it can build a four lane, divided, highway from coast to coast, it can’t close the Mexico border with a fence.

It can find money sufficient to pay for fourteen nuclear aircraft carriers and sixty-five nuclear submarines, but it can’t find the money for a god-damned fence? It can go to the moon, land, and return, learn the physical composition of the rings of Saturn, the asteroid belt, and the like, but not detect a Mexican outlaw when he crosses the border or find him once he has reached any of our cities? The U.S. can hit with a missile a rock flying past Jupiter, bring back sand from the moon, but it can’t spot illegal aliens entering the country by the horde, or catch them?

The conspiracy theorists – theory, hell; these people don’t just theorize, they steal – who are also your U.S. Congress and President spend your money – eighty million dollars from 1981 to 1984 - for things like “Health Care Financing Administration for Medicaid payments to psychiatrists for ‘unscheduled, coincidental meetings with patients’ who just happened to be attending basketball games, watching strippers, sitting on stoops, and the therapeutic like.

They have money for a two million dollar police patrol car – “the Law Enforcement Assistance Administration received two million dollars for a prototype police patrol car that was never completed. The car was loaded with gadgets and would have cost fifty thousand dollars each.”

The Congress’ Office of Education found funds for spending two hundred, twenty thousand dollars to develop a curriculum to teach college students how to watch television. How’s that for higher education you’re always talking about?

Then there was the one, point two million the Environmental Protection Agency spent to preserve a Trenton, NJ sewer as a historical monument.

Social security, we’re told by our representatives (they’re representative, all right; representative of frauds like the Jim Hoffman conspiracy theorists and George W. Bush protection racket peddlers – that social security is in trouble. Not enough money. But the Congress’ National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism can get millions of your dollars in order to find out if drunken fish are more aggressive than sober ones, if young rats are more likely than adult rats to drink booze in order to reduce anxiety, and if rats can be systematically turned into alcoholics. That’s millions, mind you.

To bad those Iraq vets in Building Eighteen at Walter Reed weren’t drunken fish or rats.

In the movie, “The Mask of Zorro,” when a Spanish soldier hornswoggled by a ruse perpetrated by the future Zorro and his brother utters a surprised exclamation, Zorro Antonio Banderas replies, “That’s because you’re stupid . . .” You, John Q. Citizen, have bought all this because, like that soldier, you’re stupid.

Anybody who will buy the “9-11,” “controlled demolition” theory will buy the government we have, too.

The CIA, the Riddler, "Limited Hangout," and "Seek Ye the Truth . . ."

Torture - mind & body - in the Home of the Brave.

The natives seem to have gotten restive again, inasmuch as my e-mail has become replete with objection after objection, comment after comment, and question after question concerning what I’ve had to say regarding the World Trade Center and “9-11.” However often I remind readers that my principle interest in the horror story of September 11, 2001 is not the matter itself, but how the public reasons and debates concerning it and issues the like, it is all to no avail. Once a small mind has decided it knows something, it won’t change; and matters like the WTC remind me of something columnist Sidney Harris once said:

“Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one.”

Now that I think of it, Harris also observed that ignorance itself is not nearly as dangerous as ignorance of ignorance. Stupidity, like insanity, often prevents its victim from realizing that something is amiss, let alone helping himself.

One thing most salient where the WTC debate is concerned is that, whereas in every other instance where I have anything to say critical of the left I am a neo-conservative three clicks to the right of Attila the Hun, and I am a bleeding-heart liberal whenever I say anything negative concerning the right, I am criticized roundly from both extremes where the World Trade Center attack is concerned.

Interesting, what?

During all my commentary on issues like anthropogenic global warming (and pollution – why the two things are never mentioned in the same context strikes me as very suspicious), the war in Iraq, “9-11,” and the like, I have discussed again and again the indisputable, widely published, fact of Operation Mockingbird. Operation Mockingbird, for those who haven’t been too obsessed during their lives with matters like “9-11,” is the Central Intelligence Agency operation by which the federal government seized and maintains control of the nations’ media and information. Operation Mockingbird was, by no mere co-incidence, born during the same CIA administrations as programs like MKULTRA, MKCHAOS, and others the infamous like – all aimed at what a Fletcher School instructor would one day term “the necessity . . . “to deceive, confuse, and bewilder the U.S. public” . . . “in order to both maintain law and order, and provide for national security.”

As the 1973 Church Hearings disclosed, the government of the Land of the Free has been intensely interested – one might fairly say “devoted” – to control of the public’s mind and, therefore, functioning as a democracy - since the end of World War Two.

“Project CHATTER” was instigated by the US Navy late in 1947. Project Chatter was directed toward identifying agents both synthetic and natural - anabasis aphylla (an alkaloid), scopolamine and mescaline, among others -.that were effective during interrogation (we don’t torture people, remember?). Fascinatingly enough, the reason given by the Navy for halting the project was “the success of other projects.”

“Waterboarding,” maybe? That was, remember, 1947.

Project BLUEBIRD was a CIA mind control program, for which the U.S. authorized experiments to be conducted by licensed psychiatrists. The experiments sought “means to affect, alter, or destroy the mind by creating new identities, inducing amnesia, inserting hypnotic access codes in subjects' minds, creating multiple personalities, and creating false memories.”

Parenthetically, the research also included placing brain electrodes in people and controlling their behavior from remote transmitters, administering daily dosages of LSD-25 to children for extended periods of time, and using electroconvulsive therapy to erase memories (two U.S Army veterans I assisted during my personal war with the U.S. of America - Land of the Free and Home of the Brave – were victims of “Bluebird” experiments).

Project ARTICHOKE was a CIA project spun off Project BLUEBIRD, this one researching interrogation methods. Artichoke was an offensive program of mind control that gathered together the intelligence divisions of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and FBI. A CIA memo dated January, 1952 puts the lie to any double talk like that concerning “waterboarding,” asking the question, "Can we get control of an individual to the point where he will do our bidding against his will and even against fundamental laws of nature, such as self preservation?" ARTICHOKE studied hypnosis, forced addiction to morphine and other chemicals, subsequent forced (“cold turkey”) withdrawal, among other methods, to produce amnesia and other vulnerable states in the Home of the Brave’s victims.

“Cold Turkey” from morphine, heroine, or cocaine addictions isn’t torture? Do tell!

In 1953 (April 20), ARTICHOKE became Project MKULTRA. Project MKULTRA was the new code name for CIA mind-control research programs. Let’s not forget that ironically the CIA – Central Intelligence Agency – was, in turn, the new agency of the military industrial complex corporations who were in the process of seizing control of the U.S.

Digraphs like MK, incidentally, designate responsibility for various CIA programs and operations. “MK” means the agency's Technical Services Division, followed by the arbitrary dictionary word ULTRA. My own code name was at one time AMSHRIKE. “AM” indicated operations against Cuba; later, matter of fact, when operations against Fidel Castro were given the same name as that which arose from my SWAT concept – it was originally dubbed cynically by the dis-believing, “the Mongoose Trick” – a CIA officer came up a preposterous story in order to cover the fact. In my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” I observed:

“Nevertheless, the Company is the Company. When it was somehow obliged to explain why the plot to kill Fidel Castro was code named Mongoose a few years ago, the CIA reported that a colonel named Lansdale had randomly selected the letters for unused cryptonym letters in the agency’s code lexicon. As I pointed out to my son during the time his therapy included writing to me, the odds against that being coincidence were about the same as the odds against randomness of selection. I explained to Aaron that the number of eight letter arrangements, words, that Lansdale could have picked from the alphabet is the mathematical combination 26C8 = 26!/8!(26-8)! = 1,526,275. Only one of those possible words is “mongoose,” and there are 8!/4!3! = 280 ways to arrange those letters, making the probability of random selection equal to 1,562,275 times 280, or 437,440,000 to one.”

For other examples of CIA cryptonyms, go to:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIA_cryptonym

Project MK-ULTRA became famous when in 1973, the U.S. Congress in the form of the Senator Frank Church Committee and a presidential commission known as the Rockefeller Commission published fourteen reports on U.S. intelligence agencies, their operations and abuses of the law and of power they had committed. The Church committee and Rockefeller Commission were the precursor to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, a “limited hangout” by the U.S. Congress and White House, intended at the deception by confusion and bewilderment of the U.S. public Project MKULTRA had sought in the first place. Although the CIA subsequently insisted that MKULTRA-type experiments had been abandoned, recent events not only betray the CIA and federal government “limited hangout” that was the Church Hearings, they make the one-time observation of James J Angleton, now deceased former CIA Director of Counter-Intelligence, still meaningful:

“Deception,” Angleton observed, “is a state of mind. And deception is the mind of the state.”

“We do not torture,” President Bush declared recently in Panama City, that in response to reports of secret CIA prisons overseas, and the use of “techniques” like “waterboarding.” “We don’t torture . . .” not unless you mean the language. Anybody remember Orwell? “Newspeak?” How about “doublespeak?”

Well their motto IS, “Seek ye the truth . . .,” and the Church report says, “Drugs were used primarily as an aid to interrogations, but MKULTRA/MKDELTA materials were also used for harassment, discrediting, or disabling purposes.”

Need I add emphasis?

Now’s a good time to remind yourself again of that “We don’t torture” quote by the honorable George W. Bush, President of the Land of the Free, and the Home of the Brave. “Drugs were used primarily . . . for disabling purpose.” Not torture.

If you can believe that, and still believe you haven’t been affected by your deceiving government’s efforts to control your mind and opinion, you are proof positive of what you refuse to believe.

Let’s also recall – it’s in that “limited hangout” record, even – that those 1975 “hearings” also disclosed attempts to assassinate foreign leaders like Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, Rafael Trujillo of the Dominican Republic, the Diem brothers of Vietnam, Gen. René Schneider of Chile; and, of course President John F. Kennedy's plan to use the Mafia to kill Fidel Castro of Cuba. Outright murder, but not torture.

May I ask why none of us has heard – not once - through all of today’s “waterboarding” dialectic, nothing about the infamous “School of the Americas?” How is it that during all the discussion of “interrogation techniques,” no one has mentioned the CIA’s KUBARK? "KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation," to be more specific. “Counterintelligence Interrogation” describes techniques including, among other things, "coercive counterintelligence interrogation of resistant sources". This 1963, Home of the Brave manual, describes “we don’t torture” methods like electric shock, and – big surprise here – “waterboarding.”

If I mention again Project MOCKINGBIRD, do you think you’ll recognize anything familiar? No, I don’t suppose – another proof of validity where what I’m saying here is concerned.

Remember “limited hangout?” A “limited hangout” is a deception, misdirection, or cover-up involving "mea culpa" type confession of a small part of previously secret information, that in order to establish credibility for the one “fessing up.” By releasing the information the person or group confessing appears to be "coming clean" – even acting with integrity; while in actuality he withholds the truly damning, critical, and indictable facts of deeper crime in order to protect himself and/or those who could be exposed were whole truth to be revealed. “Limited hangout” is typically a responsive effort intended to lower the heat being raised by investigators pursuing evidence that threatens to expose something like MKULTRA.

That includes the torture of our own soldiers - or have you forgotten already?

The “limited hangout” is all but invariably combined with distractions, miss-directions, subterfuges, red herrings, and other propaganda techniques; and if you’re astute enough to be thinking about the Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle, and their haranguing harpy sisters’ “rape of the day,” or lurid celebrity news - bilgewater garbage concerning such nationally critical figures as Britney Spears - you may be catching on. The “hangout” also leads to false trails, distractions, or ideological disinformation - all, of course, intended to permit the government and/or its agency to continue their nefarious activities.

A former CIA agent, one Victor Marchetti, wrote in the seventies: "A 'limited hangout' is spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting - sometimes even volunteering - some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

I hope you’re paying attention, attention sufficient to recognize those “clandestine professionals” as the military industrial complex and its current crop of “assets” otherwise known as the U.S. Congress.

It was during the same time as MKULTRA – you DO remember what that was intended to accomplish? – that Project MOCKINGBIRD was launched. MOCKINGBIRD was designed to do to the nation’s mind just what MKULTRA and its spin-offs were designed to do to mind and mentality of the individual. MOCKINGBIRD, like MKULTRA and all the rest, had its “spin-offs,” too - Project NORTHWOODS, for instance.

It happens that Chris, a friend who is CEO of a domestic security agency, asked succinctly (“What do you know about . . .?”) today what I knew of Operation Northwoods. My reply (paraphrased slightly for privacy and security [why the general reader never relates those two, either – speak loudly concerning the tactics, purpose, and success of MOCKINGBIRD]) was as follows:

“There were three. The first had to do with infiltration into the U.S. (at first Alaska, then we realized the Soviets weren't interested much in Alaska but in a kind of “outpost” maneuver area – practice, that is, for infiltration of Spetsnaz into the continental U.S.). We already knew (Senator Joseph McCarthy [for whom a friend of mine named Chichester did covert ops]) about "the Trust" - Soviet agents who were the children of immigrants here from Russia right after the revolution and now insinuated into all levels of our government and military). The idea was to covertly (we did) hunt down both Spetsnaz and "Trust" agents and kill them.

“That, as you know, was one of the things I was recruited and trained to do.

“The second Operation ‘Northwoods’ (1961) was the CIA ‘lemonade from lemons’ operation intended to use the original Soviet operation as an excuse to justify the same kind of operations by the CIA (and U.S. Government) against the U.S. public, partially by ‘limited hangout,’ partially as part of Operation Mockingbird – pretend, in other words, that the media were part of Soviet "Trust" ops against the U.S. and rid the government of people in the media still desirous of reporting the truth. ‘Deceive, confuse, and bewilder’ (the way a Fletcher School "wonk" put it), in order to achieve control of the U.S. public impossible (according to the Fletcher School man) by using conventional - law and police - methods.

“Several operations were, in turn, ‘spun off’ Northwoods, one being the Nixon Administrations Sandwedge (remember Daniel Ellsburg?) and others in turn spun off that (the Reagan White House’s variation on the Soviet Union’s ‘disinformation,’ for instance. COINTELPRO, for another instance, was FBI - but it used agents (‘narcs,’ for instance), plans, NSA technology, plans, etc. from Mockingbird and Northwoods.
“Northwoods Three, you might call it, started with the FISA (1978 - actually begun in 1975), and has thus far culminated in the Patriot Act. Interesting about this is the fact that while the public (foremost, all the Web blabberers) are concerned with the first level of the eavesdropping ("limited hangout" working exactly as intended), the real threat is the Northwoods effect. Access to your private actions, thoughts, etc - permits the government to sow massive confusion ("deceive, confuse," etc) in one's life and associations. They can, for instance, relatively easily make any group spastic, ineffective in its operations.

“It's fascinating that you should have asked this THIS morning. Rita and I discussed it all the way home from having visited her folks during the weekend. When a guy on TagWorld last night defended federal eavesdropping - cameras everywhere - I wrote him a note to reflect that I wished he could have walked a while in my shoes while the government was even using Northwoods techniques and technology to interfere with ATM transactions whenever I tried to get cash (it ruined, made impossible, my last "gig" for Smith Legacy Security, matter of fact).

“Amigo, I have to stop right here with any more Northwoods or Mockingbird discussion because certain parts of it are still classified information I got during my covert retaliation against the government’s tapping of my phones, burglarizing my house, etc.. Next time I see you, I'll fill you in on everything I know (which is damned near all of it, right down to names of some of the people).

“Hal”

Before I could conclude with my discussion of MKULTRA-like projects like Operation Mockingbird, Operation Northwoods, and the others, my friend Chris brought me up short with another question. He asked about “Loose Change,” a Website reaping the capitalist rewards of public sensation related “9-11” and the World Trade Center. I wrote:

“Chris,

“Loose Change is utter balderdash, more of the opportunist stuff intended to exploit “9-11” for money. I've written a great deal about it all, inasmuch as each new Web forum I go to invariably has a new cult worshipping the gods of conspiracy theory. I've also written a lot about it on my site www.judoknighterrant.com "Mongoose Trick" opinion page.

“The latest dialogue has been on TagWorld, another place from which I've gotten massive amounts of sociological, psychological, and statistical data concerning this sort of Northwoods and Mockingbird control of public opinion and mentality.

“Rita and I are as a matter of fact discussing how one might combat by way of education federal seizure of the public's mind and opinion. That's due the fact that so much of the Mockingbird, Northwoods, Sandwedge, MKCHAOS federal operations against the public, our collective thought processes, and our democratic form of government depend upon and are intended to create and ensure ignorance in the form of abject inability to reason effectively on one's own behalf.

“The Mockingbird and Northwoods people - and the people they have in turn deceived - spread rumor. When any of the conspiracy theorists on the Web can be persuaded to so much as attempt (most have no real idea how to do that) to document his claims, he refers you invariably to another site which does the same thing he is doing - like "Loose Change," for instance. You can't obtain a single piece of hard, mathematical, scientific, or logical data - just more pompous, pontificating and bloviating hearsay. I have checked each and every claim made by "Loose Change" and others: not a single fact that holds up against scientific and forensic investigation. Not one!

“Oh, now and then something sounding scientific is woven through the cloth of it all, but always it is a law of physics or the like that is logically detached from the subject domain of discourse - an irrelevant conclusion, in other words. Josef Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, wrote a great deal about it all, you know. ‘In effective propaganda,’ he said, ‘there must always appear a grain of truth. You must, of course, speak to the stupidest in your audience, because others will quickly see that what you prove is really irrelevant to your topic.’ There's more, but each time I look at the “controlled demolition” delusion, I think of Goebbels and Hitler.

“Adolf, you know, said, ‘If you would move the broadest mass of any people, you must tell them the biggest and stupidest lies. The people will fall prey more easily to a big lie than to a little one.’ The difference here is that massive communication technology like the Web lets each person the propagandists have hornswoggled become yet another propagandist – and, unlike heretofore in history, the exponential succession of dupes results in a really massive propaganda effort.”

I signed the letter before remembering what intelligence people refer to as a “false flag.” A “false flag” operative is one who appears to be one thing while indeed being another. False flag operations are those conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, and are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by someone other than the deceivers. The “false flag” appears to be doing one thing while he is in reality doing another. Pretty simple.

Pretty simple until you realize that the “false flag” may not realize that he, too, is being deceived. Among the false flag operatives like those of Project MOCKINGBIRD and NORTHWOODS are those referred to as “pull-toy” and “wind-up” (toy) “assets.” The “pull-toy” is an individual so easily led - so far right or left wing, for instance – that he can be made to do things detrimental to his own cause, simply by virtue of his zealous need to act, to DO something. The “wind-up” is another “false flag” extremist, this one so demented by the fervor of his creed that he can be triggered into action merely by the excitement of someone ranting like he, himself, does.

If that, again, reminds anyone of the “controlled demolition” theorists declaiming about the World Trade Center and “9-11,” you are far removed from those of your countrymen who are being duped by both the “Loose Change” theorists and their brethren, and the U.S. Government who is, in turn, duping them (and the nation).

So. We have a primer in that deception that is the mind of the state. A primer, however, will serve only to alert those well-intentioned and caring enough about their country to realize that they have been victimized by that “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” tactic I spoke of earlier here. The “craft of intelligence,” as it has been called, is one like that of crime detection, forensic medicine, physical science, mathematics, propositional logic, epistemology, or the like. A little knowledge is a dangerous – often self-destructive – thing, one best left to those who have devoted many years to learning.

It is the stuff from which witch-hunts and lynchings are made.

But there is also an old writing, one called The Book. In it, the man we know as Jesus (not his name, actually – and there’s still another lesson apropos of this one) said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves . . . By their fruits ye shall know them.”

Has anybody checked the fruit – or “fruits” - lately?

Stupid or Evil – “America” and Its Twisted Truth.

"He & She" - In a Nation That's Decided There's No Difference

Many years ago, a student of Dr. Stewart Holcomb at the University of Iowa, I wrote this in a research paper that would one day become the blueprint for what we now call the SWAT team: “Any purely logical analysis of tactical concerns where hostage (and armored car seizure and/or robbery) situations are concerned must be characterized by recognition of its own strengths and weaknesses. Strengths include rigidly objective examination and emotional distancing from the event. Weaknesses may on the other hand also include over-objectification of the incident or event in question, with inherent loss of that emotionally empathic framework of shared meanings necessary for full understanding. “Get knowledge, indeed – but above all, get understanding.”

Quite a mouthful, but each evening of late as we sit watching the “boob tube” in fascinated astonishment, simply amazed at the singularly monumental stupidity of the nation’s leaders (my god – the shear mediocrity of these people is appalling!), pundits, and “personalities,” I remember it.

And, witness, my last observation there, I can’t help parenthetical reflection that some of these media and politician “personalities” have all the personality of a robot.

Which, of course, is what they effectively are. Ratiocination – logical thinking – seems a thing totally foreign to any of them. From the mindless recitation of jargon solecisms like “issues” – we’re still laughing over Katie Couric’s Little Annie Fannie bubblehead remark that she was having “issues in bed” – to bimbo-babble like that being blabbered nowadays by whatever miniskirt promising a panty or pussy “flash” happens to strategically occupy the center of the television screen, we have tabloid tripe served up in mind-numbing Orwellian hate-rally fashion by people like Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberley Guilfoyle, and their Jezabel like.

Thanks to the militant feminists of the PMS-hysterical sixties, the nation and its media – the latter striving mightily to behaviorally condition the former – lives in what is only virtual reality, a reality constructed of and determined almost entirely by words. “Let’s talk,” the distaff side of any relationship from couple to nation always says – “We need to communicate.”

And talk we do, from the specious and petty intellectualism that spawned the feminist psycho-blabber of a few years ago, to the mindless bimbo-babble I spoke of a minute ago. It is enough to make archetypical men like my grandfather roll over in their graves. While the Titanic that is the U.S. ship of state bears down hard on the iceberg that is economic, ecosystem, military, and political leadership collapse, we have these haranguing harpies yammering about matters so damned trivial as to rival the vapidity of Marie Antoinette’s infamous “let them eat cake” remark. We’re headed for utter disaster, and half the populace is nattering about women’s “issues” (Aaaargh - that execrable word, again!)

God-a-mighty, girls - shut the hell up, already!

Even worse, even more cancerous to what is the essence of our form of democracy is the now nearly complete devolution of the societal mind represented by the widely held belief inherited from militant feminism that the right to speak somehow lends credibility, even validity, to what any moron may choose to declaim.

Does THAT, by the way, remind any old, married man – perhaps, like a friend of mine, the father of four daughters - of his last heavy discussion with the missus or daughter?

People, the right to speak does not mean what you say is worth anyone’s listening to; more, it sure as hell doesn’t mean you have the further right to demand that anyone listen. A warrior, for instance, I just don’t want to hear what Nancy Pelosi, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, or Condoleeza Rice have to say about military tactics, intelligence, or weapons; and I sure as hell don’t want to be represented among the Arab nations by a diminutive black woman (my god, “America,” you don’t realize how freaky fatuous that is?).

Oh, shit – NOW I’ve done it. Look, I abhor sexism – the real, the viciously stupid thing - as much or more than anyone. Probably because I hate bullying with a passion few who read this will be able to appreciate without having endured what I once did at the hands of those who will use their superior size. strength, or superiority in numbers, to inflict themselves on others weaker, I would smash with the same compunction I’d step on a bug a man who bullies a woman. Rules and laws that prohibit a woman earning the same for performing the same service or doing the same work are just, plain, wrong.

Now, please, go back and read that carefully. Note the emphasis.

And it is also wrong – just as wrong - for a women, by virtue of legislation and the societal sea-change that was generated by insane (that means, I remind you, detached from the reality) feminist hysteria of the sixties and later, to arrogate themselves to positions they cannot possible handle, and to demand pay they can’t possibly earn.

That is sexism, too, you know.

We are in point of thunderously obvious and therefore undeniable, fact watching our business and economic systems dissolve before our very eyes, with corporations on the one hand fleeing the country to escape bizarre social nostrums which include the infamous Title IX which feminists inflicted upon university athletic programs (businesses, I remind you), or being forced to import and hire illegal aliens in order to keep pace with the tax collector who also services this ideologically self-serving crap.

From Sears having been sued by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because more men than women held jobs like selling appliances, to ruling that free drinks and cheap food on “ladies night” was “unlawfully discriminatory,” to ACLU horse manure like threats against public building owners concerning number of women’s toilets, business and the economy in the U.S. have taken a pasting from feminism.

And that’s not to excuse the craven male cowardice that is the only possible explanation for the nation’s pantyhose polemicists to have succeeded in their lemming-like, “I am woman, hear me roar” migration to the implacably natural sea.

Neither is scrofulous feminism’s Typhoid Mary effect on the nation’s business and economy its only effect. Everywhere one looks nowadays, one sees natural sanity under attack where other societal considerations are concerned. Each time feminist lawyers force down the society and nation’s throat another of their ideology’s mindless arguments like that having to do with actual physical and mental gender similarity – another example of reality made entirely of words, that of “equal under the law” having become equal otherwise - the society and nation’s psyche and character take another weakening cut.

The feminist’s “death of a thousand cuts” attack on the national mentality means, for instance, children who no longer realize – have, even, internalized an induced reversal of conceptual gender roles - life facts as basic as the difference between male and female. Imagine being a child in a nation wherein one must actually listen daily to – in fact, be technologically inundated and saturated in - a contentious debate concerning anything so monumentally obvious as the difference between a boy and a girl. While it is stupefyingly incredible that one writing as I do here should have to offer probative refutation concerning anything so primordially basic – and in reality there are too many to enumerate here or even in a shelf-full of books – I offer this archetypical one:

Consider a child made to actually believe Hollywood, television movie fare nonsense like that a one hundred, ten pound slip of a woman knocking the daylights out of several pro-football linemen sized men, a GI Jane, a female U.S. Army Ranger, or U.S. Navy SEAL.

My god, “America” - you really want your kids to believe nonsense like that? You don’t recognize that this claptrap is hurting your children? Think about this: you really want your child to simply accept without thought that employers hiring a men and women with identical skills and utility to their company pay the men more? Just because they are MEN? Tell me, do you really think – free of your own moronically biased indoctrination – that your kids are so stupid they will believe that any one who can buy for less the same product – labor or skill, in this case – will willingly pay more?

YOU may be that stupidity-biased; don’t expect the kids to be.

Let’s change the subject – at least where the societal mental seizure due feminism is concerned. The nation’s nannies and their nitwit nattering aren’t – by far – the only example of ideology run wild to the nation’s detriment. Let’s try another of the country’s mendacious myths and the religion spawned and sprung up around it, that of another “equality.” I speak of rich and poor under the law.

Let one of our clamoring conservative apologists like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, or Rush Limbaugh explain on nationwide television some night how it can be fair that a Bill Gates pays the same fine for speeding as a senior citizen obliged to live on social security. Let me show up some night during O’Reilly’s phony propagandist palaver, to debate his recent excoriation of billionaire Warren Buffet for pointing out that among all the billionaire’s employees, Buffet pays the smallest proportion of his income in taxes.

Incidentally – speaking of spastic ratiocination and thinking – you don’t related things like this and the chaotic mess that is health care and related insurance, the Three Stooges state of education, or the “Girls Gone Wild” bedlam of the national whorehouse on the Potomac? REALLY? There – right there – you may find any proof of my contentions here concerning the national thought processes.

Let’s discuss, too, how under the present scheme of tax things one makes a corporation pay taxes it doesn’t hand – with all the costs for the wherewithal in so doing - immediately back to the consumer. As Ricky Ricardo of the old “I Love Lucy” Show used to say, ‘Splain dat to me, Lucy!” ‘Splain, too, Mr. O’Reilly, on what part of your income you pay that “thirty percent“ you ballyhooed with such ostentatious indignation the other night. “Thirty percent” means absolutely nothing until one know thirty percent of what – and how much “what” represents of your entire income. “No Spin,” huh?

That’s just, plain, stupid – or crooked.

Which brings up another point, one speaking more directly to Operation Mockingbird media of today like FoxNews and its utterly phony and meretricious punditry like the guys I just mentioned. Like all but the very few among the dozens of persons with whom I have debated today’s issue, the media’s supposed experts occupy the airwaves with logic of the kind that seeks to prove a point by destroying the argument of their just as speciously supposed opposition. Seemingly desperate to avoid any presentation of facts tell-tale of their own real purpose or the validity of their position, these muddle-heads resort to what logicians recognize at once as irrelevant conclusion - blissfully unaware, it seems, that by picking apart the opponent’s argument one does not prove the validity of one’s own argument.

Proof that someone is a liar does not prove his is a thief.

Now, one of my fondest memories of my grandfather was his advice that one day I would find the most difficult determination concerning my fellow man to be that of “stupid or crooked.” This is an example of that. Surely, one would think, people promulgated as experts by national news media organizations would not be so stupid as to be unaware of classic logic and the rules of debate. One finds it reasonable to attribute to the typical Website pundit of today simple sloth; too lazy to look up his sources or proof, he resorts to the “everybody knows,” rhetorical ploy, or makes up data and information out of whole cloth (the bald-faced lie, that is).

In a recent exchange having to do with the World Trade Center attack of September 11, 2001, I asked (as I have repeatedly and without remotely reasonable answer) how persons who might have brought the towers down by controlled demolition would have accomplished the Herculean task or preparing for and setting without notice and exposure the literally hundred of charges. I received responses like “invisibility” (no, I am not kidding), and the charges having been placed during construction (no, I’m not pulling your leg about that one, either).

Even more astonishing (and depressing – this is symptomatic of the appalling state public reasoning and dialogue have reached) was one arguer’s assertion – that supported by others on the same site – that his opinion was as good as anyone else’s and shouldn’t, therefore be “attacked.” Think about that one. Of whose argument – which side of the gender divide - style does that remind you?

Once again, in fact, we have the suspiciously spurious attempt to equate the right to speak with validity of the speaker’s opinion. Reality made of words. For conclusive identification, review the rhetoric of militant feminism, circa 1966.

It goes on, this “stupid or evil” conundrum. On CNN – Fox is the federal flagship, but the rest of the media is the fleet - we have a woman – one Dianna(?) West - holding forth on “what is torture?” I stare at the stunningly detached theatricality of it all. The utter, diabolical, absurdity of nonsense like this staggers me. Thirty years old, expensively coiffured, wearing apparel that would, no doubt, cost a “McJob” employee a year’s pay, in her Gucci shoes and wielding her Gucci pen, she’s been reared like a hot-house flower – to tell us about torture!

Some years ago, at the outset of the “women in combat” – strange, isn’t it that even Hitler’s Nazi Germany eschewed stooping so low – fantasia, a woman “expert” lecturing at the Pentagon recommended a “kinder, gentler military – patterned more on the example of the Salvation Army.” In a roomful of what we might have hoped military officers who were men, no one – that’s not one – objected. I spoke earlier of cowardly male capitulation to feminists, didn’t I?

We are, I remind you again, talking about the societal form of schizophrenia that is feminism in the United States. It’s as irrational nationally as any mental disease among individuals, and, since its effects are multiplied by the population of a nation, it’s that much more lethal. You imagine that I exaggerate? Go to this Website – hell, there are hundreds like it – and read. See – assuming you persist in a relatively pre-Orwellian state - the fixated, group-think mentality that has steered us into the chaotic, mentally deranged, non compos mentis state in which we presently find ourselves. Like whatever causes muscular dystrophy in the individual, this kind of diseased hysteria is making our national psychomotor responses spastic.

http://worlddefensereview.com/almabond071405.shtml

Next, considering the “Stupid or Evil” – does anybody remember the “all Cretans (or whatever) lie” conundrum? Check the recent appearance of someone - I started to say “guy;” how the hell do you know, these days – on the Wolf Blitzer, “Situation Room” (who the hell dreams up this Dell Comics schlock?), one Penn Jillette:

“I believe that there is no God. I'm beyond atheism. Atheism is not believing in God. Not believing in God is easy -- you can't prove a negative, so there's no work to do. You can't prove that there isn't an elephant inside the trunk of my car. You sure? How about now? Maybe he was just hiding before. Check again. Did I mention that my personal heartfelt definition of the word "elephant" includes mystery, order, goodness, love and a spare tire?

“So, anyone with a love for truth outside of herself has to start with no belief in God and then look for evidence of God. She needs to search for some objective evidence of a supernatural power. All the people I write e-mails to often are still stuck at this searching stage. The atheism part is easy.”

This wise man, this seer of the society, is of national television caliber?

Think about that. Imagine your interests, your property, the fate of your family, decided by a midget mentality like this. Stop and think that it’s this kind of genius that explains the state of national health care insurance, the absolutely cockamamie arguments and theorizing surrounding it, and a government that supposedly can’t formulate a plan to correct the problem. It’s this kind of genius that explains matters like how we have come to be bemired in a hopeless quagmire – we’re among other things there to “stabilize the region,” don’t forget – like Iraq, and why we have a tax system like that czar-ed and Gestapo-ed over by a monstrosity like Internal Revenue Service.

New Orleans years after Hurricanes Katrina and Rita is as it is on account of leadership like that. For crying out loud, LISTEN to the Penn Jillette candidate-for-president morons as they “debate” (did I happen to mention reality made of it’s-whatever-I-say-it-is words?)

I think - were it not for the Pavlovian state of the booby-hatch bedlam society – I should just say, “I rest my case.” This is – all of it - so logically absurd that it’s “over the top” – such meaningless equivocation and childish (heretofore) word-play” that it beggars description scathing enough.

But, just for fun, let’s see how many of the genius “Americans” who read this knows, can say, why. It’ll tell us a lot about where we are. This Jillette guy appeared on national television, a show that treats with things like the war in Iraq and all manner of societal and national issues, don’t forget.

“But,” Jillette said, “this ‘This I Believe’ thing seems to demand something more personal, some leap of faith that helps one see life's big picture, some rules to live by. So, I'm saying, ‘This I believe: I believe there is no God.’"

There’s an all-star of our Ph.D. Pantheon, for you.

Just for very short rebuttal (in no way intended to deal with the whole matter, but intended to characterize the depth of this CNN sage and sagacity laureate’s brilliance), in order to “believe” (assuming he means “think” – highly unlikely in itself) there is no god, Jillette would have to be able to be everywhere in the universe at once. That applies to his “prove a negative” remark, too.

Jesus! – “stupid or evil?” Say anything, no matter how nonsensical or absurd, and as long as it strikes a chord sympathetic with the cretin listening, it’ll be accepted as wisdom.

Next, we have the once-sycophant State Department employees who are part of the cabal sending young (middle aged, even old; even female – god, that’s despicable) citizens of their country to Iraq, but now waxing indignant because they might have to go where they’re sending others. Do I REALLY have to discuss this? Stupid or evil-wise, I mean? These swine so sicken me I may have to skip my evening whiskey. They do, though, represent a vast number of the public who stand by sheep-like as their Uriah Heap elected representatives watch George W. Bush feed their fellow citizenry into the meat-grinder of Iraq.

Aaaaaaargh! God damn it – I once went to war against outrage by government; I may, even in my dotage, do it again. How can men stand by and let this happen?

I may, I think, have answered my own question there, that when I asked what kind of men it was that capitulated to militant feminism. Abortion, for instance.

Oh, well. Next in news so mountainously portentous that only the dumb-as-a-fence-post could fail to relate it, we are informed that citizens of that utopian paradise known as Mexico are flocking to their own Tabasco state – in order to LOOT flood victims there. Wonderful people! And, according to the CNN’s Cafferty Report, recently, there are already six hundred thousand of this kind – that’s outright, already-convicted Mexican criminals – right here in the U.S. Since we have no way to know, can you help but wonder how many of these wonderful people descended upon New Orleans – or how much of the millions FEMA gave away to anyone willing to steal from the U.S. taxpayer went to people of the kind willing to steal from the drowning?

Next time, let’s talk about the national debt; maybe THAT will wake you up.

I doubt it. With New York’s nitwit governor willing to help illegal aliens with phony identification, and a presidential candidate talking out of both sides of her mouth on the matter, can anyone imagine matters couldn’t be even worse? you’re telling me you’re willing to let this kind of “leadership” rule here? Well, I’ll be damned. “Stupid or crooked.” More and more it’s the crucial question being asked by a nation of people likewise too stupid or evil to do anything but wait to see what happens to their country.

One of those “death by a thousand cut” cuts was obviously castration.

The Body of a Woman Hanging Under a Bridge - the "Land of the Free?"

Note: Where I usually write a blog in twenty minutes, this one has taken three days. No subject has every strained my powers of description where my own emotions are concerned like this one; neither has one ever so appalled me. I’m reminded of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

Seventy-one years of age, having “been everywhere, done everything,” I sat there watching, in a state of mind and body like nothing I’ve ever known before. I thought of the Roman Circus Maximus, of places like Wounded Knee, the Rape of Nanking, of Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and “work” camps associated with the Nazi Holocaust. In the course of this hideous chronicle of human cruelty, I thought of Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Hitler - even Vlad the Impaler. I thought of all the horrific, grisly savagery about which I’ve ever read, heard, or seen, running through my mind, memory, and experience looking for an equal. I was still thinking about it when I went to bed, utterly disgusted – and spent with the exertion of fury trapped inside me with nowhere to go.

In all my roamings about the planet, and they include literally dozens of countries, in all my studies of history, nothing equals this. Nothing – I’ve never seen anything like this.

But WHY? Why be so appalled, so shocked, so stunned, so stupefied? Hell, I have never liked my kind very much, that opinion and emotion having been acquired while still in high school, where I enjoyed a reputation for being a “loner” who preferred his own company. While recovering from polio and ridiculously puny, you see, I was the helpless plaything of local bullies until Spartan, self-imposed training made me too formidable to “mess with.” Nevertheless, the boyhood experience told me all I cared to know about my fellow human being. One day, “called on the carpet” for something cynical I’d said, the principal of my high school, upbraided me for my cynicism. Defiant, I seized the morning paper lying on her desk, oriented it for her to read, and snapped, “You think I should want to be like THAT?”

I don’t know what the headline was, just that it was something of the usual rape, pillage and burn – enough, I said, to tell me that I wanted to be anti-social.

I’ve never liked my species very much. But then, always when confronted with what the poet Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man,” that searing thought: what if I had been one of them? It’s always there, nettling and nagging, when I view something like this “CNN Special Report.” Since first realization of the Holocaust as a boy, I have countless times in my life when confronted with this kind of societal and cultural depravity wondered if, reared among these people, educated and indoctrinated by them, I might have been a member of one of those who herded their fellow human beings into a pit and machine-gunned them.

Now, this night, I agonized over it again. Could I have been a member of these crowds standing under the body of a lynched, burned-alive man?

No, I’ve always concluded – no, goddammit, no way. I have, after all, lived the life I have, one of continual rebellion against my society, my country, and the tendency of my kind to be a bullying, cruel, power-craving, lying son-of-a-bitch. It was always I who incurred the wrath of the crowd with not only the “lust for the truth” for which a teacher once upbraided me, but for my refusal to take part and even endeavor to thwart their schemes and devices. No, I would always satisfy myself, you wouldn’t have gone along. But still, the medusa monster that is doubt lurks in my random thoughts. I always fight it down, bury it.

But this CNN segment was an epiphany, an epiphany starting it all over again.

And as I said, I’ve had my epiphanies, realizations that shook me to my soul. When Beverly, my high school sweetheart and wife, died suddenly of the pregnancy doctors warned against, it was an epiphany, one born of the realization that a religion, the Catholic Church, had with its insane dogmas concerning sex and procreation made me her killer.

Could I do that to another, were I a fundamentalist “Christian,” Moslem, or Jew? An Ayatollah, a Mullah; a Bishop, and Cardinal, a Pope?

I had an epiphany in final realization that I had been betrayed by my country, that it had no more respect for the human and civil rights of the individual than any other of the power-mad, and that it would do murder, rape, and any other bestial crime required to retain its power and wealth. I had an epiphany, too, the first time a bullet went through me, and I realized a man was trying to end my life. Killing someone who’s trying to kill you isn’t the same, incidentally – you know he deserves killing; in fact, in energizing the survival instinct of every creature, he has been his own killer. Added to the shock of that one was the knowledge that it was my own government that was shooting.

Given political or economic power, could I become as contemptuous of my fellow citizen’s life as today’s gentry, the politician and bureaucrat?

I had an epiphany that afternoon when an eight-passenger van raced with tires screaming under acceleration to the crosswalk where I was, to hit me and hurl me on a suborbital flight that reached ten feet above the street and ended sixty- one feet from impact, all while leaving eighty-one feet of skid marks. Realization of the U.S. involvement came only later when “investigating” cops failed to write a summons and deliberately let escape occupants of the van who had leaped from their vehicle to attack me with kicks and blows as I lay stunned and writhing on the street. That’s “epiphany,” in case you’re still considering.

Could I become a sycophant so desirous of his government’s forbearance or favor that I would torment, maim, or murder a man I didn’t even know?

NO; no, no, no! I know, as do many who know me, that I am as a friend once told others, “the most non-judgmental man who ever lived.”

And Walt is a psychologist. He’s right. Back there in the time of real news, back when I still struggled to be sure in my understanding of who, what I am, the newspapers, radio, and history books were enough to provide me insight into the human condition, and why my classmates and others so enjoyed tormenting me while I was easy prey. It was also enough to make me determine that I would prefer to be as unlike the rest of my kind as possible, enough to set me one day on a course I chronicled in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.” In 1987, finally, I had a card printed, left it everywhere I traveled. It said, “Knight Errant – Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody.” On its reverse side, the monograph said, “If you’re in trouble and no else one will help, I will; no strings – just be a good person and don’t lie to me.”

Here, parenthetically, I must make a confession. My story isn’t quite what it may seem. Short of the sex act, you see, I’ve learned that there is nothing like the “high” provided by the successful rescue of another from great peril or difficulty. It’s incredibly fun; so much so that it became for me something of an obsession. And, even if - as a famous actor once observed in a famous movie of the same name, “It is a magnificent obsession” – there is a kind of selfishness in it. Once their victim, I love smash a bully. I love to deprive him of his prey, to teach him what may be the most object lesson of all lessons.

As I said, I left my Knight Errant card everywhere, I helped a lot of people, and the experiences taught me a great more where the human condition is concerned. I saw human depravity in many of its a hideous forms, from pedophilia and cruelty to children to kidnapping for white slavery.

But this! My god – these despicable devils set those men afire while they were still alive! No one, not even the Nazis of Hitler’s Germany, rival these bastards for shear, demonic cruelty. It simply “floored” me. How could I have been so blind, so comatose? All these years, I had despised the Nazis, their Gestapo, and their SS Einsatzgruppen, the swine-ish demons responsible for the Holocaust and the detachments of non-Germans who had hunted their own people for the Nazis. I despised the Germans especially because they were of my own people, my own kind. As a boy, I cringed under the indictment of all things German that was the photos of German soldiers holding pistols to the heads of kneeling Jews, Poles, and others.

Now this! Grinning devils standing under the charred and dangling remains of another human being, their victim a man innocent of any crime, yet lynched.

A woman and her son, raped – presumably even while he was forced to watch – then, mother and son, hanged from a goddamned bridge (oh, god; I wish I could have been there with a machinegun – an axe, even!)

I am a man with a long-standing reputation for the kind of anger to which the poet Dryden referred when he wrote, “Beware the fury of a patient man!” I have a fuse a mile long. But finally angered, I am a terrible enemy (there may be in that something of an explanation – and excuse, even – for the people of Germany before and during WW-11). I have been angry for three days, now – and I am still angry.

“To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue,” Eighteenth Century Statesman Edmund Burke said. Well, sir, what words are suited for this? I am inadequate in that regard, grossly so.

I strive here to pack into my words as much emotion as possible. In so doing, however, I must also confess – again – that I don’t do this just for that lynched woman and her son, or for all those men, or for black Americans generally. Oh, no – their suffering, largely – let us not for one minute doubt that the evil responsible for what I rage against still lurks in the hearts of men - has passed. We can only expiate ourselves with that woman and her son and with all the others like them by assuring that they are never forgotten by the nation who - like I – stood seemingly unconscious, indolently and fecklessly, by while they were brutalized.

I do this for me, a kind of catharsis – an expiation, even (I do it for my country, too, who ought feel as I do – but, probably won’t).

In that, I search my memory to understand how I could have been unaware as I grew up of anything so monstrously evil as the kind of racism of which we speak here. I have said before, and I say again here, that I heard – can’t remember a single time, matter of fact – during the years I lived among the mostly German people of Northeast Iowa the word, “nigger.” As I’ve also related here elsewhere on the Web, my nephew married his black wife sometime during the seventies, and my cousin, Patti, married a black guy earlier than that. I never once ever heard any racist comment concerning either couple. Not one.

Maybe that’s because I’m who I am – or was: also in my reputation then was the fact that I knocked kicking people who pissed me off. Ill manners, unkindness or cruelty, “ganging up” – bullying - like that would have pissed me off, and somebody would have punctuated his own remark by spitting teeth. Racism for me is, at its roots and in its essence, bulling. I think I’ve made my feelings, and the reasons for them where bullies are concerned, fairly well known.

But I prefer to think it was because the people I grew up among were far, far better than racism. And therein, I have still another epiphany – how much I love the places and people who made me what I was; am, too, I hope.

Still, I can’t believe it wasn’t there. How could a little place in a nation “sweltering with racism,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it so well have escaped anything as virulent as the Satanic psychosis that lynched that woman and her son, set alight and hanged while still living that man? They - I - MUST have known!

But here we go again. I have NEVER – and this is a place I seriously doubt even my enemies will gainsay what I say – stood quietly by when anything even remotely like this was occurring. If there is any one thing that more than anything else describes me and my character, it is that one. I have paid what most of my kind would consider a terrible price for it, matter of fact. It is the reason for the story I tell in “Letters,” my book.

Now I remember an instance of that, from U.S. Army basic training, 1955. We had just gotten our issue of clothing and equipment. In the barracks, we were picking bunks and the guy who had been behind me in the line during equipment issue, Johnson, and I were flipping a coin to decide who got the top bunk. Johnson was a black guy.

“Hey,” one of two guys standing across the aisle between rows of bunks called. “C’mere!”

He motioned to me, beckoning me over. I still remember the two guys’ names, but I suppose I should keep them to myself here. When I, a little out of my league here still, and wanting to offend no one, approached, the two men from Clearwater, Mississippi demanded to know if I was intending to “bunk with that nigger.” Was I a “nigger lover?”

That I didn’t acquit myself all that well – at least assuming what I know now – was due my total ignorance concerning what they seemed so intent upon. When the two explained, I was flat dumb-founded. What the hell difference did our skin color make?!

There was more, but it will suffice to say that had not the barracks sergeant come along when he did, there would have been a fight (it’s something I would encounter again and again, back then: the rest of the nation didn’t seem to understand that wrestlers aren’t much impressed with anyone who settles for “team” sports like football). You didn’t tell a guy from Northeast Iowa back then what to do or not do.

A few weeks later, a southerner cadre sergeant who didn’t think much of my views having to do with race would endeavor to give me further instruction in the matter during a clandestine meeting ordered by him on the parade ground. When, however, his attempt at my “come-uppance” failed and he summarily got his ass kicked, he was man enough to relent. As I later wrote in my book, he may have ridden my ass about everything, but he didn't offer any more extracurricular "instruction." Strength always gets respect.

No, I’ve been telling myself, I’ve not only never inflicted any kind of cruelty, word or deed, upon anyone, I’ve never been racist. But how could I have known nothing of what I was seeing this night on CNN television?

“How?” in these matters, I’ve learned, always means “who?” I’d like to go back (and, if you know me, you know I’ll do just that) and read the newspapers in Iowa of the time. Did they feature pictures like whose I saw as I watched television in shock and horror? Were there newspaper stories like those CNN featured? I doubt it – but I have to be sure.

Why? Because I have to know what my responsibility was and how I acquitted myself in fulfilling it. I have to know – as I should think my country and countrymen would - whether I somehow put out of my mind the plight of my fellow citizen under degradation, torture, and murder. I want to know, too, if I am innocent, how the society and nation might have kept me ignorant until I was old enough to induct into the army, and why.

It’s interesting, parenthetically – something that just popped into my mind as I type here – that the news “story” that followed the show I speak of here was a FoxNews attempt to justify “water-boarding,” the torture of one human being – of course, the pundit always says, “an enemy” – by another for “intelligence” (for the animal who calls himself “thinking man,” there’s always a good reason for utterly anything, isn’t there?). Maybe I’ve answered my own question. But that’s not enough for me. The next question, the only one that really matters for me, is the same one that is all that matters at this juncture for my country.

What are we going to do about what will have caused that woman’s body to hang in my mind for the rest of my life?

“9-11” - It Isn’t About Horse Thieves, You Know - Not even UFOs, Sasquatch, or the Loch Ness Monster.

I begin here anew my commentary concerning the “9-11” controversy with the reminder that it was I who within minutes of learning what had happened that day lost two good friends – they still call me “traitor” - with the statement, “The dog didn’t bark!” For years (literally) thereafter, my Website homepage featured that remark, together with a photo of the burning WTC towers and the passage from the Sherlock Holmes story “the Adventure of the Silver Blaze” explaining the reference. I believe, in short, that persons within the U.S. Government knew what Mohammed Atta and his cohort were planning, and that they let it happen.

Note that I did not simply say “government” – because that is illogically typical of the viewpoint and persons I discuss in this essay and others that preceded it.

Last during the most recent Democrat Party “debate,” Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was asked if he had seen a UFO. Moderator Tim Russert said it was a serious question, even though the "serious" question was purportedly prompted by actress Shirley MacLaine's new book.

Shirley, we’ll all remember, lives in a special world. In her book – I have to take the media’s word on this; I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine - she writes that Kucinich spotted a UFO over her home in Washington State and "found the encounter extremely moving.” Shirley also is supposed to say in the book that Kucinich "felt a connection'' in his heart and "heard direction'' in his mind.

And some wonder why I seem so paranoid – packing a pistol, training still at seventy-one in judo, and all. Folks, put a tent over this country, and you have the biggest booby-hatch, rubber room, and whorehouse in human history even remotely conceivable.

Well, I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine, but I’ve seen probably seventy-five or a hundred Unidentified Flying Objects. Hell, I’ve seen even more unidentified NON-flying objects. I live in the real world, not the climate-controlled, pick-up-the-phone-and-CALL-somebody, “what’s-a-callus,” “I-get-my-exercise-in-a-gym-and my-meat-in-the-supermarket” one where “work” is eight hours at a computer, television and Hollywood provide reality, and life goes on in a virtual hot-house for pansies. I can – still, at seventy-one – do hard labor all day; “hump” a sixty pound backpack twenty five miles in a day, do three hundred sit-ups, one hundred pushups, and fifteen pull-ups. I’ve been in gunfights, more street fights than I care to remember, and battled the government’s goons both in court and in the streets for more than nine years. I’ve been, effectively, in college for fifty years, more actual class-room study than whole university departments; and, as “been everywhere, done everything” as I am, there’s a hell of a lot of things I can’t identify. And the Bible , Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, the Dhammapada, and scriptures generally don’t really help much. The real world is like that.

But if you are typical of “Americans” (who, you may notice, are not even capable of truth where what they call their country is concerned) – meaning, of course, that your experience and first-hand knowledge is limited mostly – ninety-five percent – to your television and your home or workplace computer, you know better than I. You simply turn on the TV or “look it up” on Wikipedia. My god – that’s ridiculous! And you don’t even know it (sorry, but the shear asininity of it all is infuriating, sometimes).

Note, please, and by the way, that I did NOT say “UFO” up there. A UFO is an unidentified flying object that tens of thousands of UFO-ologists (it’s a new logos) somehow can identify. And they “identify” the object as a vehicle from outer space. All from not knowing what it is. Jesus!

Just so we’re sure we understand one another – and at the risk of redundancy - they can identify an unidentified flying object (and they call it that, too). It has little green men in it.

You, if you are typical, live in point of rather easily demonstrable fact in a world of stultifying and stupefying myth and lies, in the society and nation that is – again as a matter of statistically verifiable fact – the biggest, most determined liar in human history. Worse – again a point of statistical and study-demonstrated fact – you lie to yourself continually, even to the extent of anesthetizing yourself against day-to-day reality.

And then, when something like global warming, the war in Iraq, the World Trade Center – or an issue like that of UFO existence – arises, you proceed to foist your knowledge and “expertise” upon your fellows. It’s your right. Sure it is.

Now let me hear your expert dissertation on your responsibility.

I wonder if I should note here that “debate” (while we’re talking about peculiar identifications – how’s that for an example?) moderator Russert reminded Kucinich that polls indicate only fourteen percent of Americans say they have seen UFOs. I guess that was supposed to mean something about Kucinich’s mental state or competency – huh? Earlier in the day, you see, Congressman Kucinich had told the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer that President Bush's comments about a World War III call Mr. Bush’s mental health into question.

Dear reader, if you need a zoologist to identify an eighty hundred pound gorilla in the room like that one - if you don’t by now recognize George W. Bush as a nut case, in other words - everything will be an unidentified object. That’s flying or otherwise, fact in general.

Mention of the UFOs and all the people who have formed a cult around their insistence that their government is harboring little green men reminded me immediately – and, I think, logically - about the subject of the World Trade Center, and all the people who now choose to believe their government blew up the buildings. Obeying my penchant for such things, I have over the years checked story after story of supposed UFO sightings. I hasten to state, though, that with the most recent spate of “sightings,” that of the lights over Mexico City, and that of a “sighting” by one of our states’ governors, I didn’t bother.

Oh, yeah – I’m about to pick a fight with another “conspiracy theory” group. Well, the truth is, I’m at odds with about fifty religions, at least that many more ideologies, ESP, and fairy tales; I don’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. But it’s not my fault – I was brought up wrong. First, I spent a lot of my formative years away from people, their ideologies, religions, and indoctrinations in it all – with the terrible result that the only way I had to know the right thing to do was think. Damn – did that ever make people mad! In the sod hut by a river back in Iowa, where I put myself through high school, that’s just how it was. When I had a problem, I solved it myself – no “faith,” no “this is the way to do it” instruction, no “everybody knows” – none of that societal and cultural... -”wisdom.”

And, as I said, it kept me in continual trouble, even then. I was the “wait a minute” kid. “Wait a minute – that doesn’t make sense.” Not a good thing to say a lot when you’re a kid in a Catholic high school. “You have this terrible LUST for the truth,” a teacher nun once told me. “They’ll hang you someday.”

Yeah, they might yet. I can’t help it – the rules of logic, forensics, and knowledge (epistemology) have been settled by man and his science for a couple of hundred years – in the instance of logic a hell of a lot longer than that. We know how to determine when something is known and we know how to determine when it isn’t. We know what is consistent, decidable, and complete where any theory is concerned (“consistent” means that statements – “axioms” – within the theory are not contradictory; “complete” means that every true statement can be deduced from the axioms; and “decidable” means there is an algorithm – a formula – for deciding whether any (given) statement in the theory is a theorem or a contradiction; consistent and decidable theory is complete, but a consistent, complete theory is not necessarily decidable).

We know how to know when we have a fact, and we know when we don’t. Which means, for one thing, that objects can’t be both identified and unidentified. It also means not only that one cannot prove anything with the absence of information, it means the absence of information means nothing. Anyone who says that because it can’t be proved something doesn’t exist he knows something does exist is a liar or a fool, and one who says the absence of proof of something means something might be is not only a liar or a fool, he is a trivial liar or a fool.

And, there, I have summed up the UFO and WTC controversies. Trying to learn concerning UFO sightings was a learning process, all right – but not about what the “unidentified flying objects” were. What I learned is psychology, that of a mind desirous of believing something. I couldn’t, for instance (cynic that I had become), help noticing that UFO sightings occurred in places in direct numerical proportion to how much money could be made there from the “objects” and the cults having sprung up around them. I also came to know with certainty that each person I interviewed concerning a “sighting” would not have material proof, only the anecdotal proof provided him by his fellow. Persons outside the cult who saw something they couldn’t identify simply said they didn’t know what they’d seen; persons part of the true-believers not only saw the object, but knew it was extraterrestrial.

In fact, everything that proved it couldn’t be what the true-believer thought it was proved to him that it was. Each time one of these folks insisted that material proof existed, I learned – just like that having to do with 9-11 – that it had somehow vanished or become otherwise inaccessible. More, I could not only identify as to membership or non-membership in the UFO cult the person I was interviewing, I knew ninety percent or more of what he was going to say – i.e., just what the last cult member said.

And, as Costello says in the famous “who’s on first? - “FIRST BASE!”

No part of the World Trade Center fantasy and commercial hype so resembles that of the UFO craze than the aspect of the former having to do with Building Seven. Yesterday, when I mentioned the certainty that teachers of forensic and related science will use 9-11 as a paradigm of what not to do in making an investigation, I could not have found a better example than the WTC building which was not struck by an airplane.

The bloviating and babbling has reached such proportions that no single theory concerning it can be identified – that word, again – with certainty, but members of the new UFO conspiracy cult maintain that the collapse of this building could not have occurred unless it had already been prepared for demolition. The conspiracy theorists assume – they must, since none of them was ever in the building, and have no material evidence whatever - that damage sustained during the airliners’ attack was not sufficient to trigger building collapse.

If the reader recognizes in that the reasoning of the UFO folks, there are at least two of us.

Theorists insist that “fires were observed in Building Seven prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires.” No one offers any reason for any reasonable person to accept the theorists’ assessment of the fires. Time and again, they refer to photos and videos as proof; neither does anyone offer a written, recorded, or video-taped statement from a witness affirming any such thing. Neither is there any such evidence concerning any other facet of the matter.

On the other hand several reports on the record – none mentioned or shown on any of the theorists’ Websites, publications, or the rest – are like that of Firemen Richard Banaciski, Dan Marine, and others. “We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on,” Banaciski said. “So we go there and on the north and east side of Seven it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of Seven there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors.”

Another first responder adds that there were “tremendous, tremendous fires going on.”

As usual, in UFO-like controversies, we have evidence both in the form of material fact and witness testimony against presumption, supposition, and – of course, suspicion. There is much evidence that fire raged in the Building Seven, but conspiracy theorists don’t want – refuse – to see it. Missing evidence is to these people far more motive and powerful than existing evidence.

And the conspiracy theorists suspicions, we should note, are fed by commercial interests making stacks of money from their interest. Cui bono WTC? Not those with facts. In fact, even “not enough” facts have come to mean proof of what the suspicious have already concluded. The unidentified flying object, in other words, is once more identified because it is unidentified.

Records – and they are voluminous – say that emergency response workers at Ground Zero came to realize that extensive damage to the lower south section of WTC Seven would cause collapse as early as three P.M., something, moreover, the news media reported at the time. More, there is video footage – again, conspicuous by its absence on the 9-11 cultists’ Websites and other publications - of the Building Seven collapse. The videos show the building’s south wall giving way first, that being the side of the building having suffered most structural damage. The pile of debris resulting from the collapse measured at just under a hundred fifty yards across and twelve or thirteen stories high.

While I can’t imagine anyone using controlled demolitions to destroy the building would care, that would make a pretty sloppy job of such. (One cult Website, however – “Loose Change” - has it that the building fell in a “convenient pile”).

And then, there’s the “pull.” So far, I’ve come across that word fifty–seven times in the missives I’ve received from WTC cultists. For some of those who opine that Building Seven was blasted by federal conspirators, the most powerful “evidence” comes from WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s alleged “confession” that he authorized the tower’s destruction. In a phone conversation with a fire department officer, Silverstein said, “ . . . maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”

The key word seems to be “pull.” More, it’s indicative of the mindset of the cultists. What might “pull” mean? I trust no one would expect to hook a truck to the place and “pull” it away, so it means something else – and the spectrum of possible meaning is a short one. Of course, we might ask Silverstein, but the cultists are far beyond willingness to accept anything that doesn’t support their allegations, making that a waste of time.

To conspiracy theorists like one Alex Jones at prisonplanet.com, “pull” is “industry jargon for taking a building down with explosives.” I’ve been associated with demolitions – from boyhood as an interest and hobby, and as a professional for twenty years – and never once heard the word “pull” mean set off charges. No dictionary of word origins or etymology lists it, either. Can anybody imagine “pull” a building meaning blow it up? Really?

What was it Silverstein said he meant, again? Get the firemen out of the building? That’s what “Pull your guys out to the building” meant, maybe? That sure sounds reasonable to me.

But, of course, I’m not biased – no axe to grind. In fact, I’d love to see this one hung on the government. But then, I have one hell of an addiction to the truth. It’s a narcotic I can’t imagine having to live without. In fact, a world where there’s no certain truth sounds like a damned nightmare to me – I keep imagining myself in the place of the government here on some issue. Sheesh!

Incidentally, the fire department commander did order his men from the building – there were a number working there at the time Silverstein made his “pull” remark - before it collapsed, and no lives were lost there. There, by damn – that proves they knew the building was coming down!

But as Mark Twain observed, a lie can go around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Lease-holder Silverstein is supposed to have destroyed WTC Building Seven in order to claim a huge insurance payoff.

Think about that. If that were so, Lucy, ‘splain why would the guy would tell the world of his plot on a PBS special? ‘Splain, too, what relationship would Silverstein have with the United States Government who supposedly destroyed the other WTC buildings. And if that were so, why would anyone – even our pratfalling, power-mad government - wait until all of the tenants were evacuated from? Why kill three thousand people in the towers, then allow during an entire afternoon the tenants of Building Seven to evacuate? Yeah, “’Splain dat one, Lucy!”

And, of course, we have my objection to the whole affair again, the wherewithal of preparing still another building for demolition – all that wiring, switches, cutting, hauling, and the like – without literally thousands having noticed. A building intended for controlled demolition is always abandoned for considerable time, having been partially gutted in order to place the high explosives necessary. With all of the WTC buildings occupied right up to 9/11, how did the government manage to wire three building for complete demolition without anyone noticing? Come on, people – THINK! Try to imagine sneaking all those wires, switches explosives and fifty things more into buildings while thousands . . .

Oh, never mind – we’ve been through that before!

I’ve said little here about the claims of 9-11 cultists concerning Flight 93, the airliner whose passengers fought the men high-jacking their plane. The principal argument of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists has to do with what they say is the “impossibility” of cell phone calls from the aircraft, and comes as close to anything rational in all their allegations. In fact, they are right – something easily provable (and, at this writing, several have done just that). More, some people who reported receiving cell phone calls from relatives and others on the high-jacked airliner were obviously lying.

Having said that, what has been proven? This, I remind you, is the Land of the Lie, the home of the most mendacious people in all of history. Asking an "American" to tell the truth is like asking a pig to fly - inverted. Have we proven that everyone on the ground lied? Have we proven that there were NO phone calls from the airliners? How about calls from Flight 93? Have we proven that the government fabricated the whole story of the phone calls? Have we proven, even if the government faked ALL the phone calls, that everything the 9-11 conspiracy theorists claim is true – that the U.S. Government both destroyed the World Trade Center by controlled demolition and faked the plane crashes?

No, we haven’t – not even remotely. Certainly not in the minds of any normally rational person, and the few successes I have had in attempting to dissuade WTC theorists have resulted from my having asked the questions above.

The “cell-phone” issue, incidentally, is probably the lynch-pin for all the rest of the smorgasbord of supercilious suspicion silliness that is the “9-11” controversy, something almost certainly due the fact that most people who have studied and engaged in actual scientific forensic investigation, or have done experiments and research into the behavioral aspects of the way untrained people observe and reason, have learned. That’s that the untrained investigator or observer will almost invariably build the wall of his conclusion and opinion upon a single discovery brick in the manner of a jury who, discovering a single inconsistency in a witness’ testimony, discards it all, thereby “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

In any Olympics including a “jump to conclusion” event, the amateur WTC, UFO, or Loch Ness Monster investigator will be the gold medalist every time. Meanwhile, that the government “dog didn’t bark” cannot be disputed; neither can it be disputed that persons within the government knew something – even what – was going to happen. That persons within the government knew doesn’t, however, mean that the GOVERNMENT knew – any more than the fact that I knew it was going to happen (said so in writing decades before) meant the country knew. Neither the U.S. Government – nor any government - works that way – nor does the country work that way. The only way for an individual to get his governments attention - well, let’s not get into that.

Finally, the question everyone would really like to answer is that having to do with whether the government or persons within in deliberately let 9-11 happen. Inasmuch as intent – being a figment of the mind - is never with certainty provable, we aren’t ever going to know that. Neither do we need to know that. What we do need to know is that a dog that doesn’t bark while on guard duty is useless. We need a new dog.

This isn’t about preventing horse thieves.