An Orgy of Stupefying Nonsense - Reflections on the Weekend News

1. On NPR January 17, we have a Moslem woman speaking of Moslem women who “want to preserve their dignity as Moslem women.” Huh? Lady, is that an oxymoron? How does a woman keep her dignity and remain a Moslem (a religion and culture that hold her in less esteem, with less human rights, than a horse?!) What do you mean by “dignity?”

2. Canadian diplomats have been using a "torture awareness" manual that lists the United States and Israel among states “where torture might occur.” The manual includes information on the legal definition of torture and tips on how to tell if Canadians being held as prisoners outside the country's borders have been abused, The Toronto Star reported.

Afghanistan, China, Egypt, Guantanamo Bay, Iran, Israel, Mexico, Saudi Arabia, Syria and the United States are listed under "possible torture/abuse cases."

The Foreign Affairs Department prepared the guide, "Torture Awareness Workshop Reference Materials," because of the case of Omar Khadr -- a Canadian citizen who was arrested as a teenager in Afghanistan, where he had gone with his family, and held in Guantanamo.

The United States (the nation that brought the hemisphere the “School of the Americas” and whose C.I.A. publishes manuals explaining torture techniques and technology) says he has been treated well there, but Khadr claims extreme abuse, including being used as "a human mop" and being chained up for hours.

3. Friends in Pahrump, Nevada report that political caucuses there were a shambles - first disrupted, then taken over and controlled by Clinton forces. I wrote back to observe that anyone expecting anything else of the Clintons were like those who now express dismay at the plundering bully our corporate government and nation have become. “Those who do not learn from history,” said George Santayana, “are doomed to repeat it”

4. NPR also airs an interview with one Bob Sullivan author of a new book entitled “Gotcha Capitalism.” Like the myriad of cynical euphemisms with which we are inflicted in the nation that never tells it like it is and demonstrates its contempt for the truth in relentless fashion, “gotcha capitalism” means larceny in its sneaky fraud form, things like having to tolerate four dollar fees for ATM transactions, cell phone contracts you can’t get out of with a crowbar, paying outrages fees for insurance you don’t need on a rental car, and twenty dollars a day for wireless internet services advertised as free.

Every day, Sullivan reports, the public (I started to say “we,” but I don’t use any of these “services”) uses banks, cell phones, and credit cards, book hotels and buy airline tickets that are loaded with hidden rip-offs.

• You didn’t fill up the rental car with gas? Gotcha! The fill-up will cost you seven dollars a gallon.
• Your bank balance fell below one thousand dollars for one day? Gotcha! That’ll be twelve dollars – a “service charge.”
• You miss one payment on that 18-month “same-as-cash loan?” Gotcha! That’ll be a five hundred and twelve dollar “penalty.”
• You’re one day late on that electric bill? Gotcha! All your credit cards will now have a thirty percent interest rate (actually, my son-in-law in Lubbock, Texas recently learned that paying his electric bill on time also meant a fifteen dollar penalty – even though no notice of any such thing had ever been published).

“Gotcha Capitalism” (there’s another kind?) is a worthwhile read, I’m sure.

Another book come across in researching that one is entitled “If Americans Really Understood the Income Tax: Uncovering Our Most Expensive Ignorance.” In it, author John O. Fox details a number of the scams I uncovered and wrote about during my decade-long covert operations against the federal government When I provided proof of many of these, proof in the form of records, tape-recordings, and statements, to U.S. Senators, Congressmen, and all the major news networks, guess what happened (think about it . . .) Nothing – absolutely nothing!

The two authors, moreover, write about “capitalist” behavior I encountered repeatedly during my years of survivalist coping with the “corporate America.” In learning to live on literally pennies a day, I discovered time and time again “service fees” that were merely a verbal cover for outright theft. No service was done or even contemplated, and no quid pro quo ever intended. Cell phone companies charged me for phone calls made on phones that had been disabled and were locked in a drawer at the time the calls were supposedly made. A telephone tap at a certain bank revealed the practice of deliberately replenishing ATM machines’ twenty dollar bill supplies with bills throughout which ten dollar bills had been seeded in order to “maximize profits.”

When, the second time (Woodforest National Bank, Port Lavaca, Texas) I was shorted ten dollars, I complained. Guess what happened? I should complain to my bank (Border Federal Credit Union, Del Rio, TX). Think about that, too, by the way. When I complained to Border Federal, guess what happened. You got it.

Repeatedly (perhaps the most frequently and openly so fraud in Texas) while still traveling for the U.S. Judo Association and buying gasoline (eventually, upon leaving the NJI, I would stop gasoline consumption altogether, to begin riding a bicycle exclusively), I would first fill a gallon jug, All but invariably, the pump would register as much as ten percent more fuel than the gallon jug could contain. Curious and adding the data to my research project of the time, I would complain to the corporate employee in attendance at the place. What happened? Of course. The minimum wage, corporate employee at the business would – and probably truthfully – state that he had no power to do anything except demand the money. When I eventually experimented further by daring the clerk to call police when I handed over payment for the actual quantity of gasoline being purchased, I was – for what I assume are obvious reasons - never once reported to authorities.

The corporate oil companies aren’t, in other words, satisfied with ripping the public off with millions in congressional theft like “oil depletion allowances” and pump outrageous pump prices resulting in billions of dollars in soaring oil company profits, they must resort also to cheap, short-change swindle.

I leave to the reader to compute the millions of dollars of corporate theft from accomplished by that one simple device alone (hint: five to ten percent of total gasoline sales - $474,368,000,000 - nationally).

I can’t resist mentioning here – the story provides for the reader a means by which to assess the integrity and honesty of the federal government, together with a multiplier with which to estimate the size of federal fraud and larceny - that during my years of travail at the hands of the federal government, supposed “interest and penalties” (once a bankruptcy court had forced IRS to say – the tax men had to date resolutely refused to do so - how much I supposedly owed) on thirteen hundred dollars amounted to one hundred thousand, thirteen hundred dollars. That was during a supposed period of three years – a “penalty,” in other words, of thirty three thousand, three hundred thirty three dollars a year on thirteen hundred dollars.

Now do you perhaps understand Halliburton, Iraq, the vanishing weapons of mass destruction, and the “news” surrounding it all? A national debt of eight trillion dollars? How about a federal tax code incomprehensible even by expert accountants, courts, and IRS officials . . .

An amateur mathematician, I have caught banks and financial institutions in fraudulent computations again and again. In 1989, while doing the books for the National Judo Institute and United States Judo Federation, I discovered interest overcharges on the adjustable interest rate (tied to the national prime rate, of course) mortgage resulting in a thirteen thousand dollar refund. More, re-computation of taxes demanded by the state, city, and county tax assessors resulted in several hundreds (can’t remember, actually – it’s been a while) of dollars refund.

The Prime Interest Rate, incidentally (when, in 1989, I asked citizens across the country to explain the term, I found that an average of three per hundred could tell me – all said they had adjustable rate mortgages on their homes) is the interest rate charged by banks to their most favored borrowers (not you and I).

When that same year I computed social security benefits due a client veteran, I discovered thirteen (that number seems to come up a lot in my affairs, doesn’t it?) thousand dollars in underpayment. When the Social Security Administration paid the money, they calculated the interest erroneously (and never did pay the shortfall). For a time, it seemed I might be able to sell my services with a calculator; actually, I probably could - were "Americans" bright enough to suspect how often and for how much they are being ripped off each and every day. They'd rather know about Britney Spears latest escapade.

In 1978, investigating malfunction of a radar gun alleged by police officers of a small Midwestern city, I discovered that inaccurate speed-measuring equipment had resulted in hundreds of citizens having paid fines for speeding they probably hadn’t committed. When I confronted the city attorney with incontrovertible proof, not only was nothing done, but I learned the city had known of the defective speed analyzers defective condition for months.

In my novel, Jonatha’s Truth, Johanna, the heroine, observes that one can never trust a capitalist because everything is for sale. That includes the individual and his government, it seems.

In short, I have been an ardent researcher and discoverer of fraudulent schemes since boyhood. That included the political “bait and switch fraud” that all elections during my lifetime have been. The latest is, without the slightest danger of being gainsaid, the highest example of the bunco technique I’ve ever encountered.

“Bait and switch.” Something tells me I need to explain (obviously, anyone who puts even a little credence in the presently on-going campaign for the nation’s presidency is unfamiliar with this old fraud). In the industry of retail sales, a “bait and switch” is a form of fraud in which the retailer putting forth the fraud lures customers by advertising a product or service at a very – even unprofitably - low price. Then when the promise of “a steal” has lured resultingly greater numbers of customers, the crook tells the customers that the advertised product or service is no longer available – they sold out, of course – but a better product is. For a greater (much, usually) price, one very profitable to the retailer, of course.

The sucker purchases the higher priced item – which in most cases he wanted only because of the bargain price – because he is too stupid and/or lacking in self-control to do otherwise. Does that remind you of anything? Like voting for a candidate because they guarantee a national health care plan, lower taxes, troop withdrawal from Iraq, only to discover that it all covered for the fact that the candidate intended all along to permit uncontrolled illegal immigration and hand you the bill for everything the “undocumented” steal, destroy, and siphon of taxpayer-supported welfare programs?

How about voting for a candidate only because she is a woman, or because he is Afro-American – to learn that neither of them controls anything in which the industrial military corporations and their allies have an interest?

Read up on the "Bait and Switch" swindle – at least you’ll know with whom you should be pissed off. Should you become sufficiently learned, you will recognize the "Bait and Switch" ruse everywhere in politics and legislation. You’ll see "caption bills," legislation which purports to propose minor changes in law, all the while intending the ultimate objective of substantial changes in the wording later. The original proposal is “the Bait,” while the later “presto - change-oh” chicanery is “the Switch.”

Try for an instance the “Patriot Act”: read the title, then read the law. See if you can recognize “the Bait” and “the Switch.” That one was also an example of still another congressional hocus-pocus designed to hornswoggle the electorate and taxpayer. Once the public had come to realization of what had been done to perhaps the one law they can understand, the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution, the White House and Congress weren’t yet done.

House and senate procedure rule changes were at the outset also proposed – that’s “the Bait” – that in order to meet legal requirements for public notice and public hearings mandated by existing law. Then, with everyone set up for the swindle, different rules were proposed at a supposed final meeting. That was the maneuver known as “the Switch.” Result?” Bypass of public notice and public discussion on the rule changes governing how the final vote would be made. No one but guys like me read this stuff (not even your congressional “representatives,” matter of fact), but all the maneuvering had the political objective of getting rules and resulting legislation passed without negative public reaction that might later prove embarrassing at election time.

You not only got screwed because, even if you were bright enough to see through the “Bait and Switch,” you’ve been rendered so brain-dead and trained monkey responsive to intellectual chicanery and distortion of what otherwise would be obvious - like that peddled by FoxNews and the MOCKINGBIRD media generally - that you’d buy it all just because the salesman was a woman or an Afro-American.

The people stealing you blind in Washington, D.C. don’t even need “Bait and Switch” any more. That one requires of the sucker a functioning intellect.

Yesterday, I watched with family the testimony before congress of Federal Reserve Chairman Ben S. (Shalom) Bernanke. I’ve been, as I’ve remarked, an ardent observer of fraudulent operations for decades. I seldom – never, in fact - see anything really new. This was amazing nevertheless.

Bernanke was repeatedly, and breathtakingly, close to blurting out the actual truth. Each time – probably the result of waved warnings off camera, or scowls on the faces of the thieves supposedly interviewing him – he swerved rhetorically to avoid the self-made trap.

Let’s first remind ourselves of a quote, from one Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777-1836), who once said: "I care not what puppet is placed upon the throne of England to rule the Empire on which the sun never sets. The man who controls Britain's money supply controls the British Empire, and I control the British money supply." The absurdity of a nation of people who believe their elected representatives rule while someone else – someone over whom neither they or their representatives has any control - controls the money supply and the economy has always been mind-boggling for me.

Anyway, Bernanke controls “the puppet,” and if you watched him “testify” the other day, you know we’re about to see the “Bait and Switch” tactic still another time.

“Never trust a capitalist,” Johanna grated – “everything is for sale.”

Lewis Carroll Could Have Been a Political Pundit Today - He Obviously Understood the Candidates)

Listening to the presidential campaign “debates” is like listening to a play written by Lewis Carroll:

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.
'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least, — at least I mean what I say — that's the same thing, you know.'
'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'Why, you might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see!"'

"Impenetrability! That's what I say!" "Would you tell me, please," said Alice "what that means?"
"Now you talk like a reasonable child," said Humpty Dumpty, looking very much pleased. "I meant by 'impenetrability' that we've had enough of that subject, and it would be just as well if you'd mention what you mean to do next, as I suppose you don't mean to stop here all the rest of your life."
"That's a great deal to make one word mean," Alice said in a thoughtful tone.
"When I make a word do a lot of work like that," said Humpty Dumpty, "I always pay it extra."

When Congressman Ron Paul points out by rhetorical question that we are being attacked because we’ve made so many enemies by attacking people, Rudy Giuliani answers with an irrelevant, immaterial, non sequitur salad of pseudo logic. “America’s Mayor” seems to say terrorists aren’t attacking the U.S., they’re attacking U.S. citizens. There been five hundred attacks all over the world, he says, then names a number of people – all of them U.S. Americans.

That’s a paraphrase, by the way, the actual circular argument made so many convolute cycles, one lost track. Pretty “impenetrable.”

“’I can’t explain myself, I’m afraid, sir,’ said Alice, ‘because I’m not myself, you see.’ ‘I don’t see,’ said the Caterpillar.”

Neither do I, Alice; oops I mean Rudy.

Then we have John McCain pontificating that we “have to get control of spending.” To listen, you have to first get control of your breath – it’s breath-taking. The near $800,000,000,000 (eight hundred billion) we’ve spent on Iraq – an expenditure McCain has supported and continues to support is “controlled spending?”

"’When I make a word do a lot of work like that,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘I always pay it extra.”

That seems true of all Humpty Dumpties, doesn’t it?

McCain and the others, on both sides of the congressional aisle, moreover, don’t seem to relate spending in Iraq and elsewhere to any of the several issues discussed in these “debates.” To the question from a (supposed) moderator concerning why, if we can afford a trillion dollar war in Iraq, we can’t have health care insurance, we get the answer “inflation.” The war – costs climbing like a homesick angel toward a trillion dollars, isn’t being paid for by inflation? That doesn’t bear upon health care costs? The price of gasoline and everything that has to be hauled? Social Security solvency?

“’Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Alice.”

And Mitt Romney, looking the camera right in the eye, says “the free market” will work with the health care “situation.” FREE market? Against mega corporations who by owning the government body and soul pay no taxes, take everything the public manages to withhold by frugality right back in the form of subsidies. “ear-marks,” outright grants, and “allowances” like the infamous “oil depletion allowance (funny how that’s not been mentioned once in all the discussion of oil company profits, isn’t it?).

“If - and the thing is wildly possible - the charge of writing nonsense were ever brought against the author of this brief but instructive poem, it would be based, I feel convinced, on the line, ‘Then the bowsprit got mixed with the rudder sometimes.’”

Egad, maybe that’s it – they’re all on a SNARK hunt; and the Snark has turned out to be a Boojum.

And John McCain – who wants to get control of spending – intends to let twenty million illegal aliens stay here U.S. “They’re god’s children.” So god is footing the bill for everything they destroy, steal, siphon from that health care system all the candidates talk about without mentioning them, and send back to Mexico? John, and all the others, professes great concern for national security but is quite happy with leaving twenty million unidentified alien people, and allowing millions more to pour through the gates unannounced.

"’But I don't want to go among mad people,’ Alice remarked. ‘Oh, you can't help that,’ said the Cat: ‘we're all mad here. I'm mad. You're mad.’ ‘How do you know I'm mad?’ said Alice. ‘You must be,’ said the Cat, ‘or you wouldn't have come here.’”

When, in the middle of it all, Ron Paul insists upon truth, he sounds positively Socratic. “Begin at the beginning,” the king said, gravely, “and go on till you come to the end, then stop.”

McCain, though, though is having none of that where Iraq is concerned – especially with the spending. No, John says we may be there “not forever.”

Hmmmmm – where have I heard that before. Oh, yeah – Lewis Carroll again. “If you don't know where you are going, any road will get you there.”

That was the Cheshire Cat, I think.

Mitt Romney and Fred Thompson, bless their hearts, ask shouldn’t anyone who doesn’t purchase health insurance have to pay form his own pocket (that, presumably, is with what “anyone” has left after the government steals from him, the corporations steal from him, and the illegal aliens steal from him)?

That’s, of course, unless they’re illegal aliens from Mexico – they are “children of god.”

“’Tut, tut, child!’ said the Duchess, ‘everything's got a moral, if only you can find it.’

And it goes on and on, and on. Giuliani, McCain and all the rest of our would-be generals instruct the moderators, their fellows onstage, and the nation on the tactics of “the surge” (the same “surge” that Bill O’Reilly recently insisted “means something real in Iraq,” only to say in the next breath that “the surge of Mike Huckabee in the polls means nothing.”

“Un-dish-cover the fish, or discover the riddle… take a minute to think about it, then guess,” said the Red Queen. “Meanwhile, we’ll drink to your health – Queen Alice’s health, she screamed at the top of her voice . . .”

On the other side of the debates – the Democratic Party side – things were palpably worse. I can seldom stomach the drivel characteristic of democrats post John Kennedy, but in this instance, I force myself. It’s always a ton of laughs, a theater of the absurd as Carroll-ian as any ever written, but to caricature politics with women involved – especially the like of Hillary Clinton - would have strained even Lewis Carroll.

“I can't go back to yesterday - because I was a different person then”

The Home of the Brave wrapped in chintz and drowning in romance novel, tabloid “interests” – that means emotion, emotion, emotion – the microcosm that was the male struggling to deal with an empowered female (Kipling’s servant become the master?) in premenstrual syndrome has become the macrocosm – a nation struggling with it. With Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party candidates found themselves where the individual male trying to deal with his wife, daughter, or girl friend has always been. When Hillary had played the female’s trump card, tears, everyone not in a coma knew that in the world down the rabbit hole wherein it’s all happening there was nothing anyone could do or say that couldn’t somehow be taken advantage of, and because none dared say “shut up,” the Red Queen’s competitors and all the MOCKINGBIRD media pundits were sent into a polemical furor.

“’The Duchess! The Duchess! Oh, my dear paws! Oh, my fur and whiskers?’”

And – oh, dear god! – someone has “played the race card!” That’s after the gender – all those men (now there’s a stretch), ganging up on poor little Hillary - card had long since been played, mind you. The two supposed front-runners (more sports, games, and Hollywood war movie analogies – funny how no one ever uses a reference to theater, especially comedy and clowns) are now in a furious verbal duel. The have such exceedingly different ideas, you know – just like the Republicans.

“Tweedledum and Tweedledee agreed to have a battle, for Tweedledum said Tweedledee had spoilt his nice new rattle; just then flew down a monstrous crow as black as a tar-barrel, which frightened both the heroes so, they quite forgot their quarrel.”

It’ll work out, I predict. “Contrariwise,” continued Tweedledee, “if it was so, it might be, and if it were so, it would be: but as it isn’t it ain’t. That’s logic.”

Anyway, the “campaign” goes on; of course, anyone who’s not comatose or brain-dead otherwise and has been paying attention to history post World War Two knows that all of it will make not the slightest difference in what the nation does.

"’Now, here, you see,’ said the Red Queen, ‘it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"

Obviously – it absolutely astonishes me that like the tabloid magazines at the checkout counters everywhere, millions of people buy this patent nonsense - this Barnum and Bailey show is a fraud, a clown’s opera like the rest of television’s advertisements and “regular programming,” the modern-day version of Roman emperor Commodus’ “bread and circuses.”

The military industrial complex corporations who rule here will do as they damned please. In Iraq, we’ll run the Red Queen’s Race, seeking victory no one has defined (doesn’t a political outcome sought by military means mean killing the majority?), using tactics only a moron would pursue (attack first, then do the planning – doesn’t that sound like something from Alice in Wonderland? – then, once you’re in Indian territory, where you can find the enemy only when he finds you, and identify him only when he shoots you, you leave the circle of wagons?). The U.S. dollar will concomitantly continue its slide toward total collapse (talk about people buying the tabloids – how about a nation who thinks you can spend $800,000,000,000 on a war without affecting the economy?!).

“Write that down,’ the king said to the jury, and the jury eagerly wrote down all three dates on their slates, and then added them up, and reduced the answer to shillings and pence.”

Actually, it seems the king’s jury must have been smarter than the public in the United States – they would have begun looking for alternatives to the “shillings and pence.” The spending – piles, mountains of newly printed money - on the military, munitions for Iraq and Afghanistan will continue (“but not forever”), even accelerate. Like Alice Down the Rabbit Hole, the same people who believe they live in a republic (need I define the word?) will find themselves powerless to stop the raid on their bank accounts, those of their children and their children’s children. When George W. Bush and his Bush League strategists have attacked Iran, the effect on the nation’s economy will be absolutely – I mean no way out - devastating.

As individual households’ budgets go to hell, welfare and entitlement programs will grow apace, accelerating the national metastasis. The corporations of course, will move on to greener pastures or import more quasi-slave labor from Mexico and South America.

First among the welfare programs – in fact, it’s already begun – will be that having to do with the housing sector. The “feds” efforts to stave off – if you think we’re not in one, you’re among the wealthy (or maybe you’re Amish) - the recession will blow the already Brobdingnagian (oops – that’s Jonathan Swift) debt balloon even bigger (which means the bang! When it pops will be even louder). The easy credit form of welfare that started it all will lead, in other words (and maddeningly) to even more easy credit.

“Insanity,” Albert Einstein wrote, is continuing to do the same thing while expecting different results.” Lewis Carroll put it another way:

"’In my youth,’ father William replied to his son, ‘I feared it might injure the brain; but, now that I'm perfectly sure I have none, why, I do it again and again."

How anyone can believe we will solve the crisis in the housing market by doing what caused it only people like these morons campaigning for president could explain. More Alice in Wonderland:

“’Be what you would seem to be,’ said the Duchess, ‘-- or, if you'd like it put more simply -- never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what it might appear to others that what you were or might have been was not otherwise than what you had been would have appeared to them to be otherwise.”

“’I think I should understand that better,’ Alice said, ‘if I had it written down; but I can't quite follow it as you say it.”

Neither can we, Alice – but that’s life down our own, particular rabbit hole.

While the “stunned and stolid, brother to the ox” public goes on, stupidly indulging the political plenipotentiary Cheshire Cats - “This time it vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of its tail and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone” - their theater, the government will require more money than ever, and taxes – those taxes each and every one of the “cats” says they’re against – will increase.

Oh, they’ll sneak a lot of it in – inflation itself is a tax, you know – but in order to hoodwink (they don’t – nobody is that stupid) foreign investors in the dollar like China, they’ll pull out the political prestidigitation – taxes on beer, liquor, cigarettes, and entertainment, consumer goods, airline tickets, and the like. License fees will increase dramatically. They will be more of that “soak the rich” bullshit (maybe the slickest doubletalk deceit stunt of them all, come to think of it – a way to “launder” taxes through the corporations to the wage-earner – a lot like a minimum wage law intended to make illegal aliens competitive with the “representatives'” constituents). Kiss all that tax reform being ballyhooed by the candidates good-bye, in other words.

“’Take some more,’ the March Hare said to Alice very earnestly. ‘I’ve had nothing yet,’ Alice replied in an offended tone. ‘so I can’t take more.’ ‘You mean you can’t take less,’ said the Hatter, ‘it’s very easy to take more than nothing!’”

Election Fraud and Politicians Who Cry

The 2008 Iowa political caucuses are history, and everyone who watches the news knows more than he wanted to know; at least he heard more than he needed to hear - over and over an over. In fact, part of the problem that is a decaying U.S. America is that he listened to it all. To believe this is what it purports to be - a real election of people chosen by an electorate - you have to be Markham's description of Millet's Man With The Hoe, "Stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox."

You can believe, with the Internet and the major media at diametrical odds where the popularity of the political candidates in the current election is concerned, that there is nothing suspicious or irregular about it all? You don't find it strange, for instance, that Ron Paul is the odds on favorite with all the people writing on the Internet, yet according to the major media mired in fifth place with barely ten percent of the vote? Man, nothing better illustrates the non compos mentis state of the public I worry so much about than that. Anyone that propagandized is effectively brain-dead.

Just for an illustration of what I mean by "critical thinking," why would a U.S. Congress - people chosen because they are the most acquisitive, greed and power-maddened people in the country - influenced (I use the most innocuous and innocent term possible) by 56,000 lobbyists - 86 percent of them representatives and employees of the military industrial complex corporations - vote to end the war in Iraq? Why would U.S. Americans - a people for decades reared and steeped in the moral code that says personal selfishness and the "bottom line" are the all-important Eleventh Commandment - believe that anyone (Halliburton, for instance) would lobby the U.S. Congress to end (or even moderate) the war profiting the corporations by hundreds of billions?

Why, in the society and nation I have just described, would corporations profiting by the billions from the labor of illegal aliens - persons willing to work for far less than minimum wage (the same minimum wage lobbyists for those same corporations keep urging congress to raise (for citizens and aliens here legally, that is) - do anything other?

Let me make certain you understand that long sentence:

1. With millions of people in the U.S. illegally (and surreptitiously - no way to know who or how many there are) and willing to work for whatever they can get, the U.S. Congress will raise the minimum wage for citizens.

2. The very people who will benefit from not only the unfair labor market and the cheap labor it provides are those who control the "representatives" in Congress. These same people and their "representatives" are capitalizing by their "under the table" exploitation of illegal aliens, evading payment of income taxes, social security taxes, workers compensation or insurance therefore, and more.

YOU THINK THESE SAME "REPRESENTATIVES" WILL CLOSE THE BORDERS AND/OR DO ANYTHING MEANINGFUL ABOUT THE TORRENT OF ALIENS POURING INTO THE U.S.?

Then you probably believe any of these Jack S. Phogbounds - "Ain't no Jack S. like OUR Jack S." - will attempt to change IRS or the nation's ludicrously un-American tax system. Or stop lobbying in Washington (careful, John Edwards: these people are ruthless killers, you know). Or stop the war in Iraq. Or do anything but suck up to the Halliburton, General Bullmoose & Company of the military industrial complex.

In some homes, though, the remotes wore out. Viewers trying to escape the deluge of claptrap being spewed relentlessly ran from channel to channel in desperation. Some may even - gasp - have turned to reading a newspaper. Or, even more incredible, a book!

As Rita and I sat watching it all, we began recalling previous election campaigns - all the campaign rhetoric promises. There is no possible way to list them all here - it would take literally days (check the internet or a library, you'll see why). Campaign promises have morphed into something generic, something as familiar as the lines of a favorite play or skit. When the pontificating and bloviating politician starts a line, his audience of senior citizens can finish it.

The generality of statement and speech during a presidential election campaign is so broad as to mean utterly nothing (have you ever wondered what a politician or bureaucrat means when he says he'll take full responsibility?); nevertheless, a nation of youth like those who voted for Barak Obama (for instance) are too ignorant of history to know. They haven't heard it all dozens of times, and they won't listen to their parents or grandparents.

Uh-uh, they listen to the MOCKINGBIRD media and its pandering pundits. So it is that a candidate like Congressman Ron Paul got so little attention from voters younger than middle age. Statements like his concerning reasons the U.S. has become a pariah in the world such that people like Osama bin Laden and Moslems and Arabs generally retaliate against us are portrayed by the federally-controlled media as tantamount to treason. When comedian George Carlin remarked that the 9-11 attack wasn't all that surprising given the fact of our behavior toward the rest of the planet, and Colorado professor Ward Churchill's book "Roosting Chickens" delineated it all in itemized detail, they were, in fact, called traitors by White House political sycophants like Bill O'Reilly, Sean Hannity, and others. From the candidates other than Paul, we get the same claptrap. We are the good guys, say the candidates, we are not an "aggressor nation," and we should be "proud of America."

What does history say? History says that while the candidates bloviate, a Federal Reserve Banker, Beardsley Ruml recommended in 1946 an end to income taxation, and political candidate after candidate swore himself an enemy of taxation, federal taxation has grown relentlessly. The reason? Well, try to tell yourself it's mere coincidence that military spending has grown apace, more now that $16,000,000,000,000. Try to explain away the fact - a fact neither the candidates nor their constituents want to recognize or hear of - that as distinct from other nations, the United States dominates the world with the military power resulted from all that taxation and spending. Thanks to oppressive secrecy and to Operation MOCKINGBIRD, U.S. citizens are just about totally ignorant of the fact that our military bases and their garrisons encircle the planet.

During none of the political campaigns, including their specious "debates," will the nation hear that a vast network of U.S. miliary installations occupies every continent except Antarctica. Yet unless they know of the extent to which we flaunt our military dominance of the planet, no one listening to the campaign and debates can begin to understand the size of the threat we represent to the world and its peoples. Neither can any of the persons eagerly stating their preference for this or that candidate have any idea of the extent to which this kind of militarism undermines our system of constitutional government. The size of our military and the power of the military industrial complex corporations that have spawned it makes everything the political candidates say utter nonsense.

Sure John Edwards will throw the miliary industrial complex lobbyists out of Washington. Sure he will.

Our military deploys more than half a million soldiers and their dependents, spies, technicians, and civilian military contractors in nations all over the planet. We have as many as six thousand military installations in the United States, and more than seven hundred around the world. We operate additionally scores of secret bases, bases about which even the governments of the nations they occupy don't know. We have thirteen (or is it fourteen?) naval task forces built around aircraft carriers in all of the world oceans, a threat as naked as any can be.

But it all tickles to death U.S. corporations, especially the military industrial corporations who own government in the U.S. The cost of building and maintaining that many military installations is staggering, something simply beyond the ken of even highly intelligent and educated people. We're talking about most of a trillion dollars, after all. And the cost of bases isn't all, of course. The Pentagon and U.S. military deploy to our overseas bases as many as 275,000 uniformed personnel, together with a least that many dependents and civilian officials, and at least 50,000 locally hired foreign nationals. The taxpayer, kept totally in the dark during and by charades like last night's Iowa caucuses propaganda extravaganza, mind you, foots the bill for it all.

But Mike Huckabee "shares our values." Sure he does. Ron Paul, on the other hand, who tells you at least some of the truth - well, he doesn't share your values.

Of it all, no one thing is as disconcerting for the thinking mind still aware of what is being done to the nation's mind as the fact that after each "segment" having to do with the elections and the campaign for the most powerful office in human history, with decisions that might very well result in cataclysm of unequalled proportions including the end of most life on the planet, the major media discuss with equal time and attention Britney Spears. Think of that, if you still can. There has never in history been anything so socially, societally, and nationally sick - behavior indicative of lost touch with reality and the priorities attendant associated with reality consciousness.

It is a thing akin to going through the check-out counter at the supermarket, viewing the tabloid newspapers and magazines there, and realizing that many of the people who buy and read such drivel have also voted in past elections.

It tells you something. It tells of a nation who, by handing over to children money, empowered them economically. The children had not earned the money, did not have to (and, prospectively in their minds, would NEVER have to) earn it, and had, therefore, no reason to develop or otherwise acquire priorities. The result was generations of citizens who could be easily manipulated and bilked of their money. Children bought trash - mostly entertainment in one form or another, playthings for which their parents and mature people would never have traded their sweat, blood, and tears.

Worse, perhaps, money is power in the Land of the Fee, and the further result of children with money was empowerment of a corporate structure already busily engaged in seizing control of the nation's power structure. It's hard to believe that the congruency of the graphs delineating the increase in political power of the nation's children and that of the military industrial complex corporations is mere co-incidence. Giving children money in the proportions they are given money today is tantamount to suffrage. Do you really wonder why the nation behaves like a spoiled child?

Neither can there be any doubt concerning empowerment of the female and its contribution to the nation's demise. With children turning socially and societally insignificant persons like Britney Spears and entertainers generally into demigods, we have seen concomitantly the rise of the female. Is there any wonder that the United States has become increasingly to behave like a woman experiencing PMS (you ARE aware that women do not behave like men, and that women - especially when under stress - behave in a manner entirely different than men, are you not?)? Just for instance, consider the "Missing Woman of the Week" news media syndrome we are inflicted with continually by a media now forced by massive political and economic pressures to appeal and kowtow to society's distaff side. What resembles more the United States today - having to do with Iraq, for instance - than the mindlessly indoctrinated and willful female who goes obliviously and effectively defenseless - made so by her own, ideological self-deception - out into the predator-replete streets and world, to blunder into abuse, injury, and humiliation? Have we not done the same in Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and elsewhere of late?

Tell me you believe that in the face of problems like those faced by this country, a national media un-affected by feminine interests would prioritize equally Britney Spears' troubles and those of the nation - illegal immigration, for instance. Tell me that you believe MEN are sufficiently interested in the nonsense of the tabloids to justify their publication. Watch today's news and tell me, if you can, that devoid of the need to appeal to a female audience, we would have television in the absurd, pointless, and meaningless state it is found today. I am reminded of how representatives of Ted Turner and CNN advised a National Judo Association delegation that should they televise judo or wrestling competition in the Goodwill Games of Olympics, they would lose the woman's audience. So, just like the ridiculous Title Nine (it is demanded that we pretend women like the same sports as men) sealed the fate of true sports like wrestling, baseball, men's swimming and diving and more for many colleges, things like dance while swinging a ribbon and synchronized swimming were televised.

It will be difficult for historians to believe that the rise of militant feminism, together with the virtual abandonment of children that it engendered (in fact, demanded - abortion wasn't the only war being waged by the female against children, especially male children), was not orchestrated. Aside from obvious physical differences (even those some feminists refused to concede - even demanding that women have the "right" to engage in war-fighting and combat), the feminists said, men and women are the same. Worse, the claptrap swiftly became sanctified by the law of the land, and a nightmare ensued - the one we're living.

The fact thundered by history, a fact, now being demonstrated continually by science, is that men and women are different in many, many ways. To make even a reasonable complete list would require volumes, so I search for elucidative examples in everyday experience. Try, for instance, to tell yourself that were the nation to undergo total loss of our energy-dependent infrastructure and technology, or were it to undergo a total or near total economic collapse, or the horrendous destruction Europe and Germany experienced during World War Two, that feminism would continue to exert the political and societal influence it does today. Imagine, for further instance, that terrorists would succeed detonating a nuclear device in one of our cities; imagine how the urge to survive would re-arrange gender roles. Take a group of men and women on a hiking and survival training expedition into the mountains (as I earned a part-time living doing during my war with IRS) sometime and observe what happens.

Gender and sex equality is nonsense, nonsense sociologically equivalent to insanity, and we are paying a heavy price for it. Again, one is swamped with proof of the contention, but the observable, statistical fact that the great percentage of women are humanist and liberal in their political leanings now means months, even years of dithering discussion are required concerning every national issue; in fact, to a large degree we are now even forbidden to discuss many matters - it's politically incorrect - or we are unable to even learn of them - the media must tell us about the latest missing female and fill half of daily programming with emotional claptrap satisfying to the female audience.

I am reminded of syndicated columnist Maureen Dowd's September, 2000 column concerning the Sydney, Australia Olympic Games. In the article republished January 8, 2008 by the New York Times and titled "Liberties; Cuddle Us, or Else!" Dowd observed, "I feel a certain undeniable pride that women have taken control of the two great male preserves of America -- politics and sports -- and ruined them."

"We finally quit fretting about piddly all-male bastions like the Century Club and the Senate," Dowd continued, "and started tearing down the very pillars of masculinity. We are shaping the Olympics and the presidential race -- and now we are even redecorating the steakhouses, with silk and velvet and pink light bulbs.

"We have draped the gray steel of our leading warrior rituals in yards and yards of chintz. We have made them so mawkish, so hideously fluffy, so sentimental, kissy and fraught with personal travail, that these gladiatorial contests play more like those old Bette Davis/Joan Crawford weepies.

"This used to be guy season. Aggressive, muscular warfare focused on winning and losing, stats, handicapping, training, strategy and impenetrable debates on the modernization of the land-based leg of the nuclear triad.

"Now it's girl season, soaking in sentiment, soap opera, romantic walks along the lake, long, deep kisses on stage and guys making Cher-like hair and wardrobe changes.

"The pols and TV execs have decided that what women want is to be cuddled."

Does anybody sane - unaffected by Operation MOCKINGBIRD and federal propaganda, that is - fail to see the same in everything the nation now does? Concluding her essay columnist Dowd wrote: "Alan Dundes, a folklorist and professor of anthropology at Berkeley, has written that through history the essential theme of all competitions has been this: 'One male demonstrates his virility, his masculinity, at the expense of a male opponent. One proves one's maleness by feminizing one's opponent.' Now, to win, men have to feminize themselves. Game over."

Well, where the nation is concerned not quite. But it won't be long now. In its Chinese Water Torture (no not "Waterboarding" - that's different) fashion, the media repeated its "fingernails-scraping-on-a-blackboard," over and over an over, story of Hillary Clinton's "emotion." Aaaaaargh!!!!! What did that "cute," Internet missive of some time ago, the supposed Men's Manifesto, say? "Crying is blackmail?"

Well, Maureen Dowd, it's even worse than you portrayed it. We're in another kind of Olympics, another time that used to be "guy season." It's so bad we might even have a president concerning which all the ladies approve: one who cries. And consider what it all means: it means we have given real power - the power to make kings and queens - to our children, and we have empowered the woman to such a degree that we stand as a nation before the world in the personality of a woman. We may very well be led - another word with those "abortion," "male chauvinist," "issues" meanings - by a women. Our terrorist enemy is Islanic, a religion that holds a woman in about the same esteem as a dog (that was perhaps blasphemy - maybe the Allah, and Islam, holds the canine in higher esteem; sorry). More, we are ruled by a government controlled by mega-corporations, colossal entities who profit enormously by war and whose morality is determined by amount of profit.

We have been ruled by those same corporations since the nineteen sixties. I hold - because the good detective knows that when only one of his investigations principals has the power to do whatever it was that occurred, he is the only reasonable suspect - those corporations have orchestrated (the favorite expression of Frank G. Wisner, Operation MOCKINGBIRD's creator) it all. As Thomas Jefferson observed, "Merchants have no country. The mere spot they stand on does not constitute so strong an attachment as that from which they draw their gains."

Look around. What do you think has happened, and is happening. You know how capitalism works (they trumpet to the skies their world view and their moral code). Any idea what's coming?

P.S., Wednesday, January 9, 2008: Last night, the New Hampshire primaries, a thunderous indication of where we are headed - and a vindication for what I said here yesterday. With Hillary Clinton trailing badly in all the polls, and right up to the elections in dire straits, she cried on nationwide television. Oh, she said, if the nation only knew how much she cared. Suddenly, and unexpected turnout rush of women went to the polls . . . and we all know the rest. Welcome to government by emotion over reason, folks - I hope you like it (and maybe you should read my comment on my Tagworld page concerning leaders willing to cry).

"And there's Not Gonna Be a Damned Thing You Can Do About It"

Does anybody remember Billy Jack? "One Tin Soldier?" How about the old "saw" that goes, "here we go again." "Again" is yet another crazily-prosecuted war, a war that makes sense only to the people who profit in the billions as a result, people who contribute not a damned thing except the Operation MOCKINGBIRD propaganda promotion necessary to make the slaughter continue as long as possible.

Today comes news that the U.S. is sending more millions to Pakistan in order to rig elections in favor of those "U.S. Interests" we hear about relentlessly - SURPRISE!

Did I say "surprise?" What's surprising, considering that we are in the midst of the most obviously rigged, charade presidential election ever. For Chr--; no for your country's sake - wake the hell up and smell the skunk there in bed with you! Four or five times an hour, all day long, the television set delivers the same dissimulatingly orchestrated "news." Over and over, the canned, boiler-plate recitation concerning the latest missing woman presumed raped, murdered, and thrown away like a used condom. Interspersed through it all, on an every five minutes or so schedule, are the commercials I should think would serve as thunderous demonstration of what the politically-slanted "news" is really about. Each week, the missing women will be found dead; whereupon, the disappearance of another woman will in turn be featured until she is found dead, and the advertisers will advertise until the new missing woman is found dead, and until the stultifying process can be repeated.

The specious election "campaign" will proceed apace, with the same, hypnotizingly monotonous scripting and rhythm. Over and over and over, we will hear the same cynical promises, the same great ideas that will never come to fruition (how many times have you heard one of these fraud thespians promise to control or do away with Internal Revenue Service and a tax system as thunderously obvious in its intent and purpose?), the same pious pontificating (like George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton and the list of millionaires who run for President of the U.S. "understand" the working class and the poor) about "social justice," getting the government off the taxpayers back, and the litany of lies become as traditional (and similar in their perfunctory nature) as Christmas Carols.

Demagogue actors in a fraud farce production will promise to "bring us together," and to "unite" us, all the while participating as eagerly willing players in a massive media effort to assure divisive hatred and polarization of public opinion.

Remember Billy Jack? "I'm going to take this right foot, and I'm gonna to whop you on that side of your face, and you want to know something? There's not a damned thing you're gonna be able to do about it." It's a line to which I would refer repeatedly during instruction I gave prospective police officers at North Iowa Area Community College years ago, and I would repeat it again and again during seminars given for the Deputy Sheriffs Association and Federal Flight Deck Officers in more recent years. Each time, I would suddenly disarm or otherwise incapacitate (simulating near instantaneous killing) a man standing tactically too close to do anything about it. The demonstration had what I thought was an obvious point, and the aftermath during the rest of the seminar would demonstrate just as obviously that I had not succeeded in making the point. No matter how explosively sudden, no matter how spectacular, nothing I did could penetrate the armor of habituated illusion worn by my students.

I must have seen that smug grin - the one worn by Billy Jack's antagonist in the movie - a hundred times. Since I was a kid, I've wondered why it is that someone who knows almost nothing about a thing, will nevertheless acquire somehow the illusion that he on the contrary knows a great deal of it - even to the point of risking what is very important or dear to him. Even his life. When a minute ago I asked wife Rita about it, she noted that citizens of the U.S. have come somehow to the state that they may not admit or concede error. The phrase, "I was wrong" is tantamount to surrender, crushing defeat. For the political candidate in today's sham elections, the "flip-flopper" epithet label is the worst conceivable.

Even shown clearly and in advance (even in slow motion) the particular maneuver I would use to disarm and defeat the subject of my seminar demonstration, the latter would invariably insist each time that he was "ready." Meaning he expected to successfully resist (never, ever, did anyone ever do the obvious - move out of range of my attack). Initially damned at once as "lunacy" by life's real Sheriff Coles (the sheriff was the target for Billy Jack's Hapkido kick) "experts," "The Mongoose Tactic" was my 1958 contribution to law enforcement and security forces everywhere. In the hands of the L.A.P.D. becoming the "S.W.A.T." team tactic in 1967 and in 1972, after the terrorist attack on the Olympic Games, that of specialized anti-terrorist teams like S.A.S. 23 Regiment, Delta, SEAL Six, and others. Its paralyzing speed, of course, is its decisively conclusive character.

Smugly complacent stupidity in the opposition is important, too.

Today's meretricious election extravaganza, of course, is the political and historical equivalent of Billy Jack's "spiel" monologue. The corporations who rule in the Land of the Free stand before the sheriff public (we are to believe, in this scripted scenario, that that people like Rudy Giuliani and Hillary Clinton are the "good guys," we the smugly overconfident authority of democracy), announcing knowingly what they mean to do to us. When the MOCKINGBIRD media have water-boarded the truth and the public's conception of the same to post-traumatic syndrome mental derangement from which they can never recover, the U.S. taxpayer and electorate will find that nothing in fact has changed, a realization as sudden and stunning as a kick in the head.

Water-boarded by the propagandist MOCKINGBIRD U.S. media, the nation's public and electorate will have been stupefied to the point of believing the incredible, that the "presidential" election and all the promises made therein were real.

For many - some, like the twenty or so percent who still support our current presidential charlatan - disillusionment will come with brutal swiftness. Lying stunned on the ground like the Billy Jack villain, the public will likewise resolve to "kill the Indian son-of-a-bitch" that is the nation's governing plutocracy. Ha! In a matter of months, even weeks, the victim of Operation MOCKINGBIRD will slip back into its behaviorally-induced stupor like a woman suffering from battered wife or Stockholm syndrome. MOCKINGBIRD will have succeeded, and what was perhaps our last chance of freedom will have vanished.

The depredations of today's version of the Frankenstein Monster, the military industrial corporations, will continue (these guys are so above it all, they haven't even seen fit to abate their marauding raids on the U.S. Treasury during the elections and lobbying in Washington has gone on without pause) will continue to grow in degree and rapacity. The corporations who rule in the Land of the Fee will intensify efforts to weaken border security and to cripple efforts to stem the avalanche of illegal aliens, abandoning whole parts of the country and culture to the third-world character and culture of Mexico. The health care system, already the object of contemptuous scorn of "totalitarian" socialist (why does no one ever notice the contradiction in terms that is?) nations like Cuba, will break and collapse under the weight of free-loading by Mexico. The education system, in similar condition (and likewise victimized by political demagogue slick-talk) to that of national security, will do likewise. Lobbyists will proliferate, and abandon all pretense of their now barely disguised animosity toward the concept of representative government. Halliburton and their corporate siblings will proceed toward power equivalent or superior to that of nations, greedily gutting nation's economy and demolishing its business structure. The nation's identity crisis will reach its sociologically predictable conclusion, the patient morphing into the national equivalent of Alzheimer's dementia and amnesia.

And that won't be all. Perhaps - as far as I am personally concerned the "unkindest cut of all - the most odious of all the outrages foisted upon us by the political charlatans in Washington and our state capitols will be humiliation by the hordes of refuse humanity pouring over the border with Mexico. When Mexico has occupied California, Arizona, New Mexico, Texas, and the rest of "Aztlan," the citizenry of the conquered places will be forced to the equivalent of economic slavery, providing by dint of their work, talent, effort, and investment the health care, welfare, and social benefits the invaders' own country and society would not give them. While busily ruining and laying waste their new country as they have done their own, and sending home to Mexico and elsewhere billions of dollars embezzled here, they will fly their foreign flag over us, in contemptuous insult.

And we - having listened to and tolerated the mendacious bilge being spewed by the MOCKINGBIRD media and its political farce actors, having long since lost (sold out) to corporate power our honor and the prerogatives of free people living in a representative democracy - will deserve it.