Sitrep, September, 2008

For the uninitiated, “sitrep” is a military communications abbreviation for “situation report.” This, then, is a situation report concerning the United States of America, as observed and reconnoitered during seventy-two years of living here, serving in its military, and having survived assault by its courts and government otherwise.

As I wrote this, news of the beginning of the economic disaster I first forecast nine years ago was announced by the nation’s news media. I have, as a matter of recorded fact, been able to make accurate predictions repeatedly concerning the nation – a fact I have further stated repeatedly over the last decade, both in my books and other writings and on the Internet. Not only does no one challenge me concerning this, by scores of people have written to acknowledge the accuracy of prognoses that began in 1972 with a public speech wherein I predicted unerringly events now unfolding and having unfolded of late.

It isn’t hard and there’s no Nostradamus-like mysticism about it. Anyone using a little logic and scientific method and observing events carefully and without bias (read that last again; it makes all the difference) could do as well. This is a society that can be read like a book – a psychology book.

As Friedrich Nietzsche observed, “Insanity in individuals is something rare - but in groups, parties, nations and epochs, it is the rule.”

It is also my private opinion that the rise and fall of nations is due the fact that they inevitably go insane. The United States of America will serve as an object example of that fact of history. It was none other than a President of the United States, John Adams, who observed that “Democracy never lasts long . . . it is always a suicide.”

The U.S. is now near that final drama.

To learn the science of prediction, one must first learn science. It is science, after all, that imposes upon any theory criteria which include that used to make accurate predictions. One begins in much the manner that a tracker following potential prey does: like Sherlock Holmes, he first observes small things. Here’s an example:

Yesterday, a friend sent me a video concerning “Skidboot,” a dog who before his demise in 2007 made more money - much more money - than his owner, one David Hartwig, a Texas cowboy who shoes horses – ie., works hard - for a living. “Skidboot,” as a matter of fact, was able to make more money than most semi-skilled laborers, policemen, teachers, or middle class people in general. The dog, you see, is perhaps the most intelligent of his kind, ever. He has as a result appeared on a number of high visibility televisions programs like the Oprah Winfrey show (that right there, incidentally, would tell you a great deal were you an analyst hoping to know the future of the nation). .

Let me say it again: a dog made more money than most United States citizens.

What does that tell you about what has happened to the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee and its future? Let’s see if I can help. Among those people who make less than a dog are people most critical to the future of the U.S. In fact, just about – almost without exception - every person who will ultimately decide the survival of the country is paid less than was “Skidboot.” If that weren’t insane enough, most U.S. citizens today celebrate facts like this one, having somehow – “somehow” translated “massive information media and educational system propaganda” - been convinced that ability and hard work (the Horatio Alger Story, anyone?) can prevail over forces as capricious as those which raise a dog to prestige, power, and prerogative.

The economic system – it is more an urge or drive than a system; “system” implies thought or planning – known as capitalism regularly produces individuals like Skidboot, persons like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, George W. Bush and their purportedly arch-capitalist like. People like these invariably would have you believe they “earn” their massive incomes; in fact, to dare think otherwise is anathema to their ideology and secular religion. These – in their minds – great ones asseverate that they are rich because they deserve to be rich, that on account of their surpassing intelligence, skill, talent, and beauty – or their great effort.

The “less fortunate” – none of their conservative capitalist like believe for one minute in good fortune where they are concerned – are so “less fortunate” because they are less skillful, less intelligent, and less valuable to society and nation. The wealthy are so simply because they are worth more.

Just like “Skidboot.”

The hunter who desires to follow the prey that is accurate anticipation and prediction of something like the latest economic mess – Lehman Brothers’ bankruptcy, for instance - must understand that an ideology like that of the rags to riches, Horatio Alger Myth, forms also a schema – a pattern, algorithm, or mathematical equation. Like a mathematical series, an ideological system that provides for a canine earning more than humans, a Sean Combs “rapper” more than a mathematician, and a football player more than a college president – just three examples of an absurd microcosm – also provides for ineluctable results.

I will digress long enough here to make in an elucidating manner a pointed prediction: now that corporate capitalism has done what it invariably does, capitalists both corporate and individual will do what they always do – go looking for as much socialism as they can find. The socialism, of course, will amount to little more than a disguise, camouflage to hide the colonialism that historically always precedes capitalism. Using their irresistible access – they will call in all their “markers” and IOUs – to congress and the bureaucracy, the “free market” captialists will obtain and use legislation to again colonialize the marketplace and return to exploitation of the public.

The “Skidboot” capitalists will use their corporate buddies in Washington, D.C. to recover what all that surpassing intelligence, skill, talent, and beauty have lost. The fruit of their Herculean labors, in other words.

One schooled in a logical Taylor and Maclaurin Series like Skidboot Capitalism expects – at the very least, is not surprised by - things like the rise of presidential candidates of the caliber of Barack Obama and John McCain. Anyone astutely familiar with political history since World War Two actually expected the vice-presidential nomination of a Sarah Palin (or the presidential candidacy of a Hillary Clinton). It’s Skidboot politics. It’s Skidboot economics. It’s Skidboot national security.

In Skidboot ideology, you see, the way to promotion and pay is, in fact, not excellence or competence; it is mediocrity and incompetence. In the effeminate world that has spawned the Skidboot ideology, the competent and ingenious are more than anything else a threat (when has feminism ever demanded competition on a wrestling mat, a level playing field, or any kind of fair contest – rather than competition in a court of rhetoric and emotion). Like the corporate executive or the military commander who is promoted once he has failed or the politician or political appointee who is protected once having been caught in graft, in illicit sexuality, malfeasance, or staggering mismanagement (if FEMA directors after Hurricane Katrina don’t come to mind, you’re too far gone to understand all this) a religion, ideology, or movement like that of feminism cannot be decried, much less denounced. Even though its miserable failings and effects are everywhere evident in a nation fairly disintegrating before our eyes, feminism has the politically almighty blessing of pitiable incompetence, of feminine failure (to demand more is, after all, “sexist”) and its therefore popular appeal (in a nation like this one, far more people identify with the “red neck” than with the rocket scientist).

In the Skidboot, feminist society, one rises to stardom, to wealth, position and power because he is a member of a minority, female (especially a well-built female), able to perform some wondrous feat like throw a ball through a hoop, make music, or the otherwise insignificant like. Have failed miserably in some large endeavor is also a major political asset in a society where all success is in some form political success.

Oh, and by all means, he must be a “team player.”

So here we are. Right where anyone able gather the data, construct the logical or mathematical model, and to do the necessary computation would expect:

The nation is fifty-three trillions of dollars in debt, a major portion of which is to a creditor in whose distrust and outright hatred we were for decades schooled and propagandized – “Red” (remember that term?) China. How insane is it to continue trumpeting that we won the cold war, while we are billions and billions and billions of dollars in debt to one cold war enemy, and being made to appear a feckless laughingstock to the rest of the world by another?!

I said “sitrep.” Well, here it is:

Our economic system, one dependent entirely upon being able to hornswoggle the ignorant into working for and spending fiat money whose only real value is the hope that people will continue to work for and spend it, is a beached whale; our cold war enemies either hold mortgages on our economy or enjoy watching us slowly destroyed by our addiction to what they possess and hold in massive proportions.

The World Bank for International Settlements has ordered the U.S. Federal Reserve and the Treasury Dept. to call in all foreign-issued bonds and debt paper. They are, in other words, trying to assure that the U.S. and its Skidboot “free market” economy doesn’t take the rest of the world down the tube with it. There will be those who remember that I predicted years ago that the rest of the world’s nations would one day realize that we are a cancer growing on the planet, a great black hole, that unless they stop us, will destroy them. It seems now that they may have “realized.”

Our educational system, long the prostitute exploited by a pimp government, has long since ceased to be capable of producing the kind of intellects that would almost certainly have invented alternative sources of energy; and our Skidboot form of capitalism continues to assure that obvious alternative energy technology will be smothered by legislation, or deprived of funding by legislation (having all one’s capital, capital for use in building alternative sources of energy, confiscated by taxation).

The corporate “free marketers” will make damned sure that no free market answer to high prices at the gasoline pump occurs, in other words.

While we are being bled white by corporate capitalist greed in the form of Shylock turned Gracie Allen lending practices together with the effeminate humanist’s insistence that everybody should buy whatever they feel like “owning,” the rich man the nation elected in order to protect the poor goes on with his own version of profligate borrowing and spending, the Iraq war.

Gracie Allen, parenthetically, was famed and now deceased comedian George Burns’ wife, and as part of their Vaudeville act used to say she believed that as long as her check book had checks, her account had money.

Have I mentioned my theory that the rise and fall of nations is due the fact that they go slowly insane? Yeah, I think I did.

Continuing our “sitrep,” and related to that last concerning our educational system, still another study reports that our male children are in dire straits. That’s both scholastically and psychologically. FUBAR is the most succinct way to put it, and no one who is, as I am, a teacher, has any doubt of it. That J.S. Mill quote that I use so often concerning a nation that dwarfs its men has proved to be true where its boys are concerned, too.

But, of course, as with everything demonstrating that the chickens of feminism have begun coming home to roost, feminist both female and merely effeminate have responded in exactly the manner one would expect – with blizzards of “it’s true because I say it is” recrimination. Maybe I should reiterate that quote, in case there remains anyone with enough intellect left to profit from looking around:

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

I trust the description is one too vivid to mistake, once you’ve had that “look around.”

And not that boys are alone. As I remarked recently – and as I remark frequently, anymore – men nowadays behave like the adolescent boys of my youth. “Wouldn’t make a pimple on a man’s ass,” as a grandfather was wont to say. You may be too young to recognize it – feminism reared its Medusa head four or five decades ago, and its FUBAR effect on the public consciousness was immediately apparent – but the Congress, degraded as it is by women – behaves these days like nothing so much as a sorority, an old ladies knitting circle, or kaffeeklatsch gossip society.

That same U.S. Congress spends like it has Gracie Allen’s comically infamous checkbook.

Next, in case you somehow have the idea that we might use our much-vaunted military to regain ascendency in the world, it is now clear that the nothing-costs-too-much war machine of our society can’t beat anybody. While that may have been clear to some after Korea (anybody know about that one? – it was 1950-ish, so you have to have read some history), it became thunderously clear in Vietnam when little men in black pajamas and armed mostly with small arms and B-40 rocket launchers fought our nothing-costs-too-much army to a standstill, then took over after we had our first look at bankruptcy by welfare for military industrial complex corporation.

In 1959, during a conversation with Major General Tom Van Natta, I made the observation that no nation in its right mind – or with any mind – would oppose in conventional manner our spend-more-than-the-other-guy and bury him in war machinery and soldiers’ bodies army. They would have to fight us, of course – capitalism is what it is and says it is – but they would wage guerrilla war and “death of a thousand cuts” wars of attrition. We, I said, would eventually spend ourselves to death. I remember, too, saying that our military was in such condition that were the local girls school to stage an insurrection, I doubted that we could put it down.

And now we have an Army whose combat commands are enormously degraded by women. And we’re back to fighting guys dressed in outlandish clothes, armed with AK-47s and B-40 rocket launchers. What was it – March, 2003, that we invaded Iraq? When was “mission accomplished” declared – May, 2003?

And, voila! Here we are living in one of my first – 1959, I remind you - prognostications.

Elsewhere in bedlam known as the Land of the Free Market – where nothing military is too costly – we have new intelligence satellites being built not because we need them for intelligence, but because the military industrial complex corporations keep up the pressure to build more. You’d expect that, inasmuch as that’s the same formula that has resulted in a military more costly by many times than the next ten militaries on earth.

And for all that Brobdingnagian spending, we are less safe from our enemies than ever before. While apparently distracted sorts like the FoxNews “personalities” I made mention of a minute ago continue to pontificate that another 9-11 attack hasn’t occurred (and illogically assuming, one must believe, that another must have been scheduled or intended), few persons with any knowledge of history can have any confidence in such reasoning. Our ports and borders remain open to anyone who wants to enter – as literally thousands are doing across our border with Mexico.

If someone is more desirous of delivering a nuclear bomb than kidnapping for ransom or the slave trade one of our women or kids, the missing on the wall at Wal-Mart won’t be due kidnapping or having run away, it’ll be because they were vaporized by a nuclear explosion, or killed by some bacteriological or chemical (or other) “terrorist” weapon.

Come to think of it, the “War on Drugs” yields just about the same results as the war in Iraq or Afghanistan. Or as did the war in Vietnam. Few palpable results except higher prices, higher taxes, more political posturing and promises, lots of death and misery, and no end in sight.

Good for the “free market,” of course.

To be continued . . .