Swan Song

So, we’ve all been required to invest in the stock market and banking industry, whether we like it or not and to the tune of $20,000 for each paycheck taxpayer. All of it, of course, is on account of the same thing as Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan, and a score more before them – national security. This isn’t unprecedented, of course; there was Chrysler Corporation, and, of course, the $100,000,000,000 we invested in the oil companies by way of “oil depletion allowances” and the odious. Put those with the hundreds of billions military industrial complex corporations are permitted to steal, and you have a good idea why a home that cost $20,000 dollars in 1960 costs $200,000 today.

The stock market is climbing; of course: where’s the risk when you know the government will hold someone up in order to assure that you don’t lose. Buy whatever you choose on even bad credit – the government will make your neighbor pay what you can’t.

And right and left wing extremists alike are telling themselves this isn’t a socialist country. How blind stupid can you get?!

The two presidential candidates are promising to cut taxes (every damned election since 1960, the same litany of lies regarding taxes, and people continue voting – incredible!) by printing more fiat money and spending more, and the morons who play the children’s monopoly game of politics go on . . . is there an echo in here?

Anyway, this is my swan song to the Internet and the discussion of it all there. I started my website and conversation with the public as part of a research project having to do with a proposed socio-economic thesis (for a PhD I now realize I need like I need a new hairstyle), an effort to learn how well the U.S. public thinks, and why that might be – the effects of Operation MOCKINGBIRD, in other words. The effort, which included nationwide travel, teaching in a Texas High School, and the Internet discourse and debate to which I had reference a minute ago, has had results I couldn’t have anticipated at the outset. Together with the federal swindle to which I had reference at the outset here, it has resulted in wife Rita’s and my own determination to begin preparation for what must now come soon, the swift decay and ruin of the nation.

Operation MOCKINGBIRD, the effort of the military industrial complex brainchild that was the CIA, has succeeded eminently, probably far beyond its most hopeful imaginings at the time of its creation. Conceived as the total takeover and control of the nation’s thought processes in the form of the news and information media, MOCKINGBIRD has reduced the U.S. public to a state so reminiscent of the “proles” in George Orwell’s prophetic book, “1984,” that almost no rational and original thought can be expected. An example is an electorate that believes contradictory nonsense like that being promulgated by today’s supposed (indeed, that anyone believes real an absurd charade like the current presidential campaign is evidence of intense behavioral conditioning and resulted dementia) political parties. It will demonstrate to future historians the fact of CIA and military industrial complex coup d’etat leaders’ MKULTRA mind and opinion control science success.

An electorate supporting with its finances and vote candidates like those we have today is like a rape victim cheering on her attacker. Your government, after all, has decided that you need to assure the success of the people who have daily been stealing you blind – corporate America, Wall Street, the bankers, and the nations financiers otherwise – and the government has gone to the bank (much the way IRS did when it decided to take all of my money), and it has taken from your account $20,000.

And many of the people who have been burglarized – people so blinded and behaviorally conditioned by the nation’s Fourth Estate and their MOCKINGBIRD propagandists that they are unaware of what has happened - are cheering the burglars.

In the last several years, almost all of it during the execrable George W. Bush Administration, the U.S. public has lost most of its Constitutional rights. All telephone, computer, and private discourse is subject to governmental invasion. Across the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee, police break into homes without warrant, summarily murdering the people there. Unarmed citizens continually go down in a blizzard fusillade of bullets, or are shot down and electrocuted in public with a hideous device called a TASER (hardly anyone would find that surprising, in a nation whose congress and chief executive foment, condone, and practice torture). Law-abiding citizens are nevertheless stopped without reason on the nation’s highways, to be given a “warning ticket” for no other reason than “snooping” by the authorities.

Under the staggering burden of taxation, both by enactment, by printing press, deficit spending inflation, by staggering corporate theft, and by outright IRS thuggery, the wage-earning citizen has been reduced to Henry David Thoreau’s “quiet desperation.” The latter, together with federally-fomented ideological movements like feminism and homosexualism, has destroyed the basic social unit which is the family, with the further result that a critical portion of our children have become mindlessly ignorant savages, uncontrollable by teachers and school authorities and terrorizing the streets of our cities.

Even more signally meaningful where the nation’s youth are concerned, perhaps, are governmentally-inflicted social programs which provide for the inclusion among normal children in our schools of the mentally deficient (“challenged”), mentally deranged, and emotionally disturbed. A story in our local paper concerning an autistic child in a high school class is an example, and a microcosm of the nation and its swiftly deteriorating societal structures.


The common occurrence of acts of savage brutality like the immolation while living or savagely beating to death of the homeless and the aged, together with the further fact that large numbers of officials nevertheless work mindlessly to disarm prospective victims of such violence, are symptomatic of a society gone utterly insane.

And, of course, there is more – much, much more. Mathematical extrapolation of data having been published during my lifetime argues incontrovertibly that the North American continent will not be fit for human habitation by the dawn of the twenty-second century. The Mexican bandit – peasant villager, Magnificent Seven drama, that is despoiling reiver corporations like Uranium Resources and Exelon versus ranchers, townspeople, and local citizens currently being acted out in the area where I live is an example of the reasons the environment will kill anyone and anything foolish enough to attempt life here.

The history of nuclear energy and related research is utterly unmistakable, a trail of misery and destruction of fearsome proportions to those who will make the effort necessary to uncover it from where it has been hidden among the camouflage arrayed by the corporate powers in question and the media they own or control. While anyone with a Geiger counter or dosimeters and willing to do the necessary travel of, for instance, the state of Texas, will realize the extent of damage to the environment done by previous uranium mining – all of it despite cynically impassioned protestations to supposed state regulators concerning “clean-up” and other environmental protections – corporate influence in a nation already ruled by corporate influence of an apathetic and/or sheep-like populace will finally prevail. Those who persist in self-defense will be beaten into submission, either by legal mayhem or otherwise.

Were the continent's inhabitants to somehow save it from fatal contamination and corruption, continuing federal governmental policy having to do with deliberate support of illegal immigration - including hundreds of thousands of hardened criminals - from Mexico means inevitably and inexorably the conversion of the U.S. into a national parallel of that paragon of national virtue, Mexico. I need not recite evidence of what Mexico thunderously is, nor is it necessary to say again that a nation is what it is on account of its people. That, too, is self-evident.

The situation nationally, together with its parallel in the recent “bailout” of corporate Wall Street, of corporate predatory lenders (housing and otherwise), and of stock market corporations generally, tells a tactician like myself everything he needs to know. The Land of the Free has inexorably become the Land of the Fee, where money and political power derived from money – money created out of thin air by the very same corporate powers – rule. It’s time to begin fighting a tactical withdrawal and rearguard action.

I have begun converting our vehicles in order to make a large proportion of their fuel hydrogen (a process with which I have experience, having done the same in 1972 and again in 1981), and I am designing a system like that with which I once made a ten acre farm completely energy independent (anyone can do this: so much for protestations concerning the need to live next to a potential nuclear bomb and on land contaminated with the waste inevitably resulted from the same bomb and operations necessary to feed it).

To those with whom I have become favorably acquainted here on the Internet, I bid fond adios. To those with whom acquaintance has been not so favorable . . . well, you will probably respond with the same mindlessly knee-jerk and programmed diatribe, invective, and ad hominem lack of logic as usual. I thank you, however – you have taught me much of what I needed to know concerning the dim future of the nation for which I once loved enough to fight, kill, and be wounded.

Adios!

SITREP - Things for a Thoughtless Nation to Think About.

The word comes that the sleaze of politicians on the Potomac has cravenly capitulated to Wall Street and all the lobbyists for big business, passing the seven hundred billion dollar ($700,000,000,000) legislative “bailout” package for them. This is as clearly unconstitutional as anything that has ever happened in the nation’s history, being a classic case of unlawful expenditure of tax monies. It is the biggest single swindle of the taxpayer since the swindle that was creation of the Federal Reserve itself.

This is more, even, than it appears to be where the fate of the nation is concerned, however. It remains to be seen how many citizens will call their lawyers in order to file a federal suit to stop this raid on their finances. Every citizen affected by this, the Congress latest attempt at destruction of his life, has the legal standing to bring suit. More, every citizen has the power and standing to file a pro se lawsuit in federal court, and at the cost of purchase of a couple of books from Nolo Press, http://www.nolo.com/index.cfm, he can learn how to file the necessary papers.

It’s interesting that while this swindle will cost every U.S. family in excess of twelve thousand dollars, tax money stolen and spent illegally, and while anyone, were their twelve thousand dollar car destroyed by someone in government would sue, few or none will sue concerning this “bailout” theft of his money. Neither are seven hundred billion dollars nationally, or twelve thousand dollars family-wise, the only costs of this. Statistical analysis (my own) based on other similar actions – financing of things like the “War on Terror,” for instance – reveals that the total cost of the “bailout” to the individual citizen will be upwards of thirty thousand dollars.

Federal Inflation, as I explained in recent essays here, costs the wage-earner far more than the amount the government borrows. Borrowed money not only means interest, you know, it means costs magnified many times as the “funny” money circulates through the economy.

Failure of the nations’ citizens to react with more than sheep-like bleating will tell historians everything they need to know about reasons for the decline and fall of the United States of America.

My own, pro se, lawsuit will be filed soon.

The ludicrous Palin-Biden “debate” – there goes the meaning and sense of another word – is, mercifully, history. Only one thing could be learned from that celebration of half (or quarter) truth, outright falsehood and political posturing, of course – the simple fact that of why we are a nation in decline.

Biden, the male on stage, was obliged by the logically weird rules of our society to say nothing that in any way attacked or might otherwise offend Palin, the female on stage. The same society that a couple of decades ago insisted that women were fit for combat, able to do anything a man could do there, and, moreover insists still that she is the equal of a man in all and every respect, demands here that a candidate running for vice-president or president treat a woman as though she might be seriously injured by a word – or facial expression.

Palin, of course, will “win” this “debate” if she somehow manages to characteristically glittering generality and non sequitur her way to the end of the tawdry affair without double-talking herself into tongue-tied lingual convulsions. Or wetting – “having issues” in - her panties.

Since boyhood, regarding that last, I have detested jargonized, C.O.I.A.K (clear only if already known), solecistic language. But I fear bias. In fact, I am absolutely terrified of biased thought and behavior. That’s because there are few human conditions more crippling, both of the individual and the group. There are no biases more pernicious vicious and destructive than the religious and ideological-political variety, a kind of bias that results in the group equivalent of muscular dystrophy in the individual. This political campaign, last night’s “debate” an archetypical example, has been the most thunderous example of the spastic fecklessness to which mindless ideological and political bias leads.

Everything that is said is suspect and useless as effective communication. There is simply no need to ask what anyone ideologically and/or politically involved will say: simply learn with which ideology or political party he is identified, and you know what he will say. For the media to ask any of its parroting pundits, for instance, who “won” the “debate” makes for a rhetorical question only. For a nation asking for useful explanations, for data and material by which to make decisions or gauge the depth of the trouble we’re obviously in, the “leaders” and “experts” provide pontificating, bloviating, and vapid generalities so broad as to be continental. Or galactic.

That’s when they’re not lying outright (of course, bias is a lie internalized; and a lie is bias publicized).

Even more infuriatingly frustrating is the now publicized – long since - fact that the language we speak has been so bowdlerized, sanitized, politically corrected, castrated, and otherwise mangled as to become damned near useless for meaningful communication. Add that fact of today’s discourse to conversation with a public now largely comprised of people whose attention span is too short to internalize more than one or two – and, mind you, very simple – sentences, and you have a recreation of the Biblical Tower of Babel.

Of them all – another Mersenne number, it seems – no solecistic and/or jargonized torture of the language has resulted in a much spastic paralysis of ideas as the execrable Malapropism “issues.” Here, the only relief is comic, like Katie Couric recently telling a nationwide audience of her “issues in bed.” Or the nitwit on CNN another day talking about male “sexual issues.” And, of course, if these paragons of the marginal intellect we choose for public office these days are “on” for an hour, the hyper-hackneyed term “issues” will be repeated until the audience develops a psychological facial tic at every re-iteration. More, women and old men will promise to “fight” for this and that, recalling interminably how he or she has “fought” for this and that interminably.

Aaaargh!

If any of these pontificating popinjays were given any problem – no, not “issue;” problem – in the real word, there would never be a solution. That’s even more the case should race, gender, religion, or the like be a factor. There are simply too many words one dare not utter, too many subjects that may not be discussed.

Joe Biden may not ask Sarah Palin if she believes any of the fundamentalist Christian things she says she believes!

Barak Obama, a candidate for president of the United States, refuses to prove with a verifiable birth certificate that he is a legal citizen of the United States! What is more, no one may ask him that question on television, in the land of the free press.

I may not say “nappy-headed hoe” (or whatever the hell the word was), I may not say that someone (was it Barak Obama, and did his running mate for the presidency say it?) is articulate, honest, and whatever the hell else it was, because if I do that I have insulted everyone like him, and I may not object to the guy who is burglarizing my house or camped on my patio if he is a Mexican because my complaint means I’m racist.

If I recognize that a male human has been designed by evolution to impregnate, care for, and defend a female human being because she is . . . well, female and intended by nature to be impregnated, I am a “sexist,” and I will probably lose my job and means of livelihood – to say nothing of risk my life. We can’t, in short discuss race, even if the problem is race. We can’t discuss gender, even if the problem is gender. We can’t discuss religion, even if the problem is religion.

We can’t solve certain problems because it is against the law or otherwise societally forbidden to discuss them. What does that tell you about certain of our problems? What does that tell you about the state of our nation and its government?

We are about to accept as a candidate for the highest office in the nation on the same basis and for the same reason that we have imprisoned literally hundreds, even thousands, of men for rape they didn’t commit – because we are forbidden to question her claims and statements.

Think about it.

"What Happened?!"

Ed, a longtime friend, writes to say that what he thinks has happened to result in the latest “bailout” of a U.S. corporation is that when the U.S. demanded a “bailout” for the fat-cats in the money-changing industry – i.e., the bankers in one form or another - the Congress was ready to kiss ass as usual. Sixty thousand lobbyists in the Bordello on the Potomac aren’t there for a tour of our national monuments. Then, however, when the public outcry became threatening to their fat-cat jobs, the heroes of democracy suddenly got some “leadership” character. Ed thinks Wall Street has threatened to launch an attack on retirement funds, general investment media, and, I presume, entitlement programs in general. He warns that what follows will result further in Wall Street’s retaliation against mainstream U.S.A.

Ed was one of few people who agreed with me when I predicted years ago – almost a decade, in fact – what is happening today. I agree with him in this instance entirely. There will be, in other words, hell to pay.

Of course, none of it makes a bit of economic difference to me. I dropped out of the insane system that has produced this Lewis Carroll-ian dream more than two decades ago. I was never a “joiner,” and behaving like a jackass simply because a group of my kind was behaving like a jackass became anathema to me while I was still in high school.

‘’’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, ‘otherwise you wouldn't have come here.’”

I didn’t “come here” – which is to say I dropped out. I’m no goddamned idiot and you can’t make a slave of me – I’ll die fighting you (and take my share with me). With what’s about to come down very near now, there may be those who wonder what I did in order to have survived to be able to be watching this re-enactment of Alice’s journey down the rabbit hole.

Does anybody believe that if the Congress and the public refuses to give the bankers and financial swindlers of corporate America what they want legally, they won’t go right ahead and take it on the sly and illegally, anyway? Are you serious? You believe the fact of fifty thousand plus lobbyists in Washington, D.C. means the congressional watchmen you trust to watch the treasury are trustworthy? If you believe that, you are the principle reason we’re in this latest “screw the taxpayer” orgy.

You’re one of the morons who will vote in this next election, then bray that you’ve done your patriotic duty.

A lesson in economics – truth politicians spend most of their time suppressing – is in order. First, what we call a “dollar” – and pretend is money - is not money; it is a U.S. Government I.O.U. It is backed – i.e., given value – by the sweat, skill, and talent of the productive people of the United States. “Productive” people, in case you’ve never thought about it, are those who actually produce something real – that is, make it or make it from what is taken from the planet upon which we live.

All money, all “wealth,” is incontrovertibly derived from the planet Earth. Capitalism by definition is the turning of the earth and its resources into capital – money. Any medium of exchange, or unit thereof, is therefore representative of an amount of something derived from the earth.

The I.O.U. dollar is merely what is called by Harvard scholar types a “medium of exchange.” What does that mean? It means something that represents – represents; not is - a real thing of value, something, a commodity, derived from the planet. That, unfortunately or otherwise, includes a human being or his skill, knowledge, or ability to do what another can’t or won’t do.

Understanding economics is most easily done when the earth and all its peoples are represented by an island, one with only a few people on it. A microcosm, in other words. With time, the “money” inhabitants of the island have printed or minted becomes representative of nothing as the natural resources available on the island are used up. In the microcosmic example I used on a talk radio show from KOIA San Antonio decades ago, that of an island where the only resources were bananas growing there, the bananas have all been eaten or used otherwise. The trees have died (it won’t be too hard, in today’s ideological state, to imagine that the islanders have so polluted their island, and refused to do the hard work of cleaning up and/or caring for the trees).

The islander’s money now represents only the skill, knowledge, and labor of the inhabitants. For those unwilling or unable to work, the “medium of exchange” money is, in fact, simply a claim on the life and person of another islander. That’s all. If there are one thousand “dollars” on the island, and one hundred islanders, then each islander is worth ten dollars. Eventually, of course, the people on the island will be obliged to eat one another. And those who have succeeded in acquiring money – control and right to the life and person of another – will sell their fellow to be eaten. For money.

On the immense island that is the United States of America, under the infantile economic system that is corporate capitalism, a professional baseball player is worth literally tens of thousands of times what a soldier, or teacher is. Where the currency that is human beings is concerned, an adolescent female who cavorts semi-nude while singing doggerel verse is worth - valued at - many, many times what a doctorate-degreed musician is.

In the fall of 1956, as I was returning from a mission into Hungary during the revolution there, and having accomplished a feat of arms I knew few men on earth could duplicate, I stopped at a shop in LaGuardia Airport to buy a newspaper. The paper was still talking about the “heroics,” of Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Bill (Moose) Skowron, and the Yankees pitching staff in the recent Baseball World Series. All of the Yankees would doubtlessly be making a lot of money next year, the paper said, and I recall calculating at the time that Mickey Mantle was being paid nearly twenty times what I was.

I sat staring at the ceiling for a long time, wondering what the future might be for a country with its priorities and perspectives having to do with money and personal worth – the product of its thought processes – so twisted that it would pay to play a children’s game twenty times what it would pay for risking of life and killing in combat. In the years that followed, as I watched the nation’s economic perspective grow more and more irrational, distorted and disproportionate, I became even more certain of the conclusion I drew then.

The conclusion? - just what has happened to result in this essay. There is, of course, a mathematical algorithm – for the reader who is a mathematician, a series – modeling what has been happening. Sometimes called “the Butterfly Effect,” the process is a chaotic one, meaning that a small and otherwise insignificant factor has staggeringly disproportionate results.

Let me digress – perhaps even further - for a moment. When I was a kid in high school, it occurred to me that there were two worlds. One was the world I lived in, where building things, producing, rearing, and husbanding real, weighty, ornery, resisting things was daily, perennial experience; and the second world was the world of language – rhetoric – wherein everything was a construct of mere words.

In the real world, every cause had an inevitable, often ineluctable consequence. Life was like my already then favorite sports, judo and wrestling. Make an error, you paid its prices. Nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape. Most things were accomplished only with effort, sometimes great effort, and the rewards for effort were proportionate to the effort. Again, nowhere to hide, no excuses, no escape.

In the world or rhetoric, however, everything was entirely different. One could defeat the most skilled opponent simply with a turn of phrase, create a fight (the kind of “fight” politicians speak of daily) out of pure language, hide from his weaknesses behind a word blizzard smoke screen. One skilled with language could create anything he desired. I sometimes thought that the Apple in Eden was language, because with language man could rival even god – he could create.

Indeed, for those sufficiently astute, mere words are the medium of exchange representing reality – the planet. Like the U.S. dollar, they are a fiction, not a resource; they are a fiction, the ideated-only representation of a real thing. A person who accepts this ideated currency for anything he has produced with his labor, skill, or mind is a fool, accepting for something real and of the real world something that is an idea – a promise – alone.

In the world and virtual reality of language, that which was produced by the hands and mind of and individual is always worth the same kind of effort by and from another, no matter its effect in reality.

The value of a printed piece of paper is indeterminate and fickle as a nation who will pay a baseball player tens of thousands of times what it will pay one who teaches or guards his children.

It is as fickle as a nation who will arbitrarily and without study or any other kind of basis in fact simply decree that the value of a woman’s work is the same as that of a man, or that the value of work or product of an individual of one race is the same as that of an individual from any other race - or color, or creed, or clothing style – thusly depreciating in the same manner as the baseball player the teacher, soldier, or policeman the work, product, and person of everyone else.

It is as fickle and ripe for self-destruction as a nation that requires lending to certain people on the basis of their race, creed, or gender alone, thusly depreciating the value of credit in general – making it cost more and more - for everyone else.

It is as fickle as a nation that decrees in its educational establishment “no child left behind” – meaning that all children must stay behind.

It is as fickle as a society that will give its immature and unsophisticated children command of amounts of money sufficient to let them turn an otherwise pitiful clown masquerading as an artist or entertainer into a multi-millionaire, and let unscrupulous – corporate, of course – business prey upon the children’s immaturity.

Et cetera, ad infinitum – infinity now thunderously evident.

Of course, in addition to all of that feckless fickleness and in order to be able to steal at will from its productive citizenry, the government makes law that requires the productive citizen to exchange his blood, sweat, and tear, real-world product for a piece of paper represented by the baseball player’s product. The cold war warrior dueling with a handgun three AK-47 armed Soviet soldiers in Lövér Forest in western Hungary will be paid in currency valued in major part by a baseball player.

Money whose value has been inflated by the baseball player’s product and keeps the product of the farmer dirt cheap also keeps the public bewildered as to the value of anything. In a nation whose corporate government sings daily its “free market” litany, it is price-fixing at its most insidious, unseen, and vicious. The value – i.e., purchasing power – of “baseball player money” is being changed minute by minute as this or that profligate and asinine bargain or purchase takes place – that, in fact, while the productive person has no way to know what has happened or is happening to his money, his produce, or his value as a person.

The result today is that no one made available to the public by the news and information media, or by the government that controls them, can say what is happening or will happen. Joe Scarborough, host of this morning’s “Morning Joe” program, complains that no one, Congressman, Senator, President, Secretary of the Treasury, or political pundit is willing or able to say what has happened.

Of course not! How do you balance a checkbook on an account from which anyone can draw as much as he pleases and without recording the withdrawal, and the money being withdrawn has value which varies erratically from day to day?

Neither the average citizen nor the baseball player has any idea concerning how much President Bush’s war has cost him. The truth is, neither does anyone else, because there is no way to know! Even told, and an explanation given (the accuracy or utility of which, like the Heisenberg Principle, must be uncertain) he is unable to assess the effect of the theft until he can’t pay for things for which he once could pay and can’t borrow in order to pay for them, either. Eventually, however, everyone on the island that is our nation must borrow “money” – “money,” don’t forget, that has no certain value and whose repayment may, in fact, be impossible. The cost of everything on the island has been so inflated by the cost of things otherwise worthless, that all trade stops for re-negotiation of values and worth. What is true of the individual islander, of course, becomes eventually true for everybody on the island – or nation.

And that, Joe Scarborough – and John Q. Citizen – is what has happened.

To be continued (one solution) . . .