Continually, I hear people say they have not way to know what’s really going on in or with the nation, because “you can’t trust the media.”

No, you sure can’t. On any given night of watching television news, you will hear so much statistical nonsense, so much specious reasoning, and so much downright obvious lying, that little of what is said can be used by anyone rational as the basis of an opinion or action. It’s the pits.

But you can learn a lot otherwise about the nation from the boob tube, a whole lot. I’m not sure how I learned the science of news-watching, but I know how it started. I was still a kid in high school when I acquired my curiosity about the way the media reported the news. Beginning with a supposedly crying statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary in a place called Nasita, Wisconsin, I traveled to the site and scene of events reported in the papers and on the radio, to see what the truth was. The experience was not only something fascinating, it was enlightening.

There is something in the human being that does not like reality, the truth. A human being will believe something on the basis of evidence so flimsy as to beggar description. Usually, in that case, he believes simply and solely because he wants the thing to be true; often, matter of fact, that is the only reason for his believing. On the other hand, if a fact goes against his desires, he will simply refuse to believe on the same grounds – he doesn’t want it to be that way. That’s against even overwhelming evidence.

Discovering that made another observation all the more amazing, that man chooses to believe that truth always succeeds, that it is somehow endowed by the creator with irresistible power. He will defend his creed against reality, no matter what happens to refute it.

There is a corollary, the fact that human beings fear their own thoughts more than they fear anything else on earth. I’ve wasted more time, I think, on conversation examining and probing for reason this should be true than any other diversion save, perhaps, judo. It’s been a study, matter of fact, as intensive as that having to do with the media and its version of the truth.
Man fears his own thoughts more than financial ruin, more than ridicule – and that may be what thinking amounts to for many – and more than death. Thought, after all, is liable to discover the truth he hates. It may also discover that what he believes is nonsense. Thought is merciless to things like politics, personal philosophy, religion, and mythology. Thought doesn’t give a damn for authority or privilege. It’s devastating to ego. It’s liable to screw up you love life, too.

Apparently that has always been so, but people nowadays go even to such lengths as mind-altering drugs to avoid hearing themselves think. Living during the Presidential Administration of George W. Bush is enough to do that to a lot of people.

Anyway, my penchant for analyzing news data and the media grew to swiftly apparent and so early that my high school class prophecy was that I would one day find and capture the Abominable Snowman. I’m still at it. Using my methods, a visitor from another planet might quickly understand a great deal about, and know what to expect of, the United States, just by watching television for a couple of hours.

The visitor would see readily that commerce, money and wealth, are an obsession nothing can abate. No matter the entertainment or educational value of programming, it is interrupted every five minutes or less by at least the same amount of advertising and commercial “messages.” With the exception of local commercials, the advertising is of far higher quality and “production value” than the “regular” programming – entertainment, news, or the like. The wonder, and another clue concerning the aversion toward thought the viewing audience suffers from, is that anyone of normal – and I mean by that behaviorally un-altered - intellect can be enticed into watching.

Provided even basic understanding of behavioral psychology like that of operant conditioning, no unbiased and dispassionate observer can fail to see the behavioral propagandist component of everything presented by the screen. Currently, for instance, the method in vogue is what I call the “Mutt and Jeff,” routine. The public is – has been convinced – by relentless application of an old Josef Goebbels technique, that of the big lie, and another credited to Vladimir Lenin, the of the lie repeated often enough, that certain stereotypes exist. In this stereotypical construct, one the mind unwilling to accept what it is uncomfortable with – meaning it must think about it, every viewpoint is liberal or conservative. A world not black or white, good or evil, clear or obscure, is unacceptable – too provocative of thought.

A mind so addled is easily manipulated. While I was growing up, the Catholic Church – of which I was an innocent and fleetingly naive member – candidly stated the purpose and intent of its insistence in a “Catholic Education.” The Church knew, and taught as dogma – lest anyone stop to think - that early indoctrination of children was the key to making them behaviorally dependent upon church doctrine. The doctrine and method were to become the basis of both Nazi and Russian Marxist propaganda, and it is at the heart of today’s mind-control by the media in the United States. Unsocialized, reared outside of the influences of the culture employing it, one recognizes these things immediately.

I was an orphan, you know, provided myself a highs school education while living in a sod hut by a river in Iowa. Poverty has its advantages.

Today, I have another occasion where I have specialized insight where media propagandizing and public reaction related are known to me by way of personal experience. That’s where Fidel Castro and Cuba are concerned. The U.S. Government and the media it controls (that you can believe in a free and entrepreneurial press in a nation inflicted with an Internal Revenue Service is an example of the mind-numbing influence of behavioral propagandist technology) have waged an unrelenting war of propaganda against Cuba and its president. Nothing, no claim of concupiscence, avarice, power-madness, or profligate depravity generally, is too much.

One is reminded of assertions during Word War Two that a raging Hitler seized a carpet from the floor and chewed on it.

No matter how nonsensical, anything said about the hated “dictator” of Cuba is true in the United States. In a manner reminiscent of the Catholic Church of my youth, it is even unpatriotic to doubt, or to believe otherwise. The Cuban must be demonized, as a matter of U.S. doctrine and foreign policy.
Today, it’s a report by Forbes Magazine that Fidel Castro is the world’s seventh wealthiest man. Accounts of his supposed wealth range from five hundred, fifty-five million dollars to nine hundred million dollars. Somehow, the Cuban is also called a billionaire. That “Americans” are an innumerate people is perhaps demonstrated by the apparent disregard for the obvious.

As I’ve been saying, a visitor from another planet would draw several conclusions from the Forbes Story. He would ask, for instance, why a man who is supposed to be the absolute dictator of his nation, one eighty years of age, would have the need for any money. Why bother – counting, providing for, and all that; or having someone do all the same for him – with money? What would he purchase that he couldn’t have without the bother? Why would a monarch keep money?

What would an old man, assured of all life’s essentials, want with vast amounts of money?

Here again, I have specialized insight. I’m seventy. A man who once earned in a single month (April, 1974) one million, seven hundred sixty seven thousand, two hundred thirty-four dollars and seventeen cents ($1,764,234.17), I was impoverished by the U.S. Government and its Gestapo, the IRS. I needed only a short time to realize the power of poverty; more, I discovered the shear delight in the freedom of having whatever one wanted without being burdened with all the necessary interplay between acquisitive and avarice-driven human beings. Few of even Castro’s detractors would say he is stupid, and to attribute to him avarice is nonsense.

Finally, there is the history of U.S. media’s reporting where the island of Cuba since its revolution are concerned. It there is a better, more egregious, example of self-serving bias and concomitant indoctrination of the public, anywhere in history, I will be surprised. All of the U.S. Government’s earlier justifications for its posture vis a vis the island nation have since been repudiated by events. Since the so-called fall of the Soviet Empire, and rapprochement with the once hated – and almost as continually vilified – Communist China, “Castro’s Cuba” has remained a pariah, the paragon of evil.

Without mind-bending nonsense indoctrination, of course, that is nonsense. But it illustrates my point. The human being believes what he wants to believe, or what he has been behaviorally conditioned to believe. The mind-control methods of the military industrial corporation powers who rule here in the “Land of the Free” are well advanced. State of the art.

The only way to stay free of them – i.e., actually free – is to withdraw. As Ayn Rand (author of “Atlas Shrugged,” “The Fountainhead,” and others) once observed, “There is no way to rule innocent men.” I’ve learned a corollary, that there is no way to rule men who are not in debt. That, in the Land of the Fee, is poverty.

Poverty is power.

Sometimes, with growing frequency anymore, I sit watching in absolute amazement at a society and nation seemingly sleep-walking. “Stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” to quote Edwin Markham. That’s at best; at worst, what’s going on lately is more symptomatic of someone comatose. Or brain dead.

Tonight, May 22, 2006, nearly a year after Hurricane Katrina dismembered a New Orleans prostrated by its own corruption, indifference, and shear indolence, the government has begun evicting people from the trailer-houses it finally provided them for shelter – that after literally months. More, when the nation and its government compounded the Big Easy’s own neglect and incompetence with more of the same, plus outright indifference and criminal exploitation in the aftermath, a federal commission says that eighty percent of what happened “could have been prevented(!). NO kidding?

I am amazed at several things this betrays, none moreso than the fact that no one relates this report and the debacle it describes with things like the U.S-Mexico Border and illegal immigration from Mexico. The parallels are near endless. Once more, as in both cases, the guy everyone refers to as “John Q,” “the every-day, ordinary citizen” is considered by no one; except as a sheep to be sheared for whatever equivalent to wool “those poor migrants” or the like require, that is.

John Q. is being stolen blind, that while the people charged with representing his interests strive to curry the favor of everyone who stands to gain both by exploiting him – immigrant and immigrant exploiter alike. Just at the people entrusted with maintenance of the levees and dikes separating the public in New Orleans had better – more self-interested, i.e., - things to do, the people charged with maintenance of the border and its purposes have had better things to do.

And now, with the hurricane and storm surge of people from Mexico having struck the border levees and overwhelmed them, the nation’s working people are getting the same short shrift from the government as the people of New Orleans got after the storm from that same government.

I’d say “sad,” but it’s quite a bit worse than just sad. It’s incompetence – criminal incompetence. But what else is new?!

The most criminal incompetence here, though, is not in the nation’s capitol or state houses. Uh-uh. The most criminally incompetent behavior is that of the victims themselves. The public. We deserve what we’re getting. We asked for it, remember? Elections?

Tonight, when still another of the experts in levee and dike construction appears on a CNN Program to promote his book on the subject, the public waits patiently – or uses the remote to go elsewhere in order to watch something more lurid – for the latest news on the latest disappeared women; or, of course, the latest rape case. The latest toll of dead in Iraq has also been long relegated to the flow strip and the lady’s underwear page of the paper. Who cares? What are they going to say about Britney dropping her baby?

Hasn’t a horse fallen in a pit somewhere? A whale beached himself?

Watching the guy discuss the fact known by damned near everybody now, the fact that the government and people of New Orleans knew perfectly well what would happen when a hurricane hit there, I asked wife Rita if that mightn’t be considered a parallel to the way I started decades ago trying to warn “Americans” about the crime wave flood affecting government at all levels. Actually, I warned repeatedly (now that I’ve had a chance to consider, twenty or so) about things like the World Trade Center, too. But . . .

That’s still another parallel, isn’t it? I’ve already written here about “the dog that didn’t bark,” so I won’t bore you again with more discussion except to ask, how blind can you be? You don’t see parallels between the almost impossibly unbelievable incompetence it would take to permit something like that and what’s happening on the border, and in New Orleans?

You really don’t wonder that “the dog didn’t bark” before the Mexican flood and Katrina? Government didn’t know? You don’t see the United States and its security as a nation in September 11, New Orleans, and the border? Hey, spare me all the half-baked humanistic crap, too. I’m a seventy-year old man who has been damned near everywhere, done damned near everything, and seen just about everything there is to see. I speak four languages, once spoke seven, and can still read and write that many passably. I have by more than double more semester hours collage credit than most Ph.D.s, have won two national sports championships (judo), several shooting titles – both pistol, rifle, and archery (which I teach, by the way), dived in the seas, climbed mountains, gone (still do) damned near everywhere on a bicycle, taught several levels of elementary and high school, instructed in colleges, taught SWAT and SEAL teams (it was my idea, and I can prove that, you know) close quarters combat, and written six books. You can’t fool me. You can’t even insult me; you’re not that bright.

And you can save the sophomoric indignation, too. Time was when an elder like myself didn’t have to indulge people with far less experience or credentials, because his juniors had been reared to know their stature and place in the scheme of things. No more, but your opinion doesn’t mean shit to any professional, scientist, or rational person unless you have some experience or credentials where the subject matter is concerned – “standing,” as it was once known.

A short “war story” might be illustrative here: Asked to coach the national judo team in 1987, I was on the mat one night when a young man averred that he “always” – this is a kid nineteen years old - did a particular waza “this way,” and it was better. “You know, youngster,” I said, “the mere fact that you don’t listen carefully to a teacher with fifty years, and more than a thousand fights, experience ought to tell you why you’re not doing in contest as well as you should. It’s like what happened in the gym last night: with me handling poundages thirty percent greater than anything you can handle, and me thirty pounds lighter, old enough to be your grandfather, you still knew better about how to train with weights. Son, you’re gonna have to acquire some smarts before you’ll be able to learn anything difficult like fighting.”

If you, dear reader, don’t have brains enough to save your half-baked opinions for yourself, and shut up to listen, don’t read any further. Why should you? – you already know. Besides, long experience in these matters, including considerable research just for that purpose, reveals that little of what you say – probably – would be knowledgeable, logical, scientific, or even written in English (or Spanish, or whatever) of passable merit. All heat and no light is not only boring, it’s a waste of time; and when a writer’s first paragraph is replete with sentence fragments or run-ons, misspelled words, solecisms, Malaprops, and the like, I don’t read any further, anyway.

Why should any rational person have a debate presumably tending toward something productive with an individual who can’t muster up the self-control and discipline sufficient to keep a civil tongue in his head, or shut up while someone else is talking?

That said, let’s go back to my subject. The most criminally incompetent thing that has happened of late in the Land of the Free is not due the government’s power-maddened, pratfalling. Uh-uh. It’s you, the public. Talk about feckless! One guy, writing on a blogsite elsewhere on the Internet about the latest use of the U.S. Constitution for Charmin, suggests that we all turn on our headlights in protest! Headlights! Man, how “metrosexual” can you GET?

Another, a woman, regales the readers with reams of statistics concerning her pet cause, that of the Palestinians plight (yeah, I’ve pointed out to the lady that Palestinian promises to massacre the Israelis at the first opportunity probably has a lot to do with the nasty way they respond, but zealots are not known for their willingness to listen to even the obvious).

And so on. One form of devastation wreaked by the wind and storm surge of the hurricane known as feminism manifests itself in the fact that we now talk every “issue” – another FemSpeak coinage of the “woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” movement – to death. Actually, the thing never dies; fact, what it does do is use the freedom and surcease from normal male “DO something-ness” provided by the endlessly dithering discussion to recover strength, and come back stronger next time.

When the government wolves run off the cattle, kill the sheep, and eat the kids, the parents MARCH – have a gaudeamus and party, that is; oh, yeah, and turn on their headlights, wear T-shirts, and apply those ubiquitous bumper stickers. Man, THAT’s gotta put the government wolves in mortal terror, doesn’t it?

Feminism is everywhere, these days. In the high school here the other day, a kid BIT a teacher. Now the school board and teachers are dithering about what should be done. A while ago, another teacher was forced to physically restrain a student – tear him off someone he was assaulting – only to be sued by the parents of the attacker. Fortunately, the teacher had his tape recorder on; well “fortunately” after a while. When, you see, the parents of the miscreant learned that their kids’ lies were all defeated by the faithful and incontrovertible recording of the whole incident, they sued the teacher for “invasion of privacy” – recording the assault.

My recommendation to the two teachers was that they call the police and press charges of assault and battery. Let the court handle the little brats, AND their irresponsible parents.

A few years ago, teaching in Del Rio and substituting in a classroom that had literally been torn to pieces by students (holes kicked in walls, battered and broken desks, and the like), a kid I had sent to the front of the room to be singled out for discipline tried to punch me as I approached him. I’ve played competitive judo for fifty years, such that my hands caught the attempted sucker punch before my brain had time to engage. I caught an armlock come-along restraining hold, took the kid to the door, then outside. There, I released him and ordered him to the principal’s office.

In minutes, I – not the juvenile felon - was on the carpet before the same principal. They didn’t approve of physical force, the wimp principal said. He also implied that I should have accepted the punch. “How much harm could it have done?” The boy would “likely” have gotten his head, once he’d realized what he’d done!

I was already at the time under suspicion of having too much testosterone, that the result of my having refused a few days before to let students go back into the school gymnasium after what I later learned was a twice-a-week prank, that of tripping a fire alarm. We stood in the hot sun until the fire department arrived. My insistence that to let kids go back into the building before the fire department had checked it would be criminal and legally liable prospectively drew angry protests from several kids - and, of course, their delinquent parents. I was making a big fuss over nothing. I was a racist - a clue that certain of the the parents were not Caucasian, you may notice.

Like the two teachers who had preceded me in trying to teach that particular class, I quit after the punching incident.

Of course, I’ve already discussed here the devastating effect feminist and metrosexual male attitudes are having on boys in our schools. The Newsweek article in that regard, together with the mindless bimbo-babble of women writing to the magazine, are instructive and worth while find and read – if you haven’t already.

Neither is the educational system the only societal venue where the limp-wristed philosophies and dogmas of feminism have proved cancerous. Now we have women soldiers – in combat. We have the Jessica Lynches, too; a tiny little women – girl, really – disgracing through no fault of her own both the nation and its uniform by her total ineffectiveness in combat. Worse in the line of disgrace was a hen-pecked nation who speciously tried to make a hero of the young woman after the incident. Some things cosmetics can't cover, though; still, to this day, desirous in the most disgusting manner possible of concealing the effect of Jessica’s incompetence on her fellow soldiers, details of the action are hidden from the publid by the pussy-whipped media and congress.

In one of his Rogue Warrior series, Richard Marcinko, originator of counter-terrorist SEAL Team Six, relates how a female think-tank adviser addressing Pentagon planners recommended “the creation” – more FemSpeak, you’ll notice – of a “kinder, gentler, more sensitive army,” one less subject to male aggressiveness and machismo. Unable to remember verbatim, I’ve paraphrased that last, but not by much. The wonder, Marcinko observed, wasn’t that the woman mouthed such unadulterated nonsense (NOT the term he used, of course), but that Pentagon brass sat there and took it without protest. When the first President Bush commissioned a study on women in the military, the entire two hundred fifty-two page book did not use the word “kill” a single time. We now “engage” the enemy.” I can only guess what’s next, and it’s not suitable for mixed company, anyway.

It goes on an on. During the 2000 Summer Olympics in Sydney, columnist Maureen Dowd not only put everything here in the right perspective, but summarized what has happened succinctly. “Shed a tear for masculinity,” she wrote. “I feel undeniable pride that women have taken control of the two great male preserves of American - politics and sports - and ruined them. We have draped the gray steel of our warrior rituals in 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. Now it’s girl season, soaking in sentiment, soap opera romantic walks along the lake, deep kisses on stage and guys making Cher-like wardrobe changes. “

The columnist went on to discuss how the presidential candidate then made huge gains in the presidential polls by kissing his wife on the state at the Democratic Convention, then went on to quote a professor of anthropology somewhere. “’…through history,'" she quoted, "'the essential theme of all competition has been this: one male demonstrates his virility, his masculinity at the expense of a male opponent.’” “Now to win men have to feminize themselves. Game over.”

Dowd, of course, was right. If I hear another television commentator-“personality” asks, for instance, and Olympic Games medal winner, “How did it FEEL? I’ll smash the god-damned television set.

You not only get the point, it’s all around you. Our female national security adviser, for ‘oh-my-god!’ instance, didn’t find it remarkable that the Federal Aviation Administration didn’t consider a jack-knife a weapon, for instance. A principal reason we can’t stop the horde of Mexicans pouring across our southern border is what it might do to the FAMILIES of the illegal migrants. Take all the bleeding hearts out of the debate, endless and feminine as it is, and the matter – oops; damned near missed my chance to say “issue” – would be resolved over night.

The fact is – referring again to my observation that the truth of our situation and what’s causing it is all around us – is that we have become such a fat-head as a nation as to beggar description. Tonight Lou Dobbs is marveling at the way the government and all the people who own it are “hammering the American People.” What do you expect of people so stupid that they buy lock, stock and barrel stories like the revelation that someone has stolen thousands and thousands of Veteran’s Administration records, this at a time when the Bush League’s wire-tapping and Fourth Amendment violations generally have started the public wondering about the obvious, why do such a thing, when obviously nobody in his right mind would give anything away by talking about it on the telephone?

People, the government – that’s people, you know – does these things in order to steal. Why you hire people addicted to money to stand guard on your money still leaves me shaking my head in consternated wonder. If the computers or phones of a million people are compromised, and a dollar is stolen from the credit card or bank account of each, not one will notice. And the thief has a million dollars. And a theft like the VA – how many of those have we heard about in the last few years – covers it. Besides, it’s very convenient otherwise – “the dog ate my homework: excuse.” Everything we’re not doing that we’re supposed to do is because somebody stole all the records.

Oh, one more thing (since we’re talking about diversions with which to distract a stupid nation) before I go: I think we should make the national language Latin. Or Ancient Greek. Japanese, maybe. That way, nobody would know what the hell is going on with government just like always; the Supreme Court would hand down its already incomprehensible rulings in a language nobody understands, just like always; all the myriad of rules, regulations, ordinances, statutes, laws, and enactments – road signs and fifty more – would be incomprehensible, so nobody would pay any attention – just like always. Making the official language of government a foreign tongue would, in other words, make everybody actually equal under the law. Yeah – let’s make the official language Latin.

All the fat heads would have an incontrovertible excuse for being fat heads. "The dog ate my homework" - remember?

I'm in something of a whimsical state of mind today. You see, my website's Mongoose Trick Opinion Page absorbed another cyberattack from the feds or their friends recently - the reason I haven't added to it for a couple days. Like the last such sortie against the civil rights of one of its citizens (I hope you're remembering that Mr. Bush says they don't do that sort of thing, and his new snoop, General Hayden, says when they do do that sort of thing, it's all perfectly legal), this one was carefully exposed for what it was by demonstration, and with several witnesses, three of whom didn't know me from Adam before I included them among the witnesses. When you call a President a liar, you want to be careful you can prove it.

You'll be curious, so I'll tell you that the method used to discombobulate my computer was induction. None of the three computers here in the room failed to have its brains scrambled, although two of them weren't connected to the Internet. A technician with whom I was connected by telephone watched what was happening to my computer on his computer, and a witness here in the room watched the computers not connected to the Internet all do the same things. There's only one way to accomplish that, and only one suspect. As you'll note on my website's home page, I've arranged to make further attacks on my computer likely to be very embarrassing for someone in the bureaucracy and among our nouveau royalty elite.

Anyway, glad to have my website back.

I've been digging for this short story ever since my dialogue started with "Greta" and other the Palestine Liberation Organization sympathizers on the Truthout website. I wrote it several years ago, during the time my war with the federals was at its peak and near driving me over the edge (some who know me would tell you that I went to sleep each night then staring at a quote from Friederich Nietzsche; glued to the ceiling of my tent or RV, it said, "He who fights monsters ought take care that he doesn't become a monster, too."). Reflective upon man's almighty penchant for, one, making his fellow man miserable, and two, screwing himself up in the bargain, I wrote as a kind of therapy - to keep my head. The story's entitled, "The Lioness," and I hope you enjoy it:

On a hill near the "Green Line" separating the Palestinian Autonomous Territories and Israel and not far from the Autonomous city of Jenin, there is a winding road from Baka al-Gharbiyeh. There, Sajida Salih al Rayasha, known to her fellow Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine tullab as "Hadat" - lioness - waited, watching. Below on the road, only an occasional car moved, unusual for what was becoming something of a commuter route into Jerusalem since a series of martyr attacks on Israeli buses elsewhere.

Sajida waited patiently, recalling with smiling pleasure her rigorous training at the Soviet KGB camp near Baku on the Caspian Sea. While most would doubtlessly call Sajida Salih al Rayasha beautiful, she was nonetheless a strapping young woman, and not called The Lioness, for nothing. That her tullab classmates at the camp learned quickly. Her five foot, ten inch height included a hundred sixty pounds, and her relentless strength and sombo martial arts training made her the hand-to-hand combat equal of all but the biggest and strongest men in camp. Besides, a fire burned in The Lioness. "Hadat" hated as only a survivor of Nakba, the Cataclysm could. Literally torn from her mother's breast as the Israelis rolled over and destroyed Bayt Jibrin, her village inside the Green Line west of Hebron, she had been handed from hand to hand among seven hundred thousand refugees during al-Hijra al-Filasteeniya, the flight of the Palestinian Arabs, until rescue by one of their number, a Palestinian doctor named Laleh Kahlil.

With the doctor and her family, she lived first in Turkey, then Germany, and finally in Georgia, the Soviet Union. Recruited in Gymnasium, the German secondary school, by members of the PFLP alert for persons with her hatred of the Jews, she arrived eventually in Baku. Today as she lay waiting here in Israel, she was forty five, and she was an experienced and accomplished mujahidat - a woman, but a soldier of god, too.

This would be her sixteenth mission, and the car carrying her team would arrive on the road below any minute now. Easily the best rifleman in her section, Sajida would again make the shot. Her team would cover for her, and she would slip away before anyone knew what had happened. Her rifle, the wonderful Soviet Dragunov SVD, would provide for that. She could shoot from eight hundred metres, even nine hundred or a thousand, then be on her way, escaping before the echoes had so much as died.

Sajida was very excited. It was always this way, the thrill and anticipation of a successful mission for god. Another hated Jew enemy of the Palestinians destroyed.

Today, there was also something like joy. Curiosity, at least. Two hours before leaving for Israel and her newest mission, "Hadat" had learned that she had a brother. Friends in the new Russian Federal'naya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti Rossiyskoi Federatsii Federal Security Service, reviewing her security clearances after the demise of the old Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti KGB had discovered Sajida's family tree. With the aid of a FSB computer wizard, it took her new mentors only a matter of hours to find her brother in Ramalla. With the further assistance of a student at An-Najah, the Palestine National University, and computers there, Sajida had even exchanged pictures with Yousseff. Their sibling resemblance was unmistakable, brother and sister had noted.

What would Yousseff be doing in Ramalla, she wondered. So excited had she been then that even during their extended conversation, and communication on the Internet, she had not thought to ask. That she would be re-united and know her brother was a thing too filled with wonderment and emotion to permit that kind of triviality. I was enough to know that she would soon meet him. Then they would learn everything of their lives since the Nakba.

What would she tell him? Of her life with the Kahlil family, of course. But what of the rifle, of her life with the Mujahideen? One does not introduce oneself to her long-lost brother with tales of blood and killing. Raising her head from where a cheek rested on the back of a forearm to look from where she lay procumbent in small and shallow cave under a great rock near the crest of the hill, she scanned the road in the distance. Nothing yet. Putting her cheek back on a hand, she ruminated, remembering.

The scream came to her where she had been lying in ambush, much as she lay now. It had been her first mission. Looking down the long slide of broken and tumbled rock on the mountainside, she saw with almost stupefying horror a sight so hideous that it made the soldier of god shrink inside even now.

Somehow, impossibly it seemed, a bear came lumbering into view from behind a ridge in the slide. In its jaws, it dragged a piteously screaming child. Instantly, Sajida raised her rifle. The scale on the telescopic sight told her quickly that the range was just over a thousand meters. Worse, there was no way she could get closer quickly. The rock slide would prevent that, and the bear, hearing, would run off with the child.

Horribly, the great animal began to eat its still screaming prey, its teeth tearing a piece of flesh from a thigh. Facing away from where Sajida lay, the bear's head was down, hidden behind its great body. No choice.

Sajida's rifle cracked and bucked, the shot raising a puff of dust from the bear's chest just behind a foreleg. The perfect shot had no effect whatever. The animal didn't even raise its head. Limaaza? Sajida had no doubt why. The damned rifle caliber! The bullet was 5.54mm, weighed a mere forty grains. Soft lead, too - at a muzzle velocity of 4,300 feet per second it was intended to kill a man by blowing his head off. And the little slug wasn't going anything like fast at the bear's side, probably hadn't penetrated the hair, hide, and fat. The animal's head stayed down, eating again.

The echo of the child's screams filled the canyon. With one more shot, Sajida silenced them.

Sajida shuddered at the memory. Her first shot ever with a rifle had killed a child. She shook her head vigorously, an effort to rid it of the hideous mental picture.

Mercifully, sounds, a car, forced their way into her consciousness. Down on the road, something was happening. A cluster of vehicles had gathered, around which a crowd milled. A Zahal Israeli Defense Force CJ-5 Jeep raced to a sliding stop beside another vehicle, this one a civilian Peugeot. The three soldier occupants leaped out to race to where a man stood backed against the side of the car. Unceremoniously, one of the soldiers knocked the man to the road surface with the heavy blow of an American P-24 nightstick. Seizing her rifle from where it lay near her, Sajida shouldered it to peer through the telescopic sight at the scene below.

The man on the ground was a youth, twenty or so. As the soldiers seized him, he kicked viciously at one, then another. Suddenly, Sajida saw the circle formed by the crowd of onlookers recede, drawing back in fright. Instantly, she saw why. In his hand now, the youth brandished something, his thumb raised and poised. Adjusting her telescope's focus slightly, Sajida recognized the pencil detonator device instantly. Shifting the scope again, she also recognized the man on the ground. Abu Hassan Takay al-Jazaf, one of the team she was to meet here! Sayyi! Bad, bad, bad!

Hassan, she knew, wore twenty kilos of Semtex explosives. Pressing the detonator would kill the soldiers and most of the thirty or more Israelis around them. But even as she watched, the youth lost his chance. One of the Zahal, a big and powerful-looking man, leaped, sprawling full-length, to seize the hand holding the detonator. Al-Jazaf struggled, determined too late to complete his mission. To no avail. The Zahal soldier was, indeed, a powerful man, and he held Hassan's hand in a vise-like grip, the youth's threatening thumb closed in one massive fist.

As they had long ago, the acoustics of the rocky place somehow brought to Sajida's ears over great distance the sounds of someone in torment, this time, the voice of the Abu Hassan struggling with the soldiers, a forlorn wail of frustrated rage. With deftness born of long practice, she focused the automatic-ranging telescope sight again, swinging the cross-hairs of the sighting device to the big soldier's head.

As anyone who has used a telescopically-sighted rifle to kill a man will tell you, there is something very personal about the act. Shooter and his target are somehow joined by the sight, a kind of umbilical. The optic, it seems, magnifies not only the light and the image in It, but the natural empathy of the one human being for the other. Suddenly, the hands holding the rifle can feel the living target at the other end of the beam of light bringing the image to death-aiming eye. Even at great range, shooter can see his target's facial expression, his eyes - almost feel him breathe.

Struggling against certain death the soldier holding Hassan's hand rolled to his back, seeking to apply an arm bar across his chest, and break the arm to acquire the detonator. Through the rifle's sight, Sajida looked the man full in the face.

YOUSEFF!

The right thing is often not the easy thing, you see. "He who fights with monsters . . ."

Today launched another page on the Judo Knight-Errant website, one dedicated to the impeachment process against George W. Bush. Frankly, this is something I never dreamed in my wildest nightmare of doing. Hell, I voted for Barry Goldwater, that after having been reared among post-depression, Roosevelt Democrats, many of whom kept a picture of FDR in an honored place in their homes.

But I voted for Jimmy Carter, then Ronald Reagan. Then I stopped voting. Those who know of my war with the IRS and the U.S. Government probably won’t be surprised at that, but my reasons might. You see, the vicissitudes of war included covert intelligence gathering against my enemy – the federal government of the United States. I bugged federal offices across the country, most often by the simple expedient of a cheap briefcase full of listening equipment, inserted into the target by the even simpler device of making an appointment over some imaginary issue or question, then “absent-mindedly” leaving it behind once having visited the place. With the car radio tuned to the appropriate FM station, I would sit and listen or using a voice activated recorder, record the conversations of the bureaucrats doing what comes naturally for their kind.

What I learned shook me to the core. That you’re learning about it daily today, and responding nevertheless in a manner so puny and feckless shakes me more. It’s astonishing. Why is it so hard to understand that people who steal millions, even billions from the working men and women of their country are criminals. The fact that the criminal thieves are in government, charged with the people’s business, welfare, and security just means the crime is worse, not lesser. That’s because most of us can deal with crime by the run-of-the-mill criminal element, but when the crooks are in government, when that “organized crime” we used to hear about so much when that meant the Mafia is now the government, that’s exponentially worse.

Have you ever stopped to think that when congressmen, senators, judges, and presidents are owned by corporate powers comprising an all-powerful military industrial complex, it constitutes a criminal conspiracy? Uh-uh. Crime in government is intolerable, cancer of the heart for the anatomy of the nation. Want an example? Take Iraq, a war bought and paid for by the corporations who own our conspiracy in Washington.

Yet the public of the Land of the Free, and Home of the Brave satisfies itself with voting for candidates selected by the corporate criminal conspiracy, an exercise of stupefied sleepwalking like something from a science-fiction movie; and by protests, protests that are perhaps the ultimate in childlike, puerile fecklessness, in their castrated futility more than anything else a source of reinforcement, encouragement, and assurance for the already power-mad corporate powers.

What Makes Sammy Run today is what made him run in the novel, except that the movie industry of Schulberg’s story is now the virtual reality a nation lives in, kidnapping the public mind to transform it into a collective Number Six character on an island of subjugating illusion. That is the behavioral enslavement of a society, and it is a crime akin to genocide – the destruction of all the mentality in a country.

Having been made aware by the eavesdropping I speak of that our nation’s ruling forces intended to subjugate the public by the “deceive, bewilder, and confuse” methods recommended by policy and think-tank wonks like those from the Fletcher School and RAND Corporation, I spent much of my time during my struggle against crime by government in an effort to learn how effective my enemy’s methods had become. If I was stunned to learn what the government really was and what it intended, I was flabbergasted to the point of terror at what it had accomplished. Allow me to elucidate.
“Divide and conquer,” Julius Caesar said. Any visit to an internet forum will reveal the degree to which that has been accomplished.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with public debate; it’s a democratic ideal. But just as Japanese Judo uses opposing force to control an opponent, so does state of the art propaganda methodology avail itself of strident and hysterical polemical nonsense to the detriment of its opposition, the public. Using the massive power of electronic media, the ruling powers mold and structure, distort and intensify, public opinion until it has become something akin to the chaotic thought processes and ideation of a lunatic.

While the collective lunatic - excited by trivially nonsensical “info-tainment” “news” like that of disappeared young women, abductions, rapes, and the lurid like - mumbles, roars, slobbers and slavers, cavorts, “parties,” and masturbates, the corporate masters go about their devious ways. Where “The Prisoner” knew full well that he was that, the Number Sixes of the United States of America island have no idea.

You doubt? Consider as an example juxtaposition of the ill-conceived and ill-fated war in Iraq and the social war being waged upon society here by the ideology known as feminism. Recently, I wrote on a blogsite to deplore the dodo-like mentality of women who go into occasions of extreme danger obliviously, encouraged – ordered, in fact – to do so by the doctrines of radical feminism. The “blog” drew knee-jerk, incoherent and self-contradictory outrage, not a little of which was colored with very un-feminine vituperation and invective.

Typical was that of a women who styled herself “ravenqueen.” Caution of the kind I recommended was “imprisonment.” She wrote - capitalization, syntax, composition, paragraphing, spelling, and the rest verbatim:

“so you want to send the innocent to jail forever to protect them? And the power abusers can walk around out there, free as God, because we fear them? Under this approach we Afghans stand back and let the Taliban ruin our society, or we US citizens stand back and let Bushco do whatever it wants out of fear? What right do they have to our acquiesance? We give them the right by agreeing to be afraid of them. If you are serious in your views of women, then you are mentally ill. I'm sorry to break it to you. Everyone has a right to some risk in order to live fully. Everyone has a right to make these decisions for themselves. In your mind women are property and have no right to make choices, because they are vulnerable. I am so glad i am nowhere near your life, i kiss the feet of my wonderful parents that i am not your daughter. In your head, women never get to grow up and become independent adults. You get to grow up, the women don't. Not because they are natural victims or incompetent (despite being raised to be vulnerable by fathers like you) or have done anything wrong, but because you are doing the wrong thing by them. YOU are doing the worst thing to them, yourself. You cannot call this love. I have a burning sympathy for your wife. I hope she's not so fearful and brainwashed that she doesn't realize she can walk out of her prison at any time and there will be people who don't know her, who still care more about her than you do, if we are honest with ourselves now. really honest. Who are you to tell another human being whether they can go out alone? You belong in the can, Spock, for depriving others of their rightful lives. Now you've pushed that button you've been searching for in my heart, congratulations, you are so clever and the world is a better place. If you can't see what is wrong with your take on women, you are unsalvageable. If you dismiss everything i have said until now, please consider these three words: you are wrong.”

The lady followed her original response and remarks as follows, syntax, composition and the rest again verbatim (I’ve no idea what the “thankyou’ is for):

“thankyou. i needed that. Spock spouts off about believing in equal opportunities for women, but i know people better than that, and i have read his other comments. I recognise a misogynist in clanking armour, in sheep's clothing. He thinks he's a big man headf*cking people as 'research' for his masterly book. I once met a film director who did the same thing to his actors, especially the actress, he was something to see in action. what a sleazebag. It says something about the state of things when people with such dubious agendas to push have such unbalanced access to powerful machinery like publishers and film distributors. Notice how the funding has dropped out of feminist research, and suddenly we're getting all these expensive surveys and research papers about how the higher status of women is responsible for the breakdown of society? Women are paid (traitors, Anne Wolfe i'm talking to you, you disgust me) to do these papers because it looks better. But the money is always handed out by men. Spock thinks a woman is naive if she thinks she doesn't need a man. But what does a woman need a man for if she has her sisters to stand beside her? big kiss, TW. But i'll take a good man in my arms anyday. I don't hate men. Right now i hate Spock because men like him will see my granddaughters reduced to livestock once more. And i have every right to hate him for that.
i don't know what i'm talking about. trust me.

Ravenqueen then followed with this, still verbatim and un-corrected:

“this is not radical feminism. If you think it is, i question the value of your book-in-progress. I wouldn't waste my money on it. I'm no Shakespeare, but even i, on this brief acquaintance, can see your mind is a touch below the standard i expect from authors. Good luck with that monkey on your back. It's so attractive to women.”

There was more, without change, tenor or tone – the rest. Whether her constant use of a lower case for the first person singular pronoun denotes a psychological problem or admiration for e. e. cumings I will leave for the reader’s conjecture. What is apparent here - interesting and useful, too - is the singularly and saliently oblivious fixedness of view, something very typical of today’s supremely self-interested public. It does not occur to ravenqueen that feminism’s war on society – especially its males – parallels the war on terrorism and those in Iraq in several important features.

First, its adherents are willing to accept casualties, sacrifices for what they perceive is the great cause. The casualties, of course, will presumably come from persons other than the most fervent supporters of the war. “Leaders” and theorists for great undertakings like these do not pay the price of either their fervor or its result, whether resulted from error or otherwise.
Secondly, wars all have “collateral damage.” Feminisms’ verbal equivalents to “collateral damage” are many and vague in a manner singularly characteristic of female vernacular. especially its pseudo-intellectual wing. The “collateral damage” of “a woman’s right to choose” is dead babies. The collateral damage of “single parent” families is broken homes and metrosexual wimp males. And so on (you’ll have no trouble with identifying others – militant feminism is very loud). Suffice it to say that perhaps no social movement in history has ever delighted more in euphemistic obfuscation like that. Terms like “dead people” are bad for the troops’ morale, you know.

It is not my purpose here, mind you, to discuss feminism except as to its effect on society. My issue with feminism has to do with the apparent inability of the individual feminist militant to relate her ideology and the ideation it results in to the rest of the world and events there. Feminism, for one and only one of many ideologies extant at the time of its birth, seems to have been totally disinterested in what would result, either from the war being declared, or what winning and losing might mean for their society.
How would women prepare for something they had no way to know, nor any way to know?

Like General Motors of the time, its seems, whatever feminism wanted it assumed was good for the country

Does that remind anyone of something else facing our “deceived, bewildered, and confused” nation? Just as the “war on sexism” now finds itself in an inextricable – you can’t psychologically reconstruct and re-educate generations of children – situation, the war on terror now has us mired in an ineluctable struggle in Iraq (and Afghanistan).

And the propagandists for the new version of rule by the new royalty have succeeded eminently. "A State which dwarfs its men,” wrote J.S. Mill, “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."
That the character of society in the Unites States has changed is everywhere evident. Many of its factions boast of their contribution, none more that that of the feminist. Examples abound, one a study recently reported in Newsweek.

“Boys across the nation,” the article said, “and in every demographic group is falling behind. In elementary school, boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities, and twice as likely to be placed in special-education classes. High-school boys are losing ground to girls on standardized writing tests. And on college campuses, men who 30 years ago represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body now make up only 44 percent. This widening achievement gap, experts say, has profound implications. What are these implications? How do they affect the economy, society and families? How do they affect democracy?”

Ask a feminist if she ever thought of that. Don’t expect an answer better than the remarks of ravenqueen. In fact, in subsequent letters to Newsweek, feminists made their concern for“. . .ask what you can do for your country” very apparent. Tough shit, most said. We want it all.

That “all” might mean sawing off the limb they’ve put themselves on – destroying the nation that made their supreme selfishness possible in the first place - obviously has still not occurred to feminism. A man will always stand at the door of the cave, and drive the wolves away. Sure, they will. Just like the women of Berlin drove away the Soviet troops, once all the men in the city had been killed. I wonder if there was ever a bigger orgy of rape in history, something that has never once crossed the mind of women today in the U.S., I doubt it.

At any rate, who doubts – well, in this intellectual and ideational climate, some might - a nation of women and effeminate males is far easier to dominate than a nation of natural males and females. If you think all this a co-incidence, you may be naïve. You must believe all the tens of millions your corporately controlled congress has spent to fund studies having to do with how to accomplish just that were spent on congressional junkets instead.
The single most insidious aspect of the Prisoner scenario has to do with an education system bent on programming children like computers. The computer programmed to run to contradictory programs simultaneously can do that. It can do that because there is no way for the computer to see the relationship between the two programs. Incapable of self-awareness, it is easy for a computer to do things insane.

Anybody noticed how our programmed kids dress, behave, think?

How do we blunder from one result of spastic mentality nationally to another, the “war on terror” being just the latest? Why?
Well, could it be that we have lost, as a nation, our ability to think logically and productively, whether deductively or inductively? Could it be that we no longer can solve problems, deal with trouble? Hell, we can’t even CALL a problem a problem, or trouble trouble. Now, you know, they’re an “issue.” A problem or trouble is something that must be dealt with, repaired, straightened out, replaced, handled. Really. Physically. An “issue” is something you resolve by talking. Remind you of anything, or anyone?

Yeah, I’ll bet you can. Roughly half of us deal with everything that way. Anything you can’t deal with by talking, you deal with by picking up the phone and calling somebody.

Fine. Just remember that thanks to the same folks who brought us the little boys who act like little girls, the metrosexual male, and all that have also brought us the safe and secure society, the prison where women don’t have to feel like a prisoner because she can do everything SHE wants to do without responsibility.

In that prison, everyone is watched – and listened to – all the time.

Sometimes, a single incident or affair can elucidate human affairs, especially as related to political, religious, and ideological matters. Nowhere could that be better exemplified that where the alleged gang rape of a female dancer-stripper by members of the Duke University Lacrosse Team.
Last’s week’s FoxNews, CNN, and the erstwhile “major networks” coverage ranks with certainty among the most surreal I have ever seen in my seventy years. While the implications of news to the effect that the prosecutor will not bring his “case” before January, together with announcement that the female in question will seek satisfaction and recompense for her supposed outrage in civil court cannot be mistaken, hysterical “analyses” and “panel discussions” by “experts” continue.
Conspicuous by its lack of mention has been something else colossally obvious, that being that at least one of the players – the guy who has an air-tight alibi – will have a field day in the same kind of civil court once this is over. The pillorying of the players by the convention of feminist harpies assembled by the Fox and CNN has seen to that.
I hope attorneys for the networks can find a jury that says so, too; otherwise, Reade Seligman, for instance, will own a big part of Fox and CNN.
Unless, of course, feminism is also able to get the Supreme Court to vacation in la-la Shangri-la like it did for Roe v. Wade, signaling by legal precedent that right, wrong, and virtue in general are all to be legally determined solely by pressure-group politics. Where certain actions were once malum in se of malum in prohibitum, they are now malum because the feminist, for instance, says so. With the high court’s mental meandering on Roe V. Wade what it was, maybe it’s also unconstitutional to deny a woman’s right to put anyone she doesn’t like in jail?
Objectively, however, it’s also true that the tenor and tone of the witches’ symposium deliberating the Duke matter was seen to abate considerably last night with announcements concerning delay of the trial and that of the purported victim’s civil suit. Oops, Hecate and the ladies apparently thought, maybe we’d better back off a mite. Congratulations, girls.
Nevertheless, whatever the vicissitudes where the lacrosse team are, it will remain a fact that not even basic concepts of justice and jurisprudence long honored in western civilization remain intact under the hammering of ideologues like today’s feminists and atheists. While men accused of rape in the Nation of Laws may be identified and pilloried nationally along with their families, their accuser may not be known, and except for public record without traceability, her past may neither be connected to her by name nor used in any defense proceeding.
That’s even when she is a stripper, prostitute, or pornography queen.
While no evidence even remotely resembling the corpus delecti required for a criminal case has been forthcoming, the men accused remain on the news nightly, together with every conceivable innuendo and tidbit of tabloid character concerning their purported guilt.
What we do have is the corpus delecti for a case proving of a national crime. With, for instance, news of war in Iraq and Afghanistan, where scores of men die monthly, relegated to the ladies’ underwear add pages of the paper, and occasional appearance on the flow strip at the bottom of televisions screens, the alleged rape or disappearance – where sufficient luridity is promised – of an obscure women somewhere in the nation draws hour-by-hour coverage, together with nightly commentary and “analysis” by high-priced “experts.”
What’s even scarier is the realization that this isn’t the only place this kind of nonsense is having effect. From things like congressional deliberations having to do with social programs, to national security, to foreign policy, we behave and make decisions like this. Think about it.
As I am writing this news comes of another “ham sandwich” grand jury indictment in the Duke case (you may recall that a former Chief Judge of Judge in the state of New York, Sol Wachtler, once observed, "A grand jury would indict a ham sandwich.").
The rest of us males can only hope we’re not next, and start looking for a good alibi for the night in question (when was that, again?).
But while this kind of trial by gossip approach to forensics and jurisprudence has been long overdue for exposition, that isn’t likely to happen. Even now that DNA evidence has shown our vaunted legal system for what it really is, with hundreds of men having been wrongfully convicted and some even executed, feminism is a mighty political force – and that is the deciding factor. Just as their sisters demanded and got what has doomed hundred, even thousands of innocent men, today’s women are no more likely to relent in their hysterical reaction to rape.
“I am woman, watch me roll,” sang Helen Reddy. Remember?
Among the logically unimpeachable legal precepts steamrollered by feminism, was the time-honored principle unis testis, nullus testis – one witness, no witness. Having removed that cornerstone of common sense from the walls of justice, the feminists quickly dismantled the rest, to turn our courtrooms into the fishwives’ deliberation we see nightly on Fox and CNN.
One Fox “expert,” reporter Megyn Kendall, made my jaw drop with her astonishing asseveration that DNA evidence “consistent” with that of an un-accused Lacrosse player had evidentiary significance. Astonishing, did I say? It’s appalling.
In the first place, the odds are that Megyn Kendall is about as skilled with statistics as the rest of her profession. I spoke of that in any earlier essay, if you'll remember. Kendall’s breathless – and I would contend, criminal and civilly liable – equivocation of meaning where the words “consistent” and “significant” were concerned is nonsense.
Next, “significance” here – i.e., legally (note that I did not say “politically” or for the purposes of gossip) – is the same as statistical significance. What is "statistical significance?" Statistical significance is the probability that the observed relationship between variables, or the difference (e.g., between means) in a sample comparison occurred by pure chance, and that in the population from which the sample was drawn, no such relationship or differences exist.
There is absolutely no way a reporter could know that, especially given media journalists’ well-known ignorance of anything mathematical. In order to info-tain her slavering female audience, Kendall might just as well have found the fact that the lacrosse players wear pants is “consistent” with rape. Now that I think of it, a number of leading lights in the feminist movement have claimed things very close to that.
In the instant case, with no possibility that any such observed relationship could occur – that the finger nails and whatever is on them were both once at the same place is not logically relevant or even at issue – no statistical and, therefore, evidentiary “significance” is possible.
To use language a little less technical and high-falooting, the statistical significance of a result tells us something mathematical about the degree to which the conclusion drawn is true. That represents a scale of decreasing reliability, where the higher the “significance” (called p-value, sometimes), the less we can consider that the relation between the variables in the sample group is a reliable indicator of a relation between the respective variables in the target group (called the “population”). In other words, the “significance” is the probability of an error.
To “cut to the chase” – go for the figurative kill, actually – there is no way to assess the meaning of “significant” without numbers. More, and even with the numbers, there is no logical and rational way to avoid arbitrariness in the final conclusion concerning what level of significance a test comparison of the material Kendal spoke of might have. Our pantyhose prosecutor reporter’s “significant” might mean with regard to being of the same species, little more.
Not, however, that Greta van Susteren, Nancy Grace, Megyn Kendall, and supposed journalist company are alone in miserable misconstruction of logical, mathematical, and forensic evidence. In my decades of practice as a PI, I often found myself agape at the blundering scientific and mathematical ineptitude of the court and its officers. I once heard an FBI agent (a perjurer caught doing so in open court, but without penalty so much as remonstrance by the judge) testify in effect that the hypotenuse of a right triangle is parallel to its base, and without objection from either the court or its officers. When the same forensicist fraud testified further that a bullet fired at an angle against a smooth concrete surface often didn’t bounce, a Ph.D. professor of physics at the local university looked at me in stupefied wonder. “My god,” he said wonderingly, “no wonder so many people are in jail in this country!” That was 1978 - I’ll bet Warren has been less than surprised at the staggering number of innocent men freed by DNA testing after having been convicted of rape.
If lawyers screw up evidence often, they do it no more often anywhere than with things like statistics and genetic profile – math, you know. I once stayed on a witness stand for more than an hour, trying to explain a simple formula – Bayes' Theorem (one significant here, and I do mean significant) to a judge and two attorneys, that before a jury to whom I might as well have been speaking Japanese. Another time is was the formula for rate of work – horsepower.
No Ph.D., the opposing attorney said – I couldn’t possibly know how to do math so esoteric and abstruse.
If there’s a trial in the Duke Lacrosse Team case (and there probably will be, evidence or no – this is politics, not jurisprudence), there will be testimony paralleling the following very closely. Still, I would be willing to bet (that on the basis of statistical probability) that none of the attorneys - either those who will be in the court room or those who were on television last night - can recite Bayes' Theorem, or use it correctly in an example.
More, I would bet that none would answer correctly a question I used in a casual survey of my own some years ago. I posed a number of attorneys the following problem: in two hospitals, on the average, the ratio of girl babies to boy babies was one to one – 50/50; in one hospital, one hundred babies are born every day, in the other, only ten. One day, though, one of the hospitals has twice as many baby girls born as baby boys. In which hospital was it more likely to happen?
The answer is that it is more likely in the smaller hospital, and the reason is that statistically speaking, the probability of a random deviation of a particular size from the population mean decreases with the increase in the sample size. Simple, huh? Well, none of the great minds of forensics got the right answer.
Neither are lawyers alone. Once, when an acquaintance informed me that his wife, also a friend, was scheduled for a radical mastectomy, I was horrified to learn that the biopsy test in question was “98%” certain. When I had checked to learn additional data concerning the matter, I insisted that my friend check the doctor’s reasoning with a mathematician at the local college. Sure enough, the math professor agreed with me that the data suggested only a fifty-fifty chance that my friend had cancer.
Innumeracy, illogical forensics, and junk science aren’t the only problems with what’s happening and what’s about to happen. Let’s take that a little further, because it will sure as hell come up when this case goes to court. Say that the testimony says that a pair of matching genetic profiles (the term they use right off the bat to beginning fouling up the jury’s understanding) are found in one of two hundred individuals. Then, the great minds of the court will conclude, there is a one in two hundred chance that they come from different sources.
I can see your face screwing up. That’s what everybody would say, huh?
WRONG! The chance that the samples came from different sources simply cannot be determined by the genetic evidence alone. Circumstances can, in this case, change everything, and to a degree that makes the significance as evidence cited by the attorney lusting for the lacrosse players’ reputations and futures on FoxNews utterly unreliable, and useless in a criminal proceeding like this one.
Anybody remember the O.J. Simpson jurisprudential debacle? Defense attorneys argued that as many as eighty thousand people in the area share O.J.’s blood type. The prosecutor shot back that eighty thousand people didn’t visit the murder scene on the night in question, in effect arguing that since the genetic profile in question is found in just one in a thousand people, there is only a one in one thousand probability that the defendant is innocent. Even were that true, it ignores the rest of the corpus delecti and case to make pseudo-scientific evidence the sole determiner of guilt.
Rape investigations and trials are worse, with the result that discipline and order in all manner of endeavor have been shaken and stirred. How does any hierarchy of authority or rank maintain its integrity when all a subordinate has to do to destroy her superior is make an allegation of sexual misconduct? In an earlier writing, I related three instances of my own experience with less than scrupulous females intent upon self interest alone, and willing to destroy me to succeed. Had I been without my trusty tape recorder, I’d have been a rabbit roasting on the spit of a rape trial.
How does any official – policeman, for instance, protect himself? Same way, or video camera – and at enormous expense to the taxpayer who must provide it for him. Do you wonder how much in money Betty Friedan, Gloria Steinem, and the others have cost us all?
Which reminds me: a few days ago, after my remarks concerning women who conceive children while cuckolding their husbands a couple of women demanded to know how I could get any woman to admit she’d had sex on camera for money, or the like. I had to be a liar, they said (does that recall the woman juror who averred that no woman would have sex with three men – that happened had to have been rape).
Man, I wonder how many times I’ve heard something similar. Recently, when I observed that one conspiracy theorist’s material was plagiarized, the guy bridled. When I offered a mathematical proof showing the odds against his paragraph long, twelve sentence, recital was identical to another already published, it went right over his innumerate head. Even, when a computer program enabling teachers to catch plagiarists agreed with my numbers, he stuck to his guns. It was a coincidence, he said. Sure, I said.
Anyway, where the cheating wives are concerned, there’s, of course, always the movies they appeared in, too. But surveys like this have long been accomplished, and with a high degree of certainty. The person interviewed is asked to answer questions on the basis of a coin flip. If the coin shows a head, the interviewee is to answer the question truthfully. If it comes up tails, they answer “yes.” That way, a “yes” reply means one of two things: one, the coin landed tails; two, the lady has had sex on camera for pay. Inasmuch as the interviewer can’t know what a “yes” answer means, the women will presumably be frank.
So, let’s say, seven hundred of a thousand answer “yes.” Since we can assume a coin will land tails half of the time, approximately five hundred people have answered “yes” because the coin landed that way. That leaves two hundred people who answered “yes” out of the five hundred whose coin answered heads, and suggests that two hundred of five hundred, or forty percent, are the equivalent of porno queens.
Math, and logic, can tell you a wh-o-o-o-le LOT of things, often putting the lie to people right as they speak on television.
Anyway, affairs like the Duke University hockey players rape case may tell us all we need to know about where we're going. We live in the Time of Feminism, and the question has become one of whether we can survive the societal blunder it represents. With the ship of state that is the U, S, of A the Titanic headed for the iceberg represented by Islam, to say nothing of being almost totally incompetent to deal with all the other problems of potentially fatal nature it faces, we either disabuse ourselves of ideological stupidities like it or we die.
If militant feminism isn't the death of us, it will sure as hell put a lot of us in jail . . .