Several years ago, having first heard of the Internet and having had it explained to me, I exulted. When I said that one day in the not too distant future, the new communication would generate a candidate for the U.S. presidency, everybody listening that day laughed derisively. Now, having learned of the new Unity08 Party, they’re not laughing any more.

Basically a libertarian – I don’t capitalize because I refer to the life view and attitude, not the party (although I was once actually asked to run for office by the latter) – I see great hope for the kind of people among whom I grew up. It is a best kept secret of government not only here, but all over the globe, that libertarianism is growing with what must be for government here in the U.S. terrifying rapidity. Government, even in its democratic forms, has always belonged to the rich, and the one thing the rich have always feared more than any other is education of the commoner and poor. By “education,” I mean specifically awareness of history, and the truth it teaches.

As Ayn Rand, author of seminal works like Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead, once wrote, it is impossible to rule the innocent. Government owned by the rich – inevitably for the obvious reasons, it is always so – must therefore cause laws to proliferate until no free men, save they, are left. I’ve learned by way of my life and my struggle against government, that it is also impossible to rule those not indebted. The conditional sales contract, with its monthly payments, is an indenture contract, designed by the capitalist to assure control of the individual – “capitalize” him - by way of mortgage on his property and life.

Contractual agreements, you know, are, moreover, not governed by the U.S. or state constitutions.

And – as ironical it is that Ayn Rand, who worshipped at the altar of capitalism, should have assessed the matter so accurately – it is awareness of history - history whose study cannot be sequestered and controlled by the rich - that will make the poor fit to compete in a world that favors the fiscally powerful. It is ironical, too, that military industrial complex corporation programs like the CIA’s Operation Mockingbird should have been taken by surprise by the comparatively sudden birth and Brobdingnagian growth of the Internet. Where once it controlled radio, television, and much of the print media, the neo-conservative Mockingbird conspirators carefully contrived coup d’etat and its scheme to warp the consciousness and awareness of the public has been overwhelmed.

The horse that was the World Wide Web simply ran away before the government could bridle it.

True, Unity08 is a fledgling. More, the government is striving mightily to corral the runaway. With tactics like pumping pornography into the office of every home in the country, and using the religious – those zealots who are always willing to sell their souls to the right devil – and the far right, neo-conservative – willing to sell anything in order to protect government the own, together with the far left – always looking for an excuse for more law and government, the government is mounting an assault on the Bill of Rights and personal freedom unequalled by any in the history of our nation. I predict that – unless the people of the United States are even more effeminized, cowardly, and decadent than I believe - it won’t succeed.

More, no leader has yet emerged at this early date. I rather hope none does. “Power corrupts,” Lord Acton said, and it will ever be so. Now is the time for the lottery I’ve been speaking of since boyhood. The Internet alone makes that possible, and it is the way out of the long historic nightmare that has been class struggle.

The truth is that we are surrounded by competent leaders. The cynical and arrogant argument that one must be some kind of superior human being in order to operate government as simple as that prescribed by the U.S. Constitution is absurd, a creation of those who would preclude anyone but their class from high office. As I am continually obliged to remind my fellow citizens, the federal government of this country has constitutional authority over just three crimes – piracy, treason, and counterfeiting of money. It has four purposes: domestic justice, tranquility, common defense, and promotion of the general welfare.

Literally millions of men and women are capable of doing these things for this nation, as actually they already have done for centuries.

Nevertheless, the old-style leaders – the rich and the gentry – won’t just walk away. The people who conceived and orchestrated programs like Operation Mockingbird have control of the public mind. Their patrician ideas still thrive everywhere, including the minds of their victims, people who themselves aspire to one day enslave their fellows in the same manner they are enslaved. As Abigail Adams, our second First Lady, once observed, “All men would be tyrants if they could.”

The “common man” has never played a role in the administration of a nation or state, except as Judas-goat pawns used by the moneyed elite. Historically, in fact, the formation of any state has meant successful organization of a group of the most immoral and rapacious against all their competitors

And, of course – how on god’s green Earth does anyone doubt it (anybody hear a Mockingbird?) – the moneyed elite rule on whose behalf? What is the definition and fundamental doctrine of capitalism? More, in the entire history of mankind, there has been just one means by which the class of the poor have successfully converted their lot into something better, and that is capitalism. The slave enslaves his fellows as swiftly as he can, and mankind, too oblivious of history and too enslaved to his own concupiscence and greed to do otherwise, has mindlessly played this game of Russian roulette since time immemorial. That no one should have expected the same to happen in the Nation of Laws simply demonstrates man’s prostrate helplessness before his own foolish character and ignorance of history.

More, on account of Mockingbird-style behavioral indoctrination and opinion control, the enslaved are made to participate willingly in the processes that hand over to the elite the product of their labor, skill, and intelligence. The societally indentured ignorantly participate in what has come to be called – guess by whom – politics and political parties. When the patricians have chosen one of their number, the plebeians stupidly validate the situation and choice by taking part, voting for the latest manufacture foisted upon them by their chicaning masters

How can anyone rational deny that today’s political parties exist as quasi-official agencies of the government? The political parties here in the U.S. exist all but entirely for the purpose of deception, the appearance of free entry by the individual into the nation’s power structure. Just as there is no algorithm provided by our political and electoral process by which the opinions and desires of the individual or small group of individuals can become the choice of the society and nation, no one outside the equivalent of Orwell’s Inner Party has ever in fact been able to crash the great party of the powerful in government – unless, that is, he has agreed to play along with the Nation of Laws, Land of the Free, myth controlling the public mind.

For the first time in history, a new factor may alter that. The factor – no, not Bill O’Reilly – is the Internet.

No part of the struggle between the military industrial complex corporations and their auxiliary and the poor they have sheared like sheep since forming of the nation has been more interesting to me than that of federal elite Divide and Conquer tactic. Year after year, election after election, decade after decade, we are fed – veritably inundated in - the relentlessly similar and cynical balderdash of the military industrial corporations and their sycophant fellow corporate capitalists.

Keep it simple, Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels, instructed his fuehrer and Nazi officialdom, and repeat it endlessly. Remember? What do you see, hear today?

The same chicanery is continued relentlessly, night after night, in the U.S. media – a charade comprised of just two points of view paraded as the only ideas and solutions available to a nation increasingly desperate for answers. Like Al Capp of L’il Abner cartoon fame’s General Bullmoose, the industrial oligarchy offers its two-choice selection or nothing. It is rationally and logically absurd to call this democracy, yet the mind of the public has been so debilitated by media propaganda that it never awakes from its stunned walkabout to become aware of what’s going on.

Like a bird birthed and reared in a cage, the U.S. baby-boom citizen has never known anything else. Cut off from parents and forebears who might tell him by Mockingbird media and societal indoctrination, living in an orchestrated virtual reality, he doesn’t know what his isolated mind has no way to conceive. Even people running honestly and altruistically for office are and have been taken in by the Mockingbird media and the virtual reality it maintains. The result is that even the many good people who run for office begin to think of themselves as competing for power. A few years ago, debating with a friend and defending my point of view when I scoffed at the idea of elected representatives with power, I framed an analogy.

“Let’s assume you and I form a company,” I said. “You control everything, location of the business, purchase or design of the building, hiring and firing, what we sell - everything. You control everything except the money – which I control. Who is in power?” My friend, a reasonable man, conceded the point.

I suggest, my benighted friend, that you do, too.

Internet Libertarians – have I coined a new political term? - can draw constituency from the right, the left, and the middle. They must, however, offer ideas and solutions better than those offered by the masqueraders commonly known as the Democrat and Republican parties. There are many such ideas and solutions, all of them dangerous to the status quo and those who impose and enjoy it, the reason our government by corporation is so fearful of it. As I once observed in another essay, government must fear thought more than they fear anything else on earth. Thought is on all levels and to all interests subversive and revolutionary; thought is merciless to all manner of privilege, established institutions, and comfortable habits; it is anarchic and lawless, indifferent to authority, and careless of even the “everybody knows” wisdom of habit.

But, then, too – I hasten to add - if thought is to become the new process of government by democracy, and the possession of the common and the many, rather than the privilege of the chosen few, we must have done with fear. Fear will stand in our way like the great wall of the Rocky Mountains or the barriers once formed by the Mississippi river and the Grand Canyon, We have too long been held captive by fear that our cherished beliefs might prove delusory, fear that our traditional institutions should prove harmful, fear that all the things we profess and hold sacrosanct and unquestionable should prove less worthy of respect than we have supposed them to be.

But we can breach any wall, cross any barrier. We now have a forum largely unreachable and beyond the distortion of Mockingbird and Mockingbird-like “orchestrations” (the term favored by Mockingbird author Frank G. Wisner) by the federal protection racketeers. At long last, we can have a real debate instead of the rehearsed and canned, written by professional speech-writer, bloviating and nonsensical, demagoguery.

Many years ago, nineteen twenty-nine, matter of fact, an economist named Ludwig von Mises said that the reason old liberals – his terminology – were so misunderstood is that they stood for the general interest instead of particular interest. Still true today, the condition is far more advanced. Try to imagine anyone really more concerned for the general interest – their country, for instance – than for special interest – themselves or their group’s “single interest.”

For every one time you hear a U.S. citizen murmur the word “responsibility,” you will hear him scream “rights” a thousand times. When John Kennedy importuned his inaugural address audience to “ask not what your country can do for you, but ask what you can do for your country,” he may have had little idea of how few listened with sincere intent.

Von Mises, that long ago, would have imagined that his “old liberals” were misunderstood for the reasons I cited earlier here. Today’s liberal, however, is not a liberal in the economist’s terms (is there anything more un-liberal than today’s “liberal?”). He is a Rosie O’Donnell, Al Franken fraud, working with his opposite number in the conservative (look up the word – Ann Coulter is “conservative?”), to “deceive, confuse, and bewilder” the wannabe, would-be electorate. Spewing hate from supposedly opposite ends of the political spectrum, they work their industrial military complex masters’ divide and conquer strategy.

The Goebbels-inspired thespians of the corporate theatre we call debate and elections provide a play – as I noted, year after year, election after election – in which when the right is in supposed control the left seems attractive to the libertarian, and when the left is in supposed control, the right looks better. “Deceive, confuse, and bewilder,” Operation Mockingbird doctrine said.

The result, among a host of other things similarly cockamamie, is a supposed libertarian – just about everyone, to hear them tell it until their pet “issue” comes up – who wants freedom without markets and commerce, civil liberties without the right to property or to carry a gun, and peace without free trade and travel.

Utter nonsense, nonsense believed by the vast majority, and what it all means is that supposed libertarians are bought as easily as their totalitarian-leaning brethren on the political right or left. Worse, as long as political demagogues right and the left cynically and meretriciously preach “liberty” and “freedom,” the wannabe libertarian goes along. Standing now on his tip-toes, nose barely above the water that is relentless federal regulation, he gurgles out his mindless mantra, “we’re free, we’re free, we’re free!”

Nothing perhaps would provide a better example of such nitwit nonsense than juxtaposition of illegal immigration from Mexico and minimum wage laws. Think of it. With the criminal alien willing to work for far less, the U.S. worker must receive at least minimum wage. As the politicians lobbied by the corporations who will benefit massively from the conniving deal stack the deck against them, the U.S. worker, listening to the siren song of higher minimum wage, sells himself down the river with his own vote and participation in the system that is ruining him. Jesus!

The U.S., for instance, has been in a severe recession for several years. With our corporations leaving the country in droves for greener pastures in order to colonialize there just as they did here in the nation’s beginning, companies remaining here eagerly invite illegal immigration across a border their lobbying efforts hold open wide; this while an industrialist-reared and made president buys with the currency of young lives hideous profits for the military industrialist corporations who secured for him his office, profits which eviscerate the national economy and deepen its recession. The poor, of course, grow poorer, the middle class grows relentlessly smaller, all of it while the national media maintains the corporate oligarchy-mandated illusion of national prosperity.

“Tell a lie often enough,” said Vladimir Lenin, “and it becomes the truth.”

Anyone who needs to realize the power of the media to generate and maintain a virtual reality need only look at a populace cutting back everywhere, working as many hours as possible, yet falling further and further behind the economic curve, and watching as the gap between them and the fabulously rich widens inexorably every year, yet still reciting nevertheless their mindless freedom myth mantras. The recession will continue to deepen, into depression, driven by sky-rocketing gasoline prices. When the average price of a gallon of gasoline reaches five dollars, everything essential to the vaunted “American” standard of living will freeze. It will be interesting to listen to the Mockingbird media, then. For a refresher, go back to Germany, 1945 and listen to its radio and press media.

Like a bull in the arena being caped by the matador who will eventually destroy him, the nation’s otherwise insuperable public stands exhausted and bewildered, unable to understand what is happening to it.

The depression will be inflationary, parenthetically, with the U.S. dollar forced to surrender its status in the world. The people who gave you 9-11, New Orleans in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, then Rita, Iraq, and the like, have nothing in their “administration” to prevent or deal with any of it. The same morons who exhort the nation that it must “win” in Iraq, while having no idea what “win” means, are not likely to do better when “win” means “stay afloat economically.”

Faced with economic disaster like the military - and economic – disaster of 9-11 and Iraq, the “leaders” will do as they always have done, pass more legislation tightening controls, gin out more propagandist reality in the form of nostrums and blame-slinging back and forth between Mutt and Jeff political extremists, and arrogate to themselves more emergency powers. The poor will pay the price of it all, of course.

But, however, if the new Unity08 Party or one generated by the Internet like it is ready and seizes the opportunity, and its leaders do not make the tactical blunder that is collaboration in the system and the powers that be it has created, the corporate oligarchy created by the military-industrialist coup d’etat will fall. The revolutionary nation will have the revolution Thomas Jefferson urged free people to stage regularly.

And our children and their children won’t, in the words of Benjamin Franklin, “Piss on our graves.”

It’s hard to explain to most people the frustration I feel everyday when I add to the number representing the young men and women killed in Iraq and Afghanistan the day before. I suppose the reader here must wonder at that, thinking it’s none of my affair or responsibility. The people who call themselves American, ignoring everyone else in half a planet, have vague conceptualization where words like “responsibility” are concerned.

The people of the United States speak only of “rights” – not responsibility.

But – reference my own attitudes - maybe not, especially as I’m doing more than most to see this nightmare ended. I write dozens of letters on the subject weekly, to any and all the people who might have influence on events. For a time, I corresponded continually with troopers in Iraq; that, of course, has ended since I forwarded the truth about their morale and all the rest to federal liars and apologists like FoxNews and the rest.

Pissed off with people like Sean Hannity, Bill O’Reilly, and the Bush League sycophants, I thought then that was the right thing to do. Once more, as so often in the past, I overestimated – gave far too much credit to – the military and its miscreant commander-in-chief.

Enough. Four months before the United States invaded Iraq, I wrote to the President, the Vice-President, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, and to the Speaker of the House. I sent copies of the letter to the major media, too. In the letter, I importuned the President not to attack Iraq, and to forego the carnage that I knew would ensue. “Don’t kill all those women and children,” I pleaded. “If you really want Saddam Hussein killed, I’ll do it for you. I require only an unlimited expense account in a manner similar to that of the CIA – no one in the U.S. government can be trusted to be privy to something like this –, but I will promise to complete my mission for an expenditure only a tiny fraction of what invasion and the twenty year of occupation that will be necessary in the war’s aftermath.”

The mission, I said, could be accomplished for less than two hundred, fifty million dollars.

I went on to say that in his position he would certainly be able to get all the records and information necessary to convince him that I could do everything I was saying, and that I had no doubt that all the records required still existed. I included a tactical operations plan in sufficient detail to make it clear that I knew what I was talking of. Of course, record of my operations during Operation Mongoose – so named after me – would also serve to corroborate my admittedly surprising assertions. Finally, and in my letter to the President, I included material demonstrating the effectiveness of my own operations against the government he now heads. The argument I made was a powerful one, it being similar in method to one I’ve made several times before having to do with other operations of the kind.

Of course, nothing happened. There may be several reasons for that. First, of course, there is the obvious, that the powers that be simply wrote me off as a Rambo wannabe bull-shitter. Things like 9-11 suggest that things in the Bush League of government are that poorly done. So, maybe. But suppose the FUBAR Bush League were a tightly-run ship. Suppose further they really did want Saddam dead; say, even, that they really did give a good god-damn (year I know that’s pretty far-fetched, but we’re just supposing here, huh?) about the people he was supposedly torturing and killing. Let’s suppose even further, and say the White House didn’t want to run the nation into debt the hundreds of billions of dollars necessary to invade, occupy, and – well, everything that’s happened and is happening.

I know we’re so far “out there” that we’ve stretched the imagination of anybody but an ideological automaton like Ann Coulter, a Sean Hannity, or a Rosie O'Donnell (I haven't, obviously, space in which list all the loons being foisted on the public today by the media) to the breaking point, but just suppose.

So you get a letter from a guy who, when he checks out, you know can do this thing. When you’ve perused the file Department of Defense and the rest have coughed up, there’s damned little doubt in your mind that anybody this guy goes after is meat on a hook. He’s that damned good. What would you do?

Well, let’s keep “supposing.” Let us suppose, for a minute, that I had infiltrated (no, not just me – it’s not done that way . . . usually) Iraq and its upper echelons of government. Let us suppose further that my team and I had killed Saddam Hussein. What would have happened to, for instance, Halliburton Corporation’s stock and profits? DuPont and the rest of the military industrial complex? All that stock in all the weapons merchants, the dealers in death?

Your turn. You’re the CEO or a lobbyist for Halliburton or another industrial military complex corporation, and you hear not only the impossible – dammit, you had a deal - that you’ve got competition, but your competition is undercutting you by hundreds of billions. In fact, he’s talking millions, not billions. You’re about to lose around a cool three hundred billion dollars . . .! What do you do?

While you’re at it, just for fun, imagine that you’re a stockholder in one of the military industrial corporation companies.

Yeah. That doesn’t take Clausewitz or a rocket scientist to calculate, does it?!

But – ask FoxNews or any of their like – “That’s fantastic.”

Another possible reason, too, that my offer to “off” Saddam was rejected is that I’ve been “discredited.” After all, in the first place, I refused to shoot Fidel - a little thing about killing the citizen of a foreign country during time of peace – undeclared war, anyway. There was also the fact that everything I had been told about Castro, by media and military, proved to be a lie. Operations like that one, matter of fact, would keep some Johnson and Nixon era politicos on the hot seat for years. Salvador Allende in Chile, for instance.

The world’s nations have law, too, you know, and they do take a dim view of killing their people – even when it’s convenient for the Home of the Brave Nation of laws.

And that I stood up to the brass and got away with it - on that account or any other . . . well, you don’t do that and stay “credited.”

So, it is an easily demonstrated fact that federal government in all its forms and bureaus has striven for decades – that’s literally – in order to discredit both me and everything I say. In 1988, a U.S. District Court for Colorado ruled that to release under the Freedom of Information Act and the Tax Code my records “would irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.” It’s hard to discredit anyone when he has the record you have to alter in order to “discredit.” Go to my website, you’ll see that I’m still trying to get the records substantiating everything I say in my books and elsewhere, and the government is still “discrediting.”

That’s true, as only a little study would prove, where any of its adversaries is concerned. It was none other than Vladimir Lenin who observed that whoever controlled the public record controlled the public’s truth. The supposedly public record, after all, is a principal weapon of the politician and propagandist, state of the mind and opinion control art, and they will do anything in their power – included tamper or alter with the record – to assure that the public’s truth is under their control. More, in the Nation of Laws, the tactical doctrine of the courts and their officers demands control of the record and the publishable truth it represents. Even the most casual examination makes incontrovertible the conclusion that most – all but all - of adjective and procedure law is designed and administered in a manner directed toward discrediting the truth spoken by witnesses – that intended to assure the jury knows only what he prosecution wants them to know.

Go watch sometime – it’s not a secret. None of this is a secret, because it is no longer necessary for it to be a secret. Lulled – “deceived, confused, and bewildered” is the way a Fletcher School lecturer stated it one day in 1969 – by the Operation Mockingbird-controlled media, the American citizen is no longer sufficiently mentally competent or awake to ask questions or investigate. Even with the federally-wrought disaster rushing down on him now very apparent, he remains oblivious. He won’t know what hit him.

Continuing, another reason my efforts may have rebuffed as they were is even more obvious to even general understanding of our government since the advent of Mockingbird and its CIA inventors. Brigadier, later - Major - General Tom Van Natta, having reviewed my T.O.& E for the Special Operations Teams I was espousing – that in 1959 – remarked that an idea like mine might very well make me a marked man. “Generals want to command armies, you know. Admirals, fleets. They don’t want some first lieutenant with fifty troops putting a swift end to their wars. Be careful, son.”

Van Natta was then engaged in developing the air mobile assault now so familiar – and a variation on what would soon be known as “the mongoose trick.” But I’ve talked about all of that before, here and elsewhere, and at great length. You’ll notice that hasn’t gotten much attention, either.

What do you suppose would happen, were someone to discover a serum that would end human illness? How about a carburetor for the internal combustion engine that would burn nothing but air? What would happen, were we, together with the law, to begin teaching everyone – as I once was - to use a gun with surpassing skill? What if every citizen were empowered with the legal right to arrest lawbreakers (they are, as a matter of fact – and that, perhaps, makes still another point)?

Yeah, I know – fantastic!

Fantastic? Well, let’s talk about “fantastic” for a minute. Last night, I watched an old movie. “Patriot Games” is a spy thriller, in which and IRA hit man penetrates supposedly the best security in the world – that of the CIA. But the most interesting thing about Tom Clancy’s novel – and anyone who reads Clancy wonders how he get his hands on the stuff he does – is its depiction of satellite surveillance of Arab camps in Libya and the Saharan Desert. The “re-tasked” satellites locate the terrorists, photograph them from space and serve as “bird-dog” forward observers for a rocket strike that misses killing the intended target only by way of a fluke occurrence.

The technology, already old at the time of Clancy’s novel, is able to spot and photograph individual human beings, vehicles like pickup trucks – even things as small as AK-47 assault rifles.

Just a movie? Uh-uh. Since the invasion called Iraqi Freedom, several individuals have been killed in exactly the same manner – the fact having been ballyhooed in the media. One such “strike” was accomplished by a pilot-less aircraft and missile designed for the purpose. How do you suppose the target was located and identified? How about the house in the little Pakistani village some little while ago? Patriot Games the novel was twenty years ago. More, the government has boasted for more than fifteen years its ability to identify a golf ball from space.

"Fantastic?" You want "fantastic?" Fantastic is that with that kind of technology you didn't know there were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Finally, there’s one more explanation for my offer having been ignored. Once the tallest hog at the federal trough had summoned up the record, and his analysts had told him that in all probability, I would, indeed, cancel Saddam’s ticket to ride the planet, image again what might have happened.

One more thing. Ask yourself why it is that nothing is more thunderously conspicuous by its absence in all the supposed discussion and debate concerning the “suspect” reasons for Iraqi Freedom than mention of all that space-born technology. This government is the most rara avis possible, blind one minute, the next minute reading your newspaper from across the park.

No, I’ll take that back. The rarest bird here is the U.S. citizen. Anybody who doesn’t see through the Bush Administration wouldn’t notice a squirrel in his Fruit of the Looms.

A few days ago, Glen Beck’s CNN program discussed at detailed length Bible (and Book of Mormon, presumably) Prophecy having to do with the end of the world. The experts (why has that word come of late to make me flinch?) on the program, Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins, along with Joel Rosenberg, were agreed that Bible prophesy is being fulfilled and that the “end times” are near.

Last night Beck inveighed against the “Climate of Fear” being “fostered by the media” concerning global warning proponents. Evidently the “experts” will not have the sensational (hear the cash-registers and collection plates ring and tinkle, anyone?) Biblical version of the end of the world upstaged by anything so mundane – and deleterious of oil company profits - as global warming.

Anyone get the idea that what drives both these discussions is money – greed?

N-a-a-a-h! Shoot me for a cynic (and how cynical can you get?!)

Even more remarkable in its logical inconsistency regarding the question of fear- mongering was the tortured logic and twisted reasoning of the show’s host and his guests. Watching, you had also to wonder at the humanity – to say nothing of Christianity – of these loons. LaHaye fairly drooled at the prospect of his beloved text being vindicated. Just great if everyone dies, just so long as the Lord triumphs over all us wicked sinners. For a review of the drivel, here’s the URL

http://www.cnn.com/CNN/Programs/glenn.beck/

While I will use next time the Beck show and others (as I’ve promised) as grist for my mill concerning the abysmal state of thought process and reasoning in our benighted country, I have more important matters with which to deal today. I also addressed the subject of manners last time, and a couple of days before that, the selling of hate by the media. My e-mail has quadrupled, and I am being mentioned on other websites. Given thusly pause to consider more intently matters like these, together with the Beck Show and others like it, I’ve discovered what is almost certainly a factor in the miserable way the public of this country reasons. Some of you may even have recognized it yourselves.

That “factor” is just this: U.S. Citizens do not interrelate anything. Neither, of course – the corollary - do they prioritize. The result, as it were, is that “Americans” – from time to time, I remind us that there are thirty-four nations (note the prioritizing?) in this American hemisphere – continually start at around four of ten on a number line or scalar process. No one, in short, wants to be bothered with basics.

A few years ago, coaching athletes on the National Judo Team, I was at first amazed, then annoyed, at what I took to be their stubborn – even arrogant – refusal to study, even consider, gripping. Gripping power and skill is the sine quo non of judo, a grappling sport in which the players are fully clothed and all attacks and defenses depend upon a proper grip.

A year or so after the experience, I again encountered similar cerebral paresis in teaching police officers to prevent capture of their sidearms and shoot. When I asked officers how they trained their hands for handgun shooting, I received – invariably – an uncomprehending stare. The idea of hand strength contributing to shooting skill had never crossed their minds. It was astonishing for me to time and time again be confronted with an individual who had been practicing an endeavor for even decades, yet never realized or considered the importance of how strong his hands were to marksmanship.

Even more amazing perhaps is the fact that while I demonstrated again and again and again my ability to easily outgrip even national-class judo athletes one third my age, and to repeatedly and with ease relieve police officer students across the nation of their sidearm, no one undertook to follow my instruction.

An interesting – and instructional – sidelight to that last is the fact that several times during my the travail under harassment by police officers across the nation incited by IRS, I relieved several officers of their weapons; and when I had returned their equipment to them with the ammunition removed, the cops made no mention of the matter to superiors, other officers, or anyone else. It’s a guy thing, I presume.

There’s more. Yesterday, when I wrote about the critical importance of our society and nation’s loss of manners, I received one hundred, twenty-eight e-mail responses – even one phone call. Much of the response had to do with the fact that I spoke of male manners having to do with women, so let us start there – with a fundamental as critical to our future as is the loss of another seemingly small and unimportant thing, the honey bee.

The latter, you know, is responsible for as much as ninety percent of what we eat. Were they all to die, human beings by the millions would go hungry, many of them starve. “Little things,” as the song, “goes, mean a lot.”

Fundamentals you may have forgotten, or never learned:

First, perhaps foremost and as critical to survival on this planet as the bee, is the fact that the male human, like the female, has one purpose for having received the gift of life. That is to mate with her, then protect her and the child that results. The female has likewise but one use for Mother Nature, that of producing and nurturing a child. These things are fundamental, and they are facts, things incontrovertible by any religious, ideological, social, or other intuitive reasoning or response. More, all other human behavior is secondary and a responsive satellite.

Ignored or violated, as with any complex and chaotic system, it will seriously damage, even destroy, the species.

Oh, yeah – I can hear the empty heads being shaken. I’m very familiar with the sound – the judo grips and the shooting, remember? When, in 1962, Rachel Carson wrote her historically monumental book, “Silent Spring,” I remember hearing the same barbaric yawp from farmers then pouring insecticides and herbicides on their fields and into the water table from which they drank.

I heard the same brainless bloviating last night on the Beck show regarding air pollution and carbon dioxide being poured into the air these nitwits breathe. Can anyone doubt that “experts” like Beck, informed that there might be a den of rattlesnakes somewhere in their yard - or even house - would scoff, remark that there’ve always been rattlesnakes around there and say, “let’s see what happens – it’ll take too much time and effort to find out?” You can’t have the heuristic thought process much more FUBAR than that.

Let us return momentarily to my recent discussion of chaos and systems chaotic. It’s important to understand; more, anyone who thinks of matters like those being discussed here – even the importance of chivalry toward women – as trivial obviously does not understand chaos mathematics. First, to dispel an old, habitually intuitive idea, chaotic systems are not random. However random they may appear to be to the innumerate and uninformed among us, they are what is called “deterministic.” That means not only that they have something determining their behavior, but that they can to some degree be predicted.

Another way to say that is that one can expect that some very small force – try the honey bee – can cause horrendous result and damage.

Most critical to our discussion here is the fact that chaotic systems – and nature is a chaotic system – are sensitive, very sensitive, to the initial conditions. That, to say it another way, means that a very slight change in the starting point can lead to enormously different outcomes. To evince the essential nature of chaotic – to the intuitive “thinker” irrational of contradictory – systems, this makes them fairly unpredictable.

Finally, chaotic systems appear to be disorderly, even random. They’re not. In fact, mathematicians know that truly random systems are not chaotic; as a matter of fact – still another example of the confusion derived by intuitive thought on the mater - orderly systems predicted by classical mathematics, logic, and physics are the exceptions. In the world of ideologue, zealot, and chauvinistic patriot like Glen Beck, Sean Hannity – and, yes, Rose O’Donnell (I still can’t conceive of how a bubble head like that rises to her position of influence – god help us!) order, chaos rules!

The honey bee matter scares hell out of me; but it doesn’t scare me anywhere near like the Orwellian mindlessness of a nation that exalts by their patronage the stupefying stupidity of men and women like these. Now THAT is scary!

Almost as un-nerving is a nation of people who have yet to be taught about the “Birds and the Bees.” The society and nation had its sexual equivalent to Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” back in the chaotic (yes, you bet I chose the term purposefully) sixties. Of fifty pages of bouffant babble one could chose for illustration, I offer this one:

http://www.hippy.com/article-311.html

There, you will find carefully reasoned, logical, and scientific pronouncements like this one: “Women are an oppressed class. Our oppression is total, affecting every facet of our lives. We are exploited as sex objects, breeders, domestic servants, and cheap labor. We are considered inferior beings, whose only purpose is to enhance men’s lives. Our humanity is denied. Our prescribed behavior is enforced by the threat of physical violence.”

That was from a publication entitled “Redstockings (Bitch) Manifesto of 1969.” The term usually taken for an epithet when referring to the human female is quoted, not mine. If you notice a similarity in tone to the recent brouhahas having to do with Senator Barak Obama and Don (finally got his name straight) Imus, it’s merely because you’re not – quite – brain-dead, and you’ve been paying attention. This is not, suffice it to say, the stuff of implacable Spockian genius.

In fact, if you don’t recognize the tone and behavior of a spoiled brat, we need to include in our discussion the state of our children and the reason they, too behave like demented lunatics.

Gentle reader, there are no small things where things like nature, the weather, the ecosystem, or the role of male and female - chaotic systems - are concerned. My boy’s mother used to have a witticism, one of her own coinage (this was a very bright woman – hey, she married me, let’s not forget). “If she (or he) had a brain, she’d take it out and play with it!” I hope you get the point.

At the risk of redundancy, I also remember having written a short story while a sophomore in high school. In it, a big game hunter from Texas and the far future, went in a time machine back to the Cretaceous prehistoric period in order to hunt Tyrannosaurus Rex. Leaving, he was cautioned by his scientist employee not to kill anything but the Tyrannosaurus. The reptile, the scientist said, was extinct, so killing could affect nothing in the present time. Of course, when the hunter felled his prey, it toppled onto a butterfly, crushing and killing it; and when the Texan had returned to his own time, there was no life – none – here to greet him.

One of these days, under the urging of someone like Glen Beck or his ilk, we will kill the wrong butterfly, alter the wrong bead on the DNA chain, or take for granted one too many women. One thing is sure, that we will not upset any of the chaotic systems – and they are all interdependent, you know – with too much thought.

I was reared and grew up among men of what might be called "the old school." You may not know anything of it, because I find that no matter how I search anywhere, I am able to find little of it. I work and write a great deal in an effort to benefit my county, and I've decided that little I can do would more further that end than to teach what I was once taught by the nobleman who was my grandfather, and by the men among whom I grew up. I am, frankly, fed up to the ears on the boorish manner of today's sorry-ass surrogate for the gentleman, and I am still warrior enough to dare speak my piece.

This, then, is about how to be a gentleman, and why – if we don’t – the price may be horrendous, nothing less than the death of our nation.

The manner of the men I spoke of a minute ago was based almost entirely upon that of medieval knighthood. There have been written several version of the Knightly Code of Conduct, as it was called, and here, for example, is one:

"Live to defend and serve God and Country.
Live one's life so that it is worthy of respect and honor.
Live for freedom, justice and all that is good.
Never attack an unarmed foe.
Never attack an opponent not equal to the attack.
Never attack from behind.
Avoid lying, cheating, and falsehood.
Avoid and despise torture.
Obey the law of country and the code of chivalry.
Administer justice.
Protect the innocent.
Exhibit self control.
Show respect to authority.
Respect women.
Exhibit Courage in word and deed.
Defend the weak and innocent.
Destroy evil in all of its forms.
Fight with honor.
Avenge the wronged.
Never abandon a friend, an ally, or a noble cause.
Fight with valor always.
Always keep one's word of honor.
Always maintain one's principles.
Never betray a confidence or comrade.
Avoid deception.
Respect life and freedom.
Die with honor.
Exhibit knightly manners.
Be polite and attentive.
Be respectful of host, women, and honor.
Maintain loyalty to country, honor, freedom, and the code of chivalry.
Always be loyal to one's friends and those who lay their trust in thee."

To these, my grandfather added another: "Loyalty is above everything - except honor."

As a boy, I was taught behavior and manners I still exhibit and practice today. I will not permit a man to be rude to a woman, period. When I had come to Texas in 1995, I found that what was always a custom usually requiring only verbal remonstrance - men elsewhere apparently at least remembered proper conduct concerning women - was cause to not only defend myself verbally, but physically. That, of course, was cause for little stress - my avocation and lifestyle for what was then more than fifty years was competition judo - and a considerable number of blustering bully loudmouths learned to their fury (later and at a distance, always) and dismay otherwise that I do not suffer fools gladly.

To one macho character come upon by a friend and I as he enjoyed slapping his wife repeatedly and arrogantly as he pressed her helplessly against a car, I answered his "Who the hell are you and what gives you the right to stick your nose in my affairs" with something that may prove instructional here. "I'm the guy who's gonna kick your ass and use it to sweep this parking lot if you hit that woman again. My right is the right of any decent man who sees what you're doing."

My eyes holding his (once known among the street people who knew me as a cop and bodyguard back home as "Iron Eyes," I can appear pretty formidable when I choose), I fished a business card from my pocket and handed it to the woman. "Ma'am," I said, "it he hits or abuses you again - ever, you call me and it will be my distinct pleasure to make him very, very sorry." I didn't hear from them again, so I have no idea. But when we came out of the store we had been headed toward, the couple was still sitting in the car talking earnestly. As we walked behind their car to our truck, the woman put her arm out the car window and waved the card at us. My friend and I - the lady, too, it seems - had a little laugh at Tough Man's expense.

I do confess to have mellowed somewhat (don't get the idea that I've stopped training to fight or shoot, though - that could lead to error with serious effect) in my old age. After the six (or seventh - I don't really make a big thing of this) similar incident, one in a local K-Mart, it occurred to my that my penchant for kicking bully's asses might label me with local police as a provocateur. In several instances, including that of the WalMart incident, the police were called. In that instance, a burly character who pushed an elderly man and his wife aside in order to force his way into line ahead of them at the checkout counter, my armlock happened to smash his face on the conveyor belt and spray blood from his broken nose around there. When the old couple and the check-out lady had explained to arriving police officers what had occurred (did I forget to say that smart-ass had attempted to give me a hard shove?), I was not arrested.

I've related that particular action in my book, "Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story"

But enough of the "war stories." Let it suffice to say that was once required by my grandfather to promise that I would never permit a man to insult or harm a woman in my presence, and I don't intend to go back on my word to the man who had most to do with my upbringing. I keep my word. That's true of animals, too - another promise made a few minutes after Opa body slammed the local blacksmith after having observed him striking a horse with a pair of smithy tongs. "Boy," Opa grated, "don't let me ever catch you being cruel to a dumb animal."

"No, sir!" I said as required then. I was then about five, and the man was very like god to me. In the years that followed, I got the rest of my instruction. Once, when I had repeated a remark heard concerning a local woman who often frequented the lone tavern in our little town, he seized my arm in those pliers-like hands of his. "Son, as far as you're concerned that woman is a lady. All women are ladies to you. It doesn't make any difference who they are or what they do, it isn't about them - it's about you. Do, you, understand?"

Yup, I understood - still do.

Under my grandfather's tutelage, and that of the other men in the locale with whom I worked and lived, I learned that a man worth the name - it was a title then; not just observance of gender - changes his manner and behavior in the presence of woman or women. When a "lady" - they were all ladies to me, remember - approached or spoke to me, I took my hat off before speaking. Introduced to a lady, I came to attention, clicked my heels and slightly. Sitting when a woman approached, I rose to my feet.

I opened doors - building or car - for a woman, went up a stairs or into a strange room before her, and followed her upon going downstairs of leaving. I took my hat off, too, when entering anyone's home, did the same when eating no matter where I was. I still do that, and I still detest the boorishness ignorance of men who sit eating at a table with a woman. Annoyingly noticeable enough when one is eating along, it is clownish when in the company of a woman.

A couple of decades ago, accompanying a local attorney who happened also to be a militant feminist, I sprang ahead of her to open the door to the local courthouse. "I can open my own doors," she said archly (it was, you may recall, one of feminist's verbal back-of- the-hand sacramentals during the nitwit era). "Not when you're with me, you can't - unless you're prepared to stop me physically. That would be as silly as opening your own doors, wouldn't it?" Watching me strangely as I spoke, the lady nodded deferentially as I finished, then went through the open door as I held it.

There's more, and it will be on a website page I'm preparing here.

There are many, many things contributing to the fearsome decay of the United States of America, bewildering things few people seem to understand. There's no need, nor enough room here, to list, describe, or categorize them - they assail us daily both in the news and in actual experience. One of these societal social ills is disdain for our fellow citizen. That disdain is exhibited by nothing so much as the execrably infuriating bad manners of men. That's not to forgive women and children for boorish misconduct toward others, of course, but I'm on men's case today.

It has always men who were held to a higher standard, and it was they who held themselves to the standard, no one else. A man who had to be asked to show proper respect had dishonored himself, and was suitably ashamed.

Oh, I can hear you: it's not that important. Yeah? Well, you tell me what burning a flag is, if it's not a question of manners. How about flying another flag above our flag, suffering it to remain lying in the gutter or anywhere disgraceful, or in any other improper position. How many criminal acts - take speeding, stop sign violation, etc, etc, etc, are really and first simple acts of abusive disrespect?

Let's get something else straight, while I'm at it: Acting like an television outlaw and the anti-hero Hollywood somehow decided to exalt makes you look to guys like me like a boy. You remind me more than anything else of the guy who stood across the mat from me glaring and posturing furiously in the hope of being intimidating. What he was really showing me is how scared he was. I don't suppose he knew that, because the performance was more "whistling past the cemetary" than anything else - an attempt to add weight to his robin's ass. I used to get that kind of guy in about twenty seconds, never saw a really top-class fighter who acted that way, ever.

So, gentlemen, let's start doing this little, easy-to-do thing for our country. Let's shape up our manners. Start with the ladies. It pays dividends right away, you know. Ask any woman - except a feminist, of course. They're part of the problem - who has worse manners? And, let's not forget, feminism may never have happened, had WE not made it happen. Cheating anyone where job, position, or wages is concerned may be a crime - it is damned sure bad manners.

And at the bottom of it all manners are about respect – self-respect above all.

Many years ago, debating after church with an Iowa State Senator friend named Murray, I argued that only some kind of lottery system could restore to the United States any true semblance of democracy. Bystanders roundly hooted my preposterous idea, as did the senator.

Recently, however, it seems that I’ve acquired allies (probably, matter of fact, some of the hooters – they now have said it all along), one none other than famed attorney Gerry Spence. Great minds (wink) think alike.

Of course, after that last sally, I can hear all my usual detractors say, “Oh, my god – another thing he claims to have invented!” And all I can say in response to that is to note that one downside of truth is things like this. However it comes out, you’re “stuck” with it, the reason that I never – that’s never – say anything I can’t prove with paper record or the testimony of people who were witnesses. Mine has been a long life, one parts of which I still find incredible myself, and there are many things which occurred to me while alone, things I will never tell, and have never told, to anyone. They’re just “incredible,” that’s all.

That my contention concerning election of officials – including most eminently the U.S. President – has now proven to be what perhaps may be the only way to save our nation is to me a matter of logical thought process. “When you have considered all the possibilities,” said Sherlock Holmes, “whatever remains must be the truth.”

And that’s how I do it. Matter after matter, issue after issue (and they are not the same, incidentally) in the national news, I have called the turn correctly. That months before Operation Iraqi Freedom (man, the irony of that “floors” me) I argued that what has happened would happen (and exactly) is a matter of fact that was observed by a number of responsible people.

In fact, and on the record – much of it available here in my archives – I have not been entirely or significantly wrong once in my comments and predictions concerning national affairs in the news. That is a fact that has not been lost on a number of people, matter of fact - all of them persons in positions and fields wherein “intelligence” and foresight are often critical. I now offer counsel on matters ranging from vehicular speed in security detail convoys in Iraq to choice of weapons and tactics for certain kinds of operations. One of the men from whom I hear often is a major general in the U.S. Army, another an international security specialist, and still another an analyst whose name most here would recognize immediately.

Okay, I’ve blown my own horn enough for one session. My point is that since boyhood, I’ve been the individual a wife would one day call “Spock,” that for the character portrayed by Leonard Nimoy in the famed television series, “Star Trek.” I apply logic, mathematics, forensic, and epistemological method to everything. As emotional an individual as I am, I have learned to be absolutely unemotional in my thought processes.

And therein lies my topic here. As I’ve related already, wife Rita and I are teachers, she still and finishing forty years in the profession. We are therefore aware, almost certainly more than most, of the truly enormous decline in the ability of our country’s people to think productively and conclusively. School-children today seem by something, some force or condition, to be stultified, stunned, unable to grasp even simple concepts or do the simplest of reasoning. Faced with the hideous portent of such a thing, Rita and I are carefully trying to discover the cause, even prescribe a cure.

There remain to our scrutiny several possibilities. First among these – and almost certainly the case – is the indisputable fact of the individual citizen’s mind having been isolated and insolated by technology from the real physical world and its reality. Living far more often and longer in climate controlled, almost hermetically sealed off from the planet and locality’s environment, experienced in virtually nothing physically demanding and requiring physical solution, protected by modern systems, medicine, clothing, and the like from everything even their grandparents were obliged to survive, we live in a world become almost totally conceptual and linguistic.

With divorce from association with the real world has come loss of touch with the physical world. And with reality. Examples abound – far, far too much so – but even one chosen as serendipitously as that being reported on the television this morning will do. Recently, television personality and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell asseverated that never had there been a time when fire could melt steel. Sometime ago, discussing the World Trade Center attack with members of the Truthout and similar sites, I heard dozens of people make the same assertion; and recently, the media reported that as many as thirty percent of people interviewed agreed.

The news this morning will doubtlessly upset all of these good folks, inasmuch as it was that of a fire resulted from the crash of a tanker truck having melted steel beams in a California overpass, causing its collapse. Oops!

I note, parenthetically, that it will be great fun to hear the defensive explanations put forward by Ros1e and the conspiracy folks. Maybe, for once, even, O’Donnell will simply shut up. Not likely, of course. It amazes me that people like her are actually paid – and voluntarily - for their mindless nonsense, but that’s another matter.

And I digress. Only one who has never watched, again for instance, a blacksmith make horseshoes, or actually – as I have – constructed a bellows-intensified fire would make such an absurd contention concerning iron or steel. No one - a farmer or rancher who has used fire perhaps countless times to bend steel in making repairs or shaping tools – would make such a mistake, either. Certainly, no one who has worked in a steel mill would. In fact, and as another example of language, “that sound logical” (anybody remember Baby Huey?) reality, no one who has ever used explosives to blast rock or demolish things like buildings – as I, again, have – believes that the World Trade Center was brought down by controlled demolition. It’s absurd, and the total absence from any of the discussion (except mine) of the tremendous amount of physical work necessary to put everything necessary for such an operation is not only conspicuous by its absence, but indicative of the effect of detachment from the necessities imposed by the physical and real world on the individuals arguing the matter

In a world of concepts and ideas only, the world where all but few citizens of the United States now live, virtually – that word again – anything is possible. Maybe it was mice.

That I was first aware of what was happening while still a boy, as a matter of significant fact, had much to do with my unusual bringing up. A kid who first started making his own explosives while a sophomore in high school, I watched with cynical amusement as movie heroes like John Wayne exploded dynamite by firing a bullet into it. Bullets thrown into a campfire went off, wounding and killing people. Time and again, I heard adults explain that an engine had been sabotaged and ruined by pouring sugar into its gas tank. I knew better, having both watched my father fire a bullet by hitting where it lay on the floor with a hammer and later duplicated the stunt with a blow-torch, and once having run a lawnmower engine an entire summer and without damage on sugared gasoline.

Still, in the later case, it wasn’t until actual tests by the insurance industry decades later that the myth was finally dispelled. All these absurd ideas, the “everybody knows” kind, incidentally, were created in Hollywood. I could fill these pages with examples of more, each as utterly wrong as the 9-11, controlled demolition, foolishness.

Nevertheless, the condition has grown eminently worse. Recently, the incident having to do with Don Imus, erstwhile television talk show host, has demonstrated the pernicious effect of this kind of stupidity. All heat and no light, the verbal battle still rages, instances of it right here, with there being hardly a single logical fallacy that hasn’t been put forward as probative of something. Confident at least in some degree that many of the principals will recognize in what follows here their own arguments, I will forego use of any of these as examples of my topic today.

Suffice it to say that the Imus Affair further demonstrates the cancerous effect of new-age doublethink. With the “dumbing down” effect of isolation from the real world, together with the behavioral effect of both federal propaganda disseminated by massive media effort and equally massive production and promulgation of Hollywood, Disneyland virtual reality for entertainment purposes, our national discourse and deliberation has entered a death spiral.

What to do? Well, for openers let’s learn to think again. There are rules, you know, and the rules, those of epistemology and formal logic, have not only been known for centuries, they have formed the bed-rock foundation for all over man’s scientific progress. We know how to distinguish right from wrong, valid from invalid.

So, let’s begin with basics. Generally, the most conclusive proof or disproof of any proposition is to be found in logic or mathematics. That’s what this will be, and eventually, I will turn it into a webpage on my www.judoknighterrant.com site.

From time to time, moreover, I will also refer to websites where effective discussion and demonstration has already been made. Generally, I will offer examples and elucidate, using wherever possible current event for illustration. To begin, this will be a list of logical mistakes made repeatedly and, to me, at nauseum, by the media, advertisers, and reporters, by politicians, activists, and people in general. These come from many sources, which, wherever appropriate, will appear in parenthesis. For the purpose of learning, I’ll try to find an actual example of each in current events and news.

I mentioned logic first a minute ago, so let’s begin with it here. Straight from Operation Mockingbird and Goebbels-ian propaganda theory, if you want to bamboozle and bewilder the vast majority of people today, use fallacious reasoning. Always, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda said, speak to the stupidest person in our audience. It is fair, and statistically defensible, moreover, to say that little the public hears and sees on television today is logical. There’s little doubt that they’re following the instructions of their mentor. See for yourself – there are has been no doubt about these for centuries:

The first is so because I consider it to be the king of them all (at least where the media and fully eighty percent of the people with whom I have been debating during the course of this study), Petitio Principii – begging the question. Also known as assuming the answer, circular reasoning, or simply tautology, it argues something like – picking one from the news and talks shows – “We have to have the death penalty because it discourages murder.” The fallacy, of course, is that the “because” assumes that the possibility of being executed discourages murder.

There are many more like it – try “We have to stay in Iraq because when we come home, the enemy there will follow us home.” (‘Splain dat one to me, Luci!”)

How about, “We shouldn’t talk about pulling the troops from Iraq (or Afghanistan) because it will hurt the troops” morale.” (It will hurt the troops' morale to know they’re coming home to their families? Sure. When I was in the military, I was crushed to learn that I would be given military leave or a three day pass.) A near relative of begging the question, a fallacy that FoxNews has just about made their own – Sean Hannity is its master - is that of Stolen Concept. Hannity will use science – take the global warming issue, for instance – to prove that science is wrong. (D-u-u-u-h – dat sounds logical; and the fact that scientists say the earth has warmed up before means that it’s fine for it to warm up now; talked to any dinosaurs lately, Sean?)

Another (still) Spin City forte is what I’ve come to call the FoxNews Question, a variation on the old “when did you stop beating your wife.” “Is it possible that John Kerry (or whomever they’re after tonight) hates little kids?” Hannity says, looking down his nose. (Duh – Is it possible that you guys have the objectivity of a sex maniac? A starving shark?)

Often, a good way to defeat many of the fallacies I spotlight here, especially this one, is call Reduction ad Absurdum. “Reduce to absurdity” means to assume what the “expert” or “analyst” says is true, then carry the contention to its logical result. If, for instance, we assume that no human being (to be selfish as hell, and ignore everything else breathing like us) can live by breathing only carbon dioxide, and we know that cars are filling the air we breathe with the stuff, such that at some point in time (reductio in itself) the air will be all carbon dioxide, that means incontrovertibly that at some point we will all die. (Yeah, I know, folks, you’ll wait until we’re all gasping for breath before you want to do anything.)

Or, another example of reductio, if the population of the earth were to continue growing in the next one thousand years at the pace it grew in the last one thousand, the weight of human beings on the planet would equal that of the planet. What does that tell you?

Next, let’s try another famous one (since the time of Plato), that of Disputandum ad Verecundiam, or Argument from Authority. It has a partner in crime, too, Argument from False Authority. The former says that because Watchamacallit is and expert – they’ll wave a PhD, general’s rank, or the like at you every time – he must be right. Sure. Great.

Great, except there are exponentially many degrees of expertise – which only means more knowledgeable than the broad mass of people (Abraham Lincoln once used a kid who fished on the river in question a lot as an expert witness – because the kid fished there a lot, he knew where the currents would carry things) – to say nothing of areas of expertise. The guy is in reality claiming only to know more about the subject than his audience, which is pretty stupid when you think about it and realize that his audience is a nation. Time and time again, when you “Google” the guy you learn that his PhD is in something only remotely or not at all related to the subject (but he IS Dr. Watchamacallit).

Without this guy and his kind, FoxNews would go dead silent. Or Gretchen would have to cross and uncross her legs a whole lot.

A few years ago, one pseudo expert in one of those execrable commercials that riddle today’s programming and take everything of entertainment value from it read the lines – that’s all this means, you know – “I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV.” (Huh? – what does that do for me?).

The Appeal to False Authority, as it’s also called, is the “experts agree,” or “scientists say” “report.” Think about it – how do you check that? Who these guys are you’ll never know, and maybe you should stop and consider whether even the guy talking – or the channel, or the network, or the producer, or the . . . oh, never mind! – knows who the “experts” and “scientists” are. (Hey, guys - is this really any more than a rumor? Gretchen, one more time, please – and could you hike your mini-skirt just a tad higher?)

The last for the day is the fallacious argument known to logicians as Ignoratio Elenchi, or Irrelevant Conclusion. If you’ve heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times, and it’s simply proving one thing and believing you’ve proved another. Declaiming for weeks now, and just the other day, on the subject of global warming, Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe argues vehemently that he could and has proved over and over that there is no proof the automobile and fossil-fuel emissions are contributing to global warming. That, he says, proves we should go on as we are. (Uh, Senator – does that mean we should just wait to see what happens? I’m sure as hell glad you’re not my doctor!)

That, incidentally, is an example of the way some of these genius types often make a witches brew of several fallacious arguments, this one including not only irrelevant conclusion, but proof by absence of proof. (Remember Pat Robertson: “There must be missiles in Cuba because nobody can prove there aren’t? Do you wonder where President Bush got the idea to use the same brilliant reasoning with Iraq?)

That last one, the Pat Robertson gaffe, is called Argument ad Ignoratium – argument from ignorance. A variation is to argue that something is true because it hasn’t (or can’t be) been shown to be false.

That’s got to be enough for this time, but don’t worry – every night’s television gives me a recorder full of examples. The only trouble fro someone writing as I am here is that people like the media’s propagandists repeat the same fallacies over and over (Goebbels, remember – make it simple and say it over and over; talk to the stupidest persons in your audience?). The topics are different, though, so we can still have some fun.

Oh, yeah – you want to know what the fallacy is when the network argues with former Miss America’s nifty legs. My knightly code of honor requires that I draw a veil over that one. Suffice it to say that watching Gretchen, you tend to pay little attention to what every body else – her included - is saying. That is called non-verbal communication, and it’s FoxNews all over again.

You get to see a whole lot, in other words, but nothing you can . . . be sure of, shall we say?