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 . . .

“Unbelievable!”
With that barbaric yawp, the people who vaingloriously proclaim themselves “American,” disdainfully ignoring the other thirty four nations in the hemisphere, dismiss any fact or set of facts they chose to avoid. Easier that way, otherwise those lovers of freedom and all that is good might reasonably be expected to DO something. “Americans” talk. Or vote (more talk). They don’t do. "They" - someone else - should do. As their country drifts toward the shoals of national collapse, "Americans" continue to talk.
And the “unbelievable excuse” is one I was obliged to listened to continually - that in lieu of the assistance anyone might expect from bystanders during time of emergency, for instance - during all of the two decades the United States made war on my family and me. Even now that almost daily media reports concerning U.S. Government malfeasance, fecklessness, cruelty, abuse of civil right, and more provide more and more incontrovertible vindication for what I first said in “Letters to Aaron” twenty years ago, the Home of the Brave continues to cower behind its trademark excuse. "Unbelievable!"
Of late, even the most “unbelievable” of my assertions, those having to do with unauthorized and illegal wire-tapping, data mining on private computers, and unwarranted surveillance in general, have been exposed publicly. In fact, the President has admitted doing it, arguing speciously that he has that authority. Still, his supporters have their mantra shield. "Unbelievable!"
Oh, yeah, I've heard it all before. Ad nauseam. Years ago, in fact, when my agent, a man who knew the veracity of my claims by virtue of having checked them all, pointed out that my story was “unbelievable” to most soft and satisfied “Americans,” I let him have it. The letter, reprised in the book, “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” is here. It pretty much says it al

“Dear Jim –
Thanks for the rapid and useful response. Volume is not synonymous with ‘rambling.’ I think it was H.L. Mencken who said, ‘Anything that can be put in a nutshell belongs in a nutshell.’
“No, old buddy, I can’t get my FBI, IRS, or military records. Did you forget? The U.S. District Court ruled in 1988 or 89 that my records are a matter of national security - that to give them to me would “irreparably damage the tax collection system of the United States.” You read the court papers and ruling. That’s the first time collecting tax was ever raised to the level of national security by a court. Kind of tells you something about the ‘Land of the Free, doesn’t it?’ I told Dieter a while back that this isn’t the land of the free anymore, it’s the land the fee. With its ruling, the court said I was right. Justice in America isn’t just blind; she’s a whore.
“That case is, of course, is all documented or documentable fact. Not some visit to a UFO. The court record is there – unless they’ve altered or destroyed it. But I have my copy of the ruling, and they can’t get their hands on that. They keep trying, of course, and they’ve stolen several in the scores of burglaries I have to put up with. I think I’ll go back to my tent and the woods. Just the fact that they keep burglarizing my place ought to say volumes. And how many burglars have you heard of who pass up the TV and things they could hock to steal papers and documents? Have you forgotten about the burglaries at the Windsor Center, or Kathryn’s offices? Come on, man – pull your head out.
“You can also remember that the Attorney General of the United States himself called me. The federal magistrate who heard all the preliminary hearings before the U.S. District Court was Hilbert Schauer. He’d remember. They’ll probably kill him, come to think of it.
“Jimmy, this whole case is ‘unbelievable’ only to people who are bound and determined to find it unbelievable. Cowardice makes them eager to ignore their eyes, ears, and their minds. They’ve got the Nazi Disease. Remember? Ich habe nichts davon gewusst – ‘I didn’t know anything about it’. No, nobody in German knew was Hitler was doing.
“I’ve heard ‘unbelievable’ until it makes me want to puke. The lawyer the other day wanted to know it I got the names of the witnesses! Now, that is unbelievable. I’m fighting for my goddamned life, and I should get the names of witnesses?!
“Do you know that I actually tried? While those bastards were still trying to total me, I kept asking everyone in earshot to get witnesses names. Guess how many did. That, right there, is the reason all of this shit can happen. Nobody wants to get involved. They just want to suck up everything they can. Get the hell home to the security and standard of living somebody else is paying the price for and providing.
“Man, I can’t take you people anymore. Your ‘unbelievable’ is unbelievable.
"’Do you have any proof?’ I’m in a fucking gunfight, and I’m supposed to get the names of witnesses? What about the sonofabitches who aren’t doing anything but watching? What about them? Several people – a roomful of them – knew about my RV last year. The police took another of their ‘reports.’ I caught the burglar red-handed, followed him home, looked him full in the face, got his license number and address. The stuff he took was marked for identification.
“No warrants. No charges filed. No arrests. Doesn’t that tell anybody anything? If it doesn’t, it’s because you have made up your mind to be stupid.
“A PI down here, Catherine D’Unger, hired me. The same week I started – handled one case – she got a threatening phone call from IRS. All the way from Ogden, Utah. ‘Criminal Investigation Division,’ they said. Sound familiar? Do I have to ask why it would’ve been necessary to identify themselves as the Criminal Investigation Division? Among the lying bullshit they told Catherine was that I had used a false social security number. What does that tell you, Jimmy? They admitted at least burglary with that. The only place I ever used the wrong social security number was on the papers I marked for evidence and left to be stolen, to prove they were stolen. I agreed with Grassley’s office that everywhere the numbers zero and three were contiguous, they would be reversed. That’s the ‘wrong’ social security number, and we found it in the records they produced at a disclosure hearing. It’s one reason the Justice Department fought so hard to prevent having to surrender my records.
“Jimmy, when I laid that trap, it was inconceivable to me that anyone could dismiss proof like that with a mere word. But they did, and they still do. ‘Unbelievable.’ Well, I’ve got another word for you - ludicrous!
“No, Jimmy, I can’t fucking “focus.” I’m a sane man living in Bedlam. If I only present the evidence, everybody says the same thing. It’s open and shut, conclusive. Then I name the culprit. Yup, you’ve got it – “unbelievable.” I’ve been at war with these bastards for nineteen goddamned years. I’ve lost everything all the rest of my countrymen live for. In the last ten months, I’ve been hit by cars four times. That’s cars! Have you ever been hit by a goddamned car? Three or four thousand pounds of steel, iron, and the rest, moving at over thirty miles an hour? Let me tell you, it’s a little unsettling.
“I have three smashed bikes to show how unsettling it is. I’m bleeding inside, shitting blood, walking on dislocated bones and ankles too swollen to get boot or shoes over, and I can sit only with pain that would leave the rest of you decadent bastards whimpering. My face, where the stitches were and the glass keeps working its way out, is numb. But because I couldn’t afford x-rays and tests, can’t do business with people who get eight hundred dollars an hour, I’m “unbelievable.” Time for my word again - ludicrous.
“I don’t know it there’s a hospital report. The bills, though, were here two weeks ago. Funny how corporate America, hospitals and doctors especially, are always too late with everything, and fuck everything up when they finally do whatever, but the billing they get right and on time. Tells you something about their priorities, maybe?
“I have to go out only to get food now, sneak through the neighborhoods late at night to an all-night, K-Mart grocery. I gather food in the wild, only after sneaking out at night, camping and foraging. I’ve subsisted for days at a time on “Hill Country Fare” Cheerios, $1.79 a box. Ditto pinto beans. The only time I can relax is in a crowd or the darkness of night.
"For Christ’s sake, man, why the hell can’t anyone get it through his fat head that someone is trying to kill me! How many goddamned times does it have to happen? And the police are helping them! How the hell many times do the police have to free or refuse to arrest somebody who’s been caught burglarizing my place or trying to kill me, to make you melonheads see what’s going on? Man, this isn’t some fucking macho minimalist TV movie they make for the wannabee wimp and martial arts freak. I don’t get to yell ‘Cut!’ when I don’t like the way things are going. It’s real! Go out on the goddamned highway and watch the cars going by. Imagine being hit by one. Not in your car – on your ass.
“But there you go again. ‘Unbelievable.’ Fuck you. Try telling one of these beer-swilling – hell, they don’t even drink beer; they drink Budweiser – TV-educated, works-out-in-a-climate-controlled-gymnasium, lives-in-a-climate-controlled-house-and-travels- in-a-climate-controlled-car, has-his-hair-cut-in-a-climate-controlled-beauty-parlor, red-neck studs or his brain-dead automaton, hothouse flower woman that a man walked away from a hit by a van going fifty, and survived being knocked sixty feet? He’s too stupid to convince. Hell, the math he’s capable of can’t do his damned checkbook!
“’But facts,’ John Adams said, ‘are stubborn things.’ There are witnesses who say I was in the crosswalk. Evidence, debris resulted from the impact, was found in the crosswalk. The police report records where I stopped flying and sliding. My blood and skin left an unmistakable trail. They took pictures. This guy was going more than fifty miles an hour. In a twenty-five mile an hour zone. He tried to hit me a second time. He and another guy got out of the van and attacked me. And nobody got arrested!
“Facts are stubborn things. There were witnesses. Five lanes of bumper to bumper traffic. There are always witnesses. The witnesses this time stood by, watched the fight, then got in their cars and drove away. There have been witnesses standing by and watching for years. Take back in nineteen ninety or so, when the Thornton, Colorado Police took my computer. They took it without legal authority of any kind. None. It was a straightforward theft, an armed robbery as a matter of fact and of law. Their justification was the word of a man who was literally raving, a mentally disabled veteran whose reason for calling them was a misplaced telephone, a telephone that had been found before they had begun any search. They used that for an excuse to search my RV and take my computer.
“They refused to check the ownership of the thing, even to look at incontrovertible proof of ownership that was also in the van. A simple phone call, to any of the veteran’s doctor, the finance company, or the computer store would have ascertained everything. Even when the veteran’s son appeared to explain about his dad and the circumstances of my being there, the cops would not relent. Why? The whole incident is easily documented. The computer store is EDW in Westminster, 303-426-7772. The veteran’s name is Richard R. Benton. His son is William R. Benton. They live in Thornton, Colorado.
“There are always witnesses, Jimmy. Facts are stubborn things. Let the Thornton Police Department explain the law under which they confiscated my property. Have the Nueces County Sheriffs Office explain their handling of the burglary of my RV. Have the Corpus Christi Police explain the way they handled this rundown of a pedestrian in a crosswalk. I’ve been collecting evidence – tape recording and video-taping witnesses, government burglars, saboteurs, embezzlers, rapists and the like for years. I’ve gathered mountains of evidence no one is willing to look at and the courts have ordered concealed. That’s for years. For nothing.
“’Proof,’ you all say. Bullshit! You watch a man get blasted sixty feet through the air, kicked, stomped, and karate punched, and nobody hangs around to tell police what he saw, much less intervenes. For nineteen years now, there’s been a war – car chases, car wrecks, shots fired, blood and broken bones all over the place; burglaries, wrecked buildings and bugged offices - going on right under your goddamned Nazi Excuse noses.
“In Colorado, the government surrounds an entire town, barricades all the roads in, puts helicopter cover over the town, and goes door to door arresting a hundred nineteen people. In Idaho, a woman’s family is surrounded and besieged. She has her head blown off by a federal government sniper. Her thirteen year old son is gunned down, too – shot in the back. In Texas, another federal army surrounds a group of church people, starves them and deprives them of water, taunts them with loudspeakers and broadcast threats, attacks them with machine guns and tanks, them finally incinerates them. That kind of thing happens continually all around the country. Proof? Proof? Proof?
“What the hell is proof? You don’t see because you don’t want to see.” You don’t care as long as it isn’t you or yours the wolves are eating. You know what? Old buddy, the United States of America and its hypocrite public make me sick. When they inevitable happens and they get what they’ve brought on themselves and deserve, I’ll be watching with pleasure.

"Sincerely – you’d better believe I’m “sincere;” I’m mad. Madder than hell.

In a relatively few years now, the United States will die - cease to be a nation - because its “freedom-loving” people do not care enough about “freedom” and all that to DO anything about it. A few years ago during a debate in one of the coffee shops that had become my favorite haunt, a typical petty intellectual “American” asseverated that his one duty to his country was to vote. That, he said, was all of his responsibility (he didn’t use the word – I doubt that it’s in his vocabulary – I did).
“Americans” want something DONE when it is they who are being attacked by their government. Otherwise, they sit in coffee shops and bars and bitch.
Oh, yeah – I know what you’re thinking. I have grown so used to the “tu quoque” (look it up – it’ll do you good) recitation as part of discourse and debate that I can recite it, too. What you’re thinking is self-serving bullshit. You need to assume that everyone is like you. The fact is – and it is a fact everyone who knows me will report – that I have been DOING something about my fellow citizen in trouble since I was still a kid. Still today, I keep a hard, fast rule – that I never go anywhere without making sure that it is better for my having been there. If I can't do anything else, I pick up trash. As I said, it’s my reputation – you’re stuck with it.
But what comes next in the discussion is also very familiar. Ducks quack. Canaries and other bird brains sing the song they always sing. This one is so classic it has a name. It’s called ad hominem, a logically fallacious attack – usually sneering and sarcastic – on the object’s character, veracity, or the like. Frequently these days – everyone seems to hold stand-up comedians up as mentally superior – the ad hominem attack is in the form of a one-liner jibe.
Recently, with acquisition of access to a computer, I have joined a number of blogsites, chat rooms, and internet forums. Purpose? Well, if you know me, you’ve guessed it. Another of my fact-finder surveys, this one interested in the level of discourse in the U.S. How well do people debate, and of how much value is public discourse to the Land of Free Speech? I’ve been at it a year now, and, frankly, nothing in the news is as ominous and depressing as what I’ve learned. When columnist James Kilpatrick, Steve Allen, and others first spoke of the “dumbing down of America,” I took it with a grain of salt. Jay Leno and his “Jaywalking” was funny – for a while.
There's one more thing, another of the "American's" tu quoque ad hominem attacks on an adversary he can't answer with facts or reason. This one, too, you'll note assumes that everyone is like the detractor. I have one reason, and one only, for telling my story and wanting it promulgated. You see, I need nothing from you or my country - or anyone else's. I made myself self-sufficient, put myself outside the reach of government long ago. I have no use for money, no use for notoriety beyond what I just said. Those who know me will tell you that I was happiest while living in the woods, and that I avoid people as much as possible. There's a little story there. In high school, I was already known as "anti-social." Confronted with it one day by a teacher, I picked up the morning paper from her desk - the usual chronicles of murder, rape, thievery, war, government corruption. "Do you mean to tell me that I should be like THAT?" I asked. That ended the discussion.
Let me be even more candid (I know you, and I know how everything I say will be taken by the people and culture I know): When I started doing "Knight Errant" all those years ago, I did it because I liked how it made me feel. That's it. No other reason. The people to whose aid I went, after all, were strangers; and they stayed strangers after I helped them. With few exceptions - one a pilot I carried several miles through snow up to my waist in order that he wouldn't freeze do death or lose his hands and feet to the cold - I never saw them again. The only thing I got was how it made me feel. Are you ready? IT MADE ME FEEL SUPERIOR. In fact, I knew I was superior, because I was proving it. I could feel that way because you, my culture, society, and country TAUGHT me that people who went to the aid of others were superior human beings. Or have you forgotten . . .?! You made the rules; I won the tournament - are you saying I don't deserve the prize? F--- you!
"Dumb America" isn't funny any more. And yelling “unbelievable” won’t “get” it, either. So long, “America,” you had a great run – while it lasted.

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Antony says the words, "His life was gentle, and the elements so mixed in him that Nature might stand up and say to all the world 'This was a man!' I watched the president's speech tonight with something like the same sentiment. My thought, actually, was "This is a man?"

The speech was a few minutes ago, and I watched - S.E.R.E. training I give myself now and then.

It never ceases to amaze me that the nation of Washington, Adams, Jefferson, Madison, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower could so demean itself as to choose such a pitiful excuse as a national leader. But you are what you are, doing what you're doing. Amazing!

Like I say, I listened a few minutes ago and for my first time to a speech by George W. Bush, the corporate criminal currently installed in the nation’s highest office by the nation’s ruling military industrial military complex. Normally, I wouldn't have - I can't stomach the man. This time, though, I knew what was coming, and I wanted to see it for myself. Sure enough, the Mexican fifth Column in the White House has sealed the border, in order to assure that no one can force any of the illegal aliens being exploited by corporate "America" to leave. Twelve thousand (yeah, I know you heard six - don't forget that this guy is the biggest liar who has ever occupied the highest office) troops will assure that no one can make any of the twenty million Mexicans already here leave, and they will now fan out even further, to infest the nation, stealing jobs and services like a heard of locusts devouring a countryside's crops. In time, they will have bred sufficiently, and the United States of American will have been annexed by Mexico. Soon, everything will function here as brilliantly and efficiently as it does there, a swift and peaceful take-over. Wonderful, huh? Learn your Spanish, folks - it'll soon be the only way to petition your government.

Among all the emotions popinjay panjandrum guys like George VII evoke in men like me, one comes to the fore through all the others. There’s no need to explain, inasmuch as our ruling monarch's personal history is well known. To all the people who matter to me, so is mine. They will have no trouble in understanding why I hold the opinion of George W. Bush that I do. This guy wouldn't make a pimple on a real man's ass.

Orphan kids like me, you see, especially those who brought themselves up in a sod hut by a river while fighting for every morsel of life sustenance, haven’t the respect sufficient to make you blink if you got it in your eye where rich boys born with the proverbial silver spoon and assured success in life by patrician parents and a class conscious society are concerned. What we have, in fact, is contempt, utter contempt.

But another matter, nevertheless, remains, one to put the entire matter of illegal immigration in perspective. I want to apply to whomever holds such authority for illegal alien status. Had I been given the same amnesty that our pandering President offers them, I would have been able to get one of those jobs “American” don’t want to do. I would have been able to enjoy all the free medical care, protection from the authorities and exemption from the laws of the land, and freedom from taxation illegal aliens enjoy. I would still be with my family, too.

I, too, like the alien Mr. Bush cited so lovingly, served the country and took wounds for her. It was about the same time he came (actually, it was twenty-eight years ago for me) here that the Internal Revenue Service first destroyed my business, broke up my marriage and family, and took steps to assure that I would never again be gainfully employed. During the time Fulano de Tal was working in the fields and joining the Marines, the IRS repeated their performance on a second business, marriage, and family, this time driving a son to three attempts at suicide.

This time, the United States made absolutely sure I not only couldn’t get any of those jobs “Americans don’t do.” More, they took careful steps to assure that I was prevented from so much as receiving food stamps.

Some months ago, a daughter went through Hurricane Katrina. For days, I was unable to get any word. I’m homeless, you see, kept that way by the federal government and several of its “programs.” When I was able finally to learn that she and her family had survived with only a devastated home as damage, I was prevented from going to her assistance by the same factors which have kept my family and me apart for all these years.

Those factors are the everywhere evident and promulgated fact that the U.S. is utterly vicious towards the families of its victims, attacking and destroying them relentlessly, "collateral damage" in the great wars of political convenience and necessity.

A few days ago, when nephew took his own life, I was again prevented by my circumstances from going to my sister and her family.

So I contemptuously apply for the same consideration Mr. Bush is so anxious to extend to Illegal Mexican aliens. I haven’t the slightest expectation of anything like that kind of consideration or justice, nor would I accept any kind of beneficence or gratuity from a man of such low character, but I seek to make the point I hope will soon have become apparent.

That is that the nation of laws is a cynical and disgusting fraud, a murderous marauder and exploiter of people who hides behind a mask of sanctimonious reasonableness and piety. Watching the speech tonight had one reward. That was the realization and awareness that a nation able to do no better than this for a leader cannot have long to endure. You’ll get yours, and soon now. As for me - in case you thought I was surrendering, I will change my name to Hernando Lubberto, and I will apply for work at the local Wal-Mart as an illegal alien from Mexico. I speak Spanish, and I'm beginning to pick up a pretty good Mexican accent. Instead of paying the spate of bills I incurred recently when I got my annual medical checkup and Medicare refused to pay, I will inform the doctor and several "health car providers" that I am here illegally, and not obligated to pay. That should complete my transition to privileged status.

Meanwhile, excuse me while I go vomit.

Well, there you have it. He looked you right in the eye, told you the elephant on his leash was a toad, and that if you let him bring it in the house, it wouldn't do any harm. My god, if you believe that - after everything revealed by the Church Committee, literally thousands of such evidence in the law libraries, and just commons sense where people as corrupt as government in the Land of the Fee is concerned - you'll believe pigs not only fly, but do loops and rolls.

If you believe that the NSA surveillance of your telephone, the Patriot Act, and that are about your security, and that Osama bin Laden would plan a terrorist operation over the telephone, you should be out grazing. You're a jackass.

“You had to live – did live, from the habit that became instinct – in the assumption that every word you made was overheard, and except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.” That’s from George Orwell, of course, and the only thing there that doesn’t apply directly to today is that part about darkness. That doesn’t stop Big Brother, 2006.

In case you somehow missed it – like you’ve been comatose since he was elected president (like maybe you had a complete nervous collapse at the news) – George W. Bush is a notorious liar. In fact, it now appears that it’s become pathological. As soon as the President has delivered one of his look-them-right-in-the-eye, obvious as a whale on your plate, Texas Liars Contest whoppers, it becomes to him the truth. The man simply says whatever the situation, in his mind, demands. If he needs a counter to something and doesn’t have the factual information necessary handy (which is about ninety percent of the time), he lies. If he needs to make a point to keep from looking like a boob (about ninety-FIVE percent of the time), he lies.

George W. Bush lies so often that he’ll soon have to begin writing his name on his wrist. When you’re this far down the Bush League versions of Lewis Carroll's rabbit hole, you know, you need some kind of outside reference now and then.

The latest was that looking-you-firmly-in-the-eye speech last night. The NSA isn’t bugging your phone. They’re only bugging people al Qa’ida might be calling. My god – that beggars just about anything I’ve ever heard yet from this guy. George W. Bush would lead an elephant into your living room and tell you it was a toad. Scary.

But scarier was the press and media. During the re rigueur “analyses” our pontificating popinjay punditry foists on us after every such utterance from our Senator Foghorn President, one of the FoxNews Fred Barnes-Mort Kondracke-Mara Liasson panel said that matters like this were so complicated and demanding of high intellect that only a genius could have conceived it. But an idiot could figure it out.

I didn’t hear the rest of what Mt. Parnassus said, having fallen sideward on the couch in a paroxysm of laughter. My Rita sat staring at the screen with her jaw dropped. She said later, she was too nonplussed with trying to decipher what had been said to take in the rest. When we had recovered enough, I noted that it was amazing, wasn’t it, that a White House able to avail itself of genius of the incomprehensible and incomparable sort Barnes and company were talking about had blundered so stupidly into a mess like Iraq, and that in, no one could be found with enough genius to get us out. Remarkable!

Now, I’m pretty used to nitwit pronouncements by the television news media, it’s “anchors” (that’s probably a good term - I.Q-wise, for sure), “analysts,” and the like. Probably the worst is the shear innumeracy of the whole politically- correctedness-paralysed and benighted crowd. Beginning many years ago, I’ve taken note of the stultifyingly stupid and nonsensical statistics they wield so wildly. In an earlier writing here, I gave an example, that having to do with election of our embarrassing chief executive in the first place. On my loose-leaf pad beside the sofa where I watch the news for such, I have pages of examples of media mathematical ineptitude like these taken today from another website. http://www.journalism.ubc.ca/thunderbird/archives/2001.04/numbers.html

The website reports a survey of graduating journalism students at a leading university in the land of Dumber and Dumber. Of the students asked, 78 per cent were unable to rank "Johnny" in the appropriate percentile of his class based on standardized test results, 57 per cent could not properly calculate how a wage would increase (at an annual inflation rate of three per cent) over a 20 year period due to inflation, 52 per cent failed to convert gas mileage from liters/km to miles/gallon, 48 per cent could not select the median income from a list of five salaries, 46 per cent did not know the meaning of deficit, and 35 per cent were incapable of computing a "percentage change" in stock value.

These are our sages, our nation's redoubtable wise men, the people who tell us what’s going on. That’s the people who tell us we’re just too stupid to understand it all – trust them to know. You betcha.

Well, actually – maybe they’re right. Yesterday, I was about to write a piece beginning with the following, something sent to me by a friend named Matt. Matt says this is from a site called “Defective Yeti.” http://www.defectiveyeti.com/ (God – I love that! “Defective Yeti" . . . !) It goes:

“A new poll shows that seven out of every five of Americans don't bother to do the math. ‘When asked, 53% percent said that, when reading or hearing anything that involves two or more numbers, they don't even try to do the math,’ said lead pollster Bradley Noel. ‘Another 49% said they will often think about doing the math but ultimately decide against it. Only 19% said they will actually add things up to see if the report makes sense.’

“The results were greeted with elation from the 47 Republicans and 38 Democrats in the 100-member Senate. ‘This is great news," said Senate Majority Leader Pam Crader (D). ‘When discussing budgets or taxes, we can pretty much make stuff up: millions, trillions, deficits, surpluses -- it's all the same to them. Advertisers were equally enthusiastic. ‘This will allow us to offer consumers 1500 free hours of service during their first month of membership,’ said AOL marketer Ted Rawlins. Only the Department of Education has expressed misgivings about the findings. ‘Mathematical apathy is one of the top three educational problems this nation faces,’ DOE Chairman David Kahn warned. ‘The other one is illiteracy.’

Into that mix, you throw a President who has the god-amazing temerity to stand in front of a nationwide audience and tell us first that he’s only bugging a few phones, and second that he’s doing it because he thinks Osama bin Laden might call somebody in the United States to plan his next attack. Man, if you are so far gone, if your brain is so stick-a-fork-in-it-it’s-done cooked by Hollywood and the media that you believe anything as impossibly stupid as that, don’t read any further. You need to be out grazing somewhere. You’re a jackass.

But then again, you might. You believe that ours is a free market economy. You believe that this is the “Nation of Laws,” that we have “equal justice under the law.” You believe that this is a free country. You believe that the rich pay taxes. You believe . . . Never mind, this is a short essay, and to list all the nonsense you believe would require volumes and tomes (look it up).

Suffice it to say that you believe in a free market where lobbyists infest the halls of government like cockroaches a decaying building, an IRS controls every facet of business enterprise and gainful employment, and corporations are by legal definition alone above competition and supply and demand forces. Living in a place where every conceivable act is regulated by law and taxation, where one in every thirty-five males citizens in prison, on probation, or parole, you believe that you live in a free country. You believe that under a legal system that fines a billionaire and woman living on social security the same amount for a stop sign violation or speeding ticket there is equality. In a nation where anyone with enough money and power can form a corporation capable of passing any attempt at taxation on to the wage-earner, you believe that the rich and the corporations they of course form pay taxes. You not only believe pigs fly, you know they do snap rolls and wingovers. Nuff said?

Having been made to reconsider by that last, I pause to apologize. You’re probably NOT a jackass. Nobody is naturally that stupid – not if he can read this. You’re indoctrinated. You believe that nonsense because someone has deliberately reprogrammed your head to believe That nonsense. You need to think about that.

Anyway: Inasmuch as we know that nobody even dares talk about how his wife likes to sun in the nude, let alone things about their tax return, on the phone or computer, we know there’s got to be another motive. What makes me think so? Well, you may have forgotten that I know about all this wire-tapping, bugging, and key-hole peaking from having been its victim. Maybe you haven’t read “Letters to Aaron,” my book. Had you, you’d know how I came to realize that the United States was bugging my house and offices phones. You’d know how I set up and trapped the government in order to prove what they were doing. You know that I retaliated in kind - the reason I'm so sure about things I say here on the Mongoose Trick Forum.

I should have pulled the trigger that night – then there would be no doubt. As it is, you’re all still wandering around in a cloud of media smoke and mirrors, Mutt and Jeff bewilderment, believing nonsense.

What are they really up to? Well, I think it’s about power. Capitalism. As Ayn Rand once said, you can’t rule innocent people. I published a corollary some years ago, one more to the point today, that being that you can’t rule those free of debt, either. To explain, I need to digress momentarily, for a discussion of that last, capitalism.

Capitalism is a system whereby and wherein the strong exploit the weak. Does that remind anyone of what GOVERNMENT is? Government is the law-giver, and all law in capitalist societies is contrived to enforce that system - to provide means by which to keep the powerful more powerful than the persons whose bodies and property are to be exploited. When the exploiters appear to practice socialism, with the seemingly ubiquitous social program of one kind or the other, it is a deceit. Like throwing a bone to the wolves circling the campfire, it is NOT intended to restore any kind of parity. The idea that a capitalist thrives on competition and free market forces is one so absurd logically as to by unworthy of discussion, but in a nation society where “people don’t do the math,” that’s not the case. Begin by trying to imagine the best team in baseball or any other sport contributing funds and players to the others in order to make for everyone having an equal chance of success and closer competition. Imagine a boxer or wrestler handicapping himself in some manner in order to lessen his advantage over his opponent.

Neither has there ever been a situation or circumstances wherein all the competitors in the competition for property, money, and power were equal at the outset. Any study of history, even a cursory one, makes that fact obvious, and arguments to the contrary absurd.

Nevertheless, there is what the illogical, the illiterate, and the innumerate believe. That is also an aspect of capitalism seldom, almost never, discussed. By controlling the education and information systems of the society, the capitalists and the government they own and control indoctrinate the masses until the lie told often enough has become the truth.

That, by the way, was a religion-derived device, too. Religion does not encourage free or questioning thought. I came to recognize that when I attended the parochial high school I did. In four classes, I was encouraged to think freely. In a fifth, religion, I was taught that the church alone knew what was right. It was a sin to think for oneself. Recognize that anywhere in today's secular scheme of things? Bush League "Patriotism," for instance?

In that, capitalism had to replace the Divine Right of Kings –
the idea that GOD favored some people more than others and wanted his chosen ones to have dominion over the rest – with another, the Protestant Work Ethic.

Actually, the Protestant Work Ethic needed a bit of help. Essentially just a Divine Right surrogate, the Work Ethic decreed that god favored those who worked hardest, and that gave the powerful justification for whatever they wanted to do. All one had to do was keep all the devious, deceitful, and brutal means used to “get ahead” covert. Or make it legal. Voila! Today’s lobbyist or his medieval prototype.

As is the case with any ideological or religious concept, especially one with results in the real world, early capitalism grew convolute swiftly, acquiring all the mythology and catechism of earlier systems like religion and its kings (or vice-versa). The core myth for capitalism was the Horatio Alger (NOT, you’ll notice Sammy Glick), the “self-made” man. That’s one you’ll hear continually – daily, probably; and maybe several times daily, at that. The individual, the myth says, starts with absolutely nothing, works very hard, and succeeds - becomes a billionaire. That he is somehow impervious to the vicissitudes and verisimilitude of the world that is “…a stage, and all the men and women merely players” is never considered, much less explained. "Somehow," of course, is read "God."

It’s like sex in the Christianity. You must never think of it – that’s a sin; you must never learn anything of it – that’s a sin, too; and you must never do it, unless the church gives permission – otherwise, that’s also a sin. How you manage to do it in the face of all that – well, that’s a miracle. I suppose. Modern capitalism and its journalists like Barnes, Kondracke, and Liasson excel in that kind of non sequitur, Mad Hatter nonsense, as I noted earlier. It’s something that could only have been invented by a genius, but any dummy can understand it. Or is it that a dummy could invent it, but a genius can’t figure it out. Something like that.

Notice, too, that that billionaire was “millionaire” not long ago, and will soon be trillionaire (only if you’re among the innumerate who are largely the reason this nonsense is possible will you believe that). That’s the carrot in front of the jackass. It’s also necessary when government – the rich, that is – creates wealth by printing fiat money. A quick trip back to the island of bananas and the people gone bananas will refresh your understanding of that.

Oops – need to explain the bananas, and the people on the banana economy. A few years ago, a lady called in to a radio talk show where I was a guest. She asked if I could provide a simple analogy, an example that would explain economics. Sure, I said, and I told a story about people living on a little island somewhere, people whose only industry was a magic banana. The bananas could turn into anything anyone needed, and the islands commerce was simply that of swapping bananas. Things worked perfectly until a visitor came to the island from elsewhere. And started writing IOUs for bananas (he, of course, hadn’t grown, and didn’t have, any). You figure out what happened. Include forming a government and its banks.

Actually, I wrote the basics here in my April 16 post, and there’s little to add to that piece in general. Money of the fiat kind is a device by which government and the rich who invariably form government make claim on the bodies and skills of those too poor to have an independent source of income, or whose source of income can be taxed. Fiat money is an arrogated entitlement to the work someone else does. That simple. All forms of money, stocks, bonds, certificates, IOUs, letters of credit, derivatives, insurance contracts, futures contracts – anything valued by or giving value to money by being tradable - is a claim on someone’s work or property.

Another way to understand money in a money economy is to consider my own story. When I say that I dropped out, I mean that I took away from the rich all the vehicles by which to control me or my sources of income. To invoke Ayn Rand once more, there is no way to rule the innocent. To control people, the rulers must either make them guilty of something punishable, or make them subject to being made guilty. The former is hard cash, the latter interest rates, stocks, bonds, derivatives and things that set the value of money. A corollary is there is no way to rule people who are not in debt. Debt, regardless of what the mythologists and liars tell you, is a form of guilt meriting corporal punishment or fine.

To be un-convictable and non-punishable is to be free, which is to say overwhelmingly powerful.

The wannabee royalty and rulers despise that, the reason they go beyond glorifying and immortalizing Sammy Glick ambition to even moralize it – it’s a sin against the great god capitalism and government to do anything but run on the corporate rich man’s treadmill. “The poor man’s “getting ahead” means using the rich man’s money, at the rich man’s price – he will sell you nothing unless you use his money. If you happen to notice that such applies to the nations of the world outside the United States, I congratulate you. Front of the class (where the rich can keep an eye on you).

I, in short, went to the wilderness, lived off the land. Oh, I picked up coins in parking lots occasionally, just to buy a few things like needle and thread, yeast or cultured cheese for sour dough starter, and the like, but the land, lakes, and rivers are very fruitful in the U.S. I often went without money for months on end. And the government’s frustration and fury grew with each passing month. Whenever I left the open fields and trees along lakes and rivers, police harassment became a weekly thing, sometimes daily (as I relate elsewhere, including my book, I was stopped on the nation’s streets and highways by cops more than one hundred ten – it took a while for me to realize and start keeping tally - times).

Whenever threatened with fine or jail, I would reply, “Sure, I don’t mind a few free meals; I have no money, and my bike is mine, un-taxable. When a job as a mechanic earned me an old VW Rabbit (I bought it, fixed it up), it was titled in the name of a friend. With acquisition of a cheap tape recorder, and knowledge of the law superior to most police or criminal attorneys, I became so powerful with poverty that I began to toy with cops, even handling them physically, with impunity (the stories are also in my book). I had, matter of fact, a hell of a lot of fun.

The effect on women, incidentally, was amazing. After years of celibacy enforced by fear of being set up for rape charges, I got laid more often during the last few years in question than most men do in a lifetime. Power really IS an aphrodisiac.

But you give up some things most “Americans” would not – COULD not. Freedom isn’t free. Capitalism’s powers of propaganda and indoctrination are immensely powerful. As a matter of fact, you have been so altered mentally that in an Orwellian fashion you believe that enslavement is freedom. All but totally dependent upon society, you somehow believe yourself free.

Few, for instance, could give up their identity. That’s who – and that means what (ask someone, see what he says) – they think they are. That’s been told them by society, and they have no power or faculty to believe otherwise.

But that’s another Banana Island Story. You figure it out. The point here is that government which has to be up to something is always up to making you a prisoner, either by law making you guilty by virtue of violating its legislative enactments (we forget here about presidential directives, and a host more of similar flat fiats by tyrannously powerful people like him), or by inability to catch the carrot it keeps out of reach with legislation called civil statutes.

THAT’s what the wire-tapping and telephone bugging is all about. You’re supposed to be reminded, to realize that in a nation where damned near nothing hasn’t been declared illegal, you are subject to imprisonment just about at will. You’ve known – for crying out loud - for a very long time, at least since Operations COINTELPRO, SANDWEDGE, GEMSTONE, the Church Hearings and all that, that ALL the phones in the United States are bugged. Now you’re told again, just to make sure your certainty of guilt for something keeps you from joining in anything that might rock the President and the White House – that the capitalists’, bunkey - boat. All they need is evidence from a phone tap to prove it (haven’t you read ‘1984?’ – no, I don’t suppose). If what’s there doesn’t quite constitute enough to convince a jury of the trained monkey variety like yourself, they’ll have a legislature pattern one just for what you’ve given them (and if you don’t recognize THAT one, you haven’t been paying attention, again).

And, in case you hadn’t figured that out, either, that’s why the Constitution of the United States provides for a Fourth Amendment.

The picture is for Jamie, whose death hit me particularly hard; rest in peace, buddy - it wasn't your fault.

A sociologist . . .

Wait a minute – is it even legal to be a sociologist, anymore? “Sociology,” Webster says, is, “the study of the origin, the history, and the structure of human society and its institutions.” That’s against the law, isn’t it? Politically incorrect, at least? I mean, sociologists study societies, cultures, races, and the like. In a nation where it is against the law to notice or speak – “hate speech,” and all that? - of the differences, wouldn’t everything a sociologist does be illegal? Maybe that’s why we haven’t heard from Sociology in such a long time.

But that brings me right back to the point I had thought to make here. Anybody who disagrees, or says anything offending anyone’s pet “ism,” race, color, creed, religion, ideology, or whatever – any damned thing today, is subjected immediately to a torrent of abusive language and whatever else the “victim” can come up with. Maybe THAT is why we hear so little from sociologists today,

And with a famous sage like Tom Cruise down on psychology, it looks like we’ve seen the last of the behavioral sciences. What’s left?

Anyway, a sociologist wouldn’t have far to look, were he to desire indications for the state of things in the U.S., or to predict where it’s going. Consider television. Never amounting to much as an educational tool – there are many who would call it a negative influence in that regard - it has become all but useless for either entertainment or information purposes. Interrupted every two or three minutes by four or five minutes of advertising, it has become nothing more than a source of irritation and frustration for viewers. The wonder is that anyone watches, but that goes to my point here, also.

You’d have to be an idiot to put up with what obviously tens of millions of “Americans” do.

Who wants to try to watch a movie when it’s broken up into fifty segments, each separated by five full minutes of annoying twaddle? Even at a time like this, wanting to know how many of our young people have been killed in Iraq and Afghanistan, I watch the news only while flipping back and forth to avoid all the commercials.

Watching such a thing, a behaviorist might well draw the conclusion, totally independent of other data, that the nation where it is occurring is totally enslaved to commerce, economics, and the almighty dollar. I use that last term with trepidation, aware that extremely few – almost none – know what a dollar is.

Then, too, the behaviorist might do as I have done of late – join the many “blog” sites and opinion forums on the Internet. That, I’ll tell you, is REALLY enlightening. You see, any disagreement with any point of view on any subject results in furious, vicious, vituperative, diatribe. Along with a lexicon of attempts at verbal insult, those which have to do with questioning or otherwise disparaging the perceived enemy’s intelligence are invariably included. If you disagree with an “American” (it remains necessary to remind us that we are one of thirty-four nations in the Americas), it is because you are stupid.

That, mind you, in a nation now famed by study after study – among them Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking segment - for its stultified stupidity.

Having endured long enough to receive one hundred such “opinions,” I can report having received not one such that was supported by documentation or reasoned conclusion. Never has any one of these self-assessed mental giants shown mathematical skills equal to even what was for children with elementary school education fifty years ago common. Logically fallacious reasoning, moreover, is the absolute hallmark of the individuals in question, with the ad hominem fallacy easily the archetype. This is Jay Leno’s “Jaywalking” on a national scale.

Some, were they not indicative of our plight and prophetic of our nation’s future (I have grandkids here, you know), are downright comical. One “American” sage responded to my reference to the Little Boy and the King’s Magic Clothes, by saying that he hadn’t “seen it,” but seeing as how it interested me, it surely wouldn’t interest anyone with a brain (like him). Another modern-day Eratosthenes – it wasn’t Pascale, that’s sure - raged that anyone who knew any mathematics at all knew better than my observation that his verbatim use of a 570 word, twelve sentence paragraph was plagiarism, and that the fact was provable mathematically.

My assertion concerning plagiarism, incidentally, had to do with his essay “proving” that the World Trade Center had been brought down by controlled demolition, and after a particularly nasty barrage of invective from my would-be tormentor’s supporters. More, I noted a teacher’s program designed to do just that, catch plagiarists, had revealed that between 81 percent and 83 percent (three trials were done on the same essay) of his essay was plagiarized.

I pause again here parenthetically to relate that I then pointed out as follows: “The odds against the same paragraph - say a Shakespeare Sonnet my English teacher wife is reading today - 12 lines, 570 letters, is approximately (a number far too big for my pocket calculator) 5 X 10 to 800th power to one. That's 5, followed by 800 zeroes.

“Obviously, you know next to nothing about math and probability . . .” he fired back furiously.

“Do the math,” another Leibnitz snarled in disingenuous agreement, “. . . statistically, (italics mine) anything anybody writes or says about 9/11 will have been said or written.”

Well, now – how about THAT?

The second essayist delivered a lesson so comical for its convolute, contradictory, and incoherent irrelevance that I can’t resist quoting; just to show how exemplary of the society it is. Speaking of the paragraph in question, he says:

“Our options after the first word (damned if I know what that has to do with any part of the subject, but that’s what he said) are now limited. There are 500,000 standard words in the English language, 1,000,000 if we allow scientific. (caution, those are rough limits, of those 500,000 words Basic English as taught overseas has a vocabulary (sic – we’ll call it a “typo”) of something like 700 words [sic, again – this guy isn’t exactly Ph.D. level with English composition, either]) However, "common" English usage is much less than 500,000 words, so in common use there are probably 100,000 words. How many words do you know? Here's some statistics for you.

“‘At the other end of the scale, estimates of the number of words that an average person uses range from a few thousand (the number a person might actively use in a week) to many tens of thousands (the number an educated person might understand) or more. College-size dictionaries typically include almost 200,000 words...’ Taken from http://www.slate.com/id/2139611/

“‘Second word: words than commonly go with ‘There: ‘are, is, will, was, were", so we now have 5 choose 1. We choose ‘are’ (sic – he punctuates only now and then)

“’Third word is unlimited (sort of, you wouldn't place a word like "there" or "was" after this right?) We choose "half a million" (sic, again)

“Fourth word is again somewhat limited! We can't use "a", "was", "were", etc! We choose "words" (By now, I’ve given up completely on trying to decipher the punctuation.)

“Our sentence,” he goes on, "There are half a million words", at best is 100,000x5x100,000x100,000 = 5E15 (???? – I think he means 5 X 10 to the fifteenth power, but – well, you know) which is a far cry from your number” (yeah, it sure is - 5 X10 to the fifteenth power is a hell of a way from 5 X 10 to the eight hundredth power!).

Then, Einstein goes totally over the edge:
“And that is AT BEST...in reality it becomes more like 20,000x5x20,000x20,000 = 4E13 (????; which, considering his last, comes out to 4 X 10 to the thirteenth power – and utter confusion as to his point) and that is giving the benefit of doubt on the 20,000.”

Now he gets down to some tactics really typical of discourse in the Home of the Brave:

“I checked into your posts quite extensively! And discovered a few interesting facts Sirrah! Here you claim to be a national champion!”

Quoting me, he goes for the groin: “’Emotional outbursts like yours do not contribute productively to any discussion; more, and inasmuch as I was for many years - until I trained to fight in the judo where I now hold two national titles.’

“Yet,” my would-be tormentor goes on, “subsequent checking on the Judo website could not locate you...although perhaps I am blind in one eye and the other is closed...
http://www.usjudo.org/U.S.NationalChampionshipsHeavyweight.asp
http://www.usjudo.org/U.S.NationalChampionshipsLightweight.asp

“Although this little gem popped up as it were...
http://www.budoseek.net/vbulletin/printthread.php?t=8852

That last was a question from someone asking who I was. The inference here is uncertain, but it wasn’t an attempt at compliment. The other two references are archetypical, in that Einstein (sorry, Albert) oh, so conveniently delivered to the viewer stats for the heavyweight and lightweight SENIORS divisions that year, rather than the masters172 lbs class where I am, in fact, twice a national champion.

As I say, that last is all too archetypical of discourse in this country today. As he does everywhere else in his essay, the author preys both upon the ignorance of his audience and the certitude – confident that they are like him – that they will have either no way to know the truth or be unwilling to check what he purports to be truth.

Oh, and I forgot to mention that he concluded his piece by saying that he wouldn’t read anything I wrote in response, because he was quitting the forum. He wrote a swan song piece there, too. Does that remind you over anyone in particular – a gender, maybe?

And that’s where we are. I wrote this a while back, and it bears repeating.

“Let’s cut to the chase. I’ve come to the reluctant but inescapable conclusion that about 50% of the adults in this country are simply too ignorant and functionally incompetent to be living in a free society. They have enthusiastically abandoned their sovereignty to the lure of the welfare state. They are, in fact, afraid to be free. They have no working concept of the responsibilities of individuals who would live free of government tyranny or mob rule. Their ignorance renders them incapable of coping with the responsibilities of liberty. These are people who cannot exist at anything other than a basic level without someone else stepping forward to take care of them. They’re adult children. They need to and deserve to live in a dictatorship, hopefully, for their sake, benevolent.

“The real problem here is that the rest of us are constantly suffering encroachments upon our own freedoms to provide for the survival of the ignorant. We’re forced to invest (if that’s the word) 15% of our paychecks into a disability insurance and retirement plan that would constitute criminal activity in every one of the 50 states were it not run by government. We must do this, we’re told, because there are just too many people out there who aren’t bright enough to do it on their own. We’re facing the inevitability of socialized medicine. As soon as the social Democratic party gets its way, with no small amount of help from the Republicans, Americans will be waiting months—if not years - for basic elective surgery. Private citizens will be sent to jail for trying to find a private doctor to treat their ills outside of the approved and official government plan. Freedoms are being lost because of political pandering to those unable to cope.”

Remember what got us into this mess – especially the clown show in the White house? Election night was like a trip down Lewis Carroll’s rabbit hole. “Analysts” – those utter morons whose every word nitwit “America” hangs on – threw numbers whose meaning not one of them or their listeners had the foggiest notion of, yet each of which was given some supposedly meaningful significance. If a single one of them was accurate, I’ll eat my hat.

After all the “hanging chad” nonsense, the contradictory rulings by the several courts, and the rest, we got down to some to pseudo mathematical crap I’ve just been describing. One example was an article by a professor at the University of Southern California, who used what he called (it is, actually – but none of his prospective audience had any idea) "binomial statistical analysis" - that to "prove" the original Florida count was unfair.

That, the good prof said, was because Bush and Gore should have received roughly equal numbers of votes when a recount was done. “Binomial statistical analysis” – binomial probability, i.e. – is only useful when there are just two choices. We’ll all remember, no doubt, that there were several names on the infamous ballots, but who knew about “binomial probability?” Sure not the people I’ve been telling about. And what of the professor? Guess (you get a choice – stupid or dishonest, meaning biased).

How important is education? George W. Bush became President of the United States – that’s how important. As of this writing, twenty four hundred, twenty three of us are dead, and more than fifteen thousand maimed – some for life. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are dead. THAT’s how important it is.

Or do I have to talk about what REALLY important – the money?