The morning news yesterday says that Fidel Castro has resigned. The report brings back a lot of memories for me, among them the way I have long since learned to use U.S. relations with Cuba as a measure of my own benighted country’s character and credibility. The people of Cuba, Fidel Castro, and I, you see, have a great deal in common. Like that island nation, I have been the target of a favored U.S. weapon - that of blockade and siege; an effort to cause deprivation of basic life needs, even starvation.

I, too, like Fidel Castro, have escaped repeatedly U.S. Government attempts on my health and life.

I, too, have been for many years the victim of relentless U.S. Government vilification and lie. One blatant, evilly conceived and dedicated lie after another. Eternally the weapon most characteristic of a coward, the carefully-crafted and placed lie is still the most-favored tactic of the pusillanimous plutocrat, one still being wielded from the safety of wealth and privilege against members of the proletariat like Fidel Castro and myself. Does anyone remember President Bush’s mendacious report to the effect that Castro contributed to the global “problem” – the president’s choice of terms – by welcoming sex tourism? The U.S.’ embarrassment asseverated that the Cuban president did so in order “to bolster his failing economy.” You’ll no doubt remember, too, that the White House and its weirdo wannabe warrior found the idea in an undergraduate paper at Dartmouth University, then plagiarized it out of context.

Is THAT singularly typical of our son of privilege? How many people did this Little Lord Fauntleroy of the military industrial complex exploit, use, and abuse during his rise to the surface of the political cesspool and political power that is Washington, D.C. and the White House? This particular episode pretty much characterizes both the U.S. Government – the military industrial complex coup d’etat, that is - and its lying leadership since the 1950s.

The rise of the new King George, in fact, personifies in one man the rise of the military industrial complex corporate war on the common man, the middle class, and poor.

None of which, of course, is a real secret. Neither should it have been unexpected in a nation dedicated as this one is to the corporate capitalist ideal of exploitation and consumption of anything, everything, and anyone. The MOCKINGBIRD media simply spins the infotainment news in a behavioral manner sufficient to assure prevention of notice by its stupefied and stultified national audience. The propagandist device has the same effect as secrecy while being much more useful for political – and economic - purposes. It’s state of the insidious art, in other words.

A couple of days ago, the media promulgated another of its “hot and sexy” pieces, the tabloid, bilge-pump, FoxNews journalism demanded by the romance-novel reading, emotion-craving female and effeminized male segment of the public. That therein lies a microcosm of a nation that must cater to female issues and interests – no matter how maudlin and sentimental sappy the subject matter may be - is noteworthy, of course, but not my topic for the day. The story in question, that one Laura Todd’s life has been in turmoil as the result of federal tampering with her personal records, is one near and dear to my Patrick Henry heart.

The government, you see, deliberately and with that “malice aforethought” we so frequently hear about, tampered with public records having to do with me for more than twenty-three years. It’s one of their favorite “dirty tricks.” That, in case you don’t remember – or are like the typical U.S. citizen in that what you know of history wouldn’t make you blink if you got it in your eye - the Nixon era was the official term for criminal chicanery by the federal government, particularly the White House.

And, as Laura Todd explained to the CNN interviewer, it’s hell once you’ve been declared dead (you should pardon the expression). Mrs. Todd would also tell you what tampering with your record can do to all aspects of your life – your finances and ability to obtain credit, for instance. It’s crippling. But there’s a much more ominous face to the matter than just that, too. Falsification of police records, for instance, produces circumstances fraught with danger for the “subject” (among law enforcement personnel, a favorite – and telling one, when you think of it – reference to the citizen). It can, and often does, cost you your life.

While space constraints here prevent my telling just how much trouble it can cause, I will publish the story as I told it in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story” on my Webpage www.judoknighterrant.com The following excerpt from “Letters” is a short one, and it explains well:

“The plain, demonstrable, fact is that the citizenry of the United States has no privacy. You are the most surveilled citizen, even creature, on the planet. Cross-referenced by the most exhaustive and swift accessing system known to man, all but everything about you is known to your invasive government, even your favorite entertainment, music, and food. That includes your government’s suspicions and inferences, together with rumors and fiction – gossip – authored by not only neighbors but people who don’t even know you. Credit reporting agencies, for instance.
“In fact, a great deal more than the truth has been made part of the “record.” The John Q. Citizen of the record is a caricature of the real thing, and when you are stopped by the ubiquitous traffic cop, all of the “record” is available to him. All that is necessary for an agency of government like IRS, for instance, to “reach out and touch” you is a notation in the “record.” With a false lien entered into the credit reporting “record,” the nation’s Gestapo both ruined my credit and prevented my gainful employment for years.
“Tough. Really hardball. But I knew the tactic was even more ominous than that. Consider that a notation in the “record,” true of false, may have turned the traffic cop who has just pulled you over and is approaching alongside your car into an avowed enemy. However well-intentioned, the “record” rules his opinions, such that he may view you with fear. Or, hate. All the record has to say is “suspected of,” and you are, in the mind of the cop, guilty and convicted. If the record says you are “dangerous,” you, in turn, are in great danger. He’ll shoot you for the least provocation.
“The fact is that since the advent of licenses to carry firearms, every confrontation between a law enforcement officer and a citizen is fraught with lethal potential. Coupled with the report that you are armed, almost any kind of additional information of negative effect turns a simple traffic stop into an armed confrontation.
“In my own situation, I was aware of this almost from the beginning. After Cedar Falls Patrolman, later Detective, Les Dempster pointed his sidearm at me for utterly no reason ostensible, I realized how vulnerable I had become and what might happen. I was never in doubt thereafter about the tactical purpose of IRS’ blatant tampering and falsification of the credit, public, and police record. Events rapidly confirmed my fears. In seventeen years, weapons were pointed at me by police eleven times. Coincidence, of course. One of those convenient mistakes.”

It is, I think, noteworthy that none of the surpassing geniuses of the media will mention any of this in their discussion of Laura Todd and her troubles. That, were you studied in propagandist tactics, might endanger one of the government’s favorite extra-legal devices for avenging or otherwise dealing with those it wishes to destroy. Were it not for federal Operation MOCKINGBIRD tactics, it might even have occurred to you. If you think the forty-odd citizens killed by SWAT raids on the wrong house, or the continual stories of unarmed citizens shot to death by panicky cops, are mere foul-ups by incompetence, you’ll want to think again about the stories of people like Laura Todd. You’d better read my story, too.

You might also read my novel, “Jonatha’s Truth,” a story based on actual events about the occurrence and aftermath of just such a thing.

So concerned was I concerning federal harassment by police proxy that I endeavored by way of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit to obtain my records. To no avail, of course. So concerned was a U.S. District Court about the effect of my having possession of the truth concerning federal crime and criminality that it raised income tax collection to the level of national security in denying to me my own, “public” records. As I also said in my book, Scelus semper timidus est – “crime is always fearful.”

A criminal is always recognizable as such on that account, too. Fearful of the exposition and the truth, he is invariably a relentless liar. And the nation ruled by corporate criminals was thunderously apparent this morning. Nowhere else in the world is the truth – it’s politically incorrect” - so widely feared and hated. Long ago, when in 1961 I had arrived in Cuba with the mission to assassinate Fidel Castro and – if possible, too – Ernesto “Che” Guevara, I first became aware of “politically correct” truth – the legislated lie, that is.

Since that time, the government of the Land of the Free turned Land of the Fee has made the truth about Cuba and Castro “politically incorrect.” No favorable or positive thing about Fidel Castro is acceptable. Even his early prowess as an athlete and baseball player must be pejorated – one “news” item this morning said that Castro “claimed to have tried out with the Washington Senators.”

Meanwhile U.S. President George W. Bush spoke from Africa about “real elections” in Cuba. The United States’ despot, the man who condones and wields criminal cadre like the Internal Revenue Service, said he hopes the Castro resignation “signals the beginning of a democratic transition.”

It’s breath-taking. How the despot who has trashed the Constitution of his own nation can say things like that with a straight face again demonstrates the bizarre, Newspeak character of our “politically correct” nation. More, how a nation, itself currently engaged in a Trojan Horse election process as thunderously specious as this one, can swallow such paltry propaganda is again the stuff about which future historians will shake their heads in bemused wonderment.

But we’ve had lots of practice. I made reference the other day to a new book delineating in some detail the way the Operation MOCKINGBIRD media has co-opted and controlled the nation’s supposedly free press. Two decades of personal research has shown me much in the same manner I once learned the truth about Fidel Castro and his revolution the strangely numb manner in which the MOCKINGBIRD media benighted U.S. citizen interfaces with reality. The stunned, stolid stupidity of the “American” in public is amazing – and not a little fearsome.

Last night, for instance, I was shown a clip of an adult woman being asked by a quiz host – “Are You Smarter Than a Fifth Grader?” - what Hungary’s capitol city is. The woman – as I said, an adult – stated that she thought Europe is a nation. She had never heard of Hungary. She didn’t know that France is a nation.

Jeff Foxworthy, I’ve been asking “American” questions like that for decades. I can tell you that seventy-five percent of U.S. Citizens are so stupid that were any of them to become lost in any kind of wilderness, they would die in a week. These people read and believe the tabloids. They are entertained by today’s soap opera dramas, read romance novels the grist of which is an insult to the intellect of a child, and idolize television “personalities” like Nancy Grace, Kimberly Guilfoyle (Guileful?), and their vapid virago like.

And let’s not forget that 59,054,087 of them voted for George W. Bush, as monumentally obvious a fraud as there has ever been.

So Fidel is stepping down (odd, that – dictators step down?). I feel a loss, as I imagine the MOCKINGBIRD media must also. I will miss the yardstick for measuring U.S. Government pronouncements and behavior its relations with the Cuban leader have always provided. I imagine that Hugo Chavez has steeled himself to become the target for all the vilification and the like once reserved for Fidel. And, of course, one presumes that the media will have to look for another bugaboo whose “threat to peace in the hemisphere” persona can provide grist for their Jubilation T. Cornpone redneck, Man With a Hoe, audiences.

Fidel and I are both, perhaps, in our dotage. But I hope the old revolutionary lives long enough, and remains lucid enough, to see those who have sewn the whirlwind reap its harvest. If, as Lord Byron implied, nature has a “wild kind of justice,” he and I will see the nefarious behavior of those who rule the United States wreaked upon themselves. Disoriented by insidiously evil programs like Operation MOCKINGBIRD, those at the controls of the great airliner that is the once-great Land of the Free, Home of the Brave, Nation of Laws have flown it into a death spiral that won’t take long to reach its conclusion. And, in the words of everyone I could find all these years ago in Cuba, history will say:

Viva Fidel!

“In his controversial new book, Nick Davies argues that shadowy intelligence agencies are pumping out black propaganda to manipulate public opinion – and that the media simply swallow it wholesale.” Anybody recognize Operation MOCKINGBIRD?

A few years ago, preparing a police science defensive tactics seminar during the time a few days after the first of the ”ultimate fighter,” “vale tudo,” mixed martial arts (have I missed anything?) contests, I readied myself, too, for the inevitable discussion of what certain of us insists on calling “streetfighting,” no rules (“vale tudo” means “everything goes”).

My answer is always the same, “There are always rules.” Seldom does anyone I say that to agree; in fact, that’s actually only happened once. Two guys agreed that time, strangely enough. One of the guys who agreed was named Kupferberg, and he was a mathematician specialized in game theory. The other was a guy with a doctorate in psychology.

I hasten, before I lose my audience to the fear of that terrible word “mathematics,” to point out that relatively seldom will anyone, even in warfare, do to his enemy what he wouldn’t want his enemy to do to him. That’s the reason potential belligerents have so often attempted to establish rules of warfare like the Geneva Convention. I also hasten to point out that those who ignore such conventions (of late, those include our own government), demonstrate incontrovertibly to their opponent a mental state admitting weakness, weakness of the kind that inevitably proves fatal.

Torture, for instance is the tactic and work of an abject coward, and/or one who knows he is at a disadvantage in opposing a stronger opponent likely to win (of course, one needs to be a fighter in order to know that, something none of those ordering or espousing torture by the U.S. is).

I could list pages of examples of rules, instinctive or socialized, observed by mankind. Even lower orders of animals, in fact, observe instinctively or otherwise rules having to do with survival of their kind. The macho minimalist warrior wannabe, however, is not interested in such niceties. Nowadays, he’ll tell you so. He’s stupidly proud of his infirmity, something he doesn’t realize betrays his puerile, effeminized nature to males who would otherwise be his peers.

That, besides, is beside the point. The point is this: First, game theorists know that all games are encapsulated, and therefore formed, by their rules. Rules, that is, determine what the game is and provide for and describe what is necessary for “winning” and “losing.” In some forms of personal or group combat, for instance, rendering the opponent incapable of further competition – whether it be loss of all his ability to compete in the form of tools, money, or logistics or the incapacity resulted from injury or death – is “winning.” It’s decided by rules, however, even when the rule is that of survival (trust me, there are many, many human beings who have not and do not consider mere survival a victory).

In the first several “ultimate fighter” tournaments, the outcomes – and what they taught – were conclusive proof of an old, old rule of the matter. From the ancient Greek Olympics and Roman Circus, grapplers all but always beat those who strike blows, whether with hands, feet, elbows, knees, or head. Predictably, the first of the latter day (this sort of thing has been done again and again, always with the same results) “ultimate fighter,” mixed martial arts contest resulted in victory for a grappler in a manner so unspectacular that within literally seconds of one fighter surrendering, an analyst “expert” was saying that neither of the contestants was doing anything effective or damaging to the other.

That wasn’t surprising to an old hand like me, either. Several times in my own experience, my opponent submitted and lost the fight without the official refereeing the match having noticed. Only when I released the armlock or strangle hold and the official was informed of the opponent’s surrender was the official – and spectator crowd – apprised of what had occurred. Neither was it possible for anyone, like me, who for more than fifty years actually competed on a judo or wrestling mat two or three times a week, to fail to recognize the ineffectiveness of strikes or blows as a weapon. Boxers, for instance, throw literally hundreds of punches without meaningful effect during any fight.

Interestingly enough, parenthetically, the “Brazilian Jujitsu” practioners of the “mixed martial arts” all but invariably employ grapping techniques long common to freestyle wrestling and to competitive judo in its classical and freestyle – Olympic – forms. The difference is, again, the rules, those of “Brazilian Jujitsu” being devised in a manner favoring and promoting groundwork whereas judo – the sport-art from which the former was devised – has rules favoring throwing. In fact, the rules of competitive judo now so favor throwing that victory by matwork – especially in the form of armlocks – is very difficult.

That’s further interesting, and illustrative of my point here, in that the armlock – especially in its “jujigatame” or crucifix form – is statistically easily the most efficient and effective combative maneuver known to man (don’t bother – I’ve been keeping statistics on the matter for no less than forty-five years.) In fact, I can’t help wondering (and while I’m shown clips of the major contests again and again by enthusiasts, I’ve never been to one of these affairs personally and seen only the original one in its entirety), if the new “ultimate fighter” rules – actual or tacit (socialized, I mean) – don’t hinder the “juji.” I suspect the latter, inasmuch as the contestants in the several clips I have seen perform the jujigatame crucifix armlock so poorly its effectiveness is reduced by more than sixty percent.

In fifty-six years, more than eleven hundred organized judo and wrestling contests, I’ve had an opponent escape my armlock exactly twice.

But as Bill Cosby says, “I told you all that so I could tell you this.” This isn’t about things as trivial as the “ultimate fighter;” not even about combative sports. This is about natural rules, and the way they govern human behavior. Further, it is about the often – almost invariably so – bizarre way man-made rules tend to be counter-productive and self-defeating. A game theorist tactician since boyhood, I first began to understand the mathematics of competition when I had begun intensive, in depth, investigation of news reporting. I realized, for instance and as I related in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story,” that man fears, avoids, and despises the truth. I quoted Immanuel Kant - “Out of the crooked timber of humanity no straight thing can ever be made,” and H.G. Wells – “The Social Contract is nothing more or less than a vast conspiracy of human beings to lie to and humbug themselves and one another for the general good. Lies are the mortar that bind the savage individual into the social masonry.”

I found trying to understand – and, hence, get along with – my fellow man, while at the same time maintaining anything resembling freedom to me, almost impossible. As first, it was the reason I began to study personal – hand-to-hand combative science and art intensively. In that endeavor, mind you, I was interested only in what was most effective. Not entertaining, not sport – just effective. Broken teeth, broken noses, black eyes, and the like will do that for a kid.

One of the bewildering things then about man, you see, was – still is – the fact that among people so devoted to Christianity and its teachings, I was the not only the victim of beatings by bullies as often as three times a week, it was I to whom blame for the matter always accrued. Although I was beset by as many as four of my peers, all of whom outweighed my polio-ravaged and still recovering body, townspeople and parents always found a way to rationalize and intellectualize it all in such a fashion that the beatings were justified and/or excused.

Actually, when in 1977 my decades long mugging by the federal government had begun, I would observe ruefully that nothing had changed. In 1998, when a van operated by federal assassins had run me down as I crossed the street in a protected crosswalk, and I lay on the street literally fighting for my life against the continuing kicks and karate blows of my assailants, I thought the same as rush-hour traffic passersby strove resolutely to ignore what was happening.

Rules were being observed there, too.

But I digress. Suffice it to note that so fascinated was I with the mathematical aspects of the competition that is life on planet earth that I began what surely must have been the first attempt to quantify all of the factors therein. Forty years later, when I first learned that Colonel Trevor Dupuy and his Historical Evaluation and Research Organization (HERO) had identified and quantified for mathematical calculation and extrapolation seventy-three “combat variables,” I had done the same concerning personal combat. By not-so-great (in my opinion) co-incidence, I already assigned a CEV – Combat Effectiveness Value – to judo waza like ude hishigi jujigatame and ude hishigi hiza gatame in much the same manner as HERO had assigned CEV to tanks, guns, and military units.

But – although not without useful purpose - I digress again. Here, in a world and reality infinitely pregnant with the infinite probability of infinite perfection – paradise – human beings (homo sapiens - “thinking man”) go on making rules that forbid the very reasoning and thought that would otherwise make life for every one of us on planet earth a thing of joy. Incredibly – at least for one like me – instead of seeking ways to multiply the creative thought that will one day inevitably free us of the stupidity enslaving us, we make rules so inane, so driven by greed and concupiscence, that we almost invariably lose what we make rules in order to obtain.

“Democracy never lasts long . . .”

As a boy, by way of illustration, I learned eventually that grappling was the most effective way to fight. I used statistics and history – records – and scientific method. Experiment, both mental and actual. More, I learned from more of the same kind of mental experiment and actual competition that the most effective – hence, moral - reason for fighting was that of neutralizing the opponent or threat by restraining it - stop, in other words, what I couldn’t endure.

Most interesting to me as a boy learning what was necessary to rid myself of the hated affliction that was bullying of my peers was the scientifically incontrovertible fact that the most effective fighters pinned, armlocked, wristlocked, or leg-locked an opponent, rather than attempting to injure him with blows, kicks, head-butts, and the like. I realized, too, that an opponent who couldn’t grasp or strike me couldn’t hurt me (the reason that more recently – twenty-five years ago – I developed the “Twenty-One” system).

And, as I noted here a minute ago, the first of the “ultimate fighter” contests demonstrated the fact incontrovertibly. The grappler won easily (in fact, had Royce Gracie been practiced in the Twenty-One system and gripping, opponent Dan Severn wouldn’t have been able to deliver a single punch to his opponent’s head and face as Gracie defended from his “guard” position). But what happened?

Ah, but this isn’t about combative sports – not even the “ultimate fighter” kind, remember? But consider another state of affairs similar to the circumstances in which a kid recovering from poliomyelitis and seeking the means to free himself of bullying by his peers found himself, that of a nation faced with tyranny. Having come to the new world only a comparatively short time before, the people of this country desired freedom from the oppression into which governments heretofore had inevitably grown.

Determined to never again be beaten up, they formed a government governed by rules they believed would never be broken. Freedom was be-all and end-all of the constitution they wrote and ratified, and basically - like the “ultimate fighter” contests - there were to be few rules. The Founding Fathers of the United States also understood that rules encapsulate and dictate the form of the dual game that is the “vale tudo” fight of the individual against life. That applies to the citizen against his government, too.

The new government would therefore have few – very few - rules to wield against the peoples’ freedom.

But what happened?

Well, the “vale tudo,” no holds barred, street fight swiftly became a thing unrecognizable to any real, “no holds barred,” street fighter (me, for instance – and let’s not forget why I learned to be a fighter in the first place). You see, what the crowd wanted to see, and what the promoters (that’s the exploiter, money people) promoted, wasn’t actually what they proclaimed and professed to admire. Uh-uh. You see, really effective hand-to-hand fighting waza has little spectator appeal compared to the punches, kicks, head butts and pitifully ineffective tactics of “mixed martial arts.”

Punches, kick, head butts, and the like, while notoriously ineffective, are like the forward pass in football, the slam dunk in basketball, and the five hundred foot homerun in baseball. Fun to see for the ignorant and unknowledgeable, they are the soap opera and tabloid magazine of sports.

As with every other sport form of theater, commercialism inexorably took over so-called “mixed martial arts” competition. “There’s a sucker born every minute,” P.T. Barnum said. For reasons only sociologist, perhaps, could explain, no one asked the obvious questions. “Wait a minute, who ever saw a real, kill-or-be-killed, street fight between two guys wearing swim suits and wearing leatherized brass knuckles? “What really lethal fighter – like those our country and its C.I.A. once trained to kill without weapons – ever wasted time and risked mission failure with punches, kicks, head butts, and blows generally?”

But wait a minute – this is about government, and governments made “of the people, by the people, for the people.” That couldn’t happen to . . .

Couldn’t it? Well, what did happen? Why is the Land of the Free, the Nation of Laws, the Home of the Brave such that it would be unrecognizable to the men who created it? Why has it become the tawdry, meretricious weakling shadow of the mighty nation it once was? How could the figurative master streetfighter it once was have come to be the steroid-circus caricature of a real fight like the new “vale tudo” “ultimate fighter” of today’s supposed combative sports?

This was supposed to be nation of few laws, remember? The government was to have as little to do with the individual citizen as possible, remember? The government was to have little or no control over the genius, skill, initiative, and enterprise of the citizen, remember?

What happened?

The fact is that everything here demonstrates the fatal flaw in democracy (as John Adams said, “Democracy never lasts long. It soon wastes, exhausts, and murders itself. There was never a democracy that wasn’t a suicide.”). Few of the people who vote today – people who read the tabloids, patronize pro wrestling, the “ultimate fighter,” and the like - are bright enough to qualify to make important decisions in their own lives, let along those of others or the nation. As American journalist, essayist, magazine editor, satirist, and critic of American life and culture H.L. Mencken observed, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.” People will choose, and the formulators of “ultimate fighter” competition have exploited the fact, the tawdry, the sensationalistic, and the meretricious. They love spectacular phoniness.

The “Ultimate fighter,” rather than a competition of the best is a steroid freak show of in fact ridiculously ineffective fighters. The Land of the Free is an Orwellian caricature of its constitutional self, anything but free, with nearly everything a citizen can do “regulated.” Castrated by feminism, it cravenly seeks security and tranquility of servitude rather than the animating contest of freedom once demanded by its founders.

Now that I mention that quote, Mencken went on to say, “Democracy is also a form of worship. It is the worship of Jackals by Jackasses.” I guess that pretty much says it all for the current presidential election campaign, what?

Wrap it up, Hal – this is too long already. Suffice it to say that anyone who observes the vicissitudes of combative sports in the Land of the Fee should not be surprised at what politics and government here have become. And there, finally, is the rule of life and nature we “honor more in the breach than the observance.” Having handed over supervision of our nation and its government to youth who will not listen to their elders, youth too callow and easily duped to avoid exploitation by the same venal capitalist forces that rule all forms of sport in the U.S., we have violated the most fundamental rule in the game of life.

Take it from a guy with more time on judo and wrestling mats than today’s “ultimate fighter” has lived.

P.S. Two more quotes from Mencken (recognize anything today?):

“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be lead to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.”

“Government is a broker in pillage, and every election is a sort of advance auction in stolen goods.”

Wake up, “America” – or be John Adams’ “suicide.”

Listening last night to the media “coverage” of the presidential primaries, caucuses, related commentary, and political news, I counted the number of times the word “change” was used. Twenty-seven times. In two hours. Everyone – and that’s without exception – was agreed that “the people want change.”

I wish I had counted the number of times I’ve heard that during the dozen or so (I heard my first political speech during Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s third run for office) presidential campaigns to which I’ve listened. The word “change,” together with the phrase “the people want change” is a political mantra, the most general of all the myriad of glittering generalities inflicted on the public by these bloviating bullshitters.

Glittering generalities, parenthetically, are emotionally appealing words and phrases. The demagogue wields the glittering generality in order to avail himself of certain highly-valued, even sacred, concepts while avoiding having to say anything logical, definite, or examinable. Take an example from the smorgasbord of such, one like “support our troops.” What does “support” mean – specifically?

What does “win in Iraq” mean? How about “lose?” Samuel Johnson once noted that patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel, but in the lexicon of these scoundrels what does “patriotism” mean? How about “democracy?”

Glittering generality is, pure and simple (and if you wouldn’t expect this, living in this effeminate society as you are, you’re not paying attention), an appeal to emotion. Like ad hominem and name calling, it intends for the listener to accept the speaker’s statements without intelligent examination of the evidence. It is sneaky, dissimulating, and deceitful. It is an insidious lie. The person who does it is not trustworthy.

Trumpeting as it does that the speaker considers the listener to be a moron, the glittering generality is a sneering, insolent insult. This campaign, in fact, has become one, long, extended insult. The media’s uppity cadre of panty-hose pundits, metrosexual mavens, and Jubilation T. Cornpone wannabe warriors spew verbal garbage like “defeatist,” “cut-and-run,” “not supportive of the troops,” “lack of resolve,” and the sickening, sycophant, Uriah Heep, Sean Hannity like.

To “cut and run” (few of these people ever so much as wore the uniform, preferring to dodge the draft during Vietnam and elsewhere) would “embolden the enemy.” To tell the truth to the “American” (does any of these morons realize that there are thirty-four other nations in the Americas?) people is “demoralizing the troops.” To question the impossible stupidity of the invasion and tactics employed is “defeatist.” The “enemy” must not be permitted to “break the will of the American people” (no, but you birds have no problem with sending their kids to die or be maimed or with raiding their pocketbooks).

And when – as we most assuredly will – leave before “victory” has been won, the
stage has been set for laying all the blame for our “defeat” on all of us (I, and I can prove it) who before the invasion not only said the war was an incredibly stupid idea, but that the reason for invasion was a colossal, monumental lie.

So if one of these pandering prostitutes – presidential candidate, politician, or media pundit - uses the word “honor” again especially in the context of Iraq, I swear I’ll vomit.

Having said that, I’ll probably just have to stop listening. When used by a politician in the U.S. after all, honor is the most glittering generality of them all. I swear (it must be my day for swearing, I guess) I can only wonder why guys like John McCain bother to use it. He’s too old, I suppose to realize that most high school kids these days can’t so much as define it correctly, and their parents and elders when interviewed across the U.S. all but invariably associate the word with reward and fame.

The word “honor” is one of questionable value as a glittering generality because in a nation willing to condone torture by its government, obviously damned few people know what it means.

But stand in a mall and ask the crowds (as I so often have) what is meant when one speaks of country, peace, freedom, and honor. If you really are a patriot, I don’t recommend that you try it unless you have a strong stomach and iron control of your temper.

Suffice it to say that a glittering generality has two qualities: It is vague – if it describes anything clearly, it is the character of its user, and it has the most positive of connotations. And, as I am so often wont to say, if you don’t recognize the presidential campaign of 2007-2008, you’re not paying attention.

And they’re getting away with it. Even those close to me are continually taken in, continually slip into discussion of it all as though it were real. I’m reminded of years ago when, stopping to get my usual cup of coffee, I heard a clerk and customers discussing excitedly and anxiously the shooting of someone named “J.R.” Search my memory as I might, I could not come up with anyone known as “J.R.” To my astonishment when I asked, I learned that the conversation’s subject was a figure in a television soap opera. You had to be there, but to these stunned and stupefied people, “Dallas” and “J.R.” were real.

I’m also reminded of the restaurant patron who in discussing the 1980s financial crisis that cost tens of thousands of farmers their farms said he didn’t give a damn about farmers being forced our of business by soaring interest rates – he got his meat and produce from the supermarket.

There won’t be any “changes.” Not the kind being promised by the politicians, anyway. Oh, the flood of illegal aliens across the border with Mexico will grow exponentially after the election. That’s no matter who is “elected.” The corporations who own the U.S. and its government have created every kind of debt-based phony money they could, collateralizing – giving it value – every conceivable way. Now there’s only one way left, repeating an historical cycle far older than history, that of wealth derived from cheap labor, skill, and inventiveness sold at many times what it cost the profiteer.

Corporate capitalism won’t change, in other words. That the public can be distracted from the fact that the blood and lives of thousands are being sold at immense – hundreds of billions – profit by corporations like Halliburton demonstrates in a manner like no other the propagandist power of the “glittering generality.”

Blindly, “stunned and stolid, a brother to the ox,” we are trading our nation, our way of life, and our children’s future for generalities like “patriotism,” “peace,” “freedom,” and “honor” uttered by cynical politicians.

Yes, there are a lot of reasons – reasons even more than these – that we're in the sorry state we are. Of course, now that I think of it, those younger than middle age have only history and their parents from which to learn how things were, and make a comparison. Young people no longer read history; neither do they listen to their elders, even those they love. Most of what youth think is normal and part of living here in the U.S. comes to them by way of the media and others who also get what they think is real from it. Their parents and their educators have been and continue to be drowned out by the propagandists. Worse yet, those same parents and educators have also been behaviorist-indoctrinated – “brain-washed.”

The blind leading the blind has become the brain-washed indoctrinating the brain-washed. How else would you explain – how do you think historians will explain – the people of a nation otherwise stupid enough to pay for both destruction, then rebuilding, of a country, all while efforts to restore storm damage from hurricanes to its own country went wanting and its own nation’s infrastructure was crumbling around them?

THINK about that!

As I’ve noted, even my friends – people convinced by hard, incontrovertible facts and certain of what has happened and what is going on – slip repeatedly into the psychological and sociological rut nationally reflected in this cynical, meretricious and mendacious spectacle.

How can anybody observing the day-to-day actions of government here – including those I just mentioned - believe their elected representatives are in control? HOW? How can anyone believe that with a group of incorporated and colossally rich bankers controlling the nation’s money, the government controls anything, much less the economy? How can anyone believe, that with Brobdingnagian corporations controlling – the number of lobbyists alone in Washington, D.C. is approaching 60,000 – all but a few of their supposedly elected representatives, the nation is a republic? How can anyone believe that with a president defying the congress – he has the monumental arrogance to actually put his defiance and repudiation of his oath of office in writing – we remain a constitution-governed nation?

That is the very definition of the word “absurd!”

There’s more. In fact, it goes on and on. Again and again and again throughout these “campaign” speeches and so-called debates, it is implied and we are told that congress has no power to take our military out of Iraq. Perhaps no one thing characterizes this nonsense better than that one outrageous lie. The fact – just for yet another example of the surreal goings-on in the Land of the Free Nation of Laws - is that President Bush is in open defiance of the War Powers Act (read it, for crying out loud!).

Even if reading public law 93-148 doesn’t convince one, history – were the public to read any of it – should. On November 9, 1993, for instance, the House of Representatives used a section of the War Powers Resolution to force withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia. The Congress can not only order withdrawal from Iraq, it can withhold funds necessary to stay there. There isn’t any question about this, witness the fact that before invading Iraq, the president invoked powers given him by another law, one clarifying the War Powers Act.

He said, and I quote: "...I determine that:... [Declaring war on Iraq and] acting pursuant to the Constitution and Public Law 107-243 is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take the necessary actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001."

Of course, he lied. There is no rational doubt or question about that; even if there were, the fact of a question as serious as this where the nation is concerned demands the trial of impeachment, anyway. If that weren’t enough there is the fact that any high school class – as intellectually pitiful as our high-schoolers have become – could successfully impeach George W. Bush on the basis of his own conduct in the form of public statements. The man’s mendacity and his repudiation of his oath – why the hell do we all believe an oath of office is given (more of the “election campaign” dumb show?) – are of such voluminous record it would take a day alone just to read aloud – even without interruption - in court.

Finally, in Flast v. Cohen, 392 U.S. 83 (1968), the U.S. Supreme court held that a taxpayer has standing to sue the government in order to prevent an unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds. There can be little doubt, especially under the circumstances and the law I’ve just mentioned, that the invasion of Iraq was an “unconstitutional use of taxpayer funds.” Flast had to do with spending tax funds on religious schools (Wilbur Cohen was the Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare) but the precedent applies legally to any unconstitutional use of tax money.

This – the specious presidential campaign, the absurd conduct of government; all of it - is, in ever sense of the word, ridiculous, a mockery of our system of government and law. More, it mocks and holds in high contempt the people of the United States.

Now come we to an interesting point. In 1986, realizing that the criminal conspiracy we call “government” intended to destroy me (bullets going through your flesh is pretty convincing, in case things like illegal – that’s totally without legal process, the government acting just like a common burglar – seizure of your property, harassment of your wife and kids and more aren’t enough), I used covert operations to amass a mountain of evidence against them. During a press conference on the capitol steps in Denver and on radio talk shows, I announced my intention to make citizens arrest of anyone in government I caught in commission of crime or crimes.

The announcement so shook the government (crooks are always afraid – “scelus semper timidus est”) that then Attorney General Richard Thornburgh called me personally, offering a “compromise.” When I refused, of course, the government reverted as it always does to crime (still another example of behavior leaving no room for doubt about how our nation is really governed and what it is).

But, as I said, it’s interesting. What would happen, were I to file a suit? Now, if you don’t know how the U.S. really works, let me explain. I have already filed a number of suits. One is published on my Website, verbatim. Result? Guess. While the legal attribute of sovereignty legally frees government of civil liability for its actions, government in the Nation of Laws is never satisfied with legality or legal process. The court made no acknowledgement or response whatever.

What would happen, were I to file a suit widely publicized on the World Wide Web? One thing is certain: just like before, the government would do what it always does – violence (those photos of the leg wound were of a wound inflicted in 1986 by a federal sniper, shooting from ambush).

Were I to do it all again, it would be only to demonstrate to the people of the United States the truth about their government – the way they are ruled (“government,” in a nation as behaviorally conditioned – brainwashed – as this one, has meanings unusual in the rest of the world).

I’d settle for that: I’m seventy-one, and I’d like to assure that my grandkids won’t be the slaves the Halliburtons of the world intend.

Signs of presidential campaign desperation (Hillary crying, of course – but who wouldn’t have expected that?): Mike Huckabee promising to abolish the IRS (how many times have we heard that one - anybody happen to remember who the last one to do that was, hmmmm?). Damn, but these are tiresome people!

And the process is tiresome. Liars, particularly political liars, are boring people, boring because you always know what they’re going to say (unless, of course, you are among the public’s seventy-five percent who are barely bright enough to find their way home from work). You know - the people who think Pearl Harbor Day is about a shampoo, can’t name ten of the U.S. presidents, think the Beatles were great musicians, think that great music is whatever a whole lot of kids will spend their money to buy, and believe sticking a yellow ribbon with “support our troops” on it on their car is supporting our troops.

How about a red ribbon (symbolic of the red light district, you know) that says “support fair trials for those accused of rape”? Or, “Stop convicting the innocent of rape”?

On YouTube (I didn’t see the show), Larry King asks Michael Moore why his movie, “Fahrenheit 9-11” isn’t on television. Ha! Did King realize the cat he was letting out of the bag? Ten dollars says he’s heard from the White House or some other representative of the military industrial complex already. Can you say “Operation MOCKINGBIRD?” DARE you say “Operation MOCKINGBIRD?”

The thought occurs to me that I should publish the list of “Fahrenheit 9-11” things you won’t hear on our Freedom of Press media. Things like satellite technology once vaunted for its ability to read a car license plate from outer space, then somehow gone myopic over Iraq and about “weapons of mass destruction.” Things like a federal government capable of – and willing to - track, listen to the phone calls and bedroom conversation of one man – me – everywhere he went on the North American continent, yet taken by surprise on 9-11. Things like massive amounts of crime by officials of the government, crime like rape, extortion to commit rape, murder, embezzlement by the millions, even billions, and the like . . . Things like any of the literally tens of thousands of times a handgun or other firearm saves someone’s life, property, or freedom – from rape, for instance.

See if you can think about that and still believe the “free press” is still free.

Tell me, if the Duke University Lacrosse Team affair (by the way, when will Crystal Mangum be tried for any of her several crimes in that matter) was what it was, why would the rape of an immigrant woman by a member of the Internal Revenue Service receive not one syllable of publicity? Hmmmmm?

Why are the machinations of Internal Revenue Service so utterly disinteresting to the media? As a character in my book, “Jonatha’s Truth” avers, “Christ, anybody would have to be deaf, dumb, blind, and stupid as a brick to believe that guys given that kind of power don’t use it to scratch their horny itch. Especially when they know they can give the broad the choice between putting out a little pussy or going back to some shit-hole like Iran, Iraq, Mexico, or some other banana republic. Jesus Christ. It’s a no-brainer. When you think about it, who in the public really gives a shit? It sure as hell doesn’t really rise to the level of national security, you know – or have you forgotten that that is also our business?”

“Perry Lotts,” that particular character in my book works for the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The book is about his – and their – effort to cover up the slaughter of an American family in another of our “oops – wrong house” SWAT-style raids.

While I’m on the subject, why doesn’t the “Freedom of Press,” “public’s right to know,” Natalee Holloway, “who got raped this week” media tell us about the forty thousand (that’s 40,000, for you NASCAR, “Pearl Harbor is a shampoo, “George W. Bush is a leader” folks) murderously botched SWAT raids on private homes every year? The 40 – that’s forty - innocent people who’ve in the last twenty years been shot to death by runaway (you really think these are all mistakes, accidents?) or misguided SWAT operations?

Do you mean to tell me that if a young women having drunk herself to death is news, things like this aren’t?
“Last January, Fairfax, Va., optometrist Sal Culosi was shot and killed when a SWAT team apprehended him. He was under investigation for wagering on football games with a group of friends.”

“In 2005, for example, Baltimore's Cheryl Lynn Noel, a mother and churchgoing woman, was shot to death when she mistook raiding police officers for intruders. She was holding a legal handgun when they kicked open her bedroom door. That raid was conducted after police investigators found marijuana seeds in the family trash.”

Also in 2005, “Stockbridge's Roy and Belinda Baker were startled from their sleep by a raiding police team that destroyed the couple's front door with a battering ram. The Bakers were handcuffed and made to stand on their porch at gunpoint. Police had mistaken the Bakers' home for the house next door.”

The tyrannous, “Kristalnacht” (look it up, it’s about a Nazi atrocity before World War Two) affair that takes the cake, however, was the fatal shooting of Kathryn Johnston, eighty-eight years of age. The Atlanta, Georgia woman was shot 39 – that’s thirty-nine – times by three undercover police in her home on Neal Street in northwest Atlanta on November 21, 2006. The old woman opened fire on the officers when they had pried off burglar bars on a door, the broke it down in serving yet another of those “Land of the Free,” ‘Nation of Laws,” “no knock” arrest warrants The old woman, incidentally, fired one shot – which hit no one.

The cops, further by the way, were wearing bulletproof vests and carrying riot shields. The aftermath investigation noted that police injuries sustained in the raid were due to friendly fire and not fire from Johnston's gun.

Reason for the small equivalent to the Normandy invasion? “In an attempt to justify the no-knock warrant, the Atlanta Police Department initially claimed that the police were searching for drug dealers after a police informant was said to have bought crack cocaine at Johnston's home earlier in the day.”
That – SURPRISE! – turned out to be a lie (geez, I can hardly believe that – a cop who lied about shooting an old woman!).

Does it all remind you of anything? Must I say “Iraq?” Okay – IRAQ! And now you tell me why the rest of that story – Paul Harvey, anyone? – has been so hard to come by on the news. Operation MOCKINGBIRD, maybe?

The Supreme Court obviously hasn’t heard any of this, either. Not long ago, one of the societal sages, Justice Anthony Kennedy, in Hudson v. Michigan, June, 2006, remarked in his ruling on “no knock” searches, "If a widespread pattern of [knock-and-announce] violations were shown . . . there would be reason for grave concern." One can only wonder what the justice thinks is required for something to be called “a widespread pattern.” Obviously, the old boy – like our patrician president who “understands how people feel about things like Iraq and Hurricane Katrina victims” - speaks from the ivory tower of his social class and employment. Too bad someone can’t arrange for a SWAT raid on his house.

Of course, the comatose deaf, dumb, and blind state of the media means also that we can’t know about the factual number of SWAT team and similar outrages against James Otis’ “a man’s home is his castle” doctrine. Researchers like the Cato Institute estimate the number at fifty thousand – oops, for the redneck, Budweiser, pizza, and rap “music” crowd, that’s 50,000. Five, zero, comma, zero, zero, zero.

Jeez, judge, fifty thousand raids a year isn’t “a widespread pattern?” Maybe not, but it certainly tells the rest of us something about the widespread state of media non compos mentis doesn’t it? It tells us also about how widespread the “open society” myth is, doesn’t it? And if it doesn’t demonstrate Super Court bias toward the government, nothing will. One of these days, a cop will sue the family of his victim for the trauma he suffered – all that blood, you know - when he shot the wrong person, and the courts will hear the case. The victim was negligent for having been where the cop was shooting.

The media will go silent on the matter – because the White House demands it.

There’s more, for the critical thinker. If this is the kind of right-in-your-face, “up close and personal” obvious news media bias we get from those watchdogs of freedom and liberty the media, what can we expect during an election year (well it used to be that way) and presidential campaign? Yeah – think about that one a minute.

I mentioned this the other day, but it bears repeating. As of this morning’s news, the media now has morphed the guppy-gullible public’s reality down to a duel between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama on one side and John McCain on the other. No one else is part of the media – and, hence, the public’s – reality. Ron Paul, the only resolutely realistic (that, right there, makes anyone diametrically opposed to the MOCKINGBIRD media), straight-talking individual in the crowd, ISN’T in the crowd. Anyone polling the Internet (me, for instance) knows that as high as sixty-one percent of the public favors Paul. And I’ll tell you something else:

Anyone who does any kind of objective review of the media’s performance where accuracy and truth during the past three decades are concerned is in for on hell of a shock. Thomas Jefferson once said he’d rather live in a nation with a free press and no government than in one with a government and no press. He considered that there was security in knowledge, and that for most people the press were its first source. That is exactly why the first thing tyranny wants control of is the media, and why it was the first thing military industrial complex corporations coup d’etat plotters went after once the Central Intelligence Agency had been accomplished. Operation MOCKINGBIRD was the sine qua non keystone of it all.

That, in turn, is the reason that in the U.S. today, most journalists barely know two and two is four, and their knowledge of statistics is abysmal. Their knowledge of physics and science, laws of logic and reasoning, even economics, history, and the behavioral sciences is worse. They are, in fact, little more than actors who read lines handed them by corporate interests whose propaganda is designed to distract with lurid sex, and control with fear.

Posturing and posing as intellectuals, the news media delivers a relentless cannonade of Alice in Wonderland – strike that; make it Hollywood-inspired - falsehood. During one stretch of checking the veracity and validity of news having to do with science, physics, economics, education and a half-dozen more, I found nearly seventy percent of the data and information reported as fact by the journalists and pundits of the media in fact erroneous. Once again, I was forced to wrestle the old dilemma that goes, “crazy or crazy like a fox?” Can anybody be this stupid without intending to be?

Ask yourself how arch-conservative and arch-liberal commentators can be so “arch” on every issue. Everything is that black and white? Tell me, then, why it is that real geniuses, scientists, mathematicians, physicists, and the like are NEVER that certain about anything. Einstein wasn’t as certain about his General or Special Relativity as Sean Hannity, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, and whoever their counterparts on the left are about, for instance, anthropogenic global warming. Scientists who refuse to be religiously dogmatic all but invariably have their carefully honest and objective calculations twisted into dead-certainty by these clowns, and both sides use the same data to be dead certain concerning opposite points of view of the same issues.

And notice that, in the case of anthropogenic global warming, none of these supposed mental giants has ever so much as mentioned the obvious implications of Pascal’s Wager reasoning where the matter is concerned (even John McCain, to his credit, has finally reached realization in that regard).

Kind of reminds you of those KeyHole Satellites over Iraq all these years, doesn’t it?

But the media doesn’t know a polar ice pack from a skating rink, or an arctic blizzard from a Zamboni Machine. Ask any of these clowns to explain how the Coriolis Effect results in weather, climate change, and the like, they haven’t information sufficient to make you blink if you got it in your eye. Handed news of an incident like the Duke Lacrosse Team “rape” case, the media does what it did (quick - how much were all the settlements paid by the Kimberley Guilfoyles, the Nancy Graces, the Greta VanSusteren, and their like in the aftermath of their slanderous slop-feeding frenzy?) How many of the harpies keening like banshees for the players’ blood has admitted their outrageous wrongs or apologized. How many of major networks and their pandering pundits, analysts, and all that have taken the Reverend Al Sharpton to task for his demogueing attitude and pronouncements during that same media feeding frenzy?

Nevertheless, on every and any issue, these same “journalists,” “analysts,” and pundits - and all the morons who buy and borrow their pratfalling, Keystone Kops expertise have an opinion. It’s ridiculous. Utterly ridiculous.

I – someone who first sensed what was being done by the media to the nation’s mind while still in high school and has watched intently all his seventy-one years of life - think the frequently astonishing stupidity of the United States’ citizenry has been orchestrated. Nobody – no populace, that is - is this stupid by accident. Operation MOCKINGBIRD wasn’t an experiment. Frank G. Wisner “orchestrated” – it was a term characteristic of the man who invented “The Mighty Wurlitzer,” Radio Free Europe. He believed, he knew from experience, that like Josef Goebbels had constructed and shaped the opinions and attitudes of Nazi Germany, he could use modern technology like television to do the same in the U.S.

(Our ill-lucid leader is on television, defending his invasion of Iraq by saying that we have a right to defend ourselves. Great defense for a burglar, isn’t it? The cops nab him and he says, “I have a right to defend myself and I’m here defending my place against the people who own this place.” Well, I was talking about “stupid.”)

I started questioning the new media’s accounting of events in the nineteen fifties. I found few stories that were entirely accurate, and there were those so erroneous as to make me wonder why. It didn’t take me long to sense the political factors (think about – look it up, if you have to – how Hoover and the FBI fed and fattened on people like Pretty Boy Floyd and the like). With television, and careful, assiduous attention and study during the Cold War, I grew more and more suspicious. With continued association with the C.I.A. and with the “orchestrator” of it all himself, I lost all doubt. Everywhere I went subsequently, I did impromptu surveys designed to assess the media’s effect on public opinion. Even so, and although the method gave me my first awareness, I didn’t realize the fundamental goal of the MOCKINGBIRD propagandist - public stupidity.

“In the land of the blind,” after all, “a man with one eye is king.”

And now, fifty-six years later, I have watched the airplane that is my country slowly but perceptibly bank into the diving turn that becomes a death spiral. Pilots know, you see, that the fatal maneuver begins with pilot disorientation, sometimes very slight. You had to be paying attention to see it begin. The victim of disorientation in flight never thinks to learn what is happening, or where he is attitude-wise. As the descending turn accelerates, deceived by what he thinks he knows from his senses, he is even more unaware. Finally, the turning dive becomes one from which no recovery is possible without destroying the airplane, and he crashes – destroying the airplane. Often, however, the pilot crashes without ever coming to realization of what is happening.

And when it all began, I was already a pilot. And I watched. I watched as Congress was first insidiously co-opted by the military industrial complex corporations and their capitalist allies, then completely bought out, handing over to the coup d’etat conspirators (the same people, history will say, who killed John Kennedy) their law-making and national affairs oversight responsibilities to corporate boardrooms and managers. Slowly, incrementally, like the proverbial frog being boiled to death without his notice or natural suspicion, the people of the Land of the Free became the people of the Land of the Fee, and in the process lost - sold out - all their freedoms.

As the nation’s chief executives slowly eroded the constitutionally derived prerogatives, duties, and responsibilities of the people’s representatives, the nation spiraled down toward autocracy. We have now nearly reached the zenith of the White House’s power, and the nadir of representative government.

Nor is that all. With creation in 1948 of the Central Intelligence Agency, the military industrial complex corporations birthed, reared and strengthened by two world wars seized power. In the U.S. money is equivalent to power, and the C.I.A. had the legal power to spend – secretly and without accounting - as much of the taxpayer’s money as it wanted, and for any purpose. Give me a better definition of power. The corporate rich and government by the rich grew to god-like proportions. And prerogatives. No king, no dictator ever had so much power.

“Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” Remember?

For any reasonably intelligent observer, it all happened in plain view and was easily discernible. With the “hostile takeover” that was the nineteen fifties coup d’etat, the United States, in fact, became a corporation, one run by a board of governors who were in character and purpose essentially pirates. Gutted for everything the military industrial complex pirates required, bankrupted, and over-run by illegal aliens eager only to pick the carcass clean, the national corporation is now effectively in receivership. The corporation-style pirates, having fed on the succulent vitals of the carcass and willing to leave the vultures the rest, are moving on to more colonializing conquests; certain with the colossal arrogance of the capitalist that their still stunned and stupefied victims will provide and pay for the military forces necessary to further their next “hostile takeover.” The figurative death spiral has reached its corporate equivalent, which is liquidation. Corporate, and historic, death is very near.

Yet, somehow, the public remained through it all blissfully unaware. Operation MOCKINGBIRD had succeeded in a manner that would have made Nazi Propaganda Minister Goebbels green with envy.

Stockholders in the corporation that was the United States of America are being left with Brobdingnagian debt, and without resources with which to so much as attempt repayment. More, they will find themselves with an educational system incapable of producing citizens with anything like the intelligence and resourcefulness that once built the nation. Softened by easy, gluttonous, hot-house living and incapable of competition with Mexicans for the menial labor employment remaining of all the opportunity of which the Land of the Free once boasted.

For me, however, having watched it all happen with frustration matching in inverse manner the swift acceleration of the death spiral, there will be one, small consolation. That is that adherents to the first of the social cancers created by Operation MOCKINGBIRD in the Petrie dish of the nineteen sixties - feminism, I mean - will go on babbling their mindlessly oblivious credos to the end. Then, in order to survive as once their prehistoric sisters did, they will give themselves ignominiously to the illegal immigrant Mexicans who have become the nation’s only dominant males. Like its “I am woman, hear me roar” faction, the U.S. will stand before the world shown to be as stupid in its shame as it once was in its arrogance.

And a woman will be president.

Even following President George W. Bush's troop surge, private contractors working for the U.S. still outnumber military personnel in Iraq, with roughly 160,000 soldiers and 180,000 contractors.”

Apparently, and while simply a mathematical extrapolation based on experience and knowledge of the military, my intelligence was good when I said more than two years ago that mercenary military – “Steve Canyon” soldiers – in Iraq outnumbered regulars. I sat a couple of nights ago now with wife Rita and exchange student houseguest Phillip in a kind of fascination, like a visitor to a strange country observing some representative of an heretofore never encountered species. Again and again, I thought, “My god – how did this man become President of the United States?” With time – halfway through the speech – I wondered how in hell this twirp managed to graduate from Yale University, then, even, obtain a Masters Degree.

I guess we all know the answer to that one.

His grasp of the things about which he was speaking was always in doubt, tenuous at best. The president, still once more (god – will it never end?) recited the lines handed him like a high school sophomore reading his part in a play by Shakespeare. I was transfixed, frankly - I’ve never been able to grasp that this deeply-flawed wimp is President of the United States. But there he was, delivering the State of the Union Address. It’s surreal. Mind-boggling. My god, I wouldn’t let this guy manage a garage sale for me!

And I still can’t believe it: it’s like all these years ago when I came home from overseas, heard the Beatles, and was informed their amateurish caterwauling and three chord musical stylings had made them millionaires. But there, I suppose, you have it. The Beatles became the Beatles because children had money. And money, in the land of the fee, after all, is power.

And, of course, there you have it – the reason a monumental mediocrity like George W. Bush could be there, addressing a joint session of congress. Money obviously could run and elect Howdy-Doody President of the United States.

For crying out loud, people, this clown couldn’t possibly understand the matters of which he was speaking. I’ll be willing to bet - anyone, and any amount of money – that George W. Bush couldn’t pass a test on even the most rudimentary parts of the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model (it’s how generals and military people determine the probable outcome of things like the invasion of Iraq) having to do with the war of which he was speaking. I would be likewise willing to bet that he hasn’t the foggiest notion of the mathematics required to calculate the economic projects he was discussing in such knowing terms.

Quick, George (you phony, posturing, patrician popinjay peckerwood), how does one calculate force multiplier for terrain variance, for defender versus that of attacker, force intellect-culture superiority? What is the mathematical formula for casualty effectiveness? How about spatial effectiveness. You blabber and bloviate about the economy, taxes, and the like – well, how does one calculate profit margin for a product in business - cost minimum averaging? How does one calculate the effect of the eight hundred billion dollar expenditure on the lives of working and taxpaying citizens (it’s a factorially factored series – does that help)?

What are the numbers a commander must know in order to decide the “fence” problem having to do with national defense against an enemy like al Qaeda? What are the equations by which any competent commander calculates would compute the Combat Relative Effectiveness Value of an Arab “insurgent?”

Do you, in fact, have ANY expert knowledge of ANYTHING about anything you were speaking last night?

Of course you don’t – you were barely competent to read the god-damned speech (and, George, tone of voice and emphasis often change meaning).

No, of course not. You struggled (“Even a C student can become President of the United States” – remember?”) – which means you cheated by using your political power and patrician prerogatives – to complete even today’s almost laughable requirements for a degree in history. Next, you used the same “shucking and jiving” to power-structure finesse your way to a Master’s Degree in business. You, sir, are in fact a phony fraud, a “Beatle” posturing as a Beethoven, a Pink Panther Clouseau posturing as a Sherlock Holmes, a Charlie Chaplin Hitler posing as an Napoleon or Eisenhower.

Not that all that excuses a society and nation found in the same state of pompous ass acting like a scholar genius as yourself, and not that the emptiness of the President’s State of the Union address wasn’t expected. Anyone who didn’t know what would be said simply demonstrates that he hasn’t been paying attention (of, course, that’s always a majority of a people who want everything in those computer graphics and talk show comedian one-liners), or he has the brain of a grape.

My god, people, this man has only the foggiest idea of what he speaks! You can’t see that?

Instead, for instance, of calling for a more limited role for the menagerie we have for a federal government, George the corporate organ grinder monkey laid out plans that can only increase enormously – and fatally to the economy where middle class and poor are concerned – the plutocracy’s intervention into everything they have already bungled. That means the economy, health care, foreign policy, and education.

With the middle class disappearing even faster than the nation’s infrastructure is decaying, and after seven years of concomitant increase in the government’s pernicious presence in the day to day lives of its constituents, our feckless leader’s solution to our troubles is more of what caused them.

Does anybody remember the Albert Einstein quote, the one that says insanity is doing the same thing over and over again while expecting different results. We’re back to the age old question – stupid or evil?

Better yet while we’re remembering – does anybody remember any of previous State of the Union speeches this bombastic boob made? Wasn’t this the guy who was all for those conservative principles of limited government and individual freedom? George, ‘splain to us how you will roughly triple the size of the government while you take a stand against wasteful government spending. Yeah, “‘splain dat to me, Luci.” Your administration has been a model of conservative frugality? Give me a break!

And, by the way, please no more of those “foreign markets” you're going to open. Any more of the kind like China, we’ll all die of lead poisoning and god only knows what else – that’s if the illegal aliens pouring into the country don’t get us first.

Among, in that regard, the dozens of things having to do with government this swaggering jackanapes doesn’t seem to grasp is economics (what can you expect of a patrician prince who has never had to so much as manage a checking account or count his change in his life?). Take for an example the so-called “economic stimulus” plan. Obviously – and it is obvious to anyone who actually sits down and thinks it through to include the mathematics – that the best fix for the recession his poorly planned and bumbling operations in Iraq have brought down on us is anything that will increase business. Meaning anything that permits people to start businesses, businesses that don’t have a federal government monkey on their backs.

And, no, dummy, I didn’t say hand tax breaks to people who don’t pay taxes in the first place – meaning the colossus corporations who own the federal government. If individuals can start business, grow and re-invest, the economy will likewise grow. Instead of increasing the federal deficit by a hundred and fifty billion dollars, the government ought to focus its energy on eliminating taxes that restrain economic growth. That, in case you are as numb between the ears as you seem to be, means taxes the middle class and poor wind up paying in higher and higher prices.

What’s so damned hard to understand about this?! When, under the utterly moronic scheme of things existing now, corporations pay taxes, they add what they pay to the cost of the products. And what’s so damned arcane, so damned hard about understanding how prices and demand relate? Let me explain: if I can’t pay for the damned thing, I don’t buy it. I know I’m a real oddity, but the corollary - lending money to pay for what one can’t afford - is another reason the lenders are in a fix, and the housing market is about to become still another burden on people who work for a living.

If you want people to spend money – “recession” means they don’t, you know – they have to have money. Stop taxing capital gains, get rid of the death tax, and stop making wage-earning people pay taxes at all. Why does anyone have to explain to you booby-troops that people can’t spend the money – i.e., keep the debt-based economy healthy - you take from them?

THE REASON WE’RE IN A RECESSION IS YOU, YOU @#$%&! DUMMY – YOU SPEND TOO DAMNED MUCH!

Oh, and one more thing: in order for folks to spend money, they have to have an income – a job. Just to make that simply enough for you to grasp with that C-student mind of yours, imagine that ALL of the corporations and business owners moved overseas. Or, imagine that illegal aliens took over ALL of the jobs U.S. citizens now do – and sent their wages home to Mother Mexico. What kind of economy would that make?

Are you finished thinking? Good! Now, one more thing on that same subject: giving people back six to twelve hundred dollars of the near thirty thousand of their money you’ve spent on that boondoggle in Iraq is about as contemptuous an insult as a guy like me can imagine. That panty-waist patrician head of yours had better recognize the similarity between something like your “stimulus” and Marie Antoinette’s cake. Remember what happened to her?

No, I don’t suppose; George, they cut her god-damned HEAD off!

And you spoke of education (I don’t suppose it occurred to you, either, that for working people there’s a connection between giving your kid an education and the cost of things, the economy?). That “No Child Left Behind” monument to demagoguery has been exposed by experience for just what any thinking person or one experienced in actually educating kids would have expected. “No runner in a race being left behind” means that everybody swift must wait for those who can’t – or don’t want to – run. It’s been a total fiasco right from the beginning (kind of reminds you of just about everything you ever started, doesn’t it?).

How the hell do you think things will be improved by making everybody as stupid as YOU are?!

It wouldn’t have had a chance even so, but it you had spent even a small part of what you’re blowing on Iraq on funding federal mandates like this one, our public schools would have at least thought you really gave a damn about poor people and their kids education, you posturing, pandering prick! Abolish that White Elephant, the Department of Masturbat… er, Education, let the private sector operate (taxes again, dopey), and let people take local control of having their kids' education. You’ve made the country’s education system another FEMA at New Orleans. Who the hell wants people who can’t get right much of anything – people the watchmen who gave us 9-11 – responsible for educating our kids. Jesus!

Next (as I recall – I spent so much time fuming over the shear asininity of everything you said, the feckless falsity of it all – that I can’t be sure I remember right) there was health care. Same-o, same-o. How anyone can expect that people like our government and you will give us the health care system just about every industrialized nation on earth has is beyond imagining. With 9-11 national security, New Orleans emergency management, the Keystone Kops, Laurel and Hardy invasion of Iraq, and all the rest, we’re to expect anything other than what we have where the public’s health and health care are concerned.

Did somebody say “give me a break?”

George, get the government the hell out of health care! Man, the thought of you characters running a system like that is like watching the doctor who’s going to operate on your heart swig whiskey as he stands over you on the operating table.

George, don’t try to fix things – you’re the reason things need fixing!

Finally, you came to your favorite subject – no, not what a war hero you were; foreign policy. You’ve spent more than trillion dollars of our money on your idea of foreign policy – which is war. That, let me remind you again, is the reason we’re in recession. You’ve always spent money like you didn’t have to earn it (because, of course, you didn’t), but working people know that when a member of the family spends most their money on toys for himself, they’re gonna have to stop buying much of anything else. Even food.

Not only that, but you have turned the world’s knight errant into the world’s playground bully. We defeated the Nazis only to have you turn us into Nazis. Some of us are so damned ashamed of that torture crap, we could puke. Nothing could be worse, but god-dammit, boy, you swore to “protected, defend, and preserve” our Constitution, not use it for ass-wipe! You not only f--- up, sleep on guard duty, you then use the result as an excuse to raid our bank accounts, shame us before all our former friends in the world, you demand that we accept being treated like pets!

God damn it, you feckless fop f--- up (addition of the letters U, C, and K might – in the utterly moronic state we have come to be – explosive), you don’t have a right, because you suspect that the neighbor guy has designs on your wife or daughter, to blow up his house! More, I think it’s about time you and all those bloviating bull-shitter presidential candidates tell us plainly – in detail, dammit; not in the seemingly de rigueur galaxy-wide generalities – what those “American interests” we’re always hearing about are. What business do we have in every damned country on earth?

We go everywhere overseas, blow things all to hell, then re-build them – all at taxpayers expense, while our own bridges, roads, and infrastructure in general crumble and decay from lack of maintenance. What kind of damned fool works on his neighbor’s house while his is falling down?

Oh, yeah - I can just hear it. We have to stay in Iraq because if we leave the other guys will say we lost. They won. That doesn’t sound like a twelve-year old to you? We will be more proud if we stay there and keep killing women and kids? Strewing depleted uranium and god knows what other kind of cancerous pollution around? I’ll tell what, buddy (you were never a fighter, so you’d have no way to know), I’ve lost in competition and elsewhere more times than you’ve done anything right without being shamed or losing my honor. But then, you don’t know anything about honor, either, do you?!

We lost – by your half-assed definition – in Vietnam; what has that done to our “honor?” We’re now trading with Vietnam, are we not? Are you saying that the 58,193 men who died there were dishonored when we left without “winning?”

While I’m on the subject, maybe you and all your wannabe warrior, war-mongering pals should tell us once and for all what “victory” in Iraq means. How do we “win?” When do we know we’ve “won?” When can we leave “with honor?” Maybe you’d like also to explain what you mean by “losing.” What, someone’s going to invade the U.S. and put the nation under occupation? If that’s the case, we sure as hell have spent $16,000,000,000,000 on the military since Word War Two for nothing. Your foreign police is “foreign,” all right – foreign to any kind of even simple-minded rationality.

Bush, you and your Bush League buddies are spending our kids’ and grandkids’ futures. Do one, responsible thing in your entire pusillanimous popinjay life – resign!