Note: Where I usually write a blog in twenty minutes, this one has taken three days. No subject has every strained my powers of description where my own emotions are concerned like this one; neither has one ever so appalled me. I’m reminded of Joseph Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness.”

Seventy-one years of age, having “been everywhere, done everything,” I sat there watching, in a state of mind and body like nothing I’ve ever known before. I thought of the Roman Circus Maximus, of places like Wounded Knee, the Rape of Nanking, of Buchenwald, Dachau, Belsen, and “work” camps associated with the Nazi Holocaust. In the course of this hideous chronicle of human cruelty, I thought of Mao Tse Tung, Stalin, Hitler - even Vlad the Impaler. I thought of all the horrific, grisly savagery about which I’ve ever read, heard, or seen, running through my mind, memory, and experience looking for an equal. I was still thinking about it when I went to bed, utterly disgusted – and spent with the exertion of fury trapped inside me with nowhere to go.

In all my roamings about the planet, and they include literally dozens of countries, in all my studies of history, nothing equals this. Nothing – I’ve never seen anything like this.

But WHY? Why be so appalled, so shocked, so stunned, so stupefied? Hell, I have never liked my kind very much, that opinion and emotion having been acquired while still in high school, where I enjoyed a reputation for being a “loner” who preferred his own company. While recovering from polio and ridiculously puny, you see, I was the helpless plaything of local bullies until Spartan, self-imposed training made me too formidable to “mess with.” Nevertheless, the boyhood experience told me all I cared to know about my fellow human being. One day, “called on the carpet” for something cynical I’d said, the principal of my high school, upbraided me for my cynicism. Defiant, I seized the morning paper lying on her desk, oriented it for her to read, and snapped, “You think I should want to be like THAT?”

I don’t know what the headline was, just that it was something of the usual rape, pillage and burn – enough, I said, to tell me that I wanted to be anti-social.

I’ve never liked my species very much, like I said. But then, always when confronted with what the poet Robert Burns called “man’s inhumanity to man,” that searing thought: what if I had been one of them? It’s always there, nettling and nagging, when I view something like this “CNN Special Report.” Since first realization of the Holocaust as a boy, I have countless times in my life when confronted with this kind of societal and cultural depravity wondered if, reared among these people, educated and indoctrinated by them, I might have been of those who herded their fellow human beings into a pit and machine-gunned them.

Now, this night, I agonized over it again. Could I have been a member of these crowds standing under the body of a lynched, burned-alive man?

No, I’ve always concluded – no, goddammit, no way. I have, after all, lived the life I have, one of continual rebellion against my society, my country, and the tendency of my kind to be a bullying, cruel, power-craving, lying son-of-a-bitch. It was always I who incurred the wrath of the crowd with not only the “lust for the truth” for which a teacher once upbraided me, but for my refusal to take part and even endeavor to thwart their schemes and devices. No, I would always satisfy myself, you wouldn’t have gone along. But still, the medusa monster that is doubt lurks in my random thoughts. I always fight it down, bury it.

But this CNN segment was an epiphany, an epiphany starting it all over again.

And as I said, I’ve had my epiphanies, realizations that shook me to my soul. When Beverly, my high school sweetheart and wife, died suddenly of the pregnancy doctors warned against, it was an epiphany, one born of the realization that a religion, the Catholic Church, had with its insane dogmas concerning sex and procreation made me her killer.

Could I do that to another, were I a fundamentalist “Christian,” Moslem, or Jew? An Ayatollah, a Mullah; a Bishop, and Cardinal, a Pope?

I had an epiphany in final realization that I had been betrayed by my country, that it had no more respect for the human and civil rights of the individual than any other of the power-mad, and that it would do murder, rape, and any other bestial crime required to retain its power and wealth. I had an epiphany, too, the first time a bullet went through me, and I realized a man was trying to end my life. Killing someone who’s trying to kill you isn’t the same, incidentally – you know he deserves killing; in fact, in energizing the survival instinct of every creature, he has been his own killer. Added to the shock of that one was the knowledge that it was my own government that was shooting.

Given political or economic power, could I become as contemptuous of my fellow citizen’s life as today’s gentry, the politician and bureaucrat?

I had an epiphany that afternoon when an eight-passenger van raced with tires screaming under acceleration to the crosswalk where I was, to hit me and hurl me on a suborbital flight that reached ten feet above the street and ended sixty- one feet from impact, all while leaving eighty-one feet of skid marks. Realization of the U.S. involvement came only later when “investigating” cops failed to write a summons and deliberately let escape occupants of the van who had leaped from their vehicle to attack me with kicks and blows as I lay stunned and writhing on the street. That’s “epiphany,” in case you’re still considering.

Could I become a sycophant so desirous of his government’s forbearance or favor that I would torment, maim, or murder a man I didn’t even know?

NO; no, no, no! I know, as do many who know me, that I am as a friend once told others, “the most non-judgmental man who ever lived.”

And Walt is a psychologist. He’s right. Back there in the time of real news, back when I still struggled to be sure in my understanding of who, what I am, the newspapers, radio, and history books were enough to provide me insight into the human condition, and why my classmates and others so enjoyed tormenting me while I was easy prey. It was also enough to make me determine that I would prefer to be as unlike the rest of my kind as possible, enough to set me one day on a course I chronicled in my book “Letters to Aaron, the Hal Luebbert Story.” In 1987, finally, I had a card printed, left it everywhere I traveled. It said, “Knight Errant – Anytime, Anywhere, Anybody.” On its reverse side, the monograph said, “If you’re in trouble and no else one will help, I will; no strings – just be a good person and don’t lie to me.”

Here, parenthetically, I must make a confession. My story isn’t quite what it may seem. Short of the sex act, you see, I’ve learned that there is nothing like the “high” provided by the successful rescue of another from great peril or difficulty. It’s incredibly fun; so much so that it became for me something of an obsession. And, even if - as a famous actor once observed in a famous movie of the same name, “It is a magnificent obsession” – there is a kind of selfishness in it. Once their victim, I love smash a bully. I love to deprive him of his prey, to teach him what may be the most object lesson of all lessons.

As I said, I left my Knight Errant card everywhere, I helped a lot of people, and the experiences taught me a great more where the human condition is concerned. I saw human depravity in many of its a hideous forms, from pedophilia and cruelty to children to kidnapping for white slavery.

But this! My god – these despicable devils set those men afire while they were still alive! No one, not even the Nazis of Hitler’s Germany, rival these bastards for shear, demonic cruelty. It simply “floored” me. How could I have been so blind, so comatose? All these years, I had despised the Nazis, their Gestapo, and their SS Einsatzgruppen, the swine-ish demons responsible for the Holocaust and the detachments of non-Germans who had hunted their own people for the Nazis. I despised the Germans especially because they were of my own people, my own kind. As a boy, I cringed under the indictment of all things German that was the photos of German soldiers holding pistols to the heads of kneeling Jews, Poles, and other "Untermenschen."

Now this! Grinning devils standing under the charred and dangling remains of another human being, their victim a man innocent of any crime, yet lynched.

A woman and her son, raped – presumably even while he was forced to watch – then, mother and son, hanged from a goddamned bridge (oh, god; I wish I could have been there with a machinegun – an axe, even!)

I am a man with a long-standing reputation for the kind of anger to which the poet Dryden referred when he wrote, “Beware the fury of a patient man!” I have a fuse a mile long. But finally angered, I am a terrible enemy (there may be in that something of an explanation – and excuse, even – for the people of Germany before and during WW-11). I have been angry for three days, now – and I am still angry.

“To speak of atrocious crimes in mild language is treasonous to virtue,” Eighteenth Century Statesman Edmund Burke said. Well, sir, what words are suited for this? I am inadequate in that regard, grossly so.

I strive here, frankly, to pack into my words as much emotion as possible. In so doing, however, I must also confess – again – that I don’t do this just for that lynched woman and her son, or for all those men, or for black Americans generally. Oh, no – their suffering, largely – let us not for one minute doubt that the evil responsible for what I rage against still lurks in the hearts of men - has passed. We can only expiate ourselves with that woman and her son and with all the others like them by assuring that they are never forgotten by the nation who - like I – stood seemingly unconscious, indolently and fecklessly, by while they were brutalized.

I do this for me, a kind of catharsis – an expiation, even (I do it for my country, too, who ought feel as I do – but, probably won’t).

In that, I search my memory to understand how I could have been unaware as I grew up of anything so monstrously evil as the kind of racism of which we speak here. I have said before, and I say again here, that I heard – can’t remember a single time, matter of fact – during the years I lived among the mostly German people of Northeast Iowa the word, “nigger.” As I’ve also related here elsewhere on the Web, my nephew married his black wife sometime during the seventies, and my cousin, Patti, married a black guy earlier than that. I never once ever heard any racist comment concerning either couple. Not one.

Maybe that’s because I’m who I am – or was: also in my reputation then was the fact that I knocked kicking people who pissed me off. Ill manners, unkindness or cruelty, “ganging up” – bullying - like that would have pissed me off, and somebody would have punctuated his own remark by spitting teeth. Racism for me is, at its roots and in its essence, bulling. I think I’ve made my feelings, and the reasons for them where bullies are concerned, fairly well known.

But I prefer to think it was because the people I grew up among were far, far better than racism. And therein, I have still another epiphany – how much I love the places and people who made me what I was; am, too, I hope.

Still, I can’t believe it wasn’t there. How could a little place in a nation “sweltering with racism,” as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. put it so well have escaped anything as virulent as the Satanic psychosis that lynched that woman and her son, set alight and hanged while still living that man? They - I - MUST have known!

But here we go again. I have NEVER – and this is a place I seriously doubt even my enemies will gainsay what I say – stood quietly by when anything even remotely like this was occurring. If there is any one thing that more than anything else describes me and my character, it is that one. I have paid what most of my kind would consider a terrible price for it, matter of fact. It is the reason for the story I tell in “Letters,” my book.

Now I remember an instance of that, from U.S. Army basic training, 1955. We had just gotten our issue of clothing and equipment. In the barracks, we were picking bunks and the guy who had been behind me in the line during equipment issue, Johnson, and I were flipping a coin to decide who got the top bunk. Johnson was a black guy.

“Hey,” one of two guys standing across the aisle between rows of bunks called. “C’mere!”

He motioned to me, beckoning me over. I still remember the two guys’ names, but I suppose I should keep them to myself here. When I, a little out of my league here still, and wanting to offend no one, approached, the two men from Clearwater, Mississippi demanded to know if I was intending to “bunk with that nigger.” Was I a “nigger lover?”

That I didn’t acquit myself all that well – at least assuming what I know now – was due my total ignorance concerning what they seemed so intent upon. When the two explained, I was flat dumb-founded. What the hell difference did our skin color make?!

There was more, but it will suffice to say that had not the barracks sergeant come along when he did, there would have been a fight (it’s something I would encounter again and again, back then: the rest of the nation didn’t seem to understand that wrestlers aren’t much impressed with anyone who settles for “team” sports like football). You didn’t tell a guy from Northeast Iowa back then what to do or not do.

A few weeks later, a southerner cadre sergeant who didn’t think much of my views having to do with race would endeavor to give me further instruction in the matter during a clandestine meeting ordered by him on the parade ground. When, however, his attempt at my “come-uppance” failed and he summarily got his ass kicked, he was man enough to relent. As I later wrote in my book, he may have ridden my ass about everything, but he didn't attempt any more extracurricular "instruction." Strength always gets respect.

No, I’ve been telling myself, I’ve not only never inflicted any kind of cruelty, word or deed, upon anyone, I’ve never been racist. But how could I have known nothing of what I was seeing this night on CNN television?

“How?” in these matters, I’ve learned, always means “who?” I’d like to go back (and, if you know me, you know I’ll do just that) and read the newspapers in Iowa of the time. Did they feature pictures like whose I saw as I watched television in shock and horror? Were there newspaper stories like those CNN featured? I doubt it – but I have to be sure.

Why? Because I have to know what my responsibility was and how I acquitted myself in fulfilling it. I have to know – as I should think my country and countrymen would - whether I somehow put out of my mind the plight of my fellow citizen under degradation, torture, and murder. I want to know, too, if I am innocent, how the society and nation might have kept me ignorant until I was old enough to induct into the army, and why.

It’s interesting, parenthetically – something that just popped into my mind as I type here – that the news “story” that followed the show I speak of here was a FoxNews attempt to justify “water-boarding,” the torture of one human being – of course, the pundit always says, “an enemy” – by another for “intelligence” (for the animal who calls himself “thinking man,” there’s always a good reason for utterly anything, isn’t there?). Maybe I’ve answered my own question. But that’s not enough for me. The next question, the only one that really matters for me, is the same one that is all that matters at this juncture for my country.

What are we going to do about what will have caused that woman’s body to hang in my mind for the rest of my life?

UFOs, Sasquatch, or the Loch Ness Monster, either.

I begin here anew my commentary concerning the “9-11” controversy with the reminder that it was I who within minutes of learning what had happened that day lost two good friends – they still call me “traitor” - with the statement, “The dog didn’t bark!” For years (literally) thereafter, my Website homepage featured that remark, together with a photo of the burning WTC towers and the passage from the Sherlock Holmes story “the Adventure of the Silver Blaze” explaining the reference. I believe, in short, that persons within the U.S. Government knew what Mohammed Atta and his cohort were planning, and that they let it happen.

Note that I did not simply say “government” – because that is illogically typical of the viewpoint and persons I discuss in this essay and others that preceded it.

Last during the most recent Democrat Party “debate,” Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich was asked if he had seen a UFO. Moderator Tim Russert said it was a serious question, even though the "serious" question was purportedly prompted by actress Shirley MacLaine's new book.

Shirley, we’ll all remember, lives in a special world. In her book – I have to take the media’s word on this; I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine - she writes that Kucinich spotted a UFO over her home in Washington State and "found the encounter extremely moving.” Shirley also is supposed to say in the book that Kucinich "felt a connection'' in his heart and "heard direction'' in his mind.

And some wonder why I seem so paranoid – packing a pistol, training still at seventy-one in judo, and all. Folks, put a tent over this country, and you have the biggest booby-hatch, rubber room, and whorehouse in human history even remotely conceivable.

Well, I don’t read books by Shirley MacLaine, but I’ve seen probably seventy-five or a hundred Unidentified Flying Objects. Hell, I’ve seen even more unidentified NON-flying objects. I live in the real world, not the climate-controlled, pick-up-the-phone-and-CALL-somebody, “what’s-a-callus,” “I-get-my-exercise-in-a-gym-and my-meat-in-the-supermarket” one where “work” is eight hours at a computer, television and Hollywood provide reality, and life goes on in a virtual hot-house for pansies. I can – still, at seventy-one – do hard labor all day; “hump” a sixty pound backpack twenty five miles in a day, do three hundred sit-ups, one hundred pushups, and fifteen pull-ups. I’ve been in gunfights, more street fights than I care to remember, and battled the government’s goons both in court and in the streets for more than nine years. I’ve been, effectively, in college for fifty years, more actual class-room study than whole university departments; and, as “been everywhere, done everything” as I am, there’s a hell of a lot of things I can’t identify. And the Bible , Koran, the Bhagavad Gita, the Tibetan Book of the Dead, the I Ching, the Dhammapada, and scriptures generally don’t really help much. The real world is like that.

But if you are typical of “Americans” (who, you may notice, are not even capable of truth where what they call their country is concerned) – meaning, of course, that your experience and first-hand knowledge is limited mostly – ninety-five percent – to your television and your home or workplace computer, you know better than I. You simply turn on the TV or “look it up” on Wikipedia. My god – that’s ridiculous! And you don’t even know it (sorry, but the shear asininity of it all is infuriating, sometimes).

Note, please, and by the way, that I did NOT say “UFO” up there. A UFO is an unidentified flying object that tens of thousands of UFO-ologists (it’s a new logos) somehow can identify. And they “identify” the object as a vehicle from outer space. All from not knowing what it is. Jesus!

Just so we’re sure we understand one another – and at the risk of redundancy - they can identify an unidentified flying object (and they call it that, too). It has little green men in it.

You, if you are typical, live in point of rather easily demonstrable fact in a world of stultifying and stupefying myth and lies, in the society and nation that is – again as a matter of statistically verifiable fact – the biggest, most determined liar in human history. Worse – again a point of statistical and study-demonstrated fact – you lie to yourself continually, even to the extent of anesthetizing yourself against day-to-day reality.

And then, when something like global warming, the war in Iraq, the World Trade Center – or an issue like that of UFO existence – arises, you proceed to foist your knowledge and “expertise” upon your fellows. It’s your right. Sure it is.

Now let me hear your expert dissertation on your responsibility.

I wonder if I should note here that “debate” (while we’re talking about peculiar identifications – how’s that for an example?) moderator Russert reminded Kucinich that polls indicate only fourteen percent of Americans say they have seen UFOs. I guess that was supposed to mean something about Kucinich’s mental state or competency – huh? Earlier in the day, you see, Congressman Kucinich had told the editors of the Philadelphia Inquirer that President Bush's comments about a World War III call Mr. Bush’s mental health into question.

Dear reader, if you need a zoologist to identify an eighty hundred pound gorilla in the room like that one - if you don’t by now recognize George W. Bush as a nut case, in other words - everything will be an unidentified object. That’s flying or otherwise, fact in general.

Mention of the UFOs and all the people who have formed a cult around their insistence that their government is harboring little green men reminded me immediately – and, I think, logically - about the subject of the World Trade Center, and all the people who now choose to believe their government blew up the buildings. Obeying my penchant for such things, I have over the years checked story after story of supposed UFO sightings. I hasten to state, though, that with the most recent spate of “sightings,” that of the lights over Mexico City, and that of a “sighting” by one of our states’ governors, I didn’t bother.

Oh, yeah – I’m about to pick a fight with another “conspiracy theory” group. Well, the truth is, I’m at odds with about fifty religions, at least that many more ideologies, ESP, and fairy tales; I don’t believe in Santa Claus, or the Easter Bunny. But it’s not my fault – I was brought up wrong. First, I spent a lot of my formative years away from people, their ideologies, religions, and indoctrinations in it all – with the terrible result that the only way I had to know the right thing to do was think. Damn – did that ever make people mad! In the sod hut by a river back in Iowa, where I put myself through high school, that’s just how it was. When I had a problem, I solved it myself – no “faith,” no “this is the way to do it” instruction, no “everybody knows” – none of that societal and cultural... -”wisdom.”

And, as I said, it kept me in continual trouble, even then. I was the “wait a minute” kid. “Wait a minute – that doesn’t make sense.” Not a good thing to say a lot when you’re a kid in a Catholic high school. “You have this terrible LUST for the truth,” a teacher nun once told me. “They’ll hang you someday.”

Yeah, they might yet. I can’t help it – the rules of logic, forensics, and knowledge (epistemology) have been settled by man and his science for a couple of hundred years – in the instance of logic a hell of a lot longer than that. We know how to determine when something is known and we know how to determine when it isn’t. We know what is consistent, decidable, and complete where any theory is concerned (“consistent” means that statements – “axioms” – within the theory are not contradictory; “complete” means that every true statement can be deduced from the axioms; and “decidable” means there is an algorithm – a formula – for deciding whether any (given) statement in the theory is a theorem or a contradiction; consistent and decidable theory is complete, but a consistent, complete theory is not necessarily decidable).

We know how to know when we have a fact, and we know when we don’t. Which means, for one thing, that objects can’t be both identified and unidentified. It also means not only that one cannot prove anything with the absence of information, it means the absence of information means nothing. Anyone who says that because it can’t be proved something doesn’t exist he knows something does exist is a liar or a fool, and one who says the absence of proof of something means something might be is not only a liar or a fool, he is a trivial liar or a fool.

And, there, I have summed up the UFO and WTC controversies. Trying to learn concerning UFO sightings was a learning process, all right – but not about what the “unidentified flying objects” were. What I learned is psychology, that of a mind desirous of believing something. I couldn’t, for instance (cynic that I had become), help noticing that UFO sightings occurred in places in direct numerical proportion to how much money could be made there from the “objects” and the cults having sprung up around them. I also came to know with certainty that each person I interviewed concerning a “sighting” would not have material proof, only the anecdotal proof provided him by his fellow. Persons outside the cult who saw something they couldn’t identify simply said they didn’t know what they’d seen; persons part of the true-believers not only saw the object, but knew it was extraterrestrial.

In fact, everything that proved it couldn’t be what the true-believer thought it was proved to him that it was. Each time one of these folks insisted that material proof existed, I learned – just like that having to do with 9-11 – that it had somehow vanished or become otherwise inaccessible. More, I could not only identify as to membership or non-membership in the UFO cult the person I was interviewing, I knew ninety percent or more of what he was going to say – i.e., just what the last cult member said.

And, as Costello says in the famous “who’s on first? - “FIRST BASE!”

No part of the World Trade Center fantasy and commercial hype so resembles that of the UFO craze than the aspect of the former having to do with Building Seven. Yesterday, when I mentioned the certainty that teachers of forensic and related science will use 9-11 as a paradigm of what not to do in making an investigation, I could not have found a better example than the WTC building which was not struck by an airplane.

The bloviating and babbling has reached such proportions that no single theory concerning it can be identified – that word, again – with certainty, but members of the new UFO conspiracy cult maintain that the collapse of this building could not have occurred unless it had already been prepared for demolition. The conspiracy theorists assume – they must, since none of them was ever in the building, and have no material evidence whatever - that damage sustained during the airliners’ attack was not sufficient to trigger building collapse.

If the reader recognizes in that the reasoning of the UFO folks, there are at least two of us.

Theorists insist that “fires were observed in Building Seven prior to its collapse, but they were isolated in small parts of the building, and were puny by comparison to other building fires.” No one offers any reason for any reasonable person to accept the theorists’ assessment of the fires. Time and again, they refer to photos and videos as proof; neither does anyone offer a written, recorded, or video-taped statement from a witness affirming any such thing. Neither is there any such evidence concerning any other facet of the matter.

On the other hand several reports on the record – none mentioned or shown on any of the theorists’ Websites, publications, or the rest – are like that of Firemen Richard Banaciski, Dan Marine, and others. “We were told to go to Greenwich and Vesey and see what’s going on,” Banaciski said. “So we go there and on the north and east side of Seven it didn’t look like there was any damage at all, but then you looked on the south side of Seven there had to be a hole 20 stories tall in the building, with fire on several floors.”

Another first responder adds that there were “tremendous, tremendous fires going on.”

As usual, in UFO-like controversies, we have evidence both in the form of material fact and witness testimony against presumption, supposition, and – of course, suspicion. There is much evidence that fire raged in the Building Seven, but conspiracy theorists don’t want – refuse – to see it. Missing evidence is to these people far more motive and powerful than existing evidence.

And the conspiracy theorists suspicions, we should note, are fed by commercial interests making stacks of money from their interest. Cui bono WTC? Not those with facts. In fact, even “not enough” facts have come to mean proof of what the suspicious have already concluded. The unidentified flying object, in other words, is once more identified because it is unidentified.

Records – and they are voluminous – say that emergency response workers at Ground Zero came to realize that extensive damage to the lower south section of WTC Seven would cause collapse as early as three P.M., something, moreover, the news media reported at the time. More, there is video footage – again, conspicuous by its absence on the 9-11 cultists’ Websites and other publications - of the Building Seven collapse. The videos show the building’s south wall giving way first, that being the side of the building having suffered most structural damage. The pile of debris resulting from the collapse measured at just under a hundred fifty yards across and twelve or thirteen stories high.

While I can’t imagine anyone using controlled demolitions to destroy the building would care, that would make a pretty sloppy job of such. (One cult Website, however – “Loose Change” - has it that the building fell in a “convenient pile”).

And then, there’s the “pull.” So far, I’ve come across that word fifty–seven times in the missives I’ve received from WTC cultists. For some of those who opine that Building Seven was blasted by federal conspirators, the most powerful “evidence” comes from WTC leaseholder Larry Silverstein’s alleged “confession” that he authorized the tower’s destruction. In a phone conversation with a fire department officer, Silverstein said, “ . . . maybe the smartest thing to do is pull it.”

The key word seems to be “pull.” More, it’s indicative of the mindset of the cultists. What might “pull” mean? I trust no one would expect to hook a truck to the place and “pull” it away, so it means something else – and the spectrum of possible meaning is a short one. Of course, we might ask Silverstein, but the cultists are far beyond willingness to accept anything that doesn’t support their allegations, making that a waste of time.

To conspiracy theorists like one Alex Jones at prisonplanet.com, “pull” is “industry jargon for taking a building down with explosives.” I’ve been associated with demolitions – from boyhood as an interest and hobby, and as a professional for twenty years – and never once heard the word “pull” mean set off charges. No dictionary of word origins or etymology lists it, either. Can anybody imagine “pull” a building meaning blow it up? Really?

What was it Silverstein said he meant, again? Get the firemen out of the building? That’s what “Pull your guys out to the building” meant, maybe? That sure sounds reasonable to me.

But, of course, I’m not biased – no axe to grind. In fact, I’d love to see this one hung on the government. But then, I have one hell of an addiction to the truth. It’s a narcotic I can’t imagine having to live without. In fact, a world where there’s no certain truth sounds like a damned nightmare to me – I keep imagining myself in the place of the government here on some issue. Sheesh!

Incidentally, the fire department commander did order his men from the building – there were a number working there at the time Silverstein made his “pull” remark - before it collapsed, and no lives were lost there. There, by damn – that proves they knew the building was coming down!

But as Mark Twain observed, a lie can go around the world before the truth gets out of bed. Lease-holder Silverstein is supposed to have destroyed WTC Building Seven in order to claim a huge insurance payoff.

Think about that. If that were so, Lucy, ‘splain why would the guy would tell the world of his plot on a PBS special? ‘Splain, too, what relationship would Silverstein have with the United States Government who supposedly destroyed the other WTC buildings. And if that were so, why would anyone – even our pratfalling, power-mad government - wait until all of the tenants were evacuated from? Why kill three thousand people in the towers, then allow during an entire afternoon the tenants of Building Seven to evacuate? Yeah, “’Splain dat one, Lucy!”

And, of course, we have my objection to the whole affair again, the wherewithal of preparing still another building for demolition – all that wiring, switches, cutting, hauling, and the like – without literally thousands having noticed. A building intended for controlled demolition is always abandoned for considerable time, having been partially gutted in order to place the high explosives necessary. With all of the WTC buildings occupied right up to 9/11, how did the government manage to wire three building for complete demolition without anyone noticing? Come on, people – THINK! Try to imagine sneaking all those wires, switches explosives and fifty things more into buildings while thousands . . .

Oh, never mind – we’ve been through that before!

I’ve said little here about the claims of 9-11 cultists concerning Flight 93, the airliner whose passengers fought the men high-jacking their plane. The principal argument of the 9-11 conspiracy theorists has to do with what they say is the “impossibility” of cell phone calls from the aircraft, and comes as close to anything rational in all their allegations. In fact, they are right – something easily provable (and, at this writing, several have done just that). More, some people who reported receiving cell phone calls from relatives and others on the high-jacked airliner were obviously lying.

Having said that, what has been proven? This, I remind you, is the Land of the Lie, the home of the most mendacious people in all of history. Asking an "American" to tell the truth is like asking a pig to fly - inverted. Have we proven that everyone on the ground lied? Have we proven that there were NO phone calls from the airliners? How about calls from Flight 93? Have we proven that the government fabricated the whole story of the phone calls? Have we proven, even if the government faked ALL the phone calls, that everything the 9-11 conspiracy theorists claim is true – that the U.S. Government both destroyed the World Trade Center by controlled demolition and faked the plane crashes?

No, we haven’t – not even remotely. Certainly not in the minds of any normally rational person, and the few successes I have had in attempting to dissuade WTC theorists have resulted from my having asked the questions above.

The “cell-phone” issue, incidentally, is probably the lynch-pin for all the rest of the smorgasbord of supercilious suspicion silliness that is the “9-11” controversy, something almost certainly due the fact that most people who have studied and engaged in actual scientific forensic investigation, or have done experiments and research into the behavioral aspects of the way untrained people observe and reason, have learned. That’s that the untrained investigator or observer will almost invariably build the wall of his conclusion and opinion upon a single discovery brick in the manner of a jury who, discovering a single inconsistency in a witness’ testimony, discards it all, thereby “throwing out the baby with the bathwater.”

In any Olympics including a “jump to conclusion” event, the amateur WTC, UFO, or Loch Ness Monster investigator will be the gold medalist every time. Meanwhile, that the government “dog didn’t bark” cannot be disputed; neither can it be disputed that persons within the government knew something – even what – was going to happen. That persons within the government knew doesn’t, however, mean that the GOVERNMENT knew – any more than the fact that I knew it was going to happen (said so in writing decades before) meant the country knew. Neither the U.S. Government – nor any government - works that way – nor does the country work that way. The only way for an individual to get his governments attention - well, let’s not get into that.

Finally, the question everyone would really like to answer is that having to do with whether the government or persons within in deliberately let 9-11 happen. Inasmuch as intent – being a figment of the mind - is never with certainty provable, we aren’t ever going to know that. Neither do we need to know that. What we do need to know is that a dog that doesn’t bark while on guard duty is useless. We need a new dog.

This isn’t about preventing horse thieves.

Sunday, wife Rita and I went over to Victoria, in order for her to visit an optometrist there. I always park away from the rest of the vehicles in the lot, in order to avoid the otherwise certain battering from the car doors of people who respect nothing in this world but their own interests and comfort. I’ve written before about how such matters can tell a historical investigator about a society and nation. About a culture, too. The statistics concerning matters like parking lot courtesy, apartment or condominium complex trash and dumpsters, and more, tell a tale the politically correct and religious have a great deal of difficulty in refuting rationally.

Anyway, as we returned to the car, Phillip, the exchange student from Austria staying with us, noticed that the hood on my car was open. Trust me, there’s no way that can mean anything but the fact that someone has raised and failed to close it completely. More, my car being what it is, that means someone has gone to considerable difficulty. They’ve broken into the passenger compartment of the car.

For the next twenty minutes, while my Rita and Phillip stood a distance away, I did the drill that is checking a car for sabotage, or a bomb. Doing so, I saw that the car had been searched thoroughly, everything in the trunk moved. Since I keep survival gear there, filling the trunk almost to its capacity, that is an elaborate and time consuming process. More, the motion detectors my car is equipped with confirmed that there had been at least two intruders, persons who remained silent during the entire operation. I also saw that the intruders were professionals, inasmuch as they had opened the car and trunk with lock “picking” equipment. In broad daylight, as it was, that narrowed the identity of the trespassers considerably.

Nothing had been stolen. But how about something left? Considering and deciding to take the chance – being stopped on the way home, under the circumstances, ought prove more of an opportunity than otherwise – I signaled Rita and Phillip to get in the car.

The ride home was uneventful. Yesterday, when we awoke to find the garage door open, that being a garage door that can only come to be in that state one way, however, I immediately examined my car again. Sure enough. When I had immediately continued the voluminous record of it all started the day before by mailing it both by regular mail and e-mail to a number of friends confidential and otherwise, I relaxed.

I know, you see, far more about my would-be tormentors than they realize. Oh, they’ve been instructed to remain quiet during their operations – I’ve long since had the reputation with my government for laying ineluctable and devastating traps. More, my story with all its facets is now all over the Word Wide Web, the nation, and the world. I am, in fact, all but “untouchable.”

Legally, that is. This is – obviously – no longer a nation of laws. It will be most interesting to see what comes next.

Returning to our discussion of the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001 where we left off with French author Thierry Meyssan, whose baseless assertions are fodder for even mainstream European and Middle Eastern media, I note that in his book entitled ‘The Big Lie,’ Meyssan concludes that the Pentagon was struck by a satellite-guided missile(!) — part of an elaborate “U.S. military coup.”

Note that the U.S. military coup to which Meyssan refers occurred in the late forties and early fifties. Note, too, the utter absurdity of the story. Among dozens of things, why would the government – or anyone – attack the World Trade Center with radio-controlled airliners, then the Pentagon with a guided missile – a missile apparently equipped to strew airliner parts about the area in the process of reaching its target? Obviously, Messieur Meyssan has never heard of Occam’s Razor – or keep it simple, stupid.

If, like the operation required to bring down the World Trade Center (did anyone notice I haven’t yet mentioned Building Seven in that regard) by controlled demolition, the shear impossibility of what our modern-day Hercule Poirot claims weren’t enough, we have the argument that the holes in the Pentagon were the wrong size for having been hit by a Boeing 757.

Facts (yeah, I know they irritates hell out of the conspiracy folks, but I only deal in facts)? Well, first: When American Airlines Flight 77 hit the Pentagon's exterior wall, Ring E, it created a jagged, irregular hole roughly – we’re not talking cake knives and cookie cutters here - 75 ft. wide. That’s according to the ASCE Pentagon Building Performance investigators and their report. Note, once again, that unlike the conspiracy theorists' scores of witnesses (who have, somehow, magically disappeared [that’s names, addresses, record of existence, names and addresses of relative and associates – all that inconvenient forensic proof stuff]), the investigators, their report, and the statement so literally hundreds of witnesses are available for perusal, review, and criticism.

The Pentagon outer ring’s exterior facade collapsed about 20 minutes after impact, but ASCE based its measurements of the original hole on the number of first-floor support columns that were destroyed or damaged. Computer simulations have later confirmed the findings.

Then, there’s the matter of the second hole, a 16(?) foot one in the Pentagon's Ring C. That one, obviously, was made by Flight 77’s landing gear – the gear was found inside the building near the hole it made.

Aw shucks – Huxley’s “great tragedy of Science–the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.”

Next in this smorgasbord of tormented and spastic ratiocination we have the bizarre claim that many Pentagon windows remained in one piece — even those just above the point of impact from the Boeing 757 passenger plane. Now, admittedly, while remembering that I DID come across the Website Pentagonstrike.co.uk and its online animation being circulated in the United States and Europe, I can’t remember what all that was supposed to prove. That I don’t remember almost certainly is due the fact that some things are just not memorable, that due their absurdity and uselessness.

I supposed the "intact windows" directly above the crash site prove an aircraft smaller than a 757 hit the Pentagon. Presumably, a missile would have carried explosives – or maybe the plotters were clever enough to remove the explosives or reduce the charge in order to make it appear that a plane smaller than a 757 hit the building. . . And if the reader is shaking his head in wonderment at the convolute reasoning or plot such information would suggest, he sees why I didn’t pay enough attention to the claim to remember it.

I happen also to know that the windows in the Pentagon are blast-resistant. If they survived the crash, they did just what they were designed to do. Looking it up, I found this from one Ken Hays, Executive Vice-President of Masonry Arts, the Bessemer, Ala., company that designed, manufactured and installed the Pentagon windows: "A blast-resistant window must be designed to resist a force significantly higher than a hurricane that's hitting instantaneously. These (windows) were not designed to receive wracking seismic force," Hays notes. "They were designed to take in inward pressure from a blast event, which apparently they did: [Before the collapse] the blinds were still stacked neatly behind the window glass."

Another lovely theory slain by an ugly fact. Shazam!

Next in the smorgasbord of silly, we have the claim that there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon. "In reality, a Boeing 757 was never found," pentagonstrike.co.uk, says. “Which,” these latter day Sherlocks insists, “asks the question, ‘What hit the Pentagon on 9/11?’”

That, incidentally – and to demonstrate the logical merit of it all – (proves that) “a small plane, not a 757, hit the building.” We don’t know what hit the building, but that tells us what DID hit the building; we don’t know what hit the Pentagon, but that proves that a missile hit the Pentagon. And, something that left no debris of itself hit the building . . .

Geez – tell me guys: if the government could blow that hole in the Pentagon without leaving any debris at all, what was all that falderal about the WTC? Why were we damning the government for not finding debris THERE? What about all those pictures YOU posted everywhere to prove that a radio-controlled airliner struck? Why would the government use one method here another there, and. . .?

Oh, hell – never mind!

What are the facts, again – those anyone can locate, and check? Well, blast experts like Allyn E. Kilsheimer, (who happens to be CEO of KCE Structural Engineers in Washington, D.C.) myself, and others I know personally, basically say what Kilsheimer says. Kilsheimer was the first structural engineer to arrive at the Pentagon after the crash in order to help coordinate emergency responders.

"It was absolutely a plane, and I'll tell you why," says Kilsheimer. "I saw the marks of the plane wing on the face of the building. I picked up parts of the plane with the airline markings on them. I held in my hand the tail section of the plane, and I found the black box."

And scores – literally, again – of photos of wreckage inside and outside the building both appeared on television and remain in the record for perusal of anyone taking the time and making the effort necessary. Kilsheimer's eyewitness account is backed up, in other words, by evidence in the form of photos and video. And the CEO adds, "I held parts of uniforms from crew members in my hands, including body parts. Okay?"


Now, what I should do here, were I to subscribe to the my debate opponent's methods in the matter of the 9-11 - is say I KNOW Kilsheimer - just make something up that sounds really good and probative. Make something up out of whole cloth, something that supports my argument. Sure - that would to it.


Instead, I urge the reader to go to the Web, look for any thermo-copy, video, or redaction otherwise of any statement by any witness. See if you can find any photo, video, or other documentary proof of what the declaiming bloviator there insists is fact. Even one recorded and documented statement by any firemen, policemen witness – hobo; I don’t care – will be more than I have been able to come up with. I would absolutely love to get my hands on just one written (typed, recorded, or provable – name it) statement from some credible person who heard or saw explosions in the World Trade Center towers, Building Seven or the Pentagon. See if you can find anything but an attempt to prove something by doubting what is know. More, in other words, of the “I don’t know what happened, but that tells me what happened and who did it” balderdash.

Which reminds me: if the government brought down the Trade Center with controlled demolition, and were able to do all the necessary preparation secretly (those invisible men, able to substantially alter the building without making any noise or leaving any sign) there, why in hell use a missile – hell, even a plane – on the Pentagon?

That’s to ignore a dozen more operational, tactical, and evidentiary inconsistencies fatal to the theorist opportunists.

Here, I choose to digress for a time, in order to expand upon another thing about all this that troubles me. As one with more than fifty years in the hobby and business of making scientific incident and accident investigations and reconstructions, I have seen and heard some “doozy” constructions of myth and the fanciful tale. The World Trade Center affair is the “doozy” of them all. In years to come, I predict that it will become the textbook example of “don’t does” for forensicists, detectives and other kinds of fact investigators. The aftermath of “9-11” has been the Jump to Conclusion Olympics of all time.

Now, of course, the purveyors of all the hype, sales gimmicks, and the like – the opportunist hucksters, in other words – could have been expected. Anyone who lived through the assassination of John Kennedy, the circus surrounding the trial of O.J. Simpson, or the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, could not claim surprise.

That the public has become so easy to dupe is worrisome – stupefyingly so, in fact; and in that I refer more to those who eagerly spread the nonsense, thereby lending it a kind of credibility and power with the otherwise disinterested public and voter. In so doing, the gossip-monger and amateur – meaning for love alone, devoid of profit otherwise – sleuth plays directly into the hands of those he would defeat. By confusing in the interests of sale-ability due notoriety as many things as he possibly can, the huckster and his dupe actually make more certain that historians (like myself) will never know the whole truth.

But it’s not the worst thing we face. And why do I – who has suffered as I have for so many years under the totalitarian hand of government - crap like the story that leads my essay here, seem to defend the government in the matter that is my topic?

I don’t. Just as I once seemed to defend criminals – even the scum of the earth – against the law, I may now seem to defend the damnable U.S. government. But, friend, I don’t defend the government; I defend the truth. All these years ago, when the doing was to prove my downfall and let my enemy the state take everything from me, I defended not the criminal (albeit the U.S. Government), but the U.S. Constitution. You see, I know that whenever any one of us is on trial by the government, we are ALL on trial. Whenever the government violates the civil rights of any one of us - however base, however rotten, however vicious he may be – it violates the civil rights of each and every one of the rest of us.

Whenever anyone, group or individual, violates the truth and the scientific systems by which we know it, it violates the truth, period; it attacks sanity itself, and it plays by so doing into the very hands of those it would use falsehood to destroy. Remember the old saw, that goes, “The first liar never has a chance?” Think about it. When you lie, you assure not only that your lie will be used against you, you assure that lying itself will be used against you. In a nation where there is no truth, the tyrant rules easily. Look around you. We are in this pickle because the truth is not in us, for where there is no truth there cannot be justice.

And where there is no justice is where there is tyranny. Anyone who can believe the 9-11 conspiracy theorists concerning their government can believe their government - and believe that we live in a democracy. THAT's how important is knowing the truth, what it is, and how to know it.

Maybe SUPERMAN did it? We can't prove he didn't, so that proves he might have. Right?

In the United States, a hyper-capitalist nation un-matched by any other in that regard, any opportunity to commercialize – to prostitute or pimp - is seized. Any such matter, like the conspiracy theories having to do with the world trade center and “9-11,” is certain to produce a myriad of hucksters, persons seeking to “capitalize.” Video tapes, books, posters, tee shirts – you name it – they will appear for sale. Some - those like tee-shirts - rely simply on the “hype-able” nature of the matter, and the subject’s “notoriety.” Others rely upon the need for the individual to self-aggrandize with his fellows by appearing expert on an otherwise esoteric topic or study. These, of course, infest the internet in the form of Websites with their mendacity.

While obnoxious in their selfish irresponsibility, they are nowhere as much so as those willing to go to the time and expense of producing video tapes, even movies. Pure propagandist theatre, this mass-produced lie preys upon the ignorance of its audience for both monetary and political purpose. Like a movie-maker seeking to entertain, it foists nonsense like that of John Wayne exploding dynamite with a rifle shot, detective John Shaft using a potato as a silencer on a rifle, Hopalong Cassidy shooting the bullet of his opponent in a gunfight out of the air, a slim and sexy slip of a woman knocking the snot out of a pro football lineman type in a street-fight or easily enduring U.S. Navy SEAL training. It’s Billy Dixon’s “Long Shot at Adobe Walls.” All depend upon the ignorance of the viewer for their credibility, using the magic of “special effects” to create otherwise credible illusion.

The principal difference, of course, is purpose.

There is another difference, however, that of simply responsibility. Here, the purpose of the individual or group is the deciding ingredient. Each of us, especially as citizens of the United States, originally a democratic republic and now a nation struggling to regain its former control of government “of the people, by the people, and for the people,” has a certain responsibility created by our historic mission as a people. RESPONSIBILITY. Perhaps as old as mankind, the tendency of man to spread hearsay and rumor unverified by either reason, logic, or science, has come to be called “gossip.” In that, it has acquired a certain innocuousness and therefore – supposed, at least – innocence. Just fun. “Dishing dirt,” et cetera.

That cannot be claimed in the case of those like the exploiters of “9-11.” One of the purposes of these people is the spread of hate, hate easily expected to lead to violence. Another, while less damaging in its potential, has the purpose of widespread political effect. Recent surveys suggest that as many as one-third of the U.S. public believe their government deliberately murdered 3,000 people in order to create Reichstag-like reasons for war. That is serious, even catastrophic effect, with serious, possibly even more catastrophic portent.

Like election of a president even worse than the present one, and even more unassailable power for those who by silent coup d’etat have gained control of our nation. I speak, of course, of those in obvious and open control of our government and its policies (another matter for discussion, of course).

As with almost invariably all events of this nature and caliber, there are lessons to be learned, “lemonade to be made from lemons.” “What doesn’t kill me makes me stronger,” the old German Sprichwort and heraldic motto says. Video tapes like “9/11 Guilt: The Proof is in Your Hands,” by Don Paul, Jim Hoffman, and Celestine Star, while outright (remember John Wayne and the dynamite exploded by rifle fire, the beauty queen U.S. Navy SEAL, and the like?) fraud intended for profit alone, are exemplary of Operation Mockingbird-like propaganda tommyrot also used by tent-show evangelists and fundamentalist preachers the like of Elmer Gantry, Jim Baker, Jimmy Swaggert, and others who use hypnotic technique to dupe and seduce their gullible congregations.

Their hypocritical piety sickens – yes, and infuriates – me. I detest these people!

They are also like the Elmer Gantrys of political punditry, Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. They are the odious equivalent of hate-sellers like Ann Coulter, Al Franken, and Rosie O’Donnell. These people are not innocent purveyors of mere gossip. They are the Josef Goebbels, the Vladimir Lenins – and the Henry Kissingers - of propaganda. Make no mistake, they mean, and they serve, those who would rule the world for their own reasons and profit.

I spoke of responsibility. In our miserable schools, and among a people brought under the behavioral yoke that is illegally unreasonable and burdensome totalitarian taxation, the word has lost most of its meaning – even use. What is the responsibility of one who repeats, and thereby spreads, a rumor based upon hearsay and his own ignorance of the rumor’s subject and subject matter?

I digress with purpose here, the better to explain my view. Among the literally dozens of people with whom I have disputed and debated “9-11,” I have not found one – let me repeat that: not one – who had even a smattering of the education or knowledge required to either understand or discus the essential science of his subject. One such individual encountered recently is archetypical of the “’9-11’ Conspiracy” “theorist.” I use italics (digressing even further) with “theorist” because these people are not sufficiently knowledgeable to merit being called such, and the italics denote special meaning.

This is gossip, witnessed by the fact that again and again and again, I have posed questions seeking to learn the credibility of the individuals in question, questions like how to know or calculate the overpressure from the explosives supposedly involved, how to calculate the energy of the falling upper stories (most could not even calculate the mass in question, couldn’t define or calculate mass, had no idea of the forces acting upon structural steel or how it is calculated, how to estimate the speed and energy of the airliners, the actual theory and practice used to bring buildings down by controlled demolition, and fifty more). The answers I received were more typical of today’s evasive, dissimulating, and lying political figures. Some were down right comical. One, for instance, and asked to explain how the Herculean task of preparing the WTC for demolition without prohibitive notice might have been accomplished, responded that is was “well known” – I’ll bet I heard that expression used in this regard five hundred times (think about the logic of that one) – “the government has developed a lot of invisibility techniques just for this kind of thing.”

When I asked how the cutting, sawing, carrying, and hauling, the miles (that’s literally) of wire and equipment, the relatively huge number of personnel, their effects, and more might have been made invisible, I didn’t hear from “Greg” anymore. Too bad, only Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton have ever kept me in mirth longer.

I digress even further because I can’t resist (this one is good to keep to myself): speaking to scoffer concerning anthropogenic global warming recently, I presented the argument that is that of Pascale’s Wager (to date, incidentally, and while I have posed the question repeatedly to those of similar persuasion everywhere including the Web, I have not received a single rebuttal [think about that one, too]). My victim (I admit a certain amount of glee at exposing these intellectual charlatans for what they are in fact), stared. When I delivered the second of the one-two punch, that in any closed system like the earth’s environment, changing even a little – let alone massively - the balance of ingredients as it were could not possibly be done without repercussions of catastrophic proportions – we can’t, for instance, breathe carbon dioxide - he said, and you’ll note that I quote, “Well, we’ll just have to evolve. We have to use fossil fuels – that’s all that’s to it!”

The WTC conspiracy theorists are like that guy (a retired army officer, by the way). The stupid is understandable, but – unless stupidity is its own excuse – the irresponsibility isn’t. If you don’t know about the use of guns and things potentially injurious or lethal, don’t give others advise on their use. To do that is not unlike opening an emergency medical center, despite knowing little or nothing about medicine or treatment of injuries, masquerading as an auto mechanic to provide the public advice concerning care of their cars as an auto mechanic, or pretending to be a psychiatric counselor on the basis of having read the Bible or Koran – in all instance basing your advice upon what you’ve heard from other experts of your kind, gleaned from quick “mouse” trips to Internet website for information.

Small wonder that in some parts of the country licenses are required even for things like mowing others’ lawns professionally. To masquerade as an expert or one knowledgeable entails responsibility for results, something that seems to have escaped the attention of the WTC conspiracy theorists.

Continuing examination of the World Trade Center conspiracy theory, we come to that of “No Stand-Down Order.” Theorists claim that no fighter interceptors were “scrambled” from any of the twenty-odd airbases within close proximity to the high-jacked airliners. Following the suspiciously illogical (I find it hard to believe, still, that anyone – let alone the sort of people invariably cited in these tales – could be so stupid) reasoning of the theorists, one, for instance, says, "On September 11, Andrews AFB had two squadrons of fighter jets with the job of protecting the skies over Washington D.C. They failed to do their job, and there is only one explanation (aside to the reader – check the brilliant logic and reasoning of that one!) for this - our Air Force was ordered to Stand Down on 9/11."

Whew (have I said that before?)! Let’s look at what I found out when I checked this one (from an officer friend at Andrews). On 9/11 there were no more than 14 fighter jets on alert in the contiguous states (later, realizing I had failed to ask how many those were, I learned from another source it meant all of the forty-eight on the continent – something, I might add, that shook my up not a little).

More, there was – as of this writing, still isn’t (think about that one, too) no automatic computer network alarm capable of alerting the North American Air Defense Command (NORAD) of the threat represented by the missing planes. Sources other than my friend – who later confirmed them, however – said that civilian air traffic controllers had to use the telephone (reminds me of the guy on Grenada that time who had to use his credit card for a phone call in order to get combat air support in the battle there, then) in order to call NORAD.

I “go parenthetical” again to point out that conspiracy theorists contribute by the kind of nonsense I’m describing here to situations like this. Stupidity, like fear and the effects of nonsensical gossip like this, spread like disease. They infect all levels of society with their spastic effects. Irresponsibility, in short, is like a disease virus, capable of a Butterfly Effect of unimaginable proportions. As our society and nation continue to proliferate and grow, irresponsibility becomes a cancer cell, eating away at the very heart of our political, governmental, and security systems. This isn’t a damned disaster movie – this is real!

I proceed to quote from my notes, these taken from a website I have neglected to record. They are general, so I use them advisedly only - using Google, I could find them, but inasmuch as I make no claim of authorship – and take no credit for them:

"They [civilian Air Traffic Control, or ATC] had to pick up the phone and literally dial us," says Maj. Douglas Martin, public affairs officer for NORAD. Boston Center, one of 22 Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) regional ATC facilities, called NORAD's Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) three times: at 8:37 am EST to inform NEADS that Flight 11 was hijacked; at 9:21 am to inform the agency, mistakenly, that Flight 11 was headed for Washington (the plane had hit the North Tower 35 minutes earlier); and at 9:41 A.M. to (erroneously) identify Delta Air Lines Flight 1989 from Boston as a possible hijacking. The New York ATC called NEADS at 9:03 am to report that United Flight 175 had been hijacked — the same time the plane slammed into the South Tower. Within minutes of that first call from Boston Center, NEADS scrambled two F-15s from Otis Air Force Base in Falmouth, Mass., and three F-16s from Langley Air National Guard Base in Hampton, Va. None of the fighters got anywhere near the pirated planes.”

And, of course, any pilot who flies in the air traffic system knows why it couldn't find the hijacked flights. When the hijackers turned off the planes' transponder signal identifiers, Air Traffic Control both local and continental had to search the literally thousands of absolutely identical radar blips in what may be the country's busiest air corridors. Doesn’t anybody remember the German kid who flew his Cessna through the Soviet Union's much-vaunted air defenses into the Kremlin?

Of course, to the conspiracy theorist, trained intensively as he is by Hollywood, that is the proverbial “piece of cake.” No problem!

And what of NORAD's sophisticated, radar surveillance of the continent? Remember what I said about corollary lessons “9-11” can teach? Check this one: “NORAD may ring the continent,” one source said, but it’s looking outward for threats, It’s like a doughnut – no coverage in the middle.” When I wrote my paper in 1978, one of the observations I made concerning the feasibility of an attack using high-jacked airliners or National Guard jets (bet you didn’t think of that; and when, after enough senators had read my paper, a “red flag” operation revealed that literally hundred of armed jet fighters could have been stolen – in one instance sixteen WERE) was that NORAD was prepared to track and flight originating in the United States. They weren’t seen as threats and NORAD wasn't therefore prepared to track them.

Are you still wondering how New Orleans and FEMA’s pratfall there could have happened? You’re going to vote for all these Hillary Clinton, Rudy Giulliani, John McCain “leaders” who have brought us this “clusterf---” in the first place? Hell, you deserve the “9-11” conspiracy pimps.

Let’s see – where were we? Oh, yeah (and we’d better hurry – more nonsense daydreaming is undoubtedly going on, with even more wondrous theorization and “evidence”): theorists and “9-11” pimps asseverate that it has long (it’s like “everybody knows”) been SOP – standard operating procedure - to immediately intercept off-course planes failing to respond to communications from air traffic controllers. Obviously unaware that she was talking to a nearly life-long pilot, one bloviating bubblehead on the Truthout website sagely informed me, “When the Air Force ‘scrambles’ fighters to intercept off-course aircraft and those that enter restricted airspace in a matter of minutes.” At least, she got the “scrambles” jargon right. The facts? This from the same Website I quoted a moment ago:

“In the decade before 9/11, NORAD intercepted only one civilian plane over North America: golfer Payne Stewart's Learjet, in October 1999. With passengers and crew unconscious from cabin decompression, the plane lost radio contact but remained in transponder contact until it crashed. Even so, it took an F-16 one hour and 22 minutes to reach the stricken jet. Rules in effect back then, and on 9/11, prohibited supersonic flight on intercepts. Prior to 9/11, all other NORAD interceptions were limited to offshore Air Defense Identification Zones (ADIZ). ‘Until 9/11 there was no domestic ADIZ,’ FAA spokesman Bill Schumann tells PM. After 9/11, NORAD and the FAA increased cooperation, setting up hotlines between ATCs and NORAD command centers, according to officials from both agencies. NORAD has also increased its fighter coverage and has installed radar to monitor airspace over the continent.”

Once again, bald-faced lying by persons with obviously only television and movie theater schooling, and supposed facts without the most remote basis in reality made up out of whole cloth, all taking advantage – or, astonishingly, availing itself of - the audiences similar “expertise.” Incredible!

Next, we have the mythology engendered by and grown up around the “9-11” attack on the Pentagon. At 9:37 A.M. on 9/11, 51 minutes after Flight 175 hit the World Trade Center, the Pentagon was struck by a Boeing 757, American Airline Flight 77. More than a hundred people, all of them interviewed on the record, saw the plane hit the building, yet conspiracy theorists insist the evidence demonstrated that a missile – or a much smaller aircraft – hit the Pentagon. The amateur – not really, actually; “amateur” by definition implies the knowledge of one devoted to the practice of study of something, hardly the case here – sleuths claim that two holes were visible in the Pentagon immediately after the attack.

Neither of the two holes, the would-be Sherlock Holmes’ say, is big enough to have been made by a wide-bodied jetliner. That, you will notice is people who have never been to the scene of a plane crash, much less ever investigated one. They have never seen an aircraft burn or explode. That’s except, of course, on television or in the movies.

The impact of the Flight 77 left a 75-ft.-wide entry hole in the building's exterior wall, and a 16-ft.-wide hole in Ring C, the Pentagon's middle ring. Conspiracy theorists claim both holes are far too small to have been made by a Boeing 757. "How does a plane 125 ft. wide and 155 ft. long fit into a hole which is only 16 ft. across?" asks one Website "dedicated to discovering the bottom line truth to what really occurred on September 11, 2001."

The shear naiveté of such a remark betrays the speaker for his ignorance, assuming as it must that the building and its composition would have no effect on the aircraft. Presumably, the “expert” believes a 757 or other aircraft could just fly through the building and depart, to leave a perfect silhouette of its frontal profile in the building. What is astonishing – and worrisome in what it implies concerning the intelligence of the Websites readers – is that anyone dares say anything so vapid to an audience.

Neither Internet cuckoo-birds alone. Books have been authored by the dozens and hundreds, each lasting testimonial to its author’s lack of knowledge, information, and powers of ratiocination. One unhinged individual, Thierry Meyssan, writes, "This attack could only be committed by United States military personnel against other U.S. military personnel."

The truth? Pretty much what a real expert said, that being ASCE team member Mete Sozen, a professor of structural engineering at Purdue University (note that the italics are mine). “In this case, one wing hit the ground; the other was sheared off by the force of the impact with the Pentagon's load-bearing columns,” Sozen who specializes in the behavior of concrete buildings, said. “What was left of the plane flowed into the structure in a state closer to a liquid than a solid mass. If you expected the entire wing to cut into the building," Sozen told Popular Mechanics Magazine, "it couldn't happen."

And the reader may (if he’s more astute than the conspiracy theorists) note that the ASCE and other experts - unlike all the supposed firemen, policemen, and other nameless witnesses and experts cited by the conspiracy theory hucksters - are both on the record and available for contact.

Next time, even wilder stuff – the U.S. Government shot down Flight 93 (and, by now, probably others, Flight 175 was a tanker, not an airliner, and it was flown into the World Trade Center by radio control, there was no plane wreckage at the Pentagon, and much, much more.

Actually, I believe I can prove that the CIA had Superman hypnotized, and that it was he who seized first one aircraft after another and hurled them into the building. One wonders why Superman would have bothered with the airplanes - oh yeah, of course – the government wanted to be sure the public had an excuse to go to war. If Superman had done it, why . . . Hmmmm.

Maybe we need to think about this some more? Next time, more discussion of the “World Trade Center cover-up.”

(The first essay in this series having to do with the World Trade Center Attack and conspiracy theorists in that regard is at www.judoknighterrant.com/opinion/)

A recent discussion on TagWord with the personable members there stimulates this, my latest “rant” (strange, isn’t it, that in the land of free speech almost every example of such has pejorated to the point of becoming anathema; if there is anything we seem to hate more as a nation than free speech, I can only wonder what it is . . .). Having learned from and stimulated by Internet forums like Truthout, Alternet, Useless Knowledge, MySpace, and others, I recently elicited my latest sampling of the public discourse by commenting on a now well-festered subject, the World Trade Center and what has become part of the vernacular as “9-11.” I have revisited that particular matter a number of times, in order to “thicken” my study by way of stirring the pot again. It has, you know, become cult-ified – grown into a new religious doctrine.

In order relate the two microcosmic measures of national discourse, I also sallied – sortéed, might be a more apt term - into the discussion on several websites of national health care vis-à-vis capitalism. There were a couple more subjects, too, as members of the TW site would attest, and soon the Internet forensic wort had begun fermenting nicely. The WTC, 9-11 matter has reached a “spiritus frumenti” content of about 100 proof. Whew!

The Newspeak media helped mightily the metastasis of what might be called the public thought process with still more of the “nappy-headed hoes” (assuming that’s how you spell the neologism so beloved of worthies like the Reverend Jesse Jackson, Reverend Al Sharpton, and their pettifogging, Senator Jack S. Phogbound like), race-Pecksniffian and chip-on-the-shoulder, demagogues’ manna from heaven, words as booby-traps, like (my god, people, haven’t we had enough of this old-ladies-knitting-circle, fish-wives, panty-hose effeminate and metrosexual gay, Nancy Grace, Greta Van Susteren, Kimberly Guilfoyle, tabloid news crap - how the hell far can you take this “hate speech” bullshit, without losing ALL credibility?).

Even more to the point of my parenthetical question, how stupid can your argument get before anyone of the modest intellect necessary to recognize it as such may legally ignore it? MUST I respect and defer to witchcraft, shamanism, Santeria, and voodoo? I am required – by law, as it now seems I am - to listen respectfully when someone tells me the Blessed Virgin has appeared in the scum on a shower curtain (no, I’m not joking – it happened a while ago here in South Texas) and it’s a “sign?” From god?

Today’s discourse has become so . . . metastasized, was the word I used, wasn’t it? - as to have become so cancer-ridden, so utterly useless, that we have come as a nation to the point of absurdities that can only be explained among otherwise healthy brains by schizoid psychosis. There may be a question concerning whether the kind of stupidity the public displays is due lack of education, education that is deliberately conducive to error and stupidity, behavioral conditioning directed toward stultification and thought process confusion, or the like, but there can be no doubt where what is happening and why are concerned.

As I type this, for instance, a news program announces that a governor has repudiated his oath of office, refusing to enforce the law having to do with illegal immigration. He stands in defiance of the law, yet remains in office. It is as though he says, “I refuse to do what you chose me to do, which is the will of the people, but since you chose me I will do as I damned please – everything I can against your interests.” How is such thing possible? More to the point (again) how can you still pretend that a nation where that can be is a democracy?

Still, my discussions – especially with the breed who call themselves “conservative” (my god, Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, and the like are “CONSERVATIVE?”) - result in my being told again and again, day after day, that we are a democracy. Today, we learn that while seventy-six percent of the public is emphatically opposed to illegal immigration, politicians and the government they constitute don’t care. Democracy. Rule by the people. Sure.

The people can do nothing, but the people rule? Tell, me, someone – at what point in all this are we NOT a democracy?

Oh, but I’ve been here before. In spades. For more than two decades, 1977 to 2001, I lived in the “Nation of Laws,” where the government literally – in print, electronically, and by public action - mocked the law. That’s publicly. While the public stood idly by, watching like well-fed sheep. To a very large degree, nothing has changed yet to this day.

But my story was one occurring years ago, no one cared (or cares – and obviously), and I am more interested now in how its implications then – the ones no one found worth effort so much as attention – have resulted now. As if to assist here, the television – the Glen Beck Show and a cuckoo bird Catholic apologist – reinforces my growing fear of my demented nation. The Catholic apologist, head of one Catholic Church laity organization or councils, pontificates by extension that all sex without church sanction is evil. His analogy comes in a claim that everyone evil – i.e., not subscribing to his view of the procreative act.- would “graft a condom on male children and say, ‘have at it.’” Sex not intended to procreate, in other words, is evil.

Now, I wouldn’t care what a cuckoo-bird like that thinks or does – he’s in my view as sick in his way as the people who confuse the function of their genitals otherwise – but the fact that he might very well impose upon me in the same way that New York Governor Eliot Spitzer flaunts the law having to do with illegal immigration and President of the United States George W. Bush flaunts the U.S. Constitution. When the law becomes whatever the powerful – whether it be the all-sex-of-which-we-don’t-approve-is-evil, “the-word-is-flat-factions” or the “born-again” individual in office – say it is, I’m scared. The prospect of living in a nation governed by the Word Trade Center conspiracy theorists is alone enough to increase the frequency and intensity of my shooting practice, in other words.

I just don’t want to be in this cuckoo’s nest any more, to put it even more simply.

Still, I keep trying. The grandkids will be here when I’m gone. I keep hoping to discover a sociological, even political algorithm by which to turn around this stampede into societal insanity. I want the few rational people among us – that’s white, Anglo-Saxon males, thinking like traditional white Anglo-Saxon males who built our country, then held it together through a civil war, two world wars, and a great depression – to take it back.

Oh, it’s incontrovertibly true that we are no longer the eighty-nine percent majority that we were as late as 1965. Neither is it arguable that it’s there that things began to go to hell in a hand-basket, and I find it damned suspicious that no one but me seems to connect those facts. But I can’t legally say that anymore, CAN I? “Racist!” “Sexist!” Politically incorrect!” Maybe even “hate speech.”

Not as bad, maybe, as referring to someone as a “nappy-headed hoe,” or a “queer,” or the dreaded N-word, but that depends on who hears, right? Just trying to compose any kind of statement these days is to walk in a minefield of verbal high explosives. And the “mines” are being invented as I write this – no way to know until I step on one.

Still, I have to do something, and there must be some part of normal societal and national thought processes remaining unaffected by the politically correct paralysis. Like Patrick Henry, I know of no way to deal with the future except study of the past, and having been all my life an ardent historian, I consider what it was that once made us the greatest nation in history. What do we need to do again?

First, I think, we must, by teaching and demanding study and observation of the age-old rules of epistemology, logic, reason, and mathematics, begin to restore the public's consciousness, its sensorium, its ability to deliberate and reason productively and for its own benefit. That would mean to stop the dissemination of not only utterly false and nonsensical information on the publicly electronic media – television, radio, Internet, and elsewhere – but to provide for public debate and discourse that is logically valid in its content.

It is, in that regard, high time that moderators in public political debate, for instance, be logicians capable of pointing out to the audience fallacious statements, claims, and reasoning.

Oh, yes, I know – “free speech.” Free speech the right; the right as a matter of law. I agree, as I always have. In fact, I believe that therapy for our mentally deranged society absolutely requires restoration of free speech and the right of expression, however hateful or unpopular. Of all the oxymoronically contradictory premises we labor under as a society today, none is moreso than that of controlled free speech and expression.

You’re damned right I think you should say what you think. But what of responsibility? Ever hear, anybody, of the rule that says the right of free speech does not extend to make yelling “fire!” in a crowded theater? What about the responsibility of truth? Is it not one thing to have an opinion, another to spread for reasons or self-interest shared or otherwise falsehood, gossip, and propaganda deliberately contrived to make others act against their own best interests?

Part of a group somehow become lost in the wilderness, does not one who proclaims knowledge of the right direction in which to proceed have an obligation to know that he is right? Doesn’t “right” mean “I’ve been this way before? I know?”

Is it not a kind of societal sin to use one’s freedom of speech to spread unfounded ideas that may be crucial to his fellow citizen’s life, to our democracy, to our children, and to our way of life as a nation? Has not freedom of speech, in other words, the same responsibilities attendant any right protected by a free society? Isn’t a false assertion made on the radio, on television, or the Internet, for instance, like giving false information to the police or government? Isn’t it even more wrong – immoral – when self-serving, made only in the interests of the individual or group?

And if there is a duty to be truthful and accurate attendant the right of free speech, is there not, in turn, a duty to have a way to know when one is right, and to learn what that is? Is it not one thing to argue something believing on the basis of hearsay and very little personal knowledge of the matter that you are correct, but quite another to argue knowing you do so on no basis of proven logic, science, and mathematics? Does a computer “mouse” trip by one who knows little or nothing of the subject or matter, to a website composed by someone totally unknown to the individual in question, with total unknown expertise, knowledge, and credentials, justify one’s saying he “knows?”

Someone, columnist Sidney Harris, I think, once observed that while, "Knowledge fills a large brain; it merely inflates a small one." Put the lack of necessary effort in learning resulted from the computer with that “small one,” you’ve created an Alexander Pope’s “bookful block-head, ignorantly read, with loads of learned lumber in his head.” Lord, have I ever been through Internet lumber yard after lumber yard in the past few years!

Parenthetically, I urge the reader here to use the World Trade Center Controlled Demolition matter as an example. The exercise can be an entertaining one, for one thing, and one very informative in the light of my discussion here. Check each claim and argument for substance logically (consistent, for instance with all other information, data, and reasoning), mathematically, and scientifically. As, by all means, the obvious question – how could everything being claimed have been done without notice by the tens of thousands of people who worked in, lived and worked near, and frequented the World Trade Center? That will probably stop you, but continue anyway – in order to relate the matter to others much in the news these days.

It’s time you learned to recognize the smell of bullshit.

Continuing with my discussion of “rights,” do those even abysmally ignorant of the given subject have the right by way of their right of free speech to promulgate to others as fact their uninformed, ill-advised, and specious point of view?

Legally sure; but how about morally . . .?

My intensive study of the public discourse over the past forty years has revealed a precipitous – so sudden as to suggest cataclysmic occurrence – decline in individual and, perhaps axiomatically, societal ratiocination – the ability to reason (not merely think). Everywhere in the nation, educators report the same phenomenon. Whereas columnists like James J. Kilpatrick, Sydney Harris, and others began reporting the same thirty years ago, even comedians have of late begun using public stupidity as a shtick in their comic routines and programs. Overseas - Europe, Japan, and the Orient generally – “American” stupidity – especially when related to what has now become our celebrated arrogance - is the subject of head wagging amazement and, in some cases, glee (our bumbling, bungling president, if only in that regard, is a national catastrophe).

And, to digress somewhat, that “arrogance” comment strikes a familiar chord. You see, I have long since discerned what seems a new kind of arrogance, that of the extremist and extremism. As I wrote in my last essay, the extremist is by nature and behavior – de facto – religious; religious in his intractable self-assurance that he cannot be wrong. Availing himself of some right he somehow believes ancillary to that protected by the U.S. Constitution, he becomes a pope speaking ex cathedra – i.e., infallible. Things, however legally, scientifically, or logically absurd, become fact simply by his saying so. It’s his “right.”

Hmmmm….. If it’s illegal (I speak only of legality here, not morality) to have sex with a child younger than a certain age, why is it legal – in the face of the assertion’s utter impossibility - to assure him that the World Trade Center was destroyed with controlled demolition by the United States Government? How about my using my stature as a celebrity of one kind or the other to assure the ignorant and uninformed – the indigent and poor, for instance – that federal spending on Iraq (only for instance) has no bearing on his taxes, his chances of medical care for his children, or the like? Incapable of the simplest interest calculation, with no idea whatever how – the process both legally, and procedurally - a dollar comes to be, or why, and how its value is derived, what is the individual’s responsibility to others when discussing the economy?

Totally ignorant of anything having to do with warfare, military tactics, the Tactical Numerical Deterministic Model, Vegetius, Saxe, Clausewitz, Frederick the Great, or even the history of numerous battles, what is the social responsibility of the individual when discussing the supposed reasons for our having invaded? For leaving or staying? For assessing the strategic, tactical, political, societal, national, and moral meanings of “victory” and “defeat?”

Inasmuch as no rational person can doubt that were Iran to attack and attempt to destroy Israel, we would totally destroy Iran, what is all the jingoist blabber by neo-conservatism, and the hand-wringing tut-tutting of the knee-jerk liberal really about? Having been told categorically that Iran’s security and continued existence is directly dependent upon that of Israel, why would – how would Iran dare – attack Israel?

Oh, yeah, I hear you. You really believe that Moslems who knew there would be no one left to practice their beloved religion or worship their beloved prophet and “Allah” would attack, anyway? You’re not “ratiocinating.” You’re not free, either.

So, in answer to Steve and several others, if there were one thing I could do in an effort to restore our country to its erstwhile greatness, it would be to restore a sense of responsibility in the individual. There’s a mental experiment most will still be able to handle. Create a truth serum equivalent, a responsibility serum, in the life of every citizen, see what happens.

And, as anthropologist Margaret Mead once observed, "Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it is the only thing that ever has."