Considerations & Probes

It used to be both a luxury and a gift-light to future human progress, to ponder that which was forbidden by society's institutions: gov't, church, school, media. But on today's ever-more fragile planet, such mental exploration has become a desperate duty to the human family — since we will not survive much longer without it.

The growth of devastating modern weaponry (H-bombs and ever-more refined and munificently-supported mind-manipulation by TV 'snews and polls) has an unconsidered but obvious and ironclad historically-new consequence:
without external help, the “people” — even a massive populist army of 2nd Amendment-worshippers — will have no chance to overthrow the US gov't if that gov't continues down into the black-hole of oligarchical-tyranny slave-statism.

RichRig:
The US superrich rulership has created a politics&media world in which only the rich need apply for office.
So, any populist candidate who asks a fair shake for the poor is either:
[1] too poor to win or
[2] so rich that the media will (too often justly) smear his advocacy for the poor as hypocricy.

Choices That Kill Choices — Who're They Really Pumping?:
The choice to occupy Iraq is fishier than the choice to invade. The US' announced purpose for pre-emption was WMD-elimination, so why didn't the US leave when nothing was found? — or go the Santo-Domingo-election route by junking Saddam and leaving the Iraqis to find a leader who'd play ball with the US? (I.e., keep invading until Iraq gets it right.) Theory: the actual purpose was less to pump oil than to pump money: to shovel trillions (see below) into a skim-off business-environment so that merely 1% CPA-legerdemain (in fixed accounting books) would yield secret funds in the tens of billions, which could then indefinitely control US politics — and thereby rule a mysteriously heavy-debtor nation. (Hint to the naïve: the average kickback rate in the US is an ordmag higher than 1%.) There's nothing subtle about it:
[1] Vice Cheney's connexions to prime pumper Halliburton.
[2] In a nation whose citizens are far more concerned with a desperate economy than war, warbucks rule anyway: all four 2008 candidates for President (Clinton, Obama, and the bipartisan-siamese-twin named McCain-Lieberman) man the fiscal faucet called the Senate Armed Services Committee. And, while the Orwellian fourth estate brain-washes cheering mobs of newly-registered young sheeple to buy the ever-more-expensive cruel joke that the four candidates represent a meaningfully large range of options on continuing the Iraq-pump, the combined total number of votes by all four against a single dollar of the ordmag trillion pumped so-far, is: zero. As Plunkitt's shade would say with a smile, observing the globalist-lobby-picked faucet-foursome: the US is an electoral you-decide democracy, so TAKE YOUR CHOICE.
[It used to be that governors (with executive experience) were more likely to become presidents. But in a nation controlled by ever larger torrents of federal lucre, those at the faucet will increasingly be ever “fortunate” enough to be somehow-magically backed by such massive fiscal resources as to hold permanent sway.]

Mental Life and Death:
What do analogy and death have in common?

Parole Boards as Educators:
Parole boards claim to hand out mercy but are in reality the Trial Lawyers Assn's left arm in springing criminals. (Which is why these pliable boards are one of the few entities you can't get lawyers to sue.) Insiders know that the boards' function is privately defended otherwise, namely: to prevent the intolerable blight of jail-crowding. But the greatest danger of parole may not have been previously understood: when starting lives of crime, many criminals are caught by witnesses. So they learn from experience: don't leave witnesses. Think that might have some effect on the murder rate?
[And there are other reasons to permanently lock up career criminals at the 1st jailable offense: once someone has been in jail, he's got rage, new criminal pals, and a hard time finding non-criminal work when released — so his tendency to crime is not muted but accelerated.]

Death Penalty & the Maiden:
What has the death penalty to do with women's freedom? These days, plenty. In case no one's noticed, Roman church rejection of the death penalty for murderers and other creeps (a view now dominating the majority-Catholic EU) began as part of its attempt to look consistent about abortion — since opposition to family planning and so returning women to baby-factorydom is the Roman church's sole realistic hope of reverting western humanity to one-religion Dark-Ages bliss as of yore.
[At least give the Romans credit for being openly anti-women's rights. The rest of the establishment has let women's access to abortion atrophy, without (outside of the Bush gang) hinting that this is deliberate. See DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §E2 [p.116].]

The Oil Lobby's Idea of an Exit Strategy:
If the US oil-greed gang were really aiming to help US oil-availability — as it claimed, to justify war — then why didn't its “US” Army just knock off former puppet Saddam and leave saying we'll-be-back if you don't get set up a more compliant puppet. A more effective plan. But also cheaper, which is a downside for cliques whose lifesblood is kickbacks. So: was the dominant purpose (from day-one) of the occupation of Iraq actually just to stay&stay, while the US (oil-cartel) gov't pours billions of China-loaned money into the Halliburton funnel with Cheney's fixing-the-books skimming cronies at the exit-end, so that these funds' subsidization of political candidates will ensure energy-lobby control of the US indefinitely? — (Until the Chinese bankers now funding the Iraqmire take over the US financially.)

Perhaps this process is not entirely accidental. Other nations (such as China and-or Japan), faced with huge US arms dominance, might figure that — rather than engaging in arms competition — why not just let the US go Pentagon-fangs-broke and then buy up the US with the money saved by not building super-arms. After all, if you finally control US business and (thus) Congress, then you control “US” weapons. (Which are already presently owned not by the US but by the international oil-lobby.)

Based upon DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §G4 [p.14]:
While wincing at the shams in what popularly passes for democracy, one should be at least cautious about desiring instant pure democracy in the US, considering what the US public would do to the Bill of Rights if it could. (Polls indicate it would be more than 2/3 dismantled if put to popular vote.) Certainly, one would like a fuller slate than the pair we get to choose from in our Plunkittesque US Presidential “elections”. And no election should be regarded as valid that does not have a none-of-the-above lever. But then one realizes what sort would win here in a truly open contest. President Elvis? Lucky he's alive to accept.

DIO's President-Elvis-for-Life Ploy Finally Catches On:
Al Franken has now publicly noted (e.g., CNN 2006/11/25 18:44EST) the (technical) feasibility of the same slimy scheme we published eight years earlier (DIO 8.2 [1998] ‡5 §H16 [p.52]), showing how to side-step the 22nd Amendment's constraints, so the US can elevate BJClinton to President-For-Life:

BJC just keeps running as Veep (every 4 years) on successive Dem Presidential tickets headed by great comedians like Jay Leno, Jonathan Winters, or Maxine Waters — where it's pre-understood that the President-elect steps aside right after inauguration to let the public keep enjoying the lovable Elvis-clone it craves.

Wonder What Happened to Idealism?
What is the social use of having (all but pre-rich) students go hugely into debt just to become educated? — inevitably making potential idealists become desperately grasping, just to survive. Evidently, this is the society which a greed-motivated leadership decrees: modelling youth after itself.

Effete Dembos & Nouveau Dumbos:
Perhaps the political gulf between old-rich & new-rich arises from differing projections. The former's pleasant life-style & resultant generous nature wishes a similar fate upon all, while the latter wish that all earn happiness only through their own darwinian travail.

Despite the fatal instabilities implicit in egalitarian, communist, socialist, and truly democratic societies, they have the merit of at least temporarily lowering the size and desperation of capitalist societies' immortal slums. When observing capitalist media coverage of communist nations such as the USSR and East Germany, notice that this point tends not to get mentioned.

Some Coincidences:
[1] The brother of Afghanistan's President lives in Baltimore.
[2] Since travel by-sea is far cheaper than by-rail, Baltimore's eminence as a port is based on its proximity (relative to Philadelphia or NYC) to the US' heartland, ideal for cross-US distribution of an Atlantic-entering commodity.
[3] Value-wise, the main export of Afghanistan is opium→heroin.
[4] Baltimore has the highest rate of heroin addiction in the US.

World History Via Follow-the-Money: From The Enlightenment and the Nobility of WW2
—to a Drugged-Out Planet:
During the 18th century Enlightenment, it became hoped that humanity would become more rational. However, money runs the real world, and the biggest money has always been in three industries: arms, slavery (cheap labor and armies), & drugs.
Ever-Bigger Big-Pharma runs health-claiming drugs. (Which increasingly flow through the vessels of folks who have little or zero idea-of or interest-in the long-term synergistic effects of intervention-tampering with the well-designed bods they inherited from eons of Evolution.) Tobacco runs legal drugs-for-highs. Mobsters run the less lethal but more profitable illegal branch of same.
It used to be predicted that the 1st US president to be elected by mob money wouldn't know it until the bill was handed to him. (It was probably JFK, son of a booz-runner and serial fletcher of mob-molls.) This saying's public disappearance of late is the best evidence that it's already happened and that drug wealth will become ever more dominant: drug money is just too enormous not to control US politics — yet another obvious truth that is (ominously) not mentioned by TV 'snews.
[Note that “annual illegal drug profits in the US are ordmag 1000~times the combined (official) salaries of all of the 435 US Congressmen (who write ‘our’ laws). So, does Congress rule vice? Or vice, versa?” (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 n.5 [p.4].) Which explain much — including why drugs will remain outlawed: given how cheap drugs are to produce, the illegality (and maintaining a cartel that owns or restricts most of a society's weapons — either through international arms control or domestic gun control) is essential to the big profits and the corruption that translates into power. (Ibid ‡ §A5 & n.4 [p.3].)
One might also, e.g., explore the nowadays-superheresy of pondering whether (given exploited blacks' persistent statistical per-capita hyper-vulnerability to drug addiction) inner-city welfare-AFDC “generosity” and the primed social movement culminating in the “Great Society” were not encouraged politically by re-cycled mafia money generated from drug-profits. (Just as tobacco money was key to the 1970s launching of MS magazine — and the ascent of women's tennis. Same today for those pols pushing US marriage to drug-running Mexico.) Blacks — originally brought to the US by vile WASP slavers — are now invaluable golden-goose mafia-druglord-fodder — not to mention near-robotic bloc-voters for the Dembos. All of which could help account for why blacks are at present so frantically protected by media-PC-witch-hunts — and so glorified in the pop “music” world and in a 5th-estate Hollywood long dominated by mob-money-funnelers like Ronald Reagan's close pal-promoters Lew Wasserman and Sydney Korchak. (The latter was supervisor of “legit” enterprises started by Murder Inc founder Longy Zwillman. Korshak was also sometime sugar daddy to sometime Sec'y of State Henry S. Kissinger's sometime companion, Jill Oppenheim [St.John].) See Gus Russo's revelatory book Supermob, Bloomsbury, NYC 2006.) This, to a sometimes ludicrous extent, such as injecting a brains-of-the-operation black adviser to Robin in the film Robin Hood! — an anachronism for 12th century Sherwood Forest that barfed-out even Time's reviewer by its o-wise-one excesses). Such efforts presumably help account for why polls both here and abroad find that the public thinks the black fraction of the US population is about 1/3 — more than twice as large as it actually is.]
An obnoxiously ubiquitous plurality of TV ads are by Big Pharma. Much popular music (especially 'rap) — when it isn't purely about sex — glamorizes→pushes drugs. So most parental no-no advice to kids today is: how to fend-off the pushers that infest their [?] own schools, since schools have become to druggies what hospitals are to staph: breeders. Hmmm. Is this the US future which the heroes of WW2 died to preserve?)
Two of the last three US wars protected drug-pushers (the Afghan instance continues); the other (Iraq), protects oil-pushers — and is being fought by yet another addiction: the Islam opiate.

Rationalists tend to realize clearly that religion is merely the muddled-brain clan's transformation of wish into belief. Yet there are numerous issues where a similar confusion occurs.
[1] Most veggies believe that eating animals is unhealthy and unethical, though the neither claim follows from the other.
[Is it just a coincidence that unethical food is also poisonous? Or did god make it so? Or what?]
[2] “Pro-Lifers” claim that abortion brutalizes society. Yet abortion-permissive nations (& neighorhoods) have lower violence rates. [DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 n.15 [p.115]: “If promoting abortion is such a brutalizing, murder-engendering way of life, then: [a] Why have all the shootings (so far) in the current US controversy been by the ‘pro-life’ side? [b] Why are the nations where abortion is most taken for granted (the protestant nations of N.Europe) the very ones with the lowest rates of wifebeating and murder? [c] Why (and how) have questions [a]&[b] been virtually banned from public US~discussion — here, in the Land of the Free Press and the Home of the Brave Pols?”]
[3] Capital punishment and torture are often alleged to be ineffective. Perhaps they are, but one can suspect that much of the opposition arguments are inspired by revulsion not logic — again, a possible confusion of rightness and efficacy.
[4] An egalitarian society is a laudable ideal, but would such also be happy and productive simply because we might wish it so?
[5] Is discerning truth conducive to a better humanity?

Pearl Harbor Two: “Greater Mid-East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”:
Despite not being a sneak attack (quite to the contrary), the US invasion of Iraq was a 2nd Pearl Harbor — with the US playing the Japanese.
[a] Both aggressions were masked as altruistic. Hirohito's & Tojo's Japanese Empire pretended that invasion of China was an Asia-for-the-Asians move, to create a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. Millions died while Japan grabbed their wealth.
[b] Both invasions were triggered by desperation for oil — despite obvious intelligently-predicted disastrous consequences for the invader's long-term future.

Global Tyranny Spirals Down Into the Future:
Globalism is turning into world slavery due to the growing impossibility of non-catastrophic revolution, now that “democratic” oligarchies sit self-satisfied atop over-kill arsenals of mega-weapons, increasingly acting with the citizen-detached arrogance of Boss Tweed's whatayagonnadoaboutit.
This will indeed suppress populism for quite awhile. But it will also ensure that an ultimate genuine populist revolt can only succeed by catastrophic terrorism.

Is the US public seen by the gov't as just a big dumb born-oil-rich kid, who thinks he can drive SUVs and not have to fight a war for the oil?

The rise of the West to world-dominance has been based partly upon a social-empathetic-sacrificial tendency in its upper-middle citizenry. However, with fewer and brighter rulers enabled by military and psychological science to rule the world ever more efficiently (vs the cohesive guilds, democracies, armies, and movements of former times), is the high-IQ East's primacy dawning?

Keeping Us in Suspended Sents-of-Proportion:
Two practices have changed in the injustices system within the last few generations, and present standards help explain today's corruption:
[1] Given its minuscule rate of application (under 1%), the death penalty is dead — except as a living, thriving, nay immortal money cow for lawyers.
[2] Scandals involving those with access to power are characterized by a nearly air-tight-reliable feature, which DR finds himself mumbling whenever biggies (like Cheney-fallguy Libby) get caught doing something awful: “Nobody will go to jail.” Examples:
[a] On 2002/7/1, Swiss air-traffic controllers' screwups killed vacationing Russian families: 71 people. After 5 years of massive lawyer-fees, all those convicted were just fined and given suspended (if any) jail-sentences.
[c] Recently, a scheming, med-junkie jerkess (A.Seiler, Univ.Wisconsin-Madison student) tried to win her boyfriend back by deliberately, elaborately faking kidnap-victimhood, wasting not only a great deal of an illustrious city's time and money but hurting good people's sense of fairness — and perhaps the likelihood that they would in the future so unselfishly help searching for victims of genuine crimes. Court decision: suspended sentence, zero jail time.
[d] But it isn't all bleak. The cynics aren't always right. There's hope out there. Take the case of Mike N, the D.A. who hid evidence to put away Duke athletes maybe for decades in jail on a phony rape charge. He was convicted of his crimes in 2007. And the fellow-lawyer-klan judge nailed him good: a whole day in jail. Seeeeeeeeeee.

Has anyone tried to measure what percentage of spoiled children got so because one or both parents fell in love with them?

The Elite's Idea of MoveOn?
If use of mercenaries (“contractors”) in Iraq is eventually deemed too expensive (though congressmen must swoon at the size of the kickbacks), is the return of the draft (to supply needed IED-fodder) inevitable? — but being left for the (theatrically anti-elitist) Dembos to effect, in order to keep up the pretense of a difference between the two parties?

YOU-DECIDE Theatre — Electoral Choice 1964 to 2006:
[Stated 2006 Oct. Written 2006/11/14. Posted 11/30.] In 1964, YOU GOT TO VOTE — for or against the war in Vietnam.
The Dumbos (Goldwater) said they were for war. And they were for war.
The Dembos (Johnson) said they were for peace. And they were for war.
Do the 2006 elections suggest that the public is still buying the same act?
[Whether one is for or against the Iraq War Occupation, the phoniness of the public's 2006 “choice” on this issue makes an even bigger joke of what (since FDR) has long been a larf, anyway: US “democracy”. (And the 70%-against-the-invasion public will get to choose between two [probably New York] hawks in 2008.) Those who imagine the Dembos represent a more pacifist path might recall that it was their most spiritual elder statesman (the sweetest of them all, according to the unerringly consistent refrain of the Free Press we're supposed to trust), Rockefeller-interests-backed Prez Jimmy Trilateral-Commission Carter, who — when he wasn't busy helping the airline cartel kill off Freddy Laker's budget Skytrain, or congratulating the tobacco industry for making cigarettes “even safer” than ever — was toasting the oil-cartel-imposed secret-police-torture-based Shah “of Iran” and launching the Afghan anti-USSR guerilla movement (Bin Laden & co) that bore its inevitable fruit on 2001/9/11.]
The crock-teary Dembos keep claiming they're awful-frustrated about how they can't get enough of those awful Dumbos aboard, to get a veto-proof resolution to stop that awful war, etc, etc. Early on in pre-Broadway run of these theatrics, a few Dumbo spokesmen blurted out the obvious: all the Dembos gotta do is NOTHING. If senators just stay home and don't vote — for President Shrubya's requests to shovel hundreds of billions more into the Iraq money-pit, the war stops. (So it's up to the Free-snicker-Press to keep pumping up the canard that all those shrinking-violet con-men in Congress are afraid that the public will think any such action is letting-down-the-troops! — this while over 2/3 of both public and soldiers don't want the war. Is there any limit to the US presstitutes' brass-galls?)
Not only does this expose the Dembos' pacifist act for the fake it is, but the almost immediate disappearance of such blunt GOP snickers reveals that the Dumbos are conspiratorially on-board-cooperating in this “bipartisan” sham.

Doctored Strangevote:
Returning (2007/10/2) to the foregoing 2006 Fall prediction (also 2007 Jan followup details) — after the better part of a year of watching the Free-snicker-Press whore for their corporate-establishment owners by avoiding the simple point that exposes the Dembos' pseudo-pacifism for the mass-murder-conniving fake it is — DR wonders: what is the image the FsP is trying to project here?
TV 'snews repeatedly describes the massively bankrolled Dembos as poor confused chaps, who just can't risk offending the public by letting-down “our” oil-cartel army by not funding it. (Buying such press doesn't come cheaper than any other slimy dreamup-team lawyer-fantasy.) The at-heart-pacifist-but-irrepressibly-voting-for-war concoction the greedia keeps promoting reminds one of Stanley Kubick's Dr.Strangelove, who kept trying to be sweet and civil — but just couldn't-help-himself from being seized by a militarist salute whenever the real conqueror-beneath joyfully broke through.

HillaBritney Clinton:
An equally funny wolf-in-sheep's-clothing media-covered-for “contradiction” is Hilla the Hun (as BJClinton calls The Boss). She spent all 2007 explaining-away her vote for the Iraq invasion: if she'd only known what bad-Bush was going to do, etc. Then — when the Cheney-into-Iran Enabling-Act vote came up at the end of Sept — Oops, I did-it-again.

I am therefore I think.
(DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §C6 [p.115].)
What is conscious existence without thought?
But, conversely, doesn't the existence of dreams — not to mention robots & computers — establish that one can have thought without what we would regard as full — or even any — consciousness?

Can Ahnold Make It a ThreeFah?:
Think that Bush's Irag bloodmire is unique in “counter”-attacking a nation that didn't attack him? Well, it isn't often remembered that G.Princip, who (1914/6/28) assassinated the Austrian heir Franz Ferdinand — triggering WW1 and 10 million dead — was a Bosniak, and was an Austrian not Serbian subject (though of Serb associations), who shot FF in the capital of Bosnia (part of Austria's empire), not Serbia. (According to the Serbs, Princip had been ejected from Serbia as a dangerous person — but had been welcomed into Austria.) Austria then made ten intrusive demands upon Serbia, and arrogantly ordered instant and all-ten compliance, obviously aiming to use the Sarajevo incident as a pretext to try expanding into an area of Russian hegemony. (And Czar Nicky2 wasn't about to tolerate hegemony-shrinkage, any more than Abe Lincoln would. Lincoln launched the bloody US War Between the States over hegemony, and [a-là-Bush] only thought-up the slavery-issue as the war-justification later-on, when matters were in a bad way.) All of which in 1914 led to a war launched by doddering 84y-old Emperor Franz Joseph 1.
[Though Austria has many memorials to “Franz Joseph 1”, the war ensured there was never an FJ2. FF's death was one of several cases in which traveling members of his family were killed:
brother Max, and wife Sisi. (A zero in life, Sisi has become a cult legend after death,. An entire museum exists in her honor at Vienna's Hofburg. Have cultists noted that the inversion of her name is ISIS?)]
Germany is generally regarded as the precipitator. (And ultimately was the nation that most insisted upon war.) But note that it was Austria not Germany that was (then) a large, expansionist empire. And had been so throughout FJ's record-long 68y-rulership (1848-1916). In the 1860s, FJ had even tried (vainly) to grab Mexico! And in the 1870s, Austria went to the Arctic to claim the northern-most land in the Eastern Hemisphere (frozen Franz Josef Land).
[Austria's expansionism here included sighting non-existent lands beyond 83°N, plus Payer's claim of actually reaching land at 82°05N. Yet no part of Franz Josef Land is north of 81°51'N. (Nonetheless, the Encyclopaedia Britannica accepted the 82°05N figure at least into the 1960s, even while displaying the real Franz Josef Land in a map adjacent to the obsolete text.)]
But Austria had customarily (and more successfully, up to 1914) grown simply by devouring its more primitive neighbors in the Balkans — and was trying to do so yet again in 1914 when it invaded Serbia. (Who turned out not to be so backward as anticipated and were putting up a strong fight against FJ until Germany took over the Teutonic side of WW1.) It will be equally obvious to future historians that Bush used 9/11 to make a grab for oil. Anyway, if this precipitates World War 3, we might at last have ourselves a world war not started by an Austrian. Could be a first.
Could be. But we have an intriguing precedent-echo possibility here. Hitler was an Austrian immigrant into Germany, which didn't bar foreign natives from being TopGuy, like the US does. So, should the US change its rules — and invite a high-testosterone-plus-chemicals macho Austria-born Kahlifornya Führenator to lead the nation into the future; and perhaps make it three-for-three for Austrians?
As Britain's Sir Edward Grey, Sec'y of State for Foreign Affairs, predicted (1914/7/23 letter to Brit Amb at Vienna — a warning as explicit and as vain as DIO's on parallel disaster-inviting folly), WW1 “swept away” Europe's gentility, stability, gov'ts, empires (and produced Stalin and Hit&Muss). Final irony: Austria was trying to add a few percent to its population by [a] welcoming desperate immigrants (like Princip) and [b] haughtily dominating its backward neighbors. By the end of the Great War, with its empire dismantled, it had lost 90% of its subjects and remains today just a postage-stamp remnant of the once-great empire whose fabulous riches and culture nourished such geniuses as Schrödinger and (Czech-born) Mahler.

WW2 began not in 1941 or even 1939 but on 1931/9/18, at the Mukden railway station in Manchuria, when the Japanese army created an incident to excuse its rapid aggressive conquest of Manchuria, placing on the throne deposed Chinese Emperor Piu (see the remarkable Bertolucci 1987 film, Last Emperor) as a “native” puppet. (Which fooled no-one.) The key historical lesson here can be absorbed by noting that Mukden was an act committed independently of the elected Japanese parliament. As the US watches its army trashing Iraq with nearly nil popular support, are we seeing an essential replay — with the superficial difference that, this time around, the puppet-show is Congress. (Which should be fooling no-one.)

Confederate Math Was National Math: 60% = Zero:
Is it true that the slave states got to count slaves as 3/5 of a person when figuring their proportional representation in Congress, even while these same slaves were not allowed to vote? — or even to leave the plantation without permission, etc.
As soon as you've gotten steamed up about south'n math (nationally assented-to for nearly a century) which made 60% = zero, ask yourself why the Free Press is still so unconcerned that [since US women had no vote until the 20th century] parallel but even worse Gender-Math (100% = zero) out-endured Confederate Math by half-a-century — and no longer cares (or even bothers to point out) that while the Constitution has justly had a racial equal-rights amendment for nearly 1 1/2 centuries, the establishment still feels no impulse towards enacting a gender equal-rights amendment.
Nor have we heard about women being the beneficiaries of academic grade-“norming” — along the lines of the much-belated revelations during the 1990s, that colleges had long been quietly adding c.200 points to SAT scores, for the achievement of counting oneself as a member of a race.

One of DR's favorite math branches is sph trig (orig. c.2nd century BC), which requires depth-perception. But where did such perception come from? Answer: man is a hunter. (Walleyed vision is for the prey-animals' defense against hunters.) Natural selection gave hunters binocular vision to attack & kill mobile prey. Thus, sph trig and similar math and science developed atop a massive pile of corpses of painfully terminated prey-animals. Expanding such realization: the Library at Alexandria and the city's associated burst of learning in the 2nd century BC, were built by the wealth that Alexander's army looted from the East's riches, at the cost of the destruction of thousands of limbs, loves, & lives.
But just as evil can produce good, the converse can also occur. In the 20th century, idealists got alcohol nationally outlawed and made sure that no matter how many illegitimate children a woman bore, the state would (barely) support them. Combining the resultant pressures with massive immigration, the upshot was a bonanza for the mafia.
DR is not against idealism, but tries to keep (reminding do-gooders not to give idealism a bad name by pursuing chimeras or goals that seem good-for-their-owm-sake — without thinking out the consequences.

Question:
Why do the US-media's drumbeat pro-affirmative-action complaints always concern an ethnic group's hugely disproportionate under-representation (in a given societal sphere) — but almost never a group's hugely disproportionate over-representation?
Think about it.

And shoulder-chip lobbies' aff-act complaints are often suspiciously narrow in focus. E.g., the women's movement complains of salary discrepancies, but not about higher male insurance and imprisonment rates. (See DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 n.6 [p.91]. See also “The Inequity Inequity” on the following page, regarding press-ignored legitimate female mistreatment.) Likewise, blacks complain of negative stereotypes, yet fail to note contra-evidence — nor that stereo-typing is often simply human reason dealing with statistical evidence (such as rates of crime, pimping, & drug-peddling), and that what the press labels as prejudice is often postjudice.

US Foreign Policy: Full-Circle Logic and Full-Cycle Funding:
On MS-NBC (2007/1/19) a Lib defended Kennedy's then-recent arranging to obtain cheap oil (for poor USers) from Venezuela's evil PrezChavez (identified [dissentlessly] during the exchange as a “real jerk” who has “said bad things” about the holy US). He pointed out that, after all, oil companies (Mobil-Exxotter, etc) deal with Chavez etc. But Wash Post insider David Ignatius (on whose prescience, see Alex Cockburn Nation 2007/1/1 p.8) objected that Kennedy shouldn't be emulating oil companies, which are “amoral”. Comments:
[a] The oil cartel now runs the US via PrezCheney, whose pal Halliburton can easily skim millions from Iraq funding, for recycling back into the political process. buying yet more TV 'snews “commentators” to PiedPipe the public into electing those who will even further enrich the same Cheney-circle skimmers. (Wars have corrupted conquering nations thusly at least since Caesar.) So Ignatius is letting slip that: US foreign policy is amoral. (As if this is news, to a world observing Cheney-Bush in action.)
[b] The reason unanimously stated (during this MS-NBC exchange) for deeming Chavez a bad-guy is that he's criticized a nation whose foreign policy is (as Ignatius is obviously aware) guided by brutal, bloody amorality.

Wood-Chipper As Lie-Detector:
While it's obvious that the whole Iraq invasion was based on lies, the truth behind the US' interminable Iraqmire has remained elusive. Perhaps Iraq's Prez Nuri Kamal al-Maliki has (2007/1/17 — in desperation for his life) blown it open, through his seemingly reasonable request that Bush back up the US' longtime-mantra announced hope for a phased Iraq gov't take-over, by supplying weapons to that gov't. Problem: in too many previous cases, the US supplied weapons to temporary Muslim friends (Bin-Laden, Saddam) which ended up being shot back at US soldiers. Twice bit, the US is now more cautious — but, then: how can the new gov't survive?
Is this the kernel of the whole Iraq-disaster's mystery-intractability? — accidentally exposed to the world by an understandably desperate puppet. As the wood-chipper looms.

Will the US Empire Last for 535 Centuries?:
The following material on&of Edward Gibbon are based upon DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §C [p.77].

Instead of catering to the passing propaganda-fashions which bound ordinary scholars' effusions, the immortal historian Gibbon strove for truth & fairness — which is why his classic work Decline & Fall of the Roman Empire now hugely outshines others of his day, even despite centuries of attempted suppression. Indeed, his work had the special distinction of being on the Vatican Index of Prohibited Books (Index Librorum Prohibitorum Vatican City, 1948 ed., p.190) starting on 1783/9/26, five years before the work's serial publication was completed, in 1788!
[The Index is no longer published, being such an embarrassingly clumsy expression of the Church's continued program, of thought-control domination of its subjects, that it has lately been thoroughly Memory-Holed. Indeed, one might say that, today (for now), the only book effectively prohibited to Catholics is: the Index of Prohibited Books.
The perverse irony here is similar to the history-of-astronomy Muffia's reaction to R.Newton's book, The Crime of Claudius Ptolemy (Johns Hopkins Univ 1977): in Hist.sci, there is no such thing as crime! Except using the word “crime”. Said Alice-in-Wonderland inversion reminds one of Tom Lehrer's wry comment on the nutty wing of feminism. Lehrer recollected that, when he was a boy, there were certain words you couldn't say in front of a girl; but, now, the only word you can't say is: “girl”. (These bracketed notes are based upon DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡3 §C10 & n.32 [p.31].)]

Gibbon Chap.35, discussing the mid-5th century AD, said to be the end of 12th century after Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome:

As early as the time of Cicero and Varro it was the opinion of the Roman augurs that the twelve vultures which Romulus had seen, represented the twelve centuries assigned for the fatal period of his city…. But [Rome's] fall was announced by a clearer omen than the flight of vultures: the Roman government appeared every day … less formidable to its enemies, more odious and oppressive to its subjects. The taxes were multiplied with the public distress; economy was neglected in proportion as it became necessary; and the injustice of the rich shifted the unequal burden from themselves to the people…. If all the barbarian [terrorists] had been annihilated in the same hour, their total destruction would not have restored the empire of the West: and if Rome still survived, she survived the loss of freedom, of virtue, and of honour.

Rasputin to RussPutin:
As the US public increasingly senses that something has gone terribly wrong with the nation's direction, how long will it take to become aware that this is related to the fact that the gov't is out-of-citizen-control: it has all the weapons physical, fiscal, and psychological, to do what it likes to the public.
[One need only look at the present (and still evolving) state of another mob-influenced nation, full-circle Czarussia→USSRussia→SorryRussia (bottom-line: Rasputin→Putin), to see what a totalitarian gov't with no socialist commitment whatever to the public weal can turn into.]

God Could Not Suicide Even If He Existed
— But: Can Evil?:
Human exploitation cannot end — until it produces non-human robots to replace rulers' slaves.

Why do high-fashist-designed runway-robot super-muddles increasingly exhibit zombie-faces and zombie-walks? Suggestion:
Any super-muddle who doesn't take drugs is suspect of not being wealthy enough to buy them. (Which translates into: Failure!) So: best fake it, to help hurry that happy day when Success renders the reality affordable.

DR accepts that baseball legend Joe Jackson (who at least was privy to the 1919 World Series fix and probably took $5000 from gamblers) and Pete Rose (given what NYYankee Tom Henrich told DR) and Nobelist Barry Bonds ought to be barred from the Hall of Fame. But those who think Black-Soxer Jackson, even while hitting .375 (tops of all 1919 Series regulars) was picking his spots (to throw the Series to the Reds) are claiming more than they know. Let's say that JJ was deliberately holding-back on the half of his at-bats when it mattered. OK, then he actually batted .750 when he wanted to hit?! — the highest regular-player Series average in history. In which case, he ought to be in the Hall just for that. I.e., this history is one that doesn't need improvment.

Catches of the Post-New-Deal Era:
The theory of republican gov't is that wiser-than-the-populace but populace-elected “representatives” should guide a gov't.
The obvious catch in the US today: pols represent populace-exploiting lobbies instead of the populace, because said lobbies can buy media-lords who are far more likely to get pol-puppets elected (and ignore or — if necessary, trash-smear — honest populists), than is genuine service to the electorate.
[In the era of the New Deal, numerous pols felt that they ought to listen primarily to their constituents' needs. Was Claude Pepper the last of the breed finally to die off?]

The theory of capitalism is the truth that greed can be productive. The catch is that science (polling, TV, psychology) has increased greed's mass-dominative, gov't-corrupting, and physically-destructive powers — to planet-threatening proportions.
[The most obvious and long-standing theory-vs-practice contrast: When capital hyper-accumulates, it is inevitably used to buy the gov't's legislators and regulators. New Deal gov't attempted to prevent that — and actually established a “Brain Trust” to achieve a gov't responsive to civic concerns. Seems like ancient history, in a day when the likes of Donovan, Pena, Rove, Cheney, et ilk are considered rulership material.]

The Cheney TickerTape-Parade and the Suzette-Charles FailSafe Factor:
Given the taped-up state of Cheney's putative heart, and the queue of Dems who'll be next (or next-next, etc) in-line if the tape fails, has it been realized that Legacy-President GeeWhizBush (aka [here] as Shrubya), now could be just a ticker-beat away from an impeachment-lynching?
[But such a glad vision might best be brought up against reality: why should the Dembos go-to-the-mattresses with the Dumbos, when their mutual court-room theatre project — the visible [puppet-show] part of the US' gov't-by-lobby — is making both parties rich beyond even their greediest youthful dreams?]

Hollywood East
— US Gov't Sets New Theatrical Record in Election-Proof Leveraging:
One has seen in the past where items like Senate pay-raise bills are voted into law by getting just barely the vote needed, from the 2/3 of the Senate that's not about to run for re-election. But we have never before seen the audacity of the beyond-Mel-Brooks comedy that opens in Washington on 2007/1/20, as the Dembos take over Congress. Now, the entire gov't (the WHOLE of Congress [outside of Kucinich and a handful of others]) is pander-pretending to want to bring troops back from the Middle East (counter to the wishes of the very lobbies [oil, globalist, weapons, Jewish, etc] that fund their elections), thus letting not just a few election-proof pols dictate policy — but now just ONE election-proof pol: George Bush. Don't miss the bombastic posturing, the non-binding resolutions, the pseudo-arguments, the conveniently-paralytic factions-within-factions — the play-acting gets more refined every week.
So who says the arts are dying? [Written 2007/1/20. Posted 1/29-30.]

Those who cry-racist loudest are generally more racist than their slanderees. They get away with it because their racism is obsession-love of self rather than obsessive-hate of others.
But: wasn't the narcissism of WW2 Germany and Japan as integral a cause of mass-murder as race-hatred?
[Group-hate oft arises out of paranoia. But group-self-love's preferential behavior can cause (and sometimes accurately justify) that very paranoia in those outside the group.]

The Censorship-of-Givenness — Double-Inverse of Openminded Investigation — One Secret of Why Things Stay the Same:
Most of those who look for answers to social questions do so while simultaneously accepting orthodox Givens which have (for consecutive decades) silently converted those questions into (conventional) answers. Not only is this the opposite of investigation, but — ironically — the process often implies-ensures an outcome that is opposite to the investigator's own desire.
(Which is why so many social “realists” end up being seen [only in retrospect, because their givens are protected by press self-censorship] to have been dangerous fantasizers.) E.g.,
[a] If the two-party system is presumed while one is seeking paths towards ending corrupt oligarchical (effectively dictatorial) US rulership, the effort is doomed.
[Multiple parties at least allow clear position-taking. But insincerity is guaranteed by party-line issue-coalition platforms. (See also the Mencken Notebooks item #343: H.L.Mencken Minority Report [Knopf 1956] Johns Hopkins 1997 pp.229-230.)]
[b] If one is unwilling to discuss control of the poor's reproduction at the outset of an attempt to improve the world's future, a disastrous end-result is automatically certain.
[From DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §D4 [p.13]:
Why not … [ensure] that the children of the next US generation are born predominantly into caring, decent homes — rather than our going on inertially accepting (as faits accompli) birth after birth to poor, semi-literate, and-or addict parents living in hopeless slums, so that we must forever be trying to patch up (belatedly) the inevitable resulting disaster: illiteracy, crime, drugs, and the whole by-now-drearily-familiar show? (What would we think of the Dutch people's smarts, if they'd never built dikes but instead just tried bailing the sea out of Holland forever?)]
[c] If continuation of race-preference schemes are considered a higher priority than the elimination of poverty (DR's crucial-test for detecting robotic Dembos), then Affirmative Action etc will be a rigid Given — and the last half-century of ghetto-anti-poverty efforts could spin wheels to eternity, accomplishing nought beyond perpetual friction and frustration.
[We don't know for certain. But, as with global warming: why GAMBLE civilization's future by going down a risky path? — especially if extrication is ever more difficult the further one goes. The crucial-test question, which separates racism from mercy: if (purely hypothetically, you understand) there were a program which would cure poverty but had (as a sad-effect) the lowering of the US' fraction of blacks, would you accept it? (One-drop-American-Indian DR would readily accept a lowering of proportions of Indians or caucasians or whatevers, if it helped wipe out poverty.)
DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 n.44 [p.90]:
At this juncture, I don't understand what is the purpose of continuing the affirmative-action Noble Experiment. If the intent is to stamp out poverty, that can be far more painlessly accomplished in the manner cited at ibid §R4 [pp.88-89]. Why instead decree that a laborious, tedious, expensive, race-preferential, divisive, so-far-ineffectual, & still-unproven mass-rehab social-experiment is the sole permissible option? (I.e., why insist on fighting poverty strictly the hard way? — additionally risking possibly carrying on forever a hopeless, pointless, counter-natural-selection fight against genetic limits?) Unless there is an unstated, strangely racist requirement, demanding that, regardless of a long track-record of (mean) difficulty-in-coping (whatever the cause — cultural, providential, or IQ): a large fraction of the US positively must remain black. (Environmentalists — mostly leftwing — object to keeping dolphins in tanks or bears in zoos, yet fail to see that subsidizing ethnic ghettoes is just as artificial-unnatural.)]
[d] If a punishment-for-crime system is obsessed with (and squanders huge proportions of its labor on enriching shrinks by institutionalizing long court-debates for) chasing the anti-productive chimera, of perceiving the unknowable-nit of whether defendants reeeeally know right-from-wrong, then it cripples its efficacy (philosophically and financially) even before the judge enters the courtroom.
[An excellent instance of givenness was pointed out in just such terms by Bill Snyder (St,Croix de Beaumont, France) in International Herald Tribune 2007/2/13 p.7 Letters.]

The Jackson-Hamilton Bill to Wipe Out Racial Friction:
Based on DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §N [p.86]:
President Hillary and the First Gentleman have concocted a new medical plan, and he says he intends to reform welfare. All right, if the FG intends to spend money in the “smart” way he says he prefers, then we can improve not only US medical & welfare situations but — simultaneously — another pet FG passion: race relations.
A simple bill will do the trick: gov't medical and welfare plans must henceforth fund Michael-Jackson-style whitification process for all who desire to escape race-prejudice, on which many angry blacks have come to blame all their failures. (And, in case medicine doesn't help an applicant, we can always have the IRS bleed him white.) Likewise, all caucasians who wish to become Persons-of-Color (in order to qualify for the Affirmative Action that so enrages certain non-participants, many of whom blame it for all their failures) will be funded for free entrance into the Geo. Hamilton Darkening Clinic.
Upshot of the Jackson-Hamilton Bill: nobody will be a born-helpless Victim of racism anymore, thus: neither redneck-amateurs nor snivel-rites pros will have anything left to whine about — and we can FINALLY drop the rich establishment's diversionary Race Thing, and move on to intelligent issues, such as the increasingly gross fiscal divide between the US' wealthy exploiters and their so-easily-manipulated and balkanized poor.
[Nothing new here: in the 1860s, Wall Street lawyer & intellectual Geo. Templeton Strong (whose son was the firstborn US composer of durable serious music: 1856) was aghast in righteous condemnation of NYC's Irish anti-black rioting (in which the next-latest NYC cheap-labor wave got enraged at the very-latest). After all, no new scabs were being brought in to flood the Wall Street lawyer market and thus endanger his job.
The disarray of the left today has been well described as Balkanization. The “ethnic politics” perfected by [Dems] Michael Novak & Jack Kennedy has not only been poisonously divisive (ibid §§K5, K14, & P4) to the US, but its promoters have nervily covered themselves by accusing critics of: divisiveness.]

Protection:
In a world of nations that uniformly preach peace&freedom&rights, why are there no farms or small nations left anywhere that are independent? — free of forced taxation and-or the need for protective alliances?

Now that it's too late to go any immediate good, it's acknowledged that Iran's elected leader was deposed by force in 1953 “by the CIA”. What this really tells us is that one deception (the then-sneaky act) has been replaced by another: not translating “CIA”into what forces asked for the 1953 armed coup. That would mean fingering the oil cartel — and its puppets: the “Eisenhower” gov't, the Israel lobby, and the recently joke-renamed “Defense” Dep't (formerly War Dep't).
[While it is unfair of the increasingly hate-obsessed Moslem world to take upfront-visible Israel-in-its-midst for the cause of its woes (which are in truth primarily: US-UK oil greed, and Moslems' own cultural stagnation, over-population-poverty, & intolerant superstition), the oil-cartel-mega-beneficiary Jewish world — after for decades asking and receiving international understanding of its own long-memory-implacable just-vengeance against Nazi mass-murderers — cannot be surprised that passionate-vengeance's aim is not exclusively one-directional.]

Why do women succeed at suicide so seldom? Perhaps because threatening suicide is so much fun, while doing it would mean the end of said fun.

Why do half the citizens of the most liberal nations, e.g., Denmark and Holland (where nothing is illegal but murder and virginity), express their proud & precious self-guided freedom by committing tobacco-suicide: turning potential longterm health, beauty, & vigor into lifetime sickness, wrinklehood, weariness, filth, agony, & depression — painfully killing themselves with a slowness far exceeding that dealt out to the worst enemies of the most vicious & vindictive rule-by-torture dictators of history?
[E.g., Artaxerxes 2's torture-of-the-boats (see Plutarch's account [proving that Persia-Iran didn't need the US to teach it how to torture], but bring along a spare Scrawlins barf-bag); or Hitler's garrottings, following the failed 1944/7/20 Stauffenberg coup.]

And de Wall-Tumbler Came Tumblin' Down:
Geo.W.Bush — a.k.a The Divine Flounder — has been a bold adventurer internationally, obviously hoping to be remembered as the Ronald Tear-Down-This-Wall Reagan of the Middle East. Bush will be so remembered: he has spent ordmag a trillion dollars tearing down the wall between Iraq and Iran, which had been so laboriously constructed — at the cost of millions of Iraq-Iran lives. (In a war instigated by his father's CIA buddies and their one-time tool, Saddam [with 60 Minutes' Mike Wallace as cheerleader], funded for years by another dollar-trill from US taxpayers.)

You wonder why Iran is “upset” with the US?:
Does the average US citizen have the slightest notion of the inevitably-vindictive rage now boiling in Iran, with nuclear war a potential outcome? Iran is a heavily-Shiite nation that's fed up with a century of the West's oil cartel intruding in its and its next-door (Iraq) fellow-Shiites' affairs. After the US kicked out Iran's elected president in 1953, replacing him with a supposedly royal “Shah” (“Caesar”) and his torturing secret police, Iran had the appalling effrontery to rebel in 1979 and try to rule its own country. The West responded by inspiring CIA-anointed Saddam to attack Iran in 1980. Saddam for decades successfully used terrorism of his own people to keep Iraq's US-loathed Shiite majority at-bay, and killed millions more Shiites in his cartel-inspired 1980-1998 war on Iran. (Notice: Saddam's on trial in the 2006 US-puppet “Iraq” court [not in the International Court, B.Rawlins adds] not for killing millions, but for a few relatively piddling massacres that can't be connected to the West's connivings.)
This (deliberately) kept Iraq's Shiites from joining up with Iran's Shiite majority. (As is now happening, thanks to Bush's War.)

BoobScam — In Which We Learn How Saddam's Imaginary Nukes Got Named for Dubya:
Let's take the foregoing info — and rampoline-it up to a speculative bit of black-semihumor.
Let's imagine that Iran finally dreamed-up a clever poetic-justice scenario that got the West's ever-conspiring oil-cartel to turn upon itself. First, Iran launches a more competent replay of the Abscam scheme.
[In the 1980s, a few even-greedier-than-usual congressmen took Arab money [bad], instead of defense-contractor money or Jewish money [good]. Got caught. And every-way disgraced.]
Iran starts by investing a sliver of its gigabucks oil-profits into the money-is-all US electoral process, to deliberately:
[a] Place a Madman, Alfred Dubya Neuman — an alcoholic Alfred Dubya Neuman at that — upon the US throne.
[b] Convince the Clueless One that Saddam — the US' only puppet in the Mesopotamian region, is secretly building nukes with the dizzy dummy's name on them: Look-sir, they're even calling them “ Dubya-Am-Dizs. So — dummy spends thousands of US lives and hundreds of billions of dollars (much of it ending up in Halliburton's generous-to-hawk&FOXvolk coffers) to make Shiite Iran's fondest dream come true: he over-throws world-#1-Shiite-exterminator Saddam.
Iranian sources are now hinting that, technologically speaking, the greatest challenge here was the construction of a bunker with enough protective insulation to prevent US seismographs from detecting the plotters' Richter-10 snickerquakes….

Was the title of Wagner's gloriously immortal Ring of the Nibelungs a veiled pun on the cohesive ring of zeroes he felt he'd risen above? (See DIO 1.3 [1991] n.291 [p.174].)

Notice how US “entertainment” portrays those who avoid doorknobs & hand-shakes as loons? — in, e.g., The Aviator (2004) and the TV-series Monk. Could this be about as accidental as the ubiquity of young, smooth smokers in popular films? Well, try guessing how much the pharmaceutical industry (whose TV-ads under-write ever-larger fractions of “free” television) would lose if US citizens began catching lots fewer colds….

Masochistic Behaviorism: The Third Pigeon.
(Dennis Rawlins [who knew and enormously admired B.F.Skinner, both for his multi-faceted genius and his integrity] DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §S [p.90]):
Dropping food-rewards into the cage of pigeon who has access to a lever [feeding the bird at every pull] has been a standard testing technique, enabling modern behaviorists to advance the science of psychology.
If one rewards a pigeon (“positive reinforcement”) for pulling a lever, he will learn the connection and is called: a Conditioned pigeon.
But, if a random reward-system is established, some lever-pulling pigeons will nonetheless interpret the situation as correlative. We may perhaps call this: the Religious pigeon. (See DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 §C [p.91].)
Finally, there is the remarkable ongoing biennial national experiment (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §S [p.90]) in which, every time the pigeon pulls his lever, he gets punished (“negative reinforcement”) — but he keeps right on pulling it, anyway. In the US, we call this pigeon: the Voter.

The Wages of Bush's Torture, or (as Indian-Country-Bound US Cavalrymen Used to Say) Better Save the Last Bullet for Yourself:
By 2006, one often heard of US soldiers being killed in Iraq — but not often of US soldiers being captured.

Projection:
For a civilization to evolve & thrive, its citizens must be able to project into [a] the future & [b] other persons' concerns. (I.e., their brains must have biologically-evolved far enough to have achieved both providence & empathy.) The lowest groups fail at both. Some religious societies achieve [b] without realistic (non-fantasy) skill at [a]. But to possess strong [a] with weak [b]: this may explain why some highly intelligent nations have nonetheless remained 3rd-world.

One frequently hears of pols and(?) businessmen in Washington, NYC, & Hollywood who wisecrack: “Money talks and bullshit walks”.
Is the man-in-the-street aware of the appropriate translation? — “Money talks and honesty morality walks”.

In Which Pols Outlaw Only Those Big Items Which Might Endanger Pols:
Pols have legally restricted citizen-access to huge guns but not to huge cars. Yet the prime culprits in non-natural US deaths are: big cars and small guns.

How can USers love underdogs like the Cubs, yet (at Olympics-time) pray for the huge US to tromp Romania's gymn-pixies and Lithuania's basket-ballers? And why does TV 'snews never note that these nations' populations are, respectively, ordmag 10% and 1% of the US'? — while frequently attempting to pretend that smaller Enemy nations' teams are awesome “machines”, even attempting (when it's not too laughable) to put the frail US into an underdog frame! (And the public buys it. Are there any limits to propaganda's efficacy?) The irony is that the underdog-beats-machine routine is actually being used to imply (much in the tradition of the notorious 1936 Berlin Olympics) that the US is a nation of virtuous supermen, a delusion that can get folks into military trouble, as witness the cases of Rob't E.Lee (1863), Custer (1876), Kaiser Willy 2 (1914), Hitler (1941), & The Divine Flounder (2003). [As his political death approaches, Bush 2 is — in his own mind — becoming-a-god (to quote the deified Vespasian: Emperor 69-79 AD), history's 6th deified Caesar: the 1st since Titus (79-81), who also is notable mainly for having mass-murderously trashed a Middle-East nation.]

Ever heard a druglord (Philip Morris, Busch, church, or mafia) bemoan tax money flushed down the poverty-welfare cycle? (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §C2 [p.5].)

Touts Are Inherently Not-Smart. Or: Too-Smart?:
When one reads an article these days claiming that US stocks are cheap (such propaganda was common throughout the 1970s DJIA slide), several thoughts come:
[a] In the long run, this might well be true. Barring panics, unexpectedly successful foreign competition, Asian dumping of US stocks or (if inflation climbs) bonds, terrorist-nukes, etc.
[b] There's a not-so-hidden Catch-22 implicit in all such advice.
If a newspaper (or investment-sheet) stock-tout really believes the market is headed upward, then: why would he say so publicly? — wouldn't he make much more profit by buying up stocks quickly, before others catch-on to his wise assessment? However, if he has indeed already done so, then his now-published advice represents a conflict of interest bordering on a kiting-scheme.
(So he's either dumb or canny. But not likely neutral.)
[c] Bulls presume (from the 1980s-1990s bubble) that the future will resemble the present. But, since the rulership lives to frustrate that assumption for its own advantage, investors might pause to ask: what's the next way the public's fiscal-security expectations'll get screwed? (Citizens used to save in banks or savings-bonds; inflation ruined that. Then to investment-advisor-darling short-term bonds; but falling interest rates slashed their income. Some went to stocks, as a hedge against inflation; many were wiped out by major DJIA-falloffs in c.1970 and c.2000.)
Returning to the question of what's-next: why will corporations (increasingly concentrating on their own gross internal enrichment: CEO salaries, packages, options, buybacks, pension-dumping, etc) want to continue eternally giving out free money (dividends) to stock-holders, when the latter imagine they can get-rich-quick just speculating on non-dividend-paying “glamour” stocks?

Has the US' non-start-up of fibre-optics communication (since the mid-1990s) actually been over the matter of difficulty of tapping terrorist messages?

Needlessly-Confusing ReSpelling Gets Bombed-Out:
A question that comes naturally after rebels' 2006/7/11 bombing of India's fiscal center: wasn't globalism prematurely over-optimistic in pushing the West to start calling Bombay “Mumbai”? [The Int Herald Trib reported on 7/12 and headlined on 7/13 that all 7 bombs were placed in 1st-class, all-male railroad cars. Yet most media have avoided mentioning the fact that the rebels were being quite selective (by class & gender), in targetting those whom they regard as their exploitive oppressors. Perhaps some parallels to the 9/11 event were too uncomfortable to get near: billed by the media as an “Attack-on-America”, the lethal 9/11 blitz was in fact a selective attack upon a long-hated alien-intrusion oil-exploitation's financiers, as well as upon their military and (evidently) their pols.]

When evaluating politicians, citizens feel protected by their imagined ability to see through most con-men — a confidence which fails to account for sample-filtration, by naïvely assuming that pols are like most of the breed. After all, it's obvious that: the con-artist who least appears to be, will be the most successful — and thus the most ubiquitous in high prominence. (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §F3 [p.6].)

Will the American Poople Only Learn by Mishap Their Paid-Pipers' Inner Thoughts?

1. Pious new-model-Demmygod Jimmy Carter's 1980 nomination-acceptance speech spoke pseudo-reverentially of old-model (New-Dealer) H.Humphrey thusly: “Hubert Horatio Hornblower — er — Humphrey”.

2. MostSacredNBC blonde-newshen Amy Robach has told us (MSNBC 2003/9/26) of the latest attack upon “Jewess — Jewish settlements”.

3. House Majority Leader-soon-to-be & Nevada's Dembo Senator, Harry Reid, told us (2005/11/8) whom he was trying to defend: “the American poop — people”.
   

4. Visa's (and, o-yes, the US') snowboard-cross championess Lindsey Jacobellis (now tied with GJ for alltime-Pascal-Wager-moronhood) threw away millions of dollars by her final gratuitous hotdogging→crash at the 2006 Winter Olympics. (Though the potential 2010 comeback-drama will net her some solace-coin — and a bigger fortune [than she blew in '06] if she wins after all.) As the Greed Channel discussed this tragedy, Sue Herrera commented (CNBC 2006/2/24), in kind sympathy with the Olympics' several other unfortunate corporate-brandname-owned-and-thus-over-PREhyped losers, that it was nonetheless “quite an accomplishment to represent your company — coun, country — I should say.” [Oh — should she?]
   

5. Situation-Normal-All-FOXed-Up:
   Finally, we have the News Dep't of FOX (False-Or-Xaggerated):
   [i] The report (2006/2/5 12:05PMEST) that Iran is “rumping up the rhetoric” in the Middle East.
   [ii] During FOX's hysterical lockstep-alibiing of Cheney's gunning down his 40y-friend→“acquaintance” on 2006/2/11 Saturday (or was it Friday?), we find FOX anchor Bill Hemmer's hilarious (deliberately?) extrapolation-to-the-heights of the FOX-clan's Hemmer-the-message-for-home marching-orders, as he (2006/2/17 12:51 EST) called the event just an “accidental shooting accident”.
   Going-Off-Double-Cocked — Bad-News-Diversion Hits a New Low:
   [iii] Finally, as reported on Olbermann 2006/11/6, we have talking-FOX Jane Skinner reporting Afghan locals' election-eve demonstration of the US' degree of control of order in Afghanistan: a multiple murder. “the deputy police chief said six officers were killed, including the district's [nation's] top cock — top — cock after — cop after the vehicle they were riding in was sprayed with bullets. Three other off-[suppressed giggle]-icers were hurt in the attack.” — She and Shep Smith then cracked up with laughter. (As noted by the media's top-cop-or-whatever-trashing-FOX, K.Olbermann: this was a six-policemen-get-shot-to-death story [an incident embarrassing not to Skinner but to FOX-fave Bush] — Olbermann: “It's a big laugh, isn't it?”.)
   

Washington As Lawyer-Puppet-Theatre — Voters As Clients Who Don't Even Know They Are —
From New Deal to Screw Deal —
From Media to Greedia:
Cartoon by Danziger (Wash Post Weekly Ed 1994/6/27):
When one reads of the outrageous hypocrisies of Republicans (Mark Foley et ilk) and Democrats (see Peter Schweizer's GOP-inspired tract Do As I Say 2005), it all seems “crazy”.
[NB: Whenever something seems Crazy, this simply means that one is viewing it from a false perspective. E.g., when one hears that the gov't is paying some corporation ordmag $1000-per for coffeepots, you can guess that this is generating some off-the-books cash that will inevitably find its underground way into the political process and into corrupting the TV 'snews-greedia. Nothing at all Crazy about it.]
Hypothesis: The US hasn't yet understood that US politics has become little more than courtroom theatre.
But let's understand EXACTLY what this means, beyond the already-well-noted obvious (that [1] Congress is mostly lawyers, and [2] US lawyers tend to be smart, plausible, devious, & avaricious):
[a] Just as each of two lawyers is well-paid by his side to argue a legal suit (regardless of whether he actually believes what he's arguing), the two US political parties and their bellowing pols are well-paid to pose as advocates for their clients — i.e., their voting constituencies.
[b] But, while a lawyer in a real court-room may actually be trying to win for his client, in Washington Theatre it is more likely (given this show's consistent fat-feline prime-“contributors” and prime-beneficiaries, for decades) that the average legislator-orator is no longer a real lawyer but is just playing-one-on-TV — to convince the gullible & ever more insecure public that it has genuine, articulate, and primarily (DIO 8.2 [1998] ‡5 §K [p.57]) revolution-denecessitating “representation”, even while said Representative is naturally getting paid by — i.e., is the hireling of — corporate interests (always, always helpfully translated as “special interests” by the US' corporate-owned Free Press) who have many times more expendable cash than the combined electorate (and thus are slipping said cash to said pol and his promoters, over & under the table), a ratio which has been getting progressively more astronomical ever since the New Deal was gradually smothered to death (by irrepressible hyper-greed) throughout the 2nd half of the 20th century.
Granted, this interpretive theory is neither attractive nor comforting. But it is consistent with the US gov't's persistent — and currently ever-accelerating — inability to respond to the concerns of a free middle class.
Concerns like: whether that class will even survive — in any eventual state but that of ever-more-frantic rat-cage servitude to a small, gated community of the super-rich. (Reagan's true shining-city-on-a-hill vision?)

To build on the foregoing: the-world-seems-crazy is the cry of those too uncynical to see through the pretenses of institutions and their hired spokespeople — e.g., pols, press, Church. Simply ask whether the world is crazy for the rulership's members (the same Washington gangsters who lead the public to expect what it won't get), and one can see that the world is delightfully sane.
For them.

The front page of the 1861/12/14 Harper's Weekly (an original copy of which has been preserved in DR's family since publication) exhibits a map of Georgia, divided into counties, each displaying the percentage of its population then enslaved. Upon examination, one sees that 74% of the population of coastal “Liberty County” were slaves.

Endful and Endless Trouble From Race-Stats:
Racial quotas & “Affirmative Action” are obviously pernicious in their divisiveness (classic rulership divide-and-conquer diversion: DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §N & nn.24&25 [p.86]), yet most Libs feel that such means to a worthy end are necessary “temporarily”. (Which turns out to mean: until the Lib-World-Vision comes true. Others quietly wonder if this translates as: until alchemy comes true. See DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §§P1&R10 [pp.87&90].)
But what is the evidence underlying the conviction that quota-intervention is required? Statistics. Group A is persistently and universally not doing as well as Group B. Question: Why are such embarrassing stats regarded by anyone as material which defenders of Group A should be advertising? — when only by massive serial-blitz propaganda can the public be diverted from the evidence's obvious alternative interpretation.

Abraham Lincoln's 1861-1865 tyranny killed 600,000 USers (blood which J.W.Booth sought to avenge) — about as many deaths as all other US wars combined. This, to suppress a state's obvious right to secede from the Union. Lincoln's bloody tyranny is generally forgiven because of his oratory (he was the most intelligent of US presidents) and because most of the states who wanted freedom-from-Union were themselves practicing freedom's very antithesis: legal enslavement of their fellows. Curiously unasked question: wouldn't the same justification legitimize King George the 3rd's attempt to keep the United States from seceding from the British Empire? — after all, most of the dominant figures of the American Revolution were slaveholders: Washington, Jefferson, Madison. Indeed, Samuel Johnson's pamphleteering in favor of King George's anti-Revolution war, reasonably asked: whence cometh these slaveholders' “yelps” about freedom?!
[It is common to pass off the Founding Fathers' acceptance of slavery (even northerners like J.Adams went along with it, in order to get a big enough union of rebels to kick out the Brits) with such tritenesses as: oh-well, they were people of their times. (This, while simultaneously contending that their holy documents [Declaration & Constitution] are eternally valid.) Classic let's-paper-over-a-serious-contradiction propaganda. (Doesn't anybody ever think to challenge such transparent stuff?) No, either the Founding Fathers suffered at least from a contagious bigotry (if not exploitive poison) that throws serious doubt upon their wisdom (if not decency); or, they recognized a genuine group-disability in blacks. Logically (as against patriot-theologically), one can't have it both ways. Given merely the literacy of the nation's early leaders, one sees that the prole myth that unprejudiced-we are living in an era more enlightened than the Enlightenment is implicitly so arrogant as to be almost laughable. (See DIO 1.2 [1991] n.154 [pp.131-132]; DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡2 §H3 [p.18].)]

Popular Democracy or Cunning Conning?
Lincoln (1858/9/15 Jonesboro, IL):

all the states have the right to do exactly as they please in all their domestic relations, including that of slavery, and I hold myself under constitutional obligation to allow all the people in all the states, without interference, direct or indirect, to do exactly as they please; and I deny that I have any inclination to interfere with them even if there were no constitutional obligation.

Would any trusting hearer of this speech have suspected that Lincoln would trigger a war? (By arming forts right in southern cities' harbors, e.g., Fort Sumter. Imagine the Confederacy settling its soldiers & arms onto Staten Island!) Lincoln got 40% of the 1860 vote. What would he have gotten, had his voters known he would invade the south, causing ordmag a million casualties?

1. Though the US has gotten into countless wars, did any president of the US ever get elected by admitting that he's leading the nation into a war?

2. Did any US establishment press or TV 'snews network ever oppose a US war at its start?

3. Or any other establishment church?

What would be going on in the “troubled” the Middle East if its oil vanished?
[Well, just recall the deftest of all feminist-hassling jokes.]

I'm outraged at the Danish publication of those Moslem-insulting cartoons. The European press should be ashamed of itself — for not publishing such cartoons continuously, prominently, & aggressively throughout the last 30 years, to stir up intolerant Moslems early enough to warn Europe that its own tragic internal combine of selfish quick-buck Christian capitalists and dreamy bleeding-heart socialists was about to import a pernicious religious-nut-factory into Europe, and thereby poison (perhaps indefinitely) the most civilized region of the world.

As in so many other cases (do we blame Hitler for WW2? — or Napoleon, whose invasion of Germany forced it to unify & go Prussian), it is impossible to trace ultimate causes and responsibilities for the present state of Islam.
In antiquity, Persia harrassed Greece, which united under Alexander, who sacked Persepolis. Alexander's successor, Ptolemy 1, hired Pyrrhos who invaded Italy — and the Rome Empire soon-after became the power that crushed Greece. Christianity grew in reaction to Roman terror by torture-on-the-cross. (The cross, a torture device, is still the symbol of Christianity, its origin largely un-pondered today, as Christians torture Moslems in Iraq. Will a new religion arise there, with the water-board [or the stake as its symbol?] Later, the Byzantine Empire ruled the East Mediterranean and north Africa with a particularly uncreative, mind-deadening Christian dictatorship. (Cyril Mango Byzantium, the Empire of the New Rome 1980 p.176: “All the cosmology [the average Byzantine] needed had been set down [in Genesis] by the greatest of all scientists, the prophet Moses”) Did this oppression trigger Islam's bloody initial century of conquest? Which in turn caused the crusades. Leading to Moslem invasions of Europe, twice cresting virtually at the gates of Vienna in the 16th and even 18th centuries. Next, the West got hot about bringing democracy, freedom, & Zionism (Lawrence of Arabia, Balfour Declaration, and all that) to the Middle East — just after the spectacular abundance of oil there was realized. And by 2001 — as Arabia's most precious material resource was being mega-squandered on such Western necessities as luxury SUVs, etc — an occasional Moslem was, strangely enough, getting just a trifle upset.
Etc.

As WW2 was becoming more&more obviously lost, Hitler's fight-to-the-last-man orders were really attempting to protect his own catered life-style & throne-security — because, in effect, Germany's very-last-man-to-die was intended to be: himself.

Just before the 1862/9/17 Battle of Antietam, Abraham Lincoln sporadically for days spent hours alone weeping at the death of one youth: his young boy Willie, who had died of disease in the White House. Is there a credible record that, following the soon-after wounding & death of 23000 youths at Antietam, Lincoln shed as many tears?
Any tears?
After Cold Harbor, “butcher” Grant did.
(See DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡8 n.23 [p.76].)

If your brain was slowly shaved away surgically or bombarded with cosmic rays, how much would it take before you would no longer be? You.

A 1936 November cartoon by David Low [whose genius was 1st imparted to Dennis Rawlins by DR's lifetime friend R.L.Smith] showed sage-pipe-puffing Brit PM Stanley Baldwin so misleading England (& Colonel Blimp) that “The Pit” of world war finally yawns on their horizon; so Baldwin explains: “be reasonable! If I hadn't promised you not to lead you here, you wouldn't have come.”
This cartoon stays ever before me as we watch the very pols who [a] invented the Iraq mess and [b] got the US riddled with tens of millions of desperate Mexican illegals — now (in-effect) are resorting to the same brassy argument: we got you in so deep, the numbers are now such that you can't do anything to stop going down even deeper into the same mistake we got you to buy in the 1st place. And, ah, you'll have to keep re-electing us because all “serious” (media&pollster-blessed) parties will have this same position. But, as FOX keeps telling us about gov't: “YOU DECIDE” the course of US affairs — i.e., it's your own fault. Animal House rendered the rulership-sneer most clearly: you screwed up; you trusted us. (Cited in a slightly different context at DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 n.7 [p.13].)

Not Even the Renfield of Bram Staker's Dracula Was Dumb Enough to Suck His Own Blood;
Why the Poor Keep Electing the Rich to Office
Wouldn't Nader At Least COST You Less Than Playing Dumbos&Dembos?

The More They Steal from You, the More You Vote for Them:
The public votes for the candidate who spends the most on ads. (And if that's a genuine Dumbo-Dembo competition, it's just about the only one.) Those costs are paid from businesses' mega-profits, raked-in at public expense. (Frequently via direct gov't-subsidy contracts, which of course must loot the public for even more than the ads cost — or the “contributor” would go out of business. 'Taint charity.)
Thus: the average citizen is most likely to vote for the politician who's aiding that pol's business-backers to loot the citizen most lustily.

Dracula's Rome-Mania & Civilization's Uplift
— Who Says Things Always Stay the Same?
Crucifixion-streamliner and sometime-Christian “Vlad the Impaler”, history's (hitherto) not-fully-appreciated actual Dracula, proved how manically-Roman his native Romania could become. (And how Christians could Animal-Farmly resort to the very techniques once notoriously used to persecute them.) Vlad adopted the Roman Empire's barfable technique of controlling human masses by visually-warning of the dangers of non-submission: the Romans had routinely mass-displayed the bodies of rebels, etc, they were torturing to death — nailing them alive onto posts (sometimes in rows), using a T: a cross-bar atop a post, nailing the hands to the bar, the feet to the post.
[Many thousands of persons, including the genuine freedom-fighter Spartacus, died so. It's instructively revealing that the one victim who has drawn the world's fanatically-concentrated memory was a post-Spartacus charlatan. Note that the shape of the modern Christian symbol (cross instead of T) provides one more illustration of the notorious unreliability of legend.
(If something as definite as a T can get historically-mangled-by-convenience, one can just imagine the possibilities for distortion [in 2000y of re-telling] of the more complex fantasies of the Christian pitch, such as its pathetically ill-substantiated resurrection-from-the-dead myths, not to mention the “betrayal” of Jesus, etc.)
The T warped into the modern shape of the cross presumably because, during early Christianity, thong-binding two little perpendicular sticks together, made a more durable carry-around talisman than a rickety cemented-together T.
Business' Idea of a Historical Slasher-Film:
Living a historical-sinema life even before there was a Hollywood, the inventive Vlad didn't just blindly plagiarize his predecessors: a pre-renaissance-proto-businessman-gogetter, he severely lowered cost and labor by introducing a kinky “improvement” on torture-displaying enemies: he cut wood-costs by 50% right-off-the-top if you will, opting for no-frills executions by dispensing with all that fancy stuff like T-cross-bars & nails, thereby also wisely slashing hours&hours from torturers' time-clocks. OK, OK, so whiners complained that this — in the short term — threw lots of people out of work. (Needless to say, Vlad knew just what to do about joblessness, too.) But we have a globalist-happy-ending: Vlad's fat-trimming led to ultimately job-creating market-expansion, as he went on to became the greatest assembly-line mass-corpse-displayer of all time: allegedly ordmag 100,000 victims (whydya think they call him “Count”?), roughly 10% of the entire population of Wallachia. (Scaring-off [how else?] even the Sultan who'd conquered Constantinople. Now, are you impressed?) Presaging the equally Christian and ever-efficiently-modernizing businessman Henry Ford, Vlad replaced the Roman crucifiers' old Model-T with the new Romanian Model-A: vertical impalement up the buttocks on crossbar-less, sharpened stakes. (I.e., mass-production of human popsicles, from which Vlad created and displayed massive assendly-line forests of corpses, to strike fear into both subjects and enemies.) In brief, Vlad took crucifixion up a radical cultural-quantum-leap-step, to: goosifixion.
[Not that there couldn't be efficiency in the original version:
Embellishing an oldie:
“Ah, Jesus, I'm just terribly, terribly sorry, but we've only got three nails left; could you cross your feet? Why, that's so graciously helpf— hey, just-a-sonagod-minute: did you plan this?”
In an attempt at returning to a modicum of sobriety, we may ask whether Jesus' ballyhooed suffering-for-man's-sins was ultimo enough to evidence divinity — when it's anefully obvious that goosifixion was a far worse torture-death than even the sadistic one he endured.]
(Our abject apologies to traditionalists here; but, like they say: you just can't stop progress.)
[According to consistent medieval accounts, goosifixion was Vlad's predominant & preferred (though not exclusive) enforcement technique. See R.Florescu & R.McNally Dracula: Prince of Many Faces, His Life & His Times NYC 1989 pp.104-105.]
In brief, with pioneering assiduity, Vlad brought freshness to the then still-nascent field of human-management-by-naked-fear, whose present, less physical practitioners obviously owe him a huge if little-acknowledged debt.
[In the ugly matter of public mass-killing of those who get-in-the-way (of one trying to get-his), the uplifting spectacle of The Advance of Civilization can also be discerned in the Stalin and Hitler successive 20th century Ukraine adventures, and in the US-UK oil cartel's war-lord puppets and bomb-tossing enemies in the Middle East.
They don't use popsicle-postings anymore.]

Telling & Telling — Guidance Squared for the American Sheeple:
As the James Frey hoax unravelled, the Medium's primary concern was not so much for the preservation of truth as for the preservation of opinion-fashist Oprah's credibility. Commentator after commentator stepped up to tell the public that her cred and her authority to guide the public “taste” was thankfully undiminished in the slightest.
Translation: the US public is told to whom it must go — to be told what it must believe….

It seems that a great many “modern” painters can't even draw a straight line — or mix colors with post-kindergarten subtlety. For “critics” — well-paid to wash the public brain — to call these businessmen-promoters “artists” is akin to confering the title “chef” upon one who can't boil water.

Computer-Age Aging:
As our increasingly technological era has rendered workers' talents obsolete at ever earlier ages, economics is requiring an ever-older retirement age.
[a] How ensure the survival of those who fall into this ever-larger gap? [b] Will the younger generation keep subsidizing more&more elders' retirement years?

Convention honors love of genetically-close family members by elevating such preference to “family loyalty”. So why is an ethnic-enclave's preference for neighbors who are genetically-close condemned simultaneously as “racism”?

The Lincoln administration's glorification of “The Union”, which it forced upon the unwilling South (just as the South [and previously many of the leading Founding Fathers] forced slavery upon an unwilling zero-wage labor-force), was seen by the Confederacy as equivalent to a man sanctifying a sexual assault on his ex-wife — getting so misty-eyed at his forced conquest: as to call rape holy “union”.

Does all of civics just ultimately come down to: who's got the guns?

Racial Paranoia — There's a White Devil in the Woodpile:
One of several reasons DR opposes Affirmative Action etc is: had race-preference programs not intruded into US society (mirror-imaging the very Old-South policies Liberals rightly abhor), there probably would not even be public discussion of correlations between race and some skills. If capital-L Liberals think such discussions are ugly, well: they've brought it all upon themselves — by using governmental force to insist upon the divisive, paranoid-pandering assumption that, if groups' successes and incarceration-rates differ, this must be due to racism-in-the-woodpile.
[How does that explain the state of most black-run African nations? Not to mention several black-governed US cities?]
Even if the putative racism was sneaky-invisible, statistically-differing group performances were proof it was there, as Libs see things. (So AffActn must continue until blacks “stand-up” — to mimick Bush's devious bring-the-troops-home-from-Iraq deliberate catch-22 that the Iraq puppet-gov't must stand-up first.) Thus, it was Liberals — not A.Jensen or C.Murray — who opened the Pandora's Box of injecting statistics into passionate and legislation-inspiring public-forum ethnic-division. (By contrast to ethnic paranoia, Jensen-Murray views are not embedded in a single US law or requirement.)

Due to his frank skepticism of US race-orthodoxy (a skepticism science encourages in less volatile areas), DR sometimes facetiously calls himself the world's only redneck-leftist. But the pose is undone by the fact that realization of the mediocrity of the genes of one's own group is not classic redneckism. Nor is agnostic uncertainty. DR (of mere UK [& American Indian] origins) notes: while black average IQ may perhaps be below whites', Asians' average IQ is very likely higher — so why would anyone be proud of white skin? (Race-pride is as ridiculous and sometimes as dangerous as any other group-pride: DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §K14 [p.84].) Historically, only nationalism has proven more lethal.)
It goes without saying that one must accent the word average. Given that numerous individual whites & Asians are dim, while plenty of blacks are brilliant, it is stupid & wrong (and offensive) to judge any individual's intelligence by group skin color or gender or any other non-mental index. Even if it be true that there is a mass-statistical-correlation of that index to IQ, the point is obviously 100% irrelevant to a particular person [though, a geneticist might argue about descendants' odds of success] if that individual is an achiever. (Analogously, see DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 n.5 [p.12].) Indeed, the injustice [and divisiveness] of applying mass-stats to individuals is precisely why DR opposes Affirmative Action.
(Based upon DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 nn.42&41 [p.90].)

Yeah, I Planned the Whole Thing:
Origen and (J.W.Booth's killer) Boston Corbett (are supposed to have) castrated themselves, the latter with a pair of scissors.
Question: could this have been done without fainting?
Speculation (assuming the claims weren't mere ascetic-boasts): if one were forcibly castrated (for rape or whatever), wouldn't it be less shameful to later claim to others that the deprivation was self-inflicted?

Yes, death mocks life and ultimately snuffs it.
But, instead of depressively obsessing over the inevitable reality of life's end, why not instead concentrate on two wonderful, joyful statistical miracles? —
[1] Your ever coming into sensiate life at all — given the odds against the sperm & egg that happened to pair-off with each other, to become you (rather than each pairing off instead with any one of the myriad of other potential eggs & sperms that were available in the neighborhood at the moment of your conception).
[2] Of the hundred-plus millions of centuries since the Big Bang, the present century happens to be your century — the one that contains the now which you live in.
No matter your troubles, don't such considerations make you feel like you (without earning anything) won the ultimate-long-shot lottery? — because you did.

If We're Smart Enough to Medicate Ourselves, Why Aren't We Smart Enough to Vote Directly on Even the Plainest Political Issues? :
OK, so the US is one of the least direct-political-referendumed among the Earth's wealthy nations, since US pols think we're idiots (and prove it every election) — but, it's nice to know that [unlike the European tooboisie] we are simultaneously almost as health-smart as doctors, since TV-ads for pharmaceuticals are ever explaining to us how their pills can make us happier and-or (using not-quite-ready-for-Gray's-Anatomy gut-cartoons, etc,) will save us from whatever sneaky malaise the ads can induce us to fear is capturing our bods.
(Happy visuals meanwhile distract from fine-print-audio telling of risks [note: usually in reverse-order of frequency] and solicitously adding see-your-doctor [read: harass-beg him for any&all Latest-Miracle drugs (before the side-effects start making headlines)] — so they're as legally as off-the-hook as big tobacco.)
[Comments:
(a) DR has taken no pills for over 30 years — and is the healthiest person he knows his age.
(Won't this be a hoot to read when I drop dead? [A not-unanticipated event.]
(b) Question. Given the US' present ever-increasing ubiquity of pharmaceutical TV-ads (a plague that does not exist in most other nations), one can wonder-extrapolate: how much longer before 100% of US television TV-ads are for pharmaceuticals?
OK, OK, it's like extrapolating from mall-sprawl and-or population-growth to find out when the last blade of Earth's grass will disappear under cement and-or under human protoplasm — won't happen. However, one should ponder nonetheless (as also for the US national debt) the consequences if society even starts down such improvident paths — which are usually justified by some present crisis, yet too-often ensure that a far greater crisis is ever-looming and eventually inevitable.]

Yawning at You:
Not by accident are women pathetically vulnerable to plastic-surgery's lures. That glossy Gurlie-magazine, Cosmopolitan — with its religiously-adhered-to cañón-law cover-strategy — should have been an unindicted co-conspirator in the 1990s Dow-Corning implant case. TV 'snews could (as persistently) counter such one-sided visual propaganda, but instead gives a big-yawn pass to a potential mission that could save its viewers from serious risks to their health. But, then, TV is itself selling freak yawning-cañón women, not to mention being itself vulnerable: to the fiscal power of any medical-related lobby — why should plastic-surgery be any different?]

If everyone in the stock market merely traded & churned, the average market index would go nowhere. Is that related to the common complaint that brokers seldom tell anyone when to sell a stock? After all, bringing new money into the general market (as against merely waterbedding from one stock or sector to another) is what makes the DJIA go up — and this is THE selling point brokers use to lure yet more money. And, of course, this chain-letter aspect is what predictably-periodically causes bubbles and crashes.

Propaganda 101:
CNN's “360” (implying all-angles-universality) 2005/12/13 (caps added): “ENEMY … weapons are getting more sophisticated. How are the [US' invading] troops fighting back?”
[If outsiders & “insurgents” like Sitting Bull and Crazy [Enchanted] Horse could read 1876 newspaper accounts of the Little Bighorn and its get-'em-back aftermath, they must've had a few wry chuckles at similar stuff.]

Read-My-Lips or Never Know Me:
Has there been any remark in The Medium (TV 'snews) regarding the large list of characters whom we almost never hear directly from? Nader, Castro, Hugo Chavez (Venezuela prez), Jackie 0, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad (Iran president), even Natalee Holloway. When TV 'snews repeatedly shows you a given figure talking but you never actually hear his unvarnished words (merely a voice summing them up Just-For-You), catch on to the fact that this is probably not accidental. (Though, as the above disparate sample illustrates, the reasons for TV-voice-suppression may vary hugely.) Chavez is dealing with a pushy oil-addict to the north that has persistently tried to eject or kill him. On 2005/12/9, Ahmadinejad suggested that the Nazis' mass murder of Jews (obviously a real event) had been exaggerated. (Reported as total denial, which indeed may be his [luney] suspicion — or pandering to popular Islamic hate-mythology.)
[In fairness, note that 5 million deaths looks like a somewhat more reliable estimate than the now-iconic six million: see, e.g., Wm.L.Shirer Rise & Fall of the Third Reich 1960 Chap.27 n.71 [&n.51].]
Yet the generally-non-quoted but far more historically important part of Ahmadinejad's statement wondered aloud: “Is the killing of millions of innocent Jewish people [in Europe] by Hitler the reason for [Western] support [of] the occupiers of Jerusalem? If the Europeans are honest they should give up some of THEIR [caps added] provinces in Europe — like in Germany, Austria, or other countries — to the Zionists, and the Zionists can establish their state in Europe. You can offer [a piece of] Europe and we will support it.” [International Herald Tribune 2005/12/9 p.7. Reported by Reuters, not by a US wire service, note.] Whether or not one agrees with all or part of the quoted reasoning, it is noteworthy that the US press ignored these hard-to-answer remarks (hard to answer, that is, without admitting that Middle East oil has always been at the center of Western support for Zionism), in order to concentrate entirely upon the easy-to-answer mass-murder-semi-denial aspect. How can the US press consistently divert from the obvious here (consider the sheer censorial agility, alertness, and intense single-mindedness required) virtually EVERY TIME for decades in a row — and meantime keep pretending that it's giving its public an accurate idea of the reasons why world Islam has an enraged sense of grievance and is thus ever more dangerously extreme?

Hitler With Nukes?:
It's odd that Iran's Ahmadinejad seems to:
[a] be doubting that Hitler killed as many millions of Jews as is generally accepted — even while
[b] he tries to build weapons that might destroy Israel.
Hmmm. It's notable that both items are consistent with the theory that:
he could be hoping to personally compete with Hitler for the all-time record.
After posting this 2006/10/3 thought on 10/7, DIO was delighted to see the idea put into much pithier form by one of the two greatest of cartoonists, Toles (International Herald Tribune 2006/12/14 p.7): Ahmadinejad is shown declaring that the Hitler murder of millions of Jews

[Hmmm. With this sort of scenario developing, how can one expect the US to leave Iraq? — situated as it is in the ever-shrinking (as regards weapon-reachability) geographical gap between Iran & Israel…. While dreaming of sending Jews to hell, Ahmadinejad hopes to merit a place for him&his in heaven — there'll be no room in the 7th heaven, since Pentagon-budget requesters are already booked into it in evident perpetuity, given this latest (and typically long-avoidable) chapter in the no-job-insecurity-around-here US military's Orwellian-continuous serial-confrontation history.]

FauxFoeFeeding?
Does it tell us something that the collapse of USSR-Russia led to no serious diminution of the Pentagon budget? New ``enemies'' quickly filled the void. (There's always awesome Cuba, to justify whatever. Is that what it's there for?) Once the war-machine's fangs are into the gov't trough, and symbiotic congressmen are feeding such a fiscally voracious (and kickback-regurgitating) entity, can it ever voluntarily shrink? Would Voltaire wonder: if enemies don't exist, must they be invented? Fortunately (?), in an ever-more-crowded bunnyrabbit-religion world, invention likely won't be needed for quite a spell.

How Did Gov't Transform From Job-Protecting Equalizer to Job-Threatening Terrorist?
The middle class is ignored in modern US “elections” for the same reason it's under siege in the labor market: too expensive. (There's not much stingy welfare distributed outside the poverty areas. And, on election-day, you don't find walk-around money being handed out in middle-class neighborhoods.) So much is now made of the “free-tradist” rulership's appeal to cheap labor, that its appeal to cheap votes has been relatively ignored.
[Fundies, blacks, women, Latinos: all these constituencies are bought for a few mere tokens. (Note in passing: part-American-Indian DR is genetically related to most Latinos, whose genes are 80%-90% American Indian.) Which takes us far from the New Deal era, when the gov't actually spent money trying to increase the average citizen's job-security instead of scab-destroying it, as today.]

The First and the Last World Wars & Bush's Cred-Crippling-Crusade:
Oil-glutton GWB's lying boy-who-cried-wolf rush to pre-emptive war has fatefully squandered-crippled all credibility for such an epochal move in case it might in future really be needed against a genuine world threat. As even VatCity's doddering old pope-head was able to anticipate, the Fifth Crusade in Iraq naturally jump-started arms-races all over the world: China, EU, Japan, Iran — not to mention N.Korea's resistance to disarmament inspections. (Which just might be related to the Iraq precedent, as lampooned by Leno's 2003 “joke”: hey, what a great idea Bush has — disarm a nation and THEN attack it.) This is just the spiralling mutual-distrust scenario that inevitably led to the First World War. Will the current repeat bring us the Last World War?

Bush and Gas::
Bush 2:
Ravaged Iraq so all “Americans” could enjoy SUVs — which required an ever more expensive and ruthless army. Kept US borders open for years, so Mexicans could join that army and thereby become official “Americans” — (as if Mexico isn't in the Americas already?!) and so enjoy even more SUVs. While Bush and Condoleezza Twofer were thus bully-imposing a worldwide Pox Americana, giving no voice or notice to traditionally peaceful nations, Japan & the EU began for some obscure reason to build serious armies.
Who says Bush will leave no legacy? (Hell, he is a legacy.)

Why do US courts and medium solemnly-ritualistically speak of juries' Awesome Responsibility for the decision to end (some scummo's) life in death-penalty cases, and so squander (literally) billions/yr on ensuring that not ONE innocent person will ever, ever, ever die — even while the same nation's military is destroying sinless-baby-crammed Iraqi homes while killing innocent Iraq civilians of all ages?
How can a nation whose cheap-labor-profiting rulership is obsessed with the slightest whiff of domestic racism (or ethnic prejudice of any type) ignore — for decades on end — such a contrast in relative life-valuation,of a sort which would instantly be branded as racist by the rulership — if it weren't helping that same rulership's gluttonous oil-profits?
Likewise, if equally-anti-death-penalty popes are serious about being consistently in favor of a “culture of life”, why not excommunicate Catholic soldiers in Iraq? Obvious answer: Holy Church only gets serious about life-issues when the stand doesn't endanger it's own interests. And it's obsessed with halting abortion, since population-growth is the institution's lone hope (and you thought it was logical disputation?) for returning to the glorious world-domination it had during Dark-Ages-One.

In 2005 Autumn, polls showed disastrously declined public support for the US' continued bloody occupation of “democratic” Iraq. (Where the Iraqis' “own” gov't won't let its public vote on whether US troops should stay — and the “democratic” US gov't won't, either….) But when Dem-hawk John Murtha then called for the US army to leave Iraq, the Dumbos brilliantly challenged the Dembos' bitching about Dumbo Iraq-policy by proposing a too-quick-exit bill — snickering while it lost 403-3.
The Dembos (incl JM) understandably claimed the proposal was deliberately too-quick, which is why they voted against it.
Nonetheless, a “bipartisan” agreement soon followed to begin-to-start-to-initiate-an-opening-phase-of doing what the public wants.
I.e., to avoid doing so as long as possible.
Amidst the posturing and the usual Dembo-Dumbo punch&judy show, we find that (as usual) the glaring unasked questions linger, spotlighting the phoniness of all such theatre (despite Media pseudo-blindness to said glare):
[a] So, why wasn't there a bill proposed by the Dembos which would show that there is any split at all between the “two” parties over Iraq policy? [b] Why hasn't the US' famous “free press” (OK — so where are snickers when we really need them?) even commented on this obvious point?
Isn't it nice to see all sides happy here?
The Dumbos get to keep killing people for the oil profits that pay to get them re-elected.
The p.r. for a glacially-slomo (multi-contingency) “withdrawal” lets the Dembos get to pretend that they're relevant.
The press gets to keep waterbugging on the surface of pseudo-fracases amongst the various kept-players in our nation's corporately co-owned Dumbos&Dembos-Puppet-Theatre.  Who says soaps are irrelevant to real life…?

What is the lesson gleanable from world-wide decline of job-security following the fall of totalitarian Communism? Is the answer that in a “free” society, the rich's unrestrained greed will always end up reducing the citizenry ever nearer a state of virtual peon-