Considerations & Probes

When they start following politics, virtually all youngsters are prey to gauging pols by their manner instead of their backers and resultant actions. The speed with which one corrects this weakness is one of life's earliest unofficial IQ-tests. If more than a few percent of the population could pass the test, US “democracy” might actually be one.

US Army as Salvation Army: Fewer Barefoot Injuns:
They Died With Their Boots On, Errol Flynn's 1941 Custer-hagiocinemepic, is mainly remembered for glorification of manly, stupid, wasteful white-guy sacrifice. But the bad news is paired with the glad news: the Cavalry's hitherto-unheralded generosity to the natives — a good deed hidden in the film's very title. Said title begs to be completed: They Died With Their Boots On — Though … Not for Long.
[As the race-police rush to flog DR for above use of the antique I-Word they'll be disappointed to find that DR is an American Indian (as every US Census has known for decades, from his consistent census statement) directly descended from Pocahontas and her father, Emperor Powhatan. Nice try.]

Cens-of-Proportion —
Does Hollywood's Censorial P.C.Police ACTUALLY Find Bluebirds & Fictional Characters More Dangerous Than Volks Who ACTUALLY Killed Over 30 Million People?:
What do the lovely tunes “The Banner High” (Horst Wessel) and “Zippedee Do-Dah” (Disney) have in common? Answer:
Each appeared in a film that was banned for decades in the U.S.
The 1st is the Nazi hymn, which features prominently in Leni Riefenstahl's Triumph of the WIll (1935).
The latter song is performed by James Baskett (playing Uncle Remus) — accompanied by a cartoon bluebird — in the 1946 film Song of the South. Both singer and song won Academy Awards for their contributions to the film. But Uncle Remus was a plantation slave, albeit fictional. (And the song he sings includes an insensitively-divisive, Zimmermanesque birds-of-color-profiling identification-report: “a BLUE-bird on my shoulder”.) So the Disney corporation (under the softie-sentimental chiefs following Walt) later contributed to Racial Progress by mothballing the film for nearly a 1/2 century (and still counting?), a censorial-curtsy of racial respect which has helped blacks so much and for so long that their temperate, learned guroos hardly complain about anything anymore.
But while Triumph of the Will has now been available on DVD for several years, the ever-dangerous semi-cartoon Disney film Song of the South remains — thank-god! — unavailable WORLD-WIDE (outside racist Japan — see Maltin's Movie Guide). How lucky we are that the film industry is protecting us for our own good, from media threats they regard as comparable to a German gov't that also banned films (e.g., Chaplin's Great Dictator) for the same reason, following the spirit of book-burner Goebbels.
[Triumph of the WIll, Leni's vast-public-impact filmic love-letter to Hitler (whom she probably bedded, contra her denials), was key to elevating him into such German godhood that the army fatefully agreed (in return for the 1934/6/30 rubbing-out of socialist SA-chief Ernst R\"ohm) that its oath of induction required personally swearing loyalty to Hitler, explicitly by name. Which was why his troops kept fighting to the 1945/4/30 end — when the Russians were literally a few blocks from his Bunker. Millions died needlessly as a result of this cinematically-inculcated religious loyalty.]

The US' energy needs have long been mega-expensively met by the Oil-Cartel's slurping-up black gold, dirt-cheaply right out of the ground, in the Middle East, etc. As locals discern that their national treasure is being grabbed, the traditional extraction has come to require an Oil-Cartel Army, aka “The US Army” aka “The Coalition of the Killing” — funded by US taxpayers, not the Cartel. Result: whatever better ways of energy-provision loom, it is more to the profit of the Cartel (whose generosity controls Congress, White House, etc) to discourage them.
Only-partly-facetious antidote: bring the Army's personel home, so they can build solar-energy and geothermal equipment, wind-machines, safer nuclear power plants.

Around 2010, a frequent Exxon ad presented an underfed young blonde muddle boasting of Exxon's compacting natural gas for more efficient travel, because much of it is found “far from where it's needed”. Likely angry Arab translation: energy found in Arabia isn't needed there because the locals are too primitive to use it, so it's OK to remove it to the US where it is (desperately) needed. The army that's used to enforce this removal has an occasional parallel to Tojo Hideki's 1941 bloody invasion of the oil-rich East Indies, justified not by an oilgrab but as merely part of an ultimately beneficent “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”.

Popular opinion is nought but press opinion, which is nought but the vector sum of establishment inducements of pressvolk minus the vector-sum of their fears of establishments.

Proof: Blacks Are Smarter and Holier Than Whites —
Judicious Perceivers and Parthenogenic Conceivers:
[1] The party of the professors is the Democratic Party — which proves that it's the better party. The only ethnic group that is perceptive enough to vote 90%-plus for this superior party is blacks.
[2] Long ago, the gov't reasoned that if a mother had no man around, she deserved more child-welfare assistance than otherwise. But only blacks were en-masse smart enough to
[a] see The Possibilities in this idiotically improvident rule; and [b] be the first folk (since the BVM delivered Jesus) to solve the biological secret of virgin-birth. Today, nearly 3/4 of all US black births are virgin births: no man around, but the kids keep coming. Like mom.

The Black-Comedy Side of TV 'snews Idea of Race-“Conversation” [2013]:
Blue-eyed race-pro Michaela Angela Davis (Black Entertainment Television) believes she has dedicated her perpetually-abused life to the ploughing-in-the-sea crusade of fighting non-blacks' racial postjudices — even while boasting that her ever-psyche-bruised family's motto was “ ‘Say it loud: I'm black, and I'm proud.’ My parents worked really hard for me to love my race”.
(From her weepy contribution to CNN's latest “race-dialog” monolog: 2013/7/24.)
A similar attitude was expressed a few years ago by professional Racist-sniffer and now-#1 “Civil Rights Leader” and White House advisor, Al Sharpton (tape replayed on Fox 2013/7/29): “White folks was in the cave when we had built empires…. We built pyramids before Donald Trump knew what architecture was. We taught philosophy and astrology [sick!] and mathematics before Socrates and them Greek honkies ever got around to it.”
This is the Reverend whom NBC has long been given a daily one-hour show on MSNBC-TV — every weekday at 18h Eastern Time (tune in!), and has been in&out of the Obama Black House over 6 dozen times.

Justice Delayed-Denied — the Unspoken Hurtful Humiliation of Whites:
One of the prime evidences of societal-structural race-inequity raised throughout The Great 2012-to-eternity Race-Whining Orgy is the fact that US courts give black criminals longer sentences. (Some might say because their previous rap-sheets are usually longer.) Though DR is not white, he will nonetheless take up the white cause in outrage at The System's unfairness in so swiftly releasing white criminals right back into whites' neighborhoods so they can prey (on the few whites who are not criminals, haters & racist-murderers). Meanwhile, the very same allegedly race-blind System turns around and specially protects black neighborhoods by keeping their very, very occasional predators in jail far longer than white criminals. For how many more decades will this foul practice persist until redress? — including, preferably, substantial monetary restitution for decades of calloused neglect of justice.

On a schoolbus, over the 2013/8/3-4 weekend, three black teenage hoods near-fatally beat up a white kid who had had the effrontery to object to their involvement in drugs. We yet await post-racist President B.O.'s apt comment: “If the three's fathers had another son, he could be Trayvon.”

It's a commonplace of Lib forums to claim that all groups use drugs, so why portray blacks as having a disproportionately high number of druggies? Comments:
[a] Check out the per-capita stats, especially for related violent crime, poverty, and general underfunctioning.
[b] More revealing (regarding the blessings of forced integration), check out the white stats before-integration-vs-after.

Racial integration was suddenly forced on the US population after WW2. (When the nation began thinking imperially and wished to project an image of non-discrimination at nations targeted for natural-resources exploitation.) The gov't literally pulled National Guard rifles on the public, for-their-own-good, to achieve integration.
Whatever prior force was used by southern states, to cheat blacks of equal opportunity, naturally should have been federally negated. Remember that the pre-1865 South was a virtual prison, guarded by whites who owned slaves by owning nearly all arms. For an excellent poetic-justice history, see Bruce Levine's The Fall of the House of Dixie Random House 2013.
Question: When the US women's movement insisted on getting the vote (finally succeeding, over 1/2 century after black males got it) and began massively going to college, why was it unnecessary in this case to call out the National Guard? Answer: This unjustly barred group had long been raising itself to a state that guaranteed peaceful cultural compatibility. (Did anyone think to pre-check that point before the National Guard started pulling out guns in Mississippi&Arkansas?) Nowadays, less than a century after US women got the vote, roughly 1/2 of science grad students are female. And, 1 1/2 centuries after blacks got the vote, what fraction of science grad students are black?

Mirror-Imaging Demographic Racism:
For years, public forums have predicted that whites will soon be a minority in the US.
[One USgov't-sponsored race-pro already grinningly urges Latinos to call themselves not a minority but an “emerging majority”.]
Increasingly (and ever more incessantly), the Dumbos are now told by croc-teary Dembos that their party will die if it doesn't appeal (pander) to the same desperate and racist block-voters the Dembos live off.
If anyone makes so politically bold suicidal as to suggest that the US' turning into one more Latin-American country (a vision that partly explains why some US elders are hoping to die faster than the nation's liveability [and fiscal bankrupcy, which is not Latinos' fault]) might not be the wisest of outcomes, the likelihood that establishment media will permanently, lethally damn her/him as a Racist and-or a Hater is maybe, roughly, somewhere in the general, verrrry approximate vicinity of 100.00000000000%.
[In the interests of full Disclosure: by the One-Drop Rule ever dear to all US ethnic-politics demagogues (antibellum rednecks or modern Sharptons), DR is American Indian — which is the genetic makeup of 90% of the population of Latin America. (Thus, DR is himself effectively a Latino.)
If we make the crudely way-over-optimistic assumption that there is a 50-50 chance for a nation to turn out well, then Latin America is akin to a flipped coin coming out tails 21 times in a row, which will happen less than 1 time in a million. I.e., the low condition of all 21 Latin American nations (and the majority of the rest of the nations of the world) is not an accident. (See below under: having-more-kids-than-you-can-afford.)]
And it follows that even conservative punditz (e.g., David Brooks 2013 July) promote without-a-flinch general acceptance of the inevitability of the foregoing vision.
While the Latinization of the US is a predictable result of current national rulers' policies, quite different priorities and guidance are more likely to take the country towards a more poverty-free, stable, competitive, and intellectually productive future than has usually (read: 21  nations out of 21) been experienced south of the Rio Grande.
To be specific: why not try a simple, race-blind rule (DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §D2 [pp.12-13]) that no one has kids who can't afford them? (China has actually been accomplishing something along this line for awhile, and seems to be progressing. One could spend years watching TV 'snews in the US, and never ONCE hear anyone praise China for such providence.) But regardless of the non-raciality of the proposed rule, those racist race-pros who live off igniting race-resentments will worry the possibility that the effect might be to lower their racial brothers' percentage of the electorate. Horrors!
Oh, what a gorgeous priorities-test this ex-poses for the race-baiting Dembo grievance industry:
WHICH DO YOU CARE MORE ABOUT?
Maintaining (if not increasing) a moaner-group's fraction of the populace? Or banishing the eternal-torture called “poverty”?
(Which causes the COMPLETELY-understandable moaning in the 1st place.)
And don't ignore what we learn from the looking-glass here: if it's “racist” for provident people to object to their own disappearance why is it 100% media-unobjectionable (and never called Racist) for historically improvident, over-reproducing, culturally under-performing groups to oppose any project policy that might cause their own percentage-decline? I.e., does the EFFECT of current policy make IT anti-white racism? [Some object that the no-money-no-kids? policy would take a police-state to enforce. Well, under present policy, the US already MUST be an IRS-police-state, since it has to remove BY FORCE, from provident folk of whatever race, funds which they could devote to raising doctors, scientists, composers — this, in order that the gov't can afford to give money (bare-subsistence-stingily) to masses of improvident parents, usually from broken homes with waaaaaay more likelihood of poverty cycle-continuation than an occasional admirable but once-in-a-blue-Moon individual's miraculous cultural quantum-jump-start success-story.]

In the U.S. All Racism Is Equally Verboten — But Some Racists Are More Equal Than Others:
On 2014/10/21 national TV 'snews showed a cute-news video: as a black guy joke-insulted Obama in passing, Obama responsively joked about how inapt it was to get such guff from “a brother”.

The Media's Missing Discussion: Neighborhood Watch
Following his prejudgements of the Skip Gates case and (2012) of the Zimmerman-Martin case, flagrantly-racist US Prez B.O. again (2013/7/19) sided with his bro, in publicly & race-baitingly saying he could have spawned a TMartin lookalike. (Whose drug-taking does indeed establish a slight B.O.-Martin bond.) But is there no Prez-empathy with inadequately-policed lower-middle-class areas? Why could B.O. not express a bond with Latino volunteer neighborhood-protector Zimmerman? [Did B.O. ever offer his services for Chicago neighborhood-watch? E.g., to stop peddlers of the very cocaine he was himself sneakily involved with? (But, then, who could say that deceit isn't apt training for politics?) Or of heroine, the current chief world pusher of which is Afghanistan, the nation which B.O. has unilaterally locked the US into Special-Relationship-with until 2024?]
Any wonder Zimmerman felt the need in a mixed area to be armed when he performed the good and decent deed of trying to protect his beleaguered neighbors? (A heroic deed which NBC 100%-one-sidedly drumbeat-smeared as wannabee-cop aggression, adding that he was a racial profiler — and proving it by doctoring a police tape to pretend that GZ had identified Martin as black before being asked about color.
Balance.)
A people's failure to show selflessness in protecting their neighbors may help explain the intractability of certain crime zones. Like Chicago. And, worse, Baltimore.

The Anti-Gun Lobby Goes Nuts. Short trip.
There are neighborhoods which get inadequate or usually-too-late-on-the-scene police protection. Yet following the Zimmerman-Martin case, what network has discussed this? Evidently, rich establishment hatred of “vigilante” justice is so kneejerk (as in the outrageously persistent persecution of Bernie Goetz) that poor areas are left to fend for themselves — and then condemned as murderous and-or racist when they do.

[The hysterical-paranoid robot-marches inspired by Sharpton et ilk caused the media-lynching of GZ. But they also saved him: the jury's much-condemned pallor arose from blacks being disqualified for jury duty by volunteering they'd been in those very demonstrations.
[Reminds one of the oldie: court verdicts are the judgement of people too dumb to get off jury duty. (Jury duty is involuntary servitude — for jurors' pay that's ordmag 1/100th as much as the same courtrooms' lawyers'.)]
Since the sole non-white juror wanted — on no evidential basis whatever — to convict GZ of murder (sending him to jail perhaps FOR LIFE), it's likely that a black jury would have taken its inherited eternal racist rage out on an innocent man and destroyed him. A nondiversely-rigorous outcome with racist juries in nations saddled with a high-low brand of that media-enshrined blessing: ethnic “diversity”.]

The George Zimmerman Guide to Hunting & Killing a Black Guy:
Many weekend TV 'snews establishment soothers (whom Calvin Trillin dubs the “Sabbath windbags”) act as if there is no absolute truth of the Zimmerman case, since it depends upon one's racial experience or herd instinct. (Even Fox's Bernie Goldberg talks of whites' & blacks' “different prisms”.) Thus the mediaspeak “racial polarization” of opinion.
No, it's mostly rationality-polarization. Just as for the Simpson case. (I.e., black-racist onlookers — at the mercy of ignorance, paid-pipers, and hateful rage — got it wrong both times.) Most of those with an independently-functioning brain (which exempts Dembos of all hues) realize Martin attacked GZ, while lots of those lacking such equipment think or say they think GZ deliberately murdered a black guy because he was black.
So let's show how George Zimmerman's hunt-scheme actually worked on 2012/2/26. (We'll borrow the Prosecution's passing initial claim that GZ was atop Martin while beating him.)

1. Call the cops as soon as your quarry is spotted, and stay on the line until your location is reported.

2. Call neighborhood invaders indictable cuss-names on police tape.

3. Make sure you're in a crowded community area, to ensure lots of witnesses and echo-magnification of noise.

4. Don't just shoot the guy right off but noisily beat him up first.

5. Pick a guy lots taller, younger, & stronger than yourself.

6. While you whup him, don't shoot yet — so he can yell for help for least half a minute so the noise might with luck gather a crowd.

7. Make sure that half your punches are feather-dusters upon the bruiseless victim, while the other half miss him and hit yourself enough to cause plenty of purple.

8. Instead of quietly strangling the now-helpless victim, shoot him for the magnificent echoes.

9. Don't run off but wait for the police.

10. When they arrive, raise your hands and take credit for your kill.

Brobots & Dembots:
Let's Massively, Loudly, Angrily, Baitingly Poison Race-Relations —
Because a Neighborhood-Watcher Watched Someone
(Who Tried to Kill Him For Doing So):
If snivel-rites pros can divisively rile up millions of robotically-automatic soulbrother-bonding (i.e., racist) blacks and equally-botty Dembo whites (only 30% of whom agree with the jury's verdict! — which is, notably, 29.99% higher than Dembot pols) by insisting that the Martin-Zimmerman case demonstrated that blacks can be killed by non-blacks at will, then: where is the coverage of demonstrations pointing out that the case actually shows that Liberal media defend blacks who assault neighborhood-watchers (of any color) for just doing their job?
[It's often said that professional race-baiters like Jackson&Sharpton are chosen by blacks. False. The rulership-owned gov't-appendage media choose them all: they can (and do) ignore anyone the rulership recognizes as dangerous to its interests. Thus, we can be certain that forces which are pitting races against each other have not arisen — and been media-nourished — by accident. It is just another classic divide&conquer ploy: a war upon the middle class (which possesses the only wealth left that's not already grabbed by the rich). And the resulting steady annual shrinking of middle-class numbers — AND its wealth-per-capita — is moving the US ever-further into an inescapable black-hole of dictatorship by an oligarchy of a very few (“democratically” elected [as in 2012] by the barely-subsidized block-voting low-end) who own virtually all wealth. Question for the future: how much commerce will get done, in an economy of hundreds of millions of people where 100 elites own everything?]

Whiles to Go Before We Sleep:
From Lib-media to President B.O., we keep hearing&hearing&hearing echo-whinings that blacks are diswespected in daily encounters (car-doors locking, purses held tighter) and that The System stigmatizes or even criminalizes walking-while-black (TMartin) or driving-while-black (DWB).
Where are we seeing (even on Fox) suitably blunt rational reactions to such insultingly skewed propaganda?
[1] Respect is earned, not given.
[2] In the context of social breakdown & routine criminality in black ghettoes, all groups (not just the eternal White satan) — including blacks themselves — are leery when encountering blacks in risky circumstances.
[3] Media are afraid to assertively & frequently defuse such rage, e.g., by flipping mindless mantras (like “Whatever-While-”) to point out that everyone's leeriness is just a natural mental-stats reaction to: waaaay too much
stealing-while-black,
looting-while-black,
carjacking-while-black,
ducking-child-support-while-black
drugdealing-while-black,
raping-while-black,
pimping-while-black,
murdering-while-black.
Question: Are media&prez implying that if whites stop click-locking car doors, black-society's pathology will decline?
Why else would B.O. complain about people taking reasonable anti-crime precautions, than to discourage such wisdom? Has he or his fawning media cared about the naïve young people — some of whom DR has known — who get robbed, mugged, kidnapped (or even killed) — just so that someone won't be mildly insulted, and so that the priorities of Al Sharpton (and his bud-Prez he elected) will be satisfied?
[On multiple occasions (particularly when walking home on a lonely street at night) DR, like many other men, has had the insulting, ego-shattering experience of seeing a lady pedestrian cross the street to avoid a close encounter. Which doubtless explains why men are hundreds of S.A.T. points behind women. Aren't they?]

Cheap-Labor Exploiters Always Find a Way —
Why Jesus Was Right That the Poor You Have With You Always:
Onset of Sanger's birth control→onset of welfare subsidizing poverty.
Onset of US abortion-rights→onset of Mexican-immigration tsunami.

Mutual Ever-Wheelspinning Rehab-Crusades —
Do Rightist Whites Want to Spend Yet More Sisyphan Centuries Vainly Trying to Rehab Poverty-Trapped Blacks Without Abortion?
Do Blacks Want to Spend Yet More Sisyphan Centuries Vainly Trying to Rehab Evil Whites?
Wasn't Establishing the RIght-of-Divorce One of Liberal Civilization's Watershed Achievements?
[1] If uneducated blacks keep having more kids than can be paid-for by salaries typical for uneducated people, how can the Fox network & the Republicans keep hating abortion? — and instead continue on&on harrumphing about moral-uplift rehab (i.e., don't have sex until marriage) — which has the same chance of success already well-known from the same plan's efficacy during the decades since brown-vs-bored, during which time the black bastardy-percentage has not shrunk but grown: from 1/4 to 3/4.
[Fox's attacks on white Dembo Sandra Fluke for promoting taxpayer-support of birth control are classic unthinking moralizing — condemning Sin without asking: if a woman can't afford birth control, can she support a child? (And if she can't? Let's get common-sense basic: which is more expensive for taxpayers? Supporting birth control? Or supporting an eternity of poverty-area children?)]
[2] If whites have stubbornly persisted in being as racist, hateful, cheating, & murderous as the Civil-Righteous lobby insists, then: why would blacks want to keep on having anything to do with such Slimy Satans?
[Why not follow the example of the Mormons and Amish, who, when they found it difficult to get along with the rest of humanity, did the work necessary to create their own communities? (E.g., they didn't play victim-theatre by complaining&complaining that bigoted banks wouldn't lend to them; instead, they opted for a remedy that is obvious (to all but MSNBC race-rousers): they just set up their own banks. Why haven't enough of those saintly fatcat charity-uplifters (who showboat-give munificently to black causes) done this as StepOne of an uplift that isn't paternalistic?)]

As the establishment gets the US deeper into debt, the carrot held out to keep citizens hopeful and voteful is the Reagan-Trump dream (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 fn 9 [p.4]) that the borrowing will stimulate the growth of the economy so the public will gain and the taxes on the renewed giant will pay off the debt. One reason this isn't working is that the only net gainers from whatever growth happens are the owners of the pols, so that what grows is not the average family's wealth but rather the costs of whatever products are created by said owners — a growth necessitated by the cost-add-ons required to afford the pols & lobbyists that pass laws FORCING citizens to buy or subsidize the prime lobbies' overpriced commodities: weapons, medicines, insurance.

Most US wealth is inherited. This is worth keeping in mind when media commercials push desperate folks toward Reverse Mortgages and turning annuities into regular cash income. Both are signs of desperate times (revealing how skindeep the US “recovery” is): each wipes out your estate, so you can leave no annuity or real estate to heirs. One more step in our rulership's elimination of the middle class.

One of several reasons why no modern US pol should ever get re-elected is simple math: the quicker the turnover, the quicker the slow-learner public might begin getting a glimmer of the reality that “bipartisan” gov't-business fiscal-vampirism of the pseudo-mysteriously ever-shrinking middle class will proceed unabated no matter which poseur gets elected.

How well determined is it that Obama's father is the Kenyan generally accepted as such? Obama looks rather as if his ancestry may have come partly from Egypt (check out the Sphinx) or Ethiopia (common border with Kenya).

Insurance's Insurance. Owning the White House. Public-Election or Plutocrat-Selection?
In a nation of 300 million persons, who are the only two who have already pointed a gov't-police-backed “mandate” legal gun at citizens' heads, to force them via public-policy-mandate to kick-in to the private insurance cartel? Who are the two 2012 candidates for the US presidency.
Same two jokers: Romney & Obama. Go-figure the actuarial odds of this surely-random event.
One in over 10,000,000,000,000,000.

[The comment on this coincidence by the US Press (owned by the two's common owners): don't mention it. Instead, their press just keeps hammering at the tooboisie: it's your civic duty to vote for one of these sluts.] Despite a spectrum of such mirror-images (DIO 18 [2014] n.168 [p.55]), the American sheeple will turn out by the million to vote in November.

Who Cares Whether P.C. Actually Helps the Poor?
The Important Thing Is That Dembo-Pols Are Living Off It. Living Really Well.:
On US' ever-neutral media, one keeps hearing about “structural racism” and “white privilege”. Hmmm. What skin-hue will get its wearer hundreds of added S.A.T. points towards college admission? Which hue allows one to call other groups (or each other) any insulting term, while the media bars others from even the slightest “micro-aggression”? Which color correlates most strongly with the privilege of its children being supported by taxes paid by other colors?
Is it relevant (or a micro-aggression?) to ask: have decades of such privileges improved the education or wealth or civility or happiness of their purported “beneficiaries”?

THE GREATER DEPRESSION & Its GuvProp Rewrites [2011]:
For “Slow” Recovery, read recovery-in-reverse for US citizens.
“Free Trade” = destroy unions, and subsume US sovereignty under globalists.
“Our President” = Their President.

National Debt Maxing-Out: And You Thought Eternal Life Was a Myth:
Whether it's the low-IQ end of the citizenry or the gov't of the pols they certify-by-Election, the same Faust-scenario unfolds: having whatever you want for a few years provides a glorious spree — until it turns out that you are in DEBT-SLAVERY PERMANENTLY. That is, FOREVER. It's the only part of the Christian afterlife-fable that's actually true.

CaveBoy Obama:
The 2011/8/2 US-debt deal replayed the 2010 Dec cave-to-the-rich Obamanation by again using the ongoing Dumbo-Dembo punch&judy farce to delay agreement to the last minute and then weep that the roof will fall in if the US doesn't agree RIGHT AWAY to borrow more trillions — but (trust-us) we're takin' the cure. Tomorrow. But it's complicated, so this part of the deal won't be Right-Away.
[Parallel to the 1986 immigration deal: amnesty right-away, but closing the border: ah, well, not-quite-right-away….]
The only right-away part of the Deal is: upping the debt-ceiling another ordmag-trillion dollars.
Hmmm. What would we make of the credibility of a supposedly-rehabbed wino who swore he'd stop drinking if you'd just agree to a Deal that funded creation of a wine cellar with room for a trillion more bottles?

The idea that the US would UPlift the Third World, by increasingly getting involved in it, is giving way to the realization that US citizens are DOWNjoining its blessings: desperation, crowding, dog-eat-dog.

After the 1453 fall of Constantinople→Istanbul, did Islam crest when war became more technological?

SlateSleight:
If You Keep Voting in Fake Elections, What Kind of Elections Do You Think You'll Keep Facing?:
I do magic: card tricks, etc, apt for various ages. But, if someone asked me to rank the “US election” sleight (where a slate of two billionaire-backed candidates is billed as egalitarian Choice), I'd rank it as too obvious to try out even onr a 6y-old audience. Yet, it's worked for decades on the American Sheeple, who ineducably keep showing up, Election after Election, falling for the same old our-candidate-is-genuine-this-time-and-your-protector-from-last-election's-dud — the same “public-servant” sham by the same actors who are (had better be) servant only to the huge financial forces that own the media that pied-piper the voters to repeatedly vote-in their pawns.

Incompleted Syllogism:
[a] The mafia's income is one of the largest of all the enterprises of the world.
[b] US elections are dominated by mega-money.
[The pretend-incorruptible US press never asks: how does enormous organized-crime money affect politics? Never. Could it just possibly be that the same mega-forces that own the pols also own the press?

In the 1950s the mafia tried taking-over Cuba and establishing there a safe haven for its activities, a scheme interrupted by the US via Castro. If you were the mafia, what country would you next try taking-over, in order to prevent further such interference?

Evolution of the last half-century's rulers: from worldsavers to worldslavers.

Leechislators Laying the Foundations for the Next Bubble:
The vaunted 2010 fiscal “Reform” bill is too short on rules (no return to Glass-Steagall) but long on “Regulators”. This translates: banks buying congressional protection will have to kick-in more than ever: not once (at the legislative stage) but continuously.

Distract & Divide & Conquer & Confuse:
Ever noticed how, the more the US establishment press obsesses on ethnic equality, the more US fiscal & class inequality rocket upward? Intelligent observers ought not need to have the connexion explained.

White Republican Fakes It As Black Democrat:
When a corporate-backed hack-pol named Barack Obama ran as a rebel in 2008 and whipped up naïve kids with promises like “Let's Go Change the World” — he had to be telling his fatcat funders that any changes were not what youth was assuming, or: he would never have gotten their fiscal backing. In short, it was a con all along. (And that was no surprise to some of us.) Never has there been a greater negative gulf between a prez-candidate's promise and his deliverance. But, then, what was one to expect of a former coke-sneaking kid who got his political education in the convent called Chicago?

Rejection & Protection:
Why, early on in his reign, did Obama return a long-ago-gift bust of courageous US-Top-WW2-Ally Winston Churchill to the British Embassy? (USA Today 2010/7/23 p.A10.)
[An excuse has been given that WC was responsible for mistreating Obama's grandfather. (The ugly details of WC's career are precised at International Herald Tribune 2010/8/14-15 p.18.) Which to a narrow (perhaps ethnically-tuned) mentality, is more important than Churchill's standing up to the Nazis in 1940 when hope seemed lost, thereby effecting the winning of history's greatest war, against its worst mass-murderer.]
Why has this revealing act received so little press criticism? (Some, yes — but way insufficient.)

Unstealing:
As the Dumbo"vs"Dembo media-theatre continues bellowing about whether or not multi-millionnaires' tax-rates should go up by a few percentage points (exact figure rarely specified on-air), the 4th-estate press — being owned by the same forces that own the pols the press reports on — of course doesn't warn viewers that this is just a diversion from the germaine question: how long will it take for the proposed tax-increase to rebalance wealth? — that is, to provide a long-term “stimulus” which will restore the nation's fiscal blood supply&flow.
The entire approach is too minuscule and aims at the wrong target. by concentrating on annual income instead of accrued wealth.
[a] After all, the former is just a few percent of the latter.
[b] And the media-spat diversion is about just a few percent of that!
[c] Simple multiplication thus shows that all the Dembos' showboat-storm is over whether or not the gov't should increase the oppressive tax-burden on the poor millionnaires by about 1/10 of 1 percent of their net worth.
That is, about 1 part in 1000 per year.
The full top tax is roughly 1/3 of income, so multiplication shows that this viciously commie Class-Warfare tax rips away the fiscal flesh of a pathetically-tax-victimized billionnaire's net worth by about 1% per year. Boohoo. So: how long do you think this “progressive” tax is going to take, to make a dent in US wealth-inequity?
[The much-resented Arizona law discouraging illegals is similarly feeble, since its restriction only to those [seen] breaking some [other] law so lowers the fraction of apprehensions, that it would require decades to clear out non-citizens. Yet even this weak gesture sends Libs into crying-jags.]
Nothing in this mode will work short of partial confiscating — unstealing — the trillions recently manipulated (congame-stolen) non-productively out of the US citizenry by multi-billionnaires. (TV 'snews drumbeat-propagandizes that 100% taxing the rich wouldn't cure the national deficit [which was $18,000,000,000,000 a few minutes ago] — deliberately not noting that partial confiscation could do so.)
DIO 16 [2009] ‡4 §B4 [p.41]:

An organism can't function robustly if all blood is in the palm. A restorative confiscatory-redistribution not just of income but of wealth would help. (When the richest 2\% own perhaps most of it, this might be a wiser source of Stimulus money than the middle class' future. Obama&co act like the idea never even occurred to them.)

HowCome It Didn't Work?! Merlin-Murky Circle:
Obama's idea of a stimulus counts on the public mass-brain to be too TV 'snews-fogged to notice the magic-trick: he injected tax-money into the economy, which means just putting-back what the gov't had taxed out of it (or borrowed from China or simply printed).
Another diverion from the obvious: nothing is changed by moving money — unless it's moved from the over-rich to the otherwise-doomed middle class, to allow full fiscal bloodflow.

All alert US citizens have long known that the world's mal-distribution of wealth is not just conspiratorial but also a reflection of the reality that there isn't enough refined oil, etc to go around — and that if all commodities were evenly distributed among 7 billion people everyone would be poor.
Question: has anyone thought of that in connexion with the looming melddown (no typo) of US' sovereignty being ever more gobbled up by scheming globalist loan-vampires, who now elect our leaders for us? E.g., when Belgium buys up the US' top beermeister and fires workers, shouldn't we realize that US citizens' welfare is not the concern of nations where US citizens have no vote. (There's little enough concern where they do.) THIS is what “Free Trade” means. When China hands the US the maxed-out bill for the US' post-1981 credit-card orgy, how high will rank the happiness of citizens of a nation that funded warlord Chiang's anti-Mao bloodbath, and has military-base-ringed China for decades: Quemoy, Matsu, Taiwan, Philippines?

Tyrant Big-Julie Caesar's Politics Lives: For decades, US presidential-election victories of the Dembos — the party of the professors & intellectuals — have occurred, despite working middle-class' modest-majority opposition, through the welfare-purchased massive-majority blockvoting by the poverty class, whose kids' father is increasingly the middle-class-tax-funded gov't.
Questions:
[a] Is such a devolving society economically sustainable?
[b] Can a nation keep replacing native workers by cheap-labor illegal-immigrant scabs (so both groups' home-mortgages are unstable), outsource jobs to cheap-labor foreign companies, and then just get-by through band-aiding (with food-stamps, unemployment insurance, & redefining disability) the inevitable degradation of citizens' salary-bargaining position & their purchasing power, as well as lowering the annual national domestic manufacturing of useful products?
[c] Does the thus-programmed reduction of the US citizenry to peonage relate to the gov't's anxiety to apply weapons-control to everyone but itself?
[At the dawn of 2005, New Orleans had the highest per-capita murder rate of any US city with a population equal to or greater than its. Hurricane Katrina then expelled its criminal class temporarily to Houston; and, for several months following, murder became extinct in New Orleans. Does this suggest a more effective solution to gun-violence than the Lib dream of ensuring that all the nation's guns are in the hands of the gov't? — which can be trusted neeever to abuse the physical dominance thus created.]

Plan Nine From Utter Speciousness:
The US invaded Afghanistan in 2001 allegedly because some of 9/11 was planned there. But that was mostly by Saudis — who, like subsequent troublemakers, wouldn't be deterred if Afghanistan totally vanished: they'd just move elsewhere. So what's the point of beating up Afghanistan for a decade, other than to stuff needy suitcases of local and US crooks with drug-profit cash?.
[Some of 9/11 was planned in Germany, Canada, & Minnesota. So why aren't they invadable?]
For about a decade, the US public has been treated to a succession of annual wait-'til-next-year alleged Timetables and At-Last-We're-OnTrack-With-the-Right-Plan. But, by 2015, shouldn't the press be asking of the gov't: ah, why should we trust you when it took you OVER TEN YEARS of fumbling before you thought of (this year's) Surefire plan-for-victory-or-exit-or-whatever?

As the Afghan adventure drags pseudo-inexplicably on, when will the press start asking if heroine profits are being shared with US pols (whether or no all are aware of the source) by other organized crime?
[Decades ago, a common joke was that the 1st prez elected by the mafia wouldn't know it until he was handed the bill. Does the joke's disappearance signal it's coming true?]

PC's Cost in Public Discourse:
As the Rush Bimbo 2012 flap rumbles on, public commentators on both sides cannot explicate the truth behind their own positions. Libs promote public support for birth control for the poor as a reasonable way to lower the number of children born into poverty — but have to mask it as a “women's health” issue.
The GOP just-say-no crowd may be as stupid as it acts. (How do you lower poverty by defunding the poor's birth control? If you can't afford birth control, can you afford a kid? Which costs the taxpayer more, birth control? or welfare mom's kids?) But it's also possible that the GOP push against women's reproductive rights is due to awareness that population-control ensures that the least provident people will reproduce the most — and that this factor helps explain rapid growth in the US' percentage of poorly functioning people.
The enlightment-problem here is plain: BOTH programs would — if openly admitted — trigger charges of elitism or racism. The inability to talk frankly about such matters shows that the US' anti-racist obsession is not trivial in its import & effets.

AmurcanHisssstory:
[1] How many Founding Fathers were not rich?
[2]  Before the 1861-1865 War of Northern Aggression, did any US prez who lived in a state that permitted slavery not own slaves?
(Two thirds of the 1st dozen Presidents were slaveowners.)

If having been enslaved is the reason blacks continue not advancing in the US, one might ask how that applies to the North, where free blacks existed for centuries and still advanced all too little.

Invisible Firing Squad: The Unknown Tyrant:
Has anyone noticed how US journalists are disappearing for the crime of dissent from corporate PC? (Reminds one of other dictatorships, where no one in the official 4th-estate [“Mainstream”] medium dares even criticize the killing of criticism.)
[Wouldn't open debate of the issues be a better way than expulsion? Why is no one publicly even asking the obvious question: if one is so wrong as to merit exile, refuting him should be a cinch.]
Lou Dobbs dropped from CNN for suggesting (contra California's robust economy) that mass illegal immigration might not be good for the US.
Helen Thomas disappeared for urging peace by getting Jews out of the Middle East.
Juan Williams off of NPR for his purely imaginary notion that airplane bombers have some statistical connection to being Moslem.
Rick Sanchez for the bizarre idea (shared silently by every single one of his less bold colleagues) that Jews have a demographically disproportionate influence in the US media.
Questions on the foregoing complilation:
[1] Which two journalists were not re-hired anywhere?
Answer: Thomas & Sanchez.
[2] Which two criticized Jews?
Answer: Ditto.

CNN's firing of Sanchez can hardly be taken seriously as attempting a refutation of his point!
[The firing raises the obvious question: if the centrist dogma here (that the media are not either under biasing influences) is so valid as to justify censuring Sanchez, why does this dogma need such protection as [a] banning doubt, & [b] killing the career of any public doubter?]
So: was Sanchez' exile meant instead to confirm his point, as a warning to any other newsman who has so much as THOUGHT about even discussing (much less opining on) the matter? For, the firing decreed unambiguously that the issue cannot be discussed AT ALL in the US' Free[snigger]Press.
[Note: As an atheist, DR is a beneficiary of Jews' long experience with heading off what can happen to minorities in a rabidly religious milieu, when yahoos' majority-force is irrationally unleashed.]
TV Guide instantly went out of its way to call Sanchez' comments a “blunder”. Well, one might equally call the White Rose or Stauffenberg blunderers. The common thread: opposing tyranny. In the present case, we may see the tyranny as benign (all tyrannies think they're such), but it's tyranny nonetheless. And the expunging of anything smacking of what can (by any stretch) be deemed “racism” is becoming more not less tyrannical — WITH NO ONE ALLOWED EVEN TO DISCUSS WHO THE BENIGN TYRANT MIGHT BE.
Question (to which we do not offer a definitive short-term answer): is the US better off for this plainly-UNOPPOSABLE press-tyranny?
As we watch one journalist after another vanishing, we might recall a familiar wise warning of anti-racism pros: 1st they came for Jews, and I did nothing. Then for commies, and I did nothing. Then for homosexuals, and I did nothing. Etc. Finally, when they came for me, there was no one left to defend freedom.
The mantra of those gotta-be-eaten-last house-sluts who rush to apologize for each firing is: a-network-desk-is-a-special-responsibility (where Responsibility is clearly gauged more critically by party-line-cling than by skill or originality). I.e., only a few are killed off. The Catch: these are the people whose effusions inform and mold the minds of the other 99+ percent of the nation; as certain thoughts are forbidden to be broadcast, the larger world's thinking is constricted. (And-or enragedly inflamed.) And the spectrum of what can be said is getting steadily, incrementally narrower. The gain we get from each network execution is: it temporarily over-rides the perniciously invisible incrementality.

How can the gov't get upset at BP's having cut corners to save costs? After all, how much money would even an oil company have left after paying off all the pols required to get into the Gulf in the 1st place?
What a show it is to watch Obama complaining about how BP (& Halliburton) are “pointing-fingers” at each other — when he (who in 2008 got more BP campaign cash than anyone) is himself pointing-fingers at BP, though it is Obama who gave BP permission to drill (despite BP's possession of by far the worst safety record in the industry) — and overturned a longstanding moratorium on new offshore drilling just 3 weeks before the 2010/4/20 Gulf disaster.

The Globalist-Militarist Welfare-State World Order:
“Conservatives” continually decry the “socialization” of the US by cradle-to-grave-do-gooders who make decisions for the public whether the intended beneficiaries like it or not. The complainers seem to suffer from blindness to an embarrassing analogy, since the very same folk are also ever complaining of the White-US-burden of defending the freedoms of wimpy socialist Euro-nations by supplying most of the military personnel for various wars that are said to be protecting these nations' interests. But the US is doing so whether the intended beneficiaries like it or not.

How Noble of Congress to Take No Credit for So Much Direct Help to the Poor:
With minimal “transparency” in the 2008-2009 bailouts of the Wall Street needy, we may ask of the disappeared money (which required the bailouts): did it end up in the hands of the rich or the poor?

Gauging the Gouging:
In eons of obfuscatory talk-show “debates” on corporate-owned TV 'snews, why has the obvious question gone unasked: Insurance companies live by computing risk and thereby gauging the premiums they gouge. But if everyone is Obama-guaranteed full insurance, this rôle vanishes, so: Why will we need insurance companies any longer?
Answer: see previous paragraph — which will sufficiently explain why an elaborate & protracted Dembo-Dumbo pseudo-spat is required to make this simple matter seem so complicated that a messy, quilted-fiefs not-quite-everybody-covered ultimate bill must be required.
Also: If doctors are salaried instead of paid-by-the-operation (and are not stampeded into needless procedures by fear of over-suit), then they not the insurance cartel can make all the decisions about expenditures — thereby liposuctioning all the insurance company heads (and other greedy fat) out of the system.

Little-guy candidate Barack-Trickledown-Obama's prime largesse with public money has been to banks & insurances companies. So they can keep affording him & his fellow actors.

Who Knows Insurance Better Than the Cartel? —
the VETObama-Failsafe:
While the centrist media spent 2009 discussing whether Dembos need 50\% or 60\% of Congress to pass their insurance-company-health bill, the insurance cartel is quietly chuckling, knowing that to over-ride its fail-safe White-House operative will take 67%.

In 2009 mid-Sept, Obama's lawyer lips moved to croc-weep that the US is the only major nation not to insure all its citizens' health. Accurate. And a disgrace. However, he is using this disgrace to justify a worse one (via whipping-boy Baucus): converting the US into one of the nations (as of now) that will use a public institution (the I.R.S.) to force its citizens (by gov't-grab fine) to buy from the private medical-bucks cartel — whose mega-wealth elected him specifically to get-this-done.

When a nation's rulers are elected by mega-wealth, two things are sure:
[1] The drug traffic will never be stanched. [2] International forces will outbid local companies for ownership of pols, thus national sovereignty evaporates.

It's widely accepted that our age's greater cussing is caused by lower-class influence on media. Though that may be true in part, there is a more basic unrecognized cause, namely, life is getting progressively more frustrating for the average citizen:
[a] Technology & job-security have made day-to-day life more nervous. [b] Rage is on the rise.

Weather is a lifetime cradle that we should be more grateful to when it's good — avoiding the common error of usually noticing it only while complaining when it's bad.

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.

[Cartoon by Pat Oliphant International Herald Tribune 2008/9/21-22]

Bail to the Thief:
DR question, while watching the US gov't bleed its productive citizens and their descendants, to make sure that big risk-capital-genius bankers stay not seriously nationalized and thus still-capitalist entities who can continue to afford congressmen:
When did it become a federal obligation to bail out gambling joints?
[Isn't it comforting to know that your taxes:
[a] Fund banks' lobby-bribery of your congressmen.
[b] Similarly, when you are mugged, your taxes are required to support the (presumably near-indigent) lawyers who'll try as hard as possible to spring your mugger.]

[Cartoon by Toles International Herald Tribune 2009/2/7-8.]

How Bad Is It? And Why the US' Bozo Rulership Can't Admit How Bad.:
Let's suppose the US were a feckless teen, who'd gotten into the kind of addictively-spiraling financial debt that we've see since the sainted & mob-affiliated (see G.Russo Supermob NYC 2006, e.g., pp.116, 487, 499) Prez Ronald Reagan super-enriched his pals by inaugurating there's-no-tomorrow economics in the US. If the poor debt-ridden chump went to a professional tax-advice lawyer, you know what the advice would be? Go Chapter-Eleven: bankruptcy. But nations are too proud. So, what will the Brandnew Obamanation do? Talk “change” & boldness & strength & & self-sacrifice. But, meanwhile, bumblingly appoint a bumbling same-oldboy&girlperson cabinet, and print more money than ever to stave off reckoning….
Returning to this paragraph's intro: what path would our dummie in-hock teen choose to do if he could? Same.

From Brain-Trust to Drain-Trust — the Race to Harmaggedon
And Make Way for The Mexico City Times as the US' Newspaper-of-Record:
Speaking (as above) of Reagan's inventiveness: he also inaugurated the now-standard corrupt practice of selecting Cabinet officers primarily for their fund-raising potential. Little wonder the US is going broke: as increasing tons of mon are increasingly tossed at each national crisis, pol-rake-offs are just as increasingly becoming the immediate aim of the tosses — a classic vicious-circle harms-race since, as each election looms, the cost to compete with the previous election's standard of threshold-loot-it-takes-to-get-elected meets new competition and thus new enormity. Contra Mencken's obsolete joke that congressmen were a cheap buffoon-circus for the price, these fiscal-bloodthirsty pseudo-clowns' squanderings look likely to break the US' economy and world-primacy, end US sovereignty, and all-too-swiftly hand the nation over into globalist receivership.

When the near-bankrupt New York Times is reported as being bailed out as manipulable salvage by a Mexican billionaire (2009 Feb), Carlos Slim, the world's richest man — what pride is left before the fall?
Should the newspaper change its name to the World's-Richest-Man Times?

Are Great Scientists Mere Idea-Bags?:
On MadAve, the creators of ads are peons: “word-bags”. The same was true of playwrights in the time of Marlowe [“Shakespeare”]. which is why Shakespeare — a mere actor-celeb and businessman — could become eminent and rich without ever writing a play, while (as Robert Greene lamented on his 1592 deathbed) the actual writers starved. Question: is it any different in the scientific community? Are those who create original ideas just modestly rewarded hirelings? — while administrators, academic pols, and grant-hustlers make most of the money and headlines. Fortunately, science hasn't fallen so far into this state as other fields, but what will the future hold?

On 2009/3/30, MS-NBC's D.Shuster — who had helped elect Obama — rightly scored him for hypocrisy over (justly) firing GMC's greedy chief while not firing (instead supping with) the bankers whose responsibility for the current mess (Great Depression Two) is far greater. The comment is welcome but misses the reality of the bankers and Obama: who's in a position to fire whom? Or, to rephrase it: who owns whom? Indeed, as Shuster may come to learn: who owns the media?

New Deal or Fast Shuffle?:
On 2009/2/22, The Anointed One — our latest White House-occupying lawyer — moved his lips to promise an extra $65/month (in tax-breaks) for the working needy. (While keeping the filthy-rich's tax-rates miles below those of the genuine New Deal of FDR, who realized that over-concentrations of wealth would naturally grow exponentially to world ruination — as has been repeatedly re-proven since.) That's about $800/year. Meanwhile, the bankers (whose paper wealth was key in electing him) keep all those outsized salaries, commissions, bonuses, etc. they accumulated from their decades-long house-of-cards loan-orgy. (And the theatre known as Congress thunderously emotes over bonuses worth 1/1000th of the disappeared loot.) The gov't's net rush-rush bailout of their institutions is getting into the trillions: tens of times greater per family than $800, and each middle and lower family's heirs will be stuck with either that debt or inflation. Or globalist ownership.
[Suggestion: whenever you hear a dumb phrase needlessly echoed, ask why. E.g., what's so special about the term “toxic” loans? Simple: it's a classically Orwellian diversion from what they should be called. Like: irresponsible, corrupt, innumerate, greedy, improvident, Ponzi, idiotic, chain-letter, etc. Someone who got stung (DR didn't) can probably get much pithier; so, pithed-off readers contacting DR to suggest apt phrases are free to get as obscene as the scam-rulership's behavior.]

Being screened at a US airports is evidently headed towards a rigid choice:
[1] Be shot through by potentially carginogenic Xrays. or [2] Have a homosexual experience. (In a Free[snigger]Country, shouldn't a gropee choose his groper's gender?)
[Choice lately rendered obsolete.]

Some Enemies Are More Potent Than Others:
When will someoene in the US media ask the politically-untouchable question: weren't the top folk at the World Trade Center, which the 9/11 airplanes were aiming at, the sort of fiscal schemers who have drained & hobbled the world economy?

What With All Our Smart&Dedicated On-Guard Pols, Who [Surely Must've] Learned Their Lesson from the S&L Disaster, How Could the 2008 Crash Have Possibly Happened?:
Following the 1990s' S&L economic mess, DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §F4 [p.6] commented:

Wait 'til a fraction of the money, stolen (largely by real-estate-speculators) during the Reagan-era Savings&Lootings deregulation&kickback orgy, starts filtering into the 1992 election process, paying for mass-befuddlement advertisements, to help elect most of the very politicians who made it all possible.

The [Left's societal-salvation] theory is: just pay enough welfare, and poverty will atrophy naturally. As wacky as the Reaganomics [deficit-binge] notion that if you cut taxes enough, the unburdened economy's reborn tax-base will make up the gov't revenue-loss. One is naturally impressed by the dementia of these theories' creators — but I reserve my particular awe for the straightfaced pols & press who peddle them to the public.

The foregoing comment, upon the US' Reagan-triggered 30y borrowing spree, leads naturally to the question of whether the US economy is heading towards becoming the world's biggest Ponzi-scheme (in which one pays out to prior investors the latest in-take from new ones, to fake solvency) — as the US in truth owns less and less of itself.

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.
[Are the 2008 Fanny-Freddie disasters the result of effectively attempting to barrack the globalist-fanatic US' ever-growing slave-labor class?]

The virtues of capitalism are real (most obviously the computer explosion) and are oft-sung in the capitalist-owned press, which however tends not to notice the downsides:
SUVs' pollution & irresponsible burning of irreplaceable compact energy. Even more insidious has been a decades-long compiling of rickety credit that has — unlike a few generations ago — put average US home-buyers into 30y debt (far longer than less capitalist nations) and college graduates into ordmag $100,000 debt, about the size of their share of the national debt that has ballooned since FOX-canonized Ronald Reagan initiated gargantuan deficit-spending to enrich his super-rich pals, while evading loss of popular support over this personally-profitable largesse by not bothering to pay it by taxing a public which has been hypnotized by his pals' vaunted Free Pross into decades of innumerate-haze.

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:
[1] too poor to win, or
[2] making up for that by getting funding corruptly (in order to fight the big money arrayed against any genuine populist) and thus (too often justly) press-portrayable as crooked, or
[3] so rich that the media will (too often justly) smear his advocacy for the poor as hypocrisy.

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 [2008 April], 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.]

Some Changes Never Change:
Ever notice that all our recent presidents turn out to have strange Friends? — who don't have much interest in USers' welfare but are mega-loaded with shady cash-by-the-ton.
Carter-Bert Lance. Reagan-Ollie North. Bush1-Saudi Prince. Clinton-Whitewater & orientals in love with the Lincoln-Bedroom (and Saudis). Bush2-Enron (Kenny-Boy) (& Cheney-Halliburton). But each prez advertises himself as New&Different-from-his-predecessor, thus Obama's “Change”.
[As Obama “evolved” (as the presstitute media put it), breaking campaign promises he never even meant to keep (public campaign-funding, outta-Iraq, lower taxes), the joke going around Washington, even before the 2008 December Blag-man scandal, was: we're sure watching Change. Obama's.]
Note added 08/12/20:
The foregoing note was written 08/12/13, posted 12/15. On 12/19, it was revealed for the 1st time that Clinton was also taking bigbucks from Saudi Arabia. Thus, every prez from Reagan on was heavily, INDISPENSIBLY funded by Moslem oil-billions — which in the real world translates: the beneficiaries could do nothing without the say-so of the funders.
Curious temporal coincidence: since Reagan, the US has plunged down two self-destructive addiction-slopes, [a] trillions in deficit spending [started by Reagan], [b] tens of millions in unchecked massive immigration [tsunami started by Clinton]. If one wants to know why the US looks like it's committing suicide, one might ask how much love for the US is possessed by those funding its leadership.

Ohbummer Anointment:
Centrist media commentaries superficially appear to keep looking for emergence of the eternally-postponed “real” populist Obama. But B.Rawlins makes a point hitherto unconsidered: c'mon, these are seasoned, and thus largely cynical . They can't possibly be as naïve as their effusions pretend. So their gush-chorus for The Anointed One is simply their orchestraion of the Anointment itself.

Levelling: 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 (some might call this a kind of wise-up re-hab): 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].]

Expensive Ineducability:
After 2/3 of a century of Middle East horror, one can wonder whether the world will EVER learn the obvious: the Arabs will never accept the presence of Israel in their midst. This fact dictates that there are only three options that could solve to the problem (none of which will be allowed to occur, of course):
[1] Remove or kill all the Arabs.
[2] Uplift the Arabs' lifestyle, starting with population control. (Which cannot be promoted or even mentioned as a social solution on fake-antiElitist US media today.)
[3] Helen Thomas' fatally frank proposal: Jews leave the area. Perhaps go to a homeland created out of, e.g., Germany, which killed over 4 million Jews (a vile crime that Arabs took no part in) which caused the 1948 creation of Israel in Palestine (among the remains of the Ottoman Empire), plunging an intellectual population into the hornet's-nest of millions of rigidly religious zealots, without their consent.
Instead of a solution, it seems that the West prefers to keep black-comedically calling the rage and carnage a “Peace Process”, while pretending it's working ever-so-diligently to solve the mess it created.
Israel was originally made possible by oil-cartel forces' desire to have a nose in Arabia's oil-rich tent, starting with the 1917 Balfour Declaration of sympathy for the vision of a Jewish homeland, this being the time that the West realized the enormity of the energy lying underneath Arabia (and the British Navy's ships all went over to oil). Thanks to the West, Israel today is by far the best-armed nation in the Middle East, capable of intimidating any neighboring nation that defies the cartel — one of several nations (primarily US&UK) that will kill anyone who stands in the way of the oil-addicted West's access to its petrodrug.

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 dollars 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 [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.

Two WW2-Russia-Japan items:
[1] The reason tens of thousands of US soldiers died as the US island-hopped across the Pacific to get within B-29 range of Tokyo is that the USSR had and respected a non-aggression pact with Japan and so didn't let the US use its turf for such bombing.
(Vladivostok is as close to Tokyo as Iwo Jima.)
The USSR wouldn't even let the 1942/4/18 Doolittle B-25's land on its soil; and, when one plane did, the pilots were jailed for over a year.
[2] The reason the USSR was able to save Moscow on 1941/12/6 even as the genocidal Nazi armies were beginning to surround Moscow, was that Moscow had received (supposedly via the spy Richard Sorge) assurance that Japan had chosen to attack the East Indies for oil instead of aiding (from the east) Hitler's assault on the USSR.
Some obvious questions:
[a] Are items [1]&[2] related?
[b] Was it spy Sorge or unofficial Jap gov't channels that tipped off the USSR? Did Japan deliberately betray its pact with Germany, pretending the vital news of its intent had accidentally leaked via spy? — in order to protect its own western flank as it planned to concentrate its aggression upon spoils more to the south and east.

Historians have long debated why Hitler declared war on the US on 1941/12/11. It's often regarded as inexplicably nutty, since it committed Germany to fighting three great empires simultaneously: US, UK, USSR.
But a rational explanation exists: Hitler hoped for a quid-pro-quo We help Japan by fighting its main enemy, so Japan might help Germany by at least harassing Russia's SIberian flank. Never happened.

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] A brother of Afghanistan President Hamid Karzai lives in Baltimore. [He runs a restaurant at the city's center: Charles & Baltimore Strs.]
[2] Since travel by-sea is far cheaper than by-rail, Baltimore's eminence as a port is based on its greater 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.
[5] Some years after the above four items were posted here, the following item regarding another brother [Ahmed Wali Karzai] appeared in the 2008/10/6 International Herald Tribune (the “Global Edition of the New York Times”), p.2: “The White House says it believes that Ahmed Wali Karzai is involved in drug trafficking, and American officials have repeatedly warned President Karzai that his brother is a political liability, two senior Bush administration officials said during interviews last week …. citing limited DEA resources in Kandahar and southern Afghanistan and the absence of political will in the Afghan government to go after major drug suspects” as the cause of continuing inefficacy to counter the problem.
Later, an article in the 2009/8/27 IHT p.1 reports that Pres. Karzai recently wished to appoint a top drug-trafficker as VP but (to make a long story short & to the essential point) was told by Obama-Hilla to not blow everybody's cover so unsubtly. Unanswered question: why would the US (Bush & Obama) keep backing someone who even consideredappointing a known drug-profiteer? But the idiot-left's Peace[snigger]Candidate Obama can't get into Afghanistan deep enough fast enough. Question: When will the Dembos prosecute a war not on the side of drug-racketeers?
Have we finally reached the long-predicted time where mobster-wealth is electing a US president?
[Oh, come on, let's not get hysterical here. You'd think the US economy is collapsing from organized-criminal leeches on the flow of money to its eternal wars….
And it's not like these wars are pointless: there are US&local officials all over Afghanistan with empty suitcases that won't feel healthy until stuffed with moving cash.
Above all, we're protected by the wisdom of the American sheeple, who've never been crazy enough to elect a president from ultramobtown Chicago, have they? — a fantasy so inherently impossible, it's not even worth a fretlet.]

Coincidence: After a decade's invasion of Afghanistan, the USSR collapsed amid a huge rise in the power, wealth, & influence of organized crime in Russia.
Think that might have been triggered by cultural mingling with a narco-state? No? Well, then the US has nothing to worry about, does it?

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.
Incidentally, the 1st prez to get the bill was probably JFK (serial fletcher of mob-molls and son of a booz-runner) — now best remembered for his immortal inaugural address' charge to the nation's Vietnam-bound cannon-fodder [transl.]:

The mafia-bill-to-prez joke'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 yet educationally) NEVER 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 ads&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 (both when Dems held White House) of the last three US wars protected drug-empires (Kosovo & the pseudo-mysteriously-eternal Afghan farce); the other (Iraq), protects oil-pushers — and is being fought by yet another addiction: the Islam opiate.

Loose Change You Can Believe In:
The foregoing discussions were posted in 2007. By 2009, we have a new Prez from Chicago (i.e., Palermo West) who was elected by being mysteriously backed by more money than all the other candidates combined, which ensured that the FreePresstitute media created the required Charisma — (one recalls the warnings embedded in Gore Vidal's novel, Messiah) as well as the laughable myth that most of the money came from ordinary folks' loose change. And what is the new Prez' big new foreign policy Change (versus Shrubya's oil-grab invasion of Iraq)? Saving the oil-less but top heroin-producing nation on Earth, Afghanistan.

As just noted, heroine-fount-Afghanistan-obsessed Obama comes out of the ethereal politics of mafia-capital Chicago. But that's OK, since Congress will protect us. After all, the US Senatipede's sincere poopulist Harry Reid, is from Nevada, whose ethics were formed by Bugsy Siegel & Meyer Lansky. The [recent] Speaker of the House, 50fold-millionaire Nancy Pelosi, is a blood member of Baltimore's d'Alessandro mayoral machine — and I'll bet that a determined search (during the d'Alessandro era) could have found somehow, someone, somewhere in Baltimore who believed that machine didn't have mob connexions.

Schemes a Socially-Provident Gov't Would Curtail. (Talk About Hypotheticals….)
[a] Leaving Madoff free for months, during which he might have committed suicide without spilling. [b] Needlessly transforming old rabbit-ears-TV spectrum in a terrorist age.
(If cable transmission fails, much of the public will be without mass communication, since that's about how many won't bother to convert.) [c] Leaving GMC stocks & bonds on the market after bails began.
(Obvious temptation for insiders [especially pals of pols controlling bails] to make killings by well-timed buy-sell moves. Tammany-Hall veteran Geo.W.Plunkitt's notorious 1906 definition of “honest graft”.)
[d] The 2008-etc serial bailing out of “good” banks but not “bad” banks.
(Question: What's a “good” bank when they're nearly all failing? Partial Answer: A “good” bank is a big bank — i.e., big enough to afford the congressmen deciding who gets saved-for-another-pay.) This is just same-old-bubble-bust-bubble-cycle cafeteria capitalism: when the latest Ponziesque super-capitalist oinkfest inevitably collapses, “socialistically” loot the public to keep the pigs afloat until the economy can “recover”. (Read: Start a new bubble.)

A Revealing Contradiction:
Why is the New York Times such an establishment-suckup in its departments of drama, art, science, politics etc. — while simultaneously ever on the seismographic alert for microaggressions against aggrieved groups? Resolution: the latter's press-exaggerated slightings are convenient stimuli to ethnic rage that inspires the manipulable uneducated to blocvote for Dembos to keep power away from evangelicals whom the Jewish lobby (not without cause) fear could evolve into perpetrators of the next pogrom.

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 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 and the Indies was an Asia-for-the-Asians move, to create what Tojo brassily called the “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”. Millions died while Japan simply grabbed their wealth and killed those who objected.
[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:
Sentencing 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.
[b] 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.
[c] 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 try putting 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[snigger]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.

The Whorporate Media: 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[snigger]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 Kubrick'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 Iraq 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 associated with the Serb secret service), 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 (reluctantly: e.g., James F. Simon Lincoln & Chief Justice Taney 2006 p.214f) 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 FJ's 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 via Max) 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 unenthusiastic 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.)

Piu claimed he was forcibly kidnapped (1931/11/10) into the Emperorship of Manchuria. This was not true. The only question that remains is: how false?
Question: why did Piu voluntarily move to Tientsin — next-door to Mukden — prior to the 9/18 Mukden Incident? Since his family (which had ruled China for centuries) was from Manchuria, he was an obvious choice for puppethood, to provide legitimization of a projected Japanese puppet state. So: was Piu in on a conspiracy that started WW2?

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 for congressmen? — 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 out-endured Confederate Math by half-a-century: 100% = zero, i.e., women were counted to measure the number of congressional seats (& electoral votes) a state had, but were not allowed to vote.
And the press 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 one of any PC-anointed 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 with binocular vision. (Wall-eyed vision is for the prey-animals' defense against hunters.) Natural selection gave hunters depth-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 3rd 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-own-sake — without thinking out the consequences.
[The best modern example is the West's condemnation of China's use of forced abortion for those who can't afford children. Or the US' or Sweden's ever-ongoing self-flagellation over its old policies of sterilizing idiots, which in both cases helped (along with non-farcical immigration policies & enforcement) temporarily improve egalitarianism (& national mean IQ) decades ago. Destroying those safeguards helps few besides plutocrats. And the mafia, whose cash contributions to the political process appear to be a subject of flat-zero interest to the media, though the mob has vast sums of invisible money that obviously is spent on pols and very likely also in buying up media influence if not whole sectors.]

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 Ted 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 allies (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].)
On “MS”NBC (2014/4/20), talking-headess Alex Witt said on-air of (also-androgenously-named) fellow-headess “I love that girl.” A few years ago, Witt was addressed on-air as “girlfriend” by MS-NBC's Ashleigh Banfield. Do some women flaunt an unexplained privilege to use a word banned for men?]

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 §§D2-D4 [pp.12-13]:
How to Soak the Rich & Have Them Like It
There is a peaceful means for lowering interclass hatreds and simultaneously redistributing wealth, a means so simple and so inexpensive (as regards taxes) that its very mention is banned from all US media (right or left wing).
This radical approach is: simply do whatever it takes to ensure that middle and especially upper income groups have more kids, while the poor have fewer. If this sounds drastic or unfeeling, then ask: is a temporarily-impolite but effective & relatively rapid solution more brutal than perpetual degradation? (Were Margaret Sanger or Bertrand Russell alive, there's little doubt: [a] they'd urge intercepting this cycle with aggressive population control, and [b] network TV would ignore their very existence.) This approach (inverting the usual trend) would also ensure that, statistically, more children than not would grow up surrounded by affection, toys, books, computers, optimism, intellectual stimulation, and gentility. Less frequent foetal-alcohol-syndrome infants, and premature cocaine-snowbabies.
More homes with two parents. And no rats. Little things like that. [This probabilitistic argument should not be construed as ignoring or belittling the remarkable, hard-earned exceptions that occur among numerous poor families. On the other hand, such exceptions are too often mis-adduced in order to suggest that no foresighted demographic policies are required, to lower the high statistical incidence of poverty breeding poverty….
Also, by this means, concentrations of wealth would become diluted naturally & relatively painlessly, instead of by the current gov't policy of (forceably) taxing provident couples (who thus can afford fewer well-cared-for children themselves) in order to pay (inadequately) to feed the overnumerous children of someone else (usually improvident and single) — children whose depressing home-lives virtually kill their future-chances from the outset, so that the same gov't that encourages such a mess then taxes the middle class all over again, for eternally-ineffective band-aid “head-start” & “JOBS”-style programs.
E.g., see “Breaking the Welfare Cycle That Destroys Our Children” (which starts deceiving us right in the title: the next-last word), signed by Senator Moynihan (D, NY) (Wash Post Nat.Weekly Ed. 1990/12/3 p.23). The article (to which I add occasional astonished emphases) states that, after Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) began in 1935, surprisingly: “we experienced a vast, still little understood social change involving a huge increase in the number and proportion of children born out of wedlock…. among children born in the years 1967-69, the first cohort … tracked…. 72.3 percent of black children and 15.7 percent of nonblack children were supported by AFDC at one point or another during childhood …. Congress [in 1988 established] extensive provisions for the evaluation of the impact of the programs, especially the Job Opportunities and Basic Skills training program (JOBS)…. that will tell us over time the extent to which child dependency is increasing or decreasing — and what if anything, government programs are doing to affect that dependency…. high rates of births to young, single women {\seti may be with us for a long time. We need to …. collect the right data…. We will not even begin to know whether [Congress' 1988 bill] is having any effect until the year 2000 at the earliest, perhaps the year 2010. (To those who may wish to protest that is too long, I would answer that they should have thought of that a quarter century ago when we first spotted this social change.)” Comments: [a] No wonder politicians drink. [b] When's the next one-way flight to Japan or Europe? [c] Animal House rulership's reproach to Flounder: Face it, you screwed up; you trusted us. (Parapsychologists, UFOlogists, & Ptolemists also prefer unending data-collection, thereby avoiding confronting the shame of having pursued & promoted a false path for decades.)]
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's 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 technological 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.
[Perhaps it would be more apt to refer instead merely to those who follow the owned-media's “credible” (i.e., co-owned) candidates. But, even if the public finally wised up and voted for a genuinely populist (non-owned) candidate, do we seriously expect that the lobby-heavy, arms-toothed, and utterly ruthless Washington establishment would then respect the decision and just go home?]

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].)
[See “Will the American Poople Only Learn by Mishap Their Paid-Pipers' Inner Thoughts?”]

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 Mega-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 [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 is part of the DIO Collection) 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.
[Such hypocrisy lives on in the “Liberty” Mutual insurance company's saddling the U.S. with Obamacare's mandate.]

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.
[The US didn't get two consecutive non-slaveholder presidents until #8-#9 (VanBuren-Harrison) and #13-#14 (Fillmore-Pierce), and it took until 1861 before the nation had been ruled for two consecutive full terms by non-slaveholders: #14-#15 (Pierce-Buchanan).]
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 recent 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) 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.
[E.g., the New York Times' latest croc-weepy editorial defending law-breakers (International Herald Tribune 2009/2/2 p.8), “America's nativists are getting restless”, shows that the super-rich clan who run the NYT and the gov't is itself getting restless with concern that the coming Depression will push even its most trusting readers to wonder why the US must have tens of millions of Mexican illegals aboard when unemployment is sky-rocketing. [Could the endless string of crying-jag New York Times editorials possibly be related to the humiliating spectacle that the New York Times has lately been kept out of bankrupcy by Mexican funds?] What else but NYT panic would make it resort to the very same transparently vicious-circular: argument just cited above? But, then, it's ever so helpful to have the NYT tell us what we think, whether we think it or not: “Americans … realize that mass deportations [of illegals] would not [work]. When you add the unprecedented engagement of growing numbers of Latino voters in 2008, it becomes clear that the nativist path is the path to permanent political irrelevance.” (Emph added.)]
And, ah, you'll have to keep re-electing us because all “serious” (i.e, media&pollster-blessed) parties will have this same position. But, as FOX [False-Or-Xaggerated] keeps informing us about civics: “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. If that's a genuine Dumbo-Dembo competition, it's just about the only one.
[And, if one thinks about it: it also offers a non-paranoid explanation of why US elections keep being so close: each party polls, but the one with more money won't bother over-spending, once their pollsters assure them that they have things locked up. How can the public resist? Simple: stop answering pollsters. See DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §F2 [p.6].]
Those ad-costs (& polling 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?)

Bummed at the Stake:
Presaging the acumen (and model-lettering) of 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 all 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”?
[West Side Story's conversion of Marlowe's Romeo & Juliet — from family-loyalty drama to race-loyalty drama — brings out the parallel.]

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 [& black & American Indian] origins) notes: while black average IQ may perhaps be below whites', Orientals' 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].)

It used to be “required” that blacks be called “colored people” (still surviving in NAACP's title, though the phrase is now unallowable if not prefaced by the NAA part). (Apparently there is a world of difference between“colored people” and “people of color” [should Asians&Cauc-asians demand — just as ridiculously — to be addressed only as “people of noncolor”?!] — enough that all TV 'snews-robot-persons must [1] jump through the latter “people-of-color” hoop, not the former, if they wish to keep their jobs, and [2] NEVER ask why. [On the air.] Search your memory: recall ANY instances?) The term “negro” was at the time considered respectful. Then it, too, was banished in favor of pride in “black”. Then that was put in 2nd place. (Not enough syllables to show obligatory respect?) So ultimately “Afro-American” became media-enforced. That was evidently considered disrespectfully abbreviated, so we moved on (were moved on) to “African-American” — thus efficiently replacing single-syllable “black” with a 7-syllable genuflection to PC.
Comment: If an ethnic group staunchly continues (despite generations of remedial programs) to lead the nation in per-capita stats for drugs, illiteracy, pimping, bastardy, murder, etc, it's likely to give an ever-so-slightly negative tinge to any newly-Approved name after a while. Questions: [a] Does anyone seriously suppose that serially shifting labels is going to solve anything?
[Why does no-one in the US media ever refer to an Egyptian, Rhodesian, or S.African white new-immigrant as an “African-American”? — while lockstep referring to blacks whose family tree is entirely US for the last century as “African”-American? Pure racism.
(And why insult Canada etc by using “American” as a synonym for US-citizen, as if the other 22 nations in the Americas don't count?)]
[b] Has the special privilege of mainstream-media-enforcement of the 7-syllable salute (and brutal banishment of any&all derogatory or obsolete terms) been earned by any discernable group-achievement? — beyond block-voting for doling politicians, and blaming anyone but self for mass-failure? (Which appears to be perpetual. How many centuries will it take for establishments to stop blaming anything and everything except genetics?)
[When apartheid ended in South Africa, the only thing DR told friends was certain to go up was the crime rate, though even he was surprised at the magnitude of the quantum-jump. On 2013/2/22, Fox's Gerry Rivers was discussing S.Africa's permanent crime chaos, comparing it to Chicago's. (TV 'snews would not allow GR to note the prime common factor, even if he were inclined to do so.) In the context of juiced runner Oscar Pistoffius' deliberate murder of lawyer-model Reeva Steenkamp (just 'cause he liked the idea — while celeb-sensing he could without-consequences do-what-he-liked, as longtime-usual), GR began a reference to S.Africa's blacks as “African-Amer—” before catching himself.
A precious moment.
The incident inadvertently, tragi-comically spotlighted the eternally profitless inanity of US newsfolk feeling “obligated” to PC-autodrive-preface any discussion of blacks by making sure that (at least) the first reference does the 7-syllable ritual.
(The Olympics had a hand in the S.Africa murder by its policy of allowing athletes with such afflictions as asthma (and now even no-feet) to compete, when it knows that their regular meds weaken drug tests' ability to detect illegal substances. Which can cause erratic behavior. Like — on occasion — murder.]

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-boast-lies): 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? [2006 Apr 5]:
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 legally as off-the-hook as big tobacco.)
[Comments:
(a) DR has taken under a half-dozen 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 for cash or equivalent? 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.]

Amusical Shares:
The West has reacted to German WW2-massacres of Jews by: [1] forcing a Jewish safespace not in Germany but by stealing Arab turf, [2] forcing millions of thus-Peace-Process-fleeing Arabs into Germany.

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 while lips are moving silently), 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 4-5 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 — but 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-at-least US military's Orwellianly-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-slavery?) Is that why Stalin felt compelled to murder the rich? Is there an alternate avenue to even moderately durable security for average persons?

It has become a commonplace to equate Hitler & Stalin. They had resemblances: intelligence, courage, ruthlessness. And paranoia — by nature, nurture, & necessity. Each's gov't shrank its nation's poverty. (Until WW2.) Citizens' before-after wealth-ratio was inevitably greater in Russia.
Stalin didn't hobnob with rich. (Hitler's doing so in 1933-4 enraged SA chief Ernst Röhm [Röhm took seriously the “S” in NSDAP], who began calling Hitler a revolution-betraying “swine” for it.) Stalin, knowing the rich would never give up their super-wealth, killed them.
Stalin's intrusive rule in Latvia was much more brutal than that of Hitler, who is consequently more fondly (less unfondly?) remembered there. (By gentiles, anyway.) As one easily discerns from Riga's Occupation Museum.
Stalin didn't murder colleagues to suck up to the army elite; more the reverse.
[Röhm's murder was dictated by the army, to kill off socialism and revert Germany to aggressive militarism, in return for a requirement that all German soldiers swear personal loyalty to Hitler by name. (Dangerous cultism that bloodily prolonged WW2.) Did Stalin's much-criticized purges of his army head off something similar?] Hitler's mass murders (the concentration-camp phase of which has been slightly exaggerated, while the Russians killed by Hitler and Stalin were understated and overstated, respectively, for years) had the aim of wiping out whole races that had been classed by Nazi as Untermenschen according to nutty race theories. (Which classed Slavs and Jews as inferior, while trying to elevate Anti-Comintern-Pact Japanese to honorary Aryanship!) Stalin's mass murders (which have often been enormously exaggerated in the obsessively anti-commie West) were primarily “practical” terror (the sort of thing a commie version of Göring might have done if on his own), to force his will upon peoples — and went only so far as to engender enough fear to kill off resistance to his egalitarian commie plans for them — and fend off the spies & provocateurs the world super-rich are ever injecting into any nation that's seen as a threat to plutocracy.
Stalin's foreign policy was more defensive than offensive; feeling that his revolution was militarily vulnerable and under constant threat from capitalist schemes (e.g., the West's 1918 invasions of Russia) to strangle-the-bolshevik-baby-in-the-cradle before the commie anti-rich virus spread, Stalin was willing to ally with Hitler (1939) or the West (1945) — any Machiavellian move was OK if it avoided or at least delayed war with major powers.
While Hitler hardly objected to the rich-vs-poor gap (except for an anti-West New Year's Day speech in 1941), and let Göring live like a lord, Stalin bloodily objected — and dressed accordingly.
Great music (written mostly by composers born well before 1917) came out of Russia, while Nazi Germany left nothing beyond Orff's 1937 “Carmina Burana”.
Russian resistance broke the Nazis' attempt to enslave the rest of the world, and Stalin stayed in Moscow when the German army was (1941/12/6) so close that it's said the Kremlin's steeples were visible in German binoculars.
Stalin didn't put millions of people into gas-chambers and ovens.

When did TV 'snews discussions ever connect [a] the US' ever-more-peon-level minimum-wage, and [b] the US' ever-more-dangerous flood of immigrant-peons to satisfy the cheap-labor passion of super-capitalists, for whom no amount of cheap-skate cost-cutting is ever enough, because no amount of self-enrichment is ever enough.

Some Lives Are More Prezious Than Others:
Question: Why has the advent of the US' resort to torture arisen so recently?
Suggestion: Because CreepVeep (along with his Prezious little PupPet) has realized that this war is different in that: he personally might get hurt.
Think seriously about this point: IS IT COINCIDENTAL that the 1st time in US history when the rulership effectively authorizes torture coincides with the 1st time that same rulership's members are starting to endure long-term fear that they could (via the WMD it hopes some torturee just might tip the US off about) get killed in the next attack on a US city?

One-Party War Economy:
While there are numerous critics of the print&spend Dumbo party, few if any ask what combining massive debt and arms buildup could portend. Oil-era Western incursions into the Moslem world suggest that US arms are essential to sucking huge wealth out of that region. As debt increases by the trillion, will post-Bush threat (or use) of arms be resorted-to, in order to intimidate other nations to keep buying-supporting US bonds — or to agree to more schemes for “co-prosperity” (Hirohito's & warlord Tojo's euphemism) to grab those nations' natural resources?
The Nazi economy (managed by Hjalmar Schacht) was openly called a “war economy” by observers virtually from the start. It funded huge arms-increases by borrowing and printing money.
[Except for the Nazis' attempt to minimize foreign trade, Nazi economics has striking resemblances to the Bush gov't's: strikes-don't-happen, booming profits for businessmen (esp. cartels) and their corporation-lawyers, big talk but little real help for ever-more-extinct small businesses, and declining real wages for average workers. See, e.g., Wm. L. Shirer Rise & Fall of the 3rd Reich Chap.8 (1960 ed. pp.357f).]
The US national debt will soon exceed 10 trillion dollars; so, the average US family's share of that debt is roughly $100,000. Exactly how is all this money going to be paid back? — keeping in mind that the ever-pushier, ever-oil-thirstier US currently has roughly half of all the arms on Earth….

Voting as Deal-Making by Amateurs:
Is the rise of so many specialty-issue voters (fundies, homos, NRA, NAACP, etc) deliberately stoked by the rulership? It's a neat way to encourage passionate voting for the two parties, since they differ on such small stuff — which ensures the public's voter-certification of the massive key issues both parties are identically anti-public on: the economy and war.
The dark implication here may not have been hitherto perceived: a voter is unknowingly making an effectively Faustian deal. He votes for the party that's for his fave Thing (vouchers, guns, Army going from Club Het to Club Hed, etc) and may thereby gain in that respect; but the hidden deal is that he must simultaneously certify-by-ballot the Washington Immovable Dictatorship, whose truly major policies (economy, war, energy) are identical, i.e., “bipartisan” as both parties privately reassure their corporate owners that they will preserve continuity of same-old policies & priorities, because the same corporations fund both parties' perpetuation via the media they also own.
Voting in the US is thus like all deals with experienced con-men: the amateur always ends up with the short end.

As Greenspan Two testified before Congress on inflation (2005/11/15) and the economy, he claimed:
[a] The economy is “recovering”.
[b] Strong inflation controls are needed — which means severe ratcheting-up of interest rates.
Question: What is the economy “recovering” from?
Partial answer: Greenspan One's 2000 ratcheting-up of interest rates….

Fashion-mags decree that women add length to normal eyelashes, while subtracting from much other natural hair. Which suggests an obvious economy: use the shorn remains of the latter razing, to create the former funny exaggeration. Which could make it even funnier. “Be the 1st in your neighborhood with bushy eyelashes!” Eyelash-Perms would inevitably follow, to the charitable benefit of the needy cosmetics industry.

Lez' Be Beautiful as Narcissus:
Rationalists rightly complain that several churches try to make women ashamed for men to enjoy their bodies' beauty. But these institutions are mere amateurs. The pros reside in MadAve-Land.
And the main problem is not men's tastes but other women's. That's the audience women are religiously-fearful of offending.
It is the well-financed purpose of the conspiratorial and insidious “fashion” industry to make women ashamed of the reality of their bodies (even religious folk, who are thus defying the deity's design), by dunning TV & magazine images into them (same as film's “cool” images to glamourize smoking), images from which women will fear to deviate, images which must require expenditures — for additions, alterations, or outright faking — that profit these dunners' associates (what a coincidence): trendy-clothes, girdles, nose-jobs, all manner of implants, bras, falsies, breast-augmentation, breast-reduction, liposuction, tooth-whiteners, stockings, cosmetics, shampoos, dyes, perms, depillation (via blades, creams, wax, electricity, etc), shoes that border on foot-binding, earrings, piercings, tanning, finger-nail polish, toenail polish (lack of which risks deportation from some European nations), anti-flab dieting just short of anorexia, etc.
As a result, “sophisticated” women are spending ever-large fractions of their lives (it takes up too much of my day just to list the regimen) keeping up with the fashist demands of the thought-control hucksters (a disproportionately high fraction of whom are male homosexuals, many of whom view women less than positively) who think up this stuff and turn too many women into easily herdable sheep baaaahing for it.
[Not that men are immune from conformity, especially ideological: most older US men are creatures-of-Babbitt. But with women the fashion-percentages are worse and the locksteppery spills even into visual appearance, because that is sadly paramount for them.]
The challenge of being the rare soul who can ignore such images and fend off the ubiquitous-incessant toob&mag assault (virtually a religious education) is a test of both intelligence and independence. One would like to see more than ordmag 1% of otherwise intelligent young women showing the ability to pass that test.
[Though DR is no longer (officially) young, it should be added that the foregoing is not a recent revelation. DR has maintained for the last half-century exactly the same if-it-ain't-broke attitude towards human health and beauty.]

With Homosexuals for Fashist Friends, Do Hets Need Enemies?
Following-up on the foregoing with two natural-questions-no-pressfolk-ever-ask:
[1] How did the human race ever manage to reproduce? — before the homosexual-dominated modern fashion industry laboriously achieved an artfulness rendering it possible for women to be sufficiently perfected, that men might finally start being attracted to the opposite sex.
[b] While not insisting upon cause&effect, it is worth inquiring into the puzzle of why — strangely enough — reproduction rates have actually gone (self-suicidally) down, in those nations most addicted to the fashion world's allegedly lust-stimulating gifts (to those of the female persuasion), even while the areas lacking them are reproducing just as lustily as humanity has always burgeoned in the past, before such Necessities even existed.]

The Under Arms Race:
We all know about the problem with the arms race: if you build up your military, neighbors will build up theirs and nobody gains but arms-dealers. Likewise, few women today realize that in pre-WW2 Europe (and for decades after, in some areas), leg-shaving and underarms-shaving for women was not derigour, e.g., Germany & Italy. When fash-advertisers eventually dunned females with images & advice to make bald legs and armpits the norm, those who signed on early did so in the conviction that they had achieved an advantage over the competition. The obvious catch was that eventually all women boasted bald limbs. Classic zero-sum. Result: women — too unrebellious a gender — are stuck with wasting serious time (and occasionally blood) — plus nail-polish time — just to keep up with an unnatural fashion which by now nets them no gain whatever, because of its very ubiquity. Can women ever turn it around by reminding each other of the hucksters' contemptuous snickers at one more another example of the nonwisdom of the American sheeple? And of the patterns that have turned to dust one feminist rebellion wave after another for centuries.

The most highly educated modern women scoff at the anti-science cultism of fundies who reject Darwinism — even while in too many instances failing to recognize in the foregoing paragraph a Darwinist message: all the square-feet of body-hair that women are being MadAve-herded into destroying — laboriously destroying (often daily!) — originally evolved as so attractive to men that those with too little or too much were winnowed-out during thousands of generations of reproduction. The next time you hear put-downs of rural fundies as rejectors of science, this sort of self-examination ought to inject an apt dose of anti-superiority.

As FDR Would Have Put It: Nothing About Television Is Accidental:
Ever noticed the obnoxious rock-shlock music which various TV 'snews programs blare as they go into increasingly-interminable “breaks”? Hypothesis: won't this help alleviate the upcoming decibel-discontinuity when one gets hit by booming advertisements?

We live in an age increasingly dominated by business considerations, and we'll recognize its apogee when we're treated to the 1st pope who speaks English better than Latin.

Empathy You'll Never See on TV 'snews:
Suppose the US and Europe had only primitive weapons, and Arabia took advantage of that by occupying both areas through armed might and sucked up millions of barrels of US&Europe's oil, justifying it by declaring that Arabia had “interests” and lotsa gas-needy SUVs. Would the West —if thus subjugated — forbear the use of terrorism?
Hell, it can't even resist using torture when it's on top….

Just as the US used semi-puppet Iraq to by-proxy-invade Iran a generation ago, the US plans to invade Syria with the new puppet Iraq gov't, as soon as it's armed to the hoped-for teeth and ready for service to the US-UK oil cartel that invented Iraq in the 1st place. (And invented Saddam in the 2nd place.)

The Bounds of Reason:
Papal infallibility is sacred to the Roman faith, ever since the cardinal-college's (presumably) infallible majority-vote at Vat 1 (1870-1871). But, in light of several popes' undeniable errors, it is only held to apply within limits (faith, etc: bounds which are flexible to temporary necessity). So, naturally, botheration-DR has asked whether the limits are themselves established infallibly. (DIO 9.3 [1999] ‡6 n.75 [p.142].)
But, in case one gets the idea that bounds are a problem only for non-democracies, we must consider that democratic elections are usually based on geographical bounds which restrict the electorate's extent — bounds which are often established in un-reasonable or un-democratic ways. And, when one group within those bounds is outnumbered, it can regard “democratic” elections as suicidal. The US South so believed in 1860-1 and Iraq's Sunnis feel so today — which is the prime non-fanatical reason for their resistance, so regularly portrayed by western propaganda as purely fanatical.

Just as it is unlikely that a pharmaceutically-employed chemist will (in a year's research) come up with a pill that improves the human body (which required eons to evolve-perfect itself for survival), so it is comparably unlikely on its face that a Head-Start social program (or somesuch) will in a few decades overcome several races' apparent differences of intelligence-potential — after tens of thousands of years of evolution, during which those races' brains coped with quite different environments, obviously requiring disparate degrees of mental dexterity and providence.

Despite democracy's merits, it has downsides that bear monitoring:
Erratic calendars.
Monetary inflation.
Demographic inflation.
Proclivity to wars.
[Note also a tendency to win them. (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 n.10 [p.47].)]
Demagogic pseudo-solutions.
Accelerating rich-poor gap, from exploitation of poor's naïveté.

The Unthought Thought-Policing of Ourselves:
Is it coincidental that, while fear of job-loss is the prime punishment for genuine free discussion in the US, we find that Europe (where job-security has been far greater) must threaten its citizens with fines and jail for un-PC talk (“hate-speech”)?
Question: can any nation be called free, when many of its most creative professors' everyday home discussions on religion, race, war, patriotism, etc might get them fired or incarcerated if they occurred in class? Thus, we've come to Thought-Police ourselves automatically (i.e., without thinking) — just like TV 'snews' talking-heads do (probably less unconsciously), if they want to keep on taking limosines to work.

Intellectuals may rightly scorn plebian tendencies to confuse sexual magnetism (in fundie and-or video preachers) with god, when choosing their lives' religion; but don't many intellectuals likewise confuse sex with love when choosing their lives' mates? Indeed, isn't their divorce-rate many times higher than hicks' religious-unconversion rates?

Has it been noted that the average US family is now taxed ordmag $1000/year to subsidize higher gas-prices? (One can of course argue that ultimately this is beneficially conservatory.) I.e., US citizens — actually, their descendants — are paying (ordmag a trillion dollars [last we looked]) to crusade-invade Iraq for Democracy, Christianity, Legacy-President Bush2, Freedom & etc — and (o-by-the-way) establish new-puppet control of the world's 2nd-top oil-puddle, which (given present-top-puddle Saudi Arabia's increasingly-muttered long-term future-productivity dubiousness) was planned well before 9/11. Question: Did anyone really think replacing uppity-puppety Saddam (whose black-market oil-sales were upsetting the long-dominant, long-tentacled US-UK oil-cartel's machiavellian price-“stabilization” practices) would lower world oil prices?
(With Iraq oil-flow now out of major contention indefinitely, see here under Goldfinger.)

Snubbing & Wrecking Democracy for Democracy:
The majority of Europeans are democratically voting against US-UK-EU-forcefeeding them a program of “democratizating” the Middle East via Turkey (bordering Syria, Iraq, Iran)-into-EU plus US(and its Pony Blair)-into-Iraq, etc. (Partly because the EU citizenry realizes that it's all a smoke-screen for the real plan: armed-force cartel-controlling Middle East oil.) So, the alleged game-plan here is: bring democracy to the Arab non-democracies by defying — and thus recklessly endangering — democracy among the small (& ever-shrinking) number of genuinely democratic, cultured nations remaining on the planet.
[As if decades of injecting into Europe millions of exponentially-fertile cheap-labor peon-bacilli (from traditions long rigidly-religious, non-democratic, fanatically & threateningly censorial, treating women as uneducated male-owned babyfactories) hadn't already sufficiently endangered the fragility of Europe's precious egalitarian, worker-sympathetic, democratic-rationalist-socialist post-WW2 gov'ts. (Once these have vanished into the “free-trade”, globalist-open-borders, world-enthrallment abyss, will such decency ever return?)]

From DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §A5 [p.3]: “Paradox: how can it be legal for some city gov'ts to give away clean needles (so the golden-goose drug addict population won't die off from AIDS)? — but not legal to give away free injectable drugs (in order to kill the profits that spread the drug blight of streetcrime & municipal corruption). The apparent contradiction eases as soon as one wonders if this is not precisely the double-standard policy which druglords would prescribe.
[Ibid n.4: If you like corrupt gov't, police, & media, then: just keep drugs illegal. [Don't worry: both candidates in every single You-Decide “election” will take this position for you. See the virtually-suppressed Gore Vidal film Palermo Connection (Italy © 1989).] Another hitherto-unnoted paradox: the big profits (which purchase control of Congressmen by smarter criminals) connected to hard drugs are contingent on drugs not succeeding with most of the public. (So, black leaders' suspicion — which I do not [yet] share — that drug-sales are injected selectively into ethnic ghettoes, is not a priori incredible.) E.g., if a majority of the citizenry got hooked on cocaine, prohibition would be repealed (as for booze in 1933) — and mafia profits would plunge. In case the reader is imagining a personal stake here, it should be added that DR strictly avoids — and makes a pest of himself warning youngsters against — drugs or non-nutritive stimulants of any type. That includes tobacco, alcohol, & [except chocolate] caffeine. The happiness-through-chemistry myth promoted by US—media ads is a key element in setting up youth for drug-use. I am so turned off by this greedy propaganda that I don't even take aspirin. (Whether for individual or societal depression, the “media” singularly promotes quick-sell band-aids, not stable-health longterm solutions.)]

An analogous theory proposes itself when we hear (2014) that USAttyGen Eric (Pardon-for-Mark-Rich) Holder is proposing to save costs&souls by going easy on small drug crimes. But is the same administration pushing for the parallel logical step of getting rid of drug laws? — which would wreck the mafia's biggest cashcow by undoing the illegitimacy that maintains multi-dollar prices on products that cost pennies to make? Again: a policy that looks schizly-contradictory becomes explainable according to the theory of serious mafia influence in the US gov't.

The US public believes it longs for truth. So, why does it systematically keep electing two-faced liars to public office?

From ibid n.5 [p.4]: Lest any reader has failed to connect [the previous two paragraphs], I will add the item 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?
[See also ibid n.9.]

Eliminate the Middle-Man:
[A] Well, if the mafia is going to induce gov'ts to hand out serial welfare and even free needles (in order to harvest dollars by selling drugs to ghetto-folk kids etc — whom the mafia woos and corrupts into becoming even lowerlife than itself), then: why not just give most of the billions/yr (now wasted on perpetual-cyclic welfare) straight to the mafia? — thereby eliminating ineffectual high-expense courts (lawyers, shrinks) and joke-rehab (shrinks). I.e., the Washington-mob grants funds equal to, say, half (the total expense) directly to the mafia-mob — on the condition that (in return) the latter must maintain stability by watchfully rubbing out anyone who wishes to replace it in the initial child-corruption-process.
[B] The lawyer-klan makes many millions/yr keeping death-row scum alive.
[Running study after study purporting to show the death-penalty's inefficacy, by pretending that 1% execution-rates could scare many potential murderers. Typical example: International Herald Tribune 2000/9/23 p.3.]
And the whole show (10y→20y of gravy for mout'pieces & shrinks) is almost entirely paid for out of productive citizens' taxes. (The outrageous amounts are somehow never fit fodder for TV 'snews.) But why not [1] give 60% as much money directly to the lawyers up-front, and [2] snuff the murderers right-off? This leaves the lawyers enough free time to go out and cheat someone else (besides taxpayers) out of way more than the fiscal 40% short-fall thus created. [Oh, but … verily-verily, there might be a flaw in this plan. After all, when these lawyers' lips move, they tell us they are mere hard-working servants-of-the-poor.
So: they might turn-down the mon— … naaaaaaaaaah .]
[C] Since judges have the power to key keep evidence from juries and (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §K2 [p.57]) and have the power — as also the governor — to override juries' guilty verdicts, and since they're paid (by the taxes of citizens [incl. jury members] and-or the bribes of the convicted) at rates hundreds of times higher than juries are paid, why not reverse present procedure and let judges and governors take 1st crack at bribe-worthy cases? So indicted parties who fear conviction can render up their bribe-funds right off, promptly walk free, thereby saving the citizenry a large and ridiculous waste of their time.
[Regarding the state of legal enslavement called “jury duty”. Next time you're called to such, try a conversation with Herr Judge if you wish to learn about Freedom in the US and to empathize better with peon-wage immigrant-laborers: “Have I committed a crime? No? Then I'm free to go home?”
Also: if we-the-jury vote someone guilty, you-the-judge can over-rule us, right? (See broadening of this little-realized revealing fail-safe situation: (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §K [p.57].) And, if you do over-rule us, will you converse with us for any input from us, other than hearing our killable “guilty” verdict? Only exceptionally? Then: why are we here?]
[D] For years, US democracy has been based upon votes of millions of citizens most of whom effectively have a robot-control “wire” in their heads: TV 'snews. So they vote safely-predictably close to the slate (and sometimes even for the very candidate) anointed by most of the media. Which suggests that we save the expense, clutter, hanging-chads, & other confusing bother of all those complex mass-voting-machines — and just let CBS, NBC, ABC, etc vote directly and decide the next President by a 2-1 or (almost certainly) 3-0 majority.
[E] Shortly after hurricane Katrina, Congress discussed granting about 200 billion dollars (with hefty slices to Halliburton) to restore New Orleans to its former glory. (As US murder-capital and corruption-champ…?) But why should this largesse have to trickle-down to the city's half-million citizens, when simple division proves that this is $400,000 per citizen, over a MILLION DOLLARS per average-sized family. So, just send every Narlinz native a checque for $400,000 — that way, they can all move to L.A.'s poshest section and overnight create a cast-of-thousands sitcom: the Beverly FloodBillies.

Ad by Florida Department of Citrus, seen on History Channel 05/10/15 (emph POINTEDLY added):
Healthy-Looking Male Model looks at you (into the camera): “If you're concerned about catching a cold or the flu this season, here's an idea: move to a desert island and avoid other people for 6 months.
[Scruffy guy shown sitting on tiny island. Sole companion: a chimp — who rears up and fires off a Cape Canaveral-class sneeze.]
Or: JUST drink a glass of Florida orange juice every day.”
Unseen Female Voice: “Give your immune system more of the vitamins & minerals it needs. Florida Orange Juice. Healthy. Pure & Simple.”
DR Comment:
Given ads' usual level of honesty, we take careful note that nowhere does this clever pitch actually claim that its product will prevent cold or flu. Nor does the ad explicitly pretend that oj will work better than a policy of dodging (fluid-exchanging) contact with infected people. (In fact, the latter is by far the best method of cold-avoidance.)
Why would an ethical medium permit such a dangerously misleading ad? (Without alternate viewpoints face-to-face counter-aired.) Orange juice will provide negligible protection against contracting cold or flu, and anyone who thinks it's a shield is being encouraged to follow a careless path (hey, go lick a doorknob — where's the harm if you've got your oj) which virtually guarantees catching the very illnesses the ad pretends to provide protection against.
[Not our 1st bout with orange-juice hucksters. See prior oj-pushers Anita Bryant & Rush Bimbaugh. Note, too, that the above text's one-a-day pitch suggests that Anita's old three-a-day-OIJBAM hustle bombed.]

The best way to curtail pandemics is by quarantining the infected. But this inconveniences the plutocracy's international-trade&etc machinations and exploitations — and cancels a potential multi-billion windfall for the pharmaceutical lobby. And if this isn't enough to convince you that the gov't won't rush to quarantine, how about: killing off half of the vulnerable senior-citizen sector of the nation could sure help bail out the fiscal crunch at Social Security….

Most commentary on the reason why videos of “adult” X-films are outselling those of mainstream commercial films, suggest that it's just a mark of society's degeneration. Perhaps that's much or even most of it. However, consider this hitherto-unsaid observation: virtually all love in mainstream films is faked (purely thespian); but, though a non-trivial percentage of X-film orgasms are also faked, X-films are the only mass-commercial cinema which also frequently contain real and intense amorous emotions — even if these indeed tend to be rather more primal (& often excessively narcissistic) than some of us might prefer in expressions of mutual affection.

Explorer Matthew Henson's skills were undervalued (though not ignored, as Black History would have us believe) 100 yrs ago, but are exaggerated today, sometimes absurdly. Reminiscent of a wise person's comment on Van Gogh, who never in his life sold any of his paintings, which today fetch tens of millions: Van Gogh wasn't that bad then, nor that good now. DR will add that the reverse has been true of propaganda (1941-to-date) about Joseph Stalin, who wrought awful evils (among them: killing people and good science) but who rescued the Russian people from rich-poor-chasm slavery, Shostakovitch from descent into trivia, and Europe from Hitler.

The WW2 Russian Dead — From Beneath-Menschen to Beneath-Mention:
On the last point: when we justly laud those US citizens (including Teddy Roosevelt's non-young son) who went straight into enemy fire on D-Day, how often does ever-chauvinist TV 'snews even mention (much less laud) the equally brave Russians who were keeping 80-90% of the activated Nazi army tied down on the enormously larger eastern front? How often are we reminded that D-Day couldn't possibly have succeeded without that little diversion: the largest and most murderous battle in the history of the world? — launched (Operation Barbarosa, 1941/6/22) at the addled whim of one man.
[How addled? Read carefully the tortured-paranoid Hit&Muss reasoning in Hit's 1941/6/21 Barbarosa-eve letter to Muss, extensively quoted in Wm.L.Shirer's Rise & Fall of the Third Reich 1960. (Apologies for the Hit&Muss reference; but cartoonist David Low's inexplicably-forgotten moniker for the fumbling European Axis leaders is just too irresistible.)]
This insanity killed c.30 million Europeans — a blunder initiated partly by Hitler's insane notion that his invasion of the USSR would be a cake-walk, since Russians and all slavs are unter-menschen: sub-human.

Similarly, when we are now at long last privileged to see, near Berlin's Brandenburg Gate, a huge sculpture-cemetary of monuments to the concentration-camp dead, do we ask: where is the appropriately gigantic Berlin monument to the Russian soldiers who died in far, far larger numbers (and, to face facts, more heroically than those who were simply rounded up by Nazi race-maniacs) — successfully battling-back against a genocidal 1941/6/22 sneak-attack [like Japan's unannounced attacks on Port Arthur 1904 and Pearl Harbor 1941] that initiated the massive war-of-extermination on Russia?
[Incredibly mirrorless German complaints about the etiquette of the rampaging & raping Russian army in Berlin in 1945 put one in mind of one of Stalin's better black-irony moments, when he finally (after a few Edw.Greyesque days of trying to talk Hitler out of the coming horror) in 1941 July faced the fact that Germany was not going to stop its mass-civilian-murder assault, he said: Well, if Hitler wants a war of extermination, he shall have one.]

To expand on the previous thoughts (regarding propaganda, mass-murder, deliberateness of sacrifice, and gratitude for it): if US citizens were polled today on which two ethnic groups lost the most people during WW2, how many would realize that the answers are: Russians & Chinese?
[Note one difference: while the Russians' 20-plus million dead broke the Nazis' world conquest (the US lost about 2% as many in WW2!), the roughly-equivalently huge Chinese death-total was almost entirely wasted. The armies of spectacularly corrupt US-darling Chiang Kai-Shek (a.k.a. Cash-My-Check [Last Emperor]) were a farce. In 1945, China was the only theatre on Earth where the anti-Comintern Pact combine was winning: Japan was actually still expanding its territorial gains there — right up to the very end of the war.]
However, keep in mind that Jews lost by far the most in percentage terms.

After WW2, why did Stalin hide Hitler's body and pretend that the Führer was still on the loose?
The answer is obvious but is forbidden in the Western press:
Knowing that he became an ally of the West only upon the moment (1941/6/22) when Hitler attacked the USSR, and given Russia's post-WW2 weakness (after massive loss of young male soldiers), Stalin figured that only the joint fear of Nazism would protect him from being attacked by the West.
The implication that makes this self-evident theory still unprintable is: the West insists upon maintaining the we're-the-peace-makers mythology that Russia instigated the Cold War.
[Given the US' record of being constantly at war for decades, and its ruthlessly murderous rapes of other nations' oil, etc, the hilarity of the peace-maker mythology is ever more vital — even while ever more transparent.]
The foregoing was posted in 2007 August. On 2016/5/3, DR encountered this passage in Michael Munn's valuable compendium of little-known lore Hitler & the Nazi Cult of Film & Fame p.194, regarding the fate of Lev Knipper's NKVD mission to assassinate Hitler: “As Stalin began to realize that Hitler was now facing defeat from east and west, he began to imagine that Hitler's death might mean that the Western Allies would prefer to make peace with a new German regime and leave the Soviet Union to fight a massive European and American armed force. He cancelled Lev's mission.”

Were modern massive cheap-labor migrations into Europe partly triggered by the arrival of freedom via the birth-control pill? — which lowered provident citizens' replacement-rates to the point where toppe-nation rulerships began creating closely-controlled (pseudo-oops) leaks in national borders, in order to make up the difference.
[Notice that in the rulership's press, which drumbeat-announces that citizens of the West aren't reproducing and aren't taking low-wage jobs, there is no discussion of why this is true: it's just another example of the censorship-of-givenness. This particular given's built-in future: the US wage force will increasingly be formed of folks with a HIGHER-than-average number of children/family — who'll have to bring them up on LOWER-than-average wages — on the very same crummy pay which the capitalist-globalist US press is touting as the prime reason for luring peons to the US in the 1st place.]
The catch: when nations' losses are at the top of the IQ and ethical curve, how can winking-in bottom-nations' sneakiest peons honestly be called “replacement”?

Religion: celestial bread&circuses. Getting suckers to go for rewards that are [a] deferred (rulers' surely aren't) and [b] invisible anyway (just like the alleged celestial Dispenser, & Satan, & etc) — you know, for the con-men we call Leaders, it just doesn't get any better.

Sumo-Logic Vicious-Circle — Harms-Races, Arms-Races, & FFarms-Races:
It's said that women love SUVs from their belief that they'll be safer when they crash into their neighbors: Survival-of-the-Fattest. (And their neighbors won't think to get SUVs, too?)
Companies feel they need illegal cheap labor — because their competitors feel they need illegal cheap labor.

[Whether the harms-race is SUVs or enslaving illegals, the insanity will only be stopped by agreed-upon law. Or by catastrophe.]
More&more millions of youngsters are stuffing themselves with steroids so that their steroid-stuffed competitors won't have an edge.
[Is there a famous US family which has discovered that competing (in its chosen sport) infrequently and erratically — and only in big-money events — allows the clever advantage of building huge muscles uninterruptedly for months on end, then going off the drugs for just enough days to lose all detectable residues but not the musculature?]
Women are getting plastic-surgery for an edge over other women's surgery, which they got to get an edge over….
In 1914, Britain & Germany each had a perfect plan to prevent war: just build enough weapons to scare the Enemy. As cartoonist David Low's Colonel Blimp summed it up (Low's Autobiography):
“Gad, sir, Lord Beatty is right. We must build a bigger navy than the enemy will build when he hears we're building a bigger navy than he's building.”
How can the West be disgusted and shocked at fundamentalist religion in the Middle East, when no other weapon has a chance against the world-dominant US military?
Thought-experiment: imagine how quickly a gentle rationalist movement would be squushed by the cynical oil cartel. (So Middle East fundamentalism is simply what survives the Darwinist filter of confrontation: survival-of-the-fittest.) In response to this, the US is starting its own farms of fundie-nuts: the “Red States”.
[Has the press yet looked into the Blue-States-vs-Red-States comparative numerical per-capita-contribution to the US occupiers of Iraq?]
So, who says civilization doesn't progress? There-is-a-god, after all: humanity is evolving ever-upward — from world arms-race to world funnyfarms-race. )

Make Triumph of the Will — or I'll Will You Out of Bed??
The late cinema-genius Leni Riefenstahl was long the very last-living of the inner-circle Nazis-who-of-course-really-weren't. (By her account, one would think that most of her conversation with Hitler was arguing against his race-hatred.) But Leni always protested that she was never (physically) in bed with hetHitler. (Who was entranced by film-actresses, e.g., Hedwig Kiesler a.k.a Hedy Lamarr a.k.a. [privately, to proportion-sensitive filmoguldom] Hedy Kiester.) However, Leni's intelligent and entertaining autobiography [Picador, NY, 1992] acknowledges their long and intense mutual admiration (they were both, after all artists, occultists and professional actors), and that she was repeatedly alone with him: op cit, e.g., pp.107, 123, 128-9, 178-180, 209-11, 227-228. [The 3rd incident, at the Hotel Kaiserhof (1932/12/8) is reported as incredibly accidental.] On the 2nd (same hotel), she reports that jealous Dr.Goebbels had to wait in the salon 'til Leni & Adolf were done. (Her version of relations: he'd made a move earlier [p.107] but she inerted him off. [That's her story. And she stuck to him.] And of course it is possible that movie-fan [p.106] Hitler never pushed further, for fear of driving away an obsessive cinema dance-vision [idem] he just liked being around.) She claims [pp.130 & 142] to have physically spurned Goebbels, who controlled German film and thereby (how else) bedded its female stars; yet Goebbels' diary mentions repeated mid-1933 Leni visits just after the Nazis took over. She was enraged at later being faced with the contradiction (interview in the recent film The Wonderful, Horrible Life of Leni Riefenstahl), retorting that G was a liar; but, how would G have the prescience to know in 1933 that he would lose WW2, so that this tepid “lie”, in a private diary, would trip-up an embarrassed “I-was-not-political” [p.106] Nazi-groupiess, a generation after his death? (See similar prescience-adducing alibi in the F.Cook case: DIO 9.3 [1999] n.63 [p.139].) Her emotional reactions to Hitler were dramatic (op cit pp.128, 277; also p.305 [all-night weep at H's death]); and she was too-long prone to look for excuses for his evils (pp.257, 277, 313). Was sex a factor in her rise to the heights? LR was not shy (earliest affair: an aristocratic virtual-stranger [pp.31f]), taking-up and then dumping one lover after another — including a then-deified Hollywood Tarzan. (She hints she got him the job: p.200.) She denied being in love with Hitler, though her most famous film (her scrupulously hard-wrought and magnificently accomplished Triumph of the Will) is itself a confession of Hitler-love, throughout (though she repeatedly [e.g., pp.104f] protesteth-waaay-too-much that she was virtually forced to do the film), which is exactly what made it so effective — and thus (to her genuine surprise) helped pave the path to a war that murdered c.35 million Europeans (over 3/4 of them Russian).
In allegedly resisting making films for the Roman (Catholic) church and for (Catholic) Hitler, she claimed she could not be creative when bound by “prescribed themes” (pp.104&106). So, why did she make an exception to do Triumph of the Will? Her excuse for refusal had previously been [p.106]: “I have to have a very personal relationship with my subject matter.”

Similarly, though there is no proof one way or the other, history has one-sidedly rejected out of hand the idea that goofy Czarina Alexandra, during those ever-heftier years after her last childbirth (when slim hubby Nicky was morbidly obsessed with cigarettes, WW1, etc), ever did-it with her most adored friend: the notorious libertine Rasputin. He was bedding numerous ladies among the nobility, so is it likely that his fave — and the source of his political power — was exempted? Politeness or deference to prominent figures inclines to doubt the union, but should history be skewed by such factors?

Question: Has any historian investigated the rather debatable Leni & Alexandra orthodoxies with fresh mind and common sense?

Another rulership-mystery: why did 17y-old Marie Vetsera Marie Vetsera commit suicide with the Austrian heir, Prince Rudolf, at Mayerling on 1889/1/30?
There is another possibility. Prince Rudolf has been much glamourized in films: Charles Boyer 1932, Omar Sharif 1968.
[In 1968's Mayerline, solid brunette Sharif played slim blonde Rudolf, while slim blonde Catherine Deneuve played brunette porker Marie. Did wags on the set suggest switching the rôles?]
But he was in truth a diseased degenerate. (Partly due to his comparably worthless mother, the also-posthumously-glamourized Empress Sisi, who ignored motherhood along with all other royal duties, while nonetheless living off the crown's wealth.) Rudolf's lethal exploits included not only standard-royalty fun like slaughtering hundreds of game-animals and birds per hunt, but additionally spreading venereal disease among his various girltoys. [The wives of syphilised celebrities, e.g., Clara Schumann and Libby Bacon Custer, seem to have escaped infection. Evidently, the promiscuity leading to acquiring the disease is often a consequence not cause of amorous-estrangement from spouse.]
Rudolf desired war for the greater glory of Austria (F.Morton Nervous Splendor Penguin 1980 p.117), and he nearly shot his Emperior father in an apparent hunting accident (J.Haslip 1965 p.385) and suggested getting rid of German Kaiser Willy2 similarly (Morton op cit p.101).

The US claims its economy & its military aim at establishing a paradise of world-democratization, even while both depend upon luring-exploiting the desperate-poor-unemployed (as immigrant laborers and soldiers) — whose availability would vanish if the some-day paradise ever actually came to pass, thus simultaneously (if we accept the underlying logic here): destroying the world economy, and leaving all nations defenseless.

Pharmaceutical ads are approaching Strauss operas in length. And in structure: long, chatty 1st half, with spectacular climax of rapid-fire mayhem — fineprint warnings on heart attacks, faintness, liver-damage, even death.
(Counter-warning to the wordbags who write these hick-magnets: after 2000y, Salome's getting jealous again….)

From DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §B3 & n.8 [p.113] (see also ibid §B5 [pp.113-114]):
The US squalid poverty-cycle goes on&on — supposedly in spite of US pols' nostrums. Leftist quackcure: tax the provident to subsidize improvidents' fertility. Rightist quackcure: abortion-hating moral education. But, for both: whatever progress is effected occurs only among the brightest members of the (hopefully ex-)poor. OK, these will cut reproduction. But the dumbest fraction of the poor will go right on reproducing at a high rate.
[Since leftists&rightists preach that making poverty, race, & class frictions atrophy requires education, then: why do their policies guarantee that the maximum number of children will be born to parents with the least education?]
(This was predicted by one of the Darwins a century ago, when the possibility of widespread effective birth control first appeared on the horizon.) Thus, any temporary progress against poverty will be numerically wiped out by sheer numbers in the next generation. (I.e., the media give out encouraging “progressive” data like, e.g., a 40 million majority of the US' Roman churchfolk ignore the pope's ban on birth control, while merely 20 million RCfolk follow this sex-expert's advice. The catch? The independent 40 million will have maybe 20 million kids, while the ditto-head [why has the brave&independent US press reserved this term strictly for Rush L's audience, when most mass-religious leaders' literal-minded followers are even more robotic?] 20 million will have roughly 40 million kids.
This is “progressive”?
[So any perceived gains against poverty are systematically swamped, generation after generation, while priests & other pols decree that interfering in the poor's reproductive “rights” is immoral — though interfering-tax-forcing the endangered middle class to subsidize these human waves is not.]
Is such an elementary point simply too mathematical for our pols & press to figure out? (They never mention it.) Are they innumerate? (The Church isn't.) Or just phony? It has to be at least one of these two options. Quite possibly both. (Each party has a stake in [perpetuating] poverty: GOP loves the cheap labor; Dems get the poor's votes.) If there's no electoral choice, then taxpayer-revolt is the only non-violent exit from the subsidized-poverty cycle.
[Catechism of the Catholic Church Vat City 1994 §2373:
“Sacred Scripture and the Church's traditional practice see in large families [emph in orig] a sign of God's blessing and the parents' generosity.” No acknowledgement (by the childless [thus un-“generous”] male writers of this sentence) that high fertility enhances the Church's political power (& the [often desperate] poverty it's usually built upon). That's just an unforeseen, entirely accidental byproduct. (Vat City is as chockablock with naïfs as with wealth.) Question: how can there be peaceful multi-culturalism where 2 or 3 cults are competing to outmultiply everybody else?
(See also DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §O2 [p.61].)]

How did Mel Brooks so cannily predict — a generation in advance — the Bush-Cheney duo in his 1973 film Blazing Saddles? Mel playing the former, Harvey Korman the latter. Both dead-on.

Could Condiparrot (see Oliphant's cartoons) try straightener on her tongue?

Sadism With a Smirk — The Always-Air President:
Oregon is the only one of the 50 states that permits pain-wracked cancer patients to choose doctor-assisted suicide. Bush [whose fervent sympathy for propping-up brain-damaged persons constitutes a study in disinterested charity] is trying to overturn that law (New York Times 2005/3/21 p.1). With standard smirk, he says (2005/3/16 press conference) he approves of turning prisoners over to nations that practice torture (on their own rib-dig smirk-promise that they wouldn't think of it). In 2005, Bush's culture-of-life mantra repeatedly tortured logic and decent people, while claiming to be “saving” long-departed Terri Schiavo by grabbing her allegedly-conscious body from her life's mate, in order to keep her remains bed-imprisoned for yet another 15yrs in degraded, dribbling, immobile nirvana. (Bush grandstanding on-air yet again [2005/3/21]: “alwaysh air on the shide of life”.)
Common theme here: the President of the US is World Poster-Boy for Torture.
[Hmmm. Won't crack-head John Couey be put to death for (2005 Feb) raiding a different Florida family's home — and torturing a girl for only a few minutes?]

Further ruminations on the Terri Shiavo caaaaaaaaaaase. If a woman is totally unresponsive to external stimuli, we call her effectively brainless. But some participants got that way not via hospital-error (like Terri) but by pious “education”. Comments:
[1] After Jimmy Connors beat Vitas Gerulitas at tennis 13 times straight, Vitas finally won a match. Afterwards, when interviewers snickeringly wondered aloud how such a sub-Connors player did it, Vitas puffed-out his chest and mock-boasted: “Listen, smart-guy, nobody beats Vitas Gerulitas 14 times in a row….” As the “pro-life” contingent kept praying every Easter for Jesus to raise up Terri like himself (or Lazarus) — but never asking WHERE god's been for the last 15 Easters — the ghouls appeared to be saying: “Listen-up, skeptics, no brain-damage could possibly beat Jesus 16 Easters in a row….”
[2] How many NOs — repeated by court after court — would it have taken to penetrate the “pro-life” side of the family? — who tried tirelessly to doom their child to body-prison forever, just to satisfy their own dementia (while aiming slander-hurt at all who disagreed with it), yet these nuts largely got a pope-level free-pass by the media. Their “inter-relation” with their long-departed daughter (who was herself saying NO by over a decade of silence) reminds one of:
[a] Woody Allen getting NO-signal after NO-signal from Jennifer Salt in Play It Again Sam and still thinking she's comin'-on to him.
[b] Norman Bates in Psycho, except that he only spent 9 (not 15) years talking to his departed mom Norma's bed-ridden-bod.

An unfortunate aspect of euthanasia in most states is that it's only legal by sustenance-deprivation, not direct medical intervention. (I.e., doomed lowlife-murderers get better treatment — and more choice [believe it or not] in some states — than illness-doomed non-murderers….) Such a craven walk-away dodge of responsibility (to help a pathetically trapped fellow human being) is typical of legalistic ethicists, as against humane ethicists. But the gutless media absolutely will not mention that this is the decree not of atheists but conventionally religious folk. John Paul 2 doubtless went along with this approach — and paid the price: pointless pain and humiliation, postponing his alleged entrance into the alleged heaven which (allegedly) he sought-above-all.
(DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §G5 [p.118].)

Uniqueness-Über-Uniqueness
(& We Complain of Moslems Blasting Buddhist Monuments):
On 1975/6/21, Dennis Rawlins explored the place from which the Roman Empire was ruled for an especially terror-bloody decade (27-37 AD) by Tiberius: a palace beautifully set atop a 1000' cliff on the east point of Capri. DR returned to this remarkable site on 2005/7/28, only to find that (shortly after his 1st visit) pope JP2 had desecrated this unique pagan historic building by thoughtfully erecting a Christian church atop it — dedicated to the allegedly-virgin Mary. Thanks — we really needed that: at last, someone has been courageously original enough to dedicate a Catholic church to too-long-neglected Mary.

Divisive ethnic politics, a 1960s high for the Left, has lethally boomeranged in recent decades.
(DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §P3 [p.87].)

So it's OK that M.Culkin's family lent the kid out to share M.Jackson's bed? Hmm. Have we all along been mis-spelling the title of the film which untried Culkin's generosity suddenly earned him the lead rôle in? Wasn't it actually: Homo Loan?
But, hey, Nothing-Happened.
Question: Did longtime Columbia Pictures Boss-of-Bosses Harry Cohn ever try claiming that, OK, so he shared a bed with RitaH, MarilynM, & KimN but — gaaah-lee Nothing-Happened…? (He didn't eject.) Whollyweird may be a Swamp of Pusillanimy, but not even The Boss would try that one.
(Harry C was so universally loathed that at his huge funeral, it was remarked that the turnout just vindicated what Harry always said: give people something they want to see, and they'll fill the joint.)

Taking the Two-Party Sham to the Next Step: the Two-Palsie System:
When will the US next have a prez not named Bush or Clinton? Recall when the Philippines (which the US treated as merely a gullible, ill-educated colony) was run for years by two friendly families (headed by pals Marcos & Aquino), who just tossed the rulership back&forth? (Until an angry divorce ended in gunfire some years back.)
[See DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §A10 [p.5]; DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 §G1 [p.96].]

When asked a few years ago by an Australian who belonged to the Roman church, to join in his lobbying effort against the Moslems in East Timor, DR responded that when two bunnyrabbit religions were trying to outmultiply each other, they will always [the Earth's spaces not being infinite] end up trying to kill each other. (DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 n.8 [p.113].)
Now that Shrubya has launched Christianity's Fifth Crusade (counting from 1099AD) into Moslem Palestine, in support of the First Jewsade (1948-to-date), can we still look down condescendingly upon East Timor's bloody religion-vs-religion folly?
Point not yet openly pondered by TV 'snews: at current death rates, the US dead in Iraq will exceed the 9/11 toll in NYC in ordmag a year. Will embarrassment over this be a spur for the US to get the intended puppet-gov't set up ASAP before semi-scramming?

TV 'snews' talk-shows & yell-shows increasingly resemble the creationists' aim for biology classrooms: equal time for reality and for religious insanity. (No atheists need apply.)

Question: What's the common factor connecting all of Prez Shrubya's disasters?
Answer: An arrogance born of having so many gushers of oil money behind the prez, that no extreme of incompetent acting by him even matters.
No wonder he keeps smirking like a flunking college student whose family owns the college.

The Following 4 Paragraphs (& Horsey Cartoon) Were Posted in 2005:

Sad Fads:
Certain cultists believe that astrology and ESP are useful for playing the stock-market. Actually, they're obliquely right.
Belief in astrology and-or ESP is cyclical: public interest gets generated by interested parties; then, as the cultism gets pushier while the confirming evidence never appears, a skeptical reaction occurs and the fad wanes — until memories wane even more and the wackiness returns anew to exploit a public which has forgotten the previous generation's informed skepticism. That is why such cycles last roughly a generation.
Likewise, after a fallow period, stock-markets will rise on a circular, chain-letter basis — i.e., investors plunge funds into the market ('20s, '60s, & '90s) BECAUSE it's rising, thus causing it to rise yet further. Confidence inevitably builds (aided by paid touts: analysts, brokers, the greed-channel [CNBC]) that a great permanent transformation is afoot (or whatever), so one should always Buy, and never sell except to fund a different Buy. Much talk about Earnings, little about the fact that a stock is only worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. (Sometimes called [by insiders] the Greater-Fool Principle.) When the crash comes, investors jump in&out for a while but mostly lose yet more, so: many of the twice-bit depart for years, even decades. Since the worth of the stock-market is simply the total of what the public trusts to put into it, it will ordinarily stay low for as long as it takes for the skeptics to die away and be replaced by a more innocent new generation of lambs to be fleeced.
So, you can see that, indeed, one can learn something about investing, from sad parallels to fads like astrology and ESP.

Wall Street Is Just Thinkin' of the Little Guy:
If President Shrubya's Social Security dream is genuinely intended to trust the average citizen's fiscal responsibility, then: why FORCE citizens to set aside retirement money at all? This apparent contradiction dissolves when you realize that both parts of the PrezPlan ([a] forced confiscation, [b] unforced con-game-lure of big riches via The Wall Street Journey) are perfectly consistent with the schemes of the plutocratic elite that elected him. (Note close analogy with perfect-mafia-dream drug-needle-giveaway laws.) That elite's desperate hope to keep the Clinton Bubble from super-crashing on GOP-watch is bouyed by the prospect of injecting Social Security's multi-billions into stocks, where prices are directly proportional not to the nation's solid corporate worth but rather to the amount of money people have risked in the sometime chain-letter we call “the stock market”.

Posted 2005:
President Shrubya's SocSec-reform snake-oil is sold on the premis that: stocks have long-term performed better for the rich than bonds or savings accounts have for the middle class, So: let's get the larger public into stocks.
[Cartoon by Horsey, appearing in Wash Post WeeklyEd 2005/1/31 p.21.]
Slight catch: most company's stocks go up when the company is screwing that very same larger public via high prices, firings, and-or low wages. So, making such greedy exploitive joy universal is patently self-contradictory — and technically is about on the level of perpetual-motion machine quackery.
(PrezSmirkoff's crusade to spread prosperity worldwide [by war and threat] is equally if less obviously questionable, considering that if China & India suddenly had the US' lifestyle, world supplies of oil and perhaps water — among other commodities — would go wild in cost or insta-vanish, with a tsunamic sucking sound.) If the public is to share seriously in ownership of companies, that could help motivation. But other than that factor (which one doubts US companies would permit) the scheme looks like it's pretending to increase wealth by shuffling it differently. (An earlier illusionist faked similar loaves&fishes and water-into-wine tricks.) Unless Bush is aiming at putting stockbrokers on the gov't dole (who says Prez is agin' all social-security?), the actual aim of Shrubya-Greenspan could be primarily to supply artificial intra-venous sustenence for the rickety US stock market — still bloated from the mad Clinton-era bubble — until economic recovery eventually brings share-prices in-line with reality. A prospect which may not

given foreign competition, insane national debt that's heavily foreign-held (one way to deal with a huge, armed-to-the-teeth greedy mad-dog: buy him up?), China-induced energy-scarcity, etc.

Carnybarker Bush's stock-wealth-for-everybody perpetual-money-machine scheme reminds one of a wry comment, which even very liberal John K. Galbraith used to repeat, regarding the inflationary effect which could follow realization of demagogic leftist pols' wage-pandering (see also Marlowe-“Shakespeare” at DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.68 [p.114]):

Astronomy is potentially one of the purest academic fields: the sky is full of beauty, as is the refined and ingenious math that historically evolved in connection with astronomy. So: why has the field of astronomical history traditionally been one of the most dishonest and craven corners of academe? — far outdistancing astronomical societies in its numbers of plagiarists, gurus, fawners, liars, unprincipled hitmen, and mediocrities pretending to be genii.
The ironic explanation is that the very highness of the field's math produces an especially huge gulf (far larger than in most historical fields) between its practitioners and its historians. Too many historians of astronomy simply cannot cope with the tools of their own field, a situation which produces knawing private insecurities, thus to coagulatation around power-volk, for much-needed mutual protection from exposure. (Ancient astronomical history is the worst of the lot, due to the inevitable paucity of possible discoveries and the delicacy of the refined induction required to overcome the fragmentary surviving evidence.) All members of the coalescent lump coherently and Orwellianly refuse publicly to admit members' pratfalls — thus, they are all (officially) as Infallible as the cult they are loyal cogs of. Mother Church may indeed have pioneered Infallibility for the pope (DIO 9.3 [1999] ‡6 n.75 [p.142]), but not even VatCityInc ever thought of franchising Infallibility….
[The 2006 November issue of the lay periodical Scientific American prints Brad Schaefer's conscience-less repeat of his utterly discredited 2005 Farnese globe hypothesis — undone in detail (2006 Feb) by statistician D.Duke, regarding its accuracy, as well as its statistics. (See similarly statistician P.Huber.) Also DR on the BS 2005 paper's statistics, astronomy, atmospheric math, history, photogrammetry, even simply reading Hipparchos' statement of his observatory's latitude. BS' article goes so far as to repeat the exact same Farnese-globe date as his original 2005 article — which he knows from multiple inputs is miscomputed even for his own badly-chosen data-base. (This particular discrepancy is not huge — but it is especially undeniable, so its 2006 non-correction reveals without ambiguity BS' devotion to evidence-responsiveness and simple integrity.)]

The “press” regularly gets into predictable hair-shirt orgies of condemning its corporate-owned&controlled self for being too-too-too sympathetic to the weak&poor (i.e., too Liberal). But if you think that's the height of self-flagellating press-hypocrisy, let's go a little higher yet: during the Second Coming of convicted liar Martha Stewart, when they rollethed-away-the-stone at her temporaty tomb at Camp-Cupcake and she limosinethed forth from the grave she'd endured, the press could effuse over nothing else. During the holy day itself, a press-person was asked for the cause, and he replied: “us.” But what is always omitted from such we're-so-sorry commentary is the sub-reality that ought to be taught in schools and college courses, regarding the press fascination with this astonishingly dull magnate (and many other Celebs): if you pump enough money into the p.r.man-clique (and you're not a swastika-festooned serial killer and aren't provably involved in [a non-media brand of] incest), you can simply rent the press. (The difficulty of long maintaining such exorbitant rent-injections is the subtext to Andy Warhol's exceptionally astute remark that everyone gets to be famous for 15 minutes.) Yes, there'll be a few critical comments along the way (helps press-pretense to having at least some ethics), but the main thrust — so long as the lucre keeps getting pumped into the p.r.system — will be Celebrification of those who pay into that system.
[Question: What pathetically tiny percentage of the public actually has any idea of how 99-plus percent of “guests” get onto the top TV-talkshows? Do they suppose that the emcee just liked the haircut of tonight's “guest”?]

All media-hyped wrongdoer-“comebacks” pretend to be mercies when they are purely commercial: merely celeb-industry investment-recoupings. It's easier to recycle even a tainted a known brand-name than to jump-start a new name from-scratch.
[This scheme could be honestly-advertised (hmm — is that an oxymoron?) as: a stock-reloading scheme that really-works.]

Who Says Congress Isn't Serious?
OK, OK, so Congressmen are putting caps on fiscal awards if, say, during a minor operation, a coke-snorting surgeon accidently cuts your ulnar nerve and paralyses your hand.
But this is just a tragic misunderstanding of Congress's Solomonically wise sense of-perspective. After all, Congress in 2005 was — almost simultaneously — REMOVING caps on penalties for saying 4-letter words on the air.
[But there may need to be exemptions for words connected to our Legacy President's family, so the funding of committees to adjudicate such cases will probably take priority over unimportant issues (like old-age poverty and national-border personnel). E.g., during the 1989/11/12 abortion-rights march on Washington, very proper ladies were seen carrying signs reading: “BUSH: STAY OUT OF MINE”.]

Murder vs Mercy:
The only folks more love-starved than the women begging Scott Peterson to marry them are the exploitive congressmen angling to keep a feeding tube in a vegetating former person.

What's Good for the G-O-P is Good for You?
Some think that the super-rich's in-progress screw-the-poor world-takeover implies that one should invest in the stock market. Could be. But, a caution regarding the implicit theory here, which is: corporations will cheat workers & consumers — but not stockholders. And note the historical pseudo-oddity that every single US stock market crash has occurred while the GOP ruled the White House. (When the citizenry is so bled that there's little left to steal from them, this is not healthy even for stockholders.) The GOP's dream appears to be: every cent in the world invested in the stock market. The catch: where else could the market then go but: down? (This is another instance where an extreme example ought to bear obvious lessons for non-extreme realities.)

The Social-Worker's NightmareDream-Come-True:
Suppose, purely hypothetically, that our not-fully-smart human-evolution ancestors or cousins still walked the Earth. Purely hypothetically, you understand. Question: How would Affirmative-Action-Quota Dembos deal with the problem? Would Java-Men & Neanderthals have to be hired as physics profs in equal numbers as Cro-Magnons? Etc. The most likely social-worker-clan Answer to this egalitarian nightmare is: well, inferior man cannot have survived (or luckily [?] did not), during man's early history. But even if we grant this claim, we know that it would only be so because social-workers weren't there to Help Out. So this is a self-contradicting argument. And the (puuurely hypothetical) question remains: if a society contains large groups of non-coping individuals, must one keep jamming them into responsible positions by ethnic-group proportion instead of by individual talent?

Given the foregoing considerations: is it coincidental that all three of the main populations who've repeatedly proven impossible to peaceably integrate into modern civilized society, evolved during tens of millennia of protection — from violent extinction — by separation from the rest of mankind?

US “Democracy”:
YOU Decide! Take your completely free&uninfluenced Choice —
between two men-of-the-people, whose wives are preparing to wear to the inaugration a coat costing more than your annual salary.
(But — look on the bright side: just about the only non-fake item at presidential inaugurations is the fur hanging off the fatcats' trophy-wives.)

Rebels and go-alongs simply have two utterly different ethics and thus are persistently Out and In, respectively, entirely regardless of The System. Did not those Christians who executed the rebel pagan-mystic & heliocentrist Giordano Bruno in 1600 recall a case 1600 years earlier in which a religious dissenter was publicly murdered as-a-warning by that era's establishment?
[The 1913 Catholic Encyclopedia (vol.3; 1908) claims that Bruno's hideous execution by burning is completely misunderstood. He was-not-either burned for heliocentrism — but instead for religious heresy such as (correctly) pointing out that Jesus was doing magic tricks. WELLLL! — oKAY! Burn him! Burn him! Burn him! … (DIO 11.3 [2002] ‡6 n.11 [p.72].)
Hmmm. But, isn't there a curious coincidence here: just a few years later, Galileo (not at all a public religious heretic) was threatened for astronomical heresy by the very same Inquisition that had just roasted Bruno, and Galileo was placed under house arrest for the last decade of his life. (Bruno had been imprisoned for years before his Catholic torture-murder.) All this over astronomical heresy. In that context, alibis regarding Bruno's “crimes” suggest that the Roman church has simply added slippery deceit to murder, while still pointing to Bruno as the saga's real sinner — for talking out of bounds.]
Likewise, when Zionists in the 1977 Academy Awards audience booed Palestinian-sympathizer Vanessa Redgrave as she received her Supporting Actress award, did none of them understand that if the scene were 1943 Warsaw, she'd have been idealistically fighting to save Jews while the booers' parallels were trying to save their own skins?

Plutocratic Pavlov:
The US' corporate-owned media's ever-more-ubiquitous TalkRadioesque-GOPerator “guest commentators” have been openly boasting that, without always getting 90% of the black vote, the Dimocrats would now be virtually a fringe party. So, psychologists everywhere are waiting to learn: can the vision of capitalist-world-takeover-cheerleader C.Rice, answering the bell for the 2008 prez-election, actually produce international fatfeline salivation?

Question: Why is it that virtually (if not exactly) all the (official) actors elected to major US political office are GOP?
Answer: When you're trying to get the poor & middle classes to vote for the party of the super-rich, you quickly realize that professional pretenders' help might come in handy.

Dep't of Let's-Change-the-Subject: So the WMD-search has transformed into a crusade to bring to Iraq the blessings of “Democracy”. (Read: “Jesus” or oil-cartel-dominance, as you wish.) Hmmm. So the US State Dep't likes democracy in Moslem nations? OOOO-K, let's ask it: do you think Pakistanis should vote on whether they want the present US-supplied [and US State Dep't-threatened] arms-wielding puppet-ruler to stay in office…? [US “democracy” having blessed us with Bush-Cheney-Halliburton, one can see why soldiers have to die to bring the same Trinity to Iraq.]

How can a nation be a wise democracy, when most of its citizens believe in a non-existent and utterly illogical (all-good AND all-powerful) god (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §M2 [p.60]) — not to mention his promise of an equally non-existent eternal after-life?

The most convincing “evidence” for religion's truth is local majority opinion. But generations of cult mass-child-indoctrination proves nought but brainlets' washability.

Genderwise, the habit of lying is like the cardgame of Bridge: women play at it lots more than men, but the champions are predominantly men. Which is why male pols run the world.

For hair-trigger chain-liars rigidly incapable of back-down embarrassment (thus reacting to each clumsy fib-caused mess by reflex-resort to further deceit): no number, degradation-depth, in-deeper-galloping-amplification, or cost of successive nerve-racking selfdug-grave-crises can cure endemic fabromania born of fear of being perceived as ethically or mannerly imperfect.
(Getting-caught requires never-confess beyond-Berkeley flight from exposer, as if non-perception of imperfection's perceiver eliminates imperfection.) Prime (non-professional) loss: a lifetime of successive shunnings by the most discerning citizens.
A classic instance of Pascal's Principle (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §L [p.58]): pathological lying compulsively keeps gambling-with one's most valued possession — reputation — for tiny gains. Since not even the most skilled liars can pitch perfect games every time out, especially with only a 1-second warm-up (most habitual liars imagine they can react instantly with a perfect fib), eventual disaster is statistically pre-guaranteed.

An overlooked peculiar contributing cause to the US' notorious obesity-plague: though taking regular evening walks helps one's physique and sleep-cycle, eternal US municipal crime rates have increasingly discouraged the habit.

Isn't Looting at the Point of a Gun Called Robbery? Trial lawyers affect moral outrage that the US is the only top nation to preserve The Death Penalty. (Even if it is only applied once in a Blue-Polkadot Moon.)
[Note that popular support for executions is rising in the EU. So, keeping afloat the argument that the US is unusually barbaric may come to depend upon increasingly sinuous reasoning.]
Hmmm. Isn't it just one of those poetic coincidences of life that: the very nation with the known universe's highest lawyers/capita ratio is also the Bigdeal-Death-Penalty nation, where each precious golden-goose condemned-murderer's appeals&appeals&appeals&appeals generate gigabucks for the legal “system” most of which is sucked from lawful citizens' fiscal jugulars through gov'ts' tax-collection draculas, backed by the threat of well-armed force?
(Years ago DR warned that if it then took 10yrs to snuff a convicted murderer, but the number of US lawyers later doubled — then the post-doubling delay [between conviction & execution] would have to become 20yrs. Which is about where it indeed now is. Does any thinking person seriously doubt the two numbers' connexion, or that the future will get even more ridiculous? — perhaps culminating-collapsing only when the delay starts to exceed all participants' natural life-expectancies….)
[Another provocative coincidence: Wichita's “B-T-K” serial killer, Dennis Rader, never committed another murder (final snuffs: 1985, 1986, 1991) during the recent decade when Kansas re-instated the death penalty (1994-2004), though orthodox-criminologist accounts (prompted by lying-scum Rader, itself) all naturally prefer resorting to other explanations than this obvious and prominent possibility. (E.g., aging or more stable job — none of which prevented his 2004-2005 sneer-boasts of his torture-murders.)
Note added 2008: The detailed temporal sequence of the case may be of interest: as the anti-death-penalty forces got into gear, so did BTK-Rader: after 2 decades of silence, BTK re-emerged again (taunting-mailings to the cops) on 2004/3/17, even as the death-penalty's banishment was on the horizon. But, fortunately, only weeks after the 2004/12/31 end of the death penalty in Kansas, the cops nabbed Rader (2005/2/25) before he could again strike (at-occasional-opportunity: his M.O.) — as he inevitably would have, within the next few years. Who knows how many lives the 2005 Wichita police saved from death-by-bleeding-heart?]
Trickier math: will a criminologist compute for us how long it will take (given the gathering speed of judicial non-speed) for the rate of growth of the minimum delay-before-death-penalty to exceed the passage of time itself — so that no fresh death-penalty verdict could possibly be carried out.

Sinister Sinusoidal Symbiosis:
Note that the foregoing math works only if the number of murderers stays pretty constant, which is the case lately in the US. So, if you want to see prompter executions, pray for lots more murderers. But then the promptness may discourage the killers, and then the lawyers would go back to milking each killer to the max, until ….
(See DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §Q [p.87].)

Since US lawyerdom pushes against capital punishment, but for recycling career criminals in&out of jail as frequently as possible (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §Q [p.87]), criminal-lawyerly logic here appears to be: the killing of someone doesn't faze criminals; but, responding to repeated crimes by giving the perp years of serial free room&board — that'll lower the crime-rate.

Its no surprise that The Nation is continuing its disproportionately intense crusade against snuffing an occasional murderer. The surprise is that a leashed exchange there (2007/4/2 p.2) got enlightening. A letter-writer urged the death penalty for certainly-guilty parties. The anti-crime-thought reply scoffed at human certainty. Yet, on the same page, we see promotion of releasing murderers as soon they are deemed harmless. No comment from The Nation's thought-channellers on how one acquires certainty from the shrinks that will be doing the murderer-springing.

Streetcrime kills far more USers than “terrorism”. So why is the latter given so much more hysterical coverage? Suggestion: the rich aren't touched by the former — but are (especially in prime-targets NYC & Wash DC) absolutely TERRIFIED of the latter.
Postscript: In India's 2006/7/11 near-simultaneous train-bombings (which may restore the name Bombay to Mumbai), the perps systematically aimed at India's uppers: all seven bombs were in 1st-class cars.
[See International Herald Tribune 2006/7/13 pp.1-2.]
Yet the US press avoided that key component of the story.
As with the 2001/9/11 attacks on the WTC and the Pentagon: the targets were not the world but its ruler-exploiters. Regardless of one's attitude towards the Moslem horde — and the planet's ever-tightening Koran Belt — it is worth admiring the propagandistic skill of a “free press” whose owners have turned the 9/11 attacks upon the US' super-rich into an Attack on America, so that the US' non-rich's sons can go away to war and get killed in response, while the rich's sons helpfully wave the flag for them.

Geometric Growth or Decline?
The business-establishment that rules the US keeps crooning the mantra that the poor, pathetic, fragile US economy (which sucks up a hoggish fraction of the world's energy) HAS to use poor desperate alien labor. Businessmen get rich by never thinking ahead, of course, but if they did so (regarding their children's long-term welfare instead of their own) they might ask this simple question: when our era's cheap-labor wave is absorbed and starts exploding here (like it did back home, where it got too crowded for decent life …), then an ever-larger populace will need EVEN MORE aliens (by the very logic that justified the present wave). What is most pseudo-mysterious here is that: none of the forums pushing immigration are even talking about such geometric-growth factors or their consequences — or, indeed, whether there is any plan to eventually wean the US economy away from its alleged necessity to exploit the world's poor to maintain (for a little while longer) the US' for-now uniquely (if increasingly narrowly focussed) luxurious lifestyle.
(US business seems to have the attitude of an earlier exploiter of the poor. As Jesus said [privately], to justify his own [private] luxuries: the poor you have with you always. See DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §C2 [p.46].)

How can one seriously lower the national murder rate when every US murder creates thousands even millions in fees for lawyers, judges, shrinks, etc? — not to mention millions more in ad-billings supporting TV 'snews which regularly runs murder reports as up-front eveningly entertainment. The key sleight which ensures that the funds continue flowing: keep the average citizen fixated on the possibility that [a] he will be unjustly arrested, which diverts him from [b] the far higher likelihood that he will be unjustly mugged by a criminal repeatedly let-loose through a system paralysed by obsession with minuscule [a] instead of overwhelming [b].

VatCatholic Rent-a-Cam:
If privacy-advocates are really worried about video-cameras etc, and anti-terrorists genuinely wish to relieve citizens' fears, why don't they take on the big celestial snoop-terrorist? Isn't god the ultimate (nonerasable) camcorder? — designed by Holy Church Inc (rentable by any gov't that'll agree to the VatCats' terms), guaranteed to keep citizens in-line by threat of torture (Hell) more awful & more enduring than anything even the Nazis tried.

President Smirkoff & Co.:
We now live under the very first prez ticket ever, where both members come from one-state. Warm-guy Cheney from oil-state-Texas. (TX-Halliburton's transplant outta WY.) And Shrubya from oil-state-Texas. But, understand clearly: their reason for wanting (well before 9/11) to invade Iraq is entirely their Christian concern for the Iraqi people's right to democracy.
[Same for Rummy. Pure coincidence that he too has an oil-background: Bechtel Corp.]
When Cheney & our Minimum Leader get done with Iraq (assuming any of us are still alive), what nation will be democratized next? (Now, now, no too-easy comments like: hey — how about starting with the US?)
[Suggestion to those who share DR's mirth at Bush's straining-his-shoulders-back-to-the-limit warlord-generallissimo-in-a-business-suit strut: well, check out old Brian Donlevy 1940s films (e.g., Hangmen Also Die 1942) to view the equally contrived prototype. Again, it was a war era.]

Most citizens who read political-rags or mags, or soak-in TV 'snews, choose organs spouting primarily their own inclination's propaganda.
[Which is why The Nation (Left-junkie readership) & the National Review (Right-junkie readership) don't regularly print (as confident journals do) opposing-viewpoint authors — which nakedly reveals both publishers' fear that the other side might make enough convincing points as to shrink fiscal inflow from feeding ideological drugs to an addict-readership. A moneylithic disgrace.]
Thus, both readerships are effectively begging to be a perpetually-preached-to choir, and sealing their brains off from the vital stimulation of disagreement. Little wonder few citizens' brains grow into new opinions.
But it's a wise (and fun) habit to subscribe to magazines on the Left && Right — and (more fun yet) of an independent nature.
By reading both all sides of issues, one will be surprised to find that most forums — even fanatically extreme ones — will have at least an occasional valid or semi-valid point to contribute. And though these may indeed be rare, they are more likely to trigger (if only in reaction) novel mental streams than one's usual input will.
Note, too, that even the most Respectable forums have a fanatical aspect: there is never a single good word for socialism in the National Review, nor does The Nation like to admit that capitalism has some merits. One recalls that even pope JP2 — the pope, mind you! — was intellectually broader than that.

Public-Truth Paradox:
It is a wise Menckenism of longstanding that the proletariat hates truth. But, complimentarily, all elite institutions & establishments fear it — which is why promulgators of biggie-upsetting truth inevitably become systematically smeared as: unreliable, untruthful, and-or vile [1991].
(Analogously, see Bertrand Russell's ironic observation.)

Why Is Scott Peterson Smiling? Most people on “Death Row” will outlive me.

US politics is to goverment what Bleak House is to justice.

Both US pol-parties pretend to righteousness: the Dumbos by much kneeling & foetus-hugging; the Dembos by elaborately pretending & pretending & pretending to help a pseudo-mysteriously-ever-more-incurable poverty) class. Because the two parties' holiness-acts are superficially different, observers are too easily diverted from their non-superficial similarity: both are pretending to serve the needy while doing the bidding of the super-wealthy.

We all understand why the GOP-Dumbos need the robot-vote from the land of the creationist fundamentalists. But why do we take for granted the permanence of the Dembos' dependence upon the black vote? The Dumbos represent the super-rich 1% of the populace, so their need to fool half the remainder is numerically self-evident. But the Dems claim to be “The Party of the People”, so they should rightly be getting over 90% of the ballots for President. Yet they haven't gotten near even 60% for decades. Superficially, the most obvious answers are the growth of religious-nuttiness and the divisiveness of Affirmative Action. Both are related to the increasingly powerless & nervous condition of the middle class, that actually does the work basic to the nation's welfare.
[See Reuters' story (International Herald Tribune 2007/1/18 p.5, based upon an article appearing in the Journal of Epidemiology) on Finnish scientists' finding that even those who survive corporate down-sizing massacres have a 50%-increased chance of ending up on sleeping-pills etc. Question: how many CEO tears will be shed at the news?]
But the former is an effect of this; the latter, a cause of it — and thus immediately remediable. If the Dems would simply announce and stick to a policy of total equity towards all genders & races — no Preferences for anyone — they would instantly and shockingly gut the prime gripe that GOP-puppet Talk-Radio lives off. Preferences are sexist, racist — thus they are divisive, and play right into the rulership's hands — which is why the whole US establishment, bigbuck corporations, & their lackey-media push them.
(Do leftists never notice this?!! One doesn't need to read The Nation to get promotion of Preferences. Centrist mags push the same idea. So, one would think leftists might wonder: why is the establishment so glad & ever-ready to ‘help’ the left [commit suicide] on this?
A deeper view: if we see the two parties as a single Republicrat oligarchy, the situation is akin to that of the ancient Roman principate period created by the Caesars, in which the thinking middle class's power sank (including the murder of Cicero, Seneca, & Lucan), as the ultra-rich ultra-armed rulers ignored it and the Senate. But, whether or not we completely comprehend what is going on, observers should be increasingly skeptical about the astonishing stability (and insensitivity to average US citizens) of the 50-50-prez-election phenomenon, especially when one of the parties nakedly gives huge tax-breaks to 1% of the electorate, while the other equally-nakedly panders to the hopeless bottom 10% and (to repeat) thus deliberately turns off the worthwhile majority.

Political Highwaymen: TV 'snews can put on airs of Neutrality and-or Respectability from here to doomsday, but none of that sham can get around the reality: for political election races, the networks' ads cost millions — and virtually no one can win without them. So, regarding the airways, the nets are like highways' holdup-men of yore, telling all who wish to pass:

Tchaikovsky & Lewis Carroll are among my favorite people, but pedophilia's charm for them utterly eludes me. Suggestion: some of the sex-impulse can evolve (or warp) into love of exploring (or desecrating) the sacred or pure; and there are none more innocent than the very young.

What happened when medbiz & godbiz — two potent lobbies — collided and competed for public domination in the US? Despite the US being the most professedly religious rich nation on Earth (95% for god), medbiz has trumped and tromped god here to a truly embarrassing extent: US citizens are now outspending all other nations on life-stretching medicine, in order forever to stay out of the Holy-Heaven paradise which the US, above all nations, allegedly longs for.
(Dennis Rawlins: DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §G [p.118].)
[When pondering professedly heaven-seeking folks' desperation to cling to Planet Earth (as evidenced by the foregoing), one can wind up asking: if, according to Christianity, life is eternal (actually, inexplicably, suspiciously decreed semi-eternal: allegedly no soul before conception), then how can it be equitable that an infinitesimally tiny 100y-slice (of said infinitely large life) be so blown out of proportion as to be decreed the determinant of all?]

OIJBAM & The Law:
Before the homosexual lobby ate very-former Miss America contestant Anita Bryant, she starred in a much-aired, (obviously-)unconsciously-campy Florida orangejuice TV ad (this was years before the equally liberal Rush Limbaugh took up the orangejuice banner), enticing fashion-conscious homefolks to start slurping her product at lunch & dinner, not just at breakfast. This promotion so perfectly typified the expand-your-market approach to product-hustling that our family has ever since classified all such schemes under the acronym “OIJBAM”, in honor of Anita's immortal pitch, which was (verbatim):

Some less fruity OIJBAM plans: [a] Hooking Third World countries on tobacco.
[b] Career-truncated Bo Jackson's former salivating genius-agent computing how lucrative it would be for a bulging steroid-jock to play football as well as baseball.
[c] The Medium & other promoters accustomizing the public to “singing” (E.Merman or rock [littleknown DIO pseudofact of etymology: modern pop is called Rock because the performers look, act, & sound like they just crawled out from under one]) which is as attractive as glass-scratching, because: resting vocal cords for a few days between gigs isn't as profitable as nightly performances.
[d] Recycling criminals (via lawyer-clique-pal parole-boards) back onto the streets so rapidly that lawyers & judges can draw municipal salaries from defending-prosecuting-sentencing each precious criminal as frequently as possible. Perhaps the legal profession's ultimate vision will yet come to pass: fiscal exploitation of the same crook not just in a morning trial but in 3 court hearings on the same day. And then it'll be time to Rush a former juice-hustler out of Bimbaugh-Limbo to film a TV spot for the Trial Lawyers Ass'n: “Criminals aren't just for breakfast anymore.” (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §Q [p.87].)

If you think the foregoing 1994 comment was overdone in implying that THE purpose for the court system is lawyer-enrichment, try this why-are-they-unjailed-in-the-1st-place? item from the International Herald Tribune 2007/11/22 p.5:

ATLANTA: The Supreme Court of Georgia overturned a state law Wednesday [11/21] that banned registered sex offenders from living within 1,000 feet of schools, churches, and other areas where children congregate. The law, adopted in 2006, had been targeted by civil rights groups [lawyers] who argued that it would render vast areas off-limits to the roughly 11,000 registered sex offenders in Georgia and could backfire by encouraging offenders to stop reporting their whereabouts to authorities.

Mightn't it be wiser to deal with these mostly-incurable-deadend-anyway creeps by rendering off-limits-for-them: anyplace outside prison or crematoria?

There are political candidates who are so inadequate, so transparently intra-insecure-for-good-reason, that the only way they could possibly win elections is by convincing voters that each successive opponent is vile.
So: is it a coincidence that the US' two most embarrassingly wallflower-feckless, visibly-sweatily-ill-at-ease modern presidents (Nixon & Shrubya) were also the two dirtiest & most unprincipled opponent-smearers?

Can education (or a genuinely free press) help cure gambling “addiction”? A proposed cure-iculum:
[a] Test gambling “skill” while keeping careful score. Apply house cut and watch losses match statistical prediction exactly.
[b] Show by test that each card-value comes up 1/13 of time, each die-face 1/6. So: there is no gamble-god. I.e., your phone number or birthday won't win the lottery.
[c] Practice enough such statistical games and teach enough statistical reality that the student will become aware that (once you realize losing-to-the-house is a long-term certainty) gambling is BORING: unglamorously mechanical & repetitive.
[d] Emphasize: gambling's not an addiction. (Name a professional statistician who's so “addicted”.) The “addiction” is simply victims' stupid greed.
[What's next in the shrinks' “illness” parade? — “addiction” as alibi for rape? Murder?]
[e] Playing cards all day is not exactly exciting — without greed. It's largely just dull time-fill labor.
(Likewise: who'd show up to watch horseraces, if the lucre-spice of gambling weren't there?)
[f] Compute the total time it requires to (i) travel to the lottery-ticket booth, (ii) to purchase and (iii) scratch a ticket — then, divide this time-span into the average winning-payout: you'll find that the quotient is waaaay below the minimum-wage — and so lotteries could be banned on that ground alone.

Little-Known-pseudoFact Dep't:
The most secret and central part of TV 'snews' hiring procedure has been known to Insiders for decades as simply The Test. Any applicant for a job as newsanchor must (during his screen-test) deliver a line of Middle-East news containing the term “Peace Process” — and then (instead of guffawing at the black-humor absurdity of thus describing decades of hateful war) he must exhibit the ability to FREEZE his face into dead-serious mugdom. Then-&-only-then may he be blessed — lifted from the applicant-mass: apotheosized into the ultra-select brotherhood of Network-TalkingHeadDum.
Verily, verily, I say unto you [Matt 20.16, 22.14]: many are called; but few are frozen.
[The foregoing was posted here around 2000. but the sham goes on. (E.g., New York Times 2013/7/20 pp.1-6.) Where would be the harm in referring to peace hopes or peace attempts. Media should be ashamed of rote-repeating a term that is virtually a lie if measured against the actual history of the ever-seething, ever-disappointed Middle East.]

Question:
1. Does the public ever wonder how the US can claim to be a land of equality while over 90% of wealth is owned by ordmag 10% of the populace — and over 90% of land is owned by ordmag 1%?
2. How often does the TV-press-Medium discuss this ideological disjunct?
3. If Medium-owners were also grossly monied and landed, some might occasionally ponder the causes behind such selective silence.

Why Does TV 'snews Hard-s Election Coverage Keep Mispronouncing “Whoresrace”?
Both “main” political parties are just like all TV 'snews stations: wholly owned by the US' most bloated fatcats. (See DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §E [p.13] “You Are Getting Verrrry Sleepy…”.) And a perpetual succession of remarkably close presidential elections is the neatest scheme ever devised for [a] getting out the vote, and
[b] diverting those votes from “spoilers” — namely, anyone outside the rulership, such as Nader — i.e., the only candidates the rulers would be upset at seeing elected. (DIO 2.3 [1992]) ‡6 n.23 [p.96].)
[c] Implied prediction: when Nader (or someone as remarkable) disappears, the certainty of cliffhanger prez-elections will, too.

The Ping-Pong Scheme for Killing Progressive Political Evolution:
The “two-party system”: if you're dis-satisfied with the current rulership, the (repeatedly) failed-party's present-rulership hands you but one alternate election-option: an already repeatedly-failed-past-rulership party — i.e., the very gang whose screw-ups drove you to the election-delusion that the current gang would do less badly.
(See “Two Party Ping-Pong Pocket Plumbing”.)

Two-Cad Monte:
If you're smart enough not to get sucked into streethustlers' 3-card-monte, then: why are you voting in “two-party” US pseudo-democracy? — and the central non-choices obviously built into a Plunkitt-illusionist pick-a-puppet-any-puppet polboss-dream “election”:
[Take, e.g, the 2004 presidential race:
Severely curbing-SUVs: off the table.
No-invasion-of-Iraq: off the table.
Invasion-by-Mexico: off the table.
Shame-the-Plutocrats: off the table.
Questioning (much less altering) Greenspan-economics: off the table.
Exponential growth of non-functioning fraction of population: off the table.
So why don't enough voters get off the table? — to (at a minimum) lodge a visible protest against the US' ever-more-refined “democracy” swindle. (Comparing 3-card-monte to politics:
Who's better at the greedy con-man profession: street-crooks or pols?
Hint: check out the quality & size of their domiciles.)]

On 2005/10/10, DR re-read the foregoing observation and asked himself:
if it's naïve to waste the hours it takes to vote in crooked elections, then: how should one describe a scholar who would spend time trying to inject integrity into a persistently corrupt academic community?
DR will not repeat mythical Sysiphos' legendary mistake of spending eternity attempting to roll history-of-astronomy's communal brain uphill.

Lo, Frustration High&Low:
US history has been a kinetic kaleidoscope of ephemeral cheap-labor-injection slavery-chapters, each saga bathed in righteous justification, though in fact mercilessly & cynically intended to frustrate workers' ability to get a living wage. But do not neglect also to pity the rulers: they too have suffered serial frustration — in their centuries-long chimeral search for the perfect servant-class: indentureds, blacks, Catholics, children, “coolies”, women, “wetbacks”, etc.
[Hair-splitters will cavil that the latest waves have not been forcibly brought to the US in chains. But over-population and starvation constitute force.]
The quest continues — as tragically hopeless as ever, due to the most obvious of inherent contradictions. It's all reminiscent of some advice DR once gave (Salzburg, 2000) to a manly-girl control-freak who was naturally having problems finding a mate: “How can you find someone dumb enough for you to dominate — yet smart enough to be worth sharing life with?”

Babe-Mouthing The adult-child learning-relationship is increasingly flipped. Adults used to teach kids the three Rs. But children's quicker-absorbing minds are now teaching parents the three Cs: computers, consumerism, & cussing.
As the world grows ever more technologically complex, elders are becoming obsolete ever more quickly. To expect them to keep up with increasingly crucial computer-related skills is akin to expecting elders to learn a new spoken language every year.
Will this factor encourage the young to rebel ultimately against the fiscal burden of funding old-folks — can Social Security survive even in its present under-siege state ?

There is a simple way to end Affirmative Action and racial friction simultaneously: everybody (even rednecks, assuming they have the requisite smarts, humanity, and humility) declares himself “black”. Then everyone will Come-Together (the alleged aim of Rainbow Coalition pros) since all will be Equally entitled to Affirmative Action benefits. Thus, for the Establishment to continue its Aff-Action divisiveness, it will be necessary to root out fake blacks — which will require resurrecting the Old South's John Calhoun and the Nazis' Heinie Himmler, to make Expert-determination of who's got enough drops of black blood to qualify. Which will bring the whole tragedy full circle — and expose the ludicrous and divisive race-show for what it really is. Namely: professional racists vs amateur racists.
[A proposed tactic to preserve the quota-quo: use DNA (if the NAACP can ever bring itself to assent to any standard test), to separate real blacks from fake. But this could raise new problems:
(a) Does half-black DNA ‘merit’ half a full-black's race-norming extra SAT points for college-entrance; or, does the one-drop rule hold? — which would make everybody a member of some aggrieved minority or other.
(b) Rhetorical (PC-satirizing) thought-in-passing: if the various races are equal, then how can DNA show differences? Of course there are differences, but adducing this obvious point returns us to the implicit miracle in all PC-ideology here: one could list dozens of differences between races — EXCEPT brainpower. That is the one attribute which — by an amazing miracle of PC's (contra-Darwin) idea of Darwinian evolution — is PRECISELY identical in all races. (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 n.40 [pp.89-90].)
(c) Hmmm — doesn't the whole race-quota idea begin to look (inverting former stereotypes) rather crank — stupifyingly anti-Occam and 100%-rigidly impervious to reconsideration in the light of accumulating evidence — when even the simplest skepticism is brought to bear upon it?]

Is it outrageous or funny or outrageously funny that the US' Republicans' entire anti-Darwin nonsense is being stirred-up and exploited by social-Darwinist plutocrats and the simplistic religiosity they have nurtured in the GOPbase for decades?

If individuals' IQs can vary, why not races'?
After all, the races evolved under more varied circumstances than most nations' individual families.

Republicans should sympathize more with “terrorism”, which may be usefully defined as the dirty-trick warfare of the desperately weaponless. When the US invades a primitive nation, the invadee cannot possibly win by sophisticated air warfare, so it uses crude guerrilla tactics: sniping, murder, bombs, etc. The GOP has similar disabilities:
[a] Its essential program is simply hey-let's-make-the-super-rich-even-richer — which is kinda hard to sell to the public in honest ads.
(DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 §B5 [pp.113-114].)
[b] Through decades of kiss-up power-serving, most GOP candidates have been drained of all visible symptoms of decent humanity.
With these sorts of handicaps, can anyone blame the Republican party for resorting to smears, lies, fake empathy, juggled statistics? Heck, didn't the Dems (usually [claiming to be] poorer than the GOP) initiate dirty-tricks? — multiple-voting cemetary-residents, mafia deals, etc.
[Both parties have had mob ties for decades. JFK and Henry S. Kissinger both dated girl-friends of high mafiosi — Judith Exner and Jill Oppenheimer [aka Jill St.John], respectively. (The latter was for years the kept moll of top mob-Hollywood labor-go-between: the invisible [except to “Doonesbury”] Sydney Korshak. See the definitive and courageous [& entertaining] book, on the mob's Jewish über-mafia, by Gus Russo: Supermob NYC 2006 Chaps.14-17 [& p.467].)]
Of course, ethical folk realize that such tactics simply ensure that evil wins, no matter how things come out. But, generally, the weak will deceive (John Henry Newman got famous [and ultimately Cardinaled] by arguing aggressively [against Chas. Kingsley] and adroitly in defense of deceptive dodging: Apologia Pro Vita Sua 1950 ed., e.g., p.341) or otherwise fight dirty — because they have no chance to win otherwise, and enraged pride won't let them lose — even if such a winning-process requires the loss of the very goodness which underdog-defending is supposed to represent.

It is a given among pols that one doesn't admit a mistake. It's been found by long experience that being thus honest with voters is a loser-move. This is one of numerous symptons that the public is so retarded that it seeks the dishonesty it gets. It's one of many arguments against voting: casting a drop in a bucket of retards is not a productive pastime.

The Celebrity-Industry's Money-Cycle :
It's a well-known near-rigorous rule in the media industry that it requires “connections” (a piece of the action) to appear regularly on broadcast television today. Celebrities take this for granted: if their cycle of books or films cannot raise enough cash to support such “connections” (not to say: bribes), their careers die. (DIO 10 [2000] endnote 21 [p.104].)

What has not been publicly realized is the serious side of the media-corruption thus revealed, namely: virtually no political commentator gets on the air regularly if at all unless he's professionally whoring to promote one (or both) of the two lucre-oozing (thus media-hogging) national parties. This reduces public discourse to the abysmal level of courtrooms: just a contest between truth-juggling expert-deceivers. Those who rise above the ever-present pressure to sell out must therefore resist the temptation of not just steady-cash support but of toob-glamour. How many will care about truth that much? Which is why, despite the internet's own sluts (i.e., the ones frequently cited on TV 'snews) and other chaff, the internet's websites have provided a few intellectually-superior sources for independent analysis of events.
[From DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §H1 [p.80]:
During a live call-in radio interview on astrology in San Diego c.1980, I was told with mock solemnity by playful emcee Gabriel Angel (after I'd bluntly slammed a few astrological BSitudes): “That's likely to offend some of our listeners.” In the spirit Gabe had established, I replied in my most contrite tones: “Well, I certainly do apologize, to anyone out there whom I have not yet offended. Please be patient, and I'm sure to get around to you.” This off-the-cuff exchange, however jocular, reflects some serious realities:
[a] Sadly, most persons will not read further in a document, once finding even one item that challenges a tenet sacred to them. (Simply bald [and foolish] bigotry, masked as indignation — and an over-efficient tactic for those who never wish to change their minds. DR has been enlightened countless times by sources with whom he disagrees 90% of the time.)
[b] A filter one should know about, to understand the narrowness of the range of opinion one hears from Respectable forums: the punditz one sees regularly on the air survive by instinct; a regular must possess and hone a keen sense of what he can say on-the-air, knowing that in certain areas he must — in order to avoid offending any part of the party-line of whatever coalition-of-factions keeps getting him on-the-air at all — trim his views and steer clear of revelatory but discomfitting facts, embarrassing skeletons, and shockingly educational analogies. In such a world, DR will never fit-in. No regrets.
(In 2007 August, DR heard of the case of a prominent Baltimorean journalist who some years back had been covering the Brit Royals for the toob, when he let slip a truth, namely, that they're rather “middle-class”. [Queenie's idea of classical music is: mob crooners.] Said reporter was immediately disappeared.)]

We have earlier (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §F2 [p.79]) discussed the implicit societal vindictiveness of those who needlessly inject the issue of sanity into murder trials, thereby accomplishing nought besides putting shrinks on the state dole. This has by now become such a durable intrusion that the custom is not even questioned anymore. An extra oddity: Genesis treats the knowledge of good&evil as forbidden fruit, yet the court elevates the very same knowledge to a sign and test of sanity. There is little consistency here, except that both sources punish it fatally.

If stockbrokers, psychics, and-or astrologers can predict the future as well as they effectively pretend, then: why are do even the eldest among them need to keep drawing hefty fees from their clients? — since they ought already to be vastly wealthy using their own craft to play the market or the nags?
(See Dennis Rawlins: Skeptical Inquirer 2.1 [1977] p.71 & n.4.)
A broker who could make money grow merely 10%-per-year (and most imply-boast that they have been doing much better for clients) would in 40 years have forty-five times his original investment. How many get rich this way? — vs. how many get rich by drawing fiscal nourishment from commissions, generated by the greedy naïvete of clients who won't set aside even a few seconds (from fulltime-blindered-addiction to get-rich-easy schemes), for consideration of such obvious points?
Equally obvious: regarding those firms who act as equity-touts (selling stock advice): if the advice is solid, then why aren't the firms' mutual funds skyrocketing?
Again obvious: if the GOP is confident enough of the stock market that it prefers to encourage families' Social Security entitlements to be plunged into Wall Street, i.e., an every-individual-for-himself stock-gambling scheme, then: the gov't (which knows much more about business opportunities than the average citizen) ought to be able to run a stock-savvy super-gambler mutual-fund — for US citizens' shared old-age benefit. To mimick the GOP's just-thinking-of-the-average-joe sweet-salestalk: no one should be forced into this or any other system, but such a gov't-run super-fund option ought to be “available” & IF the gov't seriously believes in its privatization proposal. How about calling the fund something novel like, say, “Social Security”?

When you see a person starving in the street, you hopefully will try to help him — but you probably have the providence to resist inviting him into your home. Immigration-lobbies seem to lack that wisdom — I say “seem” because, though they're all for inviting poor aliens into the home country — such lobbies' political leaders make sure that it's your neighborhood not theirs where the space-sharing (and poverty-caused crime) is going to occur.
Princess Di was spoken of as a champion of the Homeless. But she didn't share her palace or her boyfriend's yacht with the poor. (Any more than do the rest of the Royals. Princess Di was the only known saint who wouldn't think of falling in love with anyone worth less than 10 million dollars. Unless we count the holy US press' passion for Presidential candidates.) Nor do the prominently poor-championing Kennedys invite the poor en-masse to come out to Hyannisport to live. Nor does the pope offer to let all the unwanted-children overpopulation (which his birth-control-opposition unleashes upon a finite planet) come in and turn VatCity into BratCity. (Has VatCity ever published the annual cost of the papal silks?)
Besides eternal hypocrisy &inefficacy (in their purported crusade to get the poor out of poverty), these otherwise disparate institutions all have one thing in common: their leaders are (in vain defiance of Matthew 6.25f) exceedingly well dressed.
International Herald Tribune 2007/2/8 p.7 [Letters]:

Regarding the article “Shades of Inequality on Rio's Beaches” (Feb.6) … about the elitism and segregation of the beaches of Rio de Janeiro …. [I have a] long family affiliation with the exceptional American outpost of the famous and liberal elite: Martha's Vineyard, which is part of Massachusetts.
This island is the chosen vacation spot of Bill and Hillary Clinton, John Kerry, Ted Kennedy, Walter Cronkite, and many other noted left-leaning political and business elites.
The first thing that many residents of the island will remind any and all interlopers is that the beaches on Martha's Vineyard are private — very, very private. Other than a small public area, all beaches are off limits except to the chosen few who can afford their multi-million-dollar vacation homes situated on the water.
The Rio beaches seem to be pretty democratic and open by comparison.

The Bushes as Frankenstein-Royalty Like Caesar, the CIA was richly and cynically funded to go abroad to subvert, control, and loot other countries. It proceeded to do so, but it also ended up (by natural and predictable poetic justice) doing likewise to its creator: using its wealth to corrupt and then eat the very home-nation that had thought it so clever to roll out such loose-cannon-mammon.
So it was inevitable that a CIA-chief's family would end up in the White House. But who would have predicted that a nation's monarchs would rule out of order? George the 3rd [to 1781], George the 1st [1989-1993], George the 2nd [2001-2009]. (See DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §A10.)

The Divine Flounder:
That gov'ts have long used religion to breed obedient soldiers is self-evident from the Caesarian practice of ruler-deification: The Divine Julius, The Divine Augustus, etc. Later, the jokers running church and state decided to build three pranks out of two by actually pretending they'd separated! We are fortunate that GWBush, current king of the world's rulership-fraternity, aims to put an end to that sham. But why stop there? Why not take our cue from Animal House's merciful wisdom regarding inept heirheads, and forthrightly christen the new millennium's fecklessly-floundering fraternity-legacy 1st president as: The Divine Flounder.
[Thus also has the concept of constitutional monarchy (with the power to smear-slime personal Enemies like V.Wilson) been brought to our blesséd shores at last — with the true power now residing in the able hands of SlimeMinister Cheney.]

A source is either reliable or it isn't.
One of my favorite fantasy-journals (New Oxford Review 71.7:24 [2004]) has recently emphasized a traditional-Roman-church certainty that heaven's gate is narrow (few will be Saved) — but then says no one knows how narrow.
Question: if god can make it so darned ABSOLUTELY crystal-clear that it is indeed narrow (so unambiguously clear, that NOR will fight for decades to promote its view of the matter), then why can't god be just as clear about how narrow?
(Just another instance of alleged non-agnostics' reflex willingness to flee to agnosticism at the slightest whiff of any of their central beliefs' patent inconsistencies. See, e.g., DIO 4.3 [1994] ‡13 n.23 [p.117]; ‡15 n.42 [p.136]; DIO 9.3 [1999] ‡6 §E8 [p.125].)

The Rawlins “Liftist-Paradox”:
Leftism may be doomed to perpetual sisyphan frustration by an obvious paradox: the sincere left's thoroughly admirable goal, of genuine & effective uplift for the uneducated masses, is a process which is, sadly, too complex & tedious for uneducated people to comprehend. (An undeniable reality, according to the need-plea of every leftist program for lifting the teeming uneducated up from ignorance.) Thus, when intelligent leftist-liftist paths to a more enlightened and durably prosperous future life are put before those masses, their present unenlightenment sadly pre-guarantees that they invariably opt instead for quick-fix pitches of much-smarter demagogic pols (see DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡8 n.68 [p.114], the socialist-spoof context of Marlowe-Shakespeare on lawyers) — not to mention begging for mind-replacement parental-wardship by institutions of long experience in numerically thriving by promotion of (or cooperation in) maintaining the very ever-interknit follies that systematically kill chances of enduring uplift: primarily superstition, sexism, & over-population.
(DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 n.7 [p.13]; DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 n.8 [p.92]; DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §G [p.80] & §R4 [pp.88-89].)

The Roundest Possible Number:
Barring horrible (and, of course, inevitable) intervening consequences, natural world population growth will just roll along at around 1%/annum. A round number I've never seen computed in print: at this well-established growth rate, how long will it take before the entire population of the world is crowded shoulder-to-shoulder? (We'll know when the day approaches, because gov't-TV 'snews will be advertising the benefits of sleeping erect and of the wondrous new physical closeness of the brotherhood of man.) The land area of the Earth is around 100000000000000 square meters, and a standing human occupies roughly 1/10 of a square meter. So 1000000000000000 persons will literally cover the Earth's land with a solid 2 meter-thick layer of human protoplasm. The current world population is about 1/2 of 10000000000 persons; thus, growth by a factor of around 200000 will do the trick. Multiplying 100 times the ln of 200000 (c.12.21) and taking the anti-ln: roughly 1200 years hence — or, about 3200 AD.
[For those who can't handle logs: multiply 1.01 times itself 1227 times to see that the product is about 200000.]
That is, in less time than merely the span of history that has passed since Mohammed or Charlemagne, our planet is scheduled to turn into a round human-sardine-can. (DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 §F [p.14].)
[For the Indonesian-archipelago region, the time of sardine-closeness looms ever nearer. E.g., in ultra-crammed East Teem-more, two traditional bunnyrabbit religions have already gotten used to taking time-out from coital over-coming, in order to let the Good bunnies try exterminating the Bad bunnies — all for a higher Purpose….
Meanwhile, we continue to read prominent New York Times editorials (e.g., International Herald Tribune 2004/10/16-17 p.6) on why the Islamic world is culturally stagnant — which never mention population control…. Note the IHT 2008/3/8-9 p.3 story headlined: “Migration to surge, EU leaders are told — Warning on fallout of climate change”, which foretells of “rising sea levels, a reduction in arable land, droughts, flooding, water shortages and diminishing food and fish stocks. Such pressures could also lead to more disputes over territory and water supplies, exacerbating social and religious tensions and fueling the radicalization of the poor. Competition for energy resources is like to increase …. competition for food, water, and land could lead to armed conflict.” A detailed article, but it somehow never found room to mention population control….]

“The Drowning of America”
How soon will southern fans be cheering for Olé Miss and Allahbama? :
Time's beautiful 2004/8/23 cover was a photo of a Central American “jaguar … just one of the [world's] species at risk.” But who will state the obvious? — the prime enemy of the jaguar's (or the Brazilian rain-forest's) survival is national TV 'snews' own video-darling: Mr. Anti-Population-Control and Mr.Anti-Woman's-Key-Right HIMself, the pope.
(Who invariably gets 100% of network TV 'snews' Easter airtime, with near-0% given to all Protestant clerics combined [not to mention reactive comment from feminist & pro-birth-control Catholics] — this in a majority-Protestant nation that's merely 10% unlapsed Roman-church. Hmmm. Might it be that the ever-cheaper-labor-exploiting US rulership [largely Sunday-Protestant] likes promoting what pope's promoting? Can one imagine any other institution than Holy Church getting such a permanent media pass on its non-democratic elections [just like ACLU] and its shameless sexism?)
It's good to memorialize achievements. So, in honor of religion's undeniably massive heritage to Latin America (which is continually El-Pasoing-it-on to the US through a flood of semi-educated cheap-labor peons barely distinguishable from slaves — even while the tsunami's Browning-of-America-promoters sanctimoniously ban the Confederate flag): should the megaslum called Mexico City be renamed PopeCity? Or — should the name be saved for just a few more years, so it can be bestowed instead upon Los Angeles? Or — if patience allows yet a few more years — why not re-name Washington DC?

A 2004/1/9 New York Times editorial claims that the US economy depends upon dirty jobs being cheaply done here by “desperate” alien workers. (The NYT's 2004/8/30 editorial passed off as a mere “ideologue” congressman [Tom Tancredo (R, CO)], who favors at least a temporary moratorium on further immigration, until filtration of terrorists can be made secure.) Comments: [1] The US already has a severe street-crime problem. (And being able simply to walk in one's neighborhood is an essential freedom — which gov't policies should protect, not degrade.) Question: might there maybe, possibly, be some tiny little correlation between [a] being severely underpaid & [b] resorting to violent crime? [2] The New York Times editorial's reasoning has a remarkable (though media-unspoken) cruel and deliberately elitist implication: the West isn't serious about trying to lift the 3rd-world's desperate state up to the standard-of-living that's taken-for-granted in the 1st-world. (Since poverty-elimination would dry up the cheap labor. Not even to go on to discuss world supplies of oil, metals, and water!) The world rulership desires and lives handsomely off the remarkably permanent-stable wealth-gap socially-stratified John-of-Salisbury world it profitably & successfully pretends to be fighting against. This because it believes (perhaps rightly, since a utopian-rationalist nation would have trouble raising an effective army) that only class-stratified nations can be clever-cynical-brutal-manipulating enough to survive in a real world of vying powers.
So, the rulership knows perfectly well how sincere are its world-wide pseudo-crusades to spread democracy, capitalism, freedom, etc — which instead justsohappen to end up primarily extracting raw materials from nations that justsohappen to keep wallowing in mass-poverty.
How can the US pretend to concern about and desire for curing world poverty, when it's simultaneously claiming it must live off it?
[Answer: the lie is a key component in the conning of the exploitee.]
[Dave Barry similarly reminds those who took joy at the recent massive tobacco settlements, to ask: in the long-run, just how serious can the gov't be about ending tobacco-use, when the gov't now gets so much desperately needed money from taxing tobacco sales?]
Note, incidentally, the patent absurdity of the globalists MUST-have-immigrant-labor premis itself: if valid, then the whole world's economy is about to collapse, for lack of cheap alien labor from Mars.
[What you won't ever read in the US' “free press”: the average US worker watches HIS life, neighborhood and-or job security get degraded — by, e.g., importation of workers from Latin America (who were peons for eons, yet now are businessmen-p.r.-“expected” to melt right in) — even while those businessmen's homes & neighborhoods just get posher from the profits generated by exploitation (often brutalization) of the very Latinos whom native workers have to live with.
And why don't we EVER read such blunt realities in the press? Because the press is the rulership-co-owned enemy.]

Note the analogy of the foregoing hypocrisy to that of Jesus, who was more interested in personal luxury for the rest of his own brief Earthly life (which he was concerned to note was not eternal), than in curing poverty (which he said was eternally incurable) among the very same desperate folk he (like gov'ts) claimed to be trying to help. (See John 11.2 & 12.3-9 for who chided Jesus for his selfish luxuries; variants: Matt 26:7-16 & Mark 14.3-11. See further at DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §C2 [p.46].) Note that, “regardless” of the efforts of the US & Jesus, the world's number of hopeless semi-slave poor people continues to increase.
This may continue until robots can replace cheap human labor. And US technology is more likely than Jesus to bring that about.

The Stuck Market:
In under 2 decades (early 80s to late 90s), the US stock market Bubbled and the Dow Jones Industrial Average multiplied by a factor of about ten. Generously rounding the span to 20y: we note that the 20th root of 10 is 12%, while the average growth of a fully robust US economy is maybe 5% — at which rate, growth by a factor of 10 would require nearly 50y (more exactly 47y). So: the end-of-20th-century Bush-Clinton Bubble sent the US stock market up 50y of growth in merely 20y. Hmmm. If things average-out in the long run (and the claimed rise of stocks in-the-long-run is the main sales-pitch of stock-broker-touts), what sorta DJIA-growth can be expected for the 30y following the Bubble?
Normally, the Dow would crash after a Bubble; so the Clinton-Bush Fed artificially manipulated interest-rates, and ameliorated disaster in the early 3rd millennium. Theories:
[a] If the US economy recovers, the Fed will keep raising interest rates to steer the DJIA sideways, thus preventing another unseemly greed-orgy. This slow-deflation process (to let the air out of the 20th century Bubble) will last for ordmag a decade.
[b] Economic recovery does not assure resumption of robust rises in the stock market, since the total value of US equities is primarily a function of spare investor-cash, and is made fragile by investors' internal greed-vs-fear psychological battles.
[c] The true cause of the 20th century Bubble was a Dumbo-era inversion of the old Dembo-run economy (back when unionized laborers were overpaid and professionals underpaid), so that relatively more disposable cash began finding its way into the possession of brighter, more future-oriented citizens than previously. As their enrichment became the market's, and stock-prices burst out of their decade-long slumber, a chain-letterish frenzy (buy-because-others-are-buying), increasingly abetted by corrupt companies, hustler-“analysts”, accountants, & media (e.g., the Greed Channel [CNBC or CashNBC]), took the market to ridiculous extremes.
[d] Given current price-levels, investors expecting an incipient repeat of the 90s (when 20%/annum stock-growth was common) are dreaming.
[The infectious fantasy that new technology will provide quick riches should be ameliorated by several considerations:
[1] While trying to ferret-out & acquire the next Microsoft (which will go up 100 times what it cost you), you will buy 99 turkeys. It averages out pretty unimpressively.
[2] Whatever makes you think a stock has a great future is already known to thousands of others who have already bought it on that basis and made it dear: so the glow is already built-into the price. (I.e., you are not the only reader of the Wall Street Journey.) So, to produce a profit for a non-insider average-joe buyer, a stock must do even better than its hype; if the company does wonderfully but somewhat less dramatically so (than projected when the stock was bought), the investor will actually lose money.
[3] If the companies who advertise investment advice knew a tenth as much as they deep-voice-confidently pretend, then they and their mutual funds would be MUCH richer than they are — and they would not even need to charge for their advice.

If the Fed knew what it was doing, the prime rate would stay relatively stable. Instead, we see huge swings — which can only encourage a suspicion that some highly placed individuals are making killings in bond futures and such.

If our Minimum Leader thinks it's a virtue to stay-the-course, then why do his policies force so many citizens to switch careers? The trend causes decent average workers more than fiscal terror: staying at a trade throughout one's life is much more likely to engender pride, purpose, & loyalty — as against empty earn&spend greed&consumerism.

Horserace? Whoresrace? Boresrace?
US election = multi-millionaire-owned media-monopoly (which decries money-influence in elections, even while its own ad-fees ensure that only multi-millionaires need apply) massages news to keep the two big-party candidates ever-neck&neck, thus reliably ensuring a seemingly-cliffhanger “horse-race” — and then uses this showbiz to get average working folks to ignore an honest and non-palatial candidate such as Nader (the sole 2000-2004 prez candidate the middle class has anything in common with) and instead get into a rage of doomsday-hysteria (e.g., DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §H20 [p.52]) about their Sacred-Duty to “choose” between two establishment-selected & politics-dulled multi-millionaire-owned multi-millionaires (DIO 2.3 [1992] ‡6 §C2 [p.91] & §G; [p.96] DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §S3; [p.90]), the standard Dumbo-vs-Dembo dramatics. When the only way to get even half the electorate to vote is by turning an election into a soaper (like Dallas or Dynasty or the House of Windsor), in which the less-fortunate are channeled-stampeded into passionate caring about the cliffhanger squabbles and fortunes of the already over-fortunate, well, hmmmm … have we perhaps strayed a mite from the idea of enlightened democracy as designed by Adams, Jefferson, and Madison?
[Granted, they too were rich (mostly slaveholders). But voters and discourse were more civilized before the 30-second spot-ad.]

Grazing along in my latest Harvard class report, I encounter numerous prayers for Bush's swift exit, while in Baltimore's nearest white ghetto, there's a bumpersticker-crop for Support-Our-Troops.
So the elder upper rich understand a mistaken & bungled preemptive war (an error whose awful future implications were best summed up in Maureen Dowd's crack about the Boys-Who-Cried-Wolfowitz), though THEY are not dying in Iraq — while many of those whose families are doing the dying will vote for their own kids' politician-cokillers.
Is patriotism becoming defined as: hating-the-gooks outranks loving&preserving one's own children?

By the way, why does the US press not regularly ask whether there's perhaps a connexion between certain oil-related parties' pre-2001/9/11 hopes to occupy oil-rich Iraq, and the fact that oil-dominated Texas brought forth (in 2000) the first US presidential ticket in history in which both candidates — Cheney (& Bush) — were effectively from the same state.
[Question: Though the news, that Saudi Arabia oil-production was peaking, came to most of us only in 2005, it seems likely that the Bush crowd knew about this five years earlier. So, its pre-9/11 planning-ahead to grab the 2nd-biggest oil-puddle on Earth (Iraq) seems all the more understandable.]

The Goldfinger Speculation:
[Posted here 2004.]
Before the US occupied Iraq, it was widely believed that the invasion would lower oil prices. So, let's understand the plan, here:
[a] Remove Saddam, whose black-market oil was gutting OPEC's desire to raise prices.
[b] Turn oil prices over to the OPEC-US-Brit oil cartel.
Did anyone other than President Cheney have to act “surprised” when oil prices instead went up? (Which, purely coincidentally, skyrocketed the value of his friends' oil.) A factor in 2004's oil-price-rise was chaotic Iraq's inability to ship much oil. Hmmm. Does anyone (but Cheney) recall the plot-idea in Goldfinger? [At last: Wayne Crawford (MS-NBC 2007/1/10) publicly aired some comments along this line. It appears that the demented intractability of Bush's speech of that evening may have finally pushed this and other private ruminations out of insiders' cranial closets.]

What are the differences between Saddam's torture of prisoners and US torture of prisoners?
Take your choice:
[a] Saddam was too lazy to squeeze reptilian tears.
[b] Saddam's torture was Evil.
[c] Saddam's torture worked.
[Comments: 1. The US evidently forgot why its CIA installed Saddam in the 1st place — to effectively suppress religious rebellion, which (as the US is now re-learning) inevitably leads to torturing the Enemy. 2. As the truth emerged regarding the US soldiers & “contractors” who were Freeing the nation of Iraq by torturing its citizens, lots of fine-line lawyering & hand-wringing about ethics went on; but what was missing from media discussion was: even though client sadists were extracting information of value from torturees, this allegedly precious info hasn't discernably helped turned the tide and win the war occupation.]

Speculations:

1. It seems to lots of us that time passes more rapidly with age. If real, is this effect related to slowing of reaction-time? If we try the approximation that time's flow-rate is roughly proportional to accumulated age, integration suggests a ln-function for accumulated life-time, which fades in memory into a seemingly-eternal past. But none of this relates to death, which is a different type of fade-out-function.

2. After a half-century of a vast spectrum of failed schemes to get blacks onto an equal footing with the rest of the US, is it time to rename the “civil rights” fight as: the “Alchemy Process” — akin to other equally well-known (and equally ever-out-of-reach) chimeras, such as the Middle East “Peace Process” or the Afghanistan “Election Process”?

3. US Civil-Rights-History As Wheelspinning Devolution:
   Brown-vs-Education-Board→Black-vs-Utterly-Bored.

4. DR is familiar with several cases of sibling-pairs where one is not so gifted as the other. The dimmer half is jealous of the other and cheats to try obscuring the difference. By analogy to the US' race-mess, one might call this: “leveling the playing field”.

5. Has it been previously suggested that Joe McCarthy's odd speaking style was simply an alcoholic's feeble attempt at mimicking inspirational FDR speeches?

6. Juggling Juggernaut
   [2005]: Ya just GOTTA admire the Greedy Oinker Party's plutocrat-funded Shock&Awe propaganda-blitzes' theological balancing-acts:
   [a] The GOP hates welfare (even the US' cruelly stingy brand) for the overabundant kids of the ill-educated slum-bound poor — yet the GOP simultaneously fights abortion, the most effective method for giving those who're too incompetent to use birth-control, a realistic hope of not reproducing beyond their means.
   [b] The GOP has tried for years to turn the young against the old by luring the young into “personal” pensions, thus draining-away Social Security money (all this, to shore-up the Clinton-Bubble-Bloated stock market where the GOP's needy funders keep their paltry holdings), the very incoming funds which aging people (especially those in their early 50s) have participated in all their working lives and counted upon the proceeds from, to sustain them in their declining years — and the “pro-life” GOP is simultaneously demanding (presumably to help their massively-contributing medical and pharmaceutical industry funders) that those dying elders who are in such terminal pain that they piteously beg for euthanasia, CANNOT have it. (A large fraction of doctors' income derives from patients' last few months of life. Are you so cruel as to want docs to suffer yacht-deprivation?)
   Summing up our two GOP-econ-theo-logic catechism-exercises:
   Anti-Bastard Bastards:
   The GOP is claiming that it stands against welfare, even while the GOP tries to ban abortion, the simplest means of lowering rates of improvident parents' hopeless-from-the-outset children. (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §G2 & n.12 [pp.80&81].)
   FatPharming:
   By fighting euthanasia, the GOP is willing to make massively-expensive lingering old-folks-home degradation-torture the final act of our lives, which just-happens to enrich fat med&pharm companies (and thereby earn the huge fiscal support pols reap from those same companies) — even while inundating young workers with terror-propaganda claiming that funding old-folks is becoming too expensive a luxury for the US.

7. Cemental Invincibility's Heights :
   In an open intellectual environment, it is all too easy to discern the obvious problems with the Bible's infantile-credibility-level Jesus-myth. So one can see why the Roman church got panicked (resorting even to backing sadistic public-torture-roasting of heretics) when that meddling Gutenberg-guy's 1453 contraption triggered the nightmare (seemingly an impossibility back in good old comfy Dark Ages One) that anyone might possess & read the Bible. But, then, to the Church's delighted shock, Christianity survived anyway.
   Further on the subject of mass dope-peddlers, we turn to the tobacco-cartel, which for decades fought & bribed to block public health-warnings — before ecstatically waking up to the seemingly incredible fact that you can TELL the public (as excellent Philip Morris TV-ads now do regularly) that tobacco will kill you in agony, yet 1/4 of the US public (and European rates are even higher) just can't wait to light up!
   Similarly, Prez B.J.Clinton was so terrified that the public would learn he'd harpooned a sperm whale in the Oral Office, that he used bribery and threats to pretend that his Monica relationship was being over-blown exaggerated — but then found (after all came out) that the public's reaction was largely to see him as just more Elvisianly-lovable than ever.
   (DIO 8 [1998] ‡5 §§H19[c], H29, & H3.)
   When the Sick-Cop goon-contingent of the scientific community (CSICOP or “The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal”) disgraced its own its middle name (backfire-screwing-up its biggest “Scientific Investigation”: of M.Gauquelin's neo-astrology [1975-to-forever]), CSICOP resorted to statistical trickery to cover its bungling, and when whistleblower DR would not go along with the sham, CSICOP threatened, suppressed, ejected, and smeared him. [Though virtually all observers have long since realized the truth, CSICOP is still smear-diverting from its astrology-disaster: see, e.g., CSICOP Exec. Councillor P.Klass' un-CSICOP-retracted web-posting.] Yet when the CSICOP loyal regular membership finally learned of CSICOP's sins, it was utterly undisturbed. (Suggesting that some ‘skeptics’ alibi evidence away remarkably like the spiritualist nuts they oppose.)
   When our Oil-Warlord Minimum Leader's fans [i] hear he's helping protect needy billionaires' incomes even while malnourishment [low-protein poverty] festers in his nation; [ii] watch him, live, bungling language & the plainest facts, losing 3 debates out of 3; [false [iii] eliminated]; and [iv] while obsessively drilling for oil, casually left Iraq ammo dumps unprotected, allowing locals to maim & kill hundreds of his own beloved non-AWOL soldiers — the middle-US' reaction to it all was: so-what, he prays. (And to the Right god.)

8. The most rigid of all current Western prejudices is that against: “prejudice”
   — much of which is actually postjudice.
   There is no theory so fervent-firmly — even if bare-closet evidence-lessly (see next paragraph) — rejected by “educated” US youngsters (who are being taught race-equality more dunningly [by school and press] than they are taught of god or country or apple-pie) than the ghastly possibility of the slightest genetic factor in groups' success-vs-failure fates.
   

9. Most evidences have always suggested (even though they may reasonably be held not to absolutely prove) that there are inherent genetic differences between groups' mean intelligences. (The counterings in the other direction [when not just revealingly argument-avoidance censorship] are never empirical research showing equality but are instead just attacks on others' research: mere weaseling-out alibis, intended to ameliorate the acceptability of such persistent evidence — even as group-success gaps go on&on, decade after decade.)
   [See, e.g., International Herald Tribune (Erik Ekholm New York Times) 2006/3/21 p.2 article, headlined: “Life keeps getting worse for black men in US”.]
   What is strange and crushingly revealing here is that anti-racists insist on reacting to what they (even in their most optimistic moments) perceive as an ambiguous evidential situation with utterly unambiguous rejection of the tiniest possibility that their racial-IQ equality-dream could be mistaken; this, expressed by total rejection of any gov't policy which is not in perfect accord with said dream, as well as by bigoted attempts to forcibly censor “bigotry”.
   NB: regarding the mean-racial-IQ-equality debate, DR has all the evidence on his doubting side. So why does DR remain (skeptical but) receptively agnostic (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 n.42 [p.90]) to new evidence, while the mean-equality-believers just can-not permit themselves to be? — as if doubting the group-equality-verity would be immoral.
   Other religions behave similarly: see the great historian of morals, W.E.H.Lecky (History of … Rationalism in Europe 1873 2:26-28, emph added), quoted at DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡1 n.17 [p.8]: in the 4th & 5th centuries AD,

   the pagans were deprived of offices in the State, … the entire worship condemned … [though their leaders] had exhibited a spirit of tolerance …. [this in decent contrast to the orthodox's] doctrine of exclusive salvation, and the conceptions of the guilt of error and of ecclesiastical authority.

10. Note, however, the little-considered though utterly self-evident fact that claiming precise equality of various races' mean intelligences proposes such an extraordinary coincidence (to an informed Darwinian) that — in any other academic area but race — it would immediately be understood that: the burden of proof must be on the claimant not the skeptic.

11. William Shockley co-invented the transistor. James Watson co-discovered DNA. Winston Churchill risked his life to save the world from Nazism. Of these great men's brilliance, principledness, creativity, and refusal to hate those they saw as of limited potential: what does the coming generation of college graduates think? Nothing at all: since these men were RACISTS.
    Perhaps today's heretics on the subject, when they're called Racist, should consider that they're in some quality company, and should check to see how well they're emulating the above-cited qualities, most especially the last.

12. Since no-one doubts that individuals vary in genetic intelligence, what (other than governments' propaganda-soothing of their cheap-labor pools) explains why it is considered indubitable that groups of these same people cannot have different mean genetic intelligence? Two obvious points:
    [1] The very existence of unequal individuals proves there is no natural or godly justice in gifts of genetic intelligence. [2] If groups are made up of unequal elements, they obviously may well have unequal averages of qualities.
    

13. Priorities:
    Libs humanely prefer erring on the side of possible race-equality, to lower the possibility that deserving youngsters will be left behind by unfair opportunities.
    Others (with an equal humanity, which the US press cannot bring itself to notice) prefer erring on the side of possible race-inequality (DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §R10 [pp.89-90]) because of concern that the West's long human-experiment in forced racial merging (still seethingly unsuccessful, with as-yet no tunnel-end-light in sight) is taking a blind, arrogant, playing-with-fire gamble — one with the catastrophic potential for a historical disaster of such moment that it compares with nuclear war, namely, destruction of the most valuable of human-societal achievements: the democratic, enlightened, optimistic, egalitarian semi-socialism of the New Deal and post-WW2 Europe.

14. If mean racial intelligences were equal, would not one expect the US civil rights movement to have long since been redeemed and become superfluous? — or at least become more of a watch-dog (to curb those who break now-long-established equal-opportunity laws) than a tragedy of continuing frustration.

15. NonProgressive Progress-Definition:
    When civil-rights “progress” is Mediumly boasted of, it is invariably measured in terms of ethnic-mingling stats achieved (“progress” = x more blacks, say, in some area or other) — but rigorously-never-EVER in terms of whether the larger society has thereby improved in civility, arts (e.g., musical tastes & sophistication), non-bastardy, generosity, discourse, intelligence, vile trash-talk, integrity, crime, rape, murder-rates, drug-ubiquity (children having to fend off drug-pushers in school-halls!), health, mob-influence, political demagoguery, security (jobs & personal), wages, hope, or happiness.
    And, ironically, the rich-poor gap, which has gotten Progressively worse ever since Brown-vs-Bored. [One recalls Johnny Carson's immortal eulogy to Lincoln: “without whom, we would not have the dunk-stuff.”]
    Bottom-line to all these considerations: take a reality check into how spectacularly the rich-vs-poor wealth-gap has grown since social Progress began being measured just by growth of numbers of ill-educated persons voting. Ever wondered if the divergence of these measures might not be accidental?
    (Is it really surprising that post-WW2 growth in the percentage of demagogically manipulable people has played into greedy rulers' hands?)
    Further: citizens have enough trouble getting along with each other even in ideal times. It hardly helps social tranquility & happiness to conspiratorially INJECT needless sources of friction into middle-class (never rulership) areas, while the rulership covers-for the problems thus generated and pitches pious propaganda about tolerance to people whom the very same pitchers have forced to compete desperately with each other for a limited number of jobs — a number which (by an unfunny coincidence) seems deliberately of a magical ability to remain less (varying only in how-much less) than the number of workers applying.
    But remember: the rulership's enticement of waves of immigrants is purely from its well-press-advertised love of needy humanity, not greed. Just like Bush's invasion & torture are for Iraq democracy — not the black-gold of oil.

16. Striking a Gusher of Brown-Gold — Resurrecting the Slave-Trade
    Indiscriminate-Multiculturalism Über-alles
    The End of Traditional US Melticulturalism:
    Like all fortunate nations, Europe & the US have known the gift of invaluable cultural gains from legal immigration. These countries' grad schools and software-companies would obviously be substantially the less for lack of the inputs of Indian, Chinese, Korean, & Japanese students. (Roughly half of Johns Hopkins University's science grad enrollment is Asian. The smarter half.) The US & UK have long sought and welcomed great scientists (Albert Einstein), artists (Sergei Rachmaninov), mathematicians (Srinivasa Ramanujan) — and this is not to overlook the contributions of just ordinary hard-working folk the nation was lucky enough to gain as citizens. (Many, high&low, have carried on and exemplified a strong work-ethic [upon which US world-dominance has been built over many determined decades] better than the US' own citizens have.) But the establishment-press-medium's rich owners continue to profit from exploitation of a Texas-size gusher of cheap labor: As Samuel T. Francis has perceived, it is the very tsupernamic quantity of this gusher that enables Latino immigrants to coagulate and metastasize, which ends up turning neighborhoods into isolated Spanish-speaking enclaves — a process that could subsume a few pretty big neighborhoods. (Like Texas, California, etc.) Thus, melticulturalism fails linguistically, separating ethnic groups into job-competing enemies.. The press' hitherto-uncritical glorification of low-end “multiculturism” (which is a warped, cruel, classist version of the US dream) has for decades been shamefully one-sided — not recognizing that business (the Ultimate Coyote) is simply skimming the comin'-in gusher as easily and conscience-lessly as bears catching leaping salmon: hey, nobody forced those fish to jump.

17. Stay-the-PeonMire:
    To return to the previous paragraph's theme: let's observe not just the invaluable pluses of immigration but also the press-unstated costs of a society's brutal exploitation of the bottom of the unmelting-pot spectrum:
    higher crime, more drugs, less free speech, growing mob-influence, more demagoguery-vulnerable electorate, superstition, larger rich-poor disparity, standard bizarro-ignorant-jealous and historically murderous anti-Jewish paranoia (arising largely from jealousy and-or greed towards a numerically-targetable group's provident wealth), ratcage-frayed nerves (inevitably rising as world population gushes on), ever-less-rational political discourse, email-snoopery, NSA tapping ordinary citizens' telephones, crummier & shriekier & more inescapable “music” (a plague heavily due to business's unit-cost obsession), “education” that's as dumbed-down as the pseudo-music — and even a pernicious inability to so much as discuss population-control anymore, since such might offend the offending groups.
    [A sad side-effect: when the average citizen finally gets outraged at the resultant crumbling social civility and cultural level, he will likely get mad at the victims, not the manipulators.]
    These are the negatives of the extended Great-Society social experiment. But, as in the previous paragraph, one asks: what are the societal gains of low-end “multiculturism”, aside from the media's sneaky-implicit ploy of counting and advertising Multiculturalism — any and all Multiculturalism — as such a social “Good” in itself. (AND — hasn't it been absolutely jolly for the stock market?) The destructive negatives just don't matter. NOTHING else matters — so long as greed's cold goal and fanatics' hot obsessions are satisfied. Meanwhile, the media soothe-assure all that even if there were any potential show-stopper “difficulties” (and of course there aren't), those are merely temporary, you know.
    A parallel blindered example: Bush keeps saying, as he gets deeper&deeper into his own light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel IraqMire mess (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §H2 [p.7]): yesh, yesh, of coursh itsh a shtruggle and there will alwaysh be difficultiesh, but itsh a noble crushade….
    (As so often, Pat Oliphant's take-off is on the mark:
    “Stay-the-Quagmire”: International Herald Tribune 2006/10/27 p.7.)

18. Some of the above points were briefly touched-on years ago at DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §G [p.80]:

    Why Does Ethnic Fairness Outrank Ideological Fairness?
    

    TV 'snews is obsessed with ethnic balance, but not ideological balance. E.g., there is virtually (if not exactly) no representation either in Congress or the Medium for socialists or atheists.
    [Curiously, even the toob's dramaworld does better than this. In recent years, there have been at least three actors on televised dramatic series who played explicit non-believers-in-god: Callie Thorne Homicide (NBC), Jennifer Morrison on House (Fox), & Emily Deschanel on Bones (Fox). Notably: most of the shows were on Fox (to its credit, since fundies are a major part of its GOP audience), and ALL the characters were bright career women.]

    What the US needs isn't forced ethnic-mixing. (Switzerland's peace is based on 4 separate live&let-live cultures.) It needs open, unforced ideological mixing: merging the Chas.Dickens-Eleanor-Roosevelt-style kindness of the left with the question-the-long-range-consequences caution of the right. Instead, the US is getting the naïvete of the left grafted onto the anti-pleasure puritanism and viciousness of the abortion-hating right.

    Result: leftist-style paternalistic subsidizing of an eternal poverty cycle, while the holier-than-God ([DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §6 [p.78]) wing of the right acts as that cycle's safety-net by killing off abortion, the only remaining hope for cutting the cycle.

    But, look on the bright side: at least the drugpeddlers are smiling. (Tobacco, booze, etc: DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 §C2 [p.5].)

    
    

19. Some Mass-Killers Are More Equal Than Others :
    The standard fighter airplanes for WW2 Axis nations were by Messerschmidt (Germany's Me-109) and Mitsubishi (Japan's “Zero”). After their machines' WW2 mass-killings were no longer possible, each company tried to sell US consumers automobiles they'd designed. Why did one succeed and the other not?
    [Why was only the Japanese company eventually accepted as a brother to US corporate-dom?
    The history of an epochal moment in the Himmleresque rehab of Japan survives: decades ago, Jerry Della Femina broke up a sober meeting of ad-men (who were trying to concoct ways to sell Japanese products to the post-WW2 US public) by suddenly bursting out: “I've got it! I've got it! — the perfect slogan for our Japanese clients:
    ‘From those wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor.’ ”
    The incident became legend, to such an extent that Jerry made it the title of an autobiographical book on his adventures as a huckster. Now, the success of Mitsubishi (which actually did supply all the very best aircraft that bombed Pearl Harbor) has turned the joke into reality. It's the happiest possible MadAve ending: after all, ad-men LIVE to pull off new frontiers in brain-bending.]

20. As globalist-free-trade continues to pry open ever-further the wealth-freedom gap between the rich rulership and the increasingly unfree, insecure, bargaining-powerless rest of humanity, the latter class will increasingly be tempted to turn to “terrorism” since no other option will be efficacious in asserting resistance to world enslavement. When will the patriotic US' non-rich begin to be aware that the “terrorists” may be less their enemy than their future selves?

21. When we used to speak of political movements, we referred to conservatism, socialism, feminism, WTCU, NRA, etc. Has the homintern evolved into a new, unique, feared, and deviant frontier in such movements? — unique in that the driving passion (if we speak of homo-sexuality rather than simply affectionate-homophilia) which has finally made it an extremely weighty political power in today's US — more sacred-cow-censorially powerful than women or [especially] the non-religious — though each of the latter groups is ordmag 10 times larger. (On the outrageous disproportions of women being cheated of power, see “The Inequity Inequity”.) The movement is, after all, founded upon a sexual obsession, and one which (as has been snickered) has the oddity of confusing an exit for an entrance. [Imagine what we'd think if there were a serious US political movement devoted to a mono-mania like ankle-fetishism or somesuch? Incidentally, note that, ironically, the very same media-censorial mechanisms, which for decades suppressed homosexuals' freedom, now one-sidedly protect their cult from criticism — in the same way that other PC-sacred cows are protected. Since the prior censorship was also indefensible, we might well take some jolly pleasure in seeing the poetic justice of the situation getting flipped. And DR, who naturally sympathizes with those helping the vulnerable, would have reacted somewhat so (with a few reservations, nonetheless, regarding male-squared tendencies to promiscuity & sadism), were it not for the AIDS plague, which has made male homosexuality's highest carnal goal-act so statistically dangerous — by contrast to the high AIDS-safety of lesbianism — that: while male homosexuality (incl. marriage) oughtn't to be suppressed (think of all the unique and wonderfully-contributing creators who've been male bi- or homo-sexual: Michelangelo, Tchaikovsky, Bernstein, Vidal), it also ought not to be unrelentingly pushed via one-sided-propaganda, to boost a crusade to which Hollywood etc seems remarkably dedicated.

22. Note that fundies' obsessive rage at homosexuality (branding it illogically as an Evil-in-Itself) may be suspect of being as sexually weird as the fundies think homosexuals are.
    [Likewise, the widespread, media-nurtured idea that whites and others are naturally racist is itself a racist attack on whites. And obviously false: if, e.g., whites inherently hate dark people, then why do so many try to get deep Sun-tans as a (dangerously false) sign of good health?]
    And this irrational anti-homosexual rage causes actions which are inanely typical of the self-defeating policies which fanatics will follow, out of rigid refusal to ponder their policies' real consequences. Driving homosexuals underground:
    [a] assists blackmailers (which could help control those who boost the very elements that fundies hate), and
    [b] will push homosexuals into het-marriage, thus reproduction. (So, tell me again why conservatives are fighting marriage between adult homosexuals?! See above under: weirdness.)]

23. Why do homosexuals typically have such traditional contempt for women (“fish”) — when 99% of those who attack them are men?

24. Many liberals and libertarians would regard challenging propaganda for male homosexuality as an infringement upon sacred freedoms. (But did such infringement occur in the broadcast-a-terrifying-example episode when 60 Minutes' Andy Rooney was suspended and nearly-executed [until he on-air recanted, a-là Galileo] for dissent from PC on homosexuality?) Does the term “propaganda” apply to the present media's passing-fashist lockstep free-advertisement use of the some-might-say ironic word “gay”. Is it repressive to discourage hiring of male homosexuals to teach the young? (Would male homosexuals actually do a more motivated job of teaching boys? Homosexual or het pedophiles even more so? Can one favor effecting one of these risky ideas but not the other?)
    While hopefully not wishing to interfere with adult-adult relationships, some might view the teaching issue as one that's similar to protecting the young from dangerous drugs (primarily tobacco) or sunbathing or cults: when is a youngster wise enough to resist propaganda or advances, which might retard or destroy his chance for the long later life that his parents are trying to ensure will be healthy and genuinely gay (in the traditional, pre-takeover sense of the word)?
    [Note, though, that the arguable continuing unhappiness of the average male homosexual's life has [despite a rigidly-PC era] persisted, due to such a tangled mix of [i] possible early atypical influences, [ii] intolerance by the extreme end of the intransigent-het spectrum, and [iii] male homosexuals own male-squaredness — that it is difficult to know how to lay blame or, more important, how to improve mean social happiness in this area.]
    As with race-equality disputes, the spat here is over which of the two vying considerations has priority. Both are controversies between groups who are mostly (we're not talking about the KKK or Roy Cohn) much better-intentioned than either side's opponents tend to realize. (Historically, each side has occasionally suppressed adult-adult free speech by those whose only sin is disagreement — without realizing that they are merely sowing and watering the seeds of determination to fight back.)

25. I agree with other atheists that “under God” in the US' pledge of allegiance is inappropriate. But isn't the very idea of pressuring children into group-mouthing ANY rote and state-enlistment pledge itself insulting to independent minds?
    (Naturally, the pledge only appeared on the US scene when the nation began going military world-imperialist. Hmmm. How had the US thrived without it for ordmag a century?) We note that our paternal gov't demands that kids recite a pledge to ITSELF, not to those children's actual parents. The obvious statist priorities here have ugly echoes of how the worst dictatorships (and churches) treat their wards' loyalties. One of the now-forgotten chapters in the history of the US' Pledge is that for decades after its inception, kids commonly outstretched their arms during its recital — until the advent of the Nazis suggested that this part of the ritual be discretely dropped — and thereafter hermetic-seal-memory-holed….

26. A New Kind of Lying in One's Teeth:
    Why ishn't the pressh ashking why our handshome-shmile Preshident keepsh talking ash if he hash a falsh-teef plate?

    
    

27. The following analyses are based upon DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §R [pp.88-90].

28. The Race Issue: Now, Which Side Is Ill With Prejudice & Hate?
    Some partly tentative comments and questions on race theory & policy in the US:

    1. The 535 legislators in the US Congress & Senate are comprised almost uniformly of leeches who lie, steal, cheat, take bribes (“contributions”), and tax-suck us as near-death as possible — just short of golden-goose-snuffing. And they do nothing except at the behest & with the permission of the rich & powerful. So why do these same volk suddenly go misty-eyed-mushy-idealist over bills on affirmative action, bussing, welfare, AFDC? — which cater to the poorest, least bribe-affording segment of the population. (Hypotheses: drug-profits. Another theory: aid is no more than 1 cent/month above what's needed to buy off armed revolt in poverty areas. Looniest right-wing explanation: [socialists] run US policy.)

    2. Today, except for Jesse “Hymietown” Jackson (whose survival of a grossly anti-Jewish statement is simply a higher form of special-exemption affirmative action), no one who dissents from political correctness on race can survive in office or prominence, in either the US gov't or its network-holy-trinity (TV 'snews, aka The Medium. In the midst of this ongoing press-hitsquad purge, how many Liberals (besides Nat Hentoff) have ever spoken up about the simple question of free speech? Instead, what we get is hand-wringing (about dreaded heresy's Implications) & fear of Hate-Speech (most of which is now [understandably] coming from blacks). And, no matter how temperate and well-intended, even the most unprejudiced, openminded suggestions of the possibility of racial mean-IQ-inequality will produce some degree of hysterical-censorial smearing of the author as a hate-goader. Yet, the fact is that every era has a view that it wants to exempt from free-speech protections: heliocentrism in the 3rd century BC & later in the Christian Dark Ages, Darwinism in the 19th & early 20th centuries, atheistic communism for many recent decades, and now race-IQ theories. (A few years hence, the top heresy will probably be something else, perhaps communism again; or maybe anti-racism, as of yore in the Old South. [As of 2007, it appears that anti-globalism is looming ever-larger as a leading suppression-worthy heresy.]) Each era thinks the previous one unenlightened — but in its smug conceit fails to see the common thread: in every case, the exception is justified by branding the banned theory corrupting to morals & social peace. (Perhaps it is. But that is beside the point: “the truth and beneficence of an idea are two separate issues.” DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡7 §G4 [p.73].) So, does “free speech” really mean: we allow free speech for all views — except those we don't allow it for?

    3. The standard orthodox newsbite for encouraging the eternal continuation of politi\-cally-racist affirmative-action schemes is: a single success-story case of a Liberal program that produced a single wonderful person. Question: does this propaganda-slant not bear an embarrassing resemblance to the standard Conservative ploy of pointing to a single success-story case of a brilliant, hardworking individual triumphing over poverty in a laissez-faire capitalist world? Common-sense common-lesson: it is unwise to found public policy (necessarily aimed at huge aggregates) on statistical exceptions. (See DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 n.5 [p.12].)

    4. The Whites-Ain't-So-Smart-Either Series:
       Whites-Ain't-So-Smart-Either Part 1):
       In response to DIO 1.1 [1991] (‡2 §D2 [p.12]) promotion of drastic cuts in poverty-area birthrates, some readers said that this would require a police state, to enforce hypothetical birthrate guidelines. DR comments:
       [i] Where does it say in the Constitution (or the Bible) that citizens can have as many children as they want, regardless of their ability to support them? This is simply a modernly made-up pseudo-Commandment, with no justification in logic or in historical results.
       [ii] Evidently, critics of radical demography do not regard the current situation as a police state: middle class citizens being forced — at the point of a taxcollector gun — to support other couples' children, and, secondarily, being forced (at same gunpoint) to support the drug cartel that lives like a mold, off the resulting social-death Hades. What does it say about the US gov't's vaunted white intelligence that:

       1. this kook poverty-cure was forced upon the US public for decades, without having been pre-tested successfully in any of the 50 states, and

       2. it took 30 years for (some of) the gov't to (begin to) realize that the cure probably isn't going to work? Indeed, even now, a few light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel media diehards still keep dishing out propaganda which begs for yet-further no-endtime-certain patience with their cruel Noble Experiment (see also DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 n.19 & §H2 [p.7]), which has succeeded primarily in blighting every major US city with sprawling, degraded slums — the cleaning up of which will take decades.

    5. The US' previous Noble Experiment, the Prohibition of Alcohol, exhibits two parallels (with WASSE Part 1):
       [a] Slowness to face failure. (Prohibition lingered on from 1920 to 1933: 13 years. Even so, that's less than half of the term of persistence of the Dems' Great-Society folly.)
       [b] The primary ultimate beneficiary of both these Experiments has been organized crime. Governmental and otherwise.

    6. The nation's Political-Correctness police continue trying to suppress unfettered discussion and to eliminate all those they disagree with (e.g., E.Butts, H.Cosell, J.Snyder, A.Rooney, A. Campanis — none of them defended by ACLU, which is too busy accepting drug money & fretting about tobacco-ad free-speech), in order to make public figures not just mostly but entirely pure of mind.
       (Reminiscent of HUAC or 1984's O'Brien.) [Note the utter phoniness of ACLU's repeated trumpetting of its defense of nutty Nazis marching for a fraction of a day in Skokie, IL — even while it ignores decades of media suppression, distortion, and slander of serious academic dissent on race-IQ issues. Considering that ACLU's middle initials stand for “Civil Liberties”, one can only conclude that ACLU doesn't think free speech counts much as a civil liberty.]
       Some years ago (1970s), the public school in the Pimlico area of Baltimore had a single teacher who was deemed offensively over-pink. (Even his name was: Rose.) He was finally hounded out of his job. Question: what sort of nation trembles when a school's teaching staff is merely 99% non-commie — unable to feel safe until that staff is made 100.000% orthodox? [Similarly, it cannot be permitted that merely 99.9% of college presidents are PC on women & math — it has to be 100.0%, as Harvard's Larry Summers has learned.] One should keep ever in memory the observation of Ben Franklin on national churches: any religion which requires establishment protection must be a logically-feeble one. (See also DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡9 §K8 [p.83].)

    7. The same PC-police are ever on the paranoid alert for “code-words” emanating from anyone suspected of heresy. Press-unasked question: why are people using code-words at all? Answer: because of palpable fear that certain explicit utterances will cause job-loss or worse. Such power-structure-embedded terror is inconsistent with:
       [a] the US's image of itself as a free country, and
       [b] the image of certain groups as powerless victims.

    8. Why have blacks held more US political offices than women, even though women far outnumber blacks? Such thought-experiments prove the obvious: blacks are not politically prominent in the US because of gov't concern for justice, or women would be better off than they are. (And black families are poorer than most, so black wealth's pull with Congress isn't the answer, either.) Which leaves us a mystery: why, then, are blacks so politically visible? (Speculative suggestions above.)

    9. Whites-Ain't-So-Smart-Either (Part 2): Civil Rights started a generation ago as the bright focus and hope for social justice, and was understandably seen as such by most of us. The uniform expectation was that, once blacks were given a fair chance, their equal mental attributes would, with reasonable promptness, become so evident that conservatives would finally be forced to crawl away in shame at their longstanding error. (This point is driven home to devastating effect in the thought-experiment at p.136 of Charles Murray's Losing Ground NYC 1984.) Instead, civil-rights bogged down & ultimately degenerated into a 30 year [note added 2007: now 40y, going on 50y …] exercise in unfalsifiability and alibi-artistry. (Recalling unfalsifiability's better-perceived pioneers: Astrologers since Ptolemy — 2 millennia ago — have expected proof of their superstition finally to appear. Any day now. The 1882-founded Society for Psychical Research was equally confident that vindication for ESP was right around the corner. And UFOlogists of the 1950s were just as sure that their dream would come true imminently. So were McCarthyists after the Hiss case, when they were certain that hundreds of reds would be flushed out of the US gov't; yet, not one other suspect was ever convicted.)

    10. Whites-Ain't-So-Smart-Either (Part 3): The ensuing permanent race-polarization disaster has destroyed: [a] the New Deal, [b] the dream of a socialist-egalitarian US, and [c] the entire left wing here. How many leftists possess humility and lack prejudice (the very prejudice which they freely project onto rightists) sufficiently to step back, from the shambles of their long experiment in human transformation, and ask:
        [a] Is it possible that, indeed, blacks are (on average) a trifle lacking mentally (perhaps in either IQ or providence) — even though rednecks say so? (Of course, all too many rednecks ignore or alibi or twist stats showing Orientals & Jews are distinctly smarter than WASPs on average.) Indeed, the injustice of applying mass-stats to individuals is precisely why DR opposes Affirmative Action.
        [In the currently fashionable inversion-lexicon of the politically-correct, “unprejudiced” = one who — preferably with absolutely-determined, cemental-faith, any-other-view-would-be-immoral immutability — believes precisely what he is told by the incessantly divisive Mainstream Medium on race&IQ, and will not for a moment admit even the possibility of ever thinking outside the idiot-box or reconsidering his position in such matters, being absolutely-eternally certain that the mean intelligence (among numerous biological factors — many of which exhibit known variations) of all races is precisely equal: a Darwinian-miracle dead-heat.
        Without exception, college presidents will swear (with SJGould) that this point is beyond-question — meanwhile scorning other fundamentalists for not accepting Darwin, who, incidentally, himself did conclude for racial intelligence-differences. As have great modern scientists who have the courage to defy libels, boycotts, threats, that “Liberals” use to shut up dissent, Shockley (inventor of the transistor) & Watson (co-discoverer of DNA).]
        Incidentally, even aside from black intellectuals, DR has 2 favorite little-known black-smarts references to pass along:
        [i] Butterfly McQueen (whose filmic portrayal of Prissy in Gone With the Wind so enrages Liberals) is a Lifetime Member of the Freedom From Religion Foundation. (This information due to Barbara Rawlins.)
        [ii] Jackie Robinson (whom DR was lucky enough to have seen in action at Ebbets Field) was such an original that his intelligence had to be specifically banned by a special rule; he was the player who thought of the now-outlawed ploy in which a runner intentionally kicks a sure-double-play grounder, accepting 1 out instead of 2. [Note added 1994/12: The Cabinet officer DR most admired was the courageously honest Jocelyn Elders.]
        [b] Should a society continue on a prejudiced (prejudged) path which rigidly assumes otherwise (and attempts to destroy those who disagree)? The key question here isn't whether races' mean IQs are equal, but rather: why found decades of divisive public policy upon the chiseled-in-stone presumption-certain that they are equal?
        What should have been carefully thought out 30y ago:
        What if the idealists are wrong about their policies' implicit assumption of precise mean racial equality? — if so, then where are these policies going to take us? Perhaps the at-the-time-unsuspected correct answer to this question was: said policies will take us precisely where we now are in 1994 [and 2015] — pointless mass-poverty cycles of perpetual frustration & failure in US inner cities.
        [At this juncture, DR doesn'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 race-blind manner cited above. 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 possible 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 eternally subsidizing-patronizing ethnic ghettoes is just as artificial-unnatural.)]
        

    
    

29. On Making SuperCapitalist-Globalism's Crushing of Employee-Security Seem So Normal, It's Weekly Entertainment:
    There was a time when Spain & Mexico were regarded as sadistic for using bull-torture as entertainment; then came 1980s nasty TV-soaps followed by 3rd Millennium-TV fake-Reality shows' serial humiliations (worm-eating, etc) — culminating in a 2003 show (Trump's Apprentice) in which a nation, whose employed citizens have never previously in their lives faced such nervously high prospects of being fired, is actually entertained by watching terrified people being fired.
    In Homer's Odyssey, enslaved sailors were mostly less interested in fighting the Cyclops, than in merely vying to be eaten last. But not even Homer thought of Cyclops' human dinners as providing sadistic pleasure for those who might themselves be on tomorrow's menu.
    

30. And there was a time when Africa was regarded as primitive for body-mutilations; then came the 1990s fad of body-piercings as a REBELLION-by-MIMICKRY new-frontier-in-oxymoronicy.

31. If one were told that an experience were only to last a little while, one would not take it quite so seriously as if permanent.
    That can become one's life-perspective upon full realization of the brevity of conscious existence itself.

32. Fantasy: Ending the Poverty Cycle:
    All young women automatically receive a gov't stipend fully adequate to pay for good food and respectable shelter. But not for children.
    If the woman wants children, she must either take the cost out of the cited income — or get a job to pay for herself and her children. But (like prosperous Singapore) no gov't support for child-bearing.
    Since most young poor women are presently having more children they they can afford, this system would apply the funds now counter-productively spent on over-supplying the nation with disadvantaged children (who disproportionately turn to crime, making moms' neighorhoods unsafe), and instead spend the money to ensure poor women a healthy, safe life. Due to the mere transfer of funds (from non-existent poor children to healthy women), this would cost no more than the current system — but could help sever the present poverty cycle.
    [And, in the long run, the gov't might even save one or two pennies on: public-defender lawyers (who effectively max-circulate criminals that mug the public), social jerkers, judges, probation officers, jail guards, court shrinks, etc.]
    

33. Immortal Immunity:
    Analogously to the immortally-immune-to-new-technology gap between rich&poor, we find that the middle-class has its own immunity to improvement: it simply cannot catch on fast enough to catch up to the rulership's wiles. E.g., it took a generation (roughly half of most persons' entire lives) for the late-20th-century European and US citizenry to catch on to the obvious: that injecting huge masses of people from poverty-blighted countries (where breaking Western morality is often necessary to fight off starvation) might perturb their own gov'ts' hard-earned but always-fragile mutual work-ethic egalitarianism.

34. The Mechanics of Democracy's Perpetual Frustration:
    Serious observation, going to the center of public political frustration.
    The masses take (at best) decades to wise-up to any given chapter of the rulership's serial con-game (“government”); thus, when (if?) any given scam (Plunkittesque elections, mass scab-immigration, celeb or military-hero candidates, etc) has at length been recognized & blunted, [a] the rulers have already moved on to a new con, and [b] the former suckers who have finally gotten wise have also gotten old and been replaced by a fresh crop of delicious Barnum-fodder.
    Any population this slow-witted may never catch up.
    [A private remark by a proudly amoral late-20th-century wall-streeter sums up what appears (if only from the wealth-gap between pseudo-caring pols and their wards) to be the top's inner attitude toward the other half:
    The US public is so dumb, it deserves to get screwed. And I enjoy getting in on the act.]

35. Business-backed pols continue down a super-capitalist path, e.g., via EU and expansion of the official labor-pool (adding to immigration's expansion). Supposedly, this is all for still-elusive psychic-benefits-to-come. Meanwhile, one watches the gradual strangulation of the socialism that gave post-WW2 Europe a unique, decades-long run of peace and humanistic uplift — suggestng that EU pols are just doing a jolly rewrite of Vitas Gerulitas' illuminating mock-boast, predicting that after 30 years of business-pawns' drip-torture degradation of workers' security and space:
    

    Hey, no system's happiness beats capitalism's 31 years in a row.
    

36. Spherical Trig Considerations: [1] Year after year, DR observes scholars unnecessarily solving sph trig problems (among others) by laborious and error-prone trial&error procedures. (The recent variously disastrous paper by Brad Schaefer [Journal for the History of Astronomy 36.2:167-196 (2005 May)] on the Farnese globe is merely the latest such embarrassment.) [In 1979, DR made similar criticism of a paper by his closest academic friend R.Newton (for which RN was grateful), so let it not be thought that the present criticism is politically motivated.] General DR rule on sph trig: trial&error is never necessary. If you know sph trig, you can always find an analytic means to solve a problem — & thus can program it for future convenience.
    [2] Those who have proposed that Hipparchos (2nd century BC) lacked sph trig and instead used spherical projection fail to note that once trig formulae on the sphere were developed (no matter how), the formulae — not the originating procedure — would be used henceforth. (Likewise, no one bothers to go through the details of proving Pythagoras' Theorem every time he uses it.)
    (It's like arguing about whether a trigonometric equation on the sphere constitutes spherical trigonometry or not — a quibble (to quote C.Wilson's private remark on the matter) spoofed in DIO's uncomplaining appended headline at DIO 7.1 [1997] ‡2 §A [p.14].)
    [3] All proofs of sph trig formulae depend upon plane trig.
    (Note: all sph trig functions are those of plane trig.)
    [4] One of DR's wisest friends, the late eminent mathematician Bart L. van der Waerden, made (almost casually, during one of our 1980s get-togethers) the deeply perceptive observation that the invention of spherical trig would have very naturally followed almost immediately upon the inception of plane trig.
    

37. What would Iraq be like if there were no oil, no US occupation, etc? Could a city of 5 million thrive on the Tigris without the oil revenue? Is the Arab world as artificially distorted by oil as the SUV-mad US is? Is it coincidental that the planet's other spigot of hyper-breeding Moslems (far-from-Mecca Indonesia) is also a top oil producing area?

38. It's Hard to Keep Score When the Players Aren't Identified:
    One could make a case for the possibility that the Luce publications (Time [1922] & Life [1936]) were started up with private funding by wealthy Chinese speculators, just as a case could be made that the magazine MS (and perhaps bigtime professional women's tennis) was launched with tobacco money.

39. Autumn Guise?:
    Aren't the latenesses of the Libby-Armitage confessions in the Wilson affair inexplicable if their stories are taken at face value?

40. Did Mozart Die of Old Age?:
    L.v.Beethoven's birth certificate survives. W.A.Mozart's doesn't. Which raises the suspicion that stage-dad Leopold M shaved a few years off his son's age when launching him into showbiz stardom — as well as a life which may have begun in commercial deceit.
    Given recent revelations that when he died (not at all in poverty), W.Mozart's main labors were as [a] a celebrity performer, and [b] as the money-savvy impresario who turned classical music into a paying-concert business, one can finally justify wondering aloud what DR has been curious about for decades: how much of his music did he have time to write?
    [Few among the wider public know how the real world of showbiz works: stars are rarer than creators, so the former can always hire the latter for relative peanuts. Impresarios can do likewise. Alfred Hitchcock didn't pretend to write his works. (Woody Shakespeare, front for Christopher Marlowe — who barely [1593/5/30] escaped execution for atheism and anti-immigration — appears not to be a parallel to Hitchcock. We call him Woody to stress Shakespeare's parallel to Woody Allen in The Front.) Ghost-assistance is well-known in the community of creators to have been long-accepted practice (and often a good idea) in various fields.]
    In the world of music, ghost-assistance has been common. Those who create wonderful melodies are not always the best packagers. So composers from Liszt to Gershwin have availed themselves of orchestration assistance, e.g., that of: J.Raff and F.Grofé, resp. (Did Hummel help orchestrate the Chopin piano concertos — now improbably adorned with trombone?)
    Returning to musician and showbizman Mozart (and speculating far out on thin-ice):
    One of the Amadeus-ballyhooed legends is Mozart's alleged ability to sit down and write out clean sheets of music, without any of the striken notes or painful re-writes that characterize mortal composers. Isn't there an obvious alternate interpretation of such a clean corpus? (Note Marlowe-Shakespeare parallel: Samuel Blumenfeld Marlowe-Shakespeare Connection 2008 pp.233&245: “The company's players remarked on the clean, unblotted manuscripts that Shakespeare always brought to the company.”) But would Mozart have had the time or care to tidy-copy-out by hand his own or (much quicker) others' blotted works? Well, it's actually known to have happened. Mozart's “Symphony #37” K.444 was largely written by Michael Haydn (FJH's brother). Indeed, the reason it became confused with WAM's work is that a copy exists entirely in Mozart's hand. Was this a unique incident? Will we ever know?

41. Virtually all English departments teach that personal library-less businessman-&-Shylock W.Shakespeare wrote “his” plays without any college background.
    Question: are college administrators aware that one of their major departments teaches that going to college is needless for learnéd even immortal high-creativity?

42. Is it coincidental that history's two most notorious despots, Napoleon&Hitler, arose in highly civilized, intellectual-hotbed nations, where the upper-rich were willing to turn to militarist-autocrats in order to protect their wealth from middle-class commie revolution.
    [Both men were ultimately brought low primarily by the same nation: Russia.]

43. Luring Illegals With Free Medical Care = US as World Emergency Room:
    Dembo candidates' sensationally-naked 2019/6/28 determination to fund (at regular USers' expense) illegals' every comfort will accomplish nothing but impoverishing USer wage-earners while enriching pandering tyrants. Already, through 2018, tens of millions of aliens have overwhelmed the GOP's deliberately-meagre border police. If the Dembos next completely open the borders, then hundreds of millions of Latino \& black nations' eternally-predictable poor will come to live in the US, attracted by gringo civilization's typical (if inexplicable-to-the-left) relative success in both social peace & wealth. Which raises a tiny question:
    What Will the US Look&Smell Like After the World's 7 Billion Arrive? Do the Networks Care? Or Ever Publicly Ask?
    Apparently, the US rulership, having checked-out San Francisco's paradise, is privately counting on unexpected auto-created salvation from the spectre of billions of stampeding aliens:
    THE SMELL WILL BECOME IMPENETRABLE.

44. The forgoing plan to force ordinary-citizen USers to fund lures for illegals is parallel to same pols' equally unspoken practice of subsidizing ghetto reproduction by taxing the middle class. Hey, it's workin' out great: the poster case is Bodymore, Murderland, a formerly productive, civilized port on the Chesapeake Bay.

45. Which Will Get Eliminated: Discussion, OverPopulation, or Humanity?
    Do Leaders Think the Future Won't Happen? —
    Or Just Don't Care What Transires After They're Dead?
    In only a few decades, the cheap-labor obsession of the globalist world's rulerships has shut down what used to be a vigorous public discussion of population control: birth control not only as an individual right but for engineering social betterment. As part of the religious-insanity-explosion that rides the population-explosion, we observe that the increasingly pious and anti-abortion US, which pretends that its capitalist-magic will bring counter-slum prosperity to other nations, can't even clean up its own crime-ridden cities' time-defyingly immortal slums — which are far worse than those of less arrogant nations such as Denmark or Austria.
    [Where one can walk safely at all hours — in all areas, rich and poor — a fact virtually never discussed in the US' Free[snigger]Press. (Though, given the EU's accelerating economic-survival-race emulation of US-brand hyper-capitalism, one wonders how much longer this precious condition will last.) Isn't the simple freedom (and health-maintenance) of walking in one's neighborhood, one of the essentials of the good life? How can the US' Declaration of Independence's (unique) Jeffersonian vision of happiness as a gov't-protected human right, be squared with a nation most of whose citizens cannot even safely take evening walks? Is this not one of the most basic, glaring-in-everyone's-face failures of a gov't so blindered by corporate-greed — and so predominantly ruled by the insulated-from-this-failure gated-community super-rich — that it doesn't really give a deep-down-damn?]
    In a world with ever-more-overflowing slums, most rulerships have (in order to maintain scab-abundance and [for-here, for-now] inter-ethnic social peace) not opted for the long-term merciful step of banning births to those who can't afford children — but instead have effectively banned speaking of it. The planet's slums are already starting what will become an accelerating process (absent serious borders): overflowing into each other. (One could even define Mexico→US immigration thusly, given the state of the neighborhoods Mexican illegals are effectively herded into.) Which is why one must warn-think about the unthinkable questions and future: Earth's crowding will be curtailed either by world-agreed-upon birth-control or by disaster. And (though impossible at present) the effective birth-control to head off disaster has to be simultaneously-world-legislated [fat chance, at present] to work; otherwise, the bunnyrabbit religions will [as is happening the world over, even as we dither] quickly overswarm-submerge those who volunteer to be responsible.) Not discussing this choice can only contribute to disaster's certainty.
    Stitch-in-time ethical-theory question upon which one speculatively-ponders only because it seems that globalists have banished public discussion of forceful birth-control impedimenta to tsupernamic border or vaginal immigration:
    If conventional repulsion of a billion intolerant-nut religious robots (who feel so harassed by the West that many if not virtually all would press the snuff-button (see the 1964 film How to Murder Your Wife), if they knew it would kill the West's billion infidels) will require (to fight the Bad guys) the US becoming yet another abortionlessly-burgeoning population of intolerant-nut Good religious robots, then, will our leaders be led to propose the most awful of ethical questions…?
    — would nuking the initial Bad-billion out of everybody's misery right now (before they become 2 billion, 4 billion, 8 billion, etc, in an ever-more-upward feedback-cycle-to-disaster [numbers→poverty→worse-numbers→even-worse-poverty…]): be more or less damaging to the quality-future (if not just: a future-at-all) of humanity? Would cause more or less total human pain, poverty, hopelessness? And inevitably-mega-lethal international confrontation? Is rapid death for a billion worse or better than slow-torture of many, many billions through death-by-slum: malnutrition, starvation, disease?
    (See DIO 1.1 [1991] ‡2 n.4 [p.12]; and DIO 4.2 [1994] ‡8 n.23 [p.76].)
    [Anyway, relax: fortunately or unfortunately, neither you nor I are going to make such decisions. Events will. But the implicit ethics-theory questions and looming practical questions are no less there, just because power-seeking policy-makers and their power-sucking think-tanks won't discuss them publicly. (Thanks to our brilliant business-puppet leaders, things have now gotten to such a delicate pass that: simply discussing prominently some of the thoughts appearing here could trigger pre-emptive action, perhaps war. But that is no reason to bury our brains. Or the tongues that connect them.) Question: Will it take the 1st nuke-exchange to force leaders at last to force birth-control belatedly upon all nations?]
    Hardly an easy question, even when one considers no more than the immediate agony, and millions of individual deaths — not to mention the more longterm-sinister Trumanesque precedent set.
    [Similar ethical questions arise when one considers quarantining the carriers of AIDS or any other contagious disease: balancing the misery of the presently quarantined relative-few against the good health of billions in the potentially AIDS-free future.]
    In response to the inevitable who-is-anyone-to-play-god objection that always occurs in reaction to such tries at providential probes, W.Allen semi-jocularly responded:. somebody has to (DIO 2.1 [1992] ‡1 n.20 [p.8].)
    DR would add: somebody's going to.
    (Especially if the world population's out-of-control gallop keeps ensuring that sects and sections will bump up-against each other ever-more crowdedly. Desperately. Aggressively. Acquisitively. Lethally.) The only question the future will answer for us is: will that eventual destructive god be a rapacious cartel, a vindictive terrorist, a religious loon, a racist nation, or (one can dream …) a decent, merciful, rational nation in the John Stuart Mill tradition that strives after the greatest-good-for-the-greatest-number?
    (Usual conceited translation: horrible-them or upright-me.)
    And are the already-remote chances, of a Millesque nation achieving such dominance, increasing or decreasing in an ever-pushier globalist world?
    Regardless, it's not like unleashing a nuke on Islam would affect whether there are (and will be for generations) millions of fanatical Moslems who want to nuke the West if (and when) they could, anyway. Roman Catholic Hitler would have, regardless of whether his quarry had started a nuke-war. And some Islamic (and non-Islamic) nations might too, if they could survive the exchange. (A few Moslem nuts [akin to Hitler's suicidal Wagnerian view] might not even care about that, since sending the whole Earth to heaven might be seen as achieving godly, end-of-sin&pain (note our own theoretical question along these lines) closure for human history — though, happily, Moslem leaders are probably more practical than that.)
    Will it eventually just come down to which side has the nerve to go first?
    And isn't it WW1-lesson-obvious that if it does so come-down (or even look like things are approaching such a face-off), some paranoid or greed party will go-first?
    And if present mutually-vindictive tensions and arms-development continue, will the 1st nuking-of-a-US-city be by an anonymous aggrieved native of one of the nations victimized for decades by the US-UK oil cartel — i.e., a “terrorist” so faceless, and in such vast company (thanks to birth-control's non-enforcement) that he can't even be identified much less apprehended, so that his idea of justice can be brought-to-justice?]
    

46. Why Earnest Realists Become Anarchists:
    Survey the sheer variety of tedious blind-alleys the rulership encourages its wards to seek relief through: democratic elections, courts, debates, 3rd party pseudo-mavericks, non-existent big-guy deity, little-guy lobbying by cheque-book, rebellion by internet, etc. After decades of effort, each inevitably fails to brake an ever-more-unmistakable world trend: increasingly self-deified rulers crushing the middle-class' control over its fate.
    [Even while each ruler emits DOMESTIC propaganda encouraging his citizens to sacrifice generously and to believe in such (revolution-depressurizing) someday-panaceas against citizens' exploitation (by himself), he routinely recognizes in his international dealings that foreign exploitation of his nation can never be fended-off unless that defense is backed by the threat of armed force.]
    So, are all the standard rulership-press-promoted chimeral eventual-justice cul-de-sacs merely an update-rewrite of an ancient saying: we are but flies to the Earth-gods, they toy with us for profit and snickers?

47. The two rulers most reputed to have been wise were Solomon & Marcus Aurelius. Yet both genii actually led to the downfall of their century-old royal lines: Saul→David→Solomon & Trajan→Hadrian→Antoninus→Aurelius. In both instances, the regimes immediately following the Most-Wise rulers were disasters.
    [Antoninus Pius was the longest-reigning yet least-remembered of the 4  Roman emperors during the golden age of the Antonines 98-180 AD. (His reign is the only one of the four which is skipped in the Vienna Kunsthistorisches Museum's large coin-display. But a photo of an aureus [DIO Collection] from his reign [bearing his image] may be seen at our analysis of the contemporary-to-him Ptolemy Geographia (DIO 14 [2008] ‡3 §N [p.55]). Among astronomers, he is remembered primarily because the formal epoch of the star catalog Claudius Ptolemy stole from Hipparchos was the regnal year of Antoninus.
    Arcane calendaric oddity: Antoninus became emperor in mid-138 AD, but the start (Thoth 1) of the Egyptian calendar-year containing that event was almost a full year earlier: 137/7/20 noon (or, in now-obsolete but nonetheless convenient Besselian reckoning [for Alexandria apparent noon], 137.547); so that became the catalog's epoch.]

48. SixtySixFix?
    Was the 1966 World Series thrown by laDodgers? Facts: Baseball betting uses odds, so a small bet can win alot. (Unlike football & basketball, where bets are on point-spread.) Especially when betting on an underdog to win 4-straight will get you roughly 30-to-1 odds, so betting $30000 can make you a millionaire. The Dodgers won the Series in 1963&65 and were the class team of the game. Between the 1965&1966 season, pitchers Sandy Koufax & Don Drysdale held out for roughly half the team's entire salary-budget, since they were the Dodgers' prime strength. Did this trigger resentment among the rest of the team? The Dodger offense was the worst in Series history, 2 runs in all, both scored in game 1 when already behind 5-0 to the Baltimore Orioles. Runless thereafter. To lose with Koufax pitching in game 2 required special effort (during the 1966 regular season, he had the best ERA of his career): center-fielder Willie Davis (later in life a doper) arranged three fielding errors in the 5th inning, bringing in 3 Oriole runs, to set up a Baltimore 6-0 win. (Only one of the runs charged to Koufax was earned.) The next two games ended 1-0 Baltimore. After the Series, Koufax quit baseball (claiming arm trouble — despite an ERA of 1.73 for 1966), never pitching another game. Overnight, the Dodgers went from champs to chumps for years: 8th place in 1967, not returning to the Series until losing in 1974. Did Koufax sense something akin to what Philadelphia A's owner-manager Connie Mack felt in 1914? Mack's team was tops in baseball after winning the 1910&11&13 Series but suddenly fell apart in the 1914 Series, losing 4-straight to the underdog Boston Braves. Familiar? Mack immediately sold off his stars, including Hall-of-Famer Eddie Collins. Five years later, with the Chicago White Sox, Collins survived as supposedly Mr.Clean of the Black Sox scandal, the 1919 Series fix of the White Sox, the best team in baseball that year. Curiously, Collins' worst of his six World Series were 1914 & 1919. Joe Jackson was banned for life for supposedly throwing the 1919 Series, though he batted .375, tops for regulars in the Series, hit its only home run, recording 5 runs, 6 RBIs (both topping the Sox), & 0 errors — vs Collins (batting .226): 2 runs, 1 RBI, & 2 errors. Collins went to Columbia University. Jackson was illiterate. As the scandal began leaking, was there a smart Soxer who made a deal by getting to investigators 1st in return for immunity?

49. Posted 2008/12/31:
    There are two current mysteries which may have a common solution.
    [a] Failed-bailed banks refuse to explain where the bail-bucks are.
    [b] The stock market is curiously resilient despite awful news and anemic volume.
    Answer: the gov't is bailing out the stock market, hiding that fact as much as possible because it would be seen as pro-fatcat, though it isn't entirely so.
    The gov't for years (Bush2 most egregiously) encouraged everyday citizens to ignore the horrendous-amplitude megasloshing greed-fear cyclicity of the stock market and just trust their fiscal future to it. So, how can the gov't now permit the market to plunge any farther than it already has? In late 2008, those who trusted this theory are apoplectic enough at having 30%-40% of their retirement wealth quickly wiped out. If the loss went to 60%-70% (right away), red rage might turn into red politics.
    [Note the final passing parenthesis. It is classic p.r. (e.g., the 1986 Challenger space disaster) to let out the bad news in pieces, not all at once.]