Happy 4th of July!

Hi everyone!

First, some good news...

I believe all of the softcovers have shipped and should be in just about everyone's hands by now. The 2nd hardcover proof seems to have gotten out the last of the bugs and the new updated files have been uploaded. That should put the hardcover books into the print queue on Thursday. I will let you know when they have shipped, which I expect---.

See, there I go again. The finished files are uploaded. That's a fact. That's the limit of what I actually know right now. I will update as soon as I get confirmation from the printer.

And, again, please excuse the unconscionable delay. Your frustration is exceeded only by my own.

As you can see from the graphics, Ejectia continues its slow construction. In the comments for the last entry, someone mentioned perhaps getting a few images large enough for desktop wallpaper. Due to this unbelievable demand the images above are thumbnails for some 1024 and 1600 pixel-wide images.

Right now we are concentrating on the Library, where the "expertise articles" will live. I've hired some pros to put a little polish on the way we actually present those files.

Now, good news and bad news: Good news! The proposals and articles we have received are terrific. Bad news! WE NEED MORE OF THEM!

Now I am willing to bet my entire vast internet fortune on the fact that you are reading this thinking, on one hand, that maybe you do know a little something about making fly-fishing lures or a killer Key Lime Pie, or you know how to shop for an automobile because you used to be a dealer, or something like that... and then that evil little voice whispers yeah, well who gives a damn about that?

WE give a damn, that's who! Let me tell you some of the topics we have already approved and look forward to in great anticipation: Dealing with Depression, Stone Soup recipes, Properties of Wool and other Natural Fibers, Life under Communism, Role-PLaying games, Roadside Assistance, Nuclear Power, Personal Defense, Weather Forecasting, Sourdough Cooking, Mine Safety, Beer Brewing, Financial Planning, and... um... that thing you know how to do.

See? Now's your chance to experience all of the excitement, glamor and endless gnawing pressure of being an internet author! Send a two paragraph proposal stating what you know and who you are to Library@ejectia.com.

As the sewers and electrical cables for Ejectia are unromantically being installed, I believe I will have to fill the void with a few non-Ejectia essays, starting, I think, with Michael Moore and Universal Healthcare. Oh, and there's always that Global Warming thing. So no shortage of work for the wicked.

Finally, since it's the Glorious Fourth, here's a link to my all-time favorite piece of work, written on July 4th, 2003. That's FOUR years ago...

TRINITY (part 1)
TRINITY (part 2)

Don't blow off any body parts you don't have spares for!

A CITY IN THE SKY

Hi everyone.

Well, Everything Takes Longer Than It Takes (see below)... but we are making decent headway behind the scenes. We've gone from the OH, WOW! phase to the HOW THE HELL DO WE DO THAT? phase, which can be a little daunting. But we soldier on!

Above are some early test renderings I have done to play with some of the overall look of the place. Now here's something interesting: everyone views this City-State differently. Some people would like it to be a collection of Greek buildings in a verdant valley. Some want it on a tropical isle. Some want a Rivendell-esque hidden valley surrounded by waterfalls, and some people even want a medieval village in the middle of a forest.

Well, the good news is, in time all of these -- and more -- will be possible. We can provide as many 'skins' to this experience as there is demand. Right now, though, the first iteration of Ejectia will probably be something like the sky city you see taking rough shape before you now. I could tell you this is because of some lofty philosophical underpinning, but the real truth is mountains and clouds are relatively easy on the render because they don't soak up memory like trees do, and these buildings are very complex. So if you like this look, that makes me happy because I do too and I've been working hard on it. But if you had something else in mind, please be patient. And by that I guess I mean please be more patient than you already are.

Moving on with the progress report: it looks like about time to get started on the main item we offer at Ejectia: those "expertise essays."

I mentioned in the prior entry that we would start with a proposal, in order to not commit you good people to a lot of work we may not be able to use right off the bat. I think it's time to start accepting submissions for those proposals.

This proposal should be very simple: one paragraph on what it is you hope to write about, and a second one on why you are qualified to do so. Remember, this is not a university research paper... your qualifications may be something as simple as you've been doing it for twenty years. We're not looking for credentials -- heck, college professors have those and some of them are prize idiots -- we're looking for experience. In Ejectia, real-world skill and the wisdom learned over time count for way, way more than a piece of paper.

So, if you have something you want to contribute, we really, really want to hear from you. Here's the standard disclaimer:

Your contribution of any material, whether in comments or otherwise, grants to William A. Whittle, Aurora Aerospace, Inc. and their affiliates, a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide license to use, sublicense, reproduce or incorporate into other material all or any portion of the material posted, for commercial or other use.

All that says is that we retain the right to use that material in any way we see fit. You of course are free to use your own material in any way you choose.

I have to tell you that with all the work we've been doing, this is the part that excites me the most. I've been waiting to look over proposals since I first got the idea in the shower, a few moons ago. If you have something to say -- and I know you do! -- you can send a two-paragraph proposal to Library [at] ejectia [dot] com. (Bloody spambots!)

Man, I cannot WAIT to see what you folks are going to come up with. Birdwatching, quantum physics, chocolate pie recipes -- it's just going to be cool.

MY BOOK REPORT

** UPDATE: Wednesday, June 20th. **

This morning I received email notification that another 53 softcover books have just shipped. That still leaves several outstanding -- they have been shipping in dribbles of five or six at a time previously -- but this was a major run that should get most of the softcovers on the way. I should receive the 2nd proof of the hardcover late this week or early next; hardcover orders should be in the queue by next week, inshallah.

Thank you all for your continued generousity and patience. The kindness you have shown regarding these delays has been a great relief on an issue that has caused me great discomfort.

This is only the second time I have used this image. The first time was back in 2004. I had confidently stated in DETERRENCE that Osama had been killed at Tora Bora. Three days later, a video of him appeared discussing the Bush/Kerry election.

I put it up now because as of this writing about half of the softcover book orders have shipped. ALL of the softcover orders were entered within a 2-3 day period several weeks ago. Looking at the print invoices I can find no rhyme or reason as to why some shipped and others didn't, but all of them are in the print queue. There just doesn't seem to be a pattern at all. When I did this back in 2004, books were out the door within a day or two of the order being placed, and arrived 3-4 days after that. Looks like they've grown in the interim somewhat.

One of Murphy's Laws is Everything Takes Longer Than It Takes. I am particularly susceptible to this brand of mischief since I tend to be an untrammeled optimist about everything and therefore am perpetually behind schedule. The Hardcover had to go back for a second proof, and that is taking far longer than it did in the past.

Of all the things that stress me in life, nothing even approaches this feeling that I have let people down. If you are one of those who ordered the books for Father's Day, or have any other reason whatsoever for being unable to put up with the delay, email me at bill@ejectejecteject.com and I will do whatever is in my power to make it up to you.

If you did pre-order a book and can continue to wait, please accept my thanks and deepest apologies for the delay.

A PROGRESS REPORT CONCERNING THAT CITY-STATE YOU ORDERED

Hi everyone,

Well, I had a busy week in the real-world job. We did a one-hour special at the Cannes Film Festival. Among the guests were Harvey Weinstein and Michael Moore. If you ever wanted to know what 800 lbs of cholesterol sitting on a beach looked like, your curiousity was assuaged. Then followed a brief discussion among four multi-multi-millionaires about how people like you and me need to pay for everyone else's health care, including, presumably, their own. The education one gets in this business...

But I digress.

"Disneyland will never be completed. It will continue to grow as long as there is imagination left in the world." --Walt Disney

What we are trying to do right now is to get a functional version of Ejectia! up and running as soon as possible. Whatever we have in place on Day One will simply be a starting point for the improvements we are planning on Day Two. Ejectia! -- like every city -- will be built on the foundations of what it was yesterday. It will never be finished. And so, with dedication and continued hard work, even the most glittering version will be, in the words of our Tech leader, Paul, merely "the ruins of the Ejectia! of tomorrow." That's a thought for the ages.

So on behalf of everyone currently working their butts off for free, I would like to simply state that we are trying to get something fun and interesting opened as soon as possible to deliver the core elements of self-improvement. There is so much more we have planned, and all of you will be able to contribute things I can never imagine. All that will come in good time.

The first wave of volunteers I called for, the IT and web specialists, have been doing an incredible job. I am privy to the flurry of e-mails they send to each other daily, and I stare at them with much the same expression as your dog has when he watches TV.  

Here's what's been happening:

Our tech Army of Darkness has defined the initial platform, and some of the modules we hope to have working at the opening are being written. We should start testing some of them in a few days. We have a domain name, a web host, and more. I have gotten some of the software I personally need to render the landscapes and the buildings.

So, I have waited until we reached this point to open a new comment thread, and here it is:

We have the tech wheels well underway. I think, at this point, we can proceed to a new phase. So I would like to call on you again, you magnificent and talented people. What we need next is twofold:

First, I would like to ask anyone who is a graphic designer to email me at bill@ejectejecteject.com (and put DESIGN in the header) if you would be interested in helping with the overall look of the place for Phase 1. I would like to limit this to people who are professionals, and who are willing to volunteer their talents along with the rest of us.  

As I mentioned in YOU ARE NOT ALONE, the key to the enterprise is expertise. I can assure you that everyone will have a chance to contribute in turn. But for the moment we need people with graphic design experience and a portfolio.

That is the narrow call. Here is a broad one:

In the near future, we will be calling for submissions to this vast Library of Experience that we all hold in our heads: a Library that will never be filled, but which must start somewhere. In order that we don't ask for mountains of work that we may not be able to use right away, we will be calling for proposals. Again, this will happen in a few days, but for now, I thought I'd put a bug in your ears: if you are one of those inclined to contribute, could you begin to think about a two-paragraph proposal for a University of Ejectia! Library entry?

The first paragraph should be a brief outline of what you want to write about, and how it is useful to other people. The second paragraph should be about why you are qualified to write on the subject.

Here's an example that I personally plan to submit:

I would like to write an entry on what happens behind the scenes on a commercial jet flight. In it, I hope to show what is happening in the airplane, on the flight deck, and in the air traffic control centers as the flight proceeds from Orlando to Los Angeles.  I will discuss what the engines are doing, how the navigation systems work, what the pilots are preparing to do next, how they are being handled by ATC, and what all of this looks like as you view it out the window. I hope to give the reader an appreciation of all the work that goes on behind the scenes in order to keep them safe and comfortable.

I'm a 500 hour instrument-rated pilot who has taught ground school for the private pilot exam. I have spent many hours in radio contact with Air Traffic Control in the Los Angeles basin, and I have an excellent understanding of basic aircraft systems, radio and GPS navigation, and the national airspace system.

That's really all we need.

I'd like to stress that while I thought I'd get you thinking about this, we are not quite ready for the actual proposal just yet...probably by the end of the week, and I will mention when in a new post when we are ready. We'll take a look at the proposals, and while I cannot promise that all will be approved right away, I CAN promise that we will carefully read and respond to every one we receive.

Remember, we are trying to open as soon as possible, so that limits just how many of these we can get ready. If we initially have to defer your proposal to a later time, I hope you will not take it personally.

Anyway, that's the immediate progress. Things are happening rather quickly behind the scenes. By the end of the coming weekend I will have a new update, and we'll be able to talk more about some of the amazing ideas we are having for further downstream.

A final, and very important note:

I and several others have read, and continue to read, every comment left by all of you. They have provided incredibly valuable ideas which have been and continue to be incorporated backstage. But they have done something much more important than that.

They continue to show all of us that there is a community of very bright, friendly, decent and honorable people out there who deserve nothing less than the best we can deliver.  Your comments and continued words of support -- to say nothing of the mind-boggling generosity you have shown in terms of volunteering time and ideas -- are making us all better people before any of this gets officially off the ground.

On behalf of those already working behind the scenes, and the many more to come, I want to thank you for providing us with an example of how good people can behave. We hope and expect to live up to the example you are setting for us daily.

Keep those comments coming! Every single one of them matters. Even the simplest sentence of support from you has unimaginable power to encourage and motivate this process.

More soon. I think we are on to something VERY big.

Bill

YOU ARE NOT ALONE (Part 1)

Folks, you are about to be hit with a BIG IDEA. 

It’s not entirely my big idea, but I’m willing to hang some tinsel on it and take credit for it.  

First, a brief set-up, and then (and I will make an announcement in BOLD CAPS) comes the Big Idea. 

Okay, the set-up: 

I’ve written a dozen or so major essays since I hung my shingle over this little corner of cyberspace, and received wonderful e-mails about all of them. But two – the last two – have generated a very specific response: more passionate; desperate, even. 

The first was Tribes, which basically posited that there were people who relied on themselves and people who relied on the State. The second was Seeing the Unseen, which took a look at conspiracy theories and the mental illness required to believe in ‘chemtrails’ and the 9/11 WAS AN INSIDE JOB pathology. 

Those both generated reams and reams of heartfelt sentiment, and that sentiment was much the same time and time again.  

I thought I was all alone, people said. And I see this sense of despair and resignation spreading all across the web; from individuals in comment sections, or in lonely posts on obscure blogs. 

Now here’s what’s interesting: this response is the same, again and again, although the stimulus is different. It might be increasing public irrationality and paranoia, or falling educational standards, or unchecked illegal immigration, or activist judges. Maybe it’s tolerance of crime, or endless lawsuits, or general mean-spiritedness. Perhaps it’s rampant defeatism, cynicism, a lack of common decency, and the sense that courage and honor are dying qualities that time is passing by. 

And maybe it’s the dawning realization that our elites in politics, academia and entertainment (which controls our mythology) are leading the charge not to salvation but to the cliffs that seem so obvious to so many common people.   

Something seems to be failing, something essential, as if all the nails and glue that hold a house together were dissolving all at once. And many people – perhaps you are one of them – watch all this happening and feel powerless to stop it.  

Well, you are not alone.  

So many stimuli, and always the same response: has the world gone mad?  

What do those stimuli have in common? 

HERE COMES THE BIG IDEA.

THE PRISONER’S DILEMMA 

Not too long ago, just in passing, my friend Richard Riley pointed me to a famous case in game theory called The Prisoner’s Dilemma.

Now we need to really understand this, because if we do I think many of our present troubles will become clear.  

Here’s how Wikipedia presents the case: 

Two suspects, A and B, are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal: if one testifies for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent, the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both stay silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a two-year sentence. Each prisoner must make the choice of whether to betray the other or to remain silent. However, neither prisoner knows for sure what choice the other prisoner will make. So this dilemma poses the question: How should the prisoners act? The dilemma can be summarized thus:  

In deciding what to do in strategic situations, it is normally important to predict what others will do. This is not the case here. If you knew the other prisoner would stay silent, your best move is to betray as you then walk free instead of receiving the minor sentence. If you knew the other prisoner would betray, your best move is still to betray, as you receive a lesser sentence than by silence. Betraying is a dominant strategy. The other prisoner reasons similarly, and therefore also chooses to betray. Yet by both betraying they get a lower payoff than they would get by staying silent. So rational, self-interested play results in each prisoner being worse off than if they had stayed silent. 

Okay, we can simplify this:

1. If I screw you, but you don’t screw me, I win very big and you lose very big.
2. If you screw me and I don’t screw you, I lose very big and you win very big.
3. If neither screws each other, we both suffer mild punishment.
4. If we both screw each other, we both suffer medium punishment. 

The Prisoner’s Dilemma, therefore, is an analogy we use to test the results of how people treat each other. 

Now, if this game is played one time, the winning strategy invariably is to Screw the Other Guy. If he doesn’t screw you, you get off free. If he does, you serve two years. But if you didn’t, and he decided to screw you – ten years. No one wants to risk that. Screw the Other Guy is the only smart position, and when the game is run thousands of times on computers it comes out the very clear winner.  

But! What happens if the game is played again and again, against the same person? Does Screw the Other Guy continue to be the best strategy?  

It does not! 

The best strategy for a repeating game (called the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma) is not Screw The Other Guy, and -- surprisingly at first glance -- it’s not Always Cooperate With The Other Guy, either.  

The winning strategy is Tit-for-Tat. That is, you do to the guy what he did to you last turn. If he cooperated, you cooperate. If he screwed you, you screw him back. Over thousands and millions of computer runs, using every strategy from complete aggression to complete forgiveness, Tit-for-Tat “wins” every time – that is, it results in the least jail time for you. 

Robert Axelrod examined this outcome in a book called The Evolution of Co-operation.  (That word ‘evolution’ having great power in this context, as we will see in a second.) 

Wikipedia again:

By analysing the top-scoring strategies, Axelrod stated several conditions necessary for a strategy to be successful.

NICE

The most important condition is that the strategy must be "nice", that is, it will not betray [Screw the Other Guy] before its opponent does. Almost all of the top-scoring strategies were nice. Therefore a purely selfish strategy for purely selfish reasons will never hit its opponent first.  

RETALIATING

However, Axelrod contended, the successful strategy must not be a blind optimist. It must always retaliate. An example of a non-retaliating strategy is Always Cooperate. This is a very bad choice, as "nasty" strategies will ruthlessly exploit such softies.  

FORGIVING

Another quality of successful strategies is that they must be forgiving. Though they will retaliate, they will once again fall back to cooperating if the opponent does not continue to play betrayals. This stops long runs of revenge and counter-revenge, maximizing points.  

NON-ENVIOUS

The last quality is being non-envious, that is not striving to score more than the opponent (impossible for a ‘nice’ strategy, i.e., a 'nice' strategy can never score more than the opponent). Therefore, Axelrod reached the Utopian-sounding conclusion that selfish individuals for their own selfish good will tend to be nice and forgiving and non-envious. [And, they will hit back when they are hit first, and keep hitting back until the opponent stops Screwing the other Guy; upon which they will revert to cooperation.]

One of the most important conclusions of Axelrod's study of the Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma is that Nice guys can finish first.

(Emphasis and brackets mine – BW)

Now things get really interesting. In The Prisoner’s Dilemma, these behaviors are expressed as choices made by individuals. But now substitute entire cultures, where the cultural norm is made up of these choices, and what do you see?  

You find the easy, knee-jerk reaction is to form a society where everyone tries to screw everyone else. It’s the short-term approach, and it makes sense in the short term. Presumably all robbers and cheats want to maintain short-term relationships with their victims. If they had to meet them again (if the game was iterated) this strategy would be, shall we say, somewhat less successful and the victims would begin to Hit Back.  

When I look out into the Third World, this is what I see: short-term strategies for immediate gain at the cost of long-term success. A swarm of trinket vendors on a beach in Mexico all need to make an immediate sale in order to eat that day, even if the cost is being so annoying and frustrating to the tourists that it prevents them from ever returning. Short term gain, long term loss. 

I make no value judgment on that behavior, because it works on some level or it would not be so prevalent. In societies where short term values trump long-term ones, it is easy, safe and stable to Screw the Other Guy. But in the long-term, nothing of consequence grows, because nice, forgiving and non-envious are advanced strategies that require a topsoil of general goodwill, trust, and respect for the rule of law.  

Societies that embrace these qualities will always out-compete those that don’t. 

You want to know what that short-term gain mentality looks like in the real world? Here you go: 

Do you see any long-term disadvantages to an arrangement like the one above? I mean, aside form the obvious fire risk, who is actually paying for all that stolen electricity? And in a Screw the Other Guy society, why should he pay? He spends money, for what gain? Why not just steal it like everyone else? And when no one pays, guess what happens to the electricity. It goes away. 

But as we see from The Iterated Prisoner’s Dilemma, there is an unnatural island of stability that is far more successful, and it is not simply trusting everyone and being all-cooperating all the time. That strategy is the worst, because it rewards being screwed by competing strategies that eat it for breakfast everytime. It is de-selected. It vanishes from the gene pool, so to speak. You see no society like that in the real world, and now you know why. Are you listening, Marxists? It doesn’t work. 

But Tit-for-Tat combines generosity and toughness. And look at the terms used to describe the most successful strategic version of Tit-for-Tat: Nice. Retaliating. Forgiving. Non-envious. 

Now, this is where my own analysis kicks in, because frankly, nice, retaliating, forgiving and non-envious pretty much sums up how I feel about the West in general and the United States in particular. The web of trust and commerce in Western societies is unthinkable in the Third World because the prosperity they produce are fat juicy targets for people raised on Screw the Other Guy. Crime and corruption are stealing, and stealing is Screwing the Other Guy. It’s short-term win, long-term loss.  

Alright, now here come the brass tacks: 

If you think about it, all of our laws – and indeed, the very idea of respect for and equality under the law – are written to protect Tit-for-Tat, because Tit-for-Tat produces the best results. You may sell your product at a profit, but if you lie about what it does we will call that fraud and you will go to jail because successful societies start nice but retaliate against those that decide to Screw the Other Guy. The punishment of fraud is what gives us confidence in the claims made by other products. Retaliating against Screw the Other Guy is not mean-spiritedness or a lust for revenge. It is essential to protect the confidence needed to stay focused on long-term wins. And that’s how, in theory, you build a cooperative society.  

You retaliate against those that take advantage of the common trust. In other words, you punish the cheaters. 

If you do not punish the cheaters, you have an “always cooperate” society that produces, consistently and rapidly, the worst possible outcome because it encourages – it selects – competing nasty strategies, by providing them with what I can only describe as a food source. Without retaliation against cheaters, cheaters thrive because that becomes the smartest strategy. There’s nothing “kind” about non-retaliation, nothing noble or good. Non-retaliation is suicide. Plain and simple.  

Remember all those stimuli I mentioned before? What do they have in common?  

Cheating in class (or getting a diploma without passing the required tests), cheating by crossing the border illegally, cheating by committing crimes and not paying for it, cheating by bribery and corruption, cheating in general rewards Screw the Other Guy as a social strategy and makes chumps of the people who need a level of societal trust – they need retaliation against Screw the Other Guy – in order to continue to cooperate.  Society needs to retaliate against cheaters because not to do so flips the coin from cooperation to betrayal. And that’s the end of everything we have worked for and cherish. 

And – and – you don’t need to be a master of game theory to know this in your bones. Because if you are offended by cheaters, it is because you are being betrayed into – you are in fact being forced into – becoming a cheater and betrayer yourself. Always-cooperating dies quickly: if you never betray and the other guy always does, he goes free and you get 20 years every time. (In other words, he’s out getting high while you work to support him.) Sooner or later, even the most dense moralist gets the message. 

When a tipping point is reached – when enough people are allowed to cheat – the system swings to a different stability mode (the default mode) and Screw the Other Guy becomes the only rational choice.  

The rational choice. Think about that for a moment.  

Does that make you angry? It damn well better. And if it does, then you are not alone.

The more I thought about this, the more amazed I became. I could waste the rest of your day coming up with examples, but let’s just pick five quick ones to show how several real-world cases can be found to demonstrate the enlightening quality of this idea. In order of increasing societal relevance:  

1. You are in a line of cars on the freeway heading for a high-traffic exit ramp. The line slows. The line is the most efficient and fair way to get the cars off the highway – first come, first served. But people are using the faster surrounding lanes to get to the head of the line and merge at the last instant. When more cars end up bypassing the line than are waiting in it, being in the line no longer makes sense. Cooperation flips to Screw the Other Guy as the best strategy, since so many people are merging at the exit the line now barely moves at all. These haphazard merges slow not only the exit lane, but also the surrounding ones as people decelerate to find a last-minute merge opportunity. It becomes a safety hazard. Everybody loses. And your willingness to commit homicide increases perceptibly.   

2. You are in a relationship. You are nice, forgiving and non-envious. You may think it is loving and kind not to retaliate when you are treated unfairly, but you’d be wrong. Anybody with any self esteem knows that if you are being wronged, you cannot just continue to take it. You must punish behavior that tries to take advantage of your good nature, in order to maintain the self-respect and reputation you need in order to be treated well. Failure to retaliate will lead to more and more abuse. Failure to retaliate makes Screw the other Guy the optimal position for the other person: they can behave as selfishly and recklessly as they like with no consequences – what’s not to love?  

Every one of us sees this every day, either in our own lives or those of our friends. Rachel Lucas raised this example when I was floating this theory. She said, “You have to teach people how to treat you.” Exactly so. One way or another. 

3. Criminals need a lawless environment in order to prosper. When simple laws enforcing common decency – excessive noise, public urination – are not enforced, the signal goes out that this is a retaliation-free zone and the invisible skull-and-crossbones flag of Screw the Other Guy flies from every building. This is why where you find broken windows you will find every manner of vice under the sun and moon. Because if people can break windows without retaliation, then they know the rules and they know what strategy to play.  

New York City now has a lower crime rate than London. Why? Because Rudy Giuliani and Bill Braxton made it a policy to enforce the small laws. My father managed the Taft Hotel briefly towards the end of his career in 1979. On a visit to Times Square in those days you kept one hand on your wallet and the other was used to shoo away the pamphleteers hawking live sex shows. Now Times Square is like Disney World. I have walked out of the Viacom building after edit sessions ending at 2:00 am and walked through Times Square with complete confidence.  

London, on the other hand, not only confiscated citizens’ handguns, they actively prosecute the few souls still willing to defend their own property. The London Police – once the envy of the world – now openly admit that they will not prosecute entire classes of crime. They have, in short, done precisely the inverse of what Giuliani and Braxton did: they have refused to retaliate, refused to punish the criminals and in doing so destroyed the trust needed for people to live in their own homes without fear. They have paid a large price for that already and I hope they have their checkbooks opened because they are a long, long way from being finished.  

4. Large numbers of non-citizens want to live in the United States. Large numbers. A society can only assimilate so many people in a given year. If millions and millions of people come here illegally, they are loading the system to capacity at the expense of the honest, decent people who are doing the right thing by applying to immigrate legally. If we reward illegal immigration with amnesty, we have allowed the illegals not only to screw our own people and laws, but even more so they harm their own countrymen who are trying to get here by cooperating.  

The biggest losers in our inability to control illegal immigration are the legal immigrants.  What benefit do these honest people gain from playing by the rules? This is as clear a real-world example as you are likely to see of the lack of retaliation flipping a system from cooperation to betrayal.  

And, by allowing this to happen, you also set a precedent, which I think is even more destructive: you are saying not only to the illegals but to the entire society that laws are for chumps. Cheaters win. How much of this do we need to be immersed in before everyone realizes the smart move is to flip from cooperation to betrayal? How much damage does it do when the very people sworn to uphold the law – uphold the rules that allow this amazing cooperation game to continue -- are the ones who seem most enthusiastic to reward cheating? Finding out the cops are in on the crime is enough to drive even the most stout-hearted person to despair. 

A steady diet of this message is not going to end well.  

Finally,  

5. Everything the West has achieved – all the science, prosperity, security and freedom – is based upon the free exchange of ideas. We tolerate offensive ideas so that this free exchange of information may continue. Disagreement is the crucible of wisdom. The price we pay for this cooperation is the daily offense we suffer at the exposure to ideas we find distasteful. 

However, when radical Muslims living in the West demand that their religion not undergo these same stresses and trials and turns violent – burning buildings or killing those who disagree with them – well, we as a society have a choice. We can be “always cooperating,” which rewards that behavior, or we can retaliate, which punishes it.  

Which do you think – reward, or punishment – is likely to produce more of this savagery, and which less?  

And frankly, which behavior is more worthy of contempt: slapping someone repeatedly in the face, or watching someone thank his assailant for doing it to them? That is not moral superiority. That is the neurosis of the masochist.  

If you are not built that way, then you are not alone.

Okay, everyone complains about the weather, but no one does anything about it. When so much of this lack of rigor and disregard for right and wrong is in our faces every day, what is a decent, law-abiding citizen to do? 

Protest in the streets? Yeah, that’s effective. I think it was Heroditus who said, “We old-skool niggaz don’ roll like that, yo.”  

So what’s left? Well, the further off the beaten track the better the adventure. You may find this next briar-ridden path leads to an interesting garden... 

THE REMNANT 

Chances are you have no idea what the term The Remnant refers to. Four years ago I certainly did not have the slightest clue. But just when I started this weblog adventure, some very good friends gave me an essay by a fellow named Albert Jay Nock. It was called Isaiah’s Job.  

In it, Nock talks about a very peculiar conversation God has with his messenger. Nock writes: 

[T]he Lord commissioned the prophet to go out and warn the people of the wrath to come. "Tell them what a worthless lot they are." He said, "Tell them what is wrong, and why and what is going to happen unless they have a change of heart and straighten up. Don't mince matters. Make it clear that they are positively down to their last chance. Give it to them good and strong and keep on giving it to them. I suppose perhaps I ought to tell you," He added, "that it won't do any good. The official class and their intelligentsia will turn up their noses at you and the masses will not even listen. They will all keep on in their own ways until they carry everything down to destruction, and you will probably be lucky if you get out with your life."

Isaiah had been very willing to take on the job – in fact, he had asked for it – but the prospect put a new face on the situation. It raised the obvious question: Why, if all that were so – if the enterprise were to be a failure from the start – was there any sense in starting it? "Ah," the Lord said, "you do not get the point. There is a Remnant there that you know nothing about. They are obscure, unorganized, inarticulate, each one rubbing along as best he can. They need to be encouraged and braced up because when everything has gone completely to the dogs, they are the ones who will come back and build up a new society; and meanwhile, your preaching will reassure them and keep them hanging on. Your job is to take care of the Remnant, so be off now and set about it."

Albert was a very highly educated fellow. He observes that, strangely enough, Plato himself used precisely the same word – Remnant -- when referring to the same group, the people whose force of character was the mortar that held ancient Athens together. Curious…

He clarifies that he is not talking about an educational or aristocratic elite:

As the word masses is commonly used, it suggests agglomerations of poor and underprivileged people, labouring people, proletarians, and it means nothing like that; it means simply the majority. The mass-man is one who has neither the force of intellect to apprehend the principles issuing in what we know as the humane life, nor the force of character to adhere to those principles steadily and strictly as laws of conduct; and because such people make up the great and overwhelming majority of mankind, they are called collectively the masses. The line of differentiation between the masses and the Remnant is set invariably by quality, not by circumstance. The Remnant are those who by force of intellect are able to apprehend these principles, and by force of character are able, at least measurably, to cleave to them. The masses are those who are unable to do either. 

I have been, and remain, a staunchly anti-elitist individual. I find the idea of belonging to a special group the most dangerous philosophical ground you can stand on. But what is remarkable about this Remnant is that the people that compose it seem to be drawn completely at random. It is not a philosophy. It is a frequency. You are on it or you are not.  And this is not a million-dollar lottery win, either: it is a call to face unpleasant facts and impending hardship. It is a quiet summons to duty. It often makes one uncomfortable, and, most often, this unfocused, vague desire – this need – to do something useful most often makes one feel very much alone.  

What’s remarkable about the Remnant -- to me, anyway – is the sheer unpredictability of its composition. Perhaps that homeless drug addict, panhandling under the overpass… perhaps he will be the one to run into a burning building while other decent and good people stand idle, waiting for something to happen. 

Waiting for someone to happen. 

During the 1992 L.A. riots, a white truck driver named Reginald Denny was pulled from his vehicle and nearly beaten to death by a mob of enraged blacks. Cinderblocks and fire extinguishers where hurled at his head. The police had been told not to enter the area. He was rescued by other black neighbors, who at great risk to themselves waded into that fury and took him into one of their own homes. He eventually recovered. 

That was Remnant. Not the actions of Delta Force operators or other First Responders – the obvious assumption -- but rather of decent, ordinary people who showed extraordinary decency and courage when the moment called them.  

And what did the passengers of United Flight 93 have in common? Men and women, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor… who knows, and more importantly, who cares? They were motivated to do extraordinary things – not all of them, for most of the people remained in their seats. But some of them (enough, as it turned out) heard that ancient and distant call, heard that tone, that frequency – and likely saved the Capitol building, symbol of our government; not to mention all the people in and around it.  

That is Remnant. That is the strength, the foundation, the core, the essence of civilization and decency in the face of barbarism and murder.  

If this sounds like a fun thing to be then I have not been making myself clear. Nock elaborates: 

[I]n any given society the Remnant are always so largely an unknown quantity. You do not know, and will never know, more than two things about them… You do not know, and will never know, who the Remnant are, nor what they are doing or will do. Two things you do know, and no more: First, that they exist; second, that they will find you. Except for these two certainties, working for the Remnant means working in impenetrable darkness; and this, I should say, is just the condition calculated most effectively to pique the interest of any prophet who is properly gifted with the imagination, insight and intellectual curiosity necessary to a successful pursuit of his trade… 

…If, for example, you are a writer or a speaker or a preacher, you put forth an idea which lodges in the [subconscious] of a casual member of the Remnant and sticks fast there. For some time it is inert; then it begins to fret and fester until presently it invades the man's conscious mind and, as one might say, corrupts it. Meanwhile, he has quite forgotten how he came by the idea in the first instance, and even perhaps thinks he has invented it; and in those circumstances, the most interesting thing of all is that you never know what the pressure of that idea will make him do. 

I was myself “corrupted” by this idea of the Remnant four years ago. The more I think about it, the more it haunts me.  

Because if you understand and believe that some people carry within them an inextinguishable spark, not of intellect or courage even, but rather of character, then you eventually come to the point where you realize -- as did Nock and Isaiah and Plato – that mere numbers of people mean nothing. For if these men are correct, being outnumbered a thousand to one is irrelevant. And about a thousand to one is the number that Isaiah is given by God when he asks how many of the Remnant there may be.  

Now you may be thinking that I am positioning this for you to consider yourself the Remnant and Your Humble Author the latest incarnation of their Prophet. I can assure you I mean no such thing. Because the maddening and magnificent thing about this quality of character is that it cannot be hustled, preached to, manipulated or organized: 

He may be quite sure that the Remnant will make their own way to him without any adventitious aids; and not only so, but if they find him employing any such aids, as I said, it is ten to one that they will smell a rat in them and will sheer off… 

… they take his message much as drivers take the directions on a roadside signboard – that is, with very little thought about the signboard, beyond being gratefully glad that it happened to be there, but with every thought about the directions. 

This seems to me to be exactly right. If I take Nock at his word – and more and more I am inclined to do exactly that – then Nock was simply transmitting a message “in the blind,” with no hope or thought to who might read it, or when. And that idea (as he predicted) has burrowed deep into my mind – so much so that I too now feel compelled to re-transmit it in a way that Plato or Isaiah or Albert Jay Nock could never have imagined: at the speed of light to magic lanterns scattered across the entire planet.  

One in a thousand of the world’s population is 6 million people. If luck breaks a certain way, this message might reach one percent of that one in a thousand. But the beautiful thing is… that will be enough. Because we are not powerless. There is, indeed, something we can do.  

Alone.  

Together. 

(Part 2 continues below or by clicking here) 

YOU ARE NOT ALONE (Part 2)

A VIRTUAL CITY-STATE 

After I got my first taste of this idea, I was immediately fired up by my total misunderstanding of the entire concept.  

I had thought that what was needed was to form this Remnant into a group, organize it, get some influence. Like the Netroots. 

See, a little knowledge… dangerous… etc. 

You cannot organize this quality. It exists subconsciously in people so varied and diffused that it is pointless to even try. Besides, so far all the Netroots have accomplished, through years of hard work advancing the Democratic agenda, is to remove one (D) beside the Senator from Connecticut and replace it with an (I). I am sure this is due to the fact that this is still the early stage of their campaign. No doubt, at this rate, they will show solid results by the turn of the century.  

We don’t have that kind of time. Nor do I have the inclination or the means to try something like that, even if I thought such online politics were effective, because trying to organize people like the ones I am speaking to is like trying to herd cats.  

No, the truth to improving – healing – a society where cooperation is on the verge of reverting to betrayal, is by a terribly unexciting and mundane path. The answer, I’m afraid, is to control the one thing you truly do have control over: yourself.  

The way to improve society is to improve yourself. A city is made up of its citizens. The higher the quality of citizen, the more secure and prosperous and wise the city becomes.  

We watch the divisiveness and mean-spiritedness accelerate as we scream and yell at each other, trying to bring our opponent around to our point of view. But the fact is, you have no control over anyone. You only control your own heart. That’s it. That’s the hand we are all dealt.  

But consider that example of the one person who, by taking action first, inspires scores of others to follow on his or her heels. What value can you place on a person like that? How many people is someone like that capable of influencing? 

Honor is a concept widely derided and discarded today. But honor is really nothing more than your personal credit rating. It is a statement of your character, and like credit, honor has leverage. It can move large numbers of people: elevate them, raise their spirits and their expectations of themselves. Honor and Courage and Character are beacons in the darkness; they draw all manner of people toward their light. Most people want to be good, to be brave, to be useful. They just need to be shown the way sometimes. And the only way to create such beacons to light our path is to commit to becoming one yourself. 

In his exceptional novel Gates of Fire, Steven Pressfield wrote of the Spartan society and ethics that led to the stand of the 300 at Thermopylae. That was an act of courage – a vision of the power of Remnant – that lights our way thousands of years later, for that stand saved Greece, and science, and reason, and with it the West and all that we have accomplished. 

Regarding the source of that courage, Pressfield writes of an aged slave, who is trying to convince the narrator -- a young orphaned boy in his care -- not to run off and attempt to live alone in the wild: 

This was the only time I saw Bruxieus truly, physically angry. He seized me by both shoulders and shook me violently, commanding me to face him. "Listen to me boy. Only gods and heroes can be brave in isolation. A man may call upon courage only one way, in the ranks with his brothers-in-arms, in the line of his tribe and his city. Most piteous of all states under heaven is that of a man alone, bereft of the gods of his home and his polis. A man without a city is not a man. He is a shadow, a shell, a joke and a mockery. That is what you have become now, my poor Xeo. No one may expect valor from one cast out alone, cut off from the gods of his home."  

This idea has great power. Courage, character, honor – all the virtues – are derived and strengthened from interactions with the virtuous. Where though, today, can one go to find a community that values such things, whose cohesiveness is formed not from the same political party, skin color, sexual orientation or any of the rest, but rather solely by a determination to improve one’s own self and in doing so improving the common welfare? 

If there was a city-state comprised of such people, would you wish to live there? I would! I think that would kick ass! But no such city exists, and to try to build one would in all likelihood devolve into a squabble over money in the best case, or develop into a bad case of Compound Isolation Disorder in the worst. Hey, look at me! I just invented a term. 

However, we live in interesting times.  

Throughout history, civilizations rise and fall. They fall for the same reason, by my reading of history: the lack of will to defend her, a cancer which starts not from the bottom but invariably from the top. A fish rots from the head, say the Russians, who ought to know. From Nero to Chamberlain, the elites evolve away from an understanding that retaliation against the lawless and the barbaric is not a vice but a virtue. They take the manifest blessings of civilization as a given and foist their own personal guilt and moral cowardice upon the entire city. They open the gates to the savage peoples who have always stood outside of progress and gentleness and culture.  

It has always been this way. If you feel you see it happening now, before your very eyes, well… you are not alone. A society unwilling to enforce the laws that civilize it, that is unable or unwilling to see the advantages of civilization, a society led by the pampered, the narcissistic and the corrupt, is not long for this Earth. Our enemies look at us and see precisely these symptoms, and the symptons are worsening. Our unwillingness to retaliate when retaliation is called for – indeed, the uneasiness with the very idea of retaliation against betrayal – has them licking their lips in anticipation. They see all this decay and they are right to see it, for it is there.  

One thing they do not see, however – also there. They do not see the Remnant. They do not see the power and resilience of what the irreplaceable Victor Davis Hanson has referred to as “the Old Breed.” 

Nock and Isaiah believed that the purpose of the Remnant was to rebuild a new civilization from the ashes of those destroyed by their own masters. And certainly to date this has always been their main function.  

But there is something different -- just perhaps, something fundamentally different this time around. Because today, for the first time in human history, common people can communicate directly with one another. We are no longer dependent on spineless politicians and the jaded masters of the press to color our opinions of the world. For the first time in human history, the Remnant can reach out to each other on these gossamer threads of a world-wide web.  

I believe – utterly – that this ability for the common person to communicate with other common people, this internet, will allow us to end-run the cycle of civilization. I believe it in my bones.  

My friends, Western Civilization is not on its last legs.  

Western Civilization is going to the stars.  Count on it. 




 

Almost home now. One last path to follow.  

In The Bridge Over the River Kwai, author Pierre Bouelle describes the difference in philosophy behind the Western idea of a bridge and the Eastern one. And though I am paraphrasing liberally, he writes: 

There is nothing in common between a bridge, as conceived by civilized society in the West, and the utilitarian scaffoldings which the Japanese forces were in the habit of erecting in the continent of Asia… The [Japanese] scaffolding would last a few days, a few weeks, sometimes even a few months, after which a flood would sweep it away, or else a series of more than usually violent jolts would make it capsize. Then the Japanese would patiently start rebuilding it. The materials they used were provided by the inexhaustible jungle… 

…But when it comes to bridge building, Western mechanical procedure entails a lot of grueling preliminaries, which swell and multiply the number of operations leading up to the actual construction. They entail, for instance, a detailed plan; and for this plan to be made it is essential to determine in advance the section and shape of every beam, the depth to which the piles are to be driven, and a mass of other details… and this mental creation, which precedes the material creation, is not the least important of the many achievements of Western genius.   

In my mind Bouelle understates the case. I maintain that all of the achievements of Western civilization are due entirely to the fact that we finish the bridge in our mind – to the smallest detail – before we build the bridge in the world.  

(Interesting, too, that most British thought this superiority was racial. It was, as I have long maintained on these pages, nothing of the kind: it was exclusively cultural. After their defeat by this power of the West and their re-structuring of their society in its image, the Japanese are now arguably the finest engineers in the world.) 

This seed of Western genius is the ability to imagine the ideal solution in one’s own imagination prior to the hammering of the first nail. This takes additional time and energy. It is a triumph of cooperation and long-term thinking over the short-term, fast and easy ad hoc solution. This is a way of thinking that has defined our culture. It is our golden heart. It is world-changing. It is refined genius, applied millions of times each day in ways large and small.  

This City-State of Virtue we desire does not exist. 

Let’s build one. 






I have in my head a blueprint of sorts, based on other contructions I have seen but incorporating a few twists worth mentioning.  

Since you are reading this, you already know that the internet can be a powerful and revolutionary source of news and opinions. That is happening at millions of nodes at this very instant, and it is changing the world.  

However, one thing we might all agree on is that the internet is not primarily known as a font of virtues. But the beauty of the internet is the endless variety of its forms. If there are hundreds of websites devoted to gay furry amputee latex fetishes, perhaps one devoted to the idea of applying the virtues to political and personal behavior might not find the market already saturated.  

I have – on my mental blueprint – the idea of a Virtual City-State. Like other online communities – World of Warcraft, Second Life, the comment sections at various blogs – it would be a place for like-minded people to meet and discuss things. But that does not help us in the real world.  

What can? What can we do to make ourselves into the best people we can be? If that envelope marked “Remnant” is sealed inside every heart, yet opened only one in a thousand times, how can we increase the delivery of that all-important message?  

Well, we can start by taking a look at what the founders of this Western society had to say, several thousand years ago, for they thought long and hard about the ideal society, and it was their thinking which so profoundly influenced our own Founding Fathers. 

Today, when we think of virtues, we tend to think of things like prudence, chastity, modesty… pretty cold porridge. But to the Greek, the Virtues were dynamic and bold. More, Aristotle and others believed they were harmonized – that is related, interconnected, so that to not know one was to imperfectly know the rest.  

They were dionethic, he said, built by rationality – the virtues of understanding of substance, science, wisdom, the practical crafts and the practical mind. 

And there were ethnic virtues, built by custom – courage and temperance; the property-based virtues of generosity and goodwill; honor-based virtues like pride, assertivity and control of anger; the social virtues of wittiness, honesty and friendliness; and the political virtue of justice. 

Start your video recorders, and then ask the average high school kid today to name some of the harmonized virtues. And I’m picking on high school kids unfairly, because the same hilarity would result if you’d asked me the identical question a few months ago. 

But look at the list of virtues in bold above, and ask yourself how you would feel about your child if they were fluent in all these? What if the political issues of the day were discussed not by how they would advance one party or the other, but rather as they held up against the list of virtues mentioned above? 

What kind of society would a citizenry so educated and versed produce?

I did a little beta-testing of this concept prior to posting this essay. I asked my regular readers two questions:

1. What are you good at?
2. Can you teach it? 

The response was extraordinary. Some people were computer database experts. Some were architects. Some were scientists, and a lot of people – most of them – were just regular people like Your Author, who has some small skill with flying machines and who would trade that skill for free legal advice, help in selecting the best resort hotel on Maui or setting up a java-based application we might need. This Virtual City-State is, even at this very second, building itself. I pointed to a patch of earth, went out for a sandwich, and when I returned foundations had been poured and columns were going up.  

It is extraordinary!

When I then asked my regulars what they wanted out of such a place, the responses were as varied as the people making them.

Some simply want a place to go and chat with like-minded people at the end of a hard day. Others want a forum where they can debate and thrash the issues of the day against any and all comers, to whet and hone their arguments and to learn wisdom from the confrontation of ideas with other ideas. Some had mentioned the idea of a Hall of Heroes, to highlight examples both past and present of the kind of behaviors that build up society, rather than the ones that tear it down (of which there is no shortage in the celebrity-obsessed main stream media.)

And me? I personally want a place where I can go to become prepared. I have had two engine failures in my first 300 hours of flight time, and they were non-events because I had rehearsed in my head, again and again, exactly what to do before the fact. Right now, if I heard on the news that a dirty bomb exploded five miles from my house, I don’t know what I would do. But I would like to know. And there are people reading this right now who know exactly what to do, because it is their business to know.

I want to hear from those people. That’s what I personally want. But this is not limited to me. This is for everyone.

Everybody is good at something. Only you know what you are best at, what you love, what you are passionate about. Can you teach it? Can you take what you know how to do better than anyone else you know and share it with the rest of us so that we might all become better people?

Not every skill may be possible to teach on the internet, but with a large enough community that mutually chips in their best skill set for the good of all, what you cannot do on the web you can arrange to do in person across much of the world.

Imagine a community that is dedicated to the idea of each man and woman improving themselves, by sharing with one another the skills and expertise they themselves have accumulated. This would be not only a forum, but a free, online, wiki-university, where members can contribute their wisdom and passion in fields ranging from Civil Defense and Unarmed Combat to Single-Malt Scotch Appreciation and Quilting. I see areas where one could get free legal, mechanical, computer or any other kind of advice; job boards where decent employers can find decent employees, and postings not only from myself but from you – yes, you there – that make sense out of the issues of the day and give us all the tools we need to go back into the world and make it a better place, through argument and persuasion, yes, but mostly through example. The amount of skill and information available to 50,000 readers of your caliber – yes you -- is mind-boggling, and not using it is a mind-boggling waste.

I would like to create a virtual city where we can pool our knowledge and skills, refresh our courage, re-affirm our morality and then take those virtues back out into the world and re-light the fire of liberty, courage and reason.

We, together, can build a virtual community where people can go to be refreshed, encouraged, educated, entertained and improved. Such a place will invariably produce better citizens and better citizens make a better society.

I want to call this place Ejectia! It’s a silly name. It’s good not to take this stuff too seriously.

And I have a charming idea that the first thing you see at the Ejectia! main page is a photo-realistic, computer-rendered, empty valley. Then, when the Discussion Hall module is ready, say, a forum building appears in the valley. You click the forum to get to the discussion hall. As each new module is added, the city grows before your eyes. The seasons change with the real world, too. Over time, an endlessly expanding movie is posted, showing the slow growth and increasing complexity of the virtual city.

And this is only what one person can visualize. Eject! Eject! Eject! belongs to Bill Whittle. But Ejectia! belongs to everyone, equally. What wonders can five thousand imagine? What glorious mental bridges can 50,000 people build?

I don’t know. But I want to find out. I think that would be just damn cool. And it would all be free.

I want a place to make myself a better person. I want to be around people who want to do the right thing, no matter how short of that goal we all fall. Anyone who feels the same way is welcome. All the rest is simple engineering.

That's the plan. You in?








      

(If you found this thought-provoking and/or of comfort to you, you might be interested in a collection of this kind of thinking. To learn more you can click here.

Meanwhile, the really fascinating stuff begins in the comments section. Even if you have never left a comment on a blog before – in fact, especially if you have not – we all encourage you to step in and introduce yourself. Everyone has something they are good at, and no matter how mundane it may seem to you it will be of use and interest to someone – likely many someones.  

Even more importantly, just leaving a word or two reinforces for all of us the central idea that brought you all the way through that thicket above: you are not alone, and we need to know that we are not alone as well.  

Click here to introduce yourself, comment on this post, or just meet some good and interesting people.  

If you are interested in helping us to build this Virtual City-State, the work begins here. 

And welcome, friend.)  

BUILDING EJECTIA (1)

This is the page where we will start with the actual planning and contruction of Ejectia! There will be updates on this page, but the real work happens in the comments. Go for it!

**UPDATE: May25th, 2007 11:00 pm**

Please forgive my absence for the last few days, but Ejectia! is proceeding at an incredible rate.

I'd like to continue to keep people advised as to where we are, since this is a community project.

So far, we have over 20 really top-flight people at work on both the planning and software implementation stages. We have decided to aim for a July 4th opening date. Version 1.0 of Ejectia! (that is, the bare bones needed to open the joint) at the present consists of the following:

1. A Declaration of Principles, and Rules of Conduct... because these wonderful, wonderful comments of yours have set the tone of this enterprise, and civility and friendliness is essential to the continuation of an online City in which we all would like to spend some time.

2. A Lounge, which will consist of several chatrooms and will feature a stunning view and audio background.

3. A University Library, with some of the self-help aspect I mentioned in the essay in place, ready to receive your pearls of wisdom and grow into a magnificent collection of experience and skill.

4. An Ejectia! Gazette, the city newspaper, which will feature upcoming events, new additions, and general news and how-to information.

and finally,

5. An Arena, where we can have individual rhetorical "gladiators" debate some of the days topics, along with online voting, a 'winnner,' and a leader board where scores are kept. Critical Thinking is a blood sport in the Ejectia Arena! Two people enter... and two people leave, shaking hands.  

This is, of course, merely a scratch on the surface of what we can do together. But the first priority is to actually get something up and running, no matter how modest, and we feel this will be enough attractions to open with while we continue to build new and exciting modules.   

Right now, the main skill sets in use are programming and information management. Once some of the software implementation has been decided upon, that focus will change to the graphic design and artwork phase. After that, we will put out a call for marketing and promotion people.

I want everyone who has left a comment here to know that I and several others comb these remarks daily, looking forsuggestions. The fact that we are working so far behind the scenes at present is because we have to build the initial scenery! But I want to assure everyone that this is proceeding far faster and in far more detail than I could have ever imagined when I worte the essay, and that is entirely due to the skill and generosity of people like yourself.

This is going to be wonderful! Keep dreaming! If it's a good idea, we'll use it eventually!

Comments for YOU ARE NOT ALONE

(I'm putting the comments to the essay on a separate page simply so that we can have a lot of them without automatically showing up in the link to the essay. Feel free to introduce yourself! Hit the COMMENTS button below)

THE RETURN OF THE QUEEN

Ladies and Gentlemen, it is my great pleasure and privilege to re-introduce the person who introduced me:

I calculate that 85% of you have no idea who I am and the rest thought I’d been in Pakistan doing bad things to Bin Laden for the last 2 ½ years (a rumor I wouldn’t mind starting, actually). So to introduce myself to the majority: I blogged heavily about five years ago, mostly political rants and pictures of my dogs, and one day Bill Whittle left a comment on my site about gun control that blew my mind. I posted it on the main page, it blew everyone else’s minds too, and Bill decided to start his own blog. Hence our friendship.

For mysterious reasons understood by none, especially me, people liked my blog, but I nonetheless suddenly quit publishing it a few years ago. Which was probably the most boneheaded thing I ever did, because soon after, blog ads became shockingly lucrative. Could I have missed a bigger boat? It’s a perfect example of how I look smarter than I really am; I walked away from a blog that was averaging about 5,000 hits a day (for a brief shining few weeks, upwards of 20,000), which at the time, was pretty damn sweet traffic, long before “gossip” blogs started making jackasses like Perez Hilton rich and famous.

I had reasons for walking away, besides being stone-cold stupid. Some had to do with my personal life: a husband who didn’t like my name all over the Internet because of potential nutburger stalkers (which caused me to rename my blog BLUE-EYED INFIDEL, a branding move on par with renaming Coca-Cola “Happy Fun Drink”); some had to do with my own sanity (had only one computer, which I worked on all day and which therefore made me want to cut myself if I stared at it any longer than necessary); and the rest purely derived from the aforementioned boneheadedness. I’d lost sight of why I was blogging in the first place and had played right into the sweaty little hands of a few trolls and hate-mailers.

But things have changed. For one, I no longer have the husband. I know, I know. It’s some sort of Shame Record for short marriages (two years) but hey, my ex is now one of my best friends and that’s something to be proud of. For another thing, I have a laptop, which makes me want to blog my ass off from anywhere in the house or yard. And last but not least, I’m older and smarter. I turned 35 last month and something about reaching that age makes me feel totally ballsy. I’m ready to berate asshats once more, baby!

And I’ve started paying attention to the news again, which is like watching a bunch of circus clowns throwing poop at each other. The headline on Drudge as I write this is about John McCain using “a curse word associated with chickens” while arguing with John Cornyn over immigration. Seriously? Did he call him a Chicken-F---er? Someone throw me a bone; I’m in the dark here. Hillary is going to run for president – oh god, yes, please. This election should be almost as hilarious as the last one. Al Gore has amped up his fearmongering and even though I do think we’re doing all sorts of naughty things to Earth, god, do I still hate that guy. And my favorite morbidly obese nutjob in the whole world, one Mr. Michael Moore, is back with a new “documentary”. It’s like manna from heaven, there for me to munch away on.

So, RachelLucas.com is back up. Bill made my banner and has given me the best encouragement a friend could ever give. I can’t thank him enough for that and for letting me announce my return here. Go buy his Second Edition, it's even more awesome!

And I also want to thank each of you who’s given me a wave in his comment section, or asked about me in emails or on your own blogs. I’ve missed you all a hell of a lot, and it’s great to be back.

AHHH...MUCH BETTER!

Sometimes you just need to build something before you can see if it works or not.

I was very fond of the parchment look when I was designing the banners. But when it actually got on the page I just...didn't...like it. A little too dark and a little too... uh... tattered.

I did a banner idea for Rachel Lucas last night. Her face was coming out from behind a cloud. The cloud picture was so damn beautiful I decided I had to keep it, me being a pilot and all rather than a curator of the Dead Sea Scrolls. So I spent an hour feeling guilty, looking for something good for Rachel...and I finally just thought "that girl is a firecracker!" and there it was.

Anyway, I really, really love this look. Much, much more optimistic. This is staying for a long time.

Now that I have the site looking the way I want, I can finally get back to doing what I have wanted to do this whole time: CATBLOGGING.

(I have heard a few murmers worrying that I was trading in big ideas for pretty graphics. Not so! I'm going for big ideas and pretty graphics. )

Regular reader and commenter Muscle Daddy has a great post about that in the previous comment section at 9:58pm on May 17th. Presentation may not be the most important thing, but it's not the least important thing, either. Not by a long shot. Anyway, I'm a happy camper. The ideas for Ejectia! are rolling in, Rachel s about ready, and I have a really good feeling about this next essay.

FINAL REHEARSAL

First, thanks to all who bought the Second Edition of Silent America. I hope to be shipping the softcovers by the beginning of next week, and the hardcover is 1-2 weeks after that. As always, I deeply appreciate the support.

I had a couple of temporary pages up during the past few days. Sorry if your comments vaporized when the page went away. This entry will stay until the new essay is up.

That should be early in the week. One of the things I've been holding for is the domain registration to clear on Ejectia.com. No point in clicking; there's nothing there yet. However, reader/commenter svinrod was kind enough to send me a graphic of his idea for the Ejectia logo, and I liked it so much I did a little 3D Studio Max on it and produced this image you see above.  

Pretty cool! So now the book, banner, new domain and other prelims are out of the way, I suppose there is nothing left to do but get on with it.  

See you in a day or two - Wednesday tops. And, as always, I'll be lurking in the comment section.

Thanks again for the book sales. It's enough to make a guy feel like a hundredaire! Or a thousandaire! Who's counting?!
 

SILENT AMERICA The Second Edition

WE ARE ALL LILEKSES TODAY!

I suppose by now it is fairly obvious that I do not comment on day-to-day events. It's not what I'm good at, and in general I don't really much care to wade into an area where other people are so much better at it than I am.

I'll make my first-ever exception here, simply to say this: I found blogs -- I had never heard the word -- through the Institute of Official Cheer. I was reading about The Grooviest Motel in Wisconsin and felt, from the instant I read James' first photo caption, that I was in the presence of not only a great writer, but a friend.

A Friend. That is how I feel about James Lileks, a man I have never met, but who has e-mailed me on occasion and left me as star-struck as a 12 year old girl with a lock of Donny Osmond's hair.

I have been profoundly moved and deeply flattered by many comments praising me as a writer, but I will state publicly in all seriousness that on my best day I cannot hold a candle to what James Lileks puts out hourly, year after year. One of my great goals in life -- and you can believe this or you cannot -- is to finally be able to write something so transcendant that James Lileks invites me for a night of poker at Jasperwood. There we will discuss the 1964 World's Fair, and terrible Canadian rock bands like The Kings and Klaatu and Doug and the Slugs. And I will have a chance to meet the man who nails, who absolutely sticks the world that I grew up in alongside him, half a world away.

Lileks has had his column at his newspaper cut. He'll be reporting the traffic beat and city council meetings, presumably. If this does indeed come to pass, he will accomplish something no human has ever done before. He will make a local city zoning commission report interesting.

This is like sending the Nimitz out to pick up some milk at 7-11. It is yet another sign that newspapers have left the building, and that their much-vaunted series of editors and peer-reviewers do not have a CLUE what the hell is going on in the world.

James Lileks is a man of such monumental talent that he will be able to do whatever he wants, wherever he wants, and whenever he wants. But I say something else in all seriousness -- and I mean this from the bottom of my heart: For me, the fight to preserve Western Civilization is a fight to preserve the bright, funny, self-deprecating voice of wholesomeness and decency that makes Lileks the champion of the America that I love. If the Trib is that plain effing stupid then one can only wonder what the man will be able to achieve if he finds himself free of that Yoke of Self-Blinded Ignorance.

James, if you need a couch to crash on...you can have my entire apartment. I will live out on the street and consider myself a very lucky man just to watch you walk by.

Your friend,

Bill

(Just another Lileks.com reader)

A NEW LOOK

Well, here's our new start -- partially finished, anyway.

The AD ASTRA VOLEMUS SELLA TONANTI translation ran away with it in a landslide. I like the banners very much. My only real problem is the white text box. I'd like to take them down some, but I don't want it to be hard to read.

There's still a lot of tweaking to do with the sidebar text colors, and the link to the SILENT AMERICA banner is not working yet. But all in all it should hopefully send off a classical vibe.

I hope to have YOU ARE NOT ALONE by the end of the weekend, and we can start in earnest!

 UPDATE: I took the white down to the lightest cream I could produce. It helps, I think.

A MOVING COMPANY

Yes, that's what you are. You have moved this poor pundit to tears. I cannot begin to tell you how touched I am by the comments in the previous post. Thanks to one and all. It means more to me than you can image. 

But, enough of that! We've got a lot of work to do.

While I'm waiting for the contractors to come by and take down a living room wall so I can get my head inside, I thought I'd give you a quick update:

The softcover book proof arrived a few hours before I left for the airport. I have to say it is really cool. The Great Hairy Silverback is about half-way through the final proofreading of the text. Over the weekend I will do the hardcover re-design, which shouldn't take long since the softcover looks so damn good. The colors really pop, and it's just a much more professional effort, inside and out. As soon as I have the proofed text the softcover will be ready, and then I need about half a day to re-format that to the hardcover dimensions. The hardcover proof should take about five days, and then we're in bidness again. I am very, very pleased.

I went back to Gainesville for the weekend to celebrate the retirement of a theater professor who started a few years before I arrived in 1979, and who for three decades has been the spine of that department. I found myself surrounded by 220 people I had not seen for anywhere from 10 to 25 years. Imagine a class reunion for every class from 1976 through to 2009 in the same room at the same time. An absolutely incredible experience, which I will touch on in YOU ARE NOT ALONE. I mention it here only because it strenghtens even further for me the incredible need we have in this society to feel at home with people we share so much with.

So again, thanks for the kind words, and just as an experiment in this idea of networked intelligence, I did a little test...

I needed a Latin translation for an idea I had for an E!3 motto. I put out the word and had a response within ten minutes.

Sure enough, Hive Mind Unit and classical scholor Penthesileia (and that is a screen name, people!) e-mailed me before the electrons were dry. I sent her the motto in English, and within no time at all I got back four possiblities which I will put up for a vote. As a student of the classics, she has taken a first-rate mind through endless hours of hard work and study, motivated no doubt by the prospect of that fabulous four-figure annual income. Well, not so fast! She has earned a free book with a street value of $24.95, which I hope she can convert into enough SPAM to keep her in a thin, watery, ham-and-MSG-flavored broth for several months -- long enough to finish her studies, at any rate.

Thanks, Penthesileia. I deeply appreciate it.

Now what we need -- attention Hive Mind! -- is someone who can tell me or show me how to set up one of those internet polls so that we can vote on which one we like. The Batsign is again on the clouds -- contact the Management at bill@ejectejecteject.com if you can help.

Obviously, I'm giving away a taste of what this new book -- in fact, this new idea, this experiment -- is all about. On some websites the idea of distributed intelligence looks like nothing so much as 100 IQ points distributed among 50,000 readers. But here -- and elsewhere, obviously -- there exists so much raw intelligence and expertise that I am knocked breathless at how much waste is generated every millisecond. This is something we should try to change.

So, while we are still getting the sets and costumes ready, let me issue another small challenge. Think about, when you can, something very simple and yet very deep -- and that is this: What are you good at? That's not necessarily even what you get paid for.

What are you good at? Can you teach it?

Think it over.

Because despite my undying gratitude for the many kindnesses you have shown me over the years (and the last comment section is almost beyond my ability to read without choking up completely), I want to stress again and again something of critical importance, and that is this:

THIS IS NOT ABOUT ME.

This is about us, our country and our civilization, and in what practical and achievable ways we can protect, defend and improve her and her people.

I'll close this small update with a little tease: We need all the help we can get. To this end, I have called upon Miss Rachel Lucas -- a voice of clarity and humor long and deeply missed around here -- to be the first of many guest writers here, and she agreed. 

This is not going to become a group blog! Unless started that way intentionally I find they tend to lose all focus. However, we will be putting on the front page anything of importance from anyone who has found a voice to help us achieve our goal -- and in this regard I am especially excited. Again, more on all this very soon when we open in earnest.

I am preparing myself to step up, because I fear the times ahead are going to call for that. We'll explore how we can do that together, in this common forum. But for now, think about your strengths, and how you can best employ them.

Your country needs you, now. It will need you a great deal more in the times to come.  

How wonderful is that?

UPDATE: We're in business:

UPDATE: We're outta business! The poll went away! Poof! NO IDEA what happened whatsoever. I'll try another! (Although my personal favorite was running away with the voting 3:1)

UPDATE: We're in business:

UNDER OLD MANAGEMENT

Just after the "publication" of SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2, I saw a comment somewhere that mentioned I was back and that we could all expect Part 3 sometime in December.

It's funny because it's true.

To my utter amazement and deep embarrassment, I discovered that even with three or four months between postings, I was still receiving around 1500 hits a day. That made me realize something: this site was like a casino on a desert road. Once it was all lit up, all neon and searchlights, lines of cars pulled up to the entrance and bustle and activity everywhere. Of course, since then it must often appear boarded up, tumbleweeds blowing through the chipped and bone-dry basins where the fountains once were, broken windows revealing large and empty rooms and a general state of abandoned dilapidation.

And still, 1500 people a day would drive by, looking for signs of life... slowing down a little, then hitting the gas and driving off, wondering how many times they would keep doing this before they finally got the message and gave up. It's especially ironic to me as the son of a hotel manager. I grew up around hospitality. I know better than that.

Let's just say I consider the past two years a near death experience.

I have been away; but not out of boredom or because bigger and better things came along. I have been silent quite a lot lately because I frankly didn't think I had much to say that I hadn't been said before. And so I have been doing a lot of reading and a lot of thinking. I have probably ten different essays lined up in my mind: it's like the arrivals at LAX on a clear night -- the landing lights of jets sixty miles away slowly making their way to the runway.

But the focus, the click -- That I have learned I cannot rush. I can spend days at this screen and get nothing -- and believe me, I have written a lot that I just threw away -- or I could wait. When it's not time, there's no way to force it out, and when the time comes, there's no way to keep it in.

Well, I think the time has come! I've said that before, and gone on to disappoint you -- and perhaps this will be the same good-natured misunderstanding of my own nature. But I don't think so. Not this time.

Something profound happened after I posted SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2. The tone of the messages I received from all of you was very different than those I got back in the glory days of 2003, when I was knocking out a major essay every two weeks. No, these all had a very strong common theme, and it has moved me very greatly. Almost all had the same core message: I thought I was all alone. I thought I was the last sane person on the Earth. I didn't think anyone else could see how bad things have gotten. Thank you.

Well, first off -- you're welcome. And I am deeply embarrassed that I have been absent so long. Also, as always my gratitude is boundless. I tried to answer every email I received, and was able to keep my head above water for about two days and then the tsunami hit. So thank you all for taking the time to write. I read every one of them and I cannot tell you how much those e-mails mean to me.

Much more importantly, it renewed the sense of... um...obligation -- yeah, I guess that's the best way to put it -- that I once felt, to help in whatever way I could to combat the despair and disinformation that was rising like a flood tide and showed no signs of abating.

So, here's what's going to happen, in order of what I at least think is increasing coolness:

First, consider the place re-opened. The comments section has been restored, starting today. I'll come back to that in a minute. Second, expect a general facelift and repainting in the near future. I'm off to Gainesville this weekend, (the house being watched by a contingent of Delta Force Operators so don't get any funny ideas), and a busy work week next week, but after that I should have some free time to fix up the joint. Third, I have been a busy bee and have finally -- after a mere three years of procrastination -- completely re-worked a Second Edition of SILENT AMERICA.

This is the book I meant to publish in the first place: All of the typos and spelling errors have been fixed, the margins are justified, there is even a table of contents, just like on them fancy store-bought books.

AND - and! -- it includes both SANCTUARY and TRIBES, which were not included in the first edition for the compelling reason that they had not been written yet.

Also, there will be a hardcover! Something with a little more heft to throw at those skateboarding punks who refuse to stay the hell off your lawn!

The softcover proof is in the mail to me as I write this. We'll give it a final look-over, and when I am happy with everything I will take a day or two to re-format it for the hardcover edition. The fact of the matter is that I alone am responsible for the errors in the first edition. I rushed it to get it out by Christmas, and all of the meticulous proofing done on my behalf was simply screwed up because a certain nameless idiot (paraphrasing Principal Skinner: "Let's call him B. Whittle... no, that's too obvious. Let's just say it was Bill W.") accidentally deleted the proofed files on the way to the printer.

I've been reluctant to really promote the book because of all of the defects in the actual printing caused completely by Unnamed Idiot. But my amends are en route, hopefully better late than never. More updates on that in a week or so.

Continuing with my efforts to reduce the suck:

Fourth, SEEING THE UNSEEN Part 3 is essentially written in my head, but I am going to put that on deck, to concentrate on the something that I am on fire about: an idea that will at minimum generate some thought and a few laughs, but also just might completely change the World As We Know It and Save Civilization Entire. Which one will it be? Well, Thank God, that is actually not up to me. It is up to you! Aha! The worm turns! Soon we will see who is lazy and Away from their Post!

That idea is the soul I was looking for, the spinal column for the new collection of essays. It's the theme I needed to get away from re-writing SILENT AMERICA every time I sat down, and I believe I have found the way out and the way in. I've been waiting and reading and thinking, hanging on for the click.

And now I can't wait. It's coming next. It starts with an essay called YOU ARE NOT ALONE. It's different. It's not just an essay, or a series of essays. It's not just a book. It's a social experiment. I hope it will be a sturdy little boat in times of rising waters. We'll see.

So, to recap:

1. Comments are reopened. Re-introduce yourselves. Same bartender -- that giant silver-backed ape I've known for forty years. It's always a little slow at first. Things will pick up come Happy Hour.

2. Re-design coming in the near future. A little paint goes a long way. You won't even see the Bondo!

3. The Second Edition of SILENT AMERICA -- with forty new pages of essay goodness -- will be available for presale next week, with hardcover and softcover deliveries within two weeks after that.

There will be a presale discount. As always, everything I charge for is available for free on the right-hand margin. (I deeply admire capitalism -- I just don't understand it very well. )

4. YOU ARE NOT ALONE is on short final. From what I have read so far (I get advance copies) it makes all the false starts of the last few years look like a giant pile of dog poo.

Can't talk now -- cogitating. Be back soon. In the meantime, talk amongst yourselves. And try to get to know each other, because MUCH will depend on that in the days and weeks and years to come. If you've been a reader and never made a comment, now's your chance. Because what I want is a friendly place where people do not have to feel alone in a world that seems to be flying to pieces and whose last, best hope is the courage, intelligence and fundamental decency of the good people who never say anything.

(P.S. -- If any of you speak latin, could you please e-mail me at bill@ejectejecteject.com? I have a motto for the website, and I need a brute translation. Thanks!)

SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2

(This is the long-overdue second part of an examination of the value of critical thinking. Part 1 is here. The final installment will deal with the issue of Global Warming)



Occam's Razor is the idea that when confronted with competing theories that explain certain data equally well, the simplest one is usually correct. It's called Occam's Razor, and not Occam's Hypothesis, or Occam's Theorem, or Occam's Bit of Useful Advice, because it is a razor -- it cuts cleanly and with great efficiency. And though it pains me to say so, this culture is in desperate need of a shave.

IT'S A CONSPIRACY!

I want to forgo the niceties of the hot towel and go straight for the jugular on this one. My goal here is not to bust any of these four conspiracy theories; that has all been done much more effectively elsewhere. What I am trying to do here is to build a chain of evidence to show a progressively deteriorating epidemic of world-wide insanity, of truly diseased thinking -- not just a misunderstanding or difference of opinion but real, diagnosable mental illness. I want to get to that disease in a minute -- and the cause of it too -- but first let's examine what some people claim to believe in and the mountains of sand one has to carry in order to bury one's head so deep.

Man on the Moon

Several years ago, I was having lunch with some co-workers and the subject of the Loch Ness Monster came up. They seemed genuinely amazed that I was so certain that it did not exist. I pointed out that an air-breathing plesiosaur would have to surface for air so often that its 'reality' would be as much in doubt as that of whales or dolphins. Also, there are essentially no fish in Loch Ness, so it has nothing to eat. The most famous photo of it is a known fake. It's a no-brainer. Not that I couldn't be convinced I was wrong, I added. But I would want to pet the damn thing, or at least stand on the carcass with my hands clasped in the air.

This shocking position got me an invitation to meet "Joe" (might be his real name; I frankly don't remember). Joe was a friend of one of my colleagues. Joe, I was told, was one of the most well-respected paranormal researchers in the world, and as it turned out, he lived a few blocks from me.

Would I be willing to debate him?

I said yes, of course -- and for a reason that I later came to regret. I said yes not because I felt some need to set this guy right, but rather because I hoped he might have something really interesting, something that might cause me to change my mind.

I met him at his apartment: the kind of musty, cluttered, book-filled room I had seen before and come to expect. There were two others in the room. We shook hands. He was a nice enough guy.

"So whatcha got?"

He pulls out a videotape. Buzz is holding the flag. Neil takes a picture. Buzz lets go of the flag pole -- and the flag waves! In the breeze! Fake! Fake! The mask slips!

You ever played golf, Joe? I ask. He has not. I tell him that the flag pole is very long, very thin, like the pin on a green. Touch that and let it go and it will wobble precisely the same way, like a giant guitar string. It's got nothing to do with air.

What else have you got?

He's got stills from the lunar surface. Where are the stars? Huh? Skeptic Boy? I thought you could see stars in space. Why don't we see any in the picture? I ask him to imagine he is on a dark road in the middle of a black night. A car is approaching with its high beams glaring. What does the grille look like?

He doesn't get the analogy. I have to explain that you can't see the grille because the lights are too bright. Your eyes (or the camera) stop down -- the iris constricts -- so that you can comfortably view the bright lights. Likewise, on the moon, the camera is exposed to see the bright lunar landscape, or the brilliant blue Earth. The stars are too dim to register. There are no stars visible in virtually any photo taken in earth orbit, either -- not behind the shuttle, or the space station.

This is a sign that it is not a fake, because while it is logical, it's also somewhat unexpected. A hoaxer would almost certainly add stars. All of the paintings that preceded the actual landing show a lunar sky ablaze with stars. This was something no one realized until we got there.

He had scores of criticisms, all of which were specious and which have been refuted in excruciating detail. I'll spare you the half-hour spent looking at lighting differences and the position of suspicious shadows and cut to the chase here.

Watch Buzz walk, I tell him. See the dust at his feet. Look at that carefully. See how it sprays like water? Very fine dust spraying like a water skier's wake? In an atmosphere -- like on a sound stage -- very fine dust is lifted by the air into a dust cloud, and we all know what a little dust cloud looks like. What you are seeing when you watch those dust trails are very small particles moving in a low-gravity vacuum. I tell him -- not that he believes me -- that it is a tougher engineering challenge to make an area the size of a movie lot into a perfect vacuum than it is to actually go to the moon.

Now it's my turn to ask some questions, and here's where it goes from the ridiculous to the sublime: I was there at Cape Kennedy for the launch of Apollo 13. Is he saying I am lying about this whole moon mission conspiracy? I and millions of others who stood there and saw those Saturn V's climb into the sky?

Of course not, says Joe. They actually launched. The astronauts just stayed in earth orbit the whole time.

I see. So we have the technical expertise to build a 40-story rocket that can produce millions of pounds of thrust. We can build capsules and lunar landers that function in zero-G. We have the means and the will to put these massive objects into Earth orbit, keep them up there for two weeks, but the additional 3-4% of the total launch energy needed to send this package to the moon is so obviously beyond our technical skill that the whole thing must be a hoax?

I'm sorry, that's the thinking of someone who is mentally ill. There is something deeper at work there.

That "something" is different than someone who "believes" in UFO's or the Loch Ness Monster. Such people may be short on critical reasoning, but the emotional force that drives them is a desire for wonder and the magical. Many have remarked that this is, indeed, almost a religious impulse. I've wanted to see a real-live flying saucer my entire life. Likewise, if Nessie really existed, what an incredible sight that would be; to look upon the last surviving dinosaur in the flesh! But a videotape of a standing wave shot from five miles away does not outweigh the whole air-breather / no fish evidence. It does not come close to outweighing it. And so I reluctantly throw Nessie back into the superstition bin from whence she came.

But these denialists -- the Moon Hoaxers and the 9/11 "Truthers" -- these are a different breed. And they are cut from precisely the same cloth. That is to say, they suffer from the same disease: an unwillingness to face reality and its consequences.

My evening with Joe was very illuminative. After the moon hoax came the following, depending on your point of view:

Alien blobs surrounding the Space Shuttle OR a negative image videotape of a blurry object at the bottom of an aquarium.

UFO squadrons flying in close formation OR distant geese at the limit of a digital zoom slowed to 5 frames per second.

A giant, manned American space station in orbit around Mars OR a still frame from NASA's 1976 Viking animation.

Otherworldly 'rods' darting invisibly through the skies of our planet OR individual frames of a large insect leaving a blurry video trail as it whizzes past the lens.

Every time I would identify one of these great mysteries, Joe had the same response: okay, but what about this! No fight, no defense -- nothing. And then we'd be on to some new blur or smudge that proved, incontrovertibly, that this "reality" we live in is a giant lie, and that we are all victims of Dark Forces moving beyond our control or even our awareness... and that while the sleepwalking sheeple go on with their corporate-controlled lives, the mysterious wheels of the Shadow Government turn inexorably onward, crushing those brave few individuals who are on to the whole horrid plot like so many ants. There is a word for this diseased mental state. 

As I was leaving Joe's, he said something I'm sure he thought was very funny. He said, "Man, I'll bet a guy like you thinks Lee Harvey Oswald really shot JFK."

Of course he shot JFK, Joe. Who do you think did it? The American Beef Council? Joe looked at me the way I had been looking at him. That is to say, he simply could not process that I could hold such a belief in my head. You're serious? I'm dead serious. I recommended Case Closed, by Gerald Posner -- without question the best piece of critical reasoning, research and logic I have ever read, bar none. I suspect he did not follow my advice. Books like that are bad for his business. Man, you're out there, said Joe. You know, the sad thing is, I'm starting to believe he is right.

A quick aside...

Back around 1989 or so, I had just moved to LA and was working the night shift as a limousine driver. I had a miserable little apartment in North Hollywood. I had heard of a book that had published the autopsy pictures of President Kennedy, and how it contained compelling evidence of a conspiracy. It was called Best Evidence and I bought it.

It doesn't rain often in Los Angeles, but it rained the night I read that book. Its author, David Lifton, claimed that Kennedy was shot from the front, but then the body was secretly taken from Air Force One to Walter Reed Army Hospital where extensive surgery 'reversed' the trajectory of the wounds to make it look like poor patsy Oswald was the real assassin.

When I finally got to the payoff a shot of electricity went through me. I realized that I was now in possession of such history-changing information that I distinctly recall getting up, opening the door and peering out into the rain to see if I was being watched. I felt, truly, for one half-hour that my life might be in danger. I wish I could say I am making this up.

That sense of uncovering deep layers of ancient cover-ups is what drove the sales of The DaVinci Code. There, too, a web of truths, half-truths and outright fabrication spun a story that left the reader with a palpable sense of awe. It made you feel important, like you knew something absolutely essential that very few others ever were privileged to know.

Now most normal people do not look at life from within a pit of failure and despair. Our lives are measured by small successes -- like raising children, serving in the military, doing volunteer work at your church -- or just doing the right thing in a thousand small but important ways, like returning money if someone makes you too much change.

These are simply the small, ordinary milestones of a life of value. They give you a sense of identity.

But if I didn't have that sense of identity rooted in my own small achievements, I wonder how likely it would have been for me to grab onto that sense of sudden empowerment, of being an initiate in some arcane club of hidden wisdom. I wonder what might have happened to me if being the Holder of Secret Knowledge had been my only source of self-esteem; the one redeeming landmark in a life of isolation and failure. Indeed, I wonder what power such a worldview would have over me if I could believe that behind the scenes lurked vast and unknowable dark forces -- forces that could topple a president and perhaps even explain why a person of my deep, vast and bountiful talents was not doing a whole lot better in life?

I wonder what might have happened to me then.

Because I did not need to believe in Giant Wheels of Conspiracy grinding John F. Kennedy to dust, I was relieved and not a little embarrassed when I finally read Case Closed. It was -- quite vividly -- like opening a window in a musty, cluttered, book-filled room and feeling the cool breeze of reason and logic air out the mind.

This is not the place for me to debate whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin that day. That would take an entire book, exhaustively researched, with extensive footnoting and reference to primary sources. There is such a book, it is called Case Closed, and as I said, it performs its function better than any book I have ever read.

I am more interested in the psychology of someone who believes in these conspiracy theories. I exempt people who have only heard one side of the story, as I did. Sadly, skepticism doesn't sell as well as hysteria. With regards to The View, ABC and Disney would rather count their ad money than waste potential revenues placing the truth for sale. If this offends you as much as it does me, you may make your purchases and plan your vacations accordingly.

Intellectually honest people, people without a deep, vested emotional need to believe the worst, are usually relieved to hear the facts that demolish superstitions like the Bermuda Triangle and the Loch Ness Monster. While there may be disappointment at the loss of an unseen world, people who have chosen to live in reality find comfort in the fact that reality is, in fact, made up of the real and not the wished for.

No, what fascinates me is the emotional motive of people who, presented with overwhelming evidence that the events that transpired on November 22nd, 1963 or September 11th, 2001 really happened exactly the way it appeared, continue to spin ever more elaborate webs in order to get to a place they need to be emotionally. Who are you going to believe: them or your own lying eyes?

All of this conspiracy nonsense comes after the fact. What we saw on those days was clear and vital and unmistakably obvious. In the case of the Kennedy assassination we are asked to believe -- against all physical evidence to the contrary -- what a few professional witnesses recall for pay ten or twenty or thirty years after the fact. Some guy who claims to see a puff of smoke on the grassy knoll is now a world-wide celebrity and not just some dude with time on his hands on a November afternoon. (And don't be deterred by the fact that a musket firing black powder was the last firearm that emitted "a puff of smoke;" perhaps Kennedy was murdered by a re-animated Stonewall Jackson. Prove it didn't happen!)

I've met a number of these people. I know this is harsh, but I'm sick of watching the damage they are doing to this civilization: these people are, to a man, complete losers. Losers. They are desperate and sad people who need to believe in some dark secret to give meaning to their lives.

In Case Closed Gerald Posner points out one thing that all the Kennedy conspiracy books have in common: a complete disregard for the main actor on that day, namely Lee Harvey Oswald. In all of Lifton's theories about stolen corpses and secret autopsies, he only devotes a page or two to Oswald. He is a peripheral player. A patsy. Some make him out to be a hero who was framed.

Posner, by contrast, devotes almost half his book to Oswald. This is the heart of it, because once you fully appreciate what a pathetic loser Oswald was, the entire day makes crystalline sense.

Who in the general public knows that Oswald tried to defect to the Soviet Union, was rejected, and slit his wrists in a Soviet hotel when he learned he was to be thrown out of the country? Who knows that the Russians reluctantly granted him asylum, shipped him to the boonies, gave him an obscure factory job making television sets, and that when his fifteen minutes of novelty were up, he desperately lied and cajoled the Soviets into letting him return to the US? Who can read about his disappointment at the lack of press coverage upon his return to America, or his desperate attempts at attention with Fair Play for Cuba, or his self-documented assassination attempt on Texas anti-communist General Edwin Walker, without seeing a pathological narcissistic loser just waiting to show the world how exceptional he really was?

Once you know Lee Harvey Oswald, you realize that he would have pulled the trigger on Cantinflas or Bozo the Clown if either one of them had been parading beneath his window that November day. It is so obvious, so straightforward, so simple... so inevitable.

But no. Instead we have to have teams of assassins, and the purchased cooperation of dozens, if not hundreds of people, all to commit a ghastly crime and pull one over on an entire nation. Posner posits at the end of his book (and I agree completely) that what drives the conspiracy idea is the intolerable belief that a lone wacko can change history. On one side of the scale, writes Posner, you have the handsome, charismatic, Leader of the Free World, and on the other side a scrawny, pathetic loser. The mind wants to add weight to Oswald's side, to give the horror some meaning. But it just isn't so. And the lie you create to meet this emotional need is more damaging to the country than the assassination of a beloved President could ever be.

I'll tell you something. These conspiracy theorists that ignore that miserable, pathetic, self-aggrandizing egomaniac named Lee Harvey Oswald, or glorify him as a patsy and a hero, do so because deep down inside they realize something unpleasant about Lee Harvey Oswald and themselves.

They are Oswald.

Look! Up in the Sky!

Some people see the Moon Hoax, Kennedy, 9/11 conspiracies and all the rest of that garbage as separate little fiefdoms of harmless lunacy. But I do not.

They all have one element in common, and it is a deadly poison which we must address if we want to regain our social health.

If you believe the lunar landing was a hoax, then you believe that your government was willing and able to lie to you in order to gain prestige it did not earn. You are willing to believe that there are thousands and thousands of engineers, astronauts, technicians, and so on, who are willing to lie on government orders: lie to their friends and family, lie to the press, lie to you. And all of them -- tens if not hundreds of thousands of them -- take their secret to the grave.

I know a lot of engineers. They are some of the most scrupulously honest people I know. They have to be -- their work depends on it. To believe that thousands of these people can lie again and again through their entire lives tells me a great deal about the person that holds such a belief.

If you further believe that the Kennedy Assassination was not the unlucky intersection of a parade route and a commie loser with a rifle, but rather a coup d'etat orchestrated by Johnson or Castro or the Mob, then you believe that your government is willing to kill (or at least cover up the killing of) a man -- the duly elected President of the United States -- in order for some shadow figure to gain power.

What military man could order such a thing? I am also honored to know many people who have served this country in uniform. To a person, I find they would try to save the life of the President, no matter how much they despised him (or her). They love the office. They love the country. That is why they serve.

There's only one kind of person that can believe a group of U.S. military officers would follow such an order: people who don't know any U.S. military officers. What does that say about how they themselves are wired? Colonel, I want you to shoot the President. That order comes direct from the Vice President!

Well, I'll get on it right away! I

t's ludicrous. It's absurd. It's widely believed. And if you believe the government was willing to do that, then you believe they are willing to do this: 

You know what these are? They're Chemtrails.

Wake up, sheeple!!

Chemtrails are one of two things:

A. They are slow-acting toxins dispersed from aerial refueling tankers designed to spread carcinogens and other lethal agents among the general population, with the goal of reducing the world's population by 85%. They are dispersed in criss-cross patterns or a series of regular lines in order to obtain maximum coverage.

Or

B. They are the product of relatively modern, high-bypass turbofans operating at altitudes where water vapor is condensed and freezes into what is essentially an artificial cirrus cloud, which naturally follow the invisible airways and VOR turning points that make up the US Airspace system. They are Contrails.

Millions of your countrymen are choosing A. Millions. Think about that, and weep. Think that there are people out there right now -- people two cars over in traffic, or ahead of you in the check-out counter -- who believe that our government is spraying high-altitude poisons designed to kill us all. That men and women -- thousands of men and women -- go to work every day, refilling the tankers with deadly chemicals, or flying top-secret missions in broad daylight, indiscriminately spraying death down on their drinking buddies, fellow church-goers, co-workers, cousins and wives and children. What kind of person--. Excuse me. I'm sorry. I don't do this often but I just can't continue this calmly:

WHAT THE LIVING HELL IS THE MATTER WITH THESE PEOPLE?!!

I think it's high time -- and way, waaaay past high time -- to start pushing back against these kinds of diseased philosophies and the fact that they are getting traction because no one seems willing to point at them and go:

Starting with the 747 in 1970, jetliners began to employ a very different kind of jet engine. The first generation of jets -- the ones that produced the thin, narrow contrails we used to see -- employed what is called a turbojet (or "pure jet") engine. These are much narrower engines than you usually see today. All of the air that a turbojet encounters goes inside the engine, where it is compressed, injected with fuel and ejected out the rear. But the 747 pioneered a radical new design, called a turbofan (or "high-bypass") engine. Just about anything you are likely to get on these days uses these high-bypass engines. They are called high-bypass because they are much wider than an old turbojet. That is because most of the air that enormous fan takes in does not go into the engine at all, but rather around the outside of it. It is, essentially, a huge propeller powered by the ten or twenty percent of the total airflow that actually enters the engine and drives the turbine shaft as it exits under very high pressure.

The net result is that a turbofan engine moves a much larger volume of air than a turbojet. That makes it more powerful, more fuel efficient and a lot more quiet... they have that hum rather than the crackling roar of the older turbojet. They are quieter because they shroud that hot air inside an invisible tube of cooler air that has gone around -- not through -- the engine core. This massive volume of heated and cooled air produces these newer, thicker, more persistent contrails, as you can see here: 

If you happen to be one of those people who, like me, flatten their face against the window for five hours rather than reading CROSSFIRE on the way home for Thanksgiving, you will often see these jets producing these contrails with your own eyes. Those jets are not filled with poison chemicals or equipped with spraying nozzles, but rather are filled with other people watching your jet produce the same hi-bypass contrails.

So either that explains it, or the whole thing is a high altitude, crop-dusting scheme designed to chemically poison a pernicious pest, namely, you and me. Now you tell me which one seems a little more likely to you, and I will in return advise you whether or not you need to seek professional psychiatric help.

(You might be relieved to know that there is hope on the Chemtrail front. As it happens, "a rescue effort of neutralizing and transmuting the toxic elements in chemtrails was initiated in early 2002 with the introduction of a device called the "chembuster" which will transmute the atmospheric energy envelope from one polarity which allow chemtrails to persist, to another polarity which will cause chemtrails to disperse and fall apart. The proliferation of chembusters around the country led to another dramatic development in early 2004 - legions of huge air elemental beings called "Sylphs" by ancient Greeks made their presence known by assuming cloud shapes that often look like wispy winged angels or animal forms who set about "cleaning up" the skies of chemtrail toxins by engulfing and transmuting chemtrail toxins into non-toxic substances.")

Well! I feel better already!

9/11 and The Birth of a Notion

Of course, all of this is just the soup for the main course.

Recently, Rosie O'Donnell said on national television that she believes 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. Well, that's why we went through the steps above. If you believe that the government lied about the moon landing, you can believe they lied about killing JFK. If they lied about JFK, then they can lie about chemtrails. And if they are willing to poison the entire population with aerial spraying, what are a few thousand people in four airliners and a couple of buildings?

Rosie O'Donnell making such a claim on a major network is a national disgrace. The fact that much of the audience cheered and applauded is nothing less than a national catastrophe.

To her, and to her audience, it is taken as granted that the government is capable of such things. As if "the government" was operated by cyborgs grown in Haliburton vats, rather than by well-meaning and patriotic people that love this country.

"This is the first time in history that fire has ever melted steel," she said. This is a statement of such pristine and perfect idiocy that it surely must be emblazoned in stone across the entrance to the Physics Imbecile wing of the Moron Museum of Natural History. But mastery of physics and engineering requires some intelligence, some perseverance and some discipline: none of which are in evidence in this buffoon. Everything is a conspiracy to a mind this far gone. The 15 British sailors kidnapped at sea? All a plan by our evil (but incompetent!) government to get the next war it so desperately needs. "Gulf of Tonkin! Google It, people!" she said on national TV. And I will, Rosie. I promise. As soon as I finish googling MAD COW DISEASE.

I will make the point yet again because I believe it is the crux of the issue: what kind of moral universe do you have to inhabit to be able to believe that your own people -- airline personnel, demolition experts, police and security forces, faked witnesses and all the rest -- are capable of such a thing? How much hate for your own society do you have to carry in order to live in such a desolate and ridiculous mental hell? What psychoses must a mind be riddled with in order to negate what was perfectly obvious and instead believe a theory of such monumental fantasy? How much pure constant hatred does that take? What, in short, is the miserable black hole of self-loathing that drives a person like Rosie O'Donnell and millions like her?

You know who I blame for this pathetic state of affairs? I blame Leonard Nimoy. I remember watching In Search Of... as a teen and always being just a little disappointed that there was so little -- you know, proof -- in any one of those episodes. In Search of Atlantis, In Search of Ghosts, In Search of Ancient Astronauts, In Search of the Bermuda Triangle, In Search of UFO's..., In Search of, in other words, every conceivable hoax and superstition on the face of the planet. And I watched it in spite of the lack of actual proof and I believed it all because it presented one thin string of opinion and falsehood cloaked as "evidence" and no one rebutted a word of it.

"We're just asking questions" was the official, voice-over disclaimer. You hear that too from the 9/11 Truth crowd when confronted with the lunacy of their claims. We're just asking questions... Well, in that vein I'd like to ask some questions myself. Is Michael Moore a serial pedophile? I'm just asking, and I'm sure a lot of my readers would just like to have some questions answered. I heard that Rosie O'Donnell ate a baby at a Satanic Ritual once -- is that true? Can you please provide the evidence that this did not in fact happen? Thanks. Who has murdered more hookers: Bill Maher or Charlie Sheen? Come on, you can't tell me there's no smoke there. I just want a possible explanation...

So that's what it has come to now. We deserve better. God damn it, we do.

In the middle of all this laziness, this lack of rigor, this mush -- a few small lights still twinkle in the darkness.

I think the entire nation owes a deep and profound debt of gratitude to the editors of Popular Mechanics magazine. Their debunking of the 9/11 conspiracy was not only first-rate journalism. It was an act of vital national importance. It was heroic.

But Popular Mechanics?! That sort of article should have been front page, above the fold in The New York Times, The LA Times, Washington Post, and all of the other 'media watchdogs' that are -- or so I am assured -- determined to safeguard the republic by presenting the truth.

There are only two small mites I might add to that monumental work.

This whole ball of earwax got started when a French author (by way of gratitude, I presume, for the hundreds of thousands of Americans killed defending his country from a tyranny they themselves were unwilling to fight) claimed that the hole in the Pentagon was far too small to have been caused by a jet. It must have been a missile!

All of these 9/11 conspiracy sites have museum-grade idiots stating what 'obviously' happens at velocities and temperatures that they are flat-out incapable of understanding. Not only are these people too stupid to understand the physics involved with what they are bloviating about -- they are too stupid to realize that they are too stupid.

An airplane is a hollow, extremely light-weight tube of aluminum, cunningly designed to lift not one ounce more than is necessary for safe flight in rough weather. An airplane is as fragile as a hollow-boned bird, and for the same reasons. The Pentagon, on the other hand, is a fortress, and as a matter of one of the very few pieces of good luck on that awful day, the side hit by American Flight 77 happened to be the only one of the five sides that had been recently reinforced to withstand a truck bomb attack.

Now if you have ever seen a bird fly into a window pane, you may realize that it does not leave a nice bird-shaped hole in the window. That is because in each historical conflict between the ground and an airplane, the ground has won every time.

Here's something to prove the point far better than any words could ever do. It is a video of an F-4 Phantom being launched into a reinforced wall at over 500 mph. The Phantom is a big airplane -- not as big as a jetliner, certainly, but far sturdier in construction. When you watch this video, you will see that massive-looking fighter jet simply vaporize into a plume of aluminum dust. Nothing comes through the other side. It. Just. Disappears.

My other small contribution -- which may be widely stated, although I have not seen it -- is to grant this revolting premise for a moment and envision the consequences.

The 9/11 Truthers claim that the twin towers were brought down by controlled demolition. Okay.

Have you ever seen a controlled demolition? Shows like this are all over The Discovery Channel. Do these people realize how all of the insulation and paneling must be stripped away from the support beams? Do they not understand how these beams must be cut open and the explosives placed with great care? Have they not any idea of the amount of time this takes -- months -- and the forest of wires that runs through the structure to the detonating mechanism? Have they given no thought -- none? -- to what an enormous job this is, and how much work goes into getting these explosives exactly where they need to be?

Apparently not. They just figure someone leaves a suitcase somewhere, I guess.

Anyone who has ever -- ever -- seen what is required to bring down a building of that size knows that the site is a disaster area of det cord, pulled paneling, and huge bundles of explosives taped to the structural columns across many floors. Has no one considered that this all had to be started after everyone went home on Monday night and before people reported for work the next day? On multiple floors of two of the busiest public spaces in the world?

No one noticed this on Tuesday morning? Hey Jim, what do you suppose that huge bundle of plastic explosives is doing there where the water cooler used to be? And where do those wires go? Well, must be some logical explanation. Let's get some coffee and bagels.

Now you're talking!

Of all the people in those buildings that morning, no one -- no one -- saw any wires anywhere? No one asked why the drywall was torn down and replaced with grey stuff duct-taped into place? None of the firemen rushing into those burning towers, checking all those floors for survivors -- none of them noticed the building was rigged to explode? That it might possibly be worth a small call on the radio?

My father was interred at Arlington National Cemetery in 2002. I will never forget that day. It changed my life, and it was the event that started me writing here at Eject! Eject! Eject!

The man who coordinated that service was on a hill about a half-mile from that side of the Pentagon on the morning of September 11th, 2001. He told me that they had been informed that something was going on in New York that morning. Then he heard something that he said he thought was a missile attack -- a roar so loud and so far beyond a normal jet sound that he looked up at that exact moment expecting to die.

What he saw emerge from the trees overhead, perhaps a hundred feet above him, was American Airlines Flight 77 as it went by in a silver blur, engines screaming in a power dive as it hit the near side of the Pentagon. He told me -- to my face -- that body parts had rained down all over that sacred field. Just like red hail on a summer day. Those body parts are buried in a special place at the base of that hill.

Now. If Rosie O'Donnell and the rest of that Lunatic Brigade is right and I am wrong, then that man -- that insignificant Army chaplain and his Honor Guard of forty men -- are all liars. He is lying to me for Halliburton and Big Oil. That Chaplain -- and all of those decent, patriotic young men in the Honor Guard, and all the commuters on the roads who saw an American Airlines jet instead of a missile -- all of those people are liars and accessories to murder. And all of the firefighters who went into buildings rigged to explode were pre-recruited suicide martyrs dying for George W. Bush's plans for world conquest. Remember: NOTHING that happened on September 11th needed any more explanation than what was obvious from the second impact... namely, that Islamic terrorists hijacked four American aircraft and flew three of them into their targets. To try to convince people of missile attacks and rigged explosives and mystery jets is nothing more than an intentional assault on reason and common sense, one that damns the innocent and protects those mass murderers with our blood on their hands.

It's an obscenity. It's a filthy, God-damned, criminal obscenity. Nothing less.

I work as a TV editor on SUNDAY MORNING SHOOTOUT. Oliver Stone was our guest several months ago. When asked if he regretted anything in his career, he had the audacity to say he regretted not putting THIS IS A WORK OF FICTION on the top of his movie JFK. He's a dramatist, he said. His job is to tell a story. He went on to say -- and I remember I gasped when I heard it -- that the problem in Dealy Plaza that day was due to "a failure of perception." That's a direct quote.  

A failure of perception. What else can that mean but that these ignorant people who were actually on the scene failed to perceive what he so clearly sees thirty years after the fact from a mansion in Beverly Hills?

Now if Oliver Stone were just a garden-variety Narcissistic Personality Disorder sufferer, I'd feel sorry for the man. But he is foisting his disease on an entire population, and using his great skill, he has helped convince another generation to share his own personal pathologies. And he is far from alone.

Think about it: The Manchurian Candidate originally featured Communist Chinese as the brainwashers. Now in the remake it's The Manchurian Corporation. Syriana shows Big Oil and the CIA assassinating poor honest Arab leaders who only want to bring democracy to their people. Did this ever actually happen?

Who cares! I'm a dramatist!

In XXX: State of the Union, prisoners and murderers must be set free to defend the country against the real threat: the Secretary of Defense. In Shooter it's up to a lone hero to assassinate the evil oil-drinking killers that make up the US government. The Constant Gardner has Big Pharmaceuticals testing deadly products on poor Africans as sort of cheap, PETA-proof lab rats. What does it matter to a bunch of dramatists that drug companies are our best defense against the plagues that reap entire generations of lives? That the CIA is not a band of rogue assassins with nothing better to do than pick off our own leaders but rather a hard-working group of dedicated men and women who work without fame or fortune or Beverly Hills mansions, day in and day out, trying to find that little thread that keeps millions of us alive and healthy and blissfully -- willfully, in the case of these dramatists -- stupid and naive?

And it goes on and on and on and on and on and on and on and on.

If it's not the the government then it's the corporations... always the bad guys. Always guilty. Always fat white men ready to kill anyone for money.

Have these dramatists ever -- ever? -- run a business? Have they any clue at all how much effort goes into keeping the french fry station at McDonald's adequately staffed, to say nothing about pulling together a few thousand people in spectacular acts of mass murder? Do they have any idea that the honest human men and women who work for the government are anything more than plot points in their own bitter narratives? Is there no end to the evidence -- as if more evidence was needed -- that we are daily led to believe the worst about our government, our businesses and our country by self-centered psychotics who understand nothing but the absolute imperative to glorify themselves at the expense of everyone and everything they share this civilization with?

And people believe this. Look at Rosie's audience.

How much poison can you put into your veins before you are too weak to walk? Too weak to breed? And how much more of this poison I.V. drip is needed until you die? How many of these cultural suicide pills are we going to swallow before we start to wake up to the fact that dramatists -- not the government -- are going to kill us all?

When you look at what these people ask you to believe, to justify that naked, awful emptiness in their own souls and the horrible damage their lies are doing to our civilization -- well, it's enough to make you want to take Occam's Razor out of its golden box and slit their miserable throats with it.















UPDATE! Rocket scientist and professional psychiatrist DR SANITY has written an exceptional column on the clinical nature of these sad but dangerous people here. Needless to say, her professional opinion and conclusions are orders of magnitude more powerful and compelling than mine. Highly recommended for those who want to know more about why some people need to believe the patently absurd.



If you have the courage to go through the looking glass and discover how I know JFK was murdered by The American Beef Council, you can learn the horrible truth here. Be very wary of the guy on the extreme right (there are no coincidences!); he's often been accused of being a CIA operative. (From GRAZING, circa 1994 (L-R) Brian Bradley, Peter Hurtgen, Alex Campbell, Eric Laing, Bill Whittle) Anyone interested in discussing any of this can do so over here. As for me, I'm always happy to hear from you directly.

THE MIDVALE SCHOOL FOR THE GIFTED

Hello.

I thought you might want to see a picture of me spending the last three months of my life researching Global Warming for SEEING THE UNSEEN, Part 2. Notice the sizable volume of climate research I have under my arm, not to mention the determination I am showing to thoroughly get inside this issue.

This is the price I have paid for spending twelve or thirteen weeks of Deep Cogitation trying to make sense out of an issue that people who have spent twelve or thirteen years on either side still cannot present coherently.

During my time at the Midvale School, I thought I would be able to learn enough about this issue to reach a solid conclusion, and then, as a public courtesy, I would Explain It All To You. That was rather an arrogant assumption on my part, but one made with the best of intentions.

What I have learned will not shed any light on whether or not Anthropogenic Global Warming is "real" -- although I have in fact come to a fairly comfortable conclusion based on a fair amount of study... and it might be a mistake to assume what that conclusion is until you read it.

I have, however, found something that I can comment on with some degree of confidence. In the last three months at Midvale I have encountered the line between being scientifically literate and being an actual scientist. And my conclusion is there is no small degree of change needed on this issue -- and other nasty aneurisms where politics and science meet. That politicians and celebrity spokespeople have let us down on this one is taken as granted. Scientists have let us down, let us down dreadfully, by doing both more and less then they should.

So rather than discuss the pros and cons of Global Warming, I want to address what I have learned concerning the obligation of scientists in a democracy and how we as a culture had better learn to deal with science as a factory to produce data, not policy... and how both lay people, and especially politicians, have an obligation to understand the essentials of the scientific method, and most importantly, to learn to respect the limits of what it can and cannot tell us. Taught effectively, that would be a lesson all of us at good old Midvale could use.

So, I'm putting my carbon graphs away, and hope some small effort at explaining how we can learn to weigh evidence would be more useful than adding another small injection of hot air into the Perfect Storm of the day. Because I have come to the conclusion -- and you are of course free to disagree -- that while the science is scary, the politics are terrifying.

I've got two weeks of hiatus starting first week of April. Expect SEEING THE UNSEEN Part 2, and AMERICA AT THERMOPYLAE before Tax Day.

I haven't been dead. I've been reading. I just haven't gotten around to that PULL sign that's been right in front of my nose.

PERCEPTION and REALITY

Just because people say you are already beaten doesn't mean it is so.

Just a thought from a kid who started to love these old lizards when they went 0-10-1 in his freshman year, and who tonight watched what attitude can do to ruin people's perception of inevitability.

Take from that what you will. I promise you part 2 of SEEING THE UNSEEN before my voice has returned.

Go Gators...you magnificent bastards!

(and you can buy that gator logo here if you are in the mood.)

MAKE A CHOICE

(SEEING THE UNSEEN is directly below this post)

The things that will destroy America are prosperity at any price, peace at any price, safety first instead of duty first, the love of soft living and the get rich quick theory of life. -- Teddy Roosevelt

As I write this, the Democrats have taken control of the House of Representatives and look likely to eke out control of the Senate.

My friends, this is time to make a choice. We have suffered a very large defeat tonight, and there is nothing now that we can do about that except decide on how we wish to face it. We have been given an opportunity to show what losing with honor should look like. Do not wail and cry. Do not shout CHEATERS! or whine about media coverage. And most especially do not blame the American people. They are not idiots and they are not sheep. Iraq is not lost, the War on Terror goes on and despite what you may be feeling right now, there will not be any US helicopters evacuating stragglers off the roof of the US embassy in Baghdad... not tomorrow or any other day. That war was won on a November night two years ago. Trust me on this one, if you can, and if you cannot then at least do not despair. Maybe now we will realize that selling this war is as important as fighting it. In that regard I've been AWOL and I am ashamed.

We have to accept the fact that the conservatives we sent to Congress in 1994 became the bloated, earmarking, tone-deaf toads of 2006. They thought they could do whatever they wanted, regardless of what their constituents think, and now they have been reminded of just who is working for whom. Remedying that sense of isolation and disconnect and unchecked power is why we have elections in the first place, and as to the consequences of it, we have no one to blame but ourselves. That imperial attitude is not unique to Republicans or Democrats. That is human nature, and correcting the excesses of human nature only becomes more costly and painful the longer it is allowed to go on. Democracy is error-correcting. Ask John Kerry.

I voted straight down the Republican ticket tonight. I am not happy about this, but I'm determined to take it like a man and use this occasion to let the opposition see what it looks like to lose with honor and grace. That they have needed a lesson in this goes without saying, and a lot of us mean to see that they will need additional instruction along these very lines in the near future. But right now that is bluster; a check folded and stuffed in a shirt pocket for cashing at our leisure. This is their night.

The Congress that the Republicans lost they lost because they abandoned the ideals that elected them in the first place. We must learn from our mistakes. We will have two years to do so.

Remember one thing before you go. The most important election we are ever likely to see in our lives was not this evening's election. Bush's re-election in 2004 was the one we HAD to have, and we got it. Be grateful for that, acknowledge that this loss is no one's fault but our own, congratulate the Democrats on their impressive wins and start figuring out how we can make sure this never EVER happens again. =)

I wish to tell my friends to be cheerful and especially to be of good will. Disappointments come and go, but moments of courage and integrity in dark hours will be there when the stars grow cold. We have lost the election, so let us maintain our determination, our dignity and our sense of humor, and let us take this moment to reflect upon how our actions have fallen short of our ideals. And then, finally, let's act like the Americans we are, roll up our sleeves and start rebuilding. We who have survived Civil War, the Nazis and the Communists can probably manage to find a way to preserve the Republic in the face of Speaker Pelosi.

America is not only much, much stronger than you imagine; it is stronger than you CAN imagine.

To those who have written me in anger over the years, I say sincere congratulations to you on a big win, and I genuinely hope it will remove some of the bitterness in your hearts and restore some belief in a system that was never broken.

As for me, I pledge to re-enter the fight with more energy, not less, and to continue to try to make the case I think needs to be made. I'll start on that tomorrow.

"Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing...after they have exhausted all other possibilities." -- Winston Churchill

Welcome to the process of exhausting all other possibilities. This is where we separate the men from the boys. Pick a line and stand in it.

SEEING THE UNSEEN Part 1

Folks, as in The Olden Days, this is a long read. It is an essay, not a blog entry. Print it, copy and paste it, or just grab a cup of coffee and settle back.

Oh, and all the pictures enlarge with a click, if you are so inclined. MMMnnnnn...pictures....

I�d like to begin this sermon, if I may, by employing some of the rhetorical restraint of the BushHitler crowd and tell you about the worst case of child abuse EVER in the annals of recorded history.

I grew up on an island. I was in the water almost every day. I wanted this Polaris Nuclear Sub more than I wanted the sun to rise. I had picked out a grotto where I could keep it docked. Taking the ferry across the bay from Hamilton, I would look over the rail in anticipation of the day when I would shadow that churning wake, the periscope a thin reed lost in the foam, pursuing those fat clueless prefects into a perfect firing position and their watery graves!

And I am not alone. In finding this picture, I discovered that there are thousands of boys like myself, begging and pleading for the six dollars and ninety-eight cents it costs to build a fully functional, 7-foot, 2-man nuclear submarine that had:

�Controls that work!
�Rockets that fire!
�Real Periscope!
�Firing torpedoes!
�Electrically lit instrument panel!

I stared at this ad for months and months on end as a small boy. And though I must have read each word a thousand times, I have no memory of the phrase �sturdily constructed of 200 lb. test fibreboard!� It finally fell to my father to inform me that �200 lb test fibreboard!� is, in fact, garden-variety cardboard. My immediate response was �but wouldn�t that get all soggy out in the ocean?� And I am deeply ashamed to admit that after all that time, it is only now, in posting this on the internet at 47 years of age, that I realized for the first time that the damn Polaris Nuclear Submarine doesn�t even have a propeller.

Well, that�s seven-year-old boys for you. Had I been so inclined, I was certainly smart enough to have determined that one could not build a Polaris Nuclear Sub with missiles and firing torpedoes and all the rest for $6.98. All $6.98 would buy you in 1967 was a cardboard box painted like a submarine.

I believed it � like so many of my cohorts � because I so desperately wanted to believe it�and the X-ray Specs, and especially those damn Sea Monkeys with their little briefcases and hats and aprons. What heartless son of a bitch wrote those ads? I hope he chokes on his brine shrimp, the bastard.

We live in a sea of information, an Information Age: and yet, it has been almost half a millennia since mankind has been so unwilling or unable to use critical thinking to separate the intellectual wheat from so�much�chaff! Critical Thinking -- the ability to analyze data, determine it�s usefulness and fidelity, to learn how to assess reliability, question methodology, weigh expertise and all the rest -� is in shockingly short supply these days. It�s not just a shame; it�s an epidemic, it is a fatal metastasizing disease in a democracy where information is used by the public to make the decisions that steer the ship of state. For the ability to think critically allows us to see the unseen; to find the truth behind the falsehood, as well as the falsehood behind the truth.

Today, it seems that legions of people � growing legions � are falling victims to ideas and beliefs that on the face of it are patently false�things that are so clearly and obviously nuts that you really have to wonder what deep, mighty engine of emotional need could possibly drive a brain so deep into a hole. Seriously now, there are millions and millions of people on this planet who will torture logic and reason to mind-bending extremes in order to believe monumentally ridiculous �theories�� theories drawn from an emotional need so warped and debased that you are catapulted beyond anger and disbelief directly into pathos and the desire to call 911 before these people hurt themselves.

So perhaps we could take a walk through Fantasy Island armed only with a shotgun of logic and a few fact-filled shells and see what intellectual tumors we may safely blow into atoms. Time is short! So let�s start with the easy stuff and work our way up to the Lord God King Mack-Daddy conundrum of our age.

CHICKENHAWKS

Let�s shag a few easy fly balls to warm up, shall we?

The Chickenhawk argument goes something like this: anyone who favors military action should not be taken seriously unless they themselves are willing to go and do the actual fighting. This particular piece of work is an anti-war crowd attempt to silence the debate by ruling that the other side is out of bounds for the duration. Like all ad hominem attacks, (argumentum ad hominem means �argument against the person�) it is an act of intellectual surrender. The person who employs an ad hominem attack is admitting they cannot win the debate on merit, and hope to chuck the entire thing out the window by attacking the messenger. This is a logical fallacy of the first order, because the messenger is not the message.

The messenger is not the message. That�s all you need to throw away the entire Chickenhawk response. But why stop there when this one is so much fun?

If you ever see this charge again, you may want to reflect that person�s own logical reasoning in the following fashion: You may not talk about education unless you are willing to become a teacher. You may not discuss poverty unless you yourself are willing to go and form a homeless shelter. How dare you criticize Congress unless you are willing to go out and get elected yourself? Your opinion on a National Health Care System is negated out of hand since you are unwilling to get a medical degree and open a clinic. And as far as your opinions regarding the Democratic Underground or The Huffington Post are concerned, well, you can just keep them to yourself, mister, unless you can produce an advanced degree in Abnormal Psychology and Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

Using the internal reasoning behind the Chickenhawk argument means you cannot comment on, speak about or even hold an opinion on any subject that is not part of your paying day job. It is simple-minded and profoundly anti-democratic, which is why it so deeply appeals to those who sling it around the most.

But wait! There�s more!

If you accept the Chickenhawk argument � that only those actually willing to go and fight have a legitimate opinion on the subject of war � then that means that any decision to go to war must rest exclusively in the hands of the military. Is that what this person really wants? To abandon civilian control of the military? That�s the box they have trapped themselves in with this argument. Now to be perfectly honest, I think Robert Heinlein made a very compelling case for just this line of reasoning in Starship Troopers (the book, not the clueless projected travesty). Heinlein said that the only people who should be allowed to vote are those that have served in the military, since only they are willing to make the ultimate sacrifice on behalf of the state. I don�t agree with that. I think civilian control of the military has been one of the pillars of our nation�s success, and it has withstood the test of both World Wars and Civil ones. But that is the world you are stuck in when you toss that little Chickenhawk grenade.

Finally, if the only legitimate opinion on Iraq, say, is that held by the troops themselves, then they are overwhelmingly in favor of being there and finishing what they started. I recently received an e-mail from an Army major who is heading back for his fourth tour. The Chickenhawk argument, coming from an anti-war commentator, legitimizes only those voices that overwhelmingly contradict the anti-war argument.

WAR OF THE BUMPER STICKERS

I�ve said before that living near the People�s Republic of Santa Monica gives you an unparalleled opportunity to see legions of people who can put their entire moral philosophy into a 3x10� piece of adhesive vinyl, applied to several tons of steel, hurtling down an eight-lane superhighway at six or seven miles per hour.

Here are some of my favorites, in no particular order:

Somewhere in Texas, a Village is missing its Idiot. I chose this one first since it�s the only one that has a particle of real wit. But the Bush is an idiot meme is very tired, and the most cursory look causes it to fall apart like -- how can I make them understand? -- like a lemon almond biscotti left too long in a grande� caffe verona.

For starters, you can of course point to the fact that the man did graduate from both Harvard and Yale, but that was with a C average, and clearly, the idea of being merely in the middle of the pack of those getting advanced degrees from America�s two preeminent universities cuts you no slack from those community-college theater major drop-outs who love to level the charge.

So let�s leave that aside for a moment � Poppy�s connections and all that � and take a moment to look at this, if you will:

This is a Convair F-102 Delta Dagger. It is a second-generation, supersonic fighter-interceptor. It cruises at 845 mph.

There were some minor aerodynamic problems with the F-102. For example, at certain power settings and angles of attack � like, say, take-off -- the jet compressor would stall and the aircraft would roll inverted. It is no picnic, skill-wise, to fly a modern F-16 with advanced avionics and fly-by-wire flight control systems. The workload on the F-102 was far higher. The F-16 has an accident rate of 4.14 occurrences per 100,000 flight hours. The F-102�s accident rate was more than three times that: 13.69 per 100,000 hours. 875 F-102A interceptors were built; 259 � almost 30% - were lost to accidents or enemy action while serving in Vietnam.

George W. Bush flew hundreds of hours in the F-102.

Now look at this:

This is the cockpit of the F-102 Delta Dagger�s successor, the F-106 Delta Dart (I could not find an F-102 panel, but they would have been very similar)

Now, picture yourself in this chair, at 40,000 feet, traveling at one and a half times the speed of sound. Now imagine that someone has painted the windows white � you are flying on instruments. Now imagine that not only do you have to be able to fly blind, by referencing these instruments, but that you also have to stare into that orange jack-o-lantern of a radar, and interpret a squiggle that will lead you to your target. Now imagine that in addition to not hitting the ground, or your wingman, and watching the squiggle, you also have to turn those switches on the right side panel to activate weapons systems, to overcome enemy countermeasures�without looking outside, as you hurtle through air at -40 degrees F, air so thin that should you lose pressure, you have about 4-6 seconds of consciousness before you black out and die.

I maintain that the instant George W. Bush closed that canopy and took off on the first of his many solo hours in an F-102, it is quite impossible that he was either an idiot or a coward.

Here is a random question from the instrument rating exam I had to pass a few years ago.

Refer to figure 91:

What should be the approximate elapsed time from the BOSEMAN (BZN) VOR to the DUBOIS (DBS) VORTAC if the wind is 24 knots from 260 degrees and your intended True Air Speed is 185 knots? (The magnetic variation is 17deg. E)

A. 33 minutes
B. 37 minutes
C. 39 minutes

(It�s C., obviously)

If he had been a civilian rather than military pilot, Dubya would have had to have passed 60 questions like this with at least 70% correct. Questions on weather, radio communications, mechanical systems, aerodynamics, pilot physiology, airspace, navigation and a hundred other things. But, since he was military, he also had to know how to operate that primitive in-flight radar, plus weapons systems, rules of engagement, electronic warfare, hydraulics, fuel systems�it goes on and on.

People like Michael Moore and Bill Maher and Keith Olberman would not be able to figure out how to close the canopy on an F-102. These people would be weeping with fear when those afterburners light up and you barrel down that runway hoping that engine doesn�t flame out and roll you inverted into the asphalt, or when you�re rocketing through the soup at 300mph watching two little needles chase each other, praying the next thing you see out the window is a runway and not a mountain goat.

George W. Bush is not stupid. It�s not possible to be a moron and fly a supersonic jet fighter, and everyone knows it.

What George W. Bush is, however, is inarticulate. English is his second language. From what I can see he does not have a first language. Abraham Lincoln spoke in simple frontier language in an age of rhetorical flourish. Like Bush, he was considered a bumpkin and an idiot, and like Bush, he realized that there were times when having people misunderestimate you repeatedly was a real advantage. That�s goal-oriented. That�s playing the deep game. That�s cunning.

I personally have gotten to the point where Bush�s malapropisms cause me to look at the floor and shake my head with an affectionate smile, in much the same way supporters of his predecessor used to do with every new revelation of coerced sex from former employees. He is what he is. But he is a damn sight more intelligent than the graphic designer in the Mini Cooper with the Village Idiot sticker. Me, personally, I look at the man�s entire catalog of flaws in the same way Lincoln looked at Grant and his drinking: I can�t spare this man. He fights.

So to me, anyway, given the above information I feel that anyone calling President Bush a moron and an idiot comes off sounding like�well�a moron and an idiot.




No Blood for Oil!

Sometimes, the best way to examine a radical assertion is to assume that it is correct and examine the likely consequences. For example, proponents of the Loch Ness Monster assert that there is a surviving plesiosaur lurking in the murky depths of a Scottish lake. We are then drawn into endless discussion of distant wakes and grainy photos and claims of hoaxes, etc. But if you cut to the chase, so to speak, and grant the premise, where does that leave you? Plesiosaurs are air-breathing reptiles that have to daily consume massive amounts of fish to survive. There are essentially no fish in Loch Ness. Does it order out for pizza? Also, as an air breather, we would not have a surface sighting once or twice a decade, but hundreds of times a day. If you grant the premise of an air-breathing dinosaur the entire proposition becomes ridiculous, not on the basis of the evidence, but on the monumental lack of evidence supporting the idea.

Likewise with a �war for oil.� What would a real "war for oil" look like? Well, US troops would have sped to the oilfields with everything we had. Everything we had. Then, secure convoy routes would have been established to the nearest port � probably Basra � and the US Navy would essentially line the entire gulf with wall-to-wall warships in order to ensure the safe passage of US-flagged tankers into and out of the region.

There would have been no overland campaign � what for? � and no fight for Baghdad. Fallujah and Mosul and all those other trouble spots would never even see an American boot. Why? No oil there. The US Military would do what it is extraordinarily well-trained to do: take and hold a very limited area, and supply secure convoys to and from this limited area on an ongoing basis. Saddam could have stayed if he wanted: probably would have saved us a lot of trouble, and the whole thing would have become a sort of super no-fly zone over the oil fields, ports and convoy routes, and the devil take the rest of it. Sadr City IED deaths? Please. What the f**k does Sadr City have that we need?

That�s what a war for oil would look like. It�s entirely possible that such an operation could have been accomplished and maintained without a single American fatality.

We have lost thousands killed and wounded because they are being blown up as they continue to provide security, electrical and water services, schools and hospitals to a land ravaged by three decades of fear, torture and barbarism. It is the American presence in the cities, providing security and some semblance of order for Iraqi citizens, that has cost us so many lives. If we are going to be tarred and slandered and pay the public relations price for �stealing Iraqi oil,� then the least we can do is go in and actually steal some of it, instead of dying to protect that resource for the use of the Iraqi people. Which is what is happening, because, as usual, there is not a shred of evidence to the contrary, no matter how many imbeciles hold up signs and dance around in giant papier�mache heads.




Coexist!

You�ve probably seen this word spelled out with various religious symbols.

Who can argue with this? Not me, certainly.

What I CAN argue with is the idea that if only enough stupid, warlike Americans would just get on the Coexist train, then the world would be a happy and peaceful garden. Who else are the people with these bumper stickers preaching to, if not their ill-informed, knuckle-dragging neocon fellow commuters?

Unfortunately, here�s where reality inserts its ugly head. There is no more multi-cultural society on earth than the United States. The United States owns the patent on Coexisting religions and ethnicities. Drive half a mile though any major US urban area and you will see more ancient ethnic enemies living cheek by jowl in harmony than any other spot on the planet. Thursday morning water cooler conversations about Dancing with the Stars wallpaper over more ancient ethnic and religious murders than history has been able to record, and this despite Hollywood and the news media�s deepest efforts to remind you on a daily basis that the black or Hispanic or Asian or white friend in the next cube is secretly seething with racial hatred just beneath that placid veneer.

Americans are able to coexist because they have subjugated, if not abandoned, those ancient religious and ethnic hatreds to join a larger family, that larger family being America. And this is why, if you truly value the idea of coexistence, you should be dead set against multi-cultural grievance and identity politics, which do nothing but pit one ethnic group against the others and reinforce, rather than dilute, ancient resentments and grievances.

Now as it turns out, there is one member of the human family that seems to be having a little difficulty with the whole coexist thing. Muslims are at war with Americans in Iraq and Afghanistan, they are fighting Animists in Africa, Hindus in Kashmir, Buddhists in Southeast Asia�they are blowing up nightclubs and schools and police stations and trains and buses and skyscrapers and are under daily orders to kill Jews on sight anywhere in the world.

I don�t mind preaching so much as preaching to the choir. When I see Coexist bumper stickers in Islamabad and Cairo and especially Riyadh to the degree I see them in Venice, California, I will be a happy man. They will make a very welcome sight covering over the Death to the Infidel! stickers that seem to be somewhat outselling Coexist messages in that part of the world. Until then I think we should coexist and carry a big stick.

End U.S. Imperialism Now!

Can I just take another quick second of your precious time to put this one to bed once and for all?

It is a staple of the left to accuse the US of �Imperialism.� That so many people can level such a charge with a straight face is a testament to the efficacy of forty years of standards-free education reform here and around the world.

An �Empire� is defined as a nation state that has political control over other nation states, and uses that political control to extract the wealth and resources from the subjugated country.

The United States of America does not have any political control over any other sovereign nation on the face of the Earth. We have influence, but influence is to control as a rich uncle is to a prison warden. That�s all you need to know. The entire idea of American Empire and U.S. Imperialism is dead on its face after that. No control means no empire. Period.

But we do have a large footprint in the rest of the world, and have military bases all across the globe. Is that a form of empire?

Look, the whole point of having an empire is to take the wealth out of the colonies and return them to enrich the home country. The US not only does not pull in the resources of other nations�it does exactly the reverse. We pump billions and billions of dollars annually into those nations that host our facilities, and the minute any one of those nations decides we are no longer welcome, we pack our bags, leave and turn those billion-dollar institutions over to the host country. (Look up Subic Bay and Clark Air Base in the Philippines for some recent examples)

This is not �imperial behavior.� It is, in fact, the precise opposite of imperial behavior. I guess somehow STOP U.S. ANTI-IMPERIALISM just doesn�t have the same snap somehow for the North Korean-backed International A.N.S.W.E.R. crowd. Color me shocked.

There are millions of people � actually, probably billions now � who genuinely believe that the wealth of the US was stolen from third world countries. This is one of the great perks of living a life free of the ability to think critically and do a little research. I have heard this slander repeated so many times I decided to look into some actual numbers to see if there is anything to this charge. This is a perfect example of how critical thinking allows you to see the unseen. That attitude, Google and ten minutes is all you need to shoot lies like this down in flames.

Okay. The US Per capita income is $41,300. That of a poor, third world country �Djibouti, say -- is $2,070.

Now it gets interesting. The US gross domestic product � the value of everything we produce in a year -- was last measured as $12 trillion, 277 billion dollars (hundreds of millions of dollars being too insignificant to count in this economy).

The GDP of Djibouti is 1 billion, 641 million US dollars.

A little basic arithmetic shows me that the US has a GDP 7,481 times greater than Djibouti. A 365 day year, composed of 24 hours in a day, yields 8,760 hours per year. Hang on to that for a sec.

Now, let�s suppose the U.S. went into Djibouti with the Marines, and stole every single thing that�s produced there in a year�just grant the premise and say we stole every goddam thing they make. If we hauled away all of Djibouti�s annual wealth, how long would it run the U.S. Economy, which is 7,481 times greater?

Well, 8,760 hours divided by 7,481 gives you an answer of 1.17 hours. In other words, it takes the U.S. 1.17 hours to produce what Djibouti produces in a year.

If the US really did go in and steal everything that the bottom thirty countries in the world produce, it might power the US economy for two or three days.

Conversely, the billions and billions of dollars the US spends annually in aid, rent, etc. � plus uncounted billions more from private American charities � would supply the entire GDP of Djibouti for hundreds of years.

Where�s your Imperialism argument now?

You Can not Simultaneously Prevent and Prepare for War � Albert Einstein.

My first paying job in my life was teaching astronomy at the Miami Space Transit Planetarium. I have been fascinated by the stars and planets for as long as I have had a memory. I bow to no one in my respect and admiration for Albert Einstein�s stunning insights into the nature of space and time, matter and energy. That a young Austrian clerk sitting in a Swiss patent office could puzzle out the structure of the Universe using only logic and imagination is in my mind the greatest feat of intelligence in human history.

With that said, why aren�t the cosmological theories of George Patton or Dwight Eisenhower ever the subject of bumper stickers? Probably because cosmology is well outside their realm of expertise.

E=mc2 is a statement of such beauty and elegance that it commands belief in an ordered and structured universe. Human nature is not so ordered and structured. Psychology is not as predictable as gravity, and it is a mistake to think that it is. Human beings are subject to Murphy�s Laws, not Newton�s.

Quoting Einstein is an appeal to authority. But politics is not an area where Einstein is an authority. I give Einstein�s opinions on spacetime great weight; his opinions on politics and human nature, not so much. No one holds Einstein up as a great authority on fashion, grooming, family life, football or hairstyling. Why? Because the modern era�s greatest mind clearly didn�t know diddly-squat about them.

Even in some areas where Einstein was an expert � quantum gravity, for example � he was flat-out wrong. �God does not play dice with the Universe," he wrote, trying to come to grips with quantum probability theory. Well, turns out God does indeed play dice with the Universe, despite what Einstein says. Einstein refused to follow the quantum evidence based on the fact that he had a clear emotional aversion to the consequences of that theory. As a victim of national militarism in Germany, he quite naturally had an emotional aversion to that too. But history is the laboratory of human behavior, and history shows wherever you care to look that while being prepared for war may not guarantee peace, being notoriously unprepared is as sure an invitation to war as you are likely to see. To quote a politician on politics, rather than an astrophysicist: �Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because America was too strong.� There is much more refined political wisdom where that came from, if you are inclined to look.

Quoting Einstein on politics is like catching a review of the latest Rob Schneider movie with the banner THE GREATEST COMEDY EVER MADE!! The source is never Variety or the L.A. Times, but rather the Palatka Times-Dispatch or the Oshkosh Super-Coupon Review. The quote is huge, the source type microscopic, because the authority is not much of an authority at all. (The smaller the source font on the screen, the more suspicious you should be.)

There is a restaurant near Santa Monica Airport, called The Spitfire Grill. It�s done in a WWII motif. In the restroom, at about eye-level for a person remaining still for a few moments, is a magazine page from 1947, talking about Soviet atrocities on local populations. The last sentence of the article almost took my breath away for its courage and moral clarity. It said:

PEACE IS FOR THE STRONG!

Gravitational lensing during a solar eclipse proved Einstein correct. History, recorded again and again through the ages, does the same for this unknown article writer, no matter what The Great Man had to say.

The day may come when the lion and the lamb lie down together, but if it does, we'd better damn sure be the lion. I don't know who came up with that line, but I wish to hell it had been me.

Give Peace a Chance

Sounds reasonable to me. How much of a chance? Three years? Five? Ten years? See, now you�re playing me for an idiot.

We gave Saddam Hussein thirteen years before the Great Rush to War. He could have stopped the whole thing by coming clean, up until the instant the first tanks crossed the border. But he did not. We know what �coming clean� to weapons inspectors looks like in the real world, because a few days after they pulled Saddam from his hidey-hole, Libya�s Colonel Khadafi turned over all the details of his nascent nuclear weapons program: blueprints, locations, stockpiles�the whole enchilada. We gave peace an even longer chance with the good Colonel, and we got bupkis: bupkis, and Pan Am 103 exploding over Lockerbie. That was our peace dividend. I can not see how anyone can deny that the idea of a little old-fashioned war and its consequence on dictators may have focused Mr. Khadafi�s mind somewhat.

War is not the Answer

Okay. I�m listening. What is the answer?

No, you don�t get to say I don�t know but I know it's not war! If you admit you don�t know what the answer is, then it logically follows that you are in no position to say what it is not.

With regards to Iraq, Saddam started a suicidal war with Iran, and then with the United States. He then proceeded to break every single element of his cease-fire agreement�shooting at allied airplanes trying to belatedly enforce no-fly zones to prevent him from massacring even more of his own people, continuing with a well-documented and undeniable effort to obtain nuclear weapons, and all the rest.

So what is the answer, Mr. Moral Superiority? Sanctions? We sanctioned him for 13 years. He bribed the UN and stole billions of dollars for new palaces and industrial shredders for the opposition. Should we just leave him alone? The New York Times reported a few days ago that Saddam was a year or two away from a nuclear weapon. Do you trust the man�s judgment after Iran and Kuwait? I don�t.

War is an ugly, messy, filthy business, and the greatest slander I have seen in these last three years is the idea that somehow the pro-war crowd thinks war is a great thing. War is an awful thing. And yet I am pro war in this case. How can that be?

This is probably the most useful thing I�ll write in this essay:

Doves think the choice is between fighting or not fighting. Hawks think the choice is between fighting now or fighting later.

If you understand this, you understand everything that follows. You don�t need to think the other side is insane, or evil. Both hawks and doves are convinced they are doing the right thing. But it seems to me there is a choice between peace at any price and a peace worth having.

We cannot undo the invasion and compare that timeline to the one we have. The only data we can use to compare these philosophies is embedded in the pages of history. What does history show?

I cannot think of a single example where appeasement � giving in to an aggressive adversary in the hope that it will convince them to become peaceful themselves � has provided any lasting peace or security. I can say in complete honesty that I look forward to hearing of any historical example that shows it does.

What I do see are barbarian forces closing in and sacking Rome because the Romans no longer had the will to defend themselves. Payments of tribute to the barbarian hordes only funded the creation of larger and better-armed hordes. The depredations of Viking Raiders throughout Northern Europe produced much in the way of ransom payments. The more ransom that was paid, the more aggressive and warlike the Vikings became. Why? Because it was working, that�s why. And why not? Bluster costs nothing. If you can scare a person into giving you his hard-earned wealth, and suffer no loss in return, well then you my friend have hit the Vandal Jackpot. On the other hand, if you are, say, the Barbary Pirates, raiding and looting and having a grand time of it all, and across the world sits a Jefferson � you know, Mr. Liberty and Restraint � who has decided he has had enough and sends out an actual Navy to track these bastards down and sink them all� well, suddenly raiding and piracy is not such a lucrative occupation. So, contrary to doomsayers throughout history, the destruction of the Barbary Pirates did not result in the recruitment of more Pirates. The destruction of the Barbary Pirates resulted in the destruction of the Barbary Pirates.

And it is just so with terrorism. When the results of terrorism do the terrorist more harm than good, terrorism will go away. We need to harm these terrorists, not reward them, if we ever expect to see the end of them.

There are endless examples of this sort of thing. It makes me wish I had a mind on the level of Victor Davis Hansen so I could name every single one of them for you. But one example rings very loud to my ears.

After World War II, the allies captured the records of the German High Command. I was stunned to discover that the Wehrmacht�s generals were so appalled at Hitler�s decision to test the resolve of the Western Powers (by marching into the demilitarized Rhineland) that they were prepared to remove or even assassinate him should there have been any resistance to the move. They were terrified of finding themselves in another war. Hitler, on the other hand, couched the violation in the same reasonable-sounding terms that Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi would have undoubtedly approved of, and in he went.

Thus began the most horrible and tragic appeasement in the history of the world.

According to the Germans' own records, a platoon of French soldiers, stationed on that bridge and unwilling to retreat (there�s your problem right there) would have caused the overthrow of Adolph Hitler, and the abandonment of his expansionist policies. Why? Because it wouldn�t have paid, that�s why. As it happened, intimidating the West paid handsomely: The Sudetenland, Austria, Czechoslovakia�It was only when the West finally realized the fruits of appeasement that Hitler was stopped. If it had happened much sooner it would have been much easier. If it had happened at the beginning it would have been painless.

Even though I did not live through it, I don�t forget lessons like this. Not something this clear. Likewise, I do not forget things that I did live through: that bullies who take your lunch money will beat you up more if you give them money and less if you fight back. There�s a logic behind this � predators have to survive every encounter with their prey, so why take chances on anything other than the sick and the weak � and there is an emotional component, too: and that is respect.

Thugs and bullies cannot produce anything of value. They have to take it from those who can. Giving it to them in the hope they will go away does not engender love or respect in them � just the opposite. It creates more contempt and confidence. If it didn�t � if they behaved like sensible people � they wouldn�t be thugs and bullies in the first place.

This projection of rationality onto irrational people is the linchpin of the liberal failure to understand human nature. To those who tend to believe every claim on innocence from career criminals, I recommend COPS therapy. Watch any single episode of COPS and you will see people earnestly swear -- I swear to God, sir! � that they do not possess the drugs they are holding in their hands. What�s that crack rock on your car seat? That�s not my crack rock, sir! It�s in your car. This isn�t my car! I swear to God sir! There are five crack rocks in your pocket. These aren�t my pants, sir! A friend gave me these pants just before I left the house! I swear to God, sir!

I have heard it reliably reported that once a police officer confronted a heroin addict who had passed out with a needle in his arm. When confronted with this, he supposedly said, that�s not my arm!

Telling reasonable people what they want to hear is a survival skill for criminals. They don�t get very far without knowing how to play people. In Narcotics Anonymous they have a spot-on term for this kind of behavior. They call it �dope-fiending.� How did you get that car? I dope-fiended my mom into letting me drive it. When a spokesman for Hamas or Al Qaeda tells you that they are only fighting America or the Jews because they are worried about Global Warming, you are being dope-fiended.

How much more control do we have over terrorists if they are people with a series of reasonable demands, rather than murdering misogynists who want women enslaved and Jews and homosexuals killed on sight? See, if it�s our fault, all we have to do is change and they will go away. But if it�s who we are, rather than what we do � well that�s a little more scary, isn�t it? That might be a little too much for the kind, gentle, sensitive latte-sipping lunch crowd to fully get behind. But that is what I hear these 7th Century murderers saying, and that is what I see them doing, and I choose not to look away just because I do not much like what I see.

Some people will believe anything if they want to believe it hard enough. Which leads us to�

Bush Lied, People Died.

Recent reports of the advanced state of the Iraqi nuclear weapons program, and the confirmed presence of 700+ chemical shells leaves this chestnut in some disarray. However, even if you take that away, the entire concept is a cowardly and petty retreat spoken by people who know better.

Here is a pretty decent encapsulation of what both Republicans and Democrats had to say about Saddam and WMD�s. You will find Bush�s and Rumsfeld�s rhetoric somewhat less adamant and warlike than that of Mr. and Mrs. Clinton, John Kerry, John Edwards, Al Gore, Robert Byrd, Nancy Pelosi, Hans Blix, Madeline Albright, Sandy Berger and all the rest. These were elected representatives who studied the same intelligence that the White House did, and came to the same conclusion.

Unfortunately for them, Al Gore in his unbridled enthusiasm went and invented the Internet, and so now there is a record of what they said and when, available to the great unwashed masses. It shows a group of people deeply concerned about what was a pressing threat to this country. And now, almost all of them claim they were lied to? Are they capable of reading intelligence reports themselves, or did Bush have to read it to them aloud, with them seated at his knee in My Pet Goat fashion, skipping the parts he didn�t think would make a good sell? Some people say that they did not get the same intelligence that Bush got. To the degree that is or isn�t true, the record shows that it was the more outlandish claims that were not included, so that the intelligence that led them to come out against Saddam and in favor of military action was less provocative than the intelligence the President and Secretaries of State and Defense saw.

The invasion of Iraq was meant to prevent Saddam Hussein from using Weapons of Mass Destruction. This mission was accomplished by the time President Bush stood on that carrier deck. The huge majority of casualties we have incurred in the occupation and reconstruction of Iraq have come about by our willingness to rebuild and secure a country that we owed nothing to whatsoever.

Here is the legacy of the Bush Lied, People Died crowd: in the future, we know that no good deeds � building of hundreds of schools and hospitals � will go reported. We know that no foul deeds � a handful of idiots humiliating prisoners over the course of a few days � will ever be put into perspective.

So why do it? Why build schools and hospitals, and protect polling places, and suffer the casualties we have suffered to get a country on it�s feet, if all we hear and see is the negative and the undeniable failures? The next time we have to go and kick the hell out of some band of rabid crazies, why not just kick the hell out of them and then go home? Because there will be a next time, and I suspect sooner rather than later. By refusing to report the myriad successes and kindnesses, our compassionate and caring moral betters in the media have only shown there is very little reason to do them in the first place, except for the satisfaction of our own morality and conscience -- which I hope will be enough.

Let me leave you with something very, very important. It is the greatest logical fallacy of them all, and if you hope to gain any perspective in the world today, I believe you have to understand what I am about to say in your bones.

You cannot just count the hits and not record the misses.

May I show you something to make this point?

What you are about to see is a graphical representation of commercial air flights over the US on any given day. You will see dawn on the east coast as more and more flights get airborne, and watch morning spread to the west as the country comes alive. It is one of the most beautiful marriages of science and art I have ever seen. It is here. Go take a peek then come back. I'll still be here.

Every dot in that animation is a jetliner, carrying hundreds of people. This is the first time I have ever actually seen the miracle that takes place in our skies every single day.

Why am I showing you this? Well, because every single dot in that ocean of sparks is a successful flight. Tens of thousands of flights land in this country every single day and no one says a word about it. And yet, when there is an accident � and you would have to watch every dot in that animation almost 2000 times to get back to the last fatal accident by a large-scale carrier � that sticks in our minds, obviously, and that image of burning wreckage is what stays with some people on their entire flight. They do not think about all the millions of flights that land safely. Nor do they think about the thousands of car accidents that occur with so much greater frequency.

Why?

Because we are recording only the hits � the crashes � and not recording the misses, namely, the safe landings. If you had to drive to work every day listening to radio announcements of every successful landing, you would be listening to a cacophony of flight numbers twenty-four hours a day. After a few years of this you might be able to get a glimmer of perspective on the safety of modern air travel.

Likewise in Iraq. Hand out candies to children on a daily basis, and the smiles and gratitude are nowhere to be seen on US television. But if some death-loving lunatic decides to scatter body parts to the four winds you can bet that will get the News media�s attention. Complete a new hospital, or a water treatment plant, or bring electricity or television stations to neighborhoods that never had them before? Yawn.

On the day of the last Iraqi elections -- the day they ratified the constitution the press said these people would never ratify -- CNN's lead story was about nasty rain showers sweeping the southeast. About these historic elections there was heard not a peep.

Iraqi TV has a version of American Idol. Did you know that? They produce hundreds of hours of comedies, game shows � all that stuff. Sounds a little arcane for Iraq, you say? A little normal? That�s because people who believe they are smarter than you have decided that such stories of hope and success do not fit the narrative needed to teach you poor ignorant slobs the lesson that you are supposed to be learning, and that lesson is that George Bush is a murderer while Saddam was a statesman, and that Iraq is a failure fueled by the blood of poor, innocent, child-like soldiers too stupid to realize that they are dying to line the pockets of Halliburton.

My critical thinking skills, such as they are, tell me that you might be able to corral an army and send it over there under such false pretenses. What I cannot explain is why so many people in the military re-up, two or three or four times, to go back and fight for this oil-soaked lie that people here maintain is the truth, despite what the people who have actually been over there have to say about it.

This is an all-volunteer military. Why would so many of these people keep returning to such danger, and put themselves and their families at such terrible risk, for a lie or a mistake?

If Iraq is a con game and an oil steal and an unwinnable quagmire then this just doesn�t make any sense. But back they go! That�s the data. The people most optimistic about Iraq � and those with the most to lose � are generally the same people. They are the men and women who are over there now because they believe they are doing something honorable and good. No one is forcing them to reenlist. Hear that John? I�d hire any one of these people in a heartbeat. They are brighter than the general population, and they are so far beyond their Ivory Tower critics in terms of discipline, courage, ingenuity, integrity and honor that it makes one�s head spin.

Are we beating these terrorist scumbags and child-targeting insurgent bastards? Are we winning?

Well, let�s see if we want to switch sides with them. Let�s imagine the war where the insurgents have our cards and we hold theirs.

Imagine the US completely occupied by Al Qaeda forces, subject to Sharia law. We are able to take pot shots at a few of them, and we manage to murder a few dozen of our own people every day in an attempt to stop the population from collaborating with the hated invader. But more and more Americans seem to be turning to Sharia and want to get on with their lives. We find sixty percent of the population wants Al-Qaeda to leave, but hatred for the US insurgent forces � the Wolverines � is at about 98%. The people hate the occupiers, but they despise the Wolverines.

Now imagine that a year into the occupation of America, George Bush�s two daughters were killed in a firefight with the enemy, which had surrounded the college sorority house where they were hiding. A year after that, President Bush was pulled out of a septic tank in Crawford by the Fedayeen, then put on trial and sentenced to hang, which he did on national television to widespread cheering. Condi Rice, captured in an early morning raid several years ago, has been a great source of useful information to target the American resistance, and Donald Rumsfeld was killed by a suicide bomber this last summer.

Everywhere you turn � in every street and every city in America � Al Qaeda forces run security patrols, training Americans to do this for themselves. The only way to stop this is by killing our own people, which further alienates us from a populace that already despises us.

Does that feel like winning to you? Me neither. Welcome to the insurgency.

Support the Troops � Bring Them Home Now!

Hey, I have an idea! How about we support the troops by bringing them home victorious? Whether the Iraqi people deserve it or not is not terribly relevant to me anymore. The troops deserve it. They deserve to leave that place on its feet, with an imperfect government � like every other government � and crime and death and all the rest but with some sense of hope amid all of that. Perhaps the same hope that keeps Iraqi men joining their police and security forces despite the danger and the horror. Regardless of what happens from now on, these people have accomplished something. They have given millions of people hope who had no hope before. That is noble and honorable and good, and nothing and no one can take that from them. That is theirs.

It�s a slog. It�s a slow, heart-rending miserable slog, and I find it as frustrating and disappointing as everyone. But I read history � a lot of history � and I have come to discover that from the inside, ALL wars are thus. We look back on World War II as a golden road to the inevitable victory, but it did not feel that way at the time. It was a miserable, awful, bloody mess with a list of disasters as long as the list of triumphs, but triumph and disaster alike were paid for in blood not because it was desirable or good or easy, but because it was necessary.

The people who are there now, who keep returning to finish the job, seem by and large to understand this. Supporting the troops by calling their mission a mistake and saying they are dying for a lie is not what I call support. Dennis Miller absolutely knocked the wind out of me when he said �I support this war, but even if I didn�t I�d lie and say I did, as long as we have those kids over there.�

This ongoing burden is a miserable solution to an ugly problem, but I believe it is the best of a series of very bad choices brought upon us not by our own doing, but by megalomaniacal lunatics who we will have to fight either now, over there, which is terrible and bloody, or later, here, which will be worse. Walking away from this fight now is like quitting chemotherapy early: immediate relief at the cost of long term consequences that are far more unpleasant.

I hate to be the person to tell you that the sub is made of cardboard. I wish it weren�t so. But sometimes all the solutions are awful, and it is the mark of a responsible adult, and a responsible adult nation, to realize that some problems you can not get around. Some problems you have to go through.

(In Part II we�ll look at Conspiracy theories: Mooon Landing Hoaxers, the Kennedy assassination, Chemtrails, and the 9/11 "truthers.")

Anyone interested in discussing any of this can do so over here. As for me, I'm always happy to hear from you.