To Whom it May Concern

Never give up! Never surrender! -- Galaxy Quest, in which a television cast is kidnapped by aliens who did not know the difference between fiction and reality.

Within 10 minutes of Sen. John McCain’s speech on foreign policy at the University of Denver he was interrupted by several protesters four separate times –- each chanting “end this war” repeatedly until they were removed.

The crowd quickly drowned them out by chanting “John McCain. John McCain, John McCain.”

McCain responded each time, drawing a standing ovation when he said, “By the way, I will never surrender in Iraq. Our American troops will come home with victory and with honor.” -- Alan Gathright, David Montero, Rocky Mountain News Originally published 07:48 a.m., May 27, 2008

Surrender? To whom?

You can call it a war, and yes, people are dying, even U. S. soldiers. You can point and say "Enemy," picking a different direction to point each time you say the magic word (Sunni insurgents, the Shiite Militias, Iran, Syria, "Islamofascists," terrorists, al Qaeda, and by golly we've caught 32 or more of al Qaeda's "#3 men" haven't we). But look at each one of those magic words and ask yourself, "How would we surrender to them?"

There is nobody to surrender to. They deposed, caught, and executed Saddam Hussein. That's it. Game over. No chemical or biological weapons exist. No nuclear weapons or weapons program.

The U.S. won the war on Iraq.

This is what winning looks like.

Winning looks like an average of 2-3 U.S. soldiers coming home every day in body bags. Over ten times that number come home physically injured. As for psychological damage, well, suck it up soldier, that's why we give you a G.I. Bill that will pay your way to any number of fine community colleges.

Winning means killing off an entire generation of Iraq young men, and driving much of the country into exile. Winning means disease and death for young children. Winning means lines around the block for terrorist training camps.

Winning means spilling our country's blood and treasure, like so much oil into a broken pipeline, to pool and soak into the sand.

Had we gone the invasion route, the U.S. could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different--and perhaps barren--outcome. -- George H. W. Bush and Brent Scrowcroft, "Why We Didn't Invade Iraq."

Moreover, when presented with the opportunity for "Nation Building," the shiny young minds of the Conservative Movement were handed the keys to the Kingdom, and got what you would expect. Second Amendment rights? Absolutely. Everybody in Iraq has a gun. Free speech? Well, sorta. Fourth and fifth amendments? Well, let's not let things get out of hand (*cough*Abu Ghraib*). Besides, low taxes and property rights are much more important.

The Movement Philosophy produced almost exactly what one would expect: a feudal society, based on who has the best organized militia and most loyal followers. The U.S. is the dominant warlord in a warloard state.

Besides, it's easy to point to real winners in Iraq. Saudi Arabian oil now sells for triple digits. Exxon/Mobil et al. makes almost as much money as the U.S. military spends in Iraq. Haliburton, Bechtel, Blackwater. Pick a contractor. It's a money river. A veritable paradise in the desert.

So a U.S. withdrawal might stop some of that cash flow. There's a loss right there, right on the balance sheets.

Let me now decode John McCain's original statement, because I and I alone possess the magic answer to the question "Surrender to whom?" And it's true, John McCain and the Republican Party will never surrender to...

Democrats.

Rand Contra The Ayn Rand Institute—Coda

In doing the barest minimum of research for the Rand Contra Bush postings, I ventured over to The Ayn Rand Institute, to see what sorts of things The Center for the Advancement of Objectivism had to say.

Mind you, I've seen things from the ARI show up on the op-ed pages of my local paper. These are usually the sorts of "laissez faire über alles" that one generally gets from Randians and corporate libertarians. These arguments are part of the general shell game of the kleptocracy, railing against government regulations that have been placed on businesses, but never, ever, complaining about the favors and privileges that businesses receive from government. It's "heads I win and tails you lose," a profitable little game that depends upon selective arguments and special pleading.

I forget if it was Rand or Nathaniel Branden, her then favorite acolyte, who once made the statement that selective enforcement of the law was a pernicious doctrine that is commonly used to provide the illusion of legality to what is basically a corrupt system. Given a broad enough law, everyone is guilty, so then the policeman becomes the only and arbitrary judge of who is punished. Of course, the same is true for philosophical principles, only more so, and the little hypocrisies in which people engage tells you volumes about their prejudices, their "unexamined premises," to use more Randian jargon. Selective argument is one of the most powerful weapons of rationalization, and a doctrine that holds reason and rationality above all else often resorts to rationalization to come to the "proper" result.

So I've seen the op-ed pieces from the ARI about affirmative action being racist, and about how health care is not a "right," and how environmental laws are crippling the economy, and, for that matter, how all regulations on corporations are crippling the economy. I hadn't seen any of the pro-abortion rights articles that the ARI has cooked up, but maybe I just missed them.

I also noticed, in my brief little foray, that Leonard Peikoff, who founded the ARI, has moved to a more distant connection with it, no longer being either on its board or staff. Cynic that I am, I notice that the ARI has a budget of about $5 million per year, and that it's director, one Yaron Brook receives a salary of $352,538 per year, which is 7/8 of the entire administrative expenses of the Institute. However, given that Peikoff is Ayn Rand's legal heir, and that the ARI's primary program is to supply copies of Rand's books to high school students (duck hunting where the ducks are, to quote Barry Goldwater), I imagine that Peikoff's royalties from that program may exceed Brook's salary. Just sayin'.

In any case, Rand's books sell even without the ARI collecting donations to pay for them, giving Peikoff the freedom to say anything he damn well wants to, and that would include such things as endorsing John Kerry for President and supporting Democrats in the 2006 election. I'm thinking that the ARI must be somewhat more circumspect; otherwise, some of that tasty donation money might be at risk. That money goes to those who follow the plutocracy/kleptocracy's strategy of "socialism for the rich, capitalism for the poor," to use the old quote.

Still, squirreling around in the ARI's archives can be scary.

On October 2, 2001, when he was still part of the ARI, Leonard Peikoff wrote an article that blamed Iran for the WTC bombing (with a nod to the Taliban and a possibly prescient comment that Bush did not seem much interested in pursuing the Taliban leadership as a target). Peikoff essentially called for a full scale war with Iran.

That's pretty ignorant. How many of us have chuckled at the congressmen, etc. who did not know that there were both Sunni and Shia Muslims? There was not a single Shiite among the 9/11 hijackers, and every one of them was connected to schools and mosques that have been financed by Saudi Arabia, not Iran. One would think that a Randian philosopher would understand that education and philosophy matters, but, oh, hell, who am I kidding? No, I wouldn't. Besides, some ARI folks get their licks in on Saudi Arabia, as we shall see.

Still, Peikoff seems to have come to his senses, at least in part, and how many of us can say that we were thinking clearly just three weeks after the WTC went down? But other articles on the ARI web site are much more chilling.

In “'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein, we are told that the real threat to America is something called "Islamic Totalitarianism," which is much more academically acceptable a phrase than "Islamofascism," isn't it?

The civilian population of an aggressor nation is not some separate entity unrelated to its government. An act of war is the act of a nation—an interconnected political, cultural, economic, and geographical unity. Whenever a nation initiates aggression against us, including by supporting anti-American terrorist groups and militant causes, it has forfeited its right to exist, and we have a right to do whatever is necessary to end the threat it poses.

Given that a nation's civilian population is a crucial, physically and spiritually indispensable part of its initiation of force—of its violation of the rights of a victim nation—it is a morally legitimate target of the retaliation of a victim nation. Any alleged imperative to spare noncombatants as such is unjust and deadly.

That said, if it is possible to isolate innocent individuals—such as dissidents, freedom fighters, and children—without military cost, they should not be killed; it is unjust and against one's rational self-interest to senselessly kill the innocent." -- "'Just War Theory' vs. American Self-Defense" by Yaron Brook and Alex Epstein

Oh, and it gets better. In "The 'Forward Strategy' for Failure," by Yaron Brook and Elan Journo, we get the following:

To defeat Japan thoroughly, however, required even more: To cut short the war and save untold thousands of American lives, the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The bombs laid waste to vast tracts of land, killed thousands of Japanese—and demonstrated that if Japan continued to threaten America, thousands more Japanese would suffer and die.

That overwhelming and ruthless use of force achieved its intended purpose. It ended the threat to the lives of Americans and returned them to safety—by demonstrating to the Germans and the Japanese that any attempt to implement their vicious ideologies would bring them only destruction. Defeated materially and broken in spirit, these enemies gave up. Since then Nazism and Japanese imperialism have withered as ideological forces.

Today, American self-defense requires the same kind of military action.

Yes, the Executive Director of the Ayn Rand Institute has called for massive thermonuclear strikes against Iran, Saudi Arabia, and any other country harboring "supporters of jihad against the West who cheer when Americans die."

A number of years ago, I made an attempt to deprogram a Randite or two, and my most potent argument seemed to be that Rand's "John Galt Pledge" was unworkable:

"I swear by my life and my love of it that I will never live for the sake of another man, nor ask another man to live for mine." --from Atlas Shrugged

It's a potent promise, actually, similar to the virtue that some people believe can be obtained from Aikido, the ability to protect yourself from the predations of others, but to refrain from harming innocents. In my attempts to deprogram Randites, I started with the fact that it is sometimes impossible to keep from harming innocents, what we call "collateral damage." Then what? Because once the line is crossed, once you allow yourself to harm, even kill, innocent people for the sake of your own interest, then where is your morality? How much of a sham does this make of your ethics?

A few actually wavered, and maybe later they began to think critically about Randian philosophy. Maybe they even began to think for themselves.

But I am now left with the unsettling feeling that perhaps they just cranked it up to 11, and rationalized it all into a nice genocidal package, just like the folks at the Ayn Rand Institute. Dear god, they really are bugfuck crazy.

One of the Places where it all Began

That was then:

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like, "I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive . . ."And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about 100 miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: "Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?"

Then it was quiet again. My attorney had taken his shirt off and was pouring beer on his chest, to facilitate the tanning process. "What the hell are you yelling about," he muttered, staring up at the sun with his eyes closed and covered with wraparound Spanish sunglasses. "Never mind," I said. "It's your turn to drive." I hit the brakes and aimed the Great Red Shark toward the shoulder of the highway. No point mentioning those bats, I thought. The poor bastard will see them soon enough. --Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Hunter S. Thompson

This is Now:

Saturday noon. Recollection of the last 24 hours is excruciatingly difficult; I have taken every remaining pill in my kit bag, and yet somehow, despite the presence of enough chemicals in my system to transform me into the Joker, I have developed a raging cold. My throat is nearly sealed shut, which may work to my advantage since I’m reaching the point at which the rude answers which bubble up in my skull every time someone speaks to me are threatening to spill over into actual vocalization. Ever since Wednesday I have been asking myself in re my pharmacopia: how many is too many? Crashing into every sharp corner in my hotel room, I know the answer: however many I took when I woke up this morning.

Last night was the Ronald Reagan Banquet, a dinner which was for and unfortunately not of Ronald Reagan. Eating a dehydrated teriyaki jerky chunk of the old fraud might have given me some of his strength. I’ve heard the words “Ronald Reagan” and “tax cuts” so many times now they’re beginning to lose whatever meaning they might have once had, and Will, that payola-stuffed bloviator of manifest destiny, will say them another three dozen times while I tuck into my mashed potatoes. After the ghouls-gone-wild reception given to Ann Coulter a few hours ago, the crowd receives him politely and respectfully, and even considering the fact that this is an older crowd, made up largely of the parents of the rich kids hooting and snarling at Ann’s anti-McCain jeremiad, it still has the tone of someone forced to hear their grandpa read cowboy poetry just after they’ve come back from yelling “SHOW US YOUR TITS!” to drunken frat girls. Will himself is perfunctory at best, showing his chipper cheerleader side only when discussing Old Mother Reagan; the rest of the time, he’s just there to pick up a check. He even senses the hostility in the room when called upon to mention the Supplicant McCain: urging the crowd to be “happy warriors” for the default candidate, he sounds like a bored Sunday school teacher leading his tenth consecutive round of “I’ve Got the Joy” for a group of sugared-up fourth-graders.--Mister Leonard Pierce, The Beast is Red, Chapter 12: Show Us Your Twits, from Sadly, No.

TAWK

I've said before that I hate the word "meme," and viral isn't that far behind, but I wouldn't mind if this gets passed around.

I didn't have a favorite Beatle, so John Lennon wasn't my favorite. But I loved him in the way that one loves someone who gave so much to the world and, for that matter, me personally, if one's personal reaction to mass culture is personal, and I've lived my life as if it is. How different, and poorer, would the world have been without Lennon? We'll never know how much poorer the world is for our loss of him.

So I hated the guy, you know, the asshole who killed John Lennon. And one day, I realized that was the only way I was ever again going to refer to him: The Asshole Who Killed John Lennon. It is the only revenge I know how to take.

Part of the creepy little smile is the knowledge of the fame of notoriety. Kill someone famous and you become as famous as they are, if only for a moment, and you'll be famous forever, in some small way. Nobody plus Somebody equals…

Nobody.

The Oklahoma mall gunman is said to have wanted "to go out in style," and told someone that he'd soon be famous. Not from me, sport. Your name is now officially The Asshole Who Killed a bunch of people in Nebraska.

And hey, you, yes, you, 24 hour news cycle TV, print journalism, and every cash-in-on-the-carnage magazine and book publisher. You're just the gawkers at a car wreck. You slow down the traffic of important information to fill the channel with this crap, TAWK news items. People die every day, in all kinds of ways. Why is this kind of death news? Why are you feeding these assholes with exactly what they crave, attention?

And don't give me any crap about how people should be aware of "the warning signs." The "warning signs" amount to being upset and looking peculiar. Yeah, it's really helping the cause to turn every citizen into a spy, ready to turn in anyone with a mental illness, or a perceived drug habit, or a brush with the law. Yeah, we've got enough resources to watch every one of them.

Crap, I'm just glad that no one has figured out a way to put up instant billboards next to traffic accidents, extra premium if it was an injury accident, because blood on the pavement draws more eyeballs.

So screw TAWK John Lennon, and TAWK@ Virginia Tech and TAWK@ the Texas Tower, and all the rest of those losers who have tried to make losers of the rest of us. I'm just trying to maneuver as quickly as I can through the mess of gawkers at the fatality accident.

The Right Tool for the Right Job

I led a highly compartmentalized existence in high school. At the Downtown Nashville YMCA I was a lifeguard, swam and wrestled competitively, did gymnastics, ran the track, lifted weights, and played pickup basketball. At Donelson High School, I was a dweeby little nerd, or, since those terms were not in use, a brain. Brains were considered to be non-athletic, and I fulfilled that stereotype to the extent that I just didn’t care much for competitive team sports, especially spectator team sports. So I didn’t go out for varsity teams (which would have meant after school practice that would have interfered with my trips to the Y), didn’t attend football/baseball/basketball games or the pep rallies associated with them. In gym class, while I wasn’t the last guy chosen, I wasn’t the first either, and I didn’t really care all that much.

Nevertheless, I did play the games, to the best of my abilities, which may have been why I slipped on the gravel when running to first. Later, there were some jokes about how it’s not correct play to slide into first, but at the time I think that the sight of blood temporarily suppressed the jokes.

And there was blood. We were all dressed in the standard gym attire: tennis shoes, gym shorts and t-shirt. I’d made a three-point landing, both knees and an elbow and they were bad scrapes. The blood began to trickle down my legs pretty much as soon as I stood up. Coach Ellis cocked his head in the direction of the school and said, “Come with me.”

We went to the School Nurse’s office, but she wasn’t there. So I dabbed away the blood, whereupon Coach Ellis took a bottle of iodine and proceeded to pour it directly onto the raw injuries.

I don’t remember if I whined, yelped, said “Oww” or what, but Coach looked at me directly and said, “You’re not real good at handling pain, are you, Pete?” (Note: I was “Pete” until I left Nashville to go to RPI).

I developed some impressive scabs, and I had to curtail swimming for a couple of weeks, but the scrapes healed up without scars, so all turned out okay.

Some twenty-odd years later, I attended my twenty year high school reunion. Not everybody I wanted to see was there, so I made a point of going out to visit Jim and Betty in LaVerne. Jim had been on the football team, so he knew the coaching staff better than I. At one point, he mentioned that he’d seen Coach Ellis a few months back and they’d gone out to have a few beers after work.

“Yeah,” said Jim. “He gave up coaching and went to work for a bank. It’s a lot more money than coaching high school, and he told me that he really enjoys his work.”

“So what does he do there?” I asked.

“He’s the loan foreclosure officer.”

“Oh,” I said, because there really wasn’t anything else to say.

I Have Officially Scared Myself

The folks at The World's Fair call it a meme, but it's really just a game:

...the premise is that you will attempt to find 5 statements, which if you were to type into google (preferably google.com, but we'll take the other country specific ones if need be), you'll find that you are returned with your blog as the number one hit.

This takes a bit of effort since finding these statements takes a little trial and error, but I'm going to guess that this meme might yield some interesting insight on the blog in question.

To make it easier, we'll let you use a search statement enclosed in quotations - this is just to increase your chances of turning up as number one, but if you happen to have a website with the awesome traffic to command the same statement without quotations, then flaunt it baby! Of course, once you find your 5 statements, pass the meme on to others.

Okay, this blog I have here is not a high traffic site; I'm pretty sure I have yet to hit triple digits for a single day. But...

Killus gives my sff.net web page. But the following single words bring you here:

• trademarksism
• semi-karma
• vertkrieg
• vuutle

But wait! There's more! The following search strings, sans quotes, also come up #1 on Google:

• brittle strategies
• John Galt is a slan
• fox hollow cafe lena
• nonrepresentational art pollack
• nonrepresentational art richard powers
• creepy little smile
• death rays and disintegrators
• playing the rent
• dead catfish under the drivers seat
• rocket boys meet radioactive boy scout
• max headroom stirner
• magic market fairy dust
• phony tough crazy brave alsop
• privation morality
• tihs not typo
• dorothy slave girl of oz
• knurdly lasers
• slan a critique

These need quotes:

• "black swan bashing"
• "son of on the road"
• "moral equivalent of socialism"
• "why barry goldwater lost tennessee"

I'm giving up now. And maybe going upstairs to pull the covers over my head.

The Emperor's New Clothes

Once upon a time, in a Kingdom by the sea, the Emperor decided to buy a new wardrobe for the annual procession.

It may seem odd that the Kingdom had an Emperor, but his father had been ruler of a small Kingdom, and his mother the ruler of another small Kingdom, each claiming one of two valleys nestled between the mountains and the sea. When the two kingdoms were merged by marriage (a fine, traditional, arranged union), "King" no longer seemed grand enough, or so their most powerful advisor said. So at the suggestion of the advisor, whose own title was simply "First Minister," the ruler of the land became the "Emperor."

The people of both Kingdoms rejoiced, since it is ever so much grander to be an Empire than a Kingdom. And the Emperor and Empress ruled grandly until they both died (far too young, all agreed), and then their only son was elevated to the throne.

The newly crowned Emperor loved beautiful new clothes. His only interests were going to the theater or in riding about in his carriage where he could show off his new clothes. He had a different costume for every hour of the day.

You might surmise from this description that the Emperor was at least mildly vainglorious, and susceptible to the flattery and blandishments of his advisors. This was perhaps true, but you should remember that the Emperor had never in his life heard anything but flattery, and had never seen anything that would tell him that there are more important things in life than appearances. So his only worry in life was to dress in elegant clothes, and he changed clothes almost every hour to show them off to his people. He never heard anything from his people save appreciation and admiration.

Word of the Emperor's refined habits spread over his kingdom and beyond. Two scoundrels who had heard of the Emperor's vanity decided to take advantage of it. They introduced themselves at the gates of the palace with a scheme in mind.

"We are tailors and weavers who have dressed the aristocracy of the many European capitals. After many years of research we have invented an extraordinary method to weave a cloth so light and fine that it is almost invisible. In fact it cannot be seen by anyone who is too stupid to appreciate its quality."

The Chief of the Guards heard the scoundrels' strange story and sent for the court Chamberlain. The Chamberlain notified the First Minister, who went to the Emperor and disclosed the news. The Emperor's curiosity got the better of him and he decided to see the two immigrants.

"Your Highness, this cloth will be woven in colors and patterns created especially for you. Its beauty will be in direct proportion to the intelligence, refinement and taste of the observer." The Emperor gave the two men a bag of gold coins in exchange for their promise to begin working on the fabric immediately.

"Just tell us what you need to get started and we'll give it to you," said the Emperor. The two tailors asked for a loom, silk, and gold thread. Then they set to work. The Emperor thought he had spent his money quite well: in addition to getting a new extraordinary suit, he would discover which of his subjects were stupid, incompetent, or lacking in refinement and taste. A few days later, he called the First Minister.

"Go and see how the work is proceeding," the Emperor told him, "and come back to let me know."

The First Minister was welcomed by the two weavers.

"We're almost finished, but we need more gold thread. Here, Excellency! Admire the colors, feel the softness!" The old man bent over the loom and looked at the fabric that was not there.

"What a marvelous fabric," he told them. "I'm sure it will do the job. I'll certainly tell the Emperor."

"We are happy to hear that!" said the two weavers. The Minister inquired about the colors and the unusual patterns. As the weavers described them, the Minister listened closely so that he would be able repeat what they said when he reported back to the Emperor.

Finally, the Emperor received the announcement that the two tailors had come to take all the measurements needed to sew his new suit.

"Come in," the Emperor ordered. Even as they bowed, the two men pretended to be holding large roll of fabric.

"Here it is your Highness, the result of our labor," the unscrupulous men said. "We have worked night and day but, at last, the most beautiful fabric in the world is ready for you. Look at the colors and feel how fine it is." At first the Emperor did not see any colors and could not feel any cloth between his fingers. But he strained his eyes and after a while he felt like fainting. Luckily the throne was right behind him and he sat down. As his vision swirled he saw a few spots and convinced himself that they were where the fabric should be.

"Ah," he said at last. "It is quite marvelous work."

Once they had taken the measurements, the two began cutting the air with scissors while sewing with their needles an invisible cloth.

"Your Highness, you'll have to take off your clothes to try on your new ones." The two scoundrels draped the new clothes on him and then held up a mirror.

"Yes, this is a beautiful suit and it looks very good on me," the Emperor said trying to look comfortable. "You've done a fine job."

Then it was time for the grand procession.

The Emperor summoned his carriage and the ceremonial parade was formed. A group of dignitaries walked at the very front of the procession and anxiously scrutinized the faces of the people in the street. Applause welcomed the royal procession.

The Emperor rode beneath a beautiful canopy, and all the people in the street and in their windows said, "Goodness, the emperor's new clothes are amazing! What a perfect fit!" No one wanted to admit to seeing nothing, for then it would be said that he was unfit for his position, or that he was stupid, or that he lacked refinement and taste. So each person sang the praises of the Emperor's New Clothes. Indeed, none of the Emperor's clothes had ever before received such praise.

Everyone said, loud enough for the others to hear: "Look at the Emperor's New Clothes! They are beautiful! What a marvelous train! And the colors! The colors of that beautiful fabric! I have never seen anything like it in my life!" They all tried to conceal their disappointment at not being able to see the clothes, and since nobody was willing to admit his own stupidity and incompetence, they all behaved as the two scoundrels had predicted.

A child, however, who had no important job and could only see things as his eyes showed them to him, went up to the carriage.

"The Emperor is naked," he said.

"Fool!" his father reprimanded, running after him. "Don't talk nonsense!" But the boy's remark, which had been heard by the bystanders, was repeated over and over again. And soon the remarks were reported to the First Minister.

"Please excuse me, sire," said the First Minister. "There is something I must do."

The First Minister found the boy and his family where they were being held by the Chief of the Guards and several of his men. "Is this the boy who cannot see the Emperor's New Clothes?" asked the First Minister? His men nodded.

"We must nip stupidity in the bud," said the First Minister. "Put out his eyes and remove the tongue of anyone who repeats what he has said."

So the First Minister returned to the procession. By the time he had rejoined the Emperor, the praise of the Emperor's New Clothes had grown much louder, and more poetic. All who watched vied with their neighbors to vehemently assert their admiration for the fineness of his garb.

The procession was a great success. Soon, the tailors had their own clothing shop, where they prepared clothes for the aristocracy of the Kingdom. Word of the fashion soon spread and tourism flourished. Visitors came from all parts of the world to marvel at the magnificent clothing worn by the Emperor and his subjects, especially the younger subjects, who learned to dance and cavort for the entertainment of foreign audiences. Much money was thereby added to the Kingdom's coffers.

And so has our Kingdom flourished, and all are happy and content, even, we think, those eyeless, tongue-less waifs whose moans caress the darkness and who do so help us dream and sleep at night.

Patch 22

The lawsuit of the ACLU against warrantless wiretaps was dismissed in Federal Court yesterday. The ACLU could not prove that they were being subject to secret wiretaps that lacked warrants, so they did not have the standing to sue.

Patch 22 could take care of this problem. Patch 22 includes the capability of detecting all secret wiretaps on any telecommunications device, including cell phones, land lines, and semaphore. The device itself need not use the Patch 22 download, but the results are only available on a machine running Patch 22.

Patch 22 will run on all computing devices, including those running Windows, MacOS, Linux, AIX, Unix, DOS, and CPM. Patch 22 is available as a set of function calls in Forth. It contains a series of properties and methods available as identical objects in Java, C++, and Smalltalk. Patch 22 features a library for Fortran, Algol, PL-1, Pascal, Cobol, Simula, Snoball, Lisp, Dynamo, Ada, and Basic. Patch 22 allows disassembly to universal assembly language.

With Patch 22 you can square the circle, trisect the angle, and duplicate the cube. Patch 22 is subject to neither Russell's Paradox, nor Gödel's Proof. Patch 22 solves the halting problem and can find a solution to NP complete problems in linear time.

Patch 22 can crack any code, and create codes that cannot be broken. Patch 22 is not subject to the law of diminishing returns. Financial calculations done with the Patch 22 Portfolio Manager replace the Invisible hand with an Iron Fist.

Patch 22 can bring order from chaos and solve the turbulence problem. It can create branches of Government where none have previously existed. It can allow the simultaneous determination of position and momentum, even of virtual particles, quantum foam, and Vice Presidents.

Patch 22 allows the creation of alternate realities and the negation of prior facts without loss of verisimilitude or candor. Patch 22 makes previous statements inoperative. Patch 22 is new and improved, while it is also from an ancient tradition. Patch 22 is from an ancient tradition of new and improved products.

Patch 22 exists in the realm of Platonic Non-Contradiction. It is part of a large database of Platonic algorithms. Patch 22 contains the entire database of Platonic algorithms. But wait, there's more.

Patch 22 contains a physical and biological interface. Patch 22 can clean your kitchen floor, cook a meal, mind the kids, and cure cancer. Patch 22 can let you work while on vacation, and sleep while you are wide awake. Patch 22 can halt the aging process and kill every man, woman, and child on Earth.

Patch 22 can go faster than light. Patch 22 can achieve Absolute Zero. Patch 22 can accessorize.

Patch 22 can be downloaded via the Platonic Empiricizer. The Platonic Empiricizer is option 22 in the 22^nd function library in Patch 22.

That Creepy Little Smile

Lee Harvey Oswald, acting alone and without accomplices, shot and killed the President and wounded Texas Governor John Connally from the sixth floor window of the Texas School Book Depository Building in Dallas on Nov. 22, 1963. --Summary of the Warren Commission Report

There are many reasons for a reasonable man to agree with the Warren Commission findings on the assassination of John Kennedy. The best one is probably that, while there are a fair number of people who agree with the Warren Commission finding, it’s pretty hard to get two of the conspiracy theorists to agree to anything. Castro did it. No, it was the Mafia. No it wasn’t, it was the CIA. Yeah, but the FBI had to be involved. So the FBI co-operated with the CIA, with Russian support, to help Castro do it. No, it was a Secret Service man who killed Kennedy by accident. Wait a minute, Nixon was clearly part of it. No, you idiot, it was Johnson. Are you sure it wasn’t Onassis?

Sheesh.

It’s also depressing that so many people think it matters at this late date, that if they could somehow prove that Oswald didn’t kill Kennedy, or if he did it as part of some Grand Conspiracy, then we could somehow re-write the last 40 years of world history so it would Come Out Right This Time. Or, at any rate, make us something less than 40 years older.

Well, I’m certainly not going to convince any Kennedy Conspiracy Theorists (you know who you are, but I’d rather you didn’t let me know it, actually), and I’m certainly not going to spend the inordinate amount of time that would be necessary to go over each obsessive detail that has been enlarged to cosmic significance here. I will make a brief aside to note that, if evidence of police interference and evidence tampering were evidence of innocence, then O. J. Simpson is as innocent as any man on the planet.

However, I have something different to say here.

A few years ago, the teenaged daughter of a friend asked about the Kennedy assassination, since all she’d ever heard was from people who thought it obvious that there was a conspiracy behind it, many of them believing that Oswald was framed. Here’s what I told her:

They caught the Olympic bomber recently, Eric Robert Rudolph, and I saw him on television as they brought him in. He was smiling, and I couldn’t get that smile out of my head. I’ve seen it before. It wasn’t a big smile; you could barely see it. But it was there. Timothy McVeigh had it, and so did John Salvi, who killed those abortion doctors. I realized that I’d seen that smile a lot of times.

Lee Harvey Oswald had it, practically up to the moment he was gunned down by Jack Ruby. You can see a hint of that smile even in Jack Ruby’s mug shot.

I think they feed on it. They’re nobodies for their entire lives, and then they get the attention that they’re sure they deserve. Why shouldn’t they smile? They’re alive and better human beings are dead. They’ve gotten what they’ve always wanted. They’re winners now, in the only way they know, by killing the real winners, and even executing them now just feeds that sense of their now being important, because now they’re important enough to kill.

That’s why people so want it all to be grander, to better purpose. Our President dead? Scores of people buried in rubble? Brave men bleeding on the pavement? It can’t be this nebbish who did it. It can’t be that pointless. It can’t, it can’t it can’t.

But it can be that pointless. There is an infinite hunger in that creepy little smile.
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I wrote the above essay last June, but I was reminded of it when I saw this.