To television we can add computers and the various screen-experiences they provide from blogs to “games,” the worlds of X-Box and Play station. This is the world of see, push, point and click, of sense-and-respond, an animal world; or perhaps it’s a war zone in which emotions and hormones go wild. Do more people use the internet to study, learn history and write analytically or to “surf” for imagery, for various kinds of pornography, including simple voyeurism, if this kind of morbidity is ever “simple.”

The main examples for the reduction of thought, feeling and humanity in this essay pertain to the “race for the oval office” which is meant to keep us in an odds-making frame of mind, that is, a dumb frenzy: yes, as Poe foresaw, modernism and progress are shams and traps [1]. But first a few words, not from our sponsor but about other major media that distinguish and have disfigured our age and our lives.

The distraction-and-reduction of humanity industries were present in film and radio but were not homogenous in their effects and had nowhere near the power to degrade our senses as do television and computers. Movie theatres of old always had a bit of neighborhood in them; most were used for vaudeville, concerts of many kinds and other public functions. Some still had pianos in a corner up front till the 1960s. The screen came down upon or was set behind a stage. There were lots of other people, pleasant or unpleasant as the details might be. The “virtual” quotient was limited.

Arguably, silent films conduced more to the sensate and human regression; they were mainly about visuals and movement although narrative development of plot still set the stage – surreal jump-cutting and absurdity were reserved for the rare “art-film” and viewers went to these expecting to see something odd and progressive: not exactly chainsaws and coeds shivering in a basement while Jason stalks dark streets. And the old “silents” had captions and legible lip movement. Radio and ‘talkies’ were all about conversation, often amazingly eloquent and witty, not least in comedies like Laurel and Hardy or the immortal Fields. So even when they were ‘racy,’ they used and strengthened literacy and interpersonal communication, faculties that contribute to (though they do not insure) community and humane dealings: television in its beginnings also had this quality: the black and white made it clearly a “fiction” even when it was news, a reproduction to be heard, studied and considered. Many of the shows (Groucho Marx, reality TV that still was real) were just radio with a few visual gimmicks filmed on an immobile stage.

Abstract elements, dissolves, fades, jump-cutting, cropping, strange juxtapositions first entered through ads and cartoons along with the color that bathed viewers in a sensual, not a literate experience. “Ooh, ah,” that’s the level to which it reduces our response, erasing the boundary between intimate and public experience. Those who produce television now are plantation owners; the hairstyles chattering at us are taskmasters and school marms: no thinking necessary class; yes, the curriculum has been dumbed-down. When you hear the cue (slogan), respond with the correct cliché. Otherwise there may be a ’sensitivity’ re-training seminar [sic]: corruption of language has stacked the deck, humans lose by being human.

Computers and the web appear to deliver the ultimate democracy. Almost everyone has access and what goes in reflects who puts it in, and why, matters only sometimes discernable and often by few. Human beings are not meant to sit in chairs or to look at screens in which so many, lowest-common-denominator distractions lurk and have been planted. A verse from P.B. Shelley, “the over-busy gardener’s deadening toil” pops to mind [2]. We indeed blunder toward death less, perhaps, like the aging Tory laureate lampooned than like the progress-mad, soon disillusioned radical. For us unfortunate moderns, part of the medium’s enslaving nature is in its analogy to a garden filled with Venus fly-traps. Consider: what creature spins webs? And what does she spin them for? And what does she do once they are caught?

When you next expound upon the “freedom” of the worldwide web, think of that [3].

Consider to that democracy, “people rule” inevitably means mob rule and that mobs are ruled by tyrants, and their paid enforcers. They inevitably destroy tradition and deference [4].

Enough for now about the media of entrapment, increasingly a byword for our time of cultural degeneracy for license leads always to tyranny and often is contrived by it (a good reason to proscribe license, and licenses). Let us turn to the horse race and to pertinent and quite descriptive comments on it made almost a millennium ago.

The evil genius of the major media shows impressive consistency; there is no way that the major developments re-shaping all our lives for the worse are going to be mentioned, much less discussed as the two Democratic nags, made to ride in tandem (Hillary, of course, wants to be “on top”) find infinite reasons to bicker. What to do about the poor, poor disenfranchised masses of Michigan and Florida? Let’s spend a few weeks nattering about that. How about Hillary’s tone in lamely imitating Obama’s vacuity? How about his hollowness, itself — “he’s a great speaker” the morons tell us. Which one of them has more momentum? Which has raised more money? What do the numbers say? Have we spent enough time enthusing about the 4500 votes Obama got in Wyoming, or has Hillary and the Emperor’s Club stolen his rolling thunder?

No truly human being can survive five or even two more months of this stuff, or of the twenty-three year old “political strategists” and “pollsters” the Demlicans, Repricrats and complicit media trot out before our protesting souls and dismayed hearts to spout their programmed talking points. In Ohio, the Demlicans say they are against NAFTA and will work to make it better, and people vote for them; no one talks about the real costs of ethanol, or of “health insurance” and its deadly triage; will either of the donkeys secure the borders, expel illegal immigrants, prevent America from being dissolved into the NAU by diktat of a President they profess to hate? Are they going to propose a set of workable measures to inhibit or stop outsourcing? Are they going to end the racism and sexism of “affirmative action” or the destruction of public education by the Teacher’s Unions and their sponsors? Since “choice” is their creed, are they going to support parental choice in education? How about choice for a father when abortion threatens or when “Mom” decides its time to divorce Dad? Will they liberate citizens from paying for the indoctrination, vaccination, labeling and spiritual disfiguring of their children or for the multi-faceted expropriation of the children by the State?

No, of course not; they support almost all of these end-game, triage, mentally and economically impoverishing problems. They represent the Corporate Collective that creates the problems, from feminism and all that follows from it to collapsed borders: as with the family, so with the nation. Will the media press them to address any of these issues? Of course not: they represent and are more directly owned by the CC than are the nags. Their job is to distract, benumb, and enchant us with sensational tit-bits, mind-numbing numbers about nothing, fake arguments, faked passion and even more faked compassion. The parade of moronic bimbos and feminized males marches on to victory uber alles.

A long time ago the Children of Israel, whose teachings long since have reached much of the world in one form or another were instructed against sorcery, divination, astrology, reading omens, or directing their behavior according to “lucky times” [5]. All these practices undermine and eventually destroy free will and responsibility as well as giving the soul-numbing impression that the Creator’s wisdom does not inform all things but that human mages can re-make the rules and re-model people. As the war on the Jews has accelerated and as Israel is submerged by foreign powers and their embedded clients all these forms of paganism are returning. It isn’t pretty or pleasant.

It is pertinent to note that the prohibitions against witchcraft which rules the regressing progressive West are near the admonitions noted above [6]. About eight and a half centuries ago, the great scholar, physician, and philosopher, Maimonides grouped them with the prohibitions against cross-dressing which, he noted, “is common among the nations and sometimes stems from a desire to arouse the passions to perversion” [7]. Maimonides examined the etymology of the prohibition against using “time deciders” and noted that its root also forbids “capturing the eyes” [8]. He emphasizes that this does not apply simply to conjuring in its physical sense. Rather, he explains, “’capturing the eyes’ is a form of necromancy [which] ‘steals the mind’ of men.” This “damage is inestimable,” he continues, for it disorders reason, the sense that the creation and Creator are rational, understanding bonded to a culture of free will, genuine freedom and responsibility. Perversion and conjuring are linked in necromancy as uniquely damaging because “the form of the soul is knowledge,” the same knowledge stolen by the conjurer and thief of the eyes [9]. So those who “capture the eyes” imperil the soul for they “make impossible things seem possible in the eyes of fools, women and children and their minds become habituated to accepting unreality as reality” (emphasis added). This is a functional description of virtual reality almost a millennium before our times and the attendant loss of personal, public and international life that is occurring as the world is “consumed with bewildering terrors” [10]. In the newly-pagan West’s house of mirrors and delusion, “reality TV” intermixes with a “virtual reality”: ‘nothing is real’ because all discriminations, boundaries in their most basic sense have been banned from speech and thought. Creation has been undone.

With the degradation and coercion of public schooling in which education has been wrecked (much as health insurance ruins medicine and health) added to the sorceries of the media and the modernist obsession with cults, augury and divination, with control, increasing since the late 18^th century, then Hegel, Mesmer, Darwin, etc, “minds become habituated to accepting unreality as reality. Reflect on this,” Maimonides concluded his discussion of those dangers. Idolatry and witchcraft really are bad ideas, enchanting and disordering the soul and sense, a great negation of freedom; the war of terror against the Jewish people who brought freedom to humankind has naturally spread to homes and ‘theatres near you.’ The wheel will come full circle; a branch that attacks its root is a branch that will wither and die.

The next time you see or hear Wild Bull Malarkey, Heraldo, the “independent populist” on CNN, the bevy of hairstyles, the “liberal and conservative commentators” screaming at each other and their guests, creating their web of virtual reality; the next time you, doing a biopsy on our culture, listen to the hollow necromancy of the nags in the race, know that you are dealing with death magic and that the “vanity and wind” has long been long a-coming. Amid this storm one needs a clear mind buttressed by sound teachings and, as the Children of Israel have shown, you’ve got to be in it for the long haul. People have a sad tendency to prefer magic to miracles, slavery-and-glitter to freedom [11].

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “the Man Who was All Used Up,” “Some Words with a Mummy,” “the Devil in the Belfry” and “The Angel of the Odd” c. 1844-7; the last named tale shows that very strange things indeed do happen and are consistent with Providence, free will and the wisdom or laws of nature the Creator imparted into the creation. Only a dreaming drunk and skeptic finds scriptural exegesis soporific, the tale wittily suggests. For the idea of enlightenment as regression see Shelley’s last poem, “The Triumph of Life.”
2. Percy Bysshe Shelley, “The Witch of Atlas” (1820), introduction Stanza 4, slight paraphrase
3. “I found a dimpled spider, fat and white / On a white heal-all, holding up a moth / Like a white piece of rigid satin cloth…” Robert Frost, “Design” (c. 1920). And so it comes to pass, more than the agnostic might have guessed: we live among and are confounded by “assorted characters of death and blight” in a world where we are instructed to “stop making sense” and “just do it,” if it’s still permitted…
4. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “My Kinsman Major Molineux (1832) gives a view of colonial raw democracy.
5. Leviticus 19:26, Deuteronomy 18:10, etc. In “The Laws of Kings and their Battles” 11:4 Maimonices finds a silver lining in the war-alliance of Edom and Ishmael.
6. The prohibition against witches and witchcraft Deut. 18:10 and Exodus 22:7. In Maimonides’ the Book of Commandments, Volume II, #34
7. Maimonides, Sefer HaMitzvoth [“Book of the Commandments”] arranged by positive injunctions, part I and prohibitions, Part II (Moznaim, 1993, English translation by Rabbi Shraga Silverstein). Maimonides groups many prohibitions against various forms of idol worship in #s 14-60, pages 11-36 of Volume 2. If legend and Sir Walter Scott are correct, Maimonides, who was the physician of Saladin, was the man who treated a wounded Richard the Lion Heart.
8. ibid. page 22, negative command II.32
9. Maimonides, Foundations of Torah, 4:8-9 offers what today would be called a biogenetic or DNA-based description of Genesis 1:26.
10. Sefer HaMitzvoth, op. cit. II. #32; see psalm 73:19 -28
11. See my archive on www.nwv.com & the essay, “Democracy, Tyranny and a Model of Ordered Liberty.”

The administration takes our taxes to subsidize farmers to grow corn for ethanol rather than for sweet corn, animal feed or to grow wheat. Thus the prices of staples like beef, milk, butter, cheese, poultry and eggs skyrocket as America becomes a hostage nation, — one that must import food, much of it toxic, from China (under Reagan’s watch, Germany and Japan factory-fished and depleted the Grand Banks off of New England). Meanwhile, so-called environmentalists relentlessly demand that more land be put off limits to human use. Sustainable development will herd humans into urban hives while food, water, and power will be controlled by the overlords. More

It appears that the advocates of brith control and population reduction (usually disguised as “zero population growth” or “environmentalism”) are winning. Overworked and sick people don’t live to collect “benefits” that were taken from them as taxes in the first place, so let them die: then they’re double losers and the books don’t look so badly out of balance.

When you hear “benefits” it means more taxes (theft) from which you may live to receive from beneficent government a “fraction.” Repeat: you may live…

Thus, government on both sides of the aisle looks to cut benefits wherever it can: raise the age for collecting social security, eligible health care cutbacks, disability benefits of veterans pillaged by ex-wives and courts or retroactively canceled for an array of diseases linked to the herbicide, agent orange. It is of these people that we speak today. Numerous articles, testimony and court records relevant to the matter may be found at http://bluewaternavy.org which all citizens should visit and study.

It is interesting that amidst the flag-waving after the 9/11 attacks the Bush administration removed presumptive disability ratings for naval personnel stationed in or near Vietnam from 1962 to May 1975. That is, the Bush administration changed the terms of the Agent Orange Act of 1991 that provided benefits for veterans who were symptomatic for the host of severe illnesses linked to exposure to AO. In February 2002, the administration (http://www.bluewaternavy.org/illness/listb/htm) promulgated rules requiring that navy veterans had to prove that they had been on land at some point or in port. Having the Veterans’ Service Medal for Vietnam, and the symptoms, no longer was adequate.

Blue Water Navy notes that short trips ashore often were undocumented, that Naval, Marine, or Coast Guard personnel often used contaminated freshwater for showers and/or drinking; that they often anchored in or at the mouths of rivers swollen with runoff from areas hosed down with Agent Orange, an oil-based herbicide made by Dow Chemical and Monsanto. Water from sprayed areas was used for drinking and the desalination for the estuary waters has been shown in Australian studies to increase the level of dioxin. Sometimes the planes spraying the toxin, circling their targets would over fly ships providing close support with spray still trailing. Nevertheless, as BWN explains, “the VA has been denying compensation for medical conditions identical to those of ‘boots on the ground’ personnel” and even canceling compensation already approved. This “has denied an entire class of combat veterans equal status as regards compensation for service connected illness and disability and has created undue financial hardship to veterans and their families by retroactive removal of an earned military veteran disability benefit while leaving them with the medical problems of the related disease”; sounds like time to raise medical insurance premiums again. The Blue Team will run with this issue.

These veterans have been and are suffering many grave medical problems from the conditions of their service: a short list of the cancers alone fills almost two pages. The diseases include chronic lymphocyte leukemia, multiple myeloma, prostate cancer, non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, tendon sheath tumors, congenital and infantile fibro sarcoma and Type II Diabetes.” These symptoms of exposure to Agent Orange have been verified by foreign and CDC studies available on the web site. Could our veteran be the victims of an overall effort to cut benefits to Americans or to triage those who have earned social security, Medicare and other benefits for which government policy makes it inexpedient to pay?

Commander Jonathan L. Haas (Retired), diagnosed with Type 2 Diabetes has been pressing a case for years which shows government agencies struggling against each other and against America’s own disabled Vets even as politicians promote utopian and Communist-type plans to “eliminate Global poverty” and create “universal health care.” Archived at www.bluewaternavy.haasruling.pdf, the claim of Commander Haas was denied in March 2004. After an appeal by the National Veterans Legal Service Program (NVLSP), in August 2006 the U.S. Court of Veterans Appeals agreed with CDR Haas and reversed the VA’s 2002 unilateral change to the rules of adjudication, once again granting Blue Water Navy veterans the ‘presumption of exposure’ granted to other Vietnam War veterans. The reasoning was that just as the Veterans in Vietnam, land or waters were exposed to enemy fire, so too were they exposed to related herbicide toxicities.  

But “the Department of Veterans Affairs refused to comply with the Court Order to process Blue Water Navy claims and circulated an internal memo (http://www.bluewaternavy.org/vastaymemo.htm) instructing all claim adjudicators from the 57 Regional Offices and the Board of Veterans Appeals to ‘hold off’ (”stay”) adjudication of any claims of this nature until the VA informed them to do otherwise… The VA continued the denial of benefits to all Blue Water Navy veterans even when there was additional documentation that the claimant actually had set foot on the soil of Vietnam in addition to serving under a Blue Water Navy command.” There was a large number of such cases from the US 7^th Fleet.

To make the DVA relese its “stay” of Naval Veterans’ claims pertaining to Agent Orange related diseases, the NVLSP filed a suit in the Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims on behalf of Nicholas Ribaudo and the American Legion…The pleading was a request to advance the Ribaudo claim to the front of the long queue of backlogs in the docket of the BVA based on undue hardship Mr. Ribaudo was facing. This filing also requested the Court to order the VA to resume processing of Blue Water Navy claims per the Haas Ruling of August 16, 2006 and to strike down the instructions of the internal VA memo imposing the illegal “stay.’” On January 9, 2007 the Court of Appeals ruled that the DVA resume processing the claims but also suggested a way for the VA to tailor their method for putting a halt to payments. In sports this is called a two-on-one.

These legal games have continued while Veterans suffer and die and the government economizes via “color of law.” Meanwhile the Democratic Party horse race of insult and “identity politics” raises $100 million per month; the media and GOP both say they’re delighted and think it’s great Americans are so involved in the distraction machine. For this spiritual illness in the body politic there may be no better cure than to re-focus on attempts to marginalize and crush Veterans and others who sacrifice to make this country prosperous and free, or to retain the freedoms in the Constitution which politicians used to swear to preserve, protect and defend. But they’ve been too busy telling us that “Islam is a religion of peace” and pretending the Koran can substitute for the Bible, at least as regards taking an oath of office. 

The postscript, writes a Blue Water Navy citizen is that the government’s actions “once again dispel the myth that the Department of Veteran Affairs is an advocate of the military veteran.” He adds that “in a macabre twist of reason and logic, the George W. Bush Whitehouse requested, through Senator Akaka, the introduction of a bill Senate Bill S-2026 to specifically eliminate all Blue Water Navy veterans from qualifying for presumptive exposure to Agent Orange (http://bluewaternavy.org/akakabill.htm also see   
 www.bluewaternavy.org/quotes2.htm ). It ought to shock and enrage that our troops are serving as “nation builders” in areas where there never has been and never will be a genuine nation, in “Iraq” and “Palestine” while destroying an ally and wasting treasure. But after all, this deceit and ruin is consistent with the contempt being shown to Vets in the Agent Orange matter. As VNVets notes, Veterans “are dying by the dozens every day.” Is this what the administration wants? For “a veteran’s claim for benefits dies with him.” As to campaign contributions and lobbying, politicians tend to grasp the suasion of Corporate Collectives like Dow more than the people in whose name they serve, and upon whose money they live, occasionally tossing back a fraction termed a “benefit.”
Visit www.bluewaternavy.org/nov7activities.htm to hear an audio of oral arguments in the matter from November 07, 2007, Case # 2007-7037. Additional Information can be found on the web site of the National Veterans Legal Service Program which led these monumental legal battles: http://nvlsp.org/Information  Tell your elected representatives, especially those in congress seeking re-election what you think of the government’s treatment of naval veterans and its priorities and what you demand they do about it.

The following real life horror story relates to these matters. It was brought to my attention by a post from the “5301 Club.”  

The members of this club are working for America’s survival and renewal. Their focus is Veteran’s issues that affect the structure of our society and all our lives. They take their name from Federal law, USC, Title 38, 5301(a) (1) that protects Veterans by reserving for them alone compensation they earned by sacrifice of their health during service. The statute reads in part that these payments are “exempt from taxation…from the claim of creditors, and shall not be liable to attachment, levy or seizure by or under any legal or equitable process whatever, either before or after receipt by the beneficiary” [1].  

That would seem sufficiently explicit to insure that the Veteran who paid with part of their health or mobility would receive this compensation and that it would “NOT be liable to attachment, levy or seizure under any legal process whatever.” But we live in “interesting times,” these post-Modern days when words mean whatever the “Master” says they mean (to paraphrase Humpty Dumpty). “Everything is a social construct” is the today’s dogma, — gender, the family, a nation, whatever: if you disagree the Red Queen says, “off with their heads!” Men, to name the most derided class are utterly expendable [1]. Not only justice but even law become impossible when words lose their meanings and the victim and outcome are designated before the game begins. The realm of relativism is the law of the jungle.

The ultimate ‘masters’ today are the petty tyrants of family law in which the guaranteed winning play is to crush the man even when what’s at stake is a Vet’s 5301 disability compensation. Jere Berry of 5301 notes that Veteran’s disability compensation “is tax exempt, and uniquely awarded to a single individual based on their specific disabilities.” Nevertheless, heartless enforcers of the feminist world state, so long and ruthlessly sought by utopian “social scientists” and their corporate enablers are using these payments as “divisible assets in divorce courts nationwide” (www.offe2008.org) [2]. Men who already have given chunks of their lives are having their ability to live the rest of it looted. They thought they were serving their nation; actually they were used by their government and its method for crushing the nation is feminism. So not even Veterans are immune from the tortures of “family law.”  

For nearly three decades, ignored by the corporate controlled media, few Americans have noticed and fewer acted as feminist ideology has suffused these courts and many sectors of society. The goals of this well-financed ideology, explicit in Marxism and Sociology, fundamental to the “welfare” state and highlighted by “environmentalists” include destroying the family, gender, the status and reality of fathers so that women ‘marry’ the state and its appointed “care-givers.” In due course, via their damaged kids, they also serve the pharmaceutical-psych testing and prescribing industry: soon enough, education becomes “special ed.” Criminalizing or pathologizing normal behavior is a major part of the new State.

After raging through the general public these horrors have now attacked even the disability compensation of Veterans. Primed by media portryals of men as irrelevant and inadequate, the juggernaut of female-initiated “no-fault” divorce in which the man is always wrong is enmeshed with many government programs (VAWA) that reduce the real security and core unit of society: children with a father and mother in their own home. First approved in California under Ronald Reagan, no-fault divorce is now so entrenched that it assaults the benefits of disabled veterans; the ‘masters’ must sense that Americans are too busy with the pressures of surviving in a collapsing economy to notice or do much to halt the atrocities. And no wonder: when have you heard a discussion or even a mention of divorce courts and bias against fathers on the media? Yet it has ravaged scores of millions of Americans. And while men (and children) are destroyed, feminists never cease to intone their mantra, “don’t be judgmental.”

One of many bitter jokes in this aspect of post-modern, end-game American life is that the father has little idea, and no de facto ability or right to know if the “child support” the court orders them to pay to the mother is actually used to support the child or children. If a father pushes to find out he will eventually be punished but will learn nothing. And yet the “custodial parent,” the mother who typically initiates the “no-fault” divorce in which the father is treated like a criminal but lacks the protections that law affords to defendants in criminal cases, receives these monies and alimony tax free to use as she sees fit. Here is one of the perversions that characterize our darkening days: a Veteran that gives his health in national service has his disability compensation taken at least in part and given tax free to a spouse or girl friend who often, in effect, has kidnapped his children since that too is the reality that no-fault divorce creates: it not only legalizes but rewards and exalts maternal kidnapping, desertion of marriage and theft.

There are several ironies here: let us note just one that dates to the origin of modern feminism and still resonates in the media. In A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) Mary Wollstonecraft argued that marriage was a form of prostitution in which a woman sold herself in exchange for maintenance instead of being fully independent and “equal.” That same ‘argument,’ disdaining nature, love, trust, tradition and the basic unit of stable and prosperous societies has been a feminist truism but only in recent decades with no-fault divorce have we seen the claim vindicated in a way very different than the first feminist intended. Since women gained the right to initiate divorce early in the twentieth century (and then the right to vote which has not exactly led to an era of peace, foreign or domestic, as they claimed, but to a state of perpetual and unnatural wars) they have indeed, with state sanction made marriage into a form of prostitution. A woman ‘contracts’ knowing that whenever she wishes she can dissolve the ‘union’ with a phone call and unsubstantiated claims of “abuse” or of being “in fear” and then seize the children, home, and most of whatever other assets there are, even the disability compensation of a crippled Veteran. A marriage contract is worthless. Those who want America destroyed are pleased because destroying families is another form of destroying the borders or of integrity in academics.

Confirmation of this chaos was provided recently by one of the talking hairstyles on FOX news. During a discussion of Paul McCartney’s divorce settlement in which his newly ex-wife secured about $130 million after four years of marriage, a pert blond commentator boomed out, “well, she earned it!” When the anchor asked if she realized what she was saying, she beamed and affirmed her view.

Hurray for feminism, the Nanny State and its infinite compassion! No-fault divorce has let women turn marriage into predatory prostitution: men be damned, children be damned, the family, the nation, the future all crumble in the mad greed and power lust of these surpassingly cruel times. Why don’t the candidates of “hope” and “compassion” attend to these grievances?

This is the context of the terrible situation in which divorced disabled Veterans find themselves. Perhaps the horror will rouse people to corrective action. There still is enough shame in this culture that few politicians will stand before a parade of disabled Vets and their supporters protesting these kinds of abuses.

The 5301 club notes that “most divorce court judges wrongly treat veteran’s disability compensation the same as military retirement pay.” But it’s not: “Military retirement pay is not tax exempt, and is paid out by the Department of Defense, not the Department of Veterans Affairs” as disability benefits are, Berry writes. Yet Veterans that resist illegal demands to sign away their dearly earned compensation are charged with contempt and even jailed. It is cold comfort to know that it is common for fathers ensnared in “family law” to be ordered to sign decrees to which they object, including the divorce filing in the first place, “or else.” The pain of the Veterans may help shine light into this dark area of American decay and perhaps fill the cavity of goddess rapture eating culture from within.

Club 5301 notes that “disability compensation should never be considered as an ‘asset’ in determining a disabled veteran’s net worth” and thus become part of the kitty to “divide” with an ex wife. Moreover, “most American taxpayers would be surprised to learn that millions of tax dollars they thought were going to pay for veteran’s benefits - were in fact being diverted to able body non-military ex-spouses in the form of alimony, or spousal support” [3] (italics added). Family courts depend on this psychological terror, and upon inducing depression and desperation in the Veteran to get them to sign away their compensation. They know that they will not be able to collect it from the VA that “won’t give it to anyone but the disabled veteran that earned the benefit,” the Club adds. Some people blather about “water-boarding” but ignore this routine torture and coercion.

Club 5301, whose information campaign is known as “Operation Firing for Effect” OFFE “has authored a customized prenuptial agreement for future disabled veterans to consider before getting married.” Contact their site for information which, until redress is gained is probably the only way a veteran can protect his or her potential disability compensation. Looking further ahead, rallies of citizens, together with Veterans hurt by this judicial and illegal tyranny should gather at Statehouses and newspaper offices demanding that their grievances be heard and redressed. It also is seasonable to demand that their concerns be addressed with specific plans for remediation by candidates for President, congress and State legislatures. States in which groups and efforts are underway include the Carolinas, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, Missouri, New Jersey, Michigan, Oklahoma, Ohio and Colorado. OFFE invites inquiries to jerebeery@aol.com. This matter is an injustice and breach of faith so glaring that it may be one the politicians will amend.
 

1. Charles L. Dodgson, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865) quotes from the Queen of Hearts… for Humpty Dumpty see Dodgson’s Through the Looking Glass

2. Here is the full text posted by Club 5301: …to protect disability compensation from third party awards; USC, Title 38, 5301(a)(1), Payments of benefits due or to become due under any law administered by the Secretary shall not be assignable except to the extent specifically authorized by law, and such payments made to, or on account of, a beneficiary shall be exempt from taxation, shall be exempt from the claim of creditors, and shall not be liable to attachment, levy, or seizure by or under any legal or equitable process whatever, either before or after receipt by the beneficiary.

3. See www.offe2008.org for quotes and news 

Few are more cruel than those endlessly prating about “compassion”; few more intolerant than those forever enforcing codes proclaiming tolerance and diversity. Corruption of language marches together with corruption of youth, families, social relations, law and the Constitution itself.

Communists are masters of grandiloquent promises of utopian beneficence that actually “banish faith, honesty, compassion, [and] the sense of what is proper” [2]. The destruction of tradition, norms, the very sense and honor of ‘the traditional’ has been destroyed by Gramscian Communism’s “revaluation of values” that reaches its peak in post-modern dogma that all meaning is “a social construct.” In effect, this means that nothing is true or legal except what those in power say it is: as Humpty Dumpty told Alice, “the [only real] question is ‘who is the master,’ that’s all.” To know where we are today, insert mistress for master and one sees how the world goes. 

That’s what happens when Darwinism becomes dogma and the “survival of the fittest” the implicit creed of society, with fittest meaning those most able to speak smoothly and crush those who dissent from the idea that human beings are simply clever animals.

Once “speech has been polished” in postmodern fashion, shaved of context, history and tradition one gets the “power knowledge” of Francis Bacon and Machiavelli’s focus on appearances, perception and the control of same: that is, the dominance of “spin” over any comment, word or question that might lead to some truth. Spin polishes words and expressions “to the extent that they offer no firm foundation for anything”; words lose their meanings, “things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, the blood-dimmed tide is loosed; and everywhere, the ceremony of innocence is drowned” [3]. With these verses, Yeats described the entire trajectory of modern and post-modern culture, high and low, the courts, public ‘education,’ the Culturetainment industry and the corruption of language that pervades and fuses all events in thoughtless conformity.

Before examining the hypnotic, omnipresent chant-words, “liberal” and “conservative” and offering a simple graph to help rouse us from the slumber on which the corruption preys, consider another quote relevant to the dilemmas of our days:

“You begin to liquidate a people by taking away its memory. You destroy its books, its culture and, its history. Then others write books for it, give another culture to it, invent another history for it; the people slowly begins to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it forgets still faster” [4]

Forgetting, denial, revaluation, re-education, “sensitivity training,” “anger management” for those who dare speak out, however intelligibly when they or theirs are wronged; at the higher levels, “counter-factual history” as a ticket to tenure; re-imagining the past, newer, ever more degraded forms of replacement theology: theosophy, New Age, the Elder Faith, gender-neutral language and harangues against boys, ‘death education,’ offspring of the eugenicists and population controllers who desolate seed, turn peace to war, and then destroy the meaning of war with ‘wars’ on drugs, of terror, and other convenient fictions of enslavement… the power lusts of those who believe the State is god and that they are the State; who believe, ultimately, that they are god.

Regular readers know that Rip and I (that’s Rip van Winkle, a not-so-fictional character born about two hundred sixty years ago, skilled in time travel and handling the shock of ‘progress’) have been following the horse race for the White House, assessing the official handicaps the nags are carrying and those they are bequeathing to us serfs. Rip’s inclined to grim humor and even more inclined to don snow shoes, grab an axe and head off to the woods for some ice-fishing. Needing the fire and more enmeshed in the collapse of the American era, I tend to serious grieving which includes diagnosis and prescription.

We decide to compromise in terms of satire or grief, something we will not do on Super Duper Tuesday or in November ‘08.

We endured the Red debate™ at the Reagan ranch and marveled at the reassembled Air Force 1 around which the edifice was built, edifice Rex, something of which Pharaoh or Nebuchadnezzar would be proud. The press treated us to several views of the plane’s main cabin, an imperial masterpiece befitting an elected leader who draws the world in his train. It was far bigger than the living-dining space in which we sat, ‘but it don’t have a fireplace,” noted Rip ‘and you can’t just doze around, drink cider and worry about the way things might have been.’

Our word play is part of resistance, countering the odd angles of political speech in acts of embattled spiritual jiu-jitsu because, as noted in our previous essay, the corruption of language, and thus of thought, feeling, relationship and community is a primary means of those who degrade, rob and rule us.

‘Tell them,’ says Rip that we’ve had ‘an unusually hearty dinner’ like that fellow in the Poe story that can’t believe the bizarre events in the news.’ Here’s how we felt after undergoing the debate™, like the haze induced by reading a daily newspaper:

“After reading the editorial matter from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, I conceived the possibility of its being Chinese and so re-read it from the end to the beginning with no more satisfactory result.” [1]

That’s what it was like listening to “the Phoenix” (TIME magazine on its cover man), “statesmanlike”™ John McCain consume half of the time that might have been spent discussing the major problems of the Republic, long since become an Oligarchy with democratic trappings that always, with Oligarchy and Tyranny reduce Republics to immorality, militarism and chaos with petty nastiness about Mr. Romney’s precise degree of support for the surge. The smirking arrogance and vapid pettiness anointed by leading Red governors, mayors and other apparatchiks seems to be the mark of a frontrunner secure in his stature with those who count.

‘We don’t count,’ Rip muttered, ‘we hunt’ and dozed off, dreaming of bass and quail.

I recall that the airbrushed features of Mr. President Putin recently graced the cover of TIME and noted that Red Chief Phoenix had harsh words for the dictator with whom we share the controls in Iran. One of the few meaningful, but inchoate comments made by the Phoenix (his ‘ashes’ are a myth) was that when he looks into Putin’s eyes he sees the letters “KGB.” If only our statesmen were as concerned with rousting out illegal aliens, including the UN and its oligarchic banditry via “treaty” and securing our nation’s borders with the National Guard or militia, rather than fences, as Mr. Putin is regarding Russian borders and power.

The time allotted the four candidates to speak must have been matched to their official vote totals in the Florida primary a night before, with Giuliani’s share given to the Phoenix, the “National Security Conservative” he endorsed. About fifteen % was left for the ‘social conservative’ from Arkansas (it must be rare to administer the Clinton fief when the lord and lady now reign from Gotham and the district situated snugly between Mary’s land and Virgin yah). Of the ninety minutes, Congressman Paul was invited to speak for about five minutes.

He should have been more assertive; one can get more time and launch a few important ideas into the media ether. Yet he did speak meaningful truths (this itself is saving grace) in a major media production, to wit: that government and corporations collude against individual property owners, their lives and liberties; that running a welfare state and an Empire (like Rome) rots the currency and impoverishes people; that there seems to be no end to the new cold war the “national security conservatives” are selling and that it’s shamefully distracting for the two top dogs to be quibbling “about who said what when” about the surge when the economy and nation are going down. He stressed the importance to freedom, so much mentioned, of limiting Federal government and its taking of wealth. Did he mention securing the border?

Hint and wish: the next prime time opportunity the Congressman has he should explain “monetary policy” in a few simple words and elucidate its relation to slavery or freedom. Let him note how the government destroys families…

Mr. Huckabee wasted time repeatedly protesting (rather than just stating it once, firmly) the way the two prima donnas were allowed to hog the show, and said little though he did close with gracious words, as did Ron Paul rather than presuming to grab for the “Reagan mantle” or talk about why they should be king. But the fish, once dead, rots from the head down so in these times it’s natural to have an inverse correlation between political status and integrity.

Last week I quoted often from H.G. Wells’ horrific vision of progress and perfectibility in the Island of Dr. Moreau particularly in regard to the decay of language into bits of shapeless sound. This topic also was central to Orwell’s vision of the modern darkness in the method of its oligarchs to achieve social control, an internal reign of terror in which lies and hollowness must be accepted as truth, or else. This topic has been treated in ancient times and commented on by others who saw the emerging essence of modernist lies about man, relationships, governance and Providence: “save, Eternal One, for the devout man is gone, for truthful men have vanished from mankind. Each one speaks vanities to his neighbor with smooth speech and a double heart. And they say, “our proud tongues make us mighty, our lips are with us: who is lord over us!”

It’s like listening to the debates, like reading the “editorial matter” and news delivered from the Ministry of Truth diffused from the Oligarchy’s main outlets, the centers of commerce and life that have become generic “media markets” determining the number of sports teams in every professional league: a key sign of how the machine operates.

When do matters in human society begin to appear hopeless to those who care and retain a humane heart, humility and a sense and some awe of the Creator and His loving gifts: political discourse shows us. “The most dangerous symptom of moral corruption is the depravity of human speech,” speech, the first and distinguishing quality of a being with an immortal soul (Genesis 2:4-7, 19-20); the bond of language to truth, the truth of creation and proper use of every gift precedes and prepares man for the companionship he needs for spiritual and material reasons [2]. Those essential needs and gifts that today are obscured and deformed by our major institutions and their hazy terminology.

The corruption and decay of speech, both purposeful and from the reductive dumbing-down that is the business of both the education industry and media (that debases all it touches) thus strikes at the heart of the Creator’s wish and providence for mankind. It is not ‘simple’ dishonesty but the effluent of a culture permeated with lies.

Moreover, language, “this gift of God, rather than being used as the sacred means of binding human relationships has become the most pernicious tool in the service of ruthless selfishness.” The target of this criticism was socialist politics and materialism, already the key signature cultural change 150 years ago. “Whatever nowadays is done supposedly for the common good is actually motivated by clever calculation of the advantages of these acts of false altruism,” Hirsch wrote. As a result, “trustworthiness, faith and honesty seem to have vanished from society…even from the earth beyond recall” [3]. “The young will disrespect the old, the true man will be driven away, and a man’s worst enemy will be his own household [i.e. his wife] {4}. These lines, discussed millennia ago might as well encode a description of our divorce, education, and political industries.

Once speech becomes “polished,” Hirsch adds, “love has given way to egoism and from this follows “the absence of compassion” and “the sense of what is proper” [5]. What we endure is the triumph of Machiavelli, roiling in our culture for five centuries and now enthroned as its de facto creed: the cult of power and its methods, terror for without faith, trustworthiness and compassion a culture’s inner products, its tenor and the projection of its essence will be terror, the triumph of the will, appetites and imagination over reason, articulation, love, truth and humility. Give them credit, Governor Huckabee and Congressman Paul modeled and mentioned this quality in their brief closing remarks. 

But Machiavelli has won, “speech has become polished smooth” and “can offer no firm foundation for anything,” any idea, policy, action or relationship. Cynicism and changing the fundamental laws of our being have fractured the ground on which we stand. “A social system based on lies will bring ruin to mankind more than any overtly brutal force” and thus “baseness is exalted among mortals” [6]. 

“From on high they loftily speak about oppression, condescendingly they speak.” This is “the peace of the wicked,” the “peace” of their peace processes and their welfare and resource management solutions to the human problem.

Late in the debate, they aired an ad for Waste Management (is this a reference to removing people, by indirect, that is, ‘environmental’ means) in which a suave female voice-over asserted the need for “us” to “live in peace together” the us, according to the visuals, being various water and wild fowl and human beings. The scene was lovely and empty of humans; a charming park for those whose eyes, lips and hips are wrapped with arrogance as their ornament (ibid 73:2-15), who “bring ruin to mankind” by ‘peace.’

“If I was to tell you how bad it [really] is, I would cause the generation of your children to rebel” against all that remains of order and grace (73:16-29). But the answer is as it was then, and given our times and mores, the very thing the ruling Oligarchs are most fiercely set against: the return of Jews to the Temple Mount and rebuilding of the Temple so the grace of the Creator most fully can restore this dark and damaged world. Opposed? Those who watched the State of the Union saw that the only time all the Blue Team joined all the Red Team, Chiefs of Staff and High Judges (cf. psalm 82) in rapturous, sustained applause was when Gog Bush declared that his administration would see a “Palestinian State” ensconced upon the heartland of the Children of Israel including all of their holiest places [7].

And so the Oligarchs intend to uproot the Tree of Life and bury its wellsprings from the world as the War of Terror pursues its multifaceted violence and lies (psalm 72:14). Orwell wrote: “the past was erased, the erasure was forgotten; the lie became truth.”

“It’s a fool’s game,” murmured Rip in his drowse, and I took a long drink and threw more kindling in the stove. The darkness and cold are almost palpable. Even as the palace of the kings of Judah is being excavated these past three years, the mighty ones have hastened to bury Zion again as Hadrian did, inventing the name “Palestine” the “non-nation and vile people,” the fiction, the big lie that plagues the world in the end of days (Deut. 32:21).

While our economy and thus our lives are destroyed around us, the Oligarchs embolden and ‘engage’ Iran in “Alliances for Civilization” and the takeover of Mesopotamia. The Islamic Brotherhood, parent group of Hamas, Fatah and Islamic Jihad writes bitterly of the degree to which Iranians control government bureaus in Syria; in the Lebanon they lament the dominance of Hizbollah, a branch of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard. Polls taken by Iranians in Persia (“Iran”) say that most people would welcome a foreign invasion to rid them of the mullahs [8]. So might many here; but “change” brought by invasion is not the way to restore grace and truth to life’s unquiet dream, to what has become the dominion of Hegel, Machiavelli and their many followers of “polished speech,” power games, the ruin of language and forgetting.   

We must demand honest and meaningful discussion, truly human speech not robotics from those who would wield power; the ninth and tenth amendments must become common knowledge and parlance; mandatory public conditioning (schooling) must be repealed because parents have the natural and inalienable right to educate their children: Americans must recognize how much a Pharaonic government owns us. Those who rather send their kids to day care and stupefaction can pay for it in the private sector; leave us out of it and spare us “statesmen with momentum” [9]. 

In closing, Rip says beware third parties fronted by the mayor of NYC. Gov. Schwarzenegger or other puppest of the Oligarchs: these are preemptive strikes against a meaningful third party headed by Ron Paul. For now, read, study classic texts, use language well, and guard all the ‘little’ things and faculties that sustain our humanity [10].

1. Edgar Allan Poe, “The Angel of the Odd” c. 1845 in Complete Stories and Poems (Doubleday 1995)
2. Commentary on psalm 12 by Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, leader and expositor of observant Jews in central Europe in the 19^th century. From notes he began making about 1840 to publication in 1881; first English-Hebrew edition, The Hirsch Psalms (Feldheim 1960; 1997)
3. Ibid
4. Sanhedrin 97a2-3 amid an extended discussion of Hebrew Scriptures on characteristics of the End of Days, the Sabbath of history and its length, 93 – 99a3 which mentions, inter alia that “the horses of the Medes will be tied to every tree in Babylon” that is, Mesopotamia (“Iraq”).
5. Hirsch op cit
6. Hirsch on 12:4-5, 9
7. One of the very few changes in pronunciation of Hebrew from ancient times is that the letter gimmel, our ‘g’ without an internal vowel used to be pronounced ‘soft’ like the ‘g’ in “George.” “Gog” literally means “roof” and is a synonym for arrogance. Grammar determines whether the first ‘g’ is hard or soft.
8. Search archives at www.memri.org Middle East Media Research Institute that translates from Arabic and Islamic media and archives their blogs, TV programs and other video.
9. “The freedom that I speak of is the freedom from servitude to other people…servitude to people is slavery to a multitude whose desires I will not fulfill even with my entire life… service to God is true freedom, and humility before Him is true honor”; the Sage in Yehuda HaLevi, Kuzari c.1090, Essay 5:25
10. Read Thomas Jefferson’s letter on education to his nephew Peter Carr, September 7, 1814.