Paxety Pages

The Iowa caucuses finished with Mitt Romney and Rick Santorum in a virtual tie. Michelle Bachman, who identified herself closely with the Tea Party, finished last. Most Tea Party folks seem to think of Romney as a big government moderate and Santorum as too much of a Washington insider. So, did the Tea Party fail?

Or, did the Tea Party succeed in infusing its smaller government, lower spending, balance the budget ideas on the Republican candidates? Both Romney and Santorum are talking about those issues.

Don Surber has a post on Santorum’s rise – and concludes with this:

Conservatives have a great AA team. Unfortunately, we’re in the big leagues. But we have a lot of prospects for 2016, which is better than where conservatives were in 2008.

It will be interesting to see how it works out.

Popularity: 5% [?]

The MSM reporters are proving, once again, that they are idiots. They are reporting that no one saw the rise of Rick Santorum. It wasn’t hard to see if you shut up, got out of the beltway, and watched.

Iowa is a retail politics state and Santorum is the only candidate who made it a point to visit each of the state’s counties early on.

Popularity: 5% [?]

To hear the liberal media talk, you’d think the only reason we went into Iraq was because of weapons of mass destruction.  No so.  One of the several reasons was Iraq’s repeated violations of UN resolutions.   In fact, the fuss in 2002/2003 was how many UN resolutions Iraq had violated.  I researched the issue, and here’s my original post.  (It contained links, but those links have long since rotted.)

I’ve been annoyed by the media reports calling the newest UN Security Council resolution on Iraq a second resolution. Donald Rumsfeld calls it the 18th. I questioned a CNN producer by e-mail, asking why they don’t accurately report the number of resolutions. He challenged me to name and attribute the resolutions. Here are 18 that I have found – making the one currently under debate the 19th:

Resolution 660 – (August 2, 1990) condemns Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait and calls for unconditional withdrawal.

Resolution 661 – (August 6, 1990) Imposes economic sanctions on Iraq.

Resolution 678 – (September 29, 1990) Demands compliance with resolution 660

Resolution 686 – (March 2, 1991) Demands Iraq’s compliance with 12 previous resolutions condemning it’s invasion of Kuwait (Resolution 660 and 11 others that slightly amend or amplify 660 -it appears the UN doesn’t count them as separate resolutions)

Resolution 687 – (April 3, 1991) Cease-fire and mandate of UNSCOM

Resolution 688 – (April 5, 1991) Condemns Iraqi attacks on Kurds and Shiites

Resolution 699 – (June 17, 1991) Iraq liable for costs associated with UNSCOM

Resolution 707 – (August 15, 1991) Iraq’s compliance, inspection flights, Iraq’s disclosures

Resolution 715 – (October 11, 1991) Approval of ongoing monitoring and verification plan

Resolution 1051 – (March 27, 1996) Approval of export/import monitoring mechanism

Resolution 1060 – (June 12, 1996) Condemnation of Iraq’s refusal to grant inspection access

Resolution 1115 – (June 21, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s refusal to grant inspections and interviews

Resolution 1134 – (October 23, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s behavior, further sanctions threatened

Resolution 1137 – (November 12, 1997) Condemnation of Iraq’s behavior, imposition of travel ban

Resolution 1154 – (March 2, 1998) Endorsement of the MOU on access to Presidential sites

Resolution 1194 – (September 9, 1998) Condemnation of Iraq’s decision to stop all UNSCOM work

Resolution 1205 – (November 5, 1998) Condemnation of Iraq’s decision to halt monitoring

Resolution 1441 – (November 7, 2002) Demands disarmament and inspections

Today, in 2011, folks are asking if the war was worth the effort.  I think one should take these resolutions into account when deciding.

Popularity: 7% [?]

The federal government has just shut down several of the largest on-line poker sites in the world! Was this to ensure the moral purity of the American public? Was it to protect the innocent, poor and uneducated from falling prey to hopeless schemes where they have little chance of winning. Well, since government sponsors various lotteries where the odds of winning are astronomical, and as random as a lightning strike, this seems improbable.

It’s the money. All those billions in poker money. The politicians want their share. This is Obama’s Fort Sumpter, the first shot fired in a war to seize the internet. Will freedom minded liberals and conservatives join together and rise up to save the last bastion of free thought and free enterprise on the planet?

The federal government is full of power-mad politicians who will stop at nothing to seize our resources so they can convert them into power for themselves. (If you want to see your money at work, take a tour of abandoned homes in your neighborhood, courtesy of the federal government, or stand in line and at the grocery store and watch shoppers with shopping baskets full of ribs, steaks and other expensive items, pay with a food stamp card, then deliver the items to the trunk of a shiny Mercedes.) The federal manta is: if it moves, tax it; if it keeps moving, regulate it; if it stops moving, subsidize it. They tax everything now, even the weather. The federal government has four basic personality types controlling our lives: thieves, liars, tyrants and incompetents; and they each have the force of arms behind them to ensure compliance, through imprisonment or death, from anyone who refuses to follow their benevolent dictums – and be sure you don’t forget about all those new hi-tech shotguns the IRS purchased recently.

I’m particularly ashamed of the part the Republican party has played in the anti-online poker war. If anything, poker is the American symbol of the individual and for capitalism, where an individual uses his skill to mitigate the ebb and flow of random statistical events and turn a profit using his intelligence. There is no reward without some risk. And free individuals should have the right to risk their resources in any manner they choose. If they eventually lose those resources playing poker, it’s still better than having the blood-hungry politicians of America confiscate them to dispense to their electorate. Given that, the Republicans should stick to fiscal issues (such as keeping the dollar sound), protecting the boarders and ensuring that the country has a strong defense, and leave the social/moral issues to the will of the public. These are the issues that won their house victory. There is no mandate for a the conservative wing of American politics to provide a moral premise for the public anymore than there is a mandate for the liberal wing to provide itself as a surrogate husband to the increasing number of fatherless families. It would be nice, and completely unexpected, if our federal government, acting through their sea of bureaucrats, loosened its hands from our wallets and removed its intrusive nostrils from our collective anuses. But don’t hold your breath.

Federal has become a byword for thievery, waste, and incompetence. Excepting the case of war (at least in the first half of the last century), there is nothing the federal bureaucracy can do as well as private industry. As a retirement age baby boomer, this is how I see the federal government: My enemy. We revolted against King George for confiscatory polices that were a lot less heinous than our current government’s, and we were perhaps less divided on issues during the Civil War. I fear that another rebellion is the only way to save the remnants of our constitutional republic.

Popularity: 25% [?]

A review of Behold a Pale Horse by William Riley Cooper, Light Technology Publishing, 1991.

Author William Cooper is a darling among the extreme faction of the UFO cult. Behold A Pale Horse is his underground magnum opus that presents “documentation” that UFOs are not only here, but have had a long-standing treaty with the United States government. The point of said contract is to trade humans to the aliens, to use for food or as Guinea pigs, in exchange for technology. The whole deal is somehow tied into conspiracies that go back thousands of years and involve every clandestine group known to mankind. In a nutshell – with the emphasis on “nut” – this is what Cooper maintains.

Jeez, with book this bad, this intellectually flaccid . . . Where to start?

First up, Mr. Cooper begins by taking cheap shots at his detractors, and former disgruntled-business partners, using one-sided arguments and character assassination like a blunt cleaver. If nothing else, any reasonable person should proceed from this point with trepidation and an awareness that they are not dealing with a socially well-adjusted individual. He refers (p.21) to a pair of his former business partners as ” two old has-been actors turned con men,” and implies that they are thieves and liars. One can only wonder why, if they are so bad, he decided to associate with them in the first place. Bad judgment? Or birds of a feather? Later (p. 231), and with no apparent awareness of irony, he accuses UFO magazine publisher Vicki Cooper (no relation) of engaging in character assassination. William Cooper should know character assassination when he sees it. It is a sub-text in Behold A Pale Horse and is constantly employed in an attempt to undermine the credibility of his detractors.

A point by point refutation of William Cooper’s blather would result in terminal tedium for the reader of this review; as for this reviewer, I have guns in the house and have had fits of depression, so must be careful least the monumental task of recounting Mr. Cooper’s logic faults and contradictory statements drives me to do myself harm. So I will summarize, and give a limited number of examples of his mental ennui.

The moon has greenery upon it, and a breathable atmosphere; hence man can walk its surface without a spacesuit. (p. 221)

He recounts a series of random acts of violence (p. 225), such as mass shootings, then infers – with no substantiation – that all perpetrators where current or former mental patients who were on Prozac and had brain implants. The latter can be proven by exhumation of the bodies, he suggests. (And how likely is it that a mental patient would be on Prozac?)

He posits (p. 220) that the book and television documentary Alternative 3 -created by the BBC and broadcast on April 1 as an April’s fool joke – is a reality. Among other things, Alternative 3 says there is a cooperative effort by the now defunct USSR and the USA, who both have had bases on the moon and mars for decades, to cull the best scientific brains by kidnapping them and relocating them to bases on mars, the moon, etc.

He informs us (p. 202) that the movies Close Encounters Of The Third Kind and ET are both lightly fictionalized versions of true events. (How about War Of The Worlds, then?)

In quick summation, Cooper believes, or at least purports to believe, that the crucifixion of Jesus, the assassination of JFK – who was killed because he discovered the aliens were behind the illegal drug trade in America (glad that’s finally solved)–are all part of the same Grand Conspiracy by a cabal of governmental elitists comprised of the Bilderberg Group, the Illuminati, and both gray and reptilian aliens which flit about the planet doing deals with our government, abducting people, and carving up cattle for sport while waiting for large vats, located in the southwestern United States, of human body parts to come to a boil. Basically, his theories are the distillation of the fantasies of the extremely dysfunctional raving paranoiacs on your average mental ward.

Of course some of you may have heard these claims before. Essentially, Cooper includes every far-out UFO/Alien Abduction rumor ever generated by the UFO cults. And why are we to now believe all these far-out rumors and myths? Why, because William Cooper has credibility. He was a member of US Naval Intelligence and had access to secret files. So he says.

Early in the book Cooper admitted that at one point he had deliberately sowed “disinformation” (p.28) about UFOs in an attempt to “convince the known agents that I was just a harmless kook who didn’t really know anything.” (How hard could that have been?) And here he reveals his method for writing Behold A Pale Horse. “I prepared some bogus information, mixed it with some true information, and passed it . . .” (ibid, 28) This is a well known tactic among practiced liars, intelligence operatives, politicians and children. ( “Oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the instruments of darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray us in deepest consequence.” Macbeth: Shakespeare).

If you mix a lie with a liberal amount of truth, people will lick it up with relish. This is why I am a Cynic. (The Cynic school of philosophy was named after dogs – who wisely smell and test things before consuming them.) This is a trick Cooper uses constantly: the fatally flawed syllogism. (A syllogism is a basic method of logic, comprised of a major statement (All men have testicles), a minor statement (John is a man) and a logical inference drawn from the truth of the major and minor premises: (John is a man; therefore, John has testicles.) When a series of true statements are presented, along with a lie, the weight of all the known truths seem to give support to the lie. It doesn’t matter how simple the truths or how radical the lie. For example: Cooper, reporting a well known UFO myth, says that President Eisenhower met with the aliens and signed a treaty with them (p.202 ). The elements of the story are as follows: On February 20, 1954, while ostensibly on a three-week vacation in Palm Springs, President Eisenhower slipped over to Edwards Air Force Base where, with a delegation of public figures, he met with the aliens and signed a treaty with them.

This can be broken into a series of statements.

There is an Edwards Air Force Base.

President Eisenhower was on vacation in Palm Springs on February 20, 1954.

The list of delegates who were in attendance are all real public figures who were alive at the time in question.

President Eisenhower signed a treaty with aliens.

Here is our flawed syllogism. Though some premises are true, one is not; hence the inference is incorrect. Though statements one through three are all true, a full three-quarters of story, it doesn’t follow that statement four is true. The weight of truth of the first three statements does absolutely nothing by way of proving the validity of the assertion of statement four. Mix a lie in with a lot of detailed truth, and the lie becomes believable. Minute detail does not mean truth, nor repeating something over and over. But a host of Cooper readers apparently have neither the wit nor the experience to understand that they are being spoon-fed a bunch of confabulation by a con-man.

Still, there is a certain portion of the population that will believe absolutely anything. One reviewer mentions that Behold A Pale Horse came highly recommended to him by a cousin, who read it in prison, where it was all the rage among inmates, particularly black inmates. That solid endorsement makes perfect sense to me. I’m sure that the prisoners in question used the same powers of discernment, and the same good decision making ability, when reading literature that they used in the events leading to their incarceration.

Mr. Cooper does not come off as an erudite individual. His writing reveals a sulky, angry, contumacious, paranoid and not at all the type of individual to have had any part in significant military intelligence operations or access to vital data. The military may be some things, but it ain’t that stupid. This has led some to speculate that Cooper was exposed to certain documents precisely because he would blab about them, hence serving a covert purpose as a purveyor of misinformation for the intelligence community. (In the intelligence field, getting disinformation out is often as important as protecting relevant information.) But the majority of documents he presents are not even valid as disinformation. He speaks of the Protocols Of The Elders Of Zion–a patent fabrication from around 1700 that has been discredited for almost three centuries – as if it were the wellspring of truth. (The Protocols, for those of you who don’t know, are purported to be a secret plan laid out by rich powerful Jews to take over the world; however, secret cabals simply don’t commit their heinous plans to paper: and the Jews are not that stupid. Believers in the reality of the Protocols are usually also the type of individuals who believe that the Jews kill and eat Christian babies.) Another document, pompously titled by Mr. Cooper as The Illuminati’s War Upon The People Of America and quoted as if it were gospel, was purportedly sent to him by someone who found it in an IBM copier they purchased at a surplus sale – which apparently provided the document with all the credibility Cooper needed. (Besides, if the Illuminati is that inept – that their secret documents are laying about in used copy machines, how much should we fear them?)

But what is truly amazing about Behold A Pale Horse is not what Cooper claims, but that some people can read the book and come away as believers! That is a stunning indictment of our educational system. To teach someone to read, but not teach them logic – to the point that they cannot discern literary feces such as this for what it is – should be a crime. Paranoid minds, and minds overly-taxed by ordinary day – to – day reality, apparently take this malarkey – filled text seriously. Discerning and intelligent readers will find it an interesting read for completely different reasons. It is a tsunami of disinformation. It is a textbook on how to avoid logical conclusions and how to sow disinformation by using completely unproven premises taken from un-credible documents. In short, it is the best example of fallacious reasoning this reviewer has yet to come across, and should be on the bookshelf of every sociologist and ardent student of inexplicably-stupid-things people believe.

If you are waiting for the alien mothership that is coming in behind the comet to pick you up, this is the book for you to read. And if your meds have kicked in, your state of consciousness may be just dim enough to comprehend it.

Addendum:

In 2001, in Arizona, while Apache County Sheriff’s deputies were serving a warrant on Mr. Cooper, Cooper shot one of the deputies in the head and was subsequently shot and killed by another deputy. I suggest that the deputy who put a bullet into Mr. Cooper did the literary world – not to mention proponents of ratiocination – an extraordinary favor. My only wish is that he had shot him sooner – before he had a chance to spew out Behold A Pale Horse. Naturally, Mr. Cooper’s fans will see his death as justification of his alien/FBI/Bilderberg/Illuminati/Jewish bankers, etcetera al. conspiracy theory. I think the answer is a lot simpler. I think maybe the deputy had a long-standing grudge against proponents of gross stupidity.

Popularity: 41% [?]