The Thieving State

Government (and governments-sponsored big science) (and governments-sponsored big universities) (and governments-subsidized big business) stole my internet, years after I'd made my offers public. I made my offers in the wake of Ivan Illich's suggestions, and Illich was interpreting (macroinformation) what he (and I) found (find) implicit in the gospels of Jesus:
We should live together without interfering with each other,
(and, Technology ought to do something for us other than destroy our environment).
The thieves aided the public is letting me fall down (in Illich's, in Jesus' wake); but when I tried to get back up again, they knocked me down, and now hold me down, even though the fed finally let me out of jail, it did so only after destroying my business, my domains, and wasting my pittance of cash.

But you know what? They did it again!

I've been a conservative boy scout type all my life. As my destroyed Knatz.com recounted, I'd cry when other boys stepped on ants, I worried myself sick that a big fire at the Rockville Centre Coca Cola bottling plant was eating up oxygen we needed to breathe. I picked up my trash, I picked up your trash. ... In the '60s I cheered Bucky Fuller's advice that we recycle.

1989, flat broke from another decade of public effort (writing, god's inspired word) with no income, I landed in Sebring FL. I heard that there was a truck out on the highway that took aluminum cans for recycling. I organized a few big trash cans to receive aluminum empties. Within days the tenants' association was knocking me aside so they could gather the cans I'd made provision for. Only later did I learn that the guy on the highway paid money for the cans! My thieving neighbors probably thought I was going to sell their garbage. So they knocked me down, the same people who didn't support my internet, the same people responsible for you not having today the internet Jesus, Illich, and I designed for you. Ah, I thought. at least they're recycling. (Meantime, god, as usual, gave me visions of dead pk having license from heaven to visit (and abide) some parts of heaven and to visit (and abide) some parts of hell. I don't know what parts of heaven I'm denied, there's plenty that I'm not denied; I don't know what parts of hell I'll be denied; but there are plenty housing and torturing my many many enemies (virtually every kleptocrat on earth), where I am welcome to improvise my own private tortures on top of Satan's standards. Some devil may be burning your feet: I come along and my choice of tormentor is held captive while I piss in their mouth! bugger their eyeball! whatever.)

That aside, here's the real laugh: government (town, county, state) knocked the tenants association aside and now the state collects the recyclables. Of course they knocked the guy in the truck out on the highway too.

The government assuming monopolies of everything, stealing the numbers rackets, racetrack handicapping, snake oil sales (the pharms) ... reminds me: I loved camping in Jonathan Dickinson State Park, Hobbe Sound FL, in the 1980s while looking for an outlet to plug my typewriter into as I struggled to find a buyer for my first novel. One day after many camping visits there I rented a canoe, paddled up the Loxahatchee River, caught a few brackish water fish, and let the ranger guide me around Trapper John's old 'gator wrestling outpost. I told the story at Knatz.com: I repeat it here before reposting the K. version:

Trapper John camped on the river, way out beyond any other settler's range. The curious visited, he turned it to cash by running a little theme park: he let people look at his 'coons, he wrestled alligators for them. The state shut him down. He died, killed himself it seems. The state took over his camp, and now shows 'coons, alligators ...

And the US pretends that Sutter's Mill was actually US property, freely available to any kleptocrat despoilers. When Sutter sued, and won, the good people of San Francisco burned the court house to the ground, scattered the judges.

The state really does know where the true power (this side of Judgment) resides: and it ain't with Jesus.

What I don't know is if anybody else pays the governments for the stolen recyclables.

Harlan Ellison wrote a story about a terminator from the future comeing back in time to kill the mother of some future hero so he wouldn't get born. Hollywood made The Terminator: great movie! Ellison sees it. No doubt he thought, hey, great job; but that's mine! where's my check? He sued the bastards, he collected. Now reprints of the moie even give him a credit.

What about all my ideas that others have made millions to billions to trillions with? No, no, no. Kleptocrats can't afford to pay any reluctant kleptocrats, certainly not any anti-kleptocrats. If the road builders really paid those ancestrally responsible for the road, where would the payments end? It was an Indian path before it was a road; but it was an animal path before it was an Indian path. And how do we know it wasn't an insect path before that? and an amoeba path before that?

Why can't we just understand that etiologies are far too complex for us to excel at. It would be so easy to follow Illich's Jesus and see that no body really owns the whole of anything. So why don't we share, and not destroy, after (severely) limiting our numbers.

If we reduced the human population to say a hundred million (before nature reduces it to zero), then it would hardly matter what any surviving thieving neighbors of mine might want to steal, there'd be no municipality to steal it from them.

Individual thieves there'd still be; but no super-tribe of thieves.

Disarmament

The magician, like the priest, may know perfectly well how his patter misleads the audience, the congregation. The public may understand the journalist's word much differently than the journalist or his organ or his organ's sponsors may mean it: and the journalist and his organ and that organ's sponsors may know perfectly well how their published diction will be misread: and ride the wave: just like the magician, the priest ... the teacher, the politician ...

There was a word I was much misled by in the 1960s. I could have been warned by Jules Henry's Culture Against Man, but I didn't read more than a page of that book till its pages had yellowed and broken into sere fragments in the half-century since I bought it. What I had not guessed was that the culture's mis-manipulation of the term was chaired by my wife's mother's second husband: Dr. Emil Benoit.

Look it up, find Henry's masterpiece. You think "disarmament" would mean, you have weapons? get rid of them. Or at least, you have weapons? get rid of some of them. Of course we were talking about ourselves and the Soviets, so we knew it didn't mean, we have weapons, the Nazis won, now the Nazis are confiscating all our weapons, so they can rule, unopposed.

I'll tell you what Henry revealed, that I hadn't known, after I divulge the family complexities: I met Hilary. Divorse and remarriage had given Hilary two sets of parents. Her father was Marcus Fleming, the IMF economist. Harvard published his papers, there's a Nobel prize in economics named for him: the Fleming effect, or some such. Her mother was employed by the UN as an economist. Marcus remarried on doctor in economics also working for the World Bank, IMF. Etta remarried Professor Emile Beniot, two PhDs from Harvard, professor of economics at Columbia's graduate Business School. (And now our son goes yawing about economics! Yai!)

So: you'd think "disarmament would mean something like, "We have enough weaponry to kill every human being (and most non-human beings) twenty times over: we'll get rid of some of ours if you get rid of some of yours." That's what the public was intended to think it meant. Meanwhile the government, Columbia Business, Harvard, the WB, the IMF ... all knew perfectly well that that is not what it meant: not as reinvented by Emile and his Disarmament Committee: it meant something more like this (the figures are symbolic, I make them up):

We have one hundred billion worth of weapons. Last year we added one hundred million worth of new weapons. At this rate, we'll add one hundred fifty million next year. We acknowledge without public discussion that our Columbia and Harvard economists have transformed the nation into one in which prosperity only occurs in relation to coercive taxation and coerced government spending. Bobby and Jo and Sally may do very well without defense contracts that spend ever more, the money going to friends of the administration, but Lockheed and Dupont and Washington DC will not do very well unless we drop ever greater loads of napalm onto little gook girls across the world and far away.

So, Emile Benoit and his cronies translated "disarmament" to mean: we have one hundred billion worth of weapons. Last year we added one hundred million worth of new weapons. With disarmament, we'll only add one hundred forty-five million next year: and the moron public will think we disarmed! Ha, ha, ha.

The joke is exactly like the one I pointed out to Nixon's White House. Nixon said that he might be able to pull US troops out of Vietnam by election time, if our prisoners of war were released. A year later he said that he might be able to pull US troops out of Vietnam by Christmas time, if our prisoners of war were released. Then the next year he said the same again: by election time. Meantime years were rolling by, lots of bombs dropped on lots of people. It sounded like he was disarming; actually he was escalating his continuation of illegal war.

Knatz.com published my old letter to Nixon on the subject. I'll put it back up at paulknatz blog. Pronto.

Oedipus: Klep Model

Oedipus

Hubris Meets Integrity: An Honest Model for Kleptocrats

Theme: we have the same political structure as did Rome, as did the Jews, as did Jerusalem. Jesus could get kangarooed by us just as easily as he got kangarooed by Herod, Pilat, Augustus ... you and me. I don't care if the Republicans or the Democrats of the Communists are in so long as we are ruled by hierarchies of supposed experts using proxies: human exercising judgments without demonstrating (to any but ourselves) that our judgments are worth a damn.

Cave men couldn't have crucified Jesus, or put a contract out on Luther: because cave men didn't have big complex bureaucracies the lies of which complexify at every level. Cave men could have murdered Jesus, shot arrows at him the instant he first appeared; but they wouldn't have had trials, and jails, and specialists in flogging ... We do.

I rewrite, hoping to condense, points made more than a decade ago at Knatz.com: about the myth of Oedipus.

Oedipus was born to a king and queen (in the days where every town, certainly every county, had its own king. The king and queen, superstitious like everyone else, took their babe to the temple where a prophecy was made: the little prince Oedipus would grow up to kill his father and marry his mother. It's a you-can't-avoid-your-own-destiny kind of story. The royal couple try to avert the prophecy by killing their son. But of course they're squeamish, have specialists to do their work for them, priests, soldiers ... murderers. But the murderer is a softie too. He takes the kid to a border and leaves him in the "wilderness." Naturally the kid survives, is adopted by the king and queen of the next county over, raised as a prince: their prince.

Princes are trained in war, trained to be regal, haughty: ready to draw the sword at every perceived slight. So Prince Oedipus is out on the public road with his princely train, along comes some other doofus in his princely train. Get out of the way, No, you get out of the way. They fight. The younger man kills the older man. Oedipus goes about his business, thinks nothing of it.

Oedipus' foster parents hear that their neighboring kingdom has lost its king. Local royalty is being solicited to find a replacement king. Oedipus' parents volunteer Oedipus. Let's say that Oedipus real parents were the royal family of Sebring. Let's say that Oedipus' foster parents were the king and queen of Avon Park, a few miles up the road. Oedipus leaves Avon Park, his princedom, and travels south to Sebring. There's the unmanned kingdom, there's the widowed queen: unknown to him, unknown to her, his biological mother (who believes that her ill-starred son has been done away with). Oedipus does what is common to lots of cultures: as the new king he has an income, a palace. In that palace is the widow who's been there since time immemorial. He marries her. (It was their Social Security. The Arabs do the same thing, Mohammed did the same thing.)

Time passes. Plenty of kings wouldn't have bothered to sleep with their aged new queen; Oedipus and his mom had children, seem to have gotten along, must have perhaps even liked each other. So he did sleep with her, and loved her.

Oedipus is aware one year that things aren't going swimmingly with his kingdom. The priests say that it's a representation of the gods' displeasure that the murder of the late king hasn't been avenged. It's state of the nation type stuff. Oedipus responds. He commissions a committee to look into it. He'll chair the committee. Evidence trickles in, then pours. Oedipus finally realizes: he's been looking for the mother fucker: he's found him: it's he himself!

Oedipus rushes to see his queen. She's heard the news. She's seen that she and her former king's efforts to defy fate have only rebounded to kick them in the teeth. She hangs herself. Oedipus finds his dead mother, queen, consort, he takes her hair pin from her hair, he stabs his own eyes out. He can't bear to see what's happened to him, what he's done, what he's been party to.

Now: I've asked for decades, loving this story (and hating our own vanity, our own hubris): if one asked Oedipus, Did you kill your father? he'd reply, No, of course not. Maybe he'd add, How dare you? Maybe he'd play marimbas on your ribs after they'd bleached in the sun for a few years. But how could he be sure?

What if you asked him, Have you ever killed anyone? He'd say, Of course, what do you take me for? a faggot?

OK, enough of that for the moment: here's pk real point, pk's pk point:

If you ask an American, Have you killed God? They'll say, nearly all or any of them, No, of course not!
If you ask an American, Have any of your representatives killed God? They'll say, No, of course not!
If you ask an American, Have you or any of your representatives tortured any innocent party? Misappropriated their property? Not paid your bills? The first answers will be emphatic and indignant. As the questions progress, they'd become a bit more uncertain: except you wouldn't get to ask so many questions before you'd find yourself in jail, stripped of your rights, your property, your identity.

We don't know what we have and haven't done. That's why God will do the judging; not us.

Kafka has K immediately blurt on being charged, I'm innocent. But K doesn't even know what the charges are! How can he plead innocence?

Better questions are: Are your political institutions corruptible?
Have you ever looked at a Van Gogh painting in the museum? in an ad? in a movie? How is any such person not guilty?

How dare we quote Jesus? Did we pay him for the original utterance? Have we paid his disciples?

Have we paid the Father?

Are you sure? Are you sure we didn't give the money to a bunch of priests? How do we know the priests passed the money to God?

The US pays its debts to banks and to major corporations: does the US pay its debts to its enemies? To the natives whose land, ideas, institutions, culture we're stolen? To Sutter whose rout west we took, then took his gold? To Illich whose social networking we've perverted? To me whose offer of inter-networked digital libraries got stolen, and perverted?

Cave men may have murdered each other left and right (not really, or we wouldn't be here), but they didn't do atrocious things as a "nation": or as a "religion."