The true secret security organization

Many people have taken the recent news of the expanding security and spy system as being equal to Homeland Security. That seems true on the surface, but in reality, Homeland Security is an office in DC with a head and a couple of assistants. It's a cover, a front, a sham designed to keep people from knowing about the actual organization.

It took months of probing, but I've uncovered the real, super top secret organization, called the Department of Suspicion, Outrage and Paranoia, or SOP for short.

This organization is so secret no one knows who actually works for it. Everyone has a seventeen digit secret number. What's more, no one knows the titles of the operatives. You see, the person hiring someone picks the title and is the only one in the organization who knows who that person is and that he or she actually works there. Each person has the right and duty to hire one subordinate, thus becoming the handler or supervisor for that new person. Each person in the organization, which now has over a half million agents, only knows the identity of two other people, his subordinate and his supervisor. I use "he" because most women, once learning how the department works, want no part of it.

This will be easier to explain with an example. Say a level one agent, an L-1, files a report, which says, "Agent Albert Roberts discovered on June 27 of last year that a 57 year old Al-Qaeda agent, one Salib Maqwarh, a Moroccan national, posing as a food importer, passed vital information to three Saudi men in Fatima's coffee house in downtown Damascus." Now, his supervisor gets this information, and in the interest of secrecy, edits out the names, actual locations and exact dates, leaving something like this: "In June of last year an agent identified an Al-Qaeda agent in a business in Damascus who was passing information to three other men."

Now, the supervisor, who is an L-2, passes the information to his supervisor, an L-3, who knows who he is but not the actual name of the other L-2 who reports to him, since he only hired one subordinate. The L-3 further edits the report to make it fit with the other report, so they look like they were written by one person. The L-3 than passes it up to the L-4, where the process repeats again. This continues up to the top of the chain, the L-17, who consolidates all those reports, further editing for secrecy, so that when the final document crosses the President's desk, it says something like: "Last year in the middle east some agents discovered Al-Qaeda operatives passing information."

Now, since each person can and should hire one other person, by the time you read this the L-1s will have hired another layer, who will then become the new L-1s, moving everyone else up one number and making the top layer now L-18 and adding ten or fifteen thousand new agents, each with a unique title, to the organization.

And that, my fellow citizens, is how we keep America safe.

Bell, CA: a lesson for us all

There is a huge lesson in the recent developments in Bell, California. After the news got out on how much some people were earning, the townsfolk got the biggest earners fired and the council to take a 90 percent cut in pay. So, you can fight city hall after all, and you, the public, can prevail over the entrenched political machines. So, what's the trick?

The Bell saga points to three steps in the process. First the news of something egregious needs to get out to the public. Openness and transparency is vital to our civic life, as are the people who dig through records and bring these things to the people.

Second, you need a critical mass. People who dislike what's happening go about to the community, stirring people out of their apathy, until a number of people, all with the same issue in hand, constitute a movement.

Finally, there is the demand, not request or humble suggestion, that things change and change now. A large and vocal group confronts the power structure and says it ends right here, right now. The officials have the choice of backing down or beating a hasty retreat out the back door.

Admittedly, it's easier in a small town, a bit harder at the state level and harder still in DC. However, it has been done before, and it can be done again. Get informed; get up and get involved.

Looking at the Obama Administration

Looks like President Obama has gone from a very approval rating after taking office, to a low rating a year and a half later. In fact, there is talk now that he may be a one term president and that republicans may retake the house. How, as the saying goes, did he squander his political capital?

For openers, somehow he didn't get the nature of his mandate. People voted for an untried junior senator due to his vague message of hope and the perception that he was the anti Bush. People, most democrats and independents and even some republicans were fed up with Bush politics and the jaded attitude of an oilman-run, war-obsessed, corporation-loving administration. Obama, many people naively believed, would fix all that and bring us back to the America we wanted to see. Didn't happen.

The first clue was that we were sick and tired of Bush's war, his paranoia about terrorists and the trillions of our money he was pouring into middle east countries that were never going to become clones of us, no matter how many bucks and troops we sent. He missed the clue, and Bush's wars became Obama's wars, made even worse by the financial melt down that left Americans jobless and homeless. Get a clue, Mr Obama, we are hurting, your policies are spewing out new terrorist, and the people over there think we're A-holes.

Companies start out small, and like people, if they are healthy and adaptable, the survive and grow. And, like people, they lose vitality, age and die. But Obama kept many of these financial institutions alive (think transplants) beyond their normal life span. Worst of all he bailed them out when they were weak and could have signed anything. Now, they are strong again, on our money, and the financial reform will likely not fully reform anything to any great degree.

Health care reform is complicated, watered down and possibly filled with pitfalls, but what the hell, he promised it, and if we keep our collective fingers crossed, it might just work.

fixing the mineral management agency should have been done prior to a major disaster. Posturing after the fact does little good for those people who have lost their incomes along the gulf.

I'm tired of hope which, like dope makes you feel things are good when they are not. Just recently changed my voter registration from democrat to none of the above.

changing my voter reg.

Republicans and Democrats are bashing each other at every level: candidates for office, members of every legislature, media pundits and people on the street. Amid all the finger pointing and name calling, nothing worthwhile is getting done. Well, some lobbyists are getting their special favors, but nothing for the rest of us.

I was a democrat, thinking that they were a bit better, more on my side. However, I now have trouble telling the difference, as our debt mounts, wars drag on, the economy continues to falter, a few corporations get rich or bailed out or both and our once great education system crumbles.

I'm going down to city hall in the morning and change my voter registration. I'll look at the current assortment of third parties and either choose one or register as an independent.

I think we all should do that. Perhaps if the two major parties saw their numbers drop down to single digit, they might just get the idea, cut the pointless games and start working together to get something worthwhile done. And, if they didn't perhaps some third parties would become major parties, and the Republicans and Democrats would go the way of the Whigs.

There is nothing written in stone that says these two parties are all we get for now and for all time. They've served their purpose, and now it's time for us to walk away from them, leaving the remaining vocal few to shout endless invectives at each other, while the rest of the country gets on with it.

Homeless sleeping ban

Attorney Ed Frey's commentary (Santa Cruz Sentinel 7/11) insists that the sleep-in is a protest for freedom and justice, two overused words. However, looking closely at his comments yields different fruit.

Frey states: "When he (Mr. Facer) arrived in Santa Cruz a few years ago, he tried many times to obtain shelter space." This apparently indicates that Facer came here years ago as a homeless person seeking shelter, not someone seeking employment and affordable rent. Also, for whatever number of years, Facer has continued to be a homeless camper. Frey doesn't say where Facer came from, why he came or how he occupied himself at his former home.

Again: "The accused must run three separate errands." How many errands do those of us who are not homeless run? We run to work. We make trips to stores to buy materials to maintain our shelters, such as paint, lumber, plumbing supplies, and when we wish to replace a crumbling fence, we must run to city hall to pay for a permit. Our lives are filled with errands that accompany being a member of the community.

In reality, we have a pool, known as the common good, and most of us both contribute to this pool and draw from it. Frey's client apparently enjoys drawing from it but has no interest in contributing to it.

I'm having trouble feeling sorry for him.

World belongs to salesmen

I think the world belongs to the salesmen. After all, no matter what you have, it's useless unless you can sell lots of it to lots of people.

I just completed my, I think, seventh book. I'm losing count. Writing it was the easy part. Selling it is another matter. I'm simply no good at sales and marketing, which I discovered when I've taken sales jobs in the past, only to earn zip.

I know of a number of excellent writers who languish in obscurity because they don't know how to catch the attention of a publisher. I also know a number of artists who are at least as good as Tom Kincade, but who live on the edge of starvation. The difference is obvious. Kincade is a marketing wiz. As a painter, he's probably a bit above average, but as a salesman of his paintings, he's a genius.

During the summer, I travel to Big Sur each week for the international short film festival, where I see the greatest films by people you and I have never heard of. However, I'll bet everyone knows the names of the directors of all the summer formula blockbusters.

Then factor in the great bands that only get to play the local clubs for beer money.

Would I opt for being a formula writer in exchange for fame and fortune? That I even ask the question dooms me and proves I'll never be a salesman.