The toughest circumstance is that most countries are filled with Positivists, the United States most of all. The Religious Right in America is positive that we are a God-fearing nation and that everyone should want to turn this into a Christer ecclesiastical state. (My "On the Road" item below on the Kansas Board of Education bears this out, if nothing else in your experience does.) The misnomered Right-to-Lifers believe that it's positively all right to take the lives of doctors and bomb clinics which allow pregnant women the freedom of making the choice to terminate their unwanted pregnancies. The neo-Puritanical liberals of the Dollar Bill and Hillary persuasion believe it's positively their duties to determine if I have another drink, smoke another cigarette, or watch mucho-macho film stars in Test-fests blow up buildings and spray cartoon-like villians with automatic weapons. And putative Democratic nominee Al Gore's wife, Tipper, thinks that I should stop listening to Tupac Shakur or the early Snoopy Doggie Dogg because it will turn a decently-paid Web journalist like myself into a Gangsta. Yeah right. Or, more appropriately, "Maybe."

The point is, I'm not positive that these people are ABSOLUTE IDYITS. But MAYBE they are a little too positive about the rectitude of their beliefs as opposed to all the other possibilities out there.

G21 ON THE ROAD

One only need take a "road trip," so to speak, and look at what passes for news and serious discussion of the issues which face us as citizens to see that there is a serious need for a genuine public policy voice among our media.

You couldn't go many places in the American media mix last week without hearing that, after the last "senseless" killing sprees, America should be prepared to give up its love affair with the gun.

From ABC News's Nightlinebringing in the Police Chiefs of Seattle, WA, and Vancouver, BC, Canada --- due to geographic proximity and comparable population --- talking about their respective annual gun-death rates, to Bill Maher on Politically Incorrectquestioning his usual coterie of second-tier celebrity pundits, to editorials in most of the major newspapers in the land, to the Talking Heads of PBS's The Newshour with Jim Lehrer, a consensus was being trumpeted with LOUD REPETITION to We the People.

The consensus among The Powers That Be boiled down to the fact that gun violence was pandemic in America and thus it was time to get serious about gun control. For the first time in the thirty years since this issue surfaced on the national public policy radar screens the "experts" had decided that there was enough public fear and a momentum of concern for moving toward banning every personal weapon except shotguns.

Bill Maher, whose livelihood certainly depends on Nielsen ratings, felt that he could say as much, repeatedly.

Meanwhile, Ted Koppel over at Nightline, while bringing the two Police Chiefs of "comparable cities" in the U.S. and Canada to make the case for gun control, failed to point out that there was one bit of data which made the two cities not-so-comparable: Seattle is predominantly white --- as is the state of Washington --- while Vancouver, like many Canadian cities, has a history of racial tolerance and is reknowned for being multi-ethnic. (A little statistic like that wouldn't help the major thrust of the story being pushed by Nightline, of course. Besides, we all know that people of color are notoriously more violent than whites, don't we?)

"Wait a minute, Rod! Are you saying the United States doesn't need gun control?"

Not exactly. All this item is meant to do is make you consider how gun control will be brought about.

I don't believe you'll find a more leftist editorialist on the Web. Hell! The Turn Left Web site put the G21 first on its list. (I *do* wish someone would tell them we're not in San Francisco, anymore.)

BUT, at the same time, because I'm a radical skeptic, I have to wonder about this recent push by the Mouthpiece Media. After all, I think there are some people who MOST DEFINITELY need to have hand guns.

Taxi drivers in most low-income, inner city neighborhoods need hand guns. They would be fools to go out at night without them, and --- in some neighborhoods --- even during the day.

If you are from any ethnic or religious minority and you get a job transfer which requires you to move the Pacific northwest of the United States, or if you're crazy enough to move there on your own, you MOST DEFINITELY need to have a hand gun in your bedroom.

I will go so far as to say, knowing that you are a law-abiding citizen and will register it, that you probably should carry it with you at all times if you're fool enough to live out there. We're talking Aryan Nations territory, after all.

You work in an all-night convenience store anywhere in America. Need I say more?

So this idea of a blanket ban on weapons doesn't sit well with me. And I'm a leftist.

ITEM: The Kansas Board of Education has decided that evolution will no longer be taught in their schools this past week.

Toto, I don't think I want any kids I know raised in Kansas anymore.

Remember when we were talking about the dangers of Positivism above? This bone-head decision is living proof of the kind of damage to futures which being so positive you are right can do. You can read more about these idyits here.

ITEM: The big Bleed-Lead item of last week was about the umpteenth Hate Crime committed in this country. This time a guy named Buford O. Furrow, Jr., decided that he wanted to convince the rest of White America that it was about time to start killing off some Jews and maybe take out a Filipino, just for grins, while you're at it.

Some of you may have missed this part of the Mouthpiece Media's coverage of the story, but Brill's Content didn't: In the first hours that this story broke, the Associated Press wire service fed all the national media that police believed the assailant was either an "Hispanic or Asian" male. The New York Timesand many other news outlets on the Web, including Yahoo! picked this up and ran with it.

You can't really attribute this to a natural bias on the part of the L.A. Police Department (or can you?) so much as you can to the projection of the prejudices of the eye-witnesses. Oops!

"Rod, are you saying that eye-witness testimony, which we rely on in our courts of law in this country, could be framed by personal prejudices?"

Me? Hell no!

Will there be more Buford Furrow's in our future? You wouldn't lose any money on that bet. I'll tell you why:

Most of the information we are fed in American media is tailored to generate FEAR. Fear produces hate; every hate-monger in history has known this. From the bleed-lead prevalence of your six o'clock local television news, to the Republican party producing Willie Horton commercials and going on and on about a "cultural war," to the doctrines of groups like the Aryan Nations and World Church of the Creator, fear is a steady diet. Fear produces hate. As long as this unfettered ration of hate is being force-fed our society, you are going to continue to mentally unstable people like Buford O. Furrow, Jr., act on that hate. The chickens, as Malcolm X pointed out, have to come home to roost.

ITEM: After workers in a nuclear arms plant in Kentucky have complained about exposure to CANCER-CAUSING PLUTONIUM RADIATION for years, our Secretary of Energy, Mr. Richardson, let's all the media know that a major investigation is beginning at the nuke weapons plant in Paducah, Kentucky, because it turns out to be TRUE.

Man! How many times have you and I heard industry officials, the Suits from public utilities, and government folks from the Department of Energy to the Nuclear Regulatory Agency to the EPA asssure us that nukes are TOTALLY SAFE and the people employed to handle them are in NO DANGER?

"We are experts in this field and we are bringing the state-of-the-art techniques and procedures to bear in order to safeguard the public."

So now we read in most major newspapers --- it was played down in the New York Times, but played up in the Washington Post --- that these nuclear weapons workers have been glowing as green as Homer Simpson. Doh!