One day in December 2003, when Saddam Hussein was captured, Bloomberg News flashed the following headline at 13:01: US TREASURIES RISE; HUSSEIN CAPTURE MAY NOT CURB TERRORISM.

Whenever there is a market move, the news media feel obligated to give the ‘reason." Half an hour later, they had to issue a new headline. As these US Treasury bonds fell in price (they fluctuate all day long, so there was nothing special about that), Bloomberg News had a new reason for the fall: Saddam’s capture (the same Saddam). At 13:31 they issued the next bulletin: US TREASURIES FALL; HUSSEIN CAPTURE BOOSTS ALLURE OF RISKY ASSETS.

So it was the same capture (the cause) explaining one event and its exact opposite. Clearly, this can’t be; these two facts cannot be linked.

- The Black Swan; Taleb

Nassim Nicholas Taleb also presents in his book the story of inductive reasoning as applied to an ordinary ice cube.

Anyone can do it. You look at an ice cube on a table out in the sun during your garden party, and you can actually predict the future with a great deal of certainty. A small puddle there on the formica.

What is slightly more difficult is the other sort, deductive reasoning; reverse-engineering the puddle. This is because there are a nagging number of etiological causes for the effect. A spilled drink, sweat, rain from the roof, a cat visit. While it’s harder to guarantee a cause, the positing of one is therefore that much easier, since no one can prove you wrong with any greater assurance.

I once knew one who was a writer, sometimes, and a metaphysician always, in those days. She produced an astrology chart for the late Jack Kerouac, which went into the first hardbound edition of Kerouac, by Ann Charters. If you ever see it, that chart is deadly accurate, where everything from alcoholism to wordsmanship and mama’s boyism is right there in the stars for all to see. Deconstructing a life when all the parts are known is very easy. If you say alcoholism results from birth in Aries with Anima Rising, who’s to prove different?

My father was excellent with the post hoc ergo propter hoc method of child rearing. It is more common than you might think if your own parents were either overly engaged or utterly indifferent. Briefly, daddy dearest would search out a habit of mine he loathed from a vast pile, and then set up an evil consequence, as; he didn’t like my playing kid games after I was twelve, so he placed me for the first time behind the wheel of our old Packard and when I lurched with the clutch, he said, that’s what happens, playin’ all those kid games.

As an old lady in a tent dress said during a literary event in more recent times, apropros of nothing I could find, "It’s a perfectly adequate mechanism, I should think." She sat there knitting the whole evening and did not look up even to delivery that line and she said nothing else before or after. I don’t remember much else about that particular soirée.

So today we see a repugnant bunch of string-pullers who inveigle the bottom-feeders to conceive and rage about their own faults and deficiencies as some alien plot, and then do the fascist formulators retreat to the squawk shows to claim the cause of the teabagger twit turmoil is a demand for less government and a cheaper one, too, and fewer gumint intrusions into their sad little lives which would not even be possible without federal relief.

Another exercise is encapulated in Lon Cheney the B movie horror and his boasts that his trashing the Constitution is what Kept Us Safe® after the big blunderbush of 9/11. A more reasonable assessment would realize how torpor since the last skyjacking and the need to please a very demanding public led to criminal neglect of the most basic principles of national defense prior to 9/11. As one expert later groaned, "I mean, come on, two Arab gentlemen with one-way tickets walking through security lines with boxcutters in their baggage?" And a passel of known al qaeda creeps flitting in and out of the country at will like swallows, and even taking flying lessons (a FBI agent did attempt at least to provoke notice at HQ on that score, but was unsuccessful).

The simple fact is, once the horror happened, the various responders geared up protective measures and a scared public only complained slightly about the hassle of long lines at airport terminals. No one had to govern Tommy in the prosthetics lab about preparing resin.

He would take each of the cups for the blends off the plastic tree, and then he would very wisely trim from the bottom of each every trace of the tip which had connected them. He said, if you don’t, the vibration from the mixer will cause them to dance off the table.

I said, Hey, Tommy, that’s a very shrewd move!

And Tommy said, "You only have to clean up one."

But it all happens due to the natural reaction of individuals on the scene, and no mass political pimp need apply for a Hero Badge. It’s another wonder how the party which so rhapsodizes about the power of the private individual is so keen to ripoff credit for the central government whenever it happens to be there in residence.