Your Friday Sunset - 9/30/05

Thought I'd start posting one of my infamous sunsets every Friday... this blog needs some colour, mang! (aside from The Turning of the Worm's colourful language, of course)

- g-spot -

Job Peelings

Ask me about the Trids sometime.

I'll tell you all about the Trids....

I've been in a not-frenzied but intense week of training (through observing, mostly) in/for my new job. Intense but neato: it's sort of like I've gone from the gut-filled trenches of Iran (oops! Iraq!) to the marbled, polished holy halls of the Pentagon, in a nice shiny uniform, with a nice, new shiny microchip...

In computing terms, I've gone from Filemaker to Assembly Code, quite literally. How would you answer this?



Fill in the blank:

__________the poor quality of the hash, the hippies choked and gagged.

a) Because

b) Because they

c) Although

d) Because of



You chose "d", right?

That's NOT because you remembered that when "because" is used as the subordinator at the head of an inverted compound sentence it has to be part of a prepositional phrase, namely, [because of], because in such a construction, the phrase head determines the semantic meaning of a following noun/gerund structure, and not a clause, which would be introduced by the (single) head word provided in option (a), [because], as in,


[Because fuckers sell oil to car drivers, the world suffers]

Prepositions and prepositional phrases are followed by noun or gerund structures, in English.

Likewise, option (c) doesn't work because, [Although] alone, is like [because] in that, as a subordinating word in the English grammar system it links to a whole clause, and not just a noun or gerund structure, or simple phrase:

O.K. [Although the hippies coughed, they got off!!!!]
Not Cool [Although the raw and hacking nature of their coughs, the hippies got off!!!]

In short, if there's no preposition, there has to be a predicate. I think.

Similarly, option (b) does not work because it is [because + they + (predicate) ] at the head of one of those noun structures that are already linked to a predicate to make a sentence:

[Because they hacked and gagged for twenty minutes, the hippies finally got off on the shitty, crumbly hash!!!]

That's why you chose "d". But you didn't remember it; you did it unconsciously.

My noo yob is teaching all the unconscious wiring given above, consciously.

Without lecturing. By guiding them through the exploration above with questions and hints, based on what they do know about the English grammar system. The vocabulary counts for nothing in the exam I prep them for. So for us, it'd be the same as:


Fill in the blank:

____________the schnell ficklity of the snosh, the melgrabs blonked and snezzed.

a) Because

b) Because they

c) Although

d) Because of



Which is exactly the same syntax as the previous example, as you doubtlessly will have already noticed. Your brain had to work a bit differently, didn't it? Now do this example, immediately above, in basic French.

{Tu es Canadien; tu connait "francais elementare!"}

That's what I teach now: the microchip/information structure interfaces of a rather deep and abstract level of the English language system. For a highly artificial, unnatural test.

I teach language hacking to students who wanna hack into English-speaky universities.

I've been doing it for a year-and-a-half in an object-oriented language for which I designed the architecture, operating system parameters and defaults, and user (me!) interface.

Now I work in the secret sub-basement, just one floor or two above the geeks in the white coats who are playing with "0" and "1" on a weird computer with eight keys.

That's what I do now, in the elitest and only school of its type in the 'hood.

That's what I do now.

I need a Guinness.

The Turning of the Worms

A One Followed By A Million Zeros

Wow.

My brain just got blown, twice, and not in a good way.

I just finished reading the latest dissertation from my partner in crime here at Brainpeelings Central ("The Big Chimp, The Big Easy and The Big Story" below; you should read it) and found myself, not surprisingly, wondering where I'd put my Jack Daniels and razor blades... damn! And you know, one is just no good without the other (poignant blogage, by the way, dood!! I laughed and then I cried and then I laughed at myself for crying).

I was going to post my own wee kudos-open-letter sort of thing, similar to what he wrote in response to my take on the over-the-edge lunacy of the Black Sheep of the Family to the south, and thought it'd be funny to use Google®'s language translator thingy to retrieve some clever-sounding French or German phrases with which to pepper it.

Imagine my shock at discovering the site that hosts this very blog is owned and operated by Google®.

It's not that they're hiding this fact; it says so at the bottom of every page (although it's quite telling that they haven't named the site something like "Bloggle" or "Bloogle"). But I just never noticed. Although I had wondered a couple of times how something so professionally laid out could be given away to the public for no charge or fee and ads. Okay, yes, I had noticed that they recently announced their "hey, include Google® ads right in your blog! Make some dough while you rail against The Man!" campaign. So there's your revenue stream. Everybody's gotta eat.

But then I got a shiver that pretty much tore me a new asshole from my lower extremities all the way up to my cerebral cortex (and beyond!)... Google® knows everything. They're documenting everything (including these very words). And if they're the uber-geeks I think they must be, they've likely got daily backups stored in dozens of underground bunkers throughout the world.

So, be of good cheer! Yes, we're most likely entering what, at best, could be described as The Dark Ages v2.0. But the monks are already hard at work, ensuring that thought and expression don't perish down the well of time. Good for them!

But these guys do realize that one day, there won't be any electricity to run the computers all this shit is stored on, right? I mean, they've allowed for this, haven't they?

Hmm, maybe not. Maybe someone will run off a hardcopy or two by chance and that will be all that's left. Eventually, we'll find the descendants of Google® shareholders copying the original by hand, spending untold hours illuminating the manuscript after the words have ceased to mean anything. And then, when drawing elaborate curly-cues out of boredom has lost its allure, they'll start imposing their own meanings on the words and pictures. Whatever is going on at the time will be what the words and pictures are actually about and it won't be just an elaborate make-work program anymore, but maybe a way out of the dark and into the light. Everything will make sense, finally.

And then the long, arduous struggle to get back to exactly where we are today, will begin again.

- g-spot -

The Big Chimp, The Big Easy, and their Big Story

So The Great Chimpanzee has taken responsibility, has he? That's like someone borrowing your car and saying, "Dude, don't sweat it; I take FULL responsibility!". Then it comes back to you with a huge scape on the driver's side and the word "responsibility" turns out to mean, "Oh, dude...I'm really, really, REALLY, SOOOO sorry, dude! Just tell your insurance agent it happened in a parking lot." And so YOU end up doing time for fraud the very second you decide to become an apologist for the asshole's lies. But that's not The Big Story.

Isn't this the same smirking goon who's just appointed himself Grand Inquisitor of the Katrina disaster? That's convenient, and rather nice of Ape King: by assigning himself the role of chief detective and IN LESS THAN A WEEK pronouncing himself to be the guilty party ("responsible"), he's saved American taxpayers millions of dollars on a full inquiry. Perhaps he can declare himself an enemy combatant of the American people and get himself shot in front of a firing squad. That's the penalty for Mass Destruction, isn't it? At least "responsible" samurai had the dignity to literally spill their guts over bad decisions; let's see what the American Leader Dude can come up with in terms of Duty and Honour. A lot of the losing generals in Japan got hanged for getting their nation caught up in a multi-theatre war of aggression. Sound familiar? The porcupines are bristling on all sides...

Cuba got whomped with a Category Five hurricane just last September. Although 20,000 houses were destroyed, Papa Fidel got 1,500,000 people to higher ground AHEAD OF THE STORM. No one died. That's what a bunch of cigar chompin', pinko sugar farmers pulled off with only a little communication and a common purpose. Oh, and leftover 1947 Studebakers with next to no petrol in their tanks. If that's all it takes, then why were these crucial elements missing in America, 2005? Go ask FEMA, which has been TURNING AWAY disaster relief en masse: go see www.informationclearinghouse.info on that topic. But that's not The Big Story; I don't want to get bogged down in it here.

Communications and the common purpose have been turned off. While Katrina certainly deserves top billing for drama, her aftermath has obscured a BIGGER story, that of Jose Padilla.

Huh?

Remember him? He's the gang-banger who has been under lock and key in solitary confinement since May, 2002...who has been asking to have charges read against him....you know...he terrorist dude who's off the radar. That dude. He's The Big Story.

"Why am I in jail?"

That seems to be a basic question after three years of incarceration, and yet the state refuses to tell him or his lawyers, citing the fact that Padilla is so dangerous to the public good that to even list his offenses in a courtroom might upset the delicate and terrible balance between the forces of Good and Evil. "Why am I in jail?" is one of the most basic questions in law, in civilised countries like America, the U.K., Canada, Australia....

The Virginia-based U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit has ruled that the President can indict people without charges and hold them indefinitely, and this power is subject to no oversight or review, let alone open to countermand. In Roman history, this is the point when Caesar was crowned Emperor. Same in Star Wars II. Same in World War Two, with Hitler. Same Big Story, always.

Goodbye Habeus Corpus. Poof. Hundreds of years of guarantees and protections handed down to the English-speaking world since the Magna Carta have just vanished in the U.S. through a court edict against an innocent man whose case has been left unnoticed in the media by Bad Intent, Katrina, and The Death of History four years ago this week (remember when only 3,000 bodies was such a big deal?). And the U.K., Canada, Australia...what do they say? Nothing. they have their own Jose Padillas; the Americans just happen to be the loudest and most overt of the Anglo horde.

America is the loudest, but look! Listen! Nothing in the media about The Big Story....

Wait a minute, there...what was that? Padilla "an innocent man"?!? Yup...that's how the law is required to view him. You and I can think whatever we want about a gangsta who, it seems, signed up for terrorist training courses in Pakistan, but the state is required to not have an opinion until one is proven beyond the shadow of a doubt in a court of law. Or WAS required, that is. Poof. Gone. No requirement of due process of law for citizens, just like the non-citizens in holiday camps like Guantanamo Bay, and "elewhere": the State is The Emperor, and his Fiat.

And Padilla's an AMERICAN CITIZEN.Think about that, all you fucking fucks who've ever supported Nixon, Reagan, Bush I, Clinton and Bush II and any of their fascist, manifest-destiny policies. That's right: you've killed democracy in your own country by electing these evil fucks, you stupid fucks. Even worse are you unmentionable fucks who neither vote, assemble, nor think. You did it; you've gone and destroyed your own Republic, just like the Romans. Congratulations! - now you get to have Caligulas and Neros who strum guitar while New Orleans drowns, and who buy $7,000 shoes while old ladies rot. Cheers! You're in the river of history now. You've chosen unwisely.

And Padilla's an AMERICAN CITIZEN. Non-Americans should be respectful to The Masters, and you goddamn' Frenchies better be quivering in your lacy undies 'bout now: behave yourselves. Don't ever get the fuck caught in Dodge after dark if you're from outta town an' you been kickin' up a ruckus...les'un say there's a pole an' a rope we keep aroun' here fer folks like that....

The Big Story. Think about it: Katrina's tale is nestled inside this Padilla epic; Katrina is the un-Bhagavad Gita within the anti-Mahabharata that has been unfolding since "that fateful, bright, blue September morning" those five years ago. The Prez can have people locked up at will without charges or appeal, as of this week; the Presidential orders which created FEMA give him the tools to do that collectively in times of national disaster; there is no appeal in the courts; and, there are tens of thousands of people who will probably have no place to go for at least a year or two. What do you think happens to them next?

"Nothin': y'all jus' sit right there an' shut the fuck up!"

The Padilla case gives Chimp Boy the right to do anything to people at whim, and he has a lot of poor black folk to deal with right now; they're getting in the way of his war; so, might as well use 'em up fer somethin' good - recruitment or rehearsals for The Really Big Story coming to a planet near you, soon. FEMA chooses who gets to go to the job fair. Non-Americans: What's FEMA called in your "country"? You've got one. We all do.

How do you like the dress rehearsals for Peak Oil, citizen?

Padilla was probably just getting a few courses in how to beat down his competition in the 'hood, terrorist style, and set up a few nifty junk deals with an AK or two thrown in on the side. But he got unlucky: the Feds don't want anyone stepping on their toes in the area of Fourth Generation Warfare and economic control (drugs) within American inner cities, and didn't want him giving anyone else any ideas, hence the lockdown. He was too smart for his own good. But that's as far as I'll go into conspiracy theory tonight.

One guy setting up a "dirty bomb attack"? THAT's a fucking conspiracy trip, man. That sort of shit doesn't go down in real life within a vacuum unless the guy happens to have figured out how to parallel-wire a series of model railroad transformers to a "gizmo" in his bathtub and make Cesium-137 out of aluminum foil; if the Federales know as much as they claim about his plans of doom, O.K. then...where are his buddies? Where's the fucking bomb parts? Padilla was unarmed, and had neither Weapons of Doom nor plans for them. Nelson Mandela WAS busted with terrorist shit, and now he's Ghandi. Think about Mandela, and then think about Jose Padilla. And then think about how a black South African "terrorist" got more due process from the Apartheid state apparatus and police services than a full citizen of The Greatest Show on Earth is getting more than a full decade after Daddy Beast proclaimed "a kinder, gentler America". If you can try the Nazi High Command in full public view at Nuremburg, then surely you can have an open court, and charges, for a dirty little loser from Chicago - those same civilised, sacred formalities that "we" granted those WW II Japanese generals who wound up dangling at the ends of ropes for war crimes; at least they got the ceremony of Justice before their necks were snapped. Padilla gets life inside a silent box. And maybe a white, tiled room and a needle, at the end...

"Justice" and "war crimes" in the same sentence? Not in the last century or so of history books.

Let's not talk about the Tokyo fire bombings of spring, 1945....

....the bombings that claimed more than three times Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.......

...the bombings that not one English-speaking high school student out of a thousand has ever heard about.

And we say that the Japanese write distorted history! We're the victors and, remember, history is written by the.....

That's scary, man.

We've been bullshitted worse than the Soviets ever were; they KNEW it was all shite. We have a free press, and Britney Spears. We lap it up.

The Big Stories. Forests or trees? You choose.

Unless you own a T.V. Then you've probably forgotten how to choose.

So. History is murdered, and there's this Commander in Chief of America who sets up his own commission to investigate government failings and finds out, in under a week, that they're all his fault: he's responsible. The President is guilty as charged, and the uncharged citizen Jose Padilla is...is...

Go about your business, citizen...nothing is happening.

And nothing WILL happen, either in BushMonkey's life, or in Padilla's. Or in the lives of the Gulf Coast refugees, until the Army recruiters and corporate slavemasters show up to offer a way "out".

Go peel some brains with this story at the water cooler tomorrow and see what happens. Probably nothing.

Maybe that's the biggest story of them all in these interesting times.

The Turning of the Worms

Bloggo-spear!!!! Open letter to g-spot

(To Our Esteemed Readers: Whooo! Whooo! This is an open letter to my colleage, g-spot, who just received a response to his happy September 11th blog, "America Has Lost Its Mind". People don't usually repond to us. Given the vitriolic nature of his invective, and the fact that somebody actually has written back IN SUPPORT of our point of view, I've just had to jump into the fray. Jump down and read g-spot's brainpeelings and his correspondent's comment for context, first)

Dear g-spot,

Right thru th' fuckin' chest, mate!!! Ouch!!! That's what I thought about the puir, wee Americans when I read your bloggage. Sad things...they're not very complicated and might not realise that the Canadian mind sometimes has an obscure Asian bent wherein we say one thing but mean quite another. I'd bet most Yanks wouldn't realise from your brainpeelings that we actually love them, like the big, clumsy family branch that's always knocking things over at the Anglo clan reunion. I don't hate Americans; I just wish they'd stop breaking things. They make us Canucks and Aussies look bad by association.

Wow. What really freaks me out, though, is that you got an almost instant response to that hand grenade full o' rant that you've just lobbed, o great g-spot, and a positive one at that! The reason this scares me is that your correspondent is either:

a) an NSA/CIA liason officer setting up our termination, because we speak The Truth; or,

b) is sincere.

I think in all sincerity that the "sincerity option" is the most likely. And dangerous. Assassinations would only affect you and me, and a small team of killers. As I blogged earlier, we live in global tymz, brutherzz an' sisterzzz!!! Your interlocutor, o g-spot, innocently reveals America's crisis; he/she demonstrates its tragic flaw, its bipolarity. This affects us all.

By the way. were this to be a Canadian respondent replying to a blog-bomb such as yours about good ol' Ad Mare Usque Mari, the Great White (but Multicultural!) North, the comment you've received could also be interpreted as,

c) An ironically-conceived, passive-aggressive dart specifically designed to make us feel uncertain and insecure.

Americans don't get a third choice.

Americans are Bipolar, by design; Canadians have Multiple Personality Disorder, by accident. We're safer; we can shift around more. We've got more options and maneuvering space. Our Karma is more evenly distributed. Parts of it are just as bad, if not worse than in the States: go ask a Cree family living in northern Manitoba if they love the Queen. But we're more middle-of-the-road. That's a multiparty system for you. And we don't worship politicians and have cute little military marching anthems composed for their official functions. We intrinsically distrust ALL of the bastards, and then just try to get on with the ol' 9-5.

If you're gonna play in the road, dancing on the white line like a Canadian may seem chickenshit, but it's safer - it's our Anglo-French paradox at work. Like in New Orleans. We're not THAT different, as everyone knows, but we're also VERY, VERY different in so many ways. For one thing, we have a tiny, wee, deadly military that won't be able to do shit if we ever REALLY piss anyone off, so we try to step on fewer toes. If we were bigger, we'd probably get ourselves into some serious fucking trouble. Small is beautiful. Americans have Big Energy and hop from lane to lane with gay abandon, and then get surprised when they and/or their playmates get squashed by Mack trucks. Vietnam...Iran...New Orleans....

One can't fund a multi-theatre war machine and build a quarter-million emergency housing units all at the same time. Nor invent a few hundred thousand jobs out of thin air: gubbamint doesn't do that in the Anglo world - yer on yer own, baby! In China, everyone would just be given orange, paper overalls and a fake, plastic construction hat, and a job working on the Three Gorges project (speaking of catastrophic floods in the making....)

Something's gonna give.

As a Canadian, a positive American response to your brainpeelings is already making me feel uncertain and insecure. But then, as most Canadians are closet fatalists, I realise that the worst option is probably the one in operation, so I can relax, and what your commentator is actually revealing is (b) the fatal flaw in the core of the American diamond, itself, (i.e. "sincerity and intellect" living two blocks away from "crazy shit") and not a sudden American capacity for handling ironic, passive-aggressive Canadian wittiness and intelligence. We may be humble, but we're still better at subtlety - mostly by historical accident. We confuse ourselves more than the Yanks do, and this keeps us safer. The fatal, tragic flaw in the U.S. of which I speak though, is, to wit:

"There are doods like this, and doods like BushMonster, sharing the same "Worlds Bestest Country"

The more different chemical elements are from each other, the more explosive their reaction is when they are combined. America, by allowing almost anything within its founding philosophy, allows self-destructive chaos. Children who grow up without manners and rules turn into little maniacs. Children who've learned the rules grow up into adults who learn how to experiment with them safely. You writer IS sincere, I believe, and s/he unknowingly reveals the imminent demise of her/his Shining City on a Hill through his/her insouciance and good-naturedness: at the other end of the rainbow, Condolezza Rice was buying shoes and taking in a musical while the Gulf Coast drowned. This sorto thang is gonna split everything right down the fucking middle; Canadians operate somewhere in the sodium-yellow band of the electromagnetic spectrum of politics and social behavior, and blur out from there a bit into the orange and green frequencies, but the Yankee Doodles, as you so aptly term them, reach all the way from infrared to ultraviolet, doodling all over the world with cruise missiles and IMF "relief" packages, and thinking in terms of sound energy and gamma rays...cowboys with space-based weapons platforms, and Gideon Bibles. The American Spectrum. Weird metaphor, but it's true, and their energy is getting stretched mighty thin. They, not us, are the most internally multicultural country, that Land O' Plenty where veterans starve on the streets, and where Mormons and S/M leather clubs compete for space. Sure, the Amerikkkan elite control 98% of everything, but the poor think that they have a right to try to have the same, and to bear arms, so maybe the Ol' American Way will win out in the end. We can only hope. But only after the contrasting colours of Star-Spangly New Rome go to war with each other. It will be ugly. People like your correspondent and Barbara Bush can't share the same borders forever, just like a mongoose and cobra, or an owl and a crow, won't share the same cage. There can only be one, Highlander!!!!...

...unless, that is, the shitwave that's going to come out of Karina over the next couple of years can be harnessed, hydroelectrical-like, by the large percentage of real Americans who, like your commentator, have the capacity to recognise how their freedom loving country has been hijacked by Big Power. America is the most creative nation the world has ever seen, in a broad sense. Perhaps the creativity of Average Americans can usurp the conservative backlash to the civil rights movement that has swung the pendulum so far to the right over the last forty years. If Americans can take control of the helm, perhaps Katrina can be the engine of change. Sad to say, but within disaster lurks opportunity.

Mao Tse Tung claimed and proved that you only need 10% of a population on your side to have a completely successful revolution, and he did it with illiterate peasants. Amurikkka's going to do it to herself with television. And anger and denial. And dissenting viewpoints on Fox and CNN. And revolution is a constitutionally-guaranteed right, South o' the Border, so the rest of the planet is just going to have to draw back, cowering, waiting to see what Big Brother is going to cook up next. I just wonder how the tiny Canadian Armed Forces are going to keep all the refugees out when it happens. Maybe it'll happen in the middle of winter during a fuel crisis and we won't have to worry too much. Like Russia, we're a very bad place to attempt to invade, in any way, for purely ecological reasons.

The second American revolution WILL be televised, but it will not have leaders, unlike in the 60's. It will just happen. Let's call it Fifth Generation Warfare.

The Turning of the Worms

America Has Lost Its Mind

I'm Canadian and I'm not proud of it, or at least not proud in the way that Americans are proud. Pride is a deadly sin, don't forget, and humility is the virtue with which to counter it. We Canadians have got humility up the wazoo, man!, we wrote the bloody book on humility! (and no, we're not proud of that either). So it is with all humility that I simply have to say : Yo! Yankee Doodles! You have lost your fucking minds and I think you should just decline like a good little empire, take your ball and go home.

Seriously, you're doing no one any good at all. You're greedy, self-absorbed and utterly dangerous. You're 100% delusional about your role in the world and your power to affect positive change (in fact, I'd go so far as to say that you see no value in affecting positive change in the first place). You honestly think the world envies you and wants to be like you and that your opinions matter but really, you're like a high school cheer leader who is heady with self-importance while oblivious to the fact that guys just want to get their hands on your tits.

You choose "leaders" who rape and pillage you, who treat those of you in the bottom 98% income bracket with utter contempt, who lie to your face in ways that would infuriate a 5 year old, and you have parades in their honour to celebrate them! What the fuck is wrong with you?!? Are you suffering from Stockholm Syndrome or something? (http://www.geocities.com/kidhistory/trauma/stockhol.htm)

To be fair, this is nothing new; it's the essence of empires. I imagine the poorest wretches of the Roman Empire saw themselves as far superior to the poor wretches unlucky enough to reside outside the Emperor's loving embrace, and in the case of the Western World, this is mostly true; a "poor" person here can't imagine the horror real poor people throughout the globe live with day in and day out. But nothing lasts forever and you are no exception. The world has been grabbing and sucking on your tits for quite awhile now but the net result is that you've developed quite a skanky reputation and pretty soon, no one will want to fuck you.

So on this day, 9/11, as you commemorate the Greatest Tragedy to Befall Mankind Ever, keep in mind that the rest of the world is cringing in embarrassment... you're the drunk uncle at the wedding whom everyone regrets inviting; we're just waiting for you to pass out so we can get on with things.

- g-spot -

The Rebirth of History? Happy 9/11, Katrina.

Everyone in the media is scrambling over themselves to say that Hurricane Katrina will be/is the turning point for a re-examination of "America's Soul", whatever that is. The thing is, the "soul" or "essence" of a nation doesn't reside in one thing or place like a gallbladder or spleen, so the examination is going to be rather hard, as it involves a whole complex of fuck-ups ranging from the shitheads in government who, over decades, ignored a catastrophe in the making, to all the selfish losers who had spare vehicle space and who drove past the abandoned masses, to the lunatics who are shooting at rescue helicopters because they're pissed off. And especially the media, who have bestowed upon themselves the laurels of democratic truth, and who devote all their wavelengths to vegetables like Terri Schiavo and Paris Hilton over the years while a nation rots on the inside and outside. When the earthquake in Kobe overwhelmed the likewise unprepared Japanese government a few years ago, the Yakuza (mafia) stepped in with all their heavy construction equipment in what was perhaps the best public-relations ploy ever executed by a criminal organisation...but the point is, for whatever reason, they felt they had to do it. Practically nobody does shit for anybody else in the States.

Freud toured the U.S. once and left declaring that the whole country was neurotic and "shouldn't have happened."

Something I've noticed over the past couple of weeks is that everyone from The Prez all the way down to the lowest "refugee" feels that someone else "should have done something about it", "it" meaning Mother Nature getting pissed off and throwing an enormous heat-transfer mechanism named Katie at the nation most responsible for global warming. This blame game comes from people floating past their floodplain and shoreline underwater houses and underwater SUVs and underwater lawn tractors in their Wal-Mart canoes, over marshy, subdivided land that pre-Columbian Indians never occupied permanently on account of the annual hurricane season. Blame it on the French for building a city there. But ah, there's the media rub; by focussing on New Orleans, the Great Eye makes us look away from the big elsewhere, the disaster zone covering four states, and not just one city. This is a disaster area the size of Great Britain. Make sure to blame the fucking media, too, who've ALL sucked the dick of Big Power over the last four years leading up to this anniversary day of History's Death, September Eleventh, and for long before as well. O public, make sure to fuck the fucking media, for being the slave and mouthpiece of the war machine that grew out of the ashes of The Greatest Media Event The World Has Ever Seen. Happy September 11th, 2005. Kill your T.V.s or you feed the beast. Learn to read again. And to speak and listen. They've boxed our minds for 50 years. Millions of dollars got diverted from Louisiana flood control to help pay for Fallujah/etc. 150,000 troops and Guardsmen could've come in handy right about now, too...

The media did that. All of that, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, Vietnam, etc. etc. They did NOT just "let it all happen" or just "report" it. They actually DID it for their fucking overlords. They've puked in our brains all our lives.Think of that the next time you give the cunts money for cable T.V. and watch their brainpuke while the first world eats the third world. Peel your brain instead...get wired and turn on. Blame yourself if you've never thought of what you'd do in a crisis, and how you'd respond to those around you.

Or blame it on the morons who take no political interest in their own juggernaut, ooops, I mean "country", and who in fact have no right to point their fingers at the gubbamint, having decided as conscious adults to be compltely uninvolved in its operation or critique. But you can't blame it on the Monkey Prez; he doan' know no better, from nature nor nurture. Look where he learned it from - Barbara Bush has just toured the Astrodome and had the following comment reported this morning:"...and so many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underpriveleged anyway, so this - this (she chuckles slightly) is working very well for them...". The Great Chimpanzee sucked on that, whilst a babe.

And let's also blame weak-kneed losers who bleat from the sidelines that the government JUST HAS TO find 400,000 jobs and housing for a dispossessed coastline. How does the state's record on job production look over the last few years in Amurikkka? Let's get real. Wasting any breath on pipe dreams in the face of a tragedy of this magnitude is nearly criminal. The nasty truths have to looked at and dealt with, in no half measures. Situations like Katrina can eventually trigger phenomena as large as The New Deal and the Monroe Doctrine; politics follows nature. Amerikkka is going to have to do something radical to deal with the mess, and this administration has proven itself to be pretty radical in just about any area requiring foresight and historical sensitivity. They're not all goin' home by Christmas.

Just about the only place any of these countless dispossessed is going to find a way out of the hurricane's concentration camps is by getting work in a nice, warm munitions plant or in the military. The former has been in recent years one of the very few true growth sectors in the U.S. financial-industrial complex, and the latter is desperate for recruits. Most Amurikkkan youths currently weigh the option of slogging through destroyed cities fighting for survival in a Mad Max shooting gallery to be a poor career choice after watching the last few years of slaughter in Afghanistan and Iraq on the tube - at least until Katrina. But if it's happened to you once, say in The Big Easy, why not get PAID to do it to someone else in their city? Better than meeting Barbara Bush in the Astrodome in the stink of shit and the wail of babies, at any rate. Watch for the recruiting angle....

Public housing for nearly half a million folks? No fuckin' way. Never.

Brothers and Sisters of the Planet, this may be it: The Big Fucking Tipping Point of Tipping Points. Katrina is the event when the most powerful country in the history of our planet will have had to make the decision to become, collectively and institutionally, either totally humane or fascist. This big one doesn't go away, unlike Uncle Osama. This one sits in its tens of thousands in concentration camps inside and around major cities until.....until...what? History has shattered and blurred in the blender of the last few years' spin, but the reality on the economic ground of this disaster makes this something beyond interpretation: the whole world is going to feel this. The War of Terror will let drop its curtain to show the stage of this REAL drama. Iraq and Afghanistan have coughed up less than 2,000 U.S. bodies, and look what that's done to the ratings of The Great Chimpanzee and his cohort. Americans have no stomach for disaster and war on their own turf. Who does? But who's also responsible for over 1,000,000 deaths by combat and attrition in Iraq and elsewhere over the last decade and a bit? If there was ever anything a radical, loony Islamist fringe needed to fuel their terrorist ravings and plans, this is it. This is the big call from Above. This WAS NOT "Amurikkka's Tsunami"; that event, last year, wiped out poor people, and was felt mostly locally. The nightmare of the Gulf coast is a truly global event. Poor countries are offering aid to the King of Nations. And not such poor ones, of course. Canadian disaster relief teams were on the ground five days before the U.S. military; the Canadian military was already assembling and offering a naval flotilla and packing emergency supplies before the Pentagon was able to relay its needs and plans up North. I bet that quite a few of the Louisiana French, who originally hail from French Canada, are gonna remember that one for years to come.

The sad thing to say is that in the end the citizens of the U.S. DO matter more than those in Indonesia or Sri Lanka, from an economic point of view: someone in the middle of Nebraska consumes about 25 times more resources than the average human being on the globe today, and as such, is responsible for powering 25 times more of the planetary economy. 400,000 destitute Americans is the same as 10,000,000 elsewhere, on average. This hits seafood restaurants in Canada, tire factories in Mexico, cell phone makers in South Korea...aid to North Korea, if ever....

Amerikkka couldn't get 100,000 people safely out of a fully-predicted disaster zone; the whole world is going to feel the effect of its total inability to deal effectively with an aftermath four times that size for years to come.

This is thunderfuck.

The Turning of the Worms

My God, The Impotent Omnipotent

I've been rifling through news reports, blogs and the like, accumulating detail on the latest catastrophe to hit the United States, namely Hurricane Katrina. If I were an American, especially a poor Southerner, I'd certainly think that maybe the Apocalypse® decided to start itself in my backyard. Of course, Americans tend to think of themselves as the center of the Universe, so I wasn't too shocked to hear the disaster described as "our tsunami", although someone should maybe remind them that the number of people simply affected by this "tsunami" was roughly the number of people killed in the one they're comparing theirs to.
In any case, it's still a disaster the likes of which I personally haven't seen in this part of the world in my lifetime and it got me thinking about God, back to the age-old question: "If God really existed, why does He let things like this happen? Why create so much astounding beauty and then stand idly by while it's destroyed?" None of the answers to this question, including that we are somehow being punished for our sins, have ever made sense to me... it seems to me that only an Entity filled with malice would treat His creations with such ambivalence.

But then something occurred to me : what if there really is a God, and He does exist, but He doesn't actually have much power or control over His creation? Maybe His forte was invention, not maintenance. Anyone whose ever had their own business knows how easy it is to get it going but a couple of years down the road, the daily grind is enough to make you want to pack it in and take up a career in ditch-digging. What if He's not so good at the Big Stuff, like intervening on behalf of entire populations and smiting their enemies, but tries to keep busy anyway by helping out where He can? You know, like dropping a $10 bill in the gutter for you to find, or having a really cute girl appear in front of you at the grocery store check out just when you're feeling a little down? Seriously, if this were the case, I think I could definitely get into religion. I mean, an incompetent but well-meaning God is better than no God, right? And if everyone bought into this idea, then we'd all have to admit that we have to take care of ourselves and stop being so damn lazy, since we'd know no one is going to be cleaning up our shit for us. At the same time, we wouldn't feel so lost and despairing, thinking we're nothing more than phenomenally unlikely chemical reactions.

Oh, and in this new religion, there is still a Heaven and a Hell; Heaven is exactly the same as here but you can eat anything you want and you don't get fat, and Playstation 2's only cost $5. Hell? Unfortunately, it's just exactly the same as here (hey, whaddya' want for nuthin'?!?)

So remember, next time you roll doubles and land on Boardwalk, that was no chance toss of the dice; that was God, doing His bit to brighten your day!

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