I wrote not so long ago about the "single-tater" religion of the Strugs and how their great leader, Foundling came upon the special name of the Great Potato, SPUD. Today, I will go into more detail about this remarkable, although probably legendary fellow.
This is the story of Foundling.
He was called Foundling because he was found in a little basket floating among the reeds and taken to the court of one of the King's daughters.
He was placed in the basket because the King of Borderland had embarked upon a course of ethnic cleansing of a group of people in his dominion known as Strugs. Afraid that the increasing number of Strugs would become a challenge to his power, he declared that all boy children born to the Strugs should be strangled in their umbilical cords at birth.
But Foundling was such a pretty baby boy, the midwife couldn't bring herself to do the ugly deed demanded of her. Instead, he was placed in a little basket and sent adrift on the river. Thus it was that he came to be raised in the court of the King of Borderland.
The Strugs had first come to Borderland a hundred years before, seeking to escape the famine that had rendered their life in Holy California untenable. At first they had been welcome, but after many years, they were persecuted and reduced to what amounted to a pool of slave labor. It was during the ensuing conflicts that Foundling, now a grown man, in a moment of anger when he came upon a Borderland overseer whipping some Strug workers that he drew his sword and struck the overseer. The overseer died from the blow and Foundling hid the body in a ditch.
Afterwards, afraid that he might be arrested for this murder, Foundling fled and went into hiding in the Wilderness.
The Wilderness was a barren area in the northeast of Borderland, a wild and lonely place of barren rocks with occasional clusters of small trees, thorns and thistles. Both food and water were hard to come by in this desolate place. It was hot during the day and chill at night. Therefore, Foundling was often thirsty and faint with hunger as he thought about his life. After about a month and a half -- and tradition will have it that it was exactly 40 days -- he noticed a bush that seemed to be in flames. Strangely, although he looked at it for a while, it seemed that the fire did not consume the bush! Intrigued by this odd phenomenon, he carefully approached. When a Voice suddenly spoke to him from the bush, Foundling stopped in his tracks!
The Voice told Foundling that he was on Holy Ground and therefore should remove his sandals. He did that and, bowing in reverence, approached what seemed to him a "burning bush". The Voice announced that he was in the Presence of the Great Potato, the God of Broken Wingh, Laughing Boy and Deceiver. It was the latter who had given the descendants of Broken Wingh and Laughing Boy the name by which they are commonly known in the Third Galaxy -- Strugs.
It soon became apparent to Foundling that he was being called to a sort of Divine Job Interview. The Great Potato had decided to hire Foundling to lead his people, the Strugs, from their virtual captivity to a Land of Easy Living, their homeland, what is known in the Third Galaxy as "Holy California".
Foundling was no dummy and also a natural born negotiator, so after a lot of haggling, he got the Voice of the Great Potato to agree to a number of things:
First of all, not being a very good public speaker, in fact, he had a terrible speech impediment, the Potato allowed him to use his older brother, Rrunner, as a front man. The careful reader may well wonder how it could be that Foundling was acquainted with his brother. Since he had been, as a newborn, set adrift in a basket, adopted and raised in the royal family of the King of Borderland, a simple soul would assume his contact with his biological family was minimal. However, the answer is simple -- the Great Potato did not have a continuity expert to vet the scripts he gave his chosen people and their prophets...
Secondly, he got the Great Potato to agree to back him up so that he could do real magic tricks that really worked! Well, at least they worked good enough so that his audiences thought that they really worked. In any case the reader should know that, according to tradition, 10 portions of magic had been poured out by the Almighty upon the Third Galaxy and 9 of those portions of magic had been poured out upon Borderland! Assuming that you are not reading with your eyes closed, you will have noticed that Foundling grew up in the Royal Court of Borderland. If you have the slightest cynical inclination, you will assume, correctly, that all practicing magicians with any skill would naturally gravitate towards the Royal Court...
Finally, after much haggling, Foundling got the Great Potato to give him a name by which to call him. This is very important in all dealings with gods -- and demons for that matter. With gods, a name is sort of like a phone number, without it, you have to wait until the god calls you. Of course, is the case of the Great Potato in the Third Galaxy, we are not talking about a god, but God, the creator of the Third Galaxy -- at least that is what is always printed on His Calling Cards -- therefore his name is not a name, but a Name. And the Name was -- SPUD.
SPUD, is a rather clever play on words, by the way -- actually, I can't call it a play on words because that would imply somebody, Foundling perhaps, had made it up. Still, it cannot not be denied that, in the language of the Strugs, SPUD is what one would think was a present, past and future form of the verb "to be" all mixed together. Of course, since the Name was given to Foundling by the Great Potato, such speculation is meaningless -- still, that is what it would seem to be if one dared to think about it without care or fear of stray lightning bolts from the Great Colander in the Sky for daring to think about it.
Monday, October 29, 2007
Friday, October 26, 2007
Who Needs a "Moppe Dreng"?
This is very very strange.
Tucked away in the recent 190 billion dollar appropriation for the monetary black hole known as "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" or, for short, "support our troops, there is an item of 88 million dollars that makes alarm bells ring so loud a deaf stone could hear them.
This money is to be used to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a 30,000 lb. bomb called a MOP, or Massive Ordinance Penetrator. Now that is what they call in Danish as real "moppe dreng" or "big boy".
The question is: why? Why would a 2 billion dollar machine like the B-2 need to do be able to carry such a thing?
First of all, the MOP is decided to penetrate and destroy hardened and/or deeply buried targets -- it is supposed to be able to go down 200 feet before detonating.
Secondly, we have fleets of other bombers, like the B-52, which could deliver such a pay load almost anywhere in the world, in particular caves in Afghanistan, for example.
One place where the B-52 couldn't deliver is to Iran, in particular the Naatanz nuclear installation a bit more than a 100 miles south of Teheran. A bunker buster of some sort would be needed to take out this harden facility and only a stealth bomber could have a reasonable chance of delivering it.
So, why? And why now?
Indeed, I must be an excitable person to be suspicious -- just because this request came from the military as an urgent need.
By the way you don't need to revive Slim Pickins, the MOP would be too big for him to straddle.
(By the way, I gleaned this from Tristero at Hullabaloo.)
Tucked away in the recent 190 billion dollar appropriation for the monetary black hole known as "fighting them over there so we don't have to fight them over here" or, for short, "support our troops, there is an item of 88 million dollars that makes alarm bells ring so loud a deaf stone could hear them.
This money is to be used to modify B-2 stealth bombers so they can carry a 30,000 lb. bomb called a MOP, or Massive Ordinance Penetrator. Now that is what they call in Danish as real "moppe dreng" or "big boy".
The question is: why? Why would a 2 billion dollar machine like the B-2 need to do be able to carry such a thing?
First of all, the MOP is decided to penetrate and destroy hardened and/or deeply buried targets -- it is supposed to be able to go down 200 feet before detonating.
Secondly, we have fleets of other bombers, like the B-52, which could deliver such a pay load almost anywhere in the world, in particular caves in Afghanistan, for example.
One place where the B-52 couldn't deliver is to Iran, in particular the Naatanz nuclear installation a bit more than a 100 miles south of Teheran. A bunker buster of some sort would be needed to take out this harden facility and only a stealth bomber could have a reasonable chance of delivering it.
So, why? And why now?
Indeed, I must be an excitable person to be suspicious -- just because this request came from the military as an urgent need.
By the way you don't need to revive Slim Pickins, the MOP would be too big for him to straddle.
(By the way, I gleaned this from Tristero at Hullabaloo.)
Tuesday, October 23, 2007
How Foundling found the Name of SPUD
Today I will continue with what I wrote earlier about the "single-tater" and "many-tater" religions in the Third Galaxy.
The basic difference is between those who worship a single deity, for example, the Great Potato, and those who worship many Potatoes.
Although it sounds simple, as it often is with realities the actual situation is somewhat more complicated than it would seem. First of all, the distinction is mainly one made by followers of single-tater religion. This sets them apart and makes them feel superior to those who worship many Potatoes.
Those who follow the major "many-tater" religion in the Third Galaxy are known as Hudoos and they take offense and this distinction and say that the Strugs, Peelers and Mashers (the major "single-tater" religions) have misunderstood what Hudooism is really about. In their own eyes, the Hudoos revere and worship various manifestations of the Ultimate Potato. On the other hand, the followers of the single-tater religions when they really get upset, in particular the Peelers, rave that the Hudoos worship demons, that is things that aren't even Potatoes!
To complicate things even more, the Strugs, Peelers and Mashers have a running disagreement among themselves as to which of them are actually worshipping the Great Potato.
The upshot is that they have had a lot of fun and games over the years in the Third Galaxy as they discussed the finer points of their theologies with swords, spears, axes, bows and arrows, guns, thumb screws, racks, boiling lead and great big bonfires.
The Strugs, as I told you before is the oldest of the three religions and was founded by a man called Foundlig. Foundling lived and died about a thousand years after Broken Wing and Laughing Boy. He gave the Strugs the Teaching codified in five books he wrote all by himself -- this was a pretty neat job because the Teaching concludes with how Foundling died and was buried.
But religion being what it is, that is a way for some people to not have to work for a living, the Strugs have explanations for this and a number of other apparent discrepancies.
According to the Teaching, it was Foundling who gave the Strugs the Explicit Name of the Great Potato, which is written SPUD. He was able to do this because the Great Potato Himself told it to Foundling. This happened after Foundling killed a foreman during a work conflict and buried the body in a ditch. Afraid the authorities were on to him, Foundling decided to go into hiding in the wilderness. The wilderness is a wild and lonely place and he must have been awful hungry. There isn't much entertainment in the wilderness, so, when he saw a burning bush that didn't go up in smoke, he went to check it out. Imagine his surprise when the Great Potato starting talking to him from the fire and told Foundling that from now on he was to call the Great Potato, "SPUD"!
It may seem to you that this was a rather round about way for the Great Potato to transmit his Teaching to the Strugs, but this is way things were done in the Third Galaxy. In any case, the story of how Foundling gave the Teaching of SPUD to the Strugs is not even half as wild as how Holy Idaho came to be regarded and the only besprouted 'Tater of the Great Potato or how Masher received the Reading of the Eternal Book -- but I will tell you about these things later.
To make a very long story extremely short, in the centuries after Foundling died, the Name became so holy and revered that nobody could speak it out loud except the highest of the high priests and only he could shout it once a year in the holy of holies in the Great Temple. In fact, when the highest of the high priests went into the holy of holies to cry out the name of SPUD, he had a rope tied around his leg in the event that he fainted or died of a heart attack -- the holy of holies was so holy that nobody except the highest of the high priests could go in there, therefore the rope, so they could drag him out...
It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that eventually nobody, not even the highest of the high priests knew how to pronounce the Name of SPUD. This was especially hard after the Great Temple was destroyed, along with the holy of holies.
The basic difference is between those who worship a single deity, for example, the Great Potato, and those who worship many Potatoes.
Although it sounds simple, as it often is with realities the actual situation is somewhat more complicated than it would seem. First of all, the distinction is mainly one made by followers of single-tater religion. This sets them apart and makes them feel superior to those who worship many Potatoes.
Those who follow the major "many-tater" religion in the Third Galaxy are known as Hudoos and they take offense and this distinction and say that the Strugs, Peelers and Mashers (the major "single-tater" religions) have misunderstood what Hudooism is really about. In their own eyes, the Hudoos revere and worship various manifestations of the Ultimate Potato. On the other hand, the followers of the single-tater religions when they really get upset, in particular the Peelers, rave that the Hudoos worship demons, that is things that aren't even Potatoes!
To complicate things even more, the Strugs, Peelers and Mashers have a running disagreement among themselves as to which of them are actually worshipping the Great Potato.
The upshot is that they have had a lot of fun and games over the years in the Third Galaxy as they discussed the finer points of their theologies with swords, spears, axes, bows and arrows, guns, thumb screws, racks, boiling lead and great big bonfires.
The Strugs, as I told you before is the oldest of the three religions and was founded by a man called Foundlig. Foundling lived and died about a thousand years after Broken Wing and Laughing Boy. He gave the Strugs the Teaching codified in five books he wrote all by himself -- this was a pretty neat job because the Teaching concludes with how Foundling died and was buried.
But religion being what it is, that is a way for some people to not have to work for a living, the Strugs have explanations for this and a number of other apparent discrepancies.
According to the Teaching, it was Foundling who gave the Strugs the Explicit Name of the Great Potato, which is written SPUD. He was able to do this because the Great Potato Himself told it to Foundling. This happened after Foundling killed a foreman during a work conflict and buried the body in a ditch. Afraid the authorities were on to him, Foundling decided to go into hiding in the wilderness. The wilderness is a wild and lonely place and he must have been awful hungry. There isn't much entertainment in the wilderness, so, when he saw a burning bush that didn't go up in smoke, he went to check it out. Imagine his surprise when the Great Potato starting talking to him from the fire and told Foundling that from now on he was to call the Great Potato, "SPUD"!
It may seem to you that this was a rather round about way for the Great Potato to transmit his Teaching to the Strugs, but this is way things were done in the Third Galaxy. In any case, the story of how Foundling gave the Teaching of SPUD to the Strugs is not even half as wild as how Holy Idaho came to be regarded and the only besprouted 'Tater of the Great Potato or how Masher received the Reading of the Eternal Book -- but I will tell you about these things later.
To make a very long story extremely short, in the centuries after Foundling died, the Name became so holy and revered that nobody could speak it out loud except the highest of the high priests and only he could shout it once a year in the holy of holies in the Great Temple. In fact, when the highest of the high priests went into the holy of holies to cry out the name of SPUD, he had a rope tied around his leg in the event that he fainted or died of a heart attack -- the holy of holies was so holy that nobody except the highest of the high priests could go in there, therefore the rope, so they could drag him out...
It doesn't take much imagination to figure out that eventually nobody, not even the highest of the high priests knew how to pronounce the Name of SPUD. This was especially hard after the Great Temple was destroyed, along with the holy of holies.
Sunday, October 21, 2007
Why We're Not Laughing...
Last week at a press conference, the Codpiece-in-Chief responded to a journalist's remarks about Putin's intention of retaining power after he steps down as President of Russia next year by joking that he "...had plans like that of his own".
Since this wit comes from a man who has several times in public joshed that things would be easier with a dictatotship, as long as he was the dictator, we are not laughing. Especially we are not laughing because he has set the stage so that, under unfortunate but quite possible future circumstances, something terrible could happen to our democracy.
I want to stress that American democracy, as an institution, is much more resiliant and vibrant than one might think. When, I write about the Third Galaxy, it is not because I think that this is what is will happen to America -- it is because these are the things that must not happen to America...
However, if America were to, God forbid, mutate into a closed, totalitarian society, it would certainly be fascist and not communist.
People mistakenly think that fascism is jack boots, crooked crosses, goose stepping soldiers and arms in rigid salute -- however, these are but trappings, window dressing.
Mussolini supposedly defined fascism as the corporative state, that is a union of politcal and economic power. With a few footnotes, this is true enough. By the way, did you know that a clique of industrialists had plans for a coup against President Roosevelt in the 1930's? Nothing came of it, partly because the man they proposed as a front figure for their putsch was General Smedley Butler, a Marine with two Comgressional Medals of Honor and a true patriot. He blew the whistle and the plans came to nothing. As this happened shortly before the confluence of madness we call the Second World War, the plot recieved little public noteriety.
Furthermore, the plot was, in fact, rather ameteurishly concieved. There are several things that need to be in place first in order to cow a population into submitting to an authoritarian dictatorship -- here is the "shopping list":
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency).
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law... [Halliburton, with a 400 million dollar no-bid contract, is building relocation centers with room for a quarter to a half-million people in the case of an undefined emergency.]
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek...a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution. [Private mercenaries in New Orleans, private "Minutemen" prowling borders, the "Watchmen on the Wall" in the Northwest US]
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service...thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents... [a] little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game... pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, [are] arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government...and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"... it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death",
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon...[In January, 2007, the President, in an Executive Order, declared that he can assume temporary dictatorial powers in order to defend the Constitution, in the case of an undefined emergency which he has the power to declare, for as long as that state of emergency lasts... ]
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison (4th President of the United States)
[These ten points and most of the comments were distilled from an article by Naomi Wolf, who, if you are familiar with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, et. al ad nauseum, is a notorius "feminazi".]
Since this wit comes from a man who has several times in public joshed that things would be easier with a dictatotship, as long as he was the dictator, we are not laughing. Especially we are not laughing because he has set the stage so that, under unfortunate but quite possible future circumstances, something terrible could happen to our democracy.
I want to stress that American democracy, as an institution, is much more resiliant and vibrant than one might think. When, I write about the Third Galaxy, it is not because I think that this is what is will happen to America -- it is because these are the things that must not happen to America...
However, if America were to, God forbid, mutate into a closed, totalitarian society, it would certainly be fascist and not communist.
People mistakenly think that fascism is jack boots, crooked crosses, goose stepping soldiers and arms in rigid salute -- however, these are but trappings, window dressing.
Mussolini supposedly defined fascism as the corporative state, that is a union of politcal and economic power. With a few footnotes, this is true enough. By the way, did you know that a clique of industrialists had plans for a coup against President Roosevelt in the 1930's? Nothing came of it, partly because the man they proposed as a front figure for their putsch was General Smedley Butler, a Marine with two Comgressional Medals of Honor and a true patriot. He blew the whistle and the plans came to nothing. As this happened shortly before the confluence of madness we call the Second World War, the plot recieved little public noteriety.
Furthermore, the plot was, in fact, rather ameteurishly concieved. There are several things that need to be in place first in order to cow a population into submitting to an authoritarian dictatorship -- here is the "shopping list":
1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
Creating a terrifying threat - hydra-like, secretive, evil - is an old trick. It can, like Hitler's invocation of a communist threat to the nation's security, be based on actual events (one Wisconsin academic has faced calls for his dismissal because he noted, among other things, that the alleged communist arson, the Reichstag fire of February 1933, was swiftly followed in Nazi Germany by passage of the Enabling Act, which replaced constitutional law with an open-ended state of emergency).
2. Create a gulag
Once you have got everyone scared, the next step is to create a prison system outside the rule of law... [Halliburton, with a 400 million dollar no-bid contract, is building relocation centers with room for a quarter to a half-million people in the case of an undefined emergency.]
3. Develop a thug caste
When leaders who seek...a "fascist shift" want to close down an open society, they send paramilitary groups of scary young men out to terrorise citizens. The Blackshirts roamed the Italian countryside beating up communists; the Brownshirts staged violent rallies throughout Germany. This paramilitary force is especially important in a democracy: you need citizens to fear thug violence and so you need thugs who are free from prosecution. [Private mercenaries in New Orleans, private "Minutemen" prowling borders, the "Watchmen on the Wall" in the Northwest US]
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
In Mussolini's Italy, in Nazi Germany, in communist East Germany, in communist China - in every closed society - secret police spy on ordinary people and encourage neighbours to spy on neighbours. The Stasi needed to keep only a minority of East Germans under surveillance to convince a majority that they themselves were being watched.
In closed societies, this surveillance is cast as being about "national security"; the true function is to keep citizens docile and inhibit their activism and dissent.
5. Harass citizens' groups
The fifth thing you do is related to step four - you infiltrate and harass citizens' groups. It can be trivial: a church in Pasadena, whose minister preached that Jesus was in favour of peace, found itself being investigated by the Internal Revenue Service...thousands of ordinary American anti-war, environmental and other groups have been infiltrated by agents... [a] little-noticed new law has redefined activism such as animal rights protests as "terrorism". So the definition of "terrorist" slowly expands to include the opposition.
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
This scares people. It is a kind of cat-and-mouse game... pro-democracy activists in China, such as Wei Jingsheng, [are] arrested and released many times. In a closing or closed society there is a "list" of dissidents and opposition leaders: you are targeted in this way once you are on the list, and it is hard to get off the list.
In 2004, America's Transportation Security Administration confirmed that it had a list of passengers who were targeted for security searches or worse if they tried to fly. People who have found themselves on the list? Two middle-aged women peace activists in San Francisco; liberal Senator Edward Kennedy; a member of Venezuela's government...and thousands of ordinary US citizens.
7. Target key individuals
Threaten civil servants, artists and academics with job loss if they don't toe the line. Mussolini went after the rectors of state universities who did not conform to the fascist line; so did Joseph Goebbels, who purged academics who were not pro-Nazi; so did Chile's Augusto Pinochet; so does the Chinese communist Politburo in punishing pro-democracy students and professors.
8. Control the press
Italy in the 1920s, Germany in the 30s, East Germany in the 50s, Czechoslovakia in the 60s, the Latin American dictatorships in the 70s, China in the 80s and 90s - all dictatorships and would-be dictators target newspapers and journalists. They threaten and harass them in more open societies that they are seeking to close, and they arrest them and worse in societies that have been closed already.
Over time in closing societies, real news is supplanted by fake news and false documents. Pinochet showed Chilean citizens falsified documents to back up his claim that terrorists had been about to attack the nation. The yellowcake charge, too, was based on forged papers.
You won't have a shutdown of news in modern America - it is not possible. But you can have, as Frank Rich and Sidney Blumenthal have pointed out, a steady stream of lies polluting the news well. What you already have is a White House directing a stream of false information that is so relentless that it is increasingly hard to sort out truth from untruth. In a fascist system, it's not the lies that count but the muddying. When citizens can't tell real news from fake, they give up their demands for accountability bit by bit.
9. Dissent equals treason
Cast dissent as "treason" and criticism as "espionage'. Every closing society does this, just as it elaborates laws that increasingly criminalise certain kinds of speech and expand the definition of "spy" and "traitor"... it is important to remind Americans that when the 1917 Espionage Act was last widely invoked, during the infamous 1919 Palmer Raids, leftist activists were arrested without warrants in sweeping roundups, kept in jail for up to five months, and "beaten, starved, suffocated, tortured and threatened with death",
10. Suspend the rule of law
The John Warner Defense Authorization Act of 2007 gave the president new powers over the national guard. This means that in a national emergency - which the president now has enhanced powers to declare - he can send Michigan's militia to enforce a state of emergency that he has declared in Oregon...[In January, 2007, the President, in an Executive Order, declared that he can assume temporary dictatorial powers in order to defend the Constitution, in the case of an undefined emergency which he has the power to declare, for as long as that state of emergency lasts... ]
Of course, the United States is not vulnerable to the violent, total closing-down of the system that followed Mussolini's march on Rome or Hitler's roundup of political prisoners. Our democratic habits are too resilient, and our military and judiciary too independent, for any kind of scenario like that.
Rather, as other critics are noting, our experiment in democracy could be closed down by a process of erosion.
It is a mistake to think that early in a fascist shift you see the profile of barbed wire against the sky. In the early days, things look normal on the surface; peasants were celebrating harvest festivals in Calabria in 1922; people were shopping and going to the movies in Berlin in 1931. Early on, as WH Auden put it, the horror is always elsewhere - while someone is being tortured, children are skating, ships are sailing: "dogs go on with their doggy life ... How everything turns away/ Quite leisurely from the disaster."
"The accumulation of all powers, legislative, executive, and judiciary, in the same hands ... is the definition of tyranny," wrote James Madison (4th President of the United States)
[These ten points and most of the comments were distilled from an article by Naomi Wolf, who, if you are familiar with Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Sean Hannity, et. al ad nauseum, is a notorius "feminazi".]
Friday, October 19, 2007
It Cannot Be Allowed to Pass...
Let it pass that he never was really elected.
Let it pass that, from the start, he set things in motion of which he had never spoken, which, in fact were diametrically opposite from what he had promised:
1. From the start he laid plans to take out Badass Poosane because, as he quaintly put it: "He tried to kill my daddy!"
2. From the start He let his evil companion, Mr. Snarly, hold secret meetings with the poobahs of the energy industry. Meetings so secret that we still don't know the agenda, the decisions, the plans -- not even who attended these meetings! (However, we can deduce from later events that plans were laid on how to bring about Arrogant control of the world's oil and natural gas reserves -- we know this by the utter incompetence with which these plans were laid, played and ensuing complete failure!)
3. From the start, he set in motion eavesdropping and spying on Arrogant citizens in order to gain "stuff" on his political opponents with which to twist their arms, as needed.
Let it pass that he ignored warnings of the impending attacks known as Terrible Tuesday and went back to jerking off on his ranch.
Let it pass that, afterwards, he completely blew all chances of capturing Ahsawyah been-Lately "dead or alive" when Farawaystan was attacked. In fact the failure was done with such elegant incompetence that one must wonder if it wasn't intentional. In any case, after a former oil company executive was democratically elected by the purple finger as President of Farawaystan, the promises of help and aid to the war torn country disappeared like the morning dew -- instead, the full force of Arrogance was brought to bear on Wudda-Wreck, which, after its illegal invasion and occupation, came, day by day, year by year to deserve its name.
Let is pass that after failing (deliberately?) to "get" been-Lately; after failing to find the Weapons of Mass Immolation in Wudda-Wreck (because they never existed!); after failing to secure access to natural gas in Farawaystan or the oil of Wudda-Wreck -- he then turned his little piggy eyes lustfully upon Uran and her vast resources of oil and natural gas.
Let it pass that Uran had no proven plans to develop Weapons of Mass Immolation -- more important was that, had they the will, they had not the capability!
What is very hard to let pass is that, at the time when the Uranians were barely able to produce nuclear fuel enriched to the 4% needed for an atomic power plant (and still far away from the 90-95% needed for a Bomb) the man who had control of the greatest military machine his poor world had ever seen, who could destroy any nation with a touch of his finger said, "If Uran were to get the Bomb, it would mean the start of World War III".
What is almost impossible to let pass is that a man who has joked at least three times in public that a "dictatorship would be great as long as he was the dictator", this little popinjay, who was born with a silver spoon in his nose, then "joked" that he was "planning to retain power" after, according to the Groundlaw of Arrogance, of his second term in office the following year.
This from a man who had established detention centers in his country with, room for a half-million; who had detained his own citizens for years with no writ of law, in some cases destroying their minds with refined techniques of torture; who had repeatedly declared that he was above any law or legal restraint because he was Codpiece-in-Chief of a "Country at War"; who had prepared an executive directive giving him dictatorial powers to protect the Groundlaw in the event of an unspecified National Emergency -- for as long as that emergency lasted (and it was he who was to declare the Emergency and announce when the emergency had ended!!!)
Letting all that pass or not, the cherry on the top of the cake and the raisin in the sausage end, is that while all this was going on, while enormous tax rebates in the hundreds of billions were given to super-rich Arrogant citizens, while a trillion dollars and a million lives were wasted in the beginnings of his military adventures -- at the same time, one in four homes in his country were not insulated and had single pane glass windows!
That meant that, at the same time that major global climate changes were becoming rapidly inevitable, 5% of the population of the Third Galaxy was burning up one fourth of the oil and gas being sucked out of the crust, much of that poor planet -- to, in essence, warm the sparrows!
If but a fraction of the tax breaks given to the super- and hyper-rich had been diverted to encourage Arrogant citizens to insulate their walls and windows -- and, by example, encourage and lead the rest of the world to sanity; if but a fraction of the resources wasted on fruitless wars of global hegemony had been used on research to develop decentralized and renewable energy sources...
Indeed! If! If! If it had been done -- what a difference it would have made!
But, it was not done -- and that cannot be allowed to pass!
Let it pass that, from the start, he set things in motion of which he had never spoken, which, in fact were diametrically opposite from what he had promised:
1. From the start he laid plans to take out Badass Poosane because, as he quaintly put it: "He tried to kill my daddy!"
2. From the start He let his evil companion, Mr. Snarly, hold secret meetings with the poobahs of the energy industry. Meetings so secret that we still don't know the agenda, the decisions, the plans -- not even who attended these meetings! (However, we can deduce from later events that plans were laid on how to bring about Arrogant control of the world's oil and natural gas reserves -- we know this by the utter incompetence with which these plans were laid, played and ensuing complete failure!)
3. From the start, he set in motion eavesdropping and spying on Arrogant citizens in order to gain "stuff" on his political opponents with which to twist their arms, as needed.
Let it pass that he ignored warnings of the impending attacks known as Terrible Tuesday and went back to jerking off on his ranch.
Let it pass that, afterwards, he completely blew all chances of capturing Ahsawyah been-Lately "dead or alive" when Farawaystan was attacked. In fact the failure was done with such elegant incompetence that one must wonder if it wasn't intentional. In any case, after a former oil company executive was democratically elected by the purple finger as President of Farawaystan, the promises of help and aid to the war torn country disappeared like the morning dew -- instead, the full force of Arrogance was brought to bear on Wudda-Wreck, which, after its illegal invasion and occupation, came, day by day, year by year to deserve its name.
Let is pass that after failing (deliberately?) to "get" been-Lately; after failing to find the Weapons of Mass Immolation in Wudda-Wreck (because they never existed!); after failing to secure access to natural gas in Farawaystan or the oil of Wudda-Wreck -- he then turned his little piggy eyes lustfully upon Uran and her vast resources of oil and natural gas.
Let it pass that Uran had no proven plans to develop Weapons of Mass Immolation -- more important was that, had they the will, they had not the capability!
What is very hard to let pass is that, at the time when the Uranians were barely able to produce nuclear fuel enriched to the 4% needed for an atomic power plant (and still far away from the 90-95% needed for a Bomb) the man who had control of the greatest military machine his poor world had ever seen, who could destroy any nation with a touch of his finger said, "If Uran were to get the Bomb, it would mean the start of World War III".
What is almost impossible to let pass is that a man who has joked at least three times in public that a "dictatorship would be great as long as he was the dictator", this little popinjay, who was born with a silver spoon in his nose, then "joked" that he was "planning to retain power" after, according to the Groundlaw of Arrogance, of his second term in office the following year.
This from a man who had established detention centers in his country with, room for a half-million; who had detained his own citizens for years with no writ of law, in some cases destroying their minds with refined techniques of torture; who had repeatedly declared that he was above any law or legal restraint because he was Codpiece-in-Chief of a "Country at War"; who had prepared an executive directive giving him dictatorial powers to protect the Groundlaw in the event of an unspecified National Emergency -- for as long as that emergency lasted (and it was he who was to declare the Emergency and announce when the emergency had ended!!!)
Letting all that pass or not, the cherry on the top of the cake and the raisin in the sausage end, is that while all this was going on, while enormous tax rebates in the hundreds of billions were given to super-rich Arrogant citizens, while a trillion dollars and a million lives were wasted in the beginnings of his military adventures -- at the same time, one in four homes in his country were not insulated and had single pane glass windows!
That meant that, at the same time that major global climate changes were becoming rapidly inevitable, 5% of the population of the Third Galaxy was burning up one fourth of the oil and gas being sucked out of the crust, much of that poor planet -- to, in essence, warm the sparrows!
If but a fraction of the tax breaks given to the super- and hyper-rich had been diverted to encourage Arrogant citizens to insulate their walls and windows -- and, by example, encourage and lead the rest of the world to sanity; if but a fraction of the resources wasted on fruitless wars of global hegemony had been used on research to develop decentralized and renewable energy sources...
Indeed! If! If! If it had been done -- what a difference it would have made!
But, it was not done -- and that cannot be allowed to pass!
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Corruption in Wudda-Wreck
A strange thing happened in Arrogance, not long before things got serious and what were later known as the Terrible Times began.
Of course, as a citizen of our happier and certainly saner world, you may wonder how one could consider the times up to then not being thought of as "terrible", but the Third Galaxy, although parallel, is not our world and what seems logical to us does not necessarily apply in that world:
If you recall, when the Codpiece-in-Chief clapped his little hands in glee and ordered the invasion of Wudda-Wreck, the Bankers of Illusion, that is the media wept in paroxysms of joy at the thought of all the flowers that would be showered upon Arrogant soldier as the citizens of Wudda-Wreck in overflowing gratitude turned over all their natural resources to Arrogant companies as a small token for having deposed the Evil Dictator, Badass Poosane, giving them Freedom, Liberty, Democracy and purple fingers.
You will also recall, how reality then unfolded in a somewhat different and actually violent ways. Wudda-Wreck descended into chaos, ethnic cleansing, civil war and, not least important, attacks on Arrogant soldiers. Hundreds and then thousands of them were flown home, at night, in flag-wrapped boxes.
Meanwhile, when it became obvious not only that Poosane possessed no Weapons of Mass Immolation and that the prospects of Democracy budding, let alone unfolding, were less than minimal, the reasons for the invasion and the following occupation and disintegration of Wudda-Wreck changed as each preceding reason became untenable. "Creating Democracy" gave way to "Staying the Course" which gave way something else and then something else and finally "Fighting them There so we don't have to Fight Them Here".
Although voices were raised that Arrogance should end its engagement in Wudda-Wreck, the idea was unable to gain political traction -- that is until the "Corruption Story" broke!
Almost overnight, there were stories in the media about the rampant corruption in Iraq and how millions of Arrogant dollars were being stolen by corrupt Wudda-Wrecki politicians, soldiers, policemen and government officials. True, this corruption had been going on since the very beginning of the occupation; true, the Wudda-Wrecki corruption was small potatoes compared to the corruption of the Arrogant companies skimming creamy billion dollar fortunes from the war and occupation -- but the outrage and anger were directed at the people of Wudda-Wreck. To us, that may seem illogical, but logic has little to do with matters of hegemony and power.
The meme grew that "Wudda-Wreck is wasting our $$$$$$s and therefore no longer deserves our Arrogant sacrifices!"
Indeed, the political will was now there to "bring our troops home!" and it would have happened if it had not been for the desire of Rexona to go down in history as a Great Chief and the machinations of his Evil Companion, "Big" Dick Snarly. Monstrous Monday came, Uran was given a demonstration of Shock and Awe, Rexona was annointed Supreme Hole and the Terrible Times began.
Had it not been for the intervention of the Alien Veggies, the fate of that poor world would have been terrible indeed!
Of course, as a citizen of our happier and certainly saner world, you may wonder how one could consider the times up to then not being thought of as "terrible", but the Third Galaxy, although parallel, is not our world and what seems logical to us does not necessarily apply in that world:
If you recall, when the Codpiece-in-Chief clapped his little hands in glee and ordered the invasion of Wudda-Wreck, the Bankers of Illusion, that is the media wept in paroxysms of joy at the thought of all the flowers that would be showered upon Arrogant soldier as the citizens of Wudda-Wreck in overflowing gratitude turned over all their natural resources to Arrogant companies as a small token for having deposed the Evil Dictator, Badass Poosane, giving them Freedom, Liberty, Democracy and purple fingers.
You will also recall, how reality then unfolded in a somewhat different and actually violent ways. Wudda-Wreck descended into chaos, ethnic cleansing, civil war and, not least important, attacks on Arrogant soldiers. Hundreds and then thousands of them were flown home, at night, in flag-wrapped boxes.
Meanwhile, when it became obvious not only that Poosane possessed no Weapons of Mass Immolation and that the prospects of Democracy budding, let alone unfolding, were less than minimal, the reasons for the invasion and the following occupation and disintegration of Wudda-Wreck changed as each preceding reason became untenable. "Creating Democracy" gave way to "Staying the Course" which gave way something else and then something else and finally "Fighting them There so we don't have to Fight Them Here".
Although voices were raised that Arrogance should end its engagement in Wudda-Wreck, the idea was unable to gain political traction -- that is until the "Corruption Story" broke!
Almost overnight, there were stories in the media about the rampant corruption in Iraq and how millions of Arrogant dollars were being stolen by corrupt Wudda-Wrecki politicians, soldiers, policemen and government officials. True, this corruption had been going on since the very beginning of the occupation; true, the Wudda-Wrecki corruption was small potatoes compared to the corruption of the Arrogant companies skimming creamy billion dollar fortunes from the war and occupation -- but the outrage and anger were directed at the people of Wudda-Wreck. To us, that may seem illogical, but logic has little to do with matters of hegemony and power.
The meme grew that "Wudda-Wreck is wasting our $$$$$$s and therefore no longer deserves our Arrogant sacrifices!"
Indeed, the political will was now there to "bring our troops home!" and it would have happened if it had not been for the desire of Rexona to go down in history as a Great Chief and the machinations of his Evil Companion, "Big" Dick Snarly. Monstrous Monday came, Uran was given a demonstration of Shock and Awe, Rexona was annointed Supreme Hole and the Terrible Times began.
Had it not been for the intervention of the Alien Veggies, the fate of that poor world would have been terrible indeed!
Monday, October 15, 2007
Coincidence Theories
Coincidence theory is a most fascinating discipline!
With this fine tool we can explain almost anything that simpler minds and weaker souls might find very strange causing them to spin strange scenarios involving all kinds of skullduggery and conspiracy!
A few examples:
That the Reichstag Fire in 1933 led to a state of emergency and Hitler was given the dictatorial powers he lusted for -- that was a coincidence!
That so many progressive and liberal personages like Martin Luther King, three Kennedys, John Lennon, Paul Wellstone (a 4th Kennedy, Ted, was supposed to have been on Paul's plane!), Athan Gibbs, the man who invented the only electronic voting machine with a paper auditing trail all died either violently or in odd accidents -- these were all coincidences! That the list could be longer would not affect Coincidence Theory one whit!
That JFK was murdered a half year after he angrily rejected the Operation Northwoods plan to stage a number of terrorist attacks within the United States to create a national mood that would allow a second and more serious invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs debacle -- that was a coincidence!
That the Codpiece-in-Chief, only weeks after inauguration was planning his invasion of Iraq and setting illegal wiretaps in motion to get dirt on his political enemies, these things having nothing to do with the fact that, two years later, Iraq was invaded and important people in Congress kept silent and even cheered as if they were afraid so that a simple-minded person might think they were being blackmailed -- all these are easily explained by Coincidence Theory!
That the Vigilent Guard exercises in September 2001 depleted the protection of air space in the North East while simulated air liner hijackings confused the remaining air space protection on the same day as Terrible Tuesday -- that was a coincidence!
That the Patriot Act and the entire concept and meme of Homeland Security was pulled up like a rabbit out of a hat not long afterwards -- that was a coincidence!
That the anthrax powder attacks which shortly followed and were ballyhooed to be the work of Iraq, yet when it was soon known the powder could have only been made in an American military laboratory, the perpetrator could not be found -- that was, of course, a coincidence!
That all that was needed to kick-start the Project for the New American Century just happened to fall neatly into place in those days -- these were all happy coincidences!
(Indeed, just so that no weak-minded person gets a silly idea, Operation Northwoods mentioned above was just a practical joke the Joint Chiefs of Staff played on JFK, but, being an East Coast liberal, he didn't see the humor in it!)
That six months after the Taliban government in Afghanistan turned down a deal for a pipeline across their country, they received the "carpet of bombs" they had been promised if they refused the "carpet of gold" in the proposed pipeline deal -- that was a coincidence!
That the man who was then elected as Afghani President by millions of purple fingers, the fact that he was a former energy company executive -- that is also a coincidence!
That there was a simulated terror drill in London, with bomb attacks on busses and the underground the morning of the actual bombings in London July 7, 2005, well, since we all know that simulated terror drills are being held almost daily in London -- this too was obviously a coincidence!
That six cruise missiles were sent in September to an air base in Louisiana which is a staging area for shipments to the Muddled East and that these missiles happened to have 150 kiloton warheads; that it was a month before two military exercises, TOPOFF (a simulated nuclear terror attack in Oregon) and Vigilent Shield (martial law declared in accordance with the Codpiece executive directive from earlier this year) -- all of these things are coincidences!
That somebody out of the loop blew the whistle on the nuke-armed cruise missiles not being where they were supposed to be -- that was not a coincidence, that was an accident!!!
That I post this on October 15, the first day of the 5 day TOPOFF / Vigilent Shield exercises is neither a coincidence nor an accident, although a certain amount of serendipity is involved.
With this fine tool we can explain almost anything that simpler minds and weaker souls might find very strange causing them to spin strange scenarios involving all kinds of skullduggery and conspiracy!
A few examples:
That the Reichstag Fire in 1933 led to a state of emergency and Hitler was given the dictatorial powers he lusted for -- that was a coincidence!
That so many progressive and liberal personages like Martin Luther King, three Kennedys, John Lennon, Paul Wellstone (a 4th Kennedy, Ted, was supposed to have been on Paul's plane!), Athan Gibbs, the man who invented the only electronic voting machine with a paper auditing trail all died either violently or in odd accidents -- these were all coincidences! That the list could be longer would not affect Coincidence Theory one whit!
That JFK was murdered a half year after he angrily rejected the Operation Northwoods plan to stage a number of terrorist attacks within the United States to create a national mood that would allow a second and more serious invasion of Cuba after the Bay of Pigs debacle -- that was a coincidence!
That the Codpiece-in-Chief, only weeks after inauguration was planning his invasion of Iraq and setting illegal wiretaps in motion to get dirt on his political enemies, these things having nothing to do with the fact that, two years later, Iraq was invaded and important people in Congress kept silent and even cheered as if they were afraid so that a simple-minded person might think they were being blackmailed -- all these are easily explained by Coincidence Theory!
That the Vigilent Guard exercises in September 2001 depleted the protection of air space in the North East while simulated air liner hijackings confused the remaining air space protection on the same day as Terrible Tuesday -- that was a coincidence!
That the Patriot Act and the entire concept and meme of Homeland Security was pulled up like a rabbit out of a hat not long afterwards -- that was a coincidence!
That the anthrax powder attacks which shortly followed and were ballyhooed to be the work of Iraq, yet when it was soon known the powder could have only been made in an American military laboratory, the perpetrator could not be found -- that was, of course, a coincidence!
That all that was needed to kick-start the Project for the New American Century just happened to fall neatly into place in those days -- these were all happy coincidences!
(Indeed, just so that no weak-minded person gets a silly idea, Operation Northwoods mentioned above was just a practical joke the Joint Chiefs of Staff played on JFK, but, being an East Coast liberal, he didn't see the humor in it!)
That six months after the Taliban government in Afghanistan turned down a deal for a pipeline across their country, they received the "carpet of bombs" they had been promised if they refused the "carpet of gold" in the proposed pipeline deal -- that was a coincidence!
That the man who was then elected as Afghani President by millions of purple fingers, the fact that he was a former energy company executive -- that is also a coincidence!
That there was a simulated terror drill in London, with bomb attacks on busses and the underground the morning of the actual bombings in London July 7, 2005, well, since we all know that simulated terror drills are being held almost daily in London -- this too was obviously a coincidence!
That six cruise missiles were sent in September to an air base in Louisiana which is a staging area for shipments to the Muddled East and that these missiles happened to have 150 kiloton warheads; that it was a month before two military exercises, TOPOFF (a simulated nuclear terror attack in Oregon) and Vigilent Shield (martial law declared in accordance with the Codpiece executive directive from earlier this year) -- all of these things are coincidences!
That somebody out of the loop blew the whistle on the nuke-armed cruise missiles not being where they were supposed to be -- that was not a coincidence, that was an accident!!!
That I post this on October 15, the first day of the 5 day TOPOFF / Vigilent Shield exercises is neither a coincidence nor an accident, although a certain amount of serendipity is involved.
Saturday, October 13, 2007
More Trouble With Brackwater...
The scene: Once again a certain plush office in the Dream Zone, one of the few places in Bodybagh, the capital of Wudda-Wrek, where an free, Arrogant citizen can walk freely about and, for example, enjoy a McBarf burger without too much fear of a bullet or a piece of shrapnel flying through the lightly salted freedom-fries.
Once again, an aide rushes in:
Sir, we have a problem with Brackwater again!
Shit! Don't those cowboys know what a holster is for?
No sir, nobody's been shot.
What's the problem then?
Well, you know all those things Prime Miniter Malarkey was coming on with about throwing Brackwater out of the country or maybe even putting them on trial in a court here in Wudda-Wreck?
Sure, he's just grandstanding for his base so he won't look like the puppet he is, if he gets too uppity, we'll just pull his strings -- or find another dolly...
But sir, that's not the problem -- the natives got upset after what he said and the families of the 20 people who got killed when the Brackwater team emptied their magazines into the crowd families are demanding reimbursement, blood money you know --
How much?
Four million dollars for the lot of them.
What? That's ridiculous, we don't pay that kind of money! Why that's 200,000 dollars for a cold corpse. That will never do!
But sir --
No way, no way! Remember a while back? We set the precedent after that Brackwater guy was coming home blind drunk after a party and this damn fool to stop him. That's ridiculous, everybody knows Brackwater people always swagger with their piece locked and loaded with the safety off! Just because the nutter was a bodyguard for the vice-president of Wudda-Wreck his blood sucking family thought they could hit us up for a quarter million.
A quarter million?
Yeah, but that would never do, why if we started paying that kind of money, people would be jumping out in front of Brackwater people just to get plugged so their families could get rich.
There was silence for a moment as the man behind the desk take a puff on his cigar.
It would be immoral of us to hand out that kind of money and tempt people to get themselves killed! Anyway, don't I have enough problem getting these damn cowboys out of the country when they pull shit like this -- do you have any idea what that costs? And then, I have to find a placement for them in another mercenary outfit -- it ain't easy, or cheap!
But sir, what shall we do with their demands?
Ignore them -- they'll come back with lesser demands. When they come down to ten fifteen thousand a body then we can strike a deal. It's very important we get a deal -- we don't want to seem heartless and cruel.
Once again, an aide rushes in:
Sir, we have a problem with Brackwater again!
Shit! Don't those cowboys know what a holster is for?
No sir, nobody's been shot.
What's the problem then?
Well, you know all those things Prime Miniter Malarkey was coming on with about throwing Brackwater out of the country or maybe even putting them on trial in a court here in Wudda-Wreck?
Sure, he's just grandstanding for his base so he won't look like the puppet he is, if he gets too uppity, we'll just pull his strings -- or find another dolly...
But sir, that's not the problem -- the natives got upset after what he said and the families of the 20 people who got killed when the Brackwater team emptied their magazines into the crowd families are demanding reimbursement, blood money you know --
How much?
Four million dollars for the lot of them.
What? That's ridiculous, we don't pay that kind of money! Why that's 200,000 dollars for a cold corpse. That will never do!
But sir --
No way, no way! Remember a while back? We set the precedent after that Brackwater guy was coming home blind drunk after a party and this damn fool to stop him. That's ridiculous, everybody knows Brackwater people always swagger with their piece locked and loaded with the safety off! Just because the nutter was a bodyguard for the vice-president of Wudda-Wreck his blood sucking family thought they could hit us up for a quarter million.
A quarter million?
Yeah, but that would never do, why if we started paying that kind of money, people would be jumping out in front of Brackwater people just to get plugged so their families could get rich.
There was silence for a moment as the man behind the desk take a puff on his cigar.
It would be immoral of us to hand out that kind of money and tempt people to get themselves killed! Anyway, don't I have enough problem getting these damn cowboys out of the country when they pull shit like this -- do you have any idea what that costs? And then, I have to find a placement for them in another mercenary outfit -- it ain't easy, or cheap!
But sir, what shall we do with their demands?
Ignore them -- they'll come back with lesser demands. When they come down to ten fifteen thousand a body then we can strike a deal. It's very important we get a deal -- we don't want to seem heartless and cruel.
Thursday, October 11, 2007
Single-tater and Many-tater Religions
Back when my only access to information about the Third Galaxy was that which was transmitted to me by an unemployed angel, it gave me some information about the religions of that unfortunate world, mainly the Peelers and the Mashers.
The fact is there were not a few other religions there and now that I have direct access to the Absolute Truth, 21st Edition, I can pretty much delve into what ever strikes my fancy -- the only problem being, of course, that it is rather slow going, as the Absolute Truth is, literally, voluminous -- there are several of or kilometers from the top of a page to its bottom.
I have mentioned earlier something of the Buddy -- he was what one might call a reformer of the Hudoo religion. The Hudoo religion developed on the subcontinent of Indya and both of them are concerned to a large degree with conscious awareness -- the term, Buddy, actually refers to the light of awareness. Many Hudoos have the custom painting a small, red dot in the middle of the forehead, as this is considered to be the seat of consciousness.
Seen from the viewpoint of their religions, the Mashers and Peelers consider themselves to be "single-taters", that is they consider that there is only One Great Potato and they tend to look down upon Hudooism and Buddyism. They accuse the Hudooists of practicing "many-taterism", that the worship many potatoes or 'taters. They tend to sneer at Buddyism and say that it is a "no-tater" religion. This is because the Buddy refused to discuss the Great Potato.
The Peelers and Mashers are the two youngest of what are known as the three great "single-tater" religions in the Third Galaxy -- the third, and oldest, is the religion of those known as the "Strugglers". All three of these religions sprang up in the area around Holy California and they all tend to refer to the Great Potato as "Spud"
I have written elsewhere about how Broken Wing thought that his Spud wanted him to sacrifice his only son, Laughing Boy. As you know, if you have read the tale, Broken Wing did not murder his son. Depending on your level of cynicism, this was fortunate -- or not -- for the three single-tater religions all evolved from Laughing Boy's descendants.
When Laughing Boy grew up he had two sons, Red Harry and Little Deceiver. They were twins, but not identical twins. Red was the first to be born and therefore should have inherited every thing from his father. But, Deceiver was a clever fellow and worked things out so that he got all the inheritance for himself.
Deceiver had some trouble with his conscience about this and not a little anxiety because he thought his older twin was going to kill him. While in the wilderness wrestling with his thoughts and anxieties, it seemed to him that he was wrestling with an angel sent by his father's Spud, the Great Potato. He lost the struggle with the angel, of course, but the angel, it seemed to him, gave him a new name: Strugg-El, that is, "he who struggles with El" -- and as is well known, "El" is an older name for the Great Potato. That is why those who follow the oldest of the single-tater religions are called Strugglers, or Struggs, for short.
If the attitude of the practitioners of the single-tater religions was negative towards the Hudoos and Buddy's, they paled in comparison to the antagonism they held towards each other. Great and bloody wars were fought between them -- all in the name of and for the sake and glory of the Great Potato they each claimed as their Spud. Indeed, the Peelers had a particular animosity towards the Struggs whom they accused of having murdered the Holy Idaho and more than once tried to exterminate them.
Since these religions were all supposedly to be based on love and peace, an outside observer would not have to be all that cynical to come to the conclusion that most of the people who called themselves, Mashers, Peelers and Struggs had their collective head up their ass.
However, there were always a few people in the Third Galaxy who could reject the obvious stoopidities in religion without throwing out the baby with the bath water so to speak. For example, this brief quote from Elmer Eggplant:
The fact is there were not a few other religions there and now that I have direct access to the Absolute Truth, 21st Edition, I can pretty much delve into what ever strikes my fancy -- the only problem being, of course, that it is rather slow going, as the Absolute Truth is, literally, voluminous -- there are several of or kilometers from the top of a page to its bottom.
I have mentioned earlier something of the Buddy -- he was what one might call a reformer of the Hudoo religion. The Hudoo religion developed on the subcontinent of Indya and both of them are concerned to a large degree with conscious awareness -- the term, Buddy, actually refers to the light of awareness. Many Hudoos have the custom painting a small, red dot in the middle of the forehead, as this is considered to be the seat of consciousness.
Seen from the viewpoint of their religions, the Mashers and Peelers consider themselves to be "single-taters", that is they consider that there is only One Great Potato and they tend to look down upon Hudooism and Buddyism. They accuse the Hudooists of practicing "many-taterism", that the worship many potatoes or 'taters. They tend to sneer at Buddyism and say that it is a "no-tater" religion. This is because the Buddy refused to discuss the Great Potato.
The Peelers and Mashers are the two youngest of what are known as the three great "single-tater" religions in the Third Galaxy -- the third, and oldest, is the religion of those known as the "Strugglers". All three of these religions sprang up in the area around Holy California and they all tend to refer to the Great Potato as "Spud"
I have written elsewhere about how Broken Wing thought that his Spud wanted him to sacrifice his only son, Laughing Boy. As you know, if you have read the tale, Broken Wing did not murder his son. Depending on your level of cynicism, this was fortunate -- or not -- for the three single-tater religions all evolved from Laughing Boy's descendants.
When Laughing Boy grew up he had two sons, Red Harry and Little Deceiver. They were twins, but not identical twins. Red was the first to be born and therefore should have inherited every thing from his father. But, Deceiver was a clever fellow and worked things out so that he got all the inheritance for himself.
Deceiver had some trouble with his conscience about this and not a little anxiety because he thought his older twin was going to kill him. While in the wilderness wrestling with his thoughts and anxieties, it seemed to him that he was wrestling with an angel sent by his father's Spud, the Great Potato. He lost the struggle with the angel, of course, but the angel, it seemed to him, gave him a new name: Strugg-El, that is, "he who struggles with El" -- and as is well known, "El" is an older name for the Great Potato. That is why those who follow the oldest of the single-tater religions are called Strugglers, or Struggs, for short.
If the attitude of the practitioners of the single-tater religions was negative towards the Hudoos and Buddy's, they paled in comparison to the antagonism they held towards each other. Great and bloody wars were fought between them -- all in the name of and for the sake and glory of the Great Potato they each claimed as their Spud. Indeed, the Peelers had a particular animosity towards the Struggs whom they accused of having murdered the Holy Idaho and more than once tried to exterminate them.
Since these religions were all supposedly to be based on love and peace, an outside observer would not have to be all that cynical to come to the conclusion that most of the people who called themselves, Mashers, Peelers and Struggs had their collective head up their ass.
However, there were always a few people in the Third Galaxy who could reject the obvious stoopidities in religion without throwing out the baby with the bath water so to speak. For example, this brief quote from Elmer Eggplant:
"There is a deeply spiritual element in our common humanity. In my opinion, it is essential for our continued survival.
None of the so-called "revealed" religions are more than approximations of putting a handle on this spirituality.
None of these "revelations came from any "Spud" person. The best came from the genius of our common human creativity. The worst came from charlatans and hustlers out to make a buck without working for a living.
As for the organized religions and religious movements, that some of them actually impede the realization of our common humanity -- shame on them!"
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
If Someone Had Set Out Deliberately
If you can believe what you read (but you can't!) the bottom line is that we haven't got a chance...
The ice is melting, pouring a thousand Niagaras into holes in the rotten ice. Greenland quakes as her glaciers calve at amazing rates. The sea is rising and none of this, none of this can be said to be in any way at all surprising!
In every case of what is nicely called, "international terrorism", stolen passports have been involved -- stolen or counterfeit, it's the same difference!
There is but one database in the world that tracks this tool the bad guys need the most -- Interpol.
With a budget of 30 million, Interpol is ignored by the oxymoronously named Homeland Security which has a budget of 38 billion.
If someone had set out deliberately to suck the world dry of natural resources and to destroy the ability of our Blue Mother to regenerate Herself from the wounds that have been inflicted on her and gouged into her soft flesh...
If someone had set out deliberately to invoke, in the name of a "War on Terra", courses of action which would not only engender, enable, strengthen and feed these dark networks, but make ever more likely a "Clash of Civilizations" where Weapons of Mass Immolation will be used...
If someone had set out deliberately to start a series of Endless Ultimate Wars and set the stage for the rise of the most terrible tyranny the world has ever known...
Well, if someone had done that, they sure have done a bang up job!
Of course, there is no "someone", just a collection of holes, a horde of nonentity blaspheming all that is holy in our common humanity, gnawing holes in the very fabric of existence -- it really has no name, but to have a handle on it, I call it Rexona.
The ice is melting, pouring a thousand Niagaras into holes in the rotten ice. Greenland quakes as her glaciers calve at amazing rates. The sea is rising and none of this, none of this can be said to be in any way at all surprising!
In every case of what is nicely called, "international terrorism", stolen passports have been involved -- stolen or counterfeit, it's the same difference!
There is but one database in the world that tracks this tool the bad guys need the most -- Interpol.
With a budget of 30 million, Interpol is ignored by the oxymoronously named Homeland Security which has a budget of 38 billion.
If someone had set out deliberately to suck the world dry of natural resources and to destroy the ability of our Blue Mother to regenerate Herself from the wounds that have been inflicted on her and gouged into her soft flesh...
If someone had set out deliberately to invoke, in the name of a "War on Terra", courses of action which would not only engender, enable, strengthen and feed these dark networks, but make ever more likely a "Clash of Civilizations" where Weapons of Mass Immolation will be used...
If someone had set out deliberately to start a series of Endless Ultimate Wars and set the stage for the rise of the most terrible tyranny the world has ever known...
Well, if someone had done that, they sure have done a bang up job!
Of course, there is no "someone", just a collection of holes, a horde of nonentity blaspheming all that is holy in our common humanity, gnawing holes in the very fabric of existence -- it really has no name, but to have a handle on it, I call it Rexona.
Monday, October 08, 2007
How Rexona Got His Rocks Off
While he was still an ordinary, yet talented, azzhole and ratfugger, Mr. Rexona demonstrated his odd genius in strange ways, talents that he would later need in his ascendancy as Supreme Hole of Arrogance.
We remember, of course, how he giggled and smiled whenever, as governor of what would later become one of the Arrogant States, he signed one of hundreds of death warrants, setting new records of insensitive arrogance under the label of "compassionately conservative".
It is also documented in the 2nd level footnotes of the 21st Edition of the Absolute Truth how he felt a "thrill coursing along his nerve system" as he licked his lips and vetoed the law which would have given basic proactive medical care to millions of children -- in fact, 3rd level footnotes maintain that he muttered, under his breath, "No Child Left Behind! Ha! I poop on them all! Bwah-ha-ha!"
We also know how he clapped his hands in glee and cried "Boy, this shore feels good!" and imagined he was buggering Badass Poosane in the cornhole as he gave the order for penetrating Wudda-Wreck. First level footnotes indicate that he got a hard-on as the Shock and Awe bombardment of Bodybagh was shown on television, in color...
But when he smiled and sent the Weapons of Mass Immolation to desolate Uran, it is absolutely confirmed that he creamed in his jeans -- his remark then was, "A fella's gotta get his kicks where he can gettem, ya know!"
A glimpse of something of what Rexona destroyed:
(You can see more at the Unapologetic Mexican)
We remember, of course, how he giggled and smiled whenever, as governor of what would later become one of the Arrogant States, he signed one of hundreds of death warrants, setting new records of insensitive arrogance under the label of "compassionately conservative".
It is also documented in the 2nd level footnotes of the 21st Edition of the Absolute Truth how he felt a "thrill coursing along his nerve system" as he licked his lips and vetoed the law which would have given basic proactive medical care to millions of children -- in fact, 3rd level footnotes maintain that he muttered, under his breath, "No Child Left Behind! Ha! I poop on them all! Bwah-ha-ha!"
We also know how he clapped his hands in glee and cried "Boy, this shore feels good!" and imagined he was buggering Badass Poosane in the cornhole as he gave the order for penetrating Wudda-Wreck. First level footnotes indicate that he got a hard-on as the Shock and Awe bombardment of Bodybagh was shown on television, in color...
But when he smiled and sent the Weapons of Mass Immolation to desolate Uran, it is absolutely confirmed that he creamed in his jeans -- his remark then was, "A fella's gotta get his kicks where he can gettem, ya know!"
A glimpse of something of what Rexona destroyed:
(You can see more at the Unapologetic Mexican)
Saturday, October 06, 2007
Thursday, October 04, 2007
Beauty and the Beast Revisited
When I went for my walk this morning, I was rewarded with one of the most magnificent sunrise displays I have seen in a long time!
The rising sun rays undershot a heavy but scattered cloud cover. It was beyond description. All one can say is, "Thanks!"
As a matter of fact that is what I presume to imagine what the Eternal mainly requires of us as conscious entities calling ourselves human beings: be thankful for the wonder we are privileged to know and experience in this life, behave decently with others and not screw up the Earth -- our Blue Mother -- who nourishes us all, along with the birds, the bees, the bears, the squirrels, the ants and all the other squiggly critters.
Speaking of birds, another experience: I saw in the sky this morning several flocks of wild geese gaggling and V'ing south for wherever it is they spend the winter -- it was a pleasure to see and hear them!
Yet another experience: two days ago, in the Happy Little Kingdom, a 10 year old girl was dragged off and raped, twice. Okay, the perp was a nasty guy called "Dirty Leif" and they got him, caught him, jailed him. Happy ending? Well, it depends on whether you are newspaper reader or a 10 year old girl.
A statistic: one out of six women raped in this country are less than 16 years old. For most of them it is their "sexual debut", as they so nicely put it in the local language.
I was working today moving firewood, getting ready for the winter season. Some of this wood had been lieing there since the last winter season and a lot of kribbly krabbly things crawled out, centipedes, pill bugs and spiders the size of a silver dollar -- kind of yechy things.
What I am trying to tell you is that there are disgusting things, ugly things, even evil things in the nature of living things -- but it is only we, the concious entities which presume to call ourselves human, who can bring the ugly evil into the world.
The rising sun rays undershot a heavy but scattered cloud cover. It was beyond description. All one can say is, "Thanks!"
As a matter of fact that is what I presume to imagine what the Eternal mainly requires of us as conscious entities calling ourselves human beings: be thankful for the wonder we are privileged to know and experience in this life, behave decently with others and not screw up the Earth -- our Blue Mother -- who nourishes us all, along with the birds, the bees, the bears, the squirrels, the ants and all the other squiggly critters.
Speaking of birds, another experience: I saw in the sky this morning several flocks of wild geese gaggling and V'ing south for wherever it is they spend the winter -- it was a pleasure to see and hear them!
Yet another experience: two days ago, in the Happy Little Kingdom, a 10 year old girl was dragged off and raped, twice. Okay, the perp was a nasty guy called "Dirty Leif" and they got him, caught him, jailed him. Happy ending? Well, it depends on whether you are newspaper reader or a 10 year old girl.
A statistic: one out of six women raped in this country are less than 16 years old. For most of them it is their "sexual debut", as they so nicely put it in the local language.
I was working today moving firewood, getting ready for the winter season. Some of this wood had been lieing there since the last winter season and a lot of kribbly krabbly things crawled out, centipedes, pill bugs and spiders the size of a silver dollar -- kind of yechy things.
What I am trying to tell you is that there are disgusting things, ugly things, even evil things in the nature of living things -- but it is only we, the concious entities which presume to call ourselves human, who can bring the ugly evil into the world.
Tuesday, October 02, 2007
Uran and the Terrible Times
This message which some, despite its obvious prescience, would call paranoid, was found circulating disturbingly widely in fact, on what we would call an internet, a few months before the beginning of those Terrible Times in the Third Galaxy. (The author was apparently never found by Hopeless Security -- and jolly good for him!):
One thing I'm sure of, it will come all on a sudden.
First, it will appear as if a reconciliation will be possible, then, out of the blue, will come an unfortunate incident or two coupled with Secret Intelligence so Sensitive that no one can know anything about it except that it poses a Grave and Imminent Threat to the Security of Arrogance.
Rexona will then, sadly, reluctantly and with heavy heart announce that he has been forced to send the bombers to protect our Arrogance from harm from the Evil Uranians!
Therefore, without warning, one dark, moon-less night in the early Spring, a couple thousand sorties will be sent and the Uranian air defense and air force will be taken out with surgical strikes and the terror of shock and awe destruction.
Special units of Synchronized Soldiers will take out selected sites of Uranian Evil!
Within a few days, bobble heads on television will spew phrases like, "The Spud was with us!", "Freedom Prevails!", "Spud bless our Arrogance!" and "Mission accomplished!".
Meanwhile, the mud lines above and below the smiling talking heads will distract any viewer who might be on the verge of thinking an independent thought. Commercial breaks will take care of the rest.
It is in such manner that Rexona will finally ascend to Supreme Hole.
The upside, of course, is that the color shots of explosions, tracer fire from the automatic weapons of gun ships and -- yeah! -- the mushroom clouds on television will be beautiful as Rexona jerks off behind his podium.
Should the citizens of Arrogance go to the streets, which they probably won't, the media will scream "traitors!" at the few who do. They will be met by crowd control units who will pacify them. The seriously disastified will, for their own safety, be sent to refuge in the relocation camps prepared earlier.
In such manner, in presidential decree and martial law, in secret subtrefuge and in public view, in silence as well as violence, the Lady of Liberty and Light will make her final transition to that of Fortress of Arrogance, to the Madam Who Rides a Fat Car.
Be thankful that you live in a world not only more peaceful, but far saner than that of the Third Galaxy!
One thing I'm sure of, it will come all on a sudden.
First, it will appear as if a reconciliation will be possible, then, out of the blue, will come an unfortunate incident or two coupled with Secret Intelligence so Sensitive that no one can know anything about it except that it poses a Grave and Imminent Threat to the Security of Arrogance.
Rexona will then, sadly, reluctantly and with heavy heart announce that he has been forced to send the bombers to protect our Arrogance from harm from the Evil Uranians!
Therefore, without warning, one dark, moon-less night in the early Spring, a couple thousand sorties will be sent and the Uranian air defense and air force will be taken out with surgical strikes and the terror of shock and awe destruction.
Special units of Synchronized Soldiers will take out selected sites of Uranian Evil!
Within a few days, bobble heads on television will spew phrases like, "The Spud was with us!", "Freedom Prevails!", "Spud bless our Arrogance!" and "Mission accomplished!".
Meanwhile, the mud lines above and below the smiling talking heads will distract any viewer who might be on the verge of thinking an independent thought. Commercial breaks will take care of the rest.
It is in such manner that Rexona will finally ascend to Supreme Hole.
The upside, of course, is that the color shots of explosions, tracer fire from the automatic weapons of gun ships and -- yeah! -- the mushroom clouds on television will be beautiful as Rexona jerks off behind his podium.
Should the citizens of Arrogance go to the streets, which they probably won't, the media will scream "traitors!" at the few who do. They will be met by crowd control units who will pacify them. The seriously disastified will, for their own safety, be sent to refuge in the relocation camps prepared earlier.
In such manner, in presidential decree and martial law, in secret subtrefuge and in public view, in silence as well as violence, the Lady of Liberty and Light will make her final transition to that of Fortress of Arrogance, to the Madam Who Rides a Fat Car.
Be thankful that you live in a world not only more peaceful, but far saner than that of the Third Galaxy!
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