A message to my friends

A message to my friends

I first I must admit that I was wondering if I was the only one that has noticed that the world ended, (The Clash of Civilizations aside,) that everything was over, that, well what can I add to that that is not already brilliantly summarized in the statement and testament: “the end of the world.” That engraves it in stone nicely.

I think that a lot of the people out there worried lots about the end of the world coming, and they were not looking forward to it, chaos, famine, pests, floods, infestation, mass graves and the gnashing of plural teeth, diabolical manifestations trouncing and baking birthday cakes, man against man, dog against man, fish against man, women raging furiously through the land, children aimlessly throating through the streets, animals, specially pigs, panicked and searching for a safety zone that did not exist, infectious anger, viral hate, guilty happiness, wolfs strolling through the streets, owls hunting babies in broad daylight, chickens and eggs rotting on each other, cows dying of malnutrition, the sun melting from its an overdose of plasma, wickedness in every drop of water, sinning adopted as normalcy, pervasive womb death everywhere, hustlers running out of drugs, alcohol and cigarrettes causing a furious luxury war, not enough makeup to hide all the women's tarnishing auras, dwarfed dreams becoming real, stale bread next to stale love, stolen hearts ripening in death throws. Yes, the end of the world had all the symptoms of depravity and raw hardship. No one wanted it to come, everyone wanted the current world to be saved even if it was and is bad, some went to churches hoping that membership would save them from the end of the world as we know it; only when the end of the world as we know it came, it wasn't what we expected at all.

It was different, so different that no one noticed it.

The Rein of Capitalism ended and I thought I was the only one that took noticed. I felt a celebration was immediately in order, I got a funny feeling all over my countenance, and I wanted to rush out and tell everyone and see them overjoyed at the event, “It happened in our life times!” What a joy. We did not have to wait, it happened now. But I went out into the streets screaming “Oh joy, Capitalism is dead, capitalism is dead, soul revival, the resurrection of feelings, the second coming of emotions, the heart rules, the passions won the cold war, the passions won the cold war.” But everyone just looked at me like one giant crazy plastic pickle walking around the farmers market on a bright Sunday day and way too yellow green.

I wondered if the children knew, they are so naturally intuitive they had to know, I checked. I asked the child in my head: “Is the world different today?” I got a happy face. Children will smile at anything, the world could have ended and they would smile at that, they don't know, they are purely feeling creatures, they just don't know.

I got a little shy about saying anything about it to anyone. Even Domaine, my adorable and insightful wife, would have held me crazy if I had said it, or so I thought, “The end of the world is upon us.” I did not say anything to her.

The spirits, which I have always trusted and which have told me and taught me many impressive things, were not talking either; they left, they were not talking to me, they were gone, gone, they were not within sight, they did not come out at 3 am, they did not rub themselves against me or go within me, not the good ones, not the bad ones, none came into my nights.

The world is empty of spirits, right now the world is empty of spirits, the world has surely ended then.

But you get into trouble when no one else notices what you notice. I pondered for a while: “Did anyone that went to see Napoleon Bonaparte being coronated Emperor Supremo know that they were witnessing the universal capitulation of monarchies?”

“Did the signatories of the Magna Carta know that they were saying goodnight to feudalism?”

“Did the Crucifiers of Christ realize that they had put paid on the Roman Empire?”

“Did those chopping away at the Berlin Wall, causing its collapse, have an inkling that they were collapsing the principal pillar of what America meant to the world?”

Fundamentally my question was: “Are the cornerstones, the pivot points, the metric tensors of history noticeable within the context of their times?”

“Did the French revolutionaries know that Bastille day marked the birth of The Republic?”

To be fair I doubt that the inventors of the wheel thought they were creating a revolution, we may not appreciate our times, we might be too much family to love our own accomplishments, the defeat of capitalism without any great bloodshed or notice ought not be a great surprise.

It has been an usual pattern of our times that there is less and less bloodshed during dramatic changes.

You cannot have watched Genghis's path through now China, or Napoleon's or Hitler's marches through the old world and dare say, “These were moderate fellows,” they were not. Their mark on history was brute and distinguishable from goodness without much of a moral quandary. But the candlelight empire, Britain, undid itself without much ado about it, they dwindled and sunk slowly into irrelevance, largely without the average Britton ever noticing it. Some bloody how within the British psyche there is still some kind of subconscious empire, the lack of blood in the demise, through cost cutting of their navy and of their colonies, seems to not have left a noticeable mark in their blocke. When ever they try to wake up from the dream of empire the “English” always somehow manage to think that because they are favorite brother with Uncle Sam, that somehow that means that they are still world dominators or some sort of thing like that. And this is so much true that they still sell themselves as cohorts to the world power, that they might whisper you wishes into Uncle Sam's ear, in his sleep, or so the rest of Europe thinks.

It doesn't matter, the world is over, I am running through the streets, my arms waving high “The world ended! The world has ended!” my friends call me crazy if you will, but Americanism and Englishnism, capitalism, consumerism and democracy are dead, dead!”

It will take sometime to sink into the mass national consciousness of every country on earth, after all there still appears to be money in the world although all the value has now been artificially manufactured and propped into a pedestal made of hay.

“Hey lucky people find your value.”

One of the key foundations of capitalism is that the value of a good or a service has to be genuine. That is the core foundation of the worth of capital and of its possible offspring profit; the value has to be real, appreciative over time, and negotiable via an unprincipled or principled third party.

The other principle value of capitalism is that all labor can be turned to money. That is that labor, work is convertible into a monetary value and that it can be stored and reused and exploited in such a manner.

Only problem is that when the value of labor or capital is artificially generated none of that is true and all of it becomes autonomously unsupportable, and nothing murder's capitalism more than dependancies. Capitalism's claim to independent resourcefulness gets neutered when there is any kind of social or governmental intervention.

If there were any hope for capitalism that time has cometh to pass. It has passed because there isn't anyone alive that can claim, after you save the capitalists, that there are any capitalists left. The capitulation of capitalism came when the capitalists proactively thought governmental intervention on their behalf and shamelessly took a bail out that favored them without any reagard to the implications. That they did not have the courage to say no, that is when they hanged themselves, that is when they surrendered capitalism into the hands of defeat.

When JP Morgan saved capitalism it was different, it was different because that was a capitalist saving the capitalists. They could save face then though there was some governmental intervention, but today, they cannot claim that government intervention is bad. The free hand has been chopped.

If Serverus can't save you no one else can.

However I think my friends and I have something to celebrate, that the end of a system came and went and hardly anyone noticed is a good thing. Not only does it show how useless it was but how worthless its profit was.

If the world economy can lose 40 trillion dollars in value and not suffer any dramatic emotional cataclysm the genuine value was never there in the first place.

Capitalism is done for, that implies many new and interesting things, we will not known what those will mean any more that those that made the transition from feudalism to mercantilism to capitalism knew their fates; however it shall none the less offer new prospects for a greater good, a world consciousness, a more enlightened age, and greater awareness that we are not the prime objective of the universe but for our superlative arrogance.

And perhaps the greatest wisdom may yet come from a realization that there is nothing to save.

I will say no more as my antagonist is gone. As for my friends they might not know but they are aware.

Ricardo Correa

Economic correction: ABOLISH THE STOCK MARKET!

I don't understand why no one has cometh forth with the logical correction to the current world's economic catastrophe. Here we are suffering the complete collapse of the capital infrastructure and instead of considering the abolition of Wall Streets everywhere governments are opting to finance its subsistence until it is able to again carry its own weight in gold.

Why would we want to save something that is not working and has proven inherently unstable? Since the Stock Market crash of 1929 less than 80 years have passed; and in between we have had other severe crisises such as the famed internet bubble burst and the Savings and Loan debacle to name but the top rated of them. And so how can we stand here today and say that there isn't something inherently wrong with the financial system, there is, there is something wrong with the system, it is obviously not working.

First of all we can all claim that the stock market is a necessity however it isn't. There was a time when there wasn't a stock market and most of humanity at least till the seventeenth hundreds, has actually financed itself and operated successfully without a functioning stock market. Some might argue that before the stock market existed the same mechanisms were in place but had not been formalized and that is very much a proper case to make; and more accurately it points out that there is no need for the stock market. Which is why here we must say that the stock market is more dangerous than any value it accrues.

The reason why the stock market is less beneficial than the value it accrues it's because the value that it accrues is not genuine value, sure at first that may have been the case, the initial stock market somewhere in Amsterdam probably dealt with genuine value, meaning that the investors had more or less a clear understanding of the possible accruals that would befall their investment. This is not because there was something inherently more honest in the character of the participants, those floating stocks and those investing in them, no they were probably suffering no greater virtue than their equivalent in the modern day. However the stock market was young, it was naive as youth is always naive and so discouragingly honest about its ways; and for that matter so were the investors, they were on a new venture together and this meant that the market had not yet created false expectations as it would later grandly do.

However the general propensity of any stock market is to bet on itself, a stock market is nothing more than a formalized gabling casino for companies and investors to bet on each others savvy. Anyone under the conception that the stock market is not a gambling institution would be wise to look at the market now. You can accumulate huge profits and huge losses but it is all based on calculated risk and you are betting that you can beat the house, or more accurately the house and you are both betting that you are going to win against the incalculable number of odds that besiege companies and investors. This is why investors constantly walk away with millions of dollars in loses and don't bother to expect someone to make it right, they know that it was a risk without a safety margin, they are aware that it was a risk they were willing to take.

National and international economic entities are willing to allow stock markets to exist because they realize that this is the only way to finance risky investment propositions that would otherwise not find capital to survive. The Internet was financed by lots of private capital that was lost when the Internet bubble collapsed but the Internet itself did not collapse; in fact the Internet has always been growing even after the Internet bubble went bust the Internet was growing and making millionaires everywhere, however many original investors lost grandly. The same took place with the Telecoms investments of the eighties, many of the original investors lost their shirts but overall the infrastructure that was built up is in used today much to the benefit of all.

On second thought when you think about the collapse of the mortgage industry it makes more sense to have a stock market, and in retrospect the Internet and the Telecoms investments were largely successful over generations of investors that is; so that the overall investment was sound though it took say three or four generations of investors for the profit capitalization to take effect. The same was true with the railroads, most of the investors that financed the tracks had to sell out before they made a profit. Stock markets start to make more sense if you don't look at them in terms of one time investors and start to measure the results over a few generations of investors. What that means is that an investment is not inherently of a nature to necessarily benefit the first generation of investors but rather best looked at as a more glacial investment that accrues its greatest benefits and value to intricate infrastructure projects or large scale enterprises. The stock markets makes sense over time and each generation of investors is sort of the guardian angel, of the moment, on watch till the day arrives when the investment matures to accrue a genuine success and profit.

This is why when you look at the stock market over time it has always performed well, it has always grown, yes it has had its abysmal performances but over time it has grown and blossomed riches from it. That brings us to the great mortgage investment crisis of today. Looked at it from a perspective of the immediacy of the moment it looks like a perfect description of a disaster. Over the last couple of decades the barriers to home ownership have been lowered because the risk associated with mortgages had been logistically diminished by the ability to pawn off the risk on someone else. If you owned a billion dollars in mortgages you could creatively repackage it into a mortgage baked security investment that someone else could purchase from you. The ability for financial entities to offload their mortgage liabilities gave them an incentive to continue adding new mortgages to their books; this created a downward market treasure that logically increased the potential number of mortgage loans. It thus became easier to buy a house because a greater number of, unusual, third party investors were helping the cash flow of first rate lenders to remain buoyant. In a sense what we were seeing was a mortgage investment binge, where foreign governments and local and foreign investors were willing to buy Susie's and Bill's mortgage in Kansas City and counted it as a futuristic asset.

As so many times happens the future failed to materialize the past's version of the future. we only need to go back to the eighties and nineties when homes were being built with all the networking wiring integrated into the walls so they would be ready as the networking home of the future. When wireless networking became the norm by the year 2001 all that walled in network cabling became a future wrongly fore casted. We now know that what they thought in the 1940s and 1950s about the year 2001 would mostly never materialize, their futuristic cars and houses could not have calculated what new materials and different life styles would conjure. In the same way in modern times it seemed right to invest in mortgages, generally not an unsafe investment, what no one could imagine is that the ability to sell mortgages to third party investors would create a huge pool of available loans so that new home owners with riskier credit habits would become eligible to own a house; and as a result it soon came to be that anyone could buy a house and make a good investment a bad investment.

The lure of home ownership is grandiose because it also offers the opportunity to get more credit, once you own a home the ability to get credit cards, second mortgages and instant cash is there for the taking, and people do just that. They get gobbled up by the ability to get instant credit cards and instant cash and of course no house is really a home till you add a second floor, tear out the backyard and remake it in your own image, or make a game room in the basement. As that happens the ability to pay the mortgage becomes strained, aside from the fact that you might have never been able to buy the home in the first place because you didn't rally merit it financially. The catastrophe grows from there.

But there again is another way to look at it, and it makes more sense if you look at it in longer term glacial cycles. Not many of those people would have owned a new home had the regulations not been eased so that mortgage liabilities could be repackaged and transfered to third parties, and in turn allow for the creative idea of sub prime mortgages which basically allowed anyone ignorant enough to take the risk to become a home owner while mildly unaware that their interest rates could double and triple depending on the economy. Moreover many investors that would have usually not invested in mortgage backed securities found themselves amiable to the idea thinking that they were buying safety margins by investing in assets that could be repossessed thus limiting their liabilities; a concept that as a whole was sound for it was based on the assumption that foreclosures would not become the norm; and when they did they turned mortgage holders into property owners of houses that they did not want with assets that could not be sold even at depreciated values.

We are witnessing something rather exquisite in these our times, the free market being unable to self correct proved that it could be bullish against reason and further proving that it does not have a cautious hand at the wheel or any self regulatory interests. Left to its own devices the free hand will always work to churn out the maximum potential of any investment market without much ado about the consequences to any and all.

Of course the very idea of a self regulating market is preposterous but at the same time that does not mean that the results are as bad as some would make them out to be. We have witnessed now first hand, in a clear and concise manner, in the span of no more than two decades what can happen when the freehand is left to its own devices. Now consider the results. First there are the investors that originally thought the whole idea of buying mortgage backed securities a good idea. They have all taken huge losses. These were investment houses, private and some public, the Chinese government may have up to 100 billion of its money in such investments, little towns in Iceland have put part of their portfolios on it, and an infinite set of investors that again may have never invested on the concept of a mortgage rather invested on the concept of mortgaged backed securities and all did lose their money as foreclosures exceeded expectations. What is interesting here is that these are a group of investors that actually entered a whole new creative investment infrastructure and so moved their capital to a new frontier and of course lost. Whereas normally these investors might have put the same money into General Electric or US Savings Bonds they turned to an investment that more directly affected the lives of everyday Americans. Thus the capital was redirected towards a riskier, less traditional client and therefore a more unpredictable market as a result we may have the largest redistribution of wealth ever in the history of The United States, and the world for this was a global investment tree.

At the other end of the spectrum is the consumer, all those persons that bought houses and had dreams of owning a home or of being more accepted as true middle class citizens. Many that could not afford it bought homes and for the first time got an inkling of the responsibilities, duties and economic dynamics that revolve around the concept of owning property. Some of those, a great number perhaps will keep their houses, either helped by relatives, the mortgage company, the local bank or some form of government assistance. As such those that never had a home have gotten an expensive education and those that managed to keep their home, whereas otherwise they might never have owned one, are now up one rung on the ladder to a stable middle class caricature.

In a sense what we have just witnessed was rather beneficial to the global economy because the capital wealth violated all of the possible processes for normal capital transference between individuals and entities and between government and individuals; a general bypass has been instituted where now the capital is going to get to where it needs to go fast and pronto. However that also implies that the capital itself has breached the wall of standard operating procedures within Wall Street and that means that the usual parties have not immediately benefited or received payment in kind for their investments.

Now aside from the obvious redistribution of wealth which will make a great academic study in a decade or two, we also have the other calamity, governments everywhere have had to redirect taxpayers money to guarantee the life of their banks and financial institutions as well as the stock markets of the world. England for instance, has had to guarantee the moneys of its compatriots in Iceland, that is an amazing accomplishment, to get a self centered England to accept external liabilities and to insure them for the sake of stabilizing its economy in relationship to Iceland of all places. And of course they have had to Nationalize their two most important banks so that kind of writes an epitaph for the glorious accomplishments of Margaret Thacher and Tony Blair. As Lady Thacher thought to create a freer market by moving more to the right than was right; and Tony Blair sort of gets banged all over the place as his centrist policies have now been turned entirely to the Left, left obliged. You see now the Government of England is more like the rest of Europe, or as the French might put it now, “Today England is more like the rest of us. And finally none of us can grasp the immensity and drastic change of the last few weeks as evidenced by the fact of a joint international action by major central banks to join in an unprecedented synchronized lowering of interest rates. Toto we are not in Kansas anymore.

In America the problem is more fascinating still, the home of capitalism has had to financed itself by selling securities to the communist Chinese and now it has to spend a trillion dollars of tax payers money shoring up the crisis while Russians can happily bargain shop the world with their 500 billion dollar surplus. And all this happened under a Republican administration; and to add to the irony it was the Democrats that fought hard to pass the bailout bill as proposed by a lame duck president and yet the bill lost on the first called vote thanks to the elephants in the house. Regardless, by default, the American government now owns Wall Street. There is no other way to look at it, the trillion dollars is only part of the investment, there is probably another half a trillion that will be invested via back end alleys to maintain confidence in the economy such as the 25 billion that has already been promised to the national car industry. So the entire system of capitalism has shown that it is unsound and that it needs constant government assistance in order to correct its calumnious vices.

Further how much capitalism can there be left if the government becomes the number one employer and consumer in the nation as is already the case?

But take that another way and this is the good side. We could save capitalism by simply eliminating the stock markets. Stock markets have one interesting value, they create an environment where capitalists can meet with entrepreneurs, they are a central plaza for investors, you want to invest you go into the stock market, instantly you will have access to a long list of companies that are searching for investment. The Stock Market most importantly creates liquidity in the investment process and reduces the investment cycle and by doing so also reduces risk. Money in any guise hates to stay still, the fact that one investor can sell his shares to another investor via a centralized depository is of great value. This allows for savvy investors to quickly best determine where there money is better spent, and it allows for a more evident value recognition based on demand. The assumption is that the hoards cannot be wrong, if everyone is investing in say, Google, they must be right. Still the point is that for the managing of investment capital, ease of capital flow, through a complex tier of investment layers, is essential and that is the genuine reason why stock markets exists and why they make sense.

However that very fluidity of investment also becomes the greatest risk opportunity within the constrains of the market. If investors can change their mind about a stock and sell it at will within a moments notice, instead of creating a more mature and sound market that creates a more volatile market because the short term investor is not interested in long term outcomes; and so what the ease of interchange does is create a rather whimsical market that is steered by the short term investor. The difference between a long term investor and a short term investor is that one is interested in the maturing process that companies go through to accrue the greatest value without having to transfer the initial investment to other investment ventures. The short term investor is only interested in accruing an immediate value by capitalizing on the fluctuations of the market however minute they may be. Thus they profit from instability by a process of increasing gain by selling and buying as if they were walking through the water by hoping rocks, sometimes doubling backwards to go maintain a forward perspective. This invariably, in the large scaling of the process, will destabilize the markets, however its effects are greatly shored up by the steady might of long term investors.

If we abolish the stock market the corrective is instant, without a stock market short term investment becomes an impossibility because without a central process for exchange capital flows will decrease liquidity.

What this means is that no investor would be allowed to go through a third party so as to invest their capital. All investors will have to go directly to the company or entrepreneur that they want to invest in and they will have to then decide if they want to invest based on the particular company strategy. This will mean that they are least likely to be short term investors, this is because they have to manually workout the value of the company, they have to negotiate the terms of the investment with that company, and even if these values are standardized they will still require more time than me going online right now and purchasing ten thousand shares of Google stock. My transaction is complex but not that difficult to execute, and frankly I don't know what Google's real strategy is other than the gathering of the worlds information, but the stock market allows me to invest without my being aware of the intricacies of the stock, whereas if I had to go directly to Google and convince them to take my money, which is pretty much as it sits right now, then it would make a greater degree of procedural detail that would make it both more participatory and also more difficult to get out of the investment; as you would have to negotiate your own terms for the purchase and sale of your investment.

Google is a perfect example of a company that is currently overvalued by any measure of the imagination. I am by the way a fan of the Google Brotherhood but the problem is that their value is pure speculation, if you look at Google today, after the free markets have just collapsed, you can no longer say that just because it looks good and it feels good it is a good investment. In the case of Google imagine that they now have so many investors believing their game plan that they have to execute but for all intends and purposes Capitalism may have ended as an economic engine when the US senate voted to pass the 700 billion dollar bailout package and it is under that guise that Google has to be judged. It's difficult to see how Capitalism could survive such massive amounts of government investment and sustain a fighting chance as a free and unadulterated market glad-handler. You have to consider the implications, if the consumer is not the principal means by which companies employ themselves in their particular business but rather do so through government bail outs of their obviously unsustainable business models, then it stands to reason that showing people the right place to shop via Google search, with uncanny accuracy, will still not yield any serious Google dollars returns to their respective clients. Now you might say but Google is still a sound investment. And I would retort that if investors, financiers and bankers are only in business because they have been bailed out by the government then it stands to reason that your job and my job are also being secured by the government, making any assumption of a free economy ludicrous and thus making Google stock highly suspect.

Thus what this means is that Google being a good investment has been swindle by false speculation about its natural capacity to deliver a return on investment; the natural capacity is just not there, it is only there as speculation which is what drives the price of Google stock. As such it has to at some point collapse, basically around the time that investors realize that Google has mastered search engines but little else. When you think of Google you think of a search engine, what else can Google do for you? It does not produce any information of significant value, it does own a liability in huge data centers that could at any time become useless warehouses of redundant data, as none of the data that Google snakes out of the Internet is Google property, the data is in the cloud at large and it is equally replicated for search criteria by the likes of Yahoo, Amazon and Microsoft to name but a few.

The problem is not however with Google, the problem is with the stock market that allows for such kind of speculation, so take the stock market out of it which in all truth is merely an arbitrage engine that adds very little value to the transactions it generates for the transactions are all speculative, they may never accrue any genuine value, or as happens it most cases, they may generate values that are bought and sold and profited from without the genuine product or value ever being produced. The stock market fundamentally allows for hypothetical values to be traded, that is the core of its business process, to permit entities to exchange equity on perceived values under the assumption that eventually those values are hammered out by a genuine, real world, business transaction. It is in this way that companies can have three, four, seven, one hundred or hundreds of thousand of times their real market value in stocks.

This would not be a problem if the speculating didn't become exponential without a cap. If there were a regulation that said that a company's stock market value could not exceed three times its gross earnings, or three times its capitalized assets, or three times its profits, then you would have a more real market valuation and a more clear headed investment process. But then who are we to say what a company is worth, if a company like Google can convince investors that it is worth hundreds of times its gross asset value. Who are we to say that that value is not real, specially so if Google continues to grow value in both the perceived and the real world scenarios?

Well the answer to that is simple, markets are not rational creatures they are irrational creatures, and are therefore more subject to err than to be right. The time is then ripe to abolish the stock market and to replace it with something more mundane, raw company stock. Each company has the ability to say what it is worth, something that can easily be determined not by potential sales, not by perceived value but by real asset and sales figures, what do you have on hand, and how much of it can you sell this year. It is that simple, based on that formula, you would still have a stock market type environment but without a stock market each investor would have to go directly to each company and bargain the purchase of the stock with them directly and regardless of potential whimsical fortune all market based capitalizations would be based on a maximum of three times asset and sales, assets and profit figures. Now if you think that is tightening the potential value of companies ask yourself how many companies are capable of growing 300 percent? Most companies are only capable of growing 300 percent their first year of business, which is not saying much, after that most companies never manage more than a meager stock market average of 15% growth. That's the reality.

That aside the most relevant change here is that there would be no speculative market, companies would not be able to capitalize via a third party entity so all of their transactions will be managed internally and as a result, will have very little speculative value; this is because it is much harder for an individual entity to increase its own worth than it is for a series of third party financial institutions to create a greater perception of wealth accrual potential. This is particularly so because those that benefit from the actual transactions of share trading have no other means of value accrual than the very transaction. And there is the inherent problem in the stock market, it is the transactions that matter and not the companies, there is no loyalty to companies, products and customers, there is only a value based on the transactions exchanged, remunerated, sold and resold, it is the volume of the transactions which accrues value, not the actual business of business.

The loss of the stock market will cause the economy to lose many jobs and businesses that are based on the slightest of bubble value accruals, that is jobs that are not real regardless of how we look at them, jobs that mislead value instead of accrue it, and as a whole the market would grow at a much slower pace, and you would see companies potential stifled by lack of investments because the only way that they could grow value in their internal stock is to genuinely grow their business.

Of course any action calling for the end of stock markets might just as well be calling for the end of capitalism. A call that has probably already been dealt by the current internal destruction of capitalism by government interference, and more with the support of Wall Street capitalists begging for government handouts. In other words, capitalism's Berlin Wall has smashed Wall Street from within, it is no small amount of irony that the leader of the largest bailout in history, the secretary of the treasury is a wall street lifer from the King of investment banks Goldman Sachs.

The current bail out will probably reach two trillion by the time you add up all the international shoring up that is currently taking place throughout all the major economic zones. Further once you have such huge amounts of artificial investment into a false economic model there is no telling how much hemorrhaging there will yet be to do. After all we have lost the free hand of capitalism and we are now under the bureaucratic hand of government that has a proven anachronistic corrective.

I therefore take no credit for something that has already been done, the destruction of the free market by no lesser free marketer pamphleteer than the American government and all because it lost all faith in market forces, or more accurately because it was frightened into action by them.

Ricardo Correa

Individualism = human energy disruptor

Individualism hasn’t been always with us nor will it be long with us in the annals of the universe it is a phase that comes and goes but has no fundamental basis to sustain an individual existence. Simply put individualism doesn’t exist any more than does freedom of speech but both are very dear to the human imagination as it conceptualizes a perfect version of itself that is capable of putting its personalized stamp within universe.

The idea of individualism can be said to be an endemic part of the human consciousness but that does not mean that it is real, genuine and indestructible. We can say it is endemic to our consciousness, and for that matter to all ergio (emotive) type consciousness, meaning emotive consciousness, because it arises from the disruption of essence wholeness or more accurately the apparent disruption of essence wholeness, as wholeness of essence cannot be disrupted. It is therefore right to say that individualism is as apparently genuine as the genuiness of a disruption in essence wholeness may appear.

Without needing to devolved to the most base standards of an essence wholeness as promulgated before time and space disruptions enter into play, we can say with absolute certainty that all beings are emotive and that their principal essence as it manifest itself in the universe is an identifiable emotive principle; you must sense feeling-being wherever the essence of an emotive being is as one of the same; a feeling we measure starting at the lowest possible quotient of emotion an ergio unit. A bite smaller than a Planck length, as it is not fundamentally dependant on time and space; this is because all fundamental essence types have no sense of time nor space, in fact time and space are an enigma to emotive essence. The fact that mathematicians have, with their formulae, detected that there really isn’t any time and therefore there really isn’t any space only proves that mathematicians are also emotive beings that have not successfully managed their logical escape from emotion.

The fact that there isn’t any time nor space means also that somehow all things are as one even if their perceptions do not acknowledge or allow for a divisible perception. Even if we were to kindly allow for the fact that mathematicians could be wrong, that the mathematics was giving them a wrong result one could still formulate that any universe, by its very conceptualization and realization, has felt all of its parts and therefore its wholeness is based on the symmetry of its parts, a symmetry that can only be obtained by sameness of origins and an absolute simmering of all genuine contradictions. That is to say that the universe as universe doesn’t exist without any and all of the parts that comprise it, the universe is encapsulated as universe only through the tale of aggregation told, but the story itself is unworthy of telling without the wholeness of universe.

None of the parts of the universe make sense by themselves; Atoms, Sun, Moon, Solar Systems and even galaxies are pointless without the conceptualizations of a universe. And the reverse is also true, the universe does not make sense without black holes and quasars and super novas. The relationship continues to invert the Macro and Micro worlds into an infinity of the other; for the universe is not only infinite in length and width and height and breath, it is infinite in the opposite direction into the infinitesimally small, the smallest part of the universe, the lowest possible quotient of energy as it implodes does not have a finite absolute point nor an absolute zero, no. Absolute zero is merely where observation ends, no different than the macrocosm where the furthest reaches of the universe hitherto end where observation ends.

But it would be folly to say that the universe is as wide as perception and more folly to say that the universe stops being at absolute zero, where energy is naught, no universe beyond that becomes an absurd naught. Why it would be difficult to accept for many obvious reasons, one being that perception dominates that assumption and so therefore substantiates its own limitation, no one has ever championed a universe based purely on perception though I grant you that scientists have done their damnedest to say that only what they know and therefore everything else has to prove itself worthy of empirical documentation; I offer that purely rational creatures serve up their own mortality rating. Regardless the point is that infinity runs in any general direction of the universe be it inward or outward or multidimensional and there is no end to that. And there is no end to that because there is no time nor space which is where energy resides but I say there is a ciphers energy beyond the scope of energy.

Now picture yourself in a universe without time and space, there would not be any individualism there because everything would very much be the same thing over and over again to the point of absolute boredom which is precisely why most people are against a world of sameness and why most people prefer to marry their opposites and like to think of themselves as different from everyone else. This is true as long as you don’t closely examine their values and ideals which tend to rhyme with those that they marry and that they harbor in friendship.

The idea that the universe would be boring if we were all the same is of course false, it would not be any more boring than it already is because we are already all the same. The fact that we do not acknowledge our sameness does not eliminate the fact of it. Our diversity is based on ignorance of one another; and our originality is based on our inability to realize the interconnectedness of things. You would not dream of driving a Ferrari if you could not show it off, nor would a Ferrari make any sense outside of social status, nor would the designers and mechanics of Ferraris make sense in a world all to themselves, they make sense in the greater context and the context makes it associative, that is similar if not identical, when a Ferrari is bought it certifies its lack of individual appeal and instead certifies its social appeal, the more Ferraris that are sold the lesser its uniqueness and since Ferraris are not manufactured in mass number one must measured their mass appeal, which is, as you well know, huge; and so there you have a car built more for mass appeal than for mass purchasing though its value is rightly commensurate to its mass appeal.

Individuality if taken to its logical conclusion has no value what so ever, its value its entirely based on perception, Very much like the French and the British before them 350 million Americans feel freer than the rest of the world, 350 million Americans feel independent of one another, 350 million Americans feel that they live in the best nation in the world and they believe that it is such a model of Justice, Freedom, Economics and Governance that they want the whole world to be just like that and so they admirably embark to proselytize and enforce that view throughout the rest of the world; and this they do as religious evangelists, traveling tourists, musicians, artists, entrepreneurs, business people, journalists, novelists all focused on selling the American way of life as the succinct model of perfection for the rest of the world, that is individualism and freedom en mass at work.

There is of course no individualism in mass acts. If I do something original and everyone else starts doing it too it not only ceases to be original but rather it also proves that it never was original in the first place. Common wants and needs and dreams and desires are not unique to any given civilization that has made its mark!

If there has ever been a true individual or an original idea then you and I have not known it and will never know it. This is because in order for an individual to exist esh has to be part of a tribe to thrive. That is to say that the most unique things would be the most disconnected things from everything else and therefore they would not acquire recognition and perish thusly.

The genius of Einstein does not make any sense without the entire scientific community and the world at large to acknowledge it and recreate it. We must be grateful that Einstein never intellectualize the property of Relativity; but then realistically it would not have made any sense either for when property is intellectualized and accredited to a single source you have to deny all of its heritage or more accurately its heritage goes unpaid. Relativity is a product of humanity Eistein was just the fellow that summarized it for us all to understand it.

Individualism as applied in modern life is ever more suspect as commercialization exploits what we have in common, it is because marketers can divine a common ground for their products, candidates and services that they are successful; and the more successful the more they step and step and stampede trample down the notion of individualism. We are not made to think the same but we think the same. Given the choice to be common or unique and different most people prefer to be common, it is not only easier but it also means that you are going to like most things on offering.

Individualism doesn’t exist. It is instead a divider, the idea is, it divides us from the ability to work together as one for a common purpose.

Each nation in this world, I think there are 196 of them, each nation in this world represents one fundamental individual hagiography combined into a nationalistic package, each nation represents an individual will that has contrived to substantiate itself patriotically and has successfully projected its civic mindedness according to shared cultural, economic, wellbeing and religious values; each nation is as closed to an individualist absolute as one can get, and any one person represented under that flag and living under its enforceable geography is part of the individualized national psyche it projects into the community of nations we call world. That is to say that the common belief in the American dream, free markets, democracy, Christian morality, protestant work ethic, is a shared belief agglomerated into a nation-state.

These individual-nations then divine to war against one another for world resources because they see each other as competing against one another for vital resources such as coal, gold, gas, livestock, farmland, water, labor, etc. And this is why there are now at least 7 different space exploration programs in our world today, because no one sees the shared interest humanity has at stake here, and so you could argue, and it is the argument I make that we are losing human energy through repetitive, redundant efforts such as the space program or idiotic efforts to abolish one another all due to our false sense of nationalism-individualism and our lack of awareness at the shared and codependent experience that is existence. Imagine if instead of 7 nations working to build a separate space program there was only one space program to which all nations contributed? Does it seem silly to you or possible? If it seems impossible it is your individualism talking, “It will never work.” And that’s you building mental barriers that become real from shared opinions; after all individualism is a shared experience that denies community.

The amount of human effort and energy that has been dedicated to an individualized framework of existence has detracted from the benefits and true potential of our combined humanity as one. This is not a view that has escaped the business world. Businesses, because they have been allowed unfettered development see the benefits of globalization and integration because they realize that they can do so much more and reach their fullest market potential no doubt in a globalize economy. The Enterprise has now become the champion of globalization, in other words the single most massive attack on individualism comes from the world’s top 1000 companies that all correctly grasp that there is only one, 1 market, not many markets, not many consumers, one market and one consumer.

An idealists business person wants to avoid business regulation and local laws and local think and they want to increase the flexibility of labor so that their cost structures are globally sound; they want to eliminate variances in cross border regulation and taxation so that their goods can flow freely from one end of the earth to another on an even keel; this is not so crazy, even for a bad reason it is not so crazy; sure they want to sell and profit from bigger and larger markets but their intent is actually harmonizing the world, the more you integrate economies the less individualism the less conflict that arises from tribal differentiation, and the greater the revenues no doubt; but the point is that businesses all over the world are realizing that catering to national agendas has little to show for returns on investment. Further businesses are realizing that products are not national goods but international goods; they don’t want to say it is made in America or China, businesses want to manufacture where it is most convenient, they are not nationalistic they are realists!

Monopolies are a logical by product of the internalization of business models, the largest corporations are able to assimilate labor energy with greater ease and because their focused is concentrated in a single-minded philosophy of business principles they are able to out-compete smaller operations and swallow them whole.

By internationalizing labor and its constructs businesses are replenishing the concept of a singular humanity and one world think. This of course is against the nature of politicians which need to keep the world nationalistic and divided, fortunately businesses have been in control of the show and are far wiser for it and so they are indeed running countries into globalize submission because in the end governments have to believe in economy and jobs as they have to generate taxes to maintain the infrastructure of nations and their political careers. The increasing need for flexible labor includes in it the mobility of labor, labor will have to be able to migrate at will for its own benefit and the to the benefit of the conglomerates; and as such the time must come when you will be able to live anywhere without having to ask permission from some local official, somewhere there is a movement arising for the freeing of all peoples to have the substantive right to live and work wherever they please, regardless of geography. That movement however has a preconceptual requirement: we must not think of home as our family, town, or our nation but home must be our world, Earth.

Thus business today, and we must include world religions too as they are monopolies, today these two are the biggest enemies not only to national and cultural concepts of personal identity but also to family. As businesses and faiths explode into the mega church of world they will find that they need a more politically correct labor force or worshiper base which implies a self void of its own opinions and values, a self that can be retrained at will, a flexible individual that brings about a kill of the individual force and if you kill the individual you kill the number one proper upper stage of individualism in the world today, the family. The one that keeps on telling you that “you are special and unique and different from your fellow neighbor” much to the detriment of your humanity.

No one of course is truly special, no baby is better than any other baby, yes preferences are made, and like we bet on horses when the babies fall out and get going in the rat race we all start placing our bets and backing those closest to us, those that identify with the personalized “I”; but that personalization could happen under any other nationality if we are placed there by chance or destiny.

The human condition is a generic condition, the emotional beings that inhabit this earth the whale and the dolphin and the monkey, etc, are by nature like the rest of us, that is to say that they come from the same essence being that brings about existence, there is not a lot of margin for originality in that, two degrees in any direction outside the solar system and you can stop being a whale or a human. What allows our existence is a cosmic microclimate of emotions that are very narrow minded in scope and that in turn make us myopic observers that see mostly self-interest and out of that self-interest is born the conclusion of our Individualism!

The conclusion is wrong, individuality does not exist, it is a self centered expression from a being that has lost direction in the context of existence, through time and space individualism grows because we have given it an extended value due to a felt but unreal isolation, we do not think as a group we think as individuals, to think as a group we join systems which are external from us and that divert our attention from a fundamental emotive that while dangerously powerful and chaotic, as it has no point of reference other than a moment, is indeed our only hope of ever understanding the true nature of our being; an eternal emotive core that has no disparate parts, that cannot talk or live outside of itself and when it enters time and space starts to live and talk as caused by an abysmal indifference from matter to its subject-being.

If humanity learns to think as one, without fearing the loss of identity that is both false and useless, then the energy of combined minds based on emotive essence produce a harmony of energy that could do many, today, unimaginable things, amazing things, things like levitation and telepathy are possible only when beings synchronize as one; like twins we are all the same but individualism has tripped our humanity, and has relegated us into a raw game of survival, where we see only immediate interest without working for the greater good of all.

As a source of unfeeling energy Individualism can challenge the material world but since the creatures that use it are emotive beings every move they make with it has a pyrrhic toll; for it is individualism that causes us to play games against one another, it is individualism that pits us into competition voiding us of the ability to work as one humanity in one world for a common cause. Life.

Ricardo Correa

A VOTE OF NO CONFIDENCE

It is time to put my prophetic talents to the test on the upcoming election, while it is too difficult to say who in particular might win, why even professional pundits refuse to put themselves out to venture a specific guess on one particular candidate, I am going to be bold and daring as I don’t have a reputation on the line.

First we must interpose some givens to the calculation, one it is not a two party system that we are analyzing, inherently the United States only has one party that is divided into a liberal and a conservative wing, the Democrats and the Republicans are thus part of the same idealistic structure executing predefined characteristic aspects based on a scaling left or right tendency.

As a rule of thumb we have observed that the Democrats tend to remain to the left of the political scale while the Republicans tend to be on the right wing of it. The two parties would have us believe that they offer a full spectrum to satisfy and guide our diplomatic and political needs. The assumption suffices to make it difficult for any third parties, i.e the Libertarians, greens, etc, from acquiring a significant hold within the Washington structure, though it is not necessarily impossible for another party to enter into the political arena, as was the case when the Republican party entered Washington, however it is interesting to note that the Republicans succeeded not in adding another party but in supplanting the Wigs thus proving amply that the political infrastructure of Washington at least as far back as the American Civil War, was already unable to carry the weight of three parties and so silently defaulted and organized itself under the dichotomy of the Democrats and Republicans.

That assumption will seem ludicrous to most people ask a conservative “What do they have in common with a Liberal?” and the reply will come back to instant animosity, they will find it difficult to explain similarities, they will find it necessary to make the Democrats communist and foreign sympathizers, and launch them off the patriotic branch as traitors. The reply will not be any different from a Liberal; the conservatives will always be uptight, xenophobic, money grabbers of uncaring magnitudes. However both parties are undoubtedly linked as one.

We have observed the Clintonesque revolution which was actually when the party of the left went way towards the center if not outright trespassed into Right wing mythology, rule from the center, the left can be business and labor union friendly ambidextrously, it could be equally against excess regulation and Monopoly friendly towards first rate job producers and first rate exporters such as Microsoft.

The revolution did not just happen in such context at a national level, it was visible from the island across the pacific where Tony Blair was able to denude the Tory’s of all pride by displaying a natural friendliness towards conservative economic values while running a savory economy as managed by his star Mr. Brown. It would be difficult to discern valuable differences between the Tories and Labor when the Tony/Brown team was executing, to the point that one could dare egregiously state that from the side lines some Tories not so far from center approved of the Tony and Brown show.

Finally nothing could demonstrate better how far the British Prime Minister had gone over the conservative wall than his support and active lobbying for President Bush’s Iraq war project II. Tony’s indefatigable sale of the war reached comic proportions, against the British peoples and even against the strong on defense Tory’s, some which became doves when faced with a hawkish Labor Prime Minister.

Of course Tony Blair was not setting a precedent when he opted to use conservative values to blur party lines and thus confuse everyone into inaction while Tory and Labor alike fuddle around figuring which PM eject-system’s cogs and pullies to yank. It was Disraeli, perhaps the brightest man to ever rule Britain, while less charming than Sir Winston he, Disraeli was able to judo master his opposition into disrepair with their own arguments. And while I am not going to prove it here, it may well be that Disraeli was the most callous and cunning liberal that ever existed, regardless he did an spectacular job as a Tory Leader, something which still baffles my mind to no end; except for the obvious, once the Tory’s figured that they had a liberal usurper within the clan and they realized that he could win elections, they figured it was better to be the party in power under the leadership of a impostor than to be ruled by the opposing party in any guise.

The point is that while the concept of Liberal and Conservative values have been segmented into stark contrast to the benefit of a chained bicameral party structure that does not mean that they don’t share each others values nor that those values are not to the benefit of their constituency and what is most relevant, what fuels the parties are the voters and they come from the same pool, regardless of class, ethnicity and generation the voters are one amorphous mass, they must all be lured to vote so that the differences and tendencies of the national psyche may be discerned.

Which means that it is the voters that will decide the 2008 election for the United States of America will ultimately decide where the country’s psyche is as regards to the threat environment, economic prospects, social and moral, etc… consciousness. But that leads directly to the prospect choices and how they will stand out from the pack, even in a state of representative government the voters will decide all outcomes.

While all of that explanation may seem out of context it squarely sets responsibility upon each individual voter to state their position and to allow them to participate in the intricate meshing of all varying political positions to be silently recombined into a single possible candidate option that will satisfy the national psyche. Yes, it is a lot of responsibility placed on one by the many, and yes it probably is primitive that we still believe in the concept of one decision maker leading the pack and they having ultimate power over all, and we are thus to patriotically and blindly follow after executing only one vote of trust.

But there is one thing we must take into consideration despite of what the pundits will have you believe the truth is that we do not formulate our opinions overnight, or even in a matter of two year long campaigns, each individual voter is influenced by an infinite set of factors, some radical some not so radical and oddly some not so of this world, so while campaigns can be rather interesting and adrenalin filled they are only there not so much to acquire a following but rather to spit out the candidate that will best spit out the desires and wants of the mass psyches. In a sense it is a campaign for the hearts and minds but in reality the minds and hearts are already predefined by the given number of circumstances and happenings that have already molded the posterity of the national psyche. In that context each candidate is not so much formulating a platform but rather catering to the platform that the mass national psyche has rendered over decades of experiences.

When we look at elections we must also take into consideration the epoch effect, this is not something that can be taken lightly even as it takes centuries to accumulate its effects, it is glacial dynamic and so change is hardly perceptible but eventually there is enough pressure in any given direction to cause your occasional significant tectonic plate shift, in this case we are of course referring to the politics and the accidents that accompany such into a demolition of old into new or old-new political operational models.

Charting the tumultuous of these events is not a simple thing to do and we are not going to do it here, we are instead going to prophesy as that allows us to be wrong in every way and still carry forward a reputation. First the guiding post of the prophesy, we are going to say that “there is currently a movement silently cresting that will cause havoc throughout the consumer based economies and ripple outwards into all other economies in so far and so impact full as they are economically internationally connected. Yes those with the least to lose will be those that have not made it into the international economic stage or/and those, ironically, that have been sanctioned, and thus kept forcefully out of the economic grid.”

That is the first aspect of the prediction we are also going to say that the time frame for it to eventuate is imminent, meaning that many of those that read this will witness the prophesy here within.

Now on to the election of 2008, which may or may not be truly a desirable post to be in. It is herewith believed that the election will be interesting from a historical point of view as it will not be the usual overseen of the superpower and policing enforcement of all of its policies world wide, instead it will be more that management of a severe downturn of affairs; this we mean that even if the hemorrhaging of economy doesn’t overtly manifest itself there will still be a substantial undertow that will drain and devastate entire sectors of the economy bringing necessary protectionisms to an overbearing dimension that will cause more harm than good and cause fanatical oscillations throughout the land with nationalistic and international consequences.

No one wants to be a prophet of doom not only because there have been so many failed prophets of doom but also because no one likes the bad news and so will disdain the prophet for it; but there are times when the burgeoning dimensions touch the prophet in such a way that they mandate telling even if it is merely heart burn. And so we proceed, “The election will be won that best represents the times pending.”

We have a precedent of a woman in Argentina winning the election so we can say with some certainty that there could be a trend towards female rulers developing, thus while everyone will be impressed with an American female president it certainly will not be the first female president of the Americans much less so of the world; we could thus rebuff the claim accordingly.

Currently there is also a trend in the Americas to lean to the left, though the Left is not sure what to make of that because it is still recovering from winning at politics with business, defense, religion friendly politics and by sidestepping traditional social and union concerns. Still we have seen how Nicaragua, Bolivia, Venezuela, Brazil have elected leaders to the left of the democrats, so there is some form of developing pattern there but we are going to ignore it, instead we are going to use the most difficult gauging parameter possible, the glacial change meter.

“The time has cometh for glacial change drama; people and times will bring about a cataclysm through the urgings of innerving energetic movements in the world political psyche, we are further going to brand ourselves heretics by saying that politics is an accident and not a natural institution, in philosophical terms an accident is something you can do without because it is not part of your pure essence, your eyes are blue, your blood is red, your pretty, but those are accidents of your being, you are none of those things, above those things is your soul, your soul is what energizes your existence, your body, even your body is an accident of your soul, something that happens because your soul enters the world, and here we are saying that when you enter the world your communication with others breaks down, chatters, and the fragments try to realign and communicate again, they start talking and signing contracts and politics arises such is the reproach to one’s and another’s soul. Politics is an institution but it is not natural, entire societies, civilizations, cultures and peoples can live without politics.”

Everyone is of course expecting the democratic party to win the election, Bush is such a stark contrast and so maligned by his handling of the war and his fervent isolationists policies that one does not have to go far to assume that he has lost the election for the Republicans. But that would be too simplistic of analysis, there is ample evidence that the Republicans could win the election again, after all there is a lot of pent up Anger in the American psyche, the American people feel cheated, they think the United Nations and the World bank are using America while employing and helping American batchers. They feel that the European union forgot how it got its start and is now becoming a competitor, so much so that American politicians go out of their way to fragment the EU alliance by catering to British dissent. And then there are those Muslims, no matter how often Americans sacrifice their lives to give them the right to vote and allow their women to drive and to cover their faces with Revlon instead of cloth, they are rebuffed, and then a jihad is declared against them with such furor that one cannot understand how their number one customer for oil can be so ill treated. But even with the plausibility of these arguments the reality is that Bush got reelected even as he had failed not because anyone thought he could fix the mess he got the nation into but rather because he continued to truly express America’s discombobulated anger over foreign disdain for American values and form of governance thus a conservative court overruled democracy, in an election, when it counted.

I put this in a separate paragraph intentionally, the supreme court did not elect a president that wasn’t desired by the national psyche, had there been a coin toss the results would have been the same, the race was close because the nation was jittery and confused, but it leaned on the side of the irrational, “react, react, lets not be reasonable, we are tired of being reasonable.” Gore would have been reasonable because he is afraid of emotion which is why he intellectualizes presuming that what you can know cannot bite you in the ass; Gore was too reasonable, he would have left volumes of national pent up angst unrepresented, given the choice the nation decided to vent via the junk yard dog that could not tell friend from foe.

The question is: “Is the nation willing to endure one more republican?” The answer is as simplistic as it needs be, “No.”

Regardless of how emotional Americans can be at heart they are more pragmatic and reasonable, they are afraid of runaway power, they want power to be controlled because they are afraid of how power corrupts and may then wrecks havoc upon the mass, for the most part the two party system has been the biggest check and balance against power mongers, and it is highly doubtful that Americans feel that they can allow the war prone party to rule for another four, the political propensity should lean away from the Republicans because of chance or due to the natural pendulum of political movements, or most likely because it just does not make sense anymore; the rampage period has come to a close.

We can eliminate Bush, and we can eliminate Rudy from the equation, I like Rudy, he seems to be a charming enough fellow, he could carry on the Bush legacy, his human factor is high for he has ample flaws and, marketing wise, is willing to admit to it, but he has that little bit of: “I love myself more than I love you.” And I think we will all have a problem with that.

Thompson, his tired, he doesn’t have a plan for the rest of his life so he decided to run fro president as if it was on the list of: “What do I do next?” Aside from that there is nothing original about that and presidents do not win elections because their wife’s are more competent.

I think we are all aware that the truth talking candidate has a truth talking candidacy but nothing else and in the real world it does not matter if you were proved your patriot soul by being in a Vietnamese jail because you went there to kill them, there has to be more than that, such as policy other than defense, there has to be an international and an economic policy, besides patriotism is becoming a liability and not an asset in an advancing world economy and freer labor flows. Sorry Senator McCain but unlike you we are all not still fighting from the perspective of Vietnam, this in no way ought lessen your suffering or sacrifice, we are just dealing with European, Russian, Asian economic markets that have nothing to do with weather we like our own country.

We could go down the endless row of republican candidates and you can argue that it is pointless; no one is going to win because the republicans are going to lose. We can then examine Obama the charming fellow coming almost out of nowhere to capture serious attention but equally proving that a charmed front can be subdued through substance. Yes there is something not there about his approach, he didn’t read enough, he forgot that charming can be deadly if ennobled with a real agenda, instead he allowed Hilary to prove that whatever she lacks in charmed she makes up by being prepared and able. This could be an argument for competence, the American people have had enough incompetence from their President, they are ready for someone who is going to mend fences and build relationships with the international community while keeping a strong sense of defense, there is something mighty and righteous about Hilary Clinton, she doesn’t seem to be a push over, and she certainly has had to battle, sometimes with her hands tied behind her back as when she was first lady, and others with the full arsenal of the senate in hand and no one can say that winning a New York senate seat is easy, she did it. Of course some will say she is riding on the coat tails of her husbands supreme political capital as he is a master at the craft of diplomacy, frankly I still don’t know if there is such a thing as Clinton doctrine but if there is it is probably I am happy with the way things are but sometimes bad things make me cry, I feel a lot.

Yes I think Clinton was sort of the Left’s response to Regan’s immense popularity with the electoral, but Regan had a very codified platform both in Economics and International policy, his expenditure on defense in a relative peaceful time for superpower politics should have seemed senseless, and it probably was, but he orchestrated well and then took the credit for the fall of the soviet union in a single sweep public relations coup that could have had little basis in reality. After all we now know that he was miss informed about Soviet Potential and capability. Where he did cause great impact was in not interfering with the disintegration, it must have been tempting, his national security advisors and secretary of state must have been tempted to proactively scavenge for the leftovers of the Soviet Empire, Regan didn’t go there, he dint cause any unnecessary friction, he let the twilight of the cold war go unsung, perhaps his greatest achievement. However Clintonesque politics did not call for change or high minded agendas, they called for equilibrium between the left and the right, he blared the last trumpet for discourse between the right and the left, and more remarkably he was able to do so even as the Republicans unleashed an all out attack, but Clinton held the middle ground in his politics and when he left the middle ground caved in and Right and Left when at each other in every platform and arena possible, the slug fest continues.

The colossal nature of the battle between the two camps is interesting because they are indeed part of the same concatenating political machine, but it helps us to conclude that the barometric pressure is set to blow, it is possible to imagine that the two party system is at an end, that it has run out of ideas or that the post cold war order calls for something else, that we are indeed facing a pending change in how politics are done at home and abroad, and we can question if it is feasible to have an Executive Branch, so much power concentrated on the whims of one elected official seems anti democratic and dangerous indeed, perhaps the day of the republics are coming to an end, its possible. If that is the case we may use that criteria to further narrow down if our next candidate will be an Elephant or a Mule.

Reality time, if a liberal wins the election, which is most likely, it implies that there are is still potential energy in the context of the capitalistic and democratic system as we know it today, that is to say that Democrats are more likely to take risk and spend callously and to take care of people, as they are naturally insecure and think that caring for others will some how imply that those others or the system will eventually care for them, thus they make the argument of socialize health care, nutrition programs and hand holding till old age. Any election that elects a democrat not only means that there is still potential in the current existing system but further that there is still hope, hope of changing and modifying the system enough so that it can keep going on from here to eternity.

There are plenty of people that think that the constitution does not need to be modified that it is some kind of perfect conceptualization of the ideal politic and can therefore remain unchanged and unchallenged for eternity. This might be a bit naïve considering that so many emperors and kings thought that there could be no alternative to monarchy and even the people that they subjugated respected such ideal, at some point though the concept of monarchy failed to fit into the national political psyche and it was thus abandoned.

It is most likely, based on the historic record, that our ideals of government, constitutions and even justice will be outmoded by new ideas and manners which we have not predicted, and so here we have a firm hard rule judgment to make, has the time come for a change of mind sets, have we reached a point the history of histories where we can no longer operate on the set of standards set forth more or less around the French revolution and the Greek foundation of rock voting democratically?

How then are we to tell that the time has come for such dramatic change?

If the time has come for change then it follows that the conservative forces will have to dominate the political arena, and I think that there is plenty of evidence that everything is shifting to the right, again it would be difficult to think of Clinton or Blair as left wingers, it would be impossible to say that they were not pro business, further they were willing to sacrifice ideals so as to reach compromises and master the art of statistically popular governance.

There is then enough evidence before us to say that if the Left has begun to lost its idealism for socialistic principles, if the unions and regulation have lost support within the Democratic party, if Hilary Clinton is willing to rethink her health package so that it is healthier on hospitals, pharmaceuticals, the American Medical Association and Insurance, then we can say that the discerning eye would have a difficult time discerning Right from Left.

It is not, and this is what we are saying, it is not a compromise, the country has shifted left, even its liberals are shifting gears for the Right, so that you can say that there will not be a valid sense for good old liberal values, what Hilary Clinton and Obama will be doing is looking to the center or the right for guidance, and their electorate will feel more comfortable if they do that, after all it is not like unions can sit there and argue that jobs can be created in the American car market when the cost of labor and production overseas can clip the value of American labor in half.

Which implies that we could argue that if the Left wins the election it is still somewhat as if the Right have won it, that they Left have successfully stolen the platform from the left, that in fact they have made themselves giraffes that can eat on either side of the fence, the implication is that if the nation is getting conservative as a whole then the stamina and potential of its institutions is used up. However ff Hilary Clinton gets elected it will not imply that liberal values have won because she has mastered the art of staying as close to the center of opinions and values so that everyone may can of say, “Well she might not be that bad.” As oppose to Obama that only has one position on the war in Iraq and so would have no option but to be against the war and could not back down from it, Hilary can turn towards the necessity of the occasion as warranted.

The problem is not one inherent to the candidates but rather one inherent within the confines of the system the political parties have not only matured but are in their twilight, we know this because they have perfected their arguments to the point of paralysis, they are out of new ideas nothing that a Republican or a Democrat tells you is going to surprise you. Some people will argue that there is still a lot of steam in their engines but these are the same people that would look at a combustion engine and think that because it only outputs about 40 percent of its energy towards locomotion that we can get to 90 percent efficiency, that is of course a fallacy, the basic principles and architecture that define the combustion engine capitalize all of its true potential at about forty percent, to gain efficiencies in output you have to change the concept an turn it into a hybrid, or base an engine on entirely new technologies and principles, which means that the best researches on engine power aren’t dedicating their energies to combustion, the system has been perfected, regardless of how many flaws are left.

In the same way we can see that anyone could say that there is still a lot of room for improvement within the framework of a bicameral democratic system, and equally and more accurately say that as things are you are not going to get anymore out of the two parties that drive this political machine, the time is ripe for a change, the question is will that change come now or later, and if later how much later. Again the stagnant nature of ideas of both parties indicate an imminent change, no one has found the third way or if the current system will just morph into a hybrid of some sort. But regardless we must take that into consideration as to who is going to get elected.

If the system still has potential in it then it should be a democrat, if it has close to zero potential it should a conservative or a overall conservative democrat, thus our choices are not easy; besides that there is another factor, Hilary is a woman and Obama is a black man, people like to make history or more accurately to participate in historic events, either way it would be history in America, since we still make distinctions based on national borders, we can discount Margaret Thatcher, Angela Merkel, Germany, Argentina President Cristina Fernandez, and Liberia’s Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf, so women in America and some men will cast their vote based on gender to break the glass ceiling, others, blacks, minorities and liberal whites might side with Obama as they would cast a vote to put the first black president in office, in the end these type of voters will have to draw their choice from the leading member candidate up to the election but doubt not that it will be a perceived value aggregator to the one of the two that makes it to the finals.

The thing is that there are no accidents as to who gets elected, the national psyche will make corrections till the very last minute like an owl homing in on its prey never letting the beak break center from the quarry jetting right or left, ascending or descending .000003 second adjustments accordingly, however prophets make predictions and move on and are therefore prone to philosophical accidents, i.e. things that are not natural to their predictions happens.

We can then predict that, since it is not a two party system but rather a two stroke engine, the people will raise to power the appropriate politician for their times and hungers. If the parties had a possibility at all, of losing to a third party the engine would be more diverse, complicated and dynamic, but party creation is not an instantaneous process, and well structured systems have rightly, or wrongly, a focused vision. Two eyes are always better than one, but not two right eyes nor two left eyes.

As a final note I will unveil my vote of no vote for either party. I will not participate in the national spectacle that has become the political arena because my consciousness is not reflected in it. The belief that we have to vote for at least the lesser of two evils is not for me a realistic approach to making a serious difference in world affairs. The fact is that when peoples are in harmony they are the least political, it is not to the advantage of political parties to see solutions beyond the political realm, thus it is objectionable that they will have us think that we are by some endemic nature political beasts. By denying the energies of my vote to the political process I am limiting the scope of their mandate and perhaps adding weight to the unveiling of other possibilities.

Ricardo Correa

As my cats love me I love me

First things first, consciousness, the meaning of consciousness is a matter of supreme importance but we can nailed it shut in a most succinct description of say the child developing such. Yes, consciousness is that simple, it is merely an awareness of self, the child recognizing its face for the first time, and the child realizing peer pressure and the realization of such as a consciousness based process. Indeed.

Consciousness as awareness of self makes perfect sense, but what does not make perfect sense is when consciousness is not taken to the next step and that is awareness of others, and through awareness of others a realization of sameness.

Consciousness is for the here and now, it is a real-time operant, it is therefore not something profound though it can have profound implications, the universe, life and everything is based on something that is wholly subconsciousness based and has absolutely no foundations in the immediate present, the recognition of the present is an afterthought, the afterthought when identified, we can call such process consciousness. I am me and I exist. That is consciousness.

Now knowing that you are you, is an amazing discovery because it occurs in the here and now, after you have gone through the mired meshed of birth process, and come out into material existence knowing not an ink of what you were before or where you come from or why you are here. The environment slams into you, the reality doesn’t give you time to think and ponder anything, everything starts unfolding and you just have to deal with it as best as you can with your reactive and intuitive species based actions.

Once you enter the here and now and realize yourself it is because you have come to a comprehension of your relationship to your environment, a mountain climber has a very conscious full-idea of himself in relationship to the mountain. I know who I am in relationship to philosophy, the world definition of self-to-world is a mandatory prescription for self-awareness, to get there you just have to hope that you have enough species-level-subconsciousness to survive before some hunter, epidemic or catastrophe kills you.

When you start to look at yourself with time to ponder you begin to realize the possibility of plastic surgery, that is to say that you can change yourself, that realization is paramount to come to the next more important conclusion, you can change yourself and adapt to meet the constrains of world parameters then it follows that not only can you adapt but that you can also change the environment, change world!

That is a paramount realization because the world is not necessarily made of you or for that matter made of those others that are like you, it is something else, to transform the earth to dig for emeralds, to refine cooper to roast coffee there has to be a consciousness transformation from self to world! Once you can create a bridge between yourself and world that has regular back and forth interaction then you get to another amazing thing, you reach another like you through the medium of world. That other can be another culture, another civilization, another tribe, another person, a nomad, but it is another like you. The discovery of the Americas was a phenomenal demonstration of two worlds coming together through the bridges created by the consciousness of world; today Indians own casinos, go to Harvard and play in the Olympics, the bridge has not only been crossed but it has been narrowed to the point of nullification. The other is not only like you but has the ability to be just like you.

The catalyst to climb into the unknown is to reach others like us, it is to find more like us that have crossed from the other side, from before life, we want to meet them in the here and because we knew them back then, before consciousness in the subconsciousness which propagates these us alls.

Consciousness then is aptly named from the roots of a subconsciousness, a silent awareness, we have always known and been aware of ourselves as coming from one giantess source that comprises us all in some magnificent singularity, from which only a bright whiteness could be seen till the great separation created the multitude of colors which we now consider individuals.

Those that hate gays, once exposed to them as a brother or a sister or a mother come to realize that they are not that different from the rest of us tolerable, and given enough time on this earth anyone might equally realized that the difference between the neocon and the militant left winger ideology are none, and given enough time the two could merge into one; as it is today they are still building the bridge towards each other with a dialectic construction crew that is busy demolishing everything that stands in between them.

Ricardo Rojo

The Chicken and the Egg Problem

The problem is fairly straightforward, people think that chickens come from eggs and eggs come from chickens and some people think that god created chickens and then chickens started to recreate themselves by laying eggs. The problem is that everyone needs a Prime Mover, a force that caused the initiated event, if there is a god the problem of what came first is solved; God doesn’t make Eggs, he created a Rooster and a Hen first and then commanded them to reproduce, their chances of survival were enhanced by the fact that they started out in paradise, and thus today you can have all the Fried Chicken you want.

God is, and has been for some time the prime mover of many things, this is because when there is no answer to something then God becomes the default answer:

“Who created everything?”

“God did.”

“Who created the Earth?”

“Why God of course?”

“Who made the Universe so perfect looking?”

“God did.”

Sadly the problem is that omnipotent entities suffer from the very impossibility of the chicken and egg problem, saying that God created chickens leaves us only one notch behind the problem and resolves nothing:

“Who created God?”

Because in the end the chicken and egg problem is merely one of first principles, god came first solves the problem part way, god was before the chicken and before the egg, god doesn’t eat dairy, he didn’t need eggs or fried chicken so why did god create chickens and eggs? Because he wanted to make humans and humans needed something to eat.

“Why did god not just make humans without a need to eat?”

“Why was it impossible to make a self-sustainable trouble free human?”

Because there is only one God and obviously gods are the most impossible thing to create in the universe, one God is a lot of god, one is enough, universes by themselves can only tolerate one God! Yes, yes the Hindus and Buddhist have a lot of gods, 700 or 10 thousand, but those are not gods, they are deities they have flaws, they don’t have supreme power, they can lose and gain their powers, and they spend a good deal of their eternities quarrelling and having affairs among themselves, not perfect!

Conclusion, there is only one god.

Problem “Who created god?” If we can answer the question of who created god we have solved the chicken and egg riddle.

Answer, no one created God because God, as an omnipotent all imperishable, none corrosive, self sustaining is a resource impossibility! God would and does require infinite energy just to be everywhere, and know everything and more complicated to create everything, therefore god’s will and actions or just even his thoughts would use up all of the universe’s energy faster than he could say “I exist!”And thus a god thing would cause the universe to implode upon itself two seconds after its inception, which is about how long it would take god to start contriving everything in existence and caput the entire universe’s energy count.

Conclusion, Gods are not an effective energy construct which is why universes avoid being contaminated with the god thing.

Which leads us to another perplexing conclusion that might solve another riddle, “Does god exist?”

Answer, “He doesn’t say because doing so would extinguish the universe and/or cause the universe to extinguish him and we don’t know which one would happen first.

Conclusion, if there is no god because god is such an absolute energy construct that it is equally auto-self-destructive because the concept consumes resources faster than they can be created then, and get this, then god did not have time to create chickens!

Impressionably for us little people, we have now solved a part of the problem, we know for sure and beyond all doubt that god did not create chickens because god doesn’t exist; which means that we know that we have the wrong answer and can move further forward or backwards to find the correct answer.

Evolution didn’t create chickens either.

Now we are not going to say that there isn’t any evolution because that would be wrong, anyone who has survived a fifty year marriage knows that there is no evolution that something can remain stagnant for at least a half a century and repeat itself indefinitely, but that doesn’t mean that things that live longer than fifty years don’t evolve, they do and can and things that cross life times in the form of species indeed do in fact evolve, and we have sufficient proof from the archeological record to conclude that species adapts, and species survives because it evolves. However that doesn’t tell you who or what created species.

Some say, that we come from a chemical whorehouse, where all of these chemicals got together and made a kind of not so delicious acidic soup and after rubbing back and forth a swirling concoction sprouted a cellular organism of some sort or at least the basic proteins were conjured to lead to organized organisms, hence the structural nomenclature. This is of course entirely possible, that a mixed up noodle sort of chicken soup created organized cell structures and there started to mate proteins from primordial acids and the whole thing is plausible but we still get stuck in the crux of our problem: “Who or what thing created the organic structures that would create the primordial soup?”

Well we are not going to go all the way back to the presumed beginning of time the big bang; because you know that the assumption of a big bang initiated universe implies and fantastically presupposes that there was a lot of pressure to create an inevitable universe and that assumption of such beautifully sculpted physical forces, as conjured by modern day physicists, imply something existing before the universe seems preposterous enough not to need much considering but still, if we think about our riddle far enough back we do get to the big bang maximum sperm count, and who or what forces created universe leads us to interrogate ourselves supremely yet again: “What came before the forces that created universe?”

We are not string theorists, nor have we the grandest of minds to be such, we are merely and purely emotional creatures, most of us, that simply defy meaning and so we are left in the quandary of first principles yet again. However I think it possible to deduct deductively towards some rational construct of those first principles: The chicken came first. It had to in order to lay the egg. The sin in the bible was sex and we know eggs lay chickens from consummated relationships, there is no way that the egg could have come first, none!

The very premise of laying an egg is a chicken type characteristic and not the reverse an egg type characteristic, you don’t assume that the egg is capable of laying a chicken and this one of those cases where the name is symbolic, you know that when the chicken lays the egg it lays it with everything there to make the chic after it has laid with everything there to make a chic, and you know that every single chicken that is born is born from an egg, except of course the very first chicken.

It has to be then that the egg came second, and that the chicken came first, and so the question is finally laid to rest here, in a world, in a universe where there are logical progressions, it is logically possible to stump one’s self with paradoxical quandaries because one is making huge assumptions and one huge one in particular, that there was a first moment, and there lays our self induced rooster of a problem, there is no time, the universe isn’t sequential, it isn’t even parallel, it is all there instantly, chickens start laying eggs as soon as they are conceived… …conceived by the universe!

I propose then to conclude here that there are no ends, that there are no beginnings that there is no time as has been well concluded by the quantum types, there was no time before quantum, there was no time before relativity, there was no such thing ever as a universe without chickens that laid eggs, there is of course no measure for the magnitude of such universe nor a speed limit for the things in it, the infinity stretches forever, in such infinity not only can all things be in their superposition, there can be a superimposed god and if someone wants to fence things in and lock them down and corner them, they can be allowed and can even follow a sequence, particularly if there is a localize need to be logical about it.

Ricardo

PERSONAL JUDGEMENT REACHES INTO US

It is a rainy day outside, I am without transport of the private kind so instead I am waiting at the bus stop with my raincoat doing wonderfully to keep the wet and cold outside, I am most happy, I like rainy days, the bus will more or less arrive on time, it doesn’t matter, I don’t expect it to be on time, I am in a pleasant contemplative state, levitation being one of the topics my head is musing, when I hear a screeching hard breaking sound, the slippery wet, the unclenching rubber, the imposing red light, a card skidding sideways, and in seconds, a collision is avoided by oncoming traffic, while the car that crossed in red captures its composure, the driver, perhaps startled, after clearing the intersection, parks at the edge. Surprisingly seconds withheld a police car was just around the corner and quickly lights a Christmas tree of lights. I feel the wave of subsided panics that must have gone through the unlucky driver’s gut, levitation harshly forgone.

As I watch the emergency lights chatter the air, I ponder what I would do were I that police officer? From the breaking you could tell that the driver hadn’t meant to cross the red light illegally but had instead found a surprising red light; intent in trespassing the law was obviously none. The car was not a new model car, while I could not place the year it was obvious that the driver was of limited financial means, a ticket was the last thing this person needed. No one was hurt, sure the oncoming traffic had been obstructed but they had adequately, taken evasive maneuvers and continued on appropriately, it all transpired so quickly and smoothly, for such an event, that no one even bothered to use their horns. Concluding that, an unfortunately absent-minded driver had made a mistake, I as the police officer, would not have given the subject a traffic ticket, I would have said, “just be more careful next time.” The officer in charge of this event didn’t feel the same way, a ticket was issued at the scene.

But that act would be a violation of the police officer’s code ethic, “to enforce the law without personal judgment.” In our society rules are not suppose to be broken thus even if they are broken without intent, they then have to be punished. This is considered “reasonable” and it is based on the assumption that punishment is a deterrent and serves to maintain alertness within the common civic mindedness. The assumption being fewer people will run red lights as long as we enforce the law regardless of the particular circumstances.

That is to say, we will not look at the individual nor offer a personalize judgment of an event, in that manner we may remain objective and serve our community’s civic mindedness well.

After a while I started to wonder if the police officer went home and felt bad about giving this particular driver a ticket, but then I figured than an experienced officer could depersonalize the situation and distance himself enough from it so that the good sleep would not be interrupted. But then it occurred to me, “what if it was his wife running that red light, what if by coincidence the person running that light were indeed his wife or even his brother, or even his best buddy,” then I kind of thought that perhaps the officer would become more humane and personalize his judgment of the event, and let them each go without a fine. Sure I think there is any number of police officers that would still have given their best friend a ticket while saying something like, “I am doing this for your own good, I want you alive and safe…” But I think the majority, observing the very uniqueness of the situation: no one was hurt, traffic automatically restored itself to normal flow, the person had not intended to run the light, then the officer would have told his buddy or his wife: “hey, your lucky it was me that caught you, be more careful or next time you might not be so lucky.” And let it go at that.

But then I think the officer might get pissed-off too if, for instance, it were his wife or his buddy with children in the car. The officer might then feel possible personal pain nearer as caused by the loss of a loved one, and thus personalizing hurt issue a ticket in anger that someone carrying children could be so careless.

Regardless the point is that the depersonalization of this event, by justice logic, causes indifference between the officer on duty and the absentminded driver. Neither is allowed to connect with the other, the officer begins to judge the situation more accurately when it is a loved one, but is more sterile in his judgment when it is an unknown person. And the intercourse of the encounter between officer and absent minded driver is one intended not to emotionally touch either one of them, it is almost as if they had put plastic gloves on their minds, for the driver is probably thinking the following: “What was I thinking…” … “How stupid of me…” … “I am lucky to be alive, the officer is just doing his job, I should have been paying attention…” Contextually the absentminded driver will merely justify the legal actions and expect a well-deserved fine, the incident was/is against the law, and for good reason it should have never taken place. The fine will hurt but it could all have been worse.

What both characters in this play fail to do is to connect to one another and they fail to do that because the secular character of their society does not allow it, that is to say that the police officer and the driver agree that the normalization of their relationship has to remain secular and depersonalized so that the system can work, that individual circumstances must be ignored which is why the situation should be judge on its most basic principles, the light was red, you are suppose to stop at a red light, the driver didn’t, there is a fine, that is the law.

This is hard knowledge, this is a fact of life, traffic laws are not very forgiving, thousands of people lose their lives and are maimed in traffic accidents per day, per year, it is a harsh reality that has to be kept to a minimum as transport for us all is not an option but a necessity of the distances between work, home and the shopping center, the three pillars of our existence.

The rain decides to increase, my very nice and lovable olive Sanyo raincoat is beginning to personalize the existing rain, it isn’t keeping out the cold as well, the bus hasn’t arrived, I fancy it will soon, but then I fancy something else more, I fancy that all those empty seats that are passing by, SUVs that can sit 8 people pass me by, endless cars with 3 empty seats pass me by, all that tonnage and energy, with heating inside, not far from me is an untenable option for a ride, even as some of them if not many of them are going near to where I am heading, and could easily offer a lift but don’t and wont.

The reason they don’t offer me a lift its because they too have depersonalized me, if I was their wife, or their buddy I would have been picked up long ago, but I am someone that they don’t know, they would rather not be bothered with helping me out of the rain, besides that there are so many bad people out there that I could be one of them, better not to take a chance, even as most people tend to be honest, and most people are not criminals, and most people waiting for a bus are probably the least likely to be aggressive types, it requires patience and a certain degree of docility to take public transport, still it is too dangerous to pick up a stranger, the probability of picking up a weirdo or a serial killer might be .000000001 percent specially as most aggressors are driving BMWs and SUVs; but the nightly news from all over the world floods us with threats from everywhere, we are logically or should I say reasonably scared, and as such distrustful of strangers, so I fancy no one is going to want to chat with me, at least part of their lonely way to somewhere.

Still I harbor this strange belief that maybe that driver that run the red light might not have run it had she or he given me a ride, as their passenger I might a said, “hey watch out there is a red light.” And then I think if all those empty seats, passing me by, were filled with people going in the same direction pooling riders together, there would be fewer accidents and fewer cars on the road, but that would require so much personalization of our world, and besides that, my bus has arrived.

Ricardo ©

POLITICAL AND ECONOMIC THINK CHANGE

Now the democrats are high on the hog with their enchanting victories, not only did they do well by winning congress but also the senate, control of both houses was unexpected, the American public however felt it necessary to create a balance that has apparently been voided by a strong White House. Thus the overcorrection but what has taken place is fascinating only in so far as boring can be fascinating.

Generally speaking the idea of checks and balances was that an independent supreme court, a strong legislature and executive, would benefit from power struggles between all three and keep them honest till the end of days. It hasn’t, it didn’t work, it is one of the aspects of our time honored constitution that ought to be revised however it isn’t going to happen until death do as apart. This is because when you fall in love with your constitution it equally becomes an unchanging premise. Thus congress, the executive and judicial will have to corner themselves indefinitely, they being the bulk of the constitution, which might explain why they don’t want to change it.

Consider our current situation, the voters have made leaders of the democrats but the democrats have amply shown that they don’t have the genius or the guts to stop the president. Still the voters figured that someone needed to send a message to the Whitehouse that its “anything goes one way forever” war strategy wasn’t working, being that the president does not have any self correcting abilities, this was necessary, it wasn’t an option, the voters didn’t have a choice, they had to mandate change not through process but by ousting the republicans from the podium. It shouldn’t be that way, the process of checks and balances ought to work, it very well didn’t.

Why it didn’t work is actually as pretty as how pretty it would have been if it had. The reason the process didn’t work its because America has been in decline since the collapse of the Soviet Union, ever since then America has been going through some severe psychological changes at every level, cultural, political, religious, and specially in the case of labor, labor has been going through a massive surge in productivity unequaled everywhere in the world.

Part of the reason for the change is obvious, the Soviet Union was a strategic enemy to have, it was “the perfect” enemy to divvy up the world with, it knew where its turf was and it did not frequent into American claimed territory, which is why the wars fought between the USSR and the USA were mere skirmishes fought through proxy, no one with any real sense of history will consider American losses in Vietnam or Korea significant in the context of two global and critically nuclear empires budding heads. However the collapse of the USSR created a huge hole where their interdependencies mattered. Defense, strategic and global hegemony, economic superiority, and good guy bad guy schematics.

America could no longer, for instance, be the only good guy, in a world where there was no Soviet Union American superiority moral or economic or even militarily could be challenged. As is the case with China and the European Union today challenging America for economic might and military autonomy. NATO has died and it is only true on paper, the EU is a mighty economic power, and the Euro is accreting EU integrity through a fresh supra-national sense of citizenship, the EU is showing that countries and borders do not pose a burden towards integration; counter that with America that is instead securing and fencing its territories from any country South of its borders. America the country that integrated autonomous states to form a successful union does not lead in creating united citizenship nationals or even in global monetary unification.

Through its actions in the Middle East where its interest cannot be seriously disguised America has vanquished moral superiority, the overthrowing of what was mostly an incompetent dictator and even a, like us secularists, instead we have placed the Middle East in grater turmoil and allows Syria and Iran to act with a certain degree of moral immunity, everyone is doing it, pushing their ways, stratifying their extremism, if the Americans can wield their sword at anyone, anywhere it creates a world of nomads, or at least gives a green light in that direction.

As is the case with Nuclear proliferation where America seems to favors India’s nuclear program but not North Korea’s or Iran’s, where you can assert who can make nuclear bombs and who can’t, you cannot!

Defense is another matter, no one likes an aggressor, America always seemed the one that would attack only as a matter of last resort, the rhetoric during the cold war was not to strike first but to strike in retaliation hitting hardest then. Today the policy on defense is twice removed from that, it is not about retaliation, it is not even about a first rapid strike, it is beyond all that, the new policy is of preemptive strike, that is to kill America’s enemies while they are still in the womb, as soon as you can hear their heart beat like beasts. America is confident that it is sensitive enough to realize friend from foe, collateral damage will be kept to a minimum; freedom however must be safeguarded at any cost to international laws, treaties or human rights. In some ways America is right, terrorist do lose their rights by tying the knot on them can ripple senselessly through money trails, communications tapping and detention without a public forum.

American productivity has risen to astonishing levels since the fall of the Soviet Union. Economist will have any number of reasons for this, I have a couple of my own, consider that after the Soviet Union fell there was nothing that could stand in the way of American success, in short if the fall of the USSR proved that America was right then the question was how much right it could further be, and that would lead to a logical extremism of the American way.

The manifestation of that extremism started with the American people, whatever doubts they may have had that they lived in the best country in the world were now eliminated, as the USSR collapsed it proved how bankrupt it was, this was a matter of finance, the USSR had failed to finance it self, it could not loan money to it self the rubble became unrubbled. Americans could then rightly or wrongly feel that they were superior, that there was now physical evidence that their system was indeed the best of all possible systems, further evidence of which could be found by the acceptance of capitalism by China, in other words Chinese and Russian acceptance of capitalism implied that capitalism was not only right but also that it was the guiding principle of economic truth. As such the American workers, capitalists, marketers, bankers, financiers, professionals, now knew for sure that it was up to them to fully exploit the power of capitalism to their own advantage, now it was just a matter of working a little harder, of producing a little more, or taking a risk on that new business venture, there was no naught on the road to wealth and happiness, there was a lot of hard work in between, but the conclusion here is this, the American peoples mindset was hardwired to think that the only way to fail was if the failed to try harder, they had all the right stuff, and so productivity skyrocketed.

Religiously America could then turn to the right and administer moral conservatism, if American values had won in the world then it stood to faith to keep them sacred, and sacred meant unchanging, marriage, the family, the fetus, had to be defended against any new ideas that could corrupt it, gay marriage, lack of prayer in schools, evolution, etc., thus there was a right wing religious uprising to preserve what was right about America and to logically, if fanatically, eliminate what was wrong, as a result a whole evangelical Christian movement surged throughout the country and became something rather unfaithful, that is to say political.

The political activism of a nationalistic religiosity put the secular constitution through an ordeal, to what degree could freedoms be granted and still be considered freedoms? Could you for instance teach “creation” in public schools, and still say that there was a separation of church and state? And what would you tell the Buddhists if the republican president was willing to hand out tax dollars to Christian do gooders but not to their monks and monasteries.

But then the idea that there has been a separation form state of any type is of course a fleece, America’s beef industry is as tied to Washington as the cows existence is tied to meat eaters, as we have seen recently even Indian casinos are part of the constituency of congress, and Enron created and wrote energy policy as much as it wrote off stocks, but then if capitalism is good and it has been proven good beyond belief, then it stands to reason that it is ok to logic that businesses have to lobby Washington and in the process absentmindedly make Washington, a government entity and thus not naturally given to capitalism. Governments cannot at any fundamental level be capitalistic, governement is about control, taxation, regulation, and so businesses have to lobby so that they can convince the government that capitalism is good and that it should be left alone and given maximum freedoms so it can produce jobs and taxes which is what the government actually cares about.

Which is why the constitution is sort of bankrupt, though a pretty document no lesser to any other greater, but it is bankrupt in that it doesn’t acknowledge that the first and foremost constituency is not the people but rather the beholden interest of business which wields power through its ability to create jobs and pay taxes which as far as superior to any of the people or for that matter any individual. I will not send my jet to pick up the president any time soon, equally I don’t think the president is going to come and stay in my spare bedroom, in fact I doubt that I could ever be the presidents friend, or even Nancy Pelosi’s friend, I mean Nancy is probably a nice person but Nancy is also a person of power and power that is not gotten cheaply nor easily, what makes a president also makes a speaker of the house, sorry Pelosi, the filtering process for democrats that make it to the top of the nation’s stage is the same, by the time the process has sifted through the rut, what is left is a political process beholden to moneyed interest. The constitution doesn’t address this matter, the constitution doesn’t address the matter that campaigning is expensive and that the people, or individual freedom, cannot pay for it. Today’s mightiest democracy is elected “by institutions.”

Recently the leading economist for the free hand of capitalism died, Milton Friedman was the man who tied Keynes’s belief that government had a right and a duty to interfere in the economic process, and fanatically promulgated the idea that the government that governs best governs least. There might be some truth in that, but since the fall of Keynesian economics and the rice of Milton Friedman there has only been more government and more regulation, and more laws and more taxes and so even as Milton would have liked to convince us that he could convince Reganomics and the republicans that government was generally a bad thing, he forgot one key thing, politicians are based on government foundations, regardless of what anyone thinks, a bureaucrat isn’t going to think like a businessmen any time soon! Nor is a business friendly president or congress going to successfully operate a country like a CEO, instead politicians will always do what is the politically right thing to do, “agree with their times.” As such we must be somewhat relief that Friedman is not with us anymore, for as one who undid Keynes, we can only assume that in passing he has at least undone himself and his times.

In the mean time, enjoy your riches.

Ricardo ©

FREEDOM, ITS JUST NOT FOR EVERYONE

Could you ever imagine a dog saying, "hmmm... I don't like the way that smells."

One of the more difficult tasks ahead for America is to get out of the war with Iraq, it will be difficult because it wasn’t easy to get into the war in the first place, reasons for the war had to be created in order to justify it. The enemy had to be created, Saddam Hussein it now turns out was more of an illusionist and more a danger to his own people than to the outside world; but still the American presidency, against the unwilling will of congress, was able to turn him into: Hitler II. He had weapons of mass destruction, he used illegal chemicals, he was working on a dirty bomb, he tortured and gassed people, he didn’t allow for freedom of speech, this latter being particularly offensive to the American people, and so on, till there was naught else to do but do the right thing, take him out.

There was however an uncomfortable problem, first the Americans had supported Saddam’s regime in its early years and so he sort of had some insight into how Americans think, I read somewhere that he feared the ethnic and religious factions within Iraq more than he feared the Americans. But also there was the fact that while America was boycotting Iraq the French and the Russians had generated some substantial rivers of moneyed interests building infrastructures, adding a generator or a power plant and selling them weapons thus creating a symbiotically beneficial relationship, and of course this gave the French and the Russians an interest in fascist stability in Iraq.

Fortunately America has always been very good at marketing even if the product is missing some fundamentals, a war could always be lobbied and sold through a fear mongering marketing campaign that would shame even New York’s top ten marketing agencies. Satellites produced detailed photos of mobile labs that were brewing chemical malice, intelligence read that there were mobile missiles that could possibly reach Israel, and the Continent of Africa had provided Uranium while from somewhere else they had centrifuges. But more critical, Russian scientists that had not fared well since the fall of the Soviet Union, were selling dirty bomb schematics to Saddam. And then one day with the honorable Secretary of State, Mr. Powell, a trusted spokes person, the war was sold but not so well that everyone wanted to join the invading army. And so America did what any child does when it doesn’t get its way, it went at it alone. Besides that would work out better, for as everyone knows the United Nations is controlled by the third world and NATO and the European Union fight wars through a bureaucratic committee process that is paralyzing and America, the can do kid, is better off without those anchors.

And so we went to war.

But as with all things here this one was to be based on everything that had been learnt in the Civil War, WW I & II, the Korean and Vietnam wars, plus with added insight from the first battle with Iraq as done by Bush Senior, that liberated Kuwait’s oil fields from the invading tribal cousins. America also had the valuable advantage of video games and artificial reality, at any given moment Americans, very much like Roman gladiators trained in their on backyards, but at any given moment there are millions of Americans training for war through video games that realistically engage their participants in real world war scenarios, where fighter jets and tanks and soldiers are constantly being strategically engaged, all while in suburbia, to destroy the known foe. But also there are the surrealistic games which also create hyper scenarios of super beings that are able to travel through grave danger to acquire immortal powers, magical potions, double tipped whips and jewel studded daggers, and a plethora of specialize weapons that could scurry battalions of anythings anywhere; and so in general America has always been at the ready not only to go at it alone, but also to be imaginative and ready in the battle front by administering the un-conscripted maximum amount of training to civilians, the national guard and active soldiers even when they are off duty, through realistic sims.

And behind all this, almost as if sent by god was Rumsfeld the Secretary of War, he was a peculiar character in this historic times in that he understood the fog of war could be lifted through the internet of war, if you could know where every soldier was through magic dust, and know if he or she was still beating a heart, and if this soldier could feed real time battle information back to headquarters, then our army would have a greater advantage over that of the enemy’s, specially if our army were smaller, lighter and could be moved on a moments notice, and so we were ready to fight the war of the future today, with the centurion Rumsfeld at the helm.

Sold then by the nice Secretary of State that was himself a former soldier-general but overall a man of peace, who believed that war should be a weapon of last resort but if used should then be one of absolute maximum killing force, we had no choice then, having all means at our disposal, having to rescue the world from terrorists, and from Islamist fanatics, and from dictatorships, our leader, President George W. Bush told us that there would now be a campaign to spread democratic values and free market values to free the peoples of the middle east, and there was naught to do but that or forsake our turn at history.

Tony Blair, a Prime Minister with socialist leanings was whiling to go to it too, because in part he understood one thing above all others, America would win that war. I mean I don’t know how bookies do odds, but I think anyone could see that regardless of how powerful and mighty Saddam was, he could not bankroll a 300 billion dollar war, in the end his psycho babble would collapse because it didn’t have adequate financing, and so I think Tony Blair being the labor minister, crunched some numbers and saw that the math projected inadequate financing in Mesopotamia, and he figured that after the destruction along the Tigres river there would be plenty of construction contracts and he, if he stood by Bush, would be rewarded with the spoils of war and the Unions would see this as an astute labor campaign, after all British truck drivers and British mercenaries are making easy six figure salaries in Iraq. Power to labor.

Towing his good friend behind him to give legitimacy to the cause, Mr. Bush had now no choice but to go to war, he had to prove his mettle, and this he did, Mr. Saddam was recently sentenced for Crimes Against Humanity, and he will hang for it, undoubtedly this is a step in the right direction, the inquisitors made right when they used to do the same, however this is not meant to fix everything, Saddam being choked to death is only part of the way to democracy in Iraq.

Now part of this newly installed government in Iraq, is working day and night, with the American military command, to introduce a professional army, a disciplined police force, and there are any number of American and British companies rebuilding the entire country, its going to look pretty when they are done, however there is just one thing, the ethnic violence, 150 thousand dead in an undeclared civil war. These tribes will just not get along, they are trying to kill one another, brother against brother, mano a mano and the bloodshed is staining the introduction of democracy, freedom and the right to drive a car and cover your face with makeup, and to show your booty.

And where do we find ourselves? Back to square one, we cannot liberate these peoples from themselves, they just don’t want to be free, they love the fray, tragedy is married to them, they don’t want to work together for the common good and no matter how much our good will wants to triumph there, to allow them to be Mormons if they want to be Mormons, to allow them to speak freely against their government if they want to, to allow them the privilege of voting plus a Western style education, to give them the benefits that knowledge and the more important that "reason" has brought us, we can give them all these things but they just don’t want them, they don’t want to practice constitutional rights, hence why things are not working out.

We will probably have to pull out of Iraq, but after spending 300 billion dollars, 3000 American casualties no one, least of all Tony Blair, will be able to say that we didn’t try, that we didn’t give it our best, those peoples over there, they just want to do things their own way, shame to see all the suffering that cost them.

But where does that leave us, a good portion of us didn’t want the war in Iraq, but we support the troops, and we support our president, no one can say anything bad about our mother or our sense of patriotism. Now we are in a perplexing situation, if we say we are against the war does that mean we are being critical of the office of the president and unsupportive of our troops? Of course it does, it is no longer Bush’s war it is now The Nation’s War! Bush might have gotten us there but it is now our war, all of us are now in it, frustrated and perplexed but it is now our war, and it doesn’t matter one bit that Rumsfeld, a leading proponent of testing his theories on defense in real war scenarios, is out and now there is a, use the cross walk please, Mr. Gates. It doesn’t matter the country is now engaged in a war of international proportions and because we went at it alone and didn’t share the reconstruction contracts the French and the Russians are just going to sit by idly amusing themselves. “We told you so.”

And of course we have to support our troops as much as we have to support the defense department and the defense industry jobs. Or we could do the brave thing, and admit that our country was wrong, that we made a mistake, that we have to pull out and that we have added to the instability of the middle east, we could do that, but we are not going to do that, because that kind of valor is suicidal, we will have to tow the line, and the democrats, now in control of senate and congress are not going to stop it, they are not going to because they cannot and suffer not from the will power to do it, in the same manner that they didn’t suffer the brilliant thoughts required to prevent the war in the first place.

The new approach is simpler than admitting defeat, it is to allow the peoples of Iraq to fail them selves, we will keep sending money and troops till they prove beyond all doubt that they cannot be helped because they are not whiling to participate in their own rescue operation. There is already ample evidence of this as they don’t want to end sectarian violence, the national police has been infiltrated by the infidels and they are carrying out poorly disguised massacres. They will fail because they are just not us, they are not like us, they don’t care about freedom and voting and separation of church and state, they don’t, if anyone has given them the chance it is us, Europe was not willing to rescue them from themselves, China has kept mostly quiet, the only ones that dared to care for them was us, and now we have to watch all our efforts come to naught.

A few years from now we will leave Iraq, the bookies surely knew we would win the war, no one said anything about winning hearts and minds, bookies, ever wise, wouldn’t have given odds on that.

Ricardo ©

Hillary La Loca For President

Hillary La Loca For President

I think because male labor is generally considered the more expensive and technical and that it has been easier to demonstrate the cooking talents of a male, thus that made it easier for males to colonize the upper echelons of the food industry. This is because male talent is demonstrative, remember that males externalize, for men make a big deal out of anything that they do and know, when a woman does a good teriyaki, though there might not be such thing as far as I am concerned, she doesn’t brag about it, and more she doesn’t cook by metrics she cooks largely by intuition, as I do too, and so the technique of male gets processed more in the context of intellect and system, and that is why not only are male chefs more defined in the context of the task but so are male waiters. Which is why expensive restaurants will not have women as wait staff, sooner they will have them washing dishes.

I still don’t like her but Maureen Dowd that asked why it was that when a man cooked everyone had to pay attention as if he were accomplishing some great feat and yet everyone ignores it when its a woman doing cooking.

The key factor here is that male elements gather there strength from social and system recognition, that is why titles are so important to males, males need careers and education and actions to define them because they feed and feed the external; women however have an internal guidance system and since they are the progenitors of society haven’t the need or want to belong to the system as a way to personify their character. Again here the critical part is that women is inward looking she knows herself and is aware of her inner desires and generally will intuitively be aware of what she wants and this does not require external approbation, a woman is fundamentally satisfied with her self, a man is fundamentally unaware of anything that he is, and generally he cannot support more than one view of himself as this is very energy intensive because he doesn’t intuit himself, that is he has to make himself into someone of relevance.

Camille Paglia, one of those philosophers that I do not like because she is too much like a man, but then philosophy is wholly masculine as it is descriptive, to the point that you could positively say that philosophy is the superbowl of intellect, anyways Camille, she is still a woman if by name only, wrote a wonderful and mentally stimulating book title Sexual Personae, I couldn’t stop laughing the whole reading, and in a couple of chapters she completely neuters males and naturally empowers women, and it would be very difficult to disagree with much of what she says.

It basically boils down to the fact that male is the artifice of life and female is what is natural or endemic to nature, she ties this in many ways, explaining such things as the beauty of the male penis as it searches to penetrate which is an outward looking function and how too vagina, which she considers an ugly monstrosity, is this thing sitting there waiting to be penetrated and equally she notes that the vagina engulfs.

Again she did a hilarious job though I don’t think much of Paglia should be taken seriously as she has become masculine and thus has dismembered her intuition.

The problem with the feminist view of the world, as I see it, is that the feminist think that men are powerful creatures and that their power leads them to dominance and that dominance is good and so good that it has undermined women and their potential contribution in the context of systems and society.

After making such glorified assumption, and it does require a certain degree of analytic suspension, they then go on to prescribe that females adopt male characteristics in order to take back the world that was stolen from under their skirts. Ha!

What I find fantastic about this is that it makes the assumption that nature was from the get go against women, that is it gave males the upper hand by making them stronger in a cavemen’s world, that is to say that species can play favoritism within the context of its endemic gender biology.

The assumption further assumes that only contributions that are observable count in the context of systems and societies. This even as we already know that 90% of the Universe is not observable, but of course feminists are just male minds within female bodies and so they are looking for evidence of woman’s historical actions in the observable economic and systemic aspect of civilization; this is perhaps the wrong place to look.

I have always said and it think you have heard me say it, that a bullfight represents the perfect critical review of male and female interaction in the process of civilization and so I will use such accordingly, though it is not limited to that, you can see it in less aesthetic formats such as American Football, and the Executives Office where a greater bull than the CEO there isn’t.

First I don’t think that women are weak, I think that they are stronger than us males, second I don’t think that they have been shorted by history, and third I think that they do indeed control the world as indeed they must as it is in their interest that there be a civilization; and Paglia doesn’t make any mistakes here, she correctly notes that it was in woman’s interest to civilize man because in civilized society there are less rapes, in fact according to Paglia and myself, we both agree wholeheartedly here, it is woman that tempers men thorugh a civilizing process! Paglia correctly assumes that women will suffer greater the less civilized the society. And while I think that the culling of male aggression through civilizing education does have its side effects, perversion being one of them, there is still a far greater accomplishment to the benefit of female, and that is that it makes society feminine in gender.

This is a very subtle reality but as I watch my male cats fight each other to secure a territory and to show that they are stronger and mightier than the other macho and I watch the females rush to watch the fight between Loki and Pacho, I know precisely where the motivation is for the fight, it is the feminine that demands an aggressive male, and those males are doing what has been pre approved as the proper way to win a female and win reproduction rights. It will not hurt us any to further note here that African tribal women refuse to have sex with the men that don’t bring meat home.

Further we cannot, even in our wildest dreams, ignore the fact that 90 percent of all species reproduce without males within their lot. Nature as a whole only produces males where the environment and conditions are so extenuating that they need someone who has been short-circuited of feelings to come and react in such environment.

However the paramount contribution of the feminine are in fact greater than that of any male or group of males, the problem is that they are not observable because it is subconscious in its representation; men perform at the conscious level, and probably don’t have much subconscious to speak of, they may indeed live and operate only in surfaces, but women operate at great subconscious levels, and males that are properly married acquire their civil guidance as it radiates from wife or mate, if either of those representations are missing then the male will default to mother and if mother is not present male will default to sister for guidance.

It has been said a thousand times, man alone is destructive and out of control, man with wife is prone to discipline, to adopt social norms, to go to church and to perform better at his job, and this has all been documented in study after study, and finally something I don’t have to make up. Ha!

The problem is that the feminists cannot see but the overt and thus they have become envious of men, and funny enough this doesn’t work against males, instead it favors them and thus feminism does it’s worse harm to women, and more detrimental to us all it does a greater harm to society because it breaks the natural equilibrium between males and females, and their dominance over society because when you have masculinated females you have lost a portion of that critical balance that nature has deigned and reigned throughout countries, with a remarkable precision of 51% females 49% males. Even nature knows enough to give the majority of the vote to the women. Further the greater the number of women cannot be overlooked from another perspective, male aggression cannot be diffused by fewer females, it can only thus increase, the fewer feminine traits in a given society the more externally and internationally aggressive and destructive that society will become, and as that society becomes more aggressive it will further masculinate its women too so that they too cannot feel the pain, for an ability to tolerate pain is a unique male ability and that becomes a terror; as your women become tough too and thus desensitized.

The society suffers as a result, think what it means that in China and in India mothers prefer to have little boys so they condone the killing of baby girls, think what it means that in Latin America parents wish their first born to be a boy, and in America think what it means that the seductive woman has been turned into an open minded coffin of ideas. Where there is no sacredness in her body, no hidden treasures, where her intense mystery has been nullified through the categorical knowledge that she can now brag of possessing.

What is a burka? A burka is a way to curve female power, man is made shameful when he spots his weakness against female might, man is always in the position of being rejected, while woman is always in the position of accepting, the pretty women watching the bullfighter are impressed by him and he will have his pick of them when he puts down the bull; his red cape is however a dress for teasing the bull, and our bullfighter is really representative of the female with his fancy jeweled golden suit, delicately tailored so that one would think he was going to an evening dance instead of a bullfight, he is not dressed for the violence of this occasion, and in a sense he is saying to the bull I am going to show you that refinement and aesthetics win over raw brute force. The bull of course doesn’t see the bullfighter as a formidable opponent, he looks smaller, weaker, dainty and he doesn’t have horns, and so that only gives the bull greater confidence to keep on ramming into that dancing red dress; till unfortunately behind the teasing dress a sword discovers bull’s mid center shoulder blades and tears at his insides, thus from his own barbarous recoiling movement the bull’s death is made.

The matador represents psychological power, the bull represents the power of action, action will always be at a disadvantage to psychological might because it is largely invisible, hidden behind an aura of beauty and tenderness and apparent harmlessness. The dance between the bull and the matador makes society and civil society at that. The Burka like the chastity belt give men a false sense of control over the feminine might, however man must live according to her bible and its righteous commands, which though written by men are against male attributes and have nothing of his interest in mind but rather to curve his brute force and use it for social purposes instead. The problem is that when males are made to wear burkas it is not obvious, today’s greater feeling sensitive male is a bull with a burka.

The process by which this comes about emasculates males because the feminine is dominant in any realm she enters and the emasculated males become this docile little creatures that don’t even know themselves as part of the curriculum mandates that they hate what its male in order to make contact with the liberated feminine; now they have to be sensitive and caring and nurses and loving and tender, and that is not technically male and so they are lost, lost from their personality, but unlike women these males don’t have the inner resource of character to manage their situation thus they have to depend on the self-help society, they will go out there and reconstruct themselves, they will make themselves sensitive, they will somehow make themselves right, and why not, surely they can, they come from a male history of can do, and so they will fix themselves, and in the end they will look like those women that make themselves ever prettier in their heads with just one more facelift!

Today women can be president I suppose we can thank the feminist movement for that, and so in 2008 Hillary Clinton will be president, ask me however if I needed that and I will tell you never! Because that first female American president is now a man! Because she could calmly stand by her man when she should have given him hell for being a lying cheat womanizer, but Hillary didn’t care about her personal life, she didn’t care about the little world, the bricks didn’t matter, she was now living in big social ideas and handling large systemic issues, ephemeral things that matter no doubt but the little thing, keeping her house in order didn’t matter, and when we care more about the ephemeral ideas the neighborhood collapses which is why subconsciously we love the Midwest because it keeps giving the national heart localize certainty. What happen was that Hillary didn’t go ballistic because she cared about her profession, she was no longer working for self and edifying self, she is edifying a system and honoring it by being respectful to it, she wasn’t going to make a mess in the Whitehouse, she wasn’t going to indignantly turn the Whitehouse into an insane asylum, Hillary la loca! La loca walking her spirit though the Lincoln bedroom eternally counting all the trespasses, La Loca Hillary wrenching her suffering on the Whitehouse lawn, La Loca destroying her family because of the derailed character of her man!

That day I would have preferred to have the country singer that stood by her man but would surely chop off his gonads if he cheated on her. I wanted to see passion, instead in Hillary I saw a bureaucrat and a bureaucrats wife all in one; Clinton himself, the little boy that is in fact not capable of loving a woman because he is a sensitive little boy, could not have felt better, he got away even as caught with his hands in the cookie jar, and it was in fact the system than reproved him, it, the god damned system reproach went berserk on him, costing millions of passionate and zealous investigation dollars, and the system did in fact impeached him! And for what? Well it had to be for cheating on his wife. Thus Hillary is vindicated in the context of system, the system protected her by acting irate on her behalf, by going berserk on her behalf, by showing feelings and illogic and passion!

And it cannot escape one how her impressive self control locks her down, it cannot escape us how we will know that as our future first lady president she will keep a level and cool head under the most difficult of situations, we can thus trust her because she is not going to be Hillary la loca!

ricardo (c)

My thoughts on GUT

I don’t think that any Grand Unified Theory of physics could survive a person levitating.

RC

Democracies Are Everywhere

From my point of view I don’t like any particular country or government, in that regard my compatriots here in Colombia can amply testify to that, as they constantly ask me: “Why are you here if you don’t like it?”

The answer to that is simple, I am in life, I am a change agent, I am not here to like what is here I am here to change it if I can. Futility is a possible consequence of my endeavor, probably the most likely scenario, but I will persist in attempting to change this place because it bothers me the way it is.

Now let me explain what my beef is with American democracy, in that it believes that at least it is some what more just or at least that it allows more freedom of expression, or more so than other systems.

The matter is that to me, a system is composed of the general assumptions of its peoples. All systems regardless of their morality or civic stance, are the product of the conduct, aspiration and self definition of their peoples.

As the self definitions cross each other over the social medium they are altered and reach a third party identity, a sort of objective composition of all the national subjectives - recombined to make a national psyche, that ought to satisfy no one in particular but is in the end result the most likely possible accord, or more precisely the most simmering point of agglomerated subjectivism.

That silent social accord is what generates the, or any, system, and with it the gamut of intolerances or tolerances that will define its institutions.

My friend Bob once recently found himself being helped from a treacherous excursion in Africa by a tribe that fed him milk and blood and offered him a virgin for a bride if he hunted down a lion. Bob was then living in a world very difficult for him to understand, specially because his potential bride had had her clitoris removed; Bob probably enjoys more satisfying a woman than being himself satisfied and so that certainly put a damper on the matter of killing the lion.

Now you would not know it from our understanding of culture but the girls and women of that tribe unite to serve up the practice of clitoris clipping. It is a right of passage, as I assume a circumcision is for Jews or even for the medical profession which for many decades approved and practically, through the auspices of hygiene, mandated the practice. Fortunately I escaped it unscathed.

To be an American you have to be many silent things, I was one for a time, I still hold many American values and I contributed to the national psyche of the country, my taxes paid, certainly bought bullets, my considerate amount of attention to National politics have contributed valuable energy to that system.

Upon my return to Colombia I attempted to transfer the American work ethic values to this country, my fellow compatriots won out on that one and today I am grateful that I have lost my ability to work efficiently and with much dedication.

My point is that what I was when I was in America, how I melted into that culture, was mandated not only by my circumstances but equally by what the system needed from me and how that triangulated with the contrived national psyche. At some point it became unbearable for me, the militancy of the national psyche was too much, I cowered under, I begun to fail at my work and in my personal relationships because I wasn’t synchronized to the professional discipline of the American national psyche.

Upon my move to Colombia I found all the inadequacies of a third world country frustrating but equally I realized that I was disengaged from the machine, that Colombia could not churn out anything efficiently, that there was plenty of indifference, and that complied, at least for now, with what I needed, I didn’t want the world staring at me as it does the United States, I didn’t want to be the center of attention, I didn’t want to improve myself every year, I didn’t want to take any more tests, I didn’t want to be defending my job from the litany of aspirants; the world slowed down, a lot, almost to a stand still.

Of course with being a Colombian come many terrible things, children are abused, people are shot, farmers are destitute, peoples lives are constantly in turmoil, there is no organization, there is little hope, no one is going to rescue anyone, everyone is out to protect the little self and by process our national psyche is small, little, insignificant, I don’t expect contributions from us to the greater world, I don’t think we are going to get out of our inner beings, we are still adolescents.

All societies have these sort of unwritten consequences, America consumes the world, 60 percent of its resources, and its politics are largely based on that horror, in some way America is always gobbling something, it has to, you cannot be so huge and powerful and not, it is that which makes it all so super-size for those of us that think little, that cannot muster the energies and concentrations to gobble things up. Colombians are self destructive, I prefer that, and that is a consequence of being in Colombia or a Colombian.

To me all nation-states are democratic, either silently or not, it is the mass aggregate will with its subconscious-simmering-psyche that makes it all happen, the final agreement that holds a nation together is that, a little bit of everyone represented as none of them in particular.

As such when you see the apparent horrors of any given government, it must also be obvious that the overall society is willing to pay that price, either to reinforce a national psyche or as a sad or fatal by product of the embroidery that is a civilization.

I admire the catholic church, 2006 year old institution, I am obviously not a Catholic but that is a supra-global psyche, the rituals seem so pointless, the priest so perverted, and yet the institution has lasted the times. There is something to be said for that.

America is a young country, as such a rouge state, so goes the book, and so has been the history of most world powers, Britain was an ass in its hay day and so we should not expect anything different of America. Unlike most I do believe that America is just a phase in human history, we are not going to be dominated by capitalism and democracy, the new world will perhaps be ruled by some metaphysical divination, a sort of -“I am aware and I comprehend…”- mind and heart set.

Of course when America fades into the sunset many things that come with it will fade too, the concept of “marketing” might go extinct, the idea that profit is a prerequisite for someone to act, might fade away as well. I expect the field of knowledge to be the first to suffer, knowledge will undoubtedly suffer, MIT and Harvard might fail as well it should be as these are institutions that have their basis on the American mind set.

Grant you none of these things were invented by America, nor is America the only one afflicted by them, it is simply that America has bought into them and perfected them unlike anyone else.

Marx did get one thing right, economy drives the essence of the thing, you look at Americas economic logistics and it is the only proper way to understand its behavior pattern.

Now I don’t blame America for being what it is, that is a world condition, America is just good at it, no more.

The problem is one of civilization and contribution to the world in general. America is still young enough, as far as countries are concerned that we don’t know what its actual contribution to humanity will be in the end, for all we know, and I rather think it so, Wall Street and Silicon Valley and Hollywood could be a blink in human history. The terracotta soldiers are 2300 years old, Chinese civilization was going through a Jade age 6000 years ago, Indian society has well over 5000 years behind it, that in itself is a very amazing thing, but see I admire things that last a long time, that establish continuity, that form foundations that linger throughout the ages.

America to me seems more like a fad, something based on spontaneity, capriciousness, a desire to be in a sort of hedonistic postponement, that is to say America is always working on the next nearest thing, and is always planning for the next event and dully postponing its enjoyment while absorbing a child like happiness of the moment.

There have been plenty of 300 year old countries that never lasted the ages. They are in fact the norm. One only needs to go back to the 19th century to see that the map makers have been busy. America’s immediate necessity is to live for the moment, and I will argue that that is why it is so able in the here and now!

This is because most people are living a cultural event, most of India is, they are not living for the immediacy of the moment, that is why they don’t see the transgressions that we witness in India. By an large they are living a movement, most of India is not living the current love affair with Western ways, most of India is like Iran when America imposed their dictator of choice the Shah; but Iran’s cultural clock ticks slowly but eventually it strikes an hour of regressive change, boom!

Culture as atomic bomb.

People that live in culture take a while to realize what’s happening, because the beauty of culture is that you don’t have to think all the time and be on the alert, that is the beauty of culture, it is also why American political strategists have so little patience with it, and equally why they think they can change it all within a year. Those people in Iraq don’t look very smart from afar, they don’t look very complicated, they look largely like savages with their contradictory and illogical ways; but what the Harvard and Chicago schools don’t measure is how those societies have clicked throughout the centuries, and that is no small accomplishment and as such it isn’t going to be undone unless it is annihilated.

The problem is that America’s youth, the lack of its own predefined culture is also what makes it appear superior, light on its feet, able to change at a moments notice, Americans can change jobs, homes, cars, friendships and location on a moments notice, just show them where the opportune horizon stretches and they will head in that direction; that real time adjustment to world events makes them winners, first to get there types; equally such looseness does not favor culture because culture is based on the locking-down of traditions. Culture doesn’t change overnight it changes over the centuries and flowery horizons are mistrusted.

If you look at all of civilization as a singular entity, and I do, then you can imagine that we needed our impetuous child explorer, America, to go out there and find out what else could be out there, in a way it had to be an isolationist, few could brave the rub that change would imply to those living in culture, America went at it alone, and perhaps it found something, only history will tell; that India and China and Russia are finally listening makes an interesting case, but then we must hope it is not the fringes of those societies, the aggressive types that are making their adoptions of the American way. Because if it is only them, then it will not last, somehow those cultures must emblematize and absorb the work ethic, the professionalism, the delusion that a career defines self, the mastery of the moment, all those things with logistical precision must be adopted wholly, else they will only reek and the clock of tradition will reach yet another hour of boom.

India, what is India to me? Nothing, I don’t know it, I am reading the Buddhist bible, it’s a translation, it was written by a man with Western values, I slept with an Indian girl once, her name was Rita, I doubt that that was her name in India, but I do think that sleeping with someone from that culture brings you all the energies that have harbored her essence, and that could be a lot. Beyond that is the cuisine which shows an amazing level of gorgeousness and essence at the same time, or maybe is the fact that they have 1700 or so plus Gods, you have to be very spiritual to have all those gods, the West is practical it only likes to maintain monotheism, but India I would guess has a lot of devout to maintain that colossal religiosity. Maybe too it is the mystics, the transcendentalists that somehow offer a different path that doesn’t seem caught up in the Tarot and the Zodiac. Or maybe it is the fact that cows are sacred and can roam free, why one of them could be the next Dali Lama.

But I really don’t know what India signifies to me except that it has lasted 5000 years and this even as their main religions are anointing inaction, the nothingness and indifference to the self.

When my nephew went to New York city, he didn’t like it. I love New York, it amply demonstrates that we can live in purely artificial environments and relationships, and that loneliness can be ignored indefinitely through fatigueless entertainment. When we go to conquer the other planets, we will need that kind of indifference to tolerate the more indifferent environment; I just love New York!

RC

Truly Liberal Radicalism

Nothing is more harmful to the radical liberal movement than its stance against capitalism and globalization. Thus I propose the following:

-It is obvious that capitalism is its own worst enemy.

-It is obvious that a market-driven humanity is not sustainable or humane.

-The marginalization of all human activity based on productive and economic measure is a self-collapsing proposition.

Thus I will urge all the liberals, the radicals, the socialists to cease fighting against capitalism and globalization, as antagonism only serves to moderate the effects of capitalism on our humanity and thus increase the longevity of its life span.

Capitalism is a phase in the contextual history of humanity, inevitably it will come to pass but it will come to pass much faster, that is humanity will get capitalism out of its system sooner if liberals participate in it rather than fight against it.

I propose that the inherent instability of capitalism, its callousness towards the human spirit can be radically magnified through participation, so that it becomes a case against itself and thus an unsustainable proposition.

What liberal forces must weigh is what has the greatest probability of defeating capitalism, being for it or against it?

I conclude that being for and pro and working for capitalism is most likely to cause the very thing to implode upon the fallacy of its premises. By becoming more capitalistic liberal forces would prove their point beyond all doubt.

One must have faith enough to believe that if one has a truth it has the potential to become painfully obvious.

RC

The Great Mall of the Americas

I could not find my way back to my truck, it was there, at the Great Mall of the Americas. I don’t feel too bad about it, that is about losing my truck at the Great Mall of the Americas, anything that huge had to be a challenge for someone little like me to remember; I was diminutively speaking a small man, 5 feet 3 inches, most people are now taller than that, Lucy the ancestor of human kind was only 3 feet 6 inches, and Lucy, of the Lucy and Ricky Ricardo show was certainly taller, at 5 feet 7 inches, taller than even Ricky, her Cuban husband. Like wise the mall of the Americas dwarfs me and I lost my truck in it.

I didn't expect to lose my truck, I am more likely to lose my keys, but this time I lost my truck. I thought I might lose my notebook but I didn’t lose my notebook though I have nightmares about losing my notebook I lost my truck instead. My truck weighs in at 4300 pounds, my notebook weights in at 4.3 pounds, most soldiers have to carry fifty pound backpacks, me 4.3 pounds and a couple more, and I am ok with that for I never walk very far, I don’t like walking. I don’t like walking long distances, it seems pointless; I don’t like cars, I don’t like being in cars for more than fifteen minutes, I don’t like plane travel for more than 45 minutes, I am a short distance person, the American continent would have never been discovered by me; I don’t have the urge to travel, the travel industry would have never materialized nor would have the international marketing industry if my genes predominated the human species, they don’t. I am but an antler within the human species, a nail of deciduous layered growth, so as to create a bony structure that intimidates yet a pair of nail clippers would cut it off.

My name is Davit Nutt, from Albarsperk, a small town in the Dacoma territories that used to belong to the Dacoma Indians but then they signed it over to the white men, and now they just operate the casinos. I am not however an Indian, I am a white man, and I don’t own the greatest mall in the Americas, I am just there now because we had a business meeting, I am a shoe salesman. I work for Longer and More Comfortable Molly’s. We specialize in shoes for people that are made larger by the culmination of their appendages.

We call them Molly shoes, I don’t know why we call them that, but I suppose Alph Parks, the owner of the company probably had a fat girlfriend named, perhaps Molly and he married Ethel Swarny and probably wanted to remember Molly instead, at least when he went to work and so there you have us, we are Molly Shoes Inc.

I am a catalog salesman, I go from door to door and sell shoes to people that are challenged by the size of their foot. This year, I made it to the list of top ten sales reps within the company; that is damn right I am the sixth most successful sales rep nationwide, frankly it is an honor. But equally I cannot brag, it isn’t that hard to sell shoes that are larger and more comfortable for larger people. And it isn’t hard because shoes of our size, large, extra large and wider and extra wider, (the secret of our design success,) large and cushy, well where else are you going to get that if not at Molly’s Shoes!

You have to give credit to big Alph, he saw the market coming, he predicted that America, as it became a bigger nation, would need bigger hamburgers, bigger malls and bigger steaks and consequently bigger cows, and bigger sex toys and logically it followed that Americans would get bigger, as success breeds size and their bigger size would make them not fit into their shoes; and thus Alph, a former hotdog salesman from Romaine Kansas opted to match the opportunity with the shoe and he begun to design shoes that are bigger and cushier and more comfortable and he hired me as his first salesman.

Why he hired me is still mesmerizing to me, the good lord cares for us in mysterious ways, I was at a greyhound bus stop, waiting for a bus to go nowhere, my wife had left me, precisely because she was not impressed by me, she once said that I could inspire a poem about yawning. When she left she took our daughter Nancy with her, Nancy ate a lot of cornflakes, and had grown where now she could use Molly Shoes but I don’t know where they are. They also took Henry with them, gosh when I think about it why even our children had sort of fat names, maybe that had something to do with it, or could it have been the chili-fries?

Ah what is a father to know, I don’t even know when we made those kids, maybe they are not even mine, frankly I wish I had greater paternal sentiments but I am more proud of having been invited to the Top Ten Molly Salesmen of the Year reunion, than I am of fathering Henry and Nancy; though they are harmless both and nice kids too. Still, as I hate to admit it, Nancy is nothing more than some kind of gum consumption machine that I am afraid will reproduce by happenstance; and Henry is a Video game fanatic consumer, where the games can never keep up with him, there is even a sweat spot on the carpeting right where he sits in front of his video game player to slaughter civilization over and over again. All this while our pooch Darwin, perhaps the most evolved member of the former family sits and muses over a bone shaped biscuit.

Davit Nutt, that is me, I am skinny, no more flesh on me than is required to cover up them bones, you can see my veins and arteries fluctuate in size with the ambient temperature, I am deathly afraid of the cold, I might be a mammal but my blood gets cold at the sight of a shadow, I am always looking for heat, maybe that is why I was attracted to my wife, she had layers of flesh. I am naturally attracted to heft, and so it is easy for me to sell oversized shoes, really I don’t understand how the other salesmen got ahead of me, they might have lied on their sales reports, maybe their managers bought some of the shoes to earn bonus points, maybe they faked sales, or maybe they overstuffed the inventory, because really I doubt that someone could beat me at the art of selling oversize Molly shoes.

I get into a house and I go in there and I say, “Look it here you see this here shoe, it will support all aspects of your lovely leg, (eighty percent of my customers are women,) and see how we have constructed the support structure to mimic how grass cushions a foot, why there are hundreds of thousands of invisible grass hairs growing right out of our shoes, and they use this new and exclusive and patented nano-organic technique where, by recovering the humidity produced by the sole of your feet, they will regenerate the grass like follicles in our shoes, so as to create a fresh grass sole supporting turf, where you will never notice you are wearing shoes, you might even feel your lovely feet naked.”

Then they sniffle and say, “But what about smells?”

“Oh nothing to that, don’t even mention it, because our nano-organic shoes have self reproducing soles they are also, impressively, self refreshing and so you go on and enjoy them as you might the morning dew under your naked feet.”

Of course I don’t use our shoes and they notice this and ask, “Why don’t you use them if they are so good?”

“Oh gosh” I flush red, “I wish I could use them, I have asked Alph to make them my size but as you can see a skinny fellow like me has not the frame to support a naturally growing sole environment shoe underneath his feet; there is not the necessary pressured conditions to create the ambient temperatures and chemical cataclysms to regenerate new soles, a process that is usually bi-monthly, for anyone offering two hundred pounds of pressure per square inch.”

The buyers do seem a little confused by all the science and so I reassure them, “But Alph keeps working at it, that guy he doesn’t give up, he knows that there is a huge market potential for his shoes and he doesn’t want to stay just a niche shoe, he wants to branch into the Olympics and Wimbledon. Why just imagine if the tennis stars could feel the grass underneath their feet, it be a whole different game; we at Molly Shoes realize the responsibility of the experience that we need share with our sole mates.”

I think it is because I am skinny that they think they have to take me under their arms, but when I smell underarm perspiration I know that I have made another sale, and there you have it, that is why I am here today, at the biggest mall of the Americas celebrating the biggest shoe success story of all time. Only I had a few wines, I normally don’t drink wine but since the boss has gotten a little rich he now feels that he has to drink wine and so he orders wine for us all too and you just cannot say no to the boss, he has this way of convincing you that you should drink wine and sell his shoes and so I do both, only the wine doesn’t sit well for me; I think us men of skin and bones should really stay away from any kind of liquor and so now because I didn’t follow that rule I am searching for my truck.

My truck doesn’t have an alarm, I get tired of alarms going off without reason, cars screaming smog are bad enough we don’t need them being obnoxious too. I never got the alarm option even as my insurance company was willing to give me a 10 percent discount off of the insurance bill if I added the alarm, apparently thieves are scared off by alarms, I refused that; and I also refused the 3 percent discount if I took the model without an ashtray, apparently smokers get into accidents three percent more than non-smokers; I also got the yellow paint job even though there was a 1 percent discount on that as well; but the truth is that I like yellow even though yellow crashes and clashes with red cars more often than not, and besides that I do smoke and so I figured what is the difference, I have a 3 percent greater probability of crashing and that probably buries that other 1 percent for having an attractive paint scheme.

And even with the attractive paint scheme I cant find my truck, damn. And if that were not enough I think the alcohol is having some effect, this I think because I have good reason to believe that at the Great Mall of the Americas I keep on going up the same stairs and the same ramp at least five times, and unless I get sober fast I might not find my truck.

Now in the old days it was easy, if you lost your vehicle at the mall you could just sit it out till about 10 pm where everyone had gone home and then the only car on the parking lot would be your yellow truck, but today the malls are open twenty four hours per day, and the people too are open twenty four hours per day, and so there is no way to empty out the parking lot.

Of course I hadn’t given up the faith, I figured I could find my truck, either by waiting for a sober memory or by ending the number of parking slots available for parking, I am an optimist, I think. And so I get into this mammoth elevator, I think it could house 30 people, and it goes straight up fast, I am going to explore the upper levels of the super parking complex, the elevator doors open like a portal into another dimension, slowly so as not to rip a little girl’s fingers off, slowly so that if there are thirty people in the elevator they can all witness with each other the industrial might of the great mall. I walk off into the ninth floor, I think it is the last one, I don’t dare to assume that I know how wide this mall is or how tall, I am on the ninth floor, ok.

Immediately as I step off I am elated at finding a Mall Cop in a white scooter type mobile with blue warning lights all over, the young man in it is a healthy fellow, well built but not robust, just good looking, he could have been in a golf cart without that blue uniform and looked the part of a wealthy country chap, I yelled with my voice while reaching him with wild armed signals.

“Hey there fellow, have you seen a yellow truck with red stripes running through the side and a chrome step, there are no two alike.”

“Well maybe yours is yours sir and with all due respect that makes it unique but here I see Ferraris by the half dozen.”

And with that he punctured the gas pedal on that electric kart gizmo and sped off, where I operated to catch him with my legs.

“No, no, just wait a minute; ok maybe there are others like mine, ok, (I was gasping for air,) but could you just be so kind as to give me a ride around this floor to see if it is here?”

The young man, I must say, was all proper, “Hey Mr. I sure would if I could but company policy doesn’t allow me, you might sue us if we get into an accident and I could lose my job,”

I paused him, “Yeah, yeah don’t worry I know and your girlfriend is pregnant and you really need this job, lets leave it at that and I will just walk on.”

With that we both signaled a mutual salute of professional attention and he purred off in his electric gizmo.

I scratched my head, I felt silly being lost, but I felt more silly for being drunk on the wine, still I went off to review the cars on the ninth floor. Not mine, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, Ferrari, not mine, not mine, Lamborghini, not mine, till I came up to a large concrete wall with the number nine on it; I had completed all the rows, I didn’t, anyway remember driving up nine levels, four maximum, I was afraid of heights. As I stood in front of the wall as if I were peeing like a Frenchman, I realized that I was in front of a door, I opened the door, and before me stood a clown in a huge ruffled yellow dress with white gloves, red cheeks and a falsely welcoming smile.

“Hey, hey Mr., you are our one millionth customer to the ride of the cytoplasm, you get to get on for free, put your money away, your money is not good here, (he was patting my back) your money is not good here, you are on us today, Mr., free suite, free food, free rides all day long and you get to start here, this is the get go point; (his happiness and incessant jolliness contagious but in a must way), you just get right on here, right on here. (guiding me with that charming force of a clown that hinders none.)”

“But I am not here to ride your ride, sorry I was just looking for my truck.”

“Yes, yes adults always have some fancy excuse as to why they don’t really want to ride our rides, but you dint come to the ninth because you dint know we were here, obviously you got here and you didn’t get here by accident right!”

“No, no you don’t understand Mr. Clown, what is your name, I am sorry what is your name?”

“Me, (his hand confirming towards his lapel,) “me, I am The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!” And with that he let lose a huge sarcophagus laughter, and repeated it for my enjoyment and any near-by listener, “The Clown of the Mall of the Americas!, that is me sir.”

“Well Mr. Clown of the Mall of the Americas, may I just walk by you, and sorry to have gotten caught in your life line.”

While I was saying that a huge squelching sound irked my ears and ended audibility within the vicinity, it was the sound of a huge mechanical machine on rail road tracks coming into its station; the cart however was little, tiny, a pure black pure metal contraption huge enough for one tiny person, but it had amplified sounds, and an amplified personage and what was more interesting was that the rails were on top so that its wheel carriage was hanging from its roof. The whole contraption, cart for one, was accompanied by a child’s song blurting out so loud that you could not hear what was audible.

“The crash cart, the cart of carts, the steroid of carts, is here to take you away, away, away you will slim into other worlds, you will hide behind the buttons of giants, you will skim the surface of milk waffles, and aid us in adding cherries to the supper chocolate sundae engine, and when we run out of cherries, which we will, you will help us push the last mile into the station. Hop, hop yourself and hop on board you all, we are on the cherry train, on the cherry train to the spiral, the black and white spiral awaits hurry on board for this train is ready to depart.” The music jostling the train and my ears, the clown pushed me onboard and locked the little black door tightly shut.

The cart as I tell you was no larger than I was, I felt like a man with a funny hat in a silent film, awkward and unaccountable. The cart whisked off at about ten miles per hour, a silence whisked in. Clouds started forming over the track, the cart began to feel, as indeed it was, too small for me. I could not make myself comfortable as an inch of something, bolts, rods, levers, pullies, wheels, springs would inch into me from all angles; my head barely cleared the metal ceiling, there were fortunately no windows so I could breath fine fresh air, but beyond that it was very claustrophobic and now I was in the plenitude of pure flight, on a track moving somewhere, but where?” I scratched any part of my body that I could scratch, I looked for moving parts on the cart, there were none, helpless, I ducked the clouds, frowning at parrots, seagulls and condors.

I don’t know why but at some point I started feeling comfortable when the thing sped up, wow, sped faster, I thought for sure it would come off the track, then it did a 360 track route, and swung downwards, I banged my head several times, my arms bruised too, I covered my eyes to prevent injury and then the thing flattened out after a remarkable screw entrance into a tunnel, and stopped; as if its passenger were not human the whole contraption swung and sprung open as if a dump truck, and thus unleashed me into the pavement. A sweet voice arrived over the intercom.

“You have arrived at the spiral tour, you do not need a ticket, you have been properly identified as our one millionth customer, your rides with us are free for the rest of your life and consecutive life times there after, please sit and wait, please sit and wait, we will be loading you into the spiral very soon, you need not get anxious, enjoy some drinks and food on us, don’t eat too much the spiral can make you a little dizzy, if you are pregnant or on your period we don’t recommend that you ride the spiral.”

I got up and scrubbed myself off while taking notice of a food stand and went right to it. A young lady, short, full of tightly straightened blond hair and dressed in a cheerleader outfit, came up to me before I could reach the counter; she was on roller skates, and made sure to halt me. “Don’t go to the bar sir, please, if you go there they don’t give me credit for your service, and if you tip while there I have to then share the tip.”

I was flustered but I leaned into the red stool that was nearest me, “Please may I have some water?”

“Oh is that all you want?”

“Yes please just a glass of water urgently.”

“But sir it doesn’t cost you anything, you are our one millionth customer and they will tip me based on your order, couldn’t you help me out, order more, I can take it home with me if you don’t want it, just help me out, its not going to cost you anything.”

Gasping for air. “Ok, Goldy, (the name on her name tag,) just order what you will, all I want is the glass of water.”

“No sir, I am not in this just for myself, you must order something for yourself, please.” Spitting her gum on the floor.

“Ok order me a hotdog and fries, and a glass of ripe cold water please.”

“Ok, that sounds better, I will add a couple of hamburgers for myself and my boyfriend, but don’t you tell anyone old man, I don’t want to lose my job over this.”

“Listen if you get me a glass of water then everything is fine, please the water.”

Giving me a sort of up and down dirty look for a skinny man. “Alright.”

Goldy came back with the glass of water and bags packed with hotdogs, fries and hamburgers, I left everything at the table and went to look at the sky, and that is when I realized it was night time. You could count every star in the night sky, amazing, it was a privilege, I got all moved by the scenery, the sky was sort of blue from the stars bleeding their light over it, and there were so many of them, and while marveling this a chorus of voices came to me.

“There he is boys, there is the millionth dollar customer of the mall of the Americas, this is a grand moment for us all.”

With that they started to shake my hand, while photographers snapped pictures of what were obviously company executives and company clowns with me.

I saw the president, a man that I identified himself as, “I am the president of the Great Mall of the Americas, it gives me great pleasure to be here with you tonight to witness you becoming the first of our spiral ride customers. Why I envy you, I wish I were going first.” He elbowed me, and as he said that the cameras snapped on furiously.

“Sir I think there has been some huge mistake I haven’t bought anything at your mall, I was just looking for my yellow truck and that is how I ended on the ninth floor.”

The fat, jolly, well dressed fellow smiled big eye, “We love modesty, that will sell better, you’re a good fellow, I admire you, sure fellows, this isn’t our million dollar customer, he is too modest for the title.”

They all laughed, clowns hugged me and forced me to dance with them, and then all the lights went off and a huge drum roll went off blaring an operatic voice, “The ride of rides, the spiral of spirals - spirals over us all, this is the moment, this is us, this is the time of the greatest mall of all time, and our one millionth customer initiates us into the blaring and spiraling infinity.”

The lights began to brighten quickening and flooding everything and the floor space opened up; Goldy rushed to pick up her food-to-go, and I backed up against a wall till I could make no half space any further; and suddenly the floor widened and the spiral opened and it was a corkscrew of black and white spinning wildly; I was all scared, and then the clown came up to me.

“Sir, you may cut the blue ribbon that unleashes the black and white corkscrew ride, unleash it please.” And with the oversized scissors in my hand, I cut the ribbon and a big orchestra blasted itself into the scenery, and dancers of every type scored every inch of floor space while trumpets blared.

The president then came up to me, and as if pointing a gun to my back escorted me to the entrance of the corkscrew, with a couple of fillies to charm me with their adolescent understatement. Still I hesitated, when they pushed me off.

I began yelling and yelling, and yelling and the spiral passed through me as if a time machine, the whole of my life was going through me, and there was nothing easy throughout the spiraling fall, until a big scarlet red bed began to seem obvious, and I landed on that huge cushion, and before me splattered cameras, signs hailing the millionth customer, and I, dazed couldn’t understand what it was all about.

Seconds later, the president and his executive clown landed near me and got me immediately off the red cushion bedding, sort of cleaned off my ruffled suit, and allowed the immensity of cameras to further pin us. Then a reporter came up to me, “How was it and what did you feel?”

“I felt dizzy, I don’t know, I felt lost, I felt spiraling out of control, I am surprised I am not hurt.”

And with that a roaring laugh came over those present. And the president grabbed the mike, and pointed at the ride, “You see it is just a spiral, it only takes you from the ninth floor to the first floor, and he felt totally out of control, ladies and gentlemen I give you the greatest mall of the Americas, the greatest mall in the land, where you are sure to feel out of control in a perfectly ordinary world.”

I fainted. Thinking about my yellow truck.

RC

A Scope of Sameness

I muse over the fact that at this very moment in fashion history millions of women the world over, in Japan, England, the entire North American continent and Africa too are all exposing their bellies to show off fashion sense. Oscar Wilde once remarked that fashion was so hideous that it had to be changed every six months. The showing off of your bellybutton trend has been with us at least some five years, though for all I know about fashion it could have ended a while back and we are now only witnessing its whiplash.

Bellybuttons are always interesting and fascinating, they are after all the thing that connected everyone of us, except perhaps Jesus Christ, Adam and Eve for they were a trio apparently conceived from a father or a hip; but the rest of us are all tied to mother through the umbilical chord and that harmony resonates through us all, and so when we see each others bellybuttons, well we know we are not Adam or Eve or Jesus but that we are all mammals.

Chickens don’t have bellybuttons, dinosaurs (are they mammals?) didn’t have bellybuttons, dolphins probably have belly buttons, I don’t really know that but I am not going to look it up, I should just be able to guess that they do. The matter is that anyone with a bellybutton could in theory participate in the bellybutton fashion show of oneness.

There is however one odd thing about fashion sense, African women and the women of India and Persia, have been exposing their bellybuttons for thousands of centuries so they are not so much participating in the fashion sense of the day; for a belly dancer is a cultural icon and her dress code has been defined as it has been for thousands of years; a genie doesn’t dress for the times. and so you could imagine a part of the world, for sure in India and Africa and Persia where exposing one’s bellybutton cannot be defined as fashion sense, instead it becomes an unconscious act, people from these places do not know that they are being fashionable because for them it isn’t fashion as much as it is tradition, and in order to be fashionable you have to be self-conscious.

Recently, democratic elections were permitted in Egypt, and wouldn’t you know it, of the seven possible candidates the one that they are most likely to elect is the same dictator they have had for decades, Mubarak. Not unlikely, in Russia, Vladimir Putin the head of state, a man that, according to the constitution cannot run for reelection, would undoubtedly win a democratic election even as he has acted to concentrate power and indeed rules as a benevolent dictator. And in my own country, Colombia, we have a democratically elected president, Mr. Uribe, who is actually more a dictator from the Harvard School of Business; and he is philosophically hopeful that a modified constitution will allow him an uninterrupted reign; for us Colombians only have this one man that can rule our country. At the periphery of Colombia is Venezuela where Hugo Chavez has been democratically elected to lead a Bolivarian revolution that will, if successful, make Uribe redundant. Chavez has facilitated his reign by making healthcare and education a national beneficence thus making himself popular enough to militaristically dictate over the affairs of his own country and its oil production.

You can see a pattern in politics much like you may see a pattern in fashion and the pattern here is that a people, democratically ruled, or ruled by dictators or kings, or parliaments are usually being ruled by the person or persons that they would have as their rulers!

Democratic states always pride themselves on the fact that they put their politicians up for popular nomination by their constituency. The assumption being that only a vote, a public and monitored vote will produce a true representative of a people. This is of course a fallacious assumption as we have seen throughout political history that countries, be they democratic, parliamentary, republican, dictatorial, militaristic and or monarchistic will invariably elect and promote similar political dynasties; and these dynasties tend to represent the “national character.”

The Russians have always liked absolutist tsars to rule them because the average Russian considers himself a serf and is his own worst enemy; as admirers of theological and monarchical theatrics they suffer the disease of blood relations and when it comes to war they love to bleed like the hemophiliacs that they are; but more they bleed because they believe that bloodletting heals the family tree.

South Americans have a tendency to love populist dictators or fatherly types because Latin men cannot bring themselves to leave their mothers and cease fearing their fathers; and Latin women have not learned to steal their boys from their mothers and become wives, but rather remain daddy’s little girl.

Italians like to be ruled by a mosaic of inconsistencies that are possessed by fanatic objectives.

The English have always liked their rulers to have higher aims with lower causes that can only be objectified by indifference and is superimposed by a brilliant disguise of witticisms.

Africans have always preferred despots, the African heart despises politics, its ear to the ground it prefers barbarian rule and barbarian law, it sublets politics to instinct and wild passions.

Unconsciously, Japan has never wanted its rulers to change, it always selects those that will forgo change, for the Japanese samurai is based on rigor, discipline, intensity of self domination, and subjugation; politically, Japan is a fetish.

The Chinese masses promote leaders that will isolate them from the rest of the world so as to acquire their one billionth of uniqueness from the rest of us. The Chinese also prefer leaders that are patient turtles in their acts, throughout Chinese history the thread of continuity is significant: a dominant aversion to foreigners, a certainty about the completeness of the Chinese universe, and as such a country and a people that can only be changed within, while promoting eons of change through spontaneous national-soul-catharses as mandated by their ambivalence towards individualism.

It is an inherent and natural tendency for national psyches to predetermine their leaders, regardless of the means to power, by a national and coherent consensus that rigorously mandates the character of the elected one.

The Bush-Republican dynasty of America is a consequence of a national psyche that was feeling insecure in the world, and seeks a rearguard action in a desperate attempt to bring a drastically changing world under a new hegemony. Bush has impressively trounced outmoded principles with callous disregard of the possible consequences; and we must be fair to him, the cold war was over, the treaties and the diplomatic mindsets that set international relations were open to discussion, Bush simply disbanded them. That which cannot be undone must be cut!

In a sense, the collective American psyche concluded that the world had changed dramatically, from the collapse of the soviet union forward, and that whatever came next no one could know, the only thing that you could do was tear everything apart and then let what must come from it rise as demanded and permitted by the new world order. Much to their credit Americans have always understood that change is something that you cannot control but that it is something that must be done; what defines the American psyche is their willingness to go into the unknown armed with only their wits about them. By selecting a president with no prejudice towards change, by electing a man that had no sense of history and ritual, they elected to realize that the modern world had changed and that they had to put a wrecking ball to the treaties and consensus of old and let what commeth may.

It takes a lot of guts to do that and Americans are admirable for their guts. By ball wrecking the past they fast forward the unknown future and have as their advantage the fact that they are always looking towards the horizon to solve all of their problems; thus they are able to perceive and indeed acquire the benefits of change much to the envy of the French who are a backward looking people, always thinking that that they can intellectualize the world and master its poetic passions in stanzas.

The French are fascinating, besides the Greeks of old no one has thought, much to their own detriment, more than the French. The French continually administer thought to their feelings, and their feelings are continually made prudish by it. Thus, in a remarkable fashion the French are fashionable but like all fashions their impact is severely handicapped by how fashionable it is. Of course a French leader has to write poems and novels, he has to have an intrusive understanding of history and needs to posses a certain effeminate disposability of character. In America these very traits would be admonished as the means of a charlatan to acquire distinction; and indeed to a large extent French history is a verbal attribute of marmalades through the promenade; still, as we shall see, these intricacies of a romanticized existence play their role in the world community.

The French have elected, and are so appointed, to be the guardians of past eccentricities, these only look like eccentricities to us now because they are adulterated by our modern worldview, in their time many of the traditions guarded by the French had their relevance. Today the wine industry has grown globally to a large extent because the French have lost control of the wine making process. But the traditions of wine making so fervently and bureaucratically guarded by the French wine makers have atoned the consistency and largely defined purpose and essence worldwide. This distinction implies that the French guard the historical presence and by doing so create the scope by which all other precedents for winemaking sift into the aging process.

It is then true that the meticulousness of winemaking, as done in France, with its infinite varieties and glorified plots would have never made a global en mass wine industry but it is also true that a global wine industry would not have been possible had it not been so.

In much the same manner we could judge how France elects its political framers, looks to set a precise precedent that while not the type to conquer the mindsets of the world, will instead be worldly. And that worldly aspect of it will undoubtedly effect, in unknown ways, how others frame their worldview or legal premise.

The wine industry is a cognoscenti reference to yet another industry that haplessly marches from tragedy to tragedy, with its own occasional fashion show of characters who trifle with the imagination: The airline industry.

Calling it the “airline industry” might be a misnomer as more money is made selling planes than is made flying passengers around the world; certainly Boeing and Airbus benefit greatly from the interesting fact that Airlines benefit from having two suppliers of Airplanes so as to reduce the risk of dependence upon one or the other; and so Boeing and Airbus are exemplars of a dual-monopoly with zero compromises. But still we talk about the “airline industry” because that is the mouth of the monster that feeds the travel industry from any angle: travel agencies, hoteliers, insurances, rental car agencies, plane manufactures, caterers, restaurateurs, conventioneers, eco hot spots, tropical islands, exotic getaways, theme parks, historical England, the royal family, Stonehenge, the pyramids, Bhutan, and the biggest rock in Australia all benefit first and foremost from the passenger-eating airline industry.

Yet even as all that is true, with all those dependencies the airline industry would, at first sight appear to be the worst run industry, the least profitable, the most strife-ridden by labor disputes, the most likely to suffer from prime material shortages or price fluctuations, and equally the most regulated of all industries and the least capable of price gouging its customers, as stiff competition sets a low profit margin, and high operating costs set stringently high load factors as the prerequisite to profitability.

In the final analysis the industry that most serves to riddle the world with immigrants and to bring businesses, governments and peoples closest together, the industry that shrinks the world continues to be an accountant’s nightmare. But then we must ask why doesn’t it just all go bankrupt and be done with it. Certainly the law of supply and demand would imply that there are far too many seats on airplanes if they are sold as such bargain rates that in the end the traveler is not paying the true cost of a ticket, upfront. That would all call for a logical free hand correction where maybe more airlines would go bankrupt, the prices could then rise, airplane seats per passenger capacity would fall, fewer people would afford travel but then the airline industry could be profitable and stay competitive.

Why doesn’t that happen? Is it because countries like Italy want to protect their airlines so that they are willing to subsidize their carriers into inferiority? Is it because bankruptcy laws in the United States are too liberal and kind to those companies that come under its protection? Is it because bankers and investors that finance the billions of dollars in airplane leases do not want to write off their losses and so they continue to renegotiate debt and reinvest hoping for a brighter day?

The truth of the airline industry is much less stark, and it is not the harbinger of bad news that the newspaper industry has made it out to be.

The airline industry isn’t an industry! It isn’t an industry because it cannot stand by itself, and more because it is not a principal in the acts of its progress. When airlines move people they always do it from a perspective of intermediaries, they are indeed what we ought call a “third-party-industry”; they are acting more as a go between than a causa célèbre or as prime mover of the thing itself. This is precisely why the airline industry does not really have high customer satisfaction and it is also why it doesn’t have high customer loyalty. You will change airlines faster than you would change toothpaste brands. You cannot feel any significant differences in airplanes, as a reason to fly this or that airline, for a modern Airbus or a modern Boeing airliner feel very much the same, first class is first class, but most of the rest of us are in cramped class, and the meals aren’t getting any better and the service is obviously not factor number one with the airlines.

If you want to know who cares about you, you just have to review their list of priorities, in the airline industry it is fuel cost, labor cost, maintenance cost, and cost per flight seat mile, then service and food, I might have the order wrong but service and food are certainly least important. So you might ask why doesn’t the airline industry care about you?

Well, don’t take it personally, the airline industry simply is not in the business of caring about you. It is in the business of moving you, your family, your friends, your business partners, your government officials, and the rest of the world’s peoples between to and fro; and this is very much like the transportation system of the slave trade, there aren’t any benefits to be gained in making you more comfortable and feeding you better, only more costs. To the airline industry the idea of you is an ephemeral idea, you exist as a piece of inventory that the longer you remain on the shelf the more you depreciate in value and thus the airline follows the old warehouse rule, first in first out and just in time inventory is what you are to them. When a plane lands gotta get you in there fast and out fast and the faster the better.

The harrowing narrowing of time between the time that the airline industry picks you up and delivers you to your destination has come under a theological constraint: the speed of sound. The speed of sound is a problem because airplanes that fly at the speed of sound make a lot of noise and people don’t like noisy neighbors. But there is a bigger constraint to it than just shockwaves, fast planes need to be small so they can slip through the air without insurmountable drag-coefficiency penalties. A larger body implies that you touch more of the atmosphere and the more you touch of the atmosphere, well, the more the atmosphere touches you, and anything that touches more costs more money to fly, that’s the drag of it.

Thus, unable to increase speed in order to make more flights within 24 hours, the next logical solution to moving more passengers in and out faster is to increase the size of the plane, fit more people in it and then you can move more people without using more planes, hence the new generation of jumbo jets that will be the equivalent of flying two planes at once, only at the cost of flying one plane, and using the flight bandwidth of just one giant plane.

But cram them and cram them has its limits too, and no one wants to think of the day that a super jumbo jet with 800 passengers crashes, but that little horror aside the growth of passengers will continue to rise for the foreseeable future so the solution of larger planes offers little hope that travel will actually get better for you and your luggage, though the differences between the two is indiscernible. Why it takes decades to expand an airport and decades to build new airplanes, and decades to understand migration and travel patterns and in decades to come oil is only going to get more expensive, so whatever the airline industry saves on consumption, through newer technologies, it will pay out as higher oil prices, due to increased demand; and that will subsume any cost benefit advantages.

You don’t get something for nothing, the airline industry is certainly proof of that and so you might say why are there airline executives even in that crazy industry, if you could be the CEO of a major airline, why would you want that headache when you could just as easily be the CEO of less cumbersome businesses? Certainly pilots love to fly and the intricacies of flying a jumbo jet have their crossword puzzle mesmerizing qualities; and certainly flight attendants love the benefits of being able to travel throughout the world and meeting interesting peoples; and for sure jet engine mechanics love drag racing; and we don’t know what to say about baggage handlers, or ticket attendants, there the glamour of the job is lost, but certainly there are plenty of people that work at an airline because they like what they do, but who would want to run an airline company, a thing three times removed from its consumer, a third-person’s perspective company?

The key to the riddle is very simple, the reason why the airline industry shows poor earnings every year, or when it does show a strong year, a rarity, it is usually one of low returns its because we measure companies on a fiscal yearly basis. This fiscal year measure works rather fine for chocolate makers and car manufactures and coal producers, as they are primal companies, thus such annual measure is more realizable than it is to measure an industry that is a third-party to everyone else’s actions; you could say it and it has been said, that the airline industry is there so that the plane makers can make airplanes; and you may extend that in any direction as it is equally true from any angle the airline industry is a third-party constituency to another industry: be it the restaurant or hotel industry or conventions or business industry etc.. the point is that as such, the basis by which we measure the airline industry should be fiscally generational, as tendencies in consumption and trends tend to be generational inflows, and thus an accurate listing of the genuine financials of a third-party type industry, as we now dare to define and claim the airline industry to be, should indicate a more precise and relevant measure of its sound or not business model. Executives that then work in this industry have not the capacity to see that there is no way to make an airline financially sound within the scope of a fiscal year but their myopia allows them to work for the industry.
In showing these various relationships some readers would argue that the same could said of the ground transport industry, or the shipping industry that are indeed basic third-party models, (and more industries such as pharmaceuticals which would seem to be fundamentally third-party-industries but that strangely also depend on ephemeral third party constructs, illnesses, diseases, viruses, governmental regulation, etc as catalysts for their own third party drug business to flourish and profit;¬¬¬) and I wouldn’t have any problem with those types of conclusions.

In brief: all types that depend on all types are fundamentally represented by their type.

RC

In & Of the Way I Write

I have just reviewed the contents of a bottle of Queen Anne whisky and there appear to be plenty enough to last me through this excerpt from a letter to Rosa. Yes I have started drinking whiskey, the logical progression of a distressed alcoholic, an organized life must follow patterns, that is what I say.

Lets take up the point of control, and let us try to view the universe through a different set of eyes than those afforded us by the five thinkers that control the modern world psyche. Instead suppose that I am right, and that we are attached to everything and everything is attached to us, and then suppose that our brains are not per say autonomous units that operate to divine logic but instead let us suppose that our brains are nothing more than antennae that pick up all sentient elements, be they experience or aesthetic principles, the latter being voided of experience as they are rather for the enjoyment of feeling the remarkable associations throughout the sentient geometry of all beings.

Recently Ravens have been caught in the act of being sneaky, calculating and forward thinking. A raven was spotted stealing from another raven as a way of avoiding doing work like figuring out where the pebble was. The other raven, (doing all the work, figuring out where the pebble was and then pressing the appropriate tray,) realized that he was being taken advantage of by the greater bully, and so tricked the bully into thinking that the pebble was in the place where it wasn’t, and while bully was at it the imaginative raven went on and ate the real pebble.

An article, on the subject, in the New York Times, went on to say how we might have to redefine the “Them and Us” way of thinking about the animal world if we keep on encountering behaviors that were once only attributed to humans.

If a raven may well be cunning then what realm of human experience isn’t covered by that, not much Id say. Day after day I watch Bush handle a reelection and I say that guy was cunning; then they tell me how he once owned a baseball team and I say that was cunning; and then he makes a war because he is a war president and I say there is a guy that sees opportunity when he sees it; and now with Katrina all over the map, the guy continues to con us all. And so suffice it to say that the difference between Bush and a Raven is that the Raven is less cunning which is to say more good.

Regardless of all that the raven is not cunning because he is smart with that bird brain of his, anymore than we can say that president Bush is smart because he has a little brain. However for once, W will help us advance the cause of humankind in much the same way that the Raven will too. Even though they do not have large brains both W and R can be effectively cunning because they tapped into the entire spectrum of sentient activity, they feel their surroundings by letting their essence bleed through and thus the surroundings bled back all the environmental information in a sort of communed feedback loop; where they can then use the gamut of human or sentient essence experience throughout their daily activity; this as if indeed they were all knowing or very smart indeed.

It is easier for us to think that our president is a very smart man, else why would he be our president, than it is for us to imagine that he is merely a puppet of a collective political agenda, of which he is merely a fundamental receptor.

The brain is really only a receptor that is in one form or another possessed by all sentient life forms, so that they may detect one another and thus share in each others experiences; anyone that uses their brain merely as a receptor is most likely to gain the greatest benefit as they have an unobstructed access to the community of sentient knowledge - that is all throughout the feeling environment.

It is only a matter of time before the false barrier of species will be broken by the communality of sentient creatures and the discovery of greedy ravens, gay pigeons and rapist dolphins is only a harbinger of the dilution of barriers between them and us.

When I think, actively think, I am performing a cataloging function, that is I am working to retrieve information so that in can be stored in the supra consciousness formulated by all sentient beings; this consciousness feeds and funnels that information to any one willing to receive it or indeed in need of it. If a monkey in Africa learns to use a stick, by using his brain method, this information is instantly available, if so desired or needed, to any other monkey or even human species throughout the world.

There are two types of writers, writers that write like me, that is merely to reflect the supra consciousness and then there are writers that write from a discovery point of view. Hemiway, Wilde and good old Victor Hugo write from the point of this is the world, this is the world, and they are securing that reality and feeding that data back to the supra consciousness. Writers like Holderlin, Blake, Rimbaud and that darling Correa write what is already in the supra consciousness. We are not so much investigators as we are assuming that the whole, that has come to be from the collection of its parts, has created an entire unknown entity, within the supra consciousness; it is that entity that we are trying to touch and represent.

As such, since I am reading what has already been written then I have no need to think as my brain is only a receptor and any thinking that I do on my part is merely interference.

All writers that are technical in nature do well to collect their thoughts and organize them and formulate them accordingly; but writers like me that touch the supreme aesthetic will do best to touch the aesthetic while trying to avoid the very bad feelings that that will bring into this here existence. As a writer of the aesthetic I am often in touch with very primal forces, which while not genuine to our supra consciousness still manage to impose a penalty, a pain upon me which often times causes me to want to curl into a corner and reconcile myself into the wall.

The individual actors of this world might well think me insane, they don’t see all the connections that I feel, they don’t recognize that back pain or migraines are actually caused by the misalignment of individuals with their sentient metrics. Nor do they realize that the reason why advance civilizations tend to gain more weight, become fatter, is because more sentient energy, from throughout the world, is centered upon then and thus causes them to increase in heft as they cannot unleash that energy fast enough.

Bush is precisely in need of exercising a lot as he has a lot of energy concentrated on him. Equally he has that collective energy to use in ample ways, without having to think, so that he may cruise the globe with the agenda of his nation and the agenda of the world.

RC

The Salsa Train

I was now on a train, a train to not exactly anywhere, I had bought my own caboose, two really, one for me and the wife and the other for the boys, my traveling companions, my partners, we sold our secret hot sauces at every train stop. People loved them, people waited for our chili train to return, they would stop working to visit with us, they would forget their children and chores, they say that the towns clocks would stop to give everyone a respite; I believe it, we make good chili salsa.

My wife, I better tell you about her now before I forget, she likes to clean a lot, she cleans all the time, these train carts get dirty a lot, they are dust collectors, as they move they pick up everything, from flies to traveling salesmen to lurid lovers, to secret agents, to dirty, dirty people, my wife cleans all the time; right now she is scrubbing the wooden floor, it will look pretty clean to me and to you after she is done, but not to her. I think she needs a kid, we don’t want to have children, or so we tell ourselves.

I am 62 now, the wife is 54, yeah I think she can still have children, but there are telling signs that we have endured and besides its just that on a train, well, what kind of life is that. We are always moving, I don’t know any other way to make a living than on this train, selling hot sauce, it’s a good ride, we don’t spend much money, we buy the ingredients at various ends of the continent and then while on the track we make it adding our secret touch, and there you have it, we circle the continent in an endless loop.

The train halts, the mountains cease to move backwards, the birds beat the train passing glances with an inching of pride, as the roaring of the diesel engines quiets into a loud humming perseverance of continuance. Diesel engines will run forever, something in them is bred for longevity, the workhorse of trade and industry are these engines, not those weaklings, maintenance heavy gasoline engines; our train is powered by a diesel and I always like to hear that roaring silence as silent as a diesel can get while we stop, the diesel keeps humming saying I am set to go on and on, it is not about speed, it is about endurance.

As our train eases into town you stop hearing the wind crossing from every direction, the squeaks and creaking noises disappear and instead you hear the children of Barington, a town full of life and yet of less than 8000 people, of which maybe thirty-five percent are children, we want to get them started early on our hot sauce train culture, and since they all love Emma, my wife, well that makes it all that much easier.

Emma comes to life when the children come up to her, they know she brings candy and trinkets from far away places that they will mostly never see, there are little plastic elephants smiling with their trunks way up in the air, and there are tigers made of wood which we pick up from a fellow in Obregon; a cold town with a hostile people with perhaps the best trinket maker in all of Asia, Stapho, or so he calls himself, I doubt he ever had a mother or a father but he was always a child and as such has always been his craft to make wooden lions and tigers and too many cobra snakes for my taste; still Obregon is a cold place, and there isn’t any heart there, the bandits are hardly welcoming though they eat our aji as raw chew for their teeth and we accept their money without questioning its origins; but we really enjoy Obregon because Stapho offers us his trinket craft, and his eyes get painfully happy when we tell him how the children, from far away places, react when we give them his trinkets. His brow lights up, you can see a fire sprinting from behind his old and dirty tunic, his bonny thorax heaves, and swirls of kisses reach us from his palms touching our faces in gratitude. This even as we don’t pay him but the bare minimum for it, Emma is a bargain shopper, she takes care of too many children and so she has to be careful with her spending, and besides that it would be rude to pay Stapho more than what the bandits pay him to make knifes of hardened tree stumps. It would be rude, or worse, unconscionable.

The kids love those toys, I keep some in our salsa kitchen, which is also where our bedroom is, they are soothing to the eye, like Stapho they are not looking for anything just a little appreciation perhaps, and that is not that hard to give to little creations of well crafted wood, with golden or green eyes, with dotted or striped bodies, and all in vivid primary colors, enchantingly simple.

Emma has a perfect memory of which kids she gave tigers to, or elephants or eagles and throughout the continent she remembers the names of each as if indeed they were all her children; which some would like to think themselves ours as dreams come to them of getting on our train and drifting off into those storied lands made up by Emma for them. These are not the lands we actually see, not those dry desserts, or those freezing mountains, nor the nutrient faulty lands, nor the hungry and poor folk that by far dominate our route, not the sting of cadavers occasionally badly disposed, not the disrobing hangings that happen along the way so as to warn the train travelers not to stop, no Emma leaves an imprint of a world full of marveling and merit, a world that everyone of the children will yearn to see until their elder years make them blind.

“No, no Yuri you already got a tiger, you show me your tiger or I will not give you anything, show it to me.”

Its sort of a game they play, she wont see Yuri for a few months to come and they just see each other long enough to argue that he would like to have two tigers while Emma would prefer that first all of the other children have tigers, and there are so many of them that we will subside before that happens.

But Yuri wants a second tiger, “My tiger madam is sad, very sad, he is lonely, he needs lady tiger to have children with and to marry and to get food for her.”

Emma looks askance “…get food for her?”

Yuri yells to make sure she hears above the roaring of the other children, “He is not eating he tells me he needs to be a father and a husband that he wants to hunt for someone else, he wants to feed his wife.”

Emma retains a small quiet because she wants to burst into laughter, but she holds back because she realizes that in some way Yuri is serious and serious in a way that could be painful to realize, she reconciles this and speaks in a gentle voice, “Well I think your green tiger better eat or there wont be much hope of him finding a wife, maybe on the next trip tiger lady will come with me, I will try to find her for you, but I cannot promise anything.”

With those words resonating in his mind, Yuri sort of despondently walks away and Emma calls him back, “Yuri.” He doesn’t turn around he is looking off at the distance, “Yuri!” He pauses and turns back, where Emma is right there to meet him hunkering down and hugging him, “You forgot your candy, its green like your tiger, its tiger food promise me you will eat it.”

Yuri retains his seriousness, “When will you return to us?”

“Oh it be a few months, maybe they will come faster,” she tries to hide the moisture in her eyes, “…you know the earth is shrinking Yuri, every year now the world is getting smaller, so we might return much sooner.”

He softens a little upon the news of a shrinking world. “I will eat the green candy then, but I will wait some days, just some days before I do.” And he grabbed the candy from her hands, pausing to feel with his eyes the pattern of her empty palm, as if a map of her whereabouts revealed itself to him, where he could be with her through some geography.

Emma watched Yuri fade into the sands of dry bush, she watched the skinny boy fading into the blades of grass, and from the station I was watching her; her long light grey skirt, picking up some sand, her white shirt reflecting the fragrance of the hot sun, her long burgundy-brown hair bundled into restraint, and still I kept on yelling that last sale. “Get your Aji now, wont be back for a while, get your Aji now, buy enough to last you till our next time…”

Only my words were drowning in the rubbing up sounds of a diesel engine roaring to go, the water tank was full, the conductor rang the air plummeting whistle three times fast, whole mechanics and hydraulics were throbbing through the dusty air, the children began to quiet in awe upon hearing the machine come to life; every time it was an amazing thing for them, they never got used to trains, they were other worldly, and we were other worldly too. Everyone started to clear out so as to make room for this huge black locomotive to engorge the scenery with its essence, even as it could not leave the tracks its immensity pounded itself throughout the surroundings engulfing everyone’s senses. Mirk, our conductor, felt all their attention laid upon him and this made him want to roar off even more, his kick was in arriving and in leaving, those two moments made him love his chu-chu train, in-between the stops and gos there was a lot of senile boredom.

When the train begun to rumble movement I realized that Emma was still hunkering down as if Yuri were still there, “Emma, Emma! The train, the train, we have to go. It is leaving Emma.”

My wife looked at me with her light blue eyes, without a word saying, “Yes I know darling, I am coming.”

And she did come, but first she had to swallow her insides whole.

RC

On in Intelligent Design

I think it is beyond reason how callous and uninviting the rational world has come to be.

I am an atheist but I could not possibly believe that I know that there isn’t a god, there simply isn’t one that I feel. I feel spirits and believe in spirits, but they are just as bad or good as any of us, and not particularly remarkable as they appear to want to deliver messages, have agendas and suffer from a want of association and some times a scary temperament.

If some one asked me to prove that there are spirits I would not be able to as they don’t do what I say, and that aside I don’t know how others might detect what I feel. Still they are there, they visit me often and more so lately.

Then I think about this Intelligent Design being taught in schools and I think to myself well I don’t really care. I am out of school and really when I was in school I only paid attention to the things that mattered to me, mostly girls, and beyond that I don’t remember much else so what harm there.

Intelligent Design might just be a clever way for the Faithful, the God fearing creatures to get their doctrine into secular academics. Clever, yes.

Why they might have found the loophole in the constitution for separation between church and state. Intelligent Design, as the title properly connotes, is a rational approach to faith; that is it concludes that god must be intelligent, i.e. not supernatural, just more intelligent than you and I, and so much so as to impress us all. He knows how to tie all those neurons and synapses and make them snap at just the right time so we can know math and math can know us. In other words the Intelligent Design proponents do not believe that God himself is a miracle but simply that he is very much like Einstein only ten billion, billion times more intelligent than E.

I don’t think it takes much rationalizing to come to the conclusion that if you rationalize a god and parachute him into the everyday doings of humanity that you will undoubtedly rationalize him out of faith and heart and miracle and religion will thus collapse. If it hasn’t already collapsed, as evidenced by the proponents of Intelligent Design which basically imply that god wasn’t an amazing love-faith-unity thing, but rather just a practical fellow applying the knowable laws and parameters of the universe to make things like humans. In other words if a god that is nothing like us cannot be proven to exist then a god that is everything like us can exist and must be provable and thus teachable.

If the evolutionists reasoned it out they would be extremely happy at this magnificent turn of events in their favor. For the problem for the empiricists of this world has been religions lack of faith in reason but now the faithful are trying to be reasonable they are saying that god has to be knowledgeable and intelligent, god is now a thinker type. As such he cannot be far from adopting logic and reason as his mondus operandis and eventually, if the faithful keep going this way, god too will believe in evolution.

So if I were the scientific community I would welcome this new worldview from the faithful. Yet we must ponder then why the evolutionists the scientists, the secular philosophers the open minded liberals, why do they mind so much if something is taught at school, specially something like Intelligent Design and the Bible and anything else like it? Why are they so scare of it? Why do they dedicate so much energy and time to lampooning in lacerating language the fact that creationist fervor wants to go back to school?

Schools have been the leading dogmatists for secular thought, and if religion wants to become secular, i.e. intelligent, then let it be so. Do scientists really think the brain is going to go backwards? Is logic so fragile that its dominance could be seeing its frightful enemy, religion, getting one leg up on it. Is not the fact that experiment after incoherent experiment continually prove beyond doubt that scientists are indeed right and correct about everything they think about the universe, not proof enough to allow them to feel secure enough so as not to fear giving a lollipop at the school playground to the faithful mongers?

I suppose that there are many things one can spend intelligence upon even defending one’s causes, but if the faithful are feeling so insecure that they want to go back to school, so as to prove themselves, by all means let them.

It was Christ that said we shall not walk alongside the sinful and tainted, hence the reason why I dropped out of school.


RC

Magdlen

Well, well a mystery poet, I liked that touch.

It is said that geniuses are dunces and I will now testify that even us normal folk are too; I don’t have the gift to recognize individual characteristics in a person as my mind has the tendency to be a super-modeler, thus in my head personal characteristics are blurred into only those that can be amassed in the giant gelatinous whole we call humanity.

So be it you will tell me when you tell me but hey I like the tickling you’ve done.

Yes! Yes! Afghan from Kifre was an amazing piece to write, I knew I had released something spectacular, something friction free, something that would just flow and flow unhindered by pretense or by style. You caught that well but you missed one part, it actually was more my ego and id than anything I have ever written, in a purer sense that was the real me writing without the subjugations of intensity, character and social demands that one feels one has to accomplish. And in this way you have it, it was liberating, liberating because it didn’t have my maleness, it didn’t have my thinker, it just had me feeling essence much as I might have felt as a child once, once before reality started pounding reality into me.

I would hope that you have stumbled into Lies, would love to hear what you think of that one. It is a mystery novel, I don’t normally write detective mysteries but my wife and my most adorable Rosa, love mysteries and so it was necessary to show them how simplistic that whole enterprise is.

You may find it at: http://www.lieslies.blogspot.com

Well mystery poet, share only what you must, that is what I say.

Besos
ricardo

“do you think you can kill a brother off so easily?” Magdlen

I don’t know if you are expressing a loose incredulity with the story as a whole, a story that is reaching to show that there are a disproportionate number of beginnings and endings within the context of a life, including the ending of a genuine friend equally ending as a sort of adopted brother, and then having a sort of kissed off euthanasia ending.

Either way let me answer the question but first let me admit that I have never killed or hacked a gopher to death much less a brother at least in the literal sense.

The Watcher’s is an attempt at dealing with the incessant disconnect that is surmounted by our incessant persistence at consistency and indeed connectivity. Life blinks all the time, when we blink our consciousness remains alert only because the brain shuts down so that we don’t notice incessant blinking. Perhaps the same thing happens when we hack a gopher, the very act shuts something off inside of us, perhaps the very same thing happens in the act of torture, perhaps we blink, perhaps our entire consciousness blinks; perhaps genocide is an act permissible by a humanity blinking away.

In The Watchers, our protagonist is dealing with a disassociation that I associate with blinking, he is trying to continue his research, he is figuring out how to continue his research while dealing with the ordeal that his research assistant, Dr Randall, has become a quadriplegic. In short he is looking the other way so as to ignore the obvious, Dr Randall is never going to recover, Dr Randall is like a brother to him and he doesn’t want to face that ending.

In my real life Magdlen, (sorry I don’t know your real name) I have suffered the ending of a great friend Antonio, a wonderful brother Gabriel and a phenomenal mother, Patricia; all endings that I didn’t want to face, I always hoped I would die first but then evidence shows that I had my part in their dying first.

I never knew Antonio in person as he was a pure theatric of an Internet friendship, we must have poured 600 letters between us but we never spoke a word or saw each other alive. In a sense the absence of presence made for a more promising friendship; which indeed it was. One day however I had to fly to Minneapolis Minnesota to see his corpse, I should have never gone, that put an unwanted period in our semantics.

My brother died of AIDS, I suppose I know how pestilence and famine destroyed civilizations, AIDS making bed with my brother brought our entire family to a stand still. In a sense I went a little crazy when my brother took his own life, because he could not sit in a bed anymore; when he called to say goodbye I didn’t answer the phone. That made a runon on our semantics.

You think by that point I would have learnt how to say goodbye but I hadn’t. Mother suffered a stroke and by doing so ended my time in America; but as I came to be with her and to sooth some of her ills there was still the challenge of being her son, and I never overcame that; we argued a lot more than either expected to argue, and then when her time was near, she could sense that she would have no further to go with me. She stopped taking her medicine, she told me so, I did nothing to encourage her to resume taking it, I might have helped killed her with the absence of my urgings.

In some ways I guess I think it is easy to kill a brother but not as easy as having something to do with killing him by way of everyday simple life associations. Maybe a mother too may be killed in this assimilated manner of indifference.

In The Watchers our protagonist is looking at Dr Randall’s wife and he realizes that she is his connectivity to Randall and that Randall must be let go by those that love him; and thus then assumes the only kind and irresponsible and irrational act, he kisses Nancy and ends the blinking slightly off key.

Perhaps it was a terrorist act, perhaps it was an act of extreme kindness, perhaps it was an acknowledgement of the feelings had by someone that had not ended.

Ricardo

The Watchers

The nascent epidemiology of the constant assumes that there are many things in between and no endings and no beginnings as no one wants to accept the responsibility for being the end and no one wants to assume control of the sort that is allotted to beginnings. I was working on precisely these principles, my job as Chief Scientist for The Arribo Group was to establish where there was complete disruption in continuity, by implication where beginnings collapse to allow other beginnings and how endings manifest themselves so as to evidence point to point structures.

It is an arcane physics, dealing with such plausible things as the geometry of space-time within such esotericism as the quantification of dimensional border crossings and metaphysical causality; these latter encompassed the quintessence of my research: at what point does reality merge with the universe? where does the border of genuine manifestations accomplish a release from the ether-ephemeral into material realities that embody cause and effect realities?

To simplify all that in more legal framework, I think it was Hegel that noted that reality was rational and what was rational was real. Which of course implies that anything that you can explain is real and my concern is why would something bother to cascade into real, that is into the known and explainable? At the very least it seemed boring, still there was a complication: You could not easily explain, much less understand, humans, and thus the premise of my research: If we are real what border had we crossed to become so, and why were we so incomprehensible? That is of course if we dare to assume that Hegel was right and you extend the obvious assumption that we are the only rational animal, in essence the most real and thus the one that must understand things so as to make them real…a.k.a. The Watchers!

The extreme of my research was bordered by where the soul enters the essence of self, character structures and, last, the cumbersome body. While my wife Anthelene thought I was rather brilliant for tackling such research, the truth was that studying the border interactions of existence did not match having to understand the essence of anything; I was merely dealing with the interactions between dimensional energies that stirred each other into varying alchemies. Perhaps because I didn't think it so difficult, I thought I could approach the problem with some reasonable axioms, and thus I was able to acquire the necessary grants to pass my days thinking of such matters. In the end the evidence would fall on the lap of the less theoretical physicists the experimenters, a task that I found as mundane as it is unnecessary. Once I worked out a theory I moved on to the next thing; it wasn't that I was lazy it was that I understood that once I thought something it was immediately in the collective memory.

Dr. Randall was my associate. I was now waiting for him to miraculously recover from a severe injury he acquired while mountain climbing some iced pinnacle. Don't know what it is about theoretical physicists but they love nature so much that they like to go here and there in expensive climbing boots and a little rope and handhold rocks. Dr Randall, we called him Rand, saved the all from being pronounced and that in itself was part of my study, why Rand and Randall had an unnatural border against their natural borders. Randall was a whole name, Rand had unnatural borders; thought it could in itself also be a whole and complete name, but for some reason, at least for Dr Randall, the acquisition of a Rand became a subcategory, an alias. The beginning, that is origin, priori, preposition were left untouched but the finale had been collapsed. Why would the latter be allowed by our way of thinking about language and not the collapse of beginnings? Why was the border on the side of beginnings harder to collapse than the collapsing of border endings?

Even in heads and tails the evidence was substantial, a lizard can easily lose its tail and survive the experience but not its head. Further evidence pointed to some interesting conjectures, the sum distortions and breakups of last names throughout history pointed to a breakage pattern that anointed a sort of rigidity towards the beginnings of first, middle and last names. This as if beginnings naturally were the controlling center of gravity for names and even words in general. You could see the phonics of names surviving, anchored only by their capital first letter. Randall could dissolve into an extreme such as Rhealdal and still be held together through an arcane conjecture held dismissively through the ages by just the letter "R". This because in some origin of lexicons you could find everything that ever commenced with the letter "R"; or we could dilute it further and still get the same from everything that sounded like an AHR and how it once, for the sake of contriteness, collapsed to rapid R.

Suppositions such as those above have a natural tendency to extend themselves into sub-categorical suppositions but there is a border to that as well; for some reason beginnings define endings and thus conclude borders. AHR or R is limited by the supposition of its very existence. Thus the reason, outside of linearity, why the letters Q and L exist is some mindful border crossing that the letter R or the sound AHR cannot and will not violate. In other words, an alphabet is a sign that the vocal universe has not a single letter that encompasses and collapses all. A monk humming the cosmic ohm is always missing something; perhaps ohm stretches as far as vocalistics may stretch but one may conclude that the breadth of ohm cannot define a universal entity or infinity. At best one could suppose, from the phonics of ohm, that its border, at least at one end away from the uttering monk, is slippery but yet finite.

These junctions are easily observable in letters as they form words but would be more difficult to observe in Randall's soul and body connection. Yet we could assume that the very same thing that occurred in the happenstance of a name could be transposed and observed in the essence and personification of Dr Randall.

My job was not only to establish the link in the gravity that existed starting with the R in Randall and the maximum allowed discombobulation of its phonetics so as to determine the maximum strength of its possessive R, but equally to determine what held Randall the scientist tied to reality even as he has suffered a severe accident, where he was held together by cast body irons and bolts, where he might be wishing himself dead, and yet he was holding himself together, talking to friends, relatives and his wife Nancy through a series of absences of noise and a presence of blinks that amounted to a blinking dependant Morse code.

There was also the border that once existed between Nancy and Randall that was now being held and violated by an obviously strong attractive force, which allowed for her to sit next to him for hours on end taking dictation from his ever blinking eyes; where he even mastered independent asynchronous blinking and could dictate two letters at the same time by dislocating the synchronicity of both eyelids. Nancy had learned to interpret and count both unsynchronized blinks simultaneously to deduce letter counts. And so now there had been a new borderless relationship between husband and wife and so possessively nondescript that they had reinvented their form of communication rather than let go of each other, proving how insurmountable their pairing pairs had become.

As you might well imagine upon hearing of Dr Randall's unfortunate fall into quadriplegics I panicked thinking that his contribution to our research would be held off indefinitely, and thus pounced us a major set back; we had after all done good work together and I considered him a valuable contributor. But then, in a most miraculous of fashions, it turned out that he was indeed performing a greater contribution now as a quadriplegic; from his ambulatory helplessness I began to realize the order of borders.

Nancy was what I would consider an incredibly strong willed woman; she was very active in her own career, an astronomer by trade. I never truly bothered to understand what she did but apparently she was always trying in this or that way to prove that the big bang didn't happen, and rather that the universe as a whole could not be pigeonholed into a singularity of space and time so absolute that it weighed crushing gravities of matter into irreparable insignificance; only to one day cause a vomiting of space-time now called the big bang. Nancy would feistily argue that this singularity was too optimal, too organized, too well thought out and thus too rational to explain the universe. In a sense Nancy thought, and she was also an expert on Quantum, that the universe was irrational, i.e. singularly borderless and using Hegel's inflexible ruler, mostly not real or worse realizable.

The problem that I had with Nancy's dinner party chimes was that if she was correct then our reality was merely some coincidental happening and thus it could not be described in any coherent manner. The implications were, to summarize it, that knowledge could not be known, that the epistemology of being was dead from the get go, in short, and it did offer some form of comfort for a researcher in my plight, in short the thing that had the shortest length, the lowest possible density, the quickest beginning and an ending not even plank length was the understanding of being. The understanding of being was inherently so unstable that it would collapse as soon as it was possible to know it, which of course it implied that you could not very much experiment with it. And if these things were true it would certainly explain why in scientific endeavors we scientists always seem to succeed at the expense of our ancestors, where killing off Newtonian and Alchemistic theories bring about new beginnings each with a shorter lifespan than the previous one; this latter for as we understand things a lot faster now they can perish faster still.

This indefatigable premise of the rapid extinction of ideas does not in any way explain why ideas continue to be born at such a feverish rate, perhaps it is because they aren't able to mature so they keep on reproducing themselves like viruses. Thus, being unable to understand is an endemic fertile nutrient for ideas. Of course I never paid much attention to Nancy at our dinner gatherings; I laughed a lot at her solemn deconstruction project of neutering the big bang. Why Anthelene and I would ponder that Nancy was actually thinking herself out of existence, nullifying herself with her premise and thus we thought it a bit unhealthy and disproportionately unnatural. As Anthelene put it, "We should be glad she is one of a kind."

All that changed in me when the honorable Dr Diana Folleck, a radical feminist and, unfortunately for me, the head of our university, gave a speech about Dr Brodeck's struggle against the male-dominated Big Bang community. According to the undistinguished Diana, a lover of all things masculine except men, Dr Nancy Brodeck was formulating a theory that would single-handedly redefine the universe into a mostly girls school diatribe where the expletive man-logic could be spliced into a cognitive feminine.

I would like to tell you that Randal and I listened to her speech but we didn't really, we were merely in attendance to assure that our grants were granted favorable sapphire eyes; but Rand then noted something piquant, "It is possible to see here how Folleck is pinching the ends of male and female divides, if she at once sees no need for man, it has to be because, as it is evident, she has incorporated maleness into herself; in fact she is a Unitarian of singularities, if all men were dead they would be dead outside of her but not within."

And perhaps due to my disdain for all feminists, when Rand put it that way it hit me that Nancy was dead on right, the singularity was not self-sustainable, but because it was a singularity it could not acknowledge anything outside of itself. That was the defining factor in border crossings. Sustainability had a mandated, an inward-looking reality, inwardness could be rational and individualistic. Eureka.

Bow to that; now that I didn't have Rand around to explain the Nancy logics I had it in me to realize that I had to eliminate the border of humor that I had created between Nancy and I.

I spent many days at the hospital. I didn't have the patience to communicate with Rand through his incessant blinking process, so our intermediary was always Nancy, she had pretty much abandoned her research, she had cancelled all her conferences, and with that I started to see the receding borders of her existence. She had to entrench in order to repeal what was happening in her innermost life, her social and professional borders were largely constructs of her relationship to herself and to Randall, and now she had not the energies to overextend her orbits. Anthelene attempted to take her away on weekend trips to our house on the lake, the lake and the nature trails that she adored had no longer the tug to pull her towards them, in a sense Anthelene and I were watching Dr Nancy Brodeck implode into a singularity that her entire science denied. I as the observer could see the definition of borders through entire scales of civilization; gradually Nancy and Anthelene became distant from one another, Nancy's dedication was now to blink with her husband.

I walked into the Randalls’ room, the machines keeping his reality alive pronouncing border crossing violations, nurses and doctors pumping their knowledge to sustain a reality called Randall, a reality that would not surrender, that kept dictating insights into our research, a reality that would pause when Randall would finally flicker off and end the cross border association with the machines that even depended on him to keep themselves plugged in.

I have worked in my endeavors with many brilliant researchers, Rand was a good researcher but he was not brilliant, he was warm and human and a man of verse, he would tell me what it was like to climb those mountains, to burn his toes with grafting ice, he would see the occasional eagle space itself through thin skies while determining him inadmissible prey; there was a cross-less border, though Randall hypothesized that if he fell to his death, the eagle could cross that border before the snow would cross it and harden him.

I think the only mountains that he hadn't trounced were the highest mountains, he climbed only to touch the earth. In some ways, I always felt that Rand was helping me cross the borders from the theoretical towards the real, and I enjoyed him very much, perhaps I even loved him as one might a brother one never had, and now that brother, Randall, was in this sterilized hospital room, watching his wife from some inner corner somewhere far away, longing perhaps to kiss her thin impregnable lips.

I sat next to Nancy and did what any good brother might have done, I breached the gap between her lips and mine, it must have lasted less than did the big bang. And the machines and diodes fluttered hyperactive heart and brain activity from Dr Randall's breath and blood, alarms went off.

Nancy's faced blushed with anger and incomprehension, nurses and doctors rushing in, "pulse too rapid, blood pressure too high, patient spastic,…" the room fully alive and everyone wondering what was happening to the patient that had been relatively stable for the past four months, except for two people that were outside the room even as they were inside; Nancy and I, she staring furiously at me, I simply looking at her in some form of outside community with Randall, we were inside the three of us, only seconds later, Randall escaped definition.

Head nurse shouts, "doctor, I have no pulse."

A long flat line after a brother's last mountain climb.


Ricardo

the runaway idea of Shakespeare

I am a little surprised to hear that Scott reads science fiction, I wouldn’t have expected it, nor did I expect that he would still be reading Shakespeare. Science Fiction itself is a genre that I think can be compared to video games; SF readers and Video Game players are stuck in some type of a mental loop that they do not seem to recognize; there are a finite number of alien civilizations and a finite number of obstacles and enemies. SF in particular always reconstructs the same theme, which could be summarized as: rational is a practical tool that should not be taken to extremes, technology will save the universe and in the future emotions will serve feelings in a jar. By an large most science fiction entails a pseudo compromise of three things, feelings, biology and technology and they are not much more brilliant than that; science fiction landscapes sustain the same political realities that we perceive today, the same rivalries, the same economic difficulties and similar apocalyptic endeavors.

And then Scott makes the mental leap which few with any frame of reference would make by noting that Shakespeare is science fiction, and that trounces the mind. Is it possible? I take another sip of my cup of coffee. The thought comes like a two ton piece of iron 30 feet long, four feet wide and four inches thick. It doesn’t fit. I take another sip of coffee.

I always have said that I am bored by Shakespeare, I wish we would get over him and move on. But then I am also bored by Freud and Tchaikovsky and Darwin. I just want to move on, I mean 80 decades of psychoanalysis ought to be enough to include two orbits of repetition! Two centuries of evolution and we have not evolved beyond it! Why then evolution itself must be the best argument against evolution.

I think ideas some times are like lollypops, only after a while a lollipop melts away and ideas unfortunately don’t come with self destruct tags, and there is the folly of it. As a result some ideas permeate civilizations well beyond their times and prevent other more brilliant ideas, (read brilliant ideas like mine,) and thus ideas suffer from very long tails that squash everything.

Someone less brilliant might say, “But Ricardo doesn’t the fact that the idea of evolution has lasted almost two centuries, doesn’t that mean that it is fertile and rich with insight and thus humanity’s intellect continues to mine it?”

No! Absolutely no! An idea is only fertile the first quarter of its life expectancy. Psychoanalysis like Relativity were both exhausted of prime material by the 1970s; there has been no significant revelation made by either camp since the 1980s killed all lines of thought and turned the world into pure action adventure. According to ideal idea life expectancies, having successfully survived adolescence both psychoanalysis and relativity should die out within the next fifty years. Psychoanalysis gets a little longer life expectancy because it is not so much a science as it is an expression of sedentary angst.

“Bur Sir Ricardo how do you know the quarter fertile life of an idea without knowing when it died?”

It is a good question but not a wise or principled one. There is no need to suspect that ideas have reached the level of half life principles that Radioactivity has championed. Radioactivity has proven beyond all doubt that it is the most substantive singular idea that has ever existed. All things appear to have to come to terms with radiation, and the idea that cockroaches will survive an atomic bomb has obviously not been tested. If I am correct, and there is no reason nor contemporary evidence that disproves this, then radioactivity can also help us date ideas, in much the same way that carbon dating allows us to date mummies.

The reason for using radioactivity its because it is pervasive, all encompassing and thus it is an absolute. And as any department of weights and measures will tell you, rulers have to be absolute! Now having defined the ruler where do we start measuring? This is not as foolish a question as it sounds, it is subject to two possible interpretations but fortunately no more than that and so there is 50/50 chance that we will get it right and if not we can change our minds and still get it right anyways.

Our starting points have to be when the human species came to be or when ideas came to be within the human species? We have to decide if ideas were born with the inception of homo sapiens or if ideas were born after homo sapiens? That is, is having an idea synonymous with homo sapient existence or is an idea a parasite mandating a precursor homo sapient?

Like I’ve said, we may go either way but there is another problem, that is no one knows when humans really came into existence so we don’t know when idea & homo sapiens could have arisen. Rumor has it that it was about 300 thousand years ago. That is not a long time and it assumes that we have all the evidence and well of course we don’t for much of what we know about our origins is pure science fiction with a doctoral endeavor as its only supporting structure.

Yet I think we may ascertain one thing, humans have not been around for more than a million years and I am very comfortable with that large margin for error. A million years ago there weren’t a lot things here, and so a million years ago some chemical biology could have risen to create homo sapiens, or god could have said, “Let there be Adam and Eve.” (That must have been his wisest move, naming things, baptism and cataloguing go hand in hand.) Or some aliens might have germinated the planet a mere million years ago. So there you have it, starting with a none to precise number we have been kind and added longevity and resistance and a long time of ignorance to the human species.

A starting point is everything, we humans work a lot on beginnings and endings and so we are fortunate that it is only a million years ago; 100 thousand to the tenth power, 333 thousand multiplied by 3 plus a little more, or half a million twice, a million is nothing really!

I think you are getting the picture mi Rosa, Rosa mia, Rosa Rosa, if ideas & homo sapiens were born at the same time then the extreme extremists mostess fertile period for ideas can only be 25% of that existence! Then it stands to reason that all ideas must absolutely start to die after a theoretical maximum of 250 thousand years! That is an incredible discovery for it will allow us to measure if an idea has gotten away with humanity. That permits us to know if an idea is becoming too autonomous from us humans and thus dangerous to the human species.

Suppose for instance that the idea of there being an omnipotent being was an idea that considered the god-idea more important than the human species, to the point that the idea God would ask humanity to sacrifice itself for the god-idea. Well with our new criteria for the life expectancy of ideas we could readily conclude that such an idea was getting out of hand and, barring there being a Galileo with another idea to challenge it for the hearts and minds of our peoples, then such an idea might have to be put to death! And if peoples wouldn’t want to let go of it, even as they knew it to be bad for them, we could instead give them a lollipop until it melts.

Or suppose for instance that there was a nullifying point for evolutionary theory, a point at which humanity ceases to perfect itself through evolution because the environment is no longer a challenge; if there is no conflict with your surroundings then evolution might nullify itself. Where there is no need to adapt why therefore Darwin? One can easily imagine humanity creating such an artificial environment, an environment so subservient to humanity that any evolution could only be a consequence of manipulation. I don’t know if manipulation has been considered as a factor in evolutionary theory but I damn well doubted. The point here being that ideas can and may indeed die of natural causes, i.e. the environment is no longer favorable, or in catastrophes, i.e. unexpectedly turning into vulgar British comedy.

But let us continue with the difficulty or not of our measure. The fact of the matter is that the assumption that ideas are born with homo sapiens is wrong. What if ideas were born before homo sapiens? Why we happen to know that Homo Habilis used tools, and to me you have to have the idea to use tools, maybe that is not the same as making tools but if you use a stick to get at some delicious red ants you are in the idea, dark chocolate ideas cannot be far away. Only Habilis wasn’t apparently very successful, indeed in the evolutionary racetrack it dropped out of the race. But that doesn’t mean that we can avoid the heavy to lift idea: Is it possible that ideas originated before homo sapiens?

Minds cannot hold such things, it is easy to think that we are the uppermost intelligent of life forms, that doesn’t require any heavy lifting, but the idea that the human species was preconceived by an idea, a superlative at that, that is not so easily graspable and so I grapple with it. Shit, it is easy to say physical evidence easily implies that we are less than a million years old as a species but how do you date the origins of idea if such by reason of causation were to predate the advent of Milesian aquatics and even homo sapiens?

I now realize that we are a little dizzy from where we started, for now there is a third question so it is no longer a 50/50 proposition of error. Idea before humanity, Idea after humanity or Idea and humanity at the same time? That is the question.

Which in a round about way gets us back to Shakespeare, and that might actually help us to answer the question as Shakespearean thought has been one of the most repetitive ideas of all time to the point where it can even build theaters, actors, writers, wealth, and dramas in real life as a matter of pure consequence. This is a clear and unspoiled sign of a mature idea, The Shakespearian idea is a mature idea because it builds things, immature ideas, that is to say ideas that are still fertile cannot build anything because they haven’t even constructed themselves.

And I think here we have finally gotten a hold of something solid, at least when it comes to ideas, which as you have witness is not an easy thing to do. And that solid thing is that ideas that are mature build genuine and solid things! Shakespeare today is an industry, it edifies London and Londoners and indeed civilization; acting or directing a Shakespearian play is often the crux of a fine career; and quoting Shakespeare a sign of self inflicted cultural kudos. More important you don’t have to think Shakespeare any more, everyone knows Shakespearian thought, even the commonest of the commonest, the lowliest of the lowliest knows something or other about the much ado about Shakespeare.

And because it is an all pervasive idea it makes it very easy to lavish and subsidize it, and to recreate more of the idea anew until this idea enters every aspect of our existence. And thus I now bleakly realize what a logical transition it was for Scott to conclude that Shakespeare is science fiction. Far from being a brilliant insight it is rather a logical foretelling of what is inevitable, there will be a Quantumitized Hamlet; a Hamlet that at once is and isn’t, a hamlet in 11 stringing dimensions that uses a tractor-bean to bring about the murderers of his father, a Hamlet that will use 3D glasses to see his adulterous mother, a Hamlet that rages through the universe in a hyper-navi-usv squeaking atoms from his rage; and finally a Hamlet that realizes how insignificant he is after overreaching the frailty of his vanities. And in this final episode we can see Hamlet put a finite point in the universe, where he inks with his own blood the stained idea that ideas are before man and will be so after man.

A ruler cannot measure an object larger than itself.

RC

CATFISH

All of a long knife, waiting there to take on this thing, where did we get started? Oh yeah I was one of the boys, well not really one of them, we grew up together and now we were all graduated, well I was sort of graduated, very close, only a couple of more months of some classes that I had wanted to take so as to feel overly academic.

Matt, Huston and I, we were the inseparable trio though my not being athletic had always somehow jeopardized the genuine equilibrium of our friendships.

Today we were sitting here on the couch at Mrs. Monties house, it was at Mrs. Monties that we grew up, she had three lovely daughters, and all six of us grew up in this house playing with Cocker Spaniel Albert, so named after Albert Einstein, Mrs. Monties liked men like Einstein, distant that is, neutered like Albert; she herself had had three daughters already when she moved into our neighborhood, some how it wasn’t necessary to ask about a father or a husband. The girls, Miniach, Ann and Lundi never mentioned a father, when they got here they were all fine and complete without one. Mrs. Monties invited the local college professors over for many an engaging conversation on the topics of the day but we never saw any love interest, we sort of accepted her autodidactic marriage.

Today, we were all going to celebrate the graduates together, a nice Sunday lunch awaited us all at Marley’s. Marley’s was as expensive as it was delicious; Mrs. Monties was treating us to a celebration of the mostly successful conclusion of our studies. Miniach, Ann and Lundi were still getting ready while Mrs. Monties was tidying up the house, something she liked to do a lot. Me and the boys were just sitting in the family room, overlooking a fine green lawn, ignoring the occasional bird or Albert’s barking and simply talking about our assured future successes with one exception; Huston, he had graduated a year earlier, as was his right as he was a year older than Matt and I, which was why he was already on his first year out in the workforce, a successful investment banking something.

I never took the time to understand what it was that Huston did, it wasn’t that he didn’t explain it to us several times, but perhaps it was how he explained it. Always in terms of his salary, why just today he had confessed, “…this next year alone I could end up making a quarter of a million dollars and I don’t know what I do to earn all that money.”

Yeah, I kind of agreed with that, I don’t know what anyone could possibly do to earn that kind of money. Matt was in awe of the amount and he was asking for pointers on how to land a job with Huston’s firm in New York; only the matter was that Huston didn’t seem near helping him.

“Well Matt, its like this,” Hands gesturing unknown modalities, “…to get you in I think is easy but do you really want to be in investment banking? I mean you have to consider how much of a fanatic you are, these guys that you could be working with are highly accelerated types, they are always eating vitamin A, its daily tennis, that fast, that strenuous and that confusing in scoring, and so you want to give it some thought because it is not for everyone.”

Fortunately Matt was a sensitive fellow but not an intuitive one and so he was undaunted, he would crash into that wall as he put it himself in a less robust fashion: “Well I would like to give it a try, my major was after all in Economics so I am suited for the role at least academically, and I intend to pursue a masters. Why I could fly down next week and maybe you could set up some meetings for me.” Yes, that was the Matt I knew, perfectly tuned to nothing but himself and his unknown objective; he was a homing pigeon he would fly anywhere he thought you wanted him to fly as long as it wasn’t towards himself.

Then there was me, in-between the laughter and the naive eternality of our friendship I had nothing more in common with these boys than my neighborhood; a neighborhood that grows over time because you live in it and you see the same faces over and over again and so they conscript themselves as part of your essence, there in your mental catalog they all successfully flutter. Miniach, Ann, Lundi, Matt, Huston, Mrs. Monties; and even types like Joe the elder statements of the neighborhood, having amply proven himself the helper of the neighborhood, Joe was Matt’s father, always ready to come over and cut your lawn help fix a leaky faucet. And then there was The Admiral.

The admiral was the go to guy for advice, he always knew what to do in any situation, he would always reasonably settle any fights between us boys. I will never forget the time that Huston and Matt dragged me through the cement in a fit of communed rage over possession of a silly water gun. My knees all bruised up and somehow we ended at the presence of the admiral. He quickly bandaged my knees up nicely, this after pouring aching disinfectant and then joining us via an all encompassing group hug, my tears were moot, I toss them off my face with a backhand and started smiling with the boys; heck we were memories for life times.

“Yoohoo boys, I need one of you to do me a favor before we leave for Marley’s.” From the deep end of the hallway, a hallway that tunneled in grayness in-between the well lighted family room to the equally well lighted dining room, there stood lacquered red hair Mrs. Monties. Her ricocheting smile, her firm grasp of the crown feathered duster, “Well which one of you boys is going to do me this favor?” The girls lined up behind her, and from there studiously analyzed us boys, their eyes were focusing on me, their smiles were focusing on me, their thoughts were pinpointed, “Jake he looks so noble…” “Why look how handsome he looks with those curls…” “…Yes he will do it for you mommy…” And that was that, Matt and Huston went to toss around a football while Mrs. Monties channeled herself from one end of the hallway to administer instructions.

Her fingers flirting through my curls, “They are so cute.” While I recollected how much free work I had nicely done for this woman, and here I was again. “All you need to do is take this here knife and go get me the catfish that is at The Admirals…” Her requests were always flirting with happiness, “…he promised me fresh fish and I just want it scaled and fillet so I can refrigerated before we leave for lunch.” She pauses as if to think with her index finger poking her cheek, “Why maybe we could even have it for supper. Yes.”

There was no question mark about the task at hand, again the neighborhood sort of builds itself into you and you are no longer just yourself, you are owned by the neighborhood it is so much you that it cannot leave you alone. I was all dressed up in olive trousers, a lightly yellow shirt and a mostly blue Cashmere sweater; and I despised with all intensity the smell of fish and fish in a bone and the scales of a fish more so, thus my fainted refusal. “But I will get all dirty just scaling the fish Mrs. Monties, how about I do it after lunch?”

“Oh nonsense Jake I will get you an old raincoat that I have had forever and it doesn’t matter if it gets dirty and then all you have to do is wash your hands afterwards and that will be that.” Hearing nothing else she fast tracked to the coat closet and in animated fast-forward returned with a brown raincoat and helped me put it on or just put it on me. The she handed me a large meat cutting knife and with that I went across the street, in a tight raincoat on a bright sunny day, with a knife in hand to get a catfish from the admiralty.

The admiral owned a sailboat and he was known for his good will gestures of bringing fish from his wild sea outings for the neighbors. I knocked at the door. “Jake how are you son? Come right on in.”

I entered at there was a beer drinking, spent the night here gang all over the house.

“Hey ballast and sailors say hello to Jake.”

They all valiantly championed off their hangovers “Hello Jake, Hello comrade.”

A nice and jolly old lady even launched a compliment my way, “Sure wishing I were a little younger right now.”

The admiral as master of ceremonies interjected, “Helda don’t be so pessimistic maybe the lad likes them good old oldies.”

The gang fornicated all over that joke and the admiral molested himself to guide me down the hallway into a smelly bathroom, that had a huge fish tank and thus he left me. “There it is boy you take that nice one there to Mrs. Monties, and tell her I kept it all lively fresh for her.”

There was this huge catfish glistening before me, giving me that non stare that is the gift of fish to give. Swimming back and forth in this aquarium that was only twice his size, thus no sooner had he gone in a straight line that he had to turn around by making slight undulations in the water, and so he kept on doing this before the man in the raincoat with the knife.

I went back without the fish, Mrs. Monties opened the door or her door was always open in our neighborhood, I threw the knife on the table while saying, “I cant do it Mrs. Monties.” And with that I let out a blistering sigh of relief.

“What do you mean Jake! Why I will have none of that, you boys cannot be disrespectful to me, you go back and get me that fish, you haven’t grown up so much that you can just be rude to someone that has cared for you all your life.” She took the knife and placed it in my hand and said. “Now go on and get me the silly fish and hurry we best be getting to Morley’s quickly.” Her resoluteness was indefatigable.

I stormed back into the admirals house, trying not to think about fish, trying not to think about anything, reflection was my problem, I was always reflecting upon things and that is why I couldn’t really do anything. My major was philosophy, I didn’t know how to scale a fish, I hypothesize about it, you just rasp the knife’s edge against the scales and they will readily come off, after that you slice the fish in half, and then cull off the fillet from the skeleton. Cannot be that hard. After scaling over the admirals gang and reaching the bathroom and facing the aquarium, and catfish yet again I realized that catfish was still alive; this wasn’t just about cleaning catfish, catfish had to be killed first. I sat on the toilet seat and reflected upon my situation.

The tank that stank had to have a limited supply of oxygen right? I didn’t know how gills worked but I had heard that fish may suffocate in water, that they can exhaust an entire seacoast of oxygen; however this catfish was the size of half of my arm and longer by three to four inches, he didn’t seem set to die of natural causes. I thought, if I could just hold him out of the water for a few seconds and if so he would drown from the over exposure to fresh air and that would do it. That was it.

Fishing his slimy body from the small aquarium was a cinch, all I then had to do was just allow enough time, catfish out of the water and he would collapse. I reached in and elevated catfish with my arms into the air as if I were offering him to the gods; and the thing was heavy maybe five or six pounds of catfish there and he hastened to a furious rush of flapping, and in the wet floor we lost our balance and catfish fell on top off me; and pretty soon we were both splashing all over the wet floor, as I was trying to grab him and he seemed not to want me to grab him, though I finally did and raised myself to my feet and without thinking I threw him back into the fish tank! Fuck! I couldn’t do it.

The raincoat had repelled water but not the stank from the tank, and I walked over to Mrs. Monties, and climbed over the fence, instead of going through the gate, as I was now more adrenalin driven, and I opened the welcoming door and there were all of them sitting there, waiting for me, and the chorus was thunderous, “We are all starving here waiting for you Mr. Jake!”

Mrs. Monties started on me. “What is going on Jake? For Christ sake it is just a little fish inst it?”

“Yes Mrs. Monties, I am sorry for taking so long but its just that the fish is not dead…” Gesturing with my hands and arms, “…it is a large and well alive catfish!”

“Well of course it is alive, it is kept fresh that way that is why I gave you the knife all you have to do is cut its head off!” With that she walked around the coffee table while frustratingly grabbing her head.

Matt, who could not stand to see any woman in any form of misery, “Mrs. Monties don’t worry I will go get the fish, why Huston will help me, we will bring it right back and clean it, it will only take us fifteen to twenty minutes at most, count on us.”

Her frustrated eyes raised towards the kind young man, and then she marched over to me, cringing. “Look that is very nice of Matt to offer but you are already wearing the coat and it will just take you a little bit of effort to get this done fast, there is no need for anyone else to get dirty here, please Jake!”

The admiral with a sleepy hussy on his lap gave me a reassuring drunkard’s smile, “Back again Jake?” I didn’t respond, there was nothing to say, I just walked over to the bathroom angry and despondently determined.

Catfish was back to normal, back to that indifferent stare, he didn’t seem to hold a grudge or any other kind of feeling, he was swimming in his forced oval circuit. I grabbed him again raising my arms, and tried hard to ignore everything that I could think, “How old is this fish? What seas has it swam? Has it had a chance to spawn? Will it know it was me that killed him? Does he have a memory of my neighborhood?” stuff like that, and while I was ignoring all those thoughts the fish drowned in my hands from all the fresh air.

I sat on the toilet and put him on my lap. I kind of knew this fish now. I looked all around the bathroom and in the empty aquarium but I didn’t see his ghost anywhere. I took the knife and dutifully cut his head off, the blood running throughout my fingers and palms, almost crawling up my arms, his head fell to the tile floor. I scrubbed the scales off his body or peeled his skin and it all seemed just like I had imagined, some parts of this lump of fish required a little more elbow grease but they all mostly came off. Until all I had on me was now catfish fillets.

I got up and threw them fillets back into the aquarium. I then went back to the expectant Mrs. Monties and friends, “Hey I wont be joining you guys for lunch today.” And with that I walked off to enjoy a nice sunny day’s walk, still wearing my stank.

RC

Green Grass Underneath My Feet

There was all lush of green grasses of every variety tickling away at my feet, you could feel the texture of each leaf of grass and the different hues did tickle you in a different way, more was the pleasure that I felt as the sole of my feet, crushing released the perfumed aroma of the grass and even made a sound rush for my ears that was admonished by the persistent repercussions of fresh grass underneath my feet; I wasn’t over one leaf of grass long enough to feel its pain just long enough to feel its pleasure.

The boys had thought I was crazy for taking off my military issued boots but me I have to feel things for it is very important to touch everything around me. My rank and name, Lieutenant Duvaye from the fifth infantry division, I was charged with a troop of thirty men, our task was to scout and destroy combatant positions behind enemy lines. There were now only 3 of us left and if you wanted to be optimistic and counted me as one of my men then there were four of us left.

Now we were walking, running, crawling, swimming, hurting, itching, scratching, hungry and hunting our way back to base through a mine field. Just a few minutes back Juan Rodriguez, to give a dead man a name, had found one of the land mines before him it had been William Redford White. Juanito was dead when we got to him there was only time to rip his name tags off or else his grim reaper would have yanked them from us as the only thing left to take back to the nether. William’s managed to send a message to his mom and five sisters, if we make it back I will find them and give them his last words; he loved them all and wanted them to take care of his 3 little girls and “…teach them right from wrong.” More or less he died saying, “right from wrong” feverishly so.

After Juanito bought it I decided I would take my boots off so as to better feel where I was stepping, don’t know why the boys thought themselves better off with boots for protection you cant feel a goddamn thing with all that army leather. I was pleasantly surprised by the wet grass, I could feel this land and its peoples they had beautiful grass. I had heard that they made lemon grass soup and other grass soups and I never had tried that stuff, grass just doesn’t seem that appetizing even in soup that can take many things but now I do feel that I have been missing something why just touching this grass between my toes feels genuinely delectable. After a while my palette was envious so I broke a grass leaf right to its roots, smelled the dirt, even the dirt had nice overtones but when I bit into the greenery, freshness everywhere the sky expanded a little, I think.

“Hey Lt how is that grass feeling under your feet?” Motioned Corporal Ralph Madden, he was our insensitive freak, he was still alive because he had thrown his dead buddy’s body on top of a grenade; during the act we all searched him with crazed eyes, his only reply, “Don’t fucking stare at me the asshole was dead already!” As he said that he sort of got wet around the eyes but we didn’t buy it, his voice dimming repetition, “Fucking asshole was dead already.” We all knew they were lovers and maybe he was just then making sure he was dead for in battle our ability to judge is severely hampered.

“Yeah isn’t that fufu grass cutting your pretty little feet sir?” Mustered Private First Class Robert Treble. Robert was always trying to fit in, he liked war or this war for sure and he wanted to be accepted, he took risks why he even saved a couple of our boys only so they could die later anyway, but his silver star for bravery was secured. Rescuing in war zones is just like fame always a temporary mission if you stay here long enough death finds you.

Robert could get all the medals he was heat seeking but none of them would ever sever his low self esteem and so he would always repeat anything anyone said to make sure that he was in line.

“Well you boys might not buy this but those boots are going to get you killed while my freshly wet toes are going to get my ass back home. You just better follow me or you aren’t going to make it out of here alive.”

Sailor, my second in command had some kind of a name we didn’t remember, he was just called Sailor because he had this love affair with boats we don’t know why this fine gunnery sergeant didn’t join the navy instead. Here he was in our filthy army where more men get and got killed, where everything goes rotten and dead wrong and while he was climbing mountains and crawling through marshes and barbed wire he kept this book of ships and their stats in his backpack. He would browse it again and again during cease fire actions or before a good night’s sleep; the navy was sure missing out on a fine and disciplined sergeant. He however was firmly with us and now noting, “Seems to me like our Lt is missing the boat upstairs.”

The other boys laughed while I stopped and turned around, “Missing the boat meaning? Meaning what Sergeant Sailor?”

“I don’t know as much as you Lieutenant Sir, I didn’t go to all those nice strategic command colleges but a man that takes his boots off in a full blown combat zone is getting too touchy feely for my nerves.”

The boys appeared to concur, PFC Treble inked on, “touchy feely.”

And Corporal Madden, “Sir, if you don’t mind I think we would all feel better if our commander were wearing his boots things are too fragile around these parts, how about it Lt Sir!” He finished that with a nice disciplined iced salute.

“Listen to me we have been losing man after man after man, the manual tells you how to dig out land mines but it doesn’t tell you where they are and the difference that metal and five thousand pellets make against my grass steeped feet as opposed to my bayonet which is metal against metal; hell I don’t expect you fools to understand all that just follow on my lead.”

Corporal Madden harked back, “It doesn’t seem right.”

Sailor loaded it up, “Sir on behalf of the men I propose that we split up, you go your way and we will go ours.”

I silently retraced my way back towards Sailor and I put my wet moist lips right to his ear, “On behalf of what men Sailor Sergeant? Haven’t you noticed you have managed to lose 27 men? haven’t you noticed that the troop has faded! So on behalf of what men do you speak? Corporal Madden is a fucking homo and PFC Treble is a fucking Star fighter or are you meaning to speak on behalf of yourself and using the lot to secure your own doubted beliefs?!”

Sergeant Sailor stood there solidly firm we were in the middle of a mine field, the landscape was flat and green where any enemy would be able to sniper pick us one by one from a mile away. The boys sort of got the message that I was still their leader but as I started to back out Sailor reiterated his stance. “Sir, with all due respect I think you could be suffering from malaria, jungle fever or just plain war but it may actually be better if you handed command of the troop to me.”

I snapped back, “Sergeant you want to relieve me of command because I took my boots off! Because I am trying something different instead of continuing to lose men to the same foolish tactic!”

At attention, sergeant Sailor held his position, “Sir I think we should put it to a vote besides right now as you say and as I see it we don’t have much of a troop so maybe we can put it to a vote.”

He didn’t want to call it a vote of confidence but that’s precisely what it was and frankly I didn’t care. “Alright then lets put it to a vote…” I Yelling, “Corporal Madden what is your vote me or Sergeant Sailor?!”

Madden sort of bowed his head looking at the grass and at my feet, “I think maybe it would be good if Sergeant Sailor were in charge for just a little while.”

I looked towards PFC Treble but I might have guessed his reply, “Yes sir it could be for just a little while, say a couple of hours and then you could have command back sir.”

I looked at Sailor, “So this is it, this is how it unfolds?…” swiftly taking out my revolver and pointing it at Sergeant’s temple, “You stupid idiots you are under military command you are not allowed to create your own hierarchy here, now put your military bodies on the ground now! On the ground now fuck-heads!”

“Lt. what are you doing put that weapon down.” Said Sergeant Sailor.

“I tell you what I am doing skipper I am offering to shoot you if what is left of the troop and you included doesn’t disarm immediately and hit the deck now!”

Corporal Madden jerked in, “Sir we cannot disarm in the middle of a fire zone.”

I fired a round that whisked past his right ear. “Me thinks that you can disarm fact is I frankly recommend that you disarm!”

PFC Robert Treble undoing his weapons belt, “I think you might be losing it Lt but I will listen to you I got no other choice.”

Lowering my tone, “Thank you private Treble, thank you.”

The three of them were there on the ground when a fighter jet formation flew overhead probably on a bombing mission. “You see those planes up there those are my planes and this is my war and you are my, my troop;…” (punctuating my chest) “…assigned to me by direct order of the commander and chief, the fucking president of our country and you cannot take that lightly men! You have to believe in the duty of command and the order of discipline, you will not turn to little nannies in the middle of a fire zone. You understand what I am saying men?!”

All three responded in alert unison. “Yes sir!”

“I cant hear you or maybe it is that you don’t mean it, louder please!”

Their voices belching into the sky. “Yes sir! yes sir!”

I took my helmet off, it was itching and it weighed too much some day they would make these helmets out of carbon fiber but only after a billion soldiers wore this fatiguing laughing metal thorns. “Well I don’t think you understand men because if you men understood the rule of command we wouldn’t be in this situation right now would we?!”

Their voices responded, “No sir we wouldn’t be in this situation now.”

I looked straight into the sun, I had seen napalm blowing up entire villages and peoples the sun was dimmed by comparison, my eyes were now sun trained. “Yeap boys this is how things start going wrong people don’t follow orders, people want to do their own thing, discipline, discipline is the order of the day and the only possible order of battle and you boys are tempted to violate that rule! Now I must make that right, you boys put me in a bad situation and I cannot allow a violation of our chain of command, I have to stop everything here and now so it doesn’t epidemically rise through the ranks.”

Corporal Madden showing a little fright, “Sir, we understand now let us just continue to march on!”

Treble reinforcing Madden, “Yes sir, lets just continue to march home, we are only a day or two away from home.”

Sailor Sergeant, “Sir we would all gladly take our boots off if that would put things right, right men?”

Resounding optimism from the men, “Yes sir” “Yes sir!” and with that they started to motion so as to take their boots off.

I aimed the gun barrel at Robert and yelled, “Not so fast private,” then I went with gun in hand towards Corporal Madden, “not so fast funny boy,” and then I pointed it straight at Sailor Sergeant. “You would take your boots off for me, I like that yeah I like that.” And with that I carelessly but willingly pulled the trigger and Sailor bought it on the forehead. The boys stiffened up as if they gave them selves for dead as well.

“Don’t worry boys you just take off those boots for we are going home, walking but we are going home.”

It was so much quieter now that the entire troop and I could feel the pretty green grass.

RC

magdlen

gracias por tus palabras

rc

Aghan from Kifre

It was in a desert town but only desert from the lack of water and vegetation, peoples were everywhere, bringing fruits from far away places, eating scrub soup or munching on dry white breads that filled the stomach till food could be had. The mud houses rose from the sand as if meant to be there, perhaps like the sand they came and went with the desert winds, but they seemed still enough for most days to last long enough for a visitor to think them from far back. Next to the dwellings a plaza arose where the noisy traders sold their goods for pennies on the cheap enough to feed the camels on the trips back to the cities, where they would gather yet another load and do so six times per year with more reliability than the length of centuries.

The desert town hailed from another time, it was placed there built through a long banished oasis of water and vegetation, only now it was held together by custom, this custom was called Kifre. Some poets had written about Kifre but they remained largely unknown perhaps because of the subject matter, romantics didn’t travel this far, the traders were not given to repeating verse, they were more likely to drink vast quantities of tea and to watch the night retreat expecting tomorrow to happen simply because Kifre had happened. These nomads inhabited Kifre year around, for them the end of the world didn’t exist, they were after all at one of its outposts; there wasn’t much need for singing, small verbal gestures accompanied by comprised hand movements would settle any arguments or title deeds; exchanges were brief for, “the desert sand gets into the mouth that talks.”

I came upon Kifre because of a dark haired woman Aghan, that had her sixty something years on her and still she brought me here with more spirit than a camel; we walked, it took us eight days of walking through the night, during the day we would huddle under our garments or bury ourselves under an unusual rock formation, our water finely measured lasted only six days, we were able to make seven with our urine, but the eighth was only survived by the possibility of reaching Kifre.

Aghan had been young around the time that Kifre became a town of small renown because it would hide those that had made themselves an ill reputation in the city; in Kifre you could hide, you didn’t need documents, if you just sat there the sun would roll over you and no one would care. One day you could die, things would eat you up, things that could not be seen by the naked eye, you didn’t have time to rot, everything silently went into something, you didn’t even rot.

The nomads welcomed any new comer that brought little things they could amuse themselves with, matches were popular, a box of matches always a good gift; and then there was something else in Kifre, the Kifre women were renowned for their inability to feel, something that certain men in the city found fascinating. Aghan was one of those women that made trips to the city to display her unmovable emotions, she could do anything to herself and not feel it, she could do anything to you and not hurt, she was a show, a private and a public show, she didn’t really know what it all meant or where all the amusement was, some wealthy men paid her to insult them with grasping tools, others would ask her to do painful things to herself; Aghan from Kifre, didn’t care, she just did the things, it was like a camel carrying its load, it was a thing to do, you didn’t complain, you didn’t ask why, you did it, it didn’t matter who or what it was all for.

She recounted some rabid sex tales and spoke as one that had never known any earthly pleasures and her eyes were of stone; her hands were brittle from age, at one time she had been a handsome woman, strong features lingered in her corrugated wrinkles. She agreed to bring me to the town, I was your average curious student traveling abroad looking not so much for adventure but for something that would mark my life, perhaps I would write about the Kifre nomads, perhaps I would study their history and perform the first official translation of their muted language, a grant could be had for such things, I was finishing grad school and I knew I didn’t want to work a normal day, Kifre offered such possibility.

Aghan made the contrast even more interesting, a nomad desert dweller catering to the cruel insensitivity only possible in a city, where everything was fun and everything was doable and one had to keep an open mind enough to think everything and anything; nomads in Kifre thought of nothing in particular and only did a few things a day, and every month that went by they moved and did a little less and less until they too stood still like their desert habitat.

After quenching our thirst slowly, “the water is always to be drunk slow,” Aghan told, “drink the water fast and you don’t get its spirit” her hands gesturing throughout her throat and mouth, after quenching our thirst slowly we went to the plaza. The nomad enclave could have no more than 250 inhabitants, I asked for a specific number but Aghan didn’t offer facts, “many men, many women, no children.” Distressed I retorted, “No children?” her gentle but coarse reply, “They come from all around here, Kifre is fed by all those that need some time away,” while her eyes were looking around and to the sky, “those that need some time away come here.” I supposed that if I bunched those around the plaza into groupings of thirty, there were probably over 400 people around the place, I marveled a nomad dwelling constantly drawing its population from without, keeping them within because they needed to get away from something. I kept thinking how I could feed myself on such a lot with a grant.

We walked around it was obvious that I was seen as a stranger but in a different way, they put their heads down so as not to look at me, only to surreptitiously search me with cavernous eyes, and it was in all done in a way that noted that they knew I wasn’t getting away from anything; they were saying, “you are passing through here don’t touch us, we are not to be with you, you are not to be with us, let him pass, don’t touch him, let him pass.” Nomads don’t like to become attached to things that aren’t going to be around, the sand always has representatives, I didn’t, that is the way they saw me.

Aghan they saw differently, she was from here, when she walked by they wouldn’t look at her, they would simply show an ineptitude at getting out of her way, she could stumble into them and they very well acted as if no one had touched them; she was another one of them like the sand she was in their nostrils and in their ears, her essence stroke them with a gentleness, a rugged gentleness that even when she wasn’t here, when she bailed to the city, the sands remembered her and put her in their throats and ears.

I was amazed to see a plaza with nothing really much to sell, a plaza empty of fish or meats, a plaza where the only thing you saw was mostly men talking to men, something was being traded, a nut perhaps, or some frown, or a mental image of some place gone, or simply the whiff of the long unwashed fellow and his garments; the receptions were brief, they spent more time saying nothing, more time saying nothing.

At that lapsing moment I stumbled into something, a cart, a cart being pulled by a skinny bearded fellow, I stumbled into him, he begun muttering in a foreign tongue that I could not assimilate, perplexed I reached for Aghan and she explained, “you have broken his cart.” I briskly replied, “He bumped into me!” and then to be clear, “He bumped into me and how could I break anything in a wooden cart.”

Aghan translated, the skinny fellow pointed to a place right near where the handles used to pull the cart joined the major cargo area; there was a sort of box like structure, no more than twelve by twelve inches square, made of light colored wood, and it had six rows, yes I remember clearly six grooved rows and strangely water was flowing from all of them, except two that were smashed; the wood chippings made it obvious that water would not run through damaged grooves, and this fellow was touching the damage and looking at me as if I had killed his first born.

Aghan noted that there was indeed damage, “I don’t think you were watching where you were going, and he rightly says that you could change direction a lot easier than a two wheel cart and a skinny man.”

Aghan proceeded to demonstrate with her hands, “You rammed here like this, and the Hijon does not take pressure, smashed, you see you smashed it.” Her hands dangling off into the sand as if that explained fallen treasures of water.

Where I sternly replied, “The Hijon, what is a Hijon? What are you talking about?”

Both Aghan and the man pointed at the box, now I understood the box was the Hijon.

Aghan explained, “There are only three Hijons in the whole of Kifre and this one had the most fountains before you smashed it.”

“But I didn’t smash it!”

“A man is culpable of his deeds, when you walk on the sand you step on many creatures and you kill them, and that is you killing them or not?”

She said it so forcefully I was coerced into agreement, “Well yes I am the one that killed them but it is unwilling I don’t see them, I step on them and I cannot help it as I have to walk the desert, and when I do that has unwanted consequences.”

“Well maybe those creatures don’t call upon you but here in Kifre, the Hijons are the primary source of our water, we depend upon them, and you have smashed this one, and we must call upon you to pay attention to your deeds.”

“Your only source of water?”

“Yes, watch?”

And the skinny fellow begun to show how the whole thing created water out of thin air, the wooden square somehow melted the humidified water in the air, and it rained through and from the groves and wow, I could not believe them till I drank the drips of drops of fresh flowing water.

“Then you see now you must pay for the damages.”

Endearing myself to the travesty, “How can I do that?”

“You must buy it from this man, you have stolen his livelihood, you must buy it to make good of the wrong you’ve done.”

“How much does he want for it?” I was thinking that no amount would be too much.

“He wants 100 Pebbles of Gold, but I think that is too much offer him 30 and settle for forty.”

And this I did and then man and Aghan both raised their hands towards the sky and rendered these words, “Just is the man that pays for his deeds.”

Finishing her assistance with the transaction Aghan noted she had to return to her mud-hut, where then among the dunes she disappeared. I stayed with the Hijon, only it ceased pouring water; I am here two days going long, and still the smashed grooves nor the good ones dribble water from the air; I move it here and there, there were no instructions and again it is just a piece of wood with groves on it, and no water yet.

RC

The Betrayals

I used to buy large doses of Marijuana from my dear friend Sergio. Sergio was this big dark Mexican with a jolly personality, very charming, whenever he was asked: “Do you know where I can get some pot?” He would respond: “I don’t know, every one always asks me that, but I don’t do that stuff, and I don’t know where to get it.” That was that. He was my dealer for four or five deals in a row. I would walk to his house, we would sit and chat about petty laughable things, always wondering when we would both move back to our home countries, to eat the good grub our mothers had raised us with. Papas chorreadas for me, Chile Reñeno for him, hay dios mio, Lengua lo mejor para mi. We talked about the pretty girls, and about our jobs, and there were things that we would never talk about, such as horoscopes, tortillas yes, carnitas more, horoscopes never.

Sergio came over to my apartment on the day that I got a new puppy. I call it an apartment because I want to give it a sense of home, a multidimensional cuddling space, but it was a studio with no kitchen, ok man, it was a room. A white but dirty bed-sheet covered the paint stained window, the bed-sheet poorly sustained by two nails, you could not pull it to the sides, if I wanted sun, I had to tie it in a centering knot, effectively splitting sunlight, a trick that is both fun and easy to reproduce, you can try it if you want, splitting sunlight. The room was white too, my mattress cover was white, there was a pee yellow covering all that whiteness, my dingy closet had all the clothes hanging on the floor, clean clothes chaotically tangling with my dirty clothes. Everything about me smelled like it was almost clean, I took a shower everyday, I don’t remember where, the room did not have a shower, there must have been a public bathroom for my pee.

Puppy was light brown, short fat, promising to grow into one big hunk of shit producing affection. His favorite thing was to pee on me, every time he jumped on me it was flying golden showers. I always manifested my distaste for his proclivity, but the urine would fade to the point where I could never really smell it, I knew it was all over my clothes because I had seen his ejection but not because I could discern the smell. Urine doesn’t spot dark clothes, I always wear dark clothes because bright colors dish out too much energy, they act too happy, they attract attention from the wrong kinds of people, I don’t like energetic beings, I like quiet beings, beings that drift through the human condition without being too happy and without being to obvious. I mean my character was made to have a puppy that had bladder control problems.

When I was a boy of seven I was still peeing my pants, wetting my bed, it was a terribly embarrassing situation, but I was afraid to ask where the restroom was, I was very shy, the fear of asking was insurmountable it was easier to pee my pants. When I was in bed it was not fear, it was laziness, I did not want to get up; I felt my bladder gloating about its disposition, urging me release, and I never bothered to restrain it; it seemed so wrong, animals in the wild pee anywhere, I was in bed, warming myself up with my pee.

My parents saw it as a problem specially because my very nice bed was one of those that had clothes drawers underneath, the mattress became a sort of filtering system which would strain my urine to its highest contaminant purity right into our clothes drawer. I never had children perhaps because I was afraid of having to deal with a child that would just pee anywhere, it is not an easy thing to have such a child. I presume that I would have been less prone to it if I had been more aware of the world around me, but I was a hermit child, I had invisible play friends all over the house, I was always kept busy by them, so I never had time for the humans.

Later in life my parents told me that I used to love to play with my shit, that I would dig my hands into it and cover my face with feces and even eat the stuff, creative baby was me, mierda on canvas, seen that many times but I was just more accurate in detail than most artists. I don’t remember those eschatological love sessions, today I mostly don’t like shit, I don’t get a thrill out of going to the restroom, and I don’t like the fact that we are held hostage by our waste disposal system. I suffer a phobia for diarrhea, something I am afflicted with every time that I return to Colombia. The last time I peed my pants was at a movie with Audrey, it was a sort of tangled date, I did not want to go to the restroom, finally I had to let it go, she wanted to touch my leg, I was coldly distant, I was fourteen.

Sergio sat on the head of the bed and I at the other end, playing with puppy while my bag of pot laid next to my plant Cassandra, a semi suicidal hypochondriac that I fed water regularly, we talked about everything, and the different women in my life would affect her in different ways, Some would sicken her, dry her, cause her to go dormant on me, a few others would make her feel well but never too well. Cassandra liked my general indifferences, we were both indifferent to each other, we were the married couple that slept in separate rooms, never talked much, or if so only about our liquids coffee and water, no toast, neither one of us liked breakfasts, and she was so indifferent that she only ate once a week, I liked that about her, I was so indifferent that sometimes I would not feed her for weeks, then she would launch herself into one of those incessantly bothersome sessions “oh no I am dying, my green leaves now pale yellow, my stems suffocated so much that even water can not be absorbed, I am shutting down, I am going to die, you can not keep me alive, I never asked you for anything, I never used that much of the house, I stayed with you through all your drinking, I never accused you of being abusive or an alcoholic like all the others, and still you never cared about me, you know I love classical music and yet you never play it for me anymore, and ever since you been seeing that black bitch, who refuses to water me, you don’t care if I die!” Cassandra, who could believe her, but she just went on like that, and I would ignore her until she had managed to yellow herself dead pale, much of her stem turning a hideously dark brownish color, and then her guilt driven campaign would get to me, I would talk to her a little, play some salsa music to try to lighten her morbid composition, I take her many dead leafs off and then feed them to her, she did not seem to object to the perverse cannibalism of self, every leaf I placed in her soil disappeared, I never asked her about it, it was a subject that neither of us wanted to address; we respected each other that much, and so slowly she would come back to life, and be green as green, again.

There was a bang at the door, bang, “police open up! This is the police open up!” I froze, the door busted itself open, three pigs, I hate cops, always have, I could never be a woman that loves men in uniform, they sicken me. This buffalo smelling insensitive monster in boots, stands in front of me, my sitting face dead smack centered on his penile personality, musk mustache, I am smelling the primordial history of the universe, this guy was a find, frozen in the primordial urine of cells that would eventually make up donkeys, pigs, some would make it to cattle, this guy had made it to buffalo, there was a lot of hair all over his body, bushes full, and the smell of stampede was all over him. Such a virgin thinker, pristine raw emotions what a treasure.

I was dead frozen, fear freezes me, my little brother once got hit by a school bus, I froze, rather than rush to help him, I froze in the moment. He gets hit by that bus many times through my life. I don’t believe is symbolism because if I did the torture would be more immense. The buffalo pig grabs my bag of pot and puts it to my face and talks in a broken language which I discern as an interrogation to ascertain his certainty, “is this yours!” Let me see we are in my studio apartment home, I don’t get a community rate on my rent, I decide not to answer, maybe I am still frozen but it seems to be a decision that I have made, not to answer. His boots hold him steady, he grabs me by the shoulders and turns me around, fuck, something feels gross about this, I know he is fucking me, but I would never be able to prove it, around these parts only physical evidence counts, judges are buffalo too.

Then Sergio, who has been silent up to this moment speaks: “I told you I don’t do that shit and I don’t sell that shit, but everyone is always asking me if I know where they can get it or if I sell it just because I am a dark Mexican, but I don’t do that shit.” Sergio had turned me in to the cops, he was a good guy, he did not do that shit. He sold me some shit, he sold me to the cops to clear himself for good. He dint’s do that shit.

I had to leave my puppy in the apartment all by himself, with Cassandra, she will not feed him, she doesn’t care, with any luck he might shower her.

ricardo

Fingers In The Right Top Drawer

After some time in the penitentiary, I went back to my studio home but it was gone, a guy wearing a real T-shirt, the type with no sleeves, never understood why they went out of style, anyway he answered the door, displaying his armpit’s generous head of hair, he was probably Italian, skinny but manly, Italians are the only men in the world that manage to look macho even when they are short and skinny, Napoleon was actually Italian, he was from Corsica, but don’t tell that to the French, anyway it is not like the French admit to anything that doesn’t serve their pride. Anyway Mr. Italian armpits just opened the door, stared at me with dark deep socketed eyes, did not say a word, I looked at him, imagined that puppy dog must have been bludgeoned to death in some kind of human dog wrestling match, I did not bother to ask about Cassandra, she was a survivor, I didn’t ask about her, but my heart would miss her always.

After doing some time in the local bars, performing a sort of liver cleansing ritual, I managed to get accepted to Medical school in Caracas Venezuela. I would miss America somewhat, but I did not want to have to lie in my employment applications: “Have you ever committed a felony?” “No.” Its hard to lie even when you are liar, people do not seem to understand that liars like me don’t do so because we like it, we do it because we are afraid, afraid of the truth. Anyway Caracas was to me a far off land, new and fresh, and accompanied by some cash that I had managed to acquire by innocent credit card fraud, I was admitted to the fine Medical School of the Americas. MSA, was sort of the great Latin hope for producing enough doctors to abort Catholics while they were still in the womb. Their graduates were all over the third world, some were as far as Italy and Spain. Their credentials were respected as long as they did not try to get into a specialty outside of their general practice: prescriptions and abortions. I was trying to get into prescriptions, the lofty end of it.

My counselor, forty seven year old Consuelo, a woman of means when it came to legs and ass, had a thing for doctors, and while many of us were not yet doctors, she pre-qualified us, I don’t think anyone graduated without her approval, but again it wasn’t that Consuelo was saying “You don’t have what it takes to be a doctor of the Americas.” It was that between her, laid the archers to the Americas.

It was with Consuelo that I learnt how to Salsa dance, music full of ripe fruits, papayas, mangos, bananas, and pineapples, Salsa is not so much a dance as a fruit feast of delicious succulent admirations. Pelvic compliance was one of the first lessons, which can be safely done during nocturnal awakenings to the memory of the music. The best Salsa dancers are always lusting lusciousness, there is no legal way to measure that in a person, no way to add it, you either have it in you or you don’t, I almost had it in me, but my overly active mind always got in the way of my lascivious lusciousness. I guess if you have lost the animal in you, if you don’t have the savage green jungle inside of you, if you can’t swing through the trees like one big ass monkey, if you can’t snake your way through the foliage, if you don’t have it in you to scare the existence pale out of a few giants, then you don’t have the rhythm, you don’t have the unhinged ass that Salsa demands and worships.

Some people feel, that if you don’t have the monster jungle in you that you can just feed it inside of yourself through avocados. Avocados are the creamy butter of the jungle lust, pregnant nippled bellies of the lush green lust, and greener still. They even rot with wanton, you have never seen anything leave existence with such perfect disregard for hygiene as an avocado does, when it throws itself into the dirt and just rots loudly proclaiming a kind of massive escalating vomiting of self dance that darkens and grows the night until the entire jungle is simmering in its darkness. The Indians always call it avocado darkness, it is considered the night in which the children are born, where bellies grow voluminous, where avocado darkness hides parenthood, where the night is not slept, where the night is not slept.

No one really knows if this is really true, though I personally believe it is; but there is one interesting fact, that many have been found dead from over stuffing themselves with avocados. The authorities sometimes dare to question the authenticity of the practice, wondering if it is possible that some involuntary assistance is given during avocado night feasting, but it would be difficult to prove that, there are certainly much easier methods of putting away your enemies, for instance, snake bites are popular and exceed chance encounters.

Anyway the villagers always keep an almost religious silence about avocado nights, they quietly condone the stuffing of one’s lover with avocados as a way to get Salsa in them, equal to a large ass monkey.

I have marveled at the life in this place, even my nights in the slammer there were muddy joys, there is something dirty about the place, dirty about the peoples, dirty about being there, dirt filled auras as wide as the planet, but the dirt is soil, pure life affirming soil, you are one with the cockroaches that chance in size with bullfrogs, the beer spits at you, the water is dirty, you have to drink the beer, the beef is tasted by the flies first, then by their vermin, the church bell rings but there are no saints here, everyone is into incest and rape and stealing from their neighbor; and wives are just as treasonous as husbands, and they all beat each other up, and they forget about it over hot chocolate and sweets, and dirty cock fights and even pigs laugh at the fun.

I was afraid of blood, demonios, I was afraid feces, of urine, of everything unsanitary, so I was glad to find that our medical school had suffered severe budgets cuts seven years back and so there was only one cadaver, and only one dead corpse of rotting flesh that was fresh enough in blood not to fall apart encountering living human contact. Still we were mostly kept away from the bodies. But for one so as not to shame our education. There were plenty of drugs to instruct those of us reaching for the pharmaceutical industry, while there was an arrangement for our fellow medical practitioners to test their talents on the local women who volunteered for free abortions. Everyone was a winner here, even sometimes the abortions would turn into frantic tube tying sessions.

But let me not skip the one corpse that was still good enough to eat, still clinging to a semblance of its past self. Some said that he was Consuelo’s failed love, a passionate romantic that got strangled by her thighs or maybe merely a metaphor for his having failed medical training, he looked German in origin, which fits the romantic part nicely and he was trying to be a doctor, which again fits the German theory nicely, but who knows, he could be anybody, he could even be a local, he was preserved in pure alcohol or formaldehyde or something like that which us doctors used to retain a certain scalable freshness in things, all the while killing other things that were trying to be borne off of them.

Anyway, obviously our school could not afford a full body suit or a decent refrigerator so they had hacked the guy up, into portions of himself, and placed him in these drawers on a sort of large aqua dilapidated table desk; legs and arms, each in separate drawers, even fingers got their own little drawers, toes too, it wasn’t quite a neat operation, and his head was in a pickle jar, kept behind the largest cover door. Pointless for me to tell you that this table desk was the center of attention. Somehow we were all connected to him, in order to graduate we would have to get to know him, personally I could have graduated myself without him, but you know modern medicine is not to be taken lightly.

His head was really only used during exams, it was a treasure, lightly handled, we were all very bright anyway, a shortage of medical schools in the United States had sent us abroad, some of us were here to please our parents, which is more evidence that we did indeed know where the frontal lobe was, the Petunias, and the Amygdala, an old time favorite of mine. Consuelo liked it too, we use to pay little boys to dig the Amygdala out of the head of dead bodies that had been abandoned in cemeteries, and then we would fry them over a fire and toast their crispy mush down our throats. Then, well, you know what then.

It was during these long humid nights that I would tell Consuelo that she could save her earlobe from my piranha teeth if she were to tell me about Aqua man. Yeah, that is what we called him. Oh Jesus, I am already telling you too much, why my doctor’s license might be at risk, say I more. Consuelo would say nothing, not a word, her fingers would glide to remove her long dark hair away from her earlobe, and motion closing her big dark eyes as if she was going into some kind of a voodoo trance, where all pain was equaled to ecstasy. I limped my way to her lips, held her cheeks with my palms, and kissed away the sands of all of Latina America.

I don’t think anyone slept at night, around these parts people wanted to be too tired to work and too tired to study, besides the dark underpinnings of the culture just called for us to accomplish our deeds at night, we sobered our days away, the heat was too much, we memorized body parts, and practiced listening to our hearts with stethoscopes, and when no one was looking we really enjoyed pricking each other with those long, silvery, pump glowing, seventy-five dollar syringes, I don’t think I can translate how exhilarating it is to prick a friend with a needle. It kept us awake even as we were sleep.

But the oddest of things, was the body of that young man in our main study room, the center of attention, was a truly fantastic affair; we loved him, everyone loved him, we never wanted to hurt him, we wanted to be near him, even Consuelo, that showed a severe indifference to him, had a certain way of coming into the room to see him. She would make a sort of dancing entrance, twirl herself 360 degrees and back right into the table, arching back, leaning her marvelous spine, which was as highly defined as her ribs, backwards, and then she would lift herself up with both hands, as if he were lifting her, only it wasn’t so, then she would lay her humid bulging ass cheeks on the table top, her hands would release her, and she realized a smile to our group; asking away our doings, as if she had just finished pleasuring her own. We were moved, twitching from the heat and from her, and from what was going on, the flies would land upon us and use the privilege of our humid stupor to nest on our pores.

When Consuelo wasn’t dancing with Aqua man, we were, that was the oddest thing about it, he made us want to dance, appropriately Salsa music, covered by tuition, was piped through the old and dysfunctional speaker system, and as soon as the music would start to dance, we would all stare at each other’s smiles and move to dance or flirt with one another into exhaustion. We would chat, we would laugh, we would joke with Aqua man, some of us, the sicker of us doctors, would toss his fingers around, and others would try to prevent it, and that was the whole dance, and the music blearing from the speaker would squabble, and pierce our ears, and our incessant laughter would inundate all. We finally ended by putting back all of Aqua man in the drawers, though not always in the right drawers, and often then a power failure and faulty generators would cause the music to cease poking at us, and so we drifted to the local bar, where we were considered rich because of our hasty cadence towards alcoholism. Many of us never made it to our home rooms, many of us were mud ditch dwellers, many of us would not graduate or make it out of there alive; one of us would be the next Aqua man, you see there had been some budget cuts seven years back, alumni contribution to our alma mater.

Consuelo, the name means consolation, the consoled one, she had been cured of all her suffering, appropriately by the medical school, not because she could forget whatever pains torture a woman with as many beautiful scars as she, but rather because she had Aqua man.

You probably want to know if I graduated, how simplistic might you be, would the answer make any more of a difference on big ass monkey salsa and dark avocado rotting nights?

ricardo

Rapid Fire Love

I opened the refrigerator door, old plastic containers brewing mean waste, a pizza box that was weeks old, bottles of mustard, ketchup, chiu chili oil, all filled only to the base of their bottom, all awaiting that day when either Lola or I would throw them away. We were a messy couple, the dirty clothes were awaiting the same thing though dirty clothes have a limit to how long they will wait to be washed, eventually they nest pincer bugs and worms to eat them away. Amidst all of the cryogenically maintained foods from our gastronomical history on the main shelf lay a Dead Goose, a dead Goose. A Starch White Goose!

I yelled at Lola who was in the other room, wasting away in anger, we had yet brewed another argument, they were getting easier to repeat by the day, “What is this feathered Goose doing in our refrigerator?” Lola scurrile yelled back rancorously scratching her voice as she did, “I am going to cook Goose on Saturday, Victoria and Robert are coming over for dinner I don’t care if you are there!” She really did not need to add that last comment, I would be there, we had not called off our irritating relationship, we were still a couple, and she was still a terrible cook, which made me more curious about Goose and Saturday. Victoria and Robert were two of our funkiest friends, Opera buffs, connoisseurs of expensive wines, dinner at their house was always an exquisite perfection, it was dangerous to cook for them, it was dangerous to go out to dinner with them, Victoria was known to make Chefs and Waiters squirm, male emasculation was her liberal practice. Robert was a nice guy, how he ended up with such a bitch is unknown, and now as a couple they are incubators for everyone else’s bad luck.

Seeing Goose in the refrigerator made me forget my anger and instead remember why I had fallen in love with Lola, she was an enervating nerve ending at the bottom of her own sole, walking around disguised as a woman, every second dying to explode. Such reckless passion was a formidable attraction for a man, such as I that spends most of his life planning and never executing the infinite number of master plans that were always on the verge of being perfected. Lola had but only one plan, to have a nervous break down, to be dangerous, to be sick, to have a massive illness nasty down on her depressions, it was like cohabiting with The Cold War, at any second the world would explode, you were her hostage, but most wonderfully amazing it was that, while Lola was Neutron Bomb Lola, it was me that was the Atomic trigger. Lola was set to go off, yes, but it would be my fault if she went off. And I don’t need to tell you how insensitive we men are, we are very insensitive. The cold war got colder, no intimacy.

There were many times that I avoided going home just to shelter my emotions, exoskeleton building activities, my hands to my head, a Martini calling my name, an olive distastefully asking me to eat it, I was in love with Bombay Gin, I took the olive out and threw it at a man that must have thought I was crazy like Lola and not crazy because of Lola. I don’t know if you can love your captor, there had been many cases of male prisoners falling in love with their guard-women, but you don’t have to swim too far to figure out why a prisoner might find a guard attractive, love is an escape, but Lola had me hostage to her roller coaster, and then too it was all my fault. Lola was The Scream in my life, I never had to yell at anyone, Lola was able to tell everyone off in any furious direction so that we would all repel each other. Now Lola was not a phenomenally attractive woman, she was pretty in her own way but not pretty. Still I held it to be true that an applied force creates an equal and opposite force, Lola, by fatally repelling the world was causing an equally fatal attraction towards herself. I did not know why I was still with her it had to be this force thing or maybe Goose on Saturday sounded good.

I went to work, I was managing a restaurant, it was a temporary job until I perfected one of my master plans, everyone could see that I did not belong there, true they all thought that they did not belong there either, but there was something special about me, I had a master plan. Restaurant work is the best, everyone in restaurants knows they are losers, you will not catch then telling you “Yes this is what I have always wanted to be.” Bankers, brokers, doctors, lawyers they all act like they are doing what they want to be doing, but restaurant workers never. And there is something humbling about working for tips in an obvious manner, brokers work for tips too, so do politicians and salesmen, technically everyone does, but restaurant workers beg for their tips. “Can I take your order please.” Translates to, “Can I take your insults please.” Or “Let me feel you superior while you chow down our grub." I was the restaurant manager, which means that I was the most overworked and underpaid of all the employees.

But being the manager had its privileges, I could account for most of the money at the end of the day, I could fuck with peoples schedules so as to make them love me or hate me, I could give away free dinners to all of my friends, though Victoria and Robert would never be seen at my restaurant. And there were terrible sides to it too, missing cooks had to be replaced by me, I was a terrible cook, I would swash and scramble things around to make them look sophisticated and different and customers never complained about my cooking because it looked so different, that they did not know if they were suppose to like it or not. The worst thing about restaurant work is cleaning restrooms and doing the freezer inventory. If there is any evidence of how backward our civilization is, it is in the fact that we have to clean restrooms, humans originally roamed in the wild and did their shit wherever they might happen to be, so it is difficult for these roaming assholes to get their shit and urine right into toilets and urinals, they miss all the time; it is amazing how inaccurate they can be even as they try; and then there are those that do not want to get it right, instead they want to send a DNA message through every other asshole that sits on that particular toilet. One day you walk into the restroom and before you is a sculpture that someone has managed to erupt, magnificent in its repugnance, and you have to clean it up, and you have to clean it up, that is the horror! And then there is freezer inventory. You have to go inside of this huge freezer, which has an axe inside, just in case you get locked in, not very encouraging, and then you have to count all the roast beef, all the pork, all the ham, all the sausages, all the prime rib, and you know when meat is frozen like that it looks scary, blotchy red and fat and purple cold and it hurts you so much to touch it that you want to take an axe to it, only it is so damn solid it is only going to hurt you more, so you don’t, and you can see your frustrated breath, belching out of you to keep you warm but it is really making you much colder, and then there are the sauces and salads and dairy products, and by the time you finish your freezer and cooler inventory the last thing you want to do is be around food and well, there you are.

On this day however there was no freezer inventory, no big bosses coming around to prove their existence, no ordering to be done, and it was a slow traffic day, few customers all very nice and quiet. I sat at the bar, our most profitable center and chatted with Geoff our most intellectual bartender. Geoff was not just an intellectual he was also a superb athletic masterpiece. He participated in He Man events like triathlons, bike races, that sort of thing. One day while lighting the restaurant’s glass fireplace, an action that required one to lean forward, bend the knees, and twist one’s torso while searching upwards with one’s head, Geoff almost fell into the blaze that he had started, fortunately he managed to recover himself instead turning into a back injury. But it was not all just back pain, there was pride to be had from the incident, Geoff, explaining to me the complexities of a highly tuned muscular body, paraphrasing words spoken by his doctor. An average torso under the same situation would have collapsed and suffered little injury, but because Geoff’s torso was a highly tune muscular action machine, his muscles, sensing perilous disaster, exerted reflexive reactions to recover him, which they did nicely, only that caused a differential straining disengagement from the left side of his lower back to the right side, which tore some ligaments. In other words his body was too sophisticated, geared to respond to severe situations, such as daunting mountain climbing, it overreacted and ripped itself apart in the recovery process. The distance one places between averageness and one’s self is not without its dangers. Or how about the time when someone was stealing money from our cash register and Geoff argued that the management could be sued for making it too easy to access the cash register. Yes, Geoff believed that to cause temptation was a crime. That is how we chatted away the infamies and consulted each other on how to best handle this or that piece of gossip, person or situation. Geoff’s final advice was always good and equally predictable, He would lean into me whispering, “Well if he bugs you so much I tell you what we can do, tonight you and I follow him home and kill him.” While I never took him up on the offer the truth was that there had been many managers and many servers that had come and gone, but Geoff had been here for eons.

So while drinking my Martini along comes these two women, both a bit average in their own very different way, and we sort of make conversation with them and for some strange reason I find myself unusually attracted to the uglier one of the two. Maybe I wasn’t feeling lucky, maybe I just want it a sure shot, maybe we were soul mates, I doubt all of those reasons, all I know is that for some strange reason I really liked her, her name was Carrie.

Carrie and I walked outside, a stroll through a dark night, lots of tourists everywhere, but we went to a balcony that was unseen by most, and talked about petty things, Carrie had a child but she was not dating anyone, and to be truthful I don’t know if I was dating Lola, we were abstinent lovers, twirling knifes at each other and not as members of a circus, one of us ought end dead; I did not molest myself with explaining my relationship with Lola to Carrie, she did not ask about it, it wasn’t like Carrie and I were really sexually attracted towards each other, I sensed that we were just feeling like the emptiness was ours to share, so Carrie and I ended up kissing each other but only once. Again it wasn’t like we were dying to do that, it just happened that way and it tasted like a perfect pot sticker. Then we parted company. We did not even exchange phone numbers but we both wanted to get together again, neither of us knew how.

I get back home late, past midnight, and Lola is, naked, sitting on the bed crying, she has been nurturing into existence many tears, she was a marathon weeping body, a bath of tears was not unusual, I was into spiritual crying myself, occasionally once every six months I would just cry for no reason at all, hey that is good for you, you don’t have to know why, I don’t have to know why. I asked her if she was OK, holding back possible guilt while wondering if someone had seen me with Carrie and called her. “Lola, what’s wrong honey?” She began to cry more ambitiously, and holding her hands to her face spoke: “I can’t cook the Goose…” her breaking voice, “…I can’t cook the Goose.” I said is there something wrong with the Goose?” but she was to busy crying to tell me so I went to the refrigerator opened the door, the light from within flooded the darkness outside, and I looked at Goose and while he was dead, he looked ok to me. I went back into the bedroom thinking maybe Lola was put off because of her very unrealistic cooking talents, or maybe Victoria had wanted to avoid the entire evening and had called to cancel as was her usual manner. “Honey what is wrong?” She got a little quiet, intermittently sobbing, and responded “I can’t cook Goose he’s an Aries.” My eyes dashed to the ceiling to see what I was missing, oh dear me and she repeated herself “Our Goose is an Aries I can’t cook a Goose that is the same sign as you are.” Well there you go, she did love me, the damn Goose was an Aries, I was an Aries… “But honey that does not matter…” She interrupts me… “You’re so insensitive sure it matters, I don’t want to eat a dead Goose that is the same sign as you are that is like killing and eating you… but I bet that if the Goose was a Libra like me that you wouldn’t care and you would eat it anyway…” “But Lola honey please, how do you know it is an Aries maybe it is something else?” “No, no, I know, I called the Goose Man who sold it to me he knows a lot about Astrology and we counted back to Goose’s hatching days and he is definitely an Aries.” So come to find out that this guy is so fanatic about horoscopes that he has a preference for Geese that are born Taurus and Aries and Leo’s and the one he sold us is an Aries and he won’t take it back, he can’t exchange meat, so we can’t get a Goose that is at least a Leo which neither of us are.

At some point in the night, not as concerned with Goose as Lola was, I was able to sleep while she stayed awake staring at my abominable insensitivity. The next morning Lola went to work and I took Goose out of the refrigerator just so that I could look at a fellow Aries that was now dead. He was a good looking Goose, oh you just have to imagine how many places he visited, how many fishes he ate, how many little Gooses were running around with his DNA, but then all imagination fades when you find out he was raised in captivity. Hard to keep us Rams in captivity sooner better dead. I talked to Goose thinking maybe we could change his sign somehow, I even called the Goose Man to see if he would cooperate but he was too ethical to try to deceive Lola and recalculate the birth date of my fellow Goose.

I went to work counting that we ought cancel Saturday’s dinner, counting that maybe we ought substitute Goose for Chicken Salad or Pasta Primavera, and I drank away wishing that Carrie the woman that I kissed once, would show up and drive away with me. This was Wednesday. The same thing happened on Thursday and Friday and Goose was still dead in our refrigerator, and Carrie had not been seen.

Saturday morning, Lola was sleeping late I went for coffee and to read the headlines, revolutions and murders were priming themselves everywhere, I tossed the paper aside and just tasted my coffee, don’t ask me why but coffee started to taste like a kiss, and I begun to suck kiss my coffee and the heat was moisturizing my lips, and it just felt better than that pot sticker kiss from Carrie but remembering Carrie I just wanted to kiss her again, maybe to accentuate the difference between coffee and pot sticker kisses. While trying to perform that imaginative trick, kissing away every sip of my tongue licking coffee so as to ascertaining why pot stickers could taste like a kiss and a kiss like a pot sticker, mushy, semi indifferent, you are going to eat me, you are going to kiss me, I don’t really mind if you want to kiss me, I sort of want you to kiss me too, and I shall well follow the perfunctory actions that are required here, move my lips, my tongue, attempt to feel sensual about the moment when in reality, I just really like you and don’t really need to kiss you. Am there thinking all this out, still preferring a kiss from my coffee when a voice at another table interrupts me. “Hey, hey aren’t you the guy that was with Carrie the other night?” I turn and act as surprised as I was, which was a lot, “Yeah, how are you?” And without responding she rushes to my table, grabs herself a seat and wobbled on it as if she could not sit still, “Did you hear what happened to Carrie? did you hear?” I frowned creating a labyrinth of doubtful looks, “No, what is it, is she ok?” “Well after she left you that night she was driving, a bit drunk as you know, going home and lost control of the car, off into a ravine, they did not spot the car till morning; she bled to death.” She follows that with, “I am sorry, I have to get going now, bye.” I went home, despondently wishing the whole earth to end my kiss of death.

When I got home, Goose was already in the oven, baking at 380 degrees, its hotter in the center of the Sun, colder in the North Pole, Lola came to welcome me at the door, looked like she had been cleaning for Queen Victoria’s arrival, I hugged her, she embraced me, gave me a big smile, “its going to be a great dinner you will see.” I kissed her and went into the room to shower and change. Aries Goose was smelling up the place. Lola was playing some lively tunes, and had drawn aside all the curtains so Sun could shine on our happiness. Coming out of the shower Lola greeted me with a towel in hand, helped me to dry my back, and said “You know I think with the leftovers from Goose I am going to be able to make you a wonderful Goose soup too.” I thought at that point of asking how she had resolved baking my fellow Aries but I did not want to deal with the possible outbreak, I anointed the soup idea.

Both Victoria and Robert were their usually properly boring selves, we discussed all the latest movies, Victoria listing in detail which directors had done what and noting their individual styles and backgrounds, she was the equivalent of a Baseball fan. Oh but she hated sports, they were so stupid; baseball card collectors were not as sophisticated as movie buffs. Robert had a butterfly collection, he talked about that, there is a name for butterfly collectors, I don’t remember it, same as stamp collectors. I had always been fascinated by butterflies that did not have to eat their entire life, to fly and then to die, no Goose meals in-between. Robert did not seem to know which particular butterfly I was talking about, maybe it didn’t exist, we talked instead how lots of these butterflies only live a few days, hours, whatever. How long do you really need to live to watch the same old Sun and the same old Moon avoid each other? I do admit to being enamored with Monarch butterflies that fly from Mexico to California, welcome migrants that flourish the tourist trade, there is even a Monarch butterfly parade. Interrupt, Lola got a little upset when I told her that I could not eat any Goose, my stomach was upset, I wasn’t lying.

Both Robert and Victoria praised the Goose, praised the soup idea, praised Lola; she was ecstatic with joy, and once gone, Lola plummeted into the couch into a ravine sleep. I called Peter our Chef, it was 11pm, “What are you doing calling me at this hour?” “I was just wondering what you would think if we added pot stickers to the menu?” “Pot stickers to the menu? what are you crazy there is nothing in our cuisine that compliments pot stickers, we are not Chinese you idiot, we are a blackened, or mostly not, steak and potato house, all of our customers are over the age of fifty, they don’t like pot stickers, they don’t eat pot stickers, they don’t even know what pot stickers are.” Peter didn’t like me, he earned a higher salary than I did, he was the Chef. All chefs think of themselves as kings, and they are really miniature kings, rulers of Serfdom Land, every restaurant their castle. Peter the cook ordered me around; he had created an award winning potato dish with a special sauce, someday in the future people would be eating his stupid potato dish out of an instant carton meal box, today he was the only one that knew how to prepare it; it tasted like hollandaise sauce to me, but I don’t know about those things.

Having used up all of my influence with Peter I went to the library and searched pot sticker recipes, a pot sticker is not that complicated of a thing, you wouldn’t imagine it but there are more recipes for these things than there are for hamburgers. I wanted to perfect pot sticker making but I wasn’t a great cook. I decided to wander the Chinese joints in search of pot stickers. One week later my boss asked me into his office, bottles of expensive wine everywhere, he fancied himself Bacchus, he was appropriately fat and more a roaring pig than Bacchus may have been. My boss questions me “Peter tells me that you want to add pot stickers to the menu is that true?” I peevishly respond “Yes…but..” Boss interference “…and what is this that you have been leaving early to go into china town? What business do we have in china town? Is your heart in your job? Are things alright at home?” I was forced to resign, that bastard Peter, he never liked me, and the wait staff did not like me either, mostly because I did not do anything, nor did I tell them what to do, which people really need, they had complained, to human resources, that I provided no direction; I don’t know how much direction a restaurant requires, specially a steak house, not much you can do with that.

Lola could not believe that I had resigned, I told her that I was working on my master plan, whatever that was, instead I spent my days hunting down the perfect pot sticker. A couple of people directed me to places that they were certain had the perfect pot sticker, but neither place tasted like that kiss of death. Reaching nothing but dead end after dead end, I felt that I was cornered into learning how to make the perfect pot sticker myself. Much to Lola’s consternation I got a job at a Chinese restaurant. There I would spy the methods of the masters, I was the only one that was not Chinese, I was the only one that spoke English, I never tried to correct the spellings on the menu, I always used numbers when ordering and I bowed my head a lot, those simple acts won me their acceptance.

I did the soups, not much to do there, you just add noodles, cabbage, peapods, ginger, celery, onions, etc… …add this add that, boil, add salt, add pepper, boil, and reboil and you never stop boiling, it is steam room ten hour facial; one after the other cauldron after cauldron, doing my time so that I could get to the perfect pot sticker, one amongst these people must have admission to the divine pot sticker kiss.

A very old woman, called by some Tzu Hsi a name that meant nothing to me, was, to me, the nicest of the group, all the rest really did not want me there, stood by me with mindful assistance; offering extra spices and extra herbs, occasionally gently urging me with grouchy menace, she would not say anything, she just gave me this very quiet push, her teeth all gone her lips curling inwardly could not much manifest more than that. I was happy that she sort of took me under her crabby care, and I expressed it by occasionally caressing her shoulder all so marvelously without words or meanings.

One day I was moved to the crab boiling pot, I had boiled all the herbs, vegetables and roots that the land and sea had produced, even done in a lot of shrimp. All boiled in my endless boiling pots. Shrimp are ugly, very ugly, I used to eat them all the time sautéed in garlic buttered cilantro, but once you see them alive and walking, forget it, you become aware of their inedibleness; Geoff used to call them “The cockroaches of the sea.” But my experience qualified me for the higher crustaceans species, Crabs. Those creatures that have one tentacle claw longer than the other, lack of symmetry problems, a formidable right tendency; I don’t know much about crabs, I did not eat crab meat, too much work, and while the whole world seems enamoured with crab cakes every recipe I ever saw for those things, and crab salads too, used imitation crab. In Spain, home of my most favorite dish, Paella, they serve it with a Crab that serves as garnish. The Crab sits with you throughout your dinner, sitting there on your plate, that is wrong, that is why we South Americans had to break with Spain. Anyway them crabs are just too much work. Boiling them was now my new job. I left the toothless Chinese lady all by herself boiling noodles away.

A very diligent, skinny and energetic fellow took over my charge. He said his name was Fong, I don’t know if that was his first name or his last name, or where in China he was from, he never tried to laugh with me, he never sparked an emotional connection to my being, I was just someone there to help him with the Crabs so he could smoke more cigarettes. My first lesson was tying the Crab’s very menacing Claw. You get these Crabs, they don’t look deadly, but Fong explains with gestures, sort of saying, “very, very dangerous these claws, you be very but very careful with Crab you hear; …grab here, like this, and then clamp claw shut, like this, and then toss the Crab back on top of all the others, so they can be uncomfortable and fully miserable right up until we boil them, ok, ok.” Life is hard even for crabs. It was for me difficult to make sense out of gestures, specially for a fellow as verbal as myself, but I managed, if only through intuition to get the idea, clamp the claw, let the thing live as long as possible before eating, then boil it alive just like a vegetable.

I had heard that Lobsters make a shrieking sound when they are discharged into boiling water, butter, lots of butter eliminates shrieking echoes; but I wasn’t expecting the same from exoskeleton armored Crabs, but I tell you true that those Crabs, all of the one’s I tossed into the boiling pots, substantiated a hideous piercing shrieking that brought many an army of Crab nightmares to my dreams. You can’t kill them fast enough but you just have to keep on killing them as fast as you can, but you really can’t expect beady eyed crabs to love you, and you can’t expect to out survive them. I don’t care where you are, who you are, or what you are, the concrete is that there are more Crabs than there are people like you, you and I will die before we boil all the Crabs. It was with this weary knowledge that I followed safety standards and made sure to keep the Crabs at a fair distance while clamping their menacing claw. They would stand on the wet ground, I would bend over and while they were looking intently into my eyes I would grab them from behind and snap the clamp on. Its not like those things can fly, still there were stories of clampers that had fallen victim to the Crabbing menaces before reaching their retirement plan. Jostling his finger at me Fong, threading similarly black beady eyes himself, would motion, “You just better be careful, they are swift and shifty creatures of the sea.” I had never seen any Crabs running, maybe on the bottom of the sea they could clock a decent kilometer, but here on concrete that exoskeleton could not possibly help them any; I smirked a little at Fong, but he did not move his beady eyes.

Lola was on the verge of leaving me, she wanted me to get a real job, she did not believe Crab Executioner Maximums, at minimum wage per hour, had much of a future, so she wasted much effort on trying to get me to quit but I was after a recipe here, so I stuck it out and Lola was boiling to get out of our relationship. Well one day, I managed to sit during a break next to my dear old Chinese lady, and so I ventured to ask her if she knew a really good recipe for pot stickers. Oh her eyes lit up like a diamond dragon, pot stickers! She knew pot stickers! She was just doing time in this joint because at her age she could not get a job anywhere else, but it was obvious that her vegetable boiling was only a side job, her true and secret talents were her magical pot stickers. I asked her for the recipe but her revolt was absolute, more or less gesturing, “oh no mister, no mister, won’t give my recipe to no one, go to my grave with it, this world isn’t good enough for my pot stickers.” Wow, I had stumbled upon the divine pot sticker Chef and she was not willing to share her secrets because she thought this world not good enough, and where else might they make pot stickers? Still I understood her, there are things one ought never give away, so I nurtured our relationship very carefully easing here the idea that I needed to have just one of these pot stickers. And then one day, she, so again gesturing, “ok, ok I make for you, but you no tell nobody, you no try to make, you just taste, taste one, one only.” Her cursive finger raised “one, only one.” One kiss. I fervently agreed.

Not three days later, she came to me while I was clamping crabs, not three days later, she halted me and handed me a foil paper wrap holding no more than just one, one, singular pot sticker. Then she went away, ushering her hands and making frowning faces in such away as if saying “now go away, leave me alone, leave me alone!” I held the moist and tender beauty in my hands, forgetting the unclamped crabs on the wet concrete floor, I stepped aside and took the daring bite, oh what a gentle kiss my lips did felt dash deeply through them, a moist tender moment, I don’t know the taste, I don’t know what condiments adorned this succulent delight, what ingredients composed such an edifice of joy, I just wished to slosh pot sticker flesh in my mouth, and not to let it wander down my deep esophagus ravine; ecstasy! Look me, to sky above and heaven I could touch, and then, all the foil paper in my hand but only empty.

Fong, seeing me not cooking gestured me to get back to my work, I nodded my head many times, “yes, yes, yes,” back to work it was; there laid a big crab below me, I, quite dazed, went carelessly to lift Crab from the wet concrete cement but beady-eye Crab swiftly reached for my neck before I could grab and clamp his enduring claw, Crab’s claw rapaciously around my Adams-apple, smack front of my neck, clamping hard down on my neck, seeking to extract divine pot sticker, while I fought and struggled to jerk Crab off of me, but it was not to be, asphyxiated, dangling from this Crab, I crashed into the wettest ground.



If everything is attacking you, you are in enemy territory.

ricardo

we have four cats

We have four cats

We have a cat, his name is Loki Cat, we have four cats and Loki is one of those cats, of all my cats Loki is the most cat like, he consumes all of his life manifestations in this manner of representation and one would not think him a very sensitive fellow, certainly the other cats know that Loki is going to do things his way and everyone else better watch out.

Our other male cat is Pacho, Pacho is the backdrop by which Loki demonstrates his maleness, Pacho is aware that his role in our household is to be fragile so that Loki can be strong, Loki attacks Pacho, Pacho never attacks Loki Cat, he is our timid cat and as such the one that we have to spend the most time protecting from Loki claws.

There are two female cats, Sarah and Lolita, Sarah is the matriarch of the family and as such the greater of all characters and she is very tender and loving while maintaining a strong sense of dignity. When I found her at the pet shop it was because she was screaming: “take me out of this cage, you have to rescue me from this hell hole, there is brutality in this world take me away from here!”

Sarah was older than I had wanted, I didn’t know anything about cat ages then so I didn’t realize it but she must have been six months old, which I think in cat years is more; anyways the thing was that something inside of Sarah told her, “there is your owner, that is the guy, scream now, scream louder, louder or he is going to escape…” and she was meowing: “these peoples are brutes, this cage is feces wridden, the food sucks here, I don’t like all these animals, get me out of here.” Of course all I could hear was “meow, MEOW, MEOW!”

One day my wife Domaine said to me, “I want a cat, I WANT A CAT, I WANT A CAT!” and I said, “I don’t like cats, I like dogs.” Cats seemed sissy like, they appear the dandies of the animal kingdom, or at least to me they appeared cold and arrogant, I once heard them described in a comic strip as “the perfect Human Resources director is a cat because they give the impression that they like people when they really don’t.” that made sense to me. One day Domaine came home with Loki, I didn’t pay attention to him for the next year, it was something that was growing and eating in my house, lots of spiders and insects and fungi did that too, so I just ignored him.

But one day I thought to myself I don’t want to have to take care of this cat thing so I must get him a companion, all things in life come in pairs, if I don’t get him another cat this guy is going to demand more attention from me and that isn’t going to happen. So I went to the pet store convinced that I would get another boy cat so as to eliminate the possibility of more cats being born; only Sarah started to scream “you will take me with you,” i.e. “MEOW” and I lost control and rescued her from the hell that is a pet store. On the way home the taxi driver asked me if she was female or male, I fumbled around trying to find her balls and she didn’t have any.

One day Domaine was working on her notebook laying on the couch with Sarah on her legs when she started to feel something else moving down there and as she motioned to look over her notebook screen there was a little mothball of hair, orange and black hues leather with eyes, and thus was born Lolita. Her mother never uttered a cry of pain a lesson and fine example of probity to all would be mothers.

We appropriately named Loki the mischievous cat of Nordic mythology, and Sarah one day just called herself Sarah and we sort of accepted it. Pacho came into the house after Domaine too found him somewhere saying “take me home” and she just could not resists, I hope those are not the same parameters by which Domaine decided to marry me. We didn’t name Lolita right away, we didn’t know what to call her, I think it was because her mother rejected her at first. Sarah was kind of not there next to her little baby girl, she kept a distance and we panicked and called the veterinarian; a very nice man that has been around cats and dogs and snakes long enough not to panic, and he said: “Sarah doesn’t yet connect the fact that she is a mother, she doesn’t know what that thing is and is still trying to identify with it. In time she will come to realize that it is her baby.” And doc was right, in a matter of a week or two Sarah accepted her lot in life and she never left the side of her baby unless it was to eat so as to replenish. She was such a good mother that one day we thought they would like an electric blanket and placed it underneath, and Sarah feeling the heat thought it was a fire and grabbed her little kitty by the neck and took off for safer ground.

It was at about this point, the entrance of Lolita into the world, that Loki Cat and Pacho started their territorial war, it seemed that they both wanted to secure sexual pleasures from both the daughter and the mother, and thus begun the hellish territorial war that has divided our household hitherto. More interesting is the fact that Loki doesn’t know that even though he is Sarah’s husband it was indeed Pacho, the passive fear stricken cat, that fathered the girl. We know this because Loki had been neutered and we were just about to neuter Pacho too when suddenly we were a day or two too late. And this is how the aggressor cat thinks that he is passing on his DNA while in reality the meek one has inherited the earth, his wife and daughter.

As I was saying we waited and waited to name Lolita waiting for her to tell us too what to call her, as she dallied around the house it became evident that Lolita didn’t care about anyone but herself, she was all, “don’t touch me, don’t love me, I don’t need you to love me, what is there to eat in this house? I am comfortable for now but stay put in case I need something.” And the whole time there was absolutely an attitude of “I don’t know if I like it here yet, I might leave at any time, I will develop an illness if I have to die to leave this rat hole;" or "...am just getting used to this place, don’t get used to me.” Appearance wise she was a Lolita cute in every way, appearing harmless but her attitude was all Lola, she was out to have fun on her own terms, one day sitting at the table, I said, “her name is Lolita” and sure it was.


RC

Recommended Reading

Well to be very blunt I know nothing about Colombian society, culture, literature or peoples. Fact is I don’t know if I remain ignorant so as to keep an open mind but it must help to annoy the stereotypes. I am currently reading The Penguin History of Latin America but I think it has a very pragmatic approach to the matter and I believe we are a metaphysical people so I wouldn’t recommend it.

I think to comprehend Latin American character it is better to read the following:

Miguel de Unamuno: A must read The Tragic Sense of Life, it is the bible rewritten by a Spanish Catholic heart that never had the faith. Unamuno does a wonderful depiction of the impossibility of our people, why we are not rational and why being rational is anti life. Thus from there it becomes easy to understand why we will never be productive and consumers regardless of material enticements.

Sense I believe that we Latinos have a vivid intent in defeating life, Jorge Luis Borgess is another fantastic fellow, and certainly a must read, particularly his collection Labyrinths. There you will find what is perhaps the best short story ever written: The Immortal. It is a masterly depiction of our metaphysics and why Latinos are generally unable to pickup after themselves and why they wont lift a finger to help anyone else. It sort of doesn’t matter in the grand scope of things, hence the reason why we would never write a book like say “Being in Time” we are never on time because we don’t tick to a calendar.

To read another one of our finest philosophers you must enter into the realm of Jose Ortega y Gasset, he wrote a book that I thought particularly illuminating, “The Revolt of the Masses” a fine elitist point of view, you will find it absolutely hilarious; more important it depicts what our Latin founding fathers believed, that they know what is best for us all.

I don’t want to sound a classicist but if you have plenty of time in your hands Don Quixote de La Mancha is the fictionalization of Unamuno’s philosophy though ironically Cervantes came first, but as Unamuno correctly pointed out he died and Don Quixote lives on.

As you might take notice I don’t stay within the continent to define the literature of our character. This is because I have a globalized ability to stereotype, our people start in Spain, trip over Portugal and flow from Mexico down the throat of the Yucatan Peninsula strait throughout the Amazon until hitting bottom at Tierra del Fuego. The fact is that there aren’t as many peoples as there are countries.

ricardo

JAKE AS THE MONSTER

Jake, well Happy Birthday man.

By the way you will not know it that my favorite video game, “Hunter Hunted” has a main character called Jake. Hahahaha! My wife and I used to play it often during our courtship years. It was a silly game but we loved it and I hope that playing it doesn’t imply that we are stupid or silly or that we don’t read The Nation. Occasionally Jake would encounter a terrible monster, (read hard to kill,) and the monster would very condescendly say, “you cannot win, put down your weapons you cannot win.” I always found those instructions hilarious, they really got your optimism down, whenever the stupid monster came out he would make all kinds of voided of syllables noises and you knew, you just knew things were going to get ugly.

Of course after a while as with all games, the Virtual Intelligence repeats its logic errors or reaches its rationalizing limits and an average human being learns that if he ducks or jumps at just the right split second the monster will react differently and give the human a chance at victory. Through repetition and error correction and of course the ability to restart the game, the eventual victim becomes the monster. The game becomes such an obvious little plot that the human being becomes bored and ignores the game and the monster, and both game and monster fade into obscurity.

You know Jake that I am going to give you a “moral to the story”. The puppet masters, in this case the game makers are aware that if the game is too complicated the majority of the people will feel dissatisfied with the game-play and abandon the product. And the disillusioned will tell their friends the game is too difficult and this in turn will lower sales expectations; and so the game has to be just right, just hard enough, just fun enough to satisfy the greatest number so that the sales figures are properly aimed at a mass market. Which is also why the cheats are available online so as to help those of us that are not gamers by nature to enjoy at least a simulated victory.

In your worldview the game creators are manipulating the gamers so as to get their money, in my world view both parties are manipulating each other and one cannot exist without the other. Your assumption that the elite and the masses are two separate entities is the equivalent of imagining that a tiger and the jungle have different priorities as far as the rainforest is concerned. They don’t!

Why would I take issue with your world view? Because it is condescending; you remind me of the monster that thought I was doomed without knowing that indeed I had more power over his existence and my own happiness. You see without me playing the game monster would be truly dead. In fact the objective of monster was to keep me alive, more than wanting to kill me the people at Hunted Hunter incorporated, which I think was Interplay, were working hard day and night to keep my attention, without that they too would be dead.

You can rightly imagine all the game designers working hard to comprehend the dynamics of my game play and mindset; “what does Ricardo like about the game? What does Ricardo dislike? When does he play more? What will give him greater satisfaction so that he buys the sequel?” But more important the game designers, undoubtedly fanatic gamers themselves, were also sacrificing their purity of game design so as to meet my less than exemplar gaming aspirations. The game designers were busy dumbing down the game so that I could be a part of their universe, so that I would play in their world, but obviously not at their Creator level of game-play.

Of course the CEO of Interplay was involved with a bunch of futurologist asking them to please guess what I was going to like next. While the Marketing group would call my house and offer me a 50% discount on any future game if I just answered a few questions so that they could best meet my expectations. Meanwhile the Sales Staff was dully working to meet sales quotas by trying to shove the game down my throat through every outlet possible.

You see Jake, perhaps because I am a common man, getting my attention is lot of work. And I must admit that getting my money is a little harder still, in part because I have limited resources, (read poor,) and in part because I am really not a consumer. And to be more honest still I don’t believe in intellectual property rights, so I didn’t even pay for the game, I got it for free and because I liked it so much I gave copies to my friends.

I don’t know how much money Interplay lost in Hunter Hunted but rumor has it that it wasn’t a very successful title, it was discontinued as sales figures did not warrant a sequel. My wife and I lost our copy and we are still trying to find one so as to recollect that period of our romance where we didn’t fight.

I think what I am saying is that the problem your Elite/Common Folk aspect ratio has is that the boundary cannot be clearly drawn. You fault the masses for not reading The Nation or Foreign Policy Review but you fail to administer the fact that it is, for instance, The Nation and what it values that has failed to capture the average imagination. I have read Foreign Policy Review and The Nation and frankly The Nation sounds like a forever in angst teenager, feeling cheated at every angle. Alexander Cockburn is surely a master of the verb and more a master at the ability to insult others at every turn. The Nation of course does have a way with words, it is purely an intellectual diatribe where the ability to toss superlatives around is only outstripped by the cult of character absolutism. Frankly I am not surprise people don’t want to read it, it is an intellectuals child’s den.

I use to read The Nation when they were still in that old newspaper print magazine format, and I seem to remember that they trashed Mother Jones for going to a colorful magazine format, it wasn’t for intellectual papers to be flashy and colorful, they must be serious and cold and sterile.

Mother Jones itself is another interesting case, I call them “the good earth people” I mean this people still think that the Indians were nice to nature, that they were one with the universe. You know I know that the American Indian wasn’t that nice, the Incas and the Chibchas and the Aztecs were even less nice, but according to Mother Jones only the white man is brutal and insensitive. One has to be blind to history to not realize that the entire evolution of humanity has been a savage adventure; and that it is only through squatter-incorporation of territory and DNA-mergers that we have grown this thing that we call a civilization.

The Nation, I don’t know how many subscribers they have, last time I checked I think it was around 170k, that is probably an accurate representation of 10% of the 3% of peoples in America that are wholly dead to their emotions and live purely in Intellectual hubris. At least The New Republic, another lover of things intellectual, has it in their sights to cater to popular opinion by expressing a liberal conservatism that tells us all that they are one of us even though they feel elitists and in fact are comfortable being elitists! The New Republic is not saying we are with the masses as The Nation likes to clamor, rather it is saying we are elitists, join us and you can be elitists too. As my favorite economist once said, “the masses more than wanting to overthrow the rich more want to be like them.”

As for Foreign Policy Review, why would you expect a publication that is a feeler for prospective policy with political insiders to be popular with the general public? I don’t read Trains and Caboose Review and don’t get me started on Slate. But to my point is that you are faulting the masses for not paying attention to obscure values and ideas. You are being just like The Nation, that is, condescending by assuming that you know more than the masses what is better for the masses; and that they are being controlled by an elitists clan and that they don’t know it because they don’t have the attention span that apparently you do.

First it must make you feel smarter to do that and if it does good for you. But allow me to pose an alternative view, that in a world of common people lucky are those that learn to be common quickly. When ever I feel special I am amazed to find my favorite rare sauces at the supermarket; throughout the years I have learnt that much of what I considered original about my philosophy was based largely on my own ignorance.

A common person has a world that caters to common people, if you are then satisfied by common undertakings this is a perfect world. How fun it must be to enjoy the Super Bowl, a sport that is glorified all over the place and that allows you to have something immediately in common with a lot of people. I myself despise violent sport so I don’t like watching those men smashing conviviality into each other, but certainly those that enjoy it are indeed in synch with each other, and that builds both family and community and nation. The fact is that the masses are tuning to each other every time they watch a basketball game or a game of golf or tennis, or dance and listen to a popular song, this is how they sync with one another, from there it is easier to be with anyone that has shared similar experiences. Under such terms you might well argue that the Elite synch with each other by going to Film Festivals, the Opera or reading droll Shakespearian witticism.

The massification of thought, ideas and interests has positively unifying aspects, uniqueness after all, even the cry for individualism has been dimmed by the commonness of such an aspiration. It is sort of the same with the ego, we all have one and it stands in the way of unification but it is equally one more thing we all have in common. Further one should always worry more for those that think they have the formulae for liberating the masses from themselves; after all they have a huge misunderstanding of the scope of the problem, for before we can liberate the masses we must be sure that the world is not a pragmatist dream come true. The masses by an large don’t try to change the world because they are generally ok with it, and more they realize that as often as the world has changed it largely has remained the same.

Personally I wished I liked McDonalds and Disneyland because I would then have more in common with Americans and the world masses, and besides that my lunches would be cheaper. The masses dominate modern society, they are the ones that are leading the world consumer order; public opinion is the marching order of the day. I don’t think that you should worry about the masses more worry about your won uniqueness which makes you a rare and endangered species.

I am limited in my beer drinking but a can never resist a Guinness Irish Stout.

Cheers.

Ricardo
A sophist

I respond to Jake on “American Innocence”

His argument, well posed as it is, makes the assumption that there is an intelligence base, an elite core that manipulates the cogs and pulleys of society so as to control the masses and keep them ignorant of what is truly happening in the world.

The assumption that there are controlling interests is not wholly wrong, certain lobbying groups and class structures permit a certain degree of control so as to maintain existing social and economic structures. The conservatives and the liberals act as true manipulators of the infinite degrees that a society can hope to move up or down, left or right. But none too much in the extreme is Nationally or Globally permitted because this would dissolve the consistency which adds social order; and more important a sort of economic and social autopilot so that we don’t have to think our lives away. I mean that all successful systems are by nature conservative.

It is not uncommon for our ancestors to believe that the Illuminati, the Jews, Skulls and Bones, Order of the Bull’s Blood, etc administer civilization. This is an important concept among the majority of the populace because at once it gives them a reason to feel good about themselves, as they are helplessly not responsible for the world that they have to live and act in everyday. Two, it gives them the comfort that at least someone is really planning everything and that there is some kind of an elite mastermind behind everything.

The counter idea, that no one is really in control of the world and that it mostly aimlessly moves through a sort of silent agreement between all parties, as ideas, thoughts and actions combined to make a sort of obtuse compromised reality, is not acceptable nor comfortable.

However I propose just such a truth. While I cannot claim to have access to central bankers and Chief Executive Officers psyches, I do believe that they are mostly reacting to events as oppose to thinking forward their master plans. In fact most of anything that happens at the political or corporate level is a reaction and usually a helpless reaction which when executed is not optimize but rather a consequence of “even the circumstances” which impose themselves as yet another option for action.

We are deterred from the view that the world is a happenstance because we are control freaks. And we believe that others, the elites, the corporations, the supra-entities are in control because we know for a fact that we are not. Obviously we cannot circumvent our knowledge of our own impotence besides the world order and so we attribute control to all the others.

The American public would like to imagine that someone is in charge of their nation, that someone is checking the plan of execution against the constitution and thus ensuring a true course. The reality again is a little different, the founders of America had an idea and with it they created a national psyche but this was only a figment of the imagination, there was no truth to liberty, independence and the good will, those were just pillars of hope against the greater reality that it was through greed, religious fanaticism and civil righteousness that the country was founded and obtained greatness. The concept of America as a democracy or an individualist nation is not a factor in its current reality. America performs well against the world because of its “blind” single-mindedness, because Americans come together as a single National-Psyche, because they are willing to overthrow individuality, because they are mass thinkers and mass consumers and mass creatures with an immense sense of social duty to a larger cause! This cause might be the church, the state or the corporation, or even simply an endeavor like the space program. But Americans depersonalize themselves, they subtract the “I” from the equation and more rapid than most societies actually accomplish a social norm, a civic and national league that with its singularity of focus will outshine brighter ideas.

Mass behaviour depersonalizes it refuses individual control. America is indeed a democratic country but not because of the national right to vote but rather because the stampede always wins. There is a national herd instinct that becomes a national will to power. No one controls this and everyone must get out of its way.

America is a synchronized country, from sea to shiny sea the country has managed to take any nationality and to give them all the same idea, that they are unique, that they are special, that they live in the freest country on earth, that they have the right to chose their government, and their neighbors, and their religion. The reality of course is a little more harsh, most Americans are Christians, is that a sign of choice? Most Americans want to spread democracy. Is that open minded? Most Americans believe capitalism is the best way to manage an economy. Is that humane? Most Americans are consumers. Is that environmentally responsible? Most Americans believe that property and intellectual rights are titled deeds to be kept away from the rest of the world. Is that a global mindset?

In a sense Americans are a particular psyche, one can generalize because any and all national psyches are the dominant aspect representation of a given nationality. Colombians are by nature incapable of organization, they are self absorbed individuals that can allow their nation to suffer a forty year war without acquiring the energy or volition to accomplish genuine change. They watch their forty year wound bleed and have nothing to do about it, because they don’t have the energy to bring change or to suffer the repercussions of change but prefer the tragedy. Unlike Americans Colombians prefer their family to the nation, they are more united by soccer than by nationhood; and the nation as a whole, well it is something but nothing warranting their immediate attention rather their immediate disdain. Colombians don’t trust governments and so they keep their government weak and corrupt to justify their perception. That is our national psyche, Colombian is a loose fitting coalition of a people that have never had the guts or combined energies to form any significant civilization. At the same time we are not of the here and now, a forty year war its just an itch. That too is our national psyche, suffering is inconsequential to our metaphysics.

But be we Greeks or Americans or Colombians there isn’t anyone person or organization that can control our interests because our interests are controlled by the clash of our desires with reality which in turn equal a national sense of being; that at best represents no one and everyone.

Jake I do hope you are a wine drinker, it is part of my human psyche. Here is a red to you.

ricardo

Compulsory Confinement

Original sin is a conceptual explanation of how one human is responsible for what all of humanity represents. According to religions we are all guilty of sin by virtue of the fact that we are born. From there we must seek redemption even as we may not have enjoyed the sins committed by our ancestors. We did not kill our brother Able, we did not betray Jesus for a few coins, we certainly did not cooperate with the Devil in his failed coup d'etat, nor were we in anyway participants in the phenomenal and inspiring act of eating from the tree of knowledge where Adam and Eve dared for a few seconds to transcend God and demonstrate their new found independence. But perhaps the greatest transgression of all was when science took the stage to demonstrate that there really wasn't much mystery to the universe that it could all be explained through knowledge, and perhaps this act could never have occurred had not Adam and Eve taken the liberty to eat from the tree of knowledge.

The phenomenally impressive thing here is that we acquire responsibility through the act that others commit, that we become victims of all the sins and beneficiaries of all the goodness committed by our ancestors; it is as if there were a subconscious moral and emotional DNA that replicates itself just as our biological self chains itself back to its primordial origins. Do we have to believe in this moral lock-down? Can we isolate ourselves from the consequences brought forth through causation?

We must not decline the historical process, there is somehow retribution for everything that we are as a matter of simple consequence if nothing else. The universe and all the things in it have a vested interest in themselves and are not going to sit quietly letting the concept of humanity march up to the podium of energy habitations without some struggle. In order to inhabit this realm we must assume energy reservations then it stands to reason as reason we must that other forms of essence will want to challenge our right to absorb cosmic energies and thus a sort of consequence of our existence is conflict; which interpreted with some latitude could be viewed as a consequence of sin and as such a retribution. The universe of course is always trying to simmer not because it wants to simmer but because it is unchaining itself from the agglomeration of energies that it has become, and it is doing this because the nothingness is all absorbing, and so we must not take it personally that the universe wants to diffuse us as it is a consequence of its being and not a true factor of its nature as its nature oddly depends on the agglomeration of energy, in the form of desired essence such as ourselves.

We must teach ourselves the world in order to unlearn ourselves. As a sort of way of reaching an acceptance of the accumulating effect of our histories we reach to externalize the consequences so as to salvage our soul from having to endure the universe crawling all over it. In this light we come into the transgression of self against the whole of our humanity, in order to endure life we subtract ourselves from the global nature of our sins or from another angle the global impact of our actions.

In short, there is a moral lock-down, we propose it to ourselves every time we attempt to escape from it, and reinforce the lock-down in the process. Rather than escape our escape merely incarcerates us in an isolation chamber, this due to the irreconcilable fact that we do not want to experience the consequences brought forth by the nature of our humanity.

RC

FUTURIST ARE DISENGAGED

The energies are accumulating always in the direction that is most willing to manifest them this regardless of the consequences. Those most willing to live in the here and now are the most likely beneficiaries of energy flows, as the fact that they are living the moment gives them the highest level of energy channeling possible for this region; thus being average is common because that is where the energies flow with the greatest ease, whereas being different is the least energy-cost effective proposition.

If you are a true futurist, not many are and the profession does seem a bit ludicrous, I don’t think the future needs midwifes, but a true futurist is the least likely person to guess the future, as a good portion of their activity would have to be dedicated to guessing the needs and wants of the future; unfortunately the future is diametrically opposed to prediction; this is not because prediction would eliminate the element of surprise and newness; as such a thing the future requires so as to impress us, and to change us, and to challenge the old folks that denounce it by becoming admires of the past; but rather because the future doesn’t know itself what it will become.

Being that the case the future isn’t going to channel energies backwards, in other words the future has no interest in backward compatibility or referential communication; it doesn’t care about the past and it doesn’t even care much for the present, and so this disassociation is what makes the job of prophesying so damn difficult; while the present and the past have time, time the factor that imprisons and allows for concordant determinations. Thus even if the future were interested in channeling backwards the problem for futurologists remains that desire energies only root where they are most likely to be manifested, the present.

The present is the highest manifestation of the resulting channeling of desire energies. Anyone that wants to live in real life, the here and now, has thus the highest potential ergio energies available for immediate use, and much to their benefit this requires little or no thought. This is one of the benefits that a rabbit has, even as the rabbit is a rather overly cautious creature, the rabbit doesn’t have the propensity to think too far ahead but rather has the propensity to react, a rabbit has a great potential of proliferation based on an incessant amount of energy, that is willing to manifest in its direction; the same applies to a rat.

Humans are a rather fragile species certainly you never see a tiger or a bear defining themselves by their looks even as their looks are impressive; but a bear doesn’t say “I need a nose job”. This is because the bear is manifesting his entire being on the earth and is only interested in surviving in it, a bear doesn’t want to make a profit, he just wants to survive and carry on the genetic composition, bears shall continue to exist says the bear essence but it doesn’t say much more, they are not saying “I want to care for the planet”, “I want to make a profit,” “I need to have my soul rescued for I am a sinner”, no bears don’t say things like that, I watched a bear eating a bear cub and I didn’t notice remorse, or sorry I have to do this, the macho bear wasn’t moralizing because moralizing requires the ability to project consequences and responsibilities; moralizing also diffuses ergio energies into metaphorical elements that have no consequence, such as contingency plans that never have to be executed or fears that never suffer their manifestations. Bear and rabbit and rat are wholly self centered on the here and now and sentient ergio energies will tend to favor them.

But then there is that fragile sentient creature, the paranoid scoundrel of the earth that does think “hey I think I will kill me a bear and a rabbit to prove to myself that I am an excellent hunter.” And thus mount the trophies up on a wall, there is the head of the bear that ate the little bear cub and there is the head of the rabbit that nervously moved back and forth too much over dead center. Now you might think “what good is that?” It isn’t any good of course but you couldn’t possibly convince the bear hunter that hunting bear is a useless proposition. Obviously bear hunters are neither geniuses nor puritans they don’t conserve energy, they are more powerful in nature than are puritans and are more likely to survive the apocalypse than Christians. Which presumably puritans and Christians alike, have convinced themselves that they don’t want to survive it because they have never banked in the here and now. Bear hunters like bears and rats and little bunny rabbits live in the here and now and ergio energies will favor them, because ergio energies are, remember, none moralizing, they just want essence representation in a particular state of being. As a hunter, as a bear, as a rat and so they represent themselves as such and will funnel all their intensity to those that are most likely not to squander them. A puritan spends far too much time dismembering their desires so they will be possesses by minimalist energies. Of course as all things this does create a weird paradox, a minimalist energy concentration does focus and so it is possible to imagine the puritans being effective moralizing hunters epidemically contaminating everything with overblown sterility.

You might be wise to ponder “why are humans so successful in reproducing in the here and now when they have time to dwell on the past and even become such absurd professionals as futurists?”

Well the thing is that humans are incredibly successful because they have been the highest level of what we call herd instinct, they are indeed an stampeded upon the earth, the bulls and cows are incompatible in stature. You don’t for instance see the catholic church trying to save the bull from the bull fighter even as one would imagine that the church and god would both be against cruelty to animals. This is because any institution first and foremost rests its power base on the number of ergio energy constituents. And so the church is fully aware that bulls are being harmed by its constituents but the bull is not a donor member, and the church may actually be seeing as tolerant if it accepts that its members will commit such follies; and so there you have it bulls are a way for the church to seem tolerant, and a way for the mass of the masses to be held in the bull ring as they never stopped bull sacrifices they merely metamorphosed into bull fighting. Finally all this represents the stampede of humans against the bull, at the end of the fight between toreador and bull it is the mass audience that decides if the bull shall live or die, a drastic form of “we shall overcome.”

In all it is a charismatic battle for energies even as we do not realize it; you don’t sit around thinking that the human species is one giant ergio energy being, but this is just what it is, the more closely you examine a being the more you have seen them all; the same is true of a cat or a rabbit, they are all the same. A rabbit, as rabbits are, is always nervous and a cat is always seemingly poised and calm. All cats are like that, why? Because they are all the same cat, there is no such thing as an individual and much less a cat independent of the species. If you come to this earth as a cat it is because the ergio desire energies manifested their desires as such, and there is nothing else to do about it but be a feline and the more cat you are the more the energies will effervescent within you and within their expression in the here and now.

In conclusion and the conclusion gets boring, the fragility of humans is somersaulted through humankind, and any and all manifestations of energy are greater the more tuned they are to the here and now, futurist are disengaged.

RC

American Innocence

I have been debating if there is such a thing as an “American innocence”. The term itself is ripe with pernicious consequences. Think of it in this respect, if America is innocent what does that say about the power that it possesses? If America is innocent does that imply that a nation may actually become a dominant world power without a comprehension of the implications and nature of power? Can the American people, the makers of America and the shapers of the modern world, be innocent?

Many Americans are crying out: “why does everyone hate us so much just because we are rich and live good lives?” There is some genuine assumption in the national psyche that the American public is benevolent, kind, concerned and generally unassuming. Even foreign enemies have gone out of their way to note that “they are not against Americans but against American government policies.” This, as if democratic peoples in a republic with the highest degree of participation in government, and oddly probably the highest level of government employment of its citizenry could somehow abstain from responsibility.

None of that rings true to the America that I know; living there for 33 years all I saw was a demonstratively aggressive society that does not very much think about the consequences of its actions and so rather than being innocent it is instead unwilling to check itself through the projection of consequences and analysis of effect. In this way it prefers to remain ignorant of what its powers may accomplish. I would not equate ignorance with innocence, though either one appears despicable from any angle. I don’t like innocent women and I don’t like innocent countries and don’t believe there is such a thing as innocence when one has the mass of destruction stored up in silos all over the yellow brick road.

I try to be fair but I am not in need of it. Anyone that believes that the American people are innocent consumers of the largest killing machine in world history can only be a beneficiary of that system. There may well be a need to look the other way to have the ability to use the “I didn’t know” coupon against personal guilt. The psyche of a nation is scripted in the results, the outcome triggers immediate feedback of what it is that we are, what it is that we represent, and the resulting symbology can be a cruel assertion. I don’t suffer for all the Colombians that suffer as it is obvious from a 40 year old guerrilla war and civil strife that the national psyche has invested a lot in suffering. Ireland is a poetic land the consequences of its savage poetic soul are embodied in its essence, the IRA and the infamous England a marriage made in hell, but a marriage none the less.

Saying that Americans are innocent is like saying Microsoft is innocent. Microsoft is a great generator of tax revenue, foreign capital, jobs, and national pride; technology being the least of its accomplishments but its hegemony over the technological industry is not based on the fact that Microsoft employees are innocent people. They are not innocents and they would feel insulted if they had an inkling that someone thought that.

General Electric might be the microwave oven for American Management, it nukes them clean of any morality and sends them off to kill, mane and mutilate the competition. Reality television amply shows that rather than being innocent the American public is insensitive, how else can the Trump audience derive satisfaction out of the firing and emasculation of people, or how can the ability to dip another in pig`s blood be entrainment.

American football is a sport based on the ability to inflict injury and to survive and defeat the opponent at all cost. American football is based on the assumption that everyone is willing to sacrifice their personal well being for the sake of the greater cause, defeat of the enemy an expectable of the debauchery of billions of dollars. Not unlike the political campaigns which further exploit the American psyche mandate for intensity, for a winner and a loser and the winner, regardless of the tactics is judge to be the right one for the job. American management gurus use sport as the metaphor for business practices, team spirit, offense, defense, win market share either by outspending your competitor or saturating the market with under priced goods.

American religious organizations with their blitzing proselytizing have left the inquisitions looking rather dull, the grand inquisitor was merely shock effect. No one at the New York Times writes about the modern crusades of Western religions, it doesn’t affect the columnists, they are part of Western culture, they see it as harmless that messiahs wearing ties are practicing their freedom of speech in Latin America so as to peddle faith helping to build churches and spreading the word with swords made of charity.

I met a lot of very nice people in Wisconsin, they played a lot of bridge, baked a lot of cookies for their neighbors, hunted deer, they loved good grub, hadn’t a mean bone in their bodies, read the bible or went to church. Sure they didn’t like the fact that the American Indian had titled rights to the fish harvest, and they didn’t like Mexicans because they just wanted to live off of American goodwill. But the Wisconsinites I met were a kind people, perhaps fully unaware of the dynamics of world politics. Yet as they meticulously trained themselves for the hunt, their dedication, their tenacity, their ability to camouflage themselves, sit still in a tree for 3 hours, was remarkable and no doubt helpful when deer hunting and in Iraq.

The Americans I have met are well intentioned, self taught and determined to perfect their race and their world, and to secure capitalism, freedom of expression and democracy throughout the world. This is what their president is doing, there is no innocence in inflicting self determination for others.

Of course if America were a pacifist power would it be a world power? Some historians have noted that the British Empire was good at conquering but not aggressive enough to hold on to their real estate. A dominant America might wisely claim ignorance of the consequences of all that it surveys but can it do anything else?

It is a trickier question to answer, benevolence doesn’t carry much weight in this world of slaughter your own lunch, and it appears that America is not going to be the empire that will represent a new world order, just like all the others it will fade into the sun set on that famous Wave Principle as any power controlled by the stock market must.

It is my conclusion that America is and has been helpless in its reign, it probably didn’t even know that it was its turn at the helm, and neither does it know what to do with it; Gorbachev displayed an uncanny ability to know when to end his own country, a rare treat for me as did De Klerk in South Africa. Now the American people have elected the man that can force their downfall, as it has to be forced, by way of his benign ignorance which is not innocent!

RC

SEX

While it remains that I have written many things this one, because of the title stands to be probably the most read. That is neither a bad nor a good thing, it is simply a fact of life that the word sex and sex itself has the most in common with all of us, and us with it and with each-other through it. Time and time again we are reminded that perhaps the largest employer of women throughout the world is the sex industry, which, like it or not provides a living for many families and in some cases even helps them out of poverty, just like in other cases it buries with drug abuse, violence and ill health.

We spend so much time fighting the sex industry and the innate desire for sex in all creatures that we have never taken a genuine look at the matter of sex. Sex researches will disagree, they will point to countless studies that have been done on the topic, either by perverts or well meaning scientists. There might indeed be a positive value in academically understanding the properties of sex but I sincerely doubt it; coming out with statistics that teenagers are having more sex, or finding out that XY percentage of the population is gay hasn’t any socially significant relevancy. The study of sexual behavior only serves to promulgate the belief that there is something wrong with it, or to indicate that a portion of the population suffers from aberrant behavior.

Let us face the reality, the facts are that teenagers, specially in advanced civilizations, are probably having less sex today that ever in the history of humankind. This is because before the 17 century there was no self indulgent embargo on feelings. It was in the seventeenth century which seems to commence the official embargo of all human sentiment and mark the beginning of the inquisition of rational against feelings and unknowns; but that horrible century, which must and will be condemned in some future histories, that seventeenth century marks the most official denial of sex, for it was by the seventeenth century that religion was officially dethroned wholly by the rigors of secular thought; the idea that a church and a state did not have to share power had been fully absorbed by then, the concept of logic as being more important than faith had fully planted itself in the human psyche; after the 17 century it wasn’t a question of weather secular values could control the planet it was a constitutional mandate that no monarch, no person, no belief could dominate the earth but that all things must first be studied in order to say what we know of them, that we must dissect everything so as to void ourselves of all doubt and myth, that a turtle could certainly not be the pivoting point for an earth circling itself; that was proven beyond all doubt by the seventeenth century. And more, for it goes on, and prepare yourselves my darlings for this is going to be a long paragraph, it was in the seventeenth century that it was decided at last that there was no going back before the magna carta, that the doings seeded by the magna carta would hold, that power and decision making could be diluted so that no concentration of power could ever again be held by one subjective monarch; Napoleon becomes immediately the personification of this collapse of center, at once emperor at once the last possible idea of emperor; torrents of immensity collapsed, and the common man now had a chance at being a noble through the edification of his being by following the processes of organization. Ladies and gentleman this was the fatal century, this was the century where we would realize that by controlling sexual urges we could designate the inherent human sensual energy for industrial use. A sexually repressed people will become organized, clean and productive! Thank you seventeenth century! But it did not stop there did it? because the climax of the seventeenth century which may well rhyme for good reason well with the enlightenment, the climax of this beast was in turning the religious dogma against sex without reproductive purpose into a secular dogma where one could have sex for fun and not beget the earth its children; here enjoyment became the paramount reason for sex as reason could not accept any other conclusion for sex, people have sex for fun, you can have sex with anyone, casual sex was born in the seventeenth century! And from there it wasn’t difficult at all to secularize the intimacy of sex, because once you can have sex with any one or any thing, and society permits it, then you have the ability to rape yourself, and that my friend is a requirement in order to create a self that is constantly repairing itself. You see before the seventeenth century the world, tyrants, religion, gods, monarchs, barbarians abused the individual but after the seventeenth century the enlightened individual could abuse the self with complete impunity, and he or she could do this only because they were granted the authority to have secular sex, sex without intimacy, sex without feeling, sex for sex sakes; and thus is born the new puritan, a puritan that is willing to live completely outside of emotion, the new puritan where it is not religion that forms the alienation from the world, it is the self that alienates it-self from the world; no longer an external force, the seventeenth century finally manages to compact the world into one workable microcosm, a self sustainable individual that can judge itself and act as a policing-judge against others. No longer do we need monarchs, priests and gods to judges us and punish us, we can judge ourselves and thus is born the autonomous and lonely unit that we call modern civilized individuality!

Why is it so important that we become aware of this, because the cold blooded reality is that we have frozen ourselves in some static high-minded act which in itself becomes a puritanical bent to control ourselves, our senses and our lives to every minute detail. The modern individual is nothing more than a self contained unit of control systems which constantly monitor the reference points of science and state so as to correct their actions! No longer do they need the grand inquisitor, the new self correcting puritan doesn’t even need a puritan ideology, that is to say, they will voluntarily sterilize themselves. And this is only possible because secular lovemaking has no feeling, it is simply a circus act, a pure raw performance, in that world even a pill can give you sex.

Now of course that sex itself doesn’t just vanish simply because it is suppressed through a process of depersonalization, making sex secular doesn’t mean that it now becomes something that we can control, it merely means that we have the capability to funnel it, the less sexual the individual the more productive. The less sexual the individual the less sensual the connection to his fellow beings and this more isolate being becomes more loyal, pliable and amenable to social and systematic structures. This is why societies like Japan, Germany, England and America are so productive, they have managed to take sexual energy and turn it into productivity. The formulae is simple enough, a sexually frustrated individual has a tendency to want to be clean and to do work, the greater the restrictions on sexual wanton the more likely that the society will produce, but also the more likely that the society will suffer perversions. Societies that secularize sex eventually suffer greater degrees of sadistic and masochistic behaviors so as to compensate for their lack of intimacy. When an individual is sterilized of sensuality there is nothing left but to hurt or be hurt so as to feel.

The supremacy of the secularization of intimacy has other perverse side effects, it will turn the very productive societies that embody it into the most aggressive societies in the world, and as a result, in order to avoid internalized violence they will export it. They will externalize their violence in order to save their compatriots, the nationalistic embargo on intimacy forces the energies to turn into action, and that action mandates a destruction of the lack of intimacy, but sense the lack of intimacy is internal and the self repairing secularized citizen is taught not to self destruct, it has to externalize the feelings that tell it to destroy and so this automaton will go forward to rationalize the maniacal agglomeration of weapons so as to have the greatest amount of punch power, so as to be invincible. Repression creates a need for invincibility, a need for power is always the desired result of lack of intimacy! The most sexually repressed nations will always have the greatest amount of weapons and an endemic anxiety to make an impossible enemy so as to use them.

We are then now faced with a world that wants to avoid the topic of sex, everything about sex is a scandal, which is why even as the sex industry is one of the largest in the world and one of the most economically successful stories of all time, it doesn’t make the news in any other guise than a negative. It is the affair, the perverted politician, the gays, the whores, the porn stars, the libertines that make the headline news. This is because sex has to be kept mentally as some kind of perversion, it is only when viewed as a perversion that the individual can castigate him or her self for wanting it, for desiring it, “I must be a pervert if I want to have sex every day,” “I must be a pervert if I desire same sex partners,” and this self imposed inquisition will assured failed satisfaction and the most plausible outlet for it is cleanliness and work effort, desire energies are thus turned into work energies; the fruitless become fruitful.

The less aggressive the society the less inhibited. You don’t have to go to far to observe this reality, the societies that have the most children at a younger age will be the most sexually liberal; this is because they are inadvertly displaying a lack of trained restraint. They will be having sex with siblings, with cousins, with the babysitter, with their uncle, with every next door neighbor and so on, that shows that there is lack of an internalize taboo against sex, and so the flimsy mandate for the taboo is external, say for instance the church in the case of Latin American; and because the church is an external force it does not have the impact that the very same taboo would have on first world nations that have managed to secularize sex and turn the individual into a self correcting grand inquisitor.

In catholic Latin America it is the catholic church that is telling the people not to have sex for other than reproductive purposes, and not to consummate the relationship until after they are married by god and church. Yet Latin America societies have very relaxed morals and their peoples are so easily overtaken by the urge to have sex that they have it when they want it without much psychological maneuvering; and hence any scientific study of those countries should show a very low perversity ratio as compared to highly developed nations.

Homosexuals and transvestites are very common in Latin American societies, however these are repressed, heterosexual sex is held in high steam but homosexuals and transvestites are not as accepted, and so the repression of these should equally show that there is a greater perversion within each practice. However even in this realm, the third world catholic societies, due to a lack of systematic structures, are mostly silent on the matter, that is there is a silent approbation of the matter, a reluctant tolerance, they know it happens, and so the relationship that a bisexual husband has with some male partner is accepted through inaction. Unlike in more advanced countries, such as America, where it is supposed that homosexuality has gained greater acceptance, yet even the homosexuals themselves have an outing program to force gays who don’t want to become public figures, to be exposed as part of the freak show that gay parading has become. This is caused by the highly systematized individual conscience which has to turn any aspect of its personal life into a political statement.

But as sexuality is not an element that can be controlled by secular or religious organizations, or even as done in first world nations through secular puritanical-individuality or/and the medical establishment, then we must speculate what is the actual intent of sex. Is sex really only for reproduction and for immediate carnal pleasure as the majority would have us think?

The answer is of course no, that sex leads to reproduction is interesting and we re not going to dispute that that is one of its primary purposes; as well that sex satisfies should not be overlooked, a good orgasm has no attractions, that I can imagine, that can beat it; but the question lurks what is sex for?

As it is so often the case with other things I do have the answer for this one, and I am sure that that will be used against me; but I cant help myself for I am not self regulating as are others which must wait for expert professional conclusions or facts to reach them before they can know anything. Self correcting secular beings can be identified because they will only reprogram themselves after they have studied expert and professional advice as given to them through systematically approved channels.

In order to answer the question we must go back to first principles, one must assume that sex is part of a first principle because it is one of the primary activities of all creatures, you have it in common with everything that reproduces on this planet or in any other planet, it is safe to assume that sentient beings have sex in common, if you don’t have some form of sex, you are probably not a sentient being. So we have already made our first primal connection, sex and sentient are inextricably related. This is due to the interesting fact that in order to have sex or to act out the sperm egg dance ahoy you have to have a sentient connection, you can not interact with something that doesn’t place an emotional burden on your existence, at least at the sexual level. Still I should point out that asexual reproduction is both the most popular form of reproduction and the most abundant species in the universe do in fact reproduce asexually. But since our discussion is about sex then that doesn’t matter to us; though I should further state that asexual reproduction is equally within sentient being.

Everything sentient being in the universe is made up a sentient energy that I call an ergio, it is a miniscule but complete sentient energy, this energy is what allows us to sense one another and it is the energy which seeks to replicate itself throughout the universe against all other possible conceptions of energy, which arise from the nothingness to represent themselves in our universe. Sentient beings embody sentient energies-ergios and these all form a singular universe within the known universe.

It doesn’t matter what type of species you are, dolphins, whales and monkeys are sentient beings, your inability to feel them as such is simply a limitation that you have imposed upon yourself through reasoning, as reasoning tells you that you are one bright human being that you posses unique intelligence, etc. Rational is what separates you from the mud that you came from, rational isolates and so you can not feel the emotions a whale possesses but regardless a whale is a sentient being, and so are aliens living in other planets and all of them with all of us share one thing in common, ergio energies. These ergio energies seek each other at some level, specially when they are separated by distance or by ideas, if you use logic then you have distanced yourself from your emotions, even as logic is a result of those emotions. The space program is largely the construct of logical applications being used to seek out other forms of sentient life in the universe.

Our quest to seek other forms of life causes us to reproduce beyond the sustainable possibility of our earth environment, we subconsciously know that we have to reproduce and reproduce our sentient energy so as to reach out to the other sentient ergio energies in the universe. First principles tell us that there is no division between sentient beings other than that which is artificial or socially or physically contrived; irremediably there is a consciousness and a subconsciousness that unites us all as one, but we are not able to perceive this throughout all the dimensional aspects of its manifestations.

However since there are things like the akashic record which sustain and commune all the events and histories and memories of sentient beings, then these things equally seek to reunite us as a way to eliminate the vast coldness of all the disparate things that have apparently nothing in common with us. The true measure of our communality is in feelings and shared experience; what you feel for your cat or dog, what you feel for your children, for your soul mate, etc is constricted with what all of them feel for you. Such is the communion between sameness. These things construct and align and realign themselves throughout the universe even as we are not physically in touch with them, they are in touch with us through same essence habitations. The fact that civilized human beings have not realized that they are the same person as the aborigines is because they don’t comprehend action at distance, they don’t comprehend the embodiment of the concept of humanity. Any person that can murder another human being has isolated the concept of humanity, as one singular entity; in a sense when you stop having sexual relationships with the world you gain the ability to destroy it. This is because sexuality and sensuality are inextricably intertwined, which is why when you endorse the secularization and monogamy of sex there are only perverse results from it.

First principles then indicate a native connection that is shared by all sentient beings, all sentient beings, when the connection becomes extenuated through interference from local, global or cosmic forces seek to repatriate it through whatever means. We are seeking the unification of all sentient life forms in the universe. Sex is a means by which we generate and propagate sentient beings, but it is also a way to heightened our awareness of other sentient beings, and this is the truly why sex! Sex heightens our awareness of those that we touch through those that we touch.

Take the seemingly simple act of paying for sex with a prostitute. First the only way to generate money is through labor, like it or not money is the production of our sweat and toil and as such when we pay a prostitute for sex it is not just money, money is just a representation of a connection that we have to the rest of the world and that is being handed to the prostitute as a form of payment. The very word prostitute has in itself an ugly sounding tone and the harshness is defined to separate us from her, even as the payment unites us. After the transaction, notice the element of a transaction which is recognized, and which occurs the world over probably more times than married couples have sex, we enter into the world of what is presumed sex without a burden. But you need to look deeper than that, there is no such thing as sex without an emotional burden, as the very connotation of the act of sex is to unburden yourself through an interaction.

What is really happening is more fascinating, every prostitute is uniting humanity, is voiding out the civilized isolation of humanity, the prostitute is a vessel by which all the individuals that cannot touch may touch and feel one another, and transfer their ergio energies throughout each other. It is touching at a distance, it is sensuality removed through a third person, the urge for connectivity is such that it will not be voided through social straightjackets, the urge to unite and to feel one another is embodied in the prostitute, she serves humanity by becoming a vessel which all can touch, and through her, every man that touches her touches every other man that touched her, and equally touches every wife and lover that those men and their wives have touched.

Prostitutes are an affordable extension of the Harem, and in the same way so are extramarital affairs or cheating in general; this is all a reflection of our search to touch all the untouchables, made so by the narrow measuring eye of morality. We have Harems and Polygamy through these various means, and the means betray a profounder cause, the need to feel.

The prostitute is and has been throughout time the first and foremost social worker, acting out of her urge to sense the despondent nature of feelings, accepting the void which her vessel becomes by allowing men and women to congregate through her.

This is so. And it is so because when you conjugate with another, you leave a portion of yourself in them, and that portion of yourself travels with them wherever they go and leaves a portion of itself with whomever they touch; your sense of being is made greater by the greater amount of those that you’ve touched, either through sex or through kind acts or through business transactions. A politician and a movie star have all the energies of all the people that think of them, stare at them, all those ergio energies are at their disposal and accumulate within them, and give them more energy to go on, to be more to symbolize us, to represent us all, that which gets our attention gets more energy to go on, in part as part of us, and in part as part of it self.

Seeing in this light the propagation of our urge to become whole again, encourages us to violate moral imperatives with promiscuous want! Sex and even its vice prostitution, is how we sensually reach out and touch one another and the others within them, in a world that denies us that right.

RC

Generational Psychosis

Any reader that is with me up to this point understands clearly that there are ergio energies that transcribe who and what we are throughout humanity and on even to sentient beings here and elsewhere in the universe, and the Akashic record historically apprehends all vices and actions into the sentient archive for all beings to source and inherit.

A device like the internet is a web of these associations and is equally the result of them. When peoples seek to communicate they will divine a way, the internet protocols however mundane are an urged result by a desire for our mass of humanity to interact; the need for speed in aircraft and even the need for aircraft is the need to reduce the time to reach a loved one or to greet a stranger, and thus humanity seeks through varying methods, with relative success, to reach out onto all parts of itself.

The reason why we seek interaction via a tool like the internet or an airplane is because we either have not learnt how to use our psychic abilities, or because we do not conceive the possibility of metaphysical astro-hopping our soul form one place to another. A phone call might be more evidence of the limitations that we impose upon ourselves and than we overcome with the very phone call that dials up our limitations.

The reason why we invented science was to circumnavigate the wall we built by falling in love with material happenings; and the ever dangerous love of rationalization of events so as to explain that which is impossible to comprehend: the universe and our relationship to it.

In a sense we can be aware of the universe but we cannot know it, and if we attempt to know it then we cancel our awareness. The two are mutually exclusive, awareness and understanding don’t get alone, scientists understand, gods are aware. A god is capable of instant on action, a scientist has to have a lot things in place to turn on the lights.

When you look at a science such as is the science of statistics you have to ask yourself are there facts in statistics? Even as facts can not be a part of something that is a mere approximation. Yet the truth be told there are only approximations to reality which harden when we put a name to them, was Samuel Clements Samuel Clements or was he Mark Twain? He was for sure both, or was he, could Samuel Clements be Mark Twain or could the reverse of that be true too?

We know Samuel Clements because of Mark Twain, and Mark Twain was a person that Samuel Clements could never be, could never be as the real world person that he was; personification implied that his name had to change to represent what he was to society as a whole. It was however Mr. Clements that intuited that such would be the correct expression of his Twain essence; Mark Twain rings true to the writings, rings true to the sensibilities of the man, and either through suggestion or by his own initiative Samuel got the name right.

This is also true for those magnificently hardworking and yet seemingly frivolous movie starts, the name Hollywood carries with it all the symbolizing energies of the place. “Holly” of course is a religious term, which immediately dazzles with spiritual connotations and mass appeal; while wood is grounded on reality and burns up. The ease of the tone has enough superficiality on it that you will not let your mind be arrested by it; the word “syllogisms” could have never been the name for “Hollywood”, this is because “syllogism” has to carry a lot of intellectual heft and so it will not meet with your expectations, of lighthearted entrainment suspended in a reality of accurate disbelief.

And so “statistics” might themselves insinuate to take a snap of something, to hold the meaning static for a second, to stack up something so that it clicks, so that it pronounces meaning, where there might be a lot of dynamic stats are halting. The picture immediately generated by stats allows you to conjure a reality, it allows you to think of a possible reality, and it allows you to modify your thinking process and your actions. If for instance, you know that a candidate is statistically projected to win by a considerable majority you might not bother to vote. And if others think just like you, due in fact to the statistics, and so you and the others end up not voting, this may cause the wrong political candidate to win but for the wrong reason; because the statistics were in fact correct, even as they will be seen as wrong due to the outcome of the election.

And so you can see that it is not easy being right even for the staticians, as the very statistics by virtue of projecting change human behavior, and so become an added burden to any equation. Still what I have shown above is that statistics can no be objective as their very reading of a political process makes them immediate participants in the process. An intelligent statistician will want to correct his mistake and so will refine the data collecting process, use more varied sources, change the method of compilation, but in all honesty the stats cannot be taken out of the process, as they are tagged by it, the process defines the stats, the stats have to tune to the process, and yet when they refine themselves they will equally change the outcome in an uncertain manner.

The cruel reality is that the statistics and their corresponding professionals have now become so much a part of the campaign that they are in fact not an alternate source of information but rather part of the process, used by either side, to seemingly objectively justify its particular inclinations.

This is why statistics will tend to work better from hindsight, it is easier to know how many households had television in the 1950s because in the fifties most of the televisions sold were sold to households as businesses did not see any need for televisions. However here another truth is also telling, teenagers in the 1950s had a fad, they liked to grease their hair. Now project that to today, what do we have before us, teenagers are using gel to grease their hair, and they are wearing baggy pants, which was also true in the fifties, back then boys wore baggy pants; still we don’t know what the connection is, maybe it is a comfort zone thing, but why the grease on the hair? Are they looking for certainty of looks? Have they found some modicum of rectitude in the ability to control their hair and know its precise location, and know thus, how they will be seen by their friends?

We can speculate for ever but we are not going to do that, the reality doesn’t have anything to do with the grease in the hair or the baggy pants, the reality is that these generations are demonstrating that they do synchronize swimming. If they are all into a particular fad what they are defining is the communication that that generation will share across the passing years, hence the name given to generations, Y, X, called them what you will the reality is that generations speak to each other with a silent agreement.

People from the baby boom generation will be the happiest seniors the world has ever known. Why? Because it is the single largest most massive generation ever to retire, that means that they will hold the world hostage with their conservative vote and their vote for senior entitlement programs! That sense of communality however is accident, it is generational, that is to say that their sense of shared agreement is not based on the fact that they are seniors but based on their communal generational statistical sense and value. They intuit and perceive the world in an intrinsic manner as experienced by their generation. And their fads, when they were teenagers, and the global acceptance of their fads tells us how well the are subconsciously integrated and perhaps how successful they will be in living and changing their times.

This is enough for now.

RC

Competitive Inaction

Now my fellows as I have said sometimes fighting for our cause means letting our opponent defeat themselves. This is a counter intuitive maneuver, one is always afraid that it will not succeed as one has little control and one assumes that our opponent is not going to realize that they are pursuing self defeating causes and take the appropriate corrective action. Also at some level our imaginations fancy that if we actively participate in the defeat of our enemy that that would somehow speed up the process of their natural demise. And yet often enough nothing could be further from the truth.

Allow me to explain, if your are in a physically competitive sport, where societies generally train themselves for the challenges of the business and political worlds, it is logical that one has to be an active participant in the actions that will lead to victory. A boxer has to attack his opponent, and wrestler must also make the moves that will lead to an opponents downfall, certainly in golf a very methodical discipline against the competitor leads to victory, in the game of football it is a highly concentrated degree of offensive strategy entwined with an overactive defensive that wins the game. But while games teach us team effort and how to compete in the business or political arena they are not real world enough to comprise complex human dynamics.

In the real world the game is not played by a highly defined set of rules that are always the same, nor is the game played on the same type of environment over and over again, nor do the fans follow one around; and there aren’t any referees to constantly monitor for a semblance of fair play. Precisely the opposite occurs, the real world environment as determined by the consumer, the fan, the voter is ever changing in unforeseen fashion. There are some referees, justice, regulatory agencies and watchdogs attempt to create a level playing field, but these are reactive forces, they are not proactive nor preventive, which makes them inadequate at all times. When corrective action is applied by the reactive forces of regulation and justice the business or political game plans are operating on a different set of real time principles and thus cancel out most positive effects that may be had by the application of regulation based on past experience.

It is often very difficult to stand on the sidelines when one has deep beliefs that are being trounced upon by the apparent opposition; hence the reason why it is so counter intuitive to comprehend that one’s enemy might be his own worst enemy, and yet more often than not, such is the case. Consider the downfall of the Soviet Union or the ongoing economic changes that are taking place in China. China is changing not because it was forced to change by external forces but rather because it had to change or it would have collapsed, as indeed happened to the Soviet Union. Now the Soviet Union, contrary to popular belief, did not collapse because the republicans went on a weapons spending binge, but rather it collapsed because of is continued pursuance of self defeating policies without significant external feedback or interference.

The lesson has to be clear, any nation or economic system that isolates itself from world dynamics is likely to collapse from lack of external input, isolation implodes, witness the case of India which for decades pursued counter productive isolationist and reactionary politics and economics only to find itself in such critical condition that it had to renounce it all, so as to benefit from the economics of exporting talent and importing jobs and industry; all based on open market economics and an acceptance of international standards and education.

Close systems collapse, systems that are open will thrive though not necessarily without suffering the tremors and quakes that are endemic to intricately intertwined systems. Exposure to world dynamics is painful but it does have the benefit that it forces gradual change closer to real time rather than the negligent change forced upon closed systems due to their artificially controlled dynamics.

It is then in our interest to some times understand that allowing our enemy to become everything that they are may be the equivalent of feeding them a fatally poisonous poison. Neither the left nor the right of the political spectrum is 100% correct with their ideas, either system if allowed to concentrate based on its value system would undoubtedly collapsed, the centrist policies of recent administrations and political prodigies have resulted from a healthy recognition that extremes and absolutes will invariably fail.

The reason why the average person is so dominant is indeed due to a subconscious realization by the majorities that the norm gets its way.

Today we are finding a highly politicized climate, where the left and the right are taking their absolutist positions, these shall offer all of those involved in the fanaticism of the times a positive route to destruction. The anomaly of such extreme positions is usually an entitlement of righteousness, when neither political party is willing to doubt their policies they set themselves on a path where they have to win by destroying their enemy. Unfortunately for the dogmatics absolutes are never successfully embodied by societies nor by governments and nations.

When one observes extremes in action one is wise to let them proceed. Disraeli the very successful British prime minister, became a prime minister when he stopped trying, and beat the opposition to a pulp by letting them carry out their policies. It was after that that he cleaned up the mess they made, much to his merit and beautification.

We should be so wise today. To antagonize an enemy is often to help them take corrective action, in great part the Soviet Union collapsed because there was really so little input from the rest of the world. It is no accident that no one in the Western world predicted the collapse, nor is it surprising that Western intelligence services had wholly inaccurate economic statistics on the cruel reality of the USSR. It was the absence of Western influence that destroyed Soviet extremism; just like a very conservative Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich, found his own way out of politics, just when he thought himself most successful.

Philosophers have long told us to learn from our enemies because they, unlike our friends, are most likely to point out our weaknesses. It is then perhaps wisest to allow an enemy to accomplish their objective without our interfering. We shall be fans of flaming actions.

RC

Relativism & Its Malcontent

Some good people are against slavery for good reason. There are many levels at which one could be against slavery; one “I don’t want to be a slave,” this is a personal and subjective approach; two, “slavery is cruel,” this is a humanitarian perspective; and “slavery is wrong,” approaches a moral or ethical perspective, when we say moral we may imply religious and when we say ethical we may imply universal principles based on civic principles and law.

Contextually it is difficult to say that any of these ideas are themselves wrong since the goings of the day mandate that slavery is wrong just as much as they mandate that the right to vote is some kind of natural inherent privileged that needs to be the right of all peoples at all times; even as for instance, the right to vote is practiced by a few as perhaps naturally it should be, and so it is.

You would then not expect to go to any civilized parties today and engage in a conversation where a character might argue for slavery and its benefits. But let us remember that there are benefits to slavery which though perhaps inhumane, still accrue a benefit to an industrial or pre industrial production environment. The pyramids were built by slaves, we all like the pyramids, tourism aside the pyramids culturally connect us to our Egyptian heritage so we must in some ways, specially if we are historians, be grateful to the pharos and their crews.

It is then that I propose to make the argument that there was a time when slavery was the right choice and the correct approach to solving a particular environmental production issue. It was not feasible to approach the matter from another perspective, feudalism, slavery, serfdom were all, while not humane, constructive in their times and allowed us to migrate towards what might be construed as higher levels of civilization, technology and in its turn greater ethical constructs.

By noting that there was an evolution in ethical thought as slavery allowed the creation of a leisure class as much as it subjugated the lower classes, what we are saying is that the very condition of slavery gradually generates the conditions that abolish it. It was inevitable that slavery would be abolished be the very reason of its own existence; as a leisure class, created by slavery, was greater able to assume the sensibilities required to comprehend an ethic based on humanistic principles. There was however a time when it would have been dangerous to have those thoughts, at the beginning of the slave trade the prevailing wisdom did not question the use of slaves, further it treated them as property, and more it treated them as a subhuman species. This, hindsight tells us was a wise approach to the matter at hand, as societies that exploited and benefited from slavery could not bring themselves to question the practice, for if that were the case they would destabilize their production and economic progress.

But once slavery was had it had in someway to seed its own abolition and this would also come with the rise of the industrial age and its need to liberalize the labor, in a sense the industrial age gave way for the social dynamic to require a mobile and more alert and less dependant labor force. In short slavery due to industrialization became an unsustainable approach to the management of labor. For in the end that is all that slavery was, a way to manage a labor pool.

Slavery offered a squanderable supply of labor for an environment that was as unpredictable as the next season’s climate and crop. But the industrial age offered a higher degree of certainty, the birth of the production line added definition and certainty to the task of production. The rise in health care added longevity and so with that came a labor force that would be productive for a greater amount of time, and hence the need to imagine that labor would have to be retired and cared for, as they weren’t going to die on the job as was the case for serfs and slaves.

The production line also brought in the need for educated labor, which would indeed cost more for the society to produce and introduce into the laboring cycle, and so there was the need to gain as much productivity as possible from the individual and in part that productivity had to be managed by creating a more flexible worker bee, that could perform many mundane and varied tasks while at some point reaching some kind of tradesman, foreman experienced status.

That scenery would beget the argument, “have we really abolished slavery?” probably not, we just can not see our form of slavery because we are contemporary frontiersman living our times without the benefit of hindsight. Though one would have to go no further than the American/Mexican border to see the million slave march, where labor is constantly funneled so as to maintain affordable vegetables at the supermarket.

Still one could say that migrant labor has a relative freedom that is not afforded to a professional as it might be crueler still to be an entitled professional laborer; the need to maintain a resume’ and to demonstrate stability, proper training, discipline, community participation and self improvement could just as well be an indiscernible ball and chain.

The point is that it is possible that a mortgage, car and credit card debt create a different kind of slavery as such things mandate the slave; but more important what we are saying here is that slavery could have migrated into more fashionable constructs which could make it indiscernible and thus acceptable to a modern morality or ethic.

It is then under such arguments that we do not have the conditions to judge the practice of slavery when it was at its zenith throughout the world. To which any respectable human being will reply, “Slavery is wrong for all times and all circumstances.” That is a moral imperative, it assumes that morality is true for all times, a none evolving morality could be misconstrued as immoral; even the catholic church has managed to evolve its morality, just the concept of celibacy is rather modern for the church.

But what about the ethical argument as that is argued from the point of civility, that all peoples are born free as part of some infallible right and as such the individual has the right to his own freedom; thus slavery is wrong for all times and all environments. The ethical case is an argument that can equally go on for all time much the same as that of capital punishment or the right to an abortion; the premise of any such argument is the assumption that we know some truths beyond all doubt and hold them to be absolutes, the preposition for that mandates zero doubt: “we know what is right, we know what will be right for our posterity 3000 years from now.”

We could assume such things only today, and only to guarantee our rights of action hitherto, based on everything that we know, which by the way is not everything there is to know, but based on everything that we know today we think all peoples are born free; more we assume that they want to be free and perhaps we are willing to risk that they will know what to do with that freedom. All of these assumptions are true today, today and today only, don’t try to spend them 3000 years from now as they might be intolerable or unusable assumptions in the year 5005 AD.

I would be hard put to testify in front of the highest court in the land and say that I had better uses and knew better what to do with the hundreds of thousands of slaves used by the Pharos to build the pyramids. Is their labor not creative in the immortal monument that it created? I hate to answer my own questions but sure it is! It was, that was the most brilliant use of labor, and if only a job creation program that would give rise to new engineering feats, what magnificent accomplishment, I rather have the slaves building pyramids, no one much bothers to recognize the accomplishment of freeways. And besides all that the pyramids were the first monumental endeavor, and that alone immortalizes every slave that participated in it.

Nor is it for us to judge the harems as plenty of ugly evidence that is generally not redacted by revisionist historians that not only were the women happy with the arrangements but that a lesbian community thrived in good health; and even the eunuchs were handsomely rewarded for their castrations. It may seem horrid to us all this thing the harem, but there is more to the harem than meets the eye, just as there is more to be said for arranged marriages.

One thing is perhaps hesitantly true for all time: no civilization and no people have ever suffered for long the dictator or the law that didn’t meet with their expectations. A people, a civilization, a culture all have an innate awareness of what is right for their times, and they will those intimate rights to themselves and live within them their times; haphazardly perhaps but within their restrain and potential all peoples are willing victims of their epochs and only barbarians to posterity.

RC

prophecies of our progeny

The mobility of the brotherhood of mankind often serves to disadvantage any possible association that we may make of it. It is easier to believe that we are individuals, that we are independent of our community and environment than it is to believe that we indeed are one giant mass portrayed with individual traits as benefits the global entity.

One doesn’t have to go to far to identify the system, take the “unique politician” an oxymoron for sure, yet every politician is out there saying that they are different and yet that they identify with each and everyone of us. More interesting is how a politician will run against the system, noting how corrupt and incestuous the system is while running on its foundation. More interesting is how we are willing to accept that when they get elected they will change everything without group and bureaucratic participation. It is not going to happen, we know it is not going to happen, that is precisely why we elect them anyway, we know they are inadequate, and we know that with all they shout they will simply make a small contribution to continuity and a modicum of tolerable change at their own expense.

Of course the very fact that a person is a politician implies that they are very much a part of the system, as no politician ever created anything as much as worked with what they found “within hands grasp”. It is exasperating to imagine that we would even benefit from a political figure that was willing to stand out side the system when the only way that they could serve us is if they could work the cogs and pulleys to help us each with our organized self interest.

In fact a politician is the ultimate and glorified representation of organized self interest. Every politician is but a manifestation of a common will that reaches a high level of organization so as to acquire political essence through collectively reinforced self interest.

I will make the case, and when I say “I” allow me to qualify it after these words, but I will make the case that artists, that is actors, comedians, painters, poets, are but representations of a common aesthetic will power that super imposes itself as a statement within the context of the social fabric!

This is true of all major creative elements, futuristic car designs are hindered by the fact that the designer can not march faster than the recombinant nature of his ideas takes to coalesce within the mind of car designers throughout the world. Why is it that if straight lines are in, every designer has to design cars with geometric straightness; we came from the Ford Model T where you could find as many straight lines as could guarantee the puritans that it was perfect, and then it evolved to curve city all over from the forties forward, and at some point, which was probably the seventies, we begun to see a revulsion through the absolutist adoption of minimalist curvature and greater fin and straight laced confinements. Even the eighties followed through on mostly straight structures with feigned curvature, and then suddenly came the nineties and someone put a full uncompromising curvature all over, every automobile had to be aggressively curbed and aggressively straight almost at the same time. Still regardless of the manufacturer and the machination you could see car design simply simmering, the nineties were the last decade where car design could argue that it had continental independence, hence forward we have a silent subconscious agreement that all futuristic cars must look retro futuristic, the digital touches of analog, and the colors harking back at a time when everything was peachy cream and at the same time some hot rod moment is screeched out.

You don’t have to ponder why that is the case, it is the case because the common mind defines the leading edge of car design. When the average Joe goes to buy a car he buys the car that he and his buddies designed in secret a few years back, in the corners of their minds, in their creative whims which may have been molested by the way a beer tasted or the way that the sun went down and caressed the paint job of their first car, those guys put that feeling in the air and somewhere else, in some academy, a sensitive fellow, mostly a loner that had more in common with a TV-tuner than with a TV, sensed the direction of car designs future, and felt it and felt it because he had something in common with it which he was willing to deny and not accept and so had to redesign the existing concepts in order to accept them as his own. Under such guidance is the child’s creative mind, at the mercy of the will of the masses. A silent design team that allows others to upset and test and evaluate the status quo so that they come as close as possible to satisfying the common individual desire.

Of course the common person can never be fully satisfied, but a common person is as close to satisfaction as one can get without getting there. The world belongs to the common folk, everyone else, specially those people from New York, London and Paris work for the masses even as they disdain us!

In some ways the disgruntled artist is more a conception of the artist mind than a reality. The artist far from being at war with his world is merely a representative of the angst and instant pleasures that a common mind wants to experience but prefers to experience through proxy as is the luxury of the privileged. We don’t need to be Kurt Cocaine or Rona the Suicide Mamma, we can let her be that, we can assume that they will make total asses of themselves in the public stage, paid handsomely with fame, we can expose them and challenge them to go further into the gutter or primal exultation of the extreme parody, and watch them overdose in their mirrored privacy and fallacy, we can watch them think themselves unique and sneak the millions that they can not imagine we are willing to pay to watch them perform for us, the circus that we demand to see. They will think they are getting away with something, we will be amazed at what they can get away with, and we will judge the future value of their essence and even tighten or loosen our silent mass imaginations here and there to tune or increase out their evolutionary characteristics.

True artists of course are not amused by the cruelness of this reality, on the contrary they are abhorred by it, they usually cut an ear off, or walk into a creek with a rock or do some other devastating thing, it is not all artists that are born so lucky as to be blind.

In the case of the Hollywood or Bollywood star it is the same, the star is born from the desires of the mass to recognize her on the screen, the mass feels the energy that it has channeled towards the actors, once the projected figure appears it is instantly recognized and subjected to the harrowing occasion of immediate approval and stardom. Every actor and every actress serve their times well, but they are servants, kept in check by a common will and an image that has to be the image that the masses have allowed for projection, a quick downfall would be met by anyone that does not buy into their allotted fame. You can not be all things to all people, you can be the thing that people have allowed you to become. Anything else is wayward bound and sure to find its own demise as critic fodder; as the critic is the interpreter of mass desire..

Of course fortunately as a rule the avatar of mass appeal is generally toned to its intended destiny, and as such will generally meet cordially with fame, fortune and happiness as such it was for a certain one called Bob Hope.

There is as always a utilitarian presentation to all this, the beauty queen represents a socially normalized beauty, be her with big smile, large teeth, high thin eyebrows, outlined eyelashes, large eyes and curves etc as mandated by the social regiment of the times, this beauty serves a higher purpose than just the ideal, the beauty queen serves as a representative model of the stile types of allure and erotic attractions. Of course as an idealized form they don’t exist in anyone type of woman though in theory the beauty queen or the Hollywood actress should conform to a great number of the socially approved traits throughout her physique and character. The service provided here for the mass is actually rather tremendous, for one it serves to appease the mass by giving it access to what it believes is not obtainable. Most girls know that they are not beauty or diva material. But when you see a modern Diva as one might call such Madonna, Sandra Bullock, Nicole Kidman, and Lulia Roberts they all have something rather striking in common, they are not spectacularly beautiful, they are rather average, there is nothing seemingly unobtainable about their beauty, they seem like a normal girl that had a makeover and it mostly worked. That, that very thing implies an immediate trendyness, a folksy acceptability assures them an instant following, this creature is now not so idealized, she is more normal, she really inst a beauty queen, and we know she inst; playboy magazine will ask her to pose not because of her beauty but rather because of her fame. And their fame comes from the fact that the audience feels at home with them.

Now in the case of the playboy bunny, the girl has to look spectacularly sexy and in fact she has to look unreal and unobtainable. Joe Smuckatelly inst going to masturbate to something he can not fantasize about and for the average Joe that mandates an unrequited love, he must not be able to reach the object of his affection. Sure a playboy centerfold is a real girl, even after playboy prunes her up, but in the end the average Joe isn’t going to marry her, he doesn’t imagine that he deserves her, even as her posing for playboy makes her in fact rather average in ambition.

The beauty queen serves precisely the same role but the audience is now the female, the beauty pageant is to allow women to measure their beauty in relationship to each other and to what appeals to males. But the beauty queen has to look less fuckable than the centerfold, she has to be able to make a living professionally perhaps, and she has to sound intelligent, she can not appear a slut or claim accessibility, she must in a sense remain in a pedestal to get that crown. This is because females are harsher judges than males, the males will be happy with a bunny but women want to see each other or actually themselves in a better light. Beauty Queens everywhere are then propagating the look and feel of a working woman or a housewife, that has the ability to pay bills, work, raise children and perhaps do soap commercials on her spare time. But more interesting the Beauty Queen is also a valve that allows the women to propagate their own sense of beauty through any and all association that they might have with the beauty queen. Their husbands will corner a moment with the beauty queen if their wife looks at them a certain way, if her eyes or lips are similar, if her hands share the imperial hand traits, even body movements bring forth this association. In the grand excursion into the primitive sexual encounter and the passionate mad embrace, there is the alluring magnification of a moment essence magnified a thousand times by proximity, you are holding the female essence!

In this charitable portrayal of what must seem to some of you a rather despicable apparition, there are no saved souls, the philosopher and the writer falls victim to this whole. Philosophers and writers in general all represent a segment of the populace that has franchised its belief and mandates expression, when I write I often say I am taking dictation. The fiction that I write is the products of the whims of the average imagination that wants to read itself and connect to others with similar comprehensions, and when I philosophize I am accepting the prophecies of our progeny. I am just a note taker, an avatar, an amanuensis, for the aspirations, the desires of the common will as they fallibly simmer within me only to be regurgitated. It is this reality that guarantees that I will be published, my reader has dictated, if I executed correctly I will be published, if my reader is not of our present time I will be published posthumously, the only thing I have to do is just type, the rest is done.

RC

Character Individuality and Community

In the plunge to become a civilization we endure the depersonalization of the individual so that we can build the coherent whole. Perhaps we can assume that there wa